I disliked a couple of those, and a few more I didn't play, but the rest are awesome. Add to that list Stealth Bastard, To the Moon, and a handful of decent console ports, twenty other games I'm forgetting right now, and it's been a hell of a year to be a (PC) gamer.
IMO, a real contender for GOTY for 2012 would be a free flash game (no, wait, it doesn't suck! Really!) called Frog Fractions. It may very well represent the end of gaming, the Platonic form of the video game made real. That sentence was only sort-of tongue in cheek. It's great.
Our justice system only works (for certain definitions of "works") because we threaten insane sentences to force less-insane plea bargains.
We can't afford to have more than a tiny number of cases go to trial, or the system would break down. Not enough money, not enough judges, not enough lawyers.
I tried to be careful not to lump all libertarians in with them, nor even to take the maybe-controversial-to-some step of naming them libertarians (I only pointed out how they tend to identify themselves).
There are lots of very prolific posters on Slashdot (and the Internet in general) who think that "Caveat Emptor" should be our national motto, and that because you could become an expert on everything, information imbalances in our economic system aren't a huge problem, or, indeed, a problem at all.
Most of these people call themselves libertarians. I call them dipshits.
Yeah, in the last year or so especially they seem to have gone to shit.
I have to quote half the words I type in, and then it still sometimes decides to only give me three or four results for what I wanted, then a second section full of crap that has nothing to do with it.
The only new thing I like is the typo/misspelling detection, and that's only because it's actually helpful and very easy and straightforward to bypass entirely.
I think they're trying to make it easier for people who don't know how to search properly (I'm continually amazed by what a rare skill that is) but considering the hoops I have to jump through to keep it from fucking up, I can imagine how worthless it must have become for someone who doesn't know the "just do what I goddamn told you to" tricks.
The idea is that you can share code (say, data models) between the client and server. IMO this is an awful reason to suffer through Javascript, though.
Node in particular handles async IO for you, which means it saves you from learning threading, or an async IO framework in some other language like Python or Ruby, or learning Erlang, or any number of other better things you could do with your time. The cost is callback soup, and having to use Javascript.
Node's package manager, NPM, makes it super-easy to set up 5-line demos of WebSocket echo servers and such, which pulls a lot of people in. Tends to be messy as hell once you get past 100 lines or so (of Coffeescript, mind you, which is what you'll have to use to maintain your sanity even that long), especially if you need more than one source for IO (say, read from RabbitMQ and Redis, output over Websockets and XMPP, or whatever—basically anything you could use it for that's interesting). You pay for the up-front ease with constructs that get excessively complex later on, IMO.
Also, there's no excuse whatsoever to use it in a case where you're simply writing a REST api or a typical website. There are way, way better tools for that kind of thing, namely anything that's not NodeJS, with an appropriately-designed cache in front of it, and a well-configured webserver.
It's because gaining 20 days a year of mandatory vacation time would mean infringing on the rights of people who want to work every single weekday. People who want vacation time are expected to bargain for it, probably making disproportionately large sacrifices to gain it (assuming they succeed at all).
I wish I were joking, or even exaggerating. No-one here gives a damn about the practical ability of most people to exercise their freedoms, so long as those freedoms exist in theory.
Last time I used it, it was far more prone to weird rendering problems and crashes (possibly a result of bad markup/code, but as a user of the browser I don't really care why those things happen) and the GUI still felt, as it had for years, like something out of Windows 95.
Not terrible, but a distant third for me. I could have put "*shudder*" next to Safari too, since the only browser I actually enjoy using right now is Chrome.
Maybe Mozilla's creative process will turn out to be cyclical and there'll be a new Phoenix project that'll give us a super-light-weight, plugin-friendly browser that renders pages reasonably well, and lacks a ton of UI fluff. Then in six or seven years that one will completely lose its way, and a few years later, after losing market share, they'll do it all over again.
