I got the "going nowhere fast" movies (Halo speedrun), but the idea of speedrun caught me so much that just at the same time I've downloaded Halflife speedrun and Quake speedrun. My impression: Gosh, Halo is so lame!!! I mean, you move so slowly, everything moves like a snail, enemies make up with numbers and durablity for their wits and speed... Just check it yourself. Halo is SLOW! YAWN!
My opinion: What fun is it to load 40 bullets into hardly moving bulky bastard who from time to time shots at you and you move so slowly that you don't even bother to dodge? For me it's MUCH more fun to load 40 bullets into walls trying to get a fast-moving, smart, one-shot enemy while trying to avoid it. I love where the game engine provides just enough speed for the player to need to stop to regain orientation and slow down just to be able to do things right. That was playing the Alien in AvP1, very vulnerable, stealthy, strong at melee, helpless at ranged combat, but devilishly fast... In AvP2 it got severely crippled. It lost its greatest advantage - speed.
There are still people who "discover" Tetris, Arcanoid, FF7, Worms... There are several extremely simple old games that will never get too old. True, they don't catch everyone's taste, but I guess at least some of these kids would enjoy them. I "discovered" Zork some 3 years ago and enjoyed it immensely. I spent some nice time on roguelikes when QuakeII was on top. I killed Sepiroth for the first time about when FFXI was released. Was I impressed? Hell, yes! And I guess most of kids who aren't complete idiots, given a little patience to get through first impressions, would be impressed.
I think you misunderstand the idea of competition/competitiveness. Few doubt Intel makes -better- processors. Yes, better quality, better top speed, better reliablity. But worse bang for the buck. In times when AMD competed with Cyrix and such, and their CPUs were vastly worse than Intel, everyone had to think twice before buying the "cheaper" one. Now the differences are minor and buying Intel is a gesture of extravagance or paranoia - because all qualities of AMD are just satisfactory and what Intel gives extra above that just mostly isn't worth its price. Sure, Intel still has upper hand in certain markets - high-reliablity servers, mission-critical equipment, hardware doing tasks of such value that price of the CPU is insignificantly low and value of the reliablity gain is invaluable. If by increasing reliablity of the application by 1% you increase profit by $10.000/month, $50 for a better CPU is nothing...
The problem is by investing into even more modern factory Intel may try to keep upper hand in the markets it owns totally (serious business etc), try to extend its share in markets where other CPU families are strong (science, servers, heavy number crunching) but certainly won't gain anyone from the "home computer" zone, people who think 3GHZ may be too much and $200 is a lot. They are those who buy Celerons, because "genuine Pentium" are too expensive, but we all know, Celerons are crap and Athlon is way better (and Duron is even cheaper) - comparable price, better quality. So either they lower prices or increase quality of their "budget" products to compete with AMD or they just won't cut into AMD's market share.
Their move may be profitable - or not. But it won't make them competitive against AMD. Wrong market, wrong set of features.
AMD got the lead because they offer better performance for the same price or better price for the same performance (or somewhere inbetween). Intel WON'T win the race by spending more money on much faster, much stronger and much more expensive hardware. Do you think they will let these $2B just evaporate? They will try to get it back in processor prices. And that's their way to failure.
Other thing besides competing in CPU prices Intel could do would be to remove overclocking cap (say, by overclocking you void warranty, if they want to protect themselves from people who burn their CPUs) and possibly limit other such monopolist practices that people just perceive as customer-unfriendly.
you must be realy new here:) FYI as you seem to be a honest nice guy and it would be a pity to see you eaten. This is not "this forum". This is Slashdot. Internet is vast and you'll find all kind of places there. Nice flash sites for kids and dark, dangerous places inhabited by murky individuals. Slashdot is definitely on the dark side. Think of a bar/pub where all kind of military-related people - soldiers, mercenaries, hired guns, assassins, spies, criminals, common thugs come. They have the common interest of learning the latest news and chance to band up with someone on some kind of "mission", be it defusing a bomb or breaking some bones of some guy owning one of them some bucks. There are many wannabes who come with illusions of noble errants to save the world and become quite quicklu disillusioned. There are also random visitors who heard about the "military-themed bar" and expect a place where they can get some news and meet people proficient in the job (imagining it to be something like a military canteen). Nobody here trusts each other because we all know everybody here IS more or less dangerous. Don't confuse "envy" marked by green/blue mark "friend/fan" with real friendship. It's professional. We never trust our "friends". What people here have in common is that they like a good fight. Many are very happy to start a burt. Sometimes some subject emerges, that pissess off almost everyone and then we just move our asses and kick whoever pisses us off. But much more often some jackass or smartass drops something that starts internal battle, and since our battle-hardened veterans know most of the old tricks by heart, one that actually works faces deep appreciation - even if it pisses off. But clueless newcomers often get eaten - just for cruel fun. The floor is littered with landmines. Beware of Slashdot.
