My Audigy 4 still uses the original drivers from 2004. I'm not complaining though, 6 channel ASIO with 3 ms latency. I'd like to see that happening in Vista's bloat DRM-ed content paths.
For everyone blaming me that their shiny Windows Vista install opens firefox when typing in an URL in the address bar, I already know that. I thought that my first sentence ("The IE rendering engine (especially in XP, no experience with Vista) is so tightly integrated it's not funny any more.") should imply that I use Windows XP. Also the last sentence("IE is everywhere in XP, less in Vista, but thanks to some EU regulations, no more in Windows 7.") should imply that it's less of a case in Vista. Windows does however open up Firefox when typing in an URL in the run menu.
To your question, winver returns:
Microsoft Windows Version 5.1 (Build 26.00.xpsp_sp3_gdr.090206-1234 : Service Pack 3), with of course all the latest updates installed. It's a Dutch version of Windows Professional (sitewide license, from my fathers business).
Yes it's legal.
I'm not upgrading to Windows Vista or 7 any time soon. All my hardware works fine with XP, and it's quick and nippy on current day systems. The only thing I like about Windows 6.0 or 6.1 (Vista or 7) is the quick execute through the start menu. Other then that, I see no way to upgrade. XP now has like 8 years of service packs and patches, it's pretty solid (My desktop now runs the same XP install for nearly 3 years, and is still as nippy as the moment I installed it, my HTPC boots under 20 seconds, which is nice.) and it just works! I'm not a gamer anymore, so I don't care about DX10 or 11, nor a great graphical user interface.
Add to that, when their usb implementation is properly following spec, the maximum draw is 100 mA when connected, and then must do a software handshake to get the full 500 mA. That can only be done by either installing the drivers (Nokia Suite is a large wad of rubbish), or having the drivers come with the OS (bloat bloat bloat). So unless you always charge at your own PC (which, on trips, is not something you do a lot, unless you happen to carry your laptop everywhere), you get a sucky 100 mA from the wall, or they are ignoring the spec (which means, stick another phone on it using another variation of the spec, things can go poof by overcharging).
Since the USB spec doesn't allow a whole lot of power, you'd need more charging time. My E71 can draw 800 mA at 5 Volts, so my 1.5 Ah 3.7 volt battery is full in ~1.4 hours, while at 500 mA around 2.2 hours, or at 100 mA around 11.1 hours. Not something you're willing to do every night in some hotel, especially with power-sucking smartphones that die within a couple of hours/days.
Sure, everybody charging their phones on the same connector is fun and all, but my Nokia charger is around 4 cc, and you get one with a new phone any ways. My dad and mom both have Nokia phones (My mom has an older model with the larger socket, but a simple €5 adapter works great), and many people do, so it's never a problem to charge your phone when you don't have your own charger around.
I'll have my standard nokia charger please, and add to that, I'm not that fond of the micro-usb connector. It feels a bit flimsy.
The IE rendering engine (especially in XP, no experience with Vista) is so tightly integrated it's not funny any more. Every application besides your browser will use IE, loads of applications just go "iexplore.exe http://www.awesomecorpsite.com/" instead of digging in the registry to get the correct browser (MSN Messenger used to open up Hotmail or Windows Live Mail with IE by default, you had to install third party hacks to get firefox to open it), and it's just everywhere. The fact that Explorer is just an extension of IE (XP still opens IE when you type a url into the adress bar of Explorer) speaks for itself.
IE is everywhere in XP, less in Vista, but thanks to some EU regulations, no more in Windows 7. So until that day, yes, you are forced to use IE.
Here in The Netherlands, you got 3 choices: Vodafone, T-Mobile or KPN (former goverment-controlled telephone company). The worst network is from T-Mobile for sure, I used to have a subscription with them (for 4 years) and coverage was mediocre at best. Calls dropping, no coverage at the most stupid locations, and 3G coverage is about 50%. Been a subscriber with Vodafone since march and I must say, everywhere I go it's either 3 or 3.5g, with some really ridiculous locations being only GSM (inside a store in the basement of a big concrete shopping mall). KPN has by far the best coverage (3G everywhere), but that comes as a price ('regular' kpn is pretty pricy, Telfort (subscriber using KPN's network) is pretty okay on prices.)
Customer support is crap though, they connected me to a non-existing number 3 times when I tried to call them on a problem with my bill.
Also in reply: the montly cap for data is not 50 MB, but it's really a fair use policy to 10x that amount.
