I can do fine in Torchlight (I haven't bought Torchlight 2 yet) with just two hotkeys - 1 for heal and 2 for mana.
But I have more fun when I mix it up - fireballs, ice, shadow armor, summon skeletons, summon animated sword, crippling aura, titan stomp, slash attack, exploding shot, etc... etc... I could have some of the ability names wrong, it's been a few weeks since I played. But anyway, I enjoy seeing all the different animations and switching between them frequently instead of doing just doing one for five minutes, then the next for five minutes, then a third for five minutes, etc...
If you have one hand on your mouse for movement and targeting, you have one hand for your keybindings. Using the 1 through 0 keys means that it's not easy to view which key you're going to press without looking unless it's a key that you just used (e.g. if you bind heal potions to the '1' key, then you can press 1 over and over without problems - but if you need to press 8, you'll probably have to take your eyes off the screen to glance at the keys).
It's much easier if you can bind the abilities you want to use through qwert, asdfg, and zxcvb (assuming a US keyboard layout). Then if you can touch type, you can hit exactly the key you want with one of the fingers of your right hand without taking your eyes off the screen. Plus you can hotkey between 15 abilities instead of 10.
Thanks. I only recently got interested in tablets, and it's mostly just a "new and shiny toy" fixation, not a real need. But I want to do my research first and get something that's as open as possible - although I'll accept proprietary device drivers under some circumstances.
I was under the impression with previous Nook tablets that Barnes & Noble actively encourages owners to root the device and had a good relationship with the Android ecosystem as a whole. But I just did some web searches to back that up, and it appears that newer device firmwares try to block root access. Dammit.
I want my first tablet with a screen larger than 7 inches. I had already decided against Amazon. I guess Barnes & Noble is out too, unless they change positions on root access to their operating systems between now and when the Nook HD Plus launches. Maybe I'll catch the next ASUS Transformer whatever it is.
I want a bigger screen than 7 inches, so the 9 inch Nook HD Plus still appeals to me. But I'm going to wait until it comes out and then see if other people can easily root it and put their own Android ROM on it.
I still intend to purchase most of the content from Barnes & Noble and Google's Play store instead of Amazon, because I fear Amazon is on a path to becoming the undisputed 800 pound gorilla of the electronic content industry. But maybe my impression is incorrect.
The Nook is a pure eBook reader. The Nook Tablet and upcoming Nook HD are skins on Android, so you can listen to music, surf the web, play games, and watch movies. The specs matter for anything aside from reading.
I think a lot of people will default to using the first eBook reader and eBook store that was installed on their tablet device. Barnes & Noble needs to sell tablets for the sole purpose of getting more people to have the Barnes & Noble eBook store as the default choice instead of Amazon.
And of course, word-of-mouth matters too. If lots of people you know own and love an Amazon eBook reader and you don't yet own an eBook reader, you yourself are more likely to buy one from Amazon. I think it's smart of Barnes & Noble to sell tablets, just for improving their eBook customer numbers and eBook store brand recognition.
If you think ISPs are not fucked up already, you have not been paying attention. The question is whether the government will make the problem worse or better.
The solution is competition, right? So I'd advocate a mixed system - the local government is responsible for connecting every home in the township or city or municipality or whatever you call it to the grid by a fiber network. Then any ISP in the country can bid to provide network connectivity and television choices over that network. The government provides the infrastructure, the free market provides the competition. If you can't connect to the internet from your house, you contact the township. If you can connect to the internet but your traffic is slow or your television isn't working, you call your ISP.
I'm not justifying the DRM, that's a separate discussion topic.
1. Just because there is a large pool of Linux gamers does not mean we will collectively all buy the big games released for Linux. I only play the occasional fighting game and strategy game, the great majority of adventure, MMORPG, and FPS games don't interest me. So while I technically count as a potential customer, it's only for a small fraction of game companies.
