I'd be really interested in seeing: - the sales difference between last year's ESPN titles and this years, and - a comparison between NFL 2k5 and Madden, which I suspect was the primary target of this ploy.
I seem to recall that the ESPN NBA, NCAA Hoops, and possibly the NHL games got better reviews than EA's lineup, anyway.
I know I jumped on ESPN's NFL game because of the price point, and I can't think I'm the only one.
I used to install computer systems in junkyards. Think 40 year old railroad cars converted into "office" space. Obviously, these places are, generally speaking, environmental nightmares. I was always waiting for the ground to catch fire when one of the owners tossed out a cigarette butt.
I saw computers shut into closets at 100 degrees F, ones where they used PVC tubing for the wiring, and had rainwater dripping down into the floor where the PC was stored, you name it. We had one RMA where the box had literally about half an inch of crud on the motherboard, and that one was in because they were upgrading (the box worked just fine).
Surprisingly, we had relatively few computer failures. Occasionally, we'd have to actually detach the temperature sensors that went off when the interior of the box got to 130F, but I don't recall the boxes coming back even after that.
Eventually, I arrived at the conclusion that PCs are a lot sturdier than we tend to give them credit for. Short of insect/rodent invasions, I can't think a fifty degree garage would be problematic, especially if you're leaving it on most of the time.
Other than the "neato" factor? I'd think, after Hubble, and the (still going) mars rovers, that we'd be able to do neater things with unmanned space flights, and we would have to worry less about things like food, water, and air.
Example: My geek wife and I just bought notebooks. Budget limitations being what they are, we had to go with bottom of the line Dells (2.2GHz Celerons, 256M , 20G, internal Broadcom Wifi).
We didn't buy these as development workstations, just boxes we could carry around. Initially, of course, I wanted to run Linux, but after 25-30 hours of various misconfigurations, I gave up, reinstalled XP Home, and everything just works. Cygwin does most of what I need anyway.
I don't consider that box to be horribly outdated, but if the grandparent's accurate, then I'm probably better off in Windows anyway. I'm not asking to run KDE 3 on a P60/16M/500M here.
I'll check back in a year or so, but in the meantime, forget it. Reinstalling various distros got old after the third or fourth time.
We've got a relatively disparate group of "web developers," who are, at least partially, retrained admin assistants. I know, I'm not happy about it either, but without the restricted areas, our web page would return to the mishmash of styles that these people think "look good."
Seriously, one of my guys REALLY loves orange text. It's just not gonna happen.
We'd love to move off of DW, as we're getting tired of some of its odd quirks. Anybody got any OSS recommendations? I'm all ears.
You know, he almost had me with this one, but you can't tell me that there was much more involved in having Greedo shoot first. It'd be what, another flashpot and some smoke, and maybe some debris falling out of the hole in the wall where he (inexplicably) missed Han?
It's NOT the original vision. The Jabba scene, and all the extraneous junk wandering around the spaceport, I don't care about, but this one really sits in my craw.
Consider the following: Imagine the political spectrum as a line with endpoints. Each party has to pick a spot on that spectrum, and they always try to maximize the amount of line they control.
If there are two parties, then each party gets all the vote between their point and the endpoint, plus half the votes "between" the two party points. The contest immediately becomes a race to the center, as the extreme votes in the country are going to usually vote for the closest candidate.
The big problem is that with three players, there's no stable solution to this game. EVERY time there's a third party candidate in the US, the party closest to the independant loses. Anderson in 80, Perot in 88, Nader in 2000.
4+ players, and the game becomes stable again. So the problem isn't the third party, it's the LACK of a fourth.
There are a myriad of problems with this analysis (political spectrum should be at LEAST a grid, if not an n-dimensional hypercube), but it's a start, anyway.
Second this. Used an 8MB visor + handspring keyboard (from targus, IIRC) for notetaking in my MBA classes. Worked like a champ, and I didn't have to lug around notebook, power supplies, etc. A couple of notes:
1) ALWAYS have a second (or third) set of batteries handy. I got something like 14-16 hours from my setup, but it'll go down at some point. 2) The keyboard really exacerbated my carpal tunnel, so I got a typical foam keyboard pad, and cut it down. The carrying weight went up a little bit, but it was well worth it. 3) As mentioned elsewhere, it's useless for complex equations or diagrams.
The "TiVo picking things for you" is nice, but the main effect of getting TiVo is that you're no longer tied to times. My wife and I routinely record things during the week, then "catch up" saturday afternoon. If we don't really care about something, it just sorta expires.
