Tell that to the Paris taxi who refused my wife and I, because he didn't want to go to the train station ("too close") despite being at the front of a taxi queue..
Similar incident happened to me in Madrid a few years ago. The driver was lucky my Spanish is terrible otherwise he would have gotten an earful. I was also pissed at my Spaniard wife for not giving him an earful for me. I would have loved the ability to call up an Uber right in front of that Taxi line. Too bad they are outlawed in Spain too.
It can get tricky if you go into the office and then to a client site and then home (or vice versa) but where I work they've got a pretty good system for figuring that all out.
For me this is not tricky at all. I will expense any miles that are greater than my normal daily commute. If my normal round-trip to my office and back home is 20 miles, I will expense any mileage that requires me to drive more than my normal 20 miles in a given day.
Eventually my Turkish labmate was able to get on to a Turkish news website and translate what was going on for us because you couldn't get to CNN or NBC or anybody. (Eventually the major American news services switched to a low bandwidth, text-only version of their sites). But yeah for a good two hours I was hunting around trying to figure out if we were under a combined real-world and cyber terror attack. In that case it was just that every news site was completely slammed with traffic, but I definitely wondered.
It didn't even occur to me to try and get any news from the Internet as I was watching the events unfold live on TV.
There are some smaller independent and mostly crowdfunded developers now that are at least claiming to try to cater to that style of play but so far there hasn't been much in that regard and at least one attempt, Pillars of Eternity, failed utterly in terms of the combat imo. It ended up playing more like Dragon Age: Origins or other modern Bioware games. Again, catering to what the majority of gamers like despite being funded by gamers like me who wanted something that played more like Icewind Dale or Baldurs Gate II.
Hmm, Pillars of Eternity is next on my list. I actually liked DA:O. I hadn't played a tactical combat RPG in years until that game. I'll eventually play DA:I once it gets to a bargain bin price.
I just picked up Divinity Original Sin in the Steam Summer Sale. This is my first Divinity game and it's very enjoyable so far. The graphics, art and sound are all excellent. There are some quirks I am getting used to and I'm still trying to learn/master the rule set as well. I like having "action points" that determine how far you can move, what type and how many abilities you can use in a given turn, etc. I've spent about 10 hours in game and have barely left the starting city/area. That said I'm taking things very slowly. It's worth a look if you haven't checked it out yet. I see it compared to Pillars of Eternity and Baldurs's Gate a lot. Definitely worth the $29.99 I picked it up for.
I think the excitement over finally getting a faster computer used to get me on a mental high that lasted through the assembly like a kid waiting for Christmas presents, but these days I just want to get it over with and the damn thing to work. I only do it because it's the only way to get the components I want, looked it over now and still can't find a PC builder that'll give me this GTX 970 SLI setup. I.
I'm in a similar boat. I'm even willing to pay a 30% upcharge for someone else to build it if I could get the exact components I want, but can't find a shop that will do that. I suppose I could buy everything myself and take it to a local shop for a "professional" build, but if I already have the components in hand I'll just do it myself.
Agreed. My philosophy is if you don't leave a VM, your reason for calling is not very important and I will not call you back. This goes for work and personal calls.
I downloaded the HP-3000 VM for VMWare about 6 months ago to check it out. It seems to work pretty much as expected. It really brought back some memories.
We did the same thing. Unfortunately the performance was terrible and roughly 25% of what was required. I hate having this legacy crap in our DC, but would have felt a little better if it could have been virtualized to at least mitigate hardware issues going forward.
I'd be curious to see the statistics of perceived OS Decay between installs on mechanical drives vs SSDs. I would always reload my system every 12-18 months on XP and then Win7. I don't think I reloaded Win7 again after I got my first SSD for my boot drive. I also did a clean install of Win 8.1 on an SSD, but it's only been 2 months so far.
It just seems odd that someone would wait for the fuel to (presumably) run out. Why not just immediately dump the plane into the ground/ocean/etc whenever said parties took control of the craft?
