This is kind of how I got interested in building levels in Descent. In Descent, all the levels could only be made of cubes. You could make larger rooms by joining cubes together. You could make things look not completely square because you could move the vertices around to make the cubes skewed, but everything was made of 3 dimensional shapes with 6 sides that were all quadrilaterals. It made building levels really easy. You could make a curved hallway by making one side of a cube a bit shorter, and attaching it to another that was the same, and repeating this pattern. And it has tools to make repeating patterns really fast. Once you got the hang of using the tools (really only took a few hours) you could build new levels extremely fast.
Which is fine though. Plenty of people spend plenty of money on "toys" to make this a viable product. $1000 for a 3D printer which is really just a toy isn't all that bad. The XBox One was $500 when it came out. By the time you get a second controller and a few games, you're probably getting close to $800. And the XBox One, or PS4, or any other console is really just a toy. You can't even run your own code on them. You can pretty much just play games. The new iPhone just came out and it's $650 for the cheapest one. And while there are some business uses of an iPhone, the vast majority of people I know with an iPhone use them solely for personal use and could do just as well with a $200 phone (or less).
Personally, I can't see the point in owning a 3D printer. The number of objects that I'd want to print out is quite small. It would make much more sense for me to go down to Home Depot and pay them to print out my parts on a $10,000 printer (assuming such a service existed), because I'd probably get better results and it would cost me less and take me less time. It's the same reason I don't own a photo printer. I can get a much better job done much faster by just taking my memory card into Walmart. If I feel like getting some really high quality prints, I can take them to a better photo place and get them printed better. But there's no way that I would have the money to afford that level of quality for my own personal use.
With the existence of Outlook you really can't depend on somebody's email client being able to render HTML. Just about the same time when IE got a passable HTML+CSS rendering engine, they started using the Word HTML engine for Outlook. The result: completely terrible support for normal HTML in Outlook. The better solution would have been to incorporate the IE rendering engine into Word and Outlook. But for some reason, they made the exact opposite decision and decided to keep using the MS Word rendering engine, and switch Outlook to use that. So it's probably not a big deal that Thunderbird has a few small problems rendering HTML.
Re:no wonder apple dropped 16GB machines
on
iOS 8 Review
·
· Score: 1
Ideally all this would be handled by the XBox itself. Developers shouldn't have to deal with what happens when the storage device is disconnected when trying to save a game. The XBox OS (whatever it is) should have a function to write out a saved game. It should be transactional so that even if it breaks part way through writing, you can still just use the previous version. All saved games should be "signed" so that they can detect if the file was corrupted or tampered with. This would prevent bugs in reading saved game files that were tampered with from allowing exploits in the system (this happened on Wii, allowing modified save games to execute code). Also, all saved games (every transaction) should be backed up to the cloud so that the user can recover their saved games if the storage media becomes corrupted or malfunctions. Saved game data is so small that all this should really be easily possible.
Re:no wonder apple dropped 16GB machines
on
iOS 8 Review
·
· Score: 1
then you also have to handle the case where the data is corrupted
.
No matter where you are storing the data, there's always a chance of the data being corrupted. And as far as users removing the storage card, computers have had that problem since as long as there have been personal computers. I'm sure most people could deal with it. People understand that they shouldn't just pull the card out randomly. If they lose their data by being stupid, then that's their own fault. They shouldn't cripple the entire user base because some users may do stupid things.
Re:no wonder apple dropped 16GB machines
on
iOS 8 Review
·
· Score: 3, Informative
But it shouldn't cost $100 for the difference between the two anyway. It's a $650 phone. It should have 64 GB by default, or have 32 GB and have the option of an SD Card. You only say that 16 GB is fine because it's $100 for the next level up. That's almost the same price as a 128 GB micro SD Card (currently 109.99). There's no reason why they should be charging you $100 for 16 GB upgrade in the first place.
Re:Not answered in review
on
iOS 8 Review
·
· Score: 1
I guess if you have the 64 GB or 128 GB version of the device this may be a problem, but most people won't install so much stuff that they need folders inside folders for launching their apps. Every level of folders you add requires another tap to bring up the folder. And there's more taps if you end up going to the wrong folder. I really like the Android/Windows model of just listing everything in alphabetical order and giving you a way to add a quick launch of the stuff you really need to access all the time.
