The WinSxS directory actually contains the master copy of every file in the original operating system and all its patches and service packs.
The files in the other directories are actually hard links to these files.
I believe service packs come with a file that removes the pre-SP versions of the files it updated at the expense of making the service pack not uninstallable.
Odds are you don't want it. Based on Microsoft's track record, Windows 8 will be a terrible iteration of their OS and should be skipped over. Just wait for the next release after 8, it will be rock solid... well as rock solid as anything rolling out of Redmond.
The track record depends on which OS you consider to be the predecessor of Windows XP.
Windows 2000 was a solid OS.
Windows ME was a toy that broke at the slightest touch.
So, if you go WinMe / WinXP / Vista / 7 / 8, then yes, 8 would be one to skip.
If you go Win2K / WinXP / Vista / 7 / 8, I'm not sure how you'd get that 8 will be bad.
Personally, I hate the whole "touch interface" look for non-touch devices (read: desktop PCs), so I intend to pass on 8.
Tell that to the extentions that constantly break on new major version.
Also, tell that to Mozilla's extension approvers, who won't approve any extension marked as having a maxVersion greater than 8, and that was 7 up until a few days ago.
Granted, you could distribute your Extension through your own site instead of the main Firefox Add-ons site...
That's making the same assumption that the people playing casual games want the same things as the people playing "gamer" games - the same assumption that all these commenters keep making. I'm not saying that's necessarily untrue, but I have to wonder why all these casual gamers don't already own home consoles if that's the case. There must be some need that's fulfilled by the mobile format, and I suspect it's "playing something when you're bored" rather than "specifically having a gaming setup at home as a full time hobby". I'm not saying there's not money to be made in the former, but you'll never outpace a dedicated home machine with a mobile device (as others have said, by the time mobiles outpace the PS3 it won't matter because hardcore gamers will be buying PS4s).
It's the same assumption that John Carmack seems to be making.
In case you missed it, his upcoming game, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_%28video_game%29]Rage[/url], is a first person shooter.
Officially supported platforms? PC, PS3, Xbox 360, and iOS.
Yes, iOS. For a high-end first person shooter demonstrating the iD Tech 5 engine.
Yes, unlike the US patent system, the US trademark system is first to file. Since Dropbox filed a trademark first, I'm not seeing the problem here...
...
...
...
...except that Dropbox is a generic term. My local library has had a dropbox to return books since the 1980s. Local video stores have them to return videos, too.
>>If we are lucky they will release the entire source code, so that the open source community can work its magic and port it them selfs
Well... the entire HL2 source code was leaked back in the day... =)
But I'd love to see the *TF2* source code released. Robin (back when he was just a uni student in Australia) released the source code to TF1 (up to a certain version), which enabled me to write CustomTF (I guess some people call it Shaka's Mod) which allows you to build your own class using a cash-based system. Hell of a lot of fun to write and play, and it turned into an open source project in its own right, with various people from around the world taking over leadership of the project at one point or another in the last 14 years.
Given that the Orange Box 2009 engine is the basis of most of Valve's current online games, it's doubtful that would happen. The closest you're going to get is the Alien Swarm code.
Even server plugins like MetaMod: Source and Orange Box are reverse engineering the server constructs to do a lot of what they do, as Valve is terrible at keeping the HL2 SDK for VSPs (Valve Server Plugins) up to date.
For those of you who don't keep track, the "Source 2009" version of the game engine used by Valve's multiplayer games has had a number of updates in the past year.
The problem is, the SDK hasn't reflected these changes.
So, right now, the final game itself has interesting C++ classes like CVoteController that don't exist in the SDK.
Does Valve plan on releasing an updated SDK along with making it free?
As I understand it, the name was more or less an accident... at the time they first started showing off the engine "Source" was the name of the engine in their version control system. Why they decided to keep with that name instead of coming up with a new one is likely lost to time.
And they rechristened the HL1 engine "GoldSrc" (because that version had gone gold) to differentiate between the two.
I have noticed this, and there are social multiplayer games. The thing is, I am wondering why some of the legacy titles, such as Zelda don't get multiplayer online variants. (A Link to the Past with 4/8/16 Links anyone?)
Zelda has had mutliplayer versions, they just weren't online.
