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  • Does Hard Drive Orientation Affect Its Lifespan?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    Many cases allow you to mount drives in vertical or horizontal configurations and external drives can be easily repositioned. Does the orientation of the hard drive affect the performance and longevity of the drive? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-drive grouping of Q&A web sites. 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7 HTG Explains: Why It’s Good That Your Computer’s RAM Is Full 10 Awesome Improvements For Desktop Users in Windows 8

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  • PHP, Ajax, and the lifespan of the request

    - by Dave
    I was wondering about the lifespan of a PHP script when called via Ajax. Assume that there is a long-running (i.e. 30 seconds) PHP script on a server and that page is loaded via Ajax. Before the script completes, the user closes the browser. Does the script continue running to completion, is it terminated, or is this a function of the server itself (I'm running Apache fwiw). Thanks for any help.

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  • What's the expectation for silverlight 2's lifespan?

    - by dwidel
    Way back when I built an internal site for a customer using silverlight 2. They've been happy with it and I've barely had to touch it. Is the expectation that this site will always work? What I'm afraid of is suddenly getting a call years from now that the users installed silverlight X and now it's broken and I'm going to have to convert it immediately past Y versions of Silverlight to get the site back up, and I don't even do Silverlight anymore. I already went through this once when it went from 2 beta to 2 release and and scrambling to fix all the breaking changes and get the site back up. It wasn't as big a deal then as we were in beta anyway. I could upgrade now but it would be really tough to go back to the customer and ask for money to do an upgrade when they are happy now and will see no noticeable benefit from staying current. Additionally there are some third party controls that would have to be licensed again. So I guess what I'm asking is there a known end of life? Or do we just play it by ear?

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  • Is there a lifespan for a dvd rom drive?

    - by Nrew
    Specifically a liteon dvd multi recorder. Which can burn and read dvd's. Is there a specific number of burns which you can use? And after that, the burner will no longer work? Do you know of any useful tips on how to have a longer dvd rom lifespan?If it has really a lifespan.

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  • Having a netbook with closed lid will decrease the lifespan of it?

    - by LanceBaynes
    I need a cheap netbook for "router" functions. [OpenBSD/Scientific Linux/whatever will be on it on OS level]. So once I configure it I will put it somewhere down for YEARS. The Question is: What is the lifespan difference of the netbook if it will be [for years]: with opened lid with closed lid I don't think there will be heat problems, because netbooks doesn't produce too much heat. But will ex.: a closed lid [for years] decrease the lifespan of a netbook?

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  • Trying to find the life expectancy of an unused flash card like SD

    - by wsams
    I read in the What's the life expectancy of an SD card? post SD cards are rated to hold data at something like 10 years sitting idle. I recall reading (not sure where) about re-energizing cards by occasionally inserting into a reader. Everything I read rates in read/write cycles and not physical decay. I'm wonder if buying a new sd card for every photo shoot would be beneficial if I could store the cards in a lock box? I was hoping for something much longer. Does anyone else agree with 10 years or maybe something more?

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  • Used HDD/ran DiskSmartView/40,000 Power-on-hours?? should i trust it w/ my data, or take it back and bitch?

    - by David Lindsay
    I just bought a used hard drive from a University Surplus Store. Decided to run DiskSmartView to make sure it wasn't ready to fail. 40,000 power-on-hours I don't know if I feel like trusting my data to something that used. I really dont know if thats unreasonably old, but when i compare it to the POH reading i get when testing my other hdds its more than 3x older (my others have 2110 hours, 6150 hours, etc.. It's a Western Digital, so that gives me a little bit of hope(WDC WD4000KD-00NAB0). I could sure use someone else's opinion here. Thanks, DAVE

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  • How to correctly partition usb flash drive and which filesystem to choose considering wear leveling?

