So I ask again, what exactly are you looking for from games? From a broad perspective, there's nothing new in games. Even something novel like Guitar Hero (itself suffering from sequelitis) was nothing really new. DDR with a guitar, yawn. But wait, not even DDR was unique! NES Track and Field but with dancing, yawn.
There's value in doing things well even if you're not ground-breaking. For example, Halo 3 is a very solid shooter with fun online play and a conclusion to a story that many of us have been following for 6 years. It may not add anything to the FPS genre directly, but that doesn't mean it's not worth playing. As another example, compare Oblivion (valid because the Game of the Year edition released this year) and Two Worlds. On the surface, they're pretty much identical -- medievel-ish PC-style RPGs with wide open worlds. Oblivion, despite being a sequel (4th of the Elder Scrolls RPGs), was great. It ran well, felt solid, had a great story, and truly benefited from the Elder Scrolls mythos. Two Worlds, on the other hand, was essentially a piece of crap (didn't stop me from enjoying it, though:). It had massive performance issues, quest-breaking bugs, horrible voice acting, and flawed controls. If you're just looking superficially, you'll dismiss both because they're just "Ultima with a modern graphical veneer, yawn," and in the process you'd miss out on the excellent game that was Oblivion. Of course you'd also miss out on the crapfest of Two Worlds, so that's not too bad:).
Forza, GT5? Racing again. -yawn- Last racing games I truly enjoyed were F-Zero and JetMoto. Guess why? They were -different- and new. The sequels sucked.
Obviously you're not the target audience for Forza or Gran Turismo, and that's fine. I take it you enjoy more arcade-style racers, in which case it'd be a shame for you to write of game series like Wipeout just because F-Zero did it first.
This is the point where someone points out how awesome Halo (or any other FPS was) and that I come back with 'I've done FPS a billion times.' There were only a few games this year that were just new levels for old ones. -yawn-
So you rule out games simply because they're presented from a first-person perspective? If so, you missed possibly the best game of the year, Portal. You also missed Bioshock and Metroid Prime 3, as well as Halo 3 (I wasn't going to mention this, but I couldn't help myself:).
Aside from that, there were some great non-FPS games out this year. Assassin's Creed was fun, if a little repetitive. Mass Effect was great in the Bioware RPG tradition, perhaps even better than the prior KOTOR games because it was not restricted to the existing Star Wars mythos. Forza 2 is perhaps the best console racing simulator to date, and although GT5 will look prettier Forza 2 still has a much better physics simulation (it updates 360 times per second, modelling all four wheels across three separate points on the contact patch). Ratchet and Clank almost made me buy a PS3 (still holding off on that), and I'm really considering dusting off my WiiMote and picking up Super Mario Galaxy.
You're referring to Peter Moore. However, he came to the Xbox project relatively late (in time for the 360), so I wouldn't exactly call him one of the "key" guys. Also, he's gone to EA now.
"Vendor independent standards" was just my badly phrased way of referring to standards which have arisen either independent of a single vendor, or have been adopted by many as they fill a void. I'm referring to web standards (which are of great important to me), network protocols, etc. which Microsoft has very consistently either ignored or extended with little to no regard for the other players in the field. Forgetting things like Javascript+DOM and CSS, I remember the days of Frontpage's special properties which it added to HTML output.
Fair enough, but that has exactly nothing to do with Vista. If your question was, "Why do you stick with Microsoft software in general?" then I could understand asking such a question. Instead, your question was, "How do you deal with Vista?" In that context, your issues with Microsoft changing or ignoring standards are moot, since you can install and run standards-compliant software just fine. Firefox and Opera both work perfectly on Vista, and even Safari runs (while it runs just as it would on XP, I hesitate to use the term "perfectly" simply because Apply software on Windows generally sucks). IIRC, Firefox was one application that got large amounts of attention from Microsoft during all of the Vista betas (as well as XP SP2), because breaking backwards compatibility with Firefox would be a huge shitstorm.
As far as standards go, the only thing I've had issues with at all on Vista are CIFS shares. Then again, that's really a de factor standard, defined and owned by Microsoft, and the change in Vista was for good reason (security) even if it did cause compatibility issues with accessing Vista shares from non-Vista clients. It's easy enough to tweak things back to "normal", as long as you're willing to muck about in the registry.
And I suspect you are many. How do you address the following issues?
I've been happily running Vista on my main laptop and desktop machines since January, so I'll take a stab at this.
increased support for DRM which inherently decreases my freedom, especially when applied to broadly
This only affects certain paths. If you're playing non-DRM files, DRM doesn't even enter into the discussion. What you're referring to is the fact that the OS has support for a fully-protected pipeline (HDCP) required for the next-generation HD disc formats (HD-DVD, Blu-Ray). If you neither have nor care about those (as I don't -- for me, the future of HD media is online, like with the Xbox Video Marketplace), you'll never notice the additional support in Vista.
continuation of Microsoft's dominance which I have found through experience indirectly hinders my ability to choose the software and hardware that I can make use of
That's just silly. My laptop is 2.5 years old, running Vista with only minor upgrades (I bumped my RAM from 1GB to 2GB and replaced my 5400RPM hard drive with a 7200RPM model nearly a year before Vista shipped). I've not personally run into any hardware incompatibilities, though one of the biggest areas of complaint (printer support) is something I almost never use anyway. On the software side of things, I've run into a few apps that wouldn't work unless I ran them as administrator, but nearly a year after installation those apps are few and far between. Anything beyond that is personal perception, and at least for me I've not run into anything that "indirectly hinders my ability to choose the software and hardware that I can make use of". Your mileage may vary.
the artificially high cost attributed to this operating system
Are you referring to the higher minimum requirements? As I already mentioned, I had moved to 2GB on my main machines well before Vista shipped, though the box I have connected to my TV that's also running Vista only has 1GB and works just fine for what I need (plays videos, shares media to my Xbox 360). I haven't had to upgrade anything else.
the continuation of apparent willful vendor independent standards
the continued use as leveraging tool to push Microsoft specific, and often closed psuedo-standards
I'm not sure what you're getting at with these two. "Vendor independent standards"? My "Designed for Windows XP" Dell laptop runs Vista perfectly well, with all the bells and whistles, and in fact the laptop has worked even better since installing Vista. XP wouldn't sleep properly on the box, choosing to always hibernate instead, and I get much better battery life as well. With XP, I could push the laptop to just under 3 hours of use before needing a recharge. With Vista I'm routinely able to get almost 3.5 hours out of the exact same laptop, with the exact same battery (that's even starting to show its age, not being able to hold as much of a charge as before). Pushing "Microsoft specific, and often closed psuedo-standards"? I can still run Firefox, OO.o, Adobe products (Flash, Acrobat, Photoshop), Apple products (Quicktime, iTunes), and anything else I like. Care to explain what you were trying to say, or have I just been trolled?
