One of the advantages of 1.2 over 1.0 is that it finally supports LADSPA plugins.
I can recommend the freely-available plugin packs, such as Computer Music Toolkit (It has Dynamic Sledgehammer, what the hell else you need? =) and Steve Harris' Plugins (Likewise one can't live without Barry's Satan Maximizer =)
In Debian, just try apt-get install blop cmt tap-plugins swh-plugins and blammo, you have tons of cool plugins that work out of box in Ardour, Audacity and Sweep...
Well, that's still better than them displaying a whole lot of PHP mysql command errors. Strictly speaking, that one remaining error should go, also...
At least it shows that whoever coded the thing could at least think a little bit of this "error handling" thing. I wonder why so many PHP coders don't care enough to check if they actually have successfully got the connection and, if they haven't, bail out gracefully...
I know... it's one of them Japanese RPGs. And none, no matter how in-depth they supposedly are, can beat the epic and fun of Star Control 2, which has been voted the Best Game Ever hundreds of times already and that still feels completely underrated. =)
Here we face the usual dilemma of putting games of different genres in same category in a "best game ever" competition - or even arranging such competition.
None of the Ninetendo Series systems ever had backwards compat. They handled this by having huge increases in power between releases.
Ahem: Gameboy Color. Gameboy Advance. Both run Gameboy Tetris (or Pokemon, if one is into such things) perfectly, even multiplayer on different generations of machines is supported.
Which is, of course, only good. Shelf space is cheap these days, consoles are easy to stack next to each other and SCART multiplexing (or chaining RF adapters) is easy to do - but the less portable widgets you have (as a general rule), the better. Even I, a widget lover, decided that probably one portable console is enough for most of my needs. And GBA is sure sweet and small compared to my old GB =)
There are some projects that are remaking the Origin-developed framework. Exult is an Ultima VII engine remake, only needs the original data files to run.
Everyone who has ever installed Ultima VII on anything post-Win95 probably knows that having no ties whatsoever to original U7 codebase is probably a good thing =)
Exult has made U7 a very good and modern game. They've fixed many of the old annoying UI issues and such.
Exult even comes with near-usable map editor and script compiler, so you can use U7 engine to do your own adventures... at least in theory. Check out this funny screenshot... =)
There are some other engine remakes, I think. Not sure what they are or if they can be used for anything interesting though.
As for EA open-sourcing anything... no way. They're holding on their IP as hard as they can. They aren't even particularly happy about fan remakes of Ultima games, even if they're approved by Richard Garriott (or even approved while he was still in Origin).
"Dost thou have any idea of the number of dead people and creatures there are? I thought not. The dead of the ages are mine to summon and control. The graves of beloved ancestors will spew forth their contents into an army. A special treat for the living, mine undead monsters will be. Imagine a skeletal dragon that cannot be killed. Consider a cabal of everliving mages eternally enthralled to me. And the most beautiful part of my plot is that, as the living die in these battles, and they will die, they will swell the ranks of the undead host. I will rule supreme - a world of the dead!"
Hehehe. The article also talks about the "Not working? Format and reinstall" kind of support. A Compaq laptop a relative had didn't even come with a Windows CD, just a quick restore CD that wiped everything. I can easily imagine their support recommending its use in various interesting flavors - if the only way to reinstall anything is to wipe out everything and restore disk image from CD.
(Win98 started to chomp mud on that laptop a year later. Was extremely hesitant to even think of trying their support if the hardware and software was that crappy. Ended up renouncing Microsoft's EULA and reinstalling Win98SE from my own CD. Apparently not had a single major problem after that.)
(And speaking of tech support, I hope I will never ever need to reinstall Windows for any of the relatives. =)
I'm not quite sure how readily available binaries of subversion 0.37 help with the problem of waiting for binaries of subversion 1.0...
Because that's only one minor rev behind. There probably aren't that many big changes in 1.0 anyway, so 0.37 will probably be good enough for the days (or weeks? no idea how hard-working the subversion maintainer is...) while waiting for 1.0...
Enigma encryption might have been a great leap ahead and looked completely state of art in the WW2, but today, it's quite trivial to crack. Enigma could be easily bruteforced - just check through the entire keyspace.
