Resident Evil was a great video game adaptation, and probably his best work so far.
Soldier was a good movie that gets panned over because a lot of people don't "get it", and it was marketed strangely when it was in theatres (come see Snake back in action! Oh wait, wrong movie!)
From what I'm hearing of Alien vs. Predator, it's going to take the cake as worst movie ever.
Oh yeah, by the way, at the end of AVP, the predator TEAMS UP with the humans, and blows himself up along with the aliens, while the one remaining human chick survives and "outruns" the blast. There, enjoy!
This is easily given away by the fact that about 50% of the educational software we use in our schools requires admin rights to run.
That's right. Kid Pix requires Administrator-level rights or it simply will not run.
It sounds like you and others at your school don't know how to properly install, configure and administrate Windows NT (4/2000/XP)
I've setup quite a number of Windows XP PCs for "family" use, with limited accounts for the children. Their software/games are setup properly, and works fine under the limited account. This includes all of the Sesame Street learning games, a SpongeBob Game, and the new Spiderman 2 game.
When I learned about interacting with SQL (of the MS variety), one of the first things I learned was to escape single quotes to double quotes. I'm amazed that today programmers still make the mistake of not escaping/cleaning what they're sending to their SQL server.
Hate to rain on your rant, but on Windows XP, it annoys the crap out of you, telling you that you should enable auto updates.
Also, the method you described to get rid of spyware (system restore, or a new install of Windows) seems a bit overkill. I've never come across a hit of spyware so bad that it justified redoing the machine from scratch. I've had a machine with Spybot reporting 500+ problems, and was able to clean it completely with AdAware, Spybot and F-Prot.
Yeah, I've found that hack/tweak, but it's kind of silly.
I've also heard of people suggesting you change your video card's PCI latency to some low value like 32 or 64, which to my understanding is a Bad Thing(tm) but it seems to fix the problem?
Did you guys do any testing on nForce2 motherboards? The sound starts to crackle after a random period of time, when in surround mode and using 5.1 -- is this a Doom3 sound engine problem, or a nVidia/nForce problem?
That's great and will work fine, given your DVD is 4.7 gigs or less. That's like 10% of all the DVDs out there. The rest of them use more space than that.
You're going to have to shrink/transcode the data down to 4.7 to burn it again, and that requires DVDShrink or an equivilant tool.
Unless you have one of them newfangled double-layer DVD-R drives, then just ignore what I'm saying.
Did you see Mythbusters the other week? They tested the myth that a raw egg in your radiator will temporarily fix small leaks. And what do you know, it worked. Weird.
Wait, you're saying that Joe user isn't responsible for maintaining/keeping his PC's software up to date?
It amazes me how many people use computers, but do not want to be responsible for them, nor do they want to learn how to maintain them. They just want it to work, and expect everything to be totally simplistic. Sorry, we're not in the year 2100.
The enclosures you linked to are notorious for problems with USB controllers, primarily the nForce (nVidia chipset) USB controllers -- you'll get random "crashes" where the computer doesn't recognize the USB drive, then finds it again, but by that time your data is corrupted. The fix is to run those cheapie drives through a powered USB 2.0 repeater/hub, to fix a clocksync issue that the generic IDEUSB chips have. Essentially nVidia's USB controller follows the USB 2.0 specs, but doesn't allow for as much variation as other controllers. It's doing the right thing; the generic USB enclosure manufacturers are not.
I spent $80+ on a CompuCable external firewire/USB2 enclosure, and it doesn't suffer this clock rate issue.
Most of the reasons you've listed for not wanting to switch from 98 to 2k/XP are pretty silly.
In the meantime, 98SE doesn't require me to "activate" it after I swap hard drives or motherboards.
Neither does XP. I've swapped/added many a hard drive to my XP computer, and it never asked me to re-activate. A motherboard is entirely a different matter, since the activation is closely tied to that. Even then it's a simple matter of saying "reactivate over the internet", and a few seconds later you're done.
98SE doesn't run services I don't need.
98 might not run "services", but it most certainly can be running anything in the background, not to mention the normal system things that are constantly running and pretty hard to disable.
And when it crashes, it crashes hard enough that nothing's writing to the hard drive when I press the hard-reset button.
Huh? How is that a benefit? What if it was in the middle of doing a registry update and hard crashes? Next time you reboot, you're gonna get that nice Windows 98 message about the registry hive being corrupted, and to reinstall Windows. Joy!
98SE boxen (as long as you're not using M$'s crapware browser and mail client) can be plugged onto the evil Intarweb - straight out of the box - without even a firewall, and not get 0wn3d.
BS. I dare you to put a stock 98se install on an unprotected line. Time how long it takes for it to be owned. Probably under 30 minutes or so.
