It does better for standards compliance, but is still slower than Safari in general.
You can't really compare Safari to Opera. Safari is about as bare-bones as a browser can be. I am all for not bundling in unecessary bloat but I find Safari pretty much unusable after having used Opera. Custom searching, mouse gestures and dynamic tabs are the first things that come to mind. Other obvious ones would be session management and being able to choose where to save a download instead of everything going to wherever you set in the preferences.
We need a clean source of power. Until then changing the end of the consumer end of the supply chain is a waste.
Hardly a waste. If we change the consumer end of the supply chain now to use something like hydrogen then when we perfect a clean source of power all we need to do is use it to make hydrogen and all of the infrastructure to distribute it is already there.
The alternative is to stick with petrol until we perfect clean power and then have to wait another 10-20 years to roll out the infrastructure to take advantage of it.
If you take a look at this map you will see that only a few counties in Texas have a max 80MPH limit. Most states have a max limit of 75, 70 or 65MPH. I would imagine it would make sense to set it at whatever the max limit is in your state as the kind of parents who are buying these are unlikely to trust their children to drive to another state.
Wanking off to a Playmate of the Month is somewhat less likely to kill him than running into a telephone pole at 95 MPH.
I'd say running into a telephone at 80MPH would have much the same effect. Wouldn't it make more sense to limit acceleration and cap the top speed at say 5 above the National speed limit, isn't that 60MPH on most roads in the states?
Yes it will but Guitar Hero III (that I bought) didn't, despite them promising it would 'at some point after launch'. So I won't be buying Guitar Hero World Tour, I will be buying Rock Band 2 on the Xbox 360 and enjoying all of the downloadable tracks for Rock Band 2 and the original.
But of course I will have to buy another guitar, as my wii one obviously won't work with the 360.
Interesting. I've never heard of a single case of pudding being aged
Christmas cake and Christmas pudding are often aged for up to a couple of years to improve the flavour. We have a Christmas pudding at home that my girlfriend's aunt made 2 years ago. Christmas cake certainly is aged for a while before it is ready, normally injected with brandy everynow and again to help it along.
This is rarely true, a single malt whisky is generally blended from many batches from the same distillery in order to give a consistant taste. Single barrel, or single batch whisky tends to be extremely expensive and is from hand picked barrels from each batch. Some distilleries allow you to buy a barrel of whisky which is then stored for you for 12-20 years. Once it is deemed ready you then pay tax on the amount that is left (a significant proportion evaporates during storage) and it is bottled up for you. This is a very risky investment as although there is a chance you will get a truly great tasting whisky more likely you will get something that is only marginally better or worse than the normal. Very good single barrel whisky can sell for hundreds or thousands of pounds a bottle.
When aging Scotch, it is very important NOT to impart too much flavor from the barrel as this overpowers the natural flavors in the whiskey itself.
Just to add to this a large part of the flavour in Scottish whisky comes from the water used to make it. For instance Islay malts have a distinctive peaty taste to them as the water used by the distillery drains through the peat moorlands in Islay.
The other systems still have a MUCH LARGER size for storage.
The Xbox 360 Arcade only has 256mb of storage. The only systems that currently have 'upwards of 80gb' are the Xbox 360 Elite and recent versions of the Playstation 3. Most console owners will either have an earlier Xbox 360 giving them 20gb or 60gb, or an earlier Playstation 3 with 20gb, 40gb or 60gb.
That aside I do think that Nintendo has missed an opportunity here. For games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero the absence of dowloadable content is a big minus point. If they had allowed usb hard drives to be attached for storage it would solve a lot of problems, providing the transfer speed was good enough.
* The most effective SPAM filter is a human, sitting in front of their e-mail client, deleting mail that they know is SPAM from the subject line.
I pretty much never see any SPAM because the host I use has Mail Foundry SPAM filtering appliances in front of the email server. It does occasionally block legitimate email marketing such as Amazon special offer emails and the like. But as it send you an email with a list of anything it isn't sure about it is easy to have them sent on through.
