There are at least a few IOS games that are quite large. One example I know of off hand is Riven which is just over 1GB to download (just under 2GB installed).
You could upgrade from PalmOS 3.5 to Palm OS 4 on most devices after paying a nominal fee for the upgrade (I think it was either $10 or $15). For devices running Palm OS 2.2 you could upgrade to Palm OS 3.5 by purchasing an upgrade kit which included a new flash chip and additional 2MB of RAM to support the new OS.
You couldn't upgrade from Palm OS 4 to Palm OS 5 because Palm OS 5 was designed to run on ARM chips and Palm OS 4 was designed for a variant of the Motorola 68k architecture.
Proof by anecdote, I know, but I've never had any issues cleaning out C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download. Now, C:\Windows\Installer on the other hand... Just leave that one alone. Compress it if you want, but don't delete that stuff, or you will majorly screw up subsequent installations/uninstallations.
Yes, cleaning out C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download is perfectly safe but usually unnecessary.
Updates are downloaded into that folder and then installed. If the installation of an update is successful, the installer is deleted from the SoftwareDistribution\Download folder. If it is unsuccessful the installer remains in the folder and the installation will be attempted again the next time Windows Update is run.
I have seen systems with a lot of installers in the SoftwareDistribution\Download folder for updates that were installed successfully. Further investigation revealed that the antivirus client on the machine was keeping a file handle to the installer open after the update was installed. As a result, when Windows failed to delete the installer because the antivirus client never closed it's handle to the file.
The way to fix this problem was to reboot the PC (to make sure there are no more open handles) and manually delete the contents of the SoftwareDistribution\Download folder. I usually follow this up by removing the installed antivirus client and installing a more well-behaved one such as Microsoft Security Essentials.
While many cameras default to using protocols like MTP or UMS, every camera I have seen over the past several years has had an option in their settings menus to enable USB Mass Storage mode.
Turning that option on makes the camera act like any other USB storage device and allows pictures to be copied easily.
Although honestly if the camera supports MTP I always use that instead since it is safer and is fully supported on Windows XP and later and on Mac OS X. Either way the camera manufacturer's software is not required.
"Support" for Microsoft products currently comprises making tedious searches in their "knowledge" base and reading their circular answers to questions only peripherally related to the problem you're actually having.
Really? I have also found the knowledge base to contain quite a bit of good information once you learn how things are organized. (I agree that the organization is not very intuitive at first but there is more information there than a casual search may reveal at first.)
I have also contacted Microsoft Support at least 3 times in the past year and I have always found them to be very knowledgeable and quite helpful.
Yes, there is a fee required to contact support but they almost always refund the fee if the problem was not caused by user error and they will continue working with you on the problem until you agree that it has been resolved.
I had one particularly puzzling problem that turned out to be a bug in IIS. The support ticket ended up being escalated to someone on the IIS development team and they built a custom hotfix to fix the issue. The problem was resolved within 2 days and they refunded the support fee automatically.
Then of course as you pointed out there is the weird window tearing thing going on, which for some reason will happen even on a top-of-the-line Windows machine with no software running except the one explorer.exe window you're moving around.
The window tearing that you are describing was fixed by the hardware accelerated window manager that was introduced in Windows Vista.
If you are experiencing window tearing on a modern Windows machine, either your graphics card or drivers does not support the features required for hardware composting or you have disabled Aero. (Disabling Aero forces a fallback to a software desktop compositor similar to the one used in Windows XP and Server 2003.)
Please note that you can disable the transparent glass effects while still taking advantage of the new window manager by switching the theme from Aero Glass to Aero Basic.
He is probably referring to the fact the Dreamcast could be connected directly to a VGA monitor instead of a TV. When a VGA monitor is connected, many Dreamcast games would display at either 800x600 or 1024x768 (depending on the game.)
While this is not quite HD, 1024x768 is fairly close to 720p (1280x720).
Actually many Wii games do switch to a 16:9 aspect ratio if you have the Wii set to EDTV (480p) mode instead of SDTV (480i) mode.
Of course this requires connecting the Wii using a component video cable instead of the included composite cable but the results look quite good if your TV has a reasonably good scaler and doesn't try to do something stupid like deinterlace the already progressive signal coming from the Wii.
