A friend of mine gave me a Halo CD with a CD key good enough to play locally but not online. I said "thanks" and got down to playing. I finished the game in about 5 days of long sessions, and here's my review:
Halo on the Mac sucks slimy donkey balls.
I kept hoping that it would get better, but it got worse and worse until finally it was torture. I finished because I'm anal-retentive that way: I hate to leave things unfinished.
Please note that I'm not trying to defend or condone software copyright violations. I understand that people sweat blood to get games out the door. But I'll save my conclusions for the end.
Also, before you write me off as same effete Mac poser, note that this is my first Mac; I got it three months ago. I've used Debian for years, and still run it as a workstation and server. I got the Mac so I could run all the Unix tools and servers I need, run Vim from Bash, and use Photoshop -- all in the same OS (as long as that OS isn't Windows, which I despise, and not for political or ideological reasons).
Here's what sucked the most:
Gameplay sucked.
Much of this game was like punishment from God. I've played FPS games since Wolfenstein, and I've never played anything that sucked like this (although I never played Daikatana;). There were several times during Halo that I thought I had fucked up somehow and gone back on my old steps. I kept running into the same environments, over and over and over again. One particular room I ran through about 40 times: literally the identical map, just new monsters. I swear, they mapped about 1/8 of the game, then just pasted the same damn rooms in for the rest of it when they ran out of time.
Monsters sucked.
I'm sorry, did I just write "new monsters?" There aren't any. There are big, fast bad-ass brute-type creatures, exactly like the ones in Unreal (don't remember what they were called). There are little things that run after you and jump and explode, shockingly similar to the annoying little fuckers in Half-Life. There are zombie humans you've had their heads eaten by head-crab-like monsters, and they shamble after you and try to hit you (again just like HL). Monster variety was lower than Doom.
Performance sucked.
I have a brand new 15" G4 Aluminum Power Book, and I had to run at 800x600 with all the graphics options turned off just to get a playable frame rate. This is the higher-end PB: 1.25GHz; 512Mb RAM and a Radeon 9600. The graphics were really pretty, just ass-slow. I got killed a few times watching a pretty slideshow, then turned all the options off.
After I finished it, my friend called and asked me what I thought. He said he wasn't very far into it, but had heard good things about the multiplayer. He said we should perhaps buy copies of the game so we could play it online. I told him not to bother.
Moral of the story: if it hadn't sucked, I would have bought two copies. I didn't go searching for a warez version and am frankly sorry that I wasted my time on it.
I'm pretty sure abcde will do the job for you. I've not tried it on OS X, but in theory it will work. It's a shell script wrapper for several CD-related programs. I've used it on a Debian box to rip hundreds of disks.
Wear Birkenstocks. I've worn nothing but for about 10 years, and my feet are very happy. You can trivially remove them at airports, but they're great for long periods of standing and walking.
I have 13B feet: very long and very thin. Consequently, finding shoes that fit well is a nightmare. Before I started wearing Birks my little toes were turning under my other ones; they were both nearly sideways. Since wearing Birks all the time (seriously: over 350 days/year here in Portland) my little toes have straightened out. Weird, but true.
I can't recommend them enough. They're not the prettiest shoes ever made, but I'll take comfort over vanity anyday, especially for something as important as my feet.
This is an elegantly-designed page, and a nice recode of the original.
For the last several months I've been working on the same project from a slightly different perspective. We have a working Slash-based site, currently in live beta, at http://www.news4neighbors.net.
The site doesn't validate, but it's all structural XHTML with CSS for layout and style. This is much rougher than the beautiful markup presented here, but the difference is that nearly our entire site is running this template system. My work is based on the Openflows strict theme, released early this year at http://strict.openflows.org. But not much of that theme is left, as their project and mine had very different goals. I've changed all of the 120-something templates, and much of the code that sends them data.
The site needs a lot of work, no doubt. But we're developing it rapidly, and have made much progress.
