Every manufacturer has its own transformer and connector so you can't interchange them. Nokia itself changed almost a dozen different types of connectors in the last 10 years (as did others too). Finally they settled (I hope so) on micro-usb connectors for charging and computer tethering. But they only did this because Chinese authorities decided that all mobile phone connectors should be micro-usb. As the Chinese market is too large to ignore, Nokia had to change their connectors to micro-usb.
And then the same treehugger will send you back to the same place to kill swarmers until they drop 5 legs which will take an average of 40 kills (even though every swarmer has at least 6 legs). And of course as swarmers are tightly packed with the mobs you mention you'll have to kill them too.
When you finally get back, you will be asked to rescue some retarded night elf chick or some moronic dwarf in the lair of the biggest hive killing all those mobs again. The reward is an item of very small to no value.
Then you realize that there is another "!" above some other treehugers head and the cow^H tauren gives a quest to follow the previous mentioned NE chick or the same dwarf which means going there killing tens of those same mobs, following and guarding the npc, and probably dying in the process, by the time all the mobs respawn.
After you finally get back to the npc, and start the escort quest again you get ambushed by some 12 year old child playing a rogue and you die because you were playing a human warlock in wow 1.3
Who cares if Facebook can technically now use whatever you post forever.
You are not thinking wide enough. Lets say some teen called Barry posts some teen photos of him and his friend Jill. In say 8 year times Jill becomes some pop "star" and facebook just sells those images to magazines for big $$$. Or Barry becomes next Andy Warhol and everything he ever did sells for bunchloads of $$$. Don't be fooled, probably 99.99% of pictures at facebook aren't worth a damn, but the rest probably are. Maybe not today, but maybe in a few years time.
So could anyone who archived the page, or even took a screenshot.
Not really. Third party (ie guy who captured the screen) can't publish any of "his" pictures, but facebook probably can, because you allowed them by accepting their tos.
The whole point of FOSS is that you can customize it however you want.
That may be true but only for some type of users. Some big/medium sizes businesses/agencies but certainly not for average home or small business users. Or even above average ones. What you are really saying is that one shouldn't criticize (ie linux distro) X because you can always change it yourself. Apart from a non sequitur, that is not true at all. I bet that 99.9% of the users I mentioned above doesn't know how to change anything in distro's source code. Should a user write his own driver for some non supported device? Why have GUI at all? Just give a user the shell, and let it write customized gui from ground up. That kind of thinking is one of the biggest reasons why Linux has so small market share on desktops. And since we were talking about netbooks (what a horrible name btw), that means we were talking about average or slightly above average users.
So onto the netbooks then. You sad you have the original EEE, and have zero problems with Ubuntu. Good for you. To relate to my previous paragraph, there is a reason why Ubuntu is made like it is. It is made for those users I was mentioning above. So people don't have to edit the source code themselves (customization in your sense). Not only because they don't know how, but because they don't want to. One of the more serious problems I had with ubuntu (gnome actually) is the problem I mentioned in the post you were replying to. I will always fall back to the previous solution I had if I can't customize something right. Sure, one can claim that in ubuntu you can customize much more than in windows xp, and I won't contest that because I don't care about pissing contests, but what I do care is that I can customize the things I spend 99.9% time with, at that is GUI layout. If I can't make the taskbar to to auto hide and show-up instantly I will fall back to the previous solution, in my case Windows xp. I just consider (at least some) gui customization essential on GUI systems. If the gui does it right from the beginning, even better. This customization is even more pronounced when you have limited screen space of the netbooks. If you don't mind the complete gui clutter on a really small screen (1st gen eee), well I do mind it. That is the reason I want that customization to work as it should. And that means proper auto hide/show not some animated, slow to react, implementation of some guy who obviously never used that feature in his life, but simply added it because all other operating systems have it (and works properly).
"As fast as it gets on net-books" using XP? We must be in alternate realities.
Of all the OSes I tried on my msi wind, Windows xp works the best hands down (it is the same with friends acer aspire one). I can imagine that xp doesn't work well on a computer with 4GB of hard drive (like your eee), and that was the second reason why I waited for the second generation netbooks to arrive. The first reason was that horrible small screen. So second gen and newer netbooks run Windows xp (and Win7, but that is another post entirely) very well. That is the problem with early adopters (I consider myself one, but I knew in advance that first gen netbooks, pardon my language, suck), first versions of everything generally aren't as good as the next ones.
