What I meant is that I have to change three different settings to make search useful for me. 1) The one you mentioned me - advanced search, 2) A registry key to tell XP to search for a keyword on all files (it ignores several extensions, not good), and reg32 to unregister ZIP support from XP and delete WFP for that file.
I have to reinstall Windows every six to ten months (because I like to do weird things until it becomes suicidal) and it is extremely time consuming running a bunch of registry/windows tweakers and doing some other tweaks manually. Worse, at work, I cannot tweak the OS. An interesting fact is that Windows Server 2003 has most of the useless stuff turned off, like animations. (And also hardware 3D disabled by default)
This is another attempt of making PC as dumb as household appliances, ironically appliances are becoming more like PC's.
Windows is also becoming less friendly toward power users. I'll have to do my own windows setup script, or a program to do many things like: turn off useless GUI animations, destroy Accessibility, annihilate Windows themes, obliterate the menu delay, eradicate many useless windows services, turn off Auto Insert, Tab auto complete, and... Oh... there is more, I'll remember when I reinstall Windows. The stupid search needs a whole section: Turn off the stupid search dog, turn on advanced search, destroy windows zip support (there's no option to avoid searching into zip files), and search on all files when I write something on "containing text" (for example, it skips *.sql files!). I do miss the older search screen, if it hadn't a limitation on the number of entries found.
I always knew we would be using MS Bob against our will sooner or later!
It is like most modern audio equipment, you can't control the EQ, they just have stupid presets. It's about giving people less freedom, but that makes things easier to market and sell to most consumers. Maybe even makes it easier to translate, document and support. The iPod is a perfect example: simplicity sells.
Remember the $399 Sega Saturn? Using an inflation calculator, in 2006 it is $532.79! And worse, people knew the $299 PSX was better at 3D performance and was going to be introduced to the US several months later. The only difference is that back then, Nintendo wasn't a competitor and had to lie about their Ultra 64 hardware until it finally arrived.
Sometimes is not about remembering how to do it... Experience tells us that is just plain wrong to do things quickly, without testing, without planning, without knowing how things work in the company, and without checking if someone (there) has written that before. And that's usually how things have to be done anyway...
Ok, actually I had forgotten the name of it. I did several tries on Google until I tried EMU10. I have used the driver in old P3/Celery computers with SBLive cards. Here's the webpage: http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?skip=1
I agree with you about hating Creative, not only their Soundblaster, PRO and 16 were insanely overpriced, they were low-tech - even the Sega Genesis had a Z80 processor to deal with sound to avoid slowing down the main CPU, and it was almost the obligatory standard: real soundcards like the Gravis Ultrasound didn't do well(wavetable via on-board RAM, hardware playback, 14 digital voices 16bit 44Khz, 32 were around 22Khz, and 8 bit playback had interpolation also via hardware). And that was years before SB Live and SB 32/64. I even liked the ProAudioSpectrum with their SCSI interfaces.
FYI, there is a freeware driver for SB Live that is a zillion times better than the Creative ones.
This patent almost describe how search software at libraries work. And libraries also have videos and audio. Anyway, it could probably cost less to pay Creative, than to prove this is another supid patent.
Geeez.. I never tought of removing the Capslock key, there are many other issues, specific to Windows.
First: Sticky keys, toggle keys, and most of the other accessibility junk that the 95% of the world don't need. One day I fell asleep holding the Shift key! That nasty screeching sound scared the hell out of me, even when my laptop had its speakers to mute - 'cause it uses the PC speaker. Everytime I reinstall Windows I forget to turn all that stuff off, maybe I'm too busy turning the other useless junk off like animations (unlike 2003 server). Worse, most PC at work have security settings, that sound sure is horrific in a quiet office.
Second: The mega-idiotic Microsoft keyboards with the Function keys disabled by default. And the wireless one does not have an indicator. By default they have Office-like features like copy, paste (I think, I forgot). Only if the driver is installed. I once liked Microsoft hardware. Now I don't.
Third: The Windows and Menu keys. Almost useless. Except Windows+M, but anyway it's already on the Desktop toolbar. Some games go from full screen to a window to display the menu. I also usually forget to turn those off.
Fotuth: Why sometimes the PC acts as if the Control key is stuck?? I tought it was due to the 70's technology of the original PC, and also due (on 286+) to wiring the CPU A20 line to the keyboard controller (I still wonder which badly programmed software needed that hack). But it does still happen on modern PC's.
