I wasn't a fan of the Mozilla browser suite, but one thing I really liked was the quick launch "agent" in the icon tray. I don't want another icon in my tray, but I would love to see Firefox preload and stay resident in memory to speed up launches. The program launches slowly sometimes and I use the browser all the time.
Then again, the browser is taking up 40MB of RAM right now which is no small chunk of change. It's no biggie for me (1.5GB RAM) but it may be unacceptable for people on lesser machines or thin clients.
I have 1.5GB of DDR400 so maybe I'm in the minority, but as long as I've used Firefox (maybe a year before 1.0) I can count the number of crashes on one hand. No doubt there are inelegant programming solutions to many issues with the browser, but they are all but transparent from my experience. And I use about 20 extensions!
ActiveX is a proprietary MS technology. MS won't let anyone else use it. I think the days of ActiveX are over due to MS's stubbornness. Intranets may use it, but companies with relatively open web browsing policies would be nuts not to force employees to use Firefox for everything but internal traffic. I run 2 anti-spyware programs about once a month and I haven't found a single piece of malware in YEARS since I switched to Firefox.
What spell checker has ever blocked content? Does Word prevent you from opening documents with misspellings? The grammar nazis are on Slashdot, not in software.
Firefox's spell checker only checks text input fields. You can right-click any text field and choose whether it should be spellchecked (default is yes). Why inform you of misspellings on a static page you can't fix?
And I'm sure Tori is beside herself with grief. Now that daddy's gone she'll never work again.
I blog with www.blogspot.com and their spellchecker is just atrocious. It works fine about 20% of the time, though its word catalogue is horrendously underpopulated, but sometimes it will inexplicably mangle the text in areas it didn't even prompt me about!
I'm using the new Word 2007 beta which supposedly has Blogger support, but I can't get it to work at all.
Long story short, the spellchecker is worth its weight in gold! This feature alone will considerably improve everyone's usage and enjoyment of the world's fancy shmancy Web 2.0 apps!
I hate this title. BitTorrent is a protocol and doesn't know what content is being transferred. BitTorrent is as "legit" as it will ever be. Did anyone ever claim HTTP was becoming more legit?
Now all we need is to get the ISPs to stop blocking Bittorrent.
I don't think we do. Net neutrality is kaput and movie companies can afford the fast lane.
BTW, use Azureus and turn on encryption support to get full speed on torrent-crippled ISPs. Encrypted packets, even those sent over the default torrent ports, can't be recognized as BT traffic so they pass through at full speed.
One of my biggest turnoffs from World of Warcraft is the patching system. You have to run an external client to download mandatory patches. A quick glance reveals that this is a bittorrent client that cannot be configured.
I tried WoW twice - once during beta and once again recently. In the beta the BT client maxed my bandwidth 100% - maximum uprate and downrate - for a 4.5GB file. The heavy load made my made my modem reset every 20 or 30 seconds and it took me days of dedicated transferring to download the game. When I tried it again a couple of weeks ago they'd eased up somewhat, allowing a maximum downrate accompanied by 20KB/s uprate. When I installed the client it detected that I had an old version and it downloaded the old patches very quickly. However, when a new patch came out (about 160MB) it took over 5 hours to download! Considering I get over 600KB/s down from my ISP it should only have taken a couple of minutes! And, of course, I couldn't play the game until I patched.
I find this really despicable. Not only do you have to pay $15/m for the game, you also have to pay with your own bandwidth. By comparison, Guild Wars, a game with no monthly fees, offers direct downloads (HTTP or FTP I guess) that always come in at top speed. Even Anarchy Online, a free MMORPG with optional for-pay expansions, offers free HTTP downloads for patches.
I seem to recall the Real online music store, if it still exists, doing something similar. Music purchasers would automatically upload songs to other purchasers while the client was running. Customers with faster uprates uploaded more, but saw no share of Real's cost savings.
