Part of the agreement you sign when you agree to take credit transactions or install credit card POS mechanisms in your place of business is that you will be liable for all transactions charged back to you by the creditor. These are typically simply called 'chargebacks' or 'reversals'. While the credit company may be involved in these and may have an agreement to limit store liability, the store suffers the brunt of fraudulent credit card transactions. These are usually handled in a manner similar to hot check writing or shoplifting... i.e.: police involvement.
EngSoc from Orwell's '1984' - Department of Homeland Security Doublespeak, also from '1984' - Politically Correct Speech Debate over Human Cloning from 'Brave New World' - Current debate over Human Cloning and Stem Cell Research. All-Powerful CIA/FBI from 'Snow Crash' - Patriot Act enchanced federal bureaus.
Large financial organizations are typically *just* moving away from COBOL based apps running on VMS and SCO to Java and C apps running on Solaris on Sun Hardware.
Now imagine this... a custom linux computer interface whittled down to fit in 300 or so megabytes and configured to boot properly and DHCP across a wide array of hardware. The other 400 are for you to store your files and settings for later use. Set it up with a few essentials - text editor, web browser of your choice, various clients, *maybe* some basic compiler tools.
Take the CD anywhere you chose to and use your own interface/desktop from any PC in the world that will let you have access to the CDROM drive and the reset switch.
While I personally think that patents are repugnant, Google has fallen down on the 'just' side of using the patent laws the way they were intending to be used. They're not trying to bilk people out of vast sums of money ala British Telecom's hyperlink patent or Amazon's 1-click buy patent. They have a unique process that they've carefully guarded and have built a business around.
Now that they've been awarded a patent for page-rank, it's required for them to make it public so that people can license it. You can't patent a trade secret and still have it be secret. People now have the opportunity to build new methods and innovate with Pagerank as a basis for that innovation. (Real innovation, not MS innovation.)
Again, I think that patents are a misstep. I think they allow too many Amazon and BT events to happen. Despite the fact that the patent system is horribly broken, Google is using patent laws responsibly here. Wait until they announce a patent on 'all search technology that lists search results on a web page' or something like that. *Then* you can start complaining about how broken the patent system is.
If you use Windows and Stardock Windowblinds, you quickly realize that there are very few 'Skins' that allow you to use Windows as efficiently as the default appearance. The same is true of Windows XP themes, Winamp 2 Skins and Winamp 3/Wasabi skins. Even if they are beautiful, they have to have enough visual similarity to the original, or else the user ends up feeling that ha has to re-learn the interface.
If you cut the comedy from 'Office Space' and replace it with inane break-room small talk about 'Dark Ages of Camelot', 'Everquest', 'Star Wars' and the latest Comic-book adapted movie like 'Daredevil', 'X-Men', etc..., they're you're pretty damn close to the truth about software developers.
Oh, and Dilbert jokes repeated ad-nauseum. A real software developer isn't a software developer unless he has a Dilbert 'strip-a-day' calender and dozens of dilber strips tacked to the inside of his cub.
One of the things I've found with newspapers who get the Barry column is that they frequently cut it to shreads.
I was reading the 2002 year in review. I couldn't immediately find it on the Miami Herald site, so I did a google search. The first result it returned was for... I think... the Phoenix paper. I read it and was kinda dissapointed. I felt like it wasn't as good and definitely wasn't as long as some of his previous years work.
Curious, because I wanted to compare, I looked 2001 on the Miami Herald site. It was there, and so was the 2002 in the search window. The 2002 article on the MH site was approximately twice as long as it was on the Phoenix site. They had edited pretty heavily... mostly to remove references harsh to the republican party or George Bush. Incensed, I checked it out in my local paper, which had also cut the article, but in different places.
If you want sraight Dave Barry, either buy the MH or check it out online at the MH website.
As long as the Freenet project continues distribute its main download in the form of a Java class and not platform specific binaries, it will *never* work well enough to be useful to people in the same manner that Kazaa, or even Gnutella are.
You can whine and kvetch all day long about how wondeful are, but the simple fact of the matter is that the fact that you have to install a virtual machine to run Freenet makes it useful only to people who understand how to install a virtual machine.
There are ways to compile Java to platform-specific binaries that don't require a virtual machine to run. The freenet project should make binaries like this available for download for PC and Macintosh. Doing otherwise is shooting themselves in the foot for the sake of shooting themselves in the foot.
Remember that SMB2 was not actually designed as a Mario Game. In Japan, the game was called 'Doki Doki Panic' and had different characters that were replaced with Mario characters for U.S. release. Note that despite being a *very* good platform game that it doesn't have the same 'jump, bounce, jump' mechanic that is the trademark of all the other Mario platform games.
The original Famicom had support for floppy-disk based game data. If I understand correctly, the floppy for the real SMB 2 (Not SMB 2 USA, which was a different game with graphics replaced to be Mario characters) contained new levels and used the old game engine from the Mario 1 cartridge. The game was rereleased once entirely on cartridge in Japan when prices dropped. Since Japanese Famicom cartridges were a different size and slightly different shape from US NES cartridges, what your friend was playing was probably the game rom from the rerelease of SMB 2 Japan which had been very poorly mounted in a taped together cartridge that would fit the NES machine.
Ask Shigeru Miyamoto about the whistles. Most of them are in his game.
Most likely, this is a case of Japanese mythology leaking through into game design. (Same thing with the leaf that changes you into a Racoon.) A lot of Japanese mythology is based around music or performance of some kind, flutes in particular. They're frequently played by Yousei (fairies and elves) and Oni (Ogres and Demons). When the sun goddess Amaterasu hid herself in a cave, the other gods lured her out by holding a festival in front of the cave's opening. The key piece of the festival was beautiful young goddess Uzume, who sang, danced, and played a flute.
I recall one evening while me and my younger brother were playing SMB3, my brother threw this temper tantrum over one particular map somewhere around world 5 or so; in his rage he slammed his fist down on the desktop, near the NES. When he did, the NES reset the game and started him over at the intro screen. Pissed, he said a string of choice words and stomped off. I picked up the controller and started a new game, and on a whim checked Mario's inventory; it still retained all of my brother's items from his previous game;-) So there I was, in the first world, with a few Tanoki suits, a Whistle, and a few other assorted not-supposed-to-haves. That was pretty cool;-)
There were a few exploits