Bush et al were wrong but some people still need to get over their frenzied nonsense dogma about being lied into war. Being right was an accident.
Being right in saying before the war that Iraq almost certainly had no effective WMD program, and/or that Iraq definitely didn't have 1/10 the capability that the Bush said they had?
If that's what you mean, then I take issue with that. It was pretty clear that a good number of the statements coming out of the Bush administration were 100% bullshit, even if some others were at least plausible.
The Powell presentation at the U.N., which spokespersons for the administration had been saying in the weeks leading up to it would convince just about everyone, was terrible. A satellite photo of a dirt lot (seriously), a single truck moving around between a few buildings with nothing indicating that anything odd was going on aside from Powell's saying so, and some computer-generated cartoons of mobile labs that we think maybe could work, and may look something like ones that Iraq maybe has. WOW.
We also had every reason to be skeptical about what they were saying, since they had repeatedly and flagrantly lied (why, when [nearly] everyone was behind the war anyway, I have no idea) about Afghanistan and Bin Laden (see the infamous Rumsfeld clip where he claims that Bin Laden has SEVERAL ultra-high-tech, super villain hideouts dug in to mountains, with truck entrances and power generators and telecommunications hubs. Fucking hilarious.) before they started talking up the war with Iraq. Aside from implausible and outright verifiably-false statements, we had counter-statements from the WMD inspection team, and the fact that Bush went ahead with the invasion after Saddam desperately started throwing doors open to said inspectors.
I would have bet ANY amount of money, on the day of the invasion, that we wouldn't find more than 1/10 as much stuff as Bush said we would, and by day 3 or 4 of the invasion I would have bet everything that we wouldn't find 1% as much as he said was there. These would not be shots in the dark; there were VERY good reasons to believe that Bush was way off the mark, which is to say that he was pulling "evidence" out of his ass. Lying, in other words.
I'll definitely be giving it a shot when the 4.0 release comes out; as I said, I don't have any particular attachment to Gnome, but the last time I found KDE to be a better solution for me was several years ago, when Gnome was having some serious stability issues and KDE was not. I'm looking forward to giving it another shot (as I do with nearly every major release)
If the aesthetics are more pleasing to me, then my only remaining concern is that I have my own preferences of applications for most things (I like Openoffice over Koffice--though admittedly I've not tried Koffice in a while--, I love Geany as a text editor and am not likely to change, I've never liked Konqueror as a browser, preferring Firefox or Opera, VLC and a light MP3 player are all I need for media, not Amarok and the like, etc.) and I'm afraid that I'll miss out on some of the integration that draws a lot of people to KDE. If nearly all of the apps I'm going to be running will be non-QT, non-KDE apps, it seems like the only things left to judge the DE on are speed and appearance, and I'd imagine that the speed will be at least no better than Gnome's (and probably a tiny bit worse) as many of my preferred apps are GTK.
Come to think of it, the last QT app that I really preferred over the alternatives was K3B, which was at one time light-years ahead of its competition. Damned thing was the only reason I needed to compile KDE-libs back when I used Gentoo:) These days, I'm not even sure what I use. It's whatever's the default in Ubuntu. Several others have caught up with K3B, so I no longer bother to install it, though I'd probably use it again if I switched to KDE. I can't think of a single other case where I'd be likely to keep the KDE default, and unlike with Gnome, I always feel (rightly or wrongly) like I'm in uncertain territory using non-default stuff in KDE...
I'd have to actually create a database and front end, which I'm somewhat loathe to do (as it involves work. Of the work, and not so cool, variety.)
Seems like an ideal problem for Ruby on Rails (or Django, or CakePHP, depending on which one you're most comfortable with).
Just throw up the scaffolding in your framework of choice, and you're done, since you don't need anything production-level or super-polished. If you already know how you want your DB tables to look, you could probably have it up and running in 15-30 minutes, with basic CRUD and search functionality.
Shit, I rarely pay over $10 for a hardback in a used book store. I don't consider it a bargain until it's under $6.
Over $3 for a paperback and I probably won't buy it. $1 or less and it's a good deal. $2 is about average.
