Regardless, I think this would be an excellent way to send a message.
Buying a printer, using all the ink and then returning it is stealing. I'm sure in the fine print for Wal-Mart's return policy it says you must return the item with all included accesories. Using the ink up means you kept something that isn't getting returned.
If you really wanted to send a message to Lexmark and keep the previous copy protected CD analogy relevent, you could simply buy a shitload of Lexmark printers (and claim they're for your office), open each box and add a note that says something along the lines of:
"This printer will not accept refilled ink cartredges due to a special protection chip. If you attempt to refill them, they will still appear to be empty and will not function. New Lexmark ink cartredges cost $(include price) and since these are your only option for continued operation of this printer, they can raise the price as high as they want. Hopefully after reading this information, you'll see this printer isn't the value you thought it was and will return it for a refund. - A friend"
Then tape the boxes back up and return them to Wal-Mart. Since Wal-Mart puts items that still seem new back out for sale, your message will be spread and you didn't even have to steal anything to do it.
This isn't a troll, I'm asking an honest question here...
As near as I can tell, Lycoris is the artist formerly known as Lindows. They took freely available open source software, slapped a Windows-lookalike skin on the desktop, then started charging for the priviledge of using their specialized click-and-run installer.
Something about them just rubs me the wrong way... Did they really do a lot of work to make open source an easier pill to swallow for the masses, or are they just prettying up the same stuff you can download yourself and slapped a price tag on it?
From their blatent copying of Microsoft's GUI (and no I am not defending Microsoft, just stating the obvious), to taking free open source software and selling it as if it was their own, they seem like a company bent on profiting from the hard work of others. I don't think that's in the true spirit of free software.
The truly amazing thing about Real Life is that the development process only took six days, although that all depends on who you ask.
Exactly - it was rushed and that's why there's so many bugs. Unfortunately, fixing the bugs would break compatibility with the current version of real life. The last time the creator tried it, he got an overflow error, lost all his work and had to start over from scratch.
It needs a better search function. Usually you have to private message another player and hope they've already seen the item you're looking for and know where it resides.
Seaching for other players for the partnership or relationship mini-games usually requires manually initiating a private message session with many different players before a suitable match is found. This can be very time consuming and while there are in-game services that claim to be able to help you with this, they don't attract enough players to be truly useful.
Not enough features come standard. If you want enhanced vision to see at night or zoom in, you have to purchase addons. If you want to know what the world you are on looks like, you must purchase a map. If you want to know your position on the map, you must purchase a GPS. Not all addons work as well as you'd expect. For example, screen capture capability with a camera addon is usually limited to only a small portion of your viewable display area.
Many of the players carry infectious agents, seemingly introduced into the game by its creator. These range from slightly annoying (they'll slow your progress in the game for a few days) to lethal (game over). Some activities in the game will expose you to infectious agents. The sexual activity minigame, while fun, is the most notorious for this. Some of the players have been trying to reverse engineer these problems and distribute patches, but they're only having limited success.
Even with all my complaints, real life does get some things right. There's nearly a limitless supply of background music tracks and while the in-game admins would prefer you purchased them as addons, they're easily enough aquired without using hardly any in-game currency once you start using the Internet features.
It's truly a shame they didn't release an exploit that was in the form of an ISO that could just be burned and booted on an Xbox... Cause they're going to end up in federal pound me in the ass prison and won't even have a ShareReactor entry to show for it.
Threatening Microsoft is like taunting a bull - it may seem fun but in the end, you'll get the horns. (Bad pun intended)
If you're a SOHO user printing in color, having to replace the printer once a year really is not a big deal when you consider the cost of ink cartreges.
My younger brother went through 2 Epson printers (each seemed to last about a year... the first kept clogging and the 2nd died of an electronic failure) before finally switching to a HP 600 series printer about a year and a half ago - it's still working.