According to their website they analyse SPAM in real time so if someone sends 10 million almost identical messages about Viagra they will notice and tell all of the Mail Foundry appliances to block anything that matches that email exactly.
The idea is that instead of trying to train your filters to recognize any SPAM you tell them to block the SPAM that is actually being sent that day.
It seems to work very well but I would imagine that the wider the adoption of the system becomes the more likely it is that someone will come up with a way to beat it.
(I am not in any way affiliated with Mail Foundry, just seems to work for us.)
All I can say is, don't believe [all of] the hype about SSDs.
When used in a device like the Eee PC a SSD is used to make the device more rugged and reliable, rather than for a speed boost. By not having any moving parts a SSD is much better at protecting data if the machine is dropped or rattled around in a bag while switched on.
You are right about the speed benefits generally though, fast hard drives are still beating a lot of SSDs in speed tests. Better ones are starting to come on to the market though.
The US can also not ignore the 40=% of its population that lives in areas with a population of less than 200,000
It isn't a case of ignoring 40%, what people are saying is why not improve service for people who choose to live in cities.
By choosing to live in a rural area or sprawling town people need to accept that they won't get the same service as a tightly compact city.
No-one is saying that service to areas with a low population density should be degraded just that by living there they can't expect the same advantages as people who live in high population density areas like big cities.
Just because in Bumfuck Idaho you have to drive 5 miles to the nearest Starbucks doesn't mean you can't have one on every street corner in New York.
That's an excellent point that on a lot of older hardware it would make sense that you don't want to wait for larger apps to load,
But for their to be a time saving on returneing to the app it must still be in memory. So the speed you gain from not having to re-open it is cancelled out by having less RAM available while it is sitting in the background.
Before I got my MacBook Pro I compared it's price to laptops from Windows OEM that were configured similarly. In every case but one the prices were comparable.
You have fallen into the same trap as most people do when comparing prices of Apple hardware to that of other manufacturers. Doing a comparison based on exactly the same spec is other relevant if the customer actually wants a computer with that exact spec.
If you want to buy a laptop from Apple you have two choices, the macbook or macbook pro. If you don't want integrated graphics that just leaves the macbook pro. So instantly someone in the market for a laptop with something better than Intel GMA graphics needs to spend £1299 minimum for an Apple machine. To get a laptop from Dell with better than integrated graphics you can spend as little as £499.
What you need to realise is that not everyone wants a machine that is high spec across the board with all the bells and whistles. Some people want one feature in particular and everything else just needs to be good enough. Apple doesn't allow for this kind of customer. They deliberately segment their products to push people into the high end products. Want an upgradable machine? Got to buy a Mac Pro, doesn't matter that you don't actually need a professional workstation if you want to be able to stick another hard drive in it or upgrade the graphics then that is your only choice.
If you fit into one of Apple's hardware pigeon holes then that is fine, but if you don't then Apple hardware is a much more expensive choice for you to get what you actually need and that is why people go to a company like Dell who have a more flexible product range.
It will be interesting to see what the response to this post is. As normally when this is brought up it prompts a deluge of Apple fans talking about how the aesthetics are what is really important and how Macs are like art.
Let's turn that upside down. Why the fsck can't I close the document I have open and then open/create another one without closing down the entire application? Why is it that closing a window sometimes means "close this document" and others it means "close this application"?
Almost all windows programs that use a 'document model' allow you to close the current doc without closing the program. They do this by having the document as a seperate entity inside the program window. All Office programs use this method as well as Adobe's apps and pretty much everything else.
The general philosophy is as described by the parent closing the app when you have finished with it, opposed to leaving it open in case you need it again in the future.
I get my email hosting from a company called Industry Square. They are a smallish hosting outfit but the reliability is good. They don't offer a lot of space but after trying a few companies I got sick of servers going down all the time and slow support response. Industry Square are pretty quick on support and not had a server problem that I have noticed in the last year or os. Not sure about IMAP though as I only use POP3.
