It's good to hear that someone else has had similar luck with Sandisk. My 512MB Cruzer Mini's gone through the washer twice now, too. The first time I had to format it to be able to write to the thing again, but I was able to copy data off it fine. The second time around (which was only last week, for the record) it worked without any additional steps. Sandisk is now one of my favorite brands and I'd recommend them to anyone. Here's hoping they never disappoint me.:)
even with the worst movies, they still "work" because all you are doing is watching them. there's no technological requirement. it's not like the movie film breaks while watching or anything.
I don't know about that... After watching Vampiyaz on my friend's Xbox, someone decided to try to start the movie again as a joke and the Xbox dvd rom wouldn't read the disc...or any other, for that matter. To this day it still barely reads any discs.:)
ED-209: You have 5 seconds to comply... four... three... two... one... I am not authorized to use physical force!
[ED-209 opens fire and shreds Mr. Kinney]
I lost restore discs for an IBM Aptiva a number of years ago and called IBM to get some replacements. They did charge me, but IIRC it was only the cost of shipping plust maybe a dollar or two.
I'd personally blame your problem on Fedora. My experiences with it have not been great. On one computer, X never worked right--the picture would corrupt itself pretty soon after boot. Everything was fine in Windows and in Ubuntu and Debian. I also tried Fedora on my laptop and ran into another problem (IIRC it was also X-related, but I forget specifics). Again, Windows, Ubuntu, Debian, and even Gentoo worked fine. Sure, it's only anecdotal evidence, and this was "ages" ago (Core 4 IIRC), but it's enough that I've decided I'll avoid Fedora from now on. Besides, I'm perfectly happy with Ubuntu and Debian.:)
How old is your friend's PSP? As I understand it, current PSPs have too new of a firmware revision to hack, while older revisions (which can be hacked) can be made to temporarily load the newer firmware and gain access to newer features. From what I've read, it is very hard (if not impossible) to revert to older firmware with the newer versions. If my information is out of date, please provide some proof and set me straight.
Thanks for your responses. I did a little price comparison between the base MBP and (roughly) equivalent HPs and Dells and both of them ended up being more expensive--~$400 and ~$200, respectively. Granted, those are being compared to prices with an educational discount (and the HP has some kind of 3 year warranty by default although I don't know how much it covers compared to AppleCare), but that discount isn't much ($200 tops). Even without that discount the MBP is pretty competitive (if not cheaper), especially considering I don't think either of the others had any type of 802.11n card and both were slightly heavier than the MBP.
Perhaps you can help me understand something I've been struggling with for a long time in regards to the Macbook Pros--Mainly, why on Earth are they so expensive? The (regular) Macbooks seem reasonably priced, but what makes the Pros worth the $1800 starting price (with an educational discount, even!)? I mean, let's take the midrange Macbook and bump it up to 2GB of RAM and you end up with something comparable to the lowest-end Pro with the exceptions of a slightly slower processor, GMA950 graphics (which is probably fine for what I'd use a laptop for) and a smaller screen and it winds up being over $400 cheaper (again, education prices). Somehow those changes don't seem worth the extra money and comparing prices with competitors such as Dell and HP seem to back me up on that.
So, given that people continue to buy Macbook Pros, there simply must be something I'm missing. I suppose now at least the Pros have better battery life, but surely there's more to the story than that. I refuse to believe the light-up keyboard has a significant influence.:)
MythTV certainly can be a bear to get setup initially, but once I found a guide for Debian I had everything working the way I wanted within an hour or (maybe) two. It also hasn't crashed once in the two years I've had it running (although I've had the IVTV drivers go haywire a time or two, which I don't consider to be bad given that is has been two years). Given my previous experience with Fedora, I'd almost blame your problems with MythTV on it, but I don't want to get into a distro flamewar.:)
With that said, I've never touched Media Center outside of watching a few videos with the Vista version. I've also not bothered much with any of the MythTV addons other than MythWeb, so I concede they may add to the difficulty. Actually, I take that back. I played around with MythGame once and didn't much care for it. It was rather annoying to get set up.
