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Comment: Re:Piracy (Score 1) 375

by ricotest (#31788804) Attached to: Game Devs On the Future of PC Gaming

I was thinking you had a kid. If you don't, I can't imagine how busy you'll be if/when that happens :)

In all seriousness, you don't need to "have no life", be unemployed or single in order to do an activity for an hour or so without interruption. I find it very hard to believe that you are truly that busy, that's all.

Comment: Re:A: Crap. Lenticular 3D. (Score 1) 165

by ricotest (#31182606) Attached to: No Glasses Needed For TI's New 3D Display
Curious, I didn't know nVidia supported other shutter glass brands in the past. I thought they had written the drivers and the 2D -> 3D conversion specifically for their 3D Vision shutter glasses.

Previous glasses presumably didn't use 120hz monitors? Or did they only support specific games, rather than patching all DirectX games at the driver level? Either way, it's disappointing that nVidia have abandoned early adopters of desktop 3D.


by ricotest (#31178552) Attached to: No Glasses Needed For TI's New 3D Display
They are separate downloads, but I don't think they have to be kept in sync. In any case, new 3D drivers continue to be released to patch games like Left 4 Dead 2.

I think nVidia are going to push this, it sells their overpriced shutter glasses and 120hz TVs from their partners, and it even encourages people to upgrade their GPU (3D naturally requires double the framerate). They've put a lot of effort into backwards compatibility and working with developers to get native 3D support in newer games.

Comment: Re:Missing the point (Score 1) 531

by ricotest (#30961356) Attached to: Has Apple Created the Perfect Board Game Platform?

The iPad isn't going to replace a music player, it's too large.

It's not going to replace a movie player, it's too small. Unless you're watching something on your own? Can't imagine that the sound is too great either.

It's not going to replace e-book readers, it doesn't use e-ink (iPad has a supposed battery life of "10 hours", Kindle is 7 days)

It's not going to replace video games for anything but the casual market, the hardware isn't up to scratch.

Plus it's completely locked-in and controlled by Apple, with proprietary formats, where you own nothing, only rent and agree to whatever terms Apple dictate. No thanks.

No thanks.

Comment: Re:Choice of Language (Score 1) 580

by ricotest (#30618380) Attached to: Myths About Code Comments

It really depends on what language you write your code in. Object-oriented languages in general require less documentation since good design and properly named methods and properties do document things relatively well .... Perl and C code, on the other hand, can be unmaintainable even with a number of comments, because the old functional design is not easily maintainable. Consider rewriting these in a more modern language.

Perl has support for OO, ranging from the built-in stuff to a full-blown object system like Moose. Perl also has an inline documentation system called POD that bears some similarity to Javadoc. This leads me to conclude that you either don't know what you're talking about, or have been working with very bad Perl programmers.

At my place of work, any code I write is likely going to be maintained for years, perhaps decades; even if it doesn't, someone else is going to end up having to fix something or add a feature, or perhaps it will be deprecated only to be pulled out of retirement later. I typically write a few paragraphs to describe the class (with example instantiation and usage) plus perhaps a sentence or two per method. None of that Javadoc-style documenting every argument and return value separately, though. But I make it decent, because even if the class is relatively simple, it might not be simple in a year's time - and if the documentation isn't there to begin with, future contributors might not bother to add their own.

Comment: Re:89% Success Rate! (Score 1) 93

by ricotest (#30613546) Attached to: Machine Translates Thoughts Into Speech

Actually, English has exactly 7 vowel letters. I learned this in first grade, why didn't everyone else? A, E, I, O, U, sometimes Y, and sometimes W.

For example, Crwth, and Cwm. Look them up!

Because those last two words are Welsh, not English. You could also argue that é is a vowel letter because of words like café, but of course these words are French in origin, even though they show up in English usage.

Comment: Re:Eyecandy in cost of usability (Score 1) 1124

by ricotest (#29522099) Attached to: Firefox To Replace Menus With Office Ribbon

This is not really a new thing. IE8 has no menubar by default. Chrome has no menubar. Both browsers succeed in usability.

Why? Think about what you do with your browser. For the vast majority, you'll want bookmarks, a back button and maybe access your history once in a while. This is not Microsoft Word, where there are hundreds of possible commands to run on a piece of text. Web browsers are perfect for the "Ribbon-style" interface because almost all functionality is encapsulated within the content window itself - i.e., viewing pages and clicking links.

It's funny that other posters bring up extensions to fix this. Many Firefox extensions eschew the menu bar entirely, because they know that users will ignore it. The extension is instead visible in the status bar, as a browser "tray icon", in the context menu, or in the toolbar itself.

Another sad thing about this is that it forges Windows UI style to Linux and other OS, and stops being consistent with the rest of the system.

A large number of modern Linux applications have already adopted the 'no menu bar' style, most noticeably for GNOME. I don't think having a menu bar just to be consistent with other applications, regardless of OS, is a positive goal for the Firefox developers.

Comment: Re:A counterexample... (Score 1) 130

by ricotest (#29322881) Attached to: Re-examining the Immersion Factor For First-Person Shooters
Crysis Warhead is a good example of this - they invested so much into the engine and assets for the first game, it was good to see an extra set of levels that built upon Crytek's experience and was a vast improvement in level design and pacing. The problem with FPS games is they tend to get boring unless they regularly switch up the game play (e.g. Half-Life 2), which seems to be difficult for most designers who are content with churning out level after level of the same thing.

Comment: Re:A counterexample... (Score 1) 130

by ricotest (#29322867) Attached to: Re-examining the Immersion Factor For First-Person Shooters
You're right, that's exactly what we need, shorter games. Never mind that most FPSs out today can be completed in an afternoon, and have very little depth (exploration, multiple routes, etc.) compared to the 20-60 hour RPGs on the market. I'm sorry that you can't spare the time in your busy life to play something longer than a couple of hours, but I think most of us want value for our money - especially if we're paying Â£35+ for the game.
