I pretty much went through the same thing you did. I started playing EQ when I was 21 and moved on to WoW during the stress test beta. Now I'm 30 and don't play any MMORPG's at all. Over the course of the past 9 years I've managed to graduate from college, get a job, get married, buy a house, and now I have a kid. I've progressively had less and less time to devote to gaming, especially since having a kid.
It's kind of weird since I always thought I would be heavily in to gaming. However, times change and it's been relegated to a very small part of my life.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. - Donald Knuth
It's never a good idea when developing an application to prematurely optimize everything for performance at the expense of clean, well-structured, and easy to maintain code. You simply don't know where your performance bottlenecks will be until the application is in production. Only then does it make sense to go back and optimize the code.
I've generally found that you only need to optimize a very small percentage of the code for large performance gains. Thus you end up with a very clean code base that is both easy to maintain AND has excellent performance.
This is kind of an aside, but the Windows version of FF3b5 has not been stable at all for me and crashes several times a day. I'm not sure if these bugs are Windows-specific, but both XP and Vista have stability problems for me. GMail is particularly bad and I've had to resort to using IE 7 on multiple occasions.
One of the more interesting features included with IE8 is "Ajax Navigation":
AJAX Navigation enables users to navigate back and forth without leaving the AJAX application and could be used navigating a page without performing a traditional full navigation. This allows websites to trigger an update to browser components like the address bar by setting the window.location.hash value, firing an event to alert components in the page and even creating an entry in the travel log. This is actually a proposed standard in the HTML 5 specification and it's nice to see Microsoft implementing it. The inability to bookmark or navigate to a page that's been updated using AJAX has always been a pain in the ass.
Every time I hear this argument it makes me cringe.
The large majority of Firefox users have no idea that they could configure Firefox so that it masquerades as IE. Of the ones that do, even a smaller percentage choose to do so. Not to mention the fact that the number of IE-only sites is now very low and dwindling every day. A couple of years ago this may have been somewhat significant, but this argument just doesn't hold up anymore.
You should consider running Linux in a VM so you don't have to do so much hacking to get it to run natively. You shouldn't have any problems running the apps you've listed.
It's incredible all that you've had to go through just to get the laptop in a semi-workable state. I don't know if I would consider myself happy running Linux on a laptop where SATA is in compatibility mode, wireless "mostly" works, sound doesn't work at all, the keyboard function buttons aren't working, and coming out of suspend crashes the machine half the time.
Although Dell may be offering Windows XP as an option, I highly doubt the large majority of Dell's customers would explicitly choose XP over Vista. Most don't even know the difference. Of the ones that do, they would need to be savvy enough to have specific reasons to choose XP over Vista.
The type of people who are submitting and voting on ideas on the IdeaStorm website are generally not your typical Dell customers. Many of these ideas were submitted to tech sites such as Slashdot and then voted on by the technical community. If you look at the most popular ideas on their site, it's all about Linux and open source - not the kind of things Joe Consumer cares about.
That said, I do think it's a good thing that they're offering XP as an option. Just don't fool yourself into thinking that this is what the majority of people are wanting.
I do have to admit that some of the novelty has worn off. Much of the initial game lineup consisted of either simplistic mini games (WarioWare, Wii Sports, Rayman's Raving Rabbits), kids games based on movies (Cars, Happy Feet, Ice Age 2, etc.), or somewhat lame ports of existing shooters (Call of Duty, Far Cry). While WarioWare and Wii Sports have definitely been fun and a hit at parties, I'm left wanting a more in-depth experience.
The only game so far that's really had any lasting appeal for me has been Zelda. Ironically, Mario Cart Double Dash for the Gamecube has probably seen more game time on my Wii than any other.
I'm sure once games like Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3 come out, my interest in the Wii will pick up again. Unfortunately, that seems like it may be a ways off...
Present choices and settings in terms of user goals, not technology. I understand the goal of making users feel squishy and loved, but this is a support headache in the making. Now instead of helpdesk/IT people being able to train that users should look for "duplexing" and turn it on, they have to look for whatever variant of "print on both sides of the paper" or "flip paper and print on other side" each manufacturer chooses to use for their drivers/programs. Technology-based description of options tend to be predictable because a precise, definitive word or phrase is applied to the option.
