Impaled from his leg through the top of his skull ? And he lived ? Good Fnarg! I want to see an MPEG of that!
Sure, sometimes absolutely unbelievable stuff happens, _BUT_ it's not because it happened once that it will necessarily become commonplace. So what if a bunch of horny pre-teens are jacking off to Lara Croft or whoever is the latest cg star these days ? I think it's just a phase, that will fade away in a few years, just like everything.
The answer is simple enough : those fet-fet noises are the result of an unreadable area on the disc. It might be a nasty scratch, or sometimes just the disc itself might have a few production flaws that go unnoticed on a stereo, yet crop up with cd-roms.
One thing I'd try is to find a good old Panasonic-Matsushita 24x cdrom drive and try ripping it on that. Why the Panasonic ? Because it is quite probably the best drive for ripping that I've ever used. It will automatically slow down when it encounters an error and retry until it gets the bits out of there, unlike today's cdroms that just run right past it and say "Did we just hit something ?".
I've managed to save many badly damaged cd's with that drive, taking a seriously beaten up disc that constantly skips and burning the ripped data onto a new disc where you could barely hear the aforementioned fet-fet noise in the worst areas. It was also quite fast for its generation, ripping at a good constant 10-12x.
The big problem is that even within the ISP's network, they still slap you with speed caps and metered limits. If I'm transferring a 40mb file to a friend living 5 miles away, subscribing to the same cable service, then I would expect it to cost ZERO bandwidth since it is all internal, and also to run at full speed instead of the castrated 128kbit/s. IStop, mentioned in a prev post, works like this. They don't charge you for traffic that stays on the inside of their network, such as proxied HTTP, NNTP, mail, and any IStop-user-to-user communication. They understand their own upstream provider's billing practices, thus they apply them fairly and equally to their own customers. We need to see more of this, since it just makes absolute sense. Why pay for data that never exits the gateway ? Do I pay per-gigabyte charges for what flies around my LAN ? hell no, why should I pay my ISP for what stays inside their LAN ?
I'm legally liable for squat. This is a discussion forum. If I tell someone to jump off a bridge and he/she does so, it is their responsibility and theirs alone (as long as I didn't trick/drug them).
Besides, I didn't tell anyone to "commit violent crimes". I merely used the traditional beatdown as a metaphor to justify my personal opinion. What you should have understood was "Kick them where it hurts : their image/wallet/reputation/human resources". Don't you know what happens when an extrovert person gets unjustly fired or just badly treated ? They talk to others, they 'convert' their coworkers. Some of those coworkers may find another job because they don't want to be the next victim of executive abuse. Quickly enough, the entire business is on its knees, having lost all the good people who deserved better. And that's what I mean by giving them a beating. A corporate beating!
If you think using actual violence in this day and age will have any positive result whatsoever, then you may be the one requiring legal aid. We've got plenty of guns already, what we need is brains.
Firing an employee because the execs don't like her night-time hobbies is also illegal to begin with. The problem is that in this fucked up system, justice costs money. Those who have no money can have very little justice.
"You're fired because you're a freaky self-destructive neo-nazi satanic slut. Go ahead and sue me! Oh that's right, you CAN'T sue me because you don't have a job anymore. Sucks to be you!"
There comes a point where one must make a choice : follow the common mediocre law and get your ass repeatedly violated by anyone with a fatter wallet than yourself, OR step outside the fuzzy lines of legality and defend your rights and beliefs. #1 is easy, lazy, reliable : accept the corporate rape, get paid, grow old and die stupid. #2 is hard, exhausting and risky : go against the grain, risk losing everything, maybe even die young but live your life and don't let anyone get in your way.
Sheep live in the hills and chew on grass, do YOU look like a fucking sheep ?
Easy : You probably have an old Motorola modem. All the newer users (in the last 18 months or so) have been getting DOCSIS modems such as the Samsung and Com21.
