Keep in mind that Delphi 1 was pretty much Turbo Pascal 9 repackaged and a nice GUI development environment thrown on.
That's rather simplistic. The last version of TP was version 7. There were DOS and Win versions. Delphi might be considered a successor to TPW, but not only was the IDE a huge improvement, so was the VCL. Saying Delphi is 'version 9' discounts many of it's labor saving features. I couldn't imagine doing Win apps without the forms designer. And I've never had to write a message loop. (at least not in Delphi)
DOS, CRT, Graph, ect. aren't available in Delphi
That is because they were for DOS applications. Delphi is strictly Windows. SysUtils replaced the functions that were reasonable for a Win app. Sorry, but ClearScreen just doesn't port. And Sleep() is better than Delay() in a multitasking environment.
NAT can reduce the risk of getting attacked, at least until you get a compromised system on your local net. If you have wireless, laptops, or friends that bring their computers over, don't rely on it. Pick up a free firewall like Kerio or ZoneAlarm.
Depending on how they are going to be used, you might look at some of the more expensive hardware. I rolled my first site when most APs were $1200, and Linksys was selling their WAP11s for $200. I put Linksys in the first warehouse, and followed through on the others to be consistant. Now, Symbol has a nice managed system where you only need one IP for the whole setup and radios are centrally administered. (I generally install 10-12 APs per site, and logging into each one to change a setting can be a pain)
Although, one advantage to using the cheaper stuff is that I can install more APs. So when I've had radios drop it doesn't give me holes in my coverage. I came home from a business trip last year and found that 6 out of 12 APs were down due to a blown power supply on my POE. Users were unhappy and the net was struggling, but we could still process/pick orders.
Ouch, $300 for just the cabinet? I hope you eBayed the extra parts. I used to hit the auctions all the time. I wish I hadn't passed on that $300 Afterburner sitdown a while back....
I built my own cocktail cabinet. $100 for a glass, a full sheet of MDF (this thing is heavy), and some miscellaneous hardware. I used the I-Paq controllers though.
But I also have a wide body pinball cab that I bought a couple years ago ($25 or $50). I might have to look into an X-Arcade controller for it. Now if I could just come up with a theme for the playfield.
What do you do, charge by the hour? I can do a 100k sq/ft warehouse in 2-3 hours by myself. And then I spend another hour or so writing up the details and marking the locations for APs. With help I'd put the test AP on a battery and be done in no time.
my 14lb laptop
That's a big laptop. Not sure I've ever seen one that heavy. Mine isn't light, and it weighs in at 7 lbs.
I logged in during lunch to reserve a few names. A lot of us didn't have to patch, we're using the open beta client and patched last week. I did run into one realm (Blackhand - Central) that seemed to be having trouble. Server population was low, but it was coming up Realm Full and kicked you into the queue. Either they screwed up the configuration on that realm, or they are still working on tuning.
I can't say what it's like in the game, I won't get time to play before the holiday. Judging from the final days of open beta, I would say you won't see much lag in game because they are limiting the number of players per realm.
At least on Mac OS you can open up the package and get the.torrent file and open that up in any BT client of your choice.
You could do it under Windows too. You just needed to dig into the EXE and pull out the resource. I used ABC, and my download went from days to hours. And since my internet connection was still usable with ABC, I let it run for a day or so after it finished.
I would *think* that the signup is by your login, since you can play on multiple machines (that would probably have different cd keys installed on them.)
Doubtful. Open Beta required a key to create an account. WoW accounts have access to the game servers and the ability to post on their web site.
More than likely, they are more concerned that each account has a CD key rather than each PC that has the software loaded. It's not possible to play without logging into their servers, so why would they care if you load the game on every PC in your house. You're only going to be able to log in with one account per CD key anyway.
But there's about 3-4 contractors on the battlefield to every soldier.
Except that a lot of those 'contractors' are 'private security', which is a PC way of saying mercenary. I doubt there are very many computer geek contractors on the battlefield. It's not their kind of FPS, and there's no air conditioning out there.....
I was old MUDer back in the day and played quite a bit of Diablo(1 and 2) as well.
Heretic. How dare you compare MUDs to Diablo. You'll have people believing you don't know the difference between persistent and instanced worlds.
WoW is sharp. As long as I don't get tired of questing, I can see about a year's worth of playing working through various character classes, with just the current content. They're going to have to work to keep my interest for 3 years like AC did.
