"Regular Meta Moderators are more likely to get mod points." -- Just another example of Slashdot's lies.
RE: your sig, completely offtopic, and probably whiny to boot (me, not you)
emperically, it appears that regular metamods who adopt strict party-approved lines get mod points. I used to get mod points every 5-7 days like clockwork. When I started disagreeing more with what was going on in the mod system, and 'unfairly' metamodding people who modded controversial (but accurate) viewpoints as 'troll' or 'flamebait', or started metamodding '+5 insightful' mods as unfair (since some of those are obviously utter crap and completely wrong) my mod points have disappeared. I get mod points maybe once a month now.
However, I do get the metamod request at least once every two hours, now, whereas it has been rumoured to be restricted to a once/day thing...
The most common symptoms i've experience with bad flash portability is with a/v syncing, sprite jerkiness, random implosions, and incorrectly [un]detected events. This has been true on any version of flash on any distro i've tried in the last 4 years... very disheartening.
There does exist GPL Flash, but I don't know when the last time it was updated was, and it only supports up to version 4.
I apologize for misinterpreting your quote. Taking into consideration a disregard for standards, yes, there's a HUGE varation on html&css rendering.
I was initially disappointed to see live365 as a people's voice winner. I remember them trying to foist proprietary plugins and poor javascript in bad popup browser windows as a control panel.
That was a few years ago. It looks like they've cleaned themselves up quite a lot, and they even correctly detect and identify a linux/konqueror3 setup... and try to sell you 'PC Booster - Boost PC Speed and stability!"
Oh, and the crappy popups are still there, and badly mangled html stream control stuff... bleah.
Truly, i will admit that they have a ton of stations to listen to, if i feel like taking the time to parse the URIs an get the real address of the stream.
If I create a Flash animation I do not have to worry about how it will appear on Mac/Linux/Windows/Netscape/Mozilla/IE/Opera. It will be consistent across all platforms. The same cannot be said for HTML and CSS. Even though standards have been set, rendering software does not always abide by those standards (mainly this only applies to MS).
Very untrue. There is sometimes a HUGE difference between quality of the same flash object on the same computer, depending on what os&browser&plugin combo you use. Sometimes there's none, sometimes it makes the flash completely unviewable as intended. This is most notably true, in my experience, switching between ie and mozilla on a windows machine, or mozilla & konq on a linux machine.
The point of valid HTML w/ CSS is that, when written correctly to standards, and displayed on a standards compliant browser, it will be the same.
Long story short, and I know it's slightly OT, I think Flash is a great way to present good looking multimedia content with a (relatively) small footprint.
I concur, but there needs to be more consistent distribution and development of the flash plugins. This is, understandably, not an easy thing to do given the number of combinations of os/browser possible. However, the problem exists.
I am not the grand-parent poster, nor related to that game in anyway. I just wanted to check it out. It appears to work perfectly with the latest version of Wine.
Finally, having an electronic version of the text would have been a nice touch
Truly, if you're programming, and using a reference manual at the same time (I don't know anyone who has the OpenGL spec memorized), it really slows you down if you have to switch from screen to book constantly.
On the plus side, it's only a matter of time before the text gets scanned and posted to the usual suspects. (names omitted to protect the innocent, and stymie the unlearned)
A mag-strip card IS a type of password. Depending on the institution that issued it, it's a rediculously long propietary password. It's a string of encoded bits. Nothing magical about it.
Furthermore, most people (and by most, i mean just about everyone), NEVER change either their PIN or their card, unless it's stolen. Is that type of system any more secure?
I am not arguing with the output of the gimp... i am not a graphic designer, and the gimp does everything I could possibly want it to (crop and rotate, basically)
(7) Dependencies (GTK+, etc.)
(sigh) Every program has dependencies. Every program uses libraries. This is not a valid criticism of any piece of software (unless you do something really stupid like requiring dozens of libs for a truly simple program, and even then there are sometimes cases where that might be defensible.)
