Posting on a forum is enough to convince you its true?
I have downloaded 5 albums. I have the Mona Lisa in my closet. Britney Spears is pregnant with my two-headed love child. My donkey, DeWayne, looks great in garters and bustier. It would be a Good Idea for you to send me 25% of your income until I decide I no longer need it. Pssst...don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
-p
P.S. I was kidding about Britney. Its a 3-headed love child.
There is no difference between doing things that you think make you happy and actually being happy. Its all perception. The tricky bit is not letting the activity consume you and cause you to neglect other aspects of your life. If you overdo it you're buying happiness on credit...and you're gonna have to pay for it later.
Taken to an extreme you have hedonism which probably isn't that good. I suppose the opposite would be asceticism...which is fine for monks and such, but not that great for the rest of us.
Its from the novel Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. Good book. Snow Crash and Neuromancer battle it out for the top spot on my favorite sci-fi/cyberpunk type novels.
These vendors need to be convinced that we are a market they should get into, not that we're desperate enough for their crap that we're willing to give up the entire movement for it.
Right. And the best way of doing this is having a huge freaking market share...so vendors think they'll eventually be able to make some money off from something.
There _isn't_ decent sheet music for most popular music. At best most of it is arranged for piano with chord notation for guitar which is usually really, really horrible. I wish there really was sheet music which actually attempted to represent the guitar being played on a particular song, rather than a horrible piano/guitar arrangement. I bought some really nice sheet music of some Michael Hedges pieces. Be nice if more of this stuff was available.
TAB is almost never accurate...but at least it gives somebody's attempt to transcribe the guitar part...and its often very useful as a starting off place to figure out a piece.
Maybe they could add "classes", such that the Engineer constructs portals (maybe even, say, sentry guns), Medics could heal their teammates, etc, so as to encourage teamplay. Of course, level design and balance would be made easier if all the levels were symmetrical, with each team having their own fortress.
Then they could call the portal a spawn point, set it in a jungle, add 60's music, and call it Battlefield Vietnam.
Why should the threat of consumption from snakes (snakes! of all things!) have driven us to evolve incredibly good eyesight? Why not hearing?
Cause snakes are quiet, like the ninja.
Why not some more obvious and simple snake defense mechanism (like, immunity from snake poison?)
Obvious? Obvious to whom? Natural selection isn't a conscious process. Whatever happened to increase survivability got passed along. Vision was an incremental process. Light and darkness. Motion. Objects. Snakes! Goddamn snakes!
Re:Question about TFA...
on
Masks in the Woods
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not a hard-core roleplayer, but I did spend a whole lot of time when I was younger playing pen-and-paper rpgs. The obvious advantage table-top rpgs or LARP has is direct interaction with other players. Things can happen as quickly as the players can talk, you aren't limited by the horrid spelling of your companions, you don't have to wait for people to peck at the keyboard, you aren't left waiting for a response because someone ran off to throw some laundry in the dryer without letting the others know...
As much as I like a lot of the emotes in WoW, they get boring...you can't make your character sound or look like you want them to.
I don't know what game companies can do to address this...probably not much.
One thing they _can_ do is to allow players to have meaningful impact on the world. Personally, the peak of roleplaying in a MMORPG, for me, was Shadowbane. There, players could form guilds/clans and actually build cities. You would stake out a plot of land, build on it, have to maintain it...and when the enemies came a callin', defend it or lose everything. You had a stake in the world. You could form alliances with other guilds and form nations and war with other nations. It was a lot of fun.
It wasn't perfect, though. While all of the above could help a player who cared about roleplaying feel invested in the world and the guild, someone who wasn't interested could simply ignore it. With a large segment of a server population not roleplaying, the roleplaying experience is lessened for those who want to roleplay. There is no solution for this. You can't enforce roleplaying. People have different definitions of what roleplaying is, when its ok to ignore roleplaying, etc. I'm sure most people have encounted someone of the mindset "No, i'm not just a rabid playerkiller. I'm actually roleplaying a psychotic assassin who thinks everyone else is trying to kill him." Bah and feh.