My wife and I probably have at least 1500 books between us--maybe closer to 2000, I've never actually counted. We're only 23, but I've spent the last four years or so buying all of the books that are on my lifetime "to read" list, plus any that my friends recommend, as I find them at used book stores (or in new in bargain bins), and she's an elementary school teacher so she has about a bajillion "young adult" books, along with her sizable collection of fantasy novels. We'll probably have about as many books as these people by the time our rate of buying slows down significantly; at that point, the average cost of my books will likely be $5-8, and for hers, maybe $2-3 or so (she gets nearly all of her kids' books used and in paperback, for $0.25-$1 each)
"I know Gnome is extremely limited if you from the OS X and Windows worlds, but hey, it's clean, simple, features confuse you anyway and it's better than that KDE thing that has clutter......and various other things that will confuse you."
Everyone always says that about Gnome, but I've never had a problem doing what I want to. It's there when I need it to be, and out of the way when I want it to be, unlike KDE, which seems to try to grab ahold of the user and shake them until they're dead. I'm sure it's a personal preference thing, but KDE feels downright stifling to me, in a way that nearly no other GUI desktop ever has. I've never not been able to do something in Gnome that I've wanted to. I don't know, maybe there's a bunch of stuff that I do from the command line that KDE users can do from the GUI, so I just don't notice. That could be it.
I'm aware that it's an aesthetic rather than technical problem that I have with KDE, but aesthetics matter, and KDE and CDE are the only environments I've used that seemed to be trying to piss me off from an aesthetics/usability perspective. I'd be embarrassed to introduce someone to Linux starting with KDE, for much the same reason that I'd be embarrassed for The Gimp to be the first program that they see while using it (oh, god, there goes another flamewar entirely...)
As for running a program as a different user: does gksu (and "apps->system tools->run as different user") not do this? I thought that it did (currently booted to XP on my gaming rig, or I'd check)
We considered three different systems: alphabetical, Dewey Decimal, and Library of Congress.
Chronological for the win!
/ Why yes, I am exactly like that guy in High Fidelity, except with books instead of records.// Never tried autobiographical organization of my books, though....
I tell people to use it because it doesn't feel like it's in you way all the time like KDE does.
Personal opinion, of course, but it's the reason I don't use KDE. Every couple of years I give it another try and am promptly reminded of why I don't like it. I can usually only take it for a couple of hours before I switch back to Gnome or XFCE.
Of the three big Linux/BSD desktop environments, BeOS, Windows since 3.1, MacOS 9 and X, and Sun's CDE, the only one that came close to being as annoying and ugly from a UI perspective was CDE. I don't mean which system I'd rather use, mind you (ugh, MacOS9 sucked so much...) but just which UI I prefer. I don't know what it is, but KDE just bugs the hell out of me. I'd love to switch, because I don't really like Gnome that much, but I can't do it. I'd go back to friggin' Windowmaker before I'd use KDE.
So, my reason isn't "it's the default on a lot of distros". It's, "my god, that thing is so damned ugly (IMO)". I think it's a combination of extreme clutter, a general sense of disorganization, and some kind of "fragile" feel that I can't quite put my finger on, with a bunch of eye candy (which I normally like) thrown around haphazardly and looking very out-of-place.
I've decided that this one's going to be like 2001 was for me: I need a quiet, dark room, no friends, no snacking, no pissing. Watch the whole thing in one sitting.
I tried both more than once with other people around. 2001 is goddamned unwatchable in a group. Finally decided I was going to force myself to watch it alone, and now it's one of my favorite movies. I've yet to try it with Blade Runner, but I got a similar "god, this movie is so BORING" feeling when watching it with others, so I suspect it'll require the same treatment.
The GTA series does, kind of. Killing innocent pedestrians will normally get you a tiny amount of cash (presumably from the person's wallet, though it just shows up "powerup"-style on the ground). Of course, doing so too much (maybe 3-4 kills) or anywhere near a cop will increase your "wanted" level and get you shot at by police officers, so it's not that useful if you're actually playing the game to advance the story, aside from maybe very early on, when you have little money.