Re:Keyboard
on
iOS 8 Review
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I know there's a lot of hate for Windows 8, but the onscreen keyboard for my Surface 2 (RT) is probably the best on screen keyboard I've ever used. I simply can't stand my Android phone keyboard anymore. I don't have an iDevice, but whenever I go to use my wife's iPad, I cringe at how bad that keyboard is. Always showing the keys in capitals so you can never figure out if you are typing in capitals is probably the most annoying part. Having left and right arrow buttons on the default keyboard for the Surface helps out so much. Also, having Ctrl key is extremely nice because I can use Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Z, just like I would on a regular keyboard.Tab needs 2 clicks, but it's still much easier than clicking on the next form field. You can switch to the full keyboard for those times when you really want access to all the keys, although I don't use it all the time. The iOS and Android keyboards might work OK on small screen 4-5 phones, but on a 10 inch tablet, where you have the extra room, there really should be some extended functionality. The iPad keyboard really needs to be different than the iPhone keyboard.
Eggs and milk have a pretty long expiry date. Worst case scenario is I buy eggs/milk that I wouldn't have needed until next week. Or I don't buy them and then I have to do without, or I decide I really need milk now, and I go out to the store again. Sure it's a "problem" but I'm not sure if I'd qualify that as a "first world problem". Maybe it's a "zeroth world problem".
The only reason I could see it being truly useful is if the fridge knew I was low on milk, and watched the sales prices at the stores so that I could always take advantage of the sales price, and it would order the milk from the store for me, and it would be delivered for free, and there would be a robot in my house to receive the order and put the milk in the fridge and I'd never have to think about whether there was enough milk in the house. That would be true home automation. My fridge telling me how much milk is in the house is kind of step in the right direction, but it's kind of useless on it's own.
Well, as far as safety goes, if you're going to be killing people, killing Nazis is about as safe as you can get without offending anybody. Once they realized killing Nazis was received well, they moved to Doom, where they were killing demons.
I can't speak for the original Surface RT, but I actually like my Surface 2 (RT). As long as you go in understanding that it is not a replacement for a full Windows machine, but rather something to compete with an Android tablet or iPad, you should be OK. Apart from the lack of apps, I haven't had any problems with my Surface 2. The lack of apps isn't much of a problem either, because I haven't found anything that I would want to do on a tablet. And it can actually do many things a lot better than an Android tablet or iPad. For instance, because it has a traditional Windows file system, all the apps can access network drives (or MS OneDrive) without having to write special code to handle connecting them.
I'm not sure if it's all that weird. I'm not sure if they thought an ultraviolent game would be so well received when they did Commander Keen. It certainly would be a big risk to spend all that time programming a game and have people reject it. Commander Keen came out in 1990, Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, Doom in 1993, and Quake in 1996. Maybe they wanted to wait until they had a popular game under their belts before they tried to risk it with something so violent. Maybe having such a success with Commander Keen gave them the freedom to work on a game like Wolfenstein or Doom without worrying about how well the public would receive it.
Just because computers are ubiquitous does not mean that programmers are ubiquitous. It's like saying that because everybody owns a car that everybody knows how to fix them.
I would say that there are fewer people who know how to fix a car/be a mechanic now than who did in the 60s. At least in terms of percentage of the population, if not in total numbers as well. There used to be a lot more people who would change their own oil or do their own brake jobs as opposed to the number of people who would attempt such a task today
The same goes for programming. There are a lot more people who own computers, but very few of them actually know how to program them. And of the people who can "program" them, for many their knowledge does not extend beyond writing a simple PHP page.
Not only that, but I imagine that COBOL isn't a fun course you can take to easily increase your GPA and I don't think there would be many schools that would make COBOL mandatory. Even if you don't end up going into finance, the kind of person who would take COBOL as an elective course is probably the kind of person who works hard and actually is interested in programming. People who elected to take COBOL as opposed to JAVA or C probably did so because they already learned those languages in their spare time when they were 15 and didn't feel they needed a course on it. People who are actually interested in programming end up becoming much better programmers and will be the people who make more money at it. Also, some of the people taking COBOL might have been already been working in the industry, and went back to school to get their degree. They might have already had a job where COBOL was important and took the course because they already knew the material.
