Not necessarily. Wikipedia's entry on the topic suggests that Lucas always meant Stormtroopers to be clones (as per commentary of Episode II) and has an uncited comment by Lucas that some Stormtroopers were clones and some were conscripts. I believe the main giveaway that stormtroopers are clones is Princess Leia's line in IV, as Luke enters her cell in a trooper outfit:
"Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?"
I believe the main give away that they aren't clones is that they all have different voices in IV, V, and VI and that Lucas is full of shit. Contrast that with II and III where they all have the same voice, because in Lucas's world, accents aren't learned, they're genetic.
FYI, the "uncited" comment is probably from the Insider where Lucas essentially made an excuse for why StormTroopers in the original trilogy were all different shapes and sizes with different voices and the ones in the PT all looked the same. Seriously, watch the Death Star docking bay scene or even just the first interrogation scene with Vader and the captain of the Tantive IV. All the troopers are different sizes. Lucas made the excuse and then left it up to the EU authors to fix because he couldn't be bothered to.
I never did figure out why he enacted that policy.
He enacted that policy because it probably dawned on him that he had no way to enforce whatever the company has in its Acceptable Use Policy (assuming there was one) because they don't own it.
This is exactly right. This is what I constantly harp about when someone wants to use their own equipment. My answer is almost always simply "If they die or don't come to work, that machine stays with them at home along with all the data. We have no control over it whatsoever and no right to the hardware since we don't own it". Where I'm at, if you find yourself more productive with your own machine than with company supplied hardware, we get you the equivalent hardware so the company can control it and monitor the software licensing. I've had absolutely no problem procuring hardware once I present the doomsday scenario.
The only thing I'm still having trouble with is getting the company to supply cell phones, but even that has at least moved in the right direction after we had a contractor decide that he didn't want to work for us anymore but we wanted to keep his phone number. He had no problem turning the number over to us and I've had no problem allocating phones to new contractors since that incident (which took months and lots of pain to resolve because people who don't work in IT think they have a clue when it comes to do a transfer of service with the phone company).
If you don't work in IT, let IT do it's job and stop trying to "learn to do it all myself". I've been doing IT professionally for almost 15 years. The reason I always tell people "The procedure is that you call me or tell me" is because I know almost exactly all the information I'm going to be asked by an outside company when I make the call. I can tell you everything you'll likely be asked too, but when you're not in IT and it takes you a full day to do something because "I didn't have time", then you end up wasting company resources as well. I once spent an hour on the phone with the phone company finishing a task that a sales person had said they would do 3 days before. And that was after two weeks of bullshit with the sales person going back and forth with me, the phone company, the owner, and the director of accounting.
That is why sometimes you need to move the hell out of the way and let IT do their job. It has a lot less to do with keeping you from doing yours and a lot more to do with knowing that you probably don't have time to just get it done.
But what the fuck do I know, right? I'm just the IT guy. (this has become my mantra since nearly everything I say is ignored whether I'm asked for my opinion or not).
If you have a kid, you should MAKE SURE THERE'S A PASSWORD ON THE COMPUTER. Follow that up with simply not allowing the kid to do anything on the computer without supervision. When the kid is old enough, they can get their own computer.
There, fixed that for you.
Try actually being a parent instead of sticking them in front of the computer and then ignoring them for an hour or more. Yes, I have two children. No, they aren't allowed to use the computer unless I'm there. Yes, both my wife and I have passwords on our computers. When the kids are old enough that they need the computers for homework, they can do it and I'll sit in the room with them. It'll interfere with my game time, but so be it. Being an effective parent is hard work, especially in a connected world.
My parents didn't have to worry about this shit because the only way to "connect" with the outside world was to dial a local number (Q-Link back in the Commodore days) and go into a chat room (the good ones cost money). We knew two things 1) Do NOT dial a long distance number (anything outside of our area and we had to check the zum too) and 2) Do NOT enter any room with a + sign on it since those ones cost more. We had 5 kids in the house and no problem following those rules. Today all of that is pretty much free, so parents need to be more diligent.
This shit isn't hard to do. People would just rather let their kids do whatever they want on the computer instead of actually acting like parents. If you need help setting this shit up, contact your local neighborhood geek. I'm sure they'll be more than happy to help and you won't even have to tell them why you want it done.
