Fifteen years down the road, which will stand up better: a game that was released in 2004 that depicts life on the streets in that same year, or a game like the Legend of Zelda, which isn't set in our world?
Hell if I know. Both have equal chances - it's only up to how the games themselves have been made. The real difference between today's "street" games and Zelda is that Zelda isn't "pushed" for people who like to wear green tunics and thwack people to pieces with a sword and toss bombs at baddies. There's no marketing gimmick. The fine folks at Nintendo actually tried to make polished games.
Know what's funny? Both the today's "street" games and Zelda were marketed the same way. Yeah. Rap. Fact is stranger than fiction. Don't believe me? See the commercial. "It's the Legend of Zelda, and it's really rad..." Ugh. Now I'm mentally compelled to put that music to any new Zelda trailer.
With record companies, I wonder if they can release low quality versions into public domain, while maintaining rights to higher quality versions. So they can release 96kbit mp3 into public domain, but a CD quality version maintains or recieves copywrite.
No, they aren't going to release anything to public domain willingly. Haven't you yet realized how stubborn those people are?
They'll tell people to either buy the (copyrighted, once again) new "digitally remastered" copy-protected wretches of "CDs", or go dig those LPs (or whatever prehistoric gramophone junk people lived with back in the day) from 1950s from archives and rip those, because they're definitely out of copyright.
Well, Python isn't exactly pure OO either, far less so than Java. There's no true data hiding, for example. There's some inconsistencies that look bad (why str(foo) and not foo.str()?). Not to even mention that deep down many types aren't really objects at all, even though they may be used as though they were.
Anyway, Java was designed as a OO language with as little non-OO stuff as possible. Python is a programming language that happens to feature object orientation, and does frequently use it as one possibility of building things - and one of Python's strengths is that you don't need to use OO in your own design, but you can if your design needs it.
Not that being pure OO language is the end-all and be-all.
Correct. Purely functional programming is the one true Holy Grail. =)
(I didn't play Ultima 7, 8, or 9 but I'm guessing ninjas and samurais weren't in them)
Definitely no ninjas in U7 (didn't make it any less of a Great Game, though), and while U7pt2 had quite a few assassins there probably aren't any ninjas in it (I'm only halfway through though), I'd guess not in U8 (though I haven't really played much that either), and I can only hope not in U9 (which I've only played a little bit so far).
Have they fixed the most annoying thing about PHP4? Specifically, if I put <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> quite normally outside of PHP code, PHP4 barfs. (Which is quite annoying if the recommended way to put PHP code in is to use <?php... ?<, specifically for XML/XHTML compliance. A savage hypocrisy.) And before you ask, no, I can't mess around with PHP configuration or anything.
Also, what about componentization? Any news on that front? I'm quite fond of Perl's HTML::Mason and sort of like JSP tag library ideas - can I clearly separate the code and the page, or do I still need to mess them together?
News of a new XML parser sound good, though. PHP4's idea of XML parsing is... ugly. =)
The thought of Russian kids having "fun" on these creepy old bland games just kinda chilled my spine for some reason.
Well, in early 1990s, I travelled to Russia. I have extremely foggy memories, but I remember the people there playing quite happily games on some rather... ancient consoles. (Further research shows the console was probably a clone of Atari 2600 - with dozens of games built in and selectable. That was pretty... odd, yeah, to see something like that in middle of what seemed like the golden age of NES. =)
I hear the country eventually got NES/Famicom clones too, must have been a real source of amazement =)
Do you know if DMA is enabled for your DVD hardware? hdparm will tell you, and allow you turn it on if need be.
Yeah, I think so. using_dma = 1 (on). So it's definitely a case of playback software not being optimized.
Or maybe this is what I get for using Debian's binaries and not compiling my own mega-super-hyper-optimized binaries. ("helpful" suggestions from Gentoo fans will arrive in five, four, three, two...)
I don't want a DVD *Player*, I want a set of DVD *Codecs* which can be plugged into my player of choice,
...which, incidentally, all have rather horrible user interfaces which also try to mimic "real" player devices.
