Actually, as far as I know the Google Play Store also takes a 30% cut. The main difference is that it costs more to get into the store with Apple (99 USD/a)than with Google (25 USD once). Things might be different for vendor-specific stores like Samsung Apps but then again those have a limited reach and are unlikely to be as attractive as Google's store.
In other words it provides a morale boost (and potentially intimidates the enemy if they don't happen to have an RPG around). Might be worth the resources.
On the other hand, this is version 2 so they obviously had a version 1 and decided that one wasn't obviously useless enough to entirely scrap the concept of homemade tanks. This may not be a terribly good design but apparently they think it's worth fielding.
Given that they have more experience getting shot at in Syria than anyone on Slashdot I'm inclined to assume that it adds at least some value over just sending out two guys with assault rifles.
I see it as the HB team burning karma in order to help THQ make their pay-what-you-want offering a success. Essentially they're (nonexclusively*) compromising three of their main pillars in order to market the fourth one (pay-what-you-want) to traditional publishers.
If this is a success for THQ then other publishers might also decide to make their content available in this manner. Whether that happens through a "Humble Commercial Bundle" spin-off or entirely separately from the HB team remains to be seen - but if it happens at all it's most likely going to be a good thing for consumers. Hey, perhaps the AAA publishers might even also make charity a part of their pay-what-you-want offerings. I'd welcome "let's split money with a charity" being seen as a valid business strategy.
* They already anonunced that they will "never stop" delivering DRM-free cross-platform indie bundles.
Yeah, dropping the no-DRM option and the EFF aren't great but I'm looking at the whole picture and I see no reason not to give them money.
THQ is one of the nicer publishers and not seeing them go under is a good thing. I can even see this being positive for the entire games market (from a gamer's perspective); more competition means more innovation.
As for the DRM... Well, it's Steam. It's already the "I could get this without DRM but Steam is more comfortable and hassle-free enough for me not to care" DRM. I can live with that. I can even live with the Windows-only nature of those games as a one-off thing.
In the end I guess this time I'll give a smaller amount to the HB team than usual but that's about it. Neither will I reduce any amount to zero (Bad THQ! How dare you try to keep yourself afloat through consumer-friendly offers?), nor will I stop paying attention to Humble Bundles altogether. I don't demand perfect karma from people I do business with; "mostly good" is still reasonable.
As long as the THQ bundle is a one-off affair I'm perfectly fine with it.
So far, all previous Humble Bundles have always given you per-game Steam codes so you could just give the codes away. This one behaves differently from usual Hunble Bundles in several regards, though. Still, you might end up with individual codes.
When no one was looking, the article was written by a nine-year old based on redundancy. The article was written by a 9-year old based on redundancy. The author of the redundant article is nine years old. That's as much as four and a half twos.
No corps uses vista and IE is updated automatically with Windows Update for consumers.
The world doesn't consist of corporations. There are plenty of SMEs without a dedicated IT department who use whatever their computers came with. They expect perfect compatibility with whichever version of IE they're running.
Vista users today all use IE 9 if they even choose IE at all. I pray IE 8 dies much much quicker than IE 6 or 7. It just might as employees start bickering that HTML 5 sites will no longer run.
That is perceived not as a fault of the browser but of the website. You can't deliver an HTML5/CSS3 website that doesn't work in IE8. Getting it to work is your problem (and the solution is to use appropriate polyfills like html5shim and selectivizr - and hope that you can get away without having to use CSS3PIE).
Otherwise we will have to wait until 2020 to use HTML 5. Fucking rediculous! I got that number because Windows 7 will not offer any service packs for 10 fucking years besides 1 which means the corps will lock it to IE 8 and keep it there. But, I could be wrong if MS mans up aftering firing the Windows VP and makes a Windows 7 SP 2 with IE 10... I could hope.
