I've tried Settlers and even though it is very similar to the Civ games, it just didn't do it for me. It didn't have that magical intangible Civ-ness that I was looking for. I know, I'm just a rabid fanboy.
It's interesting that you propose that hacking Vista will only make Microsoft more evil and cause them to lobby governments to make computer activities illegal and that these new laws will be brutally enforced by a police state.
The interesting part is that you propose open source software as the silver bullet against the tyranny of Microsoft. Using your logic, if the world started moving to OSS in a stampede, wouldn't Microsoft lobby to make OSS illegal? Will we ever see the headline "Microsoft Overturns The GPL!" on slashdot?
I've been considering buying a DS for quite a while now, but haven't found that "killer game" that would push me over the edge to do it. I have a Gameboy SP already, so I just need something to make me buy the DS.
Any version whatsoever of Civilization would make me buy a DS instantaneously. Even a crappy port of the original Civ would do it. Alpha Centauri would do it. Heck, a port of Colonization might do it. There's even a chance that Call to Power would do it. Nah, only joking on that last one.
Just give me the full depth of rules and interactions and 2D graphics and I'd probably wear out a DS every six months or so. And have to buy another one.
Civilization players are such a loyal customer base. I believe I've purchased versions of Civilization for three different operating systems, purchased every upgrade pack and "game of the year" type release, and bought each new game within the first few weeks of release, paying the absurd initial price - knowing full well that game would be half that in six months. I know I'm not alone, are there enough of us for this rabid fandom to matter to the folks that could make Civ4DS happen?
Oh, I hope so!
P.S. - I re-read what I just wrote, and yes, I'm a pathetic fanboy when it comes to Civ.
I've read alot of posts that seem to say that eBay is doing this because they are trying to protect the rights of the intellectual property owners and so forth. I think the reality is far simpler. eBay is losing money on these listings! There is undoubtedly a higher percentage of fraud on virtual goods. Trying to resolve a dispute must be a nightmare. Imagine trying to contact Blizzard to ask about a specific transfer of a virtual good between two people using their character's names? And these virtual worlds don't come with the rules and regulations that shipping physical goods in the real world do. There are no FedEX tracking numbers and signatures to prove deliveries, no paper trail. Although it is possible, in theory, for these things to exist in a virtual world, why would the maintainers of the virtual world include them especially if their EULA prohibits them in the first place? Scamming runs rampant in an environment like this. It costs money for eBay to pay fraud analysts, and the owners of the virtual worlds have absolutely no obligation to help the analysts resolve these disputes. eBay is simpling losing money, and that's why they are eliminating these listings. If the same thing suddenly started happening with expensive antique clocks, I'm sure eBay would stop listing those as well. (And no one would be going on about how it's unfair to just BUY an antique clock, instead of earning one by waiting 100 years for your own clock to become an antique.)
The first web scripting language that I did any sort of serious development with was Cold Fusion 1.0, late last century. It was simply amazing how much quicker the development of database-driven websites became. (Prior to that, I was compiling custom DLLs to load into IIS - or whatever it was called way back then.)
I very quickly made a whole series of small web applications to access our internal data - something that I later found out was called an "intranet".
Then, one day, when I was testing a form, I heavy fingered the single quote ' and the enter key on an input box and got some surprising results! The SQL statement got completely destroyed by including the quote in the input box. I actually thought this was fun, and typed in additional SQL to see if I could change the query. It was easy! I made the query do all kinds of weird things. This got me toying with forms that actually did inserts and adding random stuff to the query string and I realized how trivially easy it was to completely subvert all the smallish applications I had written. Thank the Lords of Kobol it was an internal site!
At any rate, I learned, in my safe sandbox, that securing a web application is not trivial nad is something you have to think about from the moment you sit down to code. I developed a bunch of functions to verify the existence of, escape, and validate every single piece of data that is ever passed from the UI to the database. You just have to do it, it's that simple.
Since those early days, I've done sites in Cold Fusion, ASP, JSP, PHP, Perl, WebCatalog and a couple of other oddballs, and I've always started by translating those functions to the new language, using the built-ins of the language when I could. You know what? All web scripting languages that are easy and powerful wind up being insecure in the hands of an inexperienced developer.