The other problem with MMORPGs is the grinding. I just reached lvl 40 with my first WoW character. The first 20 levels or so I was just exploring and questing...really having a ball. Eventually started reading character build guides, using the talent calculators to figure out how I was going to develop, looking into the best equipment for my character, etc...essentially, I started grinding more than playing. Lvls 35-40 were nothing but grinding...I wanted my mount. Got the mount, rode around everywhere for a few hours...and then felt completely let down. Whats left before me? Grinding to 60, deciding if my current guild is up to the end-game instances, perfecting my build, tracking down the epic equipment, etc. Nothing but grinding. Lost is the exploration and any sense of novelty. Its down to math, now.
Table-top RPGs, in my experience, have none of this. I had as much fun as a low level character as I did as a high level character. The game was about the process, not about the endgame...cause there was no endgame. The focus was the story the gamemaster had created from his own demented imaginings. Unless we were using a commercial scenario (which was very rare) it was "our" story, our games, our ideas. Each "adventure" was important...it was part of your character's life.
I suppose the the Holy Grail would be for a MMORPG with the scope of WoW or Everquest or combined with customizable instances or dungeons (like the Neverwinter Nights build tools with GameMaster led adventures). Guilds or players could build instances for their members or friends. Hell, good designers could build exceptional instances and charge a fee to run a group through their creation...but I don't see that happening any time soon.
All these games are (WoW, DaOC, STG, ect..) are big statistical simulations where the players do nothing but tweak numbers (player stats). I'd like to see a game where NOBODY get's to see ANY numeric values for ANYTHING. The only player indication should be health which should be some sort of description at the bottom of the page which says something like "you feel awful" or "the pain in my leg hurts like hell!".
I don't know if this has been tried in MMORPGs or not. It has been tried in text MUDs and, at least in my experience, wasn't liked all that much by players. A significant portion of players of these type of games really like the numbers...spend hours analyzing skills, running the math, and trying to come up with a perfect "build" for their character. Ignore these players at your own risk.
Richard Bartle wrote an article http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm/ a while back discussing the various types of players who play online games (the article was for MUDs, but I think this transfers well to other online roleplaying type games). You've either got to decide which types of player to cater to and ignore the rest, or build a game that has elements that will satisfy all player types.
Getting rid of numbers, while being a laudable goal and something I pushed for on Nightmare LPMud for a long time, turned out to be something that a large segment of the players ended up not liking much at all. YMMV.
That's the point...most iPod owners aren't interested in Microsoft's offerings anyway.
Are you serious? You think most iPod owners are members of the cult of Apple? I LOVE my iPod but if microsoft offered me music cheaper, easier, or in less lossy methods AND it worked with my iPod...I'd definately use them. If it doesn't work with my iPod but is cheaper, easier, etc...then when my iPod inevitably dies, I would switch to a player that would be compatible.
I like my iPod. Its small and easy to use...the interface is nice. The POINT, however, is the ability to have most of my music collection with me wherever I go. The player is just the media I use...whatever is the "best" player when its time for me to buy. It happened to be an iPod when I bought my last player...next player, we'll see.
The great irony about the whole DRM and Sony thing is that I am now not just a casual downloader but I actively seek out copied (and safe) versions of spyware/DRM-enabled media. I usually buy my music, support the artists, blah blah blah...but no more.
Since they've decided to surreptitiously install system-crippling crap on my computer, I've decided they are the enemy. I'll download anything they distribute. Neener neener neener! Smooch my fine red tomato, Sony! Hahaahaha!
Now if 95% of the stuff they release didn't suck, this would actually be enjoyable.
Just because I don't post a sign on my front door that says "Keep Out" doesn't give you permission to wander in and help yourself to a snack.
You're absolutely right. I can't just wander in. Bad analogy, though. A better one would be...I ring your doorbell. The door automatically opens. Your butler...better yet...your robotic butler greets me at the door, wearing nothing but a smile, hands me a list of everything in your house that it is allowed to grab, and offers to go fetch anything on that list that interests me.
I'm not breaking in your window. I'm not kicking down your door. I'm ringing the doorbell.
