Also I forgot to add that the harddrive is not mountable as a flash drive on computers without the Zen software, or computers that cannot play PlaysForSure media (if you have the Zen 2.xxxx firmware)
How can it have better sound quality than a an ipod shuffle? Objective tests show the shuffle to have a flat frequency response, lower stereo crosstalk than CD, lower SNR than CD, and ungodly low distortion. Sure you like it, but damn, don't have to lie.
I can second this, Popular Science did the test a few years back and indeed, the Shuffle had the best sound quality (particularly bass response), thanks to not using any capacitors whose charge fluxuates based on how much power is being used to headphones at any given time (I don't recall the Shuffle's alternative).
The test was simple--hook the headphone jack up to a computer, play a signal chirp from 20-20,000hz, and graph the frequencies observed vs the frequencies played. The Ipod was ok, Creative's Zen Touch was better, but the Ipod Shuffle's frequency response was best; the graph of the frequencies played vs. what should be played was closest to the line Y=x, by far. The Creative and other Apple players (Mini was worst) had significant blurring in the lower frequency range. This means on those players, the bass response would sound muddy.
So yes, the Shuffle has the best sound quality of _all_ the portable players out there.
I think you're in the minority of people to experience two Ipod issues that close together (I know many of you know friends who have Ipod problems, but given how many people have Ipods, that's not saying much).
Coming from the other side of things, I've wished since about week two of owning my Creative Zen Touch (40GB) that I had bought something else. Namely, the Ipod. The company is a pain to deal with if you have support issues. So is their player. Disconnected three times after being on hold 17 minutes each time (HMMM....). If you just want something to listen to music with, their players will work. But don't expect any of the promised firmware updates to fix any issues with the player, so make sure you know all the current problems with it. The problems with mine? Scrolling is horrible. 10x worse than the Ipods (which is perfect). You move your finger down the strip and the UI responds half a second later. On top of the that, it's innaccurate and un-predictable. Sometimes moving your finger a mm will move the song selector one strip, sometimes not at all, and sometimes it'll jump down three. You simply can't select songs safely when you're driving. In contrast, the Ipod's scroll wheel is predictable and goes where you want it. Every single time.
Other issues: -after about 6 months of use (coming up on my second six months, had to send the first in to fix the harddrive) the "forward/skip" [>>|] button halfway breaks. By that I mean sometimes you want to fast forward in the song (this is another thing I'll get to later) so you have to hold down the forward/skip button until the slider gets to the point in the song you want to listen to...so you let go of the fast forward, and then, strangely, the player skips to the next track. Apparently sometimes taking your finger off this button after having it held down tells the player to stop fast forwarding and skip to the end of the song. -As for fast forwarding, it's the most un-intuitive design. It isn't easy like on the Ipod, where you press the middle button and then move your thumb around the wheel. When you do this, the Ipod moves the slider that marks what part of the song is playing. You find the part you want, stop moving your thumb on the wheel, press the middle button again, and it plays. On Creative's players, you have to press forward and hold it down for [what feels like, I haven't timed it] 5 seconds to skip 30 seconds. A total PITA. Like to listen to your songs gapless? Be prepared to hold that button down and watch the UI for 15 seconds--(the slider movement speed increases exponentially, which means) when you finally hit the minute mark you want to listen to, you let go and find that it keeps moving ahead for the equivalent of two-ish minutes. Then it starts playing. So until you get used to letting go early, you'll be holding "|" down for another 5 seconds till you get to wherever you wanted. On top of all that, the player doesn't anticipate "jee, you know, this guy is scrolling forward and this part of the song isn't in my memory, I better spin up the harddrive to be ready for it", it waits until you've stopped fastforwarding, and then decides to spin up the harddrive, load that part of the song, and play it. And then if you overshoot where you were fastforwarding to, it does the exact same thing, it stops spinning and waits till you've stopped fastforwarding to spin up the harddrive and load that part of the song (which can't be good for the harddrive anyways, I'm sure this is what broke my first harddrive. Thankfully no problems with the warrant replacement). Like I said, don't expect to use this when you're driving. -If something about your player breaks, be prepared to pay the shipping costs [and insurance if you want to be safe] on your end as well as $35 (when mine broke this was how much it was, I think it might have changed now) as a "processing" fee. -good luck finding player covers if you want it protected. There's two that I know of, but they're both only available online. One is leather and costs something like $
how can you be sure the same won't be said of modern Christians' viewpoints in another few centuries? We can say that. Very easily. Something you left out there that is important to realize is that during this time (11th-13th centuries) the Christians had no access to the Bible-- it was controlled and read by the pope/bishops and people in power (they told the people it was too holy for them, another thing that the bible does not say). It wasn't until the reformation (16th century) and Martin Luther's "95 Thesis" that ordinary folks began to question what the religous figures were telling them. After the reformation people were finally able to read the bible and see for themselves that "gosh, you know, the bible infact does not condone anything related to the crusades." Now unless some very sick and twisted cult of Christianity comes about, one that would purpose to start another crusade, at this point it would stop being Christian, as the bible never says anywhere that they're good, it is safe to say that it "would not happen" under the guise of Christianity. Some may say that it was, but this, as the crusades, would be a misunderstanding, as the core of Christianity says nothing of the sort.
