I know that if you want all of the above it will cost more, but not enough to be royally stingy and give users a lousy 25mb in this day and age!
As for finding drives i'm afraid to quote a popular meme "ur doin it wrong". You see what you need to do is get on the "triple threat" as I call them mailing list, that is Tigerdirect,Newegg, and Amazon. if you really want to get a shot at all the deals I'd throw surpluscomputers and Starmicro into there, just to be sure. my PC has a 1Tb Samsung Ecogreen for the OS that was $35 and the 2Tb Ecogreen was $54 with code, but I said fuck it and used the savings to extend the warranty.
You get the flyers from those 5 you can get really really REALLY cheap gear. I'm waiting on the final piece to build a spare quad core PC for my dad. the cost? $199 at tigerdirect for the whole kit minus OS. We are talking Athlon X4 630 (nice chip, I've built a few using it and it is sweet), 4Gb of DDR 3 RAM, 500Gb HDD, Coolermaster CPU fan, Lite On 24x SATA DVD burner, and a nice black office style box with 500w PSU to put it in. I just ordered a nice 21 inch flat panel for my oldest, the cost? $99 with shipping. We are talking full 1080p with HDMI, DVI, and D-Sub.
There are some really dirt cheap deals to be had out there right now, but nobody advertises them on their front pages. you really have to get the flyers and keep an eye on them (I check once a day) to catch the super cheap gear. Hell I have a half a dozen customers that send me "wish lists" of gear they want and then if I spot a steal I shoot them a link and they give me a finder's fee plus pay me to install it. they get cheap gear, I get a little extra cash, it all works quite nicely.
Uhhh...no. If you set up your system to royally suck, how would it be the other guy's fault? I've dealt with companies that were so damned stingy that the employee inboxes were 25Mb! I'm sure a single attachment I'd send when they requested a file would be enough to overload and shut off their inbox. is that MY fault? I sure as hell wouldn't have chosen such lame ass inbox policies!
Now if they were pounding the servers trying to DDoS the system? right there with you. But it seems to me if this is allowed to stand it is just ripe for abuse. if I want to get you in trouble I could just make sure you found out my email address and set my inbox up so it would take a couple of letters to overload it and voila! You are a dirty filthy hacker because you blocked my ability to get email!
The last thing we need to do is reward companies for having bad practices which is exactly what this is. In this day and age of $50 2Tb drives having someone's inbox shut down because of plain old emails is just lame.
And what if a congressman decided to do this when he sponsored an unpopular bill? How many of us have clicked on one of those "Send an email to your congressman saying you don't like this!"? Because after reading TFA that is exactly what they did, they asked members to email the company and voice their displeasure. I'd say that is about as protected as one can get, the right to voice your opinion against something you don't believe in. They sure as hell shouldn't be busted simply because the company had a PHB in charge of email.
Yeah see that is the thing I just don't get. We have all these emulators that do funky as hell chips like the emotion engine and PPC of the PS2, yet here is something that ought to be trivial and it seems nobody can do it? We are talking about a Celeron and a Geforce MX GPU! Hell even the APIs are based on DirectX and the kernel on Win2K.
So you have a system that unlike the others was documented out the ass (Intel publishes tons of specs on their CPUs, the Nvidia older GPUs have been pretty well specc'ed) and as another poster listed off the top of his head had plenty of good games, yet there seems to be almost ZERO work done? Is it just MSFT hate? I mean we have emulators for some pretty lame systems that had almost no games like Virtual Boy that had to be MUCH more of a PITA to emulate, yet here is a system with hundreds of games, and nothing worth noting? I just don't get it.
hell if it weren't such a PITA I'd probably just mod the Xbox I have, I'm pretty sure I have an Xbox and a GC from when my boys outgrew them in a closet somewhere, but I just thought it would be nice to play some of those games on my preferred platform the PC. I guess that just ain't gonna happen.
Uhhh...maybe because its true? I own and run a little PC shop, it is guys like me that Linux really needs to grow. We get ZERO price breaks from MSFT so there is no loyalty there, and we certainly aren't doing it to get rich, we do it because we love computers and helping folks.
But with all the fragmentation nothing in Linux, not any of the real important stuff, ever seems to get fixed! Take drivers, everyone else has an ABI, Linux don't. You don't want an ABI? Fine and dandy then fix it so the drivers don't break when you upgrade the thing! Maybe if everyone wasn't spread so thin with a bazillion distros then you wouldn't NEED an ABI because there would be enough guys working on drivers to keep them from breaking constantly! I tried Ubuntu/Mint, Mepis, and PCLOS, these are the ones usually listed as "friendly" Linux distros. In every single case the 6 month upgrades broke something. Do you think I can afford to give away lifetime free support?
And please don't say LTS, I've been down that road and found that LTS is a codeword for "really old software" thanks to the totally messed up some software requires certain kernels. That is totally nuts! And the ONLY way LTS might be even kinda sorta viable is if you catch it right at release because last I checked XP has more time left than the current Ubuntu LTS.
Look I'm old enough to remember when we actually HAD choices in OSes, we had Commodore, we had GEM, we had DOS, we had Mac System. With the XP EOL countdown I would really like to have a "third way" as I have a feeling a LOT of former XP machines will end up on my doorstep. but as it is now with every Linux I try its the same: Install and fiddle until everything works perfect, Oh look, there's an update or upgrade. Install updates or upgrades Linux falls down with broken drivers, lather rinse repeat.
If you are a server admin, addicted to CLI and getting paid to deal with that? Linux is cool beans daddy-o. if you are a geek that thinks fiddling with OS guts is fun, and learning Bash commands is a good way to spend the weekend? Linux is for you. programmers? Ditto.
But if you are gonna gain REAL share you NEED guys like me, who can market and service your product, but right now the service and support costs would bankrupt me. My time is a minimum $35 an hour, at that rate a single borked driver forum hunt can cost me MORE than a copy of Windows 7 HP. If there wasn't 50 bazillion choices, if everyone settled on some standard and everyone worked on it? maybe things like this wouldn't happen and guys like me could get on board.
Time is ticking fellas, the XP EOL is less than 3 years now. That is gonna be hundreds of millions of boxes with NO Windows licenses. Will they end up in the dump like the last ones I got, because the cost of a Win license is worth more than the box, and I can't keep the drivers working 100% in Linux? Or will guys like me be happily installing "Linux Home Edition" and putting them in the window? That is up to you, the community. All guys like me can do is write articles and point out in forums like this what we need to sell your product. Of course all that will most likely happen for our trouble is a bunch of labels of shill and troll, and the community can go back to enjoying their 1% share and arguing for Vi VS Emacs.
Here is what I don't get...how come it seems like every system under the sun has been emulated on an x86 PC EXCEPT the one that would seem like it would be the easiest to fricking emulate? I'm of course talking about the original Xbox which was of course an X86 PC in a console shell. You'd think if ANY console would have perfect emulation it would be THAT one, as we are talking pretty bog standard PC hardware. Celeron CPU, Nvidia graphics, plain old IDE drives...wtf? I can find emulators that run pretty decent for just about every other system up to that era including PS2 but no real working Xbox emulator.
And I can't comment on how dead accurate it is but for me the best emulation platform that ever was was and is the Dreamcast. I still have my circa 2000 Dreamcast just for running emulators. Being able to just pop in a CD and have all my classic NES games ready to go? That's nice. No need for mod chips either.
But I'd say your post just illustrates what is great about FOSS not following the rules. i'm sure in most of the west emulators are a grey area at best and illegal at worst, yet it don't keep the emulator scene from having a multitude of choices from a multitude of angles. Care about pixel perfect emulation? They got that at the cost of horses. Only care about the game running? They got that too and you can even pick up handhelds like the Dingoo A320 that let you carry your emulators in your pocket.
All in all until they fix the total horseshit that is copyrights and patents so that games older than dirt aren't still tied up in legal minefields it is nice the FOSS guys still give us ways to keep these old classic games alive. I may be a Windows guy but I give credit where credit is due and for this I sincerely thank you guys. Sitting down with my two boys and actually having a game like Contra where I can kick their ass, instead of them bitchslapping me all over the place in some MMO fragfest? That's nice.
Make the excuses that you want. You are whining that other people are interfering with your carbon and fossil fuel use. That makes you are ridiculous hypocrite. See how nicely that fits? Wouldn't happen to be a teabagger per chance?
