I know there's got to be a better term for them than "inline popups", but I'm not sure what else to call them. I'm talking about pop-up ads that appear *in* the page, on a layer above the page itself, thanks to the wonders of DHTML/CSS/what-have-you.
I've seen a few of these in Firefox. They were actually advertisements for big-name movie releases. They were pretty intrustive and were usually animated, sailing across the page I was trying to view. They were relatively well-behaved, at least, offering a tiny "Close [x]" button in some corner of the ad. Of course there's no guarantee that future ads will be so generous.
Since they don't launch in separate windows, obviously current popup-blocking technology can't touch them. I wonder if this will be the next "big thing" since users and browsers are becoming more successful at blocking popups or tuning them out.
I also wonder how easy they'll be to block. Sadly, I didn't bother to look at the source, but I have a hunch they're served up via a Javascript include file that's hosted on the ad company's servers. If that's how they were done, I guess they would be easy to block... just filter out.js includes from other domains, if that's not something that's already being blocked. If not, they could be really insidious and hard to get rid of.
As an engineering focused company, we use our computers to run many in-house (command line) codes to analyze and design our products. We currently use NAS storage to store everything and use batch files and init scripts to run the correct codes over the network. This makes sure everyone is running the latest version. This also stinks. I know this isn't an original problem, so what are some other solutions for rolling out lots of simple codes like this?"
...he/she refers to source code as "codes". At least that's what the rumors on the internets tell me!
Problem with Thunderbird is that I never liked the way it handled multiple-acounts.
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I have a feeling you didn't like the way the mail was split up, with one "Inbox" per account? A lot of people didn't like that.
Well, the good news is that you now have a choice. For each email account, you can choose whether the mail goes into an account-specific Inbox OR a "global Inbox". So you can have all your mail in one big Inbox, if that's what you like.
Personally, I like having separate Inboxes for each mail account, because I have many mail accounts and each one has a pretty specific purpose. One for spam, one for friends, several for business/website-related purposes, etc. But apparently the majority of users want a global Inbox, and the developers listened. Pretty cool if you ask me.:)
I've been having similar problems with an old Toshiba 440 Satellite Pro running Windows 98.
ACPI sucks badly, and I don't know of any operating systems that can handle it without problems. Maybe some of the more advanced versions of Windows?
There are more advanced versions of Windows than Windows 98?
I'm not buying HL2 because of the lack of multiplayer options that interest me (no co-op, no 'bots). HL1 was an interesting game, but I didn't find it to be very fun without friends to share the game with - share being the operative and important word. To be more explicit, deathmatch isn't sharing - at least to me (and the folks that I play with). I played it for a couple of hours and went back to Quake II - an inferior game in every way except the one that mattered to me - it had co-op. I realize this puts me in the minority, but, sooner or later, I think that most of us will begin to tire of blasting our buddies.
I think there are some fundamental design reasons why cop-op is tough to implement. Most games that tell a story attempt to do so through scripted events. HL2's scripted events happen in real-time, inside the game engine. How do you handle these when two players are in there at once? They could be in totally different parts of the level. One person would see all of the scripted stuff, and one wouldn't.
What happens if one player's actions make part of the level impassable to the other player? The environments in HL2 are pretty dynamic and having completed the game, I can forsee a lot of instances when a player could be "cut off" if he were lagging behind the other player, with no way to proceed through the level. I guess you could have some sort of "teleport" function to let the other player catch up to the first player, but.... that's kind of corny.
I mean, co-op is a lot of fun, but I don't think companies are willing to sacrifice the design of their single-player game to make it compatible with a co-op play mode. I can see how a simple blast-em-'up like Serious Sam (god, I loved that game) or Q2 works well for cop-op, but I can't see it working too well for a "richer" game like HL2.
