Slashdot Mirror

The law states (in the uk) that if the antagonist is aggressive and moving forward, and you fear for your safety, you can legally pre-empitely strike the first blow in self defence

see this book

Totally agree. I didn't cook much until my girlfriend started to encourage me... Then I found this very funny book which has been a great help - Cooking for blokes: Duncan Anderson and Marian Walls. Note: It even includes a detailed section dedicated to explaining all those weird "gas mark" settings and spoon sizes!! Now I just wish they would write "ironing for blokes" :-)

Have you read Scott Ritter's "War on Iraq"? It's quite interesting. Ritter's an ex weapons inspector, who worked for 7 years in Iraq. He's also an ex US marine, a card-carrying Republican, and ex CIA operative. He's not the sort of guy you'd call a peacenik liberal. Yet in the book he goes through all the possible WMD types that Saddam Hussein was accused of hiding, and details why Hussein either didn't have the weapons any more or they were so far past their use-by date as to be no good to man nor beast. He details the methods used by weapons inspectors, some of which are pretty hi-tech, like the use of sniffer devices which can tell if there's even a trace of certain tell-tale chemicals in the air. I'd trust the guy when he says Hussein never had any offensive WMD capacity at the start of the war - if anyone would know, he would. Now, if Saddam didn't have the WMDs, and Bush kept saying "We know you have WMDs" even though one of his head weapons inspector told him there's no way they could have WMDs, how can Saddam possibly convince Bush otherwise? It's like arguments for and against the existence of God. If the onus is on someone to prove a thing doesn't exist, they have a very hard job indeed. If such proof is then refuted, what then can they do?

Having said all that, I'm 100% in favour of building space elevators. It's probably the coolest technology I can think of.

The mysterious process that would cause the US economy to collapse is the change in exchange rates. While US dollars are the reserve currency in which oil is traded, all nations need to ensure that they have a fistful of dollars in reserve with which they can buy oil. This means that the US treasury can print and spend dollars and can get goods in return while being confident that most of these dollars are safely tied up in foreign national banks and will not be "cashed in" against the US reserves. In effect the US has literally been able to print money since the gold standard was abolished.

If Euros become the new reserve currency, all of a sudden there will be a whole lot of dollars used to pay off any trade balances with the US. Instead of getting goods in return for paper, the US will start to get paper in return for goods. The final effect will be massive inflation in the US and a plummeting dollar on the international exchange markets.

If you want a slightly more coherent and well thought out explanation of this, I suggest you read Will Hutton's The state we're in.

I had the good fortune to be taught by Prof. Isham in the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. He is a brilliant lecturer and, while his book cannot rival the lucidity of his lectures, it comes a close second.

Yes, at least twice - I have the original version somewhere at home, and it's pretty easy to find the current version.

Your problem with Enoch Root's lifespan is tied up with the fact that that Rowling's book Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the United States as 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone'. 'Sorcerer's Stone' is, of course, meaningless, but in the world of Quicksilver, the Philosopher's Stone has particular meaning, and particular properties.

It's often a good thing to know some history.

[No, of course I'm not saying that Harry Potter is literature of the same class as Quicksilver]

The right way is to promote your project on a big site like /.

Then subtly include wishlist links, and maybe pointers to other software you wrote.

Maybe you'll get lucky and somebody will buy you a thing or two ...

The UK parliment Science and Technology recently discussed nanotechnology, they question experts on how likley senario's like those depected in Michael Crichton's Prey, are to happen.

Useful Nanotech progress in the UK:Nanotechnologies to Cure Disease.

Usually DVD players that can play multiple regions of DVD can also output in either PAL or NTSC and convert on the fly between the two formats. My current player (Sampo 611) does this, as did the previous player (Raite 750).

Check out the explanation of multi-region DVD players from amazon.co.uk

or have five parts..

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts

Thank you Douglas Adams.

looks like they have Interlingua and Esperanto both of the "planned international auxiliary language" category. But nothing says universal like "planned interplanetary auxiliary language," and it looks likes there's as many Klingon speakers as there are Matsés speakers, so where is it? But I guess they haven't finished the Klingon Shakespeare yet.

