Dude I also had that game, when the big crash happened i bought it and like a dozen more for $5 at my local Magic Mart (man i miss that store) and the one thing this all ignores is this....it wasn't fun. I don't mean like it had some bad bits you just had to plow through, I mean the whole thing was not fun at all. The pits were unpredictable and if you fell in you had to do this sloooow as hell neck stretch to get out, the entire game felt pointless and random, it really wasn't a fun game.
The simple fact is while everybody talks about how the market was flooded (which caused the crash) what they ignore how many truly good and even great games there were. Sure many of them were knockoffs of the hits, Ladybug for Coleco is a good example as it was a Pacman clone but in level designs and excitement I thought it was a better game than the original, but when you had so much competition you can't just throw together some shitty levels, slap a movie license on them, and not expect it to bomb. hell that is why movie license games have such a bad rap after all,a trend that continues to this day with the likes of Iron Man and Battleship the movie game.
Atari was already in REALLY bad shape thanks to corporate mismanagement, such as losing most of their best devs by refusing to give them credit for their work, but ET is the perfect example of what being bought by WB did to that company. Once WB bought it it was no longer about making fun games people would buy, it was all about product marketing and timetables and who gives a shit about whether its even playable, much less fun.
So I'm sorry but this guy is full of shit, it WAS that bad. You couldn't even enjoy it in a "so bad its good" sense like you could a bad movie or a bad game like "You Are Empty" (if you haven't tried it? Plot makes ZERO sense and one level you are attacked by 30 foot tall mutant attack chickens, I swear to God, you are chased around a farm by old coots with double barrels and 30 foot chickens, now THAT is good cheese!) because everything about it was just boring and unpleasant. If it hadn't had the ET movie license and been pushed so hard nobody would even remember this thing ever existed,its THAT boring and bad.
Dude the state capital in my home state covers more than 30 miles counting the subdivisions, you expect people to bike that shit? Man you could take the entire Netherlands and drop it into most states in the USA and there would be land left over, I really don't think you quite grasp the scale you are talking about here. There was a story a few years back on a guy that decided to bike across the 50 states, know how long it took him with him doing NOTHING but that 9+ hours a day? Nearly 8 YEARS.
Then there is the other elephant in the room, the fact that in most places you get the "choice" of either biking on the freeway (which I hope you like sucking smog and being a target for inattentive drivers) or you can bike through the inner city...just be sure to pin a note to your body so we know where to send your corpse when the gang bangers are done using you for target practice. Our fricking coroner has to wear a BPV when he goes to the inner city and I'll never forget a video of him trying to pick up a body, with him picking up a megaphone and saying "Stop shooting he's dead already,not an ambulance, I'm the meat wagon!" and he still ended up with a half a dozen rounds in the vehicle.
So biking? REALLY not an option friend. In my home town they got tired of all the splattered bicyclists so they banned 'em on city streets, you can only go 2 miles or less without risking a ticket, and instead made a bike path...3 miles out of town and which goes absolutely nowhere, just a flat paved road that goes along a bunch of fields, so if you want to bike for anything other than exercise here? Tough shit.
Sorry, the rules really do need clarification but sadly the governing board was exposed to 4chan for 16 hours straight and now the only thing they are really good for is drooling on the carpet.
But on the third Thursday of the month (again only if its sunny) Rule 34 takes precedent above all, which means even the most innocent of websites will be under Rule 34 which will be followed by excessive trollface. Be glad you weren't there to witness what the last occurrence did to the poor Murder She Wrote fan club, many of them were so scarred that support for the right to die went up by 20%, all the supporters had to do was show them the aftermath of that fateful Thursday...poor little old ladies. Although I hear it was nothing compared to what happened to the Pokemon fan club, but at least they are young so a decade or two of therapy should straighten them right out.
The proper name for those who surf is Penelope, unless you have a penis longer than 5 inches or were born on a Tuesday and then its Frederick.
Oh and while i'm in a correcting mood, its not an information superhighway, its a giant series of tubes from which cats and porn blend to form a double rainbow, unless its the third Thursday of the month and its sunny in which case rule 34 applies and excess trollface is the order of the day.
Uhhh...I transcode too and I notice artifacts...for about 10 seconds and then i'm too busy watching the actual content to care. Unless you get Indeo levels of shitty most folks just won't care, they really won't, or how else do you explain how 1366x768 notebooks and 720p TVs are the biggest sellers?
I can tell you why, its the same reason why my dad watches a 50 inch 1080P set yet the majority of the content he watches on it isn't even DVD quality, its because as long as its not blocky as hell he cares more about the content than what resolution its at and I have a feeling the majority feels the same.
As somebody who has their first gaming PC, a 100Mhz P1 still running with DOS 3 as the controller for an expensive old column lathe that they don't even make anymore? The problem with having that discussion is some of this stuff is just fricking insanely expensive and in a down economy you may not have the money, or spending that money might seriously hurt operations in other areas.
Believe me nobody WANTS to keep really old shit, but you may have a PHB middle manager that won't let go of a dime, sometimes as i said the cost is just too high, a lot of time you keep the old shit because you simply have no other choice.
Probably because he has the same situation as in my state, where if you want to live any closer you 1.- better make at least triple what everybody else does because the nice gated communities are insanely expensive, or 2.- Its "You know where you are? You're in the jungle baby, you're gonna die!" time. Really its THAT extreme, it Mc Mansions or slums, not really anything in between unless you live way the hell away from the capital.
And i don't know about where he lives but you couldn't pay me to ride a bicycle in the state capital, you either stick to the freeway (good way to get run over and I hope you like sucking smog) or again you drive through welcome to the jungle land since its right in the middle of town. Its like that old Chris Rock joke "You're on MLK? RUN,forget the car just RUN!" because even the cops won't go down MLK or main without being in force, not even in daylight, I sure as hell wouldn't try pedaling a bike down MLK.
