Sadly, it just isn't easy enough to use for the common person. Nor is it widespread enough that even technical people would bother - even a lot of sysadmins don't touch it, even though it'd be easy for them to deploy.
We need to have it integraded into our clients in such a way that everyone would start using it. However, it'd be a lot easier to do that with IM than email as of now. You can have the client add the contact's key when the contact is added, and you can store it on a server side list so that it never has to be done again. It is this central authority that makes it easier to pull off, though the lack of significant spam volume in IM makes it less worthwhile to do.
Maybe Apple, Google, Yahoo, MS, etc can figure out a way to integrate it into the email experience in such a way that it'd take off. But I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. Nor would it solve the spam problem on its own, since spammers can sign email too, and can even start stealing the PGP keys from infected machines.
I think it is about time that some FOSS friendly company started making noise about MS patent violations, without specifying which ones are being violated. Make sure that customers don't feel any safer using MS software than they do using Linux.
Unfortunately, it seems that nobody wants to rock the boat like that, for fear of the brutal retaliation that MS would provide for them. And MS has already cross-licensed their IP portfolio with many of the companies that they payed off in the anti-trust lawsuits, so they've taken away that avenue of attack.
Red Hat and Google are the only ones I can think of right now. Red Hat would probably be crazy to try such a stunt, and I'm not sure they're big enough to scare MS or their big customers anyhow. Google has the motive (MS has basically outright stated they want to kill Google), but do they have the resources to fight MS in the IP arena? I'm not so sure.
I've heard from people looking to port ZFS to the BSDs that it is a very difficult port, due to how tangled up it is with the operating system (Solaris) itself, and how much ZFS does for itself (volume managment, RAID, etc).
On one hand, this gives it some serious advantages when run on Solaris 10. But it also makes it difficult to port. I wonder if that is partially responsible for delaying OS X Leopard?
If I recall, there were 3 things that GPLv3 was originially going to accomplish, all of which had to do with ways people were perceived to be abusing GPLv2:
- address patents and how they may affect distribution of code - close the TiVo problem of tying hardware to a software revision (where people can't truly modify their own GPL code on their own device) - close the ISP loophole where you aren't really "distributing" your code, so you don't have to share it
We mostly hear about patents, and we heard a bit about the hardware issue when Linux objected to a GPLv3 revision. Not so much makes the news about the ISP loophole. I am not sure what the latest draft of the license does in this regard.
Thanks to virtual machine technology, we will never truly have to upgrade for hardware reasons. As long as some other OS supports the hardware, we can run Windows XP in the VM.
Just think of how long Windows 98 has stuck around, despite the lack of new drivers and software support. And now with VMs, we could probably keep running it, and see it run quite fact actually compared to the hardware of its day (especially once 3D accelleration is added to VMs).
I think the upgrade path for those wanting to stay on Windows XP could be a move to Mac OS X with Parallels, or Linux with Parallels/VMware/etc. Or possibly even just Windows XP runnning on top of a thin OS layer that provides just the VM.
Though it is the lack of software support that will eventually get you, if you care about security patches and suport contracts. Though a large amount of new software still works on Windows 98 even today, I'm not sure that it has a supported browser anymore, now that Firefox will require 2K/XP or later. It still is handy for a VM though - a single user OS like Win98 that doesn't have a lot of network services is actually not that insecure when it is just a VM inside a real OS.
I think WinXP isn't quite as suited for that sort of task right now, but there is a lot of development work going into XP and VMs, so we could see XP hand on even longer than 98 has.
I think this has more to do with the fact that "Intel Inside" and such have been ingrained in people from Intel's past advertising. The general public is much more likely to have heard of Intel than AMD, which means AMD has a much greater need to get their name out there than Intel.
Sounds a heck of a lot like DRM. Though again, the problem may not be Apple as much as their industry partners requesting it.
Maybe the DRM on the iPhone would suit Apple just fine if they get a dominant position in the market (like it does with iTunes/iPod), and they have the bonus that they can pass the blame to others for their practices.
