It adds anywhere from 0.5-1.5 seconds of latency to a HTTP connection. If you're serving a webpage with gobs of small files, you'll increase your load time quite a bit by serving it as HTTPS instead of HTTP. Of course you could take a mixed approach, but then you get a warning in most browsers that the page contains mixed HTTP/HTTPS data.
It would be hard to build a case for serving a site like, say, Wikipedia or Archive.org or even Google (search, not their other apps) over HTTPS.
I always kind of wonder that, too. I used to think the reason is that Windows is sold mostly to corporations, and home users are kind of secondary to them (even though I believe their market is about 50/50.) But now that they've segregated the Home users from the Business users, they really could do some real selling of Windows features. Of course, with Shadow Copy there are two problems:
1) Shadow Copy and the accompanying Backup utility program only ship on Vista Business and Vista Ultimate. Why not for Home users? Or at least Home Premium users? No f-ing clue.
2) The Shadow Copy UI is pretty sparse. It's hidden in the Property pane of the file/folder you're interested in, which I'd guess the vast majority of users never see.
What's interesting about Microsoft's business focus is that it leads to some pretty cool features for home users, even if Microsoft didn't intend it that way. For instance, including Remote Desktop for free in Windows 2000 Pro, then upping that by creating Remote Assistance in Windows XP. That's another example where Microsoft did it first, and Apple's just now catching up.
On a less-related tangent, what's really bothering me about Apple lately is their hostility towards Microsoft. Apple and Microsoft used to have mutual respect for each other; you'd never see a Microsoft ad telling people how crappy Macintosh is, and you wouldn't see Apple advertising how crummy Windows is. Microsoft still follows the same policy, but Apple's entire marketing strategy now seems to be entirely based on telling people that Windows sucks. I mean, those Mac vs. PC ads, the inclusion of the BSOD icon for Windows servers, etc. Come on, Apple: Microsoft's doing good work, stop being such asses.
That's great, but if you have a tool where you plug in the BMI and it spits out results then it'll give the same results for those two Unix admins, even though you'd see in an instant they have completely different body types.
The point of using numbers like BMI is so you can use those numbers to approximate real life. If BMI is the same, but the two people measured are vastly different, then it's a crappy measure.
No, Final Fantasy XI runs on PS2 and PC, which definitely meets the stated requirements:
Allowing people from multiple platforms to play together on the same server is something new and something that should be recognized.
Also, World of Warcraft allows Mac and PC users to play on the same servers. If we're just talking about MMOs.
Of course, now that I re-read that quote, a ton of games allow that. Starcraft, for instance, met that requirement in 1998. (And possibly Warcraft II, although perhaps not since I think the Windows version didn't support TCP/IP until it was re-packaged years after release.)
The real point is to make that news about EVE Online relevant to the story, the "first" you construct has to be so elaborate it's almost useless:
"It's the first space-based MMO that runs on precisely three non-console platforms!" or something similar. Other than that, it's all been done, it's all been done, it's all been dooooooone before!
Games used to be written for 5+ platforms. How many platforms did Lemmings come out on? Or the original Prince of Persia? Apple ][, Commodore 64, DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari possibly.
A game supporting 3 platforms is nothing, relatively speaking. (Since this topic is about the history of games spanning all the way to the beginning.)
I found HL2's contemporary, Doom 3, did this whole business much better, with the audio-logs system.
1) The audio-logs system is ripped-off from System Shock 2. (You can also see it at work in Bioshock.)
2) Doom 3 sucked, man. Seriously, hard-core sucked ass. PSA: If you're going to cite a game that does storytelling better than Half-Life using a game mechanic from System Shock 2, cite System Shock 2.
To answer your question, that would be explained away as a "burp" in the system.
That said, I've done pre-orders twice at Gamestop and both times the actual game was sold out on release date. I don't bother; where I'm at it's easier to get a hold of a game from your typical Fred Meyer or Target department store on release day than it is from Gamestop/EB.
