This reminds me of an article I read about banning the words "master" and "slave" from being taught in colleges in reference to installing hard disk drives in a computer. What's next? Rename crackers to "salty carb sticks"?
I'm not entirely sure but I'm PRETTY sure that GC is far more powerful than PS2. At least that's what I heard about cross-platform titles like Resident Evil 4. The PS2 is an old clunker, man!
Only because you haven't played it yet! Between the portals and the antigravity walkways there is TONS of new strategy and life in this shooter in terms of blasting and puzzle solving. You really have to see these features to understand the gravity (yuk yuk) of these design additions. I'm not much on multiplayer games but I might try a deathmatch or two just to try out the mechanics.
Also, not that it's new per se, the voice acting is really excellent in this game. The fact that the protagonist has a voice and a distinct personality is a stark contrast to the silent-but-deadly Gordon Freeman of Half Life.
At the end of the day you're shooting people in a shooter game. That ain't gonna change. But hey, you jump in platformers and you sneak in stealth games. You can only do so much to a genre without ailienating your audience, but in my experience Prey delivered a really solid mix of originality and familiarity.
I surf in spurts so my browser window is rarely open for more than 4 hours. Firefox should definitely accommodate both our surfing styles. I think many people might be persuaded to close their browser windows more often if Firefox didn't take so darn long to load. I recommend a memory-resident quick load agent in another comment on this topic.
By the way, do you have your Windows page files optimized for your huge memory pools? I support my 1.5GB of RAM with a 256MB page file on my C drive and a 512MB page file on my other SATA drive. A small page file must be kept on the system disk for stability purposes, and another small but not-too-small page file is best placed on a separate disk for the sake of speed. I made sure both of these page files have a static size, not a range, to ensure the disk space is always allocated and the page file is never fragmented.
Everybody loves unsolicited advice, right?:)
Good luck to us all for FireFox 2.5! Hopefully they'll finally throw in that new Gecko engine!
You must be a heck of a power surfer! I've never ever seen FF reach such a hefty memory footprint, and due to all the complaints similar to yours I've been sure to watch! I'm not saying you're making this up, but many of my friends are power users and none of them have had this trouble either.
Have you been updating FireFox since the pre 1.0 days? Maybe you need to do a teardown and reinstall.
One thing we do have in common is having to track down extensions that haven't been updated in time for a new release. Mozilla definitely had the right idea when they started distributing tiny patches instead of requiring a complete client download for every update, but it would have been nice if extension updates were awarded a similar upgrade.
You're absolutely right about that. The game hacking community is a great example of this. The Diablo series is riddled with hacks and cheats, and there's a huge community of programmers that share their tips on packet analysis and race condition man-in-the-middle attacks.
What OSS really needs is a killer app to show that the model can be profitable. How do you go about honouring troubleshootes in a for-profit OSS game? Do you pay them? Do you make them sign a waiver saying forfeiting payment before they may look at the code? I'm not asking YOU these questions, but I can picture a game publisher wondering the same things when presented with this idea.
If they just spawned a thread for each tab it would solve the responsiveness problems without the overhead of multiple processes.
Out of curiosity, what would happen if one tab's thread crashed? Would it take down the whole browser? Or something worse?
Re:Already losing interest.
on
Romero's New Gig
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's really doubtful anything new involving weapons and combat can be invented anymore.
What about Half Life's gravity gun? What about Black's art style? What about Prey's... EVERYTHING?
Yeah, there are only so many ways you can shoot a guy in the crotch, but FPS is the (second?) best selling genre on PC so people aren't getting tired of the genre yet.
Then again, I never thought I'd find fairly good shooters boring, but somehow paying $5 each for Operation Snowblind and Pariah felt like I got overcharged $8.
Corporations are not in the business of letting their employees do whatever they want with company property. In many countries it is perfectly legal for companies to log all activity on company-owned assets including computers, phones, supply cabinets, and even coffee machines.
But that wasn't really my point. My point was that IE is an open door for spyware and other malware which costs tons of money and man hours to remedy, plus it puts confidential corporate data at risk. Firefox puts a stop to 99.9% of this risk (via security through obscurity mostly).
When it happened to Valve with Half Life 2 the attack was pretty well executed. The code was never put on a live server but it got stolen just the same.