The only downside is having to switch your TV to 4:3 mode for those few games that do not support 16:9 (Like Kororinpa). Fortunately the vast majority of Wii games do support 16:9 mode.
If only... it would be easier to track down information when needed if Apple did have some kind of basic numbering. Or even somewhat non-intuitive number like NVidia, but at least something to point at and say "it's laptop version such-and-such" rather than trying to remember exactly what year it was purchased.
Actually Apple does give each hardware refresh a version number. In OS X you can see the version numbering by going to About This Mac and clicking on the More Info... button.
Select the Hardware option on the left side and you should see a Model Identifier that says something like "MacBookPro5,1" The 5,1 part represents the hardware version/generation.
Just a thought, as long as this is using DirectShow or the modern equivalent, doesn't this open up the web browser to any and all flaws in said stack? Are Microsoft or the rest of you really that open to rely on the multi-media stack for security tightness? I'll stay afraid and yet wish everyone else luck
If the web browser runs in Low-Rights/Reduced Privileged Mode then any flaws in Media Foundation or DirectShow are not likely to lead to an exploitable attack vector. (Reduced Privileged mode causes a process to run with a permission level below that of a regular user and allows very little access to the file system or registry.)
Unfortunately Firefox refuses to support Reduced Privileged Mode on Vista and Windows 7. Internet Explorer and Chrome do, however.
Re:That's one heck of a "long goodbye"
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
I seem to remember that some displays have a DVI-I socket (both analog and digital), and if they can't sync to a DVI-D signal, they'll fall back to the DVI-A pins.
Indeed, most of the descent LCD panels that I have worked with have had DVI-I ports and will accept a VGA signal sent through a DVI-I cable just fine.
In fact, many NEC monitors come with a VGA->DVI-I cable in the box (along with a DVI-D->DVI-I cable and sometimes a DVI-D->DVI-D cable).
I have seen some LCD panels equipped with 2 DVI ports, one DVI-I and one DVI-D. In those cases, the DVI-I port can accept an analog VGA signal or a digital DVI signal and the DVI-D port can only accept a digital DVI signal, so if you have a monitor like that make sure you use the correct port.
When are they going to switch to a different filesystem? The fat32 4GB file size limitations makes HD video a pain to deal with as well. Currently canon cameras stop recording when the file size reaches the maximum and the user has to see the recording light stop, and hit record again. A better interum solution would be to fill the 4GB file size, increment the filename by one, and keep going. I don't understand why they don't do that... it would be a simple firmware fix.
Most decent video cameras do split their files into 2GB chunks and then automatically join them when they are transferred to a PC.
I believe this behavior is required for all cameras that support the AVCHD/H.264 standard and most of the cameras that I have used that youse MPEG2 compression do this as well.
Most still cameras with a video recording feature do not split their files on purpose. The resulting time limits prevent them from being classified as a video camera which means the manufacturers don't have to pay the tariffs that some countries impose on video cameras.
That particular puzzle was originally created for online players working together, hence the weird 15 minute wait. That way there was enough leeway for online players to coordinate to solve the puzzle. When the plug was pulled on Uru Online, Cyan had to re-adapt the expansion for single player.
Why they didn't rework this particular puzzle remains a mystery, but I'm sure budgeting had much to do with it.
I suspect the reason that particular puzzle was not changed was because time travel plays a very important role in that part of the overall story.
If you pay attention to some of the clues in the area you will notice that you are actually traveling 15 minutes backwards in time. Hence the need to wait approximately 15 minutes before you see the pellet you dropped earlier.
This particular puzzle (and limited time travel) plays a larger part in the overall story which becomes even more clear in Myst V.
AFAIK they are packaged with every major linux distro out there, and I can't but presume that Windows ships with microcode patches as well.
Microcode updates for Windows machines are distributed through Microsoft Update and are downloaded and installed automatically if automatic updates is enabled (and it is enabled by default). No BIOS update required.
An example of such an update can be found by looking at Microsoft KB936357
sure it takes a little work - and you can't do it right at install - but it isn't that much work, and you have the added benefit that you don't have to care if devs are stupid and hard code paths in their software.
Actually you can instruct the installers for Vista and Windows 7 to put the Users folder which holds all of the user profiles on any drive you choose. It may work on Server 2008 and 2008 R2 as well but I have only used it on Vista and Windows 7.