I hope so, anyway, because I'd prefer something Mozilla backed to something Google backed.
All I know is launching Chrome with two dozen tabs open is faster than launching Firefox with two, and doesn't make my system fan kick on. It also doesn't make my other heavyweight applications less responsive like having FF open does; I get way more busy spinners and unresponsive GUI elements system-wide when FF is running. I can open a new tab without delay with tons of other tabs open, while FF is always sluggish to do the same even with only a couple tabs open.
Everyone where I work has noticed the same thing, and switched away from FF to Chrome or, occasionally, Safari, as a result. I don't think we have one FF fan left; it's joined the class of programs that we only open because we absolutely have to, and close as soon as possible.
Maybe it uses more memory, but I know that Chrome respects my time and the needs of other running applications much better than FF does. Don't know why, but it's not a subtle difference; more than once the answer to "why the hell is my system running like crap?" has been "oh, because I accidentally forgot to close FF".
Modern Firefox is so damn bloated that it might be the fattest browser on any system I own.
On my work laptop, only three things kick on the system fan: 1) compiling, 2) opening Eclipse or doing anything in it whatsoever, 3) launching Firefox with one or two tab set to auto-open.
Which is why I use Chrome now, and if I couldn't for some reason then I'd run Safari or (*shudder*) Opera.
Firefox is a browser of last resort, like IE. It's a clunky beast like Netscape/Mozilla used to be. It's as if they've forgotten why they created Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox in the first place...
Interesting, didn't know that. Probably falling in to the error of mixing up (part of) a common definition of a word with a technical (legal, in this case) one.
Exactly what running a Tor exit node has always struck me as, legally speaking: negligence.
You aren't liable for the child porn (or whatever), but it seems to me that you could be held liable for intentionally turning on anonymizing software, then intentionally opening it up to the entire world. If you've got the know-how to do that, you ought to be aware that there's a decent chance your equipment will be used for illegal activity. You can't just shrug your shoulders at a judge and say, "well, I didn't know with certainty that anything bad was happening" and expect that to fly.
It's practically the "I'm not touching you!" of legal defenses, IMO.
But in those cases you're not going out of your way to hide the identities of the perpetrators, or to deliberately keep yourself ignorant of how your resources are being used.
The whole "I made sure I couldn't know what was going on and you couldn't know who was doing what, then advertised that fact widely, but I didn't personally commit a crime so I can't be held responsible at all" seems like exactly the kind of argument that would (rightly) piss a judge way the hell off. It looks to me like the kind of argument some people seem to think represent the "technicalities" people acquitted on sometimes, but in fact isn't one of those at all.
Try building a pool, not putting up a fence, putting up signs saying it's free for use at any time by anyone all over the place and advertising the fact that you'll be leaving town for a week, then trying to argue to a judge that it's not at all your fault when teens throw a kegger there and one of them drowns.
Deliberately making resources available to anonymous parties to do anything they like sounds like a great way to be charged with some form of criminal negligence, and probably held liable (to some degree, at least) in civil proceedings, too.
I'm having trouble thinking of a real-world analogy for it where you wouldn't be held responsible for that, in fact.
Most of what's shitty about it is the MyISAM storage engine, which does approximately dick-all for enforcing integrity. It doesn't even have foreign key constraints. IIRC it can't do transactions either. The trade off is that it's slightly faster for some operations *eyeroll*
If MyISAM is good enough for your application then you may as well—no exaggeration—just use MongoDB or something.
InnoDB is much better. It's got some of the same not-confidence-inspiring quirks shown in the video but at least it supports transactions and foreign key constraints.
Biggest remaining differences off the top of my head are that Postgres supports a shitload more data types and data operations (many through plugins) like stuff related to geographic data and key-value stores (hey, you got NoSQL in my SQL!), and that Postgres has real separate databases, not just separate schema like MySQL, the difference there being strict separation of the data, so you can't, say, do a SELECT across two databases or even tell that there are other databases if you've only got a user account on one of them.
