Why not use something like the Divx/Xvid codec? I know both are 'lossly' compression techniques but they are extremly good. Comparing a DVD image against a Divx image appears identical to your common man (using family, friends and reletives as my 'common man') even when expanded up onto a 32" TV (sorry I don't have a bigger TV.) My Divx image was made by extracting the 45 minute vob from the DVD and running Divx Converter in standard mode producing a similar 720x576 divx encoded image which was only 400Mb instead of the 1.2gb of the VOB.
I am sure that some people will tell me they can see the difference between a h.256 compressed video and a Xvid/Divx compressed one but then there are people who will tell me that they can see the difference in a monitor that refresh's at 100Hz and one at 90Hz when they play a DVD at 25fps. The majority of people can't, most people can't hear the difference between a 128kbs audio file and a 192kbs one. Although I will admit that I can see a big difference between om video resoltuions lower than 720x576 (for example SkyOne) just not at higher resolutions unless your screen starts getting 50"+.
400Mb is more than enough for a BSG episode at good quality and resolution without artifacts
I don't pirate movies or steal music, I don't recommend anyone to do it, if you dislike the price well just wait most 'big' albums and movies hit the bargin bin about two months after realise. I don't pirate and don't want you to pirate your just giving fuel to those media company's to force more unnecessary DRM on me.
In an enviroment which requires one to mature quickly people do, it does involve alot more life expearence, in modern society the 'stresses and strains' of real life don't start having a real effect until later as far as I can make out blokes grow up around 18 and girls at 21. That doesn't mean that your not capable of good logical reasoning at 13, but things take longer because they can. When I was 13/14 I was able to make reasoned logical choices and understood and could make mature choices but 7/8 years later looking back I can see that I was a bit immature in twenty years time when I look back I'm sure I'll think me now was an immature pillock as well.
One thing thats been bothering me for a while, is every electric car or hybrid I've seen lacks solar panels. To me that makes perfect sense, quick charge battery's have a short life as well as being as it being difficult to find a charge point and cars like the above use standard connections but obviously the charge time is long enough to be annoying.
I know solar cells have a dubious enviromental advantage but a small set on a spoiler or on the roof (silicon or the new type which is less efficent) would provide a constant small charge during the day, I know most car journeys seem to be work runs or school trips where the car spends a great deal of time inactive. I know that you can buy portable solar cells like the following http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=96902 &criteria=solar%20cells&doy=8m4 ass you place three of those on a spoiler thats a steady stream of 54watts to charge your motors and is effectivily 'free' energy, adding something like that as an optional extra and I'm sure it would pay for itself in added range/costs over the lifetime of the car.
See I don't get that I'm 22 year old final year student who, well ok I also like Assembly. My point is USB flash drives make your point irrelevent, mines 5cm by 1cm by 0.5cm its 4gb of memory it follows the USB Mass Storage standard and so works on any machine running XP and every Linux distro I've used runs it happily. For this 4gb I get a localised music collection and my entire collection of university files. I have been going to different machines in the university all year plugging the device in pluggin headphones in by the time I've done that Word has opened I hit the autoplay option to get my muysic playlist running and I'm working on my final year project report.
What would you trust?
A USB flash drive and localised Office application and file storage which can be almost entirely in your control
Google Docs, an application which places all of your sensitive company information in the hands of a third party, which requires a internet connection (heaven forbid any chance of this failing!), a third party application which might want to run al sorts of processes which aren't suseptible to hacking (no, no)
USB sticks have two disadvantages, firstly then can have malware placed onto them as well as virus's and secondly when it comes to sensitive data the files can be transported home. Both issues can be overcome easily when your talking about USB sticks but I see things becoming harder when yo udeal with online applications. I may sound strange but I like complete control over things, so what are your points?
That it saves you dragging files around, firstly a well implemented exchange server can do this, secondly how hard is it to carry around a device as big as a key that weighs as much?
That you can share the files with whoever you want, umm well my University has been doing this since 2000 with MS Exchange its an easily process and we haven't (as in me and my university mates) managed to break it yet.
I just don't get it, the idea of losing all control of your data and then placing the entire companies productivity around one point of failure seems dumb to me
Your not talking about the 'ipod connector' I know a number of UK car adds are mentioning as a iPod integration are you? Those adverts annoy me so much then again I suppose saying a Line In Jack connector would be to confusing for most people. I'n not seen any 'iPod connectors' which wern't a standard input jack port much to a friends dismay after she paid £50 for it and I showed her how a £10 tape did EXACTLY the same thing and further more my phone could work it as well.
Gotta love marketing
I love my PSP and really want to say your wrong, but you've pretty much hit the nail on the head with the PSP's faults, a 1gb memory card is £40 (twice minisd's price) the screen is rubbsih is bright light (like in the garden on a sunny afternoon.) I have used my PSP as a portable media player and it isn't that bad but it wouldn't have hurt to have had louder speakers. You know I hope someone from Sony is reading this cause
I'd pay Money for a fix to play in bright light (most of the time I want to play is in bright light)
More games which don't appear to be cheap ports, games like LocoRoco, Tekken 5, GTA Vice City Stories and Wipeout all work really well as pick up and drop games for me.
More sega drive ports, I really enjoy playing sonic,sonic 2 and golden axe from the sega mega drive collection but it takes longer to load Sonic the Hedghog than it does to load Lego Star Wars 2 a game which I hate because of the rediculous load times, install the emulator on the memory card or something just let me get to sonic,golden axe,etc.. within seconds.
Finally make them UMD films cheaper! £20 for UMD which is £7.99 for the DVD version, just why would I buy UMD when I can rip the DVD into the PSP format and watch it through my memory card?
I honestly think most of the issues with the PSP could be fixed by Sony with a little work.
OK I've found the WOW, its people on slashdot "I didn't even load vista before wipping it and putting X on" or "I have to buy my son a laptop so I'll be paying for Vista and XP" and my personal favorite "I told my boss about the DRM and now we are no longer considering.
Now I don't know about you but trying a product and actually reading the real technical information to me is the way to base an opinion. Not even looking at Vista before putting XP on is just plain retarded, put a few of your games/applications on, if it doesn't work or isn't working very fast then sure put XP on. My laptop (£320 as cheap as they come) can run Vista Home basic, but not well so I XP'd it. My main desktop runs Vista extremly well and the minor alterations they've made are enough for me to have wanted to upgrade to it.
