Ahh the opposite could be easily said. Religion is a motivational device; it either makes you a better person or a worse person. You could help an unlucky man and say it's God's will to help all his 'children', or you could beat him with a stick because 'he does not walk with Allah' yadda yadda. People will use anything as an excuse. In the end each is responible for their own actions, God or no god.
That said, I'm probably a little more generous/gullible than average, but then I'm also free to chase down fake bums with a crowbar. Sure, it's not godlike to attack people, but on the other hand i'm doing the world a favor by encouraging these spoiled kids to get a job and quit panhandling while living with their parents in a $300k home. What would Jesus do ?
Isn't that the dictionary definition of "senator" ? An old worthless sack of protoplasm that turns money into law proposals ?
Day in the life of a senator:
1. golf in the morning 2. scam people on ebay 3. trade real-estate 4. molest 14yr old niece 5. check up on today's wire transfers 6. get ridiculously drunk at the steakhouse 7. sit on the board and make some laws
You've obviously never relied on a laptop for anything beyond email/pr0n. I've been cursing my excellent Inspiron for over a year now "because it's not a tablet PC". For the true road warriors out there like myself, the revolving touchscreen is a godsend. It just opens up the media possibilities.
Here's a few things I do often that would be so much nicer on a Tablet PC: ebooks, note-taking / updating my road logbook, GPS navigation, graphic/web design, movies/music.. anything that doesn't need the keyboard becomes 10x more convenient with the flip-display.
But if you do fall in that 90% of people who have a laptop just for kicks, well you could play one hell of a game a Bejeweled on the touchscreen:)
LEADtools is much more than GD, because it is built with the typical not-so-clever contract programmer in mind, where time is more valuable than money (because it's not HIS money), and whose code is worse than LEAD's (VB.net sucks!). You don't need to understand pixel theory to use LEADtools, you just tell it "Give me a Gaussian blur of X strength" and *POOF* instant Photoshop. A handy PHP/Perl developer could accomplish the same end result, except he/she will have to write the Gaussian filter on his own, which would involve coding a set of convolution matrix utility functions, color-mapping logic, perhaps some affine sub-pixel sampling. The time spent doing graphics R&D might cost more than just buying the LEAD library.
Now if a bunch of free-software peeps were to assemble such a graphics lib and release it for all to use.. hmmmm:)
Re:Over 10,000 public CCTV cameras in LONDON alone
on
1984 Comes To Boston
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· Score: 1
Okay okay so they have a longer line than I thought, but still ten thousand cameras! Heck, I should jet over there and start subway-cam porn sites:)
I, for one, am not too excited about playing a sword-wielding pedophile minister in some over-the-top medieval action RPG.
Now that you've all recovered from that, I just want to say it plainly: Religion is like kryptonite. It's got a pretty green glow but it will VAPORIZE your brain in an instant. What would you rather have, a person studying science trying to find a cure for X-fatal-disease, or a person studying theology trying to find a higher being in some book written by bored old poor folk in the dark ages ?
Religion is like Jerry Springer, it's all made up and it sucks ignorant people in like flies.
Re:Over 10,000 public CCTV cameras in LONDON alone
on
1984 Comes To Boston
·
· Score: 1
Doesn't that cause much overlap ? I mean , 6000 cams in a subway system, that's more cameras than square feet of subway track, ?
Having worked there, I can honestly assure you that any technical endeavor is half-assed licensed crap from some clever contractor who knows how to milk a cow.
So what if we have this whizbang electronic passport ? Who else has the hardware to verify its integrity except the canadian authorities ? The purpose of a passport is to authenticate your identity ABROAD. Do you think border guards in Mexico will have the e-reader ? Hell no. Anything that relies on local verification is doomed to fail, just like it does on our beloved Internet. Someone out there is going to get their hands on a chip programmer and a holographic printer because there is sufficient monetary and criminal incentive to do so. No way around it unless the whole world gets together and implements a central DB, and even then, sysadmins can be bought.
It's always a race against crime, except the bad guys have all the trump cards.
The music companies were against it because it was a clandestine hit that didn't need the "Record Industry" to flourish. I'm no fan of rap "music", but there is something tangibly sexy about the Grey Album's fusion of sound and speech, something that is sadly missing from modern music because the latter is made with a cookie-cutter approach: "Hire an icon, make him look 'street', steal 20-year-old loop, add boobies and ADVERTISE!". The Grey Album, on the other hand, was produced by someone who knows and appreciates music very intimately.
I'm a music freak too, and I find myself questioning the producer's work on recent pop singles. Today's music sounds like they didn't give a fark about the released product. It's unfinished, unpolished, but it sells like hotcakes thanks to the media and these ever-more-retarded teens.
