Actually, I don't have it installed. The "updating intellisense" problem happens for most everyone on my team, so I assumed it was a Visual Studio thing. Maybe my company just buys crappy computers (I wouldn't put it past them, low end Dells FTL).
The computer I use at work has a 2.4 GHz P4 and 1.5 Gb of RAM. It's surely not the fastest thing around, but it runs my IDE just fine and my work gets done without a hitch.
Apparently someone doesn't run Visual Studio 2005 with a moderately large C++ solution.;)
Seriously though, your work computer is nearly identical to mine, except I have 2GB of RAM. While I got the RAM upgrade earlier this year (from 1GB), and it helped quite a bit, I'm still amazed at Visual Studio's need to peg my CPU at 100% on a frequent basis. How much I hate to see "Updating Intellisense"....
Then turn off checking for automatic updates? While automatic updates may not make sense for you, which is fine, they do make sense for the majority of their users, so that's why this feature is on my default.
I believe that it's Mozilla's policy to only perform automatic updates for security or bug fix type releases. Since FF3 is a major release, there is a chance that some web page won't work, a critical extension hasn't been updated yet, etc. Basically, I see it as playing it safe, and allowing the user to upgrade when it makes the most sense for them.
I think that the proposed feature in the article is to help remind people that FF3 exists, for those users who aren't as technically savvy as the typical Slashdot reader.
Re:Establishing de facto (open source) standard ?
on
ECMAScript 4.0 Is Dead
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I haven't looked into SproutCore much, but isn't it just a framework built around JavaScript? If that's the case, how does that solve the multimedia part of the GP's request?
I foresee one problem with this set up: the SciFi channel will cancel this series at the most inconvenient time for the creators, thus causing them to stuff the rest of the story into a 4 hour miniseries, skipping all of the good parts that would have occurred if the series was left to run its course.
In the expanded universe, I think either Luke, or his children, turn over to the dark side, but return. I am not sure, as much of the expanded Star Wars universe was written by others.
I know that Luke turns to the dark side in one of the first comic series that was released in the 90's - called Dark Empire I think? That's when the Emperor is cloned or something, and he manages to turn Luke for a time. I believe that Leia gets him back, but I'm not sure.
I also think that one of Han and Leia's kids turns to the dark side in the books eventually, but I haven't been keeping up with all of the new Star Wars books over the last five years or so.
I read that in the following movies, well call them 7, 8, and 9, for lack of a better name, Luke was supposed to turn to the dark side. He was really supposed to take the Emperors place, or something like that. When I watch Return and Empire with that in mind I think I see the foreshadowing of how that happens.
All I've read is that he never really had anything planned for the "sequel" trilogy. The only bit he had thought about was when Yoda mentions "there is another" when Luke leaves Dagobah at the end of Empire. That was supposed to be revealed in the sequel trilogies (in fact using the "other" as the main character). However, after Empire Lucas grew tired of making these movies, so he decided to wrap it all up in Jedi.
It's a very interesting read, and puts the whole saga into a new light. The basic premise is that Lucas didn't have it all laid out initially, but just made it up as he went. I have no idea how accurate it is or not, but due to the crazy amount of information he has, at least some of it has to be true.
One side affect of this book is that if you ever read it, and then listen to the commentaries on the DVDs, you end up yelling at the screen every time Lucas talks about having something planned out from the beginning, which he clearly didn't.
It'd be great, but it's unlikely to happen any time soon. IE is still the dominant browser, and YouTube can't just avoid their major audience.
Why couldn't YouTube support both formats? GameTrailers does something like this - I know off hand that it supports QuickTime, WMV, and Flash (and another I think, but I'm not positive on that). I believe that it auto-detects which one is best given your OS, browser, and what is available. For example, I generally visit the site on my MacBook in Firefox, so I generally get the Quicktime version. Sometimes I get the streaming one instead (I assume because either the Quicktime version isn't available, or I only get Quicktime when streaming isn't available).
It shouldn't be that hard for YouTube to do something similar, and provide the Ogg version to FF3.1 users, and Flash to everyone else.
I think it's the "once I learned to use it properly" part that most people don't like.
