i sent him an email - here's his reply >I'm sorry, but I deliberately neglected to include the kind of ranking that you're asking for because such a ranking would be taken as a definitive pronouncement on the products tested, and three tests simply can't support that kind of conclusion, as I noted in my Disclaimers section. Also, once I did produce that chart, people would link to that directly and blow right past the details, and the details in this case are important.
the article seems well done and deep but the presentation of the results is lackluster. they performed all those rounds of tests and analysis and the "conclusions" are
Spyware and adware can prove quite difficult to remove No single anti-spyware scanner removes everything
etc. no kidding! why did they need to compare them to find out what is conventional wisdom for most people already. there is no quantifiable list of best-to-worst that i can find on the site, which is really the most valuable result of a study like this.
it grabs results from google+yahoo+ask jeeves, and then ranks stuff according to how it appears in those. since there's only 35% overlap the results are usually better than using 1 engine alone.
i worked for scopus, bought by siebel. millions of lines of code, all trashed
i worked for centerrun, nee raplix, bought by Sun. 40 people worked really hard to make a great product. now you can find it on sun's site, if you look carefully. advertising budget/market awareness of solution? zero
if you sell your software company, you can be confident the software will cease to exist.
it's totally plausible that the game is better than my review makes it sound. after all, most people seem to like it a lot. i don't think it was my setup, i jsut think it pales in comparison to other games i've played lately.
and to be fair to WoW, i think the first few hours can be confusing/boring for every MMORPG because you're killing low level stuff and neither you nor the monsters have cool gear/abilities/loot/etc.
above all else, i mainly wanted to share that it wasn't the BEST. GAME. EVER. so that the people suffering from not having a key don't feel too let down about having to wait to play it.
i've played FFXI for over a year but that's my only MMORPG experience, so my comments about WoW will inevitably have some ffxi-comparison flavor to them. i'm a hardcore gamer other than that though.
the character customization was a letdown. you can choose skin color, hair color, hair style, and facial hair, but each option has only 10 presets. you can't pick any RGB combination.
it was a little confusing when trying to get in to play with friends. apparently you start in your race's home town, and half the races (horde) start on the other side of the planet from the rest (alliance). so you have to coordinate and have everyone at least on the same island, and same race if you want to level up together.
the first thing i noticed was navigation. there's a little map but it doesn't show anything important. if you get lost an NPC can put a marker on it for you but i didn't see a way to mark it myself. guild wars has an awesome feature where you can draw on the map and everyone in your party can see it. ffxi has a full screen map mode that shows everything in your current zone (although you have to do a quest to get the map). the WoW map was jsut... green. it was useless to me. the town didnt appear on the map at all.
the next thing i noticed was how cartoonish everything was. not just the style of the models and architecture, but the 3d engine. every surface was flat and shiny-smooth. the characters and monsters moving around didn't seem to inhabit the world - footstep animation didnt match how quickly the characters moved. it looked like a movie made by an art student.
it took me about 2 hours to get level 5. apparently the best way to level up is to do quests, most of which require you to kill stuff. in ffxi, you have to be ok at your job at 10 and good at your job by level 15 or you will die every fight. in wow, i was soloing stuff 2 levels higher and reading the news in another window - it's very easy.
i've only played it 1 day and there's review by people that have played it for months already, but i wanted to comfort the people that didn't manage to get a key yesterday - (for me) it's not addicting and after the first 2 hours i was ready to stop playing because it was boring.
will it be the biggest MMORPG in time? i'm gonna go against conventional wisdom and say No. when i first started FFXI, i immediately felt like i was part of a big complex world and every time i went around a corner there was something really cool to discover. wow just seems antiseptic and empty. then again, when FFXI released in NA, it had already been out for a couple years in japan and for many months in NA beta. this is a fresh new world in WoW so maybe that's how all MMORPG start out.
it unzips to c:\dl3 and when you run it you get a little window about 400x600 that can be doubled or expanded to fullscreen
dirk is in a room with colored platforms that go up and down. it's mostly smoothly animated. you just hit L/R/U/D to move to the platform that blinks yellow. i made it across the chasm (about 15 moves) first try. it was very easy due to the blinking yellow. at the end the damsel's voice says "dragon wings! these will help you fly!" and it shows dirk "flying" (sort of waving his arms around, looked dumb) and going through a door.