They don't just work, though. The people who hang out on the forums aren't the ones who were bitten by HDCP. And you get people asking salespeople about this new fancy high-def disc and get asked if the HDTV they bought 3 years ago has HDCP, they don't know if it does or not, so that scares them off.
I don't see this as an issue at the moment. If ICT was being used then people whoes HDTVs didn't have HDCP would be put off when discs didn't work properly but ICT isn't used at all at the moment so HDCP is irrelavent for now.
The general public don't know about ICT or HDCP and won't become aware of it until ICT is actually used and they have to take a disc back because it doesn't work. This may be a problem in the future but it isn't what is stopping adoption of Blu-ray now.
In the UK it is just the same. In HMV at the weekend I scanned the blu-ray prices, movies like The Matrix which are less that £5 on DVD are £25 on blu-ray. With DVD prices still dropping people are used to picking up films that have been on DVD just six months to a year for £5. These same people (myself included) aren't going to pay five times that for the HD version. Until most blu-ray discs cost £15 or less adoption will stay slow.
He may have been speculating beforehand, and Chicago may not have made its final decision yet when he registered the thing,
He registered the domain before Chicago even decided to make a bid for the Olympics so this isn't an issue.
The issue is that the name has value to him primarily *because* of the other party's trademark. Chronology isn't really the issue.
How can it have had value to him because of a trademark that didn't exist when he registered it? This is why chronology is relevant. His site isn't commercial, has no ads and only accepts donations to fight this legal challenge so there is no financial motive here.
I think the idea is that he did it because it's someone else's copyright
As someone who doesn't understand the difference between trademarks and copyright I don't think you have anything to add to this discussion.
If you visit the guys website you will see that he isn't just trying to make some cash. He has had a website on that domain for several years discussing the possible financial implications of Chicago bidding for the Olympics. Not only does the site have a genuine purpose it also has a clear message stating that it is not in anyway connected to the actual bid that Chicago has subsquently put in for the Olympics.
Except, he is using the domain to host a site that is clearly covering the *same topic* that the trademark refers to. From a trademark law perspective, that is going to very much work against him, because it makes for a strong case that he is infringing the mark, deliberately.
Except of course for the fact that he bought the domain and created his site before the trademark came into being. Indeed before Chicago even decided to bid for the Olympics. His site is a discussion of the possible costs of a hypothetical bid for the 2016 Olympics.
The idea that he can be forced to give up the name because it is now a trademark is ridiculous. Much like if I started an international punctuation competition called Slash Dot and then demanded ownership of slashdot.org.
Playing the game on an easy level should train you to be better at the game, so that playing through the whole game gets you better as time goes on, and then you're better able to play on higher difficulties.
Another example of a game that goes against this principle is the Tiger Woods series. On normal anyone can be a fantastic golfer after a couple of hours. After a while you want more of a challenge so move up to the next difficulty - suddenly you can't play at all. The normal level is so dumbed down that when you go to the next level up you go from hitting birdies all the time to taking 20 strokes to finish a hole.
This would be more forgivable if the game didn't recommend that you start on normal, and if it wasn't an ongoing campaign. Because the whole game is one long 'career' you win loads of competitions on normal, do well and move forward. Then you move up a difficulty for a more challenging game and not only are you having to deal with the 500% rise in shot difficulty but with stronger opponents as you are further on in your career. Unfortunatly by the point you think to increase the difficulty you have invested sufficient time to make it painful to restart your career.
There's no way to make the introduction of the 5th fret completely trivial, which is the main step-up in difficult to Hard.
That is the problem with Guitar Hero 3 though, the 5th fret isn't what makes 'Hard' so much more difficult. What makes it difficult is that the number of notes you have to play doubles for most songs and even more than that for the later ones. This combined with very unforgiving hammer on and pull off sections that require perfect fingering, makes some songs almost impossible without laboriously practicing each part of the song until you can play it perfectly.
