The tabbing thing came from BeOS, where it was done right. The problem is that tabbed windows needs to be an *OS* feature, not an application feature-- on BeOS, I could drag my email window, my browser, and a FTP window into the same set of tabs, then treat that tab set like a single window. Or, if I had a dozen browser tabs, I could break them apart easily into a dozen different windows.
One of the things that struck me about Google's Chrome announcement is that they're going to treat tabs the way BeOS did, mostly-- you're still stuck with browser tabs, but at least you can split tabs into different windows with it.
Anyway, I agree with you, unless you're going to do tabs *right* (the way BeOS did), don't bother.
Please, spawning a 100 threads is NOT a bug. It's a FLAWED DESIGN. Perhaps this is why we came to the joke "it's not a bug (as in 'unexpected'), it's a feature (as in 'designed that way')".
Having your browser crash because a single webpage in a single tab did something wrong is also FLAWED DESIGN. Which particular type of FLAWED DESIGN do you like better? (I'd rather have the 100 threads and fewer browser crashes, personally.)
I dream of a future where I have means other than javascript popups to check objects in javascript in IE. Yes, yes, I know they have a script debugger today... if you have some form of.NET studio installed. Which is just peachy if you run Linux and IE4Linux.
Actually, the debugger comes with any MS product that's capable of using VBScript or JScript, meaning you only need to have Office installed. I'm pretty sure that MS doesn't spend much time thinking about the half-dozen people in the world who use "IE4Linux". I've never even heard of it.
Handwriting recognition, I think, is the most important thing for a tablet PC. And that doesn't work, as far as I can figure out. (Meaning: if it does work, it's too hard to get installed/working.)
Sorry to reply to myself, but I should add that open source applications on Windows also have crappy tablet support. Please, PLEASE, if you're an open source developer, test your product on a tablet PC and make sure that the input panel button appears in your text fields, and that you have 'checkbox'-style multiple-select.
Using any open source software on a tablet, Linux included, is painful.
In contrast, Linux is much better quality than the competitors.
Only the kernel and server apps, and even then I'm only giving it a "maybe", since Vista's kernel is capable of a larger degree of driver-crash-recovery and possibly better than the Linux kernel in other ways as well.
But at the application level, no, Linux is not better than competitors. OpenOffice will never steal marketshare away from MS Office. Open source has nothing to replace Outlook/Exchange combo. The open source replacement(s) for Active Directory are hard to configure, and unless configured right won't have the same features as AD (for example, Shadow Copy.)
And from my personal experience, I've frequently experienced crashes, applications opening with nothing but black screens, mysterious inscrutable error messages... much more on Linux than on Windows. Part of the problem is the software you use, since Windows *does* have some horrible quality software, but I still think saying "Linux is much better quality" is a total stretch.
You know, some of the people here have used both Linux and Windows.
Considering Linux has approximately ZERO tablet features, it seems to me that Windows is the right choice for this product. Even OS X has more and better tablet features, and Apple doesn't even make a tablet computer.
Where does this blogger think the development effort should come from? How long does he think HP should hold-off releasing their product so that Linux distributions can get up-to-snuff with Windows? Six months? A year? Because I own a tablet PC right now, and I can guarantee that Ubuntu is at least a year away from having equivalent tablet features to Windows Vista.
Isn't everything NASA does basically contracted from Lockheed and Boeing already?
Or are you talking about the penny-ante private sector companies, the ones who haven't managed to even get a payload into orbit yet? How many years away from having meeting the Shuttle functional requirements? Twenty? Forty?
The problem isn't that I can't name genres, the problem is that your brain will only accept ones and zeros.
So you admit that no genres have disappeared, and that "pretty much" in this case were in fact weasel words.
Uh... er... where did I mention difficulty?
You said you didn't want games to be "dumbed down." I don't know what that means, so I assumed you meant difficulty. If you don't mean difficulty, what exactly did you mean?
I don't remember claiming to represent anyone.
If you understand that your tastes don't represent a lot of people, then it should come as no surprise that the exact games you want to see made aren't being made, should it? Duh.