No, I don't care to elaborate. I think its high time you broaden your horizons on your own time.
(...)
The point here is that unwillingness to answer a question to the satisfaction of some self appointed third party does not indicate an inability to do so.
So you self-appointed yourself as a judge of the breadth of some one else's horizons?
No. What he's saying, and I think you know quite well what he's saying, is that it's none of your damn business how he or any other parent chooses to tell his children where babies come from. If he decides to make something up, that's his business. If he decides to make it true without getting into details, that is again, his business, not yours.
Maybe their child is 2 or 3 years old and would better understand that a "stork" (which is pictured in most children's books on the topic) is what brought the baby to them rather than a much more mature answer of mommy and daddy had sex.
An age appropriate answer may not be true and it doesn't have to be true. I can't see why anyone else needs an explanation of why one parent might choose the stork story over trying to explain it to a small child.
Seriously, who cares if you can't see why a parent might explain it differently. It's really none of your damn business.
Wow, way to project. I have more problems, on a system level, with the one Mac in the office than I do with the other 50 Windows PCs.
Most of the people that have problems with Windows will have problems with any OS. Something won't work right or they'll screw something up. Maybe they need to change this setting here or that setting there. Or maybe they're just to cheap so they get a cheap machine and then bitch when it has problems. Windows, Mac, Linux, it doesn't matter what OS people are running, they'll always have a problem with something.
Free software running in a browser is no more safe than free software running on the machine. It's this kind of thinking that has brought us the "click on anything that pops up" mentality.
I suppose we should feel sorry for every company that ever released something for pay that eventually went out of business because someone else was able to do it for free? Damn Microsoft for including TCP/IP in WIndows! They forced Trumpet Winsock out of business!
Eric Schmidt could simply threaten to drop their search results to page 20050 out of 20049. Even on their names or trademarks.
Better not leave any evidence of that then. Talk about abusing a monopoly position. Yes, I know there are more search engines than just Google, but I'm pretty sure that if Microsoft saw a significant drop in traffic after something like that happening, they could easily convince a judge that Google is "abusing their monopoly position". They'd end up being split into multiple companies and pay hefty fines.
As for why this is a good move, it has already been discussed several times. You either understand what monopoly is or you don't.
An abusive monopoly is what's illegal, not a simple monopoly. AT&T was split up because it was an abusive monopoly ("you have to buy our phones because only our phones work"). Microsoft should have been split up for the same reason. By the time the decision to unbundle IE came down, there was plenty of competition (Opera, Mozilla/Firefox) so the decision became moot.
Remind us again what effect that ruling has had on Microsoft? Oh, that's right, none.
But how can anyone score 100% on everything if the questions require some analytical thinking and even opinion? Especially if your opinion might differ from the exam markers (not exactly unusual).
Just curious.
You can easily score in the 90+% range on analytical thinking papers simply by convincing the reader of your point. That is usually the point of those papers. Find a subject and convince the reader of your point. Even if your opinion on the subject is the opposite of the exam marker, they are reading the paper with an eye toward being convinced of your side of the argument. If you can do that, you pass. You're not literally trying to change their mind, simply presenting facts and coming to a conclusion. As long as your conclusion is in the realm of the facts you present, you pass.
I don't have a bachelors or a masters degree, but my wife has a masters and this is exactly what she had to do for her final paper.
Are you kidding? With Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003, it practically does this for you. Insert the CD and click on each step. The installer tells you exactly what to do. Open Add or Remove Programs. Click on Add/Remove Windows Programs. Select SMTP, IIS, and whatever else the installer is telling you to do. Finish installing Exchange. That gives you POP3, IMAP, SMTP, synced calendaring, and web.
PHP and MySQL can be installed as msi's. You could install wamp if you wanted. You may have to tweak the php.ini after installing php, but that's about it.
The firewall is turned on by default.
Right-click "My Computer", select Properties, then select "Remote". Click "Enable Remote Desktop on this Computer". There's your RDP. This can also be done via the registry from a system on the same domain logged into by an admin if you know where it's at.
Seriously, I think I've had to hit an actual config file all of once when setting up a Windows server. It's on a regular basis when working on a Linux server. About the only time I need to edit the registry for something like this is to change a port number (for RDP). Everything else can easily be done through the GUI.