My problems with WoW have to do with Blizzards inexperience with MMOGs. There is nothing evolutionary about WoW. It's primarily just better graphics on a reasonably built game engine. I can't say that other developers are making any leaps forward either, but it's about time for someone to figure out the whole thin game client/the client is in the hands of the enemy thing. Blizzard has announced a policy of prohibitting external applications or UI modifications that expose more than they intended. If they don't intend for the client to see that, they shouldn't send it to them. This also goes to gameplay mechanics, rulesets should be enforced on the server. And content updates should simply be a database update and occasionally downloading some new images to the client.
Blizzard also came across quite wishy washy during the betas. No official word of whether characters would be wiped until the day that they did it. Most of us assumed it would happen, but they wouldn't say it. No official word about the length of the open beta, or when it was going to start, until it actually happened. I almost cancelled my preorder due to the way they handled OB signups. (they managed to melt every server they owned) They won't even announce the names of the retail worlds, so guilds can't get organized. WoW is going to be a success despite Blizzard.
Probably the only thing that will continue to bug me after next week though is their silly name filters. Character names can only be 12 characters long. No punctuation, no spaces, and proper cased. That, and twitch fishing.
I learned one important thing from their beta board; anytime someone mentions 'immersion' in relation to a game feature, you can just move on to the next thread. There's no useful content. It's like the nazi in usenet thing .
You just have to make different choices on what you cook. Cook things that freeze well. I make spaghetti sauce and chili 5 quarts at a time. The pan I use for lasagna is huge. But I can fix those on a weekend and they will keep in the freezer for months.
And if you're looking for really cheap, think beans, rice, and potatos.
Start buying from Dell Business. You get a better grade of technician. IE, you only have to go through the script once. And the new and improved version speaks english.
The problem is; if you don't cap your upload Blizzards' client will choke your broadband. There is no way my cable is working efficiently at 40k download and 50k upload. I have a 3000/384 pipe.
I have no problem supplying people with bandwidth, but when it takes so much that I can't even browse Slashdot on another PC, it's taking too much. Now if they want to take every bit of my upload bandwidth, blocking frame ACKs so downloading is impossible, they can feel free to pay for my cable this month. Otherwise, I'll give them 75% and I don't care if my DL speed matches my UL speed. I've put it on it's own machine and it can run for the next 2 1/2 days.
I managed about 50 meg an hour, and after 3 hours I got so frustrated with it killing my broadband I just shut it off. Blizzard is trying to squeeze every ounce of bandwidth out of their customers, so they don't have to pay to distribute the beta. But with their hacked BT client it wants to upload at the same speed as download. The result is that you get a horrible download and nothing else on your network can access the Internet.
I'll never use it again. I have a friend that has the ST2 installer, I'll either get it from him and download the patch or forget about the beta. The game isn't even released, and I'm already wondering if I wasted my money buying it.
I don't buy the "we underestimated demand" line. I think it's more along the lines of "we overestimated the capability of our systems". I would never put a page on my website and then post it to Slashdot, my broadband wouldn't handle the load. There are any number of ways they could have managed things so that their servers didn't just fall over.
Everybody has to go through their signup system. It was completely inadequate. So I'm betting we're going to revisit this in a couple weeks when the game launches. But then it's going to be people who have spent money who are going to be pissed. If they don't make some changes now, I'm predicting a very rough launch and a big black eye for Blizzard.
It seems the patch servers are affected too. I've seen plenty of people with problems there as well.
More and more often, online companies use their web sites as the primary means of communication. Try finding a phone number you can call at Amazon. Try fixing a billing problem on MSN Zone. So when they take the game servers down to fix a problem, and the web server dies from the load (if you accessed their forums, you've seen the errors), customers lose their only means of communicating with the company. It's unacceptable and unprofessional.
They have done a lot of work to link the game to their web site. So when the web server fails, part of their game is not working.
Let me give you an Everquest example. SOE has this nice web page you can go to and check the status of any world. Now suppose you have trouble logging in, so you go to the web site to check and see if the world you play on is having a problem. But you can't see anything because their web site is down too. You've paid your subscription, but you aren't going to be playing and you have no idea why, because someone decided "it's only the website, not a game server". And that is exactly the situation we had during the initial stress test, and it's much, much worse right now.