Did I, in fact, say that? I don't think I ever mentioned Halo 2.
No, you didn't. I used this thing, what's it called, oh yeah, an "example." You should look that up, it's an interesting concept, very useful!
Look, face it: you were wrong about adventure games not existing. You were wrong about genres dying out. You're cherry-picking some meaning of the phrase "dumbed down" that's purposefully selected to be the opposite meaning I assumed. You're being purposefully dense about the Halo 2 example. Do you have a single shred of intellectual honesty?
Ok, so if I log on to Steam, and I purchase and download "Sam and Max" which is a recently-released adventure game done *exactly in LucasArts style* (and as a sequel to a LucasArts adventure game), you're saying that it doesn't exist?
They're not weasel words. What are you talking about?
You said genres have died out. Name one.
Saying something like "genres have died out" is the equivalent to a geezer saying, "all kids do today is steal and swear!" It's just a nostalgia-induced generalization that, frankly, is complete and utter bullshit.
If genres have actually died out, you'd be able to name one. So name one.
What an astounding leap of logic. Because I don't want gaming to be dumbed down and turned into casual entertainment, I'm an elitist asshole? Wow.
Yes, pretty much.
If you want games to be difficult, turn up the difficulty slider.
Saying that the average person should be deprived of the games they enjoy so that only people like you can enjoy games, that's being an elitist asshole.
Here's a news flash: you don't represent many people. Microsoft sold over 8 million copies of Halo 2 and (this being Slashdot) I can pretty much guarantee you hate that game. I'm sorry that you, and people like you, don't generate as many sales as people who liked Halo 2... you'll just have to cope with that reality.
But to say Halo 2 shouldn't exist because it's "dumbed down?" You couldn't be more wrong.
Adventure gaming has become a small niche market of mostly low or average quality releases. Not exactly like it was back in the days of Sierra, Lucasarts and Infocom.
That's fine, if you say that. My annoyance is with people who literally say that the adventure genre "no longer exist", which bothers me because it makes it obvious they're not even bothering to look for adventure games. You see "adventure games no longer exist" all the time on this board.
Considering that several genres have pretty much died out, I'm not sure that's the case.
Like what? What genres have died out? (Or are you using the "pretty much" weasel-words to indicate that NO genres have, in fact, died out?)
Casual gamers have also become much too prominent, and have dumbed down games and gaming culture.
Oh yeah. God damn that general public! Gaming should be reserved for elitist assholes!
I considered Syberia incredible boring, never finished it, the story simply never really clicked for me. Now TLJ, thats different, I consider that to be one of the finest pieces of gaming every created, but that game is nearing its tenth(!) anniversary, so its not exactly a good representative for gaming today, in fact its quite the opposite, since I consider it to be released close to the end of when gaming was good.
Yes, well, I never claimed that *I* particularly like adventure games. I'm just annoyed at people who constantly cry out that they don't exist anymore, when they clearly do. The fact that Syberia is the newest one I've played doesn't say anything at all except that: 1) I'm not a fan of that genre at all, and 2) It was available on Xbox at a time when I didn't own a gaming PC.
"Why do I need all these flashy fonts on the web anyway! I have my browser show every website in Courier 10, and daggummit, that's the way every site should be! Back when I was a kid we didn't have none of these fancy fonts and we were all happier. Websites with Flash on them are basically Satan!!! GET OFF MY LAWN!"
And how many of those games are actually good? Not much. How many of those go to LucasArts quality? None.
How many have you played?
Do you genuinely know that none of them are "LucasArts quality"? Or are you just putting LucasArts on a pedestal due to your nostalgia? (Back to the theme here.)
Honestly, though, I can't speak for the quality of those games. The last adventure I played was Syberia, which was excellent. Before that, I played The Longest Journey, which was also excellent. I would personally say both of those games were better than "LucasArts quality."
Plus, LucasArts made Full Throttle, and that game sucked.
The small adventure market is certainly still there, but in large parts it seems to be driven by adventure game players that buy that stuff because they simply don't have much choice, not because the stuff is especially good.