    - by random1
    Two problems. First one: how to partition the flash drive? I shouldn't need to do this, but I'm no longer sure if my partition is properly aligned since I was forced to delete and create a new partition table after gparted complained when I tried to format the drive from FAT to ext4. The naive answer would be to say "just use default and everything is going to be alright". However if you read the following links you'll know things are not that simple: https://lwn.net/Articles/428584/ and http://linux-howto-guide.blogspot.com/2009/10/increase-usb-flash-drive-write-speed.html Then there is also the issue of cylinders, heads and sectors. Currently I get this: $sfdisk -l -uM /dev/sdd Disk /dev/sdd: 30147 cylinders, 64 heads, 32 sectors/track Warning: The partition table looks like it was made for C/H/S=*/255/63 (instead of 30147/64/32). For this listing I'll assume that geometry. Units = mebibytes of 1048576 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End MiB #blocks Id System /dev/sdd1 1 30146 30146 30869504 83 Linux $fdisk -l /dev/sdd Disk /dev/sdd: 31.6 GB, 31611420672 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3843 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00010c28 So from my current understanding I should align partitions at 4 MiB (currently it's at 1 MiB). But I still don't know how to set the heads and sectors properly for my device. Second problem: file system. From the benchmarks I saw ext4 provides the best performance, however there is the issue of wear leveling. How can I know that my Transcend JetFlash 700's microcontroller provides for wear leveling? Or will I just be killing my drive faster? I've seen a lot of posts on the web saying don't worry the newer drives already take care of that. But I've never seen a single piece of backed evidence of that and at some point people start mixing SSD with USB flash drives technology. The safe option would be to go for ext2, however a serious of tests that I performed showed horrible performance!!! These values are from a real scenario and not some synthetic test: 42 files: 3,429,415,284 bytes copied to flash drive original fat32: 15.1 MiB/s ext4 after new partition table: 10.2 MiB/s ext2 after new partition table: 1.9 MiB/s Please read the links that I posted above before answering. I would also be interested in answers backed up with some references because a lot is said and re-said but then it lacks facts. Thank you for the help.

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  • How long do Lithium Ion batteries normally last?

    - by Zifre
    On the laptop I have, I've had to buy a new Li-Ion batter roughly every year. I do use this computer quite a lot, but I'm wondering if this is normal. Right now, my battery is completely dead (it lasts for about 0.1 seconds), so I plan on buying a new one soon. Is there anything you can do to prevent Li-Ion batteries from going dead so quickly?

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  • How many times can data be read from a USB flash drive?

    - by John
    While I am aware that performing writes on a USB flash drive degrades the life expectancy of the device. I have heard the quantity of writes is anywhere from 100 thousand to 10 million, but I have not heard about number of read operations. Does reading from the device count toward this total? I am interested in writing only once to a flash drive and setting it to read-only. Then reading files from the device a thousand or more times per day, but am wondering if (at say 1,000 reads per day), the flash drive will need to be replaced within 100 days (assuming a 100,000 r/w cycle lifetime)?

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  • How harmful is a hard disk spin cycle?

    - by Gilles
    It is conventional wisdom¹ that each time you spin a hard disk down and back up, you shave some time off its life expectancy. The topic has been discussed before: Is turning off hard disks harmful? What's the effect of standby (spindown) mode on modern hard drives? Common explanations for why spindowns and spinups are harmful are that they induce more stress on the mechanical parts than ordinary running, and that they cause heat variations that are harmful to the device mechanics. Is there any data showing quantitatively how bad a spin cycle is? That is, how much life expectancy does a spin cycle cost? Or, more practically, if I know that I'm not going to need a disk for X seconds, how large should X be to warrant spinning down? ¹ But conventional wisdom has been wrong before; for example, it is commonly held that hard disks should be kept as cool as possible, but the one published study on the topic shows that cooler drives actually fail more. This study is no help here since all the disks surveyed were powered on 24/7.

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  • How harmful is a hard disk spin cycle?

    - by Gilles
    It is conventional wisdom¹ that each time you spin a hard disk down and back up, you shave some time off its life expectancy. The topic has been discussed before: Is turning off hard disks harmful? What's the effect of standby (spindown) mode on modern hard drives? Common explanations for why spindowns and spinups are harmful are that they induce more stress on the mechanical parts than ordinary running, and that they cause heat variations that are harmful to the device mechanics. Is there any data showing quantitatively how bad a spin cycle is? That is, how much life expectancy does a spin cycle cost? Or, more practically, if I know that I'm not going to need a disk for X seconds, how large should X be to warrant spinning down? ¹ But conventional wisdom has been wrong before; for example, it is commonly held that hard disks should be kept as cool as possible, but the one published study on the topic shows that cooler drives actually fail more. This study is no help here since all the disks surveyed were powered on 24/7.

