Tag Archives: Rants

Jul 24 2007
2 Comments
Life in general

Alas Poor E3, I Knew Him…

For any gamer in the world, E3 was the place to be every year when it rolled around. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, an annual convention/tradeshow for everyone in the gaming industry; from the little 3rd party developers, to the massive players (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft). I remember planning how to get to California, trying to raise the money for a plane ticket, pining away as the date came and left, with me sitting in front of my computer reading about the awesomeness. The gigantic “booths”, the playable demos of games and even consoles never before seen and played by anyone.

Last year’s attendance? 60,000 people. And that was down 10,000 from 05. First-time playables of the Wii and PS3, not to mention the 360.

Why am I going on and on about how huge and good E3 was (and yes, I mean was there)?

Because after last year’s convention, the ESA (Entertainment Software Administration, the group that runs E3) decided to kill it. And it was not a kind, euthanasia-style death. No, the ESA decided to change E3. It would be press-only, and the booths would be much,much smaller. Small enough that it could all fit inside a small hangar. And the press conferences? Microsoft’s was held in a school theater.

Attendance this year? Around 4000. Only 32 companies had booths, from 400 last year.

Even the name is different, E3 Media and Business Summit. Eugh.

ESA, you make me sick. Oh well, there are still other conventions to wish I could be at (yes, that’s right. A convention focused on a webcomic has surpassed E3).

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Jun 20 2007
Uncategorized

Best Buy Has Apple Stuff (Well, Kinda)

I visited my local Best Buy yesterday (I saw Fantastic Four: Rise of The Silver Surfer, Best Buy is just around the corner from the theater), and was surprised to see that they had a beautiful 24″ iMac on display. I of course went over and started playing with it, and noticed an iPod HiFi next to it, apparently acting as the speakers for the iMac. Didn’t know you could do this. The most curious thing was an open iPod box right in front of the HiFi, with naught but the headphones left. I left it alone, and continued playing with the iMac.

An employee quickly came over and cleared away the box, and then asked me “You aren’t going to mess up the display, right?”

Now, what the hell does that mean? I’m using an iMac 24″, minding my own business, and the guy thinks I’m going to break something. I was insulted, so I said “Of course not” and walked away.

Of course, noticing the macbook display made me stop and check them out. Of course, a brand new gen. 3 macbook pro, and two macbooks next to it, one white and one black. So I played around with them as well, noticed that they had had their batteries removed…Bad move with the macbooks, since the power cords are designed to come out easily. Jostle it too much and the computer loses its only source of power, there goes the demo. Anyway, they were very snappy, as is to be expected. The MBP was right next to a hulking monstrosity of a PC laptop, an inch thick with a huge, useless, led-ridden emblem right under the fuzzy trackpad. Eew.

So at that point I was wondering if they had the Mini and Pro on display as well, and then I saw them. Not the Mini and Pro, but the cheap printouts of said computers propped up in plastic photo holders. With pricetags under them. Seriously, it looks like instead of putting one on display, they just googled it and printed out a picture. It wasn’t even photo paper. Just plain letter paper, with cheap ink. I sincerely hope that these are placeholders, not the final displays. It’s depressing to look at them.

So props for the apple displays and selling apple stuff, but minus about a million for lame displays and kleptomaniac employees

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Mar 27 2007
1 Comment
Life in general

Optimized Firefox, UNO, and Shapeshifter (aka, why doesn't anyone make good Mac themes?)

So I was bored today and reading The Unofficial Apple Weblog, when I came across a post about UNO, a mac ‘theme unifier’. It takes a bunch of applications that most mac-heads use, and modifies their look a bit so that they all match. It sounds like a great idea, and it works pretty well, but there are a few big flaws:
First of all, it doesn’t support nearly enough applications. The ones it shows in that screenshot on their front page are the whole shebang. That’s less than 15.
It doesn’t really work that well with iTunes 7.
And lastly, it doesn’t do a great job with Firefox if you’re using a theme. Which I am. Namely this one.
But the finder and OSX message boxes (and login) are drool-worthy enough to make me keep it. Whatever.