I'd say either keep XP or contact MSFT and see if he can get a volume 7 license since it is for charity. I've found if you use VLite to strip it Windows 7 can run quite well on as low end as a socket 478 P4 2GHz with 756Mb of RAM and that is pretty damned old, although 1Gb would be better.
But as someone who has actually sold Linux boxes I can say putting Linux on them is a BAD idea unless he can afford to give them free lifetime support for the boxes. Because frankly nobody there will have a clue how to deal with Linux problems while there is ALWAYS some guy that knows how to deal with Windows, you are gonna have to deal with the PITA when they have some "must have" piece of software or printer or whatever doesn't work in Linux so welcome to fiddly town, IIRC LTS has less support left on it than XP at this point so that's no good, it just ends up being more damned work than it is worth.
And just because XP reaches EOL doesn't mean it magically stops working ya know. MSFT may want you to believe that but I have a few customers that are still running Win2K boxes for one app or another and with a firewall and good AV they run just fine. Just use a different browser instead of IE (Kmeleon or Kmeleon CCF ME both run great on even really old hardware) and you're good to go.
I think what dude is trying to get at is this: Just like how we saw that company the other week get shut down that was "renting" movies by letting you connect to a DVD player through the Internet the law treats digital and physical as two VASTLY different things. Rent a disc? that is covered under first sale. Rent a digital copy? You just walked into a minefield where the laws are firmly on the copyright cartel's side.
After all how would Gamefly PROVE they have a 1:1 ratio of renters to physical copies? Also the courts have ruled that digital requires a separate license, you don't get to format shift a DVD for instance and then offer ipod movie rentals, you have to have a separate agreement with the movie corps.
All I have to say is Gamefly better have all their ducks in a row and DAMN good lawyers, because if there is one thing we all should have learned by now is NEVER underestimate the greed of the content corps. They will either drop the banhammer on Gamefly or want so much for the digital rental rights Gamefly will lose money on the deal.
I'd say they have ONE shot, and one shot only, which if the CEO has what I'm thinking already planned may be why he is shitcanning the OSes in TFA. What can give them a good shot at the market? simple MSFT ties XBL gaming into the Nokia WinPhone. There are a hell of a lot of X360s out there and being able to play games on your cell that affect your achievements on XBL? Now THAT might be a winner. Especially if they manage to tie in AD and GPO support for businesses and Skype so you can seamlessly use Wifi (like say when you are in a hotel) to make calls.
Now would this let them beat Android and iOS? Not a chance in hell friend. but I could see the above giving them a good solid third place, which with the kind of money we are talking third place really ain't a bad position to be in. the trick though is gonna be integration, as it all needs to "just work" together: WinPhone, Win 7, XBox, all butt simple easy peasy. they pull that off a solid third could be had. if they just put out an Apple ripoff? Well it was nice knowing ya Nokia, don't forget to turn the lights off on your way out.
Actually it ain't true in the county lockups in the south, as from what I've seen the cops here are so homophobic they ain't going anywhere near a man's junk and sure ain't gonna watch!
I know because i actually had to bail my ex bro in law out not once but twice out of two different jails and in BOTH cases I had to bite my damned tongue to keep from laughing because the bulge that boy had was so comically large it looked like something out of an Airplane! spoof. I swear he must have walked out of those jails with a good oz+ of weed right there in his gigantic bulge.
Actually I only have a cell so that my elderly parents have a way to contact me if there is an accident or if they need my help. What's your excuse? And are you SERIOUSLY comparing the AIRWAVES to landlines? Are you high, or just don't understand physics? You can't make new freqs fall from the sky you know. Did you read the link? Of course not, it might shatter your illusion.
trying reading the link, that is if you can tear yourself away from your iJesus long enough.
And when was the last time you saw a Jew stone someone? What...1000+ years ago? When was the last time Muslim stoned someone? probably TODAY.
I'm so damned tired of this left wing PC bullshit! No damned wonder the teabaggers are growing like mad, because the left keeps slinging such unbelievable bullshit that people end up supporting the right trying to get away from it!
As another posted...last time an Xtian murdered an abortion doc...2009, time before that? 1989. that is TWO in TEN years. Wanna bet if I looked up Muslim suicide bombing I could find one that took place within the last 4 days, hmmm?
WAKE UP! You are comparing things that happened ONE THOUSAND YEARS AGO with things that are going on RIGHT NOW. tell you what, if it is Xenophobia why don't you exercise your free rights and go walk down the Islamic section of London drinking a beer? You won't do it, you know why? because they WILL crack your dumbass liberal skull open, that's why!
WAKE UP! They are using your PC bullshit AGAINST YOU. you are free to SUPPORT Sharia but you are NOT free to go AGAINST it. look at Europe who yet again has taken a line of appeasement. Are they living in peace? Are they acclimating to the west? fuck no! they are living in Sharia ghettos and taking whole areas under Sharia law! Do the Jews stomp you if you don't wear a yarmulke? Will the Xtians stone your daughter if she is raped? WAKE UP!
Well to answer that you would have to answer a question for me...do you plan to be alive in 2036? Because we will be having a visit from 99942 Apophis in 2029 and whether or not people in 2036 are gonna be having a REALLY bad day in August will depend on how close it goes to the "keyhole" because if it goes through the center of the keyhole our gravity will pull it enough to cause it to slam into us in 2036 if we don't stop it.
For more information see these thesetwo videos by Neil Degrasse Tyson.
Hear Hear! I would add that when PC gaming has NEVER been cheaper, when I can build customers a machine that will game quite nicely in the $450-$550 range they are supposed to give up their HD TV and go to playing on "ittty bitty eyestrain o vision"?
Just got done with a new build for a client yesterday, it has an AMD Athlon x4 630 (the whole kit cost just $200) with $89 for Win 7 HP X64, $70 for an HD4850 and $75 for me to put it together and load the software. So for less than $450 counting the wireless keyboard and mouse he is HD gaming and watching Hulu and netflix on his new 40 inch HDTV. Who in their right mind would give up that for an underpowered ARM tablet?
While I think trying to get 500 times the performance for 1w is a laudable goal (yeah good luck on that) it just doesn't change the fact the form factor and controls lend itself more to an angry birds than a Just Cause II or Batman:AA. It is the same kind of craziness as the "tablets are gonna kill PCs!" bullshit, just because PC sales are slowing down. Well no shit PC sales are slowing down, how many years have we had multicores? For most folks, hell even those that do moderate gaming, anything dual core or better is "good enough" so buying new PCs simply doesn't make sense. Hell my boys are playing TF2 and LOTRO on my 5 year old hand me downs!
Thanks, but I fully expected to be modded down. The "me me me now now NOW!" generation is so damned spoiled that God fucking forbid they should have to actually CONSERVE any resource! That is why you get these asses going "gas prices suck!" while driving the 8MPG SUV landboat, asses going "My service sucks!" while blowing through 3G watching porn and kitteh videos, why we have NIMBYs going "You can't build plants here...but I better be able to run my AC full blast bitch!"
Time and time again we see the tragedy of the commons, because there are simply too many self centered greedy little shits. I use my cell phone for....get this...making phone calls and making sure my elderly parents can get a hold of me if there is an emergency. I have access to a couple of different laptops if I need mobility and it isn't like Wifi isn't everywhere but most of the time when I'm out I try to actually ENJOY being outside! I know, its a concept! to actually enjoy a sunny day without having my face glued to a damned screen, you'd think I was a caveman throwing sticks by the way this generation acts!
But as I said sadly we'll see my prediction come true, because we are already seeing it now. More and more assholes with smartphones blasting the shit out of the towers, wiping out the honeybees thanks to the 3G freqs throwing off their sense of direction, but short of the government throwing a banhammer on the thing nobody will conserve shit. they will just keep on slamming, making cell service for ALL shitty with dropped calls and serious drops in quality, all because they are so damned spoiled they can't stand the thought of actually waiting for anything.
Just today as I went to get lunch for my family I saw one about 25 practically ready to explode because he had to wait a whole 10 minutes to get a fresh made BBQ sandwich. I thought "How fucking spoiled can you get?" but sadly that is our future, surrounded by "me me me now now NOW" little assholes blowing through resources and acting like it is their right to waste. How damned sad that is what we've turned into.
I'm just happy I've taught my boys to appreciate things and not to be wasteful, so much so that when I offered to take their dual core hand me downs and replace them with quads they both said "These do everything we need, no reason to waste money and time on PCs when the ones we have work fine. thanks anyway". needless to say I was damned proud of them, hence why they are having nice BBQ sandwiches for lunch.
