>>I think microtransactions are incompatible with good and fun game rules.
Only when they're entirely cosmetic.
As soon as they offer $$ to bypass hours of in-game time (World of Tanks) or automatically winning a battle (Stronghold Kingdoms), or, hell, gaining bonus everything (Civ World) but limited only by the cash you spend per day, it's fucking evil.
The really sad part is that without microtransactions, Stronghold Kingdoms and Civ World would be reasonably good games. Civ World costs $3/day to play competitively, though.
>>While I'm certainly not going to argue why it'd be nice if SSDs increased in capacity (given reasonable price points), I must inquiry, why the need?
It's a pain in the ass spanning two different drives, and having to do a lot of this stuff manually. Moving your user directory from your fast C:\ SSD to your large D:\ HDD, and making symlinks so that everything works correctly is easy enough. Moving your Steam folder to D:\, and then individually moving certain games over to C:\ and symlinking everything to work - EVERY TIME YOU INSTALL A NEW GAME - is a total pain in the ass.
I keep a fairly tight lid on what games I have installed on Steam - uninstalling them once it becomes clear to me that I have no desire to play a certain game again (plus I can always reinstall from Steam later), but even still I have 83.4GB in my steamapps directory.
A lot of stuff installs to C:\ whether you ask it to or not, and moving a lot of things Windows expects to find in C:\ to D:\ tends to break Windows, even if you symlink C:\Program Files to D:\Program Files. So on my 60GB SSD C:\ drive, 50GB is already used.
So, *at a minimum* I'd need a 130GB SSD, with a 240GB SSD being the obvious purchase choice so that I have room for new apps. This will run between $400-$500 at current prices, which I feel is a bit too high.
>>If I ever saw someone performing sexual intercourse on a young adolescent, I swear to God, I will fucking kill the predator with my bare hands, and stand trial by jury knowing I did the right thing.
So if you saw a pair of 16-year olds having sex... you'd kill both of them? Or just one? In which case, which one would you pick? Yes, it's illegal in a lot of states for two consenting teens to have sex with each other.
If you saw a teen photographing him or herself with a camera, would you kill them or just want them thrown in jail for "producing child porn"? (http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2008_spr/online_exploit.htm)
In fact, given that the majority of teens have had sex before graduating from high school, doesn't this make you a potential mass murderer?
Please turn your ID and passport over to the local police, comrade. They'll be in contact with you quickly.
>>Wait, people still use the start menu? I figured most people would've realized that typing two characters in the search box would be faster than navigating the menu, be it hierarchical or not.
The search box is much much slower for power users.
Besides, the way I have it set up, it's still there - just one tab away.
It's probably difficult to jerk off in an internet cafe or local library. Not to mention people that may look over your shoulder. Not that I support this bullshit law or anything. It obviously has little to nothing to do with child pornography and everything to do with giving cops more of their favorite thing: power.
Right. I was sort of... ignoring... the claim that this will be used to cut down on child porn, as it is quite obviously a pretense.
Doing a quick Google search, I see there's been 10,000 arrests in 15 years for child porn (666 a year), and a percentage of that has got to be for relatively harmless stuff like teens sexting each other.
More likely it is to try to stop people like Anonymous, with legislators not really realizing how hard it will be to destroy anonymity on the internet, and how much freedom and liberty that they'll crush along with it.
Is there anything stopping potential criminals from just popping down to the local library or internet cafe?
Hell, whenever I would pull a practical joke on a friend back in college, I never logged into a machine from the computer in my dorm - made it too easy for them to find out who'd been messing with their account. I'd just go down to the local computer lab and do it from there.
Or does this law mandate that every computer require a valid driver's license to be swiped before logging on?
And before all the whargarbl about MS dropping support... Windows XP was released in 2001. No consumer OS has been supported that long, and few enterprise OSs are. Since Windows 7 was released (that was 2 years ago) netbooks and low end systems have shipped with Windows 7 Starter. XP has not been sold on systems for years, and a four years of security support is not bad at all.
