I'll probably get modded down for writing this, but I'm more than certain that a short time after SC2 gets released there will be a pirated version that will circumvent all three of your points. When will companies learn that the only people affected by DRM are their paying customers and NOT those running pirated copies?
My iPhone 3G lasts about 4 days if used smartly and sparingly. That is, Edge for voice, data through Wifi, only a few short calls per day, no bluetooth, no music/video/games. Pretty much the same functionality you got from your Palm Treo:)
So in order to have the battery life last 4 days you pretty much have to give up most of the iPhone's smartphone features. Which means you're now carrying around a very large, very expensive regular phone. Compare that to my Nokia E71, which lasts for the same 4 days, but I can talk for about 1-2h a day over GSM with a BT headset*, use fring and browse the web over wifi, listen to some music and check contacts, appointments, etc.
There is a major power drain on the E71, the GPS receiver, It will drain a full battery in a bit over 1h, but at least it's an actual GPS receiver. But here's the absolutely coolest feature of my E71. For about $40 I can buy a spare battery and desktop battery charger, and replace the drained battery in about 30 seconds. For a small investment I could have a virtually unlimited battery life on my E71. I want to see you do that on your iPhone.:))
* The BT headset is only connected for the duration of the calls, it does drain too much battery otherwise.
Some laptops will drain the battery even when fully off (not stand-by or hibernate). My Vaio SZ280P drains about 10% battery per day, and there are even worse cases out there. Check out notebookreview.com for some of the 100+ page threads about the Vaio battery drain.
Not all Vaios have this problem, but there is no way to fix those that do have it.
That's the perks of being omnipotent, you earn cash out of thin air. But I was hoping that God* made more than $200/month in revenue from any one of his ventures.
I'm sure that someone somewhere is at this very moment pressing the acceleration pedal instead of the brake pedal, but your argument does not apply in this case. Then the problem should extend to all other vehicles manufactured in the world, but only Toyota has issued a floor mat recall.
So there are two explanations. Either the floor mat design is at fault, in which case Toyota is responsible and has corrected the issue (it's as simple as removing the winter floor mats from the vehicle and installing the summer ones). Very sloppy floor mat design though, because I've been driving with two sets of mats every winter since I got my license 10 years ago, and not once did the acceleration pedal get stuck to the floor. If I were the exception, the aftermarket mat manufacturers would have been sued out of existence by now.
The other explanation is that there MAY be something else wrong with the cars, and the cause is yet to be determined. One thing is certain though. If the floor mats are not at fault, more accidents will happen and some of them will happen in cars where the recall will have already been performed. I just hope no other people will die as a result.
The only reason I can be so detached from this issue is because nobody in my family has drive-by-wire cars. I actually drive a standard car, so even if my throttle decides to go insane, all I have to do is clutch in and put it in neutral. The engine may bounce off the rev limiter, but the car won't be going anywhere.
I ride my motorcycle a lot, and I enjoy taking pictures while on the road. I thought the 4G EeePC would be great, since it was cheap, well built and except a fan, it had no moving parts. But I sold it mainly because of the tiny SSD capacity. Even after tweaking it, and combining the two partitions (2Gb Linux non-writable and 2Gb user partition), I still had at best 3Gb of space. So it was great for quickly checking email and light web browsing, but useless for pretty much anything else. My camera has a 4Gb Compact Flash card, so I couldn't even store the pictures I'd take on a regular trip.
Manufacturers faced two options. Move to VERY expensive SSDs or cheap HDDs to satisfy consumer demand for large storage capacities. They opted for the second choice, which IMO was a good thing.
SSDs are still too new and expensive. I've looked into installing one into my new laptop, and the smallest drive I could possibly live with is 128Gb for around $400. The savings in battery life and faster speed simply do not justify the costs for me. And since I don't abuse my laptop (it survived a 5000km motorcycle trip just fine), I also don't need the ruggedness of an SSD.
I'm pretty sure you're implying China or India, and you have check your facts. Their economies may be large and successful, and some part of the population may be well off even by western standards. However the majority of people, both in China and India live in abject poverty, and their economies are creating ecological disasters of enormous proportions.
Check out this list, http://geography.about.com/cs/worldpopulation/a/mostpopulous.htm where the countries are listed by population size. Except for the western countries, every single other one has at least one major issue, besides poverty for a majority of the people, that precludes it from being a success. For instance Brazil is destroying the rain forest, Pakistan is anything but politically stable and large portions are controlled by the Taleban, Nigeria is destroying the Niger delta for oil, and so on.
