Quick! Hook him up to a generator and he can supply all the electricity needed to run Disney World!
If it were true that Walt was cryogenically preserved, he'd be able to power the freezing process himself. Guess what that would be? Perpetual motion machine. So on top of all those Oscars, he'd also get Nobel prize! Posthumously!
No. Hubble could theoretically pick up items the size of over 125x125m from moon surface, everything else is too small. You'd better not even bother with terrestrial telescopes, unless you come up with some completely amazing advances in optics.
So... Let's hope Chinese go to the moon and paint the entire surface red, after which Americans go there and paint huge Coca-Cola logo on it with white paint. That ought to make the conspiracy theorists stumped for at least a few seconds =)
Nintendo builds on previous games. They're always improving something, and at the very least, they try to maintain the same level of quality. And every now and then, they always come up with something completely new and refreshing.
EA, on the other hand, buys brilliant, talented design teams, and make them produce unimaginative sequels - excuse me - products, which have diabolically maximized profitability in form of Mass-Market Appeal, and Familiarity with Existing Products.
Does Marvel has a copywrite on characters wearing blue and yellow spandex? If so, there goes all my weekend outfits.
Ah, but there's an easy solution to that. Keep wearing the outfits, but keep yourself factual and objective. That way, you can claim that you have no "character" as such, and can't be analyzed in the context of fiction.
(Note to the moderators and my psychiatrist: the following is obviously not 100% serious.)
It's a conspiracy, I tell you! A conspiracy!
Now they have apparently figured out that they cannot change my opinion on what console system is the best. Also, even when Microsoft is huge, they can't use Electronic Arts' technique of Producing Lot Of Crap That Dumb People Will Buy. They aren't that rich and recognized.
Instead, they are relying to the same technique the spammers are using. Spammers destroyed E-mail's usability. Now, Microsoft is tring to flood every single game media source with Hype, Hype and Hype for their games, trying to leave less space for news about games for the Good Systems.
The Enemies can take away the market share. (no matter how much it sells, crap is still crap, and people with any quality consciousness will use the Good Systems.) They can take away all media space. (Most game journalism is junk anyway.) But they shall nevaarrrrrr take away our obsession with the One True Console Manufacture.
And now I'm going to play M****** P**** so that I can finish it before the sequel comes out.
(And a serious note to the end: I agree, Halo 2 hype is completely out of hands. Even most of the Good Console fans are quite rational compared to these people. =)
Ultima V recognizes tons of swear words. In PC version, you can find this in data.ovl file (just do "strings" and search forward for... well, any swearword, just remember they're in CAPITAL letters.
And the last swearword in the list is particularly interesting. "ELECTRONIC ARTS". Yeah, that's a pretty bad swearword all right, as evidenced by Ascension =)
Well, yeah - one GameCube + GBPlayer, connected to video input (or TV tuner card on PC)...
I haven't done anything like that myself (mostly because I don't have GB Player), but I tried playing Gameboy Advance games once with a car stereo and portable-CD-to-cassette-player adapter thingy (you know, one that looks like a cassette but has a cable with headphone jack and some mysterious electronics that make the cassette player play whatever comes in the cable).
Same old screen, but really damn good stereo sound =) I should try this sometime with my 4.1 computer speakers =)
I think the original article was referring to the incident of 1999 where Microsoft forgot to renew the registration of passport.com domain, which obviously also made hotmail.com inaccessible.
Brilliant. And then they sued Nethack Devteam for associating blue "e" with slowdown, general annoyance, and the fact that it can be destroyed from distance. The Devteam won, because it had been in use long before Internet Explorer was conceived, and in recent times, it was also considered parody.
A very important rule in software engineering (especially in OSS) is: A program should have as few dependancies as possible.
Yeah, so I thought, but then I thought of another important software engineering rule (especially in OSS): Diversity is good, but reinventing the wheel can be worse.
Besides, if I wait two months, someone's got.debs of it, just stick it in sources.list; If I wait an year, it'll be in main Debian repository... and the best thing is that all this time, I hear the wailing and lamentations of Gentoo zealots as they compile the thing for weeks and weeks and weeks. =)
Also, if you're interested in printing scores, Lilypond is the Best Thing Ever.
The only downside is that you've got to be a printing/typesetting geek, not necessarily a musician; Not shy away from the fact that you can't just mouse the notes to their places, but rather you have to use an interpreted language to produce printable score. It's for people who want *great* output and get the notes to *exactly* where they should be with minimum hassle, and care to spend afternoons tweaking the output to get it *perfect*. It's not necessarily for those who want easy and simple way to enter it.
