Supreme Commander will bump up against the 2GB barrier (and crash) in some multiplayer modes. Obviously, if you have a 2GB system, it will grind to a fucking halt long before then. I think your knowledge of game memory usage is obsolete.
If you want to play all games perfectly, you need 4gb. If you want to develop said games, you really, really want 8gb.
It was years ago, and I honestly couldn't tell you which one now. I'm pretty sure the only evidence I have that it ever happened is an entry in my credit report and some papers in the bottom of my documentation basket:)
All I can say is, make sure your loaner will let you pay it off without paying massive amounts extra in interest. As long as you can do that, you're reasonably safe.
I had a student loan a while back - one of those "We'll give you a real awesome interest rate, but if you're ever late on a payment, we'll jack it up hugely! Also, no payments until a year after you get out of school!" So I did some school and pretty much forgot about the payment.
Guess whether they gave me any warning that my payments were about to start. Nope! First thing I got from them in two years was a letter saying "Well, you were late on this payment - guess your interest rates triple now! Sucks to be you."
Luckily, I had enough money to just pay the entire thing off in cash, and I wasn't dumb enough to sign up for a full-interest-up-front loan. But, yeah - it was pretty clear their goal was to avoid warning me about that payment in any way, just so they could raise the rate as quickly as possible.
If it's a subtle tweak to Look Better it could be quite important. First impressions and all that. When they meet you in person, okay, maybe you don't look *quite* as good, but the chance that they'll realize it's due to digital manipulation is basically zero - and, honestly, getting the other party to meet you in person is half the battle.
I'm pretty sure Blizzard is not clinically retarded.
That said, you're also assuming that "a full health bar" is just as easy for both classes. If a Barbarian has a lot more raw HP, the orbs may not fill him up as much - sure, he can do 1000 damage without needing a pit stop, but after grabbing five orbs he can only do another 250 before he needs another. Meanwhile, the Sorceror, with Frost Armor and Freeze Monster, is able to stay away long enough that those same five orbs yields another 500 points of damage.
Except even that's broken:D but, seriously, Blizzard made their reputation off good balance and polish. I don't think they'd make such an elementary mistake, especially such a mistake which would be caught trivially in playtests. And I can guarantee that Blizzard is already doing heavy balancing playtests because that's what Blizzard does.
I take it that would be the "Apple takes elephant gun, shoots self in heart in order to spite toenail" scenario? Because . . . seriously, that just isn't going to happen.
If the answers are "yes", then sure, go for it, bug the hell out of my car - I think it's a bad idea to allow it but at least it's fair. If the answers are "no", then play by your own rules, fuckers.
That's why your car doesn't go 200mph in fog unless it can somehow know that there's nothing about to jump in front of it (like with, for example, the aforementioned fences, sensors, and networked cameras.)
It isn't necessarily. But why is it a good thing? If any person on the planet could just push a button and get whatever they wanted, what would "rich" and "poor" even mean?
On the other hand, even if it's not reproducible it may still have a reasonable fixed cost. I mean, yes, I have family vacation pictures that can't be reproduced - but if someone offered me ten million bucks for them, I'd hand them over in a second, as I could go on vacations for life with that much money (with my family, natch.)
And secondly, that money value has another important effect - it makes the company want to keep your data safe. If Bob's Storage Inc knows that losing my vacation photos will cost them *ten million bucks* they're going to keep those photos very, very, very safe . . . far safer than "we guarantee* that your data will be safe! *is not a guarantee"
On the other hand, this also assumes that doctors are competent and have your best interests in mind.
First off I want to say that I have little doubt that most doctors are good.
However, my mom was having various weight issues and lack of appetite, and went to the doctor several times over a period of months. Each time the doctor just said "oh, it's probably just stress, don't worry about it! No problem at all", to the point of completely ignoring my mom's requests for a more thorough examination.
Eventually my mom ended up in the hospital with a four-liter cyst that had to be surgically extracted. The doctor just hadn't been interested in diagnosing her, so it had gone undiagnosed, and gotten steadily worse, for months.
