I don't think anybody would complain if MS would have just released a completely new version.
Are you kidding? They would have complained louder than ever.
"You mean we have to upgrade to a whole new version to get the security fixes?! Microsoft should have fixed their current OSes!"
There's really no out for Microsoft. No matter what they did, people will complain. About the only thing they could have done differently is a more modular update, so companies could pick-and-choose updates, hopefully securing their systems as best as possible while keeping their old code running.
And even then you'd get people complaining that it was too complicated, they should just have released everything as one large patch...
EQ2 is a subscription game. They already have your credit card number. Why not set up a system to allow you to charge your preexisting credit card information for a pizza ingame?
Obviously you'd have to set it up so that the account holder can block this feature to prevent little Jimmy from charging a million pizzas to be delivered to the Lunanites, but it could still conceivably work. Oh, and people using game cards to play would be SOL, but - oh well.
Some people are just griefers in real life. You know the type online, I'm sure. Well, some people are simply like that in reality. They just like destroying things and making other people unhappy.
I think there was a good Calvin and Hobbes strip that kind of explains it, where Calvin explains that the best way to get rid of a bad mood is to give it to someone else.
Same basic idea - some people feel happy by making other people miserable.
I'd say it's closer to being able to sell your condo but management refusing to sell water, electricty, and phone service to the new owners unless they buy a brand new one. (Which will be available for purchase next Thursday. No, really, this time!)
Another fun bug was that it would flag "you're trying to run a script!" when I tried to edit a script. So the dialog would pop up ('cause my task bar is on the bottom, where it should be:P), and I'd say "yes, allow me to run the script" since I wanted to edit it.
And then it would run it, not edit it.
Turns out you can disable that "feature" by simply deleting the "ShellExecuteHook" found in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Explorer\ShellExecuteHooks (remove the space). It should be marked "AntiSpyware" or something like that. DO NOT DELETE THE KEY LISTED ABOVE. The key to delete to disable the "run a script" detection is one of the subkeys, but I can't remember which one, because I deleted it.:)
Apparently this hook also messes up domain scripts, so Windows administrators also might want to remove it if they find their logon scripts aren't being run.
Probably from MySQL's license page, which seems to be confused about how you can or can't distribute their database. Specifically:
Under the Open Source License, you must release the complete source code for the application that is built on MySQL.
...
Free use for those who never copy, modify or distribute. As long as you never distribute the MySQL Software in any way, you are free to use it for powering your application, irrespective of whether your application is under GPL license or not.
Obviously if your application only uses their database there's no reason it would need to be GPLed, since you're distributing two separate pieces of software.
However, there appears to be some sort of confusion when it comes to using the drivers, which are also under the GPL. I expect that no matter what MySQL says, if you're using JDBC or ODBC drivers than you don't need to GPL your application, since the linking doesn't occur until runtime and you never actually call any MySQL methods, just ODBC/JDBC methods. (Same for Perl's DBI, probably.) PHP's MySQL drivers are more questionable, because they're explicitly only for MySQL.
Basically, MySQL seems to want people to believe that you need to GPL your code if you so much as use their database. Otherwise, you'd need a license. That's BS - you aren't allowed to add restrictions to a GPLed product. And the GPL is pretty clear that your use of a product does not make you fall under the GPL.
Using the MySQL DB drivers in non-Open Source code, on the other hand... That's much more murky. Personally I believe that it's a non-issue in cases where your code uses a public interface like ODBC, JDBC, or Perl's DBI to access MySQL.
I don't know if they changed this after your post, but, this article is in the BSD section. I guess the Linux section overrides that because it was assigned there first?
Anyway, it is in both sections. This was a change made to Slashcode a while back, to allow an article to be "cross-section" if needed. This one is.
Uh, an automated install would just set up your system for you. The compiling part ("shit scroll by for hours") is all automated already.
Gentoo's "manual" install is basically paritioning and mounting the partitions you want to use and then extracting a giant tarball onto that structure. You then need to configure your fstab, network settings, compile a kernel, and install a bootloader.
Once you're done with that, then you move on to the automated part. The entire point to portage is to automate the compilation process.
You could, conceivably, manually install Debian or RedHat in the same way if you wanted to.
Re:What WOULD you call Google's approach?
on
Mapping Google Maps
·
· Score: 1
It's not quite AI, yet Google comes closer to realizing the fantasy of Isaac Asimov's Multivac than anything else I've experienced before. It's very weird: the impression that Google gives is that it does NOT understand your question, yet it DOES manage to find the answers you want.
