Actually, you can even have CGI in every single shot without it looking bad. The key is in using it discreetly. The Truman show is a good example: CGI was extensively used... to render the upper halves of buildings. They built the ground floors as a real set and then digitally added the upper floors, which nothing ever interacts with. Yes, it's just a glorified animated matte painting. But it works very well to turn an unimpressive set into a nicer one.
CGI can be used well for three things: Unobtrusive background stuff like this, impossible (or prohibitively expensive) things or full-CGI movies. If you stray form that (like, say, making Yoda a full-CGI Gummi Bear with a lightsaber) your movie will probably age very poorly - to the point where it may look ugly before it's even out.
Another example: A friend of mine is pursuing a PhD. His advisor is one of the world's leading experts in his field. And that sounds nice until you realize that "leading expert" translates to "absolute workaholic who works at least twelve hours a day seven days a week and expects the same from his postgrads". For the last eight years my friend has been run ragged with fun things like ninety-hour work weeks (mostly unpaid, of course) doing completely unrelated stuff for the work group during which he was naturally expected to still work on his thesis in his spare time. And of course this unrelated work had to be flawless, after all if the work group's new paper can't make it into Nature why even bother having a work group in the first place?
These days he's actually finding the time to write - not because the workload has lightened but because the university has started asking the supervisor pointed questions about why certain people are taking so long writing their thesis. But he's having huge problems actually working on his thesis because over the years he started slipping into depression and what's increasingly looking like burnout syndrome... what a surprise.
Of course he always had the option of walking away and finding a different university to write his thesis at. Except that it would've seriously pissed off his supervisor who happens to know pretty much every other potential supervisor in the country. Even if his supervisor isn't vindictive, the mere chance that he might be is enough to make leaving an unfeasibly dangerous option.
Makes me happy I got my master's-equivalent degree and left for a programming job. Postgrads run on fumes and a constant fear of their supervisor. I rather prefer the comparative tranquility of mere office politics.
Remember, this is about Europe. Some assumptions you made don't hold. For instance, in many parts of Europe living 30 minutes from any kind of civilization is only possible if you don't own a motorized vehicle. We don't have as many vast swathes of uninhabited land as the USA do. And even in bad areas of towns you're unlikely to run into people packing heat. Stuttgart isn't Detroit.
America is full of guns and there are some very good historical reasons why that is the case. Europe generally isn't, for similarly good reasons. We like to keep it that way. Sure, easy access to guns means that I can shoot someone if I decide they are a threat to me. However, it also means that they (inluding burglars, muggers etc.) can shoot me. At least the way things are now, shouting for help and/or running away is a feasible option and if more protection is desired both self defense courses and pepper spray are effective measures. I wouldn't rely on any of that if the person threatening me could put lead into my body from twenty meters away.
(For the record, I have been a witness of gun-related crime and I know perfectly well that with both the attacker and the victim running it's still perfectly possible for the attacker to shoot the victim in the leg. I also know just how much a single bullet can fuck up a person's body. Thank you, not interested.)
A little further off-topic, but you mention the sonic stinger. Is there any evidence of low frequencies causing similar symptoms? There's a public facility I visit on a regular basis, and their A/C unit causes one of the rooms to rumble at about 4 or 5 Hz. Obviously too low to "hear" but I can feel it when it kicks on, and I get nauseous shortly thereafter. Who knows?
The phenomenon is well known. Human reactions to infrasound include unease, anxiety, sleep disorders and even even a ghost sighting (in a case where the sound almost matched the resonant frequency of the human eye). It varies from person to person but it is possible that that 4-5 Hz rumble causes your nausea. What makes infrasound even more fun: Infrasound that greatly affects some people doesn't affect others much so it's hard to even identify as a problem source.
// HTTP 1.1 is essentially 1.0 so any future version of HTTP will work with our code. var weSupportThis = new Regex("^HTTP/\d+\.\d+").IsMatch(header);
There are many coders out there and many broken ways of detecting protocols. Only changing the version number might run into trouble if one side of the conversation assumes that everything starting with "HTTP" is going to be pretty much equivalent to HTTP/1.0. So at least the "PRI" part makes sense.
Depends on the game. A few MM*s are happy with giving you time off. Those are generally either pay-to-own like Guild wars or free to play and supported by a microtransaction model. Some, like Path of Exile, let you idle for as long as you like. Others, like League of Legends (admittedly a MOBA but with the same kind of non-pay-to-win microtransactions), will release your account name after a period of inactivity, although if I remember correctly, LOL allows you to recover an inactive account somehow.
I may be wrong on that last one; I dropped LOL for good when I realized it wasn't really for me.