Also, if you're a sports fan, TiVo is worth its weight in gold. No commercials, no halftime, you can blitz through "plays under review", and, at least for football, you can even blow through the huddle. I've watched every play of an entire game in about an hour. Basically, TiVo gave me most of my Sunday back.
Oh, and we have two Series 1 TiVos from about 5 years ago, and they still work fine. They're a little small compared to the new ones, but we don't usually fill ours up anyway.
Since NAFTA's initial rush, there are reports of manufacturing jobs coming BACK from Mexico. That "giant sucking sound" that Perot used to describe maquilladora companies running for the Mexican border never really materialized in the volume he thought it would. Also, several of those factories are coming back, as they get better productivity from USians.
One function of outsourcing is that the labor is cheaper, which shows up quickly on the company balance sheet. If revenue is stable, and costs go down, profit goes up. What doesn't show up quickly is ineffeciency. e.g. Time lost due to cultural differences, time spent rewriting poor code, the cost of having to negotiate every change request, and so on. While these costs exist for locally sourced companies, I'd argue they're probably lower.
It's not strictly the price of the labor that's at issue, it's performance per dollar spent. Given the economic mess, it's all about the price of the labor right now, but the efficiency argument will start creeping back in over time.
Is your penny saved actually spent locally? Or, restated, how often is that same cash going to be spent by subsequent purchases?
The multiplier is the key here. Does the money just go back into company coffers, or is it actually distributed?
If it's held as cash by the company, then its effect is negligible, except for the value of the company's equity. It's not used to buy things in the local market, which contributes to the bottom line (and profits, and eventually more purchases) of the various merchants, and so on.
If it's distributed as dividends, is that money used to buy goods in the local market, or reinvested? I would suggest that the supplyside economic model can be criticized here, as dividends paid to stockholders at large might tend to be reinvested (sometimes automatically, sometimes not), and the economic multiplier for that cash is very, very small.
If it had actually been used to pay a local programmer, who was using it to live, then the majority of the money is probably circulating freely, having been spent with merchants.
We can get into issues with the WalMartization of the planet here, but let's not.
Are we helping other countries' economies?
Again, this is arguable. Sure, we're helping them in the short term, but we've all heard stories of how the Indian outsources are getting undercut by the Czechs, or the Philipinos, or the Malaysians, or whomever.
I'm not sure, but I think this is the core of the globalist "race to the bottom" argument. If you assume that the company only cares about workers/$, then it would be logical for the jobs to drift towards the cheapest labor. Problem is, the cheapest country for labor changes periodically, and suddenly you have several countries vying for the lowest price. Does this unstable economic injection actually help their economy in the long run? Tough call.
You might want to have a look at Manias, Panics and Crashes by Kindleberger (ISBN: 0471389455). I thought it lended some insight to the process, although from a broader context. It has nothing to do with the latest crash, of course, but looks at financial irrationality.
I've owned both, although the SA box has gone back to TW. The DVR has/d a similar function, but it broke constantly.
If, for instance, you changed out of a recording that was going on, to watch something else (say, switching from a Simpsons episode you've seen 100 times to an NBA game), the future recordings under the TW's season pass would also stop at that time.
That's just one example. I don't know if they've improved things over the 3 months we haven't had one, but that's the way it was.
Just a note: I thought I would miss the second recorder ability, but I was wrong. Having two things worth watching on at the same time nearly never happens.
I finished it a while ago, but my wife has played through the first couple of levels with every character. Oddly (at least from my standpoint), she tends to stop there, and she's never actually finished the third act. Shopping in the game is also one of her favorite activities. Not in real life, mind you, just in the game.
The key, at least for her, is to keep the UI very simple. Once you start getting into strafing, she tunes out. In console land, I try to avoid exposing her to stuff with big, nasty combos (direct quote: "square - circle- R2 - screw this")
Lately, we've been playing more PS2 stuff, including ROTK (superb, but getting a little too twitchy for her in the later levels, I think), and Baldur's gate II.
Recently, during a chat with my techie wife, it became apparent that Linux may be making headway on the desktop, if only because MS's licensing issues are so overwhelming.
It follows that it may not MATTER whether Linux is "ready for the desktop," as the alternative is cost prohibitive and legally tenuous by comparison.
Not that I'm incredibly thrilled about either side of the argument here, but it is interesting.