Yeah, some of the answers are funny. I did a search for "anime" near my house, and discovered (as I basically already knew) that the closest places are in Boston. (And, no, that's not my house in the center. I actually panned and zoomed there 'cause I was playing with the map first.)
The fact that WPI, a college in Worcester, came back twice (once for an article on a parking ban as "Worcester City Of: Streets" and once for their Science Fiction Society as WPI: Massachusetts Academy) is kind of... freaky.
I seem to recall that Microsoft used to have a little icon of a speech balloon containing a ? that was used to activate the context sensative help, and that at some point it was moved to the title bar for no apparent reason. I guess that's why.
Yeah, it does sound almost exactly like that. Almost every dialog Microsoft makes uses it. (Although I suppose they could have licensed it or just disabled the feature in the Japanese version.)
Easiest way to demo this is to bring up the Desktop properties window. The little [?] will be in the righthand corner next to the X. You can also right click on most of the items to see a context menu with "What's This?" on it.
It's also used in Microsoft Office applications and IE. In fact, I can't really think of any application that uses it that Microsoft didn't write. (Well, it turns out Nero 6 does, but it forgets the "What's This?" context menu and shows the context help immediately on a right click.)
Can anyone find something that explains exactly what they're being sued over? Microsoft has made something very similar a part of the standard Windows dialog controls for quite a while now.
Yeah, I actually had traffic to my site spike by about a GB/month thanks to the MSNbot. I wound up blocking it from a vast chunk of my site while letting everything else through, since it managed to get caught up in a little loop on some dynamic page. (It was doing something so that it would increment a parameter on the query string, and wound up hitting the same page repeatedly many, many times.)
Microsoft may find that their search engine is less useful than others simply because they're banned from sites for overly-agressive spidering. They managed to increase traffic to my site 10 times with their bot alone. It's not a high-profile site. I was running happily at about 120MB/month, and MSNbot managed to jump that to about 1.2GB/month until I updated robots.txt to forbid it from anything dynamic.
Yes, you did. The figure gets mentioned once, at the very top, which "Steve" directly copied. "Steve" didn't write jack, Andrew Serros, the author the article, wrote that. Well, Steve added "Filefront uncovers the real trend and includes quotes from ESRB President Patricia Vance."
Based on the statistics given by the ESRB website (which are last year's, I can't find current), that 18% figure is by title. Unfortunately, I can't locate any updated statistics, so those figures are mostly meaningless.
Since there seem to be people confused: it's purely a bug with Gecko. It's not a bug with Slashdot's HTML. Slashdot's HTML is fine[1].
The problem is hard to demonstrate, because it's a timing issue. In order for it to trigger, you need to have downloaded enough of the page to have received only the left column, but not the content column, when the browser does an initial layout. Gecko lays out the column and makes it as wide as the page, because that's what the HTML to that point says to do.[2]
After that, it starts getting the content. Depending on exactly how you trigger the bug, two things can happen. One; it can not resize the left column's width properly, making the column take up the entire page. (Strangely enough, it gets the scrolling information correct, so you can't scroll horizontally to see the content you're missing.) Two; it can layout the column so that the width it uses when laying out the content column is too narrow, making the two overlap in the final rendering.
Basically, it's a real bug in Gecko. It happens to be triggered by Slashdot's crappy HTML, but it really is a bug in the incremental layout engine.
[1] Well, no, it isn't - it's written in such a way that it triggers the bug. But it's fine in the sense that what's wrong with it shouldn't cause the problem. Slashdot's HTML is bad enough that Slashdot 403s connections from the W3C HTML validator.
[2] It's this "column resizes wildly during incremental layout" that sort of makes this Slashdot's problem. If they specified the width exactly instead of relying on the browser to implicitly shrink the column to the width you're used to, you wouldn't see this bug.
Why would anyone in their right mind buy a DVD player when they can play DVDs on thier computer? Think about that for a while and see if you can understand why some people like video game consoles better than PCs.
The shortest answer is that I like being able to just dump the game into the console, hit power, and start playing. There's a whole lot more to do if you want to use your computer as a gaming machine than that, and there always will be because I want my computer to be a computer too.
(Says the guy with the PS2 hooked up through his computer. But, hey.)
Most people here seemed to be approaching it from the "programming" angle, and not the "create something useful" angle.
I don't think Flash is the right place to start if he really wants to learn how to program games. If he wants to design a game, then Flash is an excellent place to start.
