Quite the opposite imho. For example: Where again do you do desktop zoom in windows to see that video fullscreen where the website prefers to surround it by ads? Or how do I control a window transparency with a key plus the mouse wheel, so that I can see the window behind it too? Is it possible at all to choose which windows remain 'always on top' or 'always on bottom'? Oh, and what shady buggy shareware do I need to get multiple desktops, and why can't I assign my own keyboard shortcuts to switch around them? Why can't I run a program on one computer and let it display on another?
-You win, desktop zoom isn't properly implemented in Windows. The magnifier kinda sorta works, but it's a kludge more than a solution. Window transparency, always-on-top, and multiple desktops (complete with user-configurable keyboard shortcuts) are all handled quite nicely using nVidia's nView desktop. It's not installed by default in Win7, but it does ship with the main executable and is trivial to install. If you prefer ATI cards, I think that there are some similar functions in the Catalyst control center, but I could be mistaken. Either way, there are several freeware apps that handle this stuff (some are first party from Microsoft) that actually do their job VERY well and aren't buggy. Displaying a window on a completely independent computer seems a bit impractical, why not VNC over the network or just open the window there?
When I start a big program that takes a couple of seconds to start, and I go to the 'start' menu to start another program before the first one opens, then why does windows think it's a good idea to suddenly remove the menu where I'm trying to lookup that other program, just because the first program got far enough to open its first window?
-Ugh, that annoys me to no end as well. Definitely with you on that one!
Why, after logging in, when it looks on the screen that the computer is ready for me, does the mouse pointer still blink/flash and not let me actually do usefull things while the only thing happening is the harddrive light being on and the junk bar on the bottom getting larger and larger.
-I can't answer for the mile-long system trays that many users tend to have, but keeping the startup items clean is almost standard housekeeping at this point, and use of the msconfig tool is THOROUGHLY documented on the internet; 8 of the first 10 google results for "windows takes forever to start up" explain how to use it.
Why does every program inform me in a different way that it has an update, or wants to check online for updates, and why do I need to reboot that often for that?
-Centralized updating a la synaptic would be wonderful, but in the Windows world I think that it would present its own set of challenges. How do you show impartiality between Adobe and Scribus, while ensuring that users are only adding trustworthy repositories, but without making everyone sign up with Microsoft, or having devs sign up and charging developers to be listed fairly? Yes, it's annoying to have Windows, NOD32, Adobe apps, Java, Firefox, and FileZilla all independently bother me for updates. I'd love to see some sort of centralized management, but even if the accountants let it happen, the lawyers won't. As far as rebooting, I'll agree that in my experience, at least half of installation reboots (update or otherwise) have been mostly unnecessary and it is annoying.
What is 'fast web search', why does it hyjack my browser and make everything slower and how did it get in there, and how do I get rid of it? (repeat for dozens more spyware/adware).
-It's what happens when you don't pay the slightest bit of attention to what you're clicking. Avoiding spyware is pretty simple, but requires end users to not act stupidly.
What is an adware scanner anyway? And why do I still need a virus scanner band-aid in the 21st century?
In their defense (and no, I'm not an overt microsoft fanboy, merely a pragmatist)...
-They provide security patches, whether or not the user paid for the product. -They provide a free antivirus/antispyware program that requires no registration or consistent user interaction, whether or not the user paid for their copy of Windows. -They provide a free app called SteadyState, which allows the end user to lock down their computer even further if desired (granted the machine has to pass WGA, but SteadyState works VERY well when configured properly and is much easier than local GPO's). -More recent versions of Windows ship fairly locked down by default, requiring the user to explicitly grant admin rights when required. -More recent versions of Outlook and Windows Live Mail don't download images by default, and block executable attachments (perhaps SCR and VBS as well? haven't gotten either of those recently) without even giving the option of overriding. -IE7 and IE8 run in a sandboxed environment by default. -Office attachments are read-only by default and the user is explicitly warned if they contain macros.
I'm certainly not in favor of adding taxes to fix stupidity facilitated by a single corporation. Heck, I'm against adding new taxes in general. I'm not saying that Microsoft shouldn't be held responsible for releasing an unbaked OS in order to make the marketing and accounting departments happy. I am saying though that from where I sit, it seems that they've taken some solid steps to clean up the messes from the past. Have they gone far enough? That's certainly a worthy debate, but MSE, SteadyState, and more recent versions of IE are all on the liabilities column of the balance sheet. In fact, recall that just a few years ago, they charged for Live OneCare, and now they are giving away the majority of the functionality for free (and in my experience, the free products are more effective than the paid ones ever were).