The whole point of presenting choices in terms of user goals is to prevent the call to helpdesk/IT in the first place. If the user needs to "Print on both sides of the paper", they'll check the option that does just that. No need to call help desk to find out that they needed to have "duplexing" turned on.
Essentially, all BackSlash is doing is showing a majority of the same content as if you were reading the comments at a threshold of 4 or 5. I could personally do without Timothy's comments.
Being that MySpace is all about user-created content, there's nothing stopping it from appealing to any age demographic. Even though MySpace is still mostly dominated by teens and college students, I'm increasingly seeing older people. I'm 28 and many of my friends are in their late 20's to early 30's, most of whom have signed up in the last couple of months. I've found several friends from high school and college that I haven't talked to in years.
I think what we're seeing in the gaming industry runs parallel to what we're seeing in the movie industry. As both games and movies are becoming more and more expensive to produce, the risk of failure increases. Games are generally still priced the same as they were 10 years ago, yet the costs to produce them have increased dramatically. Publishers are less willing to take risks and thus resort to releasing games that are derivative of or sequels to past successes. As long as customers are willing to fork over their money on these games, the publishers will continue to produce them.
Microsoft is actually releasing a Restart Manager with Windows Vista that will keep the computer up and running during patches and program installations. From the link:
With Windows Vista, users won't have to restart their computers for most updates and application installations. Windows Vista knows which applications and services are using which files, and if a file needs to be updated, Windows Vista can coordinate saving the application's data, closing the application or stopping the service, updating the file, and automatically reopening the application or restarting the service. This capability is provided by a feature called Restart Manager.
Restart Manager works with Microsoft Update, Windows Update, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Microsoft Software Installer, and Microsoft Systems Management Server to detect processes that have files in use and to gracefully stop and restart services without the need to restart the entire machine. Applications that are written to take advantage of the new Restart Manager features can be restarted and restored to the same state and with the same data as before the restart.
I believe that Google has come up with one of the most clever marketing schemes ever: Release all products with the word "Beta" attached to it.
How many of Google's products are *not* in beta? I mean seriously, Google Groups has been out for over two years and is still considered in beta! I'm not saying that Google releases buggy or incomplete products. Far from it. I'm just getting tired of people using it as an excuse.
What exactly would Google gain have by making their applications not work properly in IE? The general public does not want to bother installing a different browser just so they can use a Google app. In fact, it may have the unintended effect of turning people off to Google. It gives the perception that they have lazy developers and/or just doesn't care. I'd like to believe that Google develops applications for the end-user, not just Firefox zealots.
Why does a user have to go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced to check for updates to Firefox? For the average non-technical user, this should be much more accessible.
Slashdot Mirror
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
I pushed out 37 vista business installs...
37?! In a row?
I wish I could mod you up past +5. That was the funniest Soviet Russia joke thread I've seen in a long time.
I pretty much went through the same thing you did. I started playing EQ when I was 21 and moved on to WoW during the stress test beta. Now I'm 30 and don't play any MMORPG's at all. Over the course of the past 9 years I've managed to graduate from college, get a job, get married, buy a house, and now I have a kid. I've progressively had less and less time to devote to gaming, especially since having a kid.
It's kind of weird since I always thought I would be heavily in to gaming. However, times change and it's been relegated to a very small part of my life.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
- Donald Knuth
It's never a good idea when developing an application to prematurely optimize everything for performance at the expense of clean, well-structured, and easy to maintain code. You simply don't know where your performance bottlenecks will be until the application is in production. Only then does it make sense to go back and optimize the code.
I've generally found that you only need to optimize a very small percentage of the code for large performance gains. Thus you end up with a very clean code base that is both easy to maintain AND has excellent performance.
This is kind of an aside, but the Windows version of FF3b5 has not been stable at all for me and crashes several times a day. I'm not sure if these bugs are Windows-specific, but both XP and Vista have stability problems for me. GMail is particularly bad and I've had to resort to using IE 7 on multiple occasions.
Every time I hear this argument it makes me cringe.
The large majority of Firefox users have no idea that they could configure Firefox so that it masquerades as IE. Of the ones that do, even a smaller percentage choose to do so. Not to mention the fact that the number of IE-only sites is now very low and dwindling every day. A couple of years ago this may have been somewhat significant, but this argument just doesn't hold up anymore.
