I'm assuming you're referring to using it on the Mac. The article title is about "Safari for Windows" so I'd assume the OP is referring to using it under Windows, and not on the Mac.
That being said, I've yet to use Safari for Windows for more than, say, five minutes in one stretch. Firefox works better under Windows than Safari. Yes, Safari is faster, but it doesn't fit in with Windows quite right.
Mac users frequently complain about direct-to-Mac ports of Windows software, and how they don't fit in and don't use the right keyboard shortcuts and the like. Well, Safari for Windows is the same - just in the other direction.
I've downloaded Safari for Windows (twice, in fact: home and work), and while I'm keeping it around for testing (like I keep Opera around) I have no intention of using it as my primary browser.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the most basic reason is that Safari doesn't fit in with Windows that well. I'm not talking about the "look," Aqua under Windows is fine, I'm talking about the "feel." The biggest example for me is that the back/forward buttons on my mouse don't work in Safari. They do work in Firefox. Plus Safari doesn't use standard Windows shortcuts (Ctrl-Shift-] for next tab versus Ctrl-Tab, for example).
Other things like extensions also keep me using Firefox over Safari. I like AdBlock Plus and NoScript, and those just aren't available for Safari.
As well as Flash, you can do HTML and JavaScript and graphics in <canvas> - I experimented with an FPS engine a while ago, and developed it just with desktop versions of Opera and Firefox, and reportedly it actually works on the Wii too.
It doesn't work on the Wii - I just tried.
Even if it did, you wouldn't be able to play it because there's no way to generate keyboard events with the Wii. The only events you do get are mouse motion events and the left mouse button.
The Opera-powered Wii browser is still a very capable browser, but it doesn't quite work for things like that.
Have you ever tried developing multithreaded GUI-applications?
Actually, yes.
Mixing that (event-driven) model with multi-threaded stuff requires an amount of discipline lacking in most developer teams.
The more advanced(cool) graphical components you use, the more potholes and race-conditions appear.
And? While not everything should be a thread, long-running tasks really should be. Given that all interaction between JavaScript on a webpage and the UI should be fairly well-defined through various elements, it should be possible to run the JavaScript in a non-UI thread and then sync the changes back to the UI thread when it's complete, or at set intervals.
OK, yes, I'm oversimplifying a bit. Things like the DOM creates a few thousand places where JavaScript can cause changes that should be reflected on the screen.
But still, it would be nice for each page to have its own JavaScript thread, which is free to be single-threaded on a per-page basis. Conceptually the DOM is only mutable within the context of each page, and can be synced to the UI only after certain JavaScript event handlers complete.
The only problem with that theory is that any given page's DOM is actually mutable by any chrome-based JavaScript in any window. (E.g., an extensions like the DOM Inspector can modify a page's DOM via chrome JS from another window.) So while Opera appears to do something like what I'm suggesting (I can't be sure), it probably isn't really possible in Firefox.
But still, it would be nice if a page containing while (1); didn't freeze the entire browser. (Go ahead. Try it.)
Last time I checked (which was around the Firefox 1.0 days), Firefox's JavaScript engine ran in the UI thread. This means that any long-running JavaScript task would freeze the UI, as the UI thread was no longer accepting messages - it was running JavaScript instead.
The UI will always be single-threaded, message-driven because that's how most OSes implement their UI API. The problem is that Firefox runs too many non-UI related tasks in the UI thread. Certain tasks should be done in a background thread so that the UI remains responsive. Last I checked, there's no way to do that with JavaScript in Firefox.
I've actually had to make a webpage script "yield" the CPU by basically storing all current state and then use "setTimeout" to recall it about 50ms later. This would prevent the browser from freezing, since the message loop would get to run during the 50ms timeout. In any case, it prevented the browser from becoming completely non-responsive. Still slow and jumpy, but not completely non-responsive.
The more I wait for one, the less I want one... the less compelling reasons I have for getting one, that is... the VC is nice, but not _that_ nice yet... and they're pretty draconian about what console they are tied to and where you can copy them, etc.
I have to agree with that statement - after being unable to find one when I was looking, I just sort of stopped caring and stopped looking. At some point I wandered into a Target, and someone else was buying a Wii and I discovered that this Target hadn't bothered placing their Wii stock on display. (Target has these locked display cases where all their consoles and games are stored.) So I grabbed one then.