Later in your post you attack me for wanting to be ms fanboy and not contributing to the linux. Firstly, I'm as opposite to the ms fanboy as it gets. I hate the company and their business practices (as living in colon^H croatia where we are ass raped by ms), but I do have to give credit where credit is due. I could write a book on what points os x and windows suck completely, but there are places where their programmers did job well done. Or at least job done. Denying the good parts of the windows OS isn't not only untrue, but intellectually dishonest.
On to your second part of the comment. I'll admit straight away. I don't know how to code c(++) much.
Running Windows XP on a netbook is like fitting a 350 pound driver into a golf cart. You can do it, but you won't carry many golf clubs.
Whoa there cowboy!
I'm writing this from a MSI Wind U100 with windows xp which disagrees with you very much. Windows xp takes 2.64GB (this is not a fresh install) on a 120GB hard disk so you make conclusions on your own. I know that you are thinking of those 4/8/16GB netbooks with flash drives, but frankly, only fools and simple users bought those. I mean, anyone who has any clue about computers know that small hard drive space can be a very limiting factor. Thankfully, netbooks with so little space didn't sell for a long time so today (and even yesterday) hard drive space on netbooks isn't the limiting factor at all.
If you think that Windows xp is too bloated for netbooks think again, xp runs as fast as it gets on netbooks. But primary reason why I'm running xp on this netbook is screen space. In ubuntu I just can't use the screen space properly. Let me give you an example. In ubuntu (that is gnome actually) you have the system bar at the top and task bar at the bottom. I mean, most netbooks have 600px high screens and that is the absolute minimum in my opinion. Those two bars can be made to auto hide but that doesn't work properly, because every time you touch the edge of the screen (to show the bar) it takes a second to actually start the show-up animation. That is unacceptable. Moreover, when you use firefox and set those two bars to be always displayed you end up with pitiful space to display web content. On Windows xp, there is no system bar at the top and the task bar can always be set to auto hide (which works flawlessly), so I get much more screen estate for any other content.
So until they fix those "little" issues I won't be using linux on my netbook any time soon. People may criticize windows xp (I'm first standing in line) but now it is easily the best OS for netbooks.
I've got Msi Wind and previous gen macbook (white plastic one). I've never tried the eee one but my wind has better trackpad than macbook. True, the buttons suck, but the trackpad surface itself has much less friction and it is more precise. Even though this one is the syntellic, which is worse than the synaptics one which was installed in first batch of msi winds.
I always thought that macbook pro had to have better trackpad, because it is well, "pro", and pros have to have better trackpad than the one on the standard macbook. Thanks for the info in any case.
Even if you consider that the hardware can meet win7 requirements (I got msi wind, runs win7 very well btw), the price of the OS will be a problem.
So lets say those little notebooks go for 300-500usd, how much can ms charge on top of that? As was with xp, they'll have to give away win7 basically for free.
Oh, it seems we are very quick to jump to ad hominems and meta level. Please spare me of that rubbish.
You had my responses to the parent, and you didn't acknowledge any of them. Of all the (few) points I made in the previous post you only replied to the point about 5-man instances which I described as casual friendly. Have you actually read the post you are replying to? And oh, arenas. Explain to me please, how do you manage to play 10 2v2 games in under an hour when the queue is never less then 10 minutes? Moreover, if you consider fun playing around 1500 (or under) rating, good luck getting any gear which would enable you to get better rating.
WoW is the most polished, casual friendly MMORPG ever created.
That says more about other games than WoW itself. Or do you mean that if the WoW is the most polished mmorpg, then any criticism is automatically invalid? Is that what you mean? Or do you think that I couldn't parrot that phrase as well? I also consider WoW the most polished mmorpg there is but that doesn't invalidate any of my points. Nor does make WoW any better just by saying it.
I could make much more points about WoW but it seems to me that all you want to discuss is your "fuller life". Well enjoy it then, don't waste it on WoW.
Those are daily quests (aka reputation/rep grinds) and are for bots and retards. Hardly casuals. Lets say that a casual wants to play 2h/day. What he gets with those dailies? 1h for dailies, other hour for other stuff. And you can get a reward in like 2 months(!) time with grinding like that.
