addie

His face is far too big on his head, doesn't even look like him.

Hey! Mine not only tells the time, but also the day of the week and month, and has an integrated alarm clock and stopwatch. Battery lasts for seven years, keeps time to within a few minutes per year, is cheap enough so that I don't mind wearing it when I'm cycling as I can just replace it if I break it, and it has a celebrity endorsement. Of sorts, anyway.

Only thing to be careful of is that US gallon is only 3.79 litres, not 4.55 litres like it is in the UK. (Makes the fuel economy of American cars seem even worse than they really are.)

If the diesel price is about €2.33/l at the moment and the dollar is about €0.86, then German diesel is ~$10.26/gallon at the moment.

If the lesson is "just let Ubisoft die, and support their former workers if they want to produce labour-of-love games in small indie studios", then we could be in for great things. E33 is possibly the French-est game ever made and has brought French culture around the globe, in the way that "yet another Rainbow 6 sequel" certainly does not.

Happy birthday, Fenrir!

That Batman collection the Batman / Returns / Forever / & Robin sequence? Dang. Treasure the first one, watch Returns once, and throw the other two away unwatched. Some people might not believe that a film with many scenes of Uma Thurman dancing around in corset and tights could be so bad that it's not worth your time at all, but those people are fools. I am one of them; saw it at the cinema when I was a kid.

Trying to out-jank Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, eh? I didn't see any game-breaking bugs in that 14-minute longplay, must try harder.

I don't think that being a vampire hunting people down in a maze of streets is necessarily a bad idea. If they'd gone for a stealthier, keep-out-of-sight and strike from the shadows approach, like perhaps a vampire might do, then they could have had something. The original Castle Wolfenstein was released in '81 for inspiration, and this does have 'better' graphics - more stuff moving, more detail, more colour. In fact, probably looks better than most versions of Metal Gear, from '87. You'd obviously want to keep it quick so that people keep putting money in, but I don't think 'arcade sneaking game' is exactly an over-done genre, even now.

It's one of the best ones, get playing it. Lots of shooting up Nazis, zombies and death robots; a little bit of stealth, lots of Quake 3 bunny hopping, plenty of action.

Not like the new ones, which make you watch 45 minutes of torture porn before letting you do five minutes of corridor shooting, and which just can't commit to deciding whether killing Nazis is bad.

Java dev in charge of a $100M product here. Can't actually compile it with less than 32 GB of RAM.

My old job working with a hydraulic analysis firm, needed 256 GB to run the product it in local development mode; to run customer models in production was a mainframe job - typically multi-terabytes. Computational fluid dynamics eats all your memory and asks for more. My work computer would have been pretty shitty as a gaming desktop, but did have every memory slot maxed out.

Yes, you might be working on something more lightweight, and that is fine. That doesn't mean that your requirements are the be all and end all.

Likewise. Bought a three-month sub so's that I wouldn't have to top it up too often, and then they came out with all that shit. Subscription expires in two days - forever. Hello, iVPN.

I think that "more fps" is important when there's things that move quickly compared to their size. My go-to game here is Batman: Arkham City - in the steel mill sections, there's a lot of "sparky" particle effects; in general, there's a lot of dust flying about. That stuff does look noticeably better at 90 fps than it does at 60 fps. My eyes can't really see the difference at 120 fps, but I can definitely hear the GPU fans, so locked to 90 is fine. Makes absolutely no difference to the gameplay at all, of course.

Games that are designed for 30 fps tend not to have the same kind of particle effects, mostly because they would look terrible. I do feel sorry for the graphics artists having their hands tied, rather than being able to fully express themselves, but all engineering is about weighing things up and finding the right compromise, of course.

Yassifying all of your games with a slop filter is the complete opposite of artistic expression, of course.

Can't remember any particular performance problems with ET - it's no more flickery than any other 2600 game, sound plays fine, screen changes when you fall in a hole are prompt, all that kind of thing. Now, utterly bizarre and unintuitive gameplay, yes; it has that in spades. Also quite unfinished, but Howard Scott Warshaw only got five weeks to develop it so I'm prepared to point the blame at Atari for that.

BTRFs, which has advanced filesystems features like snapshots, data integrity checks, and scrubbing, is a less performant filesystem for databases than filesystems that don't have these features, like EXT4, F2FS and XFS. No shit, Sherlock. At least compare it to ZFS or something.

If you are storing files that you care about, use a filesystem with integrity checks. If you require high database performance, it'll probably be happier using a whole partition, if not just a whole pile of disks, and be allowed to get on with it. If you are driving nails into a wall, do not compare the performance of different screwdrivers for the task. And so on.