Really? Normally, if I have a major problem, a quick Google search of the error message will take me right to Microsoft's support page with the solution.
Or I can do it the Linux way. Where I need to change something, but I can't remember where the damn web server config file is. I know it's in/etc somewhere (due to experience, otherwise I'd really be fucked). Hmm, maybe it's under "web". Nope, not there. Oh, that's right, it's probably under "apache" since that's the server for Linux. Whoops, not there either. Hmm, maybe the process list will give me a hint. Oh, that's right, it's under httpd. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Mind you that I searched for it for several minutes.
I actually had the above scenario happen to me. I don't configure Linux boxes on a regular basis, but I'm not exactly a n00b either. It had just been a while since I'd had to touch one, so it took me a while to find the file. I don't even bother with the GUI config tools under Linux unless I'm working on a machine that's not in the building.
At least with Windows all the GUI programs are in one spot (everything's under Administrative Tools) and Microsoft has plenty of support articles on how to edit the registry (when it's necessary and it often is) and exactly what needs to be changed.
I have seen plenty of forums, for both platforms, with people having the same damn problem and not getting any answers. That isn't strictly a Windows or Linux issue. That applies to every OS.
IIS started shipping in XP Media Center edition. It can be had for $110. Getting a version of Windows with a web and ftp server is very easy to do.
If you don't want to buy a more expensive version, you can also simply download a free web and ftp server. There's plenty out there that run on Windows.
It's not entirely ruined, but you certainly won't be making any big ticket purchases (ie cars or homes) without getting the highest interest rate they can stick you with. At that point, your history shows that you are not a good risk for high amounts like that.
Try applying for a home loan and see how far you get. While you may be able to get some amount, you likely won't be able to get anything significant and you won't be able to get a nice low rate.
Unfortunately all of this is practically pointless. I cannot remember when I last had a bluescreen in XP or any reason to wish for a better sound implementation.
One thing I was pleasantly surprised to find out with Vista that made it better than XP was my system attached to a KVM. Every now and then, XP would load but the keyboard and mouse simply wouldn't work, requiring a reboot. I haven't had a single instance of that happening under Vista. I haven't had a chance to try it under Windows 7 yet, but I have no doubt that it'll work just fine. Note that the KVM isn't plugged into a power adapter and is simply being powered via the PS/2 keyboard:)
Creative cards working yet? I'd heard vista lacked any decent hardware sound support, effectivelly rendering headphone gaming with X-fi cards impossible.
You mean Creative refused to release upgraded drivers and wanted you to buy upgraded hardware that had proper drivers instead. Don't blame this one on Vista or Microsoft. Everybody else seems to have had no problems with supplying upgraded drivers except Creative.
Also I don't buy their statistics. According to the latest steam hardware survey data released (June 2007) 60% of all surveyed systems were using winXP still, even a year after win7's launch unless it manages to actually outperform XP I don't see that changing anytime soon.
And 25% are running Vista. I would bet that the majority of people running Vista will upgrade to Win7 and a good chunk of the ones running XP will also upgrade to Win7 since they've been waiting for Win7.
What the hell are you running? A P3 with 128 MB of RAM and integrated video? I've found that on even a P4 2 GHz with 2 GB of RAM and integrated intel video (a low end machine by todays standards), the menus were far faster with the default settings under Vista than they were under XP. Sure, you can turn off all that fading crap in XP and make it faster, but I didn't have to do any of that with Vista to get really responsive menus. And if you've got a decent 3D accelerator (even a cheap $30 one), the system is even faster and you get the 3D flipping (which is pretty nice once you use it).
2008-2009 - Stock Dell, Vista w/ dual-headed Radeon(work computer)
For some reason Office 2007 doesn't play nicely with dual-monitors on this computer. Any application with the ribbon interface scrambles the toolbar if I remote-desktoped into this computer.
The problem here is that you're likely doing a remote desktop from a different setup. Remote desktop from a system with one monitor (maybe even two) into a system with two monitors does really wonky things, usually fixed by a restart. This isn't really a problem with Office 2007 so much as it's a problem with the way remote desktop works with dual monitors.
The screens would randomly trade places on restart... sometimes the left would be #1 and sometimes it was #2...
I'm pretty sure this is a driver issue. It happens from time to time with Nvidia drivers and Quadro NVS cards. Of course, it usually starts blue screening as well, but it's almost always after changing the configuration after the initial setup. A driver reinstall has always fixed the problem for me.
