Seriously, why not be honest with yourself? You'll be happier. Personally, I like diversity in my music. So what if I like some of Kelly Clarkson's songs? Or Enya? Sometimes I am in the mood for that. But sometimes I need to hear Clutch, Pantera, or Megadeth. And everything in between. Really about the only thing I can't stomach is country, but I can do a little Hank Williams Jr or Johnny Cash every now and again.
Now that doesn't mean that I haven't let a friend of mine live down that he once said he really liked Hanson.:) But I used to listen to lots of crap. So what? Live, learn, and for crying out loud, evolve! Try different things, allow yourself to honestly try to enjoy something for what it is. There are going to be people who listen to one kind of music their entire lives. That's OK I guess, but I just don't get it. I think diversity makes things interesting and builds creativity.
Because most of the people who have the misfortune of still running Windows 98 do so because they are comfortable with it and have no intention of changing until their hard drive melts. They got their computer eons ago, it does everything they want it to do, they don't need to play World of Warcraft or run complicated programs, and the thought of upgrading to even Windows 2000 makes them break out in cold sweats. Up until 6 months ago, my stepmother was still running her Win98 machine, until it got so undeniably slow that she was forced by necessity to upgrade to WinXP.
Up until 1 month ago, I was running Win98.
OK, "running" isn't quite the correct term. It was running on my machine, when I booted it to play Half-Life mods (that would be the first one), Quake MegaTF (yes, the olddd one), or Ghost Recon. Or if I needed to do some DVD authoring. (I have a couple of programs that I use, that I still haven't found a good enough replacement for on Linux) But I think that was about it really. But to your point, I didn't see a need to reinstall it. I finally did, with Windows 2000, because it just kept locking up on me. But as long as I didn't leave it up for very long, or did single tasks on it, it was fine. My wife's machine still runs 98, she uses it for the web, email, and Quicken. Honestly, if you just need a simple OS, for simple tasks, Win98 just isn't that bad.
Of course, it is my secondary machine, my main machine runs Kubuntu, which is up 24x7.
The worst part of cheating is that it forever creates doubt, mistrust and skepticism about the skills of others online, meaning that if you play well, you are labeled a cheater. Respect goes out the window.
Back in the Quake Meta TF days, cheaters were usually obvious, and many people flaunted it. It was always gratifying when someone would get banned for it though.:) I never used any cheats, but I did have a zoom script that allowed me to use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out in increments. Not a cheat, but it certainly helped when sniping. I had several people accuse me of cheating, and it was almost a compliment. I always tried to find the cheaters, because it was fun to test my skill against them.
I met up with one person in email, and he was asking me about cheating. I told him I didn't, and he admitted to me that he did. But in the game, he would get really really upset if people accused him of cheating. He would even have others defend him. I called him out once in a game, and that pretty much ended our friendly relationship.:)
I always wondered what the point really was, because I played for fun.
No fair putting arcade games in the list. After all, those are REAL games, from the real gaming age. So many memories. I don't think you can compare them to PC or console games, it was just.... different then. Being in an arcade was just... different. You had to spend your hard-earned money to play them. They were all new, and hard in their own ways. The entire experience was something that today's (and really yesterday's) kids just will never get to experience. I am just so glad that I did. Visit KLOV for a trip down memory lane.
(I am really surprised nobody mentioned Quake. Yeah, Doom was cool, but Quake Mega Team Fortress was just awesome IMO. Half-life and Unreal Tournament were amazing, but Quake kind of holds a special place.
George Lucas had a few good movies in him, but in reality he had one great thing and that was to revolutionize the use of special effects. He is more of a technical specialist rather than a story teller - why else would he continue to re-work the same material over and over again by enhancing the effects?
Lucas is a lucky hack. There, I said it. It's pretty well known that the reason he reworked the originals (other than the huge paychecks) was because he said they weren't up to his vision. He wasn't happy with them, they weren't really what he wanted.
He got his chance, multiple times, to create his vision - and they were terrible compared to the originals. The only reason they were successful is because they followed on the coattails of the movies that were good - those movies which he admits weren't what he wanted.
