Must admit, getting engaged has certainly had me question my own nerd-dom. But in the end I've found the effect is not as big as it's hyped to be. I'm still overclocking my computers, reading hardware reviews of obscure stuff, spending way too much time on slashdot, yadda yadda. I just can't do it ALL the time anymore, that's all!;)
I got the same board; audio quality is just lacking. Noise and hissing from the analogue outs (Grado Labs SR325s), just plain weird equaliser setups (Coax Digital out). I put my old Audigy card in my 2nd computer which got the old A7V266-E mobo and can't wait to get an Audigy2 so as to stop using the Soundstorm.
See my post further down thread list for more details.
FWIW, I should have mentioned that my Cambridge Soundworks setup whilst reasonably good for its price range & use is not hifi at all which makes it even more obvious that the Soundstorm doesn't cut it at high fidelity audio reproductions.
The Cambridge system fits the bedroom we use as office just fine though, lets us do 5.1 channel sound editing --- and to check what the sound will sound like across all frequencies it's easy enough to burn a Dolby Digital mix onto a CDRW. We use BeSweet to convert from AC3 to Dolby Digital WAV, then just burn it as music.
Then it's over to the living room, where the Rotel system is. 4x Infinity Kappa 6.2 speakers and their centre speaker, with a 5x100w THX Rotel Amp and their Sound Processor preamp. Dolby Digital decoder is in a separate box hooked up to the preamp with a beefy DB25 cable --- it's not the newest of systems but it's pretty high quality stuff anyway. Although I know that those _serious_ about their hifi will have single components in their systems costing twice what I've put in all up...:/
FWIW. Hope it puts some people off from getting the wrong expectations on the Soundstorm that NVidia touts as offering excellent sound quality. From a partly audiophile point of view, it just so doesn't.
I've manage two computers here at home, mine and my partner's. My partner does multitrack sound editing, I'm a programmer who listens to music whilst coding plus uses soundboard for gaming (F1 2002 current fave). Mine is the most powerful one, hers get my old components. 16500 winmarks 01, fwiw.
Now, when updating our motherboards with the purchase of said Asus motherboard, I moved the Audigy into hers so as to replace the old SBLive she had before thinking the Soundstorm would be as good or better than the Audigy. Also, she needed quality of sound more than I so I thought it would be a good thing.
However, an Audigy 2 is now on the shopping list for her so that I can have my Audigy 1 back. Why? The Soundstorm sound quality is just BAD. This is especially from a hifi point of view. My Grado Labs SR325s picks up hisses and noise from moving windows, programs loading etc, something that never happened before. My Audigy was just dead silent. And worst of all, the equaliser settings make everything sound distorted; in fact, music is flat out crap with a nasal metal sound with equaliser off; with EQ on I can get the nasal quality down a bit but it never approaches the natural sound of the Audigy.
Going Dolby Digital to my Cambridge Soundworks 3500 removes the hisses but the extremely poor equaliser (as compared to much more natural sounding base and treble of the Audigy) remains.
I've tested this using A-B comparisons, which is possible as the Audigy hooks up to the same miniamp by the 5.1 DIN whereas the Soundstorm uses Coaxial. Source is lossless compression ripped CDs - with the computers next to each others it's easy enough to press play at the same time and then just press the mute buttons as fit. And yes, the soundstorm _just can't match_ the natural sound of the audigy. No way.
I'm a bit of a hi fi nut, not terribly so compared to some but I've put in about A$20 000 into a Rotel hifi/home theatre system over the past 6 years and my Grado Labs are fantastic. Using the Audigy I could hardly pick the difference between that soundcard and my high end Sony Discman player, however with the Soundstorm there's just no point comparing - it's not high fidelity, at all.
In addition to playback, the microphone quality is clearly inferior to the Audigy, lots of hisses and just plain bad quality. This is tested with the help of Teamspeak and Plantronic's top of the line analogue headphone/mike (can't hold a candle to the Grados but it's comfy enough for gaming).
I really wonder what those who say motherboard based sound is comparable to standalone soundcards were smoking. They can't have that good ears, that's for sure! If it is a bad batch of the A7N8X Deluxe, please let me know. I'm extremely doubtful though.
Sorry for my long windedness, moderators - hope you find it somehow informative though.
