I still use my Asus A600 for reading ebooks, so I'd suggest getting another PDA. While I like e-ink for its display properties as well as power consumption, and I'm not totally opposed to the Amazon and Sony devices, they don't quite do it for me yet. Having to mess around with their software/online services just to get your file to display certainly doesn't help, and they're a bit pricey for single purpose devices.
Since you've used a Palm for this purpose already, you'll know that pretty much any PDA fills all of your criteria. So as for a specific suggestion, maybe the HTC Touch HD? It's got an excellent 3.8" 480x800 screen and if you don't use 3G constantly (or even turn off the GSM/CDMA reciever), the battery life should be good too as the talk time is around 8 hours. Obviously, it will also support any file format there's software available for WM, which is most of them. With a screen that large, even PDFs should be quite readable without screwing aroud with reflow.
Yep, "we" have those in Kiev, at least in some intersections (mostly in the center), and the rest flash the color before changing.
I say "we" because I no longer live there, and around here (Prague) not only are there no countdowns, there's no flashing either. I haven't actually measured how long the yellow stays up, but it feels quite short, resulting in everyone (including bus and tram drivers) occasionaly driving through on red. I'm glad there aren't nearly as many red light cameras as there are speed ones, as a significant portion of the population would be without a license within a year.
Unfortunately, trying to be more like the consoles is precicely what causes most of these problems. Games for Windows Live, Rockstar Super Adventure Club, and Steam (which for some reason usually gets a free pass) all attempt to create a more console-ish experience. Fuck that, it doesn't even matter whether they succeed or not. A decent server browser works perfectly fine, somehow I don't think a half-competent developer will have a problem implementing it if Epic could get it right back with UT99.
All the points, achievements and all the other pointless shit can fuck right off. And really, what's with the idea of yet another instant messaging system? PCs have this thing called "multitasking" which allows us to use existing communication channels to talk to friends. But no, apparently that's too hard for some of the drooling retards to understand. And of course the whole DLC thing is another bastardization of an old PC concept, known as Expansion, Add-on, or Bonus Pack. Buy it if it costs something, download the content, run the installer, and BAM! There's the expansion, right next to the original game.
Contrary to how it might seem from this post, I'm not actually foaming at the mouth. Still, I'll probably have to play some Quake Wars to release some steam, as it's actually one of the few recent (if you can call it that) games that gets almost everything right. There's no DRM besides the serial, the game doesn't really need to be "installed" and I think can even be played from a network share. The server browser is very nice and has plenty of useful filters, while the friends system is simple and unobtrusive, and the permanent statistics have no impact on the game besides your virtual dick size. Just the way it should be, unfortunately judging by the sales figures people enjoy grinding XP just too much.
Re:Bad Logic
on
Less Is Moore
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· Score: 3, Informative
If you only installed Office 2008 for the new file formats, you can wipe it and go back to whatever ancient version you were using, as there are updates available which add support for the new xml based format. Obviously the old binary format must be so much that I'm not sure what my point was any more.
It may not be supported, but at least PunkBuster works on 64 bit Win7, at last for come definitions of "work". The first time I launched ET:QW I got kicked within seconds for not having PB installed. I used their update utility to install it, but still got kicked out of the game. Turned out the PB service didn't install properly or failed to start.
Searching the net suggested that it's pretty much impossible to get PB to work on Win7, and especially the 64 bit version. However, randomly dicking around with compatibility mode and running with full admin rights finally got the service started. Unfortunately I'm not sure what the actual combination was, but if you're having similar issues, try running both the PB updater and the game with admin rights, and the updater in either Vista or XP mode. I'm not sure if running the game itself with full privileges is actually necessary, but it certainly isn't once the service is running.
but instead, a bunch of shitty songs from St. Anger and Death Magnetic.
As for the second pedal, I liked Ars' take on this: "[...] and you'll be able to hook up a second pedal to your drums in order to barely keep up with the rest of the band. Just like Lars!"
Yeah, that was an excellent and insightful post by AC there.
Except that I'm not from the UK. Why do people even think that, is it because I linked to an article from The Register? Or do you honestly think that the only people who can have a problem with certain aspects of certain parts of EU's policy are bitter right-wing Brits? For now, I'll just take it as a compliment on my skillful use of the English language.
