I don't know a single person who has said, "Wow, Vista has really made my computer so much better."
You can count me as one, sort of. When I sit down at a computer I want to use application, not the OS. I MS Office, Photoshop, Python, Cygwin, and 3D Studio Max make my computer "so much better", the OS underneath is less important- it just has to work.
What were your problems with Vista?
I've had a Vista Fujitsu laptop for 3 hassle-free months. My instinct was to go with XP, but the option of a built in 1GB flash disk cache intruiged me, and was only available with Vista, so I thought I'd at least give it a try (there was no extra cost, and an XP license is included).
The file explorer is much more usable than XP. The 'breadcrumbs' are great when you get used to them- I missed the 'Up one directory' button for a few days, but the breadcrumbs are far more powerful. File copying is a lot smarter too, with better options replacing the "cancel/overwrite" type on XP.
Network timeouts seem to be much better- XP has this annoying way of freezing for 30 seconds if you try to access a network share that doesn't exist, Vista doesn't freeze your UI.
You can in fact throw any flash drive into Vista and tell it to use all or part of it as a disk cache.
Wireless networking has given the least trouble of any computer I've used, including a Macbook Pro which every few days loses the signal until the adapter is switched off and on again.
The new 'C' series of fonts designed for subpixel rendering look great everywhere, subpixel rendering is generally a negative with a lower resolution display but with a 17" WSXGA+ display it just looks fantastic. (these fonts are availabe for XP too of course)
No more 'My Documents', and 'Documents' are not clutterd by Music, etc. The file structure is now actually usable by default, and is way easier to type from DOS or Cygwin. For example:
Windows explorer also does a much better job with image thumbnails, something that the OS X Finder does very poorly, allowing them to be scaled etc.
The only real negatives so far have been the difficulty of locating an HP printer driver (hint: try the generic Laserjet driver that HP hides away and doesn't link to), and not being able to display legacy windows help (which is fixable by downloading winhelp from MS).
I wouldn't upgrade an old PC to Vista as the difference isn't huge and the threat of driver problems is too great, but I'd buy Vista again on my next PC or laptop. It looks good (better than XP anyway which is pretty ugly), is stable and responsive, and has a bunch of great little features. The only thing that I miss from the Unix world is a decent shell, and that's easily remedied by installing Cygwin.
By bundling Thunderbird, they manage to kill the ancient MS argument against OO.o ("It doesn't even have an email client!")
Outlook is a lot more than an email client. How do I create a task from an email in Thunderbird? In Outlook it's one click. How well does Thunderbird sync with my phone/PDA?
every Microsoft Office user who's tried OpenOffice for 10 minutes and had trouble with new ideas
I'm not sure that missing a vitally important feature that was availabe in Office 2000 counts as a 'new idea'.
OpenOffice is great. Thunderbird is great too. They're great free products that fill a need for some people but they fall so far from feature parity with even old versions of Office that suggesting them as a replacement for a 'power' Offic user is just a joke.
It took me the better part of a couple of hours to place and size not only the images, but the frames that surrounded them. [...] I opened the document up with MS Word and realized that all of my work had been for naught
If you have access to MS Word, how about just adding the images in MS Word? It should take a lot less than 2 hours, and should actually save the images in the.doc. Of course, this might put you on the slippery slope to writing the whole document in MS Word- that's the way that these things happen. This is coming from someone who has long hated MS products but who now spends many hours a day in Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint and Word (all 2007) and would find it extremely difficult to switch to anything else.
The Air Muscle consists of a rubber tube covered in tough plastic netting which shortens in length like a human muscle when inflated with compressed air at low pressure.
Previously Blu-Ray sales had been about 2:1 in favor of Blu-Ray, though the whole year (66% to 34%, to be exact). Sony Blu-Ray players in the last few months have actually been outselling Toshiba standalone players, and that's not counting the PS3 numbers.
But Blu-Ray only got that momentum from the PS3, before it's release HD-DVD was outselling Blu-Ray. That's _9_Months_ with the lead! These are very early days, and bigger market leads have been lost in the past- see IBM, Atari, Betamax, and Dreamcast.
This time around the competing media are the same physical size, and even use the same codecs. In a few years time all players will be dual-format HD-DVD & Blu-Ray, and you'll need the red and blue boxes to tell them apart on your shelf.
CDs actually had quite a bit of competition from cassette tapes early on. The quality of pre-recorded tapes improved as did the decks, and other than a bit of background hiss they could hold their own against CDs which were about double the price.
The first audio CDs (US$30) and players (US$900) were released in 1982, and Audio CD didn't become the leading music format until the early 90's. Many cars had cassette players as standard until the late 90's.