The easiest way to do this is to use the Windows Automated Installation Kit to set the path and then copy the resulting XML file to a flash drive. The installer will automatically read the XML file and create the Users folder on the appropriate drive.
This method ensures that all of the permissions are properly set for the user profiles and eliminates the need to manually create a junction for the user profiles.
I'd like to see MS work on virtualization on the app level. This way, a Web browser (or more specifically a Web browser instance) has its own instance of everything in the OS.
That is exactly what Internet Explorer's Protected Mode does when running on either Vista or Windows 7 with UAC enabled. When Internet Explorer is running in Protected Mode it can only access a small handful of directories and certain registry locations even if the user running it is an administrator.
Microsoft calls applications that use this feature Low Integrity processes. For more information look here and here.
In Vista and Windows 7 only a small part of the graphics driver resides in Ring 0. Most of the graphics driver runs as unprivileged code so the potential for a kernel mode (privileged) exploit in a graphics driver is fairly small.
Sure, their new scanners and printers have full support and work fine, but if your printer is more than a few years old (released before Vista) you're very lucky if you 32 bit drivers which enable even half the functionality.
The driver model for printers and scanners did not change from XP to Vista (or from Vista to Windows 7 for that matter.) As a result, if you are running a 32-bit version of Vista or a 32-bit version of Windows 7 you can use 32-bit XP drivers just fine.
The problems start when you attempt to install 32-bit drivers on a 64-bit operating system and find the drivers won't install because the 64-bit Windows kernel cannot load 32-bit drivers.
I don't know about other brands, but most Sony point and shoot cameras support automatically taking 3 pictures at 3 different exposure values (usually called bracket exposure) which can be later combined into a HDR image. I have used it on several occasions on my W290 and it works quite well.
I suspect other manufactures have similar options - this is definitely not unique to Apple.
In the case of the iPod, Apple isn't selling music with DRM anymore, but I'm sure their old contracts are still intact that don't allow them to download DRM'd music onto any players other than Apple iPods. Not on devices that claim to be Apple iPods, but devices that actually _are_ Apple iPods.
The iTunes sync feature that made the Pre report itself as an iPod was designed to allow people who purchased DRM free tracks from iTunes to be able to sync them to the Pre for later playback. The Pre never had any support for DRM'd music tracks.
The problem is iTunes will only sync DRM free music with devices that are considered to be "trusted" by Apple which includes all iPods and a few other 3rd party players but not the Pre. Which was why Palm decided to allow the Pre to spoof the USB ID of an iPod.
my tests show that I was not even able to get to sata1 (150) speed with a usb3 controller and docked hard drive. system was i5-750 (more than enough cpu) and yet my very very old pci (!) based sil image sata150 4 port card was beating the usb3 based drive system.
Assuming you were using the same drive for both tests something must be wrong with your USB3 controller or how its connected to your motherboard. Make sure your USB3 controller is not sharing PCI Express lanes with other devices on your system and not going through a PCI Express switch which will increase latency and lower overall available bandwidth.
eSATA and SATA do support Port Multipliers which are very similar to USB hubs in many ways. Indeed, many SATA disk enclosures have port multipliers built in so they only need 1 eSATA connection to a PC/Laptop/Server/other device.
When I plug in my phone I get both iTunes and the dialog. It's a tad annoying, but I can't find any way to make the dialog stop coming up.
It sounds like iTunes doesn't properly register itself as an AutoPlay handler and is instead relying on some other way of detecting when a device is plugged in. If it did then you could configure Windows (either via the Control Panel, or through the application - in this case iTunes) to always open iTunes when that particular device is inserted and you wouldn't see the AutoPlay dialog box when you plug in the device.
Unfortunately there is not much you can do to about the extra dialog box except to set the default action to "Do Nothing" and click the check box to always perform that action. This will effectively disable AutoPlay for that device but it may be better than waiting for Apple to implement things the correct way.
Yes, but an equally useful thing would have simply been a 'Install program' menu item, that, when launched, looks on all removable media for autorun.inf files or whatever, and presents their devices, names, and icons in a little list where you pick one.
Actually older versions of Windows did have such a menu item but it was removed in Vista, probably because very few people actually used it. Prior to Vista there was a control panel applet called "Add/Remove Programs". I first encountered it in Windows 95.
