You must be one of those folks that that said at the end of "Titanic", "TOLD YOU IT WOULD SINK! What a waste of time."
Granted, Titanic could be considered a waste of time (I kind of lean towards that end at least), but not for that reason. Congratulations, you're the reason why most movies these days are boring, mindless, dis-engaging trash. Extending your brain power is just a little *too* taxing, and so Hollywood seeks your $$ by pumping out wonderful movies such as "Baby Geniuses"
Too many salesmen, too many commissions. Too little inventory, too poor customer service. Too high prices, too many just grunge music fans.
Uh, isn't that most huge chains? And what customer service are you referring to from any online store? Customer service to them is tracking your order. Let's take music stores for example.
Killer mom-and-pop stores still exist ESPECIALLY in record sales; in big cities (like Chicago) where the music scene is all about a well stocked record store, it's MUCH preferred over a chain. You walk into the store, hum a few lines, and it can be pretty damn impressive when the guy behind the counter a) knows who you are and b) can name the tune immediately. Not to mention the fact that they know what you like and drop you tidbits about what's coming out, and if you like certain bands, that you'll like certain OTHER bands, on top of which, special ordering is sooo painless most of the time. They also more often than not have a pulse on what's going on locally. And where do you get this limited selection bs?? I find MORE stuff at my local record store (and not even the obscure and/or local stuff) down the street, along with a whole slew of imports. Half the time I can't find the exact stuff I want online, like a very specific concerto recording (almost always easily found by my fave classical music place) or that Jawbreaker import that has been out of print forever.
Now don't get me wrong; I also love places like amazon when I know exactly what I want... but no internet store is going to take the place of stopping in at Reckless and chatting (or arguing!) with the music geeks on both sides of the counter about the newest album releases, etc etc.
Hideo Kojima makes decent games. He can't seem to write coherently, however... while his game plots have the potential to be interesting, they quickly get mired in illogical jumps and chopping prose.
If he wrote a screenplay, it would need an excellent editor.
... if you think base potty humor is the epitomy of a laugh, and community theater is the height of complexity.
For what it is (a good chuckle), it's pretty good. For anything more... well, go read a book, watch some shorts... even watch an x86 demo! The writing may be entertaining for awhile, but it's the same thing over and over, and it never evolved.
What is it I'm missing that folks like about Stephenson? Is it just that he hits on geek subject matter?
Woo! You win a prize.
Lame, eh? I literally laughed out loud (LOL if you please) at those bad passages... and the worst part is from what I gathered from interviews and anecdotes he's iterated, he's not even a real geek, just a geek wannabe!
You have simply reinforced what I said, as well as pointed out WHY it's NOT good writing. Since you seem to be entertained by reading the equivalent of a manual, more power to you (see O'Reilly books for a similar experience, or the latest Pulitzer prize winner for criticism).
This is how Stephenson writes: Prose, prose, looooonnnnng explanation, prose prose prose, loooong explanation. Good writers will not break the flow to enter an explanation. It will happen while you read. He doesn't seem to understand this.
I don't like Dave Eggers' way of being emotional or pandering, but he knows how to move a story along during the background moments (which is my entire point). Stephenson gives background for ENDLESS pages... but with no real reason for it other than to be geeky and appeal to geeks.
In other words, humor has nothing to do with it. The basic point was that Neal loves indulging in pointless side stories. Eggers does the same thing, except for one thing: they actually pertain to the story at hand. You may not like the story, but at least it adds to it instead of saying, "Hey, look, I can talk about unix like all those folks on/.!"
Someone un-mod the flamebait mod. It isn't flamebait because he disagrees with your opinion, especially when he has valid points.
Cryptonomicon may have been interesting when it moved, but there were pages and pages of dead space... where nothing but background explanations occurred. You *can* make background and explanations interesting if you're a good writer. Neal Stephenson is strictly mediocre. He's written some decent stuff; Cryptonomicon needed an editor. It's huge page count isn't a testament to his talents as a writer, but his lack of direction, mental masturbatory habits, and pointless diversions.
