Steam's one of the few to get it right. Honestly, I've yet to have a problem with any of their games. I know people DO have problems, but I have yet to experience them. They provide exactly what I'm looking for -- unfettered access to my game with minimal hassle.
I love the Wii. I really do. However, the innovative qualities of the system have led to several irritating side effects, and the system itself has some drawbacks that irk me.
1. Aside form several specific examples, the only true blockbuster games on the system are whatever Nintendo makes. I'm mostly okay with this; I admit, I'd buy the system just for Mario and Zelda. 2. While innovative, the control method is also very much like a fad. It has led to the rise of a huge number of absolutely horrible games that make it out only because the use the Wii controller. 3. Call me shallow, but I really don't like scaling applied to my games.. The graphics quality doesn't matter that much to me, but the Wii simply looks like ass on an LCD TV. Lower texture resolutions are fine, my game looking like I'm not wearing contacts is not.
The end result is that I play my 360 a hell of a lot more than I play my Wii. The system has a lot of potential, but the games that come out just aren't worth much in general.
I dunno... possibly because it's a fantasy based on the well-documented connection between Nazis and the occult? I'm not sure where you jumped in on the series, but the game has always been about the Nazi connection to the occult.
The first game in the "series", before Wolfenstein 3D, was Spear of Destiny. That's what the entire game was about.
Personally, I'm happy to see them return more to the roots of the series. We have enough bland, boring war games as it is.
Your premise is entirely sound, except for the fact that the ISP market does not function like a typical market would. I am typically against all government intervention, except for the fact that there are some differences to these markets.
The phone companies and cable companies are an oligopoly. Competition is non-existent from new market contenders, and entry is so prohibitively expensive that we will not likely see very many, if any competitors. This results in copycat competition whereby we all receive common denominator service and any innovation occurs only as an upgrade to existing features, much like the cell phone market. Bigger screens, snazzier phones -- same horrible data service, same call difficulties. They don't have to truly change or upgrade because there is no alternative, and they simply entice people with eye candy. In the end I'm still doing the same thing with my phone that I did 10 years ago.
If the ISPs wish to change how they do business, it should be in addition to the service they've already committed to providing, not at the expense of what they're providing, especially in a market where competition does not exist. A base service was agreed upon when I entered into an agreement to pay for services. Under normal circumstances I could simply leave once the terms changed and go with a competitor who will give me what I want, but that's not possible in this case. I have no choice, and if they get paid from businesses to do this, why wouldn't they simply marginalize all of their traffic and turn the internet into a modern day television where the content is controlled entirely by companies who are willing to pay up?
You see Net Neutrality as a way to hinder future progress; I see it as a way to hinder future disaster. Given the track record of these companies, I have very little faith in them using it for anything but their own benefit, and that will always come down to whoever is willing to pay the largest toll.
As a small side note, I fully believe AT&T and Verizon would still be deploying their fiber networks, because those networks are a direct result of -real- competition between television providers and the phone companies. They all realize that the old television networks are going to change in the future, and they are engaged in a race to get there first. Television at some point will cease to be broadcast and become a choice for the consumer to watch on their own schedules. The end result of this competition for us is higher bandwidth, more choice, and more flexibility.
Well, I'm hoping that this wasn't a troll... and if it isn't, I hope that you spend a little time reading up on what net neutrality is before approving or disapproving it.
The reason so many people here are for net neutrality is because it is essentially enforced non-regulation of the internet. It -is- rather awkward to have a regulation that states you cannot regulate, but the main purpose behind it is to prevent private interests from dictating the essential freedom of information on the internet.
More importantly is that without it, service providers are allowed dictate priority on traffic, which leads to all sorts of chilling competitive implications, especially given that there are so few providers in the US.
Let's take internet radio for example (a good example, given the payola fiasco!). You really enjoy listening to free indie internet radio. However, your ISP has decided to make some extra money by allowing people to purchase "high priority" traffic. Unfortunately for you, ClearChannel has purchased a great deal of it for their streaming of terrestrial radio stations. Your free indie internet radio station now stutters or is completely unreachable during times of high traffic because ClearChannel has essentially paid the ISP to make their radio stations more important than yours.
