I played Doom 3 and wasn't impressed with anything but how "pretty" it was. I didn't find it that fun, the replay value is almost nil. Not only that but it runs like shit on my dual Athlon MP system with 768MB of RAM and a GF4.
I hate this trend where all new video games have to be more graphically intensive and prettier, all the while having the exact same quality of gameplay of all the others already in the genre.
Quake II was/is fun, Quake III was/is fun, UT2k3/4 are fun, Diablo II Expac is fun, Enemy Territory is fun, Doom III is not. Which ones run the best? The fun ones. So why buy a game that isn't that fun that I can hardly run?
I don't care how a game looks so much as it has good replay value and is FUN.
I'm still playing Diablo II Expansion like it just came out after...christ...5 years?
I refuse to buy games that require an monthly fee to play. (If I pay by the month, why do I have to buy the game too?) Games already cost me enough in time spent, why add $ cost into it? If you play a monthly fee game that costs $10 per month for 2 years you blow $240 on it + $40 for the cost of the game. So $280 for a game. And don't give me that crap about server maintenance. Battle.net has been free for Diablo II for like 5 years and I'm pretty sure you can still play Diablo I on it which is closer to 10 years old.
I vowed ages ago never to buy bleeding edge hardware again either. It's not worth it. Wait till the market calms down then get the second, third, etc newest. I paid $488 for my CPUs when they were hot off the die cutter and $500 for my motherboard when it was bleeding edge. What are they worth now? Less than $100 each and $300 respectively and games these days aren't playable on it. I may want to play them but I'm not going to upgrade hardware because I can't play ONE game smoothly, especially when none of the games coming out impress me in any way except how they look.
If these are anything like the proximity readers I use to get in buildings for work then the range is about 3cm from the reader. You won't be buying anyone else's groceries by accident, or getting free groceries.
But I'm wary of anything touted as -proof. -proof smacks of marketing getting their grubby paws on it.
Sure they gave you some steel wool to scratch the CD with, it's only a 3-4 on Moh's hardness scale, as in not very. I'll be impressed when it can withstand being tossed shiny side town on a little bit of sand on a hard surface and rubbed around vigrously. Quartz/glass/sand/silicon are a great deal more likely to encounter your CDs than steel wool is and they're a 7 or so on Moh's hardness scale.
All the media industry is doing is maximizing profit by giving the customer as little as possible and charging as much as they'll pay for it. I forsee they'll keep removing functionality until their user base starts dropping off sharply.
The price of a seeing a movie in the theater is going up. How much longer until watching a movie costs as much as buying it does today?
How come you have to pay to buy a movie if you've already seen it? Why can't you get a movie for free if you haven't seen it so you can decide whether or not it's worth buying? The answer to all these questions is profit.
DVDs used to be cheaper than VHS, but when DVD started taking off so did its price. Now VHS movies are as cheap as they should have been back when thats all there was.
If these things were reasonably priced, who would care to obtain them without paying anyone? (downloading illegally is notstealing or theft by the way, don't let them convince you it is)
I refuse to purchase a printer that requires ink cartridges that cost over $5. Ink is not that expensive. The cartridges are not that expensive. They're just charging you that much because you don't have a choice if you want to use your printer again. If that rules out all printers (and so far it has) so be it. They're not getting my money. I was disgusted to find that the last printer I bought was $50 and the cardtridges were $30. No one should need an explaination to see that this is just wrong.
[rant]They're owned by eBay, so when you sell something, and get via Paypal, eBay is now double dipping.
They get money for the listing, AND money from your money.
If they were a nice company like Google, one or the other would be free if you used both eBay and Paypal on a given sale, but like most greedy coroporations they don't care about making their customers happy, they care about making the maximum amount of money from their customers. [/rant]
I have a dual Athlon MP 1200 board, and before that, an Abit BP6 (dual celeron). There are advantages to having dual CPUs. One of them is, if a rogue process suddenly starts using up an entire processor (a situation that would bring single cpu systems to a hard-lock) you might not even notice a performance problem until you try and use that process. You can run twice as many processes and won't see a performance hit (provided you have the RAM). For example: I can run about 4 instances of Diablo II Expansion, Firefox with about 10 pages open, and tons of other little things in the background. I'm currently running 46 processes, including 3 diablos, Firefox with 7 pages open, AIM, Rapidbackup, Google desktop search, gmail notifier, getright, Ultraedit, TrayIt, Windows Sniper, Clipomatic, Transtext, Tclock, stickies, powermenu, winbar and all the usual system processes. This is the normal state of windows for me and it runs just fine.