Hard to say who is requiring it to be locked down, and even whether it will even be locked down, at this point. But the complaint that it is more locked down than an MS SmartPhone could very well end up being valid.
I dunno, I see it more as a move to make FireFox more useful on Windows than it is on Linux, and to make it harder to move from Windows to Linux. Kind of like Visual J++ gave Java features in Windows that didn't exist on other platforms, until Sun stopped that.
Though the point about.wmv being more important than IE in the MS grand scheme is probably fair. They want.wmv and.wma to be able to compete with Adobe Flash and Apple's formats in the media space.
And of course this is a rather minor move anyhow, considering how many other options there are for playing.wmv, both inside and outside of the browser. Only people with DRM infested files are locked into the MS platform.
The we-must-keep-our-operating-system-dominance department was likely behind this more than anyone. This is the department that ultimately runs Microsoft.
And now they can claim that Windows Media is cross platform - works great in both IE on Windows and Firefox on Windows.
Those are the only platforms that really matter, right?
And in the case of Casino Royale, and probably others, you should be able to get a better than DVD quality rip on the net at some point, due to the Blu-Ray release of the same movies. Not sure if Blu-Ray rips are showing up yet or not though.
Yeah, but back in the "race to 1GHz" days, the only way the AMD Thunderbirds were keeping up to the P3 chips were by pumping out absurd abounts of heat. Especially around the time of the 1.2GHz Thunderbird and such. But the AMD chips did generally get better performance for much less money, if you didn't mind the space heater.
Then Intel came out with P4. What a mistake that was. Now you could get an Intel space heater that performed worse per clock cycle for more money than the AMD chips. Not a surprise that AMD started to get serious attention at that point, and further hype when they got x86_64 and hypertransport out the door while Intel was still riding Itanic.
The Core architecture certainly has helped Intel regain some respect, and finally both companies are ending the stupidity that involved cranking up the heat, power consumption, and GHz.
Your point that staying away from AMD for DRM reasons makes no sense is still valid though - Intel talked about "trusted computing" earlier and more often than AMD. I'm not sure that either of them are the bad guys in this battle though.
Too late for which version of the JVM? I've been told that 1.5.0 or later makes things nicer on the client side. Yeah, it may be more of a mindshare thing than a technology hurdle at this point. Jave is "old" and "slow", while AJAX is "the wave of the future". At least around here. And.NET is the next step on the dominant platform for all the Visual Studio developers, ever since Sun and MS had their spat over Java.
Others have made compilers and interpreters for other languages that work within the Java platform. I see at least Lisp, BASIC, Logo, Prolog, Smalltalk, PHP, Forth, ECMAScript (aka JS), and even COBOL, C#, and assembly language. Yeah, JRuby and Jython as well. And the latest JVM apparently made life easier for scripting languages.
What is missing is the publicity and the "officialness" that C++/C#/ASP/VB have on the Microsoft CLI. Microsoft has a big advantage in the mindshare game, given that all of the common languages and developper tools are provided and supported by MS in Visual Studio. Those that aren't provided by default, like Java for the MS CLI, end up with much less mindshare and usage.
On the Java side, there are many different providers for all these pieces. This is great for competition and innovation, but it also makes it harder to market as one package. Maybe Sun's Java going open source will help adoption somewhat. At least then the JVM could become a standard part of Linux distros and maybe even part of the Mozilla project.
I just think it is going to be hard to get people to think of Java as the wave of the future again. And I think that is what'd be needed to compete with either AJAX or.NET on the desktop, since this "cool" factor seems to attract a lot of developers and new applications. Applets and Jave Web Start were maybe ahead of their time, and now have become "uncool". Or perhaps crushed by MS is what really happened, just like Netscape and other popular cross platform development options from the time.
Guess I'm just rambling now though. Sun and the community seem to be moving things along quite nicely even without all of the hype.
