Anyway, regardless of the JVM, applets are only applets. Its security model prevents it from doing anything useful than pretty animation and fancy UIs. But for fancy UIs, we have Flash, which is definitely faster and easier to program. I think the primary interest here is "server side Java", doing heavy lifting business applications. Currently Java/J2EE is in a competition with.Net... in a race that has strong parallels with and implications for Unix/Linux vs Windows on the server side.
This memo makes me a bit nervous. Right now, I'm a Java/Perl guy professionally, and this is horrendous publicity for Java, and could pontentially tarnish Unix as well, since Java is so popular for business apps there.
(Applets seem to have kind of fallen by the wayside, though they seem to show up in more places than you'd expect...I can't do applets at work, it pops up a message about the firewall config, and I see that dialog a heck of a lot.)
For all the publicity it gets, and tons of anecdotes that slammer really threw some places for a loop, it does seem that the system is pretty robust.
But OFFLINE BACKUPS seem to be more and more of a must. Slammer didn't have much of a payload, but something like this could, and any system your responsible for had better have plans...
That's not the speculation. What speculation there is is that a group, seeking to kill the first Israeli in space may have done something. Shooting it down is out of the question, but sabotage is a possibility (though I strongly doubt it).
Maybe it was an "act of god" - er, Allah. Expressing his opinion on the Palistean conflict. (That's how it's going to be spun...man, this is a PR holiday for the extemists...I can hear it now "Let the american hear this message, of what happens when you get involved with Israel".)
Earlier this week NPR was saying how this this was good for the current government of Israel, how it was kind of a "adventurous sense of normalcy". Guess this blows that to hell, no pun intended.
Dion McGregor was like that guy who narrates his dream about the bowl ("Quit using the goddamn bowl for banging like that", from the front page of the article) and his flatmate recorded his amazing, bawdy, crazy dreams. I just bought the second CD (I don't think the first is available.) Amazing stuff. That link has some cool stuff and samples.
The Gamecube controller and the Virtual Boy controller look extremely similar... I wonder how they jumped to the bizarre claw-like design of the N64 controller...
Eh, I think they weren't sure about how to handle the reintroduction of the analog stick, so they came up with the "dual mode" claw, where you could hold it for the middle stick, or on the edges to just use the control pad.
What I find really interesting is the back and forth between Sony and Nintendo (and a bit with Sega and X-box) (who started collaborating on the playstation as an add-on to the SNES, remember)...
SNES: introduced shoulder buttons and "2nd cross pad" layout for regular buttons
PSX: totally ripped off the SNES. Replaced the 1st cross pad with buttons (a mistake IMHO), added another set of shoulder buttons (I'm also unsure about the wisdom of that, I think it might be too many under-differentiated buttons) Also started making the edges more grabble, probably because of all the shoulder buttons.
N64: The biggest innovation in controllers in a decade was the reintroduction of the analog stick, along with reintroducing 4 controller ports w.o. a multitap. The claw design was a bit strange. Oh, and the rumblepack was clever.
Sega: googling things up, the original controller was really blah, though the Nights controller seems to have been a transitional design, cribbing the analog controller from the N64, and then leading to the outline of the DC controller....which had the *brilliant* and underused VMU. If only the gameboy pad on it had been a bit better, and the batteries not so weird. Cool idea. Oh, and is this where big analog triggers got their start?
PSX Dualshock: saw N64 had a good idea with analog sticks, and applied it twice and included the rumble idea. A decent stick, though not all that comfortable. (IMO)
X-box: direct ripoff of the DC, minus the VMU. And for people with Huuuuuge hands
Game Cube: seems like Nintendo finally turned the tables and returned to the simpler, more symmetrical design that Sony was pursuing. I think they do a much better job of differentiating the various buttons though, and it's super comfortable.
I wish 3DO would return to their BattleTanx platform...I'm jonesing for a 4 player tank game on a modern platform (WDL thundertanks sucks... there's a cool new PS2 sleeper hit called "Seek and Destroy" that you can get for $10 new, but it's not 4 players alas)
But anyway, I mostly wanted to say that calling the N64 a failure console is really stretching it. When you consider the number of amazing games for it, plus the fact that it actually sold pretty well... (not to mention all the other cool things it brought back, analog sticks and 4 controller ports...)
Re:guilty about killing "true AI badguys"?
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 1
The poor copy that gets mutilated can easily be deleted when you are finished and just restore from the backup. The AI won't know the difference.
