Since you're comparing to iTunes then I'll just have to assume the comparison you're making is between iTunes and Windows Media Player. And if you seriously think that the user interface for WMP is better than the iTunes UI then I have a bridge you may be interested in purchasing...
Ah yes, the "house rules", the best way to play pretty much any RTS game.
I've found that every RTS I've played with others over a LAN has gotten boring pretty quickly, but after adding a few rules (that are enforced by throwing stuff at those who break them) like "2v2, no breaking alliances and no one is allowed to cross the river in the middle of the map for the first n minutes" tends to make the gameplay a lot more fun, I kind of wish they would build such features straight into the games but most times it's just speed, resources, tech level and map when playing multiplayer.
Of course, the NE2k driver that came with win95 didn't actually work with most NE2k-compatible NICs so you often had to have the manufacturer's driver floppy.
Another "interesting" win9x issue was when it would just decide to start munching on the TCP/IP stack, at one point I actually checked the file size and noticed that it changed by a few bytes when winsock just stopped working, and once again the win95 install disc was brought out for yet another reinstall of the IP stack...
Then you were lucky, where I worked the procedure for handling calls from the police and other authorities involved filling out a form and then handing it over to a specific member of management, and the whole procedure would generally take days to get sorted out. And the form was only to be filled out after getting an Ok to do so from a team lead.
Of course, but I just don't think it's fair to blame those working the call center, it's a management problem (and one of those unspoken "rules" in call centers is that management never gets blamed for anything. Understaffed? Clearly that is the fault of the tech support agents who aren't working hard enough because management projected that n agents should be able to handle p calls per hour and management is never wrong, that's unpossible!).
Well, most likely the people they talked to were all so far down the food chain that they didn't dare do anything because "But it was the Secret Service and they..." will still get you fired from most call centers (although if the particular incident gains enough media attention they might wait a few weeks to fire you to avoid bad PR).
/Mikael (who worked in tech support right after college)
Clearly this is a troll but regardless of all other features that MSSQL may have that MySQL doesn't there is one thing that is missing: LIMIT. No, TOP is useless for a lot of stuff and the fact that LIMIT is missing results in lots of painful hacks with nested SELECTs and other crap in stored procedures.
I suggest googling "augmented reality" to get an idea of how what I mean, the purpose is to take video input (and other sources of input) and augmenting with information from say, a computer, before displaying it on a head-mounted display. Or say, to have an IR camera mounted on the HMD in addition to the regular cameras, thus making it possible to use that video input to "see in IR".
Why spend thousands of dollars smooshing a high resolution display to your face when you can blow up a flatscreen to epic proportions and get all the resolution you need?
Well, as someone who's been waiting for an affordable HMD that I can use for an augmented reality project I've been thinking of starting, let me just ask you one thing: How would I go about mounting a 50" LCD monitor or a projector + screen on my head in a way that doesn't make result in me constantly falling over?
Ah, but it's not unique, when I did tech support (right after college) I actually had several occasions on which customers would call from areas where the power was out and scream and curse about how their DSL wasn't working. And explaining to them that our DSLAM was working just fine but that they needed to have power to their equipment just angered them even further...
I doubt it would be worth the effort to create a google street-view clone for your own personal use, you'd either have to carry around a set of cameras the whole time or stay in your car (with the camera(s) mounted on the car).
Personally I've built a small website that shows images I've uploaded from my iPhone using Google Maps, a pretty simple solution that doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment nor a very advanced software setup (on the server it's just apache+mod_python+mysql and a couple of small python scripts for creating thumbnails of the uploaded images.
Actually, from what I've seen from browsing Special ham and a few other forums it seems that most of these guys are just random, as you put it, bozos working out of their homes. While there is no doubt a few of them have connections to organized crime they're still mostly just random guys with just enough computer skills to pull off the crap they're doing.
Well, if you google for "IE8 bugs" you'll find lots of information on bugs in IE8, admittedly they're mostly minor and nowhere near as horrible as the average IE6 bug (for a website at work we have a special IE6-only stylesheet that's 500+ lines just to make the page render almost as nicely in IE6 as it does in Safari, Firefox and Opera, IE7/8 both have some issues but they're nowhere near as bad as the ones for IE6).
My original point was that claiming that IE8 is just as good at rendering standards-compliant pages as WebKit- or Gecko-based browsers simply isn't true. But yes, it's a lot better than IE6.
Except, of course, the fact that this is total and utter bullshit.
IE8 still does a lot of stuff in an awkward not-quite-standards-compliant way and behaves oddly compared to other browsers such as WebKit, Firefox and Opera.
n the third point, at 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, I need only be found accessory to 10,000 individual counts of something punishable by one hour in jail for my accumulated penalty to reach 1 year.
