Look at the list of the highest rated games of 2010. See how many times Mass Effect 2 and its expansions shows up. I count 3 with a score of 85 or better. The game of Mass Effect 2 itself is the top scoring of the year with a 94, which makes it tied for 3rd place with a bunch of games as one of the best PC games of all time.
Sorry, got a little excited there for a second. It's a great game, with RPG elements and FPS elements that does a better job than Fallout in my opinion and has a *much* better story too. It's like Final Fantasy story and FMV meets Star Wars mythology meets RPG inventory and upgrades meets FPS combat with the unique twist of pause-and-plan combat and the best use of cover I've seen, and a pretty good balance as far as how much damage you can give/take before dying (unlike the ridiculous amount of damage enemies can take in Borderlands) and realistic feeling accuracy spread of weapons. The weapons and upgrades are good too but I have to say I preferred the inventory of the first Mass Effect, other than how you had to manage hundreds of ammo upgrades and such. I've looked for a comparable game now that I'm done with Mass Effect and halfway through Mass Effect 2 but nothing compares with all of the same elements.
A bonus is that the dialog choices and storyline options you made in Mass Effect get transferred to Mass Effect 2 by importing your savegame, and will also continue into Mass Effect 3. That's just amazing in my opinion. It's the way games should be made. I could keep going but you get the picture. I put the game up there in the same league as the Zelda series, which says a lot.
Besides the 9 difficulty levels, the many expansions, the wildly varying victory conditions, and the improved AI in the expansions, there are some interesting economy strategies that aren't outlined in any way in the game's interface.
You can use a "cottage economy", a "specialist economy", or an "espionage economy". Most people start with a cottage economy but using Great People and the new features of the expansions without using near-100% on the science slider are an interesting alternative.
I'm still learning those after playing casually for years. The real pros are on CivFanatics.com. They could tell you more about those strategies than I ever could. They can be way more fun.
Linux would be nice. As it is, Civ4 is the only reason I have to boot into Windows. Everything else I need from it runs in Wine.
Civ4, not so much. I got it to work at first, then tried everything from making it windowed to disabling audio and it just kept crashing. That's with Beyond the Sword 3.19 and latest Wine from Ubuntu 10.04. No idea what the problem is.
As long as they have the toggles for Resource bubbles (CTRL-R) and Crop Yields (CTRL-Y), plus military, strategy layers, etc., it's pretty easy to see what's going on.
Or, you could just create ~/.mozilla-standard/, ~/.mozilla-ebay/ and ~/.mozilla-testing/, and point a ~/.mozilla symlink at whichever profile you want to use, like you can do for... any other program at all. Again making the "profiles" feature completely redundant on Unix-like systems.
Are you seriously suggesting altering a symlink every time you want to run a different session? Nevermind that it wouldn't work if you wanted to run 2 different profiles at once.
Profiles are immensely helpful if you have 2 logins (say to all of Google's services) and want to use both at the same time. Separate search histories, separate Gmail accounts, etc etc. All running at the same time in 2 different windows. Use different themes to tell them apart.
It looks more like IE7 or Chrome than it does any version of Office.
They: - hid the menubar. - condensed common menu items into Page and Tools drop-downs, to apply to the current page and whole app, respectively. - merged the search and address bars (which imo should never have been separate--I always hide the search bar). - merged some other buttons (stop/reload etc.). - plan to simplify the 4 different ways to access bookmarks.
GRemote on Windows Mobile (*shocker*) did it first. Air mouse over bluetooth or wifi, anyone? Click and drag works, on screen scrollwheel works, everything is rebindable. Also works as touchpad, joystick, and game wheel for racing games.
It can be used exactly like the wiimote is used for menus except there is more than one interface you can use depending on what you're trying to control. For example, one that prominently displays media play/pause buttons.
On my HTC Fuze, it feels like a very solid, very capable remote and air mouse. Works with all games, apps, and of course also the Windows desktop.
The primary reason I like the digital channels is that they are true 16:9 widescreen. Opening up the edges of the scene makes a much bigger difference than the horizontal resolution, as far as I'm concerned.
