1) Zork, Moonmist, and Spellcaster: text adventures that have yet to be matched by anything.
2) Commander Keen: for single-gamedly rejuventating a love for platformers that I had dropped a few years before because the Nintendo sucked.
3) Choplifter: the Apple ][ version had crappy graphics, chitty sound, and only 1 level. I just couldn't stop playing the damn thing.
4) Doom: the first game to make me jump in my chair. I can still picture the Cacodemons in all their pixelated glory:)
5) System Shock: the graphics were good, the gameplay was good, the storytelling sucked me in and made me dream about it.
6) Half-Life: just a damn good game all over the place. The introduction, the accident, and then the first freaky mutant to cross my path. Damn!
7) Unreal: after turning off (or was it on?) that generator in the first (or second) level of the game, you go back down the hallway you came in. Then *SLAM* and the lights start going out one... by.... one. That was freaky. Then the sliding noise of a wall moving somewhere in my immediate vicinity and a flash of teeth.
8) Quake 2: the first one was good, the second one ruled the planet. I still play it.
9) Descent: the most fun you can have in a mine. I even liked the second one. The third one, sadly, left the mines behind too often.
10) Freespace 2: taking on that first capitol ship with only 5 fighters is a traumatic experience.
11) Age of Empires 2: still my favorite RTS of all time.
12) Starcraft: probably one of the best RTS games around. Close enough to AoE2 for me to really get into it - but it's all alien!!
13) Warcraft 2: the only reason I like 2 better than the first one is because of the boats. And the grunts are just hilarious.
14) Uplink: admittedly a tough game to stay interested in after you steal your first million, but it's just too cool to stop playing:)
15) Pod: the first racing game (and possibly the first game) to make use of the then-new MMX extensions. I still love playing it - and Dethkarz and Star Wars Pod Racer (yup, I do like racing the pods).
hey, what are you doing?! don't tell the RIAA about the H-word! they haven't touched us yet, and with BitTorrent around i'm hoping they skip right over us:)
a quick summary of my technology spending habits per year:
- $1000 - hardware
- $100 - software (games)
- $0 - microsoft (though i use Windows and Office and Visual Studio. i refuse to pay for that priveledge because i have no choice but to use windows for these things. if i could choose, i would pay)
- $0 - DSL service
- $0 - EFF donations
- $250 - other non-profit donations
=============
so lemme see. i give nothing to microsoft because i am forced to use their inferior software (except possibly VisualStudio - i did purchase the '97 version of that). i give nothing to the EFF directly, though more out of ignorance than choice. i give a bit to other non-profit organisations, i buy a couple of games per year, and i upgrade my computer fairly regularly.
now if anyone would pay me to work, i could do more stuff:) like donate to the EFF, buy a second machine where Linux and only Linux will be run (maybe dual-boot to 98 for the games), and still not support micro$oft:)
you said 'small studios' inferring that large studios would already have the necessary equipment - most of them probably don't. there are 2 big studios (akin to turtle or little rock) in my city, and neither has the capability to record over about 30KHz. sure, the tape machines will do it, but none of the mics will.
so basically, i don't need a format with 100KHz sampling, but i do want it to be able to hit 30KHz (so 60KHz sampling), and the more bits the better:)
my bad about the % things. i double-checked myself and found that -50db on a song is nearly not there except on either really sensitive speakers or a really loud system. i was thinking of a linear scale when i typed that reply - again, my bad. fwiw, i have mixed the odd song with a 60db absolute range - good jazz is very cool.
i know what you mean about the drums and vox, but it's what sells records to the majority of listeners these days. the voice gets the shit compressed out of it, cleaned up a little to get rid of some breath and mouth noise, and layered (by various methods) to make it not sound as thin as it really is, and is placed slightly ahead of everything else in the mix. personally, i look to old stones and blues records for my referencing needs, unless the client or producer wants something different.
metal stayed on LP for a long time for the same reason jazz and classical did - it's better quality sound.
i never buy water, and since i don't like the taste of tap water, i tend to drink a lot of iced tea and kool-aid. i never fell for directional speaker cable, never even heard of why i should be using green magic marker on my discs, and i can hear phase shifts. once you know what to listen for it's easy. actually, just flip your system to mono while you're listening - if anything dissappears or gets quiet, there's a phase problem:) reverse one of your speaker cables to hear what i hear when even 1 track is out of phase. it'll probably give you a headache if you listen to it for too long.
