Dude I have never broken a record (haha). It's true you can scratch them with carelessness, but you have to be trying to break them.
And as for hugeness - I love the hugeness. Bring back 12" square packaging, even if you only put a CD in the box, at least you get some decent cover art to go with it:P
your recording will sound "too quiet" compared to everyone else's, and so require the listener to adjust their sound system, an inconvenience unthinkable for some reason that has always been completely opaque to me
Have a party, and try putting 50 CDs in your multidisc CD player - Put 20 CDs from 1994 and 20 CDs from 2000 and 10 CDs from 2007. Now hit random. You'll be forever going back and forth turning the old ones up and the new ones down. If you are also trying to talk to your guests or, you know, pick up or something, you aren't gonna bother, and consequently people will only hear the loud ones.
Say, for example, a $15 CD gets about an hour's worth of music. Now say a $20 golden hit game gets 100 hours of playtime
Yet another example of the decline in quality of music - when I bought Dark Side of the Moon, I may have only got 40 minutes of music for my $15 (although it was quadrophonic on vinyl, not just stereo, so I got twice as much really:P) but if I were to add up all the times in my life I have listened to that album, I got a lot more than 100 hours of playtime. Modern albums though yeah, a lot of them only have about an hour of enjoyment in them...
FWIW my favourite version is still the old Basic/Expert/Companion version - the technical parts intruded less on the role playing, and you didn't need to by loads of stuff to get going. Advanced that came out around the same time was OK, you could get going with three books at least, but you got caught up in stats and dice rolls and technical aspects of the game.
I thought the version 3 upgrade was mostly about selling books, let alone a new upgrade. The integrity went once the game was sold to WOTC really.
The real problem is: "Music industry", there one word too much in there.
let me refer you to lyrics by the great and sadly missed Australian band TISM:
Take the music from the industry,
You're left with grasping bankers;
Take the "industry" out of music,
You're left with childish wankers.
From Jesus Pots the White Ball
It's not surprising that The National Association of Theater Owners would get a bit militant, since they share an acronym with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation...
Anybody remember the sleazy guy in the library in the old Discworld PC game. He said he wouldn't give up his gold banana earring for all the gold in the kingdom, but quickly changes his tune when Rincewind actually turns up with all the gold in the kingdom.
We guessed that people would think twice when presented with the actual cash/cheque.
We also noted the exchange rate - in the mind of US/AU people, a million dollars isn't quite enough to live comfortably and never have to work again. We had to remind ourselves that 1GBP ~ 2.00USD ~ 2.35AUD ~ morethanyou'llearninyourlifetime. In fact, if you gave me 2 mill, I could retire and nearly hire someone to follow me around with their mobile.:)
That's my guess as to why they want to go this way - no company is interested in whether the light in your house is as natural looking as possible, there's gotta be a marketing reason for this. The CFLs I just bought claim to last 10,000 hours. Most of the lights in my house are on for no more than two hours a day, which means once I fill my house with CFLs, it will be 5000 days or ~ 13.5 years before I have to buy another light bulb. If everyone changed at once, all the lightbulb companies would go out of business waiting ten years for anyone to ever buy another lightbulb. But if you can make incandescent bulbs and FUD people into buying them cos they're nearly as efficient and cheaper up front, you might trick enough people into not noticing that they cost half as much but have to buy them three times as often as CFLs
Another thing that should be noted is that even if they are equally energy efficient, if you buy them even 1.5 times as often you are still creating additional load on the environment in increased energy for manufacturing and shipping.
I've just spent two days trying to get XP working on a HP notebook that arrived here with Vista preinstalled. We can't and won't use Vista (no Novell support, and you wouldn't use an only-just-released OS in a corporate environment anyway), but the HP site doesn't offer any XP drivers for it's current models. Hunted around and managed to get drivers for most things, but the nvidia driver refuses to work...
I understand that M$ has forced the Vista install on vendors, but I don't understand why they can't make the rollback to XP an option for those of us that want/need it.
