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gnoupi

232 karma · joined February 4, 2009

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gnoupi··on So You Want to Compete with Steam
Also, let's not forget another point, is that CD Projekt was already a large distributor/localizer in Poland long before they had their RED division: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Projekt

So they didn't really start out of nothing when it comes to having connections with game developers.

gnoupi··on Show HN: Free, instant, secure, disposable chat rooms built in Go
The problem with taking a discussion from a public forum private, is that in the current state, everyone can choose to dispose of the room.

As proven in this very thread, it doesn't really work. The idea that everyone can dispose of the room is interesting, but there probably should be an option so that only the creator (or the first to join) can dispose of the room, for such public place cases.

gnoupi··on Show HN: Free, instant, secure, disposable chat rooms built in Go
Password-protected and no public listing, I assume. Nothing on secure data transfer, though.
gnoupi··on Show HN: Free, instant, secure, disposable chat rooms built in Go
https://github.com/goniltalk/niltalk
gnoupi··on Show HN: Free, instant, secure, disposable chat rooms built in Go
Disposing of the room does remove it and kick everyone out, indeed. And then the link is invalid. Neat. According for the privacy page, it's all living in RAM only, so in theory there is no logging (https://niltalk.com/pages/privacy). Guess we can check the code and see for ourselves, of course.
gnoupi··on Show HN: My all-nighter project to find the best Google Reader alternative
Also, the Chrome extension is taking some liberties to "personalize suggestions": https://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/chrome_app_permiss...
gnoupi··on The Ultimate Bookmarking Tool Is Finally Here
For me, with Pocket, it's usually two clicks, and typing a tag or two in between. Or one click when I just want to "read later" without bothering with organizing.
gnoupi··on Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem
The game can actually go on for a few minutes when you lose connection. So I don't think there is much of the simulation happening server-side.
gnoupi··on Face opera
The problem is that by the time you reached the functionality of Opera with extensions, your browser is bloated and takes ages to load, and a large chunk of RAM.
gnoupi··on CryEngine 3 soft-body physics simulator
In Q3, it was more the way jumping impacted your movement speed which was a discovery. Another example would be the Tribes series, with skiing which was also an abuse of the game physics (and taken as the main movement mechanic in the latest game, Tribes Ascend).

It's nice to see such parts of gameplay emerging from simple bugs. I would argue that it's much more rare nowadays, with games which aim to be always more realistic, and blocking your movement.

gnoupi··on CryEngine 3 soft-body physics simulator
I'm not sure laptops account for a lot of the choice, when designing games, to be honest. Consoles, sure, there's a market and a reason to take them into account.

But you don't really have many AAA devs planning on running their game on laptops.

gnoupi··on Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
"he was told to go buy them himself, so he did."

Which is a problem in itself. I understand he needed another monitor. But buying it himself shows the management that they have absolutely no need to invest in that, if devs are ready to buy it themselves in the end.

gnoupi··on The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents
In theory (assuming that there are links to everyone, and no way to have separate networks) (it's of course a theory only, but seems very likely that there are "massive users", who have files of "every kind", connecting the different groups), as long as you both connect to one who is connected, it will work.

Although this is quite the extreme case, and not really the purpose for Bittorrent to begin with, I guess. The main interest is load balancing of popular downloads, not finding the one person with the one file for you.

gnoupi··on French President Sarkozy's residence implicated in torrenting scandal
My guess is that it never originated from the actual place, but was spread nonetheless by some people. The point is probably to show that finding the ip is not a reliable indicator. As opposed to the three strike, which is relying almost entirely on identifying someone from his ip, on such places.
gnoupi··on Why I Don't Use RSS Anymore
Google Reader allows me to mix high traffic and "I don't want to miss anything" sites.

I make extensive use of tags, and put my "not to miss" feeds under a "favorite" tag, that I always read. 2-3 other tags I read all from as well.

And the rest (including HN), I only read in "All items", sorted by "magic". That way, I know I will see if something big happened on these sites (it's sorted mostly by the amount of "+1", I think) in priority, and the rest, maybe later.

Then, during the weekend (slow update days), I purge all Google Reader, prepared for Monday, and it goes for another week.

That's the most effective way I've found to follow tech and gaming news, since I started. It's a good compromise in my opinion, since many of my "favorite" feeds are not really popular or likely to appear on Reddit or HN.

gnoupi··on Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs
Mostly because freedom is not really accessible for most people, in matter of computing.

