Actually the 'X' widget to close the window is intelligently (or luckily) placed : it's not flush against the edge of the window, there are a few padding pixels beside it. This means you're much less likely to throw your mouse in a corner and 'accidentally' click X (such as when you're doing something else and just thwack the mouse with your elbow or something).
Same thing goes for the Start button. Just read up any good UI design book and they will tell you that any object that sits right on the border of the screen has 'infinite height or width', because no matter how far you try to move beyond the edge, the pointer will stay put. You have one less axis to judge in order to hit that particular widget, so it is much easier to hit.
Please go find some other job. Why not go flirt with the chicks from finance ? Might as well bring Cliff along while you're at it and find out what the girls think of AskSlashdot.
The only people who have any brains here are Taco and Hemos (Michael's also ok). All the other editors should jump ship and go ruin someone else's fun instead.
We keep 'discovering' that 56, 128, 1024bit encryption is 'not enough'. Well why don't we just go right on up to 16 megabit encryption and buy ourselves a few years of leeway before the US gov't finds enough money to catch up ?
I'm quite glad the games are being redone by a separate entity. Sierra is now little more than a corporate whore, releasing incomplete titles, then dropping support within a year. They're the MTV of gaming.
Well then, somebody slap MP3.com's Payback for Playback scheme. You have to pay 20$ to be eligible to earn royalties, yet said royalties can vary wildly from one month to the next, depending on MP3.com's financialists' mood. It used to be that a decent artist could rake in a couple thousand bucks per month, now even the biggest, most whoring 'artists' earn only in the high hundreds. That sounds like some bastardized form of gambling to me.
People lie, cheat, and steal. It's a fact of life. But it's silly to blame an economic system because some people exploit others in order to benefit through said economic system.
Indeed, people will lie and cheat no matter what, but do we really want to live with an economic system that encourages liars and cheaters ?
We all hate people and their cellphones.. we especially hate them in movie theatres or other venues where silence is of utmost importance (school, anyone ?). Now does that mean that some kludgy electronic jamming system is going to work well enough without causing too many woes to the rest of us, who are decent enough to shut the damned ringer off like we're supposed to ? I think not.
The good old method works fine: if some jerk whips out his/her phone in the theatre, shush them. If they don't shush, then ask them politely.. and THEN if they don't comply, everyone in the theatre is welcome to pummel the worthless bastard. Two or three deaths like this, and the rest will behave. Fear works wonders.
I personally prefer the double-click : the odds of clicking once on the 'wrong' icon or widget are high, while the odds of clicking twice on the same widget within a fraction of a second are much lower. If my clickfinger twitches involuntarily, I don't want my drive to start loading all 7 gigabytes of the latest Mozilla build, only to close it seconds later.
Let the common fools have their synthetic steak, but they'd better not assimilate The Keg Steakhouse and their Keg Size New York. Some things must be left sacred!
Why don't we just get G.W.Bush to kill them all ? They're going to be murdered or 'commit' suicide sooner or later, why not expedite the process until we get to the root of the problem ?
Or just revoke whatever religious statute they hold, then send off the IRS to collect all the tax money they've been avoiding for the last twenty years. That would surely keep them from throwing the DMCA around.
I don't see why we couldn't apply a safety-glass-like backing to an Automend windshield. The outside would be repairable, while the inside would be safety-glass but you probably don't need to worry about airborne gravel on the inside of the car. The trick would be to avoid air between the two layers, or perhaps to meld them together somehow.
The problem with RTCW is that it's not Half-Life. Sure, HL was great in its day, I played it for a few weeks and was quite fascinated by the smooth gameplay and bizarre plot. But it did eventually get old and now it's sitting in the closet. On the other hand, I still play Quake 2 and 3.. I actually bought my current Geforce2 GTS, two years ago, mainly to play Quake3. I still play it sometimes, because that's what I like. Others prefer Unreal Tournament, which is OK.
Every FPS'er has a preference, be it Quake, UT, HL, Tribes.. whatever. They each have a different 'feel', and that's why they're all so great. RTCW has its feel, and for people like me, I think it rocks. However it is radically different from the rest and thus, it cannot be everyone's favorite, no matter what anyone says.