The third design trend that I see, is what I will call the "beauty over brains" trend. The graphics in games are so much better than they were, but so much is being invested in the development of the graphics that the actual design of the game is being neglected. Doom 3, based on the reviews that I have read, certainly suffers from this (no, I did not buy it, either). Half Life 2 has a better story than Doom 3, I'm sure. I'm not so sure that any improvement of the underlying game actually happened, though.
In a sense, yeah. HL2 is the same old FPS, executed very well in terms of story and graphics. However, the use of physics in HL2 is pretty revolutionary. Objects fly around like actual, well... objects and it's not just eye candy - a lot of the puzzles in the game depend on the clever manipulation of those objects.
For example, at one point, there's a ramp you need to drive your hovercraft over. But it's too low, and it's partially submerged in water. I found some floaty plastic barrels and placed them in the water under the ramp. Their buoyancy caused the ramp to rise to the proper angle. I was then able to drive my hovercraft over it and continue with the level.
There are a lot of puzzles like that, and even when you're not doing puzzles like that, most of the objects in the environment act in a "realistic" physical manner which adds to the fun when things are being thrown about by explosions.
Unreal Tourneyment 2004 beat it and Doom3 out the door, so when it comes to multiplayer: who cares?
Uh... the several million people who have already bought HL2 or are considering it? I don't think anybody's buying HL2 strictly for the HL2 DM multiplayer, but it's a fun bonus.
I already own UT2004, Doom3, and HL2 - and I definitely care.
Re:Uh.... does this strike anybody else as wrong?
on
NASA's Deep Impact
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You could make this "hands off" argument for anything. Moon rovers/landings, mars rovers, etc.
The question is, "Should we remain in ignorance to keep things pristine?"
Sure, you definitely have to run the risk of dirtying things up a bit in order to study them in most cases. I think that landing spacecraft on other planets is an acceptable tradeoff for the knowledge we gain.
It's the destructive nature of the Deep Impact study that made me pause. We've never really gone out and just smashed something in our solar system to bits before. The scientific gains might definitely outweigh the cost (agree with this mission or not, I can't wait to see the results) but it's not a step to be taken lightly and I hadn't seen that aspect of the mission touched upon in the coverage I've seen.
Re:Uh.... does this strike anybody else as wrong?
on
NASA's Deep Impact
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· Score: 1
Interesting set of priorities there... As for me, I can't wait until we get our act together enough to start mining all of those eons-old lumps of raw material instead of strip-mining our planet.
Where did I imply that I was in favor of strip-mining (or any other destructive process involving) the Earth?
And how does the Deep Impact mission have anything to do with mining? If you knew anything about the makeup of comets, you'd know that they're basically dirty snowballs. Not "lumps of raw material" you'd want to mine like a moon or an asteroid. Of all the things we might possibly mine in this solar system, comets are absolutely not one of them.
To top it off, I wouldn't even mind strip-mining an asteroid, comet, or moon once it's economically feasible. Like you say, I'd rather have barren space rocks mined than our fertile home planet. But there's a difference between "mining" and "possibly breaking apart", which is what the Deep Impact mission is aiming to do.
Uh.... does this strike anybody else as wrong?
on
NASA's Deep Impact
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I've loved astronomy on a casual basis since childhood and I think it's important to mankind. I'm not one of those people who thinks we should abandon NASA spending because there are still underprivilidged marmasets living in a swamp somewhere or whatever.
But isn't this kind of, uh... wrong? Possibily destroying a comet? It seems so destructive to possibly break apart something that's been circling our sun for millions of years.
I understand that comets are more like "dirty snowballs" than things of infinite beauty, and I can definitely understand the scientific reasons for this mission because they're going to get all kinds of data that they couldn't get otherwise.
I guess there will be a whole new phone sex business for this sort of technology, right?
Your post is very funny, but I think it's really insightful, too.
Never underestimate the power of pr0n when it comes to pushing new technologies. The VCR, cable TV, high-speed internet access, etc... there were a lot of factors contributing to their success, but I think the availability of pr0n was a primary factor in all of them! The power of pr0n will probably make or break this holophone technology if it becomes commercially available at some point in the future.
