It's a lot better than {8_8} apparently thinks it is. Philip Marlowe in a futuristic setting, basically. Lots of fun and interesting subtext. A cool as hell score ("Blue Runner Blues", especially). Art design to die for. I think it succeeds in large degree because it's not a science fiction movie. Blade Runner could've been set in London in 1944 (Deckard hunts nazi spies), and it would've still been a good movie.
I believe it is widely considered the best science fiction movie ever made.
Honestly, in the last few months I've gone from saying "Whatever." to the people who use IE to saying that I won't help them with ANYTHING until they dump IE....and, they are leery at first. They say "Oh. Tabs are kind of neat", and "Sure, it's keeping out spyware, but will it work with my bank web site?" (generally it does, these days... thank you Safari!)
And then I show them the power of adblock and a decent set of preferences. This is something that IE will *never* have. I show them a modestly busy page like Excite.com with IE, and then with Firefox + Adblock. And that's the trigger. IE is but a distant memory.
I can honestly say that I have TWO greeting cards on my desk at work, thanking me for installing Firefox on someone's computer.
Dear AC. There are places - huge swathes, in fact - of the USA where broadband is not available. I lived in one of them until just last year. Not only that, it was NOT possible for me to achieve a connection faster than 14.4. I spent TEN YEARS thinking of 28.8 as an UPGRADE.
Just because you're lucky enough to live in an area of this (or whatever other) country that's urban enough to have had fast internet service for several years doesn't mean everyone else has, too.
Not only that, but for the most part flash actually obstructs real content. Blind people can't interact with it. Search engines can't search it. It's a pain in the ass for a normal human being to save it. The only thing in its favor is that to some people, it looks neat.
Since it hasn't even hit the test server yet, I don't think we'll be seeing it in August no matter what the devs say. With all the Pumpkin heads in the screenshots, and the fact that CoV's beta will probably open in a couple weeks, I'm think it'll probably be early or mid October.
New Intel (9x5 chipset) boards, some nforce 3s and all nforce 4s, I think. I wouldn't buy any of the above, however. I've had terrible luck with nvidia-based motherboards and, well, Intel motherboards only work with the kind of chips I don't have.
Since I *do* build machines with SATA drives and no floppy, what I do instead is perform my initial build on something generic (Via chipset with Promise or Sil non-integrated controller, whatever, but installing onto a standard 40GB PATA drive), install all yer drivers, sysprep then ghost, and use that as the basis for my install.
Right now I have three Windows XP install discs, one for Via/Sil, one for Via/Promise, one for Intel and SiS chipsets. Works fine for me.
The studios should have mutliple tracks with which to arrange their music, even stuff from the last 2 years. Even if everything was digital, they still sampled more than 44kHz (I understand recordings have mostly been made at 48kHz or 96kHz for some time) and they still recorded the drums separate from the guitar separate from the vocal. They have something to work with, it just doesn't matter, because in that case the music is about being loud far more than it's about being any kind of nuanced.
I think I have most Jazz and classical releases. There are more DVD-As (and SACDs - I have a couple hundred of them, too) than you think. It's mostly a matter of the disc being released on boutique labels (e.g. Chesky) that don't have tons of distribution, rather than mainstream (say, EMI).
DVD-A is really the format in the better position, since almost all DVD-A discs include a AC3 track that'll play in a standard DVD player. Sadly, DVD-A also has the far weaker catalog. There's no "Kind of Blue" or "The White Album" on DVD-A.
Anyway, there's a whole bunch of chicken and egg problems associated with high-res audio (you need 5 speakers, you need a decent catalog, you need widespread adoption of players, you need simple cabling), but I have done everything I can to support BOTH of the multichannel formats.
I must be nobody, then. I have a couple hundred DVD-Audio discs, and I'm very happy to see that someone has taken the effort to ensure that someday I'll be able to copy those discs.
High resolution, multichannel audio is a good thing - much better than lossy compression on crappy downloaded tracks. It's a shame more people haven't realized that.
I use the positively militant set of Adblock rules from here, and as a result I'm barely aware that there are ads on the internet.
But... I happen to be interested in a cheap hosting plan for myself, and the parent poster here has a nice, non-intrusive advertisement as his.sig. I clicked his link, and I'm really considering signing up.
This is how ads should be. I'm glad for google, and people like this guy, who understand the power of plain-text advertizing.
Also, in the spirit of the last two posters: Fuck Double-click. Fuck them in their stupid asses.
Albatron has issues of its own - try using one of their boards with an ATI 9600 - but I give them a lot of credit for offering premium Via Envy sound chips, and they ARE reliable. Gigabyte stuff is a positive joy to work with, when I find it.
Those would probably be my top two as well, along with Biostar, which seems to make the best of the "cheapie" boards at the moment.
Many computer shops carry ECS-brand equipment for lowest-cost PCs. I pull ECS crap out of white box machines all the fucking time, probably three or four times more often than the next most common failed motherboard I deal with (Asus, if anyone cares).
I would therefore respectfully submit that perhaps the title of this article should be changed to reflect this record of poor reliabilty. Something like: "ECS: Don't ever do things the way we do them" or "ECS: We can't help it, we were born like this."