Yes, which gets to the point if the backup is the "same" creature or not. You caused one creature to suffer, and then snuffed it out. Now is it just a "clone" you've reset to, or not?
Do I see an ethical or moral problem with this? No more than I see with bombing afghanistan or Iraq. The last time we bombed Iraq over a million deaths were caused. Real deaths, not AI, not artificial objects.
yeah, yeah, this philisophical naval gazing is a luxury we have, and not as important as real lives or political action. Ah well.
Explain how the US can claim to be a moral or ethical body. I blame not just the government for those deaths, but each and every American including myself, even though I have no power to stop the killing. Ignorance is not bliss.
Cool, then you can blame all Moslems for 9/11, and all Jews for Palestine, and all Christians for the Sexual Abuse by catholic priests.
Or maybe you can realize that you can't cast responsibility on the entirity arbitrary groups of your choosing.
playing a computer game, killing the bad guys or the innocent guys doesn't really matter, whatever gets them off.
hurting real people in the real world?
Duh. I wonder.
I still can't help think that you missed the point of "what if AIs become significantly human like that we have to worry about their wellbeing."
Re:guilty about killing "true AI badguys"?
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 1
OTOH it may be that the characters in the game are self aware in the sense that a player character in a MMORPG is. Ie it's not the character per se which is self aware, but the intelligence behind it. (So you'd essentially have AIs playing characters in games.) This is an interesting philisophical twist i hadn't thought of. With an easily duplicatable conciousness, perhaps you can make an end run around my original point by saying that killing an *instance* of a duplicatable intelligence is much less bad than wiping the basic AI out of existence (of course, if those 'instances' experienced learned and matured, we're back to square one...but if they could get their knowledge back to their root AI...well, I guess that's like the puppet scenario you suggested.)
I love this kind of consciousness philosophical BSing.
Re:guilty about killing "true AI badguys"?
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 1
Not as far as I can tell. I've been playing it obsessively for a couple of weeks now, and while it certainly allows you to be reprehensible in this manner, I haven't yet encountered any missions that actually encourage it. If anything, it tends to discourage it, since that's a good way to get the police chasing you.
Well, I'm thinking of one Vice City mission, assigned from a payphone, when you gotta kill someone's wife with your car...and they have her going "Oh My God!" and making other pleas.
In a lot of the "go kill that person" missions, there's *some* pretext of "that's a bad person"...though often only from the viewpoint of the person assigning the mission.
And a lot of people find the ability to provoke all kinds of destructive mayhem irrisistable...in fact, they try to get the cops to get after them. I guess it's arguable if that's the game "encouraging" it. Certainly "enabling".
And it's a hell of a lot of fun:-)
guilty about killing "true AI badguys"?
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
So right now, some people are a bit squeamish about a game like GTA:VC, because of how it sort of encourages killing lots of innocent virtual people.
But I don't think people are worried about killing the "AIs" for their own sake--the civillians are dumber than ants--but because they remind us of "real humans", and we don't want people to become casual about the lives of those.
But what if AI advances to the point where the enemy in the game is effectively self-aware? Works to defend its self-interest, understands the situation and its place in that, has an idea of the motivation of the human player and other ingame entities, etc etc....it's a long way off, but should we ever feel bad about killing 'em?
And if not, why not? Does the fact that these virtual people are likely to be trivially duplicatable inherently diminish their value as entities? (And if so, if someone could make a perfect copy of you right now, would you be more willing to get killed?)
(I think all these thought experiments are interesting, though less so if consciousness (as we commonly think of it) ends up being more or less the "benign user illusion" some materialist philosophers describe it as. But if we take that full viewpoint, we need new standards to base some of our concepts of right and wrong on.)
$15 per time consumer sees product in a tv ad???
on
Advergames
·
· Score: 1
Development costs for the games are as little as 99 cents for each time a product appears on the screen, less than the $15 per time a consumer sees a product in a television ad, said Joel Schlader, the executive in charge of Auburn Hills, Michigan-based Chrysler's computer-game effort.
$15 per time, per consumer? That seems like a lot. Anyone know how this kind of number is figured?
Re:is there anything that a markov matrix can't do
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 1
I recently rolled my own Markov chain generator in Perl...it was easier than I thought. I'd always wanted to feed one with the love poems from my community-based love poetry site... people thought Mark V. Shaney was a real guy, though they noticed he cribbed some phrases from their own work.