There are two answers to that question. First, since there's only one required format conversion (ringtones have to be AAC, though if your source material starts as AAC like an iTMS purchase there's no conversion at all), you're not going to lose too much fidelity. Second, because the ringtone plays over the iPhone's single external speaker, whatever quality loss might happen from the conversion (for example, if you're cutting up a FLAC file to create a ringtone) will be dwarfed by the suck that is the external speaker. It's good from a speakerphone perspective, but horrible from a music perspective. That's all right, though, as you should use headphones if you actually want to listen to music.
And while it turned out to be a pretty cool product, it's got the same locked-to-a-cingle-provider, pay-twice-for-songs, proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps attitude as other US cell phones
Personally, I couldn't care less about being locked to a single provider, mostly because AT&T/Cingular is the best provider in my area and thus have no reason to switch (I was on Cingular for years before getting an iPhone). I assume by "pay-twice-for-songs" you're referring to ring tones, which couldn't be further from the truth. If you buy a song from iTunes, you can cut it up into ring tones as much as you like. More than that, you can "easily" make your own ring tones out of any audio you like without having to hack your phone at all:
Use an audio editor like Audacity to pull a 30 second or less chunk of music from your audio file. Save this as an mp3
Import the mp3 into iTunes
Use iTunes to convert the mp3 to AAC
Rename the new.m4a file to.m4r
Re-import the.m4r file into iTunes and it will go into the Ringtones folder, which can then be synced to your iPhone
"Proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps" is three ways of phrasing a single complaint, and that's changing early next year. In the meantime, you can write useful webapps or jailbreak your phone. While not ideal, Apple has committed to providing an SDK for third-party development, which is a change from their initial plans (from the start they always planned the iPhone to be locked down, rather than being a more open platform like Windows Mobile).
I'm far from an Apple fanboy, but I like my iPhone. I bought it knowing exactly what it was and was not. Then again, I also actually like Vista and don't feel that it's the biggest disappointment of 2007. From the list, I also like Office 2007 and my Zune, so perhaps I really don't have any credibility in this discussion:).
2. Slashdot keeps you logged in if you close the browser and restart it.. is that a bad design?
Slashdot has a "public" option. If you click that when you log in, your login state is only stored for the session and freed when you close the browser.
3. Many other sites do too.. it's called convenience.
Many other sites also implement a "public" mode like Slashdot has. Just as two other examples, Microsoft's Outlook Web Access (OWA) lets you choose "public" or "private" when you login, and Microsoft's Passport/Windows Live ID gives you the option to save email + password, just email, or nothing (the latter two are effectively session-only logins, as you still need the user's password in order to login subsequently). As well, every other site also has the ability to logout, which.Mac is missing.
Otherwise, yes, you're right a decent timeout is a good idea.. but what is "decent"? Sounds pretty subjective.
A "decent timeout" is trivially simple -- mark your cookie only valid for the current session (aka, use a "session cookie"). This is at odds with persistent login designs, so you have to give users the option -- login with a session cookie ("public terminal") that will expire when you close the browser, or login with a persistent cookie ("private terminal") that will remain valid for some period of time. If you only choose the latter, like.Mac, you must also provide a "logout" option. Anything less is a security violation.
I love how this is a "little", "minor" security flaw, and even though Apple actively deleted the post exposing this information nobody's really up in arms as it's just due to "bad interface design". If this were a Microsoft property, people would be screaming bloody murder.
The thing is, the CO2 is not from carbon being pulled out of the ground but instead from carbon dioxide being scrubbed by crops from the atmosphere, so it's atmospheric CO2-neutral regardless of the efficiency.
Beyond that, the original poster missed this from the E85 article:
Depending on composition and source, E85 has an octane rating of 100 to 105 compared to regular gasoline's typical rating of 87 for regular and 93 for premium. This allows it to be used in higher compression engines, which can lower emissions.
In other words, in a flex-fuel engine you're probably not going to see better emissions since cylinder compression will be set to the fuel with the lowest requirement. In an E85-only engine, you can run a higher compression and burn your fuel more efficiently, thus creating fewer emissions.
I was looking for alternative fuel to my self back in the early 1990s. I commuted to work, and fuel at $1.00/gal was an expense, a legit expense but regardless. My first choice for a retrofit was Natural Gas as your typical carbonated vehicle, which was normal at the time requires very little modification. Just shut off the petrol supply and add an air air mixer, adjust the timing and poof. The ONLY reason I didn't shell out the couple of grand to do the conversion was the simple fact that there was NO place with in 30 miles I could fuel up.
I assume you mean "carbureted", not "carbonated", and in the early 90s carburetion definitely was not the norm. By the mid-80s, nearly all new cars were fuel injected, though there were a few new models with carburetors up until the 90s (the last carbureted car in the US was in 90, the last truck was in 94). Of course you could easily buy older (mid-80s or earlier) cars that used carburetors rather than fuel injection.
Ethanol looks attractive, more so now that fuel is in excess of $3.00/gal. Brazil tried switching in the 1980s IIRC and last I checked continued to promote the use of the sugar beet surplus to make Ethanol.
Ethanol is tricky, but not because of the reasons most people bring up like redirecting food crops for fuel or causing food prices to increase. Ethanol contains less energy per gallon than gasoline (meaning you'll actually see your mpg go down if you switch to E85), and unless engines are specifically built for ethanol it can actually damage the engine (ethanol can damage bare rubber, magnesium, and aluminum parts, and is electrically conductive where gasolone is not). The changes required to use a mostly-ethanol mix like E85 are expensive.
As far as food vs. fuel goes, I have no concerns here. Right now the US government actually pays farmers to leave a percentage of their land fallow. With an increase in demand for corn crops (where the US is expecting to get most of its ethanol, though it can come from many places such as sugar beats, sugar cane, and even hemp), we would no longer need government subsidies for fallow land. In fact, simply by putting to use all of that fallow land right now we could increase production by 30% or more. Beyond that, I'm sure we can find ways to increase yields, up to and including GMOs (if it's for fuel and the crop is well-controlled to avoid cross-pollination, there's no health concerns at all).
