It's still a better idea to have your energy production concentrated. That way when we finally CAN harness tons of clean energy, you don't have 500 million power plants to switch, you have a few hundred or thousand.
Well personally, I have 3 major complaints which pretty much killed my enjoyment (listed in order of priority):
1) Interface. It's horrible. It's inconsistent. Like, for example, see how many different ways of getting back to the star map you can count. Why isn't there a "Starmap" button that's on every screen? Nope.. on this screen I need to click the tab that opened it, on this screen I have to click a 'Close' button, on another screen I have to double click the sun graphic, or some places it's IMPOSSIBLE to get to the starmap.. you have to back out to other sub screens first. The convolution boggles the mind. Some tabs close by clicking the same place you clicked to open them, other require you to click the title, others require you to click a close button. Sure, I could get used to this crappy interface so that its quirks become second nature, but that doesn't change the underlying fact that it's a crappy interface. Also, the information is SOOOOO spread out, there are way more screens than neccessary. Like, do I really need an ENTIRE SCREEN dedicated to presenting a single yes/no choice of whether my AI colonizes planets? Oh yes, and let's not forget there's not a single tooltip in the entire interface. This is an absolute sin in a game with such a complicated GUI. Also, from an aesthetic standpoint, I think it looks like crap.
2) You either wrestle tediously with the AI, or largely watch the game play itself. Doesn't matter if you turn off the "Econ AI" options... it's still there, nudging sliders around and indulging its troop transport fetish. I felt like I was just there to press the Turn button and move some ships around.. and they've even managed to ruin the strategic element of that, by being able to instantly magically grab a ship from your reserves anywhere in the galaxy.
3) Art. Or lack thereof. Did they spend their entire art budget on those video clips for the diplomacy screens? (Which ARE very cool... but again... FMV is very limiting. Why couldn't they do 3D rendering?) I'm not talking about eye-candy, I'm talking about personality, character, and colour. Part of the joy (for me anyway) of playing a good game is discovering all the art that has gone into it. The sense of wonder of landing on a new alien landscape. The simple pleasure of visually watching your colonies develop over time, instead of just stacks of numbers. In MOO2, when you researched something new, you were treated to a rotating hologram of the object, presented by an animated scientist from your race. It was interesting. It was fun. Visualizations are very powerful things. It took you into its world, and made you feel like a fellow Psilon or Silicoid or whatever. In MOO3, we get a dull log entry. The graphical depiction of research items has gone from rotating holograms to inconsistent, often completely inappropriate category icons. I feel like I'm analyzing a spreadsheet.
And don't even get me started on how much they ruined ship design and space combat. And am I the only one who thinks large portions of the research tree were fleshed out at the last second by people not talking with other? Wildly inconsistent descriptions. Some tell you how they affect game numbers, others tell you virtually nothing.
I am a long time turn based strategy gamer, going back way beyond even the very first Civ game. (Ever hear of Overlord for the C64?) I love these types of games. The first two MOO games were like heroin to me, I couldn't stop playing them. I AM this game's target demographic. But with MOO3, I had to force myself to play for several days, and then just gave up in disgust. It's a pity, because I'm sure there's an extremely deep strategy experience buried under that repulsive shell.
"Physically moving to look behind something on your monitor is incredibly inefficient"
Why do you say this? Is manipulating a keyboard and/or mouse to change your viewpoint more efficient? Head movement is intuitive, natural, and exactly how we change perspective in the real world.
Imagine a surgeon performing surgery through the use of a 3D display... both of his hands could be occupied with "virtual tools" or whatever, so it would be much easier for him to just look around the model.
Your monitor (well, technically your graphics card) "projects" *ONE PARTICULAR VIEWING ANGLE* of a 3D scene onto a flat 2D plane. If you look at this image from different angles, it always looks the same.
Basically the difference with a real 3D display unit is that if you move your head, you will see different parts of the scene, like the sides of an object, just as if you were looking at a real physical object.
