Well you have a lot to choose from in the "more difficult to use" department. Might I suggest any version of Windows?
I'm going to have to call bullshit. Using Linux, I can't open up any of the screensavers I got from the Department of Defense, but they work great on Windows.
Why the hell is this thing such a popular controller? It feels entirely unnatural. It's because the DualShock is the *only* input method you can use for most PS2/PS3 games. That is however, an excuse, and not an valid explanation.
I agree with you completely though, if I *ever* decide to buy a console, it won't be attached to a DualShock at any point in its life. Ever tried playing Motorstorm? Most controllers with trigger style shoulder buttons have a concave design (like, i dunno, a trigger) that allows your fingers to fall naturally into place while holding the controller. There's nothing natural about the PS3 Sixaxis triggers. 10 minutes of squeezing one to accelerate in a racing game (and the subsequent soreness in your fingers causing them to constantly slip off of the convex trigger) is enough to make me want to throw the damn controller out the window.
If I was comparing 200MHz to 1Ghz, I would consider it slow as well. 1Ghz compared to 0.2Ghz. One fifth the power.
=Obligatory Car Analogy=
If you had a car with 300Horsepower next to a car with 60Horsepower, what would you call the lesser car in a performance test? Unfortunately in this day and age, saying one CPU is faster than another based on clock speed alone is like saying one human runs a race faster than another based on his height, "Well obviously the big guy's going to win! He's 20% taller than the short one!"
I don't recall whether or not it actually does this during prime time, but if it does, it's on a much longer timer (probably like 3 or more hours instead of 45 minutes). I know it's an assumption to say that the box's behavior is due to the companies being "green" as it were, but you're probably right.
I do tend to watch TV later than the average person, because I work second shift, but again, my original point is that if the cable box knows what times you're in front of the TV based on remote use, and they *do* collect watching habits based on what channel you're tuned in to, why wouldn't they collect this information as well?
but they don't know if the TV set itself is turned on.
My cable box pulls this little trick after midnight or so, and says it'll turn itself off if I don't press any buttons on its universal remote (even if it's to adjust my receiver's volume). In essence, it correlates remote use to determine whether or not you're actually in front of the TV. While I adjust the volume rather frequently late at night, I do it with a separate remote, which makes the annoying "Going into Standby" message come up more often when I'm watching as opposed to the more common cable user with my type of box.
Doh! Those phonics rules I learned as a child soooo don't apply to foreign words....
Americans are convinced because of decades of draconian usage charges from telcos and cable providers (don't we all love paying extra for "High Definition" service?) that every little aspect of a service that is enough to differentiate itself from others in presentation only, and in the terms of IPv4, think directly of the presentation layer of the OSI model, that they should pay more of it. ISP's wish to abuse the American Consumers' mindset of how services are billed, and furthermore, what actually constitutes service.
It's interesting you know... For cell phones, Caller ID and Text Messages operate in a very similar fashion.... But you'd throw a fit if AT&T charged you an extra 25 cents for each call you didn't answer because you saw who was calling, and of course, an extra 10 cents on top of that because the call didn't originate from their network...
You can't send packets out on or receive them in on a variety of ports, notably 21, 25, and 80. I figured that there must be filters up on my connection because most consumers don't require service on them, and on Joe Sixpack's connection, it's more secure that way.
May I suggest you go visit an abuse's desk of an ISP not filtering port 25 outbound before stating that it's blocked for the unique reason that they don't require it? Viruses on customers' computers don't need port 25, period. It's allowed for businesses because they usually have some kind of IT dealing with viruses, but at the ISP I worked for we could block these as well if abuse was reported, no matter the price of the connection.
My point is that ISP's unrelentingly filter port 25 traffic. Abuse or not. And in the case of my ISP, they claim it's for security.
Net neutrality is an illusion. If you want to use different services, you have to pay more RIGHT NOW regardless of who your ISP is. Let me explain. Net neutrality is a concept stating something similar to the following. Your ISP gets bought out by Microsoft. Suddenly, you as a consumer on the "Cheap" internet tier can no longer perform web searches on Google without experience long page loads. Your searches on Microsoft Live are fast as lightning, but you don't like the results. You call your ISP and tell them that you can't access Google properly, and they tell you there's no problem with their "Cheap" service, it's that the cheap service has a Microsoft "Preferred Portal." If you would like to use other "Internet Portals," you have to switch to their "Unlimited Tier," and pay $20 more per month for your "Unlimited" internet access.
