They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts.
I wouldn't even stretch to call people who would do this shoppers. Thats not looking for the best deal, thats borderline robbery. If you engage in that sort of activity, I'm sure you promising to never shop there again is exactly what they want. Win/win.
It is meant to appeal to people who have left EQ because it did not appeal to them.
Which is rich coming from SOE.
A lot of us left solely because the unappealing thing was SOE's mismanagement of the patch cycle, the balancing, the changes in content, and logging in every month to find out that your class was no longer desirable. (Kinda hard to have a class that is raid-required, but not desired in a group because other classes can fill in and give the group a higher kill-rate.)
I've been pretty happy with my K8T800 VIA chipset (Asus SK8V motherboard w/ Opteron 144).
It was the KT266 that had the most problems in VIA, so I didn't buy VIA for a few years.
Re:I think Halo 2 will be big....
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 1
iPod/iPod Mini
One of the rules of being a geek is that you diss anything that you lust after but can't afford.
The hope is that by dissing the item in question that all of your friends are able to purchase but that you can't because your life sucks - is that your life will magically become less sucky and people will bow down and worship your ascerbic wisdom.
Slashdot was a neat idea, but it's basically abadonware as a technology / news site. Editors who can't be bothered to fact check, dupe-check, or do *any* editing at all. Programmers who have sat on their hands for as long as I've been here, leaving scads of bugs unfixed and improvements left hanging in the wind.
This article confirms that it originally was a direct-to-video project, as does this one.
Also covered in the Toy Story Box Set of DVDs, where they specifically talk about how TS2 was originally planned as a direct-to-consumer project. I don't remember where along the way it got changed to a theatrical release, but the gist of it was that they realized that they had a very good storyline going and made the switch.
That pretty well sums up why I quit playing EQ after about 18 months (started just after Velious).
SOE developers were absolutely clueless when it came to implementing new features. Absolutely zero thought given to the impact that particular changes would have on the entire playerbase.
At least the "vision" was consistent, which meant that if you were leveling up race X as class Y, you pretty well knew what lay ahead on the road and what was the ultimate end-game for your toon. Once SOE started making changes willy-nilly, your class would go from needed/wanted in groups/raids to unwanted/unneeded. But if enough people complained, they'd nerf something else 3 months later, and a whole new crop of players would find themselves unable to get into groups/raids.
A good example is travel. Were the boats slow? Yep. So why not add an express service NPC at the docks for those who were willing to pay a few plat to transport themselves or their group? Bingo, a new plat-sink, and you don't put the druids/wizard folks who like to port for plat out of business.
Instead, they added free transportation in the game. Ruined the port-for-plat business, and actually made it even more difficult to get back from remote corners of the globe until the PoP expansion came out and added more insta-port locations.
Call of Duty is still pretty popular and considered by most to be quite good.
Prior to the United Offensive expansion, there were over 4000-4500 active servers on a typical night. And the UO expansion (only 8 weeks old and not patched yet) already has around 2500 active servers. (Don't know how many old CoD servers still exist or were converted to UO since I only play the expansion pack servers.)
The Athlon 64 architecture currently runs many or most 32 bit applications faster than comparable Intel processors, and is competitively priced. The ability to run 64 bit code is more like a bonus. This seems more comparable to the Pentium II, which was an extremely successful CPU architecture.
AMD was smart (as in business-smart) by providing a very easy upgrade path from 32 to 64 bit CPUs. I now own an Opteron CPU, and it is a very sweet chip that runs regular old 32-bit WinXP very nicely (as well as my games). Maybe someday I'll put a 64bit O/S on it, but in the meantime I'm getting my money's worth.
Plus, the Opteron CPUs run mighty cool, even with the stock retail AMD cooler (44-48C).
Hell of a nice chip, just wish they were a bit cheaper. I would not be surprised to see Opteron make significant inroads on the Xeon market.
It's stable (although I'm actually using Mozilla).
Just wish they'd add rule-based pop-up notification windows and sounds.
Which, believe it or not, is the major blocking issue for me to switch over entirely. I get e-mail notifications through the day of new task assignments, Outlook lets me popup a notification window, Mozilla Mail doesn't.