Re:Is it still only for people without a life?
on
Everquest 2 Launches
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· Score: 1
Actually, in a MMORPG with an 'average' player, one level a week is not bad. Of course the early levels go much faster. There are people who will play 20 hours a day and level like mad, but that's not a sustainable base. You want the people who will stay around for 2 or 3 years, and with the current level 60 cap, there's no way it's going to last that long.
If all of your players are 'gotta get to the next level' types, there is a content problem with your game.
Actually, the best reason to avoid WoW and try out EQ2 is the way Blizzard has handled this open beta. Two weeks from release and their servers have completely melted down. They have completely taken the WoW.com site down. They're telling everyone to go to battle.net for info. For a while you could go directly to the forums, but now you get ACL errors. Other pages are 404s. signups.worldofwarcraft.com has cratered, you'll get a dozen connection refused between each page, and eventually get a session timeout. File Planet also melted, but it's not like that is any surprise. They had the same problem during the stress test two months ago, but not as severely. But every time they did game server maintenance, the web site would become a smoking hole under the load. Certainly not encouraging. Maybe when they can't get a reliable system by spring, they'll install Apache and get things working.
Patches for an online game aren't that big of a deal. I'm generally against game companies doing the whole release and patch thing (one of the reasons I've never been in favor of Xbox having a HD). But for online games you have to connect to their server to play anyway. So if the patch system is good, I don't have a problem with (even encourage) regular patches. Asheron's Call has monthly patches with new content, and although their patch system isn't very good, it has kept the game from getting old. It's nice to know that the monthly fee is contributing to the evolution of the game.
Unfortunately, no mod points today. But I printed it for future reference. Your post has saved me lots of time, I was planning to figure out how to do this next time I had some free time. I've been considering using one of the MAME CDs as a base to make a flash based rDesktop image. I'll grab a copy of Pilot and try that first.
What are these lines I keep hearing about? I haven't had to wait in line since I moved to this county 7 years ago. Of course, we have no voting 'machines'. Here's your ballot and a marker, fill in the appropriate circle and run it through the scanner on your way out the door....:-P Who knows, maybe it'll be standing room only tomorrow morning.
I wouldn't mind Postgresql, but it has a very annoying feature that I can't tolerate. Let me preface this by saying I work with a lot of legacy MS-SQL TransactSQL. MS-SQL can be configured (default) to NOT be case sensitive in any way, shape, or form. If I create a table called MyTable, I can address it any way I like and I will get results. Same goes for fields. The only effect is that if I do a straight dump of a result set, my fields will be called DailySales, not dailysales or DAILYSALES. So I don't have to reformat them for the users. Now, a lot of this legacy SQL and table structures took that into account.
If I try to use that with Postgresql, I have to put "every statement" inside "double quotes" so it doesn't "lowercase every freaking field and table". Case sensitivity is fine, but evaluate statements as I enter them. If they insist on lowercasing everything I don't put in quotes, lowercase the SQL server side of the comparison too.
MySQL isn't an option for me. What good is a database server that doesn't return errors on validation failures. But I can live with Firebird now that they have the super server. It, or FlameRobin/IBAccess, lowercase all of my table and field names, but I can live with that.
And yeah, in the past I wasn't all that impressed with Interbase either. I've always used ClientDatasets to avoid it until recently. My complaint has always been a lack of decent tools and it's bizarre desire to expect the client to know the location of it's GDB files.
You also repeat the myth that the CIA provided aid and training to Osama bin Laden and his cohorts. But this is not true, both the CIA and Osama himself agree.
So you want there to be 130,000!!!! U.S. troops in Afghanistan
No, I want our troops back home where they belong. I want our leadership to pull their heads out of their asses and clean up one mess before they start the next one. If Dubya didn't have the attention span of a gnat, he would have taken care of Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, rather than invading another sovereign nation, pissing off the rest of the world, and creating two messes we aren't equipped to fix.
Plus it's not like we have a troop shortage or anything. There's still 300,000!!!! reservists we haven't called up
Yeah, tell that to the reservists. The maintenance guy where I work got called up. You know, the kind of guy that reports one weekend a month and a couple weeks a year to DEFEND our nation. You also realize there are quite a few police officers and firefighters in the reserves. That certainly makes us safer, take our police officers and send them to Iraq.
Geez, talk about clueless people. Go do your happy dance and kiss up to Dubya. You realize that if he gets re-elected he's going to beat his chest and attack Iran, and possibly Syria and North Korea too.
