And?...

Of course Steam is going to have lots of 64 bit OS users. Lots of gamers will have/be upgrading to an i5 or i7 at the moment to make the most out of CPU intensive games and no matter whether you build it yourself or buy prebuilt, you'd want Win 7 64bit so you can make the most of that processor and the 8Gb of RAM you put in (because what's another £15 on the price).

Most Firefox users on the other hand probably don't play games on a PC outside of browser based games or solataire, or are using a netbook, or are using their PC at work where IT have probably bought the cheapest thing available from HP at the time of the last upgrade.

At least since 7.0, Firefox installs in the users local profile by default (AppData/local). I presume you can change it to work off the roaming profile instead but I've never needed to so haven't looked it up.

As a web developer who's currently in the process of building a complex B2B website, I can safely say you do not need to maintain 4 versions of any website. If you start with a good foundation (reset browser CSS, output clean XHTML1, use a JS library like prototype or jquery), you will find you almost never come across a browser specific problem and when you do, it's usually a minor adjustment to a CSS property to achieve the same output without triggering a bug. For example: using margin on child elements rather than padding on the parent element.

You can even use the HTML5 layout tags, such as header, footer, aside, section, etc., now in all browsers as long as you set their CSS display type to block before using them. This is because browsers will accept the tag and create an element with no definition for it, treating them like a CSS-less DIV tag, leaving you to do it in CSS.

Also, I'm yet to find much in the way of incompatibility between the browsers in regards to HTML. Yes, there is the Codec issue but that was an issue as soon as the idea of a video tag was thought of. If they accept the standard most use today it will lock people out of being able to implement the video tag (Mozilla for instance but also a lot of smaller browser developers) and in terms of the actual implementation of the tag itself, it is fairly well defined but now needs a decision to be made about codec support.

CSS is a little more browser specific at the moment but that is mainly because the W3C wants to see potential implementations of a CSS3 feature before they agree on a standard way of writing it (I believe they need at least two different implementations). Things like box-shadow and border-radius are close to a finished standard because Mozilla and Webkit wrote very similar implementations that work very well. Gradients on the other hand are still a mess as Mozilla and Webkit have differing ideas on possible implementations as well as whether to support RGBA in gradients and where in CSS to support gradients (currently it's only supported as a replacement for background-image). However, these are features that people can add to their site if they really want to experiment with them (they are progressive enhancements so don't cause problems in browsers that don't support them) but are generally suggested not to.

Although the main games are completely separate stories there are actually 2 consistent settings in the FF universe. There is the MMO setting (Giants, Elves, Cat People and their various backgrounds) and the Ivalice setting (Rabbit people, Sky Pirates, Lizard People, etc). Admittedly, by switching world but maintaining setting all FFXIV actually has is some races but no real background. Ivalice (used in Vagrant Story, FFTactics, FFTactics Advanced and FF12) has a lot more background and I personally think is the better setting.

FF11 was before WoW, I went from the European beta for FF11 (after US release and well after the Japanese release) to the US WoW beta so I'm certain of the timing. As for WoW's bugs, the thing is, the bugs were in terms of balance or abilities not working correctly, things that felt minor in comparison to FFXI's client repeatedly crashing, PlayOnline refusing to download an update from the server it had just connected to to check if there was an update. So yes, WoW was buggy, but you only noticed once you hit level 30+ whereas most other MMOs of the time (and FFXIV now) are buggy as hell before you even get into the game, so first impressions are much worse than for WoW.

The server doesn't even have a copy of the world map. Just some collision data so it can make occasional checks on a players location to make sure they are not out of bounds. It does however contain all the spawn points for enemies, npcs and some doodads (some are static and only the sparkle effect is controlled server side) and buildings (used for phasing purposes).

Stats are handled server side, as are all combat and spell actions (Mage Blink being another thing that uses the server's collision detection rather than the client's)

However, as of the Cataclysm installer, if you are playing while not completely installed a server does send you the data required for any model or map chunk requested specifically by the client (because it doesn't have a local copy) so any future public servers would have to break the streaming installer as the request would still be sent to the Blizzard servers. Which likely wont respond due to not using a valid account.

SMS messages aren't always sent to a 07*** ****** number and not all ***** SMS numbers are premium rate

How would you or the author of the addon have any idea whether the addon will work with any future update?

From what work I've done with Firefox addons (fixing one I was using after the author stopped supporting it), you can set a range of versions your addon supports but the vast majority of authors don't support versions that don't exist yet because they have no idea what Mozilla might need to change. These same authors generally check their code with the beta builds (and some with the nightly builds) and when THEY are happy that it works they'll bump up the version support and post an update.

