Whether you drive a car or ride a train, you can only go where the roads/tracks go
Yes, but when the road/tracks end, I can get out and go just about anywhere on my two feet given a reasonable amount of time and I sincerely doubt that freedom will be taken away from me anytime soon.
Humans evolved to jog and walk for long distances to track and catch animals that were faster but ran out of energy relatively quickly. The endurance of even an average modern person is quite good, most people can walk all day, sleep 6 hours and walk all day the next day too and keep doing that for weeks on end. Perhaps ending up with rather sore feet the first couple of days since very few people walk that much these days.
We've grown lazy and fat, we're chained down by unhealthy eating habits and a hauntingly large number of people are simply unable to exercise that extremely basic freedom.
Currently, I have one Maxtor 200GB, one Hitachi 250GB and two Samsungs (750GB and 1TB) in my desktop, the smallest being the oldest since I generally replace the oldest drive with a shiny new big one whenever I need an upgrade.
The 1TB Samsung I got about a month ago. Following my policy of switching out the oldest hardware, it replaced a 120GB Maxtor DiamondMax 9 that I bought back in 2004. That disk is now installed in my little sister's computer so she can store more animes and whatnot.
I know I'll probably jinx myself by saying this, but I have never ever had a disk die on me. None, nada, zilch. Not the new(ish) disks I currently use, not the old 30MB Connor disks my first PC had, not the rag-tag assembly of 130-60GB disks in between. Not even the 40/60/80GB Hitachi "Deathstars" in my dad's work computers. Not even the laptop disks that have been jumbled around, overheated in laptop bags due to bad standby setups and generally mistreated.
I bought a T42 back in 2004 for school. I used it every single day, messed about with it and had Windows XP, FreeBSD and various flavors of Linux on it at various times. Power management in Linux was flaky at best, especially standby and hibernation, where it would wake itself up and burn 100% CPU. So it overheated in my backpack and hit the automatic thermal shutdown a lot for a couple of weeks until I figured out the problem.
When my then-girlfriends Acer laptop died, I bough an Asus Eee and gave her the T42. She's lugged that damn thing around everywhere, used it outside, on the bus, on the train, for school work. We're not together anymore, but keep in touch and she's still using my old Thinkpad as her only computer for everything she does. The keys are worn shiny from all the writing she does on it and it is looking slightly worn around the corners of the lid from being pulled in and out of bags every day for years, but it's never had a single problem, it keeps on trucking and working flawlessly. The battery only lasts 10 minutes or so, but that's lithium-ion batteries for you, new ones are still being made and are quite affordable.
Best piece of hardware I ever bought. Serious hardware for serious work.
You can get a refund if you refuse the license for Windows. Lots of people have done this before.
Oh boo hoo, it's plastic? Could it be that plastic is actually a damn good material for building laptops, especially when it's reinforced like the stuff Lenovo uses? Not all plastics are equal, some are superior to metals for certain applications. Anyone with even the slightest technical bend should know this.
Thinkpads look like Thinkpads for a reason. They're black, sleek, no-nonsense machines. Why make something shiny if matte works better? (I hate those damn shiny abominations that can also be found on Thinkpads these days, unfortunately) They're for people who value performance and reliability over whizz-bang gee-gaws.
whilst driving down the highway, with cars zooming past and honking him on either side due to his religious adherence to the posted speed limit of 55mph
The officer should have cited him for being and asshat and failing to keep right.
Although it usually numbers more in the 40-50 link range, I do it as well. Open a page, middle click every link that looks interesting and then read and close them one by one. Definitely seems like the most efficient use of tabs to me.
Use Audacious, you can choose between a GTK2 interface (which rocks) and the classic XMMS/Winamp interface, which still supports skins (even Winamp 3 skins).
I like the GTK2 interface because it's very close to Foobar2000, probably the best audio player I have ever used.
You should be using Audacious these days. You can choose between a Foobar2000-esque GTK2 interface and the classic Winamp/XMMS interface, and unlike XMMS, Audacious is still under active development.
Well, there's the whole init system, rc.conf, the minimalist base system install, a choice between precompiled and source packages and so on.