From www.gimp.org, the dependencies are (and the size of said dependancy on my own system, ymmv):
which gives us a grand grand total of 91292.73 KB.
Ahem.
The Photoshop 7.0 installation on my work computer comes to: 135306.55 KB.
For a difference of: 43764.94 KB !
YAY!
Through this small and quite possibly useless test, it seems that, quite possibly, the gimp has LESS amount of dependencies. Maybe. I don't know. Who cares?
As for ldd, it reports that my copy of gimp-2.0 is linked to 34 libraries. 34. I'll leave a similar comparison on the windows side as an excercise to the reader. (ldd/usr/bin/gimp-2.0 | wc -l)
At any rate, know what you're talking about before you talk about it. I agree with some of your points, but (7) is just not sensical.
Yeah, the gimp uses GTK. It's the freakin' Gimp ToolKit, afterall. Guess what? It also depends on the linux kernel!!!! (at least on my installation)
Also, you really shouldn't use 'etc' if you only have one example of something in the category that you're discussing.
steps involved: 1. steal a webcam (no, i'm not paying anything over 5$ for a crappy 320x240 (or whatever) CMOS sensor. 2. get a v4l frame grabber 3. here's where it gets interesting, and kinda tricky... you have to somehow find some way of 'copying' (or so i've been told) the output files into some sort of 'directory' 4. then you run your choice of automatic gallery-generating script, and WHAMO, you're on the bleeding edge of WWW acronymia and coolness.
really, being an techno-elitist aside, you can automate the entire process using cron and something like scp, rsh, or rsync (preferably some combination of those)
this is ollllllllllld news, incidentally. Seems to be the general tecnological ennui that's been affecting Askslashdot and other forums lately. Why go to all the trouble of using a search engine for locating information, when you can just fire off a post and wait a day or two for someone to write a recipe for you.
Incidentally, to quote the article...
Basically, the way it works is as follows: you send any email with a picture attached to your TextAmerica account, the email address is the login/password so it looks like this login.password@tamw.com.
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!
That has got to be the stupidest solution to this problem that I have ever heard.
I have always found it in error, and sometimes dangerous, to make claims about what others do or do not know.
Did I say this wasn't going to work? Did I say that there is noone who will use this tech?
Once again, it is only inferior to YOU.
No, it matters to everyone. And in this case, inferior isn't a relative expression. Without any argument even possible, the copy you would receive would in fact be inferior to a full-fidelity CD recording. There's no way to dispute that.
Who are you to say they don't care because they don't know any better?
Let's look at this from a... ahem... marketing standpoint.
You give your consumer a choice between two products.
Choice A: Lower Quality, More Expensive, less portable.
Choice B: High Quality (potentially identical to the source, depending on how good the audio engineer is), dirt cheap, almost universally portable, and easier to use. Furthermore, Choice B can replicate any perceived benefits of choice A.
IF your target group is fully educated, and knows the facts and the choices involved, do you really thing a majority would choose an inferior product?
The main selling point this article stresses is that it's already been converted to MP3. That's a one way conversion. If you had a CD (or two, or however many as neccesary), you can convert it to MP3 if you wish. Or ogg, or whatever you want. Anyone who has the equipment and knowledge to use a usb-fob has the capability to make an mp3 (or wma, or whatever you want).
Alternatively, could not this magic music machine create a mixed-mode cd, with audio tracks AND an ISO filesystem with mp3s built in? Certainly they could have. That way, everyone wins.
As it stands, they are creating an inferior product that has no real benefits. Except you get the cool factor of having a usb key with a concert on it.
Now, to wait and regroup before the next salvo is fired, but I must make one thing clear... I'm not being hostile, I'm not angry, and I'm not presuming to inform you of what you do or do not know. I could continue on to quote some yoda shit or dao or whatever, but i think it's easier to point out that it's not worthwhile to reply to ACs or flamers. If you're trying not to be hostile, then don't.
