Because you're locked into only being able to use content that the console dev specifically wants you to have access to, meaning they make the rules, and if they want you to pay for DLC, then you have to pay for DLC. It could be the same with the PC (after all, Fallout 3 DLC also comes from Microsoft through GFWL) but that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be the same.
If you don't like having to pay for DLC, then bitch to Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. They're the ones making you pay for it. Don't whine about PC users not getting similarly screwed, because Valve and company control their own destinies on this platform and they're reaping the benefits of not being complete douchebags about it.
But really, a motivated teenager is going to somehow get around nearly everything their parents will try.
The simplest approach would be to get your parents addicted. That's what I did. My mom would tend to complain that I "spend too much time on the computer," so what did I do? I built her one. Now she's as addicted as I am.
GTX 285 - hangs with blue/black screen of death both in idle and in games although far more frequently at idle, for some people it happens so early and often that a RMA is their only option. For me it happens within 3-5 days of bootup. What I think the problem is: the card is designed to throttle down when it's not being fully utilized, but I suspect the voltage regulators weren't designed to handle this, so even during full utilization when the BIOS runs at its default profiles, you'll have massive voltage spikes and drops (I can only monitor the 3.3V sensor voltage for this in RivaTuner, but it appears to affect everything, fan speeds, core/memory clockrates, stability?) so I suspect that after some time, the voltage regulators drop the voltage for enough time that there isn't enough voltage to maintain everything in video RAM, which causes the card to hang. Fix, which I'm still testing because circumstances beyond my control haven't allowed me to try reaching a week of uptime: force the card to run in 3D performance mode in RivaTuner.
It consumes far more power and runs hotter, but I'll take both of these (it'd still be less than falling back to SLI 8800GT's) if the damn thing stays stable. No voltage craziness so far either.
Take a down payment from your users as a massive discount in exchange for them signing on as "beta testers." If they actually find something wrong with the product and send in problem reports, then they get to keep the product for just that initial down payment so long as they keep sending in problem reports. If no problem reports come in within a given amount of time, bill them the remainder of the MSRP on the product, since it obviously works well enough for their uses.
I guarantee you something like this would've been found far quicker if these drives were in absurdly high demand due to an absurdly low cost in exchange for something Windows users have taken for granted - purchasing a "new" product in order to effectively become a beta tester. After all, Windows releases are never really "done" until Microsoft stops issuing updates for them. Why pay full price for something you know damn well hasn't been tested to death and beyond like the attention a product gets when consumers get a hold of it and start finding things QA never anticipated?
Which is entirely beside the point, since I'm most assuredly not going to give them more of my money just for something that would actually work in my system when they already got away with selling me something that was advertised to work in my system and didn't. If you bought a lemon from a company and got burned by them, would you willingly give them more money for another product?
No, I think the rational response is to hate their guts for all eternity, or until they reverse their ridiculous policy of not supporting operating systems they advertise their hardware as capable of running on. As I don't ever see them doing that, I'll stick with hating their guts for all eternity.
Yeah, good idea, waste more time and money to get something that is advertised to work on my system to work on something I neither understand nor want.
Not if you destroy the packaging it came with in order to open the damn thing, or if you lose the other materials it came with. It's also not all that cost-effective if you have to pay a shipping company to get the card only to pay for shipping again to return it.
Same. Finished the second level without having the slightest clue what I was trying to accomplish. It doesn't help that the instructions are so vague that no thought is given to strategy. It's like putting a chessboard in front of somebody who has never played the game and tell them to "just move shit around until you win."
Yeah, I think with Firefox, since it doesn't preserve the filename of the image when it stores it in the cache, it has to convert it into a temporary bitmap and point the copy-paste to that temporary bitmap, under two assumptions. 1, that the other application wouldn't be able to tell what kind of file it's opening if it doesn't have the appropriate file extension, and 2, that if the other application is designed to process images, it should at very least be capable of processing a Windows Bitmap.
