I think morrowind went the correct route and just used text versus stilted dialog. I think bethesda though that with the greater budget for oblivion they could do the same thing with speech and it sounds awful and disjointed. Freelancer had the same problem with terrible pauses between the segments of speech.
Apparently ElcomSoft has some employees with/. accounts and mod points. Because I don't see how the PP is a Troll (and it wasn't a mistake, someone modded it Troll quite a while after it was modded to 5).
How else would you explain this blatant slashvertisment?
I would suggest a local university or museum first. If they won't help you for some reason (and I think they would be interested to say the least), shoot me an e-mail. I would take great pains not to damage your maps further and could give you good quality scans that are color correct and I'm also pretty good at repairing things if there is something to go buy. Solid color areas are not a problem to replace and fix, but anything with loads of detail starts getting into the "fake it till you make it" territory and is not reproduction anymore if you ask me. Any crinkles in the paper, etc can usually be effectively cloned out. I work for a small shop. Our prices on prints, etc are pretty reasonable. Scans are usually like $60 or so, but that includes a lot of time in color correction. Also what you are looking for is something that will likely take a bit of time and effort unless you have a big expensive scanner on hand. I deal with framed paintings a lot, and I can't just run a framed painting through a drum scanner or a wideformat. I usually have to either carefully lay it across a flatbed and scan a few sections or put it in the studio and shoot it, but that introduces all sorts of problems as others have said with lighting, lens distortion (no lens is perfect, especially near the corners), etc, which generally leads to somewhat of a loss in quality. Even with a medium format back you can get millions of pixels, but that image is still only as clear as the glass in front of it. A flatbed scanner is certainly ideal (unless you want to say lose the paper texture from the scan, then the camera is actually better) and will give you results with microscopic clarity. I mean hell even a cheap epson will do like 9600 dpi or so and to be honest, unless I'm scanning negatives, I rarely scan over 600dpi. If I were you I would by a cheap 11x17 scanner that does not have a recessed bed. Meaning that when you take the lid off, the scanning glass is flush with the sides of the plastic top. This is important as scanners have a fairly shallow depth of field. Now what you want to do is take your maps and get a big heavy piece of glass. Don't use plex or at least get a couple of pieces of plexiglass, as you will just basically scratch it to hell with the scanner and your efforts to clean it as it get dusty. Place the glass on a map. Next rip the lid off your scanner and start scanning away. Use the preview to judge your overlap between scans and try to give a good 10% overlap as this will help in the stitching process. You can probably get away with less, but I like to leave some room for human error as well. Make sure each scan has auto exposure and color turned off. Use a medium to high unsharp mask if you want more of the texture if your scanner software supports this. (You can also just sharpen a little in photoshop later if you like) Now scan your map in sections. Try to go for about 300 dpi if the maps are larger. If they are smaller (10x10 or so) you can bump up to 600dpi. Open up photoshop or something capable of doing rectilinear mapping and photostitch your scans. Photoshop CS4 does a wonderful job here, and if you use PS, I really recommend going ahead and using the ruler tool and rotate->arbitrary to straighten the edges of your scans as well as cropping out anything that isn't part of the image. This will make your stitching go much smoother and be less error prone as well as getting proper blends at the seams. You'll have to fix up the levels and color a bit since you turned off the autocorrection, but this should give you a good start if you really want to do it on your own. Hit up my e-mail if you would like to ask questions. I'd be happy to help as much as possible.
This is actually how I reproduce art. I just use a tripod that I can move across an xy axis and stitch the results in photoshop and then readjust any skewing, etc. You can get really great quality if you spend the time. You don't need a $30,000 medium format scanning back. If you have good lighting noise shouldn't be an issue. Especially if you stick to iso 100 or less. A 15MP DSLR should give you images that are like 20x15 or so at 300 dpi. If this is not good enough (and it really is for a lot of fine art), you just simply move the camera closer and take more shots. Sure it might take you twice as long and definitely requires some serious practice before you start getting good results, but it is effective and most importantly cheap. Flatbed scanners (even little 8x11 ones) are extremely useful as well as long as whatever you are scanning can take being touched. Some things like pencil drawings are too fragile to move around like that, but a well cured oil or a watercolor can withstand a small amount of abuse. If I had a bunch of ancient maps, I think I'd certainly call a local museum or university. They would be rather interested in checking them out anyways, so you could potentially work out some free scans out of the deal.
