I'd rather have banning. A key ban is the way to go. Sure let them sign up for a new account, that'll be $50 please. If a person makes enough of an nussance of themselves follow it up with a credit card number ban. Sure most people have more than one card, but the truly cronic bastards would be face pretty quickly with a long time ban if they didn't straighten up.
Personally I've been leaning back towards LAN parties. Cheaters are much easier to deal with, you just chuck an empty beer bottle at them after the first offense. The second offense involves dragging them out back for a little wall to wall counselling session.
That is kind of like how the artificial sweetener Saccharin got pulled from the shelves over a decade ago after they found it caused cancer in mice. It turns out to get the equivalent dosage into humans as they were giving the lab mice, one would have to have eaten 15lbs of Saccharin every day. Once this came to light they redid the tests at normal levels with both mice and primates, it still ended up causing cancer in mice, but only in mice, it had no affect on the primates.
I guess I'm just getting old, but more and more of my favorite artists have simply stopped putting out music. Most of the newer music is fine, but they beat it to death on the radio, why should I go buy it?
There is plenty of new music for me to listen to since I'm living in the UK now, but the exchange rate effectively doubles the price of a CD unless the bands release something in the US, and they beat the best songs to death on the radio over here as well.
The Genuine Advantage always seemed like a $100 fix to a $5 problem. I don't understand why they just don't offer the customers at retail they same price they offer companies like Dell for the license or even something at 2-3x times the price. You would find people a lot less willing to pirate Windows if it costs $40 instead of $220. They could get rid of all those people they have for licensing support and whole sections of their software engineers, I'm sure that would make up a large portion of the $180 difference licensing price.
For the sake of expediency I'll list the things that were correct.
Vista runs crappy on 512mb. Very true, but XP and OSX 10 runs crappy on 512mb too, so what's your point? Win98 was the last MS OS out there that did fine with that little RAM.
IE7 is unsecure. It is and it isn't. It is like arguing that guns like the Glock are unsecure because they don't have a safety switch, which is completely untrue. The power of stupid always trumps the power of software security. Stupid always finds a way. IE7 is not a very good program, but it's not a very bad on either. It's amazing how little maulware you pick up if you stay off the flash games, porn, and warez sites.
There are dozens of SF books out there that dwell on that topic. Two classics are Brave New Worlds and The Player Piano.
I can't think of the name of another where they sent out seed ships with a few thousand people on each to escape Earth which was going to be destroyed when the Sun grew to red size. Those that stayed behind had a about 1000 years left, they lowered the population to around 5 million people, wealth became a question of logistics not actual price. Want a 10m cube of gold, ok make some arrangements to have it hauled to your house, that'll be $10. They fought wars lots of wars, just for fun usuing antique weapons and set rules, with the best medical care known to man standing by. Art, music, and entertainment expanded far beyond anything that had come before it. In the end they poured their resources back into science and technology and in a very short time came up with new ships and evacuated those that wanted to leave that actually managed to catch up and land only 10 or so years behind the sleeper ships that left hundreds of years before.
Personally I think this would be closer to reality. Look at the way we live now in the US and in Europe. As wealth increases, population growth slows and opportunites expand. I don't buy the whole "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer." It's more like the "The educated get richer and the ignorant go nowhere". Even though the difference between the top an bottom grows every year, the poor in our countries don't starve to death and have enough to have 5 kids. In the US they don't pay Federal taxes anymore and they still get a sizeable refund check from the governement.
Individuals now have the ability to fund their own space programs, smart people start billion dollar companies out of things that were ust hobbies, and even the average person with a modest paycheck can become a millionare in a relatively short period of time if they are just a little frugal and invest their savings. I see this expanding with time not shrinking.
That could change. I foresee a future where cops have data-links hooked up to cameras, and GPS units on their person and their cars, where they wouldn't have access to the recorders. Sure they could turn them off, but generally bad cops do bad things repeatedly and after enough arrests with complaints of misconduct they won't stay cops very long.
Now as far as this thing in St Louis, having lived there for 25 years, there is alot of crying foul by the Black community over the treatment and racial profiling by police. St Louis is made up a many small cities that have grown together into St Louis county. A short trip on 270 will take you through a half dozen cities each with their own police force, racial make-up, and attitude towards suspicious people.
