If that was your worst (most naive/ignorant) customer you ever had to deal with then consider yourself extremely lucky.
Not my worst by a long shot. But the closest I've ever had to the problem you initially said happened on such a frequent basis.... Idiot users happen all the time. I dealt with them on a daily basis; working tech. support for Compaq, later for various ISPs, then for Dell (XPS support). And it continued, when I moved into Dell's sales department, though it was a different kind of ignorance. Now I'm in logistics, and thankfully there isn't nearly as much of it, but even here I have to deal with people who don't realize that we deliver product by courrier... every time somebody orders something through the website and puts in a PO box instead of their civic address, we have to call the customer up and correct it. And that's to say nothing of the other problems we face at a logistical level.... *shrugs*
But I chalk it up to inexperience. Not stupidity. I know things you don't. You know things that I don't. That's all part of the game. At the end of the day, you simply don't need to know some of the stuff I know, because it's not part of your job.
I'm gonna let you in on a secret... it's something that far too few people who work Tech. Support realize: those people you're making fun of? They're the reason you have a job. You have a choice to make. The only way you're going to survive in tech. support, and better still, move beyond tech. support into upper levels of the organization, is to stop treating them like a burden, and start treating them as a blessing. If you don't, you're going to burn out.
More importantly though, part of the money you're paying to replace Vista with Ubuntu goes to Microsoft
Huh, where do you get that?
Probably thought that the $40-50 difference in price was an increase, not a decrease. I'd have to check the exact pricing to be certain, but I think there's some play there. The Linux systems do tend to be lower spec than the Windows systems, but the logic behind that one is pretty easy: it's Linux. You don't need high end hardware to run it... it's zippier on stuff 2 generations old than the current version of Windows is on current generation hardware. And you're getting current generation hardware with it. Plus, it's unlikely that you're going to be running games, so you may not need an overpowered video card. Most of the people interested in Linux-based systems from Dell are interested in an e-mail/word processing machine, and so they're designed to fit that market. Those that want a Linux gaming machine will do what I did: buy* a high end system with the hardware you actually want, then reformat and install Linux.
* - or build, but I have stopped using desktops entirely, in favour of laptops. Sadly, nobody carries the pieces you need to build your own laptop around here.
My 3 years working in tech support beg to differ. Frequently (at least once or twice a week), I'd receive a call which basically boiled down to the customer being down right ticked off because they had been trying to install their printer software using the disc clearly labeled "Macintosh" on their Windows XP/Vista computer. They would then blame us because our computer was faulty, because the manufacturer of the printer told them so. I haven't worked in tech support for over a year, but I still hear my friends laughing about hours these people supposedly spend resolving issues that could have easily been solved by reading the manual, or heaven forbid... the quick start instructions designed to get you up and running in as little as possible.
The advantage of working for one of the *big* fish, then, I guess. Customers who are that naive tend to be the ones who think that you absolutely *must* have a Dell printer if you've got a Dell computer, or HP with HP....
I worked tech. support for Compaq for 4 years. On the Canadian Bilingual queue, we did everything... printers, computers, laptops; only networking and servers were done at a different location. Not once did I ever have a call like you're describing. About the closest to that I ever got was in the early days of Windows XP... a customer had just bought a Compaq computer after literally throwing his brand new HP out the 3rd floor window. Why? Because HP tech. support couldn't get his printer working... they hadn't come up with XP drivers for it yet. The funny part? With my supervisor's permission, I gave it a "best effort", and told him to download the Windows 2000 drivers... they worked, and his computer, printer and all, was up and running in the time it took him to download them from the website. The *truly* funny part? Shortly thereafter we were bought out by HP and my job was moved to India. Ahh, Carly Fiorina, how we love you.... >.>
How the hell that ranks as Insightful, I have no clue... "not flying" isn't an option for some of us. And not bringing the laptop isn't an option, either. It's my primary link to all of my work; I don't even own or use a desktop computer any more. If I'm in Toronto on Friday and Houston on Monday, then three weeks later in Hyderabad, ultimately leaving on a Friday and back at work in Toronto on Monday... well, you know how I'm going to travel. Anything that can be done to speed my way through customs and immigration is worth it. It may sound like only a minute at either end of the x-ray machine to you, but multiply that by the number of travellers who bring a laptop through, it's a *huge* amount of wasted time. And that's not even counting the time it takes to run the bomb/narc sniffer over the laptop by the customs inspector.
