Like, looking at the model of Notre Damn, I was thinking, surely someone has taken pictures of the sculptures over the door. The model looks like a blob. And you are not really plotting entire 3D landscapes, but, from what it looks like, creating 3D models of single structures, and you are not even adding color. I mean, at least the Microsoft project creates 3D landscapes. I think the two projects should merge, then you could have 3D models with actual picture overlays.
I don't know, I have just seen so many similar projects lately, this just does not wow me.
What the patents actually are of, and when they were filed. Some friends and I setup and brainstormed in late 97 and early 98 about the possibility of wireless networking using the 900 MHz and the 2.4 GHz range. I saw the first consumer devices come out around 2000 or so. If I have documentation of this, and the patent was filed later, I wonder if I can file a prior art thing?
Actually, several things work, just need to be cleaned up, and I am not sure if its a driver issue or an OS issue. Wireless cards are a nightmare. USB devices (this may actually be fixed on newer releases, I tend to get a working Linux OS and stick with it for years) need to work better than for me having to do a mnt/dev/usb04 or something. Yes, automount of USB devices. Yeah,I guess that would not be a driver issue.
There needs to be better support for things like onboard network cards. This may be better than last time I did a linux install, but last time i checked, it was kinda hit and miss as to which network cards would be supported out of the box.
This may also be improved by now, but as the last time I ran Linux, while most sound cards worked, I did not seem to have the advanced features such as 3D sound and surround sound.
How is support for BlueTooth and Cellular Modems? I do not use either currently, but know many people who do.
Last time I messed with it, dual screen support was a nightmare. Although, as NVidia and ATI are writing their own Linux drivers, this should probably be more up to them.
As I had never heard of these two portals, being an English speaking American, I googled Yandex and Naver. Interesting websites, but I could not read them. So I used Google to translate the pages into English. Found a nice photo gallery on Naver as well as some comic strips, and Yandex told me a story about how they busted some Chinese restaraunts in Moscow for substituting Dog for Lamb, and another story from Argentina about how "the woman became the man" (I actually knew what they were refering to here as I read the story earlier on NBC).
Of course, it would have been much easier for me to just pull up the English newspapers from Moscow or St. Petersburg (I actually used to get RSS feeds from them, should probably set that up again, those were fun).
I hit submit before I was finished with my comment. I hate it when I do that. I hit submit, and then am like, dope, I wish I could edit that.
The prism interface is a bit prettier than active desktop, and after looking at the article, rather than the summery, it looks like what its doing is pretty much creating a hyperlink to the page in your start menu or something. I hate to say it, but I really do not see anything innovative here. Am I missing something?
Lovely, Mozilla is now offering a 3rd party solution to an idea that has been built into Windows since 98. How is this any different from right-clicking on the desktop, going to properties, desktop, customize desktop, web, other than the fact that it uses Mozilla?
Yeah, well, a lot of times when we are preparing a new computer for people, just go over and tell Microsoft Updates to do a custom update, and install everything, and after running that a few times, go in there and set microsoft updates back to Windows Updates (Microsoft Updates can bring the system to a crawl). I have noticed this Search thing poping up over the last couple of days, yeah, its annoying, but it takes a whole 15 seconds to go into Add / Remove programs and uninstall the darn thing. I figured either that it was being bundled in MS Updates, or I was going to have to shoot the guy who is making our images.
I agree, most programs have now updated and can be installed in Vista. At least, most I have used. Cisco VPN was indeed broke, but I thought this was due to the TCP/IP stacks being rewritten for Vista, and was not due to admin issues or changing of location of files. Cisco fixed this really fast, I had an alpha version of VPN that came out just a couple of days after Vista was released, and I am now running what I think is an actual release.
The other big program I have had trouble with is that PeerGuardian for Vista RC1 does not install right in Vista64, it has something to do with driver signing. You have to manually register DLLs, or something, but there seems to be some update that Microsoft recently released that breaks this again.
Yeah, you got to read your install instructions on some vista programs, as you do have to right click on the program and do a "Run as Administrator" on it. It seems that the new default Vista access level falls somewhere between Power User and Administrator. See,s like a great security addition. Actually, seems to make it a bit more Unix like, where some programs have to be ran as Root even if you have Admin privilages. I would equate it with that.
