What I really like about the fights is that it feels like I need to exhaust EVERY SINGLE ability in my repatoire just to win.... not just spam _1_ spell or swing madly with a sword like other games.
My fights usually go like this:
1. Sneak up behind them 2. Put an electified arrow in the back of their head 3. Ready my sword and shield 4. Hit him with a fireball before he gets to me 5. Block the incoming power attack 6. Slash once or twice while taking a step back. 7. Block again 8. Slap them with some other destruction spell (it's my specialty) usually ice 9. Block 10. Slap them with my shortsword a couple more times 11. Block 12. Use my restoration spells to heal me and my attributes a bit.. or if I'm really in trouble use a healing potion 13. Block 14. Continue with steps 8-13 for a bit 15. Equip my _awesome_ magical sword 16. Slap him a couple of times with that 17. Profit!!! Oh... I mean... Win!!!
The "give and take" of the fights is what makes them so awesome... rarely do you just stomp all over someone. You have to figure out what their style is... whether they like to attack a lot or are more defensive... or use a bow... or maybe magic... or a mixture! It really adds a _lot_ of variety and gives purpose to all those abilities that you never used in RPG games before.
If you have a halfway decent computer I _highly_ recommend you pick up this game... you won't be dissapointed!
I'm in Grad school right now (Computational Engineering)... and I don't think I would survive if not for my awesome fellow grad students.
We all help eachother out... and the types of ideas generated about the way to do something are _way_ above any google search. Sure, google is good for a quick syntax check (or a man/info page... or doxygen)... but those places don't give you understanding about how to properly address a situation.
If I could suggest anything about a community site it would be this: Make sure that you make it easy for people to communicate. Do whatever you can to get the website out of the way, and make it as easy as possible for people to transfer ideas.
These are two completely different situations. Microsoft has legal restrictions put upon it becuase of it's position in the market (a Monopoly). They are _forced_ by law to play nice with others, because they have so much power.
Google isn't in this position (yet!). There are still several _large_ competitors (Yahoo and MSN) and Google is no where near a monopoly. Because of this they don't have any legal restrictions... they can do as they like because natural market forces will keep them in check (if Kinderstart.com is something people want to find... and they can't get it on Google... they will move to Yahoo or MSN... thus depriving Google of a customer). If those natural market forces ever go away in the search sector (as in Yahoo and MSN completely tank) _then_ Google will have to play nice with others as they will have a monopoly on how people retrieve information on the web...
PLEASE quit comparing Google to Microsoft. Just because a lot of people around here use them _doens't_ mean they are a Monopoly....
Not too mention that there is a Nuclear Rector outside Fulton Missouri (not terribly far from Springfield, MO)... and Springfield MO is close to Branson MO (which the simpson's have visited a couple of times).
Being from Springfield MO myself, I it's pretty plain to me that they mean Springfield MO. (although I'm sure others living in other springfields feel the same);-)
Like I mention in that reply... for me _right now_ I have no need to encrypt and I dare say that is also the position of many (most?) other email users. The ones that do feel the need to encrypt will do so.
Note that I wasn't saying anything _against_ encryption... just noting that the majority of email users probably aren't worried enough to expend the effort.
My point is that I don't do things I'm ashamed of everyone knowing....
If I were really into something freaky.... then I wouldn't hide it. Be who you are and damned the consequences;-)
But I do understand your point.
Personally I think a better argument would go back to the McCarthyism thing.... if I just happened to be interested in communism (even though I might not believe that's what we should do) and I do a _lot_ of reading about it to better understand it... and I email with people in China asking about it and I buy books on Amazon on the subject and about some of the most well known communists... what if some SQL query that aggregated all this info percolated me to the top of some "watchdog" list?
To me that is the real danger of having no privacy... the false positives (not the disclosure of freaky fetishes!)
But here I am arguing both sides of the coin;-)
Let me just say that, for me, _for email_, I am not concerned.... and I know a lot of other people are in the same boat... to the extent that's it's not worth the extra effort to encrypt the crap out of everything (no matter how small that effort is).
