Gamer Rights

Gas Powered Games ( Supreme Commander ) and Stardock ( Galactic Civ II ) have come up with a Gamers Bill of Rights, with which I can completely agree! Here is the list, taken from this site.

1. Gamers shall have the right to return games that don't work with their computers for a full refund.
2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
3. Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game's release.
4. Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
5. Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will adequately play on that computer.
6. Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won't install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their express consent.
7. Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
8. Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
9. Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
10. Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.

Well done to them!

:D

all ye gentlefolk to the yard

Milkshake

Advice Fail

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Firefox and the failed clone wars

I think I've mentioned before how I hate Firefox. If I had the choice between IE and Firefox, I'd obviously choose Firefox, but just because its better than IE doesn't make it good. I use Opera on a day to day basis and find that it does almost everything better than Firefox. Firefox has been trying really hard to catch up to opera, as is really obvious with version 3.0 release, and while they have implemented a lot of features, they aren't always well implemented. My only gripe about Opera is that sites aren't normally built for it, but often enough you can disguise Opera as Firefox and get away with more stuff, like the Google Labs features in GMail.

So what do I mean about not implementing the ideas properly?

Well again, Firefox 3 is slower than Opera 9.5, even though a lot of benchmarks seem to show loading time to be quicker, its not just about loading time. Response time on the interface matters a lot, and Opera is lightning fast.

Firefox is fat!! I use both browsers on the Asus EEE. My wife keeps Firefox for work ( and she likes it for some reason, even though it randomly crashes on GMail ). And I use Opera. She even uses opera for a lot of searching although won't normally admit that its nicer for searching than Firefox. Anyway, having only a 4GB harddisk, its really difficult to maintain free space ( especially using a big distro like openSUSE, with both KDE 3.5 and 4.1 installed ). So we install Firefox 3 ( go through the complicated process that is the upgrade, involving downloading a tar.gz file and extracting it to /usr/local, as per site instructions ). A week or two later, the 200mb free on the /home partition is gone. How? Why? I spend a few days searching and notice that Firefox has a massive ( 180mb ) folder with a really random name in .mozilla/firefox called u0o9g2w7.default ( said it was random ).  So I think, well that must be the cache, since no one is stupid enough to store anything important in a randomly named folder ( except maybe a virus or Windows ). Which is a valid thought too, cause any developer who thinks its a good idea to store important stuff in a folder called u0o9g2w7.default shouldn't work on a project with me or any of my previous software managers and colleagues. So I delete the folder, open FF again to find all of my wife's extentions and bookmarks are gone. By this time she's pretty pissed. Luckily it wasn't too long after we first installed it, so there wasn't much there. After a 3 days this time, /home partition is full. This time, I'm more careful... luckily for Linux and ls -lRS ( list all files recursively ordered by size ), I find the culprit. Its the url histroy sqlite db file. After 3 days, its already 50mb. WTF???? Seriously, how? My wife is a writer, and has to do a lot of research for the stuff she writes, so I expect her to browse a lot, but how can Firefox allow this to happen. Its claim for mobility and being able to run on anything is invalidated by stuff like this. Out of the box Firefox is great for looking at HTML+CSS sites for 1 day, but thereafter it degrades rapidly.

They seem to have a fast dial addon which sucks. Opera's speed dial is 10x better, and syncs with myOpera/Opera Link. Which brings me to another point. There is no decent equivalent to Opera Link. I understand why to some extent. If FF adds it, it detracts from the plugin creators, since they can't add a custom synchronize, but honestly all you need is a simple server sync of some thngs. And note that I say some things, not ONE thing. I like the fact that Opera Link takes care of Speed Dial and Bookmarks, and this was acctually one way we recovered some of my wife's lost bookmarks. Before we left South Africa she used Opera a lot, and her bookmarks were accessible from my.opera.com. In fact if someone made a Firefox plugin for bookmark sync with my.opera.com, she'd probably use it for her bookmarks.

Session management in FF3 is epic fail. Yes when you exit FF it asks to save the session, and yes this works. As long as you exit FF. This is inherently an issue. What if it crashes ( and it does, a lot ). So what does Firefox do in this case. It loses the session you were working on. But you say, this is expected no? NO. If you are used to Opera, you get used to a session choosing dialog that has a "Continue from last time" option, along with listing your other previously saved sessions, and the default session. This means that when you're looking for a site for 3 hours, find it and the browser crashes, you don't need to look again ( yes I have a bad memory, I won't remember the URL ).

So again, while Firefox is better than IE, I have arrived at the conclusion that the latest Konqueror with session management that works is better than Firefox, and I'll only use it as a last resort. Opera is way ahead, and I really want people to realise this. I have introduced many people to Opera, most of them can never go back to Firefox anymore. For the sake of tehnological advancement, try Opera today!