I am not a Star Wars nut, I just really liked the originals. OK, I thought the ewoks were too corny, but the trilogy as a whole was great. I saw EP I in the theater, thought it sucked. I rented EP II, and fast forwarded through most of it. I haven't seen EP III yet. These are Lucas' vision. I am not going to waste any time signing petitions to get the originals on DVD. I won't buy any super sets (or anything else) Lucas puts out. It's pretty much that simple for me.
I have that book at home, but haven't read it. It is actually my wife's.
When we were dating, we went to a big bookstore. We parted ways, she went for the language section. She was getting her master's in French linguistics at the time. I wandered around to various sections.
We met up about an hour later, each of us with several books. I was excited to have found Metamagical Themas, because I loved Hofstadter's other books I had read. She was excited about the one she found, Le Ton beau de Marot. Then we both realized that the same author wrote them. Very weird.
When she was done with her master's, she considered going for a PhD. When she looked into various programs, one of them was at Indiana University, and there is a chance it would have been working with Hofstadter. It didn't work out, she decided to not pursue the PhD, but I had grand thoughts of deep discussions with Hofstadter over a few beers.:)
Turing's death is a warning about the dangers of discriminating against people because they are different.
For all values of 'different'.
I am currently reading "Alan Turing: The Enigma" (http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/), and while I am not much for biographies, it is pretty good so far. It is quite long and detailed, but I am anxious to get through it. The foreword is by one of my favorite authors, Douglas Hofstadter. Can't wait to get his new book in 2007.
If you are a geek, read Godel Escher Bach, and The Mind's I. And if you really want to tackle something, try Metamagical Themas. It's like a good hot sauce - tasty, yet painful, leaving you wanting more.:)
Isn't this kind of redundant, and a little more complicated than it should be for the average home user? I mean, Windows already has a perfectly good filesystem, complete with nifty utilities like xcopy and ntbackup. Sheesh, people will use just about any excuse to push Linux.
Hmm, then why the "Ask Slashdot"??:)
I know, I get your point. But this problem *does* affect Linux users as well. Quite honestly, the "average home user" doesn't worry too much about backing things up. If they do, they can buy a "one touch backup" external hard drive. We linux users have (or choose) to fend for ourselves, writing scripts and searching freshmeat for clever solutions. I ended up reusing an old 120GB hard drive as an external drive, and writing a quick rsync script to copy over what I need to backup. It does what I need it to do, when I need it to do it. I choose to manually power on the external drive, run the script, then unmount and power off the drive.
The whole point is fitting the solution to your needs. There's no reason to get all huffy about it. BTW, posting "use xcopy and ntbackup" is really no different than saying "use rsync and tar". Both cryptic, both not much help.
The older we get the more crap we have seen and the less tolerant we are of new crap. Hence the question: why is there so much crap around these days?
Things which I thought were pretty good when I was 20 now look like crap to be 20 years later. Maybe the absolute level of crap today is the same as is was in the past.
I think this is correct. I mean, talk to some teenagers... maybe they will think Miami Vice is cool. Or American Pie 6: The Rehashening. There is nothing really new, it just seems the WAY it is redone is pretty bad. There will always be sequels and remakes, most will suck, a few will be good. I'm OK with remakes, as long as there is something genuine in them. I remember when I first heard that RESPECT, sung by Aretha Franklin, was a remake. The original has been forgotten, probably for good reason.
I think the main culprit is in the marketing and advertising. Absolute crap is pushed as "a blockbuster hit event". There are no normal movies or TV shows anymore, EVERYTHING is a "hit" or a "television event", and is crammed down our throats before it is ever released. We are told how great it is, and we had damn well better believe it is something we can't afford to miss. It used to be, crap was crap, people kind of accepted it for what it was. Luckily, word of mouth is still pretty accurate. I rely on friends or buzz to hear about things. And even then, it doesn't always work out. But we have seen astroturfing efforts to undermine that.
Bottom line is, until people wise up, and stop paying to see garbage like The Dukes of Hazzard, studios have no reason to change.