Do you have ANY idea state the region is in now? You take a very volatile part of the world, thanks to British and US meddling since the early 1900s. Invade two nations and do a half assed job of cleaning up both. Now terrorists are free to roam not only afghanistan, but Iraq too. We piss off some Arabs by invading, more by not getting control of things and restoring order, remove all the police, military and government of two nations, and build a breeding ground for terrorist support. With the direction we are heading, those people are going to forget what a bastard Saddam was and we'll turn him into a martyr.
Oh, and here's one for you to think about while you are cheerleading the war. Do you know how many troops we actually need to occupy two nations?
Maybe while you're at it you might actually figure out that this is a problem you don't solve by invading countries. We trained Osama and gave him money to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. We put Saddam Hussein in power and supported him to fight Iran. You realize how Iraq was created don't you? Look up Yugoslavia and see how it was created. Disparate cultures and religions lumped together into a single country because they are in the same geographical area. Now go look up Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo, and Montenegro. And ethnic cleansing, just for fun. Then realize that Iraq was created by grouping Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurds into a convenient geographical nation. How does your crystal ball work now? I didn't care for Bush Sr either, but at least he understood the complexities of the region. And before Iraq we supported the Shaw's dictatorship in Iran. US foreign policy at it's finest. We don't care what kind of people we put in power, as long as the puppy doesn't bite it's master. And believe it or not, but the Arabs don't particular like the fact that we pushed them of off their land so that we could set up a Jewish state after WWII. But then again, you say I have no clue, so you must be right.
As a part-time tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, I too wonder about the timing here.
Let me add to your paranoia. Why hasn't Kerry been more agressive? I have yet to hear him say "why haven't you been able to catch OBL in 3 years?" "If you hadn't wasted troops, lives, and $$$ attacking Iraq; Al Qaeda could be destroyed, OBL captured, and order restored in Afghanistan." And of course "why have gas prices gone up 30% in the last year and how much are your oil buddies making from it?" Instead, all we get is; "you outsourced Tora Bora and OBL got away."
Maybe the whole election is a sham. Rather than McCain being liberal, maybe Kerry is a closest Republican. BTW, how is Haliburton doing these days?
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that Delphi 1 was pretty much Turbo Pascal 9 repackaged and a nice GUI development environment thrown on.
That's rather simplistic. The last version of TP was version 7. There were DOS and Win versions. Delphi might be considered a successor to TPW, but not only was the IDE a huge improvement, so was the VCL. Saying Delphi is 'version 9' discounts many of it's labor saving features. I couldn't imagine doing Win apps without the forms designer. And I've never had to write a message loop. (at least not in Delphi)
DOS, CRT, Graph, ect. aren't available in Delphi
That is because they were for DOS applications. Delphi is strictly Windows. SysUtils replaced the functions that were reasonable for a Win app. Sorry, but ClearScreen just doesn't port. And Sleep() is better than Delay() in a multitasking environment.
NAT can reduce the risk of getting attacked, at least until you get a compromised system on your local net. If you have wireless, laptops, or friends that bring their computers over, don't rely on it. Pick up a free firewall like Kerio or ZoneAlarm.
Depending on how they are going to be used, you might look at some of the more expensive hardware. I rolled my first site when most APs were $1200, and Linksys was selling their WAP11s for $200. I put Linksys in the first warehouse, and followed through on the others to be consistant. Now, Symbol has a nice managed system where you only need one IP for the whole setup and radios are centrally administered. (I generally install 10-12 APs per site, and logging into each one to change a setting can be a pain)
Although, one advantage to using the cheaper stuff is that I can install more APs. So when I've had radios drop it doesn't give me holes in my coverage. I came home from a business trip last year and found that 6 out of 12 APs were down due to a blown power supply on my POE. Users were unhappy and the net was struggling, but we could still process/pick orders.
Ouch, $300 for just the cabinet? I hope you eBayed the extra parts. I used to hit the auctions all the time. I wish I hadn't passed on that $300 Afterburner sitdown a while back....
I built my own cocktail cabinet. $100 for a glass, a full sheet of MDF (this thing is heavy), and some miscellaneous hardware. I used the I-Paq controllers though.
But I also have a wide body pinball cab that I bought a couple years ago ($25 or $50). I might have to look into an X-Arcade controller for it. Now if I could just come up with a theme for the playfield.
