I cried when everybody raved up and down about Black and White, so I bought the thing and was so disappointed I cried.
Ok, it wasn't quite that bad. I almost cried in Starcraft when (spoiler) that bastard guy left Kerrigan behind to die. Especially since my base was in absolutely no danger whatsoever of being overrun at that point.
It depends a bit on what you're using it for. The rainbow effect doesn't do anything on Powerpoint presentations, which is 95% of what conference room screens are usually used for. Frankly, it's harder and harder to find non-DLP projectors these days. We have DLP in every conference room here and as far as I know nobody has ever complained.
Dude, CoH/CoV aren't exactly the kind of game where a person needs more than about an hour of coaching even if they're brand spanking new. The idea of a coach for a twitch game sounds pretty normal to me though. Lots of sports are about high speed precision movements (like fencing), and people have no qualms about hiring coaches to help them get better at that.
How much does it really cost to put an album on iTunes though? The hard drive space required is laughably cheap (probably about one penny's worth), and assuming that loading it onto the service requires the equivelent of some tech loading it into a CD-Rom, hitting "rip" and then just double checking to make sure the Gracenote info is correct and tagging the price, well, that's a 10 minute kinda job (if that). This also assumes some large blanket license (there is no way they're negotiating with each band individually), but overall it costs them almost nothing to put an album up.
On the other hand, Apple's margins on the record store are apparently very very low (they gotta pay for breakage and stuff on their AAC files), so it might take a couple dozen downloads before something breaks even, which could take awhile with some albums.
It's still amazing IMHO. I can't have been the only person who scoured his local paper each week to find what timeslot B5 was in, only to discover that the paper was wrong more often than it was right, and even then it was only listed at all 1 week in 3. A couple of times I only caught it by accident, but it was almost always gone from any slot within a week or two.
It also didn't help that my local affiliate liked to show the episodes out of order.
Actually, it's worse than that. It was originally planned to be a 5 year series, but then the stuidos started hinting that they were planning to cancel it after the fourth season because the ratings weren't so hot. IMHO it was amazing they had ratings at all since the timeslot was shifted every week and nobody ever bothered to tell TV Guide or anybody else when it was supposed to show. Anyway, JMS then rushed the end of the story in Season 4 and only afterward was told that he was actually going to have another season.
It's actually more complex than that too. If you're running a 600W PSU near its limit, there's a good chance you could save a fair bit of energy by upgrading to the 1000W PSU, just because the efficency of the PSU tends to go down as you get closer to its maximum load. Ultimately, the efficency is what you're concerned about, not how many watts aggregate it can put out across all of the rails.
That may be true at yours, but my Home Depot raids special ed classes for their cashiers. I did a happy dance when I saw those self checkout lanes because it ment not waiting for the always slow cashiers in their real lines. I swear we have some that take 30 seconds to scan each item, and then another 15 seconds to figure out how to put it in the bag. It used to be that the lines were always halfway across the store too. The best part is, most people are intimidated by those self checkout machines, so there is almost never a line. I'm sure that will change after awhile, but I'm happy for the few months I'll have of nearly instant checkout.
Dude, stop buying your replacement Flourescent bulbs from the antique shop. Instant-on has been a standard feature on the good bulbs for years now, and it's not hard to find white balanced bulbs either. Sizewise they are larger, but I havn't run into too many fixtures that are too small for them yet.
I reccomend the Commercial Electric bulbs sold by Home Depot. I've been using them for years and have been quite happy with the results. You can even get candelabra bulbs sometimes, although the failure rate on those bulbs is fairly high. The only incandesant bulbs I have left in my house are the Refrigerator bulb (Flourescents still hate cold temperatures), the one in the trouble light (gets broken a lot, don't want to waste $5 on each bulb), and the one I use for painting.
Don't forget that in the summer you're saving on those energy costs twice with Flourescents, since the A/C has to work to get any heat generated by your bulbs out of the house. It's still a win in the winter too since Central air systems are more efficent than resistive heaters like light bulbs. It is a big investment up front, but those bulbs not only pay for themselves in energy costs, but also in their low maintenenc--if you replace all of your bulbs at once you won't have to touch them again for years, and you can use all of those half dead bulbs in your trouble light.