So the US is more than happy turn over administrative control of the Internet domains to ICANN, but retains the right to control the root structure. In essence, ICANN becomes a semi-legitimized world front for the Internet. Other countries can't claim they don't have control over the process now, and the United States retains the true power. This will appease a few countries but on the whole nothing will change. In the end, the US hasn't given up a thing but a bloated and malformed beaureaucracy anyway.
I just invested in a lovely upgrade and the parts are due to arrive in the store tomorrow. I'm REALLY glad these Conroe reviews came out when they did because I'm going to change my order!
I've currently got a socket 754 Athlon 64 3400+ with a GeForce 6600GT. I was planning on upgrading to the AM2 socket with an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with a GeForce 7900GT.
I always wondered who plunked down the cash to upgrade hardware constantly. I guess now I know. I still don't get it though.
I can not count the number of managers that have two or three people reporting to them. There are^H^H^Hwere managers who have never worked in the field they manage.
My friend works at Intel, as a manager. He has only been in that position for 6 months or so, and he did do the work in the field. He has been saying for a while that they have too many managers. He told me he completely agreed with what they were doing, and has been saying it should be done for a long time. I guess they did a lot of research on it too (surprise surprise) and decided what the optimal number of people each manager should have, what the structure should look like, etc. He has six people reporting to him, but two other managers in his group have 4 each. He obviously hopes he doesn't lose his job, he has been there 10 years. He has always spoken highly of how the company has treated him.
Oddly enough, the reason we were talking about all this coincided with my applying for a job at Intel (yesterday) and using him as a referral. I lost my job at a small company 3 days ago, and I was a manager but still doing a lot of technical stuff. What is weird is that they replaced me with someone who was purely a manager, no technical skills at all. Strange, the ebb and flow of large/small companies in the technology sector.
(It's been a weird week - my brother lost his job last week, and my mother-in-law lost hers today. All different fields, in different parts of the country.)
I heard somewhere that Lucas doesn't like directing actors because the actors may not act in the way he wants them to, and he prefers CG because the actors do exactly what you want them to do.
George Lucas is an idiot. He bitched for years that the original trilogy wasn't what he wanted, they weren't his real vision, etc. And they were fantastic. With the prequels, he was promoting how his vision could finally be realized - and it sucked. He got what he wanted, and the movies were terrible. They were annoying and trivial, the ONLY redeeming quality about them was that we knew where there story was going. If these movies had come out in order at Lucas' hands, the series would have died. The only reason the originals were good was because Lucas wasn't as involved with them. The more he got involved, the more the movies went downhill. You can pick them apart and analyze them, but in essence, they were just mediocre movies that capitalized on their legacy.
I have to say that I haven't seen Episode III yet, but I really have no desire to see it. This isn't about Lucas ruining my childhood or anything that tragic - it's just that he makes terrible movies. No computer-generated anything is going to help him with that. He is a talentless hack who got lucky long long ago, in a galaxy far far away.
I run a Pentium90 as my firewall/router. (yes, you read that right) It is truly fanless, except for the power supply, and does a great job. It was also quite cheap (free). The only drawback is that it takes up a bit of space. But you don't really need even that much processing power for a firewall/router.
Michael
Nearly no intelligent designer writes off evolution. They write off evolution being able to produce entirely new species altogether.
Damn, I thought there was only supposed to be ONE intelligent designer. Now you are telling me there are many? This religious hoo-ha is more complicated than science, I am switching back.
So there is a long-term benefit to the Empire, but one paid for by the loss of countless innocent lives.
Not to diminish the loss of life, but let's not forget the money. Bush wants (and will probably get) a total of 120 billion dollars for the next year. We have spent almost as much money on our "war on terror" in a few years as was spent in the 13 years in Vietnam. This "war" has to be financed, and it is going to be paid for by the next several American generations.
It amazes me that people equate the "war" in Iraq as having to do with terrorism. But Bush and Co. are happy to lead people to believe that we are somehow safer because Saddam was taken out of power. And why is it still called a "war" when he declared victory years ago? It is a joke, and I am saddened that so many people in America just simply do not get it. I actually think the only reason we are still over there is so Bush cannot be impeached. Nobody would dare impeach a President while our troops are fighting overseas, right?
