I've read all your posts in this thread so far, and you basically call anyone wanting a gun "childish".
I would like to point out that your fear of "death at the hands of a civilian by gunfire" is just as childish.
The number of innocent people who die at the hand of civilians is statistically insignificant, compared to the number of innocents who die at the hands of criminals, or the police.
Your childish fear of allowing civilians to own and use guns is similar to, say, people who refuse to fly on airplanes because they can crash and kill you. Both cases are statistically VERY improbable, but the few instances of such events happening are amplified by media hype, plus the individual's lack of control over such events often terrifies them.
This is the kind of person who would rather drive, or keep the guns only legally in the hands of the police, just to remain somewhat in control of their destiny. They feel that by driving themselves, or by asserting that tenuous thread of control they have over their police department through indirect representation, that it can somehow be better trusted than the impersonal nature of an airline and it's pilots, or your average joe gun owner with his pistol.
Now, all people have "childish" fears. Some overcome them, some don't...that's life. But you want to know what is truely childish? Projecting your fears onto others to make up for your inability to conquer them. Society as a whole has decided that guns in the hands of individuals can be a good thing, for more than just reasons of self-defense...and until you can convince our society otherwise, you're just a fearmonger looking for an audience to captivate.
Oh, better stay inside today, I hear you could die out there.
Looking at the heat metrics of current P4 prescott and AMD64 chips (74w-140w), no end seems to be in sight.
Have you looked at the new Athlon64 cores?
3200+ Winchester
30w Full load 10w Idle 4w Idle with Cool 'n Quiet
You have reached the end. I've paired this puppy up wuth a very reasonable 6600 GT (55w load, fairly quiet), plus an Antec Sonata. VERY fast, VERY simple, VERY quiet.
If you're feeling cheaper, you could always buy an Athlon XP Mobile (35w TDP). Cool processors and a myriad of motherboar choices are avialable to you...just not from Intel.
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
This is a limitation of storage speed, not processing power.
Your latest, greatest hard drive is only 10-20x faster in terms of sustained read bandwidth than a drive of a decade ago, and is only about 5x faster in terms of access time.
Edit loads fast because it's a tiny program that uses low-level OS hooks to interact and render itself.
GEdit loads slow because it's about 100 times larger than Edit, and the disk subsystem hasn't kept pace with the code bloat. Plus, the high-level library interfaces Gedit uses don't help it's loading times any.
So yeah, we have mostly hit a wall in terms of loading times and what your processor can do to alleviate them. As memory gets larger and outpaces the growth of hard drive transfer speed, loading times are likely to get even larger.
Of course, there are still justifications for having a powerful processor. Half-Life 2, with it's powerful physics engine, eats processors for breakfast. I've got a 2GHz Athlon64, and the framerate can still dip well under 60fps even with minimum video settings...it just eats that many processor cycles.
And don't count out media performance. These days everyone does a little encoding / decoding here and there, and it's always nice to do it faster.
The wheel doesn't occur in nature becuase it is optimal in narrow uses, rather than flexible in all fields of use.
Ever try wheeling yourself around on rocky or broken terrain? How about swampland? Dry wind-blown sand is also not too nice for most wheels.
Legs can traverse all these types of terrain. They're less efficient, but the flexibility is worth it. Consider this: we only created roads once the wheel became popular.
It's not too difficult to understand why, either. Just take a look at systems that actually "work", like the Patriot interceptor.
Step 1: track target during it's liftoff stage, but take no action.
Step 2: when the target is cruising or goes terminal, it has a fairly predictable trajectory. Fire up your tracking radar and you can converge on the target easily with a very small window of error, and lob a Patriot at it.
Step 3: Profit!
Anyway, now imagine the typical environment you're facing attempting to track an ICBM during the burn stage. You've got a fast target that's CONTINUOUSLY making course corrections, be it due to wind, mechanical instabilities, or just the normal flight path. The tracking radar is making guesses about the target's trajectory in order to converge the location of the target...but every time it sweeps the target the damn thing isn't where it expected it to be.
