Yes, I would also like to see some more developers and support people get behind Desura for Linux and get it working properly across multiple Linux distros. Sadly, last time I looked, Desura had Linux game installers that fail, mainly due to library dependencies, while the Ubuntu software center can install the same game properly. There was no clear indication of which specific distro it was expected to be compliant with.
It would be way cool to have the one app responsible for finding, installing, launching, and also for browsing and adding mods to all those games which can run on Linux, plus hooking in community and support forums. I believe it has a valuable niche for all those games and mods which fall outside of the Steam-for-Linux catalog.
Hard to remember exactly what I saw back then, but pics I have found rule out an Apollo, it could have been a Gemini or Mercury module. Its only curiosity, but I won't be getting close to a space museum in the near future to see anything like it.
Thanx man, but I'm pretty sure I have tried searching on all the terms I could think of. There does not seem to be a lot of history recorded on what space capsules they hauled over here to New Zealand to show us.
When I was very young a capsule was brought here on tour (New Zealand, sometime around 1970-ish), but I cannot find out which one it was. I assume it was an Apollo re-entry capsule. Would somebody have a history of such things?
If I was registering a new company, the last thing I would want to give my company or servers etc is a name that already pulls up millions of pages in a simple web search. It just sounds like somebody was clueless and doesn't even know how people find services on the internet these days.
Realistically a large IO bound task is something you hand off to low-end process to get it done as fast as ppssible. Would you over-ride the O/S to transfer that 10gigs in 100 meg blocks and report each bit back to your high level UI so that th progress bar is accurate?
"...I found that JS became much more predictable once I learned a little more about what was going on..."
I am sure many of us have inherited code written more on a superstition than an understanding of JavaScript. When badly written it can be hard as all hell to trace the errors. However when it is understood and used correctly it can be very powerful while providing an elegant and often very short-and-simple solution to what you are trying to achieve. I read a book recently, JavaScript The Good Parts [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596517748.do] which, while it was a little dry to read, did a damned good job of pointing out the misconceptions and wrong ways to use types and classes, and pointed out the correct patterns for using the power of JavaScript correctly.
That book, combined with the introduction of jQuery, gave JavaScript a whole new level of fun, at least for me. Of course on the down side it made me want to rip thru years of old code (which I have not been allowed to replace/delete yet) and rewrite it in a fraction of the amount of JavaScript code that is currently used to badly achieve its purpose.
I have to wonder if those who decry JavaScript the most have the least understanding of how to use it properly - altho I have to admit, it was never intuitively apparent exactly what were the right and wrong ways of using types, functions, classes and closures.
I had a dead drive with a relatives photos on it once, and came across an identical drive a while later. The PCB connections and crimp-ons looked far too fiddly for my level of tool experience, but on close examination I found one surface-mount capacitor appeared to have lost its magic black smoke. With a fine soldering tip and some patience I managed to remove the matching capacitor from the working drive and stick it to the dead one. This worked long enough to retrieve the personal files off the drive. I was not prepared to use the drive for any longer than that tho.
Appreciate your right to an anonymous moan about Steam, but have you really had a lot of experience of how things used to be?
In the past I remember many horrible experiences while attempting to install games from a handful of CDs or from 2 or 3 DVDs released by a publisher who had their own idea of how complicated and needlessly annoying the process should be, and then the hassle of finding and inserting the DVD to be allowed to start up a game, every time I wanted to play it.
All I know is a lot of problems went away once I started using Steam, and it has never been easier from the point of deciding to buy a game to the point of kicking of a game session.
I have not noticed any of the mentioned crashy and buggy stuff, altho I have not purchased EVERY game they publish. My guess is bad graphics hardware or drivers. Invasive? what? the steam client that you can configure to start up automatically or not? What is invasive?
Yes, use SourceForge. I put my open source project up on there and my users have BOTH posted a bug report on the project. Easy to find whenever I need to think about maybe checking it out to fix it.