For an example of meandering writing that actually DOES something (and I'm not even the biggest fan), check out Dave Eggers. Or if you have an open mind, Virginia Woolf.
The problem is that I don't have a music library for me to play on crappy portables (if I did, you're right, I'd just use some sort of compression scheme); the lossless tracks are for my listening room where I have (among other things including a Rotel transport and respectable Denon turntable) a rack mounted a small audio box running Linux that uses its optical out and pulls files off the house file server. By convenience, I like being able to bring some of those on a portable. The either involves mirroring the entire 75 gigs to a compressed format (of course it would be smaller, but what a kludged solution) or having a portable that understands the lossless codec.
Anyway, you can see the problems this poses for me doing a lot music managing with iTunes. It doesn't understand FLACs, and once you get used to the insanely nice way the J River / Media Center app can update whole slews of tags in really complicated, pseudo-script ways to dragging and dropping selected files onto other existing tags, as well as physically sorting them on the drive. it's hard to use iTunes. The one thing I haven't checked into very deeply is AIFFs. The possibility to convert from FLACs to AIFFs would enable more iTunes compatibility, but it would also roughly doubly the space from 75 gigs... not a big problem, but something to keep in mind. Also, is there an AIFF encoder for Linux? (Most of my ripping / file sorting is done by the server, then tagged by the Windows box along with some file positioning correction).
So there it is. Like I said previously, I like Apple and I used to like iTunes, but I ran into a lot of small things that just made it 'not for me'. As I have no blind loyalty to any particular software set (I'm more about finding what fits the best for what I need), I'd be more than willing to head back to it if they supported FLACs. Or do AIFFs compress losslessly?
I would rather not take the risk. Purchasing a solid state player for a an active session at the gym or riding a ridge doesn't require me to have every single audio file I have, since the activity will probably not last more than the amount of music I can drop into those players, not to mention solid states are not very expensive. Perhaps you are willing to move up and down repeatedly for an hour or more while running with the ipod strapped to your arm every day and wonder if it's cutting its lifespan short? Do you think dropping an ipod is good for it as well? It's fairly common sense that a lot of active movement with a hard drive is not a good idea. While it may not break it, it can't do much to lengthen its lifespan.
No one said I used rendezvous. In fact, I'm also using smb, with samba, on a 3ware raid array (I even tested it over nfs). It doesn't matter if I'm using one of the two powerbooks I own *or* the athlon 2600, iTunes does not navigate well for huge music repositories, and I'm not just talking to response speed (iTunes will cache a lot of information off the network). I'm talking actual GUI navigation. The finder field is good for locating one track, or something by an artist, but a tree would add so much more... sometimes I want to look at files by the albums they're from, and it's very natural to look down a tree, locating artist, then perusing albums. With iTunes, everything is just lumped together in the main screen, depending on which item you've checked on the sidebar, or the term you've grepped for in the find field. Honestly? There is no good music library program for something that big. I am stuck using Media Center from J Center on the windows boxes. It has a mediocre interface for most operations, but the organization features it brings to the table really makes iTunes look like a second rate program (and for the record, I really liked iTunes when it first came out).
Once you add the fact that iTunes cannot play any lossless compression codecs, it pretty much seals the deal for me. Keep in mind that I realize that most people like iTunes, and that's fine; it's just not tuned (no pun intended) to my needs. I think it's just a bit disappointing because (I think I mentioned this in a completely seperate post) that Apple stuff usually caters to very novice users, as well as highly proficient, advanced ones, and it's part of the reason I like a lot of their products. iTunes only seems to get part of that right.