Well, simply put, they don't care becasue they don't know any better. Consider it this way: you have a 20$ USB fob, and are charged 10$ per concert. To use it, you need thousands of dollars of computer equipment.
Or, as the article mentions, there are the alternative systems that spit out CDs at you. CDs which are basically universal. CDs that have superior sound reproduction capability. You don't need a computer to play them, and if your car doesn't have a CDplayer already, such can be had for a fraction of the cost of the equipment it would take to get mp3s working in your car.
It's a bad idea for the same reasons that most of the things like this are bad ideas: you take a general public who doesn't know any better, market an inferior product at them, and then charge them extra for it just so they can have what would otherwise be available easier and less expensively by other means.
And, incidentally, mp3 is absolute shit for live music. The low end (bass & drums) and the extreme high end of the audio spectrum almost always get screwed up.
No, this technology definitely isn't for people who know what they're doing, but does that excuse it, or make it a good thing for everyone else? No. Not in the least.
Sounds awful. Most bootleggers (of the legal variety, I do not consort with thieves... erm, yeah) would rather pluck off their own ears than listen to, let alone pay for, a crappy mp3 concert that they had been to live.
I've been active on etree, StG, and similar for years, and before that I traded hand to hand. General rule (not of thumb, it's just a rule): if it's compressed, it's crap. We don't want it, and we don't want it to propogate. Because, assuredly, some dope will take his mp3 keychain, and pop it into Nero or whatever they have these days, and print out his own CD. Which will then be traded, and there will be a very sub-standard concert floating around.
"What we were seeing is that a large number of people were taking their CDs home and ripping them to MP3s, so we thought it would benefit music fans to eliminate that middle step," Reilly said.
First of all, I've learned never to trust anyone else when it comes to encoding audio. Secondly, if you can download the concert immediately afterwards, there's obviously no quality check step to make sure everything came out okay.
128M for 110s of recording time comes out to approx: 160kb/s. Totally unacceptable for live concerts.
Typing of the Dead... the greatest game ever! (okay, not really)
truly awesome game... separates the men from the boys (and the afternoon I played it, women/girls, too). A group of maybe four of us beat it in a few hours, no real challenge. The fun part was finding the special endings (including when the main boss plummets to his death, only to miraculously bungee jump back onto the roof-top where the previous battle just took place, and then burps in your face).
Truly, the best part was the tongue-in-cheek engrish phrases you were forced to spell out. Which i think is a valid design choice... try to force the players to laugh so hard they lose.
What is not often mentioned is the stable vs. unstable settings in portage. Ie, in/etc/make.conf is the setting 'ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"', which means unstable/testing packages, as opposed to "x86", which is just regular old stable pacakages.
There have been lots of issues over the past few months regarding improper (too hasty and with too little testing) moving of pacakges from ~x86 to x86. This often results in pacakges that will not compile cleanly in the stable branch for all users.
There was a hideous bug a few months back introduced into ~x86 that basically screwed up the build environment for all packages. I was one of the lucky ones that it hit. Weird permission conflicts that could not be resolved that forced a complete system reinstall. And, while one might correctly point out I'm running unstable, this was an error in portage itself, and should not have been introduced into the system at all.
Also, two weeks ago, there was an issue with xine, where the only way to get it compiled was to start the emerge, pause it, then change directory into the sandbox, remove an erroneous file, then unpause the build.
Then there was the problem with OOo not compiling correctly in the sandbox. Solution? Don't use the sandbox (red flags should be going up, here).
Then there was the problem where I somehow caught half the latest KDE upgrade in portage, but not ALL of it. So, portage upgraded some packages, then downgraded those same packages to reinstall lower numbered KDE pacakges, which then forced me to recompile everything again on the next complete sync.
Now, one may point out that all these problems will eventually be fixed with correct and updated ebuilds. And they were and will continue to be. However, these problems are not infrequent to begin with.