2. Linux is not the only alternative to Windows for games. There is now Android and iOS, and the number of Mac owners is also growing rapidly. So the gaming studios have to weigh the sales value of porting games to Linux against the sales value of porting them to other platforms with far more potential customers. Windows RT doesn't run games compatible with Windows 7, so that's effectively one more platform companies have to consider supporting - and even though we all expect Windows RT to fall flat in the market, "falling flat" for Microsoft still means millions will sell. That still makes it a more profitable target for game developers than Linux.
3. A lot of Linux gamers also game on other platforms - we dual boot Linux on a Mac or we dual boot Linux with Windows on a PC, or we have a gaming console in the living room. So the game company only has a net benefit when they sell a game to a Linux user that would not have bought the game on another platform. That cuts our effective numbers as a buying demographic even further.
4. pay about twice as much when offered the opportunity to self-adjudicate compared to windows gamers is not compelling, our self-adjudicate prices at HumbleBundle and Indie Royale double the Windows prices, but typically average an unimpressive $10 for five games and a charitable donation. If Bioware offered their next game at the expected retail price of $60 on Windows and then offered a port on Linux, buyers for Linux aren't going to pay $120.
RTFA. Controlling for age, exercise level, calorie intake, caregiver education level, and average amount of time watching television, kids in the study within the top quartile of for levels BPA in their body were more than twice as likely to be obese as kids in the study within the bottom quartile.
BPA is in some packaging for junk foods and soda cans, but it's also in some packaging for bottled water, baby bottles, containers of baby formula, children's sippy cups, and lots of packaging for other foods.
I work with people who really prefer GUIs to command lines. So when I access a server it's over ssh, but for my colleagues I had to set up XRDP. XRDP + KDE and XRDP + GNOME = pain, XRDP + XFCE is just fine. So all of our servers have that combo, and I probably spend more time working in XFCE than any other free software desktop. It gets the job done in a resource efficient way and plays nice with remote viewing right out of the box - what more could you want?
I had the lockup bug on Mint 12 with Cinnamon, and I have an AMD/ATI video card (running the open source drivers). That brought be back to Ubuntu, and since 11.10 I have to admit that Unity has become stable and works just fine for me.
Agreed. Cinnamon is 200,000 lines of code. The whole of GNOME is around 8 million. Clem and his Mint team are doing awesome work, but they're only improving one tiny (albeit very visible) portion of the whole.
Cinnamon is written in C and Vala and according to ohloh.net, has about 200,000 lines of code.
Wine is written in C++, it has to be in C++ because that's what the Microsoft APIs are. C and Vala are not easy to use, but they're easier than C++. Wine is at 2.4 million lines of code, a nice round twelve times the size of Cinnamon.
And while the Mint team is doing awesome work, they're engineering improvements on something that's already free software. The Wine team is re-implementing APIs based upon public documentation but they don't have access to the original source code. The Wine team also has more ground to cover - Microsoft has a staggering number of APIs and special cases.
You're insulting the wine team needlessly, they're tackling a monumental task. If you think you can do better, go fork the project.
If you don't like Unity it's no skin off my back, but I got accustomed to it and found it to be fine. I also switch between my IDE, terminals, browser windows, Remmina, virt-manager, LibreOffice, etc... windows pretty quickly and without issues. I also don't remember any major user interface changes since they introduced it.
Again, if you dislike Unity that's okay but I don't understand the rage it seems to inspire. I find it a lot more intuitive and easy to use than (non-Cinnamon) GNOME 3. I tried Mint, and I liked that too but I was actually getting kernel panics with the default kernels - something that hasn't happened to me with Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora in at least five years. I probably should have just tried to fix the problem or at least report it to the Mint team, but I just wiped the partition and put Ubuntu back.
We Linux gamers are too small of a demographic (except for Android, of course) for the game studios to care. If you add up all of the Linux revenue from all six Humble Indie Bundles, what's the total? $3 million? Less? That's not enough for the big gaming studios to care.
The best long term hope for games on Linux is wine (winehq.org) and newer games written in HTML5.
Cannabis is substantially less dangerous in terms of direct physical effects and also in terms of dangerous or high risk behavior done under the influence and also in terms of risk of addiction versus alcohol. The fact that one is legal and the other is not is absurd, both should be banned or both permitted.