Unlikely. IE is not a significant money maker for MS but Windows is. So they'd rather use IE upgrades to drive Windows sales rather than giving people a reason to stay with Win7. Plus, Microsoft doesn't want another XP (ie. a version of Windows adequate enough that it out-competes its own successor).
Webkit is doing everythign wrong as people blamed developers 10 years ago for not fixing their CSS and using MS code in it. A prefix is just a bit of code. How is that different? The net result is still the same.
WebKit is doing what every other browser vendor does and what the W3C relies on in order to get CSS3 tested before the specification is set in stone. Vendor prefixes are there to inform the developer that the feature is unfinished, not yet entirely correct or plain experimental and shouldn't be relied on. In fact, they were explicitly created to avoid the situation where identical core gets interpreted differently.) Nothing evil about it. Browsers need to implement cutting-edge stuff in order to make sure the edge cuts in the right direction.
Again, the problem are stupid developers who aren't aware of best practices like always following up a prefixed property by its unprefixed version and using all prefixes that are neccessary, ie. prefixes for all browser engines that haven't yet unprefixed the property in all supported versions. Oh, and of course not using really experimental stuff in production websites. Of course that would require keeping track of which properties are in the standard and which aren't and we can't expect web developers to actually learn anything about web standards.
You're right; IE7 is no longer the relevant version of Internet Explorer. IE8 is.
IE is coupled to Windows releases. Companies usually don't upgrade their Windows version unless absolutely neccessary, which means "when the hardware dies and we can't get an identical replacement". Also, many people and companies use IE because it comes with the operating system. The result is that until a particular version of Windows has a negligible marketshare, the highest version of IE compatible eith that Windows version has to be supported by web developers.
IE7 is just barely dropping off the radar today. Depending on where you are in the world it's still a must-have. IE8 support will be mandatory until about 2017 when Vista goes out of extended support (although with a lot of luck enough people will use Vista SP2, which allows them to upgrade to IE9). IE9 will have to be explicitly supported until 2020.
As for Microsoft's point: The WebKit devs are not doing anything wrong. All browsers have prefixed CSS and JS. Usually it's stuff where the spec isn't done yet or where they're not yet in full compliance with the spec. Sometimes it's stuff that they want to turn into a spec down the road, using their test implementation to identify ideas that sound good on paper but don't work in reality. That's not a problem and is encouraged behavior.
The actual problem is that the web development commnity is so utterly enamored with WebKit that a lot of web devs feel the need to use absolutely everything the engine has to offer (including utterly experimental stuff) and to assume that all other engines haven't progressed beyond CSS 2.1 yet. In extreme cases they'll even forgo the unprefixed versions of declarations, leading to websites that may very well break even on later WebKit versions as browser engines occasionally drop support for prefixed declarations after achieving unprefixed support.
I wonder if game developers also spend half their time cursing Microsoft for forcing them to code against an ancient product because the newer versions are tied to OS releases with less than total market penetration...
Of course this only works if you assume that the law itself is always just and that everyone knows and understands every applicable law in every situation. Given the realities of corporate-sponsored laws, changing societal values and a vast jungle of obscure laws I doubt that his ideal world would operate like that. Instead I'd expect things like "he sang 31 seconds from a copyrighted song in the presence of five other people. That constitutes criminal copyright infringement. Let's hit him with a fine" or "according to workplace safety regulations that worker's protective headgear is out of spec for that storage depot she spent ten minutes in lingering by the door while she talked to a coworker inside. Let's issue a warning and a fine to her".
It's really your fault for not knowing that non-parody recitals of more than thirty seconds of a copyrighted song to more than three people constitutes copyright infringement. Or that when inside a storage area containing volatile compounds the protective headgear must conform to the ISO 983452-11 headgear types A, B, C and E while the headgear issued to assembly line workers in that company only conforms to types A and C.
