The original release of Vampire Bloodlines was riddled with bugs, but there is an unofficial patch that fixes nearly all of them, and it's a really amazing game now.
In fact, there are two competing unofficial patches, one is a bit more extensive than the other, and the other is hosted by an 18+ site, but both improve the stability of the game significantly, and open up a lot more content that used to be inaccessible. Seriously, if you haven't finished it back then, reinstall, patch and play again.
Next thing you know, some litigious bastard will suggest that AT&T should have to let us choose which phones to use on our landlines! You knew the deal when you signed up for service, it's only whiners who want to stop competition who suggest that renting your princess phone is too expensive.
Actually, this used to be the case in Netherland in the '70s. You could only use phones from the national phone company (the PTT). Later, you could use any phone, as long as it was approved by the PTT. Nowadays, everybody is free to choose whatever phone they like.
The issue here is: do you think monopolies and cartels are okay, or do you want completely free competition? And to what extend is this being enforced by law?
I can't really blame Google though, since the VM is why Java is notoriously slow, and the libraries is why it's notoriously member hungry. For a PC that's not a big deal, but on a mobile device, it is. There's a reason Java ME has gone nowhere, and Google is trying to succeed where Java has failed.
Java has not been notoriously slow for a couple of years now. Unless you consider C++ notoriously slow, because that's about how fast Java 5 JVMs are. It is true that Java is somewhat memory hungry, but I don't see how that can be avoided in a proper OO language (which C++ isn't).
And Java ME has most definitely gone somewhere. If I'm not mistaken, just about every single Nokia phone runs Java, and that's a sizable chunk of the market. And I doubt they're the only phones with Java.
At this point, I can see only three semi-legitimate reasons to prefer Blu-Ray:
...
You love Java and hate Javascript. Possible reasons for this:
You prefer static typing -- I find it retarded, but there are smarter people than me on both sides of that flamewar
You don't understand Javascript
For some perverse reason, you need performance in your program itself (HDi does animate faster than Blu-Ray's Java.)
Wait, I should prefer Blu-Ray over HD-DVD? What does Java/javascript have to do with this? Even apart from the fact that Java and javascript are two completely different and unrelated beasts, Java is far superior to javascript for anything that you might consider using Java for, whereas javascript is pretty much your only option if you want to do client-side scripting.
But what does this have to do with HD-DVD/Blu-Ray? Do HD-DVD players not support Java, and BR players not suppport javascript? Either would be stupid.
I'm excited for a high definition format, and would jump at even a $299 player if it actually played all of the titles that were out there. But I, like pretty much every one else, don't want to be saddled with an obsolete and useless box (whether it cost me $99 or $999), and buying TWO new boxes is not an acceptable "solution."
I'm sure there will be players that can handle both formats. Which ofcourse is basically a loss for everybody, but at least we only have to buy a single player.
But for the moment, I'm quite happy spending my money on the $5-$10 DVDs availlable today, and not worry about the next format.
The only thing that would win me over to a new format is the availlability of many of my favourite films for $10 each.
Various games do stick their saves in My Docs by default (Dungeon Siege for instance), which always irritates me to no end when I restore my boot partition and find I've just lost however many hours of playtime. I tend to install games to another drive, and keep a small boot drive. I much prefer the save for a game being in with the game files by default.
The problem here isn't that the game stores save files in each user's personal disk space (which is as it should be), but that that personal disk space is on the boot partition. Unix systems have mounted/home from another partition since the beginning of time. Perhaps that's also possible in Windows, but I've never figured out how.
No seriously, that's what this is all about. The mousetrap industry funds research that build better, faster, stronger, smarter, fearless mice, thus increasing demand for a better mousetrap.
What do you mean, fix the caching? Is there a problem with the way Firefox is caching? If so, please explain what it is so the problem can be fixed.
You said yourself that memory wasn't being released upon closing a tab due to caching. That's what's wrong with its caching. Rule number 1 of caching: never ever keep information that's not going to be used in memory, and closing a tab is a good indication that it's probably not going to be used. If you think you might need it somewhere in the future, store it on disk. Bad caching is an important source of memory leaks.
