A thousand times YES. Together with a short repeat of necessary training if your save was weeks earlier. I've abandoned plenty of games where I've made progress, got distracted, then forgotten how to play or what I'm doing when I next reload. The result is usually repeated deaths, repeatedly hitting dead ends etc. I know games reviewers have to blast through a mega release in a weekend, but I don't think it's unreasonable for a normal to take MONTHS to finish the same game. Of course some times your skills are so rusty you've got no choice but to start over and build them again. But it's a shame where it's just lack of information, or forgotten button combinations that make the difference between finishing an old game and abandoning it.
I guess this is for Americans who think Fox News is the pinnacle of Murdoch's evil, or anyone under about 25! There's another Murdoch property, The Sun. Its circulation is still next-to-nothing in Liverpool 22 years after they published an infamous front page (THE TRUTH) lilbelling Liverpool Football Club fans. They blamed them for the Hillsborough football stadium crush, accusing fans of attacking the emergency services, urinating on dead bodies etc. For 22 years there's barely a newsagent in the city that will stock the paper, and it's the UK's biggest selling daily. News Of The World is (basically) the Sunday edition, and they are the first to call for lynch mobs whenever covering crimes against children
This is enormous news in the UK except of course in The Sun and the Times, both Murdoch papers. It's happening at a time when Murdoch wants to buy complete control of Sky, a deal which needs approval from the state. Our Prime Minister David Cameron pulls Christmas Crackers with the News of the World's former editor, who's at the centre of this scandal. And the NoTW's editor after her, Andy Coulson - Cameron appointed him as his party's communications director in 2007 - but he had to resign in January when it became clear he knew all about the illegal phone hacking. This man was in government until this surfaces.
So it's just the pinnacle of the bizarre relationship between the Murdoch press, our main political parties, and apparent public opinion. If advertisers and readers boycott the paper, which seems quite likely in the short term, you could only call it "a good start".
After screwing around moving from Unity to KDE 4.6 the other day, and finding that simply RESIZING A TERMINAL WINDOW stiffed my whole laptop, I tried xfce and my god - I forgot that's how the desktop used to work! The compositing & whizzy effects didn't work very well on an Apple last time I tried, so god knows why GNOME & KDE folks want to copy it. I'm back to a simple window manager and shell that works, and I'm not going to be talked out of them again for a while.
SIP still seems alive and well though. They get a monthly revenue stream from that though; seems a slightly safer option for Skype users wanting interoperability.
I've been through lots of version upgrades in the 5.1 series with a couple of our managed hosting customers, and they simply don't appear to be able to make a stable release. One customer's car loan system segfaulted after 600-odd days (surpriiiise!), another seems to break it every 100 or so. The latter had a support contract with MySQL AB and I dealt with them personally - what seemed really worrying was, even though this customer was paying £6000 per year, it *still* didn't seem important to anyone at the other end that a "stable" / "general availability" release of their flagship database was segfaulting. I had filed bugs, with backtraces and sample data, offered them them root passwords so they could do whatever they needed to catch the bug, but no thanks, we can't take control of your server.
To anyone that might say "but why not use 5.5, surely 5.1 is ancient history!" I'd say - this customer has been through 4, 5.0 and 5.1 and not found a single release that will stay up for more than a couple of hundred days. This customer is a MySQL "power user" who got burned on every new feature that was introduced. Stored procedures, the geospatial functions, massive sub-SELECTS - anything new tends to crash it even more often than before, and he's often had to back out and rewrite features as a result. So major version upgrades aren't considered lightly.
MySQL is going to need more than a press release to convince me that they have a commitment to high-quality code. I'll continue to plan my installations around the assumption that it dies under heavy traffic.
Yawn, another fine morning at Valve! Shall we slog on with another episode of our popular game franchise for the fanboys, or shall we work a bit harder at our store front that takes 30% of EVERY PC GAME SALE ON THE PLANET? It's not quite that dramatic, but if >50% of PC games sales were downloads last year for the first time, Steam must be taking the lion's share. And last I looked they were only 150-odd employees - still quite impressive.
