I don't know if you've ever ready any philosophy, but your comments here really apply to what some of the older philosophers preached. One of the better known works about what you can and can't trust would be Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which basically states that even what you see and sense with your own faculties, may not be the real world. How is one to ever know what's real and what isn't? How do we know that what we see and read is the truth.
Simply put, we can't, but at some point in the process, we just have to accept that we won't know anymore than what our senes can tell us until we learn otherwise.
OK, you get points for possibly the most helpful post I've witnessed on/. in a very long time. I upgraded to XP home right after it came out... and subsequently spent the next 2 weeks trying to find any information on how to do this. I've kind of forgotten about it since I learned to live without the ability (I'm too cheap to buy Pro and too honest to pirate it).
Kasumi Ninja had the worst control of any fighting game, EVER! One button to punch, one to kick, and one that you hold down while performing D-pad calisthenics in order to pull off special moves. I still have my Kasumi Ninja bandanna around here somewhere, despite selling my own Jag a long time ago. And for the record, they did come out with a six button controller later, but it saw limited release. (I don't know anybody else who had one, but then I didn't know anybody else who had a Jaguar, either.)
I'm with you on that one, man. I just finally bought my own XBox (I always had ready access to others before now, so I had no reason to buy one) and I hate the fact that I cannot seem to find a fat controller. I used to just deal with it, but after about 30 minutes of playing Forza, my hands really start to cramp since the handles don't seem to be long enough for my hands. I always liked the fat controller better, but was able to deal with the small controller until I started playing racing games. I wish MS would re-release the controller in a limited form or something, but that's akin to wishing I would win the lottery. I know it ain't gonna happen.
Re:no sequel to syndicate WTF mate?
on
Know Thy Bosses
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· Score: 1
I am well aware of the existence of the game and consistently check for it at the few shops that I find that sell used PC games, but have not yet had any luck. I get the feeling that it wasn't nearly as successful as the original.
The American Revolt expansion was extremely difficult. I don't think I played more than one or two missions of the expansion before giving up on it. They need to make another sequel darnit! Maybe Moleneaux and Lionhead will come out with an unofficial sequel, but I doubt it.
Your stories remind me of when I finally finished the first Diablo. I forget the details, but I remember that that point I had found several items that healed a percentage of health for each portion of Diablo's health that I took off. Despite having all of his minions attacking me at the same time I was attacking him, I never used a health potion and never dropped below 2/3 health or so.
I'm more or less going through a similar situation in Fable right now. I've mastered the slow time spell so that most battles with the more powerful characters I've met (Thunder, giant scorpion), I take no damage at all. I just slow time and hack away and/or shoot arrows at the enemy until they're dead, easily avoiding any attacks they may manage to execute while time is slowed. Combat has almost gotten boring in the game.
I started replaying this game about a year ago via DOSBox. I always just enjoyed persuading the enemy agents at the beginning of the game. I would just drop the drugs down to zero and hang around the start for a while until I had enough civilians to persuade an enemy agent. I always thought it good fun to rush an enemy agent with a crowd of people trailing me while he's busy firing away trying to protect himself. That could actually make the second half of the mission more fun if I decided to gun it. There's nothing like taking on enemies with 8 or more agents and a crowd of armed civilians.
It's a real shame that I've never been able to find the sequel. Or that they haven't made a modern sequel.
I started out messing around with an old 8086 back in the day. It was the family computer, but my mom had no qualms about showing me how to do things and get around. I don't remember a whole lot about the machine except that most, if not all, of the software had to be loaded from a boot disk. The family went through several computers after that (Epson 286, Packard Bell(!) 486sx/33, Compaq(!) P200MMX), but it wasn't until I graduated high school in 1999 that I finally got a computer that was all mine. It's kind of funny becuase I still remember that in those days "using the computer" was still a bit of an event. It was something I did all in and of itself. Now, I have one in every room (OK, well not the bathroom) and use them constantly throughout my time at home.