Turbo diesel engines on the other hand look even more attractive. Diesel makes MORE sense for SUVs and trucks than petrol or Ethanol, and AFAIK is are much more flexable as far as the fuel medium due to the very high compression ratio and fuel injection at the top of the stroke cycle.
Europe has learned this well, as many of their vehicles are diesel rather than petrol (the fact that diesel is cheaper there doesn't hurt). There are two big issues for diesel vehicles in the US today. First and foremost is a perception problem. Most people have only experience diesel engines in connection with trucks and other large vehicles (busses, tractors, construction vehicles, etc), which are usually load and smelly. The few attempts US car manufacturers have made at using diesel never really refined the engines to the extent of what Euro manufacturers have done. The second problem is availability. Good luck finding any of VW's excellent TDI products, and many manufacturers don't or won't offer their TDI products here (Mercedes, BMW, VW/Audi, Porsche, and more all have excellent TDI engines, but good luck finding a Cayenne or E-class with a TDI here). This is a bit of a chicken and egg problem: people won't buy diesel cars because all they know are the older, loud, smelly diesels, so manufacturers won't bring over their refined TDI systems. With no refined TDI cars for people to exper
That is a good question. I am not an EVE player myself so I don't know if this update had to be run with admin privileges but it doesn't appear to be that way from the question and reply. If you are not running as admin then how is it even possible to remove a system file that is necessary to boot the system. Unlike the EVE representative making this statement I am going to blame Microsoft, it should not be the developers responsibility to make sure they don't break the OS, it is the OS developers responsibility to make sure that it cannot be broken without admin/system/root access.
Two things to note:
This was an XP problem. Technically it could've happened on Vista, but I haven't seen anything that said it did. As such, this falls into the same category of problems that Microsoft attempted to fix in Vista with UAC -- nearly everybody ran XP as admin, and many apps expected you to be running as admin.
This was a problem with an installer/uninstaller. Since nearly everything on Windows installs into %programfiles% and that's a shared location, installers need admin access (installers that ask if you want to install for "Just this user" or "Everyone" are not going to install in %userprofile% if you choose "Just this user". They're just looking to see if the Start Menu shortcuts should go into "%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu" or "%allusersprofile%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu"). Vista will elevate your privleges when you try to run an installer (you'll get a UAC prompt), after which a misbehaving installer could screw up boot.ini. Regardless of operating systems, you almost always install applications as administrator. Yes, you can install apps in $HOME on *nix systems, but 9 times out of 10 you'll use sudo on the installer (sudo apt-get install foo). Therefore this is technically a bug that could happen on any OS. It's not difficult to imagine an application install that deletes your kernel image, for example.
The real WTF here is that they have an important game file named "boot.ini". That's an exceedingly poor choice of filename. Think of it like having a game file called "autoexec.bat" or "vmlinuz" that actually has nothing to do with the DOS boot process or the Linux kernel. The only defense they give for that is "legacy".
I suspect to most designers (of which I'm a wanna be designer) mean when we say "pixel perfect", we mean "the grid doesn't break when things get resized". Nobody sane designer wants a fixed pixel grid - we all know it looks like shit on big monitors. I want ThingA to stay inline with ThingB no matter what. That should be a simple thing to do, but HTML and CSS make it very hard, if not impossible. Ideally we should be able to flow text and objects so we could keep a block of stuff and have it stack or flow correctly.
Maybe I've just worked with crap designers, then, because I often get requirements detailing spacing down to the pixel, like this element should be 3px away from that element, this other element has a padding of 5px, etc. When I try to tell them that's not going to work with HTML+CSS (at least not in a browser-compatible, accessible way), they either don't get it ("Why is the web different than print?") or don't care ("Why can't you do what I want?").
Basically there is no way to create a good working grid with HTML and CSS. I'd argue that CSS has no business defining grids, it should be for very cosmetic stuff like fonts, colors, background images, icons (which are hacked with offsetting a background image).
While I agree that making grids in CSS really sucks (and while you can do it with table elements, that has its own set of problems), I disagree that grids shouldn't be defined by CSS. CSS is for layout just as much as cosmetics, if not more so. The content should be encoded in a semantic way, such that each element makes sense in terms of the data it contains and not in terms of where it should be on the screen. Then CSS should come along and actually lay it out. Ideally, HTML+CSS should be similar in design to TeX or XML+XSLT, where your data is represented logically and styles are applied to make it look the way you want.
Contrary to (un)popular opinion, not everything is easy to do with style sheets. Columns and grids belong in the HTML*, they are too far removed from the CSS file to be useful. But really, it isn't a good idea to put them in the HTML either. They belong in some kind of merged HTML file or something.
That really depends on the meaning of the columns in the grid. If the columns are related (ie, tabular data), they should be in the markup. If they're not (ie, navigation, content, sidebar content, ads, etc), the different blocks should be separated in your markup but their column-ness is strictly a layout issue. I will agree that current CSS sucks for doing columnar layouts in a non-hacky way, and that there's really nothing on the horizon (CSS3) to make it any better, but I also believe that it's CSS's responsibility to enable column layouts.
In short, HTML & CSS sucks for what we use it for - presenting content in a useful manner.
Not quite. HTML & CSS suck for doing pixel-perfect, magazine-like layouts, which unfortunately too many designers want. There are better formats for that, like PDF. HTML is supposed to flow, and it does. Unfortunately that often means that HTML+CSS's design goals are at odds with real-world usage scenarios. We can't fix it by saying, "Don't do this," so we have to fix it by extending HTML and CSS to do what people want.
Yes, and what was the motivation for using
elements? If it was because you have two separate components without a more appropriate element type to describe them, then that's a structural issue, not a layout issue. If it was because you are building a page with two columns, then you are screwing up and don't understand HTML. Either way, saying that "divs are better for layout" is not a sensible thing to say.
Now you're just being pedantic. Obviously it's the CSS that positions things in your layout, but when discussing table layouts versus CSS layouts, most people will call the latter "div layouts" just because it's easier to understand ("I laid out all of my stuff using table cells. What should I use if I can't use those?" "Divs styled by CSS"). If you're doing a layout that would traditionally require a table, you have several blocks of information that need to be positioned correctly. Those blocks usually don't have any semantic meaning other than "I'm a block", in which case divs are appropriate. I'm going to lay out my page using CSS regardless, so if not divs then what? Spans marked as display: block?
So how do I create a tabular layout for non-tabular data without using a table? Say, two columns - nav sidebar and main content area - having equal, but liquid height (let's say I'd like the column borders to line up)?