- Zul'Aman 10-man raid and associated quests
Hard instance for casuals actually, few guilds did it on my server anyway (ragnaros eu, so not a small server). Of those guilds, none were casual.
- Sunwell Isle, including multiple quest hubs and a new 5-man instance
Yeah, more daily grind. I do concede that there were 2 instances, one was somewhat okay, the other one just for hardcore.
- Added a new quest hub in Dustwallow Marsh for people leveling new characters
Wow, I mean, just wow! They threw few houses, couple of npcs and a few quests and thats it. Nevermind that the rest of azeroth wasn't even touched so it looks, feels and plays like a ghost world (and 98% is the same since day 1). And did I mention that it still takes an eternity to level a char to 60, 70 or 80 anyway?
They also progressively nerfed the crap out of the raid content to make it more accessible for casual players.
Yeah, they took more than a half of year to nerf ZG so the rest of 95% of guilds could pass first 4 bosses in less than 3 hours. And sorry, bwl, aq20/40 and naxx were never nerfed to the point a casual could see there more than first or second boss. Let alone final boss. And eventually when some of the instances got nerfed nobody cared anymore.
On top of that the vast majority of content in the TBC and WLK expansions is for "casuals". Look at the amount of quest content, the number of 5-man dungeons, new battlegrounds, etc. as compared to the amount of raid content.
If you consider the "vast majority of content" to be zones for leveling, then it is not really for casuals only, as you seem to imply. Every wow gamer has to get over it to become max level and try the endgame, casuals or hardcore alike. I'll admit that there is plenty of 5 man instances for casuals but that is only short term anyway. Soon enough there will be more new content pretty much for hardcore only (as they did in wow 1.0 and tbc) so casuals will get bored with the same old content (which was made irrelevant with the new content anyway).
And please don't never, ever mention pvp "content". It is pathetic. With wow 1.0 we had what, 3 battlegrounds, with wotlk, they threw another one + 3 arenas, and in wotlk they threw a whole one more battleground and two arenas. (Mind you that arenas are very non casual). Lake wintergrasp is just bleh, too large and uses vehicles (like a bad copy of UT). And all that pvp currency, minimal arena ratings, and so on are nothing more but a bunch of obstacles pointed *against* casual gamers. Not for them.
And that is my point, even though there are some additions for casuals, those are only superficial, and for every casual addition there are at least two hardcore ones.
PS Just for those who haven't played WoW: casuals in wow are those who play less than 6h per day, those who log on 0-2h per day are probably can't use WoW for nothing more than an expensive chat program.
Does os x run nice on a non apple laptop like that? Does it really? And how do you install it? If you are thinking of hackint0sh, even though it is somewhat ok to play around with it, I certainly wouldn't recommend it for any serious work.
Purely for my own edification I pulled together weather records for where I live.
(emphasis mine)
You know, there is an attribute which stands before the word warming/climate change and that is global, you know, like global warming/climate change.
Just because your or mine place hasn't changed one bit in the last x years, doesn't mean that some other places on this earth don't have dramatic changes.
The netbook my sister just got is the cheaper MSI Wind, and it has 1GB RAM, a 1.something GHZ (whatever the atom proc is, I forget, something like 1.4?), 120GB hdd, not sure about video. It runs XP quite well. I don't know if it would run Windows 7 well,(...)
I have the same computer but mine has 2GB of RAM (btw it is 1.6GHz). Windows 7 runs great on it. Feels definitely faster than with vista, but not faster than xp naturally. But fast enough because I have it installed since build 6801, and I don't miss xp one bit.
Thanks for the link. I would be lying if I would say that I'm not completely surprised by those tests because my experience tells me otherwise. But who cares about a deluded slashdotter against a guy from zdnet now?;)
But all is not that black and white as one of my points in the previous post still stand. What about games? Vista took a great performance hit and so did win7 too. That is the sole reason I have xp still installed on my main computer. The difference, unfortunately, is everything but certainly not small.
And I still haven't touched the point of a complete mess they reintroduced in UI (I don't mean eye candy) department. One day I'll do a click count of setting the common settings between Win7, xp and OS X 10.5, because this is getting out of hand unfortunately.
But they will have to make a cut won't they? We can't be locked on to legacy systems forever I guess. Today 98% of Windows software works on 64bit windows. They could always make a compatibility layer for applications which are "32bit only". There is always expensive software which works only on specific systems. No one is trying to make people throw away their working systems.
