One I haven't heard mentioned much yet (possibly because it got patched away within a few months after release) was the wonky experience system. You literally couldn't figure out how to level your character.
Well, it wasn't so much that you couldn't figure it out, is that it was entirely random.
OK, first off, I have to explain that you have two levels: your character level and your class level. Your character level would slowly go up by getting regular old XP. Your class level involved getting "SP" and SP was randomly rewarded by doing actions related to the class.
And I mean that literally. Using a class's action had a random chance of gaining SP, depending on the level of the target the action was being used on.
Now you might assume based on what I just described that "character level" was like a traditional RPG level and that "class level" would be used to unlock skills or something. Nope. All the "character level" did was unlock attribute points you can use to increase attributes whose meaning was never explained. The "class level" was your traditional RPG level - increasing it would increase all your attributes on a set growth curve. (In addition to being used to unlock skills.) And leveling that up was, quite literally, random.
The random factor was what was patched out a few months after release, they changed it so that killing enemies always generated SP. As far as I know, they never got rid of the "character" level, whose sole purpose was granting "bonus" attribute points.
I agree, I'm not sure I understand Yoshida's comment about them being "too focused on FFXI" because if anything the problem was that they essentially looked at FFXI and decided they were going to try and be as different as possible from it. (Well, at least in some aspects, considering they wholesale lifted things like the various player races from XI.)
People were looking for an updated XI for the then-next gen consoles, and instead of doing that, they did everything they could to distance the mechanics for XIV from XI, and it just didn't work.
Imagine instead of being a long series of hallways that you were linearly lead down, you were instead dumped into a large maze of nearly identical hallways and given absolutely no direction...
What was preventing Massachusetts from updating the existing site to meet the requirements?
The federal regulations required to allow people to receive subsidies under Obamacare. In order for people to fall under Obamacare, they had to re-signup using a website that had to be rewritten from the ground-up to use the new Obamacare subsidies. Basically, none of the existing site could be used because it was state-only, and they had to remake the entire thing to work with the new fed system.
And, when making this decision a year ago, who better to do that than the people building the Healthcare.gov site? Oops!
Heathcare.gov works fine. The majority of the people in my company used it to sign up (including myself) and it worked fine.
This is a Massachusetts-specific issue. Massachusetts has only just getting around to firing CGI for their incompetence. The website still doesn't work.
You do not have to simply rely on the website if it, for whatever reason, is not working for you. There are alternative ways to sign up.
You do in Massachusetts! The alternative ways involve having someone plug the information into the website for you. The website that still doesn't work.
They've had months to sign up.
And almost all of them have been trying since October. (I know my brother has!) It doesn't matter, because the Massachusetts website doesn't work. The alternative methods don't work, to the point where the state government has resorted to doing it by paper and are slowly working through the paper application backlog because the website doesn't work at all. The backend doesn't work, they simply can't process applications by computer at all. They're going to miss the deadline and have had to ask Obama to extend it.
The ironic thing is that since Obamacare is Romneycare, there was an old website that did work. But unfortunately Obamacare forced Massachusetts to build a brand new site to replace it and forced people to sign up again to meet the new federal requirements. And it's this process that's absolutely broken.
Nothing to do with Healthcare.gov, other than being built by the same chucklefucks who had to be replaced before other people could get Healthcare.gov into its current "sort of almost working" state. Remember, just like Oregon in this story, since Massachusetts has its own site, if you're a Massachusetts resident, you have to sign up using the Massachusetts site. Which still doesn't work.
Well, yeah, you could have just looked at Massachusetts and known this would happen.
Fun fact: the amount of emergency room treatment went up in Massachusetts when Romneycare passed. Fewer people were seeing their doctors than prior. I personally know people who moved to other states because the health insurance requirement meant that they lost their job.
The hugely ironic thing is that, thanks to Obamacare, there are something like 100,000 people in Massachusetts who are going to lose their Romneycare because of the new Obamacare healthcare connector requirements. And because the new Massachusetts website was made by the same people who made Healthcare.gov, it still doesn't work and the people on Romneycare (like my brother) are flat-out screwed. By the end of the month, they still won't have insurance, and the deadline to sign up will pass.