A standard tactic was what we referred to as the party car, essentially any car with two or more male teenagers along with stupid behavior or loud music, or in many case just looking like they were out of place (ie black kids in a predominately white town at 1am), would get pulled over and searched without actually commiting any violation. Yes this was racial profiling at best and on occassion racism at it's worse, but unfortunately it was also VERY effective. Typical stops resulted in arrests greater than 50% of the time, for weapons, drugs, or standing warrents. At the time there was a big fight going on over the legality of it, since they were also confiscating cars that had drugs in them, (Sorry Dad for having a joint, but thanks for letting me borrow the car.) Looks like things still haven't been settled.
Personally I don't know what the answer to it is, but I can tell you are always going to have problems with racism when you have police dealing with the people in poor areas. Not all the poor are black and not all the police are white, but those parts of town where the police try to maintain order are usually very polarized in terms of race. People of both sides get overly worked up over that one incident out of ten thousand thousand (Heh about one weeks worth of police arrests in St Louis.) that gets taped and shows a couple of human beings on their worse day.
I do think though until the Police make greater efforts to kick out the "good Ol' boys" out of their numbers, whether they be the poster child for the KKK or just a little too over enthusiastic and aggressive with their job, and the poor stop crying foul everytime one of their dirt-bag, 30th time I've been arrested criminal relatives provokes the police enough to kick their ass, then nothing is ever going to get fixed.
The ACLU sticking it's nose in with a half assed scheme is only going to prolong the racial problems.
I used to use Music Match Jukebox, but it broke down on libraries above 10 gig. I switched to Winamp and have in the neighboorhood of 70gb and it does fine, I'm told by a friend who has over 100gb that it starts choking, though he may be basing his experience on a much older build. I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.
Video playback (DVD Rips) I like Zoomplayer though it works kinda of quirky under Vista. I'll give them a few more months to patch it, then I'm going to be out looking for another. I used to have a very large growing library (just under 1TB) of bittorrented TV shows, but once I realized I was never going to watch any of them again and no one else wanted to copy them, I stopped looking for something to organize them and started to delete them. Even the DVD rips get purged now and then when ever my server gets full (~2TB). It just like cleaning out the closet, you ask yourself when was the last time you watched any of the movies. If the answer is more than a year ago, DELETE, ARE YOU SURE?, YES. It's amazing how much extra space you'll have after that.
I know iTunes works fairly well as a manager, without DRM, I had it on my computer for a few months watching LOST, but it got dumped once I realized Apple won't let you re-download anything without repaying. So after losing about $50 worth of TV shows and the fact that just about every Apple enthusiast I've come across in person has been a condencending snob if not a downright prick with far too big of a superiority complex. The crack-up is when they end up asking you to come over and help them with their "perfect" machine. It turns out even a Mac needs more than 512mb of ram and not have dozens of things running at the same time to work well. Not to mention the fact that after ponying up the $20 for QuicktimePro, I like watching movie previews as much as the next guy, I got really sick of it constantly trying to "Update" Quicktime by downloading iTunes.
The whole thing has left a very bad taste in my mouth so as a point more out of spite, than any technical shortcomings, which it has few it is an Apple product after all, I refuse to use iTunes.
Haha, why does it matter? Well imagine if the movie Conan the Barbarian stared Mike Tyson instead of Arnold. Sure he's kicking some serious butt, but that squeeky little voice sort of spoils the whole "What is best in life speach."
Mongol General:...what is best in life?
Mongol: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Mongol General: That is good! That is good.
General leans in close to Conan, very good Conan, but maybe your loin cloth is a little too tight.
It may just be me, but it just wouldn't sound as bad ass coming from an eleven year old. Of course there have been some pretty great leaders, that ruled with an iron grip at an early age, but all of them at least had reached the point in life where their testicals had actually dropped.
I'm sure there will some voice apps out there soon that not just change the pitch of the users voice, but actually layer over a voice actors voice, with great sounding Barbarian Aarrrnnoldness to had by all.
Yeah that should do ok hardware wise. Though Nvidia hasn't come out with a truly stable video drive until the most recent which came out two weeks ago or so. Now Supreme Commander only crashes once every hour or two instead of once every 15 minutes for me.
WOW runs fine, but we are talking apples and oranges here since you have a laptop and I have a desktop with totally different hardware.
