I have decided to support Barack Obama for President! Check out my Obama blog here and join the movement! Unlike other candidates, Obama needs the support of each of us. He doesn’t accept donations from lobbyists or political action committees, and the campaign counts on grass roots efforts to get the word out. Finally, you can really make a difference in politics!
Advertisers pay big bucks to place their products on popular television shows, and one of the primary ways to rate said popularity is by use of the Nielson ratings. TiVo has a software flaw that prevents these ratings from being accurate.Nielson uses a method of sampling households to gain a representative figure without knowing exactly what every viewer in the country is watching. Here is how they explain their method:Nielsen TV families are a cross-section of households from all over the United States. We carefully draw our samples in a way that offers every American household with a television an equal chance of being selected.When TiVo customers select a program to record, they do so one of two ways – by recording that individual airing or by selecting to record all of that shows episodes using a “Season Pass”. The latter method is what causes the problem with...
Though I had spent time fiddling with an old Tandy and a Commodore 64, my first true personal computer was a Packard Bell 486 DX/2. This was apparently a very popular model (as seen in the picture to the left), as many people now look back on it with joy. Joy that they have moved on. That model was a nightmare – but it was my first. Many hours of Doom and Sim City 2000 were played. My first experience online using a 9,600 baud modem was had on this machine. It was the first machine I had to troubleshoot, which is pretty much how I’ve learned everything I know about technology. Unlike most customers, I’m grateful to Packard Bell for pushing such a dog of a machine on unsuspecting customers. Had it not been for the poor combination of hardware and software bundled with this machine I’m certain I wouldn’t be where I am today. The speakers, CD-ROM drive,...
(This is simply an extension of my Tabula Rasa review posted at IGN.com.)Tabula Rasa has been out for a whole month now, and a few days more that a month for those of us who pre-ordered. I have put around 170 hours into the game in the past five weeks (sadly, that’s about five hours per day on average), and I am now level 41 in the game. What this should tell you is that I know what I’m talking about, unlike most of the “professional” game reviewers who have given Tabula Rasa such high marks without even playing the game through to level 30.Anyone who has achieved level 30 or higher in Tabula Rasa can tell you that this game needs serious work, and should not have been released when it was. There are missions that can’t be completed, UI quarks, stability and lag issues, bugs galore and most importantly a serious lack of high level content.I discussed quite...
For the uninitiated, a BETA tester refers to a gamers who tests a game in its BETA stages, meaning before the game is officially released. Game developers release their titles early for expanded testing to work out bugs and help balance the games.BETA testers are an even split of whining children and hard core gamers. Some BETAs, like pretty much all first person shooters have a larger amount of the former. Strategy games tend to have a greater number of the latter. Still, in every BETA there are the idiots who say the one thing no BETA tester should ever utter:”This is just a BETA, why are you complaining?”I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read some variation of that line in forums. Gamers have it all wrong these days. When a developer releases a game for testing, they are doing so because they need the game tested by as many people as possible. By this time...
I sent myself a test E-Mail from a client to my Gmail account, which naturally simply said “text”. This triggered Google’s AdWords system to display an advertisement from a site called – wait for it – www.test.com. This site has created an ad, and is paying money for clicks for the keyword “test”. Amazing, ain’t it?
After much pain and suffering I’ve finally figured out why Windows Vista wouldn’t let me connect via Remote Desktop Connection (RDP) – dual monitors.I discovered this after hours of troubleshooting. At first when I tried to connect using RDP I would see the Welcome screen and then it would turn black. Some research pointed to Aero being the cause of this, but I had no way of disabling it remotely because I couldn’t access my computer! Then I remembered that I could use DameWare Mini Remote Control to remotely access my computer using the RDP protocol. Since DameWare uses the same protocol I still couldn’t control the computer, but after opening some ports on my firewall I was able to push the DameWare remote control client to the computer and use it to remote control the machine. Finally, I was able to disable Aero and try RDP again. I was able to see a...
I knew my grandma played a lot of Yahoo! Gin, but I simply had no idea how much.Here are the astonishing statistics as of now:Games Played: 21668Wins: 11071Losses: 10597Games Abandoned: 39The most fascinating item to me is the amount of games abandoned. That is less than 1% folks (0.17% to be exact). What fortitude! What dedication!I know where I got my gaming chops from.