In one hand, sorry for no warning. In the other hand, if your workplace policy is such that you could lose job over what appears on your screen, you should NOT open ANY unknown links from posts on Slashdot, warning or not. One thing you can be sure, people linking to pages forwarding to some sites from the.cx domain won't issue such a warning.
I haven't tested that feature myself but it seems like Klaus Knopper has some blind relative or something, considering how much effort was put in this set of features in Knoppix. I mean, I had to use Knoppix a lot for some time and I was stumbling upon pieces "for the blind" all the time. Knoppix seems to be very serious about that, down to pushing boot-up messages to a reader device...
Okay, since you seem to read between lines where there's nothing written. (schizophrenia?) not trying to explain anything more, just answering, point by point (cartesian product):
WHAT DID FAR CRY DO, IN THE AREA OF (...) THAT WAS (...)
A. GAME DESIGN
1. NEW - Nothing worth mentioning. 2. REVOLUTIONARY - Little if anything. 3. NOT RUN-OF-THE-MILL - probably nothing.
B. CONCEPT
1. NEW - Nothing. 2. REVOLUTIONARY - Nothing. 3. NOT RUN-OF-THE-MILL - Difficult to tackle, though insignificant by itself. Just count as nothing.
C. GAME PLAY
1. NEW - Nothing special. 2. REVOLUTIONARY - Nothing. 3. NOT RUN-OF-THE-MILL - Hours or days of really enjoyable gameplay.
And everything boils down to gameplay being interesting as this is the only thing that matters. And what in nowaday world of boring games is truly unique. Revolutionary or new? No, there were some enjoyable games in the past. Special and rare - certainly. Forget that I said "foliage" and "infinite view distance". These are just features I like but by themselves they mean nothing. What factors come into a "great game"? If this question could be answered, we wouldn't have crappy games on market. Certainly good engine alone is not enough, as ID proves. Neither is a detailed world with atmosphere, on good engine, as proves Valve.
BTW, I'm trying to finish Final Fantasy 7. For maybe 5th time now. "Vintage" graphics far below today's standards, engine sucked from the very beginning, a bit annoying interface, storyline in major part linear, plot sometimes ridiculously silly/naive... But it's still a great game.
ps. Post something intelligent from time to time, you'll eventually get the karma bonus too.
You seem to limit value of the game to number of features of the engine. I personally say, screw "features of engine" and such. Evaluate quality. What is "quality" of a game? Fundamentally games are entertainment industry and so the entertainment value is essential. (just like movies, many multi-billion superproductions that are forgotten and amateur movies that make it to the top, just because they are more interesting). What makes FarCry special? That it leaves the competition far behind in playablity, entertainment factor. What makes it revolutionary? Uh, not that much at all? Just a piece of really well done job. Combining more or less known pieces many have used in the past but very few successfully (that is making them FUN!) and just getting the old thing done right...
Think Half Life 1. Was it "special"? No doubt. But what contributed to its success? 16bit textures? Improved physics? The flashlight and spray? No, major factors were the great plot, artistically crafted graphics creating the atmosphere, interesting challenges and possiblities, combined with very moderate amount of bugs. In short, playablity.
Both HL2 and D3 are revolutionary when it comes to technology - just as many other technologically revolutionary games before them, but neither of them is _special_. Especially D3 is "engine plus demo levels" release - "buy our engine and write great games, see what the game can do and how much better it could be given the right plot". With HL2, the authors concentrated on being perfect too much. Too many details, too little time. What was made was good, but it should be some 10 times bigger and without these necessary size cuts like linearity.
Great engines. Too bad the data files that come with them don't live up to the hype.
...unlimited field of view, a lot of foliage... Yes, not -that- much.