Microsoft also released a patch not long ago that seems to have increased the compatability with some programs. I don't think this is part of ?Windows updates, i think you have to download it as a KB Article, but I am thinking that this is going to be incorporated in SP1. I think that Adobe CS and CS2 are still broke, but I have used CS3 successfully in Vista.
You mean, you actually switched out the video card and did NOT reinstall Windows? While you should be able to do this, in XP it was so cumbersome and lead to so many little bugs here and there that it was just easier to reinstall the OS or do a repair install. I imagine the same thing is true with Vista. I was dual booting XP and Vista, then upgraded Video Card, motherboard, processor, and memory. So many driver issues, that instead of trying to fix everything, I just did a repair install. Windows XP and Vista both activated just fine. Of course, your license agreement may vary, affecting your ability to activate online. If so, just call the 800 number, let Microsoft know you upgraded your software and need reactivation, and they will give you an activation code over the phone.
I mean, OMG, you have to reinstall and reactivate after doing a major hardware change to your computer? This is nothing new. You are in reduced functionaliy mode for half an hour? I am actually surprised that you were able to run Windows for that long without it bluescreening on you after the upgrade because of some driver conflict.
This has been an issue since Windows '95. People have dealt with this for 12 years. You upgrade your hardware, you reinstall your Microsoft OS or spend hours or days trying to "fix" issues that may arise. Get over it, reinstall and reactivate.
Well written article, but not a single picture anywhere in sight. How can you write an article about anything to do with space, and not post a picture?
I have been using Comic Sans MS for years, and finally it seems that most OSes include this font.
However, according to the article, they are talking about replacing Ariel and Comic Sans with the same font. Most of these fonts do look a tad bit better than what they are replacing, but I am really surprised they are talking about replacing Comic Sans. I mean, Calibri is not even REMOTELY close to Comic Sans.
So, a few things actually confuse me here. First, are we saying that IE7 for Vista automatically remaps one of the standard fonts with the new ones? It does seem as if stuff looks slighly different under Vista, but I may be imagining it.
Second, Vista has been out since January, and betas and stuff for well over a year. Why are we just now hearing about this?
Kinda see now Sony's decision to remove backwards compatability from the PS3. With the PS2 still selling as strong as it is, the PS3 would be a direct competitor to their own product. Let's drop backwards compatability and then sell both consoles
Seriously? You really expect a graphic artist or video producer to pull up a webbrowser to do their work? Could you imagine the clunky control scheme of trying to edit HD video inside of Internet Explorer (Shuddrs). What about Adobe Encore, with DVD and BluRay authoring? Please tell me I am not going to have to actually upload uncompressed HD video to Adobe to be able to use it? What about the 1 gig graphic file I am working on for a billboard? Ugh!
However, there is something I have to smirk at. Lets make Dreamweaver, Flash and Shockwave webbased! Yes, I am going to go to a website to design my website!
Sorry, hit submit before finishing my comment. The article also states that the problem lies in the Kernel, but it seems to only pop up with this one antivirus program.
Although the problem occurs where users are running Kaspersky security products, it's a kernel leak that lies at the root of problem (the problem's not confined to systems running Kaspersky software, that just that this application seems to exacerbate the issue).
Apparently the submitter skimmed the article, and decided to post up a Vista bash on Slashdot.
FTA:
The "Out of Memory" error (which is affectionately known at the PC Doc HQ as the "Out of Cheese" error... don't ask why...) is one of the biggest and most baffling of Vista's file handling problems has been occurs when a Vista user (running Kaspersky Anti Virus 6 or 7) tries to copy a large number of files (~16,400) Apparently its just a problem with this antivirus program running in Vista. I move large amounts of files around in Vista quite often (granted, its Vista 64), sometimes well over 20,000 files at a time, and have never run into this issue.
