I think that the recent increase in nostalgia gaming and the decline of the PC gaming market are proof of this. Look at all the games Nintendo is selling hundreds of thousands of copies of. Not one of them has ultra-realistic graphics. What they do have is nostalgia and gameplay.
To contrast lets look at the PC gaming market. HL2 and Doom3 are the only games of note for the entire PC platform. Virtually every other game has been ignored other than MMOs, which are a seperate story. But that doesn't mean that there aren't any PC games. Look at games like Farcry you got some crazy awesome graphics there. But these games aren't selling nearly as well as the Nintendo games.
People keep forgetting that what makes a video game is the game not the video. The interactive element between the player and a virtual world is where the innovation has to happen. Just increasing the quality of the output doesn't do the trick.
The idea is not new, but think about this. Let's say you have a team of guys getting ready to make a new FPS. Instead of making a new 3d engine, models, textures, sounds, etc. Spend that time instead doing this. Make a game with so-so graphics. Do it at SNES quality graphics, or PS1 quality graphics at the most. But spend that time you would have spent working on fancy graphics to make the game bigger. In the space of just one FMV how many levels of Super Mario can you fit? In the space of just one fully rendered model with textures how much plot and detail can you add to a game like FF6?
Don't waste time on graphics. Use the computing power at your disposal to make an old school game, with high quality gameplay, but make it bigger and badder than ever before possible. If you look at how the market is swinging these days, its sure to be a big hit.
Word. I am also anti-Live Journal. Sure its not Live Journal itself that is bad. It is possible to use LJ in a way that is fine. Like a normal blog for instance.
However, the most often use of LJ I see is this. People bitch about how shitty their lives are, or they bitch and blame others about shitty daily happenings in their lives. They also obfuscate names of people and places very poorly so anyone who knows them can figure it out. Lastly they voice the opinions they don't have the balls to voice during the day to real people, because they don't hold water. They seek encouragement and sympathy from people around the world to make them feel better. Because no matter what your problem is, there is someone on the Internet who will tell you how right you are in order to make you feel not alone. And that one person telling you how right you are validates your existence despite your actual complete wrong-ness.
The other side effect of Live Journal that makes it really bad is this. People go around reading the Live Journals of others and form sort of this behind the back society. They never say something to a person in real life anything that was said in LJ. But they keep it in mind. No longer is it necessary to gossip about people like old maids. Just go around reading LJs of everyone you know and you can get the real deal.
I just feel that this whole culture surrounding things like Live Journal is so shallow and meaningless. I feel filthy every time someone links me to LJ and I go look at it. The same filth you feel when you accidentally look at the magazines in the checkout aisle. Just get it off me.
I always have to reccomend to anyone to follow the path I followed.
I used Redhat About 5 or 6 years ago. I moved to Mandrake because it supported my hardware better, and I used it up until a year ago. Then I moved to Gentoo where I am today.
Start with Fedora or Mandrake. You will learn things there, but only so much. They will probably suit your needs for quite awhile. But invariably you will find things you don't like. And the user friendly guis wont have an interface in place for you to make things the way you want them to be. And the rpm packages available wont always be the way you want them to be. When you start feeling like you want more control over your pc and it starts getting frustrating to do things its time t move.
This is when you move up the scale to gentoo, debian or one of the distros based on those two. Gobolinux, knoppix, libranet, etc. Also there is the lesser known lunar linux which is quite good. You will find one of these that suits you and that is where you will end up. Through the process of setting up this distro you will learn all the things you didn't know while using the easier distro. Rays of enlightenment will shine upon you from the heavens. Well, not quite, but it feels good.
It is possible you will be eternally satisfied with Fedora/Mandrake. If this is the case, good, don't move up. The only reason to move up the scale is if you are the kind of person who is dissatisfied with the user-friendly offerings. However, there are also people who are still dissatsified with gentoo/debian level distributions. These people do something called linux from scratch. I like to call this unemployed linux for obvious reasons.
Yeah, someone should really make a heirarchy of distributions in a nice graph. LFS could be at the top with lindows and xandros at the bottom. I'd do it, but I have a job. By the way, I'm all gentoo in this house, and yes I am a ricer and proud of it. Insert an emerge joke here.
but its just not going to happen until EVERYONE sees [group x] as just regular people too.