And don't you just loooove how I got modded down for daring to speak the truth if it doesn't fit into the left wing PC bullshit? name a SINGLE thing I said that wasn't true. Fatwas issued over cartoons? Hell even South Park made here in the USA, was censored over a Fatwa. Stoning rape victims? How about a 13 year old girl stoned to death for being gang raped?
I agree with you 100% Jedidiah that they can spin the bullshit ALL they want but the different religions are NOT all the same! While i personally think all religions are consoling BS at best, mind control at worst, the simple fact is a religion of 2 billion plus and growing REFUSES TO GROW UP and is completely and totally incompatible with the west.
Are there moderate Muslims? i'm sure there are, but they support the Islamists be REFUSING to condemn them, by allowing them to control whole areas (look up what is happening in London, where if you walk through certain neighborhoods IN BROAD DAYLIGHT you WILL be attacked if you refuse to follow Sharia law, on UK soil!) and by creating "Sharia ghettos" and them screaming "That's racist!" if a charity dares to offer women who are abused or sold into marriage under Sharia a way out.
Like it or not Islam is a thuggish, barbaric, vicious, backward ass religion that has as its whole goal nothing less than the forced subjugation of all under Sharia. Don't take MY word for it, read for yourself. look up the Hadiths, look up the word "Dhimmi" and see what they think OF YOU. you are less than a dog, you apostate. they can lie to you, cheat you, and killing you isn't considered a sin because you are not one of them. To see a similar viewpoint taught to a people one only has to go back to the Empire of the Rising Sun, where they were taught they were above other races and that by divine right they would rule the east. Wasn't real nice for the non Japs on those islands was it?
Hell for the games most folks want to play on the go I've found my customers are quite happy with the $450- $500 AMD netbooks and laptops. What i got my oldest is typical of that price point, dual core 2GHz, 4Gb of RAM, 300Gb HDD (I think, it may be a 500Gb) and a Radeon 4xxx IGP (I think its an HD4550, I can't really remember off the top of my head) and frankly that little 15 inch is great for the games he plays.
He and his college buddies sit around after class in the commons and have LAN parties (my idea, nobody had ever had LAN parties there and my oldest is shy so I told him an easy way to make buds is to frag 'em LOL!) playing TF2, LOTRO, Perfect World, hell I think they have like a half a dozen games on rotation now. But those little AMDs get good battery life, have a great picture, don't get ball frying hot, have good framerate, and are very affordable.
So unless you are one of those "must have teh benchmarks!" types I really don't see much of a point going nuts when all you want to do is some basic fragging between classes. Thanks to the consoles being so long in the tooth it isn't like most games need insane hardware, and those AMDs have more than enough power for him to do all his classwork and still have plenty of oomph for doing some gaming or watching HD video. Hell if anybody needs one Tigerdirect is having a "back to school" sale on lappies and netbooks and they have a nice refurb AMD netbook for like $299, new ones for like $430. Really not bad for an ultra portable that you can play games on.
I don't know if you'll see this or not APK, but in one of your posts you said you were uncomfortable thinking of a dog "as a tool" but it ain't like that. you get you a good mutt he quickly becomes one of your family. old Jack, with NO training at all mind you, knew EXACTLY where the property line ended and he guarded what was his.
And a good mature mutt (like I said a pup takes awhile to train and frankly I wouldn't put it past the bastards to kill a pup, I've seen it happen) can quickly be taught that your kitten is "part of the family" and allowed on the property. All I had to do was let Old Jack see me petting the cats (while paying attention to him, you don't want the dog to get jealous) and that was that, the kitties were cool. in the winter mom would laugh at the "kitty blanket" because Old Jack would lay down and the cats would dogpile on top for warmth. You'd just see his head and this big pile of multicolored fur LOL!
But get you a good mutt man, I swear it'll be the best thing you ever did. the cops hands are tied nowadays because they can be sued at the drop of a hat, and like I said I have actually seen a "thug life!"er have to be put down right in front of me because he looked straight at a 357 mag and instead of doing the smart thing and dropping the knife he just hurled racial insults and kept right on coming.
But a dog is a primal thing, especially if you can find you a nice long hair like a collie. I agree that ANY dog you save from the pound is a good thing and will probably become a good loyal member of the family, but when they see that hair stand up? They know that's their ass. you just use a little TLC and give that boy a burger when he does good and it won't take him long at all to become WELL trained, simply be using their natural instincts.
Old Jack would heel, come when you called, stand down, all by simply giving him scraps and a petting when he did what he was told. While we will always miss him his daughter has taken his place and is just as smart as her dad. the meter man and our nice next door neighbor? Know they have NOTHING to fear, as she knows they are allowed. but some "thug life!"er comes up? That's their ass Mr Postman. The funny part is my mom has a stray kitten (little kitteh badass we call him) and he can stand down lady with just her badass attitude! Lady knows the kitteh belongs so she will just look at us like "Will you do something with this thing?" and we'll pick up little kitteh badass so she can get her supper.
A good mutt is more than protection, it is a valuable member of the household. mom can take off or be in the hospital and know when she gets back ALL her things are right where she left them, as Lady is on the job. just go to the pound and get a mutt, give 'em lots of TLC, and the "thug life!" problem will go away, I bet my last dollar on it! Good luck man.
Uhhh dude? Did you decompile those? because i bet my last dollar they were NOT patches, but just plain old vanilla DX9c, simply the latest version. Hell every game I have bought in the last 6 months automatically checks at install and carries DirectX 9C (I hear DIRT comes with 11, I can say Just Cause II checks for Dx10 or better) along with the Visual C# or C++ hell I can't remember.
But those aren't "cherry picked patches" those are just the latest updates. And there is a very good reason why you have the latest updates on disc, it is because those updates add support for new features that come with the newer chips. It isn't like they went "Oh DirectX 9 is done, lets start on 10!" as you have new features that the GPU manufacturers added supported in later releases, like I believe 9c added support for more efficient buffering of textures.
But it is funny that you would try to bring up shims with Dx, as OpenGL is nothing but shims all the way down. With DirectX if you have 9c you have 9c and any card that is 9c will "just work". With OpenGL you have Nvidia specific shims, you have ATI specific shims, you have Intel specific shims, and from what I understand each is completely different and incompatible with each other.
I guess that is one of the nice things about being the 800 pound gorilla, as MSFT can just make a call and get the designers on the line and hash out what features the next DirectX will have. frankly I haven't seen a problem with directX in ages, not since XP SP2 as a matter of fact. it all "just works" and with the games carrying the latest updates for Visual C and Dx I don't have to do anything, just run the installer. that's nice and the way it should be done.
Oh and if you run into a REALLY old game that doesn't work on the latest and greatest? appCompat Toolkit is your friend. With that and a little tweaking one can get even Win95 era games up and running most of the time, well as long as you aren't running an Nvidia card that doesn't support BC. There are plenty of things to bitch about when it comes to MSFT but Dx isn't one of them friend, it "just works". and I'd take it over the "designed by committee" approach to OpenGL any day of the week.
Cool, thanks for the info. I think I'm gonna pick one of those up as I was always more of a Genesis and NES than SuperNES guy. I bet it is mode 7 that causes the problems, emulating that is rather iffy.
As for TIE fighter 95? No problemo my friend, what you need is a handy little tool called "Application Compatibility toolkit" or you can just use the premade shims linked to here. I haven't tried it myself as I really need to get me another flightstick (I was stupid enough to lend mine to my nephew and the cat killed it, damned evil kitteh!) but they swear it works great.
I have found usually if DOSBox or VirtualBox won't cut it then the AppCompat Toolkit has you covered. If you get the toolkit (I'm sure you can find it somewhere) then you'll need to try playing with the settings, it is a trial and error kind of thing. But my nephew managed to get FF 7 running on XP by just spending an hour trying settings with the toolkit and everyone knows what a fiddly bitch THAT game was!
Anyway as soon as this gig I have coming up in Oct is through (having to train a new drummer, ugh. Last one had a drinking problem which when you are doing progressive blues and funk in a trio is NOT cool) I'll snatch me up one of those Dingoo players, sounds like just what I was looking for. Feel free to shoot me an email if you run into anymore "nigglers" as I'm pretty good at finding ways to make old stuff run on new. You'd be surprised how many times that comes up. hell I even have a customer that won't touch a PC if his "Secret Weapons" copy won't run,LOL!