Now I can't say I regret the purchase, I don't, but I'm not really playing it anymore. The only thing I'm really doing is playing Virtual Console games. So on that note, I'll explain to you exactly how VC games work and let you decide just how draconian the restrictions are yourself.
First off, they are tied directly to the console they're downloaded onto and that Wii's owner. Supposedly you can back them up to SD cards, but I haven't tried that yet and from what I can tell, you have to copy them back onto the console to actually play them. In any case, you can't copy your VC games off your Wii and bring them to a friend's house: they're tied to the console and the owner.
On that "and the owner" bit: The license agreement that you have to agree to before you're allowed to access the Wii Shop Channel explicitly says that if you ever transfer ownership of the console, you must delete everything off the console. There's even a convenient option to do just that in the Wii Storage menu somewhere.
I have no idea how Nintendo intends to enforce that, of course. But you are supposed to delete all the downloaded content if you ever transfer the console to anyone else.
You're also not allowed to redownload games. So if you download a game, and then delete it, you'll have to buy the game a second time.
I have no idea what happens if your Wii breaks. I suppose that Nintendo might be able to transfer your VC games to a replacement Wii if you ship it back to them. (But if it's not under warranty, that'll probably cost you - although most likely less than a new console.) I'm not clear on this point, though - the license agreement appears to suggest that you'll have to rebuy the games should your Wii break.
Hopefully if Nintendo ever releases new versions of the Wii, they'll create some way to transfer downloaded games from console to console, so you can upgrade. At present, though, VC games are tied to the console they're downloaded onto, and you're required to delete them before transferring ownership of the console.
Sure, strategy *helps*, but, when in doubt, you wander around and kill things to gain levels.
I'd argue that that's the "right" way to do it. By using smart strategies, you can defeat enemies more easily than by simply spamming "Attack." However, if you can't find a working strategy, you can always get through challenges by leveling to the point where the challenge becomes something you can handle.
It's kind of an automatic difficulty setting - if a challenge is too hard, you can make it easier by leveling. So the better you are at the game, the harder it is because the less leveling needs to be done.
That's not to say that Final Fantasy does that completely right. The turn-based Final Fantasy games (that's FF1-FF3, prior to the introduction of ATB in FF4) make strategy essentially impossible since you can't really determine the turn order and luck plays an overly large roll in deciding whether or not a given battle is successful. The best you can do is choose equipment and skills that the opponent is weak against.
Even post-FF4, dumb luck plays too large a roll in many of the Final Fantasy games. Either the opponent spams its "I Win" ability, or it randomly decides to ineffectively attack the character with the most defense/HP. So even with a good strategy, winning frequently comes down to whether or not the computer randomly chooses smart moves or randomly chooses dumb moves.
Allowing complicated strategies while still allowing simple power-leveling is a good thing. Requiring either one and preventing the other is a bad thing. Power-leveling allows players with more time than skill to complete the game.
I have to say Netscape was a good browser and I can't fault it back in the 3.x and 4.x days but since the 4.x tree ended...
Netscape 4.x is what killed Netscape. Maybe the early 4.0 versions were acceptable, I really can't remember, but by around 4.5 it was a bloated, slow, buggy browser. Netscape 4.x is what made Internet Explorer popular. IE 5 was a breath of fresh air compared with Netscape 4. (Personally, I think that IE 4 was also many times better than NS 4, but that's a different argument. It's really unarguable that IE 5 was superior, though.)
Now some people might cry out that IE is a security nightmare and that no one should choose it over Netscape for that reason, but NS 4 was also a security nightmare. It was, simply, a worse browser than IE 5. It was in the NS 4 days that I switched to IE, and it was because IE was simply a better browser.
Netscape died in the 4.x days, when the browser became a large, slow, and bloated piece of crap. Compared with Netscape 4, IE was a fast, light, agile browser with many more features and provided a much better experience. As someone writing webapps around the Netscape 4.5/IE 5 days, I can say that IE provided a much nicer platform to write webapps for.
That changed around the release of Mozilla 1.0; but around the time of Netscape 4.5, IE was simply the better browser while Netscape was simply no longer improving their browser.
(The reason you likely won't see FF4-6 on the VC is due to the GBA rereleases).