~6 hours helping
What do you do, charge by the hour? I can do a 100k sq/ft warehouse in 2-3 hours by myself. And then I spend another hour or so writing up the details and marking the locations for APs. With help I'd put the test AP on a battery and be done in no time.
my 14lb laptop
That's a big laptop. Not sure I've ever seen one that heavy. Mine isn't light, and it weighs in at 7 lbs.
I logged in during lunch to reserve a few names. A lot of us didn't have to patch, we're using the open beta client and patched last week. I did run into one realm (Blackhand - Central) that seemed to be having trouble. Server population was low, but it was coming up Realm Full and kicked you into the queue. Either they screwed up the configuration on that realm, or they are still working on tuning.
I can't say what it's like in the game, I won't get time to play before the holiday. Judging from the final days of open beta, I would say you won't see much lag in game because they are limiting the number of players per realm.
At least on Mac OS you can open up the package and get the .torrent file and open that up in any BT client of your choice.
You could do it under Windows too. You just needed to dig into the EXE and pull out the resource. I used ABC, and my download went from days to hours. And since my internet connection was still usable with ABC, I let it run for a day or so after it finished.
I would *think* that the signup is by your login, since you can play on multiple machines (that would probably have different cd keys installed on them.)
Doubtful. Open Beta required a key to create an account. WoW accounts have access to the game servers and the ability to post on their web site.
More than likely, they are more concerned that each account has a CD key rather than each PC that has the software loaded. It's not possible to play without logging into their servers, so why would they care if you load the game on every PC in your house. You're only going to be able to log in with one account per CD key anyway.
But there's about 3-4 contractors on the battlefield to every soldier.
Except that a lot of those 'contractors' are 'private security', which is a PC way of saying mercenary. I doubt there are very many computer geek contractors on the battlefield. It's not their kind of FPS, and there's no air conditioning out there.....
I was old MUDer back in the day and played quite a bit of Diablo(1 and 2) as well.
Heretic. How dare you compare MUDs to Diablo. You'll have people believing you don't know the difference between persistent and instanced worlds.
WoW is sharp. As long as I don't get tired of questing, I can see about a year's worth of playing working through various character classes, with just the current content. They're going to have to work to keep my interest for 3 years like AC did.
My problems with WoW have to do with Blizzards inexperience with MMOGs. There is nothing evolutionary about WoW. It's primarily just better graphics on a reasonably built game engine. I can't say that other developers are making any leaps forward either, but it's about time for someone to figure out the whole thin game client/the client is in the hands of the enemy thing. Blizzard has announced a policy of prohibitting external applications or UI modifications that expose more than they intended. If they don't intend for the client to see that, they shouldn't send it to them. This also goes to gameplay mechanics, rulesets should be enforced on the server. And content updates should simply be a database update and occasionally downloading some new images to the client.
Blizzard also came across quite wishy washy during the betas. No official word of whether characters would be wiped until the day that they did it. Most of us assumed it would happen, but they wouldn't say it. No official word about the length of the open beta, or when it was going to start, until it actually happened. I almost cancelled my preorder due to the way they handled OB signups. (they managed to melt every server they owned) They won't even announce the names of the retail worlds, so guilds can't get organized. WoW is going to be a success despite Blizzard.
Probably the only thing that will continue to bug me after next week though is their silly name filters. Character names can only be 12 characters long. No punctuation, no spaces, and proper cased. That, and twitch fishing.
I learned one important thing from their beta board; anytime someone mentions 'immersion' in relation to a game feature, you can just move on to the next thread. There's no useful content. It's like the nazi in usenet thing
.
You just have to make different choices on what you cook. Cook things that freeze well. I make spaghetti sauce and chili 5 quarts at a time. The pan I use for lasagna is huge. But I can fix those on a weekend and they will keep in the freezer for months.
And if you're looking for really cheap, think beans, rice, and potatos.
Start buying from Dell Business. You get a better grade of technician. IE, you only have to go through the script once. And the new and improved version speaks english.
The problem is; if you don't cap your upload Blizzards' client will choke your broadband. There is no way my cable is working efficiently at 40k download and 50k upload. I have a 3000/384 pipe.
I have no problem supplying people with bandwidth, but when it takes so much that I can't even browse Slashdot on another PC, it's taking too much. Now if they want to take every bit of my upload bandwidth, blocking frame ACKs so downloading is impossible, they can feel free to pay for my cable this month. Otherwise, I'll give them 75% and I don't care if my DL speed matches my UL speed. I've put it on it's own machine and it can run for the next 2 1/2 days.
