Jeigh1405241495

1)Calling it a "game creating thing" is a bad sign, lol2)I'm sure you can find programs designed to create games, but you wont be able to make anything on par with current FPS games being released. You need a lot of know-how in programming and modeling to make anything past reasonably generic games using those game maker tools. Also the more complicated the game the tools can generate the more complicated they will likely be to modify to your liking. Basically google will be your friend on this one, there could be some tools out there that get you on your way but it seems like you want to create a game that is pretty advanced, and usually games like PoP have a large team of people working on them for years so it's unlikely there is a simple tool to create something on par with it. Usually easy-to-make tools come out many many years later that can generate games of a certain level, but not generate games of the current generation. You might be able to find an open source 3d engine and start working with that but then you'll again need to have some programming and modeling experience probably.

So I don't think this program is overly new, or new at all, but Loopt is a program for gps enabled devices with a new(ish) iteration availible for all those iPhone users out there. In short this prgoram allows people to create a list of friends that constantly share up to date GPS information with one another, allowing you to pull up a map of your area and see exactly where all of your friends are. At any time. How does this not creep people out?Personally I'm always a touch paranoid about big brother-ish things, but this seems rediculous to me. People are voluntarily giving a rediculous amount of information to one another. I know facebook and other social networking sites have flourished in the last few years but I find this need for information to be obtained and shared has simply gotten to such an extreme that its getting into dangerous territory.It's already obvious that sexual predators can use social networking sites to find victims. What will stop users of iLoopt from being targeted by such people, thus giving a pinpoint location to a potential predator? Even ignoring that extreme case, who the hell needs to know where there friends are at all times? Isn't that bordering on an obsessive need to know what others are doing in your absence?Then there is the issue of technological security. I don't know how secure the iPhone is but I assume its reasonably good at least. I'm sure the packets containing GPS info are encrypted nicely prior to trasnfer but what if they are somehow intercepted and cracked? Or what if someone has their iPhone stolen and has a gps lock on their friends at all times? Wouldn't be hard to use it to case out some homes to know when the residents aren't around, or when underage iPhone users are out and about.The whole idea just creeps me out if that's not obvious, but maybe some of you think I'm crazy because of it? I'd love to hear an opposing view from someone that sees the strong benefits from such a system. I can picture some benefits (parents monitoring children, locating a lost phone, etc) but still it seems to me to be pushing it beyond what the pros would warrant.

It's been a long time since I posted in here so I thought I would give an update.Chrome has completely taken over as my primary web browser. Things just feel snappier and smoother when I'm using it. I fully understand it has limits and firefox does some things better, but that isn't enough to change my opinion. When I'm using chrome it just feels like more things go more smoothly for me and I can put less effort into thinking about the browser and more into the actual browsing. Maybe it just hits all my personal marks for the GUI, or maybe it's just smoother overall. Who knows.My main concern currently is some of the webpages I develope for work don't format 100% properly in it because theya re quite complex web applications. But they are still far from unusable in it and the last update actually fixed alot of it so its on the right track. Otherwise most sites render fine for me still after considerable daily use so I have very few complaints with the browser as a whole.My only real hope so far is that they fix some of the zoom behaviour. I like browsing with my laptop extended out sometimes on my knees or whatnot making some sites hard to read so I flick the zoom up but in chrome they dont seem to zoom as nicely as in Opera for example. Not overly important but something I'm still hoping they update.Otherwise, chrome still gives me less headaches then other browsers do so it's currently my regular browser of choice.

Haha that's awesome. It always blows my mind when two species that are meant to be natural enemies come together... mostly because humans often times can't get along with other humans due to very insignificant *BLEEP* yet these animals can overcome their entire instinctual set just to get along. Great story though

Good info. One thing people need to remember is every situation and personal preference is different. Sometimes you get lucky and you have a situation that perfectly fits one product. Other time you have a situation that maybe two or three database systems would all work wonderously for. Then it falls on anything from personal preference to what you or your group or company are already experienced with or set up for.Persoanlly I've used MySql, ORacle, and MSSQL and each have strong pros and strong cons Oracle is currently the one I'm using a lot but it constantly bugs me that there is no auto incrementing fields (at least in the version I'm dealing with on my current project) and must be handled differently then normal.MSSQL sort of bugs me in some ways but when working in .Net architectures some of the tools provided make all DB interactions a breeze and simply a pleasure to work with.And and course, MySQL is top notch stuff by any standard especially when you note it's price tag.

