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Comment: Loss leader pricing strategy (Score 1) 181

by Achoi77 (#37578168) Attached to: Amazon To Lose $10 Per Kindle Fire
I don't see this as being any different as Sony or MS trying to push out their gaming consoles at a loss - just business as usual. Amazon's true advantage over direct hardware manufacturers is that they can afford to risk gambling with loss leaders while direct manufacturers like ASUS and Archos cannot. Sure, they may probably make less profit, but the opportunity to gain marketshare is too great to ignore - which is the point: to get _everybody_ to use amazon's services.

Comment: not quite like Blizzard (Score 3, Informative) 182

by Achoi77 (#34401838) Attached to: Apple's Game Center Shares Your Real Name

I figured Apple's intention is to thwart spammers; if you were able to recognize the real name of your buddy you were more likely accept the invitation rather than someone with a username like "THISISNOTVIAGRASPAM." Playing the whole social angle.

What Blizzard was intending was different. They wanted to put paper trail on all users on a publicly viewable form, in the interest of minimizing trolls and thus improving the quality of posts on their forums - to 'shame' the trolls from posting mindless drivel. Yeah, that didn't work out too well.

Comment: Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual (Score 2, Interesting) 246

by Achoi77 (#30946900) Attached to: Freeciv As Benchmark of HTML5 Canvas Javascript Performance

Man, I should have read the article. FTFA:

Note that the implementation for Internet Explorer 8 does not use the HTML5 canvas element, because this isn't supported. Freeciv.net implements a canvas-replacement using DHTML and divs with clipped background-images. Therefore the test results are not directly comparable with the other web browsers.

That's what I get for not reading the article :-(

Comment: Re:IE8 performs awesome, as usual (Score 1) 246

by Achoi77 (#30946878) Attached to: Freeciv As Benchmark of HTML5 Canvas Javascript Performance

IE should not have even been tested - it does not support HTML5 canvas elements!

Indeed it doesn't. A lot of the hacks involved to get IE to support canvas is merely an emulation of canvas using VML.

I've experimented with a bunch of sprite based animation stuff on canvas, and have seen similarly terribly poor results on a bunch of versions of IE using the code google wrote. (I'm assuming their benchmark is regarding the rendering sequence) Might as well create <image> tags, and animate the image tags with some style manipulation using js, because functionally what the hacks are doing to make canvas work on IE. (This is not regarding tricks to speed up the rendering, such as recycling DOM elements, which is cheaper than creating new DOM elements *shrug*)

Comment: The problem with vista (Score 1, Informative) 374

by Achoi77 (#29374069) Attached to: The Real-World State of Windows Use
It is impossible to do the most basic operations like:
  • Move a file over from one folder to another
  • Copy a file from one computer to another over the network
  • Cancel a file operation

I had an install of World of Warcraft on my desktop computer. I pick up a new laptop, I figure it would be faster to copy the WoW install I have on my desktop to over to the laptop over the network. After about an hour of "calculating time" - I tried to cancel the operation. Frustrated at the length of time it took to simply cancel a file, I literally pulled the plug on both machines and powered them back up.

After that I went to the Blizzard website on my laptop to download the client from there. And as for the add-ons, I zipped them up and mailed them to myself as an attachment, in order to save time.

Both the laptop and desktop have Vista on it (came with the computer).

Considering that companies usually have a central file server somewhere, imagine business workers trying to do basic file IO stuff, like copy word docs, spreadsheet files, or large .psd files from the Design Department.

As long as you never have to manage files on your computer, and you have gobs of ram, Vista is a nice OS. If not, it's better to wait for an alternative. I've preordered my copies of 7 a few months back, and I can't wait for the goddamn day I get rid of this POS operation system.

Then I can start streaming my music over the network to any machine in the house, once again.

Comment: Re:Are there any plans to revamp Parental Controls (Score 1) 520

by Achoi77 (#29150815) Attached to: Ask Blizzard About Starcraft2, Diablo III, WoW, or Battle.net
It's a rare drop, sure. The catch is that you have to have your profession skill up a certain level before it's even visible. My engineering is at 450 and I saw it drop once, but I lost the roll to my guildmate, who chose Herbalism and has skill level of 450 for picking flowers. :-(

Comment: Re:Exploits for the future (Score 2, Funny) 239

by Achoi77 (#28992795) Attached to: WebGL Standard To Bring 3D Acceleration To Browsers?
Yeah... it would be real nice if the general public had access to the source code in some kind of Open fashion regards to browsers such as Firefox or Webkit/Safari/Chrome so that stuff like exploits can be patched, making it would be possible to have tons of eyeballs pore over the code and be able to submit fixes on behalf of the community, or point out bad stuff that perhaps some other developers may have missed.

That would be cool.

Comment: Re:shocked, just shocked (Score 1) 453

by Achoi77 (#28964335) Attached to: <em>StarCraft II</em> Delayed Until 2010

The christmas rush is a profit gimmick - the games with the most (advertising) visibility generally would get the most cash - this is regardless of the quality of the game.

Blizzard doesn't really play by the marketing rules. Warcraft 3 was released in June '02. Diablo 2 also in June 2000. The first Starcraft was released at the end of March '98.

I would say that those properties have done pretty well on their own without the help of any holiday season shopping boost.