Windows RT on ARM devices will only run their new applications of the type-formerly-known-as-Metro. It also won't support traditional browser plugins, though I understand IE on it will run a builtin Flash plugin for a few curated websites. The formerly-known-as-Metro applications are designed to be tablet and smartphone friendly. So the 2GB of RAM is probably plenty.
I am making wild guesses here, but I think there are three things that may turn out to be major factors:
1. The difference between $10 for a Firefox OS phone and $12 for an Android phone with the same performance may be a very big deal in half of the world. Sure it's irrelevant in the US, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant everywhere. The Firefox OS ability to do more with less hardware, if true, will mean a lot in places where people don't blink over $50 differences between two smart phones.
2. If an Android device runs an HTML5 application just fine, Firefox OS on the same hardware still has the potential to run it better - start faster, or give more frames per second, or use less resources and allow you to switch into and out of the page more quickly, or whatever. So even if the Android and Firefox OS device are both $10, Firefox OS still has an advantage (again, assuming they really can consistently deliver better performance, which is no easy task).
3. The advantage on the developer side of HTML5 is serious. Yes, native applications blow HTML5 applications out of the water in a large number of situations. But for startups and companies with fewer resources and less funding, HTML5 still lets them target more potential customers than trying to build at last two native applications. And again, this matters more in developing economies, when an old netbook provides most of the tools you need to build an HTML5 application (it would be painful, but possible). For hundreds of millions of people around the world, the cost of an iOS development environment is more than they earn in a year.
Frankly, even with these angles I still expect Firefox OS to fail to make any noticeable impact. But I really hope it does, if I can gain a foothold it really will be revolutionary.
I would be interested in the statistics too, because I'm surprised there is any correlation at all. But of course my anecdotes are not statistical evidence, just anecdotes.
In my own family I've had young retirees that did nothing and didn't last long, old retirees that stayed active after retirement and are in great health, young retirees that stayed active and are in great health, and people planning to work until they die that are hale and hearty in their mid 80s. The most common cause of death seems to be cancer, and that doesn't seem to notice if you have a job or not.
If the difference between two jobs lets you retire at 78 instead of 82, then switching jobs to lower your retirement age is a waste of time. If the difference between two jobs lets you retire at 55 instead of 65, that's different - there is still plenty to enjoy in your 50s and 60s and even 70s and 80s if you are healthy and active.
I suspect a Core 2 Quad just idling uses maybe 100 Watts, so running it around the clock will add 100 Watt-hours * 24 hours per day * 365 days per year / 1000 Watt-hours per kwh = 876 kwh per year. At my rate of $0.20 per kwh that's $175.20 per year, plus power draw from actual usage over and above idle, plus additional power spent cooling the house to offset the heat generated by the computer.
A more efficient computer can cut those annual costs in half, and over the five year or so lifetime of the device that probably covers the cost of setting it up... but it's not a huge savings, just a little one. That's why I suggested that eventually people will just re-purpose old phones - they already own the hardware, so the setup cost is just the drives and the time spent configuring the software.
A 7200 RPM hard drive uses less than 10 watts while working, so even with a few drives in some kind of external enclosure you're only talking about maybe 25 watt-hours maximum use per regular hour. Even with a pretty busy home server it's less than half a kwh per day, maybe 2-3 kwh per day total when you factor in the cooling cost to offset the generated heat.
It's the rest of your desktop: the Intel Core series processor, motherboard, fans, and especially dedicated video card or cards that draw the big energy numbers. The hard disks alone aren't too bad.
Good question, and good point. I don't know, and I hope they do have a hard button remote for regular old channel surfing. But for managing a DVR and searching for specific content, I think a tablet is a fantastic idea - as long as the tablet itself and the user interface for the television system are good.
With respect to running a computer 24/7: we are rapidly approaching a time when the smart phone you had before your most recent upgrade is powerful enough to serve as a decent home server. Then the power costs (and cooling costs) of running your own home server 24/7 become insignificant.
