I agree that running code automatically from a USB drive is stupid but these things do have their uses in a twisted Microsoftie world.
At my college library, the computers are locked down in such a way that you cannot open an explorer window or command console and you do not have administrative rights. (That's a good thing). However, there are many programs lacking from their installations such that it limits the computers' usefulness. If you want to run a program off your flash drive because that software hasn't been installed on the computer, you can't even open explorer to find it.
When I plug in my U3 drive, the U3 menu autoruns and allows me to execute all of the applications I have installed on it. This includes PuTTY, Firefox, Pidgin, GIMP, VLC, QEMU, VNC, etc. etc. Sure, it's a security risk to these computers, but it's incredibly nice for me to be able to do it. And it's not like I am breaking the rules: they even issue these things to their student employees.
What do you slashdotters think about this? What would be a better solution? (besides asking teh library to install all of these applications on their computers)
I'm still not buying a BD player until they get sub-$200.
Hell, I'm not buying one until they get sub-$50. Hopefully by then the spec will be stabilized and the DRM will be more easily cracked and ignored (like DVD). If I can't burn a backup on my computer and play it in my official Blu-ray player (at FULL QUALITY), then I ain't interested.
Look at the quality of the scaling algorithm -- blearrrgh. Just unwatchable.
I guess I can kinda see what you are nitpicking about. Only at the highest level of zoom, though, which is overkill for me. I still think it performs beautifully because I can actually read everything clearly without physically moving closer to the screen (which defeats the purpose of owning a 37" display).
Are you saying you prefer FF2's font-size adjuster and it's wonderful ability to smoosh everything together into an unintelligible blob of nastiness?
The only thing FF3 seems to be missing is a "fit to width" button like Opera has. FF3 zoom seems to fit to the screen width automatically (which is what you want 90% of the time) up until the point where it would be forced to smoosh everything together. I guess you could call it "intelligent zoom" but it would still be nice to have the ability to turn it off.
Post a few links where you think it looks really bad. I'm interested.
It's finally good enough for me to switch permanently. Weave replaces google browser sync (because google hasn't updated their extension). Some hacks are still necessary to make other useful extensions work properly, so it's still a little rough around the edges. (see Nightly Testing tools and extensions.checkCompatibility=false). But damn it, I've waited long enough. Firefox 3 is here and I love it.
Case in point: My university's primary web portal (http://my.lamar.edu) that every student is REQUIRED to access is totally unusable in ANY browser other than IE, Firefox, or Safari. This includes official university email, financial aid, course registration, online classes, and bill payment.
If you run Linux and your computer is too slow to run Firefox, you are SOL.
You are warned of this as soon as you visit the site in an unrecognized browser. Luckily, they let you continue and try to log in anyway, but you soon discover the truth of their warning. Opera/Konqueror users are greeted with "We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later."
Don't even bother trying to view it in a mobile browser. Well, I suppose you can get through to a garbled version using the mozilla-based Minimo 0.2 if you can stand to wait long enough.
Actually after thinking a bit it dawned on me to try a false user agent in Opera. I managed to get through to my email. WTF?! Ignorant web developers piss me off.
IMO, no, it is not faster. It is just *better*. I never used firefox because I perceived it to be faster than IE6 or IE7. It just supports a crapload more features that I use every day and have grown used to. But it's true: firefox is a hog. If you want faster (or smaller memory footprint, etc.) then you should be using Opera.
Google browser sync is the only deal-breaker for me. I disabled compatibility checking and installed the nightly build tools and it still doesn't work:(
But I LOVE the zoom feature. Actually being able to read text within images from several feet away on a 37" 1920x1080 LCD is pretty damn nice. I may just have to copy over my bookmarks and live without syncing for a little while.
You pay $49 for 10GB of data and you don't think you are being completely raped? On a 24Mbps connection with bittorrent running, how long does that last you, an hour or two? WTF?!
What do you mean "for free" ?? I am paying $60 a month for that bandwidth to be available to me 100% of the time. I also expect to get my money's worth. The only way I can do that is to completely saturate it every minute of the day, if possible. Since that is near-impossible to do, I am actually UNDER-utilizing my service.
So they complain I'm using too much. That's the ISP's fault, for overselling. If they have to lower speeds, fine, I'll deal with it. I just don't want anyone to interfere with my always-on internet connection. I'm not going to stop using it halfway through the month to avoid paying additional fees.
