I really don't think that a 1% market share can be counted as a rebirth. What did it get down to at the lowest point? 0.5%? I wonder how long 8 track tapes still sold after the compact cassette became popular.
The format must be helped by the DJs who still use records. Having such a high profile usage of the format must have kept it in the minds of the buying public in a greater way than records, cassettes, reel to reel tapes, 78s, cylinders, and pianola rolls ever had.
And there are some advantages to the format. With a proper pickup (not some cheap crap), the sound is wonderful. 16 bit audio was only ever a feeble approximation of original sound. Also, there is a physical sense to getting a record that CDs never quite had.
But more importantly to the crowd here, record covers were the pre-Internet soft porn for kids. There were some damn fine covers (NSFW) back in the day!
Having said that, *Windows* has not had multiple desktops since then. Third party addon apps have.
That is not exactly fair. The entire philosophy of Linux is to have third party programs providing extensions. Linux itself can't do multiple desktops because it requires a third party package to handle the graphics and then another one to provide the desktop environment.
There is less of a need for more than one desktop on Windows because of the tendancy for Windows users to maximise every damn application that they run. Even with high resolution widescreen monitors I see some of my users diving for the maximise button, which irritates me. Why the hell did we get fancy monitors for them!
Yeah, like NASA. Those guys put up data from thermometers that clearly shows the hockey stick.
Oh wait. No, it doesn't.
Actually it does match fairly well with the hockey stick graph. The graph you posted covers a bit over a century, where as the hockey stick graph covers 1000 years. Both of them show a rise for around 1 degree celcius over the same period.
Here is the description of the graph from the BBC: The chart is relatively flat from the period AD 1000 to 1900, indicating that temperatures were relatively stable for this period of time. The flat part forms the stick's "shaft".
But after 1900, temperatures appear to shoot up, forming the hockey stick's "blade".
You can't just chop of the shaft and then claim that it never was a hockey stick. Still, maybe you can use your graph to try and prove that the climate is actually cooling.
I assume people already have an office computer, not a games computer. Also, a sufficiently old games computer becomes an office computer due to system requirements creep.
I...I..I really don't get why people do this. Do you really think that just because some software won't run on every computer in the world that it shouldn't be made. You might as well close the entire games industry because the Amish wouldn't be able to play the games.
I never suggested that Nintendo should stop producing the Wii in favour of an emulator. It would just be an option for those people who want it. We don't need to start having telethons to buy a powerful enough PCs for all the destitute African children before you can start making the software. It wouldn't have to run on that 8086 that still running in the Romanian technology museum. PC gamers understand that they need to look at the system requirements when they buy any software. We have had to do this ever since Ada Lovelace asked Charles Babbage whether his computer could play Solitaire.
There are plenty of reasons why Nintendo would not make an emulator. The fact that some people (who obviously aren't that interested in games) wouldn't be able to run it would not be a major factor.
If you don't one that fast then maybe buying a Wii is cheaper
So we agree.
Yes! It is so blindingly obvious that it should not have ever needed to be said.
Well, some of us don't have any of those new fangled computers, or DVD players. Or CD players. We don't buy any media, so clearly we're pirating the media we don't buy.
Well if only I owned a telephone, I would report you to the authorities.
It's believed that the northern U.S. was covered in a 5,000 foot thick ice cap (some time in the last 100k years). It created the 5 Great Lakes.
You should rush out and tell a scientist. Maybe they didn't know that the temperature has changed before!
OK, I am being facetious, but I can never understand why people think that they have discovered something that climate scientists didn't know (or didn't want you to know). Yes, it has been hot before and it has been cold before. The problem today is the rate of change. It is getting hot very quickly in the global scheme of things.
Also, if Anthropogenic Global Warming were true, why hasn't recorded human history, vis-a-vis, the last 1,000 years or so, shown a consistent increase in global temperatures?
The population 1000 years ago was estimated to be 300 million. Over the next 800 years, it hadn't even increased to 1 billion. Then in the last 200 years it skyrocketed to 6.7 billion. Prior to 1800 the population increased by an average of 835,000 per year. After 1800 that grew to 27.5 million per year.
