By the way, it's not 'cheating' or 'marketing'. 'Mega' means (and always has meant) 'million' (10^6). Hard-drive manufacturers are correct in their terminology. The only reason people use 'mega' for 2^20 is that some genius in the early days of computing thought that the standing metric prefixes were 'close enough' to the binary system that computers use... and, unfortunately, it was so convenient that it caught on everywhere.
Anyway. My Christmas gift to you is the seed that will hopefully allow you to change your perception of this so-called cheat. Blame that dumb computer scientist, not the hard-drive manufacturers.:(
(b)- I would imagine leet audiophiles think even CD's are already lossily encoded, much less accept more loss on top of that.
Fair enough, i suppose, but i'm talking about the l33t lossy audiophiles.:p
(c)- vorbis and mp3 are competing for the compressed music niche, if you want high bitrates switch to flac or something.
Er, 'high bit rate' in this context is between 192 and 320 kbps. Vorbis is great at low bit rates (like, the kind suitable for streaming audio), but it's not as good as MP3 at bit rates around 192, though there are ways of improving it (like GTb3 and stuff).
Incidentally, if any iRiver reps are listening, (IMO) you really need to redesign your HDD players, the features are so nice, but the design is so poor. Why an LCD on the main unit with the quality of iRiver remotes?
(a) You're confusing AC-3 with AAC. Two totally different beasts. DVDs use AC-3, while the iPod uses AAC.
(b) The 'l33t' audiophiles were using AAC long before Apple decided to add support to the iPod. Granted, it wasn't anywhere near as popular as MP3, or even Vorbis, but there was some demand. Actually, my RioVolt's (circa 1999 or so?) instruction manual has an entry about AAC in the glossary, heh.
(c) Though the rest of your post may be fairly correct (especially the part about why they'll go with MP3), i really don't think you can argue quality with Vorbis. Vorbis is awesome, but it's not usually as good as MP3 at higher bit rates. (And especially really high bit rates.):/
Aye, it does seem to me like a lot of people are seriously missing the point here. A new battery for the iPod does not cost $100. A new battery for the iPod actually costs around $40. Half of the $60 left over is Apple's service fee, and the other half is Apple ripping you off. They're ripping you off $30. Boo-hoo. Welcome to the world of Apple. They do it with their computer products (e.g., RAM) too.
While being ripped off $30 is pretty lame, it's not like Apple is the only company that gets a little too much profit from something. I don't see why the iPod is getting so much attention here. When you go to Target looking for AAs, you're going to find a whole bunch of the same-quality batteries sold at different prices. Duracell might be ripping you off here! Make a huge deal about it, everybody!
While i think you should always have TweakUI installed with Windows (you suck if you don't, heh), you don't need it to disable accounts. I don't know about Home, but on Pro, you just have to go into 'Computer Management' (Control Panel > Administrative Tools), and select the user, and check 'Disable account'.
I really can't say i care for licensed-music soundtracks much at all. I'd much rather listen to something by Mitsuda or Uematsu or Sakuraba than listen to the garbage that EA and the like license for their games. Especially, like, annoying for me is the fact (at least, it seems to me) that most licensed-music games are based around rap. And... my opinion of rap is probably common to Slashdot, heh.
As a whole, either way, i'd have to say that the whole game-music scene is declining. I haven't really got into a soundtrack since 'Final Fantasy X'. Seems like Uematsu's star is very quickly fading, in particular. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he retired within the decade. He's becoming less and less prominent within Square, and he very rarely does stuff outside of it, so i don't see him keeping his FF7/FF8/FF9-era popularity. Even FFX wasn't entirely his project. Mitsuda is supposed to be still working on new stuff, but i'm not very hopeful.
And FFXI is being done by Sakimoto. Boo.:(
So... yeah. With the big composers quickly fading, it seems like the whole game-music thing is going to go down-hill pretty quick from here. Licensed music is getting a lot more popular, even in Japan, and it's only going to get more so. Alas~~
Aye, to reiterate what was said (but in a more detailed way), the Administrator account in XP is no different from any other administrator on the system. All administrators have the same permissions and abilities by default. (Of course, you can change certain individual abilities in your secpol.msc and stuff like that.)
