Actually, the Indexing Service has been in Windows for a while now. Indeed, and I'll concede that in Vista (and backported to XP now with Live Search) it's probably actually usable.
The question wasn't whether Microsoft has a search engine that good. The question was whether they've even done something that innovative -- which wouldn't be saying much.
It's funny; 12 years later, despite only mildly changed marketshares, Leopard and Vista kind of reversed those roles, didn't they? Worse than that. Tiger and Vista reversed those roles. Leopard is all that and a bag of Time Machine.
I didn't like the "context" based access to the dai-jo (weapon) Agreed. I like it in theory -- no reason to let me whack every wall pointlessly, looking for the one that's secretly fragile, or other equally pointless things. But it's annoying to have my stance alter suddenly because there's an enemy nearby, and it just feels wrong to not be able to swing it whenever I want.
or the button mashing based fighting. That, I actually liked quite a lot, especially because there was so little fighting at all.
I would say, more of the same. No qualifiers -- the story was weird and felt like it had pieces missing, and I actually liked that, felt like it gave it kind of a surreal feeling. And the gameplay was pretty much exactly what it needed to be.
The PC port was hilarious at times -- I think it didn't quite always grasp CPU scaling. It'd detect the CPU speed as being slow, then it'd start actually using CPU, so the CPU would clock up -- and the game would be insanely fast.
Most of Microsoft's innovation isn't particularly evolutionary, though -- it's either static or devolutionary. Not true of everything, but most things...
That's why, I think. It's the irritation of seeing really good ideas elsewhere reduced to lowest-common-denominator crap on Windows.
Simple example: Google Desktop Search, and later, Spotlight. Indices had been used, and they'd been used on desktops. They hadn't been used to search an archive of personal files, though.
Keep in mind, also, that you're including things which aren't part of the GNOME distribution -- at least, Firefox is not. It just happens to use the gtk+ libs. So, just running through my fairly standard Kubuntu menu:
Strigi SpeedCrunch Printing Hardware Drivers Manager Install Adept Manager Screensaver Bovo Shishen-Sho Patience Card Game Potato Guy SameGame (I should get double points for this -- your version is called SameGNOME, if I remember) System Settings Gwenview
And on KDE4, there's also Plasma, Phonon, and friends -- pretty much none of the new technologies have K in the word.
It obviously doesn't run KDE3 under the hood, or it wouldn't be KDE4... I'm thinking more along the lines of, 99% of everything is KDE4, but some critical daemon or library has to be KDE3 for some reason.
I didn't think so, though, especially given how much longer a KDE3 app takes to start on KDE4 than the equivalent KDE4 app. (Which doesn't say anything about their respective speed; the converse is also true.)
the system can be gamed. Any system can be gamed. The question is, how easily?
Green means good, safe, and secure. Better than white or red, right? Yes, actually.
Cheap validation certificates, for cheap CAs, pretty much just check that I own the domain. So, pretty much, they'll send an email to the person in the whois, and that's about it.
So, an absurdly cheap certificate can be gamed by pwning your mailserver, or intercepting the mail somewhere, or catching the domain when you forget to renew it, or a very large number of ways other than pwning the CA or the client-side certificate cache.
With more thorough validation, they'll also check things like, if you're a corporation, that you really exist, and that this is really your website (and not just a similar-sounding one), and that you've really given your actual corporate mailing address, etc, and that you're the same person who answers your phone, etc etc. I figure they'll probably check back, too.
In other words, it reduces quite a lot of avenues of attack other than "pwn the CA" or "pwn the client-side CA cache" -- you now know, with as much certainty as that CA can give you, that this site belongs to who it says it does, and that they are a real, physical entity who you can track down and sue if they rip you off. (And, if it wasn't them, you pretty much know it's the CA and you can track them down and sue them.)
Now, it may well be security theater in the sense that it's targeting a very specific kind of attack, and that it avoids wholesale potentially better approaches (web of trust). It certainly isn't always required -- I'm thinking I don't mind $30/year for a valid SSL cert, even if it's gameable -- it's a lot less gameable than a self-signed one.
But at the same time, it is a worthwhile thing to do -- if I'm going to do Internet banking at all, I want to be damned sure that certificate was issued to my bank, and not to an email-intercepting bot.
Before you buy the Xbox Live version, realize that the Windows/Linux/Mac licenses are portable between each other, but are incompatible with the Xbox Live license.
So if you buy it for Xbox Live, you won't be able to play it anywhere else. If you buy it anywhere else, you'll be able to play it anywhere but a console.
Might still be worth it to get it on Live, just saying...
5 hours of gameplay != $20 Heard of Portal?
People bitched that Gears of War was 15-20 hours at $60. Not to mention Mass Effect around the same amount of time. So the PA game is the same 'quality' as GoW and Mass Effect? Having played some Gears of War, I had a lot more fun with this. GoW was without meaningful plot and had kind of OK gameplay -- but really, it was all about the graphics. I'd rather watch a tech demo.