And yet if I forget that I am using such crap software and copy something off a web page and paste it into Lotus Notes, the whole app freezes for over a minute. Seriously, copy-and-paste was adopted a long long time ago and most people nowdays assume that they can just do it.
So you drive in Auckland? heh. I guess that short sighted lane switching idiocy is more wide spread than just here.
I like cruise control, and I like to be able to roll along at a constant steady pace. I have wondered about when cars may be able to communicate their cruise control status to each other. At the very least, when approaching another car from behind, your car should be able to ask if you want to tag on behind, and then adjust the cruise control to match and maintain a certain distance behind the car of your choice.
I would like to think that such a thing would be accepted eventually and become widely enough used for it to be safe and reliable. Unfortunately there are many, at least here in NZ, who appear to think that a large chunk of something valuable has been carved off of their body every time another car gets past them on the road, and others who appear to be approaching some kind of seizure if they get stuck behind a car which has a gap of 1 metre or more in front of it. Sadly it may take more than technology to fix some of these attitudes.
I don't believe you can justify that statement unless you are looking for drivers for something extremely old. The driver support site has been very user friendly for several years now. The quality of the drivers may not have been so great however.
I am having constant bsod problems also, for about 6 months now, on Windows 7 with a HD4850. It doesn't have any problems running games but there is a random driver error when accessing the PC externally, e.g. using the media services from my tv. Unfortunately I have not been able to find a historical driver to fix this, and the Windows suggested driver has the same problem.
I have to say after many years of being reasonably happy with my ATI card that I will not be buying another one.
Well I can still remember the time and place where people thought it was ok to suck on a fag in public. They would even lend a fag to their friends or co-workers, who had run out of cigarettes at the time. Then a fag became something entirely different.
Actually that term is not uncommon and I have heard a number of IT professionals use it, even an IT manager in a fairly large company. The only issue I have is that some pronounce it like pewter and some more like pooter. I prefer pooter myself. And why not talk about them in a way that makes them sound ridiculous? How seriously should you take them?
I have a small bedside lamp which used to be sufficient for reading paper books with, but found it to be useless when trying to read my new Sony Reader. Not sure why that is, but ended up using a cover with built-in light now.
Also the bus ride home during winter will require the light, interior lighting quality varies and last winter the drivers usedta turn off the lights randomly for some reason.
If you read the article carefully, it seems his name is the equivalent of "whose name has been withheld", and sure enough, the newspapers here are full of stories... "the drunk driver, whose name has been withheld...", "the armed bank robber, whose name has been withheld...", "the child rapist, whose name..."
Actually my ship will have a force-field extending out half a light year ahead, which is incorporated into the mass-convertor. We won't need to slow down at all to pick a planet up for fuel. I heard some ethecists mention the need to stop and check for life forms but I'm not sure if they were going to be on board for the first trip.
That has nothing to do with TF2 at all. There is no sudden change in the challenge of playing, or any real effect on the overall team dynamic or the need to keep moving and working on the team objective. Purchasing extras instead of waiting for them is most likely something you will do for your own personal amusement, after weighing up how much money you care to spend on a frivolity.
For instance, I don't really bother with extras for certain player roles that I don't use. I don't care if the spy has a new backstabbing weapon with nifty new sound effects; if a enemy spy gets behind me (and has clue) then I am in much the same predicament, regardless of whether said spy purchased what he is stabbing me with or if he just happens to never sleep.
Maybe you are choosing the wrong server. Some server descriptions include words like "achievements server" or "trading server". I don't use them expecting hard out action, I choose other servers. There is most certainly a lot of full on action going on, and play to win usually means support your team to make it win.