Plus, given that the translations for the re-releases were generally better (to their credit, they kept the "Spoony Bard!" line), it's probably just as well. The FFVI Advance release also fixed many of the bugs in the original game. (Evasion does something now! Shields have uses! Relm no longer crashes the game, making her simply useless instead of downright dangerous!)
About the only issue with the GBA FFVI re-release is that whatever they're using to emulate the original SNES sound doesn't quite get it right, and apparently the GBA isn't quite as good at Mode 7 as the SNES was, making the airship somewhat slower.
I wonder if we can convince Square-Enix to release Terranigma in the US for the Virtual Console?
The "XP and Vista" comment is to diffuse worries that StarCraft II would require DirectX 10 and therefore require Vista. There were rumors that StarCraft II would be DirectX 10-only, and Blizzard specifically addressed them by confirming it would support both DirectX 9 and 10, with the possibility of there being some DirectX 10-only effects.
Since the linked article is on a "PC gaming" site (by which they really mean "Windows gaming"), it's not surprising it only mentioned the XP support. That's who their audience is.
Given Slashdot's audience, the confirmation of a Mac port is probably worth mentioning, but the source article was written to diffuse rumors that it would require Vista.
But, they want to find Earth. Because, uh, actually, I have no idea. I'm not sure that the writers do either.
During the first season commentary, the producers explain that the entire bit on Caprica was basically done because it was cool. The producer who came up with it (I can't remember which one) had no idea where it was going or why Sharon showed up again on Caprica, he just "thought it would be cool." As the story progressed, they eventually hit on the idea of Cylons trying to procreate, which has never really been well explained.
So, yes, I expect you're completely correct - the writers are doing this by the seat of their pants and have no idea where it's going either. The Cylons may have a plan, I just wish they'd share it with the writers...
What are you talking about? They writers constantly keep in mind the overall darkness and pull back a little to make the show lighter.
Like in the first episode, they didn't show any people on the Olympic Carrier like they originally intended, because they thought it would be just a little too dark to actually show Apollo and Starbuck killing thousands of humans in the first episode.
IANAD, so, can any harm happen with an excess of red blood cells? Maybe this will lead to a future where some could supercharge their blood to maximize oxygen carrying ability.
It's called "blood doping" and people already do it.
As for the rest of your question, IANAD either, and I'm curious about that too.
I dunno if that's true - when I finally found my Wii, the person in front of me was an old man buying it for his grandkids (I think) and the group behind me was a group of, say, 10-12 year olds. I'm 26, and of course was buying it for myself.:)
So it's not just us old NES/SNES fans buying the Wii, a new generation of kids (think the Pokémon crowd) are getting their parents to buy them too. And why not, that's where the good family-friendly games are. (Zelda and Paper Mario immediately come to mind.)
Whatever excuses have been given for FFXI abruptly closing when losing focus, it's ultimately inexcusable. It's one of (many) reasons I quit playing. I want to be able to receive email and IMs while running the game, and Square-Enix's refusal to allow it helped convince me to quit. (One reason out of many, but I don't need to get into that.)
The problem with the "prevent scripting/botting" claim is that it's simply unsupportable. It's obviously flawed in that it never worked - there have been bots playing FFXI since I started playing, and according to reports of Square-Enix continuing to ban players, have been since I stopped.
It never worked. It never could. The best it could hope to do was prevent direct interaction with other programs.
My best guess is that they were hoping that they would somehow prevent people from running debuggers against FFXI by hindering the ability to interact with another program while FFXI was running. That would never work, though, since developers obviously must have solutions in order to debug the code themselves. The simple answer is simply to run the debugger on the computer running the fullscreen program but run the UI on a separate computer, communicating over a network. Microsoft's Visual Studio calls this remote debugging and it's not exactly a new concept.
As nice as the "prevent botting" excuse may sound it simply doesn't hold any water.
They do (did?) that in Worcester too - the lights are explicitly timed so that the only way to get through one light and the next one is to speed. If you go the speed limit, you will get a red at every light.
The end result is, amazingly enough, everyone speeds, and many people run the red lights.
At the moment, they seem to be all excited about installing sensor-driven lights that don't actually turn until someone pulls up. Brilliant! Screw the major highway! Joe Dufus on Mulberry Lane is waiting!
It's worse when the damned sensor lights are broken. Where I work, there's a sensor light that's supposed to trip a green for people leaving. It doesn't work, though, leaving you sitting there for about five minutes (OK, maybe closer to three minutes - the length of a pop song, at least). That's long enough to get people to run the light under the assumption that it'll simply never turn green.