I, and many others, still play RTCW Enemy Territory. Sure, the graphics are completely dated, as the game itself is about 4-5 years old, and even when it came out it was behind the times. But it's still one of the most fun and sometimes frustrating multiplayer fps games out there. Why?
Not a single map can be won by a single person. Only if the engineers, covert ops, medics and field ops work together you can accomplish the objectives. Even soldiers are useful, as not much can defeat an mg's suppression fire, or clear a room as quickly as a panzer.
I don't care that the textures look a bit cheesy, that the walls and fields are plain or that there are no fog, shadows and other gimmicks. In the end it's the gameplay that makes or breaks a truly good fps. I can only hope that the new Wolfenstein's multiplayer will follow similar rules as RTCW:ET.
Taiwan does have lower slightly lower corporate taxes than the US and last year I know the proposal was made to lower by 5% I believe, but I don't know if it ever went through. The US could easily address this situation, but the Obama administration seems intent on doing the opposite.
I know I'll open a can of worms for saying this, but the Bush administration had 8 years of mostly positive economic growth to address this situation. Instead they chose to invest in other, less profitable ventures, like the war in Iraq. Obama is faced with the worst recession in recent times, unemployment at 7.6% if you don't count discouraged workers, a housing market that is dead, a financial sector that is about to collapse and a budget deficit that is in the trillions. Cutting corporate taxes, which are already lower compared to most other countries would be counterproductive.
As history has shown, those companies will still move their manufacturing to China, will still outsource their IT to India, and will still downsize, while paying lower taxes on their profits. The only way lower corporate taxes would work is if they were tied to certain conditions, like requiring the manufacturing and support services to be located in the US in order to qualify for them.
This was the one reason I never tried Chrome. I play a lot of Travian http://travian.com/ and there are a few Greasemonkey scripts (Travian Mod Kit and Beyond Travian) without which the game would be unbearable for serious players. On large accounts with 20+ villages, those scripts save hundreds of page loads.
I'll still wait until Chrome 2 reaches at least Beta status though. Regardless of who releases the software, I'm not in the mood to try Alpha software.
The vast majority of people I've seen using windows never log out to switch users. They are automatically logged in as Administrator or whatever admin account was created when windows was installed. Switching user profiles makes perfect sense in a browser.
I've owned the T40p and currently I have a T60p (both 14.1in SXGA+ versions). Believe me, the build quality of the T40p was much, much better. The lid in the T40 was metal (magnesium or titanium, can't remember) while in the T60 it's titanium reinforced plastic. The rubber coating is more prone to scratches, and it doesn't have the same fit.
And I know on the surface they both look like black slabs of plastic, but if you do a side by side comparison, the T40p design is also better (it had some areas angled inwards giving it a sleeker look). The touchpad was larger, the mouse buttons had a nicer plastic, etc.
Meh, no point in dwelling on the past. Those laptops will never come back. I think my next one will be a top of the line Sony IF they can get their driver issues straightened. Build quality is still excellent, performance and battery life is great. The only issue I've seen with SOME of their models is getting the necessary drivers for a clean install, which can a pain.
It's an obsession of mine, but I'd buy a new laptop tomorrow if it had exactly the same form factor, build quality and materials of the original T40p with updated internals. It would have a 14.1in SXGA+ led LCD (no widescreens please), 1 in thickness (or less), fast CPU (Core2Duo or higher) and fast video card (that won't fall out after less than a year), decent battery life (4+ h), etc.
One reason I dislike current laptops are their (generally) crappy LCD resolutions. Over the past 7-8 years I've only used laptops with 14.1in SXGA+ LCDs, including the T60p I'm typing this from. I actually prefer the 14.1in SXGA+ LCDs, but I know it's a losing battle. A very limited number of T61p were released with them, and I'm pretty sure they'll be the last in history.
I'm not unreasonable, and I understand that movies look better if they fill the widescreen. Although with all the variations in widescreen ratios, I'm yet to see a movie without any black borders. You can also display two documents side by side, even though 90% of people I've seen only show a single maximized instance of MS Word with a single document open. Widescreens do take less room in cramped spaces, allow for more keyboard space and even numpads, etc. However I use my laptop for typing, and screen height is far more important than width. I'm a minority though, so I'll adapt.