In the countries which joined during the last two enlargements (10 in 2004 and 2 in 2007), sizable parts of the population which held a referendum voted against joining the EU. Usually far from a majority, but certainly not something you can ignore and claim that the only dissent comes from the UK. Then of course are those who were for joining the EU, except that I don't think everyone unquestionably supports every single EU policy ever, so add all those people too. I can't be bothered to do the actual calculations, but considering the size of some of these countries, this adds up to plenty of people.
I guess you have too much at stake, with your country soon to become the set to the Waterworld sequel with all the associated problems. However, if the UK does fuck off, who is going to subsidise your tulips, tomatoes, and prostitutes?
Are we still talking about Windows? I don't have Photoshop installed here, but I do have both InDesign and Illustrator, and I can drag and drop any object (path, bitmap, text or even a graph) from a document in Illustrator into a document in InDesign and vice versa. It works exactly as you describe for dragging objects within an application, and is functionally identical to copy/paste.
I can even drag any object into MS Paint which accepts the drop, but of course can't interpret the content. What does work though is dragging text from Word into InDesign, the text just appears on the workspace. So in conclusion, the app just needs to handle drag and drop to accept it, and then understand the format the data is in.
As someone who lives in a EU country, I think my frothing-at-the-mouth is completely justified, as this will limit my purchasing choices. Apparently the EU fuckers are at it again, having already dealt with the huge threat that are the patio heaters.
I'm not surprised the EU isn't completely hands off in terms of the energy policy and regulation so that's not what I'm complaining about, but outright banning TVs that aren't quite up to their arbitrary standards is retarded. Labeling system? That's fine, there's been a similar system for appliances so expanding it shouldn't be a problem. However, nothing prevents me from buying a Rolls-Royce Phantom or a Lamborghini Reventon (at least not yet, let's hope they don't get any ideas) so preventing me from buying a TV they don't approve of is silly. Especially if it's not used nearly often/long enough to be a significant part of the power bill.
Of course, there's also probably EU's favorite non-tariff trade barrier angle, as most TVs aren't made in the EU but instead in China or another Asian country. Banning some of their exports will certainly show them who's who.
This is not what happes at all, at least not on XP SP2.
Setting notepad's affinity only to CPU 3 and priority to Realtime does absolutely nothing: the overall CPU usage stays at about 1-2% and Windows is perfectly responsive. But the thread is idle, I hear you say! Well doing the exact same thing to a working WinRAR process just results in 25% overall usage and ~100% core 3 utilization, leaving the system as responsive as ever.
The only reason this is even news is that Apple/ipod is involved. Ballistics calculators have been available for other PDAs for quite a while now, and of course specialized devices (likely based on the ARM 9 kits you mention) also exist.
I think the iphone actually has some sort of native code support, but in this case it's the ipod and I'm not sure about that. In any case, I can't see how it could be sigificantly easier than writing C# in Visual Studio. I went from zero VS and C# (and for that matter C++) experience to writing useful apps in an evening or two. The benefits of not having Apple suddenly decide to wash their hands off of blood money also apply.
From now on, could you describe what's going on in some other terms so that those of us who are not present can understand what's actually going on more clearly? Perhaps try transferring the information obtained by observing your surroundings into a target subject which could be easily understood by us, such as perhaps cars or computers.
I've heard of this website that would surely welcome volunteers who are good with perl and SQL. Have a look at this, I'm confident someone here would be able to contribute something useful. They have a development-related blog here
Speaking of which, why the hell do they do this? What's the point of swapping two keys around, such as Z and Y in case of the German (and Czech, and possibly quite a few other) layout? This has been my greatest keyboard-related mystery for quite a while now.
Not every game is Crysis, so it's not like everyone has 8GB DDR3 quad core SLI monsters. For instance, Source engine games run fine on my 5 year old secondary system. And to answer your question directly, by saving. People probably find it reasonable to save some money for a PC which will provide years of service.
I've warezed games instead of buying them through Steam because it was easier to do.