Gabe Newell noticed one day that his computer was acting slowly. He scanned for viruses but found nothing so he formatted and reinstalled. A few days later an admin noticed that someone had accessed Gabe's email, and further investigation revealed that the code tree had been accessed and large portions had been copied. The attacker somehow got a keylogger and backdoor tunnel installed on Valve's internal machines which provided a relay to the internal-only servers.
I fear a theft will cause a huge release delay. The game is slated to have a major multiplayer aspect with massively multiplayer staging areas and instanced group mission areas. If the code was stolen there is a significant risk of cheaters ruining the game for everyone. To be fair, this has happened in pretty much every Bill Roper game since he makes earning stats so tantilizing, but in the past it was (presumably) done without access to the source.
The big variables here are whether games will be served by the company or by players, what the pricing scheme will be (thus the urgency to fix the game), and, of course, how complete the stolen code was. For reference, the code to every single id Software game was leaked before release, and those games did just fine technically and commercially. No one could reuse stolen code commercially without getting caught, and the publisher could instate whatever crazy engine licensing agreement they want in that case.
Regardless, I adore Roper's games and I can't wait for the release of Hellgate: London. I hope I don't have to wait much longer to play it!
I have to say that I'm impressed in general with video game consumers. The most successful products are the consoles that treat their customers right. PS2 creamed the other consoles of its generation due to great games, an outstanding gamepad, an out-of-the-box DVD movie player, a low price, and backward compatibility. Even though the PS2 has the crappiest hardware of the 3 consoles it's still far and away the best seller.
It's especially fascinating to see Nintendo out-Sony Sony! The DS has great games with tiny load times, innovative display and control schemes, a low price, and backward compatibility. It's the big seller by an enormous margin even though the graphics pale in comparison to the very pretty PSP, which has loads of (severely locked-down) additional features, but I think people are much more comfortable carrying a clamshell portable game system than a scratch-prone beauty queen.
There are so many markets where the biggest names get the biggest sales, regardless of quality (fear not, I won't start my iPod rant). However, in the gaming world I feel fairly safe going with the crowd.
Big kudos to Nintendo for the DS. They've earned all the fanfare.
Just curious, what is it about Firefox you find bloaty? I find it to be a very lightweight browser, though the new spell checker is a little above and beyond (which I like).
I know it's important to send crash details to Mozilla, but ever since I read an Ars Technica article I can't stand that damn Quality Feedback Agent. The odd time Firefox crashes you're greeted with a window saying "Welcome to the Firefox Quality Feedback Agent". Don't friggin welcome me! Console me for having to bear the inconvenience of a crash!
At least Slashdot is heads and shoulders above Digg where every headline has the word "AMAZING!!"
Writing headlines is a great job!! It must have been quite challenging! I've always admired the BBC's headlines in Firefox's "Recent Headlines" RSS - not only must the story be summarized, but the column is so narrow that there's only room for about 25 characters!
I'm sure they'll make a way to identify the traffic. They'll encapsulate the first packet with an identifier or something. Plus, who says it has to run on the default torrent port? World of Warcraft uses nonstandard ports and the client uses UPNP to try to configure routers automatically.
Companies can enforce whatever they want internally. My company, VERY oddly, wrote a custom app that only supports full functionality in Firefox. When you enforce one browser externally, however, potential customers will simply find a competitor's website that works with their browser.
Most people don't know that extensions exist, never mind how to install them. A built-in spell checker will improve the whole internet! What's the problem? Mozilla already has a great spell checker engine from its Thunderbird products and it looks like they just ported it over to Firefox.
Prepare Firefox code so that it can be easily branded and customized.
I know you can change the URL of the "throbber" icon at the top-right by browsing about:config and changing the browser.throbber.url preference, so I'm sure that could be configured easily enough in an extension or alternate installer. Regardless of feasibility, this is a great idea and should be taken seriously!
You get my pseudomod for insightful! I'd love to see this feature, though I'm not sure it could be trusted in the hands of anyone but power users. I wonder if it will keep on checking for updates to previously out-of-date extensions or if we'll have to download them again.
MS called their new games console "Xbox 360" because it has a 3 in it. They were afraid a 2 would make it look inferior to the PS3. Effective? Maybe. Stupid? Definitely.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of an article I read about banning the words "master" and "slave" from being taught in colleges in reference to installing hard disk drives in a computer. What's next? Rename crackers to "salty carb sticks"?
The musicians deserve credit too! My favourite is Finnish producer Tero who has done live PA's with nothing but 2 Commodore 64s!
