Ever want a particular sound and don’t want to mess with having to find a WAV to do it?
There are websites which simply play those sites.
Some examples:
See get a good list go here:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/03/08/top-four-instant-sound-effect-sites/
I want this. I need this.
I’ve long stopped using the highest settings on my cameras because there’s really no quality difference that I can tell other than when I want to zoom in and crop a piece.
On cameras, we need a new spec to help us know what quality image we can expect.
In the meantime, check out this Ars article on the topic:
In Finland, how much you make determines the amount of a fine.
For instance, a Finnish millionaire recently got a 112,000-euro speeding ticket (he was about 10 over). That’s because the fine is calculated using what he earned last year.
So the guy who inherits his wealth and sits on his butt is fine. But the guy who’s working his rear end off gets penalized more.
Taking this to its logical conclusion, a young person should get more time in prison because he has more life available to him than an old person.
I understand the rationale – you want the punishment to be felt equally by all citizens. But this flies in the face of the concept of all people are equal in the eyes of the law. If the concern is that speeding is such a big deal (or any given crime) then lock them up. But looking at how much someone earns as a means to determining punishment is repellent.
Consider this: Two people making the same amount per hour. One person chooses to work part time. The other person chooses to work 60 hours a week. Both are caught speeding. The person who works more ends up having to pay more.
It creates a society that punishes achievement. Luckily for Finland, it has a population of 5 million and is largely homogenous. So it can get away with this kind of thinly veiled class warfare.
In the United States, by contrast, such policies would be a disaster.
But take a look at how left-wing Digg users react:
http://digg.com/autos/Finnish_millionaire_gets_111_888_euro_speeding_ticket
As some of you know, I started out in life with relatively little. It’s one of the reasons I don’t tend to be the most sympathetic person towards people who spend their entire lives being poor.
Americans who are chronically poor, in most cases, can look at their own poor choices as being why they’re in the state they’re in. The remaining are people who are physically more mentally disabled and those people I have endless compassion for.
Being wealthy doesn’t mean you’re better than others. It just means that you have managed to adapt yourself to the social/economic conditions of your environment. That happens to be a skill I’m reasonably good at.
For me, wealth has never been a goal. Freedom is the goal. I want to be free to do what I want which requires a threshold of wealth to be obtained. Beyond that, I don’t care. I’m not heavily motivated to build empires of wealth just for the sake of building empires – particularly if it results in some loss of personal freedom.
Different people have different levers that motivate them. Some people crave respect. Other people crave adulation. Still others use wealth as a score card to live a life of achievement. And there are of course people who crave material wealth because that’s what makes them happy. For me, it’s what I said, freedom. I want to do what I want to do.
I’d argue that I have a form of narcissism. Not the self-love kind but rather excessive self-ego. I do care about other people and how what I do will affect other people but I relentlessly pursue my own personal agenda.
A normal company of our size wouldn’t have its CEO out on the forums mixing it up with customers. And for good reason – I’m pretty rude and unprofessional. When I get into the mud with some disgruntled customer, it makes me and my company look amateurish and it costs us money in terms of business. Clearly, since I know those things and will still continue to hang out on the chat channels and the forums chatting with other users rather than using an alias or having “handlers” do that sort of thing I must have other priorities and I do – being able to do what I want.
In my experience, most people who are wealthy are people who have become extremely adept at doing what they are doing. And what they are doing produces wealth that enriches them. What happens, in many cases, is that the means becomes the end – their ambition becomes the goal rather than the means to a concrete objective. It’s a path that I think leads many people to have regret later in life.
Some people, which we’ll generally call “losers”, look at the most successful people and think they’re greedy. If only that were the case. The most successful people are often people who are achieving for achievement’s sake with money being the scorecard. That is what I am trying to avoid.
