one good thing about doing it this way is that a lot of people rent games before deciding to buy them so the save info would still be there even tho it's a different cd.
It's been years since the last time I rented a video game, but I always thought it was fun to rent Genesis games that had other people's saved games on it. That's something that you don't get with the new systems that all use optical media. Plus, you can't create game characters or NHL '95 users with all sorts of dirty names.;)
Great joke, but unfortunately I don't think anyone got it.
I first heard it at a restaurant while on vacation in Denmark (I'm from the US.) There was a group of Danes at the next table who overheard our plans to visit Finland later in our trip.
"Hey, do you know why people from Finland are so thin? Because the waitress asks, Are you finished? and so they say, yes I am Finnish, and she takes away the food!"
It was especially funny being told from a non-English speaker. I guess you had to be there.
I use addresses like amazon_spam@yourdomain.com
That way I can tell for SURE where itcame from. Plus I filter based on _spam in the To: field.
I thought of trying the same thing, but much of the spam I get doesn't have my address anywhere on it--it's all BCC. Of course, I have all messages without my name in the TO or CC moved to the junk mail folder anyway, but it still won't help me figure out who sold my name.
You're overlooking the biggest disadvantage of Linux...no good games! Just about the only software loaded on the computers we had in elementary school were games. Of course most everything we had on the Apples (IIe, IIc, II+) and the TRS-80 were educational titles, like Oregon Trail, Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, and Microzine (a subscription, actually.)
Hmmm...now to check the emu scene for some of these...
I'm pretty sure it's the TwinView part that makes the difference, as every other card I have seen with a TV-out locks you into the same resolution on both screens. I really wanted to run two displays at independent resolutions, so I made sure to find a card that specifically did that.
I bet your GF4 is hella fast for games though...but even with a GF2 I play UT at 1024x768 with 16 bit color and all the effects turned on, and the framerate is still fine for me.
My only complaint is that I can't use the computer at the same time, and that nView doesn't seem to let you play the video full screen on one monitor and use the other monitor for other purposes. Do you just use "Clone" or do you have something else set up?
At home I have a Gainward GeForce2 MX TwinView ViVo Golden Sample - see the review at Tom's Hardware. It's got TV-in *and* TV-out (ViVo), but the TwinView is what really sold me. You can set up multiple monitors using different resolutions, no matter what device you are connected to, such as two RGB monitors or a monitor and a TV (like I have.)
I forget which nView setting I have now, but have it configured for a 1280x960 resoultion on my 19" CRT and a separate 640x480 display on my TV. The Windows taskbar only shows on the CRT, but the TV has a mirror of the background and I can drag windows on to it. I usually leave Winamp running on the TV, but the coolest part is that it automatically scales video to full-screen on the TV. Like the other reply noted, any video window open on my main desktop will run fullscreen on the TV, whether it's in the foreground or not. Definitely worth looking into, as I'm sure Gainward has a newer GF4 card with similar functionality.
A brief reminder: The challenge consisted of two points, P and Q in the same simple-subgroup of a particular elliptic curve group. This is the value of k such that Q = kP.
Well, if Q = kP, then k = Q/P. Sheesh, it took almost two years to solve that?
I guess they wanted to be especially careful to mind their P's and Q's.
Re:Why not included the best of breed
on
LCD Round-up
·
· Score: 1
I've been using an AG Neovo 17.4" monitor for about eight months and it is absolutely fantastic (IMHO better than the mac 17's). The text is crisp and the color reproduction is oustanding. Yes, it's expensive (~$899US), but if I have to look at something for 10+ hours a day I'm going to spend the extra cash.
Ooh, color me jealous! Agreed, the Neovo displays are certainly amazing. They had a booth at the PC Expo in June and I was blown away by the quality and contrast of the display. I have an 18" Eizo L66 LCD at work and it's terrific (better be, for the $2,500 it cost new) but the optical glass coating Neovo uses really does make a difference that you have to personally see to believe.
When I can spare the cash, I'm going to replace my 19" Viewsonic G790 with the Neovo X-174. Not only is it 17.4 inches of LCD goodness with DVI, analog, and S-Video inputs, but the thing is also a work of art. If Apple Cinema LCDs are cute like a VW beetle, the Neovo displays are svelte and refined like a Mercedes-Benz S500.
