Ah, but FFXI encourages players to leave themselves logged in even when they aren't playing. FFXI allows players to sell items directly to other players through the bazaar system but a player's bazaar is only open when they are logged in. Many players leave their characters logged in while they are at work or while they are sleeping. As a result, the time reported by the FFXI/playtime command can be deceiving.
Yes, there is also the auction house system which allows players to sell items while they are not logged in but some items cannot be sold via the auction house and others are almost always sold via the bazaar system.
Just as uninstalling a program is more intuitive to just drop it in the trash. I can't say how many times I would try to stop family members from deleting folders on a Windows box to try to uninstall an app.
The problem is many times dropping a program in the trash leaves behind a ton of configuration files, user preferences, etc that are also part of the program - Just like deleting an application folder would on Windows.
More and more OS X applications are starting to include dedicated uninstallers to address this problem but they are not always located in a consistent place (some applications put an uninstaller directly in the application folder, others put it in the utilities folder).
In this instance I believe having a single location for all installers/uninstallers like the "Uninstall or change a program" dialog in Windows is the best solution.
Yes, an individual user can turn off silent updates but is there a setting that turns off silent updates for all users on a system? On Windows at least, Firefox update settings are stored per user, making it difficult to manage in a multiuser lab environment.
Civilization V uses Steam which means you can download and install it on as many systems as you like but you do need an active Internet connection during installation so you can login to your Steam account to verify ownership.
You can play it without an Internet connection by putting Steam into offline mode.
As far as DRM schemes go, Steam is one of the most customer friendly ones available.
Are you sure that was a Dell Optiplex GX-270 you worked on? I have repaired countless Dell Optiplex PCs from the GX-240 series up through the GX-745 series and I have never seen anything other than standard ATX power supplies in them, and when I was replacing bad power supplies in GX-270s and GX-280s due to the bad capacitor issues I always used standard ATX supplies from Corsair or Antec with no problems.
Now Dell did scramble the ATX connections on some of their home models (Dimension series primarly) but that only lasted for a couple of years and all Dimensions produced after 2005 or so use standard ATX supplies. As far as I know Dell never used non-standard supplies in any of their enterprise lines including the Optiplex line.
For some reason many PC laptops ship with touchpads that are quite customizable but include customized drivers that disable much of the functionality and customization that the hardware normally supports.
If your PC laptop has a touchpad made by Synaptics (which many do) you may be able to get multitouch scrolling by downloading the latest driver from here. Even if you have an older Synaptics device that doesn't support multitouch you should still be able to set up a "scroll zone" at the edges of the pad which allows you to scroll using a single finger. I have done this on many Dell and HP laptops and it works great.
Also, the main reliability problem with DVD-Rs isn't scratching (you can avoid that with careful handling), but with the dye layer degrading over time. That's a problem with any optical technology that uses dye for writability, and can only be lessened by using better (and more expensive) dyes
Bingo, it's the dye that is the problem. If you use the cheapest writable DVD media that you can find, don't be surprised if the disc is unreadable in just a few months. However, if you get good quality media such as discs manufactured by Taiyo Yuden (make sure they are genuine, beware of fakes) and burn at the recommended speeds using a high quality burner (some cheap burners do an absolutely terrible job regardless of media) the discs will last for much longer.
Exactly how long discs with high-stability dyes will last in typical environments is not known, but I have some CD-Rs that are over 15 years old and are still readable and I have DVD+R media that is over 5 years old and still perfectly readable and will probably remain so for at least another 10-15 years.
Speaking as someone who has edited everything from home movies, indie shorts, commercial web promo vids to a professional feature film on Macs and PCs, I'll throw my 2 cents in and say OS X is simply a better platform.
Personally I feel just the opposite. I hate the way that most video applications on OS X are unable to handle elementary audio and video streams without first wrapping them in a Quicktime container and then having to constantly deal with color space expansion bugs in the Quicktime player (which as of OS X 10.6 are still unfixed).