Keyboard keys work these days pretty well if you bother to learn them, but will someone please invent a media player interface that doesn't stink? Even Apple can't create a completely fool-proof media player interface - oh boy, aren't we in trouble?!
A small comparison: My computer is P3, 600MHz. PowerDVD runs fine most of the time (in Win98SE). However, DVD playback in Linux is tolerable but not 100% smooth; Xine stutters severely, VLC is almost watchable, Ogle is almost smooth but not quite, depending on DVD.
Admittedly the machine is on the low end of DVD playback recommendations... but still, commercial code seems like bit more optimized to me than the OSS code in this case. I don't have much need for neat "can't do on a real DVDCCA-licensed player" tricks if the playback sucks, right? *sigh*
(It's probably useless to whine. By the time the Linux DVD players have been optimized enough to run really smoothly on 600MHz, which is to say in a couple of years, I've probably already got a new computer anyway =)
Yet, even so, I wouldn't pay for DVD playback software actually, that stuff should be free...
Yeah, well, it does sound convincing until you see the similar scam where some distant relative of Saddam or a shady US general you've never heard of asks a little bit of help of moving tons of money out of Iraq. (Yes, it's happening.)
In other words, scammers trying to tie the scams to some real recent event - be it a recently assassinated African dictator or the aftermath of US invasion - is not really new. It has happened for quite a while now.
Yeah, the background story they may tell may sound believeable but does the thing they want to do sound believeable?
As for how it got past the Google mail filter - well, no filter is 100% spamproof.
Bah. The Titans were destroyed by the Avatar in Pagan. And the weird thing is, even when the Avatar thus became a Titan, he immediately lost those powers when returning to Earth and Britannia. (Ultima IX, as far as I understood, pretty much ignored its predecessors. Well, actually, Pagan might best be ignored as such as well.) So yes, the Titans were shattered. No one really seems to know how that really happened though.
It might work pretty well, at least with textual pages. There's just a few small problems with filtering pr0n with bayesian methods. Specifically: Spam == text. Pr0n == mostly images. You are able to block stuff based on the text on the pages themselves, of course (and hopefully the text on the sites makes them easy to recognize, or something like that...), but pictures aren't going to be filtered accurately no matter what you do. There have been some... "attempts".
Well, here's a solution: Let's just not trust anything the client says. Sanity-check everything. Make the game a dumb frontend that merely sends key signals and receives player/ammo coordinates. I know this is technically very much infeasible, but it is the only way.
One other obvious solution would be a half-baked sanity checking that might be feasible on games - of course, this might mean letting the cheater go out of sync with the game itself.
Of course, this way, cheaters may soon find out the game isn't anything like they are seeing on the screen, and will go permanently insane. And that's the beauty of the game being off sync with the cheater's client.
For example, on their screen, they sneak around and kill people, apparently going up the ranking, but on everyone else's screen, the cheater isn't actually hitting anyone and gets frequently killed by other players, ending up to the bottom of the list. The cheater's screams of "I am victorious! Rejoice!" (you can translate that to the gaming slang of the day, I'm not up to date...) sound like delusious rambling to other users, who may say something like "My friend, truly you jest, you haven't proven to be competent in this field of glory" and "I am confused by his remarks, maybe there is some kind of problem?" (again, these statements probably are usually said in slangish manner).
This contradictory communication may tell the cheater that there is some kind of problem with the game, but they can't tell what it is. This might be require strength of will, and, well, if one is resorting to cheating in multiplayer games, I suppose these people do not have much strength of will to begin with.
Well, I never paid much attention to the PC demoscene after the time hardware acceleration caught some wind under wings. However, I was definitely aware that the demo scene as such never died! I was, of course, following what kind of demos came out for Commodore 64, for example - mindblowing works even in the recent years =) I don't know much about the world at large, but at least in Scandinavia the demoscene is still alive and well.
The first proper demo I saw that used hardware acceleration was actually the 3DMark 2000's demo mode - that was just about as mindblowing experience as Second Reality was back in the day. (As I understood, Futuremark folks were demo coders themselves, or something). Yeah, I know, it's a actually a hardware benchmark program. But aren't all demos ultimately hardware benchmarks? =)
And nowadays, there's plenty of really impressive demos that use OpenGL or DirectX. I just watched through two demos today - Linux versions, and they were even open-source ones too! (Someone mentioned the link in other post. Right here.)
