addie

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.

Were Pabst moving beer for someone else? If it was their own stuff, surely the headline should be "40,000 pounds of piss water inside" instead.

If you're sharing the driving, then maybe. If you're on your own, then a ten minute break every couple of hours is sensible anyway, and so recharging isn't inconvenient. Good maps and accurate range monitoring is more important than shaving off a couple of minutes. And having all the chargers be working, ofc - standard operating practice is to have a couple of them just be frozen up, to waste your time.

Main problem that we have (UK) is that most of the places that have fast chargers are in shopping estates on the outskirts of towns, and they largely serve pretty shitty coffee, and may or may not have toilets.

Outlook is lousy, but what gets me is the fact that basically all "email, calendar, rss and chat (maybe)" apps are pretty bad. You'd think someone would have implemented something better by now.

Excel is perfect, PowerPoint doesn't need to be any better.

Word is a terrible text editor and its layout algorithm is lousy. You can make better-looking documents by converting markdown to html and then applying some css; modern browsers have much more sophisticated styling options than Word offers as "styles". You can make much better looking documents with Latex, which is pushing fifty years old now.

Both ways let you edit text files in a superior editor (which should be Vim, of course - the most superior editor). Collaborative working and revision history with Git, which runs none of the risk of Word just randomly deciding to shit itself when those features are enabled.

Fine - Word can retain a "compatible layout" mode for all those ancient documents where people have paginated by pressing enter 17 times exactly, and the line-breaking, hyphenation, text colour etc. algorithms cannot be updated. But for the rest of us, let's push things forward.