majestic

Oy, tell me about it. The last time I upgraded my graphics card I ended up having to bend the frame of my case a bit. Quite nothing like having to apply force near or on the most expensive parts in your computer.

Every now and then YouTube recommends me older things. Sometimes I realize that I missed a few things. Like this: Watched the other episodes but not that one. Had me rolling on the floor for a while. I should probably consider subscribing to more channels.

The common excuse given is that publishers fear that if the digital storefronts were cheaper than regular retailers the retailers will buy less boxes (or negotiate to pay less) and they'd lose out on the business, or they fear that the retailers would cut them out entirely and take their business elsewere. You know, just as if trading with digital goods is the same as trading real goods. It's the 21st century, you'd think corporate suits would eventually wisen up to the new reality of distribution, but no. A download is sale lost folks. In more than one way.

To be fair to Trump that's wrong. While he sure wouldn't have an issue being instated as Tangerine I, Glorious Orange of the States by some of his PROUD fascist followers that's mostly because it would stroke his ego, not because he's actually interested in the ideology or even a fascist himself. He himself is just Trump.

Majesty sure sounds like a great game.

I don't. Let me quote myself: It just caused a mild chuckle to see you being annoyed by what you perceived as a fascist statement by a German representative of the European Parliament in response to an interim report of a Spanish Member of the European Parliament on the rule of law in Poland after you happily cheer any fascists in the US just as long as they are against leftards. The report also seems to vehemently disagree with your statement that the reforms were adapted or rescinded enough: However you're not entirely wrong by calling these rules mere "guidelines" of a sort. People complain about the cucumber law of the European Union, but that there has been no solution for the Copenhagen dilemma is far more problematic. For those who are reading and interested, the Copenhagen dilemma is the issue that while there are set criteria for EU membership applicants they need to conform to before being allowed to join they immediately go away and can no longer be applied to member nations after their accession. In other words, while a proto-dicatorship like Turkey or an actual one like Belarus would never be allowed to join the EU the EU can't really do anything if an existing member nation would become one. Or arguably has become/is at the brink of becoming a proto-dictatorship in Hungary's case. Nothing except triggering Article 7. Which obversably amounts to nothing.

Specifics? Well, why not. The ECJ has judged Poland's judiciary reforms (or parts thereof) to be in violation of Article 19, Treaty of the European Union on two separate occasions. To be even more specific: Judgment of the Court of Justice of 24 June 2019, Commission v Poland, C-619/18, ECLI:EU:C:2019:531; judgment of the Court of Justice of 5 November 2019, Commission v Poland, C-192/18, ECLI:EU:C:2019:924. But yes, we're all very well aware of how PiS thinks that these are just guidelines and the EU should not concern themselves with them. That was their official explanatory statement, wasn't it? In particular for ignoring certain ECJ rulings. But never mind. I'll be out now, I think I've had my fair share of interaction in this thread for the time being. Not sure how or why I let myself get suckered into this every now and then.

Heh. Mr. Law and Order gets all "Fourth Reich incoming" when the one of the vice presidents of the European Parliament is talking about potentially cutting the subsidies of member nations that do not abide by the rules and regulations set forth and required by membership in the European Union. So what's our take on Trump trying to slash federal funding for cities or states governed by the Democrats? All fine, yeah? Or fascist? edit: This is not an endorsement of the terminology used ("aushungern") nor an endorsement of any sanctions against member nations. That's an entirely different topic, and a really tricky one. Personally I'd rather not slash subsidies because that just hurts the general population, misses the mark and allows for politicians to use such sanctions to double down on an already entrenched us vs. them divide. Proof in the quote, and all that.

I avoid the coffee language like the plague and it's worked out well so far, but since you have no prior experience you most likely won't find the verbosity of Java offensive. That might come later. Feels like you need then times the lines of code to get something done in Java than you would need in anything else. Except COBOL. Good if you're paid by LOC though. On the other hand, avoid getting paid by LOC at any cost just as well. That's such a ridiculous measurement of coding productivity. No but in all seriousness, Java is a decent and safe choice assuming you like it and want to work in that field. It's been high in demand for a while now. If you want some buzzword side to go along with Java you coud look at R, that's the new hot shice apparently. Those come and go. All the time. The classics however have endured so far. They probably will for some while yet.

Oh, well... you know. Most people who have a driving license also have no idea how to driver properly, so why are you surprised exactly?

Oh, you did? What did you learn. Or ar planning to learn?

Maybe... most software engineers are terrible at their job. So there's a lot of potential overlap between software engineers and people on the internet. The correlation certainly is there, keep digging to see if there's some causality behind it. Want to hear the funniest support call I ever got? I swear 'tis true. Phone rings, I pick up and the guy says: "Every time I delete an e-mail it's gone afterwards, why, is this normal?" I had no idea what to reply without making this even more awkward than it was, so I said I'd call the Exchange administrator and ask. Hung up, laugned a couple of minutes, then called back and told him that this indeed is the intended behaviour of the delete function in Outlook. What he was really asking about was why the deleted items folder is purged every other day because his private mail client at home doesn't do that, so he got used to "archiving" mails by deleting them. It still requires being completely oblivious to the meaning of the word delete but it's not the dumbest question I've ever had. Just the funniest. The dumbest question so far was when someone called and asked why he's still missing exported orders from a client. He "told" the system to export the orders from "today" three days ago by setting a future date in the "export orders created on" date range, so they should have been in the export three days ago, right? RIGHT? Whoever said there are no dumb questions, only dumb answers needs to spend a year in first level support. Join the dark, cynical side, get cookies... or watch your mind break. Your choice. What's the topic of this thread again? Uhm... yeah. Game news. Eh... *runs*

Don't worry Bruce, there's no indication at all that politicians will ever come for you (you as in bankers, scourge of the earth ever since the Iron Curtain fell). If that happens it'll be torches and pitchforks from a mob.