Look around, cities, states, countries can barely afford to repair their roads. We are lucky to get timer based traffic lights here, the cheaper option is ridiculous round-abouts where the main flow at peak commuter times makes it nearly impossible to travel in the opposite direction. Traffic lights with sensible and convenient functionality? Sounds like 50's style sci fi visions of the year 2000. How many of those early authors predicted that we wouldn't even be able to do proper repairs on our major highways by now? The New Zealand answer is to reduce the speed limit to suit the unsafe roads. And its not just poor little islands like NZ, there were reports just last year about certain states in the US not being able to fund road repairs and considering tearing up their hard-top to go back to cheaper loose gravel surfaces for anything that wasn't a main inter-state roadway. Sure, we SHOULD be able to make clever futuristic technilogical enhancements to our civil infrastructure, but it won't happen unless it can be done cheaper than the current systems, which I don't see happening.
The job of a tester is to put together a meaningful plan - understand how the software is going to correspond to the business needs and test the main logical paths as well as some optional and failure paths and find out what the software really does as opposed to what people think it should do.
Yeah. What he said. Sure, misconceptions abound, but when the role really is "software test engineer", the job is a lot more important than just running scripts and trying to make the software break. I think this may vary vastly between employers, and in some (or most?) situations the management themselves probably don't understand what they should be asking for from their testers. The reality is destructive testing only covers a portion of the job, while to do the job well a lot of knowledge and imagination can be needed to grasp the entire scope and complexity of the software, knowing what goes on in the back-end data, what the users see and believe is going on with the particular parts of the s/w that they use, how action in one person's role effects what is seen by a user in another role - the tester needs to see the entire view which individual users may never be involved in.
I have great respect for the testers I work with (not least because they can handle a grumpy developer without hitting me) and often prefer to go to the tester instead of the B/A for answers. Development environments may differ, but when I have a nasty bug to hunt down which requires data to be set up in multiple integrated software solutions to get just such an error to occur between them, I can't imagine what I would do without somebody there with the knowledge and patience to go thru the entire scenario to reach the point where he can say "now press that button and watch what happens".
Sure, its still annoying when the tester comes back and tells me that little Bobby Tables just broke my database, but yeah, they do need to do the simple basics first as well I guess.
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Yes, I would also like to see some more developers and support people get behind Desura for Linux and get it working properly across multiple Linux distros.
Sadly, last time I looked, Desura had Linux game installers that fail, mainly due to library dependencies, while the Ubuntu software center can install the same game properly. There was no clear indication of which specific distro it was expected to be compliant with.
It would be way cool to have the one app responsible for finding, installing, launching, and also for browsing and adding mods to all those games which can run on Linux, plus hooking in community and support forums. I believe it has a valuable niche for all those games and mods which fall outside of the Steam-for-Linux catalog.
Thanx, that sounds like a likely contender. Last time I was at MOTAT they only had a scale model of a capsule.
Still, nice to know what it was.
Hard to remember exactly what I saw back then, but pics I have found rule out an Apollo, it could have been a Gemini or Mercury module.
Its only curiosity, but I won't be getting close to a space museum in the near future to see anything like it.
Thanx man, but I'm pretty sure I have tried searching on all the terms I could think of.
There does not seem to be a lot of history recorded on what space capsules they hauled over here to New Zealand to show us.
When I was very young a capsule was brought here on tour (New Zealand, sometime around 1970-ish), but I cannot find out which one it was. I assume it was an Apollo re-entry capsule. Would somebody have a history of such things?
If I was registering a new company, the last thing I would want to give my company or servers etc is a name that already pulls up millions of pages in a simple web search.
It just sounds like somebody was clueless and doesn't even know how people find services on the internet these days.
Realistically a large IO bound task is something you hand off to low-end process to get it done as fast as ppssible. Would you over-ride the O/S to transfer that 10gigs in 100 meg blocks and report each bit back to your high level UI so that th progress bar is accurate?
"...I found that JS became much more predictable once I learned a little more about what was going on..."
I am sure many of us have inherited code written more on a superstition than an understanding of JavaScript. When badly written it can be hard as all hell to trace the errors. However when it is understood and used correctly it can be very powerful while providing an elegant and often very short-and-simple solution to what you are trying to achieve. I read a book recently, JavaScript The Good Parts [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596517748.do] which, while it was a little dry to read, did a damned good job of pointing out the misconceptions and wrong ways to use types and classes, and pointed out the correct patterns for using the power of JavaScript correctly.