Lots of other under-the-hood stuff, I'm sure, but those are the main ones I can think of from a user's perspective.
Postgres is way, way more powerful, MySQL is (slightly) more widely supported and (IMO) the free tools, both command line and GUI, for working with it are easier to learn and generally friendlier.
MySQL's a completely miserable excuse for a relational database if you use MyISAM; it's only a mostly miserable excuse for a relational database with InnoDB.
I haven't used my 360 or Wii for years, because there aren't any exclusive games out for them that really interest me.
I agree on the Wii (god that console sucks; plus, by the time you get a charger+batteries for its very hungry waggle sticks, a light bar that works more than 6ft away, and a full set of controllers+attachments because god knows no one wants to bring theirs over since they're the most annoying to sync/resync, it wasn't even cheap anymore), but the 360 has one must-have exclusive:
The updated Perfect Dark re-release.
If you haven't bought it, you should. It's glorious.
It's pretty sad that it's still a solid contender for best local multiplayer console FPS, all these years later. I guess that's a niche and ever-shrinking market these days, though:-(
Put Linux in VirtualBox on any machine that also runs Windows, unless you do lots of resource-intensive media and/or 3D work in Linux. Unless you're compiling huge programs very frequently or trying to run Blender, you won't notice the difference between that and native on even a semi-modern box. Bonus: you don't have to worry about updates blowing away your ndiswrapper config and wireless dropping out, or the crapshoot that is Linux sleep/hibernation, or upgrading your distro and finding that your audio is out, and now any page with Flash crashes X, and the only fix is "revert the relevant packages using the following 500 steps" because some dumbass decided to push alpha-level software to the front lines for absolutely no goddamn reason (yes, I'm still pissed at Ubuntu for that).
Switching from one OS to the other takes maybe 20 seconds, tops, or practically zero if whatever you're doing in Windows can be done while the virtual machine's still running.
It's not like Windows crashes much these days (unless you've got bad RAM or something's overheating) so you won't lose much stability; certainly not enough that dual-booting would result in less down time. Hell, X crashes more often than Windows, and since that usually means most of your unsaved work is gone anyway, that's not much better than a full system bounce.
As I wrote, it falls apart somewhat as you move in to more recent decades, which is when multi-author series, multi-author collections of short work, and most multi-author non-fiction volumes (that anyone's likely to have) will occur.
If that's the bulk of your library, the sure, a chronological ordering will suck.
For ~1940 and earlier, when even most non-fiction that's still read by anyone will be single-author, it's great. Classic works of science, mathematics, and the humanities all fit well in the system.
I do keep some things outside the chronology, like recent non-fic and the bulk of my mostly-shitty guilty-pleasure science fiction. My wife keeps her fantasy stuff separate. The more recent decades on the main shelves would be a cluttered mess with all our genre fic tossed in, and anyway we both browse that stuff differently from the rest.
If you're in to engineering reference books, collections of academic papers, 1920s textbooks, romance novels, spy thrillers, RPG manuals, or whatever then sure, consider using a different system:-)
Grouped by author, ordered chronologically by date of author's first major work.
Only way to go.
A friend of mine independently came to use a similar system, but he does it by author's birth (a bit easier) and does a bit of grouping by category (philosophy, literature, etc.)
Either system works great. Stats to fall apart near WWII, as in most people's libraries the dates get denser the nearer you approach now.
It's awesome having an ordering system that acts as a teaching tool. Better for idle browsing than simple alphabetical ordering, too, since works of similar style will tend to be near one another.
Slashdot Mirror
Like most every other good game on the N64, SotE deserves a re-release on a system with two analog sticks and a somewhat higher resolution.
Where have you been? PC gaming is in the middle of a renaissance.
Rock Paper Shotgun's Advent Calendar for 2012 is a good place to start.