Must be nice to have the time to drive, take the train, or take a boat wherever you go. *shrugs* Unless... you don't actually do a lot of travelling? Then again, if you do have the time to drive, take a train, or sail, then you probably aren't all that worried about an extra 5 minutes in customs.
we learn that in spite of his contributions to the open source community, Linus does not have the right to deny GPL status to anything. (yeah yeah, I know, it's a misleading headine... this *is* Slashdot after all) It's a software license. If the software developpers decide to release under the GPL or LGPL, then it's GPL software. Period. Whether or not the software is a shim for a binary blob that itself may or may not be proprietary, like NDISWrapper, is irrelevant. NDISWrapper, itself, is *not* closed source.
It's kinda like the Quake III engine. That's been released as open source, and there's an awful lot of games out there that make use of it. But it still relies on a binary blob that is itself rarely released as free. That doesn't make the engine itself any less free/open.
In the end, my opinion as a virologist is that stopping the spread of HIV, and continuing to develop a larger palette of inhibitors are the proper solutions to the HIV problem. If we treat the people who have been infected, and don't infect any more... HIV will not be a problem after 2 generations.
You'd be a good person to ask this one of, then.... is there any truth to the theory that over time, humans will develop a natural immunity to HIV in the same way that cats have largely developped immunity to Feline Leukemia and FIV?
Microsoft did NOT do "what any sane company would do"! Most sane companies do not deliberately engage in monopolist practices in order to cheat and delude their customers. Microsoft did. There is no argument about that... they have been CONVICTED many times now of doing just that, in both U.S. and European courts!
Sure they would. If they thought they could get away with it. Corporations are *not* benevolent. They're really only accountable to their stockholders, and will do anything they think they can get away with if it helps their bottom line. You should read your Adam Smith.
If higher security is the reason, wouldn't it be better to switch to Linux or OSX? Just asking.
Linux isn't automatically more secure. The only way to make something automatically more secure is to disconnect it from anything even remotely resembling a network, to limit physical access to the machine to one person (yourself), and to never install anything. The moment you allow the computer to communicate with other computers, and the moment you allow anybody else to use the computer, you have to start working hard to keep it secure.
With a competent sysadmin, *any* OS can be made secure, even Windows. The difference between Linux and older versions of Windows is that older versions of Windows have used a "Default Pass" security model. Things pass by security by default, and have to be explicitly forbidden. That's not the case in Vista. In Vista, it's "Default Deny", like Linux. Security is one of the few places where Vista really is significantly better than previous versions of Windows. Admittedly, the only systems I have that are running it are my HTPC and my mother's laptop (which hasn't actually been delivered yet, it's due today). But there *are* areas where Vista is significantly better than XP. You need to keep in mind the possibility that, just maybe, one of the main reasons that Windows is getting targetted by viruses is its market share and the fact that inexperienced users tend to avoid offerings from Linux. Compare the market share for a moment, why don't you.
The thing most of the people in this thread don't seem to understand is that Win2k was NT 5.0. XP was NT 5.1. Vista is NT 6.0. They dumped the entire kernel and started over from the ground up, focusing on security. Vista uses a completely different driver model, with virtually everything running in user mode. There's elements that I can't stand about it. Things that get immediately turned off. But there's a general rule in software: wait for the.1 release. They can't make marginal, small incremental upgrades when they're starting from scratch. They did a lot of things wrong, but they also did a lot of things right.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not but from a pure time wasting and proactive security standpoint, it makes perfect sense. I can't think of one site that uses flash for something that is actually productive or necessary to most core business functions. Sounds like an easy way to block the myriad video sites that pop up left and right.
Been to http://www.dell.com/ lately? Or any other vendor, for that matter? Sure, the site can be done without flash... but in a business where people make buying decisions based on how something is presented, with bonus points for being "sexy", having something like well-designed and well-implemented Flash applet on the website can make a *huge* difference to your bottom line.
You're making the mistake of thinking like an engineer, not a consumer.