It's sometimes tough to find good raw input for Markov Chains, (tho not as tough as it was a decade ago...)-- my attempt to use the site's message board was hampered by the way every message starts with another user's username, the recepient of the message.
best quote of the article
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 1
"Software works best in its own environment so we always take the server." -- Marty Pichinson
A very pragmatic attitude reflecting an unfortunate truth. It can be very difficult to duplicate dev and production environments even when you have people to talk to who set it up in the first place...add in the mystery and history of Company X and you might really be in a bind.
Re:My predictions for the superbowl:
on
Superbowl XXXVII
·
· Score: 1
all i could think was "that monkey is bear chow"
Re:Congrats!
on
F'd Companies
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Wow, way to spell Schadenfreude right!
I think the guy takes that Schadenfreude thing way to far. Yes, a certain large percentage of dot coms were based on lousy ideas and served to fall by the wayside. But his website seems to take delight in reporting every business failure and layoff...even with good, old economy companies doing useful things and with decent ideas about keeping income greater than expenses.
I don't think of myself as a delicate flower, or particuarly easily offended, but this guy is really annoying. Maybe I'm bitter, living through two layoffs in two years, but still, the amusement he expresses in these events that really screw with people's lives doesn't make a good regular reading diet.
Needless to say, CDs came along and largely replaced the need for such things and you can now get free software that will break up work larger than a CD into volumes.
What is the best CD-R backup freeware that works with Windows? Almost everything I care about on my compuer (i.e. everything I'll want on my next computer that I can't grab off of the web) is in c:\data\ - around 10 gig in all, and it would be cool to have some archives of that...
That said, I'll own you any place, any time. I'm not kidding;
I don't doubt it. Here's my story: I can beat any of the women in my family in most videogames, but not the one that they really get into. (for my mom that includes 2600 versions of Burger Time, Pengo, Ms Pac Man, Missile Command, and then GB Tetris.) And that included Tetris Attack.
Well, my buddy and I also got into this game, his thoughtful combo-seeking play vs. my "speedbitch" technique, usually with me having a slight edge. We played for months and months. The songs and shouts started to drive my girlfriend (who still became my wife sometime during this all) nuts. And at the next family reunion...BAM! I was champion of the family, after previously being humiliated by all of them at seperate times.
So I was pretty psyched when I went to a classic video game show and saw they had a Pok.Puzzle League tourney. I knew I there'd likely be a few freaks there who could beat me, so I wouldn't be champion, but it would be interesting to see how I did...
I got clocked in the first round. By someone who got schooled in the second.
People can build up ungodly skills in this game. (And alas, my main competitor has given it up, citing carpal tunnel like reasons, so I'm unlikely to pursue my own skills much futher)
*THE* best game in the genre, at least for two players, is "Panel de Pon" aka "Tetris Attack" aka "Pokemon Puzzle League". This game has an amazing seesaw action two player, since the garbage blocks you send to your opponent can end up being used against you, allowing combos that will bring garbage blocks raining down on your own head.
EGM mentioned some upcoming mega-puzzle-compilation for GameCube, with 4 player versions of Tetris, Tetris Attack, Dr. Mario, etc...man, I am *so* there.
My contribution to the 'amazingly simple game' genre are game buttons, reasonably rich games each played entirely within a single CGI form grey pushbutton, as both controller and display. I still come back to these every once in a while, especially Dashteroids and Happy Eater.
I've always dreamed of a home port of Prop Cycle...kind of like N64 PilotWings that the guy mentioned. I like the idea of exploring, it seems like races are too dependent on wherever the computer decides to handicap you.
yeesh, why would I want to backlight all the gunk that gets trapped in my keybord over all the years? Why don't we just make it a blacklight so any mystery stains (like, you know, coffee) can glow?
And why manufacture a mod kit, why not just build a keyboard?
Has anyone seen Love in Hell online anywhere? I get one or two cartoons in it a month in Cleveland's "Funny Times" (delivered up to me in Boston) but I think it comes out weekly, so I'm missing a lot...
It's very time consuming to use logging-based debugging to examine complicated interrelationships in your code. If all you need to know is "What was the value of variable xyz at this point in the code?" then anything other than println's is probably overkill.
I'm not sure how I'd use a regular debugger to examine a complicated interrelationship, honestly. (which probably says something about my debuggerability (eww, that sounds gross)) Could you or someone come up with some example of the kind of view a good debugger provides, that moves beyond the "value of variable xyz", and would be helpful in seeing the relationship side? (This isn't a rhetorical point I'm trying to make, I'm just not smart enough to think of an example myself.)