Sometimes, when I get busy, I will nearly forget why I’m working so hard. Because I happen to be so good at what I do, new opportunities arise to do even more – the ambition starts to become an ends unto itself. So I have to remind myself why I do this – freedom. The freedom to live my life as I see fit. To able to be the husband I want to be for my wife and the father I want to be for my children without having to compromise. It’s often a delicate balance between sticking to ones goals and controlling the urge to let ambition take over.
The long beta program draws to a close. This has been the most challenging game I’ve worked on yet.
The biggest part of the challenge has been the evolution of betas in the PC game industry. Stardock has been doing public betas of its games since 1993 when the OS/2 version of Galactic Civilizations went into beta. We’ve always done it the same way – we put the betas out very early, very buggy, very non-fun and incorporate feedback into the game.
For many years, no one else had these beta programs. But in the last couple of years, someone decided (wrongly IMO) that a public beta program would be a good marketing exercise. The problem is that when people joined the Demigod beta, many of them had only experienced those marketing betas which weren’t true betas.
Stardock betas have worked like this for eons:
Beta 1: Buggy/Sucky.
Beta 2: Less Buggy/Sucky.
Beta 3: Less Buggy/AWESOME.
When we did Sins of a Solar Empire, a lot of the beta testers came from the Galactic Civilizations world so they already knew how we worked. The Sins betas were actually a lot rougher than the Demigod betas because we had far fewer resources between us (Stardock/Ironclad). But most beta testers understood it was a beta and the game came together in the last month before release and has gone on to win tons of Game of the Year awards (like Galactic Civilizations II did before it).
With Demigod, however, being a very different game than GalCiv or Sins, we mostly had people who had never been in a Stardock beta. Many had been familiar with Supreme Commander and its “beta” (which was a marketing beta where the game was largely done). So when they picked up Demigod betas, they found that the game was buggy and utterly sucked. In Beta 1 and 2, we intentionally messed with values in order to make the game not fun so that players would focus on the parts we cared about (beta 1 – engine, beta 2 – network).
So as Beta 3B has made clear, yea, it has all come together. Suddenly there’s a growing buzz that hey, Demigod might be the strategy game to beat this year (if we can get websites to quit listing it as an RPG <g>).
It’s not beta testers fault though. The PC game industry needs to stop having those marketing betas because they completely alter the perception of what a real beta is and what the goals. This Spring, we’re going to start the Elemental beta nearly a year before release. We are currently planning to not even have the graphics engine in Beta 1 but rather have players play on the cloth map so that we can drive home the point that betas aren’t supposed to be fun, they’re supposed to be solving specific problems.
Next week, we’re going to have a beta 3C. It’ll be even better than beta 3B but still, no where near as fun as the release date game will be. The thing to remember here is that Stardock and GPG are privately held companies. We’re in this for the game. We don’t have public shareholders to satisfy. We just want to make an awesome game. Hopefully, players are now able to see what our goals were with these latest betas and like where we’re going. And like all our other games, the release date version of the game is only the beginning. 
Screenshots taken on my Thinkpad laptop (great graphics that don’t require mega hardware)
Demigod: Rook
There are a lot of things I rant about to my poor wife– CO2 claptrap, illegal immigration, political correctness, the failure of our schools, the insouciance of government, societal disintegration generally. I see cowardice everywhere. The case of our friend, Mark Steyn leaps to mind. When we have governmental tribunals to silence citizens –and non citizens alike!– (as in Canada and in Europe) totalitarianism is not far away. I am astonished that I see only shrugs over the possibility of International tribunals holding sway over Americans. I observe how clever liberals are at labeling people and then getting laws passed to silence their branded enemies. Yes, now they are truly Enemies of the State. Conservatives must continue to sound the alarm. Indeed, they must become more vocal. They cannot allow the high ground to be taken if they want to recognize their country in only a few decades hence.
Read the whole thing here: http://www.melissaclouthier.com/2009/03/06/why-conservatives-worry-a-letter-from-a-reader/
Definitely worth the read.
[Known Issues]
ü Logging out of Internet and then logging back in during a single session will not function (restart Demigod instead).