First off - love the GIMP. I have never used Photoshop, and use Linux at home and work. GIMP has served me very very well for what I use it for. I have done some things in it that have made Photoshop users say "nice!". (I just do graphics stuff for fun, not my profession at all - anyone with minor talent would kick my butt with Photoshop)
A simple example which bugged me this weekend. I needed extra space to draw in so I resized the canvas. But I can't actually paint there! Why?
This annoys the crap out of me as well. It happens all the time. Then there are things like when I am zooming in on an image, it will mysteriously jump to 1200%. I can't figure this one out. I'll be clicking in (+) and then all of a sudden... BOOM. I am looking at a massive zoom. Extremely annoying, and I can't figure out why it happens. But it has been doing that since the early versions.
And there are many many other examples of things like this. But I live when them, through gritted teeth sometimes, and still enjoy using it. It is an awesome free tool. But I think it needs to get a lot better in these small nuances.
Who has ever said Bill Gates has sacrificed for his charity? Seriously. I want to see one legitimate quote about this, because I believe you are full of shit on this point.
Read the last friggin paragraph of the post that I originally commented on. I even quoted the exact line in my first post, which used the words "self-sacrifice". That is what I was commenting on the entire time. Fuck.
Who are you to bitch and moan that he hasn't made a sacrifice? Who cares?
I don't care, I am only trying to be correct. People always oooh and ahhhh about Bill Gates' sacrifices to charity. My ONLY point is that he has not made any SACRIFICE. He has given incredibly large sums of money to charity - that is to be applauded. But don't tell me it has been a sacrifice. That is the ONLY thing I am making clear. For some reason, people like you get their panties in a bunch and start hurling insults at me for saying this.
I know you're kind very well.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Ironically, you don't know how to use the word "you're" correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that doesn't mean that I haven't let a friend of mine live down that he once said he really liked Hanson.
Up until 1 month ago, I was running Win98.
OK, "running" isn't quite the correct term. It was running on my machine, when I booted it to play Half-Life mods (that would be the first one), Quake MegaTF (yes, the olddd one), or Ghost Recon. Or if I needed to do some DVD authoring. (I have a couple of programs that I use, that I still haven't found a good enough replacement for on Linux) But I think that was about it really. But to your point, I didn't see a need to reinstall it. I finally did, with Windows 2000, because it just kept locking up on me. But as long as I didn't leave it up for very long, or did single tasks on it, it was fine. My wife's machine still runs 98, she uses it for the web, email, and Quicken. Honestly, if you just need a simple OS, for simple tasks, Win98 just isn't that bad.
Of course, it is my secondary machine, my main machine runs Kubuntu, which is up 24x7.
Back in the Quake Meta TF days, cheaters were usually obvious, and many people flaunted it. It was always gratifying when someone would get banned for it though.
I met up with one person in email, and he was asking me about cheating. I told him I didn't, and he admitted to me that he did. But in the game, he would get really really upset if people accused him of cheating. He would even have others defend him. I called him out once in a game, and that pretty much ended our friendly relationship.
I always wondered what the point really was, because I played for fun.
(I am really surprised nobody mentioned Quake. Yeah, Doom was cool, but Quake Mega Team Fortress was just awesome IMO. Half-life and Unreal Tournament were amazing, but Quake kind of holds a special place.
Lucas is a lucky hack. There, I said it. It's pretty well known that the reason he reworked the originals (other than the huge paychecks) was because he said they weren't up to his vision. He wasn't happy with them, they weren't really what he wanted.
He got his chance, multiple times, to create his vision - and they were terrible compared to the originals. The only reason they were successful is because they followed on the coattails of the movies that were good - those movies which he admits weren't what he wanted.
I am not a Star Wars nut, I just really liked the originals. OK, I thought the ewoks were too corny, but the trilogy as a whole was great. I saw EP I in the theater, thought it sucked. I rented EP II, and fast forwarded through most of it. I haven't seen EP III yet. These are Lucas' vision. I am not going to waste any time signing petitions to get the originals on DVD. I won't buy any super sets (or anything else) Lucas puts out. It's pretty much that simple for me.
