I did play through Dreamfall recently. It was fun but certainly not as good as TLJ. The puzzles weren't very well done (mostly trivial, with a few really impossible ones) and the combat they added was awful. But I enjoyed the "interactive movie" portion, which made up most of the game. From looking at the forums it sounds like they aren't planning on doing a 3rd episode, even though they had promised one earlier. Funcom are the same people who do Conan so they are pretty busy.
The Longest Journey was a wonderful adventure / puzzle game. The puzzles were ingenious and generally pretty logical (with one exception that I recall). And the story line was fantastic... easily the best story of any game I've played. Came out about 8 years ago but well worth buying and playing if you enjoy puzzles that fit nicely into the story.
If you create it for one particular customer, typically the customer paid for it and owns it, no need for GPL. In some cases if you think you can turn the code into a generic product you can license it back from the customer and resell it. Either way, GPL doesn't come into the picture.
Actually, it's a major advantage to new low level players, because they can sell the stuff they harvest for good money (e.g. for buying their level 40 mount). Low level players do NOT need to buy equipment on the AH. They get plenty of good stuff via drops / quest rewards. My characters have almost never bought gear on the AH, certainly not at the low levels.
Having actually sat on a jury, I can tell you that the judge gave us a good definition of "reasonable doubt", with emphasis on the "reasonable". From the article, Reiser did things that sure look like he was trying to erase evidence (e.g. getting rid of part of his car and hosing down the interior) and his explanations were simply "unreasonable". In that case, there is no "reasonable doubt".
And if Twitter actually SAID that to start with, fine. But no, they said they would take action against users who harass other users, and then they sit on their hands. How about Twitter actually doing what they said they would do? Wild concept, no?
Removal of attunments and Badge rewards that are equal to or better than Tier-6 level gear, theres 2 *huge* changes that undermine all the effort the hardcore raiders have put in over the past year.
WoW isn't a job where you are "putting in effort", it's a game. I'm not hardcore about playing, but I have had fun raiding. That's the point. If I'm raiding and enjoying myself and learning the fights and feeling some accomplishment, what difference does it make if someone else gets loot in a different way? I still have the accomplishment. I've run a couple of marathons... the fact that many thousands of other people have run faster than me doesn't invalidate what I did.
Relax and enjoy the game. At the end of the day, unless you are a serious pvp'er, it doesn't matter what gear someone else has, it's whether you had fun playing.
"Software ain't hardware and programmers ain't people." Programmers tend to be different: from secretaries, from accountants and from each other.
No, programmers ARE people. Programmers are different, just like secretaries are different. Managers need to recognize the differences, and programmers need to understand that they aren't some superior breed of human. They are people who do different work.
IF the backup copy is actually good. You do verify them, right? Pop them into another machine to make sure that the back is readable on something other than the drive that wrote it?
IF you remember to back it up again after a few years, before it either deteriorates or the hardware is no longer available.
But the main thing is, as an individual, I don't need to "copy books onto new pieces of paper". For my purposes, they are immortal. I have many cheap paper books that have already lasted 40 years, and will doubtless outlive me.
Perhaps for the purpose of society it is good to have digital copies maintained by organizations like the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress. But that's not the topic of this discussion. It's whether individuals find e-book readers useful. We're not talking about the survival of the knowledge of humankind, we're talking about my convenience in reading books.
The one place where I could see using ebooks is for newspapers and magazines, where ebooks are useful precisely because I don't want to preserve them, and I don't care if the files disappear or become unreadable some day.
I'll tell you this, if you don't run your work in a separate thread, you end up with unresponsive interfaces. You can do tricks like periodically stopping work and checkpointing. But if you run into a database deadlock, or some communications deadlock, or you have a developer on your team who doesn't know his code is going to be used in a UI, then your interface hangs.
Threading is almost mandatory in well behaved Windows Apps.
