Take a band like Coheed and Cambria. Their entire discography (including the Shabutie stuff) is one big epic space opera. If you listen to one song here or there, you don't get the entire picture. They would probably want you to get the entire album at each release so their story can be told, but honestly if you can grab a copy of the graphic novel it's based on you've already got the story.
Nonetheless, it's some of the best music to have come out this decade; get what you can get of it, I say.
Well said. I too have taken over a year to take my main to where he is now (55). I never grouped much, as I am not as social a person as most gamers, and being a hunter class I didn't have to. I missed out on some good gear and good storylines though. When I hit 52, I started a guild designed to help newbies and lowbie alts get started in the game and have a place to not feel so overwhelmed. Alliance gamers on my server tend to be total assholes and I wanted to do something about that. Now I rarely play my main other than for guild management. I've recently started a new hunter, determined to do with him what I missed out on with my main. So far it's been very rewarding; I deliberately chose Night Elf this time around instead of Dwarf so I'd have some new story content, and I've been more socially active too.
My girlfriend, who actually was the one who got me into the game, has two 60's and several PvP bots. She is a hardcore endgamer with her 60s, and to her it's not work. I look at endgame as a second job, and with a full-time job and a part time consulting gig here in the real world, I don't have time for it. To me, the game is all about the 1-60 and not about 60+. With the expansion, I may take my main to 60, 65 or even 70, but if MC, BWL, AQ and Naxx are required for that progression, I'll probably retire him and concentrate fully on my new hunter.
Your boss is quite the philosopher, but he's a bit off. I never paid for The Gimp, but since I cannot afford Photoshop and I don't want to pirate it, I overcame the learning curve and am now more productive in The Gimp than I ever was in Photoshop back in college. When someone hands me a tool for free, and I have to relearn some of the ways of using said tool to get the same job done, I'm going to consider the learning curve to be the price paid.
You know, I was an avid Dahl fan as a child and I also read "The Phantom Tollbooth" more than once. To this day I *still* catch myself associating Dahl with that book, when it was actually Norton Juster who penned it.
I'd love to see some wealthy individual open up a privately-owned, publicly-accessible library just as a slap in the face to this nonsensical bill. Privately owned means big bubba gubment can't censor it with this bill, and publicly accessible means just as open to the public as the public library.
To the folks above having problems with your nVidia cards being DOA/giving BSODs...I'd be willing to bet it's not the card but your PSU. I recently got a GeForce 6600GT which has a power port on it requiring a drive-style power connector to be plugged in. This card is a power hog; my "measly" 450 watt, highly recommended power supply couldn't handle the card without lockups and such. At the minimum I'd say go for a 550 watt PSU with any card from the 6xxx or 7xxx series.
Laptops are made to run Windows, which is why it's been so difficult in the past to get Linux working on them. The manufacturers do everything they can to make sure the hardware works flawlessly in Windows because, with the exception of the above company and a couple others like them, the final product WILL have Windows installed.
There currently is no such thing as a "barebones" laptop (although it's been attempted in the past), unless you are referring to sloppy seconds offered by companies reselling corporate liquidations. Those typically come with a wiped hard drive, and usually without a power cable, working battery or in some cases even an optical drive. They boot, but that's about it. The sad thing is most of the time you'll pay ~$400 for a used Pentium III machine with 256mb RAM, small HDD, no warranty and quite often a scratched screen, when you can spend ~$700 on a new Pentium-M with more RAM, bigger drive and a warranty. Back when the cheapest new laptop was $1200+ it would have been a smart investment if you just needed portable computing, but nowadays it makes more sense to buy new and dual-boot or wipe and install Linux.
No, don't consider that specific Dell model. It has an issue with the hard drive controller causing the HDD to not be able to boot. I've seen this same problem with two of these so far from my customers. Granted, Dell was quick to send new HDDs to the customers under warranty, but that's curing the symptoms and not the cause. They should recall that particular model.