With IE, it preserves everything in its cache such that you're just doing a normal file open through drag-dropping.
But yeah, it's app-specific. Has to be, since drag-dropping doesn't involve the system clipboard like copy-pasting does.
Why would it be any different in practicality? Complaining to a commercial entity ultimately means you're complaining to someone who is paid to field your complaint. The "smile and a nod" is what you get before they hang up and move on to fielding the next complaint, whereas nothing of consequence gets done. Not unless a lot of complaints roll in. With commercial entities, it's not about the seriousness of the issue, it's all about how many people complain in a given span of time, so if you're one of their few complainers, they'll write you off as a statistic and continue doing whatever it is they're doing (wrong) despite your better judgment.
Or you turn it into a means of extracting amusement from those that are giving you grief. Grief them in return. Though even that gets old after a while.
Still though, I think everyone placed into such a situation should at least attempt to salvage something from it (even/especially at the expense of others) instead of just dropping everything to say "screw it."
Mmhmm. Tried it with Firefox and the GIMP for Windows on the Google logo and get an error about being unable to open a bitmap file in my Temp directory as the file "doesn't exist." Works fine with Paint.NET (though it still treats the logo as a Windows Bitmap.)
Then it mangles the image to fit - losing resolution and pixel depth along the way.
No it doesn't. The resize is done in memory and the result is not committed to cache, so it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the local copy in cache would be, bit-for-bit, identical to the copy that the GIMP would get from the server.
No, the reason why the GIMP would have to grab the image off the server itself is that all you're really "grabbing" from Firefox is a reference to a remote image, ergo, the image's URL, rather than the raw bits of the image itself. Also, it's much more efficient to copy-paste a string of text than it is to copy-paste a decoded sequence of raw bits, especially as it cannot be assumed that the target application will correctly interpret what it's being handed. The GIMP interprets the text string as a source to open from, and grabs the image from the remote server.
Because Windows is so widely used, H/W manufactures have to make passable drivers in order to get their product sold.
No they don't! They just have to advertise that it works, it doesn't actually have to work! This is exactly the sort of crap I went through with Hauppauge in my prior posts below. They can advertise functionality all they damn well please, and once you pay for it, bring it home and void most store return policies by unpacking the damn things, you find out that *gasp* the damn things don't work as advertised and, much later, you find out that they never will! Once they've got your money though, what do they care? You can complain all you want, but if they're not going to provide support, then they're not going to provide support, and short of a class-action lawsuit, you're screwed.
Heck, chances are you wouldn't get your money back anyway even if you won a class-action suit.
"gut my system," that is. Needless to say, all the frustration and contempt towards Hauppauge that I had thought I had successfully buried has risen to the surface once again. So they support x64 with their "newer" cards? Fuck them. They'll get no points for that in my book. Every single card that they advertised as "supporting Windows Vista" should damn fucking well support Windows Vista.
Though I appreciate the "works for me" post, I just wish it wasn't a fucking Hauppauge card. Or Avermedia, though their card actually worked, it just ran too fucking hot and died from poor placement (smack dab between two 8800GT's) five minutes after installation.
Hauppauge still hasn't moved from their stance of being completely unwilling to write functional x64 drivers for the WinTV series of cards. They still insist the cards won't work with x64 systems with more than 4GB of memory. Until my Hauppauge card works without me having to gut myself of more than 80% of its memory, they can go die in a fire.
On Windows, you just throw in the disk, click ok, and your hardware is working.
Unless you're running Vista x64, have 4GB or more of memory, and are trying to install the drivers for a TV tuner. Doesn't matter which manufacturer, they all would tend to fuck up under such conditions. I gave up trying to get TV tuners to work on my rig after wasting close to $250 on various models cuz I found only one commonality amongst them: they don't fucking work.
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Because you're locked into only being able to use content that the console dev specifically wants you to have access to, meaning they make the rules, and if they want you to pay for DLC, then you have to pay for DLC. It could be the same with the PC (after all, Fallout 3 DLC also comes from Microsoft through GFWL) but that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be the same.