Ever tried using high speed internet over a line that has a lot of noise in it? Up until I replaced the wiring in my house, there were many times I saw my 6 Mbps DSL line drop to speeds painfuly slower than dialup. Remember back with analog cell phones, how awful the quality was? Okay, different technology, but I am trying to go somewhere. You got static, you got echos, it was awful. Digital cell phones have dramatically improved quality, but have you ever talked to someone while they were driving or something? There seems to be quite a huge drop of data packets. This is fine for voice (well, for most of us, lets say we put up with it), but could be fatal for data. Could you imagine the number of data errors that must happen on a cell network?
I have experienced web browsing on an Edge Datacard, and I can tell you it is painffully slow, but, as the article describes, this seems to be from latency, not from bandwidth. I will sit here sometimes waiting anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds for it to send its page requests, then it has to acknowledge that the server has recieved the requests, then the page loads up. The actual load time are not that bad, its just the latency.
Now I have been able to compare Edge VS 3G on Blackberry BES activations. I must say, I HATE 3G Blackberry activations. Yes, the activation itself is usually about 5-10 times faster than the Edge, however, the Edge activations usually never fail, the 3G usually fails several times before it finally goes through. In reality, the Blackberries I have activated on 3G networks tend to take me a couple of hours to do, whereas the Edge ones I can normally knock out in about 10-20 minutes.
Sorry, having a lot of trouble finding any info on this. Does the game run in Vista 64 with 64 bit support? I have XP x64 as well, but was wondering if there is DX10 code in it. I mean, if I can get it to run with 64 bit code and it has DX10 code, this game should be sweet.
I was about to make the same comment. Thunderbird is an e-mail client, not an Outlook replacement. Outlook does so much more than simply recieve and send e-mail to pop3/smpt servers. Right now, the only way to get tunderbird to work with Exchange is to enable IMAP support on the exchange server (strangely, also the same way you get the iPhone to work with exchange), which most system admins probably will refuse to do. No, Thunderbird is not even remotely similar to Outlook. Entourage is not Outlook. No, the only open source client I am aware of that is remotely similar to Outlook is Evolution, and it seems to be Linux only.
So, several things to point out: 1) are you using an XP SP2 disc, or a regular XP disc? If you have to install Service Pack 2, expect this to take all day. A freash install of XP SP2 on Dell machines that have reached the end of their life takes me roughly 30 minutes to install the OS and another hour to do updates.
2) Of course, if you complain to Microsoft, they will probably say something about Vista. Vista takes me roughly 25 minutes to install (surprisingly less time than XP, I am not sure why), and roughly 5-10 minutes to install updates (not including drivers)
3) I completely agree with you that the normal desktop user is probably not going to need that much storage space or horsepower. I work in IT at a fortune 500 company, and it seems to vary from job to job. Our accounting girls are on machines, many 3-4 years old, and the replacement of these machines tend to happen because hardware is giving out, and the cost of servicing the machine is higher than getting a new machine. Our image is roughly 6 gig, and the girls in accounting rarely have more than a gig of personal information on their computer, usually MUCH less.
However, this starts to vary greatly depending on who you are dealing with and what they are doing. Most of our execs will have 20-30 gig of just e-mail archives (I try to warn them to clean out archives and backup, but they just will not listen, that is until their harddrive fails). The average size of an iTunes directory for most users is around 5 gig. Still most of our users are not pushing their harddrives to the limit. What seems to be killing us is not enough ram and fragmented harddrives. Our PCs now come with a gig of RAM, although I am starting to push this to 2 gig for some of our users, and the newer macs come with anywhere from 2gig-8gig depending on which department its going to. There have been talks about getting some of our Macs dual terrabyte drives when they become more popular in the market (2 seperate SATA drives in RAID).
My point is, yes, not everyone needs this much storage. Many may never fill up the 40 gig drives they have in their machines now, probably will never need a machine with more than 512 meg of ram. Shoot, as many of them still log into mainframes using a terminal program, I do not understand why we just do not give them dumb terminals, as then you do not have to mess with Windows or Linux. Instant on. However, that does not mean there are not people who need it, and that niche is growing. Our Vista image (which we have yet to role out to users, we only have a few test machines up here in IT running it) is roughly about 18 gig (compared to 6 and a half for XP). People are downloading more iTunes. Digital cameras are getting higher resolution, and many will film in TV quality mode now, ever increasing the need for space (my recent trip to Colorado resulted in almost 7 gig of pictures and videos, and I have taken 16 gig of pictures and videos this year just with my Nikon L12 camera). More and more Jo Blow users are doing video editing on their computers. And have you seen the installs of some of these games? I am thinking BioShock was around six and a half gig. Many demos are between 1-1.5 gig. I at home am running 2TB on my desktop, and am having space problems, then again, I tend to keep more data around than the average user.
