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Comment Re:Single-screen multiplayer (Score 1) 140

On top of what you have already suggested, there's most of the racing genre (though I'm still annoyed at Criterion for not having local multiplayer in Burnout Paradise), most of the sports genre, the Rock Band series, Uncharted, Gears of War, Halo, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, etc. Resistance doesn't have standard local multiplayer from what I can tell but it does have local co-op. That's some major series to have missed there.

Comment Re:What's best (Score 1) 411

Is it? Browsers are the only application I know that decided the 'document' controls should be inside the tab. Every other application we use with tab support puts the controls above the tabs. The reason Chrome did it differently was purely to save space but it doesn't make it any more or less intuitive that tabs below. Some people even prefer tabs to the side as that make the page a more vertical space on widescreen monitors. What is intuitive to one person may not be intuitive to another.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 299

Videos that get the ad banners usually have them for one of two reasons.

  • There was copyrighted material detected in the video and the agreement that YouTube have with the copyright holder requires them to pay for the video so that do this through the advertising at the beginning of the video.
  • The video is published by a YouTube content creator and pays them for content creation. I know that there is almost always adverts at the start of TotalBiscuit's and the Yogcast's videos for instance yet there are videos in my favourites lists that never have an advert show up.

Comment Re:"Linux Command Line Tirckery" HA! (Score 1) 642

Or you could use the start menu's search tool to skip some of the clicking by going Start > enter 'account' > click 'Change Your Password'

Or you can press Ctrl+Alt+Del and click 'Change a password'.

I could make Linux look like the complicated one too by picking the longest route but in reality, for most people, there wont be a difference in the speed they could achieve something one vs. the other if they had equivalent knowledge of those OSes.

Comment Re:And worse, with random abbreviations (Score 1) 642

Well, Windows (at least Vista and 7) sees user stuff as being in C:\users\[username]\ Programs are in C:\Program Files (admittedly this on x64 Windows this and ‘Program Files (x86)’ can confuse people). Although I do get annoyed at applications that default to installing outside this folder only to find that the same app on other OS's adheres to the folder conventions of that OS >_<.

The documents folder is a bit of an oddity as on XP it’s name was relative to which user was logged in (It was seen as My Documents or [username]’s Documents). Now though it’s just ‘Documents’. And the registry has always been a massive pain in the backside.

Speaking of confusing folders and Windows though, I still get confused about which is which when it comes to System, System32 and SysWOW64. Logic should say that they are the 16bit, 32bit and 64bit stuff respectively but no... SysWOW64 is for the 32 bit stuff and System32 is for the 64 bit stuff o_O

(Note: I know why the Windows folders are the way they are. That doesn't make it any less confusing)

Comment Re:Time to move on, perhaps? (Score 1) 753

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.

Comment Re:You mean... (Score 1) 383

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.

Comment Re:The Standards Really Never Have Been the Standa (Score 1) 298

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.

Comment Re:There aren't enough fixes in the world for this (Score 1) 215

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.

Comment Re:Probably not. Sorry. (Score 1) 215

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.

Comment Re:Anonymous Coward (Score 1) 356

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.

Comment Re:silent, or totally invisible (Score 1) 287

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.

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