Re:Probably little kids that did that.
on
Baked Apple
·
· Score: 1
Nerd! You may be right, but my answer was more literary.
Truth is beauty, unless you have a really flashy lie.
Re:Probably little kids that did that.
on
Baked Apple
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Guess they turned it up to 451 F.
Re:Its a better one player game
on
Sim-Dud?
·
· Score: 1
We use a mac. We might get it sometime this winter.
Actually, we both have PCs, but they're upstairs in our offices. The mac is in the kitchen. It's like a computational neutral zone, so it's perfect for a friendly one player game rivalry.
Re:Its a better one player game
on
Sim-Dud?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Later add-ons continued this trend. I have five neighbourhoods with about 20 people each, my wife controls three of them and I control the other 2. We sort of compete in affluence and general look of houses (each neighbourhood has one or two "theme" houses, a la Trading Spaces, such as one I built with an olympic sized pool in the courtyard). It's kind of fun playing "against" her.
But Online, the sims gives you one person. You're competing basically to see who puts the most time in the game, not who plays more creatively. Where's the fun in that?
Really, the game we're anticipating most (we use a Mac) is not The Sims Online, but Sim City 4. SC4, besides allowing you to input your sims, continues the whole "multiple simulation" idea by giving you a peninsula to build a few cities on.
Re:Surprising.
on
Sim-Dud?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I dunno. A lot of people pay $23 per month just to use AOL's chat rooms, and $5-$15 fees for online dating services. If Sims Online gets big enough for a lot of people to forge relationships, they will maintain a subsistance subscription level. The "boring" skill system would be less boring if you're chatting while doing it (think online spelling bee). And it might entice people to get an alternate internet provider...$10 for juno and then $10 for Sims Online is still less than $23 for AOL. EA should forge a relationship with one of the sub-$20 providers and offer a "sims internet service," the Sims being a more successful franchise than even AOL last year.
It seems like Sims Online's biggest mistake isn't the online engine so much as the speed. You can build a sim up really quickly in the original game, getting a two or more promotions in an hour and plenty of dough. If I had to take a few days to do the same...well, I wouldn't.
include support for playing mp3s, using the controls or accessing the screen. But it _does_ run linux.
In other news, Craftsman is making a new line of hammers made entirely out of wood. No support has been announced for iron or steel heads, either clawed or ball-peen. You can't hammer with them, but they ARE made out of wood.
This was stupid the first time they posted it, too:).
You know, this isn't very useful. We already have linux based mp3 devices that are far cheaper than the iPod. The iPod's appeal is that it acts as a tool, not a computer...that is, it's simple and performs its duty infallibly. Adding a bunch of hacked features to it may be cool to some, but to me it's basically eliminating all the appeal of this type of mobile jukebox.
I mean, come on. We all laugh when we see a porsche with a big coffee can exhaust pipe slapped onto it. This is the same idea -- taking the expensive, high quality "performance player" in the market, and rendering it an alpha-quality linux box. All for the sake of playing OGG files, which you can't even generate with iTunes.
For $500, you can get a fucking sweet linux box. Or you can get an iPod. Don't wreck the latter trying to get the former.
Is the archival process going to become a big thing with the type of bandwagon internet nerds that made SETI and distributed.net such impressive projects?
I hope so. I can't wait to see it turn into a contest to see who gets the quickest archive of a piece of submitted data.
My current company sent a questionnaire asking what the toughest part of my job was. I had to admit it was a time when I spent two months developing an application that I couldn't make work, and having to walk into a department head's office and tell her that it was not only broken, but that it was my fault.
The interviewer (who turned out to be an incredibly interesting woman, curse this ring, my precioussss) spent most of the follow up convincing me to take initiative and ask for exactly what I wanted. I didn't get it, exactly, but I have been very satisfied so far that the company understands that good software takes above all other things time, planning, and room to fail. But of course, they have the luxury of being in a market where you get payed WELL before you delvier anything, and nobody grouses if you don't at all (government, nuff said)
Be prepared to be proven stupid, to go in the wrong direction and have to forget it, to bust your ass for weeks only to discover you're doing it the dumb way.