Before I upgraded to FF3, I could type "a", down arrow, enter and it would take me to ArsTechnica, or "c", down, enter to go to CNN. Just after I first upgraded, doing that would take me to some semi-random URL that had those characters in it.
Now, however, when I do that it works as it did in FF2. As some others have said here, the AwesomeBar seems to have some sort of sorting algorithm behind it that puts more often visited sites towards the top of the list. This gives you more of what you expect to happen, although not at first.
I personally didn't like the AwesomeBar much at first, but now I don't mind it. My main complaint is that it doesn't auto-complete the URL for any matches. There is an about:config entry to have it auto-complete when it matches a URL, but it still doesn't auto-complete when it matches anything else. Maybe that option will be available in 3.1.
What amazes me, is that Apple has not pushed OO to be on there. They would be smart to add a few coders to the project just to ensure that it can compete against Office on their platform.
In it's current form, OOo on OS X is really bad. While there is an alpha or beta around that is an actual OS X app, the currently released version is an X Windows app - and there are few things more jarring that loading it up and realizing that all the keyboard shortcuts use Control, not Command. And that's aside from the random redraw issues, general slowness, etc.
Now, I haven't really used OOo on OS X since about version 2.2 or so, so it's possible that this has gotten better in that time.
In any event, Apple has its own productivity apps that it can promote instead - while they don't have all the features of Office or OOo, they work well for me (although I don't use them all that heavily).
The Wii has an 0.5 GB drive, of which half appears reserved for the system software. Even Wii-compatible memory cards can't be more than 2 GB because there's no evidence that SDHC (>= 4 GB) memory cards work in a Wii. Compare this to the 20 GB drive of the Xbox 360 and the 40 GB drive of the PLAYSTATION 3.
While that is true, wouldn't downloadable songs that can be saved to an SD card be better than nothing? Super Smash Bros Brawl can save and read custom levels from the SD card, so I don't think that there is a technical reason why Rock Band couldn't do the same for downloaded songs.
About how big are the downloaded songs for the PS3/Xbox360? If they are big, then I could see an argument being made that saving them to SD cards doesn't make sense. However, even at a couple of megabytes per song, you're still going to be able to fit a large number of songs per SD card.
In any event, Nintendo really needs to get on the ball and do something about the lack of storage in the Wii. While I don't have any space issues currently, I've only had my Wii since April. I could easily see using up the 512MB easily with various save games, games from VC/WiiWare, etc.
Now I'm in Australia, and Rock Band hasn't been released here yet (I doubt it ever will be since Rock Band 2 will be out shortly anyway), so I don't really know what is lacking in the Wii version. The only thing I can think of that would make the Wii not handle a rythm game would be the low resolution making it harder to display all four players' notes clearly. Which wouldn't be the developer's fault, but if its the case, the should definitely have tried for a different UI layout.
From what I've read, the main differences between the Wii and PS3/Xbox360 versions are that there is no internect connectivity nor any downloadable songs that you can purchase. The only option is to buy additional discs from a store (or whatever) containing additional songs (for something like $20-30, not sure how many songs per disc).
A few weeks ago, my wife was talking about getting Rock Band, but since we only have a Wii it doesn't really seem worth it. It sounds like Guitar Hero: World Tour will properly support the Wii, though, so there is some hope at least.
As a PC Gamer who dabbles in console gaming, I'm not afraid to admit that console gaming is bigger. But I also know that the mouse/keyboard is the best way to control FPS and RTS games, so I'm not afraid of PC Gaming dying any time soon.
While keyboard + mouse is good, it's amazing how well the Wiimote + nunchuck works for FPS's. Using the Wiimote for aiming is about the same as using a mouse - I had no problems using this system (I normally find playing FPS's on consoles hard and annoying, due to their gamepads).
I never played Red Steel, but I've heard that the controls aren't very good for it - possibly there is a learning curve for the developers to properly use the Wiimote, but when they get it right it works very well.
I enjoyed Ninja Gaiden DS - it's somewhat short, and not as hard as other Ninja Gaiden games, but it's pretty good. You use the stylus to control everything - movement, swing your sword, special moves, etc. It takes a bit to get used to, but it works well once you've used it for a while.
