Posts by nobby

weather

I assume they don't get the levels of rain we do here in Blighty.

Whilst I think a good breeze off the Teardrop Lakes would be good for cooling, I'm not sure that the high level of... well.. "bloody water falling from the sky in sheets" would be that good for our servers.

Maximise

I think that a lot of the problems people have with this fixed-width register is the over use (or indeed over implementation) of the Maximise function.

I mean, in this world of multi-thousand pixel-wide screen, why would you need *one* application to take up the whole screen?

Ah you say "how about TV, surely I want that to be the whole screen"

Yes, I agree, there are *some* applications that benefit from being big an all over your screen at one go, but its not something you need *as standard* on *everything*

I've got a simple 1650 wide screen here. I'm running about 12 applications dotted around. Because of he fact that one of them has maximised I have to use that bloody annoying bar at the bottom of the screen to see what's open. I suppose I could put that bar up the *top* of the screen but that's not helping matters.

I mean, if you've got notepad open, surely you need some other application open too (even if its another notepad) so you can check what you're hacking?

One problem with maximise is its use by... lets call them "average users".

How many times have you gone over to a user's desk and seen that they have 45 outlook windows open? The "average user" forgets something as soon as its hidden from them, and with maximised windows *everything* gets hidden from them as soon as they open the Next Thing. Hell; explaining its quicker to close-things-you-go gets a bit tired after the first few times with each user...

Lets get rid of the maximise button, or make its function be a "change window to 80% of the screen" and, for those few application that have a need to be played full screen (games, pr0n) give them the option. Hold on, when playing the MMOs I always have the game in a window too so that I can surf whilst mining.. (In fact, how stupid do many older games look that should be 640x480 when scaled up to 1650x1080!) And when watching TV I've often surfed to the shows's website (or run the FIA Live Timing App) at the same time... Maybe there just is *no need*for the maximise button at all!

Hold on, I've a better idea. Lets just include a force-feedback option on the maximise button, when you click it an electric shock is fed back into your mouse; that'll stop people using it!

@Mike

you know. i was thinking of a reply, but then i saw a sign that said "dont feed the troll."

So i put my sandwiches back in my bag and walked away.

@Vista Haters

Ah.. so the two machines I bought last year for me and the missus to play games on should run vista fine with no problems?

like *gentle caress* they do.

i'd love the spritelyness of my old XP machine(*), i'd love the speed of the Fedora machine we used to use as a file sharer.

Hell i'd love the two new machine to admit the other machines existed on the network!

Vista is shite. Shite on old boxes and shite on new boxes.

Accept it. If you dont use your machine for much it might like you. But copying files over a network, nah. Stable desktop, nah.

Sometimes I feel like looking in the garage for my ZX Spectrum (48k upgraded from 16k manually) and seeing if it'll still work, then see if i think that Computing has got Better or just Prettier(**)

(*) bought from Tiny in 1999 as a win98se machine; four motherboards later the only piece left of the original machine was the floppy drive (which refused to work but i kept it in for keepsake) and the oem message on the windows screen (Which survived the upgrade to xp home, then xp pro); just finally got too flaky to continue even after clean installs. yes it was likely my own fault but installing vista on it trashed it due to the 18monthold motherboard not having drivers even though the vista-compatiblity check came two thumbs up.

(**) sarcasm included at no extra cost

re: "'Man-made' global warming is in fact a LIE!! "

wonder why this was posted as AC? I'm sure if the gentleman or lady had something to back this up the person may have felt inclined to add their name to the matter..

oh yes, you can't hide, George, we know its you!

Asus EEE PC

We assume that the person using the Asus EEE PC in this nefarious way was the young lady on the beach?

county-wide sales tax levies?

for lordie's sake america, just dump the crap idea of every man woman and child inventing his own tax-rate for his own fiefdom and have a single country-wide level - the amount of administrative costs you'd save would be tremendous.

hey! you could even print price tags that showed people the amount things cost (including tax) because it would be the same over the whole country!

*then* you wouldn't have tax discrepancies between states and ever online store would charge the same price to all its customers. Wow. that sounds really simple to manage.

oh well. shows i'm not an accountant eh?

space shuttle secrets?

the space shuttle has secrets?

its a thirty-year old design built by the lowest bidder. if i were a country trying to build something spaceworthy i (sharp-intake-of-breath) wouldn't start from 'ere...

Sleep State.

re: "Windows Vista promotes the use of sleep as the default off state"

It may be me.. but i seem to have an issue with "Sleep". If my vista pc ever goes to sleep. i seem to be unable to wake it up. I have tried every button on the pc. every button on the keyboard. every button (all two-and-a-half of them) on my mouse.

i resorted to pulling the power plug out.

This isn't just on my machine - the missus had the same issue "why wont my machine power on"

So far, "Sleep" seems a little "Big Sleep" to me.

These are machines bought with vista pre-installed (poor me, i know..) as i failed to find any of my other 4 machines that i could install vista on (anyone wanna buy a box set of Vista Pro Upgrade?)

i had a really really good idea

then i remembered that the "i feel lucky" button is a waste of screen space and no one older than seven uses it.

beta or vhs?

but sony lost that one....