While Sony and Microsoft are embroiled in a wanger duel over graphical power, Nintendo have publically stated that we have reached the point where graphics are really important. Nintendo understand that to continue to focus on the goal of photorealism in games, is to destroy the games industry. If games have the production costs of films, and they are certainly starting to, publishers will not take risks, and fewer games will be produced.
The upcoming Nintendo console, the Revolution, supposedly will create a new gameplay mechanism that will open video games to a much larger demographic. You can already see nintendo doing this with devices like the DS, and software like Nintendogs which really is not a game in the traditional sense.
I for one look forward to the return of a period of creative game development, similar to that of the 80s and early 90s. The industry is stagnating, and at the moment, only Nintendo seem to be making the correct sort of efforts to change that.
I always thought the best thing the DOJ could have done in terms of creating competition in the market would have been to force Microsoft to open DirectX. Shame that didn't happen, and that MS have essentially killed OpenGL in Vista.
Would you consider introducing Family Account pricing, allow multiple machines to connect from 1 IP address? You could limit the client spawns to say.. 2 other machines.
My wife and children also play WoW, and it would be rather nice if we could make use of the spare computer and play together.
This would be an excellent feature that I'm sure would be welcomed by many. I'd gladly pay a bit extra for this, but can't really justify paying for yet another full account.
Forgive me if this has already been pointed out, but there is a very large IE6 userbase that is going to remain large long after the release of IE7. Win2k and Windows98 are still widely used, and unfortunately Microsoft in their great wisdom have decided not to provide IE7 for these platforms.
The greatest service that MS can provide to the web developer community, would be to find a way to patch the IE6 engine with the bugfixes that are going in to IE7 - perhaps roll them out through windows update. IE6 is going to be around a long time, and while it is commendable that they have finally decided to address the standards compliance issues with IE, it won't really have any impact for several years. In the meantime, the css hacks will continue to be a necessity.
This is the result of the acid2 test, a test designed to rate the CSS compliance of a browser. At the moment, afaik Safari is the only fully compliant browser, with Firefox and Opera following closely behind.
This a great shame - I had naively hoped that Microsoft would fix their broken browser, and surprise us all by conforming to the standards. They had a great opportunity to really put IE back on the right track, and it looks like they've blown it.
Good job Microsoft - you're completely out of touch with what the web development community actualy wants.
If you like the concept of MMPORPGs, but don't like the reality of the endless grind to be competitive with the hardcore set of players - try Guild Wars.
While not strictly an MMO, Guild Wars has been designed from the ground up to alleviate the problems with most MMORPGs, and you can be competitive with minimal grind. Of all the games in this genre, GW is probably best suited to the casual player.
There's also no subscription fees, which is an added bonus. It's a fantastic game, and I can't recommend it enough (I play WoW too, and despite how ridiculously buggy it is and the crap support from Blizzard, it's a good game).
I thought everyone was of the opinion that we should be publically humiliating spammers, and then proceeding to torture them to death, very very slowly. When did this change? DDOSing them sounds a bit wussy.
In New Zealand our classification system for film and television tends to work the other way. Generally our censors thinks it's better to expose young adults to sex and nudity, rather than violence. As far as I'm aware, the Australian classification system is similar to the American one, and favours violence.
Well, you said flag rather than tag earlier and I didn't make a big deal about it..
Just because something is commonplace doesn't mean that it is good practice to use it. I would imagine that the majority of websites use poor markup.
As you say, the tag's meaning is clear - to make text darker. That's the problem though - HTML shouldn't be used to describe the appearance of an element.
<strong> doesn't mean make text bold, it means strongly emphasise - different devices/web viewers can interpret that in a number of ways.
Incidentally, if you think using <b> is a good idea, you are probably also doing dreadful things like using <table> for layout, and other deprecated (thanks) tags like <font> which will significantly increase your page weight. Standards compliant pages tend to be very light, and render very quickly.
HTML is a structural markup language - it should not be used to describe the appearance of a webpage - that's what CSS is for. What does <b> mean to a screenreader?
<b> is presentational, rather than semantic markup, and therefore depreciated.
I guess the Plain Old Text option still renders html.. weird. I'll try that again:
I find it amusing that you would use this rather rude error message on your website, promoting standards, yet use the <b> tag yourself which is old school presentation based html like <font> and <i> - <b> is depreciated and <strong> should be used instead.
I find it amusing that you would use this rather rude error message on your websited, promoting standards, yet use the tag yourself which is old school presentation based html like and - is depreciated and should be used instead.
javascript:dRE=/(\.google\.(com?(\...)|..|com))$ /; if(!dRE.test(location.host))alert('Sorry, you need to click while viewing a Google page');else{anon='0000000000000000';nowanon='00000 00000000000';C=document.cookie.split('; ');for(i=0;c=C[i];++i)if(/^PREF=/.test(c)){r=c.ind exOf(nowanon)==-1?nowanon:anon;document.cookie=c.r eplace(/ID=\w+:/,'ID='+r+':')+'; domain='+dRE.exec(location.host)[1]+'; path=/;expires=Mon, 01 Jan 2038 00:00:00 GMT';location.reload();}}
I was raised to believe that you default to the more restrictive, so one has to take explicit actions to "open up" functionality which can potentially bite one in the ass.