To be honest, the first thing you need to learn when writing a game is how to program first. I created a simple Asteriods game ages ago (in Java 1.0, in about a month:P), but it was before I understood the concept of a linked list, so all the "objects" in the game world wound up being in a large array. Once the array hit its limit, no more objects would spawn.
I later "invented" a linked list (something I'm mildly proud of, figuring out a common data structure without being taught it first:)) and rewrote the game so that you could have infinite objects in it. (Well, so you could have as many until you ran out of heap space, but you know what I mean...)
Flash abstracts a lot of the actual programming side away in a "scripting" language. I'd highly suggest what Yaztromo said, and start with something very simple that will teach actual programming skills. With the skills learned doing that, he should have a much more solid foundation to build something more complicated. I think it'll teach how to program something far better than just some quick Flash thing would.
Of course, it'll be less fun, but it'll be a better experience, and teach skills directly applicable to programming in college.
As we've said, it could be an error, but with two separate files both using containing the sub-string _g5_, one on Apple's site, the other on Avenue A's, this seems unlikely.
That seems to be directly implying that Tony Smith (the article author) thinks that the file exists on Avenue A's site. Clearly any string you pass will result in a 1x1 gif. Therefore, the typo was only on Apple's site.
And, yes, I know how web bugs work. I'd assume somewhere, someone is going to be looking at a very weird list of requests, wondering what on earth is up with all these apple_g6_powerbook hits.
You need to ask yourself one thing before starting to learn to program: Do you want to program games, or just make games? The two are different.
A lot of gamers wind up deciding "hey, I want to program video games!" at some point, without realizing that what they really want to do is make games. If you don't know anything about programming, then you should start by learning the basics of programming and forget making video games for a while. You need to understand the basics first, before you can start doing anything complicated.
If you really do decide to make video games, I'd highly suggest making a couple of really simple games first. Something like hangman, where you just take a list of words and make the user enter letters until they "guess" it. This will teach you the basics of keyboard input and graphical display without having to worry too much about speed or game mechanics.
I'd suggest starting with Java too - maybe grab Eclipse as your IDE, or just use a simple text editor. This solves the "cross-platform" part, and as long as you understand that you won't be creating Quake in it, you shouldn't be too disappointed. (You could, of course, also try using Mozilla.) It's similar enough to C and C++ that you'll should be able to pick up those if later you wind up making a game in C.
But based on your post, I'd suggest learning more about how to program in general first. Take some classes, if you can. Learn the basics. Learn about basic data structures. This will give you the ground-work you need to create a game, as well as help you determine if programming is really for you.
On that subject, I'm confused what the article author means by: "As we've said, it could be an error, but with two separate files both using containing the sub-string _g5_, one on Apple's site, the other on Avenue A's, this seems unlikely."
I'm guessing what he means is that the file "apple_g5_powerbook" appears to exist on the target server.
Exactly. There are something like seven developer systems running Windows that have MySQL and a web server on them for webapp development in the section I work for. Then, later, the webapp gets uploaded to a Solaris machine where the users actually use it.
I also have MySQL on my home Windows machine, since that's what my hosting provider offers. So I do some basic testing on Apache on Windows with MySQL as the database backend.
It was called "Hideous" and implemented in Java. Not having a practical use was kinda the point. I really should dig it up, see if I still have it kicking around somewhere.
I actually started writing a scripting language that used XML as it's input language. It (not surprisinly) was a lot like Lisp. It was basically written "because I could" and not for any real reason.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) I haven't done anything with it in a couple of years... Maybe I should drag it out again.
I think I understand what you mean - you don't like the new art style they're using. And, honestly, neither do I.
Between Majora's Mask and the Wind Waker, they completely altered the art style. The "new" style is used in the Four Swords, Wind Waker, and the Minish Hat.
I don't like the new style either. But the problem wasn't with the cel-shading - it's with the change of art styles. The new style is very "cartoony" and not quite as "animeish" as it used to be. The problem most people have with Wind Waker isn't really with the "cartoony look," it's with the change in art style.
Zelda looks better the way it's 'always' looked...
You mean like a cartoon?
About the only games where it didn't look strictly cartoonish was Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. Other than that, cartoon all the way.
Of course, I still feel like they've been overly kid-ifying Link, and would like to play an older Link because, let's face it, I've grown a little since 1987, but still - he's always been a cartoon.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think anybody would complain if MS would have just released a completely new version.
Are you kidding? They would have complained louder than ever.
"You mean we have to upgrade to a whole new version to get the security fixes?! Microsoft should have fixed their current OSes!"