Re:I AM WILLING TO PAY FOR TOP QUALITY! ARG!
on
iPod Mini Sells Out
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· Score: 1
Quality? When you can't play any lossless compression codec without down converting it to some kind of iPod compatible codec? Sorry, but 75 gigs of FLACs will take some time to mirror into whatever amount of mp3s that is, or AACs. Not to mention the terrible iTunes app for managing such a LARGE collection (and yes, I know all about that - I own 2 powerbooks and a G5, and having them all dip into the central linux repository for music can be a royal pain!).
I like Apple. But this is not the most user friendly thing they've designed. It is very consumer driven which is fine, but unlike the rest of their products, is not easily adaptable to different situations beyond the normal consumer mindset.
Some counterpoints, just to throw some perspective into the mix:
Anything remotely active (running, climbing, cycling) is not good with hard drive players.
The iPods don't play any formats I'm fond of like FLACs. Yes, they are overkill for portables but when over 75 gigs of your music is in the format (in my listening room, lossy formats are easy to spot), it's an annoying bear to keep a mirrored version of the files in lossy formats just so you have the option of transferring to your portable.
iTunes is terrible at managing very large, centrally located music repositories. I have a very well broken down music collection, carefully coded with tags, and stuffed into proper directories. iTunes is slow accessing the files over the network and navigating artist - album - track can be cumbersome. I tried it for awhile on my powerbooks, and just gave up.
Comcast sucks with anyone doing anything more than rudimentary web surfing and email... mainly because of the limitations of cable upload speeds, and compounded by the fact that Comcast's infrastructure varies WILDLY from area to area; try telling Comcast internet is reliable to anyone in Chicago or the surrounding suburbs, and they will laugh you into oblivion.
so to keep my entire library of flac's (well over 7000+) compatible with an ipod, I have to convert them to mp3s or aacs? And take up more space? And waste time compressing?
Dude, if you think games like Mario Sunshine, Super Monkey Ball and F-zero are kiddy games, perhaps you should pull your head out of the oh-its-so-cute-so-it-has-to-be-for-kids-only asshole.
Here's a hint, genius: mature gamers know that GAMEPLAY is what makes a game 'mature' and
great, not testosterone pumped, adrenaline injected, blood bathed mindless and shallow hyper realistic graphical extravaganzas. Here's a simple example that's not even on the gamecube: ICO is a multitudes more mature than something like Postal 2, yet how violent is ICO? While a game like Postal 2 CAN be aimed at and considered an adult game, so can the ICO... and for much better reasons.
If Nintendo ever goes the way of Sega (not likely, but you never know), it won't be because they don't make mature games... it'll be because idiots like you equate maturity with guns, violence, and blood. You, my friend, are exactly what's wrong with a lot of game fans these days.
Rez's innovation stems directly from its intelligence. There are a dearth of intelligent games out there. Frankly, any game that has more than just a casual nod towards questions and 'significance' (interpret as you will) automatically makes it innovative in my book.
If you're looking for honest-to-goodness, never-done-before as a term for innovation, you'll never find it. Likewise, you'll easily find people tossing the term around, ie Half-Life is an innovative FPS, Doom 3 is an innovation in and of itself, etc. Whatever. The point is (as previously stated) Rez may not have the most original gameplay, but similarities to other excellent games (PD 1/2/Saga/Orta as an example) is not what makes people consider it great. Sum, whole, greater, etc.
No kidding. It's like saying Ico is just Super Mario Brothers with better graphics and someone annoying to tow around.
Rez isn't innovative because of the gameplay, but because of the entire experience (which includes the significant philosophical musings behind it). While I love Panzer Dragoon in all its incarnations and with its own set of philosphical pontifications, similar gameplay does not a rip off make,
Didn't the Atari 2600 version have you playing a blocky version of the board game "Operation" after you picked up all the moving pixels off the battlefield?:P
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You must be one of those folks that that said at the end of "Titanic", "TOLD YOU IT WOULD SINK! What a waste of time."