not a very good bit of gaming, even for a huge fan of DL (which i am, i own the DL classic cdroms). if this is one of the better scenes in the game, don't expect much.
could be worse - at least it looked like animated video. the 3d RPG from a couple years ago was horrible.
i've been in 4 very small startups (3-15 people) and the core group always starts w/ people that know each other from past projects. then they network outwards getting the best people they know to refer the best people they know.
last startup i was at had mostly ph.d's (altho i'm a HS dropout) and some of the best salespeople i ever met (referred to us by the harvard MBA ceo asking the very impressive board members to refer us to some salespeople).
basically Class A people hire Class A people. class B people hire class C and D people. so ask the people you trust the most, don't go asking anonymous people.
"it does not matter if the war is not real. For when it is, victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, but it is meant to be continuous.'"
"A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance, this new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. the war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or east Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact"
i did a Bob Marley pumpkin this weekend. i didn't go all the way through the pumpkin to the inside, just got about 7/8 inch deep. pattern here http://www.fabulousfoods.com/holidays/halloween/pu mpplans2.html
i printed it out at 150%, stuck the paper to the pumpkin with pins, and used an exacto to cut marker lines for the face into the p-kin. then used the cutter tool - pic here http://www.hobbylinc.com/gr/dre/dre561.jpg - to cut in. it's 1/8 thick so i couldnt make corners or tight spots but it turned out ok. i guess i should get a pic of it online
i hate bush as much as anyone but i have bought a LOT of suits (was in sales for years) and that bulge is just the fabric bunching next to the stratch between the shoulder blades.
try it yourself. get a piece of fabric and stretch it between 2 smooth surfaces (like shoulder blades). it will bunch up at the opt and bottom of the stretch.
speaking of stretching, this whole theory is a real stretch too:( let's defeat bush because he is a psychotic half-wit, without breaking out the tin-foil hats
there's almost 500k NA players (there's 500k JP players) and no one i know (having played for a year) has a problem with the connectivity. that only affected a few people using one isp.
the MAIN problem that any serious NA FFXI player will tell you about is the latency problem. most of the endgame is camping for 3 hours in a room mashing a macro button as fast as you can (or using a bot *cough*) to win a "claim" on a monster by being the first to attack it. whoever claims it first gets the loot it drops (some monsters drop stuff worth millions of gil, real-world US$ value up to $1000 for something like nidhogg, serket, or king behemoth).
the problem is that all 30 servers (and apparently the 2 new servers they are adding tomorrow) are all in japan. this means the JP players have roughly 1/10 to 1/2 full second to claim a monster before the NA players. often for NA players it spawns with a purple name (meaning it's already claimed - unclaimed monsters have a yellow name). on my server, midgardsormr, the #1 NA guild (or "linkshell") has basically quit the game over this issue.
2nd to that there are balance problems (compare galka to taru, bastok to windurst, dragoon to whm), endgame content problems (zilart missions are about it), and economy problems (chinese players playing as employment, farming the same important items 24/7 non-stop and manipulating the economy).
personally i live with the problems and they don't affect me as much as other players but i thought if the/. community was gonna discuss FFXI, the minor problem about the ports should be put in the context of all the other stuff ppl are complaining about every day. personally i still like the game a lot:) (75bard, 60summoner, 40white mage, etc)
there's almost 500k NA players (500K JP players) and if you ask them, i think connectivity would not register as a problem at all, except for a few people using one specific ISP
by a friend of mine who is a developer of HLDS plugins (part of the HLDS community keeping HLDS servers running):
(quoted from email) Here's how it goes on 512Kbps cable connection:
1. Download steam installer (about 2 mins) and install
2. Wait while it patches itself (another 2mins). Login - at least it remembers my account from early betas (which didn't work)
3. Choose to download CS 1.6 but unheck start immediately.
4. Wait 22 mins for download. Download gets to 1 second remaining then stays on 1 second for a further 13 minutes. Network usage indicates it is still downloading at 400kbps. Give up, turn off machine and go out for diner.
5. Get back from dinner, resume CS 1.6 download - it starts immediately. I choose to start a local server on aztec with some bots.