Heh, javascript is where I really need those 'made it this far' messages, given its tendency to kind of quietly abort in some cases if there's a big error.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, regardless of the JVM, applets are only applets. Its security model prevents it from doing anything useful than pretty animation and fancy UIs. But for fancy UIs, we have Flash, which is definitely faster and easier to program. .Net ... in a race that has strong parallels with and implications for Unix/Linux vs Windows on the server side.
I think the primary interest here is "server side Java", doing heavy lifting business applications. Currently Java/J2EE is in a competition with
This memo makes me a bit nervous. Right now, I'm a Java/Perl guy professionally, and this is horrendous publicity for Java, and could pontentially tarnish Unix as well, since Java is so popular for business apps there.
(Applets seem to have kind of fallen by the wayside, though they seem to show up in more places than you'd expect...I can't do applets at work, it pops up a message about the firewall config, and I see that dialog a heck of a lot.)
2600 101. Albert from AtariAge has eventual plans to give it a permanent home there.
Good place to get a feel for the basics.
Death of the Internet! Film at 11!
For all the publicity it gets, and tons of anecdotes that slammer really threw some places for a loop, it does seem that the system is pretty robust.
But OFFLINE BACKUPS seem to be more and more of a must. Slammer didn't have much of a payload, but something like this could, and any system your responsible for had better have plans...
That's not the speculation. What speculation there is is that a group, seeking to kill the first Israeli in space may have done something. Shooting it down is out of the question, but sabotage is a possibility (though I strongly doubt it).
Maybe it was an "act of god" - er, Allah.
Expressing his opinion on the Palistean conflict.
(That's how it's going to be spun...man, this is a PR holiday for the extemists...I can hear it now "Let the american hear this message, of what happens when you get involved with Israel".)
Earlier this week NPR was saying how this this was good for the current government of Israel, how it was kind of a "adventurous sense of normalcy". Guess this blows that to hell, no pun intended.
Dion McGregor was like that guy who narrates his dream about the bowl ("Quit using the goddamn bowl for banging like that", from the front page of the article) and his flatmate recorded his amazing, bawdy, crazy dreams. I just bought the second CD (I don't think the first is available.) Amazing stuff. That link has some cool stuff and samples.
The Gamecube controller and the Virtual Boy controller look extremely similar... I wonder how they jumped to the bizarre claw-like design of the N64 controller...
Eh, I think they weren't sure about how to handle the reintroduction of the analog stick, so they came up with the "dual mode" claw, where you could hold it for the middle stick, or on the edges to just use the control pad.
What I find really interesting is the back and forth between Sony and Nintendo (and a bit with Sega and X-box) (who started collaborating on the playstation as an add-on to the SNES, remember)...
SNES: introduced shoulder buttons and "2nd cross pad" layout for regular buttons
PSX: totally ripped off the SNES. Replaced the 1st cross pad with buttons (a mistake IMHO), added another set of shoulder buttons (I'm also unsure about the wisdom of that, I think it might be too many under-differentiated buttons) Also started making the edges more grabble, probably because of all the shoulder buttons.
N64: The biggest innovation in controllers in a decade was the reintroduction of the analog stick, along with reintroducing 4 controller ports w.o. a multitap. The claw design was a bit strange. Oh, and the rumblepack was clever.
Sega: googling things up, the original controller was really blah, though the Nights controller seems to have been a transitional design, cribbing the analog controller from the N64, and then leading to the outline of the DC controller....which had the *brilliant* and underused VMU. If only the gameboy pad on it had been a bit better, and the batteries not so weird. Cool idea. Oh, and is this where big analog triggers got their start?
PSX Dualshock: saw N64 had a good idea with analog sticks, and applied it twice and included the rumble idea. A decent stick, though not all that comfortable. (IMO)
X-box: direct ripoff of the DC, minus the VMU. And for people with Huuuuuge hands
Game Cube: seems like Nintendo finally turned the tables and returned to the simpler, more symmetrical design that Sony was pursuing. I think they do a much better job of differentiating the various buttons though, and it's super comfortable.
I wish 3DO would return to their BattleTanx platform...I'm jonesing for a 4 player tank game on a modern platform (WDL thundertanks sucks... there's a cool new PS2 sleeper hit called "Seek and Destroy" that you can get for $10 new, but it's not 4 players alas)
But anyway, I mostly wanted to say that calling the N64 a failure console is really stretching it. When you consider the number of amazing games for it, plus the fact that it actually sold pretty well... (not to mention all the other cool things it brought back, analog sticks and 4 controller ports...)