I read in a book on cosmetics recently that humans neither emit nor react to pheromones as animals do. In fact human females are distinct from other primates in that they ovulate secretly (from an olfactory standpoint anyway)

this from amazon.co.uk:

"Hacking in this sense refers to modifying these devices to perform in a manner not originally intended; not compromising the security of the devices"

shame that Amazon assume that people will immediately read "Hacking" as "Cracking"

So I guess this is impressive, especially if it's taken more as a contribution to the demoscene than to gaming. But what I think is far more impressive is that a game like Starflight which included hundreds of planets, dozens and dozens of hours of gameplay, an equal number of conversations and text and hundreds of objects, all fit into 2 5 1/4 disks (360K x 2). In 1986. And while exceptional, Starflight is merely representative of the amount of efficient coding that had to go into early game creation. Kkrieger, and more so older classics like Starflight, should serve as examples to modern developers who seem to be bloating their code.

The site was created as part of a hoax to see if the chinese police would actually buy something like this. They did. The whole sordid affair is documented in this book.

Its based on an essay in Abuse your illusions called "How I crashed a Chinese Arms Biazaar With A Rifle That Doesn't Exist"

My favourite use would be tagging girls in night clubs and then stalk them. So much easier than asking for phone numbers.

And VAT rates do vary a lot, compare for instance 0% on books in the UK with 25% in Denmark.

Indeed I know for a fact that I wouldn't be half the surgeon I am today were it not for the hours I spent playing operation.

I hope Microsoft aren't taking inspiration from the British comedy show "The Fast Show"'s 'Channel 9' sketches.... :o)

For those of you who are wondering what I'm on about... see here, and here, and here, and here, and here....... Scorchio!

If it were set up to automatically upload all images to a service all the time...If something newworthy happens near you, and you catch it, I am sure the news channels would bid for your images

A similar premise was used in David Brin's Earth , where people would wear their Tru-view glasses to record suspicious activity. A bit like the "curtain twitchers", only they could be anywhere.

No postal address no .. I just use the wishlist, or a paypal donation address.

If either of those are too evil to use then I don't mind, after all I'm happy to give the software away for free and it's a bit cheeky asking for stuff really!

Does that mean I get supplicants showering me with gifts?

Seriously, thanks. It's nice to see people using the software and enjoying it.

Even allowing for the weak dollar and the 17.5% sales tax the Brits enjoy (!!!), the UK pricing is simply ridiculous. I simply can't understand why the British public puts up with it. This kind of pricing is considered normal in the UK for just about everything, including food, and the public seems happy to pay.

There would be rioting in the streets if they tried British pricing in the USA. Britain is a strange place.

Some links (click the 1's). Some are for dylexics but still relevent for all since pretty much all of us are capable of visual thought...:

I received for Christmas, "The Meaning of Everything", by Simon Winchester. This gives a very interesting and compelling account of the genesis of the dictionary, some of the very strange characters who contributed and the process by which entries are constructed. A very interesting read.

It's available on DVD.

Europe is based on capitalism, sure, but culturally is different and hopefully capitalism will not reach the extremes we see in the USA.

If you would actually read the content of the posts in this thread perhaps your argument would improve.

You imply that only full-time developers understand development; you're wrong. I am a full time admin supporting development environments. I can also code when I get the chance; I built and maintain a system to replace broken GUI tools, used by my developer community to deploy code to our servers. A decade ago I developed document production systems for two local businesses. My training is in electronics so at one time I could write 6502 assembly. I'm not ignorant.

You accuse me of saying things I haven't (money sucks, all software should be downloadable).

You say you support proprietary software for other reasons than keeping yourself employed, and back your statement up by saying "full time software developers need to be paid to write software". But I'm not the only one to point out your circular argument.

You are right that many companies writing code for in-house use are at the moment uncomfortable releasing it. But that's just a statement of the status quo, which doesn't earn you any points. Its a status quo that can change and is changing.