So, I don't know that I'd say it "rewards" the player, though it does allow you to do that. The earlier, 2D top-view GTA games on the PC did reward you, though the violence was about as realistic-looking as an NES game. In that one, running people over and hitting other cars would boost your score. Hitting a line of joggers got you a bonus. Those are the only games I've seen that really reward killing innocents, and the GTAs from GTAIII on are more like Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout I&II, etc., in that they allow killing innocents but don't particularly encourage it (most of the time).
- Detect connection losses in a sensible timeframe (Konqueror likes to have a "Stalled" connection for several hours) and reconnect/resume accordingly
Never had a problem. Plus, it keeps the connection alive, which is nice for servers that a short timeout (I assume that this can be changed if you'd rather it didn't do that).
- Be able to decide if resuming or skipping (partially) downloaded files is appropriate and act accordingly
Testing that now... OK, I started downloading a 28 MB file, killed the connection, reconnected, browsed back to the directory on the server, and told it to download again. It gave me a dialog box with "overwrite", "overwrite all", "skip", "skip all", and "resume" as options. Choosing "resume" got it going again immediately. So, it doesn't decide it automatically (not sure how it could...) but the options are there.
- Allow me to select a subset of all files in a directory (e.g. Ctrl + Click or checkboxes)
Yeah, normal selection conventions seem to work. shift+click, ctrl+click, selecting, deselecting some or all, etc.
- Allow me to save the queue to a file (or be stable).
Uh, I can't find a way to do that. Haven't had it crash once, though. Only trouble I've had was when I tried to run it on the new Firefox 3 Beta, which it's not marked as being compatible with yet, so I kind of expected that not to work (and it really, really didn't).
It's very convenient if you run Firefox as your main browser, especially if you're doing web work. Firefox (with the FireFTP and Webdev tools addons) and Notepad++ (or Geany, on Linux, which is very nearly identical) is a great kit, with all the Firefox stuff being cross-platform so I can quickly set up for work even on an unfamiliar system (especially if it already has Firefox installed).
Actually, now that I'm looking at it, I could do all my work form Firefox if I could find an addon that could replace Notepad++/Geany. Anyone know of such a thing?
Haha, yeah, I've been away from Perl for a while, and I don't think I've ever actually had need to print every element in an array without doing a bunch of stuff with it first, so constructions like that never stuck in my head.
It's a legacy of mono-spaced fonts (like on a typewriter). Single spaces after periods on a page of mono text make it hard to read. Variable-width fonts don't have that problem.
Of course, I was taught to double-space, so I still do out of habit.
I usually play through games that have "good" and "bad" alignment possibilities twice: the first time, I almost always play as good, because I get engrossed in the story and the characters and genuinely have trouble doing the bad things in the game world. The second time, the game and its characters seem less "real" to me and it's easier to play a bad guy; that is, it's easier to see the game as a game and play to reach goals (e.g. see that cutscene or take that quest that I missed because I was a good guy last time) without regard for any "harm" I cause.
I noticed that my play style in HL2:EP1 and EP2 underwent a similar transformation on first vs. 2nd and 3rd (in the case of EP2, at least) playthroughs--the first time, especially in EP1, I was constantly low on ammo and health, because I was constantly trying to protect Alyx. I even found myself deliberately taking hits that were meant for her, and getting between her and melee fighters. During the big antlion battle in EP2 where you have to protect her from wave after wave, I was hurting.
It became clear part way through my first playthrough invincible. The second time I played, I let her do most of the fighting, and spent the bulk of the big antlion fight in EP2 screwing around rather than trying to keep them away from her. Mind you however that even after I'd begun to think that she might be invincible during my first playthrough, I still didn't act like it, because I was still so in the game that it didn't matter. Second time, meh, it was just another computer program that I was using to get what I wanted. I know what happens, so it's less engrossing.