Yeah, I remember this "radio" of which you speak. I remember, years and years ago, when it was possible to find good radio...when djs programmed their own shows and there was some personality to the whole experience. Those days are, for the most part, long gone. You might be lucky enough to live in an area that still has decent radio. Be grateful. Occasionally I'll listen to college radio here in Minneapolis...not bad, sometimes.
I agree that there is decent internet radio...and I'm in love with a handful of podcasts...I think podcasts have the potential to be what radio used to be...but licensing and the RIAA will really never let that happen to the extent that it should.
I don't find it to be stuttery at all. The sound quality is...adequate. Its not massive variable bitrate quality, but for streaming music its pretty damn good. The only benefit over iTunes, imo, is the subscription thing. The subscription part is what I use it for. The only times I've ever actually paid to download/burn songs was when a coworker needed some reasonably obscure songs for her church choir to practice along with...found pretty much everything she wanted and made a CD for her (does that count as a good deed?).
If you're looking for a place to buy and download music...i'd personally stick with iTunes. Rhapsody won't give you any benefits over that. Its strength is the ability to stream anything from their library that you want to. I use it at work all the time (although for my musical tastes, i could probably just as easily get by with Radio Paradise http://www.radioparadise.com/.
I actually like rhapsody's personal radio station thing too. Make your own "radio station", plug in 5-10 bands that you like, and you have a customized radio station playing those bands and other music that they determine are "similar" (they do a pretty good job of that, though).
I've used Rhapsody for a year or two now. It's a decent service. Ignore their "programming". Listen to what you want to listen to. As far as it being in a browser, their windows based program pretty much implements a browser in the app itself...which is kinda slow and kludgy...i think trying one that is actually stand alone browser-based might improve things.
NOTE: I don't buy music through rhapsody. I use it to sample new releases, catch up on things I might have missed before, track down the odd song from my youth, and listen to stuff that is available on usenet before I download it.;)
For the $9/month (or around there, i haven't checked in a while) its the easiest way to listen to music that i don't already own (the only exception is the old days of audiogalaxy. Best. Site. Ever.)...helps me decide what music i wanna track down to stick on my ipod.
You say you don't need a new video card at all. You say yours works fine. Great. Don't get a new video card.
I don't know how much time you spend playing graphics heavy games (e.g., the new first-person shooters, Battlefield 2, for instance). I spend quite a bit of time with them. Computer gaming is one of my hobbies. Do I _need_ a top of the line graphics card? No. I don't. I bought one because it makes my hobby more enjoyable. I didn't _need_ a les paul guitar, either, just to bash away at it in my basement. Do I play better on it verses a cheaper guitar? Probably not. I have a hell of a lot more fun playing it, though.
People who spend the extra money for something that you don't have a need or desire for aren't necessarily doing it for bragging rights. If you're bragging about your video card, you don't have much else in life to brag about, imo.;)
Having said all this, I'm not saying that the gaming companies aren't bastards for putting out games that constantly push the envelope as far as hardware requirements. I'd _love_ to not have to upgrade components as often as I do. My main annoyance is that most gaming companies think they can hide the lack of innovative game design, new ideas, and enhancing the "fun-factor" of gaming by making the graphics marginally prettier. They think we won't notice. We do.
FWIW, if I won the lottery this week you wouldn't see me running out to get a new video card, either. You'd see Cadbury, the chauffeur, driving out to pick it up for me and delivering to my new island.
Yes, I played it. No, I don't have anything against it...but for those of you who have played and gone to most gaming stores, cons, or anything similar...didn't you generally feel like you were one of very few in attendance without serious geek issues? If you didn't, you were one of the masses justifying that feeling in others.;)
It has a different flavor than just 'prepares for battle'. Don Quixote 'thought' he was attacking giants. He was, in fact, attacking windmills. So...Gizmondo thought they were gearing up to attack the giants of the industry while the fruits of their labor, at least according to TFA, show that they really had no clue what they were doing. Not a bad metaphor here, really.
In my experience, undergraduate science students, at least in the US, are usually of the belief that they are being taught "facts". Maybe in an introductory class more emphasis is placed on the unknowns, but as they move into their specialties all but the most controversial or speculative ideas are presented as facts.