It *was* the new format, back in 1999. But I agree with your concept. :)
I have that book at home, but haven't read it. It is actually my wife's.
When we were dating, we went to a big bookstore. We parted ways, she went for the language section. She was getting her master's in French linguistics at the time. I wandered around to various sections.
We met up about an hour later, each of us with several books. I was excited to have found Metamagical Themas, because I loved Hofstadter's other books I had read. She was excited about the one she found, Le Ton beau de Marot. Then we both realized that the same author wrote them. Very weird.
When she was done with her master's, she considered going for a PhD. When she looked into various programs, one of them was at Indiana University, and there is a chance it would have been working with Hofstadter. It didn't work out, she decided to not pursue the PhD, but I had grand thoughts of deep discussions with Hofstadter over a few beers. :)
Paradoxically, it is about twice as long!
And quite simple to handle. Offer a free 30 second clip for people to download to test their players.
Of course, that would be the smart solution, and you can't really use that phrase in the same sentence with DRM.
I am currently reading "Alan Turing: The Enigma" (http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/), and while I am not much for biographies, it is pretty good so far. It is quite long and detailed, but I am anxious to get through it. The foreword is by one of my favorite authors, Douglas Hofstadter. Can't wait to get his new book in 2007.
If you are a geek, read Godel Escher Bach, and The Mind's I. And if you really want to tackle something, try Metamagical Themas. It's like a good hot sauce - tasty, yet painful, leaving you wanting more. :)
Hmm, then why the "Ask Slashdot"??
I know, I get your point. But this problem *does* affect Linux users as well. Quite honestly, the "average home user" doesn't worry too much about backing things up. If they do, they can buy a "one touch backup" external hard drive. We linux users have (or choose) to fend for ourselves, writing scripts and searching freshmeat for clever solutions. I ended up reusing an old 120GB hard drive as an external drive, and writing a quick rsync script to copy over what I need to backup. It does what I need it to do, when I need it to do it. I choose to manually power on the external drive, run the script, then unmount and power off the drive.
The whole point is fitting the solution to your needs. There's no reason to get all huffy about it. BTW, posting "use xcopy and ntbackup" is really no different than saying "use rsync and tar". Both cryptic, both not much help.
Things which I thought were pretty good when I was 20 now look like crap to be 20 years later. Maybe the absolute level of crap today is the same as is was in the past.
I think this is correct. I mean, talk to some teenagers... maybe they will think Miami Vice is cool. Or American Pie 6: The Rehashening. There is nothing really new, it just seems the WAY it is redone is pretty bad. There will always be sequels and remakes, most will suck, a few will be good. I'm OK with remakes, as long as there is something genuine in them. I remember when I first heard that RESPECT, sung by Aretha Franklin, was a remake. The original has been forgotten, probably for good reason.
I think the main culprit is in the marketing and advertising. Absolute crap is pushed as "a blockbuster hit event". There are no normal movies or TV shows anymore, EVERYTHING is a "hit" or a "television event", and is crammed down our throats before it is ever released. We are told how great it is, and we had damn well better believe it is something we can't afford to miss. It used to be, crap was crap, people kind of accepted it for what it was. Luckily, word of mouth is still pretty accurate. I rely on friends or buzz to hear about things. And even then, it doesn't always work out. But we have seen astroturfing efforts to undermine that.
Bottom line is, until people wise up, and stop paying to see garbage like The Dukes of Hazzard, studios have no reason to change.
Two words: United Nations
I've currently got a socket 754 Athlon 64 3400+ with a GeForce 6600GT. I was planning on upgrading to the AM2 socket with an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with a GeForce 7900GT.
I always wondered who plunked down the cash to upgrade hardware constantly. I guess now I know. I still don't get it though.
My friend works at Intel, as a manager. He has only been in that position for 6 months or so, and he did do the work in the field. He has been saying for a while that they have too many managers. He told me he completely agreed with what they were doing, and has been saying it should be done for a long time. I guess they did a lot of research on it too (surprise surprise) and decided what the optimal number of people each manager should have, what the structure should look like, etc. He has six people reporting to him, but two other managers in his group have 4 each. He obviously hopes he doesn't lose his job, he has been there 10 years. He has always spoken highly of how the company has treated him.