Most of it is to make Windows easier for users, and a living hell for old users. I think the intelligent keyboard idea died after the Amiga, which it had a 6502 CPU to handle it. I think even the Amiga 1200 couldn't detect some multiple key combinations, unlike the older Amigas.
I do have two of those old IBM-AT keyboards, thave a nice click, all keys had removable caps, so, I could change it to a Dvorak layout (and remove Capslock so it is somewhat more difficult to hit it accidentaly). And you could use them for personal defense.
I absolutely agree, learn VBA... DAO is the old, native one, (currentdb) and ADO is the new one. They both quite similar, and different at the same time. ADO is faster. M$ objects are weirdly organized (compared to Delphi or.Net) but, once you figure it out it's very useful.
I wrote my own documenter in VBA that writes the output to Excel sheets. Almost all the info you need is in the TableDef(s) objects. Documenter kinda either lacks detals, or, write a lot of junk you don't need. I'm not sure if M$ released the documenter source, they did release code of many of their wizards for Access 97.
Access is very quirky, and really bad if you need to do huge database transactions quickly or handle more than 10 users. But I kinda like unique stuff like using VBA funcions in Queries - it's horrendously slow, but, actually fun knowing you can write a query that can do anything. (it's dangerous, Access love requerying to refresh the screen). And have a job for quite a while when trying to port that ugly mess to VB.Net. You can also have fun with things not available in VB, like Application.Evaluate (ok, you can from VB if you use an Access or Excel object).
Of course, I'm having a really hard time finding a full time job position, all I get are Access Applications that are mostly really really badly designed databases, or, I have to deal with automating programs that handle absolutely scary data. (sometimes I can't call it 'data')
In 1982 there was only CGA, MDA and Hercules. EGA was introduced in 1984. I can't find pricing, but, when new, EGA cards were horrendously expensive, especially those new high-rez non-interlaced monitors.
You're absolutely right about serious nerds using Hercules cards, having it as a secondary adapter could display output from debuggers.:) I still hate programming when everything is on a single screen.
The funny thing about the Turbo button is that it was never exact. The 8088 had an 8bit bus, ran at 4.77Mhz. The 8086 ran in a 16 bit bus and has a slighlty larger prefetch buffer (so at 4.77 Mhz it was still somewhat faster than the 8088).
Technically, the Turbo button was needed because the stupid, pathetic, lousy and generic PC video cards didn't had a VBlank (vertical retrace, when the monitor finished drawing one screen) or HBlank interrupt. It was needed! You HAD to use it to avoid "snow" on older CGA cards! You could poll the VBlank like crazy - slowing your game to a crawl, or synch the clock to the VBlank. FYI: CGA used a Motorola text-only display chip, graphic modes were produced redefining charachers on-the-fly.
The 286 was much more efficient, I think most PC's switched to 8Mhz instead of 4.77. 386 was even more, with its 32 bit bus. The 386SX was actually slower than a 286 (of course, running 16 bit code).
The almost demise of the Turbo button was on the 486. They could not "slow down", the only thing that could be done was turn off the cache. They did slow down, but, it was pretty much useless... Probably, it was kinda of a "I'm a clone" tradition.
The original PC was simply not fun: CGA had horrendous, pre-selected 4 color schemes, no sprites (actually the text screen cursor is a sprite! that's why it keeps blinking even when the PC had crashed) and MDA could simply not display any graphics! Ok, now I have to try again to run Flightmare on DosBox...
I just cannot believe my luck, on Monday I will begin a 4 month temp job at Oracle...
I had a 9 month low-pay contract, so I am eating ramen, preparing homemade chicken, no dining out, no christmas gifts, checking trash bins, no cable TV, no phone, rusty car, using clothesline instead of dryer, and I'm curretly deciding cheapest internet possibility (nobody has wireless I can stea.. I mean use). I would not sleep at all if I don't save enough money to survive six months of unemployment or low paying jobs.
I think the "we're laying Oracle people" is more like a diplomatic and marketing message.
The corporate ideal is having the company financially strong regardless of employees. The problem is that usually management won't allow getting rid of other management. So it is acceptable to get rid of people, make the new job condition a living hell of the remaining ones, and blame the economy - not the management. If something breaks, they will hire consultants.