Technique/engine is one thing. Content is another. A printout of a photo of dump of junk on glossy photopaper, in 4000DPI, in 64bit color will still present a dump of junk. Much simpler printout of a photo of a waterfall will still cause better impression. Doom? Hey, something like 10 years ago I already thought about making a game, where you play a blind shaolin monk and play only using earphones, screen completely dark -all- the time. HL2 sure is nicely made etc but it's way too -small- (short, linear, closed) to mean something serious.
Thanks. By the way, yes, I -am- a zoophile. That is: a person who doesn't think animals are "the worse kind", finds their psyche equally rich and usually better in moral standards than psyche of average humans, and learns from them a lot - they are very wise in their own way. I've learned things like the species is just another meaningless barrier like race, nationality, language or color of skin. Of course there ARE differences, but they aren't -that- significant. I've learned it's silly to consider sex some kind of taboo. It's pleasant, it's fun and if both sides want it, why not? (and to all those who say "animals can't say no", just try to rape a mare. Zoos call that "airborne express". Plus they can say "yes" way more clearly than most humans.) I've learned not to worry about stuff I can't change, to enjoy simple pleasures of life, to recognize who I can trust and who not, to ignore petty little minds who find pleasure in barking at anything they can't quite understand, and quite a few other useful things. And i larned species is definitely no barrier for true love.
Oh, come on, just a harmless joke. Sorry for no "adult content" warning. (uh... I think the meaning of "adult" has strayed a bit from what the dictionary says. I personally wouldn't describe that one as "mature":)
Okay, disclaimer here - the linked movie isn't quite work-safe though not "that kind". Funny. Not trollish.
Ive heard from others it has fewer features and options,
resulting in smaller memory footprint, less overhead and generally faster and "lighter" code - shorter load times, shorter page rendering times etc.
and a more dumbed down UI. Dumbed down UI != ease of use.
That's what you got wrong. The UI is task-oriented, not feature-oriented. In this way it's "dumbed down" - the user doesn't have to care X is a component of Y and Y belongs to Z. "Advanced"? "Security&Privacy"? "Tools"? Where is it? User cares only that X does task of type A and so it can be found in the "A". Associating downloaded file type - "downloads". Easy and simple. The navigation routes don't correspond to the program internal structure but to user requirements. The options are all there, only the less used ones are dug in deeper to expose the frequently used ones.
I think the less customisability software has the harder it becomes to use, for newbies and experienced users alike.
Another thing you get wrong. While Mozilla is a combine with kitchen sink and hardly anything to add, Firefox is meant to be "bare bones to be extended". Plugins for Firefox may change its face totally and they aren't meant as "some extra fancy" but as an essential component. You build your browser to be what you want it to be by adding what you need, not by switching off what you don't want. In this respect Firefox is way more customizable than Mozilla - just not "out of the box".
It becomes more difficult for the user to customise the software for their preferences and usage pattern, and more difficult to accomplish certian tasks.
Straight opposite. First - "reasonable defaults" so there's no thing like in MSIE prefs where I run a line of checkboxes and toggle all, on to off, off to on, because -all- of them are against my preference. And then flexiblity to add any extras you desire.
The trick with useability is not to remove customisbility, but rather make software as customisable as possible but simply design a good configuration user interface that places more commonly used options more prominantly than advanced one, such as through placing the more advanced options on advanced options screens or other such techniques, thus keeping the more advanced options from confusing newbies but allowing people to gradually begin using them and discover them (and making it easy to discover them by making them all avialable through a good UI) as they become familiar with software. People often start out using software by using a subset of its features and then gradually add to their knowledge of the software and use a more complete set of its features, and different users have different needs and will use different features sets. This is why software should be as customisable as possible and not try to restrict features and functionality, but rather allow the user to customise the software to their tastes. One feature that seems useless to one person is likely essential to someone else.
You just summed up an essential part of Firefox philosophy.
If it can be displayed on screen, it can be copied. If it can be played back throuh speakers, it can be copied. If it can be read, it can be copied.
You may loss one or more: - quality - compression/memory usage - lots of CPU power to recompress without further compression loss - freedom for violating the law.
But if you see/hear it, you can copy it. As long as you remember that, no copy protection mechanism will ever stop you. It's only the matter how far back you go from the final analogue output to the digital source and where you tap into the stream to create a copy - the closer to the source, the more protection mechanisms are left, but the less quality is lost as well.
Time to look into my M2 poll and cull some braindead moderations.
Say, a tire in your car tends to explode from time to time at random, putting you on risk of death. Are you all -that- grateful the manufacturer sells your car with their own tires and not letting the dealers, or even you, to replace them with something safer?