Yay, thanks for that link! I have WMPlayer 9 installed, but find it a huge annoyance that when I want to play movie files my music playlist is ditched. Only having ONE instance of WMPlayer9 sucks big time, M$-style.
Now I'll just kick open this little gem whenever I wanna play some hot Terminator 3 teaser or something next time instead.
"With the new storage OS, users can create shadow copies of data for single or multiple volumes of information. Microsoft has also included the Distributed File System (DFS) and support for server clusters with the operating system."
Whilst these might not be original in _concept_ (they're all 'FPS'), in storyline and execution they certainly are:
System Shock 2 Deus Ex Max Payne Splinter Cell
Deus Ex morphed RPG elements into a great storyline. The utterly cool Max Payne was just as dark as a depressed Tim Burton's Batman Knightfall (I know, wishful thinking...); the Finns certainly know their stuff, can't wait for the sequel. And Splinter Cell's focus on potentially non-violent sneaking deserves kudos. Plus I just got a Radeon 9800PRO for my "ageing" XP-1900 system and SC is just amazing to behold.
For the former, as I never finished it, I've just blown off the dust of my old SS2 box and installed it for a few weeks of retro-gaming. I'm quite looking forward to the scare - and I'm sure it will still hold up.
"Let me put it to you this way: It was hyped enough that a reference to it made it into an episode of Married With Children. It's not very often sitcoms admit to the existence of movies."
I lived in Norway at the time of the release. We never got any of the hype. I bought the film on laserdisc and absolutely love(d) it. It's got enough sarcasm/self-irony to fill pools. It's still one of my favourite movies.
But I can see where you're coming from. I still haven't seen Titanic. I was dead sick of it before it even made it ashore. It might be a very good movie, and I _might_ rent it on dvd one of those years... but not the first few!
As for the Matrix, I desparately try to avoid those spoilers when going to the movies these days... Make out with my girlfriend, play snakes on the mobile phone, anything. I was "pure" when I saw the original one, and it rocked ever so much more because of it.
Because I just added @aol.com to my blocked senders list in the bluebottle.com anti-spam system that is protecting my account.
Occasionally I review the ones that are "pending verification" to see if there are any valid machine sent mails that cannot be authenticated because noone is reading the authentication challenges.
And I just got sick of seeing the @aol.com addresses there. I know noone who uses aol.com anyway - and if I did, I'd need to have a chat with them about changing ISPs.
Bull. I'm a touch writer of many years, currently using the MS Natural Keyboard Pro.
I can't imagine touch writing without the knobs on F and J for a split second. I use them as a base position reference - _that_ way I don't have to look for the keys [which I never do]. Plus, the tactile _feel_ of the keyboard is darned important. When I know what I want to write, I can spit out some 70 to 80 words per minute, my fingers just dance across the keyboard; no way I could do something like that with an optical solution.
Years back I tried using a Muckintosh -- I couldn't type on it at all because the knobs were on the D and K keys, it confused the hell outta me.
Agree fully. It does however involve getting a certain amount of experience, agility, fitness and "street smarts" (pun intended) - when you are able to go with the flow and naturally anticipate when cars don't see you etc, it beats everything else for inner city transportation.
I'm so tempted to chime in with a rant about fat, overweight, under-exercised Americans here who'd need their cars to travel anything in excess of... 20 metres. But then again, if they're gonna travel those 20 metres in a car they might as well go splash out on a Segway - it's much better for the environment.
I still can't shake my first impression of arriving in Newark October '99 for an Allaire developers conference in Boston, my first trip to the states. I saw more grossly overweight people on that airport in half an hour than I had in my last five or so years back home in Oslo, Norway.
Me? I'm a pushbike rider who wouldn't trade in his Gary Fisher or Trek Y22 with a Segway lest they paid him a very large sum of money. Uhm, I've also got a car, an '02 LEV Honda Civic Hatch, plus a motorbike. They are used only when going for longer hauls - preferrably not through the CBD. [Melbourne, VIC.]
Uhm, picture this: Lanesplitting between cars in rush hour with a Segway at 20 km/h? No? Thought so...:)
In Windows, you can simply type ALT + 0216 on the keypad for the capital Ø. Lower case is ALT + 0248. Other nice to have Norwegian characters: 0229=å, 0230=æ.