The moral of the story is, gentoo is great, "May she live forever", etc etc. However, updating is NOT always as simple as "emerge sync && emerge -uD world". If you put off updating for a few weeks, you will get dozens of packages that will be updated next time you sync. Sometimes you can let it happily hum for a few days autonomously recompiling stuff. Othertimes, compiling will exit for no good reason, and you'd best get your thinking cap on.
It's NOT idiot simple.
(incidentally, I started off using the stable tree only, but had enough problems with it that I decided i might as well use unstable to get on the bleeding edge.)
For example, a concerted effort to improve the quality of the net infrastructure could lead to more efficient distributed computing platforms, which means that eventually someone would write an improved folding program.
It's akin to an old computer science problem... you can start a heavily computational algorithm now, and waste your time, or wait a few years for computers to be many times faster, and then do the parts of the calculation that you put off in a fraction of the time. Or wait a little longer...
So, some people do the work now, and others work to improve the systems we use to do work. Seems worthwhile to me.
Sweet merciful crap, I know nobody reads the damn article, but why the hell not even the front page synopsis?
"They've been able to run it at up to 2x the regular operating speed without any major heat or battery life problems."
As for a followup in the forum... user 'ahead games' says on Thu Mar 25, 2004 7:33 pm (approximately a quarter of the way down page 2 right now)
"I haven't directly measured battery life yet, but I've left a GBA running Accelerated overnight and I don't see it having a huge impact on battery life. There is very little extra heat generated (if any at all), so a heatsink won't be neccessary."
And before anyone replies with "Jeez, it was a joke, must've gone over your head" stuff, I already realize that.
Considering that all the older consoles have been emulated, and that the emu-scene has been alive and kicking for a verrry long time, it appears that they haven't managed to squash it, yet. Or ever will.
On the other hand, this seems very similar to chop shops that install and sell mod-chips for play stations and such, that have been successfully taken down in the past.
What's wrong with Resident Evil? A bunch of people run around, kill zombies, and eventually everyone dies (except Milla... man, I love that red dress).
How is that bad, when you consider the general action/horror genre as a whole?
So, the thing that made the movies bad is the thing that made the series good? 2D characters, recycled schlock sci-fi plots, and thinly-veiled, weak one-sided political statements?
I loved TNG. I loved the movies. I didn't go into it expecting "The Ten Commandments" in space, or anything... it is what it is.
I'm trying to think of the Trek analogue to "Strike me down, and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine", but memory fails me... so I will simply say, in the latest popular cliche fashion,
KAHHHHHNNNNN!
The truth is, hollywood will continue to make crappy movies. Considering that the nemesis budget was reportedly 99 million dollars (99 mega space bucks?), and it only brought in 43 (incidental googling: nemesis numbers ) , i wouldn't've bet on another one being made anytime soon.
However, I will go see it when/if it comes out, and any other star trek ever made, because truly, I am a fan boy.
Slashdot Mirror
Square milimeters of paper:
Letter: 60322.46 mm^2 (215.9mm x 279.4mm)
A4: 62370 mm^2 (210mm × 297mm)
A4 - Letter = 2047.54, or about 3 and 3/16 square inches.
A4 is bigger.
"Regular Meta Moderators are more likely to get mod points." -- Just another example of Slashdot's lies.
...
RE: your sig, completely offtopic, and probably whiny to boot (me, not you)
emperically, it appears that regular metamods who adopt strict party-approved lines get mod points. I used to get mod points every 5-7 days like clockwork. When I started disagreeing more with what was going on in the mod system, and 'unfairly' metamodding people who modded controversial (but accurate) viewpoints as 'troll' or 'flamebait', or started metamodding '+5 insightful' mods as unfair (since some of those are obviously utter crap and completely wrong) my mod points have disappeared. I get mod points maybe once a month now.
However, I do get the metamod request at least once every two hours, now, whereas it has been rumoured to be restricted to a once/day thing
At any rate, the system is borked.
