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To me the point when HL2 shit the bed is when they pulled a Bioshock Infinite and fell in love with a gimmick...the gravity gun. In HL2 the GG was just another weapon, used in a couple of spots but other than those spots it really wasn't required. What did we get for EP 1? Gravitypaloza. By the time I was being forced to shoot basketballs at striders I was just sick of the stupid gravity gun, just as I got sick of infinite shoving that damned skyhook under my nose going "Isn't this neato"? Sure it was, before you BECAME ANNOYING ABOUT IT!!
As for so many games not played? Bundles, simple as that. You can get so many bundles on Steam that you soon end up with dozens of games and you only have so many hours in the day so...there ya go. Between the big Steam sales and Humble Bundles I probably got a good 50 games in a couple months, just not enough time to play them all before the next killer bundle comes along.
Finally as for Steam being "bloated" on OSX.....ever stop to think that OSX simply isn't very well suited as a gaming platform? Because on Windows you are looking at maybe 60Mb (I have Raptr AND Steam running and barely am using 100Mb) and from what I understand the Steam for Linux also runs quite well, which leaves OSX looking as the culprit from where I sit.
And this is different from what Google is doing with Android....how exactly? In case you missed the memo Google has been taking bog standard X86 laptops and locking them down worse than cellphones and as far as EEE? Google is already moved into the third phase by making more and more apps simply not work without GooglePlay API.
I find it hilarious how many are cheering because "Android has gots teh Linux" when in reality Google is about to make them its bitch. Have fun with that laptop that won't run 90% of the distros on distrowatch thanks to DRM or that latest version of AOSP that won't run half the apps in the playstore because its all tied to Google APIs, but "its teh Linux" so it can't be locked right?....oh wait
In space, 'just use rockets' is not the answer people want to hear, because mass is precious. In an atmosphere, though, all you need is a little extra battery power to shove air in whatever direction you prefer, which works just fine for modifying your path. It wouldn't be much like skateboarding; but I suspect that if you threw some accelerometers, clever math, and a mixture of control surfaces and glorified model airplane thrusters at the problem you could have a system that can be 'steered' by shifting your body weight, as people are accustomed to, with the actual work being handled by the aerodynamic components, since you don't have solid objects to push off of. Doesn't solve the 'make hoverboard hover' problem; but if you ignore that...
True, so it would basically take fans/propellers. Ideally, though, the hover mechanism itself would automatically enable some level of steering via weight shifting. Imagine a regular hovercraft modified for extra ground clearance. If you tilt it, it's pushing more air to one side than the other. It should also work this way in the plasma levitation systems envisioned in the paper I linked above. But in practice you'd probably want some additional control.
How would you steer this imaginary hoverboard? A skateboard will continue rolling in one direction only, as long as you do nothing. The various ways of controlling a skateboard rely on high friction in other directions. Turn it sideways quickly and you can stop it, if you know what you're doing. A hoverboard would simply continue hovering sideways, and you'd have no way to turn it without a wall or something. Similarly, there would be much less room for tricks that rely on hitting the deck against something solid, as the hover mechanism would repel any direct contact. You'd need spacewalk-style thrusters to get where you want to.
(Disclaimer: a little something from my days of physics studies http://iki.fi/teknohog/physics...)
Maybe Trucrypt isn't available for linux distros but i am sure there are plenty of alternatives that do a similar full system os encryption.
I can think of one alternative on Linux, it's called Truecrypt with an "e".
We genuinely are bad at predicting the future of tech, but it's usually not because we're too fanciful. It's usually the opposite. Tech predictions usually fail because we're way too conservative. That's partly the reason behind this joke drawing in 1981. Now predictions about almost everything else - society, politics, and social adoption of tech - are usually way too optimistic. But tech predictions are way too pessimistic.
More precisely, futurists like Osmo A. Wiio have stated that people don't understand exponential growth -- they overestimate short-term progress, but underestimate long-term. There are lots of almost unnoticeable advances that make people cry "where's my flying car" and yet over time those advances add up, amplifying each other, and we suddenly find ourselves beyond the need to fly.
Technology advances because techies remember the past and build on it, learning from past mistakes -- politics, on the other hand...
liebensraum.
Leben = life; lieben = to love
Like Bash?
They say if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day... in the beginning, Linux was like teaching him to fish. Self-reliance and knowledge and skill are good things, but if you're just hungry and don't enjoy fishing, you just want the fish. Most people who use computers these days don't want to program - they just want to be given a fish.
I'm afraid you forgot the link: http://fishshell.com/
Boot into a system which allows you immediate programming
Like Bash? For me, Linux is what made computing interesting and fun again. It has easy access to programming tools, and none of this forced separation of users and developers.
(preferably with a modern OO syntax) and access to video, sound and peripherals. If there's anything that has suffered over the past three decades, it's easy access to I/O.
I admit it gets a little complex here, but for example Python (a key element in my "fun computing" experience) has nice libraries for these. For example, some of my electronics/FPGA work owe a lot to Python's serial port module. Not because the serial port is hard to program otherwise, but for making it easy to write all kinds of code around it.
I have no experience in modern graphics programming. However, I have the feeling that the bar for awesome graphics is a tad higher today than it was in "the year 64". Today's awesome is rather nontrivial at the direct low level we associate with C64 programming, so even professionals use higher level tools. (I think my background in physics and math helps appreciate 3D graphics, for example coordinate transformations using matrices are a basic (pun inteded) skill but I imagine there are lots of programmers with no need to do it.)
Nevertheless, I understand the point about recreating an environment in the '64 spirit. There are several projects around, the two I can think of at the moment being http://sol.gfxile.net/gp/ and http://pelulamu.net/ibniz/ .
MSDN keys ARE ILLEGAL, full stop, and are no better in that regard than TPB. The license for MSDN clearly states they are ONLY to be used on testing systems and NOT for resale and its douches selling keys that got MSFT to get rid of the cheaper MSDN options and severely restrict keys.
So I'm sorry but you might as well go TPB as you aren't anymore legal and the TPB version which also passes WGA,don't mean its a legal copy.
Showing yet again that there is a reason why I like Comodo when it comes to security when Comodo found out their certs were vulnerable thanks to heartbleed Comodo got on the ball replacing certs ASAP.
No company is perfect, every company will fuck up now and then, but the nice thing about Comodo is when they see a problem they don't try to bury it or play the blame game. Instead they announce "here is the problem and here is what we are doing about it" and then they DO IT, no stalling or bullshitting. In the case of heartbleed as companies patch their sites they can get a fresh key, no muss no fuss.
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.