I have been able to automate much of my video production workflow through the use of AVISynth scripts running on Windows. For those of you who aren't familiar with AVISynth, it is a very powerful scripting language designed specifically for filtering, editing, and manipulating video streams. I have yet to find anything that comes anywhere close to the power and flexibility of AVISynth that runs on OS X and using AVISynth to do the heavy lifting has saved me tons of time over the years.
If you have to reboot your Pre frequently then I suspect something is very wrong either with some of the software you have installed or with the phone itself. I have used my Pre heavily almost every day for a year now and the last time I had to reboot it was over 3 months ago (and that was for an OS update).
The screen on the Pre should automatically turn on when you open the slider so you shouldn't need to be able to hit the power button to wake up the screen while the slider is open. If yours doesn't do this then you may a hardware problem and you should be able to get it replaced under warranty.
The CPU is a bit on the slow side but I think a faster CPU would greatly decrease the battery life which would have to be compensated for by including a larger (and heavier) battery which would make the Pre thicker and less convenient to carry around.
As far as I know you can use the free express editions of Visual Studio and and command line.NET compilers with any version of Vista or Windows 7 except for Starter. The system requirements indicate that all versions of Windows XP, Vista, and 7 are supported except for starter.
Are you sure you had the compiler installed properly? I have personally compiled.NET applications on a laptop running Vista Home Basic using Visual C# Express with no problems.
Such a time limit wouldn't change a thing in this case because Sony has developed and is actively selling modern ports of Lemmings for the PSP and the PS3 via their Playstation Network online store.
A more interesting question is why Firefox thinks Farmville is unresponsive in the first place. A few people I work with play Farmville on a regular basis and Farmville displays a progress bar that is updated constantly while it is loading. Yet for some reason Firefox still thinks that it is unresponsive even though it is updating the screen!
I assume Firefox must be expecting the plugin to respond to a particular message and assuming is is unresponsive if it doesn't respond even though the plugin may still be updating it's display area.
Windows Phone 7 is not designed to replace Windows Mobile 6.5 for all devices. I think Microsoft is designing Windows Phone 7 to to be used on low-end smartphones for consumers who may have never used a smartphone before.
The successor for Windows Mobile 6.5 is Windows Embedded Handheld which is backwards compatible with many Windows Mobile 6.x applications and is supposed to be able to run on many devices that currently run Windows Mobile 6.x. Windows Embedded Handheld is designed for high-end smartphones and enterprise/corporate devices just like Windows Mobile 6.5 was and I will be very surprised if it doesn't include basic productivity features like copy and paste.
As an added note, in Vista and windows 7 autorun is enabled by default but it will not run an executable without prompting you first, unlike XP which would just blindly run the executable.
Basically, if the autorun.inf file tries to call an executable Windows will open a dialog box allowing you to choose whether you want to run the executable or just open the drive in Windows Explorer.
You can move a disk from PC to PC with sleds, but that won't make Windows independent of the PC because of its driver model. You'll need precisely the same hardware installed in the same slots in both PCs to avoid confusing Windows.
That was true on versions of Windows prior to Vista. Prior to Vista the hardware for the PC was detected at install time and the appropriate HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) was installed. That meant that if you attempted to move the drive to a system that needed a different HAL you got an instant BSOD.
In Vista (and Windows 7 as well) Windows determines which HAL to use during boot time so you can easily move a Windows install from one machine to another even if they have very different hardware. If the boot drive is on a storage controller or RAID cards that is not supported by the driver's built-in to Vista or Windows 7 you will need to make sure the appropriate drivers are installed before moving the drive but that is fairly easy to do for most controllers.
Where I used to have to maintain OS images for every hardware configuration I manage, I now only have 2 images. One for 32-bit Windows 7 (for older hardware that can't support 64-bit) and one for 64-bit Windows 7.