As for games with alignments, I'd like for more of them to harder to be the good guy. Not by handicapping them, I mean, but rather by making the choices less easy. "Kick the puppy, get 500 gold coins. Save the puppy, get 250 gold coins and two healing potions" just isn't doing it for me any more. The choices are usually "altruistic" or "sadistic". And can't a cold, calculating son-of-a-bitch do something good when it's in his best interests without losing potency in his dark-side spells because now he's less "evil"? I'm playing "The Witcher" right now, and I've heard that it's much better about making the morality of your decisions less clear-cut (I've only been playing 5 hours or so, so I haven't seen much of that yet), so here's hoping that it becomes a trend.
PS The nineties called and they want their "iso-8859-1 hardcoded webpages" back. Need I wait for "Web 5.0" to be able to use non-latin1 characters in/. comments?
In the mean time, see this for how to get UTF-8 characters to show up in HTML.
It's not a pretty solution, nor quick, but it will work.
If you like KOTOR, you NEED to read the Tales of the Jedi comics, which are set (IIRC) just a bit before KOTOR. Start with "Knights of the Old Republic" and go through "Sith War". They tell a fairly self-contained story. I've not read Redemption, so I don't know about it, and the other two that are set before "Knights" (I think that part was originally called simply "Tales of the Jedi" and was only renamed when more series were spawned from it) are OK, but I'd recommend reading them after the others.
It even features what I *think* is the first appearance of a double-bladed lightsaber, and it, the Sith wielding it, and the scene it debuts in are ALL cooler than their counterparts in Ep. 1.
There should have been a lot more of Anakin doing bad things for the right reasons. Instead of that bizarre thing with Palpatine saving Padme or WTF ever was supposed to be his motivation, he should have actually agreed with Palpatine's politics, and only later should the really evil nature of his leadership been revealed, by which time Anakin would be too far gone to get out. As it is, I watched all three movies and never even figured out why a war was going on, who exactly was on which side, or anything that would have given all of that conflict some meaning.
I think that's why I hate the new trilogy so much: it is SO. DAMNED. EASY. to come up with something that is way better than what Lucas did, in the case of nearly every character and every plotline. Even with the stupid crap he wrote, I could make practically every major scene better with a few tweaks, and I don't get paid to make movies.
It seems only the US is willing to do the hard, thankless work, and the rest of the world is happy to enjoy the benefits, while criticizing everything the US does out the other side of their mouth.
Well, it's generally accepted that that's the state of affairs that tend to come around in a unipolar (one superpower, a global hegemon) world. That position is, in many ways, more precarious than a bipolar world, since there isn't as much of a necessity to rely on a superpower for protection from the other one, since there isn't another one. It's also relatively safe to piss off the hegemon, since any action that country takes to enforce its hegemony is likely to build antipathy globally.
Don't worry, before long we'll get a rival (or, more likely, coalition of rivals) that can go toe-to-toe with us, and then you can stop worrying about how everyone's so damned ungrateful.
The fact that it's so low leads me to assume that they included Social Security as part of the national budget, but it's funded entirely from its own special tax rather than from general revenue, and is so different from the rest of the budget that it's usually worth mentioning it on its own. It's a program that's actually MAKING money right now, and the surplus, though it is used to finance debt (at interest) is not directly diverted to other programs, but is held out for future Social Security spending (which will, in fact, eventually exceed the program's income and deplete all of that banked-up money, if nothing is changed). It's essentially self-contained and untouchable.
The % of military spending gets worse if you just look at how much it eats from the general budget, i.e. money that could be spent on something else (or not at all). Sometimes Iraq and Afghanistan are left out of figures like this, too, as so much of the funding for them gets tacked on in "supplemental" bills.
Yeah, I like the album approach. In fact, I hesitate to say a band is really good, even if I like a lot of their songs, unless they've got a whole album that I like, in its entirety and with the tracks in order.
Most of my favorite music doesn't work nearly as well (and sometimes not at all) as single tracks. Some of The Who and Zeppelin, pretty much anything by Pink Floyd, most of The Decemberists' stuff, Ludo's Broken Bride... single-track models threaten to kill the art of making a good album, rather than just a bunch of good songs, and my beloved rock operas and concept albums especially may be seeing their last days.
