I saw the proposal, and it looked like 4 or 5 thermometers indicating things like how much violence, sexuality, swearing was in the game. There was nothing there that indicated an "age", you just got a clear indicator of the content and then as a parent you could decide if it was appropriate.
The government rejected it!
First: the government did not "mandate" or "reject" any rating system. It was created by the ESRB, a organization founded by video game companies. It became a de facto standard, not a legal one -- mainly because Sega and Nintendo required that games be ESRB-rated to garner their "Seal of Approval" (and hence get the bootstrapping code needed to play the game on standard consoles).
Second, the "thermometer" rating system was a rival system proposed by another game-rating organization, the RSAC. It was used on PC games for a few years, but it ultimately failed to take off since (for better or worse) the market preferred a system uniform with the video game rating system and with clear-cut age restrictions. The government had nothing to do with its success or failure.
If your router/NAT box supports UPnP, then apps can programmatically set up port forwarding. Azureus supports UPnP, and it wouldn't surprise me to see other BitTorrent clients following suit.
Most standalone consumer-grade routers have UPnP support built-in, although you may have to turn it on through the router's setup page first. I'm assuming you're using a Linux/BSD computer as your router, so you may want to look at the links on the open-source UPnP SDK project site for pointers about plugging it into your existing setup.
Note that UPnP's port forwarding features are a potential security risk if you're using NAT as a "firewall" (yes, I've heard it referred to as such) to block out all incoming traffic, since malicious apps can now forward arbitrary ports without your intervention. Granted, IMO it's not a big security risk, since you've probably got bigger problems than forwarded ports if you're running malicious code on your computer.
Re:I never quite understood SWT
on
Eclipse 3.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
SWT's performance is actually pretty good. I've run it on first-gen iPaqs (which use 206MHz ARM CPUs), and while it wasn't going to set any land-speed records, it was usuable with a little patience -- certainly far more so than LwVCL or (groan) Swing 1.1. It sort of gets a bad rap on Linux because, for one reason or another, certain GTK themes (like GTK-Qt and older versions of Bluecurve) cause performance to be noticably worse. After switching from GTK-Qt to Clearlook, it's more than snappy enough for my tastes.
The programming model is simpler, but I wouldn't say it's straightforward. For example, it strictly enforces that all UI operations occur in the UI event thread, which takes some getting used to. (You're supposed to do it with Swing, too, but it's not enforced.) There are some asinine design choices, like placing most of the constants in a monolithic SWT class rather than in the classes that actually use them, and it's missing a lot of the syntatic sugar that Swing has (like being able to set a widget's text during construction).
All in all, it's a quirky library, but with some very slick end results. I keep getting the feeling that Sun's trying to bury it partly because it proves they could have done Java UI toolkits right the first time around, rather than needing five or six major revisions to be usable.
The division in the two cases was identical, aside from Scalia (who dissented on the private property decision but not on the medical marijuana decision). I'd call that fairly consistent.
But I agree, there's no reason for the lack of context in the blurb, since the Swordquest games are kinda esoteric to people who aren't into classic video games. They're pretty awful games, and the little prominence they have is almost entirely due to their comic-book/contest tie-ins, combined with the rarity of the third game in the series. And they aren't really sequels to Adventure -- the first game in the series was named Adventure II early in development, but quickly evolved (many would say devolved) into something else entirely.
ATI cards have two modes in Linux: 2D mode and crash mode.
OK, ATI's Linux drivers aren't quite that bad. But all sorts of random things (like the Composite extension) are broken; performance is absymal compared to the Windows drivers -- and, in the case of 2D, often worse than the open-source driver that ships with X.org; and it seems like every other kernel patch breaks the kernel module. If you're doing something serious enough to warrant three monitors and you need something the open-source drivers don't provide (e.g., 3D acceleration for the R300 series or newer), I'd strongly recommend against going with ATI.
I use an nVidia card at work. The documentation is a little obtuse (getting TwinView working is a challenge without using a third-party HOWTO) but the drivers work once they're set up.
64bit computers [...] can move the data around a lot faster
No, they can't.
Re:Goonies?
on
Top 50 DVDs
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Not to mention the notable omission of the Criterion Collection version of Brazil. It's hard to take any "Top DVDs" list seriously that doesn't acknowledge the grand-daddy of all over-the-top multi-disc sets.
Doxygen can use Graphviz to generate class and call graphs for several different languages. It helps to have Doxygen or Javadoc annotations in the code, but it's not necessary.
Unfortunately graph generation is pretty slow, but otherwise it's a fantastic tool.
Why doesn't the JRE have an auto-update feature enable by default on install, easily disabled from the control panel for those who are savvy (and stays disabled, unlike Acrobat Reader)?
The Atari 2600 used a custom chip nicknamed Stella for graphics and sound. Needless to say it's no longer available in mass quantities.
There's info on the Jakks 10-in-1 stick here; the short version of it is that it seems to be a port to some kind of mystery chip rather than emulation.
The GBA version of SMB3 is a port using native ARM code instead of emulation.
We both saw mail going out as us to others in our group, etc.
Like most E-mail worms nowadays it apparently spoofs From: addresses by picking one at random from the sender's address book. I got several copies of it today, all of which claimed to come from different people but which really came from the same IP address according to the headers.
All it means is somebody who opened the payload has you in their address book. (Good luck convincing the recipients that's the case, though.)
Taxing illegal activities is a sneaky way for governments to make criminal punishments more severe without explicitly passing a law increasing punishments. Once they bust you on illegal gambling, they go after you for tax evasion.
