I disagree. One day, this planet will be out of resources. Nasa's studies in space and other planets will mean that one day we'll be able to get off this planet and on to others. It won't happen in your life time not because of Nasa's beaurocracy (sp?), but rather because it is a BIG PROBLEM to get out of here. Nasa's been doing lots of stuff lately, you should do a little research on that.
"I always thought it would be cool to set up something like movie theaters charging a buck extra and kicking it out to NASA when showing a flick like Apollo 13, Star Wars, ET.."
I certainly wouldn't have been as upset about Episode 1 if some of my ticket money went towards sending Jar Jar to the moon.
Want to hear something interesting? LW 7.5 (and 7 I think..) has a license that explicitly lets you change between Mac and PC. I have a USB dongle with LW 7, so If I had a Mac around I could install LW on it. (I need the Mac disk, though...)
I am sooooo happy with Newtek about this. I will be buying a new laptop within the next year, and I'm really having a tough time deciding between a PC Laptop and a Mac laptop. Now that I can run LW on either platform, I really don't have a whole lot of reason to not get a Mac. Now I can spend more time worrying about the color of the casing... *G*
"That's a cool hack, but creating an object in-scene that the eyes follow that you can place and key is really rather easy in Maya."
Are we talking about the same thing? I'm talking about playing an.AVI and recording my mouse movements over the movie. I'm not talking about pointing an object at a null object and moving that around. I'm talking about capturing mouse movements. *wonders if we're talking about the same thing...* heh.
"BTW, LW 7.5 is supposed to be announced today in New York. Also, NewTek has been saying there will be a "Linux announcement" "soon" since sometime last year. Today would be nice.:-)"
Wow, that's the first I heard of that. If LW were made for Linux I'd be ready to build a Linux box just to try it!
Hmm... Maybe I'm thinking of the wrong studio. It was either Final Fantasy or Shrek (Could have sworn it was Shrek...) where they used both PC's and Macs to do the development work, but Linux was used to do the rendering. At night, they used the Mac and PC workstations to do rendering also.
"What you are effectively saying here is: 'I will gladly stand tall against the companies that do wrong, just so long as it doesn't inconvienence me'"
No, that is NOT what I'm effectively saying. Not even close. What I'm saying is that boycotting, in those two cases, does more harm than good. Even the subject of my post is pretty clear: "I want a better solution." Reread my post. I suggested more useful ways of getting my message across.
"It's buggy and riddled with unwanted features... "
Says you. Photoshop has the largest set of USEFUL tools, not to mention a very mature interface. Photoshop may be considered 'bloated', but it's the nicest kind of bloat. Any advanced user of Photoshop knows what I'm talking about. It's not like Word where you have Clippy trying to help you at every step.
"I currently boycott Nike because of their labor policies. As an active sports enthusiast, I wish I could in good concience buy nike products, as often they have the best or most available products. But I find alternatives. Then I save the receipts, and mail them to nike with a letter explaining why I bought the competitors products."
Nike once offered a web service where you could have shoes made with words printed on them. Somebody wanted the words 'child labor', or something like that. Heh NIke wouldn't let him do it, but I sure liked his idea.
That goes a hell of a lot farther than not buying their products.
I do like your suggestion of sending the reciepts.
"People don't go on hunger strikes to improve their figure, you know..."
People who go on hunger strikes make that very public. Adobe will never know that I stopped using Photoshop. Adobe products are something you buy one or two of a year. Boycotting them would have 0 influence on them.
A hunger strike against Adobe, though, would raise some eyebrows.
"Those who wouldn't give up their productivity to preserve their freedoms deserve neither freedom nor productivity."
That's a fair statement, except it doesn't get you anywhere. If I gave up using Adobe Products, how would Adobe know? I already paid for it. They wouldn't notice until an upgrade or two later that they're not selling as well. Even then, how would they connect that my not buying their product to something they did?
That's why I said "I need a better solution than boycotting." (I should have clarified that some more, I apologize.)
Now, if somebody said "Everybody who uses Adobe Products but hates what they did with Dimitry, take a day off of work and attend a protest.", then I think we'd get our message across. I'd be willing to drop Adobe for a day to make a huge vocal stink.
