... is the interactive fiction equivalent of Cage's 4'33", and is still the subject of controversy in the community. It's worth trying, and it will only take five minutes out of your day (but stimulate a lifetime of contemplation) (well, maybe not).
7. Text Adventure They didn't die: they evolved! quite long ago they became graphic adventures.
That's like saying "Books became movies." Text and graphic adventures are very different. Well, maybe only if you're a nerdy fanboy like me, but still.
In fact, Germany declared war on the US. As misjudgements go, that was a bit of a biggie, though it may not have made much difference in the end.
There are a scary number of parallels between Saddam Hussein of today, and Hitler of the 1930s.
People keep saying this, but apart from the stupid moustaches I can't see any. You seem to have some vague idea that there was apeasement going on in the 30s (unlike what's happened in Iraq for the last ten years), and that they were both evil dictators with black hats and maniacal laughter; but really, the situations are completely different.
I have now. I'm surprised to hear that the only options for XML parsing are callbacks and full tree creation. Even if you don't use Ada, you might find the XML Ada stuff interesting, and it looks like an easy paradigm to convert to the OO language du jour.
there's something human-friendlier about XML than LISP.
It's that parenthecitis thing again. I can see that, but it seems that XML is being used for a lot of things that are read and written only by machines. Save formats, for example.
Re:did this author start nothing.net?
on
Imagining Numbers
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I wish I had nothing that could make me a lot of money as well.
I've used XML Ada successfully, and it uses inheritance instead of callbacks. Maybe that would irritate him less.
It's not always practical to build a tree in-memory.
I'm not sure what that means. At some point you have to grab the information you want, and that may or may not mean building a tree. But it's up to the programmer. The last time I parsed a big XML file was to convert the public Cyc knowledge base into a different format, no tree required.
I'm still not sure what advantage XML has over Lisp. I'm near certain that the hype and giddiness is overdone.
Now I shall demonstrate why Ada is a better choice for this sort of thing.
In this bit of documentation, it is suggested that you get better code by putting an extra cast into an expression which keeps everything nicely eight bitted. The C language definition AFAIK requires that the compiler behave in this (odd) way.
The Ada equivalent is this:
A : Octet; ...
if (A and 15) = 0 then
You don't have to remember to cast, and it's all 8 bit. Ha!
In the future, all new Commodore 64 software will be written in Ada:-)
The real instructions only used up about a third or so of the available opcodes, and while most of the rest simply froze the processor, there were others that had interesting and predictable effects, and were in fact used by some of the C64 games. See this for the exciting low down.
So, I've been writing a 6502 Ada compiler just for the heck of it, and it's much more fun than targeting these new-fangled, regular instruction sets. Clearing space on the stack is great. The fastest way to do it depends on how much space you need; with one or two bytes, a couple of PHPs, three to six or so and you transfer SP to X, decrement the appropriate number of times, then send X back to SP. More than sixish, and you should TSX, TXA, SBC, TAX, TSX.
You'd be astounded at the machinations required for addressing variables on the stack, and mortified at the way a simple CMP instruction has the arrogance to affect the overflow bit. Unfortunately, this comment is to small to go into it.
Is it too good to be true? That is pretty much the only thing you need to check.
My computer is powered by a chip that has a clock speed 1,500 times greater than the one I owned in 1982, and there's over 4,000 times as much memory; yet it cost about the same.
Is that too good to be true or what?
Mind you, it didn't come with a television output.
Re:TEST before your POST
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 1
You're thinking of the colon, which separates statements in Basic. The semicolon tells the print statement not to leave a gap between two fields.
Also, the variable 'I' would almost certainly be floating point, so you wouldn't overrun it.
You may well have been having a bit of a troll, but you were marked as informative, so here I am, clearing up misconceptions about ancient programming languages. What a life I lead!
Why should we legalize yet another potentially very dangerous [bbc.co.uk] drug?
People can't be trusted to make their own decisions about these things? Are we going to ban unhealthy food as well?
Drug production and distribution is in the hands of criminals. High prices lead addicts to crime. Lack of quality control leads to deaths. And this is all so we can be protected from danger? Bah.
There's evidently an australian children's show called "Bananas in Pajamas," which has some rather nightmarish [angelfire.com] homoerotic(?) overtones.
You're not kidding; in fact the theme song goes "Bananas in pajamas are coming down the stairs."
This finally proves the assertion that the reason for the ban on in-flight electronics was to protect Airfone and in-flight movies from competition and had nothing to do with RF interference.
Uh, how much revenue to airlines make from in-flight movies? I mean, how does competition even enter into the equation?
As for the phone thing, bah. The revenue stream must be tiny; I've never seen anybody use one except me, and it wasn't that expensive.
Oh, don't mind me. Too late at night, very long day, yada yada. Sorry about the "sad" comment.
I missed the bit about virtual meetings though. That does seem pretty dumb. Well, unless I get an avatar with great clothes and a better hairstyle. Then I wouldn't mind.
