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Pain_Man

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Everything posted by Pain_Man

  1. Pain_Man

    Australia

    Nowhere is particular. A mate of mine emailed me the dog the other day.
  2. Pain_Man

    Australia

    Nowhere is particular. A mate of mine emailed me the dog the other day.
  3. Pain_Man

    Australia

    You could probably win money for some of these shots from certain TV shows. My favorite is still the Satanic "bog" cover you came up with. Nowhere is particular. A mate of mine emailed me the dog the other day.
  4. I know. They used to charge extra to being a recorder into the show--according to a Dead Head (or is it Deadhead?) friend of mine. He had quite a few concerts taped. And the sound quality was surprisingly good. (Of course, this was before nearly all the tools that studios had in the 80s are available in, relatively, cheap software/hardware packages.) Whether this would have applied to digital recorders that are cheap nowadays, I don't know. Limbaugh made an interesting observation about Garcia: "He's the only fat junkie I've ever seen." And, getting to think about it, he's right. I've never seen an overweight junkie. And it's not like there haven't been more than few rich junkies. (Look at John & Mackenzie Phillips, for you young folks, , that'd be the founder of the Mamas & the Papas and father of Mackenzie who played the older sister to Valerie Bertinelli, aka ex-Mrs. Eddie Van Halen). The Dead were never my thing, outside a few songs (e.g. "Truckin'", "Sugar Magnolia," "St. Stephen," "Casey Jones"). Still, it is sad that Jerry couldn't clean up his act and paid for it with his life. He only got one part of the old scenario right. The other two parts? Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse. He lived fast alright. Right into the ground.
  5. sorry, dont, but I don't understand the question. Why wouldn't one be able to get into the BIOS because one's using a DVI cable?
  6. My wife just told me that she watched the disc--she's outta state--and it played without error. So the problem appears to be with the verification process (doubtful) or the drive. The drive in question, a Pioneer 110D (FW 1.41) has been fucking up lately. The DIP scans have been getting worse and worse. Have to check for a FW upgrade. See if that fixes it. Can't wait to see what kind of burner the new machine has! Sorry if I sound like a CD player with a broken repeat button, but I've never had the computer I really, really wanted till now. So I'm waiting with baited breath for it to get here. I wish now that I'd bitten the bullet and paid for Two-Day Air shipping. Waiting till 30th--if actually takes that long--is going to tie me in knots!
  7. Pain_Man

