This was modded down, but is actually good advice. This is how I got much of my UNIX experience when I was young and didn't have money. Just don't do anything malicious. And don't get caught.
Whey you will realise that it is much easier and convinient to use text based e-mail clients which usually are more powerfull. I love my fetchmail/procmail/mutt setup.
You'll understand the convenience of GUI when your female friends start sending you nudie pics of themselves. Sure you can just view the files in a seperate viewer, but its just more convenient when you get an e-mail from them that says "I'd like to be fucking you in this position" followed by a picture of them in the position.
Yeah! Finally we after-schooler AD&Ders have a group nerdier than us to beat up!
Uh, sorry.. I was an after-school hacker, and I'm sure I could kick your ass. That and all the ladies loved me cause I hacked their computer assignments so they didn't have to do them. Guess I wasn't a white hat, though.. True, those white hats are pansy-ass bitches.
This little trick worked back in 1996 on the payphones in the town I went to university at:
Go to a regular payphone, dial 1-800 number. Wait for it to hang up on you. You get a strange sounding dial tone (a bit fast). You have a short amount of time (like 5 seconds or so) to dial the long distance number you want to reach, but if you do it successfully your call is connected. You can call local numbers, but you have to dial the area code.
We actually discovered it almost by accident. I told my friend about a similar technique which worked on COCOTS, but involved using a box that you use after the 1-800 number hangs up on you. We had been trying to get a red box to work, and he tried the 1-800 technique on a whim on a regular payphone. He tried using the redbox after the 1-800 and then found that it worked! We tried it a few more times and realized we didn't even need the redbox. I thought it was pretty wild that even in 1996 such a simple hole existed. We exploited the hell out of it until about 6 months later it quit working.
Yeah, I knew that was a misleading sentence when I wrote:)
It's a dual-boot box with WinXP and FreeBSD, which I failed to mention (and will put Gentoo on that one at some point). I generally boot FreeBSD when I boot it up. The few times I have been booting up WinXP it was because I have been helping my friends troubleshoot WinXP. I pirated and installed WinXP just for the eXPerience, so I know my way around it, not for any real use.
It looks like the pirates who weren't allowed to upgrade to SP1 have gotten the last laugh. Piracy does pay! Thanks MS, for pointing this out.
I thought the same thing. Unfortunately, I'm one of the pirates who used a crack which allowed me to install SP1. Now I regret what I have done.. no, not pirating WinXP, I regret installing SP1.
Fortunately, I don't use that WinXP box for much (at least not for booting WinXP).
Though I can care less for my own purposes (doing all my browsing in Linux), I like the idea of Mozilla being a complete alternative to IE (meaning it can do everything IE can). I expect Mozilla to have an option to disable loading of the ActiveX support, and also provide a version of it compiled without ActiveX support.
What browser are you using? Going back in most browsers these days will take you back to the form with whatever you had filled out restored (you don't lose your comment even if it wasn't accepted). It saves my ass all the time. I believe certain ActiveX-supporting browsers (no, not Mozilla 1.4) still don't support such simple things.
Well, right now I am an x86 user, using Debian Linux as my primary OS, and Windows for miscellaneous stuff. But the way Apple and Mac OS X is going, I think I will be a Mac user in 2005.
I really see Linux taking over the business desktop. Though I see Windows continuing to have a hold on the home user, with their games, etc. Though, yes, things can change a lot in two years.
They'll try "a", and will get little help; then they'll try "b" and get infinitely non-helpful advice like "use man" or "RTFM"
Honestly this has never happened to me. If you get that kind of response you're asking the wrong people. When I've asked a question, I either get a prompt answer, or I get no answer at all because no one is familiar with my problem. Maybe its just the type of questions I ask, and where I ask them. Being on the other end of it, I'll gladly answer people's question if I know the answer, and sometimes throw in an extra bit of advice or information.
With computer discussions in general, I see a lot of people respond to questions with "did you do a Google search?" This is sometimes a bad attitude, but in a lot of cases they are correct in saying that as some questions can be answered very easilly that way. But this is applicable to all computer-related discussions, not just open source discussions.
And I agree with your assessment about lack of documentation for the most part. But this is really a case by case thing. Some things are completely lacking in documentation, some software has brilliantly written documentation. Some software is so complex and the docs are equally complex. Also, some things are so new that the information hasn't been placed out there yet.
In some cases the project simply didn't spend enough time on documentation and the docs are not helpful. I see this a lot, even in OSS projects that are funded. I often find myself doing Google searches to find information rather than using the software's actual documentation. Fortunately a lot of the info is out there somewhere, but finding it can be difficult in some cases.
