Okay, I just signed up and downloaded EP7 by Autechre. Very cheap (as a full album purchase), very fast, certainly good enough quality for me and my iPod. I'll be using this service a lot and I hope they really clean up.
For information, payment is either standard cards or Paypal, and after purchase your tracks are made available for a standard browser-based download, either individually or in a zip file. Transfer is very fast (depending on your own connection, natch.)
There are a few oddities with prices - Sabres of Paradise's Wilmot EP is 2.99 complete, which is 1 more than the two tracks bought individually. There are also a lot of small tracks (such as the 'bolts' on Black Dog's Spanners album) that cost 99p for 20 seconds or so. But those kind of tracks you'd only really want as part of the full album, where the average price per track would be far less...
However, given that the selection of tracks and albums is very comprehensive, a few glitches are to be expected, and are easily worked around.
I urge anyone who's interested in online music and hasn't heard of Warp to give the site a try - all the files are available as previews (with fade-outs) and you'll find some wonderful stuff there. Warp's an electronica label, but a very eclectic one. If you don't get on with Aphex Twin, try Mira Calix. If you can't gel with Autechre, check out Sabres of Paradise. If Boards of Canada don't blow your kilt up, listen to The Gentle People. All unique, all worthwhile, all available.
Audiophiles note (because the 'what-no-Ogg' crowd are already in effect, I see) that the FAQ states that Warp are considering offering other codecs, including FLAC, and maybe offering higher bitrates for a higher price. Early days, though - the first thing they need is support. And here's someone who really, truly deserves it for a change.
I visited Bleep around five seconds after I saw the headline on the/. index, and five minutes later I had Autechre's EP7 on my iPod, and I'm smack in the middle of England. So go forth and support! Yo ucan pay with the usual Visa / Switch options, or Paypal. The downloads are made available straight after payment, individually or as one zip file. The album came down work's pipe in under a minute. Excellent service, excellent music.
Loss is the problem. I'm happy enough with my iPod - it's great to be able to walk around with practically my entire music collection on shuffle mode, hook it up to the hi-fi, etc. etc. But I'm in the UK, so I'm not using iTMS - DRM isn't affecting me. I guess a workaround for the lossy reencoding would be to use, say, Audio Hijack to capture a bitcopy of the AAC, reecode the result with FLAC, and invest in a Rio Karma, which will play FLAC files. You should end up with a direct copy of the AAC, minus the DRM. This is all a great workout for my shift keys, by the way... The downside is that the FLAC file won't play on an iPod, and you'll probably end up with a convoluted, ad-hoc music management system. The iTunes/iPod combo works fine for me right now - and by the time it doesn't, who knows what alternatives will have appeared?
That's interesting. I keep meaning to read up on Li-Ion batteries, because on the one hand I come across opinions like yours, which advise keeping devices plugged in when possible, and on the other hand I see a good few comments to the effect that you should let a battery run down as far as it can before recharging. The second theory has always sounded a little hokey to me, but I don't have any really reliable info one way or the other (since I haven't got my act together and done the research). I keep my iBook wall-powered whenever possible, and generally speaking my iPod is usually Firewired into the iBook, and therefore charging or charged. I set it free for walking to work etc., which generally means I'm charging it up to full from 90% or so daily. This "feels better" to me, but I still have no idea if I'm doing the right thing...
At the end of the day, I'm enjoying the iPod, so mission acccomplished. If it dies after eighteen months, what am I going to do? Hang myself? What am I, Hamlet? My iPod was an unnecessary, but very nice, purchase. I'll feel lucky if it's still working halfway through 2005 - lucky I haven't dropped it in a fishtank or got it stuck to the side of a giant magnet or, yeah, had the battery die. The way things are going, I'll be grateful if I'M still alive in June 2005, let alone my iPod...
I'd mod the parent up, but I think I'd rather add a reply and say in support of Inoshiro that the Gandhi quote, IMO, is an admonishment of cowardice, rather than an advocation of violence. To be anti-gun does not make one a coward, however (any more than being pro-gun makes one a hero), so I must confess that the relevance of the quote in this context eludes me.