There are ways to do that (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, and so on). Some are hackier than others, each one has its own set of quirks and restrictions, but then table-layouts have their own issues and drawbacks as well.
I'm a big Python advocate myself. Yes, the whitespace issue is really annoying, but once you get past that, it does a lot that other scripting languages don't. Oh, and here's the obligatory XKCD comic to prove my point:
Python is great, but when dealing with the web you either have to stick to web-standard languages (ECMAScript) or try to get another language standardized (which probably wouldn't be Python). Obviously if you take the web out of it, things open up considerably.
I would be willing to try out ASP.Net, though I'm going to guess I can't actually develop for it since I own a Mac.
You could run Parallels (which would require a Windows license, of course), or you could play with Mono. I'm not sure how much of ASP.Net 2.0 they support, nor whether ASP.Net AJAX runs on Mono, but it might be interesting to find out.
so, more importantly, I don't actually want a solution that spits out more HTML. I don't want my GUI in a web browser. I want a real actual GUI on its own. Kinda like what Java can, only with a lot less Java (oh, and a much better designed GUI).
Then you're not talking about AJAX or web development. You're talking about traditional "rich client" development, which many languages can do. Speaking of Javascript, JScrpt.NET is a full.NET language based on Javascript/JScript/ECMAScript, and as such has full access to.NET libraries like Winforms or any of the gui toolkit bindings like Qt# or GTK# (for use with Mono, mostly).
This is not pedantry. If you are thinking that layout is somehow achieved with <div> elements, then you are looking at things completely upside-down. You use the most appropriate element type for the information at hand, whether that's a table, a list, a paragraph, or whatever. You then arrange those elements with CSS. The particular element types you've used are not relevant to the layout. If you think <div> elements are in any way interesting for layout purposes, then you don't understand how the whole picture fits together.
A div is just a non-semantic block (just like a span is a non-semantic inline bit, though of course either of those could be changed by CSS). A table is very specific. Semantically, only tabular data should go into a table, and thus tables are completely wrong for layout. Divs, on the other hand, do make sense. For example, you're building a page with two columns, perhaps for a nav sidebar and a main content area. You have two separate components to your page, but they don't have any semantic meaning other than being blocks to put stuff (that is, they're not tabular data, list data, paragraphs, headings, etc). In that case, a div (short for "division", as in "page division" or something logically separate from other bits on the page) is absolutely correct to use. So now you have two divs on your page, one for the sidebar and one for the content. Using CSS, you can make these look however you like. Put the sidebar on the left or right, it doesn't matter (can't do that with a table without editing content). Put the "sidebar" along the top or bottom of the content area (can't do that with a table without editing content, either). Obviously that's CSS's doing, but you need something to work with in order to style appropriately. Within the sidebar, you have semantic data, as nav data can be considered a list. Within the content division, you have semantic data consisting of paragraphs, headings, etc. If you modelled your page as a table with a single row, with the sidebar being one cell and the content being another cell, your page is not semantic. Modelling it with divs, it is.
Divs can definitely be over-used. There are a lot of specific layouts that require wrappers and such, which usually means using divs. While you can avoid much of that, there's still some tag soup required if you want specific layouts with today's browsers, and you just have to deal with the fact that reality is intruding on your perfect little world. For my part, I would much rather have two divs wrapped in a third in order to do a two-column page layout than have a single table with columns as cells in the table.
Javascript isn't a great language. It's not robust, and it's difficult to really do good architecture with libraries using it. HTML is a pretty decent method to mark up text, but wasn't meant originally to ever be interactive.
Once you understand it, Javascript is an awesome language. It's C/C++/Java-like syntax hides its fundamentally functional underpinnings. The core datastructure in Javascript is a method. Everything can be represented in terms of methods, even to the point of not using any variables. With that in mind, it's a very powerful language that is often maligned precisely because of what it is -- many people just don't "get" functional languages (why C/C++/Java/etc are so popular and Lisp/ML/Haskell/etc are not), though you can certainly write procedural or even OO code in Javascript. It's also very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with Javascript, depending on implementations (using anonymous methods is a good way to leak memory in IE if you're not careful, for example).
As a scripting language, Javascript has a lot too offer. Too bad it's been forever tied to HTML and web stuff.
However, I suspect if AJAX and HTML were really so great/powerful/easy, many people would have stopped using flash already. I have no love for flash, but it can do things much more easily/faster than AJAX can for many tasks (disliking both technologies I'm pretty non-biased here).
People like Flash because it gives you lots of pretty, shiney bits for very little work. It's also vector-based, so you can build a pixel-perfect layout like so many bad web designers want ("Our web site must look exactly like our magazine"). Too many people associate "AJAX" with flashy Web 2.0-y visual effects (fading highlights, rounded corners, wet reflections, large fonts, etc), when AJAX is really about communication. If all you care about is glitz, go ahead and use Flash. If you want to build something that actually works well, I'd go with javascript+HTML.
However, I suspect if AJAX and HTML were really so great/powerful/easy, many people would have stopped using flash already. I have no love for flash, but it can do things much more easily/faster than AJAX can for many tasks (disliking both technologies I'm pretty non-biased here).
You may not want to hear it, but Microsoft has much of that with ASP.Net AJAX, as have others like Script#. In each case, you're writing most (or all, in the case of Script#) of your code in a.NET langauge and the compiler handles generating the javascript appropriate for your target browser(s). These work with at least Firefox and IE, and should also work with Safari, Opera, and others with minor tweaking.
the Dune Saga also has this weakness. If you truly love the world, you've got over 15 books of it to read now, but the original book alone stands on it's own. the first 3 sequals add to it, but reading beyond is unnecessary.
I respectfully disagree. The first Dune book was simply history, setting up the story for the three sequels dealing with God Emperor Leto II. Sure, you could stop after the first book and have an interesting read, but you'd miss the actual story.
I do agree that there's not much reason to read the prequels unless you really care about the Dune universe, but stopping with just book 1 on the original series? What a waste of time.
I develop on Linux and OS X and none of those tools run on anything but Windows. But you seem to be myopic in that regard--not only are there other browsers besides those from Microsoft, but there are other operating systems and tools. And fortunately the market usage of the alternatives is growing.
You might have a point, if IE ran on Linux or OS X. Because IE only runs on Windows, how would you expect to test and debug? With Linux or OS X programs? If you're going to support IE (I'm fine with you not supporting it), you need to know this stuff.
Also, I'm not ignoring that there are other browsers, or even saying that you should only use IE. All I said was that IE has the same or similar debugging and testing capabilities as were claimed for Firefox + Firebug. Claiming that IE sucks and Firefox rocks because you can debug JS in Firefox but not in IE is myopic.
