I think I kinda like your neck of the woods better:D
I wish recreational drugs would be treated with equal respect here in northam. Such a big stink over nothing, IMO. Not that I consume that stuff anymore, but it's still annoying to see it still treated as an underground thing.
Buddy, I dare you to try RDKF. Either I'm lacking the outlandish hand coordination required to not suck, or it was designed specifically to drive me insane.
I'm used to throwing my Xbox controller in frustration, now I'm going to be throwing mice... maybe I should get a couple spares:P
Extinction is what happens when all these rapidly-multiplying kids and overconsuming society pass the breaking point. When a country no longer has sufficient resources to satisfy its population, some people suffer, and some may even die. Eventually we return to an equilibrium, but if we exhaust our current energy sources and haven't found a viable alternative by then, we will be facing some very hard times.
Maybe it's not extinction in the sense of killing the entire species, but I see it as an extinction of our way of living, our western comforts, or what some might call financial freedom. What happens when gas prices hit $20 per gallon ? Cars will lose their appeal, as very few will be able to afford the fuel. How will we heat our homes in the winter ? How will we power our chainsaws to cut firewood ? We are reliant on something, and that something is very likely to be pulled from right under our feet. What then ? Everything crumbles.
I don't see why OEM's would stock these when the single-arch boards are cheaper, but one purpose I did imagine long ago when these were first announced, was for a test bench. As a PC technician I often had to put together testing rigs for four different chipsets: Intel s478, lga775, AMD Athlon/Sempron and finally an Athlon64 s939 (we were never too heavy on Socket 754). Having a single board that can take all CPU's using adapters would be great for people like me, just have one system ready to go, and swap the CPU whenever you need to test something. Running all processors on the same board means I can keep an OS installed with bench/test software. No driver shuffling, reliable networking... it would be awesome!
Different musicians, different methods, different sounds.
I kind of like the sound of my Pod; it's missing something, yes, but in some cases I appreciate the hollowness. In today's artistic wasteland of boredom and redundancy, fake can be chic. Sometimes I'll plug my bass into the PC (with pregain of course), and concoct bastard mixtures of amp modelling and re-synthesis to yield a wholly new sound. I'm no guitarist or instumentalist, I just like sound.
I don't think we can arbitrarily compare "love" with arranged marriage or any other unions. There are many variables in play, such as cultural and familial pressure, religious teachings, and in more cases than we'd like to admit, submissive behavior.
"Love" often takes the passenger seat to life's innumerable hypocrisies.
Is it just me, or has Creative Labs failed to deliver any great products in the last decade ? Everything after SB Pro has been flaky, software-bugged malaysia-cheap garbage with 23 tonnes of hype and 0.03 grams of prowess.
The last Soundblaster I tried was the first Audigy, and man did that one ever suck. I returned it a few days later, after enduring countless sound glitches, instability, incompatibility, and driver hell. Good riddance! The Live had less "features", but in this case it meant "less things that can go wrong" and it worked for me, for a while at least.
Today, I'm sticking to the inbuilt audio on my NForce motherboard. Aside from the very occasional stutter (for which Windows is more to blame than any hardware), it's worked fine for me. Yes, it is a tad noisy to my audiophile ears, and I could easily solve that by using the S/PDIF or optical ports. It does environmental audio, it does 7.1, it does everything a sound card should do: it plays sound. It even does ASIO at 16-20 ms, which ain't bad at all for onboard sound. What more could I need/want that a Soundblaster does any better, and justifies the steep price ? The only selling point I could see is real-time Dolby Digital encoding, which Nforce2 had but was not included in later chipsets to cut costs. Sound is sound; you glue together a bunch of DACs and a FIFO and call it a day. EAX is cute, but could be done in software like we did in the old days. Are you trying to tell me a 3 ghz CPU can't do resonant filtering and phase tricks ? Puh-leez!