I don't believe they'd ever do it. They can keep pushing firmware updates, blocking PSN accounts, detecting new modifications - just settle into the pattern like Microsoft have done! But to have to enter a long code for every PS3 game I buy? Is that before the long installation, followed by mandatory download and patch? Or after? And is that a one-time code meaning the same game can't be installed on a second PS3; would that be stomping on the used market at the same time? The PS3 is already the most expensive & lease pleasant to use console, they *really* can't afford to make the experience any worse.
We're still working out which vendors are going to support their phones for the long run, like Apple does with their iPhone, and which ones are expecting you buy a new one every year, like Nokia. My expectation in 2011 is that if I spend £500 on a new phone, I expect to get software updates for as long as the hardware is viable, *especially* when the manufacturer isn't bearing the cost of building the software! If Samsung don't deny this rumour and confirm they'll be issuing minor Android updates, I don't see how they expect to compete against Apple, and every other Android vendor out there. The ridiculous, wasteful "fire and forget" model of smartphone development is long dead, and manufacturers that try it will fix it, or exit the market pretty quickly.
Even 8 years ago, I never understood why Nokia didn't try to sell their phones as long-term investments, and ship better software for their premium phones as they developed it, rather than trying to hawk us a new bit of plastic every 18 months.
And then they shouldn't just cut you off but throttle speed to EDGE speeds if you hit your allowance. Nobody would complain then.
If you hit your bandwidth limit (sorry "fair usage policy", because it's unlimited, silly!), T-Mobile UK put you behind a firewall for 30 days which restricts your service between 4pm & midnight. It only lets you access web sites (ports 80 & 443) and it did feel a bit slower. I found out when I was moving house and used my phone as broadband for a few weeks. From midnight-4pm the service is normal though.
a man roared past him in a giant automatic beach combing and starfish catapulting machine which he had designed and built with his massive fortune as part of a fleet of vehicles to comb the worlds seashores spewing starfish back into the ocean
Ah yes, no matter how many times I hear it, the ancient fable of the giant starfish-catapulting machine is still a heartwarming classic.
Bloody hell, I totally agree. That sounds like a car crash, and I'll avoid it for a few more months - it sounds not at all fun. I played Fallout 3 about 12 months after release, and it maybe crashed to desktop twice. I was a twitchy quick-saver, so it didn't knock my enthusiasm for it. But quest bugs, "reload from a much earlier save, and don't do X?" That's a deal breaker.
how can you justify making the game completely unavailable to them?
I'm not sure if you use this expression in the US, but soldiers playing Medal of Honour strikes me as a busman's holiday. Maybe Gamestop just think it won't sell?
I'm waiting for a iOs-Android compatibility layer
on
The Case For Oracle
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· Score: 1
What Oracle are objecting to, regardless of the legal mechanisms they're using, is the *their* developers are being diverted onto a platform they don't control. Google don't use any Java source code, trademarks and so on, but once they have a community of programmers using the Java language (without the current Java leadership in control of the platform) Oracle may find "their" developers wanting future "Androidisms" porting back to the JDK. Imagine a Java with unsigned integers, a quicker/dirtier native code layer... Google are free to add any of these to Android without Oracle's say-so. That is the situation they don't want, the feeling that the Java language and platform is a variable commodity.
I'd place a bet that someone is working on an iOS SDK, toolchain & libraries - something to allow iOS developers to target Android without leaving Objective C, or mix & match Java + ObjC libraries. If you think Oracle's reaction to Android is bad, we can probably guess at the kinds of SDK machinations Apple would go to in order to stop "their" iOS developers from hedging their bets.
This wasn't an opt-in survey, they looked at the picture metadata from the contact pictures on a dating site, versus the number of (declared) sexual partners when those people signed up for the site. I think.
When it comes to bugs and usability problems, Ubuntu run a much sharper bug tracker - it usually has coverage of almost any minor GNOME issue. Between Canonical and their users, It might have taken many man-hours to track down, discuss and identify a small usability bug, which might only result in a fix of a few lines of code. It's not about turning the screw, it's knowing which screw to turn. So counting lines of code as the only contribution is completely unfair to Canonical.
This doesn't just go for GNOME; the best discussion of kernel and firefox bugs usually ends up being hosted on Ubuntu, just because they have fostered the largest community of enthusiastic Linux desktop users.
