I agree 100% with the "rails" comment, but that's why the game is compelling. KotOR had a GREAT story. Sure, it was like downhill skiing - you could veer a little to the left or the right - you were always going to end up in pretty much the same place at the bottom of the mountain; but what an entertaining ride.
I don't want to come off sounding like some Star Wars ass-kiss fanboi, but part of what made KotOR good was that you were stuck - precisely - to those "rails" and to the story.
I took great glee in my darkside replay. I couldn't tell you how many people I had to be nice to my first time through the game that I looked forward to taking revenge out on the second time through.
KotOR's best sequel is itself. Play it again. Dark and Light are fun enough, the dialog and story interesting enough, that it's worth every second of your second time through.
Actually,.ZIP is pretty bad at a lot of compressions. If you have 10 identical files, all of which compress to 1 meg, you'll get a 10 meg zip (plus a bit of overhead). Under ideal conditions, rezip it, and you'll get a 1 meg file (plus a bit more overhead).
Winrar makes "solid" archives for just this reason.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to buy the first High Definition (HD) Radio in the United States.
You: Did I win?
Radio Station: I'm sorry, you're caller #1
You: Did I win?
Radio Station: I'm sorry, you're caller #2
You: Did I win?
Radio Station: I'm sorry, you're caller #3
You: Did I win?
Radio Station: I'm sorry, you're caller #4
You: Did I win?
Radio Station: I'm sorry, you're caller #5
You: Did I win?
Radio Station: You're lucky caller #6! You win a High Definition Radio!
Until there is *The One True Linux Desktop*, you're going to have trouble getting the mainstream to accept it. You saw successes with Redhat (ok, maybe a bad example now) because we knew that Redhat n+1 was going to have roughly the same desktop as Redhat n.
Ok, I'm a couple hundred posts too late to get moderated to a level at which anyone will read this, but here goes.
I had always been facinated by recording television and doing video capture. Way back in the day (ok, 7 years ago) I started with a Zoran chip composite capture card and broadcast my home game-playing table to the internet for people who'd watch me play Magic: the Gathering. (Yes, I'm a colossal geek...)
Fast forward to the last couple of years. Being the last geek on my block without a dedicated PVR and with Microsoft pushing out Media Center, and with me being a MSDN+Select customer, I thought I'd try it out.
You can easily skip the rest of this and just go to AVSFORUMS. They have a message board you can't possibly keep up with:)
I purchased the Hauppauge PVR-250 (which, essentially is the 350 without radio), and gave it a try as a fulltime device behind one of the AV switches on my Pioneer (read: noisy) receivers. Media Center did just peachy. The interface is slicky and it just FEELS like a media center. But I was stuck with ASF files that took too much work to convert to a readable format for other people.
So, I looked into Snapstream. Snapstream was, essentially, Media Center with the ability to record native DVD and SVCD formats, and the ability (recently) to overnight downsample to DiVX;) for archiving.
But it wasn't quite right.
So, I turned next to my cable company's integrated DVR solution. Cox peddles the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 for another $10 a month, and with it, I get two-tuners and a good, but worse feature set than either of the software packages.
So, let me say this, if you NEED, and I don't just mean once to impress your mother upstairs out of the basement, to burn DVDs of your TV programs, or unless you NEED to archive lots of TV to DiVX;) or some other handy archive format, don't build yourself a PVR except as a hobby or to do it.
Get a TiVo. Get a DirecTiVo. Get the Cox PVR. You'll get it for much cheaper than that $150+ capture card, the $100 hard drive, the $50 video card with good looking TV-out and the $100 motherboard and case. Oh, and that case -- don't expect to enjoy watching TV unless you've purchased SILENT parts for your PC. Zalman coolers and Panflow fans aren't cheap. You won't have to fuss with overscan or underscan from your video card on your too-old no-DVI input TV either. You'll have about 200 less wires in your living room too. You also don't have to wonder what channel your TiVo accidentally used the IR-remote to change your TV too. Did it get 10 or 100 today?/shrug. I hope I got 24 and not Maricopa County Educational Television...
Anyway, if you're a geek, and I am, and you have to play with the video you catpure, go software, or at least choose an off-the-shelf PVR that lets you add a network card.
If not, for the love of god, suck up $7 or $10 a month (cheaper still than buying PVR hardware) and get the benefits of dual-tuner capture and integrated CLEAN LOOKING -----SILENT----- hardware for your TV watching experience. And, for the love of god, unless you have a TV that doubles as a PC monitor, stop trying to watch TV on it. You're going to be disappointed.
[This isn't to say that you can't ultra-geek it, build a nice home theater box, in an expensive case, using quiet parts, and connect it to your TV that's already suitable for DVI inputs and have a BETTER solution that includes DVD playing, MAME playing, etc. -- but the reality is that unless you're going into the DEEP END of the hobby -- that's right -- hobby, you're much better off with going to X-Mart and getting a TiVo, or just calling your cable company.]
