I'd have to agree. it's so U-G-L-Y! The tiles or icons or whatever....they are flat, over simplistic, have no depth to them, in bright primary colours. It's horrible! and they are rolling out this butt ugly style across all their products...hotmail, xbox, office 2013. It's terrible. I like having a bit of 3D or depth to the icons I click on.
Plus they've thrown usability out the window with win8. It's pretty piss poor. Hot corners?? W.T.F..... I tried the release previews and the only way I could make win8 vaguely useable was to install classic shell (I even have classic shell installed on a win7 pc coz I didn't like what they did to the start menu - too big and the documents menu has gone). The whole flipping back and forth between the desktop and metro I found to be very jarring and irritating experience....on the desktop pc, why are metro programs fullscreen and bright white? It hurts my eyes. Plus the metro desktop/start screen just shouts bright colours at you.
Microsoft are trying to be a jack of all trades, but it's failing pretty spectacularly. it seems they have lost the plot and I get the distinct impression that they have no clue as to what they ought to be doing anymore.
Just grab classic shell from sourceforge. It's free and the latest version bypasses metro altogether you you don't even get a glimpse of it when you log in:0 When i was testing win8 this little program made it quite bearable.
I suspect a lot of people will install one of these 3rd party apps for their friends on win8 just for a bit of piece and quiet:)
I have a nice little side hobby, repairing broken Xbox 360 consoles (RROD, e74, usual stuff). It's been interesting hobby, taken them apart and making them better, i.e. actually fixing the inherent design flaws. Also nice since I've been making a bit on the side.:)
But..... SOOOOOOOO many people have been asking me to flash their drives as part of the repair, or telling me they need the console repairing coz the drive has been flashed and they don't want to buy a new unit and all they have are copies. It's been quite an eye opener....everybody's at it, and the answer is always the same : Games are too expensive, DL DVD's are much cheaper....
I have to admit, I NEVER buy new games, because I feel that they're simply not worth the money they are charging for them. I always buy second hand games for less than half price. Oh, and no, I don't have any copied games....
People. Catch a wake up. You are selling your games for far, far, far more than people (That's your market) think they are worth. DROP YOUR PRICES. You'll:
a) Sell more games.
b) Make more money due to increased volume.
c) Reduce the piracy that you are so concerned about.
Quit being a part of the problem, and start being a part of the solution.
The music and film industry need to come to the same conclusions....the products they sell are worth a *lot* less than they think they are.
Some valid points there mate. I know um, 10 people with a 360. All of them except one has had the RROD failure, so that's a 90% failure rate over here. One guy is on his 3rd (and he's not a heavy gamer); another guy is on his 6th.
List of flaws, wow, where do I begin?
GPU heatsink that is Waaaaaay too small to cope
Fans that run too slowly; not enough cool air being pulled through the heatsinks
Poor fan shroud design - air leaks in around the sides instead of over the heatsinks
Poor quality, thin motherboard that warps easily
Poor quality, brittle lead-free solder
X-clamps pushing up and causing point pressure underneath the GPU and CPU chips
Poor quality and excessive thermal paste being used
Two centre case standoffs higher than the edge of the case (forced warping of the mobo), although I've noticed they've fixed this with the newer 360's and these are now level with the edge of the case where the mobo screws down.
Microsoft cut every corner they could, anywhere they could, to push the 360 through the door as cheaply as possible, and before the PS3 came to market. They are now paying the price, as it's cost them over a billion dollars in repairs. If it were any other company, they would have gone bust or given up on the 360. Microsoft's *cough* attempts at fixing this broken abortion of a console so far include a small extension to the GPU heatsink and epoxying the GPU and CPU chips into place, LMAO - these still break...
Reflowing the cracked solder underneath the GPU chip followed by the HYBRID X-clamp repair, then pushing 12 volts through both fans and modding the shroud by sealing it up around the edges and covering the GPU heatsink, then adding mini heatsinks to the exposed RAM chips, the HANA chaip and the Southbridge chip, is a pretty robust and long lasting repair. Other than this, the 360 needs a complete and fundamental redesign to prevent the RROD/e74 and related errors.
