Microsoft Could easily secure Windows to the point that no malware could infect the machine. You wouldn't like it, however, because you wouldn't be able to do anything on it other than browse the web. Want to install that Program? Sorry, it's not digitally signed! Like that Desktop Wallpaper? Sorry, but it's a Jpeg so it could have a Virus! ETC. If you want a Truly secure OS which doesn't need any type of protection, then you want Palladium. Simple as that.
On the other hand, Not having a secure OS means that now you have to deal with Joe Stupid installing everything Bob Ignoramus sends to him, because Bob Ignoramus would never send Joe Stupid a virus. No Sirree. Now in Joe Stupid's mind. All he sees is PAM_ANDERSON_NUDE_ON_THE_BEACH.JPG.EXE, and thinks to himself, "I wanna see that, and I'm going to click Yes on this big red box that says that this could be a virus, and I'm going to click yes on this other big red warning that says that it isn't signed, and I'm going to put my Admin Password in this box that says I need admin rights to run this file, and HEY it's not Pam Anderson, it's Paypal telling me to enter my password since my account expired, How Nice of them to remind me So I better do that, and Hold Up! This damn Punch the monkey Ad keeps coming up and my machine is running slow for some reason!!!"
Basically, Since Locking the machine Down isn't a good solution, and there's no security patches for the human brain yet, the easiest way to increase security without restricting the PC to the point that it's useless is have these addons to Stop Joe from being too stupid, but allow Joe to install Redneck Rampage Deer Hunter Extreme Machinegun Challenge when he feels like killing something. Frankly Why MS didn't have A virus scanner in XP is beyond me other than MS didn't want to hear Symantec Crying that their business they built on insecure Microsoft Os's is going away because Microsoft Suddenly decided to start securing their OS.
Frankly, The only complaint about this Microsoft Anti virus is that they are going to have definition subscriptions like all the other anti virus apps instead of just turning their AV solution on by default on Vista and allow it to update without having to worry about expiring definition subscriptions.
1) This change affects only virtual processors, not physical ones. If your running VMWare or MS Virtual Server than this is for you. Otherwise move along. 2)This licencing scheme is designed to save companies money instead of giving up more for MS. For example, say you have a 16 processor system, and you VMWare it so your running 4 instances of Windows Server 2003 with SQL server. under the old system, you had to buy SQL Server for all 16 Processors. Now you would only buy for the 4 VM's 3) Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition is now licenced for 4 instances of itself per Machine. So you could run 4 Windows 2K3 Servers VM's on one server and MS says "go for it"
They would probably work fine in an Microsoft machine if Microsoft supported it. The problem is that Bluray doesn't fall within Microsoft's vision of the future.
In Microsoft's mind, they think the next big entertainment thing is basically a Media Server, and they aren't wrong or alone here. They want to have their Media Center Editions of Windows to be the forefront of your Home Theather. They want it to be your Tivo, your Stereo, Your Photo Album and your Television all in one unit that can be accessed anywhere in your home. This is all well and good, but Microsoft wants to go further with this.
They see a future where Playing direct from DVD is in the past. The belief is that in the future, hard drives will be so big that you could store your entire DVD collection on your hard disk, and view any of the disks on demand from anywhere in your house using a Media Center PC, an extender, or even an Xbox.
Now apparently from what I'm seeing, HD-DVD is going to have the capability to allow this type of ripping from CD to hard drive built natively in the format. Bluray on the other hand will not. This is why Microsoft is all riled up because all of their Media Extenders and Xbox's With the media extender tech now become useless or at least less convenient since now For Example, you have to walk downstairs, put the Bluray disk into the Player on the MCE PC, walk back upstairs and tell the Media Extender to play the disk, Whereas with HD-DVD, you could just rip it to the hard drive, and watch it upstairs anytime you wanted to.
So at the very least, it looks like Microsoft is taking the HD-DVD side for about the same reasons Intel is. Intel wants to sell Media Servers to Store DVD content and Microsoft wants to make the OS for it. Since Bluray supposedly gives Media servers the finger when it comes to Hard Drive storage, they're picking the Format that is Embracing it.
