The current state of the economy has many people living paycheck to paycheck. Why do you think all these scammy payday-loan sharks keep multiplying like tribbles ? Do you really think people enjoy getting screwed with 60% interest ?
Wages are low, inflation is ridiculous, and overcrowding is VERY VERY REAL. The concept of "working poor" has become the new norm for college and university educated folks in various careers. This has pushed crime rates up because honest people can't make ends meet anymore, while fly-by-night crooks grace the covers of various trade magazines. The game of greed is killing everything and the rate of wealth concentration is accelerating with each passing day.
The system is failing, and quite a few people have started to believe that U.S. money is at risk of becoming worthless in the next 15 years, unless some very dramatic changes are implemented nationwide to reverse this crash course. People question ever-increasing military and space research budgets while basic infrastructure and public services fall into abandonment.
I don't know how you define "the real world", but for me it certainly isn't a piece of paper holding an imaginary and unbounded value.
At $300+, you can't fairly compare it to the entry-level M-Audio cards ($100 for an Audiophile 2496, $60 for the Revolution).
Firewire interfaces do have one thing going for them: isolation. Portability is great, but having those DAC/ADCs outside the PC case is excellent for noise levels.
If it weren't for M-Audio's spotty driver support, I'd praise them too. I've been quite happy with all their gear, they're quite affordable and they seem to know where to focus their attention... sometimes so-so build quality but excellent sound.
They did not fail to provide you with free email, and nowhere in their TOS do they offer any guarantees for spam filtering or even privacy. They are not at fault for anything here. You're certainly allowed to be dissatisfied, but Google hasn't done anything wrong or illegal.
Things get cracked, it's inevitable and people just deal with it. If your email needs are not met by Google's offerings, you're free to try someone else's email solution.
Me, I run my own mail server: problem solved! If I'm not happy with my email, the only person I need to bitch at is myself, and I'm fully empowered to fix it at whim.
If you're concerned about audio buffers "stealing" RAM on your gaming rig, then a sound card is the least of your problems.
It's funny that you should mention the SB16. SB16 was a crap card, but it was immensely popular and had great developer support. It sounded like shit, but it was popular and we should all know by now that a successful product is not necessarily a quality product, it just has to be well marketed and priced, in fact quality will often work against you.
If games could grow some balls and use their own sound processing libs, it wouldn't matter which sound card you owned as they would only be used as DACs. Crysis does its own sound processing and thus it outputs the exact same audio on any sound card, which means the onus for sound quality is on your DACs, amps and speakers, not some ghetto firmware/driver lock-in solution.
Turtle beach = YES. I don't know why they bother, but this tiny company makes great little sound cards. Simple, but clean. Their sound quality puts many "pro" cards to shame.
Bose = GOD NO! I mean, if you like the Bose sound, that's your preference and that's fine, but the term "playback quality" refers to reproducing the original sound as accurately as possible, something Bose speakers don't even try to accomplish.
The thing with sound is there are two main schools of thought: those who seek accurate reproduction, and those who seek "pleasant" reproduction. Studio monitors, high-end headphones and some brands of tower speakers shoot for accurate sound, which many people find cold and dry. Bose speakers typically produce "happy" sound, by using a gazillion drivers and psychoacoustic sound processing (think SRS).
Creative's X-Fi also specializes in this "happy" sound through the use of the so-called Crystallizer. It takes normal, clean audio, and adds the sonic equivalent of glitter dust to appeal to the aural magpies of this world. A few people dislike it (like me), but many people enjoy the effect it has on popular recordings.
So then, what do non-Bose non-Creative users lack ? Happy sound. I personally don't miss any of that stuff, and I have zero issues with my featureless onboard 8-channel sound and my cold-sounding high-end speakers. Even the Asus sound card doesn't tempt me one bit, because the features it offers, I don't want. It would be nice if a sound card could be just that: a sound processing accelerator, but in 2008 the CPU is more than capable of handling the cheap bandpass filters and flanging effects Creative calls "environmental audio". The fact that even Creative uses software EAX emulation for its cheaper products is proof of this, and the only reason it doesn't work on other cards is because of licensing/IP issues.