I hate forking out cash for this. I'd rather have ads embedded into HTML mail, than whip out my already-maxxed CC for yet another web-service that offers no SLA, and bombards me with daily "Fetish News", belonging to a Yahoo Group that doesn't really exist. I use Yahoo as a spamcatcher, much like I did with Hotmail before it became web-only (the Outlook interface sucks). 20$ (thus 30$ canadian for me) for a spamcatcher ? I'll spend 30$ of my time finding another free pop3 drop instead.
I've been thinking of something like this for a few years now : a Lego disc changer. Of course I never got around to buying the 300$ lego mindstorms kit. These days I've started tinkering with PICs so perhaps I'll manage to create such a thing, using stepping motors and cleverly positioned IR diodes and captors.
Building the mechanism is relatively simple. The hard part is writing software that will 'talk' to your CD burning software to figure out when to swap discs.
Alternately you could hire a minimum wage student to do it for you:)
It's just like what I tell my s.o. every night "Don't worry, I'm coming in a minute".. of course that minute usually happens only after a few hours of merciless coding and tweaking, by which time she is long asleep.
Just the same with Serial ATA. They've been spouting a whole bunch of buzz about it, but we have yet to see any concrete applications of the proposed standard. It's kinda like the hype that preceded USB, which was already obsolete by the time it hit the market. Methinks the same is going to happen to Serial-ATA. Why don't we just stick to SCSI instead ?
I second that opinion. SpinRite is a disk-recovery tool that does what you'd think of doing yourself. It tries a bunch of 'desperate' measures to recover your data in any possible way, using statistical analysis of read failures to figure out which bits are intact and which are corrupt, then pieces them together intelligently after successive read attempts from different 'angles'. It takes forever, but if your data is worth the wait then you will be thankful that such a great tool exists.
For those who are just tuning in, the 'bozos' in question are from Trend Micro. You remember those small timers who make second-grade antiviral software at Antivirus.com. The same poor fools who give away OEM copies of their software to motherboard makers, to bundle onto that driver disc you never used.
They are simply doing these absurd announcements to scare people into believing that virii will hail upon the end of the world. The result of such scare might lead foolish IT managers into buying enterprise versions of their antiviral software, because the thought of unplugging from the internet to avoid virii is too disturbing.
Imagine the weather channel being bought by an umbrella manufacturer; then every day they announce pouring rain just to coax people into buying umbrellas out of panic. Same thing is happening here.
What pisses MS off is that Sony's 'next big thing' is already here, and has been for over 18 months. They plan on making the PS2 prosper for many years to come, while MS is probably drawing up XBox-2 with a 2.2g P4 and GeForce4, while the original XBox is still in its infancy.
Maybe it's a territorial thing, but where I live, everyone and their mother owns a PS2, but no XBoxen are to be seen beyond the stores. Why ? For the same reason as PS1's success : huge software selection. N64 was slow to start, GCN is slow to start, and XBox is slow to start. PS2 has well over 150 titles on the market (yes, I pulled that number out of my ass).
M$ needs to get rid of the idea that the XBox is a computer. Computer games don't sell well on consoles. Console games have an immediate-gratification aspect that PC titles tend to lack. You can play a 10-minute game of Super Monkey Ball, but if you wanted a quick game of, say, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, well you wouldn't even be done setting up the arena in that time.
And it's not by snuffing the big players that they're going to gain positive attention; they're just going to split up the market even more. I'd rather license my game to Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all together, than have to sign an exclusive license and earn only 1/3 the royalties.
How can they really know what's going through the infants' minds ? Sure, they might become irritable and uneasy, but they're infants! Just leaving them alone for more than 2 seconds will make them irritable. I could criticize this 'science' all day.
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Actually the 'X' widget to close the window is intelligently (or luckily) placed : it's not flush against the edge of the window, there are a few padding pixels beside it. This means you're much less likely to throw your mouse in a corner and 'accidentally' click X (such as when you're doing something else and just thwack the mouse with your elbow or something).