That's a lot more typing. I often use a first-letter scheme as described (it's handy for systems that offer password hints, too: "Beetles" [sic] isn't giving too much away for the given password), but I'd hate to have to type the whole thing out every time.
Indeed... they actually recommend the first letter scheme at work.... personally, I am a linguist and I prefer to use an entire phrase from another language. Case in point, a few years back, after surviving a round of layoffs, my password came due. I picked Japanese to be the source language, and transliterized it into the Roman alphabet, substituting numbers which sounded the same as some of the syllables, and ended up with "Yasa4katta!" as my password. Most of my coworkers didn't speak Japanese... I'm at a new company and none of my coworkers speak Japanese (didn't survive the *next* round of layoffs 2 weeks later:P), so even if I tell them what it translates to, they will have a hard time figuring out what the password is. I've been known to use French, German, Spanish, Finnish, Latin, Greek, Japanese, and Gaelic passwords in the past. (that particular one would be read as "yah-sah-she-cat-tah". "Yasashikatta" translates to "It was easy", though a shorter, more casual form is more often used: "Yatta", which literally translates to "It's done", but carries a very similar idiomatic meaning. I used the longer word because "Yatta" was too short and didn't have any numeric subsitutions I could use:-))
Now I'm not suggesting that this 7-year old is going to be learning another language just so she can have a secure password... that's kind of like swatting a fly with a Buick: it'll get the job done, but there's much easier ways to do it. But maybe she should learn some of her favourite words in the foreign language or a couple of sentences and use those? Even something utterly basic, like "Je m'appelle killerbob", would probably offer the degree of security she wants... the idea being that if it's in a language other than the one the person who's trying to guess it is expecting, it's going to be much harder to guess. I could even tell you outright what my current password translates to, and you'd still have a hard time guessing which language it's in, and even if you did guess it, you'd have a hard time figuring out how I've misspelled it/which subsitutions I've made and which I haven't.
A fingerprint reader wouldn't work. Fingerprint reader software (such as the wonderfully open source ThinkFinger) map out a fingerprint by locating easily identifiable marks, such as swirls or dead-ends, and map their proximity to other easily identifiable marks. As this girl is seven its fair to assume that in a few more years her fingers will be twice their current size.
The fingerprint will be the same, but scaled up so all proximity will be lost.
The fingerprint readers we use in our computers at work read by proportional distance, not physical distance. If you define the distance between two key points at opposite ends of the finger as a distance of 100% and an angle of 0 degrees, the rest of the points are defined using those terms. So Point C may be at 23 degrees left, 15% distance, point D may be 16 degrees right, 4% distance, etc.
In that case, the fact that the finger grows larger over time makes no distance, because the points it's measuring are still in the same position, proportionally, just with a different scalar multiplier.
Err... I'm getting 7/1 from my cable provider for $35 CAD/month. It's consistently fast, they don't throttle it, they didn't even yell at me that month I downloaded a 56GB torrent (nor did they charge me overage, even though I'm supposed to only be 40GB/month)....
Depends on the market you're in. By European or Asian standards, even my connection is crap.
From what I hear, our best chances of finding life in our solar system is Europa. It's a giant ice ball, but beneath a thin ice shelf, there's thought to be an ocean very similar to Earth's ocean in chemistry, that's about 100km deep. Other major possibilities include Mars and Venus, both of whom have environments we've already found can support some Earth-born forms of life. We suspect Mars may have supported multi-cellular life in the past, but Europa has the best chances of supporting it today.
Seriously... Google them. Or somebody else at random. Show them how much information about them is already out there, and how easy it is to find. That'll convince them pretty quickly that they need to safeguard their information.
* How many CPU makers are out there today? 2. (Transmeta is dead).
3 that try for the mainstream (Intel, AMD, VIA), but MS also makes pared down versions of XP that run on embedded platforms, usually with CPUs by IBM, Motorola, or Conexant, though the 3 major players all have offerings in this family, too.
* How many companies make chipsets (north/southbridges) today? 4(?)
In mainstream computing, it's pretty much NVidia or ATI these days. But there's also offerings out there from all of the CPU manufacturers listed above, and probably several that I haven't thought of.
