(I doubt any army will be dumb enough to go head-to-head against the US Army in desert tank battle for a looonngg time. Even the Iraqis didn't try it a second time.)
Actually they did. They sent a huge column of tanks and other armored support south from Baghdad to attack US positions. A sandstorm was covering much of their progress. As soon as it cleared, the column was promptly bombarded by B-52s and other assorted bombers. Needless to say, the column did not reach its target, instead retreating back home at about 10% its original size.
Well, its not reallyl a MMORPG, but look at Magic Online. The online version of the Collectible Card Game Magic (Wizards.com)
You buy virtual "boosters", gain virtual cards, which you, if you collect entire sets, can convert to real paper-cards, with "real" value. And I cant remember seeing any restrictions on selling these for real cash as well.
Or even better than Magic is Sanctum which combines cards with a playing board in a most enjoyable, and addicting, experience. Similar to Magic Online, virtual cards are traded/purchased/sold both ways. Sanctum has been out _much_ longer tha Magic Online btw:)
Honestly, I wonder why if/else/elsif blocks need to be enclosed with {}
I've always preferred it...I hate "if" one-liners.
Aside from being a pain in the ass to modify if you need to turn it into a multi-line block, it makes reading coding even more annoying, can't even do searches on braces to move between blocks.
I've never met a perl programmer who could tell me what a design pattern is either
Then would you like to go out for a beer?
A design pattern is basically a code solution engineered to solve problems that occur over and over in software design. It's a basic precept of reusable object-oriented code.
In fact, most people use them while they code without even realizing it. I own a copy of the Gamma/Helm/Johnson/Vlissides Design Patterns book. I'm fully versed in C++/C (it was my first language). I use design patterns extensively in my C++ code, which I love coding in btw (my favorite object oriented language)...oodles and oodles of Singletons, Flyweights, Prototypes, and Abstract Factories just to name some of the primaries. Additionally, I consider myself a Perl veteran. Given the choice between the two, I prefer Perl for both readability and flexibility. Somehow it just makes more sense to say:
&parse if ($is_true) or exit(1);
then it is to say
if ($is_true) { parse(); } else { exit(1); }
The first flows, like poetry, like reading a book. The C code is choppy and mechanical.
You may have whatever presumptions you want about the language, but a good Perl programmer can write some amazing code. It's just alot easier to write spaghetti Perl code than C. That doesn't mean you can't make Perl code look and perform nice.
As for code re-use, ever heard of CPAN?
Oh yeah, since Perl I've learned 3 new languages, including Java, Javascript, and SQL. And no I don't believe it was any harder learning them.
I'm shocked how many Perl hating trolls can get modded up on Slashdot.
At first I didn't see the explicit sexual iamgery people are posting about on slashdot...but after being told what to look for...those inkblot creators are perverts!
There is no doubt that music exists outside the RIAA. People who actually like music already know this. They already know how to get music they like. But the majority of people don't really care about music that much. Certainly not enough to spend time researching different genres and artists. It's much easier just to be told what to like.
I really hate this elitist attitude. I happen to love punk & some pop & most of the music you'll find on the everyday music stations, including the one-hit-wonder songs. I don't like them because people "tell me" to like them. I like them because they're upbeat, catchy, and fun to sing to. I've heard _plenty_ in other genres. One of my roommates is another elitist like you with this "my music is far superior to yours" mentality. He's into everything from synth to industrial to weird shit I can't even place in a genre. Practically every band on his playlist I've never even heard of. Some I can't even pronounce.
Suffice it to say, I hear songs from these "rare" genres alot. Most of the music I can't stand. Alot of it sounds like noise to my ears...hell, some of it would be fine in a dance club, but I couldn't stand listening to it anywhere else. Then there are some groups I've come across through him that have a few songs I like (KMFDM, Wolfsheim, and Acumen to name a few)
My point in this rant is that I _enjoy_ my music. I am not brainwashed by the RIAA. I'm open to new sound and new music too. But you can't give me some band I've never heard of, whose music sounds "different" than mainstream, and claim it's somehow superior just because you happen to like it and are part of a select few who does.
By a whopping 0.4%, and with one of the G5's processors disabled. You can spin it any way you want, but the clear fact is that with the G5 Macs are competitive in CPU performance again. I don't see why this disturbs you so; competition is good.
