As many of the follow-up replies indicate, if you're paying $1200/month for minimal insurance, you should be spending less time on slashdot and more time collecting policy quotes, or maybe moving to a state with a reasonably functional economy.
after 10 years, it costs more to service the car each year than the car is worth, thus making it prohibitively expensive to INSURE
I don't know about you but my maintenance costs are unrelated to my insurance costs, and my insurance doesn't pay for maintenance. I suppose you might be trying to say that insurance wants more to rebuild an old wrecked car, but that's only if you pursue replacement cost, and that type of insurance is very rare and generally only reserved for very valuable cars.
It's been awhile since I read the rules, but I do remember that DARPA actually has speed limits in many areas. I could be wrong, but I also seem to recall reading something about 45 MPH being the absolute maximum. Maybe not, though.
Personally I doubt anyone will win any time soon, the course is intentionally difficult.
What's new is the highly "pluggable" nature of remoting in.NET. Just because the concept isn't new doesn't mean there isn't value in explaining or investigating a particular implementation. Hell, how many OpenGL books are there? For that matter, how many on Java Remoting? It's a complicated subject which you aren't just going to automagically know everything about simply because you are familiar with DCOM or some other type of remoting.
User-selected customization information for a network (e.g., HTML) document is stored at a server with reference to user identifying information that uniquely identifies the user. Whenever the user navigates back to the network address of the HTML document, the user is identified automatically and receives a customized HTML document formed in accordance with the customization information.
The intent is to return a customized version of information stored on the server. POP3 doesn't do any customization of the data you're requesting. (That is also why this isn't a generic cookie patent like many people are ranting about.)
There are tons of websites out there, but unfortunately nobody seems to have the docs online in something convenient like PDF. Still, it can't hurt to hit Google and send some e-mails. I thought about doing this, but Northstar Basic is standard enough that I didn't really need to.
It may be older than you think. I believe the machine my friend has was purchased at the beginning of 1978 or the end of 1977...
I have an elderly friend who very recently asked me to deciper and port his custom home construction estimating software from glorious Northstar Basic. This app was (and still is) running on a Northstar Z80, which hails from sometime in the late 70's. He actually creates estimates for $500K+ custom luxury homes on this thing, complete with 132-column greenbar printouts. Hey, it works. His biggest problem is finding printer ribbon cartridges (he pays a local guy to re-ink them, and ever few years disassemble the cartridges and completely replace the ribbons).
He recently asked me to build him a new machine, so I slapped together a 3GHz box. His only previous PCs were a 486 and then a P3 @ about 700MHz, but the new machine finally convinced him it was time to risk a conversion of this critical piece of software. I tried talking him into one of the many off-the-shelf estimating packages I found, but he decided he'd rather have the same old software he has always used. He's a good friend, so I agreed to help, and in the next few weeks I'll throw together a port from Northstar Basic.
What's really funny is that he's been an avid Excel user for several years, and I *know* he knows Excel well enough to reproduce every bit of work this app does, but he just won't give up the safety net of step-by-step prompting...
Sucks that somebody modded you "Troll", you're exactly right. I have several phone numbers which have never been given out, and I get telemarketing calls on them all the time these days. I have several e-mail addresses which I use for development purposes -- e.g. I would never use them on an app or post them online... and now they receive spam.
Your last sentence sums it up. Even if he wasn't just drawing ridiculous conclusions, there is no way he could present this rather tenuous connection in a court and expect to win anything.
Actually, what happened was the renderings would slowly and progressively grow fade out (hmm, interesting coincidence, no?) until finally anything you rendered was just a solid black image. I had a friend who worked for an Autodesk reseller up until only about two years ago and I never heard about anything which affected the models themselves, but the fade trick was in use as late as 1996.
We used to intentionally run copies of whatever their newest version was without the dongle just to see if it was still there.
GMFP (Get My Fcking Point). I KNOW it's for orbital repair jobs. The POINT is they didn't know they needed a repair until they were already in reentry. The rest was a joke (and an admittedly lame one).
Unless I'm mistakened, they didn't even know they needed repairs until they were well on their way towards landing. I doubt a $1 foam brush is going to hold up to the heat of reentry while the sacrificial astronaut steps outside to apply some quick patches.
This must be why they don't let NASA Administrators anywhere near the sharp instruments.
No, the volume of mail they are talking about would require use of multiple "zombies" to send
You don't know what you're talking about. It isn't remotely difficult to blast out 160,000 e-mails in a matter of seconds. I once wrote a system which cranked out notifications to hundreds of thousands of addresses on a daily basis, and was routinely called upon to distribute to *millions* of addresses. (It was a government opt-in type of thing, not spam.) Even a single 56K dial-up connection could send 160,000 e-mails in only a few minutes. A DSL or cable modem connection could handle that volume very easily, and if you had a hosted server at your disposal, it would be truly trivial.
