My own explanation I give to your statement, is that RAM is being used for temporal storing of data : When there wouldn't be enough RAM in the machine, it would use the harddrive more for temporal storage (thus 'damaging' it more).
Anytime there's not enough physical RAM to do the job, you've got to go to the swap-file (or swap-partition) on the hard-drive. Swap memory is roughly 300-600x cheaper then additional RAM, but it's performance is 3-4 orders of magnitude slower.
As for why it shortens drive life, there are a few usual ways (physical and thermal):
1) Increased seek activity on the drive. Which can wear out the head-seek assembly faster. Modern head assemblies are pretty sturdy however, it's just a coil of wire suspended in a magnetic field with a pivot point. Apply varying amounts of current to the coil and the head moves to a different track. Turn the current off and the head snaps back to the "park" zone (generally the outer edge of the platter). More likely is that the connecting wires might break or the circuitry driving the head assembly breaks down. Still, as with any physical moving part, it will only work for a certain number of operations before it breaks.
2) Increased movement of the heads generates additional heat, which causes circuit board components to overheat. This is much more likely to happen with 7200rpm (and higher) drives that aren't actively cooled. You can't touch a Maxtor 7200rpm SATA while it's running, unless you have at least *some* airflow constantly moving across the drive to draw the heat away. It's possibly to defend against this with proper cooling.
Those drives that I killed were pre-7200rpm (probably 4800 or 5400rpm), so they probably died due to mechanical causes rather then heat issues. Not because I was "damaging" the drive by using for swap, but I simply wore it out faster. So the less swapping you do, the less wear-n-tear you're putting on the drive (mostly the head assembly).
I tell myself that I will upgrade it piece by piece over the following years every single time I have bought a new PC.
RAM/CPU/motherboard are pretty tightly linked. Unless you bought the motherboard or socket type right at the start of a series and are upgrading right before that series gets killed off, it never really works out.
I usually upgrade the video card one year and then replace the CPU/MB/RAM the next year.
The only parts that stay constant from year to year is a good quality case, power-supply and drives.
To play Doom, I remember having to boot my 386 without loading the TSRs....
Was it DOS 5.0 that introduced the idea of boot configurations? (There were user-created entries in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT that would prompt the user during the boot... you could pick whether you wanted a normal configuration, or you could create a "gaming" configuration.) I'm pretty sure that feature wasn't in DOS 4.0, but I skipped DOS 4 (went straight from DOS 3.3 to 5.0).
That was a nice feature for the time. Much nicer then having to keep track of "gaming boot floppies".
Ah, such horrid memories... but at least back then you knew every single file on the system (including the DOS directory).
I've found that WinXP is rather sluggish in a computer with 256MB of RAM. Dropping in another 256MB stick, the performance takes a very perceptable jump in all sorts of machines ranging from PIII500's to XP3200+'s in day to day computer use. I've also found that doubling it again to 1GB makes for no noticible difference in the same machines.
Agreed. WinXP's base boot configuration (once you load all of the device drivers and all of the patches and a few things like instant messaging and an MP3 player) is right around 200-256MB. Which doesn't leave much room for applications. It also gets worse over time as you add more doodads to the system.
512MB is the real useable minimum for a WinXP machine being used for anything other then Notepad. And 1GB is vastly better, especially if your users have two monitors or keep a dozen different applications open at the same time.
It's the same old story that it's been for the past 10 years. Whenever you buy a new machine, always double the RAM and go with the cheaper CPU. The cost difference between 256MB and 512MB is likely about the same as between a 2.8GHz CPU and a 3.2GHz CPU. But the performance improvements will be huge if you go with the memory upgrade.
And since PC performance has pretty much flat-lined over the past 5 years (it used to double every 18 months, now it only doubles every 30-36 months), an older machine with 512MB or 1GB of RAM is still a very useful machine for general computing.
Utah Sate University Students get the same! Here in Utah, even the legislature got into the act. They made it mandatory for all students entering the state primarily to go to school pay out-of-state tuition for 2 years instead of one. Yay! They claimed that students didn't contribute anything to the state (taxes or otherwise), so they didn't deserve in-state tuition after just one year. This just goes to show that students should vote. Then they might be able to put a little fear into the politicians.