Same thing goes for the Start button. Just read up any good UI design book and they will tell you that any object that sits right on the border of the screen has 'infinite height or width', because no matter how far you try to move beyond the edge, the pointer will stay put. You have one less axis to judge in order to hit that particular widget, so it is much easier to hit.
Please go find some other job. Why not go flirt with the chicks from finance ? Might as well bring Cliff along while you're at it and find out what the girls think of AskSlashdot.
The only people who have any brains here are Taco and Hemos (Michael's also ok). All the other editors should jump ship and go ruin someone else's fun instead.
We keep 'discovering' that 56, 128, 1024bit encryption is 'not enough'. Well why don't we just go right on up to 16 megabit encryption and buy ourselves a few years of leeway before the US gov't finds enough money to catch up ?
I'm quite glad the games are being redone by a separate entity. Sierra is now little more than a corporate whore, releasing incomplete titles, then dropping support within a year. They're the MTV of gaming.
Well then, somebody slap MP3.com's Payback for Playback scheme. You have to pay 20$ to be eligible to earn royalties, yet said royalties can vary wildly from one month to the next, depending on MP3.com's financialists' mood. It used to be that a decent artist could rake in a couple thousand bucks per month, now even the biggest, most whoring 'artists' earn only in the high hundreds. That sounds like some bastardized form of gambling to me.
Indeed, people will lie and cheat no matter what, but do we really want to live with an economic system that encourages liars and cheaters ?
We all hate people and their cellphones.. we especially hate them in movie theatres or other venues where silence is of utmost importance (school, anyone ?). Now does that mean that some kludgy electronic jamming system is going to work well enough without causing too many woes to the rest of us, who are decent enough to shut the damned ringer off like we're supposed to ? I think not.
The good old method works fine: if some jerk whips out his/her phone in the theatre, shush them. If they don't shush, then ask them politely.. and THEN if they don't comply, everyone in the theatre is welcome to pummel the worthless bastard. Two or three deaths like this, and the rest will behave. Fear works wonders.
I personally prefer the double-click : the odds of clicking once on the 'wrong' icon or widget are high, while the odds of clicking twice on the same widget within a fraction of a second are much lower. If my clickfinger twitches involuntarily, I don't want my drive to start loading all 7 gigabytes of the latest Mozilla build, only to close it seconds later.
Double-clicking is easy, just get over it.
Let the common fools have their synthetic steak, but they'd better not assimilate The Keg Steakhouse and their Keg Size New York. Some things must be left sacred!
Easy : Shop elsewhere! If the Feds want to know who's buying large amounts of cheez whiz, they're going to have to work for it.
Well then, get a gun and start a-blastin'! It's amazing what people will do for you when you're the one holding the trigger.
Why don't we just get G.W.Bush to kill them all ? They're going to be murdered or 'commit' suicide sooner or later, why not expedite the process until we get to the root of the problem ?
Or just revoke whatever religious statute they hold, then send off the IRS to collect all the tax money they've been avoiding for the last twenty years. That would surely keep them from throwing the DMCA around.
I don't see why we couldn't apply a safety-glass-like backing to an Automend windshield. The outside would be repairable, while the inside would be safety-glass but you probably don't need to worry about airborne gravel on the inside of the car. The trick would be to avoid air between the two layers, or perhaps to meld them together somehow.
The problem with RTCW is that it's not Half-Life. Sure, HL was great in its day, I played it for a few weeks and was quite fascinated by the smooth gameplay and bizarre plot. But it did eventually get old and now it's sitting in the closet. On the other hand, I still play Quake 2 and 3.. I actually bought my current Geforce2 GTS, two years ago, mainly to play Quake3. I still play it sometimes, because that's what I like. Others prefer Unreal Tournament, which is OK.
Every FPS'er has a preference, be it Quake, UT, HL, Tribes.. whatever. They each have a different 'feel', and that's why they're all so great. RTCW has its feel, and for people like me, I think it rocks. However it is radically different from the rest and thus, it cannot be everyone's favorite, no matter what anyone says.