That may seem to be the case on the surface, but the B&MG foundation is a massive corporate entity which currently has about $35 billion in investments, and endowed only around 1.5 billion in 2005. The other $30 odd billion remained invested in many companies which are contributing to global health and social problems in the first place. He intends to double the investment over time. Long LA Times article here. For example, while contributing hundreds of millions to fund AIDS treatment in poor countries, in 2005, the foundation held nearly $1.5 billion worth of stock in drug companies whose practices have been widely criticized as restricting the flow of key medicines to poor people in developing nations.
What really would be a contribution to actually changing the world, rather than simply boosting your public profile with meaningless gestures like this, would be for the Gates foundation to only invest in companies with certified environmentally sustainable and socially just practices. Sure, the net profit of the foundation would be cut significantly by this, but imagine the overall philanthropic effect of some of the world's biggest polluters and exploiters falling over themselves to clean up their act and get a part of one of the world's biggest investment funds
If the allegedly saintly Bill really wanted to change to world, that's in his power, but currently the foundation does more harm than good
Hehe well yeah, fair comment about Livejournal:P The article isn't 'good' literature, just an editorial article on a gamer site. Doesn't mean it doesn't use literary devices and techniques though. I felt the GPP was over the top in criticising it that way. It may have been laid on a little thick but I guess it takes some effort to get gamers to step out of their shells and realise that there is a life going on out there.
Dunno, I could be touchy cos I lost a bunch of rare Pink Floyd and Iron Maiden posters when my parents' house burnt down in the six months between me moving out and going back to get the rest of my stuff:)
Seriously though, I think the poster was just a focus for all the emotion the guy was feeling - the writer was expecting him to be as excited about the poster as he had been when he was a pimply teenager and first bought it, but the guy himself saw the poster and realised how much they had lost, both property and the whole city of New Orleans.
When you suffer extreme loss you often find focus in the stupid little things, because accepting the totality of everything you feel is too much. There's probably a word for it...
Do you have any clue? It's called literature, pick up a book one day and you might discover it. When you are writing to express an emotion you felt strongly at a time and you want your reader to relate, you use emotive language. This is a descriptive passage, about 'life' (you may have heard of it), not yet another review of yet another Madden '0, of course it's gonna seem emotional.
A mine that can be deactivated remotely at the end of a conflict, can be deactivated remotely during the conflict by somebody clever on the other side. It's a great idea, but I doubt any army would actually add that feature.
* Performance metrics V MS Office (Even more so in the PPC Mac version!) * Comparison of Clipart and Wordart features (My kids won't use OOo cos it has none) * Cost/Benefit in switching from a version of Office that people/companies already own
As far as I can see, the difference between Firefox and OOo is that FF was a distinctly superior product, that filled a gap left by the poor features, security and function of IE. OOo on the other hand fills the same niche as MS Office, but is free. Both of them are massive bloated feature rich monsters, that 95% of people use about 5% of.
Sure, if you don't have any kind of Office software you might try OOo before forking for Office, but if you already own a copy of Office, the time taken to learn new menus and workflow isn't worth switching. Likewise if you are just gonna pirate Office then it's easier to get what you'll be using at work or school than learn something new.
Corporate environments ditto, retraining office drones to accept that a function is in a different spot, rolling out new software etc, isn't worth the time cost of switching from the Office 2000 install that was paid for once and has served well for 5 years. Likewise if you have MS licensing, it's probably all bundled with your OS licensing anyway. This may be different when the next version of Office comes out though, for orgs that will be upgrading at that point the tabbed menu structure in the new Office will mean drone retraining anyway.
I'm not pro MS by any stretch, but I have to work with it. These are arguments compiled from my attempts to live on OpenOffice alone, and from family and friends who I have tried to convince to switch. FF gave easily understood advantages, in security, functionality, but the motive to change Office suite just isn't as compelling
Slashdot Mirror
Dude I have never broken a record (haha). It's true you can scratch them with carelessness, but you have to be trying to break them.