Enjoy watching free internet TV? Too bad, FOX just purchased priority.
You and your girlfriend like a little personal time with some "erotic entertainment"? Well, your ISP just decided they're going to become family friendly, so that's the end of that.
The core of all this is allowing for the possibility of private corporations to influence the flow of information purely through monetary means. We've already seen what it has done to our political system... I don't see why anyone would want that with the internet.
You can put forth all of the logical reasons you want to switch to Linux, but in the end, you're just preaching to choir. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you on all points, but the real heart of the issue is a great deal simpler than all that.
Your average, ordinary person does not care. You can't start with them, because they have no motivation to do anything except what they've always done, and like it or not, XP and Vista do that just fine and for most people. I don't blame them, if it wasn't my hobby and career, I wouldn't care either.
The ordinary person will care when they are forced to use it, such as at their workplace. This is where you'll have to start; the problem is that Linux lacks a great deal of the fine-tune control that Windows has. I know that sounds silly, but features such as GPOs are huge. What ends up happening is Linux gets implemented on the back end, transparently, and then an AD infrastructure is implemented to provide the fine tune desktop control.
So provide corporations with a reason why to leverage Linux on the desktop, and the users will naturally begin to want to run the same thing at home as they do at work. They'll be encouraged to seek it out without alienating them by preaching to them.
As for the gamers... most of us are geeks, anyway. We'll all simply dual-boot while the market shifts and Linux becomes a viable gaming platform.
I've noticed I never really buy THAT many games for my Nintendo systems, but the ones I do buy are always top notch and give me far more enjoyment than most of the other games I own.
Are they rehashes of the same old series? Sure. But I LIKE them that way. Metroid and Zelda have evolved throughout the years, the premise is the same, but it's always something new and interesting and fun on a level that no other game can seem to come close to.
All jobs are boring. That is their nature, because you are essentially forced by your need to survive to do that which you would not voluntarily do without compensation. Even when you ARE doing something you would voluntarily do, control as to when and how you do it is stripped from you, so it becomes boring anyway.
Work will always be boring. Just work doing something you have a talent for. It won't make work a daily joy to do, but it will make it more tolerable. If you're lucky, sometimes it will even coincide with what you WANT to do, and then it actually does become fun. It just won't remain that way.:)
Back in the day, I loved typing on them. They definitely have a very aesthetically pleasing feel to them. But as my typing got faster, I realized that I was becoming even faster on laptops because of the low profile keys; it sounds silly, but the little bit of time required to raise your fingers over the key height is significant.
I now use a low profile keyboard on my desktop, and I really couldn't go back to using the old style keyboard - the keys are simply way too deep.
It looks like a great service, but in the few cases I have, my clients don't really have the ability to pay for that kind of pipe, and unfortunately, Verizon's FiOS still hasn't gotten to quite everywhere here in California.
We do have a couple clients with that sort of line at several datacenters, though, and this looks like an excellent solution. I will have to look into this further, as it would certainly simply things a lot, and we wouldn't have to worry about calling the datacenter to get tapes changed.
That would be more than enough speed for backing up, especially at the right price. I have a client who has approximately 7TB of data. It isn't because of wasted space either, but because of the industry they are in. We could perform a full backup say, once a month on the weekend, and that would greatly reduce the disaster recovery time.
He currently backs up on a "per client" basis on DLT tapes, which is fine, but my own personal nightmare is that everything crashes and we have to restore from the 50+ tapes lying around. Obviously all of this data is on arrays with hot spares and such, but I would be more than happy to have some sort of "interim" solution in the event that somehow, everything blows up.
Obviously long-term archiving on it may be an issue, but I'm not looking for that so much as I'm looking to have some sort disaster recovery option. Backup systems seem to be falling far behind the amount of data that many companies generate, so much so that we have begun to turn to redundant systems instead. For 1TB, this works great - just have a single IDE drive and back up to that, with tape for long-term, but it gets pricy for larger systems, and it does not have the benefit of being able to be brought off-site. We always recommend that bring their current backup with them each night, so if the building burns down, they still have their data.