Four Swords (GBA, required a copy of the game and a GBA for each player) and Four Swords Adventures (GBA + GameCube, required a GBA for each player plug a GBA->GC link cable) were the names of the two.
Four Swords is about to come to the DSiWare shop for free (for DSi/3DS owners) so we'll see if they add online play to it.
The other catch for multiplayer Zelda games... Four Swords explicitly limited each player to being able to carry one item, although you could swap it when you found
You cooperate with the other players to an extent (sometimes it requires all the players to push on a large block to move it... this was copied into Minish Cap, which is a prequel to Four Swords), but you're also competing with them for Force Gems... the better you do in each level, the better award you get and the more stuff you unlock in your games, and in the copy of A Link to the Past that was on the same GBA cart for the GBA-only version.
Wait, YOU were the one that locked it down to 4. How is this anyone else's fault?
Set it allow up to 127, and wait till it fails, just make sure your code is smart enough to fail soft. You created a false dependency. Its your own fault.
Not GP, but I can think of a few reasons:
There may actually be a breaking change
According to the Building an Extension page, public extensions can only be listed as compatible with versions that Mozilla has announced, which as of this writing is version 7. Failure to do this will get your extension rejected from the Mozilla Addons site.
Keep in mind that version 7 is at most 6 months away by Mozilla's new schedule...
The only things you can buy in-game is stuff that you can earn with enough gameplay. Besides, all of those items have trade-offs versus standard kit. It's not like you can buy a gun for each class that clearly bests anything else.
Don't really agree with this. There are some weapons that are just clearly better. The Dead Ringer and Your Eternal Reward are clearly better than the default spy weapons. Same with the Backburner and Axtinguisher for the Pyro. There are other examples as well, but the list would start getting long. Bottom line is that there are plenty of weapons out there for some of the classes that make the default weapons seem pretty useless.
I've clocked over 600 hours as Spy, and I'll tell you right now that it's completely situational.
The Your Eternal Reward is a tradeoff. You start off with no disguise, and if you miss a backstab or have to shoot someone, your disguise goes away until you get another backstab.
The Dead Ringer is balanced by its loud decloak sound and the limit on how much cloak you can regenerate from ammo boxes/dropped weapons. I personally like the DR, but it is fairly useless at the start of Attack/Defense maps if you're on RED. However, the Cloak and Dagger works really well there, as you essentially have infinite cloak as long as you don't move.
The normal invisibility watch is still useful as you can collect ammo boxes along the way to restore your cloak. The C&D can't do this (instead you have to stop and stand there) and the DR has a hard 40% cloak regen limit per medium or large ammo box (invis watch gets 50% from medium and 100% from large). This is probably why most expert Spies use it.
Am I an expert Spy? Hard to say. I know that I got 15 backstabs in one life using the DR and YER on cp_degrootkeep, though...
As for sounding similar, the only one that I really can recall on short notice is a pistol for the Scout, which sounds almost like the Force-A-Nature.
I hope you're joking.
They really don't sound all that similar. I don't play Scout a lot, but the FaN is in my Scout loadout. It makes a loud cracking sound (twice since it generally fires twice before stopping, the ammo is wasted if you don't fire the second shot before reloading) and has more bass to it than the pistol
The Shortstop (Scout's other primary replacement before the new update) on the other hand has more of a cracking sound than the pistol, but higher pitched and with less bass than the FaN.
(I know what the Pistol sounds like because I use it (or rather the Lugermorph, a cosmetic variation of it) a lot when I play Engineer.)
The Dead Ringer is balanced by its much louder decloak sound than the normal cloaking devices. It's only really a problem if they're using the Saharan Spy set, which makes it completely silent (but also means they have the Your Eternal Reward knife).
Spies in general are countered by Pyro, among other things.
Plus, only a Dead Ringer Spy can run through an active fire fight and live through it... any other cloaking device makes him light up like a Christmas Tree when hit by any weaponry, particularly if Heavies are involved, they can kill a Spy from full health in less than a second.
Yeah, that's true. The actual problem with the game since the Mann-conomy is another. Threats in TF2 used to be highly recognizable, both by sight (different silhouettes, different poses for holding guns, etc.) or by sound. Nowadays there are so many weapons and some of them look and sound so similar it is impossible to distinguish between them all in any useful way.
Look and sound similar? They are very few weapons in the game that actually look similar.