I do really wish that these methods had become more popular. Cross platform desktop applications with no installation required and automatic updatablility are nice.
Of course Java Applets were a bit slow and bloated for the old Pentium 200MHz and the like back in the day. Even now, it is a bit heavier than what would be necessary in a browser, though some sort of standard sandboxed runtime built in would be good.
Java Web Start would've probably taken off if client side Java were just a bit better (mostly needed to be better on Windows to succeed). The ability to have a desktop application presented as a URL in the browser is a nice tie in for the web folks, even though it'd actually run outside the browser.
I'd be great if these were improved and made a comeback, but it appears that once a technology fails to gain traction, you need something new and shiny to replace it, even if the new stuff is only better in some ways and way worse in others. AJAX is certainly trendy, but running Java and other languages on the JVM and Java Web Start would be much more functional, and could be made to be as seamless if people at Sun and elsewhere actually had worked on it.
Maybe it'll happen now that Sun is letting others have at the code to some degree, but it is probably too late for the JVM to get real traction on the client side. Maybe they need to take a cue from MS and port C++, PHP, Javascript, etc to one unified runtime (like C++, ASP.NET, and VB were done for the CLI). Heck, C# and.NET are at least partially standards - they could swallow their pride and put some of the MS/Mono stuff on the JVM too.
If it weren't for the bandwidth issues, I imagine online stores would go with something like FLAC or lossless AAC for all of their files, and have a client program transcode for the specific player being used.
Since MP3 is sadly becoming a legal mess, this may be the only somewhat safe way to support mp3 players at all.
Though if the labels and/or technology companies really want to see a music standard, they'd just buy all the rights to mp3 and make it royalty free. The up front cost would be big, but it'd probably save a lot of headache in the long run.
Honestly, I just found XP to be the most annoying and "in the way" OS out there. Linux may take a bit of work to get going on occassion, but it stays out of your way when you want to do work. OS X is braindead easy to get going and doesn't annoy the piss out of you by default either. No need to turn off all sorts of "features" to keep sane.
That said, a customized XP is also a useable desktop, especially given all the FOSS software out there that runs on Windows. It may not be my favorite choise of OS, but it can be made to work with some effort. But for me, why would I put in the effort of customizing XP and installing a bunch of 3rd party stuff just to get the most insecure desktop on the market? It would work, but why bother? The only reason to do so would be software that only runs on Windows; and for me, there is nothing there that I can't live without.
That was my first impression of XP as well, or at least some of what you describe applies.
Of course it isn't quite as bad now that I know how to turn off all the useless crap that supposedly made XP better. By the time that most power users are done tweaking XP, it isn't that far off of Win2K anymore, which by the way, I think you'd like a heck of a lot better than XP.
The one (only) place I have liked XP more than '98/2K/Linux has been on laptops. Part of that is because the vendor has a lot of Windows specific software, but part of it is just that XP handles the power features and other laptop issues a bit better. Though hibernation is hit and miss - it is great on some models, and useless on others. I think OS X is the best here, but of course that limits you to one hardware vendor.
If you love Win98 and hate XP/Vista, you may want to consider running something like Linux and then running Win98 in a virtual machine (Win4Lin works great for 98, and there are plenty of other options). Modern hardware is plenty powerful enouth to run the VM and Win98 at good speeds (that is the nice thing about having an OS that doesn't need tons of resources). The other option would be to downgrade to Win2K, but unfortunately vendor support is pretty much done for that OS too. Too bad, because 2K was a great blend of the 98 interface we were used to, with the stability of NT. Unfortunatlely it also had the security of NT...
Yet most people in Saskatchewan would bitch about how behind the times the province is for not going along with the idiocy that is DST.
Any oil companies based in Alberta (which observes DST) just have their Saskatchewan employees go to work an hour earlier in the summer. Which proves it really isn't that hard to change your business hours to accomodate the season.