Windows 7 has only been usable since Classic Shell came out about a year ago. (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/shell/classicshell.aspx and http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/)
It adds back in the missing up arrow (breadcrumbs don't work on desktop folders, or within links) and replaces the grotesque monolith that is the Win7 start menu with a properly customizable one. I took out all the cruft, and made the horrible search only happen if I hit tab first. This lets me tap the windows key and be able to use hotkeys to navigate instantly through the hierarchical menus I have set up to launch moderately-used menus and applications. It also allows you to use a proper hierarchical programs folder, instead of having to scroll through a flat list of "all programs" as if we were living in 1980 again.
Seriously, this entire Ask Slashdot is just hilarious to me. Our collective fat asses are supposed to tell desert natives how to keep cool and hydrated? Heh.
>>Why you would want to use a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat is something I've never understood.
That bit works fine. It's the addon that generates a pdf from a web page (which works better than just printing the page as a PDF) that is incompatible with FF5.
>>instead applied it to actually helping people get access to food and clean drinking water, helped them set up schools, the amount of good will we would have in the region and around the world would be enormous
You think we haven't been doing that?
A friend of mine was a Lt. in the marines (this is ~2003 or 2004) and was assigned a CNN reporter who was going to follow him around for the day. She showed up, asked what they'd be doing today, and he said they'd be visiting a couple schools that the marines built, where the reporter would get to interview the children, and then on to a place where they'd fixed up the water infrastructure.
>>The studies show that early development is when it is easiest, with the most progress taking place from age 2-6. 2nd grade is far too late for the "automatic" learning that infants and toddlers enjoy
I was 6 years old in 2nd grade, so that statement doesn't make any sense.
>>Anecdotally, the kids speak 2 languages fluently at ages 5 and 7 and learned them both without the kind of effort adults are required to make
How many hours does it take a kid to learn a language, compared with an adult? If you think it is "effortless", then you've never seen the hundreds and thousands of hours parents spent with their kids, patiently telling them, "This is a Ball. Ball." "Zhe shi yi ge qiu. Qiu."
>>Except for a very small percentage of gifted people, learning a second language *for the first time* as an adult is a hellacious amount of work. I had no trouble with Chinese grammar, because my mind already processes grammar at a higher level of abstraction.
Really? I heard the canard that learning languages is easiest when you're a kid, so when I was in second grade (no joke) I demanded to be enrolled in French classes. I didn't want to waste my window of opportunity. (And yeah, that's what happens when you expose kids to science early in life.)
I had a horribly bad time at it. I think I came away with nothing more than how to count to 20, and until I took French again in high school, I misremembered a lot of the numbers in the teens.
Taking French a bit in 6th grade was much easier than when I was in 2nd. I looked back at my younger self and said, "Eh, what an idiot."
Taking French in 9th and 10th grade was even easier than 6th.
Taking Chinese after I graduated from college was even easier than French, and it's not even a Romance language.
Conclusion: I think the whole "Youth = easier to learn languages" thing is a total crock of shit. Except for maybe the "native accent" element, as I get older, it has become easier to learn languages and other things, too.
Chinese grammar is trivially easy. Very rigorous Subject Verb Object model with the occasional preposition, elision, and time phrase to set context. No verb conjugations, no plurals, no subject/verb agreement, like in Romance languages. Pronunciation of Mandarin is simple, and very regular: 35 finals, 22 initials. Learn to pronounce all 57 correctly, and you can pronounce any word in Mandarin flawlessly. The tones are pretty easy, too, but the English-speaking brain is trained to interpret tones as meaning (4th tone = angry, 2nd tone = questioning, 3rd tone = uncertainty, 1st tone = mocking), but once you get past that, it's pretty easy too.
The only hard part, I guess, is writing the characters.
>>Probably because they have schools that actually teach the subject well.
No. They don't.
I've actually sat in on English classes in China, a few years back, and they're pretty horrible. Here's a sample class: 1) Copy down sentences on the blackboard 10 times each 2) Show them to your teacher 3) Ok, you can go.
The real kicker is that the sentences on the blackboard were all horrible, mangled, English (the result of graduates of the system), such as "The person go went up store bought coke." Not just "kinda" wrong, but brutally wrong.
