Category: Life

Well, Quinnware has released has released a new beta media player called “Quintessential Media Player” [QMP]. Quintessential Player [QCD], their standard music player provided on that site, is a very competent freeware Winamp-style music player. Heck, I even made a rather succesful skin for it [woo – 9000 downloads]. Personally QCD is my favourite music player out there.

Now, however, they’ve released a new beta player that’s more akin to Foobar/WMP, with a far more advanced playlist system, and a far more developped video player.

That said, the video player is still not anywhere nearly as fully-featured as dedicated movie players such as Media Player Classic or VideoLAN. It’s more comparable to Windows Media Player or RealPlayer in terms of its pretty-interface meets lack-of-features.

Another thing that I don’t like of this new beta “Quintessential Media Player” is the “music browser” system, which sends your tracks over to the Gracenote website, and then retrieves an information page on the album being played. I really don’t like this dependance on an internet connection, nor the commercialisation aspects of such an addition.

All good things must come to an end, and I suspect that QMP signals the end of an efficient, free, versatile, minimalist music player that was QCD. This is sort of akin to the jump of WinAmp 2.x to WinAmp 5.x for those who are geeky enough to know what I mean.

Update: It’s occured to me that maybe I was too harsh on QMP. It still is a decent player, the default skin is much prettier than the default skin for QCD, and I suspect that the plugins between QCD and QMP are fully compatible (same underlying engine).

It still beats WinAmp, and blows Windows Media Player out of the water, esp. since it adds support for external devices (ie. portable MP3 players) as well as a self-maintained rating system for your music.

Update: It’s been 3 months since I wrote this review, and QMP has become my main music player. In that time, I really haven’t been hindered by the programs intermingling with the Internet, and I find that the introduced tweaks and features make this player quite superior to its predecessor.

WASHINGTON — President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss “intelligent design” alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.

“I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” Bush said. “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”

To teach “Intelligent Design” in a science class would simply be unscientific.

Science is a philosophy in search of truth, not truth itself. It consists of theories, which must be scientifically proven. Then, the most solid theory is accepted by the community. Evolution is one such theory, but also one that has been validated/proven over and over.

Intelligent Design, however, remains a theory that cannot be proven. That in itself does not mean that it is wrong or non-existant, but scientifically it is a very weak argument. It is a case of two thousand year old scriptures vs. modern experiments.

If Bush wants “Intelligent Design” taught in a religion class, or in a class that is dedicated to studying alternative theories of the beginnings of life – that’s fine with me. But if he wants it taught alongside evolution in a science class as a theory that is just as plausible, then I have a problem.

Well, I tried Gentoo’s new experimental LiveCD. Its a fun variation – it now provides a fully functional X environment this time; as well as a GUI installer. The CD-based distro was pretty awesome – pretty much all hardware was recognized out of the box.

The installer though, left me amiss. I tried it, set it all up. I was informed within 0.5 second of me pressing the final “Install” button that the installation had failed. That in itself wasn’t bad. That is up until I went to the partitioning bit again, and noticed that this failed install also managed to wipe out my MBR. [The plan was to dual boot between Windows and Gentoo.]

Thus, my Windows install, and everything on my machine was wiped out. The good news? I did a full system backup 2 weeks ago, so I haven’t lost all that much. No lost school work or games to worry about either. So overall I’m quite happy.

I tried the distro 5 days ago, but with work only had time to fix my computer today (4 days of 12 hour shifts). Thus why I haven’t been online recently.

All I can say is “wow”.

FEAR is Monolith’s new FPS on the block. Monolith being the development house that brought us classics such as SHOGO and “No One Lives Forever”.

First off – the game engine. Monolith’s new engine is very impressive, seemingly merging the detailed characters from Doom 3, and mixing them with the visual effects of Half-Life 2. The game, thus far, has featured many cramped spaces “a la Doom 3”, though these levels failed to approach the amount of details found in the environments of Doom 3 or even HL2. That said, the graphics are sharp.