I like to think of the Administrator account as a 'back-up' account. Plus there's the fact that it's used when repairing Windows installations from the Recovery Console, and other stuff like that.
People as a concept of 'mass' behave in a manner different from people as a group of individuals. When you look at 'people' in, for example, America, you conclude that 'people' like the music of Britney Spears and Ludacris (going by some of the big names on the MTV charts). Ask your friends, though, if they like the music of either of those, and i'm guessing that'll probably be a negative. Your friends are part of 'people' in America, but don't, by any means, represent 'people'.
Far more disturbing and/or amusing than any of those examples is the fact that there does, truly, exist an 'e-wrestling' forum on GameFAQs. Seriously, i saw it once. I'm not quite positive what 'e-wrestling' is, but i'm willing to bet that it's somewhat akin to cyber-sex.
Yeah, i agree. I'm not a big fan of FPSes, and i can't stand Halo on the Xbox, but Halo is a riot on PC, especially when you get certain vehicles going in there (not the cheesy ones). Doing flips in the buggies is hilarious. Me and my friends just play for hours crashing into each other and stuff, heh.
Really, i hate to sound like a prick here, but the GameFAQs forum is the least-intelligent forum i have ever had the displeasure of viewing. I mean, this goes far below the quality of anime fora, where fat kids sit around trying to act Japanese by saying things like 'KAWAII ^___^;;;;' and 'GOMEN'.
This is a forum that has only a few subjects. The type of threads you find on GameFAQs include:
'POLL: HWO MANY OF U HAEV BETAEN THIS GAME?????//'
'I HAEV $35.72 WIHCH GAME SHULD I BUY MGS2 OR FFX?????/11'
'WUT GAME SI BETTAR FFX OR FF7&??1!'
'FF7 SEQUAL ON NGAGE TRU EOR NOT???????????????/'
You get the idea. Some people might not realise it, but there are a lot of sub-cultures, even sub-cultures of sub-cultures. Basically, the sub-culture of GameFAQs breaks down like this (broadest to most specific): video games -> console games -> RPGs -> popular RPGs. It's kind of like the whole MTV scene, except with video games. These people like ANYTHING that the big companies put out. Final Fantasy series especially.
I'm not going to lie and say i haven't enjoyed almost every FF game i've ever played, but these people are what normal people call 'fan boys', in the highest sense of the word. So, really, don't take much stock in what the people on GameFAQs say. When FFX-8 comes out and it's got Mickey Mouse and Britney Spears as the lead characters, you can expect the same rave reviews from the GameFAQs crowd that Square games always get.
Yeah.... Heh. I really sound like an ass, and i'll probably get modded down as a troll or flamebait, but somebody had to say it.
As for me, i reckon i don't expect too much out of it. I'm not one of the people in 'the scene' that take every single chance they can get to insult the game, but i've gathered sufficient evidence to form an expectation of the game. The opening FMV was retarded, i thought; the story doesn't make any sense; and the soundtrack is horrible. FFX didn't have as great of a soundtrack as older FF games did (and Nobuo's work on FFX was, for the most part, pretty mediocre), but it was still pretty damned good. I can't think of a single song on the FFX-2 soundtrack i can honestly say i like.:/
Come on, you guys are supposed to be computer nerds. Programmers and scripters and stuff. l33t hax0rz.
That being the case, you should know that '*nix' doesn't really make sense. Not in strict wild-card format, anyway. Given a list of 'UNIX *AND* UNIX clones', the wild card '*nix' would return only one result -- UNIX. (And not even that would be returned, unless you capitalise it 'Unix'.) Linux has a 'u' in it, so it wouldn't be returned. And i'm not aware of any other UNIX clones that have the so-called 'nix' thing. Unless maybe you count QNX. Which wouldn't be returned either.
Yet another 'TCP/IP over (insert inconventional medium)' article. As with all such articles, note that there will be responses regarding its Slashdotting, and subsequent replies to said responses regarding how the server housing the article is using (insert inconventional medium) to host the page(s).
Those are the three best fucking lines in the whole game. I love that part. Seriously, like, for a year or so it became this huge inside joke between me and my friends. Every time somebody said "What is this?" or anything that sounded like it, one of us would be like "... BLOOD!!".:D
Resident Evil is going to go down as a cult legend, i think, much in the way that the Evil Dead series has.