I bet you'd have trouble finding a hospital in the US without at least a few tablet PCs in it. Doctors/nurses/pharmacists/physical therapists/radiologists/etc love them for doing "paperwork" while on the go from location to location.
To use a real-world analogy, it's perfectly possible to take the paper out of a folder and put it in another, rather than to throw out the original folder and put the new one in its place.
Yes, but to do that you have to open the folder to take the paper out, right? That's the same thing MacOS is requiring you to do.
No, both a folder and an icon are "objects" and all "objects" in the filesystem should behave the same way. The watchword for a spatial interface is consistency; treating one icon differently from another icon is inconsistent.
I call BS on that section. It might as well be titled Frame_rate#Placebo_effect_in_hardcore_gamers_mind. Or I guess in Wikipedia's terms, "the section doesn't cite sources."
And I don't know exactly what my LCD gets, but it's a couple years old and I know older LCDs had problems with "ghosting" at high framerates, so I'm guessing 45 is a good practical estimate. In any case, I don't care because anything about 25-30 is fine.
Sometimes designing by philosophy is a bad idea. A good file management paradigm should never get in the way of doing what users want and expect. If your little file management philosophy does something clearly most users do not expect, then it's not a very good philosophy now is it?
I dunno. As a Mac Classic user, it does exactly what I expect. It all depends on what system you're used to. It might be true that "most" Mac OS X users expect merge to be the default action (being converts from other OSes), but I don't have any data to back that up.
I got the nerd-street-cred of being a Mac user from System 6.0.8, so I'm not exactly the typical case. (I'm still more likely to complain when Windows/Linux does something boneheaded I don't expect, like just beeping at me when I hit down-arrow at the bottom line of a text field instead of moving the cursor to the end of the line.)
Still, I entirely agree that it's moronic for Apple to cling to little bits of the spatial GUI philosophy if they're going to flush the majority of it down the toilet. Let's see all or nothing, Apple, stop this straddling.
From the users perspective you aren't really moving the directory, the intention is to move the files, thus the sane response would be to merge A with C not replace it.
From the user's perspective-- if they're a Windows user!
From the Mac Classic user's perspective, OS X just does what you'd expect a spatially-designed interface to do, treat every object the same. If you drag a Word file over a Word file with the same name, it asks if you want to replace it. Ditto folders with the same name.
The problem is that OS X still has that behavior even though it's no longer spatial at all. Since it's not spatial, it might as well do what the Windows/Linux users expect it to do and save some headaches.
That's left over from the original spatial Finder design in Mac Classic. Apple hasn't really decided whether they want to get rid of the spatial interface, so instead they've made this horrible frankenstein half-spatial, half-browser interface which pretty much everybody hates.
Doing a "replace" for that operation makes sense in a spatial system because all spatial icons are treated the same way. You'd wouldn't expect dragging a Word file named "happy.doc" into a folder already containing a "happy.doc" to perform a merge operation; so why would you expect that with a folder in the same situation?
That said, if you've never used Mac Classic, you'd think OS X has nothing but a browser interface, in which case all metaphors and ideals are out the damned window, and the OS might as well do a merge operation. Since you most likely came from Windows, or a Linux environment ripped-off from Linux, you'd expect dragging identically-named folders together to do a merge operation because that's what you're used to.
Apple needs to make up its mind what Finder is. It gets worse and worse every version.
35 FPS is more framerate than virtually everything on TV (without getting into an argument over whether interlacing counts as a second frame), and every non-digital movie ever made. So your 35 FPS is a higher framerate than a special effects masterpiece movie a couple decades ago, like Star Wars.
In other words, I don't know how you can say 35 FPS is "shuddering along". And there is a practical limit to FPS you didn't mention-- for instance, there's no point generating frames that your monitor can't render. Sure my computer can run the original Unreal at 200 FPS (or whatever), but my LCD still can only render about 45 FPS regardless.
