I switched to Mozilla Weave, and it seems to do a decent job of syncing bookmarks (which was pretty much all I was missing from Google Browser Sync). I'm currently syncing between one iBook and two XP boxes.
Note that syncing Cookies and/or History seemed to send the iBook into some sort of horrible endless loop of Firefox doom. WOrks just peachy with only Bookmarks turned on.
IIRC they're hibernating during the Martian winter; I seem to recall reading an article about the controllers moving one into a good spot so it wouldn't run completely down during the darker months. This being/., I'm too lazy to go google it for you.
I'm already a violator just because I've turned off CD auto-play on my XP boxes. It's annoying and a security risk, and now turning it off could become illegal in Canada.
An odd detail for you... In 2000-ish, I worked for a startup with a Java-based server application. It ran significantly faster on really cheap NT hardware using Sun's JVM than it did on really expensive Solaris hardware using Sun's JVM.
Supporting the Wii Remote/Nunchuk doesn't require tacked-on "motion" controls though... look at how Super Smash Bros. Brawl works. You hold the Wii Remote sideways like a classic NES controller, no motion controls at all.
The port from Windows to 360 was probably pretty trivial, and can be done with freely-available "professional" tools (XNA from MS)... so development would've been able to proceed in parallel without laying out any additional money or developer expertise.
Looks like nobody informed them about the release of Mac OS X 10.5 about six months ago. Or Vista's release about 17 months ago, for that matter.
Sure be nice if web site "designers" would do the right thing and just make sites that work. Sites are supposed to at least let you access the data, even if the formatting is all screwed up in your platform/browser combo. Locking out everyone who isn't using the browser/platform you specifically check for is stupid... you're keeping potential customers from seeing your stuff.
Parallels seems sort of hit-or-miss for gaming, which is to be expected, really. I bought it for my wife's MacBook... she mostly plays the Nancy Drew adventure games from Her Interactive. The Creature of Kapu Cave worked great, but the next one in the series (The White Wolf of Icicle Creek) is having all kinds of issues. The mouse flashes at about 15Hz, audio/video aren't synchronized at all, etc. They "upgraded" the game engine for the first time in years and broke it. Haven't upgraded her to Leopard yet, so she's out of luck for now... no BootCamp.
Even more annoying is the fact that Her Interactive actively ignores/rebuffs attempts from Mac gaming/porting houses to contact them and make native OS X versions of the games. This is a stupid business decision due to the facts that Mac users generally seem more receptive to adventure games than "traditional" PC gamers, and that Mac use in homes seems to be rising quite a bit.
Not to mention the fact that maintaining a code base for more than one platform and compiler will help flush out all kinds of weird bugs.
The same goes for NC Soft... give me an OS X client for City of Heroes/City of Villains! Blizzard has had an OS X version of the WoW client since release, and it hasn't hurt their bottom line.
Torrents aren't just for Linux distros and media piracy. Jamendo distributes music via torrent and World of Warcraft updates are torrents, for example. Jamendo might be a small fish, but you probably know at least one person playing WoW.
Managed torrents (like WoW updates) would be an excellent way to distribute operating system patches and updates.
What is this, a Linux tech support forum? My drives are fast, but copying a couple of gigs from CDs (note how most PC games still ship on CDs) takes a while.
BioShock, one of the best-reviewed games of 2007, was the last PC game I bought, possibly the last one I'll ever buy. It required a video driver "hotfix" to run, on release day (even more exciting, this hotfix broke a couple of my other games). I can't remember when its game patch was released (release day? a week or so later?), but it wasn't to fix balance issues, it was to make it go.
Same deal with Neverwinter Nights 2, the one I bought before that. I'm positive that one had a patch before I got around to installing it (IIRC it took a month or two; I was moving at the time, although I'd pre-ordered). To be fair, NWN2 ticked me off more due to the poor design (just say no to plot-driven doors as arbitrary choke points) and the way the NWN1 engine had been "improved" with so much bling that it was unusable (AFAIK the game still doesn't have decent camera control).
You seem to have misread my complaints as some sort of anti-PC-gaming thing. I love computer gaming, I remember its heyday(s) well. I wish it wasn't so craptastic these days. I'd be really sad about it if I was a huge FPS fan, but I'm not, really.
PC gaming is killing itself courtesy of the sucktastic PC gaming experience. Compare:
1) I toss a disc in my Wii, turn it on, fire up the game, and play. I have fun.
2) I toss a disc in my PC and install it for 20+ minutes, depending on my disk speed, etc. I make sure my OS is fully patched and updated, probably with a reboot in there. I make sure my video drivers are up to date (which could involve game-specific versions of the drivers), with a reboot (or two if your drivers want you to uninstall them before updating... ATI I'm looking at you). Then I download the inevitable zero-day patches required to get something close to the gaming experience advertised on the back of the box. Then I fire up the game and hope that the copy-protection mechanism doesn't hate my DVD drive or any of the software I've got installed. Then I play, and hopefully my machine can handle the game at a decent frame rate.
