I sure hope that today's game market characteristics will not have some of the most fun traits of fallout removed.
Fallout was really an adulty game. It did not have blatant nudity or sex, but your character could sleep with others (no, you didn't see anything) and it affected the story. It also had tons of gore (especially if you picked that special character trait;). You were allowed to shoot kids, and it affected the game.
I can see those things being removed from Fallout 3 because some stuck up executive or investor feels they are 'offensive' (incl. finger quotes and naggy, american voice) and would result in a higher rating and smaller target audience.
Fallout really kicked ass, and if you patched it, bugs were very rare. The things it lacked were more than enough compensated by the wonderfully executed retro 50's style.
Heck, this game had a spiral bound manual! These days you're lucky to get a tiny paper scrap pointing you to the crappy, uninformative PDF on the CD/DVD. I want proper game boxes. Those trapezoid Thief boxes kicked ass.
Gamers across the world are crossing their fingers for Fallout 3 not to suck. The real game fans don't care about Halflife 2 or Doom 3, they care about jewels like Fallout:P.
Now if only the PHP devs hadn't totally ignored Unicode support for PHP5, we might have had the perfect weblanguage. Now you're still limited to ugly hacks and extensions that the typical PHP installation does not have, and the Americans/Brits are still unaware that there's anything beyond ASCII.
The Windows NT kernels (i.e. NT/2K/XP/2k3) handle everything in Unicode internally (UTF-16 encoded) and thus are total bliss for multilanguage users. You can switch input language on the fly with a quick key combo.
The text functions contain a layer called Uniscribe, which is a system for handling complex scripts automatically.
The problem is legacy apps compiled in ANSI/8-bit mode, and which are still being churned out by clueless Windows programmers.
Making a Unicode-compatible app on Windows is no longer hard thanks to the Unicode compatibility layer (Google for unicows.dll). Just use wchar_t instead of char and be happy.
Luckily on the web, most proper sites and systems have already moved to Unicode (UTF-8 encoded).
HTML/CSS is the perfect choice for all the reasons others have mentioned, but also for another reason:
You have the chance to teach proper HTML/CSS to a person who has never been poisoned with frames and tables!
Start with basic semantic HTML and explain to her that the tags offer extra information about the text: this is a title, this is a list, this is a paragraph. Stay away from FONT, TABLE, CENTER, B, I and friends.
Get a proper HTML editor which has syntax highlighting, tag lists, etc.
Then introduce CSS. First start with tag styling, don't use id's or classes. Don't use style attributes (no style="", but only a tag). Show her how to use simple attributes like color/background-color, font-family, font-size, etc. Don't bother trying to explain what the #RRGGBB syntax is: just get her a color picker, or a list of the CSS color keywords (and yes, most non-geeks can perfectly see the difference between 'crimson' and 'red' or 'cyan' and 'turquoise').
Have her make a simple page and show her how to put it online: as a geek you surely have webspace available.
I wholeheartedly agree with you: the W3C Specs, and those for CSS in particular are very readable. Still, telling someone to RTFS scares most people even more than RTFM, so here are a couple of specifics to point people to:
- The box model. Understanding the basic box, and how margins and padding work, is a basic requirement of designing with CSS.
- Block-level elements vs Inline-elements, and how they are placed in relation to eachother. Whenever people complain about small spaces they can't get rid of, or how "some things just won't go together", it's usually an inline element which needs to become block-level, or vice versa. Now you can have menu buttons which light up over their entire area/and/ are clickable over the entire area rather than just the text.
- Float and Clear. The staple of every CSS-based design. The easiest example is a gallery thumbnail list which adjusts to your browser width.
My advice for getting people to accept CSS is to give them a copy of Firefox and an editor, and let them have fun. Once they have discovered the joy of being able to place things where you want without needing spacer gifs, you can slowly ease them into the fact that a lot of the things they are using don't work (properly) in IE.
For those who don't know what new.net is about, it's basically a company which offers custom domains. Their spyware installs a layer which takes over all DNS resolving and redirects it to their servers.
A housemate of mine got infected with New.net. He could no longer log in to the university network, because Internet access was not allowed until logged in and thus the request to resolve the domain name of the log-in server could not reach new.net. This is what happens when stupid people write software without considering all scenarios.