Most games coded that way are designed so that the engine powering the game can be used for other games, years and years in the future. The classic example is the Unreal engine; when the first Unreal came out, computers were lucky to be able to use a third of the options in it. But that same engine was used for dozens of games, some released 5-8 years after the original Unreal 1.0 engine was coded, and those options were much appreciated.
Mac laptops have had 'instant on' for years. Mac laptop users don't shut their machines down, they just close the lid and let it sleep then open the lid and have it resume in a couple of seconds. The problem this solves doesn't exist in the Mac world.
To be fair most (not all!) Windows laptops can resume from sleep in 5 seconds. A lot of the reason Windows users always shutdown and start up again is:
1) PC laptops seem to, in general, draw more power in sleep mode than Apple laptops. I've kept my iBook sleeped for 4-5 days before, and when it wakes up it still has 80% battery or more. PC laptops are almost all dead after 3 days of sleep, for some reason.
2) PC users haven't demanded this as a priority when buying a laptop.
3) Habit, "we've always done it that way!" Old laptops didn't work correctly, so people got used to that behavior and now they "play it safe" by shutting down every time.
We currently have enough reserve oil to last centuries, maybe millenia, so if you're waiting for Peak Oil, I hope you're eating healthy. "Peak Oil" assumes we're retards who never, ever could possibly come up with the technology to drill "hard" oil reserves instead of just the easy one-- fact is, we do come up with new technologies, and we could probably run the US a century on re-drilled "harder" Texas oil alone.
Tell you what. Give me one piece of supporting evidence. ONE PIECE. And I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and considering the entire story gospel. But as is, all you're doing is weaving horror stories in front of the campfire-- sorry, I'm not the kind of believe in urban legends.
Slashdot Mirror
It adds anywhere from 0.5-1.5 seconds of latency to a HTTP connection. If you're serving a webpage with gobs of small files, you'll increase your load time quite a bit by serving it as HTTPS instead of HTTP. Of course you could take a mixed approach, but then you get a warning in most browsers that the page contains mixed HTTP/HTTPS data.
It would be hard to build a case for serving a site like, say, Wikipedia or Archive.org or even Google (search, not their other apps) over HTTPS.
I always kind of wonder that, too. I used to think the reason is that Windows is sold mostly to corporations, and home users are kind of secondary to them (even though I believe their market is about 50/50.) But now that they've segregated the Home users from the Business users, they really could do some real selling of Windows features. Of course, with Shadow Copy there are two problems:
1) Shadow Copy and the accompanying Backup utility program only ship on Vista Business and Vista Ultimate. Why not for Home users? Or at least Home Premium users? No f-ing clue.
2) The Shadow Copy UI is pretty sparse. It's hidden in the Property pane of the file/folder you're interested in, which I'd guess the vast majority of users never see.
What's interesting about Microsoft's business focus is that it leads to some pretty cool features for home users, even if Microsoft didn't intend it that way. For instance, including Remote Desktop for free in Windows 2000 Pro, then upping that by creating Remote Assistance in Windows XP. That's another example where Microsoft did it first, and Apple's just now catching up.
On a less-related tangent, what's really bothering me about Apple lately is their hostility towards Microsoft. Apple and Microsoft used to have mutual respect for each other; you'd never see a Microsoft ad telling people how crappy Macintosh is, and you wouldn't see Apple advertising how crummy Windows is. Microsoft still follows the same policy, but Apple's entire marketing strategy now seems to be entirely based on telling people that Windows sucks. I mean, those Mac vs. PC ads, the inclusion of the BSOD icon for Windows servers, etc. Come on, Apple: Microsoft's doing good work, stop being such asses.
That's great, but if you have a tool where you plug in the BMI and it spits out results then it'll give the same results for those two Unix admins, even though you'd see in an instant they have completely different body types.
The point of using numbers like BMI is so you can use those numbers to approximate real life. If BMI is the same, but the two people measured are vastly different, then it's a crappy measure.
No, Final Fantasy XI runs on PS2 and PC, which definitely meets the stated requirements:
Allowing people from multiple platforms to play together on the same server is something new and something that should be recognized.
