This is a pretty big shock, but I can't say that it's completely unexpected. I kind of got the impression that Taco was phoning in some of the posts of late (he hasn't commented on anything since 2009), and the stories about him visiting tech companies' campuses seemed to be some kind of effort to get this site back toward its roots.
But, without being too big of a downer, I'd like to thank Rob for all he's done and wish him the best in whatever he ends up doing.
...WoW's users are building up a tolerance. Players are consuming new content at an ever increasing rate, and with the latest expansion Cataclysm, which took the better part of two years of development effort, many users have consumed the content and quit (again) after only six months or so.
An increasing number of people appear to be becoming tired of the same old recurring end-game structure of 10/25 player raids and working week after week on the next boss fight mechanics in order to slowly replace all of their equipment from the last tier of content with gear from the current content which will eventually get replaced again in the future.
The subscriber base has dropped significantly since it's peak shortly after the Cataclysm release, and Blizzard are now trying lots of things like giving away free copies of the original version of the game, allowing their "refer-a-friend" program to work up through level 80, and now the unlimited free trial period offer here.
Ultimately though the problem is that Blizzard has not been able to think outside the box enough to invent new and compelling *kinds* of content, and their players are increasingly unimpressed with the same cycle of leveling/raiding.
It is likely at this point that WoW has seen its peak in terms of subscriber base and relevance in the gaming world. I think they will always be able to maintain a subscriber base measured in millions, and may well run indefinitely, but if they want to grow again they need to get some fresh talent into their design group.
G.
It seems to me that they've also got a serious problem attracting new and lapsed users. For the few souls out there that haven't dipped their foot into the WoW Waters(tm) yet, they might pick up the Cataclysm box in the store and notice that it requires Wrath of the Lich King, which requires Burning Crusade, which requires Vanilla WoW, and suddenly they're looking at an investment of $120, and then $15 a month on top of that. Heck, I stopped playing shortly after Burning Crusade came out, and I'd have to blow $80 on expansions if I wanted to jump in and see the new content. That's just too steep for me.
Okay, how about this: A while back, I was browsing the entry for Pibb Xtra and found a spelling error (the author confused "access" and "assess", which I corrected, only to have it immediately reverted. I figured it was an error, so I re-fixed it, only to be accused of vandalism (they thought I was writing "asses"). That was the last time I tried to edit anything on that site.
What exactly is "I cut my teeth on"? Consider: is there any normal course of action in the business of mankind during which a person willingly cuts their teeth? We have these fantastical horror stories about warriors in ancient barbarian tribes filing their teeth for the purpose of rending and tearing the enemy to pieces and appearing ferocious. Do you really believe that? By the time mankind is able to fashion metal weaponry there is really no purpose for filing teeth, if ever there was.
I can't tell if you're wildly off base on purpose or not, so I'll provide a counter-example: Consider a small child. When born, it has no teeth, and when the teeth start to develop and grow in, what do they do? They cut through the gums, so to speak. So, "cutting teeth" is something that someone does when they're very young, or just starting out (as in, just starting out in life). Hence, "cutting one's teeth" has become roughly analogous to the early skills learned when starting any new endeavor.
In the link to the "bad news for PS3 owners", there is actually a lot more info on the dev team changes:
[Organizational Changes to the Development Team] To improve the service of FINAL FANTASY XIV, Square Enix has made the following changes to the development team:
Managerial Changes
Producer/Director Naoki Yoshida
Section Leader Changes
Assistant Director Shintaro Tamai (FINAL FANTASY X, Front Mission 5: Scars of the War)
Lead Game Designer Nobuaki Komoto (FINAL FANTASY IX, FINAL FANTASY XI)
Lead Combat System Designer Akihiko Matsui (FINAL FANTASY XI)
Technical Advisor Yoshihisa Hashimoto (Next Generation Game Engine Development)
Lead Programmer Hideyuki Kasuga (FINAL FANTASY XI, DIRGE OF CERBERUS -FINAL FANTASY VII-)
Senior Concept Artist Akihiko Yoshida (FINAL FANTASY XII, Vagrant Story)
Lead Artist Hiroshi Takai (FINAL FANTASY XI, THE LAST REMNANT)
Lead UI Designer/Lead Web Designer Hiroshi Minagawa (FINAL FANTASY XII, Vagrant Story)
Sweet, it's good that they have that patent. I hate when games move the pedestrians out of the way. Carmageddon and GTA were so much more fun than Driver was in that respect. I played Crazy Taxi at the arcades once, didn't really get why it's such a big deal.
