The day I was able to say goodbye to my land line was a sweet day indeed. Telus managed to screw up everything I ever asked them to do.
They're shady, unethical, and mostly incompetent. If it's at all possible to do so, just don't deal with them. Thankfully even rural areas are beginning to have better options.
The cinematics for Diablo were amazing. The ones for Starcraft were wonderful - I still get a chill watching the "funeral" sequence. The first one for Warcraft III blew the curve again. They always had a lock on terrific art and technical achievement.
The first two thirds of this new cinematic was just, "Pretty, but... common". The last third pulled it out, and it's once again great. They aren't leading the pack by a large margin anymore though. The available technology has leveled the playing field. They'll have to step up.
You mean that something with as many variables as strength and quality of a wireless connection can't be reduced to a value of "bars" between one and five without loss of information? Say it isn't so.
"I have played fiddle for 10 years, mostly bluegrass and Irish music."
Good heavens, man. Don't open a complex mathematical analysis with, "One time I put eight apples with four apples and I counted them up - and there were 12 apples!"
Kidding. I just thought I'd get the fiddle joke over with.
"Oh man, because its so hard to launch IE and have it go "OMG I'm not your default anymore, could you pretty please let me be your default again?"
You miss the point. The relative ease of correcting the change isn't a consideration. It should have asked permission before changing any defaults or associations. That's just considerate programming.
Good - This is the very first version of Firefox that didn't crash on me in the first half hour (or at all yet, three hours and counting). The last one was the only piece of misbehaving software on my system, and after half a day and at least a dozen crashes I gave up on it.
Bad - I had no choice. It insisted on being my default browser. That's one of the indicators of bad software. That's not "Quicktime" bad, mind you, but it's a terrible choice nonetheless.
In the end it's still my number 3. I use Opera quite often - in fact I much prefer Opera to Firefox.
My "most often used" browser is still IE7. Go ahead and flame me.
"According to the definition of sexual relations in that trial he didn't have any with Monica. He was impeached. If we are impeaching presidents for having sex/cheating on wives then Bush and Co. should be drawn and quartered."
Clinton wasn't impeached for having sex or cheating on his wife. He was impeached for lying about it under oath. Infidelity and power have always been joined at the hip. All he had to say was, "I did it, and I am sorry." Then it would have just been a P.R. problem, and not a legal one.
"When it's 1024 processors in a water-cooled solid block of silicon"
Somewhere there's a geek who has already accomplished this goal. He's using it to run Crysis at 4800x3600 with full detail, at 1600 frames per second, and no matter who he shows it off to, he still can't get laid.
"In the UK, as in most countries, the amount of wealth a person has is generally inversely proportional to how hard they've worked for it. The richest people are mostly the ones who inherited it and didn't work for it at all."
Not to be pedantic (which, of course, means I'm being pedantic), but these things are not inversely proportional. Otherwise every do-nothing who should be sleeping in a cardboard box would have a mansion, a yacht, and many dedicated servants.
I would suggest that for the average person from the gutter through the upper middle class, their wealth is proportional to their effort. I'll concede that the situation changes for the exceedingly rich.
He knows you did the work, and he's probably very happy with it. Is it really that important at this stage of your career to have your acomplishments passed up the ladder? You're a new grad. Don't look upon simple job security with disdain - it's a nice reward these days.
"then what happens ? a faggot in management decides that they should make things more easier to get more subscribers to bring in more bucks, and voila - all new players take less, and on occasion NO time to get access to what you have toiled months for."
This would only bother you if too much of your real self-image is invested in your WoW persona.
"Baloney. (MS Outlook with Exchange) is a terrible product. It just happens to be ubiquitous in the corporate world because of Mcrosoft's monopolistic practices combined with a lack of good competition."
I don't habitually defend Microsoft, but I completely disagree with you here. At work we're migrating away from Notes (thank the maker), and I happily volunteered to be one of the first users during the beta stage. I live my programming life on Solaris, and in G2, and I'm a fan of UNIX in general. I've run umpteen versions of linux in my life. I've used a dozen or more email clients with some regularity, and a number of calendars. And over the years I've realized this:
Outlook and Exchange Server make me happy.
