I dunno, the amount of people that commit assault (bar brawls), do drugs, and so on is pretty high, but I'd like to think that those aren't things that we should legalize.
I do agree with you in this particular circumstance, but at the same time, there needs to be limitations. If the idea of copyright infringement is thrown out, then artists will have no incentive to perform (other than just to express themselves, which doesn't pay the bills).
What I would like to see is a facility where I can pay my royalties for media I watch, and share that same media (MP3s, MPGs, JPGs) with others for them to watch and pay for. Perhaps a function like Microsoft's content license purchase, where Media Player can automatically request a license for protected content, only run by a company without ties to a certain media format or player. Possibly the charge could be based on percentage of the file accessed (so if a movie sucks, I don't have to pay for it).
With this facility in place, it would not only be easier for companies to charge for and distribute content, it would be easier for us as consumers, because it doesn't matter who we lend our CDs to. Fair use could be maintained by selling hard copies (DVDs, CDs), and allowing them to be copied as they can be today under fair use, but only allowing uninfringing copies to be made from the physical media. The copies that were made could be tied to the individual that made them (and anyone tied to them - family members, etc), but any distribution would require payment through the above method.
You could also institute a policy of 'free trial' for specific media - a user could have unrestricted access to e.g. the next Prozzak album, but if they don't like it, they can opt not to pay before their week (day? month? year? depends on content provider) is up. This would allow people to try a huge variety of music, and support individually those artists (and even those songs) that they prefer. I could then pay Britney Spears for Hit Me Baby One More Time and Toxic, but not for E-Mail My Heart. I wouldn't, but I could.
Some people would say this encourages pandering - you have to make songs that people like in order to get paid, which limits artistic integrity. You could branch out, but there's risk, because there's a possibility it won't be well-recieved. As such, every song you make on an album that is different from your usual style is lost revenue that could be made up for by making a song more people like.
I would say that this encourages branching out, because then people can support the individual songs they like. That is to say, if I like experimental songs 5, 7, and 9 on an otherwise mainstream CD, I can buy those songs without buying the other crap. As it is now, artists have no idea what songs you're buying the CDs for (though you can bet it's the singles).
Artists could make as many songs as they wanted, recording and producing the popular ones, and just recording misc stuff in their basement when they're playing around on their guitars, and if they put it up and people like it, then they get paid for it. This will flood the market with content, providing an almost overwhelming variety of choice for consumers to pick from.
Move to Canada. If I have a CD and lend it to my friend Fred, Fred can just rip the CD, make a copy, burn it, mix it, or whatever, and then give it back to me. As long as he is using his copy for his personal use, it's non-infringement.
I find it amusing to no end that lending a CD could be considered an infringing act. Talk about absurd. I'd jump ship when the idea was considered.
As I understand it, Apple has one offer - one contract. If you want to list music, then you sign that contract. Independant labels can sign, and they get the exact same deal, to the letter, that BMG, Sony, and Virgin have. If you don't want to sign that contact, no dice. Other than that, I don't think there are any impractical limitations to who can apply. They probably have limitations, like nothing that expouses hate or racism, but it's hard to say.
Yes, but newspapers charge a commodity price (a dollar usually) to get their papers read, and rely on ads to support the infrastructure (reporters, editors, rent, bills, printing, distribution, etc).
Thanks to the internet, online publications can eliminate a lot of the physical aspect of that (printing, distribution, even most rent and bills). This trims a lot off, leaving only the essential resources - people.
With Sun, however, they can supply a subscription at a more realistic rate, as opposed to a dollar per customer. They can make their funds directly from their subscription and support, without having to resort to other methods (ads) to make up for it. Sun's products aren't a commodity, so there's no concern of having to subsidize.
# Norton Antivirus status is not detected by Security Center
Norton's problem, they've said repeatedly they're working on a patch.