Ever played a video game and instinctively (and futilely) jerked your head to one side to try and get a better viewing angle of the action? Well this display would mean that could actually work.:)
You've got to be kidding. You're telling me you can't think of countless applications for painlessly and naturally being able to view something in 3D? How about checking out an item on EBay and being able to look at it from any angle? 3D videoconferencing? How about a 3D user interface where you can look "behind" things? 3D porn! 3D movies! Hell, even with just games... I think that'd be a bit more than 1% of users.
And best of all, this might finally give Slashdot some real depth.;D
In Red Mars (or perhaps the sequel?) they build a space elevator on Mars, counterbalanced by a large asteroid in orbit. Well, (**SPOILER WARNING**) some dissidents sever the connection between the cable and the asteroid. Result: Asteroid flung into space, and the cable falls. But... the cable doesn't just fall, because the planet is spinning, so the cable wraps itself around the planet 3 times over the course of a few hours, with steadily increasing force. By the time the end of the cable is falling, it is hitting the planet at such a velocity the shock and heat is destroying everything within several kilometres of it. Imagine vaporizing everything within a few kilometres of the equator! Not to mention the massive tsunami this would cause in the oceans.
Anyway, a space elevator collapsing, no matter where it was located, would be a major catastrophe of global proportions. But at least then the equator line on maps would be from something real!;)
"Lose the moderation system. It doesn't work, and never has."
If you don't like it, ignore the mod scores. You can just read at -1 unsorted if you want.
And IMHO, if you think reading at -1 unsorted is the same as reading at +2, highest first (which is exactly what you're saying by stating "It doesn't work"), you're on glue.
Yeah.. I was pretty much that way by the end of Blue too... the series doesn't exactly build to a climax or anything. Overall though I thought it had great characters and ideas, and a rich story. They are very well written, if a little slow towards the end. Weirdly enough, both Green Mars and Blue Mars won Hugo awards (in 94 and 97 respectively) but Red Mars didn't. (Although it did get the Nebula)
I suggest you read Kim Stanley Robinson's multiple Hugo and Nebulae winning Mars trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, which concern the colonization of Mars and the future of our species in general over the next few centuries. It is also very character driven, which draws you in and creates a compelling story.
The first book in particular, Red Mars, deals with the technical challenges of colonization and terraforming Mars in thorough scientific detail. As the series progresses, it deals more and more with the political consequences of an offworld colony and an increasingly overpopulated Earth. Brilliant series.
"It's a story of a typical TEEN CHEERLEADER VAMPIRE SLAYER, for Christ sake. And she's named BUFFY!"
It's a great show endowed with a silly name. But that's kinda the point.
The whole theme of the show is false expectations. Whedon has stated the original concept for the show was a cute blonde valley girl walking down a dark alley, and getting jumped by a vampire, exactly like countless horror movie cliches. HOWEVER, she doesn't scream, run, fall, and get savaged. Nope, she stays. And not only does she stand her ground, she kicks its ASS. This is Buffy.
This kind of sucker punch is Buffy's bread and butter. Leading the audience's expectations in one direction and then pulling the rug out. In fact it's gotten almost predictably unpredictable. Example: ****EARLY SEASON SEVEN SPOILER WARNING**** In that episode where the watcher's council gets blown up, as soon as that guy (Quentin?) started that heroic, hope filled, noble speech, I knew they were all dead. Five seconds later, BOOM!
I love the show, but I am glad it is ending. It has run a good course, and season 7 looks to be setting up for the mother of all finales. Go out with a bang, Buffy, we'll miss ya.
Do you mean it should be illegal to have any web site concerning (NOT distributing) warez?
Yeah, MOD chips are against the DMCA, but other than that, ISONews wasn't doing anything wrong. They even removed serial numbers from the NFO files. They were just a news site.
If Slashdot (or CNN for that matter) runs a story about how there are pirated copies of Two Towers on the net, they are doing the exact same thing. ISONews was just specialized.