I'm not entirely sure but I'm PRETTY sure that GC is far more powerful than PS2. At least that's what I heard about cross-platform titles like Resident Evil 4. The PS2 is an old clunker, man!
It's funny you should mention Prey...
Only because you haven't played it yet! Between the portals and the antigravity walkways there is TONS of new strategy and life in this shooter in terms of blasting and puzzle solving. You really have to see these features to understand the gravity (yuk yuk) of these design additions. I'm not much on multiplayer games but I might try a deathmatch or two just to try out the mechanics.
Also, not that it's new per se, the voice acting is really excellent in this game. The fact that the protagonist has a voice and a distinct personality is a stark contrast to the silent-but-deadly Gordon Freeman of Half Life.
At the end of the day you're shooting people in a shooter game. That ain't gonna change. But hey, you jump in platformers and you sneak in stealth games. You can only do so much to a genre without ailienating your audience, but in my experience Prey delivered a really solid mix of originality and familiarity.
I surf in spurts so my browser window is rarely open for more than 4 hours. Firefox should definitely accommodate both our surfing styles. I think many people might be persuaded to close their browser windows more often if Firefox didn't take so darn long to load. I recommend a memory-resident quick load agent in another comment on this topic.
:)
By the way, do you have your Windows page files optimized for your huge memory pools? I support my 1.5GB of RAM with a 256MB page file on my C drive and a 512MB page file on my other SATA drive. A small page file must be kept on the system disk for stability purposes, and another small but not-too-small page file is best placed on a separate disk for the sake of speed. I made sure both of these page files have a static size, not a range, to ensure the disk space is always allocated and the page file is never fragmented.
Everybody loves unsolicited advice, right?
Good luck to us all for FireFox 2.5! Hopefully they'll finally throw in that new Gecko engine!
I believe the corporation is BitTorrent Inc. It is indeed a stupid name for the company. What's their product called? BitTorrent bittorrent?
You must be a heck of a power surfer! I've never ever seen FF reach such a hefty memory footprint, and due to all the complaints similar to yours I've been sure to watch! I'm not saying you're making this up, but many of my friends are power users and none of them have had this trouble either.
Have you been updating FireFox since the pre 1.0 days? Maybe you need to do a teardown and reinstall.
One thing we do have in common is having to track down extensions that haven't been updated in time for a new release. Mozilla definitely had the right idea when they started distributing tiny patches instead of requiring a complete client download for every update, but it would have been nice if extension updates were awarded a similar upgrade.
You're absolutely right about that. The game hacking community is a great example of this. The Diablo series is riddled with hacks and cheats, and there's a huge community of programmers that share their tips on packet analysis and race condition man-in-the-middle attacks.
What OSS really needs is a killer app to show that the model can be profitable. How do you go about honouring troubleshootes in a for-profit OSS game? Do you pay them? Do you make them sign a waiver saying forfeiting payment before they may look at the code? I'm not asking YOU these questions, but I can picture a game publisher wondering the same things when presented with this idea.
Uh, yeah... hasn't this been a feature since 0.x?
If they just spawned a thread for each tab it would solve the responsiveness problems without the overhead of multiple processes.
Out of curiosity, what would happen if one tab's thread crashed? Would it take down the whole browser? Or something worse?
It's really doubtful anything new involving weapons and combat can be invented anymore.
What about Half Life's gravity gun? What about Black's art style? What about Prey's... EVERYTHING?
Yeah, there are only so many ways you can shoot a guy in the crotch, but FPS is the (second?) best selling genre on PC so people aren't getting tired of the genre yet.
Then again, I never thought I'd find fairly good shooters boring, but somehow paying $5 each for Operation Snowblind and Pariah felt like I got overcharged $8.
"Do ray mi fa so long, sucker!!" (repeat 30x)
Corporations are not in the business of letting their employees do whatever they want with company property. In many countries it is perfectly legal for companies to log all activity on company-owned assets including computers, phones, supply cabinets, and even coffee machines.
But that wasn't really my point. My point was that IE is an open door for spyware and other malware which costs tons of money and man hours to remedy, plus it puts confidential corporate data at risk. Firefox puts a stop to 99.9% of this risk (via security through obscurity mostly).
When it happened to Valve with Half Life 2 the attack was pretty well executed. The code was never put on a live server but it got stolen just the same.
