Owning a Wii, there are a bunch of really fantastic games and a whole lot of dross (though this is true to an extent on all platforms the Wii seems to suffer more than most). Without reviews, there would be no way to sift through all the chaff and find the good titles. Though the fact that terrible software continues to sell by the bucket load on the Wii suggests that the average joe probably doesn't read reviews at all.
This works for me too and isn't particually difficult on Vista or Windows 7 thanks to user account control.
I was going to pimp my site - http://www.top-windows-tutorials.com/ as well, but this thread is so buried in comments it hardly seems worth it:)
I remember at my university, going back to the 90's now, they announced a new "laptop area" in the library.
I duly arrived with my PIII laptop, only to find nowhere to plug it in. "You can't charge your laptop here" said the librarian, "we don't allow anything to be plugged in that hasn't been PAT tested by a university technician". "Oh, and there's no network access because of viruses".
"So basically, the laptop area is a table with a 'laptop area' sign above it then?" I said. "I suppose so, oh and please turn your laptops speaker off"
On another note, what about practical lessons? Expecting your students to have laptops is one thing, expecting them to buy licences for software like 3D Studio Max, for example, is another. Sure students will pirate, but can a university turn a blind eye if it's a requirement of the course, rather than just something the students trade with each other outside of the classroom?
All TC hunt seems to be doing is finding files with the.tc extension. That is something I can do in windows by opening the start menu and searching for ".tc"
The law is supposed to catch "scary terrorists" Given that there are dozens of ways to side-step your ISP's E-mail, do they only plan on catching the sort of terrorist that is computer illiterate?
Only recently I went back to my copy of STALKER - Shadow of Chernobyl only to find it was unplayable on my PC unless I downloaded a no-cd crack. I don't buy it when companies say "oh don't worry we'll make sure you can always play your game" since I've not had a satisfactory answer from THQ as to why my game won't run unless I use a legally dubious hacked version. It really puts me off buying PC games at all, and I know that I'm not the only one.
During the week I emailed a link to my own blog to my dad at work. I'd blogged about some errand I ran for his friend and he wanted to show them.
After three attempts we gave up trying to transmit the message, the message would send, but never arrive, and I received no notification that it had failed to transmit. My dad even checked with his technician to see if it was in the spam-trap at his work, it was not.
I tried sending it again to various e-mail addresses I own (such as my Yahoo one) and on to my mother. The message was never received. I rang my ever-so-helpful ISP tech support department and asked if they could trace the message as it went through the SMTP server "No we cannot" was their reply.
Anyway, after a few more experiments I found that if I removed the URL the message got transmitted fine. So I suspect there is some sort of increased effort by ISP's to filter spam, that might actually be filtering legitimate messages too.
Then again I am with Virgin Media, who have a broken network anyway (I have proven that several of their routers are faulty but they still insist it's my anti-virus or firewall).
Spindizzy is not a Codemasters game, you are thinking of Dizzy. Spindizzy was a Marble Madness clone from Electric Dreams Software.
What would you have changed?
on
BioShock Review
·
· Score: 1
Ok so we all know this is a great game, but for me it's 4/5 or 9/10, close but not perfect.
I think my biggest disappointment was the Big Daddies and little sisters, I'm a nice guy, I like bunnies and hate mean things, the idea of being a hero and rescuing a bunch of kids seems ok to me, but how much cooler would it have been if each big daddy/little sister had been unique? They could have really gone to town on making the little sisters twisted by the Adam in all sorts of ways, with their big daddy guardians specially tailored for their particular mutation. A little sister who can survive underwater, one who can use stealth, one who can walk through fire, etc etc. Of course when you saved them they would go from being creepy to cute, perhaps they could even have told you a bit about how they lived before all the weird stuff happened, thus making them more like proper characters. As it stands the first couple of big daddies you fight are really exciting, but after getting a certain plasmid they become extremely easy. Also because the little sisters use the same character model you never really feel like your helping liberate a bunch of exploited kids more just a bunch of carbon-copy videogame characters, also not helped really by the terrible lip-sync.
Talk about kicking your most loyal users in the teeth.
I'm so angry at this that I am writing a letter of complaint, stop sniggering, I know that some secretary will just file it in the cylindrical filing cabinet.