First, he said "hit the market" so I doubt he's talking about 30-year-old mainframe games. It's probably a stretch to include arcade games in his comment, but I was trying to give him a LITTLE credit, and besides those were the games that came out around the same time D&D made it's waves.
Second, you're probably talking about games like spacewar or the endless variations on the Trek game, and once again I think you'll find most of those games were also space-related.
Third, there is no shortage of D&D predecessors (Chainmail comes to mind...) which are more likely candidates as inspiration for the dungeon-adventure games that were being written back then.
Finally, it's really a stretch to call those video games. Most of them would have worked equally well on teletypes (and of course, quite a few of them were actually played that way).
Consequently, I have to agree with the original parent, it's extremely silly to credit D&D with spawning the videogame industry -- and that IS the claim the article made.
It appears they are aware of this. In the Legal Notice section at the end of the paper, they have some weird stuff (copied below) which didn't make any sense until I read the links you provided. It still doesn't make a LOT of sense, but it does appear they're jokingly making an obtuse reference to delay-line memory.
A do-it-yourself kit (long wire, speaker + microphone, shovel and a driver disk) will provide an affordable, portable and reusable way for extending storage memory on portable systems.
It is estiamted that, after digging a 100 ft well, it is possible to achieve over six kilobits of extra RAM storage at 20 kHz.
I just used my 1st ever mod points to md this post down. The original HHGG was a pretty ok movie. It could have been better, mostly by way of being longer AND having all the books included. I also might mention that the script to the bbc version was written by( at least in part) Douglas Adams. I wish disney would use his script, kinda at least.
The BBC version was only funny if you read the books, and then you were mostly laughing at the storyline. The movie doesn't even qualify for the lowly rating of "pretty ok". Though I have to admit I agree with another response to your post; they did get the voice of Marvin dead-on.
You are wrong, plain and simple. Among the most popular of the first videogames to hit the market were based off of D&D.
What are you smoking? The most popular videogames were Asteroids, Space Duel, Pac-Man, Space Invaders and a bunch of other things which are totally unrelated to D&D. In fact, they were mostly space-related. I suppose you could point to the Atari 2600 Adventure game, but that hardly qualifies as evidence of one industry spawning another. It wasn't until LATE in the videogame craze that games like Gauntlet and Dragon's Lair started showing up, and by then the videogame industry was already well on it's way to losing it's creativity and cranking out tried-and-true formula games (ten thousand variations of Street Fighter).
And if none of those references mean anything to you, you simply aren't old enough to comment on "the first videogames to hit the market".
It appears you tend to respond "Ask Google" to a lot of Ask Slashdot articles.
Then you haven't researched many of my replies. Sorry, I rarely respond with that answer. Mainly because when it actually applies, five thousand people usually beat me to the punch.:)
He says in the article that he would welcome response from the technical community.
Which is his way of saying, "Explain this to me, I'm too lazy to run a few Google searches and educate myself." It's not as if the information on anti-spam techniques are difficult to find.
While our reasons differ -- you appear to have an urge to create something physical, whereas I'm just tired of all the corporate bullshit -- that first statement so succinctly summarizes my growing urge to ditch programming as a career, I have been compelled to make it my new sig.
I get so tired of the "lines of code to initialize" argument. I have an init routine in a DX9 D3D C# program that only requires about 20 lines of code. Big deal. It proves nothing.
Handedness of the coordinate system is also relatively arbitrary. The DX LHS is a good match for computer-generated data, particularly for mapping 2D coordinates into a 3D space. One is not "more correct" than the other, and conversion is trivial.
MFC sucks, but as of DX9 the relationship is trivial at best if you're programming in C++ and if you're fortunate enough to be able to target the.NET managed infrastructure, the MFC relationship doesn't exist at all.
A better argument would be the recent MS announcement that they haven't slated any new releases for the foreseeable future. DX9 is the end of the line for the time being.
Slashdot Mirror
As many of the follow-up replies indicate, if you're paying $1200/month for minimal insurance, you should be spending less time on slashdot and more time collecting policy quotes, or maybe moving to a state with a reasonably functional economy.
I don't know about you but my maintenance costs are unrelated to my insurance costs, and my insurance doesn't pay for maintenance. I suppose you might be trying to say that insurance wants more to rebuild an old wrecked car, but that's only if you pursue replacement cost, and that type of insurance is very rare and generally only reserved for very valuable cars.
Personally I doubt anyone will win any time soon, the course is intentionally difficult.
What's new is the highly "pluggable" nature of remoting in .NET. Just because the concept isn't new doesn't mean there isn't value in explaining or investigating a particular implementation. Hell, how many OpenGL books are there? For that matter, how many on Java Remoting? It's a complicated subject which you aren't just going to automagically know everything about simply because you are familiar with DCOM or some other type of remoting.
