It's fine with me if that eventually is RoR, but considering the much vaster PHP user base, wouldn't P5 be a better starting point?
Perl 5? We're talking of object-oriented, MVC-heavy thing here. Try doing object-oriented programming in Perl 5 for more than 10 seconds and you may notice it's not really that bright idea. Breeze to instantiate a class and use it, but as for implementing it, ugh...
Perl 6 of tomorrowyear has a very nice and clean object interface, kind of like Ruby is now, actually...
That said, Perl *does* have a really nice MVC framework out there. It's called Maypole, and would absolutely kill RoR dead if Perl's object syntax weren't so horrenduous and it wouldn't need million and one weird CPAN modules to run. I haven't used it much, but it seems like it has RoR's scaffolding features on steroids...
I haven't heard PHP's syntax described that way before. To me, it seems neither simple (think python, C) nor powerful (think ruby, perl).
I have heard it described as such, not that I particularly really, really believe in it. I don't how what makes PHP "simple", apart of the fact that a lot of newbie coders get their toes wet with it and think it was a breeze to learn. I don't know if it's really that powerful, apart of the fact that zillions of zillions of libraries of debatable merit are provided with the stock language. I know PHP isn't really simple (you really need the manual open in web browser to make sense of any particular function's syntax - how_do_you(underscore) functionnames(again) and (parameters, in, order, are, which, today?)... and it's pretty verbose too, not really as powerful and clean as Perl or Ruby, yes.
But in contrast, I have never heard C being described as a particularly simple language. Usually newbie heads tend to start exploding at the time people start discussing pointers and pointer arithmetic. And I do consider Python to be falsely simple in that it's actually far more complex than it looks. =)
PHP isn't obsolete because a lot of people want cheap web hosting, and PHP is what's easily around.
I personally wish it would be dead in favor of Mason and Rails, but right now PHP is like a swarm of super-powered cockroaches - every damn web host in the planet supports it, and it isn't going away because every damn web host in the planet supports it! PHP is great because of its availability and its simple and powerful syntax, but there's little else to keep its head above the water. And with things like Smarty, it isn't *that* awful to work with.
Well, my cheap web host gives me SSH account and I could install SBCL. Maybe one day I'll install Rails there too, I've used it on a project and I've liked it a lot.
Theora bytestream format is stabilized. So now, all they have to do is to improve the encoder a bit and make the decoder slightly better (the decoder reference implementation is pretty good, except seeking the stream is not as flawless as it should in VLC and Totem at least). And, of course, major video encoding apps should made to support it out of box too, like VirtualDub(Mod) and mencoder. ffmpeg kind of does, already, with ffmpeg2theora.
As for if people even use it - videos in Wikipedia are in Theora format. That's a pretty high-profile user =)
Aside of Theora, a lot of people use ogm/ogmmux encapsulation, which is a horrenduous hack that lets V4W codecs be used with Vorbis audio - a lot of ogm files out there with XviD video and Vorbis audio.
No, it won't. Because the DRM features probably aren't mandatory, just like the current DVD DRM features aren't mandatory.
The high-profile movie distributors will put zillion different kinds of encryption and kaboom codez there. Movie makers with no money to license the stuff will not. Nor will the porn czars because they don't need such features.
Example from current situation: Many of the Finnish movies I've bought on DVD seem to be Region 0 and have no CSS encryption. I can explain the former with some near-hopeless dreams about foreigners buying the things (multinational movie studios probably don't have problems in this department), but I believe the latter needs a specific license these people don't want spend money on.
Well, Microsoft knows of WINE, their WGA FAQ specifically says WGA doesn't work - specifically isn't designed to work - in WINE. WINE folks don't care whether or not WGA works, they're just coding the program like before, minding their own business.
If Microsoft designed their check to not work in WINE, they should fix it to make it not work, then. Kind of like when Windows gets updated, and some app gets broken - generally speaking, it's app vendor's problem to make sure the software works in the new version.