Both of these problems seem more like they're related to the application or driver than to Windows itself, at least as far as I can tell.
I'm just wondering why the average Joe has to work as hard as ever and still has a struggle to provide for his (ever retreating) retirement
And yet here you are posting on Slashdot in the middle of a work day. People much older and wiser than you would hardly call that "working hard". Just because you work a 9-5 job does not mean you're working hard.
As a server admin, I rarely work hard. When I do, it's usually due to some kind of hardware failure. But it isn't exactly back breaking work, so I doubt my grandparents would've referred to it as "hard work". Then again, hard work isn't what pays anyway. Smart work is what pays.
What's amusing to me is that if you want to education or health care funded in the US, you have to lobby Congress like hell to fund it.
What's amusing to me is that people think education or health care is a proper role for the Federal Government.
What's amusing to me is that people think education or health care is a proper role for unaccountable entities whose primary responsibility is profit.
Unaccountable entities? You mean like the private schools where you can simply not enroll your child? If enough parents don't like the way a private school is run, it goes out of business.
Oh, you were referring to the public schools. The ones that are run by the government and really are unaccountable. Silly me.
Re:Postal addresses identify houses!I
on
P.I.I. In the Sky
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· Score: 1
I don't know where you're at, but around here (SoCal) the cams do take the pics from the front of your car. And yes, the flash is pretty damn bright at night.
Valve can probably fix this fairly easy, they've just chosen not to. The fact that you can "Gift" a game to someone tells me that if they wanted to allow Steam users to sell games to one another, they'd come up with a way to do it.
I've never had the urge to sell any of my used games and I've only purchased one PC game used in my life (Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne).
LOL! By this logic, every modern game is "unplayable" because they can't usually be played on a laptop.
Newsflash: gaming companies don't care about laptops. This is why, on the list of supported hardware, you'll see "Notebook or laptop versions of these cards may work but they are not supported".
Sounds to me like Might and Magic V had good graphics, you just couldn't play it on a portable system. That's no surprise. Crysis has great graphics too (along with a bunch of other games) and most of them are unplayable on laptops. Hell, Portal crashes on some desktops with integrated graphics (shocked!).
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily. Wikipedia's entry on the topic suggests that Lucas always meant Stormtroopers to be clones (as per commentary of Episode II) and has an uncited comment by Lucas that some Stormtroopers were clones and some were conscripts. I believe the main giveaway that stormtroopers are clones is Princess Leia's line in IV, as Luke enters her cell in a trooper outfit:
"Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?"
I believe the main give away that they aren't clones is that they all have different voices in IV, V, and VI and that Lucas is full of shit. Contrast that with II and III where they all have the same voice, because in Lucas's world, accents aren't learned, they're genetic.
FYI, the "uncited" comment is probably from the Insider where Lucas essentially made an excuse for why StormTroopers in the original trilogy were all different shapes and sizes with different voices and the ones in the PT all looked the same. Seriously, watch the Death Star docking bay scene or even just the first interrogation scene with Vader and the captain of the Tantive IV. All the troopers are different sizes. Lucas made the excuse and then left it up to the EU authors to fix because he couldn't be bothered to.
Mod this UP!
He enacted that policy because it probably dawned on him that he had no way to enforce whatever the company has in its Acceptable Use Policy (assuming there was one) because they don't own it.
This is exactly right. This is what I constantly harp about when someone wants to use their own equipment. My answer is almost always simply "If they die or don't come to work, that machine stays with them at home along with all the data. We have no control over it whatsoever and no right to the hardware since we don't own it". Where I'm at, if you find yourself more productive with your own machine than with company supplied hardware, we get you the equivalent hardware so the company can control it and monitor the software licensing. I've had absolutely no problem procuring hardware once I present the doomsday scenario.
The only thing I'm still having trouble with is getting the company to supply cell phones, but even that has at least moved in the right direction after we had a contractor decide that he didn't want to work for us anymore but we wanted to keep his phone number. He had no problem turning the number over to us and I've had no problem allocating phones to new contractors since that incident (which took months and lots of pain to resolve because people who don't work in IT think they have a clue when it comes to do a transfer of service with the phone company).