It seems like the only items Microcenter has superior pricing on is Intel CPUs for whatever reason (at least in Georgia). I bought my first computer from them over 20 years ago (386DX), but not much since. Newegg has proven to be a more reliable and less expensive source of computer parts over the years although they only have an online presence. Frys pissed me off several years ago by not honoring their online prices (when they were outpost.com) at the brick and mortar stores.
So Amazon is the same price or cheaper with faster shipping. Sure, the shipping may be built-in to the prime price, but I don't care if it matches the competitors.
Hmm. Unless you are ordering a lot from Amazon, I don't see how the $79 annual fee for prime is worth free (2 day) shipping. Typically I get most items in less than 5 day from them anyway. I've also been very lucky with NewEgg since they opened a warehouse in Tennessee. I live in Georgia and on several occasions I've gotten my order next day, although 2 day is more typical.
Don't get me wrong, my Touchpad is a great unit (especially for $99 and still working great after nearly 2 years), but I'm getting to the point I'd like a more powerful/lighter/thinner/longer battery life/accessories/etc tablet. I had no intention of buying a tablet (it was my first), but at that price it was worth the risk to see if a tablet would be a good fit for me.
I looked long and hard at the Nexus 10, but the recharge issue has really turned me off. I've read a ton of great things about the Nexus 7, but I'm not sure if I would be satisfied with a smaller screen. That being said, I have no problem waiting until the end of this year or even next year to finally get a new unit, especially if I'm going to drop $500 or more and I have a perfectly suitable unit right now.
Bring on a super cheap Surface and I might take a chance on Microsoft too.
A vita (playstation portable) or an DS *never* fitted in pocket, the playstation portable is 7":). The fit in pocket myth something Apple users have to justify screen envy.
No, the purpose for limiting screen sizes on the iPhone is it's too (*#&@%^ hard to use a 5" screen single-handledly. If you're looking up some information on your phone while your other hand is busy (holding a cup of coffee, an umbrella, your shopping, whatever), being able to reach the entire screen with your thumb might be useful. Perhaps to look up directions or whatever. Or to send a quick text.
This is absolutely true. I took this for granted when I picked up a Galaxy S3 for my personal phone. My work issued phone is an iPhone 4s and I find I use it much more often simply because its size. I prefer Android over IOS, but the S3 rarely get used unless I am at my desk or sitting on my couch for example. When I'm on the go (which seems more often than not) I am using the iPhone. My next Droid will be more of a "single-handed" form factor.
My wife isn't much of a gamer (aside from a few of the IOS variety), but she took interest in the New Super Mario Brothers on the Wii a few years ago and has also enjoyed it on the Wii U, which has a few extra features to involve a 2nd person if you aren't playing in full co-op mode. She also starting getting into Mario Galaxy 2 as long as I was around to help her through some of the more challenging levels/bosses. About the only other game she showed any interest in was Plants vs. Zombies, which she has played on both the iPad and PC.
Something else you might want to consider (if you haven't already) are board games. We got a few that we could play as a family, focused around games my 6 year old could play and surprisingly the wife really enjoyed Castle Panic. I think she likes the co-op and strategy/thinking aspects of it. She didn't care for Castle Keep and we haven't had a chance to break out Catan: Junior yet. You'll have more variety to choose from since you aren't looking for something that a young child grasp. I went this route as I was tired of playing Monopoly, Sorry, etc, "classic" board games.
Wow, I don't remember anything about this news. Coincidentally I've just started having GPU issues with my 4 year old laptop (Asus) with a 9800M GS last week. I just chalked to up to it being beaten to hell in general (used it for business travel for a few years) and then my kid abusing it and finally putting the nail in the coffin playing a lot of Minecraft during his time off for the holidays. It lasted a lot longer the Dell I had in 2006 with a 7900 GS (I think that was it).I even had the video card replaced once under warranty. Guess that's what I get for going Dell.
Seriously...I guess maybe this would have affected access to save games and settings for some people briefly? I was actively playing games and didn't even notice till I saw this story.