We also invented new ways to really pollute the planet like never before. If technology hadn't changed, we would be polluting the planet 21 times more than we were 1000 years ago. But now we also have coal power stations, aluminium smelters, street lights that light the world while we sleep and over 600 million cars.
With all this in mind, I really can't see how anyone can think that it is not possible that we are having an impact on the planet. We can deliberately go out of our way to change the landscape, alter the course of rivers, seed clouds to make it rain, convert deserts to farmland and make the Panama Canal. So why is not possible that we could also inadvertently alter the planet?
Finally, here is a question for all the deniers out there. If the engineering feat required today was to actually warm up the planet, how would we do it? I think that the best answer would be to do what were are already doing today.
There's a bit of a difference between throwing out old episodes of Dad's Army and throwing away data that's supposedly helping to prove that man is causing global warming.
Except when the data was thrown out, nobody knew that is what it would one day need to prove. Anyway, as other people have said here, there are many other sources of data around that you can use. If you don't trust this lot of data, or even these scientists, then just ignore them and move to all of the other scientists in the world.
If AGW was actually happening, there would be no need to "adjust" numbers and likewise no need to cover up the leaked emails
Here in the southern hemisphere we have just started our summer. According to my measurements, it is hotter now than it was six months ago. As you say, there is no need to adjust any numbers, so this means we have proof of global warming.
But seriously, there are plenty of reasons why you might need to adjust some data. New measuring equipment (from alternative manufacturers), procedural changes meaning measurements are taken at different times of the day or even a different place. An organisation might stop measuring a particular reading and you have to go to another source.
Remember, these measurements have been taken over many decades through different political administrations, through budget cuts, and through technology changes. Even the reasons for taking a certain measurement might change over time, resulting in new methodologies for data collection.
This is not just one big experiment. This is a series of thousands of different scientific endeavours all coming together. There will have to be a normalisation process involved.
It's a valid assumption considering Microsoft's lead over Apple in the market for desktop computer operating systems.
You have that backwards. How can it be a valid assumption that people don't already have a computer? Let me state it plainly. 99.999% of people who get a Wii emulator already have a computer on which to play it. They do not need to pay Microsoft or Apple just to run that software.
If you've been following gbatemp or maxconsole, you know how easy it became for a PC to run pirated DS games.
Absolutely. I wrote about DS piracy recently. Despite the large amount of DS piracy, DS titles still sell really well. The fact that some people will do the wrong thing doesn't mean that everyone will. And you know, it still is possible to pirate Wii games now, as long as you have a modded console.
Does the emulator run well on the $300 entry-level PC from Dell? If not, the PC needs an upgrade.
Did you see the specs of the computer running the Dolphin demo on YouTube in TFA? "Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU overclocked at 3,8 GHz, GPU NVIDIA GTX 260 and 4 Gigabytes of RAM." That is about average for a games computer these days. If you don't one that fast then maybe buying a Wii is cheaper, but chances are anyone interesting in gaming WILL have a system that fast.
Suddenly, they lose profit on hardware in exchange for adding to their competitor's gaming market share?
You are assuming that people haven't already got a computer and paid money to Microsoft. You are also assuming that Nintendo couldn't make their emulator work on the Mac as well. This would not really add anything to Microsoft's market share.
Suddenly, they lose profit on hardware in exchange for adding to their competitor's gaming market share?
They can still charge for the software and quite probably still make exactly the same profit on the software that they do on the hardware. Besides, there is more profit in the Wii Fit board that costs a third of the price of the Wii for just a few sensors in a plastic case. That's the genius of the Wii product line.
"The pressure for other people to write an emulator would have reduced." - Kind of backwards - its much easier to pirate something that already runs on your target system.
This doesn't make sense at all. You seem to be suggesting that an emulator is piracy. People write an emulator so they can run a Wii game on their PC. If that software already exists officially (an isn't too expensive), why would someone feel the need to write another one?
