Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
The elision of the 'e' in -cester placenames so that the 'c' and 's' have a single sound is reasonably common e.g. Leicester, Gloucester, Worcester, Towcester, Bicester. So English natives should have a reasonable chance of getting the pronunciation of a previously unseen example correct.
Comment · 12 years ago
> In UK only people who are explicitly listed on the insurance document can drive the car

That's not entirely true, it depends on your insurance. It's an offence to drive a car without insurance, and an offence to allow someone who is uninsured to drive your car. Some insurance policies do not extend the insurance you took out to driving other peoples cars. However, some fully comprehensive policies do have third party insurance while you are driving someone else's car with their permission. In that case it's fully legal to drive.

Comment · 12 years ago
It's an easily recognizable icon that indicates which room to use and doesn't rely on which language you speak. For English speakers M and F might be just as easy, but which would you use of حمام للرجال and حمام للنساء?
Comment · 12 years ago
Google is half right. One translation for "quod" is because, or reason for, which is the sense that Google is presumably using here. You're probably after "ratio" from "reor" meaning thought.
Comment · 12 years ago
I've got several hundred bookmarks, but they're certainly better sorted than the apps on my phone. I've got them in subfolders by type, and as another poster noted the address bar autofills from the bookmarks so it takes me no time at all to find any of my bookmarked pages.

In contrast I can only sort the apps on my phone on to one of several pages, and to find one I have to flick through them looking for a particular icon. I don't even get customized text descriptions, let alone subfolders, customized icons...

Comment · 12 years ago
This article misses that the browser version of installing an app on a computer is bookmarking a web page in your browser. With cloud syncing I can even take my bookmarks with me across different computers.

In their example, if I came across a useful website called 'Stayful' it would be bookmarked and available for quick access the next time I'm planning a holiday.

Comment · 13 years ago
There are some parts of the engine like move generation and searching that are nicely parallelizable with goroutines. As far as I know Go provides limited support for intrinsics, but you can always use C or assembly to provide access to things like __builtin_ffsll or _BitScanForward64 if you're using bitboards. You should be able to avoid any GC based slowdowns by using stack based variables for most functions, so in that respect it shouldn't be any slower than the corresponding C code. I've only dabbled in Go myself, but from what I've seen it's at least worth a try.
Comment · 13 years ago
For console games C++ is unlikely to be replaced in the near future, although an ever increasing portion of the game code is likely to be written in a scripting engine on top of and underlying C++ base. Of course, the main reason that the engines are written in C++ is that that's what the toolchain provided by Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo supports, so there aren't really any other options unless you want to write your own compiler. There are however a few good reasons to use C++ for console games.

Console games have some fairly unique restrictions which are difficult to meet in other languages. The most major one being that they usually have predefined memory usage maps, and often disallow allocation/deallocation for large parts of their runtime. This means that garbage collected languages aren't really an option unless you have tight control over the collection itself. Also to squeeze as much data into as little memory as possible games often use custom allocators which can take advantage of the fact that the memory layout is mostly known ahead of time and is mostly static.

The other bonus of C++ is that you can drop down into assembler, either to speed up a certain portion of code, or to work around a bug in the compiler chain. Because the toolchains tend to be targeting fairly unique systems, they tend not to be as mature as toolchains for the PC so both of these situations can, and do, occur.

With the ever increasing amount of memory available in consoles it's possible that they'll reach a point where they won't have to have as tight a control over the memory, but mostly when extra memory is available it's quickly filled with larger textures, more detailed models, higher fidelity physics maps, or more AI agents.

Comment · 13 years ago
"your application will move to the top of the pile...regardless of your qualifications."

I've not used the LinkedIn job boards, but the rest of the article implies that the rest of the list is sorted with the "most qualified" at the top. If the second part of the above quote is true, I'd be skipping straight past the "featured applicants" to the ones who are there because they have the best qualifications.

Comment · 13 years ago
These are quite different circumstances though. Bethesda were trying to apply their trademark in an overly broad way to an unconnected game, whereas the makers on your site are using Mojang's exact trademark to sell unlicensed goods based directly on their product. Had Bethesda actually taken Mojang to court it was debatable which way the case would go, although on balance most opinions I saw went with Mojang. In this case it's very much more clear cut.
Comment · 13 years ago
http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/game-progr... gives a fairly reasonable progression, and in general gamedev.net has a lot of useful tutorials and articles.
Comment · 13 years ago
Technically an overflow on a signed variable results in undefined behaviour so it could crash out, but all the compilers I've tried just wrap around.
Comment · 13 years ago
I'll quite happily take the snacks if it means I can code in peace all day and not have to worry about finding funding, talking to investors, keeping the company running, etc. They're the ones with money on the line too, they probably deserve the "massive checks".
Comment · 13 years ago
World of Goo (90%), Machinarium(90%-95%) and the PC Gaming Alliance (90% for high end titles) have all claimed piracy rates of 90% or above.

Also there seems to be a gap in your reasoning, going DRM free didn't cause the overload on their server, unless you're claiming that going DRM free caused people to pirate it. The huge pile of (previously) DRMed media currently being pirated would beg to differ with you. They did use accounts (or a code per game), so the pirates were unable to log in to the server, but the fact that they were trying to is what was causing the problems (from the update at the end of the article). If they'd had DRM, it would have been cracked, people would have pirated the game, tried to contact the servers and they still would have fallen over.

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