One thing I do know is that most of my friends avoid subscription-based MMOs like the plague. Too expensive, too demanding.
True. I play Path of Exile a lot although I don't see it as an MMO - it's more like a Diablo clone with great multiplayer. That's the appeal, actually: I don't have to run through shared areas, competing with random strangers over who gets to kill the mobs. I don't have to put up with random strangers forcing me into PVP so they can get off over how superior their optimized PVP build is to someone else's PVE build. I can party with my friends whenever we feel like it, though. The game is effectively a singleplayer game with drop-in multiplayer support. I like that.
And it doesn't do subscriptions. It has a microtransaction model that avoids the whole pay-to-win issue by only selling you cosmetic items and a few non-essential convenience things. That makes it easy to pick up and put down as well as making it completely invisible to TFA's subscription metric.
I don't really play any other MMOs. But then again I'm not into massively multiplayer games and PoE only sticks with me because it doesn't play like an MMO. Some games just fit into more than one genre.
"The USA" doesn't mean a lot now that private companies have sprung up. You do have a point, however: NASA is damn good at payloads. Their stuff usually works really well once it's up but, well, they kinda suck at launch vehicles. The most likely reason is pork. It's hard to spread out manufacturing of a space probe over fifty states but a new launch vehicle? Easily. And once parts manufacturers exist they must never go away, hence the SLS, which most likely will be unneccessarily expensive while performing worse then a vehicle that wasn't designed to generate revenue for every damn state in the union.
Honestly, NASA would probably do better if they sold their launch assets to SpaceX and focused entirely on payloads and missions. Whether they'll end up launching with rockets from Russia, Japan, SpaceX or even Copenhagen Suborbital is no matter as long as the rockets are reliable. The existing rockets have a track record and it's often a good one. NASA's new launcher doesn't.
TBH, I would've liked Yosemite better if it had Snow Leopard's UI with the more disruptive skeuomorphisms taken out. I'm not a fan of completely flat UIs and the subtle shading Snow Leopard had was just right in my opinion. Plus, Yosemite is too bright in some places.
As for Win 10: That's what a hacked uxtheme.dll is for. I found every version of Windows kinda ugly (with Win 7 being the sole exception) but it's not like you can't fix that... once you've convinced your system that all themes are genuine Microsoft themes.
(Honesly, I'd love it if the uxtheme unlock could be something that's in there by default, hidden behind a policy or something. Something easy to lock down in a corporate setting but accessible to advanced home users without having to patch a system file.)
Web developer here. Safari really does lag behind the other major browsers in terms of what it can do. At my job we're essentially keeping it on semi-support (ie. we're treating even the most modern version of Safari like it's IE9) because it's not exactly uncommon that CSS that works unprefixed in every other browser still requires a prefix in Safari - and maybe an older version of the syntax. Or it isn't supported at all. JS-wise the same applies: Every once in a while we come across thigs that everyone but Safari can do these days and then we have to add polyfills that make the site heavier.
Safari has a decent user interface (although its developer tools feel a bit clunky) and the integration with iOS Simulator is a godsend for mobile development. But that doesn't change the fact that Safari has fallen behind in terms of getting standards adopted. That's why I'm happy that Safari has only a minor market share - having first-class support for all the other major desktop browsers and half a dozen mobile ones is already enough work.
Which is why one of the first things I'll do with Windows 10 will be to install a patch that fixes uxtheme.dll. The Microsoft-provided version in every Windows so far had this persistent bug where it can't see third-party themes, which is annoying and something Microsoft really ought to fix themselves instead of relying on external programmers to pick up the slack.
Depends on what you're doing with your gamepad. For console gamers, sure, because analog sticks are the only precise directional input device available. On a PC, however, things look different and analog sticks are much less important as most of what they do is better done with a mouse.
As a PC gamer I have three main uses for a gamepad: Platformers and brawlers (where the D-pad is much superior due to its responsiveness and ease of use) and shooters (where the D-pad performs reasonably well and the analog stick only sometimes offers a real benefit). That means that the D-pad is usually the directional input device of choice.
The X360 pads have the D-pad in an awkward position for use as the main input device - because it's not supposed to be used like that. Unfortunately, that makes them sub-optimal for my use case, which is why I went for Logitech instead. Their F310/F710 series is pretty much an X360 pad with PSX-style analog sticks. The focus on the D-pad is very much appreciated, even if the design of the D-pad itself could be more ergonomic.
Again, though, it all depends on the use case. I can see how a console gamer would prefer to have the analog stick more easily accessible than the D-pad. Of course this does work in favor of the GP's post: Having those parts swappable would make the controller more attractive to a wider audience.