But, last time I can think of, not many games out there require Administrator rights to run. Maybe you have Windows Vista?
Here's a random example. The current weekend special on Steam is Tomb Raider Underworld. According to the system requirements, it runs on "Microsoft Windows XP (admin rights required)/Microsoft Windows Vista (admin rights required)". Most recent games don't do that, but I can tell you (as someone who has run as a limited user since NT4.0) that it used to be the norm a few years back.
Don't whine on/.. Just do it. Report back around year or so later how it's on the other side.
I have kind of started that. I left my main computer (a laptop) at work this weekend, so I am currently using my test Windows 7 beta system which I kept as vanilla as possible. This means I am posting this with Internet Explorer.
I have implemented the usual security measures that I have used for the last 10 years: default the firewall to block everything then explicitly allow what I want through. In IE, I have turned off Active X. Actually I am trying to get Administrator Approved ActiveX controls to allow AJAX to work in Internet Zone, but without success. I am writing the settings to the registry manually to avoid having to install the IE administrator kit (which is the usual way you set the admin approved stuff).
Until I work this out, I will keep everything off in the Internet Zone, and use Trusted Sites for anything that requires AJAX. I have disabled Flash using "Manage Add-ons". I only turn it on in those rare cases I want to see a video or something. This is actually working better than expected. It is (suprisingly) not much worse than Opera or Firefox as I thought it might be.
So there you go. That's my report after a few months.
I have 4 Macs, but 3 of those are pre-OSX. I really had high hopes for Mac OS X, because it sounded like the answer to all my dreams. Much of my tinkering time back in the Amiga and early Windows days was adding all the Unix utilities that I had come to know and love at University. The Mac OS X had all that built-in, but I found it lost a lot of ease of use in the GUI that the previous versions had. It had things like coloured buttons with no indication as to what they would do if you clicked them.
It came just at the time when my need to command line utilities diminished in favour of the graphic interface. Unfortunately, the Windows interface seemed easier for me. These days I can use either system, and I don't really see either as being dramatically better than the other one. I'm just more used to Windows these days.
I spend 99% of my time in the productive realm, the other 1% is on/.
I'm the opposite. The biggest killer of my time is that I have broadband internet where ever I go. Damn you, Slashdot!
As a long time Google user, all this nonsense makes me want to just use Alta Vista to spite the lot of them.
Funny you should say that. The simplicity of Google's search interface and accuracy of the results (in the early days at least) was the reason that I switched to Google. There was less choice, but it was more productive if all I wanted to do was just find a website. This was exactly what I was talking about in regards to operating systems.
This is a great start. The advantage of the Wii to the emulator community is that it is greatly underpowered compared to 360 and PS3. I don't mean underpowered in that it can't play games, but that the requirements to emulate it are much lower. Since people have already hacked the Wiimote to work as a mouse then there is no reason why the emulator community would not be able to incorporate this to use the real controllers.
The benefit to Nintendo is that they would still be able to sell their hardware add-ons to the emulator world. The downside is that this will act as a modded Wii and so people will probably just download the Wii games, which will still mean that Nintendo will try to shut them down eventually.
Perhaps by the time this emulator works with enough games to make it viable, they will have already come up with the Wii2 and then they won't care so much about people emulating the old system.
I think that Nintedo should have preempted this. The best solution for them would have been to release their own PC version of the Wii which can run the legit games and use the official peripherals. The pressure for other people to write an emulator would have reduced.
I stopped buying games for my PC when copy protection got intrusive and sometimes destructive. These days, I don't trust any games that insists on running as administrator and I always research the copy protection system. If Nintendo created a software Wii that sandboxed itself from the rest of the computer, I would happily play the games knowing that my system would be (mostly) safe.
As a long time Opera user, all this nonsense makes me want to just install Internet Explorer to spite the lot of them. (OK, as a web developer I know I will be installing all of them on my test computer)
The reason I have always prefered Opera is that I get all the functionality without having to install other plug-ins and programs. I'm getting too old to just keep tinkering with my setup. In my youth I probably spent 90% of my time installing new stuff & writing programs to streamline my system and only 10% actually being productive. These days I want it to be 10% tinkering and 90% productivity.