Yeah, but When Their Invasion Comes, they'll probably look at the radar and meters and stuff and think "that shielded house must be part of their intelligence network or something" and unceremoniously bomb the place.
Thus, the real trick is to protect yourself without giving away the fact that you are protected, because those who try to avoid something, and are loud about it, eventually attract the attention of those they're trying to avoid. It's kind of like saying "This thing cannot be hacked" and next thing you know, you're 0wn3d.
I've never used XP, but can't you just turn off the insert notification (or whatever it's called in English versions) on the CD-ROM drive properties? That works in 98SE. This will disable both autoplay and the CD audio autoplay, and even when the docs say it may break some app behavior, it usually doesn't (all apps I've seen that want me to insert another CD tend to rather poll the drive or something).
Quicktime is at least "mostly" open. Standard container format (basis for MPEG-4 and all!) that supports actually sensible compression methods like MPEG-4 video and MP3 audio. (Just remember to pay the license fees for those.)
Of course, both are heavily patented behemoths, but at least Apple has nothing particular against those people that develop programs to handle QT files.
And, of course, Windows players for both of them kind of suck, but that's obvious. =)
Yeah, I think someone should track down who really has the copyrights to those these days and beg until they let folks distribute the ROMs freely. It's not like they're really valuable these days or anything...
...and right now I'd need a really cool lo-rez pixel font too, and C64's is my favorite =)
Another cool project would involve complete rewrite of the firmware. A further optimized OS and a new BASIC interpreter that doesn't suck would rule... =)
has anyone seen a project to do SMP between the C64 6502 and the 1541 (the 5" drives) 6502?
No, but back in the golden eighties I saw a project that linked two machines together on cable. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
I've used a lot of different terminal emulators, and these days, I use three different ones. I have one big xterm on one desktop with root shell on it, I sometimes use eterm for random things, I just figured out MU*ing with tinyfugue might be actually fun with some special color tweaks for xterm...
...but for actually using stuff, I have GNUStep Terminal.app.
It's not a perfect terminal, of course. Font configuration is pain and there's no quick choices, paint/middle copying of stuff doesn't always work as intended (explicit pasting works fine though), and its performance went to hell when GNUStep decided to add l33t freetype anti-aliasing mumbojumbo. Not to even mention that GNUstep has weird ideas like "don't care what the window manager says, focus means front!"
But there are many good things in Terminal.app. One of the nicest things in it is the New Terminal command, Alt+N. Most other terminal emulators don't seem to have keyboard shortcut for that. There's a real scrollbar - I know xterm fans will probably flame me for that, but xaw scrollbars just don't work practically, no matter how excellent they are in theory =)
Yeah, I know, it's a silly reason to like a terminal emulator. But a small trick like that actually does make a great difference in usability.
A perfect terminal emulator would have flawless text rendering and terminal emulation (Terminal.app is perfect, if a bit slow at the moment), user-definable, per-window font choices in context menu, and preferrably the key shortcut for new terminal (I don't want to go through window manager to start up another terminal).
The GNOME terminal in comparision isn't something I really like - I wonder if they've finally fixed the mysterious garbling I first saw in very early releases? The GNOME and KDE terminals also have tabs, which are not fun - web pages are screen hogs, but that's not exactly a problem with multiple terminals with small font!
Well, I don't think they're dying - it's just that well-designed languages don't need that many revisions.
Besides, even if the language itself isn't evolving, the implementations and the libraries are. Common Lisp may not have too modern string mess-up tools, but it didn't take too long for me to find a cool regex library that does everything I could ever desire. (Look hard enough, and you can find libraries doing *everything*, for *everything*. Let's see, a quick google search for "cobol cgi library"... 22800 hits. damn.)
Thou art a town crier, sworn to tell the decrees from the lord of the land to the townsmen unaltered. The lazy and vain lord asks thee to begin the news with a pompous praise to him. Dost thou
A) Honestly refrain from praising the lord, knowing the townsmen dislike him as well, or
B) Honor thy agreement and do as thou hast been told?