The list is obviously wrong if they put Mario as #1 and Ocarina of Time as #2. Ocarina of Time is the definition of a Good Game. It's not only a great game, it could be proposed as a ludological constant to compare other games to. =)
I was kind of worried about the list though - some really great games, yes... but I was reading this like this: "FF7 as #88? Could it be possible they considered it better than... that game? Oh no. FF10 as #86? Oh dear god no. (Nervously hits pagedown) Phew! That game, the Best PC Game of All Time (According to Me), is #84." Well, there's still hope for IGN. Or something.
I agree a new icon theme is needed. The icons don't need to be made more interesting though. They need to be duller.
Originally, Nautilus had actual, genuine Susan Kare stuff. Not just style imitation - real stuff. I thought it was spartan, but it worked, unlike most of the modern icon stuff. I liked Mac and Win3.0 UI designs a lot. I liked Nautilus a lot.
Nowadays, it seems icons have to be fluffy, ephemeral, and cute. I can live with cute, but the fluffiness and complicated looks of the icons have to go. We need simpler icons. We need icons that indicate what they represent and not a damn thing more.
Plus, simpler icons are faster to make so the icon sets can be made really comprehensive, too. It's frustrating to have an icon theme you like and it lacks icons for majority of cool filetypes...
what is it about Finland that there are 800 times more hackers per capita than in the US and 40 times more than in India, Tokyo and Europe combined?
Linus said, a few years ago I think, that it was because the winters here are so long and cold that people need to come up with something to do. He wasn't sure what the real reason was, but that was as good explanation as any.
Personally, I have a better theory. Know what we have in common with Japan? That's right, a freakishly complex language that no other nation understands. And a decade ago, what was the most common cry from the people who bought computers? "This goddamn piece of junk screws up the scandinavic letters!" (the Japanese, in turn, used some more poetic term for their character set troubles.) An entire high-tech industry sprung up to make sure that the peculiar characters were properly used. Linus presented us Linux, a Modern Operating System Perfectly Capable of Handling ISO 8859-1, and also (later) ISO 8859-15 and Unicode/UTF-8. And there was a lot of rejoicing.
And I hope you agree with that - that's not the real reason, but it's as good explanation as any!
This isn't intended as a troll. I'm a GNOME fan. Just a frustrated one, regarding one particular feature of the system.
I don't know, GNOME's file associations seem really, really tricky to deal with. A few revisions back (2.6), I was marginally aware of how to manage file associations through control panel. I could not add my own icons to file types at all, but I at least managed to say which apps I wanted to be shown on Nautilus menu, which were available at all, and which was the default application.
I have no freaking idea where this thing is actually stored. In GNOME 1.x, they used some kind of really broken text file format. In early 2.x, they seemed to just keep using it. Nowadays, I have absolutely no idea how it stores the associations. Is it somewhere in gconf database, finally? I also have no idea how to really manage these file associations in 2.10: Nautilus isn't particularly helpful and I couldn't find the knob in the control center.
So is the file association stuff getting better at all? How do I manage the file associations in 2.12? And do they finally have some working way of adding icons to file types, or an actually understandable way of making icon themes?
Oh, and about article: Seems interesting. The HAL looks particularly droolworthy, based on a random and uninformed glance it seems to finally beat KDE =) And the Cairoification is always a good thing, it's definitely going to drag X11 kicking and screaming to the future, the direction where Microsoft and Apple are running blindfolded =)
This test may not be graded on a curve, but it is, practically. What is tested is a set of features, and broken things, that are more or less obscure or practical in future. The idea was to expose various weird bugs. The test was supposed to be broken when it was released and the intention was that browser vendors would get their act together and fix the bugs!
Less broken face = more compliant with the standards. Period.
And there are browsers that pass the test. Safari's new version supposedly passes (Tiger version, I suppose - I don't have it at hand, so I can't say).
I know Mozilla folks are definitely working on all of this stuff (just looked it up - bug #289480!).
The only major vendor that doesn't even try is Microsoft, who says that CSS2 is "fundamentally flawed" (despite of the evidence to the contrary, ie, quite extensive support already present in Gecko/KHTML/WebCore/etc).