I was contemplating buying an iPod when I got a backdated pay increment a couple of weeks ago. I sat looking at the Apple store page for twenty minutes or so, wondering if I should really go for the 40gb, when a new mail pinged into my inbox. It was a voucher from Apple for 20 off any purchase over 199. I took this to be divine intervention and ordered immediately. Now, I'm not suggesting you should pray for an iPod discount because, you know, that might be seen as slightly selfish. But I do suggest you think as hard as you can about buying one, and wait for Apple's serendipity dept. to pick up on it.
Having received a small back-dated pay rise this month, I decided I'd better spend it on something nice before it got devoured by Christmas, so I finally relented and ordered the iPod I'd been ogling for so long; 40gb version, screw it, from the online Apple store. This was last Tuesday. Now, Apple have been upfront from the start; they said 2-3 days assembly and 3-5 days delivery, so I can't really compain. But it's near Christmas, so I've been somewhat surprised to follow the shipping logs and discover that the iPod - after the 2 days assembly - was shipped from Taiwan, and arrived this morning in Luxembourg (gah!), from where it will presumably and hopefully ship to the UK. When it does arrive, I think I might drop Apple a line suggesting that they try to keep a few more of the buggers in stock - especially when they're advertising them eveyrwhere you look - because tracking a hotly anticipated impulse purchase across three continents is heartbreaking*...
Too right. Over here in the UK, I pay around 100 for a TV Licence, which gets me a heap of BBC TV / radio channels free of ads. Now, the TV Licence is generally unpopular, because it's seen as being rather unfair; you have to have one if you own a TV, even if you have no intention of tuning in to BBC stations. But, again, the stations are ad-free, and the BBC provides some of the finest TV out there (though it also produces its share of dross and is often accused of wasting licence money).
We also have several commercially-funded channels, which are generally much worse than the BBC - Channel Four is the best of the bunch, but mainly by virtue of the shows it imports, rather than those it creates. Ad breaks on these get longer all the time, and just about every program is sponsored by a company or product. Many channels intersperse each commercial with a one-second logo ident sequence, which is the height of madness as far as I'm concerned (actually, that will be reached when the idents are sponsored).
We then have something known as Freeview, which gives you gratis access to a variety of cable / sattelite stations once you've bought the set-top box. This allows people access to the newly created extra BBC channels. The BBC ones don't have ads; the other free stations do.
And lastly, we have subscrition sattelite and cable channels, provided though the likes of Sky. Now, these we pay for, and they cost more than the BBC licence fee. You undeniably get more channels, but they are all stuffed with ads and rife with sponsorships. So you have to ask, what are you paying for? Prior to sattelite and cable, the situation was clear-cut; you paid for the BBC and had no ads, and you got ITV free, with ads. Now, you have services that you pay for, but are still full of ads. Thanks for that.
You have the option not to pay, of course. For the moment, until the delivery system can be suitably manipulated. But this begs the question; if you're already charging a subscription fee AND showing ads, how are you going to offset the impact of TiVo on ad revenue? People are unlikely to accept a sizable hike in fees; more likely they'll tolerate a gradual lowering of standareds - more repeats, more cheap imports, more reality phone-in shows. More shit, when all's said and done.
The irony is that if I had a TiVo, it would make no difference to my ad viewing. Currently, I'll read or make a drink or just mute the TV when the ads are on; with a TiVo, I might skip them; either way, I'm not paying any attention. I'm sure that in the fullness of time we'll have glorious developments like all-in-one recording TVs that don't allow ads to be muted or skipped - we're halfway there with the ads on some DVDs.
Maybe they can add a retinal scanner to the top of the set that check to see if you're watching while the ads are on, and charges your account if you don't watch at least two hours of ads per week. Those familiar with Minority Report would surely welcome such an initiative.
I'd write less, as I don't really care about all this, but the alternative is work.
Try Fruity Loops for a simple example
on
Synthesized Singers
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· Score: 2, Informative
The music studio Fruity Loops has had a singing plug-in for a little while now; you don't have a lot of (easy) control over the pitch, so it's really more of a toy most of the time. But combined with some simple audio processing, you can easily get results like these:
What draws you to anything? It's just a game console, man. It's fun. I play Rainbow 6 with a bunch of regulars, we all have voice chat, we have a good time. We're not making a political statement. I have an Xbox, I have Live, and I enjoy it enough to carry on paying for it. That's all I can tell you. If you don't like it, don't worry about it. Do something you DO like and enjoy yourself.
