It's probably worthwhile to take a look at that stuff, if only to see the historical basis for a lot of role-playing tropes, but any seasoned player can't exactly look at "Tomb of Horrors" with fresh eyes and newbies probably don't want to do the work of converting old stuff to new systems. In the end I suspect that all this stuff is only worthwhile as nostalgia or for historical purposes. Given that, I'm not sure why the price per document is even as high as it is. I understand that this is content that probably shouldn't be free, but I can't see spending $5 on a 32 page PDF that maybe has one or two good ideas to incorporate into a living game.
Try not-video games. The board, card, or P&P role playing kind.
My GF is quite a bit younger than me, so it turns out that YuGiOh and Pokemon are part of her geek DNA and she took to this stuff like a fish to water but many of my friends are reformed Magic: The Gathering Players in their late 20s to late 30s. No one quite has the time or resources to get back in to the addiction of collectible card gaming, but stuff like Cards Against Humanity, Nuclear War, Heroscape or Munchkin goes over really well and can introduce someone to a wider world of game-playing. Gaming does not in fact have to revolve around a giant TV.
My SO is a gamer, but a different sort from me. She likes Xbox games, mostly shooters and RPG titles. The only PC game she'll play is The Sims 2. I primarily play role playing and real time strategy games. We found our crossover points in a couple different ways: 1. We compete on silly casual games on our phones and tablets. Superiority in Bubble Shooter or figuring out a new way to make pictures of dicks relevant in Draw Something is treasured gaming experience. 2. The PC gaming experience for games like Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Dragon Age is better, so we kind of play and make decisions together. I'm more of an explorer and she's more of an action junkie, but in practice this means that if one of us can't do something with our normal approach, it's time for the other to take a crack at it. 3. Sometimes I suck it up and let her kick my ass in some kind of console shooter or Kinect title. I'll also sit out with her and read while she leans on me and plays Borderlands or something. It's kind of passive/introvert together time. 4. We experimented with MMO-playing, but the MMO I actually like closed and she's not into WoW any more, so the motivation for that just evaporated. That actually worked pretty well.
Mostly, though, we play different games and it's FINE. I do my thing and she does hers.
I don't use Steam. I like PC gaming, but I want to disassociate my gaming experience entirely from online services. That leaves me with very few options. I've returned every boxed PC game I've purchased in the last three years has required some kind of online login, even for single-person, offline play. I really don't like having to play "mother may I" with Electronic Arts or Valve or anyone else. That doesn't leave me many gaming options, but I will say that every single thing I've ever gotten from GoG.com has worked, is divorced from any sort of download, copy protection or online community bullshit.
Also in a lot of case I have just as much fun watching somebody else's game playthrough videos on Youtube as playing myself. There are surprisingly complete video sets for many RPGs and other single player titles and that's just fine as far as I'm concerned.
RDP clients are typically used to administer Windows machines, but as far as I know, Linux does not have an RDP server. It has VNC and X11, but both of those guys are enormous bandwidth hogs with a limited feature set compared to what RDP is capable of.
I had a 10 week wait getting a replacement for a 32GB SLC drive from OCZ. They did not respond to support emails made on their web site, but they're very attentive if you go complain on Anandtech or HardOCP or something. In my experience, the shortest amount of time that an RMA from them has taken is a little under five weeks.
One of my customers has some systems with Revodrives. They die and I just toss them rather than bother with replacement. Some of the machines I'm dealing with are on their third one in 18 months.
I stole a bunch of large-ish binder clips from work. I binder clip stuff together. Binder clips have loops, so I stuck some screws in the underside of my desk and hung the binder clips with excess cable on them.
I seem to recall mention of something about using water as part of anti-radiological shielding.
You pretty much have to figure that anything that was meant for interstellar travel is going to have some pretty serious phlebotinum shielding to make high-energy particles a non-issue in the first place, so it's really just a matter of having armor sufficient to deal with the forces of some presumably multi-kiloton explosion.
The Vipers carried by the Galactica lacked fly-by-wire tech, presumably so that they would not be impacted by Cylon EW. It may have been that the Cylon Fighters had some EW-related function (sensor or telemetry platform, maybe?) and carried anti-fighter weapons primarily to deal with Vipers, which were fielded primarily to deal with Cylon birds and reduce the effectiveness of Cylon EW.
What I'm saying is, they could've probably justified it.
