Quoting: drmothCanonical's Unity, once the bugs were fixed, was actually really good.

Canonical's Unity was basically the Gnome desktop environment with Compiz as Window Manager (and some hacks to GTK). It only worked as long as you didn't dare to even think about opening CompizConfig. Once you even remotely considered changing any Compiz setting away from the GodCanonical-given default, your desktop was messed up beyond repair and your only option to get it working again was to nuke your compiz config files from orbit.

As unhappy as I am with recent Gnome, Unity was imho even worse...

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Wow, that marketspeak is so bad, reading it causes physical pain... That doesn't make me optimistic about the chip's performance.

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Quoting: grumpytoad

Quoting: GuestThat looks great. Has Stellaris become fun yet? Or does it still take forever to get something going just to have nothing to do for the longest time and then start experiencing excessive amounts of micromanaging and insufferable lag?

I gave it another go recently using the starnet mod, which seems to fix the AI, and requires you to get something rolling pretty quick or you'll get steamrolled. Didn't see any lag, but then only played small maps.

Is Starnet fair? I mean, does it give the AI basically free ships and resources like the default AI does, or is it smart enough to actually build and rely on a working economy?

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Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: jordicomaWhat? A functionality coming from windows world that its good?

It's not necessarily good. If windows has feature X, games will depend on it. Now it may have been better if games did Y instead, but that doesn't exist and they are stuck with X.

Just because Linux now needs a way to implement X doesn't mean that X was the best option, just that because of windows we are now stuck with it.

This.
Usually the problem of having to wait on multiple events can be solved by building cleaner (more readable, better maintainable) software architecture. I'm writing "usually" on purpose here, as there definitely are problems where going for a cleaner solution is not worth the effort, or where indeed waiting on multiple events is the most readable implementation (to be honest, right now I can't think of a problem where the latter would be the case, but that's probably just lack of experience on my side).
However, synchronization by waiting on multiple events is nearly always the easiest (quickest, cheapest in the short-term) solution to implement. If there's a deadline coming up, it's almost certainly the solution that's going to be picked, even though in the long-term it might cost more due to it being inherently more difficult to read and debug.

Generally speaking, if an API offers certain functionality, it will be used sooner or later. If one wants to be compatible, that functionality has to be there, and has to be about as performant as the original implementation (at least have the same asymptotic scaling behaviour).

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: DuncJust to be clear: anyone who openly dedicates a work to people who hate, or defends that dedication, surrenders the right to complain about “hate speech”. Period.

Nonsense. Category error. Laws about, and discussion of, "hate speech" are not about individuals. There's plenty of perfectly legal talk about individuals that would be considered hate speech if it was about some identifiable group. What you can't say about individuals is governed largely by things like slander and libel laws, which mainly proscribe false factual statements, not expressions of hatred as such.

And there are good reasons for this, both in terms of societal health and in terms of whether such speech can be morally defensible. Obviously, it can't be accurate to ascribe some negative feature to all members of a group, since on average people are people. For a constellation of reasons of which "it just can't be true" is only the beginning, it clearly can't be morally defensible to preach hate against all members of some racial, religious or other whole category of people. It is also damaging to society to set groups within it against each other.

Hatred of individuals is a rather different story. To take a somewhat extreme example, where I live in British Columbia there have been a couple of notorious serial murderers, Clifford Olson and Willie Pickton. Everyone hates their guts, obviously, because they are (or were, I think Olson finally died in prison) horrible, vicious people without conscience who did monstrous things. So nobody's going to complain a whole lot about hating those two guys, or expressing that hatred, saying very bad things about them and so on. But say someone wasn't an actual murderer--say they were a con artist who bilked old pensioners of all their savings, leaving dozens of people destitute and in some cases homeless. I think the case is pretty strong that it would still be OK to hate that person, express hate towards them and so on. So the question isn't whether it's OK to hate individuals, or say bad things about individuals because you hate them; the question is where the line should be drawn between people that it's OK to hate and people that it's not OK to hate.
Then there are people one knows personally--the horrible boss, the school bully or whoever. I find it hard to say nobody should ever be allowed to hate anyone personally.

