Sure; but "arbitary format" means I can go from FLAC/APE/WavPack/OptimFrog/WAV to any of those, plus to any lossy format, plus from said lossy formats should I really, *really* need to.
Because I want a proper backup of my music, with no worries over encoder quality or settings or format limitations or codec choice. Plus, the lossy settings I might use for a portable are probably not the same as those I'd use for my desktop.
My audio player knows how to transcode between arbitary formats, amongst plenty of other things. Just select the tracks you want converting, right click, select Convert, select the format, select the destination; if your player doesn't have similar functionality perhaps you should consider finding a better player?
Having seen plenty of sample shots from prosumer 7MP cameras with huge well designed lenses.. I'm gonna have to disagree with you here. There's a reason the sensors are comparatively enormous on dSLR's next to their compact cheapo counterparts; this sort of density comes at a huge noise and sensitivity penalty, and with the tiny, dim, distorted lens they're doubtless going to be coupled with to squeeze them into a phone-sized form-factor (as if they're not already bad enough on cheapo compacts), I don't see them being much more than gimmics. Which I guess is half the point, really;)
I dunno, maybe they'll squeeze an Ixus type camera into a slightly larger than average phone and maybe it'll be vaguely ok.. most people seem almost blind to noise and "grain" anyway, hence the silly overly-compact overly-noisy megapixel race:/
Dunno about you, but I nocd every game I buy, because I don't see the point in having to juggle CDs every time I want to play a different game. If I'm lucky I might manage to make a game work with a virtual CD drive and an image of the CD, but that's precisely the kind of thing these protections are designed to prevent, so it's hit-and-miss. Plus I don't see why I should waste another 700MB of disk space for a 3k private key I've already paid to use.
This is especially relevent when a given protection refuses to let me use legitimate software on my system, like CD/DVD burning software and virtual CD drives.
If I hadn't bought HL2 off Steam, I'd be very, very angry around about now.
No they don't. The Firefly universe is set in a single habitable/teraformable-body-rich system, colonized (pretty recently) by a seeder ship. Not that I dispute your point, but it goes to show how little emphesis it puts on the universe it's set in next to the characters who are in it.
I find it amusing that Firefly gets a lot of flack for its western-in-space style, when the likes of Star Trek has a far more laughable and shallow portrayal of humanity and space in general. Glass houses...
Just because it's being led by the OpenBSD team, doesn't mean it won't benefit {Free,Net,Dragonfly,*}BSD, Linux, etc too. That's kind of the entire point...
Parent is pretty much meaningless; "Linux" is just a kernel; there are about a billion different userspaces for it, with varying levels of support for package management ranging from Slackware's barely-beyond-tarballs to Debian's all-singing-all-dancing-dpkg/apt to Gentoo's BSDish source-based portage.
All suck in their own way (especially when things don't go to plan, which is pretty much inevitable). The trick is finding one which sucks in a way you can deal with.
I find FreeBSD ports with sysutils/portupgrade much nicer than apt (and Debian); i.e. it's easier to follow what changes are being made (check freshports.net, or sit on the cvs-ports mailing list), portaudit makes it more obvious what really needs upgrading (automated tool to check your installed packages for known vulnerabilities), port maintainers tend to be less lame (as in, they tend not to make arbitary changes which will break your system or annoy you; like, say, changing the exim user to FreeBSD-exim or moving your boot manager's config without telling you so you system doesn't come back up next month), and ironically, they tend to be more up to date (without making huge sacrifices in stability).
YMMV; it'd be a shame to limit yourself to Linux, though.
"* automatic-updates" Great, until they break a patch and there's no rollback option. Hope they test a lot with my relatively rare soundcard...
"* builtin friend finder and game launcher" Tried the Friends system. Doesn't work at all for me; users are always Offline and old ones randomly disappear when I try to add new ones.
"* easy distribution mechanism for small-time, hobbiest, open source developers" Huh? I don't see them distributing any free mods using Steam. I don't see Valve giving me tools to unpack mods to make use of anything even vaguely open source; I have to get a third party tool that Valve keep breaking for that.
"* they hired Bram Cohen" So? Doesn't seem to have done them much good.