If you're like most nerds, and have even a decent understanding of how the internet works, you know that this is a scam in the making. You, of course, are paying for bandwidth and IPv4 connectivity out to the rest of the internet, not "Microsoft Direct Connection Service plus Internet."
Some people don't realize that Net Neutrality doesn't even exist today. Try this: If you have email at, say, your office and you host it on your own domain, Telnet into port 25 on your email server. No response? That's because your ISP is filtering you RIGHT NOW. You can't send packets out on or receive them in on a variety of ports, notably 21, 25, and 80. I figured that there must be filters up on my connection because most consumers don't require service on them, and on Joe Sixpack's connection, it's more secure that way. So I called my ISP and asked them to remove the blocks so that I could test my email server at work, set up a personal FTP, and, god forbid, accept Email. I argued with them for two hours, during which they told me, several times, that I could get Business Class cable internet service (sound anything like the "Unlimited Tier" I mentioned above?) to alleviate my problem, and that the port filtering was in place to protect my ISP's subscribers from viruses and so on. I told them I didn't need that "protection" and would like it removed. They eventually forwarded me to a department that didn't give a shit.
My point is, we all get the idea, but how far fetched is the difference from paying extra for the ability to send and receive SMTP traffic, paying extra to send/receive HTTPS traffic, and, of course, the coup de gras, paying extra to access Google or Yahoo!
Time Warner thinks they can convince the American consumer that they should pay extra to access Google the same way they pay extra to watch HBO or Showtime... The same way we have to pay extra to send and receive SMTP traffic. This isn't the way it is now, and it's not the way it should be.
I've been buying quality RAM for like a decade now, paying attention to timings and bandwidth and so on, but when it comes to RAM, I have to admit that in all my gaming experience (which is extensive enough), I have seen *tangible* benefits from increasing memory bandwidth (by switching dual channel mode on/off), but I have never been able to establish a *tangible* benefit or detriment to my general computing or gaming by tightening or loosening my RAM timings.
I understand the technical details on what latencies effectively do and how they work, but I still have never seen scientific, real world results.
It is awkward to hold.
It is awkward to talk into/listen to.
It too big/bulky compared to the better phones out there. ...
It is overpriced.
It has a shitty contract.
Fixed that to make it sound more like you just described my Blackberry 8830. However, unlike an iPhone owner, I was attracted to the Blackberry because of the convergence it offered me. I've had the device for two months now and I'm about an order of magnitude more organized than I was before I got it. Of course, that doesn't mean that everyone in the world is going to be attracted to my phone's sleek features... Er, I mean Exchange integration, but that one feature alone makes it better than any other phone I've ever used. Including the iPhone.
It's about market and desire. Some people will never see that. And Steve Jobs will keep getting richer because he can.
At least, unlike other desktop environments, I actually know when a file is going to be copied or moved, and I am not going to go somewhere in a hurry with my USB flash disk only to find that I've only made a bloody shortcut to the file that is about fifty miles away. It happens.
Windows indicates the action by placing a visual cue in the bottom right corner of the icon that is being dragged.
OSX does the same with a very large, green colored cue.
And of course, if you're too dumb to realize this after all this time, you could always read the documentation, or try something new, like right click and drag.
If they found a way to do this with two projectors, though, you'd probably be able to avoid even that (though alignment/convergence issues would be a bitch).
Johnny Lee, who is actually mentioned in a post further down, did this already using low cost projectors and surfaces.
All you did was enable the defective parts. And then it blew. No surprise there.
That reminds me too, of when I read up on Phenom. AMD is supposed to be selling tri-core chips, and I read their reason for doing so is that given four cores/die, the likelihood of a faulty core is high enough that they take ones with a single faulty core, disable it, and sell it as a tri-core model.
Imagine someone trying to unlock *that* faulty hardware.
A friend of mine was running an XP computer with 512 of ram. He couldn't play Warcraft III [..]