You're barely using the capabilities of the machine you have now and you don't have any reason to keep the server. Get a decent VPN-capable router or pay $20/year for LogMeIn Hamachi if that's a need and combine it with a Synology or QNAP NAS. Those have firmware that's relatively straightforward to support and if there's ever a need for more advanced file services, they're already baked into the device.
Do make sure you buy decent disk drives for it. "Green" or "Eco" drives from WD or Seagate work for shit in disk arrays.
This really won't be a downgrade for you. It will actually probably make your life easier.
That is in fact exactly how the *AA harvests IPs from torrents, but torrents in and of themselves are not illegal, only the infringing behavior of sending copyrighted material to another person is illegal.
In theory, you can tell your client to download the.torrent file and join the swarm without allowing it to download any of the associated files. You might do this to harvest addresses from other clients or to otherwise monitor the torrent.
It's pretty suspicious behavior, but merely being in a big blob of chattering IPs doesn't necessarily indicate that yours has specifically done anything criminal.
The RIM tablet doesn't really add anything over and above other 7" tablets that might run Android. Kindle Fire and Nook Color devices can be had for less. All of those really need work with third party firmware to be made legitimately worthwhile.
I own a whole bunch of tablets, including a (work-provided) ipad2 and several options from first-tier Android OEMs. In general, the best use I've found for them is consumption of ebooks, webcomics and product manuals. My favorite device is an 8.9" Samsung Galaxy, which has the 1280x800 screen resolution of a larger Android tablet but weighs about 2/3rds what the 1" larger ipad2 does. That's a lovely combination of form factor and usability.
I guess I could get away with doing the same things on my phone as I do with my tablets, but a 4.3" screen really doesn't have the same level of utility as a 7" or larger one.
And regarding your question, I'm sufficiently annoyed by all the drawbacks to iOS that I would never consider purchasing an Apple device for myself. Data sandboxing and format limitations drive me insane.
I do that for small business machines. I know all about Sysprep and.wim files. Believe me. I also leverage the fact that there are free versions of TrueImage available for anyone whose machine includes a WD, Maxtor or Seagate hard disk. That doesn't help much to address home machines or personal laptops.
One thing in particular that I've found to be problematic in relation to getting Windows reinstalled is fear of losing purchased itunes content. If I had to guess, that's a bigger issue than absolutely anything else I've run in to.
I've actually lost clients from advocating reinstall as a standard procedure after infection. The usual claim is that it's an excuse for me to pad a bill. I know a repaired system is substantially more vulnerable than a known-clean new install is, and I can make a good case for that with my customers, but that doesn't mean they all go along with it and at some point I decided that it's not really a battle that's worth fighting.
I get a lot of mileage out of Windows Repair Portable. It restores settings for a large number of issues that don't have a regular, non-painful reset/repair/reinstall option. I've found it particularly handy for fixing the Windows Firewall and Windows updates.
I'd prefer to do a reinstall under almost all circumstances of malware infection, but that's not always an option available for home or small business systems. I particularly dislike having to rely on Windows System Restore. I really wish modern versions of Windows had a painless repair install that would allow end users to keep programs and settings.
I usually try to replace Sharepoint with Wiki or Drupal installations. Sharepoint does a lot of different stuff; I don't think there's a single drop-in replacement available in the land of OSS projects, but in my experience a lot of the time workgroups are barely scratching the surface of what they could be doing with it anyway.
I wrote this post in December of 2005 on another forum site I belong to. This experience completely soured me on any interaction with Apple. itunes is useless and has been at least going back that far. In the years since I've run across several other machines with mysterious and intractable itunes problems. I'm told it's not uncommon for people to reinstall Windows to fix itunes issues.
Anyway --
My boss brings me her notebook this morning.
She says "I can't get itunes to work"
I try to run itunes. Version 6, the one that came out maybe a month ago with the video support.
I double-click on iTunes. The computer goes "ding". itunes does not start. I think "Oh well, I will uninstall and reinstall it."
Except it's not in Add/Remove programs. Hit the program files folder. Yup. It's there.
Try to start from the.exe instead of a shortcut. Nope. Computer goes "ding". What does "ding" mean?
Download an updated installer, fresh from the web site. The installer gives me the option to remove itunes or repair it. I try both. In either case I get "error 1605", which a quick google tells me is an InstallShield error. I'm told to upgrade my installshield engine and use a "Windows Installer Cleanup Tool". itunes doesn't show on the list of things I can clean up. Quicktime and the ipod service do. I go ahead and remove those.