I dunno kids, but it detects my copy of NAV2004 no problem. Maybe I'm lucky? I Liveupdate whenever the icon shows up in my taskbar though, so maybe I got the patch already. Still, it does work.
Some programs require administrator privileges to run. All of them (that I've seen) require admin privileges to install.
Microsoft needs to make a simple way for programs to request administrator privileges, a la OS X installers, for temporary, one-time settings. If a user could run an installer or updater and it would say 'you do not have permission to install this program, please enter the administrator password', then it would be conveniant.
When I installed my laptop, I resolved to do the whole separation of accounts - an Administrator account and a User account. After about an hour, I got fed up with it being a pain in the ass to do anything, made myself an admin, and deleted the admin account. It's just not feasible.
Another good feature would be to provide deferred installation. A program could ask for a password to be allowed to install, and if the password wasn't supplied, then it would 'ghost' the installation, going through the motions, but quarantining the program first. The notification could be sent to another account with privs (e.g. mommy or daddy), it could show up on boot or reboot (single-user system), or it could be forwarded to IT personnel to be reviewed (in detail).
Installers that are not designed with this in mind could go forward as usual, but a system alert would pop up notifying them that the program would not be ready to use until someone has verified the installation is approved - input password now, or forward to whomever.
This would also have the benefit of alerting users whenever something installs something else in the background, or tries to modify an installation or settings its not allowed to touch. It would also allow network administrators at large sites to see what kind of installations are being attempted (MSN? Gator? Cool cursor spyware?) and would allow them to clamp down on users for their part in it, as well as preventing them in the future (or firewalling certain websites at the proxy, etc).
XP SP2 also limits outgoing TCP connections. It allows ten per second (I don't know if this is per process or system-wide), and after that, the connection requests get queued. Thus, if a computer is trying to open up 50 connections per second, it will open 10 the first second with 40 queued, then 10 the second second with 80 queued, and so on.
This may interfere with some practical applications, but it will also help connection flooding (will this help anyone? I don't know...). There are workarounds for it, but the workarounds have to be installed in Safe Mode with no networking support, so you'd be hard pressed to do it remotely to someone else's machine. I'm sure it's possible somehow though.
As long as the student in question has good eyesight (or good eyesight correction), you can spend a few bucks on a Palm M100 (probably find them used for $20-40) and a cheapo keyboard. If you scrounged eBay, you could probably find them for less than $50 USD together. They're small and portable, can fit in a purse, and 2 megs of memory is more than enough for a day's worth of notes.
Another option would be to get one of the fancy Sony ones with cameras, whcih can also capture overhead screens.
Can you put this into non-math terms for us laypeople that failed highschool math? All I really got from that was 'blah blah blah blah blah countries blah blah', but it sounds like what you're saying is probably really interesting or something.
People play video games to be someone else, someone important and interesting. A bounty hunter, a mage, a rogue, a walking death machine. Why would I want to come home from my boring life as a bookseller to enjoy a fake boring life as a street sweeper? Doesn't sound too compelling. If I wanted to walk into doors and step in poo to spice up my life, I'd go DO it. I play MMORPGs because I can go out with other people and cast crazy spells and blow up ugly monsters, to do stuff that I can't actually do in real life. Why would I pay money to walk into old hags? That happens whenever I go to the mall, I don't need to pay someone to do it online.
It's good that you have ideas, and I like the idea of smaller worlds with more character potency, but people wouldn't pay money.
Just for reference, when Square-Enix publishes their numbers, they generally put out two separate numbers - amount of accounts (current, paying accounts) and number of characters. Their numbers don't include free trials, or characters that were played but aren't anymore (I believe Everquest does this; FFXI deletes accounts 30 days after they are closed down).
on an interesting note, apparantly, my entire system is 'stealthed' (or at least the first 1056 ports of it are) - yay me. Shields Up thinks this is 'very cool'. I'm inclined to agree, since the only firewall I have running is the built-in Windows firewall. This is a fresh, as-of-yet untweaked version of Windows XP, with only the messenger service turned on, and Shields Up was unable to get any information whatsoever on my machine, excepting a ping reply.