My HP 932C is over two years old and still works like the day I unpacked it - although I have already spent more in damned ink then the cost of the printer. The printer it replaced, a 660cse, is also still working, at my brother's girlfriend's house. On of my friends has had an 800 series HP printer for several years now and his father has a 500 series printer - all still working. While this is just anecdotal evidence, the HP printers seemed to just keep chugging along long after they've burned up their value in ink.
If you think about it, since HP makes their money off the ink - it's in their BEST INTERESTS to make printers that last. It seems the game lately isn't to make the printers break earlier, but to make the ink cartreges run out faster... If you look at my discontinued printer, the 932c, and then look at the printer HP's web site recommends as a replacement, you'll notice the new recommended printer holds almost HALF AS MUCH INK!
If you do a lot of printing, you're getting screwed using ink jets no matter what the reliability of your printer. If you need color, get a closeout printer (pricewatch and google are your friends) that is easy to use refill kits on and refill yourself. If you can live without color, laser is the only way to go.
ATI just released a new version of their Catalyst drivers, and it fixes every known bug in every single game in existance. ATI also mentioned this driver fully supports Duke Nukem Forever, which was also released today.
AOL's proxy server recompresses images into AOL's proprietary.ART format. Just do a quick Google for AOL's.ART format and you'll find how much of an annoyance it is for web designers since it tends to overcompress everything and introduces a lot of distortion and artifacts into the images.
Before I read the article, I thought this was going to be a new technology that actually crams more bits per second down the pipe, but since it's just compression based, it's nothing new, just Earthlink playing catch-up with AOL.
Are IDE/S-ATA disks less reliable than SCSI on purpose (marketing) or only because we remember they were and think they still are ?
Can't say much for SCSI since they're so absurdly expensive per MB that I'd rather take a chance with my data than pay SCSI's going rates... But umm, yea... Modern IDE drives lose data. The most common problem isn't that they crash, it's that they end up with one or more inaccessable sector(s), you run the included recertification utility and it restores your drive to error-free status but it also *fucks up the filesystem in the process.
End result: Lost data.
With how often I've seen this happen with current 40GB, 80GB and 120GB drives, I'm beginning to think RAID isn't really a luxury anymore.
* I couldn't say fscks here, it might get taken in the wrong context.
The only thing we know for sure is that -- no matter what -- there will be some dork out there bitching and moaning about how great games used to be, and how they don't make them like they used to.
They *don't* make games like they used to.
I still remember seeing Wolfenstien 3D for the first time... "Holy shit, a 286 is doing THAT?!"
Games used to be made to squeeze every last drop of performence from the system. There was a certain awe about being entertained by the same machine that choked loading a word processor app.
Of course, the people that played games back in the day on PCs were a lot more fascinated with the hardware... You had to be... Let's face it, between low resolution graphics and FM synthesized audio, it wasn't exactly the arcade.
What has changed today is basically just the result of higher end hardware... Since you've got CD quality audio, people expect to listen to MP3s instead of MODs or MIDIs. Bitchin' 3D hardware is the standard, so if you make a game that doesn't take advantage of it, it had damn sure better be unique in some other way (like The Sims).
I don't think any of the genres really have died per-se, more accurately, they just lost mass appeal as the technology and the users it attracted have changed. While I have no statistics to back it up, I imagine the majority of PC users today are not the type that would self-identify as geeks.
so it makes fighting seem realistic...except for the dying part. no wonder people are signing up for the army like there's no tomorrow.
warning: Anecdotal evidence ahead
One of my friends joined the reserve a few months ago soon after his 18th birthday. In the past we'd frequently played realtime strategy and FPS games. He was really excited about the idea of potentially seeing combat and remarked how it would "be like playing Unreal - for real". I did try to reason with him by pointing out in "Unreal" there is no real-world consequences for failure. If you get shot, you feel no pain, you can't be taken prisoner and if you die - you can just hit the spacebar and come back.
He also liked to play the America's Army game and remarked to me how "realistic" the gameplay was. To which I replied "If it was truly realistic, you couldn't escape/exit/shut the power off to make the game go away and you wouldn't be able to try a mission you died in again. Surely, they left these elements of realism out because they'd be detrimental to the appeal of recruiting."