IMO, the bigger problem was said at the very top of the discussion - giving people the option of doing things related to security, especially when security usually goes hand in hand with inconvenience, means that the clueless majority will forsake the former to avoid the latter. On the other end of the spectrum, if you force the last guy still running XP SP1 'cuz he is too scared to upgrade it to perform that upgrade, wouldn't everyone here fly off the handle that Microsoft is forcing updates on people? Actually, IIRC, that DID happen a few years ago when MS rolled out a patch that reenabled automatic updates. Whether it's Microsoft, Apple, Canonical, or Novell, you can't act pissed one day 'cuz they're forcing people to apply security updates, and then be pissed the next because they're optional and Joe C. Lueless doesn't opt in.
The way I figure it, you can't be dumb enough to open up ports on your firewall without so much as calling the company to verify if it's legit AND have the technical skill to do the port forwarding at the same time.
what would you do if you suddenly had more money to develop a program, and a huge list of "customer requirements" from sales and marketing?
Uhm...implement them? Maybe I missed something somewhere, but I have a copy of both the 10-day-demo DV Rack and OnLocation, and didn't see 380MBytes of added features. I saw a handful (including XDCam and other new formats being supported), but the core functionality appeared to be largely unchanged. In fact, I still opt for the DV Rack demo whenever I can, just because it seems snappier. It's sad that the humor had to go, 'cuz this one was particularly memorable despite having not seen it for several years. The new OnLocation ones are bland and utterly forgettable.
Okay so this is technically a readme file, but it is still among the best technical documentation I've ever seen shipped with a piece of software. It came with the program "DV Rack", a video capture application written by Serious Magic...
Oh, good.... You're reading this file. You are indeed a wise person who takes direction well. Blessings be upon you!
IMPORTANT!
WHAT NOT TO DO: All the captured video clips in this folder (and any subfolders in it) must remain unmodified and exactly where they are for DV Rack to fully and properly function. You see, DV Rack has an internal Database that puts the clips here and this Database bloody well expects them to still be here the next time it comes around looking for them. Pay attention because this Database has a personality much like the deity figure in some religions (say, Pan or Loki). It is a singularly temperamental, unforgiving, and capricious Database Deity. It knows how to Smite and, trust us, you don't want any smiting going on around your clips. The only way to make the Database Deity cranky is to mess with the clips it puts here in this one folder.
Editing, deleting, or renaming these clips will result in inexplicable, random, and very likely BAD and NAUGHTY behavior on the part of DV Rack. No kidding, this normally elegant and refined software will start acting like a petulant three-year-old who is hours past nappy time and just had its ice cream taken away. No one wants that! So PLEASE do not perform any of these actions on any clips in this folder. However, if DV Rack is not running, you can use Windows to copy of one or more clips in this folder to somewhere else on your hard drive (outside the DV Rack folders). But don't even THINK about ever putting them back here.
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO INSTEAD: The instant, easy, proper (and painless) way to get your clutches on these clips is to first use the magic "Eject" button in the DVR. DV Rack will graciously take the clips from the evil clutches of the Database and put them next door, over in the "Ejected Clips" folder. Life is easy over there. No rules. No consequences. No three-year-olds.
So remember, don't touch the clips unless they're in the "Ejected Clips" folder or the "Garbage Clips" folder. If you do, don't come crying to us like a three- year-old who just had its ice cream taken away. You have been warned...
The DV Rack Team Thanks You For Your Most Benevolent Cooperation
Unfortunately, Serious Magic was bought out by Adobe, who decided to write a more "corporate" version of this...and inflate the app size from 18MBytes to over 400.
Then again, it's hard to take anyone seriously that uses Windows in a server role.
You fail to account for server software that's Windows-only. I'm not talking about the core functions (file/print sharing, DHCP, AD/LDAP, LAMP), because *nix does work extremely well at these tasks and I won't at all debate that. In the office I work in though, they rely on financial software that is exclusive to Windows for both clients and servers. SHOULD the vendor write a Linux version of the stuff? probably. Given that my company has already spent mid-five-figures on a Windows infrastructure that works (yes, our servers do in fact function well enough to keep the company humming along on a day-to-day basis) and the software that holds their financial and client data (and Exchange and Sharepoint), why would my company care enough to switch to Linux? Answer: they wouldn't. If you don't take me seriously, then fine, I won't stop you from having your own opinion. At the end of the day though, the servers work, the clients work, the office staff is happy, problems are manageable, and I get my paycheck at the end of the period, so my regard for your opinion is somewhat limited.
Of course it does. If you purchase MS software, they have both revenue and market share. If you pirate MS software, they don't get revenue, but they do get market share. If you use $NON_MS_SOFTWARE, their competitors gain market share (and possibly revenue, if you buy it). If Microsoft (or any other company, for that matter) has to choose between revenue+market share, market share, or neither, their choices will generally be in that order.
Maybe I'm alone in this, but in an emergency whereby I'd be dependent on the government for water, I'm fairly certain that my first reaction is NOT going to bear any resemblance to the following: "My family hasn't had a drop of sanitary water in three days. I should use the Internet instead of the phone or TV or radio broadcasts and e-mail the president and ask him to help...wait, this doesn't look like an official website! Blast! Somebody must be hacking DNS servers to prevent me from getting water!"