Slashdot Mirror
Hell if I know. Both have equal chances - it's only up to how the games themselves have been made. The real difference between today's "street" games and Zelda is that Zelda isn't "pushed" for people who like to wear green tunics and thwack people to pieces with a sword and toss bombs at baddies. There's no marketing gimmick. The fine folks at Nintendo actually tried to make polished games.
Know what's funny? Both the today's "street" games and Zelda were marketed the same way. Yeah. Rap. Fact is stranger than fiction. Don't believe me? See the commercial. "It's the Legend of Zelda, and it's really rad..." Ugh. Now I'm mentally compelled to put that music to any new Zelda trailer.
No, they aren't going to release anything to public domain willingly. Haven't you yet realized how stubborn those people are?
They'll tell people to either buy the (copyrighted, once again) new "digitally remastered" copy-protected wretches of "CDs", or go dig those LPs (or whatever prehistoric gramophone junk people lived with back in the day) from 1950s from archives and rip those, because they're definitely out of copyright.
You can already get RDF if you really want, not sure if that's enough for you...
Hehehehe. Know what this reminds me of?
"Those who don't understand Lisp are condemnded to reinvent it, poorly." (patterned after Henry Spencer's famous observation on Unix)
I'm seeing that happening all the time =)
Well, Python isn't exactly pure OO either, far less so than Java. There's no true data hiding, for example. There's some inconsistencies that look bad (why str(foo) and not foo.str()?). Not to even mention that deep down many types aren't really objects at all, even though they may be used as though they were.
Anyway, Java was designed as a OO language with as little non-OO stuff as possible. Python is a programming language that happens to feature object orientation, and does frequently use it as one possibility of building things - and one of Python's strengths is that you don't need to use OO in your own design, but you can if your design needs it.
Correct. Purely functional programming is the one true Holy Grail. =)
Definitely no ninjas in U7 (didn't make it any less of a Great Game, though), and while U7pt2 had quite a few assassins there probably aren't any ninjas in it (I'm only halfway through though), I'd guess not in U8 (though I haven't really played much that either), and I can only hope not in U9 (which I've only played a little bit so far).
Hope that's a satisfactory answer? =)
Even better (because we're talking more of these "popular open source things" and stuff):
Ogg (either hackily or properly) or Matroska.
Have they fixed the most annoying thing about PHP4? Specifically, if I put <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> quite normally outside of PHP code, PHP4 barfs. (Which is quite annoying if the recommended way to put PHP code in is to use <?php ... ?<, specifically for XML/XHTML compliance. A savage hypocrisy.) And before you ask, no, I can't mess around with PHP configuration or anything.
Also, what about componentization? Any news on that front? I'm quite fond of Perl's HTML::Mason and sort of like JSP tag library ideas - can I clearly separate the code and the page, or do I still need to mess them together?
News of a new XML parser sound good, though. PHP4's idea of XML parsing is... ugly. =)
Well, in early 1990s, I travelled to Russia. I have extremely foggy memories, but I remember the people there playing quite happily games on some rather... ancient consoles. (Further research shows the console was probably a clone of Atari 2600 - with dozens of games built in and selectable. That was pretty... odd, yeah, to see something like that in middle of what seemed like the golden age of NES. =)
I hear the country eventually got NES/Famicom clones too, must have been a real source of amazement =)
Yeah, I think so. using_dma = 1 (on). So it's definitely a case of playback software not being optimized.
Or maybe this is what I get for using Debian's binaries and not compiling my own mega-super-hyper-optimized binaries. ("helpful" suggestions from Gentoo fans will arrive in five, four, three, two...)
...which, incidentally, all have rather horrible user interfaces which also try to mimic "real" player devices.
Keyboard keys work these days pretty well if you bother to learn them, but will someone please invent a media player interface that doesn't stink? Even Apple can't create a completely fool-proof media player interface - oh boy, aren't we in trouble?!
A small comparison: My computer is P3, 600MHz. PowerDVD runs fine most of the time (in Win98SE). However, DVD playback in Linux is tolerable but not 100% smooth; Xine stutters severely, VLC is almost watchable, Ogle is almost smooth but not quite, depending on DVD.