Father-in-Law. I live in Texas, he lives in Pennsyvlania. One glorious Saturday afternoon, we reformatted his hard drive and reinstalled Windows. Over the phone.
0. get CDDB information 1. rip the tracks off of the CD 2. have the robot change cds 3. Call this script again
I ended up doing it by hand, but during that process, I came up with a couple of reasons it won't work. Primary among them is that CDDB (or FreeDB, or whatever) isn't infallible. I think I had fifteen or so CDs that weren't recognized, and some of the entries had misspellings (e.g. is Bjork spelled with or without an umlauf?).
Yes, I know you can go BACK and change these things, but it'll be easier to do on the fly.
The best idea I came up with is to rip the cds to wav files separately from encoding them. Then, while you're sitting there (since you're looking to maximize YOUR time doing this), you can just rip to your heart's content. When you're ready to be away from the computer, set the encoder to encode, and let the processor work in the background, at least from your perspective. Come back later, stop the encoding process, and rip some more, lather, rinse, repeat.
The second best idea, which I ended up implementing, is to do it at work. If you've got a CD burner, bring your CDS into work incrementally, rip four or five a day, burn them to CD, and repeat. It's not fun, but at least you've got a backup. I had to rip my entire collection for the second time because the hard drive I was storing the first effort on puked and died. At least this way, you've got a backup. Or, in my case, two.
I'll be doing my entire collection for a third time, probably, since I realized that I don't ALWAYS want VBR 320b/s encoding. 160 or so is just fine for the car or plane, and I'd rather have 10 albums/CD than 5 while mobile anyway. So, I think I have to rerip everything, unless somebody knows how to downsample mp3s.
It's OK, as I also have to get RAID going on my currently nonexistant file server, so it's in the "later" bin.
I should probably go OGG while I'm at it, but, well....
1) No, the entire argument is completely irrelevant. Why? Hell if I know, but I'm sure it's been rendered obsolete by some J2EE project that Apache's working on, based on something Bill Joy mentioned while shooting hoops in college, but hasn't had time to implement.
2) Nore? What the nell is nore? It can't be a/. discussion until someone plays the 'moron who probably can't properly use the word "its" in a sentence, but gets all bent out of shape over a trivial misspelling' card.
I think, short of a massive number of hot grits/Natalie Portman/goatse/penis bird comments, we're done here.
Don't laugh. I would swear that the Buffy TV series had a "designated screamer" position. Willow initially, then Cordelia up until she was replaced by Dawn.
Great screams, and although I've never actually tested this out empirically, I'd wager the designated screamer, in its various incarnations, did at least 85% of the screaming in the series.
This sort of thing makes me puke
on
New Heinlein Novel
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I mean, really. A substantial chunk of artistry is knowing what isn't worth publishing. Now, we've got Douglas Adams and Heinlein releasing stuff from beyond the grave that they might not deem publishable, given the option.
Simply getting more of an artist's work is NOT necessarily a good thing. For instance, I got a hold of a bootleg of a bunch of old Pixies studio sessions. The stuff they released is good, but you know what?
The stuff they didn't release is crap. They wrote bad songs, recognized them as bad songs, and DIDN'T release them. There's a reason that stuff stays in the attic, and fans should be able to respect that, IMHO.
Complete concurrance. I can't make it through the books. I've tried three times, and I always get bored/apathetic/annoyed after they leave the mushroom farmer guy for another 100 pages of trail walking.
The first movie felt very true to the books. Long, dull, lots of walking and hiding. To paraphrase John Goodman in Barton Fink, my butt was sore after the first 45 minutes.
The second movie (to which I was drug by my wife) was actually quite good, IMHO. I'd highly recommend it to anyone. The Gollum/Smegiel (sp?) sequences have to be seen to be believed.
You're right, the GUI is important. On the other hand:
what 3d effects are actually going to enhance / improve the UI?
Will dragging folders change?
Opening files?
Better splash screens?
Is XP's interface REALLY that much better than Win2K?
Is it worth the decrease in performance?
3d buttons and effects that achieve the same purposes as 2d buttons and effects are bloat, and another (blatant) attempt to force people to upgrade their PCs.
Besides which, if 8x AGP and 64M of vidMemory is the MINIMUM, it'll probably finally run smoothly on 16x and 128M. Which will probably also be $15 OEM by then, but still. Remember, XP's stated minimum is supposed to run on a PII-300 w/128M of RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be really interested in seeing:
- the sales difference between last year's ESPN titles and this years, and
- a comparison between NFL 2k5 and Madden, which I suspect was the primary target of this ploy.