"Do you pirate expensive software? If not, you have no reason to fear the DMCA."
Not true. The DMCA prevents me from doing legitimate things, such as backing up a DVD I bought. Since I need DeCSS to do that in a useful manner, I'd be violating the DMCA because it circumvents copy protection.
The DMCA takes away a number of our freedoms, even if we're working legitimately. THat's why we're fighting it.
"Lightwave... what a pile of crap. in the few minutes after I read your overlong post, I've made about the same thing in MELscript."
Lol, that is the most absurd logic I've ever heard. Instead of offending me, you made me laugh! Thanks, I needed that.:) I never claimed that VB was the only way to do what I did. I was just saying it was cool that I was able to do it.
Maya's a good tool, but you have to dump over $10,000 per seat into it if you want to beat Lightwave. Lightwave's renderer alone beats the pants off of Maya's. You have to spend like $5,000 to get Renderman if you want decent renderings out of Maya. I guess you should do a little more research on the product you're bashing.
"In general, it seems that when a developer announces a port to Linux, that usually means Linux on an x86 platform."
I understand this is a likely case, but consider that right *now* Adobe makes nearly all their products on Mac. I seriously doubt that they'd ignore the Mac/Linux market and focus on Intel/Linux. Isn't it basically just a recompile for them?
I'm a little surprised they also switched the workstations to Linux as well. In the short term I can imagine that being a real headache, but in the long term...I dunno.. that could be a really good thing.
When you do 3D animation (or digital art of any kind, really...) you don't just have one or two programs that do all the work. You have to constantly come up with new and creative solutions to animation problems. When this happens, the artists really get close to their machines. I'll give you an example: I'm a Lightwave animator running on Windows 2000. Lightwave's scene files are text based, which means I can modify a scene without necessarily having to do it through Lightwave itself.
I had a problem once where I wanted to animate realistic eye movement. Doing it by hand would be incredibly time consuming (Not to mention repetitive...) So I came up with an inventive solution. I parented the camera in Lightwave to the 'neck' of the person, and rendered a wide-angle avi from that person's perspective. Then I wrote a quick VB-App that used MS's Media Player ActiveX control to play back the.AVI, and then track my mouse movements over the movie. While it played back, I moved the mouse around the items of interest and saved that information into a text file. Then I converted the text file into a Lightwave motion file and loaded it into the eyes.
The effect was surprising! Within 6 hours or so of programming, I had written a primitive mo-cap (Mouse capture?) program that would be useful for a lot of things, not just eye movement. All this was possible because I understood VB, Windows 2000, and Lightwave. This happened to be so valuable that I bought a Windows 2000 laptop so I could experiment more with this technique in my free time.
The reason I'm surprised at the workstations switch (I should say 'initially surprised...') is that familiarity with your computer/OS is key to coming up with inventive solutions to problems. Since Linux is fairly new to the animation scene (on the creation side, not the rendering side...), it's hard to imagine those entering the animators job market would already be experienced with that OS. They'd have to re-learn how to use their computers. That may or may not be a problem, but it's a concern I have.
My point of view on this topic is starting to change after I started to write this post. It is starting to make more sense now. It is a lot easier to get my hands on a personal copy of Linux than it is to get Windows 2000 or OSX. At that point, the brand of processor becomes the least of my concerns, just the speed of it. It'll take some getting used to, but when all the dust settles, I think Dream Works will be in for a nice boost in productivity.
What I did with VB sounds like it'd be far easier on Linux. I can imagine 3D Animators eventually having more and more programming/scripting capabilities at their disposal. With these skills comes a more robust solution for any problems that arise. Hmm... maybe I should build a Linux box now.
"fter the Dmitry and DMCA flop by Adobe, I will never purchase an Adobe product and I swear to gawd I will save my friends and co-workers from thinking about purchasing an Adobe product..."
I sympathize with your view, but the reason that Adobe is so popular is because it makes a totally kick as series of products. If I lose Photoshop or After Effects, I don't have a whole lot of good choices to replace them with, especially for the money. You wouldn't be 'saving me' from Adobe, you'd be hurting me if you convinced me to switch.