The biggest challenge is that Slash itself doesn't separate content from presentation from business logic. To change one set of tags you may have to rewrite a template, change a database variable, write some Perl, or a combination. This isn't a knock on Slash -- it's very powerful and I enjoy using it -- it's just that the presentation layer hasn't been their focus.
The end-goal for this project, Slash-wise, is to have a fully XHTML/CSS compliant theme that people can easily use on their sites.
If you want more information about it, send me email at randall -at- sonofhans.net
[ FYI, I also posted this in the ALA discussion ].
In fact, I HATE bicycle helmets. Their sole purpose is to show all the people driving around that the person on the bike is middle class, [snip]
I've ridden 10s of thousands of miles and I'm here to say that a bicycle helmet is an absolute necessity, period. I've completely destroyed two helmets and scraped several more. I once scraped right through the plastic cover of a helmet and well into the insulation. If I hadn't been wearing it my scalp, hair, and a decent chunk of skull would have been left behind on the road.
"But," the yuppies tell me, "you NEED a helmet for safety!
Yes, you do. It's a matter of when, not if. Every cyclist wrecks, and some wrecks you land on your head. Why would you not want to protect your head?
It should be illegal to ride without one."
On this we agree: the government should stay the fuck out of decisions that affect only my own health. Anyone above the age of consent should be able to ride anything with as much or as little safety equipment as they desire, as long as no one else is at risk of harm. Mandatory helmet laws are like anything else the government does "for your own good:" dangerous.
I think that people gamble because they're addicted, stupid, or drunk. Often a combination. All three of those states are notoriously impervious to math, especially statistics.
And besides, what "slim" edge? There's no edge -- anything that gives a player an edge is called "cheating" by the casinos. If there were a reliable way to exploit any "edge" in a casino it would go out of business in a week.*
*And yes, I've read all the stories about people with fiendishly complicated systems who do actually make shitloads of money, but not only is this very difficult in the first place, it's getting harder. The complexity of the exception proves the rule in this case.
...certainly not to have Windows users change their passwords or logoff.
Many people rag on this, but it actually made some sense at the time. Microsoft has removed it from later versions of Windows for convenience, not security, purposes.
For people who don't know, WIndows NT 4 (and perhaps 3.5 and earlier?) required one to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to get a login prompt. Many people complained, not seeing the logic in it, but logic there is.
CTRL-ALT-DEL is can never, ever be trapped by an application -- unless Windows has hosed completely, it's guaranteed to get the OS's attention. Having to hit it to get a login box means that no other application can fake a login box. If they tried, CTRL-ALT-DEL would bring up the task manager instead of a login dialog.
So regardless of whether you like it, the minor annoyance served a good purpose and was actually a fairly clever design decision. Much smarter than, oh, allowing macro viruses to execute by default.
When it comes down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brained drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadshikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
Disclaimer: people who cheat in multi-player games, absent agreement beforehand, are pond-scum.
just one more instance of the fraying in society's moral fabric.
Oh, that's ridiculous. That's like saying I cheat at Lego when I make something different from the instructions.
For years I had uncanny aim in Quake2-engine games. I got kicked from servers a few times 'cause people thought I was a bot (just to note that pro players, or anyone at that level, is light years beyond my skill, now or ever, so I'm not bragging especially).
People asked how I did it, and it was simple. I'd start Quake 2 single-player on 'Nightmare' and use one cheat code to get the railgun and bind another key to give me railgun ammo. Then I disabled weapon switching. Every shot and every kill I made in the game was with the railgun. It was surprisingly hard. Do that a few times and your aim will improve, too.
My point is that this is one of the many uses that I bet id never imagined for cheat codes. Using them to get eternal life is kinda lame, but using them to create new and different challenges can be quite cool.