That's a term that they define earlier in the law, and they're quite clear:
"Sexual or other intimate parts", human genitals, buttocks, pubic area or female breast below a point immediately above the tip of the areola, whether naked or covered by clothing or undergarments.
Well, maybe not "quite clear" but it's not like "sexual or other intimate parts" is the phrase that determines the meaning of the law.
Welcome to modern politics. Politicians do whatever they want and don;t need to consult the public at all.
Meh, I'm not sure that really applies in this case. The law that was passed is basically a patch. And, like so many laws, I mean that quite literally: it's a list of insertions and deletions into the existing legal code.
Basically the Supreme Judicial Court said that a certain activity that was clearly intended to fall under the law didn't, because of the way the law was written. So the legislature fixed the wording of the law.
All the public debate had already happened, this was just a "bug fix," so to speak.
So while I'm not going to claim that there are definite issues of legislatures ignoring their constituents and sneaking laws through as rapidly as possible to avoid public debate on them (hi, Obamacare!), this really isn't a case of that.
I don't know which is more depressing, honestly, that stories like this do make Slashdot, or that stories like Twitch Plays Pokemon, where someone hooked up Pokemon Red to the Twitch chat system and Twitch viewers managed to play through the entire game don't. As the link demonstrates, it made the freaking BBC. It was even on the front page of NPR at one point. But not Slashdot.
Google Maps on iOS wasn't free. Was never free. Apple paid major amounts of money for it. It may have been free to you, but not to Apple.
Oh, and Apple Maps is free to them then? Before they were paying Google to deal with gathering the map data (maps, imagery, POIs) and running the servers. Costs that were shared by Google's other users, meaning that economies of scale are in play.
Now, Apple has to collect all that map data on their own, has to run their own back-end for dealing with that data, including writing their own (still hilariously broken) search over it, their own routing software, their own traffic monitoring software, and maintain the servers running said back-end. And don't forget, they had to build all that, so you need to factor in buying servers and writing all that back-end software.
I find it quite likely that sticking with Google would in fact have been far, far cheaper than building their own. The only reason they didn't is because they hate Android that much.
Most Apple Maps issues were a side effect of an early launch.
Maybe, but as far as I can tell, they've never fixed the somewhat hilariously misplaced POIs near me. They appear to be untouched from when I first checked them back when iOS 6 was released. (Although I see that the power substation is now a Men's Wearhouse instead of a Nordstroms, so I guess something has been updated.)
The other Apple Maps issue is that they don't show the difference between "there's no traffic here" and "we don't collect data for this road" making their traffic reports entirely useless.
Combine the two, and no one I know with an iDevice bothers with Apple Maps for navigation, they stick with the Google Maps app. It's still better.
Sounds like your Windows 8.1 upgrade experience went more smoothly than mine.
In my case, the upgrade replaced the working graphics drivers with ones that - well, didn't. So as soon as 8.1 got to the point where it was supposed to display the log in screen, I instead got a nice black screen.
Fun fact: how do you boot to "safe mode" in Windows 8.*? Well, by holding down Shift when selecting "Shut down" from the Power menu. How do you do that when the OS won't actually boot? You don't.
Even better getting to the recovery options involves hoping and praying your keypress lands in the incredibly tiny window it bothers checking. I ended up just powering off the laptop during boot in order to make Windows consider it a "failed" boot because I never succeeded in triggering recovery mode using shift-F8.
Well, at least when it comes to Macs, yeah, probably. Macs aren't "officially supported" where I work. (Then why do I have a Mac? Because someone decided we should make an iOS app! Which required a Mac. So I got a Mac. And then the iOS app was canceled, because it was useless anyway. So now I have a Mac I need to keep updated to keep IT happy, because it isn't "officially supported.")
I disagree (clearly). A lot of people say that Windows 8 is worthless dreck, despite the fact that it in fact has a ton of actual improvements over Windows 7. Much like more recent OS X updates, those improvements are overshadowed by mind-numbingly stupid UI choices to the point where, as far as most users are concerned, Windows 8 is worthless dreck. Despite the clear technical improvements and useful new features.