It is very unlike Fedora and Ubuntu, which are filled with semi-functional config tools, default GUIs, SysV init madness and a lot of other things I don't like.
The biggest difference compared to BSD (apart from the kernel) is that Arch is rolling-release and generally has more up-to-date packages.
I've been there doing the distro rounds where yes, my problem is fixed on $new_distro but it turns out that instead $other_feature is broken.
I've done this as well. SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo for varying periods of time. I've dabbled a bit with FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD for various reasons as well, but ran into software incompatibilities that may be fixed by now.
I've found Arch Linux to be absolutely right for my needs and wants, it's like a best of breed between Debian and Gentoo, but better. Things just work when installed, all the packages are completely vanilla with no weird tweaks or configs (I'm looking at you, Gentoo), there are no obtuse config tools apart from vi and whatever you install yourself, it has a sane init system, the community is extremely helpful and both installation and configuration is a breeze with a simple installer that does what it's told and well-commented config files.
It's probably the most FreeBSD-like Linux distro I've found, perhaps that's why I like it so much.
Clear Sky was definitely a letdown, but apart from not being quite as scary as the original, Call of Pripyat is a very worthy sequel.
Especially if you're playing on Master difficulty (absolutely mandatory) with Ceano's Call from Pripyat* mod, which makes the game much more intense. It slims down the HUD, so no more ammo counter, no more easy-mode radar with enemies pointed out and color coded for your convenience. It also makes enemies, anomalies and mutants much deadlier, makes the bullet physics more realistic, makes hunger affect you stamina regeneration, makes it necessary to sleep or you'll pass out from exhaustion, weapons have more realistic scopes, quest rewards are smaller, your HUD no longer has indicators for thrown grenades or from where you're being shot, you get far fewer medkits and they work slower and don't heal quite as much damage, food only cures hunger instead of healing etc. etc.
In short, it makes the game a lot harder and somewhat more realistic, it's a much more engrossing experience with the mod installed and one of the best games I've ever played, I consider it absolutely essential.
It includes the Atmosfear mod as well, which puts some of the best weather effects I've ever seen in the game.
I absolutely love Amnesia and the Penumbra series, they're some of the most well-executed horror games out there, precisely because they don't rely on shock value for horror. They have a very well done air of menace and dread and desperation that just works, rather than having monsters jump out of every closet going "BOOGA-BOOGA-BOOGA!". The total number of enemies between all three of them is probably less than 20, but you still feel endangered every step of the way through.
Although they're completely different games, the STALKER series has scared me shitless multiple times. A thunderstorm late at night in a swamp infested with bloodsuckers is quite an experience. I swear those invisible fuckers are just toying with me. The headlamp is wide but short-ranged and true to real life, night vision goggles are tricky at best and you know there's at least one of those monsters out there, but you have no idea where it is until you hear its ragged breathing and try to pinpoint its location from the sound alone.
But the underground labs are what really got me. The first time you go to each of them you have absolutely no idea what to expect other than you have to find some information or switch off some machine that's causing your friends to turn into mindless zombies. One of them seems fairly quiet for a while until you let you guard down and venture further in. That's when you notice a wooden box floating in a corner. After a few seconds it flies towards you and smacks you right in the face. Suddenly every single loose object in the room starts to float menacingly for no apparent reason. That's when I had to take a break.
It's tough to convey the sense of horror in words, but those games are the only ones that have really gotten to me as proper horror in a computer game. They're also damn good games in every other respect.
So perhaps an antimatter bomb would work sort of like the nuclear weapons envisioned by H. G. Wells in The World Set Free. He imagined nuclear weapons as no more powerful that ordinary explosives, but they continued to explode for days.
So the total amount of energy released would be similar to a nuclear weapon as we know them, but not instantaneous. It would be a very effective device for some creative tactical uses, imagine a fire that burns with the power of a conventional bomb for days on end that you can't put out.
Suddenly being trounced by their former partners made Nintendo revise their absolutely draconian content policies, loads and loads of Playstation games would have never seen the light had the original partnership gone through.