Except that's only true for some films and some shows. Many others recorded over the last several years actually show more of the scene in the full-screen version, whereas the wide-screen version is just the full-screen version with the top and bottom cropped off. It completely depends on how it was filmed and the transfer process.
Dreamhost repeatedly did this to me when I was hosting with them. They even modified my databases more than once. Mainly adding indexes (including ones that already existed...), but they changed the type of a column once.
Part of the tools that come with mysql is the slow query log. It will identify your queries as causing unnecessary database server load and I believe it even identifies which tables need indexes. They likely used that automated performance data to decide which changes to apply and just did it. Extra indexes are likely to help more than hurt on most websites with fairly static data and lots of reads. Note that phpMyAdmin (and possibly the command line tools) will tell you that you have a duplicate index even if one of the indexes is a composite key and the other isn't.
If they actually changed the type of a column, that's not so good.
I don't know. I've used DH for a couple of years and they've really just left me alone. Their support has been helpful, and honest about when and why they couldn't help me in some cases, including directing me to information to solve my problems with third-party scripts. And it's free with the rewards, and actually has made loads of money, so I have nothing to complain about.
I've seen the same DVD scene on three TVs, and made note of the scene change. On the 52" Sony LCD Proj set, it blocked a bit, consistently. On the Sharp Aquos 37" LCD, no blocking. On the 13" SDTV, the DVD player fritzed out and blacked for about 5 frames I think. On my. Those terrible artifacts may not be the signal. Your set may have a hard time decoding and displaying some uniquely challenging data.
Just so you know, many DVDs are not mastered correctly to the standard. What that sounds like to me is that when they cut the beginning of that scene, they dropped the initial keyframe, so the subsequent frames, which are essentially the delta, are applying that delta to the wrong initial image (keyframe). That would cause the updated portions of the image to be displayed overlayed on top of an older image, and would look blocky. Other DVD players might not be as forgiving about playing it, and might not show any video until you get to the next keyframe.
I've experienced the same problem with some poor software for splitting a DVD on to 2 single-layer DVD-Rs, software which doesn't account for keyframes. When splitting like that, you need to either reencode to generate a new keyframe at the beginning of the file, or cut on a keyframe, which doesn't always match the timing of the scene change perfectly.
I didn't pay THEM more. I paid a third party more. Having that SSH account is pretty handy.
Although if you just want it for bittorrent, tunneling tracker communications through Tor is much easier (and saves the $8). Note that the Tor community recommends not sending P2P data through Tor, but tracker communication is fine. Works great with even one of the worst throttlers, Comcast, fully restoring normal speeds.
With the system of hooks, they've basically turned everything upside down, so everything becomes recursive (ones of those things people try to avoid in programming) and there is nothing like a simple oo or functional application programming interface. Most of the time when you're programming in Drupal, you're programming in a switch, which is another thing programmers like to avoid.
I don't understand what you're trying to say about "programming in a switch". Nor do I know what you mean by turning everything upside down, so I can't comment on those.
Aren't "hooks" essentially "mount points", to borrow a term from plug-in architectures, which seems to apply just as well to Drupal modules? But instead of subclassing like you would with mount points, you have to create a function with a specific name. It's not ideal, and seems to be a limitation of the underlying language, PHP.
Django on Python is likely much more elegant, in that they use a very well defined Model-Template-View architecture and a much better OO-language, but unfortunately they do not have a mature enough project to have all the modules you need out-of-the-box like Drupal does. But compared to the PHP-based alternatives, Drupal is downright beautiful. A Python-based Drupal with many of the ideas from Django would probably be best, if it existed.
The whole problem with Drupal (well, the main problem, every popular software of any size is going to have lots of problems) is the project leads' refusal to make any kind of real API.
At least if they'd use an API for core functions this problem would be partially mitigated. They've been talking about an API for years, but no one wants to do it, and to be honest I think this suits the people at the top of Drupal (as opposed to everyone else) just fine - it's certainly not a high priority for them.