My university doesn't *support* Vista like it doesn't *support* Windows Mobile 5 on its network. Yet if I go to the huge open access computer room and explain I'm having problems connecting they will set it up for me while I'm there. The only application which doesn't work is Adobe Acrobat read 8 which breaks one of the library's ereading programs. All other products work fine, they do it because it costs money to alter the existing infrastructure and for the most part the existing infrastructure works fine, when people (which are far between) have a problem they can solve it quickly.
DRM only exists to the level you want it to, repeat after me "If I don't use a program which requests DRM then I won't suffer from DRM".
I haven't liked Linux so far because over the years I've run into problem after problem, I didn't like Red Hat 7 because it was insanely hard to set up a network connection, I just didn't like fedora 3, Debian was incredibly unstable for me and the latest version of Ubuntu proved impossible to set up without losing major functionality and learning how to mess with Config files. However when Fiesty Fawn comes out I'll still download it and place it on a PC just to get an opinion on how good it is and if I could move over to it because you never know I may love Fiesty.
Microsoft Vista bringing the WOW factor as you are amazed by all the poor FUD
I've been running Vista since a week before its offical release and I've tried running Ubuntu Edgy Eft on the same machine some of my own thoughts:
Vista
Vista is designed for joe six pack and any 'lazy' computer user when I installed it on Jan 24th everything but my creative Audigy SE 5.1 and my Creative Vista IM camera installed itself, with decent drivers. The reason creative's didn't install was because they didn't exist. Creative's drivers have always been poor so the current beta ones are no surprise to me. When setting up the pc and getting everything configured the UAC annoyed me, alot but I haven't seen it for two weeks (I made an extra limited account two weeks ago) For games I haven't noticed a performance drop although fraps tells me I have lost 5fps since I was getting more than 70 and my LCD refreshes at 70Hz well I don't care. Online gaming performance is improved while playing Myst Online: Uru Live and Until Uru I found my load times to be noticably faster as well as the download times improved, I can't explain it, but I'm not the only Vista MO:UL player whos noticed it and most of us thought we were mad. Vista only once suffered BSOD to this day I haven't figured out why all I know is something about my motherbaords ram controller when it was brand new caused the installer to crash, a reinstall (I wanted to move the drive my vista install was on) after having the motherboard a month didn't reproduce the issue. The only two things I've had a problem with were Visual Studio 2003.net and Command and Conquerer 3 (which amused me since it has VIsta 32 on the box) I've since found fixes for both, in C&C's case it was allowing the updater to download a patch and in 2003.nets case it was not to use it. Most Vista users I'm come accross have the Creative Sound card issue but thats it and I know 30/40 of them now.
Ubunutu
I gave up, I could cope with the learning curve (which I felt extreme) it was the fact that nothing worked, I lost half my machines functionality and after three/four days I still hadn't got much more than sound/video drivers installed. The final straw was WINE being a complete mistery, its almost put my off Open Source software completly.
Both were for the 64bit operating system I'm not denying people are having issues but I see this article as FUD, its like hes dilberatly gone in to find faults not to evaluate the OS's. Comparing the Linux and Vista articles both "Bottom Lines" seem to have been created first and then he's tried making his expearence fit what he wants. In vista we have these "data loss causing reboots" which I think is deeply suspicious and in Linux we gloss over the driver issues and learning curve and talk about the greater control you have. I googled Pugetina and only found articles in which he named the app so any 'issues' he had with it in Linux or Vista I can only assume are in his head, he's listed none of the third party applications which wouldn't install, the only ones I couldn't get working were Apple ones. Who uses quicktime on a windows PC? Every game excusing World of Warcraft (which I don't play) installed perfect for me and have run without issue.
Just once I'd like to read a review which wasn't biased towards linux/Vista I'm no writer and I could do a better job than this guy
As a BEng Computer Engineering Student (the course is certified by the IET) I've had to write several reports for several different modules, my two current favorites was a report on a 200MHz amplifier last year (close to seventy pages long) and my current final year project report (currently at 33,000 words.) In the first the lecturer when handing the paper to me accused me of plagarisim, because a section of the report had nothing to do his actual question (I wanted to know how MOSFET's exactly worked) and was highly detailed. It wasn't until I showed him my sources which were a few abstract math formula that he started to believe that all the maths and write up had been my own (used the five formula to check to make sure my maths were on track) still lost marks because he was never certain which annoyed me alot.
Its very easy to plagarise programming task I can remember two modules last year where a group of students did it, for pure programming then papers aren't necessairly the best way to learn, for electronics writing reports is the best way.
You keep saying that buying accross countries would be illegal yet I can think of at least two examples where this occurs within the EU. EMI sell an album in the UK they sell it in france there should be nothing preventing me getting the album from france its the same company. The only legal issue here is when a small record company which only licenses for the country in which it distributes. If you actually would like to point out some sources which say I'm wrong please do, I would be interested. But the little I've read on this sort of thing EU law is not on Apples side
How is this hard to understand? If I want to buy music in the EU then Company A can't sell it to france for say 99p and then prohibit me from buying from their french store forcing me to buy it in the UK one at £1.29. I can goto france and buy a DVD bring it home and play it on my UK DVD player. Itunes store activily stops me from buying from the French store, its price fixing. Apple can talk about how the music store won't let them, well sorry thats the local law if you cant obey it then you shouldn't be doing it. The EU simply expects Apple to let me use the french store and the frenchies use the UK store, it doesn't expect EU members to be able to access non eu member stores. So I still won't be able to use the USA store, I don't know about you but I think price fixing is bad, this is deliberate price fixing "because the record company's are forcing us" if thats the case I'd expect a anti trust case against the record companies next.
I drive a Kazuma Cheetah 200cc Motorcycle (its a much cheaper but poorly manufactured Chinese version of the Honda XR200.) It has a four litre tank on it I generally travel between 160km (99.4MPG) and 180km (111.8MPG) between refueling. In theory this would mean this prize has already been won. My bike is three years old and I believe the Honda XR200 does similar mileage and that was first manufactured in 1979 (and was manufactured until 2003 its now been replaced.)
Gas converting cars also tends to give huge performance boosts, I know a Range Rover which did 12 MPG when converted now does 32MPG, I know a Renault Laguna which did 38MPG now does something close to 70MPG. These are standard cars in the UK, most diesels do about 50-70MPG. This prize is actually pointless if America wants to drive more fuel efficient cars you need give the consumer an incentive I know plenty of European cars which are extremely pretty and very fuel efficient. If America were to raise its petrol and diesel costs to those of the UK (92p per litre or $7 a US gallon) I'd bet public transport and more fuel efficient cars would suddenly start appearing on the market.
