They have a good browser; Expression Web and Visual Studio use it when designing/developing web pages. I'm sure it's not even close to optimized, AFAIK it has no script engine attached to it, but as far as render quality goes, it's top-notch.
The problem is that IE has to be backwards-compatible with thousands of intranet applications. Firefox was able to dodge that bullet, since: 1) it was released after most of those intranet applications were already made, and 2) hardly anybody developed intranet applications for Netscape, anyway.
Considering that, I think IE7 is a really good product. The funny thing is that if MS ditched IE development, the whining here would just change from, "MS has a old browser!" to "MS refuses to support our intranet apps!"
Maybe you have a horrible personality, and the "we don't work on OSS" thing was a lie to make you feel better, instead of them saying, "you've had terrible B.O. and spinach in your teeth for the entire duration of this 4-hour long OpenOffice slideshow replete with DragonBall Z drawings."
Our historic records are a scant fragment of what actually existed at one point, and imagine if the only pieces of entertainment we have today that can survive an archeologist digging them up in 50000 years would be a copy of ET for the Atari 2600 from the landfill out in the desert.
They shredded those carts before burying them. They wouldn't find anything but shards of plastic. Of course, in 50,000 years they might have cyber-mega-brains that can look at a shard of plastic and instantly put E.T. up on a Cyber-Futur-Disp-TV. Then the cyber-mega-brain would get bored and bury it again.
As a pretty casual gamer, Tabula Rasa's introduction/tutorial was *awful*. I played for 3 weeks, and there are some game mechanics I still don't even come close to understanding: * There's something like you can sub-class your class every 4 levels, but then if you don't like the subclass you picked, you can go back to the other sub-class if you get demoted a few levels? Hell, I dunno. * The entire game is instanced like WOW dungeons, which I guess is good for their serverload, but it means that if you're in Central City you can't see your buddy who's also in Central City, even though you're chatting with him-- turns out you're in Central City 2 and he's in Central City 5. It makes no damned sense.
Also I got lost in the game world constantly; it has a radar and map, but both were hard to read and interpret. Added to that, they somehow managed to cram in *less* character customization than WOW (which has... barely any), and fewer distinct enemies.
It's no surprise the game is closing to me. I just hope it'll shut up Richard Garriot's blowhard-ness for a few years and we can all go back to forgetting he's still alive.
Haha, I thought you were going to do the "what decade did you come from?" gag so you could point out that NOBODY uses freakin' Java in a browser anymore. Java's totally dead on the web; Silverlight actually has better penetration at this point.
Why must our politicians wear a flagpin? Why did this become a big campaign issue?
So that 24-hour news networks have something to talk about. 80% or more of news this decade has been, basically, filler. Don't confuse, "CNN has nothing to run for their 7:00 hour, quick make some shit up" for "big campaign issue."
(The irony, of course, is that CNN can *make* it into a big campaign issue. Imagine how much good they could do if they actually talked about something substantive... but I guess doing actual research and reporting is too expensive.)
As an Australian I have often wondered about this myself. For example, in American TV shows it's almost impossible to find an episode of anything WITHOUT showing an American flag. Is this because the flags really are there and the producers are simply reflecting reality, or is this a false image of the amount of flags in a typical American workplace/home/street/etc?
TV shows usually take place at: * Police Stations * Courtrooms * Federal Buildings (CIA, FBI, Pentagon, White House) * Hospitals
All (well, not many hospitals, but bear with me) of which are buildings owned by the government, and for which the Flag is their "corporate logo", so to speak.
I don't think you're noticing anything at all, and I'd wager that if your country made enough decent TV shows on your own so that your networks didn't have to constantly fill air-time with US shows (ziing!) you'd notice the exact same number of flags.
I've never heard of reason number 2, actually. Around here, flying a flag upside-down is a general sign of distress, whether on the water or not... I'd handle him by simply calling the police and fire department, telling them that you have a reasonable cause to believe he requires help (the flag).
