Yup, that's the Zelda series we're talking about. Not the CD-i game, which I haven't seen live, but even the still were far more awful than this series.
I think the point is not to figure out the best languages for the project in question, then stick to them. Sticking to C++ in all situations is bad when someone at the design phase says "I think using an embedded Python interpreter would make modding the game much easier" and gets flattened just because that's a Different Language. (The game comes out, with a hacky in-house modding language that has a not-quite-C, not-quite-Basic, bug-ridden, informally-specified subset of Common Lisp in it, and modders say "gee, I wish they had just embedded Python interpreter.")
Allowing people to introduce all languages they want at all phases of the project is just asking for trouble. Picking the right languages at the start and sticking to them, however, is another story.
Uh... I've heard a lot of people saying "Don't use GPL for artistic works". The terminology already makes my head hurt. What exactly is the "source code" for an image file? A PNG file, or an.xcf.gz file, perhaps? Is compressing a PNG image to JPEG analogous to compilation of source code, so I'd have to distribute a corresponding PNG file with each JPEG file - or perhaps is it considered making a derivative work, good heavens? Do I need to add a prominent notice of my change if I gamma-correct someone's GPLed photograph?
Okay, those aren't realistic headaches, but if we start really nitpicking on the details, those might be some very important points in discussions.
Are you implying that this is an abuse of search engine optimization, or you just don't like how the duplicate sites were ranked?
Er... I'm pretty sure copies of Wikipedia text is being used to abuse search engine optimizations. As in "stick a lot of stuff that might be relevant". SEO folks copy tons and tons of text content from web and stick it to their own pages. Boom! Instant "relevant information"!
I've also heard (though I don't admit to reading all of my own spam these days) that Wikipedia text is being used as a filler text for spam (to throw Bayesian filtering to wrong track), along with other stuff like Project Gutenberg texts and whatever free stuff you can find. (Hell, I even heard some spammers used the Dungeons & Dragons System Reference Documents as spam filler. These people don't hold anything sacred.)
The flip side of offering tons of great information for public to copy is that some people are going to show it to the search engines, then say to visitors "Aha! Got you! Now look at my crap instead!" And the licenses specifically can't really make demands on how the text is presented, and it's not like these people would care about committing a bit of copyright infringement in any case, right?
Your arguments sound awfully familiar to those already refuted. In short: Stars aren't usually visible because of the fact that capturing those would need longer exposure, meaning the foreground would be overexposed (hint: Try taking a photograph anywhere with odd lighting conditions, then compare that to what you actually *see* - human eyes have pretty damn amazing dynamic range compared to cameras!) The odd shadows are mostly due to the fact that the surface isn't quite as flat as it seems, and the objects may be in a bit different angle than they immediately seem. Honestly, read the above site (and Clavius too).
I'm sure that all the fansubbed Japanese language versions of the film floating the internets isn't making them hurry the thing out the door either.
Ermmm... it doesn't take exactly a rocket scientist to figure out, based on the fact how many FF7 Fanboys (and how frigging many fangirls) there are, that it was a kind of a boneheaded move not to release the movie world-wide at the same time. Japanese release only meant that the aforementioned screaming hordes of fanboys ripped, subtitled and distributed the movie in an eyeblink - that's the obvious reaction. Had they done a simultaneous (or a near-simultaneous) world release, nobody would have bothered with that. They've only got themselves to blame for this situation.
And the fansubbed version isn't exactly going to hurt their sales - quite the contrary. That thing, as I've seen, has been the best marketing material I've seen so far. What we have here is a bunch of people who downloaded the movie, spout "omg best movie eva!!111!" and really want to grab the complete DVD set once it's out. (And as for those who downloaded the movie and said "this sucked" and arguably cause thus less profit - well, that's either a loss of a couple of DVD rental pennies, or one less DVD that ends up in the dreaded second-hand shelf!)
And if they release the DVD really, really late, and it sells dismally - well, again, it'd be their own fault for not pushing the movie while every potential buyer was still interested of it.
Last I checked, GIMP on Linux takes mysterious character sets just fine with a little bit of trouble. I type "setxkbmap fi" and bang, töttöröörää. I type "setxkbmap ru" and bang, , ! (though Slashdot will undoubtedly purge the non-latin1 characters =) All GTK+2.x apps have really nice input system chooser - just right click any text field, select "Input methods".