this is maybe already said, but i don't want to wade through all the comments to find out. sorry in advance.
the 44.1KHz sampling rate of a CD only provides a listening frequency up to 22.05KHz - only slightly beyond normal human hearing (around 20KHz or so). anything beyond about 14KHz is difficult to hear unless the volume is turned up, but if i recorded a violin to an SACD, would you hear the difference between that and the CD version? yes you would. more realistically (and easier to test) is to record a bass guitar (a good one, not some cheap $200 p.o.s.). play it back normally, then play it back with frequencies above about 6KHz cut out (any 'phile know that the highest fundamental frequency of a normally tuned bass guitar is about 620Hz, or 0.6KHz). hear the difference? yup. that's why CD is considered inferior to LP and even tape (including 8-track). you might not actually be able to hear those extremely high frequencies, but you will notice when they're missing. they are part of the sound that makes up the instrument, and without them, stradivarius can too easily sound like yamaha.
and for the immediate future, the studios will be paying extremely close attention to the mixing process to make sure that those SACDs sound good, so the consumer will in fact end up with some better music - at least for a short time.
just a note, normalizing and compressing are different things. normalisers simply increase the level of the entire waveform (or track, or whatever) so that either it's peak or average meets a certain threshold. a compressor is more like an automated fader control. if the loudness of a section passes a set threshold, the level is turned down, then back up again when the loud section passes.
i don't know where you're getting your information from, but it's way off.
i am a "braindead" sound engineer, and even i know that i use WAY more than 25% of the potential dynamic range of a CD. dynamically, a CD can manage a good 100db of dynamic range, but most playback equipment cannot. while it's true that 95% of the stuff you hear on the radio has no dynamic range to speak of, remember that radio stations have their own monster compressors to make sure that everything going out over the air is as close to 0db as they can make it. most of the mainstream pop music is heavily compressed as well, not to mention what bob rock did to metallica.
but if you ever listen to bluegrass, blues, classical, indie releases, and even punk, you'll find that they do tend to use a large portion of the available dynamic range, especially classical. the flutes are nowhere near the same volume as the horns! real audiophiles do not listen to britney spears.
but care has to be taken to make sure that even people with $50 walkmans and headphones can hear this stuff, so the dynamic range is generally compressed into a much smaller area. in my experience, this is usually around -50db to 0db, or about 50% of the available range on a CD, but it depends on the music. if it's too quiet, the listener might not appreciate it. on the other hand, some music just needs to have everything up at 0db to get the energy across. it's weird i guess, but as a producer, you have to listen for what's best, and as a mixer, you have to know what you're listening for.
congrats to you:) i've lost 10 pounds in the last 2 weeks simply by cutting cola out of my diet. yes cola - coke, sprite, etc. i was drinking about 2 litres a day (sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes much more when camping and drinking) for the past 7 or 8 years. no ulcers, no gaping cavities, but not too energetic either. stopped drinking coke 2 weeks ago, stepped on the scale this morning and found i'm down to 210 from 220:) spiffy:) now i can quit smoking and have a 10 pound buffer:)
you're still allowed to respect her. she (and Pearl Jam) are the artists, and therefore have no say whatsoever about who listens to their music, who reviews their music, how people get copies of their albums, or what colour the glued-shut cd players are. it's not like the record company would actually care enough to change anything if they don't care enough to ask about it.
Amos and Jam did not say to someone "Well glue the fucking things shut then!" i'd be surprised if it has even been mentioned in their presence. the first they'll probably hear of it is if they read Slashdot or the NYTimes.