It's not the eye-candy I miss.. trust me, I'm an old time paper and pen RPG'er, text-gamer and MUDder, I do not need flashy graphics to enjoy a game. But.. have you PLAYED MOO3? All the personality and sense of wonder just seems gone. It's just an enourmous pile of numbers. And this is from a very methodical, number-headed math major.
As I said right off the bat, I've only played about an hour, and I intend to play more, but that hour was enough to convince me that this isn't 1/10th as addictive or fun as the previous two games. YMMV, this is just an opinion.
Disclaimer: I've only spent about an hour with this game, which obviously is not nearly enough for an in-depth analysis, but I have to say I'm pretty appalled with the offering so far.
It seems like all the life, colour, and magic has been taken out of the game. Let me give you an example... in prior MOO games, when you colonized a planet, you were treated to a nice full screen animation of a spacecraft landing on the planet's surface, and saw one of your colonists putting up a flag, and then it asked you to name your new world. (You could skip these sequences if desired, of course)
In MOO3, you get a log entry. That's it. Hooray. This "reduction to bare data" seems prevalent everywhere in the game. Yes, it's efficient, detailed, and deep. So is a spreadsheet. But is it fun??? The interface is also very bland... I mean.. flat shading everywhere??? This isn't 1989 anymore, how about some gradients or textures people!? And the few space battles I've seen so far have literally been single pixel ships wandering around on a 2D grid.
The first two MOO games grabbed me like a steel clamp and didn't let go. They had so much personality and polish. This one, I am finding myself having to force myself to try and get into it.
It IS very different, but not for the reason you mention.
It's not "ENTIRELY DIGITAL". The strings produce an analog signal, which is measured by pickups, same as any other electric guitar.
The difference here is that each string gets its own digital channel, which is source pure, and can be individually manipulated. A MIDI pickup would just reduce the signal to a pitch, duration, volume, etc, it wouldn't be a real "recording" per se.
I wonder what a chord with alternating clean/distorted strings would sound like?:)
I think certain scenes and movements were astonishingly real. The one that always jumps out at me is the "Herbs and Stewed Rabbit" scene, where Gollum and Sam are arguing over cooking, and then Gollum quickly scurries over to Sam.. "Give it to us RAW... and WRIGG-GG-GGLING!"
That one movement of him scurrying over to Sam just looks so... REAL. I just about fell out of my seat the first time I saw it. Totally sold. Gollum was THERE with Sam.
Hey now.. Dreamweaver is the hand coder's friend, too. And it "outputs junk most of the time"? You've got to be kidding.. have you seen the bloated drivel that FrontPage puts out? Dreamweaver gives you total control of the code. It outputs what you tell it to output, and there are options for how backwards compatible to make the code.
Its code generation or WYSIWYG renderer isn't what makes it great. Write or import your own javascript if you don't care for Dreamweaver's, use a text editor for your CSS sheets, and you shouldn't be relying on ANY editor to preview your pages anyway. (You can preview in the browser of your choice with a single keypress, what's the problem?)
What DOES make Dreamweaver great is round trip HTML editing (hand code HTML and see the results in real time), and, most importantly, how it automatically updates all relevant pages when you move/rename a file, or edit a libary item or template. This amounts to spectacular time savings when trying to manage a large, consistent site. It's in macro site management/maintenance where Dreamweaver truly shines.
I've thought about it from this exact angle too.. maybe gravity pushes, and mass actually BLOCKS it.
It doesn't work though... Here's the problem: The Earth spins, but gravity remains constant. If gravity is actually pressure from ABOVE, it would vary depending on the Earth's orientation to the rest of the cosmos, unless you make the claim that we are bombarded with an equal amount of gravitons uniformly from every direction of space, which seems ridiculously improbable.
Yes... and? Why does anything you mentioned make disabling it a bad idea? If you have enough RAM, you should be able to keep EVERYTHING in memory and not suffer through endless hard disk hits. If I have 300 MB+ of physical RAM free, why is Windows crippling its performance by frequently accessing a 50MB swap file? Store it in memory, dammit!