Also, I've played around with KnoppMyth from time to time and it seems like it'd be a brain-dead easy way to get MythTV up and running. I've never actually gone through the installation procedure, though. I had no reason to since I was already quite pleased with my current setup. I'd give it a try if you're still interested in MythTV, though.
Super Metroid has all kinds of fun bugs that enhance replayability. I'll list just a couple:
Mockball: If you start running, then do a spinning jump/somersault, and morph into ball form just as you're landing, you can roll around at running speeds. The main benefit of this little maneuver is to get super missiles early, allowing you to skip the Spore Spawn miniboss.
Damage avoidance: If you shoot an enemy just as it is about to hit you it won't damage you...until the flashing animation stops, at any rate.
Murderbeam: Normally the game doesn't allow you to equip all beams at once (IIRC Plasma and Spazer conflict with each other). However, if you time some button presses in the status menu correctly you can glitch the game into enabling all the beams. Normally, the game will freeze immediately when you try firing this beam, but there are at least two or three places you can use it to your advantage.
1) If used at the right time during the battle with Motherbrain, you can make the battle go much more quickly (and create some interesting graphical glitches, too!). 2a) If you open a door and then fire the murderbeam into the door and then manage to jump through the door before the game crashes on you, chances are you'll find yourself in a completely different room than you intended. More importantly, all game events seem to be reset including items. Using this trick, you can collect over 100% of the items in game. 2b) I haven't seen/done this myself, but I hear if you use the murderbeam reset glitch in the right spot, you can flat out skip Ridley and Motherbrain by somehow triggering the final escape sequence early. Apparently this one only works on emulators, but I need to research it more. For the record, 2a tends to be more successful on the console although I hear there is one location that works in ZSNES.
Anyone who enjoyed Super Metroid back in the day should check out some of the Metroid fansites. There are several more tricks and glitches that allow you to complete the game in just about any order you like. It all comes together to pretty much seal the game's position as my all-time favorite. But no one cares what I think.:)
All I want from OEMs is to make laptops with hardware that is supported by Linux. They could ship a blank hard drive for all I care as long as I can install my distro of choice and have suspend/hibernate, wireless, bluetooth, graphics, etc work with very little to no trouble.
Believe it or not, not everyone shares the same priorities as you do. I also find it amusing that you chastise the entertainment industry for wanting to control people while at the very same time you are trying to control the submitter. I suppose it's OK if you do it, though, right? Would it be better if he pirated everything, too?
If people are ever going to take the F/OSS community at large seriously, we must stop this blatant hypocrisy in our members. Yes, things need to change (and DRM in general should probably be abolished), but forcing your ideals on others is not the way to go about it.
This particular implementation is stupid and probably sucks horribly, but the idea of playing a portable system's games on a bigger screen is appealing (at least to me). I'm visually impaired to the point where I can barely make out the picture on these modern handhelds--I can barely make out the GBA picture as it stands. I'd pay a fair bit of money to play DS and PSP games on a television (well, mainly DS games, but there are some interesting looking PSP games, too). I hope Nintendo and Sony are listening...
If my memory serves me correctly, IE6 SP2 was released before the particular version of Firefox that first included the "yellow bar". Nice try, though.:)
Diablo 2 (or rather, Blizzard's "support" of Diablo 2) was what drove me away from them. Basically, my Diablo 2 cd key partially faded away over time and I could no longer install the game. I tried to contact Blizzard about getting a replacement (my understanding is that they ask you to send them your manual and they'll send back a new key). I got a friendly auto-reply mail from them saying they would get back in touch with me "soon" and basically to sit tight and wait. I never heard from them again.
I also no longer buy Sierra published stuff for a very similar reason--a patch broke Empire Earth on my computer so I emailed support. They responded with a solution...for an entirely different game, even after I mentioned I had tried this particular solution from their FAQ anyway just in case it somehow fixed it (which, of course, it didn't). It's my understanding that Vivendi swallowed Sierra, though, so I guess it's a moot issue now...
