we have to keep checking the access_log to figure out what interesting tricks people are using these days
Which is easy to do. All you have to do to find new tricks is extract the User-Agent field | sort | uniq, and "MSIE 666, really Mozilla" will out like a sore thumb in any "which IE versions are people using?" query.
--
Damian Yerrick, running nightly Mozilla builds until a milestone is released that includes the trunk fix to bug 30841
I've yet to find an open source project that ignored unsolicited code that happened to be a flat out bug fix.
Pulsar writes that Linus Torvalds often rejects patches that involve non-x86 architecture-specific bug fixes, even if the bug causes a kernel panic on every platform but Linus's precious x86.
The SNES version had a much better replay value because the game didn't have a "cheap factor." What I mean is that in the SNES version, the speed of the characters and their abilities remained consistent.
That is, if you won the first race of a GP. If you didn't win, the players who beat you in the first round would get extra mushrooms. All SMK CPU players also got unlimited mushrooms to attempt to reclaim the place they finished the first race unlimited feathers to jump over anything you drop or throw, and unlimited of items you can't even get such as poison mushrooms.
User-Agent: that tricks servers but not designers
on
Mozilla 0.9.4 Released
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· Score: 2
It just makes life harder on web designers. How can we optimize our HTML code to render correctly in your browser, if you lie to us about what browser you're using?
If your browser sends
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.66; This isn't IE but really Mozilla 0.9.4)
then the server will send IE content, but the web designer will notice the satanic "666" in the User-Agent field of the logs and know something is up. A closer inspection reveals a Mozilla browser.
yes. now all you need is a way to call [aspell or ispell] from the browser and somehow usefully use its output...
Pspell is a portable C library providing an interface between apps such as Mozilla and several varieties of spell-check backends (such as Aspell's English algorithm or Ispell's language-independent algorithm), along with command-line apps that call those functions. It's licensed under GNU Lesser GPL.
Oh, and aspell/ispell is Unix-only,no?
No. Pspell is a cross-platform library, and even though Ispell is tuned for POSIX systems, Cygwin provides a good POSIX layer on Win32 systems. With the port of XFree86 4.10 to run on Windows 98/ME and Windows NT/2K, it's very hard to call a piece of source code "designed only for UNIX systems" anymore.
Any business or ISP absolutely should be using proxy servers.
Proxies are good for static content, but many sites use dynamic content, assuming each human user has a unique IP address. For example, discussion sites such as Kuro5hin and Slashdot often limit the number of comments a given unique IP address can post; running all comments.pl posts through the proxy makes it look as though one user is flooding Slashdot with AC comments. Proxies can also have bugs: I've used a Novell BorderManager proxy that didn't even let me set persistent cookies.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with proxy servers it basiclly acts a lot like your browsers cache but it in general is far more effecient and is shared aong many users.
How can a browser or proxy cache dynamic content personalized for each user?
I would have thought that having a single-process cache at the front-end (something like SQUID) which holds on to a much larger cache and then passes requests to non-caching Apache processes would have done much better.
Taco mentioned this in his conclusion:
A layer of proxy is desirable so we could send static requests to a box tuned for static pages.
These issues listed at that URL are rather minor that really don't seem affect the overall experience.
These make the game feel not fair: "GP computer has unlimited feather (jump) and mushroom (nitro) powerups to avoid your attacks and catch up. Unlike human players, the GP computer can fire off more than one attack per set of ? blocks. GP computer has items human players never get, such as egg, shrinking mushroom, etc." I've seen the computer fire off two feathers in a row to jump over two items I placed.
"No key binding editor." This is an ergonomic issue. The original Mario Party also had ergonomic problems because its buttons could not be reconfigured.
"Asymmetry: Toad has no way to attack Wario directly in battle mode." Some characters have absolute advantages over other characters. Lack of balance == lack of fun.
"Starman lasts too long," "Ghost powerup lasts way too long,"
Those affect balance in a big way, especially on MK64 where a Battle Mode player can remain invincible nearly forever by sitting on a ? block and continuously pushing Z fast enough that the user is always under the influence of Star or Ghost.
"No in-car camera view." I'd be curious as to how this would be implemented in an accurate way on a Super Nintendo with only mode 7 at your disposal.