I haven't used Gimp.app that much, but I guess your problem lies in the fact that either X11.app in general or GIMP may or may not honor the overall OSX input mode. I'm not sure how to resolve this problem, but I wager it involves quite a lot of setxkbmap or something =)
A lot of DVDs made in Finland get region code 0. I can understand that (some noble but ultimately futile dreams on Finnish cinema getting big on foreign market, I guess =). But most of the DVDs don't seem to have CSS either, which kind of puzzles me.
I'm not familiar with how CSS licensing works for content authors, but maybe, maybe some Finnish producers said "hey, let's copy protect these things" and another producer said "well, that's not going to happen, have you seen what prices they're asking for that?" (that's just for the sake of argument, I guess in real life, it's more likely the other guy is saying "but that doesn't work anyway - why bother..." =)
The point is, if you're using DRM licensing fees to fend out "hobbyists", you're also likely fending out smaller players. In an analogy that hopefully makes it all clear (even when I think DRM in general is such a failure that it practically fails in this goal, too): what use, really, is a protection that is just intended to keep rich people richer and poor people poor?
Kind of reminds me of Linux version of Neverwinter Nights - the game comes with "aluminum-reinforced Windoze brand coasters" which, upon closer inspection, have some mysterious.cab files and shit like that that Linux tools have very little clue about - but if you want to play the Linux version, you just download a gigantic tarball, uncompress, and enter the serial number from the back of the manual.
Not necessarily, the big plus of gentoo is the small number of extra services which get installed
Debian, last time I checked, installs a ton of redundant stuff, which is why God invented dpkg -r... Just because extra services get installed doesn't mean they need to stay =)
OpenOffice for example will probably be compiled with Gnome and KDE support for distros like ubuntu.
A bit bad example. At least in Debian, GNOME support is in a separate packages (openoffice.org-gnome, ooqstart-gnome, openoffice.org-evolution). I don't think OpenOffice.org even has KDE support, apart of the generic freedesktop standards support, which we hold self-evident these days.
So anything created in WordPerfect v2.2 (from 1982) or v3.0 (from 1983) is likewise not importable.
Hmm, and I thought WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS only read WordPerfect 4.x documents... could be wrong though, I've only run into >5.x documents myself.
doesn't include documents generated for other systems (like the Commodore 64 -- Paperback Writer anyone?)
Just transfer the floppy over the cable (which may prove troublesome - I only personally have a cable that plugs to a printer port, and it won't work on an EPP port, and my ol' Pentium 166 and the cable + my 1541 drive are on different sides of the country).
After that challenging task is done, extract the file with c1541, and convert from PETSCII. End result is a file probably full of funny control codes - I'm not familiar with your app, but at least MiniOffice II kept the codes pretty minimal (and you could also save an unformatted "ASCII" file, which wasn't ASCII actually), which should be fairly straightforward to clean out - you've lost the formatting in any case.
And what about Microsoft Works format? Nada.
What a relief to hear that Word can't read ancient Works shit either these days! That cuts down some of the options. =) I have a CD-R full of old documents I copied from a stack of floppies. Stuff dating from 1992-1997 or so. TEKOplus/Teko 3.1 was easy, that was just cp437/cp850 text with wacky formatting codes. Ditto with this funny Amersoft word processor. WordPerfect 5.1 opens right up in Abiword (and I think OpenOffice.org too, these days). I can probably find some solution for Lotus Word Pro if I try hard enough. I expect TeX documents still run through the thing, too. =)
But Works! Man! I used 1.0 and 2.0 for DOS at school, 2.0 for Windows a bit, and I had 4.0 for Windows at one point. (I think I have a shrinkwrapped "newish" Works here somewhere too... along with a shrinkwrapped Word 97. Might try those.) Nothing else seems to open all of these old Works word processor documents. Interestingly, all Works spreadsheets open right up in OpenOffice.org.
Now, another format that does prove to be somewhat of a headache is Windows 3.x Write... Ummm, would be fun to know what opens this stuff. Word apparently supports that, but I haven't yet found many apps in open source side that would touch those. =/
See, now I might pick one of these up to complement my PSP. One of the things that kept me from getting a DS was how big and clunky it looked.