So it annoys me that when I install Windows I now have to install mail and web programs because Microsoft were forced to separate them all.
People keep saying that people use Internet Explorer because they don't know any better (and don't know the opposition products), but I don't think that those people outside the geek community WANT to have to know about them. They just want to use a computer to do stuff. It is only as I have got older that I have really appreciated this.
Perhaps if Nintendo gave us hardware that was easier to back up, they wouldn't have these issues.
It's not really Nintendo's responsibility to do this. Back in the GBC and GBA days, flash cartridges came with cables to connect to PCs which enabled you to rip games. Modern DS ones don't seem to have this. They are designed to only be used with development kits and Internet download.
When I said "only backed up games to which they physically had access" I included games that were owned by friends. This casual piracy would obviously reduce sales (especially in clusters like schools), but nowhere near to the extent allowed by being able to easily download every game every made from a stranger across the globe.
Used for developing and homebrew software, as well as just plain copying games.
Exactly, although it is the copying of games that gets the most use of these cards. The unfortunate part (for Nintendo) is that flash cartridges offer a much better experience for gamers, because you can download multiple games to one cartridge (so you don't need to carry around extra games). You also can get access to in-game menus to added functionality play in slow motion, change the screen brightness and I think even saving at any stage (although I might be wrong about that one).
People who develop WGA cracks get hounded like crazy.
Actually, it is the distribution of the WGA cracks that will get you hounded. If people only developed these cracks for their own use then Microsoft would bother trying to stop them.
Similarly, Nintendo wouldn't care about the DS flash cartridges if people only backed up games to which they physically had access, because that kind of piracy doesn't have a great impact on sales. But when the ROMs are so easy to find on the net, it has got to make them pay attention.
Mind you, DS titles feature very well in the game charts, so they still make a hell of a lot of money. It's hard to feel too sorry for the publishers.
What would happen should Wikipedia hand over false information?
Why would they want to do this? It is not in their interest to protect people who use the encyclopedia as a blackmail tool. That is not part of their objectives.
If this was someone trying to suppress a legitimate entry (hyperthetical example: a certain B. Streisand forcing the removal of the Streisand Effect page) then they might feel the need to be less than helpful.
And what of the person who owned the false IP address that was handed out. They might (and should) start suing Wikipedia for falsely accusing them.
I have just started to look at their site and the first thing that I notice as the page was loading was that the pictures that you click on near the top to go to choose the platform all have the same alt text of "xbox reviews". That will be confusing for someone using a screen reader.
I thought the whole layout seemed a bit complicated and confusing, with javascript menus and a very busy interface. Gray text on a gray background seems an odd choice for the color blind people out there.
Still, at least they are raising public awareness. Even if you don't think that game makers should HAVE to provide support for all disabilities, this kind of site fills in the role that most game reviewers would not consider.
In addition to what the other people have said (right click->pin to taskbar), you got me curious to see what happened if you drag and drop an icon from the desktop onto the taskbar. Guess what? It pins it to the taskbar!
So now I want to know what old method of adding to the quick launch have you found that now no longer work in Windows 7? To what were you referring when you said that it was more difficult?
You are assuming that 100% of Symbian devices sold are used for web browsing. Considering the amount that some phone companies charge for data access, I very much doubt the figure would be anywhere near that percentage. Given how quickly people seem to upgrade their phones, I would also doubt that a lot of those devices are still in active use.
So my 1 purchase will count as 2 copies of Windows 7 being sold.
The quoted figures are based on Internet usage, not sales. They will not be able to see operating systems that are not installed. Nor will they see computers that are not used for surfing the net. I have six computers that in active use, but only two of them are configured for web access.
That is why these stats are inadequate for really determining operating system usage. Unfortunately there really is no better system to count them.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't think that a 1% market share can be counted as a rebirth. What did it get down to at the lowest point? 0.5%? I wonder how long 8 track tapes still sold after the compact cassette became popular.