I don't know, with CoH you can argue that the game designers remade the whole "low power" part of the game system when they introduced Enhancement Diversification.
For the 90% of Slashdotters who are wondering what I just said. In the old system you were able to boost the power/effectiveness of anything you did by 200% (three times as powerful). In the new system the cap was lowered to just under 100% (twice as powerful), which completely changed the dynamic of the game. The devs also cut the base effectiveness of most defense powers in half. This made previously invulnerable characters rather squishy and severely reduced the damage output of everybody. However, it also greatly reduced the disparity between the new and vetran players and made battles much more interesting since team wipes are far more common now. Overall the change was probably necessary (the high end game was just too easy otherwise), but the player base was not happy about it.
You should have bought nVidia cards, SLI is supported under Linux. In fact the drivers are just plain better. Every so often I hear someone on Slashdot say that ATI has cleaned up its act and finally started putting out decent drivers, and time and time again it turns out to be a lie.
That said, buying a laptop with an nVidia graphics card is not always easy. A lot of companies reserve the nVidia cards for their super high end, extremely heavy and bulky, "gamer" laptops. I don't see why you couldn't have an integrated 6150 on a laptop, but it doesn't appear to be nearly as popular as the Radeon X300 from any major manufacturer.
Of course that doesn't really matter much since the level of support the Intel chips provide is about the same as you get from the XFree Radeon driver. It's only when you start asking for fast 3D or multihead or any of those other features that the ATI drivers really look bad. Try running any modern game on an Intel graphics chip and you'll see why people prefer ATI and nVidia. I shudder at the thought of trying to use the Secondlife Linux client on an Intel graphics chip.
I don't know, I've played the "hard" import versions of some of those games and I don't think the extra difficulty really added to the fun of the game at all. In a lot of cases they just made boss battles even longer and forced you to stock 8 different items to cure status effects instead of 1. A lot of the time I think the "simplified" version is a better game because they drop the frustrating and annoying aspects of the gameplay and just focus on the fun stuff.
Mario 2 Japan was also really freaking hard. It was aimed at people who were already Mario experts, not the millions of kids who weren't even able to beat the first one. As a successor in the states it would have been a disaster, even in Japan it was considered to be a bit of a disappointment by all but the most hard core Marioheads.
Or the guys who set up fake Paypal charities right after Katrina to cash in on the disaster? Paypal has no way to verify that the charities are real, so they blocked all of them and just told people to use the safe (albiet less efficent) route of donating to the Red Cross.
Wouldn't legalized drugs be like Twinkies and screwdrivers though? Heck, even Restaraunts and service industries have to keep track of inventories, and small businesses are by far more heavily audited than any other sector of the economy.
In the end, the government will still be getting a lot more taxes from them if they were legal than they are now.
I've had netflix for a couple of years now and never noticed the throttling. I was under the impression that you had to be one of those guys who gets three movies, rips them, and then returns them the same day over and over again to get hit with the throttle.
It's sort of like Paypal where you read about all of these horror stories online, but never find any real person who's had trouble with them except for that one guy who was ripping people off on Ebay and got real pissed at them when they shut down his account before he could get the money out of it.
It's not like the video store guys have some big database of Netflix customers and will refuse to do business with you if you're on their list or something. If it makes sense to run down to the video store to pick up a movie even though you have Netflix, go for it.
Also, one of the nice things Netflix offers is the ability to create seperate movie queues for different people in your house. That way you can be sure you'll always have a movie you want to watch, your wife will have one she wants to watch, and your daughter will have one for when her friends come over.
To me it seems retarded to limit the number of views, either by time or a counter. It's not like people watch movies over and over again (unless they're 8 years old) so it won't ring much extra money from the customers, but they WILL resent you for it. iTunes was successful partially because the DRM didn't have a lot of the retarded restrictions that most studios demanded from other such companies. Ebooks have been mostly a failure because publishers insist on stuff like this (except for Jim Baen, who is raking in money like crazy with his ebooks because they lack all of the retarded baggage that normally comes with them).
I'm hoping that Jobs will turn his Reality Distortion Field up high enough to counter the RDF that the movie studio execs live in and force them to realize that if you want people to buy a product, you have to offer something they're willing to buy. Don't worry so much about pirates because they already have much better copies of what you're selling anyway (higher resolution and free), but people will tend to prefer the legal version if given a chance and the legal version doesn't suck too much.