Not that whichever local agency that handles the light cares, the red light in the left light has been burned out for a week or so now...
I would probably have "impulse-bought" a Wii, if I had found one somewhere by accident;-) Of course, *those* shelves are always empty....
The place I finally found my Wii (Target in the US) didn't have any Wii's on display. They were hidden behind the electronics counter. Only reason I found out that they had any is that someone else was buying one. While I was buying mine, some kids came up and asked for one too. So in the span of the 10 minutes or so I was in the store, I watched them sell three.
You've got to ask. Or luck out and watch someone else ask.:)
I'm sick and tired of hearing this story repeat itself over and over. It goes something like this:
I can't afford a PS3, therefore nobody can afford the PS3 and since I see them on the shelves, nobody must be buying them.
I don't think it's so much "can't afford" as "don't value the PS3 at the current price." I can afford a PS3 (well, could have afforded a PS3 until I had to spend $1000 to repair my car, but you get the point), I'm just not willing to spend $600 on one. It's not worth $600 to me, and I get the impression that it's not worth $600 to a lot of other people.
What I can afford and what I'm willing to spend are two completely different things. If I were willing to set aside the money, I could already have bought a PS3. Instead I spent the money on other things that I find more worthwhile (such as car repairs, but also a new digital camera and a Wii).
Now I'm not saying that I'll never buy a PS3 - I expect I will, eventually. I just don't plan on spending $600 for it. If it comes down in price to $300 I'd be much more willing to try and buy one.
Really, though, it all comes down to games. The Wii is backwards compatible with the Gamecube, and since I skipped the Gamecube, I'm planning on using the Wii to play some of the Gamecube games I missed. Since I already own a PS2, the PS3's backwards compatibility isn't much of a draw for me. All this adds up to different personal valuations for the consoles. The Wii is more valuable to me than the PS3 is. Therefore, the $300 I spent on the Wii (plus game) is a better value, to me, than $600 for a PS3.
It's not that people can't afford the PS3, it's that people simply don't think it's worth $600.
This is what annoys me about pretty much all forms of DRM - the anti-piracy measures ultimately make the pirated version simply better than the legal version.
With Windows, the pirated version removed the annoying "phone home" feature that Microsoft uses to ensure the product is legit. With computer games, it prevents the stupid "CD in the drive" requirement just to play a game that's using 8GB of hard drive space. With movies, it allows watchers to skip the stupid previews and FBI warning and jump straight to the actual content.
Ultimately DRM punishes those who would purchase the media legally, and makes the pirated version just that much more attractive. Why should I pay $20 for a DVD when a free rip offers better usability?
I'm more than willing to pay for content. I just don't want to have to put up with all the brain-dead restrictions placed on it solely because I'm foolish enough to actually attempt to support the content creators. For the love of common sense, make the legal product at the very least almost as good as the pirated version, instead of substantially worse!
And please, please stop demanding that people who paid for the game have to use the CD in PC games. That alone is enough to push me to find the no-CD cracks. I shouldn't have to turn to pirates to make my purchases worthwhile!
The Cell has never been intended solely to be a "game chip." It was always intended to be useful in large supercomputer type environments.
The Folding At Home client is an example of a large clustered-based application that uses the Cell as a math processor, as is the recent "real-time raytracing" demo. Both are applications of the Cell in a "mainframe" type environment.
So it's not surprising that IBM would be releasing Cell-based machines - that's been the plan all along. It was never intended just to be used in the PS3.
True. Gore claimed he created the Internet. (Literally, those were his words: "I took the initiative in creating the Internet.")
So he never said he invented it, but he certainly took credit for its creation. Given that all he did for the Internet was to budget money for it, I'd say his claims were just a little overinflated, and not at all accurate.
If Gore hadn't budgeted money for the Internet, someone else would have. He just did it first. Good for him.
(Although you have to wonder, how much carbon was released in creating the Internet? Does Gore lay claim to that too?)
As soon as you use a generic, the Java compiler requires -source 1.5 and -source 1.5 requires -target 1.5 or higher. So -target 1.4 won't work, even though theoretically generics needn't require 1.5 binaries as all the checking is done at compile-time.
