Well, they certainly need to so something. I bought a Wii for to social side of it, but the games have all focussed on the cure controller, rather than the networking. I barely turned it on for a couple of months. I've only powered it up recently to watch YouTubed episodes of Teen Titans on my TV. Frankly, if there was anyone in my extended social network that really wanted it, I'd sell it to them.
You can't simultaneously appreciate the taste of sausage and know how it's made.
You can if it's a locally produced organic sausage that isn't made from bits blasted off the bone with a high-pressure stream of water, plus the odd bit of squirrel.
I used to collect this stuff. Well, not Crays, but retro computer hardware. Fun as it is to buy for $5 a Sun Sparc server that would have cost more than $10,000, there's a reason why this stuff is being chucked out. It's a waste of space. And if you plug it in and turn it on, it's also a waste of power.
Now, if people have enough space to start their own personal museum, I'm not going to tell them not to. But if you're an ordinary person with an ordinary house, you're better off putting them on the verge for the next council bulk rubbish collection.
Exchange is not only purchased for technical reasons. Exchange is purchased so upper management can brag that they're running a company that's all grown up. I'd just successfully tested shared calendars using Sunbird and WebDAV when I got the call that we had to move to Exchange. There was no debate, the issue was not technical.
I use a Matrox Parhelia at work and Matrox's TripleHead2Go at home for Triplehead. Right now I'm using 3072x768, using one new and two secondhand Dell/BenQ 15" LCD panels. At work it's 3840x1024, using one LCD panel and two old CRTs.
Contrary to what many others have said, I find that one of the major benefits of Matrox's triplehead implementation is that as far as Windows is concerned it's one screen. This not only provides maximum compatibility with software not properly written to cope with multihead, but it means I can easily grab the entire three screens for, say, a wide Excel spreadsheet, Photoshop, or some complicated bit of code. Matrox do provide software to make the single desktop behave like three screens for the purposes of maximising windows, but I have that turned off.
"to all the people that download music, if you think you are only hurting big companies you are wrong. There are two working people with families who no longer have jobs because of music piracy."
To the record store employee that went "pfft, no" when I asked if you had any Aphex Twin, it's not downloading that killed your store, it's the JB-HiFi that has a hundred times your range. To the owner who makes it out to be some imposition to ask if you have a particular title in your store, it's not piracy either, it's the fact that your customer service is crap. And to all the places that make it impossible to find anything not in the top 20 (seriously, how are people supposed to find stuff if you group it by label?) it's the evil Internet that's killing your sales, it's the fact that the top 20 is complete pap.
I won't be bashing Microsoft regarding the production of this patch. I will, however, have a go at them for needing it (and many others) in the first place. If MS's products weren't shovelware inspired by flypaper we wouldn't have half these problems.
WoW looks better because the textures are so much better. You can get stuff to look just as good in SL if you spend as much time on the textures. Thing is, textures cost $L to upload, so people tend to upload as few as possible, and make do if they're not quite right.
What's F-ing wrong with cranking up the dpi is that after only a few small steps you have to increase the font size anyway so that people can read it. There's no point knocking yourself out with an uber-highres screen if you can't actually fit anything more on it without making it unreadable.
Also, it's been my experience that the UI and applications look crap in anything other than the default dpi. Simply not enough care was taken to make sure everything scales nicely.
There are people where I work that have difficulty with 17" 1280x1024 displays. Now, I can read default fonts on a 15" display running at 1400x1050, but more than half the people that look at that screen comment on the font size.
Anyway, 120 dpi only brings it down to 9.9". Still a lot more than the 7 or 5 or whatever the article says.
You really only run Windows for compatibility with your preferred applications. If you don't want to run any Windows apps, don't try and shoe-horn Windows onto a portal computer. That said, Windows itself can cope easily with 640x480 and no mouse. However, most applications need at least 800x600, with many needing at least 1024 pixels across.
Personally, I like to run at 3840x1024 or 3072x768 on a desktop. This is nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with the complexity of what I do with Windows.
Let's do the math. A pixel count of 1024 across and 600 down is about the minimum you need for there to be any point in the computer running a full version of Windows. Above 100dpi and you're going to need to increase the default font sizes (which means its fairly pointless to go any higher). End result: 11.87 inches on the diagonal is about the minimum for anything serious. Below that you're going to need better than average eyesight or you're going to be scrolling sideways all the time.
Knowing Sony, Grouper's probably being sued by Columbia.
And in other news, Viacom is suing GooTube for the same dubious stuff that Viacom's Ifilm and Atom do. Anyone feel like listing all the legal actions being fired off for movie and music sharing? Then the class-action stuff over DRM. And the investigations by various government bodies into anti-competitive behaviour by assorted entertainment companies. Then there's region coding, macrovision, HDMI and watermarking.
Mimic: Little green dots throughout the picture, a (small) portion of the film missing.
The Replacement Killers: Bottom 10% or so of the picture obscured until a two-line subtitle poked over the top and someone went to tell the "projectionist".
Hollow Man and the second half of Star Wars Ep3: Cyclical distortion of the audio.
Thirteen Ghosts: We were sent to the wrong theatre, the "wrong" move started 15-30 minutes after the right movie started in the right theatre.