Windows XP has an Accessibility menu with Magnifier and Narrator. Most map software use vector graphics, so zooming in doesn't degrade the image. Speech to text software could be nice if the keyboard is too cumbersome to use.
I would recommend installing two or more monitors which can be configured (since Win98) as one big desktop. Or maybe plugging the PC to a large TV with svideo or better. Most video cards also have custom brightness/contrast settings. XP's "built-in" ultra-plain generic drivers doesn't allow that, be sure to download new drivers.
Also, it's important to know about government and private institutions benefits for handicapped persons - especially for education and training.
You're right about Sunbird could get renamed. The Mozilla group likes to choose controversial names, like the Mozilla = Godzilla, Phoenix = whoever threatened to sue = arcade game?, Thunderbird = Ford and now Sunbird = Pontiac.
Youre right, next time I'll find references about what I'm talking about. Probably I read about the split screen in another marketing gimick. I meant about the 'insane flicker' that I could swear the SNES interlaced screens I saw didn't seem to flicker so bad.
Maybe I'm mad at Sega by not doing a great job like Nintendo did with the SNes hardware (sans CPU). Sega did a good job with the SegaCD, 32X and Nomad. Marketing could have been better.
The Genesis/ MegaDrive did also used a Z80 @ 4Mhz for sound and Sega Master emulation. It could be somewhat used for other stuff. There's an article somewhere by the guy who programmed Aladdin, even Sega's tech specs didn't tell things he had done. So, with a 7.8Mhz 68000 and some of the 4Mhz Z80 the Genesis should be even faster than Amigas and Macs!
The SNES does have better graphics and sound. It had less sound channels but they were all digital, even with reverb and echo, thanks to Sony. The Genesis used a stereo Yamaha chip, proably the same of the soundblaster. (geez, the sounblaster was $100? Mono! what a ripoff).
The SNES could display more background planes(4), more sprites, Mode7 (big rotating/scaling backgound, I think the sound chip DSP did the magic), more colors, and hirez which flickered insanely. (Sonic 2 dual screen is a sofware trick). The SNES CPU was too weak, Gradius III is a fine example. The same CPU caused the demise of the AppleIIGS!
I think the root of the problem is that parents teach their girls that all that can be considered 'geeky' or boyish is bad for them. I call it the Barbie syndrome, because I haven't seen Barbie mechanical engineer, Barbie computer programmer and so on.
Girls play with dolls. Boys play with 'action figures', and also with tinkertoys, legos, 'my electronic kits', 'build your own rocket', electronic toys, and such. Girls can do all that but they aren't fascinated like boys.
I remember an old study (in the 80's) which told that girls 9-10 years old began to get lower grades in science and math than boys. The hormonal factor?
Personally, I haven't met a women yet who has written code just for the fun of it or couriosity. I know many who are good programmers, they just don't love doing it.
The only bad thing about women in IT is that you must treat them professionaly, can't hide posters behind the racks, boring wallpapers, etc..
Windows has always configured itself assuming maximum eye candy and enough compatibility. People get mad when the OS doesn't run, but most won't even notice the OS performing horrendously slow. For example, finding out DMA off in any drive is frustrating. I think maybe M$ is still lazy in determining the optimum configuration.
Windows 2K, XP has too many useless services turned on. Theres a freeware app called GameXP that has an option to turn off many services. It might be too strict for most users, but for slow PC's with 128MB of RAM is a must.
By turning all the stupid XP menu / combo animations, any PC will feel 300% faster. Win2K3 has all that stupidity already off. In Win3.0 M$ mentions proudly how fast are the menus. It's frustrating that my slow Celery 500Mhz displays menus slower than my old 486-33.
I like a program called XQSet, it lacks some options (like the quick IE startup), but it has almost everything. Except tweaking services..
Yeah.. it's a Game and Watch! First the GBA NES Retro, and now the Game and Watch Retro. The perfect harwdare for emulating Punch Out arcade! And PlayChoice 10 too.:P
It should have really been called G&W retro.. The DS name sounds kind of lame, like an auto trim line. But.. that's ok, Nintendo is targeting the system to people younger than the Game and Watch!
As in most things, DVD is an evolution from Phillips CDi and VCD. Like html/http was something like joining telnet, Rich text format and Hypercard together.