You are so sad. I bet when DVDs first appeared you whined about how you couldn't record anything on them. If you'd been around at Kitty Hawk you would have yelled something about eight minutes in the air being completely useless to anybody.
The interface is shit because it's tricky to type a transcript of conversations? Do you really believe what you're saying?
This is the most staggeringly ridiculous thing I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Just joined, eh? Don't worry, you'll see a bunch of things that are even more staggeringly ridiculous by bedtime.
A bunch of kids in their basement spouting how the world could be free because to justify whatever it is they do.
I have a third floor apartment. But anyway, it's clear to me that artificial protections on something as easy to duplicate as digital media are the Custer's last stand of the industries involved. To me, it's not about whether it's right or wrong, it's about the unsustainable business model.
I don't use P2P myself, and I don't really have an opinion on the ethics of it all; but it's reality. Whining about it won't change anything.
Perhaps you missed the whole "prevalent argument" conditional put on that?
Nope, but you used so many words to make your point that my clipboard got tired and I couldn't paste it.
the majority of Slashdotters will in one story...
Actually, you got me there. The majority could be saying any old thing, but my threshold is +3, so what's going on in the bowels of Slashdot passes me right by. Which means I'm huddled in Slashdot's appendix by the way.
Firstly let me get the de rigueur insult in here: You suck eggs and your mother wears army boots! Save the insults for the next girl guides meeting moron because they just case you for the savage that you are.
Oh wait, I have bills to pay! Excuse me if I'm greedy and want to be paid for my work.
Then find a line of work that pays the bills. If the existence of file sharing technology prevents a business from making money off recorded music and/or software, it's not the network that's the problem. It's the business plan.
Musicians used to make all their money from performances. Technology created a new revenue stream, and new technology might be killing it off again. This is not fundamentally a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
... is the interactive fiction equivalent of Cage's 4'33", and is still the subject of controversy in the community. It's worth trying, and it will only take five minutes out of your day (but stimulate a lifetime of contemplation) (well, maybe not).
Here's the link in case you missed it.
7. Text Adventure
They didn't die: they evolved! quite long ago they became graphic adventures.
That's like saying "Books became movies." Text and graphic adventures are very different. Well, maybe only if you're a nerdy fanboy like me, but still.
During WW2, we basically declared war on Hitler.
In fact, Germany declared war on the US. As misjudgements go, that was a bit of a biggie, though it may not have made much difference in the end.
There are a scary number of parallels between Saddam Hussein of today, and Hitler of the 1930s.
People keep saying this, but apart from the stupid moustaches I can't see any. You seem to have some vague idea that there was apeasement going on in the 30s (unlike what's happened in Iraq for the last ten years), and that they were both evil dictators with black hats and maniacal laughter; but really, the situations are completely different.
Sorry, I guess I could have been clearer.
Ha. I could have read the article.
I have now. I'm surprised to hear that the only options for XML parsing are callbacks and full tree creation. Even if you don't use Ada, you might find the XML Ada stuff interesting, and it looks like an easy paradigm to convert to the OO language du jour.
there's something human-friendlier about XML than LISP.
It's that parenthecitis thing again. I can see that, but it seems that XML is being used for a lot of things that are read and written only by machines. Save formats, for example.
I wish I had nothing that could make me a lot of money as well.
Dot com, we miss you already.
Callbacks irritate him.
I've used XML Ada successfully, and it uses inheritance instead of callbacks. Maybe that would irritate him less.
It's not always practical to build a tree in-memory.
I'm not sure what that means. At some point you have to grab the information you want, and that may or may not mean building a tree. But it's up to the programmer. The last time I parsed a big XML file was to convert the public Cyc knowledge base into a different format, no tree required.
I'm still not sure what advantage XML has over Lisp. I'm near certain that the hype and giddiness is overdone.
See also www.cc65.org
...
:-)
Now I shall demonstrate why Ada is a better choice for this sort of thing.
In this bit of documentation, it is suggested that you get better code by putting an extra cast into an expression which keeps everything nicely eight bitted. The C language definition AFAIK requires that the compiler behave in this (odd) way.
The Ada equivalent is this:
A : Octet;
if (A and 15) = 0 then
You don't have to remember to cast, and it's all 8 bit. Ha!
In the future, all new Commodore 64 software will be written in Ada
The real instructions only used up about a third or so of the available opcodes, and while most of the rest simply froze the processor, there were others that had interesting and predictable effects, and were in fact used by some of the C64 games. See this for the exciting low down.
....
So, I've been writing a 6502 Ada compiler just for the heck of it, and it's much more fun than targeting these new-fangled, regular instruction sets. Clearing space on the stack is great. The fastest way to do it depends on how much space you need; with one or two bytes, a couple of PHPs, three to six or so and you transfer SP to X, decrement the appropriate number of times, then send X back to SP. More than sixish, and you should TSX, TXA, SBC, TAX, TSX.