Also both Vista and Windows 7 support booting via USB you just have to configure it properly. Windows 7 can even boot from a VHD file (basically a disk image) which can be on any drive that is accessible at boot time.
Actually the version of WMP included in Windows 7 has a built-in AAC codec and can play AAC files without anything else installed. No third party codec required. It also includes a H.264 video codec and a MP4 splitter so you can even play H.264 video with AAC audio with full hardware acceleration without needing to install anything.
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Be's IP bought by PalmSource and not by Palm Inc? Keep in mind that PalmSource and Palm Inc. are not the same company (although they worked closely together.) That would mean that Be's IP is currently owned by Access.
I remember PalmSource using some things from Be in PalmOS 6 - which unfortunately never got used in any devices before Access bought them.
The concept behind gog.com is nice (releasing DRM-free versions of slightly older games). However I have found many of the games to be missing content that were in the original releases.
For instance I purchased the Incredible Machine 3 but the years have taken a tole on the disc and it now has several bad scratches that make it unreadable. I purchased the Incredible Machine Mega Pack from gog.com and quickly discovered that gog.com stripped the excellent Red-book audio track from the Incredible Machine 3 leaving only the MIDI version.
Now they do provide the soundtrack as a separate download but there is no way for the game to use those audio files instead of the MIDI versions so the overall experience is not nearly as nice as the original CD release.
gog.com appears to do the same thing with other games that originally used Red-book audio (Descent for instance) and appear to be unwilling to release the games in the form of a CD image with audio tracks that could be burned and played like the originals with their full audio score. For DOS games, they use DosBox and DosBox has had support reading red-book audio directly from a CD image for a long time so there is really no excuse.
Based on your description I doubt the problem is with IE 8, rather I suspect the problem is with a mis-behaving browser plugin. New blank tabs should open nearly instantly and each tab loads in a separate thread
For instance, the Sun Java SSV Helper plugin for IE tends to cause a lot of the problems that you are describing including taking 3-4 seconds to open new tabs at times. I have no idea exactly what the Java SSV Helper plugin does but I have yet to encounter a Java applet that won't run without it, so I just disable it.
I have also seen the Adobe PDF Link Helper plugin cause problems (although the latest version of Adobe Reader 9 appears to have fixed most of those problems.)
Try starting Internet Explorer using the No Add-Ons shortcut and see if you still have problems. If performance is improved then you can launch IE the normal way and go to Manage Add-Ons and try disabling add-ons one by one until you find the ones that are causing problems.
I doubt Microsoft will ever release a 64-bit Windows Update Plugin because in Vista and later Windows Update is a standalone application that does not require or use Internet Explorer. The only users who may benefit from such a plugin would be those running XP x64 and Server 2003 x64.
Re:How about something really useful, like OOB mgm
on
Intel Launches Wi-Di
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· Score: 1
Intel already does offer out of band management on some of their motherboard chipsets. Look up Intel vPro and Intel Active Management Technology.
There is a wireless version that is supported on some laptop chipsets as well.
I handle PC support at a local college and I have found vPro to be very handy for troubleshooting PCs located at some of our remote campuses. vPro also allows us to direct PCs to boot off of an ISO image on a server and do a OS install without ever needing to touch the PC at all.
Without knowing exactly what malware was installed it is hard to tell what the infection vector was. However, I suspect she was infected through a vunerability in a browswer plugin, perhaps Adobe Reader or Flash. I have seen websites serving ads that contain an infected PDF objects on more than one occasion.
That is one reason why I always remove the Adobe Reader browser plugin. That way when I click on a link that leads to a PDF or a page has a PDF embedded in it I am prompted to download the file. That way I only download and open PDFs that I am actively seeking and am much less likely to open one that may be a vector for malware.
The Sony PRS-600 supports free hand drawing on any page and saves the results as a SVG. It also natively supports a fairly wide range of formats including TXT, RTF, LRF, ePub, and PDF.