In a few years time when dual format players are $50, and the HD disks sell for the same price as DVDs, you might feel differently.
I've only bought a handful of HD-DVDs, I don't in any way feel a need to 'collect' films, most of which are throwaway watch-once things, and can't think of a film I like enough 're-buy' it in HD. I have bought a couple of recent HD-DVDs such as Hot Fuzz- the HD version is only US$8 more, is backward-compatible with DVD, and contains a ton of exclusive extras.
How big an HDTV did you get? If you sit an appropriate distance from it you're kidding yourself if you think High def doesn't look signficantly better than DVD. Once I started getting used to the (even 720p) output from my Xbox 360 I realized how crappy DVDs look, even upscaled. At this moment in time, would you save a couple of bucks to buy a movie on VCD instead of DVD? It'll still be watchable on your HDTV. You don't 'need' HD anymore than you 'need' DVD over VCD. If you bought 1080p TV just to upscale movies, I think you should question the point behind the fancy TV in the first place.
The most stunning thing I've watched so far in HD-DVD is Planet Earth, try seeing it in HD if you get the chance, and then decide if there's a difference for yourself.
I think the Sigourney Weaver narration is only available from the discovery channel store. I can't work out why they didn't just release one version with both narrations.
Wikipedia to the rescue. It seems that they did only release on version, the David Attenborough one (thank god). Sigourney Weaver only did the narration on the Discovery channel broadcast
Wikipedia to the rescue again; as I said there are two versions of the DVD/HD-DVD/BluRay release: "The U.S. version also features a new narrator: award-winning actress and conservationist Sigourney Weaver. The Discovery Channel DVD release should contain this new narration, as listed on the Discovery Store website; but the BBC's DVD, Blu-ray and HD DVD releases in the USA will feature the original version with David Attenborough as narrator"
I hope you're watching the original* one narrated by David Attenborough
Of Course! I grew up in England, and have have been listening to David Attenborough's voice (on and off) since I was 4 when 'Life on Earth' was first shown.
I think the Sigourney Weaver narration is only available from the discovery channel store. I can't work out why they didn't just release one version with both narrations. I really can't work out why they left the 'making of' programs off the HD versions- who wouldn't want to see someone duct-taping their trousers to keep out the cockroaches and bat shit?
I agree- once you get into a good movie you forget how fancy the picture looks- a good movie on a 12" Black & White TV is still a good movie.
But 'Planet Earth' in HD is different- every time you see a panoramic view of an African plain with clearly identifiable animals moving all over it, or a time lapse satellite shot of a weather system moving around the curve of the Earth, you're reminded how stunning the picture is.
I personally find that sport in HD, 360 games, and 'Planet Earth' are the three things my 1080p set does best- I bought a couple of movies on HD-DVD and as you said, I didn't really enjoy them any more than I would have on DVD.
Why are there so few people like yourself voting and commenting on the IMDB? Right now it's at User Rating: 8.3/10 (6,424 votes). The votes, User Comments, and Message Board posts there are overwhelmingly positive.
The movie leaves me with quite a few other questions too:
Why did we have to spend 20 minutes watching robots tiptoe around the garden breaking flowerpots to set up a lame joke about the kid wanking (although his mum's reaction when the girl appeared was the best moment in the film)? That scene edited down to about a minute.
Why did they decide to go to the nearest population center with the magic cubey thing, when that will cause the greatest possible number of casualties?
Why did the army guy suddenly turn around and back the kid ("get him to his car"), when to our knowledge they'd never met and he had no idea what his car was?
Why did it turn into the heartwarming story of one boy and his pet alien robot, in the best tradition of ET, Flight of the Navigator, and Short Circuit?
With all that money, do you think they could have paid someone with some knowledge of scriptwriting to glance over the script?
Why would anyone think that getting the cube into a chopper would keep it from the alien robots, who can outfly and outgun all human aircraft?
Why the need for all the racial stereotypes?
How does a kid manage to climb up 10 stories of stairs faster than a robot who can literally fly through buildings?
Yes, it was spectacular watching that camera shake around. Seems like ILM have nailed their motion blurring algorithms so well that I didn't have a clue what was happening for most of the main battle sequences.
The iPhone doesn't really cost $600, just like your average RAZR that comes with a 3 year contract doesn't cost $0. I don't know how much the AT&T voice + data contract costs, but if it's around $55/month you're paying $2000 for 2 years of voice and data + ownership of the hardware. Of course if you were going to pay for this voice and data plan anyway, and there's no chance of a better/cheaper one coming along from a competitor in the meantime, then you will end up with a pretty good deal.
A quick look at similar phones shows that they are around the $600-700 mark.