Is the misassociation between the two not uncommon? There is not much of a difference. The idea of "creationism", AFAIK, was created as an incorrect way of trying to get scientists to give the affirmative to a God-based origin of the universe theory. I am not sure why it was created, as anything that compromises the "Christianity" of what they (the people behind creationism) were trying to do simply works against them, as it is doing now. They should have simply said "yes, we believe an entity, specifically the Christian God, a God beyond time and matter and whatnot, created the universe. We do not believe a cause-and-effect-law violating big bang occured."
There are so many problems created when people try to half-ass their way into things. This deceptive packaging you speak of is one of them.
"Creationist" != "Christian", but don't let that stand in the way of your pretending to feel victimized. Go search for any article talking about Christians/Creationists and you'll be met with hundreds of anti-Christian posts flaming about what idiots Christians are and how stupid they are for believing that an all powerful, self sufficient being created the world, instead of a "cause-and-effect law" breaching big-bang theory. There's no pretending about the existence of such hate, its right there in plain sight.
I'm not sure why this general personal vendetta exists in the online community, but the best explanation I've come up yet is that most refer back to a list of bad things [Christian] people have done, and associate the Christian name with the bad people that did those things (crusades, for example). But, as usual, guilt by association is illogical. Nothing in the bible condones the crusades, nor any other of the violations against the Laws of Humanity/Nature(tm) that are on these lists. Given the techincally-minded slant of the/. community, perhaps the problem is the percieved confliction between the bible and science? I've seen many claim that the Bible is in 180 degree confliction with many fundamentals accepted by the scientific community. But in reality, there's nothing in the Bible that says being illogical is good, or that ignoring facts is the right thing to do. Many people have asked "but this conflicts with..." or "what about here, where it says..." sorts of questions, but all of these that I've seen so far have stemmed from a misunderstanding of what the bible was saying, or the context in which it was speaking. The only areas that put scientists at odds with the Bible are the parts where scientists leave the experimentation->observation->repeat x number of times->conclusion method. But that's not a problem with the bible. Nor is it a problem with the science, as what was going on when the scientific method was breached was not science. It is a problem of a different kind, the same sort of problem that lead the crusades: people. Before it was people in power exploiting the power they had, combined with some verses twisted out of context to bring about the crusades; in these cases it is scientists leaving the scientific method. The problem is people. It is not the bible, as many seem to believe.
The US (and others) sold the precursors to him intentionally, when he was fighting a proxy war with Iran. They were all used, destroyed or otherwise past their spoilage date before even the first Gulf War. Rofl. All America asked in response to this was that they show us the orders for this, and when and how it was done. That's all. Nothing especially difficult on their end. But they didn't do it.
If you're wondering why we're over there, a good part of the reason involves having calculable results. Fewer American lives would be lost dealing with Iraq now than some other time when they use WoMD on [probably us] somebody. At that point all the naysaysers would be claiming we knew about this years ago and should have dealt with it then to avoid the loss of human life now.
About 1/5th down the page over at the Newt Gingrich Free Speech article there are a myriad of insightful comments (plenty still have not been moderated) discussing the benefits and consequences of invading Iraq. You and anyone else thinking the War in Iraq(tm) is all or mostly bad should go read them.