Now the gameplay, is scary, though its approach to how precisely to scare you is very mixed (for better or worse). At first, its all about random, scary, events (lights going out, flaps shutting). Then its about this freaky-ass girl that fades out of nowhere to provide scary taunts. And then, its these soldiers bursting out of corners when you least expect it. The final effect is one scary game, though the inconsistency might ilk some.

Lastly, I find that some game elements lack polish. The cinematics appear very bland. You can see your feet in this game, though they really do little to increase the realistic nature of the game – when you turn around, your legs stay straight as your body turns, seemingly making you appear floating about.

This game has potential. It’ll be interesting to see how it all ultimately pans out.

Textbooks. I could write a textbook on how textbooks are a ripoff.

Needless to say, depending on how popular your subject may be, you can pay upwards of $150 for a [required, mandated, don’t have it you’re screwed] textbook. Now I understand that much of that money is in fact pure profit to go pay the publishers/authors for their time/research. After all, I can buy a book of the same dimensions at Chapters [Canadian bookstore] for about $40.

I’ve learned that University is a business, and nothing else. Aims of ‘higher morals’ were simply a fantasy taught in schools. But if a standard author can be content with the profits from his $40 sell, why can’t a university professor that authored the book? Especially, since by the virtue of being introduced in any one university, his sells increase exponentially? Think of it: 3,000 students a year at University X are forced to buy his book. And thats just in one year. Who else can enjoy such market permeation?

Anyways – my thoughts are that textbooks are ripoffs. And just when I thought that it was at its worst – it got even more abysmal.

Coming to campus: E-books with expiration dates
By John Borland, CNET News.com
When students at Princeton University, the University of Utah and eight other colleges start combing their school bookstore shelves for fall semester textbooks, they’ll find a new alternative to the hard-covered tomes they’re used to buying.

Alongside the new and used versions of Dante’s “Inferno” and “Essentials of Psychology” will be little cards offering 33 percent off if students decide to download a digital version of a text instead of buying a hard copy.

So – you now pay $100 instead of $150. But you also don’t have anything tangible – no books. Therefore, the cost of producing this eBook on CD is nada. Maybe $2 at best. They cash in $98 in pure profits. Now such figures are pure speculation on my part, but needless to say that the final figures won’t be all that far off.

Not only that, but that $100 purchase is essentially deleted in 5 months by the author (DRM). Now with a normal book at $150, I can at least resell it for $70… if the new annual edition isn’t out [another ploy]… or if I fail the class [as I have], I can at least reuse it.

Not so with 5-month DRMed books. This is an exercise in pure greed if ever I saw it, and the fact that the administration of Princeton sees nothing wrong with this exploitation is even worse. My faith into the integrity of universities suddenly dropped.

I should note that price is normally somewhat irrelevant to me. I am fortunate enough that I can still live at home while I attend. That said, all my money goes to pay university. All of it, so that I may not be caught with a $20,000 debt when I get out. I have bought stuff yes – but pretty much all of it was with either tips I get in the day (I’m a tourguide), and a second job I did a month ago (which went to pay off my previous debt).

But price – is not irrelevant to my friends. Take Corie, and a million of my friends. They’re returning here in Ottawa to continue their studies. Most don’t live at home because their home is hours/days away. Here they are, now paying rent. That’s $400 a month. Plus living expenses. That’s what… $200 a month? That’s the equivalent of a month’s parttime paycheck at a standard lowly job. They are below the poverty line. If they weren’t attending university – then they could at least work fulltime. But they can’t because university schedule takes up some prime working hours. Then in summer, if they live in Ottawa, rent/living-expenses takes up much of their profits. They’ll save up maybe half of whats needed to pay off this year’s tuition, if that. They have to take loans, and go further in debt. Maybe they’re about $10,000 in debt already. 19/20 year olds.

And this university wants them to buy $100 CDs of text that will go bad in 5 months?

This is precisely why I lost faith in the institution.

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