And now, improv:
Dying officer: "There was this... INCIDENT??? Involving these... zombie... LIKE... cre... eatures...! Chris. JILL!!...... And the rest of the... STARS...... members??! Went to investigate. But... it was... TOO... LATE......... UUUGUUUGUUUUGHHHH...."
Have you checked out Openbox [icculus.org]? It is a minimalistic window manager based off of Blackbox (Similar to WindowMaker), and adds some nice refining touches. These include scrolling your mousewheel on a window titlebar to shade up and down with ease, optimization for remote X forwarding (runs very nice remotely from my PS2), actually.. just read the About [icculus.org] section on the site for the details.
I'd tried Blackbox and Fluxbox, but i hadn't seen that before. That's actually pretty nice. Thanks for pointing it out; i may just have to try it the next time i feel inclined to mess with Linux. (My interest in Linux is an off-and-on thing.):)
Check out Xfce4 [xfce.org]. It doesn't seem to be as customizable as *box/fvwm/afterstep/windowmaker, but looks much more "slick", and is fairly lean, compared to KDE and Gnome anyway.
Yeah, i'd seen Xfce before (perhaps on Slashdot), but it didn't strike me as quite close enough to the, um, OpenSTEP... system. It does look nice though. Might have to try that one as well.
I use either fluxbox or fvwm2 myself, but they are definitely in your "industrial" category.
Yeah, they are.:p
http://chris.thesmartone.net:81/~chris/snapshot5 6. png
I don't need a big advanced wm or anything. One of the things I like is the more "true" multiple desktops of windowmaker. When you goto the 2nd desktop nothing of the first remains in your way and the ablity to drag windows over is GREAT. This is good when I do alot of things such as "web devel" in one and my basic IM's in the other. Also I am running it all on a Pentium 166MMX with 128mb of RAM. So Gnome2 is useless to me cause of GTK2 (Even with all the GTK settings down it still runs like ass. KDE was nice, it honestly runs good on a 166MMX as long as you have RAM. The one thing I didn't like was the size (im on a 6gb HDD) so I tried Windowmaker. In debian I just apt-get the wmaker conf utility. This gives me all the goodies I would ever need. The one thing about fluxbox and blackbox I didn't like was the confusion I had when I ran many xterms. I kinda lost them. On a 800x600 screen (monitor issues) it's hard to keep all that shit in my view.
Just my little opinion
Surely. I understand what you mean. I know everybody's going to hate me for bringing Windows into the discussion, but... i kind of think that maybe WM could benefit from a "themes" service, like XP has. If you want the bare-bones Window Maker system, you can just turn off the service (or disable the support when you compile it, or whatever). But it would leave room for the people, like me, who think that a pretty interface is very important when it comes to usability. I'm not saying make it more complicated (well, not really); i'm just saying make it look better.
Not a flame.....but, I completely disagree. I think the reason that KDE and GNOME are so popular has everything to do with the fact that they are the default window managers in the most popular Linux distros (*cough*RedHat*cough*Suse*cough*). Another plus is that they bring that 'Windows'-ish feel, which new Linux converts crave......it gives them
something somewhat familiar while investigating a whole new world (read: Linux/*BSD/your-free-unix-like-OS-of-choice)
Hmm, yeah, i suppose that's true. Still, though, if you presented a new user with Window Maker or AfterStep as they are now, and then presented that same user with an improved Window Maker/AfterStep that sported a "Windows-quality" interface (with high-colour, alpha-blended icons, and smooth curves or sharp edges, and sleek widgets), your "normal" user would probably go for the latter, right? KDE and GNOME are like Windows in that respect, aside from the fact that they kind of function like Windows.
Interestingly enough, if i had read this story a few months ago, i would've said "Poppycock! Google should be good enough for anyone!". But lately i've been noticing that Google turns up a lot of garbage results. Like, if you search for something "generic" (like, no brand name or product name or anything like that), you're going to find a whole bunch of results that just lead to pop-up search sites.
For example, look at the results for the search 'convert wmv mpeg'. The first three results lead to the same exact search site. (Whether they have pop-ups or not, i can't tell, because i block them.) The fourth result is another search site. And then the last three are the same as the first three.