This is the main feature I miss from being an ex-ICQ user. You could send offline messages and the server would queue them for you. I think they had trouble with the sheer volume of crap they had to store this way, because this feature would work intermittently. I wouldn't use it as a general inbox, but it was very handy for when your buddy had to disconnect/reboot for a moment. Today's MSN just craps out after a minute-or-so timeout and bounces the message right back to you, or offers to open up Hotmail. It just doesn't feel right.. when I write email, it's usually of a more serious, official nature, whereas IM is just chatting.
By my memory, Windows didn't have TCP/IP in the early days. I'm talking Windows 3.1. We had to install a 3rd party TCP/IP stack, the one I remember was Trumpet Winsock. It was bundled with a dialer and once you were connected, every net-aware application simply tapped into WINSOCK.DLL and did its thing. It's hardly any different from the dialers embedded into the OS today, except networking is now ubiquitous, whereas back then it was an add-on.
The best part about early 90's internet was that it wasn't all about the web. You had email, usenet, gopher.. just gobs of condensed information without garbage, spam, nor porn *shudder*. I had a far easier time finding what I needed back then.
I can already picture these smart warheads hearing 50-Cent and turning around to go blast the ships that play Barbara Streisand instead.
So when will this power struggle come to an end already ? We have so many ways to blow stuff up, and so few ways to stop people from wanting to blow each other up.
I guess it's easier to patch the symptoms than actually solve the underlying problems. Welcome to earth.
Why bother with this elaborate scheme to sterilize males and release them back into the wild ? These things are a serious threat to our health, why can't we just kill them all and be done with it ?
Though I wish the same logic could be applied to certain human continents:P
Okay, then what's preventing someone from using headphones for their training session, then unplugging them ? It's not like they put screaming "Fawking DSL" ads in corporate training videos. Hell, at $500 a disc they don't NEED ad revenue.
What could possibly be the motivation behind such extortion (and their victims) ? I mean, when The Don shows up at your place of business with two thugs and a ferret, they're threatening your physical well-being. When a bunch of overseas l33t-hax0rz show up at my server's IP, I don't soil my Depends. It's just data.
Sure, they could run up a hefty bandwidth bill, but that's about the only thing bot-DDOS can really do, maybe forcing me to reboot the box. Boo-hoo. It's not like they own the cops, tne judge, the jury, the witnesses etc.. they're no mob, they're a bunch of blonde little shits from Sweden. They are a minor nuisance at best, and stand to lose far more than they could possibly gain.
Now if someone were doing this in partnership with the ISP, taking their cut of the bandwidth overage... Oooh road trip!
Which part of the protoplasm are you from ? I've got a handful of DVDs that force me to watch the ads, and I assure you they are not the "rental versions". Whenever you have a bunch of old farts with money (aka executive shareholders), you also have selfish hypocritical decisions such as "Let's make sure they know whose wallets they greased" when they show you three different corporate intros before even launching a long grainy irritating animated menu.
They probably reason that VHS had them anyway, so we might as well watch them. I guess these people never heard of fast-forward.
I do wonder why you bother with Netflix at all when you could just hop onto Usenet / any Supernova-style torrent site and download to your heart's content. It doesn't take all that long to download 700mb on a broadband connection, I would tend to think it's much faster than any snail-mail.
Unless you work as a media monkey in any branch of entertainment industry, I don't see why you need sound at work. If you "need" it to play music while you work, tough luck! On my PC, sound comes from a very limited number of tasks: Winamp/WMP/VLC, games, and whatever musical tools I abuse. I don't want the OS dingy-dong-beeps scaring the bejeezus out of me at 4 a.m., and I don't want these annoying web pages blarting out noise unless I specifically want to hear it.
My solution is simple: I use both the onboard sound AND a PCI card. The music/games are manually instructed to use the better card, everything else goes to the onboard. If I don't want to hear garbage, I just mute the onboard. Easy!
Still, I wish there were a global "mute" for browser-based stuff. Just a little clicky button on the toolbar, that tells embedded MIDI and Flash to shut the hell up.
