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Comment Re:Stupid idiot messages (Score 1) 526

My wife's 2003 Grand Am has two levels - light on solid means you can keep driving until you get it looked at, flashing means pull over immediately. I've only seen it flashing once - when the engine stripped a rocker arm and started flailing bits around in the head. This is an OBD II standard across all cars with the system.

Incidentally, they sell a cheap ($20, and often $15) bluetooth- or wifi-enabled plug that links up to a cell phone app to read codes and other OBD II info. It's been a godsend when I was trying to diagnose a couple issues with that car.

Comment Re:Who cares about? (Score 1) 262

Microsoft released Windows for Pen Computing somewhere around Windows 3.1 (1991ish?). The Pen addons continued through the 9x releases. Granted it's not really a tablet initiative by Microsoft personally, but they dabbled in it. It worked reasonably well, and was a full real copy of Windows. They pretty much suffered the same limitations as later Tablet PCs (and today's tablets), though. Mousing was great, any sort of data input was a giant pain and pretty much required an addon keyboard.

Comment Re:Who cares about? (Score 1) 262

with the full processing power, heat, noise, etc of the laptops of the day.

This was where they failed for me. I had a couple different Fujitsu Stylistics, and overall I loved it. OneNote was great for notes, and had pretty decent handwriting recognition. I could run any Windows application, and overall it did great. I could sync notes across devices and access them anywhere. It was pretty impressive stuff for ~2000. But the big downfall was the jet engine fan and battery life. I'd be in a quiet classroom or office meeting, and the fan would kick on. I'd get That Look from people and it got old. I also usually only managed to get 2-3 hours out of it, although I did have a spare battery I'd carry around for it. I usually had enough juice to last a whole day of college classes, but sometimes not.

It'd also get pretty darn hot when I was doing anything that ran it very hard, but note-taking didn't usually do that.

Comment Re:It's the scripts, stupid! (Score 4, Interesting) 376

My wife and I just last week did a marathon watching of all six. She hasn't historically been a Sci Fi fan, and she thinks she saw ANH as a child but didn't really remember it. Overall, she enjoyed all six fine. She recognized some of the stilted handling of the romance and such, but in general she liked it fine. She had no preconceived notions or expectations going in.

She'll admit the original trilogy are better movies, but she liked them all fine. As a lifelong Star Trek/Star Wars fan myself, it's interesting seeing her perspective on it all since for her, they're just more movies. She doesn't have a lifetime of expectations or fandom or anything.

Comment Re:Thought... (Score 3, Interesting) 359

Hadn't thought of that! Makes perfect sense.

Sadly I'm just a lone user in a sea of Good Enoughs, so there's not a lot I can do about it other than make the best of it. Said interface is written by a fluffy VOIP server company with a broad reach, so I'm sure we're not the only company that's plagued by it and unable to fix it, per se.

Comment Re:Thought... (Score 1) 359

I haven't always found this to be the case. There's one particular webapp we use at work that involves a lot of clicking on things, often alternating sides of the screen. With a mouse I have to mouse back and forth across the screen, with a touchscreen I can just touch the links. It's one of the few cases were I've actually preferred having a touchscreen. And I voted leaning against.

One could argue it's a workaround for a poorly designed website though.

Comment Re:When will the non-DRM version of sc5 be availab (Score 2) 427

Loss of an arm? DF models it down to individual fingers and toes, and fingernails and toenails. It's quite possibly one of the most painfully accurate anatomy simulation available in an RPG.

And it's probably why I've never been able to play more than about 15 minutes minutes of it before giving up in frustration and going back to something less tedious, like Hydlide or Battletoads.

Comment Re:Hmm... (Score 4, Interesting) 199

Very much This. Keep in mind as well that the encryption was for *his* protection, not the users'. He wanted to be able to claim that he had no way of knowing what was uploaded or what its content was. That he's still getting copyright takedown notices should come as no surprise at all to anyone. The difference is he can at least try to claim that he had no idea it was copyrighted material. It'll be interesting arguments if it ever ends up in court or similar.

Comment Re:Call me dumb... (Score 1) 112

You're thinking of what was called an "active digitizer". It seems to have mostly been used by older Wacom tablets and Kurta. It was used by a lot of the older tablet PCs, such as the Fujitsu Stylistic and Toshiba Dynapad lines. The pen would have a battery (AAAA usually) and it'd work through some kind of electromagnetic thing. Was much nicer than the "passive digitizer" used by resistive touchscreens as it was a lot more accurate and allowed multiple buttons easily, pressure sensitivity, etc.

It's rather different but might still count enough for prior art.

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