It was a CTX branded K62/400 with only 128MB of RAM. It certainly wasn't top of the line, but I remember the "blazing fast" 56k modem was one of the coolest things about it. And best of all, it was mine. I still remember, right after I got home I set it up to download the latest Star Wars trailer (Episode 1?) on that blazing fast modem while I went out to buy upgrades. I bought a 13GB Hard Drive to complement the 4GB that came with the PC and to use to dual boot Linux. I also bought another 128MB of RAM.
The sad truth, however, was that the machine is really kind of a piece of junk. It was cheap and for good reason since CTX was getting out of the PC business and concentrating on making monitors. No matter what OS I was running (Linux, Windows, BeOS) the machine had a nasty tendency to restart for no apparent reason. I took advantage of the warranty support (thankfully before CTX was finally purchased by Proview) and despite the fact that virtually every part has been replaced in the machine, including the motherboard and processor, the computer is still not reliable. It now sits in my closet under a pile of junk so that I can occasionally raid it for parts for a customer machine.
Still it was the first computer that was mine and mine alone.
I provide IT services in the healthcare industry, including work at several different hospitals, so here's my perspective on the situation. That said, please note that I'm not 100% up to date on the most current technologies since the hospitals I've worked at hadn't implemented many of them.
Most likely, the ICU wasn't "shut down". Instead, it's much more likely that only those computer systems used for ordering, transactioning, etc. were shut down. Please note that any life critical equipment is typically placed on a physically seperate network from the rest of the hospitals computer systems. It is acceptable to put things like MRI machines and such on the hospital LAN, but patient monitoring devices will not be affected. If this is not the case for some reason and the patient monitoring equipment was put on the same lan as the general computing systems, the IT staff and the hospital administration should be canned.
Most likely the system most affected would be the hosptials ordering system. That is, the system that handles ordering medicines from the hospitals internal pharmacy. In an ICU, that shouldn't be as big of a deal, because 1) they should already be well supplied to handle any emergencies, and 2) unless the hospital is using VOIP (seriously doubful), somebody can always call the pharmacy and tell them in person. The system won't be as automated as usual, but that shouldn't matter too terribly much. The simple truth is, despite our reliance on technology, every hospital should have a contingency plan in case the technology fails. If it's not a law, it should be. And if it's not a law and this hospital doesn't have a contingency plan, then the hosptial administration should be sacked and the hospital closed down due to unsafe conditions. These are people's lives at stake and we need all of the safety nets we can get. The same goes for if the personnell aren't properly trained on the contingency plan.
That said, this event will cost the hospital money. Mostly in personnell costs as they will undoubtedly require personnell to work longer shifts or extra shifts as they work to input the data collected during the outage (medicines administered, procedures performed, etc.) back into the hospital's computer system. In the end, that information needs to be entered into the hospital's systems if they want to get paid.
As for blame, well there's plenty of blame to go around. Firstly, the administrator of the botnet should most certainly be sent to prison for his actions. What he did was illegal, and he sure as hell should know that. Secondly, the local IT staff should be partly to blame here. Nurses and doctors get bored, they surf the internet, and junk gets on their computers. If they don't have technological methods in place to protect against such occurrances (installing the latest patches, anti-virus/anti-spyware software, etc.), they should be dismissed and somebody more competant brought in. If the IT staff had proposed such measures, but they were shot down by the CFO for financial reasons, then the CFO should get the boot. The staff using the PCs should also be to blame since they were most probably violating hospital policy
Now... the reality. Hospitals are very political entities. More so than other environments I've worked in. I doubt anybody will actually get the axe, but sometimes shakeups and/or disasters like these are needed to show the powers that be that the resources previously requested are indeed necessary for the smoothe operation of business.
To respond to your assertion that his actions had grave consequences, they are most likely not as grave as the article would have you believe. It's just more sensational to claim that the entire ICU was "shut down" due to scary computer virii. (Is there such a thing as impartial, just-the-facts-ma'am reporting these days?) Most likely the ICU continued to function on their contingency plan using pen and paper just like they probably did only a few years prior. His actions were probably no graver than they would be with any other company that would experience lost productivity due to the loss of computer systems.
How much do you actually know about AVG. Go to www.grisoft.com and you will see that they most certianly do have a for pay product. To use your logic, nobody should ever use Linux and always use Microsoft instead.