Not that an line of code matters in such a trivial place, haha. I was just wondering how restricted VBA really is. (I'm a VB/.NET/SQL coder; but I've never used VBA)
wha wha wha?! i've got a P3/700, with 256, and i think it's a Radeon 8500? Whatever the highest end PCI Radeon was. Q3 doesn't even play at 800x600 let alone anything new. In fact, isn't HL2's minimum requirement for processor in the GHz range? (I haven't looked, I just assumed it would be since it's so new)
The poster with the 800mhz processor also has 640MB of ram, compared with your 256MB. I think that's the killing factor in your experience.
Anandtech has an article up featuring the performance of older cards in HL2; I believe the 8500 did okay. You're going to need more RAM to play a modern game though.
Here's something that ought to help. Go to about:config in Firefox and look for a preference called "browser.cache.memory.capacity"
I believe it's not actually there by default. If not, create it. By default Firefox will attempt to dynamically adjust its RAM usage based on your total RAM capacity. This means it will eat up a lot of RAM eventually if it thinks you have RAM to spare.
A more sane behavior can be enforced by entering a value for that preference... this seemed to curb the "endless RAM appetite" problem for me.:D
4096 or 8192 should be a pretty sane value. (The values are in kilobytes) Google "browser.cache.memory.capacity" for more advice. Some people suggest huge values like 65536 or whatever, but I find that pretty insane unless you're trying to cache hundreds or thousands of pages in RAM... it's simply not necessary!
The situation's simultanously better and worse...
on
Is The Lone Coder Dead?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
1. Well, "lone coders" can't afford the legal work of performing patent searches. This is true. But you know what? I think small or even medium-sized corporations probably can't afford it either.
2. Even if you ARE clear of existing patents, what if a big company decides to fight you in court? Again, a small or medium-sized company could never afford to fight this.
3. Then again, it's not always in some big company's interest to shut you down or sue you out of existance. Often they probably just want a chunk of your profits. (and a chunk of zero is still zero, so they don't make money if you fold, either)
I feel kind of silly for asking this now, but I figured a lot of people really are curious. And while it's probably really crass to ask, they can always just... *not* answer it if it's too personal.
[Insert joke about "experienced" users not using a Microsoft OS in the first place.:P]
The slightly improved IE security, the IE popup blocking, the firewall, and the execute-disable stuff are probably pretty nice for new users. If I were building a machine for a casual user SP2 would be great and I wouldn't let them leave without it.
I wound up disabling the firewall, though, because it really killed my LAN transfer speeds. The IE stuff doesn't help me since I dumped that crappy web browser a long time ago for Firefox. And my CPU (AthlonXP) doesn't support the execute-disable feature.
While the firewall's nice, and several orders of magnitude better than leaving a "naked" Windows install exposed to the Internet... I don't know. I still don't trust it. I'd feel real weird hooking a box up to the 'net without some kind of hardware router/firewall that at least does NAT and isn't forwarding any ports by default.
But you guys are living what is essentially the dream life of a gamer - using your writing talents and artistic talents to make a living talking about games. Millions of schlubs all over the world run websites; but you guys managed to produce a website that's better than 99.9999% or more of them and make money doing it. It's not an understatement to say that you're quite an inspiration to those of us who would love to make a living doing that sort of thing. So I can't help but be a little curious about exactly what kinds of financial success it's brought.
(And whether you answer the question or not... I wish you more success in the future both with loved ones and your business)
I think if a market stall appeared selling dodgy copies of movies and albums, then I would also do something about it.
I have always been totally two faced about things like this. If no money is exchanged and its not being used commercially, then I don't see a problem. However, once people actually begin using actual cash, it DOES start to divert money from the real content providers, whoever they may be.
Yes I make mistakes. Don't we all?