I really don't like what they did with Dmitry, but I need a solution to express my disgruntlement with them that doesn't involve crippling my productivity.
I have the same issue with Blizzard. I've been asked to boycott Blizzard over using the DMCA to shut down BnetD. The problem I have with that is a healthy game industry = better job market for me. Blizzard consistently makes kick ass games. Not buying Blizzard 3 would do more to work against me than help prevent them from further DMCA abuse. On top of that, I think Warcarft III will be lots of fun, and I'd hate to miss out on that too.
So what do we do? I'm open to suggestions as to how to let these companies know what they're doing is unacceptable without creating ripples in the good work that they're doing. One idea is to make their email address available so people can write in their complaints. Another would be to have Slashdot carry a banner encouraging people to read about what happened and, again, give them an email address they can send complaints to.
Personally, I think this would be far more effective than saying "I won't buy your product even tho I need it."
Count me in. What's holding me back from Linux is that I can't run the programs you mentioned, plus After Effects, Lightwave, and some of the other Win things I use.
As an animator, I can tell you that I'm really excited about studios moving over to Linux. What's great about Linux is that you can run it on any platform.
I'll tell you something, Apple totally kicks ass when it comes to making laptops. I'm very happy that Lightwave 7 and all Adobe products are available on it. As a matter of fact, I am *Heavily* considering purchasing one of these machines. If the programs I mentioned ran on Linux, I'd have no qualms about buying a Mac. At that point, it wouldn't really matter!
I *Love* the idea of being totally platform independent. I could finally break out of the Windows cage.
Re:Best Buy = Best Fraud
on
Worst Buy
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· Score: 2
"Unfortunately, this refusal to exchange software is a growing trend. Eventually, I will be forced to pirate all software for testing before I make an actual purchase. "
Actually, the 'no exchange' policy on software used to be *the standard* for any place that sells games. EB, Software etc, Babbages, Kmart, EVERY PLACE had that policy. I think that's been lifted fairly recently. EB will now let you return games (at least the one by where I live...) Should Best Buy back down on that policy? Yeah, I think they should. And I'm sorry that you had a problem with them. They're worried that people'll buy the game, copy it, and then return it. That's gotten a lot harder to do these days, but I think there's still concern out there. Come to think of it, I think there were legal reasons they had to do that. It's been a few years since I had a job that sold software, anybody remember what I'm talking about?
On non-software items, Best Buy has a very liberal return policy. You have 30 days to return something (again non-software), satisfaction guaranteed. Plus they'll refund the difference if it goes on sale elsewhere. I found that *extremely* valuable when I bought a video camera. (*Note: This wasn't at Best Buy, it normally would have been, though.) It really sucks when you have too many choices, heh. I just wanted to buy a camera, find out if it did what I wanted, and then find the cheapest price.
I would personally recommend that you never buy software from Best Buy again, but I wouldn't say boycott the whole store over it. Their software return policy may stink, but there are a ton of other benefits from buying from Best Buy. For example, you can order something from the web and return it to a store if something's wrong with it. That alone makes me more likely to shop there for stuff I need at the office.
As for what you said about pirating games to see if they work, I wouldn't recommend that. But it is *always* a good policy to download a demo of a game before buying a copy. I realize as an impulse buy that's not always an option, but the problem with PC's as gaming platforms is that they're so varied you never know if it'll work or not. Usually the demo'll give you a good idea if it'll work or not. (Plus you'll find out if the game's any good!) The problem with 'pirating' it is that you not only have a high risk of getting a virus, but if the software doesn't work it's highly probable that's the result of a crack.
BTW, I just wanted to comment that I appreciate you buying your daughter another game. It really sucks learning a lesson when you're a kid. I think that was a wonderful thing that you did for her.
You realize that you're modding me down worse than the guy who originally posted the inflammatory article?
He pasted some long ass thing without line breaks, so I suggested he start using them so that his post is readable. I didn't mind the original off-topic post, but since then I've been modded as off topic AND a troll, for a total of -3 points. I went to the partent post and he only got modded down once. Give me a break!!! When I responded to it, it had like a score of 3 'interesting'!