TV streaming is no longer that amazing to us. It's a viable source of entertainment and works well in most cases. You can subscribe to services and purchase tv and movies to stream to your home computer or tv and everything is great. Why not do the same with video games? At this years Game Dev Conference we see the announcement of OnLive. Personally this service is a crazy idea to me and has me very interested. Basically it will install a 1mb-ish plugin into a browser and then let you play full fledged games (Crysis, for example) on any computer with a fast enough net connection. What basically will happen is your computer will task controller input, send it to the servers which are running the game, execute them, and feed the video response of the game back to you. All computation is done on servers and you just input controls and see the result. This will allow very weak systems to play games that are very computer intensive. In theory this is pretty stellar. While there are technical concerns (will my net be fast enough, how much trasnfer will this use of my __GB cap, etc) in optimal situations this could be pretty awesome. Assuming it will use a subscription based system with individual prices for games/rentals, a lot of problems in the industry disappear. First and foremost piracy is just gone. How would someone steal games they never actually have? This could heavily reduce piracy and thus increase sales. Further there would be no need for physical production, cutting costs more and again increasing profits on every game sold. Even more, if the console makers got on board they could focus on making games and forget about hardware which usually loses them money anyways. Ok, so sony and MS jumping on board is unlikely. But for now they have a good number of big name third party publishers ready to provide games for use on the service. Also, they intend to offer a cheap box you can buy to allow you to access the games via the net on your tv without having a computer connected to it. Analysts expect the box to be $50-100 so that'd be a great price range to allow access to a possibly never ending supply of content. Possibly the biggest draw would be the removal of a need to upgrade hardware. When new games come out it would be OnLive who upgrades there servers, not the home user upgrading videocards. When patches come out, OnlIve would patch the games. There would be no more installs, no more boxes, nothing. Just games. Ok, so this is all a grand idea that could fall flat. But personally it is very interesting to me. I'm looking forward to hearing more. Opinions? CNN Article about OnLive OnLive Website

Is there a reason you might be going crazy? I moreso just find anything to do with studying how our minds work and interact fascinating. There are some very interesting studies that have been done in social sciences that look at how people react and relate in varying situations due to factors that many times seem insignificant.One experiment that I would love to see on one of these types of platforms would be to just release all the social laws that people are controversial over for no reason (gay marriage for example) and just show those opposing them that society won't collapse if two guys choose to get married. There is too much energy in modern polictics wasted on fighting certain things that are simply shouldn't be something that the government concerns themselves with. Personally, I'm straight and really don't know many gay people but I still don't see why anyone would have a problem with them being married, so all the energy spent fighting it is a waste.This is obviously just one example of numerous that could be pursued in such a contained social environment.

Earth has a finite amount of habitable land. This is a simple fact that leads to some interesting ideas. Lately I've stumbled upon the idea of "Seasteading" (http://www.seasteading.org/) which is the idea of actually building large scale floating cities. Sure it sounds like something out of a sci fi movie but apparently it's legitimately a possibility.I'd heavily reccomend checking out Seasteading's website or googling for more sites on the topic as it was endlessly interesting to me. I'm sure I wont hit on even a fraction of the engineering behind it if I try so I'll intentionally give a super brief overview.Basically they are taking the concepts behind oil rig technology and heavily modifying it to the point where they could create a large scale city. Further this wouldn't need to all be on one platform but could actually be a modular city that could be arranged and rearranged as they saw fit. To me this alone is all very interesting as any technology intrigues me. Some of the ideas for energy production and sea-sickness-avoidance are pretty interesting among other things. Again, obviously, this is all just research and theory at this point. There isn't cities floating about in the Atlantic... but the theories seem well researched and they do a good job at convincing someone it's a possibility.Now, just as interesting (to me at least) was some of the other ideas the people behind the projects had for after the city was created. These floating cities would be the perfect place to "try" isolated and different political structures, economic setups, etc. Basically, they could be huge scale social, political, economic, etc experiments to answer some questions that simply can't be properly researched elsewhere. There would be an extremely isolated smapling of people that could, for exmaple, institute communism and see how it goes (proper communism, not *BLEEP* broken communism most people think of when they hear the word).To me any social experiment is interesting so the idea of this is simply awesome. Of course the liklihood of finding a cities worth of people that would be willing to partake in such an experiment would be low, and the type of people willing to partake would inherently affect the studies results, plus the people are all from the currently employed systems thus tainting their overall views of the world... but still it's the best we could do haha.Really I just feel it's super interesting from lots of different standpoints so wanted to share it with you guys. Hope someone finds it interesting too.