I think this is a case where Saskatchewan is so far "behind the times" that they may be more "modern" than everyone else. With the 9-5 workday losing significance all the time, DST is already becoming less and less relevant anyhow. It will likely continue to be less relevant until it is finally abolished. Hopefully Saskatchewan doesn't decide to adopt it right before it becomes totally obsolete.
As you said, I think Saskatchewan has it right, and I hope that they don't change it just to be like everyone else. Because in this instance, what everyone else is doing doesn't make sense anymore.
Yeah, not having save points at all would make a hell of a difference. If I recall correctly, loading a game took you to the beginning of the level you saved on.
You could also find your dead turtles on at least one of the levels, and free them. That obviously came in handy later on.
I wonder if the PC version was easier or something? I think it may have added save points that the NES version did not have. I remember beating the PC version - it wasn't easy, but it wasn't as hard as people are making the NES version sound.
I remember that it was also released for Amiga and Commodore, on top of the NES, IBM and Tandy releases. I actually have the box for it still too. On the box, the turtles all have a red mask and belt, instead of the 4 colors you see in the cartoon. Though in the game they have their "normal" TV colors.
Specifications: IBM PC/Tandy 1000 & 100% IBM Compatibles 512K EGA CGA/Hercules 640K/Tandy 16 Color For one player 5.25"/3.5" Disks (Version 2.0) Joystick Recommended
The blurb is pretty good too:
Fresh from the classic comics come heroes in a half shell! (TM)
Obsessed by revenge, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (R) are out to rescue the lovely April O'Neil (TM), who's been captured by SHREDDER (TM) - a maniac more menacing than an army of mind altered Bruce Lees.
And it continues on from there... (however, I'm much too lazy to type it)
No, but thanks to the US government, we eat and drink a lot of "high fructose corn syrup" in our food products, instead of using actual sugar cane (which tastes better and is healthier).
Apparently using it as a poor alternative to good sweeteners isn't enough - now we'll use it as a poor alternative to efficient fuels as well. Or maybe not, as it seems that the support isn't there after all. Maybe we can start putting real sugar back into our food sometime too.
NBC already has their own content available on nbc.com for viewing, and they continue to take their content, such as SNL skits, down from YouTube. I think that is foolish, considering the only people who go to NBC.com are probably already viewers of NBC, so such clips do not expand their audience. But I guess that is their choice.
But how could a new NBC-Tube possibly work? Why would anyone choose to post their content there instead of YouTube? NBC doesn't want to work with YouTube, why would the community want to work with NBC and add content to their walled garden?
The only thing NBC-Tube could offer over YouTube is NBC/NewsCorp clips that aren't permitted on YouTube. But they don't need the users help to populate NBC-Tube with those, as they already own the content. I'm not surre what the point would be in encouraging users to post clips of shows you already own to a "community" video site you run, when you're already showing the full show online in some cases.
NBC-Tube is likely destined to fail as a user video sharing community, as it serves no purpose and has no attraction to users in that space. It may become the replacement for the NBC.com video site, but that is about it. If NBC wants their videos on a "cool" community site, they'll have to work with one of those sites. Starting a new one that you clearly have ownership of won't encourage a community. Buying into or parterning with an existing one without affecting its operations may have a shot of succeeding.
It would seem to make more sense for the vendors to have a LiveCD version of Windows to boot and test with, instead of assuming that you'll never modify your hard drive. For those who actually keep Windows and use it, their setup would hardly be "factory" anyhow.
If you're going to require an untouched install for warranty, then you'd better be the ones providing it, either via a ROM chip, a LiveCD, or through a seperate recover partition that buyers are instructed not to wipe (or else warranty is void). In which case you should also state the "usable" hard disk space, not the total, when selling the machine.
Expecting people to not actually write to their hard drive, therefore not using the system at all, is a pretty stupid requirement for hardware warranty anyhow. And is almost certainly illegal in most juristictions.
Parking may not be a big issue if you can have your car drop you off, then go find itself a parking spot. Doesn't matter if it takes a long time to find a spot, and has to park a ways away, because you're already at work (or wherever your destination is).