While I don't believe videogames can make someone who isn't inherently violent become so, I do believe they can potentially satisfy a craving for violence in those who already possess the disposition.
I originally thought violent videogames had potential to be harmful due to the inaccurate depiction of the aftermath of violence, but after talking to my friend upon his return from basic training, I realized the army basically uses the same techniques to train soldiers. During the assult course my friend went though, no one was killed or injured. He didn't see his friends drop dead at his side, he didn't get shot or have to take the life of an enemy by means of lethal force. His training was exactly like playing Unreal for real - it taught him nothing about real war.
It looks like you're trying to masturbate! Would you like me to load:
* Your porn collection * An AIM conversation with a guy pretending to be female * Recommended self pleasuring techniques database * Featured lubricant merchants
Just when you thought it was safe to buy that amplifier bundled with 6 speakers and a subwoofer, the next thing you know - you need a new amplifier cause they'll be a speaker added for beaming stuff right into your noggin.
This is getting insane. Anyone know some companies that produce sound-cancelling hardware I can invest in? I have a feeling about something...
sticking with it since then has just been sheer cussedness....and not offering a multi-button mouse with a scroll wheel as an option with Macs is just sheer brain-deadness.
What's worse is their laptops... If you want a multi-button pointing device, you've got to connect it externally. Yuck. It's a shame too cause I would really consider getting an iBook if it had an intergrated trackball or an eraser head mouse with at least 2 buttons. As it stands, a single button touchpad is a dealbreaker.
I guess we're getting kinda OT here, but as far as deceptive advertising goes, aren't Apple's switch ads just as bad? What if you're more productive with a 3-button scroll trackball? Is Apple's "different" way really better? Do they have statistics proving applications on OS X are really more stable than those on Windows XP? Let's face it, advertising is subjective - that's why it's advertising.
If the Mac switchers have reached personal computing nirvana, the beer drinkers are all buff and having a great day with attractive females at the beach, the car is doing things that you can't legally do on public roads or Microsoft software is depicted as secure, guess what - it's an advertisment. Could you imagine what ads would be like if they depicted reality?
Scene: Int. my house, night. Me: "I'm thirsty." Cut-to wide shot of me walking out of the computer room and follow me walking to the fridge. Close up of me opening a can of Sprite(tm). Me: "Ahh... Can of fizzy liquid goodness." Cut back to wide shot of me walking back into the computer room. Fade out and show a graphic: "Sprite. Because you're too lazy to restock on something with caffine."
The first time I was introduced to Windows, I was using a Tandy 1000RLX. For those of you who didn't follow the history of Tandy's 1000 series, it basically started with the original 1000 and went something like this... RGEG@#3t232tG@#g@#G23#%#@^!@^grsg
Yea, that's about as much sense as it made - the 1000 moniker was absolutely useless for determining what kind of system it was. So anyway, as it turns out, the 1000RLX was an XT-286. Yep, while other 286s had a 16-bit bus and 16-bit ISA slots... My crappy Tandy didn't. What it did have was a 10MHz AMD 286 chip on an 8-bit bus with 256k VGA graphics, 1MB of RAM, a 1.44MB floppy drive and an XT-IDE 40MB hard drive. It also had one 8-bit ISA slot that I decided to cram a 2400bps modem into.
So anyway, I certainly didn't have the hardware for Windows 3.0 and while I don't remember the exact date, I do remember Windows 3.1 was just about to come out in a few months... So it was back in the day. I got ahold of a copy of Windows 3.0 and installed it on that Tandy and guess what - my mouse didn't work.
I called tech support (you could actually reach a live person back in the day!) for the Tandy computer... They kinda wondered where I got a copy of Windows from (since the computer didn't come with it, it came with Tandy's Deskmate) but instead of telling me "No, we don't support operating systems that didn't come bundled... blah blah blah" like you'd expect to hear today - they were actually helpful and explained that this XT-286 had the PS/2 mouse port on a non standard IRQ and I'd need to get a serial mouse.