The grandparent post specifically said you rarely need multiple UI threads. So yeah, you can have multiple worker threads in the background so your UI thread remains responsive, but you only have one thread running the UI.
I read about half of the article, and decided he wasn't making a whole lot of sense, and gave up.
He started off by bitching about how.Net was supposed to be the solution, and wasn't. Then he brought up issues with 64 bit Windows that were irrelevant.
He has an axe to grind, but I'm not sure he has a point. For example, he talks about how.Net was supposed to insulate you from the vagaries of the Win32 interface,but failed. Then he talks about how the Win32 API returns the length of a file as two 32 values that have to be combined, instead of a 64 bit value. The part he leaves out is that.Net's system.IO.FileInfo does exactly what he wants... it returns the file length as a long 64 bit value. So why bring up the old 32 bit interface when you don't have to deal with it anymore? If that's the best he can do, his argument is in trouble.
The thing that really gets me about the media coverage is that everyone just assumes that Iran could only ever possibly be interested in attacking Israel or the USA.
I suspect that has something to do with the President of Iran stating that his goal was to wipe Israel off the map. Some people don't take him seriously. People didn't take Hitler seriously, either.
I used to write stuff in VB.net until I finally learned C#. Now I shudder when I look back at any VB.net code, even my own.
Huh? I've used VB.Net and C#, and they are simply two slightly different syntactic layers on top of the.Net class libraries. You can set up your code exactly the same way, the differences are just some syntactic sugar.
However, I would argue that with the number of planets out there (many millions probably, since we've managed to find some around lots of stars, and we can't even detect the Earth-sized ones yet) and the vast distances involved, the chances of some interstellar-traveling species coming upon our particular little planet is pretty slim, no matter what sci-fi would have you believe. If the civilization lives, say, 200 million light years away, it could have been making a beeline for us since the beginning of mankind and still not be anywhere near reaching us
The problem with that argument is that a civiliation that wants to explore doesn't need to "make a beeline" for us. As the article pointed out, if they build self-replicating robots, they can cover the galaxy in a very short period of time. If you say that the only other intelligent life is so far away that the universe isn't old enough for them to have reached us yet, then you are accepting his argument that there is some kind of filter that makes the occurance of intelligent space faring species incredibly rare.
Seems to me that Blizzard has done exactly what you praise Turbine for. There is a strong, active community that mods the hell of the Blizzard client, to the point where I don't even recognize what my wife is looking at when she's playing. And as far as banning players, Blizzard bans spammers and people running bots, and I don't know a WoW player who doesn't applaud them for that action. The game simply couldn't survive if players were flooded by spam and competing with bots.
Blizzard has also taken the approach of fixing problems in the game, rather than hassling players who take advantage of them. I can remember in Everquest there were all kinds of exploits, and the response was to have the GMs harass and monitor the players. When Blizzard sees an exploit, the fix the game.
Well, if the driver had a button he could hit that flagged the current spot in the picture taking as something that needs more attention, it would be pretty trivial to review those and delete inappropriate pictures (accident scenes, private property, etc). Or if the driver had the ability to review and delete that would be even better. But as it stands, it's pretty clear that Google feels like they are big enough that they don't have to care... they take their pictures and if you don't like it, too bad.
Interesting article in latest (I think) Scientific American that says that for plutonium bombs, you still need a fancy implosion triggering mechanism, but for highly enriched uranium, you actually don't need much of anything nowadays. The article said that enrichment is so much better these days that, according to calculations (guess no one has tried it) you could generate a crude nuclear explosion simply by dropping one piece of HEU on top of another.
Article was on the need to contain / get rid of HEU at the source. The point was that it's easy to smuggle and easy to make into a bomb, so we need to get rid of the source before we lose a chunk of a city.
What is easier? ordering content via remote for immediate delivery or ordering online and waiting for it?