If you only played it once, I'd bet you didn't get the full experience, once you learn the (undocumented in the arcade version) techniques to play the thing, the game's a blast.
Voiceovers for quest text is just something I'll be skipping because I've already skimmed through the obligatory, "Sand people attacked my land cruiser while I was en route with a shipment of unobtanium for the port in Mos Eisley, and the crates with my valuable cargo are littering the deserts. Without the money, I can't afford the medicine for my sick daughter, and I'm incapable of traveling and/or fighting; would you please find 50 crates and return them to me?" I'll be already heading in the vague direction the quest NPC has sent me on, trying to get my next level/item/skill and some in-game currency.
Heck, I have friends who refuse to play Borderlands with me because I won't read the quest text before charging off in the direction of my next waypoint.
To each their own, I suppose.
Believe it or not, some people (like me) like to play games and pay attention to the little details like the "backstory" and the "raison d'être" for the things you're asked to do instead of treating the game's goals and objectives like a series of meaningless checkpoints.
Even better is the crafting interface. Crafting is such a huge part of this game, and yet it's so tough to use that it's borderline imbecilic. For instance, you get a recipe for something as a quest reward and it's displayed in your log. Once. Unless you wrote it down or have perfect recall, you're going to have to consult a fansite, on another computer, because alt-tabbing away from the game currently crashes the thing. And actually crafting a thing for a quest? You have to go to your main menu -> select your crafting option -> click 'requested items' which brings up a box with the items in it -> click the item you want to craft -> click 'OK' (I forget the verbiage since I'm not in front of it now) which fills in the materials on your crafting screen -> then click again to bring up the 'crafting minigame' where you have to pick from a few different actions that will impact the quality of the item you're attempting to make. And if you want to make multiples of the same thing? You have to go through all of those steps again. Every time! How fun!
Or the loading screens. When you're sitting there trying to log in or when you teleport somewhere, you're greeted with a black screen with "now loading" and throbber in the bottom-right corner. Wow, excitement!
Oh, and that teleporting thing? That lets you go to one of the locations around the world that you've already visited? Yeah, that uses another resource called 'anima' that regenerates at an abysmally slow rate (and I couldn't find a gauge for to see how much I had left).
I never did get the payment thing set up right. For whatever reason, Square-Enix outsourced their credit card processing to an outfit called Click and Buy that I've never heard of. Turns out that you have to create a separate account with them to handle billing, which means that I have to give some third-party my credit card information, and if I terminate my FFXIV account, I have to terminate my Click and Buy account separately, which would involve writing and sending a letter. To London. I couldn't actually get the process to complete, though (some problem with the Verified by Visa, and it was a Saturday evening, so everyone who could help was closed), so I looked at other options, I can pay with Crysta (which are like Microsoft Points or Wii Points), which are available in increments of $5 (or 500 Crysta), but to buy those, I have to register my account through Click and Buy, so it's the same stupid thing! Or I can get a Playspan 'Ultimate Game Card', which again is similar to the Crysta (with the exception that you can supposedly use the points for dozens of other online games, too), but, bafflingly, though I live in a city of almost 200,000 people, the nearest place for me to get the things is nearly 40 miles away. And, for those of you keeping score at home, the account fees (for one character) are $12.99/month (or 1299 Crysta or Ultimate Points), so if you get these ridiculous 'points', you're always going to have a surplus of them you can't use. I was able to eventually tell them that I wanted to pay for my first (free) month by using Crysta instead of my credit card, but I will not be jumping through these ridiculous flaming hoops any time soon just to continue playing this mediocre mishmash of a game.
