iTunes has problems. If you read the forums, people are reporting that iTunes REARRANGES your existing MP3 files into it's own directory scheme. Is that rude or what? Granted there is an option to turn it off, but what a bad default setting if you don't catch it!
For me,.99 a song is still too much money. But maybe I could live with that.
But it also won't download or let you create MP3 files from music you download from them. I've got a car player with a 40GB hard drive that only supports MP3 and WMA files. I'm sure there's a way to make MP3s out of the AAC files, but I have a particular dislike for artifical hurdles like that. Computers are supposed to make things easy. The majority of portable music players do MP3, why support Windows if you're not going to support the players that Windows people use? Yeah I know, "copy protection", "DRM", mumble mumble... Well I don't give a shit about copy protection, I want to listen to MY music WHEN and WHERE I want to listen to it.
But the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is that iTunes only supports Win2k and WinXP. I run Win98SE (same installtion for 2.5 years on a heavily-used gaming/Internet machine.) I'm sure it's easier for them to only support 2k/XP, but there's no technical reason it couldn't run on Win98SE. I'm not changing OS's to run iTunes, that's too much to ask.
iTunes has problems. If you read the forums, people are reporting that iTunes REARRANGES your existing MP3 files into it's own directory scheme. Is that rude or what? Granted there is an option to turn it off, but what a bad default setting if you don't catch it!
For me,.99 a song is still too much money. But maybe I could live with that.
But it also won't download or let you create MP3 files from music you download from them. I've got a car player with a 40GB hard drive that only supports MP3 and WMA files. I'm sure there's a way to make MP3s out of the AAC files, but I have a particular dislike for artifical hurdles like that. Computers are supposed to make things easy. The majority of portable music players do MP3, why support Windows if you're not going to support the players that Windows people use? Yeah I know, "copy protection", "DRM", mumble mumble... Well I don't give a shit about copy protection, I want to listen to MY music WHEN and WHERE I want to listen to it.
But the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is that iTunes only supports Win2k and WinXP. I run Win98SE (same installtion for 2.5 years on a heavily-used gaming/Internet machine.) I'm sure it's easier for them to only support 2k/XP, but there's no technical reason it couldn't run on Win98SE. I'm not changing OS's to run iTunes, that's too much to ask.
I subscribed to Emusic for almost a year, and downloaded hundreds of songs. They did almost everything right with their service, other than not having much big-name stuff. The site was easy to navigate and the songs were plain MP3s with no DRM in sight.
Now they want to limit you to 40 downloads a month for $10? 300 downloads for $50? Are they insane? I bet their cancellation rate will be 90%. If they had big name music maybe, but otherwise forget it.
Ok, it's not that bad but I'm modarately disappointed. But some of these fanboys I've been reading posts from on USENET might just kill themselves. Maybe someone should set up a crisis counciling center?
This game is a huge favorite of mine. I played the demo for months before the full game came out. The realism and HUGE play area just blew me away. I actually ordered the full game from the UK so I could get it before it hit the US stores.
I think what held Operation Flashpoint back was:
1. Difficulty. People *say* they want realism, but the casual gamer probably doesn't want to die in 1 or 2 shots.
2. System requirements. Try to crank up the resolution or eye candy and it is very taxing on your system. I don't even know if the fastest CPU with the fastest video card now could run it at full detail! A lot of people don't seem to like the graphics but I think they're great except for lack of grass.
3. Multiplayer. This is the BIGGEST thing. This game screams for multiplayer with it's great mission designer, huge play area, and air, land, and sea vehicles. But joining a game is a PAIN IN THE ASS, there is no joining a game in progress. You have to join a game that's about to start, and sit around waiting for the admin to start the game when however many players he wants finally join. This might be 30 seconds, or it might be 10 minutes. If OFP2 doesn't let you join a game in progress it's going to be a real shame.
I've had some great times the few times I've played OFP online. But instead of playing OFP online I usually fire up Day of Defeat. In 2 minutes tops including refreshing the server list and joining the server, and I'm playing.
I haven't bought a CD in a long time, I was so sick of what I wanted being $18. I could find certain things on sale for $12-14, but you never know what's going to be on sale.
But if most of the prices go down to $13 I might actually buy CDs again. Of course I don't listen to CDs anymore, I just rip them to MP3s, so they better not be copy protected. >:(
Can't we just download them online? 50 cents per song, no restrictions, instant gratification? The customer is always right you know...
