In a way, this could be a really good thing for Wii that EA missed the boat to a degree. Without the EA juggernaut from day 1, it may have left enough room for younger, more innovative companies to get a solid foot in the door. That little moment of bad judgment may well reverberate through the lifespan of the console, and I can't say I expect it to be in a bad way.
Currently, you can't play video games in a VM. At least not real ones like BF2, WoW, or anything modern.
I should've been more clear, but what I meant is, I have my doubts as to whether Terminal Velocity or Duke Nukem II or all the other classic games I have will be useful for much longer as newer OS's keep coming out. I've already had a few casualties with WinXP. As for more modern games, I don't see why MS can't overcome the emulation vs virtualization issue. They've surely got the manpower and the brainpower. My main question, though, isn't whether they could, it's why they don't.
That just gave me an interesting idea: Why doesn't MS ship fully functional versions of previous OS's, wrapped in a VM, with newer versions? What would they lose? I know I'd be far less worried about upgrading to Vista if I knew I could load up a built-in VM of DOS 6.0 or Win98SE or WinXP and play all my favorite shareware games from the '90s as easily as the latest-and-greatest. Same goes for here at work...it would be nice to know that some of our older software could just be loaded in a VM until the vendors catch up with Vista. As long as they maintain security on the sandbox itself, they wouldn't need to worry overmuch about keeping the old OS up to date, and it's not like people would be buying Vista just to exclusively use it to run XP, but it would make for a much more obvious upgrade path than the current hard cutoff in backwards compatibility.
I thought Fidel had already died, and they were using a double? Has that been proven not to be the case now? TBH I haven't really heard anything about him or thought about it one way or another for quite a few weeks now, but now I'm curious...
Plus, to most hackers, crippling Microsoft is the geek equivalent of taking down the Death Star,
Really? I'd think it's more like kicking an evil, rabid puppy. I mean, sure, it is an evil little bastard and probably deserves to be kicked...but it's still kicking a puppy, and it's still not something to be especially proud of.
I dunno. My problem with the DDS is that it doesn't put related books together. I realize that unless the library has several copies of every book this isn't feasible, but their computer replacement for the card catalog should be able to handle it. I think what I'd really, really like to see that I haven't yet in a library is something like Amazon's recommendation engine, because a lot of the time books that are related are put in totally different parts of the library. If you're writing a paper on, say, Geology, and you just go to that section of a DDS library, you're probably going to end up writing a bland paper that cites 3 resources that all pretty much regurgitate the same thing in 3 slightly different ways. That's the sort of problem that technology can solve (and, in fact, already has solved, several times over) that I just don't see libraries embracing.
I don't think they're saying so much that librarians need to play Halo 2 to do their job better, just that they need to play around with their computers; go to yahoo games, browse digg or reddit, check out the craigslist 'best of', brush up on your mahjong, find out what this 'flickr' thing is all about - essentially, spend some time on the computer and not getting any work done. I can certainly agree that while libraries may have embraced technology, it seems like they've taken the building blocks home and built something entirely theirs. No computer network replacement for card catalogs that I have ever used was what I would call intuitive compared to any modern website / 'web app', and there's really no excuse for that other than being completely oblivious to what everybody else is doing. Most of the time I'd really rather just use the old card catalog if it's available. If web startups can literally give away software left and right that can analyze the sound patterns or the ID3 info of the last mp3 I played and generate a pretty dang good list of other stuff I might like, surely the library can come up with a way to guide students to the right books better than the current system of either requiring you to know the exact author or title you want or trying to guess what keywords a librarian would have used when categorizing what I'm looking for (which are invariably different from the keywords any sane twenty-something would use to find the same thing on google or amazon, and usually require the exact spelling, e.g., archeology might get you results where archaeology won't, let alone archaeologist).
Fortunately, I'm young but I still know better. Any time I even think my wrist(s) might be getting vaguely kinda-sorta sore, I take it easy on the computer use for a few weeks, switch to mousing left-handed and / or using a trackball (actually easy except for games), change keyboard angle, etc. You don't need extreme solutions like a vertical mouse to keep healthy, you just need to pay attention to your body and take preventative measures as needed.