Could someone please explain this to me, why does Americans see the need to constantly surround themselves with US flags?
"constantly surround?" Teeny bit of hyperbole there, eh?
From where I'm sitting now in an typical office environment in a largish American city, it's easier to find a New Zealand flag than an American one. The building next door belongs to the Federal Government, so yes it flies a flag. The building down the hill from that one is a Post Office, ditto. But "constantly surrounded?" Please.
To most (non-american) people that's just plain bizarre.
You, of course, have data to back-up this assertion, right? A world-wide survey? I think it's just bizarre to you, and you're projecting.
Outside the USA, you'll only see it in dictatorships that tries to whip up unity/loyalty for to state, but obvously it's not quite the same thing here (since americans spam their surroundings with US flags by their own free will, not by a state decree).
US military personnel post with flag backgrounds. Therefore, the US is just like an abusive dictatorship. Check.
Are the majority of the population so bad at geography that they have to see a flag to know what country they're in?
Wow, how long have you been practicing your stand-up? I think you're ready for open-mic night.
Or would people assume that General Ann Dunwoody is Canadian or (gasp!) French if it wasn't for the flag in the background?
Canadians fly the flag as much, and in the same situations, as Americans. So I guess they must be a dictatorship. As is Mexico. Or maybe when you say "Americans" you mean all of North America.
More likely, though, you're just participating in holier-than-thou Euro-hate, like so many others on Slashdot.
A jet engine basically dumps a stream of kerosene into a can with a fan on both ends and lights it. There are no emissions controls. There are no catalytic converters. Aviation fuel is a witch's brew of paraffins, olefins, naphthenes, and other hydrocarbons, plus anti-oxidant, anti-corrosion, anti-static, anti-freezing, and even anti-bacterial ingredients thrown in.
Fuck the environment, when I can travel at 560 MPH in a 240-foot-long, 175-ton aircraft 7 miles above the ground for $120. What the hell did trees ever do for me?
Yeah, but what if we do spend $10 million and clone the mammoth only to find out that they aren't mighty at all? What if they were actually somewhat wimpy? We'd have been better off spending that $10 million on hairspray, lighters and Jeff Daniels.
Apple's products are vastly superior to Microsoft's.
The iPod isn't "vastly superior" to the Zune. OS X isn't "vastly superior" to Vista. You weaken your point with the overstatement.
I'm not arguing that they aren't superior at all, but "vastly" is a vast over-statement, here. Personally, I like Vista better than OS X, but I like my iPhone better as a music player than my Zune. (But I hate iTunes about 10,000 times more than the Zune software... the Zune software is actually quite nice, iTunes is a bloated, buggy, POS.)
A lot of people forget how generally unprecedented it was at the time for an action game to begin with half an hour of context and tone establishment instead of throwing you right into the fire.
I played Marathon, which manages to both throw you right into the fire *and* establish context, and has a more compelling story to boot. The real shame is that Valve gets the credit for something that, frankly, Bungie had already mastered... just because Bungie released their game for a less popular platform.
Accessibility is FAR too neglected in the gaming field. I'm not color-blind myself, but I've sometimes felt like a heel playing against a couple of my best friends who are. In Starcraft, for example, the dots on the mini-map are virtually useless for color-blind gamers. And virtually every game uses Red/Green on the HUD to indicate friend or foe.
The really sad thing is that other groups at Microsoft have excellent accessibility features. Xbox 360 developers must not work very closely with them.
Unfortunately my first attempt at creating an avatar ended up looking like Stalin, and the second like Hitler so I think we need more customization of them
I think that says more about you than Xbox Live.:)
I agree; but on the other hand, Bethestha knew when they were developing Oblivion that deleting masses of saves would be awkward and annoying and could have worked around it. As a person who frequently makes "running logs" of saves (I had 300+ Oblivion saves at one point), I completely agree that the Xbox file manager BADLY needs a "rubber-band" selection. Or a "select all" button, or something.