Driver support has been frustrating, I finally get something other than basic stereo out of my Creative X-fi sound card as of last week, but I think it'll safe for you to go back in the next couple months since most of the major players are finally getting their act together.
Not trying to be mean but you made a few mistakes. Don't feel bad I learned the hardway on this one as well.
Ok first mistake it's a Compaq. If it doesn't have a dedicated graphics card compared to integrated graphics, typical of Compaq's, you are going to see a big hit on the CPU and memory since integrated graphics uses the main CPU and memory to run the graphics.
Second mistake Pinnacle Studio 10, it barely worked right on XP, so you are fighting a loosing battle hoping that it'll work on Vista.
Also a question why are you fooling with Pinnacle Studio 10 if you are using Ulead Media Studio Pro? You have a camera, a firewire port, and editing software, you shouldn't need anything else.
If you are importing your video from your camera through an external hardware device made by Pinnacle into a firewire port on your laptop you are adding an unecessary step to the process. Plug the camera directly into the laptop and chuck the Pinnacle hardware in the garbage (or Ebay it like I did) and just use the Ulead software for transfering your videos. If you are having problems getting it to import into Ulead, just use the Windows Movie maker to inport. It's rock solid even if the software editing options are pretty basic.
The only reason I can see you using an external device to import your video is if you are using the RCA outputs on the camera. If that is the case that'll give you much lower quality video, and make the whole process a pain in the butt.
Look around on your camera for a rectangular plug with a small notch on one side of it, it's probably right next to the micro-RCA plug. That is a mini-firewire port (Don't confuse it with the mini-usb port most have, those typically are only for transfer photos you've taken with the camera.) Go back up to the store (take the camera with you) and pick up a firewire cable so you can hook it directly to the laptop. You can control all the camera functions (such as play, pause, and search) directly in the software and makes importing video a snap. Oh while you are there punch the sales clerk who sold you all the junk you didn't need.
As far as Winamp using that much CPU. It typically uses 20-30% CPU until it has fully buffered the music on your playlist and then drops down to 1-4% while playing your music. If you fill your playlist with a few dozen songs it will take it quite a while to buffer them all, especially at laptop harddrive speeds which are anemic at best. If you are listening to internet radio through Winamp it almost continously uses above 20% since you are always buffering the next audio file. This has nothing to do with Vista as Winamp has behaived this way for quite a while.
Oh you mean Windows Media Player, sorry don't use it. Nor iTunes or any other garbage DRM laced service. File lock down, sure it's in there, but it doesn't interfere with anything I create, including these DVD's that are ripping as we speak to add to my media machine downstairs.
Just for the sake of argument let's just put on our tin-foil hats for a moment and imagine a world where MS bowed to the MAFIAA and started locking down all non-DRM content, and now imagine a world were the soon to be 4 BILLION PC owners came together for a class-action lawsuit that would be like the Moon suddenly dropping out of the sky on MS and the RIAA. The day after that the real P2P network would kick into gear that makes current file swapping look quaint. All that is required is a six-pack, a 500gb external harddrive, some sneakers, and a few hours to kill.
I would be among the first to bail immediately and go pick-up the latest version of Linux, but the odds of that ever happening are about zero. So lighten up a bit. If you really hate DRM then don't use the products, it's really that simple. Vista does not interfere with anything you personally have created on your machine including ripping media.
You didn't read the person's full post. It was sitting at 20% while listening to Winamp. People forget that music can be a big hit on the processor and running scans of disc or accessing network storage eats up even more.
If I run Winamp CPU useage spikes to 40% and then drops back to 20-30% for a few minutes. Once it's done buffering the tunes in my playlist Winamp drops down to 1-4% useage. If I run a library update scan of my music across the network it eats up about 40-48% continuously until the scan is done. If they were listening to internet radio I can see it staying at above 20% the entire time since it is continuously buffering music. My CPU if you are curious an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
The things I have running in the background including Aero, taskmanager, sidebar, Norton, Skype, Logitech, and BOINC manager (paused) eat up at the most 1-4%, so if they are constantly seeing 20% useage then either they are full of shit, have spyware, or simply have a crappy machine. I'll give you a hint which it might be, the orginal poster's computer is a Compaq laptop, (All three then.) most like with integrated graphics rather than a dedicated graphics card which uses the CPU and system memory to run 3d apps which Aero most certainly is. Unlikely to be a dual-core and not even remotely high performance.