I won't call it unlimited, because it's not, even under the current scheme. It is limited by the maximum bandwidth offered multiplied by the duration of the billing period. Yours is DOUBLY limited because you only have that bandwidth available to you until you exceed some arbitrary limit. Maybe you are fine with paying $X for X GB of data, transferred at X rate. Under that scheme, my data connection would only be available to me for a fraction of the entire billing period because it would get "used up". I am only willing to pay for a data connection that is available to me WHENEVER I choose to use it.
As a Beaumont, TX subscriber, I will never purchase any kind of limited service. If they apply these limits to me, I will cancel the service and switch to DSL or another competitor. I wouldn't mind so much if they lowered the maximum speed (within reason), but the possibility of overage fees is intolerable. If their intention is to get me to start worrying about how much data I consume, then they can die in a fire.
for me slashdot is quite doable on my tilt... im on it right now in fact. opera mini is by far the best browser for it but i have high hopes for opera mobile 9. all they need really is to add better zooming ability and text formatting so i dont hae to manually horizontal-scroll.
when the next gen eeepcs come out though i will definitely consider buying one. right now they are just too new and unproven, imo.
The way I see it, they have to bundle a browser. They don't really have much of a choice now, because a browser is such a hugely important part of any modern desktop computer. The fact that they bundle IE instead of some other browser, to me, is irrelevant. Why should they be expected to bundle some other browser made by a company that is not them? Asking MS to include Firefox or Opera is futile, and asking them to remove web-browsing capability from the default setup is asinine.
Back in the days of Netscape, the inclusion of a browser in the OS was a big deal. Browsers were still a commercial product then, and including one with the operating system at no extra charge effectively destroyed Netscape's business model. That battle was lost and is largely irrelevant to today's "browser war". Today, all browsers are given away for free and are simply expected to be there at all times because we cannot effectively use a computer without one.
The only request to the EU that makes any sense at all is to require Internet Explorer to become standards-compliant. A web browser should be interchangeable as any web browser should be able to read any website because they should all comply to the same standard. If IE were standards-compliant, I don't think we would even be having this discussion. It is IE's non-compliance and certain websites' reliance on it that is damaging the web.
Perhaps if Microsoft is simply unable to fix IE, then we can start discussing alternatives (such as including a different browser). Maybe that is what's going on here, because MS has already been asked repeatedly to fix IE and still have not done so. I think if they were legally coerced, however, then they would suddenly figure out how to do it. IMHO, this is the angle we should be pursuing.
I didn't realize it was such a problem to save a streaming video to your hsrd drive for offline viewing.. Let's see, you could use tube hunter. Or you could capture the video off your screen using some kind of video capture software. Or there's always the analog hole. If they are streaming it to you, they are essentially giving it to you. If you must archive it for whatever reason, just record it. Just like you would have done with a VCR.
No offense, but I think that's just a bad idea for many reasons. There are plenty of phones out there that support 3G or better, so why not just get one of those phones if you need to browse faster instead of using the iphone and its outdated technology. Or if you just love the iphone so much, either live with its inherent slowness or wait for a better iphone to come out. There's no need to clog up everyone's airwaves with bittorrent traffic just to make a few selfish people's iphones browse the web marginally faster.
Maybe what you need is a proxy server to downsample and compress images and data so that you don't need to download as much when viewing a page. That way, everything loads a lot faster. Opera Mini already does this. I'm not sure if you can use Opera Mini on the iPhone, but perhaps you can set up Safari to use such a proxy.
IMO, you should be glad your phone is just sitting there most of the time. That way, it doesn't have to eat through your battery and require charging every couple of hours, and it is available to you whenever you need it. Mobile phones are meant to stay on all the time so that you are available to be reached no matter where you are physically located. Having a phone that needs to be constantly plugged in means you might as well stay put and use a land line and a desktop or a laptop.
IMO, the idea of bittorrent on a mobile phone is kinda silly in itself really. It's a waste of resources. Why wouldn't you download the torrent on your PC at home using its mostly idle internet connection that is meant for such intensive use? Then, you wouldn't have to worry about bandwidth or the battery life of your phone as much. You could even use SSH or a webui to queue the torrent and then download the files directly from your PC using an ftp client on your phone. Better yet, in the case of video or audio, set up a streaming server to downsample it and stream it to your phone on the fly.