VCD's were inmensely popular in China. The hardware was cheap, no copy protection, pirated movies were everywhere and there were no licenses to pay for the MPEG format. They were even multi language: left audio was chinese, right the original one.:-P
Why do you think early DVD's won't play VCD's? Big electronics companies wanted to earn money. Even the PSX has a video decoder that could have been easily modified to play VCD's. Even Windows can play the MPEG inside a VCD but won't play the VCD itself!
Please, don't forget to tell it's the Mac version. I could guess that in that era 75% of computers were DOS/Windows based.
Word Perfect 5.1 is still a great word processor - once you learn it completely. Especially the key compbiation for the menu, reveal codes, and of course print preview.
I hate Word only after it auto-formats and destroy my beatiful tables, lists and some formatting like colored backgrounds.
I absolutely agree the 486 is not historically important. It was just an enhanced 386 with the integrated (and very slow) FPU. And when introduced was insanely expensive, like today's Xeon.
486's became cheaper when AMD began selling cheap 386's using the exact same Intel 386 microcode. Intel had to create the 486SX, and the DX/2 family that kept the 486 alive for years. Even the Pentium 60 was not significantly faster than AMD's 486DX2-100. (it was DX2-120?, I forgot).
Don't forget the first 486SX, one of the wonders of engineering. It was a 486DX with the FPU circuit disabled. Anyway, the FPU was only used in high-end apps like AutoCad. Windows emulated the FPU when needed. Even Quake refused to work on 486's because the P5 FPU was much faster and allowed two integer and one FPU instruction to execute at the same time.
Probaly what most people remember is that when the 486SX came, it replaced the horrendously slow 386SX - the 386 with the 16 bit bus kludge so it could run on 286 boards. And most didn't use external cache which made them even painfully slower. Even the 286-16 was noticeable faster than the 386SX-16.
Maybe Slashdot will celebrate next the 15 years of the Pentium Pro. >:)
If I were in a foreign place I would simply tell my girlfriend to ask somebody or get a taxi!
Maybe after developing this building recognition
technology, the next step will be perfecting facial recognition so I can auto-post text based on my "yeah, sure..." gesture instead of writing all this!
Ok, ok... Maybe someone will develop this and actually win the DARPA unmanned vehicle competition. Or.. maybe they all used it and lost the race!
Since Star Wars ROTJ "attack of the killer teddy bears" I think that Lucas began to be far too involved with his kids. In EP1 he even had two annoying kid oriented characters, surpassing by far Howard the Duck. Even the plot holes (black holes?) are to accomodate kid stuff, Han shooting in defense, C3PO and R2D2 in EP1. Trying to do what Harry Potter became?
I don't understand why Star Wars is so important for nerds. Don't get me wrong, the first two were absolutely great. In the special effects deparment 2001 had better special effects 10 years earlier (even the SW SP ED can't match it), and in the scripwriting department it was inspired (a bit) from The Hidden Fortress.
For me, Star Wars marks the significance of tons of low-cost special effects in an action movie and great storytelling. EP I and II tells the significance about having tons of money, lots of years of possible planning and one of the best special effects studio on the planet, lots of Star Wars literature, lots lf loyal fans and still make an ok movie.. twice..
I don't think they stole the code, I'm not even sure if they knew their code was similar to Stacker. M$ only wanted to destroy Stacker and sell lots of DOS 6 upgrades. They did too wanted to destroy DR-DOS. Quarterdeck QEMM too. In fact, they wanted to destroy all opposition.
DOS 5 was pretty good (*anything* is better than DOS 4), so M$ had to include dblspace, anti-virus, decent backup, memmaker. M$ did a lot of advertising for DOS 6 and dblspace, including how it worked.
Stack won a lot of money but they lost some of it because M$ won the case because Stacker reverse engineered dblspace/drvspace autoloading. Maybe they told the judge it was integrated to the OS like Internet Explorer "is" now...
Here in PR we went halfway the conversion, only the liquid stuff. In fact maybe we're the only spanish speaking country dealing with the absurd imperial/english system. Ok... Except drug shipments, they are weighted in kilos.. >:)
My solution to solve all these incosistencies on the world is to talk to a child. After seeing them all struggling with the same stuff you'll quickly find out how illogical most things are. My 7 year old niece still struggles visualizing that 12 inches, is a foot and 3 of them is a yard.