The API is supposedly stable for each major version number, and even as a not-very-involved Drupal developer and Drupal user, reading the API changes and updating other author's modules for them on the occasions they've needed the help has been a breeze.
Hell, the Firefox prefs on MacOS X looks damn similar to the preferences layout in Safari, or is FireFox also claiming to be driving UI standards on MacOS X as well...
It looks better now, and does match the style of System Preferences panes of OS X. But it's actually less usable to me in that they moved connection settings (the only setting I ever have to change, to use proxies) off the main "tab". Fortunately it remembers the last tab you had open, so only a minor hindrance.
Of course if your whole system is encrypted these are not problems, but then you don't exactly have a deniably-encrypted filesystem.
The only solution seems to be running VMWare or other virtualization with the image on the encrypted disk. You still might get MRUs for the path to the VMWare image, but you could solve that with symbolic links or SUBST on Windows, alternating the mapping of a drive letter between the path to a harmless image and the path to the one on the hidden encrypted disk.
Which still leaves the problem of the pagefile. I don't know how you can get plausible deniability encrypting that.
The *only* barrier to #2 is the cost of the developer program, ($99) which isn't much of a barrier...
Most open source projects don't even buy their own domain (they use sourceforge). Domains are about $7.99....
And why should they? They're already giving away their work to the community for free. And in return, they get occasional bug fixes from the community.
This is Apple's intent: to upset that balance and encourage independent closed-source development instead. Like a Belkin partner for software.
1 - Registry bloat. No other OS keeps app settings and preferences in what really amounts of a gigantic text file. Many apps do NOT remove registry entries correctly (or fully) when uninstalled. Inevitably this file will bloat, bloat, bloat, bloat until it takes forever just to get anything out of it.
Wow, you think that a few DWORDS in a registry are going to slow down your computer? I always wondered who buys those snake-oil "registry cleaners". Now I know.
If your Windows box is slowing down, it is because of processes running (malware, random software you installed and forgot about, etc) that are consuming CPU or memory. Or it is because of disk fragmentation. Registry plays an absolutely negligible role.
Also, in all my years of running Windows and fiddling with almost everything imaginable on it, I have never corrupted the registry. Occasionally I can't figure out why for example, a file association won't stick, so I'm with you in part that it doesn't work perfectly, because it can be hard to troubleshoot. And I would much rather use Find/Replace on a text file.
But to have a bullet point that is "registry bloat" is horribly naive. Ever use a database that scales? They are typically one big file, or a set of them, with lots of little pieces of information thrown in. Do they scale and work after they become "bloated"? Of course.
Registry bloat? Talk about handing in your geek card.
Excuse me, did you just call Rails "clean"? Are you high? It may be the worst production environment I have ever seen. And I used ASP. I could be wrong on that point. I haven't played around with Rails as I have with Django. Most of what I know about Rails is from the many comparisons that have been made between it and Django, such as this Snakes and Rubies debate with Rails' creator and this one from Nasa. My understanding is it is an MVC framework, and Ruby is a dynamic, strongly typed language. Heck, if it even has namespaces it is cleaner than PHP. But I suppose I could be wrong about their similarities. Ruby is not my ideal choice of language, so I haven't looked into it in depth.
Django is okay, but only if you want to use Python; frankly Python gives me an eye twitch and I have no interest in using it. I love Python (and wxPython) for desktop apps, so I couldn't be happier to find Django. Python just fits my brain. It's the only language that I actually enjoy reading other people's source code and can quickly figure out how a whole program is laid out. But to each his own.
Yes I could build all that but using a CMS like Drupal or Joomla saves months and months of work for any kind of real functionality, and with that time saved you can work on some other code or customize the hell out of the CMS you are using, or add content (presumably why you put up the site to start with) or whatever. Yes, a CMS is especially great for smaller projects for clients who wouldn't pay for all the time it took you to build it from scratch. You get the site setup and get results quickly, pleasing your client, while still charging a decent hourly rate. Then keep that higher hourly rate for all the maintenance work. Most sites I've designed with Drupal have been a fixed rate for the initial design, so the quicker I can get that done, the more money I make.