To make a long story longer, I waited awhile for 3.1 to be released and ended up pawning off the computer on my father and convinced him to buy me a Tandy 2500SX/25 instead... So not only could I run the new Windows 3.1 with a mouse, I also could run it in 386 protected mode with a whopping 2MB of ram and an 80MB hard drive. From what I remember of Windows 3.1, it was always very slow and it seemed to crash a lot and every few weeks or so it managed to crash badly enough to corrupt itself. Blue screens nowadays make me feel all nolstalgic.
Yeah, the desktop hardware sucks right now. But I'm not sure you should judge the environment on the fact that Macintoshes are on average about half as fast as Intel machines.
It's the OS. Ever use MacOS 9? It's much faster.
I've got WinXP on my PIII 850MHz and on my Athlon XP2000. One is a lot faster in games, Photoshop and compressing Divx, they both feel about the same just browsing around the UI.
Unlike WinXP, OS X is a beast on hardware it should run much faster on.
The XP GUI is the most garish set of colors. It looks like the artwork of the mentally ill. ...and even if you change it back to the "classic" settings, you're still stuck with those horrid pastel icons. What's worse, this color scheme has become viral... AOL's latest AIM client is ugly too.
To everyone developing Windows apps: pastel is for Easter, not applications!
Slashdot Mirror
...to watch movies on their Xbox. Acting out the plot to the Matrix in Halo? OMG, get these people modchips and Xbox Media Player QUICK!
or at the very least give them the DVD dongle...
You can play games on an Xbox?! Bah. Games are only good if they have an exploit so you can load Linux and use Raincoat to flash the TSOP.
;) collection.
Microsoft Xbox - the networked media player for your TV with a really strange remote control. Games are for people with no DivX
"Ever been out in the field and wanted to make a quick wireless link calculation..."
Umm, no. I have; however, been out in the field and wished my cell phone would get a goddamn signal.
Regardless, I think this would be an excellent way to send a message.
Buying a printer, using all the ink and then returning it is stealing. I'm sure in the fine print for Wal-Mart's return policy it says you must return the item with all included accesories. Using the ink up means you kept something that isn't getting returned.
If you really wanted to send a message to Lexmark and keep the previous copy protected CD analogy relevent, you could simply buy a shitload of Lexmark printers (and claim they're for your office), open each box and add a note that says something along the lines of:
"This printer will not accept refilled ink cartredges due to a special protection chip. If you attempt to refill them, they will still appear to be empty and will not function. New Lexmark ink cartredges cost $(include price) and since these are your only option for continued operation of this printer, they can raise the price as high as they want. Hopefully after reading this information, you'll see this printer isn't the value you thought it was and will return it for a refund. - A friend"
Then tape the boxes back up and return them to Wal-Mart. Since Wal-Mart puts items that still seem new back out for sale, your message will be spread and you didn't even have to steal anything to do it.
This isn't a troll, I'm asking an honest question here...
As near as I can tell, Lycoris is the artist formerly known as Lindows. They took freely available open source software, slapped a Windows-lookalike skin on the desktop, then started charging for the priviledge of using their specialized click-and-run installer.
Something about them just rubs me the wrong way... Did they really do a lot of work to make open source an easier pill to swallow for the masses, or are they just prettying up the same stuff you can download yourself and slapped a price tag on it?
From their blatent copying of Microsoft's GUI (and no I am not defending Microsoft, just stating the obvious), to taking free open source software and selling it as if it was their own, they seem like a company bent on profiting from the hard work of others. I don't think that's in the true spirit of free software.
I was creating a world on the PC and all the sudden it was like "bleep beep beep beep beep" and I was like, "Wah?".
It devoured my world.
It was a really good world.
Then I had to create it again and I had to do it fast and it wasn't as good.
It was kinda, a bummer.
I'm God and I'm a deity.
The truly amazing thing about Real Life is that the development process only took six days, although that all depends on who you ask.