It takes a "fucking idiot" to issue such blanket statements that completely ignore technological advances. But since you're just trolling both sides of the fence in true slashtemplate fashion, I'll throw in my 2 cents and make things interesting.
Just because we are bathed in electronics today, doesn't mean they were so easily incorporated 20 years ago. Heck, how long have personal computers even been around ? Roughly 25 years. How long have they been seriously used for processing music ? Less than 12 years, and in the beginning it was pretty basic stuff: plain multitrack, very little DSP.
Now then, would you say that the XBOX isn't worth a shit because Fifa Soccer 2004 doesn't have the smell of wet grass and sweat to make it exactly like "the real thing" ? Hey, it's the latest and greatest, and things keep evolving by leaps and bounds every few years.
Perhaps soon we will discover what it is that these "vacuumophiles" claim exists deep within the 7th dimension that makes their amps sound "better", because we will come up with a tool that can detect this mysterious attribute and allow us to study it. Science is, after all, a series of theories that just happen to hold together.
Hey, I don't think it's so much nostalgia. The SID was revolutionary compared to every other sound chip on the market. It went far beyond FM synthesis and as such it is delightful for making raw techno sounds; I mean techno like it was in the 80's and 90's, not "techno" that is played in meat markets today. And it doesn't produce 8-bit crunchy sound at all, it is refreshingly clean and rich.
Ahhhhhh go fark yourself. We haven't achieved a perfect amp yet, and it is quite likely that current technology doesn't allow for "perfect" sound reproduction, but if I can't hear the distortion then it is of no consequence to me, to know that someone, somewhere, on some oscillator, at 8000x zoom, saw a blip where a dip should have been. It is "Good Enough".
Having heard nearfield monitors the other day that literally grabbed me by the ears, I can honestly declare that transistor amps sound plenty good to ME. That said, I wish someone would get a clue and not try to sell me 400$ worth of speakers and electronics in a 6000$ box.
Sound coloration should happen in the recording phase, not at playback. Let the guitarists go crazy with their broken electronics knowledge, and let it produce sounds of blissful mayhem. But then let my amp replay that mayhem the way it was heard by the artist, which is what they pressed on the record/CD. Don't give me more coloration.
Chum, if that "engineer" was able to tell the difference, it's because either one of those devices was faulty or poorly designed.
I can tell the difference between my Audiophile 2496 and an SBLive, but that's mostly because of the noise level on the SBLive. My audio setup just happens to be transparent enough to make it quite obvious. The 2496 is quiet as.. well, quieter than this crazy house for sure!
If you can't measure it, maybe we just don't have the right measuring tools/methodologies.
This said, I also think tubes are a load of religious crap. Sure, they distort elegantly, but when driving them at reasonable levels, distortion should be negligible in either tube or solid state, and thus the perceived differences should be equally negligible.
But really, any "desired" distortion should be in the hands of the producer/mixer. A playback device's job is to reproduce the sound as faithfully as it can, if someone tries to sell me tube distortion in a hi-fi amp, I reserve the right to drag them under my car from here to Alberta, and believe me, Saskatchewan's roads are anything BUT smooth.
I just use a dummy MX record on a frivolous domain I own. The MX record points to 127.0.0.1 so the spammer either spams his own box, or it just times out.
To tie in with SNK's thoughtless piracy claims (like so many other "misunderstood" game houses), notice than whenever SCEA refuses to publish something, that title immediately gains cult status and gets FTP'd to every dump site this side of the Great Firewall. Yes, I have Vib Ribbon, and Wipeout Fusion, and Thrill Kill, and all those other good/bad rejects, ON CDR. I could have gladly paid for many of them, but I couldn't, so I obtained them by whatever means I had available and threw down for a modchip.
I must admit though, than whenever I play Vib Ribbon with death metal, people accuse me of lying about quitting crack. So then I grab the nearest Dreamcast controller and smack them in the teeth.
If they are your nephews then it is your moral duty to pimp-slap them and their parents (your siblings).
Me, I've got my trusty old Dreamcast patched into my 20" SVGA, with Ikaruga superglued to the drive spindle. Whenever the little inlaws waltz over to point and laugh, I just smack them in the teeth with the controller, all without breaking my 40-chain combo.
Only shitty games come branded with an expiration date.
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Ahh the opposite could be easily said. Religion is a motivational device; it either makes you a better person or a worse person. You could help an unlucky man and say it's God's will to help all his 'children', or you could beat him with a stick because 'he does not walk with Allah' yadda yadda. People will use anything as an excuse. In the end each is responible for their own actions, God or no god.