The format must be helped by the DJs who still use records. Having such a high profile usage of the format must have kept it in the minds of the buying public in a greater way than records, cassettes, reel to reel tapes, 78s, cylinders, and pianola rolls ever had.
And there are some advantages to the format. With a proper pickup (not some cheap crap), the sound is wonderful. 16 bit audio was only ever a feeble approximation of original sound. Also, there is a physical sense to getting a record that CDs never quite had.
But more importantly to the crowd here, record covers were the pre-Internet soft porn for kids. There were some damn fine covers (NSFW) back in the day!
Having said that, *Windows* has not had multiple desktops since then. Third party addon apps have.
That is not exactly fair. The entire philosophy of Linux is to have third party programs providing extensions. Linux itself can't do multiple desktops because it requires a third party package to handle the graphics and then another one to provide the desktop environment.
There is less of a need for more than one desktop on Windows because of the tendancy for Windows users to maximise every damn application that they run. Even with high resolution widescreen monitors I see some of my users diving for the maximise button, which irritates me. Why the hell did we get fancy monitors for them!
Yeah, like NASA. Those guys put up data from thermometers that clearly shows the hockey stick.
Oh wait. No, it doesn't.
Actually it does match fairly well with the hockey stick graph. The graph you posted covers a bit over a century, where as the hockey stick graph covers 1000 years. Both of them show a rise for around 1 degree celcius over the same period.
Here is the description of the graph from the BBC:
The chart is relatively flat from the period AD 1000 to 1900, indicating that temperatures were relatively stable for this period of time. The flat part forms the stick's "shaft".
But after 1900, temperatures appear to shoot up, forming the hockey stick's "blade".
You can't just chop of the shaft and then claim that it never was a hockey stick. Still, maybe you can use your graph to try and prove that the climate is actually cooling.
I assume people already have an office computer, not a games computer. Also, a sufficiently old games computer becomes an office computer due to system requirements creep.
I...I..I really don't get why people do this. Do you really think that just because some software won't run on every computer in the world that it shouldn't be made. You might as well close the entire games industry because the Amish wouldn't be able to play the games.
I never suggested that Nintendo should stop producing the Wii in favour of an emulator. It would just be an option for those people who want it. We don't need to start having telethons to buy a powerful enough PCs for all the destitute African children before you can start making the software. It wouldn't have to run on that 8086 that still running in the Romanian technology museum. PC gamers understand that they need to look at the system requirements when they buy any software. We have had to do this ever since Ada Lovelace asked Charles Babbage whether his computer could play Solitaire.
There are plenty of reasons why Nintendo would not make an emulator. The fact that some people (who obviously aren't that interested in games) wouldn't be able to run it would not be a major factor.
If you don't one that fast then maybe buying a Wii is cheaper
So we agree.
Yes! It is so blindingly obvious that it should not have ever needed to be said.
Well, some of us don't have any of those new fangled computers, or DVD players. Or CD players. We don't buy any media, so clearly we're pirating the media we don't buy.
Well if only I owned a telephone, I would report you to the authorities.
It's believed that the northern U.S. was covered in a 5,000 foot thick ice cap (some time in the last 100k years). It created the 5 Great Lakes.
You should rush out and tell a scientist. Maybe they didn't know that the temperature has changed before!
OK, I am being facetious, but I can never understand why people think that they have discovered something that climate scientists didn't know (or didn't want you to know). Yes, it has been hot before and it has been cold before. The problem today is the rate of change. It is getting hot very quickly in the global scheme of things.
Also, if Anthropogenic Global Warming were true, why hasn't recorded human history, vis-a-vis, the last 1,000 years or so, shown a consistent increase in global temperatures?
The population 1000 years ago was estimated to be 300 million. Over the next 800 years, it hadn't even increased to 1 billion. Then in the last 200 years it skyrocketed to 6.7 billion. Prior to 1800 the population increased by an average of 835,000 per year. After 1800 that grew to 27.5 million per year.
