Honest question as a heavy C# user. Why Visual Basic? What advantage does it give, either in function or practice or even aesthetics, over C#? It seems that they are functionally identical but that C# has the better syntax; clearly there must be some reason VB.NET is still around though. Enlighten me please?

Just rediscovered Alien Legacy, a true Sierra golden age underdog from 1994. It's a space colonization game that's not a 4X, how novel!

I really really wish I could find all those old DOS TSRs from the mid-late 80s. I had one that put a bunch of ascii smiley face characters on the dos prompt that careened around and bounced off of lines of text; hold ctrl or alt to make them go in circles. I would not be surprised if it was really, truly lost in time with no remaining copies.

Visual Studio when doing C# stuff. Eclipse when doing Java stuff. On Linux, vim or notepad++ when doing C stuff or any other random shell junk. On Windows, notepad++ (okay, let's be honest, it's usually just noteBut I always wind up missing Visual Studio. It seems to fit my workflows best, and if it worked well with Java I'd replace Eclipse with it in an instant.

Don't have evidence of crimes on my phone? How about perfect legal but very private photos of my wife that I don't want J. Random Officer looking at?

Actually I think you have that wrong. To me, the jargon file had /positive/ words for misbehaving things. They were a pain to deal with, but they were fun to talk about.

As an Age of Empires / Empire Earth fan, I respectfully assert that I prefer random maps. If I'm going to sink a few hundred hours into getting good at a game, I prefer to win by skillful improvising instead of by optimizing my build orders around map travel routes that are known to-the-second and careful memorization of tile counts where I know I can block off a passage most efficiently every game. If your asymmetrical armies are well defined (and admittedly, that means they are not very asymmetrical), no map will give such an extreme advantage that it can't be overcome by spotting it early and adapting your strategy to force an engagement somewhere else. Or, hell, 'when he sees this advantageous narrow passage he's sure to build a lot of scissors units, so I'll build a bunch of rocks in anticipation and take bigger advantage than he will'.

It seems like random-map RTSes and hand-built-map RTSes are really different subgenres altogether, and they draw different crowds.

Already posted, but got a better idea. Combine it with that Myo thing that measures your tendons or whatever so it can tell what hand or finger motions you're making. The hell with touch control or voice control: Make it something you can operate by only moving the hand it's strapped to, without touching anything. Use with Bluetooth earbuds, put your thumb against your third and fourth fingers, 'swipe' up to start/stop your music, or down to skip track...maybe something to answer or hang up a phone call. This is given the assumption that the required hand signals are simple and do not have false positives. Hell, maybe you can write by signing letters in ASL under the table so you can text in a boring meeting, better than subvocal. *IF* the input was extremely usable and reliable, that just might be novel enough for me.

Of course, it occurs that I could just wear a Myo by itself and pair it to the phone in my pocket.

Don't know why, just bugs me to wear them, and I keep bashing them on things. Before I got a cell phone, I wore a carabiner watch on my belt and it was pretty cool...they were built with cheap springs though, had a tendency to stop staying clipped after a year or two, and after I lost one down an elevator shaft while disembarking I pretty much swore off timepieces (coincidentally that's around when I got a cell phone and stopped needing them).

I guess if I was working in a physical, mobile job...where taking a phone out was inconvenient (dirty hands, gloves, hands always full)...and being able to time things was really important...I'd wear a watch. I could control it with voice, that could be a killer app for some job I don't know what. ("Smartwatch, give me a thirty second countdown on my mark... Mark.") Yeah, the only use for a watch in my mind is checking the time without using your pockets, and always-on voice control is the only "smart" addition that makes sense. If you had the use of your hands to fumble with buttons or a touch screen, a phone would be easier to use.

God, Starflight was a thing of beauty. Alien Legacy (1994) had a pretty gorgeous mix of procedural and hand-tweaked, too. If you want a procedural FPS, I think what you're looking for is Tower of Guns--I haven't played it but it definitely fits the bill.

Played around with (and wrote extensions for) an implementation of this on a MUCK 10+ years ago. So, basically online text adventure with a somewhat procedural map. Wound up with procedural cities and cultures and stuff too.

I for one don't care if it's dull. I spent an awful lot of time in Noctis, which had one of the worst control schemes ever, no combat, and no interaction with other players whatsoever besides naming planets and posting short notes (the database was updated every few months and made downloadable), but boy did it have a gorgeous infinite universe in its day.

Wait, so you actually browse Slashdot at -1? Because there's some damn awful stuff on here most of the time. Acres and acres of spam, unrelated rantings of psychopaths, and copypasta from adult novels... Yes, downvoting serves a vital purpose.

This, this, this. Dependency issues on a build server are so often things like "we added this dependency on a library locally, but didn't update the build server", or even "we checked in a change that makes it work on the dev box, but didn't make a change needed for the server". That plus forgetting to merge in stuff is really the only way I ever see build breaks (where checked-in code fails to compile, as opposed to compiles failing locally).

I mean, first thing I would have though is "that's not actually him".

When I get home late and don't have time to cook before crashing, $2-$3 at McDonalds fills me up adequately for dinner (couple cheeseburgers or bacon cheddar mcchickens). $5 is more than I can eat (there's a "two big macs for $5" sale on now).

It's disgusting (if a bit addictive) but it's stupid fast, and yes, it's cheap as dirt. If I was working two jobs it would be nearly mandatory--no prep time, no dishes, right in front of the bus stop; grab it, eat, sleep.

At our local QFC, every time we try making something healthy it costs an arm and a leg. Buying in bulk helps, but the people we're talking about here can't do that all the time.