As I've said before... some people dont have anything to hide....
If people want to read all the little love letters I send my wife all day... or the email to my Dad about the cool car I saw on the way in to school this morning.... then go right ahead...
What I'm wondering is why people feel the need to hide their e-mail activities. The only situations I can think of are when you need to send sensitive information quickly (the secretary for my advisor asked for my Full Name, SSN, Address and Telephone number through email recently.... I promptly walked up to her office and told her what they were... but people not paying attention _might_ just hit reply)... but people should be aware of those situations and just avoid doing it (or use encryption on those case by case basis).
Think about it this way... when you send something using the US Postal service you can't guarantee that the message won't be read by dozens of people along the way. How many people do you know of that use secret code languages to communicate with regular mail? That's what I thought.
In summary, not everyone is worried that others are looking....
Maybe it's just me and my huge hands... but I rest about half of my hand on the mousepad and just move my fingers.... I think it's all those years of playing Quake3 Instagib (need better precision than your arm can give)....
When I watch my wife use the mouse she moves her _whole_ arm... it just looks weird like she's flailing around with it;-)
BTW... I also have one of the largest mice I can find... MS Intellimouse Explorer.
Friedmud
Re:Do people actually log-in when searching Google
on
Google Toolbar v.4
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Some of us don't have _anything_ to hide. I would gladly give all of my surfing data to whomever wishes to have it....
If they will use it for serving me ads that are about things I like then to me that's a plus.... but I guess that's just me.
Why all the paranoia? What is everyone doing on the web that they don't want others to see?
CDs are usually about 5 dollars cheaper (33% off) on iTunes (compared to Best Buy)....
Not too mention that it is _uber_ convenient and with the price of gas the savings over driving to Best Buy add up.
I still like physical disks for a lot of things.... but sometimes you just want music now....
Plus iTunes DRM is better than most. It allows me to do everything I want to with my music. I can copy it to each of my 4 computers... and to mine and my wife's iPods. I can also burn it to a cd that will play in any cd player (and can be lent to a friend).
This is not to say that I wouldn't prefer non-DRM'd music... but as far as things go I think the DRM is a fair tradeoff for the convenience and price difference.
The _only_ thing I wish I could change about iTunes... is that I wish the songs were encoded at a slightly higher bitrate. It hasn't bothered me yet (don't really have that great of speakers to play it with anyway) but I would still prefer it was at a higher bitrate.... in the future I might have a system where I could tell the difference.
My solution is to re-roll as a different race/faction and do the stuff leading up to about level 35 or so again.... I really enjoy the lower level stuff much more... but I guess that's 'cause I'm kind of a loner and am mostly playing a single player RPG that happens to have some _really_ awesome NPC's to talk to and do some ad-hoc grouping;-)
Just as with the mac purchasing decision there are plenty of other reasons to run gentoo.
I personally originally switched for the speed... and it _was_ a lot faster at that point in time (I was coming from an Slackware which was only compiled for i386 at the time... I spent a lot of time recompiling things myself to optimize them for my hardware... which led me to gentoo). But these days the speed difference isn't very large (if it exists at all).
Most of what you get out of Gentoo these days is a tried and true package system that is _extremely_ customizable. I love having the ability to include _only_ the things that I want, and just generally having an OS that is basically "generated" for my specific needs.
Sure it may take a while to originally setup (on my Athlon64 it "only" takes around 5 or 6 hours for most of the basic stuff) but after you have it up and running it is an OS that is perfectly tailored for you... further I _never_ have to wait on anything else to compile after the original compile because it all happens at night (with some cron jobs) and my system just stays up to date.
But use whatever fits the way you work.... that's what Linux is all about in the first place. Some of us like an extremely customizable/tweakable system, others just want a baseline that works... it's your choice.
It could also be that while they aren't _making_ money they aren't losing _too much_ and it would be more devastating to lose the capabilities by shutting down that production line and laying off all those people.
I've seen this in business before where you need to keep some expertise around until you figure out where to go next and while you're figuring it out you lose a little bit of money but in return you maintain your agility in that business sector...