It's not the fact it's competitive once more that bugs me. It's that a bunch of lunatic Mac advocates are trumping an absurd claim that the G5 is somehow twice the speed of a P4. Sheer lunacy. I might be inclinded to believe that a dual G5 could beat a dual Xeon by a few percentages in performance. However, this 100+% comparison garbage is absurd...they're doing crazy shit like comparing two G5s against one P4. Please.
The one thing I really dislike about the idea of T3 is the complete disregard for the basic premise set up in T2 (or even T1 for that matter). In T2 we see the Terminator and the T-1000 completely melt away.
In some defense of continuity, in T2, the T1's arm is crushed in the gears of the machinery by the T-1000. That arm _is_ left behind and not melted away. So that's some form of technology that remains of the future.
"The problem is that there is no adequate system in place that allows music lovers access to their favorite music while compensating artists and copyright holders."
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this is flat our wrong. There are SEVERAL music services that allow one to download music, burn it to CD, carry it on portable players, and the like. I use two, emusic and iTunes (which appearantly is going to be available for Windows this year).
Available on Windows this year...aka, not now...majority of lusers out there use Windows. Thus, their statement that there is no "adequate system" fits quite well...there is no system right now that fits the general public of Windows users (and not a select elitist mac loving group)
I have no idea what emusic is, is that a product accessible via Windows?
I'll gladly pay for the music I want, but I'm no interest in buying a mac just to do that.
I wouldn't classify Enter The Matrix as awful.
I mean sure it was bad, but not awful.
It was shittily coded and had enough fun action in it to make it comparable to such software blunders such as Counterstrike that are beloved by mindless shooters everywhere.
To classify something as awful, it's gotta have like _no_ redeeming qualities (see any "Tycoon" game other than Railroad/Rollercoaster Tycoon...utter trash)
Heh, this reminds me of the Casino in Dungeon Keeper. It had that little lever you could slide one way or another to either steal money from your monsters, or let them win and be happy.
Dude, letting them be happy was worth it just to see the little celebration dance that went down anytime someone hit the jackpot.:)
Reminds me of the old trick question you use to catch kids: "What weighs more: a kilogram of bricks or a kilogram of feathers?"
I've always heard the similar trick question with the word pounds instead of kilograms
It's not much of a joke if you use units of mass...because then the question is open to interpretation.
Weight has many definitions, though the one I've always used is "the gravitional force on a body"
That's why you can weigh something different on the Moon than on Earth.
If you're going to use a unit of weight (pounds), the answer of course is that they're equal.
However, if you use a unit of mass, I could say that a kilogram of bricks on the Moon weighs less than a kilogram of feathers on the Earth and vice versa:)
Aka, you leave the question open to interpretation (as the gravitational force on the body isn't a constant), and thus there's a loophole for them to get out of looking stupid. If you throw in an "on Earth", you cover your ass:>
However, if you use units of weight in the joke, there's no way for them not to look stupid:)
If there is no difference between references in Perl and C++, then how do you create a reference to a file IO handle in Perl?
You do it the same way I just said, with a \ reference
my *FILE; # declared filehandle
my $ref = \*FILE; # established reference
And that doesn't even begin to cover such horrendous things as typeglobs
I thought typeglobs were officially dead? I agree they're hideous, that's why I never use them. I thought they were an artifact of older Perl.
I'm just so numbed by looking at things like:
$var{ foo }[ bar ]("baz");
all day long that I occasionally lose sight of how strange that is.
Why is that in any way strange?
How's that differ from this:
var->foo.bar("baz");
People diss what they aren't familiar with.
The Perl line above makes perfect sense to me, as does the C++ line. All it takes is a basic grasp of the grammar of the language.
Perl programmers have invested enormous amounts of effort, time, energy and brainpower into understanding how to use references.
You still haven't proven to me this "enormous amount of effort, time, energy, or brainpower"...I believe I've shown references in Perl as being simple to use.
That's why I say that Perl is the ultimate programming language for corporate parasites who would be out of a job if the software they wrote wasn't incomprehensible to anyone else and didn't keep falling apart and crashing every time the wind blows.
You now show your true bias. Don't hold the rest of the Perl world liable for the mistakes of shitty Perl programmers you've met. I've met my equal share of C/C++ spaghetti coders. There's nothing wrong with the language. It's just that Perl lets you get away with alot more uglier things than C will allow, and there's alot of bad programmers out there that make the language look awful when it can in fact be very elegant and clean in the right hands.