We also invented new ways to really pollute the planet like never before. If technology hadn't changed, we would be polluting the planet 21 times more than we were 1000 years ago. But now we also have coal power stations, aluminium smelters, street lights that light the world while we sleep and over 600 million cars.
With all this in mind, I really can't see how anyone can think that it is not possible that we are having an impact on the planet. We can deliberately go out of our way to change the landscape, alter the course of rivers, seed clouds to make it rain, convert deserts to farmland and make the Panama Canal. So why is not possible that we could also inadvertently alter the planet?
Finally, here is a question for all the deniers out there. If the engineering feat required today was to actually warm up the planet, how would we do it? I think that the best answer would be to do what were are already doing today.
The deniers are giving a bad name to skeptics.
I don't believe that!
There's a bit of a difference between throwing out old episodes of Dad's Army and throwing away data that's supposedly helping to prove that man is causing global warming.
Except when the data was thrown out, nobody knew that is what it would one day need to prove. Anyway, as other people have said here, there are many other sources of data around that you can use. If you don't trust this lot of data, or even these scientists, then just ignore them and move to all of the other scientists in the world.
If AGW was actually happening, there would be no need to "adjust" numbers and likewise no need to cover up the leaked emails
Here in the southern hemisphere we have just started our summer. According to my measurements, it is hotter now than it was six months ago. As you say, there is no need to adjust any numbers, so this means we have proof of global warming.
But seriously, there are plenty of reasons why you might need to adjust some data. New measuring equipment (from alternative manufacturers), procedural changes meaning measurements are taken at different times of the day or even a different place. An organisation might stop measuring a particular reading and you have to go to another source.
Remember, these measurements have been taken over many decades through different political administrations, through budget cuts, and through technology changes. Even the reasons for taking a certain measurement might change over time, resulting in new methodologies for data collection.
This is not just one big experiment. This is a series of thousands of different scientific endeavours all coming together. There will have to be a normalisation process involved.
It's a valid assumption considering Microsoft's lead over Apple in the market for desktop computer operating systems.
You have that backwards. How can it be a valid assumption that people don't already have a computer? Let me state it plainly. 99.999% of people who get a Wii emulator already have a computer on which to play it. They do not need to pay Microsoft or Apple just to run that software.
If you've been following gbatemp or maxconsole, you know how easy it became for a PC to run pirated DS games.
Absolutely. I wrote about DS piracy recently. Despite the large amount of DS piracy, DS titles still sell really well. The fact that some people will do the wrong thing doesn't mean that everyone will. And you know, it still is possible to pirate Wii games now, as long as you have a modded console.
Does the emulator run well on the $300 entry-level PC from Dell? If not, the PC needs an upgrade.
Did you see the specs of the computer running the Dolphin demo on YouTube in TFA? "Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU overclocked at 3,8 GHz, GPU NVIDIA GTX 260 and 4 Gigabytes of RAM." That is about average for a games computer these days. If you don't one that fast then maybe buying a Wii is cheaper, but chances are anyone interesting in gaming WILL have a system that fast.
Suddenly, they lose profit on hardware in exchange for adding to their competitor's gaming market share?
You are assuming that people haven't already got a computer and paid money to Microsoft. You are also assuming that Nintendo couldn't make their emulator work on the Mac as well. This would not really add anything to Microsoft's market share.
Suddenly, they lose profit on hardware in exchange for adding to their competitor's gaming market share?
They can still charge for the software and quite probably still make exactly the same profit on the software that they do on the hardware. Besides, there is more profit in the Wii Fit board that costs a third of the price of the Wii for just a few sensors in a plastic case. That's the genius of the Wii product line.
"The pressure for other people to write an emulator would have reduced." - Kind of backwards - its much easier to pirate something that already runs on your target system.
This doesn't make sense at all. You seem to be suggesting that an emulator is piracy. People write an emulator so they can run a Wii game on their PC. If that software already exists officially (an isn't too expensive), why would someone feel the need to write another one?