By that logic, who would pay taxes for _anything_ since it should be easy as pie to sell Twinkies, screwdrivers, or anything else under the table? Also, why would a seller risk his neck avoiding some 5 or 10% tax (that his customers are paying)? If it were legalized the illicit production would mostly dry up because it's much much easier to operate inside of the law than out. Given the choice, I doubt few dealers would choose a life in the worst part of town hounded by the police and thrown in jail every so often. Even the cushy suburban dealers would be estatic not to have to deal with Central American paramilitary cartels as their primary supplier. The concept that legalizing drugs will increase illegal production seems highly counterintuitive to me.
Not to mention that the government will have a much easier time tracking users and abusers if they don't feel that they have to hide from the cops.
On the other hand, I'm rather libertarian about what people do with their lives. As long as it doesn't harm other people, I don't think it should be illegal. I do think lots of stuff should be regulated however, to prevent people from becoming a completely unproductive junkie, but I don't think making the activity illegal is the proper answer. In other words, I don't want anybody stepping in until it's clear that what they're doing is interfering with their life in a substantal way.
That is disappointingly vague. The admonishment against get rich quick schemes is good advice, but hardly seems against the spirit of the friendly low stakes gambing that most people take part in. "Love of money" is even more vague.
Ultimately, gambling is one of those things that reminds me of grade school where the entire class was forbidden from some activity because one or two people were unable to behave. It's ultimately unfair, but mostly unavoidable if you care at all about people with poor self control (gamblers and other addicts). Social problems never have easy solutions.
Actually, they have pushed hard enough for people to stop buying. Havn't you read about how music sales are down? Of course, they blame piracy, which makes them crack down even harder, causing more people to get disgusted and stop buying from them... Seriously, I hate being treated like a theif everytime I buy a CD, if they keep that up maybe I'll just become a thief and get the much better customer service available from illegal bootleggers.
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I cried when everybody raved up and down about Black and White, so I bought the thing and was so disappointed I cried.
Ok, it wasn't quite that bad. I almost cried in Starcraft when (spoiler) that bastard guy left Kerrigan behind to die. Especially since my base was in absolutely no danger whatsoever of being overrun at that point.
It depends a bit on what you're using it for. The rainbow effect doesn't do anything on Powerpoint presentations, which is 95% of what conference room screens are usually used for. Frankly, it's harder and harder to find non-DLP projectors these days. We have DLP in every conference room here and as far as I know nobody has ever complained.
Dude, CoH/CoV aren't exactly the kind of game where a person needs more than about an hour of coaching even if they're brand spanking new. The idea of a coach for a twitch game sounds pretty normal to me though. Lots of sports are about high speed precision movements (like fencing), and people have no qualms about hiring coaches to help them get better at that.
How much does it really cost to put an album on iTunes though? The hard drive space required is laughably cheap (probably about one penny's worth), and assuming that loading it onto the service requires the equivelent of some tech loading it into a CD-Rom, hitting "rip" and then just double checking to make sure the Gracenote info is correct and tagging the price, well, that's a 10 minute kinda job (if that). This also assumes some large blanket license (there is no way they're negotiating with each band individually), but overall it costs them almost nothing to put an album up.
On the other hand, Apple's margins on the record store are apparently very very low (they gotta pay for breakage and stuff on their AAC files), so it might take a couple dozen downloads before something breaks even, which could take awhile with some albums.
It's still amazing IMHO. I can't have been the only person who scoured his local paper each week to find what timeslot B5 was in, only to discover that the paper was wrong more often than it was right, and even then it was only listed at all 1 week in 3. A couple of times I only caught it by accident, but it was almost always gone from any slot within a week or two.
It also didn't help that my local affiliate liked to show the episodes out of order.
It's not 500 miles, it's 500km, which is more like 311 miles... Unless the "KM" above was kilo-miles. :)
Oh, and that cost was probably in Euros, which are worth more than dollars at the moment.
Actually, it's worse than that. It was originally planned to be a 5 year series, but then the stuidos started hinting that they were planning to cancel it after the fourth season because the ratings weren't so hot. IMHO it was amazing they had ratings at all since the timeslot was shifted every week and nobody ever bothered to tell TV Guide or anybody else when it was supposed to show. Anyway, JMS then rushed the end of the story in Season 4 and only afterward was told that he was actually going to have another season.