Re:ViewSonic's the way to go if gaming
on
LCD Round-up
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Honestly, the text looks great at native 1280x1024 resolution with standard anti-aliasing (i.e. no anti-aliasing for normal 10-12point fonts), and it doesn't give me a headache like ClearType does after a long day of screen-staring. Is this a feature of the LCD or a feature of my brain?
I have an 18" Eizo L66 LCD at work and I liked the normal font smoothing much better than ClearType until I used the tuner. Also, play with your color scheme in Windows and try to set the background color to a slightly off-white. I did this and the sub-pixel rendering in ClearType now looks much better.
Also, on the notebooks - they is NOT a native resolution, all resolution sizes look GREAT - why is this different with LCD?
Actually, I have several notebooks at work that have a 15" LCD with native 1600x1200 resolution (IBM Thinkpads and Dell Latitude.) It takes a fair amount of tweaking to get the menus and fonts readable with the pixels that small, but once you get it right it's pretty amazing--especially with ClearType in Windows XP.
Here's a review of the iPod I posted on Slashdot a while back in a thread about the release of the XPlay software.
A good friend of mine got an iPod as a corporate gift (he works for a major market radio station) and gave it to me since he doesn't own a Mac. Now, I don't have a Mac either, but as a tech-head and a digital audio guy I figured I could probably do something with it. I actually did consider getting a new iMac, but I'd heard about XPod (now XPlay) and figured I could check it out if I got a firewire port somehow.
Some background: I have been running Windows XP for about six months now on my homebuilt Athlon PC (T-Bird 1.33). I have been very happy with the performance and stability of XP, but the Turtle Beach Montego II Home Studio sound card I have used for years is only supported under 9x. I could get basic analog audio working by disabling ACPI in the BIOS, but with lousy driver support and no digital I/O, I realized it was time to upgrade. I thought about getting a semi-pro audio card such as those from Terratec, M-Audio, and Event, but since I also use my PC for games and home theater, I ended up getting the Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum Ex. The last Creative card I had was a SB AWE32 many years ago, and though I wouldn't touch the Live! series (especially since my mobo uses a Via chipset), the Audigy is totally killer. Now, just as posts here have mentioned the possibility of people buying a Mac to complement the iPod, a big part of the reason I picked the Audigy was for the built-in Firewire port.
Okay, time to get to the goods. I downloaded and installed a beta of XPlay and hooked up my virgin iPod. To my surprise, Windows immediately recognized the iPod as an external drive and mapped it through explorer. XPlay seemed to suggest that I should control the iPod primarily through Windows Media Player, but I have generally stayed away from WMP since they introduced v7. I have never been fond of its music library management, especially since it likes to screw with your music files even if you don't want it to--no ID3v2 tags for me, thank you. And the idea that it needs to lock up 30MB of RAM just to play one song is pretty ludicrous. A quick check revealed that WMP8 did indeed see the iPod as a portable device, but I wasn't going to use it to transfer any files.
My mp3 collection is up to about 30GB now (all ripped myself using EAC with LAME), so it was a little difficult to pick out which five gigs of tunes I wanted to take with me. Going through Windows Explorer, I ctrl-clicked the folders of my favorite albums and dragged them into the \Music folder on the mapped iPod drive. Transfer was fast but not blazing, taking about 25 minutes to copy everything over the firewire. Using the Explorer interface meant that no playlists were transferred, but the Artist/Album interface on the iPod is so good that I don't really need them anyway. I suppose that I'm not really using XPlay to its fullest, but at least WMP doesn't muck up my mp3s in the process. I'd love to see plug-in support for the iPod in my player of choice, JRiver's Media Jukebox.
Reactions: While I'm not using any of XPlay's features beyond the support for HFS, I don't really need it to. I'd much rather control things myself anyway, just doing drag 'n drops instead of becoming a slave to the software interface. I also have a first gen Diamond Rio (parallel port connection!) and the original Rio Volt, and the included software has never wowed me enough to use it regularly. Actually, that's why I liked the Volt most of all, since I could just burn my own CD's and be done with it. The iPod is definitely best of all though--the small size makes it much more convenient for the car or carrying in your pocket, and the rechargeable lithium-ion battery is just awesome. I use it in the car every day (about an hour-round trip) and only have to charge it every other week. The playback interface is the best of any I have seen--very easy to control with one hand and the white backlight works great in the dark. It does seem to skip sometimes, though it seems it's actually blank parts in the mp3 file since it happens in the same part of a song every time. My guess is that there was a blip of some sort during the firewire transfer, since the mp3s play back perfect on the computer.