Furthermore, in my experience, Windows does not seem to pre-emptively move unused data into swap as you describe, it waits until you try to load something... THEN it makes room. Pre-emptive memory clearing is what various "ram booster" utilities do, like FreeMem, etc. But, IANAWKP (I Am Not A Windows Kernel Programmer)
The only downside to disabling virtual memory should be running out of physical memory and not having an alternative.
Personally, I think Virtual Memory should not be employed until your computer runs out of physical memory. Why doesn't it work that way??
Tell me about it. I have 640MB RAM, and Windoze still grinds away at the swap file all the time.
I've completely disabled virtual memory on a few Winboxes, and the performance (and often stability) increase is astounding! We have a P2/400 hooked up to the home theatre for DivX, MP3, etc. It used to play DivX horribly slow off the network, stuttering, skipping, and freezing all over the place. We found out it was buffering it in swap... turned off virtual memory, BANG, played without missing a frame.
Unfortunately, a number of apps and games seem to be designed to specifically use VM, and won't work with it turned off, so I always end up having to turn it back on.
Conspiracy to convince people they need ever faster machines? Who knows.
Way to get bent out of shape over a single word. You ARE spinning things, using narrow examples to support your point of view.
Then you accuse of me of being rude, while in the same breath indicate I'm too dense to understand your point. That's far more insulting, IMO.. but let's move beyond that, shall we?
"I'm not providing opinions here, only insight."
Bullshit.
"Wouldn't it be weird that MS would break Opera, but not Mozilla, Netscape, or other browsers?"
Opinion.
"When I run across a site that doesn't work with Opera, it feels like the operators of the site were moronic, not that Opera is incompatible. In other words, MS's site not working right with Opera makes MS look incompetant, not Opera."
OPINION. You don't think lots of people (such as any new Opera users who don't have your experience with it?) will just assume Opera can't render it properly? I've been using Opera on and off since version 1, and if I come to a page it screws up, I STILL think, "fucking Opera", and try another browser. It doesn't matter who's fault it is, only that it didn't work with Opera. That can turn people off from Opera. Not everyone thinks like you do, has your technical knowledge and experiences, but you're implying it's the common perception. This is the heart of your spin.
"Breaking their site means potentially shoo'ing off customers. I seriously doubt any PHB would want to do that."
Opinion. It also means potentially convincing people IE handles pages better than Opera.
"That site had a style sheet for Mozilla. I do not have Mozilla installed. I just worked under the assumption that it'd be compatible with Netscape's. They get a 'Mozilla' sheet, but I have never personally tested it. I never recieved an e-mail about it while that site was up, so I'm assuming it worked."
Here we go again. You take one narrow example (your own) and conclude that "that's how these things work". Well, I've worked web design for "Dilbert-esque corp" places (Bank of Montreal, MBANX), tiny startups, and everything in between. If you're using alternate content targetted at specific browsers, it's your responsibility to TEST WITH THOSE SPECIFIC BROWSERS. This is one of the fundamental principles of any type of development.. test any platforms you have specific features for. And this specific case (the details of which you keep ignoring) is pretty far from your example. Not only does it send a different style sheet, but a larger size page, with different (less) CONTENT. Furthermore, you can't possibly claim that a UL margin setting of -30 is something they designed as a "generic" CSS sheet.
Slashdot Mirror
It's still a better idea to have your energy production concentrated. That way when we finally CAN harness tons of clean energy, you don't have 500 million power plants to switch, you have a few hundred or thousand.