Now assuming I'd be looking for a replacement laptop tomorrow (hopefully my T60p will last a while), moving to Apple would mean going "down" to a 15.4in WSXGA (loss of 150pixel height) on the Macbook Pros or 13.3in WXGA (loss of 250pixel height and 200pixel width) on the Macbooks. THERE ARE NO OTHER OPTIONS.
On the other hand I just checked out Lenovo's site. Their T500 laptop is offered with a 15.4in WSXGA or WSGA+ resolution. The WSXGA+ is only a $75 upgrade, and it offers the same height and much more width than my SXGA+. The rest of the specs are very close to the Macbook Pro, but at first glance it's about $200 cheaper.
Beyond their arguably sleek design, the absolutely only reason any rational person would even consider a Macbook or Macbook Pro is OS X. I used it briefly, and I really liked it. Unfortunately given my laptop use, the OS alone is not incentive enough to put up with the limited and (slightly) more expensive hardware.
As the average speed of the US driver has climbed, the death toll has risen as well - both in absolute numbers and in average deaths per mile travelled. There is no evidence that driving slower is more dangerous, notwithstanding your own personal feelings in the matter. And if somebody driving slow in front of you is enough to make you drive in a risky manner, you really shouldn't be driving, should you?
Please provide the studies that you are referencing. Higher death tolls could be caused by a several fold increase in vehicles on the roads, distances traveled, poor roads, etc. Obviously the kinetic energy increases with the square of the velocity, so lower velocities are safer than higher ones IF YOU WERE THE ONLY CAR ON THE ROAD.
However driving slower than the average speed of the traffic IS dangeours. You're creating a bottleneck, forcing others to pass you. Even if you're not driving slowly in the left lane (which many people do), you are still taking over the truck passing lane (in many areas trucks are not allowed in the left lane).
I hope saving a few cents in gas is worth being tailgated, rear ended, or cut off. Maybe you should adjust your driving to the norm instead of forcing others to adapt to you.
Speed as an absolute number is meaningless without taking into account road conditions. On most divided highways even 100mph is perfectly safe in light traffic, dry roads and good visibility. True, stopping distances increase and reaction times decrease, but the dangers are not much higher than at 80mph.
Now change the ideal conditions above to a snowstorm, or to a two lane twisty road (think Deals Gap), etc and 80mph can become suicidal.
I would even argue that knowing that the car is limited can create a sense of false security, especially in inexperienced drivers. The top speed should be assessed on a case by case basis, depending on road conditions, driver alertness, etc. Having an artificial upper limit removes some of the responsibility of makeing judgment calls, replacing them with "the car will tell me when I drive too fast".
So, just to be clear - would you prefer to pay for a subscription?
Not really, I'll simply get my news from other sources. The NY Times site works flawlessly, even though I block their flash ads (I love their Minimalist with Mark Bittman series, I picked up a few recipes from it). Compared to the BBC, their international coverage is broader, the articles have more depth and they are slightly less biased.
so I figure you must be confusing the BBC iPlayer with break.com or something.
You must be very easily confused, since the last time I checked, the BBC site looks nothing like break.com. As we speak I have the same BBC page loaded in Seamonkey on my desktop which is fully configured and on my laptop where I am yet to modify the hosts file.
On the laptop it plays just fine, however on my desktop it just sits doing nothing. The status bar displays "Transfering data from stats.bbc.co.uk..." A few months ago when I last tried accessing the clips the status bar displayed "Transfering data from ads.doubleckick.com" or something along those lines, which is why I thought they were displaying ads.
At least break.com works just fine on both computers.
I'm yet to see a single clip on BBC's website. They insist on running an ad from one of the major ad sites (might be doubleclick, I'm don't remember) before any clip loads. Since I have blocked most ad sites in my hosts file, the BBC clips never load.
As far as I'm concerned they could very well broadcast them in smoke signal format.
If you are seeing this message, either your ISP or your computer is caching DNS records for Neowin.net or alternatively, you have setup a 'hosts' file, pointing Neowin.net at this IP address. Please flush your DNS cache, or remove the hosts file entry in order to continue browsing Neowin. This work will ensure future speed and reliability of the Neowin.net website. We apologise for the inconvenience this may have caused."
Re:A big "duh" to the auto industry
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I agree that the Prius offers HUGE fuel savings when compared to an SUV. But did you know that a VW Gold TDi has exactly the same(or better on longer commutes) fuel consumption? And Honda is introducing a full line-up of diesel engines in their cars for 09?