If you don't work in IT, let IT do it's job and stop trying to "learn to do it all myself". I've been doing IT professionally for almost 15 years. The reason I always tell people "The procedure is that you call me or tell me" is because I know almost exactly all the information I'm going to be asked by an outside company when I make the call. I can tell you everything you'll likely be asked too, but when you're not in IT and it takes you a full day to do something because "I didn't have time", then you end up wasting company resources as well. I once spent an hour on the phone with the phone company finishing a task that a sales person had said they would do 3 days before. And that was after two weeks of bullshit with the sales person going back and forth with me, the phone company, the owner, and the director of accounting.
That is why sometimes you need to move the hell out of the way and let IT do their job. It has a lot less to do with keeping you from doing yours and a lot more to do with knowing that you probably don't have time to just get it done.
But what the fuck do I know, right? I'm just the IT guy. (this has become my mantra since nearly everything I say is ignored whether I'm asked for my opinion or not).
If you have a kid, you should MAKE SURE THERE'S A PASSWORD ON THE COMPUTER. Follow that up with simply not allowing the kid to do anything on the computer without supervision. When the kid is old enough, they can get their own computer.
There, fixed that for you.
Try actually being a parent instead of sticking them in front of the computer and then ignoring them for an hour or more. Yes, I have two children. No, they aren't allowed to use the computer unless I'm there. Yes, both my wife and I have passwords on our computers. When the kids are old enough that they need the computers for homework, they can do it and I'll sit in the room with them. It'll interfere with my game time, but so be it. Being an effective parent is hard work, especially in a connected world.
My parents didn't have to worry about this shit because the only way to "connect" with the outside world was to dial a local number (Q-Link back in the Commodore days) and go into a chat room (the good ones cost money). We knew two things 1) Do NOT dial a long distance number (anything outside of our area and we had to check the zum too) and 2) Do NOT enter any room with a + sign on it since those ones cost more. We had 5 kids in the house and no problem following those rules. Today all of that is pretty much free, so parents need to be more diligent.
This shit isn't hard to do. People would just rather let their kids do whatever they want on the computer instead of actually acting like parents. If you need help setting this shit up, contact your local neighborhood geek. I'm sure they'll be more than happy to help and you won't even have to tell them why you want it done.
No, I don't care to elaborate. I think its high time you broaden your horizons on your own time.
(...)
The point here is that unwillingness to answer a question to the satisfaction of some self appointed third party does not indicate an inability to do so.
So you self-appointed yourself as a judge of the breadth of some one else's horizons?
No. What he's saying, and I think you know quite well what he's saying, is that it's none of your damn business how he or any other parent chooses to tell his children where babies come from. If he decides to make something up, that's his business. If he decides to make it true without getting into details, that is again, his business, not yours.
Maybe their child is 2 or 3 years old and would better understand that a "stork" (which is pictured in most children's books on the topic) is what brought the baby to them rather than a much more mature answer of mommy and daddy had sex.
An age appropriate answer may not be true and it doesn't have to be true. I can't see why anyone else needs an explanation of why one parent might choose the stork story over trying to explain it to a small child.
Seriously, who cares if you can't see why a parent might explain it differently. It's really none of your damn business.
Wow, way to project. I have more problems, on a system level, with the one Mac in the office than I do with the other 50 Windows PCs.
Most of the people that have problems with Windows will have problems with any OS. Something won't work right or they'll screw something up. Maybe they need to change this setting here or that setting there. Or maybe they're just to cheap so they get a cheap machine and then bitch when it has problems. Windows, Mac, Linux, it doesn't matter what OS people are running, they'll always have a problem with something.
Free software running in a browser is no more safe than free software running on the machine. It's this kind of thinking that has brought us the "click on anything that pops up" mentality.
I suppose we should feel sorry for every company that ever released something for pay that eventually went out of business because someone else was able to do it for free? Damn Microsoft for including TCP/IP in WIndows! They forced Trumpet Winsock out of business!
Where do we draw the line?
Eric Schmidt could simply threaten to drop their search results to page 20050 out of 20049. Even on their names or trademarks.
Better not leave any evidence of that then. Talk about abusing a monopoly position. Yes, I know there are more search engines than just Google, but I'm pretty sure that if Microsoft saw a significant drop in traffic after something like that happening, they could easily convince a judge that Google is "abusing their monopoly position". They'd end up being split into multiple companies and pay hefty fines.