Pennsylvania requires that you live in the state for one year without taking any college courses in order to be considered a resident.
Which makes a good bit of sense and isn't outrageous. Nothing unusual or underhanded about it.
Depending on what exact type of SO-DIMM memory it takes, you might be surprised at memory prices (I was). IIRC, a PentiumII is probably PC66 or PC100 SDRAM?
KVR66X64SO/128 128MB PC66 SODIMM $54.00
PC100 Kingston SO-DIMMs are $56/128MB, $119/256MB
PC133 Kingston SO-DIMMs are $54/128MB, $115/256MB
We're in the process of upgrading a bunch of machines at work (desktops purchased back in 2000). So I've been catching up on memory prices for a lot of equipment. Most desktop memory is around $80 for a 256MB PC100/PC133 module. Cheap upgrade, and it gives us another 2 years of life on these boxes (all are 600-800Mhz CPUs).
(Also has the side-benefit that the employees know that things are still getting upgraded, even if money is tight.)
Really, what other legitimate use does a 30Mbps connection to the home have than the large-scale stealing of copyrighted material?
The trite example is hosting a modern game server. For example, Call of Duty supports up to 64 players (although the max realistic number that I've actually seen is 48).
If each client requires 56Kbps of bandwidth, you'll need 2688Kbps to service 48 clients. Sure, that's only 1/10th of the 30Mbps, but you could easily forecast games that require 128Kbps connections and allow for up to 128 players (which is 16384Kbps).
(Playing on a 40-player server is a lot of fun. It will be interesting to play on 100-player servers in a few years.)
Would you really move one town over just for faster internet??
I would. But then I telecommute to work 95% of the time, so high speed access is very important.
Right now I'm considering a move to another state next year (time for a change in scenery). I'm dreading the hurdles involved in finding out what high-speed access is available as well as making sure that I can get it at a particular address.
Pretty much any app written in the last few years is going to be a memory hog on a 128MB machine. AOL's Instant Messenger alone can eat 27MB. Firebird 0.7 was the lightest of the versions that I've tried, Firefox 0.8 was a pig, and Firefox 0.9 is a bit better.
256MB and 512MB chips are generally less then $100, so I think a memory upgrade is in your future. The minimum amount of memory we spec for new machines is 1GB now, which we hope will let us use the machines for 5 years. (We're currently going through and adding 256MB or 512MB chips to all of our middle-of-the-pack machines.)
Moz 1.7 is eating up 186MB on my system at the moment... (sigh). Internet Explorer probably did that as well, but it hides itself among multiple processes so it's hard to add it up.
At the machines at the library itself, though, they use a different interface (wish they wouldn't), and kiosk / IE machines -- never mind tabs, you can't even start new browser instances, so you have to pursue each possibility on the list one at a time, click, then read, then click Back to try the next one.
And a lot of websites screw with the search results page so that when you do go back, the page is no longer available and you have to search again. It makes searching for something very time-consuming.
(Then there's the bug that when you go back to a previous page, you don't always end up at the same spot in the text as when you left.)
I've never understood the big appeal of tabbed browsing, really. And I've been using Firefox for months.
What does it offer me that new windows don't?
The best way to use it is to sub-divide how you do your browsing. Right now, I have 5 Mozilla browser windows open, most with multiple tabs. Each window is dedicated to a particular topic, with the tabs being related things:
Window 1: Slashdot, with all of the stories that I want to read loaded up in background tabs. Plus new tabs for reading sub-threads that looked interesting, or opening up linked articles/pages in a new tab.
Window 2: Corporate Intranet applications (timesheet, project database, checklists for various jobs, job requests, etc).
Window 3: GMail (only one tab at the moment)
Window 4: BizRate & PriceScan as well as half a dozen tabs linking to various online stores where I was pricing out some gear.
Window 5: Yet another research window with Google in the left-hand tab, and each interesting result opened up in additional tabs.
That's pretty typical usage for me (4+ windows, 20+ tabs open), especially if it's a fragmented day where I'm tracking a few different projects. Much easier then trying to deal with 10+ Internet Explorer windows.