I hate to make a "me too" post, but that's how I feel as well. To me, a guy who downloads something for free probably had no intention of paying for it in the first place. The legitimate company probably isn't losing out on a potential sale, so no money is "lost". And nobody's getting rich off of anybody else's work.
On the other hand, somebody who makes a trip to the mall and forks over actual cash for a bootleg game very well might have paid for a legit game. I feel like the legit companies did indeed miss out on a sale in those cases.
The alternative I like best is iTunes. I wouldn't run it on an older machine but it was decent on my 1.2ghz Athlon and perfectly okay on my AthlonXP 2500 and AthlonXP 3200...
+free +excellent for LARGE (40GB+) music collections. their playlist and library features blow everybody else away. this is the "killer feature" for me. absolutely. +iTunes music store if you're into that (I'm not) +iPod support (I liked it even before I got an iPod) +easy to add artwork to albums +nice support for tagging multiple files +if anybody else on your LAN is running iTunes, you can play their music (although not copy it)... this even works if they're on a Mac and you're on Windows
-not Free in the GNU sense, obviously -uses like 50MB of RAM for my really huge collection (80GB); but I don't care because I have 1GB. sorry.:P -Mac+PC only, no linux -doesn't work with other portable players -no built-in "windowshade" mode like Winamp, but there are plugins that accomplish this
I might be wrong about this, but by the time NBC called Ohio for Bush (~1:00am), FoxNews still hadn't even called Florida. FoxNews was consistently behind every network by ABC (yeah, I flipped between all four). After calling FA early, NBC slipped behing CBS, who seemed to be calling states before everyone else. NBC took back the "early caller" crown by calling Ohio first (FoxNews didn't call it until the middle of the next day, or so their website showed).
Just because a network calls a state first doesn't mean they're better or "ahead"! After the debacle in 2000 I'd rather have accuracy than speed when it comes to "calling" a state.
Slashdot Mirror
I know there's got to be a better term for them than "inline popups", but I'm not sure what else to call them. I'm talking about pop-up ads that appear *in* the page, on a layer above the page itself, thanks to the wonders of DHTML/CSS/what-have-you.
.js includes from other domains, if that's not something that's already being blocked. If not, they could be really insidious and hard to get rid of.
I've seen a few of these in Firefox. They were actually advertisements for big-name movie releases. They were pretty intrustive and were usually animated, sailing across the page I was trying to view. They were relatively well-behaved, at least, offering a tiny "Close [x]" button in some corner of the ad. Of course there's no guarantee that future ads will be so generous.
Since they don't launch in separate windows, obviously current popup-blocking technology can't touch them. I wonder if this will be the next "big thing" since users and browsers are becoming more successful at blocking popups or tuning them out.
I also wonder how easy they'll be to block. Sadly, I didn't bother to look at the source, but I have a hunch they're served up via a Javascript include file that's hosted on the ad company's servers. If that's how they were done, I guess they would be easy to block... just filter out
...anything about code:
...he/she refers to source code as "codes". At least that's what the rumors on the internets tell me!
As an engineering focused company, we use our computers to run many in-house (command line) codes to analyze and design our products. We currently use NAS storage to store everything and use batch files and init scripts to run the correct codes over the network. This makes sure everyone is running the latest version. This also stinks. I know this isn't an original problem, so what are some other solutions for rolling out lots of simple codes like this?"
Problem with Thunderbird is that I never liked the way it handled multiple-acounts.
:)
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I have a feeling you didn't like the way the mail was split up, with one "Inbox" per account? A lot of people didn't like that.
Well, the good news is that you now have a choice. For each email account, you can choose whether the mail goes into an account-specific Inbox OR a "global Inbox". So you can have all your mail in one big Inbox, if that's what you like.
Personally, I like having separate Inboxes for each mail account, because I have many mail accounts and each one has a pretty specific purpose. One for spam, one for friends, several for business/website-related purposes, etc. But apparently the majority of users want a global Inbox, and the developers listened. Pretty cool if you ask me.