Um, give up now then. First of all, some people are racist/sexist/*ist and wont be different no matter what you do. Second of all, people have a right to be *ist if they want. I'm not, I believe people are people and that's that, and I think that is the right way to be. However, I also believe in freedom. So if you want to believe that gays shouldn't be, you go believing that. And as long as you don't actually hurt anyone else I have no problem.
On the issue of the fanfare I think it works like this. People strive to be accepted in society. They want to stay in line and conform. I think that many people, deep inside, have a *ist feeling. Like the people who are afraid of black people they meet on the street. They might not be KKK material, but they have a feeling that is instilled inside them for whatever reason. So these people in their mind, think, logically and in-line with society that race, gender and sexual orientation to not determine the good or bad of a person. But because they have that feeling inside they need to proclaim loudly "look at me I'm not *ist!".
It's like when someone accuses you of doing something that you did and you try to lie your way out of it. You have this need to claim very loudly that you didn't do it. Whether you did it or not you have a small amount of guilt in you. To rid of this guilt you need to make sure other people know for sure that you are innocent.
People who are actually innocent just brush it off. People who are actually *ist will tell it to your face and say "yeah, what of it?" But most people have a very slight tendency to feel uncomfortable regarding social issues like this. And since in their minds they conform with society in being against *ism, they must proclalim loudly their beliefs. Just like all the TV/Radio stations who need to be sure to specifically wish happy every holiday from every religeon and culture on the earth.
Get over it. Things are the way things are and that's that.
Yeah, I always find that quite strange. Go to the store and buy any Marvel comic book. Try to buy one that looks like it isn't for children. You will see the same ads for candy and kids toys in every issue each month. All the companies consider comic books to be for children. And Marvel is just making a buck off advertising so they don't care. But in the more mature comics you get these really deep plot-lines that small children probably wouldn't get next to advertisements that target 8 year olds. Yet another case of the popular conception of the world being wrong. Mainly the American conception being wrong.
joe@shmoe.com. And no, I don't think this is a problem. Nobody actually has that e-mail address. If someone does have that e-mail address they are probably so burdened with junk and spam I hope they are smart enough to get a new one. Anyways, shmoe.com is a a cyber-squatter or some such, so screw them. Using a real address of another person as your dummy address is another story.
You know those phony search sites? Yeah, you know the ones I mean. Make it so that the user can mark certain websites as bogus. Then learn to filter out those sites. Whenever a link to such a site appears in a page make it stand out with a visual queue. So my google searches could have some big bold red links that I know not to click on because they are bogus. You would have to filter both by the content of the page and the URL. Pages served from bad places would be marked as well as pages with bad stuff on them. And make it work just like thunderbird's spam filter where I start off by manually marking sites as good and bad.
Another feature that has nothing to do with machine learning. I used safari a whiles back and one thing that was very nice was that the web pages had the Macintosh widgets build in. Checkboxes in web forms were blue and clear. Buttons were rounded on the sides. The interactive form elements in web pages matched the OS. The checkboxes, radio buttons, regular buttons, textboxes, etc. should all be themable through the firefox theming interface. I want my submit butons to match the rest of the buttons on screen.
While I agree this may be closer to the way things "should be" it isn't the way things are. On the one hand I don't think IP should really exist.
But then I think contracts SHOULD exist. Without contracts and the law backing them up you couldn't do anything. For an economy to function it is absolutely necessary for their to be a way to exchange goods and services while legally binding the other parties to hold up their end of the bargain. If you go to work somewhere and you sign a contract that says the company owns the code you right, tough shit. You know what you were getting into, you agreed to it. Don't go against that, its dishonest just like the big corps we all hate.
So while I disagree with the principle of owning ideas and thoughts I agree with contracts. And if you say that the code you write will be company owned, then its going to be company owned, fuck you. You have nobody to blame but yourself.
I do this for every Star Trek related story. I have tons of Karma from all my other posts because I say insightful things about the issues of today. But every time Star Trek comes up I have to post this and every time I get modded down. It's worth it though.
STAR TREK SUCKS. Take a random episode of Star Trek and compare it with a random episode of any afternoon soap opera. It's the same damn show. Putting people in a different setting in space uniforms does not a sci-fi show make. I can't respect any Star Trek one bit. Why the hell do all you people like it so much?
First off I like nothing more than automatic memory management. Being able to forget about pointers and malloc and all that garbage makes programming infinitely easier and faster. I only write in C or assembly when I really really need the speed or when I'm at such a low level that nothing else is possible.