Much like the OP when it comes to OS X updates. Yes, there are technical improvements. It's too bad about the UI...
Yet Mavericks hasn't had any Metro like interface reboot...
Really? The slow iOS-ification of the OS doesn't count? Mavericks drops another set of iOS apps onto OS X that don't need to be there, and OS X has slowly been becoming more and more like iOS since Snow Leopard. I don't remember when they added their version of the Start Screen (Launchpad), but it's there, and you can't get rid of it. I'd say that counts.
And the Mavericks improvements I describe are most certainly noticeable. Most people use laptops these days and more than an hour extra battery life really makes a difference.
IT forced all the Macs where I work to Mavericks. (One of the most painful upgrade processes I've ever had to go through, but I'm pretty sure that was on IT. I hope it was.) There's been no battery life improvement.
I do notice that trying to open the battery menu causes some system process to crash with 100% CPU usage, so that's a new - uh, thing. Not sure it was worth the upgrade, though...
Bullshit. App Nap, Timer coalescing and compressed app memory would have been worth a paid upgrade on their own. Between them there is both more responsiveness, and a significantly improved battery life.
Yeah, and Windows 8 has a ton of great tech improvements under the hood too. Yet I really can't blame anyone who'd rather stick with Windows 7 and miss out on the enhancements they'll never notice to avoid the UI changes they most certainly will.
If the re-launched Final Fantasy XIV has one really killer feature, it is that it shifts the tone and nature of both levelling and end-game content substantially away from the WoW model (without ignoring WoW's evolutions of the genre entirely).
I have no idea what you mean. Granted I haven't played WoW since vanilla, but in FFXIV, you level up via quests, gain rest XP by logging off at an inn^W"sanctuary," and the game doesn't "really" begin until you hit level 50. Almost exactly like WoW, except for the part where you have to level a second class up to level 15 in order to play your original class past level 30 and the fact that the cap is 50, not 60.
End game content is then annoying raids with strict loot lock-outs, making for a very slow gear progression grind.
Now I have to admit that I don't know what leveling in WoW is like today, but leveling in FFXIV is basically identical to what WoW did at launch. Except you can (well, are forced to, if we're honest) level multiple classes on the same character. But it's still basically "grind quests until level cap, then switch to a gear treadmill." Just like WoW. How is this different? I'm not seeing it.
Do I really need to see my open windows and part of my desktop behind the start menu when I'm just clicking to start a program? Not really.
Actually... yes. You do. Believe it or not.
There's a concept called "doorway amnesia" where you'll tend to "forget" what it was you're doing when your surroundings change entirely. It's why everyone has experienced walking into a room and then forgetting why they went there in the first place. By entirely replacing the desktop and changing your context, it makes it harder to remember why you opened the Start Screen in the first place.
The rest of the complaints have to do with it being slower to use than the start menu thanks in part to the transition animations. My personal annoyance is that not everything you have installed shows up there, instead they're hidden behind the down arrow. Yes, yes, you can "pin them to start" but after installing a new app, it always initially confuses me when I go looking for it and it isn't on the Start Screen.
Windows renders everything to an off-screen 96dpi buffer, then just scales that up 200%.
Does Windows do the bilinear filtering thing that the Retinal MacBooks do? I saw one running in a store, and the way it handles non-DPI aware apps is bilinearly scaling it up. Made the entire thing look very blurry.
Yeah, that's what I thought too, but reading the article, I think they may actually have meant the Start Button. Apparently the idea is to make it look more like the round button it is in Windows 7.
Because that's clearly the problem.
Reading other articles on the update it's clear that there are some minor fixes to using Metro with a mouse (right clicking will bring up a traditional context menu instead of bringing it up on the bottom of the screen), but the Start Menu (you know, what people actually want back) still will not be returning.
But I can't recall hearing anyone saying "Thank god the police came and locked everything down and started busting in our doors trying to find this guy!"
You don't live near Boston, then. People were pretty much saying exactly that. I'd hate to think what the ancestors who started the American Revolution would think of the people who live here now...