It was just a joke. 2K/XP user right here. They're stable.
I've been having similar problems with an old Toshiba 440 Satellite Pro running Windows 98. ACPI sucks badly, and I don't know of any operating systems that can handle it without problems. Maybe some of the more advanced versions of Windows?
There are more advanced versions of Windows than Windows 98?
Are you posting from the future or something?
I'm not buying HL2 because of the lack of multiplayer options that interest me (no co-op, no 'bots). HL1 was an interesting game, but I didn't find it to be very fun without friends to share the game with - share being the operative and important word. To be more explicit, deathmatch isn't sharing - at least to me (and the folks that I play with). I played it for a couple of hours and went back to Quake II - an inferior game in every way except the one that mattered to me - it had co-op. I realize this puts me in the minority, but, sooner or later, I think that most of us will begin to tire of blasting our buddies.
I think there are some fundamental design reasons why cop-op is tough to implement. Most games that tell a story attempt to do so through scripted events. HL2's scripted events happen in real-time, inside the game engine. How do you handle these when two players are in there at once? They could be in totally different parts of the level. One person would see all of the scripted stuff, and one wouldn't.
What happens if one player's actions make part of the level impassable to the other player? The environments in HL2 are pretty dynamic and having completed the game, I can forsee a lot of instances when a player could be "cut off" if he were lagging behind the other player, with no way to proceed through the level. I guess you could have some sort of "teleport" function to let the other player catch up to the first player, but.... that's kind of corny.
I mean, co-op is a lot of fun, but I don't think companies are willing to sacrifice the design of their single-player game to make it compatible with a co-op play mode. I can see how a simple blast-em-'up like Serious Sam (god, I loved that game) or Q2 works well for cop-op, but I can't see it working too well for a "richer" game like HL2.
The third design trend that I see, is what I will call the "beauty over brains" trend. The graphics in games are so much better than they were, but so much is being invested in the development of the graphics that the actual design of the game is being neglected. Doom 3, based on the reviews that I have read, certainly suffers from this (no, I did not buy it, either). Half Life 2 has a better story than Doom 3, I'm sure. I'm not so sure that any improvement of the underlying game actually happened, though.
In a sense, yeah. HL2 is the same old FPS, executed very well in terms of story and graphics. However, the use of physics in HL2 is pretty revolutionary. Objects fly around like actual, well... objects and it's not just eye candy - a lot of the puzzles in the game depend on the clever manipulation of those objects.
For example, at one point, there's a ramp you need to drive your hovercraft over. But it's too low, and it's partially submerged in water. I found some floaty plastic barrels and placed them in the water under the ramp. Their buoyancy caused the ramp to rise to the proper angle. I was then able to drive my hovercraft over it and continue with the level.
There are a lot of puzzles like that, and even when you're not doing puzzles like that, most of the objects in the environment act in a "realistic" physical manner which adds to the fun when things are being thrown about by explosions.
Unreal Tourneyment 2004 beat it and Doom3 out the door, so when it comes to multiplayer:
who cares?
Uh... the several million people who have already bought HL2 or are considering it? I don't think anybody's buying HL2 strictly for the HL2 DM multiplayer, but it's a fun bonus.
I already own UT2004, Doom3, and HL2 - and I definitely care.
Could you kind of sum it up for us, thematically and plot-wise? Also, did the show ever achieve popularity?
"Panhandle" not found
What the hell?
You could make this "hands off" argument for anything. Moon rovers/landings, mars rovers, etc. The question is, "Should we remain in ignorance to keep things pristine?"
Sure, you definitely have to run the risk of dirtying things up a bit in order to study them in most cases. I think that landing spacecraft on other planets is an acceptable tradeoff for the knowledge we gain.
It's the destructive nature of the Deep Impact study that made me pause. We've never really gone out and just smashed something in our solar system to bits before. The scientific gains might definitely outweigh the cost (agree with this mission or not, I can't wait to see the results) but it's not a step to be taken lightly and I hadn't seen that aspect of the mission touched upon in the coverage I've seen.