This sort of thing happens depressingly frequently (admittedly happening 0.1% of the time would be depressingly frequently) and I've heard more than a few stories where someone managed to self-diagnose themselves correctly when the doctor just wasn't interested in bothering with it. I'm sure that a really good doctor can be a fantastic plus - but a mediocre or crummy one can be a neutral or even a minus. Self-diagnosis can save your life in those situations (at the very least, so you know to go to a different doctor.)
I mean, I know more than that just from talking to people - attack from the back, rogues have Sap, rogues have a variety of annoying moves that cause me to be stunned and die quickly in PvP, etc. But the basic idea - get behind the dude, open up with a stun, punch him to death with a dagger while using stuns and bleeds, put poison on your weapons - that I've got down, and the only rogue I've ever used is a bank alt.
(And I've browsed the Rogue talent tree just for fun.)
I agree that doing it on their first character seems kind of wonky. Level 20 is even pretty fast. Still, some classes get their Be-Useful abilities at level 20 - I'm playing a Druid right now and looking forward to cat form quite a bit. Maybe they just want to skip the 20 levels of Suck.
You think that's bad - I carried around a Leatherman for months, about half a year after 9/11, without even realizing it. I thought I'd lost it. Finally one day a security guard digs around in my pack and pulls out my trusty six-inch-long Leatherman with equally long knife blade.
"Whoa! So that's where that was! I thought I'd lost that half a year ago!"
Must've taken a dozen plane trips with it. Go TSA!
Your analogy is a bit flawed, but largely because you're not assigning the right set of costs.
The slow part is "learning World of Warcraft". Some people never do that. Some people do it relatively quickly. I got a good handle on the game itself on my second character (the first one was just after release, and a huge amount has changed since then.) I know how a Prot Warrior works very thoroughly - while I don't know what the abilities of (for example) a Rogue are, exactly, I know the basic mechanics involved - Rogues dual-wield so they need lots of extra +hit, agility and strength increase Rogue damage, Rogues use Energy instead of mana or rage.
I couldn't sit down at a level 70 rogue and be effective.
I could sit down at a level 1 rogue and, within about fifteen minutes, figure out how they work. If I had a magic button to raise me ten levels, I could probably reasonably thoroughly understand a level 10 rogue in about half an hour, and every extra ten levels might take me an hour at most.
Meanwhile, actually leveling to level 70 takes days of 24/7 playing. If I wanted to play a Rogue in end-game raiding - and I kind of do - I'm gonna be sitting at my computer grinding up to 70 over the period of weeks. All for that six or seven hours of training.
Some people need the training - especially if it's your first character. Others don't. Those of us that don't just want to get the leveling over with - we've seen the quests, we've seen the zones, we've seen the monsters, we just want XP fast.
(And some of us enjoy that end-game content. I play WoW for the challenge, and there's damn little challenge before you hit 70. The best memories I have of the game are times I managed to pull off an unexpected fantastic victory through sheer skill - you don't have that when you're expecting victory on every single fight, and the fights are largely meaningless anyway.)
On the other hand, the snail-mail option has the advantage that far fewer people will want to do it, especially if it costs them money.
I highly suspect that you could use the snail-mail method and then never actually have to send out the sourcecode - "Download from the Fedora repository! I also provide snail-mail CDs for a low fee, email for details" - nobody will ever, ever, ever pay that fee.
Settings up large complex things that most people need. The existence of those large complex things causes the OS to be used more often and have more money put towards improvements, which, itself, makes the OS stabler.
Not sure if you realize this but if you are self employed and have a history of even a relatively minor illness you cannot get health insurance at any price.
That's not true. My mom is unemployed, has health insurance, and she recently had a two-liter cyst removed from her stomach. It's expensive, of course, but "cannot get health insurance at any price" is simply wrong.
If you believe in this, go join the group. It takes about thirty seconds to sign up, and there's only 2000 more people needed to make it the third largest. I've seen more comments than that on many political posts, so I have little doubt that we can, in theory, rustle up that many people.