Happily enough, Alexa offers a download of the top million domains. Even calculating the MD5 hash for every domain every time and doing a simple string comparison using node.js, it takes only a couple of seconds to run through every single entry in that table.
arth1's domain isn't in the top million list, though.
But still, there are plenty of sites in the top million list you may not want to share with Valve that you visit, like #83, pornhub.com, or #84, huffingtonpost.com.
Am I the only one that remembers the community losing it's nut the last time there was a redesign?
I remember that. I still have D2 turned off and use the old Slashdot interface, because D2 is crap and the original version works better. (Ignoring the pagination bug they never fixed to try and force people to D2.) The beta site kills the traditional UI I still use. (To be fair, the beta site finally lets you filter by score and not just "interesting." Too bad you're not allowed to set that as a default.)
I remember when Gawker decided to Gawker-ify a bunch of their sites (essentially making them unreadable to a degree worse than the current Slashdot beta) and asked for feedback. I answered that if they went through with the change, I'd leave and never come back. They went through with the change. I left and have never been back.
If Slashdot goes through with the beta site, I'll leave and never come back. Apparently I won't be alone in that decision. I'm not sure what I'll replace it with, but I'm sure I'll find something. It wouldn't be the first time I've stopped reading a website because a redesign made it effectively unreadable.
I know. Simply because it's Gawker, I have to side with whoever the other guy is. It's Gawker, after all. Gawker is to journalism as Slashdot is to editing.
And not a moment too soon, I read somewhere that 3D printers are being used to print medical gear, can you imagine if your medical gear printed with a virus? You'd doom the human race to gray goo! It's good to think that we're safe from that, thanks to products like Norton Antivirus.
Of course, 3D prints will take twenty times as long, but it's a small price to pay for the peace of mind and ability to use a laptop as a space heater that Norton Antivirus provides.
Slashdot Mirror
One I haven't heard mentioned much yet (possibly because it got patched away within a few months after release) was the wonky experience system. You literally couldn't figure out how to level your character.
Well, it wasn't so much that you couldn't figure it out, is that it was entirely random.
OK, first off, I have to explain that you have two levels: your character level and your class level. Your character level would slowly go up by getting regular old XP. Your class level involved getting "SP" and SP was randomly rewarded by doing actions related to the class.
And I mean that literally. Using a class's action had a random chance of gaining SP, depending on the level of the target the action was being used on.
Now you might assume based on what I just described that "character level" was like a traditional RPG level and that "class level" would be used to unlock skills or something. Nope. All the "character level" did was unlock attribute points you can use to increase attributes whose meaning was never explained. The "class level" was your traditional RPG level - increasing it would increase all your attributes on a set growth curve. (In addition to being used to unlock skills.) And leveling that up was, quite literally, random.
The random factor was what was patched out a few months after release, they changed it so that killing enemies always generated SP. As far as I know, they never got rid of the "character" level, whose sole purpose was granting "bonus" attribute points.
I agree, I'm not sure I understand Yoshida's comment about them being "too focused on FFXI" because if anything the problem was that they essentially looked at FFXI and decided they were going to try and be as different as possible from it. (Well, at least in some aspects, considering they wholesale lifted things like the various player races from XI.)
People were looking for an updated XI for the then-next gen consoles, and instead of doing that, they did everything they could to distance the mechanics for XIV from XI, and it just didn't work.
Imagine instead of being a long series of hallways that you were linearly lead down, you were instead dumped into a large maze of nearly identical hallways and given absolutely no direction...
What was preventing Massachusetts from updating the existing site to meet the requirements?
The federal regulations required to allow people to receive subsidies under Obamacare. In order for people to fall under Obamacare, they had to re-signup using a website that had to be rewritten from the ground-up to use the new Obamacare subsidies. Basically, none of the existing site could be used because it was state-only, and they had to remake the entire thing to work with the new fed system.
And, when making this decision a year ago, who better to do that than the people building the Healthcare.gov site? Oops!
[dailykos.com]
Really? Really? Try again.