What really highlights the problem with Guitar Hero 3 is that there isn't the same problem with Rock Band (or GH1/2 for that matter). The real problem with Guitar Hero 3 is that the note patterns aren't intuitive, they are overly complicated and don't match the song well enough for it to be instinctive to play.
The note patterns Harmonix came up with in GH1 and 2 were very close to the actual songs. Neversoft who developed GH3 just aren't as good at translating songs into notes for the game.
The best part is, even though CoD 5 isn't out yet, they've already decided to hire Infinity Ward for CoD 6
The reason for alternating developers is to shorten the turn around time on the next game. If it takes 3 years to make a new Call of Duty game then with two developers working on the series they can release a new game every 18 months. It makes sense from a business point of view but from a gamers point of view it is a terrible idea. CoD 4 was an incredible game, but that has no bearing on what CoD 5 is going to be like, so (as with CoD 3) a lot of gamers may end up not getting what they thought they were.
At least Blizzard Activision are up front about the different developers so people who follow the news are prewarned to check CoD 5 out before rushing off to buy it just because CoD 4 was great.
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With an installer that is just 5.4mb that is some pretty skinny bloat.
You can't really compare Safari to Opera. Safari is about as bare-bones as a browser can be. I am all for not bundling in unecessary bloat but I find Safari pretty much unusable after having used Opera. Custom searching, mouse gestures and dynamic tabs are the first things that come to mind. Other obvious ones would be session management and being able to choose where to save a download instead of everything going to wherever you set in the preferences.
Hardly a waste. If we change the consumer end of the supply chain now to use something like hydrogen then when we perfect a clean source of power all we need to do is use it to make hydrogen and all of the infrastructure to distribute it is already there.
The alternative is to stick with petrol until we perfect clean power and then have to wait another 10-20 years to roll out the infrastructure to take advantage of it.
If you take a look at this map you will see that only a few counties in Texas have a max 80MPH limit. Most states have a max limit of 75, 70 or 65MPH. I would imagine it would make sense to set it at whatever the max limit is in your state as the kind of parents who are buying these are unlikely to trust their children to drive to another state.
I'd say running into a telephone at 80MPH would have much the same effect. Wouldn't it make more sense to limit acceleration and cap the top speed at say 5 above the National speed limit, isn't that 60MPH on most roads in the states?
Yes it will but Guitar Hero III (that I bought) didn't, despite them promising it would 'at some point after launch'. So I won't be buying Guitar Hero World Tour, I will be buying Rock Band 2 on the Xbox 360 and enjoying all of the downloadable tracks for Rock Band 2 and the original.
But of course I will have to buy another guitar, as my wii one obviously won't work with the 360.
This is rarely true, a single malt whisky is generally blended from many batches from the same distillery in order to give a consistant taste. Single barrel, or single batch whisky tends to be extremely expensive and is from hand picked barrels from each batch. Some distilleries allow you to buy a barrel of whisky which is then stored for you for 12-20 years. Once it is deemed ready you then pay tax on the amount that is left (a significant proportion evaporates during storage) and it is bottled up for you. This is a very risky investment as although there is a chance you will get a truly great tasting whisky more likely you will get something that is only marginally better or worse than the normal. Very good single barrel whisky can sell for hundreds or thousands of pounds a bottle.
Just to add to this a large part of the flavour in Scottish whisky comes from the water used to make it. For instance Islay malts have a distinctive peaty taste to them as the water used by the distillery drains through the peat moorlands in Islay.
The Xbox 360 Arcade only has 256mb of storage. The only systems that currently have 'upwards of 80gb' are the Xbox 360 Elite and recent versions of the Playstation 3. Most console owners will either have an earlier Xbox 360 giving them 20gb or 60gb, or an earlier Playstation 3 with 20gb, 40gb or 60gb.
