1. I just got a new Radeon 9800 Pro on eBay for $240, so I'm not sure those prices you are quoting are for real.
2. Graphics card depreciate endlessly anyway - I think everyone has to get the notion in their head that no matter how much they pay, the card will be worth zip in a few years. The most you can do is get the best bang for your buck at the time when you choose to buy, and then not think about entropy....
3. Even when the PCI Express-only cards come out, it still means a huge set of computers that cannot use these cards. This doesn't compare to the normal situation where most computers can use the latest generation of cards, and therefore the previous generation drops in price.
I'm not sure which PC Gamer you're referring to, but the UK edition panned the game with 33%. My own experience bears this out; the opening scene where you cross a desert to meet a stranger outside his caravan is quite well-done - cinematic and enigmatic. Then it all goes pear-shaped as you try to manoeuvre your character around a chasm, continuously falling off ledges and bridges as you try in vain to find an object that f**king does something. After several minutes of this, I uninstalled the demo and went back to playing "Deus Ex".
Oh, please I am BEGGING someone to mod this moron down. How many home users of Microsoft would think that moving to Linux would be a neat idea since even if they pull the support rug from under their feet - hey, no problem, they can always hack the OS.....
Are people really such slaves to fashion that they're going to fork out the same amount for a 2GB player that they could for a 30GB one (namely, the Nomad Zen NX)? Uh, wait, I guess the answer to that one is "yes".
I'm not an Apple newbie - I used them heavily for many years in the early-mid 90s when working as an editor and layout designer for magazines - but can't for the life of me understand their fetishisation. The Nomad Zen is slightly bigger, but looks better and has a better sound quality - at least, I think brushed metal looks better than then rather hospital ward shade of cream that Apple picked for the iPod.
A comparison on ebay shows that the Nomad Zen NX goes for around half the price of the iPod. Not taking into account the fact it has longer battery life, has an easily replaceable battery, and supposedly better sound.
The MP3/CD players aren't bad, and I had a Rio one for quite a while. But they _do_ skip, even when walking, which I found very frustrating. Plus they're on the large side, and you still have to carry your CDs around with you. They're good, but not comparable to a hard drive MP3 player really.
P.
> This gives them an excuse to delay release and > avoid bad press
Avoid bad press? Google is full of nothing but bad press for them? Newssites that never mention gaming news are full of "famous game stolen" stories. If they had simply announced they had needed a few extra months, a few hardcore gamers would have groaned, but the news would have slipped by most. Sorry, I don't buy this conspiracy nonsense at all.
Damn straight. This is just insane - maybe the RIAA think they are scaring people, but all they are doing is making them angrier:
1. This girl is 12 years old. 2. She's TWELVE, for crying out loud. 3. She's from a poor neighborhood. 4. There's a good chance that she thought what she was doing was completely legit.
I won't be annoyed by an RIAA boycott too much, since playing with http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/search.asp I find that most of the music I listen to comes from non-RIAA labels. But I'd urge everyone to use the above site next time they're thinking of buying a CD, and choose the non-RIAA option.
Normally I'd think anyone lauding command line interfaces was just a hairy be-sandalled Luddite, but it's true: Usenet and nn beats the pants off most web forums. It's quick, you can easily select authors/subjects you're interested in, and once you read an article, you never see it again (unless you want to). I end up telneting into my old (1988) college UNIX account in order to use nn (no having to wait for news to download there either!).
No joke; I've bought the Sunday Times on occasion (it's a UK newspaper, but has an Irish edition, albeit that just means a few extra pages of a news and an Irish culture supplement) and I don't think I've ever finished reading it. I wish newspapers didn't think that size equals quality.
It's also interesting that people bitch about how many viruses there are for Windows PCs. Hey I accept that the OS structure is less secure than say a linux system (properly configured) but you know what, who the hell as a virus programmer is going to write a virus that only affects like 5% of computers out there.
Couple that with the fact that some virus writers tend to aim at Windows purely out of spite for Bill Gates and his evil ways. Blaster contained the message "Billy Gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!" I can't see people hating Linux in such a way.
Excuse me? A bug report isn't a contribution? Where you work, do you accuse QA or test engineers of not contributing if they don't actually fix the bugs they find?
