Yes, desktops are more upgradeable, cheaper, and more powerful...
I'd think that with USB and Firewire, laptops would actually be catching up in upgradability.
No one wants to carry around an external drive. However, "upgradability" doesn't mean an external drive typically. It means the ability to add a better video card (which is possible in some laptops) or upgrade the memory (standard in most laptops) or upgrade the processor (typically not possible).
Typical people don't upgrade individual components, however, so this point is really moot (they'll wait until they have to upgrade the entire computers)
Why would people move back to desktops? Or is it that desktops have started getting cheap enough that people are switching from "family computer" to "cheap desktop for everyone"?
Cheap is key here. Ma and Pa don't understand the difference between a laptop and a desktop for a home PC environment. They do understand the difference in their pocketbook, however. They're not doing a "cheap desktop for everyone" but rather, "cheap desktop for a family computer" because they couldn't afford one before or their current computer is so old and has so many viruses on it that they just get fed up with their old slow computer and just buy a new one because they can now afford to.
Nope. I'm using the onboard sound that came with my Abit A7N. It only rarely happens anyway, so its not that big a deal. I played most of Saturday and I only had it crash once in the evening. Since I work M-F, I only have it happen once every couple of days. That isn't too much to worry about, and I can wait for the official patch to come out.
Another note to mention is that even though a developer can have as many combinations of hardware as possible, there's no feasible way for them to have them all.
Some games are pickier with hardware than others. I seem to remember Command & Conquer Generals being very picky about your memory. If you had any error at all, the game would crash. People that had other games running fine (UT2k4, RTCW) had to get new memory because the old memory was causing C&C Generals to crash. I was one of them. No matter how many tests I ran on my memory, it kept coming up good, but as soon as I removed the faulty stick, C&C Generals ran fine.
There are also some other bugs, including a certain NPC who doesn't behave properly (goes to the wrong house at night, etc) but with hundreds of NPCs, I can see one or two escaping. I've been playing Oblivion pretty religiously since it came out and haven't found any glaring bugs other than the occasional CTD.
Oblivion doesn't seem rushed at all to me. I've played other games where the game was completely unplayable to all but a select few people who ran the magic combination of hardware/software, not to mention glaring bugs in AI and graphics (major ones, such as all ATI/Nvidia cards seeing an error) that make you wonder what the developers were smoking to NOT notice it. Even console games are not immune to games like that. See Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly.
The vulnerability has been confirmed on a fully patched system with Internet Explorer 6.0 and Microsoft Windows XP SP1/SP2. The vulnerability has also been confirmed in Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview (March edition). Other versions may also be affected.
But I'm running IE6 on XP SP2 fully patched and I'm not vulnerable to their test. Since this involves macromedia flash, I'm assuming this is mixed with a bug in flash or else something else besides IE alone is causing this bug.
Project Evil (aka the NDISulator) is a special binary compatibility
layer for the FreeBSD kernel that lets you use Windows NDIS drivers
for network adapters with FreeBSD/ia32.
The announcement is the previous article in the thread.
I was going to make a smartass remark about being able to use "new and improved" trinary computers, with positive, negative, and neutral voltages on these transistors, but then I found out theyalreadyexist!
D'oh!
Well, at least I can welcome our ternary computing overlords!
For those of us with no clue wtf you're talking about or wtf those are, would you mind telling us why you use those tools as opposed to others?
Also, while you thankfully gave links to the about pages of those sites, you also seem to have inadvertantly slashdotted a few of the links (leaving those of us who actually click links in the dark about those programs)
My point was, even though I may have friends that I play online with, they may not be online all at the same time. I've been in guilds before, but there's usually too much drama going on to make the game fun.
I don't mind the lack of solo content. Really, you are playing a MMO game. Why do people have this overwhelming need to go online and play a game where thousands of other people are playing, and not work with any of them? What's the point of it? And who played D&D in whatever form (D&D, AD&D, 2e, 3, 3.5, whatever) with just one DM and one person playing one toon? I wouldn't have wasted my time as a DM creating content for a single person and a single toon. And I hate to see MMO developers waste time creating solo content for a game designed to have thousands of toons online simultaneously. Also, solo content tends to get abused by multiple player groups doing the content because it's easy. I say, no thanks.
Here's why you need solo content.
I have five friends that I game with all the time. We've been friends for years and have played every popular MMORPG. Unfortunately we're all in different timezones. All times that follow are in my local time.
John is a college student, and can play from 11:00AM to 2:00PM. He refuses to wake up earlier than that, as he has afternoon classes. He gets home around 9:00PM and doesn't go to bed until 3:00AM.