I'm not saying that bittorrent for phones should not exist, but it just doesn't make sense to me to try to use bittorrent on today's phones and networks. You can do a lot of cool stuff with a PC and if you put a little effort into it you can have a much more intelligent setup than a phone that tries to act like a PC by hammering the airwaves to torrent the latest south park episode.
Full page zoom works like a champ for me. It's not quite as refined as Opera's but it is a huge improvement over the old font-scaling. To me, page zooming is the only major feature in other browsers that keeps me from using FF 100% of the time.
In the beta, all the menus and RSS feeds are screwed up for me though. When I open Tools, for example, all I see is an empty gray pulldown box with no options. Same for Slashdot RSS, right-click menu, etc. That's unfortunate, as I would have liked to view the new options.
I can't wait until all of my extensions work in FF3. I'd use a beta if the menus weren't all screwed up and (at a minimum) Google Browser Sync supported it. Get to work, Google!
I love my 17" notebook, but I agree that it is a bit large and power-hungry. I only carry it around when I know I will use it, and for the off-days I always have my trusty HTC Kaiser. Now as far as graphics are concerned, I am a bit jealous of these new cards. I hope to hear news of the 8800M being offered as an MXM card so that I could (potentially) swap out my Go7600 for an 8800M. Come on NVIDIA, that's the whole point of having modular graphics cards!
On my new laptop, I installed Vista on a 20GB partition and I moved all of \Program Files and \Users to a separate 160gb partition, while linking them to C:\Users and C:\Program Files using NTFS junctions. The remaining 20gb is used for dual-booting Ubuntu/Sabayon/Whatever-Linux-Flavor-Of-The-Month To me, having Windows applications separate from the OS is a necessity and I will never go back to the boneheaded default of having all of my data stored as one big blob on the C drive.
Like most people, I have nowhere near enough *extra* storage capacity to actually back up 200gb of data. As such, I simply back up the entire contents of the 20 GB C:\ partition containing the core of the OS (using DriveImageXML, and not Windows' craptastic "backup" utility). This way, when my Windows installation gets hosed again, I simply restore the C drive, create the junctions to my apps and profiles on the G:\ drive, and continue as if nothing had happened.
Creating the junctions is troublesome. I believe the problem stems mainly from the fact that you cannot mess with these folders at all while the OS is up and running. Even if you shut down all your apps, Windows still acts as if these files are in use. Junctioning must be done from the another OS, from BartPE, or from the Vista recovery console (the 2K/XP recovery console is crippled in that you cannot alter files outside of \WINDOWS). You must create the new partition and assign it a drive letter, boot the CD or alternative OS, go to the console, change the drive letter of your target partition to the same one Windows uses (using the SUBST command), move all of the files to that partition (making sure to preserve their permissions), create the junctions on the C: drive using MKLINK/J, and then reboot into Windows and hope you didn't screw up.
This is a feature that has lacked MS's blessing for many years. It has been possible to make junctions since Win2k, but it's always a big pain in the butt and AFAIK no one has created a simple tool to do it. Furthermore, it is totally unsupported by MS and other software developers. Ever tried to install an App to D:\Progams? Just watch as your C:\ drive is *still* filled with crap. WTF?! You pretty much have to *trick* the OS into thinking it is still using the C drive for everything using an ugly hack. To me, this is a huge design flaw in Windows and makes Linux that much more attractive as an OS.
(Minor point:I have a Visioneer 6100 USB scanner that will not work with any distro of Linux that I have tried...YMMV) Have you tried (k)ubuntu Edgy? I have had horrendous problems with my USB devices (most notably my Samsung printer) in every linux distro that uses kernel 2.6.20+. As Edgy still uses 2.6.17, that is the OS I run on my print server.
The USB problems are a known issue relating to the 'autosuspend' features they implemented in kernel 2.6.20. The devices go into suspend mode as soon as they are detected and they will not come out of it. There are some supposed workarounds but I have had no luck in making them work, so I have chosen not to upgrade from Ubuntu Server 6.10 on my server until the kernel is patched.
cracks are NOT equivalent to piracy. Especially not simple "no-cd" cracks. A person who buys a game is well within his/her right (morally, but perhaps not legally in the freaking USA) to apply any crack to their own purchased product. The developer & publisher have already been paid, so why should they care if the game disc happens to be in the drive while the game is played? Cracks give legal game owners the ability to free themselves from these pointless restrictions.