Next I love ruby's block system, especially for stuff like this.
myarray.each { |e| puts e }
It comes in super handy for a ton of stuff. Especially when I'm doing XML.
Also, there is another thing that I first discovered in python
x, y = y, x
Save me a temporary variable, w00t.
Lastly, its not really a language feature, but in any object oriented language I love being able to serialize the objects. It's so simple to use pickle or any other serialization library and just write objects out to file or network. I never have to design a binary file format ever again. It's even better when you use Ruby and you can marshall objects into XML or YAML with a single method. Then you've got a human readable and editable file format that you can magically transform into objects again later. Super useful.
I've been building many a PC in my day. The first one I ever did is still humming away in the other room with my blog running on it. The BX chipset is by far the most reliable and stable motherboard chipset ever made. And the Abit BX6r2.0 is the best board with that chipset.
Anyway, I've never had a problem putting computers together. The reason for that is lots of research on the internet. Before I get ready to build a box I check everything. I never buy incompatible parts. I don't skimp on cost and risk getting a part by a no-name manufacturer. You don't know how many times I see people with broken hardware from no-names. Pay the extra 30 bucks and get the big name brand stuff. Abit, Asus, Leadtek, Gainward, Creative, Seagate, Corsair, Crucial, etc. If you get a video card from randomtaiwantech and it doesn't work, there's a reason.
However, me and my roomate did make a big mistake once. The reason was that there was no documentation concerning the issue on the net, and to this day, there still isn't. The first time I built a computer with a Duron isntead of a Pentium it wouldn't boot. I couldn't figure it out. The company I bought the computer from either didn't know. But what they should have noticed on my invoice was that I had a 300W power supply and that I needed more. Eventually after several RMAs I had a 300W power supply that worked somehow magically.
Later my roomate got a new PC and it had the same trouble. My computer died soon after and we realized something. The power supply is important and 300W isn't enough anymore. Motherboard manufacturers! In the documentation for a motherboard list how big a power supply is needed! You have no idea how long it took us to figure out what was wrong with several completel seperate machines not booting in the same fashion.
Let this be a lesson. 1) do research 2) do more research than is possible 3) don't be cheap 4) if you know what you're doing it wont go wrong.
Needless to say my current box has a huge expensive 450+ Watt Enermax PSU. I will never have THAT problem again.
It's a piece of cake. I've got a board at work running Linux (not uClinux, real linux) with the entire file system in flash. It has no moving parts and works great. Just build a kernel with support for the USB drive. In your fstab mount this drive as/. Follow the linux from scratch instructions to build the smallest system possible. You'll probably want to use busybox to the maximum.
Also when building the kernel try to minimize the number of modules you build. Build things into the bzimage if you have the option. But at the same time only include the bare minimum things necessary.
Lastly when you are building things with gcc be sure to use Os to optimize for size.
Since its an x86 system if the USB drive is supported by the kernel this shouldn't be difficult at all.
I have been wondering that myself. You would think that with all these viruses and vulnerabilities in windows and other MS software someone would have written a mean virus. But it seems that every worm and bug out there only does stupid stuff. They send spam. They steal information. They throw ads on your screen. Why hasn't anyone made one that formats all disks? What about one that makes a nice skull bounce around on your screen laughing at you. Its like these virus writers want to break into computers, but they aren't looking to do real damage.
I think this is a large part of the reason people aren't protecting themselves better. They have no reason to since the viruses they get aren't particularly damaging. As soon as there is a virus that formats all disks you'll see ignorant people starting to do something about computer security.
I used to read gamepro. But now there are video game websites. So there is no point in paying for something that gives me information I already know. I do still like to read Dr. Dobbs and Linux Journal and such, but only because they are free. I also liked computer shopper back when it was a huge tome of newsprint, now it sucks. There really is no reason for magazines to exist anymore since the web has completely obsolete them. Just occasionally you find content in magazines that you normally wouldn't find on the net.
It is my understanding that when someone sues you, and you settle, that it is supposed to hurt you. But when MS settles lawsuits it only helps them.
Under the settlement, Microsoft will give half the value of any unclaimed vouchers to Massachusetts' public schools.
Ok MS, you've been a bad boy. We're going to punish you by putting your software in all of our public schools. This will ensure that are children grow up with your software and never find out about that penguin guy or that yummy fruit. That's your punishment for monopolizing you bad boy.