(That, and I do wish they'd adopt a 2-tier approach to spam. Likely spam and definite spam, like SpamBayes does with Outlook. Not to mention that unmarking something as junk doesn't move it back where it came from when Moz's junk filter mis-marked it.)
I just got the Adelphia hooked up at my house (29.95 for 6 months intro) and it's an awful lot like digital heroine. I'm not really sure I'm going to be able to take a 4:1 throttle back when my 6 month trial is up. I tell you, they're just like drug dealers.
Boy, until I read your last sentence, I thought you were talking about fembots.
Toshiba laptops come with the keyboard nubby pointer (newer ones ship with both a touchpad and the nubby). Not sure when they started using the nubby, but the Toshiba Tecra that I bought back in 2000 had one.
You can also get IBM Model M clone keyboards with the pointer built in, but it's not quite the same feel. I haven't tried the official IBM version since it's a $250 keyboard (the clone keyboard was $100, useful for a server room).
Not sure if any other laptop manufs include the nubby pointer or not. My old Zeos laptop had a full key down in the lower right that acted as a mouse pointer (very odd).
Just because you can't afford it doesn't mean it's a bad computer (doesn't mean it's a good computer either).
Hear hear.
I've priced out equivalent machines to the current Apple offerings, and you do indeed get what you pay for. A dual-CPU 1.8Ghz Powermac is around $2500 sans monitor. Price out a dual-Xeon or dual-Opteron and you end up at around $2000-$2500 for a comparable system.
Where Apple might be missing the boat is in the ultra low end where you can buy a system for $600. (But why should they try to compete down there where margins are razor-thin?)
If your productivity is text oriented, then yes, taking your hands off of the keyboard is damaging to productivity. If it is graphic oriented, then a mouse, or graphic tablet is better. What if your productivity is music oriented? You're better off with a piano keyboard than a typewriter keyboard. In short, matching the interface to the task will always give you better productivity.
I'll agree with that, which is why I prefer keyboards with the little Thinkpad-style pointer nub in the middle of the keyboard. (I also have an external mouse for extended use.)
Nothing better then not having to take your fingers off the home row to click on a button in a dialog box. (Usually, a poorly designed app without clearly defined hot-keys, or where you can't tab around the fields in a logical order.)
Might be interesting if keyboards had not one, but two thumbwheels down by the space bar. Although on a traditional keyboard, more then one thumbwheel would be problematic. Not sure where you'd fit a thumbwheel on most laptops.
I wouldn't mind whatever format comes out to be enclosed, though. I have always thought it strange that Mini-Disks didn't beat out CD's. You can't scratch them! Although I guess while the media is safer, the electronics accessing the media will be a bit more prone to dust and other particulates entering the cartridge bay. Not many people would check to see if the casing was clean before putting it in like they do the bottom of a CD/DVD.
MD was pretty much DOA due to Sony licensing and pricing for licensing. Not to mention that Sony is it's own worst enemy and kept the MD as "audio only" (there was no way to get digital content on/off the drive).
Just like we saw with the "floppy killer" drives that were all 40-250MB in size. Nobody was willing to step up and publish an open standard, so none of the half a dozen formats every took off.
So here we are, 10 years later, and we're still using floppy discs as the easiest way to move a 50k document from machine A to machine B. (USB keys are getting close... but still an order of magnitude too expensive, and unplugging a drive can be problematic.)
Finally, the sixth year, you realize that HDD space has grown to the point where you can afford to store your entire CD collection in a lossless format, and rip everything, one last time, to FLAC.
Yep, yep... I've just reached that point. Going through and ripping all of my CDs for the last time into FLAC (compression=5) because DVD-R prices have finally dropped low enough that it's okay to only fit 8 CDs on a DVD-R.
I'll probably still convert from the FLAC files to MP3 (probably 256kbps) for my main audio listening, downsampling to 160kbps for use in portable players with limited "skip buffer" memory.