The only weakness in my argument is I can't at the moment find a source for my claim that most developers are not employed by proprietary software houses. By the way, look up the term "software house" if you are still confused; you might need a real dictionary though, so I'll type out the definition for you:

software house a company that specialises in producing or testing software.

I applaude that you have "dedicated countless hours" to the OSS movement. I have too, perhaps not by writing software (I am still fairly young though, so there is time) but I have, in both my day job and my sideline, spent countless hours advocating and deploying Free Software. After all, writing the code in itself doesn't mean that anyone's going to use it.

Hmmm...I liked the article, but I don't think I'm going to let you get away with that. I found the "build times are really long!" part of the article the most troubling. Here are some observations, which I'm not suggesting you're completely unaware of, it's just a convenient place for me to impart information that people don't know. Before anyone flames me, yes, they should know, but they don't. That's not my fault.

First of all, stop having a go at Microsoft's tools. You try using the PS2 dev tools for a while, and you will ache to go back to the MS tools - incremental compilation and linking, decent debugger, etc. I know you weren't really moaning (and maybe you have used PS2 tools - my sympathy), but if you're using VC6 or higher, then I don't think tool quality is going to be a major problem. Enough said.

Most big C++ projects have long build times because everyone bitches about them but nobody tries to do anything about it. I think this is often down to programmers not really understanding how compilers/linkers work, or actually being any good at performance tuning.

Job #1 when solving slow build times is really easy - all you need is some money - and not much. It's real easy - buy some more RAM. If your developers don't have at least 1Gb of RAM in their PCs, then there's probably something wrong. The good news is, it's easy to fix (buy some RAM), and RAM is so cheap that it'll pay for itself in improved productivity in a couple of weeks in extreme cases (I've experienced that first hand myself).

Yes, yes, code bloat, I remember when all you got was 16k, blah blah, "7167 bytes free", Windows sucks, etc., etc. - yes, very nice, but the fact is that buying a dev $50 worth of RAM usually saves them shedloads of time, so suck it up and do it.

After the easy stuff, here's some more easy stuff. When it comes to C++, there are trivial things you can do wrong (and often) to make your build times balloon. The single most important question to ask in C++ with respect to build times is: do I need to include that file, or can I use a forward declaration?

If no thought goes into choosing which files to include, then you don't really notice it that much on smaller projects, but on larger projects it kills your productivity (due to large build times). A few months back, I spent a couple of days pruning include directives from our project's source files. In only two cases did I actually change any implementation (on both cases, to use the pimpl idiom on a couple of choke point classes). It took me about 2 days and was hell, but at the end of it our build times were half what they used to be.

On other projects where the tools support pre-compiled headers ("Luxury!"), I've reduced build times by a factor of 4-6.

The effects are two-fold - first, each source file takes less time to compile, because it isn't including the whole bloody project, and secondly, less files get recompiled when you change stuff. Again, obvious, I know, but you'd think it wasn't, judging by the lack of effort most people put into fixing this. This addresses the "I just changed the animation file format, so why the hell is the physics system being rebuilt?" problem.

In short, more people need to read Large Scale C++ Design by John Lakos.

As for not being able to use design patterns, etc, in something as complicated as a game, that's a bit of a cop out, as I suspect you know. If you don't plan and manage your design rigourously, then your development time will usually be longer, due to bugs in the design and code. Essentially you're saying "Games are too complicated to be designed". Put like that, it doesn't sound that defensible (but: possible Straw Man alert

This sounds a lot, at least on the surface, like Ernest Rutherfurd's London, a novel (in this case spanning 2000 years) that tracks the development of the eponymous city and a few families thereabouts. It's a good read, provided you don't have to finish it on a deadline.

Britain's top hi-tech police officer has demanded a crackdown on Web sites devoted to 'abhorrent' subjects such as cannibalism and necrophilia.

burp.....

This isn't exactly a new problem. People have books full of diseases and stuff that can convince them they're about to die.

