I posted to an earlier post re Wastlands 2, but here goes...
You left out a magic word ---> "new"
I'm trying to be optimistic but i suspect i'm dead wrong - what we'll get is semi riskless stuff from well known almost immortal
zombie like devs from the 90's ( --->:-|
Something inside me thinks the existing dead bipedal mammals think they can look young again by borrowing newer models... (maybe i'm just a cynic)
Me too as a game player way back to the original "Colossal Cave" text adventure back on a PDP-11 mini computer c.a. 1978, *but*
I do have a sad feeling that if only distinguished "ancients" like Brian Fargo can automagically hit their targets, get all their old friends from Black Isle/Interplay/Obsidian etc..
then Kickstarter is a lying cake! ("it's who you know, not what you know"....)
Disclaimer: was a programmer since the 80's do some teaching, want to scratch that indie game itch....
(watching Kickstarter and other indie sites like a *hawk* - seen some good and fine games - "Dungeons of Dredmor @ 5 "dollars" (i'm european)
being a classic example of an indie game that's worth far far more...)
I'm sorry to say this, but for sure my personal experience taught me that there is no such thing thing as a program that will walk you to enlightenment.
Here's a hint: you *should* feel like an idiot looking at any reasonable size codebase for *ALL* projects - even if they are in your domain of expertise. Anything past 4-5 contributors can easily look like the FSM descended to Earth - especially if it is a project that has run for years (original devs have long departed to other lands....)
Most of the more elderly progs/dev here will tell you if you prod them hard enough that "being dumb" is the road to enlightenment - if you think you know everything already, then you're not learning!
Big codebases, many hands = you need to learn human psychology just as much as coding, and the "art of diplomacy" (also knowledge of when to get out and say - "die in a fire losers" - just in your head). Ego's and little Hitler's who think they are code gods can burn many a decent project.
Even bigger excuses for cynical games businesses to push eye candy over imagination...
Do I see hyper mega ultra texturing here? (sorry John!) or eye blisteringly grindy 10 hours of game play?
(Didn't say games studio's because as an old semi retired software developer i know crunch mode well)
(and heck, even if you want multi monitor i really don't want a machine that sucks more energy than a big fat SUV to see a big stack o real estate for developing)
(Bring back gaming for the masses, and get serious about developing on low end gfx like Intel GPU - which seriously isn't as bad as people think - misery is VIA/S3 (curses and misery be upon them)
(cough), maybe that happened here. Not two stars, but competition between those that are "on top" and those that "make do". The peak of the spectrum of the sun is around Green, and yet plants throw it away. We know there are at least four different kinds of Chlorophyll centres - at least one is near infra red.
Plants are perhaps (mostly) green because that became the dominant metaphor, but it isn't an absolute
(points at Trilobites which are my favorite - almost survived forever - defunct organisms)
(and for the dark reactions - C4 seems to be more efficient, and a recent evolution, unless my dusty knowledge is faulty - probably is...
I doubt that we can grok the games that the always deliciously hacky natural world can throw up...
I know this will sound stupid. I really do. But - in the early 20th century and the early years of flight people took risks, and hell i think didn't design for anything except *achievement* in mind. I can't imagine riding into space with several 10's of thousands of tonnes of LoX,LH2 etc. ever being *safe*.
I close my eyes, and remember the "risky" (seriously risky) science books i read. Using Tetrachloromethane (Carbon Tet) to it's friends. Mercury, other things. (Shudders at the fibrous asbestos we picked out of the pipes around Wymondham College - all nissan huts).
Still here
Bet a load of older slashdotters actually *built* those oh so dangerous science experiments from SciAm in the old days - come on! i know you're out there and breathing still
---> Bureaucracy is a killer
It's only the *dreamer's* inside NASA/JPL that kept enough alive. But what do we have to point to to motivate the kids now? I grew up dreaming of the grand tour of the solar system, manned missions to Mars
Personally, I reckon if Elon Musk can reboot, reload our visions then good luck to him
My gut instinct is that 10-20 years from now, the biggest provider of finance to SpaceX will be - the Chinese, not NASA - $100million is chicken feed....