That's because the majority if the right's beliefs have no basis in actual fact. The left however, while not flawless, is more based in fact than the right. So when you get a news report like CNN full of facts it looks like its far left to a guy on the far right. And yes, since non-Fox news tends to lean a tiny bit to the left it doesn't help. They DO select which facts they say and which ones they don't.
Solution? Dont ask me, I don't know! But I think its been pointed out many times that The Daily Show is the least biased reporting, so watch that. Or be like me and don't watch TV and only read news.google.com.
There is something you have to understand about Michael Moore's movies and truth. Everything he shows on video is true. He doesn't photoshop it, it actually happened that way. But if you pay attention to the filmography and the context in which he shows this true footage he implies other things. What happens is that people go and say "you said this, it isn't true!" when in fact he technically only implied it. The only facts in his movie are the ones you hear him say outright.
"According to XXX inserst statistic Y here".
Often he asks questions in his movies like
"If X is true and Y is true, does that make Z true?"
People will sall him a liar if Z is in fact false. But he never said Z was true, he only asked. I met this man at U of R just after he won his oscar. He is extremely meticulous in the details and the information. Nobody is going to slip one by. For every fact he actually stated as fact he has evidence to back it up.
How he gets you is that the average american ingoramus who walks away from one of his movies believes that Z is true. He never said it was, but the masses will walk away believing it like the sheep they are.
Now, I don't agree with Moore. He is really a socialist green party hippy type underneath. Let me tell you, I like my Adam Smith. Even before this movie I was determined to vote against Bush. And after I get this movie in a format where I can watch it piece by piece I can extract the facts from the implications and get a lot more ammo to use against that corporate asshat.
I already had this discussion with my friends a long while back, and some of them completely disagree with me. I point out their bad taste in games.
I say that any game worth its salt will be equally good with any theme. For example, if you took super mario brothers and made mario a stick figure and replaced goomba's with circles, koopas with triangles, bricks with hashed squares, etc. The game would be equally as good gamewise. You wouldn't want to play that game, but the point is that you can imagine the game not losing anything from a lack of theme. The mechanic remains intact.
Now take a final fantasy game. Theme is everything. If you replace everything in a final fantasy game with a generic distinguishing shape the game would fall apart. Look at a board game like monopoly. Its be re-themed a billion times, but the basic game mechanic remains.
What does this tell us? Its quite simple really. If the theme of a game can be removed, just like a CSS can be removed from an XHTML, and the game mechanic remains intact, then what you have is indeed a game. Final Fantasy is not a game. It is a partially interactive movie.
Now, it is common sense that theme is necessary and desirable. Take Metroid. The theme of Metroid means a lot. But will the game work without it? Absolutely. And the theme of metroid goes so well with the exploratory gameplay and that's what really make it stand heads and shoulders above other games.
So what we do is this. First remove the theme of a game and examine the core gamplay at a fundamental level. Rate it on its own. If it falls apart then what you have is not a game in the strictest sense. Second examine the theme on its own. A sesame street theme is going to make a big difference. Third examine the combination of the theme and the gameplay. Does it fit well together? A Sesame Street theme on the Counter-Strike game wouldn't work too well together. I point you to Barney Doom.
If you want to prove it to yourself look at some german board games. Settlers, Puerto Rico, etc. They all have themes which are complementary to the gameplay, but the games themselves stand firmly without their themes. This can be seen easily by the constant re-theming of settlers. A game like Diceland doesn't even bother with a theme. Or you could say that its theme is in fact the lack of theme.
Oh, one last thing. This system of game rating will find you raw game quality. I will now use one of my favoriate analogies. Citizen kane is the "best" movie ever. You may hate it. You may think its boring and stupid. But film-wise it is unbeatable. Zelda 1 is the same way. It is the Citizen Kane of video games. You may hate it, but that's how it is. Which games are most fun is completely independent of this. You may love to watch the Matrix #1 over and over, but film-wise it isn't great. Just as you may love to play Starcraft, it still isn't the objective best game.
Actually I'm starting to think that maybe Tetris is the citizen kane of video games.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the recent increase in nostalgia gaming and the decline of the PC gaming market are proof of this. Look at all the games Nintendo is selling hundreds of thousands of copies of. Not one of them has ultra-realistic graphics. What they do have is nostalgia and gameplay.
