Never given me any problems in any Linux distro or Windows install, and back in the days I struggled with ALSA and couldn't get the onboard mobo sound to work, all I had to do was pop in a $10 CMI8738 pci card before installation and was assured of sound. The sound quality may not be the absolute greatest, largely surpassed by the onboard sound of mobos today, but the drivers are completely mature - and even better, unobtrusive.
On a side note, I find something puzzling: Almost no add-in sound cards have an industry standard 2X5 pin front panel audio header for headphones and mic. Creative's proprietary connector doesn't count. I actually bought an ENVY24 and later a PSC724 specifically for this reason, because of Teamspeak. I know you can easily get something from Frontx or just hack up something yourself, but why should we have to? Just put some pins on the damn things!
I've been nothing but disappointed with Disney, Dreamworks, and Pixar for quite a while - they're like autophagous cannibal machines, endlessly devouring themselves and their own Hollywood culture, vomiting up ersatz ambergris and defecating marketing material.
Disney's the worst offender, mining myths and legends in the public domain since the dawn of their existence, keeping everything and giving nothing back, extending copyright law into infinity to protect their stupid fucking Mouse. I'm glad they're mostly eating themselves, now.
Curse of the Were-Rabbit had a lot of pop culture references, but never lost itself. The Iron Giant was an incredible film, but I can't say I liked the Incredibles in the same way. Both were comparatively unsuccessful.
But - for the space of a week - I did work for the Circuit City IQ Crew or whatever they're called now (new name is imminent I believe). I can't fathom how you're supposed to work on someone's computer while trying to upsell and getting pulled off your work onto the floor every minute to demonstrate a product, coming back and seeing some moron started playing with your mouse while you were gone. Charging $250 to "set up" someone's new PC, install Norton suite and Webroot, all while getting paid a measly $12 an hour? No fucking way. I'd rather charge $100, install AVG or Avast and Firefox and OpenOffice and Spybot, neuter the startup and tray with MSconfig, toast the bloatware, run updates, spending an hour and a half at most, and pocket the money myself. I just switched over to warehouse instead and did the shit in my spare time for extra cash by advertising locally. Paid better, I did a better job, and had the satisfaction that the customers aren't getting ripped a new one.
BACK to piracy?
Jesus, he must be living in a reality field all on his own. Gotta keep up the appearances for the record execs, I guess.
It's like trying to unexplode the first nuclear bomb. He'd have better luck building a time machine and assassinating Hitler. Or trying to re-imprison Yog Sothoth back in the Pentagon before he escaped to Iraq and helped open the Seventh Gate.
As long as music is commercialized in its present form, there are people who want more than they can afford, there will be piracy, theft, whatever we are calling it now. It doesn't matter how much it costs.
The stylization and the scalability really impressed me on WoW. The game runs smoothly on my old beater athlon 1.2 with a geforce2mx , and it looks acceptable, cartoony, but better than a quasi-realistic resource hog slideshow. Can't say the same about FFXI, which looked like lurching, pixelated crap.
The nicest thing about WoW, like the Elder Scrolls, is that it has enough background material to make it stand apart. It doesn't feel generic. It appeals to the casual gamer as well as the grinder, and the fact that you can solo really makes it. So many other games make you so dependent on people that you can't do crap without a party, and if you can't get a party you're screwed. There's nothing left to do but fish. So you go to fish and your one gazillion gil fishing pole breaks three times in a row and... You cancel the game, which is made as difficult as possible by navigating some cryptosatanic aolesque menu monstrosity.
WoW is wonderful. Best MMORPG since Ultima went to hell.
I've encountered problems with almost all the pc game controllers that I have used (Belkin, Logitech, Intel, Hercules, Soyo adapter...)
Biggest issue is that PC games don't support controllers very well. To get a lot of games going you need to do some kind of voodoo to get one of the sticks to emulate a mouse sometimes and then a joy axis at other times (like Morrowind - which sucks because it's a console game as well) and even then sometimes your game will still do funny shit and ignore your mappings or refuse to allocate keys (Tomb Raider AOD and Emperor's Tomb - also console games that should know better) or the sensitivity between axis and mouse movement is so extreme switching between the two is impossible.
If a game claims to support a gamepad, it should be completely playable and you shouldn't have to touch the keyboard at all except for maybe chat or advanced functions. All the menus etc should be navigable with the gamepad. The only two PC games I've played that had this functionality were Emperor's Tomb - ONLY with a Belkin controller - and Final Fantasy online - both with a Logitech that died, and with a soyo Dualshock adapter.