I have to agree here, The last time I saw any mission critical server crash, it was an NT box that had a tendency to crash once every three weeks back in 99. Every time I tracked the issue it came down to the outdated video card which we couldn't get a reliable driver for. Even then, all this server really did was handle logins, and the backup domain controller would take over.
Hell, we had an old 486 50Mhz ps/2 9595 with 16MB (upgraded to 64MB) running NT as a backup domain controller for three days when we had to take the primary down for unscheduled maintenance and the secondary blew a Voltage Regulator Module for one of the Pentium Pro's. Network never went down once during the entire time, in fact the PS/2 never had one crash. It was used for tertiary backup for the three years it was used, and never had a reboot during two of those three years. It's Probably still in the server closet with a shrine built for it or something:)
Now, I think there running 2003 on Dell's, Last I talked to them they haven't had a crash since they could remember. Honestly, I cant remember the last crash I had on a NT/2000/2003 Server that I couldn't track down to either hardware failure, or Hard/Soft (driver) failure.
...Apple announcing that Windows Vista will be an OS option for their Next Mac.
This could effectively kill off the Palm OS. Especially it this treo sells like hotcakes. I hope not since my kyocera 6035 is getting old and I'm looking for a replacement.
Daikatana wasn't a bad game, as much as it was trying to do stuff far ahead of it's time, and then over hyped it to the point where it had to reinvent everything about the genre, or it would get blasted by everyone. This is what Duke Nukem Forever is going to be up against. DNF could be a great game if it comes out. DNF could be very fun and compelling, but it's going to get blasted by reviewers because it took so long to make, and should be absolutely flawless for the amount of time it took to make.
Back to Daikatana. The biggest problem was the Bot characters. The AI for them was completely stupid, and suffered many problems. 1) They suffered from "Natalia Syndrome" and would tend to run off on their own and get killed (which was bad, since you'd die when they did.) 2) They also had friendly fire on the bots, so when they would lag behind you and they saw something move, they would almost always shoot you in the back. 3) You never could "leave your buddy superfly" or Keiko when it came to the next part of the stage. This was just a pain. especially when half of the time they couldn't navigate the complex world. Nowadays, you see much more complex AI work seamlessly with the player, and in many cases, you see what Daikatana was trying to do in more modern games (HL2 and the freedom fighter squads you can control is a good example), although still not as extreme to the point that one person dies and it's game over time.
Graphically, it's wasn't so bad. It looked ok, but it was no Half Life or Quake II, which came out around the same time or earlier. It however took a bold move and did all of the cut scenes as real time rendered scenes; something that You really didn't see much at that time, but see almost all the time today.
Storyline, wasn't bad. It could have been better, especially in the naming dept.
gameplay bucked a lot of the FPS norms. Weapons were interesting, especially the Daikatana, which leveled and got more powerful as you killed stuff with it. Kinda like the soulcube in doom III but more complex. You actually got levels and could apply them to attributes like speed, vitality, ETC.
Price was the best thing about this game. I think I paid $0.99 for the thing. It was definitely worth that price.
We have a lot of Foreign exchange students here, and one of them has an IBM/LG branded laptop with the exact same color scheme, only it's a Pentium III laptop and the titanium color is just the color of the plastic instead of a true titanium cover.
I don't remember the Model number on the laptop, so I don't know which series it was, but I do know it was at least two to three years old.
They've been saying that for over a year now. I swear they say it just to hope that the soundstorm fan base will quiet down and die off.
I've heard the Nforce3-Nforce5 will have it. I heard it's going to be an add in card. Hell, I've heard it's going to be integrated in the next video card. So far I've seen nothing tangible and I'll be surprised if I do.
