Very true in my experience. There hasn't been a machine which I've had which at some point I stopped doing updates on because some sequential update killed the machine irreversibly. Rarely, one can roll back or uninstall some update or go back to a restore point, but most of the time the only thing to do is to back up data and do a sys repair/reinstall/ghost.
For example, I got me one of them awesome Gateway P7805u notebooks a while ago and it came with a Vista SP1 license. I installed some stuff and then remembered that I can do updates. So I decided to go to SP2. Long story short, it fucked up some essential drivers and no amount of rolling back would help. Restoring from image was simple, but imagine having to do so with a vast array of installed apps and whatnot just because an update killed it all.
Hence, this is why I can't see a reason for actually buying licenses. I mean, the IEEE gives me oodles of them to use, so everything's all legal and nice...but if they didn't, I'd have no problem installing a Pro build 2600...
Good job in your listing. I totally agree that there's so much interesting stuff out there except for the 'Nu Metal' like the aforementioned Slipknot, and the rest which one hears mainly today.
Actually, most of those bands are favourites of mine. Agalloch is great for the dreaminess of the songs and the way that it really projects the image of some sort of landscape from their work. For example, I found much of The Mantle to project the image of a snowy forest somewhere in the northen regions. It's really quite neat. They aren't prolific, but as you said, their work is worth its own weight in gold.
Iced Earth, Nightwish, Opeth, and Symphony X are pretty famous. My friends who aren't into metal have still heard of them and heard something by them at some point. The others though are not as well-known, but should be.
Vintersorg also deserves to be on your list. Us/. geeks/nerds would appreciate the lyrics of the various songs more than most others as he tends to sing about philosophy and physics lately. Aside from that, quite talented having written everything on his own.
Oh, and as to the most beautiful female voice in the realm of metal, I'd have to go with the former vocalist of Theater of Tragedy back when they used to me gothic metal. Much to my dismay, now they are closer to industrial than metal, but their first two albums still have great 'metal' value.
Aside from that, from TFA: "Many themes of heavy metal are about alienation. If you have these kinds of feelings there is a lot you can get out of the music and the community of fans who are into it."
I'm trying to figure out how heavy metal has to do with alienation. From my experience, much of heavy metal themes have to do with heavy metal itself, war, fighting, storytelling, and otherwise supporting the spirit of metal. One would think that many themes of emo music would be about alienation...but definitely not heavy metal. Heavy metal is definitely about unity...
Actually, I bought a Dell recently. To my ineptitude and ignorance, I didn't realize that it was a special offer and couldn't choose XP Home, but only media center and Pro, of which Pro is like $100 more. So I end up doing a wipe and reinstall with a build 2600 version of Pro.
Installed. Drivers done. Now, I want to get some PowerToys, particularly the desktopmanager and something else. I go to MS, try the WGA download tester thing. Fine. It labels me as having a pirated version. Big deal. I go into a computer running a legal version of it, get the WGA code thing. ^C^V. Done. I can download whatever in hell I want from the MS site.
So the fact is, unlike mentioned in TFA, it's unnecessary to waste as much as 15 minutes googling for a new key and spending some time to patch it on. Just copy and paste the key from a legal or a patched-to-legal and you are done. I saved it for future use in case I need something else from M$'s site.
Almost the same here. Every time I work with WiFi, it's particularly flakey. I keep getting disconnects left and right. By now, I am sure it's not my wifi card and it isn't the drivers I have for it. Instead, as previous post mentioned, I always carry roll of already crimped Cat5e to use anywhere where there are RJ45 ports for it.
At home, since I moved to mostly-laptop, one fine day around a year and a half ago, we decided to get a router. Sure, we got a wireless one. I thought I'd be on wireless forever. No. It will disconnect and fuck up even if I am right next to a damned router. And this has been tested with self getting 2 laptops already and having others at home at times. It's the same everywhere. So despite the fact that wiring the Cat5e in a discreet way is annoying AND I had to use 100 feet of it, it is MUCH more reliable for internet usage. Hell. The only thing I ever use wireless for is if I badly need to get something from other computer or internet and am without the wires. It's far more secure(though what average consumer cares about that or knows how?) and it doesn't disconnect me at the worst times.