Considering how much addons can change Firefox, I'd rather have it this way than what you are suggesting. Especially as I have had up to date addons break the entire UI before where the author had missed checking something like 'does it work if [X] toolbar isn't visible?'.

As for you Netscape comment, is it Netscape's problem that the website coder hasn't updated his code for the latest version? No. It's the website coder's problem and if he doesn't fix it people will go elsewhere. The same is true for addons.

Addons breaking on updates is due to one of three things. Either the author is still fixing the addon for the latest update (as it's just a small tweak if nothing is actually broken), the addon is no longer developed or you are using a nightly, in which case the author hasn't even had the chance to test their own addon yet, let alone fix it.

None of this is Mozilla's responsibility, nor should it be.

So what about those of us who have had set our names on RealID already (when Blizzard stated the information would only be shared with friends) and are now required to provide paperwork to Blizzard for any kind of name change on the account?

You do not need to play WoW to have an account on the new forums. They aren't WoW specific, they are the replacement for the current Battle.Net forum and so all you need is an account (As far as I can tell, you don't even need a Blizzard game to register) so this does nothing to stop trolling at all, it'll just mean a load of fake accounts being used for posting.

The only thing this does is give information out to the people you may not want to have that information. Teachers in the UK are not allowed to interact with pupils, beyond polite greetings and the like, outside of a school environment with the possibility of being fired if they do. This essentially blocks them from using the forums because of the risk involved.

Why could they not allow you to set up an alias that shows on the forum and links to a list of characters on that account that are on the armory and allow us to pick a character to post as alongside that alias?

Bare in mind, if you have any kind of technical problem you will get asked to post it on the forum. You can phone them and then wait in the queue for ages (which is only going to get worse) or just not bother if you are in a position where you need to remain anonymous on WoW.

I've used and moderated a fair few forums over the years and, though I've never needed to moderate as many posts and users as Blizzard do, any decent forum software makes it as easy as possible for the moderator to do their job. Things like having a page that lists each flagged post with the ability on that screen to delete, ban, temp-ban, edit, visit in context and reply to the message without hunting through the actual thread.

One feature I'd really suggest Blizzard consider adding for their moderators is a way for the system to flag IPs that have had multiple accounts banned so that if someone really doesn't take a hint they can ban by IP for a period of time.

Instead they are implementing a change that only alienates good posters and security conscious players and makes all kinds of new trolling possible and worse, could potentially affect someone in real life

One thing I noticed when my WoW guild had a private radio was that, although the server uses one playlist for all visitors, it doesn't necessarily need to play the music in sync with everyone. We noticed this when some people got an advert (in our case, in jokes and event notifications) before a song started playing and some after it finished but no one actually missed any of the song or songs either side of it. Don't know if this is just the way the server handles the streaming or something in the way the data is sent.

There are still a lot of webradio stations running on Shoutcast. It's also one of the two radio players available for the PSP (Icecast being the other). Having been in solid use before AOL took over Nullsoft, it's actually quite well known (again Icecast being the only alternative I know, but I don't do webradio).

No, hormonal imbalance (no matter how it's caused) doesn't have that great an affect on someone mentally. As far I've read, at best it can nudge someone who's unknown or Bi, one side or the other but it's rare and not necessarily tied to what hormone is out of whack. In most people it'll only affect secondary sexual characteristics (body hair, muscle tone, breast development, fat distribution) and unless the person is pre-pubescent or somehow taking large doses of it they effects will mainly be unnoticeable.

He didn't say the Apple App store. He said smartphone app sales. Apple essentially showed the public they could install apps on their phones (something that could be done before but wasn't easy or understandable to the public), now they're willing to do it more often and so apps, even those developed for multi platforms are being forced by Apple's rules to make decisions that are giving Apple an advantage.

Say I want to develop an app for iPhone, Android and Symbian. Currently, I can just about write the main part of the app once and then branch it for the different APIs. However, if I want to add adverts to a trial version of this, I'm unlikely to want to set up accounts with multiple advertising programs, so I'm going to implement one across the board that sticks to Apple's rules (because they are the most strict and the platform I'm likely to sell the most apps on). Google loses out a potential customer on it's own platform because of rules in place on a rival's platform because of it's influence on developers.

Whether this is enough for the monopoly accusation is up to someone with a lot more legal experience than I, but Google (and others) have every right to be annoyed that Apple's rules are likely to affect them even outside of Apple's closed environment