I've been getting a lot of firewalled ping activity today, must be that cleanup worm. Machines that the Blaster worm never even tried to hit. I wouldn't trust a cleanup worm one bit more than I would Blaster. Everyone knows (or should know) you can't count on good intentions on the Internet!
You know, if they want to use computers to help search for copyrighted material, I guess that's fine. But a *person* should actually *look* at the material before they start sending violation notices. What's next, computer lawyers, computer judges? It's the end of the world, I tells ya.
This reminds me of the Simpsons. Homer's car has been impounded by the city of NYC (at the World Trade Center actually), and he's on a pay phone with an automated system:
Pleasant Female Voice: Thank you for calling the Parking Violations Bureau. To plead 'Not Guilty' press one now. (Homer presses one) Pleasant Female Voice: Thank You. Your call has been... Gruff Male Voice: Rejected. Pleasant Female Voice: You will be assessed the full fine, plus a small... Gruff Male Voice: Large lateness penalty. Pleasant Female Voice: Please wait by your vehicle between the hours of nine A.M. and five P.M. for Parking Officer Steve... Gruff Male Voice: Grabowski.
You must not send e-mail to many novice computer users. I have a special alias address that I give to people over the phone because my real e-mail address is a little complicated to spell out. That alias address has never been posted online or used for anything else, but it still gets spam. My conclusion? Someone I sent it to got a virus/trojan program that harvested their address book. You just can't win.
Well I see your point but in many cases the $13 Wal-Mart CD isn't really the same as the $18.99 Sam Goody CD. You see, all the naughty bits have been bleeped out on the Wal-Mart CD...
We have the amazing ability these days to make shitty people sound great on the CD but they still suck terribly live.
I agree. Of course the opposite is true too. I've heard tapes/CDs from They Might Be Giants and they were neat/funny, but they weren't produced that well. But I saw them live a few years ago in a small club in Charlottesville VA and they were completely awesome, they rocked the house. But I still can't listen to recordings of them.
Same with the Pietasters and Squirrel Nut Zippers, their live performances were much better than their CDs. I went to the Squirrel Nut Zippers web site they day after the concert and bought a bunch of their CDs. Hopefully selling it direct they'll get a decent profit.
I like IE, it's fast and works great. I've used it ever since Asheron's call forced me to install IE5....
But I've had it with popups, and the "last stand-alone" version of IE is the final straw. So I've switched to Firebird at home and as of today, at work. Pretty painless transition really, I can even drag and drop my Toolbar quick-links from IE to Firebird. So far so good.
Eudora 6.0 beta has spam filtering which seems to be Bayesian. It's a little slower to learn than PopFile, but it's pretty good so far, and of course integrated with the Eudora UI.
Playing devil's advocate here, I think the MPAA believes you just have a *license* to view the movie, and the DVD is just the medium to get it to you. You own the physical DVD itself, but not the movie. And, I'm sure the directors/writers/producers would take great offense at you skipping over important parts of their movie. I could understand that. Indeed, many movies wouldn't make sense without the sex/violence parts.
But, creator's and MPAA's arguments/reasoning aside, this is another completely asinine thing to try to legislate. Suppose they succeed in this. Will it then be illegal if I mute the volume or turn my head during the sex scenes???
For quick & dirty data conversion/processing programs QuickBasic is great. It's not fast at runtime but I can whip out a program in a couple minutes, if that.
I've processed countless gigabytes of data with QuickBasic.
I really don't like the idea of paying for songs. Emusic.com does it right. How about if the RIAA puts every one of thier songs in MP3 format on their web site and we just pay them $10 a month to legally download whatever we want?
It should be obvious that a kid with an unrestricted e-mail account is going to get load of the same damn twisted porn spam everybody else gets. We don't need Symantec to tell us that. Anyone who lets their underage child get unrestricted e-mail is setting them up to see some seriously twisted shit. The only way my kid is getting e-mail is if it's whitelist-only. Even a whitelist would be risky with header spoofing, which I predict will become more of a problem once challenge-response systems start gaining popularity.
Mmm, Duke3d. When I go into movie theatres, I still have the urge to shoot at the projection room! Duke3d was one of the first FPS games to feature realistic locations, rather than alien planets or maze-like levels.
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iTunes has problems. If you read the forums, people are reporting that iTunes REARRANGES your existing MP3 files into it's own directory scheme. Is that rude or what? Granted there is an option to turn it off, but what a bad default setting if you don't catch it!