You're also forgetting that early MD players were as large as the average tape walkman, and held only 80 minutes of music. They weren't out in 1998, the first player came out in 1992, the Sony MZ1. At that time, CD Recorders weren't popular, but they were certainly available and the elite computer users (such as myself) had them. Blank CD's cost $8.00 canadian in bulk and it took quite a while to burn them, as consumer hard drives weren't big enough, so you had to burn your disc in two passes.
To reinforce the point, RIM should hire a bunch of thugs to get rid of the IP-holding company.
More seriously, how the hell can you enforce a patent if you don't use it yourself ? Let's say I were to sell my monster PC, buy 20 pounds of heroin and file a patent on Hyperdimensional Flying Pink Elephants. Forty years from now, someone creates a real hD Flying Pink Elephant, and I sue them into oblivion even though I've never marketed such a beast because I obviously don't have the knowledge nor technology to create them. What the hell is that all about ?
NTP probably knows as much about e-mail transports as I know about Flying Pink Elephants, i.e. NOTHING! They are most certainly incapable of producing and marketing a Blackberry-like device, so why the hell should the law stop someone else from making them ?
With the kind of ubiquitous social presence that google commands, I wish they'd play harder at this game. I wouldn't be averse to them flat-out buying a whole panel of asshat politicians if it means we could shift the balance of power toward open communication and information pooling. I see Google as an important step towards knowledge-driven society (think Star Trek, minus the clingy outfits). They do things in broad, evolutionary strokes, and they often turn the industry around by breaking patterns and offering a fresh look at the building blocks of information exchange.
Ok let me rephrase: the artists will keep making music, they just won't be selling it through the conventional methods.
The "noise makers", aka the people who have no redeeming values other than pretending to sing and showing off some cleavage, they will vanish, back to the smelly murky depths of McDonalds drive-thru and suburban strip joints.
You know what ? I'm actually pleased when I see kids playing video games. At least they're not out blasting their godawful walmart subwoofers in my general direction, or driving into my fender, or making babies' babies, or getting arrested for getting loopy on bleach tablets thinking it was E, while drinking underage in a gang-operated nightclub.
Hell, I wouldn't want to be a teenager today, and I was one of the "bad kids".
I'm usually the first to say Eurasians are ahead of the times, but in this case GEEZUS FRIG have you folks never heard of CD-R ?
MD looked cool back when I was 14 and impressionable, but I walked 3 feet further, spent half the money and bought the fanciest discman in the store, to the tune of $300. Yeah, so MD is smaller, so f'ing what ? Back then I took the painstaking time to burn my own compilations at 1x. Today I spend a few minutes every week burning a new mp3 compilation for the car. Thank god the car-audio manufacturers are retarded, I've been begging for mp3-dvd for years but I don't even want to imagine how long it would take me to put together a 4.7gb playlist.
The best part about it all, is that my CDs from the early 90's still play on any equipment; at home, in the car, in my freaking game consoles! In my lifetime I've never seen an MD player for the car.
And now we have memory stick. Guess what, my 7-in-1 card reader doesn't have a memory stick slot. Oh, it even has the stupid Fuji xD slot, but no Sony, but I won't get into that. I never saw the point in buying a memory stick at double the price of any competing SD/CF device, especially since it came after all the standards were ubiquitous. Now we have the PSP, and I must admit I was impressed at the little thing, but they make you buy a freakin' memory stick, but not the regular memory stick, you need the "pro duo" kind, which is 2x more expensive than its overpriced uncle.
Sony is quite content believing we're a bunch of retarded fools easily parted from our money, and the sad part is, many of us are. I wish they'd quit distracting everyone from industry standards and spend more time making electronics that last more than 13 months:P
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm..
:D
I think I kinda like your neck of the woods better
I wish recreational drugs would be treated with equal respect here in northam. Such a big stink over nothing, IMO. Not that I consume that stuff anymore, but it's still annoying to see it still treated as an underground thing.
