Posts by E Haines 134 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2007
I use the minimum font size feature in Safari which prevents sites from obnoxiously displaying 3 pt type, and this apparently causes the nav bar to make the "Weekend edition" bit hang down permanently on the next line, covering up anything that might be there. Same thing in Firefox. You'd want to fix it so it doesn't break if the user changes font sizes. Also get rid of the ALL CAPS...nobody likes that. Nobody, ever. (And yes the popup thingy is quite annoying too.)
> In the US the meter are called globe.
No they're not; in any place in the U.S. I've ever been, meters are called meters. Maybe in Redneck Hickville (judging from your writing abilities), they're called globes. If you lost your hard drive just because of that, you were going to lose it in the next power outage anyway.
The reason it *is* likely to improve is because it's becoming less and less common to write games entirely from scratch, which need to be ported by hand. Instead you use a pre-made engine of some sort, which has support for multiple platforms out of the box, so the "porting" has mostly already been done for you. This makes it far more economically sensible to make games available for platforms with smaller marketshare.
I went directly from Snow Leopard to Mavericks, skipping 10.7 and 10.8, and Mavericks just kinda feels glitchy and slow by comparison. The "slow" bit is primarily because of the file system, which took a major speed hit somehow. Maybe you don't notice if you have flash, but I'm still using HDs. The glitches aren't terrible or frequent but it simply doesn't have that "totally rock-solid" feel anymore. While there are some good features to be sure, the whole experience has been decidedly "sidegrade" overall. But hey, it was free....
This article is just factually wrong (not to mention poorly edited..."bread"?). When the iPhone was introduced, there were no native apps, aside from the included ones. You did everything via the web. Apparently the later introduction of the app store was so successful that it seems to have wiped everyone's memories of how things really were.
Nevertheless, you have only to look at mobile web stats to see that web browsing is far from dead in that arena and access through native apps is limited. Despite dubious claims here that Safari is "bad", it was heralded as something of a revolution in mobile browsing, since it was actually usable on a phone (unlike previous attempts) and for the most part did not require crappy "mobile" versions of web sites to be functional.
So yeah, I don't really buy this article's assertions. Yes, specialist apps exist, and maybe it's not too uncommon to use them for a few of the biggest sites, but that doesn't apply to the web in general.
It's incorrect to say that WINE violates any ToS. There are (sadly) plenty of OS X games published using WINE for the "port" and nobody ever has or will ever be sued for using it. Also TransGaming's business is founded on it; Cider is a slightly tweaked WINE, as you might expect from the name.
Having an engine run on a platform is no guarantee that any games using that engine will be ported, although I'm sure it makes it easier. So yes, it is whether 'game x' runs on Linux, and no, it's rarely if ever a matter of just flipping a compile switch. (Aside from Unity, which is something of a special case since you don't normally get source code access, and even then there's still the matter of porting native code plugins, if they are used, and sometimes shaders as well.)
I won't bother with a claim, in order to increase the odds of the "victims" getting something. How's that for generous? Although it is possible for these settlement thingies to result in real money...sometime around 2005 I bought a graphics card, which was also apparently price-fixed, and was a few years later informed that I was part of a lawsuit but could opt out if I wanted. I didn't, since that would have involved some effort, and a while later I got a check for around $100 more than I had paid for the card in the first place. If I'd known that was going to happen, I would have bought dozens of the things....
I actually played Obsidian a few years ago, and didn't find it nearly as hard as you claim. It was less difficult than Riven or Revelation; I finished it (with no cheating--I agree about not going online for hints) in a few days. It's worth playing, certainly, although the first "world" is substantially better than the rest of the game, which makes the overall experience somewhat less satisfying than it could have been.
Sorry, but there wasn't any guesswork involved, unless you just weren't paying attention or had no patience. It was all logic and deduction. I completed all four without having to look up a thing on the internet, though Riven and Revelation were pretty tough. (I don't really consider the fifth to be part of the same series...I bought it and played though some of it, but it's not really the same so I kind of lost interest.)