Not to pull a wet blanket over your martyr story (and not to slam Randal, 'cause I don't want to get punched at the next Perl Mongers meeting), but you're leaving out some important details:
Intel caught him and told him to stop. He continued.
He actually used some of the passwords to login, although he didn't change or grab any data.
None of this was directy related to performance of his duties as a contractor.
I think Intel was merciful the first time, cause they could have nailed him then. The end result is awfully harsh and all out-of-proportion to the harm caused, however he was by his own admission doing something illegal that he'd been warned not to do.
This case is similar. Yes, the prison sentence is crazy for the crime, however what this guy did was stupid. He was clearly going after the reputation of his former employer: if he'd been motivated only by the good of the customer, he would have sent the email while on the job. Also, he could have just warned folks without publishing exploit details.
This is a problem many geeks have -- getting nailed for doing something technically correct but socially unnacceptable. Most of the rules that run the world aren't written down and never will be. You can be technically correct and still wrong wrong wrong.
And although they'll only cost $0.37 to start, their price growth will outstrip inflation. When a competing company starts doing the same things with better service and prices, they'll whine that they're losing business and raise prices again.
There's truth to what you say, but not as much as you think. The USPS is required by law to deliver to every address, every day (in some really small places they skip Saturdays, I hear). UPS, FedEx, etc. have to make a profit, which means that unprofitable packages don't get delivered. UPS's delivery service to some addresses is the USPS. They'll literally accept a package for delivery, label it, then drop it off at the local post office.
Besides, $.37 ain't bad; if you find a cheaper way to send half an ounce of anything 2,000 miles, lemme know.
Normally, people with invisible friends are segregated from society to protect the sane ones, not placed in charge of making the laws that all the sane people must follow.
Note that Asperger Syndrome is not the same as ADHD but methods useful for coping with one may be useful in coping with the other. Also, please don't take an internet test seriously when attempting to diagnose any kind of mental instability. Instead, if you are worried about such results, share them with your family doctor.
Am I hallucinating, or is this a/. editor practicing something resembling responsbile journalism? Jesus, Cliff, get with the program!
Actually I have done it -- it's what I do for a living. And it's trivial. If you weren't an AC, I'd tell you how:)
Re:They still haven't fixed the a huge issue
on
Mozilla 1.4RC2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The other reason is that the markup is simpler, more portable, and less bandwidth intensive. How about that?... And your newly marked up pages will be noticably heavier than the table layout.
You're on crack, and I can prove it
Here's a simple example. Go check out Slashcode.com, and look at the cute little boxes on the left and right sides of the page. The HTML necessary to generate those boxes with a TABLE layout and no CSS is so long and convoluted I can't even post it because of the lameness filter. It's 30 lines long, 1700 characters not including content, and contains 55 HTML tags. That's not ecen the worst news, which is that all that shitty markup has to be downloaded once for each table -- 9 times for slashcode.com.
Following is the HTML necessary to generate the identical box using only CSS:
You need to specifiy some CSS rules for formatting. They might look like this, and you'd specifiy it once in a global style sheet that your browser will cache:
Can't speak for Debian (but come on, apt often still leads to dependancy hell, which means that things don't get installed).
I've seen the thread below this, but hate replying to ACs:).
I've used nothing but Debian for years and I've only had dependency issues in two situations:
First install on a new system, when apt is still trying to get a working base config.
Installing packages from unstable, which is always caveat emptor.
Not that apt is perfect or anything - some people will happily tell you it shits roses, which ain't the case. But I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to manually mung a package or any other files apt controls. Files which control apt - sources.list and whatnot - I do change every now and then, but mostly as mirrors appear and disappear.
Not that it doesn't have a bit of a learning curve. Apt sometimes isn't smart enough to figure things out on its own and needs intervention. But in those cases you can nearly always use apt's (or dpkg's) public interface to solve its own problems.
So... I don't want to evangelize or flame yer ass, but depending on what you want from a computer you might try Debian again. Red Hat is easier to install, comes with more stuff OOTB and is more integrated; Debian is easier to customize and keep stable and up-to-date.