For us who repair peoples PC's either part time or full time, this is devastating news. Microsoft may love to think that we live in a world where everyone is on broadband, or where everyone can obtain updates easily, or even perhaps that reinstalling Windows is never necessary but that simply isn't true. You fix someone's PC and have to reinstall Windows, they then dial up their internet connection and Windows update tries to download hundreds of megabytes of data, well, they aren't going to sit around, so the PC goes un-patched and Malware gets in easy. Thanks to Autopatcher it was easy to patch Windows PC's after a clean install, or even PC's that had never been connected to the internet. now Microsoft go and kill it... heck, I run a Windows website and even I'm thinking of dusting off my Ubuntu installation now.
Fantastic list, I may write another article just on some of the software you recommend here!
Re:Vista Transformation Pack
on
Pimp Your XP
·
· Score: 1
My Diigo account is swelling with all these things I now have to check out, If I'd discovered the Vista Transformation Pack before I would have certainly mentioned it.
I'm the original author of the article
Thanks for everyone's comments, I was also surprised to find Slashdot had linked to my article, although I am quite proud of the article there are lots of authors on the internet all wanting their share of the spotlight so it was still a pleasant surprise.
I appreciate all comments and criticisms, let me say though I'm not affiliated with any of the software vendors in the article. The only thing I'm affiliated with is my website that I mention in my signature. Those of you who said that buying all the software I recommended would push the cost beyond that of buying Vista are correct. The point is Vista just doesn't work well for me and lots of other people out there. Every time I want to play a Game or watch a DVD (Using Nvidia's excellent Purevideo codec, no I'm not affiliated with them either) I have to reboot to XP, so I'd rather just stay in XP thank-you-very-much.
You don't >have to buy everything I recommended, just the bits that give you the functionality you want. I could have also mentioned Truecrypt (free) and PGP disk (commercial) as an alternative to Bitlocker. I do like to recommend free alternatives whenever I can as there is some fantastic software out there and thanks to those who have recommended free alternatives to the commercial software I mentioned in the article, I will certainly check those out.
I do run all the software I mentioned on my PC (AMD 4800 dual core 2gb RAM) and find it runs just as responsively as my Vista installation. I also run an old 1ghz Transmeta tablet PC, needless to say I don't run all that software on there! If your PC's an older model then your not likely to want flashy skinning software in Vista or XP flavours, that is just common sense.
Oh, I'm not affiliated with Google either, Ezineartiles have an annoying policy of only allowing about half a dozen links in each article, which is why I had to tell people to go off and search for some of the software.
thanks again for all your comments!
Slashdot Mirror
Owning a Wii, there are a bunch of really fantastic games and a whole lot of dross (though this is true to an extent on all platforms the Wii seems to suffer more than most). Without reviews, there would be no way to sift through all the chaff and find the good titles. Though the fact that terrible software continues to sell by the bucket load on the Wii suggests that the average joe probably doesn't read reviews at all.
This works for me too and isn't particually difficult on Vista or Windows 7 thanks to user account control. I was going to pimp my site - http://www.top-windows-tutorials.com/ as well, but this thread is so buried in comments it hardly seems worth it :)
I am astounded that somebody actually had to explain this on Slashdot and that the above comment by basementman was actually rated "Informative".
I remember at my university, going back to the 90's now, they announced a new "laptop area" in the library. I duly arrived with my PIII laptop, only to find nowhere to plug it in. "You can't charge your laptop here" said the librarian, "we don't allow anything to be plugged in that hasn't been PAT tested by a university technician". "Oh, and there's no network access because of viruses". "So basically, the laptop area is a table with a 'laptop area' sign above it then?" I said. "I suppose so, oh and please turn your laptops speaker off"
On another note, what about practical lessons? Expecting your students to have laptops is one thing, expecting them to buy licences for software like 3D Studio Max, for example, is another. Sure students will pirate, but can a university turn a blind eye if it's a requirement of the course, rather than just something the students trade with each other outside of the classroom?
All TC hunt seems to be doing is finding files with the .tc extension. That is something I can do in windows by opening the start menu and searching for ".tc"
The law is supposed to catch "scary terrorists"
Given that there are dozens of ways to side-step your ISP's E-mail, do they only plan on catching the sort of terrorist that is computer illiterate?
Only recently I went back to my copy of STALKER - Shadow of Chernobyl only to find it was unplayable on my PC unless I downloaded a no-cd crack. I don't buy it when companies say "oh don't worry we'll make sure you can always play your game" since I've not had a satisfactory answer from THQ as to why my game won't run unless I use a legally dubious hacked version. It really puts me off buying PC games at all, and I know that I'm not the only one.