From what I have seen of these 'mybooks' they are extremely expensive compared to using a regular external drive or especially a standard drive with an enclosure. At a quick glance these WD Mybooks are ranging from 200-400 bucks... you could have a decent sized external for 50 lol.

Complex queries can be done, slightly different syntaxing but I've seen pretty long and complicated queries run. They have all the normal SQL elements present.That said I should point out I just heard over lunch that microsoft is cutting support for Linq in favor of a new technology haha. Guess I picked a great time to learn about it

Alright, well I am no expert in this area but can give a basic rundown on the topic.Boot Sector - This is where a hard drive keeps basic information required for the 'booting' or startup of a system. Many people know the term MBR now or "Master Boot Record" which stores information on where the operating system are found, and the MBR is in the boot sector. Basically, a boot sector contains the information required to get from the motherboard receiving power to actually showing you some type of program on the screen (usually an operating system like windows).Bad Sector - These are COMPLETELY unrelated to boot sectors except that both occur on a hard drive lol. Bad sectors are simply corrupted sections of a hard disk. As far as I know this simply happens over time and cannot be avoided once too much wear and tear occurs on a disk and usually doesn't cause too much trouble in small amounts (some files may be corrupted but otherwise an OS can simply ignore bad sectors on a HD). Viruses, as far as I know, can't cause a bad sector but I'm sure they could manage to erase your boot sector leaving the computer needing some work to get access to the files inside.Hope this helps clear things up a tad. I'm sure someone else will provide more detail.

There is a tool, I cannot for the life of me remember the name right now but if I remember I will, but its some kind of highlighter that you basically highlight the edge of your object and it auto detects drastic color changes (shoe to table contrast for example) and does the selection accordingly attempting to only select the line where the color changes within the highlight line.It's basically just a modified version of the tools you guys mentioned, but it heavily minimized where photoshop[ looks to try to auto-find a place to draw the line so can make it more precise sometimes. Basically it just need there to be a consistent color change within the highlight that you paint on instead of the whole BG being green, for example.Sorry I cant remember what its called but its something you can hunt for haha.[EDIT]Also, a tip, if you do end up having to erase the background manually for images a good way to make it looks better once you do in fact remove the background is to zoom in close and use the eraser with say 20-40% opacity and a mid-high step setting to quickly swipe the edge, just 3-5 pixels into the image. This avoids having the super sharp cut along the edges but a gentle fading on the edges leaving a more smooth natural look to the image especially if you miss a few pixels in the BG erase.Oh and yea, always always always use a copy of the original.

TavoxPeru, yes it's worth downloading. I've never paid attention to the page when I download it but I imagine that's the version I use as I got it off their main site. I'm guessing the warning is an auto generated wrong one lmao. The version I have says it's registered to 2008 so seems recent. Either way, it works, it rocks, and the codecs kill almost everything I can throw at it.MPlayer is indeed a great piece of software. I use it sometimes when other players give me troubles, although like I said that isn't often with vlc heh. But MPlayer is my fallback player actually.