Few ISPs offer unlimited bandwidth these days. In the case of the WoW beta I sacrificed an additional 2.5GB (over 50%) bandwidth to download the installer. This is really unprofessional in theory, but wouldn't be so bad in practise if it at least worked as reliably as HTTP download.
I kept all my "Ninpo" issues and when I look back on them they're utter crap. The reviews are nothing but positive points. The only thing that really stood out were the Howard and Nester, and later the Mario and Zelda comics. Those were surprisingly very well done.
PCG's previews got so bad for a while that I'd just skip them entirely, but they've been greatly remedied. Nowadays they end each preview with "___ and ___ and ___ were still buggy, and I didn't like how ___ feature forced you to ___, but we presume these issues will be resolved in the final release."
Plus, some of the previews still really grab me. For instance, I found PCG's coverage of The Sims to be a million times more entertaining than the game was. I also enjoyed all the excitement and revelations about Doom 3, Half Life 2, Oblivion, and Dungeons and Dragons Online. The magazine is really struggling not to fall into the cliche it helped create - expecially with a new EIC at the helm.
I definitely miss the monolithic tomes. I don't know why they had to thin down the issues so much. Maybe it's an issue of the number of games released, but somehow I don't think so. Regardless, I still love the magazine and I agree with 90% of reviews.
PC Gamer UK is a great magazine that is mostly objective, yet upfront about any subjectivity. There's some reviews that leave me scratching my head, such as a high score for Far Cry, but like Doom 3 these are games that you either get or you don't.
I loved this magazine because it was about electronic gaming regardless of the platform. I learned so much about weird systems like 3DO and CD-I and issues with cross-platform programming, plus it gave a good perspective of how the platforms compared. I think this magazine was a great example of the golden age of gaming and was definitely written by and for the uber gaming afficionados.
I used to buy CGW and I loved it in its heyday. Their writing style was very mature and largely targeted people who were already in-the-know. I was just a kid and could only speculate about a lot of the shop talk they used, but the best way to swim is to jump in the water, right? If I'm not mistaken I switched over to PC Gamer because they had bigger and better screenshots - old CGWs may as well be a newspaper classified section with all the prose in neat columns and especially the comprehensive 2-sentence reviews of 200 games.
I picked up a CGW recently for nostalgia's sake and I just couldn't relate to it. The opinions differed from my own, the EIC in the preface mentioned wanting to turn the magazine into a component of their web presence, and they reviewed things like movies and toys and things I really didn't give a crap about. Plus, no more Scorpia.
I give kudos to the magazines that took the time to explain technologies to their readers. I keep ALL my game magazines and I love flipping through them years later. I get a little bleary-eyed when I read about the 3DFX revolution and why Windows 95 will change the face of gaming. Google will always be there to fill in the blanks (probably), but nothing beats having it all in print.
I've been buying PC Gamer (USA version) magazines for over 8 years and have subscribed for 3. The writing staff is like a second family to me and it's been really fun growing up with them, seeing who sticks, who bails, and who is promoted. I'm really proud of Greg Vederman who started out as an associate editor and has recently been promoted to Editor In Chief. The writing is consistently excellent, the magazine is respected enough to get lots of exclusive looks, and they're unabashed about stating "wish lists" in previews - a category of games journalism that usually reads like an advertisement.
PC Gamer has definitely gotten a lot thinner over the years, but I don't mind terribly as I don't have as much magazine reading time as I used to. The only section I wish they'd flesh out more is the letters to the editor - especially since my own letters never make it to print!
By the way, if you're a subscriber don't get suckered into renewing via the mailed reminders they send. For some reason they charge $35/y for renewals but only $20/y for new subscriptions. Just use a paper insert from a magazine to renew and save yourself a bunch of cash. I can't think of a better way to spent $20.
I definitely think English is sliding in general due to less emphasis on education at early levels. A little investment upfront will go a long way, no doubt.
The problem with reform is that english in no longer limited to just England and the ex-colonies, it is the lingua franca of commerce and to a lesser degree science internationally.