Back in 1998... I remember it quite clearly, Bill Gates said "The MP3 is dead." Six years later, Sony finally relents and adds MP3 playability to some of their hardware (including the PSP!).
I'll give you another example that I ran across this week.
Back in 2001 when I bought my Ford Focus ZX3, I had to add in my own CD player that would play MP3 files.
While taking my car in for service this week, I got a complimentary rental car for the day, 2005 Ford Focus ZX4 SE. It came from the factory with a built-in CD player that would play MP3 files.
No WMA/AAC support, just MP3s, and it was able to read the ID3 tags.
Personally, I'll probably always use MP3. After all, I own all of the following devices that play MP3 and it's handy to be able to easily move files from one to the other:
- in-dash CD/MP3 player in the car
- small boombox that plays CDs/MP3s
- small portable CD player that plays MP3s
- mini-CD player (8cm CDs) that playse MP3s
A few of those devices support WMA, but some are MP3 only. MP3 is the lowest-common-denominator format and there's now a lot of hardware out on the market that support MP3.
I'm surprised you don't try power-saving modes where the disks spin down (there's 10W right there for each disk), the CPU throttles back (most drop back to a dozen watts or so), or simply have the system drop into suspend. Pulling a system out of suspend only takes a second or three, compared to the 1-5 minute bootup time. Takes a second or two for a hard drive to spin back up.
Get a meter and test it for yourself, your Windows/Linux boxes are probably only consuming 100W of power when active. That's around 73kWh/mo @ $0.10 = $7.30/mo.
(Same basic issue with LCD vs CRT, 19" CRTs use 140W, 17" LCDs are around 40W for a diff of only 100W... worse, they're only lit up 8 hrs/day for a cost savings of around $2.43/mo in electricity costs.)
One of these days I'll dig out the power meter and do some real testing.
Raid-0 is what I use for my pair of 250 gig drives for video capture. they are fast enough so that I do not get any frame drops when capturing from DV or from my Targa-3000 analog capture card (capturing at a measly 20Meg per second data rate.)
For $DIETY's sake, why?
Get yourself the HuffYUV codec, which is 100% lossless, takes near-zero CPU time, costs nothing and will cut that video rate down to 7-9MB/s. Even my old and slow 5400rpm 160GB Maxtor can keep up with 8-9MB/s.
In fact, my primary capture drive is that old-n-slow 5400rpm unit.
I'd rather have twice as many pixels but keep the text size the same or larger. Makes everything a good bit crisper and easier on the eyes.
(I have a 14" 1400x1050 display on my Toshiba Tecra. That's around 127ppi instead of 96ppi. It's *almost* good enough, but 150ppi or 200ppi is probably the sweet spot. Text looks very crisp on this display.)
About the only upgrade we've done on any machines in the office are memory upgrades (in fact, we just finished doubling the RAM in machines that aren't scheduled to be replaced now for another 2-3 years).
For general office work, I'd rather save money on the CPU and spend it on RAM and a second monitor. Especially if the person does a lot of document editing.
Yeah, I've looked at the Vaios about once a year and have never been impressed. All of the ultralightweight / ultrathin laptops are mostly marketing, designed for executives who do very little grunt work (as in mostly meetings / phone calls / e-mails).
IBM ThinkPads have always been solidly built when I've handled them. Compaq used to have a good line (used more then a few back in the mid-90s).
However, I've been using Toshiba Tecras for about 5 years now and have had very good luck with them. Definitely not lightweight since they're designed as desktop replacement machines, but the keyboard and screen (1400x1050) are good enough that I don't use external devices. I've had two problems with this unit in two years (hard drive failed, CPU fan started making noise and finally stopped working).
Slashdot Mirror
They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts.
I wouldn't even stretch to call people who would do this shoppers. Thats not looking for the best deal, thats borderline robbery. If you engage in that sort of activity, I'm sure you promising to never shop there again is exactly what they want. Win/win.
They should be prosecuting under fraud laws.
It is meant to appeal to people who have left EQ because it did not appeal to them.
Which is rich coming from SOE.