Also, World of Warcraft allows Mac and PC users to play on the same servers. If we're just talking about MMOs.
Of course, now that I re-read that quote, a ton of games allow that. Starcraft, for instance, met that requirement in 1998. (And possibly Warcraft II, although perhaps not since I think the Windows version didn't support TCP/IP until it was re-packaged years after release.)
The real point is to make that news about EVE Online relevant to the story, the "first" you construct has to be so elaborate it's almost useless:
"It's the first space-based MMO that runs on precisely three non-console platforms!" or something similar. Other than that, it's all been done, it's all been done, it's all been dooooooone before!
Allowing people from multiple platforms to play together on the same server is something new and something that should be recognized.
Ok, let's recognize it when Final Fantasy XI does it-- three years ago.
Games used to be written for 5+ platforms. How many platforms did Lemmings come out on? Or the original Prince of Persia? Apple ][, Commodore 64, DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari possibly.
A game supporting 3 platforms is nothing, relatively speaking. (Since this topic is about the history of games spanning all the way to the beginning.)
I found HL2's contemporary, Doom 3, did this whole business much better, with the audio-logs system.
1) The audio-logs system is ripped-off from System Shock 2. (You can also see it at work in Bioshock.)
2) Doom 3 sucked, man. Seriously, hard-core sucked ass. PSA: If you're going to cite a game that does storytelling better than Half-Life using a game mechanic from System Shock 2, cite System Shock 2.
To answer your question, that would be explained away as a "burp" in the system.
That said, I've done pre-orders twice at Gamestop and both times the actual game was sold out on release date. I don't bother; where I'm at it's easier to get a hold of a game from your typical Fred Meyer or Target department store on release day than it is from Gamestop/EB.
I bet you'd have trouble finding a hospital in the US without at least a few tablet PCs in it. Doctors/nurses/pharmacists/physical therapists/radiologists/etc love them for doing "paperwork" while on the go from location to location.
Not flamebait, just curious: Does KDE have good tablet support?
To use a real-world analogy, it's perfectly possible to take the paper out of a folder and put it in another, rather than to throw out the original folder and put the new one in its place.
Yes, but to do that you have to open the folder to take the paper out, right? That's the same thing MacOS is requiring you to do.
No, both a folder and an icon are "objects" and all "objects" in the filesystem should behave the same way. The watchword for a spatial interface is consistency; treating one icon differently from another icon is inconsistent.
I call BS on that section. It might as well be titled Frame_rate#Placebo_effect_in_hardcore_gamers_mind. Or I guess in Wikipedia's terms, "the section doesn't cite sources."
And I don't know exactly what my LCD gets, but it's a couple years old and I know older LCDs had problems with "ghosting" at high framerates, so I'm guessing 45 is a good practical estimate. In any case, I don't care because anything about 25-30 is fine.
Sometimes designing by philosophy is a bad idea. A good file management paradigm should never get in the way of doing what users want and expect. If your little file management philosophy does something clearly most users do not expect, then it's not a very good philosophy now is it?
I dunno. As a Mac Classic user, it does exactly what I expect. It all depends on what system you're used to. It might be true that "most" Mac OS X users expect merge to be the default action (being converts from other OSes), but I don't have any data to back that up.
I got the nerd-street-cred of being a Mac user from System 6.0.8, so I'm not exactly the typical case. (I'm still more likely to complain when Windows/Linux does something boneheaded I don't expect, like just beeping at me when I hit down-arrow at the bottom line of a text field instead of moving the cursor to the end of the line.)
Still, I entirely agree that it's moronic for Apple to cling to little bits of the spatial GUI philosophy if they're going to flush the majority of it down the toilet. Let's see all or nothing, Apple, stop this straddling.
I meant to go for the more flamebait option and say "Linux environment ripped-off from Windows." With the typo it just makes no sense. Oh well.
FlexCar here in Seattle is laying-off quite a few staff. Are you sure they're making a profit?