The only way to learn a foreign language is from people actually fluent in the language, and demand vastly exceeds supply in this case in China. Hell, the guy at the school tried to offer me a job there to teach his students, and would even throw in free Chinese lessons for me in the bargain. I'd have been tempted if I was a single guy with no commitments back home. White guys are treated like rock stars in China, and it would certainly be easier to learn Mandarin with classes in China than from my local community college.
>>You'd have a hell of a time replicating that in your quake mod.
It's easy enough. There's a for loop that spits out fragments, mostly horizontally (so we can avoid wasting fragments that will just hit the ceiling) and you can adjust the constant that controls how many shards are launched. So you can turn it up arbitrarily high (until you hit the entity limit in the world). You also increase the size of the bounding box so that they fill more space when they launch.
But mostly I just turned up the damage on the shards.
On certain maps with tight, twisty corridors, the frag grenades were quite good. Big open spaces? Not so much.
>>As opposed to nuclear and it's ability to operate in the free economic market without government handouts, protections and subsidies? Ah, I get it. Or, rather not.
Nuclear has the lowest subsidy rate of any green technology. NIMBY protection isn't exactly a subsidy, either.
For solar, wind, biofuel, etc., the subsidy rates are much much higher. You can find out the subsidy rates for each type of power plant in California here: http://www.energy.ca.gov/
Hell, if you count all the money we've put into "clean coal", then in just pure dollars coal probably comes out on top, though I'd have to look at the actual numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Working nights pretty thoroughly sucks away your life-force, as nearly anyone who's done one can tell you.
I work for myself, and 11PM-3AM is always my period of peak productivity.
Your mileage may vary.
>>Are you joking? Because 25% cheaper is pretty meaningless.
Yes, it was a joke.
In math terms, ".75x = y, solve for y".
>>I think microtransactions are incompatible with good and fun game rules.
Only when they're entirely cosmetic.
As soon as they offer $$ to bypass hours of in-game time (World of Tanks) or automatically winning a battle (Stronghold Kingdoms), or, hell, gaining bonus everything (Civ World) but limited only by the cash you spend per day, it's fucking evil.
The really sad part is that without microtransactions, Stronghold Kingdoms and Civ World would be reasonably good games. Civ World costs $3/day to play competitively, though.
>>Unfortunately I can't find the price for one of these units, probably since they're still very much in the R&D phase
Didn't you read the article? The price was listed right there: they are 25% cheaper than the previous version.
There ya go. They're totally cost-efficient.
>>We did a follow up based on finding out how much it costs to run these Bitcoin operations
This should have been obvious after that one story about the guy running up a four digit power bill in order to mine a handful of bitcoins.
>>While I'm certainly not going to argue why it'd be nice if SSDs increased in capacity (given reasonable price points), I must inquiry, why the need?
It's a pain in the ass spanning two different drives, and having to do a lot of this stuff manually. Moving your user directory from your fast C:\ SSD to your large D:\ HDD, and making symlinks so that everything works correctly is easy enough. Moving your Steam folder to D:\, and then individually moving certain games over to C:\ and symlinking everything to work - EVERY TIME YOU INSTALL A NEW GAME - is a total pain in the ass.
I keep a fairly tight lid on what games I have installed on Steam - uninstalling them once it becomes clear to me that I have no desire to play a certain game again (plus I can always reinstall from Steam later), but even still I have 83.4GB in my steamapps directory.
A lot of stuff installs to C:\ whether you ask it to or not, and moving a lot of things Windows expects to find in C:\ to D:\ tends to break Windows, even if you symlink C:\Program Files to D:\Program Files. So on my 60GB SSD C:\ drive, 50GB is already used.
So, *at a minimum* I'd need a 130GB SSD, with a 240GB SSD being the obvious purchase choice so that I have room for new apps. This will run between $400-$500 at current prices, which I feel is a bit too high.
>>If I ever saw someone performing sexual intercourse on a young adolescent, I swear to God, I will fucking kill the predator with my bare hands, and stand trial by jury knowing I did the right thing.
So if you saw a pair of 16-year olds having sex... you'd kill both of them? Or just one? In which case, which one would you pick? Yes, it's illegal in a lot of states for two consenting teens to have sex with each other.