Be prepared to take criticism at this point, to learn the right way and actually practice it, to laugh at yourself and to not gloat over your fellows when they make the same mistakes. After all, the next time you do something dumb, they're the onces who will be pointing it out.
These are skills that will get you by in any field, but in programming they'll save your ass.
Come on. Do you seriously think that ALL humanities majors get a free ride while engineers get their asses busted? Please. There are PLENTY of ways to fleece grades as an engineer. In fact, the reason I left the software engineering program at my school was that most of the students were riding the smart kids to good grades, spending all their time studying and buying solutions to labs. My roommate couldn't do simple sums or holding a soldering iron and ended up with an honors degree in EE, plus an internship with Raytheon.
At the same time I was failing differential equations, I was tutoring a guy who came out with a B. I might add that his father was in the same fraternity as the professor.
I'm not saying there isn't a lot of grade inflation in the humanities -- there's gonna be, when you're dealing with something as subjective as essays. But nowadays you get the same thing in engineering classes: group projects, seminars, essays and so on. I took a D once in a class i could have TAUGHT because my project group decided I wasn't worth informing when and where they met to discuss the talk I wrote and delivered. And the professor wouldn't hear a word of protest. "This isn't an art class, this is management in engineering."
To clarify: SONY makes crap. It just happens to be full featured crap that actually works, because they DESIGN it to. If that crap is what you were looking for, than SONY's good enough.
If you compare SONY's stuff to other low end manuf. like Aiwa, Panasonic, Phillips, JVC (yes, JVC is low end, no matter what the nice man at circuit city told you), it's going to be better in some ways. SONY's TVs are still TOL. But in the audio arena, they're overpriced pap. My sherwood receiver (LOW high end...sherwood is the RCA of verity reproduction) cost about half what my friend's SONY system cost, and it has a much nicer look (no plastic), very true sound reproduction and greatly improved sound due to discrete wiring. No buzz whatsoever. What it lacks is useful DSP features, an on screen display, tons of inputs named DVD 1-3 and VSS/Sat. Guess what my SONY friend dis's my receiver for?
However, in smaller markets where no high end manufacturer would bother -- like jogmans and so on -- SONY shines. They bury the other cheaply made crap with their own cheaply made crap. Thus promoting themselves as "high end." That shit may swing in the minors, but in the majors you can't put a red display on something and jack the price up 10%.
The margins on SONY equipment are a lot higher than other manufacturers because they can exploit this fact, end result is more design and marketing cash. Also why they can afford to produce two identical "models," one for sale to Circuit City and one for sale to Best Buy, thus avoiding the inter-sound crap price wars that other manufaturers have to worry about.
It's not the size of the CRT that matters...it's the resolution of the image!
At least that's what my wife tells me.
Re:Sugar Hill Gang, anyone?
on
Hacker's Delight
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Offtopic? I think not. You can't review a book called "Hacker's Delight" and not have somebody do a bad parody of "Rapper's Delight." It's a given.
But I suppose I can't expect your average slashdot moderator to understand the great works of old school hip hop.
Sugar Hill Gang, anyone?
on
Hacker's Delight
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I said a hip, hop, hippy, hippy to the hip hop hacking you don't stop a hacking until the bang bin boogie said backslash the boogie to the rhythm of the boogity beat..
What you hear is not a test, I'm hacking to the beat. And me, the compiler, and my code are gonna start to move your screen.
See, I am das MB and I'd like to say hello To the linux loners and the mac fairys and the losers on windows.
But first I gotta..bang slash bin slash P E R L said hack kernel yes hack hack the kernel until the whole machine runs like hell.