If Perl references are so great, why were they only kludged in late in the development of Perl?
My guess would be that early on Perl was considered more of a scripting tool than a programming language. And kluging is faster than rewriting whole languages.
That's the deep-rooted problem with Perl: nothing was designed, everything was kludged in at the last minute
See Perl 6. A full re-write of the language to handle all these kluge-issues you seemingly have deep concerns with.
Why don't you explain to the class how to use references in Perl, and then justify why they're so well designed, compared to C/C++.
References in Perl are established with a single \ appended to the beginning of a data type. They're deferenced with a $.
References in C/C++ are established with a single & appended to the beginning of a data type. They're dereferenced with a *.
I don't exactly see the vast difference you're implying.
Perl (mis)taught them that programming languages were extremely difficult to learn
Difficult to learn?!?
There's only three data types, none of which need to be declared. You don't need prototypes, pointers, memory management, bounds checking, etc...
I couldn't count the degree of complexity C/C++ has over Perl.
You can learn Perl in like less than a day reading a book. Now to be truly great at it takes some time.
Oh, and I think I devised a way to turn off the pop-up audio:
1. Press the power button on your computer's speakers.
2. When you're done with the site, press the power button again.
Gee, maybe I should patent this.
Now devise a way to keep your patented method from also turning off the sound to the mp3/cd I was listening to while browsing the web.
Why make browsing the web (the killer app for Windows 95 and even 98) such a different experience from browsing around on your commputer?
Possibly because they are two entirely different tasks? Or do you delete, copy, move, rename, and create your own directories out on the web? Different tools for different pruposes...I for one hate the "webinization" of the file system. It's abusrdly stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod to +5 funny.
Thank you for your time.
Oh well, simple solution:
1) Hike taxes to 20%
2) Fast forward time
3) Instant-construct new nuke plant
4) Lower taxes back to normal
5) Happy Sims!
I've always preferred it...I hate "if" one-liners. Aside from being a pain in the ass to modify if you need to turn it into a multi-line block, it makes reading coding even more annoying, can't even do searches on braces to move between blocks.
Then would you like to go out for a beer?
A design pattern is basically a code solution engineered to solve problems that occur over and over in software design.
It's a basic precept of reusable object-oriented code.
In fact, most people use them while they code without even realizing it. I own a copy of the Gamma/Helm/Johnson/Vlissides Design Patterns book. I'm fully versed in C++/C (it was my first language). I use design patterns extensively in my C++ code, which I love coding in btw (my favorite object oriented language)...oodles and oodles of Singletons, Flyweights, Prototypes, and Abstract Factories just to name some of the primaries. Additionally, I consider myself a Perl veteran. Given the choice between the two, I prefer Perl for both readability and flexibility. Somehow it just makes more sense to say:
&parse if ($is_true) or exit(1);
then it is to say
if ($is_true) { parse(); } else { exit(1); }
The first flows, like poetry, like reading a book.
The C code is choppy and mechanical.
You may have whatever presumptions you want about the language, but a good Perl programmer can write some amazing code. It's just alot easier to write spaghetti Perl code than C. That doesn't mean you can't make Perl code look and perform nice.
As for code re-use, ever heard of CPAN?
Oh yeah, since Perl I've learned 3 new languages, including Java, Javascript, and SQL. And no I don't believe it was any harder learning them.
I'm shocked how many Perl hating trolls can get modded up on Slashdot.
Be a leech, stay out of jail :)
At first I didn't see the explicit sexual iamgery people are posting about on slashdot...but after being told what to look for...those inkblot creators are perverts !
Suffice it to say, I hear songs from these "rare" genres alot. Most of the music I can't stand. Alot of it sounds like noise to my ears...hell, some of it would be fine in a dance club, but I couldn't stand listening to it anywhere else. Then there are some groups I've come across through him that have a few songs I like (KMFDM, Wolfsheim, and Acumen to name a few)
My point in this rant is that I _enjoy_ my music. I am not brainwashed by the RIAA. I'm open to new sound and new music too. But you can't give me some band I've never heard of, whose music sounds "different" than mainstream, and claim it's somehow superior just because you happen to like it and are part of a select few who does.