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  • Delete files on external hard drive affect SSD?

    - by haar
    I've got a SSD as my primary hard drive. I have an external HDD hard drive which I use to store downloaded files. At the moment I have to delete 80 GB of that external hard drive. I realized that if I delete it normally, it would probably go to the recycle bin of my SSD. I am wondering how I can delete the files on my HDD without affecting the SSD or putting any files on it. Do you know how to do this? Best, haar

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  • Flatten date range memberships retaining only the highest priority membership (TRANSACT-SQL)

    - by shadowranger
    Problem statement: A table contains an item_id, a category_id and a date range (begin_date and end_date). No item may be in more than one category on any given date (in general; during daily rebuilding it can be in an invalid state temporarily). By default, all items are added (and re-added if removed) to a category (derived from outside data) automatically on a daily basis, and their membership in that category matches the lifespan of the item (items have their own begin and end date, and usually spend their entire lives in the same category, which is why this matches). For items in category X, it is occasionally desirable to override the default category by adding them to category Y. Membership in category Y could entirely replace membership in category X (that is, the begin and end dates for membership in category Y would match the begin and end dates of the item itself), or it could override it for an arbitrary period of time (at the beginning, middle or end the item's lifespan, possibly overriding for short periods at multiple times). Membership in category Y is not renewed automatically and additions to that category is done by manual data entry. Every day, when category X is rebuilt, we get an overlap, where any item in category Y will now be in category X as well (which is forbidden, as noted previously). Goal: After each repopulation of category X (which is done in a rather complicated and fragile manner, and ideally would be left alone), I'm trying to find an efficient means of writing a stored procedure that: Identifies the overlaps Changes existing entries, adds new ones where necessary (such as in the case where an item starts in category X, switches to category Y, then eventually switches back to category X before ending), or removes entries (when an item is in category Y for its entire life) such that every item remains in category Y (and only Y) where specified, while category X membership is maintained when not overridden by category Y. Does not affect memberships of categories A, B, C, Z, etc., which do not have override categories and are built separately, by completely different rules. Note: It can be assumed that X membership covers the entire lifespan of the item before this procedure is called, so it is unnecessary to query any data outside this table. Bonus credit: If for some reason there are two adjacent or overlapping memberships in for the same item in category Y, stitching them together into a single entry is appreciated, but not necessary. Example: item_id category_id begin_date end_date 1 X 20080101 20090628 1 Y 20090101 20090131 1 Y 20090601 20090628 2 X 20080201 20080731 2 Y 20080201 20080731 Should become: item_id category_id begin_date end_date 1 X 20080101 20081231 1 Y 20090101 20090131 1 X 20090201 20090531 1 Y 20090601 20090628 2 Y 20080201 20080731 If it matters, this needs to work on SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008

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  • Basic date/time manipulation in NHiberate query

    - by Yann Trevin
    I'm trying to restrict my NHibernate query with some basic date/time manipulation. More specifically, I want to execute the following statement (pseudo-SQL): select * from article where created_on + lifespan >= sysdate with: created_on is mapped to a property of type DateTime. lifespan is mapped to a property of type TimeSpan. sysdate is the current date/time (of the database server or ofthe application host, I don't care) Is there any built-in way to do that by using the Criteria-API or HQL? return session .CreateCriteria<Article>() .Add( ? ) .List<Article>();

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  • running a laptop continuously

    - by intuited
    I have an experienced laptop — a Dell Latitude D400, with a Pentium M CPU — that I'd like to run as an always-on server. This model was launched in 2004; I got mine second-hand in about 2007. I've heard that continuous operation is generally not a good idea with consumer hardware, but am lacking in specific knowledge about related problems, and have little idea of how much such usage patterns would reduce the lifespan of the machine. I'm mostly concerned with the unit's core components; parts such as the hard drive which are readily replaceable are, well, readily replaceable. What sorts of things can I do to increase the lifespan of this machine under such circumstances? For example, I'm guessing that it would be wise to limit the CPU frequency or take other steps to keep the internal temperature low. However, I'm not sure where the point of diminishing returns would lie with such an approach — 50°C? 40°C? Would it be useful to suspend the machine periodically, for perhaps an hour each day, or a few hours each week?

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  • How about a new platform for your next API&hellip; a CMS?