Thus, the error window remains too large to be accurate, and the interceptor missile might as well not be launched.
Now, imagine having this much difficulty with a single, well-known target...then make it realistic. The countermeasures accomanied with your ICBM are going to guarnatee you see TONS of viable targets to track.
And hell, you can't take the easy way out like the Patriot system does, because the ICBM doesn't cruise and depend on it's areodynamics to reach the target...the warheads just drop like a rock.
Sounds to me like AGP DiME with another name. Anyone else remember the i740 and it's complete lack of texture memory? Yeah, that was a great idea, since it still had to have an onboard 8MB framebuffer. Oh, surprise, surprise, so does the 6200 TC (32MB). Oh yeah, that 32MB is probably also why the card sucks for AA...it doesn't have the memory to spare.
So, let's see. You're buying an expensive system with PCIe and dual-channel DDR, plus an expensive CPU, and then you pair it with this excuse for a video card? What a joke.
On the realistic end, has anyone stopped to think about this: the video card is apt to mooch at least 128MB of system memory...this is going to make performance in games pretty sketchy with a total of 512MB memory, a more likely amount of memory for a budget machine. Thus, you have to bump up to 1GB ram just to appease your 6200 TC and leave yourself enough ram for (insert huge game here).
Think about it, if you price the difference between 1GB and 512MB, even if it's cheap ram, you're out ~$75. That's enough of a difference to buy yourself a lower-midrange card like the 5700 or the x600. Plus, you get the benefit of your video card not sapping gigabytes of precious main memory bandwidth.
Except that the only server people frequent, Freeworlds USA, is lagged to hell.
I don't understand how people can even attempt enjoy themselves in that environment, let alone survive against the hordes of laggy NPCs that can put a hole through you before your client-server connection resyncs:D
Correction. The older P54C core was on a.5 micron process.
The Pentium Pro started out on a.6 micron process (the 133 and 150MHz models) and moved to.35 micron (166, 180 and 200MHz).
And yes, the bus protcol eventually prompted companies like Powerleap to release converters for GTL+ to AGTL+, but they were pretty slow out the door. For at least the first six months, the only way to get a Tualatin platform was to invest in an i815e.
Since you have about a dozen replies, and nobody has actually ANSWERED your question, here goes:
Memory chips are delineated in terms of Megabits. Your typical DIMM has 4, 8 or 16 chips...any more requires fun stacking tricks or a double-height PCB.
The 512 Megabit chip noted here would be 64 Megabytes per chip (64 * 8 = 512). Thus, DIMMs would have the following:
4 chips = 256MB 8 chips = 512MB 16 chips = 1024MB
Now, as it has been noted, SRAM and DRAM are not compatible, so you'll never see this on a module, unless they can make these REALLY cheap and move the entire industry to switch. But at least this will help you understand.
Well, IBM got out of the consumer desktop business years ago, at least here in the US. All they sell here are workstations, servers and notebooks.
But I kinda figured that IBM wouldn't be able to recover, even back when I heard about them cutting consumer desktops...Dell is the only US maker capable of keeping up with the Japanese / Tiawanese builders. Now that a handful of contract assemblers design and build the majority of the world's notebooks, even that market is becoming cut-throat.
Man, four years ago I had a friend dumb enough to see just how much you get in a sub-$200 19" monitor. Let me tell you, I've seen monitors from TEN years ago that had more clarity.
I was pretty happy with my purchase that same year of a $400 17" Iiyama Diamondtron NF. I couldn't justify the $650 for the 10":D
Go to output plugins and select Diskwriter, and specify a place to save the file.
Now play your file(s). You won't hear your music...instead, Winamp will decode them at MAXIMUM speed allowed by your processor resources, and convert them to wav. Of course, there is an additional step from you if you want it compressed into something smaller, but Winamp will do the speedy wav conversion for you.