Zope/Plone is great for big businesses who have a dedicated server to spare with lots of RAM. For a hobbyist it's not good to start with, and you'll have trouble finding a cheap hosting solution for experimenting with.
PHP-Nuke is good as long as you don't need to touch anything because it's a mess inside. Postnuke is much better than PHP-Nuke, but it still shares a lot of ideas with PHP-Nuke.
MovableType is good if all you need is a simple blog. It does only a small set of things, but does them really well.
Drupal is very extensible, simple design, has lots of contributed modules and a good community. It does lack some of the more finished detail stuff that other systems might have (e.g. MovableType does only a blog, but does it really well), though you can add details easily if you know PHP.
A month ago an old domain name of mine (that I hadn't renewed in time) was re-registered by someone else hours after it was released. The domainname in question was a long, flemish name with a very specific meaning, so it was a deliberate overtake. The squatters are simply comparing snapshots of the domain name DB's to find expired domain names.
The new owner was a shady company... they look like a registrar, but to buy a domain name you first have to fill in a form where you enter nothing but the wanted domainname and your email address: no doubt so they can register it before you can, and then force you to buy it at any price they like (namegiant.com).
Domain name spoofing has already been done through simpler means (m1crosoft, http://www.microsoft.com@1.2.3.4/,...) which are more than enough to fool Joe Average.
It might not be important for English speakers, but even accents can cause differences in meaning. Plus all those 'squiggly chinese characters' are the normal way of writing that particular language. If it bothers you that you cannot read it, learn the language.
I don't see the web getting any much worse from this, yet it offers significant advantages to the rest of the world.
Does anyone know what this file is? It's located in my Win2K user profile's Local Settings > Temp directory. It cannot be deleted (file in use), and a hexexit shows nothing except 'File packaged with Petite' (which is sort of suspicious).
Last year in my second year of civil engineering, we got to do a project. Me and 3 people worked on exactly such a 'dance-o-meter'.
We had a couple of weird ideas about a local-positioning-system (mini gps), wristbands with transmitters, or transmitting data by contact with the floor, etc. Basically an LPS would be way out of our scope, a wristband would give problems as well: it needs power and electronics, but has to be light and portable.
We settled for turning the dancefloor into a giant, fast responding balance with pressure sensors. Those were in fact nothing more than strainstrips (not sure if this is the correct word, a resistor that changes when force is applied along its length) on the support points of the floor. It was very solid and sturdy (didn't feel like dancing on jello), but still gave out a very clean signal to the computer. By comparing this data with the music being played (some FFT magic going on here with beat detection) we finally got out a magic number saying how much people were dancing in tune.
In our case, we coupled it with an MP3 database sorted into genres, and adapting the popularity of each genre as it is being played.
Because this was a second year project, we had to settle for 1 m of floor (so max 2-3 people dancing) but our results were pretty good. Basically even when you're dancing with your arms only, you're shifting weight from one foot to the other, and this is easily detected.
'Educate the American public'. Right. Just like those 'drugs support terrorism' campaigns? What's next... 'Downloading MP3s make baby Jesus cry'?
If you read the bill you can see it's simply a repetition of the flawed arguments the big media companies have against P2P.
Take for example points (5) and (6):
(5).... users do not realize that these systems pose serious security and privacy threats to their personal computers or company networks....
(6)...Millions of copies of one of the most popular peer-to-peer networks contain software that could allow an independent company to take over portions of users' computers and Internet connections and has the capacity to keep track of users' online habits.
Privacy and security violations need to be addressed by banning spyware/adware, not P2P networks. Misleading advertising seems to be the norm in the US rather than the exception, and nothing is being done about it. Gator is not a helpful tool if it's spyware. I am not 'today's winner' if this banner is flashing, because the banner flashes all the time. And if I've "just won $50****" I'm 100% SURE I won't be seeing any of that money at all.
Why don't they ban THAT?
And heck, if people are accidentally sharing their entire harddrive, then the software's interface needs to be improved, and the setup procedure for sharing files needs to be changed. Why doesn't a P2P app come with a warning if you decide to share an entire harddrive? Oh that's right, 'a good UI' still means nothing but flashy buttons and a 'cool skin' these days, thanks to Microsoft's own crappy UI skills and inconsistencies. The fact that creating applications for Windows is a pain in the ass doesn't help much either, because a programmer will be satisfied with something that 'just works' rather than something that works well.