It's a bit disingenuous to credit MS with SVG. SVG came about because Sun/Adobe pushed an alternate format (PGML) to Microsoft's VML in the bid to become a W3C vector graphic standard. Since there was no consensus on which format to adopt, SVG was born and is the hybrid offspring of the initial proposals. If MS hadn't pushed VML, the W3C vector graphic standard would be PGML....
And if Sun/Adobe hadn't pushed PGML, the W3C vector graphic standard would be VML. What's your point? All I said was that Microsoft was one of the parties directly responsible for SVG, and they were:).
Wait, are you telling me I need to get a Windows computer just so I can install a Microsoft product to help me work around another Microsoft's products bugs?!?!?
No, I'm saying that if you're going to actively modify your code such that it runs on IE (either by your own choice or by mandate from management), you're going to have to have a Windows computer in order to run IE (WINE aside, there is no difference between running a VM like VMWare or Parallels and running a separate Windows machine). If you're going to test for IE, you need to be aware of the tools available for developing and testing in IE. Claiming that IE sucks because it doesn't have Firebug is ignorant.
Obviously the ideal situation is for things to Just Work(tm), whether you're dealing with IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, or whatever other browser you're testing with. In practice, you'll have to debug your code on each of those browsers, and when you're doing so you need to know how to do it rather than just throwing up your hands in disgust and writing off the browser because you can't figure it out.
Meanwhile, IE provides me with no means whatsoever to inspect how it is operating, no way to determine what the problem is if something goes wrong. This is unbelievably frustrating when I make my living writing web *applications*, not just web sites.
This is absolutely not true. IE has had debugger hooks since forever (at least IE4, which is the earliest IE that mattered). You simply need an external debugger in order to use them. Visual Studio works great, but you can use one of the free Express versions like Visual Web Developer Express, or you can use the archaic Microsoft Script Debugger. Enabling debugging does require poking around in the Tools -> Options Advanced tab to flip the counter-intuitively named "Disable script debugging (Internet Explorer)" to off (yes, the checkbox is a negative, so when it's checked debugging is disabled and when it's unchecked debugging is enabled). Once you've done that, you can attach your debugger to the iexplore.exe process or you can use the new debugger-related options in the "View" menu to attach, break, etc (may have to restart IE for those menu options to show up), or you can just wait for something to break and present with you a "do you want to debug?" prompt.
While hooking a debugger to IE is not quite as simple as it is in Firefox (install Firebug, you're done), it does allow you to work in a familiar interface (assuming you're familiar with Visual Studio, of course) and is sufficiently powerful. Couple that with the IE Developer Toolbar for DOM inspection and Fiddler for session inspection and you have all of the tools you need to debug even the largest of web applications. When you're done, don't forget to Drip for memory leaks.
The really sad thing about IE is that it merely takes up space in the web ecosystem; it cannot be said that it improves anything. It raises the bar for frustration tolerance among web developers but that's pretty much it. The only original idea that has come to HTML from Microsoft, sadly, has been the marquee tag, and I'm actually not really sure that it's still supported in IE.
Not directly to HTML, but Microsoft was responsible for creating XMLHTTP, the precursor to XMLHttpRequest, without which the whole "web2.0" "AJAXy" stuff wouldn't exist. I believe XMLHttpRequest is now a w3c standard, which never would've happened if not for XMLHTTP (and yes, IE7 finally does support a native XMLHttpRequest object so you don't have to have branches for XHR vs. XMLHTTP if you don't care about supporting IE6). Similarly, there would be no SVG if it weren't for VML (not to be confused with VRML). Saying that marquee is the best Microsoft's ever been able to contribute to the web is very, very shortsighted.
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So I ask again, what exactly are you looking for from games? From a broad perspective, there's nothing new in games. Even something novel like Guitar Hero (itself suffering from sequelitis) was nothing really new. DDR with a guitar, yawn. But wait, not even DDR was unique! NES Track and Field but with dancing, yawn.
There's value in doing things well even if you're not ground-breaking. For example, Halo 3 is a very solid shooter with fun online play and a conclusion to a story that many of us have been following for 6 years. It may not add anything to the FPS genre directly, but that doesn't mean it's not worth playing. As another example, compare Oblivion (valid because the Game of the Year edition released this year) and Two Worlds. On the surface, they're pretty much identical -- medievel-ish PC-style RPGs with wide open worlds. Oblivion, despite being a sequel (4th of the Elder Scrolls RPGs), was great. It ran well, felt solid, had a great story, and truly benefited from the Elder Scrolls mythos. Two Worlds, on the other hand, was essentially a piece of crap (didn't stop me from enjoying it, though :). It had massive performance issues, quest-breaking bugs, horrible voice acting, and flawed controls. If you're just looking superficially, you'll dismiss both because they're just "Ultima with a modern graphical veneer, yawn," and in the process you'd miss out on the excellent game that was Oblivion. Of course you'd also miss out on the crapfest of Two Worlds, so that's not too bad :).
Obviously you're not the target audience for Forza or Gran Turismo, and that's fine. I take it you enjoy more arcade-style racers, in which case it'd be a shame for you to write of game series like Wipeout just because F-Zero did it first.
So you rule out games simply because they're presented from a first-person perspective? If so, you missed possibly the best game of the year, Portal. You also missed Bioshock and Metroid Prime 3, as well as Halo 3 (I wasn't going to mention this, but I couldn't help myself :).
Aside from that, there were some great non-FPS games out this year. Assassin's Creed was fun, if a little repetitive. Mass Effect was great in the Bioware RPG tradition, perhaps even better than the prior KOTOR games because it was not restricted to the existing Star Wars mythos. Forza 2 is perhaps the best console racing simulator to date, and although GT5 will look prettier Forza 2 still has a much better physics simulation (it updates 360 times per second, modelling all four wheels across three separate points on the contact patch). Ratchet and Clank almost made me buy a PS3 (still holding off on that), and I'm really considering dusting off my WiiMote and picking up Super Mario Galaxy.
What exactly are you looking for from games?
You're referring to Peter Moore. However, he came to the Xbox project relatively late (in time for the 360), so I wouldn't exactly call him one of the "key" guys. Also, he's gone to EA now.
