Re: It's also a bit shit ...
Actually, knowing the complete lack of imagination at EA central, zombie DLC is inevitable.
2481 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
In fairness, Need for Speed has finally improved recently. They realised what a load of crap the old ones were and handed the series over to Criterion. The latest Most Wanted? From what I've played of it, it's basically Burnout Paradise 2.
For the first time ever, I actually really want a Need for Speed game.
Just like I had on Pocket PC 2002.
And Windows Mobile 2003.
And 5.
And 6.
And Maemo.
Well done for bringing us this revolutionary new tech, Samsung! I shall sit here and watch with the bemusement I normally reserve for Apple, as everyone praises you for inventing decades-old technology.
Between reading the article and getting to this page, every single comment criticisng Apple has received exactly one downvote. I think we have a butthurt iOS user out there.
Much as I dislike pretty much every mainstream "smartphone" these days, the problem of Android fragmentation is over-hyped by its competitors. I can't say I've ever noticed it as an issue, and I've been using Android on my work phones since 1.5. I can't think of a single app I've wanted that I couldn't have. True, I keep fairly up to date, but I was on 2.2 and 2.3 for a long time with no issues.
I accept that it's more of a pain in the arse for developers, but the only reason no-one's using older iOS versions is that any iOS device over two years old is immediately abandoned as unfashionable and (knowing Apple's rather dodgy updates) slow as hell, and never used again.
I've got a few 3Gs in the company inventory, using the latest possible iOS (4.2, I think) - you wouldn't want to use one. They're quite astonishingly unusable.
Nice to see the UK isn't the only place where "blame it on the immigrants" is a go-to scapegoat for all the country's ills.
Well, I say nice. I actually mean "fucking disgusting."
And people do not steal jobs. They are given them. When Maddox is making better political points on immigration than you, you really need to stop and re-think your approach.
Win8, be it on ARM or x86, is a non starter as far as I'm concerned.
Why? It's the best Windows version I've used in years, and TIFKAM works quite well on a tablet.
For the rest, your requirements for a tablet are clearly very different to mine. It sounds like you pretty much want a laptop replacement
That's what tablets used to be. What's wrong with wanting a tablet that actually does stuff?
Native Linux on my phone gives me, as a nerd, a far greater set of options than Android does. Of all the jumped-up feature phones pretending to be smartphones, Android is the one I use, but for technical work it's as horrendous as the rest. Ubuntu, being native Linux, will give me the option of exposing that power. It'll be all prettiness up front, but if I want a bash terminal, I'm betting I can get one. For me, that's the USP - a smartphone that looks like the rest of the shitty modern "smartphones" on top, and actually is underneath.
Hardly a fair comparison? Why?
iOS is a traditional operating system, and Safari runs on top of it. Gecko *could* run on it, but Apple won't let them.
B2G / Firefox OS is Firefox. The actual base of the OS you develop on is Gecko. Everything is rendered by it. It's like asking why you can't run Safari inside Firefox on the desktop.
So, yeah. That's why.
Did you ever read the article? Chrome isn't banned, it already has an iOS port. They just can't use V8, only JavaScriptCore. They already use Webkit anyways, so that's the same.
Firefox is also not banned, they just refuse to port because they want to use Gecko.
Oh I do apologise - theyre only banned from using their own rendering engine. Not a big deal at all, forcing them to be a deliberately slower re-skin of Safari. Nnnnnope. Nothing wrong with that. How could anyone cry foul?
And if you think all versions of Webkit are created equal, you're wrong.
By the way, I did know all that, but 'as far as I'm concerned Safari re-skins don't count as separate browsers, so the real, full-fat versions of Chrome and Firefox are indeed banned from iOS, no?
Having recently moved to Vancouver, I joined Wind, an up-and-coming pre-paid network (your credit history lags behind you by months, so I could only go pre-paid). Problem is, because they're deploying their own infrastructure, they're currently metropolitan-only. Never mind leaving the country; I'm roaming if I leave the city!
So the first thing I did? I activated the roaming options in Android. Done! Now if I happen to accidentally pick up another network's signal out in the suburbs, my phone tells me immediately, and cuts off my data connection.