The most common symptoms i've experience with bad flash portability is with a/v syncing, sprite jerkiness, random implosions, and incorrectly [un]detected events. This has been true on any version of flash on any distro i've tried in the last 4 years ... very disheartening.
There does exist GPL Flash, but I don't know when the last time it was updated was, and it only supports up to version 4.
I apologize for misinterpreting your quote. Taking into consideration a disregard for standards, yes, there's a HUGE varation on html&css rendering.
I was initially disappointed to see live365 as a people's voice winner. I remember them trying to foist proprietary plugins and poor javascript in bad popup browser windows as a control panel.
... and try to sell you 'PC Booster - Boost PC Speed and stability!"
... bleah.
That was a few years ago. It looks like they've cleaned themselves up quite a lot, and they even correctly detect and identify a linux/konqueror3 setup
Oh, and the crappy popups are still there, and badly mangled html stream control stuff
Truly, i will admit that they have a ton of stations to listen to, if i feel like taking the time to parse the URIs an get the real address of the stream.
Appears to be the same old crap.
If I create a Flash animation I do not have to worry about how it will appear on Mac/Linux/Windows/Netscape/Mozilla/IE/Opera. It will be consistent across all platforms. The same cannot be said for HTML and CSS. Even though standards have been set, rendering software does not always abide by those standards (mainly this only applies to MS).
Very untrue. There is sometimes a HUGE difference between quality of the same flash object on the same computer, depending on what os&browser&plugin combo you use. Sometimes there's none, sometimes it makes the flash completely unviewable as intended. This is most notably true, in my experience, switching between ie and mozilla on a windows machine, or mozilla & konq on a linux machine.
The point of valid HTML w/ CSS is that, when written correctly to standards, and displayed on a standards compliant browser, it will be the same.
Long story short, and I know it's slightly OT, I think Flash is a great way to present good looking multimedia content with a (relatively) small footprint.
I concur, but there needs to be more consistent distribution and development of the flash plugins. This is, understandably, not an easy thing to do given the number of combinations of os/browser possible. However, the problem exists.
I am not the grand-parent poster, nor related to that game in anyway. I just wanted to check it out. It appears to work perfectly with the latest version of Wine.
Seems to be pretty decent, too.
Finally, having an electronic version of the text would have been a nice touch
Truly, if you're programming, and using a reference manual at the same time (I don't know anyone who has the OpenGL spec memorized), it really slows you down if you have to switch from screen to book constantly.
On the plus side, it's only a matter of time before the text gets scanned and posted to the usual suspects. (names omitted to protect the innocent, and stymie the unlearned)
A mag-strip card IS a type of password. Depending on the institution that issued it, it's a rediculously long propietary password. It's a string of encoded bits. Nothing magical about it.
Furthermore, most people (and by most, i mean just about everyone), NEVER change either their PIN or their card, unless it's stolen. Is that type of system any more secure?
I am not arguing with the output of the gimp ... i am not a graphic designer, and the gimp does everything I could possibly want it to (crop and rotate, basically)
/usr/bin/gimp-2.0 | wc -l)
(7) Dependencies (GTK+, etc.)
(sigh) Every program has dependencies. Every program uses libraries. This is not a valid criticism of any piece of software (unless you do something really stupid like requiring dozens of libs for a truly simple program, and even then there are sometimes cases where that might be defensible.)
From www.gimp.org, the dependencies are (and the size of said dependancy on my own system, ymmv):
required
pkg-config (248.88 KB)
GTK+ (29197.37 KB)
GLib (7700.91 KB)
pango (3012.02 KB)
ATK (1533.89 KB)
FreeType2 (3678.24 KB)
Fontconfig (1869.40 KB)
libart2 (809.52 KB)
and the gimp itself (30797.00 KB)
for a grand total of 48050.23 KB.
optional
libexif (693.35 KB)
gimp-print (30762.39 KB)
libjpeg (1240.91 KB)
libpng (2453.95 KB)
libtiff (4106.50 KB)
libmng (2242.58 KB)
librsvg (216 KB)
libwmf (1,604 KB)
zlib (865.05 KB)
for a grand total of: 43491.38 KB
which gives us a grand grand total of 91292.73 KB.