What truly turned me off the Prius however was the way it feels as a car. It's really about as much fun as driving a dishwasher. I really wanted to like the Prius, but I can't.
I'm currently running DX10 (4.10.0000.6000) on XP SP3.
I can't remember the article, but we can thank Nvidia's driver implementation for this. So when games will require DX10, they should work on XP as well, with a bit of tweaking (mind you, I can't test this out, because I do not have a DX10 card, since all the games I'm playing at the moment are DX9).
Slashdot Mirror
I'll probably get modded down for writing this, but I'm more than certain that a short time after SC2 gets released there will be a pirated version that will circumvent all three of your points. When will companies learn that the only people affected by DRM are their paying customers and NOT those running pirated copies?
I'm trying to come up with something witty to say, but the only woman CEO that comes to mind is Carli Fiorina. That worked out well for HP...
So in order to have the battery life last 4 days you pretty much have to give up most of the iPhone's smartphone features. Which means you're now carrying around a very large, very expensive regular phone. Compare that to my Nokia E71, which lasts for the same 4 days, but I can talk for about 1-2h a day over GSM with a BT headset*, use fring and browse the web over wifi, listen to some music and check contacts, appointments, etc.
There is a major power drain on the E71, the GPS receiver, It will drain a full battery in a bit over 1h, but at least it's an actual GPS receiver. But here's the absolutely coolest feature of my E71. For about $40 I can buy a spare battery and desktop battery charger, and replace the drained battery in about 30 seconds. For a small investment I could have a virtually unlimited battery life on my E71. I want to see you do that on your iPhone. :))
* The BT headset is only connected for the duration of the calls, it does drain too much battery otherwise.
Some laptops will drain the battery even when fully off (not stand-by or hibernate). My Vaio SZ280P drains about 10% battery per day, and there are even worse cases out there. Check out notebookreview.com for some of the 100+ page threads about the Vaio battery drain.
Not all Vaios have this problem, but there is no way to fix those that do have it.
Still impressive to say the least, but the summary is wrong. It's a $30 million movie deal.
That's the perks of being omnipotent, you earn cash out of thin air. But I was hoping that God* made more than $200/month in revenue from any one of his ventures.
*Parent's user ID...
I'm sure that someone somewhere is at this very moment pressing the acceleration pedal instead of the brake pedal, but your argument does not apply in this case. Then the problem should extend to all other vehicles manufactured in the world, but only Toyota has issued a floor mat recall.
So there are two explanations. Either the floor mat design is at fault, in which case Toyota is responsible and has corrected the issue (it's as simple as removing the winter floor mats from the vehicle and installing the summer ones). Very sloppy floor mat design though, because I've been driving with two sets of mats every winter since I got my license 10 years ago, and not once did the acceleration pedal get stuck to the floor. If I were the exception, the aftermarket mat manufacturers would have been sued out of existence by now.
The other explanation is that there MAY be something else wrong with the cars, and the cause is yet to be determined. One thing is certain though. If the floor mats are not at fault, more accidents will happen and some of them will happen in cars where the recall will have already been performed. I just hope no other people will die as a result.
The only reason I can be so detached from this issue is because nobody in my family has drive-by-wire cars. I actually drive a standard car, so even if my throttle decides to go insane, all I have to do is clutch in and put it in neutral. The engine may bounce off the rev limiter, but the car won't be going anywhere.
I ride my motorcycle a lot, and I enjoy taking pictures while on the road. I thought the 4G EeePC would be great, since it was cheap, well built and except a fan, it had no moving parts. But I sold it mainly because of the tiny SSD capacity. Even after tweaking it, and combining the two partitions (2Gb Linux non-writable and 2Gb user partition), I still had at best 3Gb of space. So it was great for quickly checking email and light web browsing, but useless for pretty much anything else. My camera has a 4Gb Compact Flash card, so I couldn't even store the pictures I'd take on a regular trip.
Manufacturers faced two options. Move to VERY expensive SSDs or cheap HDDs to satisfy consumer demand for large storage capacities. They opted for the second choice, which IMO was a good thing.
SSDs are still too new and expensive. I've looked into installing one into my new laptop, and the smallest drive I could possibly live with is 128Gb for around $400. The savings in battery life and faster speed simply do not justify the costs for me. And since I don't abuse my laptop (it survived a 5000km motorcycle trip just fine), I also don't need the ruggedness of an SSD.
