are Mr. Donald Duck's nephews. I'm only posting that because I hadn't known until recently (being non-English and all). And everyone knows knowledge is power. Yay.
Seriously now, can Ubuntu's installer create a boot floppy? Previous PC I tried Ubuntu on was "GRUB Error #whatever"-ish afterwards with, apparently, a damaged partition table, and my pathetic fixboot/fixmbr attempts (XP recovery console) probably messed it up completely. Yes, it was old and falling apart; I'm not blaming anyone.
Okay... Specifically, Certificate of Authenticity (COA) labels on PCs are often unused because OEMs preinstall Windows and bypass product activation. - I take that to mean it won't affect me? After all, the COA was used. They are unique, right? Agh. Never mind....
Hm. If you don't mind a question... do you think this would/could affect me? All this talk of "preinstalled" and "preactivated" confuses me somewhat. The PC in question is brand-less and OS-less, assembled at tiny computer store. The XP now on it is a rather recent OEM version (SP2), bought a month ago or two at the same store, but installed and activated over the internet, at home, by me. Used the product key on the sticker.
Actually, I somewhat prefer the XP GUI, although I invariably deactivate much of the eye-candy, along with the file-extension- and keyboard-shortcut-hiding, the "common tasks" nonsense, the search puppy,...alright, so almost all of it is pointless and annoying. It's skinnable, though - you just need to apply a little patch before you can use third-party *.msstyles (no shareware required). Since I hate the blocky "classic" look at least as much as the waterwingness of "Luna", that's a good thing. I also really like those file-browsing-capable toolbars in addition to the usual "quick launch" type ones - are they available on 2K? (Example screenshot)
As for not so superficial differences --
Fast user switching. (Not particularly necessary, but can be useful.)
Remote desktop. (Available on 2K? I guess one might as well use VNC or something?)
Somewhat better MS-DOS app support? (Not sure, again. Can't say I'd miss it much anyway.)
Built-in firewall. (Which I never use.)
Clear Type.
Better out-of-the-box hardware support (Presumably.)
(I'm sure there's more.)
Not sure though whether any of this really constitutes a "reason". I've not used 2K at home so I'm not sure what it's like with all the latest service packs installed. I guess right now I'd choose 2K over XP myself if I had to make the choice.
The article makes it look a little like.de search engines were controlling themselves so the government and/or EU won't think they have to.
It will be interesting to see whether the "Google.com in English" link will disappear, or whether google.com/ncr, google.com/webhp, or requesting the search results page straight from the address bar will start redirecting to google.de (the google.com homepage does, though I strongly doubt that's more than plain "user-friendliness" at work there.)
Depending on line breaks I get either Die Zeit vergeht wie im Flug. Fruchtfliegen wie eine Banane. or Zeit fliegt wie Fliegen einer Pfeilfrucht wie eine Banane.
Both are obviously nonsense. What did you get? And how could it possibly preserve the joke/pun?
You're welcome, and thanks for not making me feel like an idiot for using Windows;). How did I find this "trick"? I'm not a guru at all, just poking around. "netsh.exe? Net Shell? What's that for?" - "Let's try mounting this volume inside the shared docs folder!" - "There's got to be a way to run explorer as admin without killing the process first." - "Wonder if I can get KDE to run!" - just like that. Doesn't mean I know what I'm doing. (And KDE stopped at the splash screen.)
I'm sure it's all mentioned in Windows' "Help and Support" somewhere (there's a cmd.exe reference and an explanation of the ACL stuff - at least in XP Pro, the Home Edition may not have all the same features). And then there're websites like Kelly's Korner. Yes, the built-in "Help and Support" is the closest I've seen to a manual; not sure there're any inside the retail boxes or for the "server" editions. The flimsy brochure that comes with the XP OEM discs is more like an introduction to the new GUI elements.
I share your impression... "not running as admin" doesn't appear to be part of the Microsoft Way except to keep other people from messing up. (In fact it's recommended to make them admins too in case some Win9x/DOS/misbehaving app doesn't run properly. No other workarounds are mentioned -- at least not where I looked.) I guess they wanted to make it look user-friendly above all. After all they didn't really bother newbz with the firewall either until SP2.