The problem lies with the fact that DOCSIS modems talk to uBR routers, and Motorola modems talk to a different kind of router. It just so happens that Videotron's transfer limit software only supports the pre-DOCSIS Motorola modem for now, everyone else is unmetered because of the hardware/software incompatibility.
What this basically means is that I, with my Samsung modem, am having a free ride sucking down the monthly 6gb quota almost every day, and not paying an extra penny for it. I strongly suggest that you contest any bandwidth surcharge they try to bill you, with the argument that most other users aren't charged for excess bandwidth. Just mention the Better Business Bureau (Office de Protection du Consommateur) and they'll even send a hooker to calm you down.
Just buy a bunch of Lego Mindstorms kits, build yourself a juke-bot that will live in your basement and serve the sole purpose of retrieving CD's from their shelves and popping them into your high-end stereo system. A robotic DJ, if you prefer.
I'm getting quite tired of this dependency on "the law". It feels like everyone's become lazy and gutless in the past few years. It used to be that if someone screwed you badly and you had no clean way of getting revenge, well you'd just walk up to the smiling prick and claim some physical retribution upon him. Yes, I am suggesting that you play dirty when the 'nice' methods fail. It's ugly, but sometimes it's the only way to change people.
When a high-ranking suit tosses you aside like trash, and 'the system' prevents you from finding justice, you just have to take it into your own hands. Diplomacy can go a long way, but some people have 'risen' above humanity and reason, someone needs to knock them back down to earth. How many times have we heard or felt "Sue me, it doesn't change a thing".. it is sadly true, sometimes you just don't stand a chance in court or on paper.
Giving someone a good healthy beating (without being overly gratuitous) is natural defense. Didn't you learn as a kid that if someone throws you a punch, throw one back ? When that punch is non-physical, you should equally reply with a crippling non-physical blow. For example, if I had been this Miss Malice, I would have quite gleefully defaced the ex-employer's website and exposed them for the simple-minded bigots they are. They can't call it slander if it's the truth. The bottom line is : if someone screws you hard in this fast-paced industry, screw them better. We all hate idiot crooks, why should we sit still and tolerate them ?
(go ahead, mod me down. I'm one of those aggressive types who likes to fight for what I believe in. Don't you ?)
Bah, these activation woes are easily remedied by grabbing a "Select Edition" copy from your buddies in the Client Service dept. Even if you did buy the home/pro edition for yourself, installing the select edition gets rid of product activation altogether. You get to use the same product with less hassles.
Will the FBI prosecute itself for damages and "intangible losses" ? Heck, if they can arrest someone's ass for writing a "circumvention device", I want the right to imprison a fed for installing a government-sanctioned security circumvention device on MY PROPERTY!
Jon Katz fits because we get to flame the crap out of him every few minutes. I can't think for one second that Taco and Hemos even like this guy. He's probably imposed by the upper crass, else he would have been thrown out and lynched long ago. No tech knowledge whatsoever, he's just full of buzz, which just happens to irritate most of us who are out there getting enough bullshit from our bosses already.
Next thing we'll know, he's going to run for mayor, he's so full of himself!
Just as there is no copy-protection immune to the prying eyes of a disassembling debugger and a case of jolt, requiring thumb prints will certainly deter the pathetic fools who just steal a car at random, but it won't stop the big time crooks from pulling it off. How hard can it possibly be to have a plastic coating on your fingers with fake fingerprints engraved ? Think embossed saran wrap, glued air-tight to the skin.
Or do it John Woo style : kill someone and use their fingers instead!
Don't underestimate the CPU's power. It is a pure RISC-based core, which can't be well compared to x86 speeds. Just like those 500mhz Macs that can run circles around a P3-800mhz most of the time. Also keep in mind that all of the DC's subsystems are designed for fast smooth graphics and stutterless sound, and you don't have to share CPU time with a bloated OS. A good MAME port to the DC would probably run 95% of games at full framerate, which is the most power you can get for 50$ these days.
I see what you're hinting at : the I/O controller (the cluster of 4004s) would take serial data, munch it up and spit it out as a parallel/packeted chunk of data, which offers greater bandwidth for lesser end-processing. Bah, maybe.
