I use Chrome on Windows and Firefox on Ubuntu, by preference.
I prefer Chrome, but I have some issues with it in Ubuntu. If those get solved (or if they just stop affecting ME) then I would switch to Chrome completely and would have no need for cross-browser syncing.
It would be a lot more complicated to have a system without a central server. It wouldn't work for everybody, for one thing, because they would always need to have some combination of systems up. If you only have two, one would always have to be up when the other was activated. A central server pretty much eliminates the problem of ISP outages (because you aren't using your bookmarks if the internet is out). You would need to have firewalls open and ports forwarded to allow for direct transfers between computers.
When you consider all of that, storing things server-side is really the best way to make it usable by a large number of people.
Also, keeping the stuff server-side allows you to use the service as a zero-effort backup, which I've found handy in the past.
Oh, I've no doubt that it is, or will soon be, fairly easy to find 3D glasses that can easily be worn in conjunction with regular glasses. Unless the manufacturers are just banking on everybody wearing contacts (which is an option for most people, though maybe not an attractive one to many) or on surgery becoming cheap and universally effective. There's no compelling technical reason that it shouldn't be possible, or even easy, as far as I can figure. Glasses-wearers definitely compose a large enough segment of the population to make it a very important issue.
I don't think that's technically how they look at it. It seems more like you pay to set up an account to play on the servers. You can download the whole client for free from Blizzard, even without a WoW subscription.
Some of the data that the servers use, however, is not in that client. Obviously, all the art and sound assets are included in the client, as is the gameworld's terrain, but most of the actual gameplay-related data is provided by the server.
Look at the WoW server like a website, and the client like a web browser. It's a very apt comparison.
So, the private server companies are making their own websites! Obviously, there's nothing wrong with making a website.
There is, however, something wrong with copying another website in its entirety, or even with minor changes. That's what the private servers do. It's not really about the protocol.
At least, I assume this is what the lawyers would say if anybody showed up to argue with them.
Well, the problem with the Microsoft analogy is that Windows is not a finite resource. I'm not saying that the oil is definitely almost gone, but it will run out at some point in the future. If the oil companies have not moved away from oil by then, they're pretty much done.
So how long after a spouse dies is the surviving spouse exempt from service fees for their own services?
I feel sorry about her loss, and I believe that this isn't about the money. Also, I know that when a death is involved, most companies are going to make exceptions to rules. But the (tragic) death is only tangentially related here.
The reason that she is canceling is NOT because her husband died. It is because she is moving. That part is a choice.
Yeah, I would agree. My initial guess was that the administrators saw a morale problem with the techs, and this was their idea to fix it. In fact, if you limit the view to to the techs' perspective, the idea makes sense, and I think that's probably the mistake that they made. Or, perhaps, being administrators and therefore perhaps being more used to dealing with stupid bureaucratic requirements, it never occurred to them that the doctors have more important things to worry about...
Er, I use middle click all the time, but why does it matter if you don't use it for anything else? I mean, I never hit the F8 key apart from accessing alternate Windows startup modes, but that does not constitute some kind of usability problem.
If some kind of convenient input is going mostly unused, and you have something your application needs to do often, then that unused input is a great candidate.
Blizzard doesn't shut down fansites. Shutting down cheating software and software that can be used for piracy is really not even close to the same thing.
I'd never really considered this before, but I can't imagine going through that type of training and still actually wanting to do that kind of job. Obviously, that's just me,
In order to really work well, something like that would also have to have head tracking in order to draw in the right place, and ideally the positioning system and the map itself would be extremely accurate (more accurate than they currently are). Not at all impossible, but I'm not sure it would work well enough to be worth doing quite yet.
Games don't come in 'gigantic' boxes anymore, and haven't for a while. In fact, a good old-school manual wouldn't even fit in a modern box. A lot of PC games do come in DVD-style cases, or even the more compact Blu-Ray style.
The rise of in-game help HAS largely made manuals less important, and as such they've started to become completely useless anyway. A lot of manuals that I've seen completely fail to even cover the game's basics properly.
However, a few manuals are still great. Blizzard's manuals are more than just instructions, they contain a lot of interesting stuff. I still have my Blizzard manuals going back to Diablo, because they're too cool to throw away.
The bottom line is that if a company isn't going to bother making a good manual, then it's probably a good idea to get rid of them. I just hope that a few companies realize that there is a potential way to add a little value to your world and get people a little more invested in their products.
I don't know Vogel's reasons, but I can give you some possibilities.
