You do not need to play WoW to have an account on the new forums. They aren't WoW specific, they are the replacement for the current Battle.Net forum and so all you need is an account (As far as I can tell, you don't even need a Blizzard game to register) so this does nothing to stop trolling at all, it'll just mean a load of fake accounts being used for posting.
The only thing this does is give information out to the people you may not want to have that information. Teachers in the UK are not allowed to interact with pupils, beyond polite greetings and the like, outside of a school environment with the possibility of being fired if they do. This essentially blocks them from using the forums because of the risk involved.
Why could they not allow you to set up an alias that shows on the forum and links to a list of characters on that account that are on the armory and allow us to pick a character to post as alongside that alias?
Bare in mind, if you have any kind of technical problem you will get asked to post it on the forum. You can phone them and then wait in the queue for ages (which is only going to get worse) or just not bother if you are in a position where you need to remain anonymous on WoW.
I've used and moderated a fair few forums over the years and, though I've never needed to moderate as many posts and users as Blizzard do, any decent forum software makes it as easy as possible for the moderator to do their job. Things like having a page that lists each flagged post with the ability on that screen to delete, ban, temp-ban, edit, visit in context and reply to the message without hunting through the actual thread.
One feature I'd really suggest Blizzard consider adding for their moderators is a way for the system to flag IPs that have had multiple accounts banned so that if someone really doesn't take a hint they can ban by IP for a period of time.
Instead they are implementing a change that only alienates good posters and security conscious players and makes all kinds of new trolling possible and worse, could potentially affect someone in real life
One thing I noticed when my WoW guild had a private radio was that, although the server uses one playlist for all visitors, it doesn't necessarily need to play the music in sync with everyone. We noticed this when some people got an advert (in our case, in jokes and event notifications) before a song started playing and some after it finished but no one actually missed any of the song or songs either side of it. Don't know if this is just the way the server handles the streaming or something in the way the data is sent.
There are still a lot of webradio stations running on Shoutcast. It's also one of the two radio players available for the PSP (Icecast being the other). Having been in solid use before AOL took over Nullsoft, it's actually quite well known (again Icecast being the only alternative I know, but I don't do webradio).
No, hormonal imbalance (no matter how it's caused) doesn't have that great an affect on someone mentally. As far I've read, at best it can nudge someone who's unknown or Bi, one side or the other but it's rare and not necessarily tied to what hormone is out of whack. In most people it'll only affect secondary sexual characteristics (body hair, muscle tone, breast development, fat distribution) and unless the person is pre-pubescent or somehow taking large doses of it they effects will mainly be unnoticeable.
He didn't say the Apple App store. He said smartphone app sales. Apple essentially showed the public they could install apps on their phones (something that could be done before but wasn't easy or understandable to the public), now they're willing to do it more often and so apps, even those developed for multi platforms are being forced by Apple's rules to make decisions that are giving Apple an advantage.
Say I want to develop an app for iPhone, Android and Symbian. Currently, I can just about write the main part of the app once and then branch it for the different APIs. However, if I want to add adverts to a trial version of this, I'm unlikely to want to set up accounts with multiple advertising programs, so I'm going to implement one across the board that sticks to Apple's rules (because they are the most strict and the platform I'm likely to sell the most apps on). Google loses out a potential customer on it's own platform because of rules in place on a rival's platform because of it's influence on developers.
Whether this is enough for the monopoly accusation is up to someone with a lot more legal experience than I, but Google (and others) have every right to be annoyed that Apple's rules are likely to affect them even outside of Apple's closed environment
It wasn't particularly accurate for me, pointing to London and I'm a good hour's train journey from it.
You'll be glad to know you have to opt in on each website and there are good uses for it. Just like at the moment various apps on the iPhone and Android can tell you the nearest restaurants, events, weather, news, etc. The internet will soon be able to do so as well, if you want it to.
The reason for the -webkit, -msie, -moz and -o prefixes is that CSS3 isn't finalised yet. For example, the format of parameters for background gradients is still being worked on and both Webkit and Mozilla have different ideas for how to implement it. For Example:
The above would generate the same linear gradient, but as the format of gradients isn't finalised, there is no standard to the parameters
It should also be noted that Webkit currently processes anti-aliasing before it processes any CSS transformations making things like text-shadow and CSS rotations look awful
Chrome (and I presume therefore Android's browser) does actually contain Webkit and Safari in it's User Agent string. In fact the developer tools in Chrome still use Safari UI elements.