Look, Inkscape rocks, it's just that without some key features, it's going to be far less glorious than the competition. What Inkscape folks are done so far is amazing, and the new features added here are going to please those who long for more features previously only found in pro apps. Everybody just hopes they'll keep on introducing more such cool features.
When Inkscape has pressure sensitivity all around, it's going to instantly go from "neat, but could be better" to "good enough for me, and where can I get my fanatic membership card?".
Pressure sensitivity is a pretty important thing for pro graphics apps. I got easily caught into using GIMP, they got pressure sensitivity in fairly early on (in 1.1 series, I think) and honestly think they would have been far less cool if they hadn't done that; I sure hope Inkscape's pressure support will be there and will rock just as much.
One thing that bugs me about vector apps is that vector apps generally have objects that have solid width edges. If I want to draw an object with variable width edges, I have to draw two objects, one slightly larger than the other, place it underneath the smaller one and color it with the "edge" color, then remove stroke from both objects. It's an illusion, and a hard to manage one at that, because if I want to change the shape, I need to edit both objects.
But what if I could also control the width of the edge at each of the bezier handles? That, integrated to the tablet pressure support, would make the vector graphics editing a lot more flexible and pleasant!
There has to be a feature like this in commercial apps, I think there was such feature in Corel or something... Not sure if it's really doable in SVG, but how about extending it and proposing it for next revision of SVG if it isn't here already?
::falls kneeling face on the floor:: We're not worthy! We're not worthy!
(with a very quiet voice:) my deepest apologies, our Lord, for I have not played Your modules yet... I hoped to find time, but laziness took hold in my heart...
(oh wait, I did try Demon Cards. Yet to try that in multiplayer. *sigh*)
Looking at London, i see a label with a massive expance of blank map around it.
Well, Google doesn't cover whole Europe yet.
Look at Finland in Google Maps. They have national borders and a label stating what country this might be.
Then look at Finland in MSN. They don't have city maps, or any fancy features, but at least they had locations of a lot of cities, which was far, far more than Google had! Even tons of very small towns too.
Though in Google's defense, lack of features was, this time, a fun and educational thing. It was pretty fun seeing my home city from satellite, trying to find my home from the satellite pic (the picture was in wrong angle - they've now fixed it so that it actually appears from above - and kind of blurry so making sense of the features was pretty hard, but after comparing it to the city maps in web, it was possible), or my old hometown with just the satellite pic (following the waterways and lakes until I found something that kind of looked like a faint memory of something that I saw in the phonebook map section about a decade ago - and my own memory of what the town looks like).
And in Finland - through PEGI or, if such rating were missing, rating as given by a distributor.
But I don't see how it's censorship - stores carry them anyway. I could just walk in a game store and buy it. I'm old enough. I've seen actual pornography "games" on supermarket shelves along with the rest of them, for God's sake.
Agreed, Ultima VII is the best CRPG ever, amen. Very deep plot, nicely open-ended, no artificial restrictions on what the heck to do. Generally speaking, things work.
Though I have to say I've so far also kind of enjoyed Ultima VIII - too much action, doesn't look too Ultimaish to me, but still, great music, great atmosphere and great writing.
Even 9 had it's moments
Feh... yeah, me killing Iolo because the guy told so outrageously blatant lies about him... never ever forgiving EA for this utter display of evilness.
(Looking over bucanneers den for the first time for example).
Feh^2, it was night when I first saw Buc's Den in U9... =)
The Black Sword is debatably the best weapon in U7; 25 damage, fire fields, and insta-kill (if Arcadion wants to). The original poster was referring to the "final weapon" of the game; The Black Sword is a "final" weapon in a sense... there really isn't any other "final" weapons in the game. Still, The Black Sword is only in the expansion...
Hoe of Destruction is only slightly behind (20 damage). But the really leet weaponry is up ahead: Firedoom staff (20 + kaboooooom), Triple crossbows (28 + lots of dead bystanders), Juggernaut hammers (25), Death Scythe (50), and... cannon (90 + a small bit of the wall too)!
(Stats from a random FAQ and Exult Studio.)