And let's be honest, if there was a secure and easy to use web scripting language, we'd all hate it because it tied our hands too much and made us do things a certain way. We, serious developers, love languages that let us do things the way we want to do them. Assembly developers feel confined by C, C++ developers feel confined by Java; HTML hand coders feel confined using Dreamweaver. So honestly, if they came out with SecurePHP, largely not backwards compatible for one thing, would anyone use it?
I know I'd WANT to, in theory, but would I? Would you?
The core concept of AJAX is to use Javascript in the browser to make requests to the server and then update the browser without having to load a new web page. This is accomplished by using the XMLHTTPRequest object which is available in one form or another in the lastest major browsers. This concept isn't particularly new (I worked on a project in 1999 that used a Java Applet to do the work that XMLHTTPRequest now does). However, what is new is that the technology is available natively in the major browsers, and can be used to make web-based applications more interactive and user friendly, without requiring any additional plug-ins. However, AJAX is currently a hot buzzword and way over-hyped. Anyone who already has solid Javascript skills and knows a server side scripting language should be able to pick up AJAX in a couple of hours. Eventually, there will be a nice OSS AJAX library available that will hide the details, but for right now, there's nothing better than an intimate understanding of the XMLHTTPRequest object.
If you set the wayback machine to early 1997 or so, you would find me listening to the theme for Topcat and wondering just exactly what the heck some of the words actually were.
After listening to it about ten or twenty times, trying to figure it out, I fired up the old web browser and started to search.
I tried all the major search engines for the web and newsgroups, and spent a considerable amount of time tracking down a lot of very promising links but I never did find a single page or article that unequivocally listed lyrics that even remotely matched what I was hearing.
I did, however, find a number of interesting tidbits.
First of all, the third full line of the theme (excluding "Topcat"s) is most definitely "Providing it's with dignity". This turned up in a number of newsgroup discussions. All of which failed to list the full theme.
Secondly, I found a web page dedicated to mis-hearings of the Topcat theme. These were absolutely hilarious, but the page did not list the *correct* theme anywhere. I even mucked with the URL try and find the real theme on the server somewhere, but had no luck.
Thirdly, I discovered that the show was called "Bosscat" in the UK, for some copyright reason or other. Apparently, some product was already called Topcat. Oddly, he was still called TC in the show (with dignity).
Finally, I found enough snippets of discussion and web pages with little pieces to construct what I think is the actual theme. I put it on my homepage for a while, to correct the void in the internet. Around this time, people were still amazed at all the info on the internet, claiming that you could find *anything* on the 'net. I had to break the news to them that the Topcat lyrics weren't on the 'net.
This surprised only people who had been 'net geeks for a couple of years. Since they were painfully aware of all the fan sites and other minutiae out there, they were genuinely surprised that the theme song for a reasonable well known cartoon was no where to be found. Regular people, uniformly, didn't care.
I just now searched the net for the theme again, and it's there, although I didn't find what I consider to be the canonical version anywhere. Here's what I came up with way back when:
Top Cat
The most effectual
Top Cat
Whose intellectual close friends get to call him "T. C."
Providing it's with dignity
Top Cat
The indisputable leader of the gang
He's the boss
He's a VIP (pronounced like a word)
He's a championship
He's the most tip top
Top Cat
Yes, he's a chief
He's a king, but above everything
He's the most tip top
Top Cat
Most versions screw up the "whose" with "who's" but this just isn't correct. "Whose" is definitely the start of a longer sentence, with "intellectual" modifying "friends" and not "who".
A number of versions exchange "pip" for "VIP". I went back and forth on this a little bit myself. Listening to the song and trying to hear each word in context. Ya know, using Orwellian doublethink to will myself into hearing it one way of the other. It was always easier to hear "VIP". It makes more sense in context as well.
There are quite few variations with the "a"s and the "the"s before "boss", "VIP", "championship", "chief" and "king". Again, using 1984 as my guide, the only place I really could here a "the" was before "boss". The rest were all "a"s.
Then, as now, I had a little bit too much time on my hands.