And within the tabbed interface, [Ctrl-PgUp]/[Ctrl-PgDn] is supposed to take you to the next/previous tab. No mousing required for the most part. (Although I have a trackpoint mouse pointer so my fingers never have to leave the home row anyway. Haven't used an external mouse on the laptop in forever and a day.)
No funny key combinations. Repeat, no funny key combinations. Everything must be accessable through the menus. Yeah, I know you want to be able to bind any control key combination to any function. Don't. It doesn't really speed up use anyway. Read Apple's old studies on this. People blank out on the 500ms they're thinking about the control key combo. And never, ever use keyboard toggles that don't have a permanently visible state on screen.
Key combinations really aren't a problem, but you must always display the key binding by the menu option in the menus (or on the buttons). Only about half the applications that I've seen get this right. Mozilla gets it right (as an example).
However, you should survey your users and find out what menu commands they perform frequently and assign hot-keys for those. I don't need a key combination to change the color of the background bar. I do need a key combination that starts off some task that I use 100x a day.
Do try to avoid multiple key combinations where you have to combine alt/shift/ctrl with an additional key. Those are a real PITA on a laptop keyboard where things are quite where you'd expect.
Those aren't screenshots, those are postage stamps!
The images are only 474x373 pixels, which is far from awe-inspiring on my 1600x1200 19" CRT. I'd imagine that's not the reaction that the marketing folks were looking for.
Where did they hire these web designers from? 1995? The whole website seems like it was designed only to be viewed on a 640x480 15" monitor.
IBM article about the IBM Roentgen That was LCD technology, and the big deal at the time was they were first to get to 200dpi (previous record was the Monet at 157dpi). It's 2,560 x 2,048 pixels and 16.3" diagonally, dot pitch of around 0.127mm. At one point, it was supposed to end up in ThinkPad laptops. (Wish I had one for my laptop!)
However, I don't know that anyone sells it (can't find anything).
Other alternative:
ViewSonic Vp2290b 22.2 in LCD Monitor
3840 x 2400 Pixels - Dot Pitch 0.125 Mm - VGA, SXGA - Sku: vp2290b
Price Range: $5,699.00 to $7,046.04 at 10 stores
A funny thing about late 90s movies and monitors: in a firefight, the LCDs never get hit. Every CRT in the room can get shot, but the LCDs go unscratched. Not surprising from a financial standpoint, since old, broken, or otherwise explosion-worthy CRTs are a dime a dozen and LCDs aren't, but it's still amusing to see the aftermath of an office fight scene with bits of computer shrapnel all over and one lone, unharmed LCD standing in the middle of it.
Cute, that. I'll have to watch for that.
I'm thinking it's more because you can make the audience believe that CRTs like to go BOOM. (Do they? I don't think so, but I'm not sure.) At a minimum, CRTs make/allow a nice glass-shattering sound. LCDs just don't have that BOOM factor (can't trick the audience into believe that the plastic casing is as volatile as plastic explosive).
"windowsupdate.com" is a real Microsoft site? The HTML looks like something some dumb spammer would write. There's a NOFRAMES tag, but the page doesn't have frames. There's no BODY tag (which is why the page won't display in Mozilla). There's no CSS. There are no Microsoft Front Page indicators. The domain is in REGISTRAR-LOCK. Yes, the registrant info shows Microsoft's address, but you can put anything in there.
windowsupdate.com - WHOIS shows Microsoft being in control. No lock. DNS record looks like last updated on July 6th 2004. windowsupdate.net - WHOIS also shows Microsoft in control. No lock. DNS looks like last update March 2004. windowsupdate.org - WHOIS does show someone other then Microsoft. Registered Feb 2002, expires Feb 2005 by Jacco Tunnissen in Rotterdam, NL.
Looking at the page body of www.windowsupdate.com, it's simply a text-only HTML page, but with a missing set of BODY tags. Probably due to the massive DDoS that one of the past worms inflicted. So they removed all graphics and tried to make the page as light as possible. (I am surprised it's not simply a META REFRESH pointing at windowsupdate.microsoft.com.)
bloody annoying, as I typo that from time to time at work, when building PCs. We don't build them often enough to justify mucking about with an internal mirror.
Which is a good argument for companies to use sub-domains rather then registering top-level domains willy-nilly.