Interesting set of priorities there... As for me, I can't wait until we get our act together enough to start mining all of those eons-old lumps of raw material instead of strip-mining our planet.
Where did I imply that I was in favor of strip-mining (or any other destructive process involving) the Earth?
And how does the Deep Impact mission have anything to do with mining? If you knew anything about the makeup of comets, you'd know that they're basically dirty snowballs. Not "lumps of raw material" you'd want to mine like a moon or an asteroid. Of all the things we might possibly mine in this solar system, comets are absolutely not one of them.
To top it off, I wouldn't even mind strip-mining an asteroid, comet, or moon once it's economically feasible. Like you say, I'd rather have barren space rocks mined than our fertile home planet. But there's a difference between "mining" and "possibly breaking apart", which is what the Deep Impact mission is aiming to do.
I've loved astronomy on a casual basis since childhood and I think it's important to mankind. I'm not one of those people who thinks we should abandon NASA spending because there are still underprivilidged marmasets living in a swamp somewhere or whatever.
But isn't this kind of, uh... wrong? Possibily destroying a comet? It seems so destructive to possibly break apart something that's been circling our sun for millions of years.
I understand that comets are more like "dirty snowballs" than things of infinite beauty, and I can definitely understand the scientific reasons for this mission because they're going to get all kinds of data that they couldn't get otherwise.
This seems kind of wrong to me, though.
I guess there will be a whole new phone sex business for this sort of technology, right?
Your post is very funny, but I think it's really insightful, too.
Never underestimate the power of pr0n when it comes to pushing new technologies. The VCR, cable TV, high-speed internet access, etc... there were a lot of factors contributing to their success, but I think the availability of pr0n was a primary factor in all of them! The power of pr0n will probably make or break this holophone technology if it becomes commercially available at some point in the future.
Wouldn't the following work?
Options.BlueScreen = Not (Options BlueScreen)
Not that an line of code matters in such a trivial place, haha. I was just wondering how restricted VBA really is. (I'm a VB/.NET/SQL coder; but I've never used VBA)
wha wha wha?! i've got a P3/700, with 256, and i think it's a Radeon 8500? Whatever the highest end PCI Radeon was. Q3 doesn't even play at 800x600 let alone anything new. In fact, isn't HL2's minimum requirement for processor in the GHz range? (I haven't looked, I just assumed it would be since it's so new)
The poster with the 800mhz processor also has 640MB of ram, compared with your 256MB. I think that's the killing factor in your experience.
Anandtech has an article up featuring the performance of older cards in HL2; I believe the 8500 did okay. You're going to need more RAM to play a modern game though.
Excellent! Great to know that it helped. I think that this ought to be a default setting, really. Perhaps future Firefox releases will include this. :D
Here's something that ought to help. Go to about:config in Firefox and look for a preference called "browser.cache.memory.capacity"
:D
I believe it's not actually there by default. If not, create it. By default Firefox will attempt to dynamically adjust its RAM usage based on your total RAM capacity. This means it will eat up a lot of RAM eventually if it thinks you have RAM to spare.
A more sane behavior can be enforced by entering a value for that preference... this seemed to curb the "endless RAM appetite" problem for me.
4096 or 8192 should be a pretty sane value. (The values are in kilobytes) Google "browser.cache.memory.capacity" for more advice. Some people suggest huge values like 65536 or whatever, but I find that pretty insane unless you're trying to cache hundreds or thousands of pages in RAM... it's simply not necessary!
1. Well, "lone coders" can't afford the legal work of performing patent searches. This is true. But you know what? I think small or even medium-sized corporations probably can't afford it either.
2. Even if you ARE clear of existing patents, what if a big company decides to fight you in court? Again, a small or medium-sized company could never afford to fight this.