I am actually not dependent on Windows for my games. World of Warcraft, Doom III, Wolfenstein ET, America's Army, and Thief III all run either natively or through Cedega (or both) on Linux very well. For WoW, no fancy configuration was necessary, beyond tweaking the config.wtf file. For Thief III only minor tweaks are necessary and for Doom, W:ET and AA, none whatsoever as they run natively. My true dependence on Windows is for my cellphone's management software and as soon as I get USB working correctly in VMWare Server that issue will no longer exist. So for me personally it's not games but software that was written specifically for Windows and that requires a certain level of hardware access, the kind that is difficult to emulate in products like VMWare. But, the day that I leave Windows behind once and for all in my home office is fast approaching.
Work, however, is a different matter altogether. We have an IT department that wouldn't give up Windows no matter the cost. Even if our one Windows-locked program were available in Linux/Unix/MacOS, they wouldn't switch because Windows is all they know. They are all MCSE/MCSD/etc with no CISCO certs and no Unix certs. I've heard one of them refer to Linux as "nothing but a hacker's tool to screw up people's systems". This was after I conversationally mentioned that Linux is my main OS at home. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm on an IT watchlist now, expected to try to "hack the system" at any given point when truthfully I couldn't "hack" my way out of a wet paper bag.
Also, in Slackware there is no official Nvidia package. It's still trivial though. Just fire up the Links browser, point it to http://www.nvidia.com/drivers and download the latest Nvidia linux driver. Su to root, run the driver package, let it build the kernel addon for you, and let it modify your xorg.conf. If you've already toyed with your xorg.conf it might not modify the file for you; just manually change "nv" to "nvidia". Start up X and you should see the Nvidia logo. If so, you're all good. This has worked for me for every version of Slackware from 9.0 up.
Piracy is NOT stealing. It is as WRONG as stealing, but it is more correct to call it for what it is: Copyright Infringement. This myth that piracy = theft is actually hurting the *AA's war against it. If they would call it for what it is, they could get the proper assistance from the government and be far less likely to lose in court to the few defendants who are brave enough to take it that far. According to the statutes on every US State's lawbooks(with the exception of "Theft of Services" in some states), to be charged with Theft you must deprive someone of something of value. In other words, you physically take possession of it and they physically lose possession of it. If you break into someone's house (burglary) and take a CD and put it in your pocket (theft) you have stolen it. If you download a CD without paying for it when the only way to legally download it IS to pay for it, you have committed copyright infringement. The person or company you downloaded from still has it; you didn't take possession of it. you COPIED it, hence the term COPYright infringement.
And why are you having them install Avast? I thought the point of antivirus software was to prevent viruses. Avast let 3 Viruses on a system in 1.5 hours, and meanwhile thought that windows was a virus.
Post some links to back that up, or did you just pull it out of your ass? I've been recommending Avast to my customers ever since AVG became too much of a headache to re-register. I've had one virus myself since installing Avast, which it caught and quarantined properly. That's more than I can say about Symantec or McAfee, both of which have failed me and my customers in the past.
Since you seem to think Avast is such a lousy product, please tell us what you recommend instead?
Depends on (1) where you live and (2) the value of the item. In my state, it's a misdemeanor if it's under $500 worth of stolen goods, felony above that amount. That said, stealing is stealing, and I for one wouldn't want to risk getting caught just to get one a tad bit early.
Which is why I said "like a soft-boiled egg", which is a thin shell surrounding two semisolid materials. The crust would crack and cave in on both objects, and what was left of the Moon would combine with the Earth and inertia would do the rest. I'm no physics major, but common sense and a high school education tell me that when a smaller moving object, liquid or not, hits a larger moving object, liquid or not, with enough velocity, it will affect the larger object's trajectory.
Using the Asteroid Impact Simulator, I decided to see what would happen if the Moon itself hit the Earth:
Major Global Changes:
The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass. 5.45 percent of the Earth is melted The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth's rotation period or the tilt of its axis. The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably.
I call bullshit. The Moon hitting the Earth would very well knock it out of orbit, as well as punch a nice big hole in it if not cracking it in two like a soft-boiled egg. It's a neat Asteroid Impact Simulator, but it failed the sci-fi-what-if test.