Nope. If it can't connect after being connected, it'll revert to stand-alone mode for 90 days. There are ways to force it to go into stand-alone mode all the time but you can google them. Saves are stored locally, and cloud saves are cached locally until it can connect. Settings the same deal.
This is a complete non-story.
I wouldn't say it's a complete non-story. I was affected for I guess about an hour trying to figure out WTF was wrong with Steam and/or my new Fallout NV DVD.
After installing Fallout NV from a physical DVD, activating on Steam and even pulling down the latest updates I could not launch the game. Fallout started up to the launch screen, but only gave me an option to Install (which I had just done, wtf?). Other Steam games wouldn't launch either, so I proceed to go down the trouble shooting rabbit-hole - blowing away blob files, re-installing client, rebooting, etc. Everything about Steam worked (websites, client installing/updating, etc) except for actually launching the client to login/play a game. None of the sites that track Steam uptime seemed to indicated any issues. Nothing on Steam Twitter feeds either.
Looked at my kid's PC (which already had the Steam client running) and launched games without issue. Logged out and then could not log back in. Verified it wasn't my Internet (hopped on neighbors wi-fi, different ISP), etc etc. Finally decided it was truly a Steam server side issue instead of something I had done on my PC. Just bad timing with my new game install apparently.
TL;DR
Steam had issues that affected me. Was annoying. I could have gone through the hoops to get offline mode going (there was no revert to offline mode as you suggested), but instead went back downstairs and worked on some x-mas stuff with my kid instead of taking the break I wanted to at the time. Checked back in an hour or so later and all was good again.
Not my custom, but yes, been outside of my country a lot (relatively speaking of course). Whether or not most of Europe practices that custom is irrelevant. The fact that some parts of Europe do eat late dinners prove that "10:30pm is hardly dinnertime for a normal person." is a stupid and incorrect statement. I realize you are most likely not the same AC, but whatever.
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Tell that to the Paris taxi who refused my wife and I, because he didn't want to go to the train station ("too close") despite being at the front of a taxi queue. .
Similar incident happened to me in Madrid a few years ago. The driver was lucky my Spanish is terrible otherwise he would have gotten an earful. I was also pissed at my Spaniard wife for not giving him an earful for me. I would have loved the ability to call up an Uber right in front of that Taxi line. Too bad they are outlawed in Spain too.
And now I have wasted an hour and a half of my life. Jackwagon....
It can get tricky if you go into the office and then to a client site and then home (or vice versa) but where I work they've got a pretty good system for figuring that all out.
For me this is not tricky at all. I will expense any miles that are greater than my normal daily commute. If my normal round-trip to my office and back home is 20 miles, I will expense any mileage that requires me to drive more than my normal 20 miles in a given day.
Eventually my Turkish labmate was able to get on to a Turkish news website and translate what was going on for us because you couldn't get to CNN or NBC or anybody. (Eventually the major American news services switched to a low bandwidth, text-only version of their sites). But yeah for a good two hours I was hunting around trying to figure out if we were under a combined real-world and cyber terror attack. In that case it was just that every news site was completely slammed with traffic, but I definitely wondered.
It didn't even occur to me to try and get any news from the Internet as I was watching the events unfold live on TV.
There are some smaller independent and mostly crowdfunded developers now that are at least claiming to try to cater to that style of play but so far there hasn't been much in that regard and at least one attempt, Pillars of Eternity, failed utterly in terms of the combat imo. It ended up playing more like Dragon Age: Origins or other modern Bioware games. Again, catering to what the majority of gamers like despite being funded by gamers like me who wanted something that played more like Icewind Dale or Baldurs Gate II.
Hmm, Pillars of Eternity is next on my list. I actually liked DA:O. I hadn't played a tactical combat RPG in years until that game. I'll eventually play DA:I once it gets to a bargain bin price.
I just picked up Divinity Original Sin in the Steam Summer Sale. This is my first Divinity game and it's very enjoyable so far. The graphics, art and sound are all excellent. There are some quirks I am getting used to and I'm still trying to learn/master the rule set as well. I like having "action points" that determine how far you can move, what type and how many abilities you can use in a given turn, etc. I've spent about 10 hours in game and have barely left the starting city/area. That said I'm taking things very slowly. It's worth a look if you haven't checked it out yet. I see it compared to Pillars of Eternity and Baldurs's Gate a lot. Definitely worth the $29.99 I picked it up for.