I'm one of those people you so hate that takes notes on a computer. Freshman year it was on a TI-83 with a keyboard attachment. At the end of that year, I bought a laptop to replace it--I wanted a bigger screen to type on, a backlight, and the ability to work along with the prof as he demonstrated something with the compiler (or simply to play around a little bit with a programming concept that had just been introduced). Thus far all I've really done with it was type up notes, but for that the laptop has been invaluable.
Frankly, my handwriting isn't great (although the only people that have ever had trouble reading it have been my classmates--teachers and graders have never complained). When the lights are off or dimmed (because the prof has some wonderful presentation in Powerpoint for us to copy down, for example) I can just barely see well enough to write at all, let alone legibly. Regardless of lighting, my hand writing is rather slow, especially when compared to the speeds professors like to speak.
To me the obvious solution was to get a computer of some kind and get to typing.:) Not only can I type much faster than I can write, it's also neater and I can easily go back and add something if necessary. It's also easy to jump from one place in the notes to another. I think buying that laptop was the best money I've ever spent (yes, I paid for it all myself). I do wish I had bought a Mac, though. I'm suffering from severe Mac-envy after seeing Tiger on a friend's computer, but that's completely off topic.:)
I will admit that I never thought about how annoying that clicking noise could get, but surely there's some kind of compromise that can be made. My laptop's keyboard doesn't make a lot of noise (it is clearly audible, though, of course), but combined with four or five others I can see how it would get disruptive. Maybe there's something I can do on my own that will quiet the beast a bit...does anyone have any ideas?
Speaking of annoyances during class...I absolutely hate people who just won't shut up while the prof is speaking. They drive me absolutely insane and sometimes I just want to smack them with a heavy book or something. Their chatter could even be a whisper and some times it'll still get to me, so I feel your pain. I just don't know what to do about it. Maybe everyone with a laptop should sit in the back of the room so at least you don't have clicking from every direction...
Since installing SuSE 9.3 a little over a month ago the only time I've touched the command line was when using ssh. It's nice to know it'll be there when I want it, though...
Slashdot Mirror
It's good to hear that someone else has had similar luck with Sandisk. My 512MB Cruzer Mini's gone through the washer twice now, too. The first time I had to format it to be able to write to the thing again, but I was able to copy data off it fine. The second time around (which was only last week, for the record) it worked without any additional steps. Sandisk is now one of my favorite brands and I'd recommend them to anyone. Here's hoping they never disappoint me. :)
Didn't you hear? NTorrent is the new hotness these days with max speeds up to nearly 5x GTorrent... :)
I think you may guess my opinion of Intuit's software.
;)
It's delicious?
I lost restore discs for an IBM Aptiva a number of years ago and called IBM to get some replacements. They did charge me, but IIRC it was only the cost of shipping plust maybe a dollar or two.
I'd personally blame your problem on Fedora. My experiences with it have not been great. On one computer, X never worked right--the picture would corrupt itself pretty soon after boot. Everything was fine in Windows and in Ubuntu and Debian. I also tried Fedora on my laptop and ran into another problem (IIRC it was also X-related, but I forget specifics). Again, Windows, Ubuntu, Debian, and even Gentoo worked fine. Sure, it's only anecdotal evidence, and this was "ages" ago (Core 4 IIRC), but it's enough that I've decided I'll avoid Fedora from now on. Besides, I'm perfectly happy with Ubuntu and Debian. :)
How old is your friend's PSP? As I understand it, current PSPs have too new of a firmware revision to hack, while older revisions (which can be hacked) can be made to temporarily load the newer firmware and gain access to newer features. From what I've read, it is very hard (if not impossible) to revert to older firmware with the newer versions. If my information is out of date, please provide some proof and set me straight.
Thanks for your responses. I did a little price comparison between the base MBP and (roughly) equivalent HPs and Dells and both of them ended up being more expensive--~$400 and ~$200, respectively. Granted, those are being compared to prices with an educational discount (and the HP has some kind of 3 year warranty by default although I don't know how much it covers compared to AppleCare), but that discount isn't much ($200 tops). Even without that discount the MBP is pretty competitive (if not cheaper), especially considering I don't think either of the others had any type of 802.11n card and both were slightly heavier than the MBP.