That book, combined with the introduction of jQuery, gave JavaScript a whole new level of fun, at least for me. Of course on the down side it made me want to rip thru years of old code (which I have not been allowed to replace/delete yet) and rewrite it in a fraction of the amount of JavaScript code that is currently used to badly achieve its purpose.
I have to wonder if those who decry JavaScript the most have the least understanding of how to use it properly - altho I have to admit, it was never intuitively apparent exactly what were the right and wrong ways of using types, functions, classes and closures.
I had a dead drive with a relatives photos on it once, and came across an identical drive a while later. The PCB connections and crimp-ons looked far too fiddly for my level of tool experience, but on close examination I found one surface-mount capacitor appeared to have lost its magic black smoke.
With a fine soldering tip and some patience I managed to remove the matching capacitor from the working drive and stick it to the dead one. This worked long enough to retrieve the personal files off the drive. I was not prepared to use the drive for any longer than that tho.
Appreciate your right to an anonymous moan about Steam, but have you really had a lot of experience of how things used to be?
In the past I remember many horrible experiences while attempting to install games from a handful of CDs or from 2 or 3 DVDs released by a publisher who had their own idea of how complicated and needlessly annoying the process should be, and then the hassle of finding and inserting the DVD to be allowed to start up a game, every time I wanted to play it.
All I know is a lot of problems went away once I started using Steam, and it has never been easier from the point of deciding to buy a game to the point of kicking of a game session.
I have not noticed any of the mentioned crashy and buggy stuff, altho I have not purchased EVERY game they publish. My guess is bad graphics hardware or drivers. Invasive? what? the steam client that you can configure to start up automatically or not? What is invasive?
Yes, use SourceForge. I put my open source project up on there and my users have BOTH posted a bug report on the project. Easy to find whenever I need to think about maybe checking it out to fix it.
And yet if I forget that I am using such crap software and copy something off a web page and paste it into Lotus Notes, the whole app freezes for over a minute.
Seriously, copy-and-paste was adopted a long long time ago and most people nowdays assume that they can just do it.
So you drive in Auckland? heh. I guess that short sighted lane switching idiocy is more wide spread than just here.
I like cruise control, and I like to be able to roll along at a constant steady pace. I have wondered about when cars may be able to communicate their cruise control status to each other. At the very least, when approaching another car from behind, your car should be able to ask if you want to tag on behind, and then adjust the cruise control to match and maintain a certain distance behind the car of your choice.
I would like to think that such a thing would be accepted eventually and become widely enough used for it to be safe and reliable. Unfortunately there are many, at least here in NZ, who appear to think that a large chunk of something valuable has been carved off of their body every time another car gets past them on the road, and others who appear to be approaching some kind of seizure if they get stuck behind a car which has a gap of 1 metre or more in front of it. Sadly it may take more than technology to fix some of these attitudes.
You think punch cards are bad? IBM is till pushing Lotus Notes as an email application.
Think I would prefer punch cards.
I don't believe you can justify that statement unless you are looking for drivers for something extremely old. The driver support site has been very user friendly for several years now. The quality of the drivers may not have been so great however.
I am having constant bsod problems also, for about 6 months now, on Windows 7 with a HD4850. It doesn't have any problems running games but there is a random driver error when accessing the PC externally, e.g. using the media services from my tv. Unfortunately I have not been able to find a historical driver to fix this, and the Windows suggested driver has the same problem.
I have to say after many years of being reasonably happy with my ATI card that I will not be buying another one.
Well I can still remember the time and place where people thought it was ok to suck on a fag in public.
They would even lend a fag to their friends or co-workers, who had run out of cigarettes at the time.
Then a fag became something entirely different.
Actually that term is not uncommon and I have heard a number of IT professionals use it, even an IT manager in a fairly large company. The only issue I have is that some pronounce it like pewter and some more like pooter. I prefer pooter myself.