Jake is a freshman in high school. Other than the occasional burst of immaturity, he's ok. He gets home at 3:00PM and his parents force him to go to bed at midnight.
I have a full time job and get home at 6:00PM. I can stay up until midnight without losing any sleep.
Sue is Jake's mom and a housewife. She gets the kids ready for school in the morning at 8:00AM, but after that, she has nothing better to do all day (unless she's running errands) until 3:00PM when Jake gets home and then plays online with Jake. She usually stays on about an hour later than Jake does (1:00AM).
Samuel lives in England and works late at night, but comes home around 8:00PM and usually stays on until midnight unless he falls asleep.
Don is also in high school, but lives 3 timezones away and comes home at 6:00PM and can usually stay on until 2:00AM.
Now, because I'm sure this is all confusing, I've drawn a little graph to help you understand.
zzzzzz 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 11 12 1 2 3 John jjjjjjjj [iiiiiii] jjjjjjjjjjj [iiiiiiiiiii] Jake kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk [iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii] Quince qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq [iiiiiiiiiii] Sue ss [iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii][iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii] Samuel aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa [iiiiii? Don ddddddddddddddddddddddddd [iiiiiiiiiiiiiii]
Please ignore additional characters. The [iii] is the allotted timespan.
Now, as you can see, we all have different work/school schedules and times that we can play. We can usually all play from 9-12, but there are many times when one or two of us can't play with everyone else. A MMORPG that forces us to all group together means that we can only play the game for a few hours at a time, and if for some reason (like life) we can't play the entire 3 hours, that's even less time that we can enjoy the game.
I don't have a problem with other databases. The only database that, to me, stands out as particularly bad is MySQL. That's because their marketing deceives many people.
Uh, may I point out a database more nefarious than MySQL?
MS Access.
I'm sure there are worse databases out there, but I've not come across any that are remotely as popular as MS Access with the clueless.
<p> is your friend. Love it, use it. <p> and preview should be your best friends. People will thank you and actually see your posts instead of zoning out at the enormous block of text.
Although I would suggest a team FPS (UT2k4, CS, Joint Ops, BF1942) where teamwork is mostly necessary. Make sure to turn friendly fire on. They'll have a lot of fun shooting each other until that gets boring. Not as fun as paintball, but not as painful either.:)
You might also try MMORPGs that require fixed classes to fill certain rolls. (I would suggest pre-made characters so they don't have to grind that much.) Having to depend on the tank to keep agro, and the healer to heal, and the damage dealer not to overnuke takes a lot of teamwork and people who know their roles.
I actually went to Gnucash because Quicken (not tried Quickbooks) didn't have double entry bookkeeping. I found two problems with Gnucash. One, all the automated tax stuff that Quicken has wasn't there because the program was made originally in Germany and they hadn't got around to doing US tax code stuff. Two, they didn't have a Windows version.:( Other than that, Gnucash was very nice and very simple to use.
It even let me create my own currency after a recompile. At the time, I wanted to record my purchases in FFXI. (Lots of pretty graphs letting me see what I was spending my money on) Being able to create a FFXI Gold -> USD conversion based on the RMT values, I was able to see how much my character was worth in real dollars. That was pretty neat.
By the way, if you've got everything in Quicken files already, GnuCash does import them.
You say toe-mate-oh, I say tah-mott-oh. Personal preference, I say.
1 - Your window manager provides perfectly good window control -- why would you need this duplicated into the application.
Er, what? Maybe its just me, but my window manager works fine for everything except 6 windows for the same program that makes me minimize and maximize and futz with resizing said miniature windows when all I want to do is minimize everything on that program. Or, when I'm editing a graphic that's bigger than my desktop size (standard 1024x768) the graphic takes over the whole screen and every time I click on it, all the other helper windows disappear because they're behind the picture. (This could be solved by an "Always on Top" option, I suppose)
2 - If the window manager is changed, how does MDI accomodate the new controls?
Who says it has to? Not all windows programs follow Windows controls.
3 - MDI doesn't work with virtual desktops.
Sure it does. The MDI window goes on one desktop. Oh, you mean you want the tools on one desktop and the graphic on another? That becomes a little bit harder. Or, are you talking about resizing everything perfect on one desktop, then using another desktop for another image, and a third for using a browser?
Probably the best solution to the MDI/SDI debate is having a dock window. You can tear off your SDI windows out of the dock and have the seperate windows for everything, but I can dock all of mine into the dock window, letting me have a single MDI window.