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Being right in saying before the war that Iraq almost certainly had no effective WMD program, and/or that Iraq definitely didn't have 1/10 the capability that the Bush said they had?
If that's what you mean, then I take issue with that. It was pretty clear that a good number of the statements coming out of the Bush administration were 100% bullshit, even if some others were at least plausible.
The Powell presentation at the U.N., which spokespersons for the administration had been saying in the weeks leading up to it would convince just about everyone, was terrible. A satellite photo of a dirt lot (seriously), a single truck moving around between a few buildings with nothing indicating that anything odd was going on aside from Powell's saying so, and some computer-generated cartoons of mobile labs that we think maybe could work, and may look something like ones that Iraq maybe has. WOW.
We also had every reason to be skeptical about what they were saying, since they had repeatedly and flagrantly lied (why, when [nearly] everyone was behind the war anyway, I have no idea) about Afghanistan and Bin Laden (see the infamous Rumsfeld clip where he claims that Bin Laden has SEVERAL ultra-high-tech, super villain hideouts dug in to mountains, with truck entrances and power generators and telecommunications hubs. Fucking hilarious.) before they started talking up the war with Iraq. Aside from implausible and outright verifiably-false statements, we had counter-statements from the WMD inspection team, and the fact that Bush went ahead with the invasion after Saddam desperately started throwing doors open to said inspectors.
I would have bet ANY amount of money, on the day of the invasion, that we wouldn't find more than 1/10 as much stuff as Bush said we would, and by day 3 or 4 of the invasion I would have bet everything that we wouldn't find 1% as much as he said was there. These would not be shots in the dark; there were VERY good reasons to believe that Bush was way off the mark, which is to say that he was pulling "evidence" out of his ass. Lying, in other words.
I'll definitely be giving it a shot when the 4.0 release comes out; as I said, I don't have any particular attachment to Gnome, but the last time I found KDE to be a better solution for me was several years ago, when Gnome was having some serious stability issues and KDE was not. I'm looking forward to giving it another shot (as I do with nearly every major release)
:) These days, I'm not even sure what I use. It's whatever's the default in Ubuntu. Several others have caught up with K3B, so I no longer bother to install it, though I'd probably use it again if I switched to KDE. I can't think of a single other case where I'd be likely to keep the KDE default, and unlike with Gnome, I always feel (rightly or wrongly) like I'm in uncertain territory using non-default stuff in KDE...
If the aesthetics are more pleasing to me, then my only remaining concern is that I have my own preferences of applications for most things (I like Openoffice over Koffice--though admittedly I've not tried Koffice in a while--, I love Geany as a text editor and am not likely to change, I've never liked Konqueror as a browser, preferring Firefox or Opera, VLC and a light MP3 player are all I need for media, not Amarok and the like, etc.) and I'm afraid that I'll miss out on some of the integration that draws a lot of people to KDE. If nearly all of the apps I'm going to be running will be non-QT, non-KDE apps, it seems like the only things left to judge the DE on are speed and appearance, and I'd imagine that the speed will be at least no better than Gnome's (and probably a tiny bit worse) as many of my preferred apps are GTK.
Come to think of it, the last QT app that I really preferred over the alternatives was K3B, which was at one time light-years ahead of its competition. Damned thing was the only reason I needed to compile KDE-libs back when I used Gentoo
Seems like an ideal problem for Ruby on Rails (or Django, or CakePHP, depending on which one you're most comfortable with).
Just throw up the scaffolding in your framework of choice, and you're done, since you don't need anything production-level or super-polished. If you already know how you want your DB tables to look, you could probably have it up and running in 15-30 minutes, with basic CRUD and search functionality.
Shit, I rarely pay over $10 for a hardback in a used book store. I don't consider it a bargain until it's under $6.
Over $3 for a paperback and I probably won't buy it. $1 or less and it's a good deal. $2 is about average.
