Not only were the sequels not that bad but the first one wasn't that good.
When someone first told me about The Matrix I was like "yeah the previews look retarded" and my friend was like "It was a fun action movie with some cool effects and techno music" and he was right because that's all it was. It wasn't this thought provoking masterpiece of film making that most people make it out to be. It was just a decent sci-fi action movie that ranks somewhere below Predator and Highlander yet above Predator 2.
This is what I was thinking. Xfire was really neat when I tried it like 5 years ago but I could never get enough other friends to use it for it to hit critical mass. Steam on the other hand IS my social network. My friends aren't on Facebook, AIM, or Xfire but they're ALL on Steam. Everyone I know uses it to buy games. We use it to buy games for our friends that are broke. Even games that don't use Steam like Starcraft2 we run through Steam. It lets everyone else know that you're playing and gives in-game access to the Steam overlay(SC2 doesn't minimize/restore very gracefully). The only feature I miss from Xfire is the ability to directly send files to people but it's something that hardly ever comes up anymore.
Steam made Xfire totally irrelevant and these guys are really smart to still have been able to sell it for a nice sum and get the hell out while they can.
While Vista was crap, and XP took until SP2 to get really usable
The "Vista is crap" mentality that still pervades is rather baffling to me. Especially in the context of interface and ease of use. Vista is just as easy to use as Win7. The only real interface difference is the updated taskbar to be more like the dock. The "start" menu, control panel, and keyboard shortcuts are all basically the same as Vista. To say one is crap while another is near perfection seems rather silly and ignorant.
As for XP, other than the security center, firewall, and wireless interfaces there were no major interface changes between release and SP2. I fail to see how the release version was so hard to use compared to SP2.
If you want to talk speed, stability, and security then your observations become more valid though not to the degree to which you imply. In the context of ease of use(as being discussed here) I think that you are way off base.
I too miss my AWE32. Like someone in another post mentioned, the first time I heard the difference of the Duke Nukem 3D theme between regular SB16 compatibility mode and AWE32 mode was a big awe inspiring(pun intended) moment similar to going from software Quake to glQuake. The card was not cheap(and it was HUGE) but it came with a very impressive array of software. It had a limited version of Cakewalk, a voice synthesizer for Windows Notepad, and also a crude little speech recognition program among other apps I can't remember.
I'm sure in ~10 years when photo-realistic 3D rendering is all done by our CPU's(APU?) massive vector arrays and the discreet video card is just about obsolete then we'll get all nostalgic about our Voodoo 2's and Radeon 5800's too.
I dunno. I've never had Firefox take more than a second to cold to start unless I try to start after a fresh boot of Windows while services are still loading or if alt-tabbed out of some newer 3D game. Even then it only adds a second or two. Six seconds does sound pretty unreasonable but I've never seen anything like that.
I'm also running Windows 7 x64 but with an E6600 which is the same 2.4Ghz as your chip except I have an extra meg of L2 cache. I do however have an older 150GB WD Raptor 10k RPM hard drive. It's a good bet that helps my Firefox load much faster than yours which is probably on a 5.4k notebook drive. Windows Superfetch might even be preloading Firefox for me because of my extra RAM. Whatever the cause, I've never had Firefox be anything less than totally responsive. Well... by never I suppose I mean since like 3.0. I'm sure I've had issues with older versions of FF in the past but it has indeed been a while.
After months of use, Firefox gets to a point when if freezes for 1-2 seconds when you're typing a URL and other weird things like that.
Do you mean after months of having it installed or do you actually leave the thing running for months without restarting it? The latter seems like a rather unrealistic expectation. I've never seen a problem like that but maybe my history just isn't that big. I also rarely leave it running since it starts so damn fast that I have little reason to.
Maybe on a lower end machine the speed difference actually becomes noticeable but I honestly never see it.
OMG! Firefox takes 6ms to load a page that only takes 2ms on Chrome. I CAN'T WAIT THAT ETERNITY!!!
Are you people serious? Firefox is really too bloated and slow to be usable anymore? I don't use that many extensions and only have it open like 3 tabs at start up but the damn thing still loads and is ready to read/. and email close enough to instantly for my taste. No, I'm not using it on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM of like some of you seem to think should still be good enough for a web browser. I've got a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM which is four year old technology at this point. I often run many tabs and look at flash videos and what not. I only run a few extensions like noscript and adblock. I have never once thought, "Oh God, if only my browser could be faster."
Maybe I'm not pushing Firefox as hard as some of you but it never crashes, I like the feature set and interface, and I certainly never find myself waiting for anything except for the occasional dns/network issue.