My roommate's computer, which is installed pretty much the same as my own, minus SP2, is reporting all kinds of information - computer name, workgroup, and a ton of open ports - to the ShieldsUp scanner.
I just thought I'd mention that, since the only thing I have installed that could be closing these ports and fixing things up is SP2 and the Firewall.
This is a typical byproduct of consumer mentality, and a driving force in the development of features and extensions for products.
Commoditization of computer hardware and electronics drives the price of that hardware down, as manufacturing costs are lowered, technology is improved, investment capital is reclaimed, and competition heats up. The market would not stand to have DVD players always at $300, and it wouldn't make any sense - not everyone would buy them, and the profit margins after initial set-up costs (manufacturing, developing, etc) were recouped would be obscene on a per-unit basis.
The problem is that the manufacturers can't make money on $40 DVD players. This is why DVD players, PDAs, laptops, and any other product inevitably gets cheaper in terms of a cost/benefit standpoint - cost is reduced for the same feature set, but also cost is maintained for an increased feature set. The ability to play MP3s, CD/DVD-+RW, progressive scan, and aesthetics are all improved in order to keep products at the point where the profit margins can be maintained (or even increased, due to improvements in technology and e.g. the offloading of work onto software which can be replaced with better software on the same hardware).
Take a look at the iPod, everyone's favourite example. It started at 5 gigs, then it was 5 and 10, for more, and eventually they moved to the current three-tier setup - low, medium, and high-end. When the lines are updated, the models are effectively bumped. The medium starts selling for the low-end price point, the high-end becomes medium, and a new high-end model with more features (well, more storage) arrives.
In the end, what happens is that the hardware and software used to make these iPods gets cheaper, and once it does, they bump everything down. Apple maintains the same (or similar) profit margins on each iteration, and, rather than thinking of it as lowering the price on a particular model, think of it as increasing the feature set of a particular price point.
This is another important (for the companies) reason for slave labor - it allows profits to stay up that much longer, and allows for higher profits on low-cost items, which is an enabling factor for those people disinclined to spend $300 on a DVD player. This in turn fuels the DVD software market, which I'm sure comes full-circle.
Sheesh, you'd almost think I was an economics major. Too bad I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
I use IMAP for all my mail needs - I know, it's a perfect solution to a problem you didn't ask about, but it's still an option. I found I was moving from one computer to another, logging on from websites, various webmail clients, and so on. Eventually, I gave up on moving my e-mail from one computer to another and back, and set up an IMAP server. The reason this works, of course, is that I have a server I can run it on that isn't affected by my constant moving.
Perhaps if you have a friend with a stable server somewhere, you could have it fetch copies of your e-mail every 5 minutes but leave them on the server (maybe for two or three weeks, then deleting them). That way, you could keep your current e-mail, have IMAP access to your mail, and still have redundancy in case his machine blows up.
This does require your local client to keep full copies of the e-mail cached locally, which some can do and some won't. If they do, you will get an error message when you first open your client, then you can browse at will, read e-mails, write replies, and so on. The only thing you can't do is move messages around, delete them, and so on, until you get access to the IMAP server again.
Just a thought. Probably too much work for what you want to do, but I'm in a tech-head mood tonight.
To be honest, I haven't checked benchmarks for it yet, but I just purchased a Dell Inspiron 5150 (should arrive on the 18th). The reason I picked this one in particular was that it was dell's lowest-priced laptop that still had decent video hardware.
Adding a more powerful battery and a 4x DVD burner put me up to CDN $2200 after tax and shipping.
The 5150 on the US website starts at 256 megs of ram, 3.06 GHz P4, 15" XGA at $1079 after a 10% discount.
Another Dell option is $2319 USD after 15% off (about $400 savings) for the Inspiron XPS - a little more than your target price, but the specs are impressive to say the least.