I've seen cockpit views done on NES and Sega Genesis, without arbitrary scanline rotation and scaling (i.e. Mode 7).
These aren't bugs, these are things the author personally doesn't like.
I'll admit that some of my "bugs" are personal preference, but some could say the same about the instability of Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows 98.
On the other hand, MPEG has more lenient standards, requiring members to pool and license their patents on a "reasonable and non-discriminatory basis," but not recognizing that a "non-discriminatory" policy toward Free Software implies royalty-free redistribution.
has anyone heard any release dates, or time frames, for the next mariokart?
Mario Kart 3 is already out for GBA, and Mario Kart 4 is planned for GCN. However, Nintendo has a poor track record with respect to the general bugginess of the details of the Mario Kart play design in 1 and 2.
This is just merchandising slapped on top of a game concept that has already been done.
I won't argue that merchandising is involved, but nintendo re-released TETRIS® Attack on N64 and GBC because people were still demanding it after the Super NES had been dead for a while (Frogger was the last Super NES game). Because nintendo no longer had the TETRIS® license, the company just released a Pokemon themed "official clone."
The graphics for the blocks are even the same.
Yes, the tile graphics are the same on GBC and Super NES, but they're somewhat different on N64. The N64 also adds a cylindrical board in addition to the rectangular board.
And a mouse and keyboard in a GUI is (IMO) a horrible tool to produce music.
What's a better way to input parameters for soft synthesizers and tweak them in real time? Or to edit samples non-linearly? And how is keyboard input of note values (such as that used in trackers) so terrible, especially for students who cannot afford high-end musical equipment?
DIVX could extend rental period indefinitely
on
DivX;) Goes Legit
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· Score: 2
all those greedy companies like Disney had plans for unlimited rental-based revenue. Can't you imagine you're five year old kid... "Daddy, Daddy. I want to watch Winnie the Pooh again" - for the hundreth time. Can you say, "Cha-ching"?
Wrong. All DIVX players had an option to extend a disc's rental period indefinitely (i.e. until the DIVX program ended) for US$25.
(OT)To get around comp filters, explain your links
on
DivX;) Goes Legit
·
· Score: 1
I tried to fucking post the first fucking line of this message and I got this stupid fucking message: "Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted"
The postercomment filter rejects all messages under about 60 characters because the admins set the minimum ratio for short comments to an impossible value (i.e. greater than 1). If you explain what you're linking to, you will have a longer comment, and more users are likely to click through because they know what they're clicking. (That's the problem with "You have 1 new message" banner ads; the user quickly learns that they lead nowhere and ignores them.)
The Tetris Company has not authorized any TETRIS® brand product that runs on a GNU, BSD, or UNIX® system. However, you can try one of my t*tr*s clones, which may help victims of the War on Some Drugs get off mescaline. (A non-drug version called freepuzzlearena is also available.)
Do you honestly think we are rid of 'dumb' wintel boxes that can only 'telnet'?
Yes. If a Wintel box can HTTP, it can SSH. From Google.com, type in putty ssh and click "I'm Feeling Lucky" to be taken to PuTTY, an X11-licensed SSH client for Win32. (If your firewall restricts HTTP and FTP downloads of binary programs, it probably also restricts outgoing telnet and ssh.)
But [Oracle is] still a thousand times better than all the Open Source "alternatives".
All? There are only two things you need out of a DBMS: ACID and speed. (Yes, I know they're both also names of recreational drugs.) Oracle (proprietary license with expen$ive royalties and an NDA on performance measurement) supports ACID. So does PostgreSQL (BSD license). So does SAP DB (GPL/LGPL).
Apple sued companies (particularly Franklin Computer Corp.) that violated it's patents. IBM *encouraged* people to hack and clone their BIOS.
No, the lawsuits were not about patents but about copyrights. The Apple II ROM didn't have a syscall interface like PC BIOS did; A2 syscalls were merely jsr instructions to the entry point in ROM of the function. Because this restricted the possible length of each function's binary code, it was almost impossible to make a 100% Apple compatible ROM without making it byte-identical to Apple's.
Guess which type of computer became the most successful?
The one with the more extensible API. IBM designed its BIOS syscalls around a realization that it would eventually have to change the internal structure of its BIOS in later revisions to the PC (e.g. XT and AT).