But, last time I can think of, not many games out there require Administrator rights to run. Maybe you have Windows Vista?
Here's a random example. The current weekend special on Steam is Tomb Raider Underworld. According to the system requirements, it runs on "Microsoft Windows XP (admin rights required)/Microsoft Windows Vista (admin rights required)". Most recent games don't do that, but I can tell you (as someone who has run as a limited user since NT4.0) that it used to be the norm a few years back.
Don't whine on /.. Just do it. Report back around year or so later how it's on the other side.
I have kind of started that. I left my main computer (a laptop) at work this weekend, so I am currently using my test Windows 7 beta system which I kept as vanilla as possible. This means I am posting this with Internet Explorer.
I have implemented the usual security measures that I have used for the last 10 years: default the firewall to block everything then explicitly allow what I want through. In IE, I have turned off Active X. Actually I am trying to get Administrator Approved ActiveX controls to allow AJAX to work in Internet Zone, but without success. I am writing the settings to the registry manually to avoid having to install the IE administrator kit (which is the usual way you set the admin approved stuff).
Until I work this out, I will keep everything off in the Internet Zone, and use Trusted Sites for anything that requires AJAX. I have disabled Flash using "Manage Add-ons". I only turn it on in those rare cases I want to see a video or something. This is actually working better than expected. It is (suprisingly) not much worse than Opera or Firefox as I thought it might be.
So there you go. That's my report after a few months.
Perhaps it's time to look at a mac...
I have 4 Macs, but 3 of those are pre-OSX. I really had high hopes for Mac OS X, because it sounded like the answer to all my dreams. Much of my tinkering time back in the Amiga and early Windows days was adding all the Unix utilities that I had come to know and love at University. The Mac OS X had all that built-in, but I found it lost a lot of ease of use in the GUI that the previous versions had. It had things like coloured buttons with no indication as to what they would do if you clicked them.
It came just at the time when my need to command line utilities diminished in favour of the graphic interface. Unfortunately, the Windows interface seemed easier for me. These days I can use either system, and I don't really see either as being dramatically better than the other one. I'm just more used to Windows these days.
I spend 99% of my time in the productive realm, the other 1% is on /.
I'm the opposite. The biggest killer of my time is that I have broadband internet where ever I go. Damn you, Slashdot!
As a long time Google user, all this nonsense makes me want to just use Alta Vista to spite the lot of them.
Funny you should say that. The simplicity of Google's search interface and accuracy of the results (in the early days at least) was the reason that I switched to Google. There was less choice, but it was more productive if all I wanted to do was just find a website. This was exactly what I was talking about in regards to operating systems.
This is a great start. The advantage of the Wii to the emulator community is that it is greatly underpowered compared to 360 and PS3. I don't mean underpowered in that it can't play games, but that the requirements to emulate it are much lower. Since people have already hacked the Wiimote to work as a mouse then there is no reason why the emulator community would not be able to incorporate this to use the real controllers.
The benefit to Nintendo is that they would still be able to sell their hardware add-ons to the emulator world. The downside is that this will act as a modded Wii and so people will probably just download the Wii games, which will still mean that Nintendo will try to shut them down eventually.
Perhaps by the time this emulator works with enough games to make it viable, they will have already come up with the Wii2 and then they won't care so much about people emulating the old system.
I think that Nintedo should have preempted this. The best solution for them would have been to release their own PC version of the Wii which can run the legit games and use the official peripherals. The pressure for other people to write an emulator would have reduced.
I stopped buying games for my PC when copy protection got intrusive and sometimes destructive. These days, I don't trust any games that insists on running as administrator and I always research the copy protection system. If Nintendo created a software Wii that sandboxed itself from the rest of the computer, I would happily play the games knowing that my system would be (mostly) safe.
As a long time Opera user, all this nonsense makes me want to just install Internet Explorer to spite the lot of them. (OK, as a web developer I know I will be installing all of them on my test computer)
The reason I have always prefered Opera is that I get all the functionality without having to install other plug-ins and programs. I'm getting too old to just keep tinkering with my setup. In my youth I probably spent 90% of my time installing new stuff & writing programs to streamline my system and only 10% actually being productive. These days I want it to be 10% tinkering and 90% productivity.