Skype has one killer feature for me: Working feedback suppression. With Skype I can use my notebook's built-in speakers and microphone and there is no feedback at all. With every other VoIP program I've used so far, be it Jitsi, TeamSpeak or Tox, I have to wear a headset or the conversation drowns in feedback. TeamSpeak at least tries but its implementation is clumsy (simply turning off the audio stream if it thinks feedback might happen) and unreliable.
Now, I could of course just wear a headset. Unfortunately, I need to be aware of ambient sounds so a stereo headset is out of the question and a quality mono headset that doesn't fall apart from moderate use will set me back by far more than I'm willing to spend.
So I stick with Skype despite all the warts. Because no other gratis software offers working feedback suppression. (Of course if someone added Skype-level feedback supression to Tox I'd switch in a heartbeat.)
Well, I'm a sucker for gameplay that guides the player without shoving them around. FO3 has a very natural flow from the first dungeon to the first town (introducing completely new players to the concepts of looting and trading) and from there to an obvious but well-integrated tutorial quest for the most important game mechanics. And apart from that dungeon all of it is optional, altough the intended progression is the most likely. Still, it's not like the game is forcing you to go to Megaton; it just happens to be nearby and you probably want to trade.
You could say that FONV's beginning does less hand-holding but that doesn't mean it doesn't make you go in a certain direction. For instance, when I first played the game I was so ambivalent towards the main quest that my first impulse was to say "screw that stolen delivery; I'm going to Vegas!" and then get repeatedly killed by cazadores while trying to make my way northeast. I only did what the designers wanted me to do after I had realized that doing what I actually wanted to do would be a very tough luck-based mission.
That's where I see the quality difference in the games' designs: FO3 makes sure that the interests of the designers and the players align closely. You want to go to Megaton. You want to talk to Moira. The tutorial quest sounds like easy money so new players are interested in doing it. Skipping Megaton entirely and going straight for DC is dangerous but reasonably possible. FONV, on the other hand, relies on hordes of deathclaws and cazadores to ensure that the player moves in the right direction if they don't like the utterly generic beginning of the main plot.
That's one thing that negatively affected my opinion of FONV: It makes you go in the intended direction not by making that direction particularly attractive but by just plainly walling every other direction off with tough enemies. That kinds breaks the immersion once you realize it.
FONV's beginning could've been more interesting if the designers had made sure to get the player interested in the right things. For instance, there could've been a short part before the intro where the player walks along some road not part of the game world proper, loots a corpse and shoots a couple dogs or something. Then the ambush happens (getting the player more involved than an intro sequence not connected to anything) and after the player wakes up in the doctor's house their inventory is empty and they are informed that the robot had carried all their stuff all the way to Primm for some reason. Now the player is interested in going to Primm because, main quest or not, "my stuff is there" is always a good reason to go somewhere. Especially if you have the equipment DLCs installed and want that grenade launcher back...
To be perfectly honest I actually think FO3 is more fun than FONV. A lot of that stems from the fact that FO3's initial stages are brilliantly designed while FONV's are... just kinda there.
FO3 starts off with a tutorial-slash-character-creation that actually gives you a couple snapshots of life in a vault while simultaneously getting you invested in the story. You've interacted with your dad enough for him to be an actual character so you can actually care about him running off. You get a feeling of just how much turmoil the vault is in. Thne, once you're out of the vault you immediately see the first town, which is very welcome because you have no money and a lot of vendor trash. So you go to the merchant and are immediately offered a discretionary extended tutorial in the form of the Wasteland Survival Guide quest. This tutorial, in turn, makes you travel to a variety of places, both making future exploration easier and getting you involved in further sidequests.
In essence, the game leads you towards learning its mechanics and getting involved in sidequests by means of well-crafted gameplay. You can skip much of that but for a first-time player it's easily found and feels very natural.
FONV, on the other hand... You get a generic cutscene of some people shooting you in the head. Then you wake up and have a chat with a doctor in an admittedly well-made character generation sequence. After he kicks you out the door you're just kinda there, with a storyline of "someone took some MacGuffin from you and you want it back so you can finish your job and get paid what's likely to be a pittance compared to what you're going to randomly loot throughout the game". Progression from there consists of either asking some person if they'll give you a basic tutorial or just walking off in the one direction that isn't infested with deathclaws and cazadores. There's still no investment in the main storyline and the whole thing feels very constructed and artificial.