Well if you want a digital stick & buttons like an arcade machine of yore any wired PS3 peripheral will do as it has a USB connector and presents itself as a joystick e.g. I bought one of these the other day and it has a great feel. The only weirdness is that the buttons come up in an unexpected order, so you need to be able to reprogram your emulator to recognise that - MAME certainly supports that though.
A friend of mine has am iMac from 2001 running the latest OSX
The latest OS X only runs on Intel-based Macs, which came out in 2005. I last used a G4-based Mac Mini a couple of years ago (years ahead of a 2001 imac), with Tiger, and it was frustratingly slow. If your friend'a machine is running at all quickly I imagine it's still using OS 9:-)
...and what's more, very likely have masses of cutting-edge private patches to the Linux kernel for enabling their distributed computing infrastructure. Of course they give back in lots ways (money and less valuable code), but only because they have taken such a great deal to start with.
Well if you don't mind spending a couple of hours fiddling with firmwares, CyanogenMod brings fresh features to old Android phones, as well as tethering and other carrier-unfriendly features. I agree the lack of long-term software support for most phones is shoddy, but Android was the first phone OS where the user can install "community" firmware without compromising any of the phone's existing features.
How is that a loss? There was a time when the game manual had to fire the imagination a little, make up for the chunky graphics, supply a back story, or document some complicated controls, stuff that was difficult/impossible from within the game. Now games have all the technology to explain themselves from the moment they start, and if they can't or don't, they're in trouble. What's wrong with giving some game mapping companies an inside track, folk who do a far more honest job documenting the game than the developers, and letting customers choose whether they want the manual? Developers can leave the books to people who want a colourful walk-through, and make them pay. If it's one less "compulsory" cost in a boxed title, that's fine by me.
They have a selection of their own games to port, they've moved to a cross-platform front-end - there's no reason they would care to build and test all their games on Linux just to sell to the few thousand geeks. Surely if they're putting effort into Linux, it's because they have a more popular Linux-based platform in mind - maybe their own, maybe Chrome OS, Android... but being the owner of a games platform like that without it being tied to expensive PCs, or to consoles with pricey gatekeepers, would be a major boost for Valve.
Slashdot Mirror
A thousand times YES. Together with a short repeat of necessary training if your save was weeks earlier. I've abandoned plenty of games where I've made progress, got distracted, then forgotten how to play or what I'm doing when I next reload. The result is usually repeated deaths, repeatedly hitting dead ends etc. I know games reviewers have to blast through a mega release in a weekend, but I don't think it's unreasonable for a normal to take MONTHS to finish the same game. Of course some times your skills are so rusty you've got no choice but to start over and build them again. But it's a shame where it's just lack of information, or forgotten button combinations that make the difference between finishing an old game and abandoning it.
I guess this is for Americans who think Fox News is the pinnacle of Murdoch's evil, or anyone under about 25! There's another Murdoch property, The Sun. Its circulation is still next-to-nothing in Liverpool 22 years after they published an infamous front page (THE TRUTH) lilbelling Liverpool Football Club fans. They blamed them for the Hillsborough football stadium crush, accusing fans of attacking the emergency services, urinating on dead bodies etc. For 22 years there's barely a newsagent in the city that will stock the paper, and it's the UK's biggest selling daily. News Of The World is (basically) the Sunday edition, and they are the first to call for lynch mobs whenever covering crimes against children
This is enormous news in the UK except of course in The Sun and the Times, both Murdoch papers. It's happening at a time when Murdoch wants to buy complete control of Sky, a deal which needs approval from the state. Our Prime Minister David Cameron pulls Christmas Crackers with the News of the World's former editor, who's at the centre of this scandal. And the NoTW's editor after her, Andy Coulson - Cameron appointed him as his party's communications director in 2007 - but he had to resign in January when it became clear he knew all about the illegal phone hacking. This man was in government until this surfaces.
So it's just the pinnacle of the bizarre relationship between the Murdoch press, our main political parties, and apparent public opinion. If advertisers and readers boycott the paper, which seems quite likely in the short term, you could only call it "a good start".
After screwing around moving from Unity to KDE 4.6 the other day, and finding that simply RESIZING A TERMINAL WINDOW stiffed my whole laptop, I tried xfce and my god - I forgot that's how the desktop used to work! The compositing & whizzy effects didn't work very well on an Apple last time I tried, so god knows why GNOME & KDE folks want to copy it. I'm back to a simple window manager and shell that works, and I'm not going to be talked out of them again for a while.