Another thing I tried out today was Optimized Firefox. It’s a specially-compiled version of Firefox which is optimized for the Mac. It’s pretty cool, though there aren’t too many noticable differences. The main thing is that you can get a version which uses Aqua buttons and things, so Firefox is better assimilated into iShiny™. Personally, I like having theme-defined buttons, but I guess it’s a personal preference thing.
Somthing I find a little wierd is that Mozilla doesn’t allow unofficial releases of Firefox to use the Firefox icon or name, so technically this is the Bon Echo browser, not Firefox. Don’t be fooled, it’s basically the same. And the icon is just missing the actual fox du feu.

Finally, a complaint. Why doesn’t anyone make good themes for Shapeshifter? They’re all so ugly! I don’t want my shiny Macbook Pro to look like its running OS9! I don’t want tiny, pixelly squares instead of buttons! I don’t want “titanium” themes that are so shiny and shrink-wrapped that they make it impossible to use the computer! I’ve been running Cold as my theme for a while, but I’ve kinda fallen in love with Aqua again so I’m giving Shapeshifter a break until someone makes a better theme for it. Think about practicality and elegance. I don’t want the shiniest possible OS ever (cough cough vista cough cough), nor do I want one that makes everything neon orange. Who would want that?! I mean come on, people!

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Aug 30 2006
Life in general

The following is a rant for Spraxus

This rant is written for Spraxus, a rant-based website I’m helping to develop. It’s also very true. I reserve no copyright on this rant, but Sabretooth Software does.

Internet Explorer

IE (Internet Explorer) is the Internet Browser which is made by our beloved big brother, Microsoft. This browser is the empitome of security flaws, since it is tied directly into the Windows operating system. M$, it seems, was bent on making it extremely hard if not impossible to uninstall Internet Explorer from your computer, meaning that if someone just happens to find a flaw in the rock hard security features that make up Internet Explorer (a security flaw in IE, imagine that!), they’d have almost direct access to the system files for Windows.

All of this leads Microsoft to start developing IE 7, which comes with its own virus scanner. Woo-hoo, Microsoft. A virus scanner won’t fix your security issues. IE 7 will be released as a priority download, meaning everyone using Windows XP on the internet automatically downloads it. You don’t want IE 7 and its nasty lack of menubar? Too bad, you can’t downgrade from it. What was that I said? Oh yes. lack of menubar. They’ve rearranged the window entirely to make it “simpler,” while anyone who’s been using Windows for 5 years or more will be utterly lost when the go to the top of the window to get their options and find that they aren’t there.

On top of all this, Internet Explorer is not a true internet browser. It does not comply to the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP:// ?), which states that internet browsers should display web pages as what their content-type describes them as, among many other things. This means that if a page is marked as text, it should be displayed as text. If it’s marked as a jpg, it should be displayed as a jpg, not as text. Internet Explorer does not do this. It decides for itself what the pages it displays should be displayed as, meaning if it decides to show a .jpg as text, it’s going to show you it as text.

My favorite image format, the Portable Network Graphic, or .png, doesn’t display correctly in IE. They have no transparency, whereas on Firefox they support multiple layers of transparency, allowing for cool shadows and stuff. Also, the layout engine hardly manages any CSS at all. CSS is the language of templates and website design, meaning that many-a-page look very screwed up in IE. For an example, check out www.agebuilders.org. Look at it in Firefox and then in IE and you will see what I mean.

And IE7 hasn’t fixed this problem. It is 2% more CSS-compliant than IE6. Microsoft claims that if they fix IE now, it will break half the pages in the world. While this is probably true, those pages can be fixed in the name of progress. How long are we going to be expected to wait and stand by while Microsoft stalls progress?

My conclusion: IE is extremely inferior. Don’t upgrade to IE7, download Firefox or Opera, my two favorite browsers, instead.

</rant>

Thank you Phil, you anti-alternative-spelling facist, you…

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