"* did I say automatic updates?" With no "ask me" option, no changelogs, and no way to undo them if they break. Even WinXP's Automatic Update system gives me more control than that.
"* freely available developer tools" Woo. Valve will let me develop content for their games for free? Stuff that will make their games more valuable? No shit, how nice of them!
As I understand it, you get 16.2M colour TFT's which use temporal dithering, and 16.7M ones which can display the full range natively. My LG L1710B does 16.7M afaik.
Gotta be someone here who knows more; oi, wake up!;)
"what kind of retard uploads a png of a text file? *sigh*"
Er, it's a dynamically generated image of a NFO, which often use ASCII art requiring specific types of font to render properly. Link to the text version if it bothers you.
It's not really about buying it for me, it's about the increased load times which come from paging data files out of the gcf's on demand, not to mention the added load time of Steam itself and the desire to have a game that will still be playable after Steam dies.
Much of the time appears to be Steam writing out files on demand for the game to run off. This seems to include it freezing up for 15s at a time in the middle of play for no apparant reason.
Thanks for helping to fragment my HD, Valve, and for reducing my experience for the sake of delaying a crack for all of 6 hours. You could at least let me put the HL2 cache files on a seperate drive, but I can't even move the SteamApps dir without reinstalling Steam:/
At least it doesn't whinge about my CD/DVD burning software, or virtual CD drives. And hey, I was playing within 20 minutes of release, so I guess I can cut them some slack, even if buying it direct from Valve did cost more than getting a box from a third party...
Huh? Aren't you supposed to see, you know.. fast-forwarded frames of what you're fast-forwarding through? I dunno about you, but when I FF through the god-awful intro to Enterprise I'm looking at it to see where to hit Play (even if I often wish I hadn't bothered.. damn addictions).
Does the Tivo just blank the display or something so you're relying on the timer?
"I would ask how many of you (or someone you know) has wound up on one of the RBL lists?"
Quite a few. None of them were running an open relay; it was just RBL software/maintainers deciding to arbitarily block a nice big chunk of address space, probably because of a single host a few thousand IP's away.
"It's the simplest, cheapest way to reduce spam, yet....?"
Yet they block tonnes of legitimate mail if you use them as blackhole lists, instead of just factoring them into your content-scanning filters.
Sure; I never claimed RAID-5 wasn't competitive, I was more bashing the guy who said RAID-10 was crap by comparison, when it plainly *isn't*.
I withdraw my "no matter how much" remark. RAID-10 is still simpler to implement and an excellent performer, which given how crap most hardware controllers/drivers seem to be, can only be a good thing:/
No, it eliminates the idea of being able to play your old original game; they'll still get cracked (if that's even necessary beyond online play enablers) and distributed in all the usual channels; just not before release.
I'd hope if they're going to kill the auth servers, they'd be obliged to provide a no-activation patch, too.
Uh? Can't they just package up the post-steam-activated HL2 directory? What other form of copy protection is in there that's needed to play the single player game?
If they're going to all this effort to prevent legitimate "owners" of the game from playing it until they say so, they better damn well not be putting even more hoops for them to jump through after they activate, or Valve has a *serious* chance that I won't be among them (yeah yeah, as if they're going to care about $70 out of $700,000,000).
"By "squillion", you mean four, correct? Named Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific? My god, so complicated and hard to remember!"
Not as easy as remembering my local offset from UTC, not for me and most of the planet, anyway.
"Your games will be downloaded to wherever you install Steam. If you put Steam on C:, they'll download there. If you put it on D:, they'll go there."
Right, but do I have to reinstall Steam to move it? Can they go where I like after they've been downloaded/decrypted? This is pretty basic stuff, and Steam makes it annoyingly opaque. I had 3G free on C, 16G free on D and 28G free on E when I tried to preload; my disk use has changed since I installed Steam, and it seems pretty silly that when it's going to be using GB's of disk space it won't let you choose where inside it's "easy" UI.
I can't wait for them to break a patch and for it never to work again too, that'll rock;)
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Sure; but "arbitary format" means I can go from FLAC/APE/WavPack/OptimFrog/WAV to any of those, plus to any lossy format, plus from said lossy formats should I really, *really* need to.
