What happens when tivo records a show at 4AM, when you are watching something else?
Personally I'm in bet at 4am. Call me old if you like...;)
Anyhow, TiVo records under two circumstances: (1) You've asked it to (2) It's decided you might like it to, based on the thumbs up and thumbs down statistics you've given it.
When TiVo is not in "live TV" mode, i.e. playing back buffered stuff from the last half hour, it will change channel whenever it feels like it -- because it knows you're not watching live TV. The assumption is that you only ever watch TV via TiVo, and this is what you should do.
When you *are* watching live TV, TiVo will not attempt to change channel in order to record category (2) programs. If a category (1) program is coming up, it will pop up a dialogue, "You asked me to record xxxx, press OK to change channel or Cancel to stay on this channel and not record it after all".
Yes, if you're piping output from your cable box around the house, this might cause problems. Not many people are.
The moral of the story? I suppose it's just this: 'the "many eyeballs" theory quickly breaks down in the face of esoteric algorithms'.
But.. but...
You found the bug, and now the world at large knows about it. You are a living example of the "many eyeballs" theory in action. You don't *have* to spot the bug merely by eyeballing the code; witnessing it in the wild counts too.
I'm with you there. I just downloaded Snood to see what the fuss was about, and you're right: it's Puzzle Bobble without the hypnotic music or the great graphic design.
Puzzle Bobble is also known as "Bust a Move" - you can play it on MAME, and there are versions for most consoles, from the Megadrive/Genesis right through to PS2.
Seriously, if you like Snood, try the real thing, and find out what a little finesse and a few production values can do.
I'm sure microsoft would love selling a license for a program that would allow 'full hacking' of the hardware.
It would do nothing of the sort.
The way Xbox works is, if the binary isn't signed with MS's key, the program ain't running (unless the box is chipped).
So: 1. Buy rights to use some set of ROMs. 2. Compile MAME with support for said ROMs. 3. Write whizzy front end 4. Buy license from MS, get binaries signed. 5. Sell kosher Xbox game product
MAME already runs checksums on the ROMS, although it only warns you if they're wrong. If anyone were really paranoid, they could extend this to refuse to run, and to use a more secure hash function.
FWIW I think this would be The Right Way to port games like Metal Slug 3 to the Xbox. The hardcore will appreciate getting emulation rather than a port.
It wouldn't be the first time something like this has been done. When Sega released their Sonic collection for the PC, they paid Steve Snake for a version of his KGen Genesis emulator.
Hmm, all this gets me to thinking... MAME with Kaillera on Xbox Live, for online multiplayer games and the ability to chat with the other players... If the right games were licensed, I'd buy an Xbox for that.
I love Linux, but I don't think it's right for this project. The only reason to run Linux on this thing is that you like Linux and you haven't thought of the alternatives.
What MAME needs is an OS that doesn't get in the way. There's no need for any processes other than MAME to be running, so no multitasking. We want fast, direct access to graphics and sound hardware. We want DOS. It's no coincidence that the core MAME source is written for DOS.
If a free OS is required, I'm given to understand that MAME runs fine under FreeDOS.
DOS MAME aleady contains code to underclock certain video cards to TV scanrates. ArcadeOS is one MAME frontend that can also run at these scanrates.
I don't *think* you're trolling, but you *are* missing the point. There is more than one way to make money from software, and some of them are perfectly compatible with Open Source software.
Do you think IBM release their contributions to Apache, or to Eclipse for reasons of "love, caring, thoughtfulness, kindness, compassion, vision, hope, intellect wisdom or sharing"? No, clearly IBM's bottom line is profits for their shareholders.
Open Source *can* be akin to volunteer work, but it isn't always. Alan Cox gets paid good money for hacking the Linux kernel.
On the other hand, would you really want your kids to see the message you've just posted "it's OK to compromise any ethics you have, if it helps you and yours"? Would you care to take your kids into a charity shop, to watch you explain to the volounteer help the folly of their ways? Is that "raising your kids the way they should be"?