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried Settlers and even though it is very similar to the Civ games, it just didn't do it for me. It didn't have that magical intangible Civ-ness that I was looking for. I know, I'm just a rabid fanboy.
It's interesting that you propose that hacking Vista will only make Microsoft more evil and cause them to lobby governments to make computer activities illegal and that these new laws will be brutally enforced by a police state.
The interesting part is that you propose open source software as the silver bullet against the tyranny of Microsoft. Using your logic, if the world started moving to OSS in a stampede, wouldn't Microsoft lobby to make OSS illegal? Will we ever see the headline "Microsoft Overturns The GPL!" on slashdot?
I've been considering buying a DS for quite a while now, but haven't found that "killer game" that would push me over the edge to do it. I have a Gameboy SP already, so I just need something to make me buy the DS.
Any version whatsoever of Civilization would make me buy a DS instantaneously. Even a crappy port of the original Civ would do it. Alpha Centauri would do it. Heck, a port of Colonization might do it. There's even a chance that Call to Power would do it. Nah, only joking on that last one.
Just give me the full depth of rules and interactions and 2D graphics and I'd probably wear out a DS every six months or so. And have to buy another one.
Civilization players are such a loyal customer base. I believe I've purchased versions of Civilization for three different operating systems, purchased every upgrade pack and "game of the year" type release, and bought each new game within the first few weeks of release, paying the absurd initial price - knowing full well that game would be half that in six months. I know I'm not alone, are there enough of us for this rabid fandom to matter to the folks that could make Civ4DS happen?
Oh, I hope so!
P.S. - I re-read what I just wrote, and yes, I'm a pathetic fanboy when it comes to Civ.
I've read alot of posts that seem to say that eBay is doing this because they are trying to protect the rights of the intellectual property owners and so forth. I think the reality is far simpler. eBay is losing money on these listings! There is undoubtedly a higher percentage of fraud on virtual goods. Trying to resolve a dispute must be a nightmare. Imagine trying to contact Blizzard to ask about a specific transfer of a virtual good between two people using their character's names? And these virtual worlds don't come with the rules and regulations that shipping physical goods in the real world do. There are no FedEX tracking numbers and signatures to prove deliveries, no paper trail. Although it is possible, in theory, for these things to exist in a virtual world, why would the maintainers of the virtual world include them especially if their EULA prohibits them in the first place? Scamming runs rampant in an environment like this. It costs money for eBay to pay fraud analysts, and the owners of the virtual worlds have absolutely no obligation to help the analysts resolve these disputes. eBay is simpling losing money, and that's why they are eliminating these listings. If the same thing suddenly started happening with expensive antique clocks, I'm sure eBay would stop listing those as well. (And no one would be going on about how it's unfair to just BUY an antique clock, instead of earning one by waiting 100 years for your own clock to become an antique.)
The first web scripting language that I did any sort of serious development with was Cold Fusion 1.0, late last century. It was simply amazing how much quicker the development of database-driven websites became. (Prior to that, I was compiling custom DLLs to load into IIS - or whatever it was called way back then.)
I very quickly made a whole series of small web applications to access our internal data - something that I later found out was called an "intranet".
Then, one day, when I was testing a form, I heavy fingered the single quote ' and the enter key on an input box and got some surprising results! The SQL statement got completely destroyed by including the quote in the input box. I actually thought this was fun, and typed in additional SQL to see if I could change the query. It was easy! I made the query do all kinds of weird things. This got me toying with forms that actually did inserts and adding random stuff to the query string and I realized how trivially easy it was to completely subvert all the smallish applications I had written. Thank the Lords of Kobol it was an internal site!
At any rate, I learned, in my safe sandbox, that securing a web application is not trivial nad is something you have to think about from the moment you sit down to code. I developed a bunch of functions to verify the existence of, escape, and validate every single piece of data that is ever passed from the UI to the database. You just have to do it, it's that simple.
Since those early days, I've done sites in Cold Fusion, ASP, JSP, PHP, Perl, WebCatalog and a couple of other oddballs, and I've always started by translating those functions to the new language, using the built-ins of the language when I could. You know what? All web scripting languages that are easy and powerful wind up being insecure in the hands of an inexperienced developer.