I work in Computational Engineering and can say that I know people who specifically write for epic because it is good at pushing the _huge_ amounts of serial computations (mostly solving large systems of equations) through the processor quickly.
I have personally had a dual itanium workstation sit under my desk for around 9 months. It was ok I suppose. I was doing Finite Element mechanical simulations on it and it did fairly well at it (it helped that it had 8 Gigs of RAM). I also got Gentoo compiled on it (this was before it was really supported) and it worked fairly well as a desktop (had an nvidia quadro card in it).
Personally, I think intel should just give up... they obviously lost the fight. But who knows, maybe it is actually making them _some_ money (although it can't be much).
I don't really understand teh point of the fourth law... isn't it kind of implied that robots do whatever they want anytime the first 3 laws aren't in effect?
This reminds me a bit of the Constitution where certain things where certain powers were given to the federal government and then _everything_ else was implied to be the jurisdiction of the state.
The laws should outline the fundamental properties of being a robot and then everything else the robot can come up with on it's own.
I have been wondering this myself... I have over 1500 emails in my spambox on GMail (and since they get deleted after 30 days... that translates into roughly 50 a day... which has been steadily on the rise).
And although the spam doesn't really bother me (because Gmail catches it all) I've started to worry about false positives... I get so much spam that there isn't really any way for me to check for false positives. Every once in a while I'll open up the spam folder and peruse it for false positives. I haven't found any yet, but who knows what's been caught.
Has anyone had _real_ (non mailing list) emails caught by gmail's spam filter?
I would never try to convince someone to by a $70k BMW... but I would like to mention that some of us do actually _like_ to drive... and enjoy owning cars that enhance our driving experience.
I understand that many people just need a "people mover" and don't care much about what happens between when they get in their car and when they arrive at their destination....
Some of us though _enjoy_ the trip itself (yes _even_ sitting in traffic;-)... and are willing to pay for vehicles that enhance that enjoyment.
I, myself, don't own an overly expensive car... I try to maxiimize my fun/dollars ratio for maximum impact (I drive a used Subaru WRX that I got for about $15k). But I could see myself owning a BMW at some point (probably not a really expensive one... again trying to maximize driving experience/dollar ratio).
My wife on the other hand _hates_ driving. A nice car wouldn't even help... she just doesn't want to do it. She doesn't care about "hugging turns", having a nice interior, good sound system, low road noise or whatever else. She is just trying to get to a destination. Therefore she drives a Honda Civic... it gets her where she wants to go and minimizes gas usage (right behind hating driving she also _hates_ getting gas;-)
Now of course some people just buy nice cars so they can feel important in them (and just because they "can")... but all I'm trying to portray is that there are some of us that buy nice cars for other reasons.
To bring this back on topic... many people like different things about computers... and have different computing needs. I personally like a highly personalized computing environment... and therefore use Linux. My wife just wants it to work... and cheaply... so she uses Windows. Others like a more aesthetically pleasing desktop that works slightly differently from either windows or linux and therefore they buy macs (of course there are other reasons...).
Use what makes you happy.... but rest assured that there will be someone out there who will have a "need" to use Windows on a MacBook. I personally wouldn't mind having a MacBook that could tripple boot Linux/Windows/OSX.... if not for any other reason other than "I can";-)
I post in a lot of different places though and everyone _knows_ what underscores mean;-)
Personally, I can't believe you didn't comment on my weird tendency to underscore/emphasize words that no one else would. This is actually how I talk... which comes from _years_ of speech and debate....;-)
(not too mention my odd use of.... everywhere....)
I got an ipod nano for christmas (well, and a combined birthday present since my birthday is around christmas) and I have bought a total of 1 song and 1 video (yes, I know the nano can't play video... but I go to UT and _had_ to buy the highlights for the rose bowl;-)... Even so, I have 167 items currently in my library. How is this possible? _All_ of the rest are rips of my CDs (basically all the CDs I've bought in the last 2 years... I haven't gotten around to ripping the old stuff).
I have not a _single_ illegal song in my collection but haven't bought many either.