I've been looking at Django the past couple of weeks to replace Drupal for some of my sites though. It has a much cleaner architecture (as does Rails), an MVC pattern, and it's in a language that I know well from desktop programming experience, Python. Even if a full CMS is more than you need for a project, a framework such as Django or Rails is worth a look. It handles database abstraction (using ORM), authentication, sessions, caching, and has a decent templating language. It's so MVC that there are actually files named models.py, views.py, and a template directory. models.py has python objects for each table and generates the SQL for you to match. Doesn't get much cleaner than that. Best of all it's not PHP, it's Python, so it actually uses namespaces:-) and PostGreSQL is a more common and better supported choice than MySQL.
Anyway, my point is that even if you don't want a big CMS package and you want to design much of your site from scratch, it makes a lot more sense to use an existing framework than the underlying language itself. I don't really think I can design a better authentication or session framework, for example, in a reasonable amount of time to be worth coding from scratch. The only downsides to Django are that the blog, forum, and wiki type bundles or distros don't exist yet. So if you need one of those, Drupal is a much easier choice at the moment. Some people are considering putting together ready-to-use bundles (incuding myself), but right now you have to DIY. Also, if you use shared hosting like many people do, you either need specialized Python hosting or you need one of the few major shared hosting providers that offer Python. I use DreamHost, and luckily they do offer Python scripting with FastCGI (but not mod_python).
For even more fun, if you have two differently-corrupted copies of a file and a torrent to go with it, then you can have BitTorrent stitch them together into a valid file without involving any third parties. It would be cool if someone built a small utility to do just that, built off of something like cfv, which only does torrent (+sfv,crc,csv,md5,etc.) verification.
Torrents are really just fancy networked.par/.par2 files, but it would be nice to have a tool for torrent repairing that works as well as something like QuickPar does for newsgroup files.
It's called NVidia ForceWare Network Access Manager (NAM) now on 680 and 780 boards. And it's still a piece of crap. At least 2 third-party products (Azureus was one) mention in their FAQs to uninstall NAM to avoid crashes. I had Azureus crashes all the time, prevented (sort of) only by going into Task Manager and setting the affinity to the second processor, until I uninstalled NAM.
I can think of numerous crappy state laws in recent years, but not a single bad "law" from the UN. As the other poster said, the UN doesn't make laws. They make resolutions, but at best those can be considered guidelines.
The closest thing would be international treaties, and I can easily think of a few bad ones.
And the user eats all costs of business interruption while the disputed content stays down for a minimum of two weeks (10 business days). If the content were that important to a business, it would probably make sense to pay $10/year for a domain, and roughly $20/month for hosting.
Rather than relying on someone else who can take your content down at any time for any reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the list of the highest rated games of 2010. See how many times Mass Effect 2 and its expansions shows up. I count 3 with a score of 85 or better. The game of Mass Effect 2 itself is the top scoring of the year with a 94, which makes it tied for 3rd place with a bunch of games as one of the best PC games of all time.
Sorry, got a little excited there for a second. It's a great game, with RPG elements and FPS elements that does a better job than Fallout in my opinion and has a *much* better story too. It's like Final Fantasy story and FMV meets Star Wars mythology meets RPG inventory and upgrades meets FPS combat with the unique twist of pause-and-plan combat and the best use of cover I've seen, and a pretty good balance as far as how much damage you can give/take before dying (unlike the ridiculous amount of damage enemies can take in Borderlands) and realistic feeling accuracy spread of weapons. The weapons and upgrades are good too but I have to say I preferred the inventory of the first Mass Effect, other than how you had to manage hundreds of ammo upgrades and such. I've looked for a comparable game now that I'm done with Mass Effect and halfway through Mass Effect 2 but nothing compares with all of the same elements.
A bonus is that the dialog choices and storyline options you made in Mass Effect get transferred to Mass Effect 2 by importing your savegame, and will also continue into Mass Effect 3. That's just amazing in my opinion. It's the way games should be made. I could keep going but you get the picture. I put the game up there in the same league as the Zelda series, which says a lot.