If there's an enterprise level customer out there that doesn't have a firewall blocking unnecessary ports anyway, then let them rot.
Ok, well, then what about attacks from behind the firewall? A firewall only prevents so much. If one person executes or gets infected by a trojan/worm exploiting the hole, there goes every NT 4.0 machine behind the firewall.
A firewall is not a solution. Sure, you can have an individual firewall for every NT 4.0 machine on your network, but that is going to cost you.
Getting rid of client-side processing, which would kind-of eradicate all this lowlevel cheats like wire-frames and stuff. If all the client gets it's a stream of pictures to display and all it sends back is the coordinates of what the state-of-the-art gaming controls are at the time, most cheats as we know them today would be gonzo.
Well, true this would make it more difficult to write a cheat. But then people could just write an aimbot that just reads the screen and use some kind of AI to determine where the enemy is. In any case, I don't see this ever happening in any game that involves fast-paced graphics. By the time we have very fast broadband, video cards will be at such a level that streaming video would not even come close to a locally rendered image. Maybe it would be a good idea for game developers to minimize the amount of information the client gets, though. For example, give the client only enough information to be able to render what's on the screen at a given moment, but let it render it by itself. Granted, you still have the posibility of writing an aimbot.
The only way to really defeat cheating is to use some kind of hardware solution. If this DRM crap takes off, game developers will be able to implement the technology to prevent outside applications from accessing what is being displayed on screen. But this may get hacked just like everything else. For example, someone could pipe the output of their video card to another PC, which will do the aimbot processing for you and send it back through to your keyboard/mouse/joystick.
In fact something like this has already been done. In the last few months there was a Slashdot article about someone who setup a camera which watched the computer screen and used AI to play Tetris (IIRC). The computer with the camera had no connection with the computer with Tetris on it, other than sending a keyboard signal back to it.
You can never stop cheating. But you can make it difficult to the point where most people won't attempt it.
Well, its not a one or the other kind of thing. You can use Windows and Linux. True, not everyone has two PC's and dual-booting tends to make you favor one OS over the other.
A lot of computers users don't play games. But yeah, there are a lot of things that are simply better/easier in Windows. Things like file-sharing apps (Kazaa), CD-writing software, interfacing with USB devices (cameras, mp3 players, etc). I know some people who went from knowing nothing about computers and hating them, to being total technophiles and at the computer all the time, but only to the extent that they used their Windows PC's for games, chat, and all the good multimedia stuff. I don't expect such a person to go and use Linux/UNIX, because they probably won't get what they want out of it, and the sheer amount of troubleshooting involved would be too much for them.
Then I've seen another one of my friends who started out with very little computer knowledge turn into a total Linux freak completely on his own in only a few years (career-wise he is non-technical). He went as far as to remove Windows from his PC. This guy knew more about the free/open source software world than I did, and I've been into computers for the last 15 years, 10 of which involved UNIX/Linux.
I think its when you realize you want more out of your computing experience that you move in this direction. And I think a lot of "personal users" reach a point where they itch for something more, something different. Just because someone is a casual user doesn't mean they are not capable of using Linux/UNIX and enjoying it. But then a lot of people will never take the leap to find out what its all about. Those of us who have experience in UNIX/Linux know how much it expands your computing experience, but you can only experience that for yourself.
Lately, I've been enjoying the fact that Linux is very remote access friendly. You can do everything from the command line. Sure, with Windows you can remote access the GUI, but when all you have is about 30kB/sec of bandwidth, you really can't do much very quickly. Those who haven't experienced the UNIX-like CLI, just don't know how powerful it is. And I don't feel Cygwin can give you this experience, it only shows a little of what is possible. The beauty of Linux/UNIX is that there is so much software written with the CLI in mind. The entire OS has been written in a way that everything can be done with the CLI. The GUI's are powerful too, but I think I've written enough already, so I won't go into that.
I would love to know how to use linux but to put it simply, I don't need to.
Well, someone could say they would love to know how to use computers but they simply don't need to. And its true, you don't really need to.
And one last thing:
All I have to do is double click a link to get my game to work.... what do YOU have to do? =/
I type in a single command to upgrade all the software on my computer, what do YOU have to do?:)
(and yes that upgrade command could run automatically if I wanted it to)
Why can't there be an "insert cursor(insertion point, that flashing vertical line)" command/keycombo so as to avoid having to use the mouse in the first place.