A final bit of advice though, if you have plenty of older games you like (like I do) have you thought about getting a KVM and a second box? I know what you're about to say "Don't have the room, too much mess, etc" but there is actually an easy peasy way around that. Hit your local Craigslist or eBay and look up a "Compaq Deskpro En SFF 1GHz". This is a small (about the size of a phonebook) desktop that was designed to fit under a monitor. It is beige but a can of high gloss and some masking tape fixes that (painted black it actually looks slick) and while it doesn't have AGP what it DOES have is full size PCI slots and full Win98 drivers. it is perfect for Win9x and DOS games, just slap in an old Radeon or Geforce card, hell you can pick one of the old FX5200s or my fav the X1650PRO for dirt cheap Both cards have Win98 drivers that are rock solid, and you can pick up a Trendnet 2 port KVM with sound for less than $30 at Newegg.
Anyway with the average price of the card and the box you are talking MAYBE $80 all told for a perfect classic gaming system. With that setup a simple hotkey press and you have full hardware accelerated DOS and Win9x, the sound chip they come with has SB emulation or if you want the real thing a SB Live PCI card is like $5 at Surpluscomputers.com and those have great Win9x support as well as the old DOS SB sound. Just use some twist ties to wrap up the cables and voila! You have a little black box that sits under your monitor and gives you all the classic gaming goodness you could want.
But if you run into any more nigglers just feel free to shoot me an email. I am usually here at the shop working on boxes anyway so I check my email while waiting for reinstalls to finish. When you live in a rural state you'd be surprised how many folks become attached to games, so I end up spending a LOT of time figuring out how to make the old stuff run on the new, but AppCompat is your friend, and the shims it makes fixes a LOT of the old Win9x problems. the ONLY game I haven't been able to get up and running is the i76 collection, which is what I ended up finding the Compaq for. That beast uses so many hacks to get the speed up on old machines that trying to get that thing running on a modern quad was hair pulling! Anyway i'm glad you found a sweet player you like, I'll definitely be grabbing me one of those, thanks again for the heads up.
Oh yes because God fucking forbid the me generation can't have every God damned thing NOW NOW NOW! Did you even bother to read the link I posted? Are you gonna say "Well fuck them honey bees, what do we need them for besides...well food crops? Fuck them I got YouTubes LOL!".
Here are some simple facts, like them or lump them...1.-the carriers have MASSIVELY oversubscribed.2.- The freqs we are using now for 3G ARE killing bees, and 3.- to build the kind of MASSIVE tower rollout that will allow every smartphone carrying ass to blast through YouTube on 3G will cost TRILLIONS that the carriers are NOT gonna pay.
So here are your choices sparky, again like it or lump it...1.-Deal with horribly shitty service, missed calls, and general phone suckage, or 2.-Quit sucking down the damned 3G and actually be able to make calls!
While I pretend there are choices with my AMAZING physic powers let me predict what WILL happen, watch and be amazed! The ME ME ME NOW NOW NOW spoiled asses will keep slamming the living shit out of everything they get their hands on, because God fucking forbid they should have to wait until they get to work to see that kitteh video, the towers will be such overloaded about to fucking meltdown that service for ALL will go to absolute shit, and then the ME ME MEs will go "Waaaah, I can't get decent service, waaah!".
And THIS is why we can't have nice things. It is a classic "tragedy of the commons" sitch because when faced with a LIMITED common resource the douchebags WILL fuck it up for everybody else. like I said in most places in the south bars don't mean shit anymore, you can have 4 bars and be standing still and have the call dropped. Why? because right next to me is an iPhone user blowing through 3G liks shit through a goose!
So waste your modpoints, hide your little heads in the sand, and be sure to pretend reality doesn't exist! But that won't make 1+1=3, it won't magically get the teleco duopoly to spend trillions rolling out nationwide fiber to all the towers or buying up even more freqs, nor will it make the honeybees go 'Oh my bad, I didn't know you had to see teh kittehs!". like it or not like oil,like water, and like clean air there is a LIMITED AMOUNT of freqs and capacity, and it has ALREADY been massively oversold and is ALREADY causing environmental problems. But God fucking forbid the gimmie generation scale back on anything, God fucking forbid!
Riiiight. Are you forgetting this is the SAME religion where they have riots and issue death warrants over cartoons? It isn't prejudice if it is true. If they don't want to be looked at as backward ass primitives, how about allowing differing viewpoints, ending stoning of gays and rape victims, and generally not living like it is 2000 years ago, how about that?
Riiiight, because the average person says 'hey, let me have one of them NANDgates, along with fries and a coke". GIVE ME A BREAK! WTF good is a single NAND gate? Show me a system in actual popular usage that is "unhackable" and THEN you'll have a point, otherwise you're just trolling.
Uhhh...seriously WTF dude. You DO know that DirectX IS FREE, right? Why in the hell would a game company NOT include the files just to make sure their customers could run the game? Just to be dicks? If their games have DirectX9c features and you are running on vanilla DirectX 9 (I have actually seen this on boxes that haven't been updated in ages) then putting the files on there is SMART. it is free, it cuts down on support calls, and it makes it easier on the customer. Where is the downside?
And to the poster that complained about broken DirrectX 5-7 games? That wasn't MSFT dude, you can lay that failfest squarely at the feet of NVIDIA. I have some games that old, such as Mechwarrior II and you know what? They run just fine in DOSBox on a RADEON card, even a newer card like my HD4850. It is NVIDIA that tosses backward compatibility pretty much constantly, so if you want to run the latest games AND the older ones you are SOL if you buy Nvidia. that is why I only buy AMD/ATI after being a lifelong Intel+Nvidia man, because after bribery and compiler rigging on the Intel side, and bumpgate and dropping BC on the Nvidia side those companies got to be too big a douches for my taste.
My customers are quite happy with their new ultra affordable triples and quads along with the nice Radeon GPUs I install. I mean when you can easily find the HD48xx chips, with that fat 256bit pipe for around $60? Hell its a steal! But I bet my last dollar the one complaining about DX 5-7 loss of BC bought Nvidia and found out the hard way Nvidia don't care about BC. Considering the insane temps the newer Nvidia chips are hitting frankly I'd avoid them anyway.
But if you care about old gaming DOSBox + Radeon is a winning combo. and the easiest way to get it is to go to GOG and buy their ready made games. Nearly every game works 100% perfectly (DO NOT BUY the i76 package, that game is so tied to Win98 and CPU timings all the shims in the world can't fix it!) and their DOSbox based games all run like a charm on Win 7 X64. You just buy, download (with an insane backend games are uber quick to DLoad) install and play. No DRM, no keys, no muss, no fuss. And if you are on a Radeon card all will have 100% acceleration, if you are Nvidia? Well you may just have to settle for software rendering as I said Nvidia don't do BC.
Or here is an even better idea, how about you don't use your cell phone for the damned Internet and instead either use the Wifi which is all over the damned place or wait until you get home?
Everyone is just gonna have to face some cold hard facts, like 1.-the carriers have oversubscribed like mad and frankly their towers can't take it, and 2.-unlike land lines we can't just run bigger pipes.
Hell we may already be royally fucking ourselves by killing off the honey bees with some of the freqs we are already using and yet like greedy children all I hear is "more more more!". I travel plenty across the south and while I can't speak for the rest of the country I can say that down here most of the towers are so damned overloaded by fucking iPhones that bars don't mean shit and one of my fastest growing services is putting in "mini-towers" that plug into your cable or DSL just so people can bypass the tower bullshit when they are at home (because God fricking forbid they should put down the damned iPhone and use a home phone when AT HOME, oh perish the fricking thought).
To use a line from one of the best engineers ever "She just can't take no more!". The towers are overloaded, the phone services are rapidly turning into shit, the cell phone simply wasn't made for everybody and their damned dog to be watching videos and surfing their asses off on iPhones. So why not put down the damned iPhone and just use the fricking Wifi which is actually MADE for that shit, how about that? Hell the iPhone does have Wifi doesn't it? Because one thing I've learned is that iPhone junkies would rather take a baseball bat to the nuts than put that damned thing down. I'd love to see a chart comparing cell service quality before and after iPhone, because I bet the quality level goes to shit like a turd thrown off the Empire state Building when iPhone hit the scene.