Exactly - it was rushed and that's why there's so many bugs. Unfortunately, fixing the bugs would break compatibility with the current version of real life. The last time the creator tried it, he got an overflow error, lost all his work and had to start over from scratch.
It needs a better search function. Usually you have to private message another player and hope they've already seen the item you're looking for and know where it resides.
Seaching for other players for the partnership or relationship mini-games usually requires manually initiating a private message session with many different players before a suitable match is found. This can be very time consuming and while there are in-game services that claim to be able to help you with this, they don't attract enough players to be truly useful.
Not enough features come standard. If you want enhanced vision to see at night or zoom in, you have to purchase addons. If you want to know what the world you are on looks like, you must purchase a map. If you want to know your position on the map, you must purchase a GPS. Not all addons work as well as you'd expect. For example, screen capture capability with a camera addon is usually limited to only a small portion of your viewable display area.
Many of the players carry infectious agents, seemingly introduced into the game by its creator. These range from slightly annoying (they'll slow your progress in the game for a few days) to lethal (game over). Some activities in the game will expose you to infectious agents. The sexual activity minigame, while fun, is the most notorious for this. Some of the players have been trying to reverse engineer these problems and distribute patches, but they're only having limited success.
Even with all my complaints, real life does get some things right. There's nearly a limitless supply of background music tracks and while the in-game admins would prefer you purchased them as addons, they're easily enough aquired without using hardly any in-game currency once you start using the Internet features.
It's truly a shame they didn't release an exploit that was in the form of an ISO that could just be burned and booted on an Xbox... Cause they're going to end up in federal pound me in the ass prison and won't even have a ShareReactor entry to show for it.
Threatening Microsoft is like taunting a bull - it may seem fun but in the end, you'll get the horns. (Bad pun intended)
If you're a SOHO user printing in color, having to replace the printer once a year really is not a big deal when you consider the cost of ink cartreges.
My younger brother went through 2 Epson printers (each seemed to last about a year... the first kept clogging and the 2nd died of an electronic failure) before finally switching to a HP 600 series printer about a year and a half ago - it's still working.
My HP 932C is over two years old and still works like the day I unpacked it - although I have already spent more in damned ink then the cost of the printer. The printer it replaced, a 660cse, is also still working, at my brother's girlfriend's house. On of my friends has had an 800 series HP printer for several years now and his father has a 500 series printer - all still working. While this is just anecdotal evidence, the HP printers seemed to just keep chugging along long after they've burned up their value in ink.
If you think about it, since HP makes their money off the ink - it's in their BEST INTERESTS to make printers that last. It seems the game lately isn't to make the printers break earlier, but to make the ink cartreges run out faster... If you look at my discontinued printer, the 932c, and then look at the printer HP's web site recommends as a replacement, you'll notice the new recommended printer holds almost HALF AS MUCH INK!
If you do a lot of printing, you're getting screwed using ink jets no matter what the reliability of your printer. If you need color, get a closeout printer (pricewatch and google are your friends) that is easy to use refill kits on and refill yourself. If you can live without color, laser is the only way to go.
ATI just released a new version of their Catalyst drivers, and it fixes every known bug in every single game in existance. ATI also mentioned this driver fully supports Duke Nukem Forever, which was also released today.
AOL's proxy server recompresses images into AOL's proprietary .ART format. Just do a quick Google for AOL's .ART format and you'll find how much of an annoyance it is for web designers since it tends to overcompress everything and introduces a lot of distortion and artifacts into the images.
Before I read the article, I thought this was going to be a new technology that actually crams more bits per second down the pipe, but since it's just compression based, it's nothing new, just Earthlink playing catch-up with AOL.
Are IDE/S-ATA disks less reliable than SCSI on purpose (marketing) or only because we remember they were and think they still are ?
Can't say much for SCSI since they're so absurdly expensive per MB that I'd rather take a chance with my data than pay SCSI's going rates... But umm, yea... Modern IDE drives lose data. The most common problem isn't that they crash, it's that they end up with one or more inaccessable sector(s), you run the included recertification utility and it restores your drive to error-free status but it also *fucks up the filesystem in the process.