But actually, nobody wields the weapons in U7 just because they can kick assloads of ass. I pick my weapons based on what actually looks cool. I leave Jaana with a hawk, for example. I definitely go for The Black Sword as soon as possible. =)
- W4, recently started playing U7 again (will be third time through!)
The most damaging weapon in the game is a Glass Sword, which instantly kills anything you hit with, but I don't think they count as the "final greatest most superior weapon" because they break after one use. They're quite common. There's no Mysterious Legendary Plot to find them.
But other weapons in the high damage range of that game aren't swords: there's Death Scythes, cannons, Firedoom Staffs (look at all those pretty fireballs!), powder kegs (let's do the Guy Fawkes thing again!), and a freaking Hoe of Destruction (still complaining about lack of variety, damn it?)... and the number one favorite of trigger-happy bards, triple crossbow.
In the expansion disk, there's the Black Sword which is just leet, though. And that's a "final" weapon allright.
Well, these are are XML syndication formats. In other words, they move headlines and article summaries from server to user in machine-parseable format.
There's RSS, which is the reigning de facto standard, but it also is regrettably very, very liberally specified, and even less frequently heeded. Everyone's extending it to their own heart's content more or less competently. There are lots of different variations. Not easy to implement, not easy to learn.
Atom is an attempt to make a real standard-like standard out of RSS's best features and some of its own. It tastes more commitee-like, is probably initially less funny to implement on the server end (if you're lazy), but it is very nicely standardised and as a result it's far easier to write a parser for it, too, so client support is coming fast. And, it's more than just a syndication format: There's API for publishing and the atom format can, as such, also be used as a standardised weblog backup/storage format.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0)
I really like that "Mozilla/4.0" part. Wow, MSIE is trying to still be "compatible" with Netscape 4!
What's wrong with "MSIE/7.0b (Windows NT 6.0)"? I mean, they supposedly won the browser war, shouldn't they, as victors, tell the new rules of the game?
Slashdot Mirror
Perl 5? We're talking of object-oriented, MVC-heavy thing here. Try doing object-oriented programming in Perl 5 for more than 10 seconds and you may notice it's not really that bright idea. Breeze to instantiate a class and use it, but as for implementing it, ugh...
Perl 6 of tomorrowyear has a very nice and clean object interface, kind of like Ruby is now, actually...
That said, Perl *does* have a really nice MVC framework out there. It's called Maypole, and would absolutely kill RoR dead if Perl's object syntax weren't so horrenduous and it wouldn't need million and one weird CPAN modules to run. I haven't used it much, but it seems like it has RoR's scaffolding features on steroids...
I have heard it described as such, not that I particularly really, really believe in it. I don't how what makes PHP "simple", apart of the fact that a lot of newbie coders get their toes wet with it and think it was a breeze to learn. I don't know if it's really that powerful, apart of the fact that zillions of zillions of libraries of debatable merit are provided with the stock language. I know PHP isn't really simple (you really need the manual open in web browser to make sense of any particular function's syntax - how_do_you(underscore) functionnames(again) and (parameters, in, order, are, which, today?)... and it's pretty verbose too, not really as powerful and clean as Perl or Ruby, yes.
But in contrast, I have never heard C being described as a particularly simple language. Usually newbie heads tend to start exploding at the time people start discussing pointers and pointer arithmetic. And I do consider Python to be falsely simple in that it's actually far more complex than it looks. =)
PHP isn't obsolete because a lot of people want cheap web hosting, and PHP is what's easily around.
I personally wish it would be dead in favor of Mason and Rails, but right now PHP is like a swarm of super-powered cockroaches - every damn web host in the planet supports it, and it isn't going away because every damn web host in the planet supports it! PHP is great because of its availability and its simple and powerful syntax, but there's little else to keep its head above the water. And with things like Smarty, it isn't *that* awful to work with.
Well, my cheap web host gives me SSH account and I could install SBCL. Maybe one day I'll install Rails there too, I've used it on a project and I've liked it a lot.
