Posts by Jades 6 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Nov 2010
While our main family machine (an 'experienced' Pentium D 3.4GHz) is happily running Firefox 4.01 on Lucid Puppy 5.25, the same machine running XP SP3 is still stuck on Firefox 3.6.17 as ZoneAlarm apparently isn't compatible with Firefox 4 at the moment.
Meanwhile, the main browser I use on my reconditioned AMD K6 2 500 is Opera 11 on Lucid Puppy 5.11 - it's a considerable improvement over IE6 on Win98 which is the other main OS on that machine.
The OP said "mobile devices." RISC OS 3 was used on the Acorn A4, a small laptop released in 1992. Even if you find an excuse why the A4 doesn't count then the ART newsPAD from 1996 certainly does. It was a tablet computer, with 'pad' in the name. See http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/NC.html for a picture of the NewsPad, noting the icons on the bottom left.
Why are some people so surprised about sending emails via removable media? When I was at Sunderland Uni in the late Nineties this was exactly what I had to do because my digs didn't even have a phone line. I used to transfer my email from my PC to the Internet and back via dedicated floppy disks for each account and Netscape 3. The only challenging aspect was finding a server where the IT department hadn't disabled SMTP for no obvious reason - as part of that I out found that the servers' names were intriguingly themed along the names of Blake's 7 characters or assorted pantheons of gods.
I'm a little saddened by the lack of ambition of today's pi^h^hne'erdowells. A few years back, a former employee of Jarvis hired a crew of workers and had them set about actually cutting up the mothballed Leamside line. After six days and having lifted 2.5 miles of track they were eventually caught when they were spotted by a real employee of Jarvis who realised what they were up to! http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/3044669.stm
Rather than spend a couple of million (or even less according to some reports) putting the track back, our wonderful not-for-profit Network Rail have left the whole line to rot (there are actual trees growing on some bridges). When they eventually get bored of billion quid white elephant high speed lines and buying twelve inch to the foot kits from Japan it'll cost a fortune to reinstate the line and do something useful with it like providing public transport.
Thief: The Dark Project. Should qualify as it's older than some on Lucy's list (1998). It was revolutionary at the time and very few games have ever come close to matching the gameplay since. The lighting effects in particular were great and I have a particular fondness for it as it was the game I was playing when I upgraded my system with a TNT2 Ultra. The difference that card made was amazing and I remember marvelling about just how much better the level I was on looked.
The best bit, though, has to be the chatter from the AI, some of which could be quite epic - "All these people around me are so stupid, so incompetent, so lazy! I don't see why I have to be the one to be put with these incompetent people. While everyone else is out running around... When am I going to get my dinner? That's what I want to know. When am I going to get my dinner?"
Not to mention "Join us! JOIN US NOW!"