I'll tell you why page down is much slower. If I am using my scrollwheel or scrollbar, I scroll the page while I am reading it.
This is a non-argument. You can do the same with the cursor keys.
Second, the example you made was browsing Google search results. You don't read through these documents, you scan them for results that jump out.
Thirdly, apart from the very last page, you know exactly how far PageDown will take you. There's no way refocussing takes 2 seconds, once you're used to it.
Ever heard of a scroll wheel? Or a scroll bar? Who in gods name takes their hands off a mouse to page down?
I do. It's far easier to hit pagedown than it is to mouse over to the scrollbar. Try it; race yourself.
My mouse at work doesn't have a scroll wheel, although I do love having one at home. However, hitting pagedown is still quicker if you're scanning text a page at a time.
And pray tell, how do you search for text "around" a link when you don't even know what that text is going to be? Also, the ratio of text entering to read only data while web browsing is probbaly like 1000 to 1, or higher.
OK, I'm searching for a reference to myself in Google, using Mozilla. Being a bit dense, I don't search for "John Hartnup", I just search for "Hartnup".
Page 1 of the search results doesn't include any reference to me (page down to manually browse). Type-ahead search to get the link to page 2: "2"
Page 2 is no good either. "3"
Page 3 has a mention of me, in a page called "The Gnuotes 1998-June Archive by Author". Type "Gnu" and I'm straight there.
"But what if all the links contained the same text", you ask. Not very likely; but I'll bite. As long as the summary contains something vaguely unique I'm OK. This one contains the word "Apache", so "/Apache", "shift-tab" to move to the previous link, "".
Yes, it takes a while to learn, but most really efficient interfaces do: vi for example.
1200HRs of TV means you are look at the TV too much. Even over a year.
It's a valid point, but for me at least, the point of having all that stuff on a TiVo is not to watch it all -- it's that when you sit down for a piece of your 2-3 hours a week, you have a choice, and among that choice you're likely to find something good, rather than have to put up with what's on right now -- and without any of the pesky advance planning you have to do with a VCR. The bigger the buffer, the more likely there is to be a pearl in there.
I'm still hung up on the fact that you're a serial course-quitter. Another reason people give up on education is that the course doesn't match their particular "learning style". For example, some people like to learn things by exploring and finding things out for themselves (so a teacher will facilitate and guide this activity), while other people prefer to be spoon-fed what they need, so they can learn it by rote, practice, etc.
I'm an exploratory learner, and when for a while I taught word processing to adults in evening classes, I tried to teach them all as if they were explorers too. It came as quite a revelation to find out that some of them thrived on a different way of learning.
When selecting a course, you might want to think about your own preferred learning style, and talk to the institution about how they would accommodate you.
Unfortunately, in my experience, a lot of University academics (although there are notable exceptions; hello Dr. Coxhead) are in it for the research; lecturing is the boring part of the job, they are not educationalists, and they are not particularly interested in moulding their teaching styles to match the learning styles of their students. Maybe you can find somewhere better than I did?
I'm in your position, and what I'm finding is that the classes I'm taking now (as opposed to then) have real-world applicability, and so I'm a lot more motivated and excited by the material.
I agree with what the parent poster is saying, but I personally found that my preference is exactly the opposite: at University I liked the flighty theoretical stuff most of all; I found that the "real world" stuff was too earthbound. 7 years later, it's the theoretical stuff that continues to feed my real-world work, while most of what was then "practical" is now fairly irrelevant to the current marketplace.... but it's down to personal preference. You need to examine yourself and decide what you want, before carefully selecting a course which meets your needs.
It's not like browsers cost anything. If your PC is a 486, then IE5 is going to cost you at least $500 (for a new PC).