However there are disadvantages too. Good luck finding a soundard with lots of features that gets along with dual CPUs. Creative has awful drivers and I'd almost swear they don't bother testing them, most other soundcards do just as bad or worse and offer fewer features. I built this machine back in fall of '01 and it wasn't until about a year ago that they released a set of drivers for the Audigy that I couldn't cause a BSOD at will with. If I ran Winamp using the directsound out and seeked around within a song repeatidly really fast it would BSOD 100% of the time. Not to mention you have to buy TWO processors rather than one, and the board was ~$500, is E-ATX, barely fits in an Antec SX1200 (HUGE case). In fact the hds stick out over the DIM slots and almost over the 2nd CPU. My case is gigantic and its too small for this motherboard.
You cannot fix social problems with legislation. Spam will never end as long as there will be fools who buy products advertised by unsolicited commercial e-mail. Period.
In case of a./ing here's basically the only thing at that link: Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.
Stupid users + insecure browser = why don't they just GIVE their computers away?
Talk about a bunch of zombie machines waiting to happen.
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life"
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 1
I myself had a BP6 2x Celeron 500s w/768 mb of ram. I also got it when it first came out (~1998-1999) and my dad is still using it. It works fine, still runs Windows 2000 like a champ.
I use a Tyan Thunder K7 I built in 2001 with 2x Athlon MP 1.2Ghzs & 768MB of RAM (was 1GB but the 4th stick gave me problems, rock solid with 768MB) and it still runs everything but Doom 3 perfectly acceptably. (Win2k again)
I think there's something to be said for the lifetime of dual processor machines. Just don't try and use a creative soundcard in one. If you think creative's drivers are bad with 1 processor, try two.
That said, my mom is still running a Pentium I 200mhz with 48MB of RAM. THAT beast needs to go. I can hardly stand to use it.
I think long jailterms are the wrong thing for people who commit computer crimes such as spamming, virus writing and the like.
I think their punishment should be to work in a tech support helpdesk for a number of years. It's the worst tech job you can have really. Of course they'll have to be supervised heavily to ensure they don't instruct sheeple to turn their home computers into zombies and the like, but its still a lot less monitoring required than a prison.
So Windows 2000 is unaffected....I see more and more reasons every day for NOT "upgrading" to XP.
I'm not trying to get both sides of the flame war to attack me, but I -like- Windows 2000. I haven't had to format in a couple years and most of these new security holes pass me by.
If you ask me Windows XP is Windows 2000 + bloat + security holes.
Can anybody give me a convincing reason to "upgrade" to XP? I even own a legitimate hologram cd (of XP) that I got at a.NET launch event, and I've never used it.
Actually anything with Susan Surandon in it makes me want to run for the hills. I've never been more bored during a movie.
That reminds me, she was also starring in that butcher job of Dune that the SciFi channel did 2 years ago, coincidence? Well..maybe not the SciFi channel butchered it anyway, but having her in it certainly didn't help matters.
History of Doom/Quake
on
Life After Doom
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· Score: 3, Funny
Doom Doom II Quake = Brown doom Quake II = Green doom Quake III = Shiny doom Doom 3 = ??? (nobody knows, we can't see anything)
The United States started the internet. Why shouldn't we have a great influence on it? Don't get me wrong I think it should be as unregulated as possible, but it was our idea!
This immediately brought to mind Pascal's Wager
on
Matrix Decision Making
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· Score: 3, Interesting
In short it's a decision matrix that says believing in god is a better choice than not believing in god. Being an atheist I have to admit it's about the most convincing argument I've ever seen, largely because it's purely logical. Here is the short of it:
God exists------God does not exist Wager for God-------Gain all--------Satus quo Wager against God---Misery----------Status quo
Please excuse the horrible formatting, I suck at html.
Re:Not ONLY Faster, lighter, but also IE-compatibl
on
Browser Wars 2004
·
· Score: 1
It would help, because designers that don't want to design for IE don't have to, and the ones that do, well their pages get rendered to look as the designer intended. It's a solution because I could finally stop using IE entirely. As is there are a few pages that still don't work in Firefox and I have no choice but to use IE if I want to view them.
I'm appalled. Not because it's a Microsoft product, but because Word does such a shoddy job of handling large files. It should have been written in LaTeX, then published as a post script or pdf. For those not familiar, Word chokes on that 5MB file. You can write entire books in LaTeX (or magazines since those technically contain more data).
Slashdot Mirror
I played Doom 3 and wasn't impressed with anything but how "pretty" it was. I didn't find it that fun, the replay value is almost nil. Not only that but it runs like shit on my dual Athlon MP system with 768MB of RAM and a GF4.
I hate this trend where all new video games have to be more graphically intensive and prettier, all the while having the exact same quality of gameplay of all the others already in the genre.