You have no idea how much you are right. At the facility where I used to work, I started out with an office of my own. I got very used to having peace and quiet so that I could get work done while I was actually in my office. Well, management decided that since I wasn't supervisor level, that it was unfair to the rest of the staff if the IS guy had an office and they didn't. So, I got moved to a cubicle -- on the collections floor. I was surrounded by people constantly talking on the phone, collecting money, and people who felt the need to constantly ask me stupid user type questions while I was busy trying to concentrate on something else. It eventually got to where I would probably spend about half my time in the server room, VNC'ed into my desktop machine just so that I could get work done without interruption. I was never so glad when they moved me.
Generally, I just try to only pick games which will run in windowed mode, and put up with the odd quirks that come up from task switching. I have yet to find a 3D game that runs in windowed mode, properly maximizes, and allows me to task-switch out and back into it without any annoying quirks; or a game which runs fullscreen and doesn't minimize when I task-switch out of it.
This is probably one of the reasons that Civ2 is one of the first games I install on any computer I own. It is one of the very few games that I know of that plays well in Windows. I'm sure you could point some more out to me, but I too have noticed all of the problems that you refer to. Enough so that I just gave up after a while and just kept a second computer on my desk for IM, web, TV, etc. Civ2 on the other hand, doesn't mind in the least when it gets minimized or when you Alt-Tab to another screen. The last computer I bought was my laptop for surfing in the living room and/or other areas without a computer (by the pool, in the parking lot, etc.) and I think I constantly had a game of Civ2 up on it for the first couple of months. I think the roommates may have even played along in a couple of my games while we were bored and watching TV.
Civ 4 on the other hand seems to be so much of a resource hog that I generally don't dare to run anything else on the computer while playing it.
I don't think it's uncommon for companies to rely on the pre-order funds to finish final development of a product. Sometimes they just don't get enough though, and they never release their product.
How so? There's no ability to assign individual user permissions to individual directories in XP Home. Therefore if I create one of XP's "limited" user accounts, I cannot assign the account elevated priveleges to specific directories because the software being run from the account requires it. Unfortunately, there is still some software that I run which requires it, and although it's an easy fix under Pro, in Home the only fix is to give the entire account Administrator level access.
Furthermore, there's no ability to create user accounts from the MMC in Home. You have to use the stupid, dumbed down XP home user creation screen. Not to mention (and please correct me if I'm wrong) you are unable to change the log on method to the three finger salute in Home -- you have to use the welcome screen. Lastly, network shares: when sharing a directory in Home, you have two choices for access: 1) Read Only or 2) everyone gets full control. Maybe it would be more fair to say that the security is there, but you cannot manage it. But I'm not going to be fair. It's damn frustrating being unable to manage it properly becuase the lack of the that ability eventually leads to insecurity.
Lastly, wasn't there a virus a couple of years ago that took advantage of XP administrator accounts that did not have a password set? Or did this only affect XP Pro and 2K boxes?
It was pretty much the only game played in my apartment for months. I think part of the reason I didn't play so much after the first time was because my roommate had already been playing the game for a couple of months before I started in on it. Heck, the only reason I got a chance to start playing it was becuase his busy season started at work and he was out of town a lot. Man... now I'm going to have to go buy the PS2 version just so that I can play it again...
Oh yeah. RE4 is captivating, but it's really only replayable to a point. The second time through, it was mostly just about playing around and trying out different guns. Still, I'm wishing I hadn't had to move and that I still had a roommate with a GC becuase every once in a while I still get a RE4 craving.
For me it's Civilization 2 and whatever the latest Gran Turismo is. Gran Turismo is a good game in that you never actually "beat" it. Sure, you can unlock all of the cars and get all gold medals in every race, but you can always keep coming back and racing again and (hopefully) improving on your laptimes. (I think that's what I like about racing in real life, as well.)
