Thanks for that. I was running Morrowind on a PIV 2.26 ghz with a 4200 TI, and my system is currently an Athlon64 3400+ with a 6800GT. The extra oomph should really make it look good at 1280x1024, so I might just give it another go. (Before Oblivion comes out and makes my PC run like an 8mhz Atari ST again...)
More than just PC boards. My TEAC 80cm telly went bung about 18 months ago, and my parents' identical model went 6 months later. Bad caps, $180 repair bill.
My in-laws' Netvista fell over last week, lots of magic blue smoke and 3 stuffed capacitors. The twin of that machine blew up 4 months earlier.
The air flow & knock sensors in my car went - $1450 repair bill. Is there going to be a class action? If so, that was the capacitors.
Gotta go... my washing machine is making funny noises.
My kids are both addicted to Morrowind and are hanging out for Oblivion. At 7 and 10 you'd think they were a bit young, but the 7-year-old created several homebrew dungeons and buildings in the TES construction kit, and the last I saw she was trying to apply a trader's NPC script to a wolf.
Alas, Daggerfall had them rolling about laughing at the graphics, especially the Killer Rat in the first dungeon. To think I spent more hours on DF than MW - and almost enjoyed it more. If it weren't for the bugs I'd still be playing it now.
Sadly, MW had a bug which destroyed the game for me. After several weeks playing time, the option to request promotion disappeared from all NPC dialog. Requests for help on forums and NG got me nowhere, and facing a choice between restarting the entire game or dumping it, I dumped it.
It's actually going to become the most expensive zero-g brothel the world has ever seen. Advertise a bit and people will be clamouring to join the 223-mile high club.
Bunnings do the same in Australia, but even if I did find a packet of screws 5c cheaper somewhere else I would not be first in line to claim my refund. Whatever happened to caveat emptor?
It is now illegal to use passwords of less than 26 characters, or those containing only letters of the alphabet
It is now illegal to drive a car with clear-text license plates
It is also illegal to speak on your mobile in English. Klingon is permitted until normal people learn it, at which time you'll have to switch to Esperanto.
All medicine bottles will be made from titanium and fused shut. If you can't open it - well, you just discovered what 'survival of the fittest' means.
I used to laugh at the tower of Babel story. Now we're living it.
I'm a published author, and I like the idea. Only a tiny fraction of the public will sit and read an entire book off their screen, but they might read the first chapter if they think they've managed to scab a freebie off someone. (Ill-gotten gains and all that.) If they get hooked you can bet there's a chance they'll buy a paper copy, or perhaps the author's next book.
The only sales you might lose are to those people who read a bit and don't like it. On the other hand, those people currently have to pay for the paper to preview it, and if they then decided it sucked they could bad-mouth the book for weeks. They're less likely to moan and whinge about it if they paid nothing.
The amount I'll pay decreases as the restrictions on my use of the movie increase. I'll pay a lot more for a film I can stick on a DVD and watch on another PC when this one carks it. I will pay nothing for a movie with fifteen minutes of non-skip trailers which has to be watched through DRM'd LCD glasses at five minutes past midnight on the 1st of December.
Well, it's running on the same hardware and there's only a single user so logic says you're okay. But my money is on the idea being morally bankrupt, a violation of the EULA and the sort of thing only a perverted software pirate would do.
Maybe someone could patent that storyline where a space-faring couple are marooned on a planet... and his name is Adam. Slush readers the world over would cheer their overworked eyeballs out.
Other than that, the concept of patenting a story idea sucks duck balls. Never mind the sheer mass of published work... can you imagine anyone scanning umpteen zillion unpublished short stories and novels for prior art? Whew.
Agreed. What I meant was that something like 70-80% of the LOTR footage was recoloured afterwards and they did all sorts of amazing things with lighting. (I enjoyed the docos on the DVDs as much as or more than the films themselves;-) If any films could claim to be heavy with special effects it's the LOTR trilogy. Everything was tweaked, tweaked, tweaked until it was just so, but the end effect is such a fantastic blend of real and imaginary that you're completely absorbed. Overuse wasn't the right word - 'heavy use of' is more appropriate.
The only thing absorbing about Eps 1 & 2 was the official SW toilet paper. I can't say anything about Ep3 because I haven't seen it and don't plan to.
Jar Jar represents the inventive whimsy of the characters.
Heh. Jar Jar represents the desire to sell a shitload of action figures to young kids via fast food outlets. If ever a character was invented purely to suck another age group into the maw of the Merchandise Machine...
Still, lesson learnt eh? Thy characters may be good or evil, funny, sick, demented or violent, but thou shalt never again employ irritating characters.