If you don't like having to pay for DLC, then bitch to Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. They're the ones making you pay for it. Don't whine about PC users not getting similarly screwed, because Valve and company control their own destinies on this platform and they're reaping the benefits of not being complete douchebags about it.
The simplest approach would be to get your parents addicted. That's what I did. My mom would tend to complain that I "spend too much time on the computer," so what did I do? I built her one. Now she's as addicted as I am.
Also known as "Lawful Stupid."
It tends to last a lot longer though. Usually several orders of magnitude longer.
If your OS is small enough, skip the Flash SSD altogether, get 4GB of cheap DDR memory and a Gigabyte i-RAM SSD and put your OS on that.
If only because your homeowners insurance requires it for them to maintain full liability?
I got one to add that I'm still working on:
GTX 285 - hangs with blue/black screen of death both in idle and in games although far more frequently at idle, for some people it happens so early and often that a RMA is their only option. For me it happens within 3-5 days of bootup. What I think the problem is: the card is designed to throttle down when it's not being fully utilized, but I suspect the voltage regulators weren't designed to handle this, so even during full utilization when the BIOS runs at its default profiles, you'll have massive voltage spikes and drops (I can only monitor the 3.3V sensor voltage for this in RivaTuner, but it appears to affect everything, fan speeds, core/memory clockrates, stability?) so I suspect that after some time, the voltage regulators drop the voltage for enough time that there isn't enough voltage to maintain everything in video RAM, which causes the card to hang. Fix, which I'm still testing because circumstances beyond my control haven't allowed me to try reaching a week of uptime: force the card to run in 3D performance mode in RivaTuner.
It consumes far more power and runs hotter, but I'll take both of these (it'd still be less than falling back to SLI 8800GT's) if the damn thing stays stable. No voltage craziness so far either.
Take a down payment from your users as a massive discount in exchange for them signing on as "beta testers." If they actually find something wrong with the product and send in problem reports, then they get to keep the product for just that initial down payment so long as they keep sending in problem reports. If no problem reports come in within a given amount of time, bill them the remainder of the MSRP on the product, since it obviously works well enough for their uses.
I guarantee you something like this would've been found far quicker if these drives were in absurdly high demand due to an absurdly low cost in exchange for something Windows users have taken for granted - purchasing a "new" product in order to effectively become a beta tester. After all, Windows releases are never really "done" until Microsoft stops issuing updates for them. Why pay full price for something you know damn well hasn't been tested to death and beyond like the attention a product gets when consumers get a hold of it and start finding things QA never anticipated?
Which is entirely beside the point, since I'm most assuredly not going to give them more of my money just for something that would actually work in my system when they already got away with selling me something that was advertised to work in my system and didn't. If you bought a lemon from a company and got burned by them, would you willingly give them more money for another product?
No, I think the rational response is to hate their guts for all eternity, or until they reverse their ridiculous policy of not supporting operating systems they advertise their hardware as capable of running on. As I don't ever see them doing that, I'll stick with hating their guts for all eternity.
Yeah, good idea, waste more time and money to get something that is advertised to work on my system to work on something I neither understand nor want.
Not if you destroy the packaging it came with in order to open the damn thing, or if you lose the other materials it came with. It's also not all that cost-effective if you have to pay a shipping company to get the card only to pay for shipping again to return it.
No. No, you should not. If you know what's good for you, you will stay as far away from Earth as you can.
Same. Finished the second level without having the slightest clue what I was trying to accomplish. It doesn't help that the instructions are so vague that no thought is given to strategy. It's like putting a chessboard in front of somebody who has never played the game and tell them to "just move shit around until you win."
And I apologize in advance, I tend to get drag-dropping and copy-pasting mixed up.