    Australia

    Shamus: Where the hell do you get these pictures?!? Catch your dog looking at canine porn? I have to keep an eye on my rats or they're on line ordering shit all the time. Politicians in Oz really are a pack of dickheads. I should pick up my things and move to the USA. The laws might be just as silly but at least I'll be able to sell my dog for a fortune.
  8. No apologies necessary. To me anyway. I've always felt one of things real friends do is tell you when you're fucking up. Anyone can be there when things are good, when times are rolling along. It's when things get sticky, that's when you find out who's a friend and who was just hanging out.
  9. Our dollars are the only language they understand. If enough people vote with their wallets, they may improve the quality of their product. Or they'll stop selling them. I just don't understand why people keep buying crappy product?! My experience, given the experience the vast majority of people on this board have had with Riteks, was obviously unique. So what gives? Are people just accepting 30%, 40% failure rates and saying, "Oh well"?
  10. I'm on the same page here. Given the rotten experiences that most of the Circle here have had with non-Mitsubishi DLs, I realize it's probably a fluke that my 3 pack of Riteks--which I only bought because the pack was $7.99--all burned without issue. Verbs are the only thing I buy. I've got two 10 packs in the Optical Larder.
  11. Funnily enough, I had the exact opposite experience. I bought a 3-pack of Memorex-branded Riteks and all three burned without issue. The DIP scans weren't as good as Verbs, but IMHO and, more importantly, experience, the jury is still out on whether DIP scans really prove anything about media. I've got two or three discs that have DIP scans in the 50-60% and they play on the HDTV without any errors. And they are among the oldest discs I have (3+ yrs).
  12. You mean, essentially, that he was converting analog recordings to digital, rather like converting film/video tape to HD digital (which is what the lion's share of "HD" content really is, thus I laugh at people who go satellite thinking, "Hey, Ma, we're gone be gettin' ever thang in that Hi Defernishun!!" Ahh, bull pucky! Regardless of that, unless Grain's right & I misunderstood the dude, I didn't think there were digital recording devices outside of the most advanced recording studios in the "early 80s." The first professional digital reel-to-reel tape machine I saw in 1991 cost $2500 and it was not portable in the sense that you couldn't throw it over your shoulder and walk about with a microphone. Kind of hard to drag an entire studio to a Grateful Dead concert. And Jerry & the Boys, between kisses from Harry the Horse, might've noticed an entire recording truck parked outside the concert venue. in re: Power Windows: where it was the first DDD album, the first copy I bought was on vinyl. Which is, of course, ironic. Because the original recording, digital, mix, digital, final product, digital, then they had to convert it to analog to make the LP. Kind of like taking, say, Revenge of the Sith, which was shot entirely on digital HiDef cameras, and putting it on VHS. Or, converting plastic to wood, steel to copper. Jesus I could go on forever (and frequently do, I know ).
  13. C'est vrai! Either way, we've got the year down pat
  14. 48 views and no comments. Really shows you what the informed consumer thinks of Memorex. And I remember the days when were happy to find Memorex cassettes on sale for $3 a pop (probably $5 in today's depreciated money). If you remember buying tapes and recording your CDs to listen to in your tape deck--your age is showing (or you didn't want to spring for the CD in your car!).
  15. I eventually bought a Samsung 225bw (WS) 22in LCD. It's kick ass. It's big enough so I can watch movies lying in bed. But small enough so it doesn't overwhelm (tho' admittedly, I wouldn't have minded say a 26in). http://www.samsung.com/Products/Monitor/LC...22DPWCBQXAA.asp The images are crisp and clean with 600:1 contrast ratio. It was a little too bright so I turned the brightness down by about 15%. The colors are so much richer and more vibrant than the 22in (4:3) Gateway-branded Sony flat-screen Trinitron CRT that's now Monitor #2. Though it only runs at 60Hz, the 5ms refresh time <?> makes the transitions invisible to the eye (mine anyway). Tho' it's on the expensive side, it was US$450 (incl. tax and shipping but came with a $20 rebate), it's well worth it. The best monitor I've ever seen outside that monster 30incher that Apple sells for CAD and graphics art work. Games look really, really good on it. In fact, playing Doom3--and my Gateway with the ATI X1900XTX Crossfire 512MB card hasn't arrived yet--I can see the limitations of the graphics engine. The inanimate objects and the demons looks good, but the people look rather angular. And where the game sometimes got "stuttery" with the CRT, most of that is gone. Plus it doesn't have those cheap ass little 1watt speakers that are utterly worthless. The directions in the "Quick Start" guide left something to be desired . They neglected to mention that one has to reboot the computer after connecting the monitor to the DVI port on the display card (in this case an ATI 9550 256MB). Once I did that, the image came right up as digital. And XP supports in natively so I didn't even need to install the driver (the CD was a piece of shit , it would barely run in either of my burners; took five times before it would even load; eventually I managed to rip a copy with CloneCD and mount that on a virtual drive and install the driver that way, and pull the manuals off it). The last thing, and this is embarassing , is that I can't figure out how to get it to swiveling/tilt 90 degrees. It has a range of 160, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to get it to work. I'll give their Questions like a call after the weekend to find out how. I did tech support for Dell. Hence, I saw fuck up after fuck up after fuck up. Working in the TS dept is never going to endear you to the products of the company (in most cases). Dell is cheaper that Gateway (in part because they use cheaper components). So when my wife wanted to get her bestfriend (for 25+ yrs) a computer for an Xmas present, I picked out a Dell barebones system for $410 total. I even dropped an extra 20 to get the machine the AMD equivalent of a P4 (AMD64 3200+, does this hyperthreading?)
  16. Pain_Man

