I still love my Wii. It has my favourite games of this generation of consoles such as Mario Galaxy 1 & 2, Zelda TP & SS, Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, Pandoras Tower, Metroid Prime Trilogy (amazing FPS experience on a console IMHO), Okami (PS2 port I know but it is so much better on the Wii), Super Paper Mario... I could go on and go.
Yes I enjoy other games not on the Wii such as CoD:BO2, Uncharted, God of War, etc. but over all if I had to pick one console I would pick the Wii without question. I bought it for entertainment and fun not to just have 1080p@60fps graphics. If I was a graphics addict I wouldn't bother with a console anyway as a PC easily offers far greater graphical performance. I never really understood when people say attack the Wii (and the Wii U now) for not being the most powerful console possible. I will take amazing gameplay over HD graphics any day. Super Mario Galaxy is a great example of this. It didn't have amazing graphics (although they were still pretty damn beautiful) but god damn that game was a superb platform game. Absolutely amazing gameplay.
I have a brand new Galaxy Nexus which I switched too just over a month ago from an iPhone 3GS. My biggest diappointment with Android is that the BBC iPlayer app is not available for the GN still!:( It doesn't even appear in the Android market as it is "incompatible". I can watch it view the iPlayer website (if I request the "full" site not the mobile version) but performance is not great and it eats thru the battery. It sucks as the GN has such a beautiful big screen. Yes the iPhone has newer apps (mostly games from my experience) that required an iPhone 4 or 4S due to graphical performance but I am yet to find a "general app" that does not work on my 3GS. The fragmentation on iOS is there but very minor however on Android it is pretty awful. Not to mention stock Android not coming with what I would consider to be "standard" features (such as a timer or notebook app, I was shocked to find I had to get third party apps for such things, especially when the phone comes with things like Google+, you would think Google would have been able to write a couple of simple apps that iOS had at v1).
Buy him a copy of C Primer Plus (5th Ed) by Stephen Prata and work through it with him. In my opinion it is one of the best introduction to C books available, if not the best and very friendly to first time programmers. Another option is Java: A Beginner's Guide (4th Ed) by Herbert Schildt.
I too believe that learning the lower level things such as memory allocation is the best way to make yourself a better life long programmer so I would advise C over Java however I know a lot of people who only know Java (or C#) and do just fine however they knew next to nothing about what I consider to be "real" programming. Everything they do is drag and drop then writing some logic to handle an event and letting the runtime deal with the "nitty gritty" stuff.
I saw some movies worse than that! This dude keeps kidnapping people and hooking them up to machines that they can't escape from. The only way to survive is to admit something about yourself and sacrifice part of yourself or do some kind of other horrible act like cut the key out of somebody elses stomach. The worst one for me was a reverse bear trap on somebodies head which ripped their head in half when the timer went off. Needless to say I don't think anybody actually ever survived any of it.
Oh yeah these movies were called Saw. And I saw it in the cinema. The realism and gore was extreme. If these people were put away for making similar movies and selling them on the net then how can Amazon and Play.com sell the Saw movies? Surely every horror movie should be illegal and the directors and distributors arrested?
While I understand Google's problems with Theora quality it is surprising for them to be against it (which is what I assume is their official position for Theora support in the video tag?). By the time HTML5 is all finished I am sure Theora will be good enough and if they are unsure that it will be why can't they help it along with a few $$ or directly helping with development for it?
I agree. Mozilla have supported Ogg Vorbis and Theora as of 3.5 and it works pretty good from the demos I have used. The W3C needs to ignore everyone and push forward with Ogg support in the spec. If hardware acceleration is a problem then work with companies to get it supported in hardware. I know it won't be easy but saying "ugh that is gonna be too hard, lets just drop it from the spec" is stupid, work with Nvidia and ATI and Intel, etc. to get h/w support for Ogg. I am not a specialist so I have no idea how hard it would be to get h/w support for Ogg up and running but I know that my iRiver H10 mp3 player had Ogg support back in 2003 or so, so I am sure it is possible without _too_ much work.
Perhaps it is a stupid question but why do the vendors have a say what goes into the spec and what doesn't? Isn't it up to them to choose to implement the spec fully or not? FFS just make it Ogg Vorbis/Theora and if Apple doesn't want to support it then Safari can just not support that part of the spec. It isn't like any of the browser are 100% complient anyway.