A lot of us left solely because the unappealing thing was SOE's mismanagement of the patch cycle, the balancing, the changes in content, and logging in every month to find out that your class was no longer desirable. (Kinda hard to have a class that is raid-required, but not desired in a group because other classes can fill in and give the group a higher kill-rate.)
I've been pretty happy with my K8T800 VIA chipset (Asus SK8V motherboard w/ Opteron 144).
It was the KT266 that had the most problems in VIA, so I didn't buy VIA for a few years.
iPod/iPod Mini
One of the rules of being a geek is that you diss anything that you lust after but can't afford.
The hope is that by dissing the item in question that all of your friends are able to purchase but that you can't because your life sucks - is that your life will magically become less sucky and people will bow down and worship your ascerbic wisdom.
Slashdot was a neat idea, but it's basically abadonware as a technology / news site. Editors who can't be bothered to fact check, dupe-check, or do *any* editing at all. Programmers who have sat on their hands for as long as I've been here, leaving scads of bugs unfixed and improvements left hanging in the wind.
This article confirms that it originally was a direct-to-video project, as does this one.
Also covered in the Toy Story Box Set of DVDs, where they specifically talk about how TS2 was originally planned as a direct-to-consumer project. I don't remember where along the way it got changed to a theatrical release, but the gist of it was that they realized that they had a very good storyline going and made the switch.
/clap
That pretty well sums up why I quit playing EQ after about 18 months (started just after Velious).
SOE developers were absolutely clueless when it came to implementing new features. Absolutely zero thought given to the impact that particular changes would have on the entire playerbase.
At least the "vision" was consistent, which meant that if you were leveling up race X as class Y, you pretty well knew what lay ahead on the road and what was the ultimate end-game for your toon. Once SOE started making changes willy-nilly, your class would go from needed/wanted in groups/raids to unwanted/unneeded. But if enough people complained, they'd nerf something else 3 months later, and a whole new crop of players would find themselves unable to get into groups/raids.
A good example is travel. Were the boats slow? Yep. So why not add an express service NPC at the docks for those who were willing to pay a few plat to transport themselves or their group? Bingo, a new plat-sink, and you don't put the druids/wizard folks who like to port for plat out of business.
Instead, they added free transportation in the game. Ruined the port-for-plat business, and actually made it even more difficult to get back from remote corners of the globe until the PoP expansion came out and added more insta-port locations.
Call of Duty is still pretty popular and considered by most to be quite good.
Prior to the United Offensive expansion, there were over 4000-4500 active servers on a typical night. And the UO expansion (only 8 weeks old and not patched yet) already has around 2500 active servers. (Don't know how many old CoD servers still exist or were converted to UO since I only play the expansion pack servers.)
The Athlon 64 architecture currently runs many or most 32 bit applications faster than comparable Intel processors, and is competitively priced. The ability to run 64 bit code is more like a bonus. This seems more comparable to the Pentium II, which was an extremely successful CPU architecture.
AMD was smart (as in business-smart) by providing a very easy upgrade path from 32 to 64 bit CPUs. I now own an Opteron CPU, and it is a very sweet chip that runs regular old 32-bit WinXP very nicely (as well as my games). Maybe someday I'll put a 64bit O/S on it, but in the meantime I'm getting my money's worth.
Plus, the Opteron CPUs run mighty cool, even with the stock retail AMD cooler (44-48C).
Hell of a nice chip, just wish they were a bit cheaper. I would not be surprised to see Opteron make significant inroads on the Xeon market.
Pretty sure the issue with bulletproof windows "aging" has to do with exposure to UV light.
It's stable (although I'm actually using Mozilla).
Just wish they'd add rule-based pop-up notification windows and sounds.
Which, believe it or not, is the major blocking issue for me to switch over entirely. I get e-mail notifications through the day of new task assignments, Outlook lets me popup a notification window, Mozilla Mail doesn't.
(That, and I do wish they'd adopt a 2-tier approach to spam. Likely spam and definite spam, like SpamBayes does with Outlook. Not to mention that unmarking something as junk doesn't move it back where it came from when Moz's junk filter mis-marked it.)
Yeah, I'd bet that the ToS for the 5/2 pipe will limit your bandwidth usage.