The ones I can think of are: The Minigun and Natascha look similar, but sound different. This is important, since they both have to spin-up before firing. Both their spin-up and firing sounds are different.
The Flame Thrower and Backburner look similar from a distance and sound identical. However, the Backburner has a different "mouth" to it (it looks like a snake head).
The Medic's Needle Gun and Blutsauger look quite similar. The main way to tell the difference is to see if the Medic has +3 health things appearing over his head when he shoots you.
Those are all the similar looking weapon I can think of in the game. The others all look quite different from each other, from the Shotgun and Frontier Justice (has a battery taped to it) to the Sniper Rifle and Sydney Sleeper (which has feathers attached to it).
Note: I haven't included any of the new weapons because I haven't seen how similar they look in-game.
I also intentionally ignored the Rocket Jumper and Sticky Jumper, which use the same models as the Rocket Launcher and Sticky Launcher respectively.
Last night I tried to sign in to play, and TF2 wouldn't even launch. It looks like their service was *massively* overloaded.
I bought the game 4 years ago now and I have gotten my money out of it in hours played, however it still irks me that a game I paid for is unavailable to me because of free players jumping on board.
You are aware that this happens after every update (large or small), as everyone who has CS:S, TF2, DOD:S, or HL2:DM (which is also free) as well as servers for all of the above try to update at once?
Of course, now it will be worse as even more people need to update.
Slashdot Mirror
The WinSxS directory actually contains the master copy of every file in the original operating system and all its patches and service packs.
The files in the other directories are actually hard links to these files.
I believe service packs come with a file that removes the pre-SP versions of the files it updated at the expense of making the service pack not uninstallable.
Odds are you don't want it. Based on Microsoft's track record, Windows 8 will be a terrible iteration of their OS and should be skipped over. Just wait for the next release after 8, it will be rock solid... well as rock solid as anything rolling out of Redmond.
The track record depends on which OS you consider to be the predecessor of Windows XP.
Windows 2000 was a solid OS.
Windows ME was a toy that broke at the slightest touch.
So, if you go WinMe / WinXP / Vista / 7 / 8, then yes, 8 would be one to skip.
If you go Win2K / WinXP / Vista / 7 / 8, I'm not sure how you'd get that 8 will be bad.
Personally, I hate the whole "touch interface" look for non-touch devices (read: desktop PCs), so I intend to pass on 8.
In addition to what anyGould said, pleading the fifth will likely be used against you in court.
I probably don't need to mention that pleading the fifth makes you look guilty as hell.
Tell that to the extentions that constantly break on new major version.
Also, tell that to Mozilla's extension approvers, who won't approve any extension marked as having a maxVersion greater than 8, and that was 7 up until a few days ago.
Granted, you could distribute your Extension through your own site instead of the main Firefox Add-ons site...
That's making the same assumption that the people playing casual games want the same things as the people playing "gamer" games - the same assumption that all these commenters keep making. I'm not saying that's necessarily untrue, but I have to wonder why all these casual gamers don't already own home consoles if that's the case. There must be some need that's fulfilled by the mobile format, and I suspect it's "playing something when you're bored" rather than "specifically having a gaming setup at home as a full time hobby". I'm not saying there's not money to be made in the former, but you'll never outpace a dedicated home machine with a mobile device (as others have said, by the time mobiles outpace the PS3 it won't matter because hardcore gamers will be buying PS4s).
It's the same assumption that John Carmack seems to be making.
In case you missed it, his upcoming game, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_%28video_game%29]Rage[/url], is a first person shooter.
Officially supported platforms? PC, PS3, Xbox 360, and iOS.
Yes, iOS. For a high-end first person shooter demonstrating the iD Tech 5 engine.
Steam is currently participating in a DDoS attack on itself known as the "Steam Summer Sale."
It's likely to end on the 11th, and things will return to normal.
Yes, unlike the US patent system, the US trademark system is first to file. Since Dropbox filed a trademark first, I'm not seeing the problem here...
...
...
...
...except that Dropbox is a generic term. My local library has had a dropbox to return books since the 1980s. Local video stores have them to return videos, too.
Thank you for pointing out what's wrong with the patent system again.
Sadly, it's still better than copyrights. At least patents expire, even if it is after, what, 20 years now?
I wasn't aware that facebook had a blog feature.