I'm more concerned with the tedium of his superhero cult status.
The intent is to return a customized version of information stored on the server. POP3 doesn't do any customization of the data you're requesting. (That is also why this isn't a generic cookie patent like many people are ranting about.)
It may be older than you think. I believe the machine my friend has was purchased at the beginning of 1978 or the end of 1977...
He recently asked me to build him a new machine, so I slapped together a 3GHz box. His only previous PCs were a 486 and then a P3 @ about 700MHz, but the new machine finally convinced him it was time to risk a conversion of this critical piece of software. I tried talking him into one of the many off-the-shelf estimating packages I found, but he decided he'd rather have the same old software he has always used. He's a good friend, so I agreed to help, and in the next few weeks I'll throw together a port from Northstar Basic.
What's really funny is that he's been an avid Excel user for several years, and I *know* he knows Excel well enough to reproduce every bit of work this app does, but he just won't give up the safety net of step-by-step prompting...
Your last sentence sums it up. Even if he wasn't just drawing ridiculous conclusions, there is no way he could present this rather tenuous connection in a court and expect to win anything.
We used to intentionally run copies of whatever their newest version was without the dongle just to see if it was still there.
GMFP (Get My Fcking Point). I KNOW it's for orbital repair jobs. The POINT is they didn't know they needed a repair until they were already in reentry. The rest was a joke (and an admittedly lame one).
This must be why they don't let NASA Administrators anywhere near the sharp instruments.
Jerry Springer?
Larry Flynt...
You don't know what you're talking about. It isn't remotely difficult to blast out 160,000 e-mails in a matter of seconds. I once wrote a system which cranked out notifications to hundreds of thousands of addresses on a daily basis, and was routinely called upon to distribute to *millions* of addresses. (It was a government opt-in type of thing, not spam.) Even a single 56K dial-up connection could send 160,000 e-mails in only a few minutes. A DSL or cable modem connection could handle that volume very easily, and if you had a hosted server at your disposal, it would be truly trivial.
Second, you're probably talking about games like spacewar or the endless variations on the Trek game, and once again I think you'll find most of those games were also space-related.
Third, there is no shortage of D&D predecessors (Chainmail comes to mind...) which are more likely candidates as inspiration for the dungeon-adventure games that were being written back then.
Finally, it's really a stretch to call those video games. Most of them would have worked equally well on teletypes (and of course, quite a few of them were actually played that way).
Consequently, I have to agree with the original parent, it's extremely silly to credit D&D with spawning the videogame industry -- and that IS the claim the article made.
A do-it-yourself kit (long wire, speaker + microphone, shovel and a driver disk) will provide an affordable, portable and reusable way for extending storage memory on portable systems.
It is estiamted that, after digging a 100 ft well, it is possible to achieve over six kilobits of extra RAM storage at 20 kHz.
The BBC version was only funny if you read the books, and then you were mostly laughing at the storyline. The movie doesn't even qualify for the lowly rating of "pretty ok". Though I have to admit I agree with another response to your post; they did get the voice of Marvin dead-on.
What are you smoking? The most popular videogames were Asteroids, Space Duel, Pac-Man, Space Invaders and a bunch of other things which are totally unrelated to D&D. In fact, they were mostly space-related. I suppose you could point to the Atari 2600 Adventure game, but that hardly qualifies as evidence of one industry spawning another. It wasn't until LATE in the videogame craze that games like Gauntlet and Dragon's Lair started showing up, and by then the videogame industry was already well on it's way to losing it's creativity and cranking out tried-and-true formula games (ten thousand variations of Street Fighter).
And if none of those references mean anything to you, you simply aren't old enough to comment on "the first videogames to hit the market".
It appears you tend to respond "Ask Google" to a lot of Ask Slashdot articles. Then you haven't researched many of my replies. Sorry, I rarely respond with that answer. Mainly because when it actually applies, five thousand people usually beat me to the punch. :)
Which is his way of saying, "Explain this to me, I'm too lazy to run a few Google searches and educate myself." It's not as if the information on anti-spam techniques are difficult to find.
Spam exists because it works, pure and simple.
Wow, that was poorly written!
Congratulations, you've been quoted. :)
That WOOOOSH you just heard was the point, passing close overhead.
You'll be pleased to know there is a simple answer to your question: No.
Handedness of the coordinate system is also relatively arbitrary. The DX LHS is a good match for computer-generated data, particularly for mapping 2D coordinates into a 3D space. One is not "more correct" than the other, and conversion is trivial.
MFC sucks, but as of DX9 the relationship is trivial at best if you're programming in C++ and if you're fortunate enough to be able to target the .NET managed infrastructure, the MFC relationship doesn't exist at all.
A better argument would be the recent MS announcement that they haven't slated any new releases for the foreseeable future. DX9 is the end of the line for the time being.