[Fixes/Improvements]
ü AI improvements
o Shopping, Attacking, Moving
o General targeting blocks removed
o Torchbearer Icemode planning overhaul
o Backup restart timer set to 2 seconds
o Prebuild preferences for AI Demigods
o Better Clickable prioritization
o Melee improvements to targeting, engagement, and cleanup
o Grunt citadel standoff fix
ü Memory leak elimination
ü Balancing
o Cloak of Night warp range reduced from 20 to 15.
o Mage Slayer proc chance reduced from 40 to 15 (ranged 10).
o Warp Stone range reduced from 30 to 20.
o Warp Stone price increased from 2500 to 3500.
o Oak spirit max reduced from 12 to 10.
o Sedna Yeti health and damage progression increased.
ü Rally Marker adjustments
ü Movie adjustments, and localization support
ü Update UI adjusted for clarity
ü Create Account improvements
ü Removed IP, and Port debugging information from connecting dialog.
ü Eliminated unit sliding with priests, Rook, Oak, and Regulus
ü Purchased achievement items now persist through tournament.
ü Item
o Totem of war was multiplying damage, corrected to adding damage.
o Mageslayer: attack speed increased to 25%, weapon damage increased to 45, stun removed.
ü Fixed start custom game citadel upgrade alerts.
ü Icon updates
ü Fixed overlay UI collisions (was eating mouse clicks meant for the game world)
ü Hiding cursor during opening movie chain.
ü Profile fixes for achievements
ü Setting timeout default to none (still host modifiable).
ü Added executable version checking redundancy and warning message.
ü Changed time references to 24 hour clock to help Europeans
ü Sound effect work for lobby and victory movies.
ü Added small delay to disconnect to allow goodbye packets to exchange.
ü Deprecated console
ü Game credits update
ü Retrieve Password functionality hooked up to Impulse.
ü Voice play limiting
ü Fixes to transparent wall sections, and removal of some main-path blocking walls.
ü Artillery tower unit model fixes
ü Eliminated some sound looping in menus.
ü Acclimation buff loop fixes.
ü Pause hotkey reactivation
ü Fix for lines in background of SP and MP menus.
ü Fixed floating point error on Citadel health in Conquest mode.
ü Performance related decal fixes to Hammerslam
ü Player drop AI takeover improvements
ü Changed achievement stat checking frequency.
ü UI Icon adjustments
ü Found missing textures on frozen Torchbearer.
Interesting article here: http://www.melissaclouthier.com/2009/03/04/going-john-galt-stop/
Definitely worth reading.
So my taxes are going to go up. Way up. But don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. The middle class, however, won’t be so fine.
Part of the problem with our society is that deep down, we know some basic truths about it but it has been made impolitic to speak about these truths.
So here are some of the unspoken truths that most people already know.
#1 In any group working on a mutual goal, it almost always boils down to a handful of superstars to make it a success or not. This is true whether it be a sports team or a business or even a student project.
#2 The people who actually do stuff are the ones with power. Being a CEO or being a senator doesn’t make you powerful. It’s not your position that gives you power, it’s what you do that gives you power.
#3 Some people are just more capable than others. There’s no way around it. It’s not “luck” (unless you want to say everything is genetic destiny). It’s just reality. Some people are smarter, more energetic, healthier, more self-disciplined than others.
Those 3 things add up to one general truism: Our society is driven by a tiny percent of people. The upper percent or two of tax payers are heavily represented in that group. Being rich doesn’t mean you are better. There are plenty of real nipples in the top income brackets but if you wanted to find the ones who really drive our society, you’re a lot more likely to find them at an Entreprenuer’s convention than say an ACLU meeting.
Another truism about human nature is that people will tend to do what is in their own best interest. Not everyone is that way but it is a general truism. Natural selection has guaranteed that.
Thus, if the government begins to do things to the movers and shakers of our society, you can be sure that it will “trickle down” to everyone else. People can debate whether trickle down works in terms of tax cuts but there should be no debate that misery trickles down.