Fair enough, but that has exactly nothing to do with Vista. If your question was, "Why do you stick with Microsoft software in general?" then I could understand asking such a question. Instead, your question was, "How do you deal with Vista?" In that context, your issues with Microsoft changing or ignoring standards are moot, since you can install and run standards-compliant software just fine. Firefox and Opera both work perfectly on Vista, and even Safari runs (while it runs just as it would on XP, I hesitate to use the term "perfectly" simply because Apply software on Windows generally sucks). IIRC, Firefox was one application that got large amounts of attention from Microsoft during all of the Vista betas (as well as XP SP2), because breaking backwards compatibility with Firefox would be a huge shitstorm.
As far as standards go, the only thing I've had issues with at all on Vista are CIFS shares. Then again, that's really a de factor standard, defined and owned by Microsoft, and the change in Vista was for good reason (security) even if it did cause compatibility issues with accessing Vista shares from non-Vista clients. It's easy enough to tweak things back to "normal", as long as you're willing to muck about in the registry.
I've been happily running Vista on my main laptop and desktop machines since January, so I'll take a stab at this.
This only affects certain paths. If you're playing non-DRM files, DRM doesn't even enter into the discussion. What you're referring to is the fact that the OS has support for a fully-protected pipeline (HDCP) required for the next-generation HD disc formats (HD-DVD, Blu-Ray). If you neither have nor care about those (as I don't -- for me, the future of HD media is online, like with the Xbox Video Marketplace), you'll never notice the additional support in Vista.
That's just silly. My laptop is 2.5 years old, running Vista with only minor upgrades (I bumped my RAM from 1GB to 2GB and replaced my 5400RPM hard drive with a 7200RPM model nearly a year before Vista shipped). I've not personally run into any hardware incompatibilities, though one of the biggest areas of complaint (printer support) is something I almost never use anyway. On the software side of things, I've run into a few apps that wouldn't work unless I ran them as administrator, but nearly a year after installation those apps are few and far between. Anything beyond that is personal perception, and at least for me I've not run into anything that "indirectly hinders my ability to choose the software and hardware that I can make use of". Your mileage may vary.
Are you referring to the higher minimum requirements? As I already mentioned, I had moved to 2GB on my main machines well before Vista shipped, though the box I have connected to my TV that's also running Vista only has 1GB and works just fine for what I need (plays videos, shares media to my Xbox 360). I haven't had to upgrade anything else.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with these two. "Vendor independent standards"? My "Designed for Windows XP" Dell laptop runs Vista perfectly well, with all the bells and whistles, and in fact the laptop has worked even better since installing Vista. XP wouldn't sleep properly on the box, choosing to always hibernate instead, and I get much better battery life as well. With XP, I could push the laptop to just under 3 hours of use before needing a recharge. With Vista I'm routinely able to get almost 3.5 hours out of the exact same laptop, with the exact same battery (that's even starting to show its age, not being able to hold as much of a charge as before). Pushing "Microsoft specific, and often closed psuedo-standards"? I can still run Firefox, OO.o, Adobe products (Flash, Acrobat, Photoshop), Apple products (Quicktime, iTunes), and anything else I like. Care to explain what you were trying to say, or have I just been trolled?
There are two answers to that question. First, since there's only one required format conversion (ringtones have to be AAC, though if your source material starts as AAC like an iTMS purchase there's no conversion at all), you're not going to lose too much fidelity. Second, because the ringtone plays over the iPhone's single external speaker, whatever quality loss might happen from the conversion (for example, if you're cutting up a FLAC file to create a ringtone) will be dwarfed by the suck that is the external speaker. It's good from a speakerphone perspective, but horrible from a music perspective. That's all right, though, as you should use headphones if you actually want to listen to music.
Personally, I couldn't care less about being locked to a single provider, mostly because AT&T/Cingular is the best provider in my area and thus have no reason to switch (I was on Cingular for years before getting an iPhone). I assume by "pay-twice-for-songs" you're referring to ring tones, which couldn't be further from the truth. If you buy a song from iTunes, you can cut it up into ring tones as much as you like. More than that, you can "easily" make your own ring tones out of any audio you like without having to hack your phone at all:
- Use an audio editor like Audacity to pull a 30 second or less chunk of music from your audio file. Save this as an mp3
- Import the mp3 into iTunes
- Use iTunes to convert the mp3 to AAC
- Rename the new
.m4a file to .m4r
- Re-import the
.m4r file into iTunes and it will go into the Ringtones folder, which can then be synced to your iPhone
"Proprietary, locked-down, no-3rd party apps" is three ways of phrasing a single complaint, and that's changing early next year. In the meantime, you can write useful webapps or jailbreak your phone. While not ideal, Apple has committed to providing an SDK for third-party development, which is a change from their initial plans (from the start they always planned the iPhone to be locked down, rather than being a more open platform like Windows Mobile).I'm far from an Apple fanboy, but I like my iPhone. I bought it knowing exactly what it was and was not. Then again, I also actually like Vista and don't feel that it's the biggest disappointment of 2007. From the list, I also like Office 2007 and my Zune, so perhaps I really don't have any credibility in this discussion :).
Slashdot has a "public" option. If you click that when you log in, your login state is only stored for the session and freed when you close the browser.
Many other sites also implement a "public" mode like Slashdot has. Just as two other examples, Microsoft's Outlook Web Access (OWA) lets you choose "public" or "private" when you login, and Microsoft's Passport/Windows Live ID gives you the option to save email + password, just email, or nothing (the latter two are effectively session-only logins, as you still need the user's password in order to login subsequently). As well, every other site also has the ability to logout, which .Mac is missing.
A "decent timeout" is trivially simple -- mark your cookie only valid for the current session (aka, use a "session cookie"). This is at odds with persistent login designs, so you have to give users the option -- login with a session cookie ("public terminal") that will expire when you close the browser, or login with a persistent cookie ("private terminal") that will remain valid for some period of time. If you only choose the latter, like .Mac, you must also provide a "logout" option. Anything less is a security violation.
I love how this is a "little", "minor" security flaw, and even though Apple actively deleted the post exposing this information nobody's really up in arms as it's just due to "bad interface design". If this were a Microsoft property, people would be screaming bloody murder.
Beyond that, the original poster missed this from the E85 article:
In other words, in a flex-fuel engine you're probably not going to see better emissions since cylinder compression will be set to the fuel with the lowest requirement. In an E85-only engine, you can run a higher compression and burn your fuel more efficiently, thus creating fewer emissions.I assume you mean "carbureted", not "carbonated", and in the early 90s carburetion definitely was not the norm. By the mid-80s, nearly all new cars were fuel injected, though there were a few new models with carburetors up until the 90s (the last carbureted car in the US was in 90, the last truck was in 94). Of course you could easily buy older (mid-80s or earlier) cars that used carburetors rather than fuel injection.