Yep, absolutely. It was curiosity...I bought it specifically so that I could take it apart, laugh at its numerous eye-popping design flaws and make it better.
Had it not been such a crappy console, I would never have bought one.:)
The last PC game I bought was Half Life 2. Unfortunately in order to play it, i needed to have a 'steam' account and an active internet connection. Worse, this game was locked to the account and I couldn't sell it or or even give it away. So I never bought another PC game...game over as far as I was concerned
I bought a broken xbox360 (RROD) console off fleabay really cheaply, fixed it up using a heatgun and the Team HYBRID x-clamp fix. I've got about half a dozen games for it now, (e.g. Bioshock, GoW, GoW 2, Assasin, Lego Indiana Jones) ALL of them are pre-owned. I have absolutely no intention of ever buying a new game. Why? They are too expensive, and frankly *not* worth the money new. They need to halve the price of new games before I'll consider buying a new game. Same with the xbox 360. Why waste money a new xbox360 for £170 when it will break after a year, when you can get a broken one off eBay for £35 including postage, fix it in a couple of hours and for minimal cost? I do not have a live gold account, as I have no intention of playing online - why should I pay? To play online with the wii costs nothing.
Best thing about this, Microsoft haven't received a penny off me. So what are they gonna do, try and stop people reselling their poorly designed crappy little consoles? Haha I'd like to see them try...;)
To game developers out there who may be reading this: LOWER YOUR PRICES. You charge too much. The fact that pre-owned games are selling so well is symptomatic of this, so wise up, what you are seeing is a market correction;)
You can fly direct to Costa Rica from Canada, (Air Canada) or fly direct to Mexico. From there, you can get a TACA flight, or Mecicana to anywhere in Central America. Thank God there are ways to avoid transiting through the USA.
A theoretical asteroid can be of many different sizes. An Apophis sized impactor does have global implications (though its not extinction class); however, something like what exploded above Tunguska in the early 20th century could potentially be devastating within a single country but not have an effect outside of a limited region, like a bad earthquake.
I guess you're assuming here it's a land impact. Most of the Earth is covered by water, making an oceanic impact event much more likely. If an Apophis size asteroid impacted in the Atlantic, which is a theoretical possibility with 99942 Apophis in April 13th 2036, then you're looking at a massive, mile high tidal wave taking out the entire Eastern seaboard of the US, Canada, the Caribbean, Western Europe, South America and West Africa. All gone, quite literally. Nothing but mud remaining. Or it could hit the Pacific instead. 99942 Apophis's potential collision trajectory on this date starts in Siberia, across the pacific, over Central America and to the Atlantic. These are all potential impact sites.
It's why I'll never buy an ipod, or an iphone for that matter. In any case, I still fail to see why I should pay a premium for an mp3 player and a phone....
The problem with that of course, is what happens when you want to close your account, and give the game to someone else because you've finished playing with it, or simply don't like it? What if you want to play the game again after a few years, but have removed the account and password and can't remember what they are? What if your interent connection is down for the evening - you cannot play your game in the meantime...I have these kinds of issues with HL2. And because of this, I will NEVER buy another valve/steam game ever again.
We already decided this when they announced they would start photographing and fingerprinting everyone; we just won't go to the USA, we'll spend our tourist money elsewhere. Even flying to a third country on holiday (e.g. Peru) we just avoid the USA as a stop over altogether. A friend of ours went from London to Mexico via the USA to visit his girlfriend; he got stopped and interrogated in the USA even though a) he'd done nothing wrong and b) his final destination was a third country. He's vowed never to go the USA ever again. It's just too much hassle going to the USA these days. I just wonder if they know just how much damage they're doing to their tourist industry.....