That aside I do think that Nintendo has missed an opportunity here. For games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero the absence of dowloadable content is a big minus point. If they had allowed usb hard drives to be attached for storage it would solve a lot of problems, providing the transfer speed was good enough.
I pretty much never see any SPAM because the host I use has Mail Foundry SPAM filtering appliances in front of the email server. It does occasionally block legitimate email marketing such as Amazon special offer emails and the like. But as it send you an email with a list of anything it isn't sure about it is easy to have them sent on through.
According to their website they analyse SPAM in real time so if someone sends 10 million almost identical messages about Viagra they will notice and tell all of the Mail Foundry appliances to block anything that matches that email exactly.
The idea is that instead of trying to train your filters to recognize any SPAM you tell them to block the SPAM that is actually being sent that day.
It seems to work very well but I would imagine that the wider the adoption of the system becomes the more likely it is that someone will come up with a way to beat it.
(I am not in any way affiliated with Mail Foundry, just seems to work for us.)
When used in a device like the Eee PC a SSD is used to make the device more rugged and reliable, rather than for a speed boost. By not having any moving parts a SSD is much better at protecting data if the machine is dropped or rattled around in a bag while switched on.
You are right about the speed benefits generally though, fast hard drives are still beating a lot of SSDs in speed tests. Better ones are starting to come on to the market though.
It isn't a case of ignoring 40%, what people are saying is why not improve service for people who choose to live in cities.
By choosing to live in a rural area or sprawling town people need to accept that they won't get the same service as a tightly compact city.
No-one is saying that service to areas with a low population density should be degraded just that by living there they can't expect the same advantages as people who live in high population density areas like big cities.
Just because in Bumfuck Idaho you have to drive 5 miles to the nearest Starbucks doesn't mean you can't have one on every street corner in New York.
But for their to be a time saving on returneing to the app it must still be in memory. So the speed you gain from not having to re-open it is cancelled out by having less RAM available while it is sitting in the background.
You have fallen into the same trap as most people do when comparing prices of Apple hardware to that of other manufacturers. Doing a comparison based on exactly the same spec is other relevant if the customer actually wants a computer with that exact spec.
If you want to buy a laptop from Apple you have two choices, the macbook or macbook pro. If you don't want integrated graphics that just leaves the macbook pro. So instantly someone in the market for a laptop with something better than Intel GMA graphics needs to spend £1299 minimum for an Apple machine. To get a laptop from Dell with better than integrated graphics you can spend as little as £499.
What you need to realise is that not everyone wants a machine that is high spec across the board with all the bells and whistles. Some people want one feature in particular and everything else just needs to be good enough. Apple doesn't allow for this kind of customer. They deliberately segment their products to push people into the high end products. Want an upgradable machine? Got to buy a Mac Pro, doesn't matter that you don't actually need a professional workstation if you want to be able to stick another hard drive in it or upgrade the graphics then that is your only choice.
If you fit into one of Apple's hardware pigeon holes then that is fine, but if you don't then Apple hardware is a much more expensive choice for you to get what you actually need and that is why people go to a company like Dell who have a more flexible product range.
It will be interesting to see what the response to this post is. As normally when this is brought up it prompts a deluge of Apple fans talking about how the aesthetics are what is really important and how Macs are like art.
Almost all windows programs that use a 'document model' allow you to close the current doc without closing the program. They do this by having the document as a seperate entity inside the program window. All Office programs use this method as well as Adobe's apps and pretty much everything else.
The general philosophy is as described by the parent closing the app when you have finished with it, opposed to leaving it open in case you need it again in the future.
I get my email hosting from a company called Industry Square. They are a smallish hosting outfit but the reliability is good. They don't offer a lot of space but after trying a few companies I got sick of servers going down all the time and slow support response. Industry Square are pretty quick on support and not had a server problem that I have noticed in the last year or os. Not sure about IMAP though as I only use POP3.