Generally as they move into graduate studies there is more emphasis on the quest for knowledge as opposed to the memorizing and understanding of facts.
As one of my professors said my first year of graduate school, "You're graduate students now...you're allowed to have opinions."
IMO, all science degrees should include a class in Philosophy of Science. Most undergraduate students I've talked to about this idea say something along the lines of "Philosophy has nothing to do with science."
Right. You can't prove you don't have anything. When its something as horrible as chemical weapons which we know that he did have, at least at some point, you _should_ be able to prove you destroyed it. With documentation. Where did you destroy it? How did you destroy it, etc. When?
When, after several years of politely being asked to provide this information, we (UN) finally have to send in inspectors to look ourselves, don't tell us we can't look in certain places. Don't obstruct. Why? Because we really _do_ think you have stuff. We _know_ you're a Bad Guy. We know you're dangerous and, yeah I'll admit it, control a lotta world oil and recently attacked a nearby country to get more oil. People act like its a bad thing because we might have a concern in oil. We do. Everyone does. Do we want to get rich on it? No, but we don't want a terrorist-supporting madman to be able to fuck the world economy at whim? No.
George Bush was wrong. Yeah, he was. At least as far as we know, Saddam didn't have WMDs. The purpose, however, wasn't to go in and prove Bush. It was to find out if he was or wasn't. Damn glad he was wrong. Had he been right and Saddam had had WMDs, do we doubt he'd have used it on our soldiers?
There is no elitism. What other UN member country could have taken Iraq with as few soldier and civilian deaths, captured Saddam, and helped free the Iraqi people.
One day the whole club decided to ignore the fact that Herb had been a right prick for the last decade or two. They chose to forget that Herb had crossed the white picket fence a few years back, broke into Dave's house and, facing the rest of the club who had come to Dave's defense, left the place burning and slunk back home. The club had a security force who patrolled around Dave's neighborhood for a few years but that got old and, since Herb hadn't done much but take a few potshots at the club's patrols, they figured he'd probably learned his lesson and wouldn't bother anyone again.
The club knew that Herb had once owned a stockpile of candy. They knew that he'd used it to kill many thousands of people. They told Herb, "Look! You've gotta get rid of that stuff. You can't be trusted with it. Destroy it! You need to prove to us that you've gotten rid of it before we can start trusting you again. If you don't prove it, we're gonna have to come look for ourselves, kick a few doors in, make things miserable for everyone" Herb said, "Who me? Oh, we never had anything like that. And if we did, we destroyed it."
The club said, "Prove it! We're gonna have Hans come over and make sure you've gotten rid of it." Herb said, "Oh no! Hans can come and look for it, but there are rooms he can't look in. In fact, he has to let me know in advance which rooms he wants to look in."
This went on for a while. Occasionally Hans would say things like, "Oh, yeah. Herbs cooperating fully. We're making good progress not finding any candy." Other times he'd say, "Herb isn't letting us look where we want. We'll go to check a room and not find anything but freshly polished coffee tables and the faint scent of bleach."
The club decided that Herb probably wasn't a threat to any club members. He'd learned his lesson when he attacked Dave. They knew he let his family torture, rape, and murder anyone who lived in his house but, hey, that wasn't the Club's problem. It was Herb's house, after all. Never mind that Herb gave money to the families of thugs who went into Isaac's house and blew up people left and right. Much of the club had a pretty spotty history when it came to Isaac's family anyway and thought they probably had it coming to them. Never mind that Herb often entertained guests who tried to hurt the people in George's house and had, in fact, once tried to kill George's dad. That was alright too, since most of the members of the Club thought that George's whole family had been getting pretty self-important lately and should be taken down a peg or two.
So, the club got together and decided that they'd let Hans keep looking for the candy. They weren't going to go kick in Herbs door and find out for sure that he was no threat to them. It would make them look weak to capitulate but, hey, they all realized they really were weak and it was better to look weak than to prove to everyone that you are weak.
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Really?
I mean, really?
Posting on a forum is enough to convince you its true?
I have downloaded 5 albums.
I have the Mona Lisa in my closet.
Britney Spears is pregnant with my two-headed love child.
My donkey, DeWayne, looks great in garters and bustier.