Now, the DLCs are where FONV shines. They are actually well-written, entertaining and heads and shoulders above FO3's, even if Honest Hearts bugged out on me, causing everyone in the valley to hate me and turning the entire thing into a brainless run and gun romp. Old World Blues more than made up for that, though. The main game, however, is kind of uninteresting to the point where I have no idea if I ever followed the main quest beyond going to Primm.
I guess in the end FONV has the better writing and characters but FO3 is better at motivating me to actually do something. And in the end I value gameplay over writing.
I'm not saying that Ruby and Python are highly secure systems. I'm saying that Ruby and Python web devs are smarter than PHP web devs. They less frequently get ideas like "let's use MD5 for our password hashes in 2015" or "I don't see the problem with opening a new MySQL connection every time I want something from the database". The main reason for that is that web development in Python and Ruby is more difficult than in PHP unless you have a bit of programming experience. Fewer completely green developers mean fewer rookie mistakes.
As for HTML: Yes, although those are most often boundary cases where HTML has to interact with other languages - and where the theoretical pure HTML webdev should talk to the people who use those other languages. In practice, of course, nobody uses HTML alone and thus most webdev do have to deal with JS and server-side security matters. The language itself is pretty safe, it's ecosystem isn't.
Well, those writing just straight HTML don't need to know much about security because that's not HTML's job. As for the PHP monkeys: It depends. Does the monkey use words like "Suhosin" and refuse to use a PHP older than 5.5 because that's when bcrypt became part of the standard library? Then there's a chance they actually do care about security. On the other hand, if they talk about writing WordPress plugins there's a fair chance they've given up Visual Basic development because they weren't smart enough for that.
It's a bit better with other languages; people who do their web development in Python or Ruby are usually a bit smarter than PHP monkeys (though not neccessarily smart enough to leave web development for pastures with bigger paychecks).
Disclaimer: I am a former PHP monkey. And what I said about WordPress plugin developers was far too kind.
No, this is big news. Because now we have all of the impractically expensive standards on the same connector. That saves a lot of effort on remembering which things to ignore in favor of USB 3.0.
If I remember correctly the "Teddy Ruxpin is creepy" meme stems from the fact that a Ruxpin on dying batteries would, well, sound exactly like any tape recorder on dying batteries: Wobbly and slowed down (and correspondingly pitched down). Also, the motions wouldn't work right because the motors wouldn't get enough power. I guess that might've creeped out a child or two.
Honestly, if you can't afford a driver's license you can't afford a car, either. While you can get cars for a few hundred bucks those will probably only last you until your next inspection, not to mention that you still have to pay insurance on the thing. Prices for reasonable used cars will probably start somewhere around 2,500 to 3,000 EUR.
As for the insurance: The details depend on many, many factors but as a ballpark figure you can expect about 400-500 EUR per year for that, too. You'll also need gasoline or diesel, which come at about 1.40 EUR/l (~ 5.94 USD/gallon) or 1.20 EUR/l (~ 5.08 USD/gallon), respectively*.
Honestly, poor people will probably just go for a regional ticket, which usually covers trains, trams and buses. Vastly more economical** and Germany has very solid public transport in all but the most rural places.
* Current prices near where I live. You might save up to 20 ct/l by refueling at a better time than nine o'clock in the evening but it's still not exactly cheap.
** The local transport association offers a twelve month ticket for the entire area (8,800 sq.km; ~ 3,400 sq.mi) for about 200 EUR or for less if you don't need the entire area. That's less than half of what a car's insurance alone would cost. If you do need to take a long-distance trip you can get good prices (about 80 EUR to get across Germany without having to resort to local trains) by ordering well ahead of time and taking trains or buses at less-congested times.
Look, policing is a hard, dangerous, often thankless job, and you have to understand that not everybody who wants to do it is qualified. When you hand an unqualified person a badge and a gun, they don't suddenly become qualified -- in fact, they become a liability to police everywhere.
It seems that a good solution would be to make sure that people who get badges are qualified. Make police officer a trained profession with standardized requirements. If becoming a police officer required three years of schooling, training and taking standardized tests you'd weed out some of the deadbeats and end up with police officers who have a decent understanding of both the law they're supposed to enforce and of how to enforce it without holding everyone they meet at gunpoint. With time it might turn turn policemen from people who everyone else instinctively fears and distrusts into actually respected members of society again.
It would also cut down on nonsense like putting Steven Segal in a tank and letting him drive into someone's living room. It's cute if a celebrity wants to tag along and watch but law enforcement is not a theme park and deputizing people who know nothing about law enforcement for shits and giggles should not happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you can even have CGI in every single shot without it looking bad. The key is in using it discreetly. The Truman show is a good example: CGI was extensively used... to render the upper halves of buildings. They built the ground floors as a real set and then digitally added the upper floors, which nothing ever interacts with. Yes, it's just a glorified animated matte painting. But it works very well to turn an unimpressive set into a nicer one.