I don't see why not. The local cab company used to do beer/liquor deliveries where I lived. $5 flat rate for all deliveries. As students without a car it was the best/only way to get a case of beer to the house. As long as you bill appropriately for the time it takes to complete the errand, I don't see why they couldn't make good money doing this.
Especially with this amount of money. It's one thing to walk away from your job for a million dollars (typical lottery), it's another thing to walk away from you job for a billion dollars. $1 billion is enough that you would never have to worry about money ever, no matter how much money you spent. You could just travel (first class) and live in hotels (five star) and get limousines to driver you everywhere and you still wouldn't run out of money in your entire lifetime. You could do exactly what you wanted, where you wanted, when you wanted to do it.
Or they could make the modding community better. It they created a market place for people to sell/give away their mods and give users a supported way of installing those mods, then that would be a big step in the right direction. Currently installing mods is a big pain. Even installing Forge means going through ad-hell.
Apparently there already is a Minecraft Movie in the works. I'm not sure if a Minecraft Cartoon series (or the movie for that matter) could compete with the many people that churn out thousands of videos of Minecraft on Youtube.
Maybe they just need to optimize things better then. There's no reason to draw millions of blocks if there is no way for me see millions of blocks on my screen. You can tell there's issues when it slowly draw stuff. It starts drawing caverns 50 blocks deep before it draws the stuff that's right in front of your face. They shouldn't be rendering stuff that you can't even see.
This. The XBox 360, Android, iOS, and Raspberry Pi versions all play quite well.There's no reason why a reasonable computer shouldn't be able to run this game. Yet any computer that isn't a "gaming" computer with a dedicated video card struggles with this game. They need to drop Java or figure out a way to compile Java to actual machine code so the game runs well. If they can make it so that it can run on any old computer (which by the graphics level it should be), They'll be able to sell a lot more copies. As it is, there is only 1 copy in my house because we only have 1 computer that can run it well enough. If all the computers in my house could run it well enough, we would have 4 copies so we could all play multiplayer together.
Yeah, but I think if you want to do that, a phone isn't a great device for doing that. Most are locked down in some way or another specifically to stop you from doing that. I'm not sure what device really suits that need. I'm not sure if there are enough people who truly want this experience for there to be a commercial product that offers this.
Not only your "Mac" but your iPhone/iPad/iPod touch as well. I know many people with iProducts, and many of them complain about the amount of space available on the device. Most devices only ship with 16 GB (12GB free out of the box), and since they have no SD card option, an it's $100 for an extra 16 GB of space, most users opt for the smallest storage options. Personally, I will never buy a phone/tablet that doesn't have any option for expanding storage with standard media. There is no real reason to not have a micro SD card slot except to fleece people out of money. I can't believe people fall for it.
I don't have an iPhone, but I kind of agree with this. A phone is a tool, it's not a toy that I want to play with and modify. I don't want to miss a call or not get an alarm because I installed some rogue firmware on my phone (I know people this has happened to because they're always installing different ROMs on their Android phone). I'm not saying that getting an iPhone is the only way to get this experience, but that I find that this is really the point of a phone. I wanted a toy to install software on and experiment with and crash and reboot all the time, there's plenty of devices out there that are cheaper and can do just that.
Nexus 4 and 5 made sense because they had a 4 and 5 inch screen. The 7 has a 7 inch screen. Unless the 6 has a six inch screen, the numbering system won't make sense. Perhaps they should go with Nexus 5 again, like they did with the two models of Nexus 7.
MS has done nothing to prevent a PC from being sold without an OS. You can buy plenty of computers without an OS. The reason you don't see more available from the likes of HP, Dell, Acer, and others is because it creates a support nightmare. 99% of the population would have no idea what to do with a computer if you shipped them a computer without an operating system on it. Also, not shipping an OS means they can't ship third-party nagware (Antivirus, PowerDVD, etc) on the computer that they get paid to put on there because a certain percentage of people will buy the premium versions.