Ok can someone let me know if Hell has frozen over, Slashdot appears to think an action that Microsofts done isn't evil and I know which I thought I would be seeing first
oh I realise I came on a bit of a downer about the PSP there, I Love the handheld. I carry it around with me a lot however I've found 50/60% of the games don't have the effort put into them they could have, its noticible because the 40% that do are REALLY awesome
Sigh I get tired of this biased view online, The PS3 is to expensive for me currently, its to expensive for the majority of PS2 owners, yet even on its launch we have 'record breaking' sales figure. Of course that isn't good enough, its just because they delayed the launch and manage to get just slightly more supply out there than there was demand. Its lead to all sorts of funny things on Ebay (people were winning with £350/£390 bids for the £425 console. For once I got to laugh at the evil people who do that sort of thing.
But its not good enough, I mean when I use my limited life expearence in pointing out that the Wii just isn't being sent out and that its not actually selling as insanely as people think I'm 'overated'. If I'd made a quip about the PS3 I probably would have been modded insightful or something. Yes the PSP did really well on launch day but the DS overtook, that was always going to happen, The PSP is a £179.99 device no 10 year old is going to be given that to play with and the 15-25 demographic which the PSP is really aimed at is smaller than the 10 year old one. The UMD Video turned out to be a bit of a farce, I mean The top chart DVD would be £13.97, but the UMD version would be £19.99. When you can buy offical PSP packs to take DVD's and rip them into PSP friendly format (XVID for me) means your just not going to buy a UMD Video, secondly look at the games, alot of developers put in the same effort they do for the DS which isn't enough and it shows. I do think if the PSP dropped in price to a level closer to the DS then DS sales would take a noticable hit.
We can talk about the Wii/360 having a lead and other stuff but what matters is people really wanted it Playstation is a brand people respect and now we have to ask if this can be kept up. In three months time we should start getting more accurate sales figures I'm hoping the PS3 will be on top and will be making ground on the Wii. The one to really watch out for is when the PS3 price drop happens, when that baby hits the £300 mark I'd be really curious to see what happens to the Wii and 360's lead.
yes the future isn't all about the most powerfull engine but I don't want to see the games industry going down the Wii path, just like I don't want Episodic games to be the future of gaming, what i really want to see in the future is a 2d sonic platformer, but perhaps thats just me (oh and some more 2d platformers)
OH god I love this, don't you love the whiney Wii/360 people "but but our console didn't have enough so we sold out" or "as soon as we get Wii's in their sold out" from my perspective that doesn't say alot at all.Since The Wii's release (and its intial 5 pre orders)the store where I work has had, get this, 6 Wii's delevered to us.
6
Of course we are always going a waiting list for the thing we never get any, the waiting list has stayed at 20 for months now, we might get one in but the four poeple on the top of the list have got one, but during that time three or four people asked about it.
In comparision we had 3 PS3 orders (non for staff unlike Wii/360) and 5 PS3's delivered to sell in store. We currently have 1 PS3 left. So when you look at the 'numbers' for our store a console thats been out for four months thats less than half price has only sold 11 units while after four days the PS3 has sold 7 units. We still have a PS3, but no Wii's so the Wii must be incredibly popular.
Your forgetting anouther really key thing here, there are only 15 men who work in my store. 8 of us all have plans to buy a PS3 once it hits the £300/£350 price mark (because we're part time shop workers and can't afford £500.) With a crippling price tag its doing extremly well.
Re:Really? RPGs and the lack of real changes.
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Rethinking the MMOG
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· Score: 1
RPG's don't have to be about level grinding have a looksee at http://www.mystonline.com/ theres a MMOG thats cares as I understand it works well on MAC and a few people have used cedeger to get it working on Linux. Very different from your normal MMOG's
Norton Uninstalls? Since when? The only way I know to get Norton off a hard drive is to use big magnets, even then you might need a preist and a cow to sacrifice
AV softwares never been any good, my little sister put Norton on her PC because she had a msn Malware problem. Norton caused more hassle and effort than the stupid bonzi buddy add did. Its been 3 months since then and I still haven't actually managed to uninstall norton. I keep deleting files and it keeps downloading them again. My expearence with any anti virus solution is their worse than a virus itself. When I used to fix machines I'd would just goto bullguard's website and work out which virus it was and then install the patch, it was much better than dealing with Bullguards AV application.
Oh I'd like to mention some ancedotal evidence as well, two years ago I moved into my new house we had five computers and each one had a different Anti Virus App on it. BT screwed up and we didn't have a phone line so I unplugged the router, everyone of those AV programs (Norton, Macrappy, F Secure,Bull Guard and Trend) reported 'attacks from outside sources and I saw four of them list external IP address's while Norton and Macrappy did also suggest attacks from internal (192.168) addresses. I found this interesting since every machine at the time was wired only and the router wasn't unpacked.
My Aunt bought a Macrappy subscription a week later Macrappy stopped all outgoing traffic. Phone Macrappy customer support, they tell her to go online and download the latest patch, I had to spend thirty minutes walking a dumb woman through the logical problem of "Macrappy not see internet, your patch you say only available through your autoupdate thing, me not able to get to patch, Whats the virus called so I can find a patch".
They all need to go out of business, if its easy to install and has a good interface then it kills system performance (A AMD64 4400 should not struggle to load Avast/F Secure) if it doesn't kill systemer performance then it burrows itself in like a tick and starts breaking things. The only one I found to be nice to use and not kill system performance was Liveone care but review sites say its definition listing is poor compared to the others and theres no 64bit version. I'll get to my point now, I use AV software sparingly (Basically whenever I get one free with a new motherboard) in the last ten years online I've caught 1 virus and that wasn't because of the web (tip to 14 yr olds, when backing up a virus'd machine DON'T put the files on your machine before you run a AV app)Sure I'm behind a firewall but its nothing speacial I just don't open spam, read everything before I say 'Install' and this is the big one DON'T GOTO PORN SITES, I realise this is slashdot but still. I'm not saying I don't get Malware or Spyware but then Spybot is actually a great little application.
I'm a computer engineering student in our second year (share the year with EE,E,COMMS,ROBOTICS) we had to program a 8031 (http://www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/board5/index.html) it taught me alot on how a Microprocessor and Microcontroller works, this year I've done a software programing module which was a breeze because I'd been forced to learn proper memory management had already delt with concurrency, interupts and other little tricks OS's do.