I think the excitement over finally getting a faster computer used to get me on a mental high that lasted through the assembly like a kid waiting for Christmas presents, but these days I just want to get it over with and the damn thing to work. I only do it because it's the only way to get the components I want, looked it over now and still can't find a PC builder that'll give me this GTX 970 SLI setup. I.
I'm in a similar boat. I'm even willing to pay a 30% upcharge for someone else to build it if I could get the exact components I want, but can't find a shop that will do that. I suppose I could buy everything myself and take it to a local shop for a "professional" build, but if I already have the components in hand I'll just do it myself.
Agreed. My philosophy is if you don't leave a VM, your reason for calling is not very important and I will not call you back. This goes for work and personal calls.
I downloaded the HP-3000 VM for VMWare about 6 months ago to check it out. It seems to work pretty much as expected. It really brought back some memories.
We did the same thing. Unfortunately the performance was terrible and roughly 25% of what was required. I hate having this legacy crap in our DC, but would have felt a little better if it could have been virtualized to at least mitigate hardware issues going forward.
I'd be curious to see the statistics of perceived OS Decay between installs on mechanical drives vs SSDs. I would always reload my system every 12-18 months on XP and then Win7. I don't think I reloaded Win7 again after I got my first SSD for my boot drive. I also did a clean install of Win 8.1 on an SSD, but it's only been 2 months so far.
Leech ZMODEM. :-)
Cisco and their UCS Blade systems would disagree with you.
It just seems odd that someone would wait for the fuel to (presumably) run out. Why not just immediately dump the plane into the ground/ocean/etc whenever said parties took control of the craft?
It seems like the only items Microcenter has superior pricing on is Intel CPUs for whatever reason (at least in Georgia). I bought my first computer from them over 20 years ago (386DX), but not much since. Newegg has proven to be a more reliable and less expensive source of computer parts over the years although they only have an online presence. Frys pissed me off several years ago by not honoring their online prices (when they were outpost.com) at the brick and mortar stores.
I only buy from Microcenter and Frys when they have a sale. Their non-sale pricing is pretty terrible at best (minus the junk in the "bargain bins")
So Amazon is the same price or cheaper with faster shipping. Sure, the shipping may be built-in to the prime price, but I don't care if it matches the competitors.
Hmm. Unless you are ordering a lot from Amazon, I don't see how the $79 annual fee for prime is worth free (2 day) shipping. Typically I get most items in less than 5 day from them anyway. I've also been very lucky with NewEgg since they opened a warehouse in Tennessee. I live in Georgia and on several occasions I've gotten my order next day, although 2 day is more typical.
Don't get me wrong, my Touchpad is a great unit (especially for $99 and still working great after nearly 2 years), but I'm getting to the point I'd like a more powerful/lighter/thinner/longer battery life/accessories/etc tablet. I had no intention of buying a tablet (it was my first), but at that price it was worth the risk to see if a tablet would be a good fit for me.
I looked long and hard at the Nexus 10, but the recharge issue has really turned me off. I've read a ton of great things about the Nexus 7, but I'm not sure if I would be satisfied with a smaller screen. That being said, I have no problem waiting until the end of this year or even next year to finally get a new unit, especially if I'm going to drop $500 or more and I have a perfectly suitable unit right now.
Bring on a super cheap Surface and I might take a chance on Microsoft too.
I would jump all over that. I'm about ready to retire my fire sale purchased Touchpad.
No, the purpose for limiting screen sizes on the iPhone is it's too (*#&@%^ hard to use a 5" screen single-handledly. If you're looking up some information on your phone while your other hand is busy (holding a cup of coffee, an umbrella, your shopping, whatever), being able to reach the entire screen with your thumb might be useful. Perhaps to look up directions or whatever. Or to send a quick text.