I somehow doubt that our laws would become simple enough that a single person can be reasonably expected to know and understand all of them. Or that they would be enforced with leniency and an eye towards educating the public. I rather expect them to be enforced whenever whoever's in charge decides they don't like someone.
Given that the JRE comes with a complimentary browser toolbar that you have to manually uncheck in the installer (for each update) and that Flash can't be installed without closing every browser, I want neither of those components to automatically update itself. Asking me is fine but as long as their update routines want to install crapware (or require manual intervention in the case of Adobe) fully automatic updates don't seem like a particularly good idea.
Well, Google's new Nexus models also lack removable batteries and microSD. You don't really expect those features to stick around for much longer? After all, those both cost cents per device, cutting into corporate profits for no good reason. (Customer satisfaction is no reason.)
Yeah, I'm still grumpy that the otherwise-perfect Nexus 4 was ruined by this.
Wouldn't a specially trained dog count as advanced equipment? I mean, as a sibling pointed out people already have a reasonable expectation to not be randomly scanned with thermal imaging device because the general public doesn't have those. The general public also doesn't have drug-sniffing dogs. Of course if the house smells strongly enough that a random person on the street will notice it your argument holds but I don't think that sniffer dogs count here.
I have to correct myself; I misread the price. The 16 gig version is only fifty bucks more expensive, which shifts the markup from "ludicrously bad" to merely "bad". Still, for that price difference they could've included 32 gigs.
I'm going to replace my second-gen iPod touch soonish on account of the hardware starting to degrade. Given that a current iPod touch with an acceptable capacity would cost a rather large amount of money I was considering to just get a new Android phone instead. The Nexus 4 looked exactly like what I was going for...
...until I saw that I don't get an SD slot so I'm stuck with their storage options. And even the expensive version comes with a mere 16 GB. A 32 GB microSDHC costs about twenty to thirty bucks. Yet somehow they couldn't fit more than 16 gigs onto the logic board of the Nexus 4 and even that costs a whopping 150 bucks more than the 8 gig version. I mean, that's not as ridiculously expensive as the iPod touch 5 but still it doesn't seem like a reasonable offer.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a relatively cheap, reasonably recent Android phone that comes with an SD slot? Nothing subsidized, please; that kind of phone plan isn't cost-effective for me.
The solution is obvious: Just make each core as powerful as a current singlecore desktop CPU and have all of them work at the same time, yet stay within a passively-cooled mobile processor heat envelope. That's how I understand TFA: More cores = every parallelizable task becomes trivial for a handheld mobile device because apparently waste heat doesn't scale with number of active cores. They even point out that you can run "some big apps" (presumably apps which would be taxing on a current mobile processor) and "nothing will steal performance from each other" because a small number of cores will be potent enough to run one of these "big apps". Seems to me that each core would be of similar power to a current mobile processor core.
This chip can enable nice things such as more efficient power usage - but I agree that "magically turn mobile phones into full-fledged desktop PCs with no heat problems whatsoever" seems rather unlikely.
Well, or future smartphones will come with a watercooling rig with a huge radiator attached to them. That might work.
I know a number of people who deliberately run their desktop at a fairly low resolution (think 1024x768) because they have poor eyesight and find that easier than mucking around with font settings and hoping there aren't any programs that make assumptions on how large certain UI elements are. At the same time, they might run video games at a higher resolution because video games are usually pretty good about providing resolution-independent readable text. How would you propose to handle this situation, other than "tell the user to manually change their desktop resolution before and after playing a game" or "they only get to play at 1024x768"?
By the way, I don't see how the program being able to request a different resolution would preclude the WM being in charge. I'm certain there are conceivable models where the WM remains in charge despite being able to accomodate fullscreen programs. For instance, the WM could resize the screen at its own discretion, then return the new dimensions of the screen to the game and proceed as you have described. If the game loses focus the screen gets resized to its normal dimensions. Don't want the WM to resize? Tell it not to. As long as you're not running Gnome there's probably an option for that.