I paid for my cellphone so I get to use it when I want. Personal cell phone jammers should never be allowed. Only movie theaters and the like should be allowed to use these, nobody else. And even then, I really, really, REALLY don't like the idea. Why can't one person in a theater of 400 get up and go ask a manager to kick somebody out? He won't kick them out? There's 25 other people around whoever is talking that are also very pissed off. I'm sure 25*$8 is a lot of money to a movie theater, they might think twice if a few other people go up and voice their opinion too.
Cell phones haven't been much of a problem in the theaters I've been too (in Atlanta, where you would expect this to be an issue), certainly not enough of one to warrant use of a cell phone jammer.
I don't think it's swapping. The same thing happens to me, but there's no disk activity. It just completely stops responding. If I click the mouse button a few times and then move it it comes backs. Pretty screwed up.
I can send malicious emails and execute malicious programs in my friend's Linux box with a free "developer key". Just type "su" in the terminal and then enter this "developer key" (absolutely free) and its all yours.
I should mention that yes, indeed, these situations are almost identical. A root password *can* be changed, to whatever you want, even without knowledge of what previous password was, quite easily.
You betcha. Next you can expect your local high-speed internet provider wanting a cut of the "savings" offered by using the bittorrent program. IE, "you normally pay $15 for movies. With this new bittorrent legal distribution, you only pay $10 for your movies. So we should get at least $1 of that savings, because people are only paying for their casual browsing and emailing when they pay for our service."
News submissions like this are very bad for/.'s credibility. I'm starting to see why people laugh when I talk about national security issues and, when asked where I'm reading about these things, I say "slashdot". Editors please make sure the site is legit.
when will these people have enough money? Particularly, is $50m more really worth having a crappy "The Hobbit" movie? If I already had $300m, I'd be more interested in securing rights for the BETTER PRODUCER than the one that can bring me more money. Serenity/Firefly is the perfect example of this IMO. If you have all that money, what do you do with it if there's nothing fun worth buying?
Right, because its not like Google doesn't reguarly give AOL money to keep Google the default AOL search engine.
Last I checked, sending text is not bandwidth intensive. So neither is AdSense.
When I go back to dialup at my grandma's house, Google is one of the few websites that still _feels_ fast. Plenty of dialup customers use Google. Saying these dialup customers don't matter is simply foolish.
Wow parent is spreading major FUD; go troll somewhere else. I'm not sure what you mean by "1-2 seconds to redraw the menu icons", but it's kinda hard for a system to display an icon before it has it in memory. If you notice at 1:44-45, when he moves the mouse back up to 'Accessories' after he's already been there, the icons are drawn instantly. The first time it took them time to show because they had to load from the HDD.
"In Eve, as a point of comparison, a group of "low level" players can wipe the floor with a a couple of very well equipped (and high skillpoint) enemies using trash for equipment."
But isn't that more realistic? Any relatively well fashioned sword (I don't know what "well fashioned" means exactly, but lets just say some steal folded blade) in real life would be rather effective at peircing armor, flesh, and bone. There's no way another sword could be 15 or 30 times as good (or whatever multiple of the steal sword's quality is), even if it were an uber-Titanium-platinum-best-cOmPOunD-EveER!!11!1 blade. As such, I don't think unhealthy amounts of playing time (I've played this much before and it's simply not fun) should be rewarded. Not to mention that the server load would be less and it would be cheaper for them if they didn't encourage such extreme playing measures.
There are very simple things that could be added to wow that would do a lot to keep old players entertained and new ones even more enthralled. I just picked up wow a week and a half ago but I'm already seeing a lot of pitfalls in gameplay. Why is there no system to pair equally skilled players together (why am I still playing with noobs)? Why is the PvP system so dependant on gear (thats nearly all that matters at level 60 I'm seeing)? In case you had forgotten, Mario Kart's AI _always_ cheats. But it keeps the game fun, because you can't just interpolate and say "I'm going to get to the finish line first", because that AI character may speed up much faster than usual and beat you to it. But haha! you have a red shell! So you thwart the AI's attempts to cheat and win. This never gets old. Beating the AI when all they do is follow an equation isn't fun. So all Blizzard needs to is implement some spontanaeity in the game. I want to be travelling through Darkshire and see "Duskwood is under attack!" Sure, that happens, but it's never an NPC. Its some level 60 horde player. And people never band together to attack the horde, they just say "hold on lemme go tell my friend to get on". So the guy's friend gets on, kills the horde, and then everybody goes on about their business. If Blizzard put a level limit on the characters that could attack this NPC that is rampaging (say he's level 30, let only levels 23 attack him) then people would be forced to work together to take him out, and then everybody would roll for the blue drops, etc. That would be infinately more fun than just being told "go kill VC in the deadmines" because it would be unpredictable and uncontrollable by yourself. At 2am in the morning a level xx dragon spawns in some territory. Since the only people that can attack it are level xx-7, you'd have to go seek out others for help. Half of what can make a good game comes from the social aspect-- Smash Bros, Beer Mario, and, you guessed it, PUGs in wow. Blizzard just needs to accentuate the PUG aspect of wow and it would be infinitely more fun.