Agreed; that seems to be common practice in video games. The point I was getting at is that the paths seem a little "too perfect", and the motion itself seems a bit linear and calculated. I'm not saying that they need to have Michael Bay program the cameras, but for true photorealism, the camerawork needs to be less computationally convenient.
So I went to the link in the summary to see the video, and I MUST be too jaded. It looked *exactly* like a level from Unreal Tournament 3. I love that game, so that's all well and good. I'm sure my laptop could render that youtube clip in realtime without a problem. It still seemed fake to me. The movement of the foliage was too "calculated", as was much of the debris when it fell. The camera motion was "too perfect" and looks exactly like what my camera moves look like in After Effects, which bear very little resemblance to what a camera move looks like for real.
Better than Mass Effect? yeah. Better than Counterstrike/Half-Life/Half-Life 2? you bet. Better than UT3 or Crysis? That, I feel, is debatable. If it's debatable, then I'm not certain that there is a breakthrough here. But that's just me, and I could be completely off-base here.
It's not immediately intuitive to him; I've read that many of the N900 features take a little more digging to get the most out of them. I'm sure that if they really wanted to, there's got to be a few dozen engineers in Cupertino who are getting paid enough to figure out how to interact with an onHover() action. As a former iPhone owner, I watched some of the primitive attempts at cut/paste, then seeing Apple do it nicer. I still think that SwirlyMMS pwns native MMS, but Apple did a pretty solid job shoehorning it in. They've added Exchange syncing, simple video editing, Springboard organizing, and dozens of other things that IMO are a bit challenging from a UI perspective. On the app side, EVERY remote access app (MochaVNC, LogMeIn, etc.) has had to implement some difference between navigating the screen, dragging, clicking, and right-clicking. Perhaps the N900 version of the system isn't the answer, but I'm confident that there is one.
They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. People said that about Microsoft Office (it really hadn't changed its UI much in over a decade), then they released Office 2007 and everyone screamed bloody murder because the interface was overhauled.
Photoshop isn't the simplest program in existence to pick up and use, but I'm of the persuasion that if the interface was *that* terrible that Adobe would have, at some point, done an Office 2007 ribbon-esque revamp, but my graphic designer friends give me the vibe that the UI was pretty solidly designed the first time around and really only needed to be tweaked and extended to accommodate new features as time progressed.
That might not be entirely true. Suppose for a minute that I completely believe that you have been able to 100% elude yourself from all mass media. I'd then imagine that you choose to buy products based on one of a few things:
1.) Location, Location, Location. If you pass by a Starbucks and get your coffee there, then their convenient, prominent location constitutes a form of advertising. How'd you know it was there? I'm guessing it had something to to with the highly recognizable green mermaid logo. You didn't just waltz into an unlabeled building saying "I hope they serve coffee here", you knew that Starbucks sells coffee. Location-based advertising.
2.) Word of Mouth. This is essentially indirect advertising. The person your heard it from had to have heard of the product from somewhere. If you both buy Windex because your friend saw the commercial and liked it enough to recommend, then you bought some yourself. Indirect advertising.
3.) Browse-and-Buy. Many companies pay for retailers to prominently place their products in retail stores with the intent of increasing the awareness of a product. You might hunt for a particular item that's on sale, but if you go to Staples for an SD card, a prominent display containing competitively priced Sandisk memory cards is likely to influence your purchase for Sandisk over PNY or Lexar. Retail placement advertising.
4.) I bought a Creative Sound Blaster Extigy back in 2001. It came with a limited edition of Mixmeister 3. After all, I was buying a high quality sound card, presumably for a laptop (it was the only USB audio interface I could find at the time), so DJ software was a fairly logical thing to bundle. Over the past decade, I've bought four upgrades to that product, earning Mixmeister plenty of coin. I didn't know I needed their product, but I had it, so I tried it and found out how great it is, and my wallet soon followed. Product bundling advertisement.
5.) 7-11 is open 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46.05 seconds a year. Where I live, going three miles out of range of one must be intentional. Do you think that all these stores are profitable at 2:30 Christmas morning? of course not? Heck, after 10ish I see the clerks watching videos on their Blackberries, because I'm the only customer they're going to see for the next three hours. The reason why 7-11 is open all the time is because they intend to make sure that it's in my head that if I need coffee, any time, day or night, bank holiday or not, I can get my coffee, cigarettes, lottery tickets, beer, or motor oil. They don't need to advertise on a billboard to make people aware of them. They just need to be the only place that's open and carries the item they need at midnight, and they've made it much more likely for the customer to return. Mindshare advertising.
These are just a handful of examples of advertising I can think of that requires no billboards, magazine spreads, TV spots, or product placement in movies. Saying that advertising doesn't affect you is foolish and untrue - you're lying to yourself.