Let's not forget this runs off of the Torque gaming engine with the whopping price of $750 to use the engine commercially... And what does that have to do with anything? At all?
Do yourself a favor -- download the demo. It's at least a third of the game, anyway. Then tell me it's not worth $20.
Think I'll wait for the inevitable binary patch before purchasing and I'm sure I'm not alone. Binary patch to what?
I can understand waiting for a patch to let you run off an ISO, or without a CD at all. I can understand waiting for a patch to remove the rootkit crap, so you're not risking your machine. I can understand waiting for a patch to enable offline mode.
But face it: You're already online, and on their website, to download the game. It's a trivial step to type an activation key, and you're still going to be online for that. After which, your game is activated, for all time, with no more phoning home, period.
If that's too much copy protection for you, you are not a gamer. When was the last time we had a game with this little copy protection?
Ok, that's a bit hyperbole. Even customers have to do things like enter credit card numbers, and I usually want to be online to patch it anyway.
I can safely say that I will never buy a brand-new machine -- or reformat -- without an active Internet connection.
Consider, also, that this is a downloaded game. So for your example to work, you'd have to replace your laptop, copy the downloaded installer from your old one to the new one, and try to play it, without having a net connection available.
When I bought Darwinia, from Introversion. I think it actually had less -- the download was fully unlocked and playable. But this is more usable -- I could only download a limited number of copies (even if none of these copies would ever phone home). Here, I can just grab it via straight HTTP, as many times as I need to.
I agree with the game being amazingly well done, and a lot of fun to play. But the reported figures are from one platform only (the 360) so they don't even really go so far as to show the benefits of the multi-platform release... I don't matter, but for the record, they got at least one more sale from the Linux port -- I doubt I'd have bought it if it was only Windows/360, and I'd definitely have skipped it if it was 360 only.
1. Let us disable the underlined letters in UI elements that signify the accelerators I'm curious -- why? At the very least, I hope it stays in there by default.
2. Drop the stupid K prefix. Tell you what, we'll do that when Apple drops the stupid i prefix.
From what I remember, Beryl (the Compiz fork that everyone used until it was merged again) never supported antialiasing. I don't remember what the reason was, but I suspect that there's something that makes it tricky to apply these effects to a desktop (versus a game).
Ever since they started on KDE 4, they seem to have decided to run the entire project as if it were a perpetual beta. Something doesn't work? Rewrite it! Can't finish the feature on time? Release anyway! And because of this, it should have been called a beta. They tell me that 4.2 will finally be ready...
Unless they go back to their previous development method where they actually gave a shit about quality, I'm afraid KDE will plummet in popularity. I've already switched away from it. Well, I find that 3.5 is still more usable than anything else, so I'm staying with that until 4 becomes usable. If it never does, I'll write my own.
No, I'm not kidding about that last part. Probably start with DWM or something -- I don't need that much out of a WM/desktop environment. Just a few more features to Fluxbox or Compiz and I'll be happy.
Was there somewhere or someone that said otherwise? Only the convention of a "dot-oh" release since the beginning of... since forever.
If it was meant for bleeding-edge adopters, it should have been called alpha or beta. If it was meant for application developers, call it a release candidate, or split it into two projects and call this one "kdebase 4.0".
Slashdot Mirror
The question wasn't whether Microsoft has a search engine that good. The question was whether they've even done something that innovative -- which wouldn't be saying much.
I would say, more of the same. No qualifiers -- the story was weird and felt like it had pieces missing, and I actually liked that, felt like it gave it kind of a surreal feeling. And the gameplay was pretty much exactly what it needed to be.
The PC port was hilarious at times -- I think it didn't quite always grasp CPU scaling. It'd detect the CPU speed as being slow, then it'd start actually using CPU, so the CPU would clock up -- and the game would be insanely fast.
Still, very good game.
Most of Microsoft's innovation isn't particularly evolutionary, though -- it's either static or devolutionary. Not true of everything, but most things...
That's why, I think. It's the irritation of seeing really good ideas elsewhere reduced to lowest-common-denominator crap on Windows.
Simple example: Google Desktop Search, and later, Spotlight. Indices had been used, and they'd been used on desktops. They hadn't been used to search an archive of personal files, though.
What has Microsoft done that approaches that?
Now I'm scared.
There's going to be some "Fucked 100 Fruit Fuckers", isn't there?
And probably a Testikill, just so they can.
Portal was replayable. And I have, at least some ten times, maybe more.
This really isn't.
Oh, and Portal was a better game. Quality over quantity.
And this exercise proves... what, exactly?