6. Actually CS 1.6 looks quite nice - I can run in windowed mode and move the window normally and switch applications proprerly. But why no widescreen mode lower than 1280 pixels, and why can I still only pick window sizes that match a possible screen resolution? Aztec still has the same naff layout though - just prettier textures.
7. Decide to try a dedicated server - another 10 minutes wait.
8. Choose to start a CS server. 115 minutes wait
9. Start the server - starts Ok. Then I and try and connect to it from a local client: "You have been disconnected from the server- Reason: Invalid STEAM UserID Ticket". Tried switching the server to port 27016 so as not to conflict with the client - no joy.
10. Give up trying to start a dedicated server and try and join an internet game - pick an empty server running aztec which I've already downloaded. Takes about 40 seconds to connect.
11. Server turns out to be running amx mod:(
12. Run a command to speak the time - each time the plugin plays a sound the game freezes for half a second. I've heard of the same thing happening with adminmod plugins using sound.
Conclusion: Slow & Unstable is a good summary - and the GUI is *still* ugly. The only good things I saw were the improvements to the behaviour of the window in windowed mode, but that's probably CS 1.6 rather than steam.
i've been running HLDS servers for 3+ years. here's what i think of steam:
Well there's a number of things. In no particular order:
The cache prevents me from messing with some maps - this is probably the main thing for me as server admin that bothers me. Too many maps have bad/limited/broken spawns. E.g. the default map oilrig has 27 T spawns (including a couple right next to ct spawn) and 10 CT spawns. You end up with telefrags if you have as few as 20 players and teams are 11-9
The steam client (both players and server) slows my whole machine down and takes 125MB ram - just for the gui.
Starting up server or client takes a LONG TIME. I just timed them both: I can start playing cs 1.5 in about 10 seconds. Steam CS took... 15 minutes (with a cache already downloaded) and is still going. I'm not going to wait for it to finish
I prefer a server application that doesn't require a GUI. If you need to run it as a service, e.g. via daemontools it can be done but it takes a lot more memory than the current version and gamehost crashed trying to run it.
I don't like the riot shield or new rifles but that's personal. However it DOES annoy me that they added new crap in but the hostages STILL can't swim or climb ladders, vehicles are broken (you often die if you crouch in one, etc.), and other glaring bugs are vigorously not being fixed.
Server performance was bad compared to 4.1.1.1 HLDS - cpu usage was about 4x as much on an empty server, and my ping was higher (right now 20 on HLDS compared to 50 on steam)
Lower FPS on my client (staring at a hostage on italy I get 80.0 on CS mod (maxed), but only 64-66 on steam.
Massive HD footprint - not an issue for most people but I only have an 8GB HD:(
It is not fun to use - the UI is ass, its slow, it just seems like a bad app, I reminds me of freeware from Bulgarian websites. I keep expecting it to crash.
I was really excited about it - I was one of the thousands of people that starting running it 2 hour before it was supposed to be live a few months ago, causing them to cancel the beta:) and I wanted to migrate the server to it asap. But it was so unpleasant I gave up on that idea immediately. I've tried it a dozen times since then, and my distaste has only increased. Maybe I'm just a luddite.:(
in addition, from another professional server operator:
"I'm on half isdn, thats 64K (not 128 as ful isdn is) bidirectional. Only marginally faster than a 56Kmodem, i also have limited hours in a month and if you go over those hours the ISP dump you like a hot turd. downloading and re-downloading HLDS because stream is stupid enough to corrupt its own files isn't an option. I've just been screwed out of a hobby i quite enjoyed for no particular reason and it bothers me. I've no option to reinstall anything even because i can't keep any backups or installers since its all web junk.
i don't want to install the client. I never have wanted to install it. I dont like it. The only time i did install the client was on a virtual machine and it was a bitch to work with even then, bad ui, slow and badly laid out if i did display the information i wanted to know. I really don't like it. I also don't want to get patches using steam, i want executables which i can cut to cd and use again on a different machine if i need to, autoupdate isn't something i want to use and i dislike being forced to use it like this.
steam means that every time i want to boot up a server and test a new build i'll have to have my internet connection open, i'll pay for that connection and i'm not happy about this at all."