Sure, but both are by NCsoft, evil makers of Lineage. Even if I ignore that for a moment, both games give you a rather crippled experience for free, requiring a small payment for "normal" features. My issue is that paying members gain many advantages over free players, which then makes the game not worth playing for free.
Sure it does, if you want to be anal. Problem is, this is Canada. We're not all that big on frivolous lawsuits, because quite frankly there are better way to spend one's time than sitting in court arguing over the semantics of a few sentences written in a different century.
For the sake of argument, if Rogers adds a 300px block at the top of a page, without disrupting the rest of the content, are they really making a derivative ? Or is it independent content prepended to a separate document, akin to a Fax cover sheet ?
The bottom line is: I don't care what the judge, a couple attorneys and that nosey activist think. I've got no problem with the warning itself, I have a problem with the technical workings of snooping and modifying packets in-transit. Why don't they just fire me off an email, or even an automated phone call ? Someone went to great expense to install such a system, and I guarantee you they didn't go through all that effort just to help me control my consumption... anathema! There has to be a very real profit attached to this implementation, and that's what worries me.
Okay, so business as usual. If users did receive blocked mail, they would be whining now wouldn't they ?
So Google's captcha got smashed, ho-hum! Happens all the time to others, and it is certainly NOT a good reason to blacklist Gmail, unless you also block all Yahoo and Hotmail.
If this causes your spam solution to slow down due to overload, the fault is not Google's, it's your fault for running an underpowered mail queue. Spam is everyone's problem, and we have to work together to clean it up. Pointing fingers doesn't solve shit!
It's a simple function of a limited resource. Only X many albums can be reasonably marketed in a year. The more shit acts there are, the less room that leaves for respectable artists.
I'd much rather have algorithmic vocals than algorithmic music, but I don't sing so I'm clearly biased.
You may not care about IE support on a personal site or blog, but for corporate stuff it's completely reversed, with a heavy majority of business users still running IE6. They may know of Firefox, they may even use it on their home computer, but in the office they're stuck with IE.
Me, I just try my best to support both. I don't see IE6 as the enemy, even though it does create stress... my enemy is Opera/Safari/Konq and all the other one-off niche browsers. For those small players, my rule is "best effort only", which means if I forgot to test in that browser that day, well it sucks to be you.
The cost doesn't matter if the value added is less than zero.
The e-voting machines have resulted in a second term for the world's most visible terrorist, and they've wasted countless man-millenia as everyone discussed, debated or idly witnessed the chaos surrounding voting fraud. Hell I don't even LIVE in the U.S. and I watched a "documentary" about how easy it is to screw with the Diebold counting machines. That's 90 minutes of my life I won't get back, all because of one messed up government and its conveniently incompetent equipment contractor.
If you really want to tally the cost of something, you have to look at _everything_. The up-front dollar amount is nothing compared to the thousands of people that had to deal with these broken machines and learn how to use them, along with the millions who had to waste yet more brain cells on this dead-end gadget. How about the increased difficulty to implement a working e-voting solution due to voter reluctance ? That's a tough one!
cp reality speculation vi speculation diff reality speculation
Yeap, not easy to estimate the net impact of any change on your whole concept of reality. The e-voting fiasco's true cost cannot be quantified, though in the grand scheme of things it's a small line-item.
I played WoW for a while, during a period where I was off work for a few months. I played it all freakin' day long. Then when my life got back on track, I quickly lost interest because WoW felt like work, especially after hitting the level cap. I didn't need nor want a 2nd day job.
Had I not gone back to work, I probably would have kept on playing. I don't dislike MMOs, but the primary reward they provide is some sort of progression, be it experience/levels or grinding for new gear. If you can't invest the hours to achieve that progress, then it becomes an unsatisfying exercise. If I have only an hour to kill, WoW won't give me any fun, and consoles or flash games will provide a better endorphin/time ratio:)
From what I understand, this is plain old extortion. Toss the bitch in jail with a very aggressive butch, so we'll have a precedent to use against the RIAA/MPAA's thugs.