In the case of Bioshock, the 25-install-limit is most certainly a pointless and intrusive restriction. No one expects the installer for a single-player-only game to require an internet connection to "evaluate their license", nor should they have to put up with that crap. Who knows what kind of nasty things the securom "security" mechanism is doing to the system behind the scenes? We've all heard the horror stories about the Starforce drivers. As game copy protection schemes get worse, cracks will become more and more important to savvy, freedom-loving gamers.
In my experience it is totally impossible to configure dual monitors properly without an intricate understanding of xorg.conf. Hell, it's not even possible to display wide-screen resolutions (e.g. 1680x1050) without editing xorg.conf!
I have a laptop with an NVIDIA 7600 and an HDMI-out port and I have it plugged into my 37" 1080p monitor. I want a dual-head setup with the laptop screen at 1680x1050 and the monitor at 1920x1080. This is fairly easy to do with the Nvidia display manager in Windows. The hardest part is defining a custom timing for 1920x1080 progressive scan with reduced blank. ~15 minute job, tops.
In Linux, the GUI Nvidia configuration software looked simple enough, but did nothing useful. I spent hours researching dual-head configuration on the web and found many different methods and conflicting instructions. Editing xorg.conf was an endless trial-and-error. I got the external monitor to blink a couple of times, and at one point I saw the ubuntu logo before the screen went blank again. After about six hours of this I gave up in disgust.
In most cases, I have learned to accept the painful learning curve of linux configuration. I have about a year of experience now, and I get around fairly well. However, on every linux box I own, display configuration is by FAR the most difficult and irritating experience.
Linux is awesome for back-end servers. It is great at multi-tasking and running services. I love the flexibility I have at the console. However, running desktop applications on a linux box is always a second or third-rate experience for me. I will never understand why some people believe that X is superior to the Windows interface. The major "features" I notice in X are the laggy menus, the kludgy interfaces, the nonuniformity, and the fragility. I'm slowly gravitating more toward linux, but it's these kinds of things that hold me back.
even if you bought the game, the no-cd crack is right there at gamecopyworld.com. You already know you purchased the game legally, and you have a valid key (if that game requires one). Just use a fixed-exe (or a fixed image if you don't want to modify the game's executables).. Of course I'm pretty sure you were doing this already and were using the laptop example to make a point. Game companies are retarded if they want you to insert the disc to play. Let them be retarded, and play the game your own way. Maybe someday they will learn.
Apple is being rewarded for their innovations by all of the hacks that purchase their locked-down product because it is shiny and has the Apple logo on it. I fully support these people who make a product I would consider buying (if it were available in America). If they can make an iphone that does not suck, they're cool in my book. GO CHINA!
I dont give a crap about image resizing, there is a plugin for that. And it sucks. What we need is FULL PAGE ZOOM ala Opera and IE7. I heard they implemented it in Firefox 3 but haven't enabled it yet. Maybe that is what you are referring to, I don't know. All I know is I NEED FULL PAGE ZOOM!
Slashdot Mirror
At my college library, the computers are locked down in such a way that you cannot open an explorer window or command console and you do not have administrative rights. (That's a good thing). However, there are many programs lacking from their installations such that it limits the computers' usefulness. If you want to run a program off your flash drive because that software hasn't been installed on the computer, you can't even open explorer to find it.
When I plug in my U3 drive, the U3 menu autoruns and allows me to execute all of the applications I have installed on it. This includes PuTTY, Firefox, Pidgin, GIMP, VLC, QEMU, VNC, etc. etc. Sure, it's a security risk to these computers, but it's incredibly nice for me to be able to do it. And it's not like I am breaking the rules: they even issue these things to their student employees.
What do you slashdotters think about this? What would be a better solution? (besides asking teh library to install all of these applications on their computers)
I'm still not buying a BD player until they get sub-$200.
Hell, I'm not buying one until they get sub-$50. Hopefully by then the spec will be stabilized and the DRM will be more easily cracked and ignored (like DVD). If I can't burn a backup on my computer and play it in my official Blu-ray player (at FULL QUALITY), then I ain't interested.