As a Mobile DJ, my experience tells me that the only way that's really going to work is if she's the "Queen Bee" of her social circle. If what she likes becomes popular, then all you have to do is find stuff she likes. If not, then you can bet bucks to beans that ClearChannel already has a stranglehold on whoever is the Queen Bee, and even if she likes the Creative Commons stuff (which I've found to wildly vary in quality), she'll still want to get the CHR stuff anyway.
In my experience, Napster has been pretty good about letting me re-download tracks I lost due to an emergency reformat. Additionally, utilities exist for retrieving songs off an iPod if they were synced to one. I totally agree with the fact that the issue you're talking about is complete and utter crap - even Steam lets me re-download my games as many times as I need to; surely 14GBytes of upload for Mass Effect 2has to cost them more than the ~750 MBytes from iTunes (and yes, I'm assuming iTunes here). I gotta give props to Warner here; they've just won the current round of who-can-make-their-IP-policies-even-less-customer-friendly-than-EA. On a practical note, if you're going to give her Limewire, I'd encourage you to use a utility like SteadyState or Acronis True Image to mitigate the virus/malware issues that will inevitably arise. IME, an uninfected machine with Limewire is about as common as a leprechaun riding a unicorn.
Yes, but a good mechanic will say something like "What would you like to set the spark plug gap to? A smaller gap has ($ADVANTAGE and $DRAWBACK), while a wider gap has ($NEW_ADVANTAGE and $NEW_DRAWBACK)". Lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of the options that are better left up to the driver. If options were presented to the user with no more than two sentences worth of explanation written at a 7th grade reading level, it just might be possible for the user to make an informed decision.
I've found that the simplest solution is to do a Google search on the first few characters of the product key extracted using the Magic Jellybean Keyfinder. If the search results show a few hundred hits for the complete key (and it's not an SLP/OEM key from Dell/Gateway/HP/Whoever), and the machine doesn't have an OEM sticker on it, and the build has software inconsistent with the data (i.e. DVD Decrypter , but you know the person doesn't know how to rip a disc, or WinRAR, but no RAR archives), it's probably a pirated copy. At this point, I'd call and ask, "do you ever recall seeing a Windows disc with your machine? Who built this for you? I ask this because I have a sneaky suspicion that you're running a pirated copy of Windows, which prevents you from getting certain patches and updates. How would you like to proceed?". Responses vary, but at least they know.
Premiere 1.0-6.5 sucked royally. Once they revamped it and made it "Premiere Pro", some of the more recent iterations have been fairly solid; IMO version 2.0 was the best balance between features and bloat. No, it doesn't have perfect compatibility, but I've gotten just about every AVI codec to import and edit properly. While DV-AVI is the codec that Premiere natively edits (and in many cases I find myself transcoding before editing anything else, lets the render times triple), it has supported virtually everything I've tried to edit. The only issue I had was editing.mkv files (which Adobe officially states isn't supported), but even that I was able to Google my way to a workaround. Most of the stability issues I've had have either been due to a corrupted video file, or a third party plugin misbehaving. Premiere has other issues, but it's come a LONG way in recent years.
I'll agree that tablet PCs have sucked due to interface in the past. XP treated tablet inputs as essentially a mouse, so you have people using a pen stylus like a mouse (I haven't personally seen a tablet that accepts finger presses). This works pretty well in Office 2007 when the ribbon buttons are fairly decent sized targets, but older versions had you trying to hit 16x16 pixel targets, and the tap-and-hold for right click. The pen interface was great for handwriting into your computer (which really only worked well in OneNote and Evernote, but for other apps it was a chicken-and-egg problem), and while pen-on-screen entry is among the nicest interfaces available for Photoshop and Illustrator, the biggest screen I ever saw on a tablet was 14", it had a meager hard disk, a slow processor, not enough RAM for Photoshop, its battery life was on par with other 13-14" screen laptops, and it cost triple the price of a similar laptop without the pen (there were Macbooks that were cheaper, and in design school, most everything it taught on a Mac, making a Macbook the better investment for that kind of money).
Microsoft's failure rests in the fact that they designed the Tablet PC edition of XP as more of an afterthought than a complete UI overhaul. Part of the problem here is that while the iPad has the benefit of the swaths of finger-friendly apps in the App Store that already exist and simply need to be scaled up (as opposed to OSX apps which aren't very finger-friendly either). Microsoft's strength is in desktop apps, and not supporting desktop apps on tablets would make buying one instead of a laptop as dumb as buying ice in Antarctica. Making a push for apps designed for touch input wouldn't really get very far on the PC platform.
If the data is valuable enough to steal a computer and try to hack the TPM chip using acid and needles, then it's valuable enough to threaten the person with the password to divulge it.
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Quite the opposite imho. For example: Where again do you do desktop zoom in windows to see that video fullscreen where the website prefers to surround it by ads? Or how do I control a window transparency with a key plus the mouse wheel, so that I can see the window behind it too? Is it possible at all to choose which windows remain 'always on top' or 'always on bottom'? Oh, and what shady buggy shareware do I need to get multiple desktops, and why can't I assign my own keyboard shortcuts to switch around them? Why can't I run a program on one computer and let it display on another?