Well, actually, that's what caret browsing does in Mozilla/Phoenix. Press F7 and you get a cursor that you can move around with the keyboard. You can highlight text with it and click on links, etc. Personally I don't use this feature as it tends to be a bit quirky, but is nice (especially combined with type-ahead find) if you want to do keyboard-only browsing.
If you have to leave the keyboard to grab the mouse to to insert the cursor you might as well stay with the mouse for click and drag.
For me my mouse accuracy tends to make click and drag kind of a pain, especially with a trackball. So I like the click and then keyboard to highlight text (e.g. shift-ctrl-right arrow). But that's just personal preference and also depends on the situation as to which is quicker.
The practical applications, according to the press release, is ability 'to download a full-length DVD movie in less than five seconds'.
I'm sure the MPAA would love hearing that DVD downloading is considered a "practical application." Of course, they would consider it to be 500 DVDs since the protocol is 500x faster (or whatever it is) than the average consumer's connection.
You know, people can create their own DVDs these days. Think swapping home videos. Or maybe they were speaking of a possible content delivery model for the future. But, yeah, we all know what they were talking about.. 0-day warez. Or 0-minute warez, rather.
Most lunches are spent complaining about lack of enjoyment/challenge from the job and the fact that upper-management seems not to understand what we do.
Good rendering engine, terrible User Interface (the worst of all browsers). Tabbed interface, yadda yadda yadda, ONE good idea doesn't saves Mozilla's UI. Forgot what Microsoft is about? User Interface.
I know this is all subjective, but Microsoft's IE has the least intuitive user interface of all the current browsers. It is simply missing so many important features, of course you won't know they are missing until you try other browsers. IE is far behind, especially in their user interface. Just to name a few things missing: their zoom function is very ineffective. Mozilla zooms all text, Opera zooms everything. IE is quite lacking in keyboard controls. Want to copy/paste with IE? You're pretty much forced to use the mouse to highlight text. Compare that to Mozilla, click once at the beginning or end of text and then use keyboard controls to highlight what you want; or turn on carret browsing and navigate with keyboard; then there's type-ahead find, etc, etc. Tabbed browsing is good, but its definitely not the only thing that makes Mozilla's interface so usable. And I have yet to see an IE frontend that brings it anywhere near the functionality of Mozilla or Opera.
I think Mozilla/Phoenix's UI is highly effective, and its getting better with each release. Opera 7 is the best of the bunch IMHO, especially in regards to user interface. If you're still using IE, you're sadly behind the times.
One of the main goals of the Mozilla project was to establish standards, not necessarilly create a competing browser (after all, its just a reference implementation). People scoff at this, and say "standards don't matter, I'd rather have a browser that just works." Well, guess what? I think the Mozilla project has actually been successful in achieving this goal. I haven't had to use IE for any web page. Web sites seem to be conforming to the standards because the sites I visit render correctly in whatever standards-complaint browser I use (maybe I've just been lucky). When Mozilla 1.0 was released this wasn't exactly the case, but I've seen the progression since then.
You should be thankful they even let you search for free, as they could definitely charge for such a useful service.
No. They should be thankful that I click on their ads.
But on the otherhand, Google has every right to provide content in the way they wish. However, if they want to please their ad-clicking users, then they have to provide content in a way that satisfies these users.
Intel can't get away with it any more than Creative can, I believe, and it won't be long before Creative will have to start advertising real features consumers want, rather than how many speakers the card powers, or how man kHz sampling it's capable of. Noone who is not doing professional audio work NEEDS anything better than 44 kHz.
You've struck on a very good point. These cards are for typical consumers, not musicicians. At best, its aimed at amateur musicians. However, they advertise it as if its something a professional would use.
Being a total amateur, I'm still doing my recordings at 16-bit/44 kHz. Of course those are just scratch recordings, but even if they weren't... Considering the target media (audio CD's) is 16-bit/44 kHz anyways, what difference does it make? I suppose SNR is important, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Just hack into one, and 'borrow' some time on it.
This was modded down, but is actually good advice. This is how I got much of my UNIX experience when I was young and didn't have money. Just don't do anything malicious. And don't get caught.
Whey you will realise that it is much easier and convinient to use text based e-mail clients which usually are more powerfull. I love my fetchmail/procmail/mutt setup.
You'll understand the convenience of GUI when your female friends start sending you nudie pics of themselves. Sure you can just view the files in a seperate viewer, but its just more convenient when you get an e-mail from them that says "I'd like to be fucking you in this position" followed by a picture of them in the position.
oh god.. this is what the worlds needs more of... teenage pissing
that and people lacking a sense of humour?