Further, my brother in law also got an ipod (shuffle) and got a $10 gift certificate from itunes (from me)... by the time I had left his house 4 days after christmas... he _still_ hadn't spent it all (he had bought about 8 songs). He was also filling up his collection with CDs....
So I think the 10 songs per 1 ipod sounds about right. Despite what _we_ make think here on slashdot, there are an awful lot of consumers out there who got ipods for christmas and don't know a damn thing about any P2P networks or how to get "illegal" songs.... all of these people just install itunes and enjoy how easy it is to buy music (unless you like Evanescence...).
"There are a dozen ways to encode and compress images. GIF, TIFF, JPEG..."
This is the second time I have seen this argument in this discussion... and it simply doesn't work... because those image formats are all for different purposes..
GIF: Lossless, useful for small images with limited number of colors TIFF (well, what most people think of as tiff): Lossless, useful for large full color images that need to maintain pefect quality. JPEG: Loss(full?), Useful for large full color images that can lose some quality without damaging the intended message.
Each one of these formats fills a particular niche... unlike ODF vs DocX (which is what is being discussed here).
There are plenty of other examples out there that _are_ examples of "competing standars" (DVD+R and DVD-R are the first to come to my mind).... where the things competing _do the exact same thing_.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with this!
What I really like about the fights is that it feels like I need to exhaust EVERY SINGLE ability in my repatoire just to win.... not just spam _1_ spell or swing madly with a sword like other games.
My fights usually go like this:
1. Sneak up behind them
2. Put an electified arrow in the back of their head
3. Ready my sword and shield
4. Hit him with a fireball before he gets to me
5. Block the incoming power attack
6. Slash once or twice while taking a step back.
7. Block again
8. Slap them with some other destruction spell (it's my specialty) usually ice
9. Block
10. Slap them with my shortsword a couple more times
11. Block
12. Use my restoration spells to heal me and my attributes a bit.. or if I'm really in trouble use a healing potion
13. Block
14. Continue with steps 8-13 for a bit
15. Equip my _awesome_ magical sword
16. Slap him a couple of times with that
17. Profit!!! Oh... I mean... Win!!!
The "give and take" of the fights is what makes them so awesome... rarely do you just stomp all over someone. You have to figure out what their style is... whether they like to attack a lot or are more defensive... or use a bow... or maybe magic... or a mixture! It really adds a _lot_ of variety and gives purpose to all those abilities that you never used in RPG games before.
If you have a halfway decent computer I _highly_ recommend you pick up this game... you won't be dissapointed!
Friedmud
I actually had this exact same experience... I'm glad I'm not the only one!
It seems that with the low framerate I had to kind of "creep" through the game... which, I think, is what they really wanted you to do.
With the high framerate (pretty much replaced most of my computer) I felt free to kind of "run-and-gun" and it lost a lot of the suspense factor.
Friedmud
I'm in Grad school right now (Computational Engineering)... and I don't think I would survive if not for my awesome fellow grad students.
We all help eachother out... and the types of ideas generated about the way to do something are _way_ above any google search. Sure, google is good for a quick syntax check (or a man/info page... or doxygen)... but those places don't give you understanding about how to properly address a situation.
If I could suggest anything about a community site it would be this: Make sure that you make it easy for people to communicate. Do whatever you can to get the website out of the way, and make it as easy as possible for people to transfer ideas.
Friedmud
Why does this keep coming up in this discussion?
Microsoft = MONOPOLY
Google = _not_ a monopoly
These are two completely different situations. Microsoft has legal restrictions put upon it becuase of it's position in the market (a Monopoly). They are _forced_ by law to play nice with others, because they have so much power.
Google isn't in this position (yet!). There are still several _large_ competitors (Yahoo and MSN) and Google is no where near a monopoly. Because of this they don't have any legal restrictions... they can do as they like because natural market forces will keep them in check (if Kinderstart.com is something people want to find... and they can't get it on Google... they will move to Yahoo or MSN... thus depriving Google of a customer). If those natural market forces ever go away in the search sector (as in Yahoo and MSN completely tank) _then_ Google will have to play nice with others as they will have a monopoly on how people retrieve information on the web...