*Anybody* posting, whether on or off topic, can use the advice of 'use line breaks'. As I said, modding me down as off topic since I was responding to an off topic post is fine, but taking away THREE POINTS is ridiculous!!! All I said was 'Line breaks are your friend.'
I expect this one will get modded down too. I did turn off the +1 bonus at least. You may consider what I'm saying to be off-topic or inflammatory, but I urge you to consider how you'd feel if you lost more points to telling somebody to use line breaks (I.e. make their posts READABLE) and tell me if you think you'd react any differently.
Hey dudes, curious about something: I used to have a Radeon 8500. The dual monitor support was capped at 1280 by 1024 @ 60hz. I really want to run > 60hz since I can see the flicker. Anybody know if:
a.) It can run higher than 1280 in dual mode (I really like 1600
b.) Can it run at a higher refresh rate than 60hz?
It doesnt bother me if they two monitors MUST be the same rez/refresh, but I need the higher refresh rate. Does this particular card support that? If not, does Nvidia make one that does?
Nah, don't worry about what the book is about or that he used the net to market it (as opposed to saying the internet is only a source of piracy like SOME organizations..), no no... dismiss it because he's getting publicity for it.
Damn Slashdot for getting the word out there that the internet isn't a bad place to market a book! ADVERTISING BAD!
After a stressful day, I can use a good laugh. This article didn't provide it, but I'm glad they tried. I don't think Slashdot would work if it was too focused.
I remember back in 2000, the Register ran a semi-similar joke about Apple. Here it is:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/613 1. html
Unfortunately, I think they took the image down. Try to imagine a Nasa-style picture of the sun with a solar flare erupting from the top, shaped a little like an apple stem. It resembled the Apple Logo, heh.
I showed this to a coworker (mac fanatic, no less) that read it and said something along the lines of "This doesn't surprise me." I honestly couldn't tell if I was putting her on, or if she was putting me on heh.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. One day, this planet will be out of resources. Nasa's studies in space and other planets will mean that one day we'll be able to get off this planet and on to others. It won't happen in your life time not because of Nasa's beaurocracy (sp?), but rather because it is a BIG PROBLEM to get out of here. Nasa's been doing lots of stuff lately, you should do a little research on that.
"I always thought it would be cool to set up something like movie theaters charging a buck extra and kicking it out to NASA when showing a flick like Apollo 13, Star Wars, ET.."
I certainly wouldn't have been as upset about Episode 1 if some of my ticket money went towards sending Jar Jar to the moon.
"You could always try it on OS X..."
Want to hear something interesting? LW 7.5 (and 7 I think..) has a license that explicitly lets you change between Mac and PC. I have a USB dongle with LW 7, so If I had a Mac around I could install LW on it. (I need the Mac disk, though...)
I am sooooo happy with Newtek about this. I will be buying a new laptop within the next year, and I'm really having a tough time deciding between a PC Laptop and a Mac laptop. Now that I can run LW on either platform, I really don't have a whole lot of reason to not get a Mac. Now I can spend more time worrying about the color of the casing... *G*
"That's a cool hack, but creating an object in-scene that the eyes follow that you can place and key is really rather easy in Maya."
.AVI and recording my mouse movements over the movie. I'm not talking about pointing an object at a null object and moving that around. I'm talking about capturing mouse movements. *wonders if we're talking about the same thing...* heh.
Are we talking about the same thing? I'm talking about playing an
"BTW, LW 7.5 is supposed to be announced today in New York. Also, NewTek has been saying there will be a "Linux announcement" "soon" since sometime last year. Today would be nice. :-)"
Wow, that's the first I heard of that. If LW were made for Linux I'd be ready to build a Linux box just to try it!
Hmm... Maybe I'm thinking of the wrong studio. It was either Final Fantasy or Shrek (Could have sworn it was Shrek...) where they used both PC's and Macs to do the development work, but Linux was used to do the rendering. At night, they used the Mac and PC workstations to do rendering also.
I might have my facts a little mixed up.