It would be a Good Idea for you to send me 25% of your income until I decide I no longer need it. Pssst...don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
-p
P.S. I was kidding about Britney. Its a 3-headed love child.
And look where it got him. In the nuthouse.
Followed by a multi-million dollar publishing career. Ok. Good point.
-p
There is no difference between doing things that you think make you happy and actually being happy. Its all perception. The tricky bit is not letting the activity consume you and cause you to neglect other aspects of your life. If you overdo it you're buying happiness on credit...and you're gonna have to pay for it later.
Taken to an extreme you have hedonism which probably isn't that good. I suppose the opposite would be asceticism...which is fine for monks and such, but not that great for the rest of us.
Moderation in all things.
Its from the novel Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. Good book. Snow Crash and Neuromancer battle it out for the top spot on my favorite sci-fi/cyberpunk type novels.
These vendors need to be convinced that we are a market they should get into, not that we're desperate enough for their crap that we're willing to give up the entire movement for it.
Right. And the best way of doing this is having a huge freaking market share...so vendors think they'll eventually be able to make some money off from something.
I've used a lot of tab from OLGA over the years.
There _isn't_ decent sheet music for most popular music. At best most of it is arranged for piano with chord notation for guitar which is usually really, really horrible. I wish there really was sheet music which actually attempted to represent the guitar being played on a particular song, rather than a horrible piano/guitar arrangement. I bought some really nice sheet music of some Michael Hedges pieces. Be nice if more of this stuff was available.
TAB is almost never accurate...but at least it gives somebody's attempt to transcribe the guitar part...and its often very useful as a starting off place to figure out a piece.
Maybe they could add "classes", such that the Engineer constructs portals (maybe even, say, sentry guns), Medics could heal
their teammates, etc, so as to encourage teamplay. Of course, level design and balance would be made easier if all the levels
were symmetrical, with each team having their own fortress.
Then they could call the portal a spawn point, set it in a jungle, add 60's music, and call it Battlefield Vietnam.
http://www.ultimatedallas.com/movie/art12.html
Yeah, a Dallas movie. Fear.
Cause snakes are quiet, like the ninja.
Why not some more obvious and simple snake defense mechanism (like, immunity from snake poison?)
Obvious? Obvious to whom? Natural selection isn't a conscious process. Whatever happened to increase survivability got passed along. Vision was an incremental process. Light and darkness. Motion. Objects. Snakes! Goddamn snakes!
I'm not a hard-core roleplayer, but I did spend a whole lot of time when I was younger playing pen-and-paper rpgs. The obvious advantage table-top rpgs or LARP has is direct interaction with other players. Things can happen as quickly as the players can talk, you aren't limited by the horrid spelling of your companions, you don't have to wait for people to peck at the keyboard, you aren't left waiting for a response because someone ran off to throw some laundry in the dryer without letting the others know...
As much as I like a lot of the emotes in WoW, they get boring...you can't make your character sound or look like you want them to.
I don't know what game companies can do to address this...probably not much.
One thing they _can_ do is to allow players to have meaningful impact on the world. Personally, the peak of roleplaying in a MMORPG, for me, was Shadowbane. There, players could form guilds/clans and actually build cities. You would stake out a plot of land, build on it, have to maintain it...and when the enemies came a callin', defend it or lose everything. You had a stake in the world. You could form alliances with other guilds and form nations and war with other nations. It was a lot of fun.
It wasn't perfect, though. While all of the above could help a player who cared about roleplaying feel invested in the world and the guild, someone who wasn't interested could simply ignore it. With a large segment of a server population not roleplaying, the roleplaying experience is lessened for those who want to roleplay. There is no solution for this. You can't enforce roleplaying. People have different definitions of what roleplaying is, when its ok to ignore roleplaying, etc. I'm sure most people have encounted someone of the mindset "No, i'm not just a rabid playerkiller. I'm actually roleplaying a psychotic assassin who thinks everyone else is trying to kill him." Bah and feh.