Supports resolutions up to 2048x1280; No moving parts; Infinite focus; Green monochrome, with a colour version expected late 2006...
Hey! I remember that. The computer lab's Apple IIes had those (though admittedly, not 2048x1280). I wonder if you can play Oregon trail or lemonade stand on this thing...
I can easily see guilds following a command structure. Yes, your average every day game player wouldn't follow orders unless he got some reward out of it, but guilds would definitely have the organization needed to pilot large ships. Captains would be guild leaders or else have some authority in the guild, while lower ranks would have little.
The only problem you run into is solo players who like playing in a dynamic environment that a MMORPG allows, but aren't social enough to make friends other than a quick group. This could possibly be solved with smaller ships or ships designed to run on minimal crew (2-3 people)
Also, you shouldn't be limited to what you can do by rank. If the captain is KIA then #2 should be able to step up to the captain's chair, or in a looser organization (aka 2-3 man ships, 6 man away team situations) you should be able to run stations below your rank as well. For instance, Captain pilots the ship, while Captain #2 controls weapons.
Or, avoid the second movie altogether. The movie is nothing but two people spouting off random quotes at each other with some rapid movement between scenes of people driving the speed limit.
After watching the original movie, you get a better idea of what's going on with GITS:SAC, so I will recommend seeing the first movie before the series, but the second movie is so bad that it will spoil the general mood that GITS and GITS:SAC work so hard to present.
I still remember the Danger Zone pigeon commercial by Nissan.
The windex commercial where the three birds send in their stupid buddy to test the window to see if its open or not.
The various outpost.com commercials, one of which was firing small rodents out of a cannon.
The entire budweiser frog / lizard series and the ferret.
They may not have sold any more product, but they were sure fun to watch!
There is a reason that some people watch the super bowl only for the commercials. Spending a million dollars or more on an ad placement tends to make people think twice about the quality of commercials.
Typically when I get Indian customer service they speak either perfect English (Sometimes they'll ask odd questions like "How is your climate?") or with a British accent. Perfect English still sounds like an accent to someone from the United States where every state has their own accent. Everyone has an accent to Texans except people from Texas. Some states have light accents, others heavy ones, and some states (such as Missouri) have a different accent from north to south. You'll even find certain towns that have a unique accent that's different from the rest of the state.
However, that isn't to say that perfect English or British accents aren't understandable to Americans.
To be able to browse the D&D section without the strange stares from "normal" people in regular bookstores...
...or being sent to the basement, in the dark, without stairs, to a bathroom with a sign on it that says "Beware of the Leopard" because that's where the D&D section is.
To get an honest review from someone who's used the material you're considering
Even use the material in a local game before buying!
To get a deal that you might not find somewhere else (used books?)
To find out what the latest and greatest new thing is
To laugh at the unbathed White Wolf players with cloaks and medalions.:)
All jokes aside, the key ??? is being able to listen to what your customers want rather than what some geeks on Slashdot find ideal in a game shop. You'll notice most of my ideal aspects were mostly social. That's the reason I go to a game shop as well as lots of other people. If you're welcoming to the local gaming element, people will stop by. The longer they're in your store, the more likely they are to fail a will save vs. buying new shiny things.
Slashdot Mirror
You've said the answer yourself.
No one wants to carry around an external drive. However, "upgradability" doesn't mean an external drive typically. It means the ability to add a better video card (which is possible in some laptops) or upgrade the memory (standard in most laptops) or upgrade the processor (typically not possible).
Typical people don't upgrade individual components, however, so this point is really moot (they'll wait until they have to upgrade the entire computers)
Cheap is key here. Ma and Pa don't understand the difference between a laptop and a desktop for a home PC environment. They do understand the difference in their pocketbook, however. They're not doing a "cheap desktop for everyone" but rather, "cheap desktop for a family computer" because they couldn't afford one before or their current computer is so old and has so many viruses on it that they just get fed up with their old slow computer and just buy a new one because they can now afford to.
Nope. I'm using the onboard sound that came with my Abit A7N. It only rarely happens anyway, so its not that big a deal. I played most of Saturday and I only had it crash once in the evening. Since I work M-F, I only have it happen once every couple of days. That isn't too much to worry about, and I can wait for the official patch to come out.
Another note to mention is that even though a developer can have as many combinations of hardware as possible, there's no feasible way for them to have them all.