Being beaten at their own game with the N64 and GC also made Nintendo get their act together and gave us the Wii, which still sells like the proverbial hotcakes.
The Yamaha what-now? Don't you mean the Suzuki GS500?;-)
Speaking of the GS500, for such tractor-like "refinement" and simplicity (2 valves per cylinder, low compression etc.), it gets moving really really quickly and still gets great fuel mileage.
My 1996 Bandit 600 has ~75hp and does 0-100kph in about 4.5 seconds while still only using about 6L/100km. Not bad for a early-90s engine design with four thirsty carbs.
Conclusion: Everyone should ride motorcycles. They'd be having more fun and using less fuel in the process.
For this reason, all German cars are built to speed up quickly, slow down quickly, and handle a high speed impact with some grace
Erh, no, not even by a long shot. I'd like to introduce you to cars such as the VW Polo SDI among others that still come with naturally-aspirated diesel engines. And that's not even covering the people carriers powered by 1.6L gasoline engines (VW Touran) and other such things.
The base model 3-series BMW comes with a 1.6L four-cylinder to haul its weight around, the base model Mercedes-Benz C-class comes with a 1.8L four-cylinder.
VW/Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Opel, they all make slow base models. Obviously, the brakes are good no matter the engine size, but that can be said for just about any reasonably modern car, the same thing goes for crash ratings.
Don't be blinded by the fact that you only get the higher-end German cars in the US. In Germany, low-end base model cars from those same manufacturers are everywhere. Heck, 95% of taxis in Germany and northern Europe are Mercedes-Benz. How's that for mundane?
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That depends on where you live, some countries have explicit freedom to roam, but in the US people seem to be very territorial about "their land".
Yes, but when the road/tracks end, I can get out and go just about anywhere on my two feet given a reasonable amount of time and I sincerely doubt that freedom will be taken away from me anytime soon.
Humans evolved to jog and walk for long distances to track and catch animals that were faster but ran out of energy relatively quickly. The endurance of even an average modern person is quite good, most people can walk all day, sleep 6 hours and walk all day the next day too and keep doing that for weeks on end. Perhaps ending up with rather sore feet the first couple of days since very few people walk that much these days.
We've grown lazy and fat, we're chained down by unhealthy eating habits and a hauntingly large number of people are simply unable to exercise that extremely basic freedom.
That jives well with my experiences.
Currently, I have one Maxtor 200GB, one Hitachi 250GB and two Samsungs (750GB and 1TB) in my desktop, the smallest being the oldest since I generally replace the oldest drive with a shiny new big one whenever I need an upgrade.
The 1TB Samsung I got about a month ago. Following my policy of switching out the oldest hardware, it replaced a 120GB Maxtor DiamondMax 9 that I bought back in 2004. That disk is now installed in my little sister's computer so she can store more animes and whatnot.
I know I'll probably jinx myself by saying this, but I have never ever had a disk die on me. None, nada, zilch. Not the new(ish) disks I currently use, not the old 30MB Connor disks my first PC had, not the rag-tag assembly of 130-60GB disks in between. Not even the 40/60/80GB Hitachi "Deathstars" in my dad's work computers. Not even the laptop disks that have been jumbled around, overheated in laptop bags due to bad standby setups and generally mistreated.
Hard disks as a whole are surprisingly reliable.
Eh, replace BBCode with HTML while I go hang my head in shame.
I find it truly disturbing that [b]Fringe[/b] is usually more realistic than CSI, NCIS etc.. That's fucked up.
At least Castle is reasonably realistic, apart from the whole civilian-writer-assisting-the-police-and-being-allowed-to-carry-firearms.
A bit I forgot:
I bought a T42 back in 2004 for school. I used it every single day, messed about with it and had Windows XP, FreeBSD and various flavors of Linux on it at various times. Power management in Linux was flaky at best, especially standby and hibernation, where it would wake itself up and burn 100% CPU. So it overheated in my backpack and hit the automatic thermal shutdown a lot for a couple of weeks until I figured out the problem.