    - by Elton Stoneman
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2014/05/22/how-about-a-new-platform-for-your-next-apihellip-a.aspxSay what? I’m seeing a type of API emerge which serves static or long-lived resources, which are mostly read-only and have a controlled process to update the data that gets served. Think of something like an app configuration API, where you want a central location for changeable settings. You could use this server side to store database connection strings and keep all your instances in sync, or it could be used client side to push changes out to all users (and potentially driving A/B or MVT testing). That’s a good candidate for a RESTful API which makes proper use of HTTP expiration and validation caching to minimise traffic, but really you want a front end UI where you can edit the current config that the API returns and publish your changes. Sound like a Content Mangement System would be a good fit? I’ve been looking at that and it’s a great fit for this scenario. You get a lot of what you need out of the box, the amount of custom code you need to write is minimal, and you get a whole lot of extra stuff from using CMS which is very useful, but probably not something you’d build if you had to put together a quick UI over your API content (like a publish workflow, fine-grained security and an audit trail). You typically use a CMS for HTML resources, but it’s simple to expose JSON instead – or to do content negotiation to support both, so you can open a resource in a browser and see a nice visual representation, or request it with: Accept=application/json and get the same content rendered as JSON for the app to use. Enter Umbraco Umbraco is an open source .NET CMS that’s been around for a while. It has very good adoption, a lively community and a good release cycle. It’s easy to use, has all the functionality you need for a CMS-driven API, and it’s scalable (although you won’t necessarily put much scale on the CMS layer). In the rest of this post, I’ll build out a simple app config API using Umbraco. We’ll define the structure of the configuration resource by creating a new Document Type and setting custom properties; then we’ll build a very simple Razor template to return configuration documents as JSON; then create a resource and see how it looks. And we’ll look at how you could build this into a wider solution. If you want to try this for yourself, it’s ultra easy – there’s an Umbraco image in the Azure Website gallery, so all you need to to is create a new Website, select Umbraco from the image and complete the installation. It will create a SQL Azure website to store all the content, as well as a Website instance for editing and accessing content. They’re standard Azure resources, so you can scale them as you need. The default install creates a starter site for some HTML content, which you can use to learn your way around (or just delete). 1. Create Configuration Document Type In Umbraco you manage content by creating and modifying documents, and every document has a known type, defining what properties it holds. We’ll create a new Document Type to describe some basic config settings. In the Settings section from the left navigation (spanner icon), expand Document Types and Master, hit the ellipsis and select to create a new Document Type: This will base your new type off the Master type, which gives you some existing properties that we’ll use – like the Page Title which will be the resource URL. In the Generic Properties tab for the new Document Type, you set the properties you’ll be able to edit and return for the resource: Here I’ve added a text string where I’ll set a default cache lifespan, an image which I can use for a banner display, and a date which could show the user when the next release is due. This is the sort of thing that sits nicely in an app config API. It’s likely to change during the life of the product, but not very often, so it’s good to have a centralised place where you can make and publish changes easily and safely. It also enables A/B and MVT testing, as you can change the response each client gets based on your set logic, and their apps will behave differently without needing a release. 2. Define the response template Now we’ve defined the structure of the resource (as a document), in Umbraco we can define a C# Razor template to say how that resource gets rendered to the client. If you only want to provide JSON, it’s easy to render the content of the document by building each property in the response (Umbraco uses dynamic objects so you can specify document properties as object properties), or you can support content negotiation with very little effort. Here’s a template to render the document as HTML or JSON depending on the Accept header, using JSON.NET for the API rendering: @inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoTemplatePage @using Newtonsoft.Json @{ Layout = null; } @if(UmbracoContext.HttpContext.Request.Headers["accept"] != null &amp;&amp; UmbracoContext.HttpContext.Request.Headers["accept"] == "application/json") { Response.ContentType = "application/json"; @Html.Raw(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new { cacheLifespan = CurrentPage.cacheLifespan, bannerImageUrl = CurrentPage.bannerImage, nextReleaseDate = CurrentPage.nextReleaseDate })) } else { <h1>App configuration</h1> <p>Cache lifespan: <b>@CurrentPage.cacheLifespan</b></p> <p>Banner Image: </p> <img src="@CurrentPage.bannerImage"> <p>Next Release Date: <b>@CurrentPage.nextReleaseDate</b></p> } That’s a rough-and ready example of what you can do. You could make it completely generic and just render all the document’s properties as JSON, but having a specific template for each resource gives you control over what gets sent out. And the templates are evaluated at run-time, so if you need to change the output – or extend it, say to add caching response headers – you just edit the template and save, and the next client request gets rendered from the new template. No code to build and ship. 3. Create the content With your document type created, in  the Content pane you can create a new instance of that document, where Umbraco gives you a nice UI to input values for the properties we set up on the Document Type: Here I’ve set the cache lifespan to an xs:duration value, uploaded an image for the banner and specified a release date. Each property gets the appropriate input control – text box, file upload and date picker. At the top of the page is the name of the resource – myapp in this example. That specifies the URL for the resource, so if I had a DNS entry pointing to my Umbraco instance, I could access the config with a URL like http://static.x.y.z.com/config/myapp. The setup is all done now, so when we publish this resource it’ll be available to access.  4. Access the resource Now if you open  that URL in the browser, you’ll see the HTML version rendered: - complete with the  image and formatted date. Umbraco lets you save changes and preview them before publishing, so the HTML view could be a good way of showing editors their changes in a usable view, before they confirm them. If you browse the same URL from a REST client, specifying the Accept=application/json request header, you get this response:   That’s the exact same resource, with a managed UI to publish it, being accessed as HTML or JSON with a tiny amount of effort. 5. The wider landscape If you have fairy stable content to expose as an API, I think  this approach is really worth considering. Umbraco scales very nicely, but in a typical solution you probably wouldn’t need it to. When you have additional requirements, like logging API access requests - but doing it out-of-band so clients aren’t impacted, you can put a very thin API layer on top of Umbraco, and cache the CMS responses in your API layer:   Here the API does a passthrough to CMS, so the CMS still controls the content, but it caches the response. If the response is cached for 1 minute, then Umbraco only needs to handle 1 request per minute (multiplied by the number of API instances), so if you need to support 1000s of request per second, you’re scaling a thin, simple API layer rather than having to scale the more complex CMS infrastructure (including the database). This diagram also shows an approach to logging, by asynchronously publishing a message to a queue (Redis in this case), which can be picked up later and persisted by a different process. Does it work? Beautifully. Using Azure, I spiked the solution above (including the Redis logging framework which I’ll blog about later) in half a day. That included setting up different roles in Umbraco to demonstrate a managed workflow for publishing changes, and a couple of document types representing different resources. Is it maintainable? We have three moving parts, which are all managed resources in Azure –  an Azure Website for Umbraco which may need a couple of instances for HA (or may not, depending on how long the content can be cached), a message queue (Redis is in preview in Azure, but you can easily use Service Bus Queues if performance is less of a concern), and the Web Role for the API. Two of the components are off-the-shelf, from open source projects, and the only custom code is the API which is very simple. Does it scale? Pretty nicely. With a single Umbraco instance running as an Azure Website, and with 4x instances for my API layer (Standard sized Web Roles), I got just under 4,000 requests per second served reliably, with a Worker Role in the background saving the access logs. So we had a nice UI to publish app config changes, with a friendly Web preview and a publishing workflow, capable of supporting 14 million requests in an hour, with less than a day’s effort. Worth considering if you’re publishing long-lived resources through your API.