Also this year we've been learning VHDL those of us who worked hard learning assembly last year have found it a breeze getting to play around in semi C and know how it works.
Assembly makes you appreciate higher level languages, teaches you to learn about clock cycles (remember kids SJMP uses have the cycles of LJMP!) memory limitations (you learn alot with only 8 bytes of internal memory) and with things like the SDCC you can make a program in Assembly and test it, then learn C and test it on a board and once you know basic C the only hard thing about C++ is OO. Personnally I like assembly it can make tiny programs and can help you understand some of the seemingly abstract things about programming.
UK, england you know the place where we see the religous insanity of america as strange/funny and frightening. Theres no conspiracy but lets look at things, my city has a ton of watersports lives in the country (good for walks) has a huge sports facility, has finely equipped labs, great night scene (18 drinking age remeber) as well as cinema, bowling, quasar, wall climbing stuff. People rarely stay in and when the engineering people do we do it to play with robots or to get coursework done, after all the pubs more important. Staying in and playing magic cards/D&D just seems incredibly lame when you have all that espeacially since the few players are socially inept and htink of nothing but D&D. My favorite qoute from one of the lecturers in the first year:
"University can be a hard and lonely place, make sure you get out and enjoy yourself, now I'm off to the pub"
People often remark that my first ideas are "out of the box", often their exactly whats needed in a solution but I too think terms like "out of the box" or "inventing a new box". There terms made to make people be proactive and think their speacial nothing more. "Out of the Box" thinkers tend to think laterally and are far more objective, "Inventing a new box" people tend to be people who don't like the status quo so decide that they need to do something better.
At the end of the day this article is garbage, out of three years of electrical/electronic/computer/robotics/communicat ions engineering students and four years worth of CSN/CS/Etc... students (so around 1000 people) the Univeristy's D&D club consists of five members only (only one involved with the aforementioned subjects), the university has 30,000 students currently enrolled.
Theres no correlation between D&D and the IT industry, Engineering and IT used to have people who were extremly geeky but its moving away from that. D&Ders are the geeks, geeks in my expearence the ones I've met were not academically good in any area nor were they good with the majority of people they spent too much time playing D&D to be either.
Perhaps its because your games suck?
Locoroco, GTA, Tekken, and wipeout are great PSP games they caught my eye and I bought them but on the whole PSP games do suffer. When a developer takes the time to develop a proper PSP game like the ones listed they rock and they stay high in the charts forever (last time I checked game excusing wipeout all three were in the top ten.) The problem is multiplatform releases with awfull porting and rubbish games.
I own Lego Star Wars 2, I didn't get the PS2 version because I was looking for a game for my PSP at the time. You can see Lego Star Wars is a great game I know it is because i bought it for the PS2 as well. But the PSP port has some serious flaws (like when you flick the device on I have to wait two to three minutes to resume my play) it will freeze for loading, their no audio, the list goes on and on. Alot of the multiplatform released PSP games I've bought suffer this problem, its like the developers have just tacked a few lines of code into the game to make it run on a PSP. GTA has an amazing PSP engine, its just WOW. Tekken looks better than my Tekken Tag on the PS2, Wipeout seems to be a game designed to take advantage of every feature built into a PSP. You want to sell take the time!
Locoroco is an example of a good game that has nothing to do with the PS2 or other ports, you can pick it up at the drop of a hat its simple but fun (Yes I know everyone things its really weird when they first see it) but instead of game developers seeing it and trying something similar they release their own version of Mercury which sucks. Other examples would be games like Ghost Rider where you can take you eyes of the screen and hit two buttons so you can get through the gameplay and see some story.
Your a game developer give me an original game, one that takes advantage of the PSP, that I can flick off from standby and play in seconds (umm like GTA,Tekken,Wipeout) that isn't anouther puzzle game. Oh some small advice if you have a low budget then most of the time the game won't sell that well, big games these days make it because of big budgets, thats not always true but its a start as it shows your taking the thing seriously. I currently own 12 PSP games (got one at launch) only 12 games from launch caught my eye, I got a PS2 two years before my PSP and own about 50/60 games. Perhaps this tells us something about the quality of games PSP devs are turning out? Oh and 21 million PSP's is abysmal? I am surprised that after all this time the PSP is still £179.99 but 21 million isn't bad by any means.
PS I am actually hugely pro PSP but there can be 6 months between a good game releases, which is ok for me since it takes me about 4/5 months to get through most PSP games.
Theres this thing called the interweb which is kinda integral to studying, my final year presentation is coming up and I want things perfect one of the best resources for my project is actually online (www.8052.com) so smart alecs like you kill my access at 10pm and suddenly when I hit a problem what do I do. Oh and BTW I'm currently working on this thing from 9am to 2am and have been for two weeks (project from hell, when something can go wrong it has) by your logic I'm a whiney uni boy instead of a nearly burnt out from working on this project student. My university provides free unlimited access but blocks ports associated with filesharing, this solution kills most online games and yet allows students to work from 9am to 2am.
Oh and the thing is college and university student are adults, if you treat them like children how are they going to cope in the real world? A university policy of asking students not to engage in illegal activites or do things which could be offensive to others (while detailing how said offended person should react) is more than enough, more than likely Bombay doesn't like its bandwidth bills and so it cutting back
Whats "True Personnal Clutter"? I need a little tidyness, I do a lot of my university work at home if I just let things build up with some minor attempts at organisation I can't find things normally I have to give up 5-8 hours to tidy said mess and then I can be productive again.
I have a system it works extremly well for me, when I'm telling Orange to kill my contract and I have proof I only agreed to a 12 month one I can put my hand on the letter involved in seconds.
I wouldn't say 'personnal clutter' I'm a naturally tidy person all my lecture notes for a module go in a module folder, phone records in a phone folder because of this I can find everything in seconds. One of my friends isnt his notes are a jumble and unfathomemble to anyone but him, but he can find what he needs in seconds as well. When it comes to 'filing' slobbyness and ultra neatness have their places and depending on how a person thinks depends on what is more productive for them. When it comes to group resources then neatness counts, slobbyness doesnt work.
In short by allowing people to organising stuff according to the way people think we get the most productiveness, but when these people share resources then applying a method will make the system just as accessible to everyone. This amazingly obvious statement is brought to you by Steve.