Seriously. It's not that hard. Get a boot CD, drop to a command prompt, install GRUB. If that's inconvenient, consider virtualizing one OS or the other. Say, virtualize Linux in Windows using free VMware Server.
You and your grandmother likely have different definitions of "hard".
Except for the fact that I've never had a Windows box that got compromised or infected with any kind of virus, trojan or malware. Most "vulnerabilities" in Windows are user initiated. Practice a little common sense (ie. don't run things that come from questionable or unknown sources) and you are unlikely to ever see a problem.
Baloney. Let me guess, you don't have any antivirus installed either, because you don't need it? Either you haven't been using Windows for very long or your only Windows box is turned off in the corner. Back in the 90s I got a disk from my school that was infected with Stoned, and a few years later bought a CD-ROM game that came with Michelangelo on the disc itself. Even more recently, hardware from (more or less) reputable sources come preloadedwithmalware. Heck, part of my job is removing malware from PCs on a near-daily basis, and even though I know better, my USB key got hit by the Autorun worm last Summer. So yeah, common sense and safe browsing habits are wonderful things, but they're not a panacea. There are so many attacks coming from so many vectors, that if you use a Windows box you will get some kind of infection eventually.
I played the first Pokemon game about a year ago (luckily the battery held out, since the game is pretty old). I'm an adult and I have some qualms about playing any more Pokemon after that. Not because Pokemon is kid stuff; the cartoon is kids' stuff but the games are more tolerable for all ages.
But because Pokemon so highly depends on looking up guidebooks, figuring out how to optimize your party with inadequate information, knowing things like that a particular Pokemon gets a particular attack at level 50, knowing intricacies about the level up system (did you know that your Pokemon gain stats differently depending on what they fight to level up?), etc. Later games get a lot worse, with things like rules for gaining attacks when breeding Pokemon, Pokemon that evolve under obscure circumstances you can't guess, or that only appear at certain times on the real time clock, etc.
In other words, it's complex. And complex, here, is bad. I can just imagine someone starting a newer game in this series and having to figure out "you get this Pokemon by fishing on one out of several hundred randomly chosen tiles, then find the right Pokemon, and feed it a particular stat increasing item many times while making sure it doesn't have the stat which makes the stat-increasing items useless, then let it evolve".
That's the thing about the Pokémon games. Yeah, you can look up and wade through stats until your eyes go crossed, research gameplay mechanics, delve into the mysterious 'effort values', try to figure out egg groups and chain breeding to transfer a rare/useful move to the offspring, and find the 'correct' nature to min-max your monsters, but all of that's totally optional. You can have a perfectly good time going through the game, collecting monsters to build a well-balanced team, being pleasantly surprised when your level 49 Staraptor learns Brave Bird (and reacting accordingly instead of planning for it), trading with friends, and generally enjoying the story (such as it is). That's one of the great things about the game: it caters both to the 'pick up and play' types and the people who obsess over every statistic and spend hours min-maxing.
And the same is true for me(I threw out my last printer almost a decade ago).
However at work some people must have hard copies. I finally figured out why recently. While you can multitask with any OS now but the monitors generally can only display ONE app at a time. even with widescreen monitors the majority of which have resolutions which really only allow decent reading of one document at a time. Which means if your reading from one or more sources, and compiling them on a third document you are constantly task switching back and forth which slows you down, You can stretch multiple documents out on your desk and glance at them to gather information as you type. Something that is only really possible with 2-3 monitors on computers.
At home I have 3 monitors and a TV which my computers can output on. however most people at work only get one monitor, two if they are lucky. Try working with just one piece of paper in front of you and stack all other work objects behind it. doesn't work so well does it?
The solution is either high resolution monitors(tough to find and expensive or multiple 1280x 1024 displays.
We frequently use printers at work for printing work requests for computers that customers bring in. When they pick them up, we have them sign the timesheets/bills and then go from there. We tried having them sign our monitors, but those were really hard to file.
I'm actually too lazy to switch them on a regular basis (they were set up with bogus info originally), and half the time I'm using a CC anyway (which throws anonymity out the window).