That's how it generally works in the US, but in Sweden ten murder sentences aren't 10 * the punishment for one murder, the punishment doesn't normally escalate in linear fashion. That's actually another reason for why a lot of people feel that the pirate bay trial was nothing more than a way for the media companies to use the legal system to scare people, 30 MSEK (around $3.7 million) may not seem that huge to americans but for the Swedish legal system it's an enormous amount of money.
Ah, but lots of experts on politics and law have stated that the "They only have lots of members because membership is free" argument is most likely not true.
Very long post but still so wrong. I've heard plenty of young americans call the euro "eurodollar", the same kind of americans who barely remember what celebrities were on MTV last year, much less that the word "eurodollar" has been in use for a long time.
Also, how come 99% (yeah yeah, made up statistics blablabla) of those who say/write "eurodollar" when they mean "euro" are from the US? I can't remember the last time I heard someone from the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, India or another country make that same mistake...
It's called "Euro", not "Eurodollar". Much in the same way that the swedish currency is called "Krona" and not "Kronadollar" or how the currency used in the UK is called "pound" not "pounddollar".
Ah yes, let's go back to the "good ol' days" of the late 80's and early 90's when the telcos gladly robbed you blind if you wanted to transfer data over their lines, because that was such an awesome idea...
Here's a hint: If they start to charge by the gigabyte or megabyte then they'll only do so because they figure they can rape their customers.
Of course, I'm swedish and I've never had any transfer limits on my internet connection, in the pre-1998 days when I was on dialup I did pay by the minute though, and that was a huge pain in the ass.
The quality for input with a stylus needs to be pretty high, and I suspect you wouldn't be able to rest your hands on the screen surface while using a stylus which would make it very awkward.
For years I've been trying to find a fairly small (10-13" monitor) tablet which would essentially be a Wacom Cintiq with a built-in computer just fast enough to run apps like Sketchbook Pro, Painter or other "creative" applications, but apparently there are no machines like this.
There have been a few tablets with a good stylus but these have generally been sold as "high-end" machines meaning they've been expensive, overpowered and too big, I'm looking for what could be described as a digital sketchbook, any performance-intensive image editing could be done on a regular laptop or desktop.
I've tried to look for good tablets all over the place but apparently this particular kind of tablet isn't interesting in the eyes of manufacturers (even though I've seen way too many threads on various art/graphics/design forums where people have been looking for just this kind of machine).
Oh well, the more tablets that are on the market the bigger the chances of me eventually finding what I'm looking for.
As someone who learned english from computer manuals and TV shows at the age of nine I feel the need to call bullshit. I don't think I learned any english at all in school and as a kid I was constantly confused by those of my classmates who seemed to speak worse english at 15 than I did at nine, later I realized that a possible explanation for this might have been that I was exposed to the english language on a daily basis from an early age while most of my friends never encountered it outside of class until they were in their teens, and even then they preferred to read the subtitles in movies rather than just listen. So yes, I do believe just hearing and reading english can be enough to learn quite a lot.
Not to nitpick but I'd like to correct some parts of your post...
VGA resolution means 640x480 with 4 bit color (16 colors) or 320x200 with 8 bit color ( 256 colors), most cellphones sold in the last few years are capable of graphics better than that and I sincerely doubt you know a lot of people running computers with "sub VGA screens".
Your computer most likely has 384 MiB of RAM, not 388.
1240x1024 sounds like a very odd resolution, are you sure you don't mean 1280x1024?
The closest standard resolution to 1500x1024 that I can think of is 1400x1050.
As a web developer who was using a P3 with 256 MiB of RAM at work up until recently I think I'm going to have to disagree.
How about an example of the software I tend to be running at the same time:
gVim - Not very resource intensive but it all adds up, at least when you have a dozen or so files open at once.
MS SQL Enterprise Manager
MS SQL Query Analyzer
Internet Explorer
Firefox with firebug, Web Developer and a few other addons
Safari
Opera
Clearly all of this eats more than 256 MiB of memory, on a CPU that's a few generations out of date, let's just say there's a lot of swapping...
Then there's the matter of the VGA screen, last time I checked the stats less than 4% of the users were using a resolution of 800x600 or less, why would anyone care to develop for machines running at 640x480 with 4 bit color? And how do you expect anyone to get useful work done on a machine like that?
As for the javascript, sometimes it is, unfortunately, necessary to send fairly large amounts of javascript to the clients but if done correctly then the client should cache the scripts after loading them the first time.