To contrast lets look at the PC gaming market. HL2 and Doom3 are the only games of note for the entire PC platform. Virtually every other game has been ignored other than MMOs, which are a seperate story. But that doesn't mean that there aren't any PC games. Look at games like Farcry you got some crazy awesome graphics there. But these games aren't selling nearly as well as the Nintendo games.
People keep forgetting that what makes a video game is the game not the video. The interactive element between the player and a virtual world is where the innovation has to happen. Just increasing the quality of the output doesn't do the trick.
The idea is not new, but think about this. Let's say you have a team of guys getting ready to make a new FPS. Instead of making a new 3d engine, models, textures, sounds, etc. Spend that time instead doing this. Make a game with so-so graphics. Do it at SNES quality graphics, or PS1 quality graphics at the most. But spend that time you would have spent working on fancy graphics to make the game bigger. In the space of just one FMV how many levels of Super Mario can you fit? In the space of just one fully rendered model with textures how much plot and detail can you add to a game like FF6?
Don't waste time on graphics. Use the computing power at your disposal to make an old school game, with high quality gameplay, but make it bigger and badder than ever before possible. If you look at how the market is swinging these days, its sure to be a big hit.
Word. I am also anti-Live Journal. Sure its not Live Journal itself that is bad. It is possible to use LJ in a way that is fine. Like a normal blog for instance.
However, the most often use of LJ I see is this. People bitch about how shitty their lives are, or they bitch and blame others about shitty daily happenings in their lives. They also obfuscate names of people and places very poorly so anyone who knows them can figure it out. Lastly they voice the opinions they don't have the balls to voice during the day to real people, because they don't hold water. They seek encouragement and sympathy from people around the world to make them feel better. Because no matter what your problem is, there is someone on the Internet who will tell you how right you are in order to make you feel not alone. And that one person telling you how right you are validates your existence despite your actual complete wrong-ness.
The other side effect of Live Journal that makes it really bad is this. People go around reading the Live Journals of others and form sort of this behind the back society. They never say something to a person in real life anything that was said in LJ. But they keep it in mind. No longer is it necessary to gossip about people like old maids. Just go around reading LJs of everyone you know and you can get the real deal.
I just feel that this whole culture surrounding things like Live Journal is so shallow and meaningless. I feel filthy every time someone links me to LJ and I go look at it. The same filth you feel when you accidentally look at the magazines in the checkout aisle. Just get it off me.
I always have to reccomend to anyone to follow the path I followed.
I used Redhat About 5 or 6 years ago. I moved to Mandrake because it supported my hardware better, and I used it up until a year ago. Then I moved to Gentoo where I am today.
Start with Fedora or Mandrake. You will learn things there, but only so much. They will probably suit your needs for quite awhile. But invariably you will find things you don't like. And the user friendly guis wont have an interface in place for you to make things the way you want them to be. And the rpm packages available wont always be the way you want them to be. When you start feeling like you want more control over your pc and it starts getting frustrating to do things its time t move.
This is when you move up the scale to gentoo, debian or one of the distros based on those two. Gobolinux, knoppix, libranet, etc. Also there is the lesser known lunar linux which is quite good. You will find one of these that suits you and that is where you will end up. Through the process of setting up this distro you will learn all the things you didn't know while using the easier distro. Rays of enlightenment will shine upon you from the heavens. Well, not quite, but it feels good.
It is possible you will be eternally satisfied with Fedora/Mandrake. If this is the case, good, don't move up. The only reason to move up the scale is if you are the kind of person who is dissatisfied with the user-friendly offerings. However, there are also people who are still dissatsified with gentoo/debian level distributions. These people do something called linux from scratch. I like to call this unemployed linux for obvious reasons.
Yeah, someone should really make a heirarchy of distributions in a nice graph. LFS could be at the top with lindows and xandros at the bottom. I'd do it, but I have a job. By the way, I'm all gentoo in this house, and yes I am a ricer and proud of it. Insert an emerge joke here.
but its just not going to happen until EVERYONE sees [group x] as just regular people too.
Um, give up now then. First of all, some people are racist/sexist/*ist and wont be different no matter what you do. Second of all, people have a right to be *ist if they want. I'm not, I believe people are people and that's that, and I think that is the right way to be. However, I also believe in freedom. So if you want to believe that gays shouldn't be, you go believing that. And as long as you don't actually hurt anyone else I have no problem.