CGI can be used well for three things: Unobtrusive background stuff like this, impossible (or prohibitively expensive) things or full-CGI movies. If you stray form that (like, say, making Yoda a full-CGI Gummi Bear with a lightsaber) your movie will probably age very poorly - to the point where it may look ugly before it's even out.
Another example: A friend of mine is pursuing a PhD. His advisor is one of the world's leading experts in his field. And that sounds nice until you realize that "leading expert" translates to "absolute workaholic who works at least twelve hours a day seven days a week and expects the same from his postgrads". For the last eight years my friend has been run ragged with fun things like ninety-hour work weeks (mostly unpaid, of course) doing completely unrelated stuff for the work group during which he was naturally expected to still work on his thesis in his spare time. And of course this unrelated work had to be flawless, after all if the work group's new paper can't make it into Nature why even bother having a work group in the first place?
These days he's actually finding the time to write - not because the workload has lightened but because the university has started asking the supervisor pointed questions about why certain people are taking so long writing their thesis. But he's having huge problems actually working on his thesis because over the years he started slipping into depression and what's increasingly looking like burnout syndrome... what a surprise.
Of course he always had the option of walking away and finding a different university to write his thesis at. Except that it would've seriously pissed off his supervisor who happens to know pretty much every other potential supervisor in the country. Even if his supervisor isn't vindictive, the mere chance that he might be is enough to make leaving an unfeasibly dangerous option.
Makes me happy I got my master's-equivalent degree and left for a programming job. Postgrads run on fumes and a constant fear of their supervisor. I rather prefer the comparative tranquility of mere office politics.
Remember, this is about Europe. Some assumptions you made don't hold. For instance, in many parts of Europe living 30 minutes from any kind of civilization is only possible if you don't own a motorized vehicle. We don't have as many vast swathes of uninhabited land as the USA do. And even in bad areas of towns you're unlikely to run into people packing heat. Stuttgart isn't Detroit.
America is full of guns and there are some very good historical reasons why that is the case. Europe generally isn't, for similarly good reasons. We like to keep it that way. Sure, easy access to guns means that I can shoot someone if I decide they are a threat to me. However, it also means that they (inluding burglars, muggers etc.) can shoot me. At least the way things are now, shouting for help and/or running away is a feasible option and if more protection is desired both self defense courses and pepper spray are effective measures. I wouldn't rely on any of that if the person threatening me could put lead into my body from twenty meters away.
(For the record, I have been a witness of gun-related crime and I know perfectly well that with both the attacker and the victim running it's still perfectly possible for the attacker to shoot the victim in the leg. I also know just how much a single bullet can fuck up a person's body. Thank you, not interested.)
A little further off-topic, but you mention the sonic stinger. Is there any evidence of low frequencies causing similar symptoms? There's a public facility I visit on a regular basis, and their A/C unit causes one of the rooms to rumble at about 4 or 5 Hz. Obviously too low to "hear" but I can feel it when it kicks on, and I get nauseous shortly thereafter. Who knows?
The phenomenon is well known. Human reactions to infrasound include unease, anxiety, sleep disorders and even even a ghost sighting (in a case where the sound almost matched the resonant frequency of the human eye). It varies from person to person but it is possible that that 4-5 Hz rumble causes your nausea. What makes infrasound even more fun: Infrasound that greatly affects some people doesn't affect others much so it's hard to even identify as a problem source.
There are many coders out there and many broken ways of detecting protocols. Only changing the version number might run into trouble if one side of the conversation assumes that everything starting with "HTTP" is going to be pretty much equivalent to HTTP/1.0. So at least the "PRI" part makes sense.
Depends on the game. A few MM*s are happy with giving you time off. Those are generally either pay-to-own like Guild wars or free to play and supported by a microtransaction model. Some, like Path of Exile, let you idle for as long as you like. Others, like League of Legends (admittedly a MOBA but with the same kind of non-pay-to-win microtransactions), will release your account name after a period of inactivity, although if I remember correctly, LOL allows you to recover an inactive account somehow.
I may be wrong on that last one; I dropped LOL for good when I realized it wasn't really for me.
One thing I do know is that most of my friends avoid subscription-based MMOs like the plague. Too expensive, too demanding.