The poor copy that gets mutilated can easily be deleted when you are finished and just restore from the backup. The AI won't know the difference.
Yes, which gets to the point if the backup is the "same" creature or not. You caused one creature to suffer, and then snuffed it out. Now is it just a "clone" you've reset to, or not?
Do I see an ethical or moral problem with this? No more than I see with bombing afghanistan or Iraq. The last time we bombed Iraq over a million deaths were caused. Real deaths, not AI, not artificial objects.
yeah, yeah, this philisophical naval gazing is a luxury we have, and not as important as real lives or political action. Ah well.
Explain how the US can claim to be a moral or ethical body. I blame not just the government for those deaths, but each and every American including myself, even though I have no power to stop the killing. Ignorance is not bliss.
Cool, then you can blame all Moslems for 9/11, and all Jews for Palestine, and all Christians for the Sexual Abuse by catholic priests.
Or maybe you can realize that you can't cast responsibility on the entirity arbitrary groups of your choosing.
playing a computer game, killing the bad guys or the innocent guys doesn't really matter, whatever gets them off.
hurting real people in the real world?
Duh. I wonder.
I still can't help think that you missed the point of "what if AIs become significantly human like that we have to worry about their wellbeing."
OTOH it may be that the characters in the game are self aware in the sense that a player character in a MMORPG is. Ie it's not the character per se which is self aware, but the intelligence behind it. (So you'd essentially have AIs playing characters in games.)
This is an interesting philisophical twist i hadn't thought of. With an easily duplicatable conciousness, perhaps you can make an end run around my original point by saying that killing an *instance* of a duplicatable intelligence is much less bad than wiping the basic AI out of existence (of course, if those 'instances' experienced learned and matured, we're back to square one...but if they could get their knowledge back to their root AI...well, I guess that's like the puppet scenario you suggested.)
I love this kind of consciousness philosophical BSing.
Not as far as I can tell. I've been playing it obsessively for a couple of weeks now, and while it certainly allows you to be reprehensible in this manner, I haven't yet encountered any missions that actually encourage it. If anything, it tends to discourage it, since that's a good way to get the police chasing you.
:-)
Well, I'm thinking of one Vice City mission, assigned from a payphone, when you gotta kill someone's wife with your car...and they have her going "Oh My God!" and making other pleas.
In a lot of the "go kill that person" missions, there's *some* pretext of "that's a bad person"...though often only from the viewpoint of the person assigning the mission.
And a lot of people find the ability to provoke all kinds of destructive mayhem irrisistable...in fact, they try to get the cops to get after them. I guess it's arguable if that's the game "encouraging" it. Certainly "enabling".
And it's a hell of a lot of fun
So right now, some people are a bit squeamish about a game like GTA:VC, because of how it sort of encourages killing lots of innocent virtual people.
But I don't think people are worried about killing the "AIs" for their own sake--the civillians are dumber than ants--but because they remind us of "real humans", and we don't want people to become casual about the lives of those.
But what if AI advances to the point where the enemy in the game is effectively self-aware? Works to defend its self-interest, understands the situation and its place in that, has an idea of the motivation of the human player and other ingame entities, etc etc....it's a long way off, but should we ever feel bad about killing 'em?
And if not, why not? Does the fact that these virtual people are likely to be trivially duplicatable inherently diminish their value as entities? (And if so, if someone could make a perfect copy of you right now, would you be more willing to get killed?)
(I think all these thought experiments are interesting, though less so if consciousness (as we commonly think of it) ends up being more or less the "benign user illusion" some materialist philosophers describe it as. But if we take that full viewpoint, we need new standards to base some of our concepts of right and wrong on.)
Development costs for the games are as little as 99 cents for each time a product appears on the screen, less than the $15 per time a consumer sees a product in a television ad, said Joel Schlader, the executive in charge of Auburn Hills, Michigan-based Chrysler's computer-game effort.
$15 per time, per consumer? That seems like a lot. Anyone know how this kind of number is figured?
I recently rolled my own Markov chain generator in Perl...it was easier than I thought. I'd always wanted to feed one with the love poems from my community-based love poetry site... people thought Mark V. Shaney was a real guy, though they noticed he cribbed some phrases from their own work.