Oh, shut up. I heard this same argument in 1983 and again in 1993, referring to kilobytes and megabytes. There will come a time soon where we don't have to compress things in order to digitize them. As soon as that happens, $1/GB will be expensive.
Consider. 1 second of video at 720x480x32bitx24fps is 31 megs. A DVD squashes it down, lossy, to less than a meg. I don't know if you've noticed, but DVDs suck. They're better than VHS, but they're still low res for getting zooms and projecting onto big TVs. That's a terrible resolution for still images...my camera is 2058x1800, pushing 3 meg COMPRESSED per photo. Uncompressed they're 17 meg each. A CD's only 640 meg, but an SACD is HUGE. Not to mention all the space it'll require for the complicated logic and relational databases we'll need for adaptive intelligence systems that can actually beat me in UT. Half the time.
Last I checked, games were stepping in with 2 and 3 gig footprints. Even the SIMS is over 2 gig with all the packages installed. And these games are relatively simple compared to the really interesting, multi-billion texel per object 3d we'd need to accurately model the world we live in.
The only thing holding us back from REALLY storing life, uncompressed, on our systems, is the prevalence of big fast hard drives. We'll hit $1/TB soon...by my count, around 2013...and you'll be complaining about the $1/Exabyte dream because your PLD crystaline cube grower can store 200 TB XML databases in 13 nanoseconds...
http://www.sigma-photo.com/ -- an actual manufacturer.
This is an incredibly awesome technology and I wish against wishing i could just drop in my Fuji and go with it rather than having to drop about $3k when the tech makes the rounds to Fuji/Canon/Minolta. This really is what digital photography needs, it's going to be as big a boost to the market as was the single lens motion picture camera or kodachrome. No more moire, no more "interpolation," no more expensive low light high sensitivity CCDs, cameras using this can be cheaper because of this. Less jaggies. All the minor stuff that's keeping film afficianados out of the digital age are going to go away.
Of course, for joe q megapixel, there's going to be no benefit whatsoever. It's not going to make the digital zoom better or make the software to send 640x480 snapshots of the baby's ass to grandma any easier. And this may be the reason why the biggest names haven't touched this now year old technology. Or it could be that they're trying to find a way out of licensing it...Fuji'll probably adapt their own kickass "hexagonal" pixelalignment to the idea of single pixel tech and make a good product that much better.
...a good local independent record store or radio station.
Seriously, the latter is a great source. Radio DJs listen to a LOT of music, much much more than they play. You'd be surprised at how many will list their top 3 and they're acts you've never heard of and certainly never heard on their station. I'm lucky enough to live neat weqx.com, with several fantastic DJs, one of whom I've followed across three stations and who introduced me to roughly half of the artists in my best of the left of dial stack. Plus DJing can be a lonely gig, especially at night...DJs love to talk shop over the phone when they don't have a promo to cut or whatever. There's also "listener appreciation parties," many times they'll bring stacks of discs with them to toss out to inquiring fans.
Then there's emusic.com, where I met three of my favorite new acts of the year.
Doh! I always mess those two up...I know the conceptual difference, just can't get the term straight. Until I say the one, and look at the guy behind the counter at Park Audio look at me like I have two heads.
eio.com has at least 6 different models, some as low as $40. Generally, the cheaper models will require more hacking, more delving into often apocryphal documentation, but they have a lot of laptop pulls for around $100 or so. These are too big for my tastes. Some of their smaller modules are just perfect, though their jewel -- the Sharp 6 inch for $99 -- is sold out since late 2000. Get one of those badboys and a Trident Providia (PCI VGA card with simultaneous output to VGA, component and Svideo, handled on card and not in software) and you don't even have to THINK about output. This was the autopc I ran in my van until it shit the bed...there's no room in my VW for such a device and no room in my schedule to fit it.
They also have a number of very nice character LCDs for under $20.
The price on this unit is listed as $140. Why pay that much? For less than that you can get a VGA compatible full color lcd panel, which will mount in the same space and which can be used with a simple dual head setup. I've seen an old Sharp 4 inch LCD mounted this way; the guy ran winamp visualizations on that display and they looked fab.