After I gutted his computer [..] was he able to play the game acceptably and not get screwed by alt-tabbing. If he can afford to play WOW...
Of course, if you weren't charging him for your time (or you consider your time worth nothing) He doesn't play WOW, it's Warcraft III as per the quote... I don't know what your personal policy is, but for my best and closest friends, I don't charge them anything to fix their computers. I also don't give them a timeline or any reasonable expectations either. I fix it when I get to it. That said, the reason I fixed his the way I did was because I was sick of him lagging out of my WC3 games:P.
Furthermore, at the time, he was unemployed, so he couldn't afford 512 more of RAM or a new computer, for that matter. All told, the modifications took about an hour.
Joe Sixpack benefits from a computer that runs faster, swaps less, and has a shorter boot time. In fact, I'd wager that he gets more benefit from memory than the typical/. user's second box. A friend of mine was running an XP computer with 512 of ram. He couldn't play Warcraft III at acceptable frame rates or resolution, and if he hit the windows key on accident, he would be dropped from the game because his computer couldn't swap data fast enough to get him back to his desktop within the 45 seconds that the game gives you to start responding again.
After I gutted his computer from all excess hardware (modem, spare NIC, etc.), turned off almost every service that wasn't required to boot the computer, and repartitioned his hard disk, was he able to play the game acceptably and not get screwed by alt-tabbing.
So, in short, I agree with you based on experience with "Joe six pack's" computer, and the GP is nuts.
I love it when someone from Arizona tells me that solar power is going to solve all my power problems here in northern New Hampshire.
When everyone in Arizona gets solar power (and feeds the excess back to the grid) there will be
more energy total avaliable that you get get from the grid. If I were an electrician I'd calculate it, but do you have any idea how inefficient it would be to power New Hampshire with electricity generated in Arizona? You lose a considerable amount of voltage over just 1000 feet. It's nigh over 10 million feet from AZ to NH.
I bought a Konica-Minolta 2400W color laser printer from my boss about a year ago. It sits on my desk and always prints when I tell it to. Yeah, some of the prints don't look that great because I need to replace the imaging drum (it was in an office and got put through hell), but even thought that "Error" light keeps flashing, all day and all night, it's more reliable than almost all of the other IT equipment in my home. Also, my boss wanted to get rid of it so badly that he included two full sets of color toner cartridges and about 4 or 5 B/W cartridges... The estimated life on them all together will outlast the replacement imaging drum, if I ever break down and buy it.
I got the thing for $80. I've spend more than 5 times that over the last 5 years on printers, ink, and god knows what else in the inkjet world.
Didn't Quake have an autoexec.bat file as a startup script? Quake 3, and I assume for 2 and 1, contained a file called "autoexec.cfg." I always thought it was aptly named, being a DOS veteran myself, because it contains game configs like default keybindings (e.g. bind w +move) and such that actually allow you to control the game in the first place, and it's always called during game startup. Very similar in function to the file that it is named after.
I'm one of two Mac users in my family. The other one is gay. And his boyfriend also uses a Mac. ...And they both have iPhones.
Those two also seem to think that setting a laptop on a desk means that it's a desktop, but I don't think that has anything to do with their sexual orientation.
Besides, it beats getting fucked by Windows every day. You see though, that's what I like about Windows. I know when Windows is fucking me. The only time I know I got fucked by my Mac was when I compared the machine to the check I wrote to buy it.
Companies have IT staffs for a reason. They make the computers work so that people can use them to complete tasks. It is not the responsibility of a worker to know or understand how to encrypt data. That is the responsibility of IT. IT secures the data and presents it to workers in a usable yet secure fashion. Therefore, if data is not secure, it is the fault of IT, not the worker that uses the equipment. Furthermore, because IT departments are usually run by a CTO/CIO, it is most directly the responsibility of that particular person to have secured laptops.
People want to point blame at various different scapegoats every time a laptop with confidential data is stolen when it's a useless argument. For example: San Francisco SSA Worker's laptop stolen? Data compromised? Fire (and charge) the San Francisco SSA's CTO. It's his department, his approval, his provisioned equipment, his fault. Laptop thefts are an eventuality. Not an outliar.