I'm surprised nobody has simply named the obvious, which is just pick up an older laptop on ebay. Plenty of old Toughbooks still out there, built like tanks,, with RS232 already on them. Sure it isn't as fancy as setting up VMs and trying to get them to talk to the old gear but sometimes the simplest answer is the best IMHO.
I would have ZERO problem with that as long as their 32bit XP version can support later editions of DirectX, which since its probably doing DirectX to OpenGL conversion using shims or some such that shouldn't be too big a problem.
A lot of the problems I have with WinXP boil down to the fact that its 13 years old, has had thousands of patches, and that makes it a hell of a lot more prone to breakage and less stable than Windows 7. If they can make a version of XP 32bit that is as stable as Win 7 32bit? Sounds good, i wouldn't have any problem with having that on my shelves.
But if they don't come up with a 64bit version the only systems it'll be useful for will be legacy as I have circa 2006 Pentium D systems in the shop that will hold 4GB of RAM no problem and pretty much every system since that time, with the exception of Intel Atom as Intel crippled those to make them less attractive, has supported 4GB of RAM or more. while I haven't looked to see how ReactOS supports PAE (or if it even does) I can tell you on Windows its really not hard to slam into the 3.2GB RAM limit of XP 32bit, not when 1GB graphics cards can be had for as little as $15.
One final thing though, making a hard set 4GB minimum frankly wouldn't be smart, as not only would you be forcing those that didn't have 4GB now but were planning on going 4GB later to use 32bit but as someone who has run windows 64 bit OSes like XP X64 on systems with as low as 2GB of RAM I can tell you that even without 4GB you will see benefits when going 64bit, for example having 64bit registers can make some tasks such as video transcoding faster. Ultimately it should be targeting the same system requirements of the OS they are wanting to replace, in the case of 64bit Windows its a 1GHz 64bit CPU, 2GB of RAM and a 20GB or better HDD. I'd say those system requirements are pretty reasonable and then the user should choose what is right for them.
Thanks but ironically I've never given a rat's ass about karma, i always just call it as i see it and apparently a lot of folks feel the same, they just won't say so for this reason or that.
At the end of the day though I think we have more than ample enough evidence to say with a pretty decent amount of certainty that there is simply too many that just can't handle religion, its like a dangerous drug to them and only with its removal can we work toward having true and lasting peace. If you look at the history of religion, ALL religion, and compare how much death and suffering its caused compared to the population at the time? i think one could argue that as far as percentages go more have died because of religion than any other cause by far, from the multi- deists feeding Christians to the lions to the Jewish Pogroms of the middle ages to the insane body counts in the ME today it ALL boils down to "My God is better than your god Aie ie ie ie yee!" bullshit.
While I have known some who found a sense of peace from spirituality just because a few can handle a drug doesn't mean it isn't dangerous, and I think looking at the numbers it would be hard to argue that religion isn't ultimately causing more harm than good.
Dude you better pray to whatever God you believe in that the USA don't go bankrupt, because the last time a highly nationalistic military leaning country went bankrupt it really didn't end too well for most of Eastern Europe.
The scary part is as we saw with the flimsy as hell WMD excuse it really don't take much to get Americans into a pro-war stance, as long as the press is beating that war drum and selling it the people WILL buy it. The way the ultra right has vilified South America honestly it wouldn't take much to get the people behind rolling the tanks and there is enough natural resources there to keep America going another half a century easy. Cook up a little false flag, blame it on the south of the border, sadly it really wouldn't be a hard sell, especially if America was going through another depression and resources were scarce.
Its not astounding, its fucking scary and evil as hell. You start looking into the history of the US military and CIA after WWII and you'll find false flags, terrorist actions, including those in democracies like Italy, hell the CIA helped the Contras sell crack cocaine to the black neighborhoods in the 80s when the congress cut off funding to the Contra "rebels" after finding out about their rape and death squads which to this day I still believe those in the CIA that helped the Contras should face a firing squad for treason and attempted genocide, both in South America and upon the black inner cities who have yet to recover and who've lost thousands.
You have the Gulf of Tonkin false flag, 58,000 Americans dead and probably over a million in Vietnam and Laos, we can't get an exact figure because the millions of pounds in mines we dropped are still killing people there to this day, you have the execution of an American civil rights activist by the FBI which to this day not a single charge has been filed, and you have shit like this happening to this very day such as fast & Furious which even some of the feds carrying it out said "it smelled like a false flag" and which has resulted in the death of at least one border agent and who knows how many civilians.
And the scariest part? the part that will make your blood run cold? this is only listing the shit we KNOW about and which they have ADMITTED to doing! Do you have any idea how little they fear the law to be fully willing to admit this kind of shit? since the end of WWII you have the CIA, FBI, and US military frankly running amok, didn't matter if it was in a friendly nation, hell didn't even matter if it was on US soil and targeted to Americans, just look at this map and remember that covers ONLY what we have documented evidence of, in many cases again from their very own mouths.
This is why I just can't understand those that act like the third world should embrace the USA with open arms, all it takes is one look at that map and you'll see exactly why they hate the USA, its because our CIA and military has been doing anything they want, usually hand in glove with a handful of special interests (like BP in Iran, Dole who wanted cheap fruit from South America, etc) and their choices have been do as they are told or their leaders will get replaced by puppets that will. No wonder they hate the USA.
So you went to Cambodia, a beautiful exotic land which i hear has great nightlife and is filled with sexy women, not to mention thousands of years of history...and you spent your time reading. Wow...you suck at life!
Ahhh Indeo, I remember that. The name is I believe ancient Sanskrit for "Blocks made of fecal matter". I hear the MPAA mourned when that format died because it was so good at keeping people from watching copyrighted content...or pretty much anything except colored squares. And how could we forget one of its most popular uses, it was in part thanks to Indeo we had the FMV "game";-)
As for being able to tell the difference? I'm sure you can, but you are in the minority friend. Hell the majority of notebooks today are sold with 1366x768 screens and most TV manufacturers sell a good 4 to 6 720P TV sets for each 1080P set they sell so its pretty damned obvious that most folks either can't tell or just don't care.