Theora bytestream format is stabilized. So now, all they have to do is to improve the encoder a bit and make the decoder slightly better (the decoder reference implementation is pretty good, except seeking the stream is not as flawless as it should in VLC and Totem at least). And, of course, major video encoding apps should made to support it out of box too, like VirtualDub(Mod) and mencoder. ffmpeg kind of does, already, with ffmpeg2theora.
As for if people even use it - videos in Wikipedia are in Theora format. That's a pretty high-profile user =)
Aside of Theora, a lot of people use ogm/ogmmux encapsulation, which is a horrenduous hack that lets V4W codecs be used with Vorbis audio - a lot of ogm files out there with XviD video and Vorbis audio.
No, it won't. Because the DRM features probably aren't mandatory, just like the current DVD DRM features aren't mandatory.
The high-profile movie distributors will put zillion different kinds of encryption and kaboom codez there. Movie makers with no money to license the stuff will not. Nor will the porn czars because they don't need such features.
Example from current situation: Many of the Finnish movies I've bought on DVD seem to be Region 0 and have no CSS encryption. I can explain the former with some near-hopeless dreams about foreigners buying the things (multinational movie studios probably don't have problems in this department), but I believe the latter needs a specific license these people don't want spend money on.
Oh, a lot of people I know type URLs to the google search box...
I do, too, but only to get that ever-important "cache" or "show as HTML" link =)
Well, Microsoft knows of WINE, their WGA FAQ specifically says WGA doesn't work - specifically isn't designed to work - in WINE. WINE folks don't care whether or not WGA works, they're just coding the program like before, minding their own business.
If Microsoft designed their check to not work in WINE, they should fix it to make it not work, then. Kind of like when Windows gets updated, and some app gets broken - generally speaking, it's app vendor's problem to make sure the software works in the new version.
The list is obviously wrong if they put Mario as #1 and Ocarina of Time as #2. Ocarina of Time is the definition of a Good Game. It's not only a great game, it could be proposed as a ludological constant to compare other games to. =)
I was kind of worried about the list though - some really great games, yes... but I was reading this like this: "FF7 as #88? Could it be possible they considered it better than... that game? Oh no. FF10 as #86? Oh dear god no. (Nervously hits pagedown) Phew! That game, the Best PC Game of All Time (According to Me), is #84." Well, there's still hope for IGN. Or something.
I agree a new icon theme is needed. The icons don't need to be made more interesting though. They need to be duller.
Originally, Nautilus had actual, genuine Susan Kare stuff. Not just style imitation - real stuff. I thought it was spartan, but it worked, unlike most of the modern icon stuff. I liked Mac and Win3.0 UI designs a lot. I liked Nautilus a lot.
Nowadays, it seems icons have to be fluffy, ephemeral, and cute. I can live with cute, but the fluffiness and complicated looks of the icons have to go. We need simpler icons. We need icons that indicate what they represent and not a damn thing more.
Plus, simpler icons are faster to make so the icon sets can be made really comprehensive, too. It's frustrating to have an icon theme you like and it lacks icons for majority of cool filetypes...
Linus said, a few years ago I think, that it was because the winters here are so long and cold that people need to come up with something to do. He wasn't sure what the real reason was, but that was as good explanation as any.
Personally, I have a better theory. Know what we have in common with Japan? That's right, a freakishly complex language that no other nation understands. And a decade ago, what was the most common cry from the people who bought computers? "This goddamn piece of junk screws up the scandinavic letters!" (the Japanese, in turn, used some more poetic term for their character set troubles.) An entire high-tech industry sprung up to make sure that the peculiar characters were properly used. Linus presented us Linux, a Modern Operating System Perfectly Capable of Handling ISO 8859-1, and also (later) ISO 8859-15 and Unicode/UTF-8. And there was a lot of rejoicing.
And I hope you agree with that - that's not the real reason, but it's as good explanation as any!
This isn't intended as a troll. I'm a GNOME fan. Just a frustrated one, regarding one particular feature of the system.
I don't know, GNOME's file associations seem really, really tricky to deal with. A few revisions back (2.6), I was marginally aware of how to manage file associations through control panel. I could not add my own icons to file types at all, but I at least managed to say which apps I wanted to be shown on Nautilus menu, which were available at all, and which was the default application.