Now I know why I always have that feeling that someone is looking at me. No matter which direction I look, I'm looking at myself! ;)
Well personally, I have 3 major complaints which pretty much killed my enjoyment (listed in order of priority):
1) Interface. It's horrible. It's inconsistent. Like, for example, see how many different ways of getting back to the star map you can count. Why isn't there a "Starmap" button that's on every screen? Nope.. on this screen I need to click the tab that opened it, on this screen I have to click a 'Close' button, on another screen I have to double click the sun graphic, or some places it's IMPOSSIBLE to get to the starmap.. you have to back out to other sub screens first. The convolution boggles the mind. Some tabs close by clicking the same place you clicked to open them, other require you to click the title, others require you to click a close button. Sure, I could get used to this crappy interface so that its quirks become second nature, but that doesn't change the underlying fact that it's a crappy interface. Also, the information is SOOOOO spread out, there are way more screens than neccessary. Like, do I really need an ENTIRE SCREEN dedicated to presenting a single yes/no choice of whether my AI colonizes planets? Oh yes, and let's not forget there's not a single tooltip in the entire interface. This is an absolute sin in a game with such a complicated GUI. Also, from an aesthetic standpoint, I think it looks like crap.
2) You either wrestle tediously with the AI, or largely watch the game play itself. Doesn't matter if you turn off the "Econ AI" options... it's still there, nudging sliders around and indulging its troop transport fetish. I felt like I was just there to press the Turn button and move some ships around.. and they've even managed to ruin the strategic element of that, by being able to instantly magically grab a ship from your reserves anywhere in the galaxy.
3) Art. Or lack thereof. Did they spend their entire art budget on those video clips for the diplomacy screens? (Which ARE very cool... but again... FMV is very limiting. Why couldn't they do 3D rendering?) I'm not talking about eye-candy, I'm talking about personality, character, and colour. Part of the joy (for me anyway) of playing a good game is discovering all the art that has gone into it. The sense of wonder of landing on a new alien landscape. The simple pleasure of visually watching your colonies develop over time, instead of just stacks of numbers. In MOO2, when you researched something new, you were treated to a rotating hologram of the object, presented by an animated scientist from your race. It was interesting. It was fun. Visualizations are very powerful things. It took you into its world, and made you feel like a fellow Psilon or Silicoid or whatever. In MOO3, we get a dull log entry. The graphical depiction of research items has gone from rotating holograms to inconsistent, often completely inappropriate category icons. I feel like I'm analyzing a spreadsheet.
And don't even get me started on how much they ruined ship design and space combat. And am I the only one who thinks large portions of the research tree were fleshed out at the last second by people not talking with other? Wildly inconsistent descriptions. Some tell you how they affect game numbers, others tell you virtually nothing.
I am a long time turn based strategy gamer, going back way beyond even the very first Civ game. (Ever hear of Overlord for the C64?) I love these types of games. The first two MOO games were like heroin to me, I couldn't stop playing them. I AM this game's target demographic. But with MOO3, I had to force myself to play for several days, and then just gave up in disgust. It's a pity, because I'm sure there's an extremely deep strategy experience buried under that repulsive shell.
As always, YMMV.
"Physically moving to look behind something on your monitor is incredibly inefficient"
Why do you say this? Is manipulating a keyboard and/or mouse to change your viewpoint more efficient? Head movement is intuitive, natural, and exactly how we change perspective in the real world.
Imagine a surgeon performing surgery through the use of a 3D display... both of his hands could be occupied with "virtual tools" or whatever, so it would be much easier for him to just look around the model.
Your monitor (well, technically your graphics card) "projects" *ONE PARTICULAR VIEWING ANGLE* of a 3D scene onto a flat 2D plane. If you look at this image from different angles, it always looks the same.
:)
Basically the difference with a real 3D display unit is that if you move your head, you will see different parts of the scene, like the sides of an object, just as if you were looking at a real physical object.
Ever played a video game and instinctively (and futilely) jerked your head to one side to try and get a better viewing angle of the action? Well this display would mean that could actually work.
You've got to be kidding. You're telling me you can't think of countless applications for painlessly and naturally being able to view something in 3D? How about checking out an item on EBay and being able to look at it from any angle? 3D videoconferencing? How about a 3D user interface where you can look "behind" things? 3D porn! 3D movies! Hell, even with just games... I think that'd be a bit more than 1% of users.
