news filters, at last!

Over in bug 17483, I spy movement on one of the few features that mozilla lacks which I regard as essential: news killfiles/filtering. It's probably not going to hit the nightly builds until after 1.2 is branched, and I've not seen many details yet, but it sounds good.

Go, Seth, Go!

[edit: include real bug link. DOH!]

.net/J2EE benchmark

More on that "benchmark" I reported a few days ago. The guy who wrote the article I linked now has proof that MS knew about the report at least a week before its release, and had its publicity machine all wound up and ready to go. So much for impartiality.

In addition, he's found a few issues with the supposedly "optimised" J2EE database access code. Now, I'm no expert on JDBC performance tuning, but the two issues highlighted here are just plain DUMB. Even I could improve this stuff.

And as for basing it all on a two-year-old version of Petstore...

For those of you[1] making decisions on this subject: my assessment is that the original benchmark report is effectively Microsoft-sponsored marketing FUD. Take it with a truck-load of salt.

[1] all 0.001 of you. Or maybe I overestimate my readership. :)

[Link: The Register]

UT2K3

I've played it briefly online now. Luckily, it looks like the actual game is somewhat better for performance/lag than the Demo. It still feels a bit laggy after the slickness of the Half-life netcode, though.

The biggest gripe I have about online play so far is the overcrowding of servers. Maps that the game has flagged as "2-6 players" have 12 people running around in them. Respawn camping, per se, isn't a problem, but that's only due to the risk of respawning in the middle of a three-way firefight and getting fragged before you can run a yard. I think I'll try to stick to servers running bigger maps.

Map-wise, many of them are very pretty indeed. Compared to the original game, there are a lot more low-grav maps this time round, and a lot more wide open spaces. Both are points in favour, IMO. Some are starting to grow on me, notably DM-TokaraForest, but I need to play more before I can really name any favourites.

Back to bots: the level of l33t movement skillz displayed by the bots at low difficulty is starting to really get to me.

One of the things I admired about the original UT was the way it catered for players new to this running-around-shooting lark. Unlike many similar games, which make do with 3 or 4 difficulty levels, UT had EIGHT, and the lower ones were really pretty easy. Compare this to the otherwise sublime Half-Life, where "easy" would be better named "quite difficult" and "hard" should be "you'd better be GOOD, kiddo". Now, in UT2K3, even at low levels, you've got bots translocating about like crazy.