Granted, Titanic could be considered a waste of time (I kind of lean towards that end at least), but not for that reason. Congratulations, you're the reason why most movies these days are boring, mindless, dis-engaging trash. Extending your brain power is just a little *too* taxing, and so Hollywood seeks your $$ by pumping out wonderful movies such as "Baby Geniuses"
Too many salesmen, too many commissions. Too little inventory, too poor customer service. Too high prices, too many just grunge music fans.
Uh, isn't that most huge chains? And what customer service are you referring to from any online store? Customer service to them is tracking your order. Let's take music stores for example.
Killer mom-and-pop stores still exist ESPECIALLY in record sales; in big cities (like Chicago) where the music scene is all about a well stocked record store, it's MUCH preferred over a chain. You walk into the store, hum a few lines, and it can be pretty damn impressive when the guy behind the counter a) knows who you are and b) can name the tune immediately. Not to mention the fact that they know what you like and drop you tidbits about what's coming out, and if you like certain bands, that you'll like certain OTHER bands, on top of which, special ordering is sooo painless most of the time. They also more often than not have a pulse on what's going on locally. And where do you get this limited selection bs?? I find MORE stuff at my local record store (and not even the obscure and/or local stuff) down the street, along with a whole slew of imports. Half the time I can't find the exact stuff I want online, like a very specific concerto recording (almost always easily found by my fave classical music place) or that Jawbreaker import that has been out of print forever.
Now don't get me wrong; I also love places like amazon when I know exactly what I want... but no internet store is going to take the place of stopping in at Reckless and chatting (or arguing!) with the music geeks on both sides of the counter about the newest album releases, etc etc.
Hideo Kojima makes decent games. He can't seem to write coherently, however... while his game plots have the potential to be interesting, they quickly get mired in illogical jumps and chopping prose.
If he wrote a screenplay, it would need an excellent editor.
i thought it was span?
... if you think base potty humor is the epitomy of a laugh, and community theater is the height of complexity.
For what it is (a good chuckle), it's pretty good. For anything more... well, go read a book, watch some shorts... even watch an x86 demo! The writing may be entertaining for awhile, but it's the same thing over and over, and it never evolved.
What is it I'm missing that folks like about Stephenson? Is it just that he hits on geek subject matter?
Woo! You win a prize.
Lame, eh? I literally laughed out loud (LOL if you please) at those bad passages... and the worst part is from what I gathered from interviews and anecdotes he's iterated, he's not even a real geek, just a geek wannabe!
THANK YOU! The stuff is written in such an infantile way that I'm embarassed for people when they say they say it's excellent writing.
Purchase a FingerWork Touchstream. Install software. Install XWinder. You now have more control than Cruise did in Minority Report.
You have simply reinforced what I said, as well as pointed out WHY it's NOT good writing. Since you seem to be entertained by reading the equivalent of a manual, more power to you (see O'Reilly books for a similar experience, or the latest Pulitzer prize winner for criticism).
This is how Stephenson writes: Prose, prose, looooonnnnng explanation, prose prose prose, loooong explanation. Good writers will not break the flow to enter an explanation. It will happen while you read. He doesn't seem to understand this.
or you could make your bluetooth pda dial someone's bt phone directly. :-P
I don't like Dave Eggers' way of being emotional or pandering, but he knows how to move a story along during the background moments (which is my entire point). Stephenson gives background for ENDLESS pages... but with no real reason for it other than to be geeky and appeal to geeks.
/.!"
In other words, humor has nothing to do with it. The basic point was that Neal loves indulging in pointless side stories. Eggers does the same thing, except for one thing: they actually pertain to the story at hand. You may not like the story, but at least it adds to it instead of saying, "Hey, look, I can talk about unix like all those folks on
Someone un-mod the flamebait mod. It isn't flamebait because he disagrees with your opinion, especially when he has valid points.