    Australia

    @Ken Only if someone mounts a successfull challenge. And lets face it, who can be fucked doing that? As one post I read today put it, "Judges are starting to actually read the DMCA" and thus are starting to narrow it. F'r instance. Lexmark tried this really lame dick claim that they'd put "DRM" in to their printer cartidges <!> and, therefore, companies selling those kits that refill the cartridges were violating the DMCA! The courts "smacked" that down. Another company, this one made garage door openers, tried suing a company that made a universal garage door opened, claiming that the universal garage door opener was "reverse engineering" and, thus, a violation of that part of the DMCA. The courts smacked that one quicker that owl shit as well. So there are some people and companies with the balls to take on the Evil Power and they are beginning to win. The judiciary is making it increasingly clear that they aren't going to allow the DMCA to be applied to stuff that Congress never even considered such as garage door openers and ink cartridges. But corps will keep trying to squelch competition using it, so the judiciary has to stay vigilant until the day Congress changes this fucked up excuse for a law. Depends on the country. Some countries the police have lots of trouble getting warrants, let alone conducting warantless searches. Other counties, the cops can pretty much do what they want. The countries where its often the most difficult for the police to catch criminals legal or where the sentences or very lenient (e.g. France, Germany, Spain), the cops take to beating the shit out suspects or gunning them down because they know that even if the scum are convicted, they'll walk in a few years. So which system is better? Legal executions after trials and appeals? Or they cops blowing people away on the street? The latter is certainly quicker. What no other Western country I know of has that US does is what we call the "exclusionary rule." If cops here bust down your door and find 500lbs of heroin it can't be used as evidence against you. Canada--whose justice system has been criticized--fairly or unfairly I make no judgment here--as too lentient does not have an exclusionary rule. It's the most insane piece of legislating from the bench imaginable. The Burger and Rehnquist (esp the latter) did a good job at injecting some common sense into the insanity of the Warren court decisions of the Sixties (actually the line of precedence for tying the hands of the police goes back to the 20s!). No longer do murderers walk free because a cop grabbed the form for an arson warrant instead of a murder warrant (this actually happened in the late 70s; a guy strangled his girlfriend with an electrical cord and set her body on fire; the homicide detective mistakenly grabbed a form for an arson warrant; the courts ruled that the killer's "rights" had been "violated" because the wrong fucking piece of paper was used! No more of that bullshit. It's called the "good faith" exception. As long as the cop is acting in "good faith" and not trying to get around the Bill of Rights and SCOTUS precedent, trial judges can't use ridiculous technicalities to throw out crucial evidence. And, holy shit!, putting violent criminals in jail has resulted in 12 yr straight decline in violent crimes. Wow. Locking up thugs reduces crime. A stunning concept.
  17. @Grain My wife bought a road atlas for her trip to Utah (no Mormon jokes pls. Ok, a few, tho' we aren't Mormon). We looked up your home town. Quite ironic considering your love a certain late 60s TV show. I read it differently than you did, or misunderstood it. I thought he was saying he personally made digital recordings. Also, I thought that Rush's Power Windows--also 1985--was the first DDD--all digital--album ever released? Which I hope is true. Another milestone for my favorite and Canada's most successful band. (You know, if it weren't for the taxes, I'd probably move to the GWN in a heartbeat. Expound later on this in an email.)
  18. Your own Personal Jesus Pick up the receiver I'll make up a believer Believe it or not, Johnny Cash covered PJ on his second to last album. Needless to say, it's an entirely different song in his hands (voice?). He's been quoted as saying that he thought he was too self-righteous with his religion in the 70s. Covering "Personal Jesus" can only be a kind of repudiation of the sort of televangelists he associated with back then.