Besides the 9 difficulty levels, the many expansions, the wildly varying victory conditions, and the improved AI in the expansions, there are some interesting economy strategies that aren't outlined in any way in the game's interface.
You can use a "cottage economy", a "specialist economy", or an "espionage economy". Most people start with a cottage economy but using Great People and the new features of the expansions without using near-100% on the science slider are an interesting alternative.
I'm still learning those after playing casually for years. The real pros are on CivFanatics.com. They could tell you more about those strategies than I ever could. They can be way more fun.
Linux would be nice. As it is, Civ4 is the only reason I have to boot into Windows. Everything else I need from it runs in Wine.
Civ4, not so much. I got it to work at first, then tried everything from making it windowed to disabling audio and it just kept crashing. That's with Beyond the Sword 3.19 and latest Wine from Ubuntu 10.04. No idea what the problem is.
As long as they have the toggles for Resource bubbles (CTRL-R) and Crop Yields (CTRL-Y), plus military, strategy layers, etc., it's pretty easy to see what's going on.
Or, you could just create ~/.mozilla-standard/, ~/.mozilla-ebay/ and ~/.mozilla-testing/, and point a ~/.mozilla symlink at whichever profile you want to use, like you can do for ... any other program at all. Again making the "profiles" feature completely redundant on Unix-like systems.
Are you seriously suggesting altering a symlink every time you want to run a different session? Nevermind that it wouldn't work if you wanted to run 2 different profiles at once.
Profiles are immensely helpful if you have 2 logins (say to all of Google's services) and want to use both at the same time. Separate search histories, separate Gmail accounts, etc etc. All running at the same time in 2 different windows. Use different themes to tell them apart.
It looks more like IE7 or Chrome than it does any version of Office.
They:
- hid the menubar.
- condensed common menu items into Page and Tools drop-downs, to apply to the current page and whole app, respectively.
- merged the search and address bars (which imo should never have been separate--I always hide the search bar).
- merged some other buttons (stop/reload etc.).
- plan to simplify the 4 different ways to access bookmarks.
Full description of mockup here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Sprints/Windows_Theme_Revamp/Direction_and_Feedback
Other than a brief mention of possibly adding ribbon styling, none of the above looks much like Office ribbons to me.
GRemote on Windows Mobile (*shocker*) did it first. Air mouse over bluetooth or wifi, anyone? Click and drag works, on screen scrollwheel works, everything is rebindable. Also works as touchpad, joystick, and game wheel for racing games.
It can be used exactly like the wiimote is used for menus except there is more than one interface you can use depending on what you're trying to control. For example, one that prominently displays media play/pause buttons.
On my HTC Fuze, it feels like a very solid, very capable remote and air mouse. Works with all games, apps, and of course also the Windows desktop.
The primary reason I like the digital channels is that they are true 16:9 widescreen. Opening up the edges of the scene makes a much bigger difference than the horizontal resolution, as far as I'm concerned.
Except that's only true for some films and some shows. Many others recorded over the last several years actually show more of the scene in the full-screen version, whereas the wide-screen version is just the full-screen version with the top and bottom cropped off. It completely depends on how it was filmed and the transfer process.
And most German VWs sold in the US are made in Mexico, other than the fairly rare Wolfsburg edition.
Might as well base the car's origin on where the blueprints were drafted, like everyone else does...
Dreamhost repeatedly did this to me when I was hosting with them. They even modified my databases more than once. Mainly adding indexes (including ones that already existed...), but they changed the type of a column once.
Part of the tools that come with mysql is the slow query log. It will identify your queries as causing unnecessary database server load and I believe it even identifies which tables need indexes. They likely used that automated performance data to decide which changes to apply and just did it. Extra indexes are likely to help more than hurt on most websites with fairly static data and lots of reads. Note that phpMyAdmin (and possibly the command line tools) will tell you that you have a duplicate index even if one of the indexes is a composite key and the other isn't.