The trick part of this statement was immediate delivery. As the grandparent poster said, for many/most people, downloads are slow, not fast. I have a DSL connection, and it would be many, many hours for me to download a hi-def movie. And I wouldn't be using my network connection for that time (and neither would my wife, which pretty much settles the issue right there).
So to rephrase/answer your question: which is easier? Dropping a DVD in the mail in the morning and getting one the next day, or tying up my computer and network for hours on end? Either way, I'm not going to see more than one movie a day... so the mail / disk approach wins, hands down.
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I did play through Dreamfall recently. It was fun but certainly not as good as TLJ. The puzzles weren't very well done (mostly trivial, with a few really impossible ones) and the combat they added was awful. But I enjoyed the "interactive movie" portion, which made up most of the game. From looking at the forums it sounds like they aren't planning on doing a 3rd episode, even though they had promised one earlier. Funcom are the same people who do Conan so they are pretty busy.
The Longest Journey was a wonderful adventure / puzzle game. The puzzles were ingenious and generally pretty logical (with one exception that I recall). And the story line was fantastic... easily the best story of any game I've played. Came out about 8 years ago but well worth buying and playing if you enjoy puzzles that fit nicely into the story.
Please mod the parent up... it's both informative and insightful.
If you create it for one particular customer, typically the customer paid for it and owns it, no need for GPL. In some cases if you think you can turn the code into a generic product you can license it back from the customer and resell it. Either way, GPL doesn't come into the picture.
Also no wine sale.
It's newsworthy because it points up the fallacy of the "TV is going away all video will be watched thru the Internet" meme.
Actually, it's a major advantage to new low level players, because they can sell the stuff they harvest for good money (e.g. for buying their level 40 mount). Low level players do NOT need to buy equipment on the AH. They get plenty of good stuff via drops / quest rewards. My characters have almost never bought gear on the AH, certainly not at the low levels.
Having actually sat on a jury, I can tell you that the judge gave us a good definition of "reasonable doubt", with emphasis on the "reasonable". From the article, Reiser did things that sure look like he was trying to erase evidence (e.g. getting rid of part of his car and hosing down the interior) and his explanations were simply "unreasonable". In that case, there is no "reasonable doubt".
And if Twitter actually SAID that to start with, fine. But no, they said they would take action against users who harass other users, and then they sit on their hands. How about Twitter actually doing what they said they would do? Wild concept, no?
WoW isn't a job where you are "putting in effort", it's a game. I'm not hardcore about playing, but I have had fun raiding. That's the point. If I'm raiding and enjoying myself and learning the fights and feeling some accomplishment, what difference does it make if someone else gets loot in a different way? I still have the accomplishment. I've run a couple of marathons... the fact that many thousands of other people have run faster than me doesn't invalidate what I did.
Relax and enjoy the game. At the end of the day, unless you are a serious pvp'er, it doesn't matter what gear someone else has, it's whether you had fun playing.
No, programmers ARE people. Programmers are different, just like secretaries are different. Managers need to recognize the differences, and programmers need to understand that they aren't some superior breed of human. They are people who do different work.
Guess my experience has been different... I've had hardware die FAR more often than I've had books disintegrate or become unreadable.
I've also lost books. Pretty cheap to replace. Replacing an ebook reader that I left on the beach would be a bit pricier.
IF you remember to back it up.
IF the backup copy is actually good. You do verify them, right? Pop them into another machine to make sure that the back is readable on something other than the drive that wrote it?
IF you remember to back it up again after a few years, before it either deteriorates or the hardware is no longer available.
But the main thing is, as an individual, I don't need to "copy books onto new pieces of paper". For my purposes, they are immortal. I have many cheap paper books that have already lasted 40 years, and will doubtless outlive me.
Perhaps for the purpose of society it is good to have digital copies maintained by organizations like the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress. But that's not the topic of this discussion. It's whether individuals find e-book readers useful. We're not talking about the survival of the knowledge of humankind, we're talking about my convenience in reading books.