The vast majority of Web sites contain content which could happily be presented using the HTML that was available in Netscape 1 (I'd like to say NCSA Mosaic, but back then I found the absence of tables to be a constraint -- for displaying tables, mind you, not for laying out sliced images).
The colour TV thing is a great analogy: the way the standard was designed, the broadcaster can switch over to transmitting colour, and I as a B&W TV owner won't notice the difference -- except that I can buy a colour TV any time I like. Eventually colour TVs come to dominate, but you still get the occasional B&W TV -- you can still buy cheap little 12v B&W portables for camping etc, you can get Casio watches with B&W TVs built in.
This was a very clean transition, and there are still people happily watching B&W sets today. They can no longer watch Snooker, since the commentators no longer describe which balls are which colour for the benefit of those watching in B&W;)
If you imagine that the W3C had been in control all along, and that MS and NS hadn't played fast and loose with the HTML standard, you can see how HTML4 and CSS would have provided the same smooth transition as TV viewers enjoyed. My personal web pages are written in HTML4 and CSS, and although they're prettier in Mozilla (cf. a colour TV) they're perfectly readable in Netscape 1 (cf. a B&W TV). (OK, I don't have a copy of NS1 to test on, but I'm confident it'd be fine -- it's fine in Lynx apart from the absence of images, after all).
Palmpilots, mobile phones, etc. are like the portable B&W TVs and Casio watches I referred to; it'll be a long while before they have CSS and JS, but don't you want these people to be able to read your pages?
I think it's time web authors realised they should be grateful for their readers, rather than expect gratitude from them. If we want a readership, we must make it easier on them, rather than snap at them "upgrade your browser, fool".
That said, I do have advice on my homepage to either turn off stylesheets in NS4 (because it takes CSS and does completely wrong things with it), or upgrade to Mozilla, and I refuse to work around the CSS bugs in IE (readers can live with the layout bugs). I will cater for old browsers and new, but I don't see why I should target buggy browsers.
... or, if you were to flip one image left/right, you could use a mirror.
Hold the mirror up to the monitor along the line where the two images meet, place your nose up against the edge of the mirror, and presto, you're looking at a 3D image.
If you're playing to win, Red Bull. If you're playing for fun, vodka and Red Bull...
I'm personally a big fan of the supermarket own-brand Red Bull alikes popping up in the UK. Asda's "Blue Charge" for example. The active ingredients are listed by percentage, and are identical to Red Bull. The flavour is indistinguishable.
My absolute favourite high-caffiene soda of all time was called Virgin Energy (oo-er). It got me through Glastonbury 1995 and I wish it were still on the market.
Of course, there's a lot to be said for following your body's advice and just having a nice sleep. There speaks age...
I can't find anything on the Web right now that describes the compiler bootstrapping process, so I'll summarise here. When building a compiler it's nice to be able to say that there are no external influences that might cause it not to work (like, using someone else's compiler to compile your compiler) -- so you avoid doing so using a process like this:
Define your language
Define the smallest subset possible S[0] of your language, sufficient to write a basic compiler
Implement compiler for S[0] in hand crafted machine code
Implement compiler for S[0] in your language
Compile compiler for S[0]
n=1
while(you haven't implemented the whole language)
Define larger subset S[n]
Implement compiler for S[n] using only language features supported in S[n-1]
One construction set type game I've enjoyed is Coaster Works on the Dreamcast (Jet Coaster Dream in Japan). In this you construct a roller coaster, then test it. If the coaster falls off, you have to redesign. If the coaster makes a full circuit, you get graded on safety, excitement etc.
There's a JCD2 out in Japan; must get around to importing it.
No it doesn't. The people driving in London during rush hour generally aren't doing it for fun, but because they fit into one of two categories: commuters or commercial traffic. If driving is discouraged, how are these people going to do their jobs? Public transport in London long ago passed its design capacity; try riding the Northern Line between 7am and 9am if you don't believe me. And it isn't even an option for commercial traffic - you can't take the bus or the tube if you're delivering 1000 loaves of bread to Tesco Metro.