The only real downside is that it has a 6 inch display so large PDFs are best viewed in landscape mode which displays half a page at a time.
The registry in Windows is already divided into multiple parts (called hives). Each hive is for a specific purpose and has its own ACLs:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT - File Associations, MIME types, registered DLLs, etc.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE - System-wide settings
HKEY_USERS - User-specific settings, has child hives for each user account on the system.
There are other hives as well but the ones I listed above are generally the most important ones.
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Ah, but FFXI encourages players to leave themselves logged in even when they aren't playing. FFXI allows players to sell items directly to other players through the bazaar system but a player's bazaar is only open when they are logged in. Many players leave their characters logged in while they are at work or while they are sleeping. As a result, the time reported by the FFXI /playtime command can be deceiving.
Yes, there is also the auction house system which allows players to sell items while they are not logged in but some items cannot be sold via the auction house and others are almost always sold via the bazaar system.
The problem is many times dropping a program in the trash leaves behind a ton of configuration files, user preferences, etc that are also part of the program - Just like deleting an application folder would on Windows.
More and more OS X applications are starting to include dedicated uninstallers to address this problem but they are not always located in a consistent place (some applications put an uninstaller directly in the application folder, others put it in the utilities folder).
In this instance I believe having a single location for all installers/uninstallers like the "Uninstall or change a program" dialog in Windows is the best solution.
Yes, an individual user can turn off silent updates but is there a setting that turns off silent updates for all users on a system? On Windows at least, Firefox update settings are stored per user, making it difficult to manage in a multiuser lab environment.
Civilization V uses Steam which means you can download and install it on as many systems as you like but you do need an active Internet connection during installation so you can login to your Steam account to verify ownership.
You can play it without an Internet connection by putting Steam into offline mode.
As far as DRM schemes go, Steam is one of the most customer friendly ones available.
Are you sure that was a Dell Optiplex GX-270 you worked on? I have repaired countless Dell Optiplex PCs from the GX-240 series up through the GX-745 series and I have never seen anything other than standard ATX power supplies in them, and when I was replacing bad power supplies in GX-270s and GX-280s due to the bad capacitor issues I always used standard ATX supplies from Corsair or Antec with no problems.
Now Dell did scramble the ATX connections on some of their home models (Dimension series primarly) but that only lasted for a couple of years and all Dimensions produced after 2005 or so use standard ATX supplies. As far as I know Dell never used non-standard supplies in any of their enterprise lines including the Optiplex line.
For some reason many PC laptops ship with touchpads that are quite customizable but include customized drivers that disable much of the functionality and customization that the hardware normally supports.
If your PC laptop has a touchpad made by Synaptics (which many do) you may be able to get multitouch scrolling by downloading the latest driver from here. Even if you have an older Synaptics device that doesn't support multitouch you should still be able to set up a "scroll zone" at the edges of the pad which allows you to scroll using a single finger. I have done this on many Dell and HP laptops and it works great.
Bingo, it's the dye that is the problem. If you use the cheapest writable DVD media that you can find, don't be surprised if the disc is unreadable in just a few months. However, if you get good quality media such as discs manufactured by Taiyo Yuden (make sure they are genuine, beware of fakes) and burn at the recommended speeds using a high quality burner (some cheap burners do an absolutely terrible job regardless of media) the discs will last for much longer.
Exactly how long discs with high-stability dyes will last in typical environments is not known, but I have some CD-Rs that are over 15 years old and are still readable and I have DVD+R media that is over 5 years old and still perfectly readable and will probably remain so for at least another 10-15 years.
Personally I feel just the opposite. I hate the way that most video applications on OS X are unable to handle elementary audio and video streams without first wrapping them in a Quicktime container and then having to constantly deal with color space expansion bugs in the Quicktime player (which as of OS X 10.6 are still unfixed). I have been able to automate much of my video production workflow through the use of AVISynth scripts running on Windows. For those of you who aren't familiar with AVISynth, it is a very powerful scripting language designed specifically for filtering, editing, and manipulating video streams. I have yet to find anything that comes anywhere close to the power and flexibility of AVISynth that runs on OS X and using AVISynth to do the heavy lifting has saved me tons of time over the years.