-You win, desktop zoom isn't properly implemented in Windows. The magnifier kinda sorta works, but it's a kludge more than a solution. Window transparency, always-on-top, and multiple desktops (complete with user-configurable keyboard shortcuts) are all handled quite nicely using nVidia's nView desktop. It's not installed by default in Win7, but it does ship with the main executable and is trivial to install. If you prefer ATI cards, I think that there are some similar functions in the Catalyst control center, but I could be mistaken. Either way, there are several freeware apps that handle this stuff (some are first party from Microsoft) that actually do their job VERY well and aren't buggy. Displaying a window on a completely independent computer seems a bit impractical, why not VNC over the network or just open the window there?
When I start a big program that takes a couple of seconds to start, and I go to the 'start' menu to start another program before the first one opens, then why does windows think it's a good idea to suddenly remove the menu where I'm trying to lookup that other program, just because the first program got far enough to open its first window?
-Ugh, that annoys me to no end as well. Definitely with you on that one!
Why, after logging in, when it looks on the screen that the computer is ready for me, does the mouse pointer still blink/flash and not let me actually do usefull things while the only thing happening is the harddrive light being on and the junk bar on the bottom getting larger and larger.
-I can't answer for the mile-long system trays that many users tend to have, but keeping the startup items clean is almost standard housekeeping at this point, and use of the msconfig tool is THOROUGHLY documented on the internet; 8 of the first 10 google results for "windows takes forever to start up" explain how to use it.
Why does every program inform me in a different way that it has an update, or wants to check online for updates, and why do I need to reboot that often for that?
-Centralized updating a la synaptic would be wonderful, but in the Windows world I think that it would present its own set of challenges. How do you show impartiality between Adobe and Scribus, while ensuring that users are only adding trustworthy repositories, but without making everyone sign up with Microsoft, or having devs sign up and charging developers to be listed fairly? Yes, it's annoying to have Windows, NOD32, Adobe apps, Java, Firefox, and FileZilla all independently bother me for updates. I'd love to see some sort of centralized management, but even if the accountants let it happen, the lawyers won't. As far as rebooting, I'll agree that in my experience, at least half of installation reboots (update or otherwise) have been mostly unnecessary and it is annoying.
What is 'fast web search', why does it hyjack my browser and make everything slower and how did it get in there, and how do I get rid of it? (repeat for dozens more spyware/adware).
-It's what happens when you don't pay the slightest bit of attention to what you're clicking. Avoiding spyware is pretty simple, but requires end users to not act stupidly.
What is an adware scanner anyway? And why do I still need a virus scanner band-aid in the 21st century?
In their defense (and no, I'm not an overt microsoft fanboy, merely a pragmatist)...
-They provide security patches, whether or not the user paid for the product.
-They provide a free antivirus/antispyware program that requires no registration or consistent user interaction, whether or not the user paid for their copy of Windows.
-They provide a free app called SteadyState, which allows the end user to lock down their computer even further if desired (granted the machine has to pass WGA, but SteadyState works VERY well when configured properly and is much easier than local GPO's).
-More recent versions of Windows ship fairly locked down by default, requiring the user to explicitly grant admin rights when required.
-More recent versions of Outlook and Windows Live Mail don't download images by default, and block executable attachments (perhaps SCR and VBS as well? haven't gotten either of those recently) without even giving the option of overriding.
-IE7 and IE8 run in a sandboxed environment by default.
-Office attachments are read-only by default and the user is explicitly warned if they contain macros.
I'm certainly not in favor of adding taxes to fix stupidity facilitated by a single corporation. Heck, I'm against adding new taxes in general. I'm not saying that Microsoft shouldn't be held responsible for releasing an unbaked OS in order to make the marketing and accounting departments happy. I am saying though that from where I sit, it seems that they've taken some solid steps to clean up the messes from the past. Have they gone far enough? That's certainly a worthy debate, but MSE, SteadyState, and more recent versions of IE are all on the liabilities column of the balance sheet. In fact, recall that just a few years ago, they charged for Live OneCare, and now they are giving away the majority of the functionality for free (and in my experience, the free products are more effective than the paid ones ever were).
IMO, the bigger problem was said at the very top of the discussion - giving people the option of doing things related to security, especially when security usually goes hand in hand with inconvenience, means that the clueless majority will forsake the former to avoid the latter. On the other end of the spectrum, if you force the last guy still running XP SP1 'cuz he is too scared to upgrade it to perform that upgrade, wouldn't everyone here fly off the handle that Microsoft is forcing updates on people? Actually, IIRC, that DID happen a few years ago when MS rolled out a patch that reenabled automatic updates. Whether it's Microsoft, Apple, Canonical, or Novell, you can't act pissed one day 'cuz they're forcing people to apply security updates, and then be pissed the next because they're optional and Joe C. Lueless doesn't opt in.
