First of all, for a long time, gold farmers were generally blamed for making the game less fun for "typical" users. They took up player spots on servers, which caused a lot of servers to have queues. This forced a lot of people to have to wait to get into the game during primetime hours (6-11pm). A lot of gold farmers tended to bother other players to give them buffs/conjured food/open locked boxes, usually pretty rudely. And, players that wanted to legitimately farm for their own gold had a harder time, because gold farmers would typically plant themselves in common, high-profit spots and camp spawns.
Secondly, visiting and buying from a lot of gold-selling sites puts you at risk to have your account stolen or hacked, either via key loggers or poor security on the buyer's part. Your account is stripped and liquidated, and that gold sold to others, creating a cycle that gives a very bad reputation to both gold farmers and gold sellers alike.
Third, for a while, gold seller sites would spam people in the game advertising their services, both through tells and through the in-game mail.
Now, recently, these aren't the problems that they used to be. I haven't seen a queue on my server in months, ever since the expansion it's been easier than ever to make money (less incentive for anyone buy gold), and with the most recent patch, Blizzard instituted controls to limit the amount of spam. That doesn't take away from the fact that gold farmers have accrued very bad reputations, and people who buy from gold sellers are generally seen as contributing to shady business practices.
Since it actually puts your video card to good use, Aero makes things faster, not slower. Would you want your fancy game to use some generic CPU instead of all the specalized functionaly provided by your GPU? Why should your OS be any different? Unless your hardware sucked, you would be a fool to turn Aero off--it just makes your CPU do more work!
This is true for me at least, and I wish more people could see these benefits. Quick anecdote - I run two monitors on my machine; with most games, the game displays on the primary monitor with my normal Vista desktop on the second. I've found that turning Aero off DECREASES my FPS in the game. I can only surmise that the video card is more than capable of rendering Aero on the second monitor plus what it needs to do in the game, and not taking advantage of that hurts overall.
I hope this isn't too off topic, since the story is about Empire Strikes Back, but I was listening to the commentary on the ROTJ DVDs, and Lucas said something to the effect of, "if I had known Boba Fett was going to be such a popular character, I would have put more effort into giving him a more interesting death. Most people don't really believe he's dead anyways."
For the past few months, I've had a dual monitor setup on two computers with Synergy connections to each other. This gives me four monitors with the additional advantage of having two CPUs.
Once you go dual (or quad?)-head, you never go back.
One of the hall of fame pictures featured, The Wet Bird was the March-April 2001 IRTC Winner.
This is an amazing piece of artwork. One of the other artists (scroll to bottom) even mentions that "The Wet Bird" was accused of being a photograph when it was submitted.
I've received this error a couple of times for seemingly random reasons (and at the most inopportune times), so I suspect anything related to SP2 is a coincidence.
Coincidentally, some time ago I registered thisaddressisnotreal1@hotmail.com for myself just so I could have my own dummy e-mail without the risk of it actually going to somebody's real address.
3. Buy as big of a case as you possibly can. This will allow you a lot of room to work on the inside, as well as good airflow and extra mounts.
4. Find out what every cable is *before* you plug it in. Also, make sure which direction it goes. Sometimes they need forcing, but only force after you're SURE that it's supposed to fit that way.
To add something else that I've learned about buying cables, longer cables are not always better cables. Several months ago, I went out and bought some rounded IDE cables. Because I wasn't sure exactly how long I needed them, I bought 36" cables that ended up not fitting inside my case. To this day, the extra foot of cabling is folded over and stuffed in that little space between the motherboard and the hard drive rack.
I was told that if you select multiple drives for Windows to create swap files in, it will automatically RAID the swap so you get double the performance.
Unfortunately, when I chose two drives to do this on my system with 1 GB of memory, Windows decided to make 1.5 GB swap drives on each drive, giving me an effective swap file of about 3x my RAM.
I signed up for Cashfiesta during that time, and was probably one of the few people that DIDN'T use a mouse emulator, but actually managed to use my computer for 16 hours a day for a whole month.
Then, surprise surprise, the day before Cashfiesta was supposed to send me a check, they claimed I was cheating and cancelled my account.
The Macintosh is by far the most compatible platform. It runs Classic applications, Mac OS X applications, BSD applications, Linux applications, and X11 applications. As surely you know, the Mac will even run Windows applications via Virtual PC.
You can hardly group Classic and MacOS X applications as some sort of exception to the statement. Windows XP can also run DOS and Windows 95 programs, so I hardly see your point.
VirtualPC runs a small subset of Windows applications; not necessarily perfectly, either.