Cryptonomicon may have been interesting when it moved, but there were pages and pages of dead space... where nothing but background explanations occurred. You *can* make background and explanations interesting if you're a good writer. Neal Stephenson is strictly mediocre. He's written some decent stuff; Cryptonomicon needed an editor. It's huge page count isn't a testament to his talents as a writer, but his lack of direction, mental masturbatory habits, and pointless diversions.
For an example of meandering writing that actually DOES something (and I'm not even the biggest fan), check out Dave Eggers. Or if you have an open mind, Virginia Woolf.
how does a wi-fi pda dial?
The problem is that I don't have a music library for me to play on crappy portables (if I did, you're right, I'd just use some sort of compression scheme); the lossless tracks are for my listening room where I have (among other things including a Rotel transport and respectable Denon turntable) a rack mounted a small audio box running Linux that uses its optical out and pulls files off the house file server. By convenience, I like being able to bring some of those on a portable. The either involves mirroring the entire 75 gigs to a compressed format (of course it would be smaller, but what a kludged solution) or having a portable that understands the lossless codec.
Anyway, you can see the problems this poses for me doing a lot music managing with iTunes. It doesn't understand FLACs, and once you get used to the insanely nice way the J River / Media Center app can update whole slews of tags in really complicated, pseudo-script ways to dragging and dropping selected files onto other existing tags, as well as physically sorting them on the drive. it's hard to use iTunes. The one thing I haven't checked into very deeply is AIFFs. The possibility to convert from FLACs to AIFFs would enable more iTunes compatibility, but it would also roughly doubly the space from 75 gigs... not a big problem, but something to keep in mind. Also, is there an AIFF encoder for Linux? (Most of my ripping / file sorting is done by the server, then tagged by the Windows box along with some file positioning correction).
So there it is. Like I said previously, I like Apple and I used to like iTunes, but I ran into a lot of small things that just made it 'not for me'. As I have no blind loyalty to any particular software set (I'm more about finding what fits the best for what I need), I'd be more than willing to head back to it if they supported FLACs. Or do AIFFs compress losslessly?
I would rather not take the risk. Purchasing a solid state player for a an active session at the gym or riding a ridge doesn't require me to have every single audio file I have, since the activity will probably not last more than the amount of music I can drop into those players, not to mention solid states are not very expensive. Perhaps you are willing to move up and down repeatedly for an hour or more while running with the ipod strapped to your arm every day and wonder if it's cutting its lifespan short? Do you think dropping an ipod is good for it as well? It's fairly common sense that a lot of active movement with a hard drive is not a good idea. While it may not break it, it can't do much to lengthen its lifespan.
No one said I used rendezvous. In fact, I'm also using smb, with samba, on a 3ware raid array (I even tested it over nfs). It doesn't matter if I'm using one of the two powerbooks I own *or* the athlon 2600, iTunes does not navigate well for huge music repositories, and I'm not just talking to response speed (iTunes will cache a lot of information off the network). I'm talking actual GUI navigation. The finder field is good for locating one track, or something by an artist, but a tree would add so much more... sometimes I want to look at files by the albums they're from, and it's very natural to look down a tree, locating artist, then perusing albums. With iTunes, everything is just lumped together in the main screen, depending on which item you've checked on the sidebar, or the term you've grepped for in the find field. Honestly? There is no good music library program for something that big. I am stuck using Media Center from J Center on the windows boxes. It has a mediocre interface for most operations, but the organization features it brings to the table really makes iTunes look like a second rate program (and for the record, I really liked iTunes when it first came out).
Once you add the fact that iTunes cannot play any lossless compression codecs, it pretty much seals the deal for me. Keep in mind that I realize that most people like iTunes, and that's fine; it's just not tuned (no pun intended) to my needs. I think it's just a bit disappointing because (I think I mentioned this in a completely seperate post) that Apple stuff usually caters to very novice users, as well as highly proficient, advanced ones, and it's part of the reason I like a lot of their products. iTunes only seems to get part of that right.