Would it not seem a bit more clever to actually punish those who actually LOSE the data?
No, it wouldn't. If I start working for the U.S. government in, say, the IRS, and I am provisioned a laptop, the machine is my responsibility. The following are NOT my responsibility:
Password Complexity Requirements
Full Hard Disk Encryption
Data Stored on the HDD as Opposed to a VPN/Terminal Server
Data Stored on the HDD in the First Place
The previously listed items are the responsibility of the CTO or CIO of whatever business or organization that provisioned the laptop. In this case, if I were to lose the laptop that had been provisioned to me, it would be the IRS's fault, NOT mine for any resulting data breach. That doesn't change the fact that I should be severely reprimanded (or fired) for losing company/gov't property, but I should never have to be responsible for data security policies that I don't need to understand to do my job.
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Well you have a lot to choose from in the "more difficult to use" department. Might I suggest any version of Windows?
I'm going to have to call bullshit. Using Linux, I can't open up any of the screensavers I got from the Department of Defense, but they work great on Windows.
I agree with you completely though, if I *ever* decide to buy a console, it won't be attached to a DualShock at any point in its life. Ever tried playing Motorstorm? Most controllers with trigger style shoulder buttons have a concave design (like, i dunno, a trigger) that allows your fingers to fall naturally into place while holding the controller. There's nothing natural about the PS3 Sixaxis triggers. 10 minutes of squeezing one to accelerate in a racing game (and the subsequent soreness in your fingers causing them to constantly slip off of the convex trigger) is enough to make me want to throw the damn controller out the window.
=Obligatory Car Analogy=
If you had a car with 300Horsepower next to a car with 60Horsepower, what would you call the lesser car in a performance test?
Unfortunately in this day and age, saying one CPU is faster than another based on clock speed alone is like saying one human runs a race faster than another based on his height, "Well obviously the big guy's going to win! He's 20% taller than the short one!"
...And milk cartons... You know, still missing after all these years, they never did find that damned cow...McDonald's might. If you have a quality product, you don't need to nickel-and-dime your customers to keep them paying or leaving.
I see you have never had McDonald's flapjacks. Best microwaved pancakes. Evar.
I don't recall whether or not it actually does this during prime time, but if it does, it's on a much longer timer (probably like 3 or more hours instead of 45 minutes). I know it's an assumption to say that the box's behavior is due to the companies being "green" as it were, but you're probably right.
I do tend to watch TV later than the average person, because I work second shift, but again, my original point is that if the cable box knows what times you're in front of the TV based on remote use, and they *do* collect watching habits based on what channel you're tuned in to, why wouldn't they collect this information as well?
but they don't know if the TV set itself is turned on.
My cable box pulls this little trick after midnight or so, and says it'll turn itself off if I don't press any buttons on its universal remote (even if it's to adjust my receiver's volume). In essence, it correlates remote use to determine whether or not you're actually in front of the TV. While I adjust the volume rather frequently late at night, I do it with a separate remote, which makes the annoying "Going into Standby" message come up more often when I'm watching as opposed to the more common cable user with my type of box.
t is coup de grace, but otherwise, spot on.
Doh! Those phonics rules I learned as a child soooo don't apply to foreign words....
Americans are convinced because of decades of draconian usage charges from telcos and cable providers (don't we all love paying extra for "High Definition" service?) that every little aspect of a service that is enough to differentiate itself from others in presentation only, and in the terms of IPv4, think directly of the presentation layer of the OSI model, that they should pay more of it. ISP's wish to abuse the American Consumers' mindset of how services are billed, and furthermore, what actually constitutes service.
It's interesting you know... For cell phones, Caller ID and Text Messages operate in a very similar fashion.... But you'd throw a fit if AT&T charged you an extra 25 cents for each call you didn't answer because you saw who was calling, and of course, an extra 10 cents on top of that because the call didn't originate from their network...
May I suggest you go visit an abuse's desk of an ISP not filtering port 25 outbound before stating that it's blocked for the unique reason that they don't require it? Viruses on customers' computers don't need port 25, period. It's allowed for businesses because they usually have some kind of IT dealing with viruses, but at the ISP I worked for we could block these as well if abuse was reported, no matter the price of the connection.