I do this for a living and yeah, the files are big, and even at 300dpi you can get into fairly large sizes. Personally I have printers at work that can print at 1440dpi and really anything over 600dpi is overkill. You can't really see the dots at that point unless you magnify them somehow.
you could also try hugin and play with the various projections that are rectangular. hugin uses autopano-c and seems to work pretty good. ideally get yourself a copy of photoshop cs4 and just use file->automate->photomerge and try automatic and then "reposition only" if it is for some reason trying to project on a spherical surface. the lack of seams and stitching errors in photoshop's tool really amazes me compared to other pano programs I've used. I really liked hugin and did a lot of cool stuff with it, but as soon as you throw in water or anything that moves it just really seems to break down. photoshop always gives me perfect water with smooth looking waves.....i'm sure I could probably get more smoother results from hugin, but why bother when I can just click twice and be done?
That's all pretty easy to do. All rogers has to do is come up with some custom firmware and inject it back to htc. You really think rogers has a screen printing department where their phones get printed with the logo? All that crap is done at the manufacturer so it goes into a factory sealed box. When you order 10,000 phones, you do get the option to customize your order.......
You sure can't beat OS/2 for longevity! I think I'd like to beat it with a few other things though......
I played around with OS/2 4 recently and was pretty awestruck at how dated it looked. I think even windows 95 has aged more gracefully. It cracked me up when the built-in web browser wouldn't render anything. If Windows 2000 had come instead of Windows95, there would be no argument about which was superior. OS/2 sure was fast (and relatively reliable) though.
I don't really understand how a fractured OS market would have served people better in the long run. People would have had more choices, but ultimately less choices in terms of applications available to their chosen OS. I think that there was a chance that anyone could have taken the OS wars in the late 80s, early 90s, but the IBM platform was common and dos ran everything that people were using at the time. I mean would os/2 have been a worthy competitior? It had hardly any commercial application support. Would Mac OS 7 been a better candidate to dominate? What about AmigaOS? All of these had their loyal followings (I liked all of them to be honest, except windows), but my is that most people just wanted the one platform that would run all of their stuff and windows was really the only road ahead for them from the start. No small convenience to a lot of people that windows95 ran on top of dos and would run most people's old dos applications. Even more than one at a time!
I think windows won out of necessity. If people wanted choice that badly I think that linux would have become a lot more popular than it has.
Heh. I would argue that kde 3 was super garish, and while kde 4 looks great....it still lacks a lot of the usability that exists on windows. True drag and drop, a clipboard that will pass all sorts of different kinds of data between any application. I could go on and on, but I won't. Also its interesting you mention the mismatched widgets as I find the linux experience to be the most mismatched there is. Any older X application uses any number of ancient widgets. Like look at the state of mozilla in kde for a long time as an example. Butt ugly out of the box. I'm just saying that the arguments you make can be made to perhaps an even greater extent on your beloved platform. To a lot of people those things are not all that important I guess. Macintosh certainly paved the way in end user usability and still do some things in the best way possible. My problem is the opposite of yours. All the software I really want is still on windows with no alternatives in sight. Its too bad I can't get AMD-V to work on my laptop. It would be pretty nifty to have a virtual linux machine to play with again.....
Why? Because they are listed on amazon? Google shopping has hordes of scammers that run for a week or two until the feedback starts going really south. I'd imagine that you would have been better off just buying server 2003 from microsoft direct, or just downloading an ISO if you have a good key....