There's not much to be said about Civilization 2, other than it was a really good game in its day and it just hardly ever gets old. It's simpler than 3 or 4, but that's what I like about it. The ruleset is easy enough to memorize that it's an easy game to find your way through. The other thing I love about it, and this might sound silly, is that it actually runs in a freakin window! It's all 2D graphics and is lite on the hardware requirements, which means that it will run on practically every computer I own. But hands down, I *love* being able to minimize the game when I want to take a break and do something else. It is always one of the first games I install on any computer I own and one of the few games I always come back to. Before that, I was the same way with Civ1. In fact, I remember copying Civ1 onto a set of diskettes that I snuck into my CAD class in High School and proceeded to install on my workstation.
Lastly, I can't forget to mention Super Mario Brothers 3. Especially the GB Advanced port which lets you go back and replay any level at any time after you beat the game. Of course, I do miss having an inventory full of P-Wings or Hammer Brothers suits like on the original NES version, but I guess I can't have my cake and eat it too. (For those that don't know, on the original NES version of SMB3, if you started a new game right after finishing a game, you began the game with an inventory full of P-Wings. Game 3 == Hammer Brothers suits. I played up to game 5 one day in college (oh how I miss those days of being a semi-professional slacker) and never got anything other than that.)
Oh, and as a slight addendum here, when I still had a computer around that ran DOS, I would always come back to Duke Nukem 3D from time to time. There was just something about that game that I really enjoyed.
That is pretty nifty. Is there any way I could get a copy of that script and take a look at it? I've taken over the responsibility of creating drive images for my office, and possibly even our sister offices. I've been trying to research a way to make it more automated, but so far I have been unable to come up with the right combination of search terms on google to find what I'm looking for.
That doesn't sound very legal. Even if you do have a license for each computer, as far as I know, there's no way to change the registration number of a Windows install once it's been installed and a ghost image has been made.
You've never heard of a volume license key (VLK) or of Microsoft's volume license program? The VLP version of XP (like the OEM versions) requires no online activation and uses different licence keys from the standard versions of XP. The CD-Key itself isn't your actual license to use Windows. It's merely one way of ensuring that the media was obtained legally. In the corporate world, you buy the VLP version of XP, and Microsoft emails you a CD key to use for all of your computers.
Also, changing the CD key is trivial. You just run Sysprep (found on the Windows CD) and in the course of running it, Sysprep will ask you for a CD key. This is the same software that you should be running on the PC before you make your Ghost image of it if you plan to join it to a domain.
Not to mention you then legally need a legit copy of Norton Ghost and everything else you might decide to include with it for every computer you install the image to. Although I have done zero research on the subject (Except that You'd need many licenses for Ghost), so this is all just assumption here.
I'm a little hazy on the legalities of this as well. The way it's always been explained to me is that you need a licnece of Ghost to create an image. Also, if you're running the full-on Windows client, you will of course need a license for that. However, I've always been told that when restoring an image to a PC, it is legally permitted to use the DOS version of Ghost without a licence for that PC. Now whether or not that's true, I'm not sure. I've never bothered to read the licence documentation, instead trusting the word of my higher ups.
If the hardware's different, you have to use Sysprep, but I haven't messed with that.
Actually, it's always a good idea to sysprep on XP since if you don't you'll end up with multiple computers on the network with the same SID. That really becomes a problem with AD since that's how it uniquely identifies all of the computers in the domain.
It sounds like if it wasn't the case, people would get notified all the time.
I support a billing and collections office in the healthcare industry. I wouldn't say that this kind of mistake happens "all the time" but it is honestly an easy mistake to make. That's one of the reasons we have our fancy legal disclosure thought up by the company lawyers and plastered all over our cover sheets.
Furthermore, I am led to believe that there would still be legal ramifications if the insurance company which receives the mistaken fax were to in any way take advantage of that patient data. They are still in the healthcare industry and still responsible for patient data in their care, whether that data is expressly meant for them or not.
Realistically, it's trivially simple for the person manning the fax machine to dump the paper in the shred bin that's most likely with in spitting distance of the fax machines and copy machines.
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"...and if someone patented how to calculate loan payments or the pythagorean theorem..."
Thanks for the idea.
I don't know if you've ever ready any philosophy, but your comments here really apply to what some of the older philosophers preached. One of the better known works about what you can and can't trust would be Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which basically states that even what you see and sense with your own faculties, may not be the real world. How is one to ever know what's real and what isn't? How do we know that what we see and read is the truth.