The way I figure it, you can't be dumb enough to open up ports on your firewall without so much as calling the company to verify if it's legit AND have the technical skill to do the port forwarding at the same time.
what would you do if you suddenly had more money to develop a program, and a huge list of "customer requirements" from sales and marketing?
Uhm...implement them? Maybe I missed something somewhere, but I have a copy of both the 10-day-demo DV Rack and OnLocation, and didn't see 380MBytes of added features. I saw a handful (including XDCam and other new formats being supported), but the core functionality appeared to be largely unchanged. In fact, I still opt for the DV Rack demo whenever I can, just because it seems snappier. It's sad that the humor had to go, 'cuz this one was particularly memorable despite having not seen it for several years. The new OnLocation ones are bland and utterly forgettable.
Okay so this is technically a readme file, but it is still among the best technical documentation I've ever seen shipped with a piece of software. It came with the program "DV Rack", a video capture application written by Serious Magic...
Oh, good.... You're reading this file. You are indeed a wise person who takes
direction well. Blessings be upon you!
IMPORTANT!
WHAT NOT TO DO:
All the captured video clips in this folder (and any subfolders in it) must
remain unmodified and exactly where they are for DV Rack to fully and properly
function. You see, DV Rack has an internal Database that puts the clips here
and this Database bloody well expects them to still be here the next time it
comes around looking for them. Pay attention because this Database has a
personality much like the deity figure in some religions (say, Pan or Loki). It
is a singularly temperamental, unforgiving, and capricious Database Deity. It
knows how to Smite and, trust us, you don't want any smiting going on around
your clips. The only way to make the Database Deity cranky is to mess with the
clips it puts here in this one folder.
Editing, deleting, or renaming these clips will result in inexplicable, random,
and very likely BAD and NAUGHTY behavior on the part of DV Rack. No kidding,
this normally elegant and refined software will start acting like a petulant
three-year-old who is hours past nappy time and just had its ice cream taken
away. No one wants that! So PLEASE do not perform any of these actions on any
clips in this folder. However, if DV Rack is not running, you can use Windows
to copy of one or more clips in this folder to somewhere else on your hard
drive (outside the DV Rack folders). But don't even THINK about ever putting
them back here.
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO INSTEAD:
The instant, easy, proper (and painless) way to get your clutches on these
clips is to first use the magic "Eject" button in the DVR. DV Rack will
graciously take the clips from the evil clutches of the Database and put them
next door, over in the "Ejected Clips" folder. Life is easy over there. No
rules. No consequences. No three-year-olds.
So remember, don't touch the clips unless they're in the "Ejected Clips" folder
or the "Garbage Clips" folder. If you do, don't come crying to us like a three-
year-old who just had its ice cream taken away. You have been warned...
The DV Rack Team Thanks You For Your Most Benevolent Cooperation
Unfortunately, Serious Magic was bought out by Adobe, who decided to write a more "corporate" version of this...and inflate the app size from 18MBytes to over 400.
Then again, it's hard to take anyone seriously that uses Windows in a server role.
You fail to account for server software that's Windows-only. I'm not talking about the core functions (file/print sharing, DHCP, AD/LDAP, LAMP), because *nix does work extremely well at these tasks and I won't at all debate that. In the office I work in though, they rely on financial software that is exclusive to Windows for both clients and servers. SHOULD the vendor write a Linux version of the stuff? probably. Given that my company has already spent mid-five-figures on a Windows infrastructure that works (yes, our servers do in fact function well enough to keep the company humming along on a day-to-day basis) and the software that holds their financial and client data (and Exchange and Sharepoint), why would my company care enough to switch to Linux? Answer: they wouldn't. If you don't take me seriously, then fine, I won't stop you from having your own opinion. At the end of the day though, the servers work, the clients work, the office staff is happy, problems are manageable, and I get my paycheck at the end of the period, so my regard for your opinion is somewhat limited.
Of course it does. If you purchase MS software, they have both revenue and market share. If you pirate MS software, they don't get revenue, but they do get market share. If you use $NON_MS_SOFTWARE, their competitors gain market share (and possibly revenue, if you buy it). If Microsoft (or any other company, for that matter) has to choose between revenue+market share, market share, or neither, their choices will generally be in that order.
and the fact that exclusives tend to be designed to run on hypothetical future computers from the year 2101
I loved Crysis, you insensitive clod!
Maybe I'm alone in this, but in an emergency whereby I'd be dependent on the government for water, I'm fairly certain that my first reaction is NOT going to bear any resemblance to the following: "My family hasn't had a drop of sanitary water in three days. I should use the Internet instead of the phone or TV or radio broadcasts and e-mail the president and ask him to help...wait, this doesn't look like an official website! Blast! Somebody must be hacking DNS servers to prevent me from getting water!"