Loads of people in England have books like these which are ideal for the budding hypochondriac! A lot of them are full of flow charts that let you start out with a symptom and answer questions to find out what disease you've got. You can start out with a slight headache and be dying of diphtheria before you know it!

So basically, the problem isn't really limited to the internet, but maybe it's easier to surf the net than to crack open a book when you feel ill.

I find these books useful:
Lessons learned in software testing - A good introduction
Software Testing - A whole load of thing you'd never think off
Software test automation:Effective use of test execution tools - A bible for implememting automated testing
How to break software - crashing apps by forcing error conditions
How to break software security - similar to above, but with security in mind

I find these books useful:
Lessons learned in software testing - A good introduction
Software Testing - A whole load of thing you'd never think off
Software test automation:Effective use of test execution tools - A bible for implememting automated testing
How to break software - crashing apps by forcing error conditions
How to break software security - similar to above, but with security in mind

I find these books useful:
Lessons learned in software testing - A good introduction
Software Testing - A whole load of thing you'd never think off
Software test automation:Effective use of test execution tools - A bible for implememting automated testing
How to break software - crashing apps by forcing error conditions
How to break software security - similar to above, but with security in mind

I find these books useful:
Lessons learned in software testing - A good introduction
Software Testing - A whole load of thing you'd never think off
Software test automation:Effective use of test execution tools - A bible for implememting automated testing
How to break software - crashing apps by forcing error conditions
How to break software security - similar to above, but with security in mind

I find these books useful:
Lessons learned in software testing - A good introduction
Software Testing - A whole load of thing you'd never think off
Software test automation:Effective use of test execution tools - A bible for implememting automated testing
How to break software - crashing apps by forcing error conditions
How to break software security - similar to above, but with security in mind

And, almost certainly, to the book "6 dinner Sid"

I guess. (Grandparent had a "cat" themed name).

there is some irony here somewhere....

The author of the article has written two books on X-box hacking: Hacking the XBOX: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering and Opening the XBox.

The author of the article has written two books on X-box hacking: Hacking the XBOX: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering and Opening the XBox.

You can, a number of books by Cory Doctorow books are on Amazon(UK): Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Essential Blogging , A Place So Common ..., The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction and Fantasy (The Complete Idiot's Guide) , and Eastern Standard Tribe .
There are also customer reviews of the books on the amazon.co.uk site.

You can, a number of books by Cory Doctorow books are on Amazon(UK): Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Essential Blogging , A Place So Common ..., The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction and Fantasy (The Complete Idiot's Guide) , and Eastern Standard Tribe .
There are also customer reviews of the books on the amazon.co.uk site.

You can, a number of books by Cory Doctorow books are on Amazon(UK): Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Essential Blogging , A Place So Common ..., The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction and Fantasy (The Complete Idiot's Guide) , and Eastern Standard Tribe .
There are also customer reviews of the books on the amazon.co.uk site.

You can, a number of books by Cory Doctorow books are on Amazon(UK): Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Essential Blogging , A Place So Common ..., The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction and Fantasy (The Complete Idiot's Guide) , and Eastern Standard Tribe .
There are also customer reviews of the books on the amazon.co.uk site.

You can, a number of books by Cory Doctorow books are on Amazon(UK): Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Essential Blogging , A Place So Common ..., The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction and Fantasy (The Complete Idiot's Guide) , and Eastern Standard Tribe .
There are also customer reviews of the books on the amazon.co.uk site.

Monstrous Regiment: OK, but not his best

Wee Free Men: Better than MR
(pTerry's next book, A Hat Full of Sky will be out in a couple months.)

Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams, M.J. Simpson (Hodder & Stoughton; Justin Charles & Co.)

Not sure I'd read this, I took a swing at Salmon of doubt but didn't find much interesting I hadn't already seen before in there. A good read from a while back, and recently re-issued in hardcover: Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I picked a paperback copy up in Cambridge, ten years ago and found it a great read.

(Currently reading The Soong Dynasty (non-fiction) by Sterling Seagrave, alternately with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (fiction) by Robt. Heinlein, interesting combination as both address revolutions.)

* re*ac*tor by Neil Young