End result: Lost data.
With how often I've seen this happen with current 40GB, 80GB and 120GB drives, I'm beginning to think RAID isn't really a luxury anymore.
* I couldn't say fscks here, it might get taken in the wrong context.
The only thing we know for sure is that -- no matter what -- there will be some dork out there bitching and moaning about how great games used to be, and how they don't make them like they used to.
They *don't* make games like they used to.
I still remember seeing Wolfenstien 3D for the first time... "Holy shit, a 286 is doing THAT?!"
Games used to be made to squeeze every last drop of performence from the system. There was a certain awe about being entertained by the same machine that choked loading a word processor app.
Of course, the people that played games back in the day on PCs were a lot more fascinated with the hardware... You had to be... Let's face it, between low resolution graphics and FM synthesized audio, it wasn't exactly the arcade.
What has changed today is basically just the result of higher end hardware... Since you've got CD quality audio, people expect to listen to MP3s instead of MODs or MIDIs. Bitchin' 3D hardware is the standard, so if you make a game that doesn't take advantage of it, it had damn sure better be unique in some other way (like The Sims).
I don't think any of the genres really have died per-se, more accurately, they just lost mass appeal as the technology and the users it attracted have changed. While I have no statistics to back it up, I imagine the majority of PC users today are not the type that would self-identify as geeks.
What would Dance Dance Revolution be classified under?
The same genre as whack-a-mole.
I feel like I'm playing DDR at home every time I close popups while listening to MP3s.
so it makes fighting seem realistic...except for the dying part. no wonder people are signing up for the army like there's no tomorrow.
warning: Anecdotal evidence ahead
One of my friends joined the reserve a few months ago soon after his 18th birthday. In the past we'd frequently played realtime strategy and FPS games. He was really excited about the idea of potentially seeing combat and remarked how it would "be like playing Unreal - for real". I did try to reason with him by pointing out in "Unreal" there is no real-world consequences for failure. If you get shot, you feel no pain, you can't be taken prisoner and if you die - you can just hit the spacebar and come back.
He also liked to play the America's Army game and remarked to me how "realistic" the gameplay was. To which I replied "If it was truly realistic, you couldn't escape/exit/shut the power off to make the game go away and you wouldn't be able to try a mission you died in again. Surely, they left these elements of realism out because they'd be detrimental to the appeal of recruiting."
While I don't believe videogames can make someone who isn't inherently violent become so, I do believe they can potentially satisfy a craving for violence in those who already possess the disposition.
I originally thought violent videogames had potential to be harmful due to the inaccurate depiction of the aftermath of violence, but after talking to my friend upon his return from basic training, I realized the army basically uses the same techniques to train soldiers. During the assult course my friend went though, no one was killed or injured. He didn't see his friends drop dead at his side, he didn't get shot or have to take the life of an enemy by means of lethal force. His training was exactly like playing Unreal for real - it taught him nothing about real war.
Sun Microsystems is WHAT?!
Whew, that's a relief. All this time I thought my Athlon was the cause of global warming.
It looks like you're trying to masturbate! Would you like me to load:
* Your porn collection
* An AIM conversation with a guy pretending to be female
* Recommended self pleasuring techniques database
* Featured lubricant merchants
Just when you thought it was safe to buy that amplifier bundled with 6 speakers and a subwoofer, the next thing you know - you need a new amplifier cause they'll be a speaker added for beaming stuff right into your noggin.
This is getting insane. Anyone know some companies that produce sound-cancelling hardware I can invest in? I have a feeling about something...
The site's acting flakey so I mirrored the 3 thumbnail pages on my box:
http://snotwad.dyndns.org:8000/cyberroach_mirror/
sticking with it since then has just been sheer cussedness. ...and not offering a multi-button mouse with a scroll wheel as an option with Macs is just sheer brain-deadness.
What's worse is their laptops... If you want a multi-button pointing device, you've got to connect it externally. Yuck. It's a shame too cause I would really consider getting an iBook if it had an intergrated trackball or an eraser head mouse with at least 2 buttons. As it stands, a single button touchpad is a dealbreaker.