;D
And best of all, this might finally give Slashdot some real depth.
In Red Mars (or perhaps the sequel?) they build a space elevator on Mars, counterbalanced by a large asteroid in orbit. Well, (**SPOILER WARNING**) some dissidents sever the connection between the cable and the asteroid. Result: Asteroid flung into space, and the cable falls. But... the cable doesn't just fall, because the planet is spinning, so the cable wraps itself around the planet 3 times over the course of a few hours, with steadily increasing force. By the time the end of the cable is falling, it is hitting the planet at such a velocity the shock and heat is destroying everything within several kilometres of it. Imagine vaporizing everything within a few kilometres of the equator! Not to mention the massive tsunami this would cause in the oceans.
;)
Anyway, a space elevator collapsing, no matter where it was located, would be a major catastrophe of global proportions. But at least then the equator line on maps would be from something real!
I agree with most of what you said, except this:
"Lose the moderation system. It doesn't work, and never has."
If you don't like it, ignore the mod scores. You can just read at -1 unsorted if you want.
And IMHO, if you think reading at -1 unsorted is the same as reading at +2, highest first (which is exactly what you're saying by stating "It doesn't work"), you're on glue.
Yeah.. I was pretty much that way by the end of Blue too... the series doesn't exactly build to a climax or anything. Overall though I thought it had great characters and ideas, and a rich story. They are very well written, if a little slow towards the end. Weirdly enough, both Green Mars and Blue Mars won Hugo awards (in 94 and 97 respectively) but Red Mars didn't. (Although it did get the Nebula)
I suggest you read Kim Stanley Robinson's multiple Hugo and Nebulae winning Mars trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, which concern the colonization of Mars and the future of our species in general over the next few centuries. It is also very character driven, which draws you in and creates a compelling story.
The first book in particular, Red Mars, deals with the technical challenges of colonization and terraforming Mars in thorough scientific detail. As the series progresses, it deals more and more with the political consequences of an offworld colony and an increasingly overpopulated Earth. Brilliant series.
"It's a story of a typical TEEN CHEERLEADER VAMPIRE SLAYER, for Christ sake. And she's named BUFFY!"
It's a great show endowed with a silly name. But that's kinda the point.
The whole theme of the show is false expectations. Whedon has stated the original concept for the show was a cute blonde valley girl walking down a dark alley, and getting jumped by a vampire, exactly like countless horror movie cliches. HOWEVER, she doesn't scream, run, fall, and get savaged. Nope, she stays. And not only does she stand her ground, she kicks its ASS. This is Buffy.
This kind of sucker punch is Buffy's bread and butter. Leading the audience's expectations in one direction and then pulling the rug out. In fact it's gotten almost predictably unpredictable. Example: ****EARLY SEASON SEVEN SPOILER WARNING**** In that episode where the watcher's council gets blown up, as soon as that guy (Quentin?) started that heroic, hope filled, noble speech, I knew they were all dead. Five seconds later, BOOM!
I love the show, but I am glad it is ending. It has run a good course, and season 7 looks to be setting up for the mother of all finales. Go out with a bang, Buffy, we'll miss ya.
"You run a warez site, you'll get screwed."
Do you mean it should be illegal to have any web site concerning (NOT distributing) warez?
Yeah, MOD chips are against the DMCA, but other than that, ISONews wasn't doing anything wrong. They even removed serial numbers from the NFO files. They were just a news site.
If Slashdot (or CNN for that matter) runs a story about how there are pirated copies of Two Towers on the net, they are doing the exact same thing. ISONews was just specialized.
It's not the eye-candy I miss.. trust me, I'm an old time paper and pen RPG'er, text-gamer and MUDder, I do not need flashy graphics to enjoy a game. But.. have you PLAYED MOO3? All the personality and sense of wonder just seems gone. It's just an enourmous pile of numbers. And this is from a very methodical, number-headed math major.