Buddy, I dare you to try RDKF. Either I'm lacking the outlandish hand coordination required to not suck, or it was designed specifically to drive me insane.
:P
I'm used to throwing my Xbox controller in frustration, now I'm going to be throwing mice... maybe I should get a couple spares
Extinction is what happens when all these rapidly-multiplying kids and overconsuming society pass the breaking point. When a country no longer has sufficient resources to satisfy its population, some people suffer, and some may even die. Eventually we return to an equilibrium, but if we exhaust our current energy sources and haven't found a viable alternative by then, we will be facing some very hard times.
Maybe it's not extinction in the sense of killing the entire species, but I see it as an extinction of our way of living, our western comforts, or what some might call financial freedom. What happens when gas prices hit $20 per gallon ? Cars will lose their appeal, as very few will be able to afford the fuel. How will we heat our homes in the winter ? How will we power our chainsaws to cut firewood ? We are reliant on something, and that something is very likely to be pulled from right under our feet. What then ? Everything crumbles.
Extinction of the american way.
I don't see why OEM's would stock these when the single-arch boards are cheaper, but one purpose I did imagine long ago when these were first announced, was for a test bench. As a PC technician I often had to put together testing rigs for four different chipsets: Intel s478, lga775, AMD Athlon/Sempron and finally an Athlon64 s939 (we were never too heavy on Socket 754). Having a single board that can take all CPU's using adapters would be great for people like me, just have one system ready to go, and swap the CPU whenever you need to test something. Running all processors on the same board means I can keep an OS installed with bench/test software. No driver shuffling, reliable networking... it would be awesome!
Gee, what do they call them in your neck of the woods ?
for those just tuning in, coffee shop = head shop
Different musicians, different methods, different sounds.
I kind of like the sound of my Pod; it's missing something, yes, but in some cases I appreciate the hollowness. In today's artistic wasteland of boredom and redundancy, fake can be chic. Sometimes I'll plug my bass into the PC (with pregain of course), and concoct bastard mixtures of amp modelling and re-synthesis to yield a wholly new sound. I'm no guitarist or instumentalist, I just like sound.
It's fun.
I don't think we can arbitrarily compare "love" with arranged marriage or any other unions. There are many variables in play, such as cultural and familial pressure, religious teachings, and in more cases than we'd like to admit, submissive behavior.
"Love" often takes the passenger seat to life's innumerable hypocrisies.
Posts like this are what brought me to Slashdot in the first place!
Thank you! Thank you!
(warning: extremely hateful rant)
Is it just me, or has Creative Labs failed to deliver any great products in the last decade ? Everything after SB Pro has been flaky, software-bugged malaysia-cheap garbage with 23 tonnes of hype and 0.03 grams of prowess.
The last Soundblaster I tried was the first Audigy, and man did that one ever suck. I returned it a few days later, after enduring countless sound glitches, instability, incompatibility, and driver hell. Good riddance! The Live had less "features", but in this case it meant "less things that can go wrong" and it worked for me, for a while at least.
Today, I'm sticking to the inbuilt audio on my NForce motherboard. Aside from the very occasional stutter (for which Windows is more to blame than any hardware), it's worked fine for me. Yes, it is a tad noisy to my audiophile ears, and I could easily solve that by using the S/PDIF or optical ports. It does environmental audio, it does 7.1, it does everything a sound card should do: it plays sound. It even does ASIO at 16-20 ms, which ain't bad at all for onboard sound. What more could I need/want that a Soundblaster does any better, and justifies the steep price ? The only selling point I could see is real-time Dolby Digital encoding, which Nforce2 had but was not included in later chipsets to cut costs. Sound is sound; you glue together a bunch of DACs and a FIFO and call it a day. EAX is cute, but could be done in software like we did in the old days. Are you trying to tell me a 3 ghz CPU can't do resonant filtering and phase tricks ? Puh-leez!