To make it easier on all of you pedantic types how about if instead of pluralizing Lego to Legos. We'll just abbreviate "Lego Bricks" to something that rolls off the tongue a little easier. How about "Legos"?
I just want a mechanism for building spaceships which I can then fly to blow up other people's spaceships, pirate ships, castles, or whatever else people build. Then if someone happens to blow up my spaceship I'd get to design a brand new one.
Dawn of War 2 works like this and is a great game. One massive(and really fun, especially with co-op) Space Marine campaign mode and a robust multiplayer mode with 4 distinct races. They're not even going to try and bother to make campaigns for the other races. The expansion for that is about to come out soon and it's still just more Space Marine campaign missions along with a new multiplayer race(Chaos Marines) and new multiplayer units for all races. Would it be nice to have an Ork campaign too? Sure, but a lack thereof doesn't make the large Space Marine campaign and robust multiplayer any less of a full game.
Oh man I totally miss custom models in FPS games though I'm sure it would lead to excessive abuse these days if used online. It's what led to having to use forcemodel commands. It was a big hit at LAN parties back in the day though. I still have my giant Q2 models directory somewhere. Well it's like 200mb which was giant back then. I think the best was a really good looking(by Q2 standards) John McClane model that would play Die Hard quotes. I used Mega Man most of the time because it had the death sound from the NES games.
I'm no fan of GFWL either but this statement isn't accurate. You are able to create a local profile if you just want to play single player and save your games on your PC. Unfortunately they don't make it obvious that you can do this. The advantage that the online profile gives you is that it makes your saves available no matter what computer you log in from. The Steam Cloud is nicer on cloud supported games as it works more seamlessly to synchronize your local saved games and will save controller configs too.
If you read the Anandtech article it mentions this specifically. Since the new driver can set up the max of six displays any way you want that for FPS game most would use a 5x1 configuration to keep your crosshair in the middle of the center screen.
And this is the problem with anecdotal evidence. It's pretty much 100% contrary to my 10 year experience building and support custom PC's for people. Well there may be SOME truth to your reliability concerns though the difference isn't large enough to have ever been a problem for me. If the ratio of failed AMD to Intel CPUs is 2:1 it's only because per year I'll see maybe 2 bad AMD chips and maybe one bad Intel chip. What are you doing to have all these chip failures? Unless the PSU decides to flip out and fry the whole system CPU's just don't fail for the most part. 99 out of 100 times it's just the motherboard and the CPU is fine(all numbers basically made up, but in my experience a CPU failure truely is a rare thing indeed without there being extreme environmental causes).
If you think the Celeron was any kind of match for a Sempron then you truely are hitting the crack pipe though. Let's see... we have Netburst vs K8 architechtures in which the Athlon 64 was kicking the crap out of the P4. Now lets halve the caches of each chip and disable 64-bit support. Now we have a Sempron which still runs pretty darn well since it still has an on-die memory controller and is running on a really fast Hypertransport bus. The Celeron on the other hand can't cope as well with this cache loss though since it has to access memory over the FSB which was also crippled from 800Mhz to 533Mhz. This on an architecture like Netburst that was already STARVED for FSB and memory bandwidth and depended much more on it's larger L2 cache for performance.
Duron and Sempron were great chips that performed very well for their prices and even overclocked well if you wanted. Celeron has never been worth buying since the 300A.
256MB is fine for XP when you don't have users that install every piece of software they see and have 100 little tray applets and background updaters running. Sure newer OS's need more RAM, but it's app bloat that I find really increases the need for more RAM over time.
On the other hand, when XP came out all you heard was people bitch about how it barely worked with 64MB and how slow it was with only 128 when that's what most entry level XP systems had. 98 and 2K ran wonderfully in those scenarios. 512MB was a luxury for high end boxes. Thankfully RAM just always gets cheaper in the long run.
Some day when Windows 7 comes out we'll talk about how slow it is running with 4GB and how you really need 6 or 8 for it run well. We'll complain that we need to spend an extra $50 to upgrade the shiny new $400 box from 4 to 8 gigs. We'll reminisce about our 5 year old Vista boxes that run pretty well with only 2GB.
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Not only were the sequels not that bad but the first one wasn't that good.
When someone first told me about The Matrix I was like "yeah the previews look retarded" and my friend was like "It was a fun action movie with some cool effects and techno music" and he was right because that's all it was. It wasn't this thought provoking masterpiece of film making that most people make it out to be. It was just a decent sci-fi action movie that ranks somewhere below Predator and Highlander yet above Predator 2.
No, they'll make the money back in all the games they'll sell for it.