Given the premium that Apple usually charges for their hardware, I can't really imagine a stand-alone iPhone being sold for less than around $1000.
I personally have an HTC TyTN and it's fantastic, I just wish it was a bit smaller and that the touch screen was a bit easier to use with my fingers (without the stylus) - maybe I should grow a coke nail.
There's a great quote from Not the Nine O'Clock News in about 1981 that is something to the effect of:
The USA has decided that to make up for being late to the last two world wars they're going to be really punctual this time.
Re:People are too easy to distract
on
Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
do the same thing. The only difference is that I don't see a need to apologize for my phone ringing, anymore than I would apologize for my desk/home phone ringing, or my doorbell ringing. Getting a notification that someone would like to talk to is not an offense.
Uhh, I think the apology was for answering it, not for the fact that it rang.
PDF isn't idiot proof either. I saw some sensitive letters published online as PDFs, with the names blacked out. Only problem was the 'blacking out' was simply black rectangles drawn on a different layer from the background image- anyone with Adobe Acrobat could extract the image underneath and read all the names.
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You can count me as one, sort of. When I sit down at a computer I want to use application, not the OS. I MS Office, Photoshop, Python, Cygwin, and 3D Studio Max make my computer "so much better", the OS underneath is less important- it just has to work.
What were your problems with Vista?
I've had a Vista Fujitsu laptop for 3 hassle-free months. My instinct was to go with XP, but the option of a built in 1GB flash disk cache intruiged me, and was only available with Vista, so I thought I'd at least give it a try (there was no extra cost, and an XP license is included).
The file explorer is much more usable than XP. The 'breadcrumbs' are great when you get used to them- I missed the 'Up one directory' button for a few days, but the breadcrumbs are far more powerful. File copying is a lot smarter too, with better options replacing the "cancel/overwrite" type on XP.
Network timeouts seem to be much better- XP has this annoying way of freezing for 30 seconds if you try to access a network share that doesn't exist, Vista doesn't freeze your UI.
You can in fact throw any flash drive into Vista and tell it to use all or part of it as a disk cache.
Wireless networking has given the least trouble of any computer I've used, including a Macbook Pro which every few days loses the signal until the adapter is switched off and on again.
The new 'C' series of fonts designed for subpixel rendering look great everywhere, subpixel rendering is generally a negative with a lower resolution display but with a 17" WSXGA+ display it just looks fantastic. (these fonts are availabe for XP too of course)
No more 'My Documents', and 'Documents' are not clutterd by Music, etc. The file structure is now actually usable by default, and is way easier to type from DOS or Cygwin. For example:
C:\Users\MyName\Documents
C:\Users\MyName\Videos
C:\Users\MyName\Music
Windows explorer also does a much better job with image thumbnails, something that the OS X Finder does very poorly, allowing them to be scaled etc.
The only real negatives so far have been the difficulty of locating an HP printer driver (hint: try the generic Laserjet driver that HP hides away and doesn't link to), and not being able to display legacy windows help (which is fixable by downloading winhelp from MS).
I wouldn't upgrade an old PC to Vista as the difference isn't huge and the threat of driver problems is too great, but I'd buy Vista again on my next PC or laptop. It looks good (better than XP anyway which is pretty ugly), is stable and responsive, and has a bunch of great little features. The only thing that I miss from the Unix world is a decent shell, and that's easily remedied by installing Cygwin.
Perhaps that should have been: Note how frequently the people promoting LaTex are Computer Science PhD students.
I've known plenty of PhD and Masters candidates in non-CS fields, they all used Word on either a PC or Mac, without exception.
OpenOffice is great. Thunderbird is great too. They're great free products that fill a need for some people but they fall so far from feature parity with even old versions of Office that suggesting them as a replacement for a 'power' Offic user is just a joke.
I agree about Fujitsu; I have a LifeBook E8410 and it's superbly built, with a 3-year warranty as standard. Lovely WSXGA+ non-reflective screen too.
They were building a very ambitious Biped Walker out of wood a while back but it seems to have been scrapped now.
This time around the competing media are the same physical size, and even use the same codecs. In a few years time all players will be dual-format HD-DVD & Blu-Ray, and you'll need the red and blue boxes to tell them apart on your shelf.
CDs actually had quite a bit of competition from cassette tapes early on. The quality of pre-recorded tapes improved as did the decks, and other than a bit of background hiss they could hold their own against CDs which were about double the price.
The first audio CDs (US$30) and players (US$900) were released in 1982, and Audio CD didn't become the leading music format until the early 90's. Many cars had cassette players as standard until the late 90's.
In a few years time when dual format players are $50, and the HD disks sell for the same price as DVDs, you might feel differently.