OK. Fine. Done.
The computer goes "ding" and I *still* get error 1605 when I try to reinstall.
So I hit Apple's support pages for itunes. There are eight or nine suggestions there that seem like they might be related, but most of them lead back to the Installshield support site.
I try all those things. The computer still goes "ding" and I *still* get error 1605.
I run an SFC on the machine. The computer goes "ding" the next time I try to start itunes.
Finally, against all hope, I call Apple. Maybe there's something they haven't published, or maybe this is a new issue.
Apple won't talk to me until I find the serial number for a new ipod or I cough up $50. What the ipod has to do with an itunes problem, I don't know.
Fortunately, one of the women I work with has a new ipod. Good thing. Apple won't talk to you unless you've purchased their hardware.
I calmly explain to the apple tech (LeeAnn, if anyone wants to know), what I have done prior to my call. LeeAnn identifies herself as a *windows support specialist*.
I ask her if she knows what "ding" means, or if there's some support information other than that available on Apple's web site for this problem.
LeeAnn asks me to repeat the things I did. This takes me about five minutes. I reference Apple's support pages, as I can read them off the firefox tabs in front of me. At the end of everything, LeeAnn says "I need to check on this. Can you hold?"
LeeAnn is gone just under five minutes. When she picks back up, she starts reading verbatim off one of those support web pages. I say "I have already done the the steps on that page." She starts in on another page, that I have also read. This time, I just start reading ahead of her, for she is pissing me off. I say "Is there any additional support information that you can provide me, other than the information that I already got off your web site?"
She says "Not for this issue. Have you contacted your computer manufacturer?" I say "This is not an issue for my computer manufacturer, this is an issue with Apple's software on a Windows computer." She says "Well have you contacted Microsoft?"
I think this very well might've been the point where I snapped.
I say "No. This is a problem with the functionality of *APPLE'S* software. Windows is otherwise behaving normally. I ran a program to verify that." (Furthermore, I know Windows installer was working, as I installed my bundle o' antispyware apps from an.msi file earlier that morning while I was troubleshooting). She says "What program is that?" I say "SFC" She says "I thought tha
I think this is just Sony trying once again to replicate its success with the Compact Disc format. It has a long history of making new formats, just to see if they'll catch on. I'm sure it's quite lucrative if one does, but the other aspect of that is the proliferation of bizarre Sony formats that aren't even supported by Sony after some production period. How many versions of the Memory Stick did Sony wind up making? Six? Seven?
Anyway, this is just more of that and I'm sure it will fail and be forgotten soon enough.
Except that 1024x768 was never all THAT common on laptops. Laptop display resolutions have always varied widely. 1024x768 was a common small panel size on desktop size displays while notebooks might have ranged from 800x600 all the way up to 1600x1200 even within the same product line and model (e.g. R-series Thinkpads).
1024x768 was only commonly used on desktop type panels in sizes below 17". When I look at panels of a fixed size, it's almost always the case that the taller panel with a given surface area has more overall pixels.
Are you really being so obtuse that you don't understand the distinction I am making?
The bullshit argument that some people seem to trot out is that widescreen resolutions represent "extra pixels" over the tallscreen equivalent. And that's just not true:
19" desktop or 15" laptop "tall" screen: 1280 x 1024 = 1.31 million pixels 19" desktop "wide" or 15" laptop screen: 1366 x 768 = 1.04 million pixels.
Simple math tells me that more stuff fits on the taller screen (which at that resolution is really 5:4 rather than 4:3, but whatever).
At least in the Windows world there really is a lot of stuff that has been designed with the incorrect assumption that everyone is going to have 800 vertical lines of resolution. Anything less than that feels like a regression.
I stopped buying Sony products when I called for an RMA on a Sony tape drive and was told that they don't support computer products unless they're specifically connected to computers running desktop versions of Windows. In response, I asked if that included displays. The phone monkey hung up on me.
Funny in retrospect but the level of unfriendliness suggested by that interaction is such that I've been looking forward to Sony's demise for a long, long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yale-educated artist and porn star Zak Sabbath's DiY D&D site (with occasional exposed nipples art or links to his girlfriend's tumblr and therefore not safe for work) should be required reading for RPG nerds. He's very big on RPG theorycraft, quick rules of thumb and stepping away from canned adventures like those used in many of the prepackaged modules. Having followed his blog for a while, I really see where he's coming from.