It's a lot harder to get hijacked if you mistype "windowsupdate.microsoft.com" as "windows-update.microsoft.com". So long as Microsoft maintains careful control over their top level DNS server.
It's just a pet peeve of mine from the Internet "gold rush" days where every application from a single company suddenly got it's own top-level domain. When configuring whitelists (e.g. adding sites to the trusted zone in Internet Explorer, or other apps), it's a lot nicer to be able to say "*.intuit.com" rather then having to deal with "*.inuit.com", "*.quicken.com", "*.turbotax.com".
Sure, if you want to register "*.quicken.com", that's fine, but it should've redirected to "quicken.intuit.com".
For instance, it was really a challenge for the developer of the Build engine to have support of a room directly above another room.
I don't remember any level designs in Duke Nukem 3D where there were rooms directly above other rooms. (In fact, I'm not sure it was possible at all given the way that the builder worked.)
Instead, they would be clever and use teleport to move the user to a different part of the grid where the "upper" room would be (but you wouldn't be able to see out of that upper room). Multi-level towers were usually just built at multiple spots on the world grid with teleports between the levels.
Or they'd play around with the layout so that after running around in a big circle, it felt like you were above the other room.
Sure, it wasn't real 3D, but it was extremely easy to bang out levels since you weren't trying to layout 3D objects without all of the tools of a 3D CAD program. With the builder, you could map out your level design in 2D, then you just went in and changed your floor/ceiling heights to be whatever you wanted. (Duke 3D didn't have "outdoors", just textures that sorta looked like they were outdoors.)
Designing Quake's 3D levels, OTOH, was definitely an order of magnitude more difficult, and you really had to plan ahead. (I'd guess that more modern tools are easier to use... this was back in the 1997-1999 timeframe.)
The 250GB drives are expensive. 160GB and 200GB drives are down around $0.55/GB the last time that I checked.
DVD media is under $0.20/GB. (50 4GB disks for $40 yesterday at OfficeMax)
We're in for a bit of lull though, 300GB drives have been out for a while (a year? 18 months?) and only recently has there been any company able to bring a 400GB drive to market. Things are apparently sticky in the storage market because I expected to see 500GB-600GB drives this year with TB drives in 2005. Used to be that drive sizes doubled every 18 months.
Video on Demand would have to have 100x the current selection (as in 400-1000 movie titles to select from) as well as being as cheap as the local video rental store ($2 max). Even then, it would need to be as convenient as current media where you can pause it, rewind it, fast foward, or even watch it again.
Somehow, I don't see any of that happening without having to pay a $$ monthly fee and $$ for each viewing. Plus, unless the video rental stores were in on it, there's still a turf-war to be fought.
DVD-ROM (and whatever format follows) will stick around solely for the fact that it's much simpler to use and gives the end-user greater control.
RC4 is a solid, well-respected algorithm, but using it correctly requires that the first few hundred bytes of the the keystream be discarded after every rekeying operation.
Out of curiosity, why?
(Got any links so I can read up on the why and wherefore?)
Are you complaining about the dialog boxes thaw show up saying "Connection Refused" etc? Displaying an error web page instead of Dialog boxes is one of the biggest issues to be resolved in Mozilla/Firefox.
You mean an error page like:
browser.xul.error_pages.enabled = true
(You can set that by entering "about:config" in your address bar, and then double-clicking on the entry's line.)
Gives you an error message in the browser window instead of a pop-up dialog box, with the bonus that it saves the URL and allows you to retry the action.
(If you're talking about getting that option turned on by default, nevermind... but give me a bug # so I can go vote for it.)
Slashdot Mirror
My own explanation I give to your statement, is that RAM is being used for temporal storing of data : When there wouldn't be enough RAM in the machine, it would use the harddrive more for temporal storage (thus 'damaging' it more).
Anytime there's not enough physical RAM to do the job, you've got to go to the swap-file (or swap-partition) on the hard-drive. Swap memory is roughly 300-600x cheaper then additional RAM, but it's performance is 3-4 orders of magnitude slower.