I wonder if this is some way to mitigate the "losses" to pirated software... because a cracked copy will probably still display the ads, thus count as a pair of sellable eyeballs even though the game disc itself was not paid for.
Naturally, I'd rather see the impact of ad-supported software on the sticker price. We have many resources that are purely ad-supported such as web sites and many television programs, so why not some nice free ad-supported games ? The important thing is to have relevant ads - don't try to sell me a goddamned Lexus in World of Warcraft!
Really ? Care to explain how having a picture of someone's house can cause them mental suffering ?
Would these people sue a pedestrian catching a glimpse of their wack shack ? Are they going to send me a C&D if I "accidentally" read the number on their mailbox ?
Their argument over the supposed impact on property value is bogus: everyone's values are dropping because the country is in financial crisis. Have they not seen the ridiculous foreclosure rates sweeping the nation ? Do they still hold that 1950's ideology that a house is a magical investment that steadily gains value over time without ever dropping ? Are they so obtuse to the concept of money that they believe it is infinite and everyone can idly get richer with each passing day ?
Some people gain, more people lose, but ultimately these folks sound like human failures desperately blaming their own ignorance on whoever's convenient.
Funny, while loading this page I got a "bandwidth cap warning" from my ISP, stealthily inserted into the page (Rogers Cable).
I expect nothing less from the despicable scam shop that is Rogers, but it's still kind of creepy.
For me, it's not a huge deal because I run a number of geographically diverse servers, I can VPN or proxy my traffic through any combination of them, should the need arise. Like any invasion of privacy, I'm not concerned about the marketing uses, it's the inevitable abuse that scares me, either by ISP staff sniffing passwords, or script kiddies rooting the monitoring systems (and/or the idiot sysadmin's PC).
The thing is, at this point I've given up on common sense. Things will continue to get more and more ridiculous until we reach a breaking point... the bubble will burst and there will be backlash against these invasions of privacy, but only when the common fool finally realizes their life is being tarnished by the practice.
Until then, we'll continue to be labeled as paranoids with our tinfoil hats.
I'm actually cool with this idea. In fact I really like it. I would much rather have a fresh clean OS that runs good, with VM support for those pesky old apps that don't like the new shoes. Vista was a half-way concept, trying to get the new bling without breaking too much old stuff, but fails miserably. I say screw legacy, VMs should handle the corner cases. In fact that's already what I do to some extent, running legacy apps in VMs as needed.
It would bring Windows to the same level as Linux, as far as application compatibility is concerned. The main difference is Windows will still have broad industry backing (and Visual Basic for the morons).
It worked for Apple, I'd love to see it work for Windows.
Perhaps I'm too cynical, but I don't think Adobe should even try to write 64-bit apps when they can barely manage to make a 32-bit app marginally stable.
CS3 was a big improvement over CS2 in terms of speed and reliability, but that's like saying light poop tastes better than dark poop. It's still crap.
It is only a problem because people are hypocrits when it comes to issues of race.
If you're not racist, then race should NOT matter at all. Anything less makes you racist to some degree. Even if you think you're helping one group, what you're really doing is neglecting everyone else.
The thing about this test is it would fool even clever people. The domain they were linking to is "mwr.army-support.com" well I don't know about you, but at first glance that looks somewhat legit. If it were "www.usarmy.8k0ng123u.cn", well I'd add another C-class to my IP filter.
I'll one-up you: how about transmitting a ton of fuzz data to DOS the entire fleet of vehicles, possibly confusing the heck out of the carputer and causing various problems.
We've seen so many stupid consequences to seemingly benign vulnerabilities on the PC, who's to say a kid with a Pringles can couldn't brick my car from the sidewalk ?
Slashdot Mirror
The current state of the economy has many people living paycheck to paycheck. Why do you think all these scammy payday-loan sharks keep multiplying like tribbles ? Do you really think people enjoy getting screwed with 60% interest ?