From what I can tell, there's a bug with the user's laptop and some "USB-to-serial thing" according to his forum post. Whatever it did, it managed to get the BIOS to set a password. The user decides this is because they installed Linux, and the BIOS is "only for Windows Vista" and therefore locks out non-Windows OSes.
He then links to another post as "proof" which you'll not never mentions any non-Windows OS. My guess is that it's the "USB-to-serial thing" that's causing some bug in the BIOS that corrupts parts of the CMOS, causing a password to be set. (As an added bonus, if it's truly random data, it could be an untypable password.)
So, nothing to do with running Linux, and everything to do with the "USB-to-serial" thing that the user used. At least, that's my guess.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm assuming you're referring to using it on the Mac. The article title is about "Safari for Windows" so I'd assume the OP is referring to using it under Windows, and not on the Mac.
That being said, I've yet to use Safari for Windows for more than, say, five minutes in one stretch. Firefox works better under Windows than Safari. Yes, Safari is faster, but it doesn't fit in with Windows quite right.
Mac users frequently complain about direct-to-Mac ports of Windows software, and how they don't fit in and don't use the right keyboard shortcuts and the like. Well, Safari for Windows is the same - just in the other direction.
If, of course, people keep using it.
I've downloaded Safari for Windows (twice, in fact: home and work), and while I'm keeping it around for testing (like I keep Opera around) I have no intention of using it as my primary browser.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the most basic reason is that Safari doesn't fit in with Windows that well. I'm not talking about the "look," Aqua under Windows is fine, I'm talking about the "feel." The biggest example for me is that the back/forward buttons on my mouse don't work in Safari. They do work in Firefox. Plus Safari doesn't use standard Windows shortcuts (Ctrl-Shift-] for next tab versus Ctrl-Tab, for example).
Other things like extensions also keep me using Firefox over Safari. I like AdBlock Plus and NoScript, and those just aren't available for Safari.
My computer is currently broken. (Video card was bad, so I shipped it back, I'm still waiting for the replacement.)
How am I posting to Slashdot? Using the Wii's browser, of course!
So, to answer the article's question, a little under a day, before resorting to the somewhat crazy...
It doesn't work on the Wii - I just tried.
Even if it did, you wouldn't be able to play it because there's no way to generate keyboard events with the Wii. The only events you do get are mouse motion events and the left mouse button.
The Opera-powered Wii browser is still a very capable browser, but it doesn't quite work for things like that.
Actually, yes.
And? While not everything should be a thread, long-running tasks really should be. Given that all interaction between JavaScript on a webpage and the UI should be fairly well-defined through various elements, it should be possible to run the JavaScript in a non-UI thread and then sync the changes back to the UI thread when it's complete, or at set intervals.
OK, yes, I'm oversimplifying a bit. Things like the DOM creates a few thousand places where JavaScript can cause changes that should be reflected on the screen.
But still, it would be nice for each page to have its own JavaScript thread, which is free to be single-threaded on a per-page basis. Conceptually the DOM is only mutable within the context of each page, and can be synced to the UI only after certain JavaScript event handlers complete.
The only problem with that theory is that any given page's DOM is actually mutable by any chrome-based JavaScript in any window. (E.g., an extensions like the DOM Inspector can modify a page's DOM via chrome JS from another window.) So while Opera appears to do something like what I'm suggesting (I can't be sure), it probably isn't really possible in Firefox.
But still, it would be nice if a page containing while (1) ; didn't freeze the entire browser. (Go ahead. Try it.)
Last time I checked (which was around the Firefox 1.0 days), Firefox's JavaScript engine ran in the UI thread. This means that any long-running JavaScript task would freeze the UI, as the UI thread was no longer accepting messages - it was running JavaScript instead.
The UI will always be single-threaded, message-driven because that's how most OSes implement their UI API. The problem is that Firefox runs too many non-UI related tasks in the UI thread. Certain tasks should be done in a background thread so that the UI remains responsive. Last I checked, there's no way to do that with JavaScript in Firefox.
I've actually had to make a webpage script "yield" the CPU by basically storing all current state and then use "setTimeout" to recall it about 50ms later. This would prevent the browser from freezing, since the message loop would get to run during the 50ms timeout. In any case, it prevented the browser from becoming completely non-responsive. Still slow and jumpy, but not completely non-responsive.