My wife and I probably have at least 1500 books between us--maybe closer to 2000, I've never actually counted. We're only 23, but I've spent the last four years or so buying all of the books that are on my lifetime "to read" list, plus any that my friends recommend, as I find them at used book stores (or in new in bargain bins), and she's an elementary school teacher so she has about a bajillion "young adult" books, along with her sizable collection of fantasy novels. We'll probably have about as many books as these people by the time our rate of buying slows down significantly; at that point, the average cost of my books will likely be $5-8, and for hers, maybe $2-3 or so (she gets nearly all of her kids' books used and in paperback, for $0.25-$1 each)
Everyone always says that about Gnome, but I've never had a problem doing what I want to. It's there when I need it to be, and out of the way when I want it to be, unlike KDE, which seems to try to grab ahold of the user and shake them until they're dead. I'm sure it's a personal preference thing, but KDE feels downright stifling to me, in a way that nearly no other GUI desktop ever has. I've never not been able to do something in Gnome that I've wanted to. I don't know, maybe there's a bunch of stuff that I do from the command line that KDE users can do from the GUI, so I just don't notice. That could be it.
I'm aware that it's an aesthetic rather than technical problem that I have with KDE, but aesthetics matter, and KDE and CDE are the only environments I've used that seemed to be trying to piss me off from an aesthetics/usability perspective. I'd be embarrassed to introduce someone to Linux starting with KDE, for much the same reason that I'd be embarrassed for The Gimp to be the first program that they see while using it (oh, god, there goes another flamewar entirely...)
As for running a program as a different user: does gksu (and "apps->system tools->run as different user") not do this? I thought that it did (currently booted to XP on my gaming rig, or I'd check)
Chronological for the win!
/ Why yes, I am exactly like that guy in High Fidelity, except with books instead of records.
I tell people to use it because it doesn't feel like it's in you way all the time like KDE does.
Personal opinion, of course, but it's the reason I don't use KDE. Every couple of years I give it another try and am promptly reminded of why I don't like it. I can usually only take it for a couple of hours before I switch back to Gnome or XFCE.
Of the three big Linux/BSD desktop environments, BeOS, Windows since 3.1, MacOS 9 and X, and Sun's CDE, the only one that came close to being as annoying and ugly from a UI perspective was CDE. I don't mean which system I'd rather use, mind you (ugh, MacOS9 sucked so much...) but just which UI I prefer. I don't know what it is, but KDE just bugs the hell out of me. I'd love to switch, because I don't really like Gnome that much, but I can't do it. I'd go back to friggin' Windowmaker before I'd use KDE.
So, my reason isn't "it's the default on a lot of distros". It's, "my god, that thing is so damned ugly (IMO)". I think it's a combination of extreme clutter, a general sense of disorganization, and some kind of "fragile" feel that I can't quite put my finger on, with a bunch of eye candy (which I normally like) thrown around haphazardly and looking very out-of-place.
I have no idea, but it sounds like he's someone who sells things to people who want to learn to avoid being sold things.
Genius.
I've decided that this one's going to be like 2001 was for me: I need a quiet, dark room, no friends, no snacking, no pissing. Watch the whole thing in one sitting.
I tried both more than once with other people around. 2001 is goddamned unwatchable in a group. Finally decided I was going to force myself to watch it alone, and now it's one of my favorite movies. I've yet to try it with Blade Runner, but I got a similar "god, this movie is so BORING" feeling when watching it with others, so I suspect it'll require the same treatment.
A robot trumph? So, what you're trying to say is...
This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here: huge success.
I really can't express my satisfaction.
The GTA series does, kind of. Killing innocent pedestrians will normally get you a tiny amount of cash (presumably from the person's wallet, though it just shows up "powerup"-style on the ground). Of course, doing so too much (maybe 3-4 kills) or anywhere near a cop will increase your "wanted" level and get you shot at by police officers, so it's not that useful if you're actually playing the game to advance the story, aside from maybe very early on, when you have little money.
So, I don't know that I'd say it "rewards" the player, though it does allow you to do that. The earlier, 2D top-view GTA games on the PC did reward you, though the violence was about as realistic-looking as an NES game. In that one, running people over and hitting other cars would boost your score. Hitting a line of joggers got you a bonus. Those are the only games I've seen that really reward killing innocents, and the GTAs from GTAIII on are more like Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout I&II, etc., in that they allow killing innocents but don't particularly encourage it (most of the time).