It's pretty much a given if you want to compete in the PC audio market you're dealing with Creative whether you like it or not. They were allowed to buyout all of the competition as well as most of the patents. In fact, the company that nV was geting the soundstorm tech from got bought out by Creative. The only reason Nvidia isn't owned by Creative is that they couldn't possibly buy them out, so they'll sue nV until they say "screw the audio market", which apparently nV did.
I still am holding out for a Nvidia soundstorm for athlon64, (my SN41G2 isn't going anywhere soon) but I doubt it will ever take place. At this point, once Nforce5 hits, I'm probably going to be switching to that regardless of what audio is on board.
I use Powerarchiver and have used it for a long time now.
It's not free but it does just about everything that this new version does, as well as open just about every compression format out there as well as create files with most of the compression formats as well.
At one time. MSN Messenger used to allow VOIP calls when it first came out. It got so expensive on MS that they removed the feature pretty fast though.
My guess is that it's going to be making a comeback soon.
The mini-itx and nano-itx boards require little power to operate, can run any X86 based OS, and some can run off of flash memory devices with no addons required.
The only drawback to these is that their overall performace is not as fast as their AMD or Intel counterparts, but if silence, space and power savings is what you are looking for then these are a great solution.
This is the kind of DRM i want to see. Right now DRM is a pain to use because there is so many standards that are fighting each other. What I want to see is a single adopted open standard that everyone has access to.
Although DRM is a double edged sword, it's benefits to privacy far outweigh the *AA uses for it. Having a open DRM scheme that everyone can use will just make the adoption more streamline and easier for the end user.
There should be a screening process to validate which ads work well with the world and which ones don't. Mr Bigalow doesn't really work in this case.
If they were making ads to match the era and scope of the game, for example, a coke ad that looks like it was made by advertisers of that world and time, it would work much better than having the equivalent of a 500 year old (don't know what year planetside is set in) ad on the wall.
In the example from the MMO I play (city of heroes) They have billboards everywhere advertising fake companies. If all the billboards advertising Infront Steakhouse changed to Outback steakhouse overnight, it wouldn't phase me at all, and in fact it would make the city feel more realistic since I would expect a billboard like that in a real city. Now if it was changing every time I loaded the zone, I would be causing a fit (unless its one of those changing billboards you see in real life) but as long as it followed basic billboard rules and was handled the same way billboard advertising is done in real life (IE: billboard's change about once a month or longer, various advertising multiple products not just one, ETC) then it would work for me.
On my mud, after you would have got your head ripped off, you would have to have your deity raise you from the dead. that sounds normal until you realize that all of the deity's were named after fast food characters.
So after your head got ripped off, you would type resurrect and the next thing you would see is something like "Mayor McCheese resurrects you in his temple" which of course looked like the inside of a McDonalds.
We also had Dave Thomas, Harland Sanders, The Taco Bell Chihuahua, Ronald McDonald, Long John Silver, The Burger King and The Dairy Queen as deity's. Apprently, I was ahead of my time and was doing it for free when I should have charged for it.
I can hear the Marvel guy with Big Teeth and a Plaid Suit now...
Well Billy, with the marvel MMORPG, it's now legal to make marvel characters, unlike the evil underhanded villains at Cryptic that made a superhero infringement machine hell bent on destroying the comic industry!
This is a great thing Billy, because when you play on the Marvel MMORPG, you wont get your Wolverine's name changed to GenericHero37! In fact, Your Wolverine looks a lot better than the last 93 Wolverines before you, but don't you dare make Superman, or we'll send The Punisher over to your house and "Punish" you if you know what I mean.
If this tech is anywhere close to Epson and their built in Printheds, they will be making money on both.
Epson's built in Printheds was the stupidest idea I ever saw, at least consumer wise. Yes it would print well, but I hope you dont stop printing for more than a week or so, becuase once that printhead clogs it time to toss the printer away and buy another one.
The best design I've seen so far is the Canon designs. They Practicially encouraged refilling on those cartrages, they would last just about forever, and in case of the BC21, if the print head would go bad, you would just buy the full cartrage set with the printhead instead of just the ink wells, which were also refill friendly.