Wages are low, inflation is ridiculous, and overcrowding is VERY VERY REAL. The concept of "working poor" has become the new norm for college and university educated folks in various careers. This has pushed crime rates up because honest people can't make ends meet anymore, while fly-by-night crooks grace the covers of various trade magazines. The game of greed is killing everything and the rate of wealth concentration is accelerating with each passing day.
The system is failing, and quite a few people have started to believe that U.S. money is at risk of becoming worthless in the next 15 years, unless some very dramatic changes are implemented nationwide to reverse this crash course. People question ever-increasing military and space research budgets while basic infrastructure and public services fall into abandonment.
I don't know how you define "the real world", but for me it certainly isn't a piece of paper holding an imaginary and unbounded value.
At $300+, you can't fairly compare it to the entry-level M-Audio cards ($100 for an Audiophile 2496, $60 for the Revolution).
Firewire interfaces do have one thing going for them: isolation. Portability is great, but having those DAC/ADCs outside the PC case is excellent for noise levels.
If it weren't for M-Audio's spotty driver support, I'd praise them too. I've been quite happy with all their gear, they're quite affordable and they seem to know where to focus their attention... sometimes so-so build quality but excellent sound.
They did not fail to provide you with free email, and nowhere in their TOS do they offer any guarantees for spam filtering or even privacy. They are not at fault for anything here. You're certainly allowed to be dissatisfied, but Google hasn't done anything wrong or illegal.
Things get cracked, it's inevitable and people just deal with it. If your email needs are not met by Google's offerings, you're free to try someone else's email solution.
Me, I run my own mail server: problem solved! If I'm not happy with my email, the only person I need to bitch at is myself, and I'm fully empowered to fix it at whim.
If you're concerned about audio buffers "stealing" RAM on your gaming rig, then a sound card is the least of your problems.
It's funny that you should mention the SB16. SB16 was a crap card, but it was immensely popular and had great developer support. It sounded like shit, but it was popular and we should all know by now that a successful product is not necessarily a quality product, it just has to be well marketed and priced, in fact quality will often work against you.
If games could grow some balls and use their own sound processing libs, it wouldn't matter which sound card you owned as they would only be used as DACs. Crysis does its own sound processing and thus it outputs the exact same audio on any sound card, which means the onus for sound quality is on your DACs, amps and speakers, not some ghetto firmware/driver lock-in solution.
You almost sound like a troll, but i'll bite.
Turtle beach = YES. I don't know why they bother, but this tiny company makes great little sound cards. Simple, but clean. Their sound quality puts many "pro" cards to shame.
Bose = GOD NO! I mean, if you like the Bose sound, that's your preference and that's fine, but the term "playback quality" refers to reproducing the original sound as accurately as possible, something Bose speakers don't even try to accomplish.
The thing with sound is there are two main schools of thought: those who seek accurate reproduction, and those who seek "pleasant" reproduction. Studio monitors, high-end headphones and some brands of tower speakers shoot for accurate sound, which many people find cold and dry. Bose speakers typically produce "happy" sound, by using a gazillion drivers and psychoacoustic sound processing (think SRS).
Creative's X-Fi also specializes in this "happy" sound through the use of the so-called Crystallizer. It takes normal, clean audio, and adds the sonic equivalent of glitter dust to appeal to the aural magpies of this world. A few people dislike it (like me), but many people enjoy the effect it has on popular recordings.
So then, what do non-Bose non-Creative users lack ? Happy sound. I personally don't miss any of that stuff, and I have zero issues with my featureless onboard 8-channel sound and my cold-sounding high-end speakers. Even the Asus sound card doesn't tempt me one bit, because the features it offers, I don't want. It would be nice if a sound card could be just that: a sound processing accelerator, but in 2008 the CPU is more than capable of handling the cheap bandpass filters and flanging effects Creative calls "environmental audio". The fact that even Creative uses software EAX emulation for its cheaper products is proof of this, and the only reason it doesn't work on other cards is because of licensing/IP issues.
Sure, but both are by NCsoft, evil makers of Lineage. Even if I ignore that for a moment, both games give you a rather crippled experience for free, requiring a small payment for "normal" features. My issue is that paying members gain many advantages over free players, which then makes the game not worth playing for free.