I will give you your point, though, that overall there aren't that many games that I find interesting for the DS. The Final Fantasy IV remake looks good, as does the Chrono Trigger remake (although they are changing little for this one, so I am still on the fence about it), but other than that there isn't much on the horizon that looks good (well, the third Castlevania game too I suppose).
I'm really hoping that Nintendo is working on some more "normal" games, and they just haven't announced them yet. All of the news from them this past week at E3 was rather depressing for the non-casual gamer, really.
While that is true from strictly a feature perspective...does that really matter if the majority of users don't use any of the features of Office that the online-based word processors don't have?
Google has tried to get around this with Google Gears. When installed, it lets you use Google Docs offline. Sadly, it doesn't support all browsers (I know that it works in Firefox, not sure about IE or Opera, pretty sure that it doesn't work in Safari).
While not an ideal situation, it works. You do have a point, though, in that if you don't have an internet connection you are pretty screwed if you need to access your data that is only stored online.
Hopefully as Wi-Fi becomes more ubiquitous this will be less of an issue, but not much else can be done about it really.
This happened to me as well. From what I recall, there was some text on the dialog indicating that since I installed some Betas/RCs of 3.0, that they pushed the beta of 3.0.1 out to me as well.
I'm not sure if there is anyway to toggle this "feature" on or off (other than manually installing a non-final build), but it seems like a good idea - get some more random testing done on even the security releases can't hurt.
Lifehacker has instructions on how to restore the yellow for SSL sites, among other nice UI changes (such as removing the Go and Search buttons from the Address and Search bars, respectively). It does require an extension (either Stylish or Greasemonkey), but it definitely works, I've been using this at home for a few weeks now.
It may really help Microsoft crack the Japanese market.
Actually, FF13 is going to be released only on the PS3 in Japan. It's everywhere else that gets it on both the PS3 and Xbox360. Most likely because the PS3 has a larger install base in Japan, but that is reversed most everywhere else in the world.
Before we weep too much over Windows and their government overlords we should mourn all the good startups that were crushed by unfair competition from MS. Of course Netscape comes to mind but it isn't the only one.
AND, well, Google isn't distributing alternative OSes, and the FOSS community IS... and what would be a bigger threat to Microsoft - Alternative OS or... adsense. Hmmm...
It could be argued that all of the services that Google provides over the internet make up a sort of operating system. From just Google's services you have e-mail, calendar, office suite (well, word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software - those are the core of any office suite), RSS reader, and probably others that I can't think of off the top of my head.
Assuming that you don't want/need to do anything beyond that, as long as you have a web browser capable of JavaScript, you can use any OS that you want. While that OS could be Linux, it could also be OS X, or nearly anything really. It most definitely does not have to be Windows.
Selling a computer with XP past the Microsoft cutoff date is pretty irresponsible. At least Ubuntu has community support, whereas XP will have no support? Is it really Dell's place to oversee microsoft's business decisions?
It's my understanding that the only thing changing as of June 30 is that Microsoft is going to stop selling XP. XP will be supported until something like 2014, IIRC.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I don't have it installed. The "updating intellisense" problem happens for most everyone on my team, so I assumed it was a Visual Studio thing. Maybe my company just buys crappy computers (I wouldn't put it past them, low end Dells FTL).
Apparently someone doesn't run Visual Studio 2005 with a moderately large C++ solution. ;)
Seriously though, your work computer is nearly identical to mine, except I have 2GB of RAM. While I got the RAM upgrade earlier this year (from 1GB), and it helped quite a bit, I'm still amazed at Visual Studio's need to peg my CPU at 100% on a frequent basis. How much I hate to see "Updating Intellisense"....
Then turn off checking for automatic updates? While automatic updates may not make sense for you, which is fine, they do make sense for the majority of their users, so that's why this feature is on my default.
I believe that it's Mozilla's policy to only perform automatic updates for security or bug fix type releases. Since FF3 is a major release, there is a chance that some web page won't work, a critical extension hasn't been updated yet, etc. Basically, I see it as playing it safe, and allowing the user to upgrade when it makes the most sense for them.
I think that the proposed feature in the article is to help remind people that FF3 exists, for those users who aren't as technically savvy as the typical Slashdot reader.