The Longest Journey is possibly the best adventure game ever made, and I highly doubt it ever cracked the top 10 on any sales lists. Most gamers have never heard of it. "Good" has nothing to do with "popularity," and I'd think any Slashdotter would immediately understand that.
It might be "healthier" in that it sells more, but it also turned into an industry where the important part is that things sell, not that they are good or creative.
That's called "growing up." The same thing happened to the movie industry, the recorded music industry, etc. But the great thing is that there's always independents around to keep the balance interesting.
Anyway, it's not like the industry was ever about anything different. Do you think Nintendo released Super Mario Bros because they wanted to make an artistic statement, or because they wanted to sell a shitload of consoles?
I simply lose interest, since the stories are not really much good to begin with.
At least it's a given that virtually every game released now has a story. Even ten years ago, many if not most games had no story whatsoever... or a story expressible in a single sentence. (Starsiege: Tribes, for example, one of the best multiplayer games ever made has no story.) I don't know about you, but I call that improvement.
I really can't think of a lot of older games, other than Adventures or RPGs (text or graphical) that had stories at all. With few exceptions (Marathon's terminals), "stories" didn't become required in FPS games until Half-Life and System Shock 2 blew everybody away.
I have a very hard time to actually find games that I care about these days, since most stuff simply is a forgettable time waster.
Most stuff before was. Remember, 90% of everything is crap. The reason nostalgia is so dangerous is that you only remember the exceptions to the rules, then you delude yourself into thinking the exceptions are all there was.
but games have lost a lot of the edginess that made them interesting.
Do you have a specific example?
Today games just try a little to hard to appeal to the mass market, that might help their sales, but interesting games aren't created by market research.
Wait, weren't you arguing a few paragraphs ago that the current crop of Adventure titles can't be all that good because they're not popular? Seems like a 180 degree turn here... or maybe I misunderstand.
A top-down shooter requires good reflexes, but it has nowhere near as many seizure-inducing flashing going on as todays FPS games.
Which ones have you played? Given, 1942 is pretty tame, but it's also running on the wimpiest hardware. Most games of that genre have hundreds of projectiles on screen at once, frequent full-screen flashes, all kinds of craziness. In comparison, FPS games generally only have full-screen effects when you're injured in some way.
Or maybe the games he liked are simply no longer being made. There are certainly a lot of genre and game concept that I haven't seen being used in a long long while. While other genres that I have goten already tired of long ago get new releases every month (FPS,...).
Triple-check that your favorite genre of game isn't being made anymore, because I'd wager you're wrong on that count.
Is that nostalgia, maybe a little, but that still wouldn't explain why I even enjoy old games that I never had contact with back in the day.
Nostalgia doesn't need to be exact. Maybe you haven't played that "exact" 1993 game before, but you've played enough VGA 256 DOS-based games with Soundblaster16 sound and MIDI music that you still have the same familiar reaction.
I think if you get past the nostalgia, you'll realize that the video games industry is healthier now than ever before, with a wider range of great products than ever before.
Welcome to the phenomenon we like to call "nostalgia."
I can guarantee that games today have a hell of a lot fewer seizure-inducing flashes than the games on my Commodore 64, for example. Or virtually anything in the top-down shooter genre that used to populate arcades.
Or maybe it's not nostalgia, and you're just really, really bad at picking out games. But either way, I don't think the industry is to blame.
It's the same thing as, say, Microsoft Flight Simulator as compared to Crimson Skies. Both are "flying simulations," but Crimson Skies is obviously a game, while Flight Sim is designed to run as accurately and realistically as possible.
I don't see why there's any confusion here at all. What they're offering is a racing simulation that isn't designed to be a video game, it's designed to be as realistic as possible. Even "realistic" racing sims on consoles aren't all that realistic if you look at how they handle collisions (for example).
Well, Microsoft has the same problem as everybody else. If they don't force upgrades, they get dragged over the coals for being insecure. If they do force upgrades, people complain that they can't just uninstall it and go back to the old version. Firefox is going through the exact same problem with the transition from FF2 to FF3.