I have no freaking idea where this thing is actually stored. In GNOME 1.x, they used some kind of really broken text file format. In early 2.x, they seemed to just keep using it. Nowadays, I have absolutely no idea how it stores the associations. Is it somewhere in gconf database, finally? I also have no idea how to really manage these file associations in 2.10: Nautilus isn't particularly helpful and I couldn't find the knob in the control center.
So is the file association stuff getting better at all? How do I manage the file associations in 2.12? And do they finally have some working way of adding icons to file types, or an actually understandable way of making icon themes?
Oh, and about article: Seems interesting. The HAL looks particularly droolworthy, based on a random and uninformed glance it seems to finally beat KDE =) And the Cairoification is always a good thing, it's definitely going to drag X11 kicking and screaming to the future, the direction where Microsoft and Apple are running blindfolded =)
This test may not be graded on a curve, but it is, practically. What is tested is a set of features, and broken things, that are more or less obscure or practical in future. The idea was to expose various weird bugs. The test was supposed to be broken when it was released and the intention was that browser vendors would get their act together and fix the bugs!
Less broken face = more compliant with the standards. Period.
And there are browsers that pass the test. Safari's new version supposedly passes (Tiger version, I suppose - I don't have it at hand, so I can't say).
I know Mozilla folks are definitely working on all of this stuff (just looked it up - bug #289480!).
The only major vendor that doesn't even try is Microsoft, who says that CSS2 is "fundamentally flawed" (despite of the evidence to the contrary, ie, quite extensive support already present in Gecko/KHTML/WebCore/etc).
Look, Inkscape rocks, it's just that without some key features, it's going to be far less glorious than the competition. What Inkscape folks are done so far is amazing, and the new features added here are going to please those who long for more features previously only found in pro apps. Everybody just hopes they'll keep on introducing more such cool features.
When Inkscape has pressure sensitivity all around, it's going to instantly go from "neat, but could be better" to "good enough for me, and where can I get my fanatic membership card?".
Pressure sensitivity is a pretty important thing for pro graphics apps. I got easily caught into using GIMP, they got pressure sensitivity in fairly early on (in 1.1 series, I think) and honestly think they would have been far less cool if they hadn't done that; I sure hope Inkscape's pressure support will be there and will rock just as much.
One thing that bugs me about vector apps is that vector apps generally have objects that have solid width edges. If I want to draw an object with variable width edges, I have to draw two objects, one slightly larger than the other, place it underneath the smaller one and color it with the "edge" color, then remove stroke from both objects. It's an illusion, and a hard to manage one at that, because if I want to change the shape, I need to edit both objects.
But what if I could also control the width of the edge at each of the bezier handles? That, integrated to the tablet pressure support, would make the vector graphics editing a lot more flexible and pleasant!
There has to be a feature like this in commercial apps, I think there was such feature in Corel or something... Not sure if it's really doable in SVG, but how about extending it and proposing it for next revision of SVG if it isn't here already?
::falls kneeling face on the floor:: We're not worthy! We're not worthy!
(with a very quiet voice:) my deepest apologies, our Lord, for I have not played Your modules yet... I hoped to find time, but laziness took hold in my heart...
(oh wait, I did try Demon Cards. Yet to try that in multiplayer. *sigh*)
Well, Google doesn't cover whole Europe yet.
Look at Finland in Google Maps. They have national borders and a label stating what country this might be.
Then look at Finland in MSN. They don't have city maps, or any fancy features, but at least they had locations of a lot of cities, which was far, far more than Google had! Even tons of very small towns too.
Though in Google's defense, lack of features was, this time, a fun and educational thing. It was pretty fun seeing my home city from satellite, trying to find my home from the satellite pic (the picture was in wrong angle - they've now fixed it so that it actually appears from above - and kind of blurry so making sense of the features was pretty hard, but after comparing it to the city maps in web, it was possible), or my old hometown with just the satellite pic (following the waterways and lakes until I found something that kind of looked like a faint memory of something that I saw in the phonebook map section about a decade ago - and my own memory of what the town looks like).