As for why this is a good move, it has already been discussed several times. You either understand what monopoly is or you don't.
An abusive monopoly is what's illegal, not a simple monopoly. AT&T was split up because it was an abusive monopoly ("you have to buy our phones because only our phones work"). Microsoft should have been split up for the same reason. By the time the decision to unbundle IE came down, there was plenty of competition (Opera, Mozilla/Firefox) so the decision became moot.
Remind us again what effect that ruling has had on Microsoft? Oh, that's right, none.
But how can anyone score 100% on everything if the questions require some analytical thinking and even opinion? Especially if your opinion might differ from the exam markers (not exactly unusual).
Just curious.
You can easily score in the 90+% range on analytical thinking papers simply by convincing the reader of your point. That is usually the point of those papers. Find a subject and convince the reader of your point. Even if your opinion on the subject is the opposite of the exam marker, they are reading the paper with an eye toward being convinced of your side of the argument. If you can do that, you pass. You're not literally trying to change their mind, simply presenting facts and coming to a conclusion. As long as your conclusion is in the realm of the facts you present, you pass.
I don't have a bachelors or a masters degree, but my wife has a masters and this is exactly what she had to do for her final paper.
God, the sense of entitlement around the world is making me sick...
There, fixed that for you.
Are you kidding? With Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003, it practically does this for you. Insert the CD and click on each step. The installer tells you exactly what to do. Open Add or Remove Programs. Click on Add/Remove Windows Programs. Select SMTP, IIS, and whatever else the installer is telling you to do. Finish installing Exchange. That gives you POP3, IMAP, SMTP, synced calendaring, and web.
PHP and MySQL can be installed as msi's. You could install wamp if you wanted. You may have to tweak the php.ini after installing php, but that's about it.
The firewall is turned on by default.
Right-click "My Computer", select Properties, then select "Remote". Click "Enable Remote Desktop on this Computer". There's your RDP. This can also be done via the registry from a system on the same domain logged into by an admin if you know where it's at.
Seriously, I think I've had to hit an actual config file all of once when setting up a Windows server. It's on a regular basis when working on a Linux server. About the only time I need to edit the registry for something like this is to change a port number (for RDP). Everything else can easily be done through the GUI.
Really? Normally, if I have a major problem, a quick Google search of the error message will take me right to Microsoft's support page with the solution.
Or I can do it the Linux way. Where I need to change something, but I can't remember where the damn web server config file is. I know it's in /etc somewhere (due to experience, otherwise I'd really be fucked). Hmm, maybe it's under "web". Nope, not there. Oh, that's right, it's probably under "apache" since that's the server for Linux. Whoops, not there either. Hmm, maybe the process list will give me a hint. Oh, that's right, it's under httpd. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Mind you that I searched for it for several minutes.
I actually had the above scenario happen to me. I don't configure Linux boxes on a regular basis, but I'm not exactly a n00b either. It had just been a while since I'd had to touch one, so it took me a while to find the file. I don't even bother with the GUI config tools under Linux unless I'm working on a machine that's not in the building.
At least with Windows all the GUI programs are in one spot (everything's under Administrative Tools) and Microsoft has plenty of support articles on how to edit the registry (when it's necessary and it often is) and exactly what needs to be changed.
I have seen plenty of forums, for both platforms, with people having the same damn problem and not getting any answers. That isn't strictly a Windows or Linux issue. That applies to every OS.
IIS started shipping in XP Media Center edition. It can be had for $110. Getting a version of Windows with a web and ftp server is very easy to do.
If you don't want to buy a more expensive version, you can also simply download a free web and ftp server. There's plenty out there that run on Windows.
It's not entirely ruined, but you certainly won't be making any big ticket purchases (ie cars or homes) without getting the highest interest rate they can stick you with. At that point, your history shows that you are not a good risk for high amounts like that.
Try applying for a home loan and see how far you get. While you may be able to get some amount, you likely won't be able to get anything significant and you won't be able to get a nice low rate.
Unfortunately all of this is practically pointless. I cannot remember when I last had a bluescreen in XP or any reason to wish for a better sound implementation.