Sorry, but I don't buy that WhateverMark bullshit which doesn't have any real world relevance. So tell me this:
What windows release is faster?
When copying files? 7, Vista or xp? When launching applications? 7, Vista or xp? When editing photos? 7, Vista or xp? When running games? 7, Vista or xp? etc.
I'm using them all, so I know my answer. 7 in my opinion is better than Vista, but only slightly. It was trimmed, but xp is still speed king.
But Windows 7 missed a great opportunity, and that was to push 64bit systems. As you say that windows releases are always made for the current and future hardware, with windows 7 that is only partially the case. For example, having a system with 2GB of ram is in my opinion minimum for it. But throw another 2GB and Windows 7 can't use it. So for 32bit Windows 7 you have a very narrow range of memory: 2GB to 3.something GB.
MS should have marketed Windows 7 as a 64bit OS (not only for RAM capacity, they could call it a new generation of operating systems or whatever) with an additional 32bit release for 32bit processors (subnotebooks etc). Call it Windows 7 Legacy or something.
And, in Windows 7, those fancy ribbon bars are going to be shipping as part of Windows.
If you are thinking about the ribbon menu bar from office 2007, then you'll be a little disappointed. The only place where you can see that kind of menu is in Paint and Movie Maker (which btw, are a little bit more than a trash). So hardly you can call it as any important part of windows 7.
I downloaded Team Fortress 2 via torrent and played on some cracked servers. But that was pain because the servers were changing daily, then had to manually download patches, update and then realize that the next day servers reverted to the patch before etc. But the game was excellent and I thought, those guys really deserve the money, and I would have a hassle-free experience. Then I went out and bought Orange Box (which includes TF2).
Now year later I'm still playing this excellent game and it was worth every penny.
But I see a problem though. I generally use Steam as the game updater, nothing more really. But take for example GTAIV. It requires three services to be active when playing: Steam, Games for Windows and rockstar social club. 3 separate registrations and 3 resource eating programs. That is way over the top.
Slashdot Mirror
Europe is far away from dreamland though.
Every manufacturer has its own transformer and connector so you can't interchange them. Nokia itself changed almost a dozen different types of connectors in the last 10 years (as did others too). Finally they settled (I hope so) on micro-usb connectors for charging and computer tethering. But they only did this because Chinese authorities decided that all mobile phone connectors should be micro-usb. As the Chinese market is too large to ignore, Nokia had to change their connectors to micro-usb.
Those are actually Micro-USB connectors.
For example Nokia E71.
You can read more about those types of usb connectors here.
And then the same treehugger will send you back to the same place to kill swarmers until they drop 5 legs which will take an average of 40 kills (even though every swarmer has at least 6 legs). And of course as swarmers are tightly packed with the mobs you mention you'll have to kill them too.
When you finally get back, you will be asked to rescue some retarded night elf chick or some moronic dwarf in the lair of the biggest hive killing all those mobs again. The reward is an item of very small to no value.
Then you realize that there is another "!" above some other treehugers head and the cow^H tauren gives a quest to follow the previous mentioned NE chick or the same dwarf which means going there killing tens of those same mobs, following and guarding the npc, and probably dying in the process, by the time all the mobs respawn.
After you finally get back to the npc, and start the escort quest again you get ambushed by some 12 year old child playing a rogue and you die because you were playing a human warlock in wow 1.3
God I miss those days.
Who cares if Facebook can technically now use whatever you post forever.
You are not thinking wide enough. Lets say some teen called Barry posts some teen photos of him and his friend Jill. In say 8 year times Jill becomes some pop "star" and facebook just sells those images to magazines for big $$$. Or Barry becomes next Andy Warhol and everything he ever did sells for bunchloads of $$$. Don't be fooled, probably 99.99% of pictures at facebook aren't worth a damn, but the rest probably are. Maybe not today, but maybe in a few years time.
So could anyone who archived the page, or even took a screenshot.
Not really. Third party (ie guy who captured the screen) can't publish any of "his" pictures, but facebook probably can, because you allowed them by accepting their tos.
The whole point of FOSS is that you can customize it however you want.