...and how many so-called "music reviewers" do you think can actually play music? i don't know the answer to that, but enough complete-and-total-shit music has gotten 5 star reviews to make it hard to believe that many of them have any kind of clue how to play something besides their undoubtedly (and thankfully) sub-compact peni (or is it actually "penises"?). or, like movie reviewers, they get paid to give good reviews to crap. either way....
holy shit, did you even bother reading the posting here? they are talking solely about advance copies of albums sent to reviewers - NOT the copies that are actually distributed to stores and sold.
seriously, what are you smoking? little bits trigger happy, no?
if you read the post very carefully, you'll find that it's very badly written. the grammer corrections are indeed proper since they are in seperate sentences. if the double-positive occured in the same sentence, no correction would have been required. true, they are not distributing music on devices designed to prevent authorized output, but that's not what the original post says. unless english is your second language too.
i'd also like to point out that "disseminating," while an interesting choice of words for what Epic is doing, is still a poor choice. "distributing" would have been a much better choice, especially since it doesn't have any of the overtones of saturation that "disseminate" has (look it up).
if you find this overly picky, i've got 1 word for ya - bite my ass.
hot damn! just did a search at Google for "billboard AND scam" and guess what? only a couple links referring to Billboard magizine (and both links were from Billboard about a story they did on scam artists). everything else was entirely unrelated - billboards in alaska. no, seriously:)
bowie, did you even bother to take your own advice? evidently not. so shut up unless you can offer actual proof that the Billboard charts are a scam (or otherwise as dishonest as certain other charts).
i work in the recording industry, and the above post is only slightly exaggerated. in a "high security" situation, only about 5 people have access to the master copy - the engineer and assistant, the producer, the band/artist representative, and the record company representative (this number quickly goes up accounting for aides, multiple reps, and other assistants - 5 is pretty much a minimum number). in most cases of pre-release piracy, it would be either the producer (or an assistant) or the engineer (or assistant) who has access to the final copy of the album. all it takes is 1 button pressed on the burner with a blank cd in it to create an illegal copy. these people all have keys to the studio and could do it anytime they wanted.
then there's the anonymous phone calls offering $15000US and up for copies of the album:) hard to turn that kind of money down for an hour's work, and i've seen it happen a few times.
on behalf of Canada, i apologize for celine dion. we honestly thought she was going to sing Desmond Child songs that American groups didn't buy. then some fool handed her a sheet of paper, a pen, and said "shut up, your voice is irritating the shit out of me!"
the rest (sadly) is history...
Well said, exactly what I was thinking about it. I haven't even seen the movie yet (and this is also my first visit to that site) and I could knock over half the so-called "mistakes" off the list.
As an audio engineer, I can knock quite a few more out of what's left. Sometimes (and this happens in many movies) the producer/writer/director wants to add a line or two of dialogue to the movie but filming is long finished, the sets are already dismantled (or sold off on eBay), or the budget won't let them reshoot a scene, so they simply add it in anyways - ideally it'd be well hidden, but sometimes it just isn't possible.
Another thing to remember is "what the brain hears, the brain believes." As an example, I'll use the Dukes of Hazzard. You probably already know where I'm going with this. Tires squealing on a dirt road - just doesn't happen in real life. But if you took that out of the show, most people wouldn't get the impression of a high speed chase (on dirt roads or otherwise) and it wouldn't be as believable (not that DoH was all that believable to begin with - seriously, who has a cousin even close to Daisy?). In a movie, if you see an alley on screen, 99% of the time you hear one of two things - a dumpster clang (or garbage bin knocked over) or a cat yowling. When was the last time you walked by an alley and actually heard that? Probably not recently, or often. Car doors are another thing. Take a Mercedes and slam the door - sounds like a "phoomp" kinda thing. But if you saw that in a movie, it just wouldn't seem realistic. When you see a car door slam, you expect to hear "Slamrattlethump" or something like it. Unless it's a Lamborghini or that black Interceptor in The Wraith:)
Movies (with the probable exception of documentary style films) are all about suspension of belief. You hear tires squealing, so the cars are moving fast - more excitement. You hear the cat yowling in a dark alley - more suspense. If those things weren't there, it just wouldn't seem realistic enough to allow you to believe it.
after reading most of the posts here (most of the ones i can actually see on this one page in any case), it seems i've had exactly the opposite experience with this problem.
i've had ACPI turned off since i bought this mb (and APM as well, don't turn my machine off until i'm damn good and ready), and it worked fine with Win98/2000AS and Mandrake and Sorcerer for weeks. then Win98 started crashing. then Win2K followed suit. both linuxes were fine. i checked the mb website (ecsusa.com - it's a K7S5A) and saw that many people were having similar problems. i flashed the BIOS. i got the latest drivers for everything. moved my RAM around. got the latest DirectX. still no improvement. then i saw this thread. i went into my BIOS and re-enabled ACPI (but not APM - i HATE it when it turns itself off).