That said, it's still usable by average users, it just needs some understanding and caring to use. Rosegarden can export the MIDI scores to Lilypond format as well, if you want an usable interface, but trust me, entering stuff works really nicely with plain old text editor.
They lost me to the dark side (Sega) after their stubborness over CDs.
*giggle* *giggle* *snort*...you bought the Sega CD...
...bhehehehehehehehehe...
...or Saturn... ohdearohdear...
(Insert several minutes of incoherent laughter here)
That is the price you pay for losing your faith in the almighty Nintendo! For it is written in the Book of Miyamoto, chapter IX: "15. And the Competitors shall bring out the Compact Laser Disc Storage Systems, which look good and seem cool, 16. but those Unbelievers who buy them shall be subject to Unimaginative Mass-Market Games after the era of Multimedia Full-Motion Garbage is over. 17. And the Nemesis shall set a Trap in the Night, which is especially forbidden, for it lacks quality." Verily! So is written.
Are the Atari 2600 games licensed in those console systems?
In short, yes. Same goes for the Namco, C64, and other things like that that you see sold in most "reputable" stores.
I suppose some pirate manufacturer thought that these things sell well enough, and made a similar NES system, without, of course, paying much attention at licensing (or quality control, for that matter).
I liked that game, but when I upgraded to Windows 2000 I found it didn't work.
Sssssheeesh.
You know, a few times now, I've tried to google for people who want to Boycott EA. They usually list something like this as their reason. (Most seem to be peeved about their habit to make a shitty PS2 game and then make even shittier XBox and GameCube ports based on it.)
In times like those, I feel it's almost my theatrical duty to stagger toward them, collapse to the ground, and utter the immortal dying words, "Remember Origin! Never forget Westwood!" *gasp* "Maxis, do not worry, thy wounds shall be... avenged!" *groan*
My point is, EA is extremely, extremely evil on many many many layers. Starting from outward obvious things like producing tons of stupid games. There are other bad things: They gobble up small development houses that were formerly known for great products, then make them produce crap. (Compare Ultima VII and the most recent... innovations, or lack of thereof, in Ultima Online. Compare SimCity and the... seventh millionth Sims expansion disk.)
The fact that they do shitty ports and fail to patch games they've produced... well, that's who knows how many steps outward to the utter chaotic all-consuming maw of madness EA is these days. Still pretty tame if you consider how utterly evil things you see when you start to even think of what they have done recently.
PS. you think Need for Speed 3 not working was bad? Man, just ask any Ultima fan of how the... umm... modern re-releases of old Ultima games have generally worked. Hint: Not very well...
"What's this ogg thing?" "Open it in Winamp! You have the full version, right?" "Uh, what are these s3m/mod/it files?" "Just open them in Winamp."
Okay, so Winamp will still exist as a reanimated corpse, but the question remains - what am I going to tell people to use now to open these obscure geek music formats? It's not like iTunes would particularly help here, and Microsoft definitely won't care either...
Yeah, Perl 5 hasn't changed that much over time. But it has been around for a while. Perl 6 is just different.
From what I have seen from the announcements, the Perl 6 syntax looks far cleaner, probably more consistent and less ugly. Some of the new tricks look genuinely handy. For example, if it seems like type checking would be a good idea, you can have it if you want it, even on compile time!
Especially the regular expressions side seems pretty interesting, as noted in this article. Regular expressions have always been a poor but effective replacement for grammar-based parsing, and now finally Perl is going to have both integrated. There's probably going to be less whining about line noise.
And then there's something that I find especially interesting, though it hasn't been explained in detail yet: Complete tuning of the object system. In case you haven't noticed, Perl 5's object system is a complete and utter mess that looks and smells like it has been added as an afterthought, and rest assured it's going to be changed radically for better in Perl 6. I'm definitely waiting eagerly to see what Perl 6's take is going to look like - I sure hope it's something like Ruby, only it smells like a camel =)
The idea of:p5 is not just that you can take Perl 5 code and modify it to make it work.
The idea is that if you don't bother to write a zillion-rule grammar to match whatever you're trying to match, you can still use the P5-style regular expressions you know and love. It's another case of Not Swatting A Fly With The Nuke.
Yeah, it does happen all the time. I don't see what's the big deal or how this is even news! Unless you're Really Big and Really Powerful publisher, I don't think the stores listen to the release dates anyway. Many do, but there's always some store that hasn't listened or doesn't care. And even in case of big publishers, there's still always some stores that screw up the release like this.