Agreed; that seems to be common practice in video games. The point I was getting at is that the paths seem a little "too perfect", and the motion itself seems a bit linear and calculated. I'm not saying that they need to have Michael Bay program the cameras, but for true photorealism, the camerawork needs to be less computationally convenient.
So I went to the link in the summary to see the video, and I MUST be too jaded. It looked *exactly* like a level from Unreal Tournament 3. I love that game, so that's all well and good. I'm sure my laptop could render that youtube clip in realtime without a problem. It still seemed fake to me. The movement of the foliage was too "calculated", as was much of the debris when it fell. The camera motion was "too perfect" and looks exactly like what my camera moves look like in After Effects, which bear very little resemblance to what a camera move looks like for real.
Better than Mass Effect? yeah. Better than Counterstrike/Half-Life/Half-Life 2? you bet. Better than UT3 or Crysis? That, I feel, is debatable. If it's debatable, then I'm not certain that there is a breakthrough here. But that's just me, and I could be completely off-base here.
It's not immediately intuitive to him; I've read that many of the N900 features take a little more digging to get the most out of them. I'm sure that if they really wanted to, there's got to be a few dozen engineers in Cupertino who are getting paid enough to figure out how to interact with an onHover() action. As a former iPhone owner, I watched some of the primitive attempts at cut/paste, then seeing Apple do it nicer. I still think that SwirlyMMS pwns native MMS, but Apple did a pretty solid job shoehorning it in. They've added Exchange syncing, simple video editing, Springboard organizing, and dozens of other things that IMO are a bit challenging from a UI perspective. On the app side, EVERY remote access app (MochaVNC, LogMeIn, etc.) has had to implement some difference between navigating the screen, dragging, clicking, and right-clicking. Perhaps the N900 version of the system isn't the answer, but I'm confident that there is one.
They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. People said that about Microsoft Office (it really hadn't changed its UI much in over a decade), then they released Office 2007 and everyone screamed bloody murder because the interface was overhauled.
Photoshop isn't the simplest program in existence to pick up and use, but I'm of the persuasion that if the interface was *that* terrible that Adobe would have, at some point, done an Office 2007 ribbon-esque revamp, but my graphic designer friends give me the vibe that the UI was pretty solidly designed the first time around and really only needed to be tweaked and extended to accommodate new features as time progressed.
If email worked like IM, we'd all have to have 10 email accounts.
My list of e-mail accounts goes to 11.
That might not be entirely true. Suppose for a minute that I completely believe that you have been able to 100% elude yourself from all mass media. I'd then imagine that you choose to buy products based on one of a few things:
1.) Location, Location, Location. If you pass by a Starbucks and get your coffee there, then their convenient, prominent location constitutes a form of advertising. How'd you know it was there? I'm guessing it had something to to with the highly recognizable green mermaid logo. You didn't just waltz into an unlabeled building saying "I hope they serve coffee here", you knew that Starbucks sells coffee. Location-based advertising.
2.) Word of Mouth. This is essentially indirect advertising. The person your heard it from had to have heard of the product from somewhere. If you both buy Windex because your friend saw the commercial and liked it enough to recommend, then you bought some yourself. Indirect advertising.
3.) Browse-and-Buy. Many companies pay for retailers to prominently place their products in retail stores with the intent of increasing the awareness of a product. You might hunt for a particular item that's on sale, but if you go to Staples for an SD card, a prominent display containing competitively priced Sandisk memory cards is likely to influence your purchase for Sandisk over PNY or Lexar. Retail placement advertising.
4.) I bought a Creative Sound Blaster Extigy back in 2001. It came with a limited edition of Mixmeister 3. After all, I was buying a high quality sound card, presumably for a laptop (it was the only USB audio interface I could find at the time), so DJ software was a fairly logical thing to bundle. Over the past decade, I've bought four upgrades to that product, earning Mixmeister plenty of coin. I didn't know I needed their product, but I had it, so I tried it and found out how great it is, and my wallet soon followed. Product bundling advertisement.
5.) 7-11 is open 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46.05 seconds a year. Where I live, going three miles out of range of one must be intentional. Do you think that all these stores are profitable at 2:30 Christmas morning? of course not? Heck, after 10ish I see the clerks watching videos on their Blackberries, because I'm the only customer they're going to see for the next three hours. The reason why 7-11 is open all the time is because they intend to make sure that it's in my head that if I need coffee, any time, day or night, bank holiday or not, I can get my coffee, cigarettes, lottery tickets, beer, or motor oil. They don't need to advertise on a billboard to make people aware of them. They just need to be the only place that's open and carries the item they need at midnight, and they've made it much more likely for the customer to return. Mindshare advertising.
These are just a handful of examples of advertising I can think of that requires no billboards, magazine spreads, TV spots, or product placement in movies. Saying that advertising doesn't affect you is foolish and untrue - you're lying to yourself.
You provide yours first. Given that your username is "noidentity", you of all people should agree with his right to privacy!