As I said right off the bat, I've only played about an hour, and I intend to play more, but that hour was enough to convince me that this isn't 1/10th as addictive or fun as the previous two games. YMMV, this is just an opinion.
Um, you can contact the latter? And search for their email address and maybe find more information? And look up everything else they've written?
Disclaimer: I've only spent about an hour with this game, which obviously is not nearly enough for an in-depth analysis, but I have to say I'm pretty appalled with the offering so far.
It seems like all the life, colour, and magic has been taken out of the game. Let me give you an example... in prior MOO games, when you colonized a planet, you were treated to a nice full screen animation of a spacecraft landing on the planet's surface, and saw one of your colonists putting up a flag, and then it asked you to name your new world. (You could skip these sequences if desired, of course)
In MOO3, you get a log entry. That's it. Hooray. This "reduction to bare data" seems prevalent everywhere in the game. Yes, it's efficient, detailed, and deep. So is a spreadsheet. But is it fun??? The interface is also very bland... I mean.. flat shading everywhere??? This isn't 1989 anymore, how about some gradients or textures people!? And the few space battles I've seen so far have literally been single pixel ships wandering around on a 2D grid.
The first two MOO games grabbed me like a steel clamp and didn't let go. They had so much personality and polish. This one, I am finding myself having to force myself to try and get into it.
It IS very different, but not for the reason you mention.
:)
It's not "ENTIRELY DIGITAL". The strings produce an analog signal, which is measured by pickups, same as any other electric guitar.
The difference here is that each string gets its own digital channel, which is source pure, and can be individually manipulated. A MIDI pickup would just reduce the signal to a pitch, duration, volume, etc, it wouldn't be a real "recording" per se.
I wonder what a chord with alternating clean/distorted strings would sound like?
"almost everything for Linux is written in C++"
;)
Of course, everything in Java is written for Linux.
I think certain scenes and movements were astonishingly real. The one that always jumps out at me is the "Herbs and Stewed Rabbit" scene, where Gollum and Sam are arguing over cooking, and then Gollum quickly scurries over to Sam.. "Give it to us RAW... and WRIGG-GG-GGLING!"
That one movement of him scurrying over to Sam just looks so... REAL. I just about fell out of my seat the first time I saw it. Totally sold. Gollum was THERE with Sam.
Hey now.. Dreamweaver is the hand coder's friend, too. And it "outputs junk most of the time"? You've got to be kidding.. have you seen the bloated drivel that FrontPage puts out? Dreamweaver gives you total control of the code. It outputs what you tell it to output, and there are options for how backwards compatible to make the code.
Its code generation or WYSIWYG renderer isn't what makes it great. Write or import your own javascript if you don't care for Dreamweaver's, use a text editor for your CSS sheets, and you shouldn't be relying on ANY editor to preview your pages anyway. (You can preview in the browser of your choice with a single keypress, what's the problem?)
What DOES make Dreamweaver great is round trip HTML editing (hand code HTML and see the results in real time), and, most importantly, how it automatically updates all relevant pages when you move/rename a file, or edit a libary item or template. This amounts to spectacular time savings when trying to manage a large, consistent site. It's in macro site management/maintenance where Dreamweaver truly shines.
Dude, chill out and have a bowl ;) I think his point is simply that being uninteresting is no protection against being monitored.
"Want more karma? Consider responding to any post of mine! Never fails."
Really?? Intriguing. This demands a test.
The weather is quite nice in Calgary right now. (Offtopic)
Bill Gates is a visionary, and Microsoft Windows is far superior to Linux or Mac. Simpsons sucks. (Flamebait)
F1rst p0zt! This article is stupid! Hemos and CmdrTaco are nazis! Free pR0n! (Troll)
Hey, Google has varying results because they have multiple datacentres, btw. (Redundant)
And this post will start at 2, which is definitely Overrated. That's every possible negative mod. This reply can't POSSIBLY gain karma.
I've thought about it from this exact angle too.. maybe gravity pushes, and mass actually BLOCKS it.