I think I bought one of my games before it was supposedly released. Can't remember what, probably Max Payne. I think I heard just the same old discussion somewhere. Gamer1: "I got my copy!" Gamer2: "Shouldn't it be out in Friday?" Development house rep: "Some stores apparently have started selling as soon as they got them..."
...and, of course, I have also bought several games the day (or week) after the release date simply because the stores just didn't have them on the supposed release date. =)
Because of the main stream-ness of BT these days, it won't be long until it will be essentially shut down. It is too easy to obtain the IP address of those transfering and downloading, that the MPAA and RIAA will have a field day. More people will be sued than ever before. Sad day for file sharing.
The difference between other P2P systems is that each and individual shared thing is... well, individual.
Sure, the *AAs will, through their might, make sure people won't be downloading their stuff. But the beauty of Bittorrent is that shutting down illegal sharing has no effect whatsoever on legal filesharing!
If *AAs will start shutting down or disrupting the legit file trackers that enable people to transfer files that are not copyrighted by these big humorless entities - well, that's just plain "cyberterrorism" or something.
Of course they can flatten suprnova for all I care. But they have to pry the NES timeattack video site from my cold dead hands...
No, there's more to that. You must remember that Super Mario Bros was an extremely political game. the guys dressed as Mario Brothers lead the glorious people's revolution to overthrow the oppressive capitalist government!
Let the red star flag fly over the overthrown evil exploiter monarch's liberated castle! All hail Lenin!
I can't wait for the windows 98SE code to be burned. Just imagine the glow and warmth of 328,304,203 sheets of paper burning.
Not sure if Win98SE should be burned, being the last decent 9x series OS. Win98 or ME, on the other hand, though - why not those, we'd get doubly the fun...
Burning all of that stuff would mean that there would be another great near-inexhaustible supply of energy. We could shut down half of the nuclear power plants in the world! And as a Finn, I'm particularly happy in regards to what kind of boost that would also mean to paper industry!
Expect to see an "update" or "security fix" for Media Player that messes with the association to always make it point to WMP whenever you start windows or log in...
Expect to see people a) installing Ogg Vorbis DirectShow filters and b) filling their blogs with extensive commentary regarding the lack of GUI usability of the music players, especially in regards to WMP =)
(I don't know if WMP can play icecast streams using the OggDS filter, but it seems like the logical component for that...)
Slashdot Mirror
If it were true that Walt was cryogenically preserved, he'd be able to power the freezing process himself. Guess what that would be? Perpetual motion machine. So on top of all those Oscars, he'd also get Nobel prize! Posthumously!
No. Hubble could theoretically pick up items the size of over 125x125m from moon surface, everything else is too small. You'd better not even bother with terrestrial telescopes, unless you come up with some completely amazing advances in optics.
So... Let's hope Chinese go to the moon and paint the entire surface red, after which Americans go there and paint huge Coca-Cola logo on it with white paint. That ought to make the conspiracy theorists stumped for at least a few seconds =)
Nintendo builds on previous games. They're always improving something, and at the very least, they try to maintain the same level of quality. And every now and then, they always come up with something completely new and refreshing.
EA, on the other hand, buys brilliant, talented design teams, and make them produce unimaginative sequels - excuse me - products, which have diabolically maximized profitability in form of Mass-Market Appeal, and Familiarity with Existing Products.
Was that clear enough?
Ah, but there's an easy solution to that. Keep wearing the outfits, but keep yourself factual and objective. That way, you can claim that you have no "character" as such, and can't be analyzed in the context of fiction.
(Note to the moderators and my psychiatrist: the following is obviously not 100% serious.)
It's a conspiracy, I tell you! A conspiracy!
Now they have apparently figured out that they cannot change my opinion on what console system is the best. Also, even when Microsoft is huge, they can't use Electronic Arts' technique of Producing Lot Of Crap That Dumb People Will Buy. They aren't that rich and recognized.
Instead, they are relying to the same technique the spammers are using. Spammers destroyed E-mail's usability. Now, Microsoft is tring to flood every single game media source with Hype, Hype and Hype for their games, trying to leave less space for news about games for the Good Systems.
The Enemies can take away the market share. (no matter how much it sells, crap is still crap, and people with any quality consciousness will use the Good Systems.) They can take away all media space. (Most game journalism is junk anyway.) But they shall nevaarrrrrr take away our obsession with the One True Console Manufacture.