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I know that if you want all of the above it will cost more, but not enough to be royally stingy and give users a lousy 25mb in this day and age!
As for finding drives i'm afraid to quote a popular meme "ur doin it wrong". You see what you need to do is get on the "triple threat" as I call them mailing list, that is Tigerdirect,Newegg, and Amazon. if you really want to get a shot at all the deals I'd throw surpluscomputers and Starmicro into there, just to be sure. my PC has a 1Tb Samsung Ecogreen for the OS that was $35 and the 2Tb Ecogreen was $54 with code, but I said fuck it and used the savings to extend the warranty.
You get the flyers from those 5 you can get really really REALLY cheap gear. I'm waiting on the final piece to build a spare quad core PC for my dad. the cost? $199 at tigerdirect for the whole kit minus OS. We are talking Athlon X4 630 (nice chip, I've built a few using it and it is sweet), 4Gb of DDR 3 RAM, 500Gb HDD, Coolermaster CPU fan, Lite On 24x SATA DVD burner, and a nice black office style box with 500w PSU to put it in. I just ordered a nice 21 inch flat panel for my oldest, the cost? $99 with shipping. We are talking full 1080p with HDMI, DVI, and D-Sub.
There are some really dirt cheap deals to be had out there right now, but nobody advertises them on their front pages. you really have to get the flyers and keep an eye on them (I check once a day) to catch the super cheap gear. Hell I have a half a dozen customers that send me "wish lists" of gear they want and then if I spot a steal I shoot them a link and they give me a finder's fee plus pay me to install it. they get cheap gear, I get a little extra cash, it all works quite nicely.
Uhhh...no. If you set up your system to royally suck, how would it be the other guy's fault? I've dealt with companies that were so damned stingy that the employee inboxes were 25Mb! I'm sure a single attachment I'd send when they requested a file would be enough to overload and shut off their inbox. is that MY fault? I sure as hell wouldn't have chosen such lame ass inbox policies!
Now if they were pounding the servers trying to DDoS the system? right there with you. But it seems to me if this is allowed to stand it is just ripe for abuse. if I want to get you in trouble I could just make sure you found out my email address and set my inbox up so it would take a couple of letters to overload it and voila! You are a dirty filthy hacker because you blocked my ability to get email!
The last thing we need to do is reward companies for having bad practices which is exactly what this is. In this day and age of $50 2Tb drives having someone's inbox shut down because of plain old emails is just lame.
And what if a congressman decided to do this when he sponsored an unpopular bill? How many of us have clicked on one of those "Send an email to your congressman saying you don't like this!"? Because after reading TFA that is exactly what they did, they asked members to email the company and voice their displeasure. I'd say that is about as protected as one can get, the right to voice your opinion against something you don't believe in. They sure as hell shouldn't be busted simply because the company had a PHB in charge of email.
Yeah see that is the thing I just don't get. We have all these emulators that do funky as hell chips like the emotion engine and PPC of the PS2, yet here is something that ought to be trivial and it seems nobody can do it? We are talking about a Celeron and a Geforce MX GPU! Hell even the APIs are based on DirectX and the kernel on Win2K.
So you have a system that unlike the others was documented out the ass (Intel publishes tons of specs on their CPUs, the Nvidia older GPUs have been pretty well specc'ed) and as another poster listed off the top of his head had plenty of good games, yet there seems to be almost ZERO work done? Is it just MSFT hate? I mean we have emulators for some pretty lame systems that had almost no games like Virtual Boy that had to be MUCH more of a PITA to emulate, yet here is a system with hundreds of games, and nothing worth noting? I just don't get it.
hell if it weren't such a PITA I'd probably just mod the Xbox I have, I'm pretty sure I have an Xbox and a GC from when my boys outgrew them in a closet somewhere, but I just thought it would be nice to play some of those games on my preferred platform the PC. I guess that just ain't gonna happen.
Uhhh...maybe because its true? I own and run a little PC shop, it is guys like me that Linux really needs to grow. We get ZERO price breaks from MSFT so there is no loyalty there, and we certainly aren't doing it to get rich, we do it because we love computers and helping folks.
But with all the fragmentation nothing in Linux, not any of the real important stuff, ever seems to get fixed! Take drivers, everyone else has an ABI, Linux don't. You don't want an ABI? Fine and dandy then fix it so the drivers don't break when you upgrade the thing! Maybe if everyone wasn't spread so thin with a bazillion distros then you wouldn't NEED an ABI because there would be enough guys working on drivers to keep them from breaking constantly! I tried Ubuntu/Mint, Mepis, and PCLOS, these are the ones usually listed as "friendly" Linux distros. In every single case the 6 month upgrades broke something. Do you think I can afford to give away lifetime free support?
And please don't say LTS, I've been down that road and found that LTS is a codeword for "really old software" thanks to the totally messed up some software requires certain kernels. That is totally nuts! And the ONLY way LTS might be even kinda sorta viable is if you catch it right at release because last I checked XP has more time left than the current Ubuntu LTS.
Look I'm old enough to remember when we actually HAD choices in OSes, we had Commodore, we had GEM, we had DOS, we had Mac System. With the XP EOL countdown I would really like to have a "third way" as I have a feeling a LOT of former XP machines will end up on my doorstep. but as it is now with every Linux I try its the same: Install and fiddle until everything works perfect, Oh look, there's an update or upgrade. Install updates or upgrades Linux falls down with broken drivers, lather rinse repeat.
If you are a server admin, addicted to CLI and getting paid to deal with that? Linux is cool beans daddy-o. if you are a geek that thinks fiddling with OS guts is fun, and learning Bash commands is a good way to spend the weekend? Linux is for you. programmers? Ditto.
But if you are gonna gain REAL share you NEED guys like me, who can market and service your product, but right now the service and support costs would bankrupt me. My time is a minimum $35 an hour, at that rate a single borked driver forum hunt can cost me MORE than a copy of Windows 7 HP. If there wasn't 50 bazillion choices, if everyone settled on some standard and everyone worked on it? maybe things like this wouldn't happen and guys like me could get on board.
Time is ticking fellas, the XP EOL is less than 3 years now. That is gonna be hundreds of millions of boxes with NO Windows licenses. Will they end up in the dump like the last ones I got, because the cost of a Win license is worth more than the box, and I can't keep the drivers working 100% in Linux? Or will guys like me be happily installing "Linux Home Edition" and putting them in the window? That is up to you, the community. All guys like me can do is write articles and point out in forums like this what we need to sell your product. Of course all that will most likely happen for our trouble is a bunch of labels of shill and troll, and the community can go back to enjoying their 1% share and arguing for Vi VS Emacs.
Here is what I don't get...how come it seems like every system under the sun has been emulated on an x86 PC EXCEPT the one that would seem like it would be the easiest to fricking emulate? I'm of course talking about the original Xbox which was of course an X86 PC in a console shell. You'd think if ANY console would have perfect emulation it would be THAT one, as we are talking pretty bog standard PC hardware. Celeron CPU, Nvidia graphics, plain old IDE drives...wtf? I can find emulators that run pretty decent for just about every other system up to that era including PS2 but no real working Xbox emulator.
And I can't comment on how dead accurate it is but for me the best emulation platform that ever was was and is the Dreamcast. I still have my circa 2000 Dreamcast just for running emulators. Being able to just pop in a CD and have all my classic NES games ready to go? That's nice. No need for mod chips either.
But I'd say your post just illustrates what is great about FOSS not following the rules. i'm sure in most of the west emulators are a grey area at best and illegal at worst, yet it don't keep the emulator scene from having a multitude of choices from a multitude of angles. Care about pixel perfect emulation? They got that at the cost of horses. Only care about the game running? They got that too and you can even pick up handhelds like the Dingoo A320 that let you carry your emulators in your pocket.
All in all until they fix the total horseshit that is copyrights and patents so that games older than dirt aren't still tied up in legal minefields it is nice the FOSS guys still give us ways to keep these old classic games alive. I may be a Windows guy but I give credit where credit is due and for this I sincerely thank you guys. Sitting down with my two boys and actually having a game like Contra where I can kick their ass, instead of them bitchslapping me all over the place in some MMO fragfest? That's nice.
Make the excuses that you want. You are whining that other people are interfering with your carbon and fossil fuel use. That makes you are ridiculous hypocrite. See how nicely that fits? Wouldn't happen to be a teabagger per chance?