In my (admittedly fewer than some) years of experience, the reality is that your job will always be your job. Much like life, it will not ever be entirely made of sunshine and roses, and there are many points in any career where you are tired, disillusioned, and generally sick of your job. Maybe I'm just not an optimist, but this is a lot of what life entails. A lot of people go out on their own and start their own business at this point, which is not a bad idea, it buys you a great deal of freedom. However, with that freedom, you also have a completely new set of headaches, and after the novelty wears off, running your own business ends up becoming a chore as well.
I write code for a living. I also write code for a hobby. It might seem odd that I can come to loathe some days of programming for work, only to get off work and come home and program some more, but that's just how it is. With your career, you aren't free to pursue whatever you please; in the end, the bottom line is that the company needs to make money to pay its employees and function, and that bottom line generally dictates what you get to do. In your free time, you get to do whatever happens to suit you at the time. You have no deadlines, no requirements, just absolute freedom to explore.
No matter what you choose to do, the fact that your activities for your job are dictated by the need to make money and survive will always eventually become a burden. The best thing to do is find something that gives you the kind of freedom you need and is something you can tolerate doing even when you don't want to, and stick with that. This way you can have the freedom you need while understanding that some things in life are necessary evils. Short of becoming filthy rich, there's no quick and easy way to make all of your time your own. If you're really that desperate to get out of it entirely, save as much money you can, pay off your debts, and retire as early as possible.
I love my Wii quite a bit, and Nintendo has put out some fantastic games for it. But Nintendo, from my perspective, still has the same issue that it had before -- Nintendo is the only reason to buy the console if you're a regular gamer. Looking at my list of games, most of them came entirely from Nintendo, with the exception of a few games here and there. The interface for the Wii and the DS have inspired absolute tons of games of the "mini-game" variety, and this is frustrating. That's not to say that they number of good games have decreased, but there's a great deal more useless crap to wade through. Any look at the "Reviews" list on a gaming site shows a large number of disappointing and half-baked games.
I understand that there's new people that they're selling to, but it is frustrating to look at what's coming out and seeing 5 separate versions of Sudoku. Observing my family and friends, this "new" group of gamers seem unlikely to buy more games because of the nature of the games they buy. Most gamers play a game for a while, finish it, and then move on to the next game. These new gamers are very content to simply play Wii Bowling for years. They don't seek improvements, they don't seek new experiences, they're comfortable with what they know and love. I suspect many of these companies putting these games out are thinking they've hit the jackpot, and when the new demographic gets bored, or is completely happy with what they already have, they'll fall flat.
I run Vista at home, and I have a nice rig, so I don't run into any issues either. It's fast, it's snappy, it runs everything I want it to and supports my devices, and I have no issues outputting whatever I want to my LCD TV and stereo. No complaints here.
My mom just bought a new Inspiron 1512 (I think that's the model), and it runs Vista perfectly fine as well with 1GB of RAM. It didn't come with too much vendor-installed crap, but I removed what was there (goodbye, Norton!). Overall, I enjoyed setting up her laptop, there was nothing to gripe about, it was fast.
My brother's girlfriend's sister has an Acer laptop, 1GB of RAM, and it ran Vista like crap. Acer had installed the absolute motherlode of vendor applications, which conspired to bog the system down heavily. Unlike my mom's laptop which just uses Vista's interface for things like networking, this laptop had a custom interface for EVERYTHING. It took me about 5 hours to get all of the junk uninstalled from it, after which, it ran well.
It has a lot to do with what the vendor installs, and the quality of the hardware, whether vendor or home-built.
Retro did an absolutely amazing job using the Wiimote in Metroid Prime 3. The smoothness, the reaction time, it was absolutely perfect. I was dreading it for a while after seeing what it was like playing Red Steel, but it was nothing like that. Some of the most fun gaming I've had in a long time.
Firefox has never really done much for me. I can't really say why. Some of it is the loading time when you launch it, some of it is how the layout gets under my skin. I've had a few bad experiences with it in the past, too. I just never took to it.
However, I did decide to try Opera 9.23. I hadn't tried Opera in quite some time. I have to say, I'm pleasantly surprised, and really happy with the way Opera works. So, yeah, I guess I'm one of those weirdo Opera users now.:P
(No real point to the post, I'm just really digging Opera.)