Perhaps you can help me understand something I've been struggling with for a long time in regards to the Macbook Pros--Mainly, why on Earth are they so expensive? The (regular) Macbooks seem reasonably priced, but what makes the Pros worth the $1800 starting price (with an educational discount, even!)? I mean, let's take the midrange Macbook and bump it up to 2GB of RAM and you end up with something comparable to the lowest-end Pro with the exceptions of a slightly slower processor, GMA950 graphics (which is probably fine for what I'd use a laptop for) and a smaller screen and it winds up being over $400 cheaper (again, education prices). Somehow those changes don't seem worth the extra money and comparing prices with competitors such as Dell and HP seem to back me up on that.
:)
So, given that people continue to buy Macbook Pros, there simply must be something I'm missing. I suppose now at least the Pros have better battery life, but surely there's more to the story than that. I refuse to believe the light-up keyboard has a significant influence.
MythTV certainly can be a bear to get setup initially, but once I found a guide for Debian I had everything working the way I wanted within an hour or (maybe) two. It also hasn't crashed once in the two years I've had it running (although I've had the IVTV drivers go haywire a time or two, which I don't consider to be bad given that is has been two years). Given my previous experience with Fedora, I'd almost blame your problems with MythTV on it, but I don't want to get into a distro flamewar. :)
With that said, I've never touched Media Center outside of watching a few videos with the Vista version. I've also not bothered much with any of the MythTV addons other than MythWeb, so I concede they may add to the difficulty. Actually, I take that back. I played around with MythGame once and didn't much care for it. It was rather annoying to get set up.
Also, I've played around with KnoppMyth from time to time and it seems like it'd be a brain-dead easy way to get MythTV up and running. I've never actually gone through the installation procedure, though. I had no reason to since I was already quite pleased with my current setup. I'd give it a try if you're still interested in MythTV, though.
I'd much rather them model the mechanics after Total Annihilation, but that'll never happen. :)
Regardless, it'll probably be a worthwhile game if for no other reason than the campaign. Blizzard always manages to craft a good story.
Super Metroid has all kinds of fun bugs that enhance replayability. I'll list just a couple:
:)
Mockball: If you start running, then do a spinning jump/somersault, and morph into ball form just as you're landing, you can roll around at running speeds. The main benefit of this little maneuver is to get super missiles early, allowing you to skip the Spore Spawn miniboss.
Damage avoidance: If you shoot an enemy just as it is about to hit you it won't damage you...until the flashing animation stops, at any rate.
Murderbeam: Normally the game doesn't allow you to equip all beams at once (IIRC Plasma and Spazer conflict with each other). However, if you time some button presses in the status menu correctly you can glitch the game into enabling all the beams. Normally, the game will freeze immediately when you try firing this beam, but there are at least two or three places you can use it to your advantage.
1) If used at the right time during the battle with Motherbrain, you can make the battle go much more quickly (and create some interesting graphical glitches, too!).
2a) If you open a door and then fire the murderbeam into the door and then manage to jump through the door before the game crashes on you, chances are you'll find yourself in a completely different room than you intended. More importantly, all game events seem to be reset including items. Using this trick, you can collect over 100% of the items in game.
2b) I haven't seen/done this myself, but I hear if you use the murderbeam reset glitch in the right spot, you can flat out skip Ridley and Motherbrain by somehow triggering the final escape sequence early. Apparently this one only works on emulators, but I need to research it more. For the record, 2a tends to be more successful on the console although I hear there is one location that works in ZSNES.
Anyone who enjoyed Super Metroid back in the day should check out some of the Metroid fansites. There are several more tricks and glitches that allow you to complete the game in just about any order you like. It all comes together to pretty much seal the game's position as my all-time favorite. But no one cares what I think.
All I want from OEMs is to make laptops with hardware that is supported by Linux. They could ship a blank hard drive for all I care as long as I can install my distro of choice and have suspend/hibernate, wireless, bluetooth, graphics, etc work with very little to no trouble.
Believe it or not, not everyone shares the same priorities as you do. I also find it amusing that you chastise the entertainment industry for wanting to control people while at the very same time you are trying to control the submitter. I suppose it's OK if you do it, though, right? Would it be better if he pirated everything, too?
