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Comment Household - An idea from past times? (Score 1) 77

Have fun trying to solve this "household" problem...Is that some christian midwest mom idea? I have a place where I live most of the time Then we have a room/flat in the city, where my partner lives I spend weekends in the mountains. And weeks of holidays over the world My kids sometime live with their mom, sometimes with me. Sometimes we access with WLAN, sometimes over Mobile Connections. I pay 25$ per month for 4 concurrent users and expect Netflix to fully support this usage pattern, without any hindrance.

Comment This is a swiss word. US brushes away my culture. (Score 1) 781

I bet a million that brotli and zopfli come from Google in Switzerland. IN Swiss German, these are two types of small baked breads/buns, Brötli and Zöpfli. Now go and tell Patrick McManus that I find his intervention a gross cultural ignorance.
Games

How Game Gimmicks Break Immersion 228

Posted by Soulskill from the they-can't-all-be-portal dept.
The Moving Pixels blog has brief discussion of how gimmicky game mechanics often break a player's sense of immersion, making it painfully obvious that he's simply jumping through carefully planned hoops set up by the developers. The author takes an example from Singularity, which has a weapon that can time-shift objects between a pristine, functional state and a broken, decayed state. Quoting: "The core issue with this time control device is that it's just not grand and sweeping enough. It doesn't feel like it's part of a world gone mad. Instead it's just a gameplay tool. You can only use it on certain things in certain places. You can 'un-decay' this chalkboard but not that desk. You can dissolve that piece of cover but not most of the walls in the game. The ultimate failure of such cheap tricks is that they make the game world less immersive rather than more compelling. The world gets divided into those few things that I can time shift, that different set of things I can levitate, and that majority of things that I can't interact with at all. ... I'm painfully aware that all that I'm really doing is pushing the right button at the right place and time. Sure, that's what many games are when you get down to it, but part of the artistry of game design comes from trying to hide this fact."
Image

Woman Jailed For Starting Office Fire To Leave Work Early 136

Posted by samzenpus from the take-this-job-and-spark-it dept.
A Florida woman was sentenced to nine months in jail, followed by five years of probation, for starting an office fire so she could get out of work early. From the article: "Pasco sheriff's investigators said Michelle Perrino, 40, started a fire at Bayonet Point Oxygen on May 12, 2009. Perrino drew suspicion when she mentioned the fire's origin — a filing cabinet — during an employee meeting. Employees had not been told where the fire started." I hope she had the good sense to start the fire on Friday so she could have a long weekend.

Comment Re:But they may (sadly) have been right (Score 1) 95

by lovesignal (#28161249) Attached to: Swiss Court Halts Non-Competitive Contract With Microsoft

It is ALWAYS the non-technical bureaucrats making the purchasing decisions, since they have the money. But it is the job of the IT/Computer Techs/Nerds under their command to show them the alternatives and, clearly, state why X is better than Y.

Did you ever ask yourself why THEY have the money? Why THEY are in charge? Because your technical bureaucrats/nerds are unable to keep an overview of the situation. Because they get lost in technical details instead of balancing various facts in their argumentation.

Comment Re:But they may (sadly) have been right (Score 1) 95

by lovesignal (#28161231) Attached to: Swiss Court Halts Non-Competitive Contract With Microsoft
Ok, so take that step back indeed and look at it: For a very low price, you get access to the largest and most complete software ecosystem in the world. Well documented software. Large availability of human resources trained in using this particular OS. Linux has its place. But not as the desktop of complex large scale companies.

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