Re:Doubt microsoft would care
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ReactOS Revealed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Umm didn't you make his point? Wine isn't a complete re-implementation of the Windows API's, sure much of reactOS can be made up from WINE but its still got more under its hood than just WINE as your qoute says.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not use something like the Divx/Xvid codec? I know both are 'lossly' compression techniques but they are extremly good. Comparing a DVD image against a Divx image appears identical to your common man (using family, friends and reletives as my 'common man') even when expanded up onto a 32" TV (sorry I don't have a bigger TV.) My Divx image was made by extracting the 45 minute vob from the DVD and running Divx Converter in standard mode producing a similar 720x576 divx encoded image which was only 400Mb instead of the 1.2gb of the VOB.
I am sure that some people will tell me they can see the difference between a h.256 compressed video and a Xvid/Divx compressed one but then there are people who will tell me that they can see the difference in a monitor that refresh's at 100Hz and one at 90Hz when they play a DVD at 25fps. The majority of people can't, most people can't hear the difference between a 128kbs audio file and a 192kbs one. Although I will admit that I can see a big difference between om video resoltuions lower than 720x576 (for example SkyOne) just not at higher resolutions unless your screen starts getting 50"+.
400Mb is more than enough for a BSG episode at good quality and resolution without artifacts
I don't pirate movies or steal music, I don't recommend anyone to do it, if you dislike the price well just wait most 'big' albums and movies hit the bargin bin about two months after realise. I don't pirate and don't want you to pirate your just giving fuel to those media company's to force more unnecessary DRM on me.
What are you on seriously? DDT?
In an enviroment which requires one to mature quickly people do, it does involve alot more life expearence, in modern society the 'stresses and strains' of real life don't start having a real effect until later as far as I can make out blokes grow up around 18 and girls at 21. That doesn't mean that your not capable of good logical reasoning at 13, but things take longer because they can. When I was 13/14 I was able to make reasoned logical choices and understood and could make mature choices but 7/8 years later looking back I can see that I was a bit immature in twenty years time when I look back I'm sure I'll think me now was an immature pillock as well.
One thing thats been bothering me for a while, is every electric car or hybrid I've seen lacks solar panels. To me that makes perfect sense, quick charge battery's have a short life as well as being as it being difficult to find a charge point and cars like the above use standard connections but obviously the charge time is long enough to be annoying.2 &criteria=solar%20cells&doy=8m4 ass you place three of those on a spoiler thats a steady stream of 54watts to charge your motors and is effectivily 'free' energy, adding something like that as an optional extra and I'm sure it would pay for itself in added range/costs over the lifetime of the car.
I know solar cells have a dubious enviromental advantage but a small set on a spoiler or on the roof (silicon or the new type which is less efficent) would provide a constant small charge during the day, I know most car journeys seem to be work runs or school trips where the car spends a great deal of time inactive. I know that you can buy portable solar cells like the following http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=9690
See I don't get that I'm 22 year old final year student who, well ok I also like Assembly. My point is USB flash drives make your point irrelevent, mines 5cm by 1cm by 0.5cm its 4gb of memory it follows the USB Mass Storage standard and so works on any machine running XP and every Linux distro I've used runs it happily. For this 4gb I get a localised music collection and my entire collection of university files. I have been going to different machines in the university all year plugging the device in pluggin headphones in by the time I've done that Word has opened I hit the autoplay option to get my muysic playlist running and I'm working on my final year project report.
What would you trust?
A USB flash drive and localised Office application and file storage which can be almost entirely in your control
Google Docs, an application which places all of your sensitive company information in the hands of a third party, which requires a internet connection (heaven forbid any chance of this failing!), a third party application which might want to run al sorts of processes which aren't suseptible to hacking (no, no)
USB sticks have two disadvantages, firstly then can have malware placed onto them as well as virus's and secondly when it comes to sensitive data the files can be transported home. Both issues can be overcome easily when your talking about USB sticks but I see things becoming harder when yo udeal with online applications. I may sound strange but I like complete control over things, so what are your points?
That it saves you dragging files around, firstly a well implemented exchange server can do this, secondly how hard is it to carry around a device as big as a key that weighs as much?
That you can share the files with whoever you want, umm well my University has been doing this since 2000 with MS Exchange its an easily process and we haven't (as in me and my university mates) managed to break it yet.
I just don't get it, the idea of losing all control of your data and then placing the entire companies productivity around one point of failure seems dumb to me
Your not talking about the 'ipod connector' I know a number of UK car adds are mentioning as a iPod integration are you? Those adverts annoy me so much then again I suppose saying a Line In Jack connector would be to confusing for most people. I'n not seen any 'iPod connectors' which wern't a standard input jack port much to a friends dismay after she paid £50 for it and I showed her how a £10 tape did EXACTLY the same thing and further more my phone could work it as well.
Gotta love marketing
I love my PSP and really want to say your wrong, but you've pretty much hit the nail on the head with the PSP's faults, a 1gb memory card is £40 (twice minisd's price) the screen is rubbsih is bright light (like in the garden on a sunny afternoon.) I have used my PSP as a portable media player and it isn't that bad but it wouldn't have hurt to have had louder speakers. You know I hope someone from Sony is reading this cause
I'd pay Money for a fix to play in bright light (most of the time I want to play is in bright light)
More games which don't appear to be cheap ports, games like LocoRoco, Tekken 5, GTA Vice City Stories and Wipeout all work really well as pick up and drop games for me.
More sega drive ports, I really enjoy playing sonic,sonic 2 and golden axe from the sega mega drive collection but it takes longer to load Sonic the Hedghog than it does to load Lego Star Wars 2 a game which I hate because of the rediculous load times, install the emulator on the memory card or something just let me get to sonic,golden axe,etc.. within seconds.
Finally make them UMD films cheaper! £20 for UMD which is £7.99 for the DVD version, just why would I buy UMD when I can rip the DVD into the PSP format and watch it through my memory card?
I honestly think most of the issues with the PSP could be fixed by Sony with a little work.
OK I've found the WOW, its people on slashdot "I didn't even load vista before wipping it and putting X on" or "I have to buy my son a laptop so I'll be paying for Vista and XP" and my personal favorite "I told my boss about the DRM and now we are no longer considering.
Now I don't know about you but trying a product and actually reading the real technical information to me is the way to base an opinion. Not even looking at Vista before putting XP on is just plain retarded, put a few of your games/applications on, if it doesn't work or isn't working very fast then sure put XP on. My laptop (£320 as cheap as they come) can run Vista Home basic, but not well so I XP'd it. My main desktop runs Vista extremly well and the minor alterations they've made are enough for me to have wanted to upgrade to it.