As for why it shortens drive life, there are a few usual ways (physical and thermal):
1) Increased seek activity on the drive. Which can wear out the head-seek assembly faster. Modern head assemblies are pretty sturdy however, it's just a coil of wire suspended in a magnetic field with a pivot point. Apply varying amounts of current to the coil and the head moves to a different track. Turn the current off and the head snaps back to the "park" zone (generally the outer edge of the platter). More likely is that the connecting wires might break or the circuitry driving the head assembly breaks down. Still, as with any physical moving part, it will only work for a certain number of operations before it breaks.
2) Increased movement of the heads generates additional heat, which causes circuit board components to overheat. This is much more likely to happen with 7200rpm (and higher) drives that aren't actively cooled. You can't touch a Maxtor 7200rpm SATA while it's running, unless you have at least *some* airflow constantly moving across the drive to draw the heat away. It's possibly to defend against this with proper cooling.
Those drives that I killed were pre-7200rpm (probably 4800 or 5400rpm), so they probably died due to mechanical causes rather then heat issues. Not because I was "damaging" the drive by using for swap, but I simply wore it out faster. So the less swapping you do, the less wear-n-tear you're putting on the drive (mostly the head assembly).
I tell myself that I will upgrade it piece by piece over the following years every single time I have bought a new PC.
RAM/CPU/motherboard are pretty tightly linked. Unless you bought the motherboard or socket type right at the start of a series and are upgrading right before that series gets killed off, it never really works out.
I usually upgrade the video card one year and then replace the CPU/MB/RAM the next year.
The only parts that stay constant from year to year is a good quality case, power-supply and drives.
To play Doom, I remember having to boot my 386 without loading the TSRs....
Was it DOS 5.0 that introduced the idea of boot configurations? (There were user-created entries in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT that would prompt the user during the boot... you could pick whether you wanted a normal configuration, or you could create a "gaming" configuration.) I'm pretty sure that feature wasn't in DOS 4.0, but I skipped DOS 4 (went straight from DOS 3.3 to 5.0).
That was a nice feature for the time. Much nicer then having to keep track of "gaming boot floppies".
Ah, such horrid memories... but at least back then you knew every single file on the system (including the DOS directory).
You forgot one benefit of having enough RAM.
Prolonging the life of your hard drive.
(I killed at least two drives back in the NT4 days because the I.S. folks wouldn't let me upgrade my memory.)
I've found that WinXP is rather sluggish in a computer with 256MB of RAM. Dropping in another 256MB stick, the performance takes a very perceptable jump in all sorts of machines ranging from PIII500's to XP3200+'s in day to day computer use. I've also found that doubling it again to 1GB makes for no noticible difference in the same machines.
Agreed. WinXP's base boot configuration (once you load all of the device drivers and all of the patches and a few things like instant messaging and an MP3 player) is right around 200-256MB. Which doesn't leave much room for applications. It also gets worse over time as you add more doodads to the system.
512MB is the real useable minimum for a WinXP machine being used for anything other then Notepad. And 1GB is vastly better, especially if your users have two monitors or keep a dozen different applications open at the same time.
It's the same old story that it's been for the past 10 years. Whenever you buy a new machine, always double the RAM and go with the cheaper CPU. The cost difference between 256MB and 512MB is likely about the same as between a 2.8GHz CPU and a 3.2GHz CPU. But the performance improvements will be huge if you go with the memory upgrade.
And since PC performance has pretty much flat-lined over the past 5 years (it used to double every 18 months, now it only doubles every 30-36 months), an older machine with 512MB or 1GB of RAM is still a very useful machine for general computing.
Utah Sate University Students get the same! Here in Utah, even the legislature got into the act. They made it mandatory for all students entering the state primarily to go to school pay out-of-state tuition for 2 years instead of one. Yay! They claimed that students didn't contribute anything to the state (taxes or otherwise), so they didn't deserve in-state tuition after just one year. This just goes to show that students should vote. Then they might be able to put a little fear into the politicians.
Pennsylvania requires that you live in the state for one year without taking any college courses in order to be considered a resident.
Which makes a good bit of sense and isn't outrageous. Nothing unusual or underhanded about it.
Depending on what exact type of SO-DIMM memory it takes, you might be surprised at memory prices (I was). IIRC, a PentiumII is probably PC66 or PC100 SDRAM?
