The difference is in implementation. Link prefetching was already supported in Chrome (and Firefox), which fetches the page in the background and stores the results in cache. Chrome 13 goes a step farther, actually prerendering the page in the background if requested (including running Javascript).
Not the same thing - you have groups of friends at each individual school, and you have friends in other colleges who had likely already been invited to Facebook, and everyone could network together. Who couldn't you network with? People not in college, high school students, people who had graduated. It was a very concentrated experience.
The problem with Google+ is that it's just so scattershot. I invited people I know, then they blocked invites. What's the common thing they all have together? They know me, and nothing else. There's no reason for them to come back to the site.
I have a CR-48, and the really fast boot (8 seconds), instant sleep/resume, 6-8 hour battery and 3 second shutdown go a long way in making it incredibly useful. The machine has wifi and pay-as-you-go 3G access, and you get 100 MB free 3G a month should you need to check your email when there's no hotspot or something.
Google will have trouble marketing these with all the hype around tablets, but to be honest, it's been a lot more useful than my iPad since I can actually use it as a computer without carrying around my mammoth Thinkpad W500. It's not perfect for me (though it does have SSH!), but for my Mom's next laptop, I'm going to strongly recommend a Chromebook. It's all she needs, the price is right, and there's no spinning platters, security problems, or bloat to worry about.
A key feature of iOS 4.3 was significantly improved JavaScript performance by porting Nitro to iOS, Nitro is a part of Webkit. So yes, this specific iOS update did include a rather significant Webkit update, perhaps one of the most significant ones in recent memory, which makes it suspect.
So they're holding it back on purpose. Maliciously? Who knows.
The only tracking features Chrome makes use of is a ping to Google upon successful install (RLZ identifier, by way of Google Update, which is not installed with Chromium and a separate open source project) and the suggested results in the address bar, which can be disabled.
I'm all for people using whatever browser they want because it suits their needs, but I don't get the FUD against Chrome. It's utter bullshit and anti-Google paranoia when there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made.
Google is doing this with Native Client. It allows a browser to run code compiled for x86, ARM, or LLVM bytecode in a sandbox. It's currently in beta in Chrome 10 (you can enable and try it out by going to about:flags), and apparently available for other browsers as well under the BSD license.
I enjoyed Crysis. Accomplish these objectives within a relatively open sandbox, given these powers. It only became standard fare scifi bullshit during the alien mothership levels, but was otherwise pretty neat.
Crysis 2 sounds the same way, only with the multiplayer designed by Crytek UK - formerly Free Radical, the guys behind Timesplitters and Goldeneye 007.
I can vouch for this. Signature isn't exactly a vanilla install (Microsoft wants you to have the OEM drivers and some software) but it gives you no bullshit, Live Essentials, and Security Essentials, arguably the best AV program on Windows.
If you're suggesting a friend buy a laptop or, don't want to deal with PC Decrapifier, I highly recommend it.
Or you could just, you know, play it. The service lets you demo any game free for 30 minutes.
While it clearly isn't great at games that require a twitch response, using a game controller masks latency very well. You simply don't notice it too much when playing on a PC with a 360 controller or their Microconsole. Third person action games are completely playable. I was able to go through all of Assassin's Creed II on OnLive (they gave it to me for free for signing up) and honestly, I had a pretty great experience. The fact that I could play it anywhere without worrying about hardware requirements or my saved game, was pretty damn neat. Just Cause, Trine, and Darksiders have also given me solid impressions of OnLive.
That said, the latency is fine for controller-based shooters as well, especially the slow-paced ones they offer (Bioshock, Borderlands). But won't replace me playing Bad Company 2 and Quake Live with mouse and keyboard on a high end machine.
Because you're rendering at 720p-1080p on a PS3. When you're rendering at 320x240, you can pull off a lot of neat tricks without needing that much processing power. Aside from that, you have the blu-ray and hard drive taking up valuable space.
The PSP came out during the PS2's lifespan, and easily looked just as good.
The reason Chrome has Flash integrated is because a significant number of security exploits today are of Adobe products, specifically Flash Player and Adobe Reader. By integrating Flash, Google has managed to integrate it with their silent update system and the Chrome sandbox (sandboxed Flash is in the beta channel). As for PDF viewing, Google wrote their own simple, sandboxed PDF viewer with none of Adobe's issues and shipped it in Chrome 8. Honestly, this is a lot better than users getting both of these manually and having vulnerable versions lying around.