It's annoying, sure, but it's easy enough to be aware of it.
These days a movie maker has to consider all the moral and political implications of every little thing, because otherwise some nitpicker somewhere will be offended and make a huge song and dance about it...
Yeah, wasn't it better back when films were dumb, and morals were nice black-and-white absolutes?
Spoilers: NO.
Take away the context-switching torture feature, and Windows 8 is probably the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced. The performance and storage improvements alone are worth the upgrade. But the UI is keeping punters away.
THIS
Under the silly UI (which on a Surface or phone works great), Win8 was worth the 15 quid I paid to stay up to date. It's bloody fast, and I mean bloody fast. On this tri-booting MacBook Pro it's easily the fastest operating system of the three, booting in seconds, and absolutely wipes the floor with Mac OS X (stick that in your tuned-to-the-hardware pipes, fanbois). The little enhancements lying around here and there also make it worthwhile, and it means I'll have the latest DirectX available.
So for me, this system continues to be:
Linux: Primary system, for work and getting shit done.
Windows: Secondary system, for games and media Linux can't handle (pretty rare these days).
Mac OS X: For when I have to, otherwise never booted.
Or how you love the 24 inch monitor in 1920 x 1200 and the constant muse movements on my small mouse mat to be able to drag my stupid little mouse across MASSIVE tiles to get to the one I want because I don't have a touch screen... Or the fact I have dual screens and it takes TWICE as long.
You have a 24 inch monitor and no mouse wheel?
Metro for me is a glorified start menu, and with the keyboard support they added after its first appearance, I use it like I use every other menu these days. Hit the windows key, type a bit of what I want, hit return. It's what I did in 7 and it's what I do in Kubuntu. I see Metro for about a second, then it's gone again.
And to get to the control panel? I hit the charms menu and it's right there. That's way easier than it was in 7!
Adjusted to account for Christmas, fine, but were they adjusted to account for the general upward trend in those markets anyway? As more people switch from physical to digital, what were the upward percentages in the months surrounding the shutdown?
As usual with the MPAA, I'm doubting this is the entire story. Likely cherry-picked to justify their heavy-handed tactics.
Fail bad on the first day/week (WOW, D3, Guildwars 2, COD and prolly alot more...) The accountants should just follow this rule.
In defence of Guild Wars 2, they removed the game from sale while they set up more servers, in order to maintain quality of service for the customers who had already bought it. While it frustrated me slightly, I had to give them props for being honest and caring more about their paid customers than getting more sales in.
On the Windows and Linux versions, I don't have my login saved, and it still boots to offline mode just fine if I don't have a connection. People tell me all about this necessary voodoo of logging in, booting a game once, etc, but it never seems necessary. I got on a ten hour flight the other week, and right before it I downloaded Civ 5 to my laptop. Never booted it, never fiddled with Steam at all. Got on the plane, started Steam in offline mode, played the game.
It just works. Ironically, unlike your Mac. :-p
Does Civ 5 work? Civ revolution marked the end of me as a EA customer, as the endgame was bugged to hell to the extent it ruined most games and despite releasing updates that updated *something* they never fixed that.
Revolution nearly cured me of my Civ addiction, the console-cuddling piece of shit. Civ 5, however, has reaffirmed it, and as far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with EA. Registers on Steam, has full integration with it, and works perfectly - it *can't* be an EA game.
Every EA game I've bought in recent years has had major bugs that have never been patched. Alice: Madness Returns illustrated their disgusting customer attitude perfectly for me. It had several game breaking bugs reported in chorus in their customer forums. Did they patch the game? No, they shut the forums!
Scumbags.
Downloaded Gatling Gears off Steam the other day. No Steam integration for achievements, no hub....hmm....I wonder who published this, then?
"Please log in to your EA account to continue."
Ah, that explains it. Wonder what happens if I put the licence key into Origin...
"Thank you for registering Gatling Gears! Your product is ready for download."
.........Fuck's sake.
Disgusting, abusive business practices from EA? No, surely not!
What amazes me is that people still bought the fucking thing, especially given the Diablo III saga last year. EA wants to sell you something you neither own nor control, and shut it down when they, not you, get bored of it. But they still want full price for the game, plus microtransactions.