My guess is that they'll do the same thing with IE8 that they did with IE7, that is, if you're an early adopter you'll get the chance to downgrade, but sooner or later it'll get marked a mandatory update and then it's either stop doing OS updates or stop using IE (if you really hate it that much.)
You also have to remember that the HTML renderer DLL is used by thousands of other applications, so there's really no practical way to "uninstall" it. (OS X and presumably Linux is the same way; you can "uninstall" Safari easily, but you can't remove OS X's HTML library because too many other applications rely on it.) Again, you have to be fair in your criticism; these are hard problems that *all* OSes face, not just Microsoft.
Implementing a feature Opera has had for years, now that's what I call innovation.
Opera doesn't have that feature; if Flash plug-in kills an Opera tab, the whole browser dies. If Flash kills an IE8 tab, only that tab dies and IE8 will re-create it automatically. Your other tabs are completely unaffected. Apples -> oranges.
I'll be pleased with IE crash recovery if IE crashing doesn't bring down Exporer with it.
It doesn't now; maybe you should upgrade off of IE5?
If my window manager still has to restart just because my internet browser crashes, then MS can keep IE8.
It doesn't for IE8. It also doesn't for IE7 and IE6. Seriously, could you possible be more out-of-date?
Does anyone know if IE is getting more and less tied-up into the windows kernel?
IE was never "tied-up into the Windows kernel", it was "tied-up with Windows Explorer." Not even close to the same thing. In any case, IE7 runs as a normal application, the same as any other. In Vista, it actually runs in a security sandbox as well, so if anything it has a lot less power to screw with your system than the average off-the-shelf program.
I would hope with Vista's kernel security IE8 is nearly a stand-alone product now days.
IE7 is, so I don't know why you think IE8 wouldn't be.
Oh yeah! Because you're a Slashdot shill who's dogging a product you've never even used, or probably even seen. Your last experience was with IE5, so you're just stretching to find random reasons to hate Microsoft. You could save a lot of time and typing by just writing "[Ignorant Anti-Microsoft Rant]" next time.
Welcome uninformed poster! You may want to spend a few minutes using IE8 before making claims about it, otherwise you'll look like a total tool when all your points are proven wrong!
What's tools->clear private data.. 'Always clear my private data when I close Firefox'
InPrivate can be turned on and off during a session; while it's on, your history/"private data" isn't logged, but in addition IE will also block tracking pixels. The IE8 feature is more equivalent to the "private browsing" feature in Safari, which can also be turned on/off at will, but Safari won't block tracking pixels.
The Firefox feature you mention is really nothing like it. And in any case, IE7 already has "always clear private data". (Although it's kind of a pain to use, hidden away in the "privacy" tab.)
and.. why does Firefox prompt me with:
Firefix - Restore Previous Session
Your last Firefox session closed unexpectedly. YOu can restore the tabs and windows from your previous sessions, or start a new session if you think the problem was related to a page you were viewing.
Because IE can do it PER-TAB. If Flash (for example) crashes an IE tab, IE can restart browsing on that tab without affecting the other tabs of your browser. Firefox can't do this.
I'm not saying that IE8 is going to be the best thing ever and angels will descend from the heavens to crown it in gold, I'm just saying that before you start criticizing the article, you might want to spend a few minutes determining whether you're full of crap or not.
One of the reasons IE is used/required by large companies is because virtually everything in it is configurable via Group Policy. I'd be extremely surprised if this InPrivate feature isn't.
If Firefox did more integration with Windows, it would be able to garner a lot more users in the corporate market.
Slashdot Mirror
The tabbing thing came from BeOS, where it was done right. The problem is that tabbed windows needs to be an *OS* feature, not an application feature-- on BeOS, I could drag my email window, my browser, and a FTP window into the same set of tabs, then treat that tab set like a single window. Or, if I had a dozen browser tabs, I could break them apart easily into a dozen different windows.
One of the things that struck me about Google's Chrome announcement is that they're going to treat tabs the way BeOS did, mostly-- you're still stuck with browser tabs, but at least you can split tabs into different windows with it.