Most people used it to uninstall software but the applet also had an "Add Software" button that would scan all removeable media for an installer and offer to execute it.
What I don't understand is why people keep complaining about the autorun functionality, since in Vista and later autorun files are not executed by default. Instead when an autorun file is detected a dialog box is displayed asking the user if they wish to execute the autorun, open a explorer window to browse the files on the disk/device, or do nothing.
Unfortunately some of the compatibility fixes that GOG makes to some of the games they sell end up breaking so they run worse than the original versions do. A good example of this is Riven. The original DVD version runs just fine on Windows 7 as long as the game executable is set to run in Windows 95/98 compatibility mode and the appropriate Quicktime DLLs coped from the DVD and placed in the game's directory.
Unfortunately, in GOG's version many of the Quicktime movies fail to play which makes it very hard (and in some cases nearly impossible) to complete certain parts of the game Also reading the in-game journals is nearly impossible because when the player attempts to flip a page in a journal the game flips multiple pages which makes it practically impossible to follow the story in the game.
The original DVD release does not have these problems and neither does the Steam release of the same game (or so I am told). So far GOG has refused to even acknowledge these issues. As it stands now I have wasted the $5.99 that I spent on the GOG release and ended up buying a used copy of the original DVD from a seller on ebay just so I could play the game.
I have heard that others have experienced similar problems with the GOG release of Real Myst, although I can't confirm them. (I own the original CD release and it runs fine on Windows 7 without any compatibility tweaks at all, so I am not sure how they could have messed it up but it seams they have...)
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There are at least a few IOS games that are quite large. One example I know of off hand is Riven which is just over 1GB to download (just under 2GB installed).
You could upgrade from PalmOS 3.5 to Palm OS 4 on most devices after paying a nominal fee for the upgrade (I think it was either $10 or $15). For devices running Palm OS 2.2 you could upgrade to Palm OS 3.5 by purchasing an upgrade kit which included a new flash chip and additional 2MB of RAM to support the new OS. You couldn't upgrade from Palm OS 4 to Palm OS 5 because Palm OS 5 was designed to run on ARM chips and Palm OS 4 was designed for a variant of the Motorola 68k architecture.
Yes, cleaning out C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download is perfectly safe but usually unnecessary.
Updates are downloaded into that folder and then installed. If the installation of an update is successful, the installer is deleted from the SoftwareDistribution\Download folder. If it is unsuccessful the installer remains in the folder and the installation will be attempted again the next time Windows Update is run.
I have seen systems with a lot of installers in the SoftwareDistribution\Download folder for updates that were installed successfully. Further investigation revealed that the antivirus client on the machine was keeping a file handle to the installer open after the update was installed. As a result, when Windows failed to delete the installer because the antivirus client never closed it's handle to the file.
The way to fix this problem was to reboot the PC (to make sure there are no more open handles) and manually delete the contents of the SoftwareDistribution\Download folder. I usually follow this up by removing the installed antivirus client and installing a more well-behaved one such as Microsoft Security Essentials.
While many cameras default to using protocols like MTP or UMS, every camera I have seen over the past several years has had an option in their settings menus to enable USB Mass Storage mode. Turning that option on makes the camera act like any other USB storage device and allows pictures to be copied easily. Although honestly if the camera supports MTP I always use that instead since it is safer and is fully supported on Windows XP and later and on Mac OS X. Either way the camera manufacturer's software is not required.
Really? I have also found the knowledge base to contain quite a bit of good information once you learn how things are organized. (I agree that the organization is not very intuitive at first but there is more information there than a casual search may reveal at first.)
I have also contacted Microsoft Support at least 3 times in the past year and I have always found them to be very knowledgeable and quite helpful.
Yes, there is a fee required to contact support but they almost always refund the fee if the problem was not caused by user error and they will continue working with you on the problem until you agree that it has been resolved.
I had one particularly puzzling problem that turned out to be a bug in IIS. The support ticket ended up being escalated to someone on the IIS development team and they built a custom hotfix to fix the issue. The problem was resolved within 2 days and they refunded the support fee automatically.
The window tearing that you are describing was fixed by the hardware accelerated window manager that was introduced in Windows Vista.