As a disclaimer, here, I am not a web developer. Sometimes I have to do web development because of a project, and I can get done what I need to, but I don't enjoy it or even remotely like it. I spent most of my time doing desktop application and database development, which is where I like to be.:) I have a lot of respect for the serious web developers, compatibility and such can be a nightmare to work with in that field.
Sorry if any of this is inaccurate; let's just call it a perspective from a little bit further out.
In the beginning, we had plain standard HTML and the HTTP protocol, and it was good. That really wasn't even the true beginning, but lets start there. Gradually, everyone began to see the need to do more than just displaying pictures and text; we wanted animation, we wanted applications, we wanted interactivity. All of these are good things, in my opinion. The problem is, along the way, no clear standard really emerged on how to do these things; we got many technologies built on top of what we already had, which really wasn't particularly suitable.
Like some other internet protocols (I'm looking at you, SMTP), they were designed in the infancy of the internet, long before anyone knew what it would become, and that has exposed some security issues. The "needs" of the internet have changed, but the base of what makes the internet from a user standpoint has not. I know it will never happen due to the red tape and the amount of market force needed, but it seems like what we really need is a version 2.0 of the mid-range protocols that make up the internet, designed by an open group, with security and modern needs in mind.
It's all too much of an idealist standpoint to take hold, and trying to get everyone to switch would be extremely difficult, but one can always dream.:)
Please. You've got to be joking. Wow. I guess I just imagined all of those other articles. I guess there's never articles about biology, or physics, or genetics.
My affliction must have become REALLY bad, because now I'm seeing sections titled politics and science!
I'll grant you many of the articles do pertain to computers, but there are plenty that do not.
Slashdot Mirror
Steam's one of the few to get it right. Honestly, I've yet to have a problem with any of their games. I know people DO have problems, but I have yet to experience them. They provide exactly what I'm looking for -- unfettered access to my game with minimal hassle.
I love the Wii. I really do. However, the innovative qualities of the system have led to several irritating side effects, and the system itself has some drawbacks that irk me.
1. Aside form several specific examples, the only true blockbuster games on the system are whatever Nintendo makes. I'm mostly okay with this; I admit, I'd buy the system just for Mario and Zelda.
2. While innovative, the control method is also very much like a fad. It has led to the rise of a huge number of absolutely horrible games that make it out only because the use the Wii controller.
3. Call me shallow, but I really don't like scaling applied to my games.. The graphics quality doesn't matter that much to me, but the Wii simply looks like ass on an LCD TV. Lower texture resolutions are fine, my game looking like I'm not wearing contacts is not.
The end result is that I play my 360 a hell of a lot more than I play my Wii. The system has a lot of potential, but the games that come out just aren't worth much in general.
I dunno... possibly because it's a fantasy based on the well-documented connection between Nazis and the occult? I'm not sure where you jumped in on the series, but the game has always been about the Nazi connection to the occult.
The first game in the "series", before Wolfenstein 3D, was Spear of Destiny. That's what the entire game was about.
Personally, I'm happy to see them return more to the roots of the series. We have enough bland, boring war games as it is.
To think that all this time, I was simply hitting the key to get my BIOS boot device selection menu after installing the OSes I wanted individually!
Your premise is entirely sound, except for the fact that the ISP market does not function like a typical market would. I am typically against all government intervention, except for the fact that there are some differences to these markets.
The phone companies and cable companies are an oligopoly. Competition is non-existent from new market contenders, and entry is so prohibitively expensive that we will not likely see very many, if any competitors. This results in copycat competition whereby we all receive common denominator service and any innovation occurs only as an upgrade to existing features, much like the cell phone market. Bigger screens, snazzier phones -- same horrible data service, same call difficulties. They don't have to truly change or upgrade because there is no alternative, and they simply entice people with eye candy. In the end I'm still doing the same thing with my phone that I did 10 years ago.
If the ISPs wish to change how they do business, it should be in addition to the service they've already committed to providing, not at the expense of what they're providing, especially in a market where competition does not exist. A base service was agreed upon when I entered into an agreement to pay for services. Under normal circumstances I could simply leave once the terms changed and go with a competitor who will give me what I want, but that's not possible in this case. I have no choice, and if they get paid from businesses to do this, why wouldn't they simply marginalize all of their traffic and turn the internet into a modern day television where the content is controlled entirely by companies who are willing to pay up?