Of course, this obviously works with stuff you'd expect it to, like 'mp3s' and 'warez' and 'porn', but it works with legitimate stuff too. I wonder if there'll be anything to combat this trend, whether it be implemented by Google or by someone else....
Hm, well, i'm a big Window Maker fan, myself. The whole *Step thing intrigues me, though, be it AfterStep, GNUStep, WinStep, or whatever. I just like the way the system works. However....
I realise that Window Maker and the like are pretty much designed to be "minimalist", but they seem to be lagging very far behind KDE and GNOME in terms of interface design. For example, just looking at the AfterStep screen-shots on the site (before it gets Slashdotted, heh), i'm liking the way the system is designed, in general, but it looks hideous. The graphics used in the interface are jagged, the window frames and buttons are almost industrial in their simplicity and lack of creativity, and the icons still look like really bad GIFs. And, like i said, i'm a fan of Window Maker, and prefer it over any other window-manager, but it's guilty of this too. They all look like something you might see running on a Commodore or an Amiga.
I know that they're constantly being improved and updated, and i realise the importance of laying down a proper foundation before you go around making things look nice and anti-aliased and all that jazz, but i think a lot of the reason GNOME and KDE each have such a huge following is because they're very pleasant to look at. I think WM and AfterStep and the like could benefit very much from trying to add in a little "eye candy" here and there. You don't need any gimmicks, but i really don't think it would negate the intended minimalism of the system if there were just "themes" and icons and what-not of the same calibre as those you might find looking at Nautilus or Konqueror.
Regardless of all that, Window Maker will remain my favourite window-manager, and i'll continue to recommend it to those looking for a good UNIX interface. And the whole XML graphics thing sounds really neat, also. Just wish they were "up there", in terms of what i mentioned, with GNOME and KDE.:/
Eh. One of the best ways to stay virus/worm/exploit/hack-free is to not be an idiot about it. In the 6 or 7 years of my life now that i've been physically and mentally able to use a computer regularly, i've never once got a virus, and never once got a worm, and i've only used (against my will) a firewall for 1 or 2 of those years. I've got some spyware stuff (mostly from my brother's messing around), but that's it, and that's fixed simply by running a spyware-scanner and deleting the files. No damage done.
I haven't been patched for this RPC thing until just yesterday afternoon. Originally i had intended to remain unpatched for the duration, just to see if i was "up to the challenge" of eluding the thing, but... when you've got four persons on IRC and two-dozen persons on a forum i frequent suddenly dropping like flies at the same time... heh. That kind of spooked me. So i gave in and patched it, and installed ZoneAlarm. I haven't been scanned on any of the RPC ports yet, though.
But, yeah, there are a lot of people i know, including myself, who haven't been using firewalls, and we've never been "hacked". Most of the other people i know have never even been infected with a Trojan. Either we're lucky, or we're doing something that everybody else isn't.:)
Capitalism is all about choice. Socialism is a lack of choice -- everybody must be equal, according to what your Dear Leader considers best. Except, of course for those who are more equal than others.
Socialism doesn't always have to have a Dear Leader, you know. There are many forms of socialism that are completely and entirely democratic (or "republican", if you're into semantics). Your last sentence, though, is an unfortunate and unresolved problem in most socialist countries.:)
So how is donating time to write free source code automatically socialist?
It's not. He was attempting to use the parent's definition against him.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway. My Christmas gift to you is the seed that will hopefully allow you to change your perception of this so-called cheat. Blame that dumb computer scientist, not the hard-drive manufacturers. :(
Fair enough, i suppose, but i'm talking about the l33t lossy audiophiles. :p
(c)- vorbis and mp3 are competing for the compressed music niche, if you want high bitrates switch to flac or something.
Er, 'high bit rate' in this context is between 192 and 320 kbps. Vorbis is great at low bit rates (like, the kind suitable for streaming audio), but it's not as good as MP3 at bit rates around 192, though there are ways of improving it (like GTb3 and stuff).
And get rid of that stupid joy stick. ;_;
No worries, it's a USB mass-storage device. Should be recognised by Macs or Linux or BSD or whatever as a regular ol' USB hard drive.