Very true! I found it a little ghastly that one of the main reasons China's proposed WiFi standard is being snubbed is because the official white paper was too poorly verbalized in English, but I suppose if you want to be taken seriously you have to present it in the format and language most palatable by the science community.
Reformed English could potentially be limited to the "proles", keeping business and scientific language intact, but there's always been a verbal dichotomy between classes in every language so that'd be nothing new.
"It didn't help that the "all-new from-the-ground-up" Call of Duty 2 was actually just Call of Duty 1 with a slightly upgraded rendering engine and dumbed-down interface."
I was actually very appreciative of the way they updated the game engine. The original CoD ran smooth as silk for me and it was jarring to see how choppy everything was on my fairly decent system at full detail (Athlon XP 3400, 1.5GB RAM, 6600GT). I flipped one option to DirectX 7 and I got what I really wanted - another add-on to CoD. The game still looks great after all this time and I get a solid 60 frames.
Plus, I can't speak for multiplayer cuz I find it boring as hell, but I love the minimal interface in single player. Life bars and health packs are so 1985. It's not very realistic to be shot in the face 6 times, rest, and be fully healed, but taking out such a well established interface cliche took some creative thinking. It's a risky measure that I happen to love because I don't have to take my eyes off the battlefield.
I'm not sure why but I never get tired of the CoD series. I've played and replayed the original, expansion, and sequel over and over and I keep coming back for more. Maybe it's just fun to kill Nazis, maybe it's the designers' fantastic level design with a great variety of long and short-ranged battles, or maybe it's the culmination of all the elements in one package. Regardless, the sights, sounds, and screams of these games are very polished and professional.
WWII is a great setting for games because both sides were so even. The gaming world tried the Vientam era on for size but it didn't pan out so well. With the exception of fictional or alternate-history settings I foresee WWII shooters for a heck of a long time to come.
Here's a hilarious excerpt from the EULA of a Dreamcatcher game:
"You will not copy, decompile, reverse engineer or disassemble the Application Software, or otherwise reduce the Application Software to a human perceivable form;"
If a non-interactive medium can be percieved by humans, it can be duplicated. There's no way around it. One of these days copyright law will inevitably state that any media released in any percievable form to the public domain is ripe for the picking.
A perfectly valid argument, actually. Perhaps people speak too quickly already. I believe it is one branch of American Native Indians that considers it socially rude to reply to a question without pausing first.
Then again, have you seen much American TV? There are a lot of people who struggle with language there, and I'm not just talking about ESL citizens. The is simply operating faster but language is not keeping up. In this age of abstracts and executive summaries and power lunches the onus is on us to convey our message as succintly and effciently as possible. I think the examples in TFA are ridiculous, but the idea of language reform isn't totally off base in my book.
I'm Canadian and I was taught in high school and college to put the period inside the quotes, but I looked it up anyway. According to the University of Ottawa, putting the period in the quotes is a "North American" practise. That's just about the only grammatical idiosyncrasy I've seen that American and Canadian English agree upon. Very weird!
But for the record, I've always liked the period outside the quotes best - it's more logical, like programming.
I argue the opposite. The less America has to wrestle with English the more easily they'll convey their messages.
English is a counter-intuitive language with all kinds of ridiculous rules. "Knife"? I before E except after C? Sentences ending with a quote, "end with the period inside."
As people evolve so does their means of communication. Just look at all the acronyms in the tech world and used by teenagers in instant messages. Hell, my place of business actually uses the term TLA - Three Letter Acronym. Simplified language helps us work faster.
Properly articulated English is elegant and functional, but it is also impractical and time-consuming.
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I wasn't a fan of the Mozilla browser suite, but one thing I really liked was the quick launch "agent" in the icon tray. I don't want another icon in my tray, but I would love to see Firefox preload and stay resident in memory to speed up launches. The program launches slowly sometimes and I use the browser all the time.
