I just want to jump in to say that while it's a bummer when you run out of your custom paint and pick up a new piece, it's not the end of the world. The standard armor paint can that you start out with has a number of colors that are close enough to the custom colors to "get by" until you can find the matching drop again. You can also buy these standard colors at 1 credit a piece so there's no need to ever go completely generic or utterly mismatched. Thankfully, all the drops seem to be coming in a neutral gray color now rather than the seemingly random colors during beta. I too am spoiled by CoX's excellent character designer!
"Follow your ears and that predator-like blur and you got him in no time."
I've come to the realization that there are a lot of folks out there who either can't/don't use their ears, or simply prefer to listen to music while playing. Trying to "sneak" past an enemy with your cloak on without the mask of nearby gunfire is a sure way to end up with a few pistol rounds in the face. My favorite incident of killing the "I r teh ubar sneeky" sort happened in BF2:MC (the xbox version). The game was set up in such a way that anyone, friend or foe, within a certain radius could hear your open mic unless you made sure to hit the mute button. I was defending a flag and heard some guy breathing hard into his mic, checked the screen and saw the owner's voice was in red and therefore unfriendly. I did what anybody would do: bounced a grenade around the corner. 6 kills. Flag saved.
If you've got the equipment around, or are willing to spend the money an audio compressor will protect your ears from explosions while still allowing you to have the game volume high enough to hear incidental sounds like footsteps or clinking gear coming your way. An Alesis 3630 has a pretty terrible rep as a musical device and can be picked up used for under $50. Depending on how my mixing board is patched for other projects, I'll sometimes have a 3630 on my mic to level out the sound going to TS or in-game voip and a RNC1773 on the headphones. This setup removes some of the twitchy excitement from a game so it's not always in use, but it certainly makes long gaming sessions much more comfortable.
It's called Hyper Cow and was introduced to market in 2003. There was controversy surrounding the plan to sell it in schools and the product has since disappeared from the market.
The chocolate flavor was a bit on the sweet side for a chocolate milk but was otherwise a decent product.
Those ER-20's are pretty darn nice for the price. Speech frequencies are not as heavily attenuated as a foam earplug. After a minute or three of having them, they sound "natural", it's about as close to sounding like you aren't wearing an earplug as you can get without shelling out for the custom molded versions. A single pair will last about a year of heavy usage (30+ hours a week). I buy them buy them 10 at a time and will gladly give them to anybody who will actually wear them. That said, they do have a substantial downside: they really aren't blocking a lot of sound. If your environment regularly hits in the high 90's dB(a) and you want a reusable silicone plug, I recommend trying the SilentEar plugs. You must get the proper size for your ear or they will not work. As for disposable earplugs, the Howard Leight Max plugs are quite comfy and are NRR 33, the MaxLite plugs are even more comfortable and the NRR is only reduced to 30. The MaxLites are my go-to plug when things get loud and speech/music intelligibility is not an issue. The MaxLites are one of the few plugs I can wear while sleeping without discomfort. (nightshift + low-rent apartment = sleepless "nights")
Never settle for an uncomfortable ear plug. There are hundreds of different style and material variations and even trying out 20 different types will still be a fraction of the cost of the cheapest noise-canceling 'phones. I am a repeat customer of the linked store.
Noise canceling headphones are not hearing protection, are not designed for hearing protection, and should not be treated as such.
I see quite a few comments suggesting that an employee took the drive home and later sold it. I suggest something less nefarious: Dumpster Divers. Most certainly many slashdotters have engaged in such activities and it should be surprise to none that Best Buy would have goodies ready for the pillage./me glances at his pc-turned-firewall and thinks, "good find"
In response to the comment about rusty connections: I live in an older apartment with terrible telephone wiring. Taking a few minutes to pull the phone jacks confirmed my suspicion that I would find massive corrosion on the contacts. I was getting about 100k average up with peaks of 105k. A quick spray of DeoxIt and a few wipes of a q-tip later and my upload speeds looked more like 110k average/ 115k peak. While not a miraculous improvement, the cost was negligible and certainly worth the effort. Running wide open, it comes out to uploading roughly an extra 500MB a day. Download speeds remained unchanged as I can easily reach the speed I pay for and which my modem synchs at.
How many more times must this be repeated before people finally have it beaten into them? Best Buy employees do NOT work on commission, and have not worked on commission for many years now.
"Its most controversial innovation came in 1989, when Best Buy stopped paying commissions to its sales staff and instead put them on salary. Among manufacturers like Toshiba and Hitachi that depended on salespeople to push premium-priced items, the move went over "like a fart in church," a former Best Buy executive recalls."