From the user side, it's simple: if people are stupid and leave their house door unlocked, you don't teach them to brick their doors and windows shut, you simply teach them to lock their door.
The biggest problem I see is that this sort of stuff plays right into the hands of Palladium and friends. People don't want to take responsibility for their own safety. If someone comes along and offers them 'a completely secure platform!' with lots of bells and whistles in a colorful package, then they'll buy it for sure, especially after being 'educated' on how important security is.
Thankfully there's still some great Windows software around, like NSIS (by Nullsoft). It doesn't bother unzipping itself first (single EXE), it is small, it is powerful, open-source,.... The only thing that sucks is how you create an installer, you have to write a script in a language that's a mix between assembly, PHP and C. It's not at all hard if you're a programmer, but this is the reason why NSIS will never reach those stupid companies that put their Installer in an EXE in an EXE in a ZIP. If someone were to make an NSIS-script wizard (for people who can't use the script-system) for basic actions and commonly used stuff, it would put InstallShield and friends to eternal shame.
Why do people always talk about Carmack as a 'Game designer'? He doesn't make games, he makes graphics engines. And he's damn good at that. Warren Spector, now that's a *game* designer (Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex). Or Steve Barcia, of Master-of-Orion fame.
I once went through the trouble of downloading a Carmack presentation off the web about Q3 at the time. "Um...yeah.... um... basically we have like tons of shiny things that really kick ass. It looks really awesome." Thank you for that wonderful insight, I really couldn't have deducted that from the screenshots.
Quake2 was a mindless shooter which constantly made me feel that my monitors blue-channel was broken (everything was brown/yellow). It didn't come close to Unreal's awesome atmosphere, colorful environments, sense of 'going somewhere',...
Who is the writer for Doom III's storyline? How will the voice acting be? How about (non-)linearity? What is the level of sound interaction in the games (i.e. not just 'gun::fire() { playsound("bang.wav"); }'). All these questions get ignored because it has normal mapping and stencil shadows.
I thought decompression was still allowed, or that's at least what IBM said a while ago. They might've taken a step back.
The reason some open-source projects scrapped GIF support completely is because they don't want to use it, not because they can't. Unfortunately PNG is still foreign to most people ("eh? it's not as good as JPG or GIF!") due to crappy IE support. Even worse is MNG-support, which is mostly non-existant (the replacement for animated GIFs).
If IE had full support for these two (with alpha channels and the works), I'm sure the 'regular' webdesign community would embrace them and never look back at GIF.
IMO the first thing the Mozilla team needs to do is get rid of ALL similarities with Netscape.
I don't care whether Netscape 6/7/whatever is a good browser, the way they completely FUCKED up the 4.x series had made me lose their trust forever. And I know I'm not alone. I did a summer this year which involved some HTML, and we still had to make sure it worked on NS4 because it was still used by something like 1% of their users. Yay. Forget about using CSS, let's stick to tables because that's the only way of guaranteeing your elements don't fly around the page in NS4.
So when Phoenix/Mozilla has a classic theme that says it 'recreates the familiar look of the classic Netscape 4.x series', it's actually saying that it 'makes this cool browser look like antiquated crap that everyone hates'.
For everyone except Un*x users, Netscape died when IE5 was released as it turned out that IE didn't have completely b0rked support for basic HTML features such as CSS and DHTML. They still view Netscape as the really crappy browser that does everything wrong.
So for everyone except those 5-and-a-half people who never stopped using Netscape 4.x because it was 'so much better than IE', please don't call it 'Mozilla Navigator'. The Navigator name is tied to the crap called Netscape and should die along with it. Seriously, has Netscape done anything remotely interesting ever since NS4? NS6/7 is just a branded version of Mozilla. I personally couldn't care less if a huge asteroid obliterated Netscape headquarters today.
Besides, brand recognition and naming depends on your users. Look at how Apple's Safari has become a household name in a couple of months, but how Mozilla is still squabbling over details like this. Maybe we should stop letting the geeks choose names and get some marketing droids to do it instead?
I visited Philips Remote Control dev center a couple of months ago here in Leuven, Belgium and saw an early version of one of these.
It's a luxury product of course, intended for people who just have too much money on their hands and are spending $10000 on a home cinema system anyway (that's what the devs told us).