I can recommend fastmail.fm - I found it via a/. comment, in fact. Web interface and IMAP access (working fine with Mac Mail), and a range of prices from free upwards. If you pay more, you get more space / functionality and access to the fastmail SMTP server, for ISP independence. I'll be paying for it soon, I'm sure. Since the goons at work implemented their 1/4-assed mail filter, it's been a godsend. The web interface is also nice and clean, and the whole thing has a nice white-hat feel to it. Check it out, anyway; I'll be recommending them when asked from now on.
OT, but pretty nifty - I was at a party once where someone had set up a slide projector displaying some run o' the mill psychedelic crap. I drunkely remembered that in my wallet, I had a "Bob" head printed onto acetate - no real reason, but I'd been carrying it for a few months, just stuffed in there, after I printed a load off at work. So I stumbled over and slid "Bob" into the slide holder. Lo, he duly appeared unto us, but as he was slightly ahead of the real slide and partially transparent, the autofocus mechanism was confused. From that point until the projector's horrified owner happened to walk past, we enjoyed a display of "Bob"'s image slowly and rhythmically drifting in and out of focus atop the swirling acid lightshow. If I'd been more with it, I'dve manhandled the projector and thrown "Bob"'s face onto the faces of partygoers, but as it was I had to make do without being beaten up and ejected that night.
Another reason for losing the hop might be to cut down on some of the ridiculous shortcuts that MK64 allowed through hop abuse. Now you need specifically placed scenery to launch you into the air, there's less chance of players locating glitchy shortcuts (though I'm sure some still exist). I notice on Rainbow Road that the game was quick to reset me after I fell off, even though I was heading toward a later section of the track, which was interesting. The big jump on MK64 Rainbow Road was great - 3,2,1, go, and everyone's immediately jostling to get over the barrier...
MK:DD is a rehash that deserves to be the GC savior. There are enough new features for it to deserve to be a new game (aside from the fact that it's running on better hardware), but no enough to call it a huge leap forward; but that doesn't matter, because playing it is a blast, especially in multiplayer. That's what people are going to realise when they try it, and that's when they'll stop caring about the mediocre reviews.
Flaws: well, some of the tracks are weak - I love the first three Mushroom Cup tracks, but the desert one at the end is a dog. Can't please all the people, I guess... but I think it's a great credit to Nintendo that the best track for a lot of people is Baby Park, which is a simple, flat oval - the kart handling makes it an absolute joy in single or multiplayer (it's especially good in time trial, where you can compare the different kart setups against your best ghost).
The lack of online play is a real shame, especially when you look at what's been achieved with Xbox Live - it's clear that it COULD be done. Tunnelling workarounds mean little here - the functionality needs to be built right into the game , deliberately, and accessible to all.
Still, lack of perfection is no reason not to buy a game. The reviews make some valid points, but at the end of the day, play it; you'll like it.
Further depressing developments for those of us in the UK: the 'snooper's charter' has now passed through the Lords. Ready your proxies and encryption plug-ins - but remember they might require you to hand over the key at some point.
The U.K. seems about as close to an Orwellian society as any "enlightened" country on the planet.
That's right, and it's all thanks to our right-wing "left-wing" government. And even if the people protest, it'll do no use - witness the recent war protests, or consider these excerpts from the Home Office report on ID card consultation, courtest of stand.org.uk:
What was learned from the consultation exercise?
11. Individual responses, sample surveys, and polling results have demonstrated substantial support for an identity card. Of the 5,000 people and organisations who responded formally to the consultation, 4,200 expressed a view. Over 60% of these were in favour. We also received over 5,000 e-mails from an organised opposition campaign. Over 96% of these were opposed.
12. We commissioned wider research which involved both focus groups and polling which confirmed, as independent polling has done, 80% of the general public were in favour of identity cards...
In essence, theyd've carried on commissioning research until it said what they wanted it to say, spinning any existing results in the meantime.
Frankly, nothing they say or do or agree to is going to surprise me, or a lot of other people. But because these activities aren't yet hitting people directly in the pocket, we won't see civil unrest on a scale of, say, the Poll Tax protests - people readily notice a few pounds a week being taken from them; a few freedoms here and there are perhaps harder to detect...