Most of the Vulnerabilities happen weeks to months after a patch is released. It's just getting the patch on the machine that's a problem.
As XP SP2 starts to overtake XP SP1 and SP0 sales, it should get better, since SP2 screams and yells if you turn off automatic updates. This is going to take a while since most people are paranoid of SP2 or MS won't let them install it cause their OS is a pirate.
Hopefully in longhorn, they do the same thing they did with.Net 2003 SP1 and firewall the internet until windows downloads all the critical patches. This would stop the 12 minute problem pretty quickly.
OK. This is from someone who's main job is to repair Laptops in a College Student Laptop Program. I won't say which college because I like to keep my job separated from myself, but we deal with 1000 laptops and just had to deal with this last week.
First off, Laptop locks are useless. I can pick most of them in less than 2 minutes, and can crack most of the combination locks in about the same time. Now imagine a pro doing it. Also in most cases, They'll just break the laptop case to get it off the lock. You would be surprised what little most laptop lock points are protected with. Also, don't expect the campus police to be much help. In many cases they will do a write up and that's it, So don't expect CSI to show up if it's stolen.
Second, If the college your daughter is going to has some sort of Insurance on anything stolen in the Residence hall, Get it. Period. If it does happen you can at least claim the laptop back. I honestly forgot the name of the policy we were giving out to students, but it protected just about anything in the room from just about any major incident, from stolen property to fire.
Finally, if it is a brand name laptop, and your more concerned about the data rather than cost, call up the manufacturer and see if they offer some sort of phone home capability. IBM (since this is the laptop we give to students) I know offers it for a price but to us it's not cost effective to get Vs the amount of stolen laptops we have. Other colleges we have talked to swear by it. I'm not too sure about Dell or other manufactures but I believe that they have some sort of Equivalent. Also make periodic backups of her data (or have her store important files on a Network drive if available) and bios password protect it from Hard Drive Access. The first thing a professional thief is going to do is wipe the drive since it could point back to the person it was stolen from.
I remember during the last holiday season I wanted to see how long standby lasted on my Kyocera 6035 smartphone, so I charged it and left it on standby for two weeks. When I looked at it before I returned to work it had over half a charge left.
Now I set the phone to shut off at midnight and turn on at 8AM, so from my calculations thats 225 hours from a 1500Ah battery. It could have easily gone longer and probably break 400-500 hours on standby, and this is from a phone that is about three generations behind today's phones.
There's really two notable things here. It's IBM and it's small.
I've played with an X41 non tablet a few months ago. It wasn't the most powerful thing out there, but the small size of it made it really attractable. It weighed almost nothing, and the keyboard had a great feel for a laptop that was it's size. If the tablet has anything close to the feel of the X41 then it's definitely got potential here.
As for the IBM name, you pay a premium for it but there is nothing outside of a tougbook that can touch IBM when it comes to reliability and overall toughness of their laptops. I've seen IBM R51's (it's the laptops we give to students on campus) affected by drinks, candle wax, a flood, cigarette burns, run over by a car, and even dropped from three stories and they still would turn on under those conditions. I can't imagine a latitude or an armada take that much abuse and still be functional. This isn't even getting into the IBM support side when it comes to fixing these problems. We do all the IBM support on campus and their RMA system is hard to beat.
If this tablet PC has any of these qualities, it's going to be pretty attractive to Execs and IT departments looking for their new computer replacement.
So, I guess this makes the Terminator Series pretty much infinite then, since basically they've been trying the grandfather paradox against SkyNet all these years.
That and John Conner will apparently never die, at least from a time traveling robot.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Could easily secure Windows to the point that no malware could infect the machine. You wouldn't like it, however, because you wouldn't be able to do anything on it other than browse the web. Want to install that Program? Sorry, it's not digitally signed! Like that Desktop Wallpaper? Sorry, but it's a Jpeg so it could have a Virus! ETC. If you want a Truly secure OS which doesn't need any type of protection, then you want Palladium. Simple as that.