They call it a "status message."
>>If we are lucky they will release the entire source code, so that the open source community can work its magic and port it them selfs
Well... the entire HL2 source code was leaked back in the day... =)
But I'd love to see the *TF2* source code released. Robin (back when he was just a uni student in Australia) released the source code to TF1 (up to a certain version), which enabled me to write CustomTF (I guess some people call it Shaka's Mod) which allows you to build your own class using a cash-based system. Hell of a lot of fun to write and play, and it turned into an open source project in its own right, with various people from around the world taking over leadership of the project at one point or another in the last 14 years.
Given that the Orange Box 2009 engine is the basis of most of Valve's current online games, it's doubtful that would happen. The closest you're going to get is the Alien Swarm code.
Even server plugins like MetaMod: Source and Orange Box are reverse engineering the server constructs to do a lot of what they do, as Valve is terrible at keeping the HL2 SDK for VSPs (Valve Server Plugins) up to date.
If that's the case, they are going to hold on for dear life with both hands, the company and stockholders be damned.
The larger stockholders can band together to fire the CEO.
For those of you who don't keep track, the "Source 2009" version of the game engine used by Valve's multiplayer games has had a number of updates in the past year.
The problem is, the SDK hasn't reflected these changes.
So, right now, the final game itself has interesting C++ classes like CVoteController that don't exist in the SDK.
Does Valve plan on releasing an updated SDK along with making it free?
As I understand it, the name was more or less an accident... at the time they first started showing off the engine "Source" was the name of the engine in their version control system. Why they decided to keep with that name instead of coming up with a new one is likely lost to time.
And they rechristened the HL1 engine "GoldSrc" (because that version had gone gold) to differentiate between the two.
I have noticed this, and there are social multiplayer games. The thing is, I am wondering why some of the legacy titles, such as Zelda don't get multiplayer online variants. (A Link to the Past with 4/8/16 Links anyone?)
Zelda has had mutliplayer versions, they just weren't online.
Four Swords (GBA, required a copy of the game and a GBA for each player) and Four Swords Adventures (GBA + GameCube, required a GBA for each player plug a GBA->GC link cable) were the names of the two.
Four Swords is about to come to the DSiWare shop for free (for DSi/3DS owners) so we'll see if they add online play to it.
The other catch for multiplayer Zelda games... Four Swords explicitly limited each player to being able to carry one item, although you could swap it when you found
You cooperate with the other players to an extent (sometimes it requires all the players to push on a large block to move it... this was copied into Minish Cap, which is a prequel to Four Swords), but you're also competing with them for Force Gems... the better you do in each level, the better award you get and the more stuff you unlock in your games, and in the copy of A Link to the Past that was on the same GBA cart for the GBA-only version.
Wait, YOU were the one that locked it down to 4. How is this anyone else's fault?
Set it allow up to 127, and wait till it fails, just make sure your code is smart enough to fail soft.
You created a false dependency. Its your own fault.
Not GP, but I can think of a few reasons:
Keep in mind that version 7 is at most 6 months away by Mozilla's new schedule...
What happens if I "owned" the game on Steam before, but never installed it? Do I get the 300-slots, or the 50-slots?
As far as I know, you'd get the 300 slots one.
(I think they still sold it for $20 before this week)
It got knocked down from $20 to $10 in mid-April, with Orange Box falling from $30 to $20.
Nothing that can be bought cannot be easily gotten in a few hours of playing, besides hats anyways, .
Set hats say hi.
Here's hoping this encourages Valve to remove the hats from the sets.
Heck, I'd love it if I could get the Saharan Spy set effect with my Unusual Fancy Fedora.
The only things you can buy in-game is stuff that you can earn with enough gameplay. Besides, all of those items have trade-offs versus standard kit. It's not like you can buy a gun for each class that clearly bests anything else.
Don't really agree with this. There are some weapons that are just clearly better. The Dead Ringer and Your Eternal Reward are clearly better than the default spy weapons. Same with the Backburner and Axtinguisher for the Pyro. There are other examples as well, but the list would start getting long. Bottom line is that there are plenty of weapons out there for some of the classes that make the default weapons seem pretty useless.
I've clocked over 600 hours as Spy, and I'll tell you right now that it's completely situational.