Overall, XPlay does what it advertises. I can use the iPod on my PC, which would not be possible otherwise. However, there are some other features I'd like to see, such as the ability to upgrade the iPod firmware and synchronization support for programs other than WMP. Combining the huge installed base of the PC/Windows platform with the style and reliabilty of Apple hardware is a winning situation for everyone. I think that MediaFour has done just what Apple had hoped, allowing them to sell more units without getting into the headache of supporting the PC platform. And personally, I am thrilled to be an Apple user again, since my first home computer was a IIGS. Who knows, I still might pick up an iMac after all...
"Do you not find it strange that a 2-hour DVD, with commentary, subtitles, and extra scenes, can be sold for less than $10, while few audio CDs are that low priced? "
Yes. Maybe the rest of the music world will wake up to this too.
While I do agree that compact discs are often overpriced, you can't accurately compare the price of music albums to DVD movies.
What you are forgetting is that a DVD is usually not the primary source of income for a film. Most major studio releases make back their money in the theatrical release, so the DVD is just another revenue stream. A CD (or LP, or cassette), on the other hand, is the only current method to recoup an album's own production costs.
...the fake stories weren't too far from the usual sort of stuff you see here on a daily basis.
How right you are...in fact, I didn't even notice that anything was fake. I just thought, "Man, today's stories sure do suck!" and moved on to DVDFile.
- Leigh
My experience with iPod on the PC
on
iPod on Windows
·
· Score: 1
Don't know if anyone will see this post as I caught this thread late in the game, but I though I'd share my experiences with using XPlay to access the iPod in Windows.
A good friend of mine got an iPod as a corporate gift (he works for a major market radio station) and gave it to me since he doesn't own a Mac. Now, I don't have a Mac either, but as a tech-head and a digital audio guy I figured I could probably do something with it. I actually did consider getting a new iMac, but I'd heard about XPod (now XPlay) and figured I could check it out if I got a firewire port somehow.
Some background: I have been running Windows XP for about six months now on my homebuilt Athlon PC (T-Bird 1.33). I have been very happy with the performance and stability of XP, but the Turtle Beach Montego II Home Studio sound card I have used for years is only supported under 9x. I could get basic analog audio working by disabling ACPI in the BIOS, but with lousy driver support and no digital I/O, I realized it was time to upgrade.
I thought about getting a semi-pro audio card such as those from Terratec, M-Audio, and Event, but since I also use my PC for games and home theater, I ended up getting the Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum Ex. The last Creative card I had was a SB AWE32 many years ago, and though I wouldn't touch the Live! series (especially since my mobo uses a Via chipset), the Audigy is totally killer. Now, just as posts here have mentioned the possibility of people buying a Mac to complement the iPod, a big part of the reason I picked the Audigy was for the built-in Firewire port.
Okay, time to get to the goods. I downloaded and installed a beta of XPlay and hooked up my virgin iPod. To my surprise, Windows immediately recognized the iPod as an external drive and mapped it through explorer. XPlay seemed to suggest that I should control the iPod primarily through Windows Media Player, but I have generally stayed away from WMP since they introduced v7. I have never been fond of its music library management, especially since it likes to screw with your music files even if you don't want it to--no ID3v2 tags for me, thank you. And the idea that it needs to lock up 30MB of RAM just to play one song is pretty ludicrous. A quick check revealed that WMP8 did indeed see the iPod as a portable device, but I wasn't going to use it to transfer any files.