On the other hand, Not having a secure OS means that now you have to deal with Joe Stupid installing everything Bob Ignoramus sends to him, because Bob Ignoramus would never send Joe Stupid a virus. No Sirree. Now in Joe Stupid's mind. All he sees is PAM_ANDERSON_NUDE_ON_THE_BEACH.JPG.EXE, and thinks to himself, "I wanna see that, and I'm going to click Yes on this big red box that says that this could be a virus, and I'm going to click yes on this other big red warning that says that it isn't signed, and I'm going to put my Admin Password in this box that says I need admin rights to run this file, and HEY it's not Pam Anderson, it's Paypal telling me to enter my password since my account expired, How Nice of them to remind me So I better do that, and Hold Up! This damn Punch the monkey Ad keeps coming up and my machine is running slow for some reason!!!"
Basically, Since Locking the machine Down isn't a good solution, and there's no security patches for the human brain yet, the easiest way to increase security without restricting the PC to the point that it's useless is have these addons to Stop Joe from being too stupid, but allow Joe to install Redneck Rampage Deer Hunter Extreme Machinegun Challenge when he feels like killing something. Frankly Why MS didn't have A virus scanner in XP is beyond me other than MS didn't want to hear Symantec Crying that their business they built on insecure Microsoft Os's is going away because Microsoft Suddenly decided to start securing their OS.
Frankly, The only complaint about this Microsoft Anti virus is that they are going to have definition subscriptions like all the other anti virus apps instead of just turning their AV solution on by default on Vista and allow it to update without having to worry about expiring definition subscriptions.
1) This change affects only virtual processors, not physical ones. If your running VMWare or MS Virtual Server than this is for you. Otherwise move along.
2)This licencing scheme is designed to save companies money instead of giving up more for MS. For example, say you have a 16 processor system, and you VMWare it so your running 4 instances of Windows Server 2003 with SQL server. under the old system, you had to buy SQL Server for all 16 Processors. Now you would only buy for the 4 VM's
3) Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition is now licenced for 4 instances of itself per Machine. So you could run 4 Windows 2K3 Servers VM's on one server and MS says "go for it"
The Details from the Horse at MS
They would probably work fine in an Microsoft machine if Microsoft supported it. The problem is that Bluray doesn't fall within Microsoft's vision of the future.
In Microsoft's mind, they think the next big entertainment thing is basically a Media Server, and they aren't wrong or alone here. They want to have their Media Center Editions of Windows to be the forefront of your Home Theather. They want it to be your Tivo, your Stereo, Your Photo Album and your Television all in one unit that can be accessed anywhere in your home. This is all well and good, but Microsoft wants to go further with this.
They see a future where Playing direct from DVD is in the past. The belief is that in the future, hard drives will be so big that you could store your entire DVD collection on your hard disk, and view any of the disks on demand from anywhere in your house using a Media Center PC, an extender, or even an Xbox.
Now apparently from what I'm seeing, HD-DVD is going to have the capability to allow this type of ripping from CD to hard drive built natively in the format. Bluray on the other hand will not. This is why Microsoft is all riled up because all of their Media Extenders and Xbox's With the media extender tech now become useless or at least less convenient since now For Example, you have to walk downstairs, put the Bluray disk into the Player on the MCE PC, walk back upstairs and tell the Media Extender to play the disk, Whereas with HD-DVD, you could just rip it to the hard drive, and watch it upstairs anytime you wanted to.
So at the very least, it looks like Microsoft is taking the HD-DVD side for about the same reasons Intel is. Intel wants to sell Media Servers to Store DVD content and Microsoft wants to make the OS for it. Since Bluray supposedly gives Media servers the finger when it comes to Hard Drive storage, they're picking the Format that is Embracing it.
I have to agree here, The last time I saw any mission critical server crash, it was an NT box that had a tendency to crash once every three weeks back in 99. Every time I tracked the issue it came down to the outdated video card which we couldn't get a reliable driver for. Even then, all this server really did was handle logins, and the backup domain controller would take over.