I don't think newegg is big enough to order direct. No, there are much, much larger suppliers out there. Newegg is essentially an online retail middleman. They are really cheap, but you are still certainly paying a slight markup. You have to realize that these chips are made in china, malaysia and taiwan. I would imagine most suppliers have shipped operations overseas or are just plain chinese to begin with. Look at canon. I tried to call canon to order a part for a large format $8000 printer. They wouldn't deal with me, but were happy to replace a part under warranty and even shipped an part invoice with it. Unless newegg is buying in the thousands at once, I really doubt they buy direct.
just use your cc. you can get a prepaid cc for like $5-10 if security is that much of a worry. They charge you like $1 a transaction or so and $3 to add cash. Not a terrible deal for a completely anonymous credit card......
I mean seriously. You are far more likely to be fucked over by paypal than you are to have your credit card # used for something illegal when you buy from newegg. Unless you totally don't trust SSL or anything.....don't they have a phone number too?
I always use the untouched nvidia drivers for my laptop. If they can't figure out how to make drivers for their own chipsets then shame on them. I mean most integrated nvidia chipsets have fairly fixed clock frequencies. I've even overclocked my laptops gpu slightly, without a great deal more heat generated. (thanks evga!) I always get the best performance from stock nvidia drivers. I tried the dox drivers but found them to be problematic and no faster than the nvidia stock. I guess YMMV of course......
The number that caught my eye the most was the 40gb write limit on the 256gb drive that gives the expected life of 5 years. If you use photoshop on large files for any extended period of time you will chew through that in a heartbeat. Sure I guess you could set your scratch disks to a good old platter based drive, but that's not so easy in a laptop for instance. Lets not even get into video editing or music recording. A lot of real world tasks that people use computers for (maybe even programming?) would wear down an SSD in a much faster time frame than 5 years. You notice that the numbers go WAAAAY down for the smaller drives. 10 gigs a day might seem like a fair amount, but if you hibernate your 2 gig laptop a few times, you've already gone through over half of that. I do a lot of printing from windows to a large format printer. Gigabytes of spool files in a day are pretty typical. I would destroy an SSD in less than 6 months. A friend of mine runs a recording studio. Even when using SCSI drives he still has to replace drives fairly regularly. I guess while you could argue that SSDs are more reliable (magnetic drives can be like russian roulette in a way), I just don't see them having the lifespan that I see out of older smaller drives. It seems like after 300gb, magnetic drives started becoming increasingly unreliable, especially the Seagate 1TB drives for instance. The reviews on newegg are always pretty revealing because the datacentre guys will always post reviews about buying a lot of say 20 and having half of them fail in 6 months. I love western digital drives, and i'm kind of happy to see them finally enter the consumer ssd market, but the costs really need to come down significantly. a hard drive is in reality 100x more complex to engineer than an ssd (at least that is my opinion), since the only challenges in an SSD are density and reliability. I just cannot see how costs won't be become pretty dirt cheap, though you gotta admit the densities they are pushing now are pretty impressive compared to the relative are they take up, especially when you compare it to the huge hard drives people used to use in the 70s-80s. Drives that at most held like 1 gigabyte. I think as long as they keep cranking out cheap, huge, magnetic drives for less than $100, it is going to take at least until you could say buy a 300-500gb SSD for $100, for the market to really take off.