Being that my name is Jørgen and I live in Australia, that's one feature I really like in Windows. And yes, I describe it as the "u" in _surf_ here.:)
In Australia you have to dial 00 to get an international line. In most offices you dial 0 to get an outside line. Coming home from a long week at work I once found myself talking to emergency personell wondering who was dying instead of my Norwegian brother. Go figure.
In the Aftenposten article, the following quote near the end caught my interest: "...citing Norwegian laws that protect what a consumer can do with his or her own property..."
Could this mean that copy protected 'CDs' could become illegal in Norway? I.e., the inability to make a copy of a 'CD' (per Phillip's definition it wouldn't be one) I just bought to use it in my car where it could easily be scratched (and they scratch way easily these days!) would clearly restrict my use of a product that is now my property?
This is most likely the game I have the fondest memories of. Reviews found here (no pics) and here (German, but with pics). The last one sums it up nicely: "Absolute Kult-Flugsimulation, leider mit recht wenig Missionen [sadly with too few missions]". An absolute classic, that one, indeed.
Hotbot does slashdot, Google not?
on
HotBot Returns
·
· Score: 1
Fwiw, I tried searching for my handle "funkdancer". Inktomi/Hotbot returned a fair few of my posts on slashdot, which google did not. Google did however find some much more obscure pages where I have used my handle.
ps. I only have boring stuff at my site... like pictures of really hot cars;)
If a spam lists a valid web site, I sometimes look up the site and sign up any support / sales emails I can find onto a selection of porn email lists guaranteed to make them receive spams for the rest of their lives.
Plus I might just for the fun of it try to submit 500 orders of their penis enlarger product with all fields looking something like firstname: Spam, lastname: Hater. Address: F*ckspam, City: Spamville. Etc.
At 29 I'm definitely not acting my age, but I take a fair bit of childish pleasure in hitting them back. I guess schädenfreude (or skadefryd in Norwegian) is the word.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Must admit, getting engaged has certainly had me question my own nerd-dom. But in the end I've found the effect is not as big as it's hyped to be. I'm still overclocking my computers, reading hardware reviews of obscure stuff, spending way too much time on slashdot, yadda yadda. I just can't do it ALL the time anymore, that's all! ;)
Are Asus making two kinds of the Deluxe board???
I got the same board; audio quality is just lacking. Noise and hissing from the analogue outs (Grado Labs SR325s), just plain weird equaliser setups (Coax Digital out). I put my old Audigy card in my 2nd computer which got the old A7V266-E mobo and can't wait to get an Audigy2 so as to stop using the Soundstorm.
See my post further down thread list for more details.
FWIW, I should have mentioned that my Cambridge Soundworks setup whilst reasonably good for its price range & use is not hifi at all which makes it even more obvious that the Soundstorm doesn't cut it at high fidelity audio reproductions.
:/
The Cambridge system fits the bedroom we use as office just fine though, lets us do 5.1 channel sound editing --- and to check what the sound will sound like across all frequencies it's easy enough to burn a Dolby Digital mix onto a CDRW. We use BeSweet to convert from AC3 to Dolby Digital WAV, then just burn it as music.
Then it's over to the living room, where the
Rotel system is. 4x Infinity Kappa 6.2 speakers and their centre speaker, with a 5x100w THX Rotel Amp and their Sound Processor preamp. Dolby Digital decoder is in a separate box hooked up to the preamp with a beefy DB25 cable --- it's not the newest of systems but it's pretty high quality stuff anyway. Although I know that those _serious_ about their hifi will have single components in their systems costing twice what I've put in all up...
FWIW. Hope it puts some people off from getting the wrong expectations on the Soundstorm that NVidia touts as offering excellent sound quality. From a partly audiophile point of view, it just so doesn't.
I've manage two computers here at home, mine and my partner's. My partner does multitrack sound editing, I'm a programmer who listens to music whilst coding plus uses soundboard for gaming (F1 2002 current fave). Mine is the most powerful one, hers get my old components. 16500 winmarks 01, fwiw.
Now, when updating our motherboards with the purchase of said Asus motherboard, I moved the Audigy into hers so as to replace the old SBLive she had before thinking the Soundstorm would be as good or better than the Audigy. Also, she needed quality of sound more than I so I thought it would be a good thing.