I disliked a couple of those, and a few more I didn't play, but the rest are awesome. Add to that list Stealth Bastard, To the Moon, and a handful of decent console ports, twenty other games I'm forgetting right now, and it's been a hell of a year to be a (PC) gamer.
IMO, a real contender for GOTY for 2012 would be a free flash game (no, wait, it doesn't suck! Really!) called Frog Fractions. It may very well represent the end of gaming, the Platonic form of the video game made real. That sentence was only sort-of tongue in cheek. It's great.
They should leave a long-lived cookie to let the page know that you've already seen and closed the banner.
Is the Google in my Internet? I don't think I have the Google. My Internet is Comcast.
Our justice system only works (for certain definitions of "works") because we threaten insane sentences to force less-insane plea bargains.
We can't afford to have more than a tiny number of cases go to trial, or the system would break down. Not enough money, not enough judges, not enough lawyers.
I tried to be careful not to lump all libertarians in with them, nor even to take the maybe-controversial-to-some step of naming them libertarians (I only pointed out how they tend to identify themselves).
Sorry if I didn't convey that very well.
There are lots of very prolific posters on Slashdot (and the Internet in general) who think that "Caveat Emptor" should be our national motto, and that because you could become an expert on everything, information imbalances in our economic system aren't a huge problem, or, indeed, a problem at all.
Most of these people call themselves libertarians. I call them dipshits.
Yeah, in the last year or so especially they seem to have gone to shit.
I have to quote half the words I type in, and then it still sometimes decides to only give me three or four results for what I wanted, then a second section full of crap that has nothing to do with it.
The only new thing I like is the typo/misspelling detection, and that's only because it's actually helpful and very easy and straightforward to bypass entirely.
I think they're trying to make it easier for people who don't know how to search properly (I'm continually amazed by what a rare skill that is) but considering the hoops I have to jump through to keep it from fucking up, I can imagine how worthless it must have become for someone who doesn't know the "just do what I goddamn told you to" tricks.
The idea is that you can share code (say, data models) between the client and server. IMO this is an awful reason to suffer through Javascript, though.
Node in particular handles async IO for you, which means it saves you from learning threading, or an async IO framework in some other language like Python or Ruby, or learning Erlang, or any number of other better things you could do with your time. The cost is callback soup, and having to use Javascript.
Node's package manager, NPM, makes it super-easy to set up 5-line demos of WebSocket echo servers and such, which pulls a lot of people in. Tends to be messy as hell once you get past 100 lines or so (of Coffeescript, mind you, which is what you'll have to use to maintain your sanity even that long), especially if you need more than one source for IO (say, read from RabbitMQ and Redis, output over Websockets and XMPP, or whatever—basically anything you could use it for that's interesting). You pay for the up-front ease with constructs that get excessively complex later on, IMO.
Also, there's no excuse whatsoever to use it in a case where you're simply writing a REST api or a typical website. There are way, way better tools for that kind of thing, namely anything that's not NodeJS, with an appropriately-designed cache in front of it, and a well-configured webserver.
Are you talking about the book, or NodeJS itself?
Corporatism
It's because gaining 20 days a year of mandatory vacation time would mean infringing on the rights of people who want to work every single weekday. People who want vacation time are expected to bargain for it, probably making disproportionately large sacrifices to gain it (assuming they succeed at all).
I wish I were joking, or even exaggerating. No-one here gives a damn about the practical ability of most people to exercise their freedoms, so long as those freedoms exist in theory.
Last time I used it, it was far more prone to weird rendering problems and crashes (possibly a result of bad markup/code, but as a user of the browser I don't really care why those things happen) and the GUI still felt, as it had for years, like something out of Windows 95.
Not terrible, but a distant third for me. I could have put "*shudder*" next to Safari too, since the only browser I actually enjoy using right now is Chrome.