Ahem.
The Photoshop 7.0 installation on my work computer comes to: 135306.55 KB.
For a difference of: 43764.94 KB !
YAY!
Through this small and quite possibly useless test, it seems that, quite possibly, the gimp has LESS amount of dependencies. Maybe. I don't know. Who cares?
As for ldd, it reports that my copy of gimp-2.0 is linked to 34 libraries. 34. I'll leave a similar comparison on the windows side as an excercise to the reader. (ldd
At any rate, know what you're talking about before you talk about it. I agree with some of your points, but (7) is just not sensical.
Yeah, the gimp uses GTK. It's the freakin' Gimp ToolKit, afterall. Guess what? It also depends on the linux kernel!!!! (at least on my installation)
Also, you really shouldn't use 'etc' if you only have one example of something in the category that you're discussing.
How about cron?
... you have to somehow find some way of 'copying' (or so i've been told) the output files into some sort of 'directory'
...
I did something like this many many years ago.
steps involved:
1. steal a webcam (no, i'm not paying anything over 5$ for a crappy 320x240 (or whatever) CMOS sensor.
2. get a v4l frame grabber
3. here's where it gets interesting, and kinda tricky
4. then you run your choice of automatic gallery-generating script, and WHAMO, you're on the bleeding edge of WWW acronymia and coolness.
really, being an techno-elitist aside, you can automate the entire process using cron and something like scp, rsh, or rsync (preferably some combination of those)
this is ollllllllllld news, incidentally. Seems to be the general tecnological ennui that's been affecting Askslashdot and other forums lately. Why go to all the trouble of using a search engine for locating information, when you can just fire off a post and wait a day or two for someone to write a recipe for you.
Incidentally, to quote the article
Basically, the way it works is as follows: you send any email with a picture attached to your TextAmerica account, the email address is the login/password so it looks like this login.password@tamw.com.
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!
That has got to be the stupidest solution to this problem that I have ever heard.
I have always found it in error, and sometimes dangerous, to make claims about what others do or do not know.
... ahem ... marketing standpoint.
... I'm not being hostile, I'm not angry, and I'm not presuming to inform you of what you do or do not know. I could continue on to quote some yoda shit or dao or whatever, but i think it's easier to point out that it's not worthwhile to reply to ACs or flamers. If you're trying not to be hostile, then don't.
Did I say this wasn't going to work? Did I say that there is noone who will use this tech?
Once again, it is only inferior to YOU.
No, it matters to everyone. And in this case, inferior isn't a relative expression. Without any argument even possible, the copy you would receive would in fact be inferior to a full-fidelity CD recording. There's no way to dispute that.
Who are you to say they don't care because they don't know any better?
Let's look at this from a
You give your consumer a choice between two products.
Choice A: Lower Quality, More Expensive, less portable.
Choice B: High Quality (potentially identical to the source, depending on how good the audio engineer is), dirt cheap, almost universally portable, and easier to use. Furthermore, Choice B can replicate any perceived benefits of choice A.
IF your target group is fully educated, and knows the facts and the choices involved, do you really thing a majority would choose an inferior product?
The main selling point this article stresses is that it's already been converted to MP3. That's a one way conversion. If you had a CD (or two, or however many as neccesary), you can convert it to MP3 if you wish. Or ogg, or whatever you want. Anyone who has the equipment and knowledge to use a usb-fob has the capability to make an mp3 (or wma, or whatever you want).
Alternatively, could not this magic music machine create a mixed-mode cd, with audio tracks AND an ISO filesystem with mp3s built in? Certainly they could have. That way, everyone wins.