PLEASE quit comparing Google to Microsoft. Just because a lot of people around here use them _doens't_ mean they are a Monopoly....
Friedmud
Not too mention that there is a Nuclear Rector outside Fulton Missouri (not terribly far from Springfield, MO)... and Springfield MO is close to Branson MO (which the simpson's have visited a couple of times).
;-)
Being from Springfield MO myself, I it's pretty plain to me that they mean Springfield MO. (although I'm sure others living in other springfields feel the same)
Friedmud
All very true... and well said.
7 52385
Mostly I was just playing devil's advocate.... for my own thoughts in rebuttle to my own argument see my reply here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177814&cid=14
Like I mention in that reply... for me _right now_ I have no need to encrypt and I dare say that is also the position of many (most?) other email users. The ones that do feel the need to encrypt will do so.
Note that I wasn't saying anything _against_ encryption... just noting that the majority of email users probably aren't worried enough to expend the effort.
Friedmud
My point is that I don't do things I'm ashamed of everyone knowing....
;-)
;-)
If I were really into something freaky.... then I wouldn't hide it. Be who you are and damned the consequences
But I do understand your point.
Personally I think a better argument would go back to the McCarthyism thing.... if I just happened to be interested in communism (even though I might not believe that's what we should do) and I do a _lot_ of reading about it to better understand it... and I email with people in China asking about it and I buy books on Amazon on the subject and about some of the most well known communists... what if some SQL query that aggregated all this info percolated me to the top of some "watchdog" list?
To me that is the real danger of having no privacy... the false positives (not the disclosure of freaky fetishes!)
But here I am arguing both sides of the coin
Let me just say that, for me, _for email_, I am not concerned.... and I know a lot of other people are in the same boat... to the extent that's it's not worth the extra effort to encrypt the crap out of everything (no matter how small that effort is).
Friedmud
As I've said before... some people dont have anything to hide....
If people want to read all the little love letters I send my wife all day... or the email to my Dad about the cool car I saw on the way in to school this morning.... then go right ahead...
What I'm wondering is why people feel the need to hide their e-mail activities. The only situations I can think of are when you need to send sensitive information quickly (the secretary for my advisor asked for my Full Name, SSN, Address and Telephone number through email recently.... I promptly walked up to her office and told her what they were... but people not paying attention _might_ just hit reply)... but people should be aware of those situations and just avoid doing it (or use encryption on those case by case basis).
Think about it this way... when you send something using the US Postal service you can't guarantee that the message won't be read by dozens of people along the way. How many people do you know of that use secret code languages to communicate with regular mail? That's what I thought.
In summary, not everyone is worried that others are looking....
Friedmud
I agree...
;-)
Maybe it's just me and my huge hands... but I rest about half of my hand on the mousepad and just move my fingers.... I think it's all those years of playing Quake3 Instagib (need better precision than your arm can give)....
When I watch my wife use the mouse she moves her _whole_ arm... it just looks weird like she's flailing around with it
BTW... I also have one of the largest mice I can find... MS Intellimouse Explorer.
Friedmud
Some of us don't have _anything_ to hide. I would gladly give all of my surfing data to whomever wishes to have it....
If they will use it for serving me ads that are about things I like then to me that's a plus.... but I guess that's just me.
Why all the paranoia? What is everyone doing on the web that they don't want others to see?
Friedmud
CDs are usually about 5 dollars cheaper (33% off) on iTunes (compared to Best Buy)....
Not too mention that it is _uber_ convenient and with the price of gas the savings over driving to Best Buy add up.
I still like physical disks for a lot of things.... but sometimes you just want music now....
Plus iTunes DRM is better than most. It allows me to do everything I want to with my music. I can copy it to each of my 4 computers... and to mine and my wife's iPods. I can also burn it to a cd that will play in any cd player (and can be lent to a friend).
This is not to say that I wouldn't prefer non-DRM'd music... but as far as things go I think the DRM is a fair tradeoff for the convenience and price difference.
