Yeah, I acknowledge it. And hey, apparently Adams' company was worth multi-million dollars, so he must have done something right.
I guess you can compare the Adams family (no pun intended) to the Williams family. King's Quest I had the same ripped-from-childhood-stories cottage feel to it. The gameplay although buggy was just too darned cute to ignore, even when parts of it were totally irritating and nonsensical.
By contrast, Infocom was a hive of super-analytic, formally educated engineers who matured into/hired very creative storytellers; for example, A Mind Forever Voyaging; Trinity; or Suspended.
And of course both companies are now just faded memories while Microsoft still draws blood like an engorged tick, and EA has gone from visionary publisher to shambling slaver zombie. So it goes.
Good call about Infocom's updated parser. I hadn't considered that. Adams also wrote for tighter restrictions, such as the VIC-20. His later games were from the early 80s though, so I feel justified in calling Infocom a contemporary. Just in a totally different league (not necessarily in a bad way).
I use nethack-gnome (which is full of bugs, but that's beside the point). There's a keystroke for identify object (I think it's "/"). Not a big deal.
Agreed with the 3d tilesets; that's just too much. But ASCII is just too minimal for me.
regarding the genocide note below: It would be better if they added a notice for the genus of a monster ("This is a kobold (k)"), but I've learned the letters from wikihack anyway.
Cool! Like I said, the solutions aren't exactly logical, so no matter how smart/good you are at Infocom-type adventures (and I'm not), it'll probably take you a while, due to trial-and-error and "wtf?"-moments.
I'd start with either The Count or Voodoo Castle since they're a little more sophisticated/coherent than Adventureland. And feel free to have a walkthrough at hand. Seriously though, it's mostly nostalgia at this point. Infocom has aged well - Scott Adams not so much.
Although utterly mediocre (at best) by comparison with the work of his contemporary Infocom, Scott Adams' adventure games, complete with typos, tacky jokes/puns, outright bugs, and illogical "solutions", were endearing in their own way.
Spent quite some time playing Adventureland; Voodoo Castle (with the periodically exploding test tubes which you needed to wear a suit of armor to carry); and The Count on a VIC-20 with and without my family as a child, and I have many fond memories.
> smoke cigarette OK. There's a coughin (sic) in the room. > open coffin
Um, yes. As you yourself said, "badly designed machines" are not meant to be run with the lid closed. Some laptops are badly designed. QED.
This is what the frontally-lobed call a tautology.
More seriously: many decent laptops were just not meant to run closed. This was more of a problem in the old days, but it was a problem even with iBooks, for one example. I don't think the iBook was a terrific design, but I think they were at least OK in general.
When I said I burned them out, I mean the motherboards failed from lack of venting. I was pretty stupid back then, and would 1) start a heavy number-crunching task on one and then 2) close it and put it out of the way on the corner of my desk. Also the thinkpad 600 wasn't a tablet.
Some laptops aren't designed to run with the lid closed. I burned out two (used) Thinkpad 600s this way (you can disable the auto-suspend but I later learned you really aren't supposed to:-/). It's probably different nowadays; the firmware will shut the machine down before damage occurs.
Still, if you've given up hope on fixing the lcd anyway, think about just disconnecting/severing the display cabling and sawing off the lid. It'll make the machine even lighter and thinner, and more convenient to use as long as you don't stack anything on it (which is not a good idea anyway).
They took money to publish, discreetly, something which appeared to be peer-reviewed research but wasn't (including steps to avoid academicians even noticing, such as not creating web/electronic access). It's corruption plain and simple. How the hell can you possibly think there's nothing morally wrong with this? You're either a troll, shill, or moron. There are no other possibilities, which one is it?
Most fans don't care about where their money goes; have no inclination to design artwork for you; and might be a little confused about why your app wants their credit card number.
It's still just not worth the risk to Apple. You're talking about enforcing a very vague and fine line, and what would they get out of it? The margin off 100k downloads a year? Even 500k? Or a million? Their download rate so far has been 1.3 billion per year. Although this has nowhere to go but down, it'd take a long time for mature games to be worth it.
iTunes has some songs tagged as adult content; I'm sure Spiral qualifies. On the other hand, the app store doesn't which explains this "paradox" up to first-order.
The obvious question is why the app store doesn't have an adult content section. The answer is pure politics; just calling something "adult software" (or even admitting you stock such things) has a stink of "low-art" about it: crude S&M games or masturbatory aids. On the other hand, "adult content" in music typically just means that you maybe don't want a 12 year old listening to it. Your adult friends typically wouldn't hide their NIN, but they'd hide their copy of rapelay.
And, an accurate label like "non-adult software containing/accessing music which would be labeled `adult content'" is too risky for Apple to feed its users, who might well just read it as "adult software". Sad but true: 90% would, left alone, ignore it; 5% would be in the niche; and (of course) 5% would raise holy hell about how Apple is going to start selling porn-games and rile up the 90%. It's more un-Apple than putting EQ levers or a microphone on an iPod; just icky and won't happen.
As a doctoral student in stats I'm glad to hear it.