In any case, he's wrong on one major thing: Russians aren't pirating games because they're released a bit later than elsewhere, they do it because a $50 game is about 10% of an average monthly income. Some publishers account for that and price their games competitively, and it works, mostly.
Also don't forget A Scanner Darkly, where he's playing a guy who's so fucked up on drugs, most of the time he doesn't know if he's an undercover cop, the druggie he's supposed to monitor, or both. As with the films you mentioned, he manages to perfectly portray a character with only partially functioning brain.
Apple's RDF did its job, and your post is a prime example of it. It managed to convince you, and at least a few moderators, that the Nomad Jukebox (I assume that's the player what you're talking about, as comparing the ipod to the Nomad makes no sense) has a 45min battery life instead of about 6 times that number (on rechargable AAs), or that it can't be used as a portable harddrive, or that it has terrible interface. Let's compare how one adds songs to the playlist. On the Jukebox, you go to an album or track and push "Add to queue". On the ipod... you wait four generations until this is possible, and then look up the feature on about.com.
Well I gave it a try on my HTC S730 because I have nothing else to do at work. The camera is a pretty shitty 2 megapixel with no autofocus, but it seems to work quite well. The tags are 15mm across once printed and are reliably detected from about 15cm away in rather average lighting (diffuse sunlight, the paper is in the shadow behind some equipment). Doesn't have to be straight down either, something like 45 degrees usually works fine too. Oh, scanning them from the monitor works too, but I thought that won't be a very realistic usage scenario.
Despite the usual "HURRR M$" sentiment, I think this could be pretty useful, and the implementation is already rather decent. Some people mentioned that color is a drawback, but I don't think so. Most advertising and packaging material I come across nowadays is in color, the only exceptions are perhaps the crappy flyers people try to stick in my face in public places, and I don't care about what's on them anyway.
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I still use my Asus A600 for reading ebooks, so I'd suggest getting another PDA. While I like e-ink for its display properties as well as power consumption, and I'm not totally opposed to the Amazon and Sony devices, they don't quite do it for me yet. Having to mess around with their software/online services just to get your file to display certainly doesn't help, and they're a bit pricey for single purpose devices.
Since you've used a Palm for this purpose already, you'll know that pretty much any PDA fills all of your criteria. So as for a specific suggestion, maybe the HTC Touch HD? It's got an excellent 3.8" 480x800 screen and if you don't use 3G constantly (or even turn off the GSM/CDMA reciever), the battery life should be good too as the talk time is around 8 hours. Obviously, it will also support any file format there's software available for WM, which is most of them. With a screen that large, even PDFs should be quite readable without screwing aroud with reflow.
Yep, "we" have those in Kiev, at least in some intersections (mostly in the center), and the rest flash the color before changing.
I say "we" because I no longer live there, and around here (Prague) not only are there no countdowns, there's no flashing either. I haven't actually measured how long the yellow stays up, but it feels quite short, resulting in everyone (including bus and tram drivers) occasionaly driving through on red. I'm glad there aren't nearly as many red light cameras as there are speed ones, as a significant portion of the population would be without a license within a year.
>The default install of eeeubuntu on my EeePC 701 comes with more software than I've ever seen installed on a single Windows PC.
So in other words, it's terribly bloated?
>And what about the british? Oh wait you conveniently ignore them.
The same applies for the British. Except not quite as ridiculously poor.
Unfortunately, trying to be more like the consoles is precicely what causes most of these problems. Games for Windows Live, Rockstar Super Adventure Club, and Steam (which for some reason usually gets a free pass) all attempt to create a more console-ish experience. Fuck that, it doesn't even matter whether they succeed or not. A decent server browser works perfectly fine, somehow I don't think a half-competent developer will have a problem implementing it if Epic could get it right back with UT99.
All the points, achievements and all the other pointless shit can fuck right off. And really, what's with the idea of yet another instant messaging system? PCs have this thing called "multitasking" which allows us to use existing communication channels to talk to friends. But no, apparently that's too hard for some of the drooling retards to understand. And of course the whole DLC thing is another bastardization of an old PC concept, known as Expansion, Add-on, or Bonus Pack. Buy it if it costs something, download the content, run the installer, and BAM! There's the expansion, right next to the original game.