I'm pretty sure you're implying China or India, and you have check your facts. Their economies may be large and successful, and some part of the population may be well off even by western standards. However the majority of people, both in China and India live in abject poverty, and their economies are creating ecological disasters of enormous proportions.
Check out this list, http://geography.about.com/cs/worldpopulation/a/mostpopulous.htm where the countries are listed by population size. Except for the western countries, every single other one has at least one major issue, besides poverty for a majority of the people, that precludes it from being a success. For instance Brazil is destroying the rain forest, Pakistan is anything but politically stable and large portions are controlled by the Taleban, Nigeria is destroying the Niger delta for oil, and so on.
I, and many others, still play RTCW Enemy Territory. Sure, the graphics are completely dated, as the game itself is about 4-5 years old, and even when it came out it was behind the times. But it's still one of the most fun and sometimes frustrating multiplayer fps games out there. Why?
Not a single map can be won by a single person. Only if the engineers, covert ops, medics and field ops work together you can accomplish the objectives. Even soldiers are useful, as not much can defeat an mg's suppression fire, or clear a room as quickly as a panzer.
I don't care that the textures look a bit cheesy, that the walls and fields are plain or that there are no fog, shadows and other gimmicks. In the end it's the gameplay that makes or breaks a truly good fps. I can only hope that the new Wolfenstein's multiplayer will follow similar rules as RTCW:ET.
I know I'll open a can of worms for saying this, but the Bush administration had 8 years of mostly positive economic growth to address this situation. Instead they chose to invest in other, less profitable ventures, like the war in Iraq. Obama is faced with the worst recession in recent times, unemployment at 7.6% if you don't count discouraged workers, a housing market that is dead, a financial sector that is about to collapse and a budget deficit that is in the trillions. Cutting corporate taxes, which are already lower compared to most other countries would be counterproductive.
As history has shown, those companies will still move their manufacturing to China, will still outsource their IT to India, and will still downsize, while paying lower taxes on their profits. The only way lower corporate taxes would work is if they were tied to certain conditions, like requiring the manufacturing and support services to be located in the US in order to qualify for them.
This was the one reason I never tried Chrome. I play a lot of Travian http://travian.com/ and there are a few Greasemonkey scripts (Travian Mod Kit and Beyond Travian) without which the game would be unbearable for serious players. On large accounts with 20+ villages, those scripts save hundreds of page loads.
I'll still wait until Chrome 2 reaches at least Beta status though. Regardless of who releases the software, I'm not in the mood to try Alpha software.
The vast majority of people I've seen using windows never log out to switch users. They are automatically logged in as Administrator or whatever admin account was created when windows was installed. Switching user profiles makes perfect sense in a browser.
I've owned the T40p and currently I have a T60p (both 14.1in SXGA+ versions). Believe me, the build quality of the T40p was much, much better. The lid in the T40 was metal (magnesium or titanium, can't remember) while in the T60 it's titanium reinforced plastic. The rubber coating is more prone to scratches, and it doesn't have the same fit.
And I know on the surface they both look like black slabs of plastic, but if you do a side by side comparison, the T40p design is also better (it had some areas angled inwards giving it a sleeker look). The touchpad was larger, the mouse buttons had a nicer plastic, etc.
Meh, no point in dwelling on the past. Those laptops will never come back. I think my next one will be a top of the line Sony IF they can get their driver issues straightened. Build quality is still excellent, performance and battery life is great. The only issue I've seen with SOME of their models is getting the necessary drivers for a clean install, which can a pain.
It's an obsession of mine, but I'd buy a new laptop tomorrow if it had exactly the same form factor, build quality and materials of the original T40p with updated internals. It would have a 14.1in SXGA+ led LCD (no widescreens please), 1 in thickness (or less), fast CPU (Core2Duo or higher) and fast video card (that won't fall out after less than a year), decent battery life (4+ h), etc.
Of course it will never happen, so...
One reason I dislike current laptops are their (generally) crappy LCD resolutions. Over the past 7-8 years I've only used laptops with 14.1in SXGA+ LCDs, including the T60p I'm typing this from. I actually prefer the 14.1in SXGA+ LCDs, but I know it's a losing battle. A very limited number of T61p were released with them, and I'm pretty sure they'll be the last in history.
I'm not unreasonable, and I understand that movies look better if they fill the widescreen. Although with all the variations in widescreen ratios, I'm yet to see a movie without any black borders. You can also display two documents side by side, even though 90% of people I've seen only show a single maximized instance of MS Word with a single document open. Widescreens do take less room in cramped spaces, allow for more keyboard space and even numpads, etc. However I use my laptop for typing, and screen height is far more important than width. I'm a minority though, so I'll adapt.