Well, perhaps a more civilised country will invade and liberate us. Don't worry, we're flabby and apathetic - the Brits you know from black and white war films are all long dead.
Yeah, I wouldn't claim Halo invented the inventory limitation - I can recall many happy hours of Laser Squad back on the Spectrum, trying to work out the best set of kit to carry. But I think Halo evolved the concept by combining the two-slot limit with the ability (and often requirement) to quickly swap weapons, and the careful balancing of the weapons. In the end, as its full title suggests, I think Halo is all about evolution; it doesn't present anything that's really original, but it develops its various elements beautifully...
I think you're missing the point with the 'more than two weapons' claim in Deus Ex's favour. The two-weapon limitation is one of Halo's core advantages; your choice of weapons greatly affects your strategy options, and the weapons are very well balanced - there's a good reason for using every weapon. I'm not looking to slate Deus Ex, though; it was and is a great game. But it's a *different* game - as you state several times, it's a first-person RPG - Halo isn't. It's Halo's strategic depth and emergent gameplay elements that keep me coming back to it - every time I play a level, I notice or achieve something new, even if it's just a particularly funny or rewarding explosion. I don't play Deus Ex any more because I've seen everything it's got to offer (and I enjoyed seeing it). Deus Ex is explicitly the more complex title, with its assorted character development paths and equipment options. But Halo offers far more gameplay compexity, IMO - it can't be seen on the surface, but after playing a level through two or three times in Legendary, the brilliance starts to emerge. You can't take any battle for granted, no matter how many times you've fought it before. In fact, having written this, I might just head over to Silent Cartographer for a quick scrap...
I'm reminded of a battered wife who will never leave her husband despite getting beaten again and again.
A few people point out that there's no evidence to support the story yet, and you're reminded of a battered wife? I bet every time you stub your toe, you're reminded of the Hindenburg. Oh, the humanity!
I have just looked at gnu.org, as suggested; it's cleanly arranged, valid XHTML. I wouldn't say it was ugly, and I certainly wouldn't say it was 'shit'. What I'd describe as 'shit' pages generally tend to have emerged from some GUI editor like DW, FP or even Word, and are stuffed with unnecessary features and masses of behind-the-scenes text. As an example, a page produced where I work uses Flash buttons for animations, simply to achieve a rollover effect, and the buttons just contain text. It's like that because that's the way Dreamweaver guided its author to create it. Now, I'm not saying that's purely DW's fault - I know that DW can be a very useful tool, and like any tool it can be used well or used poorly. But I do think that in order to use DW well - and by well I mean creating conformant and accessible pages, not simply 'great looking' ones - you need to be well versed in the program itself AND (X)HTML, just as you do if you're creating hand-coded pages in vi or Notepad. The difference is that vi and Notepad don't lob in chunks of code on your behalf; while such a feature can be a Godsend, it can just as easily be a curse.
Aha, yes, very good. But there's a difference between going from the OS8.5 you've been using for years to Panther, and going from the 10.2 you purchased in March to Panther. So maybe, I don't know, those who've bought a Mac or a full copy of 10.2 in the last year (six months, maybe) could get a discount... but, what the hell, as I said, bargain.
Wait, I have it. Put some kind of total CPU usage tracker in 10.3, and offer discounts on 10.4 based on how much you've actually used the OS. "A little less iMovie, and you could have had fifty bucks off."
Seems like a fair review to me; it highlights the new security features and places them in the context of recent events, oohs and aahs a little over Expose, and raises questions about the cost and compatibility issues for the end user. This is not a good time for me to be presented with Panther, since I've vowed to pay off my iBook this month, but I know full well that as soon as I see it sitting on a shelf on Saturday, it's going to get bought...
The cost is a tricky issue; it's clear a lot of work has gone into Panther,and the results certainly look good to me. I've got no problem shelling out for the new features - if I didn't like doing that, I'd use Linux exclusively - but I think an upgrade path for existing users (short of buying a new machine) would be nice. Panther is 100 in the UK; 70 would seem like a reasonable price point for those who paid for 10.2. Still, I know people who still scrabble after cracked copies of XP Pro because they can't afford to buy a copy at 250 RRP; Panther is a bargain by comparison...