Other thoughts, about the random NPC attacking a town: it would get boring if the same old dragon came and attacked Duskwood, so why not let the GMs create what you fight? Develope something like that Spore game is working on...either the GMs or high level characters could custom build and summon a creature they created themselves.
There's so many simple things Blizzard could do that would exponentially increase how fun Wow is.
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Can't imagine they'd change it if the first was so superior. I'd say so.
Also I forgot to add that the harddrive is not mountable as a flash drive on computers without the Zen software, or computers that cannot play PlaysForSure media (if you have the Zen 2.xxxx firmware)
Objective tests show the shuffle to have a flat frequency response, lower stereo crosstalk than CD, lower SNR than CD, and ungodly low distortion.
Sure you like it, but damn, don't have to lie.
I can second this, Popular Science did the test a few years back and indeed, the Shuffle had the best sound quality (particularly bass response), thanks to not using any capacitors whose charge fluxuates based on how much power is being used to headphones at any given time (I don't recall the Shuffle's alternative).
The test was simple--hook the headphone jack up to a computer, play a signal chirp from 20-20,000hz, and graph the frequencies observed vs the frequencies played. The Ipod was ok, Creative's Zen Touch was better, but the Ipod Shuffle's frequency response was best; the graph of the frequencies played vs. what should be played was closest to the line Y=x, by far. The Creative and other Apple players (Mini was worst) had significant blurring in the lower frequency range. This means on those players, the bass response would sound muddy.
So yes, the Shuffle has the best sound quality of _all_ the portable players out there.
I think you're in the minority of people to experience two Ipod issues that close together (I know many of you know friends who have Ipod problems, but given how many people have Ipods, that's not saying much).
Coming from the other side of things, I've wished since about week two of owning my Creative Zen Touch (40GB) that I had bought something else. Namely, the Ipod. The company is a pain to deal with if you have support issues. So is their player. Disconnected three times after being on hold 17 minutes each time (HMMM....). If you just want something to listen to music with, their players will work. But don't expect any of the promised firmware updates to fix any issues with the player, so make sure you know all the current problems with it. The problems with mine? Scrolling is horrible. 10x worse than the Ipods (which is perfect). You move your finger down the strip and the UI responds half a second later. On top of the that, it's innaccurate and un-predictable. Sometimes moving your finger a mm will move the song selector one strip, sometimes not at all, and sometimes it'll jump down three. You simply can't select songs safely when you're driving. In contrast, the Ipod's scroll wheel is predictable and goes where you want it. Every single time.
Other issues:
-after about 6 months of use (coming up on my second six months, had to send the first in to fix the harddrive) the "forward/skip" [>>|] button halfway breaks. By that I mean sometimes you want to fast forward in the song (this is another thing I'll get to later) so you have to hold down the forward/skip button until the slider gets to the point in the song you want to listen to...so you let go of the fast forward, and then, strangely, the player skips to the next track. Apparently sometimes taking your finger off this button after having it held down tells the player to stop fast forwarding and skip to the end of the song.