DS as it is now is not really that huge in my opinion, it's not much worse than the original GBA, which was a quite reasonably sized thing. (And as for PSP's size, well, when I saw that, I just got horrible flashbacks involving Atari Lynx... =)
I think it's good to have a small and big version of the same thing though. I have big hands. I liked original GB, found the GBC a bit less comfortable to play. GBA rocked, SP was too small. DS is right size for me, but I suppose this one will be too small, again. But for some other people, the size preferences might be the other way around.
One weird thing though, the word is that this thing has a brighter backlit display. What the heck? DS's display is the kind of thing that, while I'm not a religious person as such and don't endorse creationism, even, vividly make me recall Genesis 1:3. I mean, it's bright already.
I'm looking for a video capture of the "second reality" demo.
Wikipedia has/had an ed2k link to a video of the demo. Though if I remember correctly, it cuts off just before the end credits. There might be some other.avis here. I hear someone had made a DVD of greatest PC demos too.
The demo regrettably doesn't yet run on DOSbox, at least 0.63 (at least here it works just fine otherwise but it hangs mid-through, I've heard it's actually the demo's fault...)
You know, there's something to be said for the straightforwardness of the "Font. Color. Red. Do it." approach.
I don't know. I rather prefer the straightforwardness of "This is a title. You know how to format it." approach.
With FONT tags, you need to specify the font and color on a single passage of text. Then on another. And then another. And then another. And for the good measure, just another. And by the way, one more. And that one too. And that one there, even when you just described that other one back there to have the exact same font and color. Oh, and that one too. And almost forgot that one there.
Hurm... I don't think there were major changes to the underlying OS, but there may have been minor tweaks. Some commands got some very handy parameters in 4.0 if I remember correctly, but it's been so long time since I went from 3.3 to 6.0 that I can't remember for sure =) 5.x and 6.x were mostly about the additional gunk though, that's right.
Almost as cool as Second Reality running on Commodore 64. Almost.
Had only been cooler if they had done this on an unexpanded machine, that is, the music on the beeper instead of resorting to posh high-tech like SoundBlasters. And MS-DOS 6.22? Ridiculously luxurious updates =)
In my physics class at my university we have to turn in homework on the Internet, and the website we're using uses Flash for entering equations.
Egh. For comparison, just last week I got on an astronomy course. The lecturer said "oh, you can send the math exercises by e-mail, preferrably LaTeX or PostScript..." And he even pronounced "LaTeX" right. =)
I wonder who on Slashdot has the lowest publically accessible IP address.
Depends on how you define "lowest", but there's plenty of big organizations with small first IP address octet and a whole/8 (or many of them) to play with. 1.*.*.* and 2.*.*.* seem to be reserved, 3.*.*.* is General Electric, but the lowest ones I've personally seen messing around publicly in Wikipedia are Level 3 customers with IP addresses in 4.*.*.* range...
Re:Leaks? I'll show you LEAKS!
on
IE7 Leaked
·
· Score: 2, Informative
To leak it would have to not return some RAM after the app is closed. I've not seen that behavior in Firefox at all.
No, a memory leak is when an application allocates memory but doesn't free it when it's done with it. For example, load up a document from disk to memory, and when closing it, forgetting to deallocate the used memory.
All memory the application uses should be cleared by the operating system at the time the program is terminated. Otherwise, we'd be in a deeply sticky situation when some applications abruptly die for whatever reason...
Firefox has not been particularly awful at leaking memory; I've not looked at memory usage but around 1.0 series the thing was pretty slow when left open overnight... I restart Firefox every day and I'm happy with the operations =)
Are you sure the site in question is maintained by that user? People don't necessarily put their own sites to the URL field, they sometimes put Some Other Funny Crap there. You must be new here. =)
The copypastejob, if any, seems fairly typical, though.
Drupal boasts "clean URLs" out of the box as well. This means that urls do not have to be www.example.com?q=node/123 but rather www.example.com/node/123 (this requires mod_rewrite).