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Okay, I just signed up and downloaded EP7 by Autechre. Very cheap (as a full album purchase), very fast, certainly good enough quality for me and my iPod. I'll be using this service a lot and I hope they really clean up.
For information, payment is either standard cards or Paypal, and after purchase your tracks are made available for a standard browser-based download, either individually or in a zip file. Transfer is very fast (depending on your own connection, natch.)
There are a few oddities with prices - Sabres of Paradise's Wilmot EP is 2.99 complete, which is 1 more than the two tracks bought individually. There are also a lot of small tracks (such as the 'bolts' on Black Dog's Spanners album) that cost 99p for 20 seconds or so. But those kind of tracks you'd only really want as part of the full album, where the average price per track would be far less...
However, given that the selection of tracks and albums is very comprehensive, a few glitches are to be expected, and are easily worked around.
I urge anyone who's interested in online music and hasn't heard of Warp to give the site a try - all the files are available as previews (with fade-outs) and you'll find some wonderful stuff there. Warp's an electronica label, but a very eclectic one. If you don't get on with Aphex Twin, try Mira Calix. If you can't gel with Autechre, check out Sabres of Paradise. If Boards of Canada don't blow your kilt up, listen to The Gentle People. All unique, all worthwhile, all available.
Audiophiles note (because the 'what-no-Ogg' crowd are already in effect, I see) that the FAQ states that Warp are considering offering other codecs, including FLAC, and maybe offering higher bitrates for a higher price. Early days, though - the first thing they need is support. And here's someone who really, truly deserves it for a change.
I visited Bleep around five seconds after I saw the headline on the /. index, and five minutes later I had Autechre's EP7 on my iPod, and I'm smack in the middle of England. So go forth and support! Yo ucan pay with the usual Visa / Switch options, or Paypal. The downloads are made available straight after payment, individually or as one zip file. The album came down work's pipe in under a minute. Excellent service, excellent music.
See here for your backup, courtesty of Ambrose Bierce:
http://ths.gardenweb.com/etc/bierce.html
Loss is the problem. I'm happy enough with my iPod - it's great to be able to walk around with practically my entire music collection on shuffle mode, hook it up to the hi-fi, etc. etc. But I'm in the UK, so I'm not using iTMS - DRM isn't affecting me. I guess a workaround for the lossy reencoding would be to use, say, Audio Hijack to capture a bitcopy of the AAC, reecode the result with FLAC, and invest in a Rio Karma, which will play FLAC files. You should end up with a direct copy of the AAC, minus the DRM. This is all a great workout for my shift keys, by the way... The downside is that the FLAC file won't play on an iPod, and you'll probably end up with a convoluted, ad-hoc music management system. The iTunes/iPod combo works fine for me right now - and by the time it doesn't, who knows what alternatives will have appeared?
Hey, thanks for taking the time to write that reply up. More like you, please.
That's interesting. I keep meaning to read up on Li-Ion batteries, because on the one hand I come across opinions like yours, which advise keeping devices plugged in when possible, and on the other hand I see a good few comments to the effect that you should let a battery run down as far as it can before recharging. The second theory has always sounded a little hokey to me, but I don't have any really reliable info one way or the other (since I haven't got my act together and done the research). I keep my iBook wall-powered whenever possible, and generally speaking my iPod is usually Firewired into the iBook, and therefore charging or charged. I set it free for walking to work etc., which generally means I'm charging it up to full from 90% or so daily. This "feels better" to me, but I still have no idea if I'm doing the right thing...
At the end of the day, I'm enjoying the iPod, so mission acccomplished. If it dies after eighteen months, what am I going to do? Hang myself? What am I, Hamlet? My iPod was an unnecessary, but very nice, purchase. I'll feel lucky if it's still working halfway through 2005 - lucky I haven't dropped it in a fishtank or got it stuck to the side of a giant magnet or, yeah, had the battery die. The way things are going, I'll be grateful if I'M still alive in June 2005, let alone my iPod...
I'd mod the parent up, but I think I'd rather add a reply and say in support of Inoshiro that the Gandhi quote, IMO, is an admonishment of cowardice, rather than an advocation of violence. To be anti-gun does not make one a coward, however (any more than being pro-gun makes one a hero), so I must confess that the relevance of the quote in this context eludes me.