If you want to make sure your hijacking works fly around innocently as "Sam bin Laden" for a few months, get your name on all the "Fly lists," and then hijack a plane.
This isn't a flame or a troll, just an honest question: what's the BFD about these tags? They'd be a privacy concern to me if they had a long range, or couldn't be removed, turned off, or killed. But AFAIK none of that is true -- they have a very short range, they can easily be removed if you find them, they probably can be disabled remotely, and they can certainly be killed by EMP or something similar.
For everyone else in the supply chain the benfits are almost incredible: automatic inventory tracking among them. I worked in an auto parts warehouse during school, and a system like this would have saved them an unreal amount of money.
The worst thing about them is their potential, I think. I dread the thought of devices of this type implanted in infants at birth. But that's a pretty far-out slippery slope argument, and a very different issue.
So tell me -- for real -- what's the privacy issue here?
Pair Networks rocks my world. Uber-reliable, great support, cheap. They run FreeBSD and host their own CPAN mirror (they also host Perlmonks, Tom's Hardware, lots of other big sites). I've used them for years for everything from cheap-o FTP-only accounts ($6/month) to dedicated servers ($300/month).
1. Interpret the Constitution as literally as possible. If the costitution says it's okay (or fails to say that it's not), then go for it.
I doubt very much that Lessig said this, and I hope very much it's just a bone-head typo on your part. While you're interpreting the document literally, perhaps you should read this:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
This puts a nice bullet hole through your "(or fails to say that it's not)." Our much-maligned and little-understood constitution is meant to lay out the limits and responsibilities of government, not limit or define the rights of people. The only argument any of the signatories had against the bill of rights was their fear that a future oppressive regime would use the enumeration of rights as an excuse to take away non-enumerated rights.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL ... I remembered that strip, just not that it applied to Halo.
A friend of mine gave me a Halo CD with a CD key good enough to play locally but not online. I said "thanks" and got down to playing. I finished the game in about 5 days of long sessions, and here's my review:
Halo on the Mac sucks slimy donkey balls.
I kept hoping that it would get better, but it got worse and worse until finally it was torture. I finished because I'm anal-retentive that way: I hate to leave things unfinished.
Please note that I'm not trying to defend or condone software copyright violations. I understand that people sweat blood to get games out the door. But I'll save my conclusions for the end.
Also, before you write me off as same effete Mac poser, note that this is my first Mac; I got it three months ago. I've used Debian for years, and still run it as a workstation and server. I got the Mac so I could run all the Unix tools and servers I need, run Vim from Bash, and use Photoshop -- all in the same OS (as long as that OS isn't Windows, which I despise, and not for political or ideological reasons).
Here's what sucked the most:
Gameplay sucked. Much of this game was like punishment from God. I've played FPS games since Wolfenstein, and I've never played anything that sucked like this (although I never played DaikatanaAfter I finished it, my friend called and asked me what I thought. He said he wasn't very far into it, but had heard good things about the multiplayer. He said we should perhaps buy copies of the game so we could play it online. I told him not to bother.
Moral of the story: if it hadn't sucked, I would have bought two copies. I didn't go searching for a warez version and am frankly sorry that I wasted my time on it.
I'm pretty sure abcde will do the job for you. I've not tried it on OS X, but in theory it will work. It's a shell script wrapper for several CD-related programs. I've used it on a Debian box to rip hundreds of disks.
Wear Birkenstocks. I've worn nothing but for about 10 years, and my feet are very happy. You can trivially remove them at airports, but they're great for long periods of standing and walking.
I have 13B feet: very long and very thin. Consequently, finding shoes that fit well is a nightmare. Before I started wearing Birks my little toes were turning under my other ones; they were both nearly sideways. Since wearing Birks all the time (seriously: over 350 days/year here in Portland) my little toes have straightened out. Weird, but true.