Have you seen the Web Acess client? There's NOTHING out there that compares. The ridiculous bag of inconsistent behaviour and busted UI design that is Lotus Notes is something I'll be glad to see the tail end of.
"Sony has a small window where Blu-Ray is available and convenient, legal downloads aren't. They had better make the most of it, or Blu-Ray will join mini-disc in the "almost but not quite" category. Remember those?"
I keep hearing this, but I don't buy it, even for a second.
CD sales are really only now beginning to suffer significantly, and takes about 600MB to download a pristine copy of an album. Even so, most people are downloading compressed versions of the songs that take 1/10th of the space.
DVD's are the juggernaut of movie sales, and the ability to pirate these movies has been around for years. But it can take 7GB to download a movie, so very few people ever download uncompressed movies. So they accept degraded movies with no extras. And so DVD's are still selling.
And now you want me to believe that somehow digital downloads are going to kill sales of high definition movies in the near term, when some phantom window expires? Don't be silly. if people don't download full DVD's because the file size is too large, they certainly won't download 25-40GB high definition movies. They'll go on being happy with their over-compressed, feature-stripped versions, and the growing number of people who are buying 1080p flat panels will continue to add a PS3 or some other player to their purchase.
The far more likely source of piracy is not digital downloads - it's simple copying. The high cost of media will keep that at bay for a while.
Finally, nobody with a brain will buy movies by digital download in the near term. Hard drives don't last forever, and unless you buy the right to repeatedly download the movie in perpetuity - and the provider promises to always be there to provide the download - then you are faced with a decision. Live with the possibility of sudden loss of your purchase, or commit yourself to a never-ending cycle of backups, continually replacing the aging copies with new ones. A 50 movie collection might need 1.25 terabytes of space for backups, but then that's hardly a problem when you way how convenient they are, right?
For movies, physical media is king - and it will remain king for a very long time.
Your stomping of the grandparent was truly beautiful.
However, I cannot help but pray that the grandparent finds something with which to crush you. Because then it would be your turn again, and I would be even more entertained.
"Perhaps Congress needs to get involved and sort this mess out so HD-DVD users don't get screwed out of their investment..."
Sure. And while we're at it, we'll get Congress to get involved every single time a technology fails to gain ground. We'll go after companies that stopped supporting Laserdisc, 8-Track, Betamax, and all of the gas stations that stopped providing leaded gasoline for my '72 Dodge Dart.
People bought HD-DVD during a format war. Why in heaven's name should they be protected from the outcome of it? If the studios are willing to step up and offer compensation to people who bought the failed format, well, that would be very nice of them. But law has no business in this business.
...but this may be the first time someone has been sentenced to death for using the internet.
While it's certainly terrible to hear something like this is happening, the person is not being sentenced to death for using the internet. They're being sentenced for doing something much more specific. If somebody in the U.S. drove from one town to another and then shot somebody, they wouldn't go to jail for driving on the road.
The internet might have been used during this, well... "crime"... but you can certainly use the internet in Afghanistan (if you can get access) without getting condemned to death.
Commentary lines like this one annoy me because they're bad logic, bad summarization, and just bad in general for the brain.
According to CNN, part of Africa was hit as well. I'm worried. I just sent $1000 to a fellow over there to cover the costs needed to release $100,000 I won in a contest. He was supposed to get back to me via email.
Slashdot Mirror
The day I was able to say goodbye to my land line was a sweet day indeed. Telus managed to screw up everything I ever asked them to do.
They're shady, unethical, and mostly incompetent. If it's at all possible to do so, just don't deal with them. Thankfully even rural areas are beginning to have better options.
"For a three-minute-long cinematic, I find that statement to be misguided. You need to judge the cinematic as a whole."
Actually, that's exactly what I did. See the text you quoted, where I said the trailer was great.
My point was that what they are offering isn't eclipsing the competition like it used to.
Remember this one from 1999? The "wow" factor of that one is far greater than that of this new trailer.
Here you go.