Slashdot Mirror
What I meant is that I have to change three different settings to make search useful for me. 1) The one you mentioned me - advanced search, 2) A registry key to tell XP to search for a keyword on all files (it ignores several extensions, not good), and reg32 to unregister ZIP support from XP and delete WFP for that file.
I have to reinstall Windows every six to ten months (because I like to do weird things until it becomes suicidal) and it is extremely time consuming running a bunch of registry/windows tweakers and doing some other tweaks manually. Worse, at work, I cannot tweak the OS. An interesting fact is that Windows Server 2003 has most of the useless stuff turned off, like animations. (And also hardware 3D disabled by default)
This is another attempt of making PC as dumb as household appliances, ironically appliances are becoming more like PC's.
Windows is also becoming less friendly toward power users. I'll have to do my own windows setup script, or a program to do many things like: turn off useless GUI animations, destroy Accessibility, annihilate Windows themes, obliterate the menu delay, eradicate many useless windows services, turn off Auto Insert, Tab auto complete, and... Oh... there is more, I'll remember when I reinstall Windows. The stupid search needs a whole section: Turn off the stupid search dog, turn on advanced search, destroy windows zip support (there's no option to avoid searching into zip files), and search on all files when I write something on "containing text" (for example, it skips *.sql files!). I do miss the older search screen, if it hadn't a limitation on the number of entries found.
I always knew we would be using MS Bob against our will sooner or later!
It is like most modern audio equipment, you can't control the EQ, they just have stupid presets. It's about giving people less freedom, but that makes things easier to market and sell to most consumers. Maybe even makes it easier to translate, document and support. The iPod is a perfect example: simplicity sells.
Remember the $399 Sega Saturn? Using an inflation calculator, in 2006 it is $532.79! And worse, people knew the $299 PSX was better at 3D performance and was going to be introduced to the US several months later. The only difference is that back then, Nintendo wasn't a competitor and had to lie about their Ultra 64 hardware until it finally arrived.
Sometimes is not about remembering how to do it... Experience tells us that is just plain wrong to do things quickly, without testing, without planning, without knowing how things work in the company, and without checking if someone (there) has written that before. And that's usually how things have to be done anyway...
Ok, actually I had forgotten the name of it. I did several tries on Google until I tried EMU10. I have used the driver in old P3/Celery computers with SBLive cards. Here's the webpage:
http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?skip=1
I agree with you about hating Creative, not only their Soundblaster, PRO and 16 were insanely overpriced, they were low-tech - even the Sega Genesis had a Z80 processor to deal with sound to avoid slowing down the main CPU, and it was almost the obligatory standard: real soundcards like the Gravis Ultrasound didn't do well(wavetable via on-board RAM, hardware playback, 14 digital voices 16bit 44Khz, 32 were around 22Khz, and 8 bit playback had interpolation also via hardware). And that was years before SB Live and SB 32/64. I even liked the ProAudioSpectrum with their SCSI interfaces.
FYI, there is a freeware driver for SB Live that is a zillion times better than the Creative ones.
This patent almost describe how search software at libraries work. And libraries also have videos and audio. Anyway, it could probably cost less to pay Creative, than to prove this is another supid patent.
Geeez.. I never tought of removing the Capslock key, there are many other issues, specific to Windows.
First: Sticky keys, toggle keys, and most of the other accessibility junk that the 95% of the world don't need. One day I fell asleep holding the Shift key! That nasty screeching sound scared the hell out of me, even when my laptop had its speakers to mute - 'cause it uses the PC speaker. Everytime I reinstall Windows I forget to turn all that stuff off, maybe I'm too busy turning the other useless junk off like animations (unlike 2003 server). Worse, most PC at work have security settings, that sound sure is horrific in a quiet office.
Second: The mega-idiotic Microsoft keyboards with the Function keys disabled by default. And the wireless one does not have an indicator. By default they have Office-like features like copy, paste (I think, I forgot). Only if the driver is installed. I once liked Microsoft hardware. Now I don't.
Third: The Windows and Menu keys. Almost useless. Except Windows+M, but anyway it's already on the Desktop toolbar. Some games go from full screen to a window to display the menu. I also usually forget to turn those off.
Fotuth: Why sometimes the PC acts as if the Control key is stuck?? I tought it was due to the 70's technology of the original PC, and also due (on 286+) to wiring the CPU A20 line to the keyboard controller (I still wonder which badly programmed software needed that hack). But it does still happen on modern PC's.