I seem to recall that the ESPN NBA, NCAA Hoops, and possibly the NHL games got better reviews than EA's lineup, anyway.
I know I jumped on ESPN's NFL game because of the price point, and I can't think I'm the only one.
I used to install computer systems in junkyards. Think 40 year old railroad cars converted into "office" space. Obviously, these places are, generally speaking, environmental nightmares. I was always waiting for the ground to catch fire when one of the owners tossed out a cigarette butt.
I saw computers shut into closets at 100 degrees F, ones where they used PVC tubing for the wiring, and had rainwater dripping down into the floor where the PC was stored, you name it. We had one RMA where the box had literally about half an inch of crud on the motherboard, and that one was in because they were upgrading (the box worked just fine).
Surprisingly, we had relatively few computer failures. Occasionally, we'd have to actually detach the temperature sensors that went off when the interior of the box got to 130F, but I don't recall the boxes coming back even after that.
Eventually, I arrived at the conclusion that PCs are a lot sturdier than we tend to give them credit for. Short of insect/rodent invasions, I can't think a fifty degree garage would be problematic, especially if you're leaving it on most of the time.
Just on the off chance some marketer is lurking.
I was wondering what happened to that series.
Other than the "neato" factor? I'd think, after Hubble, and the (still going) mars rovers, that we'd be able to do neater things with unmanned space flights, and we would have to worry less about things like food, water, and air.
Not trying to be a killjoy, I'm just curious.
and the youth tend to skew republican at the moment. One generic problem with the young vote is that they tend to be enormously fickle.
5 05 36-2004Sep25.html
Check out
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A
Example: My geek wife and I just bought notebooks. Budget limitations being what they are, we had to go with bottom of the line Dells (2.2GHz Celerons, 256M , 20G, internal Broadcom Wifi).
We didn't buy these as development workstations, just boxes we could carry around. Initially, of course, I wanted to run Linux, but after 25-30 hours of various misconfigurations, I gave up, reinstalled XP Home, and everything just works. Cygwin does most of what I need anyway.
I don't consider that box to be horribly outdated, but if the grandparent's accurate, then I'm probably better off in Windows anyway. I'm not asking to run KDE 3 on a P60/16M/500M here.
I'll check back in a year or so, but in the meantime, forget it. Reinstalling various distros got old after the third or fourth time.
We've got a relatively disparate group of "web developers," who are, at least partially, retrained admin assistants. I know, I'm not happy about it either, but without the restricted areas, our web page would return to the mishmash of styles that these people think "look good."
Seriously, one of my guys REALLY loves orange text. It's just not gonna happen.
We'd love to move off of DW, as we're getting tired of some of its odd quirks. Anybody got any OSS recommendations? I'm all ears.
Streetcar, the Musical:
r .html
http://www.schirmer.com/composers/previn/streetca
Really.
You know, he almost had me with this one, but you can't tell me that there was much more involved in having Greedo shoot first. It'd be what, another flashpot and some smoke, and maybe some debris falling out of the hole in the wall where he (inexplicably) missed Han?
It's NOT the original vision. The Jabba scene, and all the extraneous junk wandering around the spaceport, I don't care about, but this one really sits in my craw.
Consider the following: Imagine the political spectrum as a line with endpoints. Each party has to pick a spot on that spectrum, and they always try to maximize the amount of line they control.
If there are two parties, then each party gets all the vote between their point and the endpoint, plus half the votes "between" the two party points. The contest immediately becomes a race to the center, as the extreme votes in the country are going to usually vote for the closest candidate.
The big problem is that with three players, there's no stable solution to this game. EVERY time there's a third party candidate in the US, the party closest to the independant loses. Anderson in 80, Perot in 88, Nader in 2000.
4+ players, and the game becomes stable again. So the problem isn't the third party, it's the LACK of a fourth.
There are a myriad of problems with this analysis (political spectrum should be at LEAST a grid, if not an n-dimensional hypercube), but it's a start, anyway.
Second this. Used an 8MB visor + handspring keyboard (from targus, IIRC) for notetaking in my MBA classes. Worked like a champ, and I didn't have to lug around notebook, power supplies, etc. A couple of notes:
1) ALWAYS have a second (or third) set of batteries handy. I got something like 14-16 hours from my setup, but it'll go down at some point.
2) The keyboard really exacerbated my carpal tunnel, so I got a typical foam keyboard pad, and cut it down. The carrying weight went up a little bit, but it was well worth it.