Same shit happens with the mobility family of radeon cards. No drivers exist for the HD2300 for XP (trying to install the standard catalyst bloatware suite gives you "this card is not supported"), yet with a bit of 3rd party support (mobility driver modder, yay!), got to work it perfectly.
Why do they restrict drivers, when there is absolutly no reason to? The drivers work, they are just not allowed to work because some money greedy CEO who thinks that those laptop users won't care.
If I were in their unfortunate shoes, I'd re-brand and rename IE... give it a nice new coat of paint and call it something new and different... make it sound like its not just IE with a candy coating. Hey - us IT folks would know better, but it might help them win back part of the non-technical market.
Most folks I know, IT or not, have a burning hatred of IE for all the s*** it put them through in its earlier revisions. They will not come back to IE... but they may come back to a Microsoft browser just so long as it doesn't look or feel like IE on the exterior. If Microsoft can't figure this little marketing ploy out then they are even more irrelevant these days than I thought them to be.
It's the other way around. IT people will recognise the change (and maybe for the better, if they get the act straightened out and provide something that adheres to standards), but 'the common people' will be confused. Just think about it, IE is the most brilliant name you can name any internet browser. "Internet Explorer", explore the internet. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, all great names, but the name itself has absolutely nothing to do with internet. Just replacing the familiar E icon with something else will confuse users, since most of them see that little blue icon as The Internet, not a program to view websites through. I've recieved loads of phonecalls or general questions about why their internet has changed all of a sudden with the release of IE7, and people who couldn't find their IE icon since it was a other shade of blue. And that was with just a little change in the layout of IE and an icon change! Imagine what would happen if they revamp the whole 'theme' of IE, or replace it with something entirely different.
The thing I hate about webstart (happened to me at least), is that it really "installs" software, it adds registery keys and adds a program to the software panel in the configuration panel in Windows.
I'm all for java or webapplications, but that is where it crossed the line for me. Not to mention the prompt in firefox.
That's thanks to my loose translation.
Lets take: "die zonder direct of indirect commercieel oogmerk de verveelvoudiging vervaardigt"
As a literal translation: "Who creates a copy without direct or indirect commercial purpose". It's hard to translate to English, but as a native Dutch reader, you would comprehend it as "Make a copy, but not so you can sell it and make money".
I know it's a wiki, but it's a carbon copy of the real lawbook, it's just the only page I could find that allows me to directly link to the article.
Let me translate something for you:
"Als inbreuk op het auteursrecht op een werk van letterkunde, wetenschap of kunst wordt niet beschouwd de verveelvoudiging welke beperkt blijft tot enkele exemplaren en welke uitsluitend dient tot eigen oefening, studie of gebruik van de natuurlijke persoon die zonder direct of indirect commercieel oogmerk de verveelvoudiging vervaardigt of tot het verveelvoudigen uitsluitend ten behoeve van zichzelf opdracht geeft."
Which you can translate loosly to:
"It is not considered copyright infringement if a copy is made solely for the purpose of own practice or study without direct or indirect commerical gain, and when the copy is only meant for himself".
If you want to read it yourself, here is a shoddy google translation: here
In short, under Dutch law, it's legal to make copy's of copyrighted works (be it a movie, music or a piece of text), only if it's for yourself and does not give you a commercial gain. This rule was originally built to support people making back-up copies for them selves, but applies to the internet too. What you CAN'T do is upload copyrighted files (uploading = distribution), and this whole legal blurb doesn't apply to applications (uploading or downloading of software is both illegal).
Google Analytics is dog slow. It usually takes up to 70% of the time to load a page here (might be some shoddy ISP routing issues, but most of Google's stuff loads fast, so I doubt that), so I adblocked/point it to 127.0.0.1 for the whole domain. Same for most analytics websites.
Sorry, analytics is fun and all, but if you insist doing everything in javascript, at least make sure the page behind it is capable of giving enough bandwidth or something.
File sharing websites already do this, sort of.
You want it for free? watch our advertisements for 15-120 seconds. You want more for free? Come back later.
You want to skip advertisements? Buy a premium account.
Then there are the people with loads of time on their hands, and start abusing the free service. First based on exploits (javascript hacking, captcha breaking etc). So they step up the requirements, making it more of a chore for other people.
Most of the time, if somebody gives me a rapidshare link or something of that sort, I say screw that. People want to be entertained NOW, instead of doing stupid stuff.
The interweb is slowly becoming a MMO, and I'm sure most people just say "screw that, I'll take my stuff somewhere else".
PII 350 mhz, SuSE Linux, installer a really bad mix of English and German, shitloads of options and a badly written "dummy's guide into linux".
