The beginning of WWII is generally cited as the invasion of Poland in September of 1939. The absolute latest date for US entry (a date that would ignore Lend / Lease and US participation in the Battle of the Atlantic, a grave diservice to the crew of, among others, Reuben James, never mind the quasi-official status of the Flying Tigers) would be December 7, 1941. Since the war ended in August of 1945, it spanned 77 months, and Pearl Harbor was attacked in the 27th month since Poland (arithmetic in my head, but it's about right.) Hardly "near the end".
You remind me of the excellent Beyond the Fringe routine, Aftermyth of War, which ends with something like. "...and then the Americans came in and spoiled everything..."
As for Viet Nam, my favorite comment was the old T-shirt that read something like, "South East Asian War Games, 1958-1972: Second Place"
But there are always and necessarily possible collisions any time the checksum space is smaller than the data space (in this case, any time the data is more than 32 characters, never mind 20GB).
I'd say "reasonable doubt", rather than mathematical certainty, is the key term here. Any checksum raises the odds that the data hasn't changed, but it can't prove that it hasn't unless there are at most the same number of possible checksums as there possible versions of the data.
The question is one of likelihood and your idea of reasonable. There are no absolutes.
Well, for me it's the reverse. I'd maybe go, even though nobody would care (although they've generously offered me tickets in past years), but Las Vegas isn't exactly around the corner from Baltimore. California would just make it worse.
Now a CGE here, or in DC, or even NYC, would be great for me.
Actually, I don't know why I included that last paragraph. Spending too much time on k5, I 'spose. The original was perfectly clear, and it's not like slashdot lets you go back and change things (or else I'd go back and remove my nit-pick.)
I find Crichton's logic a little shaky here. If "the most common defense of prey animals is to freeze," that suggests that it works a good deal of the time.
As it stands, this is equivalent to saying that "it's quite impossible that deer are vulnerable to sharp teeth, because the most common offense of predators is sharp teeth."
(As an editorial nit, how about "In The Lost World, the sequel to Jurrassic Park, Crichton suggests an opposite view.")
Well, there's a reason that the game gets a "very rare" -- it wasn't all that good then and certainly nobody much cares now.
I'm just saying that it wasn't Mel-like work. It helped to be clever, of course, but if I could get something to run then almost anybody could.
I mean, on the bright side, the "manual" that we used at Avalon Hill was about twenty pages long. There was no need for 500-page guidebooks that are yet incomplete for such a brutally simple platform.
Well, the ghosts, sure. Problem is that the whole screen flickers.
The thing is that on any given scan line one can draw two independent objects, two players. Either can be doubled or even tripled, but then they need to be identical in color and shape (barring some very clever, very tight programming), which doesn't work for the ghosts. So, they drew two ghosts on one screen, then the remaining ghost and Pacman on the other, alternating this way and hoping that persistance of vision would make it all OK, but they only did this when the various objects fell on the same scan line. As a result, the screen will be just fine until three objects lie in the same row, and then it begins to flicker until they separate.
Everybody hates the flicker, but it's hard to do three ghosts and Pacman himself without screen flipping. You've only got two players to work with, and even with the double and triple modes it gets pretty hairy.
Personally I though they probably should have swallowed hard and just screen-flipped all the time. At least then the annoying flicker would have been omni-present, instead of kicking in and out.
Nothing to download yet, but polls and development diaries galore for this interesting remake.
which is to say
[There is] Nothing to download yet, but [there are] polls and development diaries galore for this interesting remake.
Sure it's sloppy and conversational, but that's the tone arond here. It's not terribly different from imperative statements, like "Go there", which at first glance lack a subject, but which implicitly have the subject "you".
I'm surprised that only the second clause bothered you. I would have thought that if the first made sense to you, the second would have as well.
We already have information on the biggies (Apple and Windows), on the moderates (Linux and the Unixes)
and you read that as "Weirdo"?
Here's a clue for you: as a desktop OS (and I think we can safely assume that people are not syncing their PDA's on the database machines in the server room), Linux is, so far, moderately successful at best, in the sense of popularity. In fact, I'd say that "moderate" is a generous rating. There are probably tens of thousands of regular Linux desktop users, which is a lot, except that there are millions of Windows desktop users.
He's not calling Linux obscure. He's saying they know about Windows, Mac, and Linux et al, and now they want to know about obscure OS'es, people who sync their PDA's with a ZX-81 or slide rule or something.
Actually I'm quite fond of RC. I was referring more to the fact that Coca Cola's HQ is, of course, in Atlanta and that they are one of the largest corporations in the state.
It's sort of like the way that I refer to Delaware as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dupont-Nemuours.
Well, considering he wrote that story in 1956, nine years before the Multics project started (never mind UNIX), I'm thinking he worked it out on his own, based on UNIVAC.
Really? Nobody's ever said, "Hey, is there a Coke machine around here"?
Oh, wait a minute. You're in Georgia. Do they even allow other beverages in the state? Aren't the faucets labelled "Cherry" and "Classic"?
I'm in Maryland (south of the M-D line, former slave state), and that's very common usage. People also say "soda machine" or occasionally "Pepsi machine", but of course anybody who says "pop machine" is immediately stoned in the public square. We're decent people around here.
Actually, polite people write "make love" or "have sex" or maybe just change the subject. Candyass people write "f*ck", apparently to avoid AOL filters or something.