Well, let me see...
- Detect connection losses in a sensible timeframe (Konqueror likes to have a "Stalled" connection for several hours) and reconnect/resume accordingly
Never had a problem. Plus, it keeps the connection alive, which is nice for servers that a short timeout (I assume that this can be changed if you'd rather it didn't do that).
- Be able to decide if resuming or skipping (partially) downloaded files is appropriate and act accordingly
Testing that now... OK, I started downloading a 28 MB file, killed the connection, reconnected, browsed back to the directory on the server, and told it to download again. It gave me a dialog box with "overwrite", "overwrite all", "skip", "skip all", and "resume" as options. Choosing "resume" got it going again immediately. So, it doesn't decide it automatically (not sure how it could...) but the options are there.
- Allow me to select a subset of all files in a directory (e.g. Ctrl + Click or checkboxes)
Yeah, normal selection conventions seem to work. shift+click, ctrl+click, selecting, deselecting some or all, etc.
- Allow me to save the queue to a file (or be stable).
Uh, I can't find a way to do that. Haven't had it crash once, though. Only trouble I've had was when I tried to run it on the new Firefox 3 Beta, which it's not marked as being compatible with yet, so I kind of expected that not to work (and it really, really didn't).
It's very convenient if you run Firefox as your main browser, especially if you're doing web work. Firefox (with the FireFTP and Webdev tools addons) and Notepad++ (or Geany, on Linux, which is very nearly identical) is a great kit, with all the Firefox stuff being cross-platform so I can quickly set up for work even on an unfamiliar system (especially if it already has Firefox installed).
Actually, now that I'm looking at it, I could do all my work form Firefox if I could find an addon that could replace Notepad++/Geany. Anyone know of such a thing?
Tried the FireFTP extension for Firefox?
Beats the hell out of gFTP, which is what I was using before.
Haha, yeah, I've been away from Perl for a while, and I don't think I've ever actually had need to print every element in an array without doing a bunch of stuff with it first, so constructions like that never stuck in my head.
:)
Glad to hear I didn't screw up my 5 or 6 lines
"Shortcut functions"?
Uh...
$ = variable
@ = array
% = associative array
as in:
$foo = "Hello world";
print $foo;
or:
@bar = ('hello',"\n",'world');
foreach(@bar) {
print $_;
}
IIRC. I'm sure I got something wrong; I've been doing most of my work in PHP, and, more recently, Python. Haven't done much with Perl in years.
It's a legacy of mono-spaced fonts (like on a typewriter). Single spaces after periods on a page of mono text make it hard to read. Variable-width fonts don't have that problem.
Of course, I was taught to double-space, so I still do out of habit.
Er, "It became clear part way through my first playthrough invincible." should be:
It became clear part way through my first playthrough that she was invincible.
I usually play through games that have "good" and "bad" alignment possibilities twice: the first time, I almost always play as good, because I get engrossed in the story and the characters and genuinely have trouble doing the bad things in the game world. The second time, the game and its characters seem less "real" to me and it's easier to play a bad guy; that is, it's easier to see the game as a game and play to reach goals (e.g. see that cutscene or take that quest that I missed because I was a good guy last time) without regard for any "harm" I cause.
I noticed that my play style in HL2:EP1 and EP2 underwent a similar transformation on first vs. 2nd and 3rd (in the case of EP2, at least) playthroughs--the first time, especially in EP1, I was constantly low on ammo and health, because I was constantly trying to protect Alyx. I even found myself deliberately taking hits that were meant for her, and getting between her and melee fighters. During the big antlion battle in EP2 where you have to protect her from wave after wave, I was hurting.
It became clear part way through my first playthrough invincible. The second time I played, I let her do most of the fighting, and spent the bulk of the big antlion fight in EP2 screwing around rather than trying to keep them away from her. Mind you however that even after I'd begun to think that she might be invincible during my first playthrough, I still didn't act like it, because I was still so in the game that it didn't matter. Second time, meh, it was just another computer program that I was using to get what I wanted. I know what happens, so it's less engrossing.