I got totally fed up with #2 last year when Neverwinter Nights 2 and BioShock repeatedly boned me. These days, I only use my PC for playing City of Heroes/City of Villains, and only because there's no Mac client for it (c'mon NCSoft, there are a lot of Macs in homes these days). Other than that, I'm playing PS2, Wii and DS games when I want to have fun.
I'm busy with work, family, etc. and don't have time to screw around with an ornery computer. When it's fun time, I want to have fun, I don't want to sit around patching and updating things.
PC gaming is going to be 100% MMO and RTS in a couple of years if publishers don't get their act together. I'm not convinced they want to, since they've pretty much all got their fingers in the console pie as well.
I just hope they keep the game patching to a minimum. There have already been way too many PS3 and 360 games that required release-day patches, and the Wii version of Guitar Hero 3 is going to eat into Activision's profits this quarter while they send out fixed discs to everyone...
There's no point; the Canadian government has been happy to bend over and take it from the USA for decades now. Most big "Canadian" companies are owned by American companies. Most Canadian politicians are owned by American companies.
If we're smart (note our current Conservative minority government... firm evidence that most Canadians are not smart), the tanking US dollar would encourage us to forge stronger ties with, say, the European Union.
Yeah, some people are lazy and still throw out the waste from our Home Fusion reactors instead of shipping them to one of the government-owned CANDU reactor sites. What's even more WTF is that the fuel comes with a pre-paid shipping label, you just have to shove it in a box, slap the label on, and call Purolator to come pick it up.
I switched to Mozilla Weave, and it seems to do a decent job of syncing bookmarks (which was pretty much all I was missing from Google Browser Sync). I'm currently syncing between one iBook and two XP boxes.
Note that syncing Cookies and/or History seemed to send the iBook into some sort of horrible endless loop of Firefox doom. WOrks just peachy with only Bookmarks turned on.
IIRC they're hibernating during the Martian winter; I seem to recall reading an article about the controllers moving one into a good spot so it wouldn't run completely down during the darker months. This being /., I'm too lazy to go google it for you.
I'm already a violator just because I've turned off CD auto-play on my XP boxes. It's annoying and a security risk, and now turning it off could become illegal in Canada.
On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness runs pretty well on my (ancient) G4 iBook...
We don't really get out much. Unfortunately, it turns out that chicks don't dig low /. IDs.
He owns a nightclub (the DNA Lounge); he was just showing up to court in his "office" clothes.
An odd detail for you... In 2000-ish, I worked for a startup with a Java-based server application. It ran significantly faster on really cheap NT hardware using Sun's JVM than it did on really expensive Solaris hardware using Sun's JVM.
You can't really blame that on MS.
Supporting the Wii Remote/Nunchuk doesn't require tacked-on "motion" controls though... look at how Super Smash Bros. Brawl works. You hold the Wii Remote sideways like a classic NES controller, no motion controls at all.
The port from Windows to 360 was probably pretty trivial, and can be done with freely-available "professional" tools (XNA from MS)... so development would've been able to proceed in parallel without laying out any additional money or developer expertise.
It's funny that you think they read any of their email.
Spam ruined email for everyone, but it gave companies a good excuse for ignoring their support and service addresses.
Real car alarms are entirely worthless because people ignore them. Far too many false alarms.
In Canada (Ontario, at least) having one doesn't affect your car insurance at all.
Because this shows long-term planning. Since when do C-level executives plan beyond the next quarter?
Welcome to the secret No Fly List, citizen.
That can't be true, AFAIK MS doesn't use Visual SourceSafe in-house.
They use something reliable.
Looks like nobody informed them about the release of Mac OS X 10.5 about six months ago. Or Vista's release about 17 months ago, for that matter.
Sure be nice if web site "designers" would do the right thing and just make sites that work. Sites are supposed to at least let you access the data, even if the formatting is all screwed up in your platform/browser combo. Locking out everyone who isn't using the browser/platform you specifically check for is stupid... you're keeping potential customers from seeing your stuff.
Parallels seems sort of hit-or-miss for gaming, which is to be expected, really. I bought it for my wife's MacBook... she mostly plays the Nancy Drew adventure games from Her Interactive. The Creature of Kapu Cave worked great, but the next one in the series (The White Wolf of Icicle Creek) is having all kinds of issues. The mouse flashes at about 15Hz, audio/video aren't synchronized at all, etc. They "upgraded" the game engine for the first time in years and broke it. Haven't upgraded her to Leopard yet, so she's out of luck for now... no BootCamp.