When my then-girlfriends Acer laptop died, I bough an Asus Eee and gave her the T42. She's lugged that damn thing around everywhere, used it outside, on the bus, on the train, for school work. We're not together anymore, but keep in touch and she's still using my old Thinkpad as her only computer for everything she does. The keys are worn shiny from all the writing she does on it and it is looking slightly worn around the corners of the lid from being pulled in and out of bags every day for years, but it's never had a single problem, it keeps on trucking and working flawlessly. The battery only lasts 10 minutes or so, but that's lithium-ion batteries for you, new ones are still being made and are quite affordable.
Best piece of hardware I ever bought. Serious hardware for serious work.
You can get a refund if you refuse the license for Windows. Lots of people have done this before.
Oh boo hoo, it's plastic? Could it be that plastic is actually a damn good material for building laptops, especially when it's reinforced like the stuff Lenovo uses? Not all plastics are equal, some are superior to metals for certain applications. Anyone with even the slightest technical bend should know this.
Thinkpads look like Thinkpads for a reason. They're black, sleek, no-nonsense machines. Why make something shiny if matte works better? (I hate those damn shiny abominations that can also be found on Thinkpads these days, unfortunately) They're for people who value performance and reliability over whizz-bang gee-gaws.
The officer should have cited him for being and asshat and failing to keep right.
Although it usually numbers more in the 40-50 link range, I do it as well. Open a page, middle click every link that looks interesting and then read and close them one by one. Definitely seems like the most efficient use of tabs to me.
Use Audacious, you can choose between a GTK2 interface (which rocks) and the classic XMMS/Winamp interface, which still supports skins (even Winamp 3 skins).
I like the GTK2 interface because it's very close to Foobar2000, probably the best audio player I have ever used.
You should be using Audacious these days. You can choose between a Foobar2000-esque GTK2 interface and the classic Winamp/XMMS interface, and unlike XMMS, Audacious is still under active development.
So write a patch or stop whining?
I'd say it's very similar to Slackware, but with a solid dependency-solving package manager and a rolling release schedule.
Well, there's the whole init system, rc.conf, the minimalist base system install, a choice between precompiled and source packages and so on.
It is very unlike Fedora and Ubuntu, which are filled with semi-functional config tools, default GUIs, SysV init madness and a lot of other things I don't like.
The biggest difference compared to BSD (apart from the kernel) is that Arch is rolling-release and generally has more up-to-date packages.
I've done this as well. SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo for varying periods of time. I've dabbled a bit with FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD for various reasons as well, but ran into software incompatibilities that may be fixed by now.
I've found Arch Linux to be absolutely right for my needs and wants, it's like a best of breed between Debian and Gentoo, but better. Things just work when installed, all the packages are completely vanilla with no weird tweaks or configs (I'm looking at you, Gentoo), there are no obtuse config tools apart from vi and whatever you install yourself, it has a sane init system, the community is extremely helpful and both installation and configuration is a breeze with a simple installer that does what it's told and well-commented config files.
It's probably the most FreeBSD-like Linux distro I've found, perhaps that's why I like it so much.
Clear Sky was definitely a letdown, but apart from not being quite as scary as the original, Call of Pripyat is a very worthy sequel.
Especially if you're playing on Master difficulty (absolutely mandatory) with Ceano's Call from Pripyat* mod, which makes the game much more intense. It slims down the HUD, so no more ammo counter, no more easy-mode radar with enemies pointed out and color coded for your convenience. It also makes enemies, anomalies and mutants much deadlier, makes the bullet physics more realistic, makes hunger affect you stamina regeneration, makes it necessary to sleep or you'll pass out from exhaustion, weapons have more realistic scopes, quest rewards are smaller, your HUD no longer has indicators for thrown grenades or from where you're being shot, you get far fewer medkits and they work slower and don't heal quite as much damage, food only cures hunger instead of healing etc. etc.
In short, it makes the game a lot harder and somewhat more realistic, it's a much more engrossing experience with the mod installed and one of the best games I've ever played, I consider it absolutely essential.
It includes the Atmosfear mod as well, which puts some of the best weather effects I've ever seen in the game.
