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Paul Watt wrote: Are the multi-city play features interactive with other players?
Yes. You can communicate with everyone else via the regions "Wall".
Paul Watt wrote: Do both players have to be online at the same time to interactively build?
Nope. Everyone, up to 16 people, can be come and go as they please with no ill effects on your part of the game.
Paul Watt wrote: The disappoint in a model like this, is for people that have no interest in
playing connected to others and simply want to play offline.
True, but you can also play up to 16 cities at the same time in the same region. You can have up to 10 games, each in their own region going at once.
But, you'd still have to be connected to the net to play at all. That's the down side...
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It's crazy that such a simple use of network access fails so hard.
The iracing.com racing simulation service has required an internet connection to race from the start - even for practice. There's a DRM angle to it, I'm sure, but the service was built from the ground up to focus on real-time, person-versus-person racing. The iracing folks have had extremely robust network racing code for ages - going back to the Papyrus incarnation of the company (Grand Prix Legends, Nascar Racing). It's not always perfect - I've seen glitches and even dropped connections during races - but it mostly works well. I'm still pretty amazed to be racing wheel-to-wheel with someone half-way around the world.
When your company depends on something, it pays to build it well.
But this is also true: many people try to build software. Not everyone builds it well.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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In EA's case, they grossly underestimated both capacity at launch and the performance of the backend database servers. They've fixed a bunch of problems with the performance side and have just about doubled the number of servers to handle the high load.
In my huimble opinion, they should have had three times the number of servers up and running on day one and then fixed the performance issues. It would have been a better launch and they could have retired servers as the problems with the code were worked out.
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Some people insist on doing stuff that makes my head hurt. Now someone (Tomasz Janczuk[^]) has created a module to allow you to run node and ASP.NET in the same process[^]. Dogs and cats living together! What's next? Ruby+Scala? (OK, you could probably do this with JRuby, but bear with my ignorance).
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TTFN - Kent
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You have to admit, it takes balls to name a product Testacular[^]. But if you're looking for a decent test runner for your JavaScript, this could be something you'd want in hand.
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TTFN - Kent
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If a tree fell in the forest, and no one noticed... the European Commission would impose a staggering fine -- and then congratulate itself for protecting consumers from falling trees. That's essentially what just happened: the Commission fined Microsoft $732 million for failing to show its "browser ballot" when users installed one of its Windows 7 updates.
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If you could trouser $732 million for predicting a specific bug in a the next n versions of Windows and being right wouldn't you do just that?
This being from the same organisation that mislaid 20,000,000,000 Euro's while changing over from one system of agricultural subsidy to another. When we asked them who it belonged to they said 'no one'. when we asked them were it had gone they said we 'didn't have a right to know'.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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You can see this note near the top of the page on Amazon:
Important Note on "SimCity" Many customers are having issues connecting to the "SimCity" servers. EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed. Please visit https://help.ea.com/en/simcity/simcity for more information.
Page here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007VTVRFA
Based on the 1-star average of 951 customer reviews, I am guessing they were getting too many complaints. That has to be some kind of record. 
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Seems pretty stupid making it online only, I'll just stick to Sim City 4.
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...and it looks like they're selling it again.
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Do people actually use Dart? (Google's other programming language[^])
If so, you might be interested to see their interpretation of async[^]. From the post:
Future (some future result):
Future<bool> writeFile(String data,
File file) {
return file.open(FileMode.WRITE)
.then((io) => io.writeString(data))
.then((io) => io.close())
.then((io) => true)
.catchError((error) => false);
}
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TTFN - Kent
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I’m taking my own advice here and responding to some frequently asked questions I receive on SPA on my blog. I get some of these a lot and it just makes sense that I aggregate them and share for discussion. The questions are all good and they cover a variety of experiences. Hopefully by sharing them, they will be of benefit to others. Curious about SPAs? John answers your questions and offers tutorials for SPA and the Hot Towel template.
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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been in love with role-playing games. There’s something so magical about an epic storyline set in a vast, intricate world. But when it comes to actually programming a RPG, it’s easy to get intimidated by that same epic complexity! Well, there’s some good news. There are now some killer tools, frameworks and tutorials to make this a lot easier than it used to be. Your quest, should you choose to accept it...
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I thought this was about building an RPG[^]
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And I thought it was about RPG, the programming language!