:)
Hell, we had an old 486 50Mhz ps/2 9595 with 16MB (upgraded to 64MB) running NT as a backup domain controller for three days when we had to take the primary down for unscheduled maintenance and the secondary blew a Voltage Regulator Module for one of the Pentium Pro's. Network never went down once during the entire time, in fact the PS/2 never had one crash. It was used for tertiary backup for the three years it was used, and never had a reboot during two of those three years. It's Probably still in the server closet with a shrine built for it or something
Now, I think there running 2003 on Dell's, Last I talked to them they haven't had a crash since they could remember. Honestly, I cant remember the last crash I had on a NT/2000/2003 Server that I couldn't track down to either hardware failure, or Hard/Soft (driver) failure.
...Apple announcing that Windows Vista will be an OS option for their Next Mac.
This could effectively kill off the Palm OS. Especially it this treo sells like hotcakes. I hope not since my kyocera 6035 is getting old and I'm looking for a replacement.
Daikatana wasn't a bad game, as much as it was trying to do stuff far ahead of it's time, and then over hyped it to the point where it had to reinvent everything about the genre, or it would get blasted by everyone. This is what Duke Nukem Forever is going to be up against. DNF could be a great game if it comes out. DNF could be very fun and compelling, but it's going to get blasted by reviewers because it took so long to make, and should be absolutely flawless for the amount of time it took to make.
Back to Daikatana. The biggest problem was the Bot characters. The AI for them was completely stupid, and suffered many problems.
1) They suffered from "Natalia Syndrome" and would tend to run off on their own and get killed (which was bad, since you'd die when they did.)
2) They also had friendly fire on the bots, so when they would lag behind you and they saw something move, they would almost always shoot you in the back.
3) You never could "leave your buddy superfly" or Keiko when it came to the next part of the stage. This was just a pain. especially when half of the time they couldn't navigate the complex world.
Nowadays, you see much more complex AI work seamlessly with the player, and in many cases, you see what Daikatana was trying to do in more modern games (HL2 and the freedom fighter squads you can control is a good example), although still not as extreme to the point that one person dies and it's game over time.
Graphically, it's wasn't so bad. It looked ok, but it was no Half Life or Quake II, which came out around the same time or earlier. It however took a bold move and did all of the cut scenes as real time rendered scenes; something that You really didn't see much at that time, but see almost all the time today.
Storyline, wasn't bad. It could have been better, especially in the naming dept.
gameplay bucked a lot of the FPS norms. Weapons were interesting, especially the Daikatana, which leveled and got more powerful as you killed stuff with it. Kinda like the soulcube in doom III but more complex. You actually got levels and could apply them to attributes like speed, vitality, ETC.
Price was the best thing about this game. I think I paid $0.99 for the thing. It was definitely worth that price.
Looking at this picture this is nothing new.
We have a lot of Foreign exchange students here, and one of them has an IBM/LG branded laptop with the exact same color scheme, only it's a Pentium III laptop and the titanium color is just the color of the plastic instead of a true titanium cover.
I don't remember the Model number on the laptop, so I don't know which series it was, but I do know it was at least two to three years old.
They've been saying that for over a year now. I swear they say it just to hope that the soundstorm fan base will quiet down and die off.
I've heard the Nforce3-Nforce5 will have it. I heard it's going to be an add in card. Hell, I've heard it's going to be integrated in the next video card. So far I've seen nothing tangible and I'll be surprised if I do.
It's pretty much a given if you want to compete in the PC audio market you're dealing with Creative whether you like it or not. They were allowed to buyout all of the competition as well as most of the patents. In fact, the company that nV was geting the soundstorm tech from got bought out by Creative. The only reason Nvidia isn't owned by Creative is that they couldn't possibly buy them out, so they'll sue nV until they say "screw the audio market", which apparently nV did.