First of all, saying that an engine has 'better graphics' is pretty much meaningless in the case of a developer like Vogel's Spiderweb Software. The graphics are only as good as the art. I don't mean to say that Vogel's games have bad art -- I'm just saying that there is only so much of it. CryEngine is capable of some awesome graphics, but you need a team of artists to take advantage of it.
Using your own engine has a lot of advantages. You know all of its limitations and capabilities. You can modify it much more easily than you could somebody else's code, which is absolutely vital. That means that you can design your engine to fit the game rather than designing your game to fit the engine. I've seen a lot of games that clearly had that backwards, and they are always painfully generic.
Spiderweb focuses on Mac development. Their games are all out on Windows, but they are developed for Mac and come out months earlier for Mac. This puts a limit on the benefits granted by using existing engines that have not already been ported to Mac.
Then, of course, there is the matter of licensing. It's not always a problem, but it can be, especially when working on something commercial.
Finally, when you write something within an existing engine, it doesn't feel nearly as satisfying as writing it on your own. That's worth considering.
As for lengthy dungeons, Jeff Vogel (who you're praising here) uses lengthier dungeons and less dialog then Dragon Age. Do you even know what you're talking about here?
Are you sure? I can't think of any dungeon-like areas in Avernum that were as long as that mountain temple in Dragon Age. Most of the Avernum dungeons, at least in the newer ones, fit within one or two map divisions. In Avernum, it's also usually (but not always) pretty convenient to just leave any area and come back later, which helps fighting areas feel smaller if that's what you're looking for.
Outsourced? You talk as if is this came out of nowhere. A sudden problem with a product that has NOT been shit for years. That does not describe McAfee.
The really big AV outfits (I really just mean Symantec and McAfee, here) are terrible. It always seemed to me that they got big via OEM bundling, which is great because it has zilch to do with the actual quality of their products, support, or anything except for their ability to make deals with their partners.
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I use Chrome on Windows and Firefox on Ubuntu, by preference.
I prefer Chrome, but I have some issues with it in Ubuntu. If those get solved (or if they just stop affecting ME) then I would switch to Chrome completely and would have no need for cross-browser syncing.
It would be a lot more complicated to have a system without a central server. It wouldn't work for everybody, for one thing, because they would always need to have some combination of systems up. If you only have two, one would always have to be up when the other was activated. A central server pretty much eliminates the problem of ISP outages (because you aren't using your bookmarks if the internet is out). You would need to have firewalls open and ports forwarded to allow for direct transfers between computers.
When you consider all of that, storing things server-side is really the best way to make it usable by a large number of people.
Also, keeping the stuff server-side allows you to use the service as a zero-effort backup, which I've found handy in the past.
Oh, I've no doubt that it is, or will soon be, fairly easy to find 3D glasses that can easily be worn in conjunction with regular glasses. Unless the manufacturers are just banking on everybody wearing contacts (which is an option for most people, though maybe not an attractive one to many) or on surgery becoming cheap and universally effective. There's no compelling technical reason that it shouldn't be possible, or even easy, as far as I can figure. Glasses-wearers definitely compose a large enough segment of the population to make it a very important issue.
I don't think that's technically how they look at it. It seems more like you pay to set up an account to play on the servers. You can download the whole client for free from Blizzard, even without a WoW subscription.
Some of the data that the servers use, however, is not in that client. Obviously, all the art and sound assets are included in the client, as is the gameworld's terrain, but most of the actual gameplay-related data is provided by the server.
Look at the WoW server like a website, and the client like a web browser. It's a very apt comparison.
So, the private server companies are making their own websites! Obviously, there's nothing wrong with making a website.
There is, however, something wrong with copying another website in its entirety, or even with minor changes. That's what the private servers do. It's not really about the protocol.
At least, I assume this is what the lawyers would say if anybody showed up to argue with them.
Do staff lawyers' salaries count towards that figure? It seems like they wouldn't.
This is something I never understood. How exactly does Blizzard "require" completely independent parties to do anything?
The theory IS simple. P!=NP. Easy.
Proofs, though...proofs can be complicated.
Through the power of their monopoly. Are you really not familiar with this idea? There's a reason that there are antitrust laws.
*Reads list of filtering options*
So does it just hide the whole comment section, or show it as being empty?
Well, the problem with the Microsoft analogy is that Windows is not a finite resource. I'm not saying that the oil is definitely almost gone, but it will run out at some point in the future. If the oil companies have not moved away from oil by then, they're pretty much done.