Simply put, we can't, but at some point in the process, we just have to accept that we won't know anymore than what our senes can tell us until we learn otherwise.
Suddenly I feel completely and utterly inadequate.
OK, you get points for possibly the most helpful post I've witnessed on /. in a very long time. I upgraded to XP home right after it came out... and subsequently spent the next 2 weeks trying to find any information on how to do this. I've kind of forgotten about it since I learned to live without the ability (I'm too cheap to buy Pro and too honest to pirate it).
How long has this procedure been known about?
Kasumi Ninja had the worst control of any fighting game, EVER! One button to punch, one to kick, and one that you hold down while performing D-pad calisthenics in order to pull off special moves. I still have my Kasumi Ninja bandanna around here somewhere, despite selling my own Jag a long time ago. And for the record, they did come out with a six button controller later, but it saw limited release. (I don't know anybody else who had one, but then I didn't know anybody else who had a Jaguar, either.)
I'm with you on that one, man. I just finally bought my own XBox (I always had ready access to others before now, so I had no reason to buy one) and I hate the fact that I cannot seem to find a fat controller. I used to just deal with it, but after about 30 minutes of playing Forza, my hands really start to cramp since the handles don't seem to be long enough for my hands. I always liked the fat controller better, but was able to deal with the small controller until I started playing racing games. I wish MS would re-release the controller in a limited form or something, but that's akin to wishing I would win the lottery. I know it ain't gonna happen.
I am well aware of the existence of the game and consistently check for it at the few shops that I find that sell used PC games, but have not yet had any luck. I get the feeling that it wasn't nearly as successful as the original.
The American Revolt expansion was extremely difficult. I don't think I played more than one or two missions of the expansion before giving up on it. They need to make another sequel darnit! Maybe Moleneaux and Lionhead will come out with an unofficial sequel, but I doubt it.
Oh, and here's the Wikipedia link to Syndicate Wars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicate_Wars
Your stories remind me of when I finally finished the first Diablo. I forget the details, but I remember that that point I had found several items that healed a percentage of health for each portion of Diablo's health that I took off. Despite having all of his minions attacking me at the same time I was attacking him, I never used a health potion and never dropped below 2/3 health or so.
I'm more or less going through a similar situation in Fable right now. I've mastered the slow time spell so that most battles with the more powerful characters I've met (Thunder, giant scorpion), I take no damage at all. I just slow time and hack away and/or shoot arrows at the enemy until they're dead, easily avoiding any attacks they may manage to execute while time is slowed. Combat has almost gotten boring in the game.
I started replaying this game about a year ago via DOSBox. I always just enjoyed persuading the enemy agents at the beginning of the game. I would just drop the drugs down to zero and hang around the start for a while until I had enough civilians to persuade an enemy agent. I always thought it good fun to rush an enemy agent with a crowd of people trailing me while he's busy firing away trying to protect himself. That could actually make the second half of the mission more fun if I decided to gun it. There's nothing like taking on enemies with 8 or more agents and a crowd of armed civilians.
It's a real shame that I've never been able to find the sequel. Or that they haven't made a modern sequel.
I started out messing around with an old 8086 back in the day. It was the family computer, but my mom had no qualms about showing me how to do things and get around. I don't remember a whole lot about the machine except that most, if not all, of the software had to be loaded from a boot disk. The family went through several computers after that (Epson 286, Packard Bell(!) 486sx/33, Compaq(!) P200MMX), but it wasn't until I graduated high school in 1999 that I finally got a computer that was all mine. It's kind of funny becuase I still remember that in those days "using the computer" was still a bit of an event. It was something I did all in and of itself. Now, I have one in every room (OK, well not the bathroom) and use them constantly throughout my time at home.
It was a CTX branded K62/400 with only 128MB of RAM. It certainly wasn't top of the line, but I remember the "blazing fast" 56k modem was one of the coolest things about it. And best of all, it was mine. I still remember, right after I got home I set it up to download the latest Star Wars trailer (Episode 1?) on that blazing fast modem while I went out to buy upgrades. I bought a 13GB Hard Drive to complement the 4GB that came with the PC and to use to dual boot Linux. I also bought another 128MB of RAM.