You'd be astounded at the machinations required for addressing variables on the stack, and mortified at the way a simple CMP instruction has the arrogance to affect the overflow bit. Unfortunately, this comment is to small to go into it.
Meeeeeemmmoooorrrrriiiiieeeeeeeeeees
Piracy might fund terrorists, but Hollywood is where they get their bombs from.
I think you're trying to say something, but I keep missing it, because the SLEDGEHAMMER YOU'RE MAKING YOUR POINT WITH HAS LEFT ME UNCONSCIOUS.
Is it too good to be true? That is pretty much the only thing you need to check.
My computer is powered by a chip that has a clock speed 1,500 times greater than the one I owned in 1982, and there's over 4,000 times as much memory; yet it cost about the same.
Is that too good to be true or what?
Mind you, it didn't come with a television output.
You're thinking of the colon, which separates statements in Basic. The semicolon tells the print statement not to leave a gap between two fields.
Also, the variable 'I' would almost certainly be floating point, so you wouldn't overrun it.
You may well have been having a bit of a troll, but you were marked as informative, so here I am, clearing up misconceptions about ancient programming languages. What a life I lead!
Why should we legalize yet another potentially very dangerous [bbc.co.uk] drug?
People can't be trusted to make their own decisions about these things? Are we going to ban unhealthy food as well?
Drug production and distribution is in the hands of criminals. High prices lead addicts to crime. Lack of quality control leads to deaths. And this is all so we can be protected from danger? Bah.
What? I can finally smoke a joint in the US without being arrested?
Why wasn't I told?
There's evidently an australian children's show called "Bananas in Pajamas," which has some rather nightmarish [angelfire.com] homoerotic(?) overtones.
You're not kidding; in fact the theme song goes "Bananas in pajamas are coming down the stairs."
Powerful fruit indeed.
This finally proves the assertion that the reason for the ban on in-flight electronics was to protect Airfone and in-flight movies from competition and had nothing to do with RF interference.
Uh, how much revenue to airlines make from in-flight movies? I mean, how does competition even enter into the equation?
As for the phone thing, bah. The revenue stream must be tiny; I've never seen anybody use one except me, and it wasn't that expensive.
Oh, don't mind me. Too late at night, very long day, yada yada. Sorry about the "sad" comment.
I missed the bit about virtual meetings though. That does seem pretty dumb. Well, unless I get an avatar with great clothes and a better hairstyle. Then I wouldn't mind.
You are so sad. I bet when DVDs first appeared you whined about how you couldn't record anything on them. If you'd been around at Kitty Hawk you would have yelled something about eight minutes in the air being completely useless to anybody.
The interface is shit because it's tricky to type a transcript of conversations? Do you really believe what you're saying?
Oh, wait, this is satire. Has to be.
I thought There didn't encourage player killing.
You forgot to put "un" before the word "convincingly."
You can change the charges in mid trial? Smells like BS. I can't quite place why. But it smells fowl.
I think the prosecution lawyer is just chicken!
But let's wait and see how well Jon ducks these new charges.
This is the most staggeringly ridiculous thing I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Just joined, eh? Don't worry, you'll see a bunch of things that are even more staggeringly ridiculous by bedtime.
A bunch of kids in their basement spouting how the world could be free because to justify whatever it is they do.
I have a third floor apartment. But anyway, it's clear to me that artificial protections on something as easy to duplicate as digital media are the Custer's last stand of the industries involved. To me, it's not about whether it's right or wrong, it's about the unsustainable business model.
I don't use P2P myself, and I don't really have an opinion on the ethics of it all; but it's reality. Whining about it won't change anything.
Hi honey! Did I strike a nerve?
...
Perhaps you missed the whole "prevalent argument" conditional put on that?
Nope, but you used so many words to make your point that my clipboard got tired and I couldn't paste it.
the majority of Slashdotters will in one story
Actually, you got me there. The majority could be saying any old thing, but my threshold is +3, so what's going on in the bowels of Slashdot passes me right by. Which means I'm huddled in Slashdot's appendix by the way.
Firstly let me get the de rigueur insult in here: You suck eggs and your mother wears army boots! Save the insults for the next girl guides meeting moron because they just case you for the savage that you are.
Mine was better.
xxx
Pick your prophecy people: If you claim in one post that Microsoft is doomed, then you must forever disagree with any claims that they are a monopoly.
Slashdot is not monolithic!
Sigh.
Retarded, irritating and whiney -- sure. You've proved that by combining a false dichotomy with a big flaming strawman. Cheers.
Oh wait, I have bills to pay! Excuse me if I'm greedy and want to be paid for my work.
Then find a line of work that pays the bills. If the existence of file sharing technology prevents a business from making money off recorded music and/or software, it's not the network that's the problem. It's the business plan.
Musicians used to make all their money from performances. Technology created a new revenue stream, and new technology might be killing it off again. This is not fundamentally a bad thing.