In the interest of full disclosure I'm typing this at home on my 1600x900 22 inch and while i wouldn't mind picking up a 32 inch 1080P TV set to use as a monitor down the line I have to say picture wise I'm quite happy with what I have. But then again I'm also quite happy with my 12 inch netbook which is 1366x768 which I'm sure makes videophiles cry.
That is one game out of HOW many that have been released just this year? Not to mention all the games of years past, if you thought you had problems getting them to run on a widescreen monitor imagine what "fun" you'll have when its picture is the size of a postage stamp compared to your new 4K screen.
I'm sure what I am about to say will depress the shit out of the resolution nuts but truth is truth and the simple truth is you are gonna have to have a SHITLOAD of content to get people to let go of those 1080P sets and considering how much it costs to make a triple A game these days? They'll probably be one of the last things to switch. Unless you use some cheap fakery 4K art assets are gonna suck up some serious space which is gonna mean more space and/or more bandwidth...speaking of bandwidth how big of a pipe are we gonna need to have MP with 4K? Considering the ISPs are all going to caps I bet the answer is "too damned much".
Then finally there is the big fat rotting elephant lying on top of the Blu Ray which is thus, most people? They don't see any problem with what they have and they sure as fuck ain't gonna spend thousands on a set that has content measured in double digits. I mean has anybody looked at the sales of DVD versus the sales of Blu Ray lately? People seem quite content with their upscaling DVD players even though those won't even do 1080p, so good damned luck selling them on yet another format...oh and has anybody thought about the DRM? If you think Blu Ray sucks balls for DRM imagine how fucking apeshit the MPAA is gonna be when it comes to a format that gives a better picture than many theaters.
All in all I'm gonna say this will end up yet another niche videophile market, not even getting the limited adoption that Blu Ray has. The content isn't there, you'll have to have bandwidth that frankly damned few in the USA even has access to to do any streaming, its expensive as hell, and the majority see nothing wrong with what they have. I mean for crap's sake guys the majority of notebooks sold are running 1366x768, you honestly think people are gonna care about a 4K set? At the end of the day it'll be just like 3D-TV, something the TV manufacturers pushed trying to get the prices back up only to end up with a pile of unsold sets. Hell you still see something like 4 720P sets sold for each 1080P, its obvious people care about price more than resolution and "good enough" is the rule of the day.
Don't think you are from around these parts friend. You see America? Don't really have any public transportation to speak of except in a few select cities (and often in only select places in those cities) and what little public transport we have? You wouldn't want to ride on it, its not very nice in most places.
So unless you expect everyone to walk dozens of miles its not like there is much of a choice friend. Heck in my state there is a single bus line, which is very lousy, and which only follows a little circuit that covers MAYBE 20% of the capital. That's it, that is all there is. If you need to go anywhere besides that little circuit, or to any other city in the state? Tough shit.
Just a little FYI there, for while I hear other countries actually have public transport and in some places its actually quite nice that sure as hell doesn't describe a good 85%+ of the USA. Again using my state for example you drive or you get to "enjoy" living in the shittiest neighborhood in the state capital, since it only really goes to that one dirt poor area and to the malls.
The Shah was a monster, just as nasty as Stalin was to his people and we honestly DID NOT CARE as long as big oil got to do what they want. I wish i could find another copy of the map showing CIA and US military "interventions" since WWII because there was MAYBE a dozen countries on the entire planet that the CIA or US Military hadn't fucked with, it was pretty sad to look at.
Ike tried to warn us about this in the 1950s, about the rise of the MIC and the megacorps buying the US military and CIA to use as pitbulls for their interests but we didn't listen, you look into the history of these countries that hate us...can you blame 'em? We haven't had a single decade of peace since the end of WWII, not one, we are always stirring up shit in this or that third world country.
Actually I'd say it really doesn't matter as it'll take another 20 years to convert the majority at least. I live just a block from the local library that is on the edge of a lovely park so i spend a LOT of time there talking to folks and most of the book lovers? Really don't want electronic books at all. they like the feel, smell, texture of books, they like how they can just throw a paperback in their bag or backseat of the car and not have to worry about sunlight killing it, while a few of them use Kindles for the short stories that are now more often than not no longer getting paperback editions honestly if given a choice? they'd rather have the book.
Ironically its the college kids that seem to have this attitude the most, probably because so much of their lives involve screens that its nice to get away from the tech. Can't say as i blame 'em as I have yet to see an electronic book be as handy and as easy to deal with as a good old paperback.
As for TFA? Whatever Amazon goes with is gonna win, that's it. the Kindle outsells everybody else and with the new Fires you have an all in one media player/tablet/eReader that is affordable and I've heard nothing but good things about the entire kindle line from customers who've picked one up. No matter what you think of the company you have to give Amazon credit as so far they have been damned smart when it comes to how they design and market the Kindle and I haven't seen anybody come up with anything that will give the Kindle a run for its money.
This is why Neil deGrasse Tyson want us to do a closer study of Mars, because there is a good chance that the origin of life here can be found there. As he pointed out they had a "primordial soup" much earlier than we did, several kinds of bacteria can survive in space in a dormant state, and finally a lot of the debris from those large impacts ended up hitting us.
Uhhh...their neighbor is a theocracy with nukes and is a haven for terrorists and whose head bomb designer handed out "how to build a nuke" handbooks to such lovely places like North Korea...in this case I find it kinda hard to condemn them when they have such a threat on their border. I mean how do you think the USA would act if Mexico became an Islamic theocracy and started building WMDs?
Considering we had a guy running for POTUS that was singing "Bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran" with a big shit eating grin on his face WTF does anyone here think Iran is gonna think of the USA? Not to mention the last time they had a democracy we murdered their leader and forced in the Shah so BP could get cheap oil on the backs and blood of all those murdered by our dear beloved puppet the Shah.