Ethanol is tricky, but not because of the reasons most people bring up like redirecting food crops for fuel or causing food prices to increase. Ethanol contains less energy per gallon than gasoline (meaning you'll actually see your mpg go down if you switch to E85), and unless engines are specifically built for ethanol it can actually damage the engine (ethanol can damage bare rubber, magnesium, and aluminum parts, and is electrically conductive where gasolone is not). The changes required to use a mostly-ethanol mix like E85 are expensive.
As far as food vs. fuel goes, I have no concerns here. Right now the US government actually pays farmers to leave a percentage of their land fallow. With an increase in demand for corn crops (where the US is expecting to get most of its ethanol, though it can come from many places such as sugar beats, sugar cane, and even hemp), we would no longer need government subsidies for fallow land. In fact, simply by putting to use all of that fallow land right now we could increase production by 30% or more. Beyond that, I'm sure we can find ways to increase yields, up to and including GMOs (if it's for fuel and the crop is well-controlled to avoid cross-pollination, there's no health concerns at all).
Europe has learned this well, as many of their vehicles are diesel rather than petrol (the fact that diesel is cheaper there doesn't hurt). There are two big issues for diesel vehicles in the US today. First and foremost is a perception problem. Most people have only experience diesel engines in connection with trucks and other large vehicles (busses, tractors, construction vehicles, etc), which are usually load and smelly. The few attempts US car manufacturers have made at using diesel never really refined the engines to the extent of what Euro manufacturers have done. The second problem is availability. Good luck finding any of VW's excellent TDI products, and many manufacturers don't or won't offer their TDI products here (Mercedes, BMW, VW/Audi, Porsche, and more all have excellent TDI engines, but good luck finding a Cayenne or E-class with a TDI here). This is a bit of a chicken and egg problem: people won't buy diesel cars because all they know are the older, loud, smelly diesels, so manufacturers won't bring over their refined TDI systems. With no refined TDI cars for people to exper
Two things to note:
- This was an XP problem. Technically it could've happened on Vista, but I haven't seen anything that said it did. As such, this falls into the same category of problems that Microsoft attempted to fix in Vista with UAC -- nearly everybody ran XP as admin, and many apps expected you to be running as admin.
- This was a problem with an installer/uninstaller. Since nearly everything on Windows installs into %programfiles% and that's a shared location, installers need admin access (installers that ask if you want to install for "Just this user" or "Everyone" are not going to install in %userprofile% if you choose "Just this user". They're just looking to see if the Start Menu shortcuts should go into "%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu" or "%allusersprofile%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu"). Vista will elevate your privleges when you try to run an installer (you'll get a UAC prompt), after which a misbehaving installer could screw up boot.ini. Regardless of operating systems, you almost always install applications as administrator. Yes, you can install apps in $HOME on *nix systems, but 9 times out of 10 you'll use sudo on the installer (sudo apt-get install foo). Therefore this is technically a bug that could happen on any OS. It's not difficult to imagine an application install that deletes your kernel image, for example.
The real WTF here is that they have an important game file named "boot.ini". That's an exceedingly poor choice of filename. Think of it like having a game file called "autoexec.bat" or "vmlinuz" that actually has nothing to do with the DOS boot process or the Linux kernel. The only defense they give for that is "legacy".Maybe I've just worked with crap designers, then, because I often get requirements detailing spacing down to the pixel, like this element should be 3px away from that element, this other element has a padding of 5px, etc. When I try to tell them that's not going to work with HTML+CSS (at least not in a browser-compatible, accessible way), they either don't get it ("Why is the web different than print?") or don't care ("Why can't you do what I want?").
While I agree that making grids in CSS really sucks (and while you can do it with table elements, that has its own set of problems), I disagree that grids shouldn't be defined by CSS. CSS is for layout just as much as cosmetics, if not more so. The content should be encoded in a semantic way, such that each element makes sense in terms of the data it contains and not in terms of where it should be on the screen. Then CSS should come along and actually lay it out. Ideally, HTML+CSS should be similar in design to TeX or XML+XSLT, where your data is represented logically and styles are applied to make it look the way you want.
That really depends on the meaning of the columns in the grid. If the columns are related (ie, tabular data), they should be in the markup. If they're not (ie, navigation, content, sidebar content, ads, etc), the different blocks should be separated in your markup but their column-ness is strictly a layout issue. I will agree that current CSS sucks for doing columnar layouts in a non-hacky way, and that there's really nothing on the horizon (CSS3) to make it any better, but I also believe that it's CSS's responsibility to enable column layouts.
Not quite. HTML & CSS suck for doing pixel-perfect, magazine-like layouts, which unfortunately too many designers want. There are better formats for that, like PDF. HTML is supposed to flow, and it does. Unfortunately that often means that HTML+CSS's design goals are at odds with real-world usage scenarios. We can't fix it by saying, "Don't do this," so we have to fix it by extending HTML and CSS to do what people want.
Now you're just being pedantic. Obviously it's the CSS that positions things in your layout, but when discussing table layouts versus CSS layouts, most people will call the latter "div layouts" just because it's easier to understand ("I laid out all of my stuff using table cells. What should I use if I can't use those?" "Divs styled by CSS"). If you're doing a layout that would traditionally require a table, you have several blocks of information that need to be positioned correctly. Those blocks usually don't have any semantic meaning other than "I'm a block", in which case divs are appropriate. I'm going to lay out my page using CSS regardless, so if not divs then what? Spans marked as display: block?
There are ways to do that (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, and so on). Some are hackier than others, each one has its own set of quirks and restrictions, but then table-layouts have their own issues and drawbacks as well.
Python is great, but when dealing with the web you either have to stick to web-standard languages (ECMAScript) or try to get another language standardized (which probably wouldn't be Python). Obviously if you take the web out of it, things open up considerably.
You could run Parallels (which would require a Windows license, of course), or you could play with Mono. I'm not sure how much of ASP.Net 2.0 they support, nor whether ASP.Net AJAX runs on Mono, but it might be interesting to find out.
Then you're not talking about AJAX or web development. You're talking about traditional "rich client" development, which many languages can do. Speaking of Javascript, JScrpt.NET is a full .NET language based on Javascript/JScript/ECMAScript, and as such has full access to .NET libraries like Winforms or any of the gui toolkit bindings like Qt# or GTK# (for use with Mono, mostly).