I'd say either keep XP or contact MSFT and see if he can get a volume 7 license since it is for charity. I've found if you use VLite to strip it Windows 7 can run quite well on as low end as a socket 478 P4 2GHz with 756Mb of RAM and that is pretty damned old, although 1Gb would be better.
But as someone who has actually sold Linux boxes I can say putting Linux on them is a BAD idea unless he can afford to give them free lifetime support for the boxes. Because frankly nobody there will have a clue how to deal with Linux problems while there is ALWAYS some guy that knows how to deal with Windows, you are gonna have to deal with the PITA when they have some "must have" piece of software or printer or whatever doesn't work in Linux so welcome to fiddly town, IIRC LTS has less support left on it than XP at this point so that's no good, it just ends up being more damned work than it is worth.
And just because XP reaches EOL doesn't mean it magically stops working ya know. MSFT may want you to believe that but I have a few customers that are still running Win2K boxes for one app or another and with a firewall and good AV they run just fine. Just use a different browser instead of IE (Kmeleon or Kmeleon CCF ME both run great on even really old hardware) and you're good to go.
I think what dude is trying to get at is this: Just like how we saw that company the other week get shut down that was "renting" movies by letting you connect to a DVD player through the Internet the law treats digital and physical as two VASTLY different things. Rent a disc? that is covered under first sale. Rent a digital copy? You just walked into a minefield where the laws are firmly on the copyright cartel's side.
After all how would Gamefly PROVE they have a 1:1 ratio of renters to physical copies? Also the courts have ruled that digital requires a separate license, you don't get to format shift a DVD for instance and then offer ipod movie rentals, you have to have a separate agreement with the movie corps.
All I have to say is Gamefly better have all their ducks in a row and DAMN good lawyers, because if there is one thing we all should have learned by now is NEVER underestimate the greed of the content corps. They will either drop the banhammer on Gamefly or want so much for the digital rental rights Gamefly will lose money on the deal.
I'd say they have ONE shot, and one shot only, which if the CEO has what I'm thinking already planned may be why he is shitcanning the OSes in TFA. What can give them a good shot at the market? simple MSFT ties XBL gaming into the Nokia WinPhone. There are a hell of a lot of X360s out there and being able to play games on your cell that affect your achievements on XBL? Now THAT might be a winner. Especially if they manage to tie in AD and GPO support for businesses and Skype so you can seamlessly use Wifi (like say when you are in a hotel) to make calls.
Now would this let them beat Android and iOS? Not a chance in hell friend. but I could see the above giving them a good solid third place, which with the kind of money we are talking third place really ain't a bad position to be in. the trick though is gonna be integration, as it all needs to "just work" together: WinPhone, Win 7, XBox, all butt simple easy peasy. they pull that off a solid third could be had. if they just put out an Apple ripoff? Well it was nice knowing ya Nokia, don't forget to turn the lights off on your way out.
Actually it ain't true in the county lockups in the south, as from what I've seen the cops here are so homophobic they ain't going anywhere near a man's junk and sure ain't gonna watch!
I know because i actually had to bail my ex bro in law out not once but twice out of two different jails and in BOTH cases I had to bite my damned tongue to keep from laughing because the bulge that boy had was so comically large it looked like something out of an Airplane! spoof. I swear he must have walked out of those jails with a good oz+ of weed right there in his gigantic bulge.
Actually I only have a cell so that my elderly parents have a way to contact me if there is an accident or if they need my help. What's your excuse? And are you SERIOUSLY comparing the AIRWAVES to landlines? Are you high, or just don't understand physics? You can't make new freqs fall from the sky you know. Did you read the link? Of course not, it might shatter your illusion.
trying reading the link, that is if you can tear yourself away from your iJesus long enough.
And when was the last time you saw a Jew stone someone? What...1000+ years ago? When was the last time Muslim stoned someone? probably TODAY.
I'm so damned tired of this left wing PC bullshit! No damned wonder the teabaggers are growing like mad, because the left keeps slinging such unbelievable bullshit that people end up supporting the right trying to get away from it!
As another posted...last time an Xtian murdered an abortion doc...2009, time before that? 1989. that is TWO in TEN years. Wanna bet if I looked up Muslim suicide bombing I could find one that took place within the last 4 days, hmmm?
WAKE UP! You are comparing things that happened ONE THOUSAND YEARS AGO with things that are going on RIGHT NOW. tell you what, if it is Xenophobia why don't you exercise your free rights and go walk down the Islamic section of London drinking a beer? You won't do it, you know why? because they WILL crack your dumbass liberal skull open, that's why!
WAKE UP! They are using your PC bullshit AGAINST YOU. you are free to SUPPORT Sharia but you are NOT free to go AGAINST it. look at Europe who yet again has taken a line of appeasement. Are they living in peace? Are they acclimating to the west? fuck no! they are living in Sharia ghettos and taking whole areas under Sharia law! Do the Jews stomp you if you don't wear a yarmulke? Will the Xtians stone your daughter if she is raped? WAKE UP!
Well to answer that you would have to answer a question for me...do you plan to be alive in 2036? Because we will be having a visit from 99942 Apophis in 2029 and whether or not people in 2036 are gonna be having a REALLY bad day in August will depend on how close it goes to the "keyhole" because if it goes through the center of the keyhole our gravity will pull it enough to cause it to slam into us in 2036 if we don't stop it.
For more information see these these two videos by Neil Degrasse Tyson.
Hear Hear! I would add that when PC gaming has NEVER been cheaper, when I can build customers a machine that will game quite nicely in the $450-$550 range they are supposed to give up their HD TV and go to playing on "ittty bitty eyestrain o vision"?
Just got done with a new build for a client yesterday, it has an AMD Athlon x4 630 (the whole kit cost just $200) with $89 for Win 7 HP X64, $70 for an HD4850 and $75 for me to put it together and load the software. So for less than $450 counting the wireless keyboard and mouse he is HD gaming and watching Hulu and netflix on his new 40 inch HDTV. Who in their right mind would give up that for an underpowered ARM tablet?
While I think trying to get 500 times the performance for 1w is a laudable goal (yeah good luck on that) it just doesn't change the fact the form factor and controls lend itself more to an angry birds than a Just Cause II or Batman:AA. It is the same kind of craziness as the "tablets are gonna kill PCs!" bullshit, just because PC sales are slowing down. Well no shit PC sales are slowing down, how many years have we had multicores? For most folks, hell even those that do moderate gaming, anything dual core or better is "good enough" so buying new PCs simply doesn't make sense. Hell my boys are playing TF2 and LOTRO on my 5 year old hand me downs!
Thanks, but I fully expected to be modded down. The "me me me now now NOW!" generation is so damned spoiled that God fucking forbid they should have to actually CONSERVE any resource! That is why you get these asses going "gas prices suck!" while driving the 8MPG SUV landboat, asses going "My service sucks!" while blowing through 3G watching porn and kitteh videos, why we have NIMBYs going "You can't build plants here...but I better be able to run my AC full blast bitch!"
Time and time again we see the tragedy of the commons, because there are simply too many self centered greedy little shits. I use my cell phone for....get this...making phone calls and making sure my elderly parents can get a hold of me if there is an emergency. I have access to a couple of different laptops if I need mobility and it isn't like Wifi isn't everywhere but most of the time when I'm out I try to actually ENJOY being outside! I know, its a concept! to actually enjoy a sunny day without having my face glued to a damned screen, you'd think I was a caveman throwing sticks by the way this generation acts!
But as I said sadly we'll see my prediction come true, because we are already seeing it now. More and more assholes with smartphones blasting the shit out of the towers, wiping out the honeybees thanks to the 3G freqs throwing off their sense of direction, but short of the government throwing a banhammer on the thing nobody will conserve shit. they will just keep on slamming, making cell service for ALL shitty with dropped calls and serious drops in quality, all because they are so damned spoiled they can't stand the thought of actually waiting for anything.
Just today as I went to get lunch for my family I saw one about 25 practically ready to explode because he had to wait a whole 10 minutes to get a fresh made BBQ sandwich. I thought "How fucking spoiled can you get?" but sadly that is our future, surrounded by "me me me now now NOW" little assholes blowing through resources and acting like it is their right to waste. How damned sad that is what we've turned into.
I'm just happy I've taught my boys to appreciate things and not to be wasteful, so much so that when I offered to take their dual core hand me downs and replace them with quads they both said "These do everything we need, no reason to waste money and time on PCs when the ones we have work fine. thanks anyway". needless to say I was damned proud of them, hence why they are having nice BBQ sandwiches for lunch.