And now, despite their long history of failed attempts to fix exploding tires in their cars, now they want to charge extra for replacement for a safer version. "Wow, great!" you shout.
Unfortunately nobody got killed in IE crash yet, and EULA protects MS from any damage claims for loss of data and money.
I mean, I already use Thunderbird for mail. But the webpage editor is a great to scrap together a webpage (and then clean up the HTML by hand), the Chatzilla is great way to access IRC channels, if for nothing else, for free Linux user support, and for quite a few other things...
if all these come as stanalone appliations from Mozilla (no, no mIrc, no Dreamweaver please...) then I'll probably abandon Mozilla.
WikipediA SUCKS.com In no way is this site connected to Wikipedia.org
SOLLOG SAYS SLASHDOT.ORG RULES
If you think Wikipedia Sucks email the owner jwales@wikia.com
Did you know the founder of wikipedia is a self admitted pornographer?
Wikipedia.org is now one of the top 300 sites in the world for traffic as ranked by Alexa. Reporters from around the world are starting to cite Wikipedia as a 'source'. Academia is starting to cite wikipedia as a 'source'.
I don't know... maybe just some slashdotter hacked his site???
But if Sollog wanted to show "how cool he is" to slashdotters, he failed miserably. A true prophet should know most of slashdotters loathe slashdot dearly and that slashdot sucks a big time...:) (just compare the number of pro-slashdot opinions and anti-slashdot ones, found on slashdot... uh, unless you read at +1)
Slashdot Mirror
I got the "going nowhere fast" movies (Halo speedrun), but the idea of speedrun caught me so much that just at the same time I've downloaded Halflife speedrun and Quake speedrun. My impression: Gosh, Halo is so lame!!! I mean, you move so slowly, everything moves like a snail, enemies make up with numbers and durablity for their wits and speed... Just check it yourself. Halo is SLOW! YAWN!
My opinion: What fun is it to load 40 bullets into hardly moving bulky bastard who from time to time shots at you and you move so slowly that you don't even bother to dodge?
For me it's MUCH more fun to load 40 bullets into walls trying to get a fast-moving, smart, one-shot enemy while trying to avoid it. I love where the game engine provides just enough speed for the player to need to stop to regain orientation and slow down just to be able to do things right. That was playing the Alien in AvP1, very vulnerable, stealthy, strong at melee, helpless at ranged combat, but devilishly fast... In AvP2 it got severely crippled. It lost its greatest advantage - speed.
There are still people who "discover" Tetris, Arcanoid, FF7, Worms...
There are several extremely simple old games that will never get too old. True, they don't catch everyone's taste, but I guess at least some of these kids would enjoy them.
I "discovered" Zork some 3 years ago and enjoyed it immensely. I spent some nice time on roguelikes when QuakeII was on top. I killed Sepiroth for the first time about when FFXI was released. Was I impressed? Hell, yes! And I guess most of kids who aren't complete idiots, given a little patience to get through first impressions, would be impressed.
I think you misunderstand the idea of competition/competitiveness.
Few doubt Intel makes -better- processors. Yes, better quality, better top speed, better reliablity. But worse bang for the buck. In times when AMD competed with Cyrix and such, and their CPUs were vastly worse than Intel, everyone had to think twice before buying the "cheaper" one. Now the differences are minor and buying Intel is a gesture of extravagance or paranoia - because all qualities of AMD are just satisfactory and what Intel gives extra above that just mostly isn't worth its price. Sure, Intel still has upper hand in certain markets - high-reliablity servers, mission-critical equipment, hardware doing tasks of such value that price of the CPU is insignificantly low and value of the reliablity gain is invaluable.
If by increasing reliablity of the application by 1% you increase profit by $10.000/month, $50 for a better CPU is nothing...
The problem is by investing into even more modern factory Intel may try to keep upper hand in the markets it owns totally (serious business etc), try to extend its share in markets where other CPU families are strong (science, servers, heavy number crunching) but certainly won't gain anyone from the "home computer" zone, people who think 3GHZ may be too much and $200 is a lot. They are those who buy Celerons, because "genuine Pentium" are too expensive, but we all know, Celerons are crap and Athlon is way better (and Duron is even cheaper) - comparable price, better quality. So either they lower prices or increase quality of their "budget" products to compete with AMD or they just won't cut into AMD's market share.