No, my first response when I read this was, What's taking them so long? If they have discovered how to do this, why 2011? Why not mid2008-early 2009? We have terrabyte drives now, they have discovered a way to fit 4 times as much data, why 2011? No, I don't think the drives can get here fast enough with our ever growing demand for storage space
Of course, this is updating many of the old 1980s Sierra games to the engine that was used in the early 90s Sierra games. I would love to see something such as Kings Quest 6 in a fully 3D enviornment. It seems as if the adventure game genera is all but dead, and what a wonderful enviornment to put an adventure game in, a truely 3D world. That does not mean there are not 3D adventure games, but games such as Elder Scrolls Oblivian seem to fall more on RPG than adventure game.
Strangely, Sierra actually tried a couple of adventure games in a fully 3D enviornment, but Kings Quest 8 and Leisure Suite Larry Magnum Cum Lade did not do as well as other games in the series.
Could you imagine Gabriel Knight in 3D? Roaming the streets of New Orleans in full stunning 3D. Wow!
The early PS3s seem to have full backwards compatability. I bought mine in January, and have yet to see a PS2 or PSX game that it will not play, and I have about 30, some, such as FF4 and Chrono Trigger for the PSX, played on my PS3 with only minor flickering during a transition (rare, not a major problem), but at least it played, it did not play at all on any of the PS2s I threw it at.
In my experience, the backwards compatability of the early PS3s are better than the backwards compatability of the PS2.
As the early PS3s had full hardware backwards compatability, I am thinking that the compatability was closer to to 97%. I think the titles that were having problems were similar to the titles that had problems when they changed around the PS2 hardware. The early PS2s were not able to play some of the Playstation 1 games (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ps2#Software_compatibility">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ps2#Software_compatibility), and I am thinking that there were titles that worked with the original PS2 but did not work with the later. (Scroll down to Hardware revisions and read up on that)I am thinking that this may have something to do with BIOS versions though rather than hardware, as I had similar issues with Playstation Emulators depending on which BIOS I used.
There is also a list of Playstation and Playstation 2 games that did not play on the later PS2 units (a href="http://www.us.playstation.com/News/ConsumerAlerts/softwareTitles_75001.html">http://www.us.playstation.com/News/ConsumerAlerts/softwareTitles_75001.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ps3#Backward_compatibilityStates that the early software only emulation versions of the PS3 had only a 72% compatability, but that number has been increased with system updates. So, that is 28% of titles that did not work at first, and is now much lower. The page also states that Sony is striving to increase compatability.
So, while Sony is removing backwards compatability from some of their "discount" models, don't dish them for the backwards compatability in the ones that do have BC, its actually quite good.
I bought my PS3 because my PS2, with its large collection of software, went out the week before. I have 3 PS3 games, use it mainly for BluRay and PS2 games, and some PS1 games that, amazingly, play on the PS3 but not on the PS2 (such as Chrono Trigger).
I mean, companies are still releasing PS2 games. The number of PS3 titles, while growing, is still comparatively small.
The PS3 has, what, an 8 core processor? So take out the hardware backwards compatability, and do the whole thing in software. PCs have been doing this for years, yet for some reason Sony has dragged their feet on this. Has anyone actually tried playing one of the original PSX Final Fantasy games through Bleem or PSXEmu or one of the other Playstation Emulators with 3D support? Its absolutely beautiful. Sure, not everything works like this, but the number of games that do work is high enough that Sony should really consider a software backwards compatibility. You could easily introduce this in a firmware update. In fact, I would be willing to bet that Sony will notice how big of a mistake No backwards Compatability is, and release a firmware update in the near future, or discontinue the model.
Now if you were selling like a $300 system with no backwards compatability, and still sold PS2s on the shelf, then you may actually have a product you can sell. With the UK PS3 with no backwards compatability still costing over $600 USD, I would be really surprised if they move a single console.