And let's be honest, if there was a secure and easy to use web scripting language, we'd all hate it because it tied our hands too much and made us do things a certain way. We, serious developers, love languages that let us do things the way we want to do them. Assembly developers feel confined by C, C++ developers feel confined by Java; HTML hand coders feel confined using Dreamweaver. So honestly, if they came out with SecurePHP, largely not backwards compatible for one thing, would anyone use it?
I know I'd WANT to, in theory, but would I? Would you?
The core concept of AJAX is to use Javascript in the browser to make requests to the server and then update the browser without having to load a new web page. This is accomplished by using the XMLHTTPRequest object which is available in one form or another in the lastest major browsers. This concept isn't particularly new (I worked on a project in 1999 that used a Java Applet to do the work that XMLHTTPRequest now does). However, what is new is that the technology is available natively in the major browsers, and can be used to make web-based applications more interactive and user friendly, without requiring any additional plug-ins. However, AJAX is currently a hot buzzword and way over-hyped. Anyone who already has solid Javascript skills and knows a server side scripting language should be able to pick up AJAX in a couple of hours. Eventually, there will be a nice OSS AJAX library available that will hide the details, but for right now, there's nothing better than an intimate understanding of the XMLHTTPRequest object.
If you set the wayback machine to early 1997 or so, you would find me listening to the theme for Topcat and wondering just exactly what the heck some of the words actually were.
After listening to it about ten or twenty times, trying to figure it out, I fired up the old web browser and started to search.
I tried all the major search engines for the web and newsgroups, and spent a considerable amount of time tracking down a lot of very promising links but I never did find a single page or article that unequivocally listed lyrics that even remotely matched what I was hearing.
I did, however, find a number of interesting tidbits.
First of all, the third full line of the theme (excluding "Topcat"s) is most definitely "Providing it's with dignity". This turned up in a number of newsgroup discussions. All of which failed to list the full theme.
Secondly, I found a web page dedicated to mis-hearings of the Topcat theme. These were absolutely hilarious, but the page did not list the *correct* theme anywhere. I even mucked with the URL try and find the real theme on the server somewhere, but had no luck.
Thirdly, I discovered that the show was called "Bosscat" in the UK, for some copyright reason or other. Apparently, some product was already called Topcat. Oddly, he was still called TC in the show (with dignity).
Finally, I found enough snippets of discussion and web pages with little pieces to construct what I think is the actual theme. I put it on my homepage for a while, to correct the void in the internet. Around this time, people were still amazed at all the info on the internet, claiming that you could find *anything* on the 'net. I had to break the news to them that the Topcat lyrics weren't on the 'net.
This surprised only people who had been 'net geeks for a couple of years. Since they were painfully aware of all the fan sites and other minutiae out there, they were genuinely surprised that the theme song for a reasonable well known cartoon was no where to be found. Regular people, uniformly, didn't care.
I just now searched the net for the theme again, and it's there, although I didn't find what I consider to be the canonical version anywhere. Here's what I came up with way back when:
Top Cat
The most effectual
Top Cat
Whose intellectual close friends get to call him "T. C."
Providing it's with dignity
Top Cat
The indisputable leader of the gang
He's the boss
He's a VIP (pronounced like a word)
He's a championship
He's the most tip top
Top Cat
Yes, he's a chief
He's a king, but above everything
He's the most tip top
Top Cat
Most versions screw up the "whose" with "who's" but this just isn't correct. "Whose" is definitely the start of a longer sentence, with "intellectual" modifying "friends" and not "who".
A number of versions exchange "pip" for "VIP". I went back and forth on this a little bit myself. Listening to the song and trying to hear each word in context. Ya know, using Orwellian doublethink to will myself into hearing it one way of the other. It was always easier to hear "VIP". It makes more sense in context as well.
There are quite few variations with the "a"s and the "the"s before "boss", "VIP", "championship", "chief" and "king". Again, using 1984 as my guide, the only place I really could here a "the" was before "boss". The rest were all "a"s.
Then, as now, I had a little bit too much time on my hands.