However, an Audigy 2 is now on the shopping list for her so that I can have my Audigy 1 back. Why? The Soundstorm sound quality is just BAD. This is especially from a hifi point of view. My Grado Labs SR325s picks up hisses and noise from moving windows, programs loading etc, something that never happened before. My Audigy was just dead silent. And worst of all, the equaliser settings make everything sound distorted; in fact, music is flat out crap with a nasal metal sound with equaliser off; with EQ on I can get the nasal quality down a bit but it never approaches the natural sound of the Audigy.
Going Dolby Digital to my Cambridge Soundworks 3500 removes the hisses but the extremely poor equaliser (as compared to much more natural sounding base and treble of the Audigy) remains.
I've tested this using A-B comparisons, which is possible as the Audigy hooks up to the same miniamp by the 5.1 DIN whereas the Soundstorm uses Coaxial. Source is lossless compression ripped CDs - with the computers next to each others it's easy enough to press play at the same time and then just press the mute buttons as fit. And yes, the soundstorm _just can't match_ the natural sound of the audigy. No way.
I'm a bit of a hi fi nut, not terribly so compared to some but I've put in about A$20 000 into a Rotel hifi/home theatre system over the past 6 years and my Grado Labs are fantastic. Using the Audigy I could hardly pick the difference between that soundcard and my high end Sony Discman player, however with the Soundstorm there's just no point comparing - it's not high fidelity, at all.
In addition to playback, the microphone quality is clearly inferior to the Audigy, lots of hisses and just plain bad quality. This is tested with the help of Teamspeak and Plantronic's top of the line analogue headphone/mike (can't hold a candle to the Grados but it's comfy enough for gaming).
I really wonder what those who say motherboard based sound is comparable to standalone soundcards were smoking. They can't have that good ears, that's for sure! If it is a bad batch of the A7N8X Deluxe, please let me know. I'm extremely doubtful though.
Sorry for my long windedness, moderators - hope you find it somehow informative though.
LOL! That is funny as hell, where's my mod-points when I need them?
Yay, thanks for that link! I have WMPlayer 9 installed, but find it a huge annoyance that when I want to play movie files my music playlist is ditched. Only having ONE instance of WMPlayer9 sucks big time, M$-style.
Now I'll just kick open this little gem whenever I wanna play some hot Terminator 3 teaser or something next time instead.
I liked the way Stallone put those tickets to good use. Cracked me up!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/30990.html
"With the new storage OS, users can create shadow copies of data for single or multiple volumes of information. Microsoft has also included the Distributed File System (DFS) and support for server clusters with the operating system."
Good timing or what?
I know this is redundant, but ... LOL, fantastic! :)
Whilst these might not be original in _concept_ (they're all 'FPS'), in storyline and execution they certainly are:
System Shock 2
Deus Ex
Max Payne
Splinter Cell
Deus Ex morphed RPG elements into a great storyline. The utterly cool Max Payne was just as dark as a depressed Tim Burton's Batman Knightfall (I know, wishful thinking...); the Finns certainly know their stuff, can't wait for the sequel. And Splinter Cell's focus on potentially non-violent sneaking deserves kudos. Plus I just got a Radeon 9800PRO for my "ageing" XP-1900 system and SC is just amazing to behold.
For the former, as I never finished it, I've just blown off the dust of my old SS2 box and installed it for a few weeks of retro-gaming. I'm quite looking forward to the scare - and I'm sure it will still hold up.
"Let me put it to you this way: It was hyped enough that a reference to it made it into an episode of Married With Children. It's not very often sitcoms admit to the existence of movies."
... but not the first few!
I lived in Norway at the time of the release. We never got any of the hype. I bought the film on laserdisc and absolutely love(d) it. It's got enough sarcasm/self-irony to fill pools. It's still one of my favourite movies.
But I can see where you're coming from. I still haven't seen Titanic. I was dead sick of it before it even made it ashore. It might be a very good movie, and I _might_ rent it on dvd one of those years
As for the Matrix, I desparately try to avoid those spoilers when going to the movies these days... Make out with my girlfriend, play snakes on the mobile phone, anything. I was "pure" when I saw the original one, and it rocked ever so much more because of it.
Because I just added @aol.com to my blocked senders list in the bluebottle.com anti-spam system that is protecting my account.
Occasionally I review the ones that are "pending verification" to see if there are any valid machine sent mails that cannot be authenticated because noone is reading the authentication challenges.