The _only_ thing I wish I could change about iTunes... is that I wish the songs were encoded at a slightly higher bitrate. It hasn't bothered me yet (don't really have that great of speakers to play it with anyway) but I would still prefer it was at a higher bitrate.... in the future I might have a system where I could tell the difference.
Friedmud
My solution is to re-roll as a different race/faction and do the stuff leading up to about level 35 or so again.... I really enjoy the lower level stuff much more... but I guess that's 'cause I'm kind of a loner and am mostly playing a single player RPG that happens to have some _really_ awesome NPC's to talk to and do some ad-hoc grouping ;-)
Friedmud
Just so you know.... they paid _plenty_ (as in a whole shitload) of tax on that 1.5 billion dollars.....
Friedmud
Just as with the mac purchasing decision there are plenty of other reasons to run gentoo.
I personally originally switched for the speed... and it _was_ a lot faster at that point in time (I was coming from an Slackware which was only compiled for i386 at the time... I spent a lot of time recompiling things myself to optimize them for my hardware... which led me to gentoo). But these days the speed difference isn't very large (if it exists at all).
Most of what you get out of Gentoo these days is a tried and true package system that is _extremely_ customizable. I love having the ability to include _only_ the things that I want, and just generally having an OS that is basically "generated" for my specific needs.
Sure it may take a while to originally setup (on my Athlon64 it "only" takes around 5 or 6 hours for most of the basic stuff) but after you have it up and running it is an OS that is perfectly tailored for you... further I _never_ have to wait on anything else to compile after the original compile because it all happens at night (with some cron jobs) and my system just stays up to date.
But use whatever fits the way you work.... that's what Linux is all about in the first place. Some of us like an extremely customizable/tweakable system, others just want a baseline that works... it's your choice.
Friedmud
It could also be that while they aren't _making_ money they aren't losing _too much_ and it would be more devastating to lose the capabilities by shutting down that production line and laying off all those people.
I've seen this in business before where you need to keep some expertise around until you figure out where to go next and while you're figuring it out you lose a little bit of money but in return you maintain your agility in that business sector...
Friedmud
I work in Computational Engineering and can say that I know people who specifically write for epic because it is good at pushing the _huge_ amounts of serial computations (mostly solving large systems of equations) through the processor quickly.
I have personally had a dual itanium workstation sit under my desk for around 9 months. It was ok I suppose. I was doing Finite Element mechanical simulations on it and it did fairly well at it (it helped that it had 8 Gigs of RAM). I also got Gentoo compiled on it (this was before it was really supported) and it worked fairly well as a desktop (had an nvidia quadro card in it).
Personally, I think intel should just give up... they obviously lost the fight. But who knows, maybe it is actually making them _some_ money (although it can't be much).
Friedmud
Actually... strapping a cheeseburger to the side would _most definitely_ make it a better PVR!
I don't really understand teh point of the fourth law... isn't it kind of implied that robots do whatever they want anytime the first 3 laws aren't in effect?
This reminds me a bit of the Constitution where certain things where certain powers were given to the federal government and then _everything_ else was implied to be the jurisdiction of the state.
The laws should outline the fundamental properties of being a robot and then everything else the robot can come up with on it's own.
Friedmud
Just so you know.... Sony _has_ released Walkman MP3 players:
y /eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_BrowseCatalog-Start?Categor yName=pa_mp3players&Dept=audio
http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinit
But personally they don't do much for me...
Friedmud
I have been wondering this myself... I have over 1500 emails in my spambox on GMail (and since they get deleted after 30 days... that translates into roughly 50 a day... which has been steadily on the rise).
And although the spam doesn't really bother me (because Gmail catches it all) I've started to worry about false positives... I get so much spam that there isn't really any way for me to check for false positives. Every once in a while I'll open up the spam folder and peruse it for false positives. I haven't found any yet, but who knows what's been caught.
Has anyone had _real_ (non mailing list) emails caught by gmail's spam filter?
Friedmud
The "air bag" like drop sensors and integrated fingerprint scanner to name a couple.