On the issue of the fanfare I think it works like this. People strive to be accepted in society. They want to stay in line and conform. I think that many people, deep inside, have a *ist feeling. Like the people who are afraid of black people they meet on the street. They might not be KKK material, but they have a feeling that is instilled inside them for whatever reason. So these people in their mind, think, logically and in-line with society that race, gender and sexual orientation to not determine the good or bad of a person. But because they have that feeling inside they need to proclaim loudly "look at me I'm not *ist!".
It's like when someone accuses you of doing something that you did and you try to lie your way out of it. You have this need to claim very loudly that you didn't do it. Whether you did it or not you have a small amount of guilt in you. To rid of this guilt you need to make sure other people know for sure that you are innocent.
People who are actually innocent just brush it off. People who are actually *ist will tell it to your face and say "yeah, what of it?" But most people have a very slight tendency to feel uncomfortable regarding social issues like this. And since in their minds they conform with society in being against *ism, they must proclalim loudly their beliefs. Just like all the TV/Radio stations who need to be sure to specifically wish happy every holiday from every religeon and culture on the earth.
Get over it. Things are the way things are and that's that.
Yeah, I always find that quite strange. Go to the store and buy any Marvel comic book. Try to buy one that looks like it isn't for children. You will see the same ads for candy and kids toys in every issue each month. All the companies consider comic books to be for children. And Marvel is just making a buck off advertising so they don't care. But in the more mature comics you get these really deep plot-lines that small children probably wouldn't get next to advertisements that target 8 year olds. Yet another case of the popular conception of the world being wrong. Mainly the American conception being wrong.
Also, add another vote for manga.
I can do all those things in Linux. What makes you think you can't?
joe@shmoe.com. And no, I don't think this is a problem. Nobody actually has that e-mail address. If someone does have that e-mail address they are probably so burdened with junk and spam I hope they are smart enough to get a new one. Anyways, shmoe.com is a a cyber-squatter or some such, so screw them. Using a real address of another person as your dummy address is another story.
You know those phony search sites? Yeah, you know the ones I mean. Make it so that the user can mark certain websites as bogus. Then learn to filter out those sites. Whenever a link to such a site appears in a page make it stand out with a visual queue. So my google searches could have some big bold red links that I know not to click on because they are bogus. You would have to filter both by the content of the page and the URL. Pages served from bad places would be marked as well as pages with bad stuff on them. And make it work just like thunderbird's spam filter where I start off by manually marking sites as good and bad.
Another feature that has nothing to do with machine learning. I used safari a whiles back and one thing that was very nice was that the web pages had the Macintosh widgets build in. Checkboxes in web forms were blue and clear. Buttons were rounded on the sides. The interactive form elements in web pages matched the OS. The checkboxes, radio buttons, regular buttons, textboxes, etc. should all be themable through the firefox theming interface. I want my submit butons to match the rest of the buttons on screen.
While I agree this may be closer to the way things "should be" it isn't the way things are. On the one hand I don't think IP should really exist.
But then I think contracts SHOULD exist. Without contracts and the law backing them up you couldn't do anything. For an economy to function it is absolutely necessary for their to be a way to exchange goods and services while legally binding the other parties to hold up their end of the bargain. If you go to work somewhere and you sign a contract that says the company owns the code you right, tough shit. You know what you were getting into, you agreed to it. Don't go against that, its dishonest just like the big corps we all hate.
So while I disagree with the principle of owning ideas and thoughts I agree with contracts. And if you say that the code you write will be company owned, then its going to be company owned, fuck you. You have nobody to blame but yourself.
I do this for every Star Trek related story. I have tons of Karma from all my other posts because I say insightful things about the issues of today. But every time Star Trek comes up I have to post this and every time I get modded down. It's worth it though.
STAR TREK SUCKS. Take a random episode of Star Trek and compare it with a random episode of any afternoon soap opera. It's the same damn show. Putting people in a different setting in space uniforms does not a sci-fi show make. I can't respect any Star Trek one bit. Why the hell do all you people like it so much?
You may now proceed with the down-modding.
Camp Hyrule
Nuff said
I love GTK. I wish I could use it when developing cross-platform GPL programs.
wait a minute.....
He better not make it so greedo shoots first in this remake... or else.