Slashdot Mirror
Like, looking at the model of Notre Damn, I was thinking, surely someone has taken pictures of the sculptures over the door. The model looks like a blob. And you are not really plotting entire 3D landscapes, but, from what it looks like, creating 3D models of single structures, and you are not even adding color. I mean, at least the Microsoft project creates 3D landscapes. I think the two projects should merge, then you could have 3D models with actual picture overlays.
I don't know, I have just seen so many similar projects lately, this just does not wow me.
What the patents actually are of, and when they were filed. Some friends and I setup and brainstormed in late 97 and early 98 about the possibility of wireless networking using the 900 MHz and the 2.4 GHz range. I saw the first consumer devices come out around 2000 or so. If I have documentation of this, and the patent was filed later, I wonder if I can file a prior art thing?
Actually, several things work, just need to be cleaned up, and I am not sure if its a driver issue or an OS issue. Wireless cards are a nightmare. USB devices (this may actually be fixed on newer releases, I tend to get a working Linux OS and stick with it for years) need to work better than for me having to do a mnt /dev/usb04 or something. Yes, automount of USB devices. Yeah,I guess that would not be a driver issue.
There needs to be better support for things like onboard network cards. This may be better than last time I did a linux install, but last time i checked, it was kinda hit and miss as to which network cards would be supported out of the box.
This may also be improved by now, but as the last time I ran Linux, while most sound cards worked, I did not seem to have the advanced features such as 3D sound and surround sound.
How is support for BlueTooth and Cellular Modems? I do not use either currently, but know many people who do.
Last time I messed with it, dual screen support was a nightmare. Although, as NVidia and ATI are writing their own Linux drivers, this should probably be more up to them.
As I had never heard of these two portals, being an English speaking American, I googled Yandex and Naver. Interesting websites, but I could not read them. So I used Google to translate the pages into English. Found a nice photo gallery on Naver as well as some comic strips, and Yandex told me a story about how they busted some Chinese restaraunts in Moscow for substituting Dog for Lamb, and another story from Argentina about how "the woman became the man" (I actually knew what they were refering to here as I read the story earlier on NBC).
Of course, it would have been much easier for me to just pull up the English newspapers from Moscow or St. Petersburg (I actually used to get RSS feeds from them, should probably set that up again, those were fun).
I hit submit before I was finished with my comment. I hate it when I do that. I hit submit, and then am like, dope, I wish I could edit that.
The prism interface is a bit prettier than active desktop, and after looking at the article, rather than the summery, it looks like what its doing is pretty much creating a hyperlink to the page in your start menu or something. I hate to say it, but I really do not see anything innovative here. Am I missing something?
Lovely, Mozilla is now offering a 3rd party solution to an idea that has been built into Windows since 98. How is this any different from right-clicking on the desktop, going to properties, desktop, customize desktop, web, other than the fact that it uses Mozilla?
Yeah, well, a lot of times when we are preparing a new computer for people, just go over and tell Microsoft Updates to do a custom update, and install everything, and after running that a few times, go in there and set microsoft updates back to Windows Updates (Microsoft Updates can bring the system to a crawl). I have noticed this Search thing poping up over the last couple of days, yeah, its annoying, but it takes a whole 15 seconds to go into Add / Remove programs and uninstall the darn thing. I figured either that it was being bundled in MS Updates, or I was going to have to shoot the guy who is making our images.
I agree, most programs have now updated and can be installed in Vista. At least, most I have used. Cisco VPN was indeed broke, but I thought this was due to the TCP/IP stacks being rewritten for Vista, and was not due to admin issues or changing of location of files. Cisco fixed this really fast, I had an alpha version of VPN that came out just a couple of days after Vista was released, and I am now running what I think is an actual release.
The other big program I have had trouble with is that PeerGuardian for Vista RC1 does not install right in Vista64, it has something to do with driver signing. You have to manually register DLLs, or something, but there seems to be some update that Microsoft recently released that breaks this again.
Yeah, you got to read your install instructions on some vista programs, as you do have to right click on the program and do a "Run as Administrator" on it. It seems that the new default Vista access level falls somewhere between Power User and Administrator. See,s like a great security addition. Actually, seems to make it a bit more Unix like, where some programs have to be ran as Root even if you have Admin privilages. I would equate it with that.