However, the LEGO case isn't about patents or copyrights; it's about trademarks, as the name "LegOS" gives a false appearance of a LEGO product. LEGO doesn't want to tech-support third-party software that could potentially damage expensive sensors and motors.
Because for something to move in spacetime (or in time) it would need to have a variable temporal coordinate.
First of all, to define "time travel," we must define "travel." Most laypeople define "travel" as "motion" relative to a frame of reference of a large rock. Because the spacetime geodesic of an object cannot move, I consider "travel" to be a region along the geodesic where it deviates from being parallel to its local surroundings.
As the parent described, what SF writers call "time travel" is not motion in time but rather a misnomer for a nearly closed loop in the object's geodesic. Do the equations allow that an object's geodesic may loop around and nearly cross itself, creating an effect that would be perceived as "time travel" under the lay definition of travel?
No group of three of more persons shall, while wearing a hood, mask, or device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter, be, or appear in any public place within the city of Frankfort
The Constitution of the United States of America trumps any state or local law. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from taking away freedom of association and of religion (as some women feel it's more modest to cover much of their faces), and the Fourteenth says "this goes for you too, states."
I went looking for evidence. The "about this company" pages of musiccity.com and musiccityrecords.com do not mention any affiliation, but the fact that both the label and the network are headquartered in Nashville supports the assertion. Nevertheless, doesn't the availability of Charley Pride's music on the MusicCity Network make this whole issue a moot point?
Slashdot Mirror
we have to keep checking the access_log to figure out what interesting tricks people are using these days
Which is easy to do. All you have to do to find new tricks is extract the User-Agent field | sort | uniq, and "MSIE 666, really Mozilla" will out like a sore thumb in any "which IE versions are people using?" query.
-- Damian Yerrick, running nightly Mozilla builds until a milestone is released that includes the trunk fix to bug 30841I've yet to find an open source project that ignored unsolicited code that happened to be a flat out bug fix.
Pulsar writes that Linus Torvalds often rejects patches that involve non-x86 architecture-specific bug fixes, even if the bug causes a kernel panic on every platform but Linus's precious x86.
Doom, blah, have you EVER heard of wolfenstein?
Wolfenstein 3D was a clone of Midi-Maze aka Faceball 2000.
Mario Kart (racing games with weapons) is a clone of Pole Position (racing games). (Did you know that NBA Jam used Pole Position's floor-rendering algorithm?)
The SNES version had a much better replay value because the game didn't have a "cheap factor." What I mean is that in the SNES version, the speed of the characters and their abilities remained consistent.
That is, if you won the first race of a GP. If you didn't win, the players who beat you in the first round would get extra mushrooms. All SMK CPU players also got unlimited mushrooms to attempt to reclaim the place they finished the first race unlimited feathers to jump over anything you drop or throw, and unlimited of items you can't even get such as poison mushrooms.
Read more about the problems with the Mario Kart series (note: some are valid balance bugs, while others are personal preference).
It just makes life harder on web designers. How can we optimize our HTML code to render correctly in your browser, if you lie to us about what browser you're using?
If your browser sends
then the server will send IE content, but the web designer will notice the satanic "666" in the User-Agent field of the logs and know something is up. A closer inspection reveals a Mozilla browser.Yeah... Mozilla is just useless on Linux (again... this counts for all milestones): X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Users on recent Linux 2.4 and XFree86 4.1 have reported WORKSFORME. Do any other apps that link to GTK+ work?
yes. now all you need is a way to call [aspell or ispell] from the browser and somehow usefully use its output...
Pspell is a portable C library providing an interface between apps such as Mozilla and several varieties of spell-check backends (such as Aspell's English algorithm or Ispell's language-independent algorithm), along with command-line apps that call those functions. It's licensed under GNU Lesser GPL.
Oh, and aspell/ispell is Unix-only,no?
No. Pspell is a cross-platform library, and even though Ispell is tuned for POSIX systems, Cygwin provides a good POSIX layer on Win32 systems. With the port of XFree86 4.10 to run on Windows 98/ME and Windows NT/2K, it's very hard to call a piece of source code "designed only for UNIX systems" anymore.
Any business or ISP absolutely should be using proxy servers.