The other problem with MMORPGs is the grinding. I just reached lvl 40 with my first WoW character. The first 20 levels or so I was just exploring and questing...really having a ball. Eventually started reading character build guides, using the talent calculators to figure out how I was going to develop, looking into the best equipment for my character, etc...essentially, I started grinding more than playing. Lvls 35-40 were nothing but grinding...I wanted my mount. Got the mount, rode around everywhere for a few hours...and then felt completely let down. Whats left before me? Grinding to 60, deciding if my current guild is up to the end-game instances, perfecting my build, tracking down the epic equipment, etc. Nothing but grinding. Lost is the exploration and any sense of novelty. Its down to math, now.
Table-top RPGs, in my experience, have none of this. I had as much fun as a low level character as I did as a high level character. The game was about the process, not about the endgame...cause there was no endgame. The focus was the story the gamemaster had created from his own demented imaginings. Unless we were using a commercial scenario (which was very rare) it was "our" story, our games, our ideas. Each "adventure" was important...it was part of your character's life.
I suppose the the Holy Grail would be for a MMORPG with the scope of WoW or Everquest or combined with customizable instances or dungeons (like the Neverwinter Nights build tools with GameMaster led adventures). Guilds or players could build instances for their members or friends. Hell, good designers could build exceptional instances and charge a fee to run a group through their creation...but I don't see that happening any time soon.
-p
Bleh, now for a working link for the article...sorry for the newbishness.
http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
All these games are (WoW, DaOC, STG, ect..) are big statistical simulations where the players do nothing but tweak numbers (player stats). I'd like to see a game where NOBODY get's to see ANY numeric values for ANYTHING. The only player indication should be health which should be some sort of description at the bottom of the page which says something like "you feel awful" or "the pain in my leg hurts like hell!".
I don't know if this has been tried in MMORPGs or not. It has been tried in text MUDs and, at least in my experience, wasn't liked all that much by players. A significant portion of players of these type of games really like the numbers...spend hours analyzing skills, running the math, and trying to come up with a perfect "build" for their character. Ignore these players at your own risk.
Richard Bartle wrote an article http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm/ a while back discussing the various types of players who play online games (the article was for MUDs, but I think this transfers well to other online roleplaying type games). You've either got to decide which types of player to cater to and ignore the rest, or build a game that has elements that will satisfy all player types.
Getting rid of numbers, while being a laudable goal and something I pushed for on Nightmare LPMud for a long time, turned out to be something that a large segment of the players ended up not liking much at all. YMMV.
-pete
That's the point...most iPod owners aren't interested in Microsoft's offerings anyway.
Are you serious? You think most iPod owners are members of the cult of Apple? I LOVE my iPod but if microsoft offered me music cheaper, easier, or in less lossy methods AND it worked with my iPod...I'd definately use them. If it doesn't work with my iPod but is cheaper, easier, etc...then when my iPod inevitably dies, I would switch to a player that would be compatible.
I like my iPod. Its small and easy to use...the interface is nice. The POINT, however, is the ability to have most of my music collection with me wherever I go. The player is just the media I use...whatever is the "best" player when its time for me to buy. It happened to be an iPod when I bought my last player...next player, we'll see.
The great irony about the whole DRM and Sony thing is that I am now not just a casual downloader but I actively seek out copied (and safe) versions of spyware/DRM-enabled media. I usually buy my music, support the artists, blah blah blah...but no more.
Since they've decided to surreptitiously install system-crippling crap on my computer, I've decided they are the enemy. I'll download anything they distribute. Neener neener neener! Smooch my fine red tomato, Sony! Hahaahaha!
Now if 95% of the stuff they release didn't suck , this would actually be enjoyable.
-p
Just because I don't post a sign on my front door that says "Keep Out" doesn't give you permission to wander in and help yourself to a snack.
You're absolutely right. I can't just wander in. Bad analogy, though. A better one would be...I ring your doorbell. The door automatically opens. Your butler...better yet...your robotic butler greets me at the door, wearing nothing but a smile, hands me a list of everything in your house that it is allowed to grab, and offers to go fetch anything on that list that interests me.
I'm not breaking in your window. I'm not kicking down your door. I'm ringing the doorbell.