Then again, the browser is taking up 40MB of RAM right now which is no small chunk of change. It's no biggie for me (1.5GB RAM) but it may be unacceptable for people on lesser machines or thin clients.
I have 1.5GB of DDR400 so maybe I'm in the minority, but as long as I've used Firefox (maybe a year before 1.0) I can count the number of crashes on one hand. No doubt there are inelegant programming solutions to many issues with the browser, but they are all but transparent from my experience. And I use about 20 extensions!
ActiveX is a proprietary MS technology. MS won't let anyone else use it. I think the days of ActiveX are over due to MS's stubbornness. Intranets may use it, but companies with relatively open web browsing policies would be nuts not to force employees to use Firefox for everything but internal traffic. I run 2 anti-spyware programs about once a month and I haven't found a single piece of malware in YEARS since I switched to Firefox.
What spell checker has ever blocked content? Does Word prevent you from opening documents with misspellings? The grammar nazis are on Slashdot, not in software.
Firefox's spell checker only checks text input fields. You can right-click any text field and choose whether it should be spellchecked (default is yes). Why inform you of misspellings on a static page you can't fix?
And I'm sure Tori is beside herself with grief. Now that daddy's gone she'll never work again.
I blog with www.blogspot.com and their spellchecker is just atrocious. It works fine about 20% of the time, though its word catalogue is horrendously underpopulated, but sometimes it will inexplicably mangle the text in areas it didn't even prompt me about!
I'm using the new Word 2007 beta which supposedly has Blogger support, but I can't get it to work at all.
Long story short, the spellchecker is worth its weight in gold! This feature alone will considerably improve everyone's usage and enjoyment of the world's fancy shmancy Web 2.0 apps!
"BitTorrent Becomes Ever More Legit"
I hate this title. BitTorrent is a protocol and doesn't know what content is being transferred. BitTorrent is as "legit" as it will ever be. Did anyone ever claim HTTP was becoming more legit?
Now all we need is to get the ISPs to stop blocking Bittorrent.
I don't think we do. Net neutrality is kaput and movie companies can afford the fast lane.
BTW, use Azureus and turn on encryption support to get full speed on torrent-crippled ISPs. Encrypted packets, even those sent over the default torrent ports, can't be recognized as BT traffic so they pass through at full speed.
One of my biggest turnoffs from World of Warcraft is the patching system. You have to run an external client to download mandatory patches. A quick glance reveals that this is a bittorrent client that cannot be configured.
I tried WoW twice - once during beta and once again recently. In the beta the BT client maxed my bandwidth 100% - maximum uprate and downrate - for a 4.5GB file. The heavy load made my made my modem reset every 20 or 30 seconds and it took me days of dedicated transferring to download the game. When I tried it again a couple of weeks ago they'd eased up somewhat, allowing a maximum downrate accompanied by 20KB/s uprate. When I installed the client it detected that I had an old version and it downloaded the old patches very quickly. However, when a new patch came out (about 160MB) it took over 5 hours to download! Considering I get over 600KB/s down from my ISP it should only have taken a couple of minutes! And, of course, I couldn't play the game until I patched.
I find this really despicable. Not only do you have to pay $15/m for the game, you also have to pay with your own bandwidth. By comparison, Guild Wars, a game with no monthly fees, offers direct downloads (HTTP or FTP I guess) that always come in at top speed. Even Anarchy Online, a free MMORPG with optional for-pay expansions, offers free HTTP downloads for patches.
I seem to recall the Real online music store, if it still exists, doing something similar. Music purchasers would automatically upload songs to other purchasers while the client was running. Customers with faster uprates uploaded more, but saw no share of Real's cost savings.
Few ISPs offer unlimited bandwidth these days. In the case of the WoW beta I sacrificed an additional 2.5GB (over 50%) bandwidth to download the installer. This is really unprofessional in theory, but wouldn't be so bad in practise if it at least worked as reliably as HTTP download.