Not sure it affected the reading of the article. So it's a moo point.
SIP still seems alive and well though. They get a monthly revenue stream from that though; seems a slightly safer option for Skype users wanting interoperability.
I've been through lots of version upgrades in the 5.1 series with a couple of our managed hosting customers, and they simply don't appear to be able to make a stable release. One customer's car loan system segfaulted after 600-odd days (surpriiiise!), another seems to break it every 100 or so. The latter had a support contract with MySQL AB and I dealt with them personally - what seemed really worrying was, even though this customer was paying £6000 per year, it *still* didn't seem important to anyone at the other end that a "stable" / "general availability" release of their flagship database was segfaulting. I had filed bugs, with backtraces and sample data, offered them them root passwords so they could do whatever they needed to catch the bug, but no thanks, we can't take control of your server.
To anyone that might say "but why not use 5.5, surely 5.1 is ancient history!" I'd say - this customer has been through 4, 5.0 and 5.1 and not found a single release that will stay up for more than a couple of hundred days. This customer is a MySQL "power user" who got burned on every new feature that was introduced. Stored procedures, the geospatial functions, massive sub-SELECTS - anything new tends to crash it even more often than before, and he's often had to back out and rewrite features as a result. So major version upgrades aren't considered lightly.
MySQL is going to need more than a press release to convince me that they have a commitment to high-quality code. I'll continue to plan my installations around the assumption that it dies under heavy traffic.
Yawn, another fine morning at Valve! Shall we slog on with another episode of our popular game franchise for the fanboys, or shall we work a bit harder at our store front that takes 30% of EVERY PC GAME SALE ON THE PLANET? It's not quite that dramatic, but if >50% of PC games sales were downloads last year for the first time, Steam must be taking the lion's share. And last I looked they were only 150-odd employees - still quite impressive.
I don't believe they'd ever do it. They can keep pushing firmware updates, blocking PSN accounts, detecting new modifications - just settle into the pattern like Microsoft have done! But to have to enter a long code for every PS3 game I buy? Is that before the long installation, followed by mandatory download and patch? Or after? And is that a one-time code meaning the same game can't be installed on a second PS3; would that be stomping on the used market at the same time? The PS3 is already the most expensive & lease pleasant to use console, they *really* can't afford to make the experience any worse.
We're still working out which vendors are going to support their phones for the long run, like Apple does with their iPhone, and which ones are expecting you buy a new one every year, like Nokia. My expectation in 2011 is that if I spend £500 on a new phone, I expect to get software updates for as long as the hardware is viable, *especially* when the manufacturer isn't bearing the cost of building the software! If Samsung don't deny this rumour and confirm they'll be issuing minor Android updates, I don't see how they expect to compete against Apple, and every other Android vendor out there. The ridiculous, wasteful "fire and forget" model of smartphone development is long dead, and manufacturers that try it will fix it, or exit the market pretty quickly.
Even 8 years ago, I never understood why Nokia didn't try to sell their phones as long-term investments, and ship better software for their premium phones as they developed it, rather than trying to hawk us a new bit of plastic every 18 months.
From memory, they still force you through their image-degrading web proxy, so no. I didn't try DNS or ICMP tunnels :)
And then they shouldn't just cut you off but throttle speed to EDGE speeds if you hit your allowance. Nobody would complain then.
If you hit your bandwidth limit (sorry "fair usage policy", because it's unlimited, silly!), T-Mobile UK put you behind a firewall for 30 days which restricts your service between 4pm & midnight. It only lets you access web sites (ports 80 & 443) and it did feel a bit slower. I found out when I was moving house and used my phone as broadband for a few weeks. From midnight-4pm the service is normal though.
a man roared past him in a giant automatic beach combing and starfish catapulting machine which he had designed and built with his massive fortune as part of a fleet of vehicles to comb the worlds seashores spewing starfish back into the ocean
Ah yes, no matter how many times I hear it, the ancient fable of the giant starfish-catapulting machine is still a heartwarming classic.
