Tired of windows updates? Tired of having to reboot for security updates? Thinking of switching to a Mac? Think again!

This aspect of Macs has really disappointed me - seemingly every couple of weeks a new massive update is required - the usual culprits are are Quicktime and iTunes - both things I deliberately avoid using and they both require a restart!

this this article caught my eye today.
"It's a large scale modification to the core of the game," Walker hinted. "It'll debut in a limited fashion through the Medic first

I wonder if this will be the return of grenades in the form concussion grenades for medic.

Hmm so that's why the server seemed slow...

On the same topic as the last post.. This was one of those games where even getting into each others base is very difficult since they are all on defence.
Click for bigger pic.

This eng had his SG in a perfect place. He constantly (and I mean constantly) repaired his SG from the dispenser next to him. You couldn't kill it with a barrage of rockets or fully charged sniper shots. I watched demomen try to kill it with no luck - by the time they could get in range they were shot to shreds. One tried lobbing bombs up from the water but he either couldn't see where he was firing and so missed or when he moved into a better position he got wasted by the SG since it could cover the water too.

He was backed up by a couple of very good snipers and for a while (as in the screenshot) there was a soldier spamming rockets and periodically restocking from the dispenser. Leaving your own base was almost impossible, I could understand why most chose the easier option of staying in their own base "defending". You could eventually get to it as a spy but there was a strategically placed SG at the top of the ramps in the ramp room that you couldn't walk past and had an eng guarding it. If only my spy had grenades, no other class seemed to be able to make it far enough to help.

I like TF2, lets get that out of the way first. Nothing is perfect though and here are my thoughts.

I was a serious TFC player and have to say that sadly the communication in TF2 is worse. Why? Well first of all when you are dead nobody alive can see your text. This means the end of one of the few times you can actually get some teamwork going, no more "enemy coming in through water entrance" and other messages that are useful to your team and mean that although you got killed you can still be of use to your team.

To add insult to injury there is now the damned 20 second spawn time which would be a perfect time to talk to your teammates rather than stopping in your respawn or in the middle of a map - you just know you are going to get killed half way through typing if you need to type something more complicated than one of the canned messages.

I suppose they disallowed it because you can spectate, and you can spectate because of their CS style respawn delay :-/ It actually made more sense in CS as you would be dead for longer so there were usually people to actually talk to. In TF2 there is usually only one or 2 other people dead and there's little chance of actually having a conversation.

Next up - Grenades! Many excuse the removal of grenades as "to stop spamming" which is clearly rubbish if you have ever been at the other end of a soldier spamming rockets or a demoman spamming bombs along with a HWguy you know that spam is alive and well in TF2. This claim also ignores the range and richness of grenades in TFC - forget frag grenades, what about concs, hallucination grenades, EMP grenades, the Pyros flaming grenades? All these had very valid uses and greatly increased the range of tactics you could use as they had their strengths in particular situations. EMPs were great against HWguys, the pyros firebombs were a great area denial tool against snipers on 2fort. In TF2 when you have goood snipers who have set up their home on the battlements there isn't much you can do - previously there were a whole range of ways of getting to the enemy battlements whatever class you were playing. In TF2 you will end up with almost no health left and die 1 second after reaching the battlement - if you ever get there at all since the snipers have a clear shot at you as you make your way to their base.

There is one exception that makes it clear that grenades were removed for a reason other than "spamming" (and did people really spam conc grenades?. The scout could previously use conc grenades to get to the enemy battlements - either using 2 to jump the whole distance from one side to the other or concing from the ground or water. You could say that they took concs out to stop scouts concing to the other side but they obviously they want scouts to be able to get from battlement to battlement because in TF2 2fort there never used to be the roof over the bridge. They added it because they had to take out concs (for some other reason) and they had to produce some other way to let the scout get to the battlements. If they didn't have to take all grenades out of the game they would have left scouts with concs - after all they clearly want scouts to be able to do what concs used to give them. In pre release footage of TF2 you can see that there is no roof over the bridge and that Demomen have MIRVS (yet another omission from TF2).

I think they had bug(s) with grenades and due to time restrictions they took them out rather than fix them. The only other explanation is that they wanted to make TF2 less rich and more dumbed down - surely they wouldn't do that... would they?

The web is agreement

Except, presumably, web based forums :-)

I'm trying to raise a support ticket for a piece of hardware I bought from Microsoft. Firstly their UK support page is 404. Then I eventually give up and go through their US site. Their support system talks about credit cards and £46 per support request, eventually I realise that you get 2 "free" support requests before they start charging you. I am trying to report a faulty piece of hardware - should they ever charge me to contact them about that?

I go through their system which has a few entertaining bugs like a textarea where the font colour and size change when you mouse out thus changing the format of the page and making it impossible to click the "continue" button without using the keyboard to tab through the buttons. When I do finally submit it I am greeted with a page that just says.

  	
Error:
	An unknown application error occurred. Please try again in a few minutes. 

Handy! It doesn't say whats wrong or that anyone will try to fix it - just chance your luck again in a few minutes. I can't find an email address to mail my query too either. As with almost all sites that don't seem to work in Firefox when you try in IE you find it is just as broken.

This isn't the first time i've found a companies support page not working and have to wonder if they are quite happy to leave it that way.

I know they have to hack some of these apps to get them to work with RAP while it is still being fleshed out but I think this could well be the shape of things to come - here's the latest thing they have (kinda..) got running PDE. Personally I love the idea of not having to distribute tens or hundreds of MB to user's desktops and worry about how their desktop environment is set up.

Next time you see someone espousing nuclear power remember that they are still trying to clean up Windscale 50 years on.

I'm getting an increasing amount of car related spam from sites hosted on fasthosts. I'm sure i've spamcopped the same sites before but they are still being hosted by fasthosts.

This seems to indicate that fasthosts are now friendly to spammers which is sad for such a big host.