Microsoft also released a patch not long ago that seems to have increased the compatability with some programs. I don't think this is part of ?Windows updates, i think you have to download it as a KB Article, but I am thinking that this is going to be incorporated in SP1. I think that Adobe CS and CS2 are still broke, but I have used CS3 successfully in Vista.
You mean, you actually switched out the video card and did NOT reinstall Windows? While you should be able to do this, in XP it was so cumbersome and lead to so many little bugs here and there that it was just easier to reinstall the OS or do a repair install. I imagine the same thing is true with Vista. I was dual booting XP and Vista, then upgraded Video Card, motherboard, processor, and memory. So many driver issues, that instead of trying to fix everything, I just did a repair install. Windows XP and Vista both activated just fine. Of course, your license agreement may vary, affecting your ability to activate online. If so, just call the 800 number, let Microsoft know you upgraded your software and need reactivation, and they will give you an activation code over the phone.
I mean, OMG, you have to reinstall and reactivate after doing a major hardware change to your computer? This is nothing new. You are in reduced functionaliy mode for half an hour? I am actually surprised that you were able to run Windows for that long without it bluescreening on you after the upgrade because of some driver conflict.
This has been an issue since Windows '95. People have dealt with this for 12 years. You upgrade your hardware, you reinstall your Microsoft OS or spend hours or days trying to "fix" issues that may arise. Get over it, reinstall and reactivate.
Well written article, but not a single picture anywhere in sight. How can you write an article about anything to do with space, and not post a picture?
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm
Now I just have to worry about unpatched holes in Windows Media Player!
Truthfully, I already have one bloated Media Player that is part of the OS on my machine, why would I want to install another?
BTW:
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alternative.htm
To take care of that OTHER bloated media player
I have been using Comic Sans MS for years, and finally it seems that most OSes include this font.
However, according to the article, they are talking about replacing Ariel and Comic Sans with the same font. Most of these fonts do look a tad bit better than what they are replacing, but I am really surprised they are talking about replacing Comic Sans. I mean, Calibri is not even REMOTELY close to Comic Sans.
So, a few things actually confuse me here. First, are we saying that IE7 for Vista automatically remaps one of the standard fonts with the new ones? It does seem as if stuff looks slighly different under Vista, but I may be imagining it.
Second, Vista has been out since January, and betas and stuff for well over a year. Why are we just now hearing about this?
Kinda see now Sony's decision to remove backwards compatability from the PS3. With the PS2 still selling as strong as it is, the PS3 would be a direct competitor to their own product. Let's drop backwards compatability and then sell both consoles
Seriously? You really expect a graphic artist or video producer to pull up a webbrowser to do their work? Could you imagine the clunky control scheme of trying to edit HD video inside of Internet Explorer (Shuddrs). What about Adobe Encore, with DVD and BluRay authoring? Please tell me I am not going to have to actually upload uncompressed HD video to Adobe to be able to use it? What about the 1 gig graphic file I am working on for a billboard? Ugh!
However, there is something I have to smirk at. Lets make Dreamweaver, Flash and Shockwave webbased! Yes, I am going to go to a website to design my website!
Wow, I have not heard people talk about Alice in years, I thought it was dead.
Turtle forever!
FTA: The "Out of Memory" error (which is affectionately known at the PC Doc HQ as the "Out of Cheese" error
Ever tried using high speed internet over a line that has a lot of noise in it? Up until I replaced the wiring in my house, there were many times I saw my 6 Mbps DSL line drop to speeds painfuly slower than dialup. Remember back with analog cell phones, how awful the quality was? Okay, different technology, but I am trying to go somewhere. You got static, you got echos, it was awful. Digital cell phones have dramatically improved quality, but have you ever talked to someone while they were driving or something? There seems to be quite a huge drop of data packets. This is fine for voice (well, for most of us, lets say we put up with it), but could be fatal for data. Could you imagine the number of data errors that must happen on a cell network?
