I cannot believe that the mod community hasn't been brought up. There are some games (namely id-based games) that have extremely long lives because of the mod community.
People make new maps, player models, enemies, etc. to create new experiences within the game. Without cheat codes, level creation would be near impossible.
Game developers use cheat codes to debug and test the gameplay. If they took the cheats out before release, there would be no mods for the game and the lifespan would be much shorter.
1) 'driver support is abysmal...'
Perhaps for an Abysmal operating system like Win2k:) Of course driver support in general from *MANY* companies wasn't that great for Win2k, but hell support wasn't that great from Microsoft itself with all the oddball service packs that thing had to have.
There are only a select few companies that made abysmal drivers for Win2K - Creative Labs being one of them. I don't have problems with any other driver in my system - and I have an unusually large number of devices. See North40 and Bertha
3) 'not smp safe...'
You are *NOT* the average user, *LOTS* of things aren't SMP safe, and you should have done some research to check if it was first before jumping the gun and buying.
1) Lots of things are SMP safe. Again, I have no other drivers that crash my system.
2) This has been a well-known problem since the Live was introduced on NT4. It's not like Creative didn't have time to fix these problems.
3) Creative Labs should not promise to fix problems like SMP support if they don't plan on doing it. The LiveWare 3 FAQ plainly stated that SMP support was being worked on for the next release. Incidently, the 2001-11-11 driver update release still has problems and crashes more often than ever.
5) 'All creative Labs offers are cheap components. Literally. IMHO, they're not worth effort.'
I've owned Creative Labs products since the original SoundBlaster, and I've really never had that many problems with them except for one time and that was because of a crappy ass motherboard so I can't exactly blame that on them.
What about the jacks? Those cheap plastic 1/8" jacks suffer a lot of wear and tear.
The average person does not need a top-of-the-line CPU. But you cannot deny the need for faster CPUs.
Those that buy the newest stuff are the ones that drive the next year's consumer technology.
A lot of early adopters do buy hardware that they don't need. But if they want to, that is their decision. I'm not going to tell someone they need a $4000 machine to do taxes on either, that's ridiculous.
I don't advocate everybody getting the hottest thing, but for God's sake those that need it, really do need it.
Yes, I'm using one PC to render. I don't have the type of steady work to set up a farm, though it would be nice.
AMD chips were not an option when I build my workstation, they did not support SMP. I had to put together a dual PIII-1GHz. At the time, it was the best I could do. Athlons are supporting SMP now, but P4s are not.
What a strange world the chip manufacturers live in.
To all the people saying "We don't need any more speed."
There are quite a few applications in which CPU speed is never fast enough. _Never_ fast enough.
I'm a 3D animator. I render a lot of architectural flythoughs, mechanics, medical visualizations, etc.
Most of my clients need output to videotape or MPGs on CD. Now as I'm sure you are aware, NTSC playback is 30fps. So in one minute of video there are 1800 frames. Now, if each frame takes two minutes to render, your're looking at 3600 minutes, or 60 hours to complete.
I don't know about you, but 60 hours is a long time to be waiting.
Those directory names are randomly generated when Mozilla creates a profile. They are there to provide more security (no way to tell where the profiles are located without a directory listing). I don't believe they are going to be removed any time soon.
There are a few major issues to deal with before Mozilla is ready for a final release (in no particular order). These issues have recently received considerable Netscape engineering resources.
A new "outliner-widget" has been created (Thanks to Mozilla diety Dave Hyatt) to take care of mailnews performance. However, implementing it (under the MailNews_Performance_20010208_BRANCH branch) has been a huge undertaking. According to a recent newsgroup posting, the branch should land in around 2.5 weeks (Perhaps March 21st ?). For more info, see the Mailnews status page.
Necko (Mozilla's networking/cache component) is being redesigned as well.
In addition to these projects, the XSLT team plans to land their Transformiix branch by the mozilla 0.9 release, and the porkjockeys team is looking for ways to reduce startup time.
The added development cycle (mozilla 0.8.1) is going to give Mozilla QA 5 more weeks of testing after these changes land. It is these changes that will put Mozilla in a position to fully compete with other browsers.
Personally, I think that this delay is great! Mozilla 1.0 is going to be much more mature because of it.
The major reason for this [bloat in Mozilla] is that they have stuck to the W3O standards for rendering web pages.
Quite the opposite. A considerable amount of time has been spent on dealing with invalid markup.
There is no markup to "just draw a line". The closest thing to what you speak is the horizontal rule (HR). It, like any other element is subject to the same box model with padding, borders, and margins. Have you looked at the source for IE's "draw a line" code?
If only they had ignored the W3C, ignored all the conceptual, fancy coding fashions, and just made a fast browser.
Internet Explorer already provides this fuctionality, why would mozilla.org want to make a clone of IE?
There is quite a bit of work going on to speed up the mailnews component. Dave Hyatt came up with a new "outliner widget" that will be increasing scrolling and such to NC 4.x speeds.
"it's just that nobody but the Microsoft supports these standards [XSL/xHTML] in a browser."
XSL support is coming soon. XHTML support is already here in almost any modern browser.
And how about supporting CSS to format XML (like Mozilla)? Most designers already know CSS anyway. XSL is far more powerful, but let's start with some basic functionality before taking huge leaps forcing people to learn not one, but two new languages to utilize XML.