And as someone else mentioned, taxis and public transit may become more viable if it were tied into such a system. Your car/taxi may just have to take you to the nearest high capacity train or bus stop.
Transporation really could be revolutionized with a number of changes, but they are always hard to make when the infrastructure is already built for another model.
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Sadly, it just isn't easy enough to use for the common person. Nor is it widespread enough that even technical people would bother - even a lot of sysadmins don't touch it, even though it'd be easy for them to deploy.
We need to have it integraded into our clients in such a way that everyone would start using it. However, it'd be a lot easier to do that with IM than email as of now. You can have the client add the contact's key when the contact is added, and you can store it on a server side list so that it never has to be done again. It is this central authority that makes it easier to pull off, though the lack of significant spam volume in IM makes it less worthwhile to do.
Maybe Apple, Google, Yahoo, MS, etc can figure out a way to integrate it into the email experience in such a way that it'd take off. But I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. Nor would it solve the spam problem on its own, since spammers can sign email too, and can even start stealing the PGP keys from infected machines.
I think it is about time that some FOSS friendly company started making noise about MS patent violations, without specifying which ones are being violated. Make sure that customers don't feel any safer using MS software than they do using Linux.
Unfortunately, it seems that nobody wants to rock the boat like that, for fear of the brutal retaliation that MS would provide for them. And MS has already cross-licensed their IP portfolio with many of the companies that they payed off in the anti-trust lawsuits, so they've taken away that avenue of attack.
Red Hat and Google are the only ones I can think of right now. Red Hat would probably be crazy to try such a stunt, and I'm not sure they're big enough to scare MS or their big customers anyhow. Google has the motive (MS has basically outright stated they want to kill Google), but do they have the resources to fight MS in the IP arena? I'm not so sure.
I've heard from people looking to port ZFS to the BSDs that it is a very difficult port, due to how tangled up it is with the operating system (Solaris) itself, and how much ZFS does for itself (volume managment, RAID, etc).
On one hand, this gives it some serious advantages when run on Solaris 10. But it also makes it difficult to port. I wonder if that is partially responsible for delaying OS X Leopard?
Especially when Nina was never actually found. There is no hard evidence that she is even dead, though it does appear to be very likely.
It would be surprising if Hans gets convicted given the lack of a body, and the emergence of another suspect.
If I recall, there were 3 things that GPLv3 was originially going to accomplish, all of which had to do with ways people were perceived to be abusing GPLv2:
- address patents and how they may affect distribution of code
- close the TiVo problem of tying hardware to a software revision (where people can't truly modify their own GPL code on their own device)
- close the ISP loophole where you aren't really "distributing" your code, so you don't have to share it
We mostly hear about patents, and we heard a bit about the hardware issue when Linux objected to a GPLv3 revision. Not so much makes the news about the ISP loophole. I am not sure what the latest draft of the license does in this regard.
Thanks to virtual machine technology, we will never truly have to upgrade for hardware reasons. As long as some other OS supports the hardware, we can run Windows XP in the VM.
Just think of how long Windows 98 has stuck around, despite the lack of new drivers and software support. And now with VMs, we could probably keep running it, and see it run quite fact actually compared to the hardware of its day (especially once 3D accelleration is added to VMs).
I think the upgrade path for those wanting to stay on Windows XP could be a move to Mac OS X with Parallels, or Linux with Parallels/VMware/etc. Or possibly even just Windows XP runnning on top of a thin OS layer that provides just the VM.
Though it is the lack of software support that will eventually get you, if you care about security patches and suport contracts. Though a large amount of new software still works on Windows 98 even today, I'm not sure that it has a supported browser anymore, now that Firefox will require 2K/XP or later. It still is handy for a VM though - a single user OS like Win98 that doesn't have a lot of network services is actually not that insecure when it is just a VM inside a real OS.