Here, you've got me. I can really only think of American Megatrends/AMI Bios. Literally every computer I've had for the last 10 years has had an AMI Bios, and I can't think of anybody else who still makes them. I'd be extremely surprised if the list of those who make BIOSes wouldn't include Motorola and IBM, though...
* Sound cards? 2 (Intel & Creative)
Realtek, SoundMax, just to name a few others. There are other manufacturers out there. Competition still exists.
* Expansion interfaces? 2 (PCI, PCI-Express)
Express Card/34, Express Card/54, PCMCIA/Cardbus, and AGP are all still available, and supported in Vista. To say nothing of expansion devices that can be connected via USB, IEEE1394, Serial, and Parallel ports. Just because it's external doesn't mean that it's not an expansion interface. Yes, PCMCIA is just a PCI bridge, and yes, Express Card is just a PCIe and USB 2.0 bridge, but they still have different controllers, and different sets of drivers to support.
Or a Vista counting problem. It couldn't figure out what comes after 0 so it couldn't move forward. After all if it takes 14 days to copy a gig of files one has to wonder about basic math inside of Vista.
I know you're being facetious, but it isn't nearly *that* slow.... it did, however, take about 8 hours to copy 580GB of MP3s from a pair of USB 2.0 hard drives to a Firewire 400 hard drive. *shrugs*
My Vista-based HTPC did its automatic update routine on Wednesday. Among the updates were updates for MS Office/MS Works (odd, because neither is installed on the HTPC... noticed the same with my XP-based laptop... that one actually does have Office 2003 installed, but still no MS Works, likewise my PC at work). Nowhere did it ask about, or offer, Vista SP1.
Unless MS has broken from its time-honoured tradition of releasing all of the monthly updates in a batch on the 2nd Tuesday of the month, I detect the faint aroma of bovine scat.
Except that RC1 was available on MSDN, but the actual public release of Vista SP1 isn't available on the site. Once a product is out of the beta phase, even MSDN subscribers have to wait until its official release in order to download/install it.
Nitpicking: PCI Express is not PCI-X. PCI-X was a derivative of the parallel PCI bus and never found in mainstream machines.
Nitpicking your nitpick... it's not worth pointing out that PCI-X is different from PCI Express unless you also point out that PCI Express is usually abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-E.
Try using the left analog controller for SimCity... much better, and more natural, than the D-Pad, because it controls your cursor like a mouse. Smoother, and you can move diagonally, which you can't do with the d-pad. Admittedly, it's only one example, but there are others in the library where the analog controller is better. Street Fighter is another example... that was a game that was originally designed for the arcade, and as such, originally designed around joysticks. The analog controller is much more natural in that context.
It's not for every game. The original Super Mario Bros. games, for example, are better with the D-Pad. The point, however, is that there's cases where the analog stick is a better choice, even outside of the N64 library. (Mario Kart and Occarina of Time are the only N64 games I've downloaded from that part of the library....)
That entire series was well designed for joysticks... MW4 had a great control scheme with one. I played that with a Logitech Wingman Force3D. Tons of fun. Very well-designed joystick. And they're still making and selling them.
Indeed... one of the benefits of having no work to do today... I was able to find the (un)official Dell ISO of Ubuntu 7.04, which included the drivers for everything. http://linux.dell.com/ if you're interested.
Among other things, it included a known issues wiki, with exactly the settings I need to put in to get the intel-hda driver loading properly. Since it's an ALSA thing, I can use the settings with *any* linux Distro. Happy geek. Looks like I have a project for this weekend.
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Not my worst by a long shot. But the closest I've ever had to the problem you initially said happened on such a frequent basis.... Idiot users happen all the time. I dealt with them on a daily basis; working tech. support for Compaq, later for various ISPs, then for Dell (XPS support). And it continued, when I moved into Dell's sales department, though it was a different kind of ignorance. Now I'm in logistics, and thankfully there isn't nearly as much of it, but even here I have to deal with people who don't realize that we deliver product by courrier... every time somebody orders something through the website and puts in a PO box instead of their civic address, we have to call the customer up and correct it. And that's to say nothing of the other problems we face at a logistical level.... *shrugs*
But I chalk it up to inexperience. Not stupidity. I know things you don't. You know things that I don't. That's all part of the game. At the end of the day, you simply don't need to know some of the stuff I know, because it's not part of your job.