We also saw the lesser pronto's, which are basically tough, pda-sized (though thicker) smart remote controls with a color touchscreen. They are just remote controls (unlike this mini-computer), but they do come with software for designing your own button layouts and such.
Apparently it's still a worthwhile market in the US. Lots of rich people DO buy this sort of stuff.
The iPronto is basically a tablet-computer for your living room, which just happens to also be a remote control.
My main gripe when trying out the various pronto's was the touch pad which was inaccurate and seemed to respond badly... and that was without greasy fingers from crisps or popcorn.
Yet another American who doesn't realise what a big hassle it is to get into your country.
Did you know someone who applies for a green card has to give away all his rights at contestation? Are you even aware of the big friggin signs at immigration offices which 'friendily' remind the immigrant of the penalty of assaulting a federal officer, including verbal assault? Of course, combined with the fact that you have no rights at contestation, this means that if you don't say the right things, you are assaulting an officer.
I can tell you, stepping off the airplane and immediately being reminded of criminal charges should you do something wrong does NOT make you feel welcome.
And boy, don't the immigration people know this. Everyone in that airport who wore a uniform spoke to me in a smug schoolteacher kind of voice as if I was a stupid outsider whose only smart move ever was to come to the US in the first place (land of enlightment of course!), so maybe there was some hope for me after all.
One hour to go from airplane door to airport door, and we didn't have to wait for our luggage. Sounds like a fun way to start a relaxing holiday huh?
This reminds me of that story a while ago that the iTunes-installer could fry your harddrive's partition table in certain cases.
Why the heck would a regular installer program be messing with partition tables? Unless of course it was a bug in the filesystem drivers that was triggered for the first time by iTunes...
Slashdot Mirror
I sure hope that today's game market characteristics will not have some of the most fun traits of fallout removed.
;). You were allowed to shoot kids, and it affected the game.
:P.
Fallout was really an adulty game. It did not have blatant nudity or sex, but your character could sleep with others (no, you didn't see anything) and it affected the story. It also had tons of gore (especially if you picked that special character trait
I can see those things being removed from Fallout 3 because some stuck up executive or investor feels they are 'offensive' (incl. finger quotes and naggy, american voice) and would result in a higher rating and smaller target audience.
Fallout really kicked ass, and if you patched it, bugs were very rare. The things it lacked were more than enough compensated by the wonderfully executed retro 50's style.
Heck, this game had a spiral bound manual! These days you're lucky to get a tiny paper scrap pointing you to the crappy, uninformative PDF on the CD/DVD. I want proper game boxes. Those trapezoid Thief boxes kicked ass.
Gamers across the world are crossing their fingers for Fallout 3 not to suck. The real game fans don't care about Halflife 2 or Doom 3, they care about jewels like Fallout
Linktoolbar provides buttons for these at the bottom of the browser.
LinkIt automatically derives prev/next links from a page's context.
Combined, they make browsing things like webcomics a snap: no more searching for the arbitrarily styled next link.
My only wish is for it to be customizable, so I can teach it to recognize non-english "Previous" and "Next" instances.
Now if only the PHP devs hadn't totally ignored Unicode support for PHP5, we might have had the perfect weblanguage.
Now you're still limited to ugly hacks and extensions that the typical PHP installation does not have, and the Americans/Brits are still unaware that there's anything beyond ASCII.
The Windows NT kernels (i.e. NT/2K/XP/2k3) handle everything in Unicode internally (UTF-16 encoded) and thus are total bliss for multilanguage users. You can switch input language on the fly with a quick key combo.
The text functions contain a layer called Uniscribe, which is a system for handling complex scripts automatically.
The problem is legacy apps compiled in ANSI/8-bit mode, and which are still being churned out by clueless Windows programmers.
Making a Unicode-compatible app on Windows is no longer hard thanks to the Unicode compatibility layer (Google for unicows.dll). Just use wchar_t instead of char and be happy.
Luckily on the web, most proper sites and systems have already moved to Unicode (UTF-8 encoded).
HTML/CSS is the perfect choice for all the reasons others have mentioned, but also for another reason:
You have the chance to teach proper HTML/CSS to a person who has never been poisoned with frames and tables!