This conversion works for ANYTHING Winamp can play.
To disable this feature, just double-click on the waveout or directsound output plugins.
I have been saying for the longest time that people would start to hear the grumble turn to a loud roar once it became hard to buy a cellphone without a camera plus a dozen other funky widgets, and once people started to get photoed/taped/recorded form all sides without warning.
Of course, my employer doesn't care that it's getting harder to avoid recording features in products. I cannot come on-site with a complete video, photo or audio recording device.
Did you notice that most of the digital audio PLAYERS now include RECORD capabilities and provide built-in microphones for your convenience? I dunno about you, but the last time I wanted to RECORD something, I didn't reach for a shitty microphone and recorder that was added as an afterthought to bloat a feature list.
Honestly, I bought a Muvo TX a little while back to replace my older model, and damned if those fools didn't add a built-in microphone with the new generation. Suffice it to say, the mp3 player I bought to use AT WORK could get me fired...until I took the time to void the warranty, crack open the case, and disable the microphone with pliers. Here's a GREAT idea: how about a FIRMWARE update that physically disables the recording hardware, so I have SOME defense if I get caught with a MUSIC PLAYER that just happens to be a voice recorder at work. But no, companies don't give a shit...they pile on the features.
God, I hate some aspects of convergence. So many features that so many people WANT to think they're cool and useful enough to use often. Really, do people need the ability to snap crappy pictures every time they see a chicken crossing the road? Is a crappy, low-bitrate recording any better of a reminder to you than a post-it-note? We've gotten some NICE features from convergence that don't affect the usability of the phone, like say, simple organizers built-in to the phone. But CAMERAS and MICROPHONES add weight, plus they cross a line that most people weren't expecting to cross when they went shopping for a mobile PHONE. If this is the path convergence is going to take, all these small gains could be made worthless by the problems caused by this "recording mania".
Dude, you should keep a tab or two on the community, then you won't miss these things.
This card has been antcipated for nearly a month.
I have been waiting for one of two things to upgrade for HL2:
* A 6600GT AGP * An Athlon64 939 PCIe board
The 6600GT AGP won. I ordered my new system last night. And yes, kids, you can buy these in stores NOW.
Let's hear it for stupid language parsers! Yaaay!
on
Profanity Adventures
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· Score: 1
I can remember when Counterstrike admins thought they were 1337 because they installed the brand-new adminmod with an absolutely braindead speech parser.
Imagine my mindset when I'm playing de_plane, and I can't tell my teammates I'm in the cockpit.
The default wordlist also blocked such petty things like "stupid" and "suck". What, are we going to warp Little Johnny's mind because we told him he sucks? What if I want to tell him that he's a stupid sucker?
The phrase "Jumpin Jesus on a Pogo Stick" is from one of my all-time favorite monolouges:
"Stuart" by The Dead Milkmen
You know what, Stuart, I LIKE YOU. You're not like the other people, here, in the trailer park.
Oh, don't go get me wrong. They're fine people, they're good Americans. But they're content to sit back, maybe watch a little Mork and Mindy on channel 57, maybe kick back a cool, Coors 16-ouncer. They're good, fine people, Stuart. But they don't know... what the queers are doing to the soil!
You know that Jonny Wurster kid, the kid that delivers papers in the neighborhood. He's a foreign kid. Some of the neighbors say he smokes crack, but I don't believe it.
Anyway, for his tenth birthday, all he wanted was a Burrow Owl. Kept bugging his old man. "Dad, get me a burrow owl. I'll never ask for anything else as long as I live." So the guy breaks down and buys him a burrow owl.
Anyway, 10:30, the other night, I go out in my yard, and there's the Wurster kid, looking up in the tree. I say, "What are you looking for?" He says "I'm looking for my burrow owl." I say, "Jumping Jesus on a Pogo Stick. Everybody knows the burrow owl lives. In a hole. In the ground. Why the hell do you think they call it a burrow owl, anyway?" Now Stuart, do you think a kid like that is going to know what the queers are doing to the soil?