For me,
But it also won't download or let you create MP3 files from music you download from them. I've got a car player with a 40GB hard drive that only supports MP3 and WMA files. I'm sure there's a way to make MP3s out of the AAC files, but I have a particular dislike for artifical hurdles like that. Computers are supposed to make things easy. The majority of portable music players do MP3, why support Windows if you're not going to support the players that Windows people use? Yeah I know, "copy protection", "DRM", mumble mumble... Well I don't give a shit about copy protection, I want to listen to MY music WHEN and WHERE I want to listen to it.
But the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is that iTunes only supports Win2k and WinXP. I run Win98SE (same installtion for 2.5 years on a heavily-used gaming/Internet machine.) I'm sure it's easier for them to only support 2k/XP, but there's no technical reason it couldn't run on Win98SE. I'm not changing OS's to run iTunes, that's too much to ask.
Whoops, wrong article. There were 2 Apple stories in a row there...
iTunes has problems. If you read the forums, people are reporting that iTunes REARRANGES your existing MP3 files into it's own directory scheme. Is that rude or what? Granted there is an option to turn it off, but what a bad default setting if you don't catch it!
.99 a song is still too much money. But maybe I could live with that.
For me,
But it also won't download or let you create MP3 files from music you download from them. I've got a car player with a 40GB hard drive that only supports MP3 and WMA files. I'm sure there's a way to make MP3s out of the AAC files, but I have a particular dislike for artifical hurdles like that. Computers are supposed to make things easy. The majority of portable music players do MP3, why support Windows if you're not going to support the players that Windows people use? Yeah I know, "copy protection", "DRM", mumble mumble... Well I don't give a shit about copy protection, I want to listen to MY music WHEN and WHERE I want to listen to it.
But the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is that iTunes only supports Win2k and WinXP. I run Win98SE (same installtion for 2.5 years on a heavily-used gaming/Internet machine.) I'm sure it's easier for them to only support 2k/XP, but there's no technical reason it couldn't run on Win98SE. I'm not changing OS's to run iTunes, that's too much to ask.
I subscribed to Emusic for almost a year, and downloaded hundreds of songs. They did almost everything right with their service, other than not having much big-name stuff. The site was easy to navigate and the songs were plain MP3s with no DRM in sight.
Now they want to limit you to 40 downloads a month for $10? 300 downloads for $50? Are they insane? I bet their cancellation rate will be 90%. If they had big name music maybe, but otherwise forget it.
Ok, it's not that bad but I'm modarately disappointed. But some of these fanboys I've been reading posts from on USENET might just kill themselves. Maybe someone should set up a crisis counciling center?
This game is a huge favorite of mine. I played the demo for months before the full game came out. The realism and HUGE play area just blew me away. I actually ordered the full game from the UK so I could get it before it hit the US stores.
I think what held Operation Flashpoint back was:
1. Difficulty. People *say* they want realism, but the casual gamer probably doesn't want to die in 1 or 2 shots.
2. System requirements. Try to crank up the resolution or eye candy and it is very taxing on your system. I don't even know if the fastest CPU with the fastest video card now could run it at full detail! A lot of people don't seem to like the graphics but I think they're great except for lack of grass.
3. Multiplayer. This is the BIGGEST thing. This game screams for multiplayer with it's great mission designer, huge play area, and air, land, and sea vehicles. But joining a game is a PAIN IN THE ASS, there is no joining a game in progress. You have to join a game that's about to start, and sit around waiting for the admin to start the game when however many players he wants finally join. This might be 30 seconds, or it might be 10 minutes. If OFP2 doesn't let you join a game in progress it's going to be a real shame.
I've had some great times the few times I've played OFP online. But instead of playing OFP online I usually fire up Day of Defeat. In 2 minutes tops including refreshing the server list and joining the server, and I'm playing.
I haven't bought a CD in a long time, I was so sick of what I wanted being $18. I could find certain things on sale for $12-14, but you never know what's going to be on sale.
But if most of the prices go down to $13 I might actually buy CDs again. Of course I don't listen to CDs anymore, I just rip them to MP3s, so they better not be copy protected. >:(
Can't we just download them online? 50 cents per song, no restrictions, instant gratification? The customer is always right you know...
Yeah, chicks dig massive...computers.
No wait, no they don't!
I thought the article was going to say the the goobermint set up the special anonymizer.com account so they could spy on the Iranians.
Well, maybe that's the OTHER reason...
I've been getting a lot of firewalled ping activity today, must be that cleanup worm. Machines that the Blaster worm never even tried to hit. I wouldn't trust a cleanup worm one bit more than I would Blaster. Everyone knows (or should know) you can't count on good intentions on the Internet!