  19. Internal HDDs = NTFS External HDD (Iomega Silver External USB 320GB ) = FAT32 (I decided to keep it FAT32, and will sense, once my new bad-ass machine gets here the ext hdd will be for system back ups using Acronis TI 9; as well as storage of other important docs like tax files, etc; I want to be able to access it, in case of disaster, just using a 9x boot CD. Now that I read, does it make sense to do it this way? Minter only uses FAT32 because, obviously, NTFS can only be read by Windows, and, depending on the version, only by NT4, NT 5 (aka 2000), NT6 (aka XP) and, presumable NT7 (aka Vista) will have it's own version of NTFS, backwards but not forward compatible, correcto? or no correcto?)
  20. (PM, hmm, just noticed how easily that could be Pre-Menstrual. Odd no one's ever made a joke along those lines. Given the deliciously sardonic wit so many of us are blessed with, I'm surprised (dot)(dot)(dot).) Pain_Man requesth a little history lesson. He doth feel a bit of a Anyway, I found this article about Apple's proprietary lossless encoder found in iTunes (although it a codec has apparently been written for it with a third-party player, something I haven't heard of, called dbpoweAMP). This statement from the article floored me: Apple Lossless Encoding can be used for audio from other sources, too. I transferred some of my early live digital recordings, made in the early 1980s, to my Macintosh using lossless encoding in iTunes. Unlike most CDs, my live digital recordings are unrelenting in their variations in loudness and quietness (I used no limiters), and the lossless encoding handled the wide dynamic range very well. * Let me get this straight: digital recording was possible in the early 1980s? (I'm assuming this means before 1985.) And what I mean here is not that I'm surprised it existed period, but that it was available to the "man in the street." Obviously, CDs came out in the 1980s, so digital recording tech had to exist before then. And I got my first CD player in 1986. CDRs didn't appear until, what, 12 years after? But had no idea that digital records existed outside multi-million dollar recording studios! If memory serves, DAT didn't appear till the late 80s (i.e. after 1986). So I'm wondering, how this guy could have made live digital recordings during the early years of the Reagan Administration?! Many of you have been involved with digital audiophilia waaaay longer than I have so I'm hoping someone can give me a little history lesson. *The entire article can be found here http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/mac060204.html
  21. --->>Got that damned 403 error when I used ellipses. Why does that happen??? Post may be a little strange, but I was having trouble posting new threads at all--and then I remembered the problem with ellipses. Come across a couple of things I don't understand. I've installed IE 7 and, so far, I'm pretty impressed. It's a little slow loading pages vs. FireFox but I think that has to do with this new "Phishing Filter" (I'm not sure of the efficacy of this, whether it should be turned off. Any opinions on this?) It seems to me that once a page has passed muster by the filter during the "session" (in my youth the word session was usually preceeded by a word that startd with "b" and ended with "g" ) I went to copy the URL of an "emoticon" (a rather fancy word for smiley faces) from julli.dk ("Darkurbia" now--does that mean anything?) And I got this pop up: Needless to say, I was surprised. I had no idea that by copying an URL from a webpage you were allowing a web page access to your clipboard? Is Microsoft just going overboard here--trying to make up for their "Internet Security? We don't need no stinking Internet Security!!!" attitude? I'm not a programmer so I am not seeing how copying some text to one's clipboard allows a site access to the inner workings of XP? ZoneAlarm says nothing about an intrusion. So, as Ricky Ricardo used to say: "Lucy, I'm confuuse." The second has to do with this "size" of a file and "size on disc". I've seen it before, with compressed files, but I've got a new computer on the way, should be here mid-next week, hopefully earlier. So I'm copying tons of files to an ext USB hdd in preparation. Here's an example of what I'm talking about. Two property sheets. It seems common sense that a file is either one size or the other. Yet, the property sheets report a difference. What, uh, gives?
  22. This is a test. I'm getting 403 errors when I try to put up a new thread...
  23. It's because I'm American. I piss people off by breathing. Sometimes I get the feeling some people want the whole country . (Probably not the people literally climbing over walls to get in, tho.)
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