I was contemplating buying an iPod when I got a backdated pay increment a couple of weeks ago. I sat looking at the Apple store page for twenty minutes or so, wondering if I should really go for the 40gb, when a new mail pinged into my inbox. It was a voucher from Apple for 20 off any purchase over 199. I took this to be divine intervention and ordered immediately. Now, I'm not suggesting you should pray for an iPod discount because, you know, that might be seen as slightly selfish. But I do suggest you think as hard as you can about buying one, and wait for Apple's serendipity dept. to pick up on it.
Having received a small back-dated pay rise this month, I decided I'd better spend it on something nice before it got devoured by Christmas, so I finally relented and ordered the iPod I'd been ogling for so long; 40gb version, screw it, from the online Apple store. This was last Tuesday. Now, Apple have been upfront from the start; they said 2-3 days assembly and 3-5 days delivery, so I can't really compain. But it's near Christmas, so I've been somewhat surprised to follow the shipping logs and discover that the iPod - after the 2 days assembly - was shipped from Taiwan, and arrived this morning in Luxembourg (gah!), from where it will presumably and hopefully ship to the UK. When it does arrive, I think I might drop Apple a line suggesting that they try to keep a few more of the buggers in stock - especially when they're advertising them eveyrwhere you look - because tracking a hotly anticipated impulse purchase across three continents is heartbreaking*...
* feeeling exaggerated for effect.
Too right. Over here in the UK, I pay around 100 for a TV Licence, which gets me a heap of BBC TV / radio channels free of ads. Now, the TV Licence is generally unpopular, because it's seen as being rather unfair; you have to have one if you own a TV, even if you have no intention of tuning in to BBC stations. But, again, the stations are ad-free, and the BBC provides some of the finest TV out there (though it also produces its share of dross and is often accused of wasting licence money).
We also have several commercially-funded channels, which are generally much worse than the BBC - Channel Four is the best of the bunch, but mainly by virtue of the shows it imports, rather than those it creates. Ad breaks on these get longer all the time, and just about every program is sponsored by a company or product. Many channels intersperse each commercial with a one-second logo ident sequence, which is the height of madness as far as I'm concerned (actually, that will be reached when the idents are sponsored).
We then have something known as Freeview, which gives you gratis access to a variety of cable / sattelite stations once you've bought the set-top box. This allows people access to the newly created extra BBC channels. The BBC ones don't have ads; the other free stations do.
And lastly, we have subscrition sattelite and cable channels, provided though the likes of Sky. Now, these we pay for, and they cost more than the BBC licence fee. You undeniably get more channels, but they are all stuffed with ads and rife with sponsorships. So you have to ask, what are you paying for? Prior to sattelite and cable, the situation was clear-cut; you paid for the BBC and had no ads, and you got ITV free, with ads. Now, you have services that you pay for, but are still full of ads. Thanks for that.
You have the option not to pay, of course. For the moment, until the delivery system can be suitably manipulated. But this begs the question; if you're already charging a subscription fee AND showing ads, how are you going to offset the impact of TiVo on ad revenue? People are unlikely to accept a sizable hike in fees; more likely they'll tolerate a gradual lowering of standareds - more repeats, more cheap imports, more reality phone-in shows. More shit, when all's said and done.
The irony is that if I had a TiVo, it would make no difference to my ad viewing. Currently, I'll read or make a drink or just mute the TV when the ads are on; with a TiVo, I might skip them; either way, I'm not paying any attention. I'm sure that in the fullness of time we'll have glorious developments like all-in-one recording TVs that don't allow ads to be muted or skipped - we're halfway there with the ads on some DVDs.
Maybe they can add a retinal scanner to the top of the set that check to see if you're watching while the ads are on, and charges your account if you don't watch at least two hours of ads per week. Those familiar with Minority Report would surely welcome such an initiative.
I'd write less, as I don't really care about all this, but the alternative is work.
The music studio Fruity Loops has had a singing plug-in for a little while now; you don't have a lot of (easy) control over the pitch, so it's really more of a toy most of the time. But combined with some simple audio processing, you can easily get results like these:
http://www.antics.org.uk/mp3/green/ntk_copyright.m p3 (1mb MP3)
http://www.antics.org.uk/mp3/green/ntk_eod.mp3 (646kb MP3)
I'm sure it's nowhere near the league of the featured developments, but it's still a very impressive feature in an affordable package...