And in Finland - through PEGI or, if such rating were missing, rating as given by a distributor.
But I don't see how it's censorship - stores carry them anyway. I could just walk in a game store and buy it. I'm old enough. I've seen actual pornography "games" on supermarket shelves along with the rest of them, for God's sake.
No no no. Right now, we're having trouble downloading libdvdcss from Norway. We must ping the fjords to see if the server is really dead.
People get this so easily mixed up...
</obvioushumor>
Dear Slashdot editors,
I never thought I might get to say this, but now it looks like I can: "But I just installed Firefox 1.0.5..."
(marks another item done on the great big "you know you're a Slashdot reader when..." list)
Agreed, Ultima VII is the best CRPG ever, amen. Very deep plot, nicely open-ended, no artificial restrictions on what the heck to do. Generally speaking, things work.
Though I have to say I've so far also kind of enjoyed Ultima VIII - too much action, doesn't look too Ultimaish to me, but still, great music, great atmosphere and great writing.
Feh... yeah, me killing Iolo because the guy told so outrageously blatant lies about him... never ever forgiving EA for this utter display of evilness.
Feh^2, it was night when I first saw Buc's Den in U9... =)
The Black Sword is debatably the best weapon in U7; 25 damage, fire fields, and insta-kill (if Arcadion wants to). The original poster was referring to the "final weapon" of the game; The Black Sword is a "final" weapon in a sense... there really isn't any other "final" weapons in the game. Still, The Black Sword is only in the expansion...
Hoe of Destruction is only slightly behind (20 damage). But the really leet weaponry is up ahead: Firedoom staff (20 + kaboooooom), Triple crossbows (28 + lots of dead bystanders), Juggernaut hammers (25), Death Scythe (50), and... cannon (90 + a small bit of the wall too)!
(Stats from a random FAQ and Exult Studio.)
But actually, nobody wields the weapons in U7 just because they can kick assloads of ass. I pick my weapons based on what actually looks cool. I leave Jaana with a hawk, for example. I definitely go for The Black Sword as soon as possible. =)
- W4, recently started playing U7 again (will be third time through!)
Ultima VII.
The most damaging weapon in the game is a Glass Sword, which instantly kills anything you hit with, but I don't think they count as the "final greatest most superior weapon" because they break after one use. They're quite common. There's no Mysterious Legendary Plot to find them.
But other weapons in the high damage range of that game aren't swords: there's Death Scythes, cannons, Firedoom Staffs (look at all those pretty fireballs!), powder kegs (let's do the Guy Fawkes thing again!), and a freaking Hoe of Destruction (still complaining about lack of variety, damn it?)... and the number one favorite of trigger-happy bards, triple crossbow.
In the expansion disk, there's the Black Sword which is just leet, though. And that's a "final" weapon allright.
We need to educate these people! They should spend their Internet time like all good Dutchmen - hacking Blender and ranting about Scientology!
::pulls the emergency brake of the cliché train::
Well, these are are XML syndication formats. In other words, they move headlines and article summaries from server to user in machine-parseable format.
There's RSS, which is the reigning de facto standard, but it also is regrettably very, very liberally specified, and even less frequently heeded. Everyone's extending it to their own heart's content more or less competently. There are lots of different variations. Not easy to implement, not easy to learn.
Atom is an attempt to make a real standard-like standard out of RSS's best features and some of its own. It tastes more commitee-like, is probably initially less funny to implement on the server end (if you're lazy), but it is very nicely standardised and as a result it's far easier to write a parser for it, too, so client support is coming fast. And, it's more than just a syndication format: There's API for publishing and the atom format can, as such, also be used as a standardised weblog backup/storage format.
You may find the Atom web page quite informative.
I really like that "Mozilla/4.0" part. Wow, MSIE is trying to still be "compatible" with Netscape 4!
What's wrong with "MSIE/7.0b (Windows NT 6.0)"? I mean, they supposedly won the browser war, shouldn't they, as victors, tell the new rules of the game?