I guess we're getting kinda OT here, but as far as deceptive advertising goes, aren't Apple's switch ads just as bad? What if you're more productive with a 3-button scroll trackball? Is Apple's "different" way really better? Do they have statistics proving applications on OS X are really more stable than those on Windows XP? Let's face it, advertising is subjective - that's why it's advertising.
If the Mac switchers have reached personal computing nirvana, the beer drinkers are all buff and having a great day with attractive females at the beach, the car is doing things that you can't legally do on public roads or Microsoft software is depicted as secure, guess what - it's an advertisment. Could you imagine what ads would be like if they depicted reality?
Scene: Int. my house, night.
Me: "I'm thirsty."
Cut-to wide shot of me walking out of the computer room and follow me walking to the fridge.
Close up of me opening a can of Sprite(tm).
Me: "Ahh... Can of fizzy liquid goodness."
Cut back to wide shot of me walking back into the computer room. Fade out and show a graphic:
"Sprite. Because you're too lazy to restock on something with caffine."
while still integrating a "modern XP look" (blech) for marketing?
Please, please insist on a feature to disable the "modern XP look". Please.
The first time I was introduced to Windows, I was using a Tandy 1000RLX. For those of you who didn't follow the history of Tandy's 1000 series, it basically started with the original 1000 and went something like this... RGEG@#3t232tG@#g@#G23#%#@^!@^grsg
Yea, that's about as much sense as it made - the 1000 moniker was absolutely useless for determining what kind of system it was. So anyway, as it turns out, the 1000RLX was an XT-286. Yep, while other 286s had a 16-bit bus and 16-bit ISA slots... My crappy Tandy didn't. What it did have was a 10MHz AMD 286 chip on an 8-bit bus with 256k VGA graphics, 1MB of RAM, a 1.44MB floppy drive and an XT-IDE 40MB hard drive. It also had one 8-bit ISA slot that I decided to cram a 2400bps modem into.
So anyway, I certainly didn't have the hardware for Windows 3.0 and while I don't remember the exact date, I do remember Windows 3.1 was just about to come out in a few months... So it was back in the day. I got ahold of a copy of Windows 3.0 and installed it on that Tandy and guess what - my mouse didn't work.
I called tech support (you could actually reach a live person back in the day!) for the Tandy computer... They kinda wondered where I got a copy of Windows from (since the computer didn't come with it, it came with Tandy's Deskmate) but instead of telling me "No, we don't support operating systems that didn't come bundled... blah blah blah" like you'd expect to hear today - they were actually helpful and explained that this XT-286 had the PS/2 mouse port on a non standard IRQ and I'd need to get a serial mouse.
To make a long story longer, I waited awhile for 3.1 to be released and ended up pawning off the computer on my father and convinced him to buy me a Tandy 2500SX/25 instead... So not only could I run the new Windows 3.1 with a mouse, I also could run it in 386 protected mode with a whopping 2MB of ram and an 80MB hard drive. From what I remember of Windows 3.1, it was always very slow and it seemed to crash a lot and every few weeks or so it managed to crash badly enough to corrupt itself. Blue screens nowadays make me feel all nolstalgic.
Yeah, the desktop hardware sucks right now. But I'm not sure you should judge the environment on the fact that Macintoshes are on average about half as fast as Intel machines.
It's the OS. Ever use MacOS 9? It's much faster.
I've got WinXP on my PIII 850MHz and on my Athlon XP2000. One is a lot faster in games, Photoshop and compressing Divx, they both feel about the same just browsing around the UI.
Unlike WinXP, OS X is a beast on hardware it should run much faster on.
The XP GUI is the most garish set of colors. It looks like the artwork of the mentally ill. ...and even if you change it back to the "classic" settings, you're still stuck with those horrid pastel icons. What's worse, this color scheme has become viral... AOL's latest AIM client is ugly too.
To everyone developing Windows apps: pastel is for Easter, not applications!