Start with basic semantic HTML and explain to her that the tags offer extra information about the text: this is a title, this is a list, this is a paragraph. Stay away from FONT, TABLE, CENTER, B, I and friends.
Get a proper HTML editor which has syntax highlighting, tag lists, etc.
Then introduce CSS. First start with tag styling, don't use id's or classes. Don't use style attributes (no style="", but only a tag). Show her how to use simple attributes like color/background-color, font-family, font-size, etc. Don't bother trying to explain what the #RRGGBB syntax is: just get her a color picker, or a list of the CSS color keywords (and yes, most non-geeks can perfectly see the difference between 'crimson' and 'red' or 'cyan' and 'turquoise').
Have her make a simple page and show her how to put it online: as a geek you surely have webspace available.
Mail it to friends and compliment her.
I wholeheartedly agree with you: the W3C Specs, and those for CSS in particular are very readable. Still, telling someone to RTFS scares most people even more than RTFM, so here are a couple of specifics to point people to:
/and/ are clickable over the entire area rather than just the text.
- The box model. Understanding the basic box, and how margins and padding work, is a basic requirement of designing with CSS.
- Block-level elements vs Inline-elements, and how they are placed in relation to eachother. Whenever people complain about small spaces they can't get rid of, or how "some things just won't go together", it's usually an inline element which needs to become block-level, or vice versa.
Now you can have menu buttons which light up over their entire area
- Float and Clear. The staple of every CSS-based design. The easiest example is a gallery thumbnail list which adjusts to your browser width.
My advice for getting people to accept CSS is to give them a copy of Firefox and an editor, and let them have fun.
Once they have discovered the joy of being able to place things where you want without needing spacer gifs, you can slowly ease them into the fact that a lot of the things they are using don't work (properly) in IE.
Nice troll.
For those who don't know what new.net is about, it's basically a company which offers custom domains. Their spyware installs a layer which takes over all DNS resolving and redirects it to their servers.
A housemate of mine got infected with New.net. He could no longer log in to the university network, because Internet access was not allowed until logged in and thus the request to resolve the domain name of the log-in server could not reach new.net. This is what happens when stupid people write software without considering all scenarios.
So does PHP5 have proper Unicode support, or are we still supposed to pretend that you can treat UTF8 as ASCII and that it will 'just work'?
Fix up your monitor gamma (non-linear brightness control). It's very important for games like Thief that dark tones don't become black.
This is an unfortunate misconception propagated by C/C++. A character today is a 16-bit unsigned integer.
Zope/Plone is great for big businesses who have a dedicated server to spare with lots of RAM. For a hobbyist it's not good to start with, and you'll have trouble finding a cheap hosting solution for experimenting with.
PHP-Nuke is good as long as you don't need to touch anything because it's a mess inside. Postnuke is much better than PHP-Nuke, but it still shares a lot of ideas with PHP-Nuke.
MovableType is good if all you need is a simple blog. It does only a small set of things, but does them really well.
Drupal is very extensible, simple design, has lots of contributed modules and a good community. It does lack some of the more finished detail stuff that other systems might have (e.g. MovableType does only a blog, but does it really well), though you can add details easily if you know PHP.
The colon in http:// is missing.
;).
We can handle a slashdotting
The domain name system is already messed up.
...) which are more than enough to fool Joe Average.
A month ago an old domain name of mine (that I hadn't renewed in time) was re-registered by someone else hours after it was released. The domainname in question was a long, flemish name with a very specific meaning, so it was a deliberate overtake. The squatters are simply comparing snapshots of the domain name DB's to find expired domain names.
The new owner was a shady company... they look like a registrar, but to buy a domain name you first have to fill in a form where you enter nothing but the wanted domainname and your email address: no doubt so they can register it before you can, and then force you to buy it at any price they like (namegiant.com).
Domain name spoofing has already been done through simpler means (m1crosoft, http://www.microsoft.com@1.2.3.4/,
It might not be important for English speakers, but even accents can cause differences in meaning. Plus all those 'squiggly chinese characters' are the normal way of writing that particular language. If it bothers you that you cannot read it, learn the language.
I don't see the web getting any much worse from this, yet it offers significant advantages to the rest of the world.
Does anyone know what this file is? It's located in my Win2K user profile's Local Settings > Temp directory. It cannot be deleted (file in use), and a hexexit shows nothing except 'File packaged with Petite' (which is sort of suspicious).