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I can do fine in Torchlight (I haven't bought Torchlight 2 yet) with just two hotkeys - 1 for heal and 2 for mana.
But I have more fun when I mix it up - fireballs, ice, shadow armor, summon skeletons, summon animated sword, crippling aura, titan stomp, slash attack, exploding shot, etc... etc... I could have some of the ability names wrong, it's been a few weeks since I played. But anyway, I enjoy seeing all the different animations and switching between them frequently instead of doing just doing one for five minutes, then the next for five minutes, then a third for five minutes, etc...
If you have one hand on your mouse for movement and targeting, you have one hand for your keybindings. Using the 1 through 0 keys means that it's not easy to view which key you're going to press without looking unless it's a key that you just used (e.g. if you bind heal potions to the '1' key, then you can press 1 over and over without problems - but if you need to press 8, you'll probably have to take your eyes off the screen to glance at the keys).
It's much easier if you can bind the abilities you want to use through qwert, asdfg, and zxcvb (assuming a US keyboard layout). Then if you can touch type, you can hit exactly the key you want with one of the fingers of your right hand without taking your eyes off the screen. Plus you can hotkey between 15 abilities instead of 10.
Thanks. I only recently got interested in tablets, and it's mostly just a "new and shiny toy" fixation, not a real need. But I want to do my research first and get something that's as open as possible - although I'll accept proprietary device drivers under some circumstances.
I was under the impression with previous Nook tablets that Barnes & Noble actively encourages owners to root the device and had a good relationship with the Android ecosystem as a whole. But I just did some web searches to back that up, and it appears that newer device firmwares try to block root access. Dammit.
I want my first tablet with a screen larger than 7 inches. I had already decided against Amazon. I guess Barnes & Noble is out too, unless they change positions on root access to their operating systems between now and when the Nook HD Plus launches. Maybe I'll catch the next ASUS Transformer whatever it is.
I want a bigger screen than 7 inches, so the 9 inch Nook HD Plus still appeals to me. But I'm going to wait until it comes out and then see if other people can easily root it and put their own Android ROM on it.
I still intend to purchase most of the content from Barnes & Noble and Google's Play store instead of Amazon, because I fear Amazon is on a path to becoming the undisputed 800 pound gorilla of the electronic content industry. But maybe my impression is incorrect.
The Nook is a pure eBook reader. The Nook Tablet and upcoming Nook HD are skins on Android, so you can listen to music, surf the web, play games, and watch movies. The specs matter for anything aside from reading.
I think a lot of people will default to using the first eBook reader and eBook store that was installed on their tablet device. Barnes & Noble needs to sell tablets for the sole purpose of getting more people to have the Barnes & Noble eBook store as the default choice instead of Amazon.
And of course, word-of-mouth matters too. If lots of people you know own and love an Amazon eBook reader and you don't yet own an eBook reader, you yourself are more likely to buy one from Amazon. I think it's smart of Barnes & Noble to sell tablets, just for improving their eBook customer numbers and eBook store brand recognition.
If you think ISPs are not fucked up already, you have not been paying attention. The question is whether the government will make the problem worse or better.
The solution is competition, right? So I'd advocate a mixed system - the local government is responsible for connecting every home in the township or city or municipality or whatever you call it to the grid by a fiber network. Then any ISP in the country can bid to provide network connectivity and television choices over that network. The government provides the infrastructure, the free market provides the competition. If you can't connect to the internet from your house, you contact the township. If you can connect to the internet but your traffic is slow or your television isn't working, you call your ISP.
I'm not justifying the DRM, that's a separate discussion topic.
1. Just because there is a large pool of Linux gamers does not mean we will collectively all buy the big games released for Linux. I only play the occasional fighting game and strategy game, the great majority of adventure, MMORPG, and FPS games don't interest me. So while I technically count as a potential customer, it's only for a small fraction of game companies.