Yeah, TFTD was inadvertently mean-spirited. Even if you know how to avoid the tech tree bugs (thank you, ufopaedia.org) you still had to deal with tentaculats, half your starting equipment not working on land, the other half being crappy... Still, it had a nice atmosphere.
Apocalypse was very nice. Yes, they shouldn't have put in that realtime mode but the more dynamic battlefields were fun and so was the equipment. They probably could've made anti-alien gas less of a useless gimmick but that's a minor gripe. The politics were a great addition to the game and I would've loved to see what they would've been like if the devs hadn't cut part of them - there is unused data for holding cells and tracking devices in the game; apparently you could also apprehend and capture humans at some point in the original design. I also liked the fact that collateral damage now had actual consequences. I agree that the aliens were a bit boring gameplay-wise, except for those abominable Brainsuckers. Brainsuckers: Like Tentaculats, only even harder to defend against!
(Perhaps we are fortunate that they didn't follow up with another strategy release after Apocalypse; in XCOM 4 we probably would've gotten Chryssalids with psionic powers.)
Interceptor was crud. And Enforcer will never touch my hard-drive either. I could perhaps forgive them for the backstory of "lol xcom suks" if at least the gameplay was known to be good...
Thank you for your in-depth review of the game. A very interesting read.
I'm not certain if I like some of the changes they've made but a lot of them read like they're fun and on a whole the game seems to have been made with care. That certainly alleviates my fear that it's just another bit of shovelware made to cash in on a still-cherished name. I'll definitely have to check it out later.
As for Borderlands 2, which you touched on in the sibling post: *cough* I already sank about ninety hours into that game, most of that in multiplayer. I can see how it can get tedious in singleplayer but with at least one friend it's just as much of a blast as the first one. Oh, and wiping the smug grin off Jack's face is one of the more satisfying things I've ever done in a video game. Say what you want about BL2's storyline, they certainly did a good job of making the last bit engaging.
Yeah, I'm already alphafunding it. It's nice, although development does progress somewhat slowly. Then again, air combat has improved a lot; the first alphas I played were almost impossible to play because alien craft was extremely hard to shoot down.
I know it's off topic but as someone who still ranks UFO: Enemy Unknown in his personal top three games of all time I'm interested in your thoughts on XCOM: EU. On the one hand, XCOM deserves a worthy successor to the first games (especially after the two shooters) but on the other hand I can't help but think that it probably won't nearly live up to UFO and TFTD. (Yes, I could read reviews but I prefer just asking people who probably aren't being paid to play the game.)
So... What's your opinion? Is it worth getting or should I just wait until OpenXcom implements Mars?
Well, I think her uncaptainness can be explained by her being completely out of her league. Her ship is absurdly far from home, half her crew had to be replaced with terrorists, she has to get everyone to get along for seventy years without shore leave and Starfleet regulations (which she had previously decided to be some tasty Kool-aid) don't really cover that. Her raging caffeine addiction doesn't really help. She's not the captain they'd hand a flagship over to but the Voyager isn't exactly a flagship, either.
I think VOY's weak point was that the writing wasn't exactly of consistently good quality (especially the final episode, which is like a bad fanfic). The characters are mostly fine. They work - even Neelix, from time to time.
Maybe it's because I'm a Gen-Xer and I hate typing "were U at?" in emails, but I wish my iPhone and my BlackBerry had gone away for a dirty weekend and I'd wound up with the offspring.
Congratulations! Your wish has been granted and you are now the proud owner of a touch-only Blackberry!
Your argument is mainly about PV being unfeasible as an energy source, barring major improvements in PV cell efficiency. There are different sources, however (eg. offshore wind, tidal, solar thermic), that might work better. What about using gasoline generation for off-peak energy storage? What about using it for plastics production instead of energy storage?
Of course this isn't the answer to the energy crisis but it does help with one aspect - oil being finite.