I owned an Audigy for about a week, at which point I got pissed and returned it for a refund. It's just a friggin' SB Live with different firmware and a bunch of extra components on the board that serve useless things like enabling the bazillion ports on the AudigyDrive that basically costs an arm and does nothing.
I had purchased the Audigy because I was wetting myself over the prospect of having native ASIO drivers, since I have softsynths up the wazoo. It turns out that the ASIO support was flaky and unstable, and the card itself refused to function in 4.1 mode no matter what setting I gave it. It still ran in 5.1 mode so it was sending all the center sound to a speaker that didn't exist in my setup, hence I couldn't hear those things that were right in front of me.
It would appear as though it was rushed out the door much too early. Creative's support has never been too hot but this is just absurd. I'd rather plunk down thrice the price for a true pro audio card than this half-assed product.
Why not just have a page in the control panel that allows the user to select a set of tweaks that best suits his/her usage trends ? They've always had a few OpenGL tweaks that favor either graphics quality or performance, why wouldn't they just push that little after-thought further and make it a full-blown customization thing ?
For the serious gamer who spends 90% of his time in Quake and UT, he could tweak things on the side of performance, while the more business-oriented user could trade the performance for increased picture fidelity.
1024x768 doesn't seem measly to me. This is a 15" LCD we're talking about, not a 21" desktop CRT. Unless you intend to do graphics design on this laptop (which is kinda mindless considering the comparatively poor chroma quality of LCD vs CRT).
Slashdot Mirror
Pr0n.museum, goatse.cx.museum, etc
Impaled from his leg through the top of his skull ? And he lived ? Good Fnarg! I want to see an MPEG of that!
Sure, sometimes absolutely unbelievable stuff happens, _BUT_ it's not because it happened once that it will necessarily become commonplace. So what if a bunch of horny pre-teens are jacking off to Lara Croft or whoever is the latest cg star these days ? I think it's just a phase, that will fade away in a few years, just like everything.
I'd be thrown out of my neighborhood if my neighbors knew what I liked.
Ahhh.. so YOU'RE the Goatse.cx guy! =)
I don't have a problem with this, just give me a high-res boned skinned IK model of Rose McGowan :) Helloooooooo evil nurse!
The answer is simple enough : those fet-fet noises are the result of an unreadable area on the disc. It might be a nasty scratch, or sometimes just the disc itself might have a few production flaws that go unnoticed on a stereo, yet crop up with cd-roms.
One thing I'd try is to find a good old Panasonic-Matsushita 24x cdrom drive and try ripping it on that. Why the Panasonic ? Because it is quite probably the best drive for ripping that I've ever used. It will automatically slow down when it encounters an error and retry until it gets the bits out of there, unlike today's cdroms that just run right past it and say "Did we just hit something ?".
I've managed to save many badly damaged cd's with that drive, taking a seriously beaten up disc that constantly skips and burning the ripped data onto a new disc where you could barely hear the aforementioned fet-fet noise in the worst areas. It was also quite fast for its generation, ripping at a good constant 10-12x.
Ummmm
A police rep talking about low-level CD sectors ? These oregonians have a sense of humor!
The big problem is that even within the ISP's network, they still slap you with speed caps and metered limits. If I'm transferring a 40mb file to a friend living 5 miles away, subscribing to the same cable service, then I would expect it to cost ZERO bandwidth since it is all internal, and also to run at full speed instead of the castrated 128kbit/s. IStop, mentioned in a prev post, works like this. They don't charge you for traffic that stays on the inside of their network, such as proxied HTTP, NNTP, mail, and any IStop-user-to-user communication. They understand their own upstream provider's billing practices, thus they apply them fairly and equally to their own customers. We need to see more of this, since it just makes absolute sense. Why pay for data that never exits the gateway ? Do I pay per-gigabyte charges for what flies around my LAN ? hell no, why should I pay my ISP for what stays inside their LAN ?