The Geolocation spec says it has to be opt in. The reason for it's existence is the recent increase in internet use on mobiles. With Geolocation, your mobile could tell you where the nearest restaurant is, what's on at your local cinema, give you the phone numbers of local taxi companies and tell you what the weather is like without having to have multiple apps on your phone.
But this is not something completely under the control of the designer at this time. All the major web design companies and major companies with inhouse web designers design for different browser groups, not resolutions. If you take the BBC as an example, their website serves up a fixed width output based on which browser you access it with.
The point behind picking 960 as a width is that fluid layouts don't work the vast majority of the time across browsers and, without multi-column support as is coming in CSS3, content is hard to read beyond a certain line length.
Also, pixels are used in the vast majority of designs still because relative sizes, such as em, are unweildy as each size is relative to it's parent container and has noting to do with the client resolution.
I see a large number of problems with the belief that HTML5 will defeat Flash. It will become another competing format, just like Silverlight, but I highly doubt it will defeat Flash in any real meaningful way (and even if it did, it wont remove the things people find a problem with Flash, other than possibly the searchability issue).
Firstly, most web developers these days will write javascript for a framework such as Prototype, MooTools or JQuery because there are so many individual nuances to the javascript notation for each browser that it would be too frustrating to write it without such a framework. This problem will still apply to HTML5 so unless these supposed IDEs pick 1 framework and run with it, we're going to end up with a complete mess of features, frameworks and IDEs. By the time one of them becomes as usable as Visual Studio or Flash CS5, Silverlight and Flash would have both moved on in leaps and bounds attempting to stay well ahead of HTML5.
Secondly, by the time HTML5 is ready for real use (i.e. supported by the vast majority of browsers currently in use), W3C will likely be back around the table discussing HTML6 so who knows what Flash and Silverlight will be capable of by then and what uses we will have for them.
Thirdly, at the moment, HTML5 is far more complicated to write for than either Flash or Silverlight, in most cases it has a significantly larger file size, uses more resources for most of Flash and Silverlight's current usages and it is a lot harder to obscure code or source material, meaning sites like Hulu just wont use it.
There is a place for HTML5 (I'd be happy just for an implementation of canvas in IE so we don't have do all our chart generation through PHP) but it is not, and is never really likely to be (as HTML5 and not a future variant) the death of Flash and Silverlight.
Lastly, I'm sure most people here are happy to use Flashblock to stop any obnoxious Flash site but what will you do when canvas,SVG and CSS (no need for javascript) can reproduce all those annoying flashy adds with little to no way to block them all?
I presume you mean the full width. If so, you're going against the grain of usability on this one I'm afraid. The majority of designers with good knowledge of usability and CSS will build the design to a width of 960px wide as this allows for a usable design inside the max width of the majority of their visitors. If you start pushing wider, the text of the main body becomes too long in line length and therefore hard to follow on longer articles. Unfortunately, although CSS has a min-width and max-width property, they are not very reliable and are usually used only to fix problems in IE. Hopefully, once CSS3 and HTML5 are properly supported we'll have the flexibility to provide designs that adjust properly to a browsers width.
In fact, they'd be worse. You can block Flash by either not installing the plugin or using one of the many Flashblock plugins. You wont find it so easy with HTML5.
You mean the HTML that doesn't do vector graphics? Canvas adds support for it but you are then either writing SVG for it or dynamically generating it through Javascript, either way, drawing it in Flash is much easier. Also, these days, if a Flash file is created properly, it too is searchable.
I hate Flash as much as the next guy, but I have to agree that from a designers point of view, Photoshop and Flash will still be the tools to use for a good few years yet. I'm just glad that you can at least block Flash if it gets obnoxious... That wont be as simple with HTML 5.
Maybe you should have considered my whole statement. If I installed SC2 at any point when Bnet2 is running I can upgrade anything on the computer and still play. Even if you buy a new PC you can just copy the folder from one PC to another and it will still work.
Personally, I'd rather this over the old CD protection because over the course of Diablo 2's existence, I've had to buy 3 copies of it due to damage. So I have no idea how some of you think that this possibly breaking in 10 years (and no one managing to make a fake server app in that time) is any worse than the possibility your CD will break.
You wouldn't need to. The single activation they are talking about is connecting your CD-Key to your Battle.NET account. Once that is done you can just use that login to play, no matter who's actual installation you are playing on. Also, as long as you have logged in at least once on the installation with the internet connected, the game will allow you to log in while not connected (On beta, it logs in but then kicks you back out because it can't load any of the screen you have access to (multiplayer ladder, achievements, news, etc.))