Maybe Mozilla's creative process will turn out to be cyclical and there'll be a new Phoenix project that'll give us a super-light-weight, plugin-friendly browser that renders pages reasonably well, and lacks a ton of UI fluff. Then in six or seven years that one will completely lose its way, and a few years later, after losing market share, they'll do it all over again.
I hope so, anyway, because I'd prefer something Mozilla backed to something Google backed.
All I know is launching Chrome with two dozen tabs open is faster than launching Firefox with two, and doesn't make my system fan kick on. It also doesn't make my other heavyweight applications less responsive like having FF open does; I get way more busy spinners and unresponsive GUI elements system-wide when FF is running. I can open a new tab without delay with tons of other tabs open, while FF is always sluggish to do the same even with only a couple tabs open.
Everyone where I work has noticed the same thing, and switched away from FF to Chrome or, occasionally, Safari, as a result. I don't think we have one FF fan left; it's joined the class of programs that we only open because we absolutely have to, and close as soon as possible.
Maybe it uses more memory, but I know that Chrome respects my time and the needs of other running applications much better than FF does. Don't know why, but it's not a subtle difference; more than once the answer to "why the hell is my system running like crap?" has been "oh, because I accidentally forgot to close FF".
Phoenix through Firefox1.x were light browsers.
Modern Firefox is so damn bloated that it might be the fattest browser on any system I own.
On my work laptop, only three things kick on the system fan: 1) compiling, 2) opening Eclipse or doing anything in it whatsoever, 3) launching Firefox with one or two tab set to auto-open.
Which is why I use Chrome now, and if I couldn't for some reason then I'd run Safari or (*shudder*) Opera.
Firefox is a browser of last resort, like IE. It's a clunky beast like Netscape/Mozilla used to be. It's as if they've forgotten why they created Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox in the first place...
What does "help" mean, in an evolutionary context?
Seems to me that culture is just another factor to which an organism may, over generations, adapt.
Interesting, didn't know that. Probably falling in to the error of mixing up (part of) a common definition of a word with a technical (legal, in this case) one.
Exactly what running a Tor exit node has always struck me as, legally speaking: negligence.
You aren't liable for the child porn (or whatever), but it seems to me that you could be held liable for intentionally turning on anonymizing software, then intentionally opening it up to the entire world. If you've got the know-how to do that, you ought to be aware that there's a decent chance your equipment will be used for illegal activity. You can't just shrug your shoulders at a judge and say, "well, I didn't know with certainty that anything bad was happening" and expect that to fly.
It's practically the "I'm not touching you!" of legal defenses, IMO.
(IANAL)
But in those cases you're not going out of your way to hide the identities of the perpetrators, or to deliberately keep yourself ignorant of how your resources are being used.
The whole "I made sure I couldn't know what was going on and you couldn't know who was doing what, then advertised that fact widely, but I didn't personally commit a crime so I can't be held responsible at all" seems like exactly the kind of argument that would (rightly) piss a judge way the hell off. It looks to me like the kind of argument some people seem to think represent the "technicalities" people acquitted on sometimes, but in fact isn't one of those at all.
Try building a pool, not putting up a fence, putting up signs saying it's free for use at any time by anyone all over the place and advertising the fact that you'll be leaving town for a week, then trying to argue to a judge that it's not at all your fault when teens throw a kegger there and one of them drowns.
Deliberately making resources available to anonymous parties to do anything they like sounds like a great way to be charged with some form of criminal negligence, and probably held liable (to some degree, at least) in civil proceedings, too.
I'm having trouble thinking of a real-world analogy for it where you wouldn't be held responsible for that, in fact.
Most of what's shitty about it is the MyISAM storage engine, which does approximately dick-all for enforcing integrity. It doesn't even have foreign key constraints. IIRC it can't do transactions either. The trade off is that it's slightly faster for some operations *eyeroll*
If MyISAM is good enough for your application then you may as well—no exaggeration—just use MongoDB or something.
InnoDB is much better. It's got some of the same not-confidence-inspiring quirks shown in the video but at least it supports transactions and foreign key constraints.