-p
Yeah, I remember this "radio" of which you speak. I remember, years and years ago, when it was possible to find good radio...when djs programmed their own shows and there was some personality to the whole experience. Those days are, for the most part, long gone. You might be lucky enough to live in an area that still has decent radio. Be grateful. Occasionally I'll listen to college radio here in Minneapolis...not bad, sometimes.
I agree that there is decent internet radio...and I'm in love with a handful of podcasts...I think podcasts have the potential to be what radio used to be...but licensing and the RIAA will really never let that happen to the extent that it should.
I don't find it to be stuttery at all. The sound quality is...adequate. Its not massive variable bitrate quality, but for streaming music its pretty damn good. The only benefit over iTunes, imo, is the subscription thing. The subscription part is what I use it for. The only times I've ever actually paid to download/burn songs was when a coworker needed some reasonably obscure songs for her church choir to practice along with...found pretty much everything she wanted and made a CD for her (does that count as a good deed?).
If you're looking for a place to buy and download music...i'd personally stick with iTunes. Rhapsody won't give you any benefits over that. Its strength is the ability to stream anything from their library that you want to. I use it at work all the time (although for my musical tastes, i could probably just as easily get by with Radio Paradise http://www.radioparadise.com/.
I actually like rhapsody's personal radio station thing too. Make your own "radio station", plug in 5-10 bands that you like, and you have a customized radio station playing those bands and other music that they determine are "similar" (they do a pretty good job of that, though).
Sheesh, I sound like an ad guy for 'em. YMMV.
-p
I've used Rhapsody for a year or two now. It's a decent service. Ignore their "programming". Listen to what you want to listen to. As far as it being in a browser, their windows based program pretty much implements a browser in the app itself...which is kinda slow and kludgy...i think trying one that is actually stand alone browser-based might improve things.
;)
...helps me decide what music i wanna track down to stick on my ipod.
NOTE: I don't buy music through rhapsody. I use it to sample new releases, catch up on things I might have missed before, track down the odd song from my youth, and listen to stuff that is available on usenet before I download it.
For the $9/month (or around there, i haven't checked in a while) its the easiest way to listen to music that i don't already own (the only exception is the old days of audiogalaxy. Best. Site. Ever.)
-p
You say you don't need a new video card at all. You say yours works fine. Great. Don't get a new video card.
I don't know how much time you spend playing graphics heavy games (e.g., the new first-person shooters, Battlefield 2, for instance). I spend quite a bit of time with them. Computer gaming is one of my hobbies. Do I _need_ a top of the line graphics card? No. I don't. I bought one because it makes my hobby more enjoyable. I didn't _need_ a les paul guitar, either, just to bash away at it in my basement. Do I play better on it verses a cheaper guitar? Probably not. I have a hell of a lot more fun playing it, though.
People who spend the extra money for something that you don't have a need or desire for aren't necessarily doing it for bragging rights. If you're bragging about your video card, you don't have much else in life to brag about, imo.
Having said all this, I'm not saying that the gaming companies aren't bastards for putting out games that constantly push the envelope as far as hardware requirements. I'd _love_ to not have to upgrade components as often as I do. My main annoyance is that most gaming companies think they can hide the lack of innovative game design, new ideas, and enhancing the "fun-factor" of gaming by making the graphics marginally prettier. They think we won't notice. We do.
FWIW, if I won the lottery this week you wouldn't see me running out to get a new video card, either. You'd see Cadbury, the chauffeur, driving out to pick it up for me and delivering to my new island.
-pete
The opening day of Dork Mocking Season.
;)
Yes, I played it. No, I don't have anything against it...but for those of you who have played and gone to most gaming stores, cons, or anything similar...didn't you generally feel like you were one of very few in attendance without serious geek issues? If you didn't, you were one of the masses justifying that feeling in others.
-pete
It has a different flavor than just 'prepares for battle'. Don Quixote 'thought' he was attacking giants. He was, in fact, attacking windmills. So...Gizmondo thought they were gearing up to attack the giants of the industry while the fruits of their labor, at least according to TFA, show that they really had no clue what they were doing. Not a bad metaphor here, really.
In my experience, undergraduate science students, at least in the US, are usually of the belief that they are being taught "facts". Maybe in an introductory class more emphasis is placed on the unknowns, but as they move into their specialties all but the most controversial or speculative ideas are presented as facts.