I have to agree with that statement - after being unable to find one when I was looking, I just sort of stopped caring and stopped looking. At some point I wandered into a Target, and someone else was buying a Wii and I discovered that this Target hadn't bothered placing their Wii stock on display. (Target has these locked display cases where all their consoles and games are stored.) So I grabbed one then.
Now I can't say I regret the purchase, I don't, but I'm not really playing it anymore. The only thing I'm really doing is playing Virtual Console games. So on that note, I'll explain to you exactly how VC games work and let you decide just how draconian the restrictions are yourself.
First off, they are tied directly to the console they're downloaded onto and that Wii's owner. Supposedly you can back them up to SD cards, but I haven't tried that yet and from what I can tell, you have to copy them back onto the console to actually play them. In any case, you can't copy your VC games off your Wii and bring them to a friend's house: they're tied to the console and the owner.
On that "and the owner" bit: The license agreement that you have to agree to before you're allowed to access the Wii Shop Channel explicitly says that if you ever transfer ownership of the console, you must delete everything off the console. There's even a convenient option to do just that in the Wii Storage menu somewhere.
I have no idea how Nintendo intends to enforce that, of course. But you are supposed to delete all the downloaded content if you ever transfer the console to anyone else.
You're also not allowed to redownload games. So if you download a game, and then delete it, you'll have to buy the game a second time.
I have no idea what happens if your Wii breaks. I suppose that Nintendo might be able to transfer your VC games to a replacement Wii if you ship it back to them. (But if it's not under warranty, that'll probably cost you - although most likely less than a new console.) I'm not clear on this point, though - the license agreement appears to suggest that you'll have to rebuy the games should your Wii break.
Hopefully if Nintendo ever releases new versions of the Wii, they'll create some way to transfer downloaded games from console to console, so you can upgrade. At present, though, VC games are tied to the console they're downloaded onto, and you're required to delete them before transferring ownership of the console.
I'd argue that that's the "right" way to do it. By using smart strategies, you can defeat enemies more easily than by simply spamming "Attack." However, if you can't find a working strategy, you can always get through challenges by leveling to the point where the challenge becomes something you can handle.
It's kind of an automatic difficulty setting - if a challenge is too hard, you can make it easier by leveling. So the better you are at the game, the harder it is because the less leveling needs to be done.
That's not to say that Final Fantasy does that completely right. The turn-based Final Fantasy games (that's FF1-FF3, prior to the introduction of ATB in FF4) make strategy essentially impossible since you can't really determine the turn order and luck plays an overly large roll in deciding whether or not a given battle is successful. The best you can do is choose equipment and skills that the opponent is weak against.
Even post-FF4, dumb luck plays too large a roll in many of the Final Fantasy games. Either the opponent spams its "I Win" ability, or it randomly decides to ineffectively attack the character with the most defense/HP. So even with a good strategy, winning frequently comes down to whether or not the computer randomly chooses smart moves or randomly chooses dumb moves.
Allowing complicated strategies while still allowing simple power-leveling is a good thing. Requiring either one and preventing the other is a bad thing. Power-leveling allows players with more time than skill to complete the game.
Netscape 4.x is what killed Netscape. Maybe the early 4.0 versions were acceptable, I really can't remember, but by around 4.5 it was a bloated, slow, buggy browser. Netscape 4.x is what made Internet Explorer popular. IE 5 was a breath of fresh air compared with Netscape 4. (Personally, I think that IE 4 was also many times better than NS 4, but that's a different argument. It's really unarguable that IE 5 was superior, though.)
Now some people might cry out that IE is a security nightmare and that no one should choose it over Netscape for that reason, but NS 4 was also a security nightmare. It was, simply, a worse browser than IE 5. It was in the NS 4 days that I switched to IE, and it was because IE was simply a better browser.
Netscape died in the 4.x days, when the browser became a large, slow, and bloated piece of crap. Compared with Netscape 4, IE was a fast, light, agile browser with many more features and provided a much better experience. As someone writing webapps around the Netscape 4.5/IE 5 days, I can say that IE provided a much nicer platform to write webapps for.
That changed around the release of Mozilla 1.0; but around the time of Netscape 4.5, IE was simply the better browser while Netscape was simply no longer improving their browser.