Yeah! Finally we after-schooler AD&Ders have a group nerdier than us to beat up!
Uh, sorry.. I was an after-school hacker, and I'm sure I could kick your ass. That and all the ladies loved me cause I hacked their computer assignments so they didn't have to do them. Guess I wasn't a white hat, though.. True, those white hats are pansy-ass bitches.
This little trick worked back in 1996 on the payphones in the town I went to university at:
Go to a regular payphone, dial 1-800 number. Wait for it to hang up on you. You get a strange sounding dial tone (a bit fast). You have a short amount of time (like 5 seconds or so) to dial the long distance number you want to reach, but if you do it successfully your call is connected. You can call local numbers, but you have to dial the area code.
We actually discovered it almost by accident. I told my friend about a similar technique which worked on COCOTS, but involved using a box that you use after the 1-800 number hangs up on you. We had been trying to get a red box to work, and he tried the 1-800 technique on a whim on a regular payphone. He tried using the redbox after the 1-800 and then found that it worked! We tried it a few more times and realized we didn't even need the redbox. I thought it was pretty wild that even in 1996 such a simple hole existed. We exploited the hell out of it until about 6 months later it quit working.
Yeah, I knew that was a misleading sentence when I wrote :)
It's a dual-boot box with WinXP and FreeBSD, which I failed to mention (and will put Gentoo on that one at some point). I generally boot FreeBSD when I boot it up. The few times I have been booting up WinXP it was because I have been helping my friends troubleshoot WinXP. I pirated and installed WinXP just for the eXPerience, so I know my way around it, not for any real use.
It looks like the pirates who weren't allowed to upgrade to SP1 have gotten the last laugh. Piracy does pay! Thanks MS, for pointing this out.
I thought the same thing. Unfortunately, I'm one of the pirates who used a crack which allowed me to install SP1. Now I regret what I have done.. no, not pirating WinXP, I regret installing SP1.
Fortunately, I don't use that WinXP box for much (at least not for booting WinXP).
Run Windows? Want ActiveX? Run friggin Explorer!
Though I can care less for my own purposes (doing all my browsing in Linux), I like the idea of Mozilla being a complete alternative to IE (meaning it can do everything IE can). I expect Mozilla to have an option to disable loading of the ActiveX support, and also provide a version of it compiled without ActiveX support.
What browser are you using? Going back in most browsers these days will take you back to the form with whatever you had filled out restored (you don't lose your comment even if it wasn't accepted). It saves my ass all the time. I believe certain ActiveX-supporting browsers (no, not Mozilla 1.4) still don't support such simple things.
Well, right now I am an x86 user, using Debian Linux as my primary OS, and Windows for miscellaneous stuff. But the way Apple and Mac OS X is going, I think I will be a Mac user in 2005.
I really see Linux taking over the business desktop. Though I see Windows continuing to have a hold on the home user, with their games, etc. Though, yes, things can change a lot in two years.
They'll try "a", and will get little help; then they'll try "b" and get infinitely non-helpful advice like "use man" or "RTFM"
Honestly this has never happened to me. If you get that kind of response you're asking the wrong people. When I've asked a question, I either get a prompt answer, or I get no answer at all because no one is familiar with my problem. Maybe its just the type of questions I ask, and where I ask them. Being on the other end of it, I'll gladly answer people's question if I know the answer, and sometimes throw in an extra bit of advice or information.
With computer discussions in general, I see a lot of people respond to questions with "did you do a Google search?" This is sometimes a bad attitude, but in a lot of cases they are correct in saying that as some questions can be answered very easilly that way. But this is applicable to all computer-related discussions, not just open source discussions.
And I agree with your assessment about lack of documentation for the most part. But this is really a case by case thing. Some things are completely lacking in documentation, some software has brilliantly written documentation. Some software is so complex and the docs are equally complex. Also, some things are so new that the information hasn't been placed out there yet.
In some cases the project simply didn't spend enough time on documentation and the docs are not helpful. I see this a lot, even in OSS projects that are funded. I often find myself doing Google searches to find information rather than using the software's actual documentation. Fortunately a lot of the info is out there somewhere, but finding it can be difficult in some cases.
If there's an enterprise level customer out there that doesn't have a firewall blocking unnecessary ports anyway, then let them rot.
Ok, well, then what about attacks from behind the firewall? A firewall only prevents so much. If one person executes or gets infected by a trojan/worm exploiting the hole, there goes every NT 4.0 machine behind the firewall.
