Online Home of Derek Meister
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With the summer winding down and school on everyone’s minds, we’re getting more and more questions on whether those tiny (and cheap) netbooks make for a good back-to-school purchase.
I had an opportunity to speak with Fox 8 News about the pros and cons of both netbooks and notebooks for students.
There’s a thread going on the QuatertoThree games forum about “PC games that are a decade old this year.”
1999 was a strong year for PC games, as evidenced by this short list compiled in the thread:
There are plenty of memories for PC gamers in that list. Unreal Tournament was a personal favorite of mine, as it was something of an underdog before release. Most of the gaming community thought id Software’s Quake III Arena was going to completely dominate the online multiplayer FPS market that year, but Epic Games really surprised a lot of people by having so many unique (read: non-deathmatch) game types available for online play.
It was also a time where 3D graphics cards blossomed as Nvidia and ATI finally took the market from 3dfx. The Voodoo line of cards were eyeopeners when they first appeared, but the company just didn’t keep up with the changing demands of the industry. At the least, I was happy to see their proprietary Glide API lose ground to Direct3D and OpenGL.
Yes, it was a very good year for PC gamers.
The Internet offers plenty of free Windows applications to improve your productivity and your computer’s functionality, but finding them can be daunting. If you’re looking for a good place to start, take a look at the Lifehacker Pack 2009, courtesy of the ultra-productivity help site Lifehacker.com.
There’s plenty to choose from, including Foxit Reader for those tired of Adobe Reader’s bloat, or Postbox, a remixed Thunderbird client with a more G-mail feel.
There’s some talk in online communities about the state of Hulu and whether they’re limited number of advertisers is a bad sign for the company.
My personal opinion is that advertising on Hulu has some serious advantages over regular broadcast television, at least if you discount the difference in the number of viewers.
As a viewer, I’m far more likely to sit through the shorter commercials on Hulu, even if they’re unskippable, simply because the interruptions aren’t long and frequent. Also, I’m noticing that I’m paying far more attention to the commercials simply because there’s less of them. There isn’t a “wall of advertising” that ends up blurring the messages into noise.
I don’t think Hulu will entirely kill broadcast or even cable television, at least not for the current generation of viewers who have grown used to it, but it’s certainly another sign that digital distribution channels like iTunes, Xbox Marketplace and Netflix streaming video are here for the duration.
Best Buy has announced that they are rolling out an electronics recycling program to all of their US stores on February 15th. The program will allow consumers to bring in 2 devices per day, including a wide range of items, such as computers, VCRs, and some types of televisions.