The sad truth, however, was that the machine is really kind of a piece of junk. It was cheap and for good reason since CTX was getting out of the PC business and concentrating on making monitors. No matter what OS I was running (Linux, Windows, BeOS) the machine had a nasty tendency to restart for no apparent reason. I took advantage of the warranty support (thankfully before CTX was finally purchased by Proview) and despite the fact that virtually every part has been replaced in the machine, including the motherboard and processor, the computer is still not reliable. It now sits in my closet under a pile of junk so that I can occasionally raid it for parts for a customer machine.
Still it was the first computer that was mine and mine alone.
I provide IT services in the healthcare industry, including work at several different hospitals, so here's my perspective on the situation. That said, please note that I'm not 100% up to date on the most current technologies since the hospitals I've worked at hadn't implemented many of them.
Most likely, the ICU wasn't "shut down". Instead, it's much more likely that only those computer systems used for ordering, transactioning, etc. were shut down. Please note that any life critical equipment is typically placed on a physically seperate network from the rest of the hospitals computer systems. It is acceptable to put things like MRI machines and such on the hospital LAN, but patient monitoring devices will not be affected. If this is not the case for some reason and the patient monitoring equipment was put on the same lan as the general computing systems, the IT staff and the hospital administration should be canned.
Most likely the system most affected would be the hosptials ordering system. That is, the system that handles ordering medicines from the hospitals internal pharmacy. In an ICU, that shouldn't be as big of a deal, because 1) they should already be well supplied to handle any emergencies, and 2) unless the hospital is using VOIP (seriously doubful), somebody can always call the pharmacy and tell them in person. The system won't be as automated as usual, but that shouldn't matter too terribly much. The simple truth is, despite our reliance on technology, every hospital should have a contingency plan in case the technology fails. If it's not a law, it should be. And if it's not a law and this hospital doesn't have a contingency plan, then the hosptial administration should be sacked and the hospital closed down due to unsafe conditions. These are people's lives at stake and we need all of the safety nets we can get. The same goes for if the personnell aren't properly trained on the contingency plan.
That said, this event will cost the hospital money. Mostly in personnell costs as they will undoubtedly require personnell to work longer shifts or extra shifts as they work to input the data collected during the outage (medicines administered, procedures performed, etc.) back into the hospital's computer system. In the end, that information needs to be entered into the hospital's systems if they want to get paid.
As for blame, well there's plenty of blame to go around. Firstly, the administrator of the botnet should most certainly be sent to prison for his actions. What he did was illegal, and he sure as hell should know that. Secondly, the local IT staff should be partly to blame here. Nurses and doctors get bored, they surf the internet, and junk gets on their computers. If they don't have technological methods in place to protect against such occurrances (installing the latest patches, anti-virus/anti-spyware software, etc.), they should be dismissed and somebody more competant brought in. If the IT staff had proposed such measures, but they were shot down by the CFO for financial reasons, then the CFO should get the boot. The staff using the PCs should also be to blame since they were most probably violating hospital policy
Now... the reality. Hospitals are very political entities. More so than other environments I've worked in. I doubt anybody will actually get the axe, but sometimes shakeups and/or disasters like these are needed to show the powers that be that the resources previously requested are indeed necessary for the smoothe operation of business.
To respond to your assertion that his actions had grave consequences, they are most likely not as grave as the article would have you believe. It's just more sensational to claim that the entire ICU was "shut down" due to scary computer virii. (Is there such a thing as impartial, just-the-facts-ma'am reporting these days?) Most likely the ICU continued to function on their contingency plan using pen and paper just like they probably did only a few years prior. His actions were probably no graver than they would be with any other company that would experience lost productivity due to the loss of computer systems.
How much do you actually know about AVG. Go to www.grisoft.com and you will see that they most certianly do have a for pay product. To use your logic, nobody should ever use Linux and always use Microsoft instead.
I think I just got trolled.