Heathcare.gov works fine. The majority of the people in my company used it to sign up (including myself) and it worked fine.
This is a Massachusetts-specific issue. Massachusetts has only just getting around to firing CGI for their incompetence. The website still doesn't work.
You do not have to simply rely on the website if it, for whatever reason, is not working for you. There are alternative ways to sign up.
You do in Massachusetts! The alternative ways involve having someone plug the information into the website for you. The website that still doesn't work.
They've had months to sign up.
And almost all of them have been trying since October. (I know my brother has!) It doesn't matter, because the Massachusetts website doesn't work. The alternative methods don't work, to the point where the state government has resorted to doing it by paper and are slowly working through the paper application backlog because the website doesn't work at all. The backend doesn't work, they simply can't process applications by computer at all. They're going to miss the deadline and have had to ask Obama to extend it.
The ironic thing is that since Obamacare is Romneycare, there was an old website that did work. But unfortunately Obamacare forced Massachusetts to build a brand new site to replace it and forced people to sign up again to meet the new federal requirements. And it's this process that's absolutely broken.
Nothing to do with Healthcare.gov, other than being built by the same chucklefucks who had to be replaced before other people could get Healthcare.gov into its current "sort of almost working" state. Remember, just like Oregon in this story, since Massachusetts has its own site, if you're a Massachusetts resident, you have to sign up using the Massachusetts site. Which still doesn't work.
Well, yeah, you could have just looked at Massachusetts and known this would happen.
Fun fact: the amount of emergency room treatment went up in Massachusetts when Romneycare passed. Fewer people were seeing their doctors than prior. I personally know people who moved to other states because the health insurance requirement meant that they lost their job.
The hugely ironic thing is that, thanks to Obamacare, there are something like 100,000 people in Massachusetts who are going to lose their Romneycare because of the new Obamacare healthcare connector requirements. And because the new Massachusetts website was made by the same people who made Healthcare.gov, it still doesn't work and the people on Romneycare (like my brother) are flat-out screwed. By the end of the month, they still won't have insurance, and the deadline to sign up will pass.
Ah, hope and change.
That's a term that they define earlier in the law, and they're quite clear:
"Sexual or other intimate parts", human genitals, buttocks, pubic area or female breast below a point immediately above the tip of the areola, whether naked or covered by clothing or undergarments.
Well, maybe not "quite clear" but it's not like "sexual or other intimate parts" is the phrase that determines the meaning of the law.
Welcome to modern politics. Politicians do whatever they want and don;t need to consult the public at all.
Meh, I'm not sure that really applies in this case. The law that was passed is basically a patch. And, like so many laws, I mean that quite literally: it's a list of insertions and deletions into the existing legal code.
Basically the Supreme Judicial Court said that a certain activity that was clearly intended to fall under the law didn't, because of the way the law was written. So the legislature fixed the wording of the law.
All the public debate had already happened, this was just a "bug fix," so to speak.
So while I'm not going to claim that there are definite issues of legislatures ignoring their constituents and sneaking laws through as rapidly as possible to avoid public debate on them (hi, Obamacare!), this really isn't a case of that.
Considering that apparently they didn't actually discover the "real" Satoshi Nakamoto after all, I'd have to go with "no, they shouldn't have revealed anything."
I don't know which is more depressing, honestly, that stories like this do make Slashdot, or that stories like Twitch Plays Pokemon, where someone hooked up Pokemon Red to the Twitch chat system and Twitch viewers managed to play through the entire game don't. As the link demonstrates, it made the freaking BBC. It was even on the front page of NPR at one point. But not Slashdot.
This, on the other hand...
Google Maps on iOS wasn't free. Was never free. Apple paid major amounts of money for it. It may have been free to you, but not to Apple.
Oh, and Apple Maps is free to them then? Before they were paying Google to deal with gathering the map data (maps, imagery, POIs) and running the servers. Costs that were shared by Google's other users, meaning that economies of scale are in play.