There's really no out for Microsoft. No matter what they did, people will complain. About the only thing they could have done differently is a more modular update, so companies could pick-and-choose updates, hopefully securing their systems as best as possible while keeping their old code running.
And even then you'd get people complaining that it was too complicated, they should just have released everything as one large patch...
EQ2 is a subscription game. They already have your credit card number. Why not set up a system to allow you to charge your preexisting credit card information for a pizza ingame?
Obviously you'd have to set it up so that the account holder can block this feature to prevent little Jimmy from charging a million pizzas to be delivered to the Lunanites, but it could still conceivably work. Oh, and people using game cards to play would be SOL, but - oh well.
Some people are just griefers in real life. You know the type online, I'm sure. Well, some people are simply like that in reality. They just like destroying things and making other people unhappy.
I think there was a good Calvin and Hobbes strip that kind of explains it, where Calvin explains that the best way to get rid of a bad mood is to give it to someone else.
Same basic idea - some people feel happy by making other people miserable.
I'd say it's closer to being able to sell your condo but management refusing to sell water, electricty, and phone service to the new owners unless they buy a brand new one. (Which will be available for purchase next Thursday. No, really, this time!)
Another fun bug was that it would flag "you're trying to run a script!" when I tried to edit a script. So the dialog would pop up ('cause my task bar is on the bottom, where it should be :P), and I'd say "yes, allow me to run the script" since I wanted to edit it.
And then it would run it, not edit it.
Turns out you can disable that "feature" by simply deleting the "ShellExecuteHook" found in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Explorer\ShellExecuteHooks (remove the space). It should be marked "AntiSpyware" or something like that. DO NOT DELETE THE KEY LISTED ABOVE. The key to delete to disable the "run a script" detection is one of the subkeys, but I can't remember which one, because I deleted it. :)
Apparently this hook also messes up domain scripts, so Windows administrators also might want to remove it if they find their logon scripts aren't being run.
Probably from MySQL's license page, which seems to be confused about how you can or can't distribute their database. Specifically:
Obviously if your application only uses their database there's no reason it would need to be GPLed, since you're distributing two separate pieces of software.
However, there appears to be some sort of confusion when it comes to using the drivers, which are also under the GPL. I expect that no matter what MySQL says, if you're using JDBC or ODBC drivers than you don't need to GPL your application, since the linking doesn't occur until runtime and you never actually call any MySQL methods, just ODBC/JDBC methods. (Same for Perl's DBI, probably.) PHP's MySQL drivers are more questionable, because they're explicitly only for MySQL.
Basically, MySQL seems to want people to believe that you need to GPL your code if you so much as use their database. Otherwise, you'd need a license. That's BS - you aren't allowed to add restrictions to a GPLed product. And the GPL is pretty clear that your use of a product does not make you fall under the GPL.
Using the MySQL DB drivers in non-Open Source code, on the other hand... That's much more murky. Personally I believe that it's a non-issue in cases where your code uses a public interface like ODBC, JDBC, or Perl's DBI to access MySQL.
I don't know if they changed this after your post, but, this article is in the BSD section. I guess the Linux section overrides that because it was assigned there first?
Anyway, it is in both sections. This was a change made to Slashcode a while back, to allow an article to be "cross-section" if needed. This one is.
You can view it in the BSD theme if you want, too.
Uh, an automated install would just set up your system for you. The compiling part ("shit scroll by for hours") is all automated already.
Gentoo's "manual" install is basically paritioning and mounting the partitions you want to use and then extracting a giant tarball onto that structure. You then need to configure your fstab, network settings, compile a kernel, and install a bootloader.
Once you're done with that, then you move on to the automated part. The entire point to portage is to automate the compilation process.
You could, conceivably, manually install Debian or RedHat in the same way if you wanted to.
It's not quite AI, yet Google comes closer to realizing the fantasy of Isaac Asimov's Multivac than anything else I've experienced before. It's very weird: the impression that Google gives is that it does NOT understand your question, yet it DOES manage to find the answers you want.
Yeah, some of the answers are funny. I did a search for "anime" near my house, and discovered (as I basically already knew) that the closest places are in Boston. (And, no, that's not my house in the center. I actually panned and zoomed there 'cause I was playing with the map first.)
The fact that WPI, a college in Worcester, came back twice (once for an article on a parking ban as "Worcester City Of: Streets" and once for their Science Fiction Society as WPI: Massachusetts Academy) is kind of... freaky.