Even more annoying is the fact that Her Interactive actively ignores/rebuffs attempts from Mac gaming/porting houses to contact them and make native OS X versions of the games. This is a stupid business decision due to the facts that Mac users generally seem more receptive to adventure games than "traditional" PC gamers, and that Mac use in homes seems to be rising quite a bit.
Not to mention the fact that maintaining a code base for more than one platform and compiler will help flush out all kinds of weird bugs.
The same goes for NC Soft... give me an OS X client for City of Heroes/City of Villains! Blizzard has had an OS X version of the WoW client since release, and it hasn't hurt their bottom line.
Torrents aren't just for Linux distros and media piracy. Jamendo distributes music via torrent and World of Warcraft updates are torrents, for example. Jamendo might be a small fish, but you probably know at least one person playing WoW.
Managed torrents (like WoW updates) would be an excellent way to distribute operating system patches and updates.
Could someone please use this to make a real Mac OS X/Linux port using SDL and OpenGL? Thanks.
Depending on how stupid the terminal emulator software was (DOS apps, I'm looking at you), a simple
NO CARRIER
could cause a hang up.
The quality management systems one is ISO 9000.
You need to review your process.
Picking nits...
Windows NT (from DEC) - they even grabbed the VMS team
What is this, a Linux tech support forum? My drives are fast, but copying a couple of gigs from CDs (note how most PC games still ship on CDs) takes a while.
BioShock, one of the best-reviewed games of 2007, was the last PC game I bought, possibly the last one I'll ever buy. It required a video driver "hotfix" to run, on release day (even more exciting, this hotfix broke a couple of my other games). I can't remember when its game patch was released (release day? a week or so later?), but it wasn't to fix balance issues, it was to make it go.
Same deal with Neverwinter Nights 2, the one I bought before that. I'm positive that one had a patch before I got around to installing it (IIRC it took a month or two; I was moving at the time, although I'd pre-ordered). To be fair, NWN2 ticked me off more due to the poor design (just say no to plot-driven doors as arbitrary choke points) and the way the NWN1 engine had been "improved" with so much bling that it was unusable (AFAIK the game still doesn't have decent camera control).
You seem to have misread my complaints as some sort of anti-PC-gaming thing. I love computer gaming, I remember its heyday(s) well. I wish it wasn't so craptastic these days. I'd be really sad about it if I was a huge FPS fan, but I'm not, really.
PC gaming is killing itself courtesy of the sucktastic PC gaming experience. Compare:
1) I toss a disc in my Wii, turn it on, fire up the game, and play. I have fun.
2) I toss a disc in my PC and install it for 20+ minutes, depending on my disk speed, etc. I make sure my OS is fully patched and updated, probably with a reboot in there. I make sure my video drivers are up to date (which could involve game-specific versions of the drivers), with a reboot (or two if your drivers want you to uninstall them before updating... ATI I'm looking at you). Then I download the inevitable zero-day patches required to get something close to the gaming experience advertised on the back of the box. Then I fire up the game and hope that the copy-protection mechanism doesn't hate my DVD drive or any of the software I've got installed. Then I play, and hopefully my machine can handle the game at a decent frame rate.
I got totally fed up with #2 last year when Neverwinter Nights 2 and BioShock repeatedly boned me. These days, I only use my PC for playing City of Heroes/City of Villains, and only because there's no Mac client for it (c'mon NCSoft, there are a lot of Macs in homes these days). Other than that, I'm playing PS2, Wii and DS games when I want to have fun.
I'm busy with work, family, etc. and don't have time to screw around with an ornery computer. When it's fun time, I want to have fun, I don't want to sit around patching and updating things.
PC gaming is going to be 100% MMO and RTS in a couple of years if publishers don't get their act together. I'm not convinced they want to, since they've pretty much all got their fingers in the console pie as well.
I just hope they keep the game patching to a minimum. There have already been way too many PS3 and 360 games that required release-day patches, and the Wii version of Guitar Hero 3 is going to eat into Activision's profits this quarter while they send out fixed discs to everyone...
There's no point; the Canadian government has been happy to bend over and take it from the USA for decades now. Most big "Canadian" companies are owned by American companies. Most Canadian politicians are owned by American companies.
If we're smart (note our current Conservative minority government... firm evidence that most Canadians are not smart), the tanking US dollar would encourage us to forge stronger ties with, say, the European Union.
Yeah, some people are lazy and still throw out the waste from our Home Fusion reactors instead of shipping them to one of the government-owned CANDU reactor sites. What's even more WTF is that the fuel comes with a pre-paid shipping label, you just have to shove it in a box, slap the label on, and call Purolator to come pick it up.