My point is that ISP's unrelentingly filter port 25 traffic. Abuse or not. And in the case of my ISP, they claim it's for security.
First, let me say I support net neutrality.
Net neutrality is an illusion. If you want to use different services, you have to pay more RIGHT NOW regardless of who your ISP is. Let me explain. Net neutrality is a concept stating something similar to the following. Your ISP gets bought out by Microsoft. Suddenly, you as a consumer on the "Cheap" internet tier can no longer perform web searches on Google without experience long page loads. Your searches on Microsoft Live are fast as lightning, but you don't like the results. You call your ISP and tell them that you can't access Google properly, and they tell you there's no problem with their "Cheap" service, it's that the cheap service has a Microsoft "Preferred Portal." If you would like to use other "Internet Portals," you have to switch to their "Unlimited Tier," and pay $20 more per month for your "Unlimited" internet access.
If you're like most nerds, and have even a decent understanding of how the internet works, you know that this is a scam in the making. You, of course, are paying for bandwidth and IPv4 connectivity out to the rest of the internet, not "Microsoft Direct Connection Service plus Internet."
Some people don't realize that Net Neutrality doesn't even exist today. Try this: If you have email at, say, your office and you host it on your own domain, Telnet into port 25 on your email server. No response? That's because your ISP is filtering you RIGHT NOW. You can't send packets out on or receive them in on a variety of ports, notably 21, 25, and 80. I figured that there must be filters up on my connection because most consumers don't require service on them, and on Joe Sixpack's connection, it's more secure that way. So I called my ISP and asked them to remove the blocks so that I could test my email server at work, set up a personal FTP, and, god forbid, accept Email. I argued with them for two hours, during which they told me, several times, that I could get Business Class cable internet service (sound anything like the "Unlimited Tier" I mentioned above?) to alleviate my problem, and that the port filtering was in place to protect my ISP's subscribers from viruses and so on. I told them I didn't need that "protection" and would like it removed. They eventually forwarded me to a department that didn't give a shit.
My point is, we all get the idea, but how far fetched is the difference from paying extra for the ability to send and receive SMTP traffic, paying extra to send/receive HTTPS traffic, and, of course, the coup de gras, paying extra to access Google or Yahoo!
Time Warner thinks they can convince the American consumer that they should pay extra to access Google the same way they pay extra to watch HBO or Showtime... The same way we have to pay extra to send and receive SMTP traffic. This isn't the way it is now, and it's not the way it should be.
I've been buying quality RAM for like a decade now, paying attention to timings and bandwidth and so on, but when it comes to RAM, I have to admit that in all my gaming experience (which is extensive enough), I have seen *tangible* benefits from increasing memory bandwidth (by switching dual channel mode on/off), but I have never been able to establish a *tangible* benefit or detriment to my general computing or gaming by tightening or loosening my RAM timings.
I understand the technical details on what latencies effectively do and how they work, but I still have never seen scientific, real world results.
Know if there's any hard data on this?
It is awkward to talk into/listen to.
It too big/bulky compared to the better phones out there.
It is overpriced.
It has a shitty contract.
Fixed that to make it sound more like you just described my Blackberry 8830. However, unlike an iPhone owner, I was attracted to the Blackberry because of the convergence it offered me. I've had the device for two months now and I'm about an order of magnitude more organized than I was before I got it. Of course, that doesn't mean that everyone in the world is going to be attracted to my phone's sleek features... Er, I mean Exchange integration, but that one feature alone makes it better than any other phone I've ever used. Including the iPhone.
It's about market and desire. Some people will never see that. And Steve Jobs will keep getting richer because he can.
At least, unlike other desktop environments, I actually know when a file is going to be copied or moved, and I am not going to go somewhere in a hurry with my USB flash disk only to find that I've only made a bloody shortcut to the file that is about fifty miles away. It happens.
Windows indicates the action by placing a visual cue in the bottom right corner of the icon that is being dragged.
OSX does the same with a very large, green colored cue.
And of course, if you're too dumb to realize this after all this time, you could always read the documentation, or try something new, like right click and drag.