In my humble opinion, www.example.com/node/123 isn't a "clean" URL. Or rather, it's a tad bit too clean. It's cleaner than the querystring one, but in my opinion a numeric ID isn't good as an identifier of anything. URLs should be recognizable on sight. If you see an URL and have to ask "Hmm, was that the article about kernel build options or the one about the schematics of the orbital brain lasers?", that's bad.
Adding a title or date might be much better (a la the format many blogwares use, www.example.com/article/2006/01/23/whining-about-p ermalinks).
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, that's the Zelda series we're talking about. Not the CD-i game, which I haven't seen live, but even the still were far more awful than this series.
I think the point is not to figure out the best languages for the project in question, then stick to them. Sticking to C++ in all situations is bad when someone at the design phase says "I think using an embedded Python interpreter would make modding the game much easier" and gets flattened just because that's a Different Language. (The game comes out, with a hacky in-house modding language that has a not-quite-C, not-quite-Basic, bug-ridden, informally-specified subset of Common Lisp in it, and modders say "gee, I wish they had just embedded Python interpreter.")
Allowing people to introduce all languages they want at all phases of the project is just asking for trouble. Picking the right languages at the start and sticking to them, however, is another story.
Uh... I've heard a lot of people saying "Don't use GPL for artistic works". The terminology already makes my head hurt. What exactly is the "source code" for an image file? A PNG file, or an .xcf.gz file, perhaps? Is compressing a PNG image to JPEG analogous to compilation of source code, so I'd have to distribute a corresponding PNG file with each JPEG file - or perhaps is it considered making a derivative work, good heavens? Do I need to add a prominent notice of my change if I gamma-correct someone's GPLed photograph?
Okay, those aren't realistic headaches, but if we start really nitpicking on the details, those might be some very important points in discussions.
Er... I'm pretty sure copies of Wikipedia text is being used to abuse search engine optimizations. As in "stick a lot of stuff that might be relevant". SEO folks copy tons and tons of text content from web and stick it to their own pages. Boom! Instant "relevant information"!
I've also heard (though I don't admit to reading all of my own spam these days) that Wikipedia text is being used as a filler text for spam (to throw Bayesian filtering to wrong track), along with other stuff like Project Gutenberg texts and whatever free stuff you can find. (Hell, I even heard some spammers used the Dungeons & Dragons System Reference Documents as spam filler. These people don't hold anything sacred.)
The flip side of offering tons of great information for public to copy is that some people are going to show it to the search engines, then say to visitors "Aha! Got you! Now look at my crap instead!" And the licenses specifically can't really make demands on how the text is presented, and it's not like these people would care about committing a bit of copyright infringement in any case, right?
But if you had read the article blurb, you might have noted the article was about a security flaw, not a new Winamp release.
Plus, there's always people who like to say "no, please don't upgrade that thing, you're just going to shove more bloat to my eyes, dammit."
Your arguments sound awfully familiar to those already refuted. In short: Stars aren't usually visible because of the fact that capturing those would need longer exposure, meaning the foreground would be overexposed (hint: Try taking a photograph anywhere with odd lighting conditions, then compare that to what you actually *see* - human eyes have pretty damn amazing dynamic range compared to cameras!) The odd shadows are mostly due to the fact that the surface isn't quite as flat as it seems, and the objects may be in a bit different angle than they immediately seem. Honestly, read the above site (and Clavius too).
Ermmm... it doesn't take exactly a rocket scientist to figure out, based on the fact how many FF7 Fanboys (and how frigging many fangirls) there are, that it was a kind of a boneheaded move not to release the movie world-wide at the same time. Japanese release only meant that the aforementioned screaming hordes of fanboys ripped, subtitled and distributed the movie in an eyeblink - that's the obvious reaction. Had they done a simultaneous (or a near-simultaneous) world release, nobody would have bothered with that. They've only got themselves to blame for this situation.
And the fansubbed version isn't exactly going to hurt their sales - quite the contrary. That thing, as I've seen, has been the best marketing material I've seen so far. What we have here is a bunch of people who downloaded the movie, spout "omg best movie eva!!111!" and really want to grab the complete DVD set once it's out. (And as for those who downloaded the movie and said "this sucked" and arguably cause thus less profit - well, that's either a loss of a couple of DVD rental pennies, or one less DVD that ends up in the dreaded second-hand shelf!)