and from one of the authors of adminmod (the most popular and almost compulsory addon if you have an HLDS server): "Yes, I have ADSL, but I would prefere to only have to download it once so I can just use the CD to install HL and copy any other files to a friends computer without having to re-download everything. It also means if I break it I wont have to redownload the whole sodding lot. And if I am forced to use Steam I might just give up on HL1 and wait for HL2 (or try and revive LANGames.net)."
i'd just like to add my personal experience with speakeasy as an ISP
in 2001, i started paying them $200 a month for 1.5 MB SDSL with 80% of that rate guaranteed. for a year it worked but then dropped below the guaranteed minimum occasioanlly, and then often, and then constantly. despite many calls and emails to their support department my open tickets were always closed with comments like "customer doesn't know what he's talking about." Finally i closed my acct with them and started with cyberonic, who provides 768K upstream for $40/month, and haven't gone under 90% of that yet in the past 6 months.
are you looking for the greatest variety of broken tags, or the greatest number of broken tage, or what? i'm not sure how you could define one page as more malformed than another. i could make a page with 1,000,000 broken td tags. would that win?
i think all these answers are missing an essential part of your requirement, which is to keep in place the "advanced" formatting like indentations, italicization, bullets
i worked at a company that created all their docs (1100 of them) in word and wanted them to be ported to pagemaker or the like. however, at that time there was no way to do the conversion so we needed to convert them to text first. we basically had the same problem you have.
we ended up using a Word macro to convert all the word styles (font style, indents, bullets) to plaintext equivalents (tabs, _underline_, xbullets) and then saved as text. that worked nicely and i think it's the only way to accurately preserve word-specific styles and formatting.
Slashdot Mirror
i sent him an email - here's his reply
>I'm sorry, but I deliberately neglected to include the kind of ranking that you're asking for because such a ranking would be taken as a definitive pronouncement on the products tested, and three tests simply can't support that kind of conclusion, as I noted in my Disclaimers section. Also, once I did produce that chart, people would link to that directly and blow right past the details, and the details in this case are important.
Best,
Eric L. Howes
the article seems well done and deep but the presentation of the results is lackluster. they performed all those rounds of tests and analysis and the "conclusions" are
Spyware and adware can prove quite difficult to remove
No single anti-spyware scanner removes everything
etc. no kidding! why did they need to compare them to find out what is conventional wisdom for most people already. there is no quantifiable list of best-to-worst that i can find on the site, which is really the most valuable result of a study like this.
a waste of their time and ours.
i always use http://www.jux2.com
it grabs results from google+yahoo+ask jeeves, and then ranks stuff according to how it appears in those. since there's only 35% overlap the results are usually better than using 1 engine alone.
i worked for scopus, bought by siebel. millions of lines of code, all trashed
i worked for centerrun, nee raplix, bought by Sun. 40 people worked really hard to make a great product. now you can find it on sun's site, if you look carefully. advertising budget/market awareness of solution? zero
if you sell your software company, you can be confident the software will cease to exist.
another UI, with a few more features than CTmod http://www.cosmosui.org/downloads.php also i can't find the d/l link on the ctmod page...
i was a night elf priest.
it's totally plausible that the game is better than my review makes it sound. after all, most people seem to like it a lot. i don't think it was my setup, i jsut think it pales in comparison to other games i've played lately.
and to be fair to WoW, i think the first few hours can be confusing/boring for every MMORPG because you're killing low level stuff and neither you nor the monsters have cool gear/abilities/loot/etc.
above all else, i mainly wanted to share that it wasn't the BEST. GAME. EVER. so that the people suffering from not having a key don't feel too let down about having to wait to play it.
i've played FFXI for over a year but that's my only MMORPG experience, so my comments about WoW will inevitably have some ffxi-comparison flavor to them. i'm a hardcore gamer other than that though.