What draws you to anything? It's just a game console, man. It's fun. I play Rainbow 6 with a bunch of regulars, we all have voice chat, we have a good time. We're not making a political statement. I have an Xbox, I have Live, and I enjoy it enough to carry on paying for it. That's all I can tell you. If you don't like it, don't worry about it. Do something you DO like and enjoy yourself.
I can recommend fastmail.fm - I found it via a /. comment, in fact. Web interface and IMAP access (working fine with Mac Mail), and a range of prices from free upwards. If you pay more, you get more space / functionality and access to the fastmail SMTP server, for ISP independence. I'll be paying for it soon, I'm sure. Since the goons at work implemented their 1/4-assed mail filter, it's been a godsend. The web interface is also nice and clean, and the whole thing has a nice white-hat feel to it. Check it out, anyway; I'll be recommending them when asked from now on.
OT, but pretty nifty - I was at a party once where someone had set up a slide projector displaying some run o' the mill psychedelic crap. I drunkely remembered that in my wallet, I had a "Bob" head printed onto acetate - no real reason, but I'd been carrying it for a few months, just stuffed in there, after I printed a load off at work. So I stumbled over and slid "Bob" into the slide holder. Lo, he duly appeared unto us, but as he was slightly ahead of the real slide and partially transparent, the autofocus mechanism was confused. From that point until the projector's horrified owner happened to walk past, we enjoyed a display of "Bob"'s image slowly and rhythmically drifting in and out of focus atop the swirling acid lightshow. If I'd been more with it, I'dve manhandled the projector and thrown "Bob"'s face onto the faces of partygoers, but as it was I had to make do without being beaten up and ejected that night.
And, of course, Halo and KOTOR are no longer exclusive to the Xbox. So that means the $179 paperweight near your TV is good for what, exactly?
Keeping important papers in place, silly. Oh, and playing online games without having to meet people like you ;)
Another reason for losing the hop might be to cut down on some of the ridiculous shortcuts that MK64 allowed through hop abuse. Now you need specifically placed scenery to launch you into the air, there's less chance of players locating glitchy shortcuts (though I'm sure some still exist). I notice on Rainbow Road that the game was quick to reset me after I fell off, even though I was heading toward a later section of the track, which was interesting. The big jump on MK64 Rainbow Road was great - 3,2,1, go, and everyone's immediately jostling to get over the barrier...
MK:DD is a rehash that deserves to be the GC savior. There are enough new features for it to deserve to be a new game (aside from the fact that it's running on better hardware), but no enough to call it a huge leap forward; but that doesn't matter, because playing it is a blast, especially in multiplayer. That's what people are going to realise when they try it, and that's when they'll stop caring about the mediocre reviews.
Flaws: well, some of the tracks are weak - I love the first three Mushroom Cup tracks, but the desert one at the end is a dog. Can't please all the people, I guess... but I think it's a great credit to Nintendo that the best track for a lot of people is Baby Park, which is a simple, flat oval - the kart handling makes it an absolute joy in single or multiplayer (it's especially good in time trial, where you can compare the different kart setups against your best ghost).
The lack of online play is a real shame, especially when you look at what's been achieved with Xbox Live - it's clear that it COULD be done. Tunnelling workarounds mean little here - the functionality needs to be built right into the game , deliberately, and accessible to all.
Still, lack of perfection is no reason not to buy a game. The reviews make some valid points, but at the end of the day, play it; you'll like it.
Further depressing developments for those of us in the UK: the 'snooper's charter' has now passed through the Lords. Ready your proxies and encryption plug-ins - but remember they might require you to hand over the key at some point.
The U.K. seems about as close to an Orwellian society as any "enlightened" country on the planet.
That's right, and it's all thanks to our right-wing "left-wing" government. And even if the people protest, it'll do no use - witness the recent war protests, or consider these excerpts from the Home Office report on ID card consultation, courtest of stand.org.uk:
In essence, theyd've carried on commissioning research until it said what they wanted it to say, spinning any existing results in the meantime.
Frankly, nothing they say or do or agree to is going to surprise me, or a lot of other people. But because these activities aren't yet hitting people directly in the pocket, we won't see civil unrest on a scale of, say, the Poll Tax protests - people readily notice a few pounds a week being taken from them; a few freedoms here and there are perhaps harder to detect...