True. I play Path of Exile a lot although I don't see it as an MMO - it's more like a Diablo clone with great multiplayer. That's the appeal, actually: I don't have to run through shared areas, competing with random strangers over who gets to kill the mobs. I don't have to put up with random strangers forcing me into PVP so they can get off over how superior their optimized PVP build is to someone else's PVE build. I can party with my friends whenever we feel like it, though. The game is effectively a singleplayer game with drop-in multiplayer support. I like that.
And it doesn't do subscriptions. It has a microtransaction model that avoids the whole pay-to-win issue by only selling you cosmetic items and a few non-essential convenience things. That makes it easy to pick up and put down as well as making it completely invisible to TFA's subscription metric.
I don't really play any other MMOs. But then again I'm not into massively multiplayer games and PoE only sticks with me because it doesn't play like an MMO. Some games just fit into more than one genre.
"The USA" doesn't mean a lot now that private companies have sprung up. You do have a point, however: NASA is damn good at payloads. Their stuff usually works really well once it's up but, well, they kinda suck at launch vehicles. The most likely reason is pork. It's hard to spread out manufacturing of a space probe over fifty states but a new launch vehicle? Easily. And once parts manufacturers exist they must never go away, hence the SLS, which most likely will be unneccessarily expensive while performing worse then a vehicle that wasn't designed to generate revenue for every damn state in the union.
Honestly, NASA would probably do better if they sold their launch assets to SpaceX and focused entirely on payloads and missions. Whether they'll end up launching with rockets from Russia, Japan, SpaceX or even Copenhagen Suborbital is no matter as long as the rockets are reliable. The existing rockets have a track record and it's often a good one. NASA's new launcher doesn't.
What are you smoking? The movies were awesome! I especially liked "Dorkness Rising" and...
What? "The Gamers" wasn't the official D&D adaptation? That thing with Jeremy Irons was not a parody? Okay, then, the D&D movies did suck.
TBH, I would've liked Yosemite better if it had Snow Leopard's UI with the more disruptive skeuomorphisms taken out. I'm not a fan of completely flat UIs and the subtle shading Snow Leopard had was just right in my opinion. Plus, Yosemite is too bright in some places.
As for Win 10: That's what a hacked uxtheme.dll is for. I found every version of Windows kinda ugly (with Win 7 being the sole exception) but it's not like you can't fix that... once you've convinced your system that all themes are genuine Microsoft themes.
(Honesly, I'd love it if the uxtheme unlock could be something that's in there by default, hidden behind a policy or something. Something easy to lock down in a corporate setting but accessible to advanced home users without having to patch a system file.)
At least it's not: "Typewriter manufacturers hate them! See this one weird device two bored housewives came up with!"
Web developer here. Safari really does lag behind the other major browsers in terms of what it can do. At my job we're essentially keeping it on semi-support (ie. we're treating even the most modern version of Safari like it's IE9) because it's not exactly uncommon that CSS that works unprefixed in every other browser still requires a prefix in Safari - and maybe an older version of the syntax. Or it isn't supported at all. JS-wise the same applies: Every once in a while we come across thigs that everyone but Safari can do these days and then we have to add polyfills that make the site heavier.
Safari has a decent user interface (although its developer tools feel a bit clunky) and the integration with iOS Simulator is a godsend for mobile development. But that doesn't change the fact that Safari has fallen behind in terms of getting standards adopted. That's why I'm happy that Safari has only a minor market share - having first-class support for all the other major desktop browsers and half a dozen mobile ones is already enough work.
Which is why one of the first things I'll do with Windows 10 will be to install a patch that fixes uxtheme.dll. The Microsoft-provided version in every Windows so far had this persistent bug where it can't see third-party themes, which is annoying and something Microsoft really ought to fix themselves instead of relying on external programmers to pick up the slack.
nationwide crisis
Another crossover? God dammit, DC!
Depends on what you're doing with your gamepad. For console gamers, sure, because analog sticks are the only precise directional input device available. On a PC, however, things look different and analog sticks are much less important as most of what they do is better done with a mouse.
As a PC gamer I have three main uses for a gamepad: Platformers and brawlers (where the D-pad is much superior due to its responsiveness and ease of use) and shooters (where the D-pad performs reasonably well and the analog stick only sometimes offers a real benefit). That means that the D-pad is usually the directional input device of choice.
The X360 pads have the D-pad in an awkward position for use as the main input device - because it's not supposed to be used like that. Unfortunately, that makes them sub-optimal for my use case, which is why I went for Logitech instead. Their F310/F710 series is pretty much an X360 pad with PSX-style analog sticks. The focus on the D-pad is very much appreciated, even if the design of the D-pad itself could be more ergonomic.