I'd love to no longer be my own 1st, 2nd and 3rd level support but in this case we were chasing intermittent slowdowns that happened for no immediately apparent reasons after a major release change. DB load and query execution time was fine, the application servers were bored, memory usage was fine. Then we went on to measure round trips between clients and servers, code execution time. Everything said "this is fine" but it wasn't. Found out what was going on by stumbling upon a seemingly unrelated but no less hilarious issue of some code working most of the time and failing some of the time, but absolutely never when debugged. A classic Heisenbug. Turns out that the login system was the cause. Too many logins and the application server is stuck being busy logging people in an puts everything else on hold. That was no real problem for local logins, but web users had a nice little page available that would log in directly in a loop through selected records, with potentially disastrous results if the users caused a larger amount of records to be collected. Which they did. Still do. Heh. Damn thing.

Wait, what in the what now? Time's Arrow wasn't a bad episode by a long shot.

Best part of the chicken on grilled chicken. Not sure about fried chicken skin though. Yeah, that doesn't sound too appealing.

Come on, it's not that bad. Nothing beats the thrill of having an encroaching deadline, way too much left to do, crunch to get it done somehow, then work 72 hours straight right before release day, have somthing break at 3 past midnight, barely fix it in time and then have to deal with people complaining your ear off. Crunch makes you dead inside. It breaks your memory. It breaks your recollection of events. Everything becomes a blur, one day blending into the other, endless pressure, endless demands, seemingly endless work days with absolutely no end in sight, and once the project is done and released you'll end up having an inderterminate time of support duty because heaven knows, no matter how much testing you do, no matter how much you think something's working or safe or easy to use, the users find some way to break it. Sometimes, just sometimes you get stuck on an issue that seems completely impossible to resolve because you don't even have the slightest idea what's wrong. And it goes on, and on, and on. And you have people calling. Every day. Complaining. Every day. And then the next day someone new calls and says: "Hey, I just wanted to ask, is this ever going to work properly or do we have to get used to the miserable performance of the program?" At that point you finally realize why people commit suicide or run amok. Or do both.

Potentially. When you play PnP with dice rolling you often end up with sub-standard stat spreads. Sometimes the results are hilarious. One of the players of our old regular group once rolled an INT 5 barbarian who was barely capable to articulate himself. That was a fun game, but the DM canned the entire campaign after just two sessions. Not because of the barbarian but... eh. Turns out his planned storyline did not play well with a group of players using the attack on their home village to plunder everything and try to run away instead of fighting the attackers off. The stats of the BG1 NPCs would have been fine if they had just given everyone else rulebook based stats just as well. But no, monsters and enemies have highly optimized, sometimes perfect stats. Sure you wouldn't make a fighter with 9 CON even with a bad roll or a cleric that wouldn't be able to cast more than low level spells intentionally in PnP... guess Bioware figured out that WIS was a mostly useless stat even for clerics even before Gromnir came up with his character to complain about wisdom not doing anything. Heh. I seem to recall an interview where MCA stated that he read much - if not all - of the Star Wars EU in preparation for writing for KotOR 2. And yes, he couldn't deny it even if he tried. Kreia wasn't just based on Vergere, her philosophy and ideas regarding pratical skills and how the Jedi are limited by relying on the force too much comes directly from Mara Jade in the NJO books. As far as annoying NPCs go I seem to have really high tolerance. I don't mind Carth, Kaidan or Alistair. Or even Annoymen. The only NPC that ever really bothered me was Aerie, and to be honest that had more to do with the incredibly terrible timing of her whining-triggers in my first Baldur's Gate 2 playthrough than being straight out annoyed by her whining all the time.

@Amentep I guess that one's for Grounded...

My external backup disk has a folder for each partition I had. C through S. Well... I had three disks and was a firm believer of not wasting precious space by making partitions too large way back when FAT32 was still a thing. Good old times.

Imagine for a moment that this very board's company had one of the most egregious cases of mods that make a significant difference in the history of gaming. Wouldn't that be something?

I had an idea like that and even put in in the feedback thread, but then you'd just have trolls carrying the day all the time. I'm uncertain if that's a good idea. Probably a good thing I got ignored hard, and, quite frankly, if I can manage to have a "win" or two, everyone can. I'm usually dead last in these popularity contests. If that sound bitter then that is....

To be honest either way it's going to be fun. You either will see people who literally spent hundres of millions on a promise see it all be for nothing or you'll see half the internet naysayers eating their own words. I have a hard time deciding what would be more fun, and I say that as someone who backed Star Citizen and who really likes Chris Roberts' work. Except that damnable movie of course. Ugh.

Everyone, good sir. Everyone. And I'll be laughing at you when it comes out and it will be the only game you'll ever need. No, really, but... I mean, realistically, it's probably either NOT going to live up to its promise or never really come out beyond what is already there, but let's assume for the moment it would. Star Citizen could very much be the game I dreamt of having ever since the first time I played X-Wing and Wing Commander. On the other hand I'd just as soon settle for Squadron 42.

Everspace 2 is going into closed beta. I'm looking forward to giving it a spin or two soon.