yeah. i know its offtopic, but I think this is a really great idea. I have a 6 month old acer that I have to buy a new screen for because the connection to the lcd in the back is failing. I suspect that it is due to the fucking thing flexing every time I open or close it from the corner. why do they make the lids so flimsy anymore? like the old dell and thinkpad screens were fucking tanks and had metal on the inside to keep the screen protected. On the acer there is nothing but flimsy molded plastic. If you break the screen under warranty they will charge you like $400 or something retarded to replace it because it was obviously caused by the user and not some design defect. It seems to me like it was designed to fail. I've massaged it to a working state (who knows how fucking long it will last) and decided to say fuck acer and just buy a damned $80 screen off ebay. Since they have like no local service, I would otherwise have to mail it off to them and get it back in probably a worse state than I sent it a whole 3-4 weeks later. They like to wipe drives and reinstall the OEM OS as a "favor" as well apparantly. Usually I have a backup computer laying around but I bought acer in desperation because all of my backups failed one after another. I was thinking about how I could add metal or something to the inside of the case to strengthen the screen and I never thought of just stiffening the case from the back. Unfortunately my case has this retarded curve to it, so I don't know how that will exactly work without some crafty sculpting. I was thinking about just taking a piece of aluminum sheeting from work and sandwiching it underneath the backlight. It looks like I could get something to fit in there, but I don't know if it would offer much more tensile strength. Its too bad. Other than the annoying glossy screen and the stupid gloss case that gets scratched if you look at it wrong, it has been quite a nice computer. AMD virtualization is horribly broken via BIOS, but it seems a lot of Turion based notebooks have problems with virtualization. I guess the BIOS manufacturer didn't see it as a real need for the user and didn't bother to implement it properly. Sorry about the long rant. After dicking with this damned screen for 20 minutes to get it to work again (gotta break a good old CRT soon.....) I read your post felt a slight need to vent.
Its true. And sad. For some people, like myself, unfortunately money never mattered much in life, though you do pay for it as you get older.......
I have a housemate on social security. He gets by on less than I do, which I find amazing. Of course he never leaves the house, lives out of frozen boxes, and drinks the cheapest beer at a rate of a case every few days. He used to own a company at one point. You never, ever know where you might end up in life.......
I make like $10 an hour here. The median wage in my city is like $8 or so. I have skills worth more, but convincing people that I do without proper certifications, schooling, and more importantly experience, then it becomes somewhat more difficult. I have one daughter, which was from 10 years ago. Its not like I have 20 kids to support or anything. I'm just poor and lack the means to radically change that situation for the time being.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you tried the U5 remake based on dungeon siege? It was a ton of fun....
Get off my lawn!
Jane Fonda surely more than made up for that.
Mmmmmmm......puss filled anal leakage
I think morrowind went the correct route and just used text versus stilted dialog. I think bethesda though that with the greater budget for oblivion they could do the same thing with speech and it sounds awful and disjointed. Freelancer had the same problem with terrible pauses between the segments of speech.
Apparently ElcomSoft has some employees with /. accounts and mod points. Because I don't see how the PP is a Troll (and it wasn't a mistake, someone modded it Troll quite a while after it was modded to 5).
How else would you explain this blatant slashvertisment?
I think I'm just going to start only reading the trolls on slashdot. This shit really makes my day.
I would suggest a local university or museum first. If they won't help you for some reason (and I think they would be interested to say the least), shoot me an e-mail. I would take great pains not to damage your maps further and could give you good quality scans that are color correct and I'm also pretty good at repairing things if there is something to go buy. Solid color areas are not a problem to replace and fix, but anything with loads of detail starts getting into the "fake it till you make it" territory and is not reproduction anymore if you ask me. Any crinkles in the paper, etc can usually be effectively cloned out. I work for a small shop. Our prices on prints, etc are pretty reasonable. Scans are usually like $60 or so, but that includes a lot of time in color correction. Also what you are looking for is something that will likely take a bit of time and effort unless you have a big expensive scanner on hand. I deal with framed paintings a lot, and I can't just run a framed painting through a drum scanner or a wideformat. I usually have to either carefully lay it across a flatbed and scan a few sections or put it in the studio and shoot it, but that introduces all sorts of problems as others have said with lighting, lens distortion (no lens is perfect, especially near the corners), etc, which generally leads to somewhat of a loss in