My mp3 collection is up to about 30GB now (all ripped myself using EAC with LAME), so it was a little difficult to pick out which five gigs of tunes I wanted to take with me. Going through Windows Explorer, I ctrl-clicked the folders of my favorite albums and dragged them into the \Music folder on the mapped iPod drive. Transfer was fast but not blazing, taking about 25 minutes to copy everything over the firewire. Using the Explorer interface meant that no playlists were transferred, but the Artist/Album interface on the iPod is so good that I don't really need them anyway. I suppose that I'm not really using XPlay to its fullest, but at least WMP doesn't muck up my mp3s in the process. I'd love to see plug-in support for the iPod in my player of choice, JRiver's Media Jukebox.
Reactions: While I'm not using any of XPlay's features beyond the support for HFS, I don't really need it to. I'd much rather control things myself anyway, just doing drag 'n drops instead of becoming a slave to the software interface. I also have a first gen Diamond Rio (parallel port connection!) and the original Rio Volt, and the included software has never wowed me enough to use it regularly. Actually, that's why I liked the Volt most of all, since I could just burn my own CD's and be done with it.
The iPod is definitely best of all though--the small size makes it much more convenient for the car or carrying in your pocket, and the rechargeable lithium-ion battery is just awesome. I use it in the car every day (about an hour-round trip) and only have to charge it every other week. The playback interface is the best of any I have seen--very easy to control with one hand and the white backlight works great in the dark. It does seem to skip sometimes, though it seems it's actually blank parts in the mp3 file since it happens in the same part of a song every time. My guess is that there was a blip of some sort during the firewire transfer, since the mp3s play back perfect on the computer.
Overall, XPlay does what it advertises. I can use the iPod on my PC, which would not be possible otherwise. However, there are some other features I'd like to see, such as the ability to upgrade the iPod firmware and synchronization support for programs other than WMP. Combining the huge installed base of the PC/Windows platform with the style and reliabilty of Apple hardware is a winning situation for everyone. I think that MediaFour has done just what Apple had hoped, allowing them to sell more units without getting into the headache of supporting the PC platform. And personally, I am thrilled to be an Apple user again, since my first home computer was a IIGS. Who knows, I still might pick up an iMac after all...
It's got the production quality of a middle-school extra credit assignment--though, maybe it's because the designers are just better engineers than they are video producers.
But have you ever sat in a "fart chair"?
If you don't know what a fart chair is, it's a chair that's been farted a lot in.
You can only fart so many times before the odour sticks to the chair.
When that happens you'll get a nice puff of fresh fart everytime you sit down.
Just for future reference, those bits of odor that get stuck in the chair are called Farticles.
I've known people who had to throw away a whole sofa that looked perfectly good to the eye, but a quick whiff would reveal that it had been absolutely destroyed by farticles with no hope of recovery.
A few months ago I received an e-mail with the following disclaimer:
"The sender believes that this E-mail and any attachments were free of any virus, worm, Trojan horse, and/or malicious code when sent. This message and its attachments could have been infected during transmission. By reading the message and opening any attachments, the recipient accepts full responsibility for taking protective and remedial action about viruses and other defects. The sender's employer is not liable for any loss or damage arising in any way from this message or its attachments."
The sender believes the e-mail is free from viruses? Considering most of the recent virus and worm outbreaks are spread without the sender addressing any messages at all, that doesn't offer much consolation. It is even more ridiculous to say that an e-mail "could have been infected during transmission"--like someone is going to intercept a message, infect it, and pass it right on?
The disclaimer was actually forwarded to me from of my supervisors--thankfully it didn't take much of a debate for me to explain that our company didn't need to tag all of our outgoing mail with the same text.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought they used the metric system in Canada. Don't they call the quarter-pounder with cheese a Royale with cheese?
Ah ha... no one mentioned that in the parent. Thanks for the heads up!
How is "dog" two syllables? Or "fox?"
Just wondering....
I had the same problem with my old 1st-gen Playstation (bought the day it came out.) Works fine if you just flip it upside down.
Great joke, but unfortunately I don't think anyone got it.
I first heard it at a restaurant while on vacation in Denmark (I'm from the US.) There was a group of Danes at the next table who overheard our plans to visit Finland later in our trip.
"Hey, do you know why people from Finland are so thin? Because the waitress asks, Are you finished? and so they say, yes I am Finnish, and she takes away the food!"
It was especially funny being told from a non-English speaker. I guess you had to be there.
Yes, but how soon before those goddamn liberals give this organism the right to vote??