I seem to recall that Microsoft used to have a little icon of a speech balloon containing a ? that was used to activate the context sensative help, and that at some point it was moved to the title bar for no apparent reason. I guess that's why.
Yeah, it does sound almost exactly like that. Almost every dialog Microsoft makes uses it. (Although I suppose they could have licensed it or just disabled the feature in the Japanese version.)
Easiest way to demo this is to bring up the Desktop properties window. The little [?] will be in the righthand corner next to the X. You can also right click on most of the items to see a context menu with "What's This?" on it.
It's also used in Microsoft Office applications and IE. In fact, I can't really think of any application that uses it that Microsoft didn't write. (Well, it turns out Nero 6 does, but it forgets the "What's This?" context menu and shows the context help immediately on a right click.)
Can anyone find something that explains exactly what they're being sued over? Microsoft has made something very similar a part of the standard Windows dialog controls for quite a while now.
That's OK, because it's called the MBTA (or simply "the T") now. Of course, both "MBTA" or "the T" doesn't quite fit in the song quite as well.
Yeah, I actually had traffic to my site spike by about a GB/month thanks to the MSNbot. I wound up blocking it from a vast chunk of my site while letting everything else through, since it managed to get caught up in a little loop on some dynamic page. (It was doing something so that it would increment a parameter on the query string, and wound up hitting the same page repeatedly many, many times.)
Microsoft may find that their search engine is less useful than others simply because they're banned from sites for overly-agressive spidering. They managed to increase traffic to my site 10 times with their bot alone. It's not a high-profile site. I was running happily at about 120MB/month, and MSNbot managed to jump that to about 1.2GB/month until I updated robots.txt to forbid it from anything dynamic.
Yes, you did. The figure gets mentioned once, at the very top, which "Steve" directly copied. "Steve" didn't write jack, Andrew Serros, the author the article, wrote that. Well, Steve added "Filefront uncovers the real trend and includes quotes from ESRB President Patricia Vance."
Based on the statistics given by the ESRB website (which are last year's, I can't find current), that 18% figure is by title. Unfortunately, I can't locate any updated statistics, so those figures are mostly meaningless.
Since there seem to be people confused: it's purely a bug with Gecko. It's not a bug with Slashdot's HTML. Slashdot's HTML is fine[1].
The problem is hard to demonstrate, because it's a timing issue. In order for it to trigger, you need to have downloaded enough of the page to have received only the left column, but not the content column, when the browser does an initial layout. Gecko lays out the column and makes it as wide as the page, because that's what the HTML to that point says to do.[2]
After that, it starts getting the content. Depending on exactly how you trigger the bug, two things can happen. One; it can not resize the left column's width properly, making the column take up the entire page. (Strangely enough, it gets the scrolling information correct, so you can't scroll horizontally to see the content you're missing.) Two; it can layout the column so that the width it uses when laying out the content column is too narrow, making the two overlap in the final rendering.
Basically, it's a real bug in Gecko. It happens to be triggered by Slashdot's crappy HTML, but it really is a bug in the incremental layout engine.
[1] Well, no, it isn't - it's written in such a way that it triggers the bug. But it's fine in the sense that what's wrong with it shouldn't cause the problem. Slashdot's HTML is bad enough that Slashdot 403s connections from the W3C HTML validator.
[2] It's this "column resizes wildly during incremental layout" that sort of makes this Slashdot's problem. If they specified the width exactly instead of relying on the browser to implicitly shrink the column to the width you're used to, you wouldn't see this bug.
Why would anyone in their right mind buy a DVD player when they can play DVDs on thier computer? Think about that for a while and see if you can understand why some people like video game consoles better than PCs.
The shortest answer is that I like being able to just dump the game into the console, hit power, and start playing. There's a whole lot more to do if you want to use your computer as a gaming machine than that, and there always will be because I want my computer to be a computer too.
(Says the guy with the PS2 hooked up through his computer. But, hey.)
I don't think Flash is the right place to start if he really wants to learn how to program games. If he wants to design a game, then Flash is an excellent place to start.
To be honest, the first thing you need to learn when writing a game is how to program first. I created a simple Asteriods game ages ago (in Java 1.0, in about a month :P), but it was before I understood the concept of a linked list, so all the "objects" in the game world wound up being in a large array. Once the array hit its limit, no more objects would spawn.
I later "invented" a linked list (something I'm mildly proud of, figuring out a common data structure without being taught it first :)) and rewrote the game so that you could have infinite objects in it. (Well, so you could have as many until you ran out of heap space, but you know what I mean...)