That may be true but only for some type of users. Some big/medium sizes businesses/agencies but certainly not for average home or small business users. Or even above average ones. What you are really saying is that one shouldn't criticize (ie linux distro) X because you can always change it yourself. Apart from a non sequitur, that is not true at all. I bet that 99.9% of the users I mentioned above doesn't know how to change anything in distro's source code. Should a user write his own driver for some non supported device? Why have GUI at all? Just give a user the shell, and let it write customized gui from ground up. That kind of thinking is one of the biggest reasons why Linux has so small market share on desktops. And since we were talking about netbooks (what a horrible name btw), that means we were talking about average or slightly above average users.
So onto the netbooks then. You sad you have the original EEE, and have zero problems with Ubuntu. Good for you. To relate to my previous paragraph, there is a reason why Ubuntu is made like it is. It is made for those users I was mentioning above. So people don't have to edit the source code themselves (customization in your sense). Not only because they don't know how, but because they don't want to. One of the more serious problems I had with ubuntu (gnome actually) is the problem I mentioned in the post you were replying to. I will always fall back to the previous solution I had if I can't customize something right. Sure, one can claim that in ubuntu you can customize much more than in windows xp, and I won't contest that because I don't care about pissing contests, but what I do care is that I can customize the things I spend 99.9% time with, at that is GUI layout. If I can't make the taskbar to to auto hide and show-up instantly I will fall back to the previous solution, in my case Windows xp. I just consider (at least some) gui customization essential on GUI systems. If the gui does it right from the beginning, even better. This customization is even more pronounced when you have limited screen space of the netbooks. If you don't mind the complete gui clutter on a really small screen (1st gen eee), well I do mind it. That is the reason I want that customization to work as it should. And that means proper auto hide/show not some animated, slow to react, implementation of some guy who obviously never used that feature in his life, but simply added it because all other operating systems have it (and works properly).
"As fast as it gets on net-books" using XP? We must be in alternate realities.
Of all the OSes I tried on my msi wind, Windows xp works the best hands down (it is the same with friends acer aspire one). I can imagine that xp doesn't work well on a computer with 4GB of hard drive (like your eee), and that was the second reason why I waited for the second generation netbooks to arrive. The first reason was that horrible small screen. So second gen and newer netbooks run Windows xp (and Win7, but that is another post entirely) very well. That is the problem with early adopters (I consider myself one, but I knew in advance that first gen netbooks, pardon my language, suck), first versions of everything generally aren't as good as the next ones.
Later in your post you attack me for wanting to be ms fanboy and not contributing to the linux. Firstly, I'm as opposite to the ms fanboy as it gets. I hate the company and their business practices (as living in colon^H croatia where we are ass raped by ms), but I do have to give credit where credit is due. I could write a book on what points os x and windows suck completely, but there are places where their programmers did job well done. Or at least job done. Denying the good parts of the windows OS isn't not only untrue, but intellectually dishonest.
On to your second part of the comment. I'll admit straight away. I don't know how to code c(++) much.
NOT!
Or we'll have 20 years of touch screen stagnation. Great. Just as we are trying to get out of classic mobile phone layout stagnation.
Whoa there cowboy!
I'm writing this from a MSI Wind U100 with windows xp which disagrees with you very much. Windows xp takes 2.64GB (this is not a fresh install) on a 120GB hard disk so you make conclusions on your own. I know that you are thinking of those 4/8/16GB netbooks with flash drives, but frankly, only fools and simple users bought those. I mean, anyone who has any clue about computers know that small hard drive space can be a very limiting factor. Thankfully, netbooks with so little space didn't sell for a long time so today (and even yesterday) hard drive space on netbooks isn't the limiting factor at all.
If you think that Windows xp is too bloated for netbooks think again, xp runs as fast as it gets on netbooks. But primary reason why I'm running xp on this netbook is screen space. In ubuntu I just can't use the screen space properly. Let me give you an example. In ubuntu (that is gnome actually) you have the system bar at the top and task bar at the bottom. I mean, most netbooks have 600px high screens and that is the absolute minimum in my opinion. Those two bars can be made to auto hide but that doesn't work properly, because every time you touch the edge of the screen (to show the bar) it takes a second to actually start the show-up animation. That is unacceptable. Moreover, when you use firefox and set those two bars to be always displayed you end up with pitiful space to display web content. On Windows xp, there is no system bar at the top and the task bar can always be set to auto hide (which works flawlessly), so I get much more screen estate for any other content.