I hear ya. Low chair, leaned back, and my mouse sits more like 10:00, tho, and my comfortable finger placement is "a-w-e-f j-i-o-;". I also keep my keyboard far out in front of me, because it lets me rest nearly my entire forearm on the desk, and the mousepad is a little to the right, partway in front of the keyboard (it comes about as far in as the left side of the numpad), so my elbow sits on my chair's armrest and my hand is at the natural height and position it would sit at anyways when I use the mouse. It actually works quite well.
At home I actually have much better posture than at work, because I have a big gamer pad with a wrist rest, and you're not getting everything out of it if you're slouched back; it's designed for big arm movements instead of little wrist flicks. The biggest difference is that my work posture is keyboard-centric. I'm a keystroke addict even in windows, so I don't mouse much while I'm working. At home, my posture is mouse-centric, since my fingers basically sit on "shift-a-w-d" and don't move out of that general area, while my mouse hand is doing a lot of work.
My numero-uno (un)favourite Internet-era buzzword is 'web app'.
Look on the bright side: "Web Log" became "Blog", with the people who write "Blogs" called "Bloggers". It follows that "Web App" will become "Wapp". Here in not too long, web designers will be called "Wappers", and their job descriptions will be "Wapping off". This can only increase the ability of all people who work in IT or programming to ridicule web designers. This is a Good Thing.
I notice many people commenting on the high numbers of old cards. I'm personally not all that surprised. I play DoD:S a lot, and I recently upgraded from an X850 series to an x1950 series...and after about a half hour of playing, disabled nearly every whiz-bang graphics feature it offered that my old card didn't. The biggest issue was lighting...maps that were too bright, or that had poor placement / aiming of lights, resulting in bright spots fading down to dark spots, whereas on the old card lighting would be more uniform. It defeats the whole point of playing on an 'orange' map if you turn on HDR. While the new card does wonders for F.E.A.R. and allows me to now play Vanguard, I find myself disliking some of the effects it has on older games.
There are numerous scripts, programs, and even Firefox extensions that make extracting a YouTube or Google Video vid into a format you can save to and play from your desktop (flv, avi, mpg, flash,...) a cakewalk. From there it's as easy as extracting audio from any other file on your hard drive of one of those formats. 2 minutes flexing your Google-Fu should find you all you need to extract audio from YouTube or Google Video.
You can do a pretty harsh kill with 'delete' using WMIC, but I don't think it's available on XP Home. Realistically, though, most of the time if 'end process' doesn't work from Task Manager, you're just gonna take the system down by getting aggressive.
The two words I was least hoping to hear about the next version of Windows. I don't want to wait 5 - 8 more years for a new OS again. I had been hoping Vista would be like ME - quickly replaced and forgotten.
None thus far. March or April (I'm pretty sure it was March, but can't remember for sure) somehow screwballed our ESRI / ARCCad / GIS stuff. Another one from around that time killed Realtek High Definition Control Panel (onboard audio's little doodad in the taskbar) on some of our early '06 GigaByte boards, resulting in a lovely user-scaring error on every boot. Usually Windows Update doesn't screw anything up for us, but the last few...bleh. I guess we'll see.
Ditto. My roommate and I are both long-time Eve players. Recently he's been getting into Vanguard and wants me to try it. It looks great, but...oops...it requires vertex / pixel shader 2.0. From my perspective of having a pretty nice video card that handles all my other games (including Oblivion and F.E.A.R.) on high settings without issue, that's a load of crap. And it's $50, even if you buy it online and download it, no physical media involved. So essentially, this is a $200+ game just to try, plus monthly subscription. Give me a fucking break and take a lesson from CCP...the client should be a free download, and the game should be functional on hardware that is still considered pretty damn nice.
Bad idea. It creates bad feelings, and also, it hurts them in terms of getting a budget together for (a) new position(s). Schools can't generally shift funding around at the last minute for things as significantly expensive as a full-time sysadmin + possible extra support staff.
Slashdot Mirror
In a way, this could be a really good thing for Wii that EA missed the boat to a degree. Without the EA juggernaut from day 1, it may have left enough room for younger, more innovative companies to get a solid foot in the door. That little moment of bad judgment may well reverberate through the lifespan of the console, and I can't say I expect it to be in a bad way.