I first became aware of this about ten years ago, the summer my oldest boy, Bill Jr. died. You know that carnival comes into town every year? Well this year they came through with a ride called The Mixer. The man said, "Keep your head, and arms, inside the Mixer at all times." But Bill Jr, he was a DAAAREDEVIL, just like his old man. He was leaning out saying "Hey everybody, Look at me! Look at me!" Pow! He was decapitated! They found his head over by the snow cone concession.
A few days after that, I open up the mail. And there's a pamphlet in there. From Pueblo, Colorado, and it's addressed to Bill, Jr. And it's entitled, "Do you know what the queers are doing to our soil?"
Now, Stuart, if you look at the soil around any large US city, there's a big undeground homosexual population. Des Moines, Iowa, for an example. Look at the soil around Des Moines, Stuart. You can't build on it; you can't grow anything in it. The government says it's due to poor farming. But I know what's really going on, Stuart. I know it's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for gay Martians, I swear to God.
You know what, Stuart, I like you. You're not like the other people, here in this trailer park.
I havn't worked overtime in months. And if I do, standard practice is, if the program can afford it, I get paid for it (but it's not time-and-a-half). I can also typically comp any hours over 40 if I wish.
There have been occasions when programs were in such severe crunch (both in schedule and in budget)that employees were asked to work mandatory unpaid overtime, but it topped out at 6 hours per week (and I quickly got out of that hellhole).
But here's the benefit of a big defense company: you tend to get to know people...who know people...who know projects... and this allows you to get a feel for projects before you leap onboard.
Nullsoft never made a dime for AOL for the same reason that Netscape never made a dime for AOL...because AOL never had the balls to bundle them as the default media players and browsers, even though it was their intent when they purchased said companies.
I mean, why the hell do you think Winamp added video capability? They were gearing it up as a WiMP competitor, and got cold feet. Same thing for Netscape...they developed it, then got cold feet and signed a contract to continue including IE with AOL.
I suppose if Google REALLY wanted to become a solid competitor to AOL / MSN / Yahoo and the rest of the internet junkie companies, they could grab this opportunity and run with it. But I don't think they're THAT determined.
DC has non-voting representatives in the Senate (Strauss) and the house (Norton). You can imagine how little weight they have without a vote. The only representation DC gets is the opportunity to vote for president.
Furthermore, DC does not have home-rule. Let me describe this to you in the simplest way possible: if Congress wishes, they can ursurp the elected DC local government and appoint a control board to "get the city out of crisis". In addition, Congress has been known to meddle with local politics in other indirect ways to suit their own agenda...read here to get a general idea
About the only thing DC has been able to successfully do in retaliation is to change the official slogan on the license plates from "A Capitol City" to "Taxation Without Representation".
Slashdot Mirror
I've read all your posts in this thread so far, and you basically call anyone wanting a gun "childish".
I would like to point out that your fear of "death at the hands of a civilian by gunfire" is just as childish.
The number of innocent people who die at the hand of civilians is statistically insignificant, compared to the number of innocents who die at the hands of criminals, or the police.
Your childish fear of allowing civilians to own and use guns is similar to, say, people who refuse to fly on airplanes because they can crash and kill you. Both cases are statistically VERY improbable, but the few instances of such events happening are amplified by media hype, plus the individual's lack of control over such events often terrifies them.
This is the kind of person who would rather drive, or keep the guns only legally in the hands of the police, just to remain somewhat in control of their destiny. They feel that by driving themselves, or by asserting that tenuous thread of control they have over their police department through indirect representation, that it can somehow be better trusted than the impersonal nature of an airline and it's pilots, or your average joe gun owner with his pistol.