If you have to reboot your Pre frequently then I suspect something is very wrong either with some of the software you have installed or with the phone itself. I have used my Pre heavily almost every day for a year now and the last time I had to reboot it was over 3 months ago (and that was for an OS update).
The screen on the Pre should automatically turn on when you open the slider so you shouldn't need to be able to hit the power button to wake up the screen while the slider is open. If yours doesn't do this then you may a hardware problem and you should be able to get it replaced under warranty.
The CPU is a bit on the slow side but I think a faster CPU would greatly decrease the battery life which would have to be compensated for by including a larger (and heavier) battery which would make the Pre thicker and less convenient to carry around.
As far as I know you can use the free express editions of Visual Studio and and command line .NET compilers with any version of Vista or Windows 7 except for Starter. The system requirements indicate that all versions of Windows XP, Vista, and 7 are supported except for starter.
.NET applications on a laptop running Vista Home Basic using Visual C# Express with no problems.
Are you sure you had the compiler installed properly? I have personally compiled
Such a time limit wouldn't change a thing in this case because Sony has developed and is actively selling modern ports of Lemmings for the PSP and the PS3 via their Playstation Network online store.
A more interesting question is why Firefox thinks Farmville is unresponsive in the first place. A few people I work with play Farmville on a regular basis and Farmville displays a progress bar that is updated constantly while it is loading. Yet for some reason Firefox still thinks that it is unresponsive even though it is updating the screen!
I assume Firefox must be expecting the plugin to respond to a particular message and assuming is is unresponsive if it doesn't respond even though the plugin may still be updating it's display area.
Windows Phone 7 is not designed to replace Windows Mobile 6.5 for all devices. I think Microsoft is designing Windows Phone 7 to to be used on low-end smartphones for consumers who may have never used a smartphone before.
The successor for Windows Mobile 6.5 is Windows Embedded Handheld which is backwards compatible with many Windows Mobile 6.x applications and is supposed to be able to run on many devices that currently run Windows Mobile 6.x. Windows Embedded Handheld is designed for high-end smartphones and enterprise/corporate devices just like Windows Mobile 6.5 was and I will be very surprised if it doesn't include basic productivity features like copy and paste.
They did test it with iGoogle first. iGoogle has had various background images and themes for as long as I can remember.
As an added note, in Vista and windows 7 autorun is enabled by default but it will not run an executable without prompting you first, unlike XP which would just blindly run the executable.
Basically, if the autorun.inf file tries to call an executable Windows will open a dialog box allowing you to choose whether you want to run the executable or just open the drive in Windows Explorer.
That was true on versions of Windows prior to Vista. Prior to Vista the hardware for the PC was detected at install time and the appropriate HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) was installed. That meant that if you attempted to move the drive to a system that needed a different HAL you got an instant BSOD. In Vista (and Windows 7 as well) Windows determines which HAL to use during boot time so you can easily move a Windows install from one machine to another even if they have very different hardware. If the boot drive is on a storage controller or RAID cards that is not supported by the driver's built-in to Vista or Windows 7 you will need to make sure the appropriate drivers are installed before moving the drive but that is fairly easy to do for most controllers.
Where I used to have to maintain OS images for every hardware configuration I manage, I now only have 2 images. One for 32-bit Windows 7 (for older hardware that can't support 64-bit) and one for 64-bit Windows 7.
Also both Vista and Windows 7 support booting via USB you just have to configure it properly. Windows 7 can even boot from a VHD file (basically a disk image) which can be on any drive that is accessible at boot time.
Actually the version of WMP included in Windows 7 has a built-in AAC codec and can play AAC files without anything else installed. No third party codec required. It also includes a H.264 video codec and a MP4 splitter so you can even play H.264 video with AAC audio with full hardware acceleration without needing to install anything.