Most of it is to make Windows easier for users, and a living hell for old users. I think the intelligent keyboard idea died after the Amiga, which it had a 6502 CPU to handle it. I think even the Amiga 1200 couldn't detect some multiple key combinations, unlike the older Amigas.
I do have two of those old IBM-AT keyboards, thave a nice click, all keys had removable caps, so, I could change it to a Dvorak layout (and remove Capslock so it is somewhat more difficult to hit it accidentaly). And you could use them for personal defense.
I absolutely agree, learn VBA... DAO is the old, native one, (currentdb) and ADO is the new one. They both quite similar, and different at the same time. ADO is faster. M$ objects are weirdly organized (compared to Delphi or .Net) but, once you figure it out it's very useful.
I wrote my own documenter in VBA that writes the output to Excel sheets. Almost all the info you need is in the TableDef(s) objects. Documenter kinda either lacks detals, or, write a lot of junk you don't need. I'm not sure if M$ released the documenter source, they did release code of many of their wizards for Access 97.
Access is very quirky, and really bad if you need to do huge database transactions quickly or handle more than 10 users. But I kinda like unique stuff like using VBA funcions in Queries - it's horrendously slow, but, actually fun knowing you can write a query that can do anything. (it's dangerous, Access love requerying to refresh the screen). And have a job for quite a while when trying to port that ugly mess to VB.Net. You can also have fun with things not available in VB, like Application.Evaluate (ok, you can from VB if you use an Access or Excel object).
Of course, I'm having a really hard time finding a full time job position, all I get are Access Applications that are mostly really really badly designed databases, or, I have to deal with automating programs that handle absolutely scary data. (sometimes I can't call it 'data')
In 1982 there was only CGA, MDA and Hercules. EGA was introduced in 1984. I can't find pricing, but, when new, EGA cards were horrendously expensive, especially those new high-rez non-interlaced monitors.
:) I still hate programming when everything is on a single screen.
You're absolutely right about serious nerds using Hercules cards, having it as a secondary adapter could display output from debuggers.
The funny thing about the Turbo button is that it was never exact. The 8088 had an 8bit bus, ran at 4.77Mhz. The 8086 ran in a 16 bit bus and has a slighlty larger prefetch buffer (so at 4.77 Mhz it was still somewhat faster than the 8088).
Technically, the Turbo button was needed because the stupid, pathetic, lousy and generic PC video cards didn't had a VBlank (vertical retrace, when the monitor finished drawing one screen) or HBlank interrupt. It was needed! You HAD to use it to avoid "snow" on older CGA cards! You could poll the VBlank like crazy - slowing your game to a crawl, or synch the clock to the VBlank. FYI: CGA used a Motorola text-only display chip, graphic modes were produced redefining charachers on-the-fly.
The 286 was much more efficient, I think most PC's switched to 8Mhz instead of 4.77. 386 was even more, with its 32 bit bus. The 386SX was actually slower than a 286 (of course, running 16 bit code).
The almost demise of the Turbo button was on the 486. They could not "slow down", the only thing that could be done was turn off the cache. They did slow down, but, it was pretty much useless... Probably, it was kinda of a "I'm a clone" tradition.
The original PC was simply not fun: CGA had horrendous, pre-selected 4 color schemes, no sprites (actually the text screen cursor is a sprite! that's why it keeps blinking even when the PC had crashed) and MDA could simply not display any graphics! Ok, now I have to try again to run Flightmare on DosBox...
I just cannot believe my luck, on Monday I will begin a 4 month temp job at Oracle...
I had a 9 month low-pay contract, so I am eating ramen, preparing homemade chicken, no dining out, no christmas gifts, checking trash bins, no cable TV, no phone, rusty car, using clothesline instead of dryer, and I'm curretly deciding cheapest internet possibility (nobody has wireless I can stea.. I mean use). I would not sleep at all if I don't save enough money to survive six months of unemployment or low paying jobs.
I think the "we're laying Oracle people" is more like a diplomatic and marketing message.
The corporate ideal is having the company financially strong regardless of employees. The problem is that usually management won't allow getting rid of other management. So it is acceptable to get rid of people, make the new job condition a living hell of the remaining ones, and blame the economy - not the management. If something breaks, they will hire consultants.