The Your Eternal Reward is a tradeoff. You start off with no disguise, and if you miss a backstab or have to shoot someone, your disguise goes away until you get another backstab.
The Dead Ringer is balanced by its loud decloak sound and the limit on how much cloak you can regenerate from ammo boxes/dropped weapons. I personally like the DR, but it is fairly useless at the start of Attack/Defense maps if you're on RED. However, the Cloak and Dagger works really well there, as you essentially have infinite cloak as long as you don't move.
The normal invisibility watch is still useful as you can collect ammo boxes along the way to restore your cloak. The C&D can't do this (instead you have to stop and stand there) and the DR has a hard 40% cloak regen limit per medium or large ammo box (invis watch gets 50% from medium and 100% from large). This is probably why most expert Spies use it.
Am I an expert Spy? Hard to say. I know that I got 15 backstabs in one life using the DR and YER on cp_degrootkeep, though...
As for sounding similar, the only one that I really can recall on short notice is a pistol for the Scout, which sounds almost like the Force-A-Nature.
I hope you're joking.
They really don't sound all that similar. I don't play Scout a lot, but the FaN is in my Scout loadout. It makes a loud cracking sound (twice since it generally fires twice before stopping, the ammo is wasted if you don't fire the second shot before reloading) and has more bass to it than the pistol
The Shortstop (Scout's other primary replacement before the new update) on the other hand has more of a cracking sound than the pistol, but higher pitched and with less bass than the FaN.
(I know what the Pistol sounds like because I use it (or rather the Lugermorph, a cosmetic variation of it) a lot when I play Engineer.)
The starter backpack is large enough to hold all the optional gear for all the classes. It's a convenience, nothing more.
Er... no it isn't. I had 70 unique weapons in my backpack before this update, and this update added upward of 20 more.
The Spy is a Glass Cannon.
The Dead Ringer is balanced by its much louder decloak sound than the normal cloaking devices. It's only really a problem if they're using the Saharan Spy set, which makes it completely silent (but also means they have the Your Eternal Reward knife).
Spies in general are countered by Pyro, among other things.
Plus, only a Dead Ringer Spy can run through an active fire fight and live through it... any other cloaking device makes him light up like a Christmas Tree when hit by any weaponry, particularly if Heavies are involved, they can kill a Spy from full health in less than a second.
Yeah, that's true. The actual problem with the game since the Mann-conomy is another. Threats in TF2 used to be highly recognizable, both by sight (different silhouettes, different poses for holding guns, etc.) or by sound. Nowadays there are so many weapons and some of them look and sound so similar it is impossible to distinguish between them all in any useful way.
Look and sound similar? They are very few weapons in the game that actually look similar.
The ones I can think of are: The Minigun and Natascha look similar, but sound different. This is important, since they both have to spin-up before firing. Both their spin-up and firing sounds are different.
The Flame Thrower and Backburner look similar from a distance and sound identical. However, the Backburner has a different "mouth" to it (it looks like a snake head).
The Medic's Needle Gun and Blutsauger look quite similar. The main way to tell the difference is to see if the Medic has +3 health things appearing over his head when he shoots you.
Those are all the similar looking weapon I can think of in the game. The others all look quite different from each other, from the Shotgun and Frontier Justice (has a battery taped to it) to the Sniper Rifle and Sydney Sleeper (which has feathers attached to it).
Note: I haven't included any of the new weapons because I haven't seen how similar they look in-game.
I also intentionally ignored the Rocket Jumper and Sticky Jumper, which use the same models as the Rocket Launcher and Sticky Launcher respectively.
Last night I tried to sign in to play, and TF2 wouldn't even launch. It looks like their service was *massively* overloaded.
I bought the game 4 years ago now and I have gotten my money out of it in hours played, however it still irks me that a game I paid for is unavailable to me because of free players jumping on board.
You are aware that this happens after every update (large or small), as everyone who has CS:S, TF2, DOD:S, or HL2:DM (which is also free) as well as servers for all of the above try to update at once?
Of course, now it will be worse as even more people need to update.
$5 - $0.99 = $3.99?
I believe Steam approves of your arithmetic.
I originally wrote $4 and thought "wait, that doesn't sound right" and changed it.
I just changed it in the wrong direction... doh. I tell you, it's the brainwashing from stores so that we now expect everything to end in .99.