Free only matters if you actually want the thing.
Sure it does, if you want to be anal. Problem is, this is Canada. We're not all that big on frivolous lawsuits, because quite frankly there are better way to spend one's time than sitting in court arguing over the semantics of a few sentences written in a different century.
For the sake of argument, if Rogers adds a 300px block at the top of a page, without disrupting the rest of the content, are they really making a derivative ? Or is it independent content prepended to a separate document, akin to a Fax cover sheet ?
The bottom line is: I don't care what the judge, a couple attorneys and that nosey activist think. I've got no problem with the warning itself, I have a problem with the technical workings of snooping and modifying packets in-transit. Why don't they just fire me off an email, or even an automated phone call ? Someone went to great expense to install such a system, and I guarantee you they didn't go through all that effort just to help me control my consumption... anathema! There has to be a very real profit attached to this implementation, and that's what worries me.
Most users won't get blocked mail
Okay, so business as usual. If users did receive blocked mail, they would be whining now wouldn't they ?
So Google's captcha got smashed, ho-hum! Happens all the time to others, and it is certainly NOT a good reason to blacklist Gmail, unless you also block all Yahoo and Hotmail.
If this causes your spam solution to slow down due to overload, the fault is not Google's, it's your fault for running an underpowered mail queue. Spam is everyone's problem, and we have to work together to clean it up. Pointing fingers doesn't solve shit!
It's a simple function of a limited resource. Only X many albums can be reasonably marketed in a year. The more shit acts there are, the less room that leaves for respectable artists.
I'd much rather have algorithmic vocals than algorithmic music, but I don't sing so I'm clearly biased.
You may not care about IE support on a personal site or blog, but for corporate stuff it's completely reversed, with a heavy majority of business users still running IE6. They may know of Firefox, they may even use it on their home computer, but in the office they're stuck with IE.
Me, I just try my best to support both. I don't see IE6 as the enemy, even though it does create stress... my enemy is Opera/Safari/Konq and all the other one-off niche browsers. For those small players, my rule is "best effort only", which means if I forgot to test in that browser that day, well it sucks to be you.
The cost doesn't matter if the value added is less than zero.
The e-voting machines have resulted in a second term for the world's most visible terrorist, and they've wasted countless man-millenia as everyone discussed, debated or idly witnessed the chaos surrounding voting fraud. Hell I don't even LIVE in the U.S. and I watched a "documentary" about how easy it is to screw with the Diebold counting machines. That's 90 minutes of my life I won't get back, all because of one messed up government and its conveniently incompetent equipment contractor.
If you really want to tally the cost of something, you have to look at _everything_. The up-front dollar amount is nothing compared to the thousands of people that had to deal with these broken machines and learn how to use them, along with the millions who had to waste yet more brain cells on this dead-end gadget. How about the increased difficulty to implement a working e-voting solution due to voter reluctance ? That's a tough one!
cp reality speculation
vi speculation
diff reality speculation
Yeap, not easy to estimate the net impact of any change on your whole concept of reality. The e-voting fiasco's true cost cannot be quantified, though in the grand scheme of things it's a small line-item.
I played WoW for a while, during a period where I was off work for a few months. I played it all freakin' day long. Then when my life got back on track, I quickly lost interest because WoW felt like work, especially after hitting the level cap. I didn't need nor want a 2nd day job.
:)
Had I not gone back to work, I probably would have kept on playing. I don't dislike MMOs, but the primary reward they provide is some sort of progression, be it experience/levels or grinding for new gear. If you can't invest the hours to achieve that progress, then it becomes an unsatisfying exercise. If I have only an hour to kill, WoW won't give me any fun, and consoles or flash games will provide a better endorphin/time ratio
Care to give me their home addresses so my eager friends and I can visit these gold farmers of yours ? I've always wanted to beat^H^H^H^Hmeet one!
From what I understand, this is plain old extortion. Toss the bitch in jail with a very aggressive butch, so we'll have a precedent to use against the RIAA/MPAA's thugs.