There is no monthly subscription fee, and you don't need to purchase games at full retail price - you can get them as rentals and try the first 30 minutes of any game for free.
Some people have no interest in picking up a $400 console or building a gaming PC. This service allowed me to demo all of their games, realize I liked Darksiders and Assassin's Creed II and how the service worked, and play them on any computer. Granted, some latency is there when you're using a high-precision device like a mouse, but plugging in a gamepad makes the issue disappear. Yet again, I'm in Boston and they say I'm connecting to Washington DC, so maybe this will get better if they deploy closer datacenters.
I've loved this service, and they haven't done me any wrong. They allow me to sample everything and play games immediately, even on my Thinkpad W500 with a workstation card that can barely handle Starcraft 2. Is it for everyone? No. But it works for me, and I'm sure if they build it in to cable boxes, blu-ray players and televisions, it'll work for a lot of people. I don't know what's 'anti-consumer' about not having to pay for game hardware, and being able to instantly rent titles that interest me.
A few friends of mine have been using Wave for developing a game and game toolset, and its a weird mixture of wiki, message board, and group whiteboard, they usually discuss the latest project milestone on Skype while having running meeting minutes in a Wave. If someone can't make the meeting, they come along later and comment. There's long waves about everything from programming standards, to models and art assets, to release notes.
It's been so damn useful for project development that Google is planning to ship "Wave in a Box" so small teams like ours can deploy it on our own server, even after Google kills official support. And we will, we can't go back to wiki, it seems so damn archaic at this point.
RealID's Facebook integration simply allows you to see what Facebook friends are on Battle.net (and have used the FB tool), and add them as friends.
That's it. It makes perfect sense, its damn useful to add all your friends with the click of a button (they need to confirm, of course) and it only exists as a *single button* in the whole interface.
Alright, I can understand not buying something because you're opposed to the DRM, that's fine. In Steam's case I personally think its useful, to reinstall all my games on-demand wherever I am, and have my saves. The odds of me losing a CD are far greater than Valve both closing up shop *and* renegging on their promise to remove the DRM from games they sell.
But then you get to the FUD. VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) runs under Administrator as Steam Client Service (which is also used to install games). It isn't even a driver, hardly 'burying itself deep in the OS'. That's the only way an automated anti-cheat system can work and how Warden, Punkbuster, Hackguard, and others solve that problem. Civ V doesn't use VAC though, nor do most games sold on Steam.
The mundane tasks combined with teamwork with random individuals, and a text-to-speech synthesizer?
You end up with brilliant videos like this, exploring what life would be like on the moon if modern gamers were sent into space:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv6RbEOlqRo
Jeff Green earned my trust after years of being editor-in-chief for Computer Gaming World/GFW Magazine, and his great personality and style on the GFW Radio podcast.
As nice as your conspiracy theory sounds, the man is being honest and trying to change things.
For as much bullshit as they generate, 4chan's boards provide a damn neat culture. Much like Slashdot, its pretty easy to attack if you don't go there or recognize the jokes.
The Myst series is pretty awesome, but you need to be the type of person that enjoys a difficult puzzle and a slow pace.
GoG.com (Good Old Games) sells Myst and Riven (the sequel) in modern compatible versions for $6 each, no DRM. Those are by far the best games in the series.
Myst itself comes in two forms, Masterpiece edition and RealMyst, a real-time 3D remake where you can walk around in first person. I prefer masterpiece, but its a matter of preference.
What? Have you played through Crysis?
The sandbox style of gameplay and the choice between multiple suit powers actually made it an excellent game, if a little graphically intensive.
I think Google Chrome is a better fit.
GoogleUpdate.exe just sits in the background, the user doesn't know it's installed or running. When a new version of Chrome is detected, its automatically downloaded and installed without any user prompt.
The only way they could find out they're running a new version is to manually check.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue wasn't that Microsoft bundled IE, it's that they prevented OEMs from bundling Netscape.
Who is Comodo and why should I trust them?
Brink didn't use Megatextures, there was no need for it to do so.