Maybe you should send them files in.odt format, and when the inevitable reply comes back, saying that their latest and greatest version of word 2007 cannot open it, say "Oh, sorry, I keep forgetting, not everyone is using OpenOffice." Then email them the link to OpenOffice's download section;)
I've been using KDE on and off for around 10 years now, but in the past 3 years I've been using it fulltime. I must say, I'm very impressed with it, it's just getting better, and better, and better with each successive version. These new features in KDE 4 look really cool. My hat goes off to the developers; it looks really impressive. However, I think I'll stick with KDE 3.5 for now, at least until 4.1 or even 4.2 comes out;) And now that KDE apps can be run on windows....well, I think this may be the beginning of something here, and I think Microsoft are in for some serious competition in the next few years. Microsoft ought to be very worried by this....I know I would;)
My diesel has been getting around (US) 50mpg. Since I adapted it to run on vegetable oil, I've started doing some experiments using acetone. The results so far seem interesting. I appear to be getting better mileage with vegetable oil. I've just been trying sunflower oil, both with acetone and without acetone, (1.5ml per liter of fuel) and my mileage went up to (US) 60mpg. With corn oil, it was around (US) 55mpg...
Ditto. My wife just started her phd and needed a laptop to take to her office; her dad gave her one, it came with XP preinstalled, and it had a rather annoying bug where it would randomly BSOD for no apparent reason (he did mention this beforehand, something to do with the XP graphics driver). So I nuked it and installed SuSE 10.2 on it. Before I did so, I asked her if this was OK "Sure coz I don't like XP anyway and if it stops BSODing, i don't mind".
She's been using it for over a month now, and is happily using it, she has wireless, Open Office, Kontact, kmail, Firefox, her favourite linux games (like supertux) basically everything she needs. She plugged it into her university network using an ethernet cable and was able to get on the net automatically.
Amen to that...so glad I switched to linux on all my computers. None of this WGA crap. But you know what they say...there's one born every minute....oh well!
I agree. Windows peaked with 2000. It all went downhill with Ex Pee - Product Activation, and that god awful Crayola theme...yuk. There is no way we'll be going to Ex Pee, and even less chance of going to Vista. Vista is too expensive: Microsoft are asking for too much money. (£300 - $600 for the Ultimate edition? Come on...that's a rip off....) Personally, I won't pay more than £30 ($60) for a windows OS.
Now, on the other hand, about a month ago I installed SuSE linux 10.2 (64bit version) on our new homebuilt PC. I must say, I am very impressed with it. An older version of SuSE is on our laptop (which came preloaded with Ex Pee, now long since wiped), and Linux is on our home fileserver as well, which also had Ex Pee on it
As Linux is now doing almost everything we want, changing to Ex Pee / Vista seems pointless now....
I would like to thank Microsoft for putting out Ex Pee (and now Vista); it has only accelerated our switch over to Linux:o)
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I'd have to agree. it's so U-G-L-Y! The tiles or icons or whatever....they are flat, over simplistic, have no depth to them, in bright primary colours. It's horrible! and they are rolling out this butt ugly style across all their products...hotmail, xbox, office 2013. It's terrible. I like having a bit of 3D or depth to the icons I click on.
Plus they've thrown usability out the window with win8. It's pretty piss poor. Hot corners?? W.T.F..... I tried the release previews and the only way I could make win8 vaguely useable was to install classic shell (I even have classic shell installed on a win7 pc coz I didn't like what they did to the start menu - too big and the documents menu has gone). The whole flipping back and forth between the desktop and metro I found to be very jarring and irritating experience....on the desktop pc, why are metro programs fullscreen and bright white? It hurts my eyes. Plus the metro desktop/start screen just shouts bright colours at you.
Microsoft are trying to be a jack of all trades, but it's failing pretty spectacularly. it seems they have lost the plot and I get the distinct impression that they have no clue as to what they ought to be doing anymore.
Just grab classic shell from sourceforge. It's free and the latest version bypasses metro altogether you you don't even get a glimpse of it when you log in :0 When i was testing win8 this little program made it quite bearable.
I suspect a lot of people will install one of these 3rd party apps for their friends on win8 just for a bit of piece and quiet :)
But..... SOOOOOOOO many people have been asking me to flash their drives as part of the repair, or telling me they need the console repairing coz the drive has been flashed and they don't want to buy a new unit and all they have are copies. It's been quite an eye opener....everybody's at it, and the answer is always the same : Games are too expensive, DL DVD's are much cheaper....