The one place where I could see using ebooks is for newspapers and magazines, where ebooks are useful precisely because I don't want to preserve them, and I don't care if the files disappear or become unreadable some day.
It's a safe bet that those paper books will last far longer than any hard drive that you store files on
The grandparent post specifically said you rarely need multiple UI threads. So yeah, you can have multiple worker threads in the background so your UI thread remains responsive, but you only have one thread running the UI.
I read about half of the article, and decided he wasn't making a whole lot of sense, and gave up.
.Net was supposed to be the solution, and wasn't. Then he brought up issues with 64 bit Windows that were irrelevant.
He started off by bitching about how
He has an axe to grind, but I'm not sure he has a point. For example, he talks about how .Net was supposed to insulate you from the vagaries of the Win32 interface,but failed. Then he talks about how the Win32 API returns the length of a file as two 32 values that have to be combined, instead of a 64 bit value. The part he leaves out is that .Net's system.IO.FileInfo does exactly what he wants... it returns the file length as a long 64 bit value. So why bring up the old 32 bit interface when you don't have to deal with it anymore? If that's the best he can do, his argument is in trouble.
Israel was formed by vote of the United Nations.
I suspect that has something to do with the President of Iran stating that his goal was to wipe Israel off the map. Some people don't take him seriously. People didn't take Hitler seriously, either.
Huh? I've used VB.Net and C#, and they are simply two slightly different syntactic layers on top of the .Net class libraries. You can set up your code exactly the same way, the differences are just some syntactic sugar.
The problem with that argument is that a civiliation that wants to explore doesn't need to "make a beeline" for us. As the article pointed out, if they build self-replicating robots, they can cover the galaxy in a very short period of time. If you say that the only other intelligent life is so far away that the universe isn't old enough for them to have reached us yet, then you are accepting his argument that there is some kind of filter that makes the occurance of intelligent space faring species incredibly rare.
Seems to me that Blizzard has done exactly what you praise Turbine for. There is a strong, active community that mods the hell of the Blizzard client, to the point where I don't even recognize what my wife is looking at when she's playing. And as far as banning players, Blizzard bans spammers and people running bots, and I don't know a WoW player who doesn't applaud them for that action. The game simply couldn't survive if players were flooded by spam and competing with bots.
Blizzard has also taken the approach of fixing problems in the game, rather than hassling players who take advantage of them. I can remember in Everquest there were all kinds of exploits, and the response was to have the GMs harass and monitor the players. When Blizzard sees an exploit, the fix the game.
Well, if the driver had a button he could hit that flagged the current spot in the picture taking as something that needs more attention, it would be pretty trivial to review those and delete inappropriate pictures (accident scenes, private property, etc). Or if the driver had the ability to review and delete that would be even better. But as it stands, it's pretty clear that Google feels like they are big enough that they don't have to care... they take their pictures and if you don't like it, too bad.
Interesting article in latest (I think) Scientific American that says that for plutonium bombs, you still need a fancy implosion triggering mechanism, but for highly enriched uranium, you actually don't need much of anything nowadays. The article said that enrichment is so much better these days that, according to calculations (guess no one has tried it) you could generate a crude nuclear explosion simply by dropping one piece of HEU on top of another.
Article was on the need to contain / get rid of HEU at the source. The point was that it's easy to smuggle and easy to make into a bomb, so we need to get rid of the source before we lose a chunk of a city.
The trick part of this statement was immediate delivery. As the grandparent poster said, for many/most people, downloads are slow, not fast. I have a DSL connection, and it would be many, many hours for me to download a hi-def movie. And I wouldn't be using my network connection for that time (and neither would my wife, which pretty much settles the issue right there).
So to rephrase/answer your question: which is easier? Dropping a DVD in the mail in the morning and getting one the next day, or tying up my computer and network for hours on end? Either way, I'm not going to see more than one movie a day... so the mail / disk approach wins, hands down.