I'm poor and have no friends or family. :(
starting from human history and the discovery of fire and a wheel
I always start with Animal Husbandry.
My understanding of the term Beta is that all features are complete. Has something changed?
This isn't an added feature. It's a performance enhancement. It's not like Firefox was lacking a javascript engine before this build.
This is what I was thinking. Xfire was really neat when I tried it like 5 years ago but I could never get enough other friends to use it for it to hit critical mass. Steam on the other hand IS my social network. My friends aren't on Facebook, AIM, or Xfire but they're ALL on Steam. Everyone I know uses it to buy games. We use it to buy games for our friends that are broke. Even games that don't use Steam like Starcraft2 we run through Steam. It lets everyone else know that you're playing and gives in-game access to the Steam overlay(SC2 doesn't minimize/restore very gracefully). The only feature I miss from Xfire is the ability to directly send files to people but it's something that hardly ever comes up anymore.
Steam made Xfire totally irrelevant and these guys are really smart to still have been able to sell it for a nice sum and get the hell out while they can.
Why is this release numbered 3.6.6 and not 3.6.5(which is 0.0.1 more than the previous release)?
While Vista was crap, and XP took until SP2 to get really usable
The "Vista is crap" mentality that still pervades is rather baffling to me. Especially in the context of interface and ease of use. Vista is just as easy to use as Win7. The only real interface difference is the updated taskbar to be more like the dock. The "start" menu, control panel, and keyboard shortcuts are all basically the same as Vista. To say one is crap while another is near perfection seems rather silly and ignorant.
As for XP, other than the security center, firewall, and wireless interfaces there were no major interface changes between release and SP2. I fail to see how the release version was so hard to use compared to SP2.
If you want to talk speed, stability, and security then your observations become more valid though not to the degree to which you imply. In the context of ease of use(as being discussed here) I think that you are way off base.
I too miss my AWE32. Like someone in another post mentioned, the first time I heard the difference of the Duke Nukem 3D theme between regular SB16 compatibility mode and AWE32 mode was a big awe inspiring(pun intended) moment similar to going from software Quake to glQuake. The card was not cheap(and it was HUGE) but it came with a very impressive array of software. It had a limited version of Cakewalk, a voice synthesizer for Windows Notepad, and also a crude little speech recognition program among other apps I can't remember.
I'm sure in ~10 years when photo-realistic 3D rendering is all done by our CPU's(APU?) massive vector arrays and the discreet video card is just about obsolete then we'll get all nostalgic about our Voodoo 2's and Radeon 5800's too.
I dunno. I've never had Firefox take more than a second to cold to start unless I try to start after a fresh boot of Windows while services are still loading or if alt-tabbed out of some newer 3D game. Even then it only adds a second or two. Six seconds does sound pretty unreasonable but I've never seen anything like that.
I'm also running Windows 7 x64 but with an E6600 which is the same 2.4Ghz as your chip except I have an extra meg of L2 cache. I do however have an older 150GB WD Raptor 10k RPM hard drive. It's a good bet that helps my Firefox load much faster than yours which is probably on a 5.4k notebook drive. Windows Superfetch might even be preloading Firefox for me because of my extra RAM. Whatever the cause, I've never had Firefox be anything less than totally responsive. Well... by never I suppose I mean since like 3.0. I'm sure I've had issues with older versions of FF in the past but it has indeed been a while.
After months of use, Firefox gets to a point when if freezes for 1-2 seconds when you're typing a URL and other weird things like that.
Do you mean after months of having it installed or do you actually leave the thing running for months without restarting it? The latter seems like a rather unrealistic expectation. I've never seen a problem like that but maybe my history just isn't that big. I also rarely leave it running since it starts so damn fast that I have little reason to.
Maybe on a lower end machine the speed difference actually becomes noticeable but I honestly never see it.
OMG! Firefox takes 6ms to load a page that only takes 2ms on Chrome. I CAN'T WAIT THAT ETERNITY!!!
Are you people serious? Firefox is really too bloated and slow to be usable anymore? I don't use that many extensions and only have it open like 3 tabs at start up but the damn thing still loads and is ready to read /. and email close enough to instantly for my taste. No, I'm not using it on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM of like some of you seem to think should still be good enough for a web browser. I've got a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM which is four year old technology at this point. I often run many tabs and look at flash videos and what not. I only run a few extensions like noscript and adblock. I have never once thought, "Oh God, if only my browser could be faster."
Maybe I'm not pushing Firefox as hard as some of you but it never crashes, I like the feature set and interface, and I certainly never find myself waiting for anything except for the occasional dns/network issue.
How fast does a browser need to be?
No, DLC done right is more like what you get from Valve games like TF2 and L4D.