You see Net Neutrality as a way to hinder future progress; I see it as a way to hinder future disaster. Given the track record of these companies, I have very little faith in them using it for anything but their own benefit, and that will always come down to whoever is willing to pay the largest toll.
As a small side note, I fully believe AT&T and Verizon would still be deploying their fiber networks, because those networks are a direct result of -real- competition between television providers and the phone companies. They all realize that the old television networks are going to change in the future, and they are engaged in a race to get there first. Television at some point will cease to be broadcast and become a choice for the consumer to watch on their own schedules. The end result of this competition for us is higher bandwidth, more choice, and more flexibility.
Well, I'm hoping that this wasn't a troll... and if it isn't, I hope that you spend a little time reading up on what net neutrality is before approving or disapproving it.
The reason so many people here are for net neutrality is because it is essentially enforced non-regulation of the internet. It -is- rather awkward to have a regulation that states you cannot regulate, but the main purpose behind it is to prevent private interests from dictating the essential freedom of information on the internet.
More importantly is that without it, service providers are allowed dictate priority on traffic, which leads to all sorts of chilling competitive implications, especially given that there are so few providers in the US.
Let's take internet radio for example (a good example, given the payola fiasco!). You really enjoy listening to free indie internet radio. However, your ISP has decided to make some extra money by allowing people to purchase "high priority" traffic. Unfortunately for you, ClearChannel has purchased a great deal of it for their streaming of terrestrial radio stations. Your free indie internet radio station now stutters or is completely unreachable during times of high traffic because ClearChannel has essentially paid the ISP to make their radio stations more important than yours.
Enjoy watching free internet TV? Too bad, FOX just purchased priority.
You and your girlfriend like a little personal time with some "erotic entertainment"? Well, your ISP just decided they're going to become family friendly, so that's the end of that.
The core of all this is allowing for the possibility of private corporations to influence the flow of information purely through monetary means. We've already seen what it has done to our political system... I don't see why anyone would want that with the internet.
You can put forth all of the logical reasons you want to switch to Linux, but in the end, you're just preaching to choir. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you on all points, but the real heart of the issue is a great deal simpler than all that.
Your average, ordinary person does not care. You can't start with them, because they have no motivation to do anything except what they've always done, and like it or not, XP and Vista do that just fine and for most people. I don't blame them, if it wasn't my hobby and career, I wouldn't care either.
The ordinary person will care when they are forced to use it, such as at their workplace. This is where you'll have to start; the problem is that Linux lacks a great deal of the fine-tune control that Windows has. I know that sounds silly, but features such as GPOs are huge. What ends up happening is Linux gets implemented on the back end, transparently, and then an AD infrastructure is implemented to provide the fine tune desktop control.
So provide corporations with a reason why to leverage Linux on the desktop, and the users will naturally begin to want to run the same thing at home as they do at work. They'll be encouraged to seek it out without alienating them by preaching to them.
As for the gamers... most of us are geeks, anyway. We'll all simply dual-boot while the market shifts and Linux becomes a viable gaming platform.
Yeah, sorry, I should have been more clear on that...
Windows XP == Windows 2003
Windows Vista == Windows 2008
In terms of the kernel, they're considered the same.
I believe it's based on the official major releases of Windows NT, since the 9x kernel was abandoned.
1. Windows NT 3.1
2. Windows NT 3.5
3. Windows NT 4.0
4. Windows 2000
5. Windows XP
6. Windows Vista
7. Windows 7
That's basically what it boils down to for me.
I've noticed I never really buy THAT many games for my Nintendo systems, but the ones I do buy are always top notch and give me far more enjoyment than most of the other games I own.
Are they rehashes of the same old series? Sure. But I LIKE them that way. Metroid and Zelda have evolved throughout the years, the premise is the same, but it's always something new and interesting and fun on a level that no other game can seem to come close to.
There is a reason it's called work, and not play.
All jobs are boring. That is their nature, because you are essentially forced by your need to survive to do that which you would not voluntarily do without compensation. Even when you ARE doing something you would voluntarily do, control as to when and how you do it is stripped from you, so it becomes boring anyway.