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Actually, as far as I know the Google Play Store also takes a 30% cut. The main difference is that it costs more to get into the store with Apple (99 USD/a)than with Google (25 USD once). Things might be different for vendor-specific stores like Samsung Apps but then again those have a limited reach and are unlikely to be as attractive as Google's store.
In other words it provides a morale boost (and potentially intimidates the enemy if they don't happen to have an RPG around). Might be worth the resources.
On the other hand, this is version 2 so they obviously had a version 1 and decided that one wasn't obviously useless enough to entirely scrap the concept of homemade tanks. This may not be a terribly good design but apparently they think it's worth fielding.
Given that they have more experience getting shot at in Syria than anyone on Slashdot I'm inclined to assume that it adds at least some value over just sending out two guys with assault rifles.
I see it as the HB team burning karma in order to help THQ make their pay-what-you-want offering a success. Essentially they're (nonexclusively*) compromising three of their main pillars in order to market the fourth one (pay-what-you-want) to traditional publishers.
If this is a success for THQ then other publishers might also decide to make their content available in this manner. Whether that happens through a "Humble Commercial Bundle" spin-off or entirely separately from the HB team remains to be seen - but if it happens at all it's most likely going to be a good thing for consumers. Hey, perhaps the AAA publishers might even also make charity a part of their pay-what-you-want offerings. I'd welcome "let's split money with a charity" being seen as a valid business strategy.
* They already anonunced that they will "never stop" delivering DRM-free cross-platform indie bundles.
Yeah, dropping the no-DRM option and the EFF aren't great but I'm looking at the whole picture and I see no reason not to give them money.
THQ is one of the nicer publishers and not seeing them go under is a good thing. I can even see this being positive for the entire games market (from a gamer's perspective); more competition means more innovation.
As for the DRM... Well, it's Steam. It's already the "I could get this without DRM but Steam is more comfortable and hassle-free enough for me not to care" DRM. I can live with that. I can even live with the Windows-only nature of those games as a one-off thing.
In the end I guess this time I'll give a smaller amount to the HB team than usual but that's about it. Neither will I reduce any amount to zero (Bad THQ! How dare you try to keep yourself afloat through consumer-friendly offers?), nor will I stop paying attention to Humble Bundles altogether. I don't demand perfect karma from people I do business with; "mostly good" is still reasonable.
As long as the THQ bundle is a one-off affair I'm perfectly fine with it.
So far, all previous Humble Bundles have always given you per-game Steam codes so you could just give the codes away. This one behaves differently from usual Hunble Bundles in several regards, though. Still, you might end up with individual codes.
nine
When no one was looking, the article was written by a nine-year old based on redundancy. The article was written by a 9-year old based on redundancy. The author of the redundant article is nine years old. That's as much as four and a half twos.
And that's terrible.
No corps uses vista and IE is updated automatically with Windows Update for consumers.
The world doesn't consist of corporations. There are plenty of SMEs without a dedicated IT department who use whatever their computers came with. They expect perfect compatibility with whichever version of IE they're running.
Vista users today all use IE 9 if they even choose IE at all. I pray IE 8 dies much much quicker than IE 6 or 7. It just might as employees start bickering that HTML 5 sites will no longer run.
That is perceived not as a fault of the browser but of the website. You can't deliver an HTML5/CSS3 website that doesn't work in IE8. Getting it to work is your problem (and the solution is to use appropriate polyfills like html5shim and selectivizr - and hope that you can get away without having to use CSS3PIE).
Otherwise we will have to wait until 2020 to use HTML 5. Fucking rediculous! I got that number because Windows 7 will not offer any service packs for 10 fucking years besides 1 which means the corps will lock it to IE 8 and keep it there. But, I could be wrong if MS mans up aftering firing the Windows VP and makes a Windows 7 SP 2 with IE 10 ... I could hope.