I still like using my "phone number" sometimes just for the heck of it. I use 867-5309, and it's never been denied. Too many young cashiers these days to even recognize it now.:-)
Whenever I get asked for my phone number, I just politely decline to provide it, which works without a hassle most of the time. On the rare few times where that doesn't work (and if I've planned ahead) I'll give them the phone number of their own store. And if you pay in cash, you're as private as you can get.
And that's grounds for legal action because? Sony is not stopping you from reselling the games; just not letting you transfer the subscription; something you knew when you bought the game.
Well, then what happens when I try to take my copy of the game to a friend's house to show him how awesome the online part is, or because he has a better gaming setup than I do, or any number of reasons? From the description, it sounds like if I do that, I'm going to have to pay $20 for the privilege.
I'm a leftie, and my mouse is on the right, like.. well.. all the other lefties I know. Actually, I have never seen someone use a mouse of the left, though I'm sure that weirdo exists.
I've done tech support for several hundred Average Joe computer users, and out of those, I've seen the mouse on the left-hand side of the keyboard twice, and only one of those times did the person actually switch the buttons around.
I'm fairly well convinced that most people don't realize you can actually put the mouse on the left.
Seconded. My own low traffic website, gets hundreds, sometimes thousands of failed SSH logins every day, and has for nearly as long as it's been in existence. I usually end up just turning off SSH so I don't have gigantic logs to sift through every day.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a pretty big shock, but I can't say that it's completely unexpected. I kind of got the impression that Taco was phoning in some of the posts of late (he hasn't commented on anything since 2009), and the stories about him visiting tech companies' campuses seemed to be some kind of effort to get this site back toward its roots.
But, without being too big of a downer, I'd like to thank Rob for all he's done and wish him the best in whatever he ends up doing.
...WoW's users are building up a tolerance. Players are consuming new content at an ever increasing rate, and with the latest expansion Cataclysm, which took the better part of two years of development effort, many users have consumed the content and quit (again) after only six months or so.
An increasing number of people appear to be becoming tired of the same old recurring end-game structure of 10/25 player raids and working week after week on the next boss fight mechanics in order to slowly replace all of their equipment from the last tier of content with gear from the current content which will eventually get replaced again in the future.
The subscriber base has dropped significantly since it's peak shortly after the Cataclysm release, and Blizzard are now trying lots of things like giving away free copies of the original version of the game, allowing their "refer-a-friend" program to work up through level 80, and now the unlimited free trial period offer here.
Ultimately though the problem is that Blizzard has not been able to think outside the box enough to invent new and compelling *kinds* of content, and their players are increasingly unimpressed with the same cycle of leveling/raiding.
It is likely at this point that WoW has seen its peak in terms of subscriber base and relevance in the gaming world. I think they will always be able to maintain a subscriber base measured in millions, and may well run indefinitely, but if they want to grow again they need to get some fresh talent into their design group.
G.
It seems to me that they've also got a serious problem attracting new and lapsed users. For the few souls out there that haven't dipped their foot into the WoW Waters(tm) yet, they might pick up the Cataclysm box in the store and notice that it requires Wrath of the Lich King, which requires Burning Crusade, which requires Vanilla WoW, and suddenly they're looking at an investment of $120, and then $15 a month on top of that. Heck, I stopped playing shortly after Burning Crusade came out, and I'd have to blow $80 on expansions if I wanted to jump in and see the new content. That's just too steep for me.
Okay, how about this: A while back, I was browsing the entry for Pibb Xtra and found a spelling error (the author confused "access" and "assess", which I corrected, only to have it immediately reverted. I figured it was an error, so I re-fixed it, only to be accused of vandalism (they thought I was writing "asses"). That was the last time I tried to edit anything on that site.
I cut my teeth on Slackware 3.5
What exactly is "I cut my teeth on"? Consider: is there any normal course of action in the business of mankind during which a person willingly cuts their teeth? We have these fantastical horror stories about warriors in ancient barbarian tribes filing their teeth for the purpose of rending and tearing the enemy to pieces and appearing ferocious. Do you really believe that? By the time mankind is able to fashion metal weaponry there is really no purpose for filing teeth, if ever there was.