"Paralyze teh intertubes" (sigh). Hello - this is the 21st century. If you haven't woken up to the SQL injection attacks and other stuff a while back that r.a.p.e.d many websites run by naive suckers, then hell - enjoy the chaos
Don't need to think black hat - if the United Nations, US Dept of homeland (in)secure(ity) etc. can be compromised by injected SQL then maybe the frail should hide in a room and play a saxophone (Gene Hackman for you slashdot gurus)
....and - just as in the real world where it's often the bodyguards that are the assasins - think Governor of Punjab etc., those techies who manage the AS's and
the agreements between high level providers are the most fragile part of the *big* Internetwork....
A couple of years ago we lost most of the internet connectivity from Attika Greece because one idiot backhoed *all* the critical fibre optic cables
(big hint on the white hat side - real attacks would have *minimal* apparent footprint)
As a P.S., I've just had the fun of watching the local council dudes here figure out that the reason there has been no streetlights up Lycabettus Hill is that someone did an "African" pull all the copper out of the ground - so far they've taken 4 days to fix one chain of lights. (Happiness is watching other people at work - shame it took them 5-6 months to start fixing it). I was tempted to mutter something about TDR, but not sure it works with "big cables"
(Still: I had the pleasure of watching Collared Flycatchers on their way north stopping over for a while)
I don't often say that, being a polite englishman, but - so many of the USB telecoms dongles using UMTS/HSPA are *made* by Huawei (here in Greece from last night, the WIND dongle i was using...)
But after a moments thought, how would i be reassured if it was U.S. manufactured? or indeed anywhere else?
Chill out dudes - most of what you see is manufactured by 4-5 manufacturers with names like FoxConn, Compal etc...
...and conspiracy theories aside, I personally see the Chinese as being 21st century versions of what happened in my own country in the 19th...
Sorry people, but this is the 21st century. If like me, you live in a part of the world where the word cosmopolitan has lost it's meaning -> in other words where you are likely to meet people from 10-20, 50 different countries... then listen well...
Existing mechanisms for "delivering" music/video etc. suck if you are from pick a country> because none of the existing distributors (sic) - aka the vampires that take the money from the original artists are living in anytime after 1960. Why?(as an example) Because my Ukrainian friend couldn't find a legit DVD of TV series from his ethnicity (Russian) in this country even if he performed fellatio on the highest level mafia dude here. You simply *cannot* find Russian television series, or anything else here in Athens, Greece (substitute Athens with any other European capital and you'll find the same).
I guess over in Hicksville USA (which is most of your country) you wouldn't grok that
In the old days, even in the UK you could *find* (if you looked hard enough) recordings by your favorite "group". Right now, good luck finding even CD's..
Something inside me is reminded of the old closed medieval guilds. What is different here? Who is legititimate? Who *really* has rights?
Not consistent with known minerals - yet - the environments we inhabit, the planet we inhabit is clearly a small subset of geological processes,
same with biology i guess - but as a miserable amateur dreamer with scientific experience i figure we will see some delightful surprises....
---> open verdict, let the usual scientific bloodbath begin
---> quit the lame marketting crap NASA please
(one day i'll wake up and we *will* have good exobiological evidence - at least i hope so)
I'll stay a sceptic (although the optimist inside me would love to see a few cages rattled;-) )
Dead Wrong! Those of us who live in noisy (busy) cities react as much by noise as visuals... (almost got road-pizza(ed) a couple of years ago by a "silent" Toyota Prius on the road below Lycabettus Hill here in Athens Greece:-| )
Andy
Seriously. Get real. If you were about to start shipping Windows 7 and haggling for a better price per copy you *would* say that Linux returns aren't bad wouldn't you? The whole idea is to try to get the best possible deal out of MS.