Admittedly the machine is on the low end of DVD playback recommendations... but still, commercial code seems like bit more optimized to me than the OSS code in this case. I don't have much need for neat "can't do on a real DVDCCA-licensed player" tricks if the playback sucks, right? *sigh*
(It's probably useless to whine. By the time the Linux DVD players have been optimized enough to run really smoothly on 600MHz, which is to say in a couple of years, I've probably already got a new computer anyway =)
Yet, even so, I wouldn't pay for DVD playback software actually, that stuff should be free...
Yeah, well, it does sound convincing until you see the similar scam where some distant relative of Saddam or a shady US general you've never heard of asks a little bit of help of moving tons of money out of Iraq. (Yes, it's happening.)
In other words, scammers trying to tie the scams to some real recent event - be it a recently assassinated African dictator or the aftermath of US invasion - is not really new. It has happened for quite a while now.
Yeah, the background story they may tell may sound believeable but does the thing they want to do sound believeable?
As for how it got past the Google mail filter - well, no filter is 100% spamproof.
Bah. The Titans were destroyed by the Avatar in Pagan. And the weird thing is, even when the Avatar thus became a Titan, he immediately lost those powers when returning to Earth and Britannia. (Ultima IX, as far as I understood, pretty much ignored its predecessors. Well, actually, Pagan might best be ignored as such as well.) So yes, the Titans were shattered. No one really seems to know how that really happened though.
It might work pretty well, at least with textual pages. There's just a few small problems with filtering pr0n with bayesian methods. Specifically: Spam == text. Pr0n == mostly images. You are able to block stuff based on the text on the pages themselves, of course (and hopefully the text on the sites makes them easy to recognize, or something like that...), but pictures aren't going to be filtered accurately no matter what you do. There have been some... "attempts".
Well, here's a solution: Let's just not trust anything the client says. Sanity-check everything. Make the game a dumb frontend that merely sends key signals and receives player/ammo coordinates. I know this is technically very much infeasible, but it is the only way.
One other obvious solution would be a half-baked sanity checking that might be feasible on games - of course, this might mean letting the cheater go out of sync with the game itself.
Of course, this way, cheaters may soon find out the game isn't anything like they are seeing on the screen, and will go permanently insane. And that's the beauty of the game being off sync with the cheater's client.
For example, on their screen, they sneak around and kill people, apparently going up the ranking, but on everyone else's screen, the cheater isn't actually hitting anyone and gets frequently killed by other players, ending up to the bottom of the list. The cheater's screams of "I am victorious! Rejoice!" (you can translate that to the gaming slang of the day, I'm not up to date...) sound like delusious rambling to other users, who may say something like "My friend, truly you jest, you haven't proven to be competent in this field of glory" and "I am confused by his remarks, maybe there is some kind of problem?" (again, these statements probably are usually said in slangish manner).
This contradictory communication may tell the cheater that there is some kind of problem with the game, but they can't tell what it is. This might be require strength of will, and, well, if one is resorting to cheating in multiplayer games, I suppose these people do not have much strength of will to begin with.
So let's just drive the cheaters insane. =)
Well, I never paid much attention to the PC demoscene after the time hardware acceleration caught some wind under wings. However, I was definitely aware that the demo scene as such never died! I was, of course, following what kind of demos came out for Commodore 64, for example - mindblowing works even in the recent years =) I don't know much about the world at large, but at least in Scandinavia the demoscene is still alive and well.
The first proper demo I saw that used hardware acceleration was actually the 3DMark 2000's demo mode - that was just about as mindblowing experience as Second Reality was back in the day. (As I understood, Futuremark folks were demo coders themselves, or something). Yeah, I know, it's a actually a hardware benchmark program. But aren't all demos ultimately hardware benchmarks? =)
And nowadays, there's plenty of really impressive demos that use OpenGL or DirectX. I just watched through two demos today - Linux versions, and they were even open-source ones too! (Someone mentioned the link in other post. Right here.)