You can have freedom to install what you want, the way you want... only a minority ultimately knows how to. The rest is left without a clue in front of their supposed freedom.

When the iPad is presented to people, of course it's no "revolution" to most of us. But for the regular person, it's an easy way to access something which they could have had difficulties to access, before. At this point, choice matters less than the actual possibility to use something, even if this thing is framed and safely guarded, for most.

gnoupi··on Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs
Unfortunately, when you are right but don't communicate it well, people will tend to discard your truth.
gnoupi··on Impressive html5/css3 clock; no Flash.
Same here, starting to get used to that. None of the "cool effect" sites I click recently work directly on Opera.

Guess it's soon time to resign from that browser. I love it, but it's just getting tiring to have to use "open with chrome" with so many sites.

gnoupi··on BoingBoing's tribute to Steve Jobs - Classic Mac theme
That's the kind of tribute which I find a bit creepy. I mean, unless this was used another time, it looks like it was prepared "in case of the event".

Well, I guess this kind of thing is common anyway. See all the "life of Steve Jobs" articles which are popping in the news, written months ago.

But it still feels not fully right.

gnoupi··on Google's Steve Jobs tribute
Hopefully it's not a doodle. A doodle is something you have to prepare, design, draw, it's not made overnight.

The added text is an instant, unprepared change.

Having a doodle would be creepy, like "oh, we had that prepared already!" (well, a bit like boing-boing, I guess)

gnoupi··on List of inventors killed by their own inventions
Doesn't kill their creators, at least.
gnoupi··on The Hardest Game. For Adults.
It's not a matter of being adult or not. It's just a matter of being able to be in a place where you don't have social rules, life goals, or "responsibilities", and still have pleasure to be in such conditions and create your things.

Because other than creativity, it has to have a point. Because in the end, you are sitting in front of an imaginary world, which exists only for yourself. Not everyone has the motivation to build something big, just for for themselves.

In a way, (good) Minecraft multiplayer servers are more appealing, according to this. Because people rebuild social communities there, and build things together. They make plans, of how to build the place, they interact. They build little cities, they build monuments. And other people can see it too, and maybe improve their constructions.

If you are not going to export what you did (as a video, for example), or build it in a "persistent" place, shared with others, it can indeed be hard to summon the willpower to build something, without hitting the "what for?" wall.

Minecraft lacks purpose not only because of the almost non-existent rules, but also because at some point, it is really bare, and the "reward" for your creativity is only contained within itself, if you play alone.

gnoupi··on Art of writing unmaintainable code.
The most amazing thing of this essay is that somehow, I know people who never read it, yet seem to know it by memory.
gnoupi··on Anti-iPhone iPhone game makes it past Apple's review process
In a way, why would they? It's an iPhone game, meaning that Apple earns money from each game sold. Also, it is delivered to people who obviously own an iPhone already. So I doubt it's really going to hurt iPhone sales or something.
gnoupi··on IOS After Android (what's been copied by Apple from Android)
Although notifications are most likely copied from their own jailbreaking community, if I remember well, not particularly from Android.

But then again, a notification bar instead of a popup is not the most ground-breaking idea. It's a pity (and a bit silly) that they didn't implement that earlier, for sure.

gnoupi··on IOS After Android (what's been copied by Apple from Android)
And you are obviously a very calm and objective person, without any preconceived idea over Apple users, I notice.
gnoupi··on We celebrate our birthdays every year, but why not our 1,000,000,000 seconds?
Deploying surprise party in 3, 2, 1... It's over now, thanks for participating.
gnoupi··on We celebrate our birthdays every year, but why not our 1,000,000,000 seconds?
Also, it allows you to set hour and minute of birth, but the rest of the site doesn't use them.

Since it has second-related marks, it would be nice if it was working with hours and minutes as well.

gnoupi··on CSS3 Rainbow Dividers
If you open it with Opera and don't feel it particularly amazing, like I did, open it with another browser.

(Only viewing the source I realized it was supposed to be animated)

gnoupi··on What happened in my birth year?
I find that reading the Wikipedia page for the birth year is more complete and interesting.

This effort is interesting, but the black background is painful to read on for so long time. I know, years ago, pages had awful backgrounds too. The general tone isn't really of my liking, being a bit condescending like "can you imagine this didn't exist!". Yes, I can, it didn't exist when I was younger either.

That's the kind of thing which would benefit from some good narrator reading the text at the same time, though. But waiting for it to scroll like this, over the black background, is tiring. I didn't wait for the end, because of that.

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