That said, I'm probably a little more generous/gullible than average, but then I'm also free to chase down fake bums with a crowbar. Sure, it's not godlike to attack people, but on the other hand i'm doing the world a favor by encouraging these spoiled kids to get a job and quit panhandling while living with their parents in a $300k home. What would Jesus do ?
That's the perfectly shocking example of how short-sighted and hypocritical these people tend to be. Whoever gives the biggest donations wins!
Isn't that the dictionary definition of "senator" ? An old worthless sack of protoplasm that turns money into law proposals ?
Day in the life of a senator:
1. golf in the morning
2. scam people on ebay
3. trade real-estate
4. molest 14yr old niece
5. check up on today's wire transfers
6. get ridiculously drunk at the steakhouse
7. sit on the board and make some laws
Does this mean I can grow them into subwoofers if I use plenty of water and fertilizer ?
Yard-party, anyone ?
Good lord get out of the computing business!
:)
You've obviously never relied on a laptop for anything beyond email/pr0n. I've been cursing my excellent Inspiron for over a year now "because it's not a tablet PC". For the true road warriors out there like myself, the revolving touchscreen is a godsend. It just opens up the media possibilities.
Here's a few things I do often that would be so much nicer on a Tablet PC: ebooks, note-taking / updating my road logbook, GPS navigation, graphic/web design, movies/music.. anything that doesn't need the keyboard becomes 10x more convenient with the flip-display.
But if you do fall in that 90% of people who have a laptop just for kicks, well you could play one hell of a game a Bejeweled on the touchscreen
Nah, most likely it'll hoof-kick the flashlight up your posterior.
LEADtools is much more than GD, because it is built with the typical not-so-clever contract programmer in mind, where time is more valuable than money (because it's not HIS money), and whose code is worse than LEAD's (VB.net sucks!). You don't need to understand pixel theory to use LEADtools, you just tell it "Give me a Gaussian blur of X strength" and *POOF* instant Photoshop. A handy PHP/Perl developer could accomplish the same end result, except he/she will have to write the Gaussian filter on his own, which would involve coding a set of convolution matrix utility functions, color-mapping logic, perhaps some affine sub-pixel sampling. The time spent doing graphics R&D might cost more than just buying the LEAD library.
:)
Now if a bunch of free-software peeps were to assemble such a graphics lib and release it for all to use.. hmmmm
Okay okay so they have a longer line than I thought, but still ten thousand cameras! Heck, I should jet over there and start subway-cam porn sites :)
I, for one, am not too excited about playing a sword-wielding pedophile minister in some over-the-top medieval action RPG.
Now that you've all recovered from that, I just want to say it plainly: Religion is like kryptonite. It's got a pretty green glow but it will VAPORIZE your brain in an instant. What would you rather have, a person studying science trying to find a cure for X-fatal-disease, or a person studying theology trying to find a higher being in some book written by bored old poor folk in the dark ages ?
Religion is like Jerry Springer, it's all made up and it sucks ignorant people in like flies.
Doesn't that cause much overlap ? I mean , 6000 cams in a subway system, that's more cameras than square feet of subway track, ?
Having worked there, I can honestly assure you that any technical endeavor is half-assed licensed crap from some clever contractor who knows how to milk a cow.
So what if we have this whizbang electronic passport ? Who else has the hardware to verify its integrity except the canadian authorities ? The purpose of a passport is to authenticate your identity ABROAD. Do you think border guards in Mexico will have the e-reader ? Hell no. Anything that relies on local verification is doomed to fail, just like it does on our beloved Internet. Someone out there is going to get their hands on a chip programmer and a holographic printer because there is sufficient monetary and criminal incentive to do so. No way around it unless the whole world gets together and implements a central DB, and even then, sysadmins can be bought.
It's always a race against crime, except the bad guys have all the trump cards.
Add Dreamcast to that list of not-quite-there-yet emus. Well the DC emu ain't that bad (Chankast) but speed is severely lacking.
:)
That's why I've got the Dreamcast hooked up to my KVM with an Ikaruga disc permanently secured inside
The music companies were against it because it was a clandestine hit that didn't need the "Record Industry" to flourish. I'm no fan of rap "music", but there is something tangibly sexy about the Grey Album's fusion of sound and speech, something that is sadly missing from modern music because the latter is made with a cookie-cutter approach: "Hire an icon, make him look 'street', steal 20-year-old loop, add boobies and ADVERTISE!". The Grey Album, on the other hand, was produced by someone who knows and appreciates music very intimately.
I'm a music freak too, and I find myself questioning the producer's work on recent pop singles. Today's music sounds like they didn't give a fark about the released product. It's unfinished, unpolished, but it sells like hotcakes thanks to the media and these ever-more-retarded teens.