quality. Even with a medium format back you can get millions of pixels, but that image is still only as clear as the glass in front of it. A flatbed scanner is certainly ideal (unless you want to say lose the paper texture from the scan, then the camera is actually better) and will give you results with microscopic clarity. I mean hell even a cheap epson will do like 9600 dpi or so and to be honest, unless I'm scanning negatives, I rarely scan over 600dpi. If I were you I would by a cheap 11x17 scanner that does not have a recessed bed. Meaning that when you take the lid off, the scanning glass is flush with the sides of the plastic top. This is important as scanners have a fairly shallow depth of field. Now what you want to do is take your maps and get a big heavy piece of glass. Don't use plex or at least get a couple of pieces of plexiglass, as you will just basically scratch it to hell with the scanner and your efforts to clean it as it get dusty. Place the glass on a map. Next rip the lid off your scanner and start scanning away. Use the preview to judge your overlap between scans and try to give a good 10% overlap as this will help in the stitching process. You can probably get away with less, but I like to leave some room for human error as well. Make sure each scan has auto exposure and color turned off. Use a medium to high unsharp mask if you want more of the texture if your scanner software supports this. (You can also just sharpen a little in photoshop later if you like) Now scan your map in sections. Try to go for about 300 dpi if the maps are larger. If they are smaller (10x10 or so) you can bump up to 600dpi. Open up photoshop or something capable of doing rectilinear mapping and photostitch your scans. Photoshop CS4 does a wonderful job here, and if you use PS, I really recommend going ahead and using the ruler tool and rotate->arbitrary to straighten the edges of your scans as well as cropping out anything that isn't part of the image. This will make your stitching go much smoother and be less error prone as well as getting proper blends at the seams. You'll have to fix up the levels and color a bit since you turned off the autocorrection, but this should give you a good start if you really want to do it on your own. Hit up my e-mail if you would like to ask questions. I'd be happy to help as much as possible.
This is actually how I reproduce art. I just use a tripod that I can move across an xy axis and stitch the results in photoshop and then readjust any skewing, etc. You can get really great quality if you spend the time. You don't need a $30,000 medium format scanning back. If you have good lighting noise shouldn't be an issue. Especially if you stick to iso 100 or less. A 15MP DSLR should give you images that are like 20x15 or so at 300 dpi. If this is not good enough (and it really is for a lot of fine art), you just simply move the camera closer and take more shots. Sure it might take you twice as long and definitely requires some serious practice before you start getting good results, but it is effective and most importantly cheap. Flatbed scanners (even little 8x11 ones) are extremely useful as well as long as whatever you are scanning can take being touched. Some things like pencil drawings are too fragile to move around like that, but a well cured oil or a watercolor can withstand a small amount of abuse. If I had a bunch of ancient maps, I think I'd certainly call a local museum or university. They would be rather interested in checking them out anyways, so you could potentially work out some free scans out of the deal.
I do this for a living and yeah, the files are big, and even at 300dpi you can get into fairly large sizes. Personally I have printers at work that can print at 1440dpi and really anything over 600dpi is overkill. You can't really see the dots at that point unless you magnify them somehow.
you could also try hugin and play with the various projections that are rectangular. hugin uses autopano-c and seems to work pretty good. ideally get yourself a copy of photoshop cs4 and just use file->automate->photomerge and try automatic and then "reposition only" if it is for some reason trying to project on a spherical surface. the lack of seams and stitching errors in photoshop's tool really amazes me compared to other pano programs I've used. I really liked hugin and did a lot of cool stuff with it, but as soon as you throw in water or anything that moves it just really seems to break down. photoshop always gives me perfect water with smooth looking waves.....i'm sure I could probably get more smoother results from hugin, but why bother when I can just click twice and be done?
That's all pretty easy to do. All rogers has to do is come up with some custom firmware and inject it back to htc. You really think rogers has a screen printing department where their phones get printed with the logo? All that crap is done at the manufacturer so it goes into a factory sealed box. When you order 10,000 phones, you do get the option to customize your order.......
You sure can't beat OS/2 for longevity! I think I'd like to beat it with a few other things though......
I played around with OS/2 4 recently and was pretty awestruck at how dated it looked. I think even windows 95 has aged more gracefully. It cracked me up when the built-in web browser wouldn't render anything. If Windows 2000 had come instead of Windows95, there would be no argument about which was superior. OS/2 sure was fast (and relatively reliable) though.