For WAY less than that, you can get a standard serial LCD or VFD display with no circuitry from a mail order electronics store. Building your own circuit board for it shouldn't take that long and is a fun exercise. Sure, the software's nice, but it's not really HACKING if you use somebody else's software.
Way I see it, this product is designed for lazy casehackers with too much cash. Real men solder.
My earliest memory is from when I was 2 years old. I was dancing to a song and I cracked my head open (still have the scar...I fear eventual baldness).
I can still remember the tune, and sometimes find myself humming it. It was off a record of music about math, time and currency...kind of spooky, really, considering I deal with numbers about 10 hours a day...
Life is all about addiction -- an uncanny obsession that provides focus and the means to ignore distractions. Einstein was addicted to physics, Lance Armstring to training. How many of the heroes in the computer industry can be truly said to be free of the long nights of coding and social destruction that stem from a "computer addiction." Time spent performing an addictive action passes quickly and transparently...we don't notice the outside world, we are just totally and contentedly enamored with what we're doing. And that contentedness is important. It's not the same as happiness, and it's not an easily packaged thing, easily deconstructed thing. The elation of an olympic athlete or a nobel prize winner can be yours in part simply by knitting the last stitch on a scarf, killing the final boss in a game, or organizing a delicious meal. But if all you do is buy the scarf, cheat to win, and heat up the meal, your elation is diminished. The longer the wait, the better the results -- this is true even if the results themselves are as pathetic as they seem to be in EQ.
We become addicted to things which aren't immediately simple...that allow us to shine, but that require much hard work and practice. Nobody becomes addicted to games like twisted metal or jet set radio. Games which are easily finished are easily set aside. The tedious parts becoming boring. But in an addictive game, the tedious parts becoming suspenseful. They become a time for nervous intropspection and mental preration for the task ahead. Like weight lifting, or jogging, or tuning a guitar. If the drive is great enough, any reward is worthwhile. I've seen people bust their asses and destroy their family lives for free movie tickets and a piece of paper marked "Employee of the Month." I can respect EQ players for wanting to do the same.
The problem people seem to have with Everquest is that it's an artificial environment. So? Who cares! If that's what it takes for the players to enjoy themselves, why is it any of your business? Every environment is artificial...it's all constucts of the same arbitrary stuff obeying the same arbitrary rules. Politics is an artificial construct of mass interpersonal relationships, and sports are VERY artificial constructs. Your average athlete has dozens of stats which dictate his skill on the field, and even the best athlete can lose on a "bad day." To me, that seems a lot like Everquest -- a lot like any RPG. Huh, maybe that's because fantasy games are an attempt to capture the elation of success and bestow it on people who might otherwise never feel it. We can't all be Doug Flutey, but we can be with NFL Gameday 2k3.
Furthermore, the comments people have been making -- that EQ players have no other friends, that they should enjoy the outside world, that they are wasting their time -- are defeatest, rude, and useless. For one thing, I think it's true that a lot of EQ players were failed by the outside world for some reason. Maybe they are shy, or have trouble speaking, or just don't know how to make friends. For these people, environments like EQ are a godsend and can actually be helpful outside the game itself. It doesn't matter to them whether you think it's "real" or not. It may not be apparent to people who undertake the folly of trying to talk to the player while they're zoned out, but it can be effective therapy. My years as an online Quaker turned me from a quiet, nervous introvert to a rather cocky extrovert, and that attracted a lot of my friends who've never even seen Quake. Just don't try and talk to me when I'm behind that mouse.
And finally: what did you think the EQ world would be like? The real world is full of those who will cheat to win and gang up on the weak. Real systems are always decaying. You can see real life as one crushing defeat after another, interspersed by minor victories such as finding a good deal on a PDA or a funny website. Expecting games which are supposed to spin a new reality to do so in a way that is unrealistic is kind of foolish. This is what you get in a public system, boyo -- get used to it, or go back to playing Magic on the steps of the community college.