I haven't looked into SproutCore much, but isn't it just a framework built around JavaScript? If that's the case, how does that solve the multimedia part of the GP's request?
I foresee one problem with this set up: the SciFi channel will cancel this series at the most inconvenient time for the creators, thus causing them to stuff the rest of the story into a 4 hour miniseries, skipping all of the good parts that would have occurred if the series was left to run its course.
Or you could play through Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. That would make a pretty good movie, IMO.
I know that Luke turns to the dark side in one of the first comic series that was released in the 90's - called Dark Empire I think? That's when the Emperor is cloned or something, and he manages to turn Luke for a time. I believe that Leia gets him back, but I'm not sure.
I also think that one of Han and Leia's kids turns to the dark side in the books eventually, but I haven't been keeping up with all of the new Star Wars books over the last five years or so.
All I've read is that he never really had anything planned for the "sequel" trilogy. The only bit he had thought about was when Yoda mentions "there is another" when Luke leaves Dagobah at the end of Empire. That was supposed to be revealed in the sequel trilogies (in fact using the "other" as the main character). However, after Empire Lucas grew tired of making these movies, so he decided to wrap it all up in Jedi.
You might have read about it in The Secret History of Star Wars, which was discussed here a few months ago.
It's a very interesting read, and puts the whole saga into a new light. The basic premise is that Lucas didn't have it all laid out initially, but just made it up as he went. I have no idea how accurate it is or not, but due to the crazy amount of information he has, at least some of it has to be true.
One side affect of this book is that if you ever read it, and then listen to the commentaries on the DVDs, you end up yelling at the screen every time Lucas talks about having something planned out from the beginning, which he clearly didn't.
Why couldn't YouTube support both formats? GameTrailers does something like this - I know off hand that it supports QuickTime, WMV, and Flash (and another I think, but I'm not positive on that). I believe that it auto-detects which one is best given your OS, browser, and what is available. For example, I generally visit the site on my MacBook in Firefox, so I generally get the Quicktime version. Sometimes I get the streaming one instead (I assume because either the Quicktime version isn't available, or I only get Quicktime when streaming isn't available).
It shouldn't be that hard for YouTube to do something similar, and provide the Ogg version to FF3.1 users, and Flash to everyone else.
I think it's the "once I learned to use it properly" part that most people don't like.
Before I upgraded to FF3, I could type "a", down arrow, enter and it would take me to ArsTechnica, or "c", down, enter to go to CNN. Just after I first upgraded, doing that would take me to some semi-random URL that had those characters in it.
Now, however, when I do that it works as it did in FF2. As some others have said here, the AwesomeBar seems to have some sort of sorting algorithm behind it that puts more often visited sites towards the top of the list. This gives you more of what you expect to happen, although not at first.
I personally didn't like the AwesomeBar much at first, but now I don't mind it. My main complaint is that it doesn't auto-complete the URL for any matches. There is an about:config entry to have it auto-complete when it matches a URL, but it still doesn't auto-complete when it matches anything else. Maybe that option will be available in 3.1.
In it's current form, OOo on OS X is really bad. While there is an alpha or beta around that is an actual OS X app, the currently released version is an X Windows app - and there are few things more jarring that loading it up and realizing that all the keyboard shortcuts use Control, not Command. And that's aside from the random redraw issues, general slowness, etc.
Now, I haven't really used OOo on OS X since about version 2.2 or so, so it's possible that this has gotten better in that time.
In any event, Apple has its own productivity apps that it can promote instead - while they don't have all the features of Office or OOo, they work well for me (although I don't use them all that heavily).
The Wii has an 0.5 GB drive, of which half appears reserved for the system software. Even Wii-compatible memory cards can't be more than 2 GB because there's no evidence that SDHC (>= 4 GB) memory cards work in a Wii. Compare this to the 20 GB drive of the Xbox 360 and the 40 GB drive of the PLAYSTATION 3.
While that is true, wouldn't downloadable songs that can be saved to an SD card be better than nothing? Super Smash Bros Brawl can save and read custom levels from the SD card, so I don't think that there is a technical reason why Rock Band couldn't do the same for downloaded songs.