I'm legally liable for squat. This is a discussion forum. If I tell someone to jump off a bridge and he/she does so, it is their responsibility and theirs alone (as long as I didn't trick/drug them).
Besides, I didn't tell anyone to "commit violent crimes". I merely used the traditional beatdown as a metaphor to justify my personal opinion. What you should have understood was "Kick them where it hurts : their image/wallet/reputation/human resources". Don't you know what happens when an extrovert person gets unjustly fired or just badly treated ? They talk to others, they 'convert' their coworkers. Some of those coworkers may find another job because they don't want to be the next victim of executive abuse. Quickly enough, the entire business is on its knees, having lost all the good people who deserved better. And that's what I mean by giving them a beating. A corporate beating!
If you think using actual violence in this day and age will have any positive result whatsoever, then you may be the one requiring legal aid. We've got plenty of guns already, what we need is brains.
Firing an employee because the execs don't like her night-time hobbies is also illegal to begin with. The problem is that in this fucked up system, justice costs money. Those who have no money can have very little justice.
"You're fired because you're a freaky self-destructive neo-nazi satanic slut. Go ahead and sue me! Oh that's right, you CAN'T sue me because you don't have a job anymore. Sucks to be you!"
There comes a point where one must make a choice : follow the common mediocre law and get your ass repeatedly violated by anyone with a fatter wallet than yourself, OR step outside the fuzzy lines of legality and defend your rights and beliefs. #1 is easy, lazy, reliable : accept the corporate rape, get paid, grow old and die stupid. #2 is hard, exhausting and risky : go against the grain, risk losing everything, maybe even die young but live your life and don't let anyone get in your way.
Sheep live in the hills and chew on grass, do YOU look like a fucking sheep ?
Easy : You probably have an old Motorola modem. All the newer users (in the last 18 months or so) have been getting DOCSIS modems such as the Samsung and Com21.
The problem lies with the fact that DOCSIS modems talk to uBR routers, and Motorola modems talk to a different kind of router. It just so happens that Videotron's transfer limit software only supports the pre-DOCSIS Motorola modem for now, everyone else is unmetered because of the hardware/software incompatibility.
What this basically means is that I, with my Samsung modem, am having a free ride sucking down the monthly 6gb quota almost every day, and not paying an extra penny for it. I strongly suggest that you contest any bandwidth surcharge they try to bill you, with the argument that most other users aren't charged for excess bandwidth. Just mention the Better Business Bureau (Office de Protection du Consommateur) and they'll even send a hooker to calm you down.
Just buy a bunch of Lego Mindstorms kits, build yourself a juke-bot that will live in your basement and serve the sole purpose of retrieving CD's from their shelves and popping them into your high-end stereo system. A robotic DJ, if you prefer.
I'm getting quite tired of this dependency on "the law". It feels like everyone's become lazy and gutless in the past few years. It used to be that if someone screwed you badly and you had no clean way of getting revenge, well you'd just walk up to the smiling prick and claim some physical retribution upon him. Yes, I am suggesting that you play dirty when the 'nice' methods fail. It's ugly, but sometimes it's the only way to change people.
When a high-ranking suit tosses you aside like trash, and 'the system' prevents you from finding justice, you just have to take it into your own hands. Diplomacy can go a long way, but some people have 'risen' above humanity and reason, someone needs to knock them back down to earth. How many times have we heard or felt "Sue me, it doesn't change a thing".. it is sadly true, sometimes you just don't stand a chance in court or on paper.
Giving someone a good healthy beating (without being overly gratuitous) is natural defense. Didn't you learn as a kid that if someone throws you a punch, throw one back ? When that punch is non-physical, you should equally reply with a crippling non-physical blow. For example, if I had been this Miss Malice, I would have quite gleefully defaced the ex-employer's website and exposed them for the simple-minded bigots they are. They can't call it slander if it's the truth. The bottom line is : if someone screws you hard in this fast-paced industry, screw them better. We all hate idiot crooks, why should we sit still and tolerate them ?