If they actually changed the type of a column, that's not so good.
I don't know. I've used DH for a couple of years and they've really just left me alone. Their support has been helpful, and honest about when and why they couldn't help me in some cases, including directing me to information to solve my problems with third-party scripts. And it's free with the rewards, and actually has made loads of money, so I have nothing to complain about.
I've seen the same DVD scene on three TVs, and made note of the scene change. On the 52" Sony LCD Proj set, it blocked a bit, consistently. On the Sharp Aquos 37" LCD, no blocking. On the 13" SDTV, the DVD player fritzed out and blacked for about 5 frames I think. On my. Those terrible artifacts may not be the signal. Your set may have a hard time decoding and displaying some uniquely challenging data.
Just so you know, many DVDs are not mastered correctly to the standard. What that sounds like to me is that when they cut the beginning of that scene, they dropped the initial keyframe, so the subsequent frames, which are essentially the delta, are applying that delta to the wrong initial image (keyframe). That would cause the updated portions of the image to be displayed overlayed on top of an older image, and would look blocky. Other DVD players might not be as forgiving about playing it, and might not show any video until you get to the next keyframe.
I've experienced the same problem with some poor software for splitting a DVD on to 2 single-layer DVD-Rs, software which doesn't account for keyframes. When splitting like that, you need to either reencode to generate a new keyframe at the beginning of the file, or cut on a keyframe, which doesn't always match the timing of the scene change perfectly.
I didn't pay THEM more. I paid a third party more. Having that SSH account is pretty handy.
Although if you just want it for bittorrent, tunneling tracker communications through Tor is much easier (and saves the $8). Note that the Tor community recommends not sending P2P data through Tor, but tracker communication is fine. Works great with even one of the worst throttlers, Comcast, fully restoring normal speeds.
With the system of hooks, they've basically turned everything upside down, so everything becomes recursive (ones of those things people try to avoid in programming) and there is nothing like a simple oo or functional application programming interface. Most of the time when you're programming in Drupal, you're programming in a switch, which is another thing programmers like to avoid.
I don't understand what you're trying to say about "programming in a switch". Nor do I know what you mean by turning everything upside down, so I can't comment on those.
Aren't "hooks" essentially "mount points", to borrow a term from plug-in architectures, which seems to apply just as well to Drupal modules? But instead of subclassing like you would with mount points, you have to create a function with a specific name. It's not ideal, and seems to be a limitation of the underlying language, PHP.
Django on Python is likely much more elegant, in that they use a very well defined Model-Template-View architecture and a much better OO-language, but unfortunately they do not have a mature enough project to have all the modules you need out-of-the-box like Drupal does. But compared to the PHP-based alternatives, Drupal is downright beautiful. A Python-based Drupal with many of the ideas from Django would probably be best, if it existed.
The whole problem with Drupal (well, the main problem, every popular software of any size is going to have lots of problems) is the project leads' refusal to make any kind of real API.
At least if they'd use an API for core functions this problem would be partially mitigated. They've been talking about an API for years, but no one wants to do it, and to be honest I think this suits the people at the top of Drupal (as opposed to everyone else) just fine - it's certainly not a high priority for them.
What's this, if not an API? api.drupal.org
The API is supposedly stable for each major version number, and even as a not-very-involved Drupal developer and Drupal user, reading the API changes and updating other author's modules for them on the occasions they've needed the help has been a breeze.
Otherwise, Firefox would look and work like it did 5 years ago, with great support for Web standards, but terrible usability.
Yes, OMG so unusable!
I'm guessing you didn't use Firebird 5 years ago.
Hell, the Firefox prefs on MacOS X looks damn similar to the preferences layout in Safari, or is FireFox also claiming to be driving UI standards on MacOS X as well...
It looks better now, and does match the style of System Preferences panes of OS X. But it's actually less usable to me in that they moved connection settings (the only setting I ever have to change, to use proxies) off the main "tab". Fortunately it remembers the last tab you had open, so only a minor hindrance.