The only two games to use Megatextures so far are RAGE and Quake Wars. In the latter, they work quite well.
The difference is in implementation. Link prefetching was already supported in Chrome (and Firefox), which fetches the page in the background and stores the results in cache. Chrome 13 goes a step farther, actually prerendering the page in the background if requested (including running Javascript).
Implementation details are here: http://code.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/prerender.html
Then am I allowed to install a keylogger? By your logic, it's the same thing.
Not the same thing - you have groups of friends at each individual school, and you have friends in other colleges who had likely already been invited to Facebook, and everyone could network together. Who couldn't you network with? People not in college, high school students, people who had graduated. It was a very concentrated experience.
The problem with Google+ is that it's just so scattershot. I invited people I know, then they blocked invites. What's the common thing they all have together? They know me, and nothing else. There's no reason for them to come back to the site.
I have a CR-48, and the really fast boot (8 seconds), instant sleep/resume, 6-8 hour battery and 3 second shutdown go a long way in making it incredibly useful. The machine has wifi and pay-as-you-go 3G access, and you get 100 MB free 3G a month should you need to check your email when there's no hotspot or something.
Google will have trouble marketing these with all the hype around tablets, but to be honest, it's been a lot more useful than my iPad since I can actually use it as a computer without carrying around my mammoth Thinkpad W500. It's not perfect for me (though it does have SSH!), but for my Mom's next laptop, I'm going to strongly recommend a Chromebook. It's all she needs, the price is right, and there's no spinning platters, security problems, or bloat to worry about.
A key feature of iOS 4.3 was significantly improved JavaScript performance by porting Nitro to iOS, Nitro is a part of Webkit. So yes, this specific iOS update did include a rather significant Webkit update, perhaps one of the most significant ones in recent memory, which makes it suspect.
So they're holding it back on purpose. Maliciously? Who knows.
The only tracking features Chrome makes use of is a ping to Google upon successful install (RLZ identifier, by way of Google Update, which is not installed with Chromium and a separate open source project) and the suggested results in the address bar, which can be disabled.
I'm all for people using whatever browser they want because it suits their needs, but I don't get the FUD against Chrome. It's utter bullshit and anti-Google paranoia when there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made.
Google is doing this with Native Client. It allows a browser to run code compiled for x86, ARM, or LLVM bytecode in a sandbox. It's currently in beta in Chrome 10 (you can enable and try it out by going to about:flags), and apparently available for other browsers as well under the BSD license.
I enjoyed Crysis. Accomplish these objectives within a relatively open sandbox, given these powers. It only became standard fare scifi bullshit during the alien mothership levels, but was otherwise pretty neat.
Crysis 2 sounds the same way, only with the multiplayer designed by Crytek UK - formerly Free Radical, the guys behind Timesplitters and Goldeneye 007.
I can vouch for this. Signature isn't exactly a vanilla install (Microsoft wants you to have the OEM drivers and some software) but it gives you no bullshit, Live Essentials, and Security Essentials, arguably the best AV program on Windows.
If you're suggesting a friend buy a laptop or, don't want to deal with PC Decrapifier, I highly recommend it.
Or you could just, you know, play it. The service lets you demo any game free for 30 minutes.
While it clearly isn't great at games that require a twitch response, using a game controller masks latency very well. You simply don't notice it too much when playing on a PC with a 360 controller or their Microconsole. Third person action games are completely playable. I was able to go through all of Assassin's Creed II on OnLive (they gave it to me for free for signing up) and honestly, I had a pretty great experience. The fact that I could play it anywhere without worrying about hardware requirements or my saved game, was pretty damn neat. Just Cause, Trine, and Darksiders have also given me solid impressions of OnLive.
That said, the latency is fine for controller-based shooters as well, especially the slow-paced ones they offer (Bioshock, Borderlands). But won't replace me playing Bad Company 2 and Quake Live with mouse and keyboard on a high end machine.
Because you're rendering at 720p-1080p on a PS3. When you're rendering at 320x240, you can pull off a lot of neat tricks without needing that much processing power. Aside from that, you have the blu-ray and hard drive taking up valuable space.
The PSP came out during the PS2's lifespan, and easily looked just as good.