Absolutely. This is what tube "warmth" is all about, the warmth is in the distortion, and it belongs in the recording, not the reproduction.
It takes a "fucking idiot" to issue such blanket statements that completely ignore technological advances. But since you're just trolling both sides of the fence in true slashtemplate fashion, I'll throw in my 2 cents and make things interesting.
Just because we are bathed in electronics today, doesn't mean they were so easily incorporated 20 years ago. Heck, how long have personal computers even been around ? Roughly 25 years. How long have they been seriously used for processing music ? Less than 12 years, and in the beginning it was pretty basic stuff: plain multitrack, very little DSP.
Now then, would you say that the XBOX isn't worth a shit because Fifa Soccer 2004 doesn't have the smell of wet grass and sweat to make it exactly like "the real thing" ? Hey, it's the latest and greatest, and things keep evolving by leaps and bounds every few years.
Perhaps soon we will discover what it is that these "vacuumophiles" claim exists deep within the 7th dimension that makes their amps sound "better", because we will come up with a tool that can detect this mysterious attribute and allow us to study it. Science is, after all, a series of theories that just happen to hold together.
Hey, I don't think it's so much nostalgia. The SID was revolutionary compared to every other sound chip on the market. It went far beyond FM synthesis and as such it is delightful for making raw techno sounds; I mean techno like it was in the 80's and 90's, not "techno" that is played in meat markets today. And it doesn't produce 8-bit crunchy sound at all, it is refreshingly clean and rich.
Ahhhhhh go fark yourself. We haven't achieved a perfect amp yet, and it is quite likely that current technology doesn't allow for "perfect" sound reproduction, but if I can't hear the distortion then it is of no consequence to me, to know that someone, somewhere, on some oscillator, at 8000x zoom, saw a blip where a dip should have been. It is "Good Enough".
Having heard nearfield monitors the other day that literally grabbed me by the ears, I can honestly declare that transistor amps sound plenty good to ME. That said, I wish someone would get a clue and not try to sell me 400$ worth of speakers and electronics in a 6000$ box.
You have just given wings to my claim.
Sound coloration should happen in the recording phase, not at playback. Let the guitarists go crazy with their broken electronics knowledge, and let it produce sounds of blissful mayhem. But then let my amp replay that mayhem the way it was heard by the artist, which is what they pressed on the record/CD. Don't give me more coloration.
Chum, if that "engineer" was able to tell the difference, it's because either one of those devices was faulty or poorly designed.
I can tell the difference between my Audiophile 2496 and an SBLive, but that's mostly because of the noise level on the SBLive. My audio setup just happens to be transparent enough to make it quite obvious. The 2496 is quiet as.. well, quieter than this crazy house for sure!
If you can't measure it, maybe we just don't have the right measuring tools/methodologies.
This said, I also think tubes are a load of religious crap. Sure, they distort elegantly, but when driving them at reasonable levels, distortion should be negligible in either tube or solid state, and thus the perceived differences should be equally negligible.
But really, any "desired" distortion should be in the hands of the producer/mixer. A playback device's job is to reproduce the sound as faithfully as it can, if someone tries to sell me tube distortion in a hi-fi amp, I reserve the right to drag them under my car from here to Alberta, and believe me, Saskatchewan's roads are anything BUT smooth.
I just use a dummy MX record on a frivolous domain I own. The MX record points to 127.0.0.1 so the spammer either spams his own box, or it just times out.
American translation: When other people do not think like you, bomb the living bejeepers out of those sand niggers.
Windows XP : eXtra Porn
To tie in with SNK's thoughtless piracy claims (like so many other "misunderstood" game houses), notice than whenever SCEA refuses to publish something, that title immediately gains cult status and gets FTP'd to every dump site this side of the Great Firewall. Yes, I have Vib Ribbon, and Wipeout Fusion, and Thrill Kill, and all those other good/bad rejects, ON CDR. I could have gladly paid for many of them, but I couldn't, so I obtained them by whatever means I had available and threw down for a modchip.
I must admit though, than whenever I play Vib Ribbon with death metal, people accuse me of lying about quitting crack. So then I grab the nearest Dreamcast controller and smack them in the teeth.
If they are your nephews then it is your moral duty to pimp-slap them and their parents (your siblings).
Me, I've got my trusty old Dreamcast patched into my 20" SVGA, with Ikaruga superglued to the drive spindle. Whenever the little inlaws waltz over to point and laugh, I just smack them in the teeth with the controller, all without breaking my 40-chain combo.
Only shitty games come branded with an expiration date.