Sure, it works, but the entire point is that you should NEVER be forced to buy a particular type or brand of hardware to play one or two CDs when, for years, any CD-playing hardware (computers included) could play any CD. As an amateur musician who one day may release my music to the world, you can bet your life I won't go through any RIAA-owned labels. I'd rather give away my music through p2p than let them get one cent (assuming of course that anyone would buy my decidedly non-bubblegum-pop style).
I can speak from my own experience on this one. The original Doom was released when I was 15 years old. One of my buddies brought a copy of the shareware version to school and installed it on my station in the computer lab. Needless to say, I played the hell out of it. I can honestly say that until that point I had never experienced such violence and mayhem in such a personal way. It's one thing to enjoy slasher flicks and war movies, but playing Doom made me feel like I was really there. Consequently, I began having terrible nightmares, and it had a discernable negative effect on my productivity as well as my personality. Granted, I was (and still am) a fairly "normal" person by psychiatric standards; the effect was far less than it would have been on someone with a chemical imbalance.
I can only imagine what today's games, which make Doom look like child's play, would do to a developing preteen or teenager. If I ever do have any children, their mother and I will certainly be choosing their games for them.
The way America has bullied Cuba for years, simply because they disagree with it's political system is appaling.
But keep in mind, America also disagrees with China's political system, and look how much business we do with them. It's not about politics, it's that the only thing worth importing from Cuba is the cigars. Without China, we wouldn't have most of the products that support our digital lifestyles.
Except on second thoughts you'd also have to insert batteries into the monitor to be able to shut down the machine properly.
No, you wouldn't. Map a keyboard shortcut to open a terminal window, then when the power goes out, hit that shortcut and type "shutdown -h now", or even better write a shell script to do the same and launch it with a keyboard shortcut.
You aren't very familiar with *nixes, are you?
According to the review, the mouse is "shaped very much like a Glock 9mm handgun". I'm sorry, but that is most definitely not shaped like a Glock. The mouse's grip is way too long, and the barrel is too short.
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Take a band like Coheed and Cambria. Their entire discography (including the Shabutie stuff) is one big epic space opera. If you listen to one song here or there, you don't get the entire picture. They would probably want you to get the entire album at each release so their story can be told, but honestly if you can grab a copy of the graphic novel it's based on you've already got the story.
Nonetheless, it's some of the best music to have come out this decade; get what you can get of it, I say.
Well said. I too have taken over a year to take my main to where he is now (55). I never grouped much, as I am not as social a person as most gamers, and being a hunter class I didn't have to. I missed out on some good gear and good storylines though. When I hit 52, I started a guild designed to help newbies and lowbie alts get started in the game and have a place to not feel so overwhelmed. Alliance gamers on my server tend to be total assholes and I wanted to do something about that. Now I rarely play my main other than for guild management. I've recently started a new hunter, determined to do with him what I missed out on with my main. So far it's been very rewarding; I deliberately chose Night Elf this time around instead of Dwarf so I'd have some new story content, and I've been more socially active too.
My girlfriend, who actually was the one who got me into the game, has two 60's and several PvP bots. She is a hardcore endgamer with her 60s, and to her it's not work. I look at endgame as a second job, and with a full-time job and a part time consulting gig here in the real world, I don't have time for it. To me, the game is all about the 1-60 and not about 60+. With the expansion, I may take my main to 60, 65 or even 70, but if MC, BWL, AQ and Naxx are required for that progression, I'll probably retire him and concentrate fully on my new hunter.
Your boss is quite the philosopher, but he's a bit off. I never paid for The Gimp, but since I cannot afford Photoshop and I don't want to pirate it, I overcame the learning curve and am now more productive in The Gimp than I ever was in Photoshop back in college. When someone hands me a tool for free, and I have to relearn some of the ways of using said tool to get the same job done, I'm going to consider the learning curve to be the price paid.
But that's just me.
You know, I was an avid Dahl fan as a child and I also read "The Phantom Tollbooth" more than once. To this day I *still* catch myself associating Dahl with that book, when it was actually Norton Juster who penned it.
I'd love to see some wealthy individual open up a privately-owned, publicly-accessible library just as a slap in the face to this nonsensical bill. Privately owned means big bubba gubment can't censor it with this bill, and publicly accessible means just as open to the public as the public library.
No, farking isn't. Fucking might just be though.
