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HTML and CSS, frankly, suck. But what if someone created a good alternative? Here's what I think would happen:

Microsoft would never know it existed.

Goggle would re-invent a crappy version of it and pretend it was all their idea.

Apple would put a note in their developer-license-agreement prohibiting it.

Sun would release a whitepaper attempting to explain why it wasn't needed, but in their attempt they would accidentally make it clear it was a good idea after all.

Oracle would create a not-terrible-but-not-great version of it and have their salesmen spend a couple million each convincing middle and upper managers to pay twenty million for it each. Most of them would fall for it.

Sony would investigate the feasibility of introducing DRM capabilities into it.

No one would ever notice if IBM did or didn't do anything with it.

Hobbyist developers would flock towards a newly-created alternate version that seemed simpler at first glance, but was much slower and really just made it easier to introduce subtle bugs.

W3C would form a committee to standardize it. Their early recommendations would combine the worst aspects of all the various versions. The final draft would be nearly identical to the early drafts, but wouldn't be finalized until the original committee's grandchildren were in retirement facilities.

Adobe would create a mediocre, bloated, yet passable child-window-fiesta-of-an-app to deal with it and charge hundreds for it. It would be enormously popular.

The people formerly from JASC would create a great alternative to Adobe's offering at a reasonable price, and after no one bought it they would kill it off by selling the rights to the dying carcass of some formerly-relevant corporation.

Corel...ah ha ha ha ha! Corel...That's a joke that doesn't need a punchline.

Hasbro Interactive would buy the rights to one of the older versions, and sue any individuals and small businesses that had anything similar. Then they would sell their rights.

Steve Yegge will have something to say about it, but no one will know or care what it is because by the time they finish reading his post the universe will have ended. But he'll still maintain that his long-winded approach was "good marketing".

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Why is it that all the Win7 reviews seem to compare it to Vista and not XP? They all gush about how great Win7 is...compared to Vista. Of course it's better than Vista, Vista sucked. That's why no one but don't-know-any-better average Joes and corporations used it. How about comparing Win7 to the version people actually used instead of Vista? Well here's the first Win7 vs XP comparison, as far as I'm aware...

Compared to XP, Win7 sucks donkey balls. Here's a list of Win7 pros/cons:

+ It starts up and shuts down faster.

- My system's usually on 24/7, so I only give half a crap.

- The MS devs have started thinking they're Mozilla devs.

The first two are self-explanatory. The third needs explaining:

In case you're not familiar with Mozilla, this is what goes on in the mind of a Mozilla dev: "Let's fuck around with UI elements that work perfectly fine and refuse to make the changes optional".

Obviously, for something a person uses as frequently as a web browser or an OS, the details of a UI are extremely important, and what works best for different people tends to vary. One of the most damaging things a UI designer can do to productivity and usability (not to mention the extreme arrogance involved) is to pull the rug out from under people with a new design they've convinced themselves is "obviously" better, and not provide a "turn that crap off" switch.

Too much around-the-bush beating? Ok. The AwfulBar can suck my nutsack, and so can the unified Forward/Back dropdown (I thought that unified dropdown was a nice idea when IE7 introduced it...then I actually tried IE7...yea...fuck it. Dumb design).

Back to Win7: Here's the things I've tried, hated, found no way to disable, and cite as reasons MS can pry XP from my cold dead hands:

• Goddamn taskbar tooltips. I hate shit constantly popping in and out every time I move my mouse. It was bad enough in XP. Win7 just makes it worse. Sure, a thumbnail image of the running window sounds nice. But in practice, I've never found them useful. Not once. But they do get in the way. Every...fucking...time. Never found a way to fix it.

• I *like* XP's Quick Launch panel. I don't want my shortcuts scattered around with my running tasks. If I wanted my computer to look and act like a fucking Mac I'd use a fucking Mac (Why MS imitates an OS that has a fraction of Windows's marketshare, and for damn good reason, is beyond me). Never found a way to fix it.

• On XP, I always have the taskbar set to a height of two-rows. Works great. On Win7, you can technically do it, but it's clear it was a completely half-assed attempt. Hell, the system tray outright ignores the extra row. Never found a way to fix it.