That said, a 0.5 MiB html document is pretty huge, at least for what is essentially a start page, I'm sure they could trim that down if they really wanted to.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you're comparing to iTunes then I'll just have to assume the comparison you're making is between iTunes and Windows Media Player. And if you seriously think that the user interface for WMP is better than the iTunes UI then I have a bridge you may be interested in purchasing...
/Mikael
Ah yes, the "house rules", the best way to play pretty much any RTS game.
I've found that every RTS I've played with others over a LAN has gotten boring pretty quickly, but after adding a few rules (that are enforced by throwing stuff at those who break them) like "2v2, no breaking alliances and no one is allowed to cross the river in the middle of the map for the first n minutes" tends to make the gameplay a lot more fun, I kind of wish they would build such features straight into the games but most times it's just speed, resources, tech level and map when playing multiplayer.
/Mikael
Of course, the NE2k driver that came with win95 didn't actually work with most NE2k-compatible NICs so you often had to have the manufacturer's driver floppy.
Another "interesting" win9x issue was when it would just decide to start munching on the TCP/IP stack, at one point I actually checked the file size and noticed that it changed by a few bytes when winsock just stopped working, and once again the win95 install disc was brought out for yet another reinstall of the IP stack...
/Mikael
Then you were lucky, where I worked the procedure for handling calls from the police and other authorities involved filling out a form and then handing it over to a specific member of management, and the whole procedure would generally take days to get sorted out. And the form was only to be filled out after getting an Ok to do so from a team lead.
/Mikael
Of course, but I just don't think it's fair to blame those working the call center, it's a management problem (and one of those unspoken "rules" in call centers is that management never gets blamed for anything. Understaffed? Clearly that is the fault of the tech support agents who aren't working hard enough because management projected that n agents should be able to handle p calls per hour and management is never wrong, that's unpossible!).
/Mikael
Well, most likely the people they talked to were all so far down the food chain that they didn't dare do anything because "But it was the Secret Service and they..." will still get you fired from most call centers (although if the particular incident gains enough media attention they might wait a few weeks to fire you to avoid bad PR).
/Mikael (who worked in tech support right after college)
Clearly this is a troll but regardless of all other features that MSSQL may have that MySQL doesn't there is one thing that is missing: LIMIT. No, TOP is useless for a lot of stuff and the fact that LIMIT is missing results in lots of painful hacks with nested SELECTs and other crap in stored procedures.
/Mikael
I suggest googling "augmented reality" to get an idea of how what I mean, the purpose is to take video input (and other sources of input) and augmenting with information from say, a computer, before displaying it on a head-mounted display. Or say, to have an IR camera mounted on the HMD in addition to the regular cameras, thus making it possible to use that video input to "see in IR".
/Mikael
Why spend thousands of dollars smooshing a high resolution display to your face when you can blow up a flatscreen to epic proportions and get all the resolution you need?
Well, as someone who's been waiting for an affordable HMD that I can use for an augmented reality project I've been thinking of starting, let me just ask you one thing: How would I go about mounting a 50" LCD monitor or a projector + screen on my head in a way that doesn't make result in me constantly falling over?
/Mikael
Ah, but it's not unique, when I did tech support (right after college) I actually had several occasions on which customers would call from areas where the power was out and scream and curse about how their DSL wasn't working. And explaining to them that our DSLAM was working just fine but that they needed to have power to their equipment just angered them even further...
/Mikael
I doubt it would be worth the effort to create a google street-view clone for your own personal use, you'd either have to carry around a set of cameras the whole time or stay in your car (with the camera(s) mounted on the car).
Personally I've built a small website that shows images I've uploaded from my iPhone using Google Maps, a pretty simple solution that doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment nor a very advanced software setup (on the server it's just apache+mod_python+mysql and a couple of small python scripts for creating thumbnails of the uploaded images.
/Mikael
Actually, from what I've seen from browsing Special ham and a few other forums it seems that most of these guys are just random, as you put it, bozos working out of their homes. While there is no doubt a few of them have connections to organized crime they're still mostly just random guys with just enough computer skills to pull off the crap they're doing.
tl;dr These are hardly hardened mafiosos.
/Mikael
Well, if you google for "IE8 bugs" you'll find lots of information on bugs in IE8, admittedly they're mostly minor and nowhere near as horrible as the average IE6 bug (for a website at work we have a special IE6-only stylesheet that's 500+ lines just to make the page render almost as nicely in IE6 as it does in Safari, Firefox and Opera, IE7/8 both have some issues but they're nowhere near as bad as the ones for IE6).
My original point was that claiming that IE8 is just as good at rendering standards-compliant pages as WebKit- or Gecko-based browsers simply isn't true. But yes, it's a lot better than IE6.
/Mikael
Except, of course, the fact that this is total and utter bullshit.