KVR66X64SO/128 128MB PC66 SODIMM $54.00
PC100 Kingston SO-DIMMs are $56/128MB, $119/256MB
PC133 Kingston SO-DIMMs are $54/128MB, $115/256MB
(prices from Kingston)
We're in the process of upgrading a bunch of machines at work (desktops purchased back in 2000). So I've been catching up on memory prices for a lot of equipment. Most desktop memory is around $80 for a 256MB PC100/PC133 module. Cheap upgrade, and it gives us another 2 years of life on these boxes (all are 600-800Mhz CPUs).
(Also has the side-benefit that the employees know that things are still getting upgraded, even if money is tight.)
Really, what other legitimate use does a 30Mbps connection to the home have than the large-scale stealing of copyrighted material?
The trite example is hosting a modern game server. For example, Call of Duty supports up to 64 players (although the max realistic number that I've actually seen is 48).
If each client requires 56Kbps of bandwidth, you'll need 2688Kbps to service 48 clients. Sure, that's only 1/10th of the 30Mbps, but you could easily forecast games that require 128Kbps connections and allow for up to 128 players (which is 16384Kbps).
(Playing on a 40-player server is a lot of fun. It will be interesting to play on 100-player servers in a few years.)
Would you really move one town over just for faster internet??
I would. But then I telecommute to work 95% of the time, so high speed access is very important.
Right now I'm considering a move to another state next year (time for a change in scenery). I'm dreading the hurdles involved in finding out what high-speed access is available as well as making sure that I can get it at a particular address.
Thunderbird is a memory hog on my 128MB machine.
Pretty much any app written in the last few years is going to be a memory hog on a 128MB machine. AOL's Instant Messenger alone can eat 27MB. Firebird 0.7 was the lightest of the versions that I've tried, Firefox 0.8 was a pig, and Firefox 0.9 is a bit better.
256MB and 512MB chips are generally less then $100, so I think a memory upgrade is in your future. The minimum amount of memory we spec for new machines is 1GB now, which we hope will let us use the machines for 5 years. (We're currently going through and adding 256MB or 512MB chips to all of our middle-of-the-pack machines.)
Moz 1.7 is eating up 186MB on my system at the moment... (sigh). Internet Explorer probably did that as well, but it hides itself among multiple processes so it's hard to add it up.
At the machines at the library itself, though, they use a different interface (wish they wouldn't), and kiosk / IE machines -- never mind tabs, you can't even start new browser instances, so you have to pursue each possibility on the list one at a time, click, then read, then click Back to try the next one.
And a lot of websites screw with the search results page so that when you do go back, the page is no longer available and you have to search again. It makes searching for something very time-consuming.
(Then there's the bug that when you go back to a previous page, you don't always end up at the same spot in the text as when you left.)
I've never understood the big appeal of tabbed browsing, really. And I've been using Firefox for months.
What does it offer me that new windows don't?
The best way to use it is to sub-divide how you do your browsing. Right now, I have 5 Mozilla browser windows open, most with multiple tabs. Each window is dedicated to a particular topic, with the tabs being related things:
Window 1: Slashdot, with all of the stories that I want to read loaded up in background tabs. Plus new tabs for reading sub-threads that looked interesting, or opening up linked articles/pages in a new tab.
Window 2: Corporate Intranet applications (timesheet, project database, checklists for various jobs, job requests, etc).
Window 3: GMail (only one tab at the moment)
Window 4: BizRate & PriceScan as well as half a dozen tabs linking to various online stores where I was pricing out some gear.
Window 5: Yet another research window with Google in the left-hand tab, and each interesting result opened up in additional tabs.
That's pretty typical usage for me (4+ windows, 20+ tabs open), especially if it's a fragmented day where I'm tracking a few different projects. Much easier then trying to deal with 10+ Internet Explorer windows.
And within the tabbed interface, [Ctrl-PgUp]/[Ctrl-PgDn] is supposed to take you to the next/previous tab. No mousing required for the most part. (Although I have a trackpoint mouse pointer so my fingers never have to leave the home row anyway. Haven't used an external mouse on the laptop in forever and a day.)