I am getting fed up with all the BS about Windows 7 being posted on/. A few years ago the MS bashing was valid due to what they were actually doing however now people just posted a load of crap that they half read on some blog 6 weeks ago and can't remember 90% of it anyway so just make it up.
So thank you for posting that:)
Microsoft are trying to "do the right thing" by listening to customers but when they do everybody changes the topic from the good (the removal of the crappy 3 app limit) to limitations which are there because it is designed for a netbook (i.e why have DVD playback on a netbook when not one netbook has a DVD drive?!, also DVD playback isn't free, if you want DVD playback get VLC not that hard). Windows 7 is looking to be a pretty decent upgrade. I am still not that crazy about the taskbar in 7 but Homegroups are really nice and the other UI changes like desktop peek are great.
Anyway I just wanted to say thanks:) have a good weekend!
I see believing the earth is flat as no more crazy than believing some supreme being create the universe and everything in it in 6 days with no evidence what so ever*
*No the bible is not evidence. It is a collection of stories which cannot be validated as real. It is like saying, in 2000 years, that Harry Potter is "the truth".
Hehe. I love how the PDF was produced by Microsoft Word 2007, nice little dig at Adobe after they kicked up a fuss about it being installed by default.
That is RC3 was promoted to final as it is a tested build with no blockers, etc. found. It does not make sense to build RC3, test it and when it is ok build a final on the same code as they are identical, if they are not then you need to do testing again and so it becomes RC4.
The infinite popups thing can be resolved by using a system utility such as the AceHelper plugin for Total Commander to disable the javascript window popup, then close the tab and just click ok to close that single javascript popup window, as the tab is dead it doesn't loop again.
I agree this feature should really be available in Firefox but as it isn't I thought I would mention this as it has saved my session after stupidly clicking a link on Digg without reading it 100%
20 years ago I would have agreed with you but it is 2008 not 1988! Digital signatures have been available to the masses for ages and a process using digital sigs would be much faster than faxing documents. Businesses are slowing themselves down by using faxes plus they can be expensive to run if you get a lot of faxes from toner and paper needs.
I have not read the document fully yet (obviously, it is 240 pages!) but I have to say Apple do a damn good job in presenting their documents. The first thing I thought when I opened the PDF was how nicely formatted it is. It is a silly little thing but I much prefer a well presented document than just text dumped. Kudos to whoever put it together, I just hope the content is as good as the presentation!
I believe his point was "why are faxes legally binding". For example if I send a purchase order to Dell with a fake signature from a previous purchase order there is no way to verify if it is legit or not. The quality from fax machines are poor and once a copy has been faxed and faxed and faxed several times they can be almost unreadable (which is why a lot of purchase order forms, etc. have such huge fonts for the "important bits" such as order number and quote number).
Email isn't really any better but at least it has much better logging by default so detecting a forgery can be easier. Digital signatures have been around for years now but are hardly ever used. I can never understand why as they are not only much more secure but they speed up the whole process! Rather than print out a document, sign it, scan it in or fax it you just have to click "Sign" and enter your password (or whatever is needed) and it instantly jumps onto the next step in the process. This can save days and days of waiting for things to be signed off that require going around the world 16 times like more corporations.
This is exactly what I am thinking. I have had a 4GB Sandisk pen drive which is only a little bit bigger for about a year now and it is under £20 now as well. The PCPro article is more of an advertisement. This does not belong on the Slashdot front page.
In the past when we have required a high level of security for data transfers we setup a Business to Business VPN (B2BVPN). It requires that you have static public addresses but once setup it is transparent to the end users. Simply setup some space on a file server for them and then configure firewall policies to restrict access to just what they need (i.e. the file server). Also you can have as much or as little logging as you want. In my opinion it is the best way to deal with such a situation if you can get it setup.
And what is the story here? Of course Microsoft were going to come up with some kind of deal with the manufactuers of this "new" generation of lowered powered ultra portables. I don't really have a problem. People can use what they want and if Microsoft make another edition of Windows for ultra portables that is fine with me. Competition is a good thing no? Forcing end users to use something they don't want isn't a good solution, choice is. Is that what we say Linux is all about?