Yes, but no game console in history has allowed you to do that, so it would be hard to argue it as being "defective". I mean, a Model T didn't have seatbelts, does that make it "defective by design?"
Maybe when talking about the Xbox 360 they should make the tag "lacking-a-feature-I-would-like-to-have-by-design." Not as catchy though.
First of all, if it happens on unprotected streams it couldn't possibly be DRM-related, right?
Secondly, yes I do. That doesn't happen on my computer when I play MP3s, even protected iTunes MP3s. If you can provide specific repro instructions so I can reproduce that Task Manager window, I'd love to see them. But I have absolutely no clue what was happening on your computer when you took that screenshot. If it helps, my Vista Ultimate computer doesn't even seem to even run "mfpmp.exe" when I'm playing music or video, unless it also goes by some other name.
You didn't provide evidence, you provided a Slashdot thread. One that describes something that doesn't happen on my computer, or any Vista computer I've tried it on. (Which admittedly is only three, but still.)
Look, I'm sitting in front of a copy of Vista Ultimate 64-bit right now, this instant. Provide me with repro instructions so I can reproduce it right here, and I'll be convinced. I'd love to see some evidence, running on my own computer, of this mythical DRM. Until I do, it's just bullshit.
Just ignore it, it's a Slashdot myth that Vista has some magical form of DRM that "slows down" everything on your computer. That's as specific as it ever gets. If you ask for evidence of it, they always link to the same one article that refers to MP3 playback on a beta release as "proof."
I've asked about this about a dozen times, and I've never gotten a satisfactory reply. I've also asked for repro instructions for a series of actions that would result in the magical DRM blocking a user action. The simple fact is that the only DRM in Vista is in WMP; the same way the only DRM in OS X is in iTunes. There's no horrible conspiracy, and your computer isn't being "slowed down".
The old DVD Player in Mac OS 9 just blanked out the specific pixels covered by the DVD image, instead of doing nothing (like OS X does.) WMP in Windows is the same. I dunno why OS X's behavior here is so retarded, other than it's probably just a very low priority to fix.
Nothing in the summary indicated to me it doesn't work. Maybe "doesn't work as well as they anticipated." But if these techniques did find people smuggling drugs or using fake IDs, then it does indeed work, right? By definition.
Maybe 1% arrests is bad, maybe it's good; since the summary never tells us what their goal was, it's impossible to judge.
The windows OS kernel never had widgets build in. All it has is low level graphics operations in the kernel - the widget drawing code is in a library.
Yes, the kernel doesn't, but we're talking about the OS. The OS does. Suse does. Ubuntu does. Macintosh OS X does. The only OS I can think of off-hand that has no widgets is DOS, as I posted.
What , like Unix, VMS or IOS, none of which have the GUI widgets or even basic graphics in the OS kernel?
All the Unixes I know about have widgets. I have no familiarity with VMS or IOS. But again, you're using the term "OS kernel" and I'm using the term "OS." It's apparent you have mental retardation issues, but even you should be able to tell those two terms apart from each other.
Go find out about how the unix X windows system works you brainless MS fanboy, though you can't even get the MS stuff right since its shell32.dll that implements widgets - not the OS.
I don't give a shit how it works, the point is that if the OS ships with it, then it has widgets. "Operation system" and "kernel" are two different terms for a very good reason: they're TWO DIFFERENT THINGS. I have no idea why you think "Windows" the operation system consists only of a kernel; what do you call all the other stuff on the installation CD?
Oh you're way beyond a clown now.
And you're a very successful troll. And an asshole.
I apologize to the rest of Slashdot for feeding it.
I shouldn't even reply to such a troll, but I'm a sucker.
"the OS" Napster was made for was Windows, and Windows has widgets. As do the vast majority of OSes, but I guess troll there uses DOS 6.2 or something and is easily offended.
Still, a gaff of this level is well worth calling me clown and saying "for fuck's sake".