It doesn't work though... Here's the problem: The Earth spins, but gravity remains constant. If gravity is actually pressure from ABOVE, it would vary depending on the Earth's orientation to the rest of the cosmos, unless you make the claim that we are bombarded with an equal amount of gravitons uniformly from every direction of space, which seems ridiculously improbable.
Yes... and? Why does anything you mentioned make disabling it a bad idea? If you have enough RAM, you should be able to keep EVERYTHING in memory and not suffer through endless hard disk hits. If I have 300 MB+ of physical RAM free, why is Windows crippling its performance by frequently accessing a 50MB swap file? Store it in memory, dammit!
Furthermore, in my experience, Windows does not seem to pre-emptively move unused data into swap as you describe, it waits until you try to load something... THEN it makes room. Pre-emptive memory clearing is what various "ram booster" utilities do, like FreeMem, etc. But, IANAWKP (I Am Not A Windows Kernel Programmer)
The only downside to disabling virtual memory should be running out of physical memory and not having an alternative.
Personally, I think Virtual Memory should not be employed until your computer runs out of physical memory. Why doesn't it work that way??
Tell me about it. I have 640MB RAM, and Windoze still grinds away at the swap file all the time.
I've completely disabled virtual memory on a few Winboxes, and the performance (and often stability) increase is astounding! We have a P2/400 hooked up to the home theatre for DivX, MP3, etc. It used to play DivX horribly slow off the network, stuttering, skipping, and freezing all over the place. We found out it was buffering it in swap... turned off virtual memory, BANG, played without missing a frame.
Unfortunately, a number of apps and games seem to be designed to specifically use VM, and won't work with it turned off, so I always end up having to turn it back on.
Conspiracy to convince people they need ever faster machines? Who knows.
Way to get bent out of shape over a single word. You ARE spinning things, using narrow examples to support your point of view.
Then you accuse of me of being rude, while in the same breath indicate I'm too dense to understand your point. That's far more insulting, IMO.. but let's move beyond that, shall we?
"I'm not providing opinions here, only insight."
Bullshit.
"Wouldn't it be weird that MS would break Opera, but not Mozilla, Netscape, or other browsers?"
Opinion.
"When I run across a site that doesn't work with Opera, it feels like the operators of the site were moronic, not that Opera is incompatible. In other words, MS's site not working right with Opera makes MS look incompetant, not Opera."
OPINION. You don't think lots of people (such as any new Opera users who don't have your experience with it?) will just assume Opera can't render it properly? I've been using Opera on and off since version 1, and if I come to a page it screws up, I STILL think, "fucking Opera", and try another browser. It doesn't matter who's fault it is, only that it didn't work with Opera. That can turn people off from Opera. Not everyone thinks like you do, has your technical knowledge and experiences, but you're implying it's the common perception. This is the heart of your spin.
"Breaking their site means potentially shoo'ing off customers. I seriously doubt any PHB would want to do that."
Opinion. It also means potentially convincing people IE handles pages better than Opera.
"That site had a style sheet for Mozilla. I do not have Mozilla installed. I just worked under the assumption that it'd be compatible with Netscape's. They get a 'Mozilla' sheet, but I have never personally tested it. I never recieved an e-mail about it while that site was up, so I'm assuming it worked."
Here we go again. You take one narrow example (your own) and conclude that "that's how these things work". Well, I've worked web design for "Dilbert-esque corp" places (Bank of Montreal, MBANX), tiny startups, and everything in between. If you're using alternate content targetted at specific browsers, it's your responsibility to TEST WITH THOSE SPECIFIC BROWSERS. This is one of the fundamental principles of any type of development.. test any platforms you have specific features for. And this specific case (the details of which you keep ignoring) is pretty far from your example. Not only does it send a different style sheet, but a larger size page, with different (less) CONTENT. Furthermore, you can't possibly claim that a UL margin setting of -30 is something they designed as a "generic" CSS sheet.