At least they didn't blame Open Source Software. Then they might actually be right, and we can't have that.
Next I love ruby's block system, especially for stuff like this.It comes in super handy for a ton of stuff. Especially when I'm doing XML.
Also, there is another thing that I first discovered in pythonSave me a temporary variable, w00t.
Lastly, its not really a language feature, but in any object oriented language I love being able to serialize the objects. It's so simple to use pickle or any other serialization library and just write objects out to file or network. I never have to design a binary file format ever again. It's even better when you use Ruby and you can marshall objects into XML or YAML with a single method. Then you've got a human readable and editable file format that you can magically transform into objects again later. Super useful.
I've been building many a PC in my day. The first one I ever did is still humming away in the other room with my blog running on it. The BX chipset is by far the most reliable and stable motherboard chipset ever made. And the Abit BX6r2.0 is the best board with that chipset.
Anyway, I've never had a problem putting computers together. The reason for that is lots of research on the internet. Before I get ready to build a box I check everything. I never buy incompatible parts. I don't skimp on cost and risk getting a part by a no-name manufacturer. You don't know how many times I see people with broken hardware from no-names. Pay the extra 30 bucks and get the big name brand stuff. Abit, Asus, Leadtek, Gainward, Creative, Seagate, Corsair, Crucial, etc. If you get a video card from randomtaiwantech and it doesn't work, there's a reason.
However, me and my roomate did make a big mistake once. The reason was that there was no documentation concerning the issue on the net, and to this day, there still isn't. The first time I built a computer with a Duron isntead of a Pentium it wouldn't boot. I couldn't figure it out. The company I bought the computer from either didn't know. But what they should have noticed on my invoice was that I had a 300W power supply and that I needed more. Eventually after several RMAs I had a 300W power supply that worked somehow magically.
Later my roomate got a new PC and it had the same trouble. My computer died soon after and we realized something. The power supply is important and 300W isn't enough anymore. Motherboard manufacturers! In the documentation for a motherboard list how big a power supply is needed! You have no idea how long it took us to figure out what was wrong with several completel seperate machines not booting in the same fashion.
Let this be a lesson.
1) do research
2) do more research than is possible
3) don't be cheap
4) if you know what you're doing it wont go wrong.
Needless to say my current box has a huge expensive 450+ Watt Enermax PSU. I will never have THAT problem again.
It's a piece of cake. I've got a board at work running Linux (not uClinux, real linux) with the entire file system in flash. It has no moving parts and works great. Just build a kernel with support for the USB drive. In your fstab mount this drive as /. Follow the linux from scratch instructions to build the smallest system possible. You'll probably want to use busybox to the maximum.
Also when building the kernel try to minimize the number of modules you build. Build things into the bzimage if you have the option. But at the same time only include the bare minimum things necessary.
Lastly when you are building things with gcc be sure to use Os to optimize for size.
Since its an x86 system if the USB drive is supported by the kernel this shouldn't be difficult at all.
I have been wondering that myself. You would think that with all these viruses and vulnerabilities in windows and other MS software someone would have written a mean virus. But it seems that every worm and bug out there only does stupid stuff. They send spam. They steal information. They throw ads on your screen. Why hasn't anyone made one that formats all disks? What about one that makes a nice skull bounce around on your screen laughing at you. Its like these virus writers want to break into computers, but they aren't looking to do real damage.
I think this is a large part of the reason people aren't protecting themselves better. They have no reason to since the viruses they get aren't particularly damaging. As soon as there is a virus that formats all disks you'll see ignorant people starting to do something about computer security.
I used to read gamepro. But now there are video game websites. So there is no point in paying for something that gives me information I already know. I do still like to read Dr. Dobbs and Linux Journal and such, but only because they are free. I also liked computer shopper back when it was a huge tome of newsprint, now it sucks. There really is no reason for magazines to exist anymore since the web has completely obsolete them. Just occasionally you find content in magazines that you normally wouldn't find on the net.
It is my understanding that when someone sues you, and you settle, that it is supposed to hurt you. But when MS settles lawsuits it only helps them.
Under the settlement, Microsoft will give half the value of any unclaimed vouchers to Massachusetts' public schools.
Ok MS, you've been a bad boy. We're going to punish you by putting your software in all of our public schools. This will ensure that are children grow up with your software and never find out about that penguin guy or that yummy fruit. That's your punishment for monopolizing you bad boy.