I think WinXP isn't quite as suited for that sort of task right now, but there is a lot of development work going into XP and VMs, so we could see XP hand on even longer than 98 has.
I think this has more to do with the fact that "Intel Inside" and such have been ingrained in people from Intel's past advertising. The general public is much more likely to have heard of Intel than AMD, which means AMD has a much greater need to get their name out there than Intel.
Sounds a heck of a lot like DRM. Though again, the problem may not be Apple as much as their industry partners requesting it.
Maybe the DRM on the iPhone would suit Apple just fine if they get a dominant position in the market (like it does with iTunes/iPod), and they have the bonus that they can pass the blame to others for their practices.
Hard to say who is requiring it to be locked down, and even whether it will even be locked down, at this point. But the complaint that it is more locked down than an MS SmartPhone could very well end up being valid.
I dunno, I see it more as a move to make FireFox more useful on Windows than it is on Linux, and to make it harder to move from Windows to Linux. Kind of like Visual J++ gave Java features in Windows that didn't exist on other platforms, until Sun stopped that.
.wmv being more important than IE in the MS grand scheme is probably fair. They want .wmv and .wma to be able to compete with Adobe Flash and Apple's formats in the media space.
.wmv, both inside and outside of the browser. Only people with DRM infested files are locked into the MS platform.
Though the point about
And of course this is a rather minor move anyhow, considering how many other options there are for playing
The we-must-keep-our-operating-system-dominance department was likely behind this more than anyone. This is the department that ultimately runs Microsoft.
And now they can claim that Windows Media is cross platform - works great in both IE on Windows and Firefox on Windows.
Those are the only platforms that really matter, right?
And in the case of Casino Royale, and probably others, you should be able to get a better than DVD quality rip on the net at some point, due to the Blu-Ray release of the same movies. Not sure if Blu-Ray rips are showing up yet or not though.
Yeah, but back in the "race to 1GHz" days, the only way the AMD Thunderbirds were keeping up to the P3 chips were by pumping out absurd abounts of heat. Especially around the time of the 1.2GHz Thunderbird and such. But the AMD chips did generally get better performance for much less money, if you didn't mind the space heater.
Then Intel came out with P4. What a mistake that was. Now you could get an Intel space heater that performed worse per clock cycle for more money than the AMD chips. Not a surprise that AMD started to get serious attention at that point, and further hype when they got x86_64 and hypertransport out the door while Intel was still riding Itanic.
The Core architecture certainly has helped Intel regain some respect, and finally both companies are ending the stupidity that involved cranking up the heat, power consumption, and GHz.
Your point that staying away from AMD for DRM reasons makes no sense is still valid though - Intel talked about "trusted computing" earlier and more often than AMD. I'm not sure that either of them are the bad guys in this battle though.
What is missing is the publicity and the "officialness" that C++/C#/ASP/VB have on the Microsoft CLI. Microsoft has a big advantage in the mindshare game, given that all of the common languages and developper tools are provided and supported by MS in Visual Studio. Those that aren't provided by default, like Java for the MS CLI, end up with much less mindshare and usage.
On the Java side, there are many different providers for all these pieces. This is great for competition and innovation, but it also makes it harder to market as one package. Maybe Sun's Java going open source will help adoption somewhat. At least then the JVM could become a standard part of Linux distros and maybe even part of the Mozilla project.
I just think it is going to be hard to get people to think of Java as the wave of the future again. And I think that is what'd be needed to compete with either AJAX or
Guess I'm just rambling now though. Sun and the community seem to be moving things along quite nicely even without all of the hype.
I do really wish that these methods had become more popular. Cross platform desktop applications with no installation required and automatic updatablility are nice.
.NET are at least partially standards - they could swallow their pride and put some of the MS/Mono stuff on the JVM too.
Of course Java Applets were a bit slow and bloated for the old Pentium 200MHz and the like back in the day. Even now, it is a bit heavier than what would be necessary in a browser, though some sort of standard sandboxed runtime built in would be good.