Yeah, I think with Firefox, since it doesn't preserve the filename of the image when it stores it in the cache, it has to convert it into a temporary bitmap and point the copy-paste to that temporary bitmap, under two assumptions. 1, that the other application wouldn't be able to tell what kind of file it's opening if it doesn't have the appropriate file extension, and 2, that if the other application is designed to process images, it should at very least be capable of processing a Windows Bitmap.
With IE, it preserves everything in its cache such that you're just doing a normal file open through drag-dropping.
But yeah, it's app-specific. Has to be, since drag-dropping doesn't involve the system clipboard like copy-pasting does.
Why would it be any different in practicality? Complaining to a commercial entity ultimately means you're complaining to someone who is paid to field your complaint. The "smile and a nod" is what you get before they hang up and move on to fielding the next complaint, whereas nothing of consequence gets done. Not unless a lot of complaints roll in. With commercial entities, it's not about the seriousness of the issue, it's all about how many people complain in a given span of time, so if you're one of their few complainers, they'll write you off as a statistic and continue doing whatever it is they're doing (wrong) despite your better judgment.
Or you turn it into a means of extracting amusement from those that are giving you grief. Grief them in return. Though even that gets old after a while.
Still though, I think everyone placed into such a situation should at least attempt to salvage something from it (even/especially at the expense of others) instead of just dropping everything to say "screw it."
Mmhmm. Tried it with Firefox and the GIMP for Windows on the Google logo and get an error about being unable to open a bitmap file in my Temp directory as the file "doesn't exist." Works fine with Paint.NET (though it still treats the logo as a Windows Bitmap.)
No it doesn't. The resize is done in memory and the result is not committed to cache, so it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the local copy in cache would be, bit-for-bit, identical to the copy that the GIMP would get from the server.
No, the reason why the GIMP would have to grab the image off the server itself is that all you're really "grabbing" from Firefox is a reference to a remote image, ergo, the image's URL, rather than the raw bits of the image itself. Also, it's much more efficient to copy-paste a string of text than it is to copy-paste a decoded sequence of raw bits, especially as it cannot be assumed that the target application will correctly interpret what it's being handed. The GIMP interprets the text string as a source to open from, and grabs the image from the remote server.
No they don't! They just have to advertise that it works, it doesn't actually have to work! This is exactly the sort of crap I went through with Hauppauge in my prior posts below. They can advertise functionality all they damn well please, and once you pay for it, bring it home and void most store return policies by unpacking the damn things, you find out that *gasp* the damn things don't work as advertised and, much later, you find out that they never will! Once they've got your money though, what do they care? You can complain all you want, but if they're not going to provide support, then they're not going to provide support, and short of a class-action lawsuit, you're screwed.
Heck, chances are you wouldn't get your money back anyway even if you won a class-action suit.
"gut my system," that is. Needless to say, all the frustration and contempt towards Hauppauge that I had thought I had successfully buried has risen to the surface once again. So they support x64 with their "newer" cards? Fuck them. They'll get no points for that in my book. Every single card that they advertised as "supporting Windows Vista" should damn fucking well support Windows Vista.
Though I appreciate the "works for me" post, I just wish it wasn't a fucking Hauppauge card. Or Avermedia, though their card actually worked, it just ran too fucking hot and died from poor placement (smack dab between two 8800GT's) five minutes after installation.
Hauppauge still hasn't moved from their stance of being completely unwilling to write functional x64 drivers for the WinTV series of cards. They still insist the cards won't work with x64 systems with more than 4GB of memory. Until my Hauppauge card works without me having to gut myself of more than 80% of its memory, they can go die in a fire.
Now for a bit of unexpected hilarity, try the same thing with GIMP for Windows.
It won't work.
Unless you're running Vista x64, have 4GB or more of memory, and are trying to install the drivers for a TV tuner. Doesn't matter which manufacturer, they all would tend to fuck up under such conditions. I gave up trying to get TV tuners to work on my rig after wasting close to $250 on various models cuz I found only one commonality amongst them: they don't fucking work.
So just torpedo the fucking thing.