I can't tell if you're wildly off base on purpose or not, so I'll provide a counter-example: Consider a small child. When born, it has no teeth, and when the teeth start to develop and grow in, what do they do? They cut through the gums, so to speak. So, "cutting teeth" is something that someone does when they're very young, or just starting out (as in, just starting out in life). Hence, "cutting one's teeth" has become roughly analogous to the early skills learned when starting any new endeavor.
If I get this right. Have I ever seen ANY fighting game with split screen?
Some of the Dragon Ball Z fighting games for the Super NES had split-screens
In the link to the "bad news for PS3 owners", there is actually a lot more info on the dev team changes:
[Organizational Changes to the Development Team]
To improve the service of FINAL FANTASY XIV, Square Enix has made the following changes to the development team:
Managerial Changes
Producer/Director
Naoki Yoshida
Section Leader Changes
Assistant Director
Shintaro Tamai (FINAL FANTASY X, Front Mission 5: Scars of the War)
Lead Game Designer
Nobuaki Komoto (FINAL FANTASY IX, FINAL FANTASY XI)
Lead Combat System Designer
Akihiko Matsui (FINAL FANTASY XI)
Technical Advisor
Yoshihisa Hashimoto (Next Generation Game Engine Development)
Lead Programmer
Hideyuki Kasuga (FINAL FANTASY XI, DIRGE OF CERBERUS -FINAL FANTASY VII-)
Senior Concept Artist
Akihiko Yoshida (FINAL FANTASY XII, Vagrant Story)
Lead Artist
Hiroshi Takai (FINAL FANTASY XI, THE LAST REMNANT)
Lead UI Designer/Lead Web Designer
Hiroshi Minagawa (FINAL FANTASY XII, Vagrant Story)
I'm not sure I have ever pressed the Caps Lock key on purpose... Anyone?
I did when I was programming COBOL back in college... *shudder*
Sweet, it's good that they have that patent. I hate when games move the pedestrians out of the way. Carmageddon and GTA were so much more fun than Driver was in that respect. I played Crazy Taxi at the arcades once, didn't really get why it's such a big deal.
If you only played it once, I'd bet you didn't get the full experience, once you learn the (undocumented in the arcade version) techniques to play the thing, the game's a blast.
Since the archive is around 2 petabytes it's probably going to be a while.
Voiceovers for quest text is just something I'll be skipping because I've already skimmed through the obligatory, "Sand people attacked my land cruiser while I was en route with a shipment of unobtanium for the port in Mos Eisley, and the crates with my valuable cargo are littering the deserts. Without the money, I can't afford the medicine for my sick daughter, and I'm incapable of traveling and/or fighting; would you please find 50 crates and return them to me?" I'll be already heading in the vague direction the quest NPC has sent me on, trying to get my next level/item/skill and some in-game currency.
Heck, I have friends who refuse to play Borderlands with me because I won't read the quest text before charging off in the direction of my next waypoint.
To each their own, I suppose.
Believe it or not, some people (like me) like to play games and pay attention to the little details like the "backstory" and the "raison d'être" for the things you're asked to do instead of treating the game's goals and objectives like a series of meaningless checkpoints.
Even better is the crafting interface. Crafting is such a huge part of this game, and yet it's so tough to use that it's borderline imbecilic. For instance, you get a recipe for something as a quest reward and it's displayed in your log. Once. Unless you wrote it down or have perfect recall, you're going to have to consult a fansite, on another computer, because alt-tabbing away from the game currently crashes the thing. And actually crafting a thing for a quest? You have to go to your main menu -> select your crafting option -> click 'requested items' which brings up a box with the items in it -> click the item you want to craft -> click 'OK' (I forget the verbiage since I'm not in front of it now) which fills in the materials on your crafting screen -> then click again to bring up the 'crafting minigame' where you have to pick from a few different actions that will impact the quality of the item you're attempting to make. And if you want to make multiples of the same thing? You have to go through all of those steps again. Every time! How fun!