Now, Apple has to collect all that map data on their own, has to run their own back-end for dealing with that data, including writing their own (still hilariously broken) search over it, their own routing software, their own traffic monitoring software, and maintain the servers running said back-end. And don't forget, they had to build all that, so you need to factor in buying servers and writing all that back-end software.
I find it quite likely that sticking with Google would in fact have been far, far cheaper than building their own. The only reason they didn't is because they hate Android that much.
Most Apple Maps issues were a side effect of an early launch.
Maybe, but as far as I can tell, they've never fixed the somewhat hilariously misplaced POIs near me. They appear to be untouched from when I first checked them back when iOS 6 was released. (Although I see that the power substation is now a Men's Wearhouse instead of a Nordstroms, so I guess something has been updated.)
The other Apple Maps issue is that they don't show the difference between "there's no traffic here" and "we don't collect data for this road" making their traffic reports entirely useless.
Combine the two, and no one I know with an iDevice bothers with Apple Maps for navigation, they stick with the Google Maps app. It's still better.
Sounds like your Windows 8.1 upgrade experience went more smoothly than mine.
In my case, the upgrade replaced the working graphics drivers with ones that - well, didn't. So as soon as 8.1 got to the point where it was supposed to display the log in screen, I instead got a nice black screen.
Fun fact: how do you boot to "safe mode" in Windows 8.*? Well, by holding down Shift when selecting "Shut down" from the Power menu. How do you do that when the OS won't actually boot? You don't.
Even better getting to the recovery options involves hoping and praying your keypress lands in the incredibly tiny window it bothers checking. I ended up just powering off the laptop during boot in order to make Windows consider it a "failed" boot because I never succeeded in triggering recovery mode using shift-F8.
Your IT guys probably suck then.
Well, at least when it comes to Macs, yeah, probably. Macs aren't "officially supported" where I work. (Then why do I have a Mac? Because someone decided we should make an iOS app! Which required a Mac. So I got a Mac. And then the iOS app was canceled, because it was useless anyway. So now I have a Mac I need to keep updated to keep IT happy, because it isn't "officially supported.")
I disagree (clearly). A lot of people say that Windows 8 is worthless dreck, despite the fact that it in fact has a ton of actual improvements over Windows 7. Much like more recent OS X updates, those improvements are overshadowed by mind-numbingly stupid UI choices to the point where, as far as most users are concerned, Windows 8 is worthless dreck. Despite the clear technical improvements and useful new features.
Much like the OP when it comes to OS X updates. Yes, there are technical improvements. It's too bad about the UI...
Yet Mavericks hasn't had any Metro like interface reboot...
Really? The slow iOS-ification of the OS doesn't count? Mavericks drops another set of iOS apps onto OS X that don't need to be there, and OS X has slowly been becoming more and more like iOS since Snow Leopard. I don't remember when they added their version of the Start Screen (Launchpad), but it's there, and you can't get rid of it. I'd say that counts.
And the Mavericks improvements I describe are most certainly noticeable. Most people use laptops these days and more than an hour extra battery life really makes a difference.
IT forced all the Macs where I work to Mavericks. (One of the most painful upgrade processes I've ever had to go through, but I'm pretty sure that was on IT. I hope it was.) There's been no battery life improvement.
I do notice that trying to open the battery menu causes some system process to crash with 100% CPU usage, so that's a new - uh, thing. Not sure it was worth the upgrade, though...
Bullshit. App Nap, Timer coalescing and compressed app memory would have been worth a paid upgrade on their own. Between them there is both more responsiveness, and a significantly improved battery life.
Yeah, and Windows 8 has a ton of great tech improvements under the hood too. Yet I really can't blame anyone who'd rather stick with Windows 7 and miss out on the enhancements they'll never notice to avoid the UI changes they most certainly will.
If the re-launched Final Fantasy XIV has one really killer feature, it is that it shifts the tone and nature of both levelling and end-game content substantially away from the WoW model (without ignoring WoW's evolutions of the genre entirely).
I have no idea what you mean. Granted I haven't played WoW since vanilla, but in FFXIV, you level up via quests, gain rest XP by logging off at an inn^W"sanctuary," and the game doesn't "really" begin until you hit level 50. Almost exactly like WoW, except for the part where you have to level a second class up to level 15 in order to play your original class past level 30 and the fact that the cap is 50, not 60.