Unlikely. IE is not a significant money maker for MS but Windows is. So they'd rather use IE upgrades to drive Windows sales rather than giving people a reason to stay with Win7. Plus, Microsoft doesn't want another XP (ie. a version of Windows adequate enough that it out-competes its own successor).
Webkit is doing everythign wrong as people blamed developers 10 years ago for not fixing their CSS and using MS code in it. A prefix is just a bit of code. How is that different? The net result is still the same.
WebKit is doing what every other browser vendor does and what the W3C relies on in order to get CSS3 tested before the specification is set in stone. Vendor prefixes are there to inform the developer that the feature is unfinished, not yet entirely correct or plain experimental and shouldn't be relied on. In fact, they were explicitly created to avoid the situation where identical core gets interpreted differently.) Nothing evil about it. Browsers need to implement cutting-edge stuff in order to make sure the edge cuts in the right direction.
Again, the problem are stupid developers who aren't aware of best practices like always following up a prefixed property by its unprefixed version and using all prefixes that are neccessary, ie. prefixes for all browser engines that haven't yet unprefixed the property in all supported versions. Oh, and of course not using really experimental stuff in production websites. Of course that would require keeping track of which properties are in the standard and which aren't and we can't expect web developers to actually learn anything about web standards.
You're right; IE7 is no longer the relevant version of Internet Explorer. IE8 is.
IE is coupled to Windows releases. Companies usually don't upgrade their Windows version unless absolutely neccessary, which means "when the hardware dies and we can't get an identical replacement". Also, many people and companies use IE because it comes with the operating system. The result is that until a particular version of Windows has a negligible marketshare, the highest version of IE compatible eith that Windows version has to be supported by web developers.
IE7 is just barely dropping off the radar today. Depending on where you are in the world it's still a must-have. IE8 support will be mandatory until about 2017 when Vista goes out of extended support (although with a lot of luck enough people will use Vista SP2, which allows them to upgrade to IE9). IE9 will have to be explicitly supported until 2020.
As for Microsoft's point: The WebKit devs are not doing anything wrong. All browsers have prefixed CSS and JS. Usually it's stuff where the spec isn't done yet or where they're not yet in full compliance with the spec. Sometimes it's stuff that they want to turn into a spec down the road, using their test implementation to identify ideas that sound good on paper but don't work in reality. That's not a problem and is encouraged behavior.
The actual problem is that the web development commnity is so utterly enamored with WebKit that a lot of web devs feel the need to use absolutely everything the engine has to offer (including utterly experimental stuff) and to assume that all other engines haven't progressed beyond CSS 2.1 yet. In extreme cases they'll even forgo the unprefixed versions of declarations, leading to websites that may very well break even on later WebKit versions as browser engines occasionally drop support for prefixed declarations after achieving unprefixed support.
I wonder if game developers also spend half their time cursing Microsoft for forcing them to code against an ancient product because the newer versions are tied to OS releases with less than total market penetration...
Of course this only works if you assume that the law itself is always just and that everyone knows and understands every applicable law in every situation. Given the realities of corporate-sponsored laws, changing societal values and a vast jungle of obscure laws I doubt that his ideal world would operate like that. Instead I'd expect things like "he sang 31 seconds from a copyrighted song in the presence of five other people. That constitutes criminal copyright infringement. Let's hit him with a fine" or "according to workplace safety regulations that worker's protective headgear is out of spec for that storage depot she spent ten minutes in lingering by the door while she talked to a coworker inside. Let's issue a warning and a fine to her".
It's really your fault for not knowing that non-parody recitals of more than thirty seconds of a copyrighted song to more than three people constitutes copyright infringement. Or that when inside a storage area containing volatile compounds the protective headgear must conform to the ISO 983452-11 headgear types A, B, C and E while the headgear issued to assembly line workers in that company only conforms to types A and C.
