General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

Valve Employee Handbook is Refreshingly Honest

Posted: 22 Apr 2012 11:36 AM PDT

Valve HandbookHave you ever wondered what everyday life is like for the average worker at Valve? As a privately held company they tend to be a bit overly secretive, and as such we know surprisingly little about what they do all day. Aside from tormenting us with silence over Half-Life 3, it turns out new employees actually get issued a handbook on what to do "when no one's there telling you what to do".

The handbook includes a great run down on the values and principles that we've all come to know and love, but also details an impressively honest admission of the things they aren't so good at (p. 52). Also included is instructions on what to do "if we all screw up" (p.23). 

We didn't see anything pertaining to what to do in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse, so we can only assume this is a working draft. For Valve fans, this is a must read.

AMD Dropping Support For Pre-HD 5000 Series GPUs in July

Posted: 22 Apr 2012 11:22 AM PDT

HD-4000If you're still gaming on a Radeon HD-4000 series graphics card (or older) your GPU isn't about to self-destruct, but it will fall out of mainstream support in the very near future. AMD announced today that Catalyst 12.6 will mark the end of the road for anything prior to the HD-5000 series, or to put it simply, anything that isn't DirectX-11 compliant.

Though this will likely be of little comfort for those with pre-Evergreen, cutting out support for older hardware will help trim down the file size for Catalyst 12.7 and beyond. AMD has yet confirmed, however it is expected they will offer at least some basic level of hardware support for these boards in Windows 8. While their gaming performance hay-day has definitely come and gone, they still have plenty of power for basic Windows tasks, and make for a great hand-me-down for gamers looking to upgrade family off older integrated graphics.

Ever Wonder What Valve’s Head Honcho Gabe Newell Thinks of Origin?

Posted: 22 Apr 2012 10:53 AM PDT

Gabe NewellValve has been attempting to be very outwardly complimentary of EA over the last several months, perhaps in the misguided hope that the publisher will quit it with the Origin exclusives, and start bringing some of its titles back into compliance with Steams terms of service. You'd be hard pressed to find any bad blood between the two companies, at least on the Valve side, but yet the stalemate remains. On the most recent Seven Day Cooldown podcast, Jack Inacker asked Newell what EA was doing right with Origin. His answer? Uhhh (pause), ummm (pause). 

Newell not waiting to keep the world waiting eventually admitted that EA has a lot of work to do, and claims they have a ton of smart people working on the problem. He probably won't win any new fans over at EA with those remarks, but at least he stop short of saying what pretty much everyone else will in the comments below.

Kotaku has an embedded link to the comments about Origin, or you can check out the full interview with Newell at Seven Day Cooldown's site.

(Image Credit = sevendaycooldown.com)

Can’t Register The Domain You Always Wanted? Blame This Guy

Posted: 22 Apr 2012 10:23 AM PDT

Mike MannWith more than 100 million .com domains already registered, finding something that doesn't sound absolutely ridiculous is getting much harder than it used to be. One might simply assume that more people are joining the virtual land rush, and while that's probably true, you can also blame a small handful of domain speculators such as Mike Mann pictured to the right. CNET profiled Mann as part of a larger story on domain hoarders, and considering that he snatched up 14,962 domain names over a 24 hour period, I would say he certainly falls into that category. 

The article points out the sometimes seedy in-workings of the domain registry business, and how some crafty individuals have found ways to buy priority access with registrars, and even employ the use of  scripts to snatch up domains in nano seconds any time of the day or night. Mann specifically admitted to making use of tools that sift through Google-friendly keywords, analyses the traffic potential, filters out possible trademark violations, then just starts buying en-mass. 

"We have a filter, but I'm the world's most efficient human filter for this sort of thing," said Mann, true to form. "I don't think anyone can read huge lists of domain names as quickly as I can and understand what they're reading. I'm a pattern reader. It's a huge pain in the ass, but it's what I do for a living."

Then the machines take over. "The robot just goes to the registrars -- buy, buy, buy," he said.

Interesting Fact about Mann: He doesn't smoke, I guess he just think it makes him look hip.

New Study Says Exercise Won’t Save Us From The Long Term Effects of Sitting

Posted: 22 Apr 2012 09:43 AM PDT

StudyTechnology enthusiasts come from all different walks of life, but we have one thing in common aside from a mutual love of gadgets. From a health standpoint, even the best of us aren't getting enough exercise. A new study that looked at the habits of 222,497 Australian adults found that those who sat more than 11 hours a day had a 40 percent higher risk of dying over three years as opposed to those who sat less than four hours a day. Exercise naturally helped improve the odds, however the risk of death still increased the longer active people sat. 

The study was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, and covered a range of adults aged 45 and older. Factors such as age, weight, physical activity, and general health were all accounted for, leaving little in common among the sample group other than sedentary tendencies.

The study suggests anyone who falls into this demographic focus on "reducing sitting time in addition to increasing physical activity levels".  Depending on the type of job you have, this can be a bit of a challenge. If the goal is to sit less than 11 hours per day, and assuming you sleep 8 hours per night, this means you would need to be fully vertical more than 5 hours per day. To reach the ideal target pointed out in the study you would need to be on your feet a whopping 12 hours a day once you factor out sleep. 

So I'm pretty much screwed, anyone else?
Posted by Shri Krishna

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