Flash abstracts a lot of the actual programming side away in a "scripting" language. I'd highly suggest what Yaztromo said, and start with something very simple that will teach actual programming skills. With the skills learned doing that, he should have a much more solid foundation to build something more complicated. I think it'll teach how to program something far better than just some quick Flash thing would.
Of course, it'll be less fun, but it'll be a better experience, and teach skills directly applicable to programming in college.
To repeat the quote from the article:
That seems to be directly implying that Tony Smith (the article author) thinks that the file exists on Avenue A's site. Clearly any string you pass will result in a 1x1 gif. Therefore, the typo was only on Apple's site.
And, yes, I know how web bugs work. I'd assume somewhere, someone is going to be looking at a very weird list of requests, wondering what on earth is up with all these apple_g6_powerbook hits.
You need to ask yourself one thing before starting to learn to program: Do you want to program games, or just make games? The two are different.
A lot of gamers wind up deciding "hey, I want to program video games!" at some point, without realizing that what they really want to do is make games. If you don't know anything about programming, then you should start by learning the basics of programming and forget making video games for a while. You need to understand the basics first, before you can start doing anything complicated.
If you really do decide to make video games, I'd highly suggest making a couple of really simple games first. Something like hangman, where you just take a list of words and make the user enter letters until they "guess" it. This will teach you the basics of keyboard input and graphical display without having to worry too much about speed or game mechanics.
I'd suggest starting with Java too - maybe grab Eclipse as your IDE, or just use a simple text editor. This solves the "cross-platform" part, and as long as you understand that you won't be creating Quake in it, you shouldn't be too disappointed. (You could, of course, also try using Mozilla.) It's similar enough to C and C++ that you'll should be able to pick up those if later you wind up making a game in C.
But based on your post, I'd suggest learning more about how to program in general first. Take some classes, if you can. Learn the basics. Learn about basic data structures. This will give you the ground-work you need to create a game, as well as help you determine if programming is really for you.
On that subject, I'm confused what the article author means by: "As we've said, it could be an error, but with two separate files both using containing the sub-string _g5_, one on Apple's site, the other on Avenue A's, this seems unlikely."
I'm guessing what he means is that the file "apple_g5_powerbook" appears to exist on the target server.
Well, "http://switch.atdmt.com/action/i bet any damn string will work here and the register is just freaking stupid" works, and "http://switch.atdmt.com/action/tony smith is a wanker" seems OK too. Obviously they were already prepared for this story!
Or, of course, the bug accepts any input string and just dumps a 1x1 transparent GIF.
Exactly. There are something like seven developer systems running Windows that have MySQL and a web server on them for webapp development in the section I work for. Then, later, the webapp gets uploaded to a Solaris machine where the users actually use it.
I also have MySQL on my home Windows machine, since that's what my hosting provider offers. So I do some basic testing on Apache on Windows with MySQL as the database backend.
Yeah, instead of:
(+ 4 5)
You'd do something like:
<plus>
<num>4</num>
<num>5</num>
</plus>
Or, more complicated:
(if (> x 1) 2 4)
Became:
<if>
<greater-than>
<var>x</var>
<num>1</num>
</greater-than>
<num>2</num>
<num>4</num>
</if>
It was called "Hideous" and implemented in Java. Not having a practical use was kinda the point. I really should dig it up, see if I still have it kicking around somewhere.
I actually started writing a scripting language that used XML as it's input language. It (not surprisinly) was a lot like Lisp. It was basically written "because I could" and not for any real reason.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) I haven't done anything with it in a couple of years... Maybe I should drag it out again.
I think I understand what you mean - you don't like the new art style they're using. And, honestly, neither do I.
Between Majora's Mask and the Wind Waker, they completely altered the art style. The "new" style is used in the Four Swords, Wind Waker, and the Minish Hat.
Link used to have a very anime-ish look to it. You can look at this album from the Ocarina of Time, specifically young Link and old Link. Compare with art from Wind Waker (like Link posing).
I don't like the new style either. But the problem wasn't with the cel-shading - it's with the change of art styles. The new style is very "cartoony" and not quite as "animeish" as it used to be. The problem most people have with Wind Waker isn't really with the "cartoony look," it's with the change in art style.
Zelda looks better the way it's 'always' looked...
You mean like a cartoon?
About the only games where it didn't look strictly cartoonish was Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. Other than that, cartoon all the way.
Of course, I still feel like they've been overly kid-ifying Link, and would like to play an older Link because, let's face it, I've grown a little since 1987, but still - he's always been a cartoon.