The idea is to relieve the roads for commercial traffic. You can get 1000 loaves of bread to Tesco much quicker if the road's not congested with thousands of private cars.
There are personal solutions to the tube overcrowding problem. The simplest, and the one I use, is to not work in London (I don't believe this is a facetious suggestion). If you feel you must work in London for some reason, how about negotiating flexitime so you don't travel in the peak hours? Employers are going to have to help with this situation too.
Telecommuting isn't an option for most people, really it isn't even an option for technical people like sysadmins. Yes, you can telnet over S/WAN and restart a mail server, that's trivial. But London is one of the world's financial centres; when there's a problem with an application consisting of millions of lines of bespoke code from half a dozen different vendors running on millions of pounds of hardware from another half dozen vendors (pretty much all IT in the Square Mile is like this), the only way to solve the problem is to get all the relevant people together in a room working on it. There is no alternative but for people to travel into London itself to work.
In the short term, these institutions can well afford to pay their employees' tolls for them, if they really think it's essential that they drive in. In the long term, they might consider moving their operations somewhere cheaper and easier to get to than central London. This would be a good thing all round.
MY OTHER CAR BURNS FOREIGN OIL ... whereas the electric car runs on a combination of foreign oil and nuclear power (unless perhaps you have your own windfarm)
I've quickly scanned the responses, and nobody seems to have mentioned this (or if they did, nobody modded them up):
The article doesn't mention what games they tested.
I'm sure most of us have played certain games to the extent that you feel your brain has been rewired: most/. readers, I'd guess will have at some point gone to bed after a few hours playing Tetris, Minesweeper, or even those pen and paper grid based Logic Problems, and found themselves dreaming of grids or falling pieces. This in an example of your brain being rewired with new skills -- which depending on the game, may or may not be valuable skills in the real world.
A recent (reprehensible IMHO) UK TV program ran an IQ test, a large chunk of which was to do with reasoning about rotating shapes. Playing a lot of Tetris has to be training for questions like that.
I've made kids play Solitaire in order to develop mouse coordination. LucasArts point'n'click-ers train the mind in warped comedy logic Quake trains the mind in lightning reactions and terrain-based strategy Rhythm-action games train the mind in keeping to a beat (potentially useful to the budding drummer!) etc.
The article is worthless unless it tells us what sort of game it's claiming to be harmful.
If you have WINE that indicates that you have a Windows license.
Early on, you needed bits from a real Windows installation to get WINE to work. Last time I looked, you could get many Windows applications to run in WINE without any part of real Windows. Remember, WINE is a reimplementation of the Windows API, not an emulator under which Windows runs.
So, no, running WINE doesn't imply that you have a Windows license, nor that you should have one.
I write server code that will be run by another part of the organisation, on machines that I don't have access to. As a result it's useful to be able to turn on extremely detailed tracing so that the guys running the service can send us traces of sessions that didn't behave right.
I find that the trace calls in the code are often as good as comments, in that someone browsing the code could use the traces to work out what's going on.
e.g. for(lc=0;bytes_left>0;lc++) {
trace("In main parsing loop, chunk %d, %d bytes remaining to process",lc,bytes_left); }
... tells us the purpose of the loop, and the purpose of two variables. Clearly putting a real/* comment */ next to the trace line would be redundant.
I think even if I weren't tracing, I would place comments in pretty much the same places.Of course this isn't all the commenting I do -- there are certainly comments required above and beyond these, such as detailed descriptions of what a function should do above the declaration.
That depends on the acoustic model,the encoding scheme and where in the signal the image is hidden. For example one could encode the image entirely in frequencies higher than those audible to humans. Some encoding schemes would certainly strip that information pretty early on.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens when tivo records a show at 4AM, when you are watching something else?
;)
Personally I'm in bet at 4am. Call me old if you like...