Slashdot Mirror
Nerd! You may be right, but my answer was more literary.
Truth is beauty, unless you have a really flashy lie.
Guess they turned it up to 451 F.
We use a mac. We might get it sometime this winter.
Actually, we both have PCs, but they're upstairs in our offices. The mac is in the kitchen. It's like a computational neutral zone, so it's perfect for a friendly one player game rivalry.
Later add-ons continued this trend. I have five neighbourhoods with about 20 people each, my wife controls three of them and I control the other 2. We sort of compete in affluence and general look of houses (each neighbourhood has one or two "theme" houses, a la Trading Spaces, such as one I built with an olympic sized pool in the courtyard). It's kind of fun playing "against" her.
But Online, the sims gives you one person. You're competing basically to see who puts the most time in the game, not who plays more creatively. Where's the fun in that?
Really, the game we're anticipating most (we use a Mac) is not The Sims Online, but Sim City 4. SC4, besides allowing you to input your sims, continues the whole "multiple simulation" idea by giving you a peninsula to build a few cities on.
I dunno. A lot of people pay $23 per month just to use AOL's chat rooms, and $5-$15 fees for online dating services. If Sims Online gets big enough for a lot of people to forge relationships, they will maintain a subsistance subscription level. The "boring" skill system would be less boring if you're chatting while doing it (think online spelling bee). And it might entice people to get an alternate internet provider...$10 for juno and then $10 for Sims Online is still less than $23 for AOL. EA should forge a relationship with one of the sub-$20 providers and offer a "sims internet service," the Sims being a more successful franchise than even AOL last year.
It seems like Sims Online's biggest mistake isn't the online engine so much as the speed. You can build a sim up really quickly in the original game, getting a two or more promotions in an hour and plenty of dough. If I had to take a few days to do the same...well, I wouldn't.
include support for playing mp3s, using the controls or accessing the screen. But it _does_ run linux.
:).
In other news, Craftsman is making a new line of hammers made entirely out of wood. No support has been announced for iron or steel heads, either clawed or ball-peen. You can't hammer with them, but they ARE made out of wood.
This was stupid the first time they posted it, too
You know, this isn't very useful. We already have linux based mp3 devices that are far cheaper than the iPod. The iPod's appeal is that it acts as a tool, not a computer...that is, it's simple and performs its duty infallibly. Adding a bunch of hacked features to it may be cool to some, but to me it's basically eliminating all the appeal of this type of mobile jukebox.
I mean, come on. We all laugh when we see a porsche with a big coffee can exhaust pipe slapped onto it. This is the same idea -- taking the expensive, high quality "performance player" in the market, and rendering it an alpha-quality linux box. All for the sake of playing OGG files, which you can't even generate with iTunes.
For $500, you can get a fucking sweet linux box. Or you can get an iPod. Don't wreck the latter trying to get the former.
Is the archival process going to become a big thing with the type of bandwagon internet nerds that made SETI and distributed.net such impressive projects?
I hope so. I can't wait to see it turn into a contest to see who gets the quickest archive of a piece of submitted data.
"First DIBS!"
(it took me SO long to set up that pun.)
My current company sent a questionnaire asking what the toughest part of my job was. I had to admit it was a time when I spent two months developing an application that I couldn't make work, and having to walk into a department head's office and tell her that it was not only broken, but that it was my fault.
The interviewer (who turned out to be an incredibly interesting woman, curse this ring, my precioussss) spent most of the follow up convincing me to take initiative and ask for exactly what I wanted. I didn't get it, exactly, but I have been very satisfied so far that the company understands that good software takes above all other things time, planning, and room to fail. But of course, they have the luxury of being in a market where you get payed WELL before you delvier anything, and nobody grouses if you don't at all (government, nuff said)
Be prepared to be wrong.
