I've only just left the dial-up world myself and I don't recall websites being that much of a problem. One thing that can't hurt though is a good ad filter. I use proxomitron.
I like the core of Windows as a common platform for development of hardware and software. I hate the bloat and I loath the licensing. I don't care how nice the campus looks, I just want a (fast, stable) product that does what I want without it somehow being a breach of some licence or other.
While the bottom temporarily dropped out of the PDA market, it's come back stronger than ever now that wireless technologies are coming as standard. I don't have any need for a PDA that can't talk to some sort of network, but I've just bought a WiFi enabled PDA that talks to my home wireless network so that I can remote control my stuff, browse the web or whatever. Even as recently as last year I was declaring that I'd never buy another PDA (I had a Newton and a Palm) when I bought my new Series 60 mobile phone, but without wireless it's not a handy little device around the home.
Ignoring connectivity for a moment, sure, people would rather carry one thing over four, but people also have their own requirements for this stuff. I have my mobile phone, an iPod, a Pocket PC and a digital camera that I use at least semi-regularly. The mobile is with me all the time, the iPod almost all the time, the Pocket PC is used a lot at home at the moment and the camera is taken with me when I know I'm going to be taking photos. These devices are all of varying vintages, ranging from 5 years to 10 days old. Invariably, you get used to how they work and you don't feel the need to replace them while they still do. You'll make do with multiple items even if there is an integrated solution that's just as good in all the aspects that matter.
Anyway, if my phone was my camera, how would I lend my camera to a friend for the weekend?
I worked out that the cheapest way, by far, to add storage is to just put an IDE hard drive in a PC. I have two on a network. If you run out of controllers before you run out of space, buy a PCI IDE card. Sod RAID for backups, buy a DVD burner, I've got a dual layer one, just waiting for media.
My mother had a duck crap on her laptop. Wasn't two months old at the time. It's about three years old now and it suffers more because it runs 98 than because of the duck.
I think you're referring to SIPPs. A friend of mine desoldered all the pins from his SIPPs when he upgraded to a new motherboard that took SIMMs. I don't remember it working.
I tried Fusion, but the grabbing hold of the ledge thing really ruined the pace for me.
It's cool. I play a few hours of Diablo II on a LAN with friends each week, but other than that I've got almost two seasons of Babylon 5 that I've never seen to watch. I won't even need to think about a new game for months. And when that time rolls around, there are classes in Sacred that I haven't even tried yet.
I found the camera system to be seriously flawed, many times I was just lining up an action as the camera moved 180 degrees on me, causing the character to plunge to his death. Also, I found the puzzles to be tedious and annoying. I gave up at the first door that you had to get to within a time limit after attempting to run maybe a dozen times, each time having to deal with camera problems and a sadistic and contrived palace security system. I could do it fast and get hurled off the ledge when the camera screwed me over, or I could wait for the camera to do its thing and not make it to the door in time. On a scale of one to fun this was a minus hojillion. I don't know any of my friends who finished the PC version either, all citing serious camera annoyance.
I'm not a huge fan of platformers, but I liked the first PoP, and I very much enjoyed Super Metroid. I currently have Sonic on my N-Gage. The Super Mario Brothers leaves me cold though.
Tactical RPG or real-time strategy stuff doesn't do much for me. I'm a Diablo II fan myself, also enjoying Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Siege and most recently Sacred. I also had great fun with Lord of the Rings: Two Towers and Return of the King on the GBA.
The first two points in the writeup are the reason why I gave up on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time after spending A$100 on a copy for the PS2. Mind you, the reason why it was such a waste of time and I kept dying was a combination of stupid traps and a really bad camera system. Hint: If your camera algorithm flips from one side of the player to the other just as they're about to perform a tricky maneuver with controls that are relative to the camera position you're going to annoy some people.
As an aside, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was the last game I bought for the current generation of video game consoles. My Gamecube is packed away, my PS2 is just my DVD player. I simply can't find any enjoyable games on consoles for me at the moment.
I picked up on that one too. I wouldn't want a screen predominantly for TV that couldn't play anything by itself, because I don't want to have to turn everything on every time. Heck, when I bought my first 15" LCD screen for home I spent 3x the price of a normal screen in order to get one with speakers, a tuner and lots of video input options.
Sounds like a sound card with 128MB of RAM and an Ogg Vorbis decoder would help with resource management significantly. Anything like this out there or on the horizon?
I can tell you that the theory is realistic, having run several compressed filesystems and generally having an interest in (transparent) compression, but I can't say if it's correct. It sounds a little wrong as it's fairly easy to say "no, don't try to compress files with extension X because it won't work". More likely Gmail choked on the decoding of attachments -- as you wouldn't store them in a wasteful 7-bit format.
I hammered my own gmail account by forwarding up all my old messages using an Eudora filter. I was sending as many as 2,000 messages in a 15 minute period at one stage. While Gmail didn't lock me out, some messages took a particularly long time to appear. These messages were typically old automated receipts, such as eBay messages, that all look very similar but are in fact separate conversations. I'm guessing that there's a lot of overhead when a message arrives to determine if it's related to existing messages.