Quake II was/is fun, Quake III was/is fun, UT2k3/4 are fun, Diablo II Expac is fun, Enemy Territory is fun, Doom III is not. Which ones run the best? The fun ones. So why buy a game that isn't that fun that I can hardly run?
I don't care how a game looks so much as it has good replay value and is FUN.
I'm still playing Diablo II Expansion like it just came out after...christ...5 years?
I refuse to buy games that require an monthly fee to play. (If I pay by the month, why do I have to buy the game too?) Games already cost me enough in time spent, why add $ cost into it? If you play a monthly fee game that costs $10 per month for 2 years you blow $240 on it + $40 for the cost of the game. So $280 for a game. And don't give me that crap about server maintenance. Battle.net has been free for Diablo II for like 5 years and I'm pretty sure you can still play Diablo I on it which is closer to 10 years old.
I vowed ages ago never to buy bleeding edge hardware again either. It's not worth it. Wait till the market calms down then get the second, third, etc newest. I paid $488 for my CPUs when they were hot off the die cutter and $500 for my motherboard when it was bleeding edge. What are they worth now? Less than $100 each and $300 respectively and games these days aren't playable on it. I may want to play them but I'm not going to upgrade hardware because I can't play ONE game smoothly, especially when none of the games coming out impress me in any way except how they look.
If these are anything like the proximity readers I use to get in buildings for work then the range is about 3cm from the reader. You won't be buying anyone else's groceries by accident, or getting free groceries.
But I'm wary of anything touted as -proof. -proof smacks of marketing getting their grubby paws on it.
e ss_ad_.htm#3.6.1.
Sure they gave you some steel wool to scratch the CD with, it's only a 3-4 on Moh's hardness scale, as in not very. I'll be impressed when it can withstand being tossed shiny side town on a little bit of sand on a hard surface and rubbed around vigrously. Quartz/glass/sand/silicon are a great deal more likely to encounter your CDs than steel wool is and they're a 7 or so on Moh's hardness scale.
I picked Moh's because to explain because: Mohs hardness is defined by how well a substance will resist scratching by another substance. from: http://www.calce.umd.edu/general/Facilities/Hardn
Like the info, work on the bragging.
*Modded down*
Since when do the nerds/geeks worry about clothing style?
Since some of us want to have more than a plutonic relationship with a living breathing female human.
All the media industry is doing is maximizing profit by giving the customer as little as possible and charging as much as they'll pay for it. I forsee they'll keep removing functionality until their user base starts dropping off sharply.
The price of a seeing a movie in the theater is going up. How much longer until watching a movie costs as much as buying it does today?
How come you have to pay to buy a movie if you've already seen it? Why can't you get a movie for free if you haven't seen it so you can decide whether or not it's worth buying? The answer to all these questions is profit.
DVDs used to be cheaper than VHS, but when DVD started taking off so did its price. Now VHS movies are as cheap as they should have been back when thats all there was.
If these things were reasonably priced, who would care to obtain them without paying anyone? (downloading illegally is not stealing or theft by the way, don't let them convince you it is)
Fight back, download movies.
I refuse to purchase a printer that requires ink cartridges that cost over $5. Ink is not that expensive. The cartridges are not that expensive. They're just charging you that much because you don't have a choice if you want to use your printer again. If that rules out all printers (and so far it has) so be it. They're not getting my money. I was disgusted to find that the last printer I bought was $50 and the cardtridges were $30. No one should need an explaination to see that this is just wrong.
[rant]They're owned by eBay, so when you sell something, and get via Paypal, eBay is now double dipping.
They get money for the listing, AND money from your money.
If they were a nice company like Google, one or the other would be free if you used both eBay and Paypal on a given sale, but like most greedy coroporations they don't care about making their customers happy, they care about making the maximum amount of money from their customers. [/rant]
I have a dual Athlon MP 1200 board, and before that, an Abit BP6 (dual celeron). There are advantages to having dual CPUs. One of them is, if a rogue process suddenly starts using up an entire processor (a situation that would bring single cpu systems to a hard-lock) you might not even notice a performance problem until you try and use that process. You can run twice as many processes and won't see a performance hit (provided you have the RAM). For example: I can run about 4 instances of Diablo II Expansion, Firefox with about 10 pages open, and tons of other little things in the background. I'm currently running 46 processes, including 3 diablos, Firefox with 7 pages open, AIM, Rapidbackup, Google desktop search, gmail notifier, getright, Ultraedit, TrayIt, Windows Sniper, Clipomatic, Transtext, Tclock, stickies, powermenu, winbar and all the usual system processes. This is the normal state of windows for me and it runs just fine.