Anyhow, TiVo records under two circumstances: (1) You've asked it to (2) It's decided you might like it to, based on the thumbs up and thumbs down statistics you've given it.
When TiVo is not in "live TV" mode, i.e. playing back buffered stuff from the last half hour, it will change channel whenever it feels like it -- because it knows you're not watching live TV. The assumption is that you only ever watch TV via TiVo, and this is what you should do.
When you *are* watching live TV, TiVo will not attempt to change channel in order to record category (2) programs. If a category (1) program is coming up, it will pop up a dialogue, "You asked me to record xxxx, press OK to change channel or Cancel to stay on this channel and not record it after all".
Yes, if you're piping output from your cable box around the house, this might cause problems. Not many people are.
The moral of the story? I suppose it's just this: 'the "many eyeballs" theory quickly breaks down in the face of esoteric algorithms'.
But.. but...
You found the bug, and now the world at large knows about it. You are a living example of the "many eyeballs" theory in action. You don't *have* to spot the bug merely by eyeballing the code; witnessing it in the wild counts too.
Because it is just a lame Puzzle Bobble ripoff.
I'm with you there. I just downloaded Snood to see what the fuss was about, and you're right: it's Puzzle Bobble without the hypnotic music or the great graphic design.
Details of the arcade original here.
Puzzle Bobble is also known as "Bust a Move" - you can play it on MAME, and there are versions for most consoles, from the Megadrive/Genesis right through to PS2.
Seriously, if you like Snood, try the real thing, and find out what a little finesse and a few production values can do.
I'm sure microsoft would love selling a license for a program that would allow 'full hacking' of the hardware.
It would do nothing of the sort.
The way Xbox works is, if the binary isn't signed with MS's key, the program ain't running (unless the box is chipped).
So:
1. Buy rights to use some set of ROMs.
2. Compile MAME with support for said ROMs.
3. Write whizzy front end
4. Buy license from MS, get binaries signed.
5. Sell kosher Xbox game product
MAME already runs checksums on the ROMS, although it only warns you if they're wrong. If anyone were really paranoid, they could extend this to refuse to run, and to use a more secure hash function.
FWIW I think this would be The Right Way to port games like Metal Slug 3 to the Xbox. The hardcore will appreciate getting emulation rather than a port.
It wouldn't be the first time something like this has been done. When Sega released their Sonic collection for the PC, they paid Steve Snake for a version of his KGen Genesis emulator.
Hmm, all this gets me to thinking... MAME with Kaillera on Xbox Live, for online multiplayer games and the ability to chat with the other players... If the right games were licensed, I'd buy an Xbox for that.
I love Linux, but I don't think it's right for this project. The only reason to run Linux on this thing is that you like Linux and you haven't thought of the alternatives.
What MAME needs is an OS that doesn't get in the way. There's no need for any processes other than MAME to be running, so no multitasking. We want fast, direct access to graphics and sound hardware. We want DOS. It's no coincidence that the core MAME source is written for DOS.
If a free OS is required, I'm given to understand that MAME runs fine under FreeDOS.
DOS MAME aleady contains code to underclock certain video cards to TV scanrates. ArcadeOS is one MAME frontend that can also run at these scanrates.
I don't *think* you're trolling, but you *are* missing the point. There is more than one way to make money from software, and some of them are perfectly compatible with Open Source software.
Do you think IBM release their contributions to Apache, or to Eclipse for reasons of "love, caring, thoughtfulness, kindness, compassion, vision, hope, intellect wisdom or sharing"? No, clearly IBM's bottom line is profits for their shareholders.
Open Source *can* be akin to volunteer work, but it isn't always. Alan Cox gets paid good money for hacking the Linux kernel.
On the other hand, would you really want your kids to see the message you've just posted "it's OK to compromise any ethics you have, if it helps you and yours"? Would you care to take your kids into a charity shop, to watch you explain to the volounteer help the folly of their ways? Is that "raising your kids the way they should be"?