Slashdot Mirror
They have a good browser; Expression Web and Visual Studio use it when designing/developing web pages. I'm sure it's not even close to optimized, AFAIK it has no script engine attached to it, but as far as render quality goes, it's top-notch.
The problem is that IE has to be backwards-compatible with thousands of intranet applications. Firefox was able to dodge that bullet, since: 1) it was released after most of those intranet applications were already made, and 2) hardly anybody developed intranet applications for Netscape, anyway.
Considering that, I think IE7 is a really good product. The funny thing is that if MS ditched IE development, the whining here would just change from, "MS has a old browser!" to "MS refuses to support our intranet apps!"
Maybe you have a horrible personality, and the "we don't work on OSS" thing was a lie to make you feel better, instead of them saying, "you've had terrible B.O. and spinach in your teeth for the entire duration of this 4-hour long OpenOffice slideshow replete with DragonBall Z drawings."
Our historic records are a scant fragment of what actually existed at one point, and imagine if the only pieces of entertainment we have today that can survive an archeologist digging them up in 50000 years would be a copy of ET for the Atari 2600 from the landfill out in the desert.
They shredded those carts before burying them. They wouldn't find anything but shards of plastic. Of course, in 50,000 years they might have cyber-mega-brains that can look at a shard of plastic and instantly put E.T. up on a Cyber-Futur-Disp-TV. Then the cyber-mega-brain would get bored and bury it again.
As a pretty casual gamer, Tabula Rasa's introduction/tutorial was *awful*. I played for 3 weeks, and there are some game mechanics I still don't even come close to understanding:
* There's something like you can sub-class your class every 4 levels, but then if you don't like the subclass you picked, you can go back to the other sub-class if you get demoted a few levels? Hell, I dunno.
* The entire game is instanced like WOW dungeons, which I guess is good for their serverload, but it means that if you're in Central City you can't see your buddy who's also in Central City, even though you're chatting with him-- turns out you're in Central City 2 and he's in Central City 5. It makes no damned sense.
Also I got lost in the game world constantly; it has a radar and map, but both were hard to read and interpret. Added to that, they somehow managed to cram in *less* character customization than WOW (which has ... barely any), and fewer distinct enemies.
It's no surprise the game is closing to me. I just hope it'll shut up Richard Garriot's blowhard-ness for a few years and we can all go back to forgetting he's still alive.
Haha, I thought you were going to do the "what decade did you come from?" gag so you could point out that NOBODY uses freakin' Java in a browser anymore. Java's totally dead on the web; Silverlight actually has better penetration at this point.
Your post is awesome. Thanks.
Why must our politicians wear a flagpin? Why did this become a big campaign issue?
So that 24-hour news networks have something to talk about. 80% or more of news this decade has been, basically, filler. Don't confuse, "CNN has nothing to run for their 7:00 hour, quick make some shit up" for "big campaign issue."
(The irony, of course, is that CNN can *make* it into a big campaign issue. Imagine how much good they could do if they actually talked about something substantive... but I guess doing actual research and reporting is too expensive.)
As an Australian I have often wondered about this myself. For example, in American TV shows it's almost impossible to find an episode of anything WITHOUT showing an American flag. Is this because the flags really are there and the producers are simply reflecting reality, or is this a false image of the amount of flags in a typical American workplace/home/street/etc?
TV shows usually take place at:
* Police Stations
* Courtrooms
* Federal Buildings (CIA, FBI, Pentagon, White House)
* Hospitals
All (well, not many hospitals, but bear with me) of which are buildings owned by the government, and for which the Flag is their "corporate logo", so to speak.
I don't think you're noticing anything at all, and I'd wager that if your country made enough decent TV shows on your own so that your networks didn't have to constantly fill air-time with US shows (ziing!) you'd notice the exact same number of flags.
I've never heard of reason number 2, actually. Around here, flying a flag upside-down is a general sign of distress, whether on the water or not... I'd handle him by simply calling the police and fire department, telling them that you have a reasonable cause to believe he requires help (the flag).