You have no idea how much you are right. At the facility where I used to work, I started out with an office of my own. I got very used to having peace and quiet so that I could get work done while I was actually in my office. Well, management decided that since I wasn't supervisor level, that it was unfair to the rest of the staff if the IS guy had an office and they didn't. So, I got moved to a cubicle -- on the collections floor. I was surrounded by people constantly talking on the phone, collecting money, and people who felt the need to constantly ask me stupid user type questions while I was busy trying to concentrate on something else. It eventually got to where I would probably spend about half my time in the server room, VNC'ed into my desktop machine just so that I could get work done without interruption. I was never so glad when they moved me.
I need somebody like you to help me write my resume. Somehow "responded to helpdesk tickets" just doesn't have a very glamorous ring to it.
Generally, I just try to only pick games which will run in windowed mode, and put up with the odd quirks that come up from task switching. I have yet to find a 3D game that runs in windowed mode, properly maximizes, and allows me to task-switch out and back into it without any annoying quirks; or a game which runs fullscreen and doesn't minimize when I task-switch out of it.
This is probably one of the reasons that Civ2 is one of the first games I install on any computer I own. It is one of the very few games that I know of that plays well in Windows. I'm sure you could point some more out to me, but I too have noticed all of the problems that you refer to. Enough so that I just gave up after a while and just kept a second computer on my desk for IM, web, TV, etc. Civ2 on the other hand, doesn't mind in the least when it gets minimized or when you Alt-Tab to another screen. The last computer I bought was my laptop for surfing in the living room and/or other areas without a computer (by the pool, in the parking lot, etc.) and I think I constantly had a game of Civ2 up on it for the first couple of months. I think the roommates may have even played along in a couple of my games while we were bored and watching TV.
Civ 4 on the other hand seems to be so much of a resource hog that I generally don't dare to run anything else on the computer while playing it.
I don't think it's uncommon for companies to rely on the pre-order funds to finish final development of a product. Sometimes they just don't get enough though, and they never release their product.
You are wrong.
How so? There's no ability to assign individual user permissions to individual directories in XP Home. Therefore if I create one of XP's "limited" user accounts, I cannot assign the account elevated priveleges to specific directories because the software being run from the account requires it. Unfortunately, there is still some software that I run which requires it, and although it's an easy fix under Pro, in Home the only fix is to give the entire account Administrator level access.
Furthermore, there's no ability to create user accounts from the MMC in Home. You have to use the stupid, dumbed down XP home user creation screen. Not to mention (and please correct me if I'm wrong) you are unable to change the log on method to the three finger salute in Home -- you have to use the welcome screen. Lastly, network shares: when sharing a directory in Home, you have two choices for access: 1) Read Only or 2) everyone gets full control. Maybe it would be more fair to say that the security is there, but you cannot manage it. But I'm not going to be fair. It's damn frustrating being unable to manage it properly becuase the lack of the that ability eventually leads to insecurity.
Lastly, wasn't there a virus a couple of years ago that took advantage of XP administrator accounts that did not have a password set? Or did this only affect XP Pro and 2K boxes?
Ahh... XP Home, where resetting a user account's password is only a reboot into safe mode away. The absolute pinnacle of security.
I think I'm the only person I know who actually bothered to set the administrator account on his XP Home box.
That said, you are correct regarding the privelege levels not being fully implemented into XP. They're barely implemented at all.
It was pretty much the only game played in my apartment for months. I think part of the reason I didn't play so much after the first time was because my roommate had already been playing the game for a couple of months before I started in on it. Heck, the only reason I got a chance to start playing it was becuase his busy season started at work and he was out of town a lot. Man... now I'm going to have to go buy the PS2 version just so that I can play it again...
Oh yeah. RE4 is captivating, but it's really only replayable to a point. The second time through, it was mostly just about playing around and trying out different guns. Still, I'm wishing I hadn't had to move and that I still had a roommate with a GC becuase every once in a while I still get a RE4 craving.
For me it's Civilization 2 and whatever the latest Gran Turismo is. Gran Turismo is a good game in that you never actually "beat" it. Sure, you can unlock all of the cars and get all gold medals in every race, but you can always keep coming back and racing again and (hopefully) improving on your laptimes. (I think that's what I like about racing in real life, as well.)