I somehow doubt that our laws would become simple enough that a single person can be reasonably expected to know and understand all of them. Or that they would be enforced with leniency and an eye towards educating the public. I rather expect them to be enforced whenever whoever's in charge decides they don't like someone.
Given that the JRE comes with a complimentary browser toolbar that you have to manually uncheck in the installer (for each update) and that Flash can't be installed without closing every browser, I want neither of those components to automatically update itself. Asking me is fine but as long as their update routines want to install crapware (or require manual intervention in the case of Adobe) fully automatic updates don't seem like a particularly good idea.
Well, Google's new Nexus models also lack removable batteries and microSD. You don't really expect those features to stick around for much longer? After all, those both cost cents per device, cutting into corporate profits for no good reason. (Customer satisfaction is no reason.)
Yeah, I'm still grumpy that the otherwise-perfect Nexus 4 was ruined by this.
Wouldn't a specially trained dog count as advanced equipment? I mean, as a sibling pointed out people already have a reasonable expectation to not be randomly scanned with thermal imaging device because the general public doesn't have those. The general public also doesn't have drug-sniffing dogs. Of course if the house smells strongly enough that a random person on the street will notice it your argument holds but I don't think that sniffer dogs count here.
I have to correct myself; I misread the price. The 16 gig version is only fifty bucks more expensive, which shifts the markup from "ludicrously bad" to merely "bad". Still, for that price difference they could've included 32 gigs.
I'm going to replace my second-gen iPod touch soonish on account of the hardware starting to degrade. Given that a current iPod touch with an acceptable capacity would cost a rather large amount of money I was considering to just get a new Android phone instead. The Nexus 4 looked exactly like what I was going for...
...until I saw that I don't get an SD slot so I'm stuck with their storage options. And even the expensive version comes with a mere 16 GB. A 32 GB microSDHC costs about twenty to thirty bucks. Yet somehow they couldn't fit more than 16 gigs onto the logic board of the Nexus 4 and even that costs a whopping 150 bucks more than the 8 gig version. I mean, that's not as ridiculously expensive as the iPod touch 5 but still it doesn't seem like a reasonable offer.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a relatively cheap, reasonably recent Android phone that comes with an SD slot? Nothing subsidized, please; that kind of phone plan isn't cost-effective for me.
The solution is obvious: Just make each core as powerful as a current singlecore desktop CPU and have all of them work at the same time, yet stay within a passively-cooled mobile processor heat envelope. That's how I understand TFA: More cores = every parallelizable task becomes trivial for a handheld mobile device because apparently waste heat doesn't scale with number of active cores. They even point out that you can run "some big apps" (presumably apps which would be taxing on a current mobile processor) and "nothing will steal performance from each other" because a small number of cores will be potent enough to run one of these "big apps". Seems to me that each core would be of similar power to a current mobile processor core.
This chip can enable nice things such as more efficient power usage - but I agree that "magically turn mobile phones into full-fledged desktop PCs with no heat problems whatsoever" seems rather unlikely.
Well, or future smartphones will come with a watercooling rig with a huge radiator attached to them. That might work.
I know a number of people who deliberately run their desktop at a fairly low resolution (think 1024x768) because they have poor eyesight and find that easier than mucking around with font settings and hoping there aren't any programs that make assumptions on how large certain UI elements are. At the same time, they might run video games at a higher resolution because video games are usually pretty good about providing resolution-independent readable text. How would you propose to handle this situation, other than "tell the user to manually change their desktop resolution before and after playing a game" or "they only get to play at 1024x768"?
By the way, I don't see how the program being able to request a different resolution would preclude the WM being in charge. I'm certain there are conceivable models where the WM remains in charge despite being able to accomodate fullscreen programs. For instance, the WM could resize the screen at its own discretion, then return the new dimensions of the screen to the game and proceed as you have described. If the game loses focus the screen gets resized to its normal dimensions. Don't want the WM to resize? Tell it not to. As long as you're not running Gnome there's probably an option for that.