You should consider running Linux in a VM so you don't have to do so much hacking to get it to run natively. You shouldn't have any problems running the apps you've listed.
It's incredible all that you've had to go through just to get the laptop in a semi-workable state. I don't know if I would consider myself happy running Linux on a laptop where SATA is in compatibility mode, wireless "mostly" works, sound doesn't work at all, the keyboard function buttons aren't working, and coming out of suspend crashes the machine half the time.
To each their own I guess.
So what does that make IBM?
10 PRINT "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0"
20 GOTO 10
Although Dell may be offering Windows XP as an option, I highly doubt the large majority of Dell's customers would explicitly choose XP over Vista. Most don't even know the difference. Of the ones that do, they would need to be savvy enough to have specific reasons to choose XP over Vista.
The type of people who are submitting and voting on ideas on the IdeaStorm website are generally not your typical Dell customers. Many of these ideas were submitted to tech sites such as Slashdot and then voted on by the technical community. If you look at the most popular ideas on their site, it's all about Linux and open source - not the kind of things Joe Consumer cares about.
That said, I do think it's a good thing that they're offering XP as an option. Just don't fool yourself into thinking that this is what the majority of people are wanting.
I do have to admit that some of the novelty has worn off. Much of the initial game lineup consisted of either simplistic mini games (WarioWare, Wii Sports, Rayman's Raving Rabbits), kids games based on movies (Cars, Happy Feet, Ice Age 2, etc.), or somewhat lame ports of existing shooters (Call of Duty, Far Cry). While WarioWare and Wii Sports have definitely been fun and a hit at parties, I'm left wanting a more in-depth experience.
The only game so far that's really had any lasting appeal for me has been Zelda. Ironically, Mario Cart Double Dash for the Gamecube has probably seen more game time on my Wii than any other.
I'm sure once games like Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3 come out, my interest in the Wii will pick up again. Unfortunately, that seems like it may be a ways off...
The whole point of presenting choices in terms of user goals is to prevent the call to helpdesk/IT in the first place. If the user needs to "Print on both sides of the paper", they'll check the option that does just that. No need to call help desk to find out that they needed to have "duplexing" turned on.
Essentially, all BackSlash is doing is showing a majority of the same content as if you were reading the comments at a threshold of 4 or 5. I could personally do without Timothy's comments.
Being that MySpace is all about user-created content, there's nothing stopping it from appealing to any age demographic. Even though MySpace is still mostly dominated by teens and college students, I'm increasingly seeing older people. I'm 28 and many of my friends are in their late 20's to early 30's, most of whom have signed up in the last couple of months. I've found several friends from high school and college that I haven't talked to in years.
I think what we're seeing in the gaming industry runs parallel to what we're seeing in the movie industry. As both games and movies are becoming more and more expensive to produce, the risk of failure increases. Games are generally still priced the same as they were 10 years ago, yet the costs to produce them have increased dramatically. Publishers are less willing to take risks and thus resort to releasing games that are derivative of or sequels to past successes. As long as customers are willing to fork over their money on these games, the publishers will continue to produce them.
I believe that Google has come up with one of the most clever marketing schemes ever: Release all products with the word "Beta" attached to it.
How many of Google's products are *not* in beta? I mean seriously, Google Groups has been out for over two years and is still considered in beta! I'm not saying that Google releases buggy or incomplete products. Far from it. I'm just getting tired of people using it as an excuse.
What exactly would Google gain have by making their applications not work properly in IE? The general public does not want to bother installing a different browser just so they can use a Google app. In fact, it may have the unintended effect of turning people off to Google. It gives the perception that they have lazy developers and/or just doesn't care. I'd like to believe that Google develops applications for the end-user, not just Firefox zealots.
What does the platform the forum is built on have anything to do with whether or not it's "user friendly"?
Why does a user have to go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced to check for updates to Firefox? For the average non-technical user, this should be much more accessible.
Ironically enough, the privacy page linked from the installer (at time of writing) merely said "TODO: Privacy policy goes here".
TODO: Add some witty comment tying Microsoft's "TODO" patent with their WMP privacy policy.