On 10/28/2010 1:08 AM, Invisible wrote:
>>> For the love of God, just don't buy the PC from PC World! >_<
>>>
>> But, but, they are glorious and wonderful experts on computers.. Oh,
>> wait.. For a moment I had an 80s flashback, you know, when that was
>> *kind of* true. lol
>
> I'm just bitter that if my previous laptop had come from any other
> retailer, it would have had a 3 year warranty backed by Sharp. But
> because it came from PC World, same brand, same model, you get only 6
> months warranty. And it's backed by PC World. (I.e., if it breaks, PC
> World fix it themselves. Or rather, incompetently fail repeatedly to fix
> it...)

Well. My point is that PC World magazine now sucks, and has since the 
90s. But, other than Dr. Dobbs, which specializes in programming, but 
still often has too much in "Windows only", nearly **all** general 
computer magazines, unless its like a Linux mag, (and yes, I am 
including Mac mags in this statement), are pretty much articles that 
function as advertisement for their advertisements, mixed in with a few 
things that might actually be semi-useful, if you are a) a near total 
incompetents, b) don't care how or why anything works, or c) don't care 
if the information you are getting is incomplete, bad, or shilling for 
the company that made the product being "reviewed".

I vaguely remember when I bought some of these because they had code in 
them, or real information, and did real reviews. You know, sort of like 
how Wired was once edgy, and willing to point out how stupid products 
where, not just mass producing articles on how great everything sent 
them to review is.

Bugs the hell out of me that you can't get anything "useful" any more. 
Though, bugs be even more than, in the case of things like Dr. Dobbs, 
the "assumption" is always now that you have OpenGL, or DirectX, or 
*something* available to do all the dirty work for you, so no one has to 
explain how to do certain things, you know.. like, if you wanted to use 
Catmull-Rom for something *other* than a) graphics, or b) without the 
damn DirectX library, which apparently has it in there. Its like, now 
that we have 3D libraries, everyone has forgotten how to even *do* shit 
without them...

Websites are not much better though. Took me several tries to find one 
that both explained that this was what I was looking for *and* that you 
apply the equation to each part of the vector, instead of having to do 
something complicated to it (examples being invariably in a language 
that was hard to parse, or, in 99% of cases, showing only "one 
dimension")... How hard is it for people to add on sentence, explaining 
how to apply it to vectors with N parts? Seriously? Turned out, for 
where I needed it, I already have matrix support, so could apply it to 
the whole vector, instead of each part. Man it would have been annoying 
otherwise, but, not as frustrating as the, "Dude, since you are looking 
for this, you must already understand everything I am telling you, even 
though I really don't clearly describe what is going on.", mentality you 
get from some articles. lol

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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