Their move may be profitable - or not. But it won't make them competitive against AMD. Wrong market, wrong set of features.
AMD got the lead because they offer better performance for the same price or better price for the same performance (or somewhere inbetween). Intel WON'T win the race by spending more money on much faster, much stronger and much more expensive hardware. Do you think they will let these $2B just evaporate? They will try to get it back in processor prices. And that's their way to failure.
Other thing besides competing in CPU prices Intel could do would be to remove overclocking cap (say, by overclocking you void warranty, if they want to protect themselves from people who burn their CPUs) and possibly limit other such monopolist practices that people just perceive as customer-unfriendly.
Or what would the system answer to "Who is Bush?"
"Bush is the president of *": 888 results.
"Bush is an idiot": 5,830 results.
Actually correct? Who cares? Politically incorrect and that's what matters!
Feed it the news about Iraq. Then ask it what the war was about.
Good bye, new system, too dangerous for "national security".
you must be realy new here :)
FYI as you seem to be a honest nice guy and it would be a pity to see you eaten.
This is not "this forum". This is Slashdot. Internet is vast and you'll find all kind of places there. Nice flash sites for kids and dark, dangerous places inhabited by murky individuals. Slashdot is definitely on the dark side. Think of a bar/pub where all kind of military-related people - soldiers, mercenaries, hired guns, assassins, spies, criminals, common thugs come. They have the common interest of learning the latest news and chance to band up with someone on some kind of "mission", be it defusing a bomb or breaking some bones of some guy owning one of them some bucks. There are many wannabes who come with illusions of noble errants to save the world and become quite quicklu disillusioned. There are also random visitors who heard about the "military-themed bar" and expect a place where they can get some news and meet people proficient in the job (imagining it to be something like a military canteen). Nobody here trusts each other because we all know everybody here IS more or less dangerous. Don't confuse "envy" marked by green/blue mark "friend/fan" with real friendship. It's professional. We never trust our "friends". What people here have in common is that they like a good fight. Many are very happy to start a burt. Sometimes some subject emerges, that pissess off almost everyone and then we just move our asses and kick whoever pisses us off. But much more often some jackass or smartass drops something that starts internal battle, and since our battle-hardened veterans know most of the old tricks by heart, one that actually works faces deep appreciation - even if it pisses off. But clueless newcomers often get eaten - just for cruel fun. The floor is littered with landmines.
Beware of Slashdot.
HIBT?
Damned commercial spammer.
-1 overrated, Timothy.
In one hand, sorry for no warning. In the other hand, if your workplace policy is such that you could lose job over what appears on your screen, you should NOT open ANY unknown links from posts on Slashdot, warning or not. One thing you can be sure, people linking to pages forwarding to some sites from the .cx domain won't issue such a warning.
I haven't tested that feature myself but it seems like Klaus Knopper has some blind relative or something, considering how much effort was put in this set of features in Knoppix. I mean, I had to use Knoppix a lot for some time and I was stumbling upon pieces "for the blind" all the time. Knoppix seems to be very serious about that, down to pushing boot-up messages to a reader device...
Okay, since you seem to read between lines where there's nothing written. (schizophrenia?) not trying to explain anything more, just answering, point by point (cartesian product):
WHAT DID FAR CRY DO, IN THE AREA OF (...) THAT WAS (...)
A. GAME DESIGN
1. NEW - Nothing worth mentioning.
2. REVOLUTIONARY - Little if anything.
3. NOT RUN-OF-THE-MILL - probably nothing.
B. CONCEPT
1. NEW - Nothing.
2. REVOLUTIONARY - Nothing.
3. NOT RUN-OF-THE-MILL - Difficult to tackle, though insignificant by itself. Just count as nothing.
C. GAME PLAY
1. NEW - Nothing special.
2. REVOLUTIONARY - Nothing.
3. NOT RUN-OF-THE-MILL - Hours or days of really enjoyable gameplay.
And everything boils down to gameplay being interesting as this is the only thing that matters. And what in nowaday world of boring games is truly unique. Revolutionary or new? No, there were some enjoyable games in the past. Special and rare - certainly. Forget that I said "foliage" and "infinite view distance". These are just features I like but by themselves they mean nothing. What factors come into a "great game"? If this question could be answered, we wouldn't have crappy games on market. Certainly good engine alone is not enough, as ID proves. Neither is a detailed world with atmosphere, on good engine, as proves Valve.