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  • Day 2 - Game Design Documentation

    - by dapostolov
    So yesterday I didn't cut any code for my game but I was able to do a tiny bit of research on the XNA Game Development Technology and the communities out there and do you know what? I feel I'm a bit closer to my goal. The bad news is today I didn't cut code either. However, not all is lost because I wanted to get my ideas on paper and today I just did that.  Today, I began to jot down notes about the game and how I felt the visual elements would interact with each other. Unlike my workplace, my personal level of documentation is nothing more than a task list or a mind map of my ideas; it helps me streamline my solutions quiet effectively and circumvent the long process of articulating each thought to the n-th degree. I truly dislike documentation (because I have an extremely hard time articulating my thought and solutions); however, because I tend to do a really good job with documentation I tend to get stuck writing the buggers. But as a generalist remark: 'No Developer likes documentation.' For now let's stick with my basic notes and call this post a living document. Here are my notes, fresh, from after watching the new first episode of Merlin second season! Actually, a quick recommendation to anyone who is reading this (if anyone is): I truly recommend you envelope yourself in the medium or task you're trying to tackle. Be one with moment and feel it! For instance: Are you writing a fantasy script / game? What would the music of the genre sound like? For me the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is frackin awesome. There are many other good CD's out there, which I listen to (some who even use medival instruments, but Conan I keep returning to. It's a creative trigger for me. Ask yourself what would the imagery look like? Time to surf google for artist renditions of fantasy! What would the game feel like? Start playing some of your favorite games that inspire you, be wary though, have some self control and don't let it absorb your time. Anyhow, onto the documentation... Screens, Scenes, and Sprites. Oh My! (groan...) The first thing that came to mind were the screens, I thought the following would suffice: Menu Screen Character Customisation Screen Loading Screen? Battle Ground The Menu Screen Ok. So, the thought here is when the game loads a huge title is displayed: Wizard Wars. The player is prompted with 3 menu items: 1 Player Game, 2 Player Game, and Exit. Since I'm targetting the PC platform, as a non-networked game to start, I picture myself running my mouse over each menu option and the visual element of the menu item changes, along with a sound to indicate that I am over a curent menu item. And as I move my mouse away, it changes back, and possibly an exit mouse sound. Maybe on the screen somewhere is a brazier alit with a magical tome open right beside it, OR, maybe the tome is the menu! I hear the menu music as mellow, not obtrusive or piercing. On a menu item select, a confirmation sound bellows to indicate the players selection. The Esc key will always return me to the previous screens or desktop. The menu screen must feel...dark, like a really important ritual is about to happen and thus the music should build up. 1 Player Game - > Customize Character(s) 2 Player Game - > Customize Character(s) Exit - > Back to Windows Notes: So the first thing I pick up here are a couple things: First and foremost, my artistic abilities suck crap, so I may have to hire an artist (now that i've said that, lets get techy) graphical objects will be positioned within a scene on each screen / window. Menu items will be represented grapically, possibly animated, and have sound / animation effects triggered by user input or a time line. I have an animated scene involving a brazier or fire on a stick IF I was to move this game to the xbox, I'd have to track which menu item is currently selected (unless I do a mouse pointer type thing.) WindowObject has a scene A Scene has many GameObjects GameObject has a position graphic or animation MenuObject is a GameObject which has a mouse in, mouse out, and click event which either does something graphically (animation), does something with sound, or moves to another screen.  