Second most annoying problem is that each controller enumerates the buttons differently, sometimes it's impossible to remap, even using a combination of windows drivers mapping keys and directinput in-game.
It's like the antithesis of plug and play, and as far from a console experience as could be.
If Microsoft has any brains, when we plug this new cross platform XNA Xbox360 pad in, it shouldn't require any drivers, it should have one of the analog sticks mapped to emulate MOUSE MOVEMENT (maybe with a button to switch modes like the intel), and two or three buttons mapped to left/middle/right, and maybe some kind of scroll wheel, and the dpad maybe mapped to WASD. A standard config of buttons and controls, completely transparent but with available functions for the programmers to offer an enhanced interface. A standard array of buttons. Like a console. Usable without any special driver voodoo or remapping if so desired. The intel gamepad was really good at the mouse emulation, but it just didn't have enough buttons.
And as far as the hardware goes, on everything but the soyo to dualshock adapter, the analog sticks always croak after a while, and no amount of recalibration will save them. I don't ever want to start spinning crazily in the middle of a fight with Dagoth Ur. The pads need to be tanks. Like a Model M. I'm tired of pads croaking on me or perfectly good pads not working cause the game won't let you remap the wonky controls.
In this case, I think standardization will be a good thing. Too bad it's going to be an xbox pad though.
...
Wow.
Sorry.
Guess I had some buried passionate feelings about gamepads.
Let's see what we have here... Age of Wonders, Age of Wonders 2, Civilization III, Dungeon Siege, Neverwinter Nights, Rise of Nations, Temple of Elemental Evil, Couple of Tom Clancy games, Couple of Tomb Raiders, Tropico, Zoo Tycoon, etc. Some old ones, some newish ones. It let me try Angel of Darkness and Splinter Cell without coughing up a lot of cash only to find I didn't like em too much. It's a nice service. And I'm addicted to Tropico.
If I was in charge of a business or government office (or even the library I work at), and needed reliable multiple office workstations with word processing and network connectivity I'd buy a bunch of cheap duron rigs and get someone qualified to install all of them with redhat or mandrake. There's also no point in spending 300 on a constantly changing ms office format when openoffice is there. My philosophical sympathies as well as my financial sympathies are with open source. That said, from a personal point of view:
I ran a dos BBS back in the days before the internet was widely accessible. I remember when I first got on the net in 95 or so, i had to use a shell account. I remember using pine, lynx, finger, gopher, archie, telnet, zmodem, ymodem, all that. Coming from dos it made sense but was still unfamiliar. Then I discovered slirp and windows 3.11 and windows 95, went to tucows and got netscape (I was always in the netscape camp), eudora, viewed some pr0n, got flamed on alt.magick.chaos, screwed around on undernet with mirc, etc, all the while dodging blue screens left and right, until my brother fuxx0r3d the partitions during a slackware install, toasting all my documents, my whole new website I had been working on for a while, all the research I was doing for school, etc. It pissed me off.
Then for a couple of years, 1997-2001, I didn't own a computer. I didn't have too much money. I learned a little about the most current hardware from the library where I now work, checked out some books, sniffed around the anandtech forums for deals, bought a copy of windows 2000 oem, a duron, a stick of 128 ram, a kt133a board, a 30 gig drive, cheap 8 meg video card, and shoved it all in a case and installed. The whole thing cost $350. Then I connected to the net and d/led all the drivers and service packs through a cable modem. DL'ed Mozilla, napster and then gnutella clients, played diablo 2, got a webcam so me and my wife could videoconference with my family who live 2 hours away, voice over ip, installed a tv tuner, did video capture off cartoon network, turned em into vcd, scanned a bunch of articles in from academic journals for school research, all normal everyday fun things you do with a win box. I love self configuring devices that automount and turn on and stuff when i stick them in the drive or the usb port. No IRQ problems. I especially like it when I plug in a device and I don't even have to install a driver.