Warning... addictive content

Classic XKCD comic..

Mojave, strength of the Bear, speed of the Puma?

So, Microsoft decided to pull some publicity about Vista by inventing a name, and showcasing it under that name.  This is what they did: An few weeks ago ( July 2008 ), Microsoft gathered 120 computer users ( supposedly Mac, Linux, Win XP and Win 2000 ) users and showed them a new OS, called Mojave. They get a 10 minute demo of the fancy OS in action. Then once the salesperson pulls his pitch and got some comments ( on camera and writing ), people find out it was Vista. 90% of them said that they liked what they saw of Mojave. Now what is wrong with that. Its a great marketing stunt, I mean these are people who won't use Vista, and now they see it in action and are impressed. Well there are a few points I want to make about it:

UAC: Microsoft admitted that UAC ( where it asks for a password to run any app not designed specifically for Vista ) was designed to annoy the user and that although it is a good security feature, because its new to Windows users, its a pain. Mojave did not feature UAC. Or at least in the demo, they didn't do a real "test in the wild" where random user apps were run, no, just their base set of applications. So take out one of Vista's most annoying features, and demo Vista, of course people will be happy.

Hardware: They ran this demo on the HP Pavilion DV2000. Hardware built for Vista. There was no cheap TV card inserted, or random webcam from 2003. This was a fully featured, decent spec laptop, which was built to work with Vista. Out in the real world away from Microsoft land, people want to plug in that sound card they bought in 2001, and that funky no name brand webcam that only works in Linux and Windows 98 that they bought before Microsoft rushed to make Win ME cause 2000 failed as a end user desktop. Vista is great if you plan only to ever have hardware built for it. Vista is also a resource hog. Old machines won't run it. I don't see Vista on the EEE ( altho it was done, I'm sure it was as a joke ). I do however see XP on mobile laptops, OSX on the iPhone, and Linux on just about anything more than a calculator ( remembering that Android, Google's new phone OS is Linux based ).

Software: I really enjoy Worms World Party, I don't know about anyone else, but its a game ( like StarCraft ) that I can keep playing. They didn't demo it on Mojave. Obviously, because its a random application that a user might want to run, that isn't Vista compatible. Microsoft might deny it, but there are a lot of applications that don't run on Vista. A 10 minute demo of selected apps in a controlled environment means that these problems are not obvious.

Time: Well, 10 minutes is not really enough to do anything decent with like determine whether 2 hours of music listening will degrade the system performance. I used to have an openSUSE 10.3 pc running 24 hours a day. I would reboot it mostly because in South Africa, power is not a consistent resource. Thankfully I'm in Netherlands now, and when I get a desktop I will probably do the same thing again. But on occasion that Eskom could maintain electricity for more than a month, we had uptimes of 30+ days. No slowing down, no crashing, no poor memory management, and no BSOD ( blue screen of death ). In 10 minutes you won't see these problems which are common to Microsoft operating systems.

The point is that in 10 minutes, I could sell a toaster running the first Ubuntu release with Enlightenment 0.16 to the Armish. If a demo is set up properly, anything can look good. I have always maintained that any OS is good enough for anyone to use if it is set up properly. Over the last few years linux distributions have got to the point where the end user no longer feels alienated by the OS, and honestly, Mac OSX and Windows Vista are becoming more like linux, so a demo of any of these 3 OSes could go down well if done properly. I want to attempt a screen cast soon of openSUSE 10.3 + KDE 4.1 ( with desktop effects ), and see how people respond. When I get some time, you will see the post :) All I'm saying is that in 10 minutes, you can't expect people to get a feel for an OS. It normally takes weeks before you discover all its nuances and get used to the way in which it operates. Although Microsoft will start shouting about this marketing trickery of theirs, its not really worth listening too.

In the end, my opinion is fixed on seeing no need to run a Microsoft OS, unless you're a heavy gamer, in which case you won't be using the resource hog that is Vista. Even then I find that if a game doesn't run under wine on Linux it probably isn't worth running or there is a clone out there somewhere. Of course game companies are slowly moving to prefer the consoles and there are even some games that have native Linux clients, like Eve Online ( sort of native, but ported with Cedega ), UT 2004, Enemy Territory:Quake Wars, etc. But thats just me, I'm a minority in this anyway. Either way, some Vista publicity stunt won't convince me or any serious gamers either. Maybe if Windows 7 allowed me to replace the display manager with XGL and run KDE4.1 natively, I'd consider it, otherwise, no thanks.

South Africa at its best