Got it installed, but really just fubar. Never looked back into Linux until 2 years ago, when my Windows install crashed beyond repair and I needed some files from my harddrive. Don't know why, but among my dad's "Windows Rescue CD's" was a copy of Debian live-CD. Booted that up, and was able to recover my files. Never got a real linux setup till a few months back, since I never could either Ubuntu or Debian to work on my Radeon 9800. It always crashed booting.
My distro of choice is EEEbuntu (with the cool blue theme, instead of the manure themed vanilla Ubuntu), and works pretty nicely. Also found myself using windows-r (run box) a lot more since everytime something is broken in Ubuntu (and that happens a lot to me), it's usually fixed by dumping commands into the terminal.
My only grudge with linux are the poor UI's of some of it's programs. I would never trade in photoshop with GIMP, Blender is shortcut hell and some things are not so intuitive, for example, double click on something in windows to select only the connected regular a-zA-Z0-9, triple click to select all the contents of the textbox. I use that to for example select a word out of a url, or select a whole word quickly in a word processor, while this feature is missing from most distro's I've used. Anybody found this anywhere else?
Or slipstream your drivers in with nLite Find out what your sata controller is (probably intel), get the drivers, integrate them into your install CD, and you got a working XP cd.
Since I reinstall XP every 4-5 months on my laptop, built myself a installer CD with all the drivers and some essential programs (pretty much an image, but disguised as the windows installer). Put in CD, press return, fast format drive, press install and walk away. Come back 15 minutes later to find a fully working fresh install of XP waiting for you.
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They made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
Creative delivers hardly any drivers at all.
My Audigy 4 still uses the original drivers from 2004. I'm not complaining though, 6 channel ASIO with 3 ms latency. I'd like to see that happening in Vista's bloat DRM-ed content paths.
For everyone blaming me that their shiny Windows Vista install opens firefox when typing in an URL in the address bar, I already know that. I thought that my first sentence ("The IE rendering engine (especially in XP, no experience with Vista) is so tightly integrated it's not funny any more.") should imply that I use Windows XP. Also the last sentence("IE is everywhere in XP, less in Vista, but thanks to some EU regulations, no more in Windows 7.") should imply that it's less of a case in Vista. Windows does however open up Firefox when typing in an URL in the run menu.
To your question, winver returns:
Microsoft Windows Version 5.1 (Build 26.00.xpsp_sp3_gdr.090206-1234 : Service Pack 3), with of course all the latest updates installed. It's a Dutch version of Windows Professional (sitewide license, from my fathers business).
Yes it's legal.
I'm not upgrading to Windows Vista or 7 any time soon. All my hardware works fine with XP, and it's quick and nippy on current day systems. The only thing I like about Windows 6.0 or 6.1 (Vista or 7) is the quick execute through the start menu. Other then that, I see no way to upgrade. XP now has like 8 years of service packs and patches, it's pretty solid (My desktop now runs the same XP install for nearly 3 years, and is still as nippy as the moment I installed it, my HTPC boots under 20 seconds, which is nice.) and it just works! I'm not a gamer anymore, so I don't care about DX10 or 11, nor a great graphical user interface.
You've obviously never replaced a laptop keyboard.
Replacement keyboard for Fujitsu Siemes amilo series: €80.
Touch screens, when properly placed, won't get destroyed by liquids that easily (damn early morning with coffee next to my laptop).
Yo dawg, I heard you like adblocking so we block the ads here so we can block ads while you block ads (with adblock).
Add to that, when their usb implementation is properly following spec, the maximum draw is 100 mA when connected, and then must do a software handshake to get the full 500 mA. That can only be done by either installing the drivers (Nokia Suite is a large wad of rubbish), or having the drivers come with the OS (bloat bloat bloat). So unless you always charge at your own PC (which, on trips, is not something you do a lot, unless you happen to carry your laptop everywhere), you get a sucky 100 mA from the wall, or they are ignoring the spec (which means, stick another phone on it using another variation of the spec, things can go poof by overcharging).
Since the USB spec doesn't allow a whole lot of power, you'd need more charging time. My E71 can draw 800 mA at 5 Volts, so my 1.5 Ah 3.7 volt battery is full in ~1.4 hours, while at 500 mA around 2.2 hours, or at 100 mA around 11.1 hours. Not something you're willing to do every night in some hotel, especially with power-sucking smartphones that die within a couple of hours/days.
Sure, everybody charging their phones on the same connector is fun and all, but my Nokia charger is around 4 cc, and you get one with a new phone any ways. My dad and mom both have Nokia phones (My mom has an older model with the larger socket, but a simple €5 adapter works great), and many people do, so it's never a problem to charge your phone when you don't have your own charger around.