... green. it was useless to me. the town didnt appear on the map at all.
the character customization was a letdown. you can choose skin color, hair color, hair style, and facial hair, but each option has only 10 presets. you can't pick any RGB combination.
it was a little confusing when trying to get in to play with friends. apparently you start in your race's home town, and half the races (horde) start on the other side of the planet from the rest (alliance). so you have to coordinate and have everyone at least on the same island, and same race if you want to level up together.
the first thing i noticed was navigation. there's a little map but it doesn't show anything important. if you get lost an NPC can put a marker on it for you but i didn't see a way to mark it myself. guild wars has an awesome feature where you can draw on the map and everyone in your party can see it. ffxi has a full screen map mode that shows everything in your current zone (although you have to do a quest to get the map). the WoW map was jsut
the next thing i noticed was how cartoonish everything was. not just the style of the models and architecture, but the 3d engine. every surface was flat and shiny-smooth. the characters and monsters moving around didn't seem to inhabit the world - footstep animation didnt match how quickly the characters moved. it looked like a movie made by an art student.
it took me about 2 hours to get level 5. apparently the best way to level up is to do quests, most of which require you to kill stuff. in ffxi, you have to be ok at your job at 10 and good at your job by level 15 or you will die every fight. in wow, i was soloing stuff 2 levels higher and reading the news in another window - it's very easy.
i've only played it 1 day and there's review by people that have played it for months already, but i wanted to comfort the people that didn't manage to get a key yesterday - (for me) it's not addicting and after the first 2 hours i was ready to stop playing because it was boring.
will it be the biggest MMORPG in time? i'm gonna go against conventional wisdom and say No. when i first started FFXI, i immediately felt like i was part of a big complex world and every time i went around a corner there was something really cool to discover. wow just seems antiseptic and empty. then again, when FFXI released in NA, it had already been out for a couple years in japan and for many months in NA beta. this is a fresh new world in WoW so maybe that's how all MMORPG start out.
i'll save you the effort of downloading the demo
it unzips to c:\dl3 and when you run it you get a little window about 400x600 that can be doubled or expanded to fullscreen
dirk is in a room with colored platforms that go up and down. it's mostly smoothly animated. you just hit L/R/U/D to move to the platform that blinks yellow. i made it across the chasm (about 15 moves) first try. it was very easy due to the blinking yellow. at the end the damsel's voice says "dragon wings! these will help you fly!" and it shows dirk "flying" (sort of waving his arms around, looked dumb) and going through a door.
not a very good bit of gaming, even for a huge fan of DL (which i am, i own the DL classic cdroms). if this is one of the better scenes in the game, don't expect much.
could be worse - at least it looked like animated video. the 3d RPG from a couple years ago was horrible.
this is sort of rts/god-game
if you're on a pc i would try empire earth, rise of nations, dawn of war or total annihilation if you want a good rts.
for god games, try anything in the sim series (simcity, sims1, etc) or any of the tycoon series
i've been in 4 very small startups (3-15 people) and the core group always starts w/ people that know each other from past projects. then they network outwards getting the best people they know to refer the best people they know. last startup i was at had mostly ph.d's (altho i'm a HS dropout) and some of the best salespeople i ever met (referred to us by the harvard MBA ceo asking the very impressive board members to refer us to some salespeople). basically Class A people hire Class A people. class B people hire class C and D people. so ask the people you trust the most, don't go asking anonymous people.
"it does not matter if the war is not real. For when it is, victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, but it is meant to be continuous.'"
"A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance, this new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. the war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or east Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact"
wish i had seen this a couple days ago
u mpplans2.html
i did a Bob Marley pumpkin this weekend. i didn't go all the way through the pumpkin to the inside, just got about 7/8 inch deep. pattern here http://www.fabulousfoods.com/holidays/halloween/p
i printed it out at 150%, stuck the paper to the pumpkin with pins, and used an exacto to cut marker lines for the face into the p-kin. then used the cutter tool - pic here http://www.hobbylinc.com/gr/dre/dre561.jpg - to cut in. it's 1/8 thick so i couldnt make corners or tight spots but it turned out ok. i guess i should get a pic of it online
i hate bush as much as anyone but i have bought a LOT of suits (was in sales for years) and that bulge is just the fabric bunching next to the stratch between the shoulder blades.
:( let's defeat bush because he is a psychotic half-wit, without breaking out the tin-foil hats
try it yourself. get a piece of fabric and stretch it between 2 smooth surfaces (like shoulder blades). it will bunch up at the opt and bottom of the stretch.
speaking of stretching, this whole theory is a real stretch too
there's almost 500k NA players (there's 500k JP players) and no one i know (having played for a year) has a problem with the connectivity. that only affected a few people using one isp.