(This rant expired by the equivalent crashes on the same game played on a friend's XP rig - I observed that when a game in XP goes down hard, the OS keeps running. That's not a feature, that's a bug! No mouse, no GUI, just a frozen 3D rendering of the game, but the hard drive light just flickers happily as the remaining components of the OS busily "manage" the swap file. You sorta wait for the light to flicker out, and hope that you press the hard-reset button before it comes back up. WTF kind of crap is that?)
Your friend should try hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del to get back to the desktop, or even the "Windows key" gets me back there after a game freezes. ATi added a crash management program to their Catalyst drivers that helps you recover from GPU hangs, and it works pretty well. Besides, if your games/apps are crashing, you've got bigger problems than waiting for your hard drive light to stop flickering.
If your files are properly tagged, FooBar can automatically replaygain them by each album. Basically just select them all and let it process for a bit.
I deal with the same problem. I have an Audigy Deluxe, and an older driver disc (doesn't have drivers for Windows XP on it) -- if I just install the card, and go to Creative's "Auto Update", it wants to only install the bare minimum drivers. No options to install the other apps (taskbar/remote control/speaker setup/etc.) -- what the crap?
Also, digging around the site, if you do find one of those other programs to download.. when you try to run them, they say they can't find an older version to update and force you to quit.
As for normalization, I wouldn't leave that up to your soundcard. Use a decent audio player like FooBar2000, and set replaygain levels on your tracks. Enjoy the stability.
Or, if you want, buy the OctiMax plugin for Winamp2/5.. it's a multiband compressor/limiter, and does a pretty good job at keeping things steady. I use it for radio broadcasts, or LAN parties.
I'll just throw in my two cents-- I have an HP CD-RW drive, a 4x model I believe.. it's years old, and has probably burned 1000+ discs, and it's still chugging along to this day without a hitch. I think it's made probably 2 coasters in its lifetime, but they were due to my mistakes.
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Yes, because people use Windows XP SP2 to run "web and application servers with high client counts or large transaction rates."
Oh wait, they DON'T.
They'd use a SERVER line of products, like Windows 2000/2003 Server.
Of course. Tri-color LEDs and a bit of work will get you there. And I'm sure someone can google for case mods done with tri-color LEDs before 2002.
Mortal Kombat was campy, but watchable.
Street Fighter was unwatchable.
Resident Evil was a great video game adaptation, and probably his best work so far.
Soldier was a good movie that gets panned over because a lot of people don't "get it", and it was marketed strangely when it was in theatres (come see Snake back in action! Oh wait, wrong movie!)
From what I'm hearing of Alien vs. Predator, it's going to take the cake as worst movie ever.
Oh yeah, by the way, at the end of AVP, the predator TEAMS UP with the humans, and blows himself up along with the aliens, while the one remaining human chick survives and "outruns" the blast. There, enjoy!
Worst. Screen. Shots. Ever.
Why even bother making this game?
This is easily given away by the fact that about 50% of the educational software we use in our schools requires admin rights to run.
That's right. Kid Pix requires Administrator-level rights or it simply will not run.
It sounds like you and others at your school don't know how to properly install, configure and administrate Windows NT (4/2000/XP)
I've setup quite a number of Windows XP PCs for "family" use, with limited accounts for the children. Their software/games are setup properly, and works fine under the limited account. This includes all of the Sesame Street learning games, a SpongeBob Game, and the new Spiderman 2 game.
It helps to know what you're doing.
Check out Symantec's FAQ on SP2.
Yes, I like to run software from poorly designed and non-informational webpages that could potentially hose my system. Sign me up!
When I learned about interacting with SQL (of the MS variety), one of the first things I learned was to escape single quotes to double quotes. I'm amazed that today programmers still make the mistake of not escaping/cleaning what they're sending to their SQL server.
When did Dax NOT look hot?
Exactly, never.
Hate to rain on your rant, but on Windows XP, it annoys the crap out of you, telling you that you should enable auto updates.
Also, the method you described to get rid of spyware (system restore, or a new install of Windows) seems a bit overkill. I've never come across a hit of spyware so bad that it justified redoing the machine from scratch. I've had a machine with Spybot reporting 500+ problems, and was able to clean it completely with AdAware, Spybot and F-Prot.
Yeah, I've found that hack/tweak, but it's kind of silly.
I've also heard of people suggesting you change your video card's PCI latency to some low value like 32 or 64, which to my understanding is a Bad Thing(tm) but it seems to fix the problem?
Who knows.
I like how I get modded off-topic. What exactly was off topic? The fact that I wasn't kissing John's butt or something?
Hey John,
Did you guys do any testing on nForce2 motherboards? The sound starts to crackle after a random period of time, when in surround mode and using 5.1 -- is this a Doom3 sound engine problem, or a nVidia/nForce problem?
That's great and will work fine, given your DVD is 4.7 gigs or less. That's like 10% of all the DVDs out there. The rest of them use more space than that.
You're going to have to shrink/transcode the data down to 4.7 to burn it again, and that requires DVDShrink or an equivilant tool.