Damn, I wish I had h4x0r parents like that. Mine just told me to brush my teeth, and get three square meals a day.
I'll second this. The Longest Journey is a really marvellous adventure game. If you enjoyed Grim Fandango, please get yourself a copy of this game:)
Developers simply don't have the balls to make an adventure game these days. There's a game studio in Auckland called Binary Star I visited about a year ago. At the time they were developing a game called Homeland which was most definately a Lucasarts style inventory based 3rd person adventure game. Over the last year, due presumably to some sort of financial pressure, or maybe sheer idiocy, it has turned in to an fps 'with adventure elements'. I suspect this is typical of the entire industry, and is a pretty depressing state of affairs.
There are still intelligent and innovative games made today, like Katamari Damashii for example, but sadly the adventure genre really does appear to be dead.
Lucas Arts - how about a new indy adventure game to tie in with the movie?
I've been playing Guild Wars recently, which like WoW is a MMORPG. The patching system they have implimented is quite remarkable in that you really don't even know it's there. The Guild Wars client, very unobtrusively, streams new content and patches while you are playing.
Fight Club, while an excellent film, did bomb, and infuriated Ruppert Murdoch.
A film like Fight Club, simply would not be produced today... well not in Hollywood at least.
From Wikipedia:
The film opened with $11 million, a surprise #1 movie in a close race that weekend at the box office. However, it fell very quickly in subsequent weekends, finishing with only $37 million in the U.S. It was regarded as a failure as the budget was $63 million, not including advertising which could have been another $20-30 million. Even with the $63 million later accumulated overseas, executives at 20th Century Fox still felt the movie was a severe disappointment, so much that Entertainment Chief Bill Mechanic was fired. According to Mechanic, he had personally clashed with Fox owner Rupert Murdoch over Fight Club and it cost him his job, barely a year after Fox's Titanic had become the highest-grossing film ever made.
Slashdot Mirror
amen
Sony and Microsoft do not.
While Sony and Microsoft are embroiled in a wanger duel over graphical power, Nintendo have publically stated that we have reached the point where graphics are really important. Nintendo understand that to continue to focus on the goal of photorealism in games, is to destroy the games industry. If games have the production costs of films, and they are certainly starting to, publishers will not take risks, and fewer games will be produced.
The upcoming Nintendo console, the Revolution, supposedly will create a new gameplay mechanism that will open video games to a much larger demographic. You can already see nintendo doing this with devices like the DS, and software like Nintendogs which really is not a game in the traditional sense.
I for one look forward to the return of a period of creative game development, similar to that of the 80s and early 90s. The industry is stagnating, and at the moment, only Nintendo seem to be making the correct sort of efforts to change that.
I always thought the best thing the DOJ could have done in terms of creating competition in the market would have been to force Microsoft to open DirectX.
Shame that didn't happen, and that MS have essentially killed OpenGL in Vista.
Would you consider introducing Family Account pricing, allow multiple machines to connect from 1 IP address? You could limit the client spawns to say.. 2 other machines.
My wife and children also play WoW, and it would be rather nice if we could make use of the spare computer and play together.
This would be an excellent feature that I'm sure would be welcomed by many. I'd gladly pay a bit extra for this, but can't really justify paying for yet another full account.
Forgive me if this has already been pointed out, but there is a very large IE6 userbase that is going to remain large long after the release of IE7. Win2k and Windows98 are still widely used, and unfortunately Microsoft in their great wisdom have decided not to provide IE7 for these platforms.
The greatest service that MS can provide to the web developer community, would be to find a way to patch the IE6 engine with the bugfixes that are going in to IE7 - perhaps roll them out through windows update. IE6 is going to be around a long time, and while it is commendable that they have finally decided to address the standards compliance issues with IE, it won't really have any impact for several years. In the meantime, the css hacks will continue to be a necessity.
observe.
This is the result of the acid2 test, a test designed to rate the CSS compliance of a browser. At the moment, afaik Safari is the only fully compliant browser, with Firefox and Opera following closely behind.
This a great shame - I had naively hoped that Microsoft would fix their broken browser, and surprise us all by conforming to the standards. They had a great opportunity to really put IE back on the right track, and it looks like they've blown it.
Good job Microsoft - you're completely out of touch with what the web development community actualy wants.
If you like the concept of MMPORPGs, but don't like the reality of the endless grind to be competitive with the hardcore set of players - try Guild Wars.