Contrary to how it might seem from this post, I'm not actually foaming at the mouth. Still, I'll probably have to play some Quake Wars to release some steam, as it's actually one of the few recent (if you can call it that) games that gets almost everything right. There's no DRM besides the serial, the game doesn't really need to be "installed" and I think can even be played from a network share. The server browser is very nice and has plenty of useful filters, while the friends system is simple and unobtrusive, and the permanent statistics have no impact on the game besides your virtual dick size. Just the way it should be, unfortunately judging by the sales figures people enjoy grinding XP just too much.
If you only installed Office 2008 for the new file formats, you can wipe it and go back to whatever ancient version you were using, as there are updates available which add support for the new xml based format. Obviously the old binary format must be so much that I'm not sure what my point was any more.
It may not be supported, but at least PunkBuster works on 64 bit Win7, at last for come definitions of "work". The first time I launched ET:QW I got kicked within seconds for not having PB installed. I used their update utility to install it, but still got kicked out of the game. Turned out the PB service didn't install properly or failed to start.
Searching the net suggested that it's pretty much impossible to get PB to work on Win7, and especially the 64 bit version. However, randomly dicking around with compatibility mode and running with full admin rights finally got the service started. Unfortunately I'm not sure what the actual combination was, but if you're having similar issues, try running both the PB updater and the game with admin rights, and the updater in either Vista or XP mode. I'm not sure if running the game itself with full privileges is actually necessary, but it certainly isn't once the service is running.
but instead, a bunch of shitty songs from St. Anger and Death Magnetic.
As for the second pedal, I liked Ars' take on this: "[...] and you'll be able to hook up a second pedal to your drums in order to barely keep up with the rest of the band. Just like Lars!"
Speaking of the whitehouse mascot, I think their latest cover makes the whole magazine worth it, no matter what the actual content is.
Yeah, that was an excellent and insightful post by AC there.
Except that I'm not from the UK. Why do people even think that, is it because I linked to an article from The Register? Or do you honestly think that the only people who can have a problem with certain aspects of certain parts of EU's policy are bitter right-wing Brits? For now, I'll just take it as a compliment on my skillful use of the English language.
In the countries which joined during the last two enlargements (10 in 2004 and 2 in 2007), sizable parts of the population which held a referendum voted against joining the EU. Usually far from a majority, but certainly not something you can ignore and claim that the only dissent comes from the UK. Then of course are those who were for joining the EU, except that I don't think everyone unquestionably supports every single EU policy ever, so add all those people too. I can't be bothered to do the actual calculations, but considering the size of some of these countries, this adds up to plenty of people.
I guess you have too much at stake, with your country soon to become the set to the Waterworld sequel with all the associated problems. However, if the UK does fuck off, who is going to subsidise your tulips, tomatoes, and prostitutes?
Are we still talking about Windows? I don't have Photoshop installed here, but I do have both InDesign and Illustrator, and I can drag and drop any object (path, bitmap, text or even a graph) from a document in Illustrator into a document in InDesign and vice versa. It works exactly as you describe for dragging objects within an application, and is functionally identical to copy/paste.
I can even drag any object into MS Paint which accepts the drop, but of course can't interpret the content. What does work though is dragging text from Word into InDesign, the text just appears on the workspace. So in conclusion, the app just needs to handle drag and drop to accept it, and then understand the format the data is in.
As someone who lives in a EU country, I think my frothing-at-the-mouth is completely justified, as this will limit my purchasing choices. Apparently the EU fuckers are at it again, having already dealt with the huge threat that are the patio heaters.
I'm not surprised the EU isn't completely hands off in terms of the energy policy and regulation so that's not what I'm complaining about, but outright banning TVs that aren't quite up to their arbitrary standards is retarded. Labeling system? That's fine, there's been a similar system for appliances so expanding it shouldn't be a problem. However, nothing prevents me from buying a Rolls-Royce Phantom or a Lamborghini Reventon (at least not yet, let's hope they don't get any ideas) so preventing me from buying a TV they don't approve of is silly. Especially if it's not used nearly often/long enough to be a significant part of the power bill.
