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PC Games (Games)

Putting Up With Consolitis 369

Posted by Soulskill from the my-keyboard-doesn't-have-a-trigger dept.
An anonymous reader tips an article about 'consolitis,' the term given to game design decisions made for the console that spill over and negatively impact the PC versions of video games. "Perhaps the most obvious indicator of consolitis, a poor control scheme can single-handedly ruin the PC version of a game and should become apparent after a short time spent playing. Generally this has to do with auto-aim in a shooter or not being able to navigate menus with the mouse. Also, not enough hotkeys in an RPG — that one’s really annoying. ... Possibly the most disastrous outcome of an industry-wide shift to console-oriented development is that technological innovation will be greatly slowed. Though a $500+ video card is considered top of the line, a $250 one will now play pretty much any game at the highest settings with no problem. (Maybe that’s what everyone wanted?) Pretty soon, however, graphics chip makers won’t be able to sustain their rate of growth because the software is so far behind, which will be bad for gamers on consoles as well as PC."

Comment i remember your post! (Score 1) 391

by jimjamjoh (#33846070) Attached to: Word Processors — One Writer's Further Retreat

I remember reading this post those many years ago and nodding my head in agreement as I read along. In college, I drafted all of my essays in Vim before importing them to OO.o for pdf generation. It's a wonderful tool for the job of cranking out text, but you're right that the ability to read what you've already written is distracting and antithetical to the goal of simply pumping out text, which is the novelist's first charge.

I think you've stumbled onto a very interesting use of ed here, though I daresay you're likely an army of one amongst your peers for your choose of authoring tools. :)

Comment Oracle DBAs (Score 5, Interesting) 397

by jimjamjoh (#27823003) Attached to: The Biggest Cults In Tech

Anyone who's ever worked in an org w/ full-time Oracle DBAs can attest to how fanatical they are in allegiance to Oracle, even to the point of ruin.

And it's funny, too, because you think they're interested in databases, relational concepts, data integrity, and all of this in general, but they're not, they interested in Oracle products, period. They'd quit before they managed a SQL Server or PostgreSQL database for you.

Cultists.
Image

Chimpanzees Exchange Meat For Sex 313

Posted by samzenpus from the what-do-I-get-for-a-cheeseburger dept.
the_therapist writes "A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, studied chimps in the Tai Forest reserve in Ivory Coast and discovered that chimpanzees enter into 'deals' whereby they exchange meat for sex. Among the findings are that 'male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts.' They also found this to be 'a long-term exchange, so males continue to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are.'"
Perl

Free Resources for Windows Perl Development 117

Posted by kdawson from the christmas-present dept.
jamie pointed out an important announcement in the Perl community. Adam Kennedy, known as Alias, developed Strawberry Perl to "make Win32 a truly first class citizen of the Perl platform world." Over the last year, major CPAN modules have used Strawberry Perl to get to releases that work trouble-free on Windows. But the tens of thousands of smaller modules on CPAN are lagging, in many cases because of lack of access to a Windows environment for development and testing. Now Alias has worked with Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab to provide for every CPAN author free access to a centrally-hosted virtual machine environment containing every major version of Windows. "More information (and press releases) will follow, the entire program under which this partnership will be run is so new it's only just been given a name, so some of the organisational details will ironed out as we go. But for now, to all the CPAN authors, all I have to add is... Merry Christmas. P.S. Or your appropriate equivalent religious or non-religious event, if any, occurring during the month of December, etc., etc."

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