i didn't have to reinstall Win98 or 2000AS. they work fine now. Mandrake and Sorcerer still work fine. my 3DMark2001 score improved by about 10% (wtf?). winamp doesn't crash my system anymore:)
good advice - except for the part about getting a bunch of certifications. where would i get the extra money for that? sure i can take a frontpage course (AAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGG!!!) for $200 or so, but would it do me any good? probably not. i'd probably fail and get arrested for bitch-slapping the prof for being an idiot and telling me that frontpage is the best editor there is:(
honestly, i don't think i've ever given a resume to someone in HR unless specifically directed to do so by the person i want to hire me - course, they usually say that so that HR can tell me to get lost i think.
i don't think a CS degree is worthless by any means. my problem is with mathematics. CS is heavy math. therefore, it would be an extremely good idea for me to get that particular degree (plus the obvious distinction of then being able to write a lossless audio codec from scratch in assembly language without even using a calculator;)
if i could afford an accountant to handle my business books, i would. for the time being, sadly, i have to muddle through on my own and get raped at every turn. unfortunately, that's the stupid way to do it since i'm obviously not very good at it. i should maybe talk to H&R Block or something....
i think i get billed about $400 every 3 months. i don't pay it. if i had the extra money, i'd probably buy something more immediately useful - like car insurance or gas...
not quite right. health care is provided by the government, but it still costs money. most people get subsidized (through their jobs, credit history, sexual orientation, i don't even know what else) and never have to spend a penny on being covered. some of us (like yours truly) get a bill every 3 months for $400 that we don't pay - so we're not covered by the health care system.
emphasis on the words "personal exemption" - i do my contracts through a company name so i can write off things like insurance (which i sometimes have had), rent, gas, isp payments, etc. maybe not the best way to do things, but the only exemption i have is GST exemption.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Zork, Moonmist, and Spellcaster: text adventures that have yet to be matched by anything. 2) Commander Keen: for single-gamedly rejuventating a love for platformers that I had dropped a few years before because the Nintendo sucked. 3) Choplifter: the Apple ][ version had crappy graphics, chitty sound, and only 1 level. I just couldn't stop playing the damn thing. 4) Doom: the first game to make me jump in my chair. I can still picture the Cacodemons in all their pixelated glory :)
5) System Shock: the graphics were good, the gameplay was good, the storytelling sucked me in and made me dream about it.
6) Half-Life: just a damn good game all over the place. The introduction, the accident, and then the first freaky mutant to cross my path. Damn!
7) Unreal: after turning off (or was it on?) that generator in the first (or second) level of the game, you go back down the hallway you came in. Then *SLAM* and the lights start going out one... by.... one. That was freaky. Then the sliding noise of a wall moving somewhere in my immediate vicinity and a flash of teeth.
8) Quake 2: the first one was good, the second one ruled the planet. I still play it.
9) Descent: the most fun you can have in a mine. I even liked the second one. The third one, sadly, left the mines behind too often.
10) Freespace 2: taking on that first capitol ship with only 5 fighters is a traumatic experience.
11) Age of Empires 2: still my favorite RTS of all time.
12) Starcraft: probably one of the best RTS games around. Close enough to AoE2 for me to really get into it - but it's all alien!!
13) Warcraft 2: the only reason I like 2 better than the first one is because of the boats. And the grunts are just hilarious.
14) Uplink: admittedly a tough game to stay interested in after you steal your first million, but it's just too cool to stop playing :)
15) Pod: the first racing game (and possibly the first game) to make use of the then-new MMX extensions. I still love playing it - and Dethkarz and Star Wars Pod Racer (yup, I do like racing the pods).