What Microsoft has done is made it quite cheap to sell computers with Windows pre-installed. They certainly make it cheaper for Dell to pre-install Windows on a machine than for the end user to buy their own copy. They may have even said that they will raise the price if they don't make all their machines come with Windows. But manufacturers do that kind of stuff all the time in other areas. It costs almost as much for a whole new bike for the price you'd pay just for the drive train on a bicycle if you were to buy it apart from the bike. Companies pay big money to get exclusive rights to products (think games and products that are only sold in specific stores) because they know they'll make make money off the customer in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
This is kind of how I got interested in building levels in Descent. In Descent, all the levels could only be made of cubes. You could make larger rooms by joining cubes together. You could make things look not completely square because you could move the vertices around to make the cubes skewed, but everything was made of 3 dimensional shapes with 6 sides that were all quadrilaterals. It made building levels really easy. You could make a curved hallway by making one side of a cube a bit shorter, and attaching it to another that was the same, and repeating this pattern. And it has tools to make repeating patterns really fast. Once you got the hang of using the tools (really only took a few hours) you could build new levels extremely fast.
Which is fine though. Plenty of people spend plenty of money on "toys" to make this a viable product. $1000 for a 3D printer which is really just a toy isn't all that bad. The XBox One was $500 when it came out. By the time you get a second controller and a few games, you're probably getting close to $800. And the XBox One, or PS4, or any other console is really just a toy. You can't even run your own code on them. You can pretty much just play games. The new iPhone just came out and it's $650 for the cheapest one. And while there are some business uses of an iPhone, the vast majority of people I know with an iPhone use them solely for personal use and could do just as well with a $200 phone (or less).
Personally, I can't see the point in owning a 3D printer. The number of objects that I'd want to print out is quite small. It would make much more sense for me to go down to Home Depot and pay them to print out my parts on a $10,000 printer (assuming such a service existed), because I'd probably get better results and it would cost me less and take me less time. It's the same reason I don't own a photo printer. I can get a much better job done much faster by just taking my memory card into Walmart. If I feel like getting some really high quality prints, I can take them to a better photo place and get them printed better. But there's no way that I would have the money to afford that level of quality for my own personal use.
With the existence of Outlook you really can't depend on somebody's email client being able to render HTML. Just about the same time when IE got a passable HTML+CSS rendering engine, they started using the Word HTML engine for Outlook. The result: completely terrible support for normal HTML in Outlook. The better solution would have been to incorporate the IE rendering engine into Word and Outlook. But for some reason, they made the exact opposite decision and decided to keep using the MS Word rendering engine, and switch Outlook to use that. So it's probably not a big deal that Thunderbird has a few small problems rendering HTML.
Ideally all this would be handled by the XBox itself. Developers shouldn't have to deal with what happens when the storage device is disconnected when trying to save a game. The XBox OS (whatever it is) should have a function to write out a saved game. It should be transactional so that even if it breaks part way through writing, you can still just use the previous version. All saved games should be "signed" so that they can detect if the file was corrupted or tampered with. This would prevent bugs in reading saved game files that were tampered with from allowing exploits in the system (this happened on Wii, allowing modified save games to execute code). Also, all saved games (every transaction) should be backed up to the cloud so that the user can recover their saved games if the storage media becomes corrupted or malfunctions. Saved game data is so small that all this should really be easily possible.
But it shouldn't cost $100 for the difference between the two anyway. It's a $650 phone. It should have 64 GB by default, or have 32 GB and have the option of an SD Card. You only say that 16 GB is fine because it's $100 for the next level up. That's almost the same price as a 128 GB micro SD Card (currently 109.99). There's no reason why they should be charging you $100 for 16 GB upgrade in the first place.
I guess if you have the 64 GB or 128 GB version of the device this may be a problem, but most people won't install so much stuff that they need folders inside folders for launching their apps. Every level of folders you add requires another tap to bring up the folder. And there's more taps if you end up going to the wrong folder. I really like the Android/Windows model of just listing everything in alphabetical order and giving you a way to add a quick launch of the stuff you really need to access all the time.
