I never learned to touch type the "correct" way (i.e., homerow keys and all that) but after ten years of programming, I have no trouble pounding out hundreds of words per minute without glancing at the keys. If your hands still haven't gotten the hang of things after twenty years, I seriously doubt you're going to have any luck forcing them to learn.
It really sounds like there's some kind of spinal disconnect going on here. Your fingers should have learned where all the keys are by now, and you should be able to hit them without even thinking about it.
In GTA3 and Vice City, if you don't complete a mission, you can't accept any more missions from that source until it's completed. Of course, you can still run around all you want, and you can go on missions from other sources, but at a certain point, the storyline requires that incomplete mission to be completed, and before long you'll run out of other missions you can take. If you want to reach the end of the game, you must complete every mission.
Hmm. Last time I installed Windows XP Pro SP1, I'm pretty sure I only got a little system tray balloon popup notifying me that auto-updating was enabled by default. I could be wrong, though. That was a few months ago.
The article throws around big angry words like "required" and "mandatory", but what it really boils down to is that Microsoft is just talking about enabling the existing auto-update functionality by default. The confusing thing is, they already do this.
When you install Windows XP, auto-update is enabled by default. You do get a little message notifying you of this, but it's enabled until you turn it off manually. In addition, the recently-released Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 enables auto-update without even informing you, even if you had manually disabled it prior to installing the service pack. Microsoft is already doing what this article seems to imply they're only considering doing. Where's the news here?
PGE park is used for a lot more than just baseball. In addition, there's a heavily-used lightrail stop just across the street from the park, which would probably benefit from free WiFi as well. Still, the image of some dork reading Slashdot during a ball game and catching a fly ball in the face is pretty hilarious.
Name one publisher, game developer, or other entity that has gone out and hired over 100 quality assurance testers for the specific purpose of testing a multiplayer game. Or, better yet, name one that has hired over 1,000.
You won't be able to, but even if a company had done that, they'd be paying an enormous chunk of money for an unrealistic testing environment when they could just release a free demo and get the game tested by potentially hundreds of thousands of real people on real configurations on the real Internet, and they wouldn't have to pay a dime for it other than the bandwidth costs for hosting the demo download.
Now, which course of action seems to make more business sense to you?
In the case of a single player demo, I would agree with you, but multiplayer demos serve a very useful purpose. There's just no better way to test a multiplayer game than for a whole lot of real people to actually test it in real-world situations. This has been the case with every major multiplayer game I can think of released in the last ten years.
Perhaps you have more software development and quality assurance experience than I do. Please, explain to me how one goes about testing the limits of a multiplayer game without getting hundreds, perhaps thousands of people to play it online, in the environment for which it was intended. Do you expect the game developer to hire hundreds of QA testers and set up hundreds of machines, each with different hardware and a separate wide-area Internet connection? Ha! Not likely.
Furthermore, there is nothing in the definition of the word "demonstration" that implies that the demonstration must exactly reflect the nature or workings of the thing being demonstrated. A demonstration is an *example* of the final product, it is not necessarily a fractal representation of the final product itself.
You didn't just step out of a time machine, did you? You're not a visitor from the past, are you? You do realize that multiplayer demos of first person shooters have been pretty standard fare ever since Quake, right?
There's just no better way to test multiplayer code than to release a demo to the public and see what bugs crop up. The fact that the demo helps give the game publicity is really just a nice side effect -- they're probably primarily interested in working the kinks out of the multiplayer system.
While I love NewEgg.com, and while they've never given me any reason to suspect anything, you should be aware that their user feedback policy clearly states that they don't consider the user forums a place for product reviews, and that they reserve the right to remove negative reviews without notice or justification. I'd be sure to check other sites to make sure that the user reviews that made it to NewEgg.com aren't just the good ones.
Considering I had to rip the case off my Cappuccino and rig an old AMD retail heatsink and fan on top of the processor (which was a 1GHz Celeron) just to keep it from overheating constantly, they'd have some major heat issues with a cluster of Cappuccinos. Not that you were being serious or anything.