I'm getting tired of the "Maybe they will figure out another way to improve their failing business model?" line.
The school is a business, and they're trying to protect their liability, not sell records.
If they had a special smoke detector in the dorms that alerted them to students smoking pot, busting those students wouldn't be for the purpose of improving their failing alcohol selling model.
I'm on month number four of my Atkins diet, and I've been averaging 3.06 pounds a week. I've never been a man who eats breakfast, and I enjoy ceasar salads, so it's been pretty easy for me to both eat the foods I'm supposed to and not load myself up with all the grease and cholesterol that people complain about.
Chicken breasts with a nice low-carb sauce, green beans and a salad makes a dinner that fits Atkins' carb rules, is low calore too, AND is healthy in almost every other "traditional" regard.
I used to track my eating religiously using Fitday.
I don't claim in my post to be a programmer. Despite my ability to script the bare essentials for my real job, programming (at all) is not my area of expertise.
Arguing with AC's isn't exactly productive, but here goes.
The simple fact of the matter is that some of us are experts in one technological field or another, yet lack the ability to debug other people's code, or re-code our own solutions. Were we all able to produce high-usability cryptological software ourselves, nobody else would ever need to write any.
This is why software developemnt shops have seperate QA and developement branches. Testing software and finding bugs takes skills that aren't necessarily the same skills programmers have.
"Subscription" fire departments collect revinue two ways, (a) by billing monthly insurance sytle, or (b) by billing you for the number of trucks, men, and feet of hose laid when there's an actual emergency.
Subscription fire departments don't ignore EMS and fire calls from people who didn't pay their premium - they just bill them on the back end.
Similarly, no priority is given by order of who paid up front and who didn't. EMS and fire calls are processed by order of severity, just like any non-subscription (read: municipal) emergency service provider.
Rural/Metro is one such company. There are numerous others - especially in the EMS (esp ambulance) business.
This is VASTLY different from giving priority to subscribers first for life-threatening medical conditions.
P3-800 is *vastly* ahead of the corporate curve. Take a look at the P2 systems coming from places like Computer Surplus Outlet. The P2-400 is whats in your hospitals, schools and government offices, because that's whats hitting the refurb sellers now. Dell Optiplexes man...
As much as I hate screaming "Mod Parent Up!" I have to.
Curt Schilling is the example of the proto-modern pitcher. He brings his laptop on the road (not just to play Everquest) where he studies his database of umpires, parks, and batters. He knows, better than anyone what pitch to throw against a batter in this league on a certain count, in a certain park, a certian time through the batting order, and if the umpire is going to call it a strike or a ball.
He knows that x-player is going to take y-pitch on z-count, and when the home plate umpire can't pull the trigger on it and call a strike becuase he's afraid "the machine" is going to report back to league officer that he was wrong Curt is screwed.
A "uniform strike zone" is the same sort of "Bad Thing(tm)" that night-games at Wrigley are. What's next? A DH in the NL? *shudder*
#1 Largest Drop: 400ft (#2 is 306 by Steel Dragon at Nagashima Spaland in Japan) #1 Height: 420ft (#2 Steel Dragon again) #1 Fastest: 120mph (#2 Dodonpa at Fujikyu Highlands in Japan) #1 Angle of Descent: 90o. (In a 5-way tie!)
Of course, Superman at 6 Flags Magic Mountain at 415ft isn't too shabby in the wood coaster category either considering it does 100mph and the same 90o drop.
'Dragster, however, doesn't make the list of the longest by a longshot.
Both Cedar Point's "other" Roller Coaster (Millenium Force) and Japan's Steel Dragon rank top three on this list AND every other list of speed, height, drop records.
Side by side, I'd have to say that Steel Dragon (in Steel) and Superman (in wood) still might be the most impressive of the lot.
My Usenet Provider (easynews) already does this. I can redeem 15 days of CPU time with United Devices (Ligandfit) for a gig of extra downloading. I've got about 3 years of CPU time (total), and I've got about 48 unused extra gigs of extra downloads waiting should I need them someday. [I used a few already.] I acrue them slightly faster than I use them, so it's all going well:)
Now, the problem is, of course, that binary news providers exist pretty much so lazy people like me can steal -- you know, just like P2P networks do.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to come off sounding like some Star Wars ass-kiss fanboi, but part of what made KotOR good was that you were stuck - precisely - to those "rails" and to the story.
I took great glee in my darkside replay. I couldn't tell you how many people I had to be nice to my first time through the game that I looked forward to taking revenge out on the second time through.
No lesbianism huh? Damn.
KotOR's best sequel is itself. Play it again. Dark and Light are fun enough, the dialog and story interesting enough, that it's worth every second of your second time through.