(...oh, and...first?)
Currently, you can't play video games in a VM. At least not real ones like BF2, WoW, or anything modern.
I should've been more clear, but what I meant is, I have my doubts as to whether Terminal Velocity or Duke Nukem II or all the other classic games I have will be useful for much longer as newer OS's keep coming out. I've already had a few casualties with WinXP. As for more modern games, I don't see why MS can't overcome the emulation vs virtualization issue. They've surely got the manpower and the brainpower. My main question, though, isn't whether they could, it's why they don't.
with backwards compatibility provided by VMs
That just gave me an interesting idea: Why doesn't MS ship fully functional versions of previous OS's, wrapped in a VM, with newer versions? What would they lose? I know I'd be far less worried about upgrading to Vista if I knew I could load up a built-in VM of DOS 6.0 or Win98SE or WinXP and play all my favorite shareware games from the '90s as easily as the latest-and-greatest. Same goes for here at work...it would be nice to know that some of our older software could just be loaded in a VM until the vendors catch up with Vista. As long as they maintain security on the sandbox itself, they wouldn't need to worry overmuch about keeping the old OS up to date, and it's not like people would be buying Vista just to exclusively use it to run XP, but it would make for a much more obvious upgrade path than the current hard cutoff in backwards compatibility.
Ah, didn't see. Mods to you, if anybody has 'em. :-/
The link on 'A Gnu Dawn' points to xkdc.com; I'm going to take a not-so-wild guess here and say it was supposed to be the geeky comic xkcd.
I thought Fidel had already died, and they were using a double? Has that been proven not to be the case now? TBH I haven't really heard anything about him or thought about it one way or another for quite a few weeks now, but now I'm curious...
I dunno. My problem with the DDS is that it doesn't put related books together. I realize that unless the library has several copies of every book this isn't feasible, but their computer replacement for the card catalog should be able to handle it. I think what I'd really, really like to see that I haven't yet in a library is something like Amazon's recommendation engine, because a lot of the time books that are related are put in totally different parts of the library. If you're writing a paper on, say, Geology, and you just go to that section of a DDS library, you're probably going to end up writing a bland paper that cites 3 resources that all pretty much regurgitate the same thing in 3 slightly different ways. That's the sort of problem that technology can solve (and, in fact, already has solved, several times over) that I just don't see libraries embracing.
I don't think they're saying so much that librarians need to play Halo 2 to do their job better, just that they need to play around with their computers; go to yahoo games, browse digg or reddit, check out the craigslist 'best of', brush up on your mahjong, find out what this 'flickr' thing is all about - essentially, spend some time on the computer and not getting any work done. I can certainly agree that while libraries may have embraced technology, it seems like they've taken the building blocks home and built something entirely theirs. No computer network replacement for card catalogs that I have ever used was what I would call intuitive compared to any modern website / 'web app', and there's really no excuse for that other than being completely oblivious to what everybody else is doing. Most of the time I'd really rather just use the old card catalog if it's available.
If web startups can literally give away software left and right that can analyze the sound patterns or the ID3 info of the last mp3 I played and generate a pretty dang good list of other stuff I might like, surely the library can come up with a way to guide students to the right books better than the current system of either requiring you to know the exact author or title you want or trying to guess what keywords a librarian would have used when categorizing what I'm looking for (which are invariably different from the keywords any sane twenty-something would use to find the same thing on google or amazon, and usually require the exact spelling, e.g., archeology might get you results where archaeology won't, let alone archaeologist).
Fortunately, I'm young but I still know better. Any time I even think my wrist(s) might be getting vaguely kinda-sorta sore, I take it easy on the computer use for a few weeks, switch to mousing left-handed and / or using a trackball (actually easy except for games), change keyboard angle, etc. You don't need extreme solutions like a vertical mouse to keep healthy, you just need to pay attention to your body and take preventative measures as needed.