-As for fast forwarding, it's the most un-intuitive design. It isn't easy like on the Ipod, where you press the middle button and then move your thumb around the wheel. When you do this, the Ipod moves the slider that marks what part of the song is playing. You find the part you want, stop moving your thumb on the wheel, press the middle button again, and it plays. On Creative's players, you have to press forward and hold it down for [what feels like, I haven't timed it] 5 seconds to skip 30 seconds. A total PITA. Like to listen to your songs gapless? Be prepared to hold that button down and watch the UI for 15 seconds--(the slider movement speed increases exponentially, which means) when you finally hit the minute mark you want to listen to, you let go and find that it keeps moving ahead for the equivalent of two-ish minutes. Then it starts playing. So until you get used to letting go early, you'll be holding "|" down for another 5 seconds till you get to wherever you wanted. On top of all that, the player doesn't anticipate "jee, you know, this guy is scrolling forward and this part of the song isn't in my memory, I better spin up the harddrive to be ready for it", it waits until you've stopped fastforwarding, and then decides to spin up the harddrive, load that part of the song, and play it. And then if you overshoot where you were fastforwarding to, it does the exact same thing, it stops spinning and waits till you've stopped fastforwarding to spin up the harddrive and load that part of the song (which can't be good for the harddrive anyways, I'm sure this is what broke my first harddrive. Thankfully no problems with the warrant replacement). Like I said, don't expect to use this when you're driving.
-If something about your player breaks, be prepared to pay the shipping costs [and insurance if you want to be safe] on your end as well as $35 (when mine broke this was how much it was, I think it might have changed now) as a "processing" fee.
-good luck finding player covers if you want it protected. There's two that I know of, but they're both only available online. One is leather and costs something like $
Oops sorry about the quote.
Is the misassociation between the two not uncommon? There is not much of a difference. The idea of "creationism", AFAIK, was created as an incorrect way of trying to get scientists to give the affirmative to a God-based origin of the universe theory. I am not sure why it was created, as anything that compromises the "Christianity" of what they (the people behind creationism) were trying to do simply works against them, as it is doing now. They should have simply said "yes, we believe an entity, specifically the Christian God, a God beyond time and matter and whatnot, created the universe. We do not believe a cause-and-effect-law violating big bang occured."
There are so many problems created when people try to half-ass their way into things. This deceptive packaging you speak of is one of them.
I'm not sure why this general personal vendetta exists in the online community, but the best explanation I've come up yet is that most refer back to a list of bad things [Christian] people have done, and associate the Christian name with the bad people that did those things (crusades, for example). But, as usual, guilt by association is illogical. Nothing in the bible condones the crusades, nor any other of the violations against the Laws of Humanity/Nature(tm) that are on these lists. Given the techincally-minded slant of the
So the GP is right in claiming to be victimized.
So don't bother watching it like I did.
If you're wondering why we're over there, a good part of the reason involves having calculable results. Fewer American lives would be lost dealing with Iraq now than some other time when they use WoMD on [probably us] somebody. At that point all the naysaysers would be claiming we knew about this years ago and should have dealt with it then to avoid the loss of human life now.
About 1/5th down the page over at the Newt Gingrich Free Speech article there are a myriad of insightful comments (plenty still have not been moderated) discussing the benefits and consequences of invading Iraq. You and anyone else thinking the War in Iraq(tm) is all or mostly bad should go read them.
I paid for my cellphone so I get to use it when I want. Personal cell phone jammers should never be allowed. Only movie theaters and the like should be allowed to use these, nobody else. And even then, I really, really, REALLY don't like the idea. Why can't one person in a theater of 400 get up and go ask a manager to kick somebody out? He won't kick them out? There's 25 other people around whoever is talking that are also very pissed off. I'm sure 25*$8 is a lot of money to a movie theater, they might think twice if a few other people go up and voice their opinion too.
Cell phones haven't been much of a problem in the theaters I've been too (in Atlanta, where you would expect this to be an issue), certainly not enough of one to warrant use of a cell phone jammer.
**you've
I don't think it's swapping. The same thing happens to me, but there's no disk activity. It just completely stops responding. If I click the mouse button a few times and then move it it comes backs. Pretty screwed up.
I can send malicious emails and execute malicious programs in my friend's Linux box with a free "developer key". Just type "su" in the terminal and then enter this "developer key" (absolutely free) and its all yours.
I should mention that yes, indeed, these situations are almost identical. A root password *can* be changed, to whatever you want, even without knowledge of what previous password was, quite easily.
Also, note that you can't just use debit cards for everything.There's nothing stopping them from using mastercard.
Does "closing the tab" mean nothing to you?