I can't recommend them enough. They're not the prettiest shoes ever made, but I'll take comfort over vanity anyday, especially for something as important as my feet.
This is an elegantly-designed page, and a nice recode of the original.
For the last several months I've been working on the same project from a slightly different perspective. We have a working Slash-based site, currently in live beta, at http://www.news4neighbors.net.
The site doesn't validate, but it's all structural XHTML with CSS for layout and style. This is much rougher than the beautiful markup presented here, but the difference is that nearly our entire site is running this template system. My work is based on the Openflows strict theme, released early this year at http://strict.openflows.org. But not much of that theme is left, as their project and mine had very different goals. I've changed all of the 120-something templates, and much of the code that sends them data.
The site needs a lot of work, no doubt. But we're developing it rapidly, and have made much progress.
The biggest challenge is that Slash itself doesn't separate content from presentation from business logic. To change one set of tags you may have to rewrite a template, change a database variable, write some Perl, or a combination. This isn't a knock on Slash -- it's very powerful and I enjoy using it -- it's just that the presentation layer hasn't been their focus.
The end-goal for this project, Slash-wise, is to have a fully XHTML/CSS compliant theme that people can easily use on their sites.
If you want more information about it, send me email at randall -at- sonofhans.net
[ FYI, I also posted this in the ALA discussion ].
I've ridden 10s of thousands of miles and I'm here to say that a bicycle helmet is an absolute necessity, period. I've completely destroyed two helmets and scraped several more. I once scraped right through the plastic cover of a helmet and well into the insulation. If I hadn't been wearing it my scalp, hair, and a decent chunk of skull would have been left behind on the road.
Yes, you do. It's a matter of when, not if. Every cyclist wrecks, and some wrecks you land on your head. Why would you not want to protect your head?
On this we agree: the government should stay the fuck out of decisions that affect only my own health. Anyone above the age of consent should be able to ride anything with as much or as little safety equipment as they desire, as long as no one else is at risk of harm. Mandatory helmet laws are like anything else the government does "for your own good:" dangerous.
"Right! God, if only that war on drugs hadn't been so effective! I could really use some fucking marijuana now!" :)
I think that people gamble because they're addicted, stupid, or drunk. Often a combination. All three of those states are notoriously impervious to math, especially statistics.
And besides, what "slim" edge? There's no edge -- anything that gives a player an edge is called "cheating" by the casinos. If there were a reliable way to exploit any "edge" in a casino it would go out of business in a week.*
*And yes, I've read all the stories about people with fiendishly complicated systems who do actually make shitloads of money, but not only is this very difficult in the first place, it's getting harder. The complexity of the exception proves the rule in this case.
Many people rag on this, but it actually made some sense at the time. Microsoft has removed it from later versions of Windows for convenience, not security, purposes.
For people who don't know, WIndows NT 4 (and perhaps 3.5 and earlier?) required one to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to get a login prompt. Many people complained, not seeing the logic in it, but logic there is.
CTRL-ALT-DEL is can never, ever be trapped by an application -- unless Windows has hosed completely, it's guaranteed to get the OS's attention. Having to hit it to get a login box means that no other application can fake a login box. If they tried, CTRL-ALT-DEL would bring up the task manager instead of a login dialog.
So regardless of whether you like it, the minor annoyance served a good purpose and was actually a fairly clever design decision. Much smarter than, oh, allowing macro viruses to execute by default.
The bunny ... the bunny ... oooh, I love the bunny ...
For years I had uncanny aim in Quake2-engine games. I got kicked from servers a few times 'cause people thought I was a bot (just to note that pro players, or anyone at that level, is light years beyond my skill, now or ever, so I'm not bragging especially).
People asked how I did it, and it was simple. I'd start Quake 2 single-player on 'Nightmare' and use one cheat code to get the railgun and bind another key to give me railgun ammo. Then I disabled weapon switching. Every shot and every kill I made in the game was with the railgun. It was surprisingly hard. Do that a few times and your aim will improve, too.