It's sometimes tough to find good raw input for Markov Chains, (tho not as tough as it was a decade ago...)-- my attempt to use the site's message board was hampered by the way every message starts with another user's username, the recepient of the message.
"Software works best in its own environment so we always take the server." -- Marty Pichinson
A very pragmatic attitude reflecting an unfortunate truth. It can be very difficult to duplicate dev and production environments even when you have people to talk to who set it up in the first place...add in the mystery and history of Company X and you might really be in a bind.
all i could think was "that monkey is bear chow"
Wow, way to spell Schadenfreude right!
I think the guy takes that Schadenfreude thing way to far. Yes, a certain large percentage of dot coms were based on lousy ideas and served to fall by the wayside. But his website seems to take delight in reporting every business failure and layoff...even with good, old economy companies doing useful things and with decent ideas about keeping income greater than expenses.
I don't think of myself as a delicate flower, or particuarly easily offended, but this guy is really annoying. Maybe I'm bitter, living through two layoffs in two years, but still, the amusement he expresses in these events that really screw with people's lives doesn't make a good regular reading diet.
Needless to say, CDs came along and largely replaced the need for such things and you can now get free software that will break up work larger than a CD into volumes.
What is the best CD-R backup freeware that works with Windows? Almost everything I care about on my compuer (i.e. everything I'll want on my next computer that I can't grab off of the web) is in c:\data\ - around 10 gig in all, and it would be cool to have some archives of that...
That said, I'll own you any place, any time. I'm not kidding;
I don't doubt it.
Here's my story: I can beat any of the women in my family in most videogames, but not the one that they really get into. (for my mom that includes 2600 versions of Burger Time, Pengo, Ms Pac Man, Missile Command, and then GB Tetris.) And that included Tetris Attack.
Well, my buddy and I also got into this game, his thoughtful combo-seeking play vs. my "speedbitch" technique, usually with me having a slight edge. We played for months and months. The songs and shouts started to drive my girlfriend (who still became my wife sometime during this all) nuts. And at the next family reunion...BAM! I was champion of the family, after previously being humiliated by all of them at seperate times.
So I was pretty psyched when I went to a classic video game show and saw they had a Pok.Puzzle League tourney. I knew I there'd likely be a few freaks there who could beat me, so I wouldn't be champion, but it would be interesting to see how I did...
I got clocked in the first round. By someone who got schooled in the second.
People can build up ungodly skills in this game. (And alas, my main competitor has given it up, citing carpal tunnel like reasons, so I'm unlikely to pursue my own skills much futher)
*THE* best game in the genre, at least for two players, is "Panel de Pon" aka "Tetris Attack" aka "Pokemon Puzzle League". This game has an amazing seesaw action two player, since the garbage blocks you send to your opponent can end up being used against you, allowing combos that will bring garbage blocks raining down on your own head.
EGM mentioned some upcoming mega-puzzle-compilation for GameCube, with 4 player versions of Tetris, Tetris Attack, Dr. Mario, etc...man, I am *so* there.
My contribution to the 'amazingly simple game' genre are game buttons, reasonably rich games each played entirely within a single CGI form grey pushbutton, as both controller and display. I still come back to these every once in a while, especially Dashteroids and Happy Eater.
I've always dreamed of a home port of Prop Cycle...kind of like N64 PilotWings that the guy mentioned. I like the idea of exploring, it seems like races are too dependent on wherever the computer decides to handicap you.
yeesh, why would I want to backlight all the gunk that gets trapped in my keybord over all the years? Why don't we just make it a blacklight so any mystery stains (like, you know, coffee) can glow?
And why manufacture a mod kit, why not just build a keyboard?
Has anyone seen Love in Hell online anywhere? I get one or two cartoons in it a month in Cleveland's "Funny Times" (delivered up to me in Boston) but I think it comes out weekly, so I'm missing a lot...
It's very time consuming to use logging-based debugging to examine complicated interrelationships in your code. If all you need to know is "What was the value of variable xyz at this point in the code?" then anything other than println's is probably overkill.
I'm not sure how I'd use a regular debugger to examine a complicated interrelationship, honestly. (which probably says something about my debuggerability (eww, that sounds gross)) Could you or someone come up with some example of the kind of view a good debugger provides, that moves beyond the "value of variable xyz", and would be helpful in seeing the relationship side? (This isn't a rhetorical point I'm trying to make, I'm just not smart enough to think of an example myself.)
Heh, javascript is where I really need those 'made it this far' messages, given its tendency to kind of quietly abort in some cases if there's a big error.