A cancelled account of mine got hacked somehow, and I only discovered it months later when I went to reactivate it. Blizzard basically said "sucks to be you, we won't do anything". My first level 60 character is gone forever, which makes me kind of sad.
I hear a lot of talk about how to convert back and forth, but nobody's mentioning the thing that I would consider the most important:
When you convert from.png to.tif, are you losing data?
Most of these convert scripts seem to work by starting Ghostview and rendering a.tif out of your PDF. This is a *terrible terrible idea*. What you'd really want to do is reach into the PDF itself, and extract the lossless images perfectly. Anything else is like printing the.PDF and scanning the printout - you might lose pixels, you might gain extra pixels, and you almost certainly won't be perfectly aligned with the "pixel grain" of the original image.
Unless you can guarantee that you'll pulling out, pixel-by-pixel, the exact original data, I would stick with PDFs.
I'm going to second the guy saying that you have to take 20% time rather than just having it given to you - I had a 20% project the entire time I worked at Google, and I would occasionally say things like "okay, the new server's up, I'm taking a 20% week". Nobody minded at all, and I got a lot done.
(Most of which never did, and therefore never will, see the light of day. But so it goes. At least I fixed up the Calculator quite a bit.)
I may as well advertise a little here - I'm working on a multiplayer tank combat game with native Linux support, and I recently made my first Linux release. I don't really know what I'm doing regarding packaging Linux games at the moment, but I've got it wrapped up in a.deb that works on the most recent Ubuntu. Check out the Mandible Games main page, or the Mandible Games development log.
Yeah, this is the point where you toss in a preprocessing step to turn that language construct into a warning or disableable error, and rig up something to yell at people if it ever ends up in the VCS . . . not where you break the language spec.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not a dick, he's an asshole.
You should get your eyes checked.
Supreme Commander will bump up against the 2GB barrier (and crash) in some multiplayer modes. Obviously, if you have a 2GB system, it will grind to a fucking halt long before then. I think your knowledge of game memory usage is obsolete.
If you want to play all games perfectly, you need 4gb. If you want to develop said games, you really, really want 8gb.
(I have 8gb for that reason.)
It was years ago, and I honestly couldn't tell you which one now. I'm pretty sure the only evidence I have that it ever happened is an entry in my credit report and some papers in the bottom of my documentation basket :)
All I can say is, make sure your loaner will let you pay it off without paying massive amounts extra in interest. As long as you can do that, you're reasonably safe.
I had a student loan a while back - one of those "We'll give you a real awesome interest rate, but if you're ever late on a payment, we'll jack it up hugely! Also, no payments until a year after you get out of school!" So I did some school and pretty much forgot about the payment.
Guess whether they gave me any warning that my payments were about to start. Nope! First thing I got from them in two years was a letter saying "Well, you were late on this payment - guess your interest rates triple now! Sucks to be you."
Luckily, I had enough money to just pay the entire thing off in cash, and I wasn't dumb enough to sign up for a full-interest-up-front loan. But, yeah - it was pretty clear their goal was to avoid warning me about that payment in any way, just so they could raise the rate as quickly as possible.
If it's a subtle tweak to Look Better it could be quite important. First impressions and all that. When they meet you in person, okay, maybe you don't look *quite* as good, but the chance that they'll realize it's due to digital manipulation is basically zero - and, honestly, getting the other party to meet you in person is half the battle.
I'm pretty sure Blizzard is not clinically retarded.
That said, you're also assuming that "a full health bar" is just as easy for both classes. If a Barbarian has a lot more raw HP, the orbs may not fill him up as much - sure, he can do 1000 damage without needing a pit stop, but after grabbing five orbs he can only do another 250 before he needs another. Meanwhile, the Sorceror, with Frost Armor and Freeze Monster, is able to stay away long enough that those same five orbs yields another 500 points of damage.
