Comment Re:Too much competition (Score 2) 85
It kind of annoys me that the Vita TV never reached north America. The Vita games I'm interested in don't actually need touch controls and in Japan its like half the price of the Vita itself.
It kind of annoys me that the Vita TV never reached north America. The Vita games I'm interested in don't actually need touch controls and in Japan its like half the price of the Vita itself.
I did a few shenanigans here and there. Most were just weird things though.
I do remember accidentally making a command attached to a room that would essentially delete your inventory if you were a wizard because it turns out there was an admin command with the same name. And another that would fill up your inventory with undroppable items.
Oh, and I can't forget the rooms that moved you automatically between them in a circle so fast that you had to spam directions and hope you exited to a room that was outside the circle of spinning rooms.... it was supposed to move you from room to room every 2 seconds or so (to simulate a giant spinning gear in a clock tower), not every
Then again, I suppose I should have actually learned C before monkeying around with LPC... this was back when I was in my early teens and my only programming experience at that time was BASIC.
Oh god, I haven't done coding for LP mud stuff in almost 20 years... while I don't remember doing any crazy shenanigans like that (although I should have seeing as how my brother was also a wizard on the same mud), I do remember making some interesting oopsies.
I never did get back into it after mud ownership passed to a new person, who didn't make backups, and the guy hosting the mud lost his temper and deleted the whole thing.
You're assuming he means that they purchased the phones 'by accident' rather than what he probably intended, which is that they later had buyer's remorse and felt they'd made a mistake. He's deliberately blurring the meaning here, but he's almost certainly not claiming that people went home with phones and didn't realise until later that they weren't made by Apple.
Except that's exactly what Apple claimed in court in the Apple v. Samsung cases.
Not quite true - there are some people out there with genuinely altruistic motivations. It's just that the West has managed to make a religion out of selfishness, so they're few and far between, and often lambasted.
All hail Dollah!
Believe it or not, Half Life 2 and episodes are DRM free and can be run without Steam. Lots of steam games don't have DRM. Steam is simply a distrobution platform that provides optional DRM that actually works pretty well. On top of all this, Steam's family sharing even lets you share your games with family and friends. The only games that don't work with family sharing are those with additional DRM on top, like Uplay, GFWL, Rockstar, etc. because they require a secondary login and the key can only be registered to one account.
If this was true, it certainly isn't as of May 2010, when HL2 was updated to the then-latest Source version so it could be ported to Mac. Like all of Valve's games, HL2 and its episodes are SteamWorks games and require Steam to function.
It helps that Steam doesn't need to validate games every time you play them. I think it validates them once a month.
It looks like Valve finally managed to iron out Steam's inability to switch to Offline mode if an Internet connection isn't present when Steam starts, too... so you should be able to play installed games if your connection goes offline.
There have only been a minor handful of widespread issues with Steam's system, the most notable being Half-Life 2's launch... in 2004.
Now, if only they could invest in better infrastructure for their Friends service and matchmaking systems (affects TF2 MvM, CSGO, and DOTA2) so they wouldn't go down 2-7 times a week...
I think people forget that GNU has their own communications library for secure sockets... [url=http://www.gnutls.org/]GnuTLS[/url].
I know why OpenBSD won't use it (because it's LGPL), but why won't anyone else?
So, I'm surprised no one has come up with this term yet to describe the vision of the FCC: Net Neuterality.
I'm sure it has Bob Barker's support.
TELECOMS have a monopoly on COPPER PHONE LINES. It has nothing to do with internet. And you could always get a phone via VOIP or Cellular. Whatever advantage the telecoms had was gone at the turn of the century.
...and cable lines, since you seem to be forgetting that the cable providers are also telecoms.
Government created Microsoft?
Created Microsoft, no.
From what I've heard (I think the source was Cringely's Accidental Empires / Triumph of the Nerds), the US government mandated that IBM couldn't create its own chips or operating system for its upcoming line of personal computers due to its monopoly position in the mainframe/minicomputer market.
So, IBM went to this company named "Intel" and licensed their 8088 and 8086 processors for use in it.
IBM also went to Microsoft and licensed this product called "DOS" as their operating system... which Microsoft in turn purchased from Seattle Computer Products.
So, while the government didn't create Microsoft, they created the Wintel monopoly that existed for 20ish years prior to the rise of smartphones.
As far as I know, you cannot precompile shaders anyway because the compiled code is hardware-dependent. The shader processors are different among architectures and manufacturers, and do not have a common baseline like "x86-64" to target, like we have on the CPU side.
Why? Surely the shaders remain stored in the video card's memory and don't directly interact with the host OS.
We do have common baselines of GLSL and HLSL, but those are converted into hardware specific instructions on the card itself.
The shiny new features in DirectX do not actually matter for a long time after their release, since game developers will rarely use them as the new DirectX's are available only on newer Windows's. Quite a many developers try maximize amount of potential customers by a single codebase. If the MS would still release new versions of DirectX to all Windows variants still in support, it might have a better stand against OpenGL.
Windows XP's death has basically given developers free reign to support DirectX 11.0 as their new minimum.
Then again, even before this, DX11 features popped up as optional features in games like Batman: Arkham City (and presumably Origins).
Here is wisdom. Let him that has understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred three score and six.
Solve that for my Slashdot password.
Dude, that password was so easy.
I've updated your password to the answer to a new riddle:
Why is a raven like a writing desk?
Good luck spelling it correctly!
See GOG.com (where I purchased witcher 2, which I have yet to play). Same basic idea, lots of discounts, nice organization, etc.. Only no DRM! None at all!
Witcher 2 was a bad example.
Every version of The Witcher 2 sold on services that weren't sold through GOG had DRM when the game launched. This included retail copies, which had SecuRom.
How many NASA managers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? "That's a known problem... don't worry about it."