I wish those that just blindly wave the flag would take a look at the history of the CIA and US Military since the end of WWII, because honestly? Most of the time we have been the BAD GUYS. Let me put up a quote from a former general in the US Marines, see how much of this sounds familiar...
"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."
Sound familiar? BTW how many of you know that Afghanistan has a mineral deposit so big it may end up being worth more than the Iraq oil fields? Sadly the USA doesn't do a damned thing because its "right" anymore, not unless some corp can exploit a place and make out like Gods.
Well I'm afraid you haven't kept up with the SCOTUS because so far they have ruled in favor of EULA, shrink wrap, and TOS as long as they give you a notice of change and give you the option to opt out without penalty, such as a carrier changing their TOS has to give you the option of saying "That is not what I agreed to" and walking away without getting dinged by a fee for doing so.
So while there is no current case that I know of involving website TOS and browsers so far the courts have ruled pretty consistently in favor of the courts, no matter that in the case of shrink wraps its completely lop sided and thanks to the fact nobody will take back software once its been opened unlike TOS and EULAs you can't escape without penalty. Considering how heavily they have ruled in favor of licenses it really wouldn't surprise me one bit if a website could scream DMCA violation and win, in fact I can't even think of a case where the court ruled against the corp when it comes to DMCA with the exception of fair use such as parodies or background music such as "dancing Prince baby".
And whether you admire him or not if you aren't karma trolling you really need to put something in your sig to let people know you aren't him nor a lawyer, because I bet most will do just as I did and see NYCL and automatically think its him. Kinda ironic when there is some guy running around here calling himself "hairytoes" trying to copy me, but when I see NYCL I automatically think its NYC Lawyer.
What chasing? As another pointed out target the 32bit and 64bit at Win 7 and call it a day, nobody is buying Win 8.blah blah unless they are forced to with a new system and a lot of those folks end up coming to me going "Take that stupid thing off my system!".
As for the benefits to the customer, lower prices and having an OS that a company isn't just gonna pull the plug on so they can sell them another copy? I still have WinXP P4 boxes in one corner of the shop for sale...do you think I WANT to have systems that I know have less than a year before they have a giant fucking bullseye painted on them? Think I wouldn't prefer to give them an OS that is gonna be updated past Apr of next year?
The simple fact is not everybody has the money for a new system in this shitty economy and I try to have systems at all price points just to make sure that anybody that walks into my shop can walk out with a computer. Can't run Linux on them thanks to the shitty driver situation and how often an update pisses on the drivers, not to mention the hardware roulette where you have no God damned clue what printers, wireless cards etc will run on the damned thing because the lists are ALWAYS out of date and require knowledge no average user is gonna know like which fucking kernel version they have (which just shows how shitty Linus Torvalds is at dealing with drivers, you shouldn't HAVE to know that shit just to get a functional device) so I literally have no other choice, its leave XP on them or have no systems cheaper than $250 in the shop.
And I make a grand total of $60 on a new build thanks to the boat anchor that is Windows licenses, if I didn't have to pay that wallet raping for a copy of Windows Home? I'd still make $60 a build and the price would lowered by the difference between the cost of Windows and the cost of ReactOS which like I said I wouldn't mind paying $20 to $25 a copy just to help support them, after all I was happy to pay $40 a copy for Xandros Home, only damned Linux I ever saw that could do two in place upgrades and have all the drivers keep working.
The simple fact is we system builders really don't have a choice in the matter, Linux is too damned fiddly, breaks too often, too damned many problems have as their ONLY solution "Tweak this pile of CLI crap (which no home user is qualified to do) because it was designed for hardware B,rev C and thanks to Torvalds sucking dick on drivers it won't work if the hardware is hardware B, rev D, and once you are done tweaking input this bullshit into bash and pray to St iGNUcious" and its pretty God damned obvious by now you can give it the fuck up when it comes to having either the consumer software or hardware companies support you, its NOT gonna happen. And NO Wine is NOT an option, its just as damned fiddly, fails as often as it works,supports too little, and requires too much of a consumer when it comes to skill to be a viable option for anything but a handful of software like old versions of MS Office which most consumers don't even use.
So we system builders would be happy to give the finger to MSFT, we just don't have that option because there isn't anything like reactOS to take its place. instead we'll get another 500 distros on distrowatch that can all be summed up as "Its (insert Linux base) with (insert one of the same 5 DEs) with the same old software, the same problems as always,same fucked up driver model,same breakage, same lack of software, same old same" and its not gonna work, if it was gonna work it would have by now. So Windows will keep the desktop, Apple will own the mobile, and we system builders will keep having to give money hand over fist to MSFT.
Just goes to prove what I've been saying for years, the absolute best way to move humanity forward towards peace and brotherhood....would be to take every religious text on the planet and throw them in a massive bonfire that blots out the sun.
What does the whole India/Pakistan hatred boil down to? "My God is better than your God Aie ie ie ie yee!" bullshit. Hutus and Tutsi, pretty much ALL of the middle east bullshit, now that the East/West ideology wars we can see how truly harmful religion is just by looking at all the wars and terrorism being fought in the name of this or that skybully. And please don't say "Its not the religion, its the practitioners" because I'm sorry but we have more than enough evidence that shows that for every one person that can handle it you get a dozen that either completely turn off their brains and become mindless followers that don't question jack shit their religious leaders say (who always end up corrupted) or who completely have the cheese slip off their cracker to become foaming zealots.
So really those of us that would like to see the "Star Trek" future of everyone treated as equals should want nothing less than the compete and total destruction of all religion because it is, like the WMDs talked about in TFA, just too damned dangerous. I'm sure I'll get hatred from the true believers, but if you could actually look at anything without the infection of religion? You'd see I'm right, I can show horror after horror, from suicide bombers to those blowing up abortion clinics to outright genocide and at the end of the day it ALL comes down to religion. We simply cannot handle religion, its like a drug that too few are able to take, its just got too many risks and too many side effects for it to be any good.