BTW, I'm trying to finish Final Fantasy 7. For maybe 5th time now. "Vintage" graphics far below today's standards, engine sucked from the very beginning, a bit annoying interface, storyline in major part linear, plot sometimes ridiculously silly/naive... But it's still a great game.
ps. Post something intelligent from time to time, you'll eventually get the karma bonus too.
Now you change what you said. You said:
There is absolutely nothing special
Now you say:
FarCry simply wasn't a revolutionary game
You seem to limit value of the game to number of features of the engine. I personally say, screw "features of engine" and such. Evaluate quality. What is "quality" of a game? Fundamentally games are entertainment industry and so the entertainment value is essential. (just like movies, many multi-billion superproductions that are forgotten and amateur movies that make it to the top, just because they are more interesting). What makes FarCry special? That it leaves the competition far behind in playablity, entertainment factor. What makes it revolutionary? Uh, not that much at all? Just a piece of really well done job. Combining more or less known pieces many have used in the past but very few successfully (that is making them FUN!) and just getting the old thing done right...
Think Half Life 1. Was it "special"? No doubt. But what contributed to its success? 16bit textures? Improved physics? The flashlight and spray? No, major factors were the great plot, artistically crafted graphics creating the atmosphere, interesting challenges and possiblities, combined with very moderate amount of bugs. In short, playablity.
Both HL2 and D3 are revolutionary when it comes to technology - just as many other technologically revolutionary games before them, but neither of them is _special_. Especially D3 is "engine plus demo levels" release - "buy our engine and write great games, see what the game can do and how much better it could be given the right plot". With HL2, the authors concentrated on being perfect too much. Too many details, too little time. What was made was good, but it should be some 10 times bigger and without these necessary size cuts like linearity.
Great engines. Too bad the data files that come with them don't live up to the hype.
...unlimited field of view, a lot of foliage...
Yes, not -that- much.
Technique/engine is one thing. Content is another. A printout of a photo of dump of junk on glossy photopaper, in 4000DPI, in 64bit color will still present a dump of junk. Much simpler printout of a photo of a waterfall will still cause better impression. Doom? Hey, something like 10 years ago I already thought about making a game, where you play a blind shaolin monk and play only using earphones, screen completely dark -all- the time. HL2 sure is nicely made etc but it's way too -small- (short, linear, closed) to mean something serious.
Thanks. By the way, yes, I -am- a zoophile. That is: a person who doesn't think animals are "the worse kind", finds their psyche equally rich and usually better in moral standards than psyche of average humans, and learns from them a lot - they are very wise in their own way. I've learned things like the species is just another meaningless barrier like race, nationality, language or color of skin. Of course there ARE differences, but they aren't -that- significant. I've learned it's silly to consider sex some kind of taboo. It's pleasant, it's fun and if both sides want it, why not? (and to all those who say "animals can't say no", just try to rape a mare. Zoos call that "airborne express". Plus they can say "yes" way more clearly than most humans.) I've learned not to worry about stuff I can't change, to enjoy simple pleasures of life, to recognize who I can trust and who not, to ignore petty little minds who find pleasure in barking at anything they can't quite understand, and quite a few other useful things. And i larned species is definitely no barrier for true love.
Uh, I don't understand the hate. Are you jealous or what?
Oh, come on, just a harmless joke. Sorry for no "adult content" warning. (uh... I think the meaning of "adult" has strayed a bit from what the dictionary says. I personally wouldn't describe that one as "mature" :)
Okay, disclaimer here - the linked movie isn't quite work-safe though not "that kind". Funny. Not trollish.
That's the inside jargon. Outsiders are permitted to use "pervert". Just like the hacker/cracker confusion. :)
Ok, point by point.
Ive heard from others it has fewer features and options,
resulting in smaller memory footprint, less overhead and generally faster and "lighter" code - shorter load times, shorter page rendering times etc.
and a more dumbed down UI. Dumbed down UI != ease of use.
That's what you got wrong. The UI is task-oriented, not feature-oriented. In this way it's "dumbed down" - the user doesn't have to care X is a component of Y and Y belongs to Z. "Advanced"? "Security&Privacy"? "Tools"? Where is it? User cares only that X does task of type A and so it can be found in the "A". Associating downloaded file type - "downloads". Easy and simple. The navigation routes don't correspond to the program internal structure but to user requirements. The options are all there, only the less used ones are dug in deeper to expose the frequently used ones.