I managed about 50 meg an hour, and after 3 hours I got so frustrated with it killing my broadband I just shut it off. Blizzard is trying to squeeze every ounce of bandwidth out of their customers, so they don't have to pay to distribute the beta. But with their hacked BT client it wants to upload at the same speed as download. The result is that you get a horrible download and nothing else on your network can access the Internet.
I'll never use it again. I have a friend that has the ST2 installer, I'll either get it from him and download the patch or forget about the beta. The game isn't even released, and I'm already wondering if I wasted my money buying it.
I don't buy the "we underestimated demand" line. I think it's more along the lines of "we overestimated the capability of our systems". I would never put a page on my website and then post it to Slashdot, my broadband wouldn't handle the load. There are any number of ways they could have managed things so that their servers didn't just fall over.
Everybody has to go through their signup system. It was completely inadequate. So I'm betting we're going to revisit this in a couple weeks when the game launches. But then it's going to be people who have spent money who are going to be pissed. If they don't make some changes now, I'm predicting a very rough launch and a big black eye for Blizzard.
It seems the patch servers are affected too. I've seen plenty of people with problems there as well.
More and more often, online companies use their web sites as the primary means of communication. Try finding a phone number you can call at Amazon. Try fixing a billing problem on MSN Zone. So when they take the game servers down to fix a problem, and the web server dies from the load (if you accessed their forums, you've seen the errors), customers lose their only means of communicating with the company. It's unacceptable and unprofessional.
They have done a lot of work to link the game to their web site. So when the web server fails, part of their game is not working.
Let me give you an Everquest example. SOE has this nice web page you can go to and check the status of any world. Now suppose you have trouble logging in, so you go to the web site to check and see if the world you play on is having a problem. But you can't see anything because their web site is down too. You've paid your subscription, but you aren't going to be playing and you have no idea why, because someone decided "it's only the website, not a game server". And that is exactly the situation we had during the initial stress test, and it's much, much worse right now.
Actually, in a MMORPG with an 'average' player, one level a week is not bad. Of course the early levels go much faster. There are people who will play 20 hours a day and level like mad, but that's not a sustainable base. You want the people who will stay around for 2 or 3 years, and with the current level 60 cap, there's no way it's going to last that long.
If all of your players are 'gotta get to the next level' types, there is a content problem with your game.
Actually, the best reason to avoid WoW and try out EQ2 is the way Blizzard has handled this open beta. Two weeks from release and their servers have completely melted down. They have completely taken the WoW.com site down. They're telling everyone to go to battle.net for info. For a while you could go directly to the forums, but now you get ACL errors. Other pages are 404s. signups.worldofwarcraft.com has cratered, you'll get a dozen connection refused between each page, and eventually get a session timeout. File Planet also melted, but it's not like that is any surprise. They had the same problem during the stress test two months ago, but not as severely. But every time they did game server maintenance, the web site would become a smoking hole under the load. Certainly not encouraging. Maybe when they can't get a reliable system by spring, they'll install Apache and get things working.
Patches for an online game aren't that big of a deal. I'm generally against game companies doing the whole release and patch thing (one of the reasons I've never been in favor of Xbox having a HD). But for online games you have to connect to their server to play anyway. So if the patch system is good, I don't have a problem with (even encourage) regular patches. Asheron's Call has monthly patches with new content, and although their patch system isn't very good, it has kept the game from getting old. It's nice to know that the monthly fee is contributing to the evolution of the game.
Unfortunately, no mod points today. But I printed it for future reference. Your post has saved me lots of time, I was planning to figure out how to do this next time I had some free time. I've been considering using one of the MAME CDs as a base to make a flash based rDesktop image. I'll grab a copy of Pilot and try that first.
What are these lines I keep hearing about? I haven't had to wait in line since I moved to this county 7 years ago. Of course, we have no voting 'machines'. Here's your ballot and a marker, fill in the appropriate circle and run it through the scanner on your way out the door.... :-P Who knows, maybe it'll be standing room only tomorrow morning.
I wouldn't mind Postgresql, but it has a very annoying feature that I can't tolerate. Let me preface this by saying I work with a lot of legacy MS-SQL TransactSQL. MS-SQL can be configured (default) to NOT be case sensitive in any way, shape, or form. If I create a table called MyTable, I can address it any way I like and I will get results. Same goes for fields. The only effect is that if I do a straight dump of a result set, my fields will be called DailySales, not dailysales or DAILYSALES. So I don't have to reformat them for the users. Now, a lot of this legacy SQL and table structures took that into account.