You know, if they want to use computers to help search for copyrighted material, I guess that's fine. But a *person* should actually *look* at the material before they start sending violation notices. What's next, computer lawyers, computer judges? It's the end of the world, I tells ya.
This reminds me of the Simpsons. Homer's car has been impounded by the city of NYC (at the World Trade Center actually), and he's on a pay phone with an automated system:
Pleasant Female Voice: Thank you for calling the Parking Violations Bureau. To plead 'Not Guilty' press one now.
(Homer presses one)
Pleasant Female Voice: Thank You. Your call has been...
Gruff Male Voice: Rejected.
Pleasant Female Voice: You will be assessed the full fine, plus a small...
Gruff Male Voice: Large lateness penalty.
Pleasant Female Voice: Please wait by your vehicle between the hours of nine A.M. and five P.M. for Parking Officer Steve...
Gruff Male Voice: Grabowski.
You must not send e-mail to many novice computer users. I have a special alias address that I give to people over the phone because my real e-mail address is a little complicated to spell out. That alias address has never been posted online or used for anything else, but it still gets spam. My conclusion? Someone I sent it to got a virus/trojan program that harvested their address book. You just can't win.
Yeah I bought Winger too. And (ssh, don't tell anyone) Whitesnake. Actually I guess they were better than Winger.
Don't feel bad, Metallica, Nirvana, and Guns & Roses will always be in my collection too. Timeless kick-ass rock, especially Appetite for Destruction.
Well I see your point but in many cases the $13 Wal-Mart CD isn't really the same as the $18.99 Sam Goody CD. You see, all the naughty bits have been bleeped out on the Wal-Mart CD...
I agree. Of course the opposite is true too. I've heard tapes/CDs from They Might Be Giants and they were neat/funny, but they weren't produced that well. But I saw them live a few years ago in a small club in Charlottesville VA and they were completely awesome, they rocked the house. But I still can't listen to recordings of them.
Same with the Pietasters and Squirrel Nut Zippers, their live performances were much better than their CDs. I went to the Squirrel Nut Zippers web site they day after the concert and bought a bunch of their CDs. Hopefully selling it direct they'll get a decent profit.
If they charged $99 I'd buy one. Otherwise I'm a PC guy.
I like IE, it's fast and works great. I've used it ever since Asheron's call forced me to install IE5....
But I've had it with popups, and the "last stand-alone" version of IE is the final straw. So I've switched to Firebird at home and as of today, at work. Pretty painless transition really, I can even drag and drop my Toolbar quick-links from IE to Firebird. So far so good.
Does this mean I could harvest all my spam and use it to power my house?!?
Eudora 6.0 beta has spam filtering which seems to be Bayesian. It's a little slower to learn than PopFile, but it's pretty good so far, and of course integrated with the Eudora UI.
http://eudora.com/betas
Playing devil's advocate here, I think the MPAA believes you just have a *license* to view the movie, and the DVD is just the medium to get it to you. You own the physical DVD itself, but not the movie. And, I'm sure the directors/writers/producers would take great offense at you skipping over important parts of their movie. I could understand that. Indeed, many movies wouldn't make sense without the sex/violence parts.
But, creator's and MPAA's arguments/reasoning aside, this is another completely asinine thing to try to legislate. Suppose they succeed in this. Will it then be illegal if I mute the volume or turn my head during the sex scenes???
For quick & dirty data conversion/processing programs QuickBasic is great. It's not fast at runtime but I can whip out a program in a couple minutes, if that.
I've processed countless gigabytes of data with QuickBasic.
I really don't like the idea of paying for songs. Emusic.com does it right. How about if the RIAA puts every one of thier songs in MP3 format on their web site and we just pay them $10 a month to legally download whatever we want?
It should be obvious that a kid with an unrestricted e-mail account is going to get load of the same damn twisted porn spam everybody else gets. We don't need Symantec to tell us that. Anyone who lets their underage child get unrestricted e-mail is setting them up to see some seriously twisted shit. The only way my kid is getting e-mail is if it's whitelist-only. Even a whitelist would be risky with header spoofing, which I predict will become more of a problem once challenge-response systems start gaining popularity.
Mmm, Duke3d. When I go into movie theatres, I still have the urge to shoot at the projection room! Duke3d was one of the first FPS games to feature realistic locations, rather than alien planets or maze-like levels.
I usually download whatever I can from http://3dgamers.com You don't get all the crap that FilePlanet puts you through.