Yeah, TFTD was inadvertently mean-spirited. Even if you know how to avoid the tech tree bugs (thank you, ufopaedia.org) you still had to deal with tentaculats, half your starting equipment not working on land, the other half being crappy... Still, it had a nice atmosphere.
Apocalypse was very nice. Yes, they shouldn't have put in that realtime mode but the more dynamic battlefields were fun and so was the equipment. They probably could've made anti-alien gas less of a useless gimmick but that's a minor gripe. The politics were a great addition to the game and I would've loved to see what they would've been like if the devs hadn't cut part of them - there is unused data for holding cells and tracking devices in the game; apparently you could also apprehend and capture humans at some point in the original design. I also liked the fact that collateral damage now had actual consequences. I agree that the aliens were a bit boring gameplay-wise, except for those abominable Brainsuckers. Brainsuckers: Like Tentaculats, only even harder to defend against!
(Perhaps we are fortunate that they didn't follow up with another strategy release after Apocalypse; in XCOM 4 we probably would've gotten Chryssalids with psionic powers.)
Interceptor was crud. And Enforcer will never touch my hard-drive either. I could perhaps forgive them for the backstory of "lol xcom suks" if at least the gameplay was known to be good...
Thank you for your in-depth review of the game. A very interesting read.
I'm not certain if I like some of the changes they've made but a lot of them read like they're fun and on a whole the game seems to have been made with care. That certainly alleviates my fear that it's just another bit of shovelware made to cash in on a still-cherished name. I'll definitely have to check it out later.
As for Borderlands 2, which you touched on in the sibling post: *cough* I already sank about ninety hours into that game, most of that in multiplayer. I can see how it can get tedious in singleplayer but with at least one friend it's just as much of a blast as the first one. Oh, and wiping the smug grin off Jack's face is one of the more satisfying things I've ever done in a video game. Say what you want about BL2's storyline, they certainly did a good job of making the last bit engaging.
Yeah, I'm already alphafunding it. It's nice, although development does progress somewhat slowly. Then again, air combat has improved a lot; the first alphas I played were almost impossible to play because alien craft was extremely hard to shoot down.
I know it's off topic but as someone who still ranks UFO: Enemy Unknown in his personal top three games of all time I'm interested in your thoughts on XCOM: EU. On the one hand, XCOM deserves a worthy successor to the first games (especially after the two shooters) but on the other hand I can't help but think that it probably won't nearly live up to UFO and TFTD. (Yes, I could read reviews but I prefer just asking people who probably aren't being paid to play the game.)
So... What's your opinion? Is it worth getting or should I just wait until OpenXcom implements Mars?
Well, I think her uncaptainness can be explained by her being completely out of her league. Her ship is absurdly far from home, half her crew had to be replaced with terrorists, she has to get everyone to get along for seventy years without shore leave and Starfleet regulations (which she had previously decided to be some tasty Kool-aid) don't really cover that. Her raging caffeine addiction doesn't really help. She's not the captain they'd hand a flagship over to but the Voyager isn't exactly a flagship, either.
I think VOY's weak point was that the writing wasn't exactly of consistently good quality (especially the final episode, which is like a bad fanfic). The characters are mostly fine. They work - even Neelix, from time to time.
Maybe it's because I'm a Gen-Xer and I hate typing "were U at?" in emails, but I wish my iPhone and my BlackBerry had gone away for a dirty weekend and I'd wound up with the offspring.
Congratulations! Your wish has been granted and you are now the proud owner of a touch-only Blackberry!
Your argument is mainly about PV being unfeasible as an energy source, barring major improvements in PV cell efficiency. There are different sources, however (eg. offshore wind, tidal, solar thermic), that might work better. What about using gasoline generation for off-peak energy storage? What about using it for plastics production instead of energy storage?
Of course this isn't the answer to the energy crisis but it does help with one aspect - oil being finite.