I'm currently using VirtuaWin. It works ok, but again not as good as in Linux. I think I remember using virtual dimension when I first started looking for multiple desktops on Windows. Have you tried VirtuaWin? Is there anything that is provided by virtual dimension that would make the experience better?
I'm running my SageTV setup off a 60 GB partition. THat provides me with more than enough space. Just convert to MPEG 4 after you're done watching the show. You lose a bit of quality, but I'm recording from analog cable, so there isn't much quality to begin with. With 900 GB, I could probably keep all the TV I watch for a year. With MPEG4, I can get a 1 hour show into about 500 MB. So 900 GB would be 1800 hours of TV. That's 75 days worth of 24 hour TV, or about 5 hours a day.
This is my view point. We could fill up that much space. But how many people could actually find a good use for that much space? I record a lot of stuff on SageTV, and I only have a 160 GB drive. That's on my main computer. I could probably use a bigger drive, but I find that I have enough space to tape a weeks worth of shows easy. If I start taping more stuff than I have space for, than I never get around to watching it anyway. Most of the time when it gets close to full, is because I've taped a bunch of movies, which I intend to burn to DVD. I've burnt a lot of movies to DVD that I haven't ended up watching yet. Sure it's possible to fill up such a large drive, but when would a person find the time to actually watch or listen to all that media.
So if someone lets a domain expire, and then you buy it (or register it, you never really buy a domain), and then try to sell it back to them, then you are a domain hijacker? I'd call it being a smart business man. It's not like you stole the domain from them by pretending to be them. They had plenty of time to renew the domain. If they don't renew it, they have shown that they aren't that interested in keeping it. If someone, even a past owner offers to buy your domain, what's wrong with asking a fair price? Or even an overly inflated price. Isn't it just using the free market to your advantage.
What I really want on Windows is native multiple desktops. I've tried a couple of the bolted on solutions, and they get the job done, but seem to work quite slowly, and not be quite as good as multiple desktops on Linux, and Unix. This is a really old feature, and I can't for the life of me figure out why they haven't gotten around to adding this feature to windows yet. I'm not sure how much functionality adding KDE4 to windows will add. I haven't seen it yet, but if it works anywhere close to as good as it works on windows then I'll be switching to it instantly. On the other hand, if it feels like any of the other kludgy explorer/shell replacements i've seen on windows, it will be be a total flop.
How about a standard monitor with one camera on each side of the screen, at about eye level. Then from the image taken from both cameras, some computer algorithm figures out what it would look like from the middle of the monitor, where the camera would ideally be situated. As a plus, the two cameras allows for 3D images to be generated. I don't even know if you'd need 2 monitors for this. Just use the camera on the top of the monitor as they are now, and calculate the projection to the middle of the screen.
I agree with you here. Real snow tires are the most important thing. All season radials are just a joke. Anybody who has tried real winter tires knows just how much better they are. If anything should be mandated to increase driver safety, having proper snow tires should be one of them.
In Canada, children require car seats until they are 8 (booster seat), so it's quite common that if you have 3 kids, that they will all be in some form of child seat at the same time.
I'm not sure where you live, but to me, it doesn't seem like it rains more than 1/5 of the time. So it could be completely unrelated. There actually could be a higher rate of accidents while it's raining, because it doesn't rain every day, at least not unless you live in the tropics. And even there, it only rains a couple hours, not all day long.
You could still have a big steal bumper that absorbs energy from a collision. It just depends on how you attach it to the car. If there was a solid bumper, mounted with big thick springs, it could probably absorb quite a bit of a crash, while at the same time not completely shattering when you bumped into something at 5 mph.
I agree with you. It's not that hard to learn how to parallel park. With a good teacher, and proper instruction, you can learn it in about 10 minutes. I find it quite scary that there are people on the road who don't have enough control over the car to parallel park. If you can't control where the car is going at a low speed, what happens when something unexpected happens on the highway.
Actually, if you've used vista, you'd see that when you click the start button, there's a tiny power icon that makes it hibernate. If you want to shut it down, what you actually have to do, is click on the even smaller arrow icon beside that, and select shut down. I haven't played around with this a lot, but I haven't seen any options to change what that "power" button does. What was wrong with old system? Where shut down was a full menu item, and when you clicked it, it brought up the options you had.
The system alerts annoy me to no end. Moving a shortcut in the start menu, to another folder in the start menu shows 3 dialogs so that you can OK it. Seriously? It's terrible. I should be able to re-organize my start menu without going through a million dialogs.
That's the thing. Intel has really good drivers. I have a cheap laptop, and it flies with the 3D desktop. I have a Desktop with a more powerful ATI card, and a faster processor, and no matter which drivers I install, the 3D performance seems to be sub-par. NVidia drivers on Linux are better from what I hear, but they probably still aren't offloading as much as they should be.
Eye candy doesn't have to eat up processor time. I running a laptop with Intel GMA and a Celeron 1.6. It has Mandriva installed with the 3D desktop. It flies. I haven't noticed any slow downs, and at times actually seems smoother than the old 2D desktops. Vista is just programmed extremely terribly. There's no reason you should need a powerful computer to run a 3D desktop. It's no more complicated than the games that were release 8 years ago. Look at Quake 3, Descent 3, and others. Does Vista look any more complicated than that? No, and it shouldn't take more of a computer to run than what those programs ran on.