My university doesn't *support* Vista like it doesn't *support* Windows Mobile 5 on its network. Yet if I go to the huge open access computer room and explain I'm having problems connecting they will set it up for me while I'm there. The only application which doesn't work is Adobe Acrobat read 8 which breaks one of the library's ereading programs. All other products work fine, they do it because it costs money to alter the existing infrastructure and for the most part the existing infrastructure works fine, when people (which are far between) have a problem they can solve it quickly.
DRM only exists to the level you want it to, repeat after me "If I don't use a program which requests DRM then I won't suffer from DRM".
I haven't liked Linux so far because over the years I've run into problem after problem, I didn't like Red Hat 7 because it was insanely hard to set up a network connection, I just didn't like fedora 3, Debian was incredibly unstable for me and the latest version of Ubuntu proved impossible to set up without losing major functionality and learning how to mess with Config files. However when Fiesty Fawn comes out I'll still download it and place it on a PC just to get an opinion on how good it is and if I could move over to it because you never know I may love Fiesty.
Microsoft Vista bringing the WOW factor as you are amazed by all the poor FUD
I've been running Vista since a week before its offical release and I've tried running Ubuntu Edgy Eft on the same machine some of my own thoughts:
.
Vista
Vista is designed for joe six pack and any 'lazy' computer user when I installed it on Jan 24th everything but my creative Audigy SE 5.1 and my Creative Vista IM camera installed itself, with decent drivers. The reason creative's didn't install was because they didn't exist. Creative's drivers have always been poor so the current beta ones are no surprise to me. When setting up the pc and getting everything configured the UAC annoyed me, alot but I haven't seen it for two weeks (I made an extra limited account two weeks ago) For games I haven't noticed a performance drop although fraps tells me I have lost 5fps since I was getting more than 70 and my LCD refreshes at 70Hz well I don't care. Online gaming performance is improved while playing Myst Online: Uru Live and Until Uru I found my load times to be noticably faster as well as the download times improved, I can't explain it, but I'm not the only Vista MO:UL player whos noticed it and most of us thought we were mad. Vista only once suffered BSOD to this day I haven't figured out why all I know is something about my motherbaords ram controller when it was brand new caused the installer to crash, a reinstall (I wanted to move the drive my vista install was on) after having the motherboard a month didn't reproduce the issue. The only two things I've had a problem with were Visual Studio 2003.net and Command and Conquerer 3 (which amused me since it has VIsta 32 on the box) I've since found fixes for both, in C&C's case it was allowing the updater to download a patch and in 2003.nets case it was not to use it. Most Vista users I'm come accross have the Creative Sound card issue but thats it and I know 30/40 of them now.
Ubunutu
I gave up, I could cope with the learning curve (which I felt extreme) it was the fact that nothing worked, I lost half my machines functionality and after three/four days I still hadn't got much more than sound/video drivers installed. The final straw was WINE being a complete mistery, its almost put my off Open Source software completly
Both were for the 64bit operating system I'm not denying people are having issues but I see this article as FUD, its like hes dilberatly gone in to find faults not to evaluate the OS's. Comparing the Linux and Vista articles both "Bottom Lines" seem to have been created first and then he's tried making his expearence fit what he wants. In vista we have these "data loss causing reboots" which I think is deeply suspicious and in Linux we gloss over the driver issues and learning curve and talk about the greater control you have. I googled Pugetina and only found articles in which he named the app so any 'issues' he had with it in Linux or Vista I can only assume are in his head, he's listed none of the third party applications which wouldn't install, the only ones I couldn't get working were Apple ones. Who uses quicktime on a windows PC? Every game excusing World of Warcraft (which I don't play) installed perfect for me and have run without issue.
Just once I'd like to read a review which wasn't biased towards linux/Vista I'm no writer and I could do a better job than this guy
As a BEng Computer Engineering Student (the course is certified by the IET) I've had to write several reports for several different modules, my two current favorites was a report on a 200MHz amplifier last year (close to seventy pages long) and my current final year project report (currently at 33,000 words.) In the first the lecturer when handing the paper to me accused me of plagarisim, because a section of the report had nothing to do his actual question (I wanted to know how MOSFET's exactly worked) and was highly detailed. It wasn't until I showed him my sources which were a few abstract math formula that he started to believe that all the maths and write up had been my own (used the five formula to check to make sure my maths were on track) still lost marks because he was never certain which annoyed me alot.
Its very easy to plagarise programming task I can remember two modules last year where a group of students did it, for pure programming then papers aren't necessairly the best way to learn, for electronics writing reports is the best way.
You keep saying that buying accross countries would be illegal yet I can think of at least two examples where this occurs within the EU. EMI sell an album in the UK they sell it in france there should be nothing preventing me getting the album from france its the same company. The only legal issue here is when a small record company which only licenses for the country in which it distributes. If you actually would like to point out some sources which say I'm wrong please do, I would be interested. But the little I've read on this sort of thing EU law is not on Apples side
How is this hard to understand? If I want to buy music in the EU then Company A can't sell it to france for say 99p and then prohibit me from buying from their french store forcing me to buy it in the UK one at £1.29. I can goto france and buy a DVD bring it home and play it on my UK DVD player. Itunes store activily stops me from buying from the French store, its price fixing. Apple can talk about how the music store won't let them, well sorry thats the local law if you cant obey it then you shouldn't be doing it. The EU simply expects Apple to let me use the french store and the frenchies use the UK store, it doesn't expect EU members to be able to access non eu member stores. So I still won't be able to use the USA store, I don't know about you but I think price fixing is bad, this is deliberate price fixing "because the record company's are forcing us" if thats the case I'd expect a anti trust case against the record companies next.
I drive a Kazuma Cheetah 200cc Motorcycle (its a much cheaper but poorly manufactured Chinese version of the Honda XR200.) It has a four litre tank on it I generally travel between 160km (99.4MPG) and 180km (111.8MPG) between refueling. In theory this would mean this prize has already been won. My bike is three years old and I believe the Honda XR200 does similar mileage and that was first manufactured in 1979 (and was manufactured until 2003 its now been replaced.)
Gas converting cars also tends to give huge performance boosts, I know a Range Rover which did 12 MPG when converted now does 32MPG, I know a Renault Laguna which did 38MPG now does something close to 70MPG. These are standard cars in the UK, most diesels do about 50-70MPG. This prize is actually pointless if America wants to drive more fuel efficient cars you need give the consumer an incentive I know plenty of European cars which are extremely pretty and very fuel efficient. If America were to raise its petrol and diesel costs to those of the UK (92p per litre or $7 a US gallon) I'd bet public transport and more fuel efficient cars would suddenly start appearing on the market.