So until they fix those "little" issues I won't be using linux on my netbook any time soon. People may criticize windows xp (I'm first standing in line) but now it is easily the best OS for netbooks.
And if coded correctly, that would be 10-12 lines max, wouldn't it?;)
I've got Msi Wind and previous gen macbook (white plastic one). I've never tried the eee one but my wind has better trackpad than macbook. True, the buttons suck, but the trackpad surface itself has much less friction and it is more precise. Even though this one is the syntellic, which is worse than the synaptics one which was installed in first batch of msi winds.
I always thought that macbook pro had to have better trackpad, because it is well, "pro", and pros have to have better trackpad than the one on the standard macbook. Thanks for the info in any case.
Even if you consider that the hardware can meet win7 requirements (I got msi wind, runs win7 very well btw), the price of the OS will be a problem.
So lets say those little notebooks go for 300-500usd, how much can ms charge on top of that? As was with xp, they'll have to give away win7 basically for free.
Oh, it seems we are very quick to jump to ad hominems and meta level. Please spare me of that rubbish.
You had my responses to the parent, and you didn't acknowledge any of them. Of all the (few) points I made in the previous post you only replied to the point about 5-man instances which I described as casual friendly. Have you actually read the post you are replying to? And oh, arenas. Explain to me please, how do you manage to play 10 2v2 games in under an hour when the queue is never less then 10 minutes? Moreover, if you consider fun playing around 1500 (or under) rating, good luck getting any gear which would enable you to get better rating.
WoW is the most polished, casual friendly MMORPG ever created.
That says more about other games than WoW itself. Or do you mean that if the WoW is the most polished mmorpg, then any criticism is automatically invalid? Is that what you mean? Or do you think that I couldn't parrot that phrase as well? I also consider WoW the most polished mmorpg there is but that doesn't invalidate any of my points. Nor does make WoW any better just by saying it.
I could make much more points about WoW but it seems to me that all you want to discuss is your "fuller life". Well enjoy it then, don't waste it on WoW.
- Netherwing quest hub
- Shatari Skyguard quest hub
- Ogri'la quest hub
Those are daily quests (aka reputation/rep grinds) and are for bots and retards. Hardly casuals. Lets say that a casual wants to play 2h/day. What he gets with those dailies? 1h for dailies, other hour for other stuff. And you can get a reward in like 2 months(!) time with grinding like that.
- Zul'Aman 10-man raid and associated quests
Hard instance for casuals actually, few guilds did it on my server anyway (ragnaros eu, so not a small server). Of those guilds, none were casual.
- Sunwell Isle, including multiple quest hubs and a new 5-man instance
Yeah, more daily grind. I do concede that there were 2 instances, one was somewhat okay, the other one just for hardcore.
- Added a new quest hub in Dustwallow Marsh for people leveling new characters
Wow, I mean, just wow! They threw few houses, couple of npcs and a few quests and thats it. Nevermind that the rest of azeroth wasn't even touched so it looks, feels and plays like a ghost world (and 98% is the same since day 1). And did I mention that it still takes an eternity to level a char to 60, 70 or 80 anyway?
They also progressively nerfed the crap out of the raid content to make it more accessible for casual players.
Yeah, they took more than a half of year to nerf ZG so the rest of 95% of guilds could pass first 4 bosses in less than 3 hours. And sorry, bwl, aq20/40 and naxx were never nerfed to the point a casual could see there more than first or second boss. Let alone final boss. And eventually when some of the instances got nerfed nobody cared anymore.
On top of that the vast majority of content in the TBC and WLK expansions is for "casuals". Look at the amount of quest content, the number of 5-man dungeons, new battlegrounds, etc. as compared to the amount of raid content.
If you consider the "vast majority of content" to be zones for leveling, then it is not really for casuals only, as you seem to imply. Every wow gamer has to get over it to become max level and try the endgame, casuals or hardcore alike. I'll admit that there is plenty of 5 man instances for casuals but that is only short term anyway. Soon enough there will be more new content pretty much for hardcore only (as they did in wow 1.0 and tbc) so casuals will get bored with the same old content (which was made irrelevant with the new content anyway).