"What you are effectively saying here is: 'I will gladly stand tall against the companies that do wrong, just so long as it doesn't inconvienence me'"
No, that is NOT what I'm effectively saying. Not even close. What I'm saying is that boycotting, in those two cases, does more harm than good. Even the subject of my post is pretty clear: "I want a better solution." Reread my post. I suggested more useful ways of getting my message across.
"It's buggy and riddled with unwanted features... "
Says you. Photoshop has the largest set of USEFUL tools, not to mention a very mature interface. Photoshop may be considered 'bloated', but it's the nicest kind of bloat. Any advanced user of Photoshop knows what I'm talking about. It's not like Word where you have Clippy trying to help you at every step.
"I currently boycott Nike because of their labor policies. As an active sports enthusiast, I wish I could in good concience buy nike products, as often they have the best or most available products. But I find alternatives. Then I save the receipts, and mail them to nike with a letter explaining why I bought the competitors products."
Nike once offered a web service where you could have shoes made with words printed on them. Somebody wanted the words 'child labor', or something like that. Heh NIke wouldn't let him do it, but I sure liked his idea.
That goes a hell of a lot farther than not buying their products.
I do like your suggestion of sending the reciepts.
"People don't go on hunger strikes to improve their figure, you know..."
People who go on hunger strikes make that very public. Adobe will never know that I stopped using Photoshop. Adobe products are something you buy one or two of a year. Boycotting them would have 0 influence on them.
A hunger strike against Adobe, though, would raise some eyebrows.
See the difference?
"Those who wouldn't give up their productivity to preserve their freedoms deserve neither freedom nor productivity."
That's a fair statement, except it doesn't get you anywhere. If I gave up using Adobe Products, how would Adobe know? I already paid for it. They wouldn't notice until an upgrade or two later that they're not selling as well. Even then, how would they connect that my not buying their product to something they did?
That's why I said "I need a better solution than boycotting." (I should have clarified that some more, I apologize.)
Now, if somebody said "Everybody who uses Adobe Products but hates what they did with Dimitry, take a day off of work and attend a protest.", then I think we'd get our message across. I'd be willing to drop Adobe for a day to make a huge vocal stink.
See what I'm saying now?
"Do you pirate expensive software? If not, you have no reason to fear the DMCA."
Not true. The DMCA prevents me from doing legitimate things, such as backing up a DVD I bought. Since I need DeCSS to do that in a useful manner, I'd be violating the DMCA because it circumvents copy protection.
The DMCA takes away a number of our freedoms, even if we're working legitimately. THat's why we're fighting it.
"Lightwave... what a pile of crap. in the few minutes after I read your overlong post, I've made about the same thing in MELscript."
:) I never claimed that VB was the only way to do what I did. I was just saying it was cool that I was able to do it.
Lol, that is the most absurd logic I've ever heard. Instead of offending me, you made me laugh! Thanks, I needed that.
Maya's a good tool, but you have to dump over $10,000 per seat into it if you want to beat Lightwave. Lightwave's renderer alone beats the pants off of Maya's. You have to spend like $5,000 to get Renderman if you want decent renderings out of Maya. I guess you should do a little more research on the product you're bashing.
"Isn't this logic pretty much the reason M$ has no real competitors?"
I'm sorry, I don't follow. Could you elaborate?
"In general, it seems that when a developer announces a port to Linux, that usually means Linux on an x86 platform."
I understand this is a likely case, but consider that right *now* Adobe makes nearly all their products on Mac. I seriously doubt that they'd ignore the Mac/Linux market and focus on Intel/Linux. Isn't it basically just a recompile for them?
I'm a little surprised they also switched the workstations to Linux as well. In the short term I can imagine that being a real headache, but in the long term...I dunno.. that could be a really good thing.
.AVI, and then track my mouse movements over the movie. While it played back, I moved the mouse around the items of interest and saved that information into a text file. Then I converted the text file into a Lightwave motion file and loaded it into the eyes.
When you do 3D animation (or digital art of any kind, really...) you don't just have one or two programs that do all the work. You have to constantly come up with new and creative solutions to animation problems. When this happens, the artists really get close to their machines. I'll give you an example: I'm a Lightwave animator running on Windows 2000. Lightwave's scene files are text based, which means I can modify a scene without necessarily having to do it through Lightwave itself.