OTOH, if you have the $200/mo package, they'll turn a blind eye to the amount of bandwidth that you use or what traffic goes over that link.
(Which is why I convinced work that I needed a static/business DSL linkup instead of the consumer-level account.)
I just got the Adelphia hooked up at my house (29.95 for 6 months intro) and it's an awful lot like digital heroine. I'm not really sure I'm going to be able to take a 4:1 throttle back when my 6 month trial is up. I tell you, they're just like drug dealers.
Boy, until I read your last sentence, I thought you were talking about fembots.
Oh, HEROIN!
True, I completely forgot about e-mail.
Only exception would be if you don't have a net connection or are stuck on 14.4kbps dial-up.
Toshiba laptops come with the keyboard nubby pointer (newer ones ship with both a touchpad and the nubby). Not sure when they started using the nubby, but the Toshiba Tecra that I bought back in 2000 had one.
You can also get IBM Model M clone keyboards with the pointer built in, but it's not quite the same feel. I haven't tried the official IBM version since it's a $250 keyboard (the clone keyboard was $100, useful for a server room).
Not sure if any other laptop manufs include the nubby pointer or not. My old Zeos laptop had a full key down in the lower right that acted as a mouse pointer (very odd).
Just because you can't afford it doesn't mean it's a bad computer (doesn't mean it's a good computer either).
Hear hear.
I've priced out equivalent machines to the current Apple offerings, and you do indeed get what you pay for. A dual-CPU 1.8Ghz Powermac is around $2500 sans monitor. Price out a dual-Xeon or dual-Opteron and you end up at around $2000-$2500 for a comparable system.
Where Apple might be missing the boat is in the ultra low end where you can buy a system for $600. (But why should they try to compete down there where margins are razor-thin?)
If your productivity is text oriented, then yes, taking your hands off of the keyboard is damaging to productivity. If it is graphic oriented, then a mouse, or graphic tablet is better. What if your productivity is music oriented? You're better off with a piano keyboard than a typewriter keyboard. In short, matching the interface to the task will always give you better productivity.
I'll agree with that, which is why I prefer keyboards with the little Thinkpad-style pointer nub in the middle of the keyboard. (I also have an external mouse for extended use.)
Nothing better then not having to take your fingers off the home row to click on a button in a dialog box. (Usually, a poorly designed app without clearly defined hot-keys, or where you can't tab around the fields in a logical order.)
Might be interesting if keyboards had not one, but two thumbwheels down by the space bar. Although on a traditional keyboard, more then one thumbwheel would be problematic. Not sure where you'd fit a thumbwheel on most laptops.
1) Because it's cheaper to reuse manuf equipment that can move / stack / sort 120mm discs.
2) Stores have acres and acres of shelf space dedicated to storing and displaying 120mm sized packaging.
3) Consumers have hundreds of millions of cases and other storage furniture dedicated to storing and displaying 120mm packaging.
(Anyone remember what a PITA it was when the new DVD packaging came out because they made it larger then CD jewel cases?)
I wouldn't mind whatever format comes out to be enclosed, though. I have always thought it strange that Mini-Disks didn't beat out CD's. You can't scratch them! Although I guess while the media is safer, the electronics accessing the media will be a bit more prone to dust and other particulates entering the cartridge bay. Not many people would check to see if the casing was clean before putting it in like they do the bottom of a CD/DVD.
MD was pretty much DOA due to Sony licensing and pricing for licensing. Not to mention that Sony is it's own worst enemy and kept the MD as "audio only" (there was no way to get digital content on/off the drive).
Just like we saw with the "floppy killer" drives that were all 40-250MB in size. Nobody was willing to step up and publish an open standard, so none of the half a dozen formats every took off.
So here we are, 10 years later, and we're still using floppy discs as the easiest way to move a 50k document from machine A to machine B. (USB keys are getting close... but still an order of magnitude too expensive, and unplugging a drive can be problematic.)
Finally, the sixth year, you realize that HDD space has grown to the point where you can afford to store your entire CD collection in a lossless format, and rip everything, one last time, to FLAC.