Keep in mind, also, that you're including things which aren't part of the GNOME distribution -- at least, Firefox is not. It just happens to use the gtk+ libs. So, just running through my fairly standard Kubuntu menu:
Strigi
SpeedCrunch
Printing
Hardware Drivers Manager
Install
Adept Manager
Screensaver
Bovo
Shishen-Sho
Patience Card Game
Potato Guy
SameGame (I should get double points for this -- your version is called SameGNOME, if I remember)
System Settings
Gwenview
And on KDE4, there's also Plasma, Phonon, and friends -- pretty much none of the new technologies have K in the word.
Now can we get back to why you even care?
I didn't think so, though, especially given how much longer a KDE3 app takes to start on KDE4 than the equivalent KDE4 app. (Which doesn't say anything about their respective speed; the converse is also true.)
Cheap validation certificates, for cheap CAs, pretty much just check that I own the domain. So, pretty much, they'll send an email to the person in the whois, and that's about it.
So, an absurdly cheap certificate can be gamed by pwning your mailserver, or intercepting the mail somewhere, or catching the domain when you forget to renew it, or a very large number of ways other than pwning the CA or the client-side certificate cache.
With more thorough validation, they'll also check things like, if you're a corporation, that you really exist, and that this is really your website (and not just a similar-sounding one), and that you've really given your actual corporate mailing address, etc, and that you're the same person who answers your phone, etc etc. I figure they'll probably check back, too.
In other words, it reduces quite a lot of avenues of attack other than "pwn the CA" or "pwn the client-side CA cache" -- you now know, with as much certainty as that CA can give you, that this site belongs to who it says it does, and that they are a real, physical entity who you can track down and sue if they rip you off. (And, if it wasn't them, you pretty much know it's the CA and you can track them down and sue them.)
Now, it may well be security theater in the sense that it's targeting a very specific kind of attack, and that it avoids wholesale potentially better approaches (web of trust). It certainly isn't always required -- I'm thinking I don't mind $30/year for a valid SSL cert, even if it's gameable -- it's a lot less gameable than a self-signed one.
But at the same time, it is a worthwhile thing to do -- if I'm going to do Internet banking at all, I want to be damned sure that certificate was issued to my bank, and not to an email-intercepting bot.
Before you buy the Xbox Live version, realize that the Windows/Linux/Mac licenses are portable between each other, but are incompatible with the Xbox Live license.
So if you buy it for Xbox Live, you won't be able to play it anywhere else. If you buy it anywhere else, you'll be able to play it anywhere but a console.
Might still be worth it to get it on Live, just saying...
Do yourself a favor -- download the demo. It's at least a third of the game, anyway. Then tell me it's not worth $20.
I think the main thing most people ran into was movement, right?
Here's a tip: Click and hold the button down. At least one reviewer never figured this out. I admit it took me awhile.
I can understand waiting for a patch to let you run off an ISO, or without a CD at all. I can understand waiting for a patch to remove the rootkit crap, so you're not risking your machine. I can understand waiting for a patch to enable offline mode.
But face it: You're already online, and on their website, to download the game. It's a trivial step to type an activation key, and you're still going to be online for that. After which, your game is activated, for all time, with no more phoning home, period.
If that's too much copy protection for you, you are not a gamer. When was the last time we had a game with this little copy protection?
And given that it only phones home once, I suspect these patches/cracks will be much easier than with some other systems -- like Steam.
Ok, that's a bit hyperbole. Even customers have to do things like enter credit card numbers, and I usually want to be online to patch it anyway.
I can safely say that I will never buy a brand-new machine -- or reformat -- without an active Internet connection.
Consider, also, that this is a downloaded game. So for your example to work, you'd have to replace your laptop, copy the downloaded installer from your old one to the new one, and try to play it, without having a net connection available.
When I bought Darwinia, from Introversion. I think it actually had less -- the download was fully unlocked and playable. But this is more usable -- I could only download a limited number of copies (even if none of these copies would ever phone home). Here, I can just grab it via straight HTTP, as many times as I need to.
I like it, so far. BitTorrent might be better, but other than that, it's the anti-Steam of online distribution.
And it supports Linux!
Yes, it was pretty damned good, but I still assert that Portal is the best $20 ever spent on a game.
From what I remember, Beryl (the Compiz fork that everyone used until it was merged again) never supported antialiasing. I don't remember what the reason was, but I suspect that there's something that makes it tricky to apply these effects to a desktop (versus a game).
No, I'm not kidding about that last part. Probably start with DWM or something -- I don't need that much out of a WM/desktop environment. Just a few more features to Fluxbox or Compiz and I'll be happy.
They tell me that most of the features are still there, just in config files (without GUI dialogs).
They also tell me that a lot is coming back in 4.1, and that 4.2 will be fully ready to take over from kde3.
If it was meant for bleeding-edge adopters, it should have been called alpha or beta. If it was meant for application developers, call it a release candidate, or split it into two projects and call this one "kdebase 4.0".
Calling it "KDE 4.0" was a mistake.