Is there anyway to get access to elevated privs in Windows without quiting your current work session?
Usually I use a "runas/user:administrator cmd.exe".cmd script for an admin command prompt and then start the control panels or management console snap-ins I need from there (they're the *.MSC and *.CPL files in %SYSTEMROOTt%\system32, Windows Update is wupdmgr.exe). You may want to add.CPL to the PATHEXT variable. Explorer can be runas-ed as well, but must first be set to run separate processes (checkbox somewhere under "folder options: view"). "Run as..." is also available from the context menu.
Does anyone actually "5p33|<" |_!|<3 7|-|15? I'm beginning to wonder whether it's not just a myth. "ur gay", yes, but "/\/\" for "M"? In realtime? Outside of ASCII art? Must be terribly inconvenient. No wonder they need to abbreviate two-letter-words! Anyway, I've never seen this extreme form of leetspeak in the wild, except when it's being made fun of. Then again, I don't play "those" games (much) and have no warez d00d acquaintances either. And as a retired author of embarrassing scrolltexts I've always made sure I...oh, never mind. I never actually bothered making fonts with underscores or angle brackets. Or "@" signs. (What are those good for anyway, other than overwriting files on Commodores?)
And not a word about "top posting/full quotes" on MS netiquette page.
So... mh. What these people claim is not that the machine itself sees into the future, but that it reacts to humans seeing into the future, right?
It (1) reacts to people trying to influence it, and (2) "goes nuts" prior to disasters that (2b) matter to the people around the "egg".
2b is the "glue" here. The machine doesn't know anything about the disasters at all; it just reacts to people anticipating that "something big is going to happen" even though they aren't aware of it. With its particular "sensorium" of cheap electronics, the machine picks up on it - it reacts to "folks feeling different".
Although I guess that's still way too vague to get excited about just yet.
(unlike TNG where enterprise just flew around the galaxy doing whatever and none of the episodes tied anything together)
That's why I actually ended up watching it, though. Sure, you had to figure out who's who and such, but episodes like Thine Own Self, The Inner Light or Emergence didn't require you to know much about Star Trek politics, alliances, factions, wars. They just used the ST universe as a vehicle for a couple quite original stories (by TV standards) that didn't have much of an effect on future episodes - which is unfortunate, yes, but OTOH I'm not sure the ST universe would have lasted long had every new week's weirdness followed the Enterprise around.
My impression was that whenever ST develops drawn-out story arcs they tend to focus on these more conventional, more 'adventure story'-like aspects of the Star Trek universe, aspects that kinda require you to already "care". And while I liked DS9, it wasn't thanks to the, hm, execution rather than the Bajor/Cardassia/Prophets and Dominion stuff.
Okay, I don't know how to get back on topic from here...
Already have. But think about it... do you hold books at arm's length (or more)? Probably not (unless you're as far-sighted as I'm not); yet screen fonts are often smaller. It's just not nice for longish texts -- IMHO, et cetera.
I don't really understand this preference for sans serif fonts. I use Georgia all the time, both to override other websites' fonts and for my own (except for headlines and menus). Is that bad? I find Georgia much, much more pleasant to read - it's not squashed together like Times New Roman nor is it as "barren" and uniform as many sans-serif typefaces (with I, l, 1 often looking quite alike).
Then again, my Mozilla's minimum font size is usually set to 16 or 18. If I'd let websites have their way, I'd end up with on-screen text that's even smaller than printed text. Then those "clean" sans-serif fonts might indeed work better thanks to greater clarity at microscopic sizes. Seems absurd to me, though - shouldn't the medium you're farther away from and that has the lower resolution use larger fonts? Ohwell.
Weird. For years I've run it from E:\WINXP, with only NTLDR, boot.ini etc. on C:\, and "My Documents" elsewhere still. Not to mention the differences between different language versions (nearly all recent installers know I don't have anything called "C:\Program Files".) I think all the DLL issues I had were due to multiple versions floating around (what with many apps coming with their own GNU tools or GTK DLLs), not due to hardcoded directories. Can't say I know how exactly this works, I'm just surprised going with a non-defaultish %windir% would cause problems.