That's a shock. They've been crying for years that people don't use their internet connections in the same manner as the telephone. Pay us a bunch of money and then barely use the service so we can over sell our capacity, which won't become apparrent until there is an natural disaster and the networks get clogged.
"Somebody running a server in their basement on our network and uploading illegal copies movies raises the costs for everybody else and jams the network in ways we're not compensated for,"
Uhh bullshit. We pay for the connection, we get to use the connection. If you don't like that quit selling us "Unlimited" Service and then crying when we actually use it as such.
It would be funny to have an national protest by uploading, legal things of course, all over the world just to see how badly we could cripple the internet. Say you entire photo library to your favorite photo site, or a nice modest ten gig transfer through chat programs such as Skype, or a few hundred emails with a files attached to them to everyone you know. Just for 24 hours or so and watch all this "unlimited" bandwidth grind the system to a hault.
As a follow up trick start up few hundred class-action lawsuits for fraudulent buisness practices and false advertisment.
I'm immediately suspicious when you say laptop. I get similary remarks from alot of people at work. "I just bought xxx, a high end laptop/desktop and it won't play games for crap." 50% of the time after looking at their machine it turns out that they may have paid alot for their machine, but neglected to get something with a decent video card in it. The other 50%, when it comes to laptops, it turns out their machine was overheating because the heatsinks had come loose.
Even a machine with an entry level graphics card should be able to handle WOW fairly easily considering how old WOW is. If it still runs poorly, go back and beat up your sales rep for lying to you about the laptops abilities.
Note: Integrated graphic are not the same thing as a dedicated graphics card.
My perpetual bile is still alive and well. I still hate various communication companies with a passion and would rather do without than go back.
I've ditched the land line and cell phone for Skype and a pay as you go sim card in my last contract cell phone. The cable got booted and bittorrent, DVD rentals and recently JOOST went in their place. I would have hated my bank but it got bought out typically once every other year, so which of the five companies am I supposed to curse? I jumped into USAA and have been happy as a clam ever since.
It's too bad they are a DOD only credit union, they'd take over the world if they could ever go public.
Dangerously skirting the outer edges of propaganda...
If you mean by the "skirting the edges" as in passed from documentary, on through propaganda and to the far edge bordering the paranoid and lunatic fringe, then yes, he is dangerously skirting the outer edges of propaganda.
As a recent arrival in the UK, The Great Police State with all its CCTV's, must be a voyeur one, since it seems I've hardly ever see the police, even then though I live half a block away from the police station. About the only "Big Brother" activity I've witnessed is that a female officer (Big Sister) dropped by and asked me who I was in a casual sort of way a few weeks after I moved in. I don't know if it was a general neighborhood survey, or a let's eyeball the new guy. I little strange, but no different than living in a small town in the US where the local sheriff stops by to say howdy or in the larger cities where the police will drive through the neighborhoods on patrol. Not a bad policy, of course, but if you think "They" are out to get you, then it might make you a little nervous.
As far as crime it's pretty quiet in the smaller towns near where I live, though the media, just like the one back in the US, would have you think we were in the middle of a pedophile/gun infested war zone with the way they hyperventilate over everything. If they want to see that they should move out to California. They have more violent crimes a year there than here, and even then it's not as bad as the media makes it out to be.
Council estates? Are those like HUD homes in the US? Where they give cheap rent to people in nicer neighboorhood so that those can become fucked up too just like the poorer areas?
Next time don't be so quick to jump to conclusions
Exactly which website do you think you are on? That's rich, no jumping to conclusions, hahahahahaahhaahahaha.
My bad I didn't think there was anyone out there that actually likes getting spam. It's not like the guys that sign up for as much junk snail mail as possible and use it to heat there home. I can't possibly think of one single newsletter that isn't just bullshit adds that has ever had a problem getting through to my inbox.
But seriously if companies weren't such a bunch of gits with newsletters and promotional material and made it retarded obvious how to unsubscribe (As in the very first line of the newsletter should read click here to unsubscribe.), and then actually unsubscribe you in a prompt manner, then maybe then your precious newsletters wouldn't get blocked...but alas they don't and probably never will, so boo hoo you won't get all those special offers you so live for.