Three words: Don't do it. Here's a *real life* story as to why. Once upon a time (ok, about 13-14 years ago) there was a large Greek software company that wanted to make a property tax program. The problem was that they didn't have the data. Yours truly got to reverse engineer a competitors database. Yes, I extracted all of their pathetically encrypted DB (substitution cipher WTF?). Now, if you know anything about databases or mailing lists or even log tables, you know that there are often deliberately false entries so that it's easy to know your data is be ripped (a bit earlier in time I caught out a Cypriot company ripping off the english greek dictionary data I'd been involved in that way).
I warned the project manager that sure go ahead and use the data as a basis for programming but not for the production program.
A couple of months later, the competitors lawyers appeared and (cough) out of court (cough) settlement.
Never did find out how much it cost "my" software house...
In the end they had to employ a gaggle of impoverished undergrads to build their own DB.
So, be very very careful. It might be a good idea to *ask* if you can re-use the data - often it's possible for non commercial purposes...
You were lucky. I read Chemistry at a certain well known university in the south west of england, and having done an internship at the John Innes (Institute) Centre the previous year (i.e. *real* lab work)was totally shocked at the sloppy, dirty, abused lab equipment. Safety? Standards? Nope, just the usual generic white crystalline shit on balances (my old boss at J.I.I would have nailed me to a tree if I ever left equipment in that state). Good luck if you had the misfortune that the white shit was NaCN (cyanide remedy - oh probably three months old).
(and the post grads were *worse* than the undergrads - complaining e.g. that I refused to do a standard deviation on three freaking results).
Working in a real lab is no guarentee though - remember that poor sad biochemist who was an expert on mecury toxicity who ended up killed by one drop of methyl mercury that seeped through her protective gloves?
Andy
(glad to play with considerably safer things like computers for many years)
It's worth comparing this response time with the recent (mere) 12 hours that "greeter" was b0rked on Ubuntu jaunty - and remember that's on an alpha of the next release...
on a memory stick. That way you can carry around your bookmarks etc. between machines. I'm doing that right now from a friend's internet cafe...
See here
Restoring USER32.DLL from the CD will get you the version which was installed when you *first*
installed XP.
In other words if your CD is XP + SP1, you'll get the SP1 version. SP2, the SP2
version.
So, you'll need to re run whatever
update procedure you use to get back to a fully up to date and patched system.
Big hint: google "Heise update" - (I keep all of the updates for XP, vista english on a handy WD pocketdrive (6GB)).
I just checked on my machine and on a fully patched (post SP3) machine you can find a copy of the newest USER32.DLL in
"%SYSTEMROOT%\servicepackfiles\i386".
On my machine it has a size of 578,560 bytes (version from properties is: 5.1.2600.5512)
(Then again, maybe AVG hoses that backup copy as well...)
Slashdot Mirror
One approach - just point out that spamming social media with ilikes from a single source will very likely backfire and
get the company *bad* publicity (...and hint that marketroids might lose *their* jobs) .
Might even scare them a bit (wipes crocodile tear from eye....)
Andy
(Yes it is *personal* accounts, but a big batch in one go is a dead giveaway)
You left out a magic word ---> "new" I'm trying to be optimistic but i suspect i'm dead wrong - what we'll get is semi riskless stuff from well known almost immortal
zombie like devs from the 90's ( ---> :-|
Something inside me thinks the existing dead bipedal mammals think they can look young again by borrowing newer models... (maybe i'm just a cynic)
Andy
I do have a sad feeling that if only distinguished "ancients" like Brian Fargo can automagically hit their targets, get all their old friends from Black Isle/Interplay/Obsidian etc..
then Kickstarter is a lying cake! ("it's who you know, not what you know"....)
Disclaimer: was a programmer since the 80's do some teaching, want to scratch that indie game itch ....
(watching Kickstarter and other indie sites like a *hawk* - seen some good and fine games - "Dungeons of Dredmor @ 5 "dollars" (i'm european)
being a classic example of an indie game that's worth far far more...)