I wonder if this is some way to mitigate the "losses" to pirated software... because a cracked copy will probably still display the ads, thus count as a pair of sellable eyeballs even though the game disc itself was not paid for.
Naturally, I'd rather see the impact of ad-supported software on the sticker price. We have many resources that are purely ad-supported such as web sites and many television programs, so why not some nice free ad-supported games ? The important thing is to have relevant ads - don't try to sell me a goddamned Lexus in World of Warcraft!
Really ? Care to explain how having a picture of someone's house can cause them mental suffering ?
Would these people sue a pedestrian catching a glimpse of their wack shack ? Are they going to send me a C&D if I "accidentally" read the number on their mailbox ?
Their argument over the supposed impact on property value is bogus: everyone's values are dropping because the country is in financial crisis. Have they not seen the ridiculous foreclosure rates sweeping the nation ? Do they still hold that 1950's ideology that a house is a magical investment that steadily gains value over time without ever dropping ? Are they so obtuse to the concept of money that they believe it is infinite and everyone can idly get richer with each passing day ?
Some people gain, more people lose, but ultimately these folks sound like human failures desperately blaming their own ignorance on whoever's convenient.
Funny, while loading this page I got a "bandwidth cap warning" from my ISP, stealthily inserted into the page (Rogers Cable).
I expect nothing less from the despicable scam shop that is Rogers, but it's still kind of creepy.
For me, it's not a huge deal because I run a number of geographically diverse servers, I can VPN or proxy my traffic through any combination of them, should the need arise. Like any invasion of privacy, I'm not concerned about the marketing uses, it's the inevitable abuse that scares me, either by ISP staff sniffing passwords, or script kiddies rooting the monitoring systems (and/or the idiot sysadmin's PC).
The thing is, at this point I've given up on common sense. Things will continue to get more and more ridiculous until we reach a breaking point... the bubble will burst and there will be backlash against these invasions of privacy, but only when the common fool finally realizes their life is being tarnished by the practice.
Until then, we'll continue to be labeled as paranoids with our tinfoil hats.
I'm actually cool with this idea. In fact I really like it. I would much rather have a fresh clean OS that runs good, with VM support for those pesky old apps that don't like the new shoes. Vista was a half-way concept, trying to get the new bling without breaking too much old stuff, but fails miserably. I say screw legacy, VMs should handle the corner cases. In fact that's already what I do to some extent, running legacy apps in VMs as needed.
It would bring Windows to the same level as Linux, as far as application compatibility is concerned. The main difference is Windows will still have broad industry backing (and Visual Basic for the morons).
It worked for Apple, I'd love to see it work for Windows.
Perhaps I'm too cynical, but I don't think Adobe should even try to write 64-bit apps when they can barely manage to make a 32-bit app marginally stable.
CS3 was a big improvement over CS2 in terms of speed and reliability, but that's like saying light poop tastes better than dark poop. It's still crap.
It is only a problem because people are hypocrits when it comes to issues of race.
If you're not racist, then race should NOT matter at all. Anything less makes you racist to some degree. Even if you think you're helping one group, what you're really doing is neglecting everyone else.
Depends how you define "terrorist".
In this case, they're "terrorizing" the software industry. To some people, that's worse than murder, rape, and of course widespread corporate fraud.
Problem is, those people are in office.
The thing about this test is it would fool even clever people. The domain they were linking to is "mwr.army-support.com" well I don't know about you, but at first glance that looks somewhat legit. If it were "www.usarmy.8k0ng123u.cn", well I'd add another C-class to my IP filter.
Of course, one can hack the machine to disable all of this.. but honestly.. these people can be fired too ;)
Or promoted. I've found most morons don't feel hindered by the AV, unlike true power users who don't NEED the AV in the first place.
I'll one-up you: how about transmitting a ton of fuzz data to DOS the entire fleet of vehicles, possibly confusing the heck out of the carputer and causing various problems.
We've seen so many stupid consequences to seemingly benign vulnerabilities on the PC, who's to say a kid with a Pringles can couldn't brick my car from the sidewalk ?