Now assuming I'd be looking for a replacement laptop tomorrow (hopefully my T60p will last a while), moving to Apple would mean going "down" to a 15.4in WSXGA (loss of 150pixel height) on the Macbook Pros or 13.3in WXGA (loss of 250pixel height and 200pixel width) on the Macbooks. THERE ARE NO OTHER OPTIONS.
On the other hand I just checked out Lenovo's site. Their T500 laptop is offered with a 15.4in WSXGA or WSGA+ resolution. The WSXGA+ is only a $75 upgrade, and it offers the same height and much more width than my SXGA+. The rest of the specs are very close to the Macbook Pro, but at first glance it's about $200 cheaper.
Beyond their arguably sleek design, the absolutely only reason any rational person would even consider a Macbook or Macbook Pro is OS X. I used it briefly, and I really liked it. Unfortunately given my laptop use, the OS alone is not incentive enough to put up with the limited and (slightly) more expensive hardware.
Please provide the studies that you are referencing. Higher death tolls could be caused by a several fold increase in vehicles on the roads, distances traveled, poor roads, etc. Obviously the kinetic energy increases with the square of the velocity, so lower velocities are safer than higher ones IF YOU WERE THE ONLY CAR ON THE ROAD.
However driving slower than the average speed of the traffic IS dangeours. You're creating a bottleneck, forcing others to pass you. Even if you're not driving slowly in the left lane (which many people do), you are still taking over the truck passing lane (in many areas trucks are not allowed in the left lane).
I hope saving a few cents in gas is worth being tailgated, rear ended, or cut off. Maybe you should adjust your driving to the norm instead of forcing others to adapt to you.
Speed as an absolute number is meaningless without taking into account road conditions. On most divided highways even 100mph is perfectly safe in light traffic, dry roads and good visibility. True, stopping distances increase and reaction times decrease, but the dangers are not much higher than at 80mph.
Now change the ideal conditions above to a snowstorm, or to a two lane twisty road (think Deals Gap), etc and 80mph can become suicidal.
I would even argue that knowing that the car is limited can create a sense of false security, especially in inexperienced drivers. The top speed should be assessed on a case by case basis, depending on road conditions, driver alertness, etc. Having an artificial upper limit removes some of the responsibility of makeing judgment calls, replacing them with "the car will tell me when I drive too fast".
Not really, I'll simply get my news from other sources. The NY Times site works flawlessly, even though I block their flash ads (I love their Minimalist with Mark Bittman series, I picked up a few recipes from it). Compared to the BBC, their international coverage is broader, the articles have more depth and they are slightly less biased.
You must be very easily confused, since the last time I checked, the BBC site looks nothing like break.com. As we speak I have the same BBC page loaded in Seamonkey on my desktop which is fully configured and on my laptop where I am yet to modify the hosts file.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7560995.stm
On the laptop it plays just fine, however on my desktop it just sits doing nothing. The status bar displays "Transfering data from stats.bbc.co.uk..." A few months ago when I last tried accessing the clips the status bar displayed "Transfering data from ads.doubleckick.com" or something along those lines, which is why I thought they were displaying ads.
At least break.com works just fine on both computers.
I'm yet to see a single clip on BBC's website. They insist on running an ad from one of the major ad sites (might be doubleclick, I'm don't remember) before any clip loads. Since I have blocked most ad sites in my hosts file, the BBC clips never load.
As far as I'm concerned they could very well broadcast them in smoke signal format.
Vista I assume?
Do what those guys did:
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/18/1938223
I mean who's going to notice?
I agree that the Prius offers HUGE fuel savings when compared to an SUV. But did you know that a VW Gold TDi has exactly the same(or better on longer commutes) fuel consumption? And Honda is introducing a full line-up of diesel engines in their cars for 09?
What truly turned me off the Prius however was the way it feels as a car. It's really about as much fun as driving a dishwasher. I really wanted to like the Prius, but I can't.
I'm currently running DX10 (4.10.0000.6000) on XP SP3.
I can't remember the article, but we can thank Nvidia's driver implementation for this. So when games will require DX10, they should work on XP as well, with a bit of tweaking (mind you, I can't test this out, because I do not have a DX10 card, since all the games I'm playing at the moment are DX9).