I'm gonna let you in on a secret... it's something that far too few people who work Tech. Support realize: those people you're making fun of? They're the reason you have a job. You have a choice to make. The only way you're going to survive in tech. support, and better still, move beyond tech. support into upper levels of the organization, is to stop treating them like a burden, and start treating them as a blessing. If you don't, you're going to burn out.
Probably thought that the $40-50 difference in price was an increase, not a decrease. I'd have to check the exact pricing to be certain, but I think there's some play there. The Linux systems do tend to be lower spec than the Windows systems, but the logic behind that one is pretty easy: it's Linux. You don't need high end hardware to run it... it's zippier on stuff 2 generations old than the current version of Windows is on current generation hardware. And you're getting current generation hardware with it. Plus, it's unlikely that you're going to be running games, so you may not need an overpowered video card. Most of the people interested in Linux-based systems from Dell are interested in an e-mail/word processing machine, and so they're designed to fit that market. Those that want a Linux gaming machine will do what I did: buy* a high end system with the hardware you actually want, then reformat and install Linux.
* - or build, but I have stopped using desktops entirely, in favour of laptops. Sadly, nobody carries the pieces you need to build your own laptop around here.
The advantage of working for one of the *big* fish, then, I guess. Customers who are that naive tend to be the ones who think that you absolutely *must* have a Dell printer if you've got a Dell computer, or HP with HP....
I worked tech. support for Compaq for 4 years. On the Canadian Bilingual queue, we did everything... printers, computers, laptops; only networking and servers were done at a different location. Not once did I ever have a call like you're describing. About the closest to that I ever got was in the early days of Windows XP... a customer had just bought a Compaq computer after literally throwing his brand new HP out the 3rd floor window. Why? Because HP tech. support couldn't get his printer working... they hadn't come up with XP drivers for it yet. The funny part? With my supervisor's permission, I gave it a "best effort", and told him to download the Windows 2000 drivers... they worked, and his computer, printer and all, was up and running in the time it took him to download them from the website. The *truly* funny part? Shortly thereafter we were bought out by HP and my job was moved to India. Ahh, Carly Fiorina, how we love you.... >.>
Of course not. This is Slashdot. There's at least what, 5 or 6 Linux users here.
How the hell that ranks as Insightful, I have no clue... "not flying" isn't an option for some of us. And not bringing the laptop isn't an option, either. It's my primary link to all of my work; I don't even own or use a desktop computer any more. If I'm in Toronto on Friday and Houston on Monday, then three weeks later in Hyderabad, ultimately leaving on a Friday and back at work in Toronto on Monday... well, you know how I'm going to travel. Anything that can be done to speed my way through customs and immigration is worth it. It may sound like only a minute at either end of the x-ray machine to you, but multiply that by the number of travellers who bring a laptop through, it's a *huge* amount of wasted time. And that's not even counting the time it takes to run the bomb/narc sniffer over the laptop by the customs inspector.
Must be nice to have the time to drive, take the train, or take a boat wherever you go. *shrugs* Unless... you don't actually do a lot of travelling? Then again, if you do have the time to drive, take a train, or sail, then you probably aren't all that worried about an extra 5 minutes in customs.
we learn that in spite of his contributions to the open source community, Linus does not have the right to deny GPL status to anything. (yeah yeah, I know, it's a misleading headine... this *is* Slashdot after all) It's a software license. If the software developpers decide to release under the GPL or LGPL, then it's GPL software. Period. Whether or not the software is a shim for a binary blob that itself may or may not be proprietary, like NDISWrapper, is irrelevant. NDISWrapper, itself, is *not* closed source.
It's kinda like the Quake III engine. That's been released as open source, and there's an awful lot of games out there that make use of it. But it still relies on a binary blob that is itself rarely released as free. That doesn't make the engine itself any less free/open.
You'd be a good person to ask this one of, then.... is there any truth to the theory that over time, humans will develop a natural immunity to HIV in the same way that cats have largely developped immunity to Feline Leukemia and FIV?