To the folks above having problems with your nVidia cards being DOA/giving BSODs...I'd be willing to bet it's not the card but your PSU. I recently got a GeForce 6600GT which has a power port on it requiring a drive-style power connector to be plugged in. This card is a power hog; my "measly" 450 watt, highly recommended power supply couldn't handle the card without lockups and such. At the minimum I'd say go for a 550 watt PSU with any card from the 6xxx or 7xxx series.
Laptops are made to run Windows, which is why it's been so difficult in the past to get Linux working on them. The manufacturers do everything they can to make sure the hardware works flawlessly in Windows because, with the exception of the above company and a couple others like them, the final product WILL have Windows installed.
There currently is no such thing as a "barebones" laptop (although it's been attempted in the past), unless you are referring to sloppy seconds offered by companies reselling corporate liquidations. Those typically come with a wiped hard drive, and usually without a power cable, working battery or in some cases even an optical drive. They boot, but that's about it. The sad thing is most of the time you'll pay ~$400 for a used Pentium III machine with 256mb RAM, small HDD, no warranty and quite often a scratched screen, when you can spend ~$700 on a new Pentium-M with more RAM, bigger drive and a warranty. Back when the cheapest new laptop was $1200+ it would have been a smart investment if you just needed portable computing, but nowadays it makes more sense to buy new and dual-boot or wipe and install Linux.
No, don't consider that specific Dell model. It has an issue with the hard drive controller causing the HDD to not be able to boot. I've seen this same problem with two of these so far from my customers. Granted, Dell was quick to send new HDDs to the customers under warranty, but that's curing the symptoms and not the cause. They should recall that particular model.
I am actually not dependent on Windows for my games. World of Warcraft, Doom III, Wolfenstein ET, America's Army, and Thief III all run either natively or through Cedega (or both) on Linux very well. For WoW, no fancy configuration was necessary, beyond tweaking the config.wtf file. For Thief III only minor tweaks are necessary and for Doom, W:ET and AA, none whatsoever as they run natively. My true dependence on Windows is for my cellphone's management software and as soon as I get USB working correctly in VMWare Server that issue will no longer exist. So for me personally it's not games but software that was written specifically for Windows and that requires a certain level of hardware access, the kind that is difficult to emulate in products like VMWare. But, the day that I leave Windows behind once and for all in my home office is fast approaching.
Work, however, is a different matter altogether. We have an IT department that wouldn't give up Windows no matter the cost. Even if our one Windows-locked program were available in Linux/Unix/MacOS, they wouldn't switch because Windows is all they know. They are all MCSE/MCSD/etc with no CISCO certs and no Unix certs. I've heard one of them refer to Linux as "nothing but a hacker's tool to screw up people's systems". This was after I conversationally mentioned that Linux is my main OS at home. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm on an IT watchlist now, expected to try to "hack the system" at any given point when truthfully I couldn't "hack" my way out of a wet paper bag.
That's why I'm not voting for him for president this time around!
Oh, wait....
Also, in Slackware there is no official Nvidia package. It's still trivial though. Just fire up the Links browser, point it to http://www.nvidia.com/drivers and download the latest Nvidia linux driver. Su to root, run the driver package, let it build the kernel addon for you, and let it modify your xorg.conf. If you've already toyed with your xorg.conf it might not modify the file for you; just manually change "nv" to "nvidia". Start up X and you should see the Nvidia logo. If so, you're all good. This has worked for me for every version of Slackware from 9.0 up.
Piracy is NOT stealing. It is as WRONG as stealing, but it is more correct to call it for what it is: Copyright Infringement. This myth that piracy = theft is actually hurting the *AA's war against it. If they would call it for what it is, they could get the proper assistance from the government and be far less likely to lose in court to the few defendants who are brave enough to take it that far. According to the statutes on every US State's lawbooks(with the exception of "Theft of Services" in some states), to be charged with Theft you must deprive someone of something of value. In other words, you physically take possession of it and they physically lose possession of it. If you break into someone's house (burglary) and take a CD and put it in your pocket (theft) you have stolen it. If you download a CD without paying for it when the only way to legally download it IS to pay for it, you have committed copyright infringement. The person or company you downloaded from still has it; you didn't take possession of it. you COPIED it, hence the term COPYright infringement.