I use both, and by no means does "YahooPOPS" work "just as well". I mean, it's cool that I can download my Yahoo mail for free, but I still use Hotmail with OE as my primary mail access. YahooPOPS is very slow (over broadband it takes a minute or two to download/upload even a few emails) and it has to be _regularly_ updated. Also, since it's POP, you can then only access the mail from one location; OE/Hotmail allows me to access my mail both at home and work (and of course elsewhere through a browser).
This is great, just as long as Rio improve their build quality and service. I've had two Rio Volts; the first started pausing for no apparent reason. The second works, but is plagued by minor tics, a battery case that never stays shut, huge startup times, jumps in sound and skipping even when playing MP3s.
After the third remote control broke, and I tried to buy a new one from Rio itself (rather than Amazon, where I bought it) it turned out that not only would they not ship items from their e-store, they would even accept a non-US credit card it (when I tried to buy and have it sent to a US friend to send on to me). Needless to say, I'm not impressed by a company quite happy to take foreigner's money while giving them a shoddy service.
I've been using Yahoo BillPay for over a year now at $7 a month, and I'd never, EVER go back to writing checks and mailing bills.
Is this typical in the USA? In Ireland, I pay all my bills by either credit card or direct debit. I then pay my credit cards online direct from my bank; people who don't want to (or can't) pay online can use the bank's 24-hour phone services. Using cheques and snail-mail for financial transactions seems to be a thing of the past these days.
The fact is that they cost a fortune ("somewhat cheap"? Pur-leaze.), are slow but still unwieldy and make you look like King Dork McDork of Dorkania from the the planet Dorkeraan. They have all the disadvantages of a car (problems with parking, cost, lack of exercise) with the disadvantages of a bike (no weather protection, no passengers, relatively slow speed) and none of the benefits. In short, they are ridiculous. There is definitely a market for one-person medium-speed transportation systems, but this is not the solution.
Er, not necessarily. Since heat rises, and the power supply is at the top, it shouldn't heat the case much anyway. Having recently switched from a loud PSU to a Zalmon power supply and lowered the voltage on my case fan from 12v to 7v (to make it less noisy), I've noticed only a minimal increase in temperature (still waybelow any max limits) and a blessed release from buzzing noises... I can now sleep with my PC at the end of the bed switched on, and more importantly, so can my girlfriend (admittedly not the usual review criteria for Slashdot....)
I find it bizarre but not surprising that the parent comment gets moderated up. As a technical writer, my worse nightmare is working with assholes like this, who mistake arcane knowledge in a particular field for intelligence. Hands up on Slashdot who doesn't speak fluent French? Hah hah, you're all idiots. Actually, you're not, but it seems most of you have no problem calling people who don't speak or understand "tech-ese" as idiots. Just as in same way most of us might learn enough French to help us get around Paris on a holiday, there are many who learn just enough tech-ese to get around a computer as they do their job.
Using that search engine, I'm shocked to find that the late great Bill Hicks, of all people, has his albums published by an RIAA member. I wonder what he would have made of a fan being sued by a corporation?
Not just that; as I've said before, most of the mainstream artists that the companies associated with the RIAA promote are sold based on image and marketing and reinforcement, not on their music. P2P music routes around this marketing hype, enabling people to hear a wide range of music from artists that they may never usually get a chance to here.
Before P2P, you had to be a relatively unconservative type to want to plonk down actual hard cash to hear music from an artist who you'd only vaguely heard of, but whose music wasn't played 24/7 on the usual corporate media. It was a safer option to simply buy the latest hit album; you at least knew there was one catchy tune on it, even if the rest was a dud.
Now, when you download a track to try it out, there's no marketing bull. You can easily discover that the hyped artist's albums consists of rubbish, and also find that the relatively unknown artist is simply wonderful.
I imagine this levelling of the playing field is terrifying to record company marketing managers.
Excuse me, I believe you are indulging
in P2P lyrics sharing, you copyright terrorist! Don't you realise that by repeating Wham! lyrics, you are stealing money from Andy Ridgeley, who can barely afford to feed himself?