And as for hugeness - I love the hugeness. Bring back 12" square packaging, even if you only put a CD in the box, at least you get some decent cover art to go with it :P
your recording will sound "too quiet" compared to everyone else's, and so require the listener to adjust their sound system, an inconvenience unthinkable for some reason that has always been completely opaque to me
Have a party, and try putting 50 CDs in your multidisc CD player - Put 20 CDs from 1994 and 20 CDs from 2000 and 10 CDs from 2007. Now hit random. You'll be forever going back and forth turning the old ones up and the new ones down. If you are also trying to talk to your guests or, you know, pick up or something, you aren't gonna bother, and consequently people will only hear the loud ones.
spoken like a true redneck australian..."We're surrounded by asians, we must protect our borders from their culture, yellow peril, arrgh"
Say, for example, a $15 CD gets about an hour's worth of music. Now say a $20 golden hit game gets 100 hours of playtime
Yet another example of the decline in quality of music - when I bought Dark Side of the Moon, I may have only got 40 minutes of music for my $15 (although it was quadrophonic on vinyl, not just stereo, so I got twice as much really :P) but if I were to add up all the times in my life I have listened to that album, I got a lot more than 100 hours of playtime. Modern albums though yeah, a lot of them only have about an hour of enjoyment in them...
Somebody should mod this up. It is a great perspective!
FWIW my favourite version is still the old Basic/Expert/Companion version - the technical parts intruded less on the role playing, and you didn't need to by loads of stuff to get going. Advanced that came out around the same time was OK, you could get going with three books at least, but you got caught up in stats and dice rolls and technical aspects of the game. I thought the version 3 upgrade was mostly about selling books, let alone a new upgrade. The integrity went once the game was sold to WOTC really.
The real problem is: "Music industry", there one word too much in there.
let me refer you to lyrics by the great and sadly missed Australian band TISM :
Take the music from the industry,You're left with grasping bankers;
Take the "industry" out of music,
You're left with childish wankers.
From Jesus Pots the White Ball
It's not surprising that The National Association of Theater Owners would get a bit militant, since they share an acronym with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation...
Anybody remember the sleazy guy in the library in the old Discworld PC game. He said he wouldn't give up his gold banana earring for all the gold in the kingdom, but quickly changes his tune when Rincewind actually turns up with all the gold in the kingdom.
We guessed that people would think twice when presented with the actual cash/cheque.
We also noted the exchange rate - in the mind of US/AU people, a million dollars isn't quite enough to live comfortably and never have to work again. We had to remind ourselves that 1GBP ~ 2.00USD ~ 2.35AUD ~ morethanyou'llearninyourlifetime. In fact, if you gave me 2 mill, I could retire and nearly hire someone to follow me around with their mobile. :)
At what point is Godwin's Law applicable to this formula?
No, you'd cut its cost in half by installing Linux. You would increase its value sevenfold by installing Linux.
how would you feel if any Windows machine on the same subnet progressively reduced the capability of all your Linux or Mac boxes?
Dude, that already happens. Certainly the speed of their network connection is affected...
I would have modded you funny, but I had mod points last week when I didn't need them
That's my guess as to why they want to go this way - no company is interested in whether the light in your house is as natural looking as possible, there's gotta be a marketing reason for this. The CFLs I just bought claim to last 10,000 hours. Most of the lights in my house are on for no more than two hours a day, which means once I fill my house with CFLs, it will be 5000 days or ~ 13.5 years before I have to buy another light bulb. If everyone changed at once, all the lightbulb companies would go out of business waiting ten years for anyone to ever buy another lightbulb. But if you can make incandescent bulbs and FUD people into buying them cos they're nearly as efficient and cheaper up front, you might trick enough people into not noticing that they cost half as much but have to buy them three times as often as CFLs
Another thing that should be noted is that even if they are equally energy efficient, if you buy them even 1.5 times as often you are still creating additional load on the environment in increased energy for manufacturing and shipping.
Sadly this'll be off the front page now, but I just wanted to say thanks! Who woulda thought whining on Slashdot would find me a solution!
I've just spent two days trying to get XP working on a HP notebook that arrived here with Vista preinstalled. We can't and won't use Vista (no Novell support, and you wouldn't use an only-just-released OS in a corporate environment anyway), but the HP site doesn't offer any XP drivers for it's current models. Hunted around and managed to get drivers for most things, but the nvidia driver refuses to work...
I understand that M$ has forced the Vista install on vendors, but I don't understand why they can't make the rollback to XP an option for those of us that want/need it.