Me, when I mean "fuck" I write "fuck". It's not like Aunt Bea won't figure out (and be offended by) "f*ck" or "fsck", and at least my way doesn't insult her intelligence.
I wish I could lay my hands on the book I read some years back, written by one of Jack's "Tramieleons". It was a fun read, at least, and described Jack as a fearsome sort of guy, certainly capable of giving a company a wild ride. It might have been Michael Tomczyk's, but I wouldn't swear to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know which joke you mean, although I suppose that almost any joke about that war would be old by now.
The beginning of WWII is generally cited as the invasion of Poland in September of 1939. The absolute latest date for US entry (a date that would ignore Lend / Lease and US participation in the Battle of the Atlantic, a grave diservice to the crew of, among others, Reuben James, never mind the quasi-official status of the Flying Tigers) would be December 7, 1941. Since the war ended in August of 1945, it spanned 77 months, and Pearl Harbor was attacked in the 27th month since Poland (arithmetic in my head, but it's about right.) Hardly "near the end".
You remind me of the excellent Beyond the Fringe routine, Aftermyth of War, which ends with something like. "...and then the Americans came in and spoiled everything..."
As for Viet Nam, my favorite comment was the old T-shirt that read something like, "South East Asian War Games, 1958-1972: Second Place"
I'd say "reasonable doubt", rather than mathematical certainty, is the key term here. Any checksum raises the odds that the data hasn't changed, but it can't prove that it hasn't unless there are at most the same number of possible checksums as there possible versions of the data.
The question is one of likelihood and your idea of reasonable. There are no absolutes.
Have we really gotten to the point where we want an amoral President?
Now a CGE here, or in DC, or even NYC, would be great for me.
Oddly enough, Coleco owned the Colecovision. The Intellisivison was, on the other hand, a Mattell product.
My apologies. Get some sleep. :)
As it stands, this is equivalent to saying that "it's quite impossible that deer are vulnerable to sharp teeth, because the most common offense of predators is sharp teeth."
(As an editorial nit, how about "In The Lost World, the sequel to Jurrassic Park, Crichton suggests an opposite view.")
I'm just saying that it wasn't Mel-like work. It helped to be clever, of course, but if I could get something to run then almost anybody could.
I mean, on the bright side, the "manual" that we used at Avalon Hill was about twenty pages long. There was no need for 500-page guidebooks that are yet incomplete for such a brutally simple platform.
Trust me, I remember.
The thing is that on any given scan line one can draw two independent objects, two players. Either can be doubled or even tripled, but then they need to be identical in color and shape (barring some very clever, very tight programming), which doesn't work for the ghosts. So, they drew two ghosts on one screen, then the remaining ghost and Pacman on the other, alternating this way and hoping that persistance of vision would make it all OK, but they only did this when the various objects fell on the same scan line. As a result, the screen will be just fine until three objects lie in the same row, and then it begins to flicker until they separate.
Personally I though they probably should have swallowed hard and just screen-flipped all the time. At least then the annoying flicker would have been omni-present, instead of kicking in and out.
It wasn't all that hard. I'd wager any good programmer could pick it up, and I know at least one not-so-good programmer who managed to get out a game.
Red Grange appears in Madden 2003!
Or perhaps trial by wombat. I'm not sure how that would work, but it could be entertaining for the children.
which is to say
Sure it's sloppy and conversational, but that's the tone arond here. It's not terribly different from imperative statements, like "Go there", which at first glance lack a subject, but which implicitly have the subject "you".
I'm surprised that only the second clause bothered you. I would have thought that if the first made sense to you, the second would have as well.
and you read that as "Weirdo"?
Here's a clue for you: as a desktop OS (and I think we can safely assume that people are not syncing their PDA's on the database machines in the server room), Linux is, so far, moderately successful at best, in the sense of popularity. In fact, I'd say that "moderate" is a generous rating. There are probably tens of thousands of regular Linux desktop users, which is a lot, except that there are millions of Windows desktop users.
He's not calling Linux obscure. He's saying they know about Windows, Mac, and Linux et al, and now they want to know about obscure OS'es, people who sync their PDA's with a ZX-81 or slide rule or something.
To*ché!
It's sort of like the way that I refer to Delaware as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dupont-Nemuours.
My mom met him in Rome, I believe, although they later met again in California.
Multiplexed Information and Computing Service
Well, considering he wrote that story in 1956, nine years before the Multics project started (never mind UNIX), I'm thinking he worked it out on his own, based on UNIVAC.
Oh, wait a minute. You're in Georgia. Do they even allow other beverages in the state? Aren't the faucets labelled "Cherry" and "Classic"?
I'm in Maryland (south of the M-D line, former slave state), and that's very common usage. People also say "soda machine" or occasionally "Pepsi machine", but of course anybody who says "pop machine" is immediately stoned in the public square. We're decent people around here.
Me, when I mean "fuck" I write "fuck". It's not like Aunt Bea won't figure out (and be offended by) "f*ck" or "fsck", and at least my way doesn't insult her intelligence.
I wish I could lay my hands on the book I read some years back, written by one of Jack's "Tramieleons". It was a fun read, at least, and described Jack as a fearsome sort of guy, certainly capable of giving a company a wild ride. It might have been Michael Tomczyk's, but I wouldn't swear to it.