Please hand yourself over to Gruppenpanzergeneral Ashcroft at your nearest RIAA Detention Booth.
Slashdot Mirror
1. I just got a new Radeon 9800 Pro on eBay for $240, so I'm not sure those prices you are quoting are for real.
2. Graphics card depreciate endlessly anyway - I think everyone has to get the notion in their head that no matter how much they pay, the card will be worth zip in a few years. The most you can do is get the best bang for your buck at the time when you choose to buy, and then not think about entropy....
3. Even when the PCI Express-only cards come out, it still means a huge set of computers that cannot use these cards. This doesn't compare to the normal situation where most computers can use the latest generation of cards, and therefore the previous generation drops in price.
P.
I'm not sure which PC Gamer you're referring to, but the UK edition panned the game with 33%. My own experience bears this out; the opening scene where you cross a desert to meet a stranger outside his caravan is quite well-done - cinematic and enigmatic. Then it all goes pear-shaped as you try to manoeuvre your character around a chasm, continuously falling off ledges and bridges as you try in vain to find an object that f**king does something. After several minutes of this, I uninstalled the demo and went back to playing "Deus Ex".
P.
Didn't we see this story before? Oh wait, that was in 2003. And 2002. And.... P.
Oh, please I am BEGGING someone to mod this moron down. How many home users of Microsoft would think that moving to Linux would be a neat idea since even if they pull the support rug from under their feet - hey, no problem, they can always hack the OS.....
P.
Are people really such slaves to fashion that they're going to fork out the same amount for a 2GB player that they could for a 30GB one (namely, the Nomad Zen NX)? Uh, wait, I guess the answer to that one is "yes".
I'm not an Apple newbie - I used them heavily for many years in the early-mid 90s when working as an editor and layout designer for magazines - but can't for the life of me understand their fetishisation. The Nomad Zen is slightly bigger, but looks better and has a better sound quality - at least, I think brushed metal looks better than then rather hospital ward shade of cream that Apple picked for the iPod.
As in a lot in life, go figure.
P.
A comparison on ebay shows that the Nomad Zen NX goes for around half the price of the iPod. Not taking into account the fact it has longer battery life, has an easily replaceable battery, and supposedly better sound. The MP3/CD players aren't bad, and I had a Rio one for quite a while. But they _do_ skip, even when walking, which I found very frustrating. Plus they're on the large side, and you still have to carry your CDs around with you. They're good, but not comparable to a hard drive MP3 player really. P.
> This gives them an excuse to delay release and > avoid bad press
Avoid bad press? Google is full of nothing but bad press for them? Newssites that never mention gaming news are full of "famous game stolen" stories. If they had simply announced they had needed a few extra months, a few hardcore gamers would have groaned, but the news would have slipped by most. Sorry, I don't buy this conspiracy nonsense at all.
P.
Damn straight. This is just insane - maybe the RIAA think they are scaring people, but all they are doing is making them angrier:
1. This girl is 12 years old.
2. She's TWELVE, for crying out loud.
3. She's from a poor neighborhood.
4. There's a good chance that she thought what she was doing was completely legit.
I won't be annoyed by an RIAA boycott too much, since playing with http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/search.asp I find that most of the music I listen to comes from non-RIAA labels. But I'd urge everyone to use the above site next time they're thinking of buying a CD, and choose the non-RIAA option.
P.
Normally I'd think anyone lauding command line interfaces was just a hairy be-sandalled Luddite, but it's true: Usenet and nn beats the pants off most web forums. It's quick, you can easily select authors/subjects you're interested in, and once you read an article, you never see it again (unless you want to). I end up telneting into my old (1988) college UNIX account in order to use nn (no having to wait for news to download there either!).
P.
No joke; I've bought the Sunday Times on occasion (it's a UK newspaper, but has an Irish edition, albeit that just means a few extra pages of a news and an Irish culture supplement) and I don't think I've ever finished reading it. I wish newspapers didn't think that size equals quality.
P.
It's also interesting that people bitch about how many viruses there are for Windows PCs. Hey I accept that the OS structure is less secure than say a linux system (properly configured) but you know what, who the hell as a virus programmer is going to write a virus that only affects like 5% of computers out there.
