Shabaz

I didn't realize they use their own renderer. Pretty neat.

I guess I was thinking that the raycasting approach I've seen used in some of the sparse voxel octree stuff I read wouldn't make sense when you want the blockiness of voxels to actually show up very clearly, plus that it looked like you could achieve the same look using polygon based cubes. Guess I should've done a bit more research.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not sure that either Voxatron or 3D Dot Game Heroes actually use voxel based rendering. They may or may not store their models as voxels but I'm pretty sure that at some point it's converted into a polygonal model and shoved into a traditional polygon based rasterizing pipeline. As opposed to doing some raycasting into a datastructure containing voxels (e.g. an octree), which from my very limited understanding is roughly what a voxel based rendering pipeline looks like.

Doesn't take away the fact that both games look pretty damn nifty though.

Firefox's arguments for not really bothering with the remaining parts of Acid3 was that it seemed like it they weren't testing particularly relevant standards and that the implementations of the other browsers for those standards were mostly to pass Acid3 and not particularly useful either. See http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3/ for more info.

That seems like valid reasoning to me. I've also seen Hixie make comments that seem to indicate him wanting to avoid these issues for any potential Acid4:

When we do Acid4 (probably around the time we have at least three major browsers shipping Acid3-passing browsers), I think we'll have to focus on testing fewer, more critical things. Acid3 tests a lot of critical stuff, but also checks a lot of less important stuff at the same time, and it's in those areas that we've had the most problems with specs changing under us.

From http://ln.hixie.ch/?count=1&start=1215829569

It is calculated based on train schedules from what I can tell. I just got off the train and there is an outage between Almere and Lelystad (in the middle of the map) because of maintenance, but I can see active trains on the map. The entire service is run by buses this weekend.

I have only read the gdgt transcript, so if you watched it somehow I'm going to defer to you about anything not in the transcript.

But as far as the 'completely different' thing goes, as far as I know the lower signal can be caused by signal being absorbed by your hand. But what seems to happen with the iPhone 4 is that there is also this shorting issue because of an exposed antenna. But when directly asked about the shorting issue they say it's about your body being a "pretty effective signal absorber".

One of the things that most bothered me in the initial responses from Apple (the Jobs emails and the open letter) is that none of them acknowledge that there is a fundamental difference between antennas from other smartphones losing signal and the iPhone 4, where the antenna is exposed and can be shorted, even with one finger. I'm kind of disappointed they apparently still don't acknowledge that (maybe the live transcript is incomplete).

Citing dropped call numbers or return rates or showing other smartphones with signal reduction caused by something completely different just seems like willful misinformation. I suppose their usual MO is to not acknowledge complaints head-on, but that's usually with new features people would like to see. If I can short an antenna and change its RF characteristics so as to lead to an instant dropped call, that seems like a fundamental engineering flaw, and I would've liked them to acknowledge that.

What they've disabled is unauthenticated LAN games. The plan, at least this time last year, was to have connections try to go over the LAN if the players are within a LAN. All the players must however authenticate with the Battle.net server.

I asked Canessa whether the solution his team is working on might include a pseudo-LAN connection, where the game would only check in with Battle.net to authenticate before reverting to typical LAN behavior.

"Something like that," he replied. "Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don't know if it's once or periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection.. those are the things that we're working on."

From http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/60156