It also probably wouldn't stand too long if real crypto breakers who knew their stuff would start their job without knowing anything about the encryption scheme, even. The science has gone so far in recent times.
And an easy way to illustrate: Compare output from Enigma with any modern cipher. Enigma output looks like completely mangled words - the text is garbled, the layout of the message is exposed. Modern cipher output looks like a completely random arrangement of bits, everything completely spread around the message with no point to really take a good grip on. With Enigma, if you know that Nazi guy is always putting "Heil Hitler" at the end, you have already cracked that much of the message.
If the thing looks trivial, then it probably is. If it doesn't, it probably isn't. Of course, this isn't always truein either way.
Now I'll get more coffee so I can start making sense today.
Hrrrrrrrrm. 7 out of 21 games are baseball or american football. One soccer game (PES2). (Where's Microprose Soccer??? Or even the true fossil of C64 games that makes all other games look modern in comparison, Commodore International Football from, what was it, 1982 or 1983?)
Okay, there probably wouldn't be any problem with this, but they didn't put in C64 California Games! Or, for that matter, any of the track and field games on the 8-bit machines, some of which notably Destroyed Joysticks far more throughoutly than any of the modern offerings - and that's not because they build sturdier joysticks these days.
Yeah, a bit funny. Just about to vote for Suspended, in retrospect probably the most unusual game I've ever played, when my 3 AM brain notices Nethack at the bottom of the list. Good adventure... or the grand adventure. Tough choice. Had to be the grand adventure.
And then I trudged on, puzzled by these odd categories (Best Tony Hawk Game? The one favored by barkeepers as a coaster... The Best GTA Game? "Minor Traffic Violation", bleah, who cares...), and got boundlessly frustrated when the noobs don't know anything about good games (Ultima Online probably going to win when Ultima VII would be around, and freaking Warcraft III taking the jackpot when Warcraft II was the one that really shined, dammit... And by the time Chrono Trigger or whatever the hell it was was trashing Star Control II, I was almost ready to scream "Get a life, you freaking japanophiles", but I restrained myself from doing so =)
[To mofo.com]
First let me say that your corporate name, MOFO, sounds as if it were specifically designed to strike fear into the hearts of anyone you deal with. Or perhaps you just don't understand the slang meaning of the term MOFO.
Vincent Flanders of Web Pages That Suck used Morrison & Foerster LLP (mofo.com) as an example of bad domain name choice. The other one used as an example was analtech.com (that's right, it's not that kind of company =)
The article is no longer on the WPTS site, but the WPTS book has this bit: "...I received a lot of e-mail explaining the choice. Basically, the law firm knows what it means, and they're proud of their name because they want to have the image of a law firm you don't want to mess with."
I wonder if we ever see a Haskell and Lisp compilers that target Parrot - I hope we do. I've found a native-code Haskell compiler but I might prefer Lisp - I just haven't found an open-source native-code Lisp compiler. Parrot might be a small stand-alone app, suitable as a small runtime environment.
Well, since everything seems to be scalar and list and everyone uses map and grep, Perl is a functional language in a very good disguise =)
Perl 5 does have its quirks. Yet, the quirks are hardly something that will make coding impossible. Even with its quirks, it's still a language that works just fine for what it does.
Perl 5 reminds me of an almost regularly cleaned room. You can live there, stay for hours, there's a lot of cool stuff people have brought to the room... do everything you want and have fun. Just don't move the sofa because there's tons of dust under it.
Perl 6 designers, then, are finding us a new room, move all old stuff from the old room there, and then ask the people where each of the things should be put or would the things look better a few meters to the left, perhaps. And they carry out all of the old newspapers and install one of those automated vacuum cleaners too.
I don't have my rulebook within 100 kilometer radius, and I only opened it last year to check out the MTV control panel, but I was left with the impression that the 2nd edition was more "d20ish" than the d20 System(tm). Heard the new edition isn't going to be changed much rule-wise.
Of course, if I had implemented the combat system, I would have used the LMERP combat system - the GM dives behind the screen so that he's harder to hit, and players throw the d20 at each other - whoever is hit is out.
Tuning by eye, however, is something else entirely. It is an obscure talent that I've only seen demonstrated once.