I had a problem once where I wanted to animate realistic eye movement. Doing it by hand would be incredibly time consuming (Not to mention repetitive...) So I came up with an inventive solution. I parented the camera in Lightwave to the 'neck' of the person, and rendered a wide-angle avi from that person's perspective. Then I wrote a quick VB-App that used MS's Media Player ActiveX control to play back the
The effect was surprising! Within 6 hours or so of programming, I had written a primitive mo-cap (Mouse capture?) program that would be useful for a lot of things, not just eye movement. All this was possible because I understood VB, Windows 2000, and Lightwave. This happened to be so valuable that I bought a Windows 2000 laptop so I could experiment more with this technique in my free time.
The reason I'm surprised at the workstations switch (I should say 'initially surprised...') is that familiarity with your computer/OS is key to coming up with inventive solutions to problems. Since Linux is fairly new to the animation scene (on the creation side, not the rendering side...), it's hard to imagine those entering the animators job market would already be experienced with that OS. They'd have to re-learn how to use their computers. That may or may not be a problem, but it's a concern I have.
My point of view on this topic is starting to change after I started to write this post. It is starting to make more sense now. It is a lot easier to get my hands on a personal copy of Linux than it is to get Windows 2000 or OSX. At that point, the brand of processor becomes the least of my concerns, just the speed of it. It'll take some getting used to, but when all the dust settles, I think Dream Works will be in for a nice boost in productivity.
What I did with VB sounds like it'd be far easier on Linux. I can imagine 3D Animators eventually having more and more programming/scripting capabilities at their disposal. With these skills comes a more robust solution for any problems that arise. Hmm... maybe I should build a Linux box now.
"fter the Dmitry and DMCA flop by Adobe, I will never purchase an Adobe product and I swear to gawd I will save my friends and co-workers from thinking about purchasing an Adobe product..."
I sympathize with your view, but the reason that Adobe is so popular is because it makes a totally kick as series of products. If I lose Photoshop or After Effects, I don't have a whole lot of good choices to replace them with, especially for the money. You wouldn't be 'saving me' from Adobe, you'd be hurting me if you convinced me to switch.
I really don't like what they did with Dmitry, but I need a solution to express my disgruntlement with them that doesn't involve crippling my productivity.
I have the same issue with Blizzard. I've been asked to boycott Blizzard over using the DMCA to shut down BnetD. The problem I have with that is a healthy game industry = better job market for me. Blizzard consistently makes kick ass games. Not buying Blizzard 3 would do more to work against me than help prevent them from further DMCA abuse. On top of that, I think Warcarft III will be lots of fun, and I'd hate to miss out on that too.
So what do we do? I'm open to suggestions as to how to let these companies know what they're doing is unacceptable without creating ripples in the good work that they're doing. One idea is to make their email address available so people can write in their complaints. Another would be to have Slashdot carry a banner encouraging people to read about what happened and, again, give them an email address they can send complaints to.
Personally, I think this would be far more effective than saying "I won't buy your product even tho I need it."
Count me in. What's holding me back from Linux is that I can't run the programs you mentioned, plus After Effects, Lightwave, and some of the other Win things I use.
As an animator, I can tell you that I'm really excited about studios moving over to Linux. What's great about Linux is that you can run it on any platform.
I'll tell you something, Apple totally kicks ass when it comes to making laptops. I'm very happy that Lightwave 7 and all Adobe products are available on it. As a matter of fact, I am *Heavily* considering purchasing one of these machines. If the programs I mentioned ran on Linux, I'd have no qualms about buying a Mac. At that point, it wouldn't really matter!
I *Love* the idea of being totally platform independent. I could finally break out of the Windows cage.
"Unfortunately, this refusal to exchange software is a growing trend. Eventually, I will be forced to pirate all software for testing before I make an actual purchase. "
Actually, the 'no exchange' policy on software used to be *the standard* for any place that sells games. EB, Software etc, Babbages, Kmart, EVERY PLACE had that policy. I think that's been lifted fairly recently. EB will now let you return games (at least the one by where I live...) Should Best Buy back down on that policy? Yeah, I think they should. And I'm sorry that you had a problem with them. They're worried that people'll buy the game, copy it, and then return it. That's gotten a lot harder to do these days, but I think there's still concern out there. Come to think of it, I think there were legal reasons they had to do that. It's been a few years since I had a job that sold software, anybody remember what I'm talking about?