It's probably worthwhile to take a look at that stuff, if only to see the historical basis for a lot of role-playing tropes, but any seasoned player can't exactly look at "Tomb of Horrors" with fresh eyes and newbies probably don't want to do the work of converting old stuff to new systems. In the end I suspect that all this stuff is only worthwhile as nostalgia or for historical purposes. Given that, I'm not sure why the price per document is even as high as it is. I understand that this is content that probably shouldn't be free, but I can't see spending $5 on a 32 page PDF that maybe has one or two good ideas to incorporate into a living game.
Oh, ALSO:
Try not-video games. The board, card, or P&P role playing kind.
My GF is quite a bit younger than me, so it turns out that YuGiOh and Pokemon are part of her geek DNA and she took to this stuff like a fish to water but many of my friends are reformed Magic: The Gathering Players in their late 20s to late 30s. No one quite has the time or resources to get back in to the addiction of collectible card gaming, but stuff like Cards Against Humanity, Nuclear War, Heroscape or Munchkin goes over really well and can introduce someone to a wider world of game-playing. Gaming does not in fact have to revolve around a giant TV.
My SO is a gamer, but a different sort from me. She likes Xbox games, mostly shooters and RPG titles. The only PC game she'll play is The Sims 2. I primarily play role playing and real time strategy games.
We found our crossover points in a couple different ways:
1. We compete on silly casual games on our phones and tablets. Superiority in Bubble Shooter or figuring out a new way to make pictures of dicks relevant in Draw Something is treasured gaming experience.
2. The PC gaming experience for games like Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Dragon Age is better, so we kind of play and make decisions together. I'm more of an explorer and she's more of an action junkie, but in practice this means that if one of us can't do something with our normal approach, it's time for the other to take a crack at it.
3. Sometimes I suck it up and let her kick my ass in some kind of console shooter or Kinect title. I'll also sit out with her and read while she leans on me and plays Borderlands or something. It's kind of passive/introvert together time.
4. We experimented with MMO-playing, but the MMO I actually like closed and she's not into WoW any more, so the motivation for that just evaporated. That actually worked pretty well.
Mostly, though, we play different games and it's FINE. I do my thing and she does hers.
How is handing control of your gaming experience entirely over to Valve any better than handing it over to Microsoft or Sony?
I don't use Steam. I like PC gaming, but I want to disassociate my gaming experience entirely from online services. That leaves me with very few options. I've returned every boxed PC game I've purchased in the last three years has required some kind of online login, even for single-person, offline play. I really don't like having to play "mother may I" with Electronic Arts or Valve or anyone else. That doesn't leave me many gaming options, but I will say that every single thing I've ever gotten from GoG.com has worked, is divorced from any sort of download, copy protection or online community bullshit.
Also in a lot of case I have just as much fun watching somebody else's game playthrough videos on Youtube as playing myself. There are surprisingly complete video sets for many RPGs and other single player titles and that's just fine as far as I'm concerned.
RDP clients are typically used to administer Windows machines, but as far as I know, Linux does not have an RDP server. It has VNC and X11, but both of those guys are enormous bandwidth hogs with a limited feature set compared to what RDP is capable of.
I had a 10 week wait getting a replacement for a 32GB SLC drive from OCZ. They did not respond to support emails made on their web site, but they're very attentive if you go complain on Anandtech or HardOCP or something. In my experience, the shortest amount of time that an RMA from them has taken is a little under five weeks.
One of my customers has some systems with Revodrives. They die and I just toss them rather than bother with replacement. Some of the machines I'm dealing with are on their third one in 18 months.
I stole a bunch of large-ish binder clips from work. I binder clip stuff together. Binder clips have loops, so I stuck some screws in the underside of my desk and hung the binder clips with excess cable on them.
It's not super-pretty but it works just fine.
Please mod up for truth, justice and the HP way.
I seem to recall mention of something about using water as part of anti-radiological shielding.
You pretty much have to figure that anything that was meant for interstellar travel is going to have some pretty serious phlebotinum shielding to make high-energy particles a non-issue in the first place, so it's really just a matter of having armor sufficient to deal with the forces of some presumably multi-kiloton explosion.
The Vipers carried by the Galactica lacked fly-by-wire tech, presumably so that they would not be impacted by Cylon EW. It may have been that the Cylon Fighters had some EW-related function (sensor or telemetry platform, maybe?) and carried anti-fighter weapons primarily to deal with Vipers, which were fielded primarily to deal with Cylon birds and reduce the effectiveness of Cylon EW.