(a) You're confusing AC-3 with AAC. Two totally different beasts. DVDs use AC-3, while the iPod uses AAC.
(b) The 'l33t' audiophiles were using AAC long before Apple decided to add support to the iPod. Granted, it wasn't anywhere near as popular as MP3, or even Vorbis, but there was some demand. Actually, my RioVolt's (circa 1999 or so?) instruction manual has an entry about AAC in the glossary, heh.
(c) Though the rest of your post may be fairly correct (especially the part about why they'll go with MP3), i really don't think you can argue quality with Vorbis. Vorbis is awesome, but it's not usually as good as MP3 at higher bit rates. (And especially really high bit rates.) :/
While being ripped off $30 is pretty lame, it's not like Apple is the only company that gets a little too much profit from something. I don't see why the iPod is getting so much attention here. When you go to Target looking for AAs, you're going to find a whole bunch of the same-quality batteries sold at different prices. Duracell might be ripping you off here! Make a huge deal about it, everybody!
Just FYI. :)
As a whole, either way, i'd have to say that the whole game-music scene is declining. I haven't really got into a soundtrack since 'Final Fantasy X'. Seems like Uematsu's star is very quickly fading, in particular. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he retired within the decade. He's becoming less and less prominent within Square, and he very rarely does stuff outside of it, so i don't see him keeping his FF7/FF8/FF9-era popularity. Even FFX wasn't entirely his project. Mitsuda is supposed to be still working on new stuff, but i'm not very hopeful.
And FFXI is being done by Sakimoto. Boo. :(
So... yeah. With the big composers quickly fading, it seems like the whole game-music thing is going to go down-hill pretty quick from here. Licensed music is getting a lot more popular, even in Japan, and it's only going to get more so. Alas~~
I like to think of the Administrator account as a 'back-up' account. Plus there's the fact that it's used when repairing Windows installations from the Recovery Console, and other stuff like that.
You can stay connected to messenger servers, you know. You can wake up to an IM just as easily as you can an e-mail.
You follow? :/
Far more disturbing and/or amusing than any of those examples is the fact that there does, truly, exist an 'e-wrestling' forum on GameFAQs. Seriously, i saw it once. I'm not quite positive what 'e-wrestling' is, but i'm willing to bet that it's somewhat akin to cyber-sex.
Yeah, i agree. I'm not a big fan of FPSes, and i can't stand Halo on the Xbox, but Halo is a riot on PC, especially when you get certain vehicles going in there (not the cheesy ones). Doing flips in the buggies is hilarious. Me and my friends just play for hours crashing into each other and stuff, heh.
This is a forum that has only a few subjects. The type of threads you find on GameFAQs include:
'POLL: HWO MANY OF U HAEV BETAEN THIS GAME?????//'
'I HAEV $35.72 WIHCH GAME SHULD I BUY MGS2 OR FFX?????/11'
'WUT GAME SI BETTAR FFX OR FF7&??1!'
'FF7 SEQUAL ON NGAGE TRU EOR NOT???????????????/'
You get the idea. Some people might not realise it, but there are a lot of sub-cultures, even sub-cultures of sub-cultures. Basically, the sub-culture of GameFAQs breaks down like this (broadest to most specific): video games -> console games -> RPGs -> popular RPGs. It's kind of like the whole MTV scene, except with video games. These people like ANYTHING that the big companies put out. Final Fantasy series especially.
I'm not going to lie and say i haven't enjoyed almost every FF game i've ever played, but these people are what normal people call 'fan boys', in the highest sense of the word. So, really, don't take much stock in what the people on GameFAQs say. When FFX-8 comes out and it's got Mickey Mouse and Britney Spears as the lead characters, you can expect the same rave reviews from the GameFAQs crowd that Square games always get.
Yeah.... Heh. I really sound like an ass, and i'll probably get modded down as a troll or flamebait, but somebody had to say it.
As for me, i reckon i don't expect too much out of it. I'm not one of the people in 'the scene' that take every single chance they can get to insult the game, but i've gathered sufficient evidence to form an expectation of the game. The opening FMV was retarded, i thought; the story doesn't make any sense; and the soundtrack is horrible. FFX didn't have as great of a soundtrack as older FF games did (and Nobuo's work on FFX was, for the most part, pretty mediocre), but it was still pretty damned good. I can't think of a single song on the FFX-2 soundtrack i can honestly say i like. :/
It doesn't. Senor Crumble is merely a spelling-Nazi poser.