Anyway, I agree with you, unless you're going to do tabs *right* (the way BeOS did), don't bother.
Oh please, you're using Debian now. Of course "you'll pass" on IE8. Would you use ANY version of IE, ever?
Please, spawning a 100 threads is NOT a bug. It's a FLAWED DESIGN. Perhaps this is why we came to the joke "it's not a bug (as in 'unexpected'), it's a feature (as in 'designed that way')".
Having your browser crash because a single webpage in a single tab did something wrong is also FLAWED DESIGN. Which particular type of FLAWED DESIGN do you like better? (I'd rather have the 100 threads and fewer browser crashes, personally.)
You can account for this by the lack of tabs in IE (a fundamental flaw in today's world)
In "today's world", IE has had tabs for two years. Maybe you should join today's world before talking about it, huh?
I dream of a future where I have means other than javascript popups to check objects in javascript in IE. Yes, yes, I know they have a script debugger today ... if you have some form of .NET studio installed. Which is just peachy if you run Linux and IE4Linux.
Actually, the debugger comes with any MS product that's capable of using VBScript or JScript, meaning you only need to have Office installed. I'm pretty sure that MS doesn't spend much time thinking about the half-dozen people in the world who use "IE4Linux". I've never even heard of it.
Handwriting recognition, I think, is the most important thing for a tablet PC. And that doesn't work, as far as I can figure out. (Meaning: if it does work, it's too hard to get installed/working.)
Sorry to reply to myself, but I should add that open source applications on Windows also have crappy tablet support. Please, PLEASE, if you're an open source developer, test your product on a tablet PC and make sure that the input panel button appears in your text fields, and that you have 'checkbox'-style multiple-select.
Using any open source software on a tablet, Linux included, is painful.
In contrast, Linux is much better quality than the competitors.
Only the kernel and server apps, and even then I'm only giving it a "maybe", since Vista's kernel is capable of a larger degree of driver-crash-recovery and possibly better than the Linux kernel in other ways as well.
But at the application level, no, Linux is not better than competitors. OpenOffice will never steal marketshare away from MS Office. Open source has nothing to replace Outlook/Exchange combo. The open source replacement(s) for Active Directory are hard to configure, and unless configured right won't have the same features as AD (for example, Shadow Copy.)
And from my personal experience, I've frequently experienced crashes, applications opening with nothing but black screens, mysterious inscrutable error messages... much more on Linux than on Windows. Part of the problem is the software you use, since Windows *does* have some horrible quality software, but I still think saying "Linux is much better quality" is a total stretch.
You know, some of the people here have used both Linux and Windows.
Considering Linux has approximately ZERO tablet features, it seems to me that Windows is the right choice for this product. Even OS X has more and better tablet features, and Apple doesn't even make a tablet computer.
Where does this blogger think the development effort should come from? How long does he think HP should hold-off releasing their product so that Linux distributions can get up-to-snuff with Windows? Six months? A year? Because I own a tablet PC right now, and I can guarantee that Ubuntu is at least a year away from having equivalent tablet features to Windows Vista.
Isn't everything NASA does basically contracted from Lockheed and Boeing already?
Or are you talking about the penny-ante private sector companies, the ones who haven't managed to even get a payload into orbit yet? How many years away from having meeting the Shuttle functional requirements? Twenty? Forty?
So one sheriff abusing his position is equal to ALL OF AMERICA'S PROMISE IS A LIE THE CONSTITUTION IS TOILET PAPER!!!
There's no middle ground for you?
I've never admitted such things, and no weasel words have been used. You're making shit up.
Then stop the bullshit and name a genre that disappeared. I'm waiting, as I've been all morning, for you to tell me which genres have disappeared.
Wow. What a content-less reply.
The problem isn't that I can't name genres, the problem is that your brain will only accept ones and zeros.
So you admit that no genres have disappeared, and that "pretty much" in this case were in fact weasel words.
Uh... er... where did I mention difficulty?
You said you didn't want games to be "dumbed down." I don't know what that means, so I assumed you meant difficulty. If you don't mean difficulty, what exactly did you mean?