This is absolutely true. I took this for granted when I picked up a Galaxy S3 for my personal phone. My work issued phone is an iPhone 4s and I find I use it much more often simply because its size. I prefer Android over IOS, but the S3 rarely get used unless I am at my desk or sitting on my couch for example. When I'm on the go (which seems more often than not) I am using the iPhone. My next Droid will be more of a "single-handed" form factor.
I believe he said he has 3 kids under the age of three, the effort has surely been made already!
My wife isn't much of a gamer (aside from a few of the IOS variety), but she took interest in the New Super Mario Brothers on the Wii a few years ago and has also enjoyed it on the Wii U, which has a few extra features to involve a 2nd person if you aren't playing in full co-op mode. She also starting getting into Mario Galaxy 2 as long as I was around to help her through some of the more challenging levels/bosses. About the only other game she showed any interest in was Plants vs. Zombies, which she has played on both the iPad and PC.
Something else you might want to consider (if you haven't already) are board games. We got a few that we could play as a family, focused around games my 6 year old could play and surprisingly the wife really enjoyed Castle Panic. I think she likes the co-op and strategy/thinking aspects of it. She didn't care for Castle Keep and we haven't had a chance to break out Catan: Junior yet. You'll have more variety to choose from since you aren't looking for something that a young child grasp. I went this route as I was tired of playing Monopoly, Sorry, etc, "classic" board games.
Wow, I don't remember anything about this news. Coincidentally I've just started having GPU issues with my 4 year old laptop (Asus) with a 9800M GS last week. I just chalked to up to it being beaten to hell in general (used it for business travel for a few years) and then my kid abusing it and finally putting the nail in the coffin playing a lot of Minecraft during his time off for the holidays. It lasted a lot longer the Dell I had in 2006 with a 7900 GS (I think that was it).I even had the video card replaced once under warranty. Guess that's what I get for going Dell.
Seriously...I guess maybe this would have affected access to save games and settings for some people briefly? I was actively playing games and didn't even notice till I saw this story.
Nope. If it can't connect after being connected, it'll revert to stand-alone mode for 90 days. There are ways to force it to go into stand-alone mode all the time but you can google them. Saves are stored locally, and cloud saves are cached locally until it can connect. Settings the same deal.
This is a complete non-story.
I wouldn't say it's a complete non-story. I was affected for I guess about an hour trying to figure out WTF was wrong with Steam and/or my new Fallout NV DVD.
After installing Fallout NV from a physical DVD, activating on Steam and even pulling down the latest updates I could not launch the game. Fallout started up to the launch screen, but only gave me an option to Install (which I had just done, wtf?). Other Steam games wouldn't launch either, so I proceed to go down the trouble shooting rabbit-hole - blowing away blob files, re-installing client, rebooting, etc. Everything about Steam worked (websites, client installing/updating, etc) except for actually launching the client to login/play a game. None of the sites that track Steam uptime seemed to indicated any issues. Nothing on Steam Twitter feeds either.
Looked at my kid's PC (which already had the Steam client running) and launched games without issue. Logged out and then could not log back in. Verified it wasn't my Internet (hopped on neighbors wi-fi, different ISP), etc etc. Finally decided it was truly a Steam server side issue instead of something I had done on my PC. Just bad timing with my new game install apparently.
TL;DR
Steam had issues that affected me. Was annoying. I could have gone through the hoops to get offline mode going (there was no revert to offline mode as you suggested), but instead went back downstairs and worked on some x-mas stuff with my kid instead of taking the break I wanted to at the time. Checked back in an hour or so later and all was good again.
Not my custom, but yes, been outside of my country a lot (relatively speaking of course). Whether or not most of Europe practices that custom is irrelevant. The fact that some parts of Europe do eat late dinners prove that "10:30pm is hardly dinnertime for a normal person." is a stupid and incorrect statement. I realize you are most likely not the same AC, but whatever.
Umm. Been to Europe much? A late dinner is very common, especially in the summer.
And now I need to find my copy of Quake and crank it up again. Ahh, the memories....