I agree. I bought a $CDN 450 laptop a couple months ago. Loaded Mandriva on it and it runs very snappy. When I'm running under a regular load it consumes about 20 watts. That's for a 1.6 GHz P IV Celeron, with an Intel 950 GMA. Much more useful than what you get with this fit PC. Plus you can bring a laptop with you, and use it at the coffee shop and such. I don't imagine you can do the same with this one.
Sounds like something that the Canadian government would embrace. There's rules for government websites that the url must be bilingual, so the directory path and file names must be mirrored to create the same structure in both French and English. The loophole in the rules is that you don't have to provide multiple directories and folders where the name isn't linguistic, such as calling your file 1243.html, or ESADOFE.html. So you can either mirror your directory structure in French and English, or have a completely incomprehensible gibberish based directory structure.
How much space do these samples take up? It it too much to be loaded into memory? Seems to me that if you're re-reading the sample every time you need it, then there's something wrong with the way the program accesses the samples.
Well, from what I know, the write speeds are abysmal, but the read speeds are actually quite fast, especially when you're accessing lots of little files, because you cut down on seek times. So a flash drive would be optimal for putting static data like the OS, and Programs, which change very rarely, and contain lots of little files that need to be read very quickly. Your computer would boot a lot faster, and programs would start much quicker. I don't think these would operate well as a swap partition, but then again, the best solution to swap is just buy more RAM, so you don't have to use it.
The OS has no power to decide which sectors are written to. The drive contains it's own map of the sectors, and does the write-leveling itself. The OS may think it's writing to sector X, but it's really only a logical sector. It could actually be writing to sector A,B, or C. At least that's how I understand it. Of course this only makes sense with solid state drives, because they don't have variable seek times depending on which sector you put the data at.
So if a player is using a controller where the analog thumbstick is mapped to the main axes and the D-pad is mapped to the point-of-view hat, should I force the player to use the analog thumbstick to navigate the menus?
Simple. I have never seen a menu system where you needed more than 2 axes, and if anybody designed such a menu system, they should be shot. So allow the user to control the menu system with any set of axes. If they want to use the rudder and throttle to move through the menus, then let them, it's not going to hurt anything.
what can player 1 do while player 2 is piddling around on the controller mapping screen?
Well, the Wii allows things to be save inside the controller. So if you go to a friends house to play a game, you can bring your wiimote, and your saved controller configuration with you. Also, you only need to mess around with the controls the first time, after that it's saved, so no more messing around. If it's your first time playing the game, and you're just at a party or something then just use the default controls. But for a game that you are going to be playing day after day for weeks, it makes sense that you should be able to modify the controls.
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I'm currently using VirtuaWin. It works ok, but again not as good as in Linux. I think I remember using virtual dimension when I first started looking for multiple desktops on Windows. Have you tried VirtuaWin? Is there anything that is provided by virtual dimension that would make the experience better?
I'm running my SageTV setup off a 60 GB partition. THat provides me with more than enough space. Just convert to MPEG 4 after you're done watching the show. You lose a bit of quality, but I'm recording from analog cable, so there isn't much quality to begin with. With 900 GB, I could probably keep all the TV I watch for a year. With MPEG4, I can get a 1 hour show into about 500 MB. So 900 GB would be 1800 hours of TV. That's 75 days worth of 24 hour TV, or about 5 hours a day.
This is my view point. We could fill up that much space. But how many people could actually find a good use for that much space? I record a lot of stuff on SageTV, and I only have a 160 GB drive. That's on my main computer. I could probably use a bigger drive, but I find that I have enough space to tape a weeks worth of shows easy. If I start taping more stuff than I have space for, than I never get around to watching it anyway. Most of the time when it gets close to full, is because I've taped a bunch of movies, which I intend to burn to DVD. I've burnt a lot of movies to DVD that I haven't ended up watching yet. Sure it's possible to fill up such a large drive, but when would a person find the time to actually watch or listen to all that media.
So if someone lets a domain expire, and then you buy it (or register it, you never really buy a domain), and then try to sell it back to them, then you are a domain hijacker? I'd call it being a smart business man. It's not like you stole the domain from them by pretending to be them. They had plenty of time to renew the domain. If they don't renew it, they have shown that they aren't that interested in keeping it. If someone, even a past owner offers to buy your domain, what's wrong with asking a fair price? Or even an overly inflated price. Isn't it just using the free market to your advantage.
What I really want on Windows is native multiple desktops. I've tried a couple of the bolted on solutions, and they get the job done, but seem to work quite slowly, and not be quite as good as multiple desktops on Linux, and Unix. This is a really old feature, and I can't for the life of me figure out why they haven't gotten around to adding this feature to windows yet. I'm not sure how much functionality adding KDE4 to windows will add. I haven't seen it yet, but if it works anywhere close to as good as it works on windows then I'll be switching to it instantly. On the other hand, if it feels like any of the other kludgy explorer/shell replacements i've seen on windows, it will be be a total flop.
