When the enthalpy of Satan's domain is reduced to the point where dihydrogen oxide becomes solid, perhaps?
Seriously, I don't know. But do you really think that asking a subset of Slashdot is going to be any more informative than the officially maintained FAQs?
What makes you think that I'd ever recommend a softmodem over a hardware one? If you're talking modems then the choice, as I see it, isn't between a generic hardware-based modem and a name-brand softmodem, it's between a generic hardware-based modem and a name-brand hardware-based one too: I always like to compare apples with apples.
Yes, the performance of a generic hardware-based modem might be identical or even superior to a name-brand hardware-based one at the time of purchase but, as I pointed out, what happens if the device breaks down or if you later decide to change operating system is important too. With a name-brand purchase, you're not going to struggle as much to get proper technical support and finding drivers for newer OSes is a lot easier too.
To give you an example I have a close friend whose mother bought a generic modem that cost £25 when rather than the recognisable brand model that I recommended for £40. When she wanted to upgrade to running the latest version of Windows and take advantage of the V.90 standard that was emerging at the time she couldn't (or rather, I couldn't) find the drivers or flash the modem to use the latest standard because the manufacturer was impossible to track down (and the literature that was originally provided with the modem was very basic, to say the least).
End result? After too much time wasted trying to find solutions that probably didn't exist in the first place she finally opted to buy a new modem, which this time cost more than the price of the first one. However, if she had bought the modem that I had recommended in the first place not only would she have saved money in the long run but she would have saved herself, my friend and me many fruitless hours trying to achieve the impossible.
Now I don't know about you but my time is valuable to me. Those wasted hours are lost to me and I'm not getting them back. All because someone who obviously didn't know as much as they thought they did told her that "modems all the same".
My motto when it comes to buying hardware, especially when it comes to hardware that I'm recommending for other (usually less technically-adept) people is to buy a decent product from a good brand.
No-name modems, video cards, network adapters, etc might seem like a bargain but when you run into any kind of problem, or when you come to changing OS, then a no-name product is going to leave you up shit creak without a paddle virtually every single time.
Providing tech support to friends and relatives is one thing, providing tech support for a cheap, near-unsupported part is another thing altogether. If for no reason other than I don't want to piss off people I care about, I always make sure that I have them buying with reliability rather than false value in mind, and if that means I take the extra time necessary to research exactly what they need and handpick the product that they should buy then that's what I'll do.
Have a look at the latest Philips LCD models, especially their Pixel Plus and Pixel Plus 2 designs. Simply put, they're stunning. Better pictures than most CRT televisions, in fact. And direct sunlight doesn't faze them at all.
I almost bought four CDs yesterday as part of a "buy 4 for £20" promotion in a branch of HMV. One of the CDs, an album by Ultravox originally recorded in the early 1980s, was DRM-locked. There was no other CD that I was remotely interested in the offer and I wasn't going to buy a CD that I couldn't listen to freely (my PC with Winamp or my Palm Tungsten E is how I listen to my CDs) so I left the store empty-handed.
End result of the DRM: the non-sale of four CDs. The crazy thing here is the DRM was on an album that hasn't been in any kind of music chart for over twenty years, and anyone who's likely to want it either owns it already or would be willing to pay for it. Certainly, it's not the kind of album that would be downloaded by a lot of people even if it were to be ripped and made available by someone on a P2P service.
In other words, by putting copy "protection" mechanisms on a CD that really doesn't benefit from it the record company has lost a sale and the record industry has lost four. And who knows what else I would have bought if I hadn't been disgusted enough to walk out of the store without looking at another thing?
You could argue that DRM isn't an issue for most of the music-buying public but, as the ownership of PC and MP3 players increases, the public's awareness of these blocks on their usage will increase, and sooner or later that will translate into fewer purchases of DRMed titles.
Earth to music industry: you're shooting yourself in the foot with both barrels. Stop before it's too late.
Uh, most of can spell perfectly well, thank you very much, it's the 16 year-old kids who've got by using "leet" speak that have difficulty spelling the simplest of words.
By the way, not being American, we prefer being "civilised" to being "civilized".