I don't see these "legitimate users" threatening to boycott games with Safedisc on it.
I didn't buy the second Neverwinter Nights expansion because it was reported that it refused to run if you were using any CD emulation software. I was using said software at the time to run Chessmaster 8000 without having to keep the disc in my drive.
That and I never finished the first expansion, despite enjoying the original game.
I had a similar issue a the last place I worked. We were able to work around it by having one of the Apache C gurus tweak mod_gzip to not compress stuff going to anything with one of the X-Proxy headers set, but even that wasn't 100% effective.
I increased the minimum size required before a page would be compressed. I think I took it up to 3k. That solved the problem, or people just gave up, I'm never sure which it is.
Slashdot Mirror
...unless you particularly feel like converting all your purchases into US$.
I can do better than that. How about we detail the situations were a string of crap made us give up on a whole class of products?
I've only just left the dial-up world myself and I don't recall websites being that much of a problem. One thing that can't hurt though is a good ad filter. I use proxomitron.
I like the core of Windows as a common platform for development of hardware and software. I hate the bloat and I loath the licensing. I don't care how nice the campus looks, I just want a (fast, stable) product that does what I want without it somehow being a breach of some licence or other.
Ignoring connectivity for a moment, sure, people would rather carry one thing over four, but people also have their own requirements for this stuff. I have my mobile phone, an iPod, a Pocket PC and a digital camera that I use at least semi-regularly. The mobile is with me all the time, the iPod almost all the time, the Pocket PC is used a lot at home at the moment and the camera is taken with me when I know I'm going to be taking photos. These devices are all of varying vintages, ranging from 5 years to 10 days old. Invariably, you get used to how they work and you don't feel the need to replace them while they still do. You'll make do with multiple items even if there is an integrated solution that's just as good in all the aspects that matter.
Anyway, if my phone was my camera, how would I lend my camera to a friend for the weekend?
U: I'm having problems with my SCSI controller.
S: Does the sound card part still work?
U: Uhh...
I worked out that the cheapest way, by far, to add storage is to just put an IDE hard drive in a PC. I have two on a network. If you run out of controllers before you run out of space, buy a PCI IDE card. Sod RAID for backups, buy a DVD burner, I've got a dual layer one, just waiting for media.
My mother had a duck crap on her laptop. Wasn't two months old at the time. It's about three years old now and it suffers more because it runs 98 than because of the duck.
I think you're referring to SIPPs. A friend of mine desoldered all the pins from his SIPPs when he upgraded to a new motherboard that took SIMMs. I don't remember it working.
What version of Windows? It wasn't until 98SE that Windows would issue a HLT to the CPU when it wasn't using it.
It's not a scam you insensitive clod!
One of my filters or browser settings was killing the onMouseOver status changer, so the test more or less fell flat. Does this score me over 100%?
It's cool. I play a few hours of Diablo II on a LAN with friends each week, but other than that I've got almost two seasons of Babylon 5 that I've never seen to watch. I won't even need to think about a new game for months. And when that time rolls around, there are classes in Sacred that I haven't even tried yet.
I found the camera system to be seriously flawed, many times I was just lining up an action as the camera moved 180 degrees on me, causing the character to plunge to his death. Also, I found the puzzles to be tedious and annoying. I gave up at the first door that you had to get to within a time limit after attempting to run maybe a dozen times, each time having to deal with camera problems and a sadistic and contrived palace security system. I could do it fast and get hurled off the ledge when the camera screwed me over, or I could wait for the camera to do its thing and not make it to the door in time. On a scale of one to fun this was a minus hojillion. I don't know any of my friends who finished the PC version either, all citing serious camera annoyance.
Tactical RPG or real-time strategy stuff doesn't do much for me. I'm a Diablo II fan myself, also enjoying Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Siege and most recently Sacred. I also had great fun with Lord of the Rings: Two Towers and Return of the King on the GBA.
As an aside, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was the last game I bought for the current generation of video game consoles. My Gamecube is packed away, my PS2 is just my DVD player. I simply can't find any enjoyable games on consoles for me at the moment.
I picked up on that one too. I wouldn't want a screen predominantly for TV that couldn't play anything by itself, because I don't want to have to turn everything on every time. Heck, when I bought my first 15" LCD screen for home I spent 3x the price of a normal screen in order to get one with speakers, a tuner and lots of video input options.
I didn't know that Seagate were putting little backup batteries in their hard drives...
Sounds like a sound card with 128MB of RAM and an Ogg Vorbis decoder would help with resource management significantly. Anything like this out there or on the horizon?
I hammered my own gmail account by forwarding up all my old messages using an Eudora filter. I was sending as many as 2,000 messages in a 15 minute period at one stage. While Gmail didn't lock me out, some messages took a particularly long time to appear. These messages were typically old automated receipts, such as eBay messages, that all look very similar but are in fact separate conversations. I'm guessing that there's a lot of overhead when a message arrives to determine if it's related to existing messages.
That and I never finished the first expansion, despite enjoying the original game.
Meanwhile, I love having a real bluetooth stack, and the latest nVidia drivers work with the concurrent sessions hack.