Work will always be boring. Just work doing something you have a talent for. It won't make work a daily joy to do, but it will make it more tolerable. If you're lucky, sometimes it will even coincide with what you WANT to do, and then it actually does become fun. It just won't remain that way. :)
I agree with this, personally.
Back in the day, I loved typing on them. They definitely have a very aesthetically pleasing feel to them. But as my typing got faster, I realized that I was becoming even faster on laptops because of the low profile keys; it sounds silly, but the little bit of time required to raise your fingers over the key height is significant.
I now use a low profile keyboard on my desktop, and I really couldn't go back to using the old style keyboard - the keys are simply way too deep.
It looks like a great service, but in the few cases I have, my clients don't really have the ability to pay for that kind of pipe, and unfortunately, Verizon's FiOS still hasn't gotten to quite everywhere here in California.
We do have a couple clients with that sort of line at several datacenters, though, and this looks like an excellent solution. I will have to look into this further, as it would certainly simply things a lot, and we wouldn't have to worry about calling the datacenter to get tapes changed.
That would be more than enough speed for backing up, especially at the right price. I have a client who has approximately 7TB of data. It isn't because of wasted space either, but because of the industry they are in. We could perform a full backup say, once a month on the weekend, and that would greatly reduce the disaster recovery time.
He currently backs up on a "per client" basis on DLT tapes, which is fine, but my own personal nightmare is that everything crashes and we have to restore from the 50+ tapes lying around. Obviously all of this data is on arrays with hot spares and such, but I would be more than happy to have some sort of "interim" solution in the event that somehow, everything blows up.
Obviously long-term archiving on it may be an issue, but I'm not looking for that so much as I'm looking to have some sort disaster recovery option. Backup systems seem to be falling far behind the amount of data that many companies generate, so much so that we have begun to turn to redundant systems instead. For 1TB, this works great - just have a single IDE drive and back up to that, with tape for long-term, but it gets pricy for larger systems, and it does not have the benefit of being able to be brought off-site. We always recommend that bring their current backup with them each night, so if the building burns down, they still have their data.
Wow, these are awesome. Thank you for posting them!
In my (admittedly fewer than some) years of experience, the reality is that your job will always be your job. Much like life, it will not ever be entirely made of sunshine and roses, and there are many points in any career where you are tired, disillusioned, and generally sick of your job. Maybe I'm just not an optimist, but this is a lot of what life entails. A lot of people go out on their own and start their own business at this point, which is not a bad idea, it buys you a great deal of freedom. However, with that freedom, you also have a completely new set of headaches, and after the novelty wears off, running your own business ends up becoming a chore as well.
I write code for a living. I also write code for a hobby. It might seem odd that I can come to loathe some days of programming for work, only to get off work and come home and program some more, but that's just how it is. With your career, you aren't free to pursue whatever you please; in the end, the bottom line is that the company needs to make money to pay its employees and function, and that bottom line generally dictates what you get to do. In your free time, you get to do whatever happens to suit you at the time. You have no deadlines, no requirements, just absolute freedom to explore.
No matter what you choose to do, the fact that your activities for your job are dictated by the need to make money and survive will always eventually become a burden. The best thing to do is find something that gives you the kind of freedom you need and is something you can tolerate doing even when you don't want to, and stick with that. This way you can have the freedom you need while understanding that some things in life are necessary evils. Short of becoming filthy rich, there's no quick and easy way to make all of your time your own. If you're really that desperate to get out of it entirely, save as much money you can, pay off your debts, and retire as early as possible.
I love my Wii quite a bit, and Nintendo has put out some fantastic games for it. But Nintendo, from my perspective, still has the same issue that it had before -- Nintendo is the only reason to buy the console if you're a regular gamer. Looking at my list of games, most of them came entirely from Nintendo, with the exception of a few games here and there. The interface for the Wii and the DS have inspired absolute tons of games of the "mini-game" variety, and this is frustrating. That's not to say that they number of good games have decreased, but there's a great deal more useless crap to wade through. Any look at the "Reviews" list on a gaming site shows a large number of disappointing and half-baked games.