You betcha. Next you can expect your local high-speed internet provider wanting a cut of the "savings" offered by using the bittorrent program. IE, "you normally pay $15 for movies. With this new bittorrent legal distribution, you only pay $10 for your movies. So we should get at least $1 of that savings, because people are only paying for their casual browsing and emailing when they pay for our service."
News submissions like this are very bad for /.'s credibility. I'm starting to see why people laugh when I talk about national security issues and, when asked where I'm reading about these things, I say "slashdot". Editors please make sure the site is legit.
Lately I've begun to wonder...
when will these people have enough money? Particularly, is $50m more really worth having a crappy "The Hobbit" movie? If I already had $300m, I'd be more interested in securing rights for the BETTER PRODUCER than the one that can bring me more money. Serenity/Firefly is the perfect example of this IMO. If you have all that money, what do you do with it if there's nothing fun worth buying?
Right, because its not like Google doesn't reguarly give AOL money to keep Google the default AOL search engine.
Last I checked, sending text is not bandwidth intensive. So neither is AdSense.
When I go back to dialup at my grandma's house, Google is one of the few websites that still _feels_ fast. Plenty of dialup customers use Google. Saying these dialup customers don't matter is simply foolish.
Wow parent is spreading major FUD; go troll somewhere else. I'm not sure what you mean by "1-2 seconds to redraw the menu icons", but it's kinda hard for a system to display an icon before it has it in memory. If you notice at 1:44-45, when he moves the mouse back up to 'Accessories' after he's already been there, the icons are drawn instantly. The first time it took them time to show because they had to load from the HDD.
"In Eve, as a point of comparison, a group of "low level" players can wipe the floor with a a couple of very well equipped (and high skillpoint) enemies using trash for equipment."
But isn't that more realistic? Any relatively well fashioned sword (I don't know what "well fashioned" means exactly, but lets just say some steal folded blade) in real life would be rather effective at peircing armor, flesh, and bone. There's no way another sword could be 15 or 30 times as good (or whatever multiple of the steal sword's quality is), even if it were an uber-Titanium-platinum-best-cOmPOunD-EveER!!11!1 blade. As such, I don't think unhealthy amounts of playing time (I've played this much before and it's simply not fun) should be rewarded. Not to mention that the server load would be less and it would be cheaper for them if they didn't encourage such extreme playing measures.
There are very simple things that could be added to wow that would do a lot to keep old players entertained and new ones even more enthralled. I just picked up wow a week and a half ago but I'm already seeing a lot of pitfalls in gameplay. Why is there no system to pair equally skilled players together (why am I still playing with noobs)? Why is the PvP system so dependant on gear (thats nearly all that matters at level 60 I'm seeing)? In case you had forgotten, Mario Kart's AI _always_ cheats. But it keeps the game fun, because you can't just interpolate and say "I'm going to get to the finish line first", because that AI character may speed up much faster than usual and beat you to it. But haha! you have a red shell! So you thwart the AI's attempts to cheat and win. This never gets old. Beating the AI when all they do is follow an equation isn't fun.
So all Blizzard needs to is implement some spontanaeity in the game. I want to be travelling through Darkshire and see "Duskwood is under attack!" Sure, that happens, but it's never an NPC. Its some level 60 horde player. And people never band together to attack the horde, they just say "hold on lemme go tell my friend to get on". So the guy's friend gets on, kills the horde, and then everybody goes on about their business. If Blizzard put a level limit on the characters that could attack this NPC that is rampaging (say he's level 30, let only levels 23 attack him) then people would be forced to work together to take him out, and then everybody would roll for the blue drops, etc. That would be infinately more fun than just being told "go kill VC in the deadmines" because it would be unpredictable and uncontrollable by yourself. At 2am in the morning a level xx dragon spawns in some territory. Since the only people that can attack it are level xx-7, you'd have to go seek out others for help. Half of what can make a good game comes from the social aspect-- Smash Bros, Beer Mario, and, you guessed it, PUGs in wow. Blizzard just needs to accentuate the PUG aspect of wow and it would be infinitely more fun.
Other thoughts, about the random NPC attacking a town: it would get boring if the same old dragon came and attacked Duskwood, so why not let the GMs create what you fight? Develope something like that Spore game is working on...either the GMs or high level characters could custom build and summon a creature they created themselves.
There's so many simple things Blizzard could do that would exponentially increase how fun Wow is.