Andy
Most of the more elderly progs/dev here will tell you if you prod them hard enough that "being dumb" is the road to enlightenment - if you think you know everything already, then you're not learning!
Big codebases, many hands = you need to learn human psychology just as much as coding, and the "art of diplomacy" (also knowledge of when to get out and say - "die in a fire losers" - just in your head). Ego's and little Hitler's who think they are code gods can burn many a decent project.
Andy
Do I see hyper mega ultra texturing here? (sorry John!) or eye blisteringly grindy 10 hours of game play?
(Didn't say games studio's because as an old semi retired software developer i know crunch mode well)
(and heck, even if you want multi monitor i really don't want a machine that sucks more energy than a big fat SUV to see a big stack o real estate for developing)
(Bring back gaming for the masses, and get serious about developing on low end gfx like Intel GPU - which seriously isn't as bad as people think - misery is VIA/S3 (curses and misery be upon them)
Andy
Plants are perhaps (mostly) green because that became the dominant metaphor, but it isn't an absolute
(points at Trilobites which are my favorite - almost survived forever - defunct organisms)
(and for the dark reactions - C4 seems to be more efficient, and a recent evolution, unless my dusty knowledge is faulty - probably is...
I doubt that we can grok the games that the always deliciously hacky natural world can throw up...
Andy
(and cover our rear ends, and encourage SpaceX and others to fight it out, perhaps crash and burn
At the best, it would look like the early days of aviation
(a bit of a mess, but interesting)
Andy
I close my eyes, and remember the "risky" (seriously risky) science books i read. Using Tetrachloromethane (Carbon Tet) to it's friends. Mercury, other things. (Shudders at the fibrous asbestos we picked out of the pipes around Wymondham College - all nissan huts).
Still here
Bet a load of older slashdotters actually *built* those oh so dangerous science experiments from SciAm in the old days - come on! i know you're out there and breathing still
---> Bureaucracy is a killer
It's only the *dreamer's* inside NASA/JPL that kept enough alive. But what do we have to point to to motivate the kids now? I grew up dreaming of the grand tour of the solar system, manned missions to Mars
Personally, I reckon if Elon Musk can reboot, reload our visions then good luck to him
My gut instinct is that 10-20 years from now, the biggest provider of finance to SpaceX will be - the Chinese, not NASA - $100million is chicken feed....
Andy
"Paralyze teh intertubes" (sigh). Hello - this is the 21st century. If you haven't woken up to the SQL injection attacks and other stuff a while back that r.a.p.e.d many websites run by naive suckers, then hell - enjoy the chaos
Don't need to think black hat - if the United Nations, US Dept of homeland (in)secure(ity) etc. can be compromised by injected SQL then maybe the frail should hide in a room and play a saxophone (Gene Hackman for you slashdot gurus)
A couple of years ago we lost most of the internet connectivity from Attika Greece because one idiot backhoed *all* the critical fibre optic cables
(big hint on the white hat side - real attacks would have *minimal* apparent footprint)
As a P.S., I've just had the fun of watching the local council dudes here figure out that the reason there has been no streetlights up Lycabettus Hill is that someone did an "African" pull all the copper out of the ground - so far they've taken 4 days to fix one chain of lights. (Happiness is watching other people at work - shame it took them 5-6 months to start fixing it). I was tempted to mutter something about TDR, but not sure it works with "big cables"
(Still: I had the pleasure of watching Collared Flycatchers on their way north stopping over for a while)
Andy
I don't often say that, being a polite englishman, but - so many of the USB telecoms dongles using UMTS/HSPA are *made* by Huawei (here in Greece from last night, the WIND dongle i was using ...)
But after a moments thought, how would i be reassured if it was U.S. manufactured? or indeed anywhere else?
Chill out dudes - most of what you see is manufactured by 4-5 manufacturers with names like FoxConn, Compal etc...
Mind the alligators and have a nice day
Andy
Makes me glad i'm a semi retired developer - (please no more...(grins)
Andy
or as a famous ex-intel design engineer puts it "Blue Crystals (R)"
and... mozilla was *always* a bloaty program, it's just got more re-engineered (sic) in it's bloatiness...