My point is that this is one of the many uses that I bet id never imagined for cheat codes. Using them to get eternal life is kinda lame, but using them to create new and different challenges can be quite cool.
- Intel caught him and told him to stop. He continued.
- He actually used some of the passwords to login, although he didn't change or grab any data.
- None of this was directy related to performance of his duties as a contractor.
I think Intel was merciful the first time, cause they could have nailed him then. The end result is awfully harsh and all out-of-proportion to the harm caused, however he was by his own admission doing something illegal that he'd been warned not to do.This case is similar. Yes, the prison sentence is crazy for the crime, however what this guy did was stupid. He was clearly going after the reputation of his former employer: if he'd been motivated only by the good of the customer, he would have sent the email while on the job. Also, he could have just warned folks without publishing exploit details.
This is a problem many geeks have -- getting nailed for doing something technically correct but socially unnacceptable. Most of the rules that run the world aren't written down and never will be. You can be technically correct and still wrong wrong wrong.
Besides, $
Actually I have done it -- it's what I do for a living. And it's trivial. If you weren't an AC, I'd tell you how :)
You're on crack, and I can prove it
Here's a simple example. Go check out Slashcode.com, and look at the cute little boxes on the left and right sides of the page. The HTML necessary to generate those boxes with a TABLE layout and no CSS is so long and convoluted I can't even post it because of the lameness filter. It's 30 lines long, 1700 characters not including content, and contains 55 HTML tags. That's not ecen the worst news, which is that all that shitty markup has to be downloaded once for each table -- 9 times for slashcode.com.
Following is the HTML necessary to generate the identical box using only CSS:
You need to specifiy some CSS rules for formatting. They might look like this, and you'd specifiy it once in a global style sheet that your browser will cache:Summary: you're on crack, and I just proved it. CSS is dramatically less markup-intense than tables and font tags.Simple ADHD test: "In chapter 7, what kind of car did Gatsby drive?"
I've used nothing but Debian for years and I've only had dependency issues in two situations:
- First install on a new system, when apt is still trying to get a working base config.
- Installing packages from unstable, which is always caveat emptor.
Not that apt is perfect or anything - some people will happily tell you it shits roses, which ain't the case. But I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to manually mung a package or any other files apt controls. Files which control apt - sources.list and whatnot - I do change every now and then, but mostly as mirrors appear and disappear.Not that it doesn't have a bit of a learning curve. Apt sometimes isn't smart enough to figure things out on its own and needs intervention. But in those cases you can nearly always use apt's (or dpkg's) public interface to solve its own problems.
So
If you want to make sure your hijacking works fly around innocently as "Sam bin Laden" for a few months, get your name on all the "Fly lists," and then hijack a plane.
This isn't a flame or a troll, just an honest question: what's the BFD about these tags? They'd be a privacy concern to me if they had a long range, or couldn't be removed, turned off, or killed. But AFAIK none of that is true -- they have a very short range, they can easily be removed if you find them, they probably can be disabled remotely, and they can certainly be killed by EMP or something similar.
For everyone else in the supply chain the benfits are almost incredible: automatic inventory tracking among them. I worked in an auto parts warehouse during school, and a system like this would have saved them an unreal amount of money.
The worst thing about them is their potential, I think. I dread the thought of devices of this type implanted in infants at birth. But that's a pretty far-out slippery slope argument, and a very different issue.
So tell me -- for real -- what's the privacy issue here?
Pair Networks rocks my world. Uber-reliable, great support, cheap. They run FreeBSD and host their own CPAN mirror (they also host Perlmonks, Tom's Hardware, lots of other big sites). I've used them for years for everything from cheap-o FTP-only accounts ($6/month) to dedicated servers ($300/month).
[ pause for effect ]