I think this is probably down to the fact the beta is designed for performance testing and Battle.NET is only used as the set up medium (Blizzard have stated once a game is started it runs P2P), so it could be dropping you out of games because it's failing to update performance logs, etc. online
While I've been playing the beta I've noticed a peak in connection at regular intervals throughout games (both vs CPU and another player), even to the point of having to wait a moment for the game to sort itself out which suggests some kind of data transfer happening.
My suggestion would be to wait and see if the same problem occurs with the release version (obviously from someone else).
The EA Sports titles mentioned in the article will have the more draconian version you are referring too. If you buy a used version of any 2011 EA Sports title you will not have any online multiplayer or DLC support unless you pay $10 for the online pass. I don't play any sports games so I don't know the state of offline multiplayer but with the amount of other games that have completed dropped offline multiplayer in favour of online multiplayer (Burnout Paradise for example) this amount to roping off a large portion of what you pay for.
I've read a load of comments in support of this on some gaming websites and most of them don't even make sense. As an example, one of the more common arguments for this goes along the lines of: "Companies like EA are losing massive amounts of money to people playing used copies on their servers". Excuse me but I thought I paid for XBox Live Gold because Microsoft took care of the server issues and as I have a copy you have been paid for by someone else who no longer plays the game (due to not having it), surely you've already had that 'server cost' paid for?
The spec is supposed to work so that if it cannot play the content of the src attribute of the video tag it tries to display the contents of the tag itself. So, in theory at least, your example should work (but it depends on developers supporting it).
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
You can have a library written in (Apple's languages) to handle calls to the APIs by the looks of it (though the bit in brackets could be interpreted to mean any intermediary/compatibility layer) but you can't write your application in anything but (Apple's languages) so your example would be rejected for being originally written in Flash/AS3.
But that isn't the browser and the reason YouTube videos can now be viewed in the browser on iPhone is because YouTube doesn't use flash to show the video on iPhone (but equally, the iPhone can't see any annotations on videos on YouTube because only the flash player has support for this at the moment).
You also can't view YouTube videos embeded on other websites on the iPhone as it the embed feature is done through a flash player (and is one of the things HTML5 will have trouble replicating due to it requiring cross site javascript).
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You do not need to play WoW to have an account on the new forums. They aren't WoW specific, they are the replacement for the current Battle.Net forum and so all you need is an account (As far as I can tell, you don't even need a Blizzard game to register) so this does nothing to stop trolling at all, it'll just mean a load of fake accounts being used for posting.
The only thing this does is give information out to the people you may not want to have that information. Teachers in the UK are not allowed to interact with pupils, beyond polite greetings and the like, outside of a school environment with the possibility of being fired if they do. This essentially blocks them from using the forums because of the risk involved.
Why could they not allow you to set up an alias that shows on the forum and links to a list of characters on that account that are on the armory and allow us to pick a character to post as alongside that alias?
Bare in mind, if you have any kind of technical problem you will get asked to post it on the forum. You can phone them and then wait in the queue for ages (which is only going to get worse) or just not bother if you are in a position where you need to remain anonymous on WoW.
I've used and moderated a fair few forums over the years and, though I've never needed to moderate as many posts and users as Blizzard do, any decent forum software makes it as easy as possible for the moderator to do their job. Things like having a page that lists each flagged post with the ability on that screen to delete, ban, temp-ban, edit, visit in context and reply to the message without hunting through the actual thread.
One feature I'd really suggest Blizzard consider adding for their moderators is a way for the system to flag IPs that have had multiple accounts banned so that if someone really doesn't take a hint they can ban by IP for a period of time.
Instead they are implementing a change that only alienates good posters and security conscious players and makes all kinds of new trolling possible and worse, could potentially affect someone in real life
One thing I noticed when my WoW guild had a private radio was that, although the server uses one playlist for all visitors, it doesn't necessarily need to play the music in sync with everyone. We noticed this when some people got an advert (in our case, in jokes and event notifications) before a song started playing and some after it finished but no one actually missed any of the song or songs either side of it. Don't know if this is just the way the server handles the streaming or something in the way the data is sent.
There are still a lot of webradio stations running on Shoutcast. It's also one of the two radio players available for the PSP (Icecast being the other). Having been in solid use before AOL took over Nullsoft, it's actually quite well known (again Icecast being the only alternative I know, but I don't do webradio).
No, hormonal imbalance (no matter how it's caused) doesn't have that great an affect on someone mentally. As far I've read, at best it can nudge someone who's unknown or Bi, one side or the other but it's rare and not necessarily tied to what hormone is out of whack. In most people it'll only affect secondary sexual characteristics (body hair, muscle tone, breast development, fat distribution) and unless the person is pre-pubescent or somehow taking large doses of it they effects will mainly be unnoticeable.