It's actually more complex than that too. If you're running a 600W PSU near its limit, there's a good chance you could save a fair bit of energy by upgrading to the 1000W PSU, just because the efficency of the PSU tends to go down as you get closer to its maximum load. Ultimately, the efficency is what you're concerned about, not how many watts aggregate it can put out across all of the rails.
Pretty much any phone with J2ME.
That may be true at yours, but my Home Depot raids special ed classes for their cashiers. I did a happy dance when I saw those self checkout lanes because it ment not waiting for the always slow cashiers in their real lines. I swear we have some that take 30 seconds to scan each item, and then another 15 seconds to figure out how to put it in the bag. It used to be that the lines were always halfway across the store too. The best part is, most people are intimidated by those self checkout machines, so there is almost never a line. I'm sure that will change after awhile, but I'm happy for the few months I'll have of nearly instant checkout.
Dude, stop buying your replacement Flourescent bulbs from the antique shop. Instant-on has been a standard feature on the good bulbs for years now, and it's not hard to find white balanced bulbs either. Sizewise they are larger, but I havn't run into too many fixtures that are too small for them yet.
I reccomend the Commercial Electric bulbs sold by Home Depot. I've been using them for years and have been quite happy with the results. You can even get candelabra bulbs sometimes, although the failure rate on those bulbs is fairly high. The only incandesant bulbs I have left in my house are the Refrigerator bulb (Flourescents still hate cold temperatures), the one in the trouble light (gets broken a lot, don't want to waste $5 on each bulb), and the one I use for painting.
Don't forget that in the summer you're saving on those energy costs twice with Flourescents, since the A/C has to work to get any heat generated by your bulbs out of the house. It's still a win in the winter too since Central air systems are more efficent than resistive heaters like light bulbs. It is a big investment up front, but those bulbs not only pay for themselves in energy costs, but also in their low maintenenc--if you replace all of your bulbs at once you won't have to touch them again for years, and you can use all of those half dead bulbs in your trouble light.
I don't know, with CoH you can argue that the game designers remade the whole "low power" part of the game system when they introduced Enhancement Diversification.
For the 90% of Slashdotters who are wondering what I just said. In the old system you were able to boost the power/effectiveness of anything you did by 200% (three times as powerful). In the new system the cap was lowered to just under 100% (twice as powerful), which completely changed the dynamic of the game. The devs also cut the base effectiveness of most defense powers in half. This made previously invulnerable characters rather squishy and severely reduced the damage output of everybody. However, it also greatly reduced the disparity between the new and vetran players and made battles much more interesting since team wipes are far more common now. Overall the change was probably necessary (the high end game was just too easy otherwise), but the player base was not happy about it.
You should have bought nVidia cards, SLI is supported under Linux. In fact the drivers are just plain better. Every so often I hear someone on Slashdot say that ATI has cleaned up its act and finally started putting out decent drivers, and time and time again it turns out to be a lie.
That said, buying a laptop with an nVidia graphics card is not always easy. A lot of companies reserve the nVidia cards for their super high end, extremely heavy and bulky, "gamer" laptops. I don't see why you couldn't have an integrated 6150 on a laptop, but it doesn't appear to be nearly as popular as the Radeon X300 from any major manufacturer.
Of course that doesn't really matter much since the level of support the Intel chips provide is about the same as you get from the XFree Radeon driver. It's only when you start asking for fast 3D or multihead or any of those other features that the ATI drivers really look bad. Try running any modern game on an Intel graphics chip and you'll see why people prefer ATI and nVidia. I shudder at the thought of trying to use the Secondlife Linux client on an Intel graphics chip.
I don't know, I've played the "hard" import versions of some of those games and I don't think the extra difficulty really added to the fun of the game at all. In a lot of cases they just made boss battles even longer and forced you to stock 8 different items to cure status effects instead of 1. A lot of the time I think the "simplified" version is a better game because they drop the frustrating and annoying aspects of the gameplay and just focus on the fun stuff.
Mario 2 Japan was also really freaking hard. It was aimed at people who were already Mario experts, not the millions of kids who weren't even able to beat the first one. As a successor in the states it would have been a disaster, even in Japan it was considered to be a bit of a disappointment by all but the most hard core Marioheads.