Oddly enough, the reason we were talking about all this coincided with my applying for a job at Intel (yesterday) and using him as a referral. I lost my job at a small company 3 days ago, and I was a manager but still doing a lot of technical stuff. What is weird is that they replaced me with someone who was purely a manager, no technical skills at all. Strange, the ebb and flow of large/small companies in the technology sector.
(It's been a weird week - my brother lost his job last week, and my mother-in-law lost hers today. All different fields, in different parts of the country.)
My TRS-80 is up in 1.7 seconds.
OK, how do you buy a mobile phone?
George Lucas is an idiot. He bitched for years that the original trilogy wasn't what he wanted, they weren't his real vision, etc. And they were fantastic. With the prequels, he was promoting how his vision could finally be realized - and it sucked. He got what he wanted, and the movies were terrible. They were annoying and trivial, the ONLY redeeming quality about them was that we knew where there story was going. If these movies had come out in order at Lucas' hands, the series would have died. The only reason the originals were good was because Lucas wasn't as involved with them. The more he got involved, the more the movies went downhill. You can pick them apart and analyze them, but in essence, they were just mediocre movies that capitalized on their legacy.
I have to say that I haven't seen Episode III yet, but I really have no desire to see it. This isn't about Lucas ruining my childhood or anything that tragic - it's just that he makes terrible movies. No computer-generated anything is going to help him with that. He is a talentless hack who got lucky long long ago, in a galaxy far far away.
I run a Pentium90 as my firewall/router. (yes, you read that right) It is truly fanless, except for the power supply, and does a great job. It was also quite cheap (free). The only drawback is that it takes up a bit of space. But you don't really need even that much processing power for a firewall/router. Michael
Damn, I thought there was only supposed to be ONE intelligent designer. Now you are telling me there are many? This religious hoo-ha is more complicated than science, I am switching back.
The only reason that these kooks are rioting over this is because they don't have sports teams that win championships.
Not to diminish the loss of life, but let's not forget the money. Bush wants (and will probably get) a total of 120 billion dollars for the next year. We have spent almost as much money on our "war on terror" in a few years as was spent in the 13 years in Vietnam. This "war" has to be financed, and it is going to be paid for by the next several American generations.
It amazes me that people equate the "war" in Iraq as having to do with terrorism. But Bush and Co. are happy to lead people to believe that we are somehow safer because Saddam was taken out of power. And why is it still called a "war" when he declared victory years ago? It is a joke, and I am saddened that so many people in America just simply do not get it. I actually think the only reason we are still over there is so Bush cannot be impeached. Nobody would dare impeach a President while our troops are fighting overseas, right?
A simple example which bugged me this weekend. I needed extra space to draw in so I resized the canvas. But I can't actually paint there! Why?
This annoys the crap out of me as well. It happens all the time. Then there are things like when I am zooming in on an image, it will mysteriously jump to 1200%. I can't figure this one out. I'll be clicking in (+) and then all of a sudden ... BOOM. I am looking at a massive zoom. Extremely annoying, and I can't figure out why it happens. But it has been doing that since the early versions.
And there are many many other examples of things like this. But I live when them, through gritted teeth sometimes, and still enjoy using it. It is an awesome free tool. But I think it needs to get a lot better in these small nuances.
Read the last friggin paragraph of the post that I originally commented on. I even quoted the exact line in my first post, which used the words "self-sacrifice". That is what I was commenting on the entire time. Fuck.
I don't care, I am only trying to be correct. People always oooh and ahhhh about Bill Gates' sacrifices to charity. My ONLY point is that he has not made any SACRIFICE. He has given incredibly large sums of money to charity - that is to be applauded. But don't tell me it has been a sacrifice. That is the ONLY thing I am making clear. For some reason, people like you get their panties in a bunch and start hurling insults at me for saying this.
I know you're kind very well.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Ironically, you don't know how to use the word "you're" correctly.