Unless you have one of them newfangled double-layer DVD-R drives, then just ignore what I'm saying.
Fate of Atlantis is still one of my favorite games of all time. Everything came together perfectly on that one.
Did you see Mythbusters the other week? They tested the myth that a raw egg in your radiator will temporarily fix small leaks. And what do you know, it worked. Weird.
You think that's air you're breathing?
Wait, you're saying that Joe user isn't responsible for maintaining/keeping his PC's software up to date?
It amazes me how many people use computers, but do not want to be responsible for them, nor do they want to learn how to maintain them. They just want it to work, and expect everything to be totally simplistic. Sorry, we're not in the year 2100.
USB loves to gobble up CPU cycles, but is relatively fast I guess. Still not as fast as a native SATA or IDE connection, though.
The enclosures you linked to are notorious for problems with USB controllers, primarily the nForce (nVidia chipset) USB controllers -- you'll get random "crashes" where the computer doesn't recognize the USB drive, then finds it again, but by that time your data is corrupted. The fix is to run those cheapie drives through a powered USB 2.0 repeater/hub, to fix a clocksync issue that the generic IDEUSB chips have. Essentially nVidia's USB controller follows the USB 2.0 specs, but doesn't allow for as much variation as other controllers. It's doing the right thing; the generic USB enclosure manufacturers are not.
I spent $80+ on a CompuCable external firewire/USB2 enclosure, and it doesn't suffer this clock rate issue.
Most of the reasons you've listed for not wanting to switch from 98 to 2k/XP are pretty silly.
In the meantime, 98SE doesn't require me to "activate" it after I swap hard drives or motherboards.
Neither does XP. I've swapped/added many a hard drive to my XP computer, and it never asked me to re-activate. A motherboard is entirely a different matter, since the activation is closely tied to that. Even then it's a simple matter of saying "reactivate over the internet", and a few seconds later you're done.
98SE doesn't run services I don't need.
98 might not run "services", but it most certainly can be running anything in the background, not to mention the normal system things that are constantly running and pretty hard to disable.
And when it crashes, it crashes hard enough that nothing's writing to the hard drive when I press the hard-reset button.
Huh? How is that a benefit? What if it was in the middle of doing a registry update and hard crashes? Next time you reboot, you're gonna get that nice Windows 98 message about the registry hive being corrupted, and to reinstall Windows. Joy!
98SE boxen (as long as you're not using M$'s crapware browser and mail client) can be plugged onto the evil Intarweb - straight out of the box - without even a firewall, and not get 0wn3d.
BS. I dare you to put a stock 98se install on an unprotected line. Time how long it takes for it to be owned. Probably under 30 minutes or so.
(This rant expired by the equivalent crashes on the same game played on a friend's XP rig - I observed that when a game in XP goes down hard, the OS keeps running. That's not a feature, that's a bug! No mouse, no GUI, just a frozen 3D rendering of the game, but the hard drive light just flickers happily as the remaining components of the OS busily "manage" the swap file. You sorta wait for the light to flicker out, and hope that you press the hard-reset button before it comes back up. WTF kind of crap is that?)
Your friend should try hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del to get back to the desktop, or even the "Windows key" gets me back there after a game freezes. ATi added a crash management program to their Catalyst drivers that helps you recover from GPU hangs, and it works pretty well. Besides, if your games/apps are crashing, you've got bigger problems than waiting for your hard drive light to stop flickering.
If your files are properly tagged, FooBar can automatically replaygain them by each album. Basically just select them all and let it process for a bit.
I deal with the same problem. I have an Audigy Deluxe, and an older driver disc (doesn't have drivers for Windows XP on it) -- if I just install the card, and go to Creative's "Auto Update", it wants to only install the bare minimum drivers. No options to install the other apps (taskbar/remote control/speaker setup/etc.) -- what the crap?
Also, digging around the site, if you do find one of those other programs to download.. when you try to run them, they say they can't find an older version to update and force you to quit.
As for normalization, I wouldn't leave that up to your soundcard. Use a decent audio player like FooBar2000, and set replaygain levels on your tracks. Enjoy the stability.
Or, if you want, buy the OctiMax plugin for Winamp2/5.. it's a multiband compressor/limiter, and does a pretty good job at keeping things steady. I use it for radio broadcasts, or LAN parties.
I'll just throw in my two cents-- I have an HP CD-RW drive, a 4x model I believe.. it's years old, and has probably burned 1000+ discs, and it's still chugging along to this day without a hitch. I think it's made probably 2 coasters in its lifetime, but they were due to my mistakes.
Their website is also a joke. Have you tried logging into http://support.dell.com/ ? 500 errors constantly/randomly.
Just look at their Reseller Rating.. it's a 3.39 out of 10. That's AWFUL.
Check out my horror story posted on Dell's forums, about my Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop. I love the replies.. "it's your own fault." Riight.