I'll have my standard nokia charger please, and add to that, I'm not that fond of the micro-usb connector. It feels a bit flimsy.
The IE rendering engine (especially in XP, no experience with Vista) is so tightly integrated it's not funny any more. Every application besides your browser will use IE, loads of applications just go "iexplore.exe http://www.awesomecorpsite.com/" instead of digging in the registry to get the correct browser (MSN Messenger used to open up Hotmail or Windows Live Mail with IE by default, you had to install third party hacks to get firefox to open it), and it's just everywhere.
The fact that Explorer is just an extension of IE (XP still opens IE when you type a url into the adress bar of Explorer) speaks for itself.
IE is everywhere in XP, less in Vista, but thanks to some EU regulations, no more in Windows 7. So until that day, yes, you are forced to use IE.
Then everybody would just omit the tags.
Lots of forums that link to copyrighted material already tell people to put stuff in code tags, one so that they don't get in the server logs (referral in header), second that they don't provide links (hey, it's just plaintext!).
Here in The Netherlands, you got 3 choices: Vodafone, T-Mobile or KPN (former goverment-controlled telephone company). The worst network is from T-Mobile for sure, I used to have a subscription with them (for 4 years) and coverage was mediocre at best. Calls dropping, no coverage at the most stupid locations, and 3G coverage is about 50%.
Been a subscriber with Vodafone since march and I must say, everywhere I go it's either 3 or 3.5g, with some really ridiculous locations being only GSM (inside a store in the basement of a big concrete shopping mall). KPN has by far the best coverage (3G everywhere), but that comes as a price ('regular' kpn is pretty pricy, Telfort (subscriber using KPN's network) is pretty okay on prices.)
Customer support is crap though, they connected me to a non-existing number 3 times when I tried to call them on a problem with my bill. Also in reply: the montly cap for data is not 50 MB, but it's really a fair use policy to 10x that amount.
Same shit happens with the mobility family of radeon cards. No drivers exist for the HD2300 for XP (trying to install the standard catalyst bloatware suite gives you "this card is not supported"), yet with a bit of 3rd party support (mobility driver modder, yay!), got to work it perfectly.
Why do they restrict drivers, when there is absolutly no reason to? The drivers work, they are just not allowed to work because some money greedy CEO who thinks that those laptop users won't care.
You ever even heard of 4chan?
If I were in their unfortunate shoes, I'd re-brand and rename IE... give it a nice new coat of paint and call it something new and different... make it sound like its not just IE with a candy coating. Hey - us IT folks would know better, but it might help them win back part of the non-technical market.
Most folks I know, IT or not, have a burning hatred of IE for all the s*** it put them through in its earlier revisions. They will not come back to IE... but they may come back to a Microsoft browser just so long as it doesn't look or feel like IE on the exterior. If Microsoft can't figure this little marketing ploy out then they are even more irrelevant these days than I thought them to be.
It's the other way around. IT people will recognise the change (and maybe for the better, if they get the act straightened out and provide something that adheres to standards), but 'the common people' will be confused. Just think about it, IE is the most brilliant name you can name any internet browser. "Internet Explorer", explore the internet. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, all great names, but the name itself has absolutely nothing to do with internet. Just replacing the familiar E icon with something else will confuse users, since most of them see that little blue icon as The Internet, not a program to view websites through. I've recieved loads of phonecalls or general questions about why their internet has changed all of a sudden with the release of IE7, and people who couldn't find their IE icon since it was a other shade of blue. And that was with just a little change in the layout of IE and an icon change! Imagine what would happen if they revamp the whole 'theme' of IE, or replace it with something entirely different.
As a webdeveloper, I'm already glad that IE8 does things somewhat along standards, instead of that hackjob implementation of "The Microsoft Standard©", along with the fact that other browsers are gaining ground. Atleast now normal people with their default searchbar ridden browsers can look at my site and see something that looks somewhat allright, instead of all the crap you used to put up with, such as non-alpha pngs, things alignment out of whack, half-assed attempt at CSS implementation, etc.
Yes they did, They have these new fancy VB6 GUI's that can simultaneously track IP's and tighten up graphics.
The thing I hate about webstart (happened to me at least), is that it really "installs" software, it adds registery keys and adds a program to the software panel in the configuration panel in Windows.
I'm all for java or webapplications, but that is where it crossed the line for me. Not to mention the prompt in firefox.
Netherlands: 19% sales Tax, + 33,5-52% income tax. Whoo?