Quality? When you can't play any lossless compression codec without down converting it to some kind of iPod compatible codec? Sorry, but 75 gigs of FLACs will take some time to mirror into whatever amount of mp3s that is, or AACs. Not to mention the terrible iTunes app for managing such a LARGE collection (and yes, I know all about that - I own 2 powerbooks and a G5, and having them all dip into the central linux repository for music can be a royal pain!).
I like Apple. But this is not the most user friendly thing they've designed. It is very consumer driven which is fine, but unlike the rest of their products, is not easily adaptable to different situations beyond the normal consumer mindset.
Some counterpoints, just to throw some perspective into the mix:
Anything remotely active (running, climbing, cycling) is not good with hard drive players.
The iPods don't play any formats I'm fond of like FLACs. Yes, they are overkill for portables but when over 75 gigs of your music is in the format (in my listening room, lossy formats are easy to spot), it's an annoying bear to keep a mirrored version of the files in lossy formats just so you have the option of transferring to your portable.
iTunes is terrible at managing very large, centrally located music repositories. I have a very well broken down music collection, carefully coded with tags, and stuffed into proper directories. iTunes is slow accessing the files over the network and navigating artist - album - track can be cumbersome. I tried it for awhile on my powerbooks, and just gave up.
Comcast sucks with anyone doing anything more than rudimentary web surfing and email... mainly because of the limitations of cable upload speeds, and compounded by the fact that Comcast's infrastructure varies WILDLY from area to area; try telling Comcast internet is reliable to anyone in Chicago or the surrounding suburbs, and they will laugh you into oblivion.
so to keep my entire library of flac's (well over 7000+) compatible with an ipod, I have to convert them to mp3s or aacs? And take up more space? And waste time compressing?
Dude, if you think games like Mario Sunshine, Super Monkey Ball and F-zero are kiddy games, perhaps you should pull your head out of the oh-its-so-cute-so-it-has-to-be-for-kids-only asshole.
Here's a hint, genius: mature gamers know that GAMEPLAY is what makes a game 'mature' and great, not testosterone pumped, adrenaline injected, blood bathed mindless and shallow hyper realistic graphical extravaganzas. Here's a simple example that's not even on the gamecube: ICO is a multitudes more mature than something like Postal 2, yet how violent is ICO? While a game like Postal 2 CAN be aimed at and considered an adult game, so can the ICO... and for much better reasons.
If Nintendo ever goes the way of Sega (not likely, but you never know), it won't be because they don't make mature games... it'll be because idiots like you equate maturity with guns, violence, and blood. You, my friend, are exactly what's wrong with a lot of game fans these days.
Rez's innovation stems directly from its intelligence. There are a dearth of intelligent games out there. Frankly, any game that has more than just a casual nod towards questions and 'significance' (interpret as you will) automatically makes it innovative in my book.
If you're looking for honest-to-goodness, never-done-before as a term for innovation, you'll never find it. Likewise, you'll easily find people tossing the term around, ie Half-Life is an innovative FPS, Doom 3 is an innovation in and of itself, etc. Whatever. The point is (as previously stated) Rez may not have the most original gameplay, but similarities to other excellent games (PD 1/2/Saga/Orta as an example) is not what makes people consider it great. Sum, whole, greater, etc.
No kidding. It's like saying Ico is just Super Mario Brothers with better graphics and someone annoying to tow around.
Rez isn't innovative because of the gameplay, but because of the entire experience (which includes the significant philosophical musings behind it). While I love Panzer Dragoon in all its incarnations and with its own set of philosphical pontifications, similar gameplay does not a rip off make,
Didn't the Atari 2600 version have you playing a blocky version of the board game "Operation" after you picked up all the moving pixels off the battlefield? :P
Um, can someone give me a link to specs on B2??
Uh, what do you think they used before CDs became comenplace as storage mediums for consoles?
You don't seem to know much about consoles (especially modern sound generation techniques). A good percentage *isn't* redbook, even to this day.