And please don't never, ever mention pvp "content". It is pathetic. With wow 1.0 we had what, 3 battlegrounds, with wotlk, they threw another one + 3 arenas, and in wotlk they threw a whole one more battleground and two arenas. (Mind you that arenas are very non casual). Lake wintergrasp is just bleh, too large and uses vehicles (like a bad copy of UT). And all that pvp currency, minimal arena ratings, and so on are nothing more but a bunch of obstacles pointed *against* casual gamers. Not for them.
And that is my point, even though there are some additions for casuals, those are only superficial, and for every casual addition there are at least two hardcore ones.
PS Just for those who haven't played WoW: casuals in wow are those who play less than 6h per day, those who log on 0-2h per day are probably can't use WoW for nothing more than an expensive chat program.
Does os x run nice on a non apple laptop like that? Does it really? And how do you install it? If you are thinking of hackint0sh, even though it is somewhat ok to play around with it, I certainly wouldn't recommend it for any serious work.
(emphasis mine)
You know, there is an attribute which stands before the word warming/climate change and that is global, you know, like global warming/climate change.
Just because your or mine place hasn't changed one bit in the last x years, doesn't mean that some other places on this earth don't have dramatic changes.
I have the same computer but mine has 2GB of RAM (btw it is 1.6GHz). Windows 7 runs great on it. Feels definitely faster than with vista, but not faster than xp naturally. But fast enough because I have it installed since build 6801, and I don't miss xp one bit.
Thanks for the link. I would be lying if I would say that I'm not completely surprised by those tests because my experience tells me otherwise. But who cares about a deluded slashdotter against a guy from zdnet now?;)
But all is not that black and white as one of my points in the previous post still stand. What about games? Vista took a great performance hit and so did win7 too. That is the sole reason I have xp still installed on my main computer. The difference, unfortunately, is everything but certainly not small.
And I still haven't touched the point of a complete mess they reintroduced in UI (I don't mean eye candy) department. One day I'll do a click count of setting the common settings between Win7, xp and OS X 10.5, because this is getting out of hand unfortunately.
But they will have to make a cut won't they? We can't be locked on to legacy systems forever I guess. Today 98% of Windows software works on 64bit windows. They could always make a compatibility layer for applications which are "32bit only". There is always expensive software which works only on specific systems. No one is trying to make people throw away their working systems.
And after Evian brand, I propose we call it:
Drater!
Sorry, but I don't buy that WhateverMark bullshit which doesn't have any real world relevance. So tell me this:
What windows release is faster?
When copying files? 7, Vista or xp?
When launching applications? 7, Vista or xp?
When editing photos? 7, Vista or xp?
When running games? 7, Vista or xp?
etc.
I'm using them all, so I know my answer. 7 in my opinion is better than Vista, but only slightly. It was trimmed, but xp is still speed king.
But Windows 7 missed a great opportunity, and that was to push 64bit systems. As you say that windows releases are always made for the current and future hardware, with windows 7 that is only partially the case. For example, having a system with 2GB of ram is in my opinion minimum for it. But throw another 2GB and Windows 7 can't use it. So for 32bit Windows 7 you have a very narrow range of memory: 2GB to 3.something GB.
MS should have marketed Windows 7 as a 64bit OS (not only for RAM capacity, they could call it a new generation of operating systems or whatever) with an additional 32bit release for 32bit processors (subnotebooks etc). Call it Windows 7 Legacy or something.
But it is always easy to adapt to something better, but hard to adapt to something worse.
If you are thinking about the ribbon menu bar from office 2007, then you'll be a little disappointed. The only place where you can see that kind of menu is in Paint and Movie Maker (which btw, are a little bit more than a trash). So hardly you can call it as any important part of windows 7.
Or a Windows Live Writer as a recent example, which as I found it is a great blog editor.
And all of this tracked by doubleclick.net and google-analytics...
I know how to counter that, but other 99% of the people don't.
I downloaded Team Fortress 2 via torrent and played on some cracked servers. But that was pain because the servers were changing daily, then had to manually download patches, update and then realize that the next day servers reverted to the patch before etc. But the game was excellent and I thought, those guys really deserve the money, and I would have a hassle-free experience. Then I went out and bought Orange Box (which includes TF2).
Now year later I'm still playing this excellent game and it was worth every penny.
But I see a problem though. I generally use Steam as the game updater, nothing more really. But take for example GTAIV. It requires three services to be active when playing: Steam, Games for Windows and rockstar social club. 3 separate registrations and 3 resource eating programs. That is way over the top.