Java Web Start would've probably taken off if client side Java were just a bit better (mostly needed to be better on Windows to succeed). The ability to have a desktop application presented as a URL in the browser is a nice tie in for the web folks, even though it'd actually run outside the browser.
I'd be great if these were improved and made a comeback, but it appears that once a technology fails to gain traction, you need something new and shiny to replace it, even if the new stuff is only better in some ways and way worse in others. AJAX is certainly trendy, but running Java and other languages on the JVM and Java Web Start would be much more functional, and could be made to be as seamless if people at Sun and elsewhere actually had worked on it.
Maybe it'll happen now that Sun is letting others have at the code to some degree, but it is probably too late for the JVM to get real traction on the client side. Maybe they need to take a cue from MS and port C++, PHP, Javascript, etc to one unified runtime (like C++, ASP.NET, and VB were done for the CLI). Heck, C# and
If it weren't for the bandwidth issues, I imagine online stores would go with something like FLAC or lossless AAC for all of their files, and have a client program transcode for the specific player being used.
Since MP3 is sadly becoming a legal mess, this may be the only somewhat safe way to support mp3 players at all.
Though if the labels and/or technology companies really want to see a music standard, they'd just buy all the rights to mp3 and make it royalty free. The up front cost would be big, but it'd probably save a lot of headache in the long run.
Honestly, I just found XP to be the most annoying and "in the way" OS out there. Linux may take a bit of work to get going on occassion, but it stays out of your way when you want to do work. OS X is braindead easy to get going and doesn't annoy the piss out of you by default either. No need to turn off all sorts of "features" to keep sane.
That said, a customized XP is also a useable desktop, especially given all the FOSS software out there that runs on Windows. It may not be my favorite choise of OS, but it can be made to work with some effort. But for me, why would I put in the effort of customizing XP and installing a bunch of 3rd party stuff just to get the most insecure desktop on the market? It would work, but why bother? The only reason to do so would be software that only runs on Windows; and for me, there is nothing there that I can't live without.
That was my first impression of XP as well, or at least some of what you describe applies.
Of course it isn't quite as bad now that I know how to turn off all the useless crap that supposedly made XP better. By the time that most power users are done tweaking XP, it isn't that far off of Win2K anymore, which by the way, I think you'd like a heck of a lot better than XP.
The one (only) place I have liked XP more than '98/2K/Linux has been on laptops. Part of that is because the vendor has a lot of Windows specific software, but part of it is just that XP handles the power features and other laptop issues a bit better. Though hibernation is hit and miss - it is great on some models, and useless on others. I think OS X is the best here, but of course that limits you to one hardware vendor.
If you love Win98 and hate XP/Vista, you may want to consider running something like Linux and then running Win98 in a virtual machine (Win4Lin works great for 98, and there are plenty of other options). Modern hardware is plenty powerful enouth to run the VM and Win98 at good speeds (that is the nice thing about having an OS that doesn't need tons of resources). The other option would be to downgrade to Win2K, but unfortunately vendor support is pretty much done for that OS too. Too bad, because 2K was a great blend of the 98 interface we were used to, with the stability of NT. Unfortunatlely it also had the security of NT...
Yet most people in Saskatchewan would bitch about how behind the times the province is for not going along with the idiocy that is DST.
Any oil companies based in Alberta (which observes DST) just have their Saskatchewan employees go to work an hour earlier in the summer. Which proves it really isn't that hard to change your business hours to accomodate the season.
I think this is a case where Saskatchewan is so far "behind the times" that they may be more "modern" than everyone else. With the 9-5 workday losing significance all the time, DST is already becoming less and less relevant anyhow. It will likely continue to be less relevant until it is finally abolished. Hopefully Saskatchewan doesn't decide to adopt it right before it becomes totally obsolete.
As you said, I think Saskatchewan has it right, and I hope that they don't change it just to be like everyone else. Because in this instance, what everyone else is doing doesn't make sense anymore.