Because I want a proper backup of my music, with no worries over encoder quality or settings or format limitations or codec choice. Plus, the lossy settings I might use for a portable are probably not the same as those I'd use for my desktop.
My audio player knows how to transcode between arbitary formats, amongst plenty of other things. Just select the tracks you want converting, right click, select Convert, select the format, select the destination; if your player doesn't have similar functionality perhaps you should consider finding a better player?
"7 megapixels is quite clear indeed"
;)
:/
Having seen plenty of sample shots from prosumer 7MP cameras with huge well designed lenses.. I'm gonna have to disagree with you here. There's a reason the sensors are comparatively enormous on dSLR's next to their compact cheapo counterparts; this sort of density comes at a huge noise and sensitivity penalty, and with the tiny, dim, distorted lens they're doubtless going to be coupled with to squeeze them into a phone-sized form-factor (as if they're not already bad enough on cheapo compacts), I don't see them being much more than gimmics. Which I guess is half the point, really
I dunno, maybe they'll squeeze an Ixus type camera into a slightly larger than average phone and maybe it'll be vaguely ok.. most people seem almost blind to noise and "grain" anyway, hence the silly overly-compact overly-noisy megapixel race
"If this is the same NHS that wastes money on novacaine shots for people donating blood"
No. They do waste it on tea and biscuits though; those moneywasting scum.
Dunno about you, but I nocd every game I buy, because I don't see the point in having to juggle CDs every time I want to play a different game. If I'm lucky I might manage to make a game work with a virtual CD drive and an image of the CD, but that's precisely the kind of thing these protections are designed to prevent, so it's hit-and-miss. Plus I don't see why I should waste another 700MB of disk space for a 3k private key I've already paid to use.
This is especially relevent when a given protection refuses to let me use legitimate software on my system, like CD/DVD burning software and virtual CD drives.
If I hadn't bought HL2 off Steam, I'd be very, very angry around about now.
"faster-than-light travel"
No they don't. The Firefly universe is set in a single habitable/teraformable-body-rich system, colonized (pretty recently) by a seeder ship. Not that I dispute your point, but it goes to show how little emphesis it puts on the universe it's set in next to the characters who are in it.
I find it amusing that Firefly gets a lot of flack for its western-in-space style, when the likes of Star Trek has a far more laughable and shallow portrayal of humanity and space in general. Glass houses...
Just because it's being led by the OpenBSD team, doesn't mean it won't benefit {Free,Net,Dragonfly,*}BSD, Linux, etc too. That's kind of the entire point...
Parent is pretty much meaningless; "Linux" is just a kernel; there are about a billion different userspaces for it, with varying levels of support for package management ranging from Slackware's barely-beyond-tarballs to Debian's all-singing-all-dancing-dpkg/apt to Gentoo's BSDish source-based portage.
All suck in their own way (especially when things don't go to plan, which is pretty much inevitable). The trick is finding one which sucks in a way you can deal with.
I find FreeBSD ports with sysutils/portupgrade much nicer than apt (and Debian); i.e. it's easier to follow what changes are being made (check freshports.net, or sit on the cvs-ports mailing list), portaudit makes it more obvious what really needs upgrading (automated tool to check your installed packages for known vulnerabilities), port maintainers tend to be less lame (as in, they tend not to make arbitary changes which will break your system or annoy you; like, say, changing the exim user to FreeBSD-exim or moving your boot manager's config without telling you so you system doesn't come back up next month), and ironically, they tend to be more up to date (without making huge sacrifices in stability).
YMMV; it'd be a shame to limit yourself to Linux, though.
Yeah, it automates the total nightmare for you so you just end up downloading and reinstalling 400MB of crap every week for about 3k of delta.
In my experience the GeForce 256 was quite happy running without the fan, provided the rest of your system was fairly cool.
"* automatic-updates"
Great, until they break a patch and there's no rollback option. Hope they test a lot with my relatively rare soundcard...
"* builtin friend finder and game launcher"
Tried the Friends system. Doesn't work at all for me; users are always Offline and old ones randomly disappear when I try to add new ones.
"* easy distribution mechanism for small-time, hobbiest, open source developers"
Huh? I don't see them distributing any free mods using Steam. I don't see Valve giving me tools to unpack mods to make use of anything even vaguely open source; I have to get a third party tool that Valve keep breaking for that.