I'll agree with anything else wireless being easy to set-up but generally having bad reception...except my MX610 mouse. It's so close to the computer usually that there's hardly any interference. The batteries are good too. So far I had to change them for the first time after half a year.
But yes, if I need something reliable, which I prefer to aesthetically pleasing and lackluster functionality, I get the wired stuff. Worst case scenario, I take 10 minutes to rewire everything and it stays like that for a month or two.
Brettspielwelt (BoardGameWorld in German) has been online for a really long time and has around 40-50 various Rio Grande games which one can play multiplayer via some java applet and standalone client.
I simply fail to understand how normal people without watercooling and such are keeping their new Intel chips cool. I personally own a 530J (3.0 Ghz w/ HT) and this thing runs around 50-55 Celsius at idle depending on the room and motherboard temps and can spike past 70 Celsius when it is under a load with the stock heatsink/fan. It runs so hot, that if it is under a load, it may trigger throttling, which of course reduces performance by around a half in order to keep the heat down, which sucks because you may as well be using a lower clock chip with more stability and easier cooling.
I can't imagine how hot the new 6xx one gets. In any case, more cooling is bad because it takes more electricity. More electricity used by chip and by cooling == higher bills. Very bad. Is this related to the voltage used as opposed to that of AMD? I am confounded.
Luckily, most people have broadband so AOL will die.
Unfortunately, some people have AOL with Broadband. And it is surprisingly cheap altogether if you do it through them.
For the average user who does not need a very fast connection and frequently uses AOL, this is a pretty good solution. Just like the AOL computer advertised in the tigerdirect catalog I got for some odd reason.
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Very true in my experience. There hasn't been a machine which I've had which at some point I stopped doing updates on because some sequential update killed the machine irreversibly. Rarely, one can roll back or uninstall some update or go back to a restore point, but most of the time the only thing to do is to back up data and do a sys repair/reinstall/ghost.
For example, I got me one of them awesome Gateway P7805u notebooks a while ago and it came with a Vista SP1 license. I installed some stuff and then remembered that I can do updates. So I decided to go to SP2. Long story short, it fucked up some essential drivers and no amount of rolling back would help. Restoring from image was simple, but imagine having to do so with a vast array of installed apps and whatnot just because an update killed it all.
Hence, this is why I can't see a reason for actually buying licenses. I mean, the IEEE gives me oodles of them to use, so everything's all legal and nice...but if they didn't, I'd have no problem installing a Pro build 2600...
Strange how no one mentioned Utopia yet.
Pretty famous team-based strategy browser game. It's changed dramatically over the years, but it's still alive.
Obligatory wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(online_game)
Good job in your listing. I totally agree that there's so much interesting stuff out there except for the 'Nu Metal' like the aforementioned Slipknot, and the rest which one hears mainly today.
/. geeks/nerds would appreciate the lyrics of the various songs more than most others as he tends to sing about philosophy and physics lately. Aside from that, quite talented having written everything on his own.
Actually, most of those bands are favourites of mine. Agalloch is great for the dreaminess of the songs and the way that it really projects the image of some sort of landscape from their work. For example, I found much of The Mantle to project the image of a snowy forest somewhere in the northen regions. It's really quite neat. They aren't prolific, but as you said, their work is worth its own weight in gold.
Iced Earth, Nightwish, Opeth, and Symphony X are pretty famous. My friends who aren't into metal have still heard of them and heard something by them at some point. The others though are not as well-known, but should be.
Vintersorg also deserves to be on your list. Us
Oh, and as to the most beautiful female voice in the realm of metal, I'd have to go with the former vocalist of Theater of Tragedy back when they used to me gothic metal. Much to my dismay, now they are closer to industrial than metal, but their first two albums still have great 'metal' value.