What I'm saying is, they could've probably justified it.
You're barely using the capabilities of the machine you have now and you don't have any reason to keep the server. Get a decent VPN-capable router or pay $20/year for LogMeIn Hamachi if that's a need and combine it with a Synology or QNAP NAS. Those have firmware that's relatively straightforward to support and if there's ever a need for more advanced file services, they're already baked into the device.
Do make sure you buy decent disk drives for it. "Green" or "Eco" drives from WD or Seagate work for shit in disk arrays.
This really won't be a downgrade for you. It will actually probably make your life easier.
Installing most well known consumer Antivirus products or especially security suites.
That is in fact exactly how the *AA harvests IPs from torrents, but torrents in and of themselves are not illegal, only the infringing behavior of sending copyrighted material to another person is illegal.
In theory, you can tell your client to download the .torrent file and join the swarm without allowing it to download any of the associated files. You might do this to harvest addresses from other clients or to otherwise monitor the torrent.
It's pretty suspicious behavior, but merely being in a big blob of chattering IPs doesn't necessarily indicate that yours has specifically done anything criminal.
The RIM tablet doesn't really add anything over and above other 7" tablets that might run Android. Kindle Fire and Nook Color devices can be had for less. All of those really need work with third party firmware to be made legitimately worthwhile.
I own a whole bunch of tablets, including a (work-provided) ipad2 and several options from first-tier Android OEMs. In general, the best use I've found for them is consumption of ebooks, webcomics and product manuals. My favorite device is an 8.9" Samsung Galaxy, which has the 1280x800 screen resolution of a larger Android tablet but weighs about 2/3rds what the 1" larger ipad2 does. That's a lovely combination of form factor and usability.
I guess I could get away with doing the same things on my phone as I do with my tablets, but a 4.3" screen really doesn't have the same level of utility as a 7" or larger one.
And regarding your question, I'm sufficiently annoyed by all the drawbacks to iOS that I would never consider purchasing an Apple device for myself. Data sandboxing and format limitations drive me insane.
I do that for small business machines. I know all about Sysprep and .wim files. Believe me. I also leverage the fact that there are free versions of TrueImage available for anyone whose machine includes a WD, Maxtor or Seagate hard disk. That doesn't help much to address home machines or personal laptops.
One thing in particular that I've found to be problematic in relation to getting Windows reinstalled is fear of losing purchased itunes content. If I had to guess, that's a bigger issue than absolutely anything else I've run in to.
I've actually lost clients from advocating reinstall as a standard procedure after infection. The usual claim is that it's an excuse for me to pad a bill. I know a repaired system is substantially more vulnerable than a known-clean new install is, and I can make a good case for that with my customers, but that doesn't mean they all go along with it and at some point I decided that it's not really a battle that's worth fighting.
I get a lot of mileage out of Windows Repair Portable. It restores settings for a large number of issues that don't have a regular, non-painful reset/repair/reinstall option. I've found it particularly handy for fixing the Windows Firewall and Windows updates.
I'd prefer to do a reinstall under almost all circumstances of malware infection, but that's not always an option available for home or small business systems. I particularly dislike having to rely on Windows System Restore. I really wish modern versions of Windows had a painless repair install that would allow end users to keep programs and settings.
I usually try to replace Sharepoint with Wiki or Drupal installations. Sharepoint does a lot of different stuff; I don't think there's a single drop-in replacement available in the land of OSS projects, but in my experience a lot of the time workgroups are barely scratching the surface of what they could be doing with it anyway.
I wrote this post in December of 2005 on another forum site I belong to. This experience completely soured me on any interaction with Apple. itunes is useless and has been at least going back that far. In the years since I've run across several other machines with mysterious and intractable itunes problems. I'm told it's not uncommon for people to reinstall Windows to fix itunes issues.
Anyway
--
My boss brings me her notebook this morning.
She says "I can't get itunes to work"
I try to run itunes. Version 6, the one that came out maybe a month ago with the video support.
I double-click on iTunes. The computer goes "ding". itunes does not start.
I think "Oh well, I will uninstall and reinstall it."
Except it's not in Add/Remove programs.
Hit the program files folder. Yup. It's there.
Try to start from the .exe instead of a shortcut. Nope. Computer goes "ding". What does "ding" mean?