Sure they would. If they thought they could get away with it. Corporations are *not* benevolent. They're really only accountable to their stockholders, and will do anything they think they can get away with if it helps their bottom line. You should read your Adam Smith.
Linux isn't automatically more secure. The only way to make something automatically more secure is to disconnect it from anything even remotely resembling a network, to limit physical access to the machine to one person (yourself), and to never install anything. The moment you allow the computer to communicate with other computers, and the moment you allow anybody else to use the computer, you have to start working hard to keep it secure.
With a competent sysadmin, *any* OS can be made secure, even Windows. The difference between Linux and older versions of Windows is that older versions of Windows have used a "Default Pass" security model. Things pass by security by default, and have to be explicitly forbidden. That's not the case in Vista. In Vista, it's "Default Deny", like Linux. Security is one of the few places where Vista really is significantly better than previous versions of Windows. Admittedly, the only systems I have that are running it are my HTPC and my mother's laptop (which hasn't actually been delivered yet, it's due today). But there *are* areas where Vista is significantly better than XP. You need to keep in mind the possibility that, just maybe, one of the main reasons that Windows is getting targetted by viruses is its market share and the fact that inexperienced users tend to avoid offerings from Linux. Compare the market share for a moment, why don't you.
The thing most of the people in this thread don't seem to understand is that Win2k was NT 5.0. XP was NT 5.1. Vista is NT 6.0. They dumped the entire kernel and started over from the ground up, focusing on security. Vista uses a completely different driver model, with virtually everything running in user mode. There's elements that I can't stand about it. Things that get immediately turned off. But there's a general rule in software: wait for the
Been to http://www.dell.com/ lately? Or any other vendor, for that matter? Sure, the site can be done without flash... but in a business where people make buying decisions based on how something is presented, with bonus points for being "sexy", having something like well-designed and well-implemented Flash applet on the website can make a *huge* difference to your bottom line.
You're making the mistake of thinking like an engineer, not a consumer.
Indeed... they actually recommend the first letter scheme at work.... personally, I am a linguist and I prefer to use an entire phrase from another language. Case in point, a few years back, after surviving a round of layoffs, my password came due. I picked Japanese to be the source language, and transliterized it into the Roman alphabet, substituting numbers which sounded the same as some of the syllables, and ended up with "Yasa4katta!" as my password. Most of my coworkers didn't speak Japanese... I'm at a new company and none of my coworkers speak Japanese (didn't survive the *next* round of layoffs 2 weeks later
Now I'm not suggesting that this 7-year old is going to be learning another language just so she can have a secure password... that's kind of like swatting a fly with a Buick: it'll get the job done, but there's much easier ways to do it. But maybe she should learn some of her favourite words in the foreign language or a couple of sentences and use those? Even something utterly basic, like "Je m'appelle killerbob", would probably offer the degree of security she wants... the idea being that if it's in a language other than the one the person who's trying to guess it is expecting, it's going to be much harder to guess. I could even tell you outright what my current password translates to, and you'd still have a hard time guessing which language it's in, and even if you did guess it, you'd have a hard time figuring out how I've misspelled it/which subsitutions I've made and which I haven't.
The fingerprint readers we use in our computers at work read by proportional distance, not physical distance. If you define the distance between two key points at opposite ends of the finger as a distance of 100% and an angle of 0 degrees, the rest of the points are defined using those terms. So Point C may be at 23 degrees left, 15% distance, point D may be 16 degrees right, 4% distance, etc.
In that case, the fact that the finger grows larger over time makes no distance, because the points it's measuring are still in the same position, proportionally, just with a different scalar multiplier.
Err... I'm getting 7/1 from my cable provider for $35 CAD/month. It's consistently fast, they don't throttle it, they didn't even yell at me that month I downloaded a 56GB torrent (nor did they charge me overage, even though I'm supposed to only be 40GB/month)....
Depends on the market you're in. By European or Asian standards, even my connection is crap.
McCarthyism.
It's not what they did, it's what they are.