I have to admit, I NEVER buy new games, because I feel that they're simply not worth the money they are charging for them. I always buy second hand games for less than half price. Oh, and no, I don't have any copied games....
People. Catch a wake up. You are selling your games for far, far, far more than people (That's your market) think they are worth. DROP YOUR PRICES. You'll:
a) Sell more games.
b) Make more money due to increased volume.
c) Reduce the piracy that you are so concerned about.
Quit being a part of the problem, and start being a part of the solution.
The music and film industry need to come to the same conclusions....the products they sell are worth a *lot* less than they think they are.
Some valid points there mate. I know um, 10 people with a 360. All of them except one has had the RROD failure, so that's a 90% failure rate over here. One guy is on his 3rd (and he's not a heavy gamer); another guy is on his 6th.
List of flaws, wow, where do I begin?
GPU heatsink that is Waaaaaay too small to cope
Fans that run too slowly; not enough cool air being pulled through the heatsinks
Poor fan shroud design - air leaks in around the sides instead of over the heatsinks
Poor quality, thin motherboard that warps easily
Poor quality, brittle lead-free solder
X-clamps pushing up and causing point pressure underneath the GPU and CPU chips
Poor quality and excessive thermal paste being used
Two centre case standoffs higher than the edge of the case (forced warping of the mobo), although I've noticed they've fixed this with the newer 360's and these are now level with the edge of the case where the mobo screws down.
Microsoft cut every corner they could, anywhere they could, to push the 360 through the door as cheaply as possible, and before the PS3 came to market. They are now paying the price, as it's cost them over a billion dollars in repairs. If it were any other company, they would have gone bust or given up on the 360. Microsoft's *cough* attempts at fixing this broken abortion of a console so far include a small extension to the GPU heatsink and epoxying the GPU and CPU chips into place, LMAO - these still break...
Reflowing the cracked solder underneath the GPU chip followed by the HYBRID X-clamp repair, then pushing 12 volts through both fans and modding the shroud by sealing it up around the edges and covering the GPU heatsink, then adding mini heatsinks to the exposed RAM chips, the HANA chaip and the Southbridge chip, is a pretty robust and long lasting repair.
Other than this, the 360 needs a complete and fundamental redesign to prevent the RROD/e74 and related errors.
Had it not been such a crappy console, I would never have bought one. :)
I bought a broken xbox360 (RROD) console off fleabay really cheaply, fixed it up using a heatgun and the Team HYBRID x-clamp fix. I've got about half a dozen games for it now, (e.g. Bioshock, GoW, GoW 2, Assasin, Lego Indiana Jones) ALL of them are pre-owned. I have absolutely no intention of ever buying a new game. Why? They are too expensive, and frankly *not* worth the money new. They need to halve the price of new games before I'll consider buying a new game. Same with the xbox 360. Why waste money a new xbox360 for £170 when it will break after a year, when you can get a broken one off eBay for £35 including postage, fix it in a couple of hours and for minimal cost? I do not have a live gold account, as I have no intention of playing online - why should I pay? To play online with the wii costs nothing.
Best thing about this, Microsoft haven't received a penny off me. So what are they gonna do, try and stop people reselling their poorly designed crappy little consoles? Haha I'd like to see them try... ;)
To game developers out there who may be reading this: LOWER YOUR PRICES. You charge too much. The fact that pre-owned games are selling so well is symptomatic of this, so wise up, what you are seeing is a market correction ;)
You can fly direct to Costa Rica from Canada, (Air Canada) or fly direct to Mexico. From there, you can get a TACA flight, or Mecicana to anywhere in Central America. Thank God there are ways to avoid transiting through the USA.
A theoretical asteroid can be of many different sizes. An Apophis sized impactor does have global implications (though its not extinction class); however, something like what exploded above Tunguska in the early 20th century could potentially be devastating within a single country but not have an effect outside of a limited region, like a bad earthquake.