If you are experiencing window tearing on a modern Windows machine, either your graphics card or drivers does not support the features required for hardware composting or you have disabled Aero. (Disabling Aero forces a fallback to a software desktop compositor similar to the one used in Windows XP and Server 2003.)
Please note that you can disable the transparent glass effects while still taking advantage of the new window manager by switching the theme from Aero Glass to Aero Basic.
He is probably referring to the fact the Dreamcast could be connected directly to a VGA monitor instead of a TV. When a VGA monitor is connected, many Dreamcast games would display at either 800x600 or 1024x768 (depending on the game.)
While this is not quite HD, 1024x768 is fairly close to 720p (1280x720).
Actually many Wii games do switch to a 16:9 aspect ratio if you have the Wii set to EDTV (480p) mode instead of SDTV (480i) mode.
Of course this requires connecting the Wii using a component video cable instead of the included composite cable but the results look quite good if your TV has a reasonably good scaler and doesn't try to do something stupid like deinterlace the already progressive signal coming from the Wii.
The only downside is having to switch your TV to 4:3 mode for those few games that do not support 16:9 (Like Kororinpa). Fortunately the vast majority of Wii games do support 16:9 mode.
Actually Apple does give each hardware refresh a version number. In OS X you can see the version numbering by going to About This Mac and clicking on the More Info... button. Select the Hardware option on the left side and you should see a Model Identifier that says something like "MacBookPro5,1" The 5,1 part represents the hardware version/generation.
If the web browser runs in Low-Rights/Reduced Privileged Mode then any flaws in Media Foundation or DirectShow are not likely to lead to an exploitable attack vector. (Reduced Privileged mode causes a process to run with a permission level below that of a regular user and allows very little access to the file system or registry.)
Unfortunately Firefox refuses to support Reduced Privileged Mode on Vista and Windows 7. Internet Explorer and Chrome do, however.
Indeed, most of the descent LCD panels that I have worked with have had DVI-I ports and will accept a VGA signal sent through a DVI-I cable just fine.
In fact, many NEC monitors come with a VGA->DVI-I cable in the box (along with a DVI-D->DVI-I cable and sometimes a DVI-D->DVI-D cable).
I have seen some LCD panels equipped with 2 DVI ports, one DVI-I and one DVI-D. In those cases, the DVI-I port can accept an analog VGA signal or a digital DVI signal and the DVI-D port can only accept a digital DVI signal, so if you have a monitor like that make sure you use the correct port.
Most decent video cameras do split their files into 2GB chunks and then automatically join them when they are transferred to a PC.
I believe this behavior is required for all cameras that support the AVCHD/H.264 standard and most of the cameras that I have used that youse MPEG2 compression do this as well.
Most still cameras with a video recording feature do not split their files on purpose. The resulting time limits prevent them from being classified as a video camera which means the manufacturers don't have to pay the tariffs that some countries impose on video cameras.
I suspect the reason that particular puzzle was not changed was because time travel plays a very important role in that part of the overall story.
If you pay attention to some of the clues in the area you will notice that you are actually traveling 15 minutes backwards in time. Hence the need to wait approximately 15 minutes before you see the pellet you dropped earlier.
This particular puzzle (and limited time travel) plays a larger part in the overall story which becomes even more clear in Myst V.
Microcode updates for Windows machines are distributed through Microsoft Update and are downloaded and installed automatically if automatic updates is enabled (and it is enabled by default). No BIOS update required.
An example of such an update can be found by looking at Microsoft KB936357
Actually you can instruct the installers for Vista and Windows 7 to put the Users folder which holds all of the user profiles on any drive you choose. It may work on Server 2008 and 2008 R2 as well but I have only used it on Vista and Windows 7.
The easiest way to do this is to use the Windows Automated Installation Kit to set the path and then copy the resulting XML file to a flash drive. The installer will automatically read the XML file and create the Users folder on the appropriate drive.
This method ensures that all of the permissions are properly set for the user profiles and eliminates the need to manually create a junction for the user profiles.
That is exactly what Internet Explorer's Protected Mode does when running on either Vista or Windows 7 with UAC enabled. When Internet Explorer is running in Protected Mode it can only access a small handful of directories and certain registry locations even if the user running it is an administrator.