There's not much to be said about Civilization 2, other than it was a really good game in its day and it just hardly ever gets old. It's simpler than 3 or 4, but that's what I like about it. The ruleset is easy enough to memorize that it's an easy game to find your way through. The other thing I love about it, and this might sound silly, is that it actually runs in a freakin window! It's all 2D graphics and is lite on the hardware requirements, which means that it will run on practically every computer I own. But hands down, I *love* being able to minimize the game when I want to take a break and do something else. It is always one of the first games I install on any computer I own and one of the few games I always come back to. Before that, I was the same way with Civ1. In fact, I remember copying Civ1 onto a set of diskettes that I snuck into my CAD class in High School and proceeded to install on my workstation.
Lastly, I can't forget to mention Super Mario Brothers 3. Especially the GB Advanced port which lets you go back and replay any level at any time after you beat the game. Of course, I do miss having an inventory full of P-Wings or Hammer Brothers suits like on the original NES version, but I guess I can't have my cake and eat it too. (For those that don't know, on the original NES version of SMB3, if you started a new game right after finishing a game, you began the game with an inventory full of P-Wings. Game 3 == Hammer Brothers suits. I played up to game 5 one day in college (oh how I miss those days of being a semi-professional slacker) and never got anything other than that.)
Oh, and as a slight addendum here, when I still had a computer around that ran DOS, I would always come back to Duke Nukem 3D from time to time. There was just something about that game that I really enjoyed.
That is pretty nifty. Is there any way I could get a copy of that script and take a look at it? I've taken over the responsibility of creating drive images for my office, and possibly even our sister offices. I've been trying to research a way to make it more automated, but so far I have been unable to come up with the right combination of search terms on google to find what I'm looking for.
That doesn't sound very legal. Even if you do have a license for each computer, as far as I know, there's no way to change the registration number of a Windows install once it's been installed and a ghost image has been made.
You've never heard of a volume license key (VLK) or of Microsoft's volume license program? The VLP version of XP (like the OEM versions) requires no online activation and uses different licence keys from the standard versions of XP. The CD-Key itself isn't your actual license to use Windows. It's merely one way of ensuring that the media was obtained legally. In the corporate world, you buy the VLP version of XP, and Microsoft emails you a CD key to use for all of your computers.
Also, changing the CD key is trivial. You just run Sysprep (found on the Windows CD) and in the course of running it, Sysprep will ask you for a CD key. This is the same software that you should be running on the PC before you make your Ghost image of it if you plan to join it to a domain.
Not to mention you then legally need a legit copy of Norton Ghost and everything else you might decide to include with it for every computer you install the image to. Although I have done zero research on the subject (Except that You'd need many licenses for Ghost), so this is all just assumption here.
I'm a little hazy on the legalities of this as well. The way it's always been explained to me is that you need a licnece of Ghost to create an image. Also, if you're running the full-on Windows client, you will of course need a license for that. However, I've always been told that when restoring an image to a PC, it is legally permitted to use the DOS version of Ghost without a licence for that PC. Now whether or not that's true, I'm not sure. I've never bothered to read the licence documentation, instead trusting the word of my higher ups.
If the hardware's different, you have to use Sysprep, but I haven't messed with that.
Actually, it's always a good idea to sysprep on XP since if you don't you'll end up with multiple computers on the network with the same SID. That really becomes a problem with AD since that's how it uniquely identifies all of the computers in the domain.
It sounds like if it wasn't the case, people would get notified all the time.
I support a billing and collections office in the healthcare industry. I wouldn't say that this kind of mistake happens "all the time" but it is honestly an easy mistake to make. That's one of the reasons we have our fancy legal disclosure thought up by the company lawyers and plastered all over our cover sheets.
Furthermore, I am led to believe that there would still be legal ramifications if the insurance company which receives the mistaken fax were to in any way take advantage of that patient data. They are still in the healthcare industry and still responsible for patient data in their care, whether that data is expressly meant for them or not.
Realistically, it's trivially simple for the person manning the fax machine to dump the paper in the shred bin that's most likely with in spitting distance of the fax machines and copy machines.