Kef Reference series. Wonderful speakers, particularly for classical music.
Normally I normally go to midnight showings of the geek-anticipated variety. The crowds are more appreciative, and given the geekish inability to mate, babies tend not to be a problem.
On the other hand, even though I've spent $25,000 on speakers, surround processing, a projector, screen and theater-like seating, a decent movie theater still has a bigger screen and better sound than I do.
And sometimes, there's nothing like communal awe. Anyone else see a midnight showing of "Return of the King?" You know, the ones that only the hardcore fans went to?
I do feel a difference in responsiveness in using 2003 Server over XP or 2000, yes. Actually, though, what REALLY made me aware of the difference was loaning out a machine with 2003 Server installed to someone who'd had XP. The hardware on the machines in question was identical but my customer was swearing up and down that I had given her a faster computer.
2003 has a different kernel version from XP and most of the fluff is turned off by default. There's no system restore or theme support, and those are good things.
The desktop machine will be faster, not because of the OS, but because laptop hard disks suck donkey dick, even if the drive has the same # of RPMs. Also, your Pentium 4M processor throttles quite a bit when it's unplugged from a wall or when the CPU is less than fully utilized. Finally, unless you reloaded your HP notebook sometime after you got it, you have the monumental piles of shit that HP puts on everything, running in the background.
All that said, 2000 and XP really do perform virtually identically on the same hardware. Server 2003 is somewhat faster than both - I've taken to loading my desktops with the Web Edition Server (I have a bunch of spare licenses) because it seems like the most tolerable upgrade from 2000 Pro.
Well, the cheapest way to do it is to run your new-ish VCR into something that has the right in- and outputs, yet doesn't grok macrovision. I use an old beta unit for that purpose.
However, it's really worth tracking down rips from the laserdisc set if you'd like the best possible quality. Non-degrading picture + more common Svideo outputs (yes, some (S)VHS players have 'em, but you'd really have to go out of your way to own one of them) both contribute a lot to having something that doesn't awful to anyone used to 36"+ TVs and DVD picture quality.
4.7GB ISOs of the laserdisc versions are on Torrent sites everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a lot better than {8_8} apparently thinks it is. Philip Marlowe in a futuristic setting, basically. Lots of fun and interesting subtext. A cool as hell score ("Blue Runner Blues", especially). Art design to die for.
I think it succeeds in large degree because it's not a science fiction movie. Blade Runner could've been set in London in 1944 (Deckard hunts nazi spies), and it would've still been a good movie.
I believe it is widely considered the best science fiction movie ever made.
Are there people out there like that?
...and, they are leery at first. They say "Oh. Tabs are kind of neat", and "Sure, it's keeping out spyware, but will it work with my bank web site?" (generally it does, these days... thank you Safari!)
Honestly, in the last few months I've gone from saying "Whatever." to the people who use IE to saying that I won't help them with ANYTHING until they dump IE.
And then I show them the power of adblock and a decent set of preferences. This is something that IE will *never* have. I show them a modestly busy page like Excite.com with IE, and then with Firefox + Adblock. And that's the trigger. IE is but a distant memory.
I can honestly say that I have TWO greeting cards on my desk at work, thanking me for installing Firefox on someone's computer.
Dear AC. There are places - huge swathes, in fact - of the USA where broadband is not available. I lived in one of them until just last year. Not only that, it was NOT possible for me to achieve a connection faster than 14.4. I spent TEN YEARS thinking of 28.8 as an UPGRADE.
Just because you're lucky enough to live in an area of this (or whatever other) country that's urban enough to have had fast internet service for several years doesn't mean everyone else has, too.
Not only that, but for the most part flash actually obstructs real content. Blind people can't interact with it. Search engines can't search it. It's a pain in the ass for a normal human being to save it. The only thing in its favor is that to some people, it looks neat.
Flash is bullshit and should be treated as such.
Since it hasn't even hit the test server yet, I don't think we'll be seeing it in August no matter what the devs say. With all the Pumpkin heads in the screenshots, and the fact that CoV's beta will probably open in a couple weeks, I'm think it'll probably be early or mid October.
New Intel (9x5 chipset) boards, some nforce 3s and all nforce 4s, I think.
I wouldn't buy any of the above, however. I've had terrible luck with nvidia-based motherboards and, well, Intel motherboards only work with the kind of chips I don't have.
Since I *do* build machines with SATA drives and no floppy, what I do instead is perform my initial build on something generic (Via chipset with Promise or Sil non-integrated controller, whatever, but installing onto a standard 40GB PATA drive), install all yer drivers, sysprep then ghost, and use that as the basis for my install.
Right now I have three Windows XP install discs, one for Via/Sil, one for Via/Promise, one for Intel and SiS chipsets. Works fine for me.
XP has the same problem. The solution is to get a motherboard which properly integrates the SATA controller into the system chipset.
Er, that should be 20, not 2.
Doesn't pop music always sound like crap anyway?