I got tired of losing track of friends every time I or they changed ISP's. Gmail is my poison of choice, since they keep the unsolicited "Penis Enlargement" spam to a minimum, but man is my secondary email account choked with newsletters and special offers from companies I've done business with. Gmail does make that fairly easy to deal with since their search function works well enough to find the important stuff.
Most business these days want an email address to send an invoice to, whether they be virtual, mail-order, or brick and morter, and it amazes me how often I end up getting junk mail from them anyway, even after I specifically request not to. This is why I have my personal email address and a secondary one. That way my main address stays nearly 100% junk mail free and the other well let's just say I get lot's of monthly specials from all those companies I've opted out from.
I say instead of the ISP auto-charging for emails they just include a "Bill them tab" on my web-email site, so if I click on it for yet another special offer, the sender gets charged six cents. A penny for the ISP/mail server and a nickel for me. I could pay my entire montly ISP service fee with all the crap that clogs up my box.
Nice bit of hype. Privatized jail has not been accused of increasing profits by increasing the number of prisoners, the Justice systems hand out the sentences not the jails, but by treating prisoners...well you know...like prisoners.
No cable tv, shitty food, bare minimum health and mental care, no Internet access, etc, etc. Oh the horror, those poor people, what did they ever do to be treated that way, oh wait a tic, yeah that's right they're scumbag criminals.
I say we haven't had a good penal colony is some time, look how well Australia turned out. Anyone have a good idea on where we can send the cream of our societal crop?
Yeah right, more likely your company defaulted everyone in instead of out for all the junk mail. In my book that is called spam, and they were correct to label you as such.
I don't know about it being jerky, it's been smooth as butter for me. I can see there being a problem for some devices, older equipment or small portables. It would be very smart of the to come up with a bittrate setting, but I'm not sure if they'd be able to do that without having to have multiple streams of the same content out there.
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Personally I've been leaning back towards LAN parties. Cheaters are much easier to deal with, you just chuck an empty beer bottle at them after the first offense. The second offense involves dragging them out back for a little wall to wall counselling session.
That is kind of like how the artificial sweetener Saccharin got pulled from the shelves over a decade ago after they found it caused cancer in mice. It turns out to get the equivalent dosage into humans as they were giving the lab mice, one would have to have eaten 15lbs of Saccharin every day. Once this came to light they redid the tests at normal levels with both mice and primates, it still ended up causing cancer in mice, but only in mice, it had no affect on the primates.
There is plenty of new music for me to listen to since I'm living in the UK now, but the exchange rate effectively doubles the price of a CD unless the bands release something in the US, and they beat the best songs to death on the radio over here as well.
The Genuine Advantage always seemed like a $100 fix to a $5 problem. I don't understand why they just don't offer the customers at retail they same price they offer companies like Dell for the license or even something at 2-3x times the price. You would find people a lot less willing to pirate Windows if it costs $40 instead of $220. They could get rid of all those people they have for licensing support and whole sections of their software engineers, I'm sure that would make up a large portion of the $180 difference licensing price.
For the sake of expediency I'll list the things that were correct.
Vista runs crappy on 512mb. Very true, but XP and OSX 10 runs crappy on 512mb too, so what's your point? Win98 was the last MS OS out there that did fine with that little RAM.
IE7 is unsecure. It is and it isn't. It is like arguing that guns like the Glock are unsecure because they don't have a safety switch, which is completely untrue. The power of stupid always trumps the power of software security. Stupid always finds a way. IE7 is not a very good program, but it's not a very bad on either. It's amazing how little maulware you pick up if you stay off the flash games, porn, and warez sites.
I can't think of the name of another where they sent out seed ships with a few thousand people on each to escape Earth which was going to be destroyed when the Sun grew to red size. Those that stayed behind had a about 1000 years left, they lowered the population to around 5 million people, wealth became a question of logistics not actual price. Want a 10m cube of gold, ok make some arrangements to have it hauled to your house, that'll be $10. They fought wars lots of wars, just for fun usuing antique weapons and set rules, with the best medical care known to man standing by. Art, music, and entertainment expanded far beyond anything that had come before it. In the end they poured their resources back into science and technology and in a very short time came up with new ships and evacuated those that wanted to leave that actually managed to catch up and land only 10 or so years behind the sleeper ships that left hundreds of years before.