Last year in my second year of civil engineering, we got to do a project. Me and 3 people worked on exactly such a 'dance-o-meter'.
;).
We had a couple of weird ideas about a local-positioning-system (mini gps), wristbands with transmitters, or transmitting data by contact with the floor, etc.
Basically an LPS would be way out of our scope, a wristband would give problems as well: it needs power and electronics, but has to be light and portable.
We settled for turning the dancefloor into a giant, fast responding balance with pressure sensors. Those were in fact nothing more than strainstrips (not sure if this is the correct word, a resistor that changes when force is applied along its length) on the support points of the floor. It was very solid and sturdy (didn't feel like dancing on jello), but still gave out a very clean signal to the computer. By comparing this data with the music being played (some FFT magic going on here with beat detection) we finally got out a magic number saying how much people were dancing in tune.
In our case, we coupled it with an MP3 database sorted into genres, and adapting the popularity of each genre as it is being played.
Because this was a second year project, we had to settle for 1 m of floor (so max 2-3 people dancing) but our results were pretty good. Basically even when you're dancing with your arms only, you're shifting weight from one foot to the other, and this is easily detected.
You don't need fancy body-networks for this
'Educate the American public'. Right. Just like those 'drugs support terrorism' campaigns? What's next... 'Downloading MP3s make baby Jesus cry'?
If you read the bill you can see it's simply a repetition of the flawed arguments the big media companies have against P2P.
Take for example points (5) and (6):
Privacy and security violations need to be addressed by banning spyware/adware, not P2P networks. Misleading advertising seems to be the norm in the US rather than the exception, and nothing is being done about it. Gator is not a helpful tool if it's spyware. I am not 'today's winner' if this banner is flashing, because the banner flashes all the time. And if I've "just won $50****" I'm 100% SURE I won't be seeing any of that money at all.
Why don't they ban THAT?
And heck, if people are accidentally sharing their entire harddrive, then the software's interface needs to be improved, and the setup procedure for sharing files needs to be changed. Why doesn't a P2P app come with a warning if you decide to share an entire harddrive? Oh that's right, 'a good UI' still means nothing but flashy buttons and a 'cool skin' these days, thanks to Microsoft's own crappy UI skills and inconsistencies. The fact that creating applications for Windows is a pain in the ass doesn't help much either, because a programmer will be satisfied with something that 'just works' rather than something that works well.
From the user side, it's simple: if people are stupid and leave their house door unlocked, you don't teach them to brick their doors and windows shut, you simply teach them to lock their door.
The biggest problem I see is that this sort of stuff plays right into the hands of Palladium and friends. People don't want to take responsibility for their own safety. If someone comes along and offers them 'a completely secure platform!' with lots of bells and whistles in a colorful package, then they'll buy it for sure, especially after being 'educated' on how important security is.
Thankfully there's still some great Windows software around, like NSIS (by Nullsoft). It doesn't bother unzipping itself first (single EXE), it is small, it is powerful, open-source, .... The only thing that sucks is how you create an installer, you have to write a script in a language that's a mix between assembly, PHP and C. It's not at all hard if you're a programmer, but this is the reason why NSIS will never reach those stupid companies that put their Installer in an EXE in an EXE in a ZIP.
If someone were to make an NSIS-script wizard (for people who can't use the script-system) for basic actions and commonly used stuff, it would put InstallShield and friends to eternal shame.
Strange, that sounds awfully familiar. Perhaps you should look up who armed the Iraqi's and Taleban in the first place?
Why do people always talk about Carmack as a 'Game designer'? He doesn't make games, he makes graphics engines. And he's damn good at that.
...
Warren Spector, now that's a *game* designer (Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex). Or Steve Barcia, of Master-of-Orion fame.
I once went through the trouble of downloading a Carmack presentation off the web about Q3 at the time. "Um...yeah.... um... basically we have like tons of shiny things that really kick ass. It looks really awesome."
Thank you for that wonderful insight, I really couldn't have deducted that from the screenshots.
Quake2 was a mindless shooter which constantly made me feel that my monitors blue-channel was broken (everything was brown/yellow). It didn't come close to Unreal's awesome atmosphere, colorful environments, sense of 'going somewhere',
Who is the writer for Doom III's storyline? How will the voice acting be? How about (non-)linearity? What is the level of sound interaction in the games (i.e. not just 'gun::fire() { playsound("bang.wav"); }').