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Dude I also had that game, when the big crash happened i bought it and like a dozen more for $5 at my local Magic Mart (man i miss that store) and the one thing this all ignores is this....it wasn't fun. I don't mean like it had some bad bits you just had to plow through, I mean the whole thing was not fun at all. The pits were unpredictable and if you fell in you had to do this sloooow as hell neck stretch to get out, the entire game felt pointless and random, it really wasn't a fun game.
The simple fact is while everybody talks about how the market was flooded (which caused the crash) what they ignore how many truly good and even great games there were. Sure many of them were knockoffs of the hits, Ladybug for Coleco is a good example as it was a Pacman clone but in level designs and excitement I thought it was a better game than the original, but when you had so much competition you can't just throw together some shitty levels, slap a movie license on them, and not expect it to bomb. hell that is why movie license games have such a bad rap after all,a trend that continues to this day with the likes of Iron Man and Battleship the movie game.
Atari was already in REALLY bad shape thanks to corporate mismanagement, such as losing most of their best devs by refusing to give them credit for their work, but ET is the perfect example of what being bought by WB did to that company. Once WB bought it it was no longer about making fun games people would buy, it was all about product marketing and timetables and who gives a shit about whether its even playable, much less fun.
So I'm sorry but this guy is full of shit, it WAS that bad. You couldn't even enjoy it in a "so bad its good" sense like you could a bad movie or a bad game like "You Are Empty" (if you haven't tried it? Plot makes ZERO sense and one level you are attacked by 30 foot tall mutant attack chickens, I swear to God, you are chased around a farm by old coots with double barrels and 30 foot chickens, now THAT is good cheese!) because everything about it was just boring and unpleasant. If it hadn't had the ET movie license and been pushed so hard nobody would even remember this thing ever existed,its THAT boring and bad.
Dude the state capital in my home state covers more than 30 miles counting the subdivisions, you expect people to bike that shit? Man you could take the entire Netherlands and drop it into most states in the USA and there would be land left over, I really don't think you quite grasp the scale you are talking about here. There was a story a few years back on a guy that decided to bike across the 50 states, know how long it took him with him doing NOTHING but that 9+ hours a day? Nearly 8 YEARS.
Then there is the other elephant in the room, the fact that in most places you get the "choice" of either biking on the freeway (which I hope you like sucking smog and being a target for inattentive drivers) or you can bike through the inner city...just be sure to pin a note to your body so we know where to send your corpse when the gang bangers are done using you for target practice. Our fricking coroner has to wear a BPV when he goes to the inner city and I'll never forget a video of him trying to pick up a body, with him picking up a megaphone and saying "Stop shooting he's dead already,not an ambulance, I'm the meat wagon!" and he still ended up with a half a dozen rounds in the vehicle.
So biking? REALLY not an option friend. In my home town they got tired of all the splattered bicyclists so they banned 'em on city streets, you can only go 2 miles or less without risking a ticket, and instead made a bike path...3 miles out of town and which goes absolutely nowhere, just a flat paved road that goes along a bunch of fields, so if you want to bike for anything other than exercise here? Tough shit.
Sorry, the rules really do need clarification but sadly the governing board was exposed to 4chan for 16 hours straight and now the only thing they are really good for is drooling on the carpet.
But on the third Thursday of the month (again only if its sunny) Rule 34 takes precedent above all, which means even the most innocent of websites will be under Rule 34 which will be followed by excessive trollface. Be glad you weren't there to witness what the last occurrence did to the poor Murder She Wrote fan club, many of them were so scarred that support for the right to die went up by 20%, all the supporters had to do was show them the aftermath of that fateful Thursday...poor little old ladies. Although I hear it was nothing compared to what happened to the Pokemon fan club, but at least they are young so a decade or two of therapy should straighten them right out.
The proper name for those who surf is Penelope, unless you have a penis longer than 5 inches or were born on a Tuesday and then its Frederick.
Oh and while i'm in a correcting mood, its not an information superhighway, its a giant series of tubes from which cats and porn blend to form a double rainbow, unless its the third Thursday of the month and its sunny in which case rule 34 applies and excess trollface is the order of the day.
Bah, you kids, always wanting to rename stuff just to be trendy! Its Formosa now get off my lawn!
Uhhh...I transcode too and I notice artifacts...for about 10 seconds and then i'm too busy watching the actual content to care. Unless you get Indeo levels of shitty most folks just won't care, they really won't, or how else do you explain how 1366x768 notebooks and 720p TVs are the biggest sellers?
I can tell you why, its the same reason why my dad watches a 50 inch 1080P set yet the majority of the content he watches on it isn't even DVD quality, its because as long as its not blocky as hell he cares more about the content than what resolution its at and I have a feeling the majority feels the same.
As somebody who has their first gaming PC, a 100Mhz P1 still running with DOS 3 as the controller for an expensive old column lathe that they don't even make anymore? The problem with having that discussion is some of this stuff is just fricking insanely expensive and in a down economy you may not have the money, or spending that money might seriously hurt operations in other areas.
Believe me nobody WANTS to keep really old shit, but you may have a PHB middle manager that won't let go of a dime, sometimes as i said the cost is just too high, a lot of time you keep the old shit because you simply have no other choice.
Probably because he has the same situation as in my state, where if you want to live any closer you 1.- better make at least triple what everybody else does because the nice gated communities are insanely expensive, or 2.- Its "You know where you are? You're in the jungle baby, you're gonna die!" time. Really its THAT extreme, it Mc Mansions or slums, not really anything in between unless you live way the hell away from the capital.
And i don't know about where he lives but you couldn't pay me to ride a bicycle in the state capital, you either stick to the freeway (good way to get run over and I hope you like sucking smog) or again you drive through welcome to the jungle land since its right in the middle of town. Its like that old Chris Rock joke "You're on MLK? RUN,forget the car just RUN!" because even the cops won't go down MLK or main without being in force, not even in daylight, I sure as hell wouldn't try pedaling a bike down MLK.