What's really ironic is that the above review brings up the spelling and grammar of the book as an issue - "much of the text is awkwardly phrased, and dotted with avoidable errors in spelling or diction" - yet this appears only a few paragraphs after the line "'Dude' is funnier in the title than when it appears several times in the text" where the reviewer clearly used "then" when he should have used "than".
It's one of life's little ironies that people who are formally taught or bother to learn a second language often speak and/or write it better than most people to whom it is their native tongue. I have friends from Germany, Sweden, Brazil, Holland, etc and all of them speak better English than a lot of native English-speakers, and only their slight accents give them away.
Certainly it's the case that most non-English speakers make far more effort to learn English than English speakers do other languages.
2. The sum total of my post was "You forgot the first one: 0) does it play Ogg Vorbis files?" The rest of the shit you're talking about has nothing to do with me or anything I said, so why not address the person who you're clearly pissed off at instead of taking it out on my ass?
I don't think that the Windows 95/98 release works on Windows XP: at least that's what the first review here says. I hope that it runs on Windows 2000, because that's what I'm using, but I bet I'm hoping in vain.
I practically bought my first PC just to run X-Wing. Sure, I had played things like Wing Commander and Wing Commander 2 before then but X-Wing blew them out of the water: the sights, the sounds and the idea that you could take on the Empire in your very own X-Wing made it the best PC game of its era.
TIE Fighter, which came along a few years later, was technically superior but it was X-Wing that created the mould. It's definitely up there in my list of the top PC games of all time.
Slashdot Mirror
Do your rules apply for non-Plug-and-Play ISA bus hardware that's years old? I don't think so.
Someone on Slashdot who asks politely before taking someone else's intellectual property? What's the world coming to?
Sure, go ahead and borrow it, but only for non-profit use.
So this story is a case of "All your BS are belong to us"?
But when will they ever have native OS X support?
When the enthalpy of Satan's domain is reduced to the point where dihydrogen oxide becomes solid, perhaps?
Seriously, I don't know. But do you really think that asking a subset of Slashdot is going to be any more informative than the officially maintained FAQs?
What makes you think that I'd ever recommend a softmodem over a hardware one? If you're talking modems then the choice, as I see it, isn't between a generic hardware-based modem and a name-brand softmodem, it's between a generic hardware-based modem and a name-brand hardware-based one too: I always like to compare apples with apples.
Yes, the performance of a generic hardware-based modem might be identical or even superior to a name-brand hardware-based one at the time of purchase but, as I pointed out, what happens if the device breaks down or if you later decide to change operating system is important too. With a name-brand purchase, you're not going to struggle as much to get proper technical support and finding drivers for newer OSes is a lot easier too.
To give you an example I have a close friend whose mother bought a generic modem that cost £25 when rather than the recognisable brand model that I recommended for £40. When she wanted to upgrade to running the latest version of Windows and take advantage of the V.90 standard that was emerging at the time she couldn't (or rather, I couldn't) find the drivers or flash the modem to use the latest standard because the manufacturer was impossible to track down (and the literature that was originally provided with the modem was very basic, to say the least).
End result? After too much time wasted trying to find solutions that probably didn't exist in the first place she finally opted to buy a new modem, which this time cost more than the price of the first one. However, if she had bought the modem that I had recommended in the first place not only would she have saved money in the long run but she would have saved herself, my friend and me many fruitless hours trying to achieve the impossible.
Now I don't know about you but my time is valuable to me. Those wasted hours are lost to me and I'm not getting them back. All because someone who obviously didn't know as much as they thought they did told her that "modems all the same".
My motto when it comes to buying hardware, especially when it comes to hardware that I'm recommending for other (usually less technically-adept) people is to buy a decent product from a good brand.
No-name modems, video cards, network adapters, etc might seem like a bargain but when you run into any kind of problem, or when you come to changing OS, then a no-name product is going to leave you up shit creak without a paddle virtually every single time.
Providing tech support to friends and relatives is one thing, providing tech support for a cheap, near-unsupported part is another thing altogether. If for no reason other than I don't want to piss off people I care about, I always make sure that I have them buying with reliability rather than false value in mind, and if that means I take the extra time necessary to research exactly what they need and handpick the product that they should buy then that's what I'll do.