I've only bought a handful of HD-DVDs, I don't in any way feel a need to 'collect' films, most of which are throwaway watch-once things, and can't think of a film I like enough 're-buy' it in HD. I have bought a couple of recent HD-DVDs such as Hot Fuzz- the HD version is only US$8 more, is backward-compatible with DVD, and contains a ton of exclusive extras.
How big an HDTV did you get? If you sit an appropriate distance from it you're kidding yourself if you think High def doesn't look signficantly better than DVD. Once I started getting used to the (even 720p) output from my Xbox 360 I realized how crappy DVDs look, even upscaled. At this moment in time, would you save a couple of bucks to buy a movie on VCD instead of DVD? It'll still be watchable on your HDTV. You don't 'need' HD anymore than you 'need' DVD over VCD. If you bought 1080p TV just to upscale movies, I think you should question the point behind the fancy TV in the first place.
The most stunning thing I've watched so far in HD-DVD is Planet Earth, try seeing it in HD if you get the chance, and then decide if there's a difference for yourself.
The Discovery store confirms this: http://shopping.discovery.com/product-65763.html?
I think the Sigourney Weaver narration is only available from the discovery channel store. I can't work out why they didn't just release one version with both narrations. I really can't work out why they left the 'making of' programs off the HD versions- who wouldn't want to see someone duct-taping their trousers to keep out the cockroaches and bat shit?
I agree- once you get into a good movie you forget how fancy the picture looks- a good movie on a 12" Black & White TV is still a good movie.
But 'Planet Earth' in HD is different- every time you see a panoramic view of an African plain with clearly identifiable animals moving all over it, or a time lapse satellite shot of a weather system moving around the curve of the Earth, you're reminded how stunning the picture is.
I personally find that sport in HD, 360 games, and 'Planet Earth' are the three things my 1080p set does best- I bought a couple of movies on HD-DVD and as you said, I didn't really enjoy them any more than I would have on DVD.
So who translated it for our plucky hero?
Why are there so few people like yourself voting and commenting on the IMDB? Right now it's at User Rating: 8.3/10 (6,424 votes). The votes, User Comments, and Message Board posts there are overwhelmingly positive.
The movie leaves me with quite a few other questions too:
Why did we have to spend 20 minutes watching robots tiptoe around the garden breaking flowerpots to set up a lame joke about the kid wanking (although his mum's reaction when the girl appeared was the best moment in the film)? That scene edited down to about a minute.
Why did they decide to go to the nearest population center with the magic cubey thing, when that will cause the greatest possible number of casualties?
Why did the army guy suddenly turn around and back the kid ("get him to his car"), when to our knowledge they'd never met and he had no idea what his car was?
Why did it turn into the heartwarming story of one boy and his pet alien robot, in the best tradition of ET, Flight of the Navigator, and Short Circuit?
With all that money, do you think they could have paid someone with some knowledge of scriptwriting to glance over the script?
Why would anyone think that getting the cube into a chopper would keep it from the alien robots, who can outfly and outgun all human aircraft?
Why the need for all the racial stereotypes?
How does a kid manage to climb up 10 stories of stairs faster than a robot who can literally fly through buildings?
In most parts of the US it's over USD$3 per gallon, not too far from AU: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publ ications/wrgp/mogas_home_page.html
The iPhone doesn't really cost $600, just like your average RAZR that comes with a 3 year contract doesn't cost $0. I don't know how much the AT&T voice + data contract costs, but if it's around $55/month you're paying $2000 for 2 years of voice and data + ownership of the hardware. Of course if you were going to pay for this voice and data plan anyway, and there's no chance of a better/cheaper one coming along from a competitor in the meantime, then you will end up with a pretty good deal.
A quick look at similar phones shows that they are around the $600-700 mark.
HTC Touch $590 http://www.mobileplanet.com/p.aspx?i=149753
02 XDA Aton Exec $770 http://www.mobileplanet.com/p.aspx?i=138374
HTC TyTN $685 http://www.mobileplanet.com/p.aspx?i=145222
Given the premium that Apple usually charges for their hardware, I can't really imagine a stand-alone iPhone being sold for less than around $1000.
I personally have an HTC TyTN and it's fantastic, I just wish it was a bit smaller and that the touch screen was a bit easier to use with my fingers (without the stylus) - maybe I should grow a coke nail.
The USA has decided that to make up for being late to the last two world wars they're going to be really punctual this time.
PDF isn't idiot proof either. I saw some sensitive letters published online as PDFs, with the names blacked out. Only problem was the 'blacking out' was simply black rectangles drawn on a different layer from the background image- anyone with Adobe Acrobat could extract the image underneath and read all the names.