All these questions get ignored because it has normal mapping and stencil shadows.
I thought decompression was still allowed, or that's at least what IBM said a while ago. They might've taken a step back.
The reason some open-source projects scrapped GIF support completely is because they don't want to use it, not because they can't. Unfortunately PNG is still foreign to most people ("eh? it's not as good as JPG or GIF!") due to crappy IE support. Even worse is MNG-support, which is mostly non-existant (the replacement for animated GIFs).
If IE had full support for these two (with alpha channels and the works), I'm sure the 'regular' webdesign community would embrace them and never look back at GIF.
IMO the first thing the Mozilla team needs to do is get rid of ALL similarities with Netscape.
I don't care whether Netscape 6/7/whatever is a good browser, the way they completely FUCKED up the 4.x series had made me lose their trust forever. And I know I'm not alone. I did a summer this year which involved some HTML, and we still had to make sure it worked on NS4 because it was still used by something like 1% of their users. Yay. Forget about using CSS, let's stick to tables because that's the only way of guaranteeing your elements don't fly around the page in NS4.
So when Phoenix/Mozilla has a classic theme that says it 'recreates the familiar look of the classic Netscape 4.x series', it's actually saying that it 'makes this cool browser look like antiquated crap that everyone hates'.
For everyone except Un*x users, Netscape died when IE5 was released as it turned out that IE didn't have completely b0rked support for basic HTML features such as CSS and DHTML. They still view Netscape as the really crappy browser that does everything wrong.
So for everyone except those 5-and-a-half people who never stopped using Netscape 4.x because it was 'so much better than IE', please don't call it 'Mozilla Navigator'. The Navigator name is tied to the crap called Netscape and should die along with it. Seriously, has Netscape done anything remotely interesting ever since NS4? NS6/7 is just a branded version of Mozilla. I personally couldn't care less if a huge asteroid obliterated Netscape headquarters today.
Besides, brand recognition and naming depends on your users. Look at how Apple's Safari has become a household name in a couple of months, but how Mozilla is still squabbling over details like this. Maybe we should stop letting the geeks choose names and get some marketing droids to do it instead?
I visited Philips Remote Control dev center a couple of months ago here in Leuven, Belgium and saw an early version of one of these. It's a luxury product of course, intended for people who just have too much money on their hands and are spending $10000 on a home cinema system anyway (that's what the devs told us). We also saw the lesser pronto's, which are basically tough, pda-sized (though thicker) smart remote controls with a color touchscreen. They are just remote controls (unlike this mini-computer), but they do come with software for designing your own button layouts and such. Apparently it's still a worthwhile market in the US. Lots of rich people DO buy this sort of stuff. The iPronto is basically a tablet-computer for your living room, which just happens to also be a remote control. My main gripe when trying out the various pronto's was the touch pad which was inaccurate and seemed to respond badly... and that was without greasy fingers from crisps or popcorn.
Yet another American who doesn't realise what a big hassle it is to get into your country. Did you know someone who applies for a green card has to give away all his rights at contestation? Are you even aware of the big friggin signs at immigration offices which 'friendily' remind the immigrant of the penalty of assaulting a federal officer, including verbal assault? Of course, combined with the fact that you have no rights at contestation, this means that if you don't say the right things, you are assaulting an officer. I can tell you, stepping off the airplane and immediately being reminded of criminal charges should you do something wrong does NOT make you feel welcome. And boy, don't the immigration people know this. Everyone in that airport who wore a uniform spoke to me in a smug schoolteacher kind of voice as if I was a stupid outsider whose only smart move ever was to come to the US in the first place (land of enlightment of course!), so maybe there was some hope for me after all. One hour to go from airplane door to airport door, and we didn't have to wait for our luggage. Sounds like a fun way to start a relaxing holiday huh?
This reminds me of that story a while ago that the iTunes-installer could fry your harddrive's partition table in certain cases. Why the heck would a regular installer program be messing with partition tables? Unless of course it was a bug in the filesystem drivers that was triggered for the first time by iTunes...
It's just a stupid piece of textile. You Americans are way too attached to symbols: get out more.