Download an updated installer, fresh from the web site.
The installer gives me the option to remove itunes or repair it. I try both. In either case I get "error 1605", which a quick google tells me is an InstallShield error. I'm told to upgrade my installshield engine and use a "Windows Installer Cleanup Tool". itunes doesn't show on the list of things I can clean up. Quicktime and the ipod service do. I go ahead and remove those.
OK. Fine. Done.
The computer goes "ding" and I *still* get error 1605 when I try to reinstall.
So I hit Apple's support pages for itunes. There are eight or nine suggestions there that seem like they might be related, but most of them lead back to the Installshield support site.
I try all those things. The computer still goes "ding" and I *still* get error 1605.
I run an SFC on the machine. The computer goes "ding" the next time I try to start itunes.
Finally, against all hope, I call Apple. Maybe there's something they haven't published, or maybe this is a new issue.
Apple won't talk to me until I find the serial number for a new ipod or I cough up $50. What the ipod has to do with an itunes problem, I don't know.
Fortunately, one of the women I work with has a new ipod. Good thing. Apple won't talk to you unless you've purchased their hardware.
I calmly explain to the apple tech (LeeAnn, if anyone wants to know), what I have done prior to my call. LeeAnn identifies herself as a *windows support specialist*.
I ask her if she knows what "ding" means, or if there's some support information other than that available on Apple's web site for this problem.
LeeAnn asks me to repeat the things I did. This takes me about five minutes. I reference Apple's support pages, as I can read them off the firefox tabs in front of me. At the end of everything, LeeAnn says "I need to check on this. Can you hold?"
LeeAnn is gone just under five minutes. When she picks back up, she starts reading verbatim off one of those support web pages. I say "I have already done the the steps on that page." She starts in on another page, that I have also read. This time, I just start reading ahead of her, for she is pissing me off. I say "Is there any additional support information that you can provide me, other than the information that I already got off your web site?"
She says "Not for this issue. Have you contacted your computer manufacturer?"
I say "This is not an issue for my computer manufacturer, this is an issue with Apple's software on a Windows computer."
She says "Well have you contacted Microsoft?"
I think this very well might've been the point where I snapped.
I say "No. This is a problem with the functionality of *APPLE'S* software. Windows is otherwise behaving normally. I ran a program to verify that." (Furthermore, I know Windows installer was working, as I installed my bundle o' antispyware apps from an .msi file earlier that morning while I was troubleshooting).
She says "What program is that?"
I say "SFC"
She says "I thought tha
I think this is just Sony trying once again to replicate its success with the Compact Disc format. It has a long history of making new formats, just to see if they'll catch on. I'm sure it's quite lucrative if one does, but the other aspect of that is the proliferation of bizarre Sony formats that aren't even supported by Sony after some production period. How many versions of the Memory Stick did Sony wind up making? Six? Seven?
Anyway, this is just more of that and I'm sure it will fail and be forgotten soon enough.
Except that 1024x768 was never all THAT common on laptops. Laptop display resolutions have always varied widely. 1024x768 was a common small panel size on desktop size displays while notebooks might have ranged from 800x600 all the way up to 1600x1200 even within the same product line and model (e.g. R-series Thinkpads).
1024x768 was only commonly used on desktop type panels in sizes below 17". When I look at panels of a fixed size, it's almost always the case that the taller panel with a given surface area has more overall pixels.
Are you really being so obtuse that you don't understand the distinction I am making?
The bullshit argument that some people seem to trot out is that widescreen resolutions represent "extra pixels" over the tallscreen equivalent. And that's just not true:
19" desktop or 15" laptop "tall" screen: 1280 x 1024 = 1.31 million pixels
19" desktop "wide" or 15" laptop screen: 1366 x 768 = 1.04 million pixels.
Simple math tells me that more stuff fits on the taller screen (which at that resolution is really 5:4 rather than 4:3, but whatever).
At least in the Windows world there really is a lot of stuff that has been designed with the incorrect assumption that everyone is going to have 800 vertical lines of resolution. Anything less than that feels like a regression.
I stopped buying Sony products when I called for an RMA on a Sony tape drive and was told that they don't support computer products unless they're specifically connected to computers running desktop versions of Windows. In response, I asked if that included displays. The phone monkey hung up on me.
Funny in retrospect but the level of unfriendliness suggested by that interaction is such that I've been looking forward to Sony's demise for a long, long time.