End game content is then annoying raids with strict loot lock-outs, making for a very slow gear progression grind.
Now I have to admit that I don't know what leveling in WoW is like today, but leveling in FFXIV is basically identical to what WoW did at launch. Except you can (well, are forced to, if we're honest) level multiple classes on the same character. But it's still basically "grind quests until level cap, then switch to a gear treadmill." Just like WoW. How is this different? I'm not seeing it.
Do I really need to see my open windows and part of my desktop behind the start menu when I'm just clicking to start a program? Not really.
Actually... yes. You do. Believe it or not.
There's a concept called "doorway amnesia" where you'll tend to "forget" what it was you're doing when your surroundings change entirely. It's why everyone has experienced walking into a room and then forgetting why they went there in the first place. By entirely replacing the desktop and changing your context, it makes it harder to remember why you opened the Start Screen in the first place.
The rest of the complaints have to do with it being slower to use than the start menu thanks in part to the transition animations. My personal annoyance is that not everything you have installed shows up there, instead they're hidden behind the down arrow. Yes, yes, you can "pin them to start" but after installing a new app, it always initially confuses me when I go looking for it and it isn't on the Start Screen.
Windows renders everything to an off-screen 96dpi buffer, then just scales that up 200%.
Does Windows do the bilinear filtering thing that the Retinal MacBooks do? I saw one running in a store, and the way it handles non-DPI aware apps is bilinearly scaling it up. Made the entire thing look very blurry.
Yeah, that's what I thought too, but reading the article, I think they may actually have meant the Start Button. Apparently the idea is to make it look more like the round button it is in Windows 7.
Because that's clearly the problem.
Reading other articles on the update it's clear that there are some minor fixes to using Metro with a mouse (right clicking will bring up a traditional context menu instead of bringing it up on the bottom of the screen), but the Start Menu (you know, what people actually want back) still will not be returning.
But I can't recall hearing anyone saying "Thank god the police came and locked everything down and started busting in our doors trying to find this guy!"
You don't live near Boston, then. People were pretty much saying exactly that. I'd hate to think what the ancestors who started the American Revolution would think of the people who live here now...
Happily enough, Alexa offers a download of the top million domains. Even calculating the MD5 hash for every domain every time and doing a simple string comparison using node.js, it takes only a couple of seconds to run through every single entry in that table.
arth1's domain isn't in the top million list, though.
But still, there are plenty of sites in the top million list you may not want to share with Valve that you visit, like #83, pornhub.com, or #84, huffingtonpost.com.
Am I the only one that remembers the community losing it's nut the last time there was a redesign?
I remember that. I still have D2 turned off and use the old Slashdot interface, because D2 is crap and the original version works better. (Ignoring the pagination bug they never fixed to try and force people to D2.) The beta site kills the traditional UI I still use. (To be fair, the beta site finally lets you filter by score and not just "interesting." Too bad you're not allowed to set that as a default.)
I remember when Gawker decided to Gawker-ify a bunch of their sites (essentially making them unreadable to a degree worse than the current Slashdot beta) and asked for feedback. I answered that if they went through with the change, I'd leave and never come back. They went through with the change. I left and have never been back.
If Slashdot goes through with the beta site, I'll leave and never come back. Apparently I won't be alone in that decision. I'm not sure what I'll replace it with, but I'm sure I'll find something. It wouldn't be the first time I've stopped reading a website because a redesign made it effectively unreadable.
I know. Simply because it's Gawker, I have to side with whoever the other guy is. It's Gawker, after all. Gawker is to journalism as Slashdot is to editing.
And not a moment too soon, I read somewhere that 3D printers are being used to print medical gear, can you imagine if your medical gear printed with a virus? You'd doom the human race to gray goo! It's good to think that we're safe from that, thanks to products like Norton Antivirus.
Of course, 3D prints will take twenty times as long, but it's a small price to pay for the peace of mind and ability to use a laptop as a space heater that Norton Antivirus provides.