This is the main feature I miss from being an ex-ICQ user. You could send offline messages and the server would queue them for you. I think they had trouble with the sheer volume of crap they had to store this way, because this feature would work intermittently. I wouldn't use it as a general inbox, but it was very handy for when your buddy had to disconnect/reboot for a moment. Today's MSN just craps out after a minute-or-so timeout and bounces the message right back to you, or offers to open up Hotmail. It just doesn't feel right.. when I write email, it's usually of a more serious, official nature, whereas IM is just chatting.
By my memory, Windows didn't have TCP/IP in the early days. I'm talking Windows 3.1. We had to install a 3rd party TCP/IP stack, the one I remember was Trumpet Winsock. It was bundled with a dialer and once you were connected, every net-aware application simply tapped into WINSOCK.DLL and did its thing. It's hardly any different from the dialers embedded into the OS today, except networking is now ubiquitous, whereas back then it was an add-on.
The best part about early 90's internet was that it wasn't all about the web. You had email, usenet, gopher.. just gobs of condensed information without garbage, spam, nor porn *shudder*. I had a far easier time finding what I needed back then.
I can already picture these smart warheads hearing 50-Cent and turning around to go blast the ships that play Barbara Streisand instead.
So when will this power struggle come to an end already ? We have so many ways to blow stuff up, and so few ways to stop people from wanting to blow each other up.
I guess it's easier to patch the symptoms than actually solve the underlying problems. Welcome to earth.
Why bother with this elaborate scheme to sterilize males and release them back into the wild ? These things are a serious threat to our health, why can't we just kill them all and be done with it ?
:P
Though I wish the same logic could be applied to certain human continents
Okay, then what's preventing someone from using headphones for their training session, then unplugging them ? It's not like they put screaming "Fawking DSL" ads in corporate training videos. Hell, at $500 a disc they don't NEED ad revenue.
What could possibly be the motivation behind such extortion (and their victims) ? I mean, when The Don shows up at your place of business with two thugs and a ferret, they're threatening your physical well-being. When a bunch of overseas l33t-hax0rz show up at my server's IP, I don't soil my Depends. It's just data.
Sure, they could run up a hefty bandwidth bill, but that's about the only thing bot-DDOS can really do, maybe forcing me to reboot the box. Boo-hoo. It's not like they own the cops, tne judge, the jury, the witnesses etc.. they're no mob, they're a bunch of blonde little shits from Sweden. They are a minor nuisance at best, and stand to lose far more than they could possibly gain.
Now if someone were doing this in partnership with the ISP, taking their cut of the bandwidth overage... Oooh road trip!
Which part of the protoplasm are you from ? I've got a handful of DVDs that force me to watch the ads, and I assure you they are not the "rental versions". Whenever you have a bunch of old farts with money (aka executive shareholders), you also have selfish hypocritical decisions such as "Let's make sure they know whose wallets they greased" when they show you three different corporate intros before even launching a long grainy irritating animated menu.
They probably reason that VHS had them anyway, so we might as well watch them. I guess these people never heard of fast-forward.
I do wonder why you bother with Netflix at all when you could just hop onto Usenet / any Supernova-style torrent site and download to your heart's content. It doesn't take all that long to download 700mb on a broadband connection, I would tend to think it's much faster than any snail-mail.
Unless you work as a media monkey in any branch of entertainment industry, I don't see why you need sound at work. If you "need" it to play music while you work, tough luck! On my PC, sound comes from a very limited number of tasks: Winamp/WMP/VLC, games, and whatever musical tools I abuse. I don't want the OS dingy-dong-beeps scaring the bejeezus out of me at 4 a.m., and I don't want these annoying web pages blarting out noise unless I specifically want to hear it.
My solution is simple: I use both the onboard sound AND a PCI card. The music/games are manually instructed to use the better card, everything else goes to the onboard. If I don't want to hear garbage, I just mute the onboard. Easy!
Still, I wish there were a global "mute" for browser-based stuff. Just a little clicky button on the toolbar, that tells embedded MIDI and Flash to shut the hell up.