As for games with alignments, I'd like for more of them to harder to be the good guy. Not by handicapping them, I mean, but rather by making the choices less easy. "Kick the puppy, get 500 gold coins. Save the puppy, get 250 gold coins and two healing potions" just isn't doing it for me any more. The choices are usually "altruistic" or "sadistic". And can't a cold, calculating son-of-a-bitch do something good when it's in his best interests without losing potency in his dark-side spells because now he's less "evil"? I'm playing "The Witcher" right now, and I've heard that it's much better about making the morality of your decisions less clear-cut (I've only been playing 5 hours or so, so I haven't seen much of that yet), so here's hoping that it becomes a trend.
In the mean time, see this for how to get UTF-8 characters to show up in HTML.
It's not a pretty solution, nor quick, but it will work.
If you like KOTOR, you NEED to read the Tales of the Jedi comics, which are set (IIRC) just a bit before KOTOR. Start with "Knights of the Old Republic" and go through "Sith War". They tell a fairly self-contained story. I've not read Redemption, so I don't know about it, and the other two that are set before "Knights" (I think that part was originally called simply "Tales of the Jedi" and was only renamed when more series were spawned from it) are OK, but I'd recommend reading them after the others.
It even features what I *think* is the first appearance of a double-bladed lightsaber, and it, the Sith wielding it, and the scene it debuts in are ALL cooler than their counterparts in Ep. 1.
There should have been a lot more of Anakin doing bad things for the right reasons. Instead of that bizarre thing with Palpatine saving Padme or WTF ever was supposed to be his motivation, he should have actually agreed with Palpatine's politics, and only later should the really evil nature of his leadership been revealed, by which time Anakin would be too far gone to get out. As it is, I watched all three movies and never even figured out why a war was going on, who exactly was on which side, or anything that would have given all of that conflict some meaning.
I think that's why I hate the new trilogy so much: it is SO. DAMNED. EASY. to come up with something that is way better than what Lucas did, in the case of nearly every character and every plotline. Even with the stupid crap he wrote, I could make practically every major scene better with a few tweaks, and I don't get paid to make movies.
Well, it's generally accepted that that's the state of affairs that tend to come around in a unipolar (one superpower, a global hegemon) world. That position is, in many ways, more precarious than a bipolar world, since there isn't as much of a necessity to rely on a superpower for protection from the other one, since there isn't another one. It's also relatively safe to piss off the hegemon, since any action that country takes to enforce its hegemony is likely to build antipathy globally.
Don't worry, before long we'll get a rival (or, more likely, coalition of rivals) that can go toe-to-toe with us, and then you can stop worrying about how everyone's so damned ungrateful.
Worse are what people think we spend on "welfare", especially in "red" states.
The fact that it's so low leads me to assume that they included Social Security as part of the national budget, but it's funded entirely from its own special tax rather than from general revenue, and is so different from the rest of the budget that it's usually worth mentioning it on its own. It's a program that's actually MAKING money right now, and the surplus, though it is used to finance debt (at interest) is not directly diverted to other programs, but is held out for future Social Security spending (which will, in fact, eventually exceed the program's income and deplete all of that banked-up money, if nothing is changed). It's essentially self-contained and untouchable.
The % of military spending gets worse if you just look at how much it eats from the general budget, i.e. money that could be spent on something else (or not at all). Sometimes Iraq and Afghanistan are left out of figures like this, too, as so much of the funding for them gets tacked on in "supplemental" bills.
Yeah, I like the album approach. In fact, I hesitate to say a band is really good, even if I like a lot of their songs, unless they've got a whole album that I like, in its entirety and with the tracks in order.
Most of my favorite music doesn't work nearly as well (and sometimes not at all) as single tracks. Some of The Who and Zeppelin, pretty much anything by Pink Floyd, most of The Decemberists' stuff, Ludo's Broken Bride... single-track models threaten to kill the art of making a good album, rather than just a bunch of good songs, and my beloved rock operas and concept albums especially may be seeing their last days.