I was screwing around on the net and reading slashdot and decided to try my hand at installing red hat, my first distro try. My first impression was that it loaded ok, but there was no sound, and every app was named incomprehensibly, starting with Xblah or Kblah or Gblah. There were some odd messages during boot, I think some of my hardware wasn't working correctly, and I could make no sense of the directory structure, nautilus was confusing. And why were there so many apps? What did they all do? How much editing do I need to do? It seemed as if too much of my system was stuffed with somebody's mother's brother's cousin's friend's betaware v.03 text editor/mp3 player/ghostscript whatever program which someone incorporated as a dependency. There was some picture of what appeared to be a stinky foot where the start button is on win. I thought, ok let's install Mozilla, it worked! then I tried to get java 2 to work, which led me into my first command line nightmare. Immediately followed with quicktime, the sound problem, and by this time I decided say what the hell, let's try to find some simple how to's on the net, which told me at some point told me to edit something called "foo"? by typing those two magick letters VI, how the fuck do I get out of this PReHiSToRiC MoNGo PRoGRaM!!@!!! Hard reset.
All right it wasn't that bad... I want to stick a cd in the drive and have the application install. It's a royal pain in the ass problem trying to get "normal" stuff like java to work right in mozilla, those things could have been done in 5 minutes on a windows machine. They probably take less time on a mac, but macs dont have reasonably fast $350 duron systems. I don't want to spend all day screwing around with the OS, I want to run programs. I mean I know I could take several months to learn the OS ins and outs via command line and a few years learning to write my own drivers...?! The command line is currently relied upon too much and is consequently a prehistoric nightmare rather than the efficient expert's tool it yearns to be.
I've upgraded somewhat and and running on an oem xp pro (which is cheaper than my new video card). I had to flash the bios to get xp to install which wasn't a big problem. I like the application compatibility mode. It doesn't blue screen. Installation of new apps is easy. (So is updating with new security patches). More importantly, it allows me to run openoffice, winamp, mozilla, gnucleus, gimp, my copy of diablo 2, return to castle wolfenstein, console emulators, connect my visor, view dvds, and no, it doesn't crash. I don't like the fact it asks me for money sometimes, and I know sometimes in the middle of the night it calls home to some microsoft server, and I know there's a lot of bundled crap (some distros have a lot too though...), but yes, it is a more-than-decent OS from an ease of use and compatibility and stability standpont. I will continue to screw around with linux but it is not ready for me to use as a primary OS yet. I support open source and use open source applications, and I have had the chance to use some *NICE* linux installs on friend's computers (maybe I'll try Mandrake next time, and I like KDE), but all those friends are computer science majors... Someday I'll switch but not today, I have too much to do. I'll pay the $130 and be done with it. That's what I make in a day and a half.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically saying that in Korea, only old people listen to heavy metal.
Never given me any problems in any Linux distro or Windows install, and back in the days I struggled with ALSA and couldn't get the onboard mobo sound to work, all I had to do was pop in a $10 CMI8738 pci card before installation and was assured of sound. The sound quality may not be the absolute greatest, largely surpassed by the onboard sound of mobos today, but the drivers are completely mature - and even better, unobtrusive.
On a side note, I find something puzzling: Almost no add-in sound cards have an industry standard 2X5 pin front panel audio header for headphones and mic. Creative's proprietary connector doesn't count. I actually bought an ENVY24 and later a PSC724 specifically for this reason, because of Teamspeak. I know you can easily get something from Frontx or just hack up something yourself, but why should we have to? Just put some pins on the damn things!
I've been nothing but disappointed with Disney, Dreamworks, and Pixar for quite a while - they're like autophagous cannibal machines, endlessly devouring themselves and their own Hollywood culture, vomiting up ersatz ambergris and defecating marketing material.
Disney's the worst offender, mining myths and legends in the public domain since the dawn of their existence, keeping everything and giving nothing back, extending copyright law into infinity to protect their stupid fucking Mouse. I'm glad they're mostly eating themselves, now.
Curse of the Were-Rabbit had a lot of pop culture references, but never lost itself. The Iron Giant was an incredible film, but I can't say I liked the Incredibles in the same way. Both were comparatively unsuccessful.
People love crap.
But - for the space of a week - I did work for the Circuit City IQ Crew or whatever they're called now (new name is imminent I believe). I can't fathom how you're supposed to work on someone's computer while trying to upsell and getting pulled off your work onto the floor every minute to demonstrate a product, coming back and seeing some moron started playing with your mouse while you were gone. Charging $250 to "set up" someone's new PC, install Norton suite and Webroot, all while getting paid a measly $12 an hour? No fucking way. I'd rather charge $100, install AVG or Avast and Firefox and OpenOffice and Spybot, neuter the startup and tray with MSconfig, toast the bloatware, run updates, spending an hour and a half at most, and pocket the money myself. I just switched over to warehouse instead and did the shit in my spare time for extra cash by advertising locally. Paid better, I did a better job, and had the satisfaction that the customers aren't getting ripped a new one.