Plus, given that the translations for the re-releases were generally better (to their credit, they kept the "Spoony Bard!" line), it's probably just as well. The FFVI Advance release also fixed many of the bugs in the original game. (Evasion does something now! Shields have uses! Relm no longer crashes the game, making her simply useless instead of downright dangerous!)
About the only issue with the GBA FFVI re-release is that whatever they're using to emulate the original SNES sound doesn't quite get it right, and apparently the GBA isn't quite as good at Mode 7 as the SNES was, making the airship somewhat slower.
I wonder if we can convince Square-Enix to release Terranigma in the US for the Virtual Console?
The "XP and Vista" comment is to diffuse worries that StarCraft II would require DirectX 10 and therefore require Vista. There were rumors that StarCraft II would be DirectX 10-only, and Blizzard specifically addressed them by confirming it would support both DirectX 9 and 10, with the possibility of there being some DirectX 10-only effects.
Since the linked article is on a "PC gaming" site (by which they really mean "Windows gaming"), it's not surprising it only mentioned the XP support. That's who their audience is.
Given Slashdot's audience, the confirmation of a Mac port is probably worth mentioning, but the source article was written to diffuse rumors that it would require Vista.
During the first season commentary, the producers explain that the entire bit on Caprica was basically done because it was cool. The producer who came up with it (I can't remember which one) had no idea where it was going or why Sharon showed up again on Caprica, he just "thought it would be cool." As the story progressed, they eventually hit on the idea of Cylons trying to procreate, which has never really been well explained.
So, yes, I expect you're completely correct - the writers are doing this by the seat of their pants and have no idea where it's going either. The Cylons may have a plan, I just wish they'd share it with the writers...
What are you talking about? They writers constantly keep in mind the overall darkness and pull back a little to make the show lighter.
Like in the first episode, they didn't show any people on the Olympic Carrier like they originally intended, because they thought it would be just a little too dark to actually show Apollo and Starbuck killing thousands of humans in the first episode.
And there are other examples just like that!
(Really. They explain it on the DVD commentary.)
It's called "blood doping" and people already do it.
As for the rest of your question, IANAD either, and I'm curious about that too.
I dunno if that's true - when I finally found my Wii, the person in front of me was an old man buying it for his grandkids (I think) and the group behind me was a group of, say, 10-12 year olds. I'm 26, and of course was buying it for myself. :)
So it's not just us old NES/SNES fans buying the Wii, a new generation of kids (think the Pokémon crowd) are getting their parents to buy them too. And why not, that's where the good family-friendly games are. (Zelda and Paper Mario immediately come to mind.)
Whatever excuses have been given for FFXI abruptly closing when losing focus, it's ultimately inexcusable. It's one of (many) reasons I quit playing. I want to be able to receive email and IMs while running the game, and Square-Enix's refusal to allow it helped convince me to quit. (One reason out of many, but I don't need to get into that.)
The problem with the "prevent scripting/botting" claim is that it's simply unsupportable. It's obviously flawed in that it never worked - there have been bots playing FFXI since I started playing, and according to reports of Square-Enix continuing to ban players, have been since I stopped.
It never worked. It never could. The best it could hope to do was prevent direct interaction with other programs.
My best guess is that they were hoping that they would somehow prevent people from running debuggers against FFXI by hindering the ability to interact with another program while FFXI was running. That would never work, though, since developers obviously must have solutions in order to debug the code themselves. The simple answer is simply to run the debugger on the computer running the fullscreen program but run the UI on a separate computer, communicating over a network. Microsoft's Visual Studio calls this remote debugging and it's not exactly a new concept.
As nice as the "prevent botting" excuse may sound it simply doesn't hold any water.
They do (did?) that in Worcester too - the lights are explicitly timed so that the only way to get through one light and the next one is to speed. If you go the speed limit, you will get a red at every light.
The end result is, amazingly enough, everyone speeds, and many people run the red lights.
It's worse when the damned sensor lights are broken. Where I work, there's a sensor light that's supposed to trip a green for people leaving. It doesn't work, though, leaving you sitting there for about five minutes (OK, maybe closer to three minutes - the length of a pop song, at least). That's long enough to get people to run the light under the assumption that it'll simply never turn green.
Not that whichever local agency that handles the light cares, the red light in the left light has been burned out for a week or so now...
Dammit, dammit, dammit, caught it after I hit submit. I know better, honest.