If you saw a teen photographing him or herself with a camera, would you kill them or just want them thrown in jail for "producing child porn"? (http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2008_spr/online_exploit.htm)
In fact, given that the majority of teens have had sex before graduating from high school, doesn't this make you a potential mass murderer?
Please turn your ID and passport over to the local police, comrade. They'll be in contact with you quickly.
>>Wait, people still use the start menu? I figured most people would've realized that typing two characters in the search box would be faster than navigating the menu, be it hierarchical or not.
The search box is much much slower for power users.
Besides, the way I have it set up, it's still there - just one tab away.
Right. I was sort of... ignoring... the claim that this will be used to cut down on child porn, as it is quite obviously a pretense.
Doing a quick Google search, I see there's been 10,000 arrests in 15 years for child porn (666 a year), and a percentage of that has got to be for relatively harmless stuff like teens sexting each other.
More likely it is to try to stop people like Anonymous, with legislators not really realizing how hard it will be to destroy anonymity on the internet, and how much freedom and liberty that they'll crush along with it.
Is there anything stopping potential criminals from just popping down to the local library or internet cafe?
Hell, whenever I would pull a practical joke on a friend back in college, I never logged into a machine from the computer in my dorm - made it too easy for them to find out who'd been messing with their account. I'd just go down to the local computer lab and do it from there.
Or does this law mandate that every computer require a valid driver's license to be swiped before logging on?
Windows 7 has only been usable since Classic Shell came out about a year ago. (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/shell/classicshell.aspx and http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/)
It adds back in the missing up arrow (breadcrumbs don't work on desktop folders, or within links) and replaces the grotesque monolith that is the Win7 start menu with a properly customizable one. I took out all the cruft, and made the horrible search only happen if I hit tab first. This lets me tap the windows key and be able to use hotkeys to navigate instantly through the hierarchical menus I have set up to launch moderately-used menus and applications. It also allows you to use a proper hierarchical programs folder, instead of having to scroll through a flat list of "all programs" as if we were living in 1980 again.
>>The TOR license and scope will obviously benefit from ALMOST A DECADE of MMO experience since the original SW:Galaxies license negotiation.
To be fair, Star Wars Galaxies didn't benefit from the ALMOST A DECADE of MMO experience before it was made, either.
>>Desert natives in Cairo?
Cairo is in the desert.
The people that live in Cairo should know better how to deal with the heat - again, in Cairo - than random people on the internet.
>>Wear long, loose white clothes.
Or black clothes, like the Bedouins:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v283/n5745/abs/283373a0.html
Seriously, this entire Ask Slashdot is just hilarious to me. Our collective fat asses are supposed to tell desert natives how to keep cool and hydrated? Heh.
>>Why you would want to use a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat is something I've never understood.
That bit works fine. It's the addon that generates a pdf from a web page (which works better than just printing the page as a PDF) that is incompatible with FF5.
>>I've been developing restartless addons all this year and have yet to report a single headache.
I haven't upgraded to Firefox 5 because it's incompatible with Adobe Acrobat X.
Thanks, Firefox Team!
>>Because she knew it was staged.
Pfft. That's actually what his unit had been doing for the previous month. Building schools and so forth.
But the news media don't want to report on it, because it's not sexy. So it creates a false perception that idiots like you buy into.
>>instead applied it to actually helping people get access to food and clean drinking water, helped them set up schools, the amount of good will we would have in the region and around the world would be enormous
You think we haven't been doing that?
A friend of mine was a Lt. in the marines (this is ~2003 or 2004) and was assigned a CNN reporter who was going to follow him around for the day. She showed up, asked what they'd be doing today, and he said they'd be visiting a couple schools that the marines built, where the reporter would get to interview the children, and then on to a place where they'd fixed up the water infrastructure.
She said: "That's boring." And left.
>>Age doesn't seem to matter much either. 45 and wanting a 20 year old? No problem!
Isn't this more or less what "living like a rock star" means?
>>The studies show that early development is when it is easiest, with the most progress taking place from age 2-6. 2nd grade is far too late for the "automatic" learning that infants and toddlers enjoy
I was 6 years old in 2nd grade, so that statement doesn't make any sense.