Sometimes a video game dumps me into some wholly unwelcoming maze of bulkheads, military gear, random crates and big-mouthed cynical NPCs, and I wonder just wtf I'm supposed to "save" this for. Sure, it's just some straight action game, but would it be so bad if it had something to fight for?
Even Aliens (the movie) had that little girl and the heroic android. I'm not claiming protective instincts are particularly cerebral or that appealing to them is innovative, but - well, for me they made all the difference. The sheer visceral thrill isn't reason enough for grit.
Why not give me something to care about? It doesn't have to be cheesy, corny, clean or soap-y; there's not just "heartless black" and "brainless white".
At the same time, I do understand people get tired of the "ever helpful Federation". As much as I like it that ST is utopian and idealistic, something about it seems overly artificial, and not just because it obviously is artificial. Not just because they never say "fuck" or aren't "flawed" enough or because it's "politically correct" (really - if anything, there should be fewer white males in that future)... I dunno. They don't seem to have much in the way of, say, music, or dancing, or literature, or sex, or games. Just recreations of "classic" works from the past, and the odd dish or sport with "so-and-soian" or "hover-" prefixed. Similarly it's uncertain why exactly Earth is such a paradise now. I'd expect people to be truly...different from us if they were capable of sustaining such a society. Not just with "less bad stuff" but with more and new good stuff too, beyond all their useful blinkenlights tech.
Doesn't bother me that much though, I still prefer it to simply being shown how awful we as a species are (I'm already way too inclined to agree).
I bought one a few years ago*, mostly because of Archon. Although I prefer the Amiga version with its extra deadly Banshee, the 8-bit Atari one was the first I'd seen. Fascinating game, could see it built into a stylish coffee table or something like that.
Hm, screenshots don't seem too over-engineered. Compared to Wrath Unleashed at least...
(*still not sure what the four metal switches on the back do that some previous owner installed; no manuals and the disk drive's dead)
Hm, there's a Theremin in "Bob's Shadow" (cEvin Key's (excellent) solo album "The Ghost of Each Room"), played by one Frank Verschuuren. Though I've suspected it's the ethereal wailing that's responsible for much of the song's atmosphere, I've never been completely sure which of the instruments it actually is until listening to these Theremin samples. I'd love to play around with one myself...
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are Mr. Donald Duck's nephews. I'm only posting that because I hadn't known until recently (being non-English and all). And everyone knows knowledge is power. Yay.
'kay, that's what I thought. Thanks for the clarification(s).
Seriously now, can Ubuntu's installer create a boot floppy? Previous PC I tried Ubuntu on was "GRUB Error #whatever"-ish afterwards with, apparently, a damaged partition table, and my pathetic fixboot/fixmbr attempts (XP recovery console) probably messed it up completely. Yes, it was old and falling apart; I'm not blaming anyone.
Okay... Specifically, Certificate of Authenticity (COA) labels on PCs are often unused because OEMs preinstall Windows and bypass product activation. - I take that to mean it won't affect me? After all, the COA was used. They are unique, right? Agh. Never mind. ...
Hm. If you don't mind a question... do you think this would/could affect me? All this talk of "preinstalled" and "preactivated" confuses me somewhat. The PC in question is brand-less and OS-less, assembled at tiny computer store. The XP now on it is a rather recent OEM version (SP2), bought a month ago or two at the same store, but installed and activated over the internet, at home, by me. Used the product key on the sticker.
Heh, yah, it's funny - just not for the "correct" reasons ;)
Hm... what about nvidia? And what about using two graphics cards? Win 98 handled that just fine.
Actually, I somewhat prefer the XP GUI, although I invariably deactivate much of the eye-candy, along with the file-extension- and keyboard-shortcut-hiding, the "common tasks" nonsense, the search puppy, ...alright, so almost all of it is pointless and annoying. It's skinnable, though - you just need to apply a little patch before you can use third-party *.msstyles (no shareware required). Since I hate the blocky "classic" look at least as much as the waterwingness of "Luna", that's a good thing. I also really like those file-browsing-capable toolbars in addition to the usual "quick launch" type ones - are they available on 2K? (Example screenshot)
As for not so superficial differences --
Fast user switching. (Not particularly necessary, but can be useful.)