Now, all people have "childish" fears. Some overcome them, some don't...that's life. But you want to know what is truely childish? Projecting your fears onto others to make up for your inability to conquer them. Society as a whole has decided that guns in the hands of individuals can be a good thing, for more than just reasons of self-defense...and until you can convince our society otherwise, you're just a fearmonger looking for an audience to captivate.
Oh, better stay inside today, I hear you could die out there.
Looking at the heat metrics of current P4 prescott and AMD64 chips (74w-140w), no end seems to be in sight.
Have you looked at the new Athlon64 cores?
3200+ Winchester
30w Full load
10w Idle
4w Idle with Cool 'n Quiet
You have reached the end. I've paired this puppy up wuth a very reasonable 6600 GT (55w load, fairly quiet), plus an Antec Sonata. VERY fast, VERY simple, VERY quiet.
If you're feeling cheaper, you could always buy an Athlon XP Mobile (35w TDP). Cool processors and a myriad of motherboar choices are avialable to you...just not from Intel.
This is a limitation of storage speed, not processing power.
Your latest, greatest hard drive is only 10-20x faster in terms of sustained read bandwidth than a drive of a decade ago, and is only about 5x faster in terms of access time.
Edit loads fast because it's a tiny program that uses low-level OS hooks to interact and render itself.
GEdit loads slow because it's about 100 times larger than Edit, and the disk subsystem hasn't kept pace with the code bloat. Plus, the high-level library interfaces Gedit uses don't help it's loading times any.
So yeah, we have mostly hit a wall in terms of loading times and what your processor can do to alleviate them. As memory gets larger and outpaces the growth of hard drive transfer speed, loading times are likely to get even larger.
Of course, there are still justifications for having a powerful processor. Half-Life 2, with it's powerful physics engine, eats processors for breakfast. I've got a 2GHz Athlon64, and the framerate can still dip well under 60fps even with minimum video settings...it just eats that many processor cycles.
And don't count out media performance. These days everyone does a little encoding / decoding here and there, and it's always nice to do it faster.
The wheel doesn't occur in nature becuase it is optimal in narrow uses, rather than flexible in all fields of use.
Ever try wheeling yourself around on rocky or broken terrain? How about swampland? Dry wind-blown sand is also not too nice for most wheels.
Legs can traverse all these types of terrain. They're less efficient, but the flexibility is worth it. Consider this: we only created roads once the wheel became popular.
It's not too difficult to understand why, either. Just take a look at systems that actually "work", like the Patriot interceptor.
Step 1: track target during it's liftoff stage, but take no action.
Step 2: when the target is cruising or goes terminal, it has a fairly predictable trajectory. Fire up your tracking radar and you can converge on the target easily with a very small window of error, and lob a Patriot at it.
Step 3: Profit!
Anyway, now imagine the typical environment you're facing attempting to track an ICBM during the burn stage. You've got a fast target that's CONTINUOUSLY making course corrections, be it due to wind, mechanical instabilities, or just the normal flight path. The tracking radar is making guesses about the target's trajectory in order to converge the location of the target...but every time it sweeps the target the damn thing isn't where it expected it to be.
Thus, the error window remains too large to be accurate, and the interceptor missile might as well not be launched.
Now, imagine having this much difficulty with a single, well-known target...then make it realistic. The countermeasures accomanied with your ICBM are going to guarnatee you see TONS of viable targets to track.
And hell, you can't take the easy way out like the Patriot system does, because the ICBM doesn't cruise and depend on it's areodynamics to reach the target...the warheads just drop like a rock.
Gotta second that, the GA-KNSNXP-939 was nothing but trouble, would refuse to run paired DDR 400 sticks at anything higher than 333, single-channel.
Damn thing also didn't support Cool 'N Quiet properly.
The sad thing is a board that was $50 cheaper ended up doing all of the above without batting an eye, and now I'm happy with my Asus A8V.
I sure hope Gigabyte makes better video cards...I personally wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole.