The cinematics for Diablo were amazing. The ones for Starcraft were wonderful - I still get a chill watching the "funeral" sequence. The first one for Warcraft III blew the curve again. They always had a lock on terrific art and technical achievement.
The first two thirds of this new cinematic was just, "Pretty, but... common". The last third pulled it out, and it's once again great. They aren't leading the pack by a large margin anymore though. The available technology has leveled the playing field. They'll have to step up.
"when the species last shared a common ancestor with humans"
It seems to me that if they shared a common ancestor at any point, they'd always share a common ancestor.
You mean that something with as many variables as strength and quality of a wireless connection can't be reduced to a value of "bars" between one and five without loss of information? Say it isn't so.
Slow news day, apparently.
"I have played fiddle for 10 years, mostly bluegrass and Irish music."
Good heavens, man. Don't open a complex mathematical analysis with, "One time I put eight apples with four apples and I counted them up - and there were 12 apples!"
Kidding. I just thought I'd get the fiddle joke over with.
"I, for one, prefer my Les Paul ..."
welcome to the guitarist's rumble! Sharks on the left, Jets on the right! Get dancing.
Just wait until the classic Strat guys show up.
I've got six guitars from six makers, and they're all great for something.
"Oh man, because its so hard to launch IE and have it go "OMG I'm not your default anymore, could you pretty please let me be your default again?"
You miss the point. The relative ease of correcting the change isn't a consideration. It should have asked permission before changing any defaults or associations. That's just considerate programming.
"And FF3 doesn't insist on being a default browser any more than Opera or IE7"
My install screen said, "Firefox will be installed as the default browser." No checkbox, no question.
Good - This is the very first version of Firefox that didn't crash on me in the first half hour (or at all yet, three hours and counting). The last one was the only piece of misbehaving software on my system, and after half a day and at least a dozen crashes I gave up on it. Bad - I had no choice. It insisted on being my default browser. That's one of the indicators of bad software. That's not "Quicktime" bad, mind you, but it's a terrible choice nonetheless. In the end it's still my number 3. I use Opera quite often - in fact I much prefer Opera to Firefox. My "most often used" browser is still IE7. Go ahead and flame me.
"According to the definition of sexual relations in that trial he didn't have any with Monica. He was impeached. If we are impeaching presidents for having sex/cheating on wives then Bush and Co. should be drawn and quartered."
Clinton wasn't impeached for having sex or cheating on his wife. He was impeached for lying about it under oath. Infidelity and power have always been joined at the hip. All he had to say was, "I did it, and I am sorry." Then it would have just been a P.R. problem, and not a legal one.
"When it's 1024 processors in a water-cooled solid block of silicon"
Somewhere there's a geek who has already accomplished this goal. He's using it to run Crysis at 4800x3600 with full detail, at 1600 frames per second, and no matter who he shows it off to, he still can't get laid.
"2.5 - get a good DP for free."
In my experience, a good DP costs at least four times your companions usual hourly rate.
"In the UK, as in most countries, the amount of wealth a person has is generally inversely proportional to how hard they've worked for it. The richest people are mostly the ones who inherited it and didn't work for it at all."
Not to be pedantic (which, of course, means I'm being pedantic), but these things are not inversely proportional. Otherwise every do-nothing who should be sleeping in a cardboard box would have a mansion, a yacht, and many dedicated servants.
I would suggest that for the average person from the gutter through the upper middle class, their wealth is proportional to their effort. I'll concede that the situation changes for the exceedingly rich.
He knows you did the work, and he's probably very happy with it. Is it really that important at this stage of your career to have your acomplishments passed up the ladder? You're a new grad. Don't look upon simple job security with disdain - it's a nice reward these days.
"then what happens ? a faggot in management decides that they should make things more easier to get more subscribers to bring in more bucks, and voila - all new players take less, and on occasion NO time to get access to what you have toiled months for."
This would only bother you if too much of your real self-image is invested in your WoW persona.
"Baloney. (MS Outlook with Exchange) is a terrible product. It just happens to be ubiquitous in the corporate world because of Mcrosoft's monopolistic practices combined with a lack of good competition."