Windows XP has an Accessibility menu with Magnifier and Narrator. Most map software use vector graphics, so zooming in doesn't degrade the image. Speech to text software could be nice if the keyboard is too cumbersome to use.
I would recommend installing two or more monitors which can be configured (since Win98) as one big desktop. Or maybe plugging the PC to a large TV with svideo or better. Most video cards also have custom brightness/contrast settings. XP's "built-in" ultra-plain generic drivers doesn't allow that, be sure to download new drivers.
Also, it's important to know about government and private institutions benefits for handicapped persons - especially for education and training.
You're right about Sunbird could get renamed. The Mozilla group likes to choose controversial names, like the Mozilla = Godzilla, Phoenix = whoever threatened to sue = arcade game?, Thunderbird = Ford and now Sunbird = Pontiac.
Youre right, next time I'll find references about what I'm talking about. Probably I read about the split screen in another marketing gimick. I meant about the 'insane flicker' that I could swear the SNES interlaced screens I saw didn't seem to flicker so bad.
Maybe I'm mad at Sega by not doing a great job like Nintendo did with the SNes hardware (sans CPU). Sega did a good job with the SegaCD, 32X and Nomad. Marketing could have been better.
The Genesis/ MegaDrive did also used a Z80 @ 4Mhz for sound and Sega Master emulation. It could be somewhat used for other stuff. There's an article somewhere by the guy who programmed Aladdin, even Sega's tech specs didn't tell things he had done. So, with a 7.8Mhz 68000 and some of the 4Mhz Z80 the Genesis should be even faster than Amigas and Macs!
/scaling backgound, I think the sound chip DSP did the magic), more colors, and hirez which flickered insanely. (Sonic 2 dual screen is a sofware trick). The SNES CPU was too weak, Gradius III is a fine example. The same CPU caused the demise of the AppleIIGS!
The SNES does have better graphics and sound. It had less sound channels but they were all digital, even with reverb and echo, thanks to Sony. The Genesis used a stereo Yamaha chip, proably the same of the soundblaster. (geez, the sounblaster was $100? Mono! what a ripoff).
The SNES could display more background planes(4), more sprites, Mode7 (big rotating
I think the root of the problem is that parents teach their girls that all that can be considered 'geeky' or boyish is bad for them. I call it the Barbie syndrome, because I haven't seen Barbie mechanical engineer, Barbie computer programmer and so on.
Girls play with dolls. Boys play with 'action figures', and also with tinkertoys, legos, 'my electronic kits', 'build your own rocket', electronic toys, and such. Girls can do all that but they aren't fascinated like boys.
I remember an old study (in the 80's) which told that girls 9-10 years old began to get lower grades in science and math than boys. The hormonal factor?
Personally, I haven't met a women yet who has written code just for the fun of it or couriosity. I know many who are good programmers, they just don't love doing it.
The only bad thing about women in IT is that you must treat them professionaly, can't hide posters behind the racks, boring wallpapers, etc..
Windows has always configured itself assuming maximum eye candy and enough compatibility. People get mad when the OS doesn't run, but most won't even notice the OS performing horrendously slow. For example, finding out DMA off in any drive is frustrating. I think maybe M$ is still lazy in determining the optimum configuration.
Windows 2K, XP has too many useless services turned on. Theres a freeware app called GameXP that has an option to turn off many services. It might be too strict for most users, but for slow PC's with 128MB of RAM is a must.
By turning all the stupid XP menu / combo animations, any PC will feel 300% faster. Win2K3 has all that stupidity already off. In Win3.0 M$ mentions proudly how fast are the menus. It's frustrating that my slow Celery 500Mhz displays menus slower than my old 486-33.
I like a program called XQSet, it lacks some options (like the quick IE startup), but it has almost everything. Except tweaking services..
Yeah.. it's a Game and Watch! First the GBA NES Retro, and now the Game and Watch Retro. The perfect harwdare for emulating Punch Out arcade! And PlayChoice 10 too. :P
It should have really been called G&W retro.. The DS name sounds kind of lame, like an auto trim line. But.. that's ok, Nintendo is targeting the system to people younger than the Game and Watch!
As in most things, DVD is an evolution from Phillips CDi and VCD. Like html/http was something like joining telnet, Rich text format and Hypercard together.