I thought of trying the same thing, but much of the spam I get doesn't have my address anywhere on it--it's all BCC. Of course, I have all messages without my name in the TO or CC moved to the junk mail folder anyway, but it still won't help me figure out who sold my name.
You're overlooking the biggest disadvantage of Linux...no good games! Just about the only software loaded on the computers we had in elementary school were games. Of course most everything we had on the Apples (IIe, IIc, II+) and the TRS-80 were educational titles, like Oregon Trail, Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, and Microzine (a subscription, actually.)
Hmmm...now to check the emu scene for some of these...
Without BASIC, how else can you play fun pranks on the classroom TRS-80?
10 PRINT "MISS LIPPE SMELLS LIKE DOO ";
20 GOTO 10
RUN
I'm pretty sure it's the TwinView part that makes the difference, as every other card I have seen with a TV-out locks you into the same resolution on both screens. I really wanted to run two displays at independent resolutions, so I made sure to find a card that specifically did that.
I bet your GF4 is hella fast for games though...but even with a GF2 I play UT at 1024x768 with 16 bit color and all the effects turned on, and the framerate is still fine for me.
At home I have a Gainward GeForce2 MX TwinView ViVo Golden Sample - see the review at Tom's Hardware. It's got TV-in *and* TV-out (ViVo), but the TwinView is what really sold me. You can set up multiple monitors using different resolutions, no matter what device you are connected to, such as two RGB monitors or a monitor and a TV (like I have.)
I forget which nView setting I have now, but have it configured for a 1280x960 resoultion on my 19" CRT and a separate 640x480 display on my TV. The Windows taskbar only shows on the CRT, but the TV has a mirror of the background and I can drag windows on to it. I usually leave Winamp running on the TV, but the coolest part is that it automatically scales video to full-screen on the TV. Like the other reply noted, any video window open on my main desktop will run fullscreen on the TV, whether it's in the foreground or not. Definitely worth looking into, as I'm sure Gainward has a newer GF4 card with similar functionality.
Well, if Q = kP, then k = Q/P. Sheesh, it took almost two years to solve that?
I guess they wanted to be especially careful to mind their P's and Q's.
When I can spare the cash, I'm going to replace my 19" Viewsonic G790 with the Neovo X-174. Not only is it 17.4 inches of LCD goodness with DVI, analog, and S-Video inputs, but the thing is also a work of art. If Apple Cinema LCDs are cute like a VW beetle, the Neovo displays are svelte and refined like a Mercedes-Benz S500.
I have an 18" Eizo L66 LCD at work and I liked the normal font smoothing much better than ClearType until I used the tuner. Also, play with your color scheme in Windows and try to set the background color to a slightly off-white. I did this and the sub-pixel rendering in ClearType now looks much better.
Yeah, but with an LCD where is your cat going to sleep?
See Ben Brown's switch commercial for the demonstration.
Here's a review of the iPod I posted on Slashdot a while back in a thread about the release of the XPlay software.
While I do agree that compact discs are often overpriced, you can't accurately compare the price of music albums to DVD movies.
What you are forgetting is that a DVD is usually not the primary source of income for a film. Most major studio releases make back their money in the theatrical release, so the DVD is just another revenue stream. A CD (or LP, or cassette), on the other hand, is the only current method to recoup an album's own production costs.
-Leigh
Evelyn Forever
How right you are...in fact, I didn't even notice that anything was fake. I just thought, "Man, today's stories sure do suck!" and moved on to DVDFile.
- Leigh
Don't know if anyone will see this post as I caught this thread late in the game, but I though I'd share my experiences with using XPlay to access the iPod in Windows.
A good friend of mine got an iPod as a corporate gift (he works for a major market radio station) and gave it to me since he doesn't own a Mac. Now, I don't have a Mac either, but as a tech-head and a digital audio guy I figured I could probably do something with it. I actually did consider getting a new iMac, but I'd heard about XPod (now XPlay) and figured I could check it out if I got a firewire port somehow.
Some background: I have been running Windows XP for about six months now on my homebuilt Athlon PC (T-Bird 1.33). I have been very happy with the performance and stability of XP, but the Turtle Beach Montego II Home Studio sound card I have used for years is only supported under 9x. I could get basic analog audio working by disabling ACPI in the BIOS, but with lousy driver support and no digital I/O, I realized it was time to upgrade.