The reason Chrome has Flash integrated is because a significant number of security exploits today are of Adobe products, specifically Flash Player and Adobe Reader. By integrating Flash, Google has managed to integrate it with their silent update system and the Chrome sandbox (sandboxed Flash is in the beta channel). As for PDF viewing, Google wrote their own simple, sandboxed PDF viewer with none of Adobe's issues and shipped it in Chrome 8.
Honestly, this is a lot better than users getting both of these manually and having vulnerable versions lying around.
There is no monthly subscription fee, and you don't need to purchase games at full retail price - you can get them as rentals and try the first 30 minutes of any game for free.
Some people have no interest in picking up a $400 console or building a gaming PC. This service allowed me to demo all of their games, realize I liked Darksiders and Assassin's Creed II and how the service worked, and play them on any computer. Granted, some latency is there when you're using a high-precision device like a mouse, but plugging in a gamepad makes the issue disappear. Yet again, I'm in Boston and they say I'm connecting to Washington DC, so maybe this will get better if they deploy closer datacenters.
I've loved this service, and they haven't done me any wrong. They allow me to sample everything and play games immediately, even on my Thinkpad W500 with a workstation card that can barely handle Starcraft 2. Is it for everyone? No. But it works for me, and I'm sure if they build it in to cable boxes, blu-ray players and televisions, it'll work for a lot of people. I don't know what's 'anti-consumer' about not having to pay for game hardware, and being able to instantly rent titles that interest me.
"Real-time message board for projects."
A few friends of mine have been using Wave for developing a game and game toolset, and its a weird mixture of wiki, message board, and group whiteboard, they usually discuss the latest project milestone on Skype while having running meeting minutes in a Wave. If someone can't make the meeting, they come along later and comment. There's long waves about everything from programming standards, to models and art assets, to release notes.
It's been so damn useful for project development that Google is planning to ship "Wave in a Box" so small teams like ours can deploy it on our own server, even after Google kills official support. And we will, we can't go back to wiki, it seems so damn archaic at this point.
RealID's Facebook integration simply allows you to see what Facebook friends are on Battle.net (and have used the FB tool), and add them as friends. That's it. It makes perfect sense, its damn useful to add all your friends with the click of a button (they need to confirm, of course) and it only exists as a *single button* in the whole interface.
Alright, I can understand not buying something because you're opposed to the DRM, that's fine. In Steam's case I personally think its useful, to reinstall all my games on-demand wherever I am, and have my saves. The odds of me losing a CD are far greater than Valve both closing up shop *and* renegging on their promise to remove the DRM from games they sell. But then you get to the FUD. VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) runs under Administrator as Steam Client Service (which is also used to install games). It isn't even a driver, hardly 'burying itself deep in the OS'. That's the only way an automated anti-cheat system can work and how Warden, Punkbuster, Hackguard, and others solve that problem. Civ V doesn't use VAC though, nor do most games sold on Steam.
The mundane tasks combined with teamwork with random individuals, and a text-to-speech synthesizer? You end up with brilliant videos like this, exploring what life would be like on the moon if modern gamers were sent into space: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv6RbEOlqRo
Jeff Green earned my trust after years of being editor-in-chief for Computer Gaming World/GFW Magazine, and his great personality and style on the GFW Radio podcast. As nice as your conspiracy theory sounds, the man is being honest and trying to change things.
For as much bullshit as they generate, 4chan's boards provide a damn neat culture. Much like Slashdot, its pretty easy to attack if you don't go there or recognize the jokes.
The Myst series is pretty awesome, but you need to be the type of person that enjoys a difficult puzzle and a slow pace. GoG.com (Good Old Games) sells Myst and Riven (the sequel) in modern compatible versions for $6 each, no DRM. Those are by far the best games in the series. Myst itself comes in two forms, Masterpiece edition and RealMyst, a real-time 3D remake where you can walk around in first person. I prefer masterpiece, but its a matter of preference.
What? Have you played through Crysis? The sandbox style of gameplay and the choice between multiple suit powers actually made it an excellent game, if a little graphically intensive.
I think Google Chrome is a better fit. GoogleUpdate.exe just sits in the background, the user doesn't know it's installed or running. When a new version of Chrome is detected, its automatically downloaded and installed without any user prompt. The only way they could find out they're running a new version is to manually check.