Be prepared to be proven stupid, to go in the wrong direction and have to forget it, to bust your ass for weeks only to discover you're doing it the dumb way.
Be prepared to take criticism at this point, to learn the right way and actually practice it, to laugh at yourself and to not gloat over your fellows when they make the same mistakes. After all, the next time you do something dumb, they're the onces who will be pointing it out.
These are skills that will get you by in any field, but in programming they'll save your ass.
Come on. Do you seriously think that ALL humanities majors get a free ride while engineers get their asses busted? Please. There are PLENTY of ways to fleece grades as an engineer. In fact, the reason I left the software engineering program at my school was that most of the students were riding the smart kids to good grades, spending all their time studying and buying solutions to labs. My roommate couldn't do simple sums or holding a soldering iron and ended up with an honors degree in EE, plus an internship with Raytheon.
At the same time I was failing differential equations, I was tutoring a guy who came out with a B. I might add that his father was in the same fraternity as the professor.
I'm not saying there isn't a lot of grade inflation in the humanities -- there's gonna be, when you're dealing with something as subjective as essays. But nowadays you get the same thing in engineering classes: group projects, seminars, essays and so on. I took a D once in a class i could have TAUGHT because my project group decided I wasn't worth informing when and where they met to discuss the talk I wrote and delivered. And the professor wouldn't hear a word of protest. "This isn't an art class, this is management in engineering."
Somebody mod this up...it's pretty funny
To clarify: SONY makes crap. It just happens to be full featured crap that actually works, because they DESIGN it to. If that crap is what you were looking for, than SONY's good enough.
If you compare SONY's stuff to other low end manuf. like Aiwa, Panasonic, Phillips, JVC (yes, JVC is low end, no matter what the nice man at circuit city told you), it's going to be better in some ways. SONY's TVs are still TOL. But in the audio arena, they're overpriced pap. My sherwood receiver (LOW high end...sherwood is the RCA of verity reproduction) cost about half what my friend's SONY system cost, and it has a much nicer look (no plastic), very true sound reproduction and greatly improved sound due to discrete wiring. No buzz whatsoever. What it lacks is useful DSP features, an on screen display, tons of inputs named DVD 1-3 and VSS/Sat. Guess what my SONY friend dis's my receiver for?
However, in smaller markets where no high end manufacturer would bother -- like jogmans and so on -- SONY shines. They bury the other cheaply made crap with their own cheaply made crap. Thus promoting themselves as "high end." That shit may swing in the minors, but in the majors you can't put a red display on something and jack the price up 10%.
The margins on SONY equipment are a lot higher than other manufacturers because they can exploit this fact, end result is more design and marketing cash. Also why they can afford to produce two identical "models," one for sale to Circuit City and one for sale to Best Buy, thus avoiding the inter-sound crap price wars that other manufaturers have to worry about.
Wack.
It's not the size of the CRT that matters...it's the resolution of the image!
At least that's what my wife tells me.
Offtopic? I think not. You can't review a book called "Hacker's Delight" and not have somebody do a bad parody of "Rapper's Delight." It's a given.
But I suppose I can't expect your average slashdot moderator to understand the great works of old school hip hop.
I said a hip, hop, hippy, hippy to the hip hop hacking you don't stop a hacking until the bang bin boogie said backslash the boogie to the rhythm of the boogity beat..
What you hear is not a test, I'm hacking to the beat. And me, the compiler, and my code are gonna start to move your screen.
See, I am das MB and I'd like to say hello
To the linux loners and the mac fairys and the losers on windows.
But first I gotta..bang slash bin slash P E R L said hack kernel yes hack hack the kernel until the whole machine runs like hell.
Proper.
Oh, shut up. I heard this same argument in 1983 and again in 1993, referring to kilobytes and megabytes. There will come a time soon where we don't have to compress things in order to digitize them. As soon as that happens, $1/GB will be expensive.