And don't you just loooove how I got modded down for daring to speak the truth if it doesn't fit into the left wing PC bullshit? name a SINGLE thing I said that wasn't true. Fatwas issued over cartoons? Hell even South Park made here in the USA, was censored over a Fatwa. Stoning rape victims? How about a 13 year old girl stoned to death for being gang raped?
I agree with you 100% Jedidiah that they can spin the bullshit ALL they want but the different religions are NOT all the same! While i personally think all religions are consoling BS at best, mind control at worst, the simple fact is a religion of 2 billion plus and growing REFUSES TO GROW UP and is completely and totally incompatible with the west.
Are there moderate Muslims? i'm sure there are, but they support the Islamists be REFUSING to condemn them, by allowing them to control whole areas (look up what is happening in London, where if you walk through certain neighborhoods IN BROAD DAYLIGHT you WILL be attacked if you refuse to follow Sharia law, on UK soil!) and by creating "Sharia ghettos" and them screaming "That's racist!" if a charity dares to offer women who are abused or sold into marriage under Sharia a way out.
Like it or not Islam is a thuggish, barbaric, vicious, backward ass religion that has as its whole goal nothing less than the forced subjugation of all under Sharia. Don't take MY word for it, read for yourself. look up the Hadiths, look up the word "Dhimmi" and see what they think OF YOU. you are less than a dog, you apostate. they can lie to you, cheat you, and killing you isn't considered a sin because you are not one of them. To see a similar viewpoint taught to a people one only has to go back to the Empire of the Rising Sun, where they were taught they were above other races and that by divine right they would rule the east. Wasn't real nice for the non Japs on those islands was it?
Hell for the games most folks want to play on the go I've found my customers are quite happy with the $450- $500 AMD netbooks and laptops. What i got my oldest is typical of that price point, dual core 2GHz, 4Gb of RAM, 300Gb HDD (I think, it may be a 500Gb) and a Radeon 4xxx IGP (I think its an HD4550, I can't really remember off the top of my head) and frankly that little 15 inch is great for the games he plays.
He and his college buddies sit around after class in the commons and have LAN parties (my idea, nobody had ever had LAN parties there and my oldest is shy so I told him an easy way to make buds is to frag 'em LOL!) playing TF2, LOTRO, Perfect World, hell I think they have like a half a dozen games on rotation now. But those little AMDs get good battery life, have a great picture, don't get ball frying hot, have good framerate, and are very affordable.
So unless you are one of those "must have teh benchmarks!" types I really don't see much of a point going nuts when all you want to do is some basic fragging between classes. Thanks to the consoles being so long in the tooth it isn't like most games need insane hardware, and those AMDs have more than enough power for him to do all his classwork and still have plenty of oomph for doing some gaming or watching HD video. Hell if anybody needs one Tigerdirect is having a "back to school" sale on lappies and netbooks and they have a nice refurb AMD netbook for like $299, new ones for like $430. Really not bad for an ultra portable that you can play games on.
I don't know if you'll see this or not APK, but in one of your posts you said you were uncomfortable thinking of a dog "as a tool" but it ain't like that. you get you a good mutt he quickly becomes one of your family. old Jack, with NO training at all mind you, knew EXACTLY where the property line ended and he guarded what was his.
And a good mature mutt (like I said a pup takes awhile to train and frankly I wouldn't put it past the bastards to kill a pup, I've seen it happen) can quickly be taught that your kitten is "part of the family" and allowed on the property. All I had to do was let Old Jack see me petting the cats (while paying attention to him, you don't want the dog to get jealous) and that was that, the kitties were cool. in the winter mom would laugh at the "kitty blanket" because Old Jack would lay down and the cats would dogpile on top for warmth. You'd just see his head and this big pile of multicolored fur LOL!
But get you a good mutt man, I swear it'll be the best thing you ever did. the cops hands are tied nowadays because they can be sued at the drop of a hat, and like I said I have actually seen a "thug life!"er have to be put down right in front of me because he looked straight at a 357 mag and instead of doing the smart thing and dropping the knife he just hurled racial insults and kept right on coming.
But a dog is a primal thing, especially if you can find you a nice long hair like a collie. I agree that ANY dog you save from the pound is a good thing and will probably become a good loyal member of the family, but when they see that hair stand up? They know that's their ass. you just use a little TLC and give that boy a burger when he does good and it won't take him long at all to become WELL trained, simply be using their natural instincts.
Old Jack would heel, come when you called, stand down, all by simply giving him scraps and a petting when he did what he was told. While we will always miss him his daughter has taken his place and is just as smart as her dad. the meter man and our nice next door neighbor? Know they have NOTHING to fear, as she knows they are allowed. but some "thug life!"er comes up? That's their ass Mr Postman. The funny part is my mom has a stray kitten (little kitteh badass we call him) and he can stand down lady with just her badass attitude! Lady knows the kitteh belongs so she will just look at us like "Will you do something with this thing?" and we'll pick up little kitteh badass so she can get her supper.
A good mutt is more than protection, it is a valuable member of the household. mom can take off or be in the hospital and know when she gets back ALL her things are right where she left them, as Lady is on the job. just go to the pound and get a mutt, give 'em lots of TLC, and the "thug life!" problem will go away, I bet my last dollar on it! Good luck man.
Uhhh dude? Did you decompile those? because i bet my last dollar they were NOT patches, but just plain old vanilla DX9c, simply the latest version. Hell every game I have bought in the last 6 months automatically checks at install and carries DirectX 9C (I hear DIRT comes with 11, I can say Just Cause II checks for Dx10 or better) along with the Visual C# or C++ hell I can't remember.
But those aren't "cherry picked patches" those are just the latest updates. And there is a very good reason why you have the latest updates on disc, it is because those updates add support for new features that come with the newer chips. It isn't like they went "Oh DirectX 9 is done, lets start on 10!" as you have new features that the GPU manufacturers added supported in later releases, like I believe 9c added support for more efficient buffering of textures.
But it is funny that you would try to bring up shims with Dx, as OpenGL is nothing but shims all the way down. With DirectX if you have 9c you have 9c and any card that is 9c will "just work". With OpenGL you have Nvidia specific shims, you have ATI specific shims, you have Intel specific shims, and from what I understand each is completely different and incompatible with each other.
I guess that is one of the nice things about being the 800 pound gorilla, as MSFT can just make a call and get the designers on the line and hash out what features the next DirectX will have. frankly I haven't seen a problem with directX in ages, not since XP SP2 as a matter of fact. it all "just works" and with the games carrying the latest updates for Visual C and Dx I don't have to do anything, just run the installer. that's nice and the way it should be done.
Oh and if you run into a REALLY old game that doesn't work on the latest and greatest? appCompat Toolkit is your friend. With that and a little tweaking one can get even Win95 era games up and running most of the time, well as long as you aren't running an Nvidia card that doesn't support BC. There are plenty of things to bitch about when it comes to MSFT but Dx isn't one of them friend, it "just works". and I'd take it over the "designed by committee" approach to OpenGL any day of the week.
Cool, thanks for the info. I think I'm gonna pick one of those up as I was always more of a Genesis and NES than SuperNES guy. I bet it is mode 7 that causes the problems, emulating that is rather iffy.
As for TIE fighter 95? No problemo my friend, what you need is a handy little tool called "Application Compatibility toolkit" or you can just use the premade shims linked to here. I haven't tried it myself as I really need to get me another flightstick (I was stupid enough to lend mine to my nephew and the cat killed it, damned evil kitteh!) but they swear it works great.
I have found usually if DOSBox or VirtualBox won't cut it then the AppCompat Toolkit has you covered. If you get the toolkit (I'm sure you can find it somewhere) then you'll need to try playing with the settings, it is a trial and error kind of thing. But my nephew managed to get FF 7 running on XP by just spending an hour trying settings with the toolkit and everyone knows what a fiddly bitch THAT game was!
Anyway as soon as this gig I have coming up in Oct is through (having to train a new drummer, ugh. Last one had a drinking problem which when you are doing progressive blues and funk in a trio is NOT cool) I'll snatch me up one of those Dingoo players, sounds like just what I was looking for. Feel free to shoot me an email if you run into anymore "nigglers" as I'm pretty good at finding ways to make old stuff run on new. You'd be surprised how many times that comes up. hell I even have a customer that won't touch a PC if his "Secret Weapons" copy won't run,LOL!