I'm surprised nobody has simply named the obvious, which is just pick up an older laptop on ebay. Plenty of old Toughbooks still out there, built like tanks,, with RS232 already on them. Sure it isn't as fancy as setting up VMs and trying to get them to talk to the old gear but sometimes the simplest answer is the best IMHO.
I would have ZERO problem with that as long as their 32bit XP version can support later editions of DirectX, which since its probably doing DirectX to OpenGL conversion using shims or some such that shouldn't be too big a problem.
A lot of the problems I have with WinXP boil down to the fact that its 13 years old, has had thousands of patches, and that makes it a hell of a lot more prone to breakage and less stable than Windows 7. If they can make a version of XP 32bit that is as stable as Win 7 32bit? Sounds good, i wouldn't have any problem with having that on my shelves.
But if they don't come up with a 64bit version the only systems it'll be useful for will be legacy as I have circa 2006 Pentium D systems in the shop that will hold 4GB of RAM no problem and pretty much every system since that time, with the exception of Intel Atom as Intel crippled those to make them less attractive, has supported 4GB of RAM or more. while I haven't looked to see how ReactOS supports PAE (or if it even does) I can tell you on Windows its really not hard to slam into the 3.2GB RAM limit of XP 32bit, not when 1GB graphics cards can be had for as little as $15.
One final thing though, making a hard set 4GB minimum frankly wouldn't be smart, as not only would you be forcing those that didn't have 4GB now but were planning on going 4GB later to use 32bit but as someone who has run windows 64 bit OSes like XP X64 on systems with as low as 2GB of RAM I can tell you that even without 4GB you will see benefits when going 64bit, for example having 64bit registers can make some tasks such as video transcoding faster. Ultimately it should be targeting the same system requirements of the OS they are wanting to replace, in the case of 64bit Windows its a 1GHz 64bit CPU, 2GB of RAM and a 20GB or better HDD. I'd say those system requirements are pretty reasonable and then the user should choose what is right for them.
Thanks but ironically I've never given a rat's ass about karma, i always just call it as i see it and apparently a lot of folks feel the same, they just won't say so for this reason or that.
At the end of the day though I think we have more than ample enough evidence to say with a pretty decent amount of certainty that there is simply too many that just can't handle religion, its like a dangerous drug to them and only with its removal can we work toward having true and lasting peace. If you look at the history of religion, ALL religion, and compare how much death and suffering its caused compared to the population at the time? i think one could argue that as far as percentages go more have died because of religion than any other cause by far, from the multi- deists feeding Christians to the lions to the Jewish Pogroms of the middle ages to the insane body counts in the ME today it ALL boils down to "My God is better than your god Aie ie ie ie yee!" bullshit.
While I have known some who found a sense of peace from spirituality just because a few can handle a drug doesn't mean it isn't dangerous, and I think looking at the numbers it would be hard to argue that religion isn't ultimately causing more harm than good.
Dude you better pray to whatever God you believe in that the USA don't go bankrupt, because the last time a highly nationalistic military leaning country went bankrupt it really didn't end too well for most of Eastern Europe.
The scary part is as we saw with the flimsy as hell WMD excuse it really don't take much to get Americans into a pro-war stance, as long as the press is beating that war drum and selling it the people WILL buy it. The way the ultra right has vilified South America honestly it wouldn't take much to get the people behind rolling the tanks and there is enough natural resources there to keep America going another half a century easy. Cook up a little false flag, blame it on the south of the border, sadly it really wouldn't be a hard sell, especially if America was going through another depression and resources were scarce.
Its not astounding, its fucking scary and evil as hell. You start looking into the history of the US military and CIA after WWII and you'll find false flags, terrorist actions, including those in democracies like Italy, hell the CIA helped the Contras sell crack cocaine to the black neighborhoods in the 80s when the congress cut off funding to the Contra "rebels" after finding out about their rape and death squads which to this day I still believe those in the CIA that helped the Contras should face a firing squad for treason and attempted genocide, both in South America and upon the black inner cities who have yet to recover and who've lost thousands.
You have the Gulf of Tonkin false flag, 58,000 Americans dead and probably over a million in Vietnam and Laos, we can't get an exact figure because the millions of pounds in mines we dropped are still killing people there to this day, you have the execution of an American civil rights activist by the FBI which to this day not a single charge has been filed, and you have shit like this happening to this very day such as fast & Furious which even some of the feds carrying it out said "it smelled like a false flag" and which has resulted in the death of at least one border agent and who knows how many civilians.
And the scariest part? the part that will make your blood run cold? this is only listing the shit we KNOW about and which they have ADMITTED to doing! Do you have any idea how little they fear the law to be fully willing to admit this kind of shit? since the end of WWII you have the CIA, FBI, and US military frankly running amok, didn't matter if it was in a friendly nation, hell didn't even matter if it was on US soil and targeted to Americans, just look at this map and remember that covers ONLY what we have documented evidence of, in many cases again from their very own mouths.
This is why I just can't understand those that act like the third world should embrace the USA with open arms, all it takes is one look at that map and you'll see exactly why they hate the USA, its because our CIA and military has been doing anything they want, usually hand in glove with a handful of special interests (like BP in Iran, Dole who wanted cheap fruit from South America, etc) and their choices have been do as they are told or their leaders will get replaced by puppets that will. No wonder they hate the USA.
So you went to Cambodia, a beautiful exotic land which i hear has great nightlife and is filled with sexy women, not to mention thousands of years of history...and you spent your time reading. Wow...you suck at life!
Ahhh Indeo, I remember that. The name is I believe ancient Sanskrit for "Blocks made of fecal matter". I hear the MPAA mourned when that format died because it was so good at keeping people from watching copyrighted content...or pretty much anything except colored squares. And how could we forget one of its most popular uses, it was in part thanks to Indeo we had the FMV "game" ;-)
As for being able to tell the difference? I'm sure you can, but you are in the minority friend. Hell the majority of notebooks today are sold with 1366x768 screens and most TV manufacturers sell a good 4 to 6 720P TV sets for each 1080P set they sell so its pretty damned obvious that most folks either can't tell or just don't care.