Right... whenever you have more than one country who thinks they are a superpower, you have a good chance that there will be a war.
Actually, when you've got more than one superpower, you've got a balance of power or a cold war. When you've got a single superpower, then you've got someone who can wage war pretty much with impunity.
Close firefox and re-open (with the same session), and FireFox will drop to between 100-200MB.
Yes, of course, you're removing all the cached content and all the memory fragmentation. It's like completely clearing every single cache and completely defragging memory. Of course memory dropped. That's not necessarily a memory leak.
Why is Firefox caching all those closed tabs in memory instead of on disk? It might make sense to cache the previous webpage in memory, but after a tab has been closed, it's most definitely safe to rely solely on the disk cache for the content of that tab. Not doing to counts as a memory leak in my book. And in any book about proper caching, for that matter.
In fact, it might be nice if firefox noticed when its cache is growing to large and purged old data a bit more aggressively. I wouldn't be surprised if Firefox's ambitious caching is responsible for many of its memory and performance issues.
I've never seen it, and nearly everyone I see on the Firefox Bugs forum has never seen it. It sounds pretty rare to me.
Firefox is infamous for its memory bugs and performance degradation. A lot of people consider this Firefox's main problem, and even its only important problem. Very recent versions have lessened these problems somewhat, but it is still bad enough that I've finally installed Opera on my work PC and laptop.
Perhaps the Firefox devs are not the kind of powerusers as other firefox users, but ignoring complaints from users means that you're alienating part of your user base, and that means that eventually you're going to lose market share. Probably to Opera. Firefox may remain an excellent substitute for IE for a very long time to come, but some people want more than a substitute.
Or you could shut up and sign it. Unless you've got another job in your back pocket, the market's kind of thin these days.
Where is this? Because in Netherland there's an extreme shortage of good programmers, and an obundance of jobs (although not all of them equally enviable). If I had to sign a contract like this, I'd take it as a hint to look for a better job.
Take it home,
Scan it,
Using, the gimp, cut out the paragraphs you disagree with, and stretch the others by just enough to cover any blank space left over. You may need to move paragraphs from one page to the next or previous to make it less obvious,
Print it out,
Sign it.
Chances are, if the job is well executed, nobody will read in detail what you signed. And it is fully legal too, as you are doing that to a document with your own signature.
This reminds me of a BOFH episode where he'd added all sorts of crazy clauses to his contract, which entitled him to all sorts of ridiculous things. Like declaring a night as the pub as business expenses or something.
What if I would DEMAND that Google also include the Dutch "Queen's day" for the rest of the world to see?
Actually, I seem to recall a Google logo that was orange and had a crown on one the the 'o's. I can't finds it on Google's list of holiday logo's, however. I also remember a christmassy logo, and can't find that anywhere either, so maybe I'm just imagining things.
What are your thoughts on Google now that it designed a logo for veterans?
Fantastic! Google has had its head up its search engine for more than 7 years!
I'm glad to see the change of heart, and I'll use Google more often
I still have major gripes with Google, but at least this is a small step in the right direction
Looks like someone reminded people at Google they live in the U.S. and enjoy freedoms soldiers have shed blood fighting for
1 lonely logo for veterans since 1999? Whoopidy-freakin-doo!
Google's logos are irrelevant
Google only did it to get WND off its back
Must have been the new guy who did the design. He's not hip to the anti-American company rules yet
Google is still evil, and must be shunned at all costs
I tried to vote "Good for Google to bring attention to yet another holiday, but you can't expect them to honor every single holiday on the face of the earth, can you?", but somehow they forgot to include that option. Perhaps I should mail them about this omission?
SC2000 is (perhaps unintentionally) designed to teach children that the only functional form society can take is a mixed-market socialist system. Which, funnily enough, is what most Western countries have today.
So basically its teaching them how to build a country up to first-world standards. That's good, right?