Biggest remaining differences off the top of my head are that Postgres supports a shitload more data types and data operations (many through plugins) like stuff related to geographic data and key-value stores (hey, you got NoSQL in my SQL!), and that Postgres has real separate databases, not just separate schema like MySQL, the difference there being strict separation of the data, so you can't, say, do a SELECT across two databases or even tell that there are other databases if you've only got a user account on one of them.
Lots of other under-the-hood stuff, I'm sure, but those are the main ones I can think of from a user's perspective.
Postgres is way, way more powerful, MySQL is (slightly) more widely supported and (IMO) the free tools, both command line and GUI, for working with it are easier to learn and generally friendlier.
MySQL's a completely miserable excuse for a relational database if you use MyISAM; it's only a mostly miserable excuse for a relational database with InnoDB.
I agree on the Wii (god that console sucks; plus, by the time you get a charger+batteries for its very hungry waggle sticks, a light bar that works more than 6ft away, and a full set of controllers+attachments because god knows no one wants to bring theirs over since they're the most annoying to sync/resync, it wasn't even cheap anymore), but the 360 has one must-have exclusive:
The updated Perfect Dark re-release.
If you haven't bought it, you should. It's glorious.
It's pretty sad that it's still a solid contender for best local multiplayer console FPS, all these years later. I guess that's a niche and ever-shrinking market these days, though :-(
Put Linux in VirtualBox on any machine that also runs Windows, unless you do lots of resource-intensive media and/or 3D work in Linux. Unless you're compiling huge programs very frequently or trying to run Blender, you won't notice the difference between that and native on even a semi-modern box. Bonus: you don't have to worry about updates blowing away your ndiswrapper config and wireless dropping out, or the crapshoot that is Linux sleep/hibernation, or upgrading your distro and finding that your audio is out, and now any page with Flash crashes X, and the only fix is "revert the relevant packages using the following 500 steps" because some dumbass decided to push alpha-level software to the front lines for absolutely no goddamn reason (yes, I'm still pissed at Ubuntu for that).
Switching from one OS to the other takes maybe 20 seconds, tops, or practically zero if whatever you're doing in Windows can be done while the virtual machine's still running.
It's not like Windows crashes much these days (unless you've got bad RAM or something's overheating) so you won't lose much stability; certainly not enough that dual-booting would result in less down time. Hell, X crashes more often than Windows, and since that usually means most of your unsaved work is gone anyway, that's not much better than a full system bounce.
The "only way to go" thing was hyperbole, yeah.
As I wrote, it falls apart somewhat as you move in to more recent decades, which is when multi-author series, multi-author collections of short work, and most multi-author non-fiction volumes (that anyone's likely to have) will occur.
If that's the bulk of your library, the sure, a chronological ordering will suck.
For ~1940 and earlier, when even most non-fiction that's still read by anyone will be single-author, it's great. Classic works of science, mathematics, and the humanities all fit well in the system.
I do keep some things outside the chronology, like recent non-fic and the bulk of my mostly-shitty guilty-pleasure science fiction. My wife keeps her fantasy stuff separate. The more recent decades on the main shelves would be a cluttered mess with all our genre fic tossed in, and anyway we both browse that stuff differently from the rest.
If you're in to engineering reference books, collections of academic papers, 1920s textbooks, romance novels, spy thrillers, RPG manuals, or whatever then sure, consider using a different system :-)
Grouped by author, ordered chronologically by date of author's first major work.
Only way to go.
A friend of mine independently came to use a similar system, but he does it by author's birth (a bit easier) and does a bit of grouping by category (philosophy, literature, etc.)
Either system works great. Stats to fall apart near WWII, as in most people's libraries the dates get denser the nearer you approach now.
It's awesome having an ordering system that acts as a teaching tool. Better for idle browsing than simple alphabetical ordering, too, since works of similar style will tend to be near one another.