I've tried on numerous occasions to contact TigerDirect regarding gaping security holes in their site, and I've never received a response. Perhaps the only reliable way to get a response from them is to post a story on Slashdot.
This game is LOADED with extras and other cool stuff. The Warchowski Brothers are HARDCORE gamers and went to enormous lengths to make sure that you get your money's worth on this game.
It doesn't matter to me what character I play the game as. The gameplay is still crappy and not worth my fifty bucks. And I can download the Animatrix episodes for free.
P.S. Read the PC requirements for this game before playing it. My money sez that you need to upgrade your PC.
I never said the game was slow. I just said it was crappy. The framerate is great, it's just that the graphics suck. Even if the graphics didn't suck, the gameplay still would. The fact that they both suck just makes me miss my $50 even more.
How do I store my CDs? Digitally. Whenever I buy a CD, whether it's music or data, it gets ripped straight to my hard drive and tossed in a corner. Every so often I'll go pick up the old CDs from the corner and throw them away or distribute them throughout the house for use as coasters. If I ever need a physical copy of something again, I just burn it to a CD-R from the image on my hard drive, since CD-Rs are so cheap.
Of course, I am running out of places to store my DVDs...my hard drive isn't quite big enough for all of them yet...
Is there some reason why this image, which is mostly black with just a few colored fingernail-sized areas, needs to be a 419K JPEG? When I converted it to a 69K PNG, I couldn't even tell the two images apart.
"I have noticed that framerates get very-low in large area locations, but I think the recent patches will fix it."
The patch did nothing to improve my performance. In fact, after installing the patch, the game now crashes even more frequently than it did before, which was already too frequent. And whatever you do, for godssake, DON'T hit ALT-TAB while playing!
I bought it. It sucks. Graphics are terrible, gameplay is like a half-assed version of Max Payne (which was SUCH a better game), and the hour of additional footage is complete crap (not to mention it's all encoded in shitty low-quality DivX). Plus the game's performance is absolutely horrendous. That's $50 down the drain.
How ironic. I just happened to be bored at work, so I popped open my laptop and attempted to connect to a wireless network from a nearby office. Lo and behold, they aren't using WEP and they're running a DHCP server. The first thing I did after connecting was browse to Slashdot, and I find this article at the top of the page.
I'll try saying this one last time, and this is it.
The quote mentioned nothing about released versions. The quote said specifically that MySQL did not have working subselect support. It did not say anything about released subselect support. Therefore, no matter what your opinions are on whether alpha versions of software are "real" or not, the MySQL team has implemented working subselects, and you'll note that that is exactly what I said in my initial comment. If you're reading anything else into it, that's your problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried several times, but it refused to submit my score. Said the email server was down. Oh well.
Gross speed: 107wpm
Errors: 1 word
Net speed: 106wpm
Accuracy: 99%
Okay, okay, I exaggerated. I haven't measured in years, but last time I checked I think I averaged around 120wpm.
It really sounds like there's some kind of spinal disconnect going on here. Your fingers should have learned where all the keys are by now, and you should be able to hit them without even thinking about it.
In GTA3 and Vice City, if you don't complete a mission, you can't accept any more missions from that source until it's completed. Of course, you can still run around all you want, and you can go on missions from other sources, but at a certain point, the storyline requires that incomplete mission to be completed, and before long you'll run out of other missions you can take. If you want to reach the end of the game, you must complete every mission.
Hmm. Last time I installed Windows XP Pro SP1, I'm pretty sure I only got a little system tray balloon popup notifying me that auto-updating was enabled by default. I could be wrong, though. That was a few months ago.
When you install Windows XP, auto-update is enabled by default. You do get a little message notifying you of this, but it's enabled until you turn it off manually. In addition, the recently-released Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 enables auto-update without even informing you, even if you had manually disabled it prior to installing the service pack. Microsoft is already doing what this article seems to imply they're only considering doing. Where's the news here?