That's thanks to my loose translation.
Lets take: "die zonder direct of indirect commercieel oogmerk de verveelvoudiging vervaardigt"
As a literal translation: "Who creates a copy without direct or indirect commercial purpose".
It's hard to translate to English, but as a native Dutch reader, you would comprehend it as
"Make a copy, but not so you can sell it and make money".
You're distributing, not copying.
windows-r cmd enter
I know it's a wiki, but it's a carbon copy of the real lawbook, it's just the only page I could find that allows me to directly link to the article.
Let me translate something for you:
"Als inbreuk op het auteursrecht op een werk van letterkunde, wetenschap of kunst wordt niet beschouwd de verveelvoudiging welke beperkt blijft tot enkele exemplaren en welke uitsluitend dient tot eigen oefening, studie of gebruik van de natuurlijke persoon die zonder direct of indirect commercieel oogmerk de verveelvoudiging vervaardigt of tot het verveelvoudigen uitsluitend ten behoeve van zichzelf opdracht geeft."
Which you can translate loosly to:
"It is not considered copyright infringement if a copy is made solely for the purpose of own practice or study without direct or indirect commerical gain, and when the copy is only meant for himself".
If you want to read it yourself, here is a shoddy google translation: here
In short, under Dutch law, it's legal to make copy's of copyrighted works (be it a movie, music or a piece of text), only if it's for yourself and does not give you a commercial gain. This rule was originally built to support people making back-up copies for them selves, but applies to the internet too. What you CAN'T do is upload copyrighted files (uploading = distribution), and this whole legal blurb doesn't apply to applications (uploading or downloading of software is both illegal).
Your turn.
Google Analytics is dog slow. It usually takes up to 70% of the time to load a page here (might be some shoddy ISP routing issues, but most of Google's stuff loads fast, so I doubt that), so I adblocked/point it to 127.0.0.1 for the whole domain. Same for most analytics websites.
Sorry, analytics is fun and all, but if you insist doing everything in javascript, at least make sure the page behind it is capable of giving enough bandwidth or something.
If there is an incentive, people will abuse it.
File sharing websites already do this, sort of. You want it for free?
watch our advertisements for 15-120 seconds.
You want more for free?
Come back later.
You want to skip advertisements?
Buy a premium account.
Then there are the people with loads of time on their hands, and start abusing the free service.
First based on exploits (javascript hacking, captcha breaking etc).
So they step up the requirements, making it more of a chore for other people.
Most of the time, if somebody gives me a rapidshare link or something of that sort, I say screw that.
People want to be entertained NOW, instead of doing stupid stuff.
The interweb is slowly becoming a MMO, and I'm sure most people just say "screw that, I'll take my stuff somewhere else".
Note to everyone, this does NOT work with the kindle, I repeat, does NOT WORK with the kindle. >:(.
I guess IBM only has one thing to do:
Download the internet on their super-computer.
PII 350 mhz, SuSE Linux, installer a really bad mix of English and German, shitloads of options and a badly written "dummy's guide into linux".
Got it installed, but really just fubar. Never looked back into Linux until 2 years ago, when my Windows install crashed beyond repair and I needed some files from my harddrive. Don't know why, but among my dad's "Windows Rescue CD's" was a copy of Debian live-CD. Booted that up, and was able to recover my files. Never got a real linux setup till a few months back, since I never could either Ubuntu or Debian to work on my Radeon 9800. It always crashed booting.
My distro of choice is EEEbuntu (with the cool blue theme, instead of the manure themed vanilla Ubuntu), and works pretty nicely. Also found myself using windows-r (run box) a lot more since everytime something is broken in Ubuntu (and that happens a lot to me), it's usually fixed by dumping commands into the terminal.
My only grudge with linux are the poor UI's of some of it's programs. I would never trade in photoshop with GIMP, Blender is shortcut hell and some things are not so intuitive, for example, double click on something in windows to select only the connected regular a-zA-Z0-9, triple click to select all the contents of the textbox. I use that to for example select a word out of a url, or select a whole word quickly in a word processor, while this feature is missing from most distro's I've used. Anybody found this anywhere else?
Or slipstream your drivers in with nLite
Find out what your sata controller is (probably intel), get the drivers, integrate them into your install CD, and you got a working XP cd.
Since I reinstall XP every 4-5 months on my laptop, built myself a installer CD with all the drivers and some essential programs (pretty much an image, but disguised as the windows installer). Put in CD, press return, fast format drive, press install and walk away. Come back 15 minutes later to find a fully working fresh install of XP waiting for you.