I'll tell you why page down is much slower. If I am using my scrollwheel or scrollbar, I scroll the page while I am reading it.
This is a non-argument. You can do the same with the cursor keys.
Second, the example you made was browsing Google search results. You don't read through these documents, you scan them for results that jump out.
Thirdly, apart from the very last page, you know exactly how far PageDown will take you. There's no way refocussing takes 2 seconds, once you're used to it.
So I used to mean "hit enter", and /. didn't escape the angle brackets.
} " for the second.
So, it's "1{enter}2{enter}3{enter}Gnu{enter}" for the first example, or "1{enter}2{enter}3{enter}/Apache{shift-tab}{enter
Ever heard of a scroll wheel? Or a scroll bar? Who in gods name takes their hands off a mouse to page down?
I do. It's far easier to hit pagedown than it is to mouse over to the scrollbar. Try it; race yourself.
My mouse at work doesn't have a scroll wheel, although I do love having one at home. However, hitting pagedown is still quicker if you're scanning text a page at a time.
And pray tell, how do you search for text "around" a link when you don't even know what that text is going to be? Also, the ratio of text entering to read only data while web browsing is probbaly like 1000 to 1, or higher.
OK, I'm searching for a reference to myself in Google, using Mozilla. Being a bit dense, I don't search for "John Hartnup", I just search for "Hartnup".
Page 1 of the search results doesn't include any reference to me (page down to manually browse). Type-ahead search to get the link to page 2: "2"
Page 2 is no good either. "3"
Page 3 has a mention of me, in a page called "The Gnuotes 1998-June Archive by Author". Type "Gnu" and I'm straight there.
"But what if all the links contained the same text", you ask. Not very likely; but I'll bite. As long as the summary contains something vaguely unique I'm OK. This one contains the word "Apache", so "/Apache", "shift-tab" to move to the previous link, "".
Yes, it takes a while to learn, but most really efficient interfaces do: vi for example.
With only 2-3hrs/week of TV, yeah, you'd be fine.
1200HRs of TV means you are look at the TV too much. Even over a year.
It's a valid point, but for me at least, the point of having all that stuff on a TiVo is not to watch it all -- it's that when you sit down for a piece of your 2-3 hours a week, you have a choice, and among that choice you're likely to find something good, rather than have to put up with what's on right now -- and without any of the pesky advance planning you have to do with a VCR. The bigger the buffer, the more likely there is to be a pearl in there.
Following up on myslef, tut!
I'm still hung up on the fact that you're a serial course-quitter. Another reason people give up on education is that the course doesn't match their particular "learning style". For example, some people like to learn things by exploring and finding things out for themselves (so a teacher will facilitate and guide this activity), while other people prefer to be spoon-fed what they need, so they can learn it by rote, practice, etc.
I'm an exploratory learner, and when for a while I taught word processing to adults in evening classes, I tried to teach them all as if they were explorers too. It came as quite a revelation to find out that some of them thrived on a different way of learning.
When selecting a course, you might want to think about your own preferred learning style, and talk to the institution about how they would accommodate you.
Unfortunately, in my experience, a lot of University academics (although there are notable exceptions; hello Dr. Coxhead) are in it for the research; lecturing is the boring part of the job, they are not educationalists, and they are not particularly interested in moulding their teaching styles to match the learning styles of their students. Maybe you can find somewhere better than I did?
I'm in your position, and what I'm finding is that the classes I'm taking now (as opposed to then) have real-world applicability, and so I'm a lot more motivated and excited by the material.
... but it's down to personal preference. You need to examine yourself and decide what you want, before carefully selecting a course which meets your needs.
I agree with what the parent poster is saying, but I personally found that my preference is exactly the opposite: at University I liked the flighty theoretical stuff most of all; I found that the "real world" stuff was too earthbound. 7 years later, it's the theoretical stuff that continues to feed my real-world work, while most of what was then "practical" is now fairly irrelevant to the current marketplace.