I hate forking out cash for this. I'd rather have ads embedded into HTML mail, than whip out my already-maxxed CC for yet another web-service that offers no SLA, and bombards me with daily "Fetish News", belonging to a Yahoo Group that doesn't really exist. I use Yahoo as a spamcatcher, much like I did with Hotmail before it became web-only (the Outlook interface sucks).
20$ (thus 30$ canadian for me) for a spamcatcher ? I'll spend 30$ of my time finding another free pop3 drop instead.
Black water is what happens when black ice finally melts. Duh!
I've been thinking of something like this for a few years now : a Lego disc changer. Of course I never got around to buying the 300$ lego mindstorms kit. These days I've started tinkering with PICs so perhaps I'll manage to create such a thing, using stepping motors and cleverly positioned IR diodes and captors.
:)
Building the mechanism is relatively simple. The hard part is writing software that will 'talk' to your CD burning software to figure out when to swap discs.
Alternately you could hire a minimum wage student to do it for you
Aye.. but the Simpsons use subtle humor, while Animaniacs was an all-out parade of witty slapstick, in the true warner-brothers tradition.
It's just like what I tell my s.o. every night "Don't worry, I'm coming in a minute".. of course that minute usually happens only after a few hours of merciless coding and tweaking, by which time she is long asleep.
Just the same with Serial ATA. They've been spouting a whole bunch of buzz about it, but we have yet to see any concrete applications of the proposed standard. It's kinda like the hype that preceded USB, which was already obsolete by the time it hit the market. Methinks the same is going to happen to Serial-ATA. Why don't we just stick to SCSI instead ?
Does that mean I can tamper with the door lock, or just kick and tilt the bot to get a free song ?
I second that opinion. SpinRite is a disk-recovery tool that does what you'd think of doing yourself. It tries a bunch of 'desperate' measures to recover your data in any possible way, using statistical analysis of read failures to figure out which bits are intact and which are corrupt, then pieces them together intelligently after successive read attempts from different 'angles'. It takes forever, but if your data is worth the wait then you will be thankful that such a great tool exists.
For those who are just tuning in, the 'bozos' in question are from Trend Micro. You remember those small timers who make second-grade antiviral software at Antivirus.com. The same poor fools who give away OEM copies of their software to motherboard makers, to bundle onto that driver disc you never used.
They are simply doing these absurd announcements to scare people into believing that virii will hail upon the end of the world. The result of such scare might lead foolish IT managers into buying enterprise versions of their antiviral software, because the thought of unplugging from the internet to avoid virii is too disturbing.
Imagine the weather channel being bought by an umbrella manufacturer; then every day they announce pouring rain just to coax people into buying umbrellas out of panic. Same thing is happening here.
What pisses MS off is that Sony's 'next big thing' is already here, and has been for over 18 months. They plan on making the PS2 prosper for many years to come, while MS is probably drawing up XBox-2 with a 2.2g P4 and GeForce4, while the original XBox is still in its infancy.
Maybe it's a territorial thing, but where I live, everyone and their mother owns a PS2, but no XBoxen are to be seen beyond the stores. Why ? For the same reason as PS1's success : huge software selection. N64 was slow to start, GCN is slow to start, and XBox is slow to start. PS2 has well over 150 titles on the market (yes, I pulled that number out of my ass).
M$ needs to get rid of the idea that the XBox is a computer. Computer games don't sell well on consoles. Console games have an immediate-gratification aspect that PC titles tend to lack. You can play a 10-minute game of Super Monkey Ball, but if you wanted a quick game of, say, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, well you wouldn't even be done setting up the arena in that time.
And it's not by snuffing the big players that they're going to gain positive attention; they're just going to split up the market even more. I'd rather license my game to Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all together, than have to sign an exclusive license and earn only 1/3 the royalties.
How can they really know what's going through the infants' minds ? Sure, they might become irritable and uneasy, but they're infants! Just leaving them alone for more than 2 seconds will make them irritable. I could criticize this 'science' all day.