Faced with unemployment that has hoovered near 10 percent and an increasingly disillusioned voter over the administration’s economic policies, Republican leaders in Congress, and a few endangered Democrats have sought to distance themselves from the White House before the midterm elections.
It might seem like I work for Google or stalk their product announcements or something. I read their blog and like Chrome's Bayonetta theme, but I don't work for them and (for various reasons) don't plan to.
Update, December 16, 2009: For now, I've worked around the sleep problem by moving the pad to another USB port. I still hope I can get it to wake up the PC from its original port.
I recently impulse-bought Windows 7, Street Fighter IV, extra RAM, and an "xbox circle" controller.1 I'm pleased with all three2 (and yes, I do like red-haired Viper, whom I quote in the post title; thanks in advance for asking). Part of me wishes that pictures in Windows 7 taken with pre-paywall Window Clippings wouldn't have "'dirty' glass" (Kerr's words, not mine) and that Eden's Aegis wouldn't crash miserably (complete with blue screen in some cases)3 in 7 since version 0.50, but those are minor things.
Though the controller is not as good for older PC games, it has a lot of buttons and is pretty easy to read from and set to vibrate. (I actually wrote a C++ input tester for it that vibrated in response to the side triggers, but got lost in other code I wanted to add to it and cleared it all out for an overhaul I may give within the next few decades.) It also can—or could, in my case—wake my PC from standby if I held the Guide button or any of its ten other digital buttons and I allowed the controller to do so:4
Why could? I'm not entirely sure, but after adding the RAM (which did not affect controller wakeup) I decided to fiddle with RMClock's thermal throttling settings. I disabled the driver check so that RMClock would actually start, and ran it. The throttling worked, but I guess RMClock also overwrote ACPI tables or something, so the controller (or its port) is simply powered off during sleep. (No other device seems to be affected, but keyboard wakeup and Guide button wakeup put me in far different mindsets as I begin using my compy.) I'm still trying to get back the old behavior, so I'm now much less eager to use apps that use unsigned drivers—even if they are meant to make the PC faster and sexier—unless I know damn well what they do.
1 I quote the great philosopher, investor, and entertainment critic Chadwardenn, of course.
2 I'm not affiliated with Microsoft, Capcom, or any of their partners.
3 I guess it's a DirectX initialization gone horribly wrong. If Direct3D 9 is set to use software mode only, 0.50 and 0.90 are actually playable, but are slow and show garbage. Bah.
4 I am trying the object tag for the image. Newer browsers should show it, or alternate text, nicely.
I've had Apple Software Update for a while to get updates to the Safari browser. I saw it pop up not too long ago:
I have neither an iPhone nor any earlier version of the Utility, nor do I have QuickTime.
There has been earlier controversy about how new programs are placed in the updater. I think the separate "New software" list was the right thing to do (they have largely stuck to it in my experience), and I can't imagine they can accomplish monopolist goals with an "iPhone Configuration Utility", but vigilance is key to keeping programs from becoming disingenuous. (For those curious, Windows Vista doesn't list e.g. Windows Live Essentials separately in its Windows Update either, and I've set to "Ignore" the two Apple updates.)
I am not a fan of the Nvidia display driver installer's old-ish look: it covers up the screen with a faux-maximized window and prints the software's name in big bold-italic Times New Roman. It always installs quickly, though, and much more so when I upgraded my card's driver from version 185.85—to my pleasant surprise (and as Microsoft has promised Vista would allow for years), installing 186.18 didn't restart the rig, as a few others have noticed.
Well, sort of. It does restart Windows Explorer, at least, and that nukes taskbar icons of programs that don't know better. A simple logoff and logon (relogon?) fixes that in a flash, and lets me finally enjoy Vista's "no-reboot" boast.