You're also forgetting that early MD players were as large as the average tape walkman, and held only 80 minutes of music. They weren't out in 1998, the first player came out in 1992, the Sony MZ1. At that time, CD Recorders weren't popular, but they were certainly available and the elite computer users (such as myself) had them. Blank CD's cost $8.00 canadian in bulk and it took quite a while to burn them, as consumer hard drives weren't big enough, so you had to burn your disc in two passes.
When in doubt, Wikipedia!
To reinforce the point, RIM should hire a bunch of thugs to get rid of the IP-holding company.
More seriously, how the hell can you enforce a patent if you don't use it yourself ? Let's say I were to sell my monster PC, buy 20 pounds of heroin and file a patent on Hyperdimensional Flying Pink Elephants. Forty years from now, someone creates a real hD Flying Pink Elephant, and I sue them into oblivion even though I've never marketed such a beast because I obviously don't have the knowledge nor technology to create them. What the hell is that all about ?
NTP probably knows as much about e-mail transports as I know about Flying Pink Elephants, i.e. NOTHING! They are most certainly incapable of producing and marketing a Blackberry-like device, so why the hell should the law stop someone else from making them ?
With the kind of ubiquitous social presence that google commands, I wish they'd play harder at this game. I wouldn't be averse to them flat-out buying a whole panel of asshat politicians if it means we could shift the balance of power toward open communication and information pooling. I see Google as an important step towards knowledge-driven society (think Star Trek, minus the clingy outfits). They do things in broad, evolutionary strokes, and they often turn the industry around by breaking patterns and offering a fresh look at the building blocks of information exchange.
Ok let me rephrase: the artists will keep making music, they just won't be selling it through the conventional methods.
The "noise makers", aka the people who have no redeeming values other than pretending to sing and showing off some cleavage, they will vanish, back to the smelly murky depths of McDonalds drive-thru and suburban strip joints.
You know what ? I'm actually pleased when I see kids playing video games. At least they're not out blasting their godawful walmart subwoofers in my general direction, or driving into my fender, or making babies' babies, or getting arrested for getting loopy on bleach tablets thinking it was E, while drinking underage in a gang-operated nightclub.
Hell, I wouldn't want to be a teenager today, and I was one of the "bad kids".
The secret to great science:
1. aim low
2. succeed
3. gloat
I mean puh-leez... how hard can it be to mimic fish ? Do they even have intellect at all ?
I'm usually the first to say Eurasians are ahead of the times, but in this case GEEZUS FRIG have you folks never heard of CD-R ?
:P
MD looked cool back when I was 14 and impressionable, but I walked 3 feet further, spent half the money and bought the fanciest discman in the store, to the tune of $300. Yeah, so MD is smaller, so f'ing what ? Back then I took the painstaking time to burn my own compilations at 1x. Today I spend a few minutes every week burning a new mp3 compilation for the car. Thank god the car-audio manufacturers are retarded, I've been begging for mp3-dvd for years but I don't even want to imagine how long it would take me to put together a 4.7gb playlist.
The best part about it all, is that my CDs from the early 90's still play on any equipment; at home, in the car, in my freaking game consoles! In my lifetime I've never seen an MD player for the car.
And now we have memory stick. Guess what, my 7-in-1 card reader doesn't have a memory stick slot. Oh, it even has the stupid Fuji xD slot, but no Sony, but I won't get into that. I never saw the point in buying a memory stick at double the price of any competing SD/CF device, especially since it came after all the standards were ubiquitous. Now we have the PSP, and I must admit I was impressed at the little thing, but they make you buy a freakin' memory stick, but not the regular memory stick, you need the "pro duo" kind, which is 2x more expensive than its overpriced uncle.
Sony is quite content believing we're a bunch of retarded fools easily parted from our money, and the sad part is, many of us are. I wish they'd quit distracting everyone from industry standards and spend more time making electronics that last more than 13 months