Couple that with the fact that some virus writers tend to aim at Windows purely out of spite for Bill Gates and his evil ways. Blaster contained the message "Billy Gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!" I can't see people hating Linux in such a way.
P.
Excuse me? A bug report isn't a contribution? Where you work, do you accuse QA or test engineers of not contributing if they don't actually fix the bugs they find?
P.
I use both, and by no means does "YahooPOPS" work "just as well". I mean, it's cool that I can download my Yahoo mail for free, but I still use Hotmail with OE as my primary mail access. YahooPOPS is very slow (over broadband it takes a minute or two to download/upload even a few emails) and it has to be _regularly_ updated. Also, since it's POP, you can then only access the mail from one location; OE/Hotmail allows me to access my mail both at home and work (and of course elsewhere through a browser).
P.
After the third remote control broke, and I tried to buy a new one from Rio itself (rather than Amazon, where I bought it) it turned out that not only would they not ship items from their e-store, they would even accept a non-US credit card it (when I tried to buy and have it sent to a US friend to send on to me). Needless to say, I'm not impressed by a company quite happy to take foreigner's money while giving them a shoddy service.
P.
Is this typical in the USA? In Ireland, I pay all my bills by either credit card or direct debit. I then pay my credit cards online direct from my bank; people who don't want to (or can't) pay online can use the bank's 24-hour phone services. Using cheques and snail-mail for financial transactions seems to be a thing of the past these days.
P.
The fact is that they cost a fortune ("somewhat cheap"? Pur-leaze.), are slow but still unwieldy and make you look like King Dork McDork of Dorkania from the the planet Dorkeraan. They have all the disadvantages of a car (problems with parking, cost, lack of exercise) with the disadvantages of a bike (no weather protection, no passengers, relatively slow speed) and none of the benefits. In short, they are ridiculous. There is definitely a market for one-person medium-speed transportation systems, but this is not the solution.
P.
If you're both in the online adult entertainment business, you do. Badda bish.
Oh wait, I said "sleep" and gave the game away. Damn.
P.
Er, not necessarily. Since heat rises, and the power supply is at the top, it shouldn't heat the case much anyway. Having recently switched from a loud PSU to a Zalmon power supply and lowered the voltage on my case fan from 12v to 7v (to make it less noisy), I've noticed only a minimal increase in temperature (still waybelow any max limits) and a blessed release from buzzing noises... I can now sleep with my PC at the end of the bed switched on, and more importantly, so can my girlfriend (admittedly not the usual review criteria for Slashdot ....)
P.
I find it bizarre but not surprising that the parent comment gets moderated up. As a technical writer, my worse nightmare is working with assholes like this, who mistake arcane knowledge in a particular field for intelligence. Hands up on Slashdot who doesn't speak fluent French? Hah hah, you're all idiots. Actually, you're not, but it seems most of you have no problem calling people who don't speak or understand "tech-ese" as idiots. Just as in same way most of us might learn enough French to help us get around Paris on a holiday, there are many who learn just enough tech-ese to get around a computer as they do their job.
P.
P.
P.
Before P2P, you had to be a relatively unconservative type to want to plonk down actual hard cash to hear music from an artist who you'd only vaguely heard of, but whose music wasn't played 24/7 on the usual corporate media. It was a safer option to simply buy the latest hit album; you at least knew there was one catchy tune on it, even if the rest was a dud.
Now, when you download a track to try it out, there's no marketing bull. You can easily discover that the hyped artist's albums consists of rubbish, and also find that the relatively unknown artist is simply wonderful.
I imagine this levelling of the playing field is terrifying to record company marketing managers.
P.
P.
>BAM!
>I Am
>A Man
Excuse me, I believe you are indulging in P2P lyrics sharing, you copyright terrorist! Don't you realise that by repeating Wham! lyrics, you are stealing money from Andy Ridgeley, who can barely afford to feed himself?
Please hand yourself over to Gruppenpanzergeneral Ashcroft at your nearest RIAA Detention Booth.
Thank you for your cooperation, citizen.
P.
Yeah, I remember that lil' Avril when she was 8 years old, touring clubs and carrying equipment like a true roadie.... P.