Can never tell here on slashdot when people are being sarcastic. Or maybe it's that old joke: "Statisticians are people who are good with numbers, but didn't have the personality to be accountants..." Some people do just not "get" that cross-validation error doesn't work in all fields.
Unless it's one of those (many) models which is incomplete or unpredictable; is fancy enough to get people riled up; works well for a while; and then fails catastrophically.
Well, it'll still drive everyone else out of business... but...
Fast computers and good data aren't enough. Lenders and investors tend to be conservative (or at least they demand that from their quantitative models) and thus need strong, trustworthy error bounds. Whatever "calculation for each individual and then integrated" means, it doesn't seem very amenable to error bounds/variance estimates.
yeah. I can't get the intel integrated graphics to stop doing that, no matter what I do. To test it, I wrote an example code to use double buffer and do vsync. Amazingly, it just kept on tearing. Annoying.
For a while, there actually was a Ubuntu Christian Edition. It came with some Bible software and a custom gui for dansguardian (web filtering). And the standard brown ubuntu color scheme, except with an added Jesus.
Thoughtful movies have always been made and always will be made. Watchmen is just another instance, possibly a damaging one: its low attendance (sorry but it's true) renewed and justified studio policy for PG-13 superhero movies.
Anyway, good movies will keep sneaking under the radar now and then if you're looking for them. I remember seeing The Quiet American many years ago; it was near opening night, and there were about 10 other people in the theatre.
"Hallelujah" was too generic for a love scene with masked heroes. They missed a chance to use a truly weird song which would have, nonetheless, fit the scene perfectly with a little editing: the Aphex Twin remix of David Bowie's "Heroes".
You couldn't write a song with more appropriate lyrics, and the disjointed and apocalyptic remix fits the movie perfectly.
I might look at it. I'm starting to read social theory in my old age. I'm still skeptical though, and starting out by referring to The Difference Engine doesn't do much to hook me.
I wonder how much of modern so-called Marxism, is actually social theory/cultural studies which happens to nucleate around the kernels of ideas Marx happened to spin out. Hmm.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I acknowledge it. And hey, apparently Adams' company was worth multi-million dollars, so he must have done something right.
I guess you can compare the Adams family (no pun intended) to the Williams family. King's Quest I had the same ripped-from-childhood-stories cottage feel to it. The gameplay although buggy was just too darned cute to ignore, even when parts of it were totally irritating and nonsensical.
By contrast, Infocom was a hive of super-analytic, formally educated engineers who matured into/hired very creative storytellers; for example, A Mind Forever Voyaging; Trinity; or Suspended.
And of course both companies are now just faded memories while Microsoft still draws blood like an engorged tick, and EA has gone from visionary publisher to shambling slaver zombie. So it goes.
Good call about Infocom's updated parser. I hadn't considered that. Adams also wrote for tighter restrictions, such as the VIC-20. His later games were from the early 80s though, so I feel justified in calling Infocom a contemporary. Just in a totally different league (not necessarily in a bad way).
I use nethack-gnome (which is full of bugs, but that's beside the point). There's a keystroke for identify object (I think it's "/"). Not a big deal.
Agreed with the 3d tilesets; that's just too much. But ASCII is just too minimal for me.
regarding the genocide note below: It would be better if they added a notice for the genus of a monster ("This is a kobold (k)"), but I've learned the letters from wikihack anyway.
Cool! Like I said, the solutions aren't exactly logical, so no matter how smart/good you are at Infocom-type adventures (and I'm not), it'll probably take you a while, due to trial-and-error and "wtf?"-moments.
I'd start with either The Count or Voodoo Castle since they're a little more sophisticated/coherent than Adventureland. And feel free to have a walkthrough at hand. Seriously though, it's mostly nostalgia at this point. Infocom has aged well - Scott Adams not so much.
Although utterly mediocre (at best) by comparison with the work of his contemporary Infocom, Scott Adams' adventure games, complete with typos, tacky jokes/puns, outright bugs, and illogical "solutions", were endearing in their own way.
Spent quite some time playing Adventureland; Voodoo Castle (with the periodically exploding test tubes which you needed to wear a suit of armor to carry); and The Count on a VIC-20 with and without my family as a child, and I have many fond memories.
> smoke cigarette
OK. There's a coughin (sic) in the room.
> open coffin
Um, yes. As you yourself said, "badly designed machines" are not meant to be run with the lid closed. Some laptops are badly designed. QED.
This is what the frontally-lobed call a tautology.
More seriously: many decent laptops were just not meant to run closed. This was more of a problem in the old days, but it was a problem even with iBooks, for one example. I don't think the iBook was a terrific design, but I think they were at least OK in general.
When I said I burned them out, I mean the motherboards failed from lack of venting. I was pretty stupid back then, and would 1) start a heavy number-crunching task on one and then 2) close it and put it out of the way on the corner of my desk. Also the thinkpad 600 wasn't a tablet.
Some laptops aren't designed to run with the lid closed. I burned out two (used) Thinkpad 600s this way (you can disable the auto-suspend but I later learned you really aren't supposed to :-/). It's probably different nowadays; the firmware will shut the machine down before damage occurs.