Or the loading screens. When you're sitting there trying to log in or when you teleport somewhere, you're greeted with a black screen with "now loading" and throbber in the bottom-right corner. Wow, excitement!
Oh, and that teleporting thing? That lets you go to one of the locations around the world that you've already visited? Yeah, that uses another resource called 'anima' that regenerates at an abysmally slow rate (and I couldn't find a gauge for to see how much I had left).
I never did get the payment thing set up right. For whatever reason, Square-Enix outsourced their credit card processing to an outfit called Click and Buy that I've never heard of. Turns out that you have to create a separate account with them to handle billing, which means that I have to give some third-party my credit card information, and if I terminate my FFXIV account, I have to terminate my Click and Buy account separately, which would involve writing and sending a letter. To London. I couldn't actually get the process to complete, though (some problem with the Verified by Visa, and it was a Saturday evening, so everyone who could help was closed), so I looked at other options, I can pay with Crysta (which are like Microsoft Points or Wii Points), which are available in increments of $5 (or 500 Crysta), but to buy those, I have to register my account through Click and Buy, so it's the same stupid thing! Or I can get a Playspan 'Ultimate Game Card', which again is similar to the Crysta (with the exception that you can supposedly use the points for dozens of other online games, too), but, bafflingly, though I live in a city of almost 200,000 people, the nearest place for me to get the things is nearly 40 miles away. And, for those of you keeping score at home, the account fees (for one character) are $12.99/month (or 1299 Crysta or Ultimate Points), so if you get these ridiculous 'points', you're always going to have a surplus of them you can't use. I was able to eventually tell them that I wanted to pay for my first (free) month by using Crysta instead of my credit card, but I will not be jumping through these ridiculous flaming hoops any time soon just to continue playing this mediocre mishmash of a game.
Seriously. It's not that hard. Get a boot CD, drop to a command prompt, install GRUB. If that's inconvenient, consider virtualizing one OS or the other. Say, virtualize Linux in Windows using free VMware Server.
You and your grandmother likely have different definitions of "hard".
Except for the fact that I've never had a Windows box that got compromised or infected with any kind of virus, trojan or malware. Most "vulnerabilities" in Windows are user initiated. Practice a little common sense (ie. don't run things that come from questionable or unknown sources) and you are unlikely to ever see a problem.
Baloney. Let me guess, you don't have any antivirus installed either, because you don't need it? Either you haven't been using Windows for very long or your only Windows box is turned off in the corner. Back in the 90s I got a disk from my school that was infected with Stoned, and a few years later bought a CD-ROM game that came with Michelangelo on the disc itself. Even more recently, hardware from (more or less) reputable sources come preloaded with malware. Heck, part of my job is removing malware from PCs on a near-daily basis, and even though I know better, my USB key got hit by the Autorun worm last Summer. So yeah, common sense and safe browsing habits are wonderful things, but they're not a panacea. There are so many attacks coming from so many vectors, that if you use a Windows box you will get some kind of infection eventually.
Why is the OP - who is denigrating a Linux distro - modded a Troll, whereas the poster above him - denigrating Windows - modded as Funny?
You must be new here.
I played the first Pokemon game about a year ago (luckily the battery held out, since the game is pretty old). I'm an adult and I have some qualms about playing any more Pokemon after that. Not because Pokemon is kid stuff; the cartoon is kids' stuff but the games are more tolerable for all ages.
But because Pokemon so highly depends on looking up guidebooks, figuring out how to optimize your party with inadequate information, knowing things like that a particular Pokemon gets a particular attack at level 50, knowing intricacies about the level up system (did you know that your Pokemon gain stats differently depending on what they fight to level up?), etc. Later games get a lot worse, with things like rules for gaining attacks when breeding Pokemon, Pokemon that evolve under obscure circumstances you can't guess, or that only appear at certain times on the real time clock, etc.
In other words, it's complex. And complex, here, is bad. I can just imagine someone starting a newer game in this series and having to figure out "you get this Pokemon by fishing on one out of several hundred randomly chosen tiles, then find the right Pokemon, and feed it a particular stat increasing item many times while making sure it doesn't have the stat which makes the stat-increasing items useless, then let it evolve".