So how long after a spouse dies is the surviving spouse exempt from service fees for their own services?
I feel sorry about her loss, and I believe that this isn't about the money. Also, I know that when a death is involved, most companies are going to make exceptions to rules. But the (tragic) death is only tangentially related here.
The reason that she is canceling is NOT because her husband died. It is because she is moving. That part is a choice.
Lower res textures are probably fine, though, given the lower resolution of the actual display,
Yeah, I would agree. My initial guess was that the administrators saw a morale problem with the techs, and this was their idea to fix it. In fact, if you limit the view to to the techs' perspective, the idea makes sense, and I think that's probably the mistake that they made. Or, perhaps, being administrators and therefore perhaps being more used to dealing with stupid bureaucratic requirements, it never occurred to them that the doctors have more important things to worry about...
To somebody that truly believes something, teaching that something doesn't sound like indoctrination.
I would guess that reporting to their advertisers is just as important to them as securing the content.
Both are things that they absolutely have to do in order to exist in the form that they do.
Er, I use middle click all the time, but why does it matter if you don't use it for anything else? I mean, I never hit the F8 key apart from accessing alternate Windows startup modes, but that does not constitute some kind of usability problem.
If some kind of convenient input is going mostly unused, and you have something your application needs to do often, then that unused input is a great candidate.
Blizzard doesn't shut down fansites. Shutting down cheating software and software that can be used for piracy is really not even close to the same thing.
I'd never really considered this before, but I can't imagine going through that type of training and still actually wanting to do that kind of job. Obviously, that's just me,
In order to really work well, something like that would also have to have head tracking in order to draw in the right place, and ideally the positioning system and the map itself would be extremely accurate (more accurate than they currently are). Not at all impossible, but I'm not sure it would work well enough to be worth doing quite yet.
Games don't come in 'gigantic' boxes anymore, and haven't for a while. In fact, a good old-school manual wouldn't even fit in a modern box. A lot of PC games do come in DVD-style cases, or even the more compact Blu-Ray style.
The rise of in-game help HAS largely made manuals less important, and as such they've started to become completely useless anyway. A lot of manuals that I've seen completely fail to even cover the game's basics properly.
However, a few manuals are still great. Blizzard's manuals are more than just instructions, they contain a lot of interesting stuff. I still have my Blizzard manuals going back to Diablo, because they're too cool to throw away.
The bottom line is that if a company isn't going to bother making a good manual, then it's probably a good idea to get rid of them. I just hope that a few companies realize that there is a potential way to add a little value to your world and get people a little more invested in their products.
I don't know Vogel's reasons, but I can give you some possibilities.
First of all, saying that an engine has 'better graphics' is pretty much meaningless in the case of a developer like Vogel's Spiderweb Software. The graphics are only as good as the art. I don't mean to say that Vogel's games have bad art -- I'm just saying that there is only so much of it. CryEngine is capable of some awesome graphics, but you need a team of artists to take advantage of it.
Using your own engine has a lot of advantages. You know all of its limitations and capabilities. You can modify it much more easily than you could somebody else's code, which is absolutely vital. That means that you can design your engine to fit the game rather than designing your game to fit the engine. I've seen a lot of games that clearly had that backwards, and they are always painfully generic.
Spiderweb focuses on Mac development. Their games are all out on Windows, but they are developed for Mac and come out months earlier for Mac. This puts a limit on the benefits granted by using existing engines that have not already been ported to Mac.
Then, of course, there is the matter of licensing. It's not always a problem, but it can be, especially when working on something commercial.
Finally, when you write something within an existing engine, it doesn't feel nearly as satisfying as writing it on your own. That's worth considering.
As for lengthy dungeons, Jeff Vogel (who you're praising here) uses lengthier dungeons and less dialog then Dragon Age. Do you even know what you're talking about here?
Are you sure? I can't think of any dungeon-like areas in Avernum that were as long as that mountain temple in Dragon Age. Most of the Avernum dungeons, at least in the newer ones, fit within one or two map divisions. In Avernum, it's also usually (but not always) pretty convenient to just leave any area and come back later, which helps fighting areas feel smaller if that's what you're looking for.
Outsourced? You talk as if is this came out of nowhere. A sudden problem with a product that has NOT been shit for years. That does not describe McAfee.
The really big AV outfits (I really just mean Symantec and McAfee, here) are terrible. It always seemed to me that they got big via OEM bundling, which is great because it has zilch to do with the actual quality of their products, support, or anything except for their ability to make deals with their partners.