Again, though, it all depends on the use case. I can see how a console gamer would prefer to have the analog stick more easily accessible than the D-pad. Of course this does work in favor of the GP's post: Having those parts swappable would make the controller more attractive to a wider audience.
Skype has one killer feature for me: Working feedback suppression. With Skype I can use my notebook's built-in speakers and microphone and there is no feedback at all. With every other VoIP program I've used so far, be it Jitsi, TeamSpeak or Tox, I have to wear a headset or the conversation drowns in feedback. TeamSpeak at least tries but its implementation is clumsy (simply turning off the audio stream if it thinks feedback might happen) and unreliable.
Now, I could of course just wear a headset. Unfortunately, I need to be aware of ambient sounds so a stereo headset is out of the question and a quality mono headset that doesn't fall apart from moderate use will set me back by far more than I'm willing to spend.
So I stick with Skype despite all the warts. Because no other gratis software offers working feedback suppression. (Of course if someone added Skype-level feedback supression to Tox I'd switch in a heartbeat.)
Well, I'm a sucker for gameplay that guides the player without shoving them around. FO3 has a very natural flow from the first dungeon to the first town (introducing completely new players to the concepts of looting and trading) and from there to an obvious but well-integrated tutorial quest for the most important game mechanics. And apart from that dungeon all of it is optional, altough the intended progression is the most likely. Still, it's not like the game is forcing you to go to Megaton; it just happens to be nearby and you probably want to trade.
You could say that FONV's beginning does less hand-holding but that doesn't mean it doesn't make you go in a certain direction. For instance, when I first played the game I was so ambivalent towards the main quest that my first impulse was to say "screw that stolen delivery; I'm going to Vegas!" and then get repeatedly killed by cazadores while trying to make my way northeast. I only did what the designers wanted me to do after I had realized that doing what I actually wanted to do would be a very tough luck-based mission.
That's where I see the quality difference in the games' designs: FO3 makes sure that the interests of the designers and the players align closely. You want to go to Megaton. You want to talk to Moira. The tutorial quest sounds like easy money so new players are interested in doing it. Skipping Megaton entirely and going straight for DC is dangerous but reasonably possible. FONV, on the other hand, relies on hordes of deathclaws and cazadores to ensure that the player moves in the right direction if they don't like the utterly generic beginning of the main plot.
That's one thing that negatively affected my opinion of FONV: It makes you go in the intended direction not by making that direction particularly attractive but by just plainly walling every other direction off with tough enemies. That kinds breaks the immersion once you realize it.
FONV's beginning could've been more interesting if the designers had made sure to get the player interested in the right things. For instance, there could've been a short part before the intro where the player walks along some road not part of the game world proper, loots a corpse and shoots a couple dogs or something. Then the ambush happens (getting the player more involved than an intro sequence not connected to anything) and after the player wakes up in the doctor's house their inventory is empty and they are informed that the robot had carried all their stuff all the way to Primm for some reason. Now the player is interested in going to Primm because, main quest or not, "my stuff is there" is always a good reason to go somewhere. Especially if you have the equipment DLCs installed and want that grenade launcher back...
To be perfectly honest I actually think FO3 is more fun than FONV. A lot of that stems from the fact that FO3's initial stages are brilliantly designed while FONV's are... just kinda there.
FO3 starts off with a tutorial-slash-character-creation that actually gives you a couple snapshots of life in a vault while simultaneously getting you invested in the story. You've interacted with your dad enough for him to be an actual character so you can actually care about him running off. You get a feeling of just how much turmoil the vault is in. Thne, once you're out of the vault you immediately see the first town, which is very welcome because you have no money and a lot of vendor trash. So you go to the merchant and are immediately offered a discretionary extended tutorial in the form of the Wasteland Survival Guide quest. This tutorial, in turn, makes you travel to a variety of places, both making future exploration easier and getting you involved in further sidequests.
In essence, the game leads you towards learning its mechanics and getting involved in sidequests by means of well-crafted gameplay. You can skip much of that but for a first-time player it's easily found and feels very natural.
FONV, on the other hand... You get a generic cutscene of some people shooting you in the head. Then you wake up and have a chat with a doctor in an admittedly well-made character generation sequence. After he kicks you out the door you're just kinda there, with a storyline of "someone took some MacGuffin from you and you want it back so you can finish your job and get paid what's likely to be a pittance compared to what you're going to randomly loot throughout the game". Progression from there consists of either asking some person if they'll give you a basic tutorial or just walking off in the one direction that isn't infested with deathclaws and cazadores. There's still no investment in the main storyline and the whole thing feels very constructed and artificial.