And now I'm going to play M****** P**** so that I can finish it before the sequel comes out.
(And a serious note to the end: I agree, Halo 2 hype is completely out of hands. Even most of the Good Console fans are quite rational compared to these people. =)
Ultima V recognizes tons of swear words. In PC version, you can find this in data.ovl file (just do "strings" and search forward for... well, any swearword, just remember they're in CAPITAL letters.
And the last swearword in the list is particularly interesting. "ELECTRONIC ARTS". Yeah, that's a pretty bad swearword all right, as evidenced by Ascension =)
Well, yeah - one GameCube + GBPlayer, connected to video input (or TV tuner card on PC)...
I haven't done anything like that myself (mostly because I don't have GB Player), but I tried playing Gameboy Advance games once with a car stereo and portable-CD-to-cassette-player adapter thingy (you know, one that looks like a cassette but has a cable with headphone jack and some mysterious electronics that make the cassette player play whatever comes in the cable).
Same old screen, but really damn good stereo sound =) I should try this sometime with my 4.1 computer speakers =)
I think the original article was referring to the incident of 1999 where Microsoft forgot to renew the registration of passport.com domain, which obviously also made hotmail.com inaccessible.
Some Slashdotter then paid the domain renewal and soon the site was back up =)
Brilliant. And then they sued Nethack Devteam for associating blue "e" with slowdown, general annoyance, and the fact that it can be destroyed from distance. The Devteam won, because it had been in use long before Internet Explorer was conceived, and in recent times, it was also considered parody.
Or something.
Yeah, so I thought, but then I thought of another important software engineering rule (especially in OSS): Diversity is good, but reinventing the wheel can be worse.
Besides, if I wait two months, someone's got .debs of it, just stick it in sources.list; If I wait an year, it'll be in main Debian repository... and the best thing is that all this time, I hear the wailing and lamentations of Gentoo zealots as they compile the thing for weeks and weeks and weeks. =)
Also, if you're interested in printing scores, Lilypond is the Best Thing Ever.
The only downside is that you've got to be a printing/typesetting geek, not necessarily a musician; Not shy away from the fact that you can't just mouse the notes to their places, but rather you have to use an interpreted language to produce printable score. It's for people who want *great* output and get the notes to *exactly* where they should be with minimum hassle, and care to spend afternoons tweaking the output to get it *perfect*. It's not necessarily for those who want easy and simple way to enter it.
That said, it's still usable by average users, it just needs some understanding and caring to use. Rosegarden can export the MIDI scores to Lilypond format as well, if you want an usable interface, but trust me, entering stuff works really nicely with plain old text editor.
*giggle* *giggle* *snort* ...you bought the Sega CD...
...bhehehehehehehehehe...
...or Saturn... ohdearohdear...
(Insert several minutes of incoherent laughter here)
That is the price you pay for losing your faith in the almighty Nintendo! For it is written in the Book of Miyamoto, chapter IX: "15. And the Competitors shall bring out the Compact Laser Disc Storage Systems, which look good and seem cool, 16. but those Unbelievers who buy them shall be subject to Unimaginative Mass-Market Games after the era of Multimedia Full-Motion Garbage is over. 17. And the Nemesis shall set a Trap in the Night, which is especially forbidden, for it lacks quality." Verily! So is written.
As for other things, I definitely agree =)
In short, yes. Same goes for the Namco, C64, and other things like that that you see sold in most "reputable" stores.
I suppose some pirate manufacturer thought that these things sell well enough, and made a similar NES system, without, of course, paying much attention at licensing (or quality control, for that matter).
Sssssheeesh.
You know, a few times now, I've tried to google for people who want to Boycott EA. They usually list something like this as their reason. (Most seem to be peeved about their habit to make a shitty PS2 game and then make even shittier XBox and GameCube ports based on it.)
In times like those, I feel it's almost my theatrical duty to stagger toward them, collapse to the ground, and utter the immortal dying words, "Remember Origin! Never forget Westwood!" *gasp* "Maxis, do not worry, thy wounds shall be... avenged!" *groan*
My point is, EA is extremely, extremely evil on many many many layers. Starting from outward obvious things like producing tons of stupid games. There are other bad things: They gobble up small development houses that were formerly known for great products, then make them produce crap. (Compare Ultima VII and the most recent... innovations, or lack of thereof, in Ultima Online. Compare SimCity and the... seventh millionth Sims expansion disk.)