And I just got sick of seeing the @aol.com addresses there. I know noone who uses aol.com anyway - and if I did, I'd need to have a chat with them about changing ISPs.
FWIW (not much I guess)...
Bull. I'm a touch writer of many years, currently using the MS Natural Keyboard Pro.
I can't imagine touch writing without the knobs on F and J for a split second. I use them as a base position reference - _that_ way I don't have to look for the keys [which I never do]. Plus, the tactile _feel_ of the keyboard is darned important. When I know what I want to write, I can spit out some 70 to 80 words per minute, my fingers just dance across the keyboard; no way I could do something like that with an optical solution.
Years back I tried using a Muckintosh -- I couldn't type on it at all because the knobs were on the D and K keys, it confused the hell outta me.
Agree fully. It does however involve getting a certain amount of experience, agility, fitness and "street smarts" (pun intended) - when you are able to go with the flow and naturally anticipate when cars don't see you etc, it beats everything else for inner city transportation.
I'm so tempted to chime in with a rant about fat, overweight, under-exercised Americans here who'd need their cars to travel anything in excess of ... 20 metres. But then again, if they're gonna travel those 20 metres in a car they might as well go splash out on a Segway - it's much better for the environment.
:)
I still can't shake my first impression of arriving in Newark October '99 for an Allaire developers conference in Boston, my first trip to the states. I saw more grossly overweight people on that airport in half an hour than I had in my last five or so years back home in Oslo, Norway.
Me? I'm a pushbike rider who wouldn't trade in his Gary Fisher or Trek Y22 with a Segway lest they paid him a very large sum of money. Uhm, I've also got a car, an '02 LEV Honda Civic Hatch, plus a motorbike. They are used only when going for longer hauls - preferrably not through the CBD. [Melbourne, VIC.]
Uhm, picture this: Lanesplitting between cars in rush hour with a Segway at 20 km/h? No? Thought so...
In Windows, you can simply type ALT + 0216 on the keypad for the capital Ø. Lower case is ALT + 0248. Other nice to have Norwegian characters: 0229=å, 0230=æ.
:)
Being that my name is Jørgen and I live in Australia, that's one feature I really like in Windows. And yes, I describe it as the "u" in _surf_ here.
Cheers.
That's their right. It is their trademark.
But it doesn't _make it right_, dammit.
Ah, and I guess I should mention that "000" is the nation wide emergency number in Australia. [Bummer].
In Australia you have to dial 00 to get an international line. In most offices you dial 0 to get an outside line. Coming home from a long week at work I once found myself talking to emergency personell wondering who was dying instead of my Norwegian brother. Go figure.
In the Aftenposten article, the following quote near the end caught my interest:
"...citing Norwegian laws that protect what a consumer can do with his or her own property..."
Could this mean that copy protected 'CDs' could become illegal in Norway? I.e., the inability to make a copy of a 'CD' (per Phillip's definition it wouldn't be one) I just bought to use it in my car where it could easily be scratched (and they scratch way easily these days!) would clearly restrict my use of a product that is now my property?
A few good things could come out of this ruling.
This is most likely the game I have the fondest memories of. Reviews found here (no pics) and here (German, but with pics). The last one sums it up nicely: "Absolute Kult-Flugsimulation, leider mit recht wenig Missionen [sadly with too few missions]". An absolute classic, that one, indeed.
Fwiw, I tried searching for my handle "funkdancer". Inktomi/Hotbot returned a fair few of my posts on slashdot, which google did not. Google did however find some much more obscure pages where I have used my handle.
... like pictures of really hot cars ;)
ps. I only have boring stuff at my site
If a spam lists a valid web site, I sometimes look up the site and sign up any support / sales emails I can find onto a selection of porn email lists guaranteed to make them receive spams for the rest of their lives.
:)
Plus I might just for the fun of it try to submit 500 orders of their penis enlarger product with all fields looking something like firstname: Spam, lastname: Hater. Address: F*ckspam, City: Spamville. Etc.
At 29 I'm definitely not acting my age, but I take a fair bit of childish pleasure in hitting them back. I guess schädenfreude (or skadefryd in Norwegian) is the word.
There's no pleasure greater than schädenfreude.
Before we know it we'll have SATAN in our offices then ... Serial ATA Networks.
(Sorry couldn't resist)