hey, what are you doing?! don't tell the RIAA about the H-word! they haven't touched us yet, and with BitTorrent around i'm hoping they skip right over us :)
a quick summary of my technology spending habits per year:
:) like donate to the EFF, buy a second machine where Linux and only Linux will be run (maybe dual-boot to 98 for the games), and still not support micro$oft :)
- $1000 - hardware
- $100 - software (games)
- $0 - microsoft (though i use Windows and Office and Visual Studio. i refuse to pay for that priveledge because i have no choice but to use windows for these things. if i could choose, i would pay)
- $0 - DSL service
- $0 - EFF donations
- $250 - other non-profit donations
=============
so lemme see. i give nothing to microsoft because i am forced to use their inferior software (except possibly VisualStudio - i did purchase the '97 version of that). i give nothing to the EFF directly, though more out of ignorance than choice. i give a bit to other non-profit organisations, i buy a couple of games per year, and i upgrade my computer fairly regularly.
now if anyone would pay me to work, i could do more stuff
good points :)
:)
you said 'small studios' inferring that large studios would already have the necessary equipment - most of them probably don't. there are 2 big studios (akin to turtle or little rock) in my city, and neither has the capability to record over about 30KHz. sure, the tape machines will do it, but none of the mics will.
so basically, i don't need a format with 100KHz sampling, but i do want it to be able to hit 30KHz (so 60KHz sampling), and the more bits the better
cool, thanks :)
my bad about the % things. i double-checked myself and found that -50db on a song is nearly not there except on either really sensitive speakers or a really loud system. i was thinking of a linear scale when i typed that reply - again, my bad. fwiw, i have mixed the odd song with a 60db absolute range - good jazz is very cool.
i know what you mean about the drums and vox, but it's what sells records to the majority of listeners these days. the voice gets the shit compressed out of it, cleaned up a little to get rid of some breath and mouth noise, and layered (by various methods) to make it not sound as thin as it really is, and is placed slightly ahead of everything else in the mix. personally, i look to old stones and blues records for my referencing needs, unless the client or producer wants something different.
metal stayed on LP for a long time for the same reason jazz and classical did - it's better quality sound.
:) reverse one of your speaker cables to hear what i hear when even 1 track is out of phase. it'll probably give you a headache if you listen to it for too long.
i never buy water, and since i don't like the taste of tap water, i tend to drink a lot of iced tea and kool-aid. i never fell for directional speaker cable, never even heard of why i should be using green magic marker on my discs, and i can hear phase shifts. once you know what to listen for it's easy. actually, just flip your system to mono while you're listening - if anything dissappears or gets quiet, there's a phase problem
this is maybe already said, but i don't want to wade through all the comments to find out. sorry in advance.
the 44.1KHz sampling rate of a CD only provides a listening frequency up to 22.05KHz - only slightly beyond normal human hearing (around 20KHz or so). anything beyond about 14KHz is difficult to hear unless the volume is turned up, but if i recorded a violin to an SACD, would you hear the difference between that and the CD version? yes you would. more realistically (and easier to test) is to record a bass guitar (a good one, not some cheap $200 p.o.s.). play it back normally, then play it back with frequencies above about 6KHz cut out (any 'phile know that the highest fundamental frequency of a normally tuned bass guitar is about 620Hz, or 0.6KHz). hear the difference? yup. that's why CD is considered inferior to LP and even tape (including 8-track). you might not actually be able to hear those extremely high frequencies, but you will notice when they're missing. they are part of the sound that makes up the instrument, and without them, stradivarius can too easily sound like yamaha.
and for the immediate future, the studios will be paying extremely close attention to the mixing process to make sure that those SACDs sound good, so the consumer will in fact end up with some better music - at least for a short time.
just a note, normalizing and compressing are different things. normalisers simply increase the level of the entire waveform (or track, or whatever) so that either it's peak or average meets a certain threshold. a compressor is more like an automated fader control. if the loudness of a section passes a set threshold, the level is turned down, then back up again when the loud section passes.
i don't know where you're getting your information from, but it's way off.
i am a "braindead" sound engineer, and even i know that i use WAY more than 25% of the potential dynamic range of a CD. dynamically, a CD can manage a good 100db of dynamic range, but most playback equipment cannot. while it's true that 95% of the stuff you hear on the radio has no dynamic range to speak of, remember that radio stations have their own monster compressors to make sure that everything going out over the air is as close to 0db as they can make it. most of the mainstream pop music is heavily compressed as well, not to mention what bob rock did to metallica.