I don't really understand how a fractured OS market would have served people better in the long run. People would have had more choices, but ultimately less choices in terms of applications available to their chosen OS. I think that there was a chance that anyone could have taken the OS wars in the late 80s, early 90s, but the IBM platform was common and dos ran everything that people were using at the time. I mean would os/2 have been a worthy competitior? It had hardly any commercial application support. Would Mac OS 7 been a better candidate to dominate? What about AmigaOS? All of these had their loyal followings (I liked all of them to be honest, except windows), but my is that most people just wanted the one platform that would run all of their stuff and windows was really the only road ahead for them from the start. No small convenience to a lot of people that windows95 ran on top of dos and would run most people's old dos applications. Even more than one at a time!
I think windows won out of necessity. If people wanted choice that badly I think that linux would have become a lot more popular than it has.
Heh. I would argue that kde 3 was super garish, and while kde 4 looks great....it still lacks a lot of the usability that exists on windows. True drag and drop, a clipboard that will pass all sorts of different kinds of data between any application. I could go on and on, but I won't. Also its interesting you mention the mismatched widgets as I find the linux experience to be the most mismatched there is. Any older X application uses any number of ancient widgets. Like look at the state of mozilla in kde for a long time as an example. Butt ugly out of the box. I'm just saying that the arguments you make can be made to perhaps an even greater extent on your beloved platform. To a lot of people those things are not all that important I guess. Macintosh certainly paved the way in end user usability and still do some things in the best way possible. My problem is the opposite of yours. All the software I really want is still on windows with no alternatives in sight. Its too bad I can't get AMD-V to work on my laptop. It would be pretty nifty to have a virtual linux machine to play with again.....
Why? Because they are listed on amazon? Google shopping has hordes of scammers that run for a week or two until the feedback starts going really south. I'd imagine that you would have been better off just buying server 2003 from microsoft direct, or just downloading an ISO if you have a good key....
I don't think newegg is big enough to order direct. No, there are much, much larger suppliers out there. Newegg is essentially an online retail middleman. They are really cheap, but you are still certainly paying a slight markup. You have to realize that these chips are made in china, malaysia and taiwan. I would imagine most suppliers have shipped operations overseas or are just plain chinese to begin with. Look at canon. I tried to call canon to order a part for a large format $8000 printer. They wouldn't deal with me, but were happy to replace a part under warranty and even shipped an part invoice with it. Unless newegg is buying in the thousands at once, I really doubt they buy direct.
just use your cc. you can get a prepaid cc for like $5-10 if security is that much of a worry. They charge you like $1 a transaction or so and $3 to add cash. Not a terrible deal for a completely anonymous credit card......
I mean seriously. You are far more likely to be fucked over by paypal than you are to have your credit card # used for something illegal when you buy from newegg. Unless you totally don't trust SSL or anything.....don't they have a phone number too?
I always use the untouched nvidia drivers for my laptop. If they can't figure out how to make drivers for their own chipsets then shame on them. I mean most integrated nvidia chipsets have fairly fixed clock frequencies. I've even overclocked my laptops gpu slightly, without a great deal more heat generated. (thanks evga!) I always get the best performance from stock nvidia drivers. I tried the dox drivers but found them to be problematic and no faster than the nvidia stock. I guess YMMV of course......
that's why I hate hold'em. no real skill necessary, you might as well play blackjack.