Bloody hell, I totally agree. That sounds like a car crash, and I'll avoid it for a few more months - it sounds not at all fun. I played Fallout 3 about 12 months after release, and it maybe crashed to desktop twice. I was a twitchy quick-saver, so it didn't knock my enthusiasm for it. But quest bugs, "reload from a much earlier save, and don't do X?" That's a deal breaker.
I'm not sure if you use this expression in the US, but soldiers playing Medal of Honour strikes me as a busman's holiday. Maybe Gamestop just think it won't sell?
GIANT PAELLA
What Oracle are objecting to, regardless of the legal mechanisms they're using, is the *their* developers are being diverted onto a platform they don't control. Google don't use any Java source code, trademarks and so on, but once they have a community of programmers using the Java language (without the current Java leadership in control of the platform) Oracle may find "their" developers wanting future "Androidisms" porting back to the JDK. Imagine a Java with unsigned integers, a quicker/dirtier native code layer ... Google are free to add any of these to Android without Oracle's say-so. That is the situation they don't want, the feeling that the Java language and platform is a variable commodity.
I'd place a bet that someone is working on an iOS SDK, toolchain & libraries - something to allow iOS developers to target Android without leaving Objective C, or mix & match Java + ObjC libraries. If you think Oracle's reaction to Android is bad, we can probably guess at the kinds of SDK machinations Apple would go to in order to stop "their" iOS developers from hedging their bets.
This wasn't an opt-in survey, they looked at the picture metadata from the contact pictures on a dating site, versus the number of (declared) sexual partners when those people signed up for the site. I think.
When it comes to bugs and usability problems, Ubuntu run a much sharper bug tracker - it usually has coverage of almost any minor GNOME issue. Between Canonical and their users, It might have taken many man-hours to track down, discuss and identify a small usability bug, which might only result in a fix of a few lines of code. It's not about turning the screw, it's knowing which screw to turn. So counting lines of code as the only contribution is completely unfair to Canonical.
This doesn't just go for GNOME; the best discussion of kernel and firefox bugs usually ends up being hosted on Ubuntu, just because they have fostered the largest community of enthusiastic Linux desktop users.
Well if you want a digital stick & buttons like an arcade machine of yore any wired PS3 peripheral will do as it has a USB connector and presents itself as a joystick e.g. I bought one of these the other day and it has a great feel. The only weirdness is that the buttons come up in an unexpected order, so you need to be able to reprogram your emulator to recognise that - MAME certainly supports that though.
If it's not screamingly obvious, Google run their own Linux kernel, which probably contains more secret sauce than anything else they've written.
A friend of mine has am iMac from 2001 running the latest OSX
The latest OS X only runs on Intel-based Macs, which came out in 2005. I last used a G4-based Mac Mini a couple of years ago (years ahead of a 2001 imac), with Tiger, and it was frustratingly slow. If your friend'a machine is running at all quickly I imagine it's still using OS 9 :-)
...and what's more, very likely have masses of cutting-edge private patches to the Linux kernel for enabling their distributed computing infrastructure. Of course they give back in lots ways (money and less valuable code), but only because they have taken such a great deal to start with.
Well if you don't mind spending a couple of hours fiddling with firmwares, CyanogenMod brings fresh features to old Android phones, as well as tethering and other carrier-unfriendly features. I agree the lack of long-term software support for most phones is shoddy, but Android was the first phone OS where the user can install "community" firmware without compromising any of the phone's existing features.
How is that a loss? There was a time when the game manual had to fire the imagination a little, make up for the chunky graphics, supply a back story, or document some complicated controls, stuff that was difficult/impossible from within the game. Now games have all the technology to explain themselves from the moment they start, and if they can't or don't, they're in trouble. What's wrong with giving some game mapping companies an inside track, folk who do a far more honest job documenting the game than the developers, and letting customers choose whether they want the manual? Developers can leave the books to people who want a colourful walk-through, and make them pay. If it's one less "compulsory" cost in a boxed title, that's fine by me.
They have a selection of their own games to port, they've moved to a cross-platform front-end - there's no reason they would care to build and test all their games on Linux just to sell to the few thousand geeks. Surely if they're putting effort into Linux, it's because they have a more popular Linux-based platform in mind - maybe their own, maybe Chrome OS, Android... but being the owner of a games platform like that without it being tied to expensive PCs, or to consoles with pricey gatekeepers, would be a major boost for Valve.