Still, if you've given up hope on fixing the lcd anyway, think about just disconnecting/severing the display cabling and sawing off the lid. It'll make the machine even lighter and thinner, and more convenient to use as long as you don't stack anything on it (which is not a good idea anyway).
So moron it is. Thanks for clearing that up.
As many others have posted, publisher != printing house; especially a science publisher. HTH. HAND.
They took money to publish, discreetly, something which appeared to be peer-reviewed research but wasn't (including steps to avoid academicians even noticing, such as not creating web/electronic access). It's corruption plain and simple. How the hell can you possibly think there's nothing morally wrong with this? You're either a troll, shill, or moron. There are no other possibilities, which one is it?
That novelty band, Presidents of the United States of America, already has a streaming music app: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/02/bands-bypass-itunes-by-streaming-music-through-iphone-apps.ars
Most fans don't care about where their money goes; have no inclination to design artwork for you; and might be a little confused about why your app wants their credit card number.
It's still just not worth the risk to Apple. You're talking about enforcing a very vague and fine line, and what would they get out of it? The margin off 100k downloads a year? Even 500k? Or a million? Their download rate so far has been 1.3 billion per year. Although this has nowhere to go but down, it'd take a long time for mature games to be worth it.
iTunes has some songs tagged as adult content; I'm sure Spiral qualifies. On the other hand, the app store doesn't which explains this "paradox" up to first-order.
The obvious question is why the app store doesn't have an adult content section. The answer is pure politics; just calling something "adult software" (or even admitting you stock such things) has a stink of "low-art" about it: crude S&M games or masturbatory aids. On the other hand, "adult content" in music typically just means that you maybe don't want a 12 year old listening to it. Your adult friends typically wouldn't hide their NIN, but they'd hide their copy of rapelay.
And, an accurate label like "non-adult software containing/accessing music which would be labeled `adult content'" is too risky for Apple to feed its users, who might well just read it as "adult software". Sad but true: 90% would, left alone, ignore it; 5% would be in the niche; and (of course) 5% would raise holy hell about how Apple is going to start selling porn-games and rile up the 90%. It's more un-Apple than putting EQ levers or a microphone on an iPod; just icky and won't happen.
That episode was re-done in 2009 terms:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uxTpyCdriY
As a doctoral student in stats I'm glad to hear it.
Can never tell here on slashdot when people are being sarcastic. Or maybe it's that old joke: "Statisticians are people who are good with numbers, but didn't have the personality to be accountants..." Some people do just not "get" that cross-validation error doesn't work in all fields.
Unless it's one of those (many) models which is incomplete or unpredictable; is fancy enough to get people riled up; works well for a while; and then fails catastrophically.
Well, it'll still drive everyone else out of business... but...
Fast computers and good data aren't enough. Lenders and investors tend to be conservative (or at least they demand that from their quantitative models) and thus need strong, trustworthy error bounds. Whatever "calculation for each individual and then integrated" means, it doesn't seem very amenable to error bounds/variance estimates.
yeah. I can't get the intel integrated graphics to stop doing that, no matter what I do. To test it, I wrote an example code to use double buffer and do vsync. Amazingly, it just kept on tearing. Annoying.
For a while, there actually was a Ubuntu Christian Edition. It came with some Bible software and a custom gui for dansguardian (web filtering). And the standard brown ubuntu color scheme, except with an added Jesus.
http://ubuntuce.com/screenshots.htm
Looks like they ran out of steam though, and decided instead to focus on a Jesus/youtube mashup: thejesustv.com
Weird. Worked for me, but that's actually a bad thing. This kind of inconsistency is sort of disturbing.
I keep an old kernel around for when I need to use my old version of Matlab; the newer ones cause it to crash early and often.
Eh, I can understand that it's not everyone's cup of tea. It's beautiful to me, even though James admits he did it in "a few hours".
Thoughtful movies have always been made and always will be made. Watchmen is just another instance, possibly a damaging one: its low attendance (sorry but it's true) renewed and justified studio policy for PG-13 superhero movies.
Anyway, good movies will keep sneaking under the radar now and then if you're looking for them. I remember seeing The Quiet American many years ago; it was near opening night, and there were about 10 other people in the theatre.
"Hallelujah" was too generic for a love scene with masked heroes. They missed a chance to use a truly weird song which would have, nonetheless, fit the scene perfectly with a little editing: the Aphex Twin remix of David Bowie's "Heroes".
You couldn't write a song with more appropriate lyrics, and the disjointed and apocalyptic remix fits the movie perfectly.
What went wrong with the linux acroread? I use it on ubuntu 8.04 with no problems except for no encryption, which hasn't been a problem yet.
I might look at it. I'm starting to read social theory in my old age. I'm still skeptical though, and starting out by referring to The Difference Engine doesn't do much to hook me.
I wonder how much of modern so-called Marxism, is actually social theory/cultural studies which happens to nucleate around the kernels of ideas Marx happened to spin out. Hmm.
If you're in New York and worried about $2k/year, it's time to move somewhere else.
Seriously.
I can only assume that less strenuous places are cheaper.