/. community was gonna discuss FFXI, the minor problem about the ports should be put in the context of all the other stuff ppl are complaining about every day. personally i still like the game a lot :) (75bard, 60summoner, 40white mage, etc)
the MAIN problem that any serious NA FFXI player will tell you about is the latency problem. most of the endgame is camping for 3 hours in a room mashing a macro button as fast as you can (or using a bot *cough*) to win a "claim" on a monster by being the first to attack it. whoever claims it first gets the loot it drops (some monsters drop stuff worth millions of gil, real-world US$ value up to $1000 for something like nidhogg, serket, or king behemoth).
the problem is that all 30 servers (and apparently the 2 new servers they are adding tomorrow) are all in japan. this means the JP players have roughly 1/10 to 1/2 full second to claim a monster before the NA players. often for NA players it spawns with a purple name (meaning it's already claimed - unclaimed monsters have a yellow name). on my server, midgardsormr, the #1 NA guild (or "linkshell") has basically quit the game over this issue.
2nd to that there are balance problems (compare galka to taru, bastok to windurst, dragoon to whm), endgame content problems (zilart missions are about it), and economy problems (chinese players playing as employment, farming the same important items 24/7 non-stop and manipulating the economy).
personally i live with the problems and they don't affect me as much as other players but i thought if the
there's almost 500k NA players (500K JP players) and if you ask them, i think connectivity would not register as a problem at all, except for a few people using one specific ISP
i don't mean to troll but your post left me confused.
/. advice). i am confused
you want to hide IE to only the few people too dumb to type iexplore in the start > run dialog...
but you are worried about blocking a potential install of a specific obscure chat program?
so you have 2 unexplained goals, with totally different solutions (easy vs. so hard you need
by a friend of mine who is a developer of HLDS plugins (part of the HLDS community keeping HLDS servers running):
:(
(quoted from email)
Here's how it goes on 512Kbps cable
connection:
1. Download steam installer (about 2 mins) and install
2. Wait while it patches itself (another 2mins). Login - at least it remembers my account from early betas (which didn't work)
3. Choose to download CS 1.6 but unheck start immediately.
4. Wait 22 mins for download. Download gets to 1 second remaining then stays on 1 second for a further 13 minutes. Network usage indicates it is still downloading at 400kbps. Give up, turn off machine and go out for diner.
5. Get back from dinner, resume CS 1.6 download - it starts immediately. I choose to start a local server on aztec with some bots.
6. Actually CS 1.6 looks quite nice - I can run in windowed mode and move the window normally and switch applications proprerly. But why no widescreen mode lower than 1280 pixels, and why can I still only pick window sizes that match a possible screen resolution? Aztec still has the same naff layout though - just prettier textures.
7. Decide to try a dedicated server - another 10 minutes wait.
8. Choose to start a CS server. 115 minutes wait
9. Start the server - starts Ok. Then I and try and connect to it from a local client: "You have been disconnected from the server- Reason: Invalid STEAM UserID Ticket". Tried switching the server to port 27016 so as not to conflict with the client - no joy.
10. Give up trying to start a dedicated server and try and join an internet game - pick an empty server running aztec which I've already downloaded. Takes about 40 seconds to connect.
11. Server turns out to be running amx mod
12. Run a command to speak the time - each time the plugin plays a sound the game freezes for half a second. I've heard of the same thing happening with adminmod plugins using sound.
Conclusion: Slow & Unstable is a good summary - and the GUI is *still* ugly. The only good things I saw were the improvements to the behaviour of the window in windowed mode, but that's probably CS 1.6 rather than steam.
i've been running HLDS servers for 3+ years. here's what i think of steam:
... 15 minutes (with a cache already downloaded) and is still going. I'm not going to wait for it to finish
:(
:) and I wanted to migrate the server to it asap. But it was so unpleasant I gave up on that idea immediately. I've tried it a dozen times since then, and my distaste has only increased. Maybe I'm just a luddite. :(
Well there's a number of things. In no particular order:
The cache prevents me from messing with some maps - this is probably the main thing for me as server admin that bothers me. Too many maps have bad/limited/broken spawns. E.g. the default map oilrig has 27 T spawns (including a couple right next to ct spawn) and 10 CT spawns. You end up with telefrags if you have as few as 20 players and teams are 11-9
The steam client (both players and server) slows my whole machine down and takes 125MB ram - just for the gui.