but if you ever listen to bluegrass, blues, classical, indie releases, and even punk, you'll find that they do tend to use a large portion of the available dynamic range, especially classical. the flutes are nowhere near the same volume as the horns! real audiophiles do not listen to britney spears.
but care has to be taken to make sure that even people with $50 walkmans and headphones can hear this stuff, so the dynamic range is generally compressed into a much smaller area. in my experience, this is usually around -50db to 0db, or about 50% of the available range on a CD, but it depends on the music. if it's too quiet, the listener might not appreciate it. on the other hand, some music just needs to have everything up at 0db to get the energy across. it's weird i guess, but as a producer, you have to listen for what's best, and as a mixer, you have to know what you're listening for.
congrats to you :) i've lost 10 pounds in the last 2 weeks simply by cutting cola out of my diet. yes cola - coke, sprite, etc. i was drinking about 2 litres a day (sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes much more when camping and drinking) for the past 7 or 8 years. no ulcers, no gaping cavities, but not too energetic either. stopped drinking coke 2 weeks ago, stepped on the scale this morning and found i'm down to 210 from 220 :) spiffy :) now i can quit smoking and have a 10 pound buffer :)
you're still allowed to respect her. she (and Pearl Jam) are the artists, and therefore have no say whatsoever about who listens to their music, who reviews their music, how people get copies of their albums, or what colour the glued-shut cd players are. it's not like the record company would actually care enough to change anything if they don't care enough to ask about it.
Amos and Jam did not say to someone "Well glue the fucking things shut then!" i'd be surprised if it has even been mentioned in their presence. the first they'll probably hear of it is if they read Slashdot or the NYTimes.
...and how many so-called "music reviewers" do you think can actually play music? i don't know the answer to that, but enough complete-and-total-shit music has gotten 5 star reviews to make it hard to believe that many of them have any kind of clue how to play something besides their undoubtedly (and thankfully) sub-compact peni (or is it actually "penises"?). or, like movie reviewers, they get paid to give good reviews to crap. either way....
holy shit, did you even bother reading the posting here? they are talking solely about advance copies of albums sent to reviewers - NOT the copies that are actually distributed to stores and sold.
seriously, what are you smoking? little bits trigger happy, no?
if you read the post very carefully, you'll find that it's very badly written. the grammer corrections are indeed proper since they are in seperate sentences. if the double-positive occured in the same sentence, no correction would have been required. true, they are not distributing music on devices designed to prevent authorized output, but that's not what the original post says. unless english is your second language too. i'd also like to point out that "disseminating," while an interesting choice of words for what Epic is doing, is still a poor choice. "distributing" would have been a much better choice, especially since it doesn't have any of the overtones of saturation that "disseminate" has (look it up). if you find this overly picky, i've got 1 word for ya - bite my ass.
hot damn! just did a search at Google for "billboard AND scam" and guess what? only a couple links referring to Billboard magizine (and both links were from Billboard about a story they did on scam artists). everything else was entirely unrelated - billboards in alaska. no, seriously :)
bowie, did you even bother to take your own advice? evidently not. so shut up unless you can offer actual proof that the Billboard charts are a scam (or otherwise as dishonest as certain other charts).
i work in the recording industry, and the above post is only slightly exaggerated. in a "high security" situation, only about 5 people have access to the master copy - the engineer and assistant, the producer, the band/artist representative, and the record company representative (this number quickly goes up accounting for aides, multiple reps, and other assistants - 5 is pretty much a minimum number). in most cases of pre-release piracy, it would be either the producer (or an assistant) or the engineer (or assistant) who has access to the final copy of the album. all it takes is 1 button pressed on the burner with a blank cd in it to create an illegal copy. these people all have keys to the studio and could do it anytime they wanted. then there's the anonymous phone calls offering $15000US and up for copies of the album :) hard to turn that kind of money down for an hour's work, and i've seen it happen a few times.
on behalf of Canada, i apologize for celine dion. we honestly thought she was going to sing Desmond Child songs that American groups didn't buy. then some fool handed her a sheet of paper, a pen, and said "shut up, your voice is irritating the shit out of me!" the rest (sadly) is history...
Well said, exactly what I was thinking about it. I haven't even seen the movie yet (and this is also my first visit to that site) and I could knock over half the so-called "mistakes" off the list.