IE8 still does a lot of stuff in an awkward not-quite-standards-compliant way and behaves oddly compared to other browsers such as WebKit, Firefox and Opera.
/Mikael
n the third point, at 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, I need only be found accessory to 10,000 individual counts of something punishable by one hour in jail for my accumulated penalty to reach 1 year.
That's how it generally works in the US, but in Sweden ten murder sentences aren't 10 * the punishment for one murder, the punishment doesn't normally escalate in linear fashion. That's actually another reason for why a lot of people feel that the pirate bay trial was nothing more than a way for the media companies to use the legal system to scare people, 30 MSEK (around $3.7 million) may not seem that huge to americans but for the Swedish legal system it's an enormous amount of money.
/Mikael
Ah, but lots of experts on politics and law have stated that the "They only have lots of members because membership is free" argument is most likely not true.
/Mikael
Very long post but still so wrong. I've heard plenty of young americans call the euro "eurodollar", the same kind of americans who barely remember what celebrities were on MTV last year, much less that the word "eurodollar" has been in use for a long time.
Also, how come 99% (yeah yeah, made up statistics blablabla) of those who say/write "eurodollar" when they mean "euro" are from the US? I can't remember the last time I heard someone from the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, India or another country make that same mistake...
/Mikael
It's called "Euro", not "Eurodollar". Much in the same way that the swedish currency is called "Krona" and not "Kronadollar" or how the currency used in the UK is called "pound" not "pounddollar".
/Mikael
Ah yes, let's go back to the "good ol' days" of the late 80's and early 90's when the telcos gladly robbed you blind if you wanted to transfer data over their lines, because that was such an awesome idea...
Here's a hint: If they start to charge by the gigabyte or megabyte then they'll only do so because they figure they can rape their customers.
Of course, I'm swedish and I've never had any transfer limits on my internet connection, in the pre-1998 days when I was on dialup I did pay by the minute though, and that was a huge pain in the ass.
/Mikael
The quality for input with a stylus needs to be pretty high, and I suspect you wouldn't be able to rest your hands on the screen surface while using a stylus which would make it very awkward.
/Mikael
For years I've been trying to find a fairly small (10-13" monitor) tablet which would essentially be a Wacom Cintiq with a built-in computer just fast enough to run apps like Sketchbook Pro, Painter or other "creative" applications, but apparently there are no machines like this.
There have been a few tablets with a good stylus but these have generally been sold as "high-end" machines meaning they've been expensive, overpowered and too big, I'm looking for what could be described as a digital sketchbook, any performance-intensive image editing could be done on a regular laptop or desktop.
I've tried to look for good tablets all over the place but apparently this particular kind of tablet isn't interesting in the eyes of manufacturers (even though I've seen way too many threads on various art/graphics/design forums where people have been looking for just this kind of machine).
Oh well, the more tablets that are on the market the bigger the chances of me eventually finding what I'm looking for.
/Mikael
I didn't speak english with my classmates, I had to spend 2x40 minutes every week listening to their attempts to read simple sentences aloud.
/Mikael
As someone who learned english from computer manuals and TV shows at the age of nine I feel the need to call bullshit. I don't think I learned any english at all in school and as a kid I was constantly confused by those of my classmates who seemed to speak worse english at 15 than I did at nine, later I realized that a possible explanation for this might have been that I was exposed to the english language on a daily basis from an early age while most of my friends never encountered it outside of class until they were in their teens, and even then they preferred to read the subtitles in movies rather than just listen. So yes, I do believe just hearing and reading english can be enough to learn quite a lot.
/Mikael
Not to nitpick but I'd like to correct some parts of your post...
VGA resolution means 640x480 with 4 bit color (16 colors) or 320x200 with 8 bit color ( 256 colors), most cellphones sold in the last few years are capable of graphics better than that and I sincerely doubt you know a lot of people running computers with "sub VGA screens".
/Mikael
As a web developer who was using a P3 with 256 MiB of RAM at work up until recently I think I'm going to have to disagree.
How about an example of the software I tend to be running at the same time:
Clearly all of this eats more than 256 MiB of memory, on a CPU that's a few generations out of date, let's just say there's a lot of swapping...
Then there's the matter of the VGA screen, last time I checked the stats less than 4% of the users were using a resolution of 800x600 or less, why would anyone care to develop for machines running at 640x480 with 4 bit color? And how do you expect anyone to get useful work done on a machine like that?
As for the javascript, sometimes it is, unfortunately, necessary to send fairly large amounts of javascript to the clients but if done correctly then the client should cache the scripts after loading them the first time.
That said, a 0.5 MiB html document is pretty huge, at least for what is essentially a start page, I'm sure they could trim that down if they really wanted to.
/Mikael