I know there's a lot of hate for Windows 8, but the onscreen keyboard for my Surface 2 (RT) is probably the best on screen keyboard I've ever used. I simply can't stand my Android phone keyboard anymore. I don't have an iDevice, but whenever I go to use my wife's iPad, I cringe at how bad that keyboard is. Always showing the keys in capitals so you can never figure out if you are typing in capitals is probably the most annoying part. Having left and right arrow buttons on the default keyboard for the Surface helps out so much. Also, having Ctrl key is extremely nice because I can use Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Z, just like I would on a regular keyboard.Tab needs 2 clicks, but it's still much easier than clicking on the next form field. You can switch to the full keyboard for those times when you really want access to all the keys, although I don't use it all the time. The iOS and Android keyboards might work OK on small screen 4-5 phones, but on a 10 inch tablet, where you have the extra room, there really should be some extended functionality. The iPad keyboard really needs to be different than the iPhone keyboard.
Eggs and milk have a pretty long expiry date. Worst case scenario is I buy eggs/milk that I wouldn't have needed until next week. Or I don't buy them and then I have to do without, or I decide I really need milk now, and I go out to the store again. Sure it's a "problem" but I'm not sure if I'd qualify that as a "first world problem". Maybe it's a "zeroth world problem".
The only reason I could see it being truly useful is if the fridge knew I was low on milk, and watched the sales prices at the stores so that I could always take advantage of the sales price, and it would order the milk from the store for me, and it would be delivered for free, and there would be a robot in my house to receive the order and put the milk in the fridge and I'd never have to think about whether there was enough milk in the house. That would be true home automation. My fridge telling me how much milk is in the house is kind of step in the right direction, but it's kind of useless on it's own.
Well, as far as safety goes, if you're going to be killing people, killing Nazis is about as safe as you can get without offending anybody. Once they realized killing Nazis was received well, they moved to Doom, where they were killing demons.
I can't speak for the original Surface RT, but I actually like my Surface 2 (RT). As long as you go in understanding that it is not a replacement for a full Windows machine, but rather something to compete with an Android tablet or iPad, you should be OK. Apart from the lack of apps, I haven't had any problems with my Surface 2. The lack of apps isn't much of a problem either, because I haven't found anything that I would want to do on a tablet. And it can actually do many things a lot better than an Android tablet or iPad. For instance, because it has a traditional Windows file system, all the apps can access network drives (or MS OneDrive) without having to write special code to handle connecting them.
I'm not sure if it's all that weird. I'm not sure if they thought an ultraviolent game would be so well received when they did Commander Keen. It certainly would be a big risk to spend all that time programming a game and have people reject it. Commander Keen came out in 1990, Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, Doom in 1993, and Quake in 1996. Maybe they wanted to wait until they had a popular game under their belts before they tried to risk it with something so violent. Maybe having such a success with Commander Keen gave them the freedom to work on a game like Wolfenstein or Doom without worrying about how well the public would receive it.
Just because computers are ubiquitous does not mean that programmers are ubiquitous. It's like saying that because everybody owns a car that everybody knows how to fix them.
I would say that there are fewer people who know how to fix a car/be a mechanic now than who did in the 60s. At least in terms of percentage of the population, if not in total numbers as well. There used to be a lot more people who would change their own oil or do their own brake jobs as opposed to the number of people who would attempt such a task today
The same goes for programming. There are a lot more people who own computers, but very few of them actually know how to program them. And of the people who can "program" them, for many their knowledge does not extend beyond writing a simple PHP page.
Not only that, but I imagine that COBOL isn't a fun course you can take to easily increase your GPA and I don't think there would be many schools that would make COBOL mandatory. Even if you don't end up going into finance, the kind of person who would take COBOL as an elective course is probably the kind of person who works hard and actually is interested in programming. People who elected to take COBOL as opposed to JAVA or C probably did so because they already learned those languages in their spare time when they were 15 and didn't feel they needed a course on it. People who are actually interested in programming end up becoming much better programmers and will be the people who make more money at it. Also, some of the people taking COBOL might have been already been working in the industry, and went back to school to get their degree. They might have already had a job where COBOL was important and took the course because they already knew the material.
I don't see why not. The local cab company used to do beer/liquor deliveries where I lived. $5 flat rate for all deliveries. As students without a car it was the best/only way to get a case of beer to the house. As long as you bill appropriately for the time it takes to complete the errand, I don't see why they couldn't make good money doing this.