Some games are pickier with hardware than others. I seem to remember Command & Conquer Generals being very picky about your memory. If you had any error at all, the game would crash. People that had other games running fine (UT2k4, RTCW) had to get new memory because the old memory was causing C&C Generals to crash. I was one of them. No matter how many tests I ran on my memory, it kept coming up good, but as soon as I removed the faulty stick, C&C Generals ran fine.
There are also some other bugs, including a certain NPC who doesn't behave properly (goes to the wrong house at night, etc) but with hundreds of NPCs, I can see one or two escaping. I've been playing Oblivion pretty religiously since it came out and haven't found any glaring bugs other than the occasional CTD.
Oblivion doesn't seem rushed at all to me. I've played other games where the game was completely unplayable to all but a select few people who ran the magic combination of hardware/software, not to mention glaring bugs in AI and graphics (major ones, such as all ATI/Nvidia cards seeing an error) that make you wonder what the developers were smoking to NOT notice it. Even console games are not immune to games like that. See Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly.
According to the advisory linked in the article:
But I'm running IE6 on XP SP2 fully patched and I'm not vulnerable to their test. Since this involves macromedia flash, I'm assuming this is mixed with a bug in flash or else something else besides IE alone is causing this bug.
This was done somewhat in FreeBSD in Project Evil.
See link here.Quote from the linked page:
The announcement is the previous article in the thread.
I was going to make a smartass remark about being able to use "new and improved" trinary computers, with positive, negative, and neutral voltages on these transistors, but then I found out they already exist!
D'oh!
Well, at least I can welcome our ternary computing overlords!
Nevermind, you actually read the article and those are the programs mentioned in the article.
For those of us with no clue wtf you're talking about or wtf those are, would you mind telling us why you use those tools as opposed to others?
Also, while you thankfully gave links to the about pages of those sites, you also seem to have inadvertantly slashdotted a few of the links (leaving those of us who actually click links in the dark about those programs)
My point was, even though I may have friends that I play online with, they may not be online all at the same time. I've been in guilds before, but there's usually too much drama going on to make the game fun.
Here's why you need solo content.
I have five friends that I game with all the time. We've been friends for years and have played every popular MMORPG. Unfortunately we're all in different timezones. All times that follow are in my local time.
John is a college student, and can play from 11:00AM to 2:00PM. He refuses to wake up earlier than that, as he has afternoon classes. He gets home around 9:00PM and doesn't go to bed until 3:00AM.
Jake is a freshman in high school. Other than the occasional burst of immaturity, he's ok. He gets home at 3:00PM and his parents force him to go to bed at midnight.
I have a full time job and get home at 6:00PM. I can stay up until midnight without losing any sleep.
Sue is Jake's mom and a housewife. She gets the kids ready for school in the morning at 8:00AM, but after that, she has nothing better to do all day (unless she's running errands) until 3:00PM when Jake gets home and then plays online with Jake. She usually stays on about an hour later than Jake does (1:00AM).
Samuel lives in England and works late at night, but comes home around 8:00PM and usually stays on until midnight unless he falls asleep.
Don is also in high school, but lives 3 timezones away and comes home at 6:00PM and can usually stay on until 2:00AM.
Now, because I'm sure this is all confusing, I've drawn a little graph to help you understand.
Please ignore additional characters. The [iii] is the allotted timespan.
Now, as you can see, we all have different work/school schedules and times that we can play. We can usually all play from 9-12, but there are many times when one or two of us can't play with everyone else. A MMORPG that forces us to all group together means that we can only play the game for a few hours at a time, and if for some reason (like life) we can't play the entire 3 hours, that's even less time that we can enjoy the game.
Now do you understand?
Uh, may I point out a database more nefarious than MySQL?
MS Access.
I'm sure there are worse databases out there, but I've not come across any that are remotely as popular as MS Access with the clueless.
And maybe he just didn't wait long enough because Oblivion is scheduled to come out next week according to Gamespot.
The wall... of text!
<p> is your friend. Love it, use it. <p> and preview should be your best friends. People will thank you and actually see your posts instead of zoning out at the enormous block of text.
Actually, yes.
Although I would suggest a team FPS (UT2k4, CS, Joint Ops, BF1942) where teamwork is mostly necessary. Make sure to turn friendly fire on. They'll have a lot of fun shooting each other until that gets boring. Not as fun as paintball, but not as painful either. :)
You might also try MMORPGs that require fixed classes to fill certain rolls. (I would suggest pre-made characters so they don't have to grind that much.) Having to depend on the tank to keep agro, and the healer to heal, and the damage dealer not to overnuke takes a lot of teamwork and people who know their roles.