Generally as they move into graduate studies there is more emphasis on the quest for knowledge as opposed to the memorizing and understanding of facts.
As one of my professors said my first year of graduate school, "You're graduate students now...you're allowed to have opinions."
IMO, all science degrees should include a class in Philosophy of Science. Most undergraduate students I've talked to about this idea say something along the lines of "Philosophy has nothing to do with science."
-pete
Right. You can't prove you don't have anything. When its something as horrible as chemical weapons which we know that he did have, at least at some point, you _should_ be able to prove you destroyed it. With documentation. Where did you destroy it? How did you destroy it, etc. When?
;)
When, after several years of politely being asked to provide this information, we (UN) finally have to send in inspectors to look ourselves, don't tell us we can't look in certain places. Don't obstruct. Why? Because we really _do_ think you have stuff. We _know_ you're a Bad Guy. We know you're dangerous and, yeah I'll admit it, control a lotta world oil and recently attacked a nearby country to get more oil. People act like its a bad thing because we might have a concern in oil. We do. Everyone does. Do we want to get rich on it? No, but we don't want a terrorist-supporting madman to be able to fuck the world economy at whim? No.
George Bush was wrong. Yeah, he was. At least as far as we know, Saddam didn't have WMDs. The purpose, however, wasn't to go in and prove Bush. It was to find out if he was or wasn't. Damn glad he was wrong. Had he been right and Saddam had had WMDs, do we doubt he'd have used it on our soldiers?
There is no elitism. What other UN member country could have taken Iraq with as few soldier and civilian deaths, captured Saddam, and helped free the Iraqi people.
More later, gotta play Ravenshield now.
One day the whole club decided to ignore the fact that Herb had been a right prick for the last decade or two. They chose to forget that Herb had crossed the white picket fence a few years back, broke into Dave's house and, facing the rest of the club who had come to Dave's defense, left the place burning and slunk back home. The club had a security force who patrolled around Dave's neighborhood for a few years but that got old and, since Herb hadn't done much but take a few potshots at the club's patrols, they figured he'd probably learned his lesson and wouldn't bother anyone again.
The club knew that Herb had once owned a stockpile of candy. They knew that he'd used it to kill many thousands of people. They told Herb, "Look! You've gotta get rid of that stuff. You can't be trusted with it. Destroy it! You need to prove to us that you've gotten rid of it before we can start trusting you again. If you don't prove it, we're gonna have to come look for ourselves, kick a few doors in, make things miserable for everyone" Herb said, "Who me? Oh, we never had anything like that. And if we did, we destroyed it."
The club said, "Prove it! We're gonna have Hans come over and make sure you've gotten rid of it." Herb said, "Oh no! Hans can come and look for it, but there are rooms he can't look in. In fact, he has to let me know in advance which rooms he wants to look in."
This went on for a while. Occasionally Hans would say things like, "Oh, yeah. Herbs cooperating fully. We're making good progress not finding any candy." Other times he'd say, "Herb isn't letting us look where we want. We'll go to check a room and not find anything but freshly polished coffee tables and the faint scent of bleach."
The club decided that Herb probably wasn't a threat to any club members. He'd learned his lesson when he attacked Dave. They knew he let his family torture, rape, and murder anyone who lived in his house but, hey, that wasn't the Club's problem. It was Herb's house, after all. Never mind that Herb gave money to the families of thugs who went into Isaac's house and blew up people left and right. Much of the club had a pretty spotty history when it came to Isaac's family anyway and thought they probably had it coming to them. Never mind that Herb often entertained guests who tried to hurt the people in George's house and had, in fact, once tried to kill George's dad. That was alright too, since most of the members of the Club thought that George's whole family had been getting pretty self-important lately and should be taken down a peg or two.
So, the club got together and decided that they'd let Hans keep looking for the candy. They weren't going to go kick in Herbs door and find out for sure that he was no threat to them. It would make them look weak to capitulate but, hey, they all realized they really were weak and it was better to look weak than to prove to everyone that you are weak.
"Bugger that for a lark," said George.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Spin!... *thwap*