As a Mobile DJ, my experience tells me that the only way that's really going to work is if she's the "Queen Bee" of her social circle. If what she likes becomes popular, then all you have to do is find stuff she likes. If not, then you can bet bucks to beans that ClearChannel already has a stranglehold on whoever is the Queen Bee, and even if she likes the Creative Commons stuff (which I've found to wildly vary in quality), she'll still want to get the CHR stuff anyway.
In my experience, Napster has been pretty good about letting me re-download tracks I lost due to an emergency reformat. Additionally, utilities exist for retrieving songs off an iPod if they were synced to one. I totally agree with the fact that the issue you're talking about is complete and utter crap - even Steam lets me re-download my games as many times as I need to; surely 14GBytes of upload for Mass Effect 2has to cost them more than the ~750 MBytes from iTunes (and yes, I'm assuming iTunes here). I gotta give props to Warner here; they've just won the current round of who-can-make-their-IP-policies-even-less-customer-friendly-than-EA. On a practical note, if you're going to give her Limewire, I'd encourage you to use a utility like SteadyState or Acronis True Image to mitigate the virus/malware issues that will inevitably arise. IME, an uninfected machine with Limewire is about as common as a leprechaun riding a unicorn.
Yes, but a good mechanic will say something like "What would you like to set the spark plug gap to? A smaller gap has ($ADVANTAGE and $DRAWBACK), while a wider gap has ($NEW_ADVANTAGE and $NEW_DRAWBACK)". Lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of the options that are better left up to the driver. If options were presented to the user with no more than two sentences worth of explanation written at a 7th grade reading level, it just might be possible for the user to make an informed decision.
I've found that the simplest solution is to do a Google search on the first few characters of the product key extracted using the Magic Jellybean Keyfinder. If the search results show a few hundred hits for the complete key (and it's not an SLP/OEM key from Dell/Gateway/HP/Whoever), and the machine doesn't have an OEM sticker on it, and the build has software inconsistent with the data (i.e. DVD Decrypter , but you know the person doesn't know how to rip a disc, or WinRAR, but no RAR archives), it's probably a pirated copy. At this point, I'd call and ask, "do you ever recall seeing a Windows disc with your machine? Who built this for you? I ask this because I have a sneaky suspicion that you're running a pirated copy of Windows, which prevents you from getting certain patches and updates. How would you like to proceed?". Responses vary, but at least they know.
Time isn't money. Time is the non-spatial continuum in which events occur linearly, typically in order of increasing entropy.
Premiere 1.0-6.5 sucked royally. Once they revamped it and made it "Premiere Pro", some of the more recent iterations have been fairly solid; IMO version 2.0 was the best balance between features and bloat. No, it doesn't have perfect compatibility, but I've gotten just about every AVI codec to import and edit properly. While DV-AVI is the codec that Premiere natively edits (and in many cases I find myself transcoding before editing anything else, lets the render times triple), it has supported virtually everything I've tried to edit. The only issue I had was editing .mkv files (which Adobe officially states isn't supported), but even that I was able to Google my way to a workaround. Most of the stability issues I've had have either been due to a corrupted video file, or a third party plugin misbehaving. Premiere has other issues, but it's come a LONG way in recent years.
Uhm...I think you're confusing the iPad with the Macbook Air.
I'll agree that tablet PCs have sucked due to interface in the past. XP treated tablet inputs as essentially a mouse, so you have people using a pen stylus like a mouse (I haven't personally seen a tablet that accepts finger presses). This works pretty well in Office 2007 when the ribbon buttons are fairly decent sized targets, but older versions had you trying to hit 16x16 pixel targets, and the tap-and-hold for right click. The pen interface was great for handwriting into your computer (which really only worked well in OneNote and Evernote, but for other apps it was a chicken-and-egg problem), and while pen-on-screen entry is among the nicest interfaces available for Photoshop and Illustrator, the biggest screen I ever saw on a tablet was 14", it had a meager hard disk, a slow processor, not enough RAM for Photoshop, its battery life was on par with other 13-14" screen laptops, and it cost triple the price of a similar laptop without the pen (there were Macbooks that were cheaper, and in design school, most everything it taught on a Mac, making a Macbook the better investment for that kind of money).
Microsoft's failure rests in the fact that they designed the Tablet PC edition of XP as more of an afterthought than a complete UI overhaul. Part of the problem here is that while the iPad has the benefit of the swaths of finger-friendly apps in the App Store that already exist and simply need to be scaled up (as opposed to OSX apps which aren't very finger-friendly either). Microsoft's strength is in desktop apps, and not supporting desktop apps on tablets would make buying one instead of a laptop as dumb as buying ice in Antarctica. Making a push for apps designed for touch input wouldn't really get very far on the PC platform.
http://xkcd.com/538/
If the data is valuable enough to steal a computer and try to hack the TPM chip using acid and needles, then it's valuable enough to threaten the person with the password to divulge it.