And yet, actual real-world data shows the single most reliable way to reduce crime is to hire more police and put them on the streets, while fighting the "root causes" enumerated by "most" anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists consistently fails.
Not really. The problem is that fighting root causes takes a lot more time, whereas hiring more police has an immediate effect. And politicians aren't exactly know for their long term planning. But if you compare crime rates per country with the minimum standard of living, there's a clear correlation.
There are different kinds of crime, and different reactions to poverty, but there certainly is a category of crime that's caused by poor people seeing crime as the only way to get ahead. If you can't get a job, or the only job you can get pays too little (by whatever standard), and you see other people who do have money, well, you've got little to lose and a lot to gain.
This effect is increased by seeing successful criminals flaunt their wealth. So it certainly helps to have police locking up criminals and taking away their ill-gotten gains, but when the poor, potential criminals still don't have other options, they may still still take the risk.
See, it's a combination of factors. There's no silver bullet. People like silver bullets, but they just don't work.
SimCity has an interesting American bias that you probably wouldn't get unless you live in Europe. Try setting taxes in SimCity to somewhere below a European level -- eg. 20-25% -- and your cities literally fall into ruins. Well, I'm in Europe now, taxes above that, and the cities seem to be thriving.
Income is usually taxed by the state, not the city. I've always assumed the taxes in SimCity were some kind of city tax.
For example, SC gets the players to discover that
the way to counter rising crime is to put in more police stations.
Most anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists
would disagree violently.
If they disagree too violently, we'll need more police stations.
This comment is funny, but it relies on a common misperception that the poor kids for whom the OLPC was created have no idea what modern urban life is like. Most of them live in or in the shadow of large modern cities, Johannisberg, Kolkata, Rio de Janeiro, Jakarta, Manila, and Mexico City, just to name a few. They have plenty of opportunities to see modern life, they just don't have much opportunity to participate.
For kids in big cities, yes, but about about those in subsaharan Africa? I've been to Mali, and that country has about a single tarmac road, and only government buildings in the capital have more than two floors. Villages in Dogon country have a single gas-powered fridge so they can sell Coca Cola and bottled water to tourists. I really wonder how those kids would react to building a giant city with skyscrapers, powerlines and a sewer grid (or was that SimCity 2000?).
When there's groups that can take up to two hours to play the game
Two hours to play the basic game? How the hell do you do that? Although I don't expect our 15 minute record to be broken anytime soon, a game of Settlers really shouldn't take much more than 60 minutes. It's easy to play a couple of games in an evening.
By the way, in that 15 minute game, one player started with both 5-8-10 points, and the first 6 rolls were all 5, 8 or 10. It was a quick win from there. Settlers is most balanced when every player makes sure he starts with a wide spread of production numbers and production fields. If you start with less than 6 different numbers, you're too vulnerable to bad luck. One exception: it's great to produce wood and clay at the same number, since you always need them together anyway. To a lesser extend, this is also true for ore and grain, especially in a 4-player game.
Unlike many American games which are net sum (you gain by taking directly from other players)...
This is a lousy way to describe the difference between American games and Eurogames. It's true that American games are often more aggressive, and more aimed at taking the other guy out, whereas German games are more constructive, aimed at building the biggest and/or best, but IMO a far more fundamental difference is that US games tend to be more simulationist; the game designer takes a certain theme or situation, and comes up with game mechanics that best try to simulate that situation. Eurogames, on the other hand, work more from the game mechanics than the simulation. They often do have some theme or situation that the game revolves around, but it's not sacred, and it's mostly an excuse to make use of these funky new game mechanics.
The end result is that American-style games tend to be more realistic and more detailed, but also take more time, whereas Eurogames tend to be easier, faster, and more balanced, but a bit more abstract.
On average, ofcourse. There are some really good simulation games made in Europe, and there are many American games that are more about mechanics than simulation. You might argue that many games from Cheapass Games, for example, are closer to Eurogames.
