329 karma · joined June 23, 2011
Say the player loses a 75% roll, then attempts another identical 75% roll. The game will actually give you better odds for the second roll. I think it's silly -- the game basically lies to you about your odds on the second attempt.
Sid Meier talked about it at length in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY7aRJE-oOY. It starts around 18:25.
What? CloudFront bandwidth costs are, at best, the same as S3 outbound costs, and at worse much more expensive.
S3 outbound costs are 12 cents per GB worldwide. [1]
CloudFont outbound costs are 12-25 cents per GB, depending on the region. [2]
Not only that, but your cost-per-request on CloudFront way more than S3 ($0.004 per 10,000 requests on S3 vs $0.0075-$0.0160 per 10,000 requests on CloudFront)
[1] http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [2] http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
- http://cs2hx.codeplex.com/ (open source)
- http://jsc.sourceforge.net/ (open source)
With EC2, the hourly rate is outrageous for an always-on server. You really need to buy reserved instances for it to be cost-effective. In my case I found I really needed to buy the 3-year heavy utilization reserved instances.
The hourly rate is best just for occasional spikes or when you're experimenting with different hardware configurations.
And yes, they were massively overcharging for dedicated instances, as they charged $7300 per month just for the privilege of being able to use dedicated instances (that doesn't include the cost of the instance itself.) I always assumed they were doing so just to reserve that feature for their big customers.
Another option is to switch to mono and run your .net apps with EC2's Linux prices. Then it's even cheaper than Azure. This is what I did for my current project.
Microsoft's main source of control over OEMs is the logo program. All laptops that want to get the "Designed for Windows" sticker (logo) have to pass a minimum bar set by Microsoft, which includes things like "must boot within X seconds" or "must sleep within Y seconds", "must output the correct audio frequencies", etc. My guess is none of the logo tests invoke the accelerometer which is why this got missed.
The logo program is great in theory, but in practice it doesn't work too well since consumers don't care about the sticker. Therefore, if Microsoft makes the requirements too high, OEMs will simply stop trying and just sell their laptops without a sticker.
I found Kerbal to be a good stepping-stone to Orbiter. Kerbal is more instant-gratification, but it lacks the realism that I've come to love from Orbiter.
I've learned a ton about spaceflight from playing Orbiter. It makes watching real launches much more interesting, since you will actually know what's going on.
Start out with the built-in Delta Glider. Once you're comfortable with that, download the XR2 Ravenstar from http://www.alteaaerospace.com/ (free). It's a much more advanced craft with more bells and whistles to play with, but it's also a bit more challenging to fly.
Voting is inherently skewed towards popularity, which is not always correlated with quality.
From the headline, I had assumed you spent all night learning the ins and outs of every option and were going to present your findings. I was disappointed to find this was just a poll.
If your site was in the top 1,000, you'd have a different experience since the spammers would be adapting to every one of your exotic captchas no matter how many times you change it.
I'm curious how you're doing the parsing. I see that you reference both NRefactory (which reads C#) and Cecil (which reads IL) -- can you talk about how are each of these used and how you combine them?
Also, did you consider using Roslyn (Microsoft's official C# parser)? Obviously it's still beta, but once it's complete would it remove the need for Cecil and NRefactory completely?
If that's how you prefer it, that's fine. But all my mechanic ever chats with me about is about how much I need his $49.99 radiator purge. It's not how I want to spend my time.
If its going to be safe, noone will need to be convinced.
Many people have an innate fear of things they can't control. Think about all the people who fear flying on commercial airliners -- quoting them a statistic about its safety doesn't make their fear go away. There will need to be a lot of convincing.
I've encountered the same reaction, and I believe it is widespread. But here's the thing: even the people who insist on owning and driving their own cars, and refuse to let it drive them, can still benefit greatly from owning a self-driving car.
Imagine never having to park - you just get out of your car in front of your destination and it goes and finds a parking spot.
Imagine never having to get someone to drop you off at the airport. Your car can just go home afterwards.
Imagine getting your oil changed or other maintenance. The car can do this on its own when you don't need it.
I believe that we'll see a lot of marketing geared towards the people who would never let a car drive them around. This will be a great stepping-stone to help convince these people that it's safe. They'll get it for the convenience, but then eventually one day they'll use it when they're drunk or tired. Eventually, they'll learn to trust it.
In this video [1], Foursquare says the biggest problem they're facing with EC2 is consistency in I/O performance. They say that the instance storage simply isn't fast enough for them, and while EBS is fast enough when RAIDed, it isn't consistent since it isn't local (EBS is traffic goes over the network). Reddit has also complained about EBS, but they've been able to move onto the instance storage.
If you're willing to reserve the instance for 3 years, the average monthly cost becomes only $656. That's quite a good deal.
Foursquare says in that video they're planning to migrate off of EC2, in part due to I/O performance. I'll be interested to hear whether or not this instance type changes their minds.
[1] http://www.10gen.com/presentations/MongoNYC-2012/MongoDB-at-...
Rackspace's prices are insane. $1,314/mo for a cloud server with 30gb of ram, compared to $657/mo for 34gb on AWS.
Plus with AWS you can use reserved instances to get that cost down to $286/mo. Rackspace has no way to get the cost down.
That makes Rackspace cost over 4.5x more when comparing based on ram.
With MonoTouch, you still write against the native iOS UI. Therefore, from the user's perspective, your app is native.
Since the UI is the same, the only thing that could be different between an ObjC and MonoTouch app is performance. In my experience there's no noticeable performance hit with MonoTouch except for app startup time (my MonoTouch app takes about 2 seconds to startup on a 3gs)
Here's a graph of the three provider's prices: http://i.imgur.com/G2laJ.png
This isn't too different from what Steam already does with Windows and a Mac version. Two platforms, one Steam. Users will use whichever they like more, and Steam wins either way.
It's also no different from Microsoft promoting Windows as a gaming platform while also owning x-box. Both are profitable, and both get exclusive content.
Just a few aggressive bots could easily double my hosting expenses, and right now I'm not even profitable just with humans playing it. Bots can't offset their cost by being shown ads like humans can.
This is interesting because MongoDB has taken a lot of flak for their global write lock. Also, updating a MongoDB document can require moving it if it grew too much for it's allocated space, which is another thing that hurts write performance. I guess these things haven't hurt their public perception of their write speed as much as I thought.
I'm currently using the Rackspace VM that gives 4gb of ram. I wanted to switch to EC2 after they dropped prices, but I would have either had to drop down to a small (1.7gb - not an option for my workload) or up to a large (7gb - costs over $50/mo more).
With all of these improvements Amazon is making, Rackspace's VM offerings are now horribly overpriced.
CAPTCHAs on an API. Never thought I'd see the day...
They already have search categories in the top-left. In their screenshots, they're on the "Web" tab. Why not just add a new tab representing generic search, make that the default, and leave the web search as it is today?
Making the "Web search" also search your personal data, then giving you an option to make the "Web search" do a non-personalized search just seems backwards to me.