Now, the DLCs are where FONV shines. They are actually well-written, entertaining and heads and shoulders above FO3's, even if Honest Hearts bugged out on me, causing everyone in the valley to hate me and turning the entire thing into a brainless run and gun romp. Old World Blues more than made up for that, though. The main game, however, is kind of uninteresting to the point where I have no idea if I ever followed the main quest beyond going to Primm.
I guess in the end FONV has the better writing and characters but FO3 is better at motivating me to actually do something. And in the end I value gameplay over writing.
I'm not saying that Ruby and Python are highly secure systems. I'm saying that Ruby and Python web devs are smarter than PHP web devs. They less frequently get ideas like "let's use MD5 for our password hashes in 2015" or "I don't see the problem with opening a new MySQL connection every time I want something from the database". The main reason for that is that web development in Python and Ruby is more difficult than in PHP unless you have a bit of programming experience. Fewer completely green developers mean fewer rookie mistakes.
As for HTML: Yes, although those are most often boundary cases where HTML has to interact with other languages - and where the theoretical pure HTML webdev should talk to the people who use those other languages. In practice, of course, nobody uses HTML alone and thus most webdev do have to deal with JS and server-side security matters. The language itself is pretty safe, it's ecosystem isn't.
Well, those writing just straight HTML don't need to know much about security because that's not HTML's job. As for the PHP monkeys: It depends. Does the monkey use words like "Suhosin" and refuse to use a PHP older than 5.5 because that's when bcrypt became part of the standard library? Then there's a chance they actually do care about security. On the other hand, if they talk about writing WordPress plugins there's a fair chance they've given up Visual Basic development because they weren't smart enough for that.
It's a bit better with other languages; people who do their web development in Python or Ruby are usually a bit smarter than PHP monkeys (though not neccessarily smart enough to leave web development for pastures with bigger paychecks).
Disclaimer: I am a former PHP monkey. And what I said about WordPress plugin developers was far too kind.
No, this is big news. Because now we have all of the impractically expensive standards on the same connector. That saves a lot of effort on remembering which things to ignore in favor of USB 3.0.
If I remember correctly the "Teddy Ruxpin is creepy" meme stems from the fact that a Ruxpin on dying batteries would, well, sound exactly like any tape recorder on dying batteries: Wobbly and slowed down (and correspondingly pitched down). Also, the motions wouldn't work right because the motors wouldn't get enough power. I guess that might've creeped out a child or two.
I think it's very likely that your phone will experience battery failure within the next four billion years so the theory can't be discounted.
Honestly, if you can't afford a driver's license you can't afford a car, either. While you can get cars for a few hundred bucks those will probably only last you until your next inspection, not to mention that you still have to pay insurance on the thing. Prices for reasonable used cars will probably start somewhere around 2,500 to 3,000 EUR.
As for the insurance: The details depend on many, many factors but as a ballpark figure you can expect about 400-500 EUR per year for that, too. You'll also need gasoline or diesel, which come at about 1.40 EUR/l (~ 5.94 USD/gallon) or 1.20 EUR/l (~ 5.08 USD/gallon), respectively*.
Honestly, poor people will probably just go for a regional ticket, which usually covers trains, trams and buses. Vastly more economical** and Germany has very solid public transport in all but the most rural places.
* Current prices near where I live. You might save up to 20 ct/l by refueling at a better time than nine o'clock in the evening but it's still not exactly cheap.
** The local transport association offers a twelve month ticket for the entire area (8,800 sq.km; ~ 3,400 sq.mi) for about 200 EUR or for less if you don't need the entire area. That's less than half of what a car's insurance alone would cost. If you do need to take a long-distance trip you can get good prices (about 80 EUR to get across Germany without having to resort to local trains) by ordering well ahead of time and taking trains or buses at less-congested times.
Look, policing is a hard, dangerous, often thankless job, and you have to understand that not everybody who wants to do it is qualified. When you hand an unqualified person a badge and a gun, they don't suddenly become qualified -- in fact, they become a liability to police everywhere.
It seems that a good solution would be to make sure that people who get badges are qualified. Make police officer a trained profession with standardized requirements. If becoming a police officer required three years of schooling, training and taking standardized tests you'd weed out some of the deadbeats and end up with police officers who have a decent understanding of both the law they're supposed to enforce and of how to enforce it without holding everyone they meet at gunpoint. With time it might turn turn policemen from people who everyone else instinctively fears and distrusts into actually respected members of society again.
It would also cut down on nonsense like putting Steven Segal in a tank and letting him drive into someone's living room. It's cute if a celebrity wants to tag along and watch but law enforcement is not a theme park and deputizing people who know nothing about law enforcement for shits and giggles should not happen.