I still am holding out for a Nvidia soundstorm for athlon64, (my SN41G2 isn't going anywhere soon) but I doubt it will ever take place. At this point, once Nforce5 hits, I'm probably going to be switching to that regardless of what audio is on board.
Now there's something I would pay to see, and it's got to be more frightening than Alien Vs Predator.
I use Powerarchiver and have used it for a long time now.
It's not free but it does just about everything that this new version does, as well as open just about every compression format out there as well as create files with most of the compression formats as well.
For free, I'll second 7-zip.
At one time. MSN Messenger used to allow VOIP calls when it first came out. It got so expensive on MS that they removed the feature pretty fast though.
My guess is that it's going to be making a comeback soon.
http://www.viaembedded.com/
The mini-itx and nano-itx boards require little power to operate, can run any X86 based OS, and some can run off of flash memory devices with no addons required.
The only drawback to these is that their overall performace is not as fast as their AMD or Intel counterparts, but if silence, space and power savings is what you are looking for then these are a great solution.
This is the kind of DRM i want to see. Right now DRM is a pain to use because there is so many standards that are fighting each other. What I want to see is a single adopted open standard that everyone has access to.
Although DRM is a double edged sword, it's benefits to privacy far outweigh the *AA uses for it. Having a open DRM scheme that everyone can use will just make the adoption more streamline and easier for the end user.
It doesn't. that's the problem here.
There should be a screening process to validate which ads work well with the world and which ones don't. Mr Bigalow doesn't really work in this case.
If they were making ads to match the era and scope of the game, for example, a coke ad that looks like it was made by advertisers of that world and time, it would work much better than having the equivalent of a 500 year old (don't know what year planetside is set in) ad on the wall.
In the example from the MMO I play (city of heroes) They have billboards everywhere advertising fake companies. If all the billboards advertising Infront Steakhouse changed to Outback steakhouse overnight, it wouldn't phase me at all, and in fact it would make the city feel more realistic since I would expect a billboard like that in a real city. Now if it was changing every time I loaded the zone, I would be causing a fit (unless its one of those changing billboards you see in real life) but as long as it followed basic billboard rules and was handled the same way billboard advertising is done in real life (IE: billboard's change about once a month or longer, various advertising multiple products not just one, ETC) then it would work for me.
Dear Peaceoholics
No.
Love Rockstar Games.
PS: Reserve your Copy of Bully today!
So they are basicially going to bring clippy back from the dead?
I can see it now. you type the letter T and Clippy comes up and says "It looks like your issuing a Tornado warning! do you need any help?"
Great. Now to get GTA in australia, your going to have to go to your local Mafia boss to get it for you.
In fact, that could be a pretty good mini game for the next GTA.
On my mud, after you would have got your head ripped off, you would have to have your deity raise you from the dead. that sounds normal until you realize that all of the deity's were named after fast food characters.
So after your head got ripped off, you would type resurrect and the next thing you would see is something like "Mayor McCheese resurrects you in his temple" which of course looked like the inside of a McDonalds.
We also had Dave Thomas, Harland Sanders, The Taco Bell Chihuahua, Ronald McDonald, Long John Silver, The Burger King and The Dairy Queen as deity's. Apprently, I was ahead of my time and was doing it for free when I should have charged for it.
I can hear the Marvel guy with Big Teeth and a Plaid Suit now...
Well Billy, with the marvel MMORPG, it's now legal to make marvel characters, unlike the evil underhanded villains at Cryptic that made a superhero infringement machine hell bent on destroying the comic industry!
This is a great thing Billy, because when you play on the Marvel MMORPG, you wont get your Wolverine's name changed to GenericHero37! In fact, Your Wolverine looks a lot better than the last 93 Wolverines before you, but don't you dare make Superman, or we'll send The Punisher over to your house and "Punish" you if you know what I mean.
Not exactly.
If this tech is anywhere close to Epson and their built in Printheds, they will be making money on both.