Except even that's broken :D but, seriously, Blizzard made their reputation off good balance and polish. I don't think they'd make such an elementary mistake, especially such a mistake which would be caught trivially in playtests. And I can guarantee that Blizzard is already doing heavy balancing playtests because that's what Blizzard does.
I take it that would be the "Apple takes elephant gun, shoots self in heart in order to spite toenail" scenario? Because . . . seriously, that just isn't going to happen.
More to the point, in my opinion:
Can I follow a police car around for a day?
Can I plant a GPS device on a police car?
If the answers are "yes", then sure, go for it, bug the hell out of my car - I think it's a bad idea to allow it but at least it's fair. If the answers are "no", then play by your own rules, fuckers.
That's why your car doesn't go 200mph in fog unless it can somehow know that there's nothing about to jump in front of it (like with, for example, the aforementioned fences, sensors, and networked cameras.)
It isn't necessarily. But why is it a good thing? If any person on the planet could just push a button and get whatever they wanted, what would "rich" and "poor" even mean?
On the other hand, even if it's not reproducible it may still have a reasonable fixed cost. I mean, yes, I have family vacation pictures that can't be reproduced - but if someone offered me ten million bucks for them, I'd hand them over in a second, as I could go on vacations for life with that much money (with my family, natch.)
And secondly, that money value has another important effect - it makes the company want to keep your data safe. If Bob's Storage Inc knows that losing my vacation photos will cost them *ten million bucks* they're going to keep those photos very, very, very safe . . . far safer than "we guarantee* that your data will be safe! *is not a guarantee"
On the other hand, this also assumes that doctors are competent and have your best interests in mind.
First off I want to say that I have little doubt that most doctors are good.
However, my mom was having various weight issues and lack of appetite, and went to the doctor several times over a period of months. Each time the doctor just said "oh, it's probably just stress, don't worry about it! No problem at all", to the point of completely ignoring my mom's requests for a more thorough examination.
Eventually my mom ended up in the hospital with a four-liter cyst that had to be surgically extracted. The doctor just hadn't been interested in diagnosing her, so it had gone undiagnosed, and gotten steadily worse, for months.
This sort of thing happens depressingly frequently (admittedly happening 0.1% of the time would be depressingly frequently) and I've heard more than a few stories where someone managed to self-diagnose themselves correctly when the doctor just wasn't interested in bothering with it. I'm sure that a really good doctor can be a fantastic plus - but a mediocre or crummy one can be a neutral or even a minus. Self-diagnosis can save your life in those situations (at the very least, so you know to go to a different doctor.)
True, but that's why I need a few hours :)
I mean, I know more than that just from talking to people - attack from the back, rogues have Sap, rogues have a variety of annoying moves that cause me to be stunned and die quickly in PvP, etc. But the basic idea - get behind the dude, open up with a stun, punch him to death with a dagger while using stuns and bleeds, put poison on your weapons - that I've got down, and the only rogue I've ever used is a bank alt.
(And I've browsed the Rogue talent tree just for fun.)
I agree that doing it on their first character seems kind of wonky. Level 20 is even pretty fast. Still, some classes get their Be-Useful abilities at level 20 - I'm playing a Druid right now and looking forward to cat form quite a bit. Maybe they just want to skip the 20 levels of Suck.
You think that's bad - I carried around a Leatherman for months, about half a year after 9/11, without even realizing it. I thought I'd lost it. Finally one day a security guard digs around in my pack and pulls out my trusty six-inch-long Leatherman with equally long knife blade.
"Whoa! So that's where that was! I thought I'd lost that half a year ago!"
Must've taken a dozen plane trips with it. Go TSA!
Your analogy is a bit flawed, but largely because you're not assigning the right set of costs.
The slow part is "learning World of Warcraft". Some people never do that. Some people do it relatively quickly. I got a good handle on the game itself on my second character (the first one was just after release, and a huge amount has changed since then.) I know how a Prot Warrior works very thoroughly - while I don't know what the abilities of (for example) a Rogue are, exactly, I know the basic mechanics involved - Rogues dual-wield so they need lots of extra +hit, agility and strength increase Rogue damage, Rogues use Energy instead of mana or rage.