I have experienced web browsing on an Edge Datacard, and I can tell you it is painffully slow, but, as the article describes, this seems to be from latency, not from bandwidth. I will sit here sometimes waiting anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds for it to send its page requests, then it has to acknowledge that the server has recieved the requests, then the page loads up. The actual load time are not that bad, its just the latency.
Now I have been able to compare Edge VS 3G on Blackberry BES activations. I must say, I HATE 3G Blackberry activations. Yes, the activation itself is usually about 5-10 times faster than the Edge, however, the Edge activations usually never fail, the 3G usually fails several times before it finally goes through. In reality, the Blackberries I have activated on 3G networks tend to take me a couple of hours to do, whereas the Edge ones I can normally knock out in about 10-20 minutes.
Sorry, having a lot of trouble finding any info on this. Does the game run in Vista 64 with 64 bit support? I have XP x64 as well, but was wondering if there is DX10 code in it. I mean, if I can get it to run with 64 bit code and it has DX10 code, this game should be sweet.
Sure, lets put Passion of the Christ in the same rating as Pulp Fiction.
I was about to make the same comment. Thunderbird is an e-mail client, not an Outlook replacement. Outlook does so much more than simply recieve and send e-mail to pop3/smpt servers. Right now, the only way to get tunderbird to work with Exchange is to enable IMAP support on the exchange server (strangely, also the same way you get the iPhone to work with exchange), which most system admins probably will refuse to do. No, Thunderbird is not even remotely similar to Outlook. Entourage is not Outlook. No, the only open source client I am aware of that is remotely similar to Outlook is Evolution, and it seems to be Linux only.
So, several things to point out:
1) are you using an XP SP2 disc, or a regular XP disc? If you have to install Service Pack 2, expect this to take all day. A freash install of XP SP2 on Dell machines that have reached the end of their life takes me roughly 30 minutes to install the OS and another hour to do updates.
2) Of course, if you complain to Microsoft, they will probably say something about Vista. Vista takes me roughly 25 minutes to install (surprisingly less time than XP, I am not sure why), and roughly 5-10 minutes to install updates (not including drivers)
3) I completely agree with you that the normal desktop user is probably not going to need that much storage space or horsepower. I work in IT at a fortune 500 company, and it seems to vary from job to job. Our accounting girls are on machines, many 3-4 years old, and the replacement of these machines tend to happen because hardware is giving out, and the cost of servicing the machine is higher than getting a new machine. Our image is roughly 6 gig, and the girls in accounting rarely have more than a gig of personal information on their computer, usually MUCH less.
However, this starts to vary greatly depending on who you are dealing with and what they are doing. Most of our execs will have 20-30 gig of just e-mail archives (I try to warn them to clean out archives and backup, but they just will not listen, that is until their harddrive fails). The average size of an iTunes directory for most users is around 5 gig. Still most of our users are not pushing their harddrives to the limit. What seems to be killing us is not enough ram and fragmented harddrives. Our PCs now come with a gig of RAM, although I am starting to push this to 2 gig for some of our users, and the newer macs come with anywhere from 2gig-8gig depending on which department its going to. There have been talks about getting some of our Macs dual terrabyte drives when they become more popular in the market (2 seperate SATA drives in RAID).
My point is, yes, not everyone needs this much storage. Many may never fill up the 40 gig drives they have in their machines now, probably will never need a machine with more than 512 meg of ram. Shoot, as many of them still log into mainframes using a terminal program, I do not understand why we just do not give them dumb terminals, as then you do not have to mess with Windows or Linux. Instant on. However, that does not mean there are not people who need it, and that niche is growing. Our Vista image (which we have yet to role out to users, we only have a few test machines up here in IT running it) is roughly about 18 gig (compared to 6 and a half for XP). People are downloading more iTunes. Digital cameras are getting higher resolution, and many will film in TV quality mode now, ever increasing the need for space (my recent trip to Colorado resulted in almost 7 gig of pictures and videos, and I have taken 16 gig of pictures and videos this year just with my Nikon L12 camera). More and more Jo Blow users are doing video editing on their computers. And have you seen the installs of some of these games? I am thinking BioShock was around six and a half gig. Many demos are between 1-1.5 gig. I at home am running 2TB on my desktop, and am having space problems, then again, I tend to keep more data around than the average user.