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Be's IP bought by PalmSource and not by Palm Inc? Keep in mind that PalmSource and Palm Inc. are not the same company (although they worked closely together.) That would mean that Be's IP is currently owned by Access.
I remember PalmSource using some things from Be in PalmOS 6 - which unfortunately never got used in any devices before Access bought them.
The concept behind gog.com is nice (releasing DRM-free versions of slightly older games). However I have found many of the games to be missing content that were in the original releases.
For instance I purchased the Incredible Machine 3 but the years have taken a tole on the disc and it now has several bad scratches that make it unreadable. I purchased the Incredible Machine Mega Pack from gog.com and quickly discovered that gog.com stripped the excellent Red-book audio track from the Incredible Machine 3 leaving only the MIDI version.
Now they do provide the soundtrack as a separate download but there is no way for the game to use those audio files instead of the MIDI versions so the overall experience is not nearly as nice as the original CD release.
gog.com appears to do the same thing with other games that originally used Red-book audio (Descent for instance) and appear to be unwilling to release the games in the form of a CD image with audio tracks that could be burned and played like the originals with their full audio score. For DOS games, they use DosBox and DosBox has had support reading red-book audio directly from a CD image for a long time so there is really no excuse.
Based on your description I doubt the problem is with IE 8, rather I suspect the problem is with a mis-behaving browser plugin. New blank tabs should open nearly instantly and each tab loads in a separate thread
For instance, the Sun Java SSV Helper plugin for IE tends to cause a lot of the problems that you are describing including taking 3-4 seconds to open new tabs at times. I have no idea exactly what the Java SSV Helper plugin does but I have yet to encounter a Java applet that won't run without it, so I just disable it.
I have also seen the Adobe PDF Link Helper plugin cause problems (although the latest version of Adobe Reader 9 appears to have fixed most of those problems.)
Try starting Internet Explorer using the No Add-Ons shortcut and see if you still have problems. If performance is improved then you can launch IE the normal way and go to Manage Add-Ons and try disabling add-ons one by one until you find the ones that are causing problems.
I doubt Microsoft will ever release a 64-bit Windows Update Plugin because in Vista and later Windows Update is a standalone application that does not require or use Internet Explorer. The only users who may benefit from such a plugin would be those running XP x64 and Server 2003 x64.
Intel already does offer out of band management on some of their motherboard chipsets. Look up Intel vPro and Intel Active Management Technology.
There is a wireless version that is supported on some laptop chipsets as well.
I handle PC support at a local college and I have found vPro to be very handy for troubleshooting PCs located at some of our remote campuses. vPro also allows us to direct PCs to boot off of an ISO image on a server and do a OS install without ever needing to touch the PC at all.
Without knowing exactly what malware was installed it is hard to tell what the infection vector was. However, I suspect she was infected through a vunerability in a browswer plugin, perhaps Adobe Reader or Flash. I have seen websites serving ads that contain an infected PDF objects on more than one occasion.
That is one reason why I always remove the Adobe Reader browser plugin. That way when I click on a link that leads to a PDF or a page has a PDF embedded in it I am prompted to download the file. That way I only download and open PDFs that I am actively seeking and am much less likely to open one that may be a vector for malware.
The Sony PRS-600 supports free hand drawing on any page and saves the results as a SVG. It also natively supports a fairly wide range of formats including TXT, RTF, LRF, ePub, and PDF.
The only real downside is that it has a 6 inch display so large PDFs are best viewed in landscape mode which displays half a page at a time.
The registry in Windows is already divided into multiple parts (called hives). Each hive is for a specific purpose and has its own ACLs:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT - File Associations, MIME types, registered DLLs, etc.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE - System-wide settings
HKEY_USERS - User-specific settings, has child hives for each user account on the system.
There are other hives as well but the ones I listed above are generally the most important ones.