I don't know how well my system is going to handle games - they're mostly a secondary priority, and the system is going to have enough power to run FFXI at least, so that's all I'm really concerned about - but as far as a mixture of cheap and effective (assuming you're not going to want to play Doom 3 on it), Dell is probably the best way to go.
Think 'special features'. Interviews with the crew, featurettes, trailers of new games, demos of other games, bonus content, secondary modes, and so on. With 50 gigs of space, it doesn't matter what you put on - you can put everything on, and let the developers sort it out.
I get to visit webpages that do not format correctly in Firefox (at least not without some discomfort) Really? I don't. Can you name any offhand?
Pacific Mountain Scale Shops is a perfect example. Besides the fact that the person designing the website was incompetant (see if you can find the link to 'c:\documents and settings\...' - it's not hard) and they did simple things in apparantly complex ways - but you know what? It works in IE.
That being said, I'm going to redesign the site (it's my parents' business) to fix the stupidity on the site, but the example remains a valid one.
1) DVD drive spinning
- this could probably be mitigated by ripping the movie into quicktime and playing off your hard drive (which I believe consumes less power than the DVD drive)
On Macs, you can drag the files from the DVD to the hard drive, and the DVD player software will play them fine. If you do this while plugged in at home, you can get a DVD played easily on just battery.
At Starbucks, one of the major limiting factors of how we could arrange the furniture was the wall sockets. Every time I suggested where we put the couch, the manager said 'yeah, but that would block the outlets'. I pointed out that we never used them, and she said 'no, but the laptop users do'.
Most of the laptops out there won't last as long without electricity as our frequent patrons would prefer. The longer they can work on their presentations and reports, the more coffee they'll buy. When in doubt, plug in.
That's a very good idea. I am all for giving id Software as much money as is feasibly possible for this game, and giving EBGames/Gamestop as LITTLE money as possible for ANYTHING.
Trust me, EB Games/Gamestop get almost nothing from games you buy there. On new games, the margin is so slim as to be negligable. EB and (I presume) Gamestop make their money on pre-owned games and higher-margin accessories. If you don't want to give EB money, then only buy new games there, and they'll hardly get a cent (and you'll get your game sooner).
That being said, if you pay the same price to id, they get the whole shebang, but I'd rather get the game that day instead of potentially waiting.
I was in the market for a laptop and priced out a Dell jobbie for around $1900 CDN before tax (it comes to about $1700 USD for the same model with the same options, for reference), reasoning that what it had would probably be enough for the games I play (Final Fantasy XI mostly).
Let's compare their statistics:
- A 1.5-gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 chip or AMD Athlon 1500. - 384 megabytes of memory. - Two gigabytes of hard drive space. - An nVidia GeForce 3 graphics card or better; or an ATI Technologies 8500 or better.
To what my laptop had equipped:
- A 2.4 GHz Pentium Mobile - 512 megs of memory (in Canada, the Inspiron 5150 comes with 512 minimum, which surprised me; I updated the US model with this as well for better price comparisons) - A 60 gig HD (this was a free update at the time, it's only 40 gig normally). - A 64 meg nVidia Geforce FX Go5200
This kind of gives an idea of how out of date I am in terms of computer technology - I accidentally priced out a laptop that has the specs to run Doom3, when all I wanted was a little T&L and some HD space for Atlantis rips. Wow. Not bad for a programming-and-also-some-gaming rig.
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I dunno, the amount of people that commit assault (bar brawls), do drugs, and so on is pretty high, but I'd like to think that those aren't things that we should legalize.
I do agree with you in this particular circumstance, but at the same time, there needs to be limitations. If the idea of copyright infringement is thrown out, then artists will have no incentive to perform (other than just to express themselves, which doesn't pay the bills).