* http://privat.bahnhof.se/wb220832/stalker/ceanos.download.html
Proverbial gluttons?
You really should give it a try again, the later areas of the game (oh god, the prison) are even more scary ;-)
I absolutely love Amnesia and the Penumbra series, they're some of the most well-executed horror games out there, precisely because they don't rely on shock value for horror. They have a very well done air of menace and dread and desperation that just works, rather than having monsters jump out of every closet going "BOOGA-BOOGA-BOOGA!". The total number of enemies between all three of them is probably less than 20, but you still feel endangered every step of the way through.
Although they're completely different games, the STALKER series has scared me shitless multiple times. A thunderstorm late at night in a swamp infested with bloodsuckers is quite an experience. I swear those invisible fuckers are just toying with me. The headlamp is wide but short-ranged and true to real life, night vision goggles are tricky at best and you know there's at least one of those monsters out there, but you have no idea where it is until you hear its ragged breathing and try to pinpoint its location from the sound alone.
But the underground labs are what really got me. The first time you go to each of them you have absolutely no idea what to expect other than you have to find some information or switch off some machine that's causing your friends to turn into mindless zombies. One of them seems fairly quiet for a while until you let you guard down and venture further in. That's when you notice a wooden box floating in a corner. After a few seconds it flies towards you and smacks you right in the face. Suddenly every single loose object in the room starts to float menacingly for no apparent reason. That's when I had to take a break.
It's tough to convey the sense of horror in words, but those games are the only ones that have really gotten to me as proper horror in a computer game. They're also damn good games in every other respect.
So perhaps an antimatter bomb would work sort of like the nuclear weapons envisioned by H. G. Wells in The World Set Free. He imagined nuclear weapons as no more powerful that ordinary explosives, but they continued to explode for days.
So the total amount of energy released would be similar to a nuclear weapon as we know them, but not instantaneous. It would be a very effective device for some creative tactical uses, imagine a fire that burns with the power of a conventional bomb for days on end that you can't put out.
It was probably for the best, really.
Suddenly being trounced by their former partners made Nintendo revise their absolutely draconian content policies, loads and loads of Playstation games would have never seen the light had the original partnership gone through.
Being beaten at their own game with the N64 and GC also made Nintendo get their act together and gave us the Wii, which still sells like the proverbial hotcakes.
Nokia will be announcing the N9 at the MWC in a couple of weeks, supposedly it's the successor to the N900.
Capacitive 800x480 (or higher) touch screen, hardware keyboard, Nokia's usual high-quality construction, Meego, probably 32-64GB storage, it's going to be a monster powerful device and probably replace my netbook altogether.
The Yamaha what-now? Don't you mean the Suzuki GS500? ;-)
Speaking of the GS500, for such tractor-like "refinement" and simplicity (2 valves per cylinder, low compression etc.), it gets moving really really quickly and still gets great fuel mileage.
My 1996 Bandit 600 has ~75hp and does 0-100kph in about 4.5 seconds while still only using about 6L/100km. Not bad for a early-90s engine design with four thirsty carbs.
Conclusion: Everyone should ride motorcycles. They'd be having more fun and using less fuel in the process.
Erh, no, not even by a long shot. I'd like to introduce you to cars such as the VW Polo SDI among others that still come with naturally-aspirated diesel engines. And that's not even covering the people carriers powered by 1.6L gasoline engines (VW Touran) and other such things.
The base model 3-series BMW comes with a 1.6L four-cylinder to haul its weight around, the base model Mercedes-Benz C-class comes with a 1.8L four-cylinder.
VW/Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Opel, they all make slow base models. Obviously, the brakes are good no matter the engine size, but that can be said for just about any reasonably modern car, the same thing goes for crash ratings.
Don't be blinded by the fact that you only get the higher-end German cars in the US. In Germany, low-end base model cars from those same manufacturers are everywhere. Heck, 95% of taxis in Germany and northern Europe are Mercedes-Benz. How's that for mundane?
You are correct, of course.
I tell you, even it is a different pope, the fist-fight against the pope in the Sistine Chapel at the end of Assassin's Creed II felt glorious.