Sounds to me like AGP DiME with another name. Anyone else remember the i740 and it's complete lack of texture memory? Yeah, that was a great idea, since it still had to have an onboard 8MB framebuffer. Oh, surprise, surprise, so does the 6200 TC (32MB). Oh yeah, that 32MB is probably also why the card sucks for AA...it doesn't have the memory to spare.
So, let's see. You're buying an expensive system with PCIe and dual-channel DDR, plus an expensive CPU, and then you pair it with this excuse for a video card? What a joke.
On the realistic end, has anyone stopped to think about this: the video card is apt to mooch at least 128MB of system memory...this is going to make performance in games pretty sketchy with a total of 512MB memory, a more likely amount of memory for a budget machine. Thus, you have to bump up to 1GB ram just to appease your 6200 TC and leave yourself enough ram for (insert huge game here).
Think about it, if you price the difference between 1GB and 512MB, even if it's cheap ram, you're out ~$75. That's enough of a difference to buy yourself a lower-midrange card like the 5700 or the x600. Plus, you get the benefit of your video card not sapping gigabytes of precious main memory bandwidth.
Except that the only server people frequent, Freeworlds USA, is lagged to hell.
:D
I don't understand how people can even attempt enjoy themselves in that environment, let alone survive against the hordes of laggy NPCs that can put a hole through you before your client-server connection resyncs
Correction. The older P54C core was on a .5 micron process.
.6 micron process (the 133 and 150MHz models) and moved to .35 micron (166, 180 and 200MHz).
The Pentium Pro started out on a
And yes, the bus protcol eventually prompted companies like Powerleap to release converters for GTL+ to AGTL+, but they were pretty slow out the door. For at least the first six months, the only way to get a Tualatin platform was to invest in an i815e.
PPro (6th-generation, OOOE, Register renaming, fully pipelined ALUs/FPU, etc. .5 micron, 120-200 MHz) ->
.35 micron shrink, 233-300MHz) ->
PII Klamath (Added MMX, better 16-bit performance, external cache,
PII Deschutes (.25 micron process shrink, added official 100MHz FSB, basis for Celerons, 300-450MHz) ->
PIII Katmai (.25 micron optimization, added SSE, introduced official 133MHz FSB 450-650MHz) ->
PIII Coppermine (.18 micron shrink, added on-die 256K cache on 256-bit bus, 500-1133 MHz) ->
PIII Tualatin (.13 micron shrink, bumped cache to 512K, used new incompatible bus protocol, 600-1400 MHz)
Since you have about a dozen replies, and nobody has actually ANSWERED your question, here goes:
Memory chips are delineated in terms of Megabits. Your typical DIMM has 4, 8 or 16 chips...any more requires fun stacking tricks or a double-height PCB.
The 512 Megabit chip noted here would be 64 Megabytes per chip (64 * 8 = 512). Thus, DIMMs would have the following:
4 chips = 256MB
8 chips = 512MB
16 chips = 1024MB
Now, as it has been noted, SRAM and DRAM are not compatible, so you'll never see this on a module, unless they can make these REALLY cheap and move the entire industry to switch. But at least this will help you understand.
Yeah, then we could have had innovative products like the Post-It CELL.
Well, IBM got out of the consumer desktop business years ago, at least here in the US. All they sell here are workstations, servers and notebooks.
But I kinda figured that IBM wouldn't be able to recover, even back when I heard about them cutting consumer desktops...Dell is the only US maker capable of keeping up with the Japanese / Tiawanese builders. Now that a handful of contract assemblers design and build the majority of the world's notebooks, even that market is becoming cut-throat.
Yeah, I was just saying to my friend the other day:
...doesn't everybody?
"Hey, when I think of THE FUTURE, I think of Rod Stewart!"
Man, four years ago I had a friend dumb enough to see just how much you get in a sub-$200 19" monitor. Let me tell you, I've seen monitors from TEN years ago that had more clarity.