However there are disadvantages too. Good luck finding a soundard with lots of features that gets along with dual CPUs. Creative has awful drivers and I'd almost swear they don't bother testing them, most other soundcards do just as bad or worse and offer fewer features. I built this machine back in fall of '01 and it wasn't until about a year ago that they released a set of drivers for the Audigy that I couldn't cause a BSOD at will with. If I ran Winamp using the directsound out and seeked around within a song repeatidly really fast it would BSOD 100% of the time. Not to mention you have to buy TWO processors rather than one, and the board was ~$500, is E-ATX, barely fits in an Antec SX1200 (HUGE case). In fact the hds stick out over the DIM slots and almost over the 2nd CPU. My case is gigantic and its too small for this motherboard.
and the first thing that came to mind was portable pr0n. I can think of no other useful reason for a 20gb portable device that can play movies.
You cannot fix social problems with legislation. Spam will never end as long as there will be fools who buy products advertised by unsolicited commercial e-mail. Period.
./ing here's basically the only thing at that link: Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.
Which is why you should send this to everybody you know: http://www.boulderpledge.com/
In case of a
-Roger Ebert
Stupid users + insecure browser = why don't they just GIVE their computers away?
Talk about a bunch of zombie machines waiting to happen.
I myself had a BP6 2x Celeron 500s w/768 mb of ram. I also got it when it first came out (~1998-1999) and my dad is still using it. It works fine, still runs Windows 2000 like a champ.
I use a Tyan Thunder K7 I built in 2001 with 2x Athlon MP 1.2Ghzs & 768MB of RAM (was 1GB but the 4th stick gave me problems, rock solid with 768MB) and it still runs everything but Doom 3 perfectly acceptably. (Win2k again)
I think there's something to be said for the lifetime of dual processor machines. Just don't try and use a creative soundcard in one. If you think creative's drivers are bad with 1 processor, try two.
That said, my mom is still running a Pentium I 200mhz with 48MB of RAM. THAT beast needs to go. I can hardly stand to use it.
I think long jailterms are the wrong thing for people who commit computer crimes such as spamming, virus writing and the like.
I think their punishment should be to work in a tech support helpdesk for a number of years. It's the worst tech job you can have really. Of course they'll have to be supervised heavily to ensure they don't instruct sheeple to turn their home computers into zombies and the like, but its still a lot less monitoring required than a prison.
So Windows 2000 is unaffected....I see more and more reasons every day for NOT "upgrading" to XP.
.NET launch event, and I've never used it.
I'm not trying to get both sides of the flame war to attack me, but I -like- Windows 2000. I haven't had to format in a couple years and most of these new security holes pass me by.
If you ask me Windows XP is Windows 2000 + bloat + security holes.
Can anybody give me a convincing reason to "upgrade" to XP? I even own a legitimate hologram cd (of XP) that I got at a
The Death of "The Death of" articles. How is it newsworthy that something is no longer getting used much?
I'm not trying to be flamebait, isn't news usually about up and coming stuff, not down and going stuff?
The floppy disk has been dead for a while now, it just hasn't been buried yet.
We get signal!
Main screen turn on!
and so on...
So are you saying they're all doing it?
Actually anything with Susan Surandon in it makes me want to run for the hills. I've never been more bored during a movie.
That reminds me, she was also starring in that butcher job of Dune that the SciFi channel did 2 years ago, coincidence? Well..maybe not the SciFi channel butchered it anyway, but having her in it certainly didn't help matters.
Doom
Doom II
Quake = Brown doom
Quake II = Green doom
Quake III = Shiny doom
Doom 3 = ??? (nobody knows, we can't see anything)
The United States started the internet. Why shouldn't we have a great influence on it? Don't get me wrong I think it should be as unregulated as possible, but it was our idea!
In short it's a decision matrix that says believing in god is a better choice than not believing in god. Being an atheist I have to admit it's about the most convincing argument I've ever seen, largely because it's purely logical. Here is the short of it:
God exists------God does not exist
Wager for God-------Gain all--------Satus quo
Wager against God---Misery----------Status quo
Read all about it here.
Please excuse the horrible formatting, I suck at html.
It would help, because designers that don't want to design for IE don't have to, and the ones that do, well their pages get rendered to look as the designer intended. It's a solution because I could finally stop using IE entirely. As is there are a few pages that still don't work in Firefox and I have no choice but to use IE if I want to view them.
I'm appalled. Not because it's a Microsoft product, but because Word does such a shoddy job of handling large files. It should have been written in LaTeX, then published as a post script or pdf. For those not familiar, Word chokes on that 5MB file. You can write entire books in LaTeX (or magazines since those technically contain more data).