As it stands, they are creating an inferior product that has no real benefits. Except you get the cool factor of having a usb key with a concert on it.
Now, to wait and regroup before the next salvo is fired, but I must make one thing clear
Do or do not, there is no try : )
Well, simply put, they don't care becasue they don't know any better. Consider it this way: you have a 20$ USB fob, and are charged 10$ per concert. To use it, you need thousands of dollars of computer equipment.
Or, as the article mentions, there are the alternative systems that spit out CDs at you. CDs which are basically universal. CDs that have superior sound reproduction capability. You don't need a computer to play them, and if your car doesn't have a CDplayer already, such can be had for a fraction of the cost of the equipment it would take to get mp3s working in your car.
It's a bad idea for the same reasons that most of the things like this are bad ideas: you take a general public who doesn't know any better, market an inferior product at them, and then charge them extra for it just so they can have what would otherwise be available easier and less expensively by other means.
And, incidentally, mp3 is absolute shit for live music. The low end (bass & drums) and the extreme high end of the audio spectrum almost always get screwed up.
No, this technology definitely isn't for people who know what they're doing, but does that excuse it, or make it a good thing for everyone else? No. Not in the least.
Sounds awful. Most bootleggers (of the legal variety, I do not consort with thieves ... erm, yeah) would rather pluck off their own ears than listen to, let alone pay for, a crappy mp3 concert that they had been to live.
I've been active on etree, StG, and similar for years, and before that I traded hand to hand. General rule (not of thumb, it's just a rule): if it's compressed, it's crap. We don't want it, and we don't want it to propogate. Because, assuredly, some dope will take his mp3 keychain, and pop it into Nero or whatever they have these days, and print out his own CD. Which will then be traded, and there will be a very sub-standard concert floating around.
"What we were seeing is that a large number of people were taking their CDs home and ripping them to MP3s, so we thought it would benefit music fans to eliminate that middle step," Reilly said.
First of all, I've learned never to trust anyone else when it comes to encoding audio. Secondly, if you can download the concert immediately afterwards, there's obviously no quality check step to make sure everything came out okay.
128M for 110s of recording time comes out to approx: 160kb/s. Totally unacceptable for live concerts.
Typing of the Dead ... the greatest game ever! (okay, not really)
... separates the men from the boys (and the afternoon I played it, women/girls, too). A group of maybe four of us beat it in a few hours, no real challenge. The fun part was finding the special endings (including when the main boss plummets to his death, only to miraculously bungee jump back onto the roof-top where the previous battle just took place, and then burps in your face).
... try to force the players to laugh so hard they lose.
truly awesome game
Man, did i suffer some RSI that day.
Linkage: here
Truly, the best part was the tongue-in-cheek engrish phrases you were forced to spell out. Which i think is a valid design choice
I was about to ask, until I discovered that George Orwell is a pen-name.
What is not often mentioned is the stable vs. unstable settings in portage. Ie, in /etc/make.conf is the setting 'ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"', which means unstable/testing packages, as opposed to "x86", which is just regular old stable pacakages.
There have been lots of issues over the past few months regarding improper (too hasty and with too little testing) moving of pacakges from ~x86 to x86. This often results in pacakges that will not compile cleanly in the stable branch for all users.
There was a hideous bug a few months back introduced into ~x86 that basically screwed up the build environment for all packages. I was one of the lucky ones that it hit. Weird permission conflicts that could not be resolved that forced a complete system reinstall. And, while one might correctly point out I'm running unstable, this was an error in portage itself, and should not have been introduced into the system at all.
Also, two weeks ago, there was an issue with xine, where the only way to get it compiled was to start the emerge, pause it, then change directory into the sandbox, remove an erroneous file, then unpause the build.
Then there was the problem with OOo not compiling correctly in the sandbox. Solution? Don't use the sandbox (red flags should be going up, here).
Then there was the problem where I somehow caught half the latest KDE upgrade in portage, but not ALL of it. So, portage upgraded some packages, then downgraded those same packages to reinstall lower numbered KDE pacakges, which then forced me to recompile everything again on the next complete sync.