The number that caught my eye the most was the 40gb write limit on the 256gb drive that gives the expected life of 5 years. If you use photoshop on large files for any extended period of time you will chew through that in a heartbeat. Sure I guess you could set your scratch disks to a good old platter based drive, but that's not so easy in a laptop for instance. Lets not even get into video editing or music recording. A lot of real world tasks that people use computers for (maybe even programming?) would wear down an SSD in a much faster time frame than 5 years. You notice that the numbers go WAAAAY down for the smaller drives. 10 gigs a day might seem like a fair amount, but if you hibernate your 2 gig laptop a few times, you've already gone through over half of that. I do a lot of printing from windows to a large format printer. Gigabytes of spool files in a day are pretty typical. I would destroy an SSD in less than 6 months. A friend of mine runs a recording studio. Even when using SCSI drives he still has to replace drives fairly regularly. I guess while you could argue that SSDs are more reliable (magnetic drives can be like russian roulette in a way), I just don't see them having the lifespan that I see out of older smaller drives. It seems like after 300gb, magnetic drives started becoming increasingly unreliable, especially the Seagate 1TB drives for instance. The reviews on newegg are always pretty revealing because the datacentre guys will always post reviews about buying a lot of say 20 and having half of them fail in 6 months. I love western digital drives, and i'm kind of happy to see them finally enter the consumer ssd market, but the costs really need to come down significantly. a hard drive is in reality 100x more complex to engineer than an ssd (at least that is my opinion), since the only challenges in an SSD are density and reliability. I just cannot see how costs won't be become pretty dirt cheap, though you gotta admit the densities they are pushing now are pretty impressive compared to the relative are they take up, especially when you compare it to the huge hard drives people used to use in the 70s-80s. Drives that at most held like 1 gigabyte. I think as long as they keep cranking out cheap, huge, magnetic drives for less than $100, it is going to take at least until you could say buy a 300-500gb SSD for $100, for the market to really take off.
yeah. i know its offtopic, but I think this is a really great idea. I have a 6 month old acer that I have to buy a new screen for because the connection to the lcd in the back is failing. I suspect that it is due to the fucking thing flexing every time I open or close it from the corner. why do they make the lids so flimsy anymore? like the old dell and thinkpad screens were fucking tanks and had metal on the inside to keep the screen protected. On the acer there is nothing but flimsy molded plastic. If you break the screen under warranty they will charge you like $400 or something retarded to replace it because it was obviously caused by the user and not some design defect. It seems to me like it was designed to fail. I've massaged it to a working state (who knows how fucking long it will last) and decided to say fuck acer and just buy a damned $80 screen off ebay. Since they have like no local service, I would otherwise have to mail it off to them and get it back in probably a worse state than I sent it a whole 3-4 weeks later. They like to wipe drives and reinstall the OEM OS as a "favor" as well apparantly. Usually I have a backup computer laying around but I bought acer in desperation because all of my backups failed one after another. I was thinking about how I could add metal or something to the inside of the case to strengthen the screen and I never thought of just stiffening the case from the back. Unfortunately my case has this retarded curve to it, so I don't know how that will exactly work without some crafty sculpting. I was thinking about just taking a piece of aluminum sheeting from work and sandwiching it underneath the backlight. It looks like I could get something to fit in there, but I don't know if it would offer much more tensile strength. Its too bad. Other than the annoying glossy screen and the stupid gloss case that gets scratched if you look at it wrong, it has been quite a nice computer. AMD virtualization is horribly broken via BIOS, but it seems a lot of Turion based notebooks have problems with virtualization. I guess the BIOS manufacturer didn't see it as a real need for the user and didn't bother to implement it properly. Sorry about the long rant. After dicking with this damned screen for 20 minutes to get it to work again (gotta break a good old CRT soon.....) I read your post felt a slight need to vent.
woosh
Its true. And sad. For some people, like myself, unfortunately money never mattered much in life, though you do pay for it as you get older.......
I have a housemate on social security. He gets by on less than I do, which I find amazing. Of course he never leaves the house, lives out of frozen boxes, and drinks the cheapest beer at a rate of a case every few days. He used to own a company at one point. You never, ever know where you might end up in life.......
I make like $10 an hour here. The median wage in my city is like $8 or so. I have skills worth more, but convincing people that I do without proper certifications, schooling, and more importantly experience, then it becomes somewhat more difficult. I have one daughter, which was from 10 years ago. Its not like I have 20 kids to support or anything. I'm just poor and lack the means to radically change that situation for the time being.