I don't habitually defend Microsoft, but I completely disagree with you here. At work we're migrating away from Notes (thank the maker), and I happily volunteered to be one of the first users during the beta stage. I live my programming life on Solaris, and in G2, and I'm a fan of UNIX in general. I've run umpteen versions of linux in my life. I've used a dozen or more email clients with some regularity, and a number of calendars. And over the years I've realized this:
Outlook and Exchange Server make me happy.
Have you seen the Web Acess client? There's NOTHING out there that compares. The ridiculous bag of inconsistent behaviour and busted UI design that is Lotus Notes is something I'll be glad to see the tail end of.
"Sony has a small window where Blu-Ray is available and convenient, legal downloads aren't. They had better make the most of it, or Blu-Ray will join mini-disc in the "almost but not quite" category. Remember those?"
I keep hearing this, but I don't buy it, even for a second.
CD sales are really only now beginning to suffer significantly, and takes about 600MB to download a pristine copy of an album. Even so, most people are downloading compressed versions of the songs that take 1/10th of the space.
DVD's are the juggernaut of movie sales, and the ability to pirate these movies has been around for years. But it can take 7GB to download a movie, so very few people ever download uncompressed movies. So they accept degraded movies with no extras. And so DVD's are still selling.
And now you want me to believe that somehow digital downloads are going to kill sales of high definition movies in the near term, when some phantom window expires? Don't be silly. if people don't download full DVD's because the file size is too large, they certainly won't download 25-40GB high definition movies. They'll go on being happy with their over-compressed, feature-stripped versions, and the growing number of people who are buying 1080p flat panels will continue to add a PS3 or some other player to their purchase.
The far more likely source of piracy is not digital downloads - it's simple copying. The high cost of media will keep that at bay for a while.
Finally, nobody with a brain will buy movies by digital download in the near term. Hard drives don't last forever, and unless you buy the right to repeatedly download the movie in perpetuity - and the provider promises to always be there to provide the download - then you are faced with a decision. Live with the possibility of sudden loss of your purchase, or commit yourself to a never-ending cycle of backups, continually replacing the aging copies with new ones. A 50 movie collection might need 1.25 terabytes of space for backups, but then that's hardly a problem when you way how convenient they are, right?
For movies, physical media is king - and it will remain king for a very long time.
Your stomping of the grandparent was truly beautiful.
However, I cannot help but pray that the grandparent finds something with which to crush you. Because then it would be your turn again, and I would be even more entertained.
Carry on! I'm tuned to this channel.
"Perhaps Congress needs to get involved and sort this mess out so HD-DVD users don't get screwed out of their investment..."
Sure. And while we're at it, we'll get Congress to get involved every single time a technology fails to gain ground. We'll go after companies that stopped supporting Laserdisc, 8-Track, Betamax, and all of the gas stations that stopped providing leaded gasoline for my '72 Dodge Dart.
People bought HD-DVD during a format war. Why in heaven's name should they be protected from the outcome of it? If the studios are willing to step up and offer compensation to people who bought the failed format, well, that would be very nice of them. But law has no business in this business.
Trying to market and sell their commercial products through promotion and contests.
Despicable. I don't know how they can sleep at night.
...but this may be the first time someone has been sentenced to death for using the internet.
While it's certainly terrible to hear something like this is happening, the person is not being sentenced to death for using the internet. They're being sentenced for doing something much more specific. If somebody in the U.S. drove from one town to another and then shot somebody, they wouldn't go to jail for driving on the road.
The internet might have been used during this, well... "crime"... but you can certainly use the internet in Afghanistan (if you can get access) without getting condemned to death.
Commentary lines like this one annoy me because they're bad logic, bad summarization, and just bad in general for the brain.
All the games for the Apple IIe looked like crap because of those silly green monitors. Except, of course, for Lode Runner, which was unaffected.
According to CNN, part of Africa was hit as well. I'm worried. I just sent $1000 to a fellow over there to cover the costs needed to release $100,000 I won in a contest. He was supposed to get back to me via email.