"Oh look we have these new maps, game types, and weapons that we've created for our several year old $20 game. You can have them for free."
By that time I won't need a fake I.D. to rent Ultraporn.
To make it easier on all of you pedantic types how about if instead of pluralizing Lego to Legos. We'll just abbreviate "Lego Bricks" to something that rolls off the tongue a little easier. How about "Legos"?
I just want a mechanism for building spaceships which I can then fly to blow up other people's spaceships, pirate ships, castles, or whatever else people build. Then if someone happens to blow up my spaceship I'd get to design a brand new one.
Dawn of War 2 works like this and is a great game. One massive(and really fun, especially with co-op) Space Marine campaign mode and a robust multiplayer mode with 4 distinct races. They're not even going to try and bother to make campaigns for the other races. The expansion for that is about to come out soon and it's still just more Space Marine campaign missions along with a new multiplayer race(Chaos Marines) and new multiplayer units for all races. Would it be nice to have an Ork campaign too? Sure, but a lack thereof doesn't make the large Space Marine campaign and robust multiplayer any less of a full game.
Oh man I totally miss custom models in FPS games though I'm sure it would lead to excessive abuse these days if used online. It's what led to having to use forcemodel commands. It was a big hit at LAN parties back in the day though. I still have my giant Q2 models directory somewhere. Well it's like 200mb which was giant back then. I think the best was a really good looking(by Q2 standards) John McClane model that would play Die Hard quotes. I used Mega Man most of the time because it had the death sound from the NES games.
I'm no fan of GFWL either but this statement isn't accurate. You are able to create a local profile if you just want to play single player and save your games on your PC. Unfortunately they don't make it obvious that you can do this. The advantage that the online profile gives you is that it makes your saves available no matter what computer you log in from. The Steam Cloud is nicer on cloud supported games as it works more seamlessly to synchronize your local saved games and will save controller configs too.
Water beats Rock, Fire, and Ground.
Water is vulnerable however to Grass and Electric.
Here's a helpful chart.
If you read the Anandtech article it mentions this specifically. Since the new driver can set up the max of six displays any way you want that for FPS game most would use a 5x1 configuration to keep your crosshair in the middle of the center screen.
Lots of people still play Quake 3. These days it's called Quake Live though.
And this is the problem with anecdotal evidence. It's pretty much 100% contrary to my 10 year experience building and support custom PC's for people. Well there may be SOME truth to your reliability concerns though the difference isn't large enough to have ever been a problem for me. If the ratio of failed AMD to Intel CPUs is 2:1 it's only because per year I'll see maybe 2 bad AMD chips and maybe one bad Intel chip. What are you doing to have all these chip failures? Unless the PSU decides to flip out and fry the whole system CPU's just don't fail for the most part. 99 out of 100 times it's just the motherboard and the CPU is fine(all numbers basically made up, but in my experience a CPU failure truely is a rare thing indeed without there being extreme environmental causes).
If you think the Celeron was any kind of match for a Sempron then you truely are hitting the crack pipe though. Let's see... we have Netburst vs K8 architechtures in which the Athlon 64 was kicking the crap out of the P4. Now lets halve the caches of each chip and disable 64-bit support. Now we have a Sempron which still runs pretty darn well since it still has an on-die memory controller and is running on a really fast Hypertransport bus. The Celeron on the other hand can't cope as well with this cache loss though since it has to access memory over the FSB which was also crippled from 800Mhz to 533Mhz. This on an architecture like Netburst that was already STARVED for FSB and memory bandwidth and depended much more on it's larger L2 cache for performance.
Duron and Sempron were great chips that performed very well for their prices and even overclocked well if you wanted. Celeron has never been worth buying since the 300A.
I'M SO ANGRY!!!
No, you buy a Vista Business license which is downward compatible with XP Pro.
256MB is fine for XP when you don't have users that install every piece of software they see and have 100 little tray applets and background updaters running. Sure newer OS's need more RAM, but it's app bloat that I find really increases the need for more RAM over time.
On the other hand, when XP came out all you heard was people bitch about how it barely worked with 64MB and how slow it was with only 128 when that's what most entry level XP systems had. 98 and 2K ran wonderfully in those scenarios. 512MB was a luxury for high end boxes. Thankfully RAM just always gets cheaper in the long run.
Some day when Windows 7 comes out we'll talk about how slow it is running with 4GB and how you really need 6 or 8 for it run well. We'll complain that we need to spend an extra $50 to upgrade the shiny new $400 box from 4 to 8 gigs. We'll reminisce about our 5 year old Vista boxes that run pretty well with only 2GB.
The more things change...