Well, perhaps a more civilised country will invade and liberate us. Don't worry, we're flabby and apathetic - the Brits you know from black and white war films are all long dead.
Yeah, I wouldn't claim Halo invented the inventory limitation - I can recall many happy hours of Laser Squad back on the Spectrum, trying to work out the best set of kit to carry. But I think Halo evolved the concept by combining the two-slot limit with the ability (and often requirement) to quickly swap weapons, and the careful balancing of the weapons. In the end, as its full title suggests, I think Halo is all about evolution; it doesn't present anything that's really original, but it develops its various elements beautifully...
I think you're missing the point with the 'more than two weapons' claim in Deus Ex's favour. The two-weapon limitation is one of Halo's core advantages; your choice of weapons greatly affects your strategy options, and the weapons are very well balanced - there's a good reason for using every weapon. I'm not looking to slate Deus Ex, though; it was and is a great game. But it's a *different* game - as you state several times, it's a first-person RPG - Halo isn't. It's Halo's strategic depth and emergent gameplay elements that keep me coming back to it - every time I play a level, I notice or achieve something new, even if it's just a particularly funny or rewarding explosion. I don't play Deus Ex any more because I've seen everything it's got to offer (and I enjoyed seeing it). Deus Ex is explicitly the more complex title, with its assorted character development paths and equipment options. But Halo offers far more gameplay compexity, IMO - it can't be seen on the surface, but after playing a level through two or three times in Legendary, the brilliance starts to emerge. You can't take any battle for granted, no matter how many times you've fought it before. In fact, having written this, I might just head over to Silent Cartographer for a quick scrap...
I'm reminded of a battered wife who will never leave her husband despite getting beaten again and again.
A few people point out that there's no evidence to support the story yet, and you're reminded of a battered wife? I bet every time you stub your toe, you're reminded of the Hindenburg. Oh, the humanity!
I have just looked at gnu.org, as suggested; it's cleanly arranged, valid XHTML. I wouldn't say it was ugly, and I certainly wouldn't say it was 'shit'. What I'd describe as 'shit' pages generally tend to have emerged from some GUI editor like DW, FP or even Word, and are stuffed with unnecessary features and masses of behind-the-scenes text. As an example, a page produced where I work uses Flash buttons for animations, simply to achieve a rollover effect, and the buttons just contain text. It's like that because that's the way Dreamweaver guided its author to create it. Now, I'm not saying that's purely DW's fault - I know that DW can be a very useful tool, and like any tool it can be used well or used poorly. But I do think that in order to use DW well - and by well I mean creating conformant and accessible pages, not simply 'great looking' ones - you need to be well versed in the program itself AND (X)HTML, just as you do if you're creating hand-coded pages in vi or Notepad. The difference is that vi and Notepad don't lob in chunks of code on your behalf; while such a feature can be a Godsend, it can just as easily be a curse.
Aha, yes, very good. But there's a difference between going from the OS8.5 you've been using for years to Panther, and going from the 10.2 you purchased in March to Panther. So maybe, I don't know, those who've bought a Mac or a full copy of 10.2 in the last year (six months, maybe) could get a discount... but, what the hell, as I said, bargain.
Wait, I have it. Put some kind of total CPU usage tracker in 10.3, and offer discounts on 10.4 based on how much you've actually used the OS. "A little less iMovie, and you could have had fifty bucks off."
Seems like a fair review to me; it highlights the new security features and places them in the context of recent events, oohs and aahs a little over Expose, and raises questions about the cost and compatibility issues for the end user. This is not a good time for me to be presented with Panther, since I've vowed to pay off my iBook this month, but I know full well that as soon as I see it sitting on a shelf on Saturday, it's going to get bought...
The cost is a tricky issue; it's clear a lot of work has gone into Panther,and the results certainly look good to me. I've got no problem shelling out for the new features - if I didn't like doing that, I'd use Linux exclusively - but I think an upgrade path for existing users (short of buying a new machine) would be nice. Panther is 100 in the UK; 70 would seem like a reasonable price point for those who paid for 10.2. Still, I know people who still scrabble after cracked copies of XP Pro because they can't afford to buy a copy at 250 RRP; Panther is a bargain by comparison...