Just like one of my friends. He'd come with other guys to play games on the C64, bring the tapes... ask for the screwdriver... I hit Load, he tunes the read head for a second, "Right... there"... and it loads perfectly.
I'm a floppy drive fan. I never got a good hang of how to tune the azimuth of the tape drive, the only way I do it today is by trial and error, and some games I have still don't load. Could anyone possibly tune the thing right every time in two seconds? Be one with the tape drive? Bullshit. But when I saw it, I had to believe it.
These people with such extraordinary Tuning Talent shoud be honored.
No, that's a vocoder. She was actually going for that effect (god only knows)
Hmm. I heard "Believe" had autotuner instead of vocoder. The most recent boy band song I heard apparently used autotuner, and it sounds just like Cher's effect. =)
The web page also says the two things are similar, and lists all sorts of other things done to the song to make it sound as boybandish as possible. =)
The people who make censorware often also block well-known "loophole" sites (proxies, archives, Google caches, toys that do funny filtering to web pages, etc etc...)
One way of getting Freenet is to connect to a publicly open freenet node and download distribution package directly from there, then install it and auto-upgrade. I'm not aware of any at the moment, though, but I guess they are out there...
However, looking at the Morse chart he would have a problem writing code and reading mathematical notations with the limitations of the Morse alphabet.
Knowing how easily the morse guys use abbreviations for everything, he probably coded in Forth... =)
Freenet is a sourceforge project, so you should be able to get it from there.
Let's take a look what the original poster said, shall we?
Request for URL http://66.35.250.209:80/ denied by WebBlocker (Status: denied Category: questionable/illegal/gambling). This site has been blocked per Company [or country] policy.
And now, let's see what reverse lookup says, shall we?
We know that IBM is capable of turning against strategic platforms overnight - they have done so in the past.
Ah, the legendary IBM technology business adaptation skills...
Tomorrow on ibm.com: "Welcome to IBM - Irreplaceable Bratwurst Machines(r), the finest production equipment for food industry. Meat In, Sausages Out(sm)" =)
Slashdot Mirror
One of the advantages of 1.2 over 1.0 is that it finally supports LADSPA plugins.
I can recommend the freely-available plugin packs, such as Computer Music Toolkit (It has Dynamic Sledgehammer, what the hell else you need? =) and Steve Harris' Plugins (Likewise one can't live without Barry's Satan Maximizer =)
In Debian, just try apt-get install blop cmt tap-plugins swh-plugins and blammo, you have tons of cool plugins that work out of box in Ardour, Audacity and Sweep...
The others are flinging around other cool Linux audio apps, allow me to mention one more.
GNU Lilypond, simply the sweetest music typesetting package ever made. It is very very amazing.
Well, that's still better than them displaying a whole lot of PHP mysql command errors. Strictly speaking, that one remaining error should go, also...
At least it shows that whoever coded the thing could at least think a little bit of this "error handling" thing. I wonder why so many PHP coders don't care enough to check if they actually have successfully got the connection and, if they haven't, bail out gracefully...
Ha, they've already done that, and it was perfect. Wizards, Warriors and a Word from our Sponsor. Even the official movie wouldn't get better than that. =)
I know... it's one of them Japanese RPGs. And none, no matter how in-depth they supposedly are, can beat the epic and fun of Star Control 2, which has been voted the Best Game Ever hundreds of times already and that still feels completely underrated. =)
Here we face the usual dilemma of putting games of different genres in same category in a "best game ever" competition - or even arranging such competition.
Ahem: Gameboy Color. Gameboy Advance. Both run Gameboy Tetris (or Pokemon, if one is into such things) perfectly, even multiplayer on different generations of machines is supported.
Which is, of course, only good. Shelf space is cheap these days, consoles are easy to stack next to each other and SCART multiplexing (or chaining RF adapters) is easy to do - but the less portable widgets you have (as a general rule), the better. Even I, a widget lover, decided that probably one portable console is enough for most of my needs. And GBA is sure sweet and small compared to my old GB =)
There are some projects that are remaking the Origin-developed framework. Exult is an Ultima VII engine remake, only needs the original data files to run.
