Draginol

Multiplayer gaming is still tedious in PC Gaming JoeUser Forums

We played Rise of Nations this evening here on the LAN. Even with ideal conditions, multiplayer strategy games are almost more effort than they're worth. I think age is a major factor here. When I was in my 20s, I burned thousands of hours mucking around trying to get Total Annihilation or Warcraft 2 or C&C or whatever games going. But now at 32, I seem to have a lot less time or at least patience to throw away 20%+ of the "game day" due to various problems in multiplayer. Whether th

Is Spam actually getting worse? in Personal Computing JoeUser Forums

Some months ago I started using some spam filters. My favorite has been SpamPal. Our mail server also has its own spam filter on there. They worked reasonably well. About 90% of the spam was caught by them. Which for me was significant because each day I get around 500 to 600 email of which around 300 to 400 is spam. Going through 600 email to find the 200 legitimate email was a major pain. It's still quite a pain even with the filters. But in the past month, more and more spam has b

Reply to m_BadDayForTheHungarians = this->BWAAAHAHA in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Well the question really comes down to whether it's more readable to have something like this->bMarked is more readable or whether m_bMarked is more readable. I think this->bMarked is more readable, you prefer m_bMarked is. At that point, you essentially have a draw. What breaks the tie is the legacy code involved which uses this->bMarked. ;)

Getting your own blog here at JoeUser.com status report in Blogging JoeUser Forums

The new JoeUser.com system is still very new. There are still zillions of little buglets we're working through. Just today we fixed a problem with printing of articles as well as enhancing and then fixing the email article feature. There's still a lot of work to be done so please bear with us. But coming in a few weeks, people who create accounts (or already have accounts) will have the option of having their own blog. It'll be free to have your own blog here. And your blog won't be so

Iraq: Just one stop in the war on terror in Politics JoeUser Forums

Right now there's a lot of people who seem to think that because we haven't found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is a major problem for the US. In fact, it's not. In the bigger picture, WMD was just a low hanging fruit excuse to do what needed to be done in Iraq. Those same people seem to forget that there were a lot of other low hanging fruit reasons to invade Iraq. One of the most obvious is, if he didn't have WMD, then Saddam was a fool to flout the UN resolutions and m

Reply to Should making Europe like us be a campaign issue? in Politics JoeUser Forums

With regards to France and Italy and WW 2 statistics. I've been trying to find the book that had the deaths broken up as to which side they were on when the death occurred. France lost 250,000 troops in WW2 total, Italy lost 330,000. But none of the net resources I've found break it up. I've always wondered where those statistics for France come from in the sense that they only fought at a nation on the side of the allies (and I mean actually fought) for about 6 weeks in the summer of 1940. For

Should making Europe like us be a campaign issue? in Politics JoeUser Forums

In American politics, presidential candidates like Howard Dean stress the need of getting other countries to like us "again". Do you think that French candidates sweat whether the United States likes France? In fact, the United States has a 200+ year obsession with wanting other countries to like us or to accept us. The upper crusts of the American life have traditionally felt scorn and embarrassment at the "crass" culture of the United States. In the United States, the midd

Mars is as close as it's going to get in Pure Technology JoeUser Forums

This was taken with the Hubble space telescope. As I mentioned last week , I bought the $300 ETX-70 hoping to see Mars up close. Anyone who is vaguely familiar with astronomy is probably laughing at the "typical newbie" naiveté when it comes to astronomy. The ETX-70 is a 2 inch or so telesco

Reply to Adventures in texture land. in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Pretty cool. One suggestion - better headlines. ;)

Hard Drive Crash in Personal Computing JoeUser Forums

I am notoriously bad about backing up my computer. And my main home machine went down this past week. The hard drive actually physically died. The motor went out or something. It's the machine that had all the baby pictures on it. Every picture that we had taken of our 2 children since they were born were on that computer. And the hard drive was dead. Luckily, I had been making backups thanks to those new portable USB drives that you can get at Best Buy or whatever, there's r

WindowBlinds Review in USA Today in Personal Computing JoeUser Forums

USA Today reviewed WindowBlinds 4 and it definitely made my day. Reviews usually make me cringe. That's because often times, when you're a small company, the reviewer cranks through the product in 10 minutes and whips up a review. Even when the review is favorable, it's often full of errors. But USA Today really nailed it. It was true vindication. You see, the problem with t

Reply to When crime isn't counted as a crime in Current Events JoeUser Forums

I'm not linking debt and crime here. The problem is that there are busineses that seem to operate on the principle of trying to screw other companies out of money. It's people exploiting the system. And to me, it's a pretty fine line between the guy stealing a candy bar from the store and the guy stealing a truckloda of candybars from the guy makin gthem.