What I would like to see is a facility where I can pay my royalties for media I watch, and share that same media (MP3s, MPGs, JPGs) with others for them to watch and pay for. Perhaps a function like Microsoft's content license purchase, where Media Player can automatically request a license for protected content, only run by a company without ties to a certain media format or player. Possibly the charge could be based on percentage of the file accessed (so if a movie sucks, I don't have to pay for it).
With this facility in place, it would not only be easier for companies to charge for and distribute content, it would be easier for us as consumers, because it doesn't matter who we lend our CDs to. Fair use could be maintained by selling hard copies (DVDs, CDs), and allowing them to be copied as they can be today under fair use, but only allowing uninfringing copies to be made from the physical media. The copies that were made could be tied to the individual that made them (and anyone tied to them - family members, etc), but any distribution would require payment through the above method.
You could also institute a policy of 'free trial' for specific media - a user could have unrestricted access to e.g. the next Prozzak album, but if they don't like it, they can opt not to pay before their week (day? month? year? depends on content provider) is up. This would allow people to try a huge variety of music, and support individually those artists (and even those songs) that they prefer. I could then pay Britney Spears for Hit Me Baby One More Time and Toxic, but not for E-Mail My Heart. I wouldn't, but I could.
Some people would say this encourages pandering - you have to make songs that people like in order to get paid, which limits artistic integrity. You could branch out, but there's risk, because there's a possibility it won't be well-recieved. As such, every song you make on an album that is different from your usual style is lost revenue that could be made up for by making a song more people like.
I would say that this encourages branching out, because then people can support the individual songs they like. That is to say, if I like experimental songs 5, 7, and 9 on an otherwise mainstream CD, I can buy those songs without buying the other crap. As it is now, artists have no idea what songs you're buying the CDs for (though you can bet it's the singles).
Artists could make as many songs as they wanted, recording and producing the popular ones, and just recording misc stuff in their basement when they're playing around on their guitars, and if they put it up and people like it, then they get paid for it. This will flood the market with content, providing an almost overwhelming variety of choice for consumers to pick from.
Wouldn't that be neat?
--Dan
Move to Canada. If I have a CD and lend it to my friend Fred, Fred can just rip the CD, make a copy, burn it, mix it, or whatever, and then give it back to me. As long as he is using his copy for his personal use, it's non-infringement.
I find it amusing to no end that lending a CD could be considered an infringing act. Talk about absurd. I'd jump ship when the idea was considered.
--Dan
As I understand it, Apple has one offer - one contract. If you want to list music, then you sign that contract. Independant labels can sign, and they get the exact same deal, to the letter, that BMG, Sony, and Virgin have. If you don't want to sign that contact, no dice. Other than that, I don't think there are any impractical limitations to who can apply. They probably have limitations, like nothing that expouses hate or racism, but it's hard to say.
--Dan
Yes, but newspapers charge a commodity price (a dollar usually) to get their papers read, and rely on ads to support the infrastructure (reporters, editors, rent, bills, printing, distribution, etc).
Thanks to the internet, online publications can eliminate a lot of the physical aspect of that (printing, distribution, even most rent and bills). This trims a lot off, leaving only the essential resources - people.
With Sun, however, they can supply a subscription at a more realistic rate, as opposed to a dollar per customer. They can make their funds directly from their subscription and support, without having to resort to other methods (ads) to make up for it. Sun's products aren't a commodity, so there's no concern of having to subsidize.
--Dan
I dunno kids, but it detects my copy of NAV2004 no problem. Maybe I'm lucky? I Liveupdate whenever the icon shows up in my taskbar though, so maybe I got the patch already. Still, it does work.
--Dan
Some programs require administrator privileges to run. All of them (that I've seen) require admin privileges to install.
Microsoft needs to make a simple way for programs to request administrator privileges, a la OS X installers, for temporary, one-time settings. If a user could run an installer or updater and it would say 'you do not have permission to install this program, please enter the administrator password', then it would be conveniant.