Remote desktop. (Available on 2K? I guess one might as well use VNC or something?)
Somewhat better MS-DOS app support? (Not sure, again. Can't say I'd miss it much anyway.)
Built-in firewall. (Which I never use.)
Clear Type.
Better out-of-the-box hardware support (Presumably.)
(I'm sure there's more.)
Not sure though whether any of this really constitutes a "reason". I've not used 2K at home so I'm not sure what it's like with all the latest service packs installed. I guess right now I'd choose 2K over XP myself if I had to make the choice.
The article makes it look a little like .de search engines were controlling themselves so the government and/or EU won't think they have to.
It will be interesting to see whether the "Google.com in English" link will disappear, or whether google.com/ncr, google.com/webhp, or requesting the search results page straight from the address bar will start redirecting to google.de (the google.com homepage does, though I strongly doubt that's more than plain "user-friendliness" at work there.)
??
Depending on line breaks I get either Die Zeit vergeht wie im Flug. Fruchtfliegen wie eine Banane. or Zeit fliegt wie Fliegen einer Pfeilfrucht wie eine Banane.
Both are obviously nonsense. What did you get? And how could it possibly preserve the joke/pun?
Well, intuition tells me this is just natural language, and therefore not subject to formal logic. So it must be true ;)
Try Foxit PDF Reader; I love it. Displays PDFs nearly instantly (though I don't know how fast Adobe's is on this machine as I've never installed it).
You're welcome, and thanks for not making me feel like an idiot for using Windows ;). How did I find this "trick"? I'm not a guru at all, just poking around. "netsh.exe? Net Shell? What's that for?" - "Let's try mounting this volume inside the shared docs folder!" - "There's got to be a way to run explorer as admin without killing the process first." - "Wonder if I can get KDE to run!" - just like that. Doesn't mean I know what I'm doing. (And KDE stopped at the splash screen.)
I'm sure it's all mentioned in Windows' "Help and Support" somewhere (there's a cmd.exe reference and an explanation of the ACL stuff - at least in XP Pro, the Home Edition may not have all the same features). And then there're websites like Kelly's Korner. Yes, the built-in "Help and Support" is the closest I've seen to a manual; not sure there're any inside the retail boxes or for the "server" editions. The flimsy brochure that comes with the XP OEM discs is more like an introduction to the new GUI elements.
I share your impression... "not running as admin" doesn't appear to be part of the Microsoft Way except to keep other people from messing up. (In fact it's recommended to make them admins too in case some Win9x/DOS/misbehaving app doesn't run properly. No other workarounds are mentioned -- at least not where I looked.) I guess they wanted to make it look user-friendly above all. After all they didn't really bother newbz with the firewall either until SP2.
Good luck with your friends' computers...
Usually I use a "runas /user:administrator cmd.exe" .cmd script for an admin command prompt and then start the control panels or management console snap-ins I need from there (they're the *.MSC and *.CPL files in %SYSTEMROOTt%\system32, Windows Update is wupdmgr.exe). You may want to add .CPL to the PATHEXT variable. Explorer can be runas-ed as well, but must first be set to run separate processes (checkbox somewhere under "folder options: view"). "Run as..." is also available from the context menu.
And not a word about "top posting/full quotes" on MS netiquette page.
It (1) reacts to people trying to influence it, and (2) "goes nuts" prior to disasters that (2b) matter to the people around the "egg".
2b is the "glue" here. The machine doesn't know anything about the disasters at all; it just reacts to people anticipating that "something big is going to happen" even though they aren't aware of it. With its particular "sensorium" of cheap electronics, the machine picks up on it - it reacts to "folks feeling different".
Although I guess that's still way too vague to get excited about just yet.
And while I liked DS9, it wasn't thanks to the [...] -- I meant "it was", not "wasn't". Eep.