It does happen, but you need to choose an isp with more "$30,000" clients than "$30" clients. Sure, for my $20 a month I dont get access to their super-secret-special pager number for use during holidays or emergencies. It doesn't really matter though. The only unannounced outage of service I've seen this last year was for under an hour, was due to the line provider, and was given a message in the call waiting pool as to what the problem was before I even had to bother asking a human what the problem was.
To me, the best part about the package is that their "residential" service is what most isps consider "buisness" packages: only static ips, all ports unblocked, no throttling, usenet, dialup backup. The only complaint most people have had with this isp was the lack of 24/7 tech support, which they started offereing back in March. Take a look at the announcement page, does your isp offer this?
Mine does.
Ahh, glad you commented. Seems I was a bit confused by the titles. I thought "Session 1" referred to the first episode and "Session 2" the second episode etc, but it looks like the dvds contain about 5 episodes a piece. The online store I originally found them on didn't have descriptions, hence the confusion.
I did that a few times with the sub7 bot. There used to be quite a few infected machines left with the default password in place attacking an irc server I used. Seems strange to me now, but the author included feature to remove the sub7 code from the infected machine. After removing the bot from a number of the machine, the controller started setting a password on newly infected machines. I eventually figured out the dynamic host name the infected machines were connecting to and had the service point the domain name to 127.0.0.1. A smallish botnet shut down with a simple phone call.
It was, quite probably, a binaural recording. The localization of sounds in a binaural recording can be frighteningly realistic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural
Wouldn't an X3 be *complete* overkill? Why recomend the top-of-the-line, feature packed and expensive modchip when the parent only wants his games to load faster? A sofmod with a coldboot-to-live feature would work just fine in this case. http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=2 15055
I find that to be one of the most annoying parts of XBL games. Thankfully, most of the team based games I have played restrict you to speaking only to your teamates unless in close proximity to an enemy. I suggest liberal use of the mute feature. Loud children, racists, obnoxious enemy or team members, echos, broken mics, people with tvs too loud, people with music up too loud; mute 'em all. If they aren't willing to fix their bad behavious, chances are you don't need to hear them as they aren't helping the team anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
I just want to jump in to say that while it's a bummer when you run out of your custom paint and pick up a new piece, it's not the end of the world. The standard armor paint can that you start out with has a number of colors that are close enough to the custom colors to "get by" until you can find the matching drop again. You can also buy these standard colors at 1 credit a piece so there's no need to ever go completely generic or utterly mismatched. Thankfully, all the drops seem to be coming in a neutral gray color now rather than the seemingly random colors during beta. I too am spoiled by CoX's excellent character designer!
Actually, it makes so much sense to use night vision equipment that some movie theaters have been doing it for years.
Watching the crowd during an advanced screening using night vision has been pretty standard for some time now. The use of such technology is spreading to more widespread releases as well. Military-style night-sights have been sent to every outlet in the country showing the new Harry Potter film, The Prisoner of Azkaban.
"Follow your ears and that predator-like blur and you got him in no time."
I've come to the realization that there are a lot of folks out there who either can't/don't use their ears, or simply prefer to listen to music while playing. Trying to "sneak" past an enemy with your cloak on without the mask of nearby gunfire is a sure way to end up with a few pistol rounds in the face. My favorite incident of killing the "I r teh ubar sneeky" sort happened in BF2:MC (the xbox version). The game was set up in such a way that anyone, friend or foe, within a certain radius could hear your open mic unless you made sure to hit the mute button. I was defending a flag and heard some guy breathing hard into his mic, checked the screen and saw the owner's voice was in red and therefore unfriendly. I did what anybody would do: bounced a grenade around the corner. 6 kills. Flag saved.
If you've got the equipment around, or are willing to spend the money an audio compressor will protect your ears from explosions while still allowing you to have the game volume high enough to hear incidental sounds like footsteps or clinking gear coming your way. An Alesis 3630 has a pretty terrible rep as a musical device and can be picked up used for under $50. Depending on how my mixing board is patched for other projects, I'll sometimes have a 3630 on my mic to level out the sound going to TS or in-game voip and a RNC1773 on the headphones. This setup removes some of the twitchy excitement from a game so it's not always in use, but it certainly makes long gaming sessions much more comfortable.
It's called Hyper Cow and was introduced to market in 2003. There was controversy surrounding the plan to sell it in schools and the product has since disappeared from the market.
The chocolate flavor was a bit on the sweet side for a chocolate milk but was otherwise a decent product.
Those ER-20's are pretty darn nice for the price. Speech frequencies are not as heavily attenuated as a foam earplug. After a minute or three of having them, they sound "natural", it's about as close to sounding like you aren't wearing an earplug as you can get without shelling out for the custom molded versions. A single pair will last about a year of heavy usage (30+ hours a week). I buy them buy them 10 at a time and will gladly give them to anybody who will actually wear them. That said, they do have a substantial downside: they really aren't blocking a lot of sound. If your environment regularly hits in the high 90's dB(a) and you want a reusable silicone plug, I recommend trying the SilentEar plugs. You must get the proper size for your ear or they will not work.