(go ahead, mod me down. I'm one of those aggressive types who likes to fight for what I believe in. Don't you ?)
Bah, these activation woes are easily remedied by grabbing a "Select Edition" copy from your buddies in the Client Service dept. Even if you did buy the home/pro edition for yourself, installing the select edition gets rid of product activation altogether. You get to use the same product with less hassles.
Of course it sounds like something I pulled out of my ass, but find a real crook who's motivated to pull it off, and he/she will.
Will the FBI prosecute itself for damages and "intangible losses" ? Heck, if they can arrest someone's ass for writing a "circumvention device", I want the right to imprison a fed for installing a government-sanctioned security circumvention device on MY PROPERTY!
I say this thing is a hoax.
Jon Katz fits because we get to flame the crap out of him every few minutes. I can't think for one second that Taco and Hemos even like this guy. He's probably imposed by the upper crass, else he would have been thrown out and lynched long ago. No tech knowledge whatsoever, he's just full of buzz, which just happens to irritate most of us who are out there getting enough bullshit from our bosses already.
Next thing we'll know, he's going to run for mayor, he's so full of himself!
Just as there is no copy-protection immune to the prying eyes of a disassembling debugger and a case of jolt, requiring thumb prints will certainly deter the pathetic fools who just steal a car at random, but it won't stop the big time crooks from pulling it off. How hard can it possibly be to have a plastic coating on your fingers with fake fingerprints engraved ? Think embossed saran wrap, glued air-tight to the skin.
Or do it John Woo style : kill someone and use their fingers instead!
Hey! Jerry Fallwell.. fall well... sounds like a terrorist bomber's name to me :) Sic the CIA on his tight bigot's ass.
Don't underestimate the CPU's power. It is a pure RISC-based core, which can't be well compared to x86 speeds. Just like those 500mhz Macs that can run circles around a P3-800mhz most of the time. Also keep in mind that all of the DC's subsystems are designed for fast smooth graphics and stutterless sound, and you don't have to share CPU time with a bloated OS. A good MAME port to the DC would probably run 95% of games at full framerate, which is the most power you can get for 50$ these days.
I see what you're hinting at : the I/O controller (the cluster of 4004s) would take serial data, munch it up and spit it out as a parallel/packeted chunk of data, which offers greater bandwidth for lesser end-processing. Bah, maybe.
I owned an Audigy for about a week, at which point I got pissed and returned it for a refund. It's just a friggin' SB Live with different firmware and a bunch of extra components on the board that serve useless things like enabling the bazillion ports on the AudigyDrive that basically costs an arm and does nothing.
I had purchased the Audigy because I was wetting myself over the prospect of having native ASIO drivers, since I have softsynths up the wazoo. It turns out that the ASIO support was flaky and unstable, and the card itself refused to function in 4.1 mode no matter what setting I gave it. It still ran in 5.1 mode so it was sending all the center sound to a speaker that didn't exist in my setup, hence I couldn't hear those things that were right in front of me.
It would appear as though it was rushed out the door much too early. Creative's support has never been too hot but this is just absurd. I'd rather plunk down thrice the price for a true pro audio card than this half-assed product.
Why not just have a page in the control panel that allows the user to select a set of tweaks that best suits his/her usage trends ? They've always had a few OpenGL tweaks that favor either graphics quality or performance, why wouldn't they just push that little after-thought further and make it a full-blown customization thing ?
For the serious gamer who spends 90% of his time in Quake and UT, he could tweak things on the side of performance, while the more business-oriented user could trade the performance for increased picture fidelity.
Mod Omnifarious' post up, he's got a seriously valid and important point here.
Ok then, an Alpha geek talking on ITS cell phoen and checking SOMEONE ELSES email.
Better ?
1024x768 doesn't seem measly to me. This is a 15" LCD we're talking about, not a 21" desktop CRT. Unless you intend to do graphics design on this laptop (which is kinda mindless considering the comparatively poor chroma quality of LCD vs CRT).