That being the case, you should know that '*nix' doesn't really make sense. Not in strict wild-card format, anyway. Given a list of 'UNIX *AND* UNIX clones', the wild card '*nix' would return only one result -- UNIX. (And not even that would be returned, unless you capitalise it 'Unix'.) Linux has a 'u' in it, so it wouldn't be returned. And i'm not aware of any other UNIX clones that have the so-called 'nix' thing. Unless maybe you count QNX. Which wouldn't be returned either.
We could all just say 'POSIX-based systems'....
Yet another 'TCP/IP over (insert inconventional medium)' article. As with all such articles, note that there will be responses regarding its Slashdotting, and subsequent replies to said responses regarding how the server housing the article is using (insert inconventional medium) to host the page(s).
Resident Evil is going to go down as a cult legend, i think, much in the way that the Evil Dead series has.
And now, improv:
Dying officer: "There was this... INCIDENT??? Involving these... zombie... LIKE... cre... eatures...! Chris. JILL!! ... ... And the rest of the... STARS... ... members??! Went to investigate. But... it was... TOO... LATE... ... ... UUUGUUUGUUUUGHHHH...."
For example, look at the results for the search 'convert wmv mpeg'. The first three results lead to the same exact search site. (Whether they have pop-ups or not, i can't tell, because i block them.) The fourth result is another search site. And then the last three are the same as the first three.
Of course, this obviously works with stuff you'd expect it to, like 'mp3s' and 'warez' and 'porn', but it works with legitimate stuff too. I wonder if there'll be anything to combat this trend, whether it be implemented by Google or by someone else....
I realise that Window Maker and the like are pretty much designed to be "minimalist", but they seem to be lagging very far behind KDE and GNOME in terms of interface design. For example, just looking at the AfterStep screen-shots on the site (before it gets Slashdotted, heh), i'm liking the way the system is designed, in general, but it looks hideous. The graphics used in the interface are jagged, the window frames and buttons are almost industrial in their simplicity and lack of creativity, and the icons still look like really bad GIFs. And, like i said, i'm a fan of Window Maker, and prefer it over any other window-manager, but it's guilty of this too. They all look like something you might see running on a Commodore or an Amiga.
I know that they're constantly being improved and updated, and i realise the importance of laying down a proper foundation before you go around making things look nice and anti-aliased and all that jazz, but i think a lot of the reason GNOME and KDE each have such a huge following is because they're very pleasant to look at. I think WM and AfterStep and the like could benefit very much from trying to add in a little "eye candy" here and there. You don't need any gimmicks, but i really don't think it would negate the intended minimalism of the system if there were just "themes" and icons and what-not of the same calibre as those you might find looking at Nautilus or Konqueror.
Regardless of all that, Window Maker will remain my favourite window-manager, and i'll continue to recommend it to those looking for a good UNIX interface. And the whole XML graphics thing sounds really neat, also. Just wish they were "up there", in terms of what i mentioned, with GNOME and KDE. :/
The system of inflections, syntax, and word formation of a language.
I haven't been patched for this RPC thing until just yesterday afternoon. Originally i had intended to remain unpatched for the duration, just to see if i was "up to the challenge" of eluding the thing, but... when you've got four persons on IRC and two-dozen persons on a forum i frequent suddenly dropping like flies at the same time... heh. That kind of spooked me. So i gave in and patched it, and installed ZoneAlarm. I haven't been scanned on any of the RPC ports yet, though.
But, yeah, there are a lot of people i know, including myself, who haven't been using firewalls, and we've never been "hacked". Most of the other people i know have never even been infected with a Trojan. Either we're lucky, or we're doing something that everybody else isn't. :)
Socialism doesn't always have to have a Dear Leader, you know. There are many forms of socialism that are completely and entirely democratic (or "republican", if you're into semantics). Your last sentence, though, is an unfortunate and unresolved problem in most socialist countries. :)
So how is donating time to write free source code automatically socialist?
It's not. He was attempting to use the parent's definition against him.