That may seem to be the case on the surface, but the B&MG foundation is a massive corporate entity which currently has about $35 billion in investments, and endowed only around 1.5 billion in 2005. The other $30 odd billion remained invested in many companies which are contributing to global health and social problems in the first place. He intends to double the investment over time. Long LA Times article here. For example, while contributing hundreds of millions to fund AIDS treatment in poor countries, in 2005, the foundation held nearly $1.5 billion worth of stock in drug companies whose practices have been widely criticized as restricting the flow of key medicines to poor people in developing nations.
What really would be a contribution to actually changing the world, rather than simply boosting your public profile with meaningless gestures like this, would be for the Gates foundation to only invest in companies with certified environmentally sustainable and socially just practices. Sure, the net profit of the foundation would be cut significantly by this, but imagine the overall philanthropic effect of some of the world's biggest polluters and exploiters falling over themselves to clean up their act and get a part of one of the world's biggest investment funds
If the allegedly saintly Bill really wanted to change to world, that's in his power, but currently the foundation does more harm than good
Yup, it was Nancy Knight (at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado) - here's a reference.
I see a red door and I want it femtoblasted black....nope, you're right, doesn't scan.
Who wants quiet? I want the world's Freakin' Loudest Home Theatre System!
Hehe well yeah, fair comment about Livejournal :P The article isn't 'good' literature, just an editorial article on a gamer site. Doesn't mean it doesn't use literary devices and techniques though. I felt the GPP was over the top in criticising it that way. It may have been laid on a little thick but I guess it takes some effort to get gamers to step out of their shells and realise that there is a life going on out there.
Dunno, I could be touchy cos I lost a bunch of rare Pink Floyd and Iron Maiden posters when my parents' house burnt down in the six months between me moving out and going back to get the rest of my stuff :)
Seriously though, I think the poster was just a focus for all the emotion the guy was feeling - the writer was expecting him to be as excited about the poster as he had been when he was a pimply teenager and first bought it, but the guy himself saw the poster and realised how much they had lost, both property and the whole city of New Orleans.
When you suffer extreme loss you often find focus in the stupid little things, because accepting the totality of everything you feel is too much. There's probably a word for it...
Do you have any clue? It's called literature, pick up a book one day and you might discover it. When you are writing to express an emotion you felt strongly at a time and you want your reader to relate, you use emotive language. This is a descriptive passage, about 'life' (you may have heard of it), not yet another review of yet another Madden '0, of course it's gonna seem emotional.
A mine that can be deactivated remotely at the end of a conflict, can be deactivated remotely during the conflict by somebody clever on the other side. It's a great idea, but I doubt any army would actually add that feature.
Some things that should not be in the ad:
* Performance metrics V MS Office (Even more so in the PPC Mac version!)
* Comparison of Clipart and Wordart features (My kids won't use OOo cos it has none)
* Cost/Benefit in switching from a version of Office that people/companies already own
As far as I can see, the difference between Firefox and OOo is that FF was a distinctly superior product, that filled a gap left by the poor features, security and function of IE. OOo on the other hand fills the same niche as MS Office, but is free. Both of them are massive bloated feature rich monsters, that 95% of people use about 5% of.
Sure, if you don't have any kind of Office software you might try OOo before forking for Office, but if you already own a copy of Office, the time taken to learn new menus and workflow isn't worth switching. Likewise if you are just gonna pirate Office then it's easier to get what you'll be using at work or school than learn something new.
Corporate environments ditto, retraining office drones to accept that a function is in a different spot, rolling out new software etc, isn't worth the time cost of switching from the Office 2000 install that was paid for once and has served well for 5 years. Likewise if you have MS licensing, it's probably all bundled with your OS licensing anyway. This may be different when the next version of Office comes out though, for orgs that will be upgrading at that point the tabbed menu structure in the new Office will mean drone retraining anyway.
I'm not pro MS by any stretch, but I have to work with it. These are arguments compiled from my attempts to live on OpenOffice alone, and from family and friends who I have tried to convince to switch. FF gave easily understood advantages, in security, functionality, but the motive to change Office suite just isn't as compelling