:D
I was pretty happy with my purchase that same year of a $400 17" Iiyama Diamondtron NF. I couldn't justify the $650 for the 10"
Winamp can do this.
Go to output plugins and select Diskwriter, and specify a place to save the file.
Now play your file(s). You won't hear your music...instead, Winamp will decode them at MAXIMUM speed allowed by your processor resources, and convert them to wav. Of course, there is an additional step from you if you want it compressed into something smaller, but Winamp will do the speedy wav conversion for you.
This conversion works for ANYTHING Winamp can play.
To disable this feature, just double-click on the waveout or directsound output plugins.
Well, if Winamp does eventually go under, here's your alternative:
XMMS, in the spirit of Winamp's community, also has tons of video game music plugins available.
Furthermore, there is a plugin that allows you to use Winamp plugins (dlls) on XMMS.
I use both platforms for my MP3 / FLAC / SHN / SPC / NSF / GYM / VGM listening habits, and I'm happy with both.
I have been saying for the longest time that people would start to hear the grumble turn to a loud roar once it became hard to buy a cellphone without a camera plus a dozen other funky widgets, and once people started to get photoed/taped/recorded form all sides without warning.
Of course, my employer doesn't care that it's getting harder to avoid recording features in products. I cannot come on-site with a complete video, photo or audio recording device.
Did you notice that most of the digital audio PLAYERS now include RECORD capabilities and provide built-in microphones for your convenience? I dunno about you, but the last time I wanted to RECORD something, I didn't reach for a shitty microphone and recorder that was added as an afterthought to bloat a feature list.
Honestly, I bought a Muvo TX a little while back to replace my older model, and damned if those fools didn't add a built-in microphone with the new generation. Suffice it to say, the mp3 player I bought to use AT WORK could get me fired...until I took the time to void the warranty, crack open the case, and disable the microphone with pliers. Here's a GREAT idea: how about a FIRMWARE update that physically disables the recording hardware, so I have SOME defense if I get caught with a MUSIC PLAYER that just happens to be a voice recorder at work. But no, companies don't give a shit...they pile on the features.
God, I hate some aspects of convergence. So many features that so many people WANT to think they're cool and useful enough to use often. Really, do people need the ability to snap crappy pictures every time they see a chicken crossing the road? Is a crappy, low-bitrate recording any better of a reminder to you than a post-it-note? We've gotten some NICE features from convergence that don't affect the usability of the phone, like say, simple organizers built-in to the phone. But CAMERAS and MICROPHONES add weight, plus they cross a line that most people weren't expecting to cross when they went shopping for a mobile PHONE. If this is the path convergence is going to take, all these small gains could be made worthless by the problems caused by this "recording mania".
Sorry, I just had to rant.
Dude, you should keep a tab or two on the community, then you won't miss these things.
This card has been antcipated for nearly a month.
I have been waiting for one of two things to upgrade for HL2:
* A 6600GT AGP
* An Athlon64 939 PCIe board
The 6600GT AGP won. I ordered my new system last night. And yes, kids, you can buy these in stores NOW.
I can remember when Counterstrike admins thought they were 1337 because they installed the brand-new adminmod with an absolutely braindead speech parser.
Imagine my mindset when I'm playing de_plane, and I can't tell my teammates I'm in the cockpit.
The default wordlist also blocked such petty things like "stupid" and "suck". What, are we going to warp Little Johnny's mind because we told him he sucks? What if I want to tell him that he's a stupid sucker?
Stupid word parsers can suck my cock.
Yeah, that leaves plenty of time to have sex with "fully-functional" androids, and bounce the positron particle beam off the main deflector dish.
The phrase "Jumpin Jesus on a Pogo Stick" is from one of my all-time favorite monolouges:
... what the queers are doing
"Stuart" by The Dead Milkmen
You know what, Stuart, I LIKE YOU. You're not like the other
people, here, in the trailer park.