Consider. 1 second of video at 720x480x32bitx24fps is 31 megs. A DVD squashes it down, lossy, to less than a meg. I don't know if you've noticed, but DVDs suck. They're better than VHS, but they're still low res for getting zooms and projecting onto big TVs. That's a terrible resolution for still images...my camera is 2058x1800, pushing 3 meg COMPRESSED per photo. Uncompressed they're 17 meg each. A CD's only 640 meg, but an SACD is HUGE. Not to mention all the space it'll require for the complicated logic and relational databases we'll need for adaptive intelligence systems that can actually beat me in UT. Half the time.
Last I checked, games were stepping in with 2 and 3 gig footprints. Even the SIMS is over 2 gig with all the packages installed. And these games are relatively simple compared to the really interesting, multi-billion texel per object 3d we'd need to accurately model the world we live in.
The only thing holding us back from REALLY storing life, uncompressed, on our systems, is the prevalence of big fast hard drives. We'll hit $1/TB soon...by my count, around 2013...and you'll be complaining about the $1/Exabyte dream because your PLD crystaline cube grower can store 200 TB XML databases in 13 nanoseconds...
http://www.sigma-photo.com/ -- an actual manufacturer.
This is an incredibly awesome technology and I wish against wishing i could just drop in my Fuji and go with it rather than having to drop about $3k when the tech makes the rounds to Fuji/Canon/Minolta. This really is what digital photography needs, it's going to be as big a boost to the market as was the single lens motion picture camera or kodachrome. No more moire, no more "interpolation," no more expensive low light high sensitivity CCDs, cameras using this can be cheaper because of this. Less jaggies. All the minor stuff that's keeping film afficianados out of the digital age are going to go away.
Of course, for joe q megapixel, there's going to be no benefit whatsoever. It's not going to make the digital zoom better or make the software to send 640x480 snapshots of the baby's ass to grandma any easier. And this may be the reason why the biggest names haven't touched this now year old technology. Or it could be that they're trying to find a way out of licensing it...Fuji'll probably adapt their own kickass "hexagonal" pixelalignment to the idea of single pixel tech and make a good product that much better.
...a good local independent record store or radio station.
Seriously, the latter is a great source. Radio DJs listen to a LOT of music, much much more than they play. You'd be surprised at how many will list their top 3 and they're acts you've never heard of and certainly never heard on their station. I'm lucky enough to live neat weqx.com, with several fantastic DJs, one of whom I've followed across three stations and who introduced me to roughly half of the artists in my best of the left of dial stack. Plus DJing can be a lonely gig, especially at night...DJs love to talk shop over the phone when they don't have a promo to cut or whatever. There's also "listener appreciation parties," many times they'll bring stacks of discs with them to toss out to inquiring fans.
Then there's emusic.com, where I met three of my favorite new acts of the year.
Doh! I always mess those two up...I know the conceptual difference, just can't get the term straight. Until I say the one, and look at the guy behind the counter at Park Audio look at me like I have two heads.
eio.com has at least 6 different models, some as low as $40. Generally, the cheaper models will require more hacking, more delving into often apocryphal documentation, but they have a lot of laptop pulls for around $100 or so. These are too big for my tastes. Some of their smaller modules are just perfect, though their jewel -- the Sharp 6 inch for $99 -- is sold out since late 2000. Get one of those badboys and a Trident Providia (PCI VGA card with simultaneous output to VGA, component and Svideo, handled on card and not in software) and you don't even have to THINK about output. This was the autopc I ran in my van until it shit the bed...there's no room in my VW for such a device and no room in my schedule to fit it.
They also have a number of very nice character LCDs for under $20.
The price on this unit is listed as $140. Why pay that much? For less than that you can get a VGA compatible full color lcd panel, which will mount in the same space and which can be used with a simple dual head setup. I've seen an old Sharp 4 inch LCD mounted this way; the guy ran winamp visualizations on that display and they looked fab.