Character Customisation Screen With either the 1 or 2 player option selected, both selections will come to this screen; a wizard requires a name, powers, and vestements of course! Player one will configure his character first and then player two. I considered a split screen for PC but to have two people fighting over a keyboard would probably suck. For XBox, a split screen could work; maybe when I get into the networking portion (phase 2 blog?) of this game I will remove the 2 player option for PC and provide only multiplayer and I will leave 2 player for xbox...hmm... Anyhow...I picture the creation process as follows: Name: (textbox / keyboard entry) - for xbox, this would have to be different. Robe Color: (color box, or something) Stats: Speed, Oomph, and Health. (as sliders) 1 as minimum and 10 as maximum. Ok, Back, and Cancel buttons / options. Each stat has a benefit which are listed below. The idea is the player decides if he wants his wizard to run fast, be a tank and ... hit with a purse.Regardless, the player will have a pool of 12 points to use. Ideally, A balanced wizard will have 5 in each attribute. Spells? The only spell of choice is a ball of fire which comes without question. The music and screen should still feel like a ritual. The Character Speed Basically, how fast your character moves and casts. Oomph (Best Monster Truck Voice): PURE POWAH!!! The damage output of your fireball. Health How much damage you can take. Notes: I realise the game dynamics may sound uninteresting at the moment; but I think after a couple releases, we could have some other grand ideas such as: saved profiles, gold to upgrade arsenal of spells, talents, etc...but for now...a vanilla fireball thrower mage will suffice for this experiment. OK. So... a MenuObject  may need to be loosely coupled to allow future items such as networking? may be a button? a CharacterObject has a name speed oomph health and a funky robe color. cap on the three stats (1-10) an arsenal of 1 spell (possibly could expand this) The Loading Screen As is. The Battleground Screen For now, I'm keeping the screen as max resolution for the PC. The screen isn't going to move or even be a split screen. I'm not aiming high here because I want to see what level of change is involved when new features / concepts are added to game content. I'm interested to find out if we could apply techniques such as MVC or MVVM to this type of development or is it too tightly coupled? This reminds me when when my best friend and I were brainstorming our game idea (this is going back a while...1994, 6?) and he cringed at the thought of bringing business technology into games, especially when I suggested a database to store character information and COM / DCOM as the medium, but it seems I wasn't far off (reflecting); just like his implementation of a xml "config file" for dynamic direct-x menus back before .net in 1999...anyhow...i digress... The Battle One screen, two characters lobing balls of fire at each other...It doesn't get better than that. Every so often a scroll appears...and the fireballs bounce off walls, or the wizard has rapid fire, or even scrolls of healing! The scroll options are endless. Two bars at the top, each the color of the wizard (with their name beside the bar) indicate how much health they have. Possibly the appearance of the scrolls means the battle is taking too long? I'm thinking 1 player controls: up, down, left, right and space to fire the button. Or even possibly, mouse click and shift - mouse button to fire a spell in the direction they are facing. Two player controls: a, s, d, f and space AND arrows (up, down, left, right) and Del key or Crtl. The game ends when a player has 0 health and a dialog box appears asking for a rematch / reconfigure / exit. Health goes down when a fireball (friendly or not), connects with a wizard. When a wizard connects with a scroll, a countdown clock / icon appears near the health bar and the wizard begins to glow. For the most part, a wizard can have only scroll 1 effect on him at a time. Notes: Ok, there's alot to cover here. a CharacterObject is a GameObject it travels at a set velocity it travels in a direction it has sounds (walking, running, casting, impact, dying, laughing, whistling, other?) it has animations (walking, running, casting, impact, dying, laughing, idle, other?) it has a lifespan (determined by health) it is alive or dead it has a position a ScrollObject is a GameObject it carries a transferance of points "damage" (or healing, bad scroll effect?) (determinde by caster) it carries a transferance of "other" it is stationary it has a sound on impact it has a stationary animation it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it has a fade animation? it has a lifespan (determined by game) it is alive or dead it has a position a WallObject is a GameObject it has a sound on fireball impact? it is a still image / stationary it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it is dead it has a position A FireBall is a GameObject it carries a transferance of poinst "damage" (or healing, bad scroll effect?) (determinde by caster) it travels at a set velocity it travels in a direction it has a sound it has a travel animation it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it has a fade animation? it has a lifespan (determined by caster) it is alive or dead it has a position As I look at this, I can see some common attributes in each object that I can carry up to the GameObject. I think I'm going to end the documentation here, it's taken me a bit of time to type this all out, tomorrow. I'll load up my IDE and my paint studio to get some good old fashioned cowboy hacking going!   D.