And if they release the DVD really, really late, and it sells dismally - well, again, it'd be their own fault for not pushing the movie while every potential buyer was still interested of it.
Last I checked, GIMP on Linux takes mysterious character sets just fine with a little bit of trouble. I type "setxkbmap fi" and bang, töttöröörää. I type "setxkbmap ru" and bang, , ! (though Slashdot will undoubtedly purge the non-latin1 characters =) All GTK+2.x apps have really nice input system chooser - just right click any text field, select "Input methods".
I haven't used Gimp.app that much, but I guess your problem lies in the fact that either X11.app in general or GIMP may or may not honor the overall OSX input mode. I'm not sure how to resolve this problem, but I wager it involves quite a lot of setxkbmap or something =)
A lot of DVDs made in Finland get region code 0. I can understand that (some noble but ultimately futile dreams on Finnish cinema getting big on foreign market, I guess =). But most of the DVDs don't seem to have CSS either, which kind of puzzles me.
I'm not familiar with how CSS licensing works for content authors, but maybe, maybe some Finnish producers said "hey, let's copy protect these things" and another producer said "well, that's not going to happen, have you seen what prices they're asking for that?" (that's just for the sake of argument, I guess in real life, it's more likely the other guy is saying "but that doesn't work anyway - why bother..." =)
The point is, if you're using DRM licensing fees to fend out "hobbyists", you're also likely fending out smaller players. In an analogy that hopefully makes it all clear (even when I think DRM in general is such a failure that it practically fails in this goal, too): what use, really, is a protection that is just intended to keep rich people richer and poor people poor?
Kind of reminds me of Linux version of Neverwinter Nights - the game comes with "aluminum-reinforced Windoze brand coasters" which, upon closer inspection, have some mysterious .cab files and shit like that that Linux tools have very little clue about - but if you want to play the Linux version, you just download a gigantic tarball, uncompress, and enter the serial number from the back of the manual.
Debian, last time I checked, installs a ton of redundant stuff, which is why God invented dpkg -r... Just because extra services get installed doesn't mean they need to stay =)
A bit bad example. At least in Debian, GNOME support is in a separate packages (openoffice.org-gnome, ooqstart-gnome, openoffice.org-evolution). I don't think OpenOffice.org even has KDE support, apart of the generic freedesktop standards support, which we hold self-evident these days.
Hmm, and I thought WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS only read WordPerfect 4.x documents... could be wrong though, I've only run into >5.x documents myself.
Just transfer the floppy over the cable (which may prove troublesome - I only personally have a cable that plugs to a printer port, and it won't work on an EPP port, and my ol' Pentium 166 and the cable + my 1541 drive are on different sides of the country).
After that challenging task is done, extract the file with c1541, and convert from PETSCII. End result is a file probably full of funny control codes - I'm not familiar with your app, but at least MiniOffice II kept the codes pretty minimal (and you could also save an unformatted "ASCII" file, which wasn't ASCII actually), which should be fairly straightforward to clean out - you've lost the formatting in any case.
What a relief to hear that Word can't read ancient Works shit either these days! That cuts down some of the options. =) I have a CD-R full of old documents I copied from a stack of floppies. Stuff dating from 1992-1997 or so. TEKOplus/Teko 3.1 was easy, that was just cp437/cp850 text with wacky formatting codes. Ditto with this funny Amersoft word processor. WordPerfect 5.1 opens right up in Abiword (and I think OpenOffice.org too, these days). I can probably find some solution for Lotus Word Pro if I try hard enough. I expect TeX documents still run through the thing, too. =)
But Works! Man! I used 1.0 and 2.0 for DOS at school, 2.0 for Windows a bit, and I had 4.0 for Windows at one point. (I think I have a shrinkwrapped "newish" Works here somewhere too... along with a shrinkwrapped Word 97. Might try those.) Nothing else seems to open all of these old Works word processor documents. Interestingly, all Works spreadsheets open right up in OpenOffice.org.