Sure others had done similar things... but IBM was the first large manufacturer (that I'm aware of) to integrate them into the laptop itself.
Friedmud
I would never try to convince someone to by a $70k BMW... but I would like to mention that some of us do actually _like_ to drive... and enjoy owning cars that enhance our driving experience.
;-)... and are willing to pay for vehicles that enhance that enjoyment.
;-)
;-)
I understand that many people just need a "people mover" and don't care much about what happens between when they get in their car and when they arrive at their destination....
Some of us though _enjoy_ the trip itself (yes _even_ sitting in traffic
I, myself, don't own an overly expensive car... I try to maxiimize my fun/dollars ratio for maximum impact (I drive a used Subaru WRX that I got for about $15k). But I could see myself owning a BMW at some point (probably not a really expensive one... again trying to maximize driving experience/dollar ratio).
My wife on the other hand _hates_ driving. A nice car wouldn't even help... she just doesn't want to do it. She doesn't care about "hugging turns", having a nice interior, good sound system, low road noise or whatever else. She is just trying to get to a destination. Therefore she drives a Honda Civic... it gets her where she wants to go and minimizes gas usage (right behind hating driving she also _hates_ getting gas
Now of course some people just buy nice cars so they can feel important in them (and just because they "can")... but all I'm trying to portray is that there are some of us that buy nice cars for other reasons.
To bring this back on topic... many people like different things about computers... and have different computing needs. I personally like a highly personalized computing environment... and therefore use Linux. My wife just wants it to work... and cheaply... so she uses Windows. Others like a more aesthetically pleasing desktop that works slightly differently from either windows or linux and therefore they buy macs (of course there are other reasons...).
Use what makes you happy.... but rest assured that there will be someone out there who will have a "need" to use Windows on a MacBook. I personally wouldn't mind having a MacBook that could tripple boot Linux/Windows/OSX.... if not for any other reason other than "I can"
Friedmud
heh... true, true.
;-)
;-)
.... everywhere....)
I post in a lot of different places though and everyone _knows_ what underscores mean
Personally, I can't believe you didn't comment on my weird tendency to underscore/emphasize words that no one else would. This is actually how I talk... which comes from _years_ of speech and debate....
(not too mention my odd use of
Friedmud
Your statement describes my situation...
;-)... Even so, I have 167 items currently in my library. How is this possible? _All_ of the rest are rips of my CDs (basically all the CDs I've bought in the last 2 years... I haven't gotten around to ripping the old stuff).
I got an ipod nano for christmas (well, and a combined birthday present since my birthday is around christmas) and I have bought a total of 1 song and 1 video (yes, I know the nano can't play video... but I go to UT and _had_ to buy the highlights for the rose bowl
I have not a _single_ illegal song in my collection but haven't bought many either.
Further, my brother in law also got an ipod (shuffle) and got a $10 gift certificate from itunes (from me)... by the time I had left his house 4 days after christmas... he _still_ hadn't spent it all (he had bought about 8 songs). He was also filling up his collection with CDs....
So I think the 10 songs per 1 ipod sounds about right. Despite what _we_ make think here on slashdot, there are an awful lot of consumers out there who got ipods for christmas and don't know a damn thing about any P2P networks or how to get "illegal" songs.... all of these people just install itunes and enjoy how easy it is to buy music (unless you like Evanescence...).
Friedmud
"There are a dozen ways to encode and compress images. GIF, TIFF, JPEG..."
This is the second time I have seen this argument in this discussion... and it simply doesn't work... because those image formats are all for different purposes..
GIF: Lossless, useful for small images with limited number of colors
TIFF (well, what most people think of as tiff): Lossless, useful for large full color images that need to maintain pefect quality.
JPEG: Loss(full?), Useful for large full color images that can lose some quality without damaging the intended message.
Each one of these formats fills a particular niche... unlike ODF vs DocX (which is what is being discussed here).
There are plenty of other examples out there that _are_ examples of "competing standars" (DVD+R and DVD-R are the first to come to my mind).... where the things competing _do the exact same thing_.
Friedmud