During the week I emailed a link to my own blog to my dad at work. I'd blogged about some errand I ran for his friend and he wanted to show them. After three attempts we gave up trying to transmit the message, the message would send, but never arrive, and I received no notification that it had failed to transmit. My dad even checked with his technician to see if it was in the spam-trap at his work, it was not. I tried sending it again to various e-mail addresses I own (such as my Yahoo one) and on to my mother. The message was never received. I rang my ever-so-helpful ISP tech support department and asked if they could trace the message as it went through the SMTP server "No we cannot" was their reply. Anyway, after a few more experiments I found that if I removed the URL the message got transmitted fine. So I suspect there is some sort of increased effort by ISP's to filter spam, that might actually be filtering legitimate messages too. Then again I am with Virgin Media, who have a broken network anyway (I have proven that several of their routers are faulty but they still insist it's my anti-virus or firewall).
Spindizzy is not a Codemasters game, you are thinking of Dizzy. Spindizzy was a Marble Madness clone from Electric Dreams Software.
Ok so we all know this is a great game, but for me it's 4/5 or 9/10, close but not perfect. I think my biggest disappointment was the Big Daddies and little sisters, I'm a nice guy, I like bunnies and hate mean things, the idea of being a hero and rescuing a bunch of kids seems ok to me, but how much cooler would it have been if each big daddy/little sister had been unique? They could have really gone to town on making the little sisters twisted by the Adam in all sorts of ways, with their big daddy guardians specially tailored for their particular mutation. A little sister who can survive underwater, one who can use stealth, one who can walk through fire, etc etc. Of course when you saved them they would go from being creepy to cute, perhaps they could even have told you a bit about how they lived before all the weird stuff happened, thus making them more like proper characters. As it stands the first couple of big daddies you fight are really exciting, but after getting a certain plasmid they become extremely easy. Also because the little sisters use the same character model you never really feel like your helping liberate a bunch of exploited kids more just a bunch of carbon-copy videogame characters, also not helped really by the terrible lip-sync.
Talk about kicking your most loyal users in the teeth. I'm so angry at this that I am writing a letter of complaint, stop sniggering, I know that some secretary will just file it in the cylindrical filing cabinet. For us who repair peoples PC's either part time or full time, this is devastating news. Microsoft may love to think that we live in a world where everyone is on broadband, or where everyone can obtain updates easily, or even perhaps that reinstalling Windows is never necessary but that simply isn't true. You fix someone's PC and have to reinstall Windows, they then dial up their internet connection and Windows update tries to download hundreds of megabytes of data, well, they aren't going to sit around, so the PC goes un-patched and Malware gets in easy. Thanks to Autopatcher it was easy to patch Windows PC's after a clean install, or even PC's that had never been connected to the internet. now Microsoft go and kill it... heck, I run a Windows website and even I'm thinking of dusting off my Ubuntu installation now.
Fantastic list, I may write another article just on some of the software you recommend here!
My Diigo account is swelling with all these things I now have to check out, If I'd discovered the Vista Transformation Pack before I would have certainly mentioned it.
I'm the original author of the article Thanks for everyone's comments, I was also surprised to find Slashdot had linked to my article, although I am quite proud of the article there are lots of authors on the internet all wanting their share of the spotlight so it was still a pleasant surprise. I appreciate all comments and criticisms, let me say though I'm not affiliated with any of the software vendors in the article. The only thing I'm affiliated with is my website that I mention in my signature. Those of you who said that buying all the software I recommended would push the cost beyond that of buying Vista are correct. The point is Vista just doesn't work well for me and lots of other people out there. Every time I want to play a Game or watch a DVD (Using Nvidia's excellent Purevideo codec, no I'm not affiliated with them either) I have to reboot to XP, so I'd rather just stay in XP thank-you-very-much. You don't >have to buy everything I recommended, just the bits that give you the functionality you want. I could have also mentioned Truecrypt (free) and PGP disk (commercial) as an alternative to Bitlocker. I do like to recommend free alternatives whenever I can as there is some fantastic software out there and thanks to those who have recommended free alternatives to the commercial software I mentioned in the article, I will certainly check those out. I do run all the software I mentioned on my PC (AMD 4800 dual core 2gb RAM) and find it runs just as responsively as my Vista installation. I also run an old 1ghz Transmeta tablet PC, needless to say I don't run all that software on there! If your PC's an older model then your not likely to want flashy skinning software in Vista or XP flavours, that is just common sense. Oh, I'm not affiliated with Google either, Ezineartiles have an annoying policy of only allowing about half a dozen links in each article, which is why I had to tell people to go off and search for some of the software. thanks again for all your comments!