• Vista-style "All Programs" list. Another on my list of "Things that sounded great until I actually used them." Never found a way to fix it.

• Drag-select files is borderline broken. I always use "detail" view (and for good reason). But in Win7, you can't drag-select group of files in detail view unless you start from all the way outside the entire table. Incredible pain in the ass for such an incredibly basic operation. Especially-so if you have a lot of columns or files in a given directory. Never found a way to fix it.

• Where the hell are damn tree-view expand/collapse icons? Oh, there's one of them...and now it's gone...now there's another...shit, now it's gone too...Could Microsoft really not figure out it's a pain to click on something that's not fucking there until you're already over it? Their famed usability lab somehow didn't clue them in? Useless invisi-expansion icon. And it sure takes its damn time fading in, too. Never found a way to fix it.

• In XP, I quite like being able to expand a directory in the tree-view by clicking the label. Win7 mandates that I use the useless never-there mini-invisi-expansion icon. Yea that's right Win7, slow me down for no reason. And make me shell out money for the privilege. Never found a way to fix it.

• Explorer's tree-view seems to be starting to take a cue from GTK in "how to needlessly waste screen real-estate." Never found a way to fix it.

• The open/save dialog is gimped. And by "gimped" I mean "It's visually-bloated and slows me down in a way reminiscent of GIMP's notoriously shit open/save dialogs." It's not as bad as GIMP's dialogs, of course, but that sure as hell ain't saying much. The primary problem seems to be the large GTK-style-excess-padding favorites section inserted above the real directory-tree. Problem is, I don't use the favorites much. But Win7 expects me to. Fuck them. And guess what? Never found a way to fix it.

I'll admit, I do like how renaming a file automatically selects just the filename without the extension (even though there's still no reason not to at least have a way to turn that off for anyone who might not like it). And I like that Win7's explorer actually obeys my "always show the tree-view instead of that useless task pane" setting, unlike XP. But those aren't remotely enough to sell me on the "upgrade".

Oh yea, and then there's the RIAA/MPAA reach-around with the driver-level restrictions on A/V output quality without passing DRM checks. And the driver-revocation-for-the-protection-of-DRM system. Did I mention "Fuck DRM"? No? Fuck DRM, and fuck all who use or create it, no matter what their reason or intention for doing so. (And no, I'm not talking about Palladium. Hell, Palladium's not even what the Slashdotter kids claimed it was anyway.)

So yea, compared to WinXP, Win7 is nothing more than another Vista. Better than Vista? Maybe in some ways. XP-killer? Not fucking remotely.

I'll switch to either Linux or BSD before I upgrade to Win7. (But not OSX. Fuck OSX.)

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I already did a review of Shadow of the Colossus a while ago...sort of...

About a year after that, curiosity finally overcame my severe allergy to the game's horrid framerate, and I actually played it through. Of course, even *that* was awhile ago now, and I'm just now posting this, umm, re-review...

Very Ico-like atmosphere (naturally). Other than that, Shadow of the Colossus can be described like this:

Take any of the 3D Zelda games (they're all good), and make the following changes:

• Pro: Make about half of the bosses three times as freaking awesome. (Disappointingly, not all the bosses are particularly "colossal", but none of them are below-par compared to Zelda bosses, which is good.)
• Pro: Remove all the pointless yammering.
• Pro: Remove minor irritants like the "low energy" beep and the cheesy "item-get" fanfare.

• Con: Make the framerate suck (as I've already said).
• Con: Make the controls not particularly responsive, most notably when riding the horse.
• Con: Remove 90% of the side-quests, leaving most of the map a barren nothingness.
• Con: Remove 100% of the dungeons.

Basically, it's a gimped 3D Zelda with a few better bosses. Find the next boss, beat it, and repeat, while occasionally taking some time to grab increases for your maximum health and strength. However, the good parts (ie, the bosses and atmosphere) definitely make it well-worth playing through if you can find a cheap used copy.

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"I've been commissioned to design a roadway for the city, and I've come up with a great design! It assumes that everyone has V12 cars...But come on, V12s have been around forever. Isn't it way past time that all those 4-cylinder owners finally upgraded? I'll be dammed if I'm going to compromise my wonderful design and take slightly more development time just to cater to the few people still living in the stone age."