I don't remember claiming to represent anyone.
If you understand that your tastes don't represent a lot of people, then it should come as no surprise that the exact games you want to see made aren't being made, should it? Duh.
Did I, in fact, say that? I don't think I ever mentioned Halo 2.
No, you didn't. I used this thing, what's it called, oh yeah, an "example." You should look that up, it's an interesting concept, very useful!
Look, face it: you were wrong about adventure games not existing. You were wrong about genres dying out. You're cherry-picking some meaning of the phrase "dumbed down" that's purposefully selected to be the opposite meaning I assumed. You're being purposefully dense about the Halo 2 example. Do you have a single shred of intellectual honesty?
For all intents and purposes it does not exist.
Ok, so if I log on to Steam, and I purchase and download "Sam and Max" which is a recently-released adventure game done *exactly in LucasArts style* (and as a sequel to a LucasArts adventure game), you're saying that it doesn't exist?
They're not weasel words. What are you talking about?
You said genres have died out. Name one.
Saying something like "genres have died out" is the equivalent to a geezer saying, "all kids do today is steal and swear!" It's just a nostalgia-induced generalization that, frankly, is complete and utter bullshit.
If genres have actually died out, you'd be able to name one. So name one.
What an astounding leap of logic. Because I don't want gaming to be dumbed down and turned into casual entertainment, I'm an elitist asshole? Wow.
Yes, pretty much.
If you want games to be difficult, turn up the difficulty slider.
Saying that the average person should be deprived of the games they enjoy so that only people like you can enjoy games, that's being an elitist asshole.
Here's a news flash: you don't represent many people. Microsoft sold over 8 million copies of Halo 2 and (this being Slashdot) I can pretty much guarantee you hate that game. I'm sorry that you, and people like you, don't generate as many sales as people who liked Halo 2... you'll just have to cope with that reality.
But to say Halo 2 shouldn't exist because it's "dumbed down?" You couldn't be more wrong.
Adventure gaming has become a small niche market of mostly low or average quality releases. Not exactly like it was back in the days of Sierra, Lucasarts and Infocom.
That's fine, if you say that. My annoyance is with people who literally say that the adventure genre "no longer exist", which bothers me because it makes it obvious they're not even bothering to look for adventure games. You see "adventure games no longer exist" all the time on this board.
Considering that several genres have pretty much died out, I'm not sure that's the case.
Like what? What genres have died out? (Or are you using the "pretty much" weasel-words to indicate that NO genres have, in fact, died out?)
Casual gamers have also become much too prominent, and have dumbed down games and gaming culture.
Oh yeah. God damn that general public! Gaming should be reserved for elitist assholes!
I considered Syberia incredible boring, never finished it, the story simply never really clicked for me. Now TLJ, thats different, I consider that to be one of the finest pieces of gaming every created, but that game is nearing its tenth(!) anniversary, so its not exactly a good representative for gaming today, in fact its quite the opposite, since I consider it to be released close to the end of when gaming was good.
Yes, well, I never claimed that *I* particularly like adventure games. I'm just annoyed at people who constantly cry out that they don't exist anymore, when they clearly do. The fact that Syberia is the newest one I've played doesn't say anything at all except that: 1) I'm not a fan of that genre at all, and 2) It was available on Xbox at a time when I didn't own a gaming PC.
I shouldn't have even typed it.
I think the majority of responses will be:
"Why do I need all these flashy fonts on the web anyway! I have my browser show every website in Courier 10, and daggummit, that's the way every site should be! Back when I was a kid we didn't have none of these fancy fonts and we were all happier. Websites with Flash on them are basically Satan!!! GET OFF MY LAWN!"
And how many of those games are actually good? Not much. How many of those go to LucasArts quality? None.
How many have you played?
Do you genuinely know that none of them are "LucasArts quality"? Or are you just putting LucasArts on a pedestal due to your nostalgia? (Back to the theme here.)
Honestly, though, I can't speak for the quality of those games. The last adventure I played was Syberia, which was excellent. Before that, I played The Longest Journey, which was also excellent. I would personally say both of those games were better than "LucasArts quality."