And why not talk about them in a way that makes them sound ridiculous? How seriously should you take them?
I have a small bedside lamp which used to be sufficient for reading paper books with, but found it to be useless when trying to read my new Sony Reader. Not sure why that is, but ended up using a cover with built-in light now.
Also the bus ride home during winter will require the light, interior lighting quality varies and last winter the drivers usedta turn off the lights randomly for some reason.
If you read the article carefully, it seems his name is the equivalent of "whose name has been withheld", and sure enough, the newspapers here are full of stories... "the drunk driver, whose name has been withheld...", "the armed bank robber, whose name has been withheld...", "the child rapist, whose name..."
Actually my ship will have a force-field extending out half a light year ahead, which is incorporated into the mass-convertor. We won't need to slow down at all to pick a planet up for fuel. I heard some ethecists mention the need to stop and check for life forms but I'm not sure if they were going to be on board for the first trip.
That has nothing to do with TF2 at all. There is no sudden change in the challenge of playing, or any real effect on the overall team dynamic or the need to keep moving and working on the team objective. Purchasing extras instead of waiting for them is most likely something you will do for your own personal amusement, after weighing up how much money you care to spend on a frivolity.
For instance, I don't really bother with extras for certain player roles that I don't use. I don't care if the spy has a new backstabbing weapon with nifty new sound effects; if a enemy spy gets behind me (and has clue) then I am in much the same predicament, regardless of whether said spy purchased what he is stabbing me with or if he just happens to never sleep.
Maybe you are choosing the wrong server. Some server descriptions include words like "achievements server" or "trading server". I don't use them expecting hard out action, I choose other servers. There is most certainly a lot of full on action going on, and play to win usually means support your team to make it win.
Look around, cities, states, countries can barely afford to repair their roads. We are lucky to get timer based traffic lights here, the cheaper option is ridiculous round-abouts where the main flow at peak commuter times makes it nearly impossible to travel in the opposite direction.
Traffic lights with sensible and convenient functionality? Sounds like 50's style sci fi visions of the year 2000. How many of those early authors predicted that we wouldn't even be able to do proper repairs on our major highways by now? The New Zealand answer is to reduce the speed limit to suit the unsafe roads.
And its not just poor little islands like NZ, there were reports just last year about certain states in the US not being able to fund road repairs and considering tearing up their hard-top to go back to cheaper loose gravel surfaces for anything that wasn't a main inter-state roadway.
Sure, we SHOULD be able to make clever futuristic technilogical enhancements to our civil infrastructure, but it won't happen unless it can be done cheaper than the current systems, which I don't see happening.
The job of a tester is to put together a meaningful plan - understand how the software is going to correspond to the business needs and test the main logical paths as well as some optional and failure paths and find out what the software really does as opposed to what people think it should do.
Yeah. What he said. Sure, misconceptions abound, but when the role really is "software test engineer", the job is a lot more important than just running scripts and trying to make the software break. I think this may vary vastly between employers, and in some (or most?) situations the management themselves probably don't understand what they should be asking for from their testers. The reality is destructive testing only covers a portion of the job, while to do the job well a lot of knowledge and imagination can be needed to grasp the entire scope and complexity of the software, knowing what goes on in the back-end data, what the users see and believe is going on with the particular parts of the s/w that they use, how action in one person's role effects what is seen by a user in another role - the tester needs to see the entire view which individual users may never be involved in.
I have great respect for the testers I work with (not least because they can handle a grumpy developer without hitting me) and often prefer to go to the tester instead of the B/A for answers. Development environments may differ, but when I have a nasty bug to hunt down which requires data to be set up in multiple integrated software solutions to get just such an error to occur between them, I can't imagine what I would do without somebody there with the knowledge and patience to go thru the entire scenario to reach the point where he can say "now press that button and watch what happens".
Sure, its still annoying when the tester comes back and tells me that little Bobby Tables just broke my database, but yeah, they do need to do the simple basics first as well I guess.