So it annoys me that when I install Windows I now have to install mail and web programs because Microsoft were forced to separate them all.
People keep saying that people use Internet Explorer because they don't know any better (and don't know the opposition products), but I don't think that those people outside the geek community WANT to have to know about them. They just want to use a computer to do stuff. It is only as I have got older that I have really appreciated this.
Perhaps if Nintendo gave us hardware that was easier to back up, they wouldn't have these issues.
It's not really Nintendo's responsibility to do this. Back in the GBC and GBA days, flash cartridges came with cables to connect to PCs which enabled you to rip games. Modern DS ones don't seem to have this. They are designed to only be used with development kits and Internet download.
I'd say that wouldn't have any impact on sales.
When I said "only backed up games to which they physically had access" I included games that were owned by friends. This casual piracy would obviously reduce sales (especially in clusters like schools), but nowhere near to the extent allowed by being able to easily download every game every made from a stranger across the globe.
Used for developing and homebrew software, as well as just plain copying games.
Exactly, although it is the copying of games that gets the most use of these cards. The unfortunate part (for Nintendo) is that flash cartridges offer a much better experience for gamers, because you can download multiple games to one cartridge (so you don't need to carry around extra games). You also can get access to in-game menus to added functionality play in slow motion, change the screen brightness and I think even saving at any stage (although I might be wrong about that one).
People who develop WGA cracks get hounded like crazy.
Actually, it is the distribution of the WGA cracks that will get you hounded. If people only developed these cracks for their own use then Microsoft would bother trying to stop them.
Similarly, Nintendo wouldn't care about the DS flash cartridges if people only backed up games to which they physically had access, because that kind of piracy doesn't have a great impact on sales. But when the ROMs are so easy to find on the net, it has got to make them pay attention.
Mind you, DS titles feature very well in the game charts, so they still make a hell of a lot of money. It's hard to feel too sorry for the publishers.
What would happen should Wikipedia hand over false information?
Why would they want to do this? It is not in their interest to protect people who use the encyclopedia as a blackmail tool. That is not part of their objectives.
If this was someone trying to suppress a legitimate entry (hyperthetical example: a certain B. Streisand forcing the removal of the Streisand Effect page) then they might feel the need to be less than helpful.
And what of the person who owned the false IP address that was handed out. They might (and should) start suing Wikipedia for falsely accusing them.
I have just started to look at their site and the first thing that I notice as the page was loading was that the pictures that you click on near the top to go to choose the platform all have the same alt text of "xbox reviews". That will be confusing for someone using a screen reader.
I thought the whole layout seemed a bit complicated and confusing, with javascript menus and a very busy interface. Gray text on a gray background seems an odd choice for the color blind people out there.
Still, at least they are raising public awareness. Even if you don't think that game makers should HAVE to provide support for all disabilities, this kind of site fills in the role that most game reviewers would not consider.
In addition to what the other people have said (right click->pin to taskbar), you got me curious to see what happened if you drag and drop an icon from the desktop onto the taskbar. Guess what? It pins it to the taskbar!
So now I want to know what old method of adding to the quick launch have you found that now no longer work in Windows 7? To what were you referring when you said that it was more difficult?
You are assuming that 100% of Symbian devices sold are used for web browsing. Considering the amount that some phone companies charge for data access, I very much doubt the figure would be anywhere near that percentage. Given how quickly people seem to upgrade their phones, I would also doubt that a lot of those devices are still in active use.
So my 1 purchase will count as 2 copies of Windows 7 being sold.
The quoted figures are based on Internet usage, not sales. They will not be able to see operating systems that are not installed. Nor will they see computers that are not used for surfing the net. I have six computers that in active use, but only two of them are configured for web access.
That is why these stats are inadequate for really determining operating system usage. Unfortunately there really is no better system to count them.