It's not like browsers cost anything.
;)
If your PC is a 486, then IE5 is going to cost you at least $500 (for a new PC).
The vast majority of Web sites contain content which could happily be presented using the HTML that was available in Netscape 1 (I'd like to say NCSA Mosaic, but back then I found the absence of tables to be a constraint -- for displaying tables, mind you, not for laying out sliced images).
The colour TV thing is a great analogy: the way the standard was designed, the broadcaster can switch over to transmitting colour, and I as a B&W TV owner won't notice the difference -- except that I can buy a colour TV any time I like. Eventually colour TVs come to dominate, but you still get the occasional B&W TV -- you can still buy cheap little 12v B&W portables for camping etc, you can get Casio watches with B&W TVs built in.
This was a very clean transition, and there are still people happily watching B&W sets today. They can no longer watch Snooker, since the commentators no longer describe which balls are which colour for the benefit of those watching in B&W
If you imagine that the W3C had been in control all along, and that MS and NS hadn't played fast and loose with the HTML standard, you can see how HTML4 and CSS would have provided the same smooth transition as TV viewers enjoyed. My personal web pages are written in HTML4 and CSS, and although they're prettier in Mozilla (cf. a colour TV) they're perfectly readable in Netscape 1 (cf. a B&W TV). (OK, I don't have a copy of NS1 to test on, but I'm confident it'd be fine -- it's fine in Lynx apart from the absence of images, after all).
Palmpilots, mobile phones, etc. are like the portable B&W TVs and Casio watches I referred to; it'll be a long while before they have CSS and JS, but don't you want these people to be able to read your pages?
I think it's time web authors realised they should be grateful for their readers, rather than expect gratitude from them. If we want a readership, we must make it easier on them, rather than snap at them "upgrade your browser, fool".
That said, I do have advice on my homepage to either turn off stylesheets in NS4 (because it takes CSS and does completely wrong things with it), or upgrade to Mozilla, and I refuse to work around the CSS bugs in IE (readers can live with the layout bugs). I will cater for old browsers and new, but I don't see why I should target buggy browsers.
... or, if you were to flip one image left/right, you could use a mirror.
Hold the mirror up to the monitor along the line
where the two images meet, place your nose up
against the edge of the mirror, and presto, you're
looking at a 3D image.
If you're playing to win, Red Bull. If you're playing for fun, vodka and Red Bull...
I'm personally a big fan of the supermarket own-brand Red Bull alikes popping up in the UK. Asda's "Blue Charge" for example. The active ingredients are listed by percentage, and are identical to Red Bull. The flavour is indistinguishable.
My absolute favourite high-caffiene soda of all time was called Virgin Energy (oo-er). It got me through Glastonbury 1995 and I wish it were still on the market.
Of course, there's a lot to be said for following your body's advice and just having a nice sleep. There speaks age...
One construction set type game I've enjoyed is Coaster Works on the Dreamcast (Jet Coaster Dream in Japan). In this you construct a roller coaster, then test it. If the coaster falls off, you have to redesign. If the coaster makes a full circuit, you get graded on safety, excitement etc.
There's a JCD2 out in Japan; must get around to importing it.
No it doesn't. The people driving in London during rush hour generally aren't doing it for fun, but because they fit into one of two categories: commuters or commercial traffic. If driving is discouraged, how are these people going to do their jobs? Public transport in London long ago passed its design capacity; try riding the Northern Line between 7am and 9am if you don't believe me. And it isn't even an option for commercial traffic - you can't take the bus or the tube if you're delivering 1000 loaves of bread to Tesco Metro.
The idea is to relieve the roads for commercial traffic. You can get 1000 loaves of bread to Tesco much quicker if the road's not congested with thousands of private cars.