I couldn't sit down at a level 70 rogue and be effective.
I could sit down at a level 1 rogue and, within about fifteen minutes, figure out how they work. If I had a magic button to raise me ten levels, I could probably reasonably thoroughly understand a level 10 rogue in about half an hour, and every extra ten levels might take me an hour at most.
Meanwhile, actually leveling to level 70 takes days of 24/7 playing. If I wanted to play a Rogue in end-game raiding - and I kind of do - I'm gonna be sitting at my computer grinding up to 70 over the period of weeks. All for that six or seven hours of training.
Some people need the training - especially if it's your first character. Others don't. Those of us that don't just want to get the leveling over with - we've seen the quests, we've seen the zones, we've seen the monsters, we just want XP fast.
(And some of us enjoy that end-game content. I play WoW for the challenge, and there's damn little challenge before you hit 70. The best memories I have of the game are times I managed to pull off an unexpected fantastic victory through sheer skill - you don't have that when you're expecting victory on every single fight, and the fights are largely meaningless anyway.)
On the other hand, the snail-mail option has the advantage that far fewer people will want to do it, especially if it costs them money.
I highly suspect that you could use the snail-mail method and then never actually have to send out the sourcecode - "Download from the Fedora repository! I also provide snail-mail CDs for a low fee, email for details" - nobody will ever, ever, ever pay that fee.
Settings up large complex things that most people need. The existence of those large complex things causes the OS to be used more often and have more money put towards improvements, which, itself, makes the OS stabler.
Not sure if you realize this but if you are self employed and have a history of even a relatively minor illness you cannot get health insurance at any price.
That's not true. My mom is unemployed, has health insurance, and she recently had a two-liter cyst removed from her stomach. It's expensive, of course, but "cannot get health insurance at any price" is simply wrong.
Still better than nothing. We probably won't change his mind or get anyone to notice, but we certainly won't if we don't try.
it's now the fourth largest.
If you believe in this, go join the group. It takes about thirty seconds to sign up, and there's only 2000 more people needed to make it the third largest. I've seen more comments than that on many political posts, so I have little doubt that we can, in theory, rustle up that many people.
A cancelled account of mine got hacked somehow, and I only discovered it months later when I went to reactivate it. Blizzard basically said "sucks to be you, we won't do anything". My first level 60 character is gone forever, which makes me kind of sad.
Blizzard will, apparently, not fix all problems.
I hear a lot of talk about how to convert back and forth, but nobody's mentioning the thing that I would consider the most important:
When you convert from .png to .tif, are you losing data?
Most of these convert scripts seem to work by starting Ghostview and rendering a .tif out of your PDF. This is a *terrible terrible idea*. What you'd really want to do is reach into the PDF itself, and extract the lossless images perfectly. Anything else is like printing the .PDF and scanning the printout - you might lose pixels, you might gain extra pixels, and you almost certainly won't be perfectly aligned with the "pixel grain" of the original image.
Unless you can guarantee that you'll pulling out, pixel-by-pixel, the exact original data, I would stick with PDFs.
I'm going to second the guy saying that you have to take 20% time rather than just having it given to you - I had a 20% project the entire time I worked at Google, and I would occasionally say things like "okay, the new server's up, I'm taking a 20% week". Nobody minded at all, and I got a lot done.
(Most of which never did, and therefore never will, see the light of day. But so it goes. At least I fixed up the Calculator quite a bit.)
I may as well advertise a little here - I'm working on a multiplayer tank combat game with native Linux support, and I recently made my first Linux release. I don't really know what I'm doing regarding packaging Linux games at the moment, but I've got it wrapped up in a .deb that works on the most recent Ubuntu. Check out the Mandible Games main page, or the Mandible Games development log.
Yeah, this is the point where you toss in a preprocessing step to turn that language construct into a warning or disableable error, and rig up something to yell at people if it ever ends up in the VCS . . . not where you break the language spec.
Sigh.