Starting up server or client takes a LONG TIME. I just timed them both: I can start playing cs 1.5 in about 10 seconds. Steam CS took
I prefer a server application that doesn't require a GUI. If you need to run it as a service, e.g. via daemontools it can be done but it takes a lot more memory than the current version and gamehost crashed trying to run it.
I don't like the riot shield or new rifles but that's personal. However it DOES annoy me that they added new crap in but the hostages STILL can't swim or climb ladders, vehicles are broken (you often die if you crouch in one, etc.), and other glaring bugs are vigorously not being fixed.
Server performance was bad compared to 4.1.1.1 HLDS - cpu usage was about 4x as much on an empty server, and my ping was higher (right now 20 on HLDS compared to 50 on steam)
Lower FPS on my client (staring at a hostage on italy I get 80.0 on CS mod (maxed), but only 64-66 on steam.
Massive HD footprint - not an issue for most people but I only have an 8GB HD
It is not fun to use - the UI is ass, its slow, it just seems like a bad app, I reminds me of freeware from Bulgarian websites. I keep expecting it to crash.
I was really excited about it - I was one of the thousands of people that starting running it 2 hour before it was supposed to be live a few months ago, causing them to cancel the beta
in addition, from another professional server operator:
"I'm on half isdn, thats 64K (not 128 as ful isdn is) bidirectional. Only marginally faster than a 56Kmodem, i also have limited hours in a month and if you go over those hours the ISP dump you like a hot turd. downloading and re-downloading HLDS because stream is stupid enough to corrupt its own files isn't an option. I've just been screwed out of a hobby i quite enjoyed for no particular reason and it bothers me. I've no option to reinstall anything even because i can't keep any backups or installers since its all web junk.
i don't want to install the client. I never have wanted to install it. I dont like it. The only time i did install the client was on a virtual machine and it was a bitch to work with even then, bad ui, slow and badly laid out if i did display the information i wanted to know. I really don't like it. I also don't want to get patches using steam, i want executables which i can cut to cd and use again on a different machine if i need to, autoupdate isn't something i want to use and i dislike being forced to use it like this.
steam means that every time i want to boot up a server and test a new build i'll have to have my internet connection open, i'll pay for that connection and i'm not happy about this at all."
and from one of the authors of adminmod (the most popular and almost compulsory addon if you have an HLDS server):
"Yes, I have ADSL, but I would prefere to only have to download it once so I can just use the CD to install HL and copy any other files to a friends computer without having to re-download everything. It also means if I break it I wont have to redownload the whole sodding lot. And if I am forced to use Steam I might just give up on HL1 and wait for HL2 (or try and revive LANGames.net)."
much better reviews here - http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/05/ 1847238
i'd just like to add my personal experience with speakeasy as an ISP in 2001, i started paying them $200 a month for 1.5 MB SDSL with 80% of that rate guaranteed. for a year it worked but then dropped below the guaranteed minimum occasioanlly, and then often, and then constantly. despite many calls and emails to their support department my open tickets were always closed with comments like "customer doesn't know what he's talking about." Finally i closed my acct with them and started with cyberonic, who provides 768K upstream for $40/month, and haven't gone under 90% of that yet in the past 6 months.
is there any place to get "books" (source material) online for free?
i have had them change the wording of my reviews. for example they changed the word "crap" to the word "fair" - heh heh.
are you looking for the greatest variety of broken tags, or the greatest number of broken tage, or what? i'm not sure how you could define one page as more malformed than another. i could make a page with 1,000,000 broken td tags. would that win?
i think all these answers are missing an essential part of your requirement, which is to keep in place the "advanced" formatting like indentations, italicization, bullets
i worked at a company that created all their docs (1100 of them) in word and wanted them to be ported to pagemaker or the like. however, at that time there was no way to do the conversion so we needed to convert them to text first. we basically had the same problem you have.
we ended up using a Word macro to convert all the word styles (font style, indents, bullets) to plaintext equivalents (tabs, _underline_, xbullets) and then saved as text. that worked nicely and i think it's the only way to accurately preserve word-specific styles and formatting.
but it didn't make it. i guess my description wasn't as appealing?