That's the thing about the Pokémon games. Yeah, you can look up and wade through stats until your eyes go crossed, research gameplay mechanics, delve into the mysterious 'effort values', try to figure out egg groups and chain breeding to transfer a rare/useful move to the offspring, and find the 'correct' nature to min-max your monsters, but all of that's totally optional. You can have a perfectly good time going through the game, collecting monsters to build a well-balanced team, being pleasantly surprised when your level 49 Staraptor learns Brave Bird (and reacting accordingly instead of planning for it), trading with friends, and generally enjoying the story (such as it is). That's one of the great things about the game: it caters both to the 'pick up and play' types and the people who obsess over every statistic and spend hours min-maxing.
And the same is true for me(I threw out my last printer almost a decade ago).
However at work some people must have hard copies. I finally figured out why recently. While you can multitask with any OS now but the monitors generally can only display ONE app at a time. even with widescreen monitors the majority of which have resolutions which really only allow decent reading of one document at a time. Which means if your reading from one or more sources, and compiling them on a third document you are constantly task switching back and forth which slows you down, You can stretch multiple documents out on your desk and glance at them to gather information as you type. Something that is only really possible with 2-3 monitors on computers.
At home I have 3 monitors and a TV which my computers can output on. however most people at work only get one monitor, two if they are lucky. Try working with just one piece of paper in front of you and stack all other work objects behind it. doesn't work so well does it?
The solution is either high resolution monitors(tough to find and expensive or multiple 1280x 1024 displays.
We frequently use printers at work for printing work requests for computers that customers bring in. When they pick them up, we have them sign the timesheets/bills and then go from there. We tried having them sign our monitors, but those were really hard to file.
I'm actually too lazy to switch them on a regular basis (they were set up with bogus info originally), and half the time I'm using a CC anyway (which throws anonymity out the window).
I still like using my "phone number" sometimes just for the heck of it. I use 867-5309, and it's never been denied. Too many young cashiers these days to even recognize it now. :-)
Whenever I get asked for my phone number, I just politely decline to provide it, which works without a hassle most of the time. On the rare few times where that doesn't work (and if I've planned ahead) I'll give them the phone number of their own store. And if you pay in cash, you're as private as you can get.
Hell, I coldn't even figure out how to remove the wallpaper on that netbook I just bought.
If your netbook has Windows 7 Starter on it, you won't be able to change the wallpaper.
And that's grounds for legal action because? Sony is not stopping you from reselling the games; just not letting you transfer the subscription; something you knew when you bought the game.
Well, then what happens when I try to take my copy of the game to a friend's house to show him how awesome the online part is, or because he has a better gaming setup than I do, or any number of reasons? From the description, it sounds like if I do that, I'm going to have to pay $20 for the privilege.
Or in other words, the IT becomes "single point of failure." While PC can run without any infrastructure or IT involvement.
Eh?
Without email, files on the network, network printers, whatever corporate apps you have, internet... what good is that PC?
Solitaire.
What if they agree to use their severance to buy Vista: Ultimate Edition?
What if their severance pay was Vista: Ultimate Edition?
I'm a leftie, and my mouse is on the right, like.. well.. all the other lefties I know. Actually, I have never seen someone use a mouse of the left, though I'm sure that weirdo exists.
I've done tech support for several hundred Average Joe computer users, and out of those, I've seen the mouse on the left-hand side of the keyboard twice, and only one of those times did the person actually switch the buttons around.
I'm fairly well convinced that most people don't realize you can actually put the mouse on the left.
Wether it's mechanical or optical, moving the mouse while holding it upside down wouldn't result in your cursor moving around.
Wrong axis. He was likely holding it so that the buttons were on the end closest to him.
You forgot 'you insensitive clod', you insensitive clod!
Seconded. My own low traffic website, gets hundreds, sometimes thousands of failed SSH logins every day, and has for nearly as long as it's been in existence. I usually end up just turning off SSH so I don't have gigantic logs to sift through every day.