"why he thinks Star Wars attracts such a huge following"
I'd say 'used to attract' a huge following, before Ep 1 demonstrated the idol had feet of clay (either that or waa-aa-ay too much access to the big red 'special effects' button. But if that were true LOTR would have sucked and it didn't suck ergo it's not over-use of special effects which destroys a film. Breath in.)
I don't know about most of their content, or even half or a fraction. You take a 100+ page daily newspaper and turn that into web pages. Then take the next 100+ page daily newspaper and repeat. Do that for a month and you'd have a gigantic web site, whereas most online sites belonging to newpapers seem to have a handful of stories under each category. (Sure, if you strip all the ads from a newspaper you'd get 50 or 60 pages of content, but the websites seem to have just as many ads stuffed into them.)
I'm using Aussie papers like the Sunday Times, West Australian and SMH in this example - the websites are pretty lean but the papers are truly massive. The impression I get is that the vast bulk of printed contact never makes it online, probably due to copyright and the rights they buy from freelancers. For example, there was an article about an SF magazine I'm involved with. It was in the printed edition but never made it online. I enquired about putting a scan on our website and they wanted a payment of over $1000.
Another example: This page is updated weekly to show the book reviews from the SMH. There were 35 reviews in September, only two of which appeared on the website. (According to the article links on that page.)
The Kobe earthquake did have an impact on RAM prices (if that's the right word, in the circumstances) However, that was '95/'96
Way back then I remember some guy trying to sell me a 2nd hand 32mb ram stick for over $100. I just told him I'd wait a couple of weeks. (By then it had probably doubled to $200. Gee, I sure nailed that price-gouger.)
A couple of years ago I was all fired up about converting my computer-owning relatives to Linux. (None of them are interested in gaming, other than solitaire-type time wasters.) Over time I've moved on from the cold-turkey method to the boiled frogs plan. One by one I switched them to Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org a single app at a time. A couple more years and all their vital data will be in nice portable files, and when their Windows partition requires yet another fresh install I'll be able to pop a linux DVD in instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only can see it, it shows next week's programs ... today!
Thanks for that. I was running Morrowind on a PIV 2.26 ghz with a 4200 TI, and my system is currently an Athlon64 3400+ with a 6800GT. The extra oomph should really make it look good at 1280x1024, so I might just give it another go. (Before Oblivion comes out and makes my PC run like an 8mhz Atari ST again...)
More than just PC boards. My TEAC 80cm telly went bung about 18 months ago, and my parents' identical model went 6 months later. Bad caps, $180 repair bill.
My in-laws' Netvista fell over last week, lots of magic blue smoke and 3 stuffed capacitors. The twin of that machine blew up 4 months earlier.
The air flow & knock sensors in my car went - $1450 repair bill. Is there going to be a class action? If so, that was the capacitors.
Gotta go... my washing machine is making funny noises.
I did look up the orbiting altitude for the ISS, but I didn't fancy searching google for zero-g porn.
My kids are both addicted to Morrowind and are hanging out for Oblivion. At 7 and 10 you'd think they were a bit young, but the 7-year-old created several homebrew dungeons and buildings in the TES construction kit, and the last I saw she was trying to apply a trader's NPC script to a wolf.
Alas, Daggerfall had them rolling about laughing at the graphics, especially the Killer Rat in the first dungeon. To think I spent more hours on DF than MW - and almost enjoyed it more. If it weren't for the bugs I'd still be playing it now.
Sadly, MW had a bug which destroyed the game for me. After several weeks playing time, the option to request promotion disappeared from all NPC dialog. Requests for help on forums and NG got me nowhere, and facing a choice between restarting the entire game or dumping it, I dumped it.
It's actually going to become the most expensive zero-g brothel the world has ever seen. Advertise a bit and people will be clamouring to join the 223-mile high club.
Bunnings do the same in Australia, but even if I did find a packet of screws 5c cheaper somewhere else I would not be first in line to claim my refund. Whatever happened to caveat emptor?
At his age the only thing he should have on his lap top is Linspire.
In other news ...
It is now illegal to use passwords of less than 26 characters, or those containing only letters of the alphabet
It is now illegal to drive a car with clear-text license plates
It is also illegal to speak on your mobile in English. Klingon is permitted until normal people learn it, at which time you'll have to switch to Esperanto.
All medicine bottles will be made from titanium and fused shut. If you can't open it - well, you just discovered what 'survival of the fittest' means.
I used to laugh at the tower of Babel story. Now we're living it.
