Bockit

> ...throttle back their hydro plants and store more water behind dams for later use.

I find the idea of using a dam as a battery quite interesting.

I couldnt say for commonality, but for me writing scripts in notepad for a game emulator to make new items, using a series of tutorials and articles that had been turned into a .chm file because their coverage was so good.

My ISP gives emails at 50%, 80% and of course 100%. They also do options 3 and 4 (no idea about 2) but the emails are so very easy, and knowing you've hit 50% gives you time to mitigate before you get capped.

I've had the opposite experience to you. It took a little while to understand what was going on but once I did, I set up a project template that I've been able to use in all projects with little in the way of changes. Dev with asynchronous loading and production with built file.

The best thing about it is I use jade for my template language and it can be configured to precompile the jade in the bill step, allowing me to use jade in the browser on older browsers. Also as mentioned in a sibling comment I use the same config file for building and development.

This isn't specific to requirejs but it was also possible to work it into the asset pipeline of my backend system so that in production it compiles, caches and serves the built file and in dev it uses the asynchronous loader.

The only issue I've run into is the same as the flotr2 issue described in the post, which it sounds like there is an easy fix for ski look forward to trying it out.

I think this could potentially be a worthwhile outcome. Advertisers ignore it, eventually someone manages to explain successfully to enough people with clout that this is a bad thing, and hopefully something is done to require advertisers to respect the setting.

Maybe turning on some kind of dev mode to enable the feature, and then keep the modals as well.

I think it's interesting that everything seems to be introductory level[1]. I wonder if over time higher level material would be added.

[1]: Don't get me wrong, it's still useful and imo, great.

Anecdotally, I still have people dismiss Diablo 3 over the connectivity issues at launch, and make error 37 comments. Even from people who played through the issues and stuck around for a bit, it's the thing that stands out most for them.

Success or failure depends on your definition of success here. Successful game, sure. Successful sequel to Diablo 2, it doesn't seem to have the same popularity, and I think the connection issues at launch framed a lot of people's opinions about the game.

Of all the links I have seen posted so far, I have yet to see anything lifted from their site.

When I'm designing I consciously ignore any sense of "this is difficult/impossible to implement" and when I'm working with a designer I tell them to ignore development constraints in the design process. Once we have a fina design and it is impossible, sure you can reevaluate, but don't let that influence the initial designs IMO.

This is something they're going to have to deal with eventually. It will happen, and it will suck, and they will have to manage it. I think once you reach a large enough scale in a business connecting strangers, unsavoury events are statistically unavoidable. I guess the trick is not just mitigating the chance but also being ready to respond. Which means both to the victims and to the public.

Thanks for the reply. Ok, I'll probably give it a trial and see how it goes then!

I'm pretty committed to my mindcrack pack world at the moment though, so what are the plans to support other modpacks in the future?

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head with the collection of mods comment. Some add major new features and tons of content, others are add-ons to the bigger mods adding a couple of new items that fit in another mod's theme. My understanding is that it started off as a collection of mods that the curators managed to make work together.

In its current state, it's a launcher for clients, essentially a package manager for minecraft mods, with several public packages available (Mindcrack, ftb) and also the ability to add private packages, or make your own by editing the existing ones.

What makes the mods special I guess is a combination of the sheer amount of content they add (energy systems, different realms with different monsters and bosses, more armour, ores, different biomes, beekeeping aka pokemon) and the way they all work together either by design or by glue mods.

Rather than reading up what all 30 mods do, I'd look at the following mods and see if any interest you. Please note, a lot of these mods add new types of resources to the new game, e.g., copper, silver, tin, lead, uranium, rubies.

Buildcraft + forrestry + thermal expansion: Buildcraft is one of what I consider the base mods, which adds the idea of energy called Minecraft Joules (MJ) which is used to power their machine blocks. Also adds pipes to transport items, liquids and energy. You can use these mods to do things like automatic tree farms, beekeeping, quarries (autmoatically mines out an area) lava pump.

Railcraft: Adds a couple of things that interact well with buildcraft, steam boilers, more buildcraft engines (engines generate MJ), liquid tanks (for storage) and tons of different rail stuff than in vanilla minecraft, e.g., launcher tracks, high speed rails, locomotives.

IndustrialCraft 2 and optionally Gregtech: Adds its own energy system, EU, which is used to power its own machine blocks. These machine blocks are all about item processing, e.g., getting ores and turning it into 2x or 3x as many ingots as you would have normally received in vanilla minecraft. Gregtech sort of extends this processing technology tree, adds some new items but also 'balances' all of the mods in the pack, editing their configurations so that they don't enable, in Greg's mind, an unfair amount of resources to be generated for a given period of time. Whether or not you agree with such a viewpoint is one of the distinguishing factors between the modpacks.

ComputerCraft: LUA programmable computers and 'turtles' (think logo) that can interact with the environment. MiscPeripherals is another mod that adds more methods for computers and turtles to interact with the minecraft environment and other mods.

Mystcraft: Adds the ability to generate new worlds, with funky settings like, multiple suns, always-night, dense ores, only plains biomes, purple sunset, and many more. Lets you teleport between realms.

Twilight Forest: A new realm, like the end or the nether, which is a more fantasy/magically oriented realm than normal minecraft, with entirely new creatures, monsters and bosses. I believe the idea behind it is if you're looking for a more magical setting than normal minecraft you could play entirely in this realm.