Available on Windows this year...aka, not now...majority of lusers out there use Windows. Thus, their statement that there is no "adequate system" fits quite well...there is no system right now that fits the general public of Windows users (and not a select elitist mac loving group) I have no idea what emusic is, is that a product accessible via Windows? I'll gladly pay for the music I want, but I'm no interest in buying a mac just to do that.
I wouldn't classify Enter The Matrix as awful.
I mean sure it was bad, but not awful.
It was shittily coded and had enough fun action in it to make it comparable to such software blunders such as Counterstrike that are beloved by mindless shooters everywhere.
To classify something as awful, it's gotta have like _no_ redeeming qualities (see any "Tycoon" game other than Railroad/Rollercoaster Tycoon...utter trash)
It had that little lever you could slide one way or another to either steal money from your monsters, or let them win and be happy.
Dude, letting them be happy was worth it just to see the little celebration dance that went down anytime someone hit the jackpot. :)
I've always heard the similar trick question with the word pounds instead of kilograms
:) :>
However, if you use units of weight in the joke, there's no way for them not to look stupid :)
It's not much of a joke if you use units of mass...because then the question is open to interpretation.
Weight has many definitions, though the one I've always used is "the gravitional force on a body"
That's why you can weigh something different on the Moon than on Earth.
If you're going to use a unit of weight (pounds), the answer of course is that they're equal.
However, if you use a unit of mass, I could say that a kilogram of bricks on the Moon weighs less than a kilogram of feathers on the Earth and vice versa
Aka, you leave the question open to interpretation (as the gravitational force on the body isn't a constant), and thus there's a loophole for them to get out of looking stupid. If you throw in an "on Earth", you cover your ass
Huge Dam...
Shabby construction...
Cracks forming...
Thrifty spending on building materials...
Sideshow Bob...
Bart...
(must focus mind...resist urge...)
The girl's last name is "DEEP"!
For the love of God, run with it!
Where are all you humor writers?
That's GOLD!
Many of the nastier japanese swords that I've seen had diamond coats or something to make them sharper.
You do it the same way I just said, with a \ reference
my *FILE; # declared filehandle
my $ref = \*FILE; # established reference
And that doesn't even begin to cover such horrendous things as typeglobs
I thought typeglobs were officially dead? I agree they're hideous, that's why I never use them. I thought they were an artifact of older Perl.
Why is that in any way strange?How's that differ from this:
var->foo.bar("baz");
People diss what they aren't familiar with.
The Perl line above makes perfect sense to me, as does the C++ line. All it takes is a basic grasp of the grammar of the language.
Perl programmers have invested enormous amounts of effort, time, energy and brainpower into understanding how to use references.
You still haven't proven to me this "enormous amount of effort, time, energy, or brainpower"...I believe I've shown references in Perl as being simple to use.
You now show your true bias. Don't hold the rest of the Perl world liable for the mistakes of shitty Perl programmers you've met. I've met my equal share of C/C++ spaghetti coders. There's nothing wrong with the language. It's just that Perl lets you get away with alot more uglier things than C will allow, and there's alot of bad programmers out there that make the language look awful when it can in fact be very elegant and clean in the right hands.If Perl references are so great, why were they only kludged in late in the development of Perl?
My guess would be that early on Perl was considered more of a scripting tool than a programming language. And kluging is faster than rewriting whole languages.
That's the deep-rooted problem with Perl: nothing was designed, everything was kludged in at the last minute
See Perl 6. A full re-write of the language to handle all these kluge-issues you seemingly have deep concerns with.
References in Perl are established with a single \ appended to the beginning of a data type. They're deferenced with a $.
References in C/C++ are established with a single & appended to the beginning of a data type. They're dereferenced with a *.
I don't exactly see the vast difference you're implying.
Difficult to learn?!? There's only three data types, none of which need to be declared. You don't need prototypes, pointers, memory management, bounds checking, etc... I couldn't count the degree of complexity C/C++ has over Perl. You can learn Perl in like less than a day reading a book. Now to be truly great at it takes some time.
That's like the Slashdot equivalent of a tetris
Magius_AR
Possibly because they are two entirely different tasks? Or do you delete, copy, move, rename, and create your own directories out on the web? Different tools for different pruposes...I for one hate the "webinization" of the file system. It's abusrdly stupid.
I find it very funny that there's only been like 23 posts on this topic. If it was Windows or IIS or something, there'd be like 500 minimum.