At first I kind of smirked, seeing that some one else used the title. Do I care? No. Really, it’s just the official terminology for a blue screen of death. But there was a more important thing that I started thinking of. Why can the federal government just come in and “grab” any domain they want? Even domains registered outside of the United States? What about a little thing I like to call the United States Constitution? This is a result of big government. Democrats and Republicans both love big government. We need people who understand and respect the Constitution in charge. I’m crying right now about this, much like a certain person in the house. And yes, this is a big fucking deal.

In typical Web 2.0 fashion, it has lots of blank white space and that downright annoying as all hell header that scrolls down with the page. I have to ask: why? What was so wrong with the older design? Or even the design older than that? I’m hearing reports that it isn’t compatible with older browsers on older operating systems, so this is a major bummer. If only web designers would design sites the way I would: “if it doesn’t work with Netscape/Internet Explorer 3, then it sucks”. There might have been a lot of things to hate about 1990′s web design (such as most GeoCities pages), but at least for the most part it sucked less. I’d love to hear what you think of the new design.

Written from my Fedora 14 Virtual machine.

EDIT: Of course here is the news entry about the redesign itself.

Is it racism when you want to play a game where communication and lag can make or break a game?

Micro-transactions are quite possibly the worst idea to grace video gaming. Originally, they said the micro-transactions would be cheap. Cents. Maybe a dollar or two. That was an idea I could go along with. Cheap items to customize your game play (but not let you have a have an advantage over other players). The Team Fortress 2 micro-transaction system (the “Mann Co. store”) is not cheap. The game itself cost $20 when I bought it (standalone retail release in April 2008). As I write this post, it is currently 50% off, going for $9.99. The Orange Box (which included Team Fortress 2, Portal, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode One and Half-Life 2 Episode Two) cost $50, when released in October of 2007. Look through the screenshots below to see how much some items cost. It’s amazing, actually, that people purchase these “items”. And, some of these items have bonuses when purchased through a bundle. Valve said that items for purchase can also be dropped using the item-drop system. From what I can tell, some items are only available for purchase.

Valve, I don’t want to think this, but you’re turning into Activision or EA. That’s something I thought would never happen. But I was naive. In the end, everyone sells out.

Oh wait, they expect for people to get tired of the game and no longer play it online, thus allowing them to discontinue it. But if I sell my copy of the game, another player who never played it before will be interested in it and will be playing it online. Meaning it’d be a little more controversial to discontinue it. What about just stating on the back of the package “Online services will be discontinued on November 30, 2013” (or whatever date they decide to discontinue it).

There’s also that pesky First Sale Doctrine, which basically states that people are allowed to sell or give away anything when they want to.

I upgraded to Windows XP a few years ago. Yes, I did use prior to that. But on my own computer it was Windows 2000 or bust. It was my computer, so I had the say on what software was being run on it. But today… well a few days ago, rather. I upgraded to Windows Vista. The very software I complained about. The very software I made fun of. I knew that it was inevitable that I would upgrade. Linux is great, but at the moment it isn’t a Windows killer. And, I hate to admit it, but Windows Vista isn’t very bad at all. It takes a little while to get used to it. They changed a lot of things for the better (eg: Windows update) and some things not so much for the better. Actually compared to my testing of Windows 7, I prefer Vista. I like that Vista is darker than 7. I like the Vista UI better. But, Vista is the OS I’ll be using for the forseeable future. Funny how that works, hmm?

The "Wow" started in 2007 and I failed to realize it.

When you first start Firefox, you’ll notice several things. For one, tabs are now on top (though you may set it so that tabs are on the bottom, like older Firefox releases). There is also the newer, more modern theme. Surprisingly, I like it.

On Vista/7 systems, the default UI is the “Firefox bar”. It can still be used on 2000/XP systems, and looks fairly good even if it is not being used in its intended environment. As always, you can always disable it and use the classic UI on Vista/7 systems.

Currently, Firefox 4 gets 97/100 on the acid 3 test, while Firefox 3.6.6 gets 94/100. By the time Firefox is officially released, it will get 100/100 on the test. Though, that is not as important as many of the other HTML5 improvements in the beta. Firefox now supports WebM video, which will surely be more popular thanks to YouTube’s encoding of all videos to WebM.

Firefox 3 introduced the current add-on system. It does what it needs to do and does it well. Firefox 4 introduces a new add-on system that no longer opens a dialog box. Now, the add-on system is interfaced with in a tab. It does the same job as Firefox 3.x’s system and it keeps with the new UI’s “theme”.

Not to mention that Firefox 4 supports hardware acceleration for videos current. Though later releases should expand this to in-page content. Don’t worry though, Firefox 4 supports this through DirectX 9 on Windows (so it will be compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7). Firefox 4 also supports Direct2D (which is available in Windows 7 and the “Platform Update” in Vista). IE9 does the same thing, and performance should be superior with Firefox 4. There are other new features that I’ll discuss in the final review of Firefox 4.

All in all, I feel that right now Firefox 4 is an excellent browser. Even in the pre-release state that it is (though I have yet to have it crash on me). Unless I find a serious problem with it, I will probably use it until the final vesion of Firefox 4 is released.

EDIT: Firefox 4 Beta 2 and now Beta 3 are released. As I said, I will post a final review when Firefox 4 is released.

But with the latest game (Bad Company 2), I really can’t say the same. The server browser is downright horrible (the latency doesn’t even show up correctly). The buggy quirks annoyed me. It was like every other DICE game; the game is great except for those little things. And a lot of those little things make a big thing. After the Modern Warfare 2 (I’m sorry but MW2 was and always will be Mech Warrior 2) dedicated server, or lack of, fiasco, DICE promised that BC2 would feature dedicated servers. And they were right.. well somewhat. The game does indeed have dedicated servers. But they’re not servers that I could run in my basement. I have to rent a server from an “authorized provider”.  With BF2, there were ranked (rented) servers, that would allow unlocks and unranked servers that wouldn’t allow unlocks, but anyone could run. Why isn’t there an option for that in Bad Company 2? I would like to be able to practice flying the different helicopters offline, but with this I can’t. Why don’t you allow for unranked servers?

I’d rather have an open specification such as HTML5 that can be freely implemented in any browser on any platform imaginable that won’t crash and require 98% CPU usage to watch a 360p video on YouTube in fullscreen. So what if it can’t do a few stupid things that shouldn’t even be done with in the first place. Though, I will admit that Flash has a time and a place. But that place is not in a users web browser when they’re watching stupid videos on YouTube or uploading files to a website. There are things that Flash does well and there are things that Flash just doesn’t do well.