Extrabees: Really a small mod but has so much playtime involved. Forrestry adds beekeeping to the game, and extra bees adds a hundred or so more bees to the original 10-20 forrestry bees, with bees further down the evolutionary chain producing more advanced materials, e.g., diamonds. It also adds some machines to aid in the beekeeping process.

There are more mods worth talking about, but I should get back to work :) I'd watch some lets play videos on youtube to get more of a feel for what's going on. Just jumping into the game can be kind of overwhelming.

If anyone enjoyed minecraft but doesn't play anymore, I've been trying out feed the beast this year and found it reinvigorated minecraft for me.

A couple of questions for Minefold:

1) How does the hourly pricing scheme work with things like chunkloaders?

2) Where are the servers located? I'm from Sydney so if it's not in Australia it's unlikely I'm going to move off my mac mini if they have to be hosted offshore.

EDIT: Clarifications.

It's nice to hear this kind of device review from a corner you don't usually hear it from. Rather than the usual kind of review broken up into the usual sections, maybe a storage, space, benchmarks, screen, software kind of thing, we have a guy who has specific use cases for it talking about how he used it for those cases, what worked and what didn't. And then comparing it to how he normally does those kinds of activities.

Even though I don't have the same use cases as him, I feel like I got more out of it this way.

Yeah. And on top of connection quality issues, some companies with bandwidth caps count uploads as well. I haven't really seen what kind of bandwidth would be used but it's something I'm going to check out and possibly warn some people I've recommended it to in the past.

I look forward to the day when I can watch in-game footage of games, maybe replays from RTS games for example, in a game-engine in the browser.

I like the explanation of terms, but come to a different conclusion. Rather than a universal my/yours I would think it ends up being whatever is appropriate to the interface. Some interfaces are for tasks that require "tools" others not.

I find it a very different experience and have no trouble following discussions in linear threads. I find linear gets you more substantial discussions with multiple contributors all aware of one another.

Thanks for sharing, this is cool.

Is it possible to preload the image before applying the style? The flashes to what I think is the normal bg image and image loading progress thing makes it harder to compare backgrounds.

I can't explain why it exploded but I have an observation I've pieced together watching a few of my friends play after some leave and some stick around.

Generally, if you don't have an idea for a project, for example, making a tree house, the game can get quite boring if setting up automatic resource gathering stuff isn't your thing.

Australia is a market where Apple holds a healthy phone market share and has both subsidised and unsubsidised iPhones available. Anecdotally, people who can afford get it outright and those that can't take the 2 year carrier contract.

Not related at to code at all but your comment about catching you off-guard reminded me of a comment chain I was a part of on reddit. There was a comment about assigned seating in movies and I replied with how I liked the system and why, and then the reply to me was something along the lines of, "Remind me to never hang out with you.". Water off a duck's back to me but it did give me a moment's pause and I recognised that if I weren't used to such behaviour it would have affected me.

It reinforced a feeling I have that, sadly, you can't seem exist in communities on the internet without being ready to put up with unanticipated 'hate' (for lack of a better word).

I know many people who given time to become more experienced, would benefit greatly from various aspects of the net, but I worry they wouldn't last a week before they decided it was something they never want a part of.

Perhaps a way to configure it to work in that environment may be: Bug email gets sent to the dev it determines responsible, and if they 'sit on it' it gets sent to the whole team. With an appropriate sit-on-the-email period of a couple of hours, or a day. If it was really critical the dev in question could easily escalate it anyway in that kind of environment.

This should give you the contextual advantage first, and then collaborative advantage very soon after.

I think it's great that page content is getting more love lately, e.g., this and the recent NYTimes snowfall article [1].

Based on choppiness when scrolling, it does seem however that browsers still have a way to go in performance. I look forward to when scrolling a page like that is as smooth as butter on any device / browser combo.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/

I agree very strongly with the sentiment of the article, and would like to add that I think the flipped side of the "I don't understand" is just as important.

I.e., You're trying to explain something and someone doesn't understand, you should be patient with the person. I don't think it's always (or even greater than 50%) the case, but enough times after finding out what the lynchpin of understanding was there are ways I could have improved my first explanation.

This kind of thing is what I've always seen as the potential end result of things like google analytics and also facebook connect. Both products that have javascript running on a vast number of websites, with the potential to link to personally identifiable information, in a similar manner to that discussed in article.

I can't imagine that I'm alone in this train of thought.

For anyone else who thought, "What, there was a period of time known as the cryptowars?" and wants to know more, I found this article gave a decent rundown[1].

[1]: http://www.fipr.org/press/050525crypto.html

I found that I'd reached the same stage. If it wasn't multiplayer with the chance for competition, I couldn't get into it. If you're looking to branch out a bit though, I found just playing through co-op games with the same people I'd normally, 'train' with so to speak, was a great way to get back into the vibe of single player and non-competitive multiplayer.

Then again if you're happy with things that way, then no need to change things up.

Nowadays they have macro programs to help with this that use LUA or custom scripting languages to run the game.

I remember learning LUA by writing scripts. Probably my pinnacle here was one to harvest wood / mine automatically, recalling to a bank to drop everything off and then head to a new mine, rotating mines so they wouldn't run out and playing a siren noise and sending me an email when the anti-macro popup would come up.

At this point I was more playing to see how advanced and resilient I could make my script, and less so to play the game, heh.