Ok can someone let me know if Hell has frozen over, Slashdot appears to think an action that Microsofts done isn't evil and I know which I thought I would be seeing first
oh I realise I came on a bit of a downer about the PSP there, I Love the handheld. I carry it around with me a lot however I've found 50/60% of the games don't have the effort put into them they could have, its noticible because the 40% that do are REALLY awesome
Sigh I get tired of this biased view online, The PS3 is to expensive for me currently, its to expensive for the majority of PS2 owners, yet even on its launch we have 'record breaking' sales figure. Of course that isn't good enough, its just because they delayed the launch and manage to get just slightly more supply out there than there was demand. Its lead to all sorts of funny things on Ebay (people were winning with £350/£390 bids for the £425 console. For once I got to laugh at the evil people who do that sort of thing.
But its not good enough, I mean when I use my limited life expearence in pointing out that the Wii just isn't being sent out and that its not actually selling as insanely as people think I'm 'overated'. If I'd made a quip about the PS3 I probably would have been modded insightful or something.
Yes the PSP did really well on launch day but the DS overtook, that was always going to happen, The PSP is a £179.99 device no 10 year old is going to be given that to play with and the 15-25 demographic which the PSP is really aimed at is smaller than the 10 year old one. The UMD Video turned out to be a bit of a farce, I mean The top chart DVD would be £13.97, but the UMD version would be £19.99. When you can buy offical PSP packs to take DVD's and rip them into PSP friendly format (XVID for me) means your just not going to buy a UMD Video, secondly look at the games, alot of developers put in the same effort they do for the DS which isn't enough and it shows. I do think if the PSP dropped in price to a level closer to the DS then DS sales would take a noticable hit.
We can talk about the Wii/360 having a lead and other stuff but what matters is people really wanted it Playstation is a brand people respect and now we have to ask if this can be kept up. In three months time we should start getting more accurate sales figures I'm hoping the PS3 will be on top and will be making ground on the Wii. The one to really watch out for is when the PS3 price drop happens, when that baby hits the £300 mark I'd be really curious to see what happens to the Wii and 360's lead.
yes the future isn't all about the most powerfull engine but I don't want to see the games industry going down the Wii path, just like I don't want Episodic games to be the future of gaming, what i really want to see in the future is a 2d sonic platformer, but perhaps thats just me (oh and some more 2d platformers)
OH god I love this, don't you love the whiney Wii/360 people "but but our console didn't have enough so we sold out" or "as soon as we get Wii's in their sold out" from my perspective that doesn't say alot at all.Since The Wii's release (and its intial 5 pre orders)the store where I work has had, get this, 6 Wii's delevered to us.
6
Of course we are always going a waiting list for the thing we never get any, the waiting list has stayed at 20 for months now, we might get one in but the four poeple on the top of the list have got one, but during that time three or four people asked about it.
In comparision we had 3 PS3 orders (non for staff unlike Wii/360) and 5 PS3's delivered to sell in store. We currently have 1 PS3 left. So when you look at the 'numbers' for our store a console thats been out for four months thats less than half price has only sold 11 units while after four days the PS3 has sold 7 units. We still have a PS3, but no Wii's so the Wii must be incredibly popular.
Your forgetting anouther really key thing here, there are only 15 men who work in my store. 8 of us all have plans to buy a PS3 once it hits the £300/£350 price mark (because we're part time shop workers and can't afford £500.) With a crippling price tag its doing extremly well.
RPG's don't have to be about level grinding have a looksee at http://www.mystonline.com/ theres a MMOG thats cares as I understand it works well on MAC and a few people have used cedeger to get it working on Linux. Very different from your normal MMOG's
Norton Uninstalls? Since when? The only way I know to get Norton off a hard drive is to use big magnets, even then you might need a preist and a cow to sacrifice
AV softwares never been any good, my little sister put Norton on her PC because she had a msn Malware problem. Norton caused more hassle and effort than the stupid bonzi buddy add did. Its been 3 months since then and I still haven't actually managed to uninstall norton. I keep deleting files and it keeps downloading them again. My expearence with any anti virus solution is their worse than a virus itself. When I used to fix machines I'd would just goto bullguard's website and work out which virus it was and then install the patch, it was much better than dealing with Bullguards AV application.
Oh I'd like to mention some ancedotal evidence as well, two years ago I moved into my new house we had five computers and each one had a different Anti Virus App on it. BT screwed up and we didn't have a phone line so I unplugged the router, everyone of those AV programs (Norton, Macrappy, F Secure,Bull Guard and Trend) reported 'attacks from outside sources and I saw four of them list external IP address's while Norton and Macrappy did also suggest attacks from internal (192.168) addresses. I found this interesting since every machine at the time was wired only and the router wasn't unpacked.
My Aunt bought a Macrappy subscription a week later Macrappy stopped all outgoing traffic. Phone Macrappy customer support, they tell her to go online and download the latest patch, I had to spend thirty minutes walking a dumb woman through the logical problem of "Macrappy not see internet, your patch you say only available through your autoupdate thing, me not able to get to patch, Whats the virus called so I can find a patch".
They all need to go out of business, if its easy to install and has a good interface then it kills system performance (A AMD64 4400 should not struggle to load Avast/F Secure) if it doesn't kill systemer performance then it burrows itself in like a tick and starts breaking things. The only one I found to be nice to use and not kill system performance was Liveone care but review sites say its definition listing is poor compared to the others and theres no 64bit version.
I'll get to my point now, I use AV software sparingly (Basically whenever I get one free with a new motherboard) in the last ten years online I've caught 1 virus and that wasn't because of the web (tip to 14 yr olds, when backing up a virus'd machine DON'T put the files on your machine before you run a AV app)Sure I'm behind a firewall but its nothing speacial I just don't open spam, read everything before I say 'Install' and this is the big one DON'T GOTO PORN SITES, I realise this is slashdot but still. I'm not saying I don't get Malware or Spyware but then Spybot is actually a great little application.
I'm a computer engineering student in our second year (share the year with EE,E,COMMS,ROBOTICS) we had to program a 8031 (http://www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/board5/index.html) it taught me alot on how a Microprocessor and Microcontroller works, this year I've done a software programing module which was a breeze because I'd been forced to learn proper memory management had already delt with concurrency, interupts and other little tricks OS's do.