Also I have to take issue with the assertion that "puzzles are typically solved by acquiring long lists of items". In fact there are no items that you acquire, aside from the book pages. That was deliberate, to get away from the often-arbitrary "inventory puzzles" in previous adventure games. Instead, puzzles are typically solved by observation and manipulating the environment. I'm pretty sure these games helped train my real-world powers of observation to be less bad....
A more serious problem is what happens if you zoom your text at all, so it's anything larger than the (tiny) default size. Try it...most nested comments become a single vertical line of text, rendering them unreadable. I suspect someone has used pixels in the CSS somewhere where it really should be ems. I typically have text set to not display smaller than 14pts, because while I can read smaller text, I'd prefer to avoid the eyestrain thankyouverymuch. So basically the recent change has broken the comments view, since this wasn't a problem before. It should be standard practice while developing websites to occasionally zoom your text in and out to ensure you haven't improperly hard-coded something in a browser-breaking fashion.
We had smart meters installed a year ago; as far as I know there wasn't a choice. So far my bills have been the same, maybe slightly lower. The main difference was not having to shovel a path to the meter during the winter, which was kind of nice actually. I'm sorry but I just can't really get worked up about the whole thing.
Yes, Safari does indeed block third-party cookies; you're not wrong. It's a perfectly adequate web browser, by the way, and judging from browser market share stats, a large majority of Mac users don't bother with anything else, so yeah I'd say it accounts for something. Namely, it accounts for evil Mac users destroying the web economy! Woo!
Sorry, but no. Hardware-agnostic operating systems already existed before MS-DOS, and there was plenty of competition that drove computer prices far below $5K. Many computers from Commodore, Atari, etc. were typically in the $300-$1000 range (in 1980s dollars to be sure, but nevertheless what you're claiming is demonstrably false).
> It's a little harder to see why Redmond wasn't keen to suggest Mac users install Windows 8 using Boot Camp
Because using Boot Camp involves rebooting the machine, which is undesirable, not to mention that it requires that you dedicate a disk partition to another OS. If you're a developer, you're not going to constantly reboot the entire machine in order to test web sites if you can simply run a VM instead, and the virtualised OS can be contained in a disk image. It's not like running IE requires 100% CPU power.
Even an expanded A1200 couldn't really run it properly. I ended up playing the Mac version via one of the Mac emulators, since it ran at native speed and 640x480 on a Picasso96 graphics card (yes, my A1200 was expanded far past the point of making any sense, but it was cool anyway) was far faster than the AGA chip.
"I think you should be worried about getting where you want to go if you use Apple Maps, to be honest."
If we're being honest, in my area, Google maps has a street name wrong, and if you specify a particular address in a particular town, it shows you a street with that name, but in the wrong town. (Which almost screwed me over, but at least I had sense not to blindly trust it and said "wait, this can't be right".) Apple's maps doesn't have either of those problems. This is, of course, a sample size of 1, and I'm sure there are still plenty of issues with Apple's maps, but nevertheless I wouldn't consider it wise for Google to be criticizing others too much when their own product is far from perfect.
At least give me 16:10 instead of 16:9, which is something that's becoming increasingly difficult. Display technology in general kind of sucks actually and in many ways seems to have regressed since CRTs...you're constantly being stuck with choices like "do you want decent color, *or* do you want to play games acceptably?"
The reason they're not protesting in Apple stores is because they recognize that the fact is Microsoft has become more locked down than Apple. OS X software can be installed from any source without restriction (if you don't want the OS harping on you about unsigned apps you can disable that in the preferences easily enough). That's not something you can say about Metro apps.
Indeed, I know several families who barely use their PCs anymore because they've pretty much replaced them with iOS and Android devices. Not intentionally, mind--they get an iPhone or whatever and just gradually turn on the PC less and less, since a lot of what they used it for is more conveniently done on a mobile device. So people talking about "but what about dishwashers and feature phones" are missing the point...yes this is a relatively new thing; this situation with computing devices wasn't possible 10 years ago.
> Valve don't want that and neither do the other game vendors since they have no intention of coughing up 30% to Apple or MS in order to sell on their respective platforms.
But the other game vendors do have the intention of coughing up 30+% to Valve in order to be on Steam? What difference does it make? Unless you go it alone, you will be coughing up a reasonably hefty percentage to somebody.
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