Personally I think this would be closer to reality. Look at the way we live now in the US and in Europe. As wealth increases, population growth slows and opportunites expand. I don't buy the whole "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer." It's more like the "The educated get richer and the ignorant go nowhere". Even though the difference between the top an bottom grows every year, the poor in our countries don't starve to death and have enough to have 5 kids. In the US they don't pay Federal taxes anymore and they still get a sizeable refund check from the governement.
Individuals now have the ability to fund their own space programs, smart people start billion dollar companies out of things that were ust hobbies, and even the average person with a modest paycheck can become a millionare in a relatively short period of time if they are just a little frugal and invest their savings. I see this expanding with time not shrinking.
Now as far as this thing in St Louis, having lived there for 25 years, there is alot of crying foul by the Black community over the treatment and racial profiling by police. St Louis is made up a many small cities that have grown together into St Louis county. A short trip on 270 will take you through a half dozen cities each with their own police force, racial make-up, and attitude towards suspicious people.
A standard tactic was what we referred to as the party car, essentially any car with two or more male teenagers along with stupid behavior or loud music, or in many case just looking like they were out of place (ie black kids in a predominately white town at 1am), would get pulled over and searched without actually commiting any violation. Yes this was racial profiling at best and on occassion racism at it's worse, but unfortunately it was also VERY effective. Typical stops resulted in arrests greater than 50% of the time, for weapons, drugs, or standing warrents. At the time there was a big fight going on over the legality of it, since they were also confiscating cars that had drugs in them, (Sorry Dad for having a joint, but thanks for letting me borrow the car.) Looks like things still haven't been settled.
Personally I don't know what the answer to it is, but I can tell you are always going to have problems with racism when you have police dealing with the people in poor areas. Not all the poor are black and not all the police are white, but those parts of town where the police try to maintain order are usually very polarized in terms of race. People of both sides get overly worked up over that one incident out of ten thousand thousand (Heh about one weeks worth of police arrests in St Louis.) that gets taped and shows a couple of human beings on their worse day.
I do think though until the Police make greater efforts to kick out the "good Ol' boys" out of their numbers, whether they be the poster child for the KKK or just a little too over enthusiastic and aggressive with their job, and the poor stop crying foul everytime one of their dirt-bag, 30th time I've been arrested criminal relatives provokes the police enough to kick their ass, then nothing is ever going to get fixed.
The ACLU sticking it's nose in with a half assed scheme is only going to prolong the racial problems.
Video playback (DVD Rips) I like Zoomplayer though it works kinda of quirky under Vista. I'll give them a few more months to patch it, then I'm going to be out looking for another. I used to have a very large growing library (just under 1TB) of bittorrented TV shows, but once I realized I was never going to watch any of them again and no one else wanted to copy them, I stopped looking for something to organize them and started to delete them. Even the DVD rips get purged now and then when ever my server gets full (~2TB). It just like cleaning out the closet, you ask yourself when was the last time you watched any of the movies. If the answer is more than a year ago, DELETE, ARE YOU SURE?, YES. It's amazing how much extra space you'll have after that.
I know iTunes works fairly well as a manager, without DRM, I had it on my computer for a few months watching LOST, but it got dumped once I realized Apple won't let you re-download anything without repaying. So after losing about $50 worth of TV shows and the fact that just about every Apple enthusiast I've come across in person has been a condencending snob if not a downright prick with far too big of a superiority complex. The crack-up is when they end up asking you to come over and help them with their "perfect" machine. It turns out even a Mac needs more than 512mb of ram and not have dozens of things running at the same time to work well. Not to mention the fact that after ponying up the $20 for QuicktimePro, I like watching movie previews as much as the next guy, I got really sick of it constantly trying to "Update" Quicktime by downloading iTunes.
The whole thing has left a very bad taste in my mouth so as a point more out of spite, than any technical shortcomings, which it has few it is an Apple product after all, I refuse to use iTunes.
Mongol General: ...what is best in life?
Mongol: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Mongol General: That is good! That is good.
General leans in close to Conan, very good Conan, but maybe your loin cloth is a little too tight.