He didn't say the Apple App store. He said smartphone app sales. Apple essentially showed the public they could install apps on their phones (something that could be done before but wasn't easy or understandable to the public), now they're willing to do it more often and so apps, even those developed for multi platforms are being forced by Apple's rules to make decisions that are giving Apple an advantage.
Say I want to develop an app for iPhone, Android and Symbian. Currently, I can just about write the main part of the app once and then branch it for the different APIs. However, if I want to add adverts to a trial version of this, I'm unlikely to want to set up accounts with multiple advertising programs, so I'm going to implement one across the board that sticks to Apple's rules (because they are the most strict and the platform I'm likely to sell the most apps on). Google loses out a potential customer on it's own platform because of rules in place on a rival's platform because of it's influence on developers.
Whether this is enough for the monopoly accusation is up to someone with a lot more legal experience than I, but Google (and others) have every right to be annoyed that Apple's rules are likely to affect them even outside of Apple's closed environment
It wasn't particularly accurate for me, pointing to London and I'm a good hour's train journey from it.
You'll be glad to know you have to opt in on each website and there are good uses for it. Just like at the moment various apps on the iPhone and Android can tell you the nearest restaurants, events, weather, news, etc. The internet will soon be able to do so as well, if you want it to.
The reason for the -webkit, -msie, -moz and -o prefixes is that CSS3 isn't finalised yet. For example, the format of parameters for background gradients is still being worked on and both Webkit and Mozilla have different ideas for how to implement it. For Example:
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, top, bottom, from(rgb(0,0,0)), to(rgb(255,255,255)));
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgb(0,0,0) 0, rgb(255,255,255) 100%);
The above would generate the same linear gradient, but as the format of gradients isn't finalised, there is no standard to the parameters
It should also be noted that Webkit currently processes anti-aliasing before it processes any CSS transformations making things like text-shadow and CSS rotations look awful
Chrome (and I presume therefore Android's browser) does actually contain Webkit and Safari in it's User Agent string. In fact the developer tools in Chrome still use Safari UI elements.
The Geolocation spec says it has to be opt in. The reason for it's existence is the recent increase in internet use on mobiles. With Geolocation, your mobile could tell you where the nearest restaurant is, what's on at your local cinema, give you the phone numbers of local taxi companies and tell you what the weather is like without having to have multiple apps on your phone.
But this is not something completely under the control of the designer at this time. All the major web design companies and major companies with inhouse web designers design for different browser groups, not resolutions. If you take the BBC as an example, their website serves up a fixed width output based on which browser you access it with.
The point behind picking 960 as a width is that fluid layouts don't work the vast majority of the time across browsers and, without multi-column support as is coming in CSS3, content is hard to read beyond a certain line length.
Also, pixels are used in the vast majority of designs still because relative sizes, such as em, are unweildy as each size is relative to it's parent container and has noting to do with the client resolution.
I see a large number of problems with the belief that HTML5 will defeat Flash. It will become another competing format, just like Silverlight, but I highly doubt it will defeat Flash in any real meaningful way (and even if it did, it wont remove the things people find a problem with Flash, other than possibly the searchability issue).
Firstly, most web developers these days will write javascript for a framework such as Prototype, MooTools or JQuery because there are so many individual nuances to the javascript notation for each browser that it would be too frustrating to write it without such a framework. This problem will still apply to HTML5 so unless these supposed IDEs pick 1 framework and run with it, we're going to end up with a complete mess of features, frameworks and IDEs. By the time one of them becomes as usable as Visual Studio or Flash CS5, Silverlight and Flash would have both moved on in leaps and bounds attempting to stay well ahead of HTML5.
Secondly, by the time HTML5 is ready for real use (i.e. supported by the vast majority of browsers currently in use), W3C will likely be back around the table discussing HTML6 so who knows what Flash and Silverlight will be capable of by then and what uses we will have for them.
Thirdly, at the moment, HTML5 is far more complicated to write for than either Flash or Silverlight, in most cases it has a significantly larger file size, uses more resources for most of Flash and Silverlight's current usages and it is a lot harder to obscure code or source material, meaning sites like Hulu just wont use it.
There is a place for HTML5 (I'd be happy just for an implementation of canvas in IE so we don't have do all our chart generation through PHP) but it is not, and is never really likely to be (as HTML5 and not a future variant) the death of Flash and Silverlight.
Lastly, I'm sure most people here are happy to use Flashblock to stop any obnoxious Flash site but what will you do when canvas,SVG and CSS (no need for javascript) can reproduce all those annoying flashy adds with little to no way to block them all?