You're also apparently not very good at reading Slashdot, because this comes up in just about every Mario related article. :)
Or the guys who set up fake Paypal charities right after Katrina to cash in on the disaster? Paypal has no way to verify that the charities are real, so they blocked all of them and just told people to use the safe (albiet less efficent) route of donating to the Red Cross.
Wouldn't legalized drugs be like Twinkies and screwdrivers though? Heck, even Restaraunts and service industries have to keep track of inventories, and small businesses are by far more heavily audited than any other sector of the economy.
In the end, the government will still be getting a lot more taxes from them if they were legal than they are now.
I've had netflix for a couple of years now and never noticed the throttling. I was under the impression that you had to be one of those guys who gets three movies, rips them, and then returns them the same day over and over again to get hit with the throttle.
It's sort of like Paypal where you read about all of these horror stories online, but never find any real person who's had trouble with them except for that one guy who was ripping people off on Ebay and got real pissed at them when they shut down his account before he could get the money out of it.
It's not like the video store guys have some big database of Netflix customers and will refuse to do business with you if you're on their list or something. If it makes sense to run down to the video store to pick up a movie even though you have Netflix, go for it.
Also, one of the nice things Netflix offers is the ability to create seperate movie queues for different people in your house. That way you can be sure you'll always have a movie you want to watch, your wife will have one she wants to watch, and your daughter will have one for when her friends come over.
To me it seems retarded to limit the number of views, either by time or a counter. It's not like people watch movies over and over again (unless they're 8 years old) so it won't ring much extra money from the customers, but they WILL resent you for it. iTunes was successful partially because the DRM didn't have a lot of the retarded restrictions that most studios demanded from other such companies. Ebooks have been mostly a failure because publishers insist on stuff like this (except for Jim Baen, who is raking in money like crazy with his ebooks because they lack all of the retarded baggage that normally comes with them).
I'm hoping that Jobs will turn his Reality Distortion Field up high enough to counter the RDF that the movie studio execs live in and force them to realize that if you want people to buy a product, you have to offer something they're willing to buy. Don't worry so much about pirates because they already have much better copies of what you're selling anyway (higher resolution and free), but people will tend to prefer the legal version if given a chance and the legal version doesn't suck too much.
By that logic, who would pay taxes for _anything_ since it should be easy as pie to sell Twinkies, screwdrivers, or anything else under the table? Also, why would a seller risk his neck avoiding some 5 or 10% tax (that his customers are paying)? If it were legalized the illicit production would mostly dry up because it's much much easier to operate inside of the law than out. Given the choice, I doubt few dealers would choose a life in the worst part of town hounded by the police and thrown in jail every so often. Even the cushy suburban dealers would be estatic not to have to deal with Central American paramilitary cartels as their primary supplier. The concept that legalizing drugs will increase illegal production seems highly counterintuitive to me.
Not to mention that the government will have a much easier time tracking users and abusers if they don't feel that they have to hide from the cops.
On the other hand, I'm rather libertarian about what people do with their lives. As long as it doesn't harm other people, I don't think it should be illegal. I do think lots of stuff should be regulated however, to prevent people from becoming a completely unproductive junkie, but I don't think making the activity illegal is the proper answer. In other words, I don't want anybody stepping in until it's clear that what they're doing is interfering with their life in a substantal way.
That is disappointingly vague. The admonishment against get rich quick schemes is good advice, but hardly seems against the spirit of the friendly low stakes gambing that most people take part in. "Love of money" is even more vague.
Ultimately, gambling is one of those things that reminds me of grade school where the entire class was forbidden from some activity because one or two people were unable to behave. It's ultimately unfair, but mostly unavoidable if you care at all about people with poor self control (gamblers and other addicts). Social problems never have easy solutions.
If only KiB, MiB, and GiB didn't look so retarded...
Actually, they have pushed hard enough for people to stop buying. Havn't you read about how music sales are down? Of course, they blame piracy, which makes them crack down even harder, causing more people to get disgusted and stop buying from them... Seriously, I hate being treated like a theif everytime I buy a CD, if they keep that up maybe I'll just become a thief and get the much better customer service available from illegal bootleggers.