As for disposable earplugs, the Howard Leight Max plugs are quite comfy and are NRR 33, the MaxLite plugs are even more comfortable and the NRR is only reduced to 30. The MaxLites are my go-to plug when things get loud and speech/music intelligibility is not an issue. The MaxLites are one of the few plugs I can wear while sleeping without discomfort. (nightshift + low-rent apartment = sleepless "nights")
Never settle for an uncomfortable ear plug. There are hundreds of different style and material variations and even trying out 20 different types will still be a fraction of the cost of the cheapest noise-canceling 'phones.
I am a repeat customer of the linked store.
Noise canceling headphones are not hearing protection, are not designed for hearing protection, and should not be treated as such.
Brilliant! Social Engineering works both ways.
How's this float yer boat? http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeskalinden/51683256/
They most certainly do, but it tends to increase the price. Repair costs can also be quite a bit higher on such a design.
I see quite a few comments suggesting that an employee took the drive home and later sold it. I suggest something less nefarious: Dumpster Divers. Most certainly many slashdotters have engaged in such activities and it should be surprise to none that Best Buy would have goodies ready for the pillage. /me glances at his pc-turned-firewall and thinks, "good find"
In response to the comment about rusty connections: I live in an older apartment with terrible telephone wiring. Taking a few minutes to pull the phone jacks confirmed my suspicion that I would find massive corrosion on the contacts. I was getting about 100k average up with peaks of 105k. A quick spray of DeoxIt and a few wipes of a q-tip later and my upload speeds looked more like 110k average/ 115k peak. While not a miraculous improvement, the cost was negligible and certainly worth the effort. Running wide open, it comes out to uploading roughly an extra 500MB a day. Download speeds remained unchanged as I can easily reach the speed I pay for and which my modem synchs at.
Yup, I bit. You win a cookie.
How many more times must this be repeated before people finally have it beaten into them? Best Buy employees do NOT work on commission, and have not worked on commission for many years now.
"Its most controversial innovation came in 1989, when Best Buy stopped paying commissions to its sales staff and instead put them on salary. Among manufacturers like Toshiba and Hitachi that depended on salespeople to push premium-priced items, the move went over "like a fart in church," a former Best Buy executive recalls."
It does happen, but you need to choose an isp with more "$30,000" clients than "$30" clients. Sure, for my $20 a month I dont get access to their super-secret-special pager number for use during holidays or emergencies. It doesn't really matter though. The only unannounced outage of service I've seen this last year was for under an hour, was due to the line provider, and was given a message in the call waiting pool as to what the problem was before I even had to bother asking a human what the problem was. To me, the best part about the package is that their "residential" service is what most isps consider "buisness" packages: only static ips, all ports unblocked, no throttling, usenet, dialup backup. The only complaint most people have had with this isp was the lack of 24/7 tech support, which they started offereing back in March. Take a look at the announcement page, does your isp offer this? Mine does.
I imagine they use the USPS Confirm service as does Gamefly, who won an award for developing the system along with the USPS
Ahh, glad you commented. Seems I was a bit confused by the titles. I thought "Session 1" referred to the first episode and "Session 2" the second episode etc, but it looks like the dvds contain about 5 episodes a piece. The online store I originally found them on didn't have descriptions, hence the confusion.
The worst abuse of splitting I've seen is with the Cowboy Bebop releases. 1 episode per dvd, $20 per dvd, 29 episodes = no way I'm paying for it.
I did that a few times with the sub7 bot. There used to be quite a few infected machines left with the default password in place attacking an irc server I used. Seems strange to me now, but the author included feature to remove the sub7 code from the infected machine. After removing the bot from a number of the machine, the controller started setting a password on newly infected machines. I eventually figured out the dynamic host name the infected machines were connecting to and had the service point the domain name to 127.0.0.1. A smallish botnet shut down with a simple phone call.
It was, quite probably, a binaural recording. The localization of sounds in a binaural recording can be frighteningly realistic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural
Wouldn't an X3 be *complete* overkill? Why recomend the top-of-the-line, feature packed and expensive modchip when the parent only wants his games to load faster? A sofmod with a coldboot-to-live feature would work just fine in this case. http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=2 15055
I find that to be one of the most annoying parts of XBL games. Thankfully, most of the team based games I have played restrict you to speaking only to your teamates unless in close proximity to an enemy. I suggest liberal use of the mute feature. Loud children, racists, obnoxious enemy or team members, echos, broken mics, people with tvs too loud, people with music up too loud; mute 'em all. If they aren't willing to fix their bad behavious, chances are you don't need to hear them as they aren't helping the team anyways.