We tried firefox but with w2k's 256 color limitation on terminal sessions, most toolbar icons showed as black squares rendering the software unusable.
One theme that does work in 256-color Terminal Services is "708090-lite" by Ronald Buehlmann. It's not the prettiest, but it does get the job done.
I used to know a good color theme, but it wasn't updated yet when I moved to Firefox 0.9, and now I've forgotten it.
No funny key combinations. Repeat, no funny key combinations. Everything must be accessable through the menus. Yeah, I know you want to be able to bind any control key combination to any function. Don't. It doesn't really speed up use anyway. Read Apple's old studies on this. People blank out on the 500ms they're thinking about the control key combo. And never, ever use keyboard toggles that don't have a permanently visible state on screen.
Key combinations really aren't a problem, but you must always display the key binding by the menu option in the menus (or on the buttons). Only about half the applications that I've seen get this right. Mozilla gets it right (as an example).
However, you should survey your users and find out what menu commands they perform frequently and assign hot-keys for those. I don't need a key combination to change the color of the background bar. I do need a key combination that starts off some task that I use 100x a day.
Do try to avoid multiple key combinations where you have to combine alt/shift/ctrl with an additional key. Those are a real PITA on a laptop keyboard where things are quite where you'd expect.
Those aren't screenshots, those are postage stamps!
The images are only 474x373 pixels, which is far from awe-inspiring on my 1600x1200 19" CRT. I'd imagine that's not the reaction that the marketing folks were looking for.
Where did they hire these web designers from? 1995? The whole website seems like it was designed only to be viewed on a 640x480 15" monitor.
P.S.: IBM also makes a hi-res LCD display:
IBM 9503DG3 22.2 in LCD FLAT PANEL Monitor
3840 x 2400 Pixels - Sku: 9503DG3
Pricing is pretty much the same as the ViewSonic.
Whatever happened to the IBM Roentgen?
IBM article about the IBM Roentgen That was LCD technology, and the big deal at the time was they were first to get to 200dpi (previous record was the Monet at 157dpi). It's 2,560 x 2,048 pixels and 16.3" diagonally, dot pitch of around 0.127mm. At one point, it was supposed to end up in ThinkPad laptops. (Wish I had one for my laptop!)
However, I don't know that anyone sells it (can't find anything).
Other alternative:
ViewSonic Vp2290b 22.2 in LCD Monitor
3840 x 2400 Pixels - Dot Pitch 0.125 Mm - VGA, SXGA - Sku: vp2290b
Price Range: $5,699.00 to $7,046.04 at 10 stores
The ViewSonic VP2290B/VP2290B2 are 203ppi LCDs.
A funny thing about late 90s movies and monitors: in a firefight, the LCDs never get hit. Every CRT in the room can get shot, but the LCDs go unscratched. Not surprising from a financial standpoint, since old, broken, or otherwise explosion-worthy CRTs are a dime a dozen and LCDs aren't, but it's still amusing to see the aftermath of an office fight scene with bits of computer shrapnel all over and one lone, unharmed LCD standing in the middle of it.
Cute, that. I'll have to watch for that.
I'm thinking it's more because you can make the audience believe that CRTs like to go BOOM. (Do they? I don't think so, but I'm not sure.) At a minimum, CRTs make/allow a nice glass-shattering sound. LCDs just don't have that BOOM factor (can't trick the audience into believe that the plastic casing is as volatile as plastic explosive).
"windowsupdate.com" is a real Microsoft site? The HTML looks like something some dumb spammer would write. There's a NOFRAMES tag, but the page doesn't have frames. There's no BODY tag (which is why the page won't display in Mozilla). There's no CSS. There are no Microsoft Front Page indicators. The domain is in REGISTRAR-LOCK. Yes, the registrant info shows Microsoft's address, but you can put anything in there.
(fires up Demon.net's net tools page)
windowsupdate.com - WHOIS shows Microsoft being in control. No lock. DNS record looks like last updated on July 6th 2004.
windowsupdate.net - WHOIS also shows Microsoft in control. No lock. DNS looks like last update March 2004.
windowsupdate.org - WHOIS does show someone other then Microsoft. Registered Feb 2002, expires Feb 2005 by Jacco Tunnissen in Rotterdam, NL.