Now, another format that does prove to be somewhat of a headache is Windows 3.x Write... Ummm, would be fun to know what opens this stuff. Word apparently supports that, but I haven't yet found many apps in open source side that would touch those. =/
DS as it is now is not really that huge in my opinion, it's not much worse than the original GBA, which was a quite reasonably sized thing. (And as for PSP's size, well, when I saw that, I just got horrible flashbacks involving Atari Lynx... =)
I think it's good to have a small and big version of the same thing though. I have big hands. I liked original GB, found the GBC a bit less comfortable to play. GBA rocked, SP was too small. DS is right size for me, but I suppose this one will be too small, again. But for some other people, the size preferences might be the other way around.
One weird thing though, the word is that this thing has a brighter backlit display. What the heck? DS's display is the kind of thing that, while I'm not a religious person as such and don't endorse creationism, even, vividly make me recall Genesis 1:3. I mean, it's bright already.
Wikipedia has/had an ed2k link to a video of the demo. Though if I remember correctly, it cuts off just before the end credits. There might be some other .avis here. I hear someone had made a DVD of greatest PC demos too.
The demo regrettably doesn't yet run on DOSbox, at least 0.63 (at least here it works just fine otherwise but it hangs mid-through, I've heard it's actually the demo's fault...)
Most certainly not! Linus has a surprisingly bad memory. Okay, that's a nitpick, but still =)
I don't know. I rather prefer the straightforwardness of "This is a title. You know how to format it." approach.
With FONT tags, you need to specify the font and color on a single passage of text. Then on another. And then another. And then another. And for the good measure, just another. And by the way, one more. And that one too. And that one there, even when you just described that other one back there to have the exact same font and color. Oh, and that one too. And almost forgot that one there.
After Netscape & IE 4 died, CSS just works.
Hurm... I don't think there were major changes to the underlying OS, but there may have been minor tweaks. Some commands got some very handy parameters in 4.0 if I remember correctly, but it's been so long time since I went from 3.3 to 6.0 that I can't remember for sure =) 5.x and 6.x were mostly about the additional gunk though, that's right.
That's pretty damn impressive!
Almost as cool as Second Reality running on Commodore 64. Almost.
Had only been cooler if they had done this on an unexpanded machine, that is, the music on the beeper instead of resorting to posh high-tech like SoundBlasters. And MS-DOS 6.22? Ridiculously luxurious updates =)
Egh. For comparison, just last week I got on an astronomy course. The lecturer said "oh, you can send the math exercises by e-mail, preferrably LaTeX or PostScript..." And he even pronounced "LaTeX" right. =)
In Antitrust they had a bunch of IPs that were random numbers in the 10.*.*.* range... A grin-worthy moment seeing that in a movie =)
Depends on how you define "lowest", but there's plenty of big organizations with small first IP address octet and a whole /8 (or many of them) to play with. 1.*.*.* and 2.*.*.* seem to be reserved, 3.*.*.* is General Electric, but the lowest ones I've personally seen messing around publicly in Wikipedia are Level 3 customers with IP addresses in 4.*.*.* range...
No, a memory leak is when an application allocates memory but doesn't free it when it's done with it. For example, load up a document from disk to memory, and when closing it, forgetting to deallocate the used memory.
All memory the application uses should be cleared by the operating system at the time the program is terminated. Otherwise, we'd be in a deeply sticky situation when some applications abruptly die for whatever reason...
Firefox has not been particularly awful at leaking memory; I've not looked at memory usage but around 1.0 series the thing was pretty slow when left open overnight... I restart Firefox every day and I'm happy with the operations =)
Are you sure the site in question is maintained by that user? People don't necessarily put their own sites to the URL field, they sometimes put Some Other Funny Crap there. You must be new here. =)
The copypastejob, if any, seems fairly typical, though.
I thought "BETA" was supposed to be what Web 2.0 was all about?
Come on, for example Rails got popular when it was hyped like "It's a dream to develop for! And version 0.12 is out!"
=)
In my humble opinion, www.example.com/node/123 isn't a "clean" URL. Or rather, it's a tad bit too clean. It's cleaner than the querystring one, but in my opinion a numeric ID isn't good as an identifier of anything. URLs should be recognizable on sight. If you see an URL and have to ask "Hmm, was that the article about kernel build options or the one about the schematics of the orbital brain lasers?", that's bad.
Adding a title or date might be much better (a la the format many blogwares use, www.example.com/article/2006/01/23/whining-about-p ermalinks).