So, then, Margaret Thatcher, and politicians. Should politicians be exempt due to the particular nature of what they do? There is often a sort of presumption made about politicians that, no matter what their expressed ideology, they should get a pass of sorts because they should be assumed to believe that application of that ideology and their policies will have net positive effects, no matter how absurd it might be to believe such a thing. It's rarely expressed this explicitly, but politicians are assumed to be acting in good faith--or at least, even if we have doubts that they really are, we should sort of pretend to believe it unless there is proof to the contrary. And having assumed that they are acting in good faith and that their chosen policies are intended to benefit everyone, or at least the most people possible, in the long run at least, we can then follow a logic saying that one shouldn't hate them for those policies, no matter how damaging they might be: The politician was doing their best, they didn't intend to do damage, so hate is not legitimate.
(Incidentally, this may be one of the reasons for the outrage much of the political and commentator class had about Trump--he made it so incredibly obvious that this professional courtesy was not deserved, with the transparency of his willingness to say absolutely anything that was convenient for him in the moment)

I question both ends of that. First, many politicians are quite consciously engaged in deception, trying to convince the public to embrace policies and ideologies that they know perfectly well will harm most of that same public, because it benefits them personally or a relatively small group they consider themselves to belong to. They are virtually identical to the confidence trickster above, only on a mass scale. It is clearly as legitimate to hate them as it is to hate anyone causing major harm for profit.
Others are in an odd middle ground . . . they believe in their ideology, more or less, but deep down they know there's something dodgy; they tell lies that they know are lies in specific, but tell themselves that the spirit of what they're saying is true; they carefully avoid looking at the impact of what they do, or thinking about anything that may make them feel uncomfortable. Hypocrites, cowards, just not looking at the side their bread isn't buttered on, but not quite consciously doing damage for profit. Should one hate such people? Perhaps not, although I'd find it hard to object to "contempt".

But even if someone is completely sincere, just how much damage should they get a pass for? At what point does stubbornness become an insufficient excuse for dealing death? Which brings us to Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher is clearly responsible for a mountain of excess deaths and mass impoverishment--far more than any serial murderer or confidence trickster. It is possible to persuade oneself that she sincerely thought this would in some way be for the best in the long run, but it's hard to persuade oneself that she cared. Thatcher was callous, apparently utterly lacking in empathy; she may not have been enthusiastic about the damage she caused as such, although there were times it seemed she thought anyone crushed by her policies deserved it, but she clearly was at best indifferent to the suffering and death she caused, and she encouraged others to be similarly callous. Any non-politician who caused as much damage as Thatcher did with as little conscience, there would be no controversy about hating them. Should she get a pass because she was in politics?

I think not. And indeed, I think serious excoriation and hatred of people who do that much damage serves a social purpose: Discouraging other people from getting ideas about doing the same. Oddly, I don't personally hate Thatcher. I think she was evil, but I'm a Canadian--my relationship to her isn't personal enough for hate. But I'm not going to say hating her would be illegitimate. I'd probably really hate her guts if I was British.

Thanks for this. Your postings are a joy to read. Well informed and formulated eloquently.

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Quoting: kaimanclassless per-use skill-based character development

While Betrayal at Krondor wasn't classless, it also had per-use skill-based character development. You could set a focus, but skills improved by using them.

Quoting: slaapliedjeFor sure it was. If I recall it is one where you could get disease and freeze to death.
Still wasn't as bad as Robinson's Requiem / Deus, in which if you tumbled down a hill, you would break your ankles and have to bandage and heal them. 'Survival' games these days are weak sauce compared to those.

That makes me think of Unreal World [External Link].

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Shut up and take my money!

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Quoting: sourpuzHmmm, am I the only thinking that their voiceover guy somehow borked up the name of the game, of all things? I'm hearing "River Realms".

Might be intentional? In the context he could be referring to the area before it became desolate. But that's just me guessing...

In any case, the game looks quite interesting to me. A bit like Caravan from Daedalic, but with a combat system that seems to be more to my taste. The setting also has a certain Dark Sun vibe to it, which I really enjoyed playing Pen&Paper.

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I'd already be happy if switching between Galactic Community Fleet Ship Designer and regular empire Ship Designer wouldn't reproducibly crash...

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Wait, what? Gibbous looks even better than this trailer?
How is it possible that it's not yet in my Steam Library then? That's a mistake that must be corrected at once!

(I just saw that by backing the new game you get a 50% discount on Gibbous - going to do just that.)

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