In the interest of full disclosure I'm typing this at home on my 1600x900 22 inch and while i wouldn't mind picking up a 32 inch 1080P TV set to use as a monitor down the line I have to say picture wise I'm quite happy with what I have. But then again I'm also quite happy with my 12 inch netbook which is 1366x768 which I'm sure makes videophiles cry.
That is one game out of HOW many that have been released just this year? Not to mention all the games of years past, if you thought you had problems getting them to run on a widescreen monitor imagine what "fun" you'll have when its picture is the size of a postage stamp compared to your new 4K screen.
I'm sure what I am about to say will depress the shit out of the resolution nuts but truth is truth and the simple truth is you are gonna have to have a SHITLOAD of content to get people to let go of those 1080P sets and considering how much it costs to make a triple A game these days? They'll probably be one of the last things to switch. Unless you use some cheap fakery 4K art assets are gonna suck up some serious space which is gonna mean more space and/or more bandwidth...speaking of bandwidth how big of a pipe are we gonna need to have MP with 4K? Considering the ISPs are all going to caps I bet the answer is "too damned much".
Then finally there is the big fat rotting elephant lying on top of the Blu Ray which is thus, most people? They don't see any problem with what they have and they sure as fuck ain't gonna spend thousands on a set that has content measured in double digits. I mean has anybody looked at the sales of DVD versus the sales of Blu Ray lately? People seem quite content with their upscaling DVD players even though those won't even do 1080p, so good damned luck selling them on yet another format...oh and has anybody thought about the DRM? If you think Blu Ray sucks balls for DRM imagine how fucking apeshit the MPAA is gonna be when it comes to a format that gives a better picture than many theaters.
All in all I'm gonna say this will end up yet another niche videophile market, not even getting the limited adoption that Blu Ray has. The content isn't there, you'll have to have bandwidth that frankly damned few in the USA even has access to to do any streaming, its expensive as hell, and the majority see nothing wrong with what they have. I mean for crap's sake guys the majority of notebooks sold are running 1366x768, you honestly think people are gonna care about a 4K set? At the end of the day it'll be just like 3D-TV, something the TV manufacturers pushed trying to get the prices back up only to end up with a pile of unsold sets. Hell you still see something like 4 720P sets sold for each 1080P, its obvious people care about price more than resolution and "good enough" is the rule of the day.
Don't think you are from around these parts friend. You see America? Don't really have any public transportation to speak of except in a few select cities (and often in only select places in those cities) and what little public transport we have? You wouldn't want to ride on it, its not very nice in most places.
So unless you expect everyone to walk dozens of miles its not like there is much of a choice friend. Heck in my state there is a single bus line, which is very lousy, and which only follows a little circuit that covers MAYBE 20% of the capital. That's it, that is all there is. If you need to go anywhere besides that little circuit, or to any other city in the state? Tough shit.
Just a little FYI there, for while I hear other countries actually have public transport and in some places its actually quite nice that sure as hell doesn't describe a good 85%+ of the USA. Again using my state for example you drive or you get to "enjoy" living in the shittiest neighborhood in the state capital, since it only really goes to that one dirt poor area and to the malls.
The Shah was a monster, just as nasty as Stalin was to his people and we honestly DID NOT CARE as long as big oil got to do what they want. I wish i could find another copy of the map showing CIA and US military "interventions" since WWII because there was MAYBE a dozen countries on the entire planet that the CIA or US Military hadn't fucked with, it was pretty sad to look at.
Ike tried to warn us about this in the 1950s, about the rise of the MIC and the megacorps buying the US military and CIA to use as pitbulls for their interests but we didn't listen, you look into the history of these countries that hate us...can you blame 'em? We haven't had a single decade of peace since the end of WWII, not one, we are always stirring up shit in this or that third world country.
Actually I'd say it really doesn't matter as it'll take another 20 years to convert the majority at least. I live just a block from the local library that is on the edge of a lovely park so i spend a LOT of time there talking to folks and most of the book lovers? Really don't want electronic books at all. they like the feel, smell, texture of books, they like how they can just throw a paperback in their bag or backseat of the car and not have to worry about sunlight killing it, while a few of them use Kindles for the short stories that are now more often than not no longer getting paperback editions honestly if given a choice? they'd rather have the book.
Ironically its the college kids that seem to have this attitude the most, probably because so much of their lives involve screens that its nice to get away from the tech. Can't say as i blame 'em as I have yet to see an electronic book be as handy and as easy to deal with as a good old paperback.
As for TFA? Whatever Amazon goes with is gonna win, that's it. the Kindle outsells everybody else and with the new Fires you have an all in one media player/tablet/eReader that is affordable and I've heard nothing but good things about the entire kindle line from customers who've picked one up. No matter what you think of the company you have to give Amazon credit as so far they have been damned smart when it comes to how they design and market the Kindle and I haven't seen anybody come up with anything that will give the Kindle a run for its money.
This is why Neil deGrasse Tyson want us to do a closer study of Mars, because there is a good chance that the origin of life here can be found there. As he pointed out they had a "primordial soup" much earlier than we did, several kinds of bacteria can survive in space in a dormant state, and finally a lot of the debris from those large impacts ended up hitting us.
Uhhh...their neighbor is a theocracy with nukes and is a haven for terrorists and whose head bomb designer handed out "how to build a nuke" handbooks to such lovely places like North Korea...in this case I find it kinda hard to condemn them when they have such a threat on their border. I mean how do you think the USA would act if Mexico became an Islamic theocracy and started building WMDs?
Considering we had a guy running for POTUS that was singing "Bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran" with a big shit eating grin on his face WTF does anyone here think Iran is gonna think of the USA? Not to mention the last time they had a democracy we murdered their leader and forced in the Shah so BP could get cheap oil on the backs and blood of all those murdered by our dear beloved puppet the Shah.