>>Anecdotally, the kids speak 2 languages fluently at ages 5 and 7 and learned them both without the kind of effort adults are required to make
How many hours does it take a kid to learn a language, compared with an adult? If you think it is "effortless", then you've never seen the hundreds and thousands of hours parents spent with their kids, patiently telling them, "This is a Ball. Ball." "Zhe shi yi ge qiu. Qiu."
>>Except for a very small percentage of gifted people, learning a second language *for the first time* as an adult is a hellacious amount of work. I had no trouble with Chinese grammar, because my mind already processes grammar at a higher level of abstraction.
Really? I heard the canard that learning languages is easiest when you're a kid, so when I was in second grade (no joke) I demanded to be enrolled in French classes. I didn't want to waste my window of opportunity. (And yeah, that's what happens when you expose kids to science early in life.)
I had a horribly bad time at it. I think I came away with nothing more than how to count to 20, and until I took French again in high school, I misremembered a lot of the numbers in the teens.
Taking French a bit in 6th grade was much easier than when I was in 2nd. I looked back at my younger self and said, "Eh, what an idiot."
Taking French in 9th and 10th grade was even easier than 6th.
Taking Chinese after I graduated from college was even easier than French, and it's not even a Romance language.
Conclusion: I think the whole "Youth = easier to learn languages" thing is a total crock of shit. Except for maybe the "native accent" element, as I get older, it has become easier to learn languages and other things, too.
Chinese grammar is trivially easy. Very rigorous Subject Verb Object model with the occasional preposition, elision, and time phrase to set context. No verb conjugations, no plurals, no subject/verb agreement, like in Romance languages. Pronunciation of Mandarin is simple, and very regular: 35 finals, 22 initials. Learn to pronounce all 57 correctly, and you can pronounce any word in Mandarin flawlessly. The tones are pretty easy, too, but the English-speaking brain is trained to interpret tones as meaning (4th tone = angry, 2nd tone = questioning, 3rd tone = uncertainty, 1st tone = mocking), but once you get past that, it's pretty easy too.
The only hard part, I guess, is writing the characters.
>>Probably because they have schools that actually teach the subject well.
No. They don't.
I've actually sat in on English classes in China, a few years back, and they're pretty horrible. Here's a sample class:
1) Copy down sentences on the blackboard 10 times each
2) Show them to your teacher
3) Ok, you can go.
The real kicker is that the sentences on the blackboard were all horrible, mangled, English (the result of graduates of the system), such as "The person go went up store bought coke." Not just "kinda" wrong, but brutally wrong.
The only way to learn a foreign language is from people actually fluent in the language, and demand vastly exceeds supply in this case in China. Hell, the guy at the school tried to offer me a job there to teach his students, and would even throw in free Chinese lessons for me in the bargain. I'd have been tempted if I was a single guy with no commitments back home. White guys are treated like rock stars in China, and it would certainly be easier to learn Mandarin with classes in China than from my local community college.
>>You'd have a hell of a time replicating that in your quake mod.
It's easy enough. There's a for loop that spits out fragments, mostly horizontally (so we can avoid wasting fragments that will just hit the ceiling) and you can adjust the constant that controls how many shards are launched. So you can turn it up arbitrarily high (until you hit the entity limit in the world). You also increase the size of the bounding box so that they fill more space when they launch.
But mostly I just turned up the damage on the shards.
On certain maps with tight, twisty corridors, the frag grenades were quite good. Big open spaces? Not so much.
>>Using words like "whippersnappers", I doubt you're going to get them to listen to you at all, let alone teach them anything.
Yes, obviously I have no sense of humour.
>>As opposed to nuclear and it's ability to operate in the free economic market without government handouts, protections and subsidies? Ah, I get it. Or, rather not.
Nuclear has the lowest subsidy rate of any green technology. NIMBY protection isn't exactly a subsidy, either.
For solar, wind, biofuel, etc., the subsidy rates are much much higher. You can find out the subsidy rates for each type of power plant in California here: http://www.energy.ca.gov/
Hell, if you count all the money we've put into "clean coal", then in just pure dollars coal probably comes out on top, though I'd have to look at the actual numbers.