I could rant all day about EA's horrible attitude toward its customer base, but I have stuff do so, so I'll be more succinct:
Fuck EA. Fuck them in the ear.
I'm in two minds on this one. If Mark can drag Linux kicking and screaming past its current desktop boundaries into popular relevance, that will most likely benefit it as a whole. He's interested in making it popular, and whether or not you like Unity, it's shiny, and shiny appeals to the end user. (It's a reality I despise, but Apple's kinda proven once and for all that end users are magpies.) Besides, just because newbies use a Linux distro isn't going to suddenly turn the kernel into Windows ME.
On the other hand, Linux bods have long since resented moves that are overtly commercial, and if he's going to continue to make Ubuntu popular, he needs the support of Linux's broad base. Move the system too far from that base, or piss people off too much, and he risks losing contributions.
It's difficult, but I'm continuing to support him thus far. Unity isn't the horrendous system-breaker people pretend it is, no more than Metro is on Windows 8 - those are just knee jerk reactions, and I'm guilty of them too. The plan's ambitious, and he has a Molyneux-style habit of talking up shit he hasn't built yet, but if he can pull it off it'll be bloody impressive. Mithras knows, I'm begging for a proper Linux OS on a proper smartphone, like I used to have before Nokia went batty nuggets.
Remember, no matter what vitriol you can hurl at his UI, at its core the distro is still very good. When Ubuntu has done things differently in the past, it's generally worked pretty well. I still run Kubuntu on everything I own - the solid Ubuntu base with the KDE I like over the top. (I did this long before Unity arrived.) No matter what happens at this point, it'd be impossible for him to take that solid base away from us.
which can't even render correctly half the pages.
As a web developer with a not-insignificant amount of front-end experience, bollocks. Gecko is more consistent than anything else. I'm sure some tool will now link me to the Mozzy bug tracker, as if that proved something over every other browser that totally doesn't have a bug tracker.
But then I'm still wondering how your second sentence is justification for the first.
I've not run into any of those problems and I use FF heavily on a daily basis for web development. I'm loaded up with lots of plugins too.
Snap. I use it under Linux, where it doesn't have some of the Windows-based optimisations, and it's rock solid. And really, on my development machine, which is currently using 1.5GB of my 8GB RAM to run Netbeans and an attached Tomcat instance, do you think I give two shits about my bajillion Firefox tabs using 400MB?
One browser engine to rule them all won't fix your problems. There'll always be bad implementations and different versions of WebKit about, and if WebKit is the only engine out there then the incentive to fix problems is gone.
<u>THIS</u>
I have nothing against WebKit. I've got plenty of browsers that use it and most of them are fine. I have something against whatever buggy, unfixed version of WebKit they cram into Chrome in order to claim all the latest gadgets and buzzwords.
Oh look, an Opera fanboy! I was wondering where you were in all this. I expect the rest are weeping in a corner.
FF and Chrome both provide bare-bones browsers that require third-party extensions to come close to Opera's native feature set.
That would be the extension framework that Opera insisted it didn't need, then added anyway? And where do you get off calling the two browsers that caned everyone else for years "bare bones"?
Besides, maybe not everyone requires that functionality in the browser. Better to leave it slim and provide optional installers than let it get bloated.
When those browsers do get more built-in functionality it tends to be cut-down versions of stuff Opera added a few releases back (compare Chrome or FF's New Tab layouts copied from the far-superior Speed Dial in Opera).
See, this is the hipster mindset at work. You complain that other browsers don't have features that Opera has, which is fair enough. Then they add those features, and you complain that they "copied them", and refuse to accept the improvement.
Everyone rips off everyone else and you know it. IE7 was a blatant point-for-point copy of Firefox. Everyone and their mother has ripped off Firebug for their developer toolset. Firefox and IE swiped Chrome's minimalist interface (though I turned it off back in FF4, so I can't honestly say if it still looks that way). Firefox went for Chrome's stupid 6-week release cycle (though Jetpack came of that, and Jetpack is awesome). If I were to go back, I'm willing to bet that I can find features in Opera that other browsers had first - so what?
Windows 8 finally added ISO mounting. OMG, how dare they rip off Linux??!