2. Linux is not the only alternative to Windows for games. There is now Android and iOS, and the number of Mac owners is also growing rapidly. So the gaming studios have to weigh the sales value of porting games to Linux against the sales value of porting them to other platforms with far more potential customers. Windows RT doesn't run games compatible with Windows 7, so that's effectively one more platform companies have to consider supporting - and even though we all expect Windows RT to fall flat in the market, "falling flat" for Microsoft still means millions will sell. That still makes it a more profitable target for game developers than Linux.
3. A lot of Linux gamers also game on other platforms - we dual boot Linux on a Mac or we dual boot Linux with Windows on a PC, or we have a gaming console in the living room. So the game company only has a net benefit when they sell a game to a Linux user that would not have bought the game on another platform. That cuts our effective numbers as a buying demographic even further.
4. pay about twice as much when offered the opportunity to self-adjudicate compared to windows gamers is not compelling, our self-adjudicate prices at HumbleBundle and Indie Royale double the Windows prices, but typically average an unimpressive $10 for five games and a charitable donation. If Bioware offered their next game at the expected retail price of $60 on Windows and then offered a port on Linux, buyers for Linux aren't going to pay $120.
RTFA. Controlling for age, exercise level, calorie intake, caregiver education level, and average amount of time watching television, kids in the study within the top quartile of for levels BPA in their body were more than twice as likely to be obese as kids in the study within the bottom quartile.
BPA is in some packaging for junk foods and soda cans, but it's also in some packaging for bottled water, baby bottles, containers of baby formula, children's sippy cups, and lots of packaging for other foods.
I work with people who really prefer GUIs to command lines. So when I access a server it's over ssh, but for my colleagues I had to set up XRDP. XRDP + KDE and XRDP + GNOME = pain, XRDP + XFCE is just fine. So all of our servers have that combo, and I probably spend more time working in XFCE than any other free software desktop. It gets the job done in a resource efficient way and plays nice with remote viewing right out of the box - what more could you want?
I had the lockup bug on Mint 12 with Cinnamon, and I have an AMD/ATI video card (running the open source drivers). That brought be back to Ubuntu, and since 11.10 I have to admit that Unity has become stable and works just fine for me.
Agreed. Cinnamon is 200,000 lines of code. The whole of GNOME is around 8 million. Clem and his Mint team are doing awesome work, but they're only improving one tiny (albeit very visible) portion of the whole.
Cinnamon is written in C and Vala and according to ohloh.net, has about 200,000 lines of code.
Wine is written in C++, it has to be in C++ because that's what the Microsoft APIs are. C and Vala are not easy to use, but they're easier than C++. Wine is at 2.4 million lines of code, a nice round twelve times the size of Cinnamon.
And while the Mint team is doing awesome work, they're engineering improvements on something that's already free software. The Wine team is re-implementing APIs based upon public documentation but they don't have access to the original source code. The Wine team also has more ground to cover - Microsoft has a staggering number of APIs and special cases.
You're insulting the wine team needlessly, they're tackling a monumental task. If you think you can do better, go fork the project.
If you don't like Unity it's no skin off my back, but I got accustomed to it and found it to be fine. I also switch between my IDE, terminals, browser windows, Remmina, virt-manager, LibreOffice, etc... windows pretty quickly and without issues. I also don't remember any major user interface changes since they introduced it.
Again, if you dislike Unity that's okay but I don't understand the rage it seems to inspire. I find it a lot more intuitive and easy to use than (non-Cinnamon) GNOME 3. I tried Mint, and I liked that too but I was actually getting kernel panics with the default kernels - something that hasn't happened to me with Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora in at least five years. I probably should have just tried to fix the problem or at least report it to the Mint team, but I just wiped the partition and put Ubuntu back.
We Linux gamers are too small of a demographic (except for Android, of course) for the game studios to care. If you add up all of the Linux revenue from all six Humble Indie Bundles, what's the total? $3 million? Less? That's not enough for the big gaming studios to care.
The best long term hope for games on Linux is wine (winehq.org) and newer games written in HTML5.
Cannabis is substantially less dangerous in terms of direct physical effects and also in terms of dangerous or high risk behavior done under the influence and also in terms of risk of addiction versus alcohol. The fact that one is legal and the other is not is absurd, both should be banned or both permitted.