I actually went to Gnucash because Quicken (not tried Quickbooks) didn't have double entry bookkeeping. I found two problems with Gnucash. One, all the automated tax stuff that Quicken has wasn't there because the program was made originally in Germany and they hadn't got around to doing US tax code stuff. Two, they didn't have a Windows version. :( Other than that, Gnucash was very nice and very simple to use.
It even let me create my own currency after a recompile. At the time, I wanted to record my purchases in FFXI. (Lots of pretty graphs letting me see what I was spending my money on) Being able to create a FFXI Gold -> USD conversion based on the RMT values, I was able to see how much my character was worth in real dollars. That was pretty neat.
By the way, if you've got everything in Quicken files already, GnuCash does import them.
You say toe-mate-oh, I say tah-mott-oh. Personal preference, I say.
Er, what? Maybe its just me, but my window manager works fine for everything except 6 windows for the same program that makes me minimize and maximize and futz with resizing said miniature windows when all I want to do is minimize everything on that program. Or, when I'm editing a graphic that's bigger than my desktop size (standard 1024x768) the graphic takes over the whole screen and every time I click on it, all the other helper windows disappear because they're behind the picture. (This could be solved by an "Always on Top" option, I suppose)Who says it has to? Not all windows programs follow Windows controls.
Sure it does. The MDI window goes on one desktop. Oh, you mean you want the tools on one desktop and the graphic on another? That becomes a little bit harder. Or, are you talking about resizing everything perfect on one desktop, then using another desktop for another image, and a third for using a browser?
Probably the best solution to the MDI/SDI debate is having a dock window. You can tear off your SDI windows out of the dock and have the seperate windows for everything, but I can dock all of mine into the dock window, letting me have a single MDI window.
Hey! I remember that. The computer lab's Apple IIes had those (though admittedly, not 2048x1280). I wonder if you can play Oregon trail or lemonade stand on this thing...
The solution is Guilds.
I can easily see guilds following a command structure. Yes, your average every day game player wouldn't follow orders unless he got some reward out of it, but guilds would definitely have the organization needed to pilot large ships. Captains would be guild leaders or else have some authority in the guild, while lower ranks would have little.
The only problem you run into is solo players who like playing in a dynamic environment that a MMORPG allows, but aren't social enough to make friends other than a quick group. This could possibly be solved with smaller ships or ships designed to run on minimal crew (2-3 people)
Also, you shouldn't be limited to what you can do by rank. If the captain is KIA then #2 should be able to step up to the captain's chair, or in a looser organization (aka 2-3 man ships, 6 man away team situations) you should be able to run stations below your rank as well. For instance, Captain pilots the ship, while Captain #2 controls weapons.
Wow, I can run .NET 2.0 on my FreeBSD 6.0 laptop now? Which port do I use?
Or, avoid the second movie altogether. The movie is nothing but two people spouting off random quotes at each other with some rapid movement between scenes of people driving the speed limit.
After watching the original movie, you get a better idea of what's going on with GITS:SAC, so I will recommend seeing the first movie before the series, but the second movie is so bad that it will spoil the general mood that GITS and GITS:SAC work so hard to present.
They also all start with the letter F.
Yes.
I still remember the Danger Zone pigeon commercial by Nissan.
The windex commercial where the three birds send in their stupid buddy to test the window to see if its open or not.
The various outpost.com commercials, one of which was firing small rodents out of a cannon.
The entire budweiser frog / lizard series and the ferret.
They may not have sold any more product, but they were sure fun to watch!
There is a reason that some people watch the super bowl only for the commercials. Spending a million dollars or more on an ad placement tends to make people think twice about the quality of commercials.
Typically when I get Indian customer service they speak either perfect English (Sometimes they'll ask odd questions like "How is your climate?") or with a British accent. Perfect English still sounds like an accent to someone from the United States where every state has their own accent. Everyone has an accent to Texans except people from Texas. Some states have light accents, others heavy ones, and some states (such as Missouri) have a different accent from north to south. You'll even find certain towns that have a unique accent that's different from the rest of the state.
However, that isn't to say that perfect English or British accents aren't understandable to Americans.
I concur with the parent. Also...
All jokes aside, the key ??? is being able to listen to what your customers want rather than what some geeks on Slashdot find ideal in a game shop. You'll notice most of my ideal aspects were mostly social. That's the reason I go to a game shop as well as lots of other people. If you're welcoming to the local gaming element, people will stop by. The longer they're in your store, the more likely they are to fail a will save vs. buying new shiny things.