For WAY less than that, you can get a standard serial LCD or VFD display with no circuitry from a mail order electronics store. Building your own circuit board for it shouldn't take that long and is a fun exercise. Sure, the software's nice, but it's not really HACKING if you use somebody else's software.
Way I see it, this product is designed for lazy casehackers with too much cash. Real men solder.
My earliest memory is from when I was 2 years old. I was dancing to a song and I cracked my head open (still have the scar...I fear eventual baldness).
I can still remember the tune, and sometimes find myself humming it. It was off a record of music about math, time and currency...kind of spooky, really, considering I deal with numbers about 10 hours a day...
Life is all about addiction -- an uncanny obsession that provides focus and the means to ignore distractions. Einstein was addicted to physics, Lance Armstring to training. How many of the heroes in the computer industry can be truly said to be free of the long nights of coding and social destruction that stem from a "computer addiction." Time spent performing an addictive action passes quickly and transparently...we don't notice the outside world, we are just totally and contentedly enamored with what we're doing. And that contentedness is important. It's not the same as happiness, and it's not an easily packaged thing, easily deconstructed thing. The elation of an olympic athlete or a nobel prize winner can be yours in part simply by knitting the last stitch on a scarf, killing the final boss in a game, or organizing a delicious meal. But if all you do is buy the scarf, cheat to win, and heat up the meal, your elation is diminished. The longer the wait, the better the results -- this is true even if the results themselves are as pathetic as they seem to be in EQ.
We become addicted to things which aren't immediately simple...that allow us to shine, but that require much hard work and practice. Nobody becomes addicted to games like twisted metal or jet set radio. Games which are easily finished are easily set aside. The tedious parts becoming boring. But in an addictive game, the tedious parts becoming suspenseful. They become a time for nervous intropspection and mental preration for the task ahead. Like weight lifting, or jogging, or tuning a guitar. If the drive is great enough, any reward is worthwhile. I've seen people bust their asses and destroy their family lives for free movie tickets and a piece of paper marked "Employee of the Month." I can respect EQ players for wanting to do the same.
The problem people seem to have with Everquest is that it's an artificial environment. So? Who cares! If that's what it takes for the players to enjoy themselves, why is it any of your business? Every environment is artificial...it's all constucts of the same arbitrary stuff obeying the same arbitrary rules. Politics is an artificial construct of mass interpersonal relationships, and sports are VERY artificial constructs. Your average athlete has dozens of stats which dictate his skill on the field, and even the best athlete can lose on a "bad day." To me, that seems a lot like Everquest -- a lot like any RPG. Huh, maybe that's because fantasy games are an attempt to capture the elation of success and bestow it on people who might otherwise never feel it. We can't all be Doug Flutey, but we can be with NFL Gameday 2k3.
Furthermore, the comments people have been making -- that EQ players have no other friends, that they should enjoy the outside world, that they are wasting their time -- are defeatest, rude, and useless. For one thing, I think it's true that a lot of EQ players were failed by the outside world for some reason. Maybe they are shy, or have trouble speaking, or just don't know how to make friends. For these people, environments like EQ are a godsend and can actually be helpful outside the game itself. It doesn't matter to them whether you think it's "real" or not. It may not be apparent to people who undertake the folly of trying to talk to the player while they're zoned out, but it can be effective therapy. My years as an online Quaker turned me from a quiet, nervous introvert to a rather cocky extrovert, and that attracted a lot of my friends who've never even seen Quake. Just don't try and talk to me when I'm behind that mouse.
And finally: what did you think the EQ world would be like? The real world is full of those who will cheat to win and gang up on the weak. Real systems are always decaying. You can see real life as one crushing defeat after another, interspersed by minor victories such as finding a good deal on a PDA or a funny website. Expecting games which are supposed to spin a new reality to do so in a way that is unrealistic is kind of foolish. This is what you get in a public system, boyo -- get used to it, or go back to playing Magic on the steps of the community college.