A final bit of advice though, if you have plenty of older games you like (like I do) have you thought about getting a KVM and a second box? I know what you're about to say "Don't have the room, too much mess, etc" but there is actually an easy peasy way around that. Hit your local Craigslist or eBay and look up a "Compaq Deskpro En SFF 1GHz". This is a small (about the size of a phonebook) desktop that was designed to fit under a monitor. It is beige but a can of high gloss and some masking tape fixes that (painted black it actually looks slick) and while it doesn't have AGP what it DOES have is full size PCI slots and full Win98 drivers. it is perfect for Win9x and DOS games, just slap in an old Radeon or Geforce card, hell you can pick one of the old FX5200s or my fav the X1650PRO for dirt cheap Both cards have Win98 drivers that are rock solid, and you can pick up a Trendnet 2 port KVM with sound for less than $30 at Newegg.
Anyway with the average price of the card and the box you are talking MAYBE $80 all told for a perfect classic gaming system. With that setup a simple hotkey press and you have full hardware accelerated DOS and Win9x, the sound chip they come with has SB emulation or if you want the real thing a SB Live PCI card is like $5 at Surpluscomputers.com and those have great Win9x support as well as the old DOS SB sound. Just use some twist ties to wrap up the cables and voila! You have a little black box that sits under your monitor and gives you all the classic gaming goodness you could want.
But if you run into any more nigglers just feel free to shoot me an email. I am usually here at the shop working on boxes anyway so I check my email while waiting for reinstalls to finish. When you live in a rural state you'd be surprised how many folks become attached to games, so I end up spending a LOT of time figuring out how to make the old stuff run on the new, but AppCompat is your friend, and the shims it makes fixes a LOT of the old Win9x problems. the ONLY game I haven't been able to get up and running is the i76 collection, which is what I ended up finding the Compaq for. That beast uses so many hacks to get the speed up on old machines that trying to get that thing running on a modern quad was hair pulling! Anyway i'm glad you found a sweet player you like, I'll definitely be grabbing me one of those, thanks again for the heads up.
Oh yes because God fucking forbid the me generation can't have every God damned thing NOW NOW NOW! Did you even bother to read the link I posted? Are you gonna say "Well fuck them honey bees, what do we need them for besides...well food crops? Fuck them I got YouTubes LOL!".
Here are some simple facts, like them or lump them...1.-the carriers have MASSIVELY oversubscribed.2.- The freqs we are using now for 3G ARE killing bees, and 3.- to build the kind of MASSIVE tower rollout that will allow every smartphone carrying ass to blast through YouTube on 3G will cost TRILLIONS that the carriers are NOT gonna pay.
So here are your choices sparky, again like it or lump it...1.-Deal with horribly shitty service, missed calls, and general phone suckage, or 2.-Quit sucking down the damned 3G and actually be able to make calls!
While I pretend there are choices with my AMAZING physic powers let me predict what WILL happen, watch and be amazed! The ME ME ME NOW NOW NOW spoiled asses will keep slamming the living shit out of everything they get their hands on, because God fucking forbid they should have to wait until they get to work to see that kitteh video, the towers will be such overloaded about to fucking meltdown that service for ALL will go to absolute shit, and then the ME ME MEs will go "Waaaah, I can't get decent service, waaah!".
And THIS is why we can't have nice things. It is a classic "tragedy of the commons" sitch because when faced with a LIMITED common resource the douchebags WILL fuck it up for everybody else. like I said in most places in the south bars don't mean shit anymore, you can have 4 bars and be standing still and have the call dropped. Why? because right next to me is an iPhone user blowing through 3G liks shit through a goose!
So waste your modpoints, hide your little heads in the sand, and be sure to pretend reality doesn't exist! But that won't make 1+1=3, it won't magically get the teleco duopoly to spend trillions rolling out nationwide fiber to all the towers or buying up even more freqs, nor will it make the honeybees go 'Oh my bad, I didn't know you had to see teh kittehs!". like it or not like oil,like water, and like clean air there is a LIMITED AMOUNT of freqs and capacity, and it has ALREADY been massively oversold and is ALREADY causing environmental problems. But God fucking forbid the gimmie generation scale back on anything, God fucking forbid!
Riiiight. Are you forgetting this is the SAME religion where they have riots and issue death warrants over cartoons? It isn't prejudice if it is true. If they don't want to be looked at as backward ass primitives, how about allowing differing viewpoints, ending stoning of gays and rape victims, and generally not living like it is 2000 years ago, how about that?
Riiiight, because the average person says 'hey, let me have one of them NANDgates, along with fries and a coke". GIVE ME A BREAK! WTF good is a single NAND gate? Show me a system in actual popular usage that is "unhackable" and THEN you'll have a point, otherwise you're just trolling.
Uhhh...seriously WTF dude. You DO know that DirectX IS FREE, right? Why in the hell would a game company NOT include the files just to make sure their customers could run the game? Just to be dicks? If their games have DirectX9c features and you are running on vanilla DirectX 9 (I have actually seen this on boxes that haven't been updated in ages) then putting the files on there is SMART. it is free, it cuts down on support calls, and it makes it easier on the customer. Where is the downside?
And to the poster that complained about broken DirrectX 5-7 games? That wasn't MSFT dude, you can lay that failfest squarely at the feet of NVIDIA. I have some games that old, such as Mechwarrior II and you know what? They run just fine in DOSBox on a RADEON card, even a newer card like my HD4850. It is NVIDIA that tosses backward compatibility pretty much constantly, so if you want to run the latest games AND the older ones you are SOL if you buy Nvidia. that is why I only buy AMD/ATI after being a lifelong Intel+Nvidia man, because after bribery and compiler rigging on the Intel side, and bumpgate and dropping BC on the Nvidia side those companies got to be too big a douches for my taste.
My customers are quite happy with their new ultra affordable triples and quads along with the nice Radeon GPUs I install. I mean when you can easily find the HD48xx chips, with that fat 256bit pipe for around $60? Hell its a steal! But I bet my last dollar the one complaining about DX 5-7 loss of BC bought Nvidia and found out the hard way Nvidia don't care about BC. Considering the insane temps the newer Nvidia chips are hitting frankly I'd avoid them anyway.
But if you care about old gaming DOSBox + Radeon is a winning combo. and the easiest way to get it is to go to GOG and buy their ready made games. Nearly every game works 100% perfectly (DO NOT BUY the i76 package, that game is so tied to Win98 and CPU timings all the shims in the world can't fix it!) and their DOSbox based games all run like a charm on Win 7 X64. You just buy, download (with an insane backend games are uber quick to DLoad) install and play. No DRM, no keys, no muss, no fuss. And if you are on a Radeon card all will have 100% acceleration, if you are Nvidia? Well you may just have to settle for software rendering as I said Nvidia don't do BC.
Or here is an even better idea, how about you don't use your cell phone for the damned Internet and instead either use the Wifi which is all over the damned place or wait until you get home?
Everyone is just gonna have to face some cold hard facts, like 1.-the carriers have oversubscribed like mad and frankly their towers can't take it, and 2.-unlike land lines we can't just run bigger pipes.
Hell we may already be royally fucking ourselves by killing off the honey bees with some of the freqs we are already using and yet like greedy children all I hear is "more more more!". I travel plenty across the south and while I can't speak for the rest of the country I can say that down here most of the towers are so damned overloaded by fucking iPhones that bars don't mean shit and one of my fastest growing services is putting in "mini-towers" that plug into your cable or DSL just so people can bypass the tower bullshit when they are at home (because God fricking forbid they should put down the damned iPhone and use a home phone when AT HOME, oh perish the fricking thought).
To use a line from one of the best engineers ever "She just can't take no more!". The towers are overloaded, the phone services are rapidly turning into shit, the cell phone simply wasn't made for everybody and their damned dog to be watching videos and surfing their asses off on iPhones. So why not put down the damned iPhone and just use the fricking Wifi which is actually MADE for that shit, how about that? Hell the iPhone does have Wifi doesn't it? Because one thing I've learned is that iPhone junkies would rather take a baseball bat to the nuts than put that damned thing down. I'd love to see a chart comparing cell service quality before and after iPhone, because I bet the quality level goes to shit like a turd thrown off the Empire state Building when iPhone hit the scene.