BACK to piracy? Jesus, he must be living in a reality field all on his own. Gotta keep up the appearances for the record execs, I guess. It's like trying to unexplode the first nuclear bomb. He'd have better luck building a time machine and assassinating Hitler. Or trying to re-imprison Yog Sothoth back in the Pentagon before he escaped to Iraq and helped open the Seventh Gate. As long as music is commercialized in its present form, there are people who want more than they can afford, there will be piracy, theft, whatever we are calling it now. It doesn't matter how much it costs.
The nicest thing about WoW, like the Elder Scrolls, is that it has enough background material to make it stand apart. It doesn't feel generic. It appeals to the casual gamer as well as the grinder, and the fact that you can solo really makes it. So many other games make you so dependent on people that you can't do crap without a party, and if you can't get a party you're screwed. There's nothing left to do but fish. So you go to fish and your one gazillion gil fishing pole breaks three times in a row and... You cancel the game, which is made as difficult as possible by navigating some cryptosatanic aolesque menu monstrosity.
WoW is wonderful. Best MMORPG since Ultima went to hell.
Biggest issue is that PC games don't support controllers very well. To get a lot of games going you need to do some kind of voodoo to get one of the sticks to emulate a mouse sometimes and then a joy axis at other times (like Morrowind - which sucks because it's a console game as well) and even then sometimes your game will still do funny shit and ignore your mappings or refuse to allocate keys (Tomb Raider AOD and Emperor's Tomb - also console games that should know better) or the sensitivity between axis and mouse movement is so extreme switching between the two is impossible.
If a game claims to support a gamepad, it should be completely playable and you shouldn't have to touch the keyboard at all except for maybe chat or advanced functions. All the menus etc should be navigable with the gamepad. The only two PC games I've played that had this functionality were Emperor's Tomb - ONLY with a Belkin controller - and Final Fantasy online - both with a Logitech that died, and with a soyo Dualshock adapter.
Second most annoying problem is that each controller enumerates the buttons differently, sometimes it's impossible to remap, even using a combination of windows drivers mapping keys and directinput in-game.
It's like the antithesis of plug and play, and as far from a console experience as could be.
If Microsoft has any brains, when we plug this new cross platform XNA Xbox360 pad in, it shouldn't require any drivers, it should have one of the analog sticks mapped to emulate MOUSE MOVEMENT (maybe with a button to switch modes like the intel), and two or three buttons mapped to left/middle/right, and maybe some kind of scroll wheel, and the dpad maybe mapped to WASD. A standard config of buttons and controls, completely transparent but with available functions for the programmers to offer an enhanced interface. A standard array of buttons. Like a console. Usable without any special driver voodoo or remapping if so desired. The intel gamepad was really good at the mouse emulation, but it just didn't have enough buttons.
And as far as the hardware goes, on everything but the soyo to dualshock adapter, the analog sticks always croak after a while, and no amount of recalibration will save them. I don't ever want to start spinning crazily in the middle of a fight with Dagoth Ur. The pads need to be tanks. Like a Model M. I'm tired of pads croaking on me or perfectly good pads not working cause the game won't let you remap the wonky controls.
In this case, I think standardization will be a good thing. Too bad it's going to be an xbox pad though.
Wow.
Sorry.
Guess I had some buried passionate feelings about gamepads.
Jesus I thought for a second there there was a _2600_ toolbar.
Let's see what we have here... Age of Wonders, Age of Wonders 2, Civilization III, Dungeon Siege, Neverwinter Nights, Rise of Nations, Temple of Elemental Evil, Couple of Tom Clancy games, Couple of Tomb Raiders, Tropico, Zoo Tycoon, etc. Some old ones, some newish ones. It let me try Angel of Darkness and Splinter Cell without coughing up a lot of cash only to find I didn't like em too much. It's a nice service. And I'm addicted to Tropico.
is the cost of an Ipod.