3. Then again, it's not always in some big company's interest to shut you down or sue you out of existance. Often they probably just want a chunk of your profits. (and a chunk of zero is still zero, so they don't make money if you fold, either)
What a fucking country.
I feel kind of silly for asking this now, but I figured a lot of people really are curious. And while it's probably really crass to ask, they can always just... *not* answer it if it's too personal.
[Insert joke about "experienced" users not using a Microsoft OS in the first place. :P]
The slightly improved IE security, the IE popup blocking, the firewall, and the execute-disable stuff are probably pretty nice for new users. If I were building a machine for a casual user SP2 would be great and I wouldn't let them leave without it.
I wound up disabling the firewall, though, because it really killed my LAN transfer speeds. The IE stuff doesn't help me since I dumped that crappy web browser a long time ago for Firefox. And my CPU (AthlonXP) doesn't support the execute-disable feature.
While the firewall's nice, and several orders of magnitude better than leaving a "naked" Windows install exposed to the Internet... I don't know. I still don't trust it. I'd feel real weird hooking a box up to the 'net without some kind of hardware router/firewall that at least does NAT and isn't forwarding any ports by default.
I apologize for the crass nature of the question!
But you guys are living what is essentially the dream life of a gamer - using your writing talents and artistic talents to make a living talking about games. Millions of schlubs all over the world run websites; but you guys managed to produce a website that's better than 99.9999% or more of them and make money doing it. It's not an understatement to say that you're quite an inspiration to those of us who would love to make a living doing that sort of thing. So I can't help but be a little curious about exactly what kinds of financial success it's brought.
(And whether you answer the question or not... I wish you more success in the future both with loved ones and your business)
I think if a market stall appeared selling dodgy copies of movies and albums, then I would also do something about it. I have always been totally two faced about things like this. If no money is exchanged and its not being used commercially, then I don't see a problem. However, once people actually begin using actual cash, it DOES start to divert money from the real content providers, whoever they may be. Yes I make mistakes. Don't we all?
I hate to make a "me too" post, but that's how I feel as well. To me, a guy who downloads something for free probably had no intention of paying for it in the first place. The legitimate company probably isn't losing out on a potential sale, so no money is "lost". And nobody's getting rich off of anybody else's work.
On the other hand, somebody who makes a trip to the mall and forks over actual cash for a bootleg game very well might have paid for a legit game. I feel like the legit companies did indeed miss out on a sale in those cases.
The alternative I like best is iTunes. I wouldn't run it on an older machine but it was decent on my 1.2ghz Athlon and perfectly okay on my AthlonXP 2500 and AthlonXP 3200...
:P
+free
+excellent for LARGE (40GB+) music collections. their playlist and library features blow everybody else away. this is the "killer feature" for me. absolutely.
+iTunes music store if you're into that (I'm not)
+iPod support (I liked it even before I got an iPod)
+easy to add artwork to albums
+nice support for tagging multiple files
+if anybody else on your LAN is running iTunes, you can play their music (although not copy it)... this even works if they're on a Mac and you're on Windows
-not Free in the GNU sense, obviously
-uses like 50MB of RAM for my really huge collection (80GB); but I don't care because I have 1GB. sorry.
-Mac+PC only, no linux
-doesn't work with other portable players
-no built-in "windowshade" mode like Winamp, but there are plugins that accomplish this
I might be wrong about this, but by the time NBC called Ohio for Bush (~1:00am), FoxNews still hadn't even called Florida. FoxNews was consistently behind every network by ABC (yeah, I flipped between all four). After calling FA early, NBC slipped behing CBS, who seemed to be calling states before everyone else. NBC took back the "early caller" crown by calling Ohio first (FoxNews didn't call it until the middle of the next day, or so their website showed).
Just because a network calls a state first doesn't mean they're better or "ahead"! After the debacle in 2000 I'd rather have accuracy than speed when it comes to "calling" a state.
I could definitely see myself going for something like that for rear satellite speakers. :)