Yeah, not having save points at all would make a hell of a difference. If I recall correctly, loading a game took you to the beginning of the level you saved on.
You could also find your dead turtles on at least one of the levels, and free them. That obviously came in handy later on.
I wonder if the PC version was easier or something? I think it may have added save points that the NES version did not have. I remember beating the PC version - it wasn't easy, but it wasn't as hard as people are making the NES version sound.
I remember that it was also released for Amiga and Commodore, on top of the NES, IBM and Tandy releases. I actually have the box for it still too. On the box, the turtles all have a red mask and belt, instead of the 4 colors you see in the cartoon. Though in the game they have their "normal" TV colors.
Specifications:
IBM PC/Tandy 1000 & 100% IBM Compatibles
512K EGA
CGA/Hercules
640K/Tandy 16 Color
For one player
5.25"/3.5" Disks (Version 2.0)
Joystick Recommended
The blurb is pretty good too:
Fresh from the classic comics come heroes in a half shell! (TM)
Obsessed by revenge, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (R) are out to rescue the lovely April O'Neil (TM), who's been captured by SHREDDER (TM) - a maniac more menacing than an army of mind altered Bruce Lees.
And it continues on from there... (however, I'm much too lazy to type it)
No one actually eats corn!
No, but thanks to the US government, we eat and drink a lot of "high fructose corn syrup" in our food products, instead of using actual sugar cane (which tastes better and is healthier).
Apparently using it as a poor alternative to good sweeteners isn't enough - now we'll use it as a poor alternative to efficient fuels as well. Or maybe not, as it seems that the support isn't there after all. Maybe we can start putting real sugar back into our food sometime too.
NBC already has their own content available on nbc.com for viewing, and they continue to take their content, such as SNL skits, down from YouTube. I think that is foolish, considering the only people who go to NBC.com are probably already viewers of NBC, so such clips do not expand their audience. But I guess that is their choice.
But how could a new NBC-Tube possibly work? Why would anyone choose to post their content there instead of YouTube? NBC doesn't want to work with YouTube, why would the community want to work with NBC and add content to their walled garden?
The only thing NBC-Tube could offer over YouTube is NBC/NewsCorp clips that aren't permitted on YouTube. But they don't need the users help to populate NBC-Tube with those, as they already own the content. I'm not surre what the point would be in encouraging users to post clips of shows you already own to a "community" video site you run, when you're already showing the full show online in some cases.
NBC-Tube is likely destined to fail as a user video sharing community, as it serves no purpose and has no attraction to users in that space. It may become the replacement for the NBC.com video site, but that is about it. If NBC wants their videos on a "cool" community site, they'll have to work with one of those sites. Starting a new one that you clearly have ownership of won't encourage a community. Buying into or parterning with an existing one without affecting its operations may have a shot of succeeding.
It would seem to make more sense for the vendors to have a LiveCD version of Windows to boot and test with, instead of assuming that you'll never modify your hard drive. For those who actually keep Windows and use it, their setup would hardly be "factory" anyhow.
If you're going to require an untouched install for warranty, then you'd better be the ones providing it, either via a ROM chip, a LiveCD, or through a seperate recover partition that buyers are instructed not to wipe (or else warranty is void). In which case you should also state the "usable" hard disk space, not the total, when selling the machine.
Expecting people to not actually write to their hard drive, therefore not using the system at all, is a pretty stupid requirement for hardware warranty anyhow. And is almost certainly illegal in most juristictions.
Parking may not be a big issue if you can have your car drop you off, then go find itself a parking spot. Doesn't matter if it takes a long time to find a spot, and has to park a ways away, because you're already at work (or wherever your destination is).
And as someone else mentioned, taxis and public transit may become more viable if it were tied into such a system. Your car/taxi may just have to take you to the nearest high capacity train or bus stop.
Transporation really could be revolutionized with a number of changes, but they are always hard to make when the infrastructure is already built for another model.
Heh, I knew there had to be a silver lining somewhere.