If people are ever going to take the F/OSS community at large seriously, we must stop this blatant hypocrisy in our members. Yes, things need to change (and DRM in general should probably be abolished), but forcing your ideals on others is not the way to go about it.
What are these..."fri-ends" you speak of?
Command & Conquer was a fun game, wasn't it? :)
(For those who don't know, CNC is a sort-of-popular abbrievation for C&C--see planetcnc.com for example...)
This particular implementation is stupid and probably sucks horribly, but the idea of playing a portable system's games on a bigger screen is appealing (at least to me). I'm visually impaired to the point where I can barely make out the picture on these modern handhelds--I can barely make out the GBA picture as it stands. I'd pay a fair bit of money to play DS and PSP games on a television (well, mainly DS games, but there are some interesting looking PSP games, too). I hope Nintendo and Sony are listening...
If my memory serves me correctly, IE6 SP2 was released before the particular version of Firefox that first included the "yellow bar". Nice try, though. :)
Care to more specifically define "proper use" for Seagate's drives? I've got a few of their drives in a Mythtv/file server box... :)
FF VI's story was far superior to FF VII's, but that's just one man's opinion...
Solution: flying cars. :)
Diablo 2 (or rather, Blizzard's "support" of Diablo 2) was what drove me away from them. Basically, my Diablo 2 cd key partially faded away over time and I could no longer install the game. I tried to contact Blizzard about getting a replacement (my understanding is that they ask you to send them your manual and they'll send back a new key). I got a friendly auto-reply mail from them saying they would get back in touch with me "soon" and basically to sit tight and wait. I never heard from them again.
I also no longer buy Sierra published stuff for a very similar reason--a patch broke Empire Earth on my computer so I emailed support. They responded with a solution...for an entirely different game, even after I mentioned I had tried this particular solution from their FAQ anyway just in case it somehow fixed it (which, of course, it didn't). It's my understanding that Vivendi swallowed Sierra, though, so I guess it's a moot issue now...
I'm one of those people you so hate that takes notes on a computer. Freshman year it was on a TI-83 with a keyboard attachment. At the end of that year, I bought a laptop to replace it--I wanted a bigger screen to type on, a backlight, and the ability to work along with the prof as he demonstrated something with the compiler (or simply to play around a little bit with a programming concept that had just been introduced). Thus far all I've really done with it was type up notes, but for that the laptop has been invaluable.
:) Not only can I type much faster than I can write, it's also neater and I can easily go back and add something if necessary. It's also easy to jump from one place in the notes to another. I think buying that laptop was the best money I've ever spent (yes, I paid for it all myself). I do wish I had bought a Mac, though. I'm suffering from severe Mac-envy after seeing Tiger on a friend's computer, but that's completely off topic. :)
Frankly, my handwriting isn't great (although the only people that have ever had trouble reading it have been my classmates--teachers and graders have never complained). When the lights are off or dimmed (because the prof has some wonderful presentation in Powerpoint for us to copy down, for example) I can just barely see well enough to write at all, let alone legibly. Regardless of lighting, my hand writing is rather slow, especially when compared to the speeds professors like to speak.
To me the obvious solution was to get a computer of some kind and get to typing.
I will admit that I never thought about how annoying that clicking noise could get, but surely there's some kind of compromise that can be made. My laptop's keyboard doesn't make a lot of noise (it is clearly audible, though, of course), but combined with four or five others I can see how it would get disruptive. Maybe there's something I can do on my own that will quiet the beast a bit...does anyone have any ideas?
Speaking of annoyances during class...I absolutely hate people who just won't shut up while the prof is speaking. They drive me absolutely insane and sometimes I just want to smack them with a heavy book or something. Their chatter could even be a whisper and some times it'll still get to me, so I feel your pain. I just don't know what to do about it. Maybe everyone with a laptop should sit in the back of the room so at least you don't have clicking from every direction...
Since installing SuSE 9.3 a little over a month ago the only time I've touched the command line was when using ssh. It's nice to know it'll be there when I want it, though...