A few years ago there was a state that passed a marijuana sales tax so they could hit dealers with tax evasion on top of drug-dealing charges. Funnily enough, a dealer actually paid the tax, which nobody really expected. A court ruled the state couldn't use that as evidence against him, and I think the law was repealed shortly afterwards.
I'm pretty sure they have. I don't have any hard numbers to prove it, but I've built a lot of computers for family and friends, and the KT266A and later boards are less flaky than their predecessors. I still prefer nForce 2 boards for the bells and whistles, but VIA chipsets are a far less masochistic choice nowadays.
That said, the 4-in-1s are still a mess, so if you're not having any problems with the built-in Windows drivers, don't install the 4-in-1s. IIRC it was just a couple of months ago that VIA released a 4-in-1 set that caused massive IDE corruption if you had more than 1 GB of memory. The more things change, the more they stay the same . . .
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Second, the "thermometer" rating system was a rival system proposed by another game-rating organization, the RSAC. It was used on PC games for a few years, but it ultimately failed to take off since (for better or worse) the market preferred a system uniform with the video game rating system and with clear-cut age restrictions. The government had nothing to do with its success or failure.
Most standalone consumer-grade routers have UPnP support built-in, although you may have to turn it on through the router's setup page first. I'm assuming you're using a Linux/BSD computer as your router, so you may want to look at the links on the open-source UPnP SDK project site for pointers about plugging it into your existing setup.
Note that UPnP's port forwarding features are a potential security risk if you're using NAT as a "firewall" (yes, I've heard it referred to as such) to block out all incoming traffic, since malicious apps can now forward arbitrary ports without your intervention. Granted, IMO it's not a big security risk, since you've probably got bigger problems than forwarded ports if you're running malicious code on your computer.
The programming model is simpler, but I wouldn't say it's straightforward. For example, it strictly enforces that all UI operations occur in the UI event thread, which takes some getting used to. (You're supposed to do it with Swing, too, but it's not enforced.) There are some asinine design choices, like placing most of the constants in a monolithic SWT class rather than in the classes that actually use them, and it's missing a lot of the syntatic sugar that Swing has (like being able to set a widget's text during construction).
All in all, it's a quirky library, but with some very slick end results. I keep getting the feeling that Sun's trying to bury it partly because it proves they could have done Java UI toolkits right the first time around, rather than needing five or six major revisions to be usable.
"What's wrong?" asks e^x.
"There's a Differential Operator in town!" yells x^2. "If I run into him too many times, I'll disappear!"
"Don't worry," responds e^x. "I'll go have a chat with him. No, don't worry about me -- he can't hurt me. After all, I'm e^x."
So e^x walks down the street to the Differential Operator. "My friend tells me you're a Differential Operator," e^x says pompously. "Well, I'm e^x."
"Pleased to meet you, e^x," says the Differential Operator. "I'm d/dt."
The division in the two cases was identical, aside from Scalia (who dissented on the private property decision but not on the medical marijuana decision). I'd call that fairly consistent.
But I agree, there's no reason for the lack of context in the blurb, since the Swordquest games are kinda esoteric to people who aren't into classic video games. They're pretty awful games, and the little prominence they have is almost entirely due to their comic-book/contest tie-ins, combined with the rarity of the third game in the series. And they aren't really sequels to Adventure -- the first game in the series was named Adventure II early in development, but quickly evolved (many would say devolved) into something else entirely.
OK, ATI's Linux drivers aren't quite that bad. But all sorts of random things (like the Composite extension) are broken; performance is absymal compared to the Windows drivers -- and, in the case of 2D, often worse than the open-source driver that ships with X.org; and it seems like every other kernel patch breaks the kernel module. If you're doing something serious enough to warrant three monitors and you need something the open-source drivers don't provide (e.g., 3D acceleration for the R300 series or newer), I'd strongly recommend against going with ATI.
I use an nVidia card at work. The documentation is a little obtuse (getting TwinView working is a challenge without using a third-party HOWTO) but the drivers work once they're set up.
Ask and ye shall receive.
Not to mention the notable omission of the Criterion Collection version of Brazil. It's hard to take any "Top DVDs" list seriously that doesn't acknowledge the grand-daddy of all over-the-top multi-disc sets.
Unfortunately graph generation is pretty slow, but otherwise it's a fantastic tool.
There's an explanation here of how it could be used to exploit buffer overflows in apps.
Before EclipseME, I used Antenna. It obviously doesn't integrate as nicely into Eclipse, but it still beats writing Makefiles by a longshot.
The only thing even remotely close that I can think of is that Carmack removed the NV30 rendering path from DOOM 3. But he's not exactly removing it because he doesn't like nVidia's OpenGL support.
There's info on the Jakks 10-in-1 stick here; the short version of it is that it seems to be a port to some kind of mystery chip rather than emulation.
The GBA version of SMB3 is a port using native ARM code instead of emulation.
WinZip's AES encryption is documented here. PKWare's format is apparently proprietary.
All it means is somebody who opened the payload has you in their address book. (Good luck convincing the recipients that's the case, though.)
A few years ago there was a state that passed a marijuana sales tax so they could hit dealers with tax evasion on top of drug-dealing charges. Funnily enough, a dealer actually paid the tax, which nobody really expected. A court ruled the state couldn't use that as evidence against him, and I think the law was repealed shortly afterwards.
Done. That was easy!
6.1 is 5.1 plus a rear center speaker, as you guessed. IIRC 7.1 is 5.1 plus two side speakers.
That said, the 4-in-1s are still a mess, so if you're not having any problems with the built-in Windows drivers, don't install the 4-in-1s. IIRC it was just a couple of months ago that VIA released a 4-in-1 set that caused massive IDE corruption if you had more than 1 GB of memory. The more things change, the more they stay the same . . .