Looking at the page body of www.windowsupdate.com, it's simply a text-only HTML page, but with a missing set of BODY tags. Probably due to the massive DDoS that one of the past worms inflicted. So they removed all graphics and tried to make the page as light as possible. (I am surprised it's not simply a META REFRESH pointing at windowsupdate.microsoft.com.)
bloody annoying, as I typo that from time to time at work, when building PCs. We don't build them often enough to justify mucking about with an internal mirror.
Which is a good argument for companies to use sub-domains rather then registering top-level domains willy-nilly.
It's a lot harder to get hijacked if you mistype "windowsupdate.microsoft.com" as "windows-update.microsoft.com". So long as Microsoft maintains careful control over their top level DNS server.
It's just a pet peeve of mine from the Internet "gold rush" days where every application from a single company suddenly got it's own top-level domain. When configuring whitelists (e.g. adding sites to the trusted zone in Internet Explorer, or other apps), it's a lot nicer to be able to say "*.intuit.com" rather then having to deal with "*.inuit.com", "*.quicken.com", "*.turbotax.com".
Sure, if you want to register "*.quicken.com", that's fine, but it should've redirected to "quicken.intuit.com".
(sorry, just venting)
For instance, it was really a challenge for the developer of the Build engine to have support of a room directly above another room.
I don't remember any level designs in Duke Nukem 3D where there were rooms directly above other rooms. (In fact, I'm not sure it was possible at all given the way that the builder worked.)
Instead, they would be clever and use teleport to move the user to a different part of the grid where the "upper" room would be (but you wouldn't be able to see out of that upper room). Multi-level towers were usually just built at multiple spots on the world grid with teleports between the levels.
Or they'd play around with the layout so that after running around in a big circle, it felt like you were above the other room.
Sure, it wasn't real 3D, but it was extremely easy to bang out levels since you weren't trying to layout 3D objects without all of the tools of a 3D CAD program. With the builder, you could map out your level design in 2D, then you just went in and changed your floor/ceiling heights to be whatever you wanted. (Duke 3D didn't have "outdoors", just textures that sorta looked like they were outdoors.)
Designing Quake's 3D levels, OTOH, was definitely an order of magnitude more difficult, and you really had to plan ahead. (I'd guess that more modern tools are easier to use... this was back in the 1997-1999 timeframe.)
The 250GB drives are expensive. 160GB and 200GB drives are down around $0.55/GB the last time that I checked.
DVD media is under $0.20/GB. (50 4GB disks for $40 yesterday at OfficeMax)
We're in for a bit of lull though, 300GB drives have been out for a while (a year? 18 months?) and only recently has there been any company able to bring a 400GB drive to market. Things are apparently sticky in the storage market because I expected to see 500GB-600GB drives this year with TB drives in 2005. Used to be that drive sizes doubled every 18 months.
Video on Demand would have to have 100x the current selection (as in 400-1000 movie titles to select from) as well as being as cheap as the local video rental store ($2 max). Even then, it would need to be as convenient as current media where you can pause it, rewind it, fast foward, or even watch it again.
Somehow, I don't see any of that happening without having to pay a $$ monthly fee and $$ for each viewing. Plus, unless the video rental stores were in on it, there's still a turf-war to be fought.
DVD-ROM (and whatever format follows) will stick around solely for the fact that it's much simpler to use and gives the end-user greater control.
RC4 is a solid, well-respected algorithm, but using it correctly requires that the first few hundred bytes of the the keystream be discarded after every rekeying operation.
Out of curiosity, why?
(Got any links so I can read up on the why and wherefore?)
Are you complaining about the dialog boxes thaw show up saying "Connection Refused" etc? Displaying an error web page instead of Dialog boxes is one of the biggest issues to be resolved in Mozilla/Firefox.
You mean an error page like:
browser.xul.error_pages.enabled = true
(You can set that by entering "about:config" in your address bar, and then double-clicking on the entry's line.)
Gives you an error message in the browser window instead of a pop-up dialog box, with the bonus that it saves the URL and allows you to retry the action.
(If you're talking about getting that option turned on by default, nevermind... but give me a bug # so I can go vote for it.)