There are personal solutions to the tube overcrowding problem. The simplest, and the one I use, is to not work in London (I don't believe this is a facetious suggestion). If you feel you must work in London for some reason, how about negotiating flexitime so you don't travel in the peak hours? Employers are going to have to help with this situation too.
Telecommuting isn't an option for most people, really it isn't even an option for technical people like sysadmins. Yes, you can telnet over S/WAN and restart a mail server, that's trivial. But London is one of the world's financial centres; when there's a problem with an application consisting of millions of lines of bespoke code from half a dozen different vendors running on millions of pounds of hardware from another half dozen vendors (pretty much all IT in the Square Mile is like this), the only way to solve the problem is to get all the relevant people together in a room working on it. There is no alternative but for people to travel into London itself to work.
In the short term, these institutions can well afford to pay their employees' tolls for them, if they really think it's essential that they drive in. In the long term, they might consider moving their operations somewhere cheaper and easier to get to than central London. This would be a good thing all round.
MY OTHER CAR BURNS FOREIGN OIL ... whereas the electric car runs on a combination of foreign oil and nuclear power (unless perhaps you have your own windfarm)
I've quickly scanned the responses, and nobody seems to have mentioned this (or if they did, nobody modded them up):
/. readers, I'd guess will have at some point gone to bed after a few hours playing Tetris, Minesweeper, or even those pen and paper grid based Logic Problems, and found themselves dreaming of grids or falling pieces. This in an example of your brain being rewired with new skills -- which depending on the game, may or may not be valuable skills in the real world.
The article doesn't mention what games they tested.
I'm sure most of us have played certain games to the extent that you feel your brain has been rewired: most
A recent (reprehensible IMHO) UK TV program ran an IQ test, a large chunk of which was to do with reasoning about rotating shapes. Playing a lot of Tetris has to be training for questions like that.
I've made kids play Solitaire in order to develop mouse coordination.
LucasArts point'n'click-ers train the mind in warped comedy logic
Quake trains the mind in lightning reactions and terrain-based strategy
Rhythm-action games train the mind in keeping to a beat (potentially useful to the budding drummer!)
etc.
The article is worthless unless it tells us what sort of game it's claiming to be harmful.
Maybe because Sun assume you'll be on a network, and if you care about the time you can run ntp...
If you have WINE that indicates that you have a Windows license.
Early on, you needed bits from a real Windows installation to get WINE to work. Last time I looked, you could get many Windows applications to run in WINE without any part of real Windows. Remember, WINE is a reimplementation of the Windows API, not an emulator under which Windows runs.
So, no, running WINE doesn't imply that you have a Windows license, nor that you should have one.
I write server code that will be run by another part of the organisation, on machines that I don't have access to. As a result it's useful to be able to turn on extremely detailed tracing so that the guys running the service can send us traces of sessions that didn't behave right.
/* comment */ next to the trace line would be redundant.
I find that the trace calls in the code are often as good as comments, in that someone browsing the code could use the traces to work out what's going on.
e.g.
for(lc=0;bytes_left>0;lc++)
{
trace("In main parsing loop, chunk %d, %d bytes remaining to process",lc,bytes_left);
}
... tells us the purpose of the loop, and the purpose of two variables. Clearly putting a real
I think even if I weren't tracing, I would place comments in pretty much the same places.Of course this isn't all the commenting I do -- there are certainly comments required above and beyond these, such as detailed descriptions of what a function should do above the declaration.
That depends on the acoustic model,the encoding scheme and where in the signal the image is hidden. For example one could encode the image entirely in frequencies higher than those audible to humans. Some encoding schemes would certainly strip that information pretty early on.
TiVos do not have a 'commercial skip' feature (30x to skip add breaks in a few seconds).
It's available as a backdoor feature. A few obscure button presses on the handset.
Still, Tivo seem anxious not to upset the broadcasters. I'd be interested to see their official response.