Something I don't even remember: Started playing Tomb Raider instead of the right movie.
And this ignores the fact that most of the titles above were also crap. It's not a boycott per se, it's just that movies are not worth seeing in the cinema anymore. Or renting on DVD. Movie studios may be worried about "piracy", but they should be more worried if more people decide that movies aren't even worth watching free.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they certainly need to so something. I bought a Wii for to social side of it, but the games have all focussed on the cure controller, rather than the networking. I barely turned it on for a couple of months. I've only powered it up recently to watch YouTubed episodes of Teen Titans on my TV. Frankly, if there was anyone in my extended social network that really wanted it, I'd sell it to them.
You should sue Achromatic1978 for libel.
I used to collect this stuff. Well, not Crays, but retro computer hardware. Fun as it is to buy for $5 a Sun Sparc server that would have cost more than $10,000, there's a reason why this stuff is being chucked out. It's a waste of space. And if you plug it in and turn it on, it's also a waste of power.
Now, if people have enough space to start their own personal museum, I'm not going to tell them not to. But if you're an ordinary person with an ordinary house, you're better off putting them on the verge for the next council bulk rubbish collection.
Exchange is not only purchased for technical reasons. Exchange is purchased so upper management can brag that they're running a company that's all grown up. I'd just successfully tested shared calendars using Sunbird and WebDAV when I got the call that we had to move to Exchange. There was no debate, the issue was not technical.
I prefer not having a join in the middle, and the TripleHead2Go lets me use any powerful 3D card with triplehead.
I use a Matrox Parhelia at work and Matrox's TripleHead2Go at home for Triplehead. Right now I'm using 3072x768, using one new and two secondhand Dell/BenQ 15" LCD panels. At work it's 3840x1024, using one LCD panel and two old CRTs.
Contrary to what many others have said, I find that one of the major benefits of Matrox's triplehead implementation is that as far as Windows is concerned it's one screen. This not only provides maximum compatibility with software not properly written to cope with multihead, but it means I can easily grab the entire three screens for, say, a wide Excel spreadsheet, Photoshop, or some complicated bit of code. Matrox do provide software to make the single desktop behave like three screens for the purposes of maximising windows, but I have that turned off.
I won't be bashing Microsoft regarding the production of this patch. I will, however, have a go at them for needing it (and many others) in the first place. If MS's products weren't shovelware inspired by flypaper we wouldn't have half these problems.
What I want is a first-party "XPLite"
It's called the DC06. This link is as good as any.
WoW looks better because the textures are so much better. You can get stuff to look just as good in SL if you spend as much time on the textures. Thing is, textures cost $L to upload, so people tend to upload as few as possible, and make do if they're not quite right.
What's F-ing wrong with cranking up the dpi is that after only a few small steps you have to increase the font size anyway so that people can read it. There's no point knocking yourself out with an uber-highres screen if you can't actually fit anything more on it without making it unreadable.
Also, it's been my experience that the UI and applications look crap in anything other than the default dpi. Simply not enough care was taken to make sure everything scales nicely.
There are people where I work that have difficulty with 17" 1280x1024 displays. Now, I can read default fonts on a 15" display running at 1400x1050, but more than half the people that look at that screen comment on the font size.
Anyway, 120 dpi only brings it down to 9.9". Still a lot more than the 7 or 5 or whatever the article says.
You really only run Windows for compatibility with your preferred applications. If you don't want to run any Windows apps, don't try and shoe-horn Windows onto a portal computer. That said, Windows itself can cope easily with 640x480 and no mouse. However, most applications need at least 800x600, with many needing at least 1024 pixels across.
Personally, I like to run at 3840x1024 or 3072x768 on a desktop. This is nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with the complexity of what I do with Windows.
Let's do the math. A pixel count of 1024 across and 600 down is about the minimum you need for there to be any point in the computer running a full version of Windows. Above 100dpi and you're going to need to increase the default font sizes (which means its fairly pointless to go any higher). End result: 11.87 inches on the diagonal is about the minimum for anything serious. Below that you're going to need better than average eyesight or you're going to be scrolling sideways all the time.
That's just like daylight savings here in Western Australia (which, thankfully, ends tonight).
Frankly, maintstream entertainment has gotten so hostile I'd rather just play a boardgame with some friends.
What does it matter, given that the chances of Dell ever shipping you the right thing appear to be rapidly approaching zero?
I use a tool to remove the EULA from the installation process, so I never agree to anything. Or maybe I don't, how would Microsoft know?
- Mimic: Little green dots throughout the picture, a (small) portion of the film missing.
- The Replacement Killers: Bottom 10% or so of the picture obscured until a two-line subtitle poked over the top and someone went to tell the "projectionist".
- Hollow Man and the second half of Star Wars Ep3: Cyclical distortion of the audio.
- Thirteen Ghosts: We were sent to the wrong theatre, the "wrong" move started 15-30 minutes after the right movie started in the right theatre.
- Something I don't even remember: Started playing Tomb Raider instead of the right movie.
And this ignores the fact that most of the titles above were also crap. It's not a boycott per se, it's just that movies are not worth seeing in the cinema anymore. Or renting on DVD. Movie studios may be worried about "piracy", but they should be more worried if more people decide that movies aren't even worth watching free.