Well, there are a few references to LINQ in other forums, but I had not until recently learned of this new addition to .Net (Version 3.5 and up) that I feel it's good to let people know about because I found it pretty interesting. As a precursor to this post know that I don't have a huge amount of experience with LINQ but simply hope to provide a brief overview and maybe get some people interested in the new technology. First, a couple useful links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Integrated_Query https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397926.aspx First off, Linq stands for Language Integrated Query. It is a way built into .Net to allow you to programatically set up and interact with databases that you have created. Note: This is not a database system, it simply is an interface to allow applications to interact with the database. You still need a proper database system to be set up to connect to. LINQ allows a programmer to set up a mapping of all the tables within a database (a simple drag/drop from the server explorer allows all current tables, attributes, relationships, etc to be translated over) which allows the program to then see the database in an object oriented fashion. On can then set up the ability to interact with database as if they were simple objects with attributes. Low level queries are very simple to write with LINQ as well, as you can call to retrieve rows/columns easily and store then in datasets that can be further manipulated without continued database interaction. Basically, what linq does is allow you to avoid writing a million "Select ID from Table where Name = Bob" style queries and allows you to really simplify the interactions between the business logic and the data layer. Further it makes it rediculously easy to store the results in very convenient ways to be used in datasets, views, and what have you. I am by no means a LINQ guru, as mentioned I have relatively limited experience with it having used it only briefly on a project at work. If anyone has more to add or minor corrections to what I have said, please do so

Interesting tutorial. As mentioned its almost painfully brief, but that could be good enough to at least show people that they can make something appear on screen that they themselves created, and get them interested in looking deeper into coding with c++ or another language. Luckily most of the basic coding techniques are transferable between languages and just the syntax changes a little but after figuring out the differences the overall style of many individual little things doesn't change alot.

Well you don't need to make an enclosure, you can buy them for rediculously cheap and just plug in the drive and whamo, external drive is ready lol. No knowledge required

I recently acquired Dead Space for my Playstation 3. I've been waiting for a true survival horror game to come out for this generation for a long time. Many games I've tried recently had simple "enemy jumps out of no where at you" scares but past that lacked atmosphere and depth and none really got into the players head or pulled them into the game. Enter Dead Space.The graphics are amazing. Some other reviewers have commented on grainy looks to come of the graphics and I've even seen screenshots prior to buying the game that just looked lower in quality. That said on my reasonably sized tv (37 inch hd lcd) it looks phenomenal. The textures look detailed, the enemies look twisted, and the atmosphere is thick and tense. As you walk down a hallway an d see dingy walls, blood smears, and shadows cast all over the place your mind just floats into the game world. Seeing a shadow sprint by and not being able to find the source enemy is a thrill in itself and so when there are the traditional jump scares they feel fresher as they don't happen every time you expect, and happen other times you dont.To continue keeping the atmosphere every menu (sans the save menu which kicked me out to the default ps3 save menu) is holo-projected in front of your character and can be rotated using the main camera or rotated in relation to the view of the character. This is a very cool effect and adds a lot to the game as you always feel like you are indeed your character.Yet another factor in pulling the user in is the sound. The range is impressive in regards to the sound as they don't overdo it with music or noises. When you hear a scream or moan in the background you twirl around to make sure it's source isn't within striking range (or if its even in the room you are in). Other times the music ramps up when you get into a heated battle and fades afterwards leaving you feeling alone in the dead silence of the station you are trying to find a way off. Even more impressive are the hollow sounds when you are in zero-g ,no oxygen environments. Guns thud as if underwater and screeching enemies sound strangely distant even though they are mere feet away.The game is pretty linear but has some exploration and scavenging involved with the ability to buy/sell items giving you some incentive to scavenge for stuff you dont even need to allow later purchases. Adding another dynamic to your time on the spaceship.The storyline is interesting without taking too much time away from the actual gameplay and the game is a reasonable length with cool features and replay modes availible after beating it the first time.I'd highly recommend dead space to anyone looking for a new shooter or horror game.

I'm quit interested in this game. My computer is an old piece of trash so it wont be an option on there but I am hoping to snag myself the PS3 version in the future. (Un)Fortunately there are an insane amount of games out or coming out soon that I need to acquire and play so it might have to be pushed back but everything I have seen on Farcry 2 has so far implied it is a very solid and fun FPS. Even though it seems completely disconnected from the first I'm excited to see what it holds.