I guess I can kinda see what you are nitpicking about. Only at the highest level of zoom, though, which is overkill for me. I still think it performs beautifully because I can actually read everything clearly without physically moving closer to the screen (which defeats the purpose of owning a 37" display).
Are you saying you prefer FF2's font-size adjuster and it's wonderful ability to smoosh everything together into an unintelligible blob of nastiness?
The only thing FF3 seems to be missing is a "fit to width" button like Opera has. FF3 zoom seems to fit to the screen width automatically (which is what you want 90% of the time) up until the point where it would be forced to smoosh everything together. I guess you could call it "intelligent zoom" but it would still be nice to have the ability to turn it off.
Post a few links where you think it looks really bad. I'm interested.
It's finally good enough for me to switch permanently. Weave replaces google browser sync (because google hasn't updated their extension). Some hacks are still necessary to make other useful extensions work properly, so it's still a little rough around the edges. (see Nightly Testing tools and extensions.checkCompatibility=false). But damn it, I've waited long enough. Firefox 3 is here and I love it.
If you run Linux and your computer is too slow to run Firefox, you are SOL.
You are warned of this as soon as you visit the site in an unrecognized browser. Luckily, they let you continue and try to log in anyway, but you soon discover the truth of their warning. Opera/Konqueror users are greeted with "We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later."
Don't even bother trying to view it in a mobile browser. Well, I suppose you can get through to a garbled version using the mozilla-based Minimo 0.2 if you can stand to wait long enough.
Actually after thinking a bit it dawned on me to try a false user agent in Opera. I managed to get through to my email. WTF?! Ignorant web developers piss me off.
IMO, no, it is not faster. It is just *better*. I never used firefox because I perceived it to be faster than IE6 or IE7. It just supports a crapload more features that I use every day and have grown used to. But it's true: firefox is a hog. If you want faster (or smaller memory footprint, etc.) then you should be using Opera.
But I LOVE the zoom feature. Actually being able to read text within images from several feet away on a 37" 1920x1080 LCD is pretty damn nice. I may just have to copy over my bookmarks and live without syncing for a little while.
You pay $49 for 10GB of data and you don't think you are being completely raped? On a 24Mbps connection with bittorrent running, how long does that last you, an hour or two? WTF?!
So they complain I'm using too much. That's the ISP's fault, for overselling. If they have to lower speeds, fine, I'll deal with it. I just don't want anyone to interfere with my always-on internet connection. I'm not going to stop using it halfway through the month to avoid paying additional fees.
I won't call it unlimited, because it's not, even under the current scheme. It is limited by the maximum bandwidth offered multiplied by the duration of the billing period. Yours is DOUBLY limited because you only have that bandwidth available to you until you exceed some arbitrary limit. Maybe you are fine with paying $X for X GB of data, transferred at X rate. Under that scheme, my data connection would only be available to me for a fraction of the entire billing period because it would get "used up". I am only willing to pay for a data connection that is available to me WHENEVER I choose to use it.
Ad blocking software will become a cost-saving device and their usage will explode. Great way to destroy the internet as we know it.
As a Beaumont, TX subscriber, I will never purchase any kind of limited service. If they apply these limits to me, I will cancel the service and switch to DSL or another competitor. I wouldn't mind so much if they lowered the maximum speed (within reason), but the possibility of overage fees is intolerable. If their intention is to get me to start worrying about how much data I consume, then they can die in a fire.
when the next gen eeepcs come out though i will definitely consider buying one. right now they are just too new and unproven, imo.
Back in the days of Netscape, the inclusion of a browser in the OS was a big deal. Browsers were still a commercial product then, and including one with the operating system at no extra charge effectively destroyed Netscape's business model. That battle was lost and is largely irrelevant to today's "browser war". Today, all browsers are given away for free and are simply expected to be there at all times because we cannot effectively use a computer without one.
The only request to the EU that makes any sense at all is to require Internet Explorer to become standards-compliant. A web browser should be interchangeable as any web browser should be able to read any website because they should all comply to the same standard. If IE were standards-compliant, I don't think we would even be having this discussion. It is IE's non-compliance and certain websites' reliance on it that is damaging the web.
Perhaps if Microsoft is simply unable to fix IE, then we can start discussing alternatives (such as including a different browser). Maybe that is what's going on here, because MS has already been asked repeatedly to fix IE and still have not done so. I think if they were legally coerced, however, then they would suddenly figure out how to do it. IMHO, this is the angle we should be pursuing.