One thing I was pleasantly surprised to find out with Vista that made it better than XP was my system attached to a KVM. Every now and then, XP would load but the keyboard and mouse simply wouldn't work, requiring a reboot. I haven't had a single instance of that happening under Vista. I haven't had a chance to try it under Windows 7 yet, but I have no doubt that it'll work just fine. Note that the KVM isn't plugged into a power adapter and is simply being powered via the PS/2 keyboard :)
Creative cards working yet? I'd heard vista lacked any decent hardware sound support, effectivelly rendering headphone gaming with X-fi cards impossible.
You mean Creative refused to release upgraded drivers and wanted you to buy upgraded hardware that had proper drivers instead. Don't blame this one on Vista or Microsoft. Everybody else seems to have had no problems with supplying upgraded drivers except Creative.
Also I don't buy their statistics. According to the latest steam hardware survey data released (June 2007) 60% of all surveyed systems were using winXP still, even a year after win7's launch unless it manages to actually outperform XP I don't see that changing anytime soon.
And 25% are running Vista. I would bet that the majority of people running Vista will upgrade to Win7 and a good chunk of the ones running XP will also upgrade to Win7 since they've been waiting for Win7.
What the hell are you running? A P3 with 128 MB of RAM and integrated video? I've found that on even a P4 2 GHz with 2 GB of RAM and integrated intel video (a low end machine by todays standards), the menus were far faster with the default settings under Vista than they were under XP. Sure, you can turn off all that fading crap in XP and make it faster, but I didn't have to do any of that with Vista to get really responsive menus. And if you've got a decent 3D accelerator (even a cheap $30 one), the system is even faster and you get the 3D flipping (which is pretty nice once you use it).
2008-2009 - Stock Dell, Vista w/ dual-headed Radeon(work computer)
The problem here is that you're likely doing a remote desktop from a different setup. Remote desktop from a system with one monitor (maybe even two) into a system with two monitors does really wonky things, usually fixed by a restart. This isn't really a problem with Office 2007 so much as it's a problem with the way remote desktop works with dual monitors.
The screens would randomly trade places on restart... sometimes the left would be #1 and sometimes it was #2...
I'm pretty sure this is a driver issue. It happens from time to time with Nvidia drivers and Quadro NVS cards. Of course, it usually starts blue screening as well, but it's almost always after changing the configuration after the initial setup. A driver reinstall has always fixed the problem for me.
Both of these problems seem more like they're related to the application or driver than to Windows itself, at least as far as I can tell.
I'm just wondering why the average Joe has to work as hard as ever and still has a struggle to provide for his (ever retreating) retirement
And yet here you are posting on Slashdot in the middle of a work day. People much older and wiser than you would hardly call that "working hard". Just because you work a 9-5 job does not mean you're working hard.
As a server admin, I rarely work hard. When I do, it's usually due to some kind of hardware failure. But it isn't exactly back breaking work, so I doubt my grandparents would've referred to it as "hard work". Then again, hard work isn't what pays anyway. Smart work is what pays.
What's amusing to me is that if you want to education or health care funded in the US, you have to lobby Congress like hell to fund it.
What's amusing to me is that people think education or health care is a proper role for the Federal Government.
What's amusing to me is that people think education or health care is a proper role for unaccountable entities whose primary responsibility is profit.
Unaccountable entities? You mean like the private schools where you can simply not enroll your child? If enough parents don't like the way a private school is run, it goes out of business.
Oh, you were referring to the public schools. The ones that are run by the government and really are unaccountable. Silly me.
I don't know where you're at, but around here (SoCal) the cams do take the pics from the front of your car. And yes, the flash is pretty damn bright at night.
Valve can probably fix this fairly easy, they've just chosen not to. The fact that you can "Gift" a game to someone tells me that if they wanted to allow Steam users to sell games to one another, they'd come up with a way to do it.
I've never had the urge to sell any of my used games and I've only purchased one PC game used in my life (Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne).
LOL! By this logic, every modern game is "unplayable" because they can't usually be played on a laptop.
Newsflash: gaming companies don't care about laptops. This is why, on the list of supported hardware, you'll see "Notebook or laptop versions of these cards may work but they are not supported".
Sounds to me like Might and Magic V had good graphics, you just couldn't play it on a portable system. That's no surprise. Crysis has great graphics too (along with a bunch of other games) and most of them are unplayable on laptops. Hell, Portal crashes on some desktops with integrated graphics (shocked!).