Windows RT on ARM devices will only run their new applications of the type-formerly-known-as-Metro. It also won't support traditional browser plugins, though I understand IE on it will run a builtin Flash plugin for a few curated websites. The formerly-known-as-Metro applications are designed to be tablet and smartphone friendly. So the 2GB of RAM is probably plenty.
But that price is nuts. No thanks.
I am making wild guesses here, but I think there are three things that may turn out to be major factors:
1. The difference between $10 for a Firefox OS phone and $12 for an Android phone with the same performance may be a very big deal in half of the world. Sure it's irrelevant in the US, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant everywhere. The Firefox OS ability to do more with less hardware, if true, will mean a lot in places where people don't blink over $50 differences between two smart phones.
2. If an Android device runs an HTML5 application just fine, Firefox OS on the same hardware still has the potential to run it better - start faster, or give more frames per second, or use less resources and allow you to switch into and out of the page more quickly, or whatever. So even if the Android and Firefox OS device are both $10, Firefox OS still has an advantage (again, assuming they really can consistently deliver better performance, which is no easy task).
3. The advantage on the developer side of HTML5 is serious. Yes, native applications blow HTML5 applications out of the water in a large number of situations. But for startups and companies with fewer resources and less funding, HTML5 still lets them target more potential customers than trying to build at last two native applications. And again, this matters more in developing economies, when an old netbook provides most of the tools you need to build an HTML5 application (it would be painful, but possible). For hundreds of millions of people around the world, the cost of an iOS development environment is more than they earn in a year.
Frankly, even with these angles I still expect Firefox OS to fail to make any noticeable impact. But I really hope it does, if I can gain a foothold it really will be revolutionary.
I would be interested in the statistics too, because I'm surprised there is any correlation at all. But of course my anecdotes are not statistical evidence, just anecdotes.
In my own family I've had young retirees that did nothing and didn't last long, old retirees that stayed active after retirement and are in great health, young retirees that stayed active and are in great health, and people planning to work until they die that are hale and hearty in their mid 80s. The most common cause of death seems to be cancer, and that doesn't seem to notice if you have a job or not.
If the difference between two jobs lets you retire at 78 instead of 82, then switching jobs to lower your retirement age is a waste of time. If the difference between two jobs lets you retire at 55 instead of 65, that's different - there is still plenty to enjoy in your 50s and 60s and even 70s and 80s if you are healthy and active.
I suspect a Core 2 Quad just idling uses maybe 100 Watts, so running it around the clock will add 100 Watt-hours * 24 hours per day * 365 days per year / 1000 Watt-hours per kwh = 876 kwh per year. At my rate of $0.20 per kwh that's $175.20 per year, plus power draw from actual usage over and above idle, plus additional power spent cooling the house to offset the heat generated by the computer.
A more efficient computer can cut those annual costs in half, and over the five year or so lifetime of the device that probably covers the cost of setting it up... but it's not a huge savings, just a little one. That's why I suggested that eventually people will just re-purpose old phones - they already own the hardware, so the setup cost is just the drives and the time spent configuring the software.
A 7200 RPM hard drive uses less than 10 watts while working, so even with a few drives in some kind of external enclosure you're only talking about maybe 25 watt-hours maximum use per regular hour. Even with a pretty busy home server it's less than half a kwh per day, maybe 2-3 kwh per day total when you factor in the cooling cost to offset the generated heat.
It's the rest of your desktop: the Intel Core series processor, motherboard, fans, and especially dedicated video card or cards that draw the big energy numbers. The hard disks alone aren't too bad.
Good question, and good point. I don't know, and I hope they do have a hard button remote for regular old channel surfing. But for managing a DVR and searching for specific content, I think a tablet is a fantastic idea - as long as the tablet itself and the user interface for the television system are good.
With respect to running a computer 24/7: we are rapidly approaching a time when the smart phone you had before your most recent upgrade is powerful enough to serve as a decent home server. Then the power costs (and cooling costs) of running your own home server 24/7 become insignificant.