Especially with this amount of money. It's one thing to walk away from your job for a million dollars (typical lottery), it's another thing to walk away from you job for a billion dollars. $1 billion is enough that you would never have to worry about money ever, no matter how much money you spent. You could just travel (first class) and live in hotels (five star) and get limousines to driver you everywhere and you still wouldn't run out of money in your entire lifetime. You could do exactly what you wanted, where you wanted, when you wanted to do it.
Or they could make the modding community better. It they created a market place for people to sell/give away their mods and give users a supported way of installing those mods, then that would be a big step in the right direction. Currently installing mods is a big pain. Even installing Forge means going through ad-hell.
Apparently there already is a Minecraft Movie in the works. I'm not sure if a Minecraft Cartoon series (or the movie for that matter) could compete with the many people that churn out thousands of videos of Minecraft on Youtube.
Maybe they just need to optimize things better then. There's no reason to draw millions of blocks if there is no way for me see millions of blocks on my screen. You can tell there's issues when it slowly draw stuff. It starts drawing caverns 50 blocks deep before it draws the stuff that's right in front of your face. They shouldn't be rendering stuff that you can't even see.
This. The XBox 360, Android, iOS, and Raspberry Pi versions all play quite well.There's no reason why a reasonable computer shouldn't be able to run this game. Yet any computer that isn't a "gaming" computer with a dedicated video card struggles with this game. They need to drop Java or figure out a way to compile Java to actual machine code so the game runs well. If they can make it so that it can run on any old computer (which by the graphics level it should be), They'll be able to sell a lot more copies. As it is, there is only 1 copy in my house because we only have 1 computer that can run it well enough. If all the computers in my house could run it well enough, we would have 4 copies so we could all play multiplayer together.
Yeah, but I think if you want to do that, a phone isn't a great device for doing that. Most are locked down in some way or another specifically to stop you from doing that. I'm not sure what device really suits that need. I'm not sure if there are enough people who truly want this experience for there to be a commercial product that offers this.
Not only your "Mac" but your iPhone/iPad/iPod touch as well. I know many people with iProducts, and many of them complain about the amount of space available on the device. Most devices only ship with 16 GB (12GB free out of the box), and since they have no SD card option, an it's $100 for an extra 16 GB of space, most users opt for the smallest storage options. Personally, I will never buy a phone/tablet that doesn't have any option for expanding storage with standard media. There is no real reason to not have a micro SD card slot except to fleece people out of money. I can't believe people fall for it.
I don't have an iPhone, but I kind of agree with this. A phone is a tool, it's not a toy that I want to play with and modify. I don't want to miss a call or not get an alarm because I installed some rogue firmware on my phone (I know people this has happened to because they're always installing different ROMs on their Android phone). I'm not saying that getting an iPhone is the only way to get this experience, but that I find that this is really the point of a phone. I wanted a toy to install software on and experiment with and crash and reboot all the time, there's plenty of devices out there that are cheaper and can do just that.
Nexus 4 and 5 made sense because they had a 4 and 5 inch screen. The 7 has a 7 inch screen. Unless the 6 has a six inch screen, the numbering system won't make sense. Perhaps they should go with Nexus 5 again, like they did with the two models of Nexus 7.
MS has done nothing to prevent a PC from being sold without an OS. You can buy plenty of computers without an OS. The reason you don't see more available from the likes of HP, Dell, Acer, and others is because it creates a support nightmare. 99% of the population would have no idea what to do with a computer if you shipped them a computer without an operating system on it. Also, not shipping an OS means they can't ship third-party nagware (Antivirus, PowerDVD, etc) on the computer that they get paid to put on there because a certain percentage of people will buy the premium versions.
What Microsoft has done is made it quite cheap to sell computers with Windows pre-installed. They certainly make it cheaper for Dell to pre-install Windows on a machine than for the end user to buy their own copy. They may have even said that they will raise the price if they don't make all their machines come with Windows. But manufacturers do that kind of stuff all the time in other areas. It costs almost as much for a whole new bike for the price you'd pay just for the drive train on a bicycle if you were to buy it apart from the bike. Companies pay big money to get exclusive rights to products (think games and products that are only sold in specific stores) because they know they'll make make money off the customer in the end.