About how big are the downloaded songs for the PS3/Xbox360? If they are big, then I could see an argument being made that saving them to SD cards doesn't make sense. However, even at a couple of megabytes per song, you're still going to be able to fit a large number of songs per SD card.
In any event, Nintendo really needs to get on the ball and do something about the lack of storage in the Wii. While I don't have any space issues currently, I've only had my Wii since April. I could easily see using up the 512MB easily with various save games, games from VC/WiiWare, etc.
From what I've read, the main differences between the Wii and PS3/Xbox360 versions are that there is no internect connectivity nor any downloadable songs that you can purchase. The only option is to buy additional discs from a store (or whatever) containing additional songs (for something like $20-30, not sure how many songs per disc).
A few weeks ago, my wife was talking about getting Rock Band, but since we only have a Wii it doesn't really seem worth it. It sounds like Guitar Hero: World Tour will properly support the Wii, though, so there is some hope at least.
While keyboard + mouse is good, it's amazing how well the Wiimote + nunchuck works for FPS's. Using the Wiimote for aiming is about the same as using a mouse - I had no problems using this system (I normally find playing FPS's on consoles hard and annoying, due to their gamepads).
I never played Red Steel, but I've heard that the controls aren't very good for it - possibly there is a learning curve for the developers to properly use the Wiimote, but when they get it right it works very well.
I enjoyed Ninja Gaiden DS - it's somewhat short, and not as hard as other Ninja Gaiden games, but it's pretty good. You use the stylus to control everything - movement, swing your sword, special moves, etc. It takes a bit to get used to, but it works well once you've used it for a while.
I'm currently playing through the two Castlevania games for the DS (Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin).
I will give you your point, though, that overall there aren't that many games that I find interesting for the DS. The Final Fantasy IV remake looks good, as does the Chrono Trigger remake (although they are changing little for this one, so I am still on the fence about it), but other than that there isn't much on the horizon that looks good (well, the third Castlevania game too I suppose).
I'm really hoping that Nintendo is working on some more "normal" games, and they just haven't announced them yet. All of the news from them this past week at E3 was rather depressing for the non-casual gamer, really.
While that is true from strictly a feature perspective...does that really matter if the majority of users don't use any of the features of Office that the online-based word processors don't have?
Google has tried to get around this with Google Gears. When installed, it lets you use Google Docs offline. Sadly, it doesn't support all browsers (I know that it works in Firefox, not sure about IE or Opera, pretty sure that it doesn't work in Safari).
While not an ideal situation, it works. You do have a point, though, in that if you don't have an internet connection you are pretty screwed if you need to access your data that is only stored online.
Hopefully as Wi-Fi becomes more ubiquitous this will be less of an issue, but not much else can be done about it really.
This happened to me as well. From what I recall, there was some text on the dialog indicating that since I installed some Betas/RCs of 3.0, that they pushed the beta of 3.0.1 out to me as well.
I'm not sure if there is anyway to toggle this "feature" on or off (other than manually installing a non-final build), but it seems like a good idea - get some more random testing done on even the security releases can't hurt.
Lifehacker has instructions on how to restore the yellow for SSL sites, among other nice UI changes (such as removing the Go and Search buttons from the Address and Search bars, respectively). It does require an extension (either Stylish or Greasemonkey), but it definitely works, I've been using this at home for a few weeks now.
Actually, FF13 is going to be released only on the PS3 in Japan. It's everywhere else that gets it on both the PS3 and Xbox360. Most likely because the PS3 has a larger install base in Japan, but that is reversed most everywhere else in the world.
Such as Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net.
It could be argued that all of the services that Google provides over the internet make up a sort of operating system. From just Google's services you have e-mail, calendar, office suite (well, word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software - those are the core of any office suite), RSS reader, and probably others that I can't think of off the top of my head.
Assuming that you don't want/need to do anything beyond that, as long as you have a web browser capable of JavaScript, you can use any OS that you want. While that OS could be Linux, it could also be OS X, or nearly anything really. It most definitely does not have to be Windows.
It's my understanding that the only thing changing as of June 30 is that Microsoft is going to stop selling XP. XP will be supported until something like 2014, IIRC.