I want an app that can - possibly with some help from me - take/make a recording of me talking(singing/whatever) and then change it into what it sounds for _me_ inside my head.
I want people to know who I think I am, not what I come across as:-)
(Does that exist? I bet there exists some book/magazine db thing that can scan names and barcodes to both build up a db and tell me if I already own the item I'm currently looking at.)
So I attended a local security talk a couple of months back and there I asked a security expert from my ISP (Telenor - Norway) if they blocked outgoing packets with source IP address differing from the real sender address.
"No" he said.
WTF? I am sure there is some legitimate reason for being able to send such a packet, but I can't think of any, and the contract should be amended to say "no spoofed source address unless agreed upon". Sending spoof packets should make the ISP auto-throttle them if not just black-hole.
There are two problems with The Year of the Desktop for Linux: 1. Linux - it is a kernel and can't fix what goes on in the desktop. I never understand why people expect those to correlate. 2. Linus - there is no Linus in the GUI world who can put the foot down and stamp out a path.
And yes, X and its ecosystem _is_ a problem. When parts of the GUI are separated and with individually selectable APIs you get a wonderful sense of freedom, but the days of yore with the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Archimedes, the Be, and Apple they did unwittingly reap rewards from having a nazi stranglehold on the _whole_ of the GUI. How do you go about adding 'Datatypes' (Amiga feature - I believe Be had something more advanced?) to every GUI running on top of Linux? Who can plant the flag on top of that hill and declare "so be it"? It is a framework for GUIs that really made everything easier for everyone. Failing that, I'd like to point the the XPK compression framework for the Amiga that in many ways was similar to Datatypes - for the end user it also helps the desktop experience by being able to handle more types of data in applications that didn't have an explicitly coded way to do so.
Linux has solved the kernel part, but you shouldn't expect that to automatically fix things several layers higher in the stack.
I have my stacks of C&VG stored on one of my shelves. Got close to 90% of the issues I think.
They really were something else. The writing on the longer pieces was top notch, and the news and previews had lots of exclusives. They had really connected writers. And those front pages... best ever. The 90s were not too kind to it as it had to fight more kiddy targeting publications and all the media was fed through the same hose. At least we got Edge from then on.
The pc train with M$ shuffling coal until it was spewing hellfire killed my beloved Amiga (oh yes, C= did plenty to suicide - not denying that). For that they get my eternal hatred and I'll never give them an inch.
And then they panic and throw umpteen billions at the console market to stall SONY in the living room. You can hate on SONY as much as you like, but M$ has a very special place reserved for it in Hell.
And document "standards". And committee work. And Exchange restores. And embrace and extend. And breaking alternative DOSes. And modal windows blocking me working. And tarting up a retarded DOS little by little. And having an OS sacrificing stability for performance. The evil and stupidity seems to be never ending. My grudges are old, but they really work hard to come up with some new ones so I wont forget.
There is a weekly paper her in Norway called Morgenbladet (probably named from the time yonks ago when it was daily) that seems to do actual journalism.
But apart from that, I prefer olds instead of news: Retro Gamer. New magazines all write about the same things, RG write about totally different stuff (and which actually takes some reporting and investigating to find out).
I'm stuck in the past so Retro Gamer is the perfect magazine for me then. Check out their site at http://www.retrogamer.net/.
The magazine has the most researched content I have seen in ages, and not just run of the mill reviews that you will find similar copies of in your avarage gaming magazine.
It is also a magazine which is strongly interacting with its readership through the forum. Well worth checking out.
> but I can't say I see what's the mourning about when it comes to choices that were at best illusionary
Hybrid builds. Perhaps they were not for you, but I had a lot of fun with them. 33/38/0 FoK you rogues from WotLK is rather classic, though that was nerfed fast http://www.gamestool.net/tc/wow335/roguet.php. Personally I used an ultra-defensive 0/53/18 build for Wintergrasp PvP, and 21/50/0 for PvE. Just about everything like that is gone - the number of talents to pick between is nothing compared to what it was (and so many of them are just gone and not baked into the class), or you can't pick halfway between the trees anymore.
You can have any taste you want as long as it is vanilla.
(And I say that with a lot of irony as that was how the Macintosh used to be described in the 68000 days - now you can have the shiny user-friendly handholding graphical experience or you can get your hands dirty at the unix command prompt, a model I think is very sensible and which Blizzard could learn a lot from.)
>THAT is the kind of problems the newbies have, not min-maxing stuff in a talent tree.