I guess you're assuming here it's a land impact. Most of the Earth is covered by water, making an oceanic impact event much more likely. If an Apophis size asteroid impacted in the Atlantic, which is a theoretical possibility with 99942 Apophis in April 13th 2036, then you're looking at a massive, mile high tidal wave taking out the entire Eastern seaboard of the US, Canada, the Caribbean, Western Europe, South America and West Africa. All gone, quite literally. Nothing but mud remaining. Or it could hit the Pacific instead. 99942 Apophis's potential collision trajectory on this date starts in Siberia, across the pacific, over Central America and to the Atlantic. These are all potential impact sites.
How the fuck can I have a *cough* "rich internet experience" with silverlight on a 64bit dual core PC running Linux????
It's why I'll never buy an ipod, or an iphone for that matter. In any case, I still fail to see why I should pay a premium for an mp3 player and a phone....
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so much for it being touted as the competitor to google...
The problem with that of course, is what happens when you want to close your account, and give the game to someone else because you've finished playing with it, or simply don't like it? What if you want to play the game again after a few years, but have removed the account and password and can't remember what they are? What if your interent connection is down for the evening - you cannot play your game in the meantime...I have these kinds of issues with HL2. And because of this, I will NEVER buy another valve/steam game ever again.
MS Office has been available on the Linux OS via WINE for many, many years....
We already decided this when they announced they would start photographing and fingerprinting everyone; we just won't go to the USA, we'll spend our tourist money elsewhere. Even flying to a third country on holiday (e.g. Peru) we just avoid the USA as a stop over altogether. A friend of ours went from London to Mexico via the USA to visit his girlfriend; he got stopped and interrogated in the USA even though a) he'd done nothing wrong and b) his final destination was a third country. He's vowed never to go the USA ever again. It's just too much hassle going to the USA these days. I just wonder if they know just how much damage they're doing to their tourist industry.....
Maybe you should send them files in .odt format, and when the inevitable reply comes back, saying that their latest and greatest version of word 2007 cannot open it, say "Oh, sorry, I keep forgetting, not everyone is using OpenOffice." Then email them the link to OpenOffice's download section ;)
I've been using KDE on and off for around 10 years now, but in the past 3 years I've been using it fulltime. I must say, I'm very impressed with it, it's just getting better, and better, and better with each successive version. These new features in KDE 4 look really cool. My hat goes off to the developers; it looks really impressive. However, I think I'll stick with KDE 3.5 for now, at least until 4.1 or even 4.2 comes out ;) And now that KDE apps can be run on windows....well, I think this may be the beginning of something here, and I think Microsoft are in for some serious competition in the next few years. Microsoft ought to be very worried by this....I know I would ;)
35mpg....come on!
The truth is, DRM actually stands for Digitally Restricted Media
Hey, so how is the weather in Redmond today? ;-)
She's been using it for over a month now, and is happily using it, she has wireless, Open Office, Kontact, kmail, Firefox, her favourite linux games (like supertux) basically everything she needs. She plugged it into her university network using an ethernet cable and was able to get on the net automatically.
First Post! yay!
Religion (n) A large, popular cult...
Amen to that...so glad I switched to linux on all my computers. None of this WGA crap. But you know what they say...there's one born every minute....oh well!
Now, on the other hand, about a month ago I installed SuSE linux 10.2 (64bit version) on our new homebuilt PC. I must say, I am very impressed with it. An older version of SuSE is on our laptop (which came preloaded with Ex Pee, now long since wiped), and Linux is on our home fileserver as well, which also had Ex Pee on it
As Linux is now doing almost everything we want, changing to Ex Pee / Vista seems pointless now....
I would like to thank Microsoft for putting out Ex Pee (and now Vista); it has only accelerated our switch over to Linux :o)
General: AArgh! Fucking Windows 98! Get Bill Gates in here now!
{Billy G is dragged in by a couple of soldiers}
General: 'You told us Windows 98 would be faster, and more efficient with better access to the internet!'
Billy G: 'It IS faster; over five million...'
{General: Takes a gun and blows Billy G's head off before he finishes the sentence, to wide cheering and applause heard in the background}
An absolutely classic moment... :)