I kept all my "Ninpo" issues and when I look back on them they're utter crap. The reviews are nothing but positive points. The only thing that really stood out were the Howard and Nester, and later the Mario and Zelda comics. Those were surprisingly very well done.
PCG's previews got so bad for a while that I'd just skip them entirely, but they've been greatly remedied. Nowadays they end each preview with "___ and ___ and ___ were still buggy, and I didn't like how ___ feature forced you to ___, but we presume these issues will be resolved in the final release."
Plus, some of the previews still really grab me. For instance, I found PCG's coverage of The Sims to be a million times more entertaining than the game was. I also enjoyed all the excitement and revelations about Doom 3, Half Life 2, Oblivion, and Dungeons and Dragons Online. The magazine is really struggling not to fall into the cliche it helped create - expecially with a new EIC at the helm.
I definitely miss the monolithic tomes. I don't know why they had to thin down the issues so much. Maybe it's an issue of the number of games released, but somehow I don't think so. Regardless, I still love the magazine and I agree with 90% of reviews.
PC Gamer UK is a great magazine that is mostly objective, yet upfront about any subjectivity. There's some reviews that leave me scratching my head, such as a high score for Far Cry, but like Doom 3 these are games that you either get or you don't.
I loved this magazine because it was about electronic gaming regardless of the platform. I learned so much about weird systems like 3DO and CD-I and issues with cross-platform programming, plus it gave a good perspective of how the platforms compared. I think this magazine was a great example of the golden age of gaming and was definitely written by and for the uber gaming afficionados.
I used to buy CGW and I loved it in its heyday. Their writing style was very mature and largely targeted people who were already in-the-know. I was just a kid and could only speculate about a lot of the shop talk they used, but the best way to swim is to jump in the water, right? If I'm not mistaken I switched over to PC Gamer because they had bigger and better screenshots - old CGWs may as well be a newspaper classified section with all the prose in neat columns and especially the comprehensive 2-sentence reviews of 200 games.
I picked up a CGW recently for nostalgia's sake and I just couldn't relate to it. The opinions differed from my own, the EIC in the preface mentioned wanting to turn the magazine into a component of their web presence, and they reviewed things like movies and toys and things I really didn't give a crap about. Plus, no more Scorpia.
I give kudos to the magazines that took the time to explain technologies to their readers. I keep ALL my game magazines and I love flipping through them years later. I get a little bleary-eyed when I read about the 3DFX revolution and why Windows 95 will change the face of gaming. Google will always be there to fill in the blanks (probably), but nothing beats having it all in print.
I've been buying PC Gamer (USA version) magazines for over 8 years and have subscribed for 3. The writing staff is like a second family to me and it's been really fun growing up with them, seeing who sticks, who bails, and who is promoted. I'm really proud of Greg Vederman who started out as an associate editor and has recently been promoted to Editor In Chief. The writing is consistently excellent, the magazine is respected enough to get lots of exclusive looks, and they're unabashed about stating "wish lists" in previews - a category of games journalism that usually reads like an advertisement.
PC Gamer has definitely gotten a lot thinner over the years, but I don't mind terribly as I don't have as much magazine reading time as I used to. The only section I wish they'd flesh out more is the letters to the editor - especially since my own letters never make it to print!
By the way, if you're a subscriber don't get suckered into renewing via the mailed reminders they send. For some reason they charge $35/y for renewals but only $20/y for new subscriptions. Just use a paper insert from a magazine to renew and save yourself a bunch of cash. I can't think of a better way to spent $20.
If English made any sense whatsoever it would be exactly the way you outline it here.
I definitely think English is sliding in general due to less emphasis on education at early levels. A little investment upfront will go a long way, no doubt.
The problem with reform is that english in no longer limited to just England and the ex-colonies, it is the lingua franca of commerce and to a lesser degree science internationally.