I thought about getting a semi-pro audio card such as those from Terratec, M-Audio, and Event, but since I also use my PC for games and home theater, I ended up getting the Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum Ex. The last Creative card I had was a SB AWE32 many years ago, and though I wouldn't touch the Live! series (especially since my mobo uses a Via chipset), the Audigy is totally killer. Now, just as posts here have mentioned the possibility of people buying a Mac to complement the iPod, a big part of the reason I picked the Audigy was for the built-in Firewire port.
Okay, time to get to the goods. I downloaded and installed a beta of XPlay and hooked up my virgin iPod. To my surprise, Windows immediately recognized the iPod as an external drive and mapped it through explorer. XPlay seemed to suggest that I should control the iPod primarily through Windows Media Player, but I have generally stayed away from WMP since they introduced v7. I have never been fond of its music library management, especially since it likes to screw with your music files even if you don't want it to--no ID3v2 tags for me, thank you. And the idea that it needs to lock up 30MB of RAM just to play one song is pretty ludicrous. A quick check revealed that WMP8 did indeed see the iPod as a portable device, but I wasn't going to use it to transfer any files.
My mp3 collection is up to about 30GB now (all ripped myself using EAC with LAME), so it was a little difficult to pick out which five gigs of tunes I wanted to take with me. Going through Windows Explorer, I ctrl-clicked the folders of my favorite albums and dragged them into the \Music folder on the mapped iPod drive. Transfer was fast but not blazing, taking about 25 minutes to copy everything over the firewire. Using the Explorer interface meant that no playlists were transferred, but the Artist/Album interface on the iPod is so good that I don't really need them anyway. I suppose that I'm not really using XPlay to its fullest, but at least WMP doesn't muck up my mp3s in the process. I'd love to see plug-in support for the iPod in my player of choice, JRiver's Media Jukebox.
Reactions: While I'm not using any of XPlay's features beyond the support for HFS, I don't really need it to. I'd much rather control things myself anyway, just doing drag 'n drops instead of becoming a slave to the software interface. I also have a first gen Diamond Rio (parallel port connection!) and the original Rio Volt, and the included software has never wowed me enough to use it regularly. Actually, that's why I liked the Volt most of all, since I could just burn my own CD's and be done with it.
The iPod is definitely best of all though--the small size makes it much more convenient for the car or carrying in your pocket, and the rechargeable lithium-ion battery is just awesome. I use it in the car every day (about an hour-round trip) and only have to charge it every other week. The playback interface is the best of any I have seen--very easy to control with one hand and the white backlight works great in the dark. It does seem to skip sometimes, though it seems it's actually blank parts in the mp3 file since it happens in the same part of a song every time. My guess is that there was a blip of some sort during the firewire transfer, since the mp3s play back perfect on the computer.
Overall, XPlay does what it advertises. I can use the iPod on my PC, which would not be possible otherwise. However, there are some other features I'd like to see, such as the ability to upgrade the iPod firmware and synchronization support for programs other than WMP. Combining the huge installed base of the PC/Windows platform with the style and reliabilty of Apple hardware is a winning situation for everyone. I think that MediaFour has done just what Apple had hoped, allowing them to sell more units without getting into the headache of supporting the PC platform. And personally, I am thrilled to be an Apple user again, since my first home computer was a IIGS. Who knows, I still might pick up an iMac after all...
- Leigh
Did anyone watch the promotional video?
It's got the production quality of a middle-school extra credit assignment--though, maybe it's because the designers are just better engineers than they are video producers.
- Leigh
A few months ago I received an e-mail with the following disclaimer:
The sender believes the e-mail is free from viruses? Considering most of the recent virus and worm outbreaks are spread without the sender addressing any messages at all, that doesn't offer much consolation. It is even more ridiculous to say that an e-mail "could have been infected during transmission"--like someone is going to intercept a message, infect it, and pass it right on?
The disclaimer was actually forwarded to me from of my supervisors--thankfully it didn't take much of a debate for me to explain that our company didn't need to tag all of our outgoing mail with the same text.
---