I used the Chrome extension for a few months and the OCR was never very accurate. Even giant, clear block letters were often not recognized.

It always worked pretty well for me. It just got annoying to have on all the time.

The phone performs poorly, and the excuse is to blame the "impatience" of Americans?

This comment reads like a sarcastic "It's not a bug, it's a feature." If the phone is terrible compared to the competition, people aren't going to be patient and adaptable--they're going to buy the competition.

There's competition at that price?

You were, he's looking for an argument.

> Then why no try to promote tinkering ? A game company dedicated to game development in a way he deems fit ?

But why? If he doesn't want to run Mojang, he probably doesn't want to start another game company at the moment.

Can he enjoy tinkering around himself without having to go on some divine mission to spread his ideas and passions around the world?

> some divine mission

you're exaggerating. that's not what I'm saying. maybe he just doesn't really like video games after all, he just like writing lines of code without any interest in the result ?

Why does he keep having small projects though ? I don't understand what's the purpose of keeping it small. Why not hire people and tell them what sort of algorithms he wants ?

Some programmers have a fetish for the code itself, not for the result. Just being proud of "I did it myself". How about making a game that can be enjoyed, that's the only thing I think that really matters I think.

If you're doing any work at all with .NET, Visual Studio is the greatest IDE in the world. Believe it or not, people can be productive without a command line--especially if you can use VS to automatically generate thousands of lines of code.

If you don't mind me asking, where are you located? I get good T-Mobile reception inside all types of buildings in and around the Kansas City metro. The only place I've ever lost coverage is in the basement floors of my doctor's office away from windows.

Their rural coverage is pretty awful though.

I am currently in Charlottesville, VA (it is kind of like a suburb). It has a lot of hills, which affects the reception. Every carrier other than T-Mobile has signal boosters placed throughout the city to counteract spotty coverage.

I've noticed that I only have issues when I go into a building that's not made mostly out of wood. At McDonalds or something, I get great reception, but when I step into a lecture hall or a federal building, the reception drops to 0 bars. Immediately outside of it, the reception is fine.

Aside from getting a phone with a really strong antenna, I'm not sure what to do about this.

Here is the website for his OS: http://www.templeos.org/ (redirected from losethos.com)

It's common knowledge that losethos is a schizophrenic.

I was worried about DRM, but the beta convinced me it was worth it. Server-side simulation processing makes the game run lightning fast.

The simulation was a huge resource drain in SC4. So I can see how offloading it would be a speed up. That said, if it's such a drain on today's insanely powerful desktop computers, they must have an insane backing server infrastructure in place to support it. I've got 50W worth of processing power available for the sim engine (investing half of my CPUs; still far more power than I had for SC4), are they going to put up 50W of processing power while I'm playing?

I can't imagine they've really got that. Either GlassBox is simplified, or made more efficient, or important parts of it are run locally. Either way, using it as a reason to have it online-only is a sham. It's just DRM, the same kind as Assassins Creed's online-only protection.

I'll buy it anyway. I wouldn't even care about the DRM, it's everything else that I'm hearing that scares me.

I don't know the details about which parts of the simulation are run locally and server-side, but the fact that your cities are "always on" (i.e. other players' cities can trade and visit your city even if you're not playing) tells me that a good portion of the resources/traffic simulation is run on Maxis servers.

It may be not be a valid reason for you, but Sim City ran significantly faster than Civilization V on my machine. To me, they both perform a massive number of simultaneous simulations, and Sim City's performance is near instantaneous.

That said, there's one huge factor none of the beta players can take into account when judging Sim City's performance: no one has been able to build massive, multiple-city metropolises, as play time was limited to hour-long sessions.

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.

Yep, one of the developers mentioned that everything is verified server side, but the temporary offline mode indicates that its not that important.

I'm just curious, why are you using Watt as a unit here? Is that like, half the TDP of your CPU or something?

Something like that, yes. Watts seemed like the most universal unit to use. The point being that even if they're really efficient, they'd still be using 25W x the number of concurrent clients in power, which is just absurd especially since they're not charging monthly. They're not doing any kind of complicated simulation on the server side.

So it's fine to save your game into /dev/null as long as the game is lighting fast? How does that justify DRM?

I agree, its simulation has depth that rivals Civilization V. And even better, the game's simulation is run on the Maxis servers so it doesn't lose speed with larger cities. Sim City 4 and Civ 5 both have problems with processing large maps. Totally worth the DRM for me.

I definitely agree about VS. Microsoft got a bunch of heat for VS2012, but it's been their best release yet. Their IntelliSense support for C# is unmatched by any other language-IDE pairing I've used.

That said, I've used MonoDevelop in Windows and OS X and it works pretty damn well. The Mono project has done a great job mirroring the .NET API and runtime.