This used to be an uber-geek passtime with 20-sided dices, a dedicated gamesmaster, and a whole lot of imagination to conjure scenarios and put yourself into the place of bearded warriors and buxom amazones. This has been pimped up in attractive graphics and moody sounds, and suddenly everybody wanted in on this thanks to some very good marketing of the social aspects and managing to be the "IT" thing (getting a snowball effect).
So a noob can not grok the mechanics, wording, and interface of it. I am totally not surprised. I would be surprised if _any_ game came natural to someone who stumbles into it for the first time. That can not be a problem WoW (or its competitors) is responsible for solving. Streamlining is good. Reducing grind and annoyances is good. Holding hands and suggesting player actions is good. Reducing options and variety is not - that is dumbing down.
It seems to me that people think it is an either/or - either you have lots of talents you can pick and choose from yourself, or the game makes every decision for you. Hide the complexities if you need be, but let those of us who think they are interesting be allowed to tinker with them. (Sounds like I'm describing a Mac!)
(BTW, it is probably not a healthy sign when the metagame of picking the best talents, stats, classes, races, and gear is more interesting than playing the game... yeah yeah, noobs are lucky to not be bothered with that)
>5. The talent trees. >B) You haven't actually lost much.
Compared to Cataclysm? No, it is an improvement in some ways. Compared to all previous expansions? Immensely, if you liked deviating from the beaten path. "Hybrid" specs are no longer (only hybrid classes).
What is the fallout from that? _Pure_ classes had more choices for combinations that took some developer elbow grease to balance in regards for damage or utility. They lost that. The hybrid classes often have their optional talents looking something like "tank - you do this, heal - you do that, dps - you do elsewise". The pure classes get one choice, and you'll like it or else.
RPGs used to be about this and that stat and this and that talent, right? Blizzard is chucking most of that out the window. If they wanted to fix the talent system they could simply have auto-selected talents for you, and if you wanted something else you had to go to your class trainer and pay for a talent reset like you do when you change spec for your class.
And all that is bad design anyway IMO: You are giving the user a sense of accomplishment if s/he is clicking the button himself, _even_ if it is the only possible thing to click on. The user feels _s/he_ has done it, and not had the system do it for you. (But suggesting for the user is fine if you don't force it.)
From time to time/. puts up stories about commercial code checkers that has all kinds of cool AI built-in.
Wouldn't a test of "if this then exit, if not this then exit" be flagged as a possible logic bug when there is more code after that last exit but before function end?
a)
An ad-block type addon does not download the ad so the user does not see it
b)
An ad-block type addon tells the browser that the ad should be downloaded later/at lower priority and not shown to the user.
In case b) it might be slightly slower for you (or not), but you would be just as happily ignorant, and the advertiser would have no idea that you actually didn't look at it.
I expect we will see b) appear if need be.
The brother of this idea is a browser adblocker that actually loads the ads, but does not show them to you. Might need a change or two to your browser to make it know what to just invisibelize, but that should be doable?
(You still want to block tracker gifs and similar, but that already works, you just need two kinds of iffy address links.)
This company has some old products. And some new license agreements. Possibly by the appearance of some new brushes in management who had ideas about how clients should be paying them.
I suggest you take a good look at what you have signed and see if it matches what you _think_ you have rights to. Always good advice anyway.
Draconian DRM is discussion worthy, but isn't anybody interested in discussing the rumoured hw?
Going x64 sounds like the beancounters did a mutiny (cue images of Monty Python film).
Especially when they had a unique and strong architecture they could simply enhance, speed up, and fix the warts on. Easy compatibility too that way.
If giving just _1_ advice to SONY it is to have more memory in their machine than all the rest. Design it for a variable amount of memory, sit tight and wait for the competition, then up your number seriously. 2x if possible. And 4G is not enough in any way or shape. They need to one-up what a typical PC at the time can be expected to have - a made-for-PS4 game should outspec your regular PC and the easiest way is to do it with more memory.
If they want to make it a media box they need to stuff it with a big hd. If they want it to focus on gaming only, stuff it with a fast SSD.
Don't change the architecture. Do a few internal tuneups and do some 2x-4x scaleups of the available units.
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." - Henry Spencer
Well, there are days I keep thinking to myself that much the same applies to the Amiga. Except often not actually getting what they want.
On my Amiga I had a (de)compressing filesystem. You basically named it and told it what real directory to link to. After that your view of that filesystem was as if the files were uncompressed. You could use your real path to fiddle back and forth with compression and selecting algorithms per file. There was a very nice compression framework done by third-parties that this used - plug-in compressions of all types.