Epson's built in Printheds was the stupidest idea I ever saw, at least consumer wise. Yes it would print well, but I hope you dont stop printing for more than a week or so, becuase once that printhead clogs it time to toss the printer away and buy another one.
The best design I've seen so far is the Canon designs. They Practicially encouraged refilling on those cartrages, they would last just about forever, and in case of the BC21, if the print head would go bad, you would just buy the full cartrage set with the printhead instead of just the ink wells, which were also refill friendly.
Most of the Vulnerabilities happen weeks to months after a patch is released. It's just getting the patch on the machine that's a problem.
.Net 2003 SP1 and firewall the internet until windows downloads all the critical patches. This would stop the 12 minute problem pretty quickly.
As XP SP2 starts to overtake XP SP1 and SP0 sales, it should get better, since SP2 screams and yells if you turn off automatic updates. This is going to take a while since most people are paranoid of SP2 or MS won't let them install it cause their OS is a pirate.
Hopefully in longhorn, they do the same thing they did with
OK. This is from someone who's main job is to repair Laptops in a College Student Laptop Program. I won't say which college because I like to keep my job separated from myself, but we deal with 1000 laptops and just had to deal with this last week.
First off, Laptop locks are useless. I can pick most of them in less than 2 minutes, and can crack most of the combination locks in about the same time. Now imagine a pro doing it. Also in most cases, They'll just break the laptop case to get it off the lock. You would be surprised what little most laptop lock points are protected with. Also, don't expect the campus police to be much help. In many cases they will do a write up and that's it, So don't expect CSI to show up if it's stolen.
Second, If the college your daughter is going to has some sort of Insurance on anything stolen in the Residence hall, Get it. Period. If it does happen you can at least claim the laptop back. I honestly forgot the name of the policy we were giving out to students, but it protected just about anything in the room from just about any major incident, from stolen property to fire.
Finally, if it is a brand name laptop, and your more concerned about the data rather than cost, call up the manufacturer and see if they offer some sort of phone home capability. IBM (since this is the laptop we give to students) I know offers it for a price but to us it's not cost effective to get Vs the amount of stolen laptops we have. Other colleges we have talked to swear by it. I'm not too sure about Dell or other manufactures but I believe that they have some sort of Equivalent. Also make periodic backups of her data (or have her store important files on a Network drive if available) and bios password protect it from Hard Drive Access. The first thing a professional thief is going to do is wipe the drive since it could point back to the person it was stolen from.
I remember during the last holiday season I wanted to see how long standby lasted on my Kyocera 6035 smartphone, so I charged it and left it on standby for two weeks. When I looked at it before I returned to work it had over half a charge left.
Now I set the phone to shut off at midnight and turn on at 8AM, so from my calculations thats 225 hours from a 1500Ah battery. It could have easily gone longer and probably break 400-500 hours on standby, and this is from a phone that is about three generations behind today's phones.
There's really two notable things here. It's IBM and it's small.
I've played with an X41 non tablet a few months ago. It wasn't the most powerful thing out there, but the small size of it made it really attractable. It weighed almost nothing, and the keyboard had a great feel for a laptop that was it's size. If the tablet has anything close to the feel of the X41 then it's definitely got potential here.
As for the IBM name, you pay a premium for it but there is nothing outside of a tougbook that can touch IBM when it comes to reliability and overall toughness of their laptops. I've seen IBM R51's (it's the laptops we give to students on campus) affected by drinks, candle wax, a flood, cigarette burns, run over by a car, and
even dropped from three stories and they still would turn on under those conditions. I can't imagine a latitude or an armada take that much abuse and still be functional. This isn't even getting into the IBM support side when it comes to fixing these problems. We do all the IBM support on campus and their RMA system is hard to beat.
If this tablet PC has any of these qualities, it's going to be pretty attractive to Execs and IT departments looking for their new computer replacement.
So, I guess this makes the Terminator Series pretty much infinite then, since basically they've been trying the grandfather paradox against SkyNet all these years.
That and John Conner will apparently never die, at least from a time traveling robot.