What are the benefits? You mean apart from a better quality picture, HDTV support, etc?
Have a look at the latest Philips LCD models, especially their Pixel Plus and Pixel Plus 2 designs. Simply put, they're stunning. Better pictures than most CRT televisions, in fact. And direct sunlight doesn't faze them at all.
But how many of those books were game guides and walkthroughs?
Consider it a GIF from the Gods.
I almost bought four CDs yesterday as part of a "buy 4 for £20" promotion in a branch of HMV. One of the CDs, an album by Ultravox originally recorded in the early 1980s, was DRM-locked. There was no other CD that I was remotely interested in the offer and I wasn't going to buy a CD that I couldn't listen to freely (my PC with Winamp or my Palm Tungsten E is how I listen to my CDs) so I left the store empty-handed.
End result of the DRM: the non-sale of four CDs. The crazy thing here is the DRM was on an album that hasn't been in any kind of music chart for over twenty years, and anyone who's likely to want it either owns it already or would be willing to pay for it. Certainly, it's not the kind of album that would be downloaded by a lot of people even if it were to be ripped and made available by someone on a P2P service.
In other words, by putting copy "protection" mechanisms on a CD that really doesn't benefit from it the record company has lost a sale and the record industry has lost four. And who knows what else I would have bought if I hadn't been disgusted enough to walk out of the store without looking at another thing?
You could argue that DRM isn't an issue for most of the music-buying public but, as the ownership of PC and MP3 players increases, the public's awareness of these blocks on their usage will increase, and sooner or later that will translate into fewer purchases of DRMed titles.
Earth to music industry: you're shooting yourself in the foot with both barrels. Stop before it's too late.
Uh, most of can spell perfectly well, thank you very much, it's the 16 year-old kids who've got by using "leet" speak that have difficulty spelling the simplest of words.
By the way, not being American, we prefer being "civilised" to being "civilized".
Anyone younger than 20 probably has no idea what a record is.
If it means fewer people will be exposed to Celine Dion then it can't be a bad thing.
What's really ironic is that the above review brings up the spelling and grammar of the book as an issue - "much of the text is awkwardly phrased, and dotted with avoidable errors in spelling or diction" - yet this appears only a few paragraphs after the line "'Dude' is funnier in the title than when it appears several times in the text" where the reviewer clearly used "then" when he should have used "than".
It's one of life's little ironies that people who are formally taught or bother to learn a second language often speak and/or write it better than most people to whom it is their native tongue. I have friends from Germany, Sweden, Brazil, Holland, etc and all of them speak better English than a lot of native English-speakers, and only their slight accents give them away.
Certainly it's the case that most non-English speakers make far more effort to learn English than English speakers do other languages.
At least I don't keep my brain in it, unlike some ACs.
Hey pops, you're outnumbered something like 8 to 1. And your odds aren't getting any better.
1. It was a joke. Laugh, silly.
2. The sum total of my post was "You forgot the first one: 0) does it play Ogg Vorbis files?" The rest of the shit you're talking about has nothing to do with me or anything I said, so why not address the person who you're clearly pissed off at instead of taking it out on my ass?
Slashdot UIDs less than six digits are old and busted.
Six digits plus is the way to go now, and yes, I am taking the piss out of your comment.
You forgot the first one:
0) does it play Ogg Vorbis files?
Lucasfiles.com has a patch that lets you run the Windows 95/98 versions of X-Wing and TIE Fighter under Windows 2000 and XP, which is good news.
I don't think that the Windows 95/98 release works on Windows XP: at least that's what the first review here says. I hope that it runs on Windows 2000, because that's what I'm using, but I bet I'm hoping in vain.
I practically bought my first PC just to run X-Wing. Sure, I had played things like Wing Commander and Wing Commander 2 before then but X-Wing blew them out of the water: the sights, the sounds and the idea that you could take on the Empire in your very own X-Wing made it the best PC game of its era.
TIE Fighter, which came along a few years later, was technically superior but it was X-Wing that created the mould. It's definitely up there in my list of the top PC games of all time.
Hey, you can clearly read so why not read all of my post instead of just part of it? And by "all" I mean including the last paragraph.
I love it when people set up new accounts so that they can troll without prejudice.