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  • Virtual Disk Manager: The service cannot be started

    - by MikkoP
    I installed a SSD disk in my computer and installed Windows 7 in it. I disabled defragmentation on the disk. Now when I try to partition my other disk I'm getting an error Virtual Disk Manager The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it. Well, I'm not willing to enable defragmentation because it makes the lifespan of the SSD shorter. Solutions? Thanks

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  • Dual boot, win7 & ubuntu. Gparted, resize not move. Performance?

    - by data_jepp
    I installed dual boot on a computer that already had win7 installed. The question here is about gparted ability to move partitions. I made place for ubuntu in the computers "Data" partition, by resizing it. But I canceled the "move" action. Was that incredibly stupid, or is this care? Maybe performance is affected. Can this effect the hd's lifespan? The computer is UL30A.

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  • VirtualBox host: Ubuntu vs. Windows XP

    - by iambriansreed
    In order to lengthen the lifespan of my machine I am replacing the weakest link, the hard drive and installing a new OS. I had planned on using xp pro as my virtualbox host and ubuntu as guest. After messing with ubuntu desktop and server I am really impressed and am thinking of reversing the virtualbox setup; ubuntu host xp guest. I would use XP for Adobe Fireworks, Netflix, and iTunes (maybe) that's pretty much it. Any reason not to do ubuntu host with xp guest? I know the xp vbox will run slower as a guest but really how much slower? It's a desktop. 4gb ram, 500gb disk, Pent D 3.2 ghz

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