elmuerte

TLJ: awesome Dreamfall: terrible The kickstarted video doesn't convince me to spend $20

Goldblum mode? Ohm you mean puffins mode.

It shouldn't, but it often is. Often even quite horrible. A lot of things you have to remove are kept in place by pressure between two pieces of plastic, not screws. But you're not sure if you got all screws and the damn thing still doesn't come loose until you apply more pressure, to the point where you think it's going to break, but then the part gets loose. And for things you think are easily accessibly you often have to dismantle half the system (thinks like memory or the harddrive). Why not? And what's the best way to block the fan from spinning?

And the carpet?

Ok, so I'm now on 2/3rd of the movie (really have to get to bed). I still cannot conclude if Gabe is a bright mind. What I get from the video is that Gabe, as managing directory of Valve (right?), cultivated a culture of experimentation and running with it for a long time to see where is goes. This is quite in contrast with most companies, there's either no experimentation because of the uncertainty of "ROI", or experiments are killed of when they didn't reach a certain level of success at a given point. Valve obviously (or rather apparently) can get away with it because they've got plenty of money. Although, the reason they've got plenty of money could be because they were open and patient with experimentation. Given that Gabe is constantly positioning himself as a team player in this video makes it difficult to attribute anything to him, or rather anymore in valve. That, I think is a good thing he presents himself as open for debate, or even remarks. Obviously there is a chance that this is all a really well played manager role where he makes you give the delusion that you have something to say (or have influence). So he might be brilliant at herding cats. Anyway, the jury is still out. I'm a tech focused person, and as far as I can tell Gabe is ... erm ... well, not really tech focus, but surely not standard business focused. He's more a tinkerer, and facilitator thereof. Anyway... I do like that Valve is somewhat moving in a direction to open up Steam. This has been one of my major complaints with Steam pretty since it started to become a digital distributor rather and a DRM solution. Looks like they finally realize the fundamental flaw of a walled garden. We'll (including Value) see how this experiment turns out. ps, thanks for the link to the video. It's way more interesting than the usual PR filled content that circulates the gaming press.

Maybe I should have elaborated more on that. I haven't heard much from Gabe himself directly, just people/press praising him with punchlines, or filtered interview. I'm rather reluctant to accept people's words, especially when I don't know them well. And to be honest, I don't even have a clue want Gabe does, or even what's Valve's goal is. But that's was also mentioned during the podcast, Valve simply tries whatever, so see what works (sort of). The exact details are obviously somewhat secret. Anyway, Gabe isn't somebody that puts our articles in the channels that I monitor. That's why I asked for for a link, because I wanted to know more. I'm currently 20 minutes in on that video, and I still have no idea who Gabe is, what he does. I do like that he's most talking about "we as a team" rather than "I" or "The company".

Schafers? You mean Schaefer, the Runic Games guys, right? They were not regular guest. My lineup would be: Chris, Jake, Sean, Nick, Steve, JP, Evan, ... I think I'm forgetting somebody. But I guess you're right, this would be too much people on a single cast. Maybe should do what most episodical things do, a clip show.

Any link to a transcript of the Gabe Newell thingy? I'm still not convinced that he's a bright mind rather than some guy that got in at the right time and earned money to spend like liquid and by being able to do so keep failure under wraps by occasional success. (Also, I'm intrigued by the description of Gabe's information filtering thing, I often do that too).

Oh right. Wait 15 minutes before turning on your laptop for the liquid air to evaporate (it's not a harmful residue, it is not (or should not be) conducting), you just don't want the liquid to bother the fan when its turning. If static electricity bothers you, touch your central heading while holding your laptop (or a top hat if you own one).

A reunion with all hosts and reoccurring guests.

I've got the same problem. I have a second playthrough stuck on the minecart level. I'm waiting until I've forgotten enough about it before I can continue. But that will probably take a very long while :/

You know what would be awkward? If Gabe puts on a red coat and trousers during the Steam x-mas sale and put in on the steam storefront.

Buy compressed-air cans to clean out the heatsink. Blow the air through the intake side. Make sure the laptop is really turned off (best to remove the battery), you don't want the fans to be powered when doing this. Also, you might want to do this outside. A vacuum works, but compressed-air works much much better.

btw, I like the awesome "heater" case mod

what a weird keyboard, the ctrl is gone

It's Tuesday, so we can hunt for the 5th... I don't really feel like it yet.

I'm already using steams OpenID for authentication. Denying getting a key when the user has the game already in the inventory might be a good idea. Of course the user will need to make his profile temporarily public in order to receive a key. But I obviously need to block new users from getting keys to prevent abusers. But to check for, minimum account age of X months and at least Y games and Z gametime? Tracking where the gift goes to is pretty much impossible, and I already gave up on that idea. If I cannot reliably track a gift, then I shouldn't add a multiplier to regifting. Note, most of the logic is only going to work while a profile and inventory is public. Steam doesn't provide a proper API to access profile data (except for the most basic profile). Library is only available via globally throttled XML, and the inventory is just a hack on the json stream of webinterface.

Wait... you can do something with those turtles?

I don't know the plans of idlethumbs with the Ship keys, but I'm still busy developing the steamfruitcake.com site. I have most of the basic functionality working, currently trying to make a usable site out of it. I haven't worked out an idea to facilitate key distribution via that site. I'm not sure if there is a reliable way to do so.

I played Gravity Bone a long time ago, but I didn't accept it well. Not sure if I ran into issues, or if I was not ready for the experience. I've replayed it as part of TFoL, and it was a bit buggy in gameplay. Anyway... In the end, I'm not really getting the whole Citizen Abel stuff. For me, it's too vague, it's too implicit and I'm not getting it.

I have 0 experience with PS3 tech. But as far as I know the PS3 had, just like PCs, RAM and Graphical RAM. The Xbox360 had RAM accesible by both GPU and CPU. So in the PS3 you can to move data from CPU ram to GPU ram. That's only an excuse on the GPU site, on the CPU (PPU) side there is still a lot of potentional (if they could have convinced the devs to invest in a different paradigm to maximize PPU usage). Conceptiual, the Cell architecure is awesome, but it requires a lot of ground breaking investment, so... maybe not a good thing?

oh crap... you're right. So, one MI6 HQ explosion in the reboot. A period movie would be interesting, but I rather have a bot movie with a proper evil genius and a plot to take over the world (which could be a period movie).

I've more or less ignored posts in this subforum, because I'm not following the bookcast. I'm not following it because I don't see myself as a reader, I've detailed this in an other thread already, but it looks like the subject is concerns me. I do stop to think, I stop to think a lot, and that's the reason why I don't read a lot of fiction, As for nonfiction I prefer to have a computer near to make notes when my train of thought starts rolling, This thinking of me is stopping me from reading fiction because it distracts me from story, I wander off. Most of the times I read I'm riding the train for a while (going to my parent or friends) and quite often I need to flip open my laptop to make notes of the train what left the station because of the stuff that I just read. Being a software developer I have not yet have had the need to pull a Tom Hall and have a whiteboard in the shower. This is because the stuff I think out in the shower cannot be expressed on a small whiteboard, but I do sometimes need to make notes after these eureka moments. .... I've been thinking too much here, I've rewritten this paragraph a couple of times already (different content ever time). I can't really put down the right words I want to have here, but it's something along the line that people don't stop enough to think.