Plus, LucasArts made Full Throttle, and that game sucked.
The small adventure market is certainly still there, but in large parts it seems to be driven by adventure game players that buy that stuff because they simply don't have much choice, not because the stuff is especially good.
The Longest Journey is possibly the best adventure game ever made, and I highly doubt it ever cracked the top 10 on any sales lists. Most gamers have never heard of it. "Good" has nothing to do with "popularity," and I'd think any Slashdotter would immediately understand that.
It might be "healthier" in that it sells more, but it also turned into an industry where the important part is that things sell, not that they are good or creative.
That's called "growing up." The same thing happened to the movie industry, the recorded music industry, etc. But the great thing is that there's always independents around to keep the balance interesting.
Anyway, it's not like the industry was ever about anything different. Do you think Nintendo released Super Mario Bros because they wanted to make an artistic statement, or because they wanted to sell a shitload of consoles?
I simply lose interest, since the stories are not really much good to begin with.
At least it's a given that virtually every game released now has a story. Even ten years ago, many if not most games had no story whatsoever... or a story expressible in a single sentence. (Starsiege: Tribes, for example, one of the best multiplayer games ever made has no story.) I don't know about you, but I call that improvement.
I really can't think of a lot of older games, other than Adventures or RPGs (text or graphical) that had stories at all. With few exceptions (Marathon's terminals), "stories" didn't become required in FPS games until Half-Life and System Shock 2 blew everybody away.
I have a very hard time to actually find games that I care about these days, since most stuff simply is a forgettable time waster.
Most stuff before was. Remember, 90% of everything is crap. The reason nostalgia is so dangerous is that you only remember the exceptions to the rules, then you delude yourself into thinking the exceptions are all there was.
but games have lost a lot of the edginess that made them interesting.
Do you have a specific example?
Today games just try a little to hard to appeal to the mass market, that might help their sales, but interesting games aren't created by market research.
Wait, weren't you arguing a few paragraphs ago that the current crop of Adventure titles can't be all that good because they're not popular? Seems like a 180 degree turn here... or maybe I misunderstand.
A top-down shooter requires good reflexes, but it has nowhere near as many seizure-inducing flashing going on as todays FPS games.
Which ones have you played? Given, 1942 is pretty tame, but it's also running on the wimpiest hardware. Most games of that genre have hundreds of projectiles on screen at once, frequent full-screen flashes, all kinds of craziness. In comparison, FPS games generally only have full-screen effects when you're injured in some way.
Or maybe the games he liked are simply no longer being made. There are certainly a lot of genre and game concept that I haven't seen being used in a long long while. While other genres that I have goten already tired of long ago get new releases every month (FPS, ...).
Are you sure? Usually I find people complaining about the lack of Adventure games while ignoring the dozens of Adventure games that come out every single year: http://www.gamespot.com/reviews.html?platform=5&category=Adventure+Games&type=reviews&mode=top&sort=post_date&sortdir=asc#
Triple-check that your favorite genre of game isn't being made anymore, because I'd wager you're wrong on that count.
Is that nostalgia, maybe a little, but that still wouldn't explain why I even enjoy old games that I never had contact with back in the day.
Nostalgia doesn't need to be exact. Maybe you haven't played that "exact" 1993 game before, but you've played enough VGA 256 DOS-based games with Soundblaster16 sound and MIDI music that you still have the same familiar reaction.
I think if you get past the nostalgia, you'll realize that the video games industry is healthier now than ever before, with a wider range of great products than ever before.
Welcome to the phenomenon we like to call "nostalgia."
I can guarantee that games today have a hell of a lot fewer seizure-inducing flashes than the games on my Commodore 64, for example. Or virtually anything in the top-down shooter genre that used to populate arcades.
Or maybe it's not nostalgia, and you're just really, really bad at picking out games. But either way, I don't think the industry is to blame.
It's the same thing as, say, Microsoft Flight Simulator as compared to Crimson Skies. Both are "flying simulations," but Crimson Skies is obviously a game, while Flight Sim is designed to run as accurately and realistically as possible.