When crime isn't counted as a crime in Current Events JoeUser Forums

Steven Den Beste, who I've known since "the OS/2 days" took a short sebatical to gather his thoughts and has retu

Rising Stars in Movies & TV & Books JoeUser Forums

My diabolical friend Norm lent me a series of comics called "Rising Stars". It's created by the same guy who made Babylon 5. On the NGs, we always refer to him as JMS. It's a fantastic series of comic books. In a nutshell, what happens is that in a small Illinois town, a flash of light occurs one evening. All the women in that town who were pregnant at the time (around 11

Securing the desktop right out of existence in Software Development JoeUser Forums

Stardock's Chief Technologist has taken a close look at Microsoft's early concept for their secure PC initiative (NGSCB for Next Generation Secure Computing Base). You can read the full article here . Currently, third parties can extend Windows by having their program create a hook into the OS. Hooks come in many forms (system

Why does Disney always kill off mom? in Movies & TV & Books JoeUser Forums

My wife and I saw "Finding Nemo". Early on, the mother fish dies. This isn't a spoiler as the more we thought about it, the more we realize that mothers are pretty disposable in Disney films. Let's take a look: Move Fate of Mother Finding Nemo Mother dies in movie Aladdin Aladdi

Reply to Galactic Civilizations broadens its horizons in PC Gaming JoeUser Forums

It's the end of the world as I know it! ;)

Galactic Civilizations broadens its horizons in PC Gaming JoeUser Forums

I must admit that it's pretty cool seeing the Galactic Civilizations community coming into its own. Besides there being various "empires" of users now with their own websites to discuss strategies and exploring the GalCiv universe, there's now a regular comic strip for it. <img border="0" src="https://www.joeuser.com/images/Fa

Canon Elura Camcorder in Gadgets & Electronics JoeUser Forums

The Canon Elura is quite fantastic so far but I've only had it a few days. It is tiny. Really tiny. The screenshot doesn't do it justice. It's not much bigger than my Little Elph camera that Canon makes (sheesh, you'd think I worked for Canon, I guess they're just on the

Gadget update in Gadgets & Electronics JoeUser Forums

Got a lot of gadgets still to write up about. As fast as I type, it's not nearly fast enough to get everything that's in my head onto paper. I've got a neat headphone MP3 player to review, some noise canceling headphones to review, software goodies, and a few other things. Will get to them as soon as I can.

If I were a writer I would write... in Blogging JoeUser Forums

Ever since college, I've had a long term goal of becoming a fiction author. The problem is that while I can crank out words fast, their quality is oh so poor. I'm just not cut out for serious writing. I can be mildly amusing in a pinch but drama, eck. During my senior year of college, I actually started on the first part of the "back story" of the main set of stories I've had in my head. My wonderful aunt agreed to edit them. And so I handed in the f

Anonymous commenting implemented in Blogging JoeUser Forums

On JoeUser classic no one could even comment on a blog. No matter how obnoxious my opinion was on some topic, no one could come on and say "Hey, you may not like your Mac but at least it's not constantly infected by worm viruses!" or something like that. Now, on the new JoeUser.com, you can. On anonymous comments I do have the right to delete them (so no more "Go back to Russia!" comment

Summer 2003 Pictures in Blogging JoeUser Forums

Well what kind of blog doesn't have pictures and other personal stuff on it? Here's some pictures from this summer so far... Alex & Ryan at the zoo <p align="

Mars so close yet so far in Pure Technology JoeUser Forums

Mars reaches the closest point it's been to the Earth in 66,000 years on August 27. Rather impulsively, I went out and got a telescope. The results have not been very good thus far. I got the Meade ETX-70AT. From what I've read, this is a pretty good telescope. What's really nifty about it is that it comes with a little computer that lets me just select what I want to look and and it will rotate and change angle to point at what I want to see. This is pretty useful.

Getting the Kinks out in Blogging JoeUser Forums

XXX As you can see, the system is still under development and will be for the next few weeks. It'll be shaping up pretty quickly though I suspect. yyy Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor i