Yes. Very good job guys. I've been away for a while and really enjoying the new interface. Even though its a bit skeumorphic, the grey linen is much nicer on the eyes.

-The site attracts a nice variety of interesting individuals.
-The content is consistently high level.
-The site is well run, has a fun interface and is easy on the eyes.
-The relatively small population of the site helps to create a nice sense of community.
-I get into some good debates here.

Working with lasers, id hazzard a guess that it is the specific wavelength of the laser that does not interract with the absorbtion of its energy when presented on a white interface. Im sure any non-white color would just as easily have caused it to burst.

The music is horrendous, but he's pretty good with the interfaces.

I created an account years ago when I was curious about the buzz and experienced an odd glitch. The first thing I did was walk off a pier and the I was standing underwater with no way to get back to the surface that I could find. My character was fine, and I got bored quick and logged off......Logged on about 2 years later out of curiosity again, and my character was still underwater standing beside that same pier!!

Oh and look man, don't feel offed because no one on the site will seem to respond to your character: Online paranoia, cliquish rules, etc. make any chat scenario unlike one in the world of flesh and blood...Call it human-interface nature or cyber-rules, I tend to label it developmental disability anymore
and trudge along my merry way. If people can't feel comfortable striking up a conversation with a stranger online from the comfort of their computer, well, they are probably equally as bad at it in the world of matter-manifest flesh.

Every X-Com game after TFTD has sucked. Developers keep changing the gameplay away from what made those first two games so good.

When a game is as popular as X-Com was, you are only going to piss off potential customers who loved the originals if you "re-imagine" it into a completely different genre. X-Com was not based on movies/books/comics with beloved characters that could carry a game into other genres and remain successful (think Star Wars). The X-Com world and story did not have deeply fleshed-out canon that could grab the attention of fans, regardless of the genre.

If you create a game that diverges from the gameplay that made X-Com X-Com, it's simply not an X-Com game, imho, and slapping a title like "X-Com: Enemy Unknown" onto the box doesn't make it an X-Com game either. The gameplay/genre WAS X-Com. Not much else defined it. You can have the smartest, most talented people in the industry (who, yet again, claim to be huge fans of the original) working on the damn thing, and still release a pile of shit. You can see it coming when they start throwing out lines like "streamlined interface" (consolized), or "re-imagined" (different genre and/or fundamental changes to gameplay).

The game is getting generally great reviews, and maybe I'd feel differently if they had called it "Martin Attack" or something. But they didn't. They called it "X-Com". And it isn't.

>> ^dag:

@spoco2 - tablets are awesome mainly because of the form factor. The fact that you can be standing up in a bus and hold one like you would a book - makes them very versatile - and something you can't do with a laptop. Form factor use cases are hard to explain to people though until they experience it, and work them into their own lives.


Yeah, I get that people do use them. I have three different tablets sitting in my drawer beside me (for app development)... I could take them home and use them whenever I want... but I've never felt the need.

I think it's due to my hatred of typing on screens for anything more than a quick SMS. That's why I love the idea of the Surface, with the keyboard/mouse just built into the cover, and that it's running full windows so I can do real work on it, at real typing speeds if I want. But still use a tablet touch interface for all those things that it makes sense for.

For me, it's the first tablet I've seen the point in, but the market size and share of the iPad shows I'm in the minority!

Hang on a sec - what your saying is old unsupported devices - such as a 4 year old Windows Vista 7 laptop have a best version. So why, JUST NOW, right when win8 is around the corner are the automatic updates which are enabled on every new PC restricting my dad's functionality?

This isn't a case of his installed the latest win8 beta (he has not surprisingly as he was in IT for 30 years - but it's in a separate boot partition and runs all of his usb functions perfectly). This is an update to vista 32 bit drivers which has lessoned his functionally roughly a month before win8 comes out.

Could be a bug, could be a coincidence. Could be microsoft are shaking the tree just enough to make people question if they need the new OS.

Lets take a couple more points of view - you've probably seen the start trek TNG vs special edition videos where the original footage looked WAY worse than what was aired originally. If not maybe your a gamer? Notice how blizzard are preparing "Titan" for launch (new mmo) whilst at the same time releasing a kung-fu panda expansion for wow whilst addressing none of the failings Guild Wars 2 has highlighted.

It pays for companies to make their old products look obsolete whilst retaining their brand loyalty

Sorry for rant - had a few to drink.

In reply to this comment by oritteropo:
Since the update introduced an unwelcome new feature and you had to roll back, you're kinda supporting my point actually : Every old unsupported device has one "best" version, and it's not always the newest one.

Microsoft say Oct 26 for Win 8, but you'd have to look at the machine specs to see if an upgrade is possible. The interface changes haven't been welcomed by all, either.

Quite a few people hold back on new windows releases until the teething issues have been ironed out... so win 7 is looking good at this point.
In reply to this comment by zaust:
You say that but I was round at my dads today and he'd had to roll back his Vista laptop to an earlier backup because the latest "updates" meant it no longer had the USB resources to run both his printer and scanner. When's Win 8 out again?

Since the update introduced an unwelcome new feature and you had to roll back, you're kinda supporting my point actually Every old unsupported device has one "best" version, and it's not always the newest one.

Microsoft say Oct 26 for Win 8, but you'd have to look at the machine specs to see if an upgrade is possible. The interface changes haven't been welcomed by all, either.

Quite a few people hold back on new windows releases until the teething issues have been ironed out... so win 7 is looking good at this point.
In reply to this comment by zaust:
You say that but I was round at my dads today and he'd had to roll back his Vista laptop to an earlier backup because the latest "updates" meant it no longer had the USB resources to run both his printer and scanner. When's Win 8 out again?

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^spoco2:

Yeah, and the whole 'promote' a status thing, with the option of paying to promote being trialled also spells the end it would seem.
People are entrenched, to be sure, but if a cleaner, competitor comes along and provides a simple migration process ('enter your login details and we'll transfer all your photos/videos over to our FlubBrook service now'), people will jump ship if Facebook keeps becoming more and more and more of an advertising platform rather than a social network.

I think any competitor would genuinely struggle simply to overcome the inertia, i.e. everyone is on facebook because everyone is on facebook. Look at Google+. Their interface was cleaner, they had some neat ideas (I still think the "circles" concept is something facebook needs to steal), but no-one posted there because they weren't going to post the same thing twice. As a sidenote, I personally didn't like using google as a social network. Google already knows waaaay too much about me.



Facebook and google are similar beasts-The biggest ones, the shittiest ones. Use it, then lose it is my motto on the entertainmentnet.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^spoco2:

Yeah, and the whole 'promote' a status thing, with the option of paying to promote being trialled also spells the end it would seem.
People are entrenched, to be sure, but if a cleaner, competitor comes along and provides a simple migration process ('enter your login details and we'll transfer all your photos/videos over to our FlubBrook service now'), people will jump ship if Facebook keeps becoming more and more and more of an advertising platform rather than a social network.

I think any competitor would genuinely struggle simply to overcome the inertia, i.e. everyone is on facebook because everyone is on facebook. Look at Google+. Their interface was cleaner, they had some neat ideas (I still think the "circles" concept is something facebook needs to steal), but no-one posted there because they weren't going to post the same thing twice. As a sidenote, I personally didn't like using google as a social network. Google already knows waaaay too much about me.


Don't underestimate the power of 'new and improved'... No-one thought people would move away from AOL at the time. People thought Myspace was the bee's knees. It seems like the way to build up a new social network is start specialised then grow out.

Myspace did with music, then grew out.
Facebook did so with one school, then many then anyone.
Google+ didn't do that, and it doesn't seem to be catching on yet.