I hear ya. Low chair, leaned back, and my mouse sits more like 10:00, tho, and my comfortable finger placement is "a-w-e-f j-i-o-;". I also keep my keyboard far out in front of me, because it lets me rest nearly my entire forearm on the desk, and the mousepad is a little to the right, partway in front of the keyboard (it comes about as far in as the left side of the numpad), so my elbow sits on my chair's armrest and my hand is at the natural height and position it would sit at anyways when I use the mouse. It actually works quite well.
At home I actually have much better posture than at work, because I have a big gamer pad with a wrist rest, and you're not getting everything out of it if you're slouched back; it's designed for big arm movements instead of little wrist flicks. The biggest difference is that my work posture is keyboard-centric. I'm a keystroke addict even in windows, so I don't mouse much while I'm working. At home, my posture is mouse-centric, since my fingers basically sit on "shift-a-w-d" and don't move out of that general area, while my mouse hand is doing a lot of work.
Also...Like...Damn.
My numero-uno (un)favourite Internet-era buzzword is 'web app'.
Look on the bright side: "Web Log" became "Blog", with the people who write "Blogs" called "Bloggers". It follows that "Web App" will become "Wapp". Here in not too long, web designers will be called "Wappers", and their job descriptions will be "Wapping off".
This can only increase the ability of all people who work in IT or programming to ridicule web designers. This is a Good Thing.
I notice many people commenting on the high numbers of old cards. I'm personally not all that surprised. I play DoD:S a lot, and I recently upgraded from an X850 series to an x1950 series...and after about a half hour of playing, disabled nearly every whiz-bang graphics feature it offered that my old card didn't. The biggest issue was lighting...maps that were too bright, or that had poor placement / aiming of lights, resulting in bright spots fading down to dark spots, whereas on the old card lighting would be more uniform. It defeats the whole point of playing on an 'orange' map if you turn on HDR. While the new card does wonders for F.E.A.R. and allows me to now play Vanguard, I find myself disliking some of the effects it has on older games.
F.E.A.R.
There are numerous scripts, programs, and even Firefox extensions that make extracting a YouTube or Google Video vid into a format you can save to and play from your desktop (flv, avi, mpg, flash, ...) a cakewalk. From there it's as easy as extracting audio from any other file on your hard drive of one of those formats. 2 minutes flexing your Google-Fu should find you all you need to extract audio from YouTube or Google Video.
You can do a pretty harsh kill with 'delete' using WMIC, but I don't think it's available on XP Home. Realistically, though, most of the time if 'end process' doesn't work from Task Manager, you're just gonna take the system down by getting aggressive.
The two words I was least hoping to hear about the next version of Windows. I don't want to wait 5 - 8 more years for a new OS again. I had been hoping Vista would be like ME - quickly replaced and forgotten.
None thus far. March or April (I'm pretty sure it was March, but can't remember for sure) somehow screwballed our ESRI / ARCCad / GIS stuff. Another one from around that time killed Realtek High Definition Control Panel (onboard audio's little doodad in the taskbar) on some of our early '06 GigaByte boards, resulting in a lovely user-scaring error on every boot. Usually Windows Update doesn't screw anything up for us, but the last few...bleh. I guess we'll see.
Unless you use Winamp and have the 'Restore file associations at Winamp startup' option enabled...in yo' face, MS!
Ditto. My roommate and I are both long-time Eve players. Recently he's been getting into Vanguard and wants me to try it. It looks great, but...oops...it requires vertex / pixel shader 2.0. From my perspective of having a pretty nice video card that handles all my other games (including Oblivion and F.E.A.R.) on high settings without issue, that's a load of crap. And it's $50, even if you buy it online and download it, no physical media involved . So essentially, this is a $200+ game just to try, plus monthly subscription. Give me a fucking break and take a lesson from CCP...the client should be a free download, and the game should be functional on hardware that is still considered pretty damn nice.
Bad idea. It creates bad feelings, and also, it hurts them in terms of getting a budget together for (a) new position(s). Schools can't generally shift funding around at the last minute for things as significantly expensive as a full-time sysadmin + possible extra support staff.
Or a Counter Strike fan.
Writing something disturbing is enough to cost you your right to own a gun? Wow...I sure hope Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino aren't avid hunters.