Yep, yep... I've just reached that point. Going through and ripping all of my CDs for the last time into FLAC (compression=5) because DVD-R prices have finally dropped low enough that it's okay to only fit 8 CDs on a DVD-R.
I'll probably still convert from the FLAC files to MP3 (probably 256kbps) for my main audio listening, downsampling to 160kbps for use in portable players with limited "skip buffer" memory.
Back in 1998... I remember it quite clearly, Bill Gates said "The MP3 is dead." Six years later, Sony finally relents and adds MP3 playability to some of their hardware (including the PSP!).
I'll give you another example that I ran across this week.
Back in 2001 when I bought my Ford Focus ZX3, I had to add in my own CD player that would play MP3 files.
While taking my car in for service this week, I got a complimentary rental car for the day, 2005 Ford Focus ZX4 SE. It came from the factory with a built-in CD player that would play MP3 files.
No WMA/AAC support, just MP3s, and it was able to read the ID3 tags.
Personally, I'll probably always use MP3. After all, I own all of the following devices that play MP3 and it's handy to be able to easily move files from one to the other:
- in-dash CD/MP3 player in the car
- small boombox that plays CDs/MP3s
- small portable CD player that plays MP3s
- mini-CD player (8cm CDs) that playse MP3s
A few of those devices support WMA, but some are MP3 only. MP3 is the lowest-common-denominator format and there's now a lot of hardware out on the market that support MP3.
I'm surprised you don't try power-saving modes where the disks spin down (there's 10W right there for each disk), the CPU throttles back (most drop back to a dozen watts or so), or simply have the system drop into suspend. Pulling a system out of suspend only takes a second or three, compared to the 1-5 minute bootup time. Takes a second or two for a hard drive to spin back up.
Get a meter and test it for yourself, your Windows/Linux boxes are probably only consuming 100W of power when active. That's around 73kWh/mo @ $0.10 = $7.30/mo.
(Same basic issue with LCD vs CRT, 19" CRTs use 140W, 17" LCDs are around 40W for a diff of only 100W... worse, they're only lit up 8 hrs/day for a cost savings of around $2.43/mo in electricity costs.)
One of these days I'll dig out the power meter and do some real testing.
Raid-0 is what I use for my pair of 250 gig drives for video capture. they are fast enough so that I do not get any frame drops when capturing from DV or from my Targa-3000 analog capture card (capturing at a measly 20Meg per second data rate.)
For $DIETY's sake, why?
Get yourself the HuffYUV codec, which is 100% lossless, takes near-zero CPU time, costs nothing and will cut that video rate down to 7-9MB/s. Even my old and slow 5400rpm 160GB Maxtor can keep up with 8-9MB/s.
In fact, my primary capture drive is that old-n-slow 5400rpm unit.
I'd rather have twice as many pixels but keep the text size the same or larger. Makes everything a good bit crisper and easier on the eyes.
(I have a 14" 1400x1050 display on my Toshiba Tecra. That's around 127ppi instead of 96ppi. It's *almost* good enough, but 150ppi or 200ppi is probably the sweet spot. Text looks very crisp on this display.)
About the only upgrade we've done on any machines in the office are memory upgrades (in fact, we just finished doubling the RAM in machines that aren't scheduled to be replaced now for another 2-3 years).
For general office work, I'd rather save money on the CPU and spend it on RAM and a second monitor. Especially if the person does a lot of document editing.
Yeah, I've looked at the Vaios about once a year and have never been impressed. All of the ultralightweight / ultrathin laptops are mostly marketing, designed for executives who do very little grunt work (as in mostly meetings / phone calls / e-mails).
IBM ThinkPads have always been solidly built when I've handled them. Compaq used to have a good line (used more then a few back in the mid-90s).
However, I've been using Toshiba Tecras for about 5 years now and have had very good luck with them. Definitely not lightweight since they're designed as desktop replacement machines, but the keyboard and screen (1400x1050) are good enough that I don't use external devices. I've had two problems with this unit in two years (hard drive failed, CPU fan started making noise and finally stopped working).