Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:As a teacher, I say Kudos to Valve! (Score 1) 83

Glad to see this coming to fruition, The head of this project from Valve was at the future of education panel at PAX east this year and it was quite an interesting presentation. It was pretty annoying that it got shunted into a slightly shorter time slot, this is an incredibly interesting subject area.

Comment Re:Worthy successor? (Score 1) 246

There's no NDA in the beta. Non elective mode has 'slots' and you pick one of a selection of skills for each slot based on it's type. For example, pick a rage generator for this slot (bash, cleave, frenzy, etc), this slot you have to pick a rage spender, and this slot is for a utility skill. Elective mode just lets you pick any skills for your bar and gets rid of the slots.

Comment Re:Not sued, but "contacted. (Score 2) 407

I received my only cease and desist letter around 06 for downloading a game I already owned. I'd left my NWN2 cds at home when I went back to school and just grabbed a new copy of it and used my cd keys for the install. The annoying part was they sent the letter to my schools IT department, who just told me I was in violation, so I deleted everything questionable only to find out it was the one thing I didn't delete because I legitimately owned. This is probably why I'm such a sucker for steam now and have 200+ games on my account.

Comment Re:gene wolfe -urth of the new sun (Score 1) 1244

I was thinking the same thing when debating if I should mention Gene Wolfe in this thread. The reason for mentioning him is that it seems like almost everyone who has found his works has done so by accident. However he's gotten more deserved recognition recently. I know he's popped up on several 'best of sci-fi/fantasy' lists in the last year. "The Book of the New Sun" is simply wonderful, that is all.

Comment Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score 4, Informative) 653

While I don't really have too much of a horse in this race, and I don't think it's indicative of all outsourcing teams, I remember one gem from an internship I was working during college. We were given a code base developed by a 'guru' from eastern European country, I want to say Ukrainian. The product was an add-on for Outlook, and at one point I was given the problem of 'The app is slow with more then 10 contacts, almost unusable, speed it up.' After a bit of hunting around I found the problem was where the add-on was searching through the contacts lists trying to find a subset.

They'd managed to create a search algorithm with a big O of something around n cubed. I set about rewriting it to get it down to N all while wondering why on earth Outlooks API didn't support this relatively basic feature. It was at this point that I discovered that the API actually did support it, however the programmer had written a wrapper around the API hiding the method in question, then re-implemented it in the train wreck of code I was removing. That was the last time I ever worried about competition from cheap outsourced labor.

Slashdot Top Deals

If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.

Working...