Blog

February | 2008 | YAY! it's Andrew!

As the web becomes filled with more and more advanced applications, the number of text boxes I find myself composing into increases. A typical day has me writing lengthy forum posts, lengthy messages on the discussion topics at work, and design specifications into tickets and bug reports. In all these cases, at any given time if I slip up and fire my browser’s back or forward buttons or close the browser window, my work is instantly lost.

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I was doing some upgrade work on my Vista machine last weekend. Once I was done popping in some more ram and updating all my drivers, I decided to check out some of the Vista performance tip guides available on the web. They all highlighted roughly the same features, but one that stood out was a little checkbox in the hard disk management properties that let you “further improve disk performance” at the expense of “increasing the risk of data loss if the disk loses power.” No problem, that’s what my battery backup device is for.

I started looking for benchmarks, and found none. My search string was pretty similar to the title of this post. That’s on purpose, because I want to help anyone else looking for a benchmark on this feature.

THIS FEATURE DOES NOTHING EXCEPT RE-INTRODUCE AN OLD WINDOWS BUG.

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Valve’s Portal has been reviewed to death. It’s time to stop talking about the past and looking to the future. Is Portal a seminal game in our field? If so, how can we apply its ideas going forward?

Step one is to stop thinking that portals (the warpy things themselves) are things that can be used only in Portal (proper, the game). In the same way that ketchup can make a burger, or fries, or scrambled eggs taste better, portals can increase the delectability of our current genres. Portal showed us how the gun can be used in a puzzle or action genre, but there are many genres that make up our industry.

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