:-P
VCD's were inmensely popular in China. The hardware was cheap, no copy protection, pirated movies were everywhere and there were no licenses to pay for the MPEG format. They were even multi language: left audio was chinese, right the original one.
Why do you think early DVD's won't play VCD's? Big electronics companies wanted to earn money. Even the PSX has a video decoder that could have been easily modified to play VCD's. Even Windows can play the MPEG inside a VCD but won't play the VCD itself!
Please, don't forget to tell it's the Mac version. I could guess that in that era 75% of computers were DOS/Windows based.
Word Perfect 5.1 is still a great word processor - once you learn it completely. Especially the key compbiation for the menu, reveal codes, and of course print preview.
I hate Word only after it auto-formats and destroy my beatiful tables, lists and some formatting like colored backgrounds.
I absolutely agree the 486 is not historically important. It was just an enhanced 386 with the integrated (and very slow) FPU. And when introduced was insanely expensive, like today's Xeon.
486's became cheaper when AMD began selling cheap 386's using the exact same Intel 386 microcode. Intel had to create the 486SX, and the DX/2 family that kept the 486 alive for years. Even the Pentium 60 was not significantly faster than AMD's 486DX2-100. (it was DX2-120?, I forgot).
Don't forget the first 486SX, one of the wonders of engineering. It was a 486DX with the FPU circuit disabled. Anyway, the FPU was only used in high-end apps like AutoCad. Windows emulated the FPU when needed. Even Quake refused to work on 486's because the P5 FPU was much faster and allowed two integer and one FPU instruction to execute at the same time.
Probaly what most people remember is that when the 486SX came, it replaced the horrendously slow 386SX - the 386 with the 16 bit bus kludge so it could run on 286 boards. And most didn't use external cache which made them even painfully slower. Even the 286-16 was noticeable faster than the 386SX-16.
Maybe Slashdot will celebrate next the 15 years of the Pentium Pro. >:)
If I were in a foreign place I would simply tell my girlfriend to ask somebody or get a taxi! Maybe after developing this building recognition technology, the next step will be perfecting facial recognition so I can auto-post text based on my "yeah, sure..." gesture instead of writing all this! Ok, ok... Maybe someone will develop this and actually win the DARPA unmanned vehicle competition. Or.. maybe they all used it and lost the race!
Since Star Wars ROTJ "attack of the killer teddy bears" I think that Lucas began to be far too involved with his kids. In EP1 he even had two annoying kid oriented characters, surpassing by far Howard the Duck. Even the plot holes (black holes?) are to accomodate kid stuff, Han shooting in defense, C3PO and R2D2 in EP1. Trying to do what Harry Potter became?
I don't understand why Star Wars is so important for nerds. Don't get me wrong, the first two were absolutely great. In the special effects deparment 2001 had better special effects 10 years earlier (even the SW SP ED can't match it), and in the scripwriting department it was inspired (a bit) from The Hidden Fortress.
For me, Star Wars marks the significance of tons of low-cost special effects in an action movie and great storytelling. EP I and II tells the significance about having tons of money, lots of years of possible planning and one of the best special effects studio on the planet, lots of Star Wars literature, lots lf loyal fans and still make an ok movie.. twice..
I don't think they stole the code, I'm not even sure if they knew their code was similar to Stacker. M$ only wanted to destroy Stacker and sell lots of DOS 6 upgrades. They did too wanted to destroy DR-DOS. Quarterdeck QEMM too. In fact, they wanted to destroy all opposition.
DOS 5 was pretty good (*anything* is better than DOS 4), so M$ had to include dblspace, anti-virus, decent backup, memmaker. M$ did a lot of advertising for DOS 6 and dblspace, including how it worked.
Stack won a lot of money but they lost some of it because M$ won the case because Stacker reverse engineered dblspace/drvspace autoloading. Maybe they told the judge it was integrated to the OS like Internet Explorer "is" now...
Here in PR we went halfway the conversion, only the liquid stuff. In fact maybe we're the only spanish speaking country dealing with the absurd imperial/english system. Ok... Except drug shipments, they are weighted in kilos.. >:)
My solution to solve all these incosistencies on the world is to talk to a child. After seeing them all struggling with the same stuff you'll quickly find out how illogical most things are. My 7 year old niece still struggles visualizing that 12 inches, is a foot and 3 of them is a yard.