Aside from that, from TFA: "Many themes of heavy metal are about alienation. If you have these kinds of feelings there is a lot you can get out of the music and the community of fans who are into it."
I'm trying to figure out how heavy metal has to do with alienation. From my experience, much of heavy metal themes have to do with heavy metal itself, war, fighting, storytelling, and otherwise supporting the spirit of metal. One would think that many themes of emo music would be about alienation...but definitely not heavy metal. Heavy metal is definitely about unity...
Actually, I bought a Dell recently. To my ineptitude and ignorance, I didn't realize that it was a special offer and couldn't choose XP Home, but only media center and Pro, of which Pro is like $100 more. So I end up doing a wipe and reinstall with a build 2600 version of Pro.
Installed. Drivers done. Now, I want to get some PowerToys, particularly the desktopmanager and something else. I go to MS, try the WGA download tester thing. Fine. It labels me as having a pirated version. Big deal. I go into a computer running a legal version of it, get the WGA code thing. ^C^V. Done. I can download whatever in hell I want from the MS site.
So the fact is, unlike mentioned in TFA, it's unnecessary to waste as much as 15 minutes googling for a new key and spending some time to patch it on. Just copy and paste the key from a legal or a patched-to-legal and you are done. I saved it for future use in case I need something else from M$'s site.
Almost the same here. Every time I work with WiFi, it's particularly flakey. I keep getting disconnects left and right. By now, I am sure it's not my wifi card and it isn't the drivers I have for it. Instead, as previous post mentioned, I always carry roll of already crimped Cat5e to use anywhere where there are RJ45 ports for it. At home, since I moved to mostly-laptop, one fine day around a year and a half ago, we decided to get a router. Sure, we got a wireless one. I thought I'd be on wireless forever. No. It will disconnect and fuck up even if I am right next to a damned router. And this has been tested with self getting 2 laptops already and having others at home at times. It's the same everywhere. So despite the fact that wiring the Cat5e in a discreet way is annoying AND I had to use 100 feet of it, it is MUCH more reliable for internet usage. Hell. The only thing I ever use wireless for is if I badly need to get something from other computer or internet and am without the wires. It's far more secure(though what average consumer cares about that or knows how?) and it doesn't disconnect me at the worst times. I'll agree with anything else wireless being easy to set-up but generally having bad reception...except my MX610 mouse. It's so close to the computer usually that there's hardly any interference. The batteries are good too. So far I had to change them for the first time after half a year. But yes, if I need something reliable, which I prefer to aesthetically pleasing and lackluster functionality, I get the wired stuff. Worst case scenario, I take 10 minutes to rewire everything and it stays like that for a month or two.
Brettspielwelt (BoardGameWorld in German) has been online for a really long time and has around 40-50 various Rio Grande games which one can play multiplayer via some java applet and standalone client.
Check the Wikipedia entry on them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrettspielWelt and here is the English portal: http://www.brettspielwelt.info/
My favorites are Carcassonne(of course!), Peurto Rico(games can be VERY LONG though), and Tichu.
I simply fail to understand how normal people without watercooling and such are keeping their new Intel chips cool. I personally own a 530J (3.0 Ghz w/ HT) and this thing runs around 50-55 Celsius at idle depending on the room and motherboard temps and can spike past 70 Celsius when it is under a load with the stock heatsink/fan. It runs so hot, that if it is under a load, it may trigger throttling, which of course reduces performance by around a half in order to keep the heat down, which sucks because you may as well be using a lower clock chip with more stability and easier cooling. I can't imagine how hot the new 6xx one gets. In any case, more cooling is bad because it takes more electricity. More electricity used by chip and by cooling == higher bills. Very bad. Is this related to the voltage used as opposed to that of AMD? I am confounded.
Unfortunately, some people have AOL with Broadband. And it is surprisingly cheap altogether if you do it through them.
For the average user who does not need a very fast connection and frequently uses AOL, this is a pretty good solution. Just like the AOL computer advertised in the tigerdirect catalog I got for some odd reason.