"* they hired Bram Cohen"
So? Doesn't seem to have done them much good.
"* did I say automatic updates?"
With no "ask me" option, no changelogs, and no way to undo them if they break. Even WinXP's Automatic Update system gives me more control than that.
"* freely available developer tools"
Woo. Valve will let me develop content for their games for free? Stuff that will make their games more valuable? No shit, how nice of them!
"Get the boxed version and you don't need to worry about d/ling the game."
And you get the added advantage that you have to activate via Steam *and* keep the CD/DVD in the drive. WTF?
As I understand it, you get 16.2M colour TFT's which use temporal dithering, and 16.7M ones which can display the full range natively. My LG L1710B does 16.7M afaik.
;)
Gotta be someone here who knows more; oi, wake up!
100Hz 19" CRT and 60Hz 17" TFT here; no problems. Not sure how I'd focus on both though, I'd have to diverge my eyes and focus at the same time..
Er, it's a dynamically generated image of a NFO, which often use ASCII art requiring specific types of font to render properly. Link to the text version if it bothers you.
It's not really about buying it for me, it's about the increased load times which come from paging data files out of the gcf's on demand, not to mention the added load time of Steam itself and the desire to have a game that will still be playable after Steam dies.
Much of the time appears to be Steam writing out files on demand for the game to run off. This seems to include it freezing up for 15s at a time in the middle of play for no apparant reason.
:/
Thanks for helping to fragment my HD, Valve, and for reducing my experience for the sake of delaying a crack for all of 6 hours. You could at least let me put the HL2 cache files on a seperate drive, but I can't even move the SteamApps dir without reinstalling Steam
At least it doesn't whinge about my CD/DVD burning software, or virtual CD drives. And hey, I was playing within 20 minutes of release, so I guess I can cut them some slack, even if buying it direct from Valve did cost more than getting a box from a third party...
And don't forget that I can even run official nVidia drivers on my FreeBSD workstation. Plays a mean game of UT2k4 under Linux emulation ;)
Huh? Aren't you supposed to see, you know.. fast-forwarded frames of what you're fast-forwarding through? I dunno about you, but when I FF through the god-awful intro to Enterprise I'm looking at it to see where to hit Play (even if I often wish I hadn't bothered.. damn addictions).
Does the Tivo just blank the display or something so you're relying on the timer?
Quite a few. None of them were running an open relay; it was just RBL software/maintainers deciding to arbitarily block a nice big chunk of address space, probably because of a single host a few thousand IP's away.
Yet they block tonnes of legitimate mail if you use them as blackhole lists, instead of just factoring them into your content-scanning filters.
Sure; I never claimed RAID-5 wasn't competitive, I was more bashing the guy who said RAID-10 was crap by comparison, when it plainly *isn't*.
:/
I withdraw my "no matter how much" remark. RAID-10 is still simpler to implement and an excellent performer, which given how crap most hardware controllers/drivers seem to be, can only be a good thing
No, it eliminates the idea of being able to play your old original game; they'll still get cracked (if that's even necessary beyond online play enablers) and distributed in all the usual channels; just not before release.
I'd hope if they're going to kill the auth servers, they'd be obliged to provide a no-activation patch, too.
Uh? Can't they just package up the post-steam-activated HL2 directory? What other form of copy protection is in there that's needed to play the single player game?
If they're going to all this effort to prevent legitimate "owners" of the game from playing it until they say so, they better damn well not be putting even more hoops for them to jump through after they activate, or Valve has a *serious* chance that I won't be among them (yeah yeah, as if they're going to care about $70 out of $700,000,000).
Not as easy as remembering my local offset from UTC, not for me and most of the planet, anyway.
Right, but do I have to reinstall Steam to move it? Can they go where I like after they've been downloaded/decrypted? This is pretty basic stuff, and Steam makes it annoyingly opaque. I had 3G free on C, 16G free on D and 28G free on E when I tried to preload; my disk use has changed since I installed Steam, and it seems pretty silly that when it's going to be using GB's of disk space it won't let you choose where inside it's "easy" UI.
I can't wait for them to break a patch and for it never to work again too, that'll rock