And if you were "cheap" you could use a loader patch that recognized the executable directly and decompressed it.
Of course, storage systems will probably begin compressing data by default to increase space and speed. I think some might already do (though you might want a standard that transfers compressed over the wire all the way into your host).
Get a motorized desk you can regulate so you can stand and work. Some times you'll want to sit, especially when getting used to it.
Sitting too much skews your muscle lengths and will give you back trouble. Well, at least it did for me. Standing is free help for that. Next thing is real good shoes to support your standing. I haven't tried barefoot, you might need to check with your doctor what is best for you.
Blizzard seems obsessed with pushing everyone to current-tier. That has had a few odd consequences, like killing off content (Naxx40 - even leaving behind questlines that can't be completed, Onyxia40(?), Zul'Gurub) - who in their right mind destroys content?
It also means that any item that could be even remotely useful in a current/higher tier gets removed or nerfed: All items with "%" based modifiers are gone, the rogue cape with reduced fall damage is gone, the warlock thing that let you summon your voidwalker without a shard in 3.0 (obsoleted now), gear from Naxx40 (imagine how easy it would have been to take a few 80s and run 60s through Naxx40 to gear them out with the first _proper_ itemized gear in the game - gear that lasts you until Northrend).
The Bind-on-Account items that WotLK introduced has been cut back on - now you have to grind each and every alt to exalted to get access to enchants, and the old BoA gear wasn't lifted to support level 85.
And why they piled on the the difficulty layer in 4.0 I don't know. Add in the straightjacket of the new talent trees with no hybrid spec'ing, and you're slowly but surely sucking the fun out of the game.
When you say "better" you mean "faster", right?
Hurd isn't supposed to be faster, it is supposed to be better.
And yes, at a cost in speed.
Their biggest issue is drivers and hw compatibility IMO; the speed issue is diminishing over time.
Best of wishes to the Hurd developers.
Flash is the biggest piece of crap I have on this OpenSUSE system of mine. It is the only thing that can freeze my machine flat out (mouse moving, but NOTHING responding, even keyboard and X kill shortcut). Fullscreen watching on YouTube is a 35% chance to tear my hair out.
11 will hopefully be a better version. Hopefully.
Slashdot Mirror
I want an app that can - possibly with some help from me - take/make a recording of me talking(singing/whatever) and then change it into what it sounds for _me_ inside my head.
I want people to know who I think I am, not what I come across as :-)
(Does that exist? I bet there exists some book/magazine db thing that can scan names and barcodes to both build up a db and tell me if I already own the item I'm currently looking at.)
So I attended a local security talk a couple of months back and there I asked a security expert from my ISP (Telenor - Norway) if they blocked outgoing packets with source IP address differing from the real sender address.
"No" he said.
WTF? I am sure there is some legitimate reason for being able to send such a packet, but I can't think of any, and the contract should be amended to say "no spoofed source address unless agreed upon".
Sending spoof packets should make the ISP auto-throttle them if not just black-hole.
"E" is a pretty respectable language in the Pascal family(IIRC) that has it's home on the Amiga.See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
And as comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody, Wikipedia already there links to two other languages called "E".
"Learning To Code" and "Computer Science" One is a subset of the other.
There are two problems with The Year of the Desktop for Linux:
1. Linux - it is a kernel and can't fix what goes on in the desktop. I never understand why people expect those to correlate.
2. Linus - there is no Linus in the GUI world who can put the foot down and stamp out a path.
And yes, X and its ecosystem _is_ a problem. When parts of the GUI are separated and with individually selectable APIs you get a wonderful sense of freedom, but the days of yore with the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Archimedes, the Be, and Apple they did unwittingly reap rewards from having a nazi stranglehold on the _whole_ of the GUI.
How do you go about adding 'Datatypes' (Amiga feature - I believe Be had something more advanced?) to every GUI running on top of Linux? Who can plant the flag on top of that hill and declare "so be it"? It is a framework for GUIs that really made everything easier for everyone.
Failing that, I'd like to point the the XPK compression framework for the Amiga that in many ways was similar to Datatypes - for the end user it also helps the desktop experience by being able to handle more types of data in applications that didn't have an explicitly coded way to do so.
Linux has solved the kernel part, but you shouldn't expect that to automatically fix things several layers higher in the stack.
I have my stacks of C&VG stored on one of my shelves. Got close to 90% of the issues I think.
They really were something else. The writing on the longer pieces was top notch, and the news and previews had lots of exclusives. They had really connected writers. And those front pages... best ever.
