sspiff

63 ms·

691.
by sspiff 13y ago
That's not entirely true. They have/had benefit for rulers. They serve to indicate which people one feudal lord can tax and press into his army, and which people shall be pressed into his neighbours army and pay him taxes. At the
692.
by sspiff 13y ago
Exactly. The typical example of weak central authority and strong local rule is the Holy Roman Empire (famously described by Voltaire as "This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neithe
693.
by sspiff 13y ago
Indeed, though I was a little suspicious about wether this was really possible. Maybe we'll find out soon.
694.
by sspiff 13y ago
But I believe Glide wasn't a Microsoft API, so the example is still fine to defend your case.
695.
by sspiff 13y ago
I said large scale, not very many people had the accelerators required to use these APIs. Glide is perhaps the first real example to hit a scale that mattered.
696.
by sspiff 13y ago
I think they do, although that's probably fine. Germany was "the enemy" of the Soviet Union, as was Japan. France was "the enemy" of pretty much everyone else in the Napoleonic wars. There's nothing wrong with
697.
by sspiff 13y ago
If only one nation is playable in the game, the other nation is singled out as "the enemy". If you can only play Germany, Russia is your enemy in the entire game. However, I think that's a silly distinction to make - you can&
698.
by sspiff 13y ago
Sure, but they were on opposite sides for most of the time, and they inflicted horrendous casualties on each other (Germany suffered almost as many casualties in a single battle in the east as the entire war in the west, and Russia more so)
699.
by sspiff 13y ago
Sure, it's a gray area. But do you think Apple would reject a game depicting the Roman Empire fighting of the Huns? Or the Aztecs vs the Inca? Or is that OK, because we're not familiar with a current group of people that strongly
700.
by sspiff 13y ago
Right, but we're talking about 3D hardware APIs, which didn't really exist in a large scale until the late 90's/early 2000's.
701.
by sspiff 13y ago
It was probably born out of the fact that this is the truth for PC gaming, where Microsoft uses DirectX and "all" the other platforms use OpenGL. For a long time, console game development was obscure and unaccessible (and to a lar
702.
by sspiff 13y ago
Of course I have a preference, but in general you work in teams, and the quality of the code base and standard practices of the group are more defining in how fun or productive something is to work on than the choice of language. I know nob
703.
by sspiff 13y ago
I was struck by the same impression: why label or restrict yourself to a single language? And why label all other languages as short-lived, low quality fads? Because that's what reading the two "tl;dr" sections at the top ind
704.
by sspiff 13y ago
To be honest, I haven't got a clue. Affordable, multi-decade storage is still an unsolved problem as far as I know. A RAID NAS is a good medium-term solution, and perhaps creating offline backups on disconnected drives every 5 years or
705.
by sspiff 13y ago
I used to play it on a 90MHz Pentium with 48MB of RAM, running Windows NT4, and let me tell you, it did not run well. I remember there being this one mission where you have to survive for a fixed amount of time (10min? 15min?), and on this
706.
by sspiff 13y ago
This kind of reverse engineering never fails to impress. If you asked me ahead of time, I'd probably have said "possible in theory, but there would be so many obstacles to overcome that no one will succeed in practice."
707.
by sspiff 13y ago
Hard disks are also not very good at long term storage, I believe most aren't designed to hold their magnetic charge for decades without being powered and rewritten.
708.
by sspiff 13y ago
Hard disks are also bad for backup because they rely on a magnetic charge being retained on the platters. Eventually, this charge becomes to weak to be read reliably, so it is unsuitable for long-term storage. Pressed disks (as in, those no
709.
by sspiff 13y ago
Large companies are hesitant to upload backups of important and often secret information to cloud providers, even if it is encrypted (because who says their encryption will be safe in 20 years?). This technology is obviously targeting this
710.
by sspiff 13y ago
While I doubt many here really know the person in question personally (having read about him doesn't qualify), I'm sorry if you do (for both his illness and having offended you), and it's not as if I'm devoid of emotions
711.
by sspiff 13y ago
I understand. I wasn't as touched by this plot twist of sorts (partly because I read your comment prior to reading the article, so I knew what to expect). I've seen quite a few dieing developer stories over the past few months, so
712.
by sspiff 13y ago
They fail to address the way they solved the protocol problem (only being able to encode 6 keys in one event). I'm assuming they went the custom-protocol-extension route, meaning sending more than 6 keys restricted to Windows-only driv
713.
by sspiff 13y ago
Why does that make his comment less relevant or correct? Should we all just comment "so sad, he's way to young/talented/... to die"? Illness and death are just as ubiquitous and universal as they are sad. People get
714.
by sspiff 13y ago
I have the option to work from home, but I dislike doing so, specifically because it makes it easy for me to slack and procrastinate, and because I dislike bringing my work into my home environment. I can use the prying eyes of my peers to
715.
by sspiff 13y ago
A few things bother me: 1. The documentation clearly mentions only cmd-key based shortcuts, implying Mac-only support. 2. They say they will be sending out invites, and that they've released a bunch of libraries as open source. This im
716.
by sspiff 13y ago
I think the emacs one is great. Guix and and c-graph could possibly be salvaged by simplifying and stylizing.
717.
by sspiff 13y ago
I sure hope this will have a rich plugin API and support non-web non-scripting languages as first class citizens. That would make it stand out from most recent editors.
718.
by sspiff 13y ago
This looks great! I'd be more than happy with an open source, modern editor to replace the current myriad of specialized-language editors (QtCreator, Brackets, ...), Sublime Text and Komodo Edit I'm using.
719.
by sspiff 13y ago
I withdrew my money a couple of weeks ago to a European bank account, shortly before the news of their issues broke. It wasn't a fortune but it was a large enough amount to care about. Still hasn't made it onto my account. I doubt
720.
by sspiff 13y ago
The same was true for the OLPC, so netcan's argument is still valid.

More ›