I understand that there's new people that they're selling to, but it is frustrating to look at what's coming out and seeing 5 separate versions of Sudoku. Observing my family and friends, this "new" group of gamers seem unlikely to buy more games because of the nature of the games they buy. Most gamers play a game for a while, finish it, and then move on to the next game. These new gamers are very content to simply play Wii Bowling for years. They don't seek improvements, they don't seek new experiences, they're comfortable with what they know and love. I suspect many of these companies putting these games out are thinking they've hit the jackpot, and when the new demographic gets bored, or is completely happy with what they already have, they'll fall flat.
I run Vista at home, and I have a nice rig, so I don't run into any issues either. It's fast, it's snappy, it runs everything I want it to and supports my devices, and I have no issues outputting whatever I want to my LCD TV and stereo. No complaints here.
My mom just bought a new Inspiron 1512 (I think that's the model), and it runs Vista perfectly fine as well with 1GB of RAM. It didn't come with too much vendor-installed crap, but I removed what was there (goodbye, Norton!). Overall, I enjoyed setting up her laptop, there was nothing to gripe about, it was fast.
My brother's girlfriend's sister has an Acer laptop, 1GB of RAM, and it ran Vista like crap. Acer had installed the absolute motherlode of vendor applications, which conspired to bog the system down heavily. Unlike my mom's laptop which just uses Vista's interface for things like networking, this laptop had a custom interface for EVERYTHING. It took me about 5 hours to get all of the junk uninstalled from it, after which, it ran well.
It has a lot to do with what the vendor installs, and the quality of the hardware, whether vendor or home-built.
When it's a small company complaining, you won't hear of it. That's the problem.
Oh my god, it's already begun!
It's only 1:44 on my clock!
Wow, I'd never heard of Paint.Net. This is a great little tool. Thanks!
Seconded.
Retro did an absolutely amazing job using the Wiimote in Metroid Prime 3. The smoothness, the reaction time, it was absolutely perfect. I was dreading it for a while after seeing what it was like playing Red Steel, but it was nothing like that. Some of the most fun gaming I've had in a long time.
Firefox has never really done much for me. I can't really say why. Some of it is the loading time when you launch it, some of it is how the layout gets under my skin. I've had a few bad experiences with it in the past, too. I just never took to it.
:P
However, I did decide to try Opera 9.23. I hadn't tried Opera in quite some time. I have to say, I'm pleasantly surprised, and really happy with the way Opera works. So, yeah, I guess I'm one of those weirdo Opera users now.
(No real point to the post, I'm just really digging Opera.)
As a disclaimer, here, I am not a web developer. Sometimes I have to do web development because of a project, and I can get done what I need to, but I don't enjoy it or even remotely like it. I spent most of my time doing desktop application and database development, which is where I like to be. :) I have a lot of respect for the serious web developers, compatibility and such can be a nightmare to work with in that field.
:)
Sorry if any of this is inaccurate; let's just call it a perspective from a little bit further out.
In the beginning, we had plain standard HTML and the HTTP protocol, and it was good. That really wasn't even the true beginning, but lets start there. Gradually, everyone began to see the need to do more than just displaying pictures and text; we wanted animation, we wanted applications, we wanted interactivity. All of these are good things, in my opinion. The problem is, along the way, no clear standard really emerged on how to do these things; we got many technologies built on top of what we already had, which really wasn't particularly suitable.
Like some other internet protocols (I'm looking at you, SMTP), they were designed in the infancy of the internet, long before anyone knew what it would become, and that has exposed some security issues. The "needs" of the internet have changed, but the base of what makes the internet from a user standpoint has not. I know it will never happen due to the red tape and the amount of market force needed, but it seems like what we really need is a version 2.0 of the mid-range protocols that make up the internet, designed by an open group, with security and modern needs in mind.
It's all too much of an idealist standpoint to take hold, and trying to get everyone to switch would be extremely difficult, but one can always dream.
Please. You've got to be joking. Wow. I guess I just imagined all of those other articles. I guess there's never articles about biology, or physics, or genetics.
My affliction must have become REALLY bad, because now I'm seeing sections titled politics and science!
I'll grant you many of the articles do pertain to computers, but there are plenty that do not.