If I was in charge of a business or government office (or even the library I work at), and needed reliable multiple office workstations with word processing and network connectivity I'd buy a bunch of cheap duron rigs and get someone qualified to install all of them with redhat or mandrake. There's also no point in spending 300 on a constantly changing ms office format when openoffice is there. My philosophical sympathies as well as my financial sympathies are with open source. That said, from a personal point of view:
I ran a dos BBS back in the days before the internet was widely accessible. I remember when I first got on the net in 95 or so, i had to use a shell account. I remember using pine, lynx, finger, gopher, archie, telnet, zmodem, ymodem, all that. Coming from dos it made sense but was still unfamiliar. Then I discovered slirp and windows 3.11 and windows 95, went to tucows and got netscape (I was always in the netscape camp), eudora, viewed some pr0n, got flamed on alt.magick.chaos, screwed around on undernet with mirc, etc, all the while dodging blue screens left and right, until my brother fuxx0r3d the partitions during a slackware install, toasting all my documents, my whole new website I had been working on for a while, all the research I was doing for school, etc. It pissed me off.
Then for a couple of years, 1997-2001, I didn't own a computer. I didn't have too much money. I learned a little about the most current hardware from the library where I now work, checked out some books, sniffed around the anandtech forums for deals, bought a copy of windows 2000 oem, a duron, a stick of 128 ram, a kt133a board, a 30 gig drive, cheap 8 meg video card, and shoved it all in a case and installed. The whole thing cost $350. Then I connected to the net and d/led all the drivers and service packs through a cable modem. DL'ed Mozilla, napster and then gnutella clients, played diablo 2, got a webcam so me and my wife could videoconference with my family who live 2 hours away, voice over ip, installed a tv tuner, did video capture off cartoon network, turned em into vcd, scanned a bunch of articles in from academic journals for school research, all normal everyday fun things you do with a win box. I love self configuring devices that automount and turn on and stuff when i stick them in the drive or the usb port. No IRQ problems. I especially like it when I plug in a device and I don't even have to install a driver.
I was screwing around on the net and reading slashdot and decided to try my hand at installing red hat, my first distro try. My first impression was that it loaded ok, but there was no sound, and every app was named incomprehensibly, starting with Xblah or Kblah or Gblah. There were some odd messages during boot, I think some of my hardware wasn't working correctly, and I could make no sense of the directory structure, nautilus was confusing. And why were there so many apps? What did they all do? How much editing do I need to do? It seemed as if too much of my system was stuffed with somebody's mother's brother's cousin's friend's betaware v.03 text editor/mp3 player/ghostscript whatever program which someone incorporated as a dependency. There was some picture of what appeared to be a stinky foot where the start button is on win. I thought, ok let's install Mozilla, it worked! then I tried to get java 2 to work, which led me into my first command line nightmare. Immediately followed with quicktime, the sound problem, and by this time I decided say what the hell, let's try to find some simple how to's on the net, which told me at some point told me to edit something called "foo"? by typing those two magick letters VI, how the fuck do I get out of this PReHiSToRiC MoNGo PRoGRaM!!@!!! Hard reset.
All right it wasn't that bad... I want to stick a cd in the drive and have the application install. It's a royal pain in the ass problem trying to get "normal" stuff like java to work right in mozilla, those things could have been done in 5 minutes on a windows machine. They probably take less time on a mac, but macs dont have reasonably fast $350 duron systems. I don't want to spend all day screwing around with the OS, I want to run programs. I mean I know I could take several months to learn the OS ins and outs via command line and a few years learning to write my own drivers...?! The command line is currently relied upon too much and is consequently a prehistoric nightmare rather than the efficient expert's tool it yearns to be.
I've upgraded somewhat and and running on an oem xp pro (which is cheaper than my new video card). I had to flash the bios to get xp to install which wasn't a big problem. I like the application compatibility mode. It doesn't blue screen. Installation of new apps is easy. (So is updating with new security patches). More importantly, it allows me to run openoffice, winamp, mozilla, gnucleus, gimp, my copy of diablo 2, return to castle wolfenstein, console emulators, connect my visor, view dvds, and no, it doesn't crash. I don't like the fact it asks me for money sometimes, and I know sometimes in the middle of the night it calls home to some microsoft server, and I know there's a lot of bundled crap (some distros have a lot too though...), but yes, it is a more-than-decent OS from an ease of use and compatibility and stability standpont. I will continue to screw around with linux but it is not ready for me to use as a primary OS yet. I support open source and use open source applications, and I have had the chance to use some *NICE* linux installs on friend's computers (maybe I'll try Mandrake next time, and I like KDE), but all those friends are computer science majors... Someday I'll switch but not today, I have too much to do. I'll pay the $130 and be done with it. That's what I make in a day and a half.