I don't see this as an issue at the moment. If ICT was being used then people whoes HDTVs didn't have HDCP would be put off when discs didn't work properly but ICT isn't used at all at the moment so HDCP is irrelavent for now.
The general public don't know about ICT or HDCP and won't become aware of it until ICT is actually used and they have to take a disc back because it doesn't work. This may be a problem in the future but it isn't what is stopping adoption of Blu-ray now.
In the UK it is just the same. In HMV at the weekend I scanned the blu-ray prices, movies like The Matrix which are less that £5 on DVD are £25 on blu-ray. With DVD prices still dropping people are used to picking up films that have been on DVD just six months to a year for £5. These same people (myself included) aren't going to pay five times that for the HD version. Until most blu-ray discs cost £15 or less adoption will stay slow.
He registered the domain before Chicago even decided to make a bid for the Olympics so this isn't an issue.
How can it have had value to him because of a trademark that didn't exist when he registered it? This is why chronology is relevant. His site isn't commercial, has no ads and only accepts donations to fight this legal challenge so there is no financial motive here.
As someone who doesn't understand the difference between trademarks and copyright I don't think you have anything to add to this discussion.
If you visit the guys website you will see that he isn't just trying to make some cash. He has had a website on that domain for several years discussing the possible financial implications of Chicago bidding for the Olympics. Not only does the site have a genuine purpose it also has a clear message stating that it is not in anyway connected to the actual bid that Chicago has subsquently put in for the Olympics.
Except of course for the fact that he bought the domain and created his site before the trademark came into being. Indeed before Chicago even decided to bid for the Olympics. His site is a discussion of the possible costs of a hypothetical bid for the 2016 Olympics.
The idea that he can be forced to give up the name because it is now a trademark is ridiculous. Much like if I started an international punctuation competition called Slash Dot and then demanded ownership of slashdot.org.
Another example of a game that goes against this principle is the Tiger Woods series. On normal anyone can be a fantastic golfer after a couple of hours. After a while you want more of a challenge so move up to the next difficulty - suddenly you can't play at all. The normal level is so dumbed down that when you go to the next level up you go from hitting birdies all the time to taking 20 strokes to finish a hole.
This would be more forgivable if the game didn't recommend that you start on normal, and if it wasn't an ongoing campaign. Because the whole game is one long 'career' you win loads of competitions on normal, do well and move forward. Then you move up a difficulty for a more challenging game and not only are you having to deal with the 500% rise in shot difficulty but with stronger opponents as you are further on in your career. Unfortunatly by the point you think to increase the difficulty you have invested sufficient time to make it painful to restart your career.
That is the problem with Guitar Hero 3 though, the 5th fret isn't what makes 'Hard' so much more difficult. What makes it difficult is that the number of notes you have to play doubles for most songs and even more than that for the later ones. This combined with very unforgiving hammer on and pull off sections that require perfect fingering, makes some songs almost impossible without laboriously practicing each part of the song until you can play it perfectly.
What really highlights the problem with Guitar Hero 3 is that there isn't the same problem with Rock Band (or GH1/2 for that matter). The real problem with Guitar Hero 3 is that the note patterns aren't intuitive, they are overly complicated and don't match the song well enough for it to be instinctive to play.
The note patterns Harmonix came up with in GH1 and 2 were very close to the actual songs. Neversoft who developed GH3 just aren't as good at translating songs into notes for the game.
The reason for alternating developers is to shorten the turn around time on the next game. If it takes 3 years to make a new Call of Duty game then with two developers working on the series they can release a new game every 18 months. It makes sense from a business point of view but from a gamers point of view it is a terrible idea. CoD 4 was an incredible game, but that has no bearing on what CoD 5 is going to be like, so (as with CoD 3) a lot of gamers may end up not getting what they thought they were.
At least Blizzard Activision are up front about the different developers so people who follow the news are prewarned to check CoD 5 out before rushing off to buy it just because CoD 4 was great.