And why are you having them install Avast? I thought the point of antivirus software was to prevent viruses. Avast let 3 Viruses on a system in 1.5 hours, and meanwhile thought that windows was a virus.
Post some links to back that up, or did you just pull it out of your ass? I've been recommending Avast to my customers ever since AVG became too much of a headache to re-register. I've had one virus myself since installing Avast, which it caught and quarantined properly. That's more than I can say about Symantec or McAfee, both of which have failed me and my customers in the past.
Since you seem to think Avast is such a lousy product, please tell us what you recommend instead?
no omnipotent being could sensibly be as petty and hateful towards mankind as the Catholic church claims God is.
You've never met the being known as Q then, right?
and since recieving stolen goods is a felony...
Depends on (1) where you live and (2) the value of the item. In my state, it's a misdemeanor if it's under $500 worth of stolen goods, felony above that amount. That said, stealing is stealing, and I for one wouldn't want to risk getting caught just to get one a tad bit early.
Which is why I said "like a soft-boiled egg", which is a thin shell surrounding two semisolid materials. The crust would crack and cave in on both objects, and what was left of the Moon would combine with the Earth and inertia would do the rest. I'm no physics major, but common sense and a high school education tell me that when a smaller moving object, liquid or not, hits a larger moving object, liquid or not, with enough velocity, it will affect the larger object's trajectory.
Using the Asteroid Impact Simulator, I decided to see what would happen if the Moon itself hit the Earth:
Major Global Changes:
The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass.5.45 percent of the Earth is melted
The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth's rotation period or the tilt of its axis.
The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably.
I call bullshit. The Moon hitting the Earth would very well knock it out of orbit, as well as punch a nice big hole in it if not cracking it in two like a soft-boiled egg. It's a neat Asteroid Impact Simulator, but it failed the sci-fi-what-if test.
Sure, it works, but the entire point is that you should NEVER be forced to buy a particular type or brand of hardware to play one or two CDs when, for years, any CD-playing hardware (computers included) could play any CD. As an amateur musician who one day may release my music to the world, you can bet your life I won't go through any RIAA-owned labels. I'd rather give away my music through p2p than let them get one cent (assuming of course that anyone would buy my decidedly non-bubblegum-pop style).
I can speak from my own experience on this one. The original Doom was released when I was 15 years old. One of my buddies brought a copy of the shareware version to school and installed it on my station in the computer lab. Needless to say, I played the hell out of it. I can honestly say that until that point I had never experienced such violence and mayhem in such a personal way. It's one thing to enjoy slasher flicks and war movies, but playing Doom made me feel like I was really there. Consequently, I began having terrible nightmares, and it had a discernable negative effect on my productivity as well as my personality. Granted, I was (and still am) a fairly "normal" person by psychiatric standards; the effect was far less than it would have been on someone with a chemical imbalance.
I can only imagine what today's games, which make Doom look like child's play, would do to a developing preteen or teenager. If I ever do have any children, their mother and I will certainly be choosing their games for them.
Didn't crash me (Safari/Tiger) but strangely enough, it launched Adium (IM client) upon closing the browser tab.
The way America has bullied Cuba for years, simply because they disagree with it's political system is appaling.
But keep in mind, America also disagrees with China's political system, and look how much business we do with them. It's not about politics, it's that the only thing worth importing from Cuba is the cigars. Without China, we wouldn't have most of the products that support our digital lifestyles.
Except on second thoughts you'd also have to insert batteries into the monitor to be able to shut down the machine properly.
No, you wouldn't. Map a keyboard shortcut to open a terminal window, then when the power goes out, hit that shortcut and type "shutdown -h now", or even better write a shell script to do the same and launch it with a keyboard shortcut. You aren't very familiar with *nixes, are you?
According to the review, the mouse is "shaped very much like a Glock 9mm handgun". I'm sorry, but that is most definitely not shaped like a Glock. The mouse's grip is way too long, and the barrel is too short.
"The ends do not justify the means."
You must watch a lot of Star Trek. Oh yeah, Slashdot....