Yeah, but When Their Invasion Comes, they'll probably look at the radar and meters and stuff and think "that shielded house must be part of their intelligence network or something" and unceremoniously bomb the place.
Thus, the real trick is to protect yourself without giving away the fact that you are protected, because those who try to avoid something, and are loud about it, eventually attract the attention of those they're trying to avoid. It's kind of like saying "This thing cannot be hacked" and next thing you know, you're 0wn3d.
I've never used XP, but can't you just turn off the insert notification (or whatever it's called in English versions) on the CD-ROM drive properties? That works in 98SE. This will disable both autoplay and the CD audio autoplay, and even when the docs say it may break some app behavior, it usually doesn't (all apps I've seen that want me to insert another CD tend to rather poll the drive or something).
Quicktime is at least "mostly" open. Standard container format (basis for MPEG-4 and all!) that supports actually sensible compression methods like MPEG-4 video and MP3 audio. (Just remember to pay the license fees for those.)
While, of course, Microsoft will get ve-ry ve-ry ang-ry if you try to use ASF for anything.
Of course, both are heavily patented behemoths, but at least Apple has nothing particular against those people that develop programs to handle QT files.
And, of course, Windows players for both of them kind of suck, but that's obvious. =)
Actually, it does happen, and those that it don't become victim of that tend to frequently joke about it.
Yeah, I think someone should track down who really has the copyrights to those these days and beg until they let folks distribute the ROMs freely. It's not like they're really valuable these days or anything...
...and right now I'd need a really cool lo-rez pixel font too, and C64's is my favorite =)
Another cool project would involve complete rewrite of the firmware. A further optimized OS and a new BASIC interpreter that doesn't suck would rule... =)
No, but back in the golden eighties I saw a project that linked two machines together on cable. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
Some pathetic rambling follows...
I've used a lot of different terminal emulators, and these days, I use three different ones. I have one big xterm on one desktop with root shell on it, I sometimes use eterm for random things, I just figured out MU*ing with tinyfugue might be actually fun with some special color tweaks for xterm...
...but for actually using stuff, I have GNUStep Terminal.app.
It's not a perfect terminal, of course. Font configuration is pain and there's no quick choices, paint/middle copying of stuff doesn't always work as intended (explicit pasting works fine though), and its performance went to hell when GNUStep decided to add l33t freetype anti-aliasing mumbojumbo. Not to even mention that GNUstep has weird ideas like "don't care what the window manager says, focus means front!"
But there are many good things in Terminal.app. One of the nicest things in it is the New Terminal command, Alt+N. Most other terminal emulators don't seem to have keyboard shortcut for that. There's a real scrollbar - I know xterm fans will probably flame me for that, but xaw scrollbars just don't work practically, no matter how excellent they are in theory =)
Yeah, I know, it's a silly reason to like a terminal emulator. But a small trick like that actually does make a great difference in usability.
A perfect terminal emulator would have flawless text rendering and terminal emulation (Terminal.app is perfect, if a bit slow at the moment), user-definable, per-window font choices in context menu, and preferrably the key shortcut for new terminal (I don't want to go through window manager to start up another terminal).
The GNOME terminal in comparision isn't something I really like - I wonder if they've finally fixed the mysterious garbling I first saw in very early releases? The GNOME and KDE terminals also have tabs, which are not fun - web pages are screen hogs, but that's not exactly a problem with multiple terminals with small font!
Well, I don't think they're dying - it's just that well-designed languages don't need that many revisions.
Besides, even if the language itself isn't evolving, the implementations and the libraries are. Common Lisp may not have too modern string mess-up tools, but it didn't take too long for me to find a cool regex library that does everything I could ever desire. (Look hard enough, and you can find libraries doing *everything*, for *everything*. Let's see, a quick google search for "cobol cgi library"... 22800 hits. damn.)
Thou art a town crier, sworn to tell the decrees from the lord of the land to the townsmen unaltered. The lazy and vain lord asks thee to begin the news with a pompous praise to him. Dost thou
A) Honestly refrain from praising the lord, knowing the townsmen dislike him as well, or
B) Honor thy agreement and do as thou hast been told?
Aww heck, as if that would matter. =)