The place I finally found my Wii (Target in the US) didn't have any Wii's on display. They were hidden behind the electronics counter. Only reason I found out that they had any is that someone else was buying one. While I was buying mine, some kids came up and asked for one too. So in the span of the 10 minutes or so I was in the store, I watched them sell three.
You've got to ask. Or luck out and watch someone else ask. :)
I don't think it's so much "can't afford" as "don't value the PS3 at the current price." I can afford a PS3 (well, could have afforded a PS3 until I had to spend $1000 to repair my car, but you get the point), I'm just not willing to spend $600 on one. It's not worth $600 to me, and I get the impression that it's not worth $600 to a lot of other people.
What I can afford and what I'm willing to spend are two completely different things. If I were willing to set aside the money, I could already have bought a PS3. Instead I spent the money on other things that I find more worthwhile (such as car repairs, but also a new digital camera and a Wii).
Now I'm not saying that I'll never buy a PS3 - I expect I will, eventually. I just don't plan on spending $600 for it. If it comes down in price to $300 I'd be much more willing to try and buy one.
Really, though, it all comes down to games. The Wii is backwards compatible with the Gamecube, and since I skipped the Gamecube, I'm planning on using the Wii to play some of the Gamecube games I missed. Since I already own a PS2, the PS3's backwards compatibility isn't much of a draw for me. All this adds up to different personal valuations for the consoles. The Wii is more valuable to me than the PS3 is. Therefore, the $300 I spent on the Wii (plus game) is a better value, to me, than $600 for a PS3.
It's not that people can't afford the PS3, it's that people simply don't think it's worth $600.
This is what annoys me about pretty much all forms of DRM - the anti-piracy measures ultimately make the pirated version simply better than the legal version.
With Windows, the pirated version removed the annoying "phone home" feature that Microsoft uses to ensure the product is legit. With computer games, it prevents the stupid "CD in the drive" requirement just to play a game that's using 8GB of hard drive space. With movies, it allows watchers to skip the stupid previews and FBI warning and jump straight to the actual content.
Ultimately DRM punishes those who would purchase the media legally, and makes the pirated version just that much more attractive. Why should I pay $20 for a DVD when a free rip offers better usability?
I'm more than willing to pay for content. I just don't want to have to put up with all the brain-dead restrictions placed on it solely because I'm foolish enough to actually attempt to support the content creators. For the love of common sense, make the legal product at the very least almost as good as the pirated version, instead of substantially worse!
And please, please stop demanding that people who paid for the game have to use the CD in PC games. That alone is enough to push me to find the no-CD cracks. I shouldn't have to turn to pirates to make my purchases worthwhile!
The Cell has never been intended solely to be a "game chip." It was always intended to be useful in large supercomputer type environments.
The Folding At Home client is an example of a large clustered-based application that uses the Cell as a math processor, as is the recent "real-time raytracing" demo. Both are applications of the Cell in a "mainframe" type environment.
So it's not surprising that IBM would be releasing Cell-based machines - that's been the plan all along. It was never intended just to be used in the PS3.
True. Gore claimed he created the Internet. (Literally, those were his words: "I took the initiative in creating the Internet.")
So he never said he invented it, but he certainly took credit for its creation. Given that all he did for the Internet was to budget money for it, I'd say his claims were just a little overinflated, and not at all accurate.
If Gore hadn't budgeted money for the Internet, someone else would have. He just did it first. Good for him.
(Although you have to wonder, how much carbon was released in creating the Internet? Does Gore lay claim to that too?)
As soon as you use a generic, the Java compiler requires -source 1.5 and -source 1.5 requires -target 1.5 or higher. So -target 1.4 won't work, even though theoretically generics needn't require 1.5 binaries as all the checking is done at compile-time.
From what I can tell, there's a bug with the user's laptop and some "USB-to-serial thing" according to his forum post. Whatever it did, it managed to get the BIOS to set a password. The user decides this is because they installed Linux, and the BIOS is "only for Windows Vista" and therefore locks out non-Windows OSes.
He then links to another post as "proof" which you'll not never mentions any non-Windows OS. My guess is that it's the "USB-to-serial thing" that's causing some bug in the BIOS that corrupts parts of the CMOS, causing a password to be set. (As an added bonus, if it's truly random data, it could be an untypable password.)
So, nothing to do with running Linux, and everything to do with the "USB-to-serial" thing that the user used. At least, that's my guess.