It may just be me, but it just wouldn't sound as bad ass coming from an eleven year old. Of course there have been some pretty great leaders, that ruled with an iron grip at an early age, but all of them at least had reached the point in life where their testicals had actually dropped.
I'm sure there will some voice apps out there soon that not just change the pitch of the users voice, but actually layer over a voice actors voice, with great sounding Barbarian Aarrrnnoldness to had by all.
WOW runs fine, but we are talking apples and oranges here since you have a laptop and I have a desktop with totally different hardware.
Driver support has been frustrating, I finally get something other than basic stereo out of my Creative X-fi sound card as of last week, but I think it'll safe for you to go back in the next couple months since most of the major players are finally getting their act together.
Ok first mistake it's a Compaq. If it doesn't have a dedicated graphics card compared to integrated graphics, typical of Compaq's, you are going to see a big hit on the CPU and memory since integrated graphics uses the main CPU and memory to run the graphics.
Second mistake Pinnacle Studio 10, it barely worked right on XP, so you are fighting a loosing battle hoping that it'll work on Vista.
Also a question why are you fooling with Pinnacle Studio 10 if you are using Ulead Media Studio Pro? You have a camera, a firewire port, and editing software, you shouldn't need anything else.
If you are importing your video from your camera through an external hardware device made by Pinnacle into a firewire port on your laptop you are adding an unecessary step to the process. Plug the camera directly into the laptop and chuck the Pinnacle hardware in the garbage (or Ebay it like I did) and just use the Ulead software for transfering your videos. If you are having problems getting it to import into Ulead, just use the Windows Movie maker to inport. It's rock solid even if the software editing options are pretty basic.
The only reason I can see you using an external device to import your video is if you are using the RCA outputs on the camera. If that is the case that'll give you much lower quality video, and make the whole process a pain in the butt. Look around on your camera for a rectangular plug with a small notch on one side of it, it's probably right next to the micro-RCA plug. That is a mini-firewire port (Don't confuse it with the mini-usb port most have, those typically are only for transfer photos you've taken with the camera.) Go back up to the store (take the camera with you) and pick up a firewire cable so you can hook it directly to the laptop. You can control all the camera functions (such as play, pause, and search) directly in the software and makes importing video a snap. Oh while you are there punch the sales clerk who sold you all the junk you didn't need.
As far as Winamp using that much CPU. It typically uses 20-30% CPU until it has fully buffered the music on your playlist and then drops down to 1-4% while playing your music. If you fill your playlist with a few dozen songs it will take it quite a while to buffer them all, especially at laptop harddrive speeds which are anemic at best. If you are listening to internet radio through Winamp it almost continously uses above 20% since you are always buffering the next audio file. This has nothing to do with Vista as Winamp has behaived this way for quite a while.
Hope this helps.
Just for the sake of argument let's just put on our tin-foil hats for a moment and imagine a world where MS bowed to the MAFIAA and started locking down all non-DRM content, and now imagine a world were the soon to be 4 BILLION PC owners came together for a class-action lawsuit that would be like the Moon suddenly dropping out of the sky on MS and the RIAA. The day after that the real P2P network would kick into gear that makes current file swapping look quaint. All that is required is a six-pack, a 500gb external harddrive, some sneakers, and a few hours to kill.
I would be among the first to bail immediately and go pick-up the latest version of Linux, but the odds of that ever happening are about zero. So lighten up a bit. If you really hate DRM then don't use the products, it's really that simple. Vista does not interfere with anything you personally have created on your machine including ripping media.
If I run Winamp CPU useage spikes to 40% and then drops back to 20-30% for a few minutes. Once it's done buffering the tunes in my playlist Winamp drops down to 1-4% useage. If I run a library update scan of my music across the network it eats up about 40-48% continuously until the scan is done. If they were listening to internet radio I can see it staying at above 20% the entire time since it is continuously buffering music. My CPU if you are curious an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
The things I have running in the background including Aero, taskmanager, sidebar, Norton, Skype, Logitech, and BOINC manager (paused) eat up at the most 1-4%, so if they are constantly seeing 20% useage then either they are full of shit, have spyware, or simply have a crappy machine. I'll give you a hint which it might be, the orginal poster's computer is a Compaq laptop, (All three then.) most like with integrated graphics rather than a dedicated graphics card which uses the CPU and system memory to run 3d apps which Aero most certainly is. Unlikely to be a dual-core and not even remotely high performance.