I didn't realize it was such a problem to save a streaming video to your hsrd drive for offline viewing.. Let's see, you could use tube hunter. Or you could capture the video off your screen using some kind of video capture software. Or there's always the analog hole. If they are streaming it to you, they are essentially giving it to you. If you must archive it for whatever reason, just record it. Just like you would have done with a VCR.
No offense, but I think that's just a bad idea for many reasons. There are plenty of phones out there that support 3G or better, so why not just get one of those phones if you need to browse faster instead of using the iphone and its outdated technology. Or if you just love the iphone so much, either live with its inherent slowness or wait for a better iphone to come out. There's no need to clog up everyone's airwaves with bittorrent traffic just to make a few selfish people's iphones browse the web marginally faster. Maybe what you need is a proxy server to downsample and compress images and data so that you don't need to download as much when viewing a page. That way, everything loads a lot faster. Opera Mini already does this. I'm not sure if you can use Opera Mini on the iPhone, but perhaps you can set up Safari to use such a proxy. IMO, you should be glad your phone is just sitting there most of the time. That way, it doesn't have to eat through your battery and require charging every couple of hours, and it is available to you whenever you need it. Mobile phones are meant to stay on all the time so that you are available to be reached no matter where you are physically located. Having a phone that needs to be constantly plugged in means you might as well stay put and use a land line and a desktop or a laptop. IMO, the idea of bittorrent on a mobile phone is kinda silly in itself really. It's a waste of resources. Why wouldn't you download the torrent on your PC at home using its mostly idle internet connection that is meant for such intensive use? Then, you wouldn't have to worry about bandwidth or the battery life of your phone as much. You could even use SSH or a webui to queue the torrent and then download the files directly from your PC using an ftp client on your phone. Better yet, in the case of video or audio, set up a streaming server to downsample it and stream it to your phone on the fly. I'm not saying that bittorrent for phones should not exist, but it just doesn't make sense to me to try to use bittorrent on today's phones and networks. You can do a lot of cool stuff with a PC and if you put a little effort into it you can have a much more intelligent setup than a phone that tries to act like a PC by hammering the airwaves to torrent the latest south park episode.
Full page zoom works like a champ for me. It's not quite as refined as Opera's but it is a huge improvement over the old font-scaling. To me, page zooming is the only major feature in other browsers that keeps me from using FF 100% of the time. In the beta, all the menus and RSS feeds are screwed up for me though. When I open Tools, for example, all I see is an empty gray pulldown box with no options. Same for Slashdot RSS, right-click menu, etc. That's unfortunate, as I would have liked to view the new options. I can't wait until all of my extensions work in FF3. I'd use a beta if the menus weren't all screwed up and (at a minimum) Google Browser Sync supported it. Get to work, Google!
I love my 17" notebook, but I agree that it is a bit large and power-hungry. I only carry it around when I know I will use it, and for the off-days I always have my trusty HTC Kaiser. Now as far as graphics are concerned, I am a bit jealous of these new cards. I hope to hear news of the 8800M being offered as an MXM card so that I could (potentially) swap out my Go7600 for an 8800M. Come on NVIDIA, that's the whole point of having modular graphics cards!
On my new laptop, I installed Vista on a 20GB partition and I moved all of \Program Files and \Users to a separate 160gb partition, while linking them to C:\Users and C:\Program Files using NTFS junctions. The remaining 20gb is used for dual-booting Ubuntu/Sabayon/Whatever-Linux-Flavor-Of-The-Month To me, having Windows applications separate from the OS is a necessity and I will never go back to the boneheaded default of having all of my data stored as one big blob on the C drive.
/J, and then reboot into Windows and hope you didn't screw up.
Like most people, I have nowhere near enough *extra* storage capacity to actually back up 200gb of data. As such, I simply back up the entire contents of the 20 GB C:\ partition containing the core of the OS (using DriveImageXML, and not Windows' craptastic "backup" utility). This way, when my Windows installation gets hosed again, I simply restore the C drive, create the junctions to my apps and profiles on the G:\ drive, and continue as if nothing had happened.