PGE park is used for a lot more than just baseball. In addition, there's a heavily-used lightrail stop just across the street from the park, which would probably benefit from free WiFi as well. Still, the image of some dork reading Slashdot during a ball game and catching a fly ball in the face is pretty hilarious.
So you're telling me they edited a major motion picture entirely on Linux? Right.
You won't be able to, but even if a company had done that, they'd be paying an enormous chunk of money for an unrealistic testing environment when they could just release a free demo and get the game tested by potentially hundreds of thousands of real people on real configurations on the real Internet, and they wouldn't have to pay a dime for it other than the bandwidth costs for hosting the demo download.
Now, which course of action seems to make more business sense to you?
In the case of a single player demo, I would agree with you, but multiplayer demos serve a very useful purpose. There's just no better way to test a multiplayer game than for a whole lot of real people to actually test it in real-world situations. This has been the case with every major multiplayer game I can think of released in the last ten years.
Furthermore, there is nothing in the definition of the word "demonstration" that implies that the demonstration must exactly reflect the nature or workings of the thing being demonstrated. A demonstration is an *example* of the final product, it is not necessarily a fractal representation of the final product itself.
There's just no better way to test multiplayer code than to release a demo to the public and see what bugs crop up. The fact that the demo helps give the game publicity is really just a nice side effect -- they're probably primarily interested in working the kinks out of the multiplayer system.
While I love NewEgg.com, and while they've never given me any reason to suspect anything, you should be aware that their user feedback policy clearly states that they don't consider the user forums a place for product reviews, and that they reserve the right to remove negative reviews without notice or justification. I'd be sure to check other sites to make sure that the user reviews that made it to NewEgg.com aren't just the good ones.
Considering I had to rip the case off my Cappuccino and rig an old AMD retail heatsink and fan on top of the processor (which was a 1GHz Celeron) just to keep it from overheating constantly, they'd have some major heat issues with a cluster of Cappuccinos. Not that you were being serious or anything.
I've tried on numerous occasions to contact TigerDirect regarding gaping security holes in their site, and I've never received a response. Perhaps the only reliable way to get a response from them is to post a story on Slashdot.
It doesn't matter to me what character I play the game as. The gameplay is still crappy and not worth my fifty bucks. And I can download the Animatrix episodes for free.
P.S. Read the PC requirements for this game before playing it. My money sez that you need to upgrade your PC.
I never said the game was slow. I just said it was crappy. The framerate is great, it's just that the graphics suck. Even if the graphics didn't suck, the gameplay still would. The fact that they both suck just makes me miss my $50 even more.
Of course, I am running out of places to store my DVDs...my hard drive isn't quite big enough for all of them yet...
This was PNG-8, which is limited to a 255-color palette. There was some dithering involved, thus the reason for my comment.
Is there some reason why this image, which is mostly black with just a few colored fingernail-sized areas, needs to be a 419K JPEG? When I converted it to a 69K PNG, I couldn't even tell the two images apart.
The patch did nothing to improve my performance. In fact, after installing the patch, the game now crashes even more frequently than it did before, which was already too frequent. And whatever you do, for godssake, DON'T hit ALT-TAB while playing!
I bought it. It sucks. Graphics are terrible, gameplay is like a half-assed version of Max Payne (which was SUCH a better game), and the hour of additional footage is complete crap (not to mention it's all encoded in shitty low-quality DivX). Plus the game's performance is absolutely horrendous. That's $50 down the drain.
Hooray for free (as in beer) wireless!
Touché. I initially interpreted"all kinds" as meaning "a lot", whereas he may have meant "every kind". So you probably have a valid point.
The quote mentioned nothing about released versions. The quote said specifically that MySQL did not have working subselect support. It did not say anything about released subselect support. Therefore, no matter what your opinions are on whether alpha versions of software are "real" or not, the MySQL team has implemented working subselects, and you'll note that that is exactly what I said in my initial comment. If you're reading anything else into it, that's your problem.
The end.