That's because the majority if the right's beliefs have no basis in actual fact. The left however, while not flawless, is more based in fact than the right. So when you get a news report like CNN full of facts it looks like its far left to a guy on the far right. And yes, since non-Fox news tends to lean a tiny bit to the left it doesn't help. They DO select which facts they say and which ones they don't.
Solution? Dont ask me, I don't know! But I think its been pointed out many times that The Daily Show is the least biased reporting, so watch that. Or be like me and don't watch TV and only read news.google.com.
I'm surprised that Grucci didn't think of this first. They are usually at the forefront of fireworks technology.
There is something you have to understand about Michael Moore's movies and truth. Everything he shows on video is true. He doesn't photoshop it, it actually happened that way. But if you pay attention to the filmography and the context in which he shows this true footage he implies other things. What happens is that people go and say "you said this, it isn't true!" when in fact he technically only implied it. The only facts in his movie are the ones you hear him say outright.
"According to XXX inserst statistic Y here".
Often he asks questions in his movies like
"If X is true and Y is true, does that make Z true?"
People will sall him a liar if Z is in fact false. But he never said Z was true, he only asked. I met this man at U of R just after he won his oscar. He is extremely meticulous in the details and the information. Nobody is going to slip one by. For every fact he actually stated as fact he has evidence to back it up.
How he gets you is that the average american ingoramus who walks away from one of his movies believes that Z is true. He never said it was, but the masses will walk away believing it like the sheep they are.
Now, I don't agree with Moore. He is really a socialist green party hippy type underneath. Let me tell you, I like my Adam Smith. Even before this movie I was determined to vote against Bush. And after I get this movie in a format where I can watch it piece by piece I can extract the facts from the implications and get a lot more ammo to use against that corporate asshat.
I already had this discussion with my friends a long while back, and some of them completely disagree with me. I point out their bad taste in games.
I say that any game worth its salt will be equally good with any theme. For example, if you took super mario brothers and made mario a stick figure and replaced goomba's with circles, koopas with triangles, bricks with hashed squares, etc. The game would be equally as good gamewise. You wouldn't want to play that game, but the point is that you can imagine the game not losing anything from a lack of theme. The mechanic remains intact.
Now take a final fantasy game. Theme is everything. If you replace everything in a final fantasy game with a generic distinguishing shape the game would fall apart. Look at a board game like monopoly. Its be re-themed a billion times, but the basic game mechanic remains.
What does this tell us? Its quite simple really. If the theme of a game can be removed, just like a CSS can be removed from an XHTML, and the game mechanic remains intact, then what you have is indeed a game. Final Fantasy is not a game. It is a partially interactive movie.
Now, it is common sense that theme is necessary and desirable. Take Metroid. The theme of Metroid means a lot. But will the game work without it? Absolutely. And the theme of metroid goes so well with the exploratory gameplay and that's what really make it stand heads and shoulders above other games.
So what we do is this. First remove the theme of a game and examine the core gamplay at a fundamental level. Rate it on its own. If it falls apart then what you have is not a game in the strictest sense. Second examine the theme on its own. A sesame street theme is going to make a big difference. Third examine the combination of the theme and the gameplay. Does it fit well together? A Sesame Street theme on the Counter-Strike game wouldn't work too well together. I point you to Barney Doom.
If you want to prove it to yourself look at some german board games. Settlers, Puerto Rico, etc. They all have themes which are complementary to the gameplay, but the games themselves stand firmly without their themes. This can be seen easily by the constant re-theming of settlers. A game like Diceland doesn't even bother with a theme. Or you could say that its theme is in fact the lack of theme.
Oh, one last thing. This system of game rating will find you raw game quality. I will now use one of my favoriate analogies. Citizen kane is the "best" movie ever. You may hate it. You may think its boring and stupid. But film-wise it is unbeatable. Zelda 1 is the same way. It is the Citizen Kane of video games. You may hate it, but that's how it is. Which games are most fun is completely independent of this. You may love to watch the Matrix #1 over and over, but film-wise it isn't great. Just as you may love to play Starcraft, it still isn't the objective best game.
Actually I'm starting to think that maybe Tetris is the citizen kane of video games.
Let me be the first to say what everyone else is gearing up to say.
gnumeric exists. Acknowledge both its existence and superiority in the world of spreadsheets.