When I installed my laptop, I resolved to do the whole separation of accounts - an Administrator account and a User account. After about an hour, I got fed up with it being a pain in the ass to do anything, made myself an admin, and deleted the admin account. It's just not feasible.
Another good feature would be to provide deferred installation. A program could ask for a password to be allowed to install, and if the password wasn't supplied, then it would 'ghost' the installation, going through the motions, but quarantining the program first. The notification could be sent to another account with privs (e.g. mommy or daddy), it could show up on boot or reboot (single-user system), or it could be forwarded to IT personnel to be reviewed (in detail).
Installers that are not designed with this in mind could go forward as usual, but a system alert would pop up notifying them that the program would not be ready to use until someone has verified the installation is approved - input password now, or forward to whomever.
This would also have the benefit of alerting users whenever something installs something else in the background, or tries to modify an installation or settings its not allowed to touch. It would also allow network administrators at large sites to see what kind of installations are being attempted (MSN? Gator? Cool cursor spyware?) and would allow them to clamp down on users for their part in it, as well as preventing them in the future (or firewalling certain websites at the proxy, etc).
Just a thought.
--Dan
XP SP2 also limits outgoing TCP connections. It allows ten per second (I don't know if this is per process or system-wide), and after that, the connection requests get queued. Thus, if a computer is trying to open up 50 connections per second, it will open 10 the first second with 40 queued, then 10 the second second with 80 queued, and so on.
This may interfere with some practical applications, but it will also help connection flooding (will this help anyone? I don't know...). There are workarounds for it, but the workarounds have to be installed in Safe Mode with no networking support, so you'd be hard pressed to do it remotely to someone else's machine. I'm sure it's possible somehow though.
--Dan
I thought George Bush said they speak Mexican. I'm so confused. They must speak a lot of languages!
--Dan
The Ford Nova didn't do any better in Latin America, which Ford discovered was because 'no' means 'no', and 'va' means go.
Not to say the car didn't live up to its reputation necessarily, but that's another issue entirely.
--Dan
As long as the student in question has good eyesight (or good eyesight correction), you can spend a few bucks on a Palm M100 (probably find them used for $20-40) and a cheapo keyboard. If you scrounged eBay, you could probably find them for less than $50 USD together. They're small and portable, can fit in a purse, and 2 megs of memory is more than enough for a day's worth of notes.
Another option would be to get one of the fancy Sony ones with cameras, whcih can also capture overhead screens.
--Dan
Can you put this into non-math terms for us laypeople that failed highschool math? All I really got from that was 'blah blah blah blah blah countries blah blah', but it sounds like what you're saying is probably really interesting or something.
--Dan
People play video games to be someone else, someone important and interesting. A bounty hunter, a mage, a rogue, a walking death machine. Why would I want to come home from my boring life as a bookseller to enjoy a fake boring life as a street sweeper? Doesn't sound too compelling. If I wanted to walk into doors and step in poo to spice up my life, I'd go DO it. I play MMORPGs because I can go out with other people and cast crazy spells and blow up ugly monsters, to do stuff that I can't actually do in real life. Why would I pay money to walk into old hags? That happens whenever I go to the mall, I don't need to pay someone to do it online.
It's good that you have ideas, and I like the idea of smaller worlds with more character potency, but people wouldn't pay money.
--Dan
Just for reference, when Square-Enix publishes their numbers, they generally put out two separate numbers - amount of accounts (current, paying accounts) and number of characters. Their numbers don't include free trials, or characters that were played but aren't anymore (I believe Everquest does this; FFXI deletes accounts 30 days after they are closed down).
--Dan
If they ever come up with a device for my computer that shoves a hot poker in my ass every so often, I'll be in heaven!
Close...
--Dan
on an interesting note, apparantly, my entire system is 'stealthed' (or at least the first 1056 ports of it are) - yay me. Shields Up thinks this is 'very cool'. I'm inclined to agree, since the only firewall I have running is the built-in Windows firewall. This is a fresh, as-of-yet untweaked version of Windows XP, with only the messenger service turned on, and Shields Up was unable to get any information whatsoever on my machine, excepting a ping reply.