Slashdot Mirror
The original release of Vampire Bloodlines was riddled with bugs, but there is an unofficial patch that fixes nearly all of them, and it's a really amazing game now.
In fact, there are two competing unofficial patches, one is a bit more extensive than the other, and the other is hosted by an 18+ site, but both improve the stability of the game significantly, and open up a lot more content that used to be inaccessible. Seriously, if you haven't finished it back then, reinstall, patch and play again.
Actually, this used to be the case in Netherland in the '70s. You could only use phones from the national phone company (the PTT). Later, you could use any phone, as long as it was approved by the PTT. Nowadays, everybody is free to choose whatever phone they like.
The issue here is: do you think monopolies and cartels are okay, or do you want completely free competition? And to what extend is this being enforced by law?
Java has not been notoriously slow for a couple of years now. Unless you consider C++ notoriously slow, because that's about how fast Java 5 JVMs are. It is true that Java is somewhat memory hungry, but I don't see how that can be avoided in a proper OO language (which C++ isn't).
And Java ME has most definitely gone somewhere. If I'm not mistaken, just about every single Nokia phone runs Java, and that's a sizable chunk of the market. And I doubt they're the only phones with Java.
Wait, I should prefer Blu-Ray over HD-DVD? What does Java/javascript have to do with this? Even apart from the fact that Java and javascript are two completely different and unrelated beasts, Java is far superior to javascript for anything that you might consider using Java for, whereas javascript is pretty much your only option if you want to do client-side scripting.
But what does this have to do with HD-DVD/Blu-Ray? Do HD-DVD players not support Java, and BR players not suppport javascript? Either would be stupid.
I'm sure there will be players that can handle both formats. Which ofcourse is basically a loss for everybody, but at least we only have to buy a single player.
But for the moment, I'm quite happy spending my money on the $5-$10 DVDs availlable today, and not worry about the next format. The only thing that would win me over to a new format is the availlability of many of my favourite films for $10 each.
The problem here isn't that the game stores save files in each user's personal disk space (which is as it should be), but that that personal disk space is on the boot partition. Unix systems have mounted /home from another partition since the beginning of time. Perhaps that's also possible in Windows, but I've never figured out how.
No seriously, that's what this is all about. The mousetrap industry funds research that build better, faster, stronger, smarter, fearless mice, thus increasing demand for a better mousetrap.
You said yourself that memory wasn't being released upon closing a tab due to caching. That's what's wrong with its caching. Rule number 1 of caching: never ever keep information that's not going to be used in memory, and closing a tab is a good indication that it's probably not going to be used. If you think you might need it somewhere in the future, store it on disk. Bad caching is an important source of memory leaks.
Actually, when you've got more than one superpower, you've got a balance of power or a cold war. When you've got a single superpower, then you've got someone who can wage war pretty much with impunity.
Then fix the caching and fragmentation. I admit, caching properly is hard, especially knowing when to release it, but it's also Very Important.
Why is Firefox caching all those closed tabs in memory instead of on disk? It might make sense to cache the previous webpage in memory, but after a tab has been closed, it's most definitely safe to rely solely on the disk cache for the content of that tab. Not doing to counts as a memory leak in my book. And in any book about proper caching, for that matter.
In fact, it might be nice if firefox noticed when its cache is growing to large and purged old data a bit more aggressively. I wouldn't be surprised if Firefox's ambitious caching is responsible for many of its memory and performance issues.
Firefox is infamous for its memory bugs and performance degradation. A lot of people consider this Firefox's main problem, and even its only important problem. Very recent versions have lessened these problems somewhat, but it is still bad enough that I've finally installed Opera on my work PC and laptop.
Perhaps the Firefox devs are not the kind of powerusers as other firefox users, but ignoring complaints from users means that you're alienating part of your user base, and that means that eventually you're going to lose market share. Probably to Opera. Firefox may remain an excellent substitute for IE for a very long time to come, but some people want more than a substitute.