I run XP on my first gen Eee PC because I wanted Windows. It runs just as quick as the default Xandros and other Linux distros I put on it. I didn't have to do anything special to get XP running on it either. I borrowed an external CD drive from a friend and installed XP. Installed the drivers and thats it. Same thing for Ubuntu.
People bash on about XP being slow and crappy on these low power systems but in reality it isn't. Vista is going to be another story and so I welcome Microsoft's efforts to make Vista run as well as XP does currently. Stripping extra services out which only 0.1% of Windows users actually use will help greatly. One thing I assume they will do is setup some kind of specification for what is and isn't a "lower powered ultra portable laptop" and then only license this "special version" to OEMs with a system that meets the specs. I also welcome this as it gives Linux a spec to aim at as well.
All in all I welcome Microsoft's decision. Competition is good for us (the consumers). Let's enjoy it and give them feedback on what you want/don't want.
Personally I think this is fantastic news. I am sorry to the MSN customers who are being shafted by this but it proves that DRM is crap. I have had dozens of discussions with people over the past few years (since iTMS) about how DRM is evil and everybody always replies with "Yeah but will never do that! Stop being a silly paranoid fool". Examples like this are just ammo in the fight against DRM. Tell everybody who supports DRM'd media about it.
Also part of me wonders if Microsoft are doing this on purpose? I know it sounds weird as Microsoft are not anti-DRM however they run thousands of redundant servers but keep them around because it makes no difference to them. So why retire just these servers? I find it difficult to believe they see very high load. If you read between the lines it also reads as if they are doing this to damage DRM more than anything else.
I ran WinFLP on my Eee when I first got it however the lack of null.sys driver caused Cygwin to play up. I assume it is possible to copy this from an XP install and install it but I cannot find a way to get it installed in FLP.
Also I found no difference in performance between XP and FLP.
Slashdot Mirror
I still love my Wii. It has my favourite games of this generation of consoles such as Mario Galaxy 1 & 2, Zelda TP & SS, Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, Pandoras Tower, Metroid Prime Trilogy (amazing FPS experience on a console IMHO), Okami (PS2 port I know but it is so much better on the Wii), Super Paper Mario... I could go on and go.
Yes I enjoy other games not on the Wii such as CoD:BO2, Uncharted, God of War, etc. but over all if I had to pick one console I would pick the Wii without question. I bought it for entertainment and fun not to just have 1080p@60fps graphics. If I was a graphics addict I wouldn't bother with a console anyway as a PC easily offers far greater graphical performance. I never really understood when people say attack the Wii (and the Wii U now) for not being the most powerful console possible. I will take amazing gameplay over HD graphics any day. Super Mario Galaxy is a great example of this. It didn't have amazing graphics (although they were still pretty damn beautiful) but god damn that game was a superb platform game. Absolutely amazing gameplay.
I have a brand new Galaxy Nexus which I switched too just over a month ago from an iPhone 3GS. My biggest diappointment with Android is that the BBC iPlayer app is not available for the GN still! :( It doesn't even appear in the Android market as it is "incompatible". I can watch it view the iPlayer website (if I request the "full" site not the mobile version) but performance is not great and it eats thru the battery. It sucks as the GN has such a beautiful big screen. Yes the iPhone has newer apps (mostly games from my experience) that required an iPhone 4 or 4S due to graphical performance but I am yet to find a "general app" that does not work on my 3GS. The fragmentation on iOS is there but very minor however on Android it is pretty awful. Not to mention stock Android not coming with what I would consider to be "standard" features (such as a timer or notebook app, I was shocked to find I had to get third party apps for such things, especially when the phone comes with things like Google+, you would think Google would have been able to write a couple of simple apps that iOS had at v1).
Buy him a copy of C Primer Plus (5th Ed) by Stephen Prata and work through it with him. In my opinion it is one of the best introduction to C books available, if not the best and very friendly to first time programmers. Another option is Java: A Beginner's Guide (4th Ed) by Herbert Schildt.
I too believe that learning the lower level things such as memory allocation is the best way to make yourself a better life long programmer so I would advise C over Java however I know a lot of people who only know Java (or C#) and do just fine however they knew next to nothing about what I consider to be "real" programming. Everything they do is drag and drop then writing some logic to handle an event and letting the runtime deal with the "nitty gritty" stuff.