A firewall is not a solution. Sure, you can have an individual firewall for every NT 4.0 machine on your network, but that is going to cost you.
Getting rid of client-side processing, which would kind-of eradicate all this lowlevel cheats like wire-frames and stuff. If all the client gets it's a stream of pictures to display and all it sends back is the coordinates of what the state-of-the-art gaming controls are at the time, most cheats as we know them today would be gonzo.
Well, true this would make it more difficult to write a cheat. But then people could just write an aimbot that just reads the screen and use some kind of AI to determine where the enemy is. In any case, I don't see this ever happening in any game that involves fast-paced graphics. By the time we have very fast broadband, video cards will be at such a level that streaming video would not even come close to a locally rendered image. Maybe it would be a good idea for game developers to minimize the amount of information the client gets, though. For example, give the client only enough information to be able to render what's on the screen at a given moment, but let it render it by itself. Granted, you still have the posibility of writing an aimbot.
The only way to really defeat cheating is to use some kind of hardware solution. If this DRM crap takes off, game developers will be able to implement the technology to prevent outside applications from accessing what is being displayed on screen. But this may get hacked just like everything else. For example, someone could pipe the output of their video card to another PC, which will do the aimbot processing for you and send it back through to your keyboard/mouse/joystick.
In fact something like this has already been done. In the last few months there was a Slashdot article about someone who setup a camera which watched the computer screen and used AI to play Tetris (IIRC). The computer with the camera had no connection with the computer with Tetris on it, other than sending a keyboard signal back to it.
You can never stop cheating. But you can make it difficult to the point where most people won't attempt it.
Well, its not a one or the other kind of thing. You can use Windows and Linux. True, not everyone has two PC's and dual-booting tends to make you favor one OS over the other.
:)
A lot of computers users don't play games. But yeah, there are a lot of things that are simply better/easier in Windows. Things like file-sharing apps (Kazaa), CD-writing software, interfacing with USB devices (cameras, mp3 players, etc). I know some people who went from knowing nothing about computers and hating them, to being total technophiles and at the computer all the time, but only to the extent that they used their Windows PC's for games, chat, and all the good multimedia stuff. I don't expect such a person to go and use Linux/UNIX, because they probably won't get what they want out of it, and the sheer amount of troubleshooting involved would be too much for them.
Then I've seen another one of my friends who started out with very little computer knowledge turn into a total Linux freak completely on his own in only a few years (career-wise he is non-technical). He went as far as to remove Windows from his PC. This guy knew more about the free/open source software world than I did, and I've been into computers for the last 15 years, 10 of which involved UNIX/Linux.
I think its when you realize you want more out of your computing experience that you move in this direction. And I think a lot of "personal users" reach a point where they itch for something more, something different. Just because someone is a casual user doesn't mean they are not capable of using Linux/UNIX and enjoying it. But then a lot of people will never take the leap to find out what its all about. Those of us who have experience in UNIX/Linux know how much it expands your computing experience, but you can only experience that for yourself.
Lately, I've been enjoying the fact that Linux is very remote access friendly. You can do everything from the command line. Sure, with Windows you can remote access the GUI, but when all you have is about 30kB/sec of bandwidth, you really can't do much very quickly. Those who haven't experienced the UNIX-like CLI, just don't know how powerful it is. And I don't feel Cygwin can give you this experience, it only shows a little of what is possible. The beauty of Linux/UNIX is that there is so much software written with the CLI in mind. The entire OS has been written in a way that everything can be done with the CLI. The GUI's are powerful too, but I think I've written enough already, so I won't go into that.
I would love to know how to use linux but to put it simply, I don't need to.
Well, someone could say they would love to know how to use computers but they simply don't need to. And its true, you don't really need to.
And one last thing:
All I have to do is double click a link to get my game to work.... what do YOU have to do? =/
I type in a single command to upgrade all the software on my computer, what do YOU have to do?
(and yes that upgrade command could run automatically if I wanted it to)
Why can't there be an "insert cursor(insertion point, that flashing vertical line)" command/keycombo so as to avoid having to use the mouse in the first place.
Well, actually, that's what caret browsing does in Mozilla/Phoenix. Press F7 and you get a cursor that you can move around with the keyboard. You can highlight text with it and click on links, etc. Personally I don't use this feature as it tends to be a bit quirky, but is nice (especially combined with type-ahead find) if you want to do keyboard-only browsing.
If you have to leave the keyboard to grab the mouse to to insert the cursor you might as well stay with the mouse for click and drag.