If there's a competitor where they do something the others don't do really well, perhaps for a particular sub section of the market. Then that group of people will favour it... then slowly others who have to interact with the sub section will keep finding themselves being pointed there... then eventually THEY want to get in on this new action... then they use the new site's ability to auto post to Facebook so their old friends don't miss anything... then the old friends start wanting to use these new fangled things the new site has... until everyone has shifted over and Facebook becomes a wasteland that only receives auto posts from other sites.



Or, you could be right and it'll be here until we blast off from the rotting ball of Earth for our new home on another planet.

>> ^spoco2:


Yeah, and the whole 'promote' a status thing, with the option of paying to promote being trialled also spells the end it would seem.
People are entrenched, to be sure, but if a cleaner, competitor comes along and provides a simple migration process ('enter your login details and we'll transfer all your photos/videos over to our FlubBrook service now'), people will jump ship if Facebook keeps becoming more and more and more of an advertising platform rather than a social network.


I think any competitor would genuinely struggle simply to overcome the inertia, i.e. everyone is on facebook because everyone is on facebook. Look at Google+. Their interface was cleaner, they had some neat ideas (I still think the "circles" concept is something facebook needs to steal), but no-one posted there because they weren't going to post the same thing twice. As a sidenote, I personally didn't like using google as a social network. Google already knows waaaay too much about me.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Hmmm, that's not good. It should definitely not be caching email addresses. I think I need to raise the bat signal on this one.

@lucky760 - trouble down at the old mill.

>> ^Sagemind:

I've done these three things. (Previously)(and currently)
1). "emails for new profiles comments" is ticked.
2). "new comments for your bookmarks" is unticked.
3). replace your email address - I've added XX at the end (.netxx)
What's Ironic, is I just received an email telling me that you, @dag just quoted me.
Is the Sift working off cashed emails? I wouldn't know.
I also have to apologize. My aim here is not to be a pain in the neck. It's just email after all. It does however pose in interesting quandary. Is the interface working correctly?
If in the end, I'm still getting email, I'll deal with it - these type of glitches just make me want to show that we control the computer, and not the other way around.
I feel bad because I'm making such a big deal over it, so my apologies again.

I've done these three things. (Previously)(and currently)

1). "emails for new profiles comments" is ticked.
2). "new comments for your bookmarks" is unticked.
3). replace your email address - I've added XX at the end (.netxx)

What's Ironic, is I just received an email telling me that you, @dag just quoted me.
Is the Sift working off cashed emails? I wouldn't know.

I also have to apologize. My aim here is not to be a pain in the neck. It's just email after all. It does however pose in interesting quandary. Is the interface working correctly?

If in the end, I'm still getting email, I'll deal with it - these type of glitches just make me want to show that we control the computer, and not the other way around.

I feel bad because I'm making such a big deal over it, so my apologies again.

This was designed for touchscreen interface, so of course it's going to be better with a touchscreen. But, the idea of a 'touchscreen monitor workstation' does not make ergonomic sense. For the majority of us who sit at a desk with their monitor in front of them, imagine experiencing this software 'as intended,' with a touchscreen monitor. Now, imagine holding your arm out with your hand arched backwards and clicking items on the desktop...for 8 hours a day. If typing on a keyboard gives people carpeltunnel issues, mousing around with this kind of setup will have long lines at all the hospitals.

Let's say we have our ideal setup to prevent all injuries. We have the monitor lay flat on the desk or at rather flat angle, and then people can mouse around on it rather comfortably. Now, your monitor is where your keyboard goes. Typing on the screen works in a pinch, but a real keyboard is certainly much better. The only setup I've seen that has successfully married a touchscreen monitor with a keyboard is the new small tablet systems, where both the monitor and the keyboard are small enough to fit on your lap at the same time. Of course, if you want to do more than surf the web or check emails, that dinky screen really doesn't do it.

Touchscreens are for toys, not for productivity.