From what I hear, our best chances of finding life in our solar system is Europa. It's a giant ice ball, but beneath a thin ice shelf, there's thought to be an ocean very similar to Earth's ocean in chemistry, that's about 100km deep. Other major possibilities include Mars and Venus, both of whom have environments we've already found can support some Earth-born forms of life. We suspect Mars may have supported multi-cellular life in the past, but Europa has the best chances of supporting it today.
Seriously... Google them. Or somebody else at random. Show them how much information about them is already out there, and how easy it is to find. That'll convince them pretty quickly that they need to safeguard their information.
3 that try for the mainstream (Intel, AMD, VIA), but MS also makes pared down versions of XP that run on embedded platforms, usually with CPUs by IBM, Motorola, or Conexant, though the 3 major players all have offerings in this family, too.
In mainstream computing, it's pretty much NVidia or ATI these days. But there's also offerings out there from all of the CPU manufacturers listed above, and probably several that I haven't thought of.
NVidia, ATI, Intel, S3, Matrox, VIA, Cirrus, IBM.... There's others, too....
Here, you've got me. I can really only think of American Megatrends/AMI Bios. Literally every computer I've had for the last 10 years has had an AMI Bios, and I can't think of anybody else who still makes them. I'd be extremely surprised if the list of those who make BIOSes wouldn't include Motorola and IBM, though...
Realtek, SoundMax, just to name a few others. There are other manufacturers out there. Competition still exists.
Express Card/34, Express Card/54, PCMCIA/Cardbus, and AGP are all still available, and supported in Vista. To say nothing of expansion devices that can be connected via USB, IEEE1394, Serial, and Parallel ports. Just because it's external doesn't mean that it's not an expansion interface. Yes, PCMCIA is just a PCI bridge, and yes, Express Card is just a PCIe and USB 2.0 bridge, but they still have different controllers, and different sets of drivers to support.
I know you're being facetious, but it isn't nearly *that* slow.... it did, however, take about 8 hours to copy 580GB of MP3s from a pair of USB 2.0 hard drives to a Firewire 400 hard drive. *shrugs*
My Vista-based HTPC did its automatic update routine on Wednesday. Among the updates were updates for MS Office/MS Works (odd, because neither is installed on the HTPC... noticed the same with my XP-based laptop... that one actually does have Office 2003 installed, but still no MS Works, likewise my PC at work). Nowhere did it ask about, or offer, Vista SP1.
Unless MS has broken from its time-honoured tradition of releasing all of the monthly updates in a batch on the 2nd Tuesday of the month, I detect the faint aroma of bovine scat.
Except that RC1 was available on MSDN, but the actual public release of Vista SP1 isn't available on the site. Once a product is out of the beta phase, even MSDN subscribers have to wait until its official release in order to download/install it.
Nitpicking your nitpick... it's not worth pointing out that PCI-X is different from PCI Express unless you also point out that PCI Express is usually abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-E.
Try using the left analog controller for SimCity... much better, and more natural, than the D-Pad, because it controls your cursor like a mouse. Smoother, and you can move diagonally, which you can't do with the d-pad. Admittedly, it's only one example, but there are others in the library where the analog controller is better. Street Fighter is another example... that was a game that was originally designed for the arcade, and as such, originally designed around joysticks. The analog controller is much more natural in that context.
It's not for every game. The original Super Mario Bros. games, for example, are better with the D-Pad. The point, however, is that there's cases where the analog stick is a better choice, even outside of the N64 library. (Mario Kart and Occarina of Time are the only N64 games I've downloaded from that part of the library....)
That entire series was well designed for joysticks... MW4 had a great control scheme with one. I played that with a Logitech Wingman Force3D. Tons of fun. Very well-designed joystick. And they're still making and selling them.
Nunchuck. And there's 2 on the "Classic Controller". Likewise, every GC controller (which can also be connected to the Wii) has 2 analog sticks.
And yes... I agree. They are joysticks.
Indeed... one of the benefits of having no work to do today... I was able to find the (un)official Dell ISO of Ubuntu 7.04, which included the drivers for everything. http://linux.dell.com/ if you're interested.
Among other things, it included a known issues wiki, with exactly the settings I need to put in to get the intel-hda driver loading properly. Since it's an ALSA thing, I can use the settings with *any* linux Distro. Happy geek. Looks like I have a project for this weekend.