3) As mentioned elsewhere, it's useless for complex equations or diagrams.
It was, IMHO, the perfect notetaking system.
The "TiVo picking things for you" is nice, but the main effect of getting TiVo is that you're no longer tied to times. My wife and I routinely record things during the week, then "catch up" saturday afternoon. If we don't really care about something, it just sorta expires.
Also, if you're a sports fan, TiVo is worth its weight in gold. No commercials, no halftime, you can blitz through "plays under review", and, at least for football, you can even blow through the huddle. I've watched every play of an entire game in about an hour. Basically, TiVo gave me most of my Sunday back.
Oh, and we have two Series 1 TiVos from about 5 years ago, and they still work fine. They're a little small compared to the new ones, but we don't usually fill ours up anyway.
Since NAFTA's initial rush, there are reports of manufacturing jobs coming BACK from Mexico. That "giant sucking sound" that Perot used to describe maquilladora companies running for the Mexican border never really materialized in the volume he thought it would. Also, several of those factories are coming back, as they get better productivity from USians.
One function of outsourcing is that the labor is cheaper, which shows up quickly on the company balance sheet. If revenue is stable, and costs go down, profit goes up. What doesn't show up quickly is ineffeciency. e.g. Time lost due to cultural differences, time spent rewriting poor code, the cost of having to negotiate every change request, and so on. While these costs exist for locally sourced companies, I'd argue they're probably lower.
It's not strictly the price of the labor that's at issue, it's performance per dollar spent. Given the economic mess, it's all about the price of the labor right now, but the efficiency argument will start creeping back in over time.
The multiplier is the key here. Does the money just go back into company coffers, or is it actually distributed?
If it's held as cash by the company, then its effect is negligible, except for the value of the company's equity. It's not used to buy things in the local market, which contributes to the bottom line (and profits, and eventually more purchases) of the various merchants, and so on.
If it's distributed as dividends, is that money used to buy goods in the local market, or reinvested? I would suggest that the supplyside economic model can be criticized here, as dividends paid to stockholders at large might tend to be reinvested (sometimes automatically, sometimes not), and the economic multiplier for that cash is very, very small.
If it had actually been used to pay a local programmer, who was using it to live, then the majority of the money is probably circulating freely, having been spent with merchants.
We can get into issues with the WalMartization of the planet here, but let's not.
Again, this is arguable. Sure, we're helping them in the short term, but we've all heard stories of how the Indian outsources are getting undercut by the Czechs, or the Philipinos, or the Malaysians, or whomever.
I'm not sure, but I think this is the core of the globalist "race to the bottom" argument. If you assume that the company only cares about workers/$, then it would be logical for the jobs to drift towards the cheapest labor. Problem is, the cheapest country for labor changes periodically, and suddenly you have several countries vying for the lowest price. Does this unstable economic injection actually help their economy in the long run? Tough call.
You might want to have a look at Manias, Panics and Crashes by Kindleberger (ISBN: 0471389455). I thought it lended some insight to the process, although from a broader context. It has nothing to do with the latest crash, of course, but looks at financial irrationality.
-sound of high powered, yet extremely fine lathe-
one, two, three...
I'll be back.
I've owned both, although the SA box has gone back to TW. The DVR has/d a similar function, but it broke constantly.
If, for instance, you changed out of a recording that was going on, to watch something else (say, switching from a Simpsons episode you've seen 100 times to an NBA game), the future recordings under the TW's season pass would also stop at that time.
That's just one example. I don't know if they've improved things over the 3 months we haven't had one, but that's the way it was.
Just a note: I thought I would miss the second recorder ability, but I was wrong. Having two things worth watching on at the same time nearly never happens.
I finished it a while ago, but my wife has played through the first couple of levels with every character. Oddly (at least from my standpoint), she tends to stop there, and she's never actually finished the third act. Shopping in the game is also one of her favorite activities. Not in real life, mind you, just in the game.
The key, at least for her, is to keep the UI very simple. Once you start getting into strafing, she tunes out. In console land, I try to avoid exposing her to stuff with big, nasty combos (direct quote: "square - circle- R2 - screw this")
Lately, we've been playing more PS2 stuff, including ROTK (superb, but getting a little too twitchy for her in the later levels, I think), and Baldur's gate II.
Recently, during a chat with my techie wife, it became apparent that Linux may be making headway on the desktop, if only because MS's licensing issues are so overwhelming.