(used to build the first MPR as a machine burn in lolz)
Maybe i'll not live to see Firefox XP or Vista if i'm lucky...
After fixing stuff for a friend so he can have a familiar browser (he updated to 4.0) i'm becoming more and more a convert to chrome...
Andy
BTW: in case you don't know, there *really* are black pools of water in East Anglia that are somehow *weird*
(my part of the world when i was young - born in Norwich)
Andy
It was standard practice on screen editors in the old days
(on CP/M-68k for heaven's sake)
The rest mean *zero*. Go SUE the late Bob Wallace for"easily selecting text" (if you don't see the irony in my comment,you're too young)
Andy
Existing mechanisms for "delivering" music/video etc. suck if you are from pick a country> because none of the existing distributors (sic) - aka the vampires that take the money from the original artists are living in anytime after 1960. Why?(as an example) Because my Ukrainian friend couldn't find a legit DVD of TV series from his ethnicity (Russian) in this country even if he performed fellatio on the highest level mafia dude here. You simply *cannot* find Russian television series, or anything else here in Athens, Greece (substitute Athens with any other European capital and you'll find the same).
I guess over in Hicksville USA (which is most of your country) you wouldn't grok that
In the old days, even in the UK you could *find* (if you looked hard enough) recordings by your favorite "group". Right now, good luck finding even CD's.. Something inside me is reminded of the old closed medieval guilds. What is different here? Who is legititimate? Who *really* has rights?
(and if you really wanted a *free* market.....)
Andy
If you live on a mostly island nation, there is nowhere to run , nowhere to hide
Personally, as an atheist, i'm tempted to pray for my (potentially future) friends over there
Different cultures, they don't matter...
Even now in the 21st century on earth we can have our "chestnuts" rattled quite easily
5.2,5.3 richter here in athens feels like nothing at all to worry about....
and btw, don't forget our new zealand friends who are facing even more aftershocks...
Andy
---> open verdict, let the usual scientific bloodbath begin
---> quit the lame marketting crap NASA please
(one day i'll wake up and we *will* have good exobiological evidence - at least i hope so)
I'll stay a sceptic (although the optimist inside me would love to see a few cages rattled ;-) )
Andy
Dead Wrong! Those of us who live in noisy (busy) cities react as much by noise as visuals... (almost got road-pizza(ed) a couple of years ago by a "silent" Toyota Prius on the road below Lycabettus Hill here in Athens Greece :-| )
Andy
Andy
I warned the project manager that sure go ahead and use the data as a basis for programming but not for the production program.
A couple of months later, the competitors lawyers appeared and (cough) out of court (cough) settlement.
Never did find out how much it cost "my" software house...
In the end they had to employ a gaggle of impoverished undergrads to build their own DB.
So, be very very careful. It might be a good idea to *ask* if you can re-use the data - often it's possible for non commercial purposes...
Andy
Mu
(and the post grads were *worse* than the undergrads - complaining e.g. that I refused to do a standard deviation on three freaking results).
Working in a real lab is no guarentee though - remember that poor sad biochemist who was an expert on mecury toxicity who ended up killed by one drop of methyl mercury that seeped through her protective gloves?
Andy
(glad to play with considerably safer things like computers for many years)
Andy
Andy
In other words if your CD is XP + SP1, you'll get the SP1 version. SP2, the SP2 version.
So, you'll need to re run whatever update procedure you use to get back to a fully up to date and patched system.
Big hint: google "Heise update" - (I keep all of the updates for XP, vista english on a handy WD pocketdrive (6GB)).
I just checked on my machine and on a fully patched (post SP3) machine you can find a copy of the newest USER32.DLL in "%SYSTEMROOT%\servicepackfiles\i386".
On my machine it has a size of 578,560 bytes (version from properties is: 5.1.2600.5512)
(Then again, maybe AVG hoses that backup copy as well ...)
Andy