For me my mouse accuracy tends to make click and drag kind of a pain, especially with a trackball. So I like the click and then keyboard to highlight text (e.g. shift-ctrl-right arrow). But that's just personal preference and also depends on the situation as to which is quicker.
The practical applications, according to the press release, is ability 'to download a full-length DVD movie in less than five seconds'.
I'm sure the MPAA would love hearing that DVD downloading is considered a "practical application." Of course, they would consider it to be 500 DVDs since the protocol is 500x faster (or whatever it is) than the average consumer's connection.
You know, people can create their own DVDs these days. Think swapping home videos. Or maybe they were speaking of a possible content delivery model for the future. But, yeah, we all know what they were talking about.. 0-day warez. Or 0-minute warez, rather.
I bet everyone else spends lunch talking about what condescending pretentious cocksucker you are. You're fired.
Ummm... No. They spend their lunch talking about how sexy I am. Yes, I'm riding through life on my good looks.
Most lunches are spent complaining about lack of enjoyment/challenge from the job and the fact that upper-management seems not to understand what we do.
Welcome to every company everywhere.
Ummm.. No. I spend my lunch eating.
Good rendering engine, terrible User Interface (the worst of all browsers). Tabbed interface, yadda yadda yadda, ONE good idea doesn't saves Mozilla's UI.
Forgot what Microsoft is about? User Interface.
I know this is all subjective, but Microsoft's IE has the least intuitive user interface of all the current browsers. It is simply missing so many important features, of course you won't know they are missing until you try other browsers. IE is far behind, especially in their user interface. Just to name a few things missing: their zoom function is very ineffective. Mozilla zooms all text, Opera zooms everything. IE is quite lacking in keyboard controls. Want to copy/paste with IE? You're pretty much forced to use the mouse to highlight text. Compare that to Mozilla, click once at the beginning or end of text and then use keyboard controls to highlight what you want; or turn on carret browsing and navigate with keyboard; then there's type-ahead find, etc, etc. Tabbed browsing is good, but its definitely not the only thing that makes Mozilla's interface so usable. And I have yet to see an IE frontend that brings it anywhere near the functionality of Mozilla or Opera.
I think Mozilla/Phoenix's UI is highly effective, and its getting better with each release. Opera 7 is the best of the bunch IMHO, especially in regards to user interface. If you're still using IE, you're sadly behind the times.
One of the main goals of the Mozilla project was to establish standards, not necessarilly create a competing browser (after all, its just a reference implementation). People scoff at this, and say "standards don't matter, I'd rather have a browser that just works." Well, guess what? I think the Mozilla project has actually been successful in achieving this goal. I haven't had to use IE for any web page. Web sites seem to be conforming to the standards because the sites I visit render correctly in whatever standards-complaint browser I use (maybe I've just been lucky). When Mozilla 1.0 was released this wasn't exactly the case, but I've seen the progression since then.
Get ready for 200 comments saying "Why would you run Linux when you can run OS X?"
Indian enginners are said to be quite good and damn cheep if I recall well.
IAAIE (I am an Indian engineer)
You're damn right we are good, but we are not cheap. Oh wait, I was born in the United States so I don't really count as an Indian engineer.
Personally, I don't like online books too much. I'd rather be able to kick back and drink a beer and read. Can't do that with a 19" CRT.
Ah.. But with online books, you can kick back and smoke a joint and read. Can't do that with... oh wait, nevermind.
After watching Final Fantasy and being very impressed, I've been hoping to see some photorealistic CGI porn. Just imagine what could be done.
You should be thankful they even let you search for free, as they could definitely charge for such a useful service.
No. They should be thankful that I click on their ads.
But on the otherhand, Google has every right to provide content in the way they wish. However, if they want to please their ad-clicking users, then they have to provide content in a way that satisfies these users.
Intel can't get away with it any more than Creative can, I believe, and it won't be long before Creative will have to start advertising real features consumers want, rather than how many speakers the card powers, or how man kHz sampling it's capable of. Noone who is not doing professional audio work NEEDS anything better than 44 kHz.
You've struck on a very good point. These cards are for typical consumers, not musicicians. At best, its aimed at amateur musicians. However, they advertise it as if its something a professional would use.
Being a total amateur, I'm still doing my recordings at 16-bit/44 kHz. Of course those are just scratch recordings, but even if they weren't... Considering the target media (audio CD's) is 16-bit/44 kHz anyways, what difference does it make? I suppose SNR is important, though.