Yes, I have to manage 3 large insurance websites with no CMS tools... Thanks
They've already started doing it: http://www.9to5mac.com/Flash-html5-canvas-35409730
I presume you mean the full width. If so, you're going against the grain of usability on this one I'm afraid. The majority of designers with good knowledge of usability and CSS will build the design to a width of 960px wide as this allows for a usable design inside the max width of the majority of their visitors. If you start pushing wider, the text of the main body becomes too long in line length and therefore hard to follow on longer articles. Unfortunately, although CSS has a min-width and max-width property, they are not very reliable and are usually used only to fix problems in IE. Hopefully, once CSS3 and HTML5 are properly supported we'll have the flexibility to provide designs that adjust properly to a browsers width.
In fact, they'd be worse. You can block Flash by either not installing the plugin or using one of the many Flashblock plugins. You wont find it so easy with HTML5.
You mean the HTML that doesn't do vector graphics? Canvas adds support for it but you are then either writing SVG for it or dynamically generating it through Javascript, either way, drawing it in Flash is much easier. Also, these days, if a Flash file is created properly, it too is searchable.
I hate Flash as much as the next guy, but I have to agree that from a designers point of view, Photoshop and Flash will still be the tools to use for a good few years yet. I'm just glad that you can at least block Flash if it gets obnoxious... That wont be as simple with HTML 5.
Maybe you should have considered my whole statement. If I installed SC2 at any point when Bnet2 is running I can upgrade anything on the computer and still play. Even if you buy a new PC you can just copy the folder from one PC to another and it will still work.
Personally, I'd rather this over the old CD protection because over the course of Diablo 2's existence, I've had to buy 3 copies of it due to damage. So I have no idea how some of you think that this possibly breaking in 10 years (and no one managing to make a fake server app in that time) is any worse than the possibility your CD will break.
Starcraft 2 is pretty much idientical to this, except the single player which can be played in offline mode.
You wouldn't need to. The single activation they are talking about is connecting your CD-Key to your Battle.NET account. Once that is done you can just use that login to play, no matter who's actual installation you are playing on. Also, as long as you have logged in at least once on the installation with the internet connected, the game will allow you to log in while not connected (On beta, it logs in but then kicks you back out because it can't load any of the screen you have access to (multiplayer ladder, achievements, news, etc.))
I think this is probably down to the fact the beta is designed for performance testing and Battle.NET is only used as the set up medium (Blizzard have stated once a game is started it runs P2P), so it could be dropping you out of games because it's failing to update performance logs, etc. online
While I've been playing the beta I've noticed a peak in connection at regular intervals throughout games (both vs CPU and another player), even to the point of having to wait a moment for the game to sort itself out which suggests some kind of data transfer happening.
My suggestion would be to wait and see if the same problem occurs with the release version (obviously from someone else).
Perfect example of this is Google Maps on the iPod Touch (works purely off of WiFi as there is no GPS or Cell Radio)
The EA Sports titles mentioned in the article will have the more draconian version you are referring too. If you buy a used version of any 2011 EA Sports title you will not have any online multiplayer or DLC support unless you pay $10 for the online pass. I don't play any sports games so I don't know the state of offline multiplayer but with the amount of other games that have completed dropped offline multiplayer in favour of online multiplayer (Burnout Paradise for example) this amount to roping off a large portion of what you pay for.
I've read a load of comments in support of this on some gaming websites and most of them don't even make sense. As an example, one of the more common arguments for this goes along the lines of: "Companies like EA are losing massive amounts of money to people playing used copies on their servers". Excuse me but I thought I paid for XBox Live Gold because Microsoft took care of the server issues and as I have a copy you have been paid for by someone else who no longer plays the game (due to not having it), surely you've already had that 'server cost' paid for?
The spec is supposed to work so that if it cannot play the content of the src attribute of the video tag it tries to display the contents of the tag itself. So, in theory at least, your example should work (but it depends on developers supporting it).
You can have a library written in (Apple's languages) to handle calls to the APIs by the looks of it (though the bit in brackets could be interpreted to mean any intermediary/compatibility layer) but you can't write your application in anything but (Apple's languages) so your example would be rejected for being originally written in Flash/AS3.
But that isn't the browser and the reason YouTube videos can now be viewed in the browser on iPhone is because YouTube doesn't use flash to show the video on iPhone (but equally, the iPhone can't see any annotations on videos on YouTube because only the flash player has support for this at the moment).
You also can't view YouTube videos embeded on other websites on the iPhone as it the embed feature is done through a flash player (and is one of the things HTML5 will have trouble replicating due to it requiring cross site javascript).