My roommate's computer, which is installed pretty much the same as my own, minus SP2, is reporting all kinds of information - computer name, workgroup, and a ton of open ports - to the ShieldsUp scanner.
I just thought I'd mention that, since the only thing I have installed that could be closing these ports and fixing things up is SP2 and the Firewall.
--Dan
This is a typical byproduct of consumer mentality, and a driving force in the development of features and extensions for products.
Commoditization of computer hardware and electronics drives the price of that hardware down, as manufacturing costs are lowered, technology is improved, investment capital is reclaimed, and competition heats up. The market would not stand to have DVD players always at $300, and it wouldn't make any sense - not everyone would buy them, and the profit margins after initial set-up costs (manufacturing, developing, etc) were recouped would be obscene on a per-unit basis.
The problem is that the manufacturers can't make money on $40 DVD players. This is why DVD players, PDAs, laptops, and any other product inevitably gets cheaper in terms of a cost/benefit standpoint - cost is reduced for the same feature set, but also cost is maintained for an increased feature set. The ability to play MP3s, CD/DVD-+RW, progressive scan, and aesthetics are all improved in order to keep products at the point where the profit margins can be maintained (or even increased, due to improvements in technology and e.g. the offloading of work onto software which can be replaced with better software on the same hardware).
Take a look at the iPod, everyone's favourite example. It started at 5 gigs, then it was 5 and 10, for more, and eventually they moved to the current three-tier setup - low, medium, and high-end. When the lines are updated, the models are effectively bumped. The medium starts selling for the low-end price point, the high-end becomes medium, and a new high-end model with more features (well, more storage) arrives.
In the end, what happens is that the hardware and software used to make these iPods gets cheaper, and once it does, they bump everything down. Apple maintains the same (or similar) profit margins on each iteration, and, rather than thinking of it as lowering the price on a particular model, think of it as increasing the feature set of a particular price point.
This is another important (for the companies) reason for slave labor - it allows profits to stay up that much longer, and allows for higher profits on low-cost items, which is an enabling factor for those people disinclined to spend $300 on a DVD player. This in turn fuels the DVD software market, which I'm sure comes full-circle.
Sheesh, you'd almost think I was an economics major. Too bad I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
--Dan
I use IMAP for all my mail needs - I know, it's a perfect solution to a problem you didn't ask about, but it's still an option. I found I was moving from one computer to another, logging on from websites, various webmail clients, and so on. Eventually, I gave up on moving my e-mail from one computer to another and back, and set up an IMAP server. The reason this works, of course, is that I have a server I can run it on that isn't affected by my constant moving.
Perhaps if you have a friend with a stable server somewhere, you could have it fetch copies of your e-mail every 5 minutes but leave them on the server (maybe for two or three weeks, then deleting them). That way, you could keep your current e-mail, have IMAP access to your mail, and still have redundancy in case his machine blows up.
This does require your local client to keep full copies of the e-mail cached locally, which some can do and some won't. If they do, you will get an error message when you first open your client, then you can browse at will, read e-mails, write replies, and so on. The only thing you can't do is move messages around, delete them, and so on, until you get access to the IMAP server again.
Just a thought. Probably too much work for what you want to do, but I'm in a tech-head mood tonight.
--Dan
To be honest, I haven't checked benchmarks for it yet, but I just purchased a Dell Inspiron 5150 (should arrive on the 18th). The reason I picked this one in particular was that it was dell's lowest-priced laptop that still had decent video hardware.
The specs I got were as follows:
- 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 HT
- 15" SXGA+ LCD
- 512 MB RAM
- 60 GB HD
- 64 MB nVidia GeForce FX Go5200
Adding a more powerful battery and a 4x DVD burner put me up to CDN $2200 after tax and shipping.