Microsoft calls applications that use this feature Low Integrity processes. For more information look here and here.
In Vista and Windows 7 only a small part of the graphics driver resides in Ring 0. Most of the graphics driver runs as unprivileged code so the potential for a kernel mode (privileged) exploit in a graphics driver is fairly small.
The driver model for printers and scanners did not change from XP to Vista (or from Vista to Windows 7 for that matter.) As a result, if you are running a 32-bit version of Vista or a 32-bit version of Windows 7 you can use 32-bit XP drivers just fine.
The problems start when you attempt to install 32-bit drivers on a 64-bit operating system and find the drivers won't install because the 64-bit Windows kernel cannot load 32-bit drivers.
I don't know about other brands, but most Sony point and shoot cameras support automatically taking 3 pictures at 3 different exposure values (usually called bracket exposure) which can be later combined into a HDR image. I have used it on several occasions on my W290 and it works quite well.
I suspect other manufactures have similar options - this is definitely not unique to Apple.
The iTunes sync feature that made the Pre report itself as an iPod was designed to allow people who purchased DRM free tracks from iTunes to be able to sync them to the Pre for later playback. The Pre never had any support for DRM'd music tracks.
The problem is iTunes will only sync DRM free music with devices that are considered to be "trusted" by Apple which includes all iPods and a few other 3rd party players but not the Pre. Which was why Palm decided to allow the Pre to spoof the USB ID of an iPod.
Assuming you were using the same drive for both tests something must be wrong with your USB3 controller or how its connected to your motherboard. Make sure your USB3 controller is not sharing PCI Express lanes with other devices on your system and not going through a PCI Express switch which will increase latency and lower overall available bandwidth.
eSATA and SATA do support Port Multipliers which are very similar to USB hubs in many ways. Indeed, many SATA disk enclosures have port multipliers built in so they only need 1 eSATA connection to a PC/Laptop/Server/other device.
When I plug in my phone I get both iTunes and the dialog. It's a tad annoying, but I can't find any way to make the dialog stop coming up.
It sounds like iTunes doesn't properly register itself as an AutoPlay handler and is instead relying on some other way of detecting when a device is plugged in. If it did then you could configure Windows (either via the Control Panel, or through the application - in this case iTunes) to always open iTunes when that particular device is inserted and you wouldn't see the AutoPlay dialog box when you plug in the device.
Unfortunately there is not much you can do to about the extra dialog box except to set the default action to "Do Nothing" and click the check box to always perform that action. This will effectively disable AutoPlay for that device but it may be better than waiting for Apple to implement things the correct way.
Actually older versions of Windows did have such a menu item but it was removed in Vista, probably because very few people actually used it. Prior to Vista there was a control panel applet called "Add/Remove Programs". I first encountered it in Windows 95.
Most people used it to uninstall software but the applet also had an "Add Software" button that would scan all removeable media for an installer and offer to execute it.
What I don't understand is why people keep complaining about the autorun functionality, since in Vista and later autorun files are not executed by default. Instead when an autorun file is detected a dialog box is displayed asking the user if they wish to execute the autorun, open a explorer window to browse the files on the disk/device, or do nothing.
Unfortunately some of the compatibility fixes that GOG makes to some of the games they sell end up breaking so they run worse than the original versions do. A good example of this is Riven. The original DVD version runs just fine on Windows 7 as long as the game executable is set to run in Windows 95/98 compatibility mode and the appropriate Quicktime DLLs coped from the DVD and placed in the game's directory.
Unfortunately, in GOG's version many of the Quicktime movies fail to play which makes it very hard (and in some cases nearly impossible) to complete certain parts of the game Also reading the in-game journals is nearly impossible because when the player attempts to flip a page in a journal the game flips multiple pages which makes it practically impossible to follow the story in the game.
The original DVD release does not have these problems and neither does the Steam release of the same game (or so I am told). So far GOG has refused to even acknowledge these issues. As it stands now I have wasted the $5.99 that I spent on the GOG release and ended up buying a used copy of the original DVD from a seller on ebay just so I could play the game.
I have heard that others have experienced similar problems with the GOG release of Real Myst, although I can't confirm them. (I own the original CD release and it runs fine on Windows 7 without any compatibility tweaks at all, so I am not sure how they could have messed it up but it seams they have...)