Gabe Newell noticed one day that his computer was acting slowly. He scanned for viruses but found nothing so he formatted and reinstalled. A few days later an admin noticed that someone had accessed Gabe's email, and further investigation revealed that the code tree had been accessed and large portions had been copied. The attacker somehow got a keylogger and backdoor tunnel installed on Valve's internal machines which provided a relay to the internal-only servers.
I fear a theft will cause a huge release delay. The game is slated to have a major multiplayer aspect with massively multiplayer staging areas and instanced group mission areas. If the code was stolen there is a significant risk of cheaters ruining the game for everyone. To be fair, this has happened in pretty much every Bill Roper game since he makes earning stats so tantilizing, but in the past it was (presumably) done without access to the source.
The big variables here are whether games will be served by the company or by players, what the pricing scheme will be (thus the urgency to fix the game), and, of course, how complete the stolen code was. For reference, the code to every single id Software game was leaked before release, and those games did just fine technically and commercially. No one could reuse stolen code commercially without getting caught, and the publisher could instate whatever crazy engine licensing agreement they want in that case.
Regardless, I adore Roper's games and I can't wait for the release of Hellgate: London. I hope I don't have to wait much longer to play it!
I have to say that I'm impressed in general with video game consumers. The most successful products are the consoles that treat their customers right. PS2 creamed the other consoles of its generation due to great games, an outstanding gamepad, an out-of-the-box DVD movie player, a low price, and backward compatibility. Even though the PS2 has the crappiest hardware of the 3 consoles it's still far and away the best seller.
It's especially fascinating to see Nintendo out-Sony Sony! The DS has great games with tiny load times, innovative display and control schemes, a low price, and backward compatibility. It's the big seller by an enormous margin even though the graphics pale in comparison to the very pretty PSP, which has loads of (severely locked-down) additional features, but I think people are much more comfortable carrying a clamshell portable game system than a scratch-prone beauty queen.
There are so many markets where the biggest names get the biggest sales, regardless of quality (fear not, I won't start my iPod rant). However, in the gaming world I feel fairly safe going with the crowd.
Big kudos to Nintendo for the DS. They've earned all the fanfare.
Just curious, what is it about Firefox you find bloaty? I find it to be a very lightweight browser, though the new spell checker is a little above and beyond (which I like).
I know it's important to send crash details to Mozilla, but ever since I read an Ars Technica article I can't stand that damn Quality Feedback Agent. The odd time Firefox crashes you're greeted with a window saying "Welcome to the Firefox Quality Feedback Agent". Don't friggin welcome me! Console me for having to bear the inconvenience of a crash!
A few months old now, but likely indicative of trends:
7 /
Canada leads the world in Firefox Usage (love that capitalization)
http://www.digitalhomecanada.com/content/view/124
At least Slashdot is heads and shoulders above Digg where every headline has the word "AMAZING!!"
Writing headlines is a great job!! It must have been quite challenging! I've always admired the BBC's headlines in Firefox's "Recent Headlines" RSS - not only must the story be summarized, but the column is so narrow that there's only room for about 25 characters!
I'm sure they'll make a way to identify the traffic. They'll encapsulate the first packet with an identifier or something. Plus, who says it has to run on the default torrent port? World of Warcraft uses nonstandard ports and the client uses UPNP to try to configure routers automatically.
Companies can enforce whatever they want internally. My company, VERY oddly, wrote a custom app that only supports full functionality in Firefox. When you enforce one browser externally, however, potential customers will simply find a competitor's website that works with their browser.
Most people don't know that extensions exist, never mind how to install them. A built-in spell checker will improve the whole internet! What's the problem? Mozilla already has a great spell checker engine from its Thunderbird products and it looks like they just ported it over to Firefox.
Prepare Firefox code so that it can be easily branded and customized.
I know you can change the URL of the "throbber" icon at the top-right by browsing about:config and changing the browser.throbber.url preference, so I'm sure that could be configured easily enough in an extension or alternate installer. Regardless of feasibility, this is a great idea and should be taken seriously!
You get my pseudomod for insightful! I'd love to see this feature, though I'm not sure it could be trusted in the hands of anyone but power users. I wonder if it will keep on checking for updates to previously out-of-date extensions or if we'll have to download them again.
Does that strategy actually work?
MS called their new games console "Xbox 360" because it has a 3 in it. They were afraid a 2 would make it look inferior to the PS3. Effective? Maybe. Stupid? Definitely.