Also this year we've been learning VHDL those of us who worked hard learning assembly last year have found it a breeze getting to play around in semi C and know how it works.
Assembly makes you appreciate higher level languages, teaches you to learn about clock cycles (remember kids SJMP uses have the cycles of LJMP!) memory limitations (you learn alot with only 8 bytes of internal memory) and with things like the SDCC you can make a program in Assembly and test it, then learn C and test it on a board and once you know basic C the only hard thing about C++ is OO. Personnally I like assembly it can make tiny programs and can help you understand some of the seemingly abstract things about programming.
UK, england you know the place where we see the religous insanity of america as strange/funny and frightening. Theres no conspiracy but lets look at things, my city has a ton of watersports lives in the country (good for walks) has a huge sports facility, has finely equipped labs, great night scene (18 drinking age remeber) as well as cinema, bowling, quasar, wall climbing stuff. People rarely stay in and when the engineering people do we do it to play with robots or to get coursework done, after all the pubs more important. Staying in and playing magic cards/D&D just seems incredibly lame when you have all that espeacially since the few players are socially inept and htink of nothing but D&D. My favorite qoute from one of the lecturers in the first year:
"University can be a hard and lonely place, make sure you get out and enjoy yourself, now I'm off to the pub"
People often remark that my first ideas are "out of the box", often their exactly whats needed in a solution but I too think terms like "out of the box" or "inventing a new box". There terms made to make people be proactive and think their speacial nothing more. "Out of the Box" thinkers tend to think laterally and are far more objective, "Inventing a new box" people tend to be people who don't like the status quo so decide that they need to do something better.
t ions engineering students and four years worth of CSN/CS/Etc... students (so around 1000 people) the Univeristy's D&D club consists of five members only (only one involved with the aforementioned subjects), the university has 30,000 students currently enrolled.
At the end of the day this article is garbage, out of three years of electrical/electronic/computer/robotics/communica
Theres no correlation between D&D and the IT industry, Engineering and IT used to have people who were extremly geeky but its moving away from that. D&Ders are the geeks, geeks in my expearence the ones I've met were not academically good in any area nor were they good with the majority of people they spent too much time playing D&D to be either.
Perhaps its because your games suck?
Locoroco, GTA, Tekken, and wipeout are great PSP games they caught my eye and I bought them but on the whole PSP games do suffer. When a developer takes the time to develop a proper PSP game like the ones listed they rock and they stay high in the charts forever (last time I checked game excusing wipeout all three were in the top ten.) The problem is multiplatform releases with awfull porting and rubbish games.
I own Lego Star Wars 2, I didn't get the PS2 version because I was looking for a game for my PSP at the time. You can see Lego Star Wars is a great game I know it is because i bought it for the PS2 as well. But the PSP port has some serious flaws (like when you flick the device on I have to wait two to three minutes to resume my play) it will freeze for loading, their no audio, the list goes on and on. Alot of the multiplatform released PSP games I've bought suffer this problem, its like the developers have just tacked a few lines of code into the game to make it run on a PSP. GTA has an amazing PSP engine, its just WOW. Tekken looks better than my Tekken Tag on the PS2, Wipeout seems to be a game designed to take advantage of every feature built into a PSP. You want to sell take the time!
Locoroco is an example of a good game that has nothing to do with the PS2 or other ports, you can pick it up at the drop of a hat its simple but fun (Yes I know everyone things its really weird when they first see it) but instead of game developers seeing it and trying something similar they release their own version of Mercury which sucks. Other examples would be games like Ghost Rider where you can take you eyes of the screen and hit two buttons so you can get through the gameplay and see some story.
Your a game developer give me an original game, one that takes advantage of the PSP, that I can flick off from standby and play in seconds (umm like GTA,Tekken,Wipeout) that isn't anouther puzzle game. Oh some small advice if you have a low budget then most of the time the game won't sell that well, big games these days make it because of big budgets, thats not always true but its a start as it shows your taking the thing seriously. I currently own 12 PSP games (got one at launch) only 12 games from launch caught my eye, I got a PS2 two years before my PSP and own about 50/60 games. Perhaps this tells us something about the quality of games PSP devs are turning out? Oh and 21 million PSP's is abysmal? I am surprised that after all this time the PSP is still £179.99 but 21 million isn't bad by any means.
PS I am actually hugely pro PSP but there can be 6 months between a good game releases, which is ok for me since it takes me about 4/5 months to get through most PSP games.
Theres this thing called the interweb which is kinda integral to studying, my final year presentation is coming up and I want things perfect one of the best resources for my project is actually online (www.8052.com) so smart alecs like you kill my access at 10pm and suddenly when I hit a problem what do I do. Oh and BTW I'm currently working on this thing from 9am to 2am and have been for two weeks (project from hell, when something can go wrong it has) by your logic I'm a whiney uni boy instead of a nearly burnt out from working on this project student. My university provides free unlimited access but blocks ports associated with filesharing, this solution kills most online games and yet allows students to work from 9am to 2am.
Oh and the thing is college and university student are adults, if you treat them like children how are they going to cope in the real world? A university policy of asking students not to engage in illegal activites or do things which could be offensive to others (while detailing how said offended person should react) is more than enough, more than likely Bombay doesn't like its bandwidth bills and so it cutting back
Whats "True Personnal Clutter"? I need a little tidyness, I do a lot of my university work at home if I just let things build up with some minor attempts at organisation I can't find things normally I have to give up 5-8 hours to tidy said mess and then I can be productive again.
I have a system it works extremly well for me, when I'm telling Orange to kill my contract and I have proof I only agreed to a 12 month one I can put my hand on the letter involved in seconds.
I wouldn't say 'personnal clutter' I'm a naturally tidy person all my lecture notes for a module go in a module folder, phone records in a phone folder because of this I can find everything in seconds. One of my friends isnt his notes are a jumble and unfathomemble to anyone but him, but he can find what he needs in seconds as well. When it comes to 'filing' slobbyness and ultra neatness have their places and depending on how a person thinks depends on what is more productive for them. When it comes to group resources then neatness counts, slobbyness doesnt work.
In short by allowing people to organising stuff according to the way people think we get the most productiveness, but when these people share resources then applying a method will make the system just as accessible to everyone. This amazingly obvious statement is brought to you by Steve.
Umm didn't you make his point? Wine isn't a complete re-implementation of the Windows API's, sure much of reactOS can be made up from WINE but its still got more under its hood than just WINE as your qoute says.