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I've been teeth-deep in Client-side Javascript frameworks over the last 4 months for Tekpub. This month is Angular, last month was Ember's turn and I gave up. It's the first time I've given up - here's why.... You Keep Telling Me It's MVC... Yes, the concept of MVC has been contorted over the past decade as web frameworks have adopted it and massaged it to their own ends. What does this mean? You keep using that word MVC. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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I was trained in Java at University. The OOP matrix was firmly implanted in my thinking. I wanted to share some things that I have learned from Clojure that were certainly possible in Java but never became fundamental to my programming practice. Clojure certainly has learned a lot from Java. It might be cool if the learning went both ways. These are universal principles. In fact, these principles are actually well known in the OOP world. You probably already know them, so learning Clojure is not required (but it is recommended!). Bonus: watch the embedded videos to get a deeper insight into each point.
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Working in Go was tons of fun; the language designers have put a lot of work into making the language a joy to use. We particularly appreciated the first-class focus the language puts on the parts of development that are uninteresting in theory but very important in practice, such as third-party library management, coding convention enforcement, and testing. With that said, we ran into a series of gotchas, irritants, and warts while developing our application, which I’ll elaborate on below. Ultimately, these problems were severe enough that they convinced us that we couldn't justify the gains we saw from using Go... Eventually, Go will be just as easy to use for web development as Ruby or Python -- but it isn’t there yet.
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At Stripe, we rely heavily on ruby and EventMachine to power various internal and external services. Over the last several months, we’ve known that one such service suffered from a gradual memory leak, that would cause its memory usage to gradually balloon from a normal ~50MB to multiple gigabytes. It was easy enough to work around the leak by adding monitoring and restarting the process whenever memory usage grew too large, but we were determined to track down the root cause. Our exploration is a tour through a number of different debugging tools and techniques, so I thought I would share it here. Go ahead, blame the C pointers. It's almost always C pointers.
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When people complain about PHP being a horrible language, not fit for human consumption, they will often talk about how the features of their favourite language are far more refined; have been designed with elegance in mind; are consistent and secure. And you know what? They're right. But PHP is still a better tool. When people write very long blog posts about the horror that is PHP, which lead to double-clawed hammers being created, then they're right. But that double-clawed PHP hammer is still a better tool. It works, out of the box, for people who don't know what they're doing.
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He has some good points.
There are some applications that are not written in PHP, like RhodeCode (Python) or Orchard CMS that can set up their own database. BUT! They can do so only with the default EMBEDDED databases (SQLite and SQL Server CE respectively). PHP is the only system I know of that can automatically set up databases on a database server!
Granted, there are ways to do that in other frameworks, but one has to use 3RD party libraries that often cannot cope with recent releases or are so poorly written they are mostly unusable.
PHP has a lot of strengths, and I actually know one person who made PHP his default Linux shell interpreter. (He used a modified version of it to handle built-in commands). And yes, I think he went a little overboard with that, as he now has set up, on Windows, a custom shell that is a blend of PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, PowerShell, and the default command system, and can actually write all of those languages in one file and run it.
Now that leads to a major mess!
(e.g. 'Vomit Code' or 'Diarrhea Code') 
Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
 2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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OK, I have to admit that I actually missed the party. Brad Cox first described his “Object-Oriented pre-compiler”, OOPC, in The January 1983 issue of ACM SIGPLAN Notices. "This describes the Object Oriented Pre-Compiler, OOPC, a language and a run-time library for producing C programs that operate by the run-time conventions of Smalltalk 80 in a UNIX environment. These languages offer Object Oriented Programming in which data, and the programs which may access it, are designed, built and maintained as inseparable units called objects." Notice that the abstract has to explain what OOP is: these were early days at least as far as the commercial software industry viewed objects. From SmallTalk to Nextstep to iOS. [Many Happy] returns;
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Back in late January, I received the TECK for review, a keyboard that goes by the not-so-humble name of “Truly Ergonomic Computer Keyboard”, manufactured by a company that likewise uses the name Truly Ergonomic (hello name space collision). I’m sure other companies that make ergonomic keyboards might take exception to the name, but as far as I’m concerned that’s mostly marketing. The real question is how the TECK fares in day-to-day use, and whether it’s really a better keyboard for serious typists—and particularly typists like me that suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS)—compared to the other options. Is it good enough to give up your beloved Microsoft Natural keyboard?
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What the hell is that, were the designers drunk?
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Windows RT was/is positioned to be a variant of the Windows platform that is lightweight, offers great battery life, and has a terrific out of the box experience by shipping with Office pre-installed. One of the arguments behind Windows RT was that Intel was not able to scale its CPUs down quickly enough to be power efficient and at the same time, ARM had found ways to scale up its designs at a rapid pace to compete with Intel in the low-price market. In theory, it sounded great, ARM based devices would dominate the low-end market (netbook-ish category of devices) and Intel/AMD would fight in the upper regions for those who wanted proper Windows 8 and the ability to run legacy applications. While good on paper, this separation has yet to appear in the market. Intel’s ability to scale down versus ARM’s ability to scale up.
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