Could someone please explain this to me, why does Americans see the need to constantly surround themselves with US flags?
"constantly surround?" Teeny bit of hyperbole there, eh?
From where I'm sitting now in an typical office environment in a largish American city, it's easier to find a New Zealand flag than an American one. The building next door belongs to the Federal Government, so yes it flies a flag. The building down the hill from that one is a Post Office, ditto. But "constantly surrounded?" Please.
To most (non-american) people that's just plain bizarre.
You, of course, have data to back-up this assertion, right? A world-wide survey? I think it's just bizarre to you, and you're projecting.
Outside the USA, you'll only see it in dictatorships that tries to whip up unity/loyalty for to state, but obvously it's not quite the same thing here (since americans spam their surroundings with US flags by their own free will, not by a state decree).
US military personnel post with flag backgrounds. Therefore, the US is just like an abusive dictatorship. Check.
Are the majority of the population so bad at geography that they have to see a flag to know what country they're in?
Wow, how long have you been practicing your stand-up? I think you're ready for open-mic night.
Or would people assume that General Ann Dunwoody is Canadian or (gasp!) French if it wasn't for the flag in the background?
Canadians fly the flag as much, and in the same situations, as Americans. So I guess they must be a dictatorship. As is Mexico. Or maybe when you say "Americans" you mean all of North America.
More likely, though, you're just participating in holier-than-thou Euro-hate, like so many others on Slashdot.
A jet engine basically dumps a stream of kerosene into a can with a fan on both ends and lights it. There are no emissions controls. There are no catalytic converters. Aviation fuel is a witch's brew of paraffins, olefins, naphthenes, and other hydrocarbons, plus anti-oxidant, anti-corrosion, anti-static, anti-freezing, and even anti-bacterial ingredients thrown in.
Fuck the environment, when I can travel at 560 MPH in a 240-foot-long, 175-ton aircraft 7 miles above the ground for $120. What the hell did trees ever do for me?
Yeah, but what if we do spend $10 million and clone the mammoth only to find out that they aren't mighty at all? What if they were actually somewhat wimpy? We'd have been better off spending that $10 million on hairspray, lighters and Jeff Daniels.
Apple's products are vastly superior to Microsoft's.
The iPod isn't "vastly superior" to the Zune. OS X isn't "vastly superior" to Vista. You weaken your point with the overstatement.
I'm not arguing that they aren't superior at all, but "vastly" is a vast over-statement, here. Personally, I like Vista better than OS X, but I like my iPhone better as a music player than my Zune. (But I hate iTunes about 10,000 times more than the Zune software... the Zune software is actually quite nice, iTunes is a bloated, buggy, POS.)
A lot of people forget how generally unprecedented it was at the time for an action game to begin with half an hour of context and tone establishment instead of throwing you right into the fire.
I played Marathon, which manages to both throw you right into the fire *and* establish context, and has a more compelling story to boot. The real shame is that Valve gets the credit for something that, frankly, Bungie had already mastered... just because Bungie released their game for a less popular platform.
Accessibility is FAR too neglected in the gaming field. I'm not color-blind myself, but I've sometimes felt like a heel playing against a couple of my best friends who are. In Starcraft, for example, the dots on the mini-map are virtually useless for color-blind gamers. And virtually every game uses Red/Green on the HUD to indicate friend or foe.
The really sad thing is that other groups at Microsoft have excellent accessibility features. Xbox 360 developers must not work very closely with them.
I hope they get you squared away.
Unfortunately my first attempt at creating an avatar ended up looking like Stalin, and the second like Hitler so I think we need more customization of them
I think that says more about you than Xbox Live. :)
I agree; but on the other hand, Bethestha knew when they were developing Oblivion that deleting masses of saves would be awkward and annoying and could have worked around it. As a person who frequently makes "running logs" of saves (I had 300+ Oblivion saves at one point), I completely agree that the Xbox file manager BADLY needs a "rubber-band" selection. Or a "select all" button, or something.