The 5150 on the US website starts at 256 megs of ram, 3.06 GHz P4, 15" XGA at $1079 after a 10% discount.
Another Dell option is $2319 USD after 15% off (about $400 savings) for the Inspiron XPS - a little more than your target price, but the specs are impressive to say the least.
I don't know how well my system is going to handle games - they're mostly a secondary priority, and the system is going to have enough power to run FFXI at least, so that's all I'm really concerned about - but as far as a mixture of cheap and effective (assuming you're not going to want to play Doom 3 on it), Dell is probably the best way to go.
Think 'special features'. Interviews with the crew, featurettes, trailers of new games, demos of other games, bonus content, secondary modes, and so on. With 50 gigs of space, it doesn't matter what you put on - you can put everything on, and let the developers sort it out.
--Dan
Pacific Mountain Scale Shops is a perfect example. Besides the fact that the person designing the website was incompetant (see if you can find the link to 'c:\documents and settings\...' - it's not hard) and they did simple things in apparantly complex ways - but you know what? It works in IE.
That being said, I'm going to redesign the site (it's my parents' business) to fix the stupidity on the site, but the example remains a valid one.
--Dan
1) DVD drive spinning
- this could probably be mitigated by ripping the movie into quicktime and playing off your hard drive (which I believe consumes less power than the DVD drive)
On Macs, you can drag the files from the DVD to the hard drive, and the DVD player software will play them fine. If you do this while plugged in at home, you can get a DVD played easily on just battery.
--Dan
At Starbucks, one of the major limiting factors of how we could arrange the furniture was the wall sockets. Every time I suggested where we put the couch, the manager said 'yeah, but that would block the outlets'. I pointed out that we never used them, and she said 'no, but the laptop users do'.
Most of the laptops out there won't last as long without electricity as our frequent patrons would prefer. The longer they can work on their presentations and reports, the more coffee they'll buy. When in doubt, plug in.
--Dan
That's a very good idea. I am all for giving id Software as much money as is feasibly possible for this game, and giving EBGames/Gamestop as LITTLE money as possible for ANYTHING.
Trust me, EB Games/Gamestop get almost nothing from games you buy there. On new games, the margin is so slim as to be negligable. EB and (I presume) Gamestop make their money on pre-owned games and higher-margin accessories. If you don't want to give EB money, then only buy new games there, and they'll hardly get a cent (and you'll get your game sooner).
That being said, if you pay the same price to id, they get the whole shebang, but I'd rather get the game that day instead of potentially waiting.
--Dan
Sure, they are still "in progress" releases, but you can actually download them and try them out, which is way more than can be said for Longhorn.
:p
You obviously don't go to the same websites I do.
(kidding!)
--Dan
I'm genuinely surprised.
I was in the market for a laptop and priced out a Dell jobbie for around $1900 CDN before tax (it comes to about $1700 USD for the same model with the same options, for reference), reasoning that what it had would probably be enough for the games I play (Final Fantasy XI mostly).
Let's compare their statistics:
- A 1.5-gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 chip or AMD Athlon 1500.
- 384 megabytes of memory.
- Two gigabytes of hard drive space.
- An nVidia GeForce 3 graphics card or better; or an ATI Technologies 8500 or better.
To what my laptop had equipped:
- A 2.4 GHz Pentium Mobile
- 512 megs of memory (in Canada, the Inspiron 5150 comes with 512 minimum, which surprised me; I updated the US model with this as well for better price comparisons)
- A 60 gig HD (this was a free update at the time, it's only 40 gig normally).
- A 64 meg nVidia Geforce FX Go5200
This kind of gives an idea of how out of date I am in terms of computer technology - I accidentally priced out a laptop that has the specs to run Doom3, when all I wanted was a little T&L and some HD space for Atlantis rips. Wow. Not bad for a programming-and-also-some-gaming rig.
--Dan