Another method that just skipped my mind until now would be to use an old hard drive if you have one of adequate size not in use along with an external enclosure. They sell cases that latch onto normal internal hard drives and turn them into externals for relatively cheap so that might be another venue you can look into. All external harddrives are just that, a normal drive with a case and a usb cable or other external connection so if you have an old HD kicking around it could be a good way to save a few bucks.Also, might I ask what you want this for? Seems weird to only want a 50 gig external when such huge ones exist for relatively low costs lol.

There will likely never be a 'silver bullet' of antivirus software that makes everyone happy, kills all viruses/spyware, etc. By anture they are constantly becoming outdated so thats an issue immediately and also because of how they work there are many issues like computer performance hits, bloated programs, etc. Frankly I feel that asking for opinions is fine but in this case they should only be used as a guide when there are particular elements of the software they mention liking or disliking in which it mirrors your own thought style. If you care alot about the interface then check what people say about that, or if performance hits are your main concern ask about that, or if the only thing you care about is that it cleans the viruses specifically check into that. It's usually a balancing act and you need to decide where you want to fall on it.Personally I've tried a lot and have never used a paid one that was horrible, except some that had bigger performance hits, and currently am running Nod32 without a hitch. As mentioned above I too also avoid stupid moves so that helps a lot but as long as you follow basic safe surfing practices any AV software should work out great for you.

I'm sure if you just shop around you can find one for relatively little money. I mean you can buy 500gig-1TB drives for like a hundred bucks here (Canada) if you keep an eye out for sales so I'm guessing online it would not be hard to find similar prices especially if you dip into the lower capacity ranges. What kind of price range are we talking here? I mean if by cheap you mean 10 bucks you might be out of luck but if you mean 50 it might be possible. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ 3 seconds with google resulted in that page, there are 160gb externals for ÂŁ34.99 and they are based out of the UK, as well they have various other sized drives. MIght be worth checking but again, 'cheap' is pretty ambiguous so that still might not be in your price range.

Personally I just stick to VLC. It has such a streamlined design that is minimalist without lacking functionality and comes with pretty much every codec I need. I use it all the time for most if not all of my media needs so it'd take something pretty special to dethrone it from my top ranked applications lol. Personally I just want a media player to play media. All the extra doo-dads that many players incorporate now do nothing, in my eyes, but bloat the system and slow things down when what I'm looking for is a simple librarying system for media and the ability to listen to, watch, etc the media I've collected.</rant>I might give GOM a try when I get home, as you seem to back it strongly. But I doubt it'll win my love haha

For playing myself I like basketball, hockey, tennis. All great games that can be picked up quickly without much effort (well hockey it depends how insane into it you get lol). I've also started liking golf lately though I suck, will need to play more next year.For watching I'm huge into hockey and football (american style). I'll watch other sports usually but those are the main two. Baseball is the only sport I get insanely bored watching haha, not sure how people love it so much...

I'm sure my list will be pretty standard but here goes nothing. I'm listing basically whatever I think of that I got legally for free, regardless of freeware/opensource/etc classifications lol.Trillian (basic edition)GTalkGimpInkscapefirefoxchromeoperaeclipsenotepad++bluefishvarious linux distros and accompanying programsmsn webcam recorder (great lesser known app for people who do webcam meetings at work where important info is shared quickly)skypethunderbirdI know there is a ton more but you get the idea. I use free when I can haha. Opensource and other free software has increased in quality dramatically since I've embarked on my adventure into tech-dom so it's always fun to see what is availible to the public if they take the time to scour the net.

I dont know if I would agree that it is a necessity to learn C or C++ to achieve the things yordan mentioned, but that said I would agree that it's worth it to learn cpp. Alot of what you already know in java will translate over so it's not like learning from scratch and a lot of things you want to do will likely be able to be done in a more efficient manner using C++. At least its worth looking into some basic C++ and see if its something you like or not. Good luck.