How about a standard monitor with one camera on each side of the screen, at about eye level. Then from the image taken from both cameras, some computer algorithm figures out what it would look like from the middle of the monitor, where the camera would ideally be situated. As a plus, the two cameras allows for 3D images to be generated. I don't even know if you'd need 2 monitors for this. Just use the camera on the top of the monitor as they are now, and calculate the projection to the middle of the screen.
Yes, same number of button clicks, but the targets are smaller.
It's like saying, "Oh noes" you can create your own character models in Quake, and make it look like whatever you want, including naked people.
I agree with you here. Real snow tires are the most important thing. All season radials are just a joke. Anybody who has tried real winter tires knows just how much better they are. If anything should be mandated to increase driver safety, having proper snow tires should be one of them.
Wait.... I'm confused... are you telling me to buy a Honda Civic?
In Canada, children require car seats until they are 8 (booster seat), so it's quite common that if you have 3 kids, that they will all be in some form of child seat at the same time.
I'm not sure where you live, but to me, it doesn't seem like it rains more than 1/5 of the time. So it could be completely unrelated. There actually could be a higher rate of accidents while it's raining, because it doesn't rain every day, at least not unless you live in the tropics. And even there, it only rains a couple hours, not all day long.
You could still have a big steal bumper that absorbs energy from a collision. It just depends on how you attach it to the car. If there was a solid bumper, mounted with big thick springs, it could probably absorb quite a bit of a crash, while at the same time not completely shattering when you bumped into something at 5 mph.
I agree with you. It's not that hard to learn how to parallel park. With a good teacher, and proper instruction, you can learn it in about 10 minutes. I find it quite scary that there are people on the road who don't have enough control over the car to parallel park. If you can't control where the car is going at a low speed, what happens when something unexpected happens on the highway.
Actually, if you've used vista, you'd see that when you click the start button, there's a tiny power icon that makes it hibernate. If you want to shut it down, what you actually have to do, is click on the even smaller arrow icon beside that, and select shut down. I haven't played around with this a lot, but I haven't seen any options to change what that "power" button does. What was wrong with old system? Where shut down was a full menu item, and when you clicked it, it brought up the options you had.
The system alerts annoy me to no end. Moving a shortcut in the start menu, to another folder in the start menu shows 3 dialogs so that you can OK it. Seriously? It's terrible. I should be able to re-organize my start menu without going through a million dialogs.
That's the thing. Intel has really good drivers. I have a cheap laptop, and it flies with the 3D desktop. I have a Desktop with a more powerful ATI card, and a faster processor, and no matter which drivers I install, the 3D performance seems to be sub-par. NVidia drivers on Linux are better from what I hear, but they probably still aren't offloading as much as they should be.
Eye candy doesn't have to eat up processor time. I running a laptop with Intel GMA and a Celeron 1.6. It has Mandriva installed with the 3D desktop. It flies. I haven't noticed any slow downs, and at times actually seems smoother than the old 2D desktops. Vista is just programmed extremely terribly. There's no reason you should need a powerful computer to run a 3D desktop. It's no more complicated than the games that were release 8 years ago. Look at Quake 3, Descent 3, and others. Does Vista look any more complicated than that? No, and it shouldn't take more of a computer to run than what those programs ran on.
I agree. I bought a $CDN 450 laptop a couple months ago. Loaded Mandriva on it and it runs very snappy. When I'm running under a regular load it consumes about 20 watts. That's for a 1.6 GHz P IV Celeron, with an Intel 950 GMA. Much more useful than what you get with this fit PC. Plus you can bring a laptop with you, and use it at the coffee shop and such. I don't imagine you can do the same with this one.
Sounds like something that the Canadian government would embrace. There's rules for government websites that the url must be bilingual, so the directory path and file names must be mirrored to create the same structure in both French and English. The loophole in the rules is that you don't have to provide multiple directories and folders where the name isn't linguistic, such as calling your file 1243.html, or ESADOFE.html. So you can either mirror your directory structure in French and English, or have a completely incomprehensible gibberish based directory structure.
How much space do these samples take up? It it too much to be loaded into memory? Seems to me that if you're re-reading the sample every time you need it, then there's something wrong with the way the program accesses the samples.
Well, from what I know, the write speeds are abysmal, but the read speeds are actually quite fast, especially when you're accessing lots of little files, because you cut down on seek times. So a flash drive would be optimal for putting static data like the OS, and Programs, which change very rarely, and contain lots of little files that need to be read very quickly. Your computer would boot a lot faster, and programs would start much quicker. I don't think these would operate well as a swap partition, but then again, the best solution to swap is just buy more RAM, so you don't have to use it.
The OS has no power to decide which sectors are written to. The drive contains it's own map of the sectors, and does the write-leveling itself. The OS may think it's writing to sector X, but it's really only a logical sector. It could actually be writing to sector A,B, or C. At least that's how I understand it. Of course this only makes sense with solid state drives, because they don't have variable seek times depending on which sector you put the data at.