I think the less customisability software has the harder it becomes to use, for newbies and experienced users alike.
Another thing you get wrong. While Mozilla is a combine with kitchen sink and hardly anything to add, Firefox is meant to be "bare bones to be extended". Plugins for Firefox may change its face totally and they aren't meant as "some extra fancy" but as an essential component. You build your browser to be what you want it to be by adding what you need, not by switching off what you don't want. In this respect Firefox is way more customizable than Mozilla - just not "out of the box".
It becomes more difficult for the user to customise the software for their preferences and usage pattern, and more difficult to accomplish certian tasks.
Straight opposite. First - "reasonable defaults" so there's no thing like in MSIE prefs where I run a line of checkboxes and toggle all, on to off, off to on, because -all- of them are against my preference. And then flexiblity to add any extras you desire.
The trick with useability is not to remove customisbility, but rather make software as customisable as possible but simply design a good configuration user interface that places more commonly used options more prominantly than advanced one, such as through placing the more advanced options on advanced options screens or other such techniques, thus keeping the more advanced options from confusing newbies but allowing people to gradually begin using them and discover them (and making it easy to discover them by making them all avialable through a good UI) as they become familiar with software. People often start out using software by using a subset of its features and then gradually add to their knowledge of the software and use a more complete set of its features, and different users have different needs and will use different features sets. This is why software should be as customisable as possible and not try to restrict features and functionality, but rather allow the user to customise the software to their tastes. One feature that seems useless to one person is likely essential to someone else.
You just summed up an essential part of Firefox philosophy.
www.spreadfirefox.com
s /SpreadFirefox.jpg ;)
Or some community submission for that matter:
http://vcl.ctrl-c.liu.se/vcl/Artists/Wooly-Mitten
Call me crazy but I am having a hard time finding any truth in the "facts" as reported by Microsoft.
Damned karma whore!
If it can be displayed on screen, it can be copied.
If it can be played back throuh speakers, it can be copied.
If it can be read, it can be copied.
You may loss one or more:
- quality
- compression/memory usage
- lots of CPU power to recompress without further compression loss
- freedom for violating the law.
But if you see/hear it, you can copy it. As long as you remember that, no copy protection mechanism will ever stop you. It's only the matter how far back you go from the final analogue output to the digital source and where you tap into the stream to create a copy - the closer to the source, the more protection mechanisms are left, but the less quality is lost as well.
Time to look into my M2 poll and cull some braindead moderations.
Say, a tire in your car tends to explode from time to time at random, putting you on risk of death. Are you all -that- grateful the manufacturer sells your car with their own tires and not letting the dealers, or even you, to replace them with something safer?
And now, despite their long history of failed attempts to fix exploding tires in their cars, now they want to charge extra for replacement for a safer version. "Wow, great!" you shout.
Unfortunately nobody got killed in IE crash yet, and EULA protects MS from any damage claims for loss of data and money.
...because of the cool extras.
I mean, I already use Thunderbird for mail.
But the webpage editor is a great to scrap together a webpage (and then clean up the HTML by hand), the Chatzilla is great way to access IRC channels, if for nothing else, for free Linux user support, and for quite a few other things...
if all these come as stanalone appliations from Mozilla (no, no mIrc, no Dreamweaver please...) then I'll probably abandon Mozilla.
[quote] It's locked right no since the /.ers are being especially stupid today[/quote]
You definitely underestimate the average daily stupidity of slashdotters.
I mean...
.com
:)
Forum - Articles - Donate - Banners
WikipediA SUCKS
In no way is this site connected to Wikipedia.org
SOLLOG SAYS SLASHDOT.ORG RULES
If you think Wikipedia Sucks email the owner jwales@wikia.com
Did you know the founder of wikipedia is a self admitted pornographer?
Wikipedia.org is now one of the top 300 sites in the world for traffic as ranked by Alexa. Reporters from around the world are starting to cite Wikipedia as a 'source'. Academia is starting to cite wikipedia as a 'source'.
I don't know... maybe just some slashdotter hacked his site???
But if Sollog wanted to show "how cool he is" to slashdotters, he failed miserably. A true prophet should know most of slashdotters loathe slashdot dearly and that slashdot sucks a big time...
(just compare the number of pro-slashdot opinions and anti-slashdot ones, found on slashdot... uh, unless you read at +1)