No, my first response when I read this was, What's taking them so long? If they have discovered how to do this, why 2011? Why not mid2008-early 2009? We have terrabyte drives now, they have discovered a way to fit 4 times as much data, why 2011? No, I don't think the drives can get here fast enough with our ever growing demand for storage space
Most of the games I would like to see have already been remade, like some of Square's old Final Fantasy games and Chrono Trigger.
Of course, what I would really like to see remade are some old Sierra games, such as Space Quest, Kings Quest, Quest for Glory.... Oh, wait....
http://www.agdinteractive.com/
Of course, this is updating many of the old 1980s Sierra games to the engine that was used in the early 90s Sierra games. I would love to see something such as Kings Quest 6 in a fully 3D enviornment. It seems as if the adventure game genera is all but dead, and what a wonderful enviornment to put an adventure game in, a truely 3D world. That does not mean there are not 3D adventure games, but games such as Elder Scrolls Oblivian seem to fall more on RPG than adventure game.
Strangely, Sierra actually tried a couple of adventure games in a fully 3D enviornment, but Kings Quest 8 and Leisure Suite Larry Magnum Cum Lade did not do as well as other games in the series.
Could you imagine Gabriel Knight in 3D? Roaming the streets of New Orleans in full stunning 3D. Wow!
The early PS3s seem to have full backwards compatability. I bought mine in January, and have yet to see a PS2 or PSX game that it will not play, and I have about 30, some, such as FF4 and Chrono Trigger for the PSX, played on my PS3 with only minor flickering during a transition (rare, not a major problem), but at least it played, it did not play at all on any of the PS2s I threw it at.
In my experience, the backwards compatability of the early PS3s are better than the backwards compatability of the PS2.
As the early PS3s had full hardware backwards compatability, I am thinking that the compatability was closer to to 97%. I think the titles that were having problems were similar to the titles that had problems when they changed around the PS2 hardware. The early PS2s were not able to play some of the Playstation 1 games (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ps2#Software_compatibility">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ps2#Software_compatibility), and I am thinking that there were titles that worked with the original PS2 but did not work with the later. (Scroll down to Hardware revisions and read up on that)I am thinking that this may have something to do with BIOS versions though rather than hardware, as I had similar issues with Playstation Emulators depending on which BIOS I used.
There is also a list of Playstation and Playstation 2 games that did not play on the later PS2 units (a href="http://www.us.playstation.com/News/ConsumerAlerts/softwareTitles_75001.html">http://www.us.playstation.com/News/ConsumerAlerts/softwareTitles_75001.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ps3#Backward_compatibilityStates that the early software only emulation versions of the PS3 had only a 72% compatability, but that number has been increased with system updates. So, that is 28% of titles that did not work at first, and is now much lower. The page also states that Sony is striving to increase compatability.
So, while Sony is removing backwards compatability from some of their "discount" models, don't dish them for the backwards compatability in the ones that do have BC, its actually quite good.
I bought my PS3 because my PS2, with its large collection of software, went out the week before. I have 3 PS3 games, use it mainly for BluRay and PS2 games, and some PS1 games that, amazingly, play on the PS3 but not on the PS2 (such as Chrono Trigger).
I mean, companies are still releasing PS2 games. The number of PS3 titles, while growing, is still comparatively small.
The PS3 has, what, an 8 core processor? So take out the hardware backwards compatability, and do the whole thing in software. PCs have been doing this for years, yet for some reason Sony has dragged their feet on this. Has anyone actually tried playing one of the original PSX Final Fantasy games through Bleem or PSXEmu or one of the other Playstation Emulators with 3D support? Its absolutely beautiful. Sure, not everything works like this, but the number of games that do work is high enough that Sony should really consider a software backwards compatibility. You could easily introduce this in a firmware update. In fact, I would be willing to bet that Sony will notice how big of a mistake No backwards Compatability is, and release a firmware update in the near future, or discontinue the model.
Now if you were selling like a $300 system with no backwards compatability, and still sold PS2s on the shelf, then you may actually have a product you can sell. With the UK PS3 with no backwards compatability still costing over $600 USD, I would be really surprised if they move a single console.