Oh, don't go get me wrong. They're fine people, they're
good Americans. But they're content to sit back, maybe
watch a little Mork and Mindy on channel 57, maybe kick
back a cool, Coors 16-ouncer. They're good, fine people,
Stuart. But they don't know
to the soil!
You know that Jonny Wurster kid, the kid that delivers papers
in the neighborhood. He's a foreign kid. Some of the neighbors
say he smokes crack, but I don't believe it.
Anyway, for his tenth birthday, all he wanted was a Burrow Owl.
Kept bugging his old man. "Dad, get me a burrow owl. I'll never
ask for anything else as long as I live." So the guy
breaks down and buys him a burrow owl.
Anyway, 10:30, the other night, I go out in my yard, and there's
the Wurster kid, looking up in the tree. I say, "What are
you looking for?" He says "I'm looking for my burrow owl."
I say, "Jumping Jesus on a Pogo Stick. Everybody knows
the burrow owl lives. In a hole. In the ground. Why the hell do you
think they call it a burrow owl, anyway?" Now Stuart, do you
think a kid like that is going to know what the queers are
doing to the soil?
I first became aware of this about ten years ago, the summer
my oldest boy, Bill Jr. died. You know that carnival comes into
town every year? Well this year they came through with a ride
called The Mixer. The man said, "Keep your head, and arms, inside
the Mixer at all times." But Bill Jr, he was a DAAAREDEVIL, just
like his old man. He was leaning out saying "Hey everybody,
Look at me! Look at me!" Pow! He was decapitated! They found
his head over by the snow cone concession.
A few days after that, I open up the mail. And there's a pamphlet
in there. From Pueblo, Colorado, and it's addressed to Bill, Jr.
And it's entitled, "Do you know what the queers are doing to our
soil?"
Now, Stuart, if you look at the soil around any large US city,
there's a big undeground homosexual population. Des Moines, Iowa,
for an example. Look at the soil around Des Moines, Stuart.
You can't build on it; you can't grow anything in it. The government
says it's due to poor farming. But I know what's really going on,
Stuart. I know it's the queers. They're in it with the aliens.
They're building landing strips for gay Martians, I swear to
God.
You know what, Stuart, I like you. You're not like the other
people, here in this trailer park.
I work in the defense industry.
I havn't worked overtime in months. And if I do, standard practice is, if the program can afford it, I get paid for it (but it's not time-and-a-half). I can also typically comp any hours over 40 if I wish.
There have been occasions when programs were in such severe crunch (both in schedule and in budget)that employees were asked to work mandatory unpaid overtime, but it topped out at 6 hours per week (and I quickly got out of that hellhole).
But here's the benefit of a big defense company: you tend to get to know people...who know people...who know projects... and this allows you to get a feel for projects before you leap onboard.
Nullsoft never made a dime for AOL for the same reason that Netscape never made a dime for AOL...because AOL never had the balls to bundle them as the default media players and browsers, even though it was their intent when they purchased said companies.
I mean, why the hell do you think Winamp added video capability? They were gearing it up as a WiMP competitor, and got cold feet. Same thing for Netscape...they developed it, then got cold feet and signed a contract to continue including IE with AOL.
I suppose if Google REALLY wanted to become a solid competitor to AOL / MSN / Yahoo and the rest of the internet junkie companies, they could grab this opportunity and run with it. But I don't think they're THAT determined.
To clarify:
DC has non-voting representatives in the Senate (Strauss) and the house (Norton). You can imagine how little weight they have without a vote. The only representation DC gets is the opportunity to vote for president.
Furthermore, DC does not have home-rule. Let me describe this to you in the simplest way possible: if Congress wishes, they can ursurp the elected DC local government and appoint a control board to "get the city out of crisis". In addition, Congress has been known to meddle with local politics in other indirect ways to suit their own agenda...read here to get a general idea
About the only thing DC has been able to successfully do in retaliation is to change the official slogan on the license plates from "A Capitol City" to "Taxation Without Representation".