The 90s were not too kind to it as it had to fight more kiddy targeting publications and all the media was fed through the same hose. At least we got Edge from then on.
Is there any reason we can't get bounds checking in C?
I think I read something about an interpreted version of C some time ago that did this.
The pc train with M$ shuffling coal until it was spewing hellfire killed my beloved Amiga (oh yes, C= did plenty to suicide - not denying that).
For that they get my eternal hatred and I'll never give them an inch.
And then they panic and throw umpteen billions at the console market to stall SONY in the living room. You can hate on SONY as much as you like, but M$ has a very special place reserved for it in Hell.
And document "standards". And committee work. And Exchange restores. And embrace and extend. And breaking alternative DOSes. And modal windows blocking me working. And tarting up a retarded DOS little by little. And having an OS sacrificing stability for performance.
The evil and stupidity seems to be never ending. My grudges are old, but they really work hard to come up with some new ones so I wont forget.
There is a weekly paper her in Norway called Morgenbladet (probably named from the time yonks ago when it was daily) that seems to do actual journalism.
But apart from that, I prefer olds instead of news: Retro Gamer. New magazines all write about the same things, RG write about totally different stuff (and which actually takes some reporting and investigating to find out).
I'm stuck in the past so Retro Gamer is the perfect magazine for me then. Check out their site at http://www.retrogamer.net/.
The magazine has the most researched content I have seen in ages, and not just run of the mill reviews that you will find similar copies of in your avarage gaming magazine.
It is also a magazine which is strongly interacting with its readership through the forum. Well worth checking out.
> but I can't say I see what's the mourning about when it comes to choices that were at best illusionary
Hybrid builds. Perhaps they were not for you, but I had a lot of fun with them. 33/38/0 FoK you rogues from WotLK is rather classic, though that was nerfed fast http://www.gamestool.net/tc/wow335/roguet.php.
Personally I used an ultra-defensive 0/53/18 build for Wintergrasp PvP, and 21/50/0 for PvE.
Just about everything like that is gone - the number of talents to pick between is nothing compared to what it was (and so many of them are just gone and not baked into the class), or you can't pick halfway between the trees anymore.
You can have any taste you want as long as it is vanilla.
(And I say that with a lot of irony as that was how the Macintosh used to be described in the 68000 days - now you can have the shiny user-friendly handholding graphical experience or you can get your hands dirty at the unix command prompt, a model I think is very sensible and which Blizzard could learn a lot from.)
>THAT is the kind of problems the newbies have, not min-maxing stuff in a talent tree.
This used to be an uber-geek passtime with 20-sided dices, a dedicated gamesmaster, and a whole lot of imagination to conjure scenarios and put yourself into the place of bearded warriors and buxom amazones. This has been pimped up in attractive graphics and moody sounds, and suddenly everybody wanted in on this thanks to some very good marketing of the social aspects and managing to be the "IT" thing (getting a snowball effect).
So a noob can not grok the mechanics, wording, and interface of it. I am totally not surprised. I would be surprised if _any_ game came natural to someone who stumbles into it for the first time. That can not be a problem WoW (or its competitors) is responsible for solving.
Streamlining is good. Reducing grind and annoyances is good. Holding hands and suggesting player actions is good. Reducing options and variety is not - that is dumbing down.
It seems to me that people think it is an either/or - either you have lots of talents you can pick and choose from yourself, or the game makes every decision for you.
Hide the complexities if you need be, but let those of us who think they are interesting be allowed to tinker with them. (Sounds like I'm describing a Mac!)
(BTW, it is probably not a healthy sign when the metagame of picking the best talents, stats, classes, races, and gear is more interesting than playing the game... yeah yeah, noobs are lucky to not be bothered with that)
>5. The talent trees.
>B) You haven't actually lost much.
Compared to Cataclysm? No, it is an improvement in some ways.
Compared to all previous expansions? Immensely, if you liked deviating from the beaten path. "Hybrid" specs are no longer (only hybrid classes).
What is the fallout from that? _Pure_ classes had more choices for combinations that took some developer elbow grease to balance in regards for damage or utility. They lost that.
The hybrid classes often have their optional talents looking something like "tank - you do this, heal - you do that, dps - you do elsewise". The pure classes get one choice, and you'll like it or else.
RPGs used to be about this and that stat and this and that talent, right? Blizzard is chucking most of that out the window. If they wanted to fix the talent system they could simply have auto-selected talents for you, and if you wanted something else you had to go to your class trainer and pay for a talent reset like you do when you change spec for your class.