Proxies are good for static content, but many sites use dynamic content, assuming each human user has a unique IP address. For example, discussion sites such as Kuro5hin and Slashdot often limit the number of comments a given unique IP address can post; running all comments.pl posts through the proxy makes it look as though one user is flooding Slashdot with AC comments. Proxies can also have bugs: I've used a Novell BorderManager proxy that didn't even let me set persistent cookies.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with proxy servers it basiclly acts a lot like your browsers cache but it in general is far more effecient and is shared aong many users.
How can a browser or proxy cache dynamic content personalized for each user?
I would have thought that having a single-process cache at the front-end (something like SQUID) which holds on to a much larger cache and then passes requests to non-caching Apache processes would have done much better.
Taco mentioned this in his conclusion:
These issues listed at that URL are rather minor that really don't seem affect the overall experience.
These make the game feel not fair: "GP computer has unlimited feather (jump) and mushroom (nitro) powerups to avoid your attacks and catch up. Unlike human players, the GP computer can fire off more than one attack per set of ? blocks. GP computer has items human players never get, such as egg, shrinking mushroom, etc." I've seen the computer fire off two feathers in a row to jump over two items I placed.
"No key binding editor." This is an ergonomic issue. The original Mario Party also had ergonomic problems because its buttons could not be reconfigured.
"Asymmetry: Toad has no way to attack Wario directly in battle mode." Some characters have absolute advantages over other characters. Lack of balance == lack of fun.
"Starman lasts too long," "Ghost powerup lasts way too long,"
Those affect balance in a big way, especially on MK64 where a Battle Mode player can remain invincible nearly forever by sitting on a ? block and continuously pushing Z fast enough that the user is always under the influence of Star or Ghost.
"No in-car camera view." I'd be curious as to how this would be implemented in an accurate way on a Super Nintendo with only mode 7 at your disposal.
I've seen cockpit views done on NES and Sega Genesis, without arbitrary scanline rotation and scaling (i.e. Mode 7).
These aren't bugs, these are things the author personally doesn't like.
I'll admit that some of my "bugs" are personal preference, but some could say the same about the instability of Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows 98.
What about all the patents related to jpeg2000 and mpeg4?
ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 Working Group 1, better known as the Joint Photographic Experts Group, developed the JPEG bitstream standard (part of IS 10918-1), the SPIFF (.jpg) file format (IS 10918-3), and a new "JPEG 2000" wavelet coding system. JPEG has a policy of requiring all members to license patents royalty-free if the patent is essential for implementing the standard.
On the other hand, MPEG has more lenient standards, requiring members to pool and license their patents on a "reasonable and non-discriminatory basis," but not recognizing that a "non-discriminatory" policy toward Free Software implies royalty-free redistribution.
has anyone heard any release dates, or time frames, for the next mariokart?
Mario Kart 3 is already out for GBA, and Mario Kart 4 is planned for GCN. However, Nintendo has a poor track record with respect to the general bugginess of the details of the Mario Kart play design in 1 and 2.
Is anybody annoyed by the right-click-forbidden feature of these pages?
Yes. Read more about why right-click traps are a Bad Thing.
Anybody know how to make a "Toggle ECMAScript" button on the Mozilla 0.9.x toolbar?
This is just merchandising slapped on top of a game concept that has already been done.
I won't argue that merchandising is involved, but nintendo re-released TETRIS® Attack on N64 and GBC because people were still demanding it after the Super NES had been dead for a while (Frogger was the last Super NES game). Because nintendo no longer had the TETRIS® license, the company just released a Pokemon themed "official clone."
The graphics for the blocks are even the same.
Yes, the tile graphics are the same on GBC and Super NES, but they're somewhat different on N64. The N64 also adds a cylindrical board in addition to the rectangular board.
Copying games you own is illegal because semiconductors don't have the fair use or backup exception for their first 10 years. However, Matthew Leverton made a TA clone for the PC called Who Let The Blocks Out. Unfortunately, every path given to the file is a 404.
And a mouse and keyboard in a GUI is (IMO) a horrible tool to produce music.
What's a better way to input parameters for soft synthesizers and tweak them in real time? Or to edit samples non-linearly? And how is keyboard input of note values (such as that used in trackers) so terrible, especially for students who cannot afford high-end musical equipment?
all those greedy companies like Disney had plans for unlimited rental-based revenue. Can't you imagine you're five year old kid... "Daddy, Daddy. I want to watch Winnie the Pooh again" - for the hundreth time. Can you say, "Cha-ching"?