If they found a way to do this with two projectors, though, you'd probably be able to avoid even that (though alignment/convergence issues would be a bitch).
Johnny Lee, who is actually mentioned in a post further down, did this already using low cost projectors and surfaces.
Look at Automatic Projector Calibration on his website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/thesis/
For clarity, was that with one core disabled or *the defective* core disabled?
All you did was enable the defective parts. And then it blew. No surprise there.
That reminds me too, of when I read up on Phenom. AMD is supposed to be selling tri-core chips, and I read their reason for doing so is that given four cores/die, the likelihood of a faulty core is high enough that they take ones with a single faulty core, disable it, and sell it as a tri-core model.
Imagine someone trying to unlock *that* faulty hardware.
Furthermore, at the time, he was unemployed, so he couldn't afford 512 more of RAM or a new computer, for that matter. All told, the modifications took about an hour.
Joe Sixpack benefits from a computer that runs faster, swaps less, and has a shorter boot time. In fact, I'd wager that he gets more benefit from memory than the typical
After I gutted his computer from all excess hardware (modem, spare NIC, etc.), turned off almost every service that wasn't required to boot the computer, and repartitioned his hard disk, was he able to play the game acceptably and not get screwed by alt-tabbing.
So, in short, I agree with you based on experience with "Joe six pack's" computer, and the GP is nuts.
(Sorry for the youtube mashup, it's the audio that counts.)
When everyone in Arizona gets solar power (and feeds the excess back to the grid) there will be more energy total avaliable that you get get from the grid.
If I were an electrician I'd calculate it, but do you have any idea how inefficient it would be to power New Hampshire with electricity generated in Arizona? You lose a considerable amount of voltage over just 1000 feet. It's nigh over 10 million feet from AZ to NH.
I bought a Konica-Minolta 2400W color laser printer from my boss about a year ago. It sits on my desk and always prints when I tell it to. Yeah, some of the prints don't look that great because I need to replace the imaging drum (it was in an office and got put through hell), but even thought that "Error" light keeps flashing, all day and all night, it's more reliable than almost all of the other IT equipment in my home. Also, my boss wanted to get rid of it so badly that he included two full sets of color toner cartridges and about 4 or 5 B/W cartridges... The estimated life on them all together will outlast the replacement imaging drum, if I ever break down and buy it.
I got the thing for $80. I've spend more than 5 times that over the last 5 years on printers, ink, and god knows what else in the inkjet world.
The other one is gay.
And his boyfriend also uses a Mac.
...And they both have iPhones.
Those two also seem to think that setting a laptop on a desk means that it's a desktop, but I don't think that has anything to do with their sexual orientation.
Besides, it beats getting fucked by Windows every day. You see though, that's what I like about Windows. I know when Windows is fucking me. The only time I know I got fucked by my Mac was when I compared the machine to the check I wrote to buy it.
Companies have IT staffs for a reason. They make the computers work so that people can use them to complete tasks. It is not the responsibility of a worker to know or understand how to encrypt data. That is the responsibility of IT. IT secures the data and presents it to workers in a usable yet secure fashion. Therefore, if data is not secure, it is the fault of IT, not the worker that uses the equipment. Furthermore, because IT departments are usually run by a CTO/CIO, it is most directly the responsibility of that particular person to have secured laptops.
People want to point blame at various different scapegoats every time a laptop with confidential data is stolen when it's a useless argument. For example: San Francisco SSA Worker's laptop stolen? Data compromised? Fire (and charge) the San Francisco SSA's CTO. It's his department, his approval, his provisioned equipment, his fault. Laptop thefts are an eventuality. Not an outliar.
No, it wouldn't. If I start working for the U.S. government in, say, the IRS, and I am provisioned a laptop, the machine is my responsibility.
The following are NOT my responsibility:
The previously listed items are the responsibility of the CTO or CIO of whatever business or organization that provisioned the laptop. In this case, if I were to lose the laptop that had been provisioned to me, it would be the IRS's fault, NOT mine for any resulting data breach. That doesn't change the fact that I should be severely reprimanded (or fired) for losing company/gov't property, but I should never have to be responsible for data security policies that I don't need to understand to do my job.