Of course, there's also probably EU's favorite non-tariff trade barrier angle, as most TVs aren't made in the EU but instead in China or another Asian country. Banning some of their exports will certainly show them who's who.
This is not what happes at all, at least not on XP SP2.
Setting notepad's affinity only to CPU 3 and priority to Realtime does absolutely nothing: the overall CPU usage stays at about 1-2% and Windows is perfectly responsive. But the thread is idle, I hear you say! Well doing the exact same thing to a working WinRAR process just results in 25% overall usage and ~100% core 3 utilization, leaving the system as responsive as ever.
The only reason this is even news is that Apple/ipod is involved. Ballistics calculators have been available for other PDAs for quite a while now, and of course specialized devices (likely based on the ARM 9 kits you mention) also exist.
I think the iphone actually has some sort of native code support, but in this case it's the ipod and I'm not sure about that. In any case, I can't see how it could be sigificantly easier than writing C# in Visual Studio. I went from zero VS and C# (and for that matter C++) experience to writing useful apps in an evening or two. The benefits of not having Apple suddenly decide to wash their hands off of blood money also apply.
From now on, could you describe what's going on in some other terms so that those of us who are not present can understand what's actually going on more clearly? Perhaps try transferring the information obtained by observing your surroundings into a target subject which could be easily understood by us, such as perhaps cars or computers.
I've heard of this website that would surely welcome volunteers who are good with perl and SQL. Have a look at this, I'm confident someone here would be able to contribute something useful. They have a development-related blog here
Speaking of which, why the hell do they do this? What's the point of swapping two keys around, such as Z and Y in case of the German (and Czech, and possibly quite a few other) layout? This has been my greatest keyboard-related mystery for quite a while now.
Not every game is Crysis, so it's not like everyone has 8GB DDR3 quad core SLI monsters. For instance, Source engine games run fine on my 5 year old secondary system. And to answer your question directly, by saving. People probably find it reasonable to save some money for a PC which will provide years of service.
>Unfortunately, most people aren't like you.
Yeah, exactly. I actually bought TF2 right away. Then I realized that it wasn't nearly as good as it seemed, and now I'm stuck with it.
I've warezed games instead of buying them through Steam because it was easier to do.
In any case, he's wrong on one major thing: Russians aren't pirating games because they're released a bit later than elsewhere, they do it because a $50 game is about 10% of an average monthly income. Some publishers account for that and price their games competitively, and it works, mostly.
Also don't forget A Scanner Darkly, where he's playing a guy who's so fucked up on drugs, most of the time he doesn't know if he's an undercover cop, the druggie he's supposed to monitor, or both. As with the films you mentioned, he manages to perfectly portray a character with only partially functioning brain.
>And I wish other laptops had the "two finger" right click and the two-finger scroll.
Why, so one could have more accidental right clicks and scrolls?
Apple's RDF did its job, and your post is a prime example of it. It managed to convince you, and at least a few moderators, that the Nomad Jukebox (I assume that's the player what you're talking about, as comparing the ipod to the Nomad makes no sense) has a 45min battery life instead of about 6 times that number (on rechargable AAs), or that it can't be used as a portable harddrive, or that it has terrible interface. Let's compare how one adds songs to the playlist. On the Jukebox, you go to an album or track and push "Add to queue". On the ipod... you wait four generations until this is possible, and then look up the feature on about.com.
> I can't imagine why anybody would play Quake Live [instead of this]...
Furries.
Well I gave it a try on my HTC S730 because I have nothing else to do at work. The camera is a pretty shitty 2 megapixel with no autofocus, but it seems to work quite well. The tags are 15mm across once printed and are reliably detected from about 15cm away in rather average lighting (diffuse sunlight, the paper is in the shadow behind some equipment). Doesn't have to be straight down either, something like 45 degrees usually works fine too. Oh, scanning them from the monitor works too, but I thought that won't be a very realistic usage scenario.
Despite the usual "HURRR M$" sentiment, I think this could be pretty useful, and the implementation is already rather decent. Some people mentioned that color is a drawback, but I don't think so. Most advertising and packaging material I come across nowadays is in color, the only exceptions are perhaps the crappy flyers people try to stick in my face in public places, and I don't care about what's on them anyway.