Wrong. All DIVX players had an option to extend a disc's rental period indefinitely (i.e. until the DIVX program ended) for US$25.
I tried to fucking post the first fucking line of this message and I got this stupid fucking message: "Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted"
The postercomment filter rejects all messages under about 60 characters because the admins set the minimum ratio for short comments to an impossible value (i.e. greater than 1). If you explain what you're linking to, you will have a longer comment, and more users are likely to click through because they know what they're clicking. (That's the problem with "You have 1 new message" banner ads; the user quickly learns that they lead nowhere and ignores them.)
try TuxTyping or Tetris
The Tetris Company has not authorized any TETRIS® brand product that runs on a GNU, BSD, or UNIX® system. However, you can try one of my t*tr*s clones, which may help victims of the War on Some Drugs get off mescaline. (A non-drug version called freepuzzlearena is also available.)
Do you honestly think we are rid of 'dumb' wintel boxes that can only 'telnet'?
Yes. If a Wintel box can HTTP, it can SSH. From Google.com, type in putty ssh and click "I'm Feeling Lucky" to be taken to PuTTY, an X11-licensed SSH client for Win32. (If your firewall restricts HTTP and FTP downloads of binary programs, it probably also restricts outgoing telnet and ssh.)
But [Oracle is] still a thousand times better than all the Open Source "alternatives".
All? There are only two things you need out of a DBMS: ACID and speed. (Yes, I know they're both also names of recreational drugs.) Oracle (proprietary license with expen$ive royalties and an NDA on performance measurement) supports ACID. So does PostgreSQL (BSD license). So does SAP DB (GPL/LGPL).
Apple sued companies (particularly Franklin Computer Corp.) that violated it's patents. IBM *encouraged* people to hack and clone their BIOS.
No, the lawsuits were not about patents but about copyrights. The Apple II ROM didn't have a syscall interface like PC BIOS did; A2 syscalls were merely jsr instructions to the entry point in ROM of the function. Because this restricted the possible length of each function's binary code, it was almost impossible to make a 100% Apple compatible ROM without making it byte-identical to Apple's.
But the real reason Apple sued is because their contract with Microsoft required them to do so. Microsoft owned the copyright on the Basic interpreter in Apple II Plus and later computers.
Guess which type of computer became the most successful?
The one with the more extensible API. IBM designed its BIOS syscalls around a realization that it would eventually have to change the internal structure of its BIOS in later revisions to the PC (e.g. XT and AT).
However, the LEGO case isn't about patents or copyrights; it's about trademarks, as the name "LegOS" gives a false appearance of a LEGO product. LEGO doesn't want to tech-support third-party software that could potentially damage expensive sensors and motors.
Because for something to move in spacetime (or in time) it would need to have a variable temporal coordinate.
First of all, to define "time travel," we must define "travel." Most laypeople define "travel" as "motion" relative to a frame of reference of a large rock. Because the spacetime geodesic of an object cannot move, I consider "travel" to be a region along the geodesic where it deviates from being parallel to its local surroundings.
As the parent described, what SF writers call "time travel" is not motion in time but rather a misnomer for a nearly closed loop in the object's geodesic. Do the equations allow that an object's geodesic may loop around and nearly cross itself, creating an effect that would be perceived as "time travel" under the lay definition of travel?
No group of three of more persons shall, while wearing a hood, mask, or device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter, be, or appear in any public place within the city of Frankfort
The Constitution of the United States of America trumps any state or local law. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from taking away freedom of association and of religion (as some women feel it's more modest to cover much of their faces), and the Fourteenth says "this goes for you too, states."
musiccity records OWNS the musiccity network.
I went looking for evidence. The "about this company" pages of musiccity.com and musiccityrecords.com do not mention any affiliation, but the fact that both the label and the network are headquartered in Nashville supports the assertion. Nevertheless, doesn't the availability of Charley Pride's music on the MusicCity Network make this whole issue a moot point?
Maybe I'm missing something, but what's the beef with a 100K program?
You can't enter a 100 KB program in a 64 KB demo competition. However, you can enter a well-written 64 KB demo in an 8 MB demo competition.