I've found that far more software is, and always has been, available for Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Couple of points, specific to WoW:
First of all, for a long time, gold farmers were generally blamed for making the game less fun for "typical" users. They took up player spots on servers, which caused a lot of servers to have queues. This forced a lot of people to have to wait to get into the game during primetime hours (6-11pm). A lot of gold farmers tended to bother other players to give them buffs/conjured food/open locked boxes, usually pretty rudely. And, players that wanted to legitimately farm for their own gold had a harder time, because gold farmers would typically plant themselves in common, high-profit spots and camp spawns.
Secondly, visiting and buying from a lot of gold-selling sites puts you at risk to have your account stolen or hacked, either via key loggers or poor security on the buyer's part. Your account is stripped and liquidated, and that gold sold to others, creating a cycle that gives a very bad reputation to both gold farmers and gold sellers alike.
Third, for a while, gold seller sites would spam people in the game advertising their services, both through tells and through the in-game mail.
Now, recently, these aren't the problems that they used to be. I haven't seen a queue on my server in months, ever since the expansion it's been easier than ever to make money (less incentive for anyone buy gold), and with the most recent patch, Blizzard instituted controls to limit the amount of spam. That doesn't take away from the fact that gold farmers have accrued very bad reputations, and people who buy from gold sellers are generally seen as contributing to shady business practices.
This is true for me at least, and I wish more people could see these benefits. Quick anecdote - I run two monitors on my machine; with most games, the game displays on the primary monitor with my normal Vista desktop on the second. I've found that turning Aero off DECREASES my FPS in the game. I can only surmise that the video card is more than capable of rendering Aero on the second monitor plus what it needs to do in the game, and not taking advantage of that hurts overall.
I hope this isn't too off topic, since the story is about Empire Strikes Back, but I was listening to the commentary on the ROTJ DVDs, and Lucas said something to the effect of, "if I had known Boba Fett was going to be such a popular character, I would have put more effort into giving him a more interesting death. Most people don't really believe he's dead anyways."
For the past few months, I've had a dual monitor setup on two computers with Synergy connections to each other. This gives me four monitors with the additional advantage of having two CPUs.
Once you go dual (or quad?)-head, you never go back.
One of the hall of fame pictures featured, The Wet Bird was the March-April 2001 IRTC Winner.
This is an amazing piece of artwork. One of the other artists (scroll to bottom) even mentions that "The Wet Bird" was accused of being a photograph when it was submitted.
Unbelievable stuff.
I've received this error a couple of times for seemingly random reasons (and at the most inopportune times), so I suspect anything related to SP2 is a coincidence.
Coincidentally, some time ago I registered thisaddressisnotreal1@hotmail.com for myself just so I could have my own dummy e-mail without the risk of it actually going to somebody's real address.
4. Find out what every cable is *before* you plug it in. Also, make sure which direction it goes. Sometimes they need forcing, but only force after you're SURE that it's supposed to fit that way.
To add something else that I've learned about buying cables, longer cables are not always better cables. Several months ago, I went out and bought some rounded IDE cables. Because I wasn't sure exactly how long I needed them, I bought 36" cables that ended up not fitting inside my case. To this day, the extra foot of cabling is folded over and stuffed in that little space between the motherboard and the hard drive rack.
Obligatory source for obligatory Simpsons quote
I was told that if you select multiple drives for Windows to create swap files in, it will automatically RAID the swap so you get double the performance.
Unfortunately, when I chose two drives to do this on my system with 1 GB of memory, Windows decided to make 1.5 GB swap drives on each drive, giving me an effective swap file of about 3x my RAM.
Can I ask who was the one that perpetuated all of those hardware misconceptions?
Whoever decided to tell the uninformed masses that the hard drive is that large rectangular box on the ground should be shot.
Two other guys were linked in the article as having their own Tron costumes
I signed up for Cashfiesta during that time, and was probably one of the few people that DIDN'T use a mouse emulator, but actually managed to use my computer for 16 hours a day for a whole month.
Then, surprise surprise, the day before Cashfiesta was supposed to send me a check, they claimed I was cheating and cancelled my account.
But I'm not bitter, really.
Actually, this is the link to Google's features.
The Macintosh is by far the most compatible platform. It runs Classic applications, Mac OS X applications, BSD applications, Linux applications, and X11 applications. As surely you know, the Mac will even run Windows applications via Virtual PC.
You can hardly group Classic and MacOS X applications as some sort of exception to the statement. Windows XP can also run DOS and Windows 95 programs, so I hardly see your point.
VirtualPC runs a small subset of Windows applications; not necessarily perfectly, either.
I've found that far more software is, and always has been, available for Windows.