The fact that they do shitty ports and fail to patch games they've produced... well, that's who knows how many steps outward to the utter chaotic all-consuming maw of madness EA is these days. Still pretty tame if you consider how utterly evil things you see when you start to even think of what they have done recently.
PS. you think Need for Speed 3 not working was bad? Man, just ask any Ultima fan of how the... umm... modern re-releases of old Ultima games have generally worked. Hint: Not very well...
"What's this ogg thing?" "Open it in Winamp! You have the full version, right?" "Uh, what are these s3m/mod/it files?" "Just open them in Winamp."
Okay, so Winamp will still exist as a reanimated corpse, but the question remains - what am I going to tell people to use now to open these obscure geek music formats? It's not like iTunes would particularly help here, and Microsoft definitely won't care either...
Yeah, Perl 5 hasn't changed that much over time. But it has been around for a while. Perl 6 is just different.
From what I have seen from the announcements, the Perl 6 syntax looks far cleaner, probably more consistent and less ugly. Some of the new tricks look genuinely handy. For example, if it seems like type checking would be a good idea, you can have it if you want it, even on compile time!
Especially the regular expressions side seems pretty interesting, as noted in this article. Regular expressions have always been a poor but effective replacement for grammar-based parsing, and now finally Perl is going to have both integrated. There's probably going to be less whining about line noise.
And then there's something that I find especially interesting, though it hasn't been explained in detail yet: Complete tuning of the object system. In case you haven't noticed, Perl 5's object system is a complete and utter mess that looks and smells like it has been added as an afterthought, and rest assured it's going to be changed radically for better in Perl 6. I'm definitely waiting eagerly to see what Perl 6's take is going to look like - I sure hope it's something like Ruby, only it smells like a camel =)
The idea of :p5 is not just that you can take Perl 5 code and modify it to make it work.
The idea is that if you don't bother to write a zillion-rule grammar to match whatever you're trying to match, you can still use the P5-style regular expressions you know and love. It's another case of Not Swatting A Fly With The Nuke.
Argh, aim bots in paintball. NOT good. Next they'll be practicing running patterns and start spawn-camping too.
Is there no sport, digital or analog, that doesn't suffer from l33t cheats?
Here's a whole page devoted to this... uh... art form.
Yeah, it does happen all the time. I don't see what's the big deal or how this is even news! Unless you're Really Big and Really Powerful publisher, I don't think the stores listen to the release dates anyway. Many do, but there's always some store that hasn't listened or doesn't care. And even in case of big publishers, there's still always some stores that screw up the release like this.
I think I bought one of my games before it was supposedly released. Can't remember what, probably Max Payne. I think I heard just the same old discussion somewhere. Gamer1: "I got my copy!" Gamer2: "Shouldn't it be out in Friday?" Development house rep: "Some stores apparently have started selling as soon as they got them..."
...and, of course, I have also bought several games the day (or week) after the release date simply because the stores just didn't have them on the supposed release date. =)
The difference between other P2P systems is that each and individual shared thing is... well, individual.
Sure, the *AAs will, through their might, make sure people won't be downloading their stuff. But the beauty of Bittorrent is that shutting down illegal sharing has no effect whatsoever on legal filesharing!
If *AAs will start shutting down or disrupting the legit file trackers that enable people to transfer files that are not copyrighted by these big humorless entities - well, that's just plain "cyberterrorism" or something.
Of course they can flatten suprnova for all I care. But they have to pry the NES timeattack video site from my cold dead hands...
No, there's more to that. You must remember that Super Mario Bros was an extremely political game. the guys dressed as Mario Brothers lead the glorious people's revolution to overthrow the oppressive capitalist government!
Let the red star flag fly over the overthrown evil exploiter monarch's liberated castle! All hail Lenin!
Not sure if Win98SE should be burned, being the last decent 9x series OS. Win98 or ME, on the other hand, though - why not those, we'd get doubly the fun...
Burning all of that stuff would mean that there would be another great near-inexhaustible supply of energy. We could shut down half of the nuclear power plants in the world! And as a Finn, I'm particularly happy in regards to what kind of boost that would also mean to paper industry!
Expect to see people a) installing Ogg Vorbis DirectShow filters and b) filling their blogs with extensive commentary regarding the lack of GUI usability of the music players, especially in regards to WMP =)
(I don't know if WMP can play icecast streams using the OggDS filter, but it seems like the logical component for that...)
Sounds like OpenGL and video overlay glitches. Your VHS player probably has a buggy graphics driver. I recommend upgrading the firmware.
Oh, wait, wrong era of technology...