Of course if your whole system is encrypted these are not problems, but then you don't exactly have a deniably-encrypted filesystem.
The only solution seems to be running VMWare or other virtualization with the image on the encrypted disk. You still might get MRUs for the path to the VMWare image, but you could solve that with symbolic links or SUBST on Windows, alternating the mapping of a drive letter between the path to a harmless image and the path to the one on the hidden encrypted disk.
Which still leaves the problem of the pagefile. I don't know how you can get plausible deniability encrypting that.
The *only* barrier to #2 is the cost of the developer program, ($99) which isn't much of a barrier...
Most open source projects don't even buy their own domain (they use sourceforge). Domains are about $7.99....
And why should they? They're already giving away their work to the community for free. And in return, they get occasional bug fixes from the community.
This is Apple's intent: to upset that balance and encourage independent closed-source development instead. Like a Belkin partner for software.
1 - Registry bloat. No other OS keeps app settings and preferences in what really amounts of a gigantic text file. Many apps do NOT remove registry entries correctly (or fully) when uninstalled. Inevitably this file will bloat, bloat, bloat, bloat until it takes forever just to get anything out of it.
Wow, you think that a few DWORDS in a registry are going to slow down your computer? I always wondered who buys those snake-oil "registry cleaners". Now I know.
If your Windows box is slowing down, it is because of processes running (malware, random software you installed and forgot about, etc) that are consuming CPU or memory. Or it is because of disk fragmentation. Registry plays an absolutely negligible role.
Also, in all my years of running Windows and fiddling with almost everything imaginable on it, I have never corrupted the registry. Occasionally I can't figure out why for example, a file association won't stick, so I'm with you in part that it doesn't work perfectly, because it can be hard to troubleshoot. And I would much rather use Find/Replace on a text file.
But to have a bullet point that is "registry bloat" is horribly naive. Ever use a database that scales? They are typically one big file, or a set of them, with lots of little pieces of information thrown in. Do they scale and work after they become "bloated"? Of course.
Registry bloat? Talk about handing in your geek card.
I've been looking at Django the past couple of weeks to replace Drupal for some of my sites though. It has a much cleaner architecture (as does Rails), an MVC pattern, and it's in a language that I know well from desktop programming experience, Python. Even if a full CMS is more than you need for a project, a framework such as Django or Rails is worth a look. It handles database abstraction (using ORM), authentication, sessions, caching, and has a decent templating language. It's so MVC that there are actually files named models.py, views.py, and a template directory. models.py has python objects for each table and generates the SQL for you to match. Doesn't get much cleaner than that. Best of all it's not PHP, it's Python, so it actually uses namespaces
Anyway, my point is that even if you don't want a big CMS package and you want to design much of your site from scratch, it makes a lot more sense to use an existing framework than the underlying language itself. I don't really think I can design a better authentication or session framework, for example, in a reasonable amount of time to be worth coding from scratch. The only downsides to Django are that the blog, forum, and wiki type bundles or distros don't exist yet. So if you need one of those, Drupal is a much easier choice at the moment. Some people are considering putting together ready-to-use bundles (incuding myself), but right now you have to DIY. Also, if you use shared hosting like many people do, you either need specialized Python hosting or you need one of the few major shared hosting providers that offer Python. I use DreamHost, and luckily they do offer Python scripting with FastCGI (but not mod_python).
Torrents are really just fancy networked
It's called NVidia ForceWare Network Access Manager (NAM) now on 680 and 780 boards. And it's still a piece of crap. At least 2 third-party products (Azureus was one) mention in their FAQs to uninstall NAM to avoid crashes. I had Azureus crashes all the time, prevented (sort of) only by going into Task Manager and setting the affinity to the second processor, until I uninstalled NAM.
Good motherboards, bad motherboard drivers.
The closest thing would be international treaties, and I can easily think of a few bad ones.
Rather than relying on someone else who can take your content down at any time for any reason.
0 ibm.com
BTW, IBM handles much of GE's IT, including its web site.
Both of whom cheated, by putting the majority of the site in Flash.