On non-software items, Best Buy has a very liberal return policy. You have 30 days to return something (again non-software), satisfaction guaranteed. Plus they'll refund the difference if it goes on sale elsewhere. I found that *extremely* valuable when I bought a video camera. (*Note: This wasn't at Best Buy, it normally would have been, though.) It really sucks when you have too many choices, heh. I just wanted to buy a camera, find out if it did what I wanted, and then find the cheapest price.
I would personally recommend that you never buy software from Best Buy again, but I wouldn't say boycott the whole store over it. Their software return policy may stink, but there are a ton of other benefits from buying from Best Buy. For example, you can order something from the web and return it to a store if something's wrong with it. That alone makes me more likely to shop there for stuff I need at the office.
As for what you said about pirating games to see if they work, I wouldn't recommend that. But it is *always* a good policy to download a demo of a game before buying a copy. I realize as an impulse buy that's not always an option, but the problem with PC's as gaming platforms is that they're so varied you never know if it'll work or not. Usually the demo'll give you a good idea if it'll work or not. (Plus you'll find out if the game's any good!) The problem with 'pirating' it is that you not only have a high risk of getting a virus, but if the software doesn't work it's highly probable that's the result of a crack.
BTW, I just wanted to comment that I appreciate you buying your daughter another game. It really sucks learning a lesson when you're a kid. I think that was a wonderful thing that you did for her.
You realize that you're modding me down worse than the guy who originally posted the inflammatory article?
He pasted some long ass thing without line breaks, so I suggested he start using them so that his post is readable. I didn't mind the original off-topic post, but since then I've been modded as off topic AND a troll, for a total of -3 points. I went to the partent post and he only got modded down once. Give me a break!!! When I responded to it, it had like a score of 3 'interesting'!
*Anybody* posting, whether on or off topic, can use the advice of 'use line breaks'. As I said, modding me down as off topic since I was responding to an off topic post is fine, but taking away THREE POINTS is ridiculous!!! All I said was 'Line breaks are your friend.'
I expect this one will get modded down too. I did turn off the +1 bonus at least. You may consider what I'm saying to be off-topic or inflammatory, but I urge you to consider how you'd feel if you lost more points to telling somebody to use line breaks (I.e. make their posts READABLE) and tell me if you think you'd react any differently.
Hey dudes, curious about something: I used to have a Radeon 8500. The dual monitor support was capped at 1280 by 1024 @ 60hz. I really want to run > 60hz since I can see the flicker. Anybody know if:
a.) It can run higher than 1280 in dual mode (I really like 1600
b.) Can it run at a higher refresh rate than 60hz?
It doesnt bother me if they two monitors MUST be the same rez/refresh, but I need the higher refresh rate. Does this particular card support that? If not, does Nvidia make one that does?
Tip: Line breaks are your friend.
Nah, don't worry about what the book is about or that he used the net to market it (as opposed to saying the internet is only a source of piracy like SOME organizations..), no no... dismiss it because he's getting publicity for it.
Damn Slashdot for getting the word out there that the internet isn't a bad place to market a book! ADVERTISING BAD!
That's ironic. My parent post got a Troll mod. If you read the rest of this thread, you'll find that kind of amusing. :)
"Post real stories Slashdot...please!"
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After a stressful day, I can use a good laugh. This article didn't provide it, but I'm glad they tried. I don't think Slashdot would work if it was too focused.
I remember back in 2000, the Register ran a semi-similar joke about Apple. Here it is:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/61
Unfortunately, I think they took the image down. Try to imagine a Nasa-style picture of the sun with a solar flare erupting from the top, shaped a little like an apple stem. It resembled the Apple Logo, heh.
I showed this to a coworker (mac fanatic, no less) that read it and said something along the lines of "This doesn't surprise me." I honestly couldn't tell if I was putting her on, or if she was putting me on heh.