Everyone who has ever installed Ultima VII on anything post-Win95 probably knows that having no ties whatsoever to original U7 codebase is probably a good thing =)
Exult has made U7 a very good and modern game. They've fixed many of the old annoying UI issues and such.
Exult even comes with near-usable map editor and script compiler, so you can use U7 engine to do your own adventures... at least in theory. Check out this funny screenshot... =)
There are some other engine remakes, I think. Not sure what they are or if they can be used for anything interesting though.
As for EA open-sourcing anything... no way. They're holding on their IP as hard as they can. They aren't even particularly happy about fan remakes of Ultima games, even if they're approved by Richard Garriott (or even approved while he was still in Origin).
"Dost thou have any idea of the number of dead people and creatures there are? I thought not. The dead of the ages are mine to summon and control. The graves of beloved ancestors will spew forth their contents into an army. A special treat for the living, mine undead monsters will be. Imagine a skeletal dragon that cannot be killed. Consider a cabal of everliving mages eternally enthralled to me. And the most beautiful part of my plot is that, as the living die in these battles, and they will die, they will swell the ranks of the undead host. I will rule supreme - a world of the dead!"
- Horance the Liche in Ultima VII: The Black Gate
Isn't that a little bit redundant expression? Aren't those two the same things? =)
Hehehe. The article also talks about the "Not working? Format and reinstall" kind of support. A Compaq laptop a relative had didn't even come with a Windows CD, just a quick restore CD that wiped everything. I can easily imagine their support recommending its use in various interesting flavors - if the only way to reinstall anything is to wipe out everything and restore disk image from CD.
(Win98 started to chomp mud on that laptop a year later. Was extremely hesitant to even think of trying their support if the hardware and software was that crappy. Ended up renouncing Microsoft's EULA and reinstalling Win98SE from my own CD. Apparently not had a single major problem after that.)
(And speaking of tech support, I hope I will never ever need to reinstall Windows for any of the relatives. =)
Because that's only one minor rev behind. There probably aren't that many big changes in 1.0 anyway, so 0.37 will probably be good enough for the days (or weeks? no idea how hard-working the subversion maintainer is...) while waiting for 1.0...
Enigma encryption might have been a great leap ahead and looked completely state of art in the WW2, but today, it's quite trivial to crack. Enigma could be easily bruteforced - just check through the entire keyspace.
It also probably wouldn't stand too long if real crypto breakers who knew their stuff would start their job without knowing anything about the encryption scheme, even. The science has gone so far in recent times.
And an easy way to illustrate: Compare output from Enigma with any modern cipher. Enigma output looks like completely mangled words - the text is garbled, the layout of the message is exposed. Modern cipher output looks like a completely random arrangement of bits, everything completely spread around the message with no point to really take a good grip on. With Enigma, if you know that Nazi guy is always putting "Heil Hitler" at the end, you have already cracked that much of the message.
If the thing looks trivial, then it probably is. If it doesn't, it probably isn't. Of course, this isn't always true in either way.
Now I'll get more coffee so I can start making sense today.
Hrrrrrrrrm. 7 out of 21 games are baseball or american football. One soccer game (PES2). (Where's Microprose Soccer??? Or even the true fossil of C64 games that makes all other games look modern in comparison, Commodore International Football from, what was it, 1982 or 1983?)
Okay, there probably wouldn't be any problem with this, but they didn't put in C64 California Games! Or, for that matter, any of the track and field games on the 8-bit machines, some of which notably Destroyed Joysticks far more throughoutly than any of the modern offerings - and that's not because they build sturdier joysticks these days.
Yeah, a bit funny. Just about to vote for Suspended, in retrospect probably the most unusual game I've ever played, when my 3 AM brain notices Nethack at the bottom of the list. Good adventure... or the grand adventure. Tough choice. Had to be the grand adventure.