Creating the junctions is troublesome. I believe the problem stems mainly from the fact that you cannot mess with these folders at all while the OS is up and running. Even if you shut down all your apps, Windows still acts as if these files are in use. Junctioning must be done from the another OS, from BartPE, or from the Vista recovery console (the 2K/XP recovery console is crippled in that you cannot alter files outside of \WINDOWS). You must create the new partition and assign it a drive letter, boot the CD or alternative OS, go to the console, change the drive letter of your target partition to the same one Windows uses (using the SUBST command), move all of the files to that partition (making sure to preserve their permissions), create the junctions on the C: drive using MKLINK
This is a feature that has lacked MS's blessing for many years. It has been possible to make junctions since Win2k, but it's always a big pain in the butt and AFAIK no one has created a simple tool to do it. Furthermore, it is totally unsupported by MS and other software developers. Ever tried to install an App to D:\Progams? Just watch as your C:\ drive is *still* filled with crap. WTF?! You pretty much have to *trick* the OS into thinking it is still using the C drive for everything using an ugly hack. To me, this is a huge design flaw in Windows and makes Linux that much more attractive as an OS.
cracks are NOT equivalent to piracy. Especially not simple "no-cd" cracks. A person who buys a game is well within his/her right (morally, but perhaps not legally in the freaking USA) to apply any crack to their own purchased product. The developer & publisher have already been paid, so why should they care if the game disc happens to be in the drive while the game is played? Cracks give legal game owners the ability to free themselves from these pointless restrictions.
In the case of Bioshock, the 25-install-limit is most certainly a pointless and intrusive restriction. No one expects the installer for a single-player-only game to require an internet connection to "evaluate their license", nor should they have to put up with that crap. Who knows what kind of nasty things the securom "security" mechanism is doing to the system behind the scenes? We've all heard the horror stories about the Starforce drivers. As game copy protection schemes get worse, cracks will become more and more important to savvy, freedom-loving gamers.
In my experience it is totally impossible to configure dual monitors properly without an intricate understanding of xorg.conf. Hell, it's not even possible to display wide-screen resolutions (e.g. 1680x1050) without editing xorg.conf!
I have a laptop with an NVIDIA 7600 and an HDMI-out port and I have it plugged into my 37" 1080p monitor. I want a dual-head setup with the laptop screen at 1680x1050 and the monitor at 1920x1080. This is fairly easy to do with the Nvidia display manager in Windows. The hardest part is defining a custom timing for 1920x1080 progressive scan with reduced blank. ~15 minute job, tops.
In Linux, the GUI Nvidia configuration software looked simple enough, but did nothing useful. I spent hours researching dual-head configuration on the web and found many different methods and conflicting instructions. Editing xorg.conf was an endless trial-and-error. I got the external monitor to blink a couple of times, and at one point I saw the ubuntu logo before the screen went blank again. After about six hours of this I gave up in disgust.
In most cases, I have learned to accept the painful learning curve of linux configuration. I have about a year of experience now, and I get around fairly well. However, on every linux box I own, display configuration is by FAR the most difficult and irritating experience.
Linux is awesome for back-end servers. It is great at multi-tasking and running services. I love the flexibility I have at the console. However, running desktop applications on a linux box is always a second or third-rate experience for me. I will never understand why some people believe that X is superior to the Windows interface. The major "features" I notice in X are the laggy menus, the kludgy interfaces, the nonuniformity, and the fragility. I'm slowly gravitating more toward linux, but it's these kinds of things that hold me back.
even if you bought the game, the no-cd crack is right there at gamecopyworld.com. You already know you purchased the game legally, and you have a valid key (if that game requires one). Just use a fixed-exe (or a fixed image if you don't want to modify the game's executables).. Of course I'm pretty sure you were doing this already and were using the laptop example to make a point. Game companies are retarded if they want you to insert the disc to play. Let them be retarded, and play the game your own way. Maybe someday they will learn.
Apple is being rewarded for their innovations by all of the hacks that purchase their locked-down product because it is shiny and has the Apple logo on it. I fully support these people who make a product I would consider buying (if it were available in America). If they can make an iphone that does not suck, they're cool in my book. GO CHINA!
I dont give a crap about image resizing, there is a plugin for that. And it sucks. What we need is FULL PAGE ZOOM ala Opera and IE7. I heard they implemented it in Firefox 3 but haven't enabled it yet. Maybe that is what you are referring to, I don't know. All I know is I NEED FULL PAGE ZOOM!
Wheres NOD32? This test is lame.