Very true! I found it a little ghastly that one of the main reasons China's proposed WiFi standard is being snubbed is because the official white paper was too poorly verbalized in English, but I suppose if you want to be taken seriously you have to present it in the format and language most palatable by the science community.
Reformed English could potentially be limited to the "proles", keeping business and scientific language intact, but there's always been a verbal dichotomy between classes in every language so that'd be nothing new.
"It didn't help that the "all-new from-the-ground-up" Call of Duty 2 was actually just Call of Duty 1 with a slightly upgraded rendering engine and dumbed-down interface."
I was actually very appreciative of the way they updated the game engine. The original CoD ran smooth as silk for me and it was jarring to see how choppy everything was on my fairly decent system at full detail (Athlon XP 3400, 1.5GB RAM, 6600GT). I flipped one option to DirectX 7 and I got what I really wanted - another add-on to CoD. The game still looks great after all this time and I get a solid 60 frames.
Plus, I can't speak for multiplayer cuz I find it boring as hell, but I love the minimal interface in single player. Life bars and health packs are so 1985. It's not very realistic to be shot in the face 6 times, rest, and be fully healed, but taking out such a well established interface cliche took some creative thinking. It's a risky measure that I happen to love because I don't have to take my eyes off the battlefield.
I'm not sure why but I never get tired of the CoD series. I've played and replayed the original, expansion, and sequel over and over and I keep coming back for more. Maybe it's just fun to kill Nazis, maybe it's the designers' fantastic level design with a great variety of long and short-ranged battles, or maybe it's the culmination of all the elements in one package. Regardless, the sights, sounds, and screams of these games are very polished and professional.
WWII is a great setting for games because both sides were so even. The gaming world tried the Vientam era on for size but it didn't pan out so well. With the exception of fictional or alternate-history settings I foresee WWII shooters for a heck of a long time to come.
Here's a hilarious excerpt from the EULA of a Dreamcatcher game:
t ial_blends/bl/images/blindfold.jpg
"You will not copy, decompile, reverse engineer or disassemble the Application Software, or otherwise reduce the Application Software to a human perceivable form;"
This is the only surefire DRM:
http://www.rockingham.k12.va.us/sound_sorting/ini
If a non-interactive medium can be percieved by humans, it can be duplicated. There's no way around it. One of these days copyright law will inevitably state that any media released in any percievable form to the public domain is ripe for the picking.
A perfectly valid argument, actually. Perhaps people speak too quickly already. I believe it is one branch of American Native Indians that considers it socially rude to reply to a question without pausing first.
Then again, have you seen much American TV? There are a lot of people who struggle with language there, and I'm not just talking about ESL citizens. The is simply operating faster but language is not keeping up. In this age of abstracts and executive summaries and power lunches the onus is on us to convey our message as succintly and effciently as possible. I think the examples in TFA are ridiculous, but the idea of language reform isn't totally off base in my book.
Here's a picture of 2 things that fold with almost zero effort - http://www.spinmet.co.za/images/london%20folding%2 0chair%20lowres.jpg
Whoops, forgot to post the link - http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/writcent/hypergrammar/q marks.html
I'm Canadian and I was taught in high school and college to put the period inside the quotes, but I looked it up anyway. According to the University of Ottawa, putting the period in the quotes is a "North American" practise. That's just about the only grammatical idiosyncrasy I've seen that American and Canadian English agree upon. Very weird!
But for the record, I've always liked the period outside the quotes best - it's more logical, like programming.
I argue the opposite. The less America has to wrestle with English the more easily they'll convey their messages.
English is a counter-intuitive language with all kinds of ridiculous rules. "Knife"? I before E except after C? Sentences ending with a quote, "end with the period inside."
As people evolve so does their means of communication. Just look at all the acronyms in the tech world and used by teenagers in instant messages. Hell, my place of business actually uses the term TLA - Three Letter Acronym. Simplified language helps us work faster.
Properly articulated English is elegant and functional, but it is also impractical and time-consuming.