From the users perspective you aren't really moving the directory, the intention is to move the files, thus the sane response would be to merge A with C not replace it.
From the user's perspective-- if they're a Windows user!
From the Mac Classic user's perspective, OS X just does what you'd expect a spatially-designed interface to do, treat every object the same. If you drag a Word file over a Word file with the same name, it asks if you want to replace it. Ditto folders with the same name.
The problem is that OS X still has that behavior even though it's no longer spatial at all. Since it's not spatial, it might as well do what the Windows/Linux users expect it to do and save some headaches.
That's left over from the original spatial Finder design in Mac Classic. Apple hasn't really decided whether they want to get rid of the spatial interface, so instead they've made this horrible frankenstein half-spatial, half-browser interface which pretty much everybody hates.
Doing a "replace" for that operation makes sense in a spatial system because all spatial icons are treated the same way. You'd wouldn't expect dragging a Word file named "happy.doc" into a folder already containing a "happy.doc" to perform a merge operation; so why would you expect that with a folder in the same situation?
That said, if you've never used Mac Classic, you'd think OS X has nothing but a browser interface, in which case all metaphors and ideals are out the damned window, and the OS might as well do a merge operation. Since you most likely came from Windows, or a Linux environment ripped-off from Linux, you'd expect dragging identically-named folders together to do a merge operation because that's what you're used to.
Apple needs to make up its mind what Finder is. It gets worse and worse every version.
I wrote a blog entry on that a few weeks ago, after encountering both Pipe Dream and Simon recycled as mini-games in two big-budget titles:
http://blakeyrat.com/2007/09/04/is-the-world-out-of-games/
35 FPS is more framerate than virtually everything on TV (without getting into an argument over whether interlacing counts as a second frame), and every non-digital movie ever made. So your 35 FPS is a higher framerate than a special effects masterpiece movie a couple decades ago, like Star Wars.
In other words, I don't know how you can say 35 FPS is "shuddering along". And there is a practical limit to FPS you didn't mention-- for instance, there's no point generating frames that your monitor can't render. Sure my computer can run the original Unreal at 200 FPS (or whatever), but my LCD still can only render about 45 FPS regardless.
Most games coded that way are designed so that the engine powering the game can be used for other games, years and years in the future. The classic example is the Unreal engine; when the first Unreal came out, computers were lucky to be able to use a third of the options in it. But that same engine was used for dozens of games, some released 5-8 years after the original Unreal 1.0 engine was coded, and those options were much appreciated.
Mac laptops have had 'instant on' for years. Mac laptop users don't shut their machines down, they just close the lid and let it sleep then open the lid and have it resume in a couple of seconds. The problem this solves doesn't exist in the Mac world.
To be fair most (not all!) Windows laptops can resume from sleep in 5 seconds. A lot of the reason Windows users always shutdown and start up again is:
1) PC laptops seem to, in general, draw more power in sleep mode than Apple laptops. I've kept my iBook sleeped for 4-5 days before, and when it wakes up it still has 80% battery or more. PC laptops are almost all dead after 3 days of sleep, for some reason.
2) PC users haven't demanded this as a priority when buying a laptop.
3) Habit, "we've always done it that way!" Old laptops didn't work correctly, so people got used to that behavior and now they "play it safe" by shutting down every time.
We currently have enough reserve oil to last centuries, maybe millenia, so if you're waiting for Peak Oil, I hope you're eating healthy. "Peak Oil" assumes we're retards who never, ever could possibly come up with the technology to drill "hard" oil reserves instead of just the easy one-- fact is, we do come up with new technologies, and we could probably run the US a century on re-drilled "harder" Texas oil alone.
This is a much better use of the Mechanical Turk service:
http://www.thesheepmarket.com/
Get 1,000 random Internet users to draw you a left-facing sheep.
Tell you what. Give me one piece of supporting evidence. ONE PIECE. And I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and considering the entire story gospel. But as is, all you're doing is weaving horror stories in front of the campfire-- sorry, I'm not the kind of believe in urban legends.