Winrar makes "solid" archives for just this reason.
This is a day too late for anyone to read, but at least McAfee detects these URLs.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to buy the first High Definition (HD) Radio in the United States.
You: Did I win?
Radio Station: I'm sorry, you're caller #1
You: Did I win?
Radio Station: I'm sorry, you're caller #2
You: Did I win?
Radio Station: I'm sorry, you're caller #3
You: Did I win?
Radio Station: I'm sorry, you're caller #4
You: Did I win?
Radio Station: I'm sorry, you're caller #5
You: Did I win?
Radio Station: You're lucky caller #6! You win a High Definition Radio!
I will be modded down for heresy, but...
Until there is *The One True Linux Desktop*, you're going to have trouble getting the mainstream to accept it. You saw successes with Redhat (ok, maybe a bad example now) because we knew that Redhat n+1 was going to have roughly the same desktop as Redhat n.
There is no -1 "I disagree"
This post burried as well, but... ...it was a preview problem. It was a "Plain Old Text" message submitted as HTML. /shrug
Ok, I'm a couple hundred posts too late to get moderated to a level at which anyone will read this, but here goes. I had always been facinated by recording television and doing video capture. Way back in the day (ok, 7 years ago) I started with a Zoran chip composite capture card and broadcast my home game-playing table to the internet for people who'd watch me play Magic: the Gathering. (Yes, I'm a colossal geek...) Fast forward to the last couple of years. Being the last geek on my block without a dedicated PVR and with Microsoft pushing out Media Center, and with me being a MSDN+Select customer, I thought I'd try it out. You can easily skip the rest of this and just go to AVSFORUMS. They have a message board you can't possibly keep up with :)
I purchased the Hauppauge PVR-250 (which, essentially is the 350 without radio), and gave it a try as a fulltime device behind one of the AV switches on my Pioneer (read: noisy) receivers. Media Center did just peachy. The interface is slicky and it just FEELS like a media center. But I was stuck with ASF files that took too much work to convert to a readable format for other people.
So, I looked into Snapstream. Snapstream was, essentially, Media Center with the ability to record native DVD and SVCD formats, and the ability (recently) to overnight downsample to DiVX;) for archiving.
But it wasn't quite right.
So, I turned next to my cable company's integrated DVR solution. Cox peddles the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 for another $10 a month, and with it, I get two-tuners and a good, but worse feature set than either of the software packages.
So, let me say this, if you NEED, and I don't just mean once to impress your mother upstairs out of the basement, to burn DVDs of your TV programs, or unless you NEED to archive lots of TV to DiVX;) or some other handy archive format, don't build yourself a PVR except as a hobby or to do it.
Get a TiVo. Get a DirecTiVo. Get the Cox PVR. You'll get it for much cheaper than that $150+ capture card, the $100 hard drive, the $50 video card with good looking TV-out and the $100 motherboard and case. Oh, and that case -- don't expect to enjoy watching TV unless you've purchased SILENT parts for your PC. Zalman coolers and Panflow fans aren't cheap. You won't have to fuss with overscan or underscan from your video card on your too-old no-DVI input TV either. You'll have about 200 less wires in your living room too. You also don't have to wonder what channel your TiVo accidentally used the IR-remote to change your TV too. Did it get 10 or 100 today? /shrug. I hope I got 24 and not Maricopa County Educational Television...
Anyway, if you're a geek, and I am, and you have to play with the video you catpure, go software, or at least choose an off-the-shelf PVR that lets you add a network card.
If not, for the love of god, suck up $7 or $10 a month (cheaper still than buying PVR hardware) and get the benefits of dual-tuner capture and integrated CLEAN LOOKING -----SILENT----- hardware for your TV watching experience. And, for the love of god, unless you have a TV that doubles as a PC monitor, stop trying to watch TV on it. You're going to be disappointed.
[This isn't to say that you can't ultra-geek it, build a nice home theater box, in an expensive case, using quiet parts, and connect it to your TV that's already suitable for DVI inputs and have a BETTER solution that includes DVD playing, MAME playing, etc. -- but the reality is that unless you're going into the DEEP END of the hobby -- that's right -- hobby, you're much better off with going to X-Mart and getting a TiVo, or just calling your cable company.]
I'm getting tired of the "Maybe they will figure out another way to improve their failing business model?" line.
The school is a business, and they're trying to protect their liability, not sell records.
If they had a special smoke detector in the dorms that alerted them to students smoking pot, busting those students wouldn't be for the purpose of improving their failing alcohol selling model.
Well, sooner or later V'ger runs into an alien species and gets sent back to earth, but the crew of the Enterprise will save us from destruction.