Yes, but no game console in history has allowed you to do that, so it would be hard to argue it as being "defective". I mean, a Model T didn't have seatbelts, does that make it "defective by design?"
Maybe when talking about the Xbox 360 they should make the tag "lacking-a-feature-I-would-like-to-have-by-design." Not as catchy though.
First of all, if it happens on unprotected streams it couldn't possibly be DRM-related, right?
Secondly, yes I do. That doesn't happen on my computer when I play MP3s, even protected iTunes MP3s. If you can provide specific repro instructions so I can reproduce that Task Manager window, I'd love to see them. But I have absolutely no clue what was happening on your computer when you took that screenshot. If it helps, my Vista Ultimate computer doesn't even seem to even run "mfpmp.exe" when I'm playing music or video, unless it also goes by some other name.
You didn't provide evidence, you provided a Slashdot thread. One that describes something that doesn't happen on my computer, or any Vista computer I've tried it on. (Which admittedly is only three, but still.)
Look, I'm sitting in front of a copy of Vista Ultimate 64-bit right now, this instant. Provide me with repro instructions so I can reproduce it right here, and I'll be convinced. I'd love to see some evidence, running on my own computer, of this mythical DRM. Until I do, it's just bullshit.
Just ignore it, it's a Slashdot myth that Vista has some magical form of DRM that "slows down" everything on your computer. That's as specific as it ever gets. If you ask for evidence of it, they always link to the same one article that refers to MP3 playback on a beta release as "proof."
I've asked about this about a dozen times, and I've never gotten a satisfactory reply. I've also asked for repro instructions for a series of actions that would result in the magical DRM blocking a user action. The simple fact is that the only DRM in Vista is in WMP; the same way the only DRM in OS X is in iTunes. There's no horrible conspiracy, and your computer isn't being "slowed down".
The old DVD Player in Mac OS 9 just blanked out the specific pixels covered by the DVD image, instead of doing nothing (like OS X does.) WMP in Windows is the same. I dunno why OS X's behavior here is so retarded, other than it's probably just a very low priority to fix.
Nothing in the summary indicated to me it doesn't work. Maybe "doesn't work as well as they anticipated." But if these techniques did find people smuggling drugs or using fake IDs, then it does indeed work, right? By definition.
Maybe 1% arrests is bad, maybe it's good; since the summary never tells us what their goal was, it's impossible to judge.
The windows OS kernel never had widgets build in. All it has is low level graphics operations in the kernel - the widget drawing code is in a library.
Yes, the kernel doesn't, but we're talking about the OS. The OS does. Suse does. Ubuntu does. Macintosh OS X does. The only OS I can think of off-hand that has no widgets is DOS, as I posted.
What , like Unix, VMS or IOS, none of which have the GUI widgets or even basic graphics in the OS kernel?
All the Unixes I know about have widgets. I have no familiarity with VMS or IOS. But again, you're using the term "OS kernel" and I'm using the term "OS." It's apparent you have mental retardation issues, but even you should be able to tell those two terms apart from each other.
Go find out about how the unix X windows system works you brainless MS fanboy, though you can't even get the MS stuff right since its shell32.dll that implements widgets - not the OS.
I don't give a shit how it works, the point is that if the OS ships with it, then it has widgets. "Operation system" and "kernel" are two different terms for a very good reason: they're TWO DIFFERENT THINGS. I have no idea why you think "Windows" the operation system consists only of a kernel; what do you call all the other stuff on the installation CD?
Oh you're way beyond a clown now.
And you're a very successful troll. And an asshole.
I apologize to the rest of Slashdot for feeding it.
I shouldn't even reply to such a troll, but I'm a sucker.
"the OS" Napster was made for was Windows, and Windows has widgets. As do the vast majority of OSes, but I guess troll there uses DOS 6.2 or something and is easily offended.
Still, a gaff of this level is well worth calling me clown and saying "for fuck's sake".