I'm a published author, and I like the idea. Only a tiny fraction of the public will sit and read an entire book off their screen, but they might read the first chapter if they think they've managed to scab a freebie off someone. (Ill-gotten gains and all that.) If they get hooked you can bet there's a chance they'll buy a paper copy, or perhaps the author's next book. The only sales you might lose are to those people who read a bit and don't like it. On the other hand, those people currently have to pay for the paper to preview it, and if they then decided it sucked they could bad-mouth the book for weeks. They're less likely to moan and whinge about it if they paid nothing.
Pity Google didn't bite...
I'd suggest Gentoo but they'd have to build more power stations to cope with millions of CPUs at 100% for 3 or 4 days.
The amount I'll pay decreases as the restrictions on my use of the movie increase. I'll pay a lot more for a film I can stick on a DVD and watch on another PC when this one carks it. I will pay nothing for a movie with fifteen minutes of non-skip trailers which has to be watched through DRM'd LCD glasses at five minutes past midnight on the 1st of December.
Well, it's running on the same hardware and there's only a single user so logic says you're okay. But my money is on the idea being morally bankrupt, a violation of the EULA and the sort of thing only a perverted software pirate would do.
Maybe someone could patent that storyline where a space-faring couple are marooned on a planet ... and his name is Adam. Slush readers the world over would cheer their overworked eyeballs out.
... can you imagine anyone scanning umpteen zillion unpublished short stories and novels for prior art? Whew.
Other than that, the concept of patenting a story idea sucks duck balls. Never mind the sheer mass of published work
When you said full moon, I was expecting (dreading) something along the lines of goatse
or 'A Toy Story with an unhappy ending'
Agreed. What I meant was that something like 70-80% of the LOTR footage was recoloured afterwards and they did all sorts of amazing things with lighting. (I enjoyed the docos on the DVDs as much as or more than the films themselves ;-) If any films could claim to be heavy with special effects it's the LOTR trilogy. Everything was tweaked, tweaked, tweaked until it was just so, but the end effect is such a fantastic blend of real and imaginary that you're completely absorbed. Overuse wasn't the right word - 'heavy use of' is more appropriate.
The only thing absorbing about Eps 1 & 2 was the official SW toilet paper. I can't say anything about Ep3 because I haven't seen it and don't plan to.
Jar Jar represents the inventive whimsy of the characters.
Heh. Jar Jar represents the desire to sell a shitload of action figures to young kids via fast food outlets. If ever a character was invented purely to suck another age group into the maw of the Merchandise Machine...
Still, lesson learnt eh? Thy characters may be good or evil, funny, sick, demented or violent, but thou shalt never again employ irritating characters.
"why he thinks Star Wars attracts such a huge following"
I'd say 'used to attract' a huge following, before Ep 1 demonstrated the idol had feet of clay (either that or waa-aa-ay too much access to the big red 'special effects' button. But if that were true LOTR would have sucked and it didn't suck ergo it's not over-use of special effects which destroys a film. Breath in.)
I don't know about most of their content, or even half or a fraction. You take a 100+ page daily newspaper and turn that into web pages. Then take the next 100+ page daily newspaper and repeat. Do that for a month and you'd have a gigantic web site, whereas most online sites belonging to newpapers seem to have a handful of stories under each category. (Sure, if you strip all the ads from a newspaper you'd get 50 or 60 pages of content, but the websites seem to have just as many ads stuffed into them.)
I'm using Aussie papers like the Sunday Times, West Australian and SMH in this example - the websites are pretty lean but the papers are truly massive. The impression I get is that the vast bulk of printed contact never makes it online, probably due to copyright and the rights they buy from freelancers. For example, there was an article about an SF magazine I'm involved with. It was in the printed edition but never made it online. I enquired about putting a scan on our website and they wanted a payment of over $1000.
Another example: This page is updated weekly to show the book reviews from the SMH. There were 35 reviews in September, only two of which appeared on the website. (According to the article links on that page.)
The Kobe earthquake did have an impact on RAM prices (if that's the right word, in the circumstances) However, that was '95/'96
Way back then I remember some guy trying to sell me a 2nd hand 32mb ram stick for over $100. I just told him I'd wait a couple of weeks. (By then it had probably doubled to $200. Gee, I sure nailed that price-gouger.)
A couple of years ago I was all fired up about converting my computer-owning relatives to Linux. (None of them are interested in gaming, other than solitaire-type time wasters.) Over time I've moved on from the cold-turkey method to the boiled frogs plan. One by one I switched them to Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org a single app at a time. A couple more years and all their vital data will be in nice portable files, and when their Windows partition requires yet another fresh install I'll be able to pop a linux DVD in instead.
If you take the windows away, that meme will become 'In Korea, only cold people ...'
Agreed, excellent utility. Barely a day goes by when I don't use it 8-10 times.