A div is just a non-semantic block (just like a span is a non-semantic inline bit, though of course either of those could be changed by CSS). A table is very specific. Semantically, only tabular data should go into a table, and thus tables are completely wrong for layout. Divs, on the other hand, do make sense. For example, you're building a page with two columns, perhaps for a nav sidebar and a main content area. You have two separate components to your page, but they don't have any semantic meaning other than being blocks to put stuff (that is, they're not tabular data, list data, paragraphs, headings, etc). In that case, a div (short for "division", as in "page division" or something logically separate from other bits on the page) is absolutely correct to use. So now you have two divs on your page, one for the sidebar and one for the content. Using CSS, you can make these look however you like. Put the sidebar on the left or right, it doesn't matter (can't do that with a table without editing content). Put the "sidebar" along the top or bottom of the content area (can't do that with a table without editing content, either). Obviously that's CSS's doing, but you need something to work with in order to style appropriately. Within the sidebar, you have semantic data, as nav data can be considered a list. Within the content division, you have semantic data consisting of paragraphs, headings, etc. If you modelled your page as a table with a single row, with the sidebar being one cell and the content being another cell, your page is not semantic. Modelling it with divs, it is.
Divs can definitely be over-used. There are a lot of specific layouts that require wrappers and such, which usually means using divs. While you can avoid much of that, there's still some tag soup required if you want specific layouts with today's browsers, and you just have to deal with the fact that reality is intruding on your perfect little world. For my part, I would much rather have two divs wrapped in a third in order to do a two-column page layout than have a single table with columns as cells in the table.
Once you understand it, Javascript is an awesome language. It's C/C++/Java-like syntax hides its fundamentally functional underpinnings. The core datastructure in Javascript is a method. Everything can be represented in terms of methods, even to the point of not using any variables. With that in mind, it's a very powerful language that is often maligned precisely because of what it is -- many people just don't "get" functional languages (why C/C++/Java/etc are so popular and Lisp/ML/Haskell/etc are not), though you can certainly write procedural or even OO code in Javascript. It's also very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with Javascript, depending on implementations (using anonymous methods is a good way to leak memory in IE if you're not careful, for example).
As a scripting language, Javascript has a lot too offer. Too bad it's been forever tied to HTML and web stuff.
People like Flash because it gives you lots of pretty, shiney bits for very little work. It's also vector-based, so you can build a pixel-perfect layout like so many bad web designers want ("Our web site must look exactly like our magazine"). Too many people associate "AJAX" with flashy Web 2.0-y visual effects (fading highlights, rounded corners, wet reflections, large fonts, etc), when AJAX is really about communication. If all you care about is glitz, go ahead and use Flash. If you want to build something that actually works well, I'd go with javascript+HTML.
You may not want to hear it, but Microsoft has much of that with ASP.Net AJAX, as have others like Script#. In each case, you're writing most (or all, in the case of Script#) of your code in a .NET langauge and the compiler handles generating the javascript appropriate for your target browser(s). These work with at least Firefox and IE, and should also work with Safari, Opera, and others with minor tweaking.
I respectfully disagree. The first Dune book was simply history, setting up the story for the three sequels dealing with God Emperor Leto II. Sure, you could stop after the first book and have an interesting read, but you'd miss the actual story.
I do agree that there's not much reason to read the prequels unless you really care about the Dune universe, but stopping with just book 1 on the original series? What a waste of time.
How does naming a street after a humor author have anything to do with the environment?
You might have a point, if IE ran on Linux or OS X. Because IE only runs on Windows, how would you expect to test and debug? With Linux or OS X programs? If you're going to support IE (I'm fine with you not supporting it), you need to know this stuff.
Also, I'm not ignoring that there are other browsers, or even saying that you should only use IE. All I said was that IE has the same or similar debugging and testing capabilities as were claimed for Firefox + Firebug. Claiming that IE sucks and Firefox rocks because you can debug JS in Firefox but not in IE is myopic.
And if Sun/Adobe hadn't pushed PGML, the W3C vector graphic standard would be VML. What's your point? All I said was that Microsoft was one of the parties directly responsible for SVG, and they were :).
No, I'm saying that if you're going to actively modify your code such that it runs on IE (either by your own choice or by mandate from management), you're going to have to have a Windows computer in order to run IE (WINE aside, there is no difference between running a VM like VMWare or Parallels and running a separate Windows machine). If you're going to test for IE, you need to be aware of the tools available for developing and testing in IE. Claiming that IE sucks because it doesn't have Firebug is ignorant.
Obviously the ideal situation is for things to Just Work(tm), whether you're dealing with IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, or whatever other browser you're testing with. In practice, you'll have to debug your code on each of those browsers, and when you're doing so you need to know how to do it rather than just throwing up your hands in disgust and writing off the browser because you can't figure it out.
This is absolutely not true. IE has had debugger hooks since forever (at least IE4, which is the earliest IE that mattered). You simply need an external debugger in order to use them. Visual Studio works great, but you can use one of the free Express versions like Visual Web Developer Express, or you can use the archaic Microsoft Script Debugger. Enabling debugging does require poking around in the Tools -> Options Advanced tab to flip the counter-intuitively named "Disable script debugging (Internet Explorer)" to off (yes, the checkbox is a negative, so when it's checked debugging is disabled and when it's unchecked debugging is enabled). Once you've done that, you can attach your debugger to the iexplore.exe process or you can use the new debugger-related options in the "View" menu to attach, break, etc (may have to restart IE for those menu options to show up), or you can just wait for something to break and present with you a "do you want to debug?" prompt.
While hooking a debugger to IE is not quite as simple as it is in Firefox (install Firebug, you're done), it does allow you to work in a familiar interface (assuming you're familiar with Visual Studio, of course) and is sufficiently powerful. Couple that with the IE Developer Toolbar for DOM inspection and Fiddler for session inspection and you have all of the tools you need to debug even the largest of web applications. When you're done, don't forget to Drip for memory leaks.
Not directly to HTML, but Microsoft was responsible for creating XMLHTTP, the precursor to XMLHttpRequest, without which the whole "web2.0" "AJAXy" stuff wouldn't exist. I believe XMLHttpRequest is now a w3c standard, which never would've happened if not for XMLHTTP (and yes, IE7 finally does support a native XMLHttpRequest object so you don't have to have branches for XHR vs. XMLHTTP if you don't care about supporting IE6). Similarly, there would be no SVG if it weren't for VML (not to be confused with VRML). Saying that marquee is the best Microsoft's ever been able to contribute to the web is very, very shortsighted.