If I try to use that with Postgresql, I have to put "every statement" inside "double quotes" so it doesn't "lowercase every freaking field and table". Case sensitivity is fine, but evaluate statements as I enter them. If they insist on lowercasing everything I don't put in quotes, lowercase the SQL server side of the comparison too.
MySQL isn't an option for me. What good is a database server that doesn't return errors on validation failures. But I can live with Firebird now that they have the super server. It, or FlameRobin/IBAccess, lowercase all of my table and field names, but I can live with that.
And yeah, in the past I wasn't all that impressed with Interbase either. I've always used ClientDatasets to avoid it until recently. My complaint has always been a lack of decent tools and it's bizarre desire to expect the client to know the location of it's GDB files.
Who said Afghanistan and Iraq were messes?
Afghanistan
That's actually an AP wire article, BTW, in case you are questioning the source.
Afghanistan is so peaceful we lost 4 soldiers there in October, and the total is up to 142 so far.
And everything is just peachy in Iraq too?
You also repeat the myth that the CIA provided aid and training to Osama bin Laden and his cohorts. But this is not true, both the CIA and Osama himself agree.
I guess MSNBC and The BBC are just lying then.
So you want there to be 130,000!!!! U.S. troops in Afghanistan
No, I want our troops back home where they belong. I want our leadership to pull their heads out of their asses and clean up one mess before they start the next one. If Dubya didn't have the attention span of a gnat, he would have taken care of Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, rather than invading another sovereign nation, pissing off the rest of the world, and creating two messes we aren't equipped to fix.
Plus it's not like we have a troop shortage or anything. There's still 300,000!!!! reservists we haven't called up
Yeah, tell that to the reservists. The maintenance guy where I work got called up. You know, the kind of guy that reports one weekend a month and a couple weeks a year to DEFEND our nation. You also realize there are quite a few police officers and firefighters in the reserves. That certainly makes us safer, take our police officers and send them to Iraq.
Geez, talk about clueless people. Go do your happy dance and kiss up to Dubya. You realize that if he gets re-elected he's going to beat his chest and attack Iran, and possibly Syria and North Korea too.
Do you have ANY idea state the region is in now? You take a very volatile part of the world, thanks to British and US meddling since the early 1900s. Invade two nations and do a half assed job of cleaning up both. Now terrorists are free to roam not only afghanistan, but Iraq too. We piss off some Arabs by invading, more by not getting control of things and restoring order, remove all the police, military and government of two nations, and build a breeding ground for terrorist support. With the direction we are heading, those people are going to forget what a bastard Saddam was and we'll turn him into a martyr.
Oh, and here's one for you to think about while you are cheerleading the war. Do you know how many troops we actually need to occupy two nations?
Maybe while you're at it you might actually figure out that this is a problem you don't solve by invading countries. We trained Osama and gave him money to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. We put Saddam Hussein in power and supported him to fight Iran. You realize how Iraq was created don't you? Look up Yugoslavia and see how it was created. Disparate cultures and religions lumped together into a single country because they are in the same geographical area. Now go look up Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo, and Montenegro. And ethnic cleansing, just for fun. Then realize that Iraq was created by grouping Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurds into a convenient geographical nation. How does your crystal ball work now? I didn't care for Bush Sr either, but at least he understood the complexities of the region. And before Iraq we supported the Shaw's dictatorship in Iran. US foreign policy at it's finest. We don't care what kind of people we put in power, as long as the puppy doesn't bite it's master. And believe it or not, but the Arabs don't particular like the fact that we pushed them of off their land so that we could set up a Jewish state after WWII. But then again, you say I have no clue, so you must be right.
As a part-time tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, I too wonder about the timing here.
Let me add to your paranoia. Why hasn't Kerry been more agressive? I have yet to hear him say "why haven't you been able to catch OBL in 3 years?" "If you hadn't wasted troops, lives, and $$$ attacking Iraq; Al Qaeda could be destroyed, OBL captured, and order restored in Afghanistan." And of course "why have gas prices gone up 30% in the last year and how much are your oil buddies making from it?" Instead, all we get is; "you outsourced Tora Bora and OBL got away."
Maybe the whole election is a sham. Rather than McCain being liberal, maybe Kerry is a closest Republican. BTW, how is Haliburton doing these days?