Microsoft, Netscape, Mosaic, they are partially all to blame for the current state of the web. If browsers didn't render broken HTML in the first place, there would be no broken HTML on the web.
The time spent coding modern browsers to be "compliant" with broken HTML is an absolute waste. That time could be better spent developing support for real standards.
To the web designers and developers: Stop writing broken markup! This non-professionalism approach to building the web can only be justified by lazyness.
To everyone: when refering to the Netscape browser, it would help if you specified 4.x or 6.x - they are radically different.
Slashdot Mirror
I cannot believe that the mod community hasn't been brought up. There are some games (namely id-based games) that have extremely long lives because of the mod community.
People make new maps, player models, enemies, etc. to create new experiences within the game. Without cheat codes, level creation would be near impossible.
Game developers use cheat codes to debug and test the gameplay. If they took the cheats out before release, there would be no mods for the game and the lifespan would be much shorter.
The average person does not need a top-of-the-line CPU. But you cannot deny the need for faster CPUs.
Those that buy the newest stuff are the ones that drive the next year's consumer technology.
A lot of early adopters do buy hardware that they don't need. But if they want to, that is their decision. I'm not going to tell someone they need a $4000 machine to do taxes on either, that's ridiculous.
I don't advocate everybody getting the hottest thing, but for God's sake those that need it, really do need it.
Yes, I'm using one PC to render. I don't have the type of steady work to set up a farm, though it would be nice.
AMD chips were not an option when I build my workstation, they did not support SMP. I had to put together a dual PIII-1GHz. At the time, it was the best I could do. Athlons are supporting SMP now, but P4s are not.
What a strange world the chip manufacturers live in.
To all the people saying "We don't need any more speed."
There are quite a few applications in which CPU speed is never fast enough. _Never_ fast enough.
I'm a 3D animator. I render a lot of architectural flythoughs, mechanics, medical visualizations, etc.
Most of my clients need output to videotape or MPGs on CD. Now as I'm sure you are aware, NTSC playback is 30fps. So in one minute of video there are 1800 frames. Now, if each frame takes two minutes to render, your're looking at 3600 minutes, or 60 hours to complete.
I don't know about you, but 60 hours is a long time to be waiting.
Those directory names are randomly generated when Mozilla creates a profile. They are there to provide more security (no way to tell where the profiles are located without a directory listing). I don't believe they are going to be removed any time soon.
BTW, the .slt extension stands for "salt".
There are a few major issues to deal with before Mozilla is ready for a final release (in no particular order). These issues have recently received considerable Netscape engineering resources.
A new "outliner-widget" has been created (Thanks to Mozilla diety Dave Hyatt) to take care of mailnews performance. However, implementing it (under the MailNews_Performance_20010208_BRANCH branch) has been a huge undertaking. According to a recent newsgroup posting, the branch should land in around 2.5 weeks (Perhaps March 21st ?). For more info, see the Mailnews status page.
Necko (Mozilla's networking/cache component) is being redesigned as well.
In addition to these projects, the XSLT team plans to land their Transformiix branch by the mozilla 0.9 release, and the porkjockeys team is looking for ways to reduce startup time.
The added development cycle (mozilla 0.8.1) is going to give Mozilla QA 5 more weeks of testing after these changes land. It is these changes that will put Mozilla in a position to fully compete with other browsers.
Personally, I think that this delay is great! Mozilla 1.0 is going to be much more mature because of it.
The major reason for this [bloat in Mozilla] is that they have stuck to the W3O standards for rendering web pages.
Quite the opposite. A considerable amount of time has been spent on dealing with invalid markup.
There is no markup to "just draw a line". The closest thing to what you speak is the horizontal rule (HR). It, like any other element is subject to the same box model with padding, borders, and margins. Have you looked at the source for IE's "draw a line" code?
If only they had ignored the W3C, ignored all the conceptual, fancy coding fashions, and just made a fast browser.
Internet Explorer already provides this fuctionality, why would mozilla.org want to make a clone of IE?
There is quite a bit of work going on to speed up the mailnews component. Dave Hyatt came up with a new "outliner widget" that will be increasing scrolling and such to NC 4.x speeds.
In case you are interested, see the Mailnews Status page.
According to a recent newsgroup posting, the new branch should be landing in about 2.5 weeks for testing in the nightlies.
How do you manage to get 106% of your users to view your site with IE? Hmm... what will MS think of next? :)
XSL support is coming soon. XHTML support is already here in almost any modern browser.
And how about supporting CSS to format XML (like Mozilla)? Most designers already know CSS anyway. XSL is far more powerful, but let's start with some basic functionality before taking huge leaps forcing people to learn not one, but two new languages to utilize XML.
Typical IE user. He didn't even *open* his rant element with the tag.
Sloppy, very sloppy.
Microsoft, Netscape, Mosaic, they are partially all to blame for the current state of the web. If browsers didn't render broken HTML in the first place, there would be no broken HTML on the web.
The time spent coding modern browsers to be "compliant" with broken HTML is an absolute waste. That time could be better spent developing support for real standards.
To the web designers and developers: Stop writing broken markup! This non-professionalism approach to building the web can only be justified by lazyness.
To everyone: when refering to the Netscape browser, it would help if you specified 4.x or 6.x - they are radically different.