I don't see why there's any confusion here at all. What they're offering is a racing simulation that isn't designed to be a video game, it's designed to be as realistic as possible. Even "realistic" racing sims on consoles aren't all that realistic if you look at how they handle collisions (for example).
Well, Microsoft has the same problem as everybody else. If they don't force upgrades, they get dragged over the coals for being insecure. If they do force upgrades, people complain that they can't just uninstall it and go back to the old version. Firefox is going through the exact same problem with the transition from FF2 to FF3.
My guess is that they'll do the same thing with IE8 that they did with IE7, that is, if you're an early adopter you'll get the chance to downgrade, but sooner or later it'll get marked a mandatory update and then it's either stop doing OS updates or stop using IE (if you really hate it that much.)
You also have to remember that the HTML renderer DLL is used by thousands of other applications, so there's really no practical way to "uninstall" it. (OS X and presumably Linux is the same way; you can "uninstall" Safari easily, but you can't remove OS X's HTML library because too many other applications rely on it.) Again, you have to be fair in your criticism; these are hard problems that *all* OSes face, not just Microsoft.
Implementing a feature Opera has had for years, now that's what I call innovation.
Opera doesn't have that feature; if Flash plug-in kills an Opera tab, the whole browser dies. If Flash kills an IE8 tab, only that tab dies and IE8 will re-create it automatically. Your other tabs are completely unaffected. Apples -> oranges.
I'll be pleased with IE crash recovery if IE crashing doesn't bring down Exporer with it.
It doesn't now; maybe you should upgrade off of IE5?
If my window manager still has to restart just because my internet browser crashes, then MS can keep IE8.
It doesn't for IE8. It also doesn't for IE7 and IE6. Seriously, could you possible be more out-of-date?
Does anyone know if IE is getting more and less tied-up into the windows kernel?
IE was never "tied-up into the Windows kernel", it was "tied-up with Windows Explorer." Not even close to the same thing. In any case, IE7 runs as a normal application, the same as any other. In Vista, it actually runs in a security sandbox as well, so if anything it has a lot less power to screw with your system than the average off-the-shelf program.
I would hope with Vista's kernel security IE8 is nearly a stand-alone product now days.
IE7 is, so I don't know why you think IE8 wouldn't be.
Oh yeah! Because you're a Slashdot shill who's dogging a product you've never even used, or probably even seen. Your last experience was with IE5, so you're just stretching to find random reasons to hate Microsoft. You could save a lot of time and typing by just writing "[Ignorant Anti-Microsoft Rant]" next time.
Welcome uninformed poster! You may want to spend a few minutes using IE8 before making claims about it, otherwise you'll look like a total tool when all your points are proven wrong!
What's tools->clear private data .. 'Always clear my private data when I close Firefox'
InPrivate can be turned on and off during a session; while it's on, your history/"private data" isn't logged, but in addition IE will also block tracking pixels. The IE8 feature is more equivalent to the "private browsing" feature in Safari, which can also be turned on/off at will, but Safari won't block tracking pixels.
The Firefox feature you mention is really nothing like it. And in any case, IE7 already has "always clear private data". (Although it's kind of a pain to use, hidden away in the "privacy" tab.)
and .. why does Firefox prompt me with:
Firefix - Restore Previous Session
Your last Firefox session closed unexpectedly. YOu can restore the tabs and windows from your previous sessions, or start a new session if you think the problem was related to a page you were viewing.
Because IE can do it PER-TAB. If Flash (for example) crashes an IE tab, IE can restart browsing on that tab without affecting the other tabs of your browser. Firefox can't do this.
I'm not saying that IE8 is going to be the best thing ever and angels will descend from the heavens to crown it in gold, I'm just saying that before you start criticizing the article, you might want to spend a few minutes determining whether you're full of crap or not.
One of the reasons IE is used/required by large companies is because virtually everything in it is configurable via Group Policy. I'd be extremely surprised if this InPrivate feature isn't.
If Firefox did more integration with Windows, it would be able to garner a lot more users in the corporate market.