Microsoft WHQL certify crappy drivers ergo MS take some of the blame.
I saw some movies worse than that! This dude keeps kidnapping people and hooking them up to machines that they can't escape from. The only way to survive is to admit something about yourself and sacrifice part of yourself or do some kind of other horrible act like cut the key out of somebody elses stomach. The worst one for me was a reverse bear trap on somebodies head which ripped their head in half when the timer went off. Needless to say I don't think anybody actually ever survived any of it.
Oh yeah these movies were called Saw. And I saw it in the cinema. The realism and gore was extreme. If these people were put away for making similar movies and selling them on the net then how can Amazon and Play.com sell the Saw movies? Surely every horror movie should be illegal and the directors and distributors arrested?
While I understand Google's problems with Theora quality it is surprising for them to be against it (which is what I assume is their official position for Theora support in the video tag?). By the time HTML5 is all finished I am sure Theora will be good enough and if they are unsure that it will be why can't they help it along with a few $$ or directly helping with development for it?
But Mozilla already have supported it with Firefox 3.5??
I agree. Mozilla have supported Ogg Vorbis and Theora as of 3.5 and it works pretty good from the demos I have used. The W3C needs to ignore everyone and push forward with Ogg support in the spec. If hardware acceleration is a problem then work with companies to get it supported in hardware. I know it won't be easy but saying "ugh that is gonna be too hard, lets just drop it from the spec" is stupid, work with Nvidia and ATI and Intel, etc. to get h/w support for Ogg. I am not a specialist so I have no idea how hard it would be to get h/w support for Ogg up and running but I know that my iRiver H10 mp3 player had Ogg support back in 2003 or so, so I am sure it is possible without _too_ much work.
Perhaps it is a stupid question but why do the vendors have a say what goes into the spec and what doesn't? Isn't it up to them to choose to implement the spec fully or not? FFS just make it Ogg Vorbis/Theora and if Apple doesn't want to support it then Safari can just not support that part of the spec. It isn't like any of the browser are 100% complient anyway.
THANK YOU!
I am getting fed up with all the BS about Windows 7 being posted on /. A few years ago the MS bashing was valid due to what they were actually doing however now people just posted a load of crap that they half read on some blog 6 weeks ago and can't remember 90% of it anyway so just make it up.
So thank you for posting that :)
Microsoft are trying to "do the right thing" by listening to customers but when they do everybody changes the topic from the good (the removal of the crappy 3 app limit) to limitations which are there because it is designed for a netbook (i.e why have DVD playback on a netbook when not one netbook has a DVD drive?!, also DVD playback isn't free, if you want DVD playback get VLC not that hard). Windows 7 is looking to be a pretty decent upgrade. I am still not that crazy about the taskbar in 7 but Homegroups are really nice and the other UI changes like desktop peek are great.
Anyway I just wanted to say thanks :) have a good weekend!
I see believing the earth is flat as no more crazy than believing some supreme being create the universe and everything in it in 6 days with no evidence what so ever*
*No the bible is not evidence. It is a collection of stories which cannot be validated as real. It is like saying, in 2000 years, that Harry Potter is "the truth".
Buy an external modem they are like $5 these days.
Hehe. I love how the PDF was produced by Microsoft Word 2007, nice little dig at Adobe after they kicked up a fuss about it being installed by default.
And? That has always been the case. Professional is the "business" version (domain membership, remote desktop, etc.) and costs more at retail too.
They are the same :)
That is RC3 was promoted to final as it is a tested build with no blockers, etc. found. It does not make sense to build RC3, test it and when it is ok build a final on the same code as they are identical, if they are not then you need to do testing again and so it becomes RC4.
The infinite popups thing can be resolved by using a system utility such as the AceHelper plugin for Total Commander to disable the javascript window popup, then close the tab and just click ok to close that single javascript popup window, as the tab is dead it doesn't loop again.