It follows that it may not MATTER whether Linux is "ready for the desktop," as the alternative is cost prohibitive and legally tenuous by comparison.
Not that I'm incredibly thrilled about either side of the argument here, but it is interesting.
Father-in-Law. I live in Texas, he lives in Pennsyvlania. One glorious Saturday afternoon, we reformatted his hard drive and reinstalled Windows. Over the phone.
Did I mention that he's practically deaf?
"FORMAT C:/ \s"
"E?"
"No, C"
"G?"
Something like:
0. get CDDB information
1. rip the tracks off of the CD
2. have the robot change cds
3. Call this script again
I ended up doing it by hand, but during that process, I came up with a couple of reasons it won't work. Primary among them is that CDDB (or FreeDB, or whatever) isn't infallible. I think I had fifteen or so CDs that weren't recognized, and some of the entries had misspellings (e.g. is Bjork spelled with or without an umlauf?).
Yes, I know you can go BACK and change these things, but it'll be easier to do on the fly.
The best idea I came up with is to rip the cds to wav files separately from encoding them. Then, while you're sitting there (since you're looking to maximize YOUR time doing this), you can just rip to your heart's content. When you're ready to be away from the computer, set the encoder to encode, and let the processor work in the background, at least from your perspective. Come back later, stop the encoding process, and rip some more, lather, rinse, repeat.
The second best idea, which I ended up implementing, is to do it at work. If you've got a CD burner, bring your CDS into work incrementally, rip four or five a day, burn them to CD, and repeat. It's not fun, but at least you've got a backup. I had to rip my entire collection for the second time because the hard drive I was storing the first effort on puked and died. At least this way, you've got a backup. Or, in my case, two.
I'll be doing my entire collection for a third time, probably, since I realized that I don't ALWAYS want VBR 320b/s encoding. 160 or so is just fine for the car or plane, and I'd rather have 10 albums/CD than 5 while mobile anyway. So, I think I have to rerip everything, unless somebody knows how to downsample mp3s.
It's OK, as I also have to get RAID going on my currently nonexistant file server, so it's in the "later" bin.
I should probably go OGG while I'm at it, but, well....
1) No, the entire argument is completely irrelevant. Why? Hell if I know, but I'm sure it's been rendered obsolete by some J2EE project that Apache's working on, based on something Bill Joy mentioned while shooting hoops in college, but hasn't had time to implement.
/. discussion until someone plays the 'moron who probably can't properly use the word "its" in a sentence, but gets all bent out of shape over a trivial misspelling' card.
2) Nore? What the nell is nore? It can't be a
I think, short of a massive number of hot grits/Natalie Portman/goatse/penis bird comments, we're done here.
Don't laugh. I would swear that the Buffy TV series had a "designated screamer" position. Willow initially, then Cordelia up until she was replaced by Dawn.
Great screams, and although I've never actually tested this out empirically, I'd wager the designated screamer, in its various incarnations, did at least 85% of the screaming in the series.
I mean, really. A substantial chunk of artistry is knowing what isn't worth publishing. Now, we've got Douglas Adams and Heinlein releasing stuff from beyond the grave that they might not deem publishable, given the option.
Simply getting more of an artist's work is NOT necessarily a good thing. For instance, I got a hold of a bootleg of a bunch of old Pixies studio sessions. The stuff they released is good, but you know what?
The stuff they didn't release is crap. They wrote bad songs, recognized them as bad songs, and DIDN'T release them. There's a reason that stuff stays in the attic, and fans should be able to respect that, IMHO.
Complete concurrance. I can't make it through the books. I've tried three times, and I always get bored/apathetic/annoyed after they leave the mushroom farmer guy for another 100 pages of trail walking.
The first movie felt very true to the books. Long, dull, lots of walking and hiding. To paraphrase John Goodman in Barton Fink, my butt was sore after the first 45 minutes.
The second movie (to which I was drug by my wife) was actually quite good, IMHO. I'd highly recommend it to anyone. The Gollum/Smegiel (sp?) sequences have to be seen to be believed.
3d buttons and effects that achieve the same purposes as 2d buttons and effects are bloat, and another (blatant) attempt to force people to upgrade their PCs.
Besides which, if 8x AGP and 64M of vidMemory is the MINIMUM, it'll probably finally run smoothly on 16x and 128M. Which will probably also be $15 OEM by then, but still. Remember, XP's stated minimum is supposed to run on a PII-300 w/128M of RAM.
They ARE kidding, right?