I'm on month number four of my Atkins diet, and I've been averaging 3.06 pounds a week. I've never been a man who eats breakfast, and I enjoy ceasar salads, so it's been pretty easy for me to both eat the foods I'm supposed to and not load myself up with all the grease and cholesterol that people complain about.
l ?O wner=mythosaz
Chicken breasts with a nice low-carb sauce, green beans and a salad makes a dinner that fits Atkins' carb rules, is low calore too, AND is healthy in almost every other "traditional" regard.
I used to track my eating religiously using Fitday.
http://www.fitday.com/WebFit/PublicJournals.htm
Fitday is a fantastic dieter's resource, and in the link abvove, if you scroll back to the first couple months of my diet you can see what I ate.
Forged canadian emails are only worth 5/8ths of a day in a US prison.
Christ this gets repetitive -- to remind people that not everyone can program.
Being able to find faults and being able to fix them are two very different skillsets.
Memo - For Immediate Distribution
From: VeriSign
To: ICANN
RE: Sitefinder
Pound sand, dickheads.
Who said I could program?
I don't claim in my post to be a programmer. Despite my ability to script the bare essentials for my real job, programming (at all) is not my area of expertise.
Arguing with AC's isn't exactly productive, but here goes.
The simple fact of the matter is that some of us are experts in one technological field or another, yet lack the ability to debug other people's code, or re-code our own solutions. Were we all able to produce high-usability cryptological software ourselves, nobody else would ever need to write any.
This is why software developemnt shops have seperate QA and developement branches. Testing software and finding bugs takes skills that aren't necessarily the same skills programmers have.
Enjoy.
I can't be the only one who misread the title as:
...damn, how did they know?
YOU Spend More Time on Web Than TV
"Subscription" fire departments collect revinue two ways, (a) by billing monthly insurance sytle, or (b) by billing you for the number of trucks, men, and feet of hose laid when there's an actual emergency.
Subscription fire departments don't ignore EMS and fire calls from people who didn't pay their premium - they just bill them on the back end.
Similarly, no priority is given by order of who paid up front and who didn't. EMS and fire calls are processed by order of severity, just like any non-subscription (read: municipal) emergency service provider.
Rural/Metro is one such company. There are numerous others - especially in the EMS (esp ambulance) business.
This is VASTLY different from giving priority to subscribers first for life-threatening medical conditions.
P3-800 is *vastly* ahead of the corporate curve. Take a look at the P2 systems coming from places like Computer Surplus Outlet. The P2-400 is whats in your hospitals, schools and government offices, because that's whats hitting the refurb sellers now. Dell Optiplexes man...
P3-800? Lucky bastard.
As much as I hate screaming "Mod Parent Up!" I have to.
Curt Schilling is the example of the proto-modern pitcher. He brings his laptop on the road (not just to play Everquest) where he studies his database of umpires, parks, and batters. He knows, better than anyone what pitch to throw against a batter in this league on a certain count, in a certain park, a certian time through the batting order, and if the umpire is going to call it a strike or a ball.
He knows that x-player is going to take y-pitch on z-count, and when the home plate umpire can't pull the trigger on it and call a strike becuase he's afraid "the machine" is going to report back to league officer that he was wrong Curt is screwed.
A "uniform strike zone" is the same sort of "Bad Thing(tm)" that night-games at Wrigley are. What's next? A DH in the NL? *shudder*
Show me the guy making liquid nitrogen from ice cream, and then we'll talk.
I wanted to test drive the new Explorer, but it was $5 to have the sales person open the door, and $20 to drive it around the block.
Yeah, I know. This guy isn't selling them, but at $5 to stand on the thing for a few seconds, it's a freakin' crime.
Top Thrill Dragster is:
#1 Largest Drop: 400ft (#2 is 306 by Steel Dragon at Nagashima Spaland in Japan)
#1 Height: 420ft (#2 Steel Dragon again)
#1 Fastest: 120mph (#2 Dodonpa at Fujikyu Highlands in Japan)
#1 Angle of Descent: 90o. (In a 5-way tie!)
Of course, Superman at 6 Flags Magic Mountain at 415ft isn't too shabby in the wood coaster category either considering it does 100mph and the same 90o drop.
'Dragster, however, doesn't make the list of the longest by a longshot.
Both Cedar Point's "other" Roller Coaster (Millenium Force) and Japan's Steel Dragon rank top three on this list AND every other list of speed, height, drop records.
Side by side, I'd have to say that Steel Dragon (in Steel) and Superman (in wood) still might be the most impressive of the lot.
My Usenet Provider (easynews) already does this. I can redeem 15 days of CPU time with United Devices (Ligandfit) for a gig of extra downloading. I've got about 3 years of CPU time (total), and I've got about 48 unused extra gigs of extra downloads waiting should I need them someday. [I used a few already.] I acrue them slightly faster than I use them, so it's all going well :)
Now, the problem is, of course, that binary news providers exist pretty much so lazy people like me can steal -- you know, just like P2P networks do.