Where is this? Because in Netherland there's an extreme shortage of good programmers, and an obundance of jobs (although not all of them equally enviable). If I had to sign a contract like this, I'd take it as a hint to look for a better job.
This reminds me of a BOFH episode where he'd added all sorts of crazy clauses to his contract, which entitled him to all sorts of ridiculous things. Like declaring a night as the pub as business expenses or something.
Actually, I seem to recall a Google logo that was orange and had a crown on one the the 'o's. I can't finds it on Google's list of holiday logo's, however. I also remember a christmassy logo, and can't find that anywhere either, so maybe I'm just imagining things.
What I'd like to know is, does WND accept liberal and conservative attack ads equally, or are they a bunch of hypocites?
I mean, if they want to be accepted as an independent news site, then surely they'd try to be neutral, independent and objective, right?
I tried to vote "Good for Google to bring attention to yet another holiday, but you can't expect them to honor every single holiday on the face of the earth, can you?", but somehow they forgot to include that option. Perhaps I should mail them about this omission?
So basically its teaching them how to build a country up to first-world standards. That's good, right?
Not really. The problem is that fighting root causes takes a lot more time, whereas hiring more police has an immediate effect. And politicians aren't exactly know for their long term planning. But if you compare crime rates per country with the minimum standard of living, there's a clear correlation.
There are different kinds of crime, and different reactions to poverty, but there certainly is a category of crime that's caused by poor people seeing crime as the only way to get ahead. If you can't get a job, or the only job you can get pays too little (by whatever standard), and you see other people who do have money, well, you've got little to lose and a lot to gain. This effect is increased by seeing successful criminals flaunt their wealth. So it certainly helps to have police locking up criminals and taking away their ill-gotten gains, but when the poor, potential criminals still don't have other options, they may still still take the risk.
See, it's a combination of factors. There's no silver bullet. People like silver bullets, but they just don't work.
Income is usually taxed by the state, not the city. I've always assumed the taxes in SimCity were some kind of city tax.
If they disagree too violently, we'll need more police stations.
For kids in big cities, yes, but about about those in subsaharan Africa? I've been to Mali, and that country has about a single tarmac road, and only government buildings in the capital have more than two floors. Villages in Dogon country have a single gas-powered fridge so they can sell Coca Cola and bottled water to tourists. I really wonder how those kids would react to building a giant city with skyscrapers, powerlines and a sewer grid (or was that SimCity 2000?).
Two hours to play the basic game? How the hell do you do that? Although I don't expect our 15 minute record to be broken anytime soon, a game of Settlers really shouldn't take much more than 60 minutes. It's easy to play a couple of games in an evening.
By the way, in that 15 minute game, one player started with both 5-8-10 points, and the first 6 rolls were all 5, 8 or 10. It was a quick win from there. Settlers is most balanced when every player makes sure he starts with a wide spread of production numbers and production fields. If you start with less than 6 different numbers, you're too vulnerable to bad luck. One exception: it's great to produce wood and clay at the same number, since you always need them together anyway. To a lesser extend, this is also true for ore and grain, especially in a 4-player game.
Might make a nice counterpoint to The Settlers of Canaan (which does exist).
This is a lousy way to describe the difference between American games and Eurogames. It's true that American games are often more aggressive, and more aimed at taking the other guy out, whereas German games are more constructive, aimed at building the biggest and/or best, but IMO a far more fundamental difference is that US games tend to be more simulationist; the game designer takes a certain theme or situation, and comes up with game mechanics that best try to simulate that situation. Eurogames, on the other hand, work more from the game mechanics than the simulation. They often do have some theme or situation that the game revolves around, but it's not sacred, and it's mostly an excuse to make use of these funky new game mechanics.
The end result is that American-style games tend to be more realistic and more detailed, but also take more time, whereas Eurogames tend to be easier, faster, and more balanced, but a bit more abstract.
On average, ofcourse. There are some really good simulation games made in Europe, and there are many American games that are more about mechanics than simulation. You might argue that many games from Cheapass Games, for example, are closer to Eurogames.