While not strictly an MMO, Guild Wars has been designed from the ground up to alleviate the problems with most MMORPGs, and you can be competitive with minimal grind. Of all the games in this genre, GW is probably best suited to the casual player.
There's also no subscription fees, which is an added bonus. It's a fantastic game, and I can't recommend it enough (I play WoW too, and despite how ridiculously buggy it is and the crap support from Blizzard, it's a good game).
um.. when was IE6 released? Quite a number of years ago. Firefox releases are comparatively swift, yes.
I thought everyone was of the opinion that we should be publically humiliating spammers, and then proceeding to torture them to death, very very slowly. When did this change? DDOSing them sounds a bit wussy.
In New Zealand our classification system for film and television tends to work the other way. Generally our censors thinks it's better to expose young adults to sex and nudity, rather than violence. As far as I'm aware, the Australian classification system is similar to the American one, and favours violence.
Are you an IE developer by any chance? :)
The only thing that benefits from the use of a table is tabular data - that's its intended purpose. It should never be used for layout. Use CSS.
h tags aren't a burden, they are essential - they define the structure of your document.
the font tag is obsolete. Once again, use CSS.
Learn web standards, CSS, and XHTML and you will find yourself in a happy place.
Well, you said flag rather than tag earlier and I didn't make a big deal about it..
Just because something is commonplace doesn't mean that it is good practice to use it. I would imagine that the majority of websites use poor markup.
As you say, the tag's meaning is clear - to make text darker. That's the problem though - HTML shouldn't be used to describe the appearance of an element.
<strong> doesn't mean make text bold, it means strongly emphasise - different devices/web viewers can interpret that in a number of ways.
Incidentally, if you think using <b> is a good idea, you are probably also doing dreadful things like using <table> for layout, and other deprecated (thanks) tags like <font> which will significantly increase your page weight. Standards compliant pages tend to be very light, and render very quickly.
HTML is a structural markup language - it should not be used to describe the appearance of a webpage - that's what CSS is for. What does <b> mean to a screenreader?
<b> is presentational, rather than semantic markup, and therefore depreciated.
I guess the Plain Old Text option still renders html .. weird. I'll try that again:
I find it amusing that you would use this rather rude error message on your website, promoting standards, yet use the <b> tag yourself which is old school presentation based html like <font> and <i> - <b> is depreciated and <strong> should be used instead.
I find it amusing that you would use this rather rude error message on your websited, promoting standards, yet use the tag yourself which is old school presentation based html like and - is depreciated and should be used instead.
A nice bookmarklet for google anonymisation:
$ /; if(!dRE.test(location.host))alert('Sorry, you need to click while viewing a Google page');else{anon='0000000000000000';nowanon='00000 00000000000';C=document.cookie.split('; ');for(i=0;c=C[i];++i)if(/^PREF=/.test(c)){r=c.ind exOf(nowanon)==-1?nowanon:anon;document.cookie=c.r eplace(/ID=\w+:/,'ID='+r+':')+'; domain='+dRE.exec(location.host)[1]+'; path=/;expires=Mon, 01 Jan 2038 00:00:00 GMT';location.reload();}}
javascript:dRE=/(\.google\.(com?(\...)|..|com))
"That was TERRIBLE!"
Damn, I wish I had h4x0r parents like that. Mine just told me to brush my teeth, and get three square meals a day.
I'll second this. The Longest Journey is a really marvellous adventure game. If you enjoyed Grim Fandango, please get yourself a copy of this game :)
Developers simply don't have the balls to make an adventure game these days. There's a game studio in Auckland called Binary Star I visited about a year ago. At the time they were developing a game called Homeland which was most definately a Lucasarts style inventory based 3rd person adventure game. Over the last year, due presumably to some sort of financial pressure, or maybe sheer idiocy, it has turned in to an fps 'with adventure elements'. I suspect this is typical of the entire industry, and is a pretty depressing state of affairs.
There are still intelligent and innovative games made today, like Katamari Damashii for example, but sadly the adventure genre really does appear to be dead.
Lucas Arts - how about a new indy adventure game to tie in with the movie?
and oddly enough, the Microsoft Xbox 360 is PPC based.. has the world gone mad? :)
I've been playing Guild Wars recently, which like WoW is a MMORPG. The patching system they have implimented is quite remarkable in that you really don't even know it's there. The Guild Wars client, very unobtrusively, streams new content and patches while you are playing.
Monolithic patches are so 2004 :)
Fight Club, while an excellent film, did bomb, and infuriated Ruppert Murdoch.
A film like Fight Club, simply would not be produced today... well not in Hollywood at least. From Wikipedia:Hi there.
Have you read any of Moore's comics?
My guess is you haven't. My wife, who absolutely abhors the concept of comic books, was very moved by V for Vendetta.
Might I suggest reading some of his work before forming an opinion?
those bastards create a cheesy ending, revealing V's true identity ala scooby doo, and pretty much miss the point of the comic entirely.