:)
As an audio engineer, I can knock quite a few more out of what's left. Sometimes (and this happens in many movies) the producer/writer/director wants to add a line or two of dialogue to the movie but filming is long finished, the sets are already dismantled (or sold off on eBay), or the budget won't let them reshoot a scene, so they simply add it in anyways - ideally it'd be well hidden, but sometimes it just isn't possible.
Another thing to remember is "what the brain hears, the brain believes." As an example, I'll use the Dukes of Hazzard. You probably already know where I'm going with this. Tires squealing on a dirt road - just doesn't happen in real life. But if you took that out of the show, most people wouldn't get the impression of a high speed chase (on dirt roads or otherwise) and it wouldn't be as believable (not that DoH was all that believable to begin with - seriously, who has a cousin even close to Daisy?). In a movie, if you see an alley on screen, 99% of the time you hear one of two things - a dumpster clang (or garbage bin knocked over) or a cat yowling. When was the last time you walked by an alley and actually heard that? Probably not recently, or often. Car doors are another thing. Take a Mercedes and slam the door - sounds like a "phoomp" kinda thing. But if you saw that in a movie, it just wouldn't seem realistic. When you see a car door slam, you expect to hear "Slamrattlethump" or something like it. Unless it's a Lamborghini or that black Interceptor in The Wraith
Movies (with the probable exception of documentary style films) are all about suspension of belief. You hear tires squealing, so the cars are moving fast - more excitement. You hear the cat yowling in a dark alley - more suspense. If those things weren't there, it just wouldn't seem realistic enough to allow you to believe it.
after reading most of the posts here (most of the ones i can actually see on this one page in any case), it seems i've had exactly the opposite experience with this problem.
:)
i've had ACPI turned off since i bought this mb (and APM as well, don't turn my machine off until i'm damn good and ready), and it worked fine with Win98/2000AS and Mandrake and Sorcerer for weeks. then Win98 started crashing. then Win2K followed suit. both linuxes were fine. i checked the mb website (ecsusa.com - it's a K7S5A) and saw that many people were having similar problems. i flashed the BIOS. i got the latest drivers for everything. moved my RAM around. got the latest DirectX. still no improvement. then i saw this thread. i went into my BIOS and re-enabled ACPI (but not APM - i HATE it when it turns itself off).
i didn't have to reinstall Win98 or 2000AS. they work fine now. Mandrake and Sorcerer still work fine. my 3DMark2001 score improved by about 10% (wtf?). winamp doesn't crash my system anymore
good advice - except for the part about getting a bunch of certifications. where would i get the extra money for that? sure i can take a frontpage course (AAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGG!!!) for $200 or so, but would it do me any good? probably not. i'd probably fail and get arrested for bitch-slapping the prof for being an idiot and telling me that frontpage is the best editor there is :(
;)
honestly, i don't think i've ever given a resume to someone in HR unless specifically directed to do so by the person i want to hire me - course, they usually say that so that HR can tell me to get lost i think.
i don't think a CS degree is worthless by any means. my problem is with mathematics. CS is heavy math. therefore, it would be an extremely good idea for me to get that particular degree (plus the obvious distinction of then being able to write a lossless audio codec from scratch in assembly language without even using a calculator
if i could afford an accountant to handle my business books, i would. for the time being, sadly, i have to muddle through on my own and get raped at every turn. unfortunately, that's the stupid way to do it since i'm obviously not very good at it. i should maybe talk to H&R Block or something....
so far i've been lucky :)
in any case, i will be getting coverage in the near future (i hope).
i think i get billed about $400 every 3 months. i don't pay it. if i had the extra money, i'd probably buy something more immediately useful - like car insurance or gas...
not quite right. health care is provided by the government, but it still costs money. most people get subsidized (through their jobs, credit history, sexual orientation, i don't even know what else) and never have to spend a penny on being covered. some of us (like yours truly) get a bill every 3 months for $400 that we don't pay - so we're not covered by the health care system.
emphasis on the words "personal exemption" - i do my contracts through a company name so i can write off things like insurance (which i sometimes have had), rent, gas, isp payments, etc. maybe not the best way to do things, but the only exemption i have is GST exemption.