I wish those that just blindly wave the flag would take a look at the history of the CIA and US Military since the end of WWII, because honestly? Most of the time we have been the BAD GUYS. Let me put up a quote from a former general in the US Marines, see how much of this sounds familiar...
"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."
Sound familiar? BTW how many of you know that Afghanistan has a mineral deposit so big it may end up being worth more than the Iraq oil fields? Sadly the USA doesn't do a damned thing because its "right" anymore, not unless some corp can exploit a place and make out like Gods.
Well I'm afraid you haven't kept up with the SCOTUS because so far they have ruled in favor of EULA, shrink wrap, and TOS as long as they give you a notice of change and give you the option to opt out without penalty, such as a carrier changing their TOS has to give you the option of saying "That is not what I agreed to" and walking away without getting dinged by a fee for doing so.
So while there is no current case that I know of involving website TOS and browsers so far the courts have ruled pretty consistently in favor of the courts, no matter that in the case of shrink wraps its completely lop sided and thanks to the fact nobody will take back software once its been opened unlike TOS and EULAs you can't escape without penalty. Considering how heavily they have ruled in favor of licenses it really wouldn't surprise me one bit if a website could scream DMCA violation and win, in fact I can't even think of a case where the court ruled against the corp when it comes to DMCA with the exception of fair use such as parodies or background music such as "dancing Prince baby".
And whether you admire him or not if you aren't karma trolling you really need to put something in your sig to let people know you aren't him nor a lawyer, because I bet most will do just as I did and see NYCL and automatically think its him. Kinda ironic when there is some guy running around here calling himself "hairytoes" trying to copy me, but when I see NYCL I automatically think its NYC Lawyer.
What chasing? As another pointed out target the 32bit and 64bit at Win 7 and call it a day, nobody is buying Win 8.blah blah unless they are forced to with a new system and a lot of those folks end up coming to me going "Take that stupid thing off my system!".
As for the benefits to the customer, lower prices and having an OS that a company isn't just gonna pull the plug on so they can sell them another copy? I still have WinXP P4 boxes in one corner of the shop for sale...do you think I WANT to have systems that I know have less than a year before they have a giant fucking bullseye painted on them? Think I wouldn't prefer to give them an OS that is gonna be updated past Apr of next year?
The simple fact is not everybody has the money for a new system in this shitty economy and I try to have systems at all price points just to make sure that anybody that walks into my shop can walk out with a computer. Can't run Linux on them thanks to the shitty driver situation and how often an update pisses on the drivers, not to mention the hardware roulette where you have no God damned clue what printers, wireless cards etc will run on the damned thing because the lists are ALWAYS out of date and require knowledge no average user is gonna know like which fucking kernel version they have (which just shows how shitty Linus Torvalds is at dealing with drivers, you shouldn't HAVE to know that shit just to get a functional device) so I literally have no other choice, its leave XP on them or have no systems cheaper than $250 in the shop.
And I make a grand total of $60 on a new build thanks to the boat anchor that is Windows licenses, if I didn't have to pay that wallet raping for a copy of Windows Home? I'd still make $60 a build and the price would lowered by the difference between the cost of Windows and the cost of ReactOS which like I said I wouldn't mind paying $20 to $25 a copy just to help support them, after all I was happy to pay $40 a copy for Xandros Home, only damned Linux I ever saw that could do two in place upgrades and have all the drivers keep working.
The simple fact is we system builders really don't have a choice in the matter, Linux is too damned fiddly, breaks too often, too damned many problems have as their ONLY solution "Tweak this pile of CLI crap (which no home user is qualified to do) because it was designed for hardware B,rev C and thanks to Torvalds sucking dick on drivers it won't work if the hardware is hardware B, rev D, and once you are done tweaking input this bullshit into bash and pray to St iGNUcious" and its pretty God damned obvious by now you can give it the fuck up when it comes to having either the consumer software or hardware companies support you, its NOT gonna happen. And NO Wine is NOT an option, its just as damned fiddly, fails as often as it works,supports too little, and requires too much of a consumer when it comes to skill to be a viable option for anything but a handful of software like old versions of MS Office which most consumers don't even use.
So we system builders would be happy to give the finger to MSFT, we just don't have that option because there isn't anything like reactOS to take its place. instead we'll get another 500 distros on distrowatch that can all be summed up as "Its (insert Linux base) with (insert one of the same 5 DEs) with the same old software, the same problems as always,same fucked up driver model,same breakage, same lack of software, same old same" and its not gonna work, if it was gonna work it would have by now. So Windows will keep the desktop, Apple will own the mobile, and we system builders will keep having to give money hand over fist to MSFT.
Just goes to prove what I've been saying for years, the absolute best way to move humanity forward towards peace and brotherhood....would be to take every religious text on the planet and throw them in a massive bonfire that blots out the sun.
What does the whole India/Pakistan hatred boil down to? "My God is better than your God Aie ie ie ie yee!" bullshit. Hutus and Tutsi, pretty much ALL of the middle east bullshit, now that the East/West ideology wars we can see how truly harmful religion is just by looking at all the wars and terrorism being fought in the name of this or that skybully. And please don't say "Its not the religion, its the practitioners" because I'm sorry but we have more than enough evidence that shows that for every one person that can handle it you get a dozen that either completely turn off their brains and become mindless followers that don't question jack shit their religious leaders say (who always end up corrupted) or who completely have the cheese slip off their cracker to become foaming zealots.
So really those of us that would like to see the "Star Trek" future of everyone treated as equals should want nothing less than the compete and total destruction of all religion because it is, like the WMDs talked about in TFA, just too damned dangerous. I'm sure I'll get hatred from the true believers, but if you could actually look at anything without the infection of religion? You'd see I'm right, I can show horror after horror, from suicide bombers to those blowing up abortion clinics to outright genocide and at the end of the day it ALL comes down to religion. We simply cannot handle religion, its like a drug that too few are able to take, its just got too many risks and too many side effects for it to be any good.