That's why I actually ended up watching it, though. Sure, you had to figure out who's who and such, but episodes like Thine Own Self, The Inner Light or Emergence didn't require you to know much about Star Trek politics, alliances, factions, wars. They just used the ST universe as a vehicle for a couple quite original stories (by TV standards) that didn't have much of an effect on future episodes - which is unfortunate, yes, but OTOH I'm not sure the ST universe would have lasted long had every new week's weirdness followed the Enterprise around.
My impression was that whenever ST develops drawn-out story arcs they tend to focus on these more conventional, more 'adventure story'-like aspects of the Star Trek universe, aspects that kinda require you to already "care". And while I liked DS9, it wasn't thanks to the, hm, execution rather than the Bajor/Cardassia/Prophets and Dominion stuff.
Okay, I don't know how to get back on topic from here...
Okay, okay, it's all subjective.
Already have. But think about it... do you hold books at arm's length (or more)? Probably not (unless you're as far-sighted as I'm not); yet screen fonts are often smaller. It's just not nice for longish texts -- IMHO, et cetera.
Then again, my Mozilla's minimum font size is usually set to 16 or 18. If I'd let websites have their way, I'd end up with on-screen text that's even smaller than printed text. Then those "clean" sans-serif fonts might indeed work better thanks to greater clarity at microscopic sizes. Seems absurd to me, though - shouldn't the medium you're farther away from and that has the lower resolution use larger fonts? Ohwell.
Weird. For years I've run it from E:\WINXP, with only NTLDR, boot.ini etc. on C:\, and "My Documents" elsewhere still. Not to mention the differences between different language versions (nearly all recent installers know I don't have anything called "C:\Program Files".) I think all the DLL issues I had were due to multiple versions floating around (what with many apps coming with their own GNU tools or GTK DLLs), not due to hardcoded directories. Can't say I know how exactly this works, I'm just surprised going with a non-defaultish %windir% would cause problems.
I think I basically agree...
Sometimes a video game dumps me into some wholly unwelcoming maze of bulkheads, military gear, random crates and big-mouthed cynical NPCs, and I wonder just wtf I'm supposed to "save" this for. Sure, it's just some straight action game, but would it be so bad if it had something to fight for?
Even Aliens (the movie) had that little girl and the heroic android. I'm not claiming protective instincts are particularly cerebral or that appealing to them is innovative, but - well, for me they made all the difference. The sheer visceral thrill isn't reason enough for grit.
Why not give me something to care about? It doesn't have to be cheesy, corny, clean or soap-y; there's not just "heartless black" and "brainless white".
At the same time, I do understand people get tired of the "ever helpful Federation". As much as I like it that ST is utopian and idealistic, something about it seems overly artificial, and not just because it obviously is artificial. Not just because they never say "fuck" or aren't "flawed" enough or because it's "politically correct" (really - if anything, there should be fewer white males in that future)... I dunno. They don't seem to have much in the way of, say, music, or dancing, or literature, or sex, or games. Just recreations of "classic" works from the past, and the odd dish or sport with "so-and-soian" or "hover-" prefixed. Similarly it's uncertain why exactly Earth is such a paradise now. I'd expect people to be truly ...different from us if they were capable of sustaining such a society. Not just with "less bad stuff" but with more and new good stuff too, beyond all their useful blinkenlights tech.
Doesn't bother me that much though, I still prefer it to simply being shown how awful we as a species are (I'm already way too inclined to agree).
{lots of off-topic stuff deleted...}
Hm, screenshots don't seem too over-engineered. Compared to Wrath Unleashed at least...
(*still not sure what the four metal switches on the back do that some previous owner installed; no manuals and the disk drive's dead)
Hm, there's a Theremin in "Bob's Shadow" (cEvin Key's (excellent) solo album "The Ghost of Each Room"), played by one Frank Verschuuren. Though I've suspected it's the ethereal wailing that's responsible for much of the song's atmosphere, I've never been completely sure which of the instruments it actually is until listening to these Theremin samples. I'd love to play around with one myself...