Hypothetical, obviously. But it demonstrates exactly why programmers who trot out the "640k should be enough for everyone" show horse to defend their consumer-whoreism approach to development piss me off. (Well, that, and the fact that Gates never actually said it.)

I'll certainly grant that there are legitimate uses for 64-bit and multi-core. But this whole attitude of "Something that doesn't emit 64-bit is useless" and such has gotten ridiculously out of hand. Most people and programs don't need 64-bit or multi-core. Sure, a few do. And sure, many things can be better with 64-bit or multi-core - but they don't fucking need it. The notion that they do is a load of high-octane V12 bullshit.

This is the point where I inevitably get a bunch of crap about "But that's all the stores sell!" So what? Is that all that's in common use? Of course not. I don't know about you, but I develop for the hardware that people have, not hardware they might get if and when they decide to go buy something new (nevermind the second-hand market...you know...like eBay...maybe you've heard of it?). And when I optimize something to run well on the lower-end, guess what? It'll still run even better on the V12s. Even moreso since mine isn't one of the inevitably three or more programs on the user's system that all simultaneously believe their optimizations can rely on having at least of couple cores to their self.

And of course there's embedded software. You know, that stuff that the self-centered "waste loads of resources, because my time is more important" programmers always seem to forget exists. Embedded 32-bit and/or single-core devices are going to be around for quite awhile longer. Even the ones that don't stay 32-bit or single-core are still typically going to lag behind desktops, laptops and servers. Even aside from that, there's still power drainage and battery life. All of which leads me to another reason for software developers to cut the consumer-whore crap:

True story: A certain OS developer kept making each version more bloated than the last. They did it because they were Moore-worshipers, plus the bloat led to more hardware sales, which 90% of the time, were pre-packaged with their OS. Then they continued that with OS "Big Panoramic View 6" which completely fucked up their ability to compete in the emerging netbook and tablet markets: Ie, devices which were, guess what? Low-powered! Ah ha ha! Stupid fucks. So...are you behaving like Microsoft?

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Well, I've gotten the hell around to it. Whee!

I've moved this not-a-blog from dev-scene.com to my own web space. And I've switched from WordPress to TangoCMS in the process. Also, comments are back on ("Whee!" again).

Dev-scene.com is a great site. I have nothing against it. The reasons I moved this away, though, are (most important to least important):

1. I've had very little time for homebrew lately, and consequently, most of my posts have nothing to do with homebrew. So I felt it was inappropriate and inconsiderate for me to keep this site hosted there.
2. I wanted to re-enable comments, but require CAPTCHA for it.
3. I don't particularly like WordPress.

I'll probably be posting more frequently again now. I had been avoiding making posts for awhile because of #1 above. (Triple "whee"?)

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Originally posted: May 9th, 2009

Just what the internet needs, another random Joe's worthless opinion on it:

(Disclaimer: I've always liked Star Trek, fuck, I even liked the animated series. So it's not like I'm a trek-hater that, unsurprisingly, hated it.)

Saw the first two scenes. Roughly ten minutes. That's it. That's all I could actually take.

First Scene: Worst directing and camera work in movie/film/television history. Seriously. Words like that get tossed around a lot. But I really, truly mean it. In fact, I can actually say that the old Hana Barbara cartoons had better directing without resorting to hyperbole. I can't believe I can say that, but it's true.

Even Paul Greengrass (Of The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum Butchering) knows how to properly frame up a subject. People hate Michael Bay, but he can do it too. Hell, even Uwe Boll can fucking do it. But somehow JJ Abrams can't. Instead, he sets up the absolute worst shots humanly possible (this, in addition to the same paint-mixer-as-a-tripod-syndrome Greengrass suffers from), does it all deliberately, and still tries to call himself a director. What the hell is going on at Paramount that this guy has managed to secure a job?

Second Scene: BAM! Product placement in the face! In Star Trek. Yes, that's right. Product placement...in Star Trek. And you thought Minority Report was fiction. Take a good guess what company I'm never buying a phone from...

Icing On The Shit Cake: Granted: I love "Sabotage". Question: What the fuck is it doing in Star Trek?

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