"Somebody running a server in their basement on our network and uploading illegal copies movies raises the costs for everybody else and jams the network in ways we're not compensated for,"
Uhh bullshit. We pay for the connection, we get to use the connection. If you don't like that quit selling us "Unlimited" Service and then crying when we actually use it as such.
It would be funny to have an national protest by uploading, legal things of course, all over the world just to see how badly we could cripple the internet. Say you entire photo library to your favorite photo site, or a nice modest ten gig transfer through chat programs such as Skype, or a few hundred emails with a files attached to them to everyone you know. Just for 24 hours or so and watch all this "unlimited" bandwidth grind the system to a hault.
As a follow up trick start up few hundred class-action lawsuits for fraudulent buisness practices and false advertisment.
Even a machine with an entry level graphics card should be able to handle WOW fairly easily considering how old WOW is. If it still runs poorly, go back and beat up your sales rep for lying to you about the laptops abilities.
Note: Integrated graphic are not the same thing as a dedicated graphics card.
My perpetual bile is still alive and well. I still hate various communication companies with a passion and would rather do without than go back.
I've ditched the land line and cell phone for Skype and a pay as you go sim card in my last contract cell phone. The cable got booted and bittorrent, DVD rentals and recently JOOST went in their place. I would have hated my bank but it got bought out typically once every other year, so which of the five companies am I supposed to curse? I jumped into USAA and have been happy as a clam ever since.
It's too bad they are a DOD only credit union, they'd take over the world if they could ever go public.
If you mean by the "skirting the edges" as in passed from documentary, on through propaganda and to the far edge bordering the paranoid and lunatic fringe, then yes, he is dangerously skirting the outer edges of propaganda.
As far as crime it's pretty quiet in the smaller towns near where I live, though the media, just like the one back in the US, would have you think we were in the middle of a pedophile/gun infested war zone with the way they hyperventilate over everything. If they want to see that they should move out to California. They have more violent crimes a year there than here, and even then it's not as bad as the media makes it out to be.
Council estates? Are those like HUD homes in the US? Where they give cheap rent to people in nicer neighboorhood so that those can become fucked up too just like the poorer areas?
Exactly which website do you think you are on? That's rich, no jumping to conclusions, hahahahahaahhaahahaha.
My bad I didn't think there was anyone out there that actually likes getting spam. It's not like the guys that sign up for as much junk snail mail as possible and use it to heat there home. I can't possibly think of one single newsletter that isn't just bullshit adds that has ever had a problem getting through to my inbox.
But seriously if companies weren't such a bunch of gits with newsletters and promotional material and made it retarded obvious how to unsubscribe (As in the very first line of the newsletter should read click here to unsubscribe.), and then actually unsubscribe you in a prompt manner, then maybe then your precious newsletters wouldn't get blocked...but alas they don't and probably never will, so boo hoo you won't get all those special offers you so live for.
I got tired of losing track of friends every time I or they changed ISP's. Gmail is my poison of choice, since they keep the unsolicited "Penis Enlargement" spam to a minimum, but man is my secondary email account choked with newsletters and special offers from companies I've done business with. Gmail does make that fairly easy to deal with since their search function works well enough to find the important stuff.
I say instead of the ISP auto-charging for emails they just include a "Bill them tab" on my web-email site, so if I click on it for yet another special offer, the sender gets charged six cents. A penny for the ISP/mail server and a nickel for me. I could pay my entire montly ISP service fee with all the crap that clogs up my box.
No cable tv, shitty food, bare minimum health and mental care, no Internet access, etc, etc. Oh the horror, those poor people, what did they ever do to be treated that way, oh wait a tic, yeah that's right they're scumbag criminals.
I say we haven't had a good penal colony is some time, look how well Australia turned out. Anyone have a good idea on where we can send the cream of our societal crop?
Yeah right, more likely your company defaulted everyone in instead of out for all the junk mail. In my book that is called spam, and they were correct to label you as such.
I don't know about it being jerky, it's been smooth as butter for me. I can see there being a problem for some devices, older equipment or small portables. It would be very smart of the to come up with a bittrate setting, but I'm not sure if they'd be able to do that without having to have multiple streams of the same content out there.