Now, one may point out that all these problems will eventually be fixed with correct and updated ebuilds. And they were and will continue to be. However, these problems are not infrequent to begin with.
The moral of the story is, gentoo is great, "May she live forever", etc etc. However, updating is NOT always as simple as "emerge sync && emerge -uD world". If you put off updating for a few weeks, you will get dozens of packages that will be updated next time you sync. Sometimes you can let it happily hum for a few days autonomously recompiling stuff. Othertimes, compiling will exit for no good reason, and you'd best get your thinking cap on.
It's NOT idiot simple.
(incidentally, I started off using the stable tree only, but had enough problems with it that I decided i might as well use unstable to get on the bleeding edge.)
Different people value things differently.
... you can start a heavily computational algorithm now, and waste your time, or wait a few years for computers to be many times faster, and then do the parts of the calculation that you put off in a fraction of the time. Or wait a little longer ...
For example, a concerted effort to improve the quality of the net infrastructure could lead to more efficient distributed computing platforms, which means that eventually someone would write an improved folding program.
It's akin to an old computer science problem
So, some people do the work now, and others work to improve the systems we use to do work. Seems worthwhile to me.
Personally, I run chessbrain.
Sweet merciful crap, I know nobody reads the damn article, but why the hell not even the front page synopsis?
... user 'ahead games' says on Thu Mar 25, 2004 7:33 pm (approximately a quarter of the way down page 2 right now)
"They've been able to run it at up to 2x the regular operating speed without any major heat or battery life problems."
As for a followup in the forum
"I haven't directly measured battery life yet, but I've left a GBA running Accelerated overnight and I don't see it having a huge impact on battery life. There is very little extra heat generated (if any at all), so a heatsink won't be neccessary."
And before anyone replies with "Jeez, it was a joke, must've gone over your head" stuff, I already realize that.
Considering that all the older consoles have been emulated, and that the emu-scene has been alive and kicking for a verrry long time, it appears that they haven't managed to squash it, yet. Or ever will.
On the other hand, this seems very similar to chop shops that install and sell mod-chips for play stations and such, that have been successfully taken down in the past.
That's the same exact thing. Those crypto functions are included in C# as either extra libraries or 1000 extra lines of code.
It's not magical, or fundamentally different in any way.
Unless you'd expect that they wouldn't believe it
"It's so crazy, it just might work
What's wrong with Resident Evil? A bunch of people run around, kill zombies, and eventually everyone dies (except Milla ... man, I love that red dress).
How is that bad, when you consider the general action/horror genre as a whole?
Okay. Geez, can't take a joke? I did say approximately.
8 88 79353856337336990862707537410378210647910118607312 951181346186064504
Anyway, I whipped out bc and here's your handle to 100 decimals.
262537412640768743.9999999999992500725971981856
I guess it really was worth all the trouble to see, after all.
If your iPod is too big for you to handle, perhaps you need to work out some more?
as for exp(pi*sqrt(163)), that's approx 261447868023771980, yes? Any significance?
So, the thing that made the movies bad is the thing that made the series good? 2D characters, recycled schlock sci-fi plots, and thinly-veiled, weak one-sided political statements?
... it is what it is.
... so I will simply say, in the latest popular cliche fashion,
I loved TNG. I loved the movies. I didn't go into it expecting "The Ten Commandments" in space, or anything
I'm trying to think of the Trek analogue to "Strike me down, and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine", but memory fails me
KAHHHHHNNNNN!
The truth is, hollywood will continue to make crappy movies. Considering that the nemesis budget was reportedly 99 million dollars (99 mega space bucks?), and it only brought in 43 (incidental googling: nemesis numbers ) , i wouldn't've bet on another one being made anytime soon.
However, I will go see it when/if it comes out, and any other star trek ever made, because truly, I am a fan boy.