I agree this feature should really be available in Firefox but as it isn't I thought I would mention this as it has saved my session after stupidly clicking a link on Digg without reading it 100%
20 years ago I would have agreed with you but it is 2008 not 1988! Digital signatures have been available to the masses for ages and a process using digital sigs would be much faster than faxing documents. Businesses are slowing themselves down by using faxes plus they can be expensive to run if you get a lot of faxes from toner and paper needs.
I have not read the document fully yet (obviously, it is 240 pages!) but I have to say Apple do a damn good job in presenting their documents. The first thing I thought when I opened the PDF was how nicely formatted it is. It is a silly little thing but I much prefer a well presented document than just text dumped. Kudos to whoever put it together, I just hope the content is as good as the presentation!
I believe his point was "why are faxes legally binding". For example if I send a purchase order to Dell with a fake signature from a previous purchase order there is no way to verify if it is legit or not. The quality from fax machines are poor and once a copy has been faxed and faxed and faxed several times they can be almost unreadable (which is why a lot of purchase order forms, etc. have such huge fonts for the "important bits" such as order number and quote number).
Email isn't really any better but at least it has much better logging by default so detecting a forgery can be easier. Digital signatures have been around for years now but are hardly ever used. I can never understand why as they are not only much more secure but they speed up the whole process! Rather than print out a document, sign it, scan it in or fax it you just have to click "Sign" and enter your password (or whatever is needed) and it instantly jumps onto the next step in the process. This can save days and days of waiting for things to be signed off that require going around the world 16 times like more corporations.
This is exactly what I am thinking. I have had a 4GB Sandisk pen drive which is only a little bit bigger for about a year now and it is under £20 now as well. The PCPro article is more of an advertisement. This does not belong on the Slashdot front page.
In the past when we have required a high level of security for data transfers we setup a Business to Business VPN (B2BVPN). It requires that you have static public addresses but once setup it is transparent to the end users. Simply setup some space on a file server for them and then configure firewall policies to restrict access to just what they need (i.e. the file server). Also you can have as much or as little logging as you want. In my opinion it is the best way to deal with such a situation if you can get it setup.
And what is the story here? Of course Microsoft were going to come up with some kind of deal with the manufactuers of this "new" generation of lowered powered ultra portables. I don't really have a problem. People can use what they want and if Microsoft make another edition of Windows for ultra portables that is fine with me. Competition is a good thing no? Forcing end users to use something they don't want isn't a good solution, choice is. Is that what we say Linux is all about?
I run XP on my first gen Eee PC because I wanted Windows. It runs just as quick as the default Xandros and other Linux distros I put on it. I didn't have to do anything special to get XP running on it either. I borrowed an external CD drive from a friend and installed XP. Installed the drivers and thats it. Same thing for Ubuntu.
People bash on about XP being slow and crappy on these low power systems but in reality it isn't. Vista is going to be another story and so I welcome Microsoft's efforts to make Vista run as well as XP does currently. Stripping extra services out which only 0.1% of Windows users actually use will help greatly. One thing I assume they will do is setup some kind of specification for what is and isn't a "lower powered ultra portable laptop" and then only license this "special version" to OEMs with a system that meets the specs. I also welcome this as it gives Linux a spec to aim at as well.
All in all I welcome Microsoft's decision. Competition is good for us (the consumers). Let's enjoy it and give them feedback on what you want/don't want.
Guess you missed that /integrate: switch?
I slipstreamed SP3 just fine and this system is running from the disc I made.
Personally I think this is fantastic news. I am sorry to the MSN customers who are being shafted by this but it proves that DRM is crap. I have had dozens of discussions with people over the past few years (since iTMS) about how DRM is evil and everybody always replies with "Yeah but will never do that! Stop being a silly paranoid fool". Examples like this are just ammo in the fight against DRM. Tell everybody who supports DRM'd media about it.
Also part of me wonders if Microsoft are doing this on purpose? I know it sounds weird as Microsoft are not anti-DRM however they run thousands of redundant servers but keep them around because it makes no difference to them. So why retire just these servers? I find it difficult to believe they see very high load. If you read between the lines it also reads as if they are doing this to damage DRM more than anything else.
I ran WinFLP on my Eee when I first got it however the lack of null.sys driver caused Cygwin to play up. I assume it is possible to copy this from an XP install and install it but I cannot find a way to get it installed in FLP.
Also I found no difference in performance between XP and FLP.