And all that is bad design anyway IMO: You are giving the user a sense of accomplishment if s/he is clicking the button himself, _even_ if it is the only possible thing to click on. The user feels _s/he_ has done it, and not had the system do it for you. (But suggesting for the user is fine if you don't force it.)
From time to time /. puts up stories about commercial code checkers that has all kinds of cool AI built-in.
Wouldn't a test of "if this then exit, if not this then exit" be flagged as a possible logic bug when there is more code after that last exit but before function end?
a) An ad-block type addon does not download the ad so the user does not see it b) An ad-block type addon tells the browser that the ad should be downloaded later/at lower priority and not shown to the user. In case b) it might be slightly slower for you (or not), but you would be just as happily ignorant, and the advertiser would have no idea that you actually didn't look at it. I expect we will see b) appear if need be.
The brother of this idea is a browser adblocker that actually loads the ads, but does not show them to you. Might need a change or two to your browser to make it know what to just invisibelize, but that should be doable?
(You still want to block tracker gifs and similar, but that already works, you just need two kinds of iffy address links.)
This company has some old products. And some new license agreements. Possibly by the appearance of some new brushes in management who had ideas about how clients should be paying them.
I suggest you take a good look at what you have signed and see if it matches what you _think_ you have rights to. Always good advice anyway.
And besides, the thing about BIX was that you could have private forums like Commodore did with their developer support.
Draconian DRM is discussion worthy, but isn't anybody interested in discussing the rumoured hw? Going x64 sounds like the beancounters did a mutiny (cue images of Monty Python film). Especially when they had a unique and strong architecture they could simply enhance, speed up, and fix the warts on. Easy compatibility too that way.
If giving just _1_ advice to SONY it is to have more memory in their machine than all the rest.
Design it for a variable amount of memory, sit tight and wait for the competition, then up your number seriously. 2x if possible.
And 4G is not enough in any way or shape. They need to one-up what a typical PC at the time can be expected to have - a made-for-PS4 game should outspec your regular PC and the easiest way is to do it with more memory.
If they want to make it a media box they need to stuff it with a big hd.
If they want it to focus on gaming only, stuff it with a fast SSD.
Don't change the architecture. Do a few internal tuneups and do some 2x-4x scaleups of the available units.
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." - Henry Spencer
Well, there are days I keep thinking to myself that much the same applies to the Amiga. Except often not actually getting what they want.
On my Amiga I had a (de)compressing filesystem. You basically named it and told it what real directory to link to. After that your view of that filesystem was as if the files were uncompressed. You could use your real path to fiddle back and forth with compression and selecting algorithms per file. There was a very nice compression framework done by third-parties that this used - plug-in compressions of all types.
And if you were "cheap" you could use a loader patch that recognized the executable directly and decompressed it.
Of course, storage systems will probably begin compressing data by default to increase space and speed. I think some might already do (though you might want a standard that transfers compressed over the wire all the way into your host).
Get a motorized desk you can regulate so you can stand and work. Some times you'll want to sit, especially when getting used to it.
Sitting too much skews your muscle lengths and will give you back trouble. Well, at least it did for me. Standing is free help for that.
Next thing is real good shoes to support your standing. I haven't tried barefoot, you might need to check with your doctor what is best for you.
It also means that any item that could be even remotely useful in a current/higher tier gets removed or nerfed: All items with "%" based modifiers are gone, the rogue cape with reduced fall damage is gone, the warlock thing that let you summon your voidwalker without a shard in 3.0 (obsoleted now), gear from Naxx40 (imagine how easy it would have been to take a few 80s and run 60s through Naxx40 to gear them out with the first _proper_ itemized gear in the game - gear that lasts you until Northrend).
The Bind-on-Account items that WotLK introduced has been cut back on - now you have to grind each and every alt to exalted to get access to enchants, and the old BoA gear wasn't lifted to support level 85.
And why they piled on the the difficulty layer in 4.0 I don't know. Add in the straightjacket of the new talent trees with no hybrid spec'ing, and you're slowly but surely sucking the fun out of the game.
When you say "better" you mean "faster", right? Hurd isn't supposed to be faster, it is supposed to be better. And yes, at a cost in speed. Their biggest issue is drivers and hw compatibility IMO; the speed issue is diminishing over time. Best of wishes to the Hurd developers.
Flash is the biggest piece of crap I have on this OpenSUSE system of mine. It is the only thing that can freeze my machine flat out (mouse moving, but NOTHING responding, even keyboard and X kill shortcut). Fullscreen watching on YouTube is a 35% chance to tear my hair out. 11 will hopefully be a better version. Hopefully.