The studios should have mutliple tracks with which to arrange their music, even stuff from the last 2 years. Even if everything was digital, they still sampled more than 44kHz (I understand recordings have mostly been made at 48kHz or 96kHz for some time) and they still recorded the drums separate from the guitar separate from the vocal. They have something to work with, it just doesn't matter, because in that case the music is about being loud far more than it's about being any kind of nuanced.
I think I have most Jazz and classical releases. There are more DVD-As (and SACDs - I have a couple hundred of them, too) than you think. It's mostly a matter of the disc being released on boutique labels (e.g. Chesky) that don't have tons of distribution, rather than mainstream (say, EMI).
DVD-A is really the format in the better position, since almost all DVD-A discs include a AC3 track that'll play in a standard DVD player. Sadly, DVD-A also has the far weaker catalog. There's no "Kind of Blue" or "The White Album" on DVD-A.
Anyway, there's a whole bunch of chicken and egg problems associated with high-res audio (you need 5 speakers, you need a decent catalog, you need widespread adoption of players, you need simple cabling), but I have done everything I can to support BOTH of the multichannel formats.
I must be nobody, then. I have a couple hundred DVD-Audio discs, and I'm very happy to see that someone has taken the effort to ensure that someday I'll be able to copy those discs.
High resolution, multichannel audio is a good thing - much better than lossy compression on crappy downloaded tracks. It's a shame more people haven't realized that.
Trackballs don't have that problem.
Speaking as someone with just over 8TB of online storage crammed into my 1200 square foot home, I think that day is closer than you think.
:D
I can't wait.
Wow. I didn't think it was possible for a rational human being to agree with Antonin Scalia about anything
Yup, actually I did sign up. Your .sig worked. :)
See, now here is a funny thing.
.sig. I clicked his link, and I'm really considering signing up.
I use the positively militant set of Adblock rules from here, and as a result I'm barely aware that there are ads on the internet.
But... I happen to be interested in a cheap hosting plan for myself, and the parent poster here has a nice, non-intrusive advertisement as his
This is how ads should be. I'm glad for google, and people like this guy, who understand the power of plain-text advertizing.
Also, in the spirit of the last two posters: Fuck Double-click. Fuck them in their stupid asses.
I prefer inpple, myself. :D
Albatron has issues of its own - try using one of their boards with an ATI 9600 - but I give them a lot of credit for offering premium Via Envy sound chips, and they ARE reliable.
Gigabyte stuff is a positive joy to work with, when I find it.
Those would probably be my top two as well, along with Biostar, which seems to make the best of the "cheapie" boards at the moment.
Many computer shops carry ECS-brand equipment for lowest-cost PCs. I pull ECS crap out of white box machines all the fucking time, probably three or four times more often than the next most common failed motherboard I deal with (Asus, if anyone cares).
I would therefore respectfully submit that perhaps the title of this article should be changed to reflect this record of poor reliabilty. Something like: "ECS: Don't ever do things the way we do them" or "ECS: We can't help it, we were born like this."
Where is the +4 funny for this?
Kef Reference series. Wonderful speakers, particularly for classical music.
Normally I normally go to midnight showings of the geek-anticipated variety. The crowds are more appreciative, and given the geekish inability to mate, babies tend not to be a problem.
On the other hand, even though I've spent $25,000 on speakers, surround processing, a projector, screen and theater-like seating, a decent movie theater still has a bigger screen and better sound than I do.
And sometimes, there's nothing like communal awe. Anyone else see a midnight showing of "Return of the King?" You know, the ones that only the hardcore fans went to?
I do feel a difference in responsiveness in using 2003 Server over XP or 2000, yes.
Actually, though, what REALLY made me aware of the difference was loaning out a machine with 2003 Server installed to someone who'd had XP. The hardware on the machines in question was identical but my customer was swearing up and down that I had given her a faster computer.
2003 has a different kernel version from XP and most of the fluff is turned off by default. There's no system restore or theme support, and those are good things.
The desktop machine will be faster, not because of the OS, but because laptop hard disks suck donkey dick, even if the drive has the same # of RPMs. Also, your Pentium 4M processor throttles quite a bit when it's unplugged from a wall or when the CPU is less than fully utilized.
Finally, unless you reloaded your HP notebook sometime after you got it, you have the monumental piles of shit that HP puts on everything, running in the background.
All that said, 2000 and XP really do perform virtually identically on the same hardware. Server 2003 is somewhat faster than both - I've taken to loading my desktops with the Web Edition Server (I have a bunch of spare licenses) because it seems like the most tolerable upgrade from 2000 Pro.
Well, the cheapest way to do it is to run your new-ish VCR into something that has the right in- and outputs, yet doesn't grok macrovision. I use an old beta unit for that purpose.
However, it's really worth tracking down rips from the laserdisc set if you'd like the best possible quality. Non-degrading picture + more common Svideo outputs (yes, some (S)VHS players have 'em, but you'd really have to go out of your way to own one of them) both contribute a lot to having something that doesn't awful to anyone used to 36"+ TVs and DVD picture quality.
4.7GB ISOs of the laserdisc versions are on Torrent sites everywhere.
I'd suggest a Radeon X700 Pro for about $120. It's somewhat faster than a 9800 Pro especially for the newer games. Very reasonable.