And then I trudged on, puzzled by these odd categories (Best Tony Hawk Game? The one favored by barkeepers as a coaster... The Best GTA Game? "Minor Traffic Violation", bleah, who cares...), and got boundlessly frustrated when the noobs don't know anything about good games (Ultima Online probably going to win when Ultima VII would be around, and freaking Warcraft III taking the jackpot when Warcraft II was the one that really shined, dammit... And by the time Chrono Trigger or whatever the hell it was was trashing Star Control II, I was almost ready to scream "Get a life, you freaking japanophiles", but I restrained myself from doing so =)
Vincent Flanders of Web Pages That Suck used Morrison & Foerster LLP (mofo.com) as an example of bad domain name choice. The other one used as an example was analtech.com (that's right, it's not that kind of company =)
The article is no longer on the WPTS site, but the WPTS book has this bit: "...I received a lot of e-mail explaining the choice. Basically, the law firm knows what it means, and they're proud of their name because they want to have the image of a law firm you don't want to mess with."
Hmm... dynamic language support.
I wonder if we ever see a Haskell and Lisp compilers that target Parrot - I hope we do. I've found a native-code Haskell compiler but I might prefer Lisp - I just haven't found an open-source native-code Lisp compiler. Parrot might be a small stand-alone app, suitable as a small runtime environment.
Well, since everything seems to be scalar and list and everyone uses map and grep, Perl is a functional language in a very good disguise =)
Perl 5 does have its quirks. Yet, the quirks are hardly something that will make coding impossible. Even with its quirks, it's still a language that works just fine for what it does.
Perl 5 reminds me of an almost regularly cleaned room. You can live there, stay for hours, there's a lot of cool stuff people have brought to the room... do everything you want and have fun. Just don't move the sofa because there's tons of dust under it.
Perl 6 designers, then, are finding us a new room, move all old stuff from the old room there, and then ask the people where each of the things should be put or would the things look better a few meters to the left, perhaps. And they carry out all of the old newspapers and install one of those automated vacuum cleaners too.
Yeah, and back in the day there was this legendary new young telegram guy who got the job after learning the letters T, I and A...
(In Finland, "Dit" and "Dah" are called "Ti" and "Taa". =)
I don't have my rulebook within 100 kilometer radius, and I only opened it last year to check out the MTV control panel, but I was left with the impression that the 2nd edition was more "d20ish" than the d20 System(tm). Heard the new edition isn't going to be changed much rule-wise.
Of course, if I had implemented the combat system, I would have used the LMERP combat system - the GM dives behind the screen so that he's harder to hit, and players throw the d20 at each other - whoever is hit is out.
Just like one of my friends. He'd come with other guys to play games on the C64, bring the tapes... ask for the screwdriver... I hit Load, he tunes the read head for a second, "Right... there"... and it loads perfectly.
I'm a floppy drive fan. I never got a good hang of how to tune the azimuth of the tape drive, the only way I do it today is by trial and error, and some games I have still don't load. Could anyone possibly tune the thing right every time in two seconds? Be one with the tape drive? Bullshit. But when I saw it, I had to believe it.
These people with such extraordinary Tuning Talent shoud be honored.
AC:
Hmm. I heard "Believe" had autotuner instead of vocoder. The most recent boy band song I heard apparently used autotuner, and it sounds just like Cher's effect. =)
The web page also says the two things are similar, and lists all sorts of other things done to the song to make it sound as boybandish as possible. =)
The people who make censorware often also block well-known "loophole" sites (proxies, archives, Google caches, toys that do funny filtering to web pages, etc etc...)
One way of getting Freenet is to connect to a publicly open freenet node and download distribution package directly from there, then install it and auto-upgrade. I'm not aware of any at the moment, though, but I guess they are out there...
Let's take a look what the original poster said, shall we?
Request for URL http://66.35.250.209:80/ denied by WebBlocker (Status: denied Category: questionable/illegal/gambling). This site has been blocked per Company [or country] policy.
And now, let's see what reverse lookup says, shall we?
nighthowl:~$ host 66.35.250.209
Name: projects.sourceforge.net
Address: 66.35.250.209
"I can't download it from Sourceforge." "That's too bad, have you tried Sourceforge?"
Well, one possibility might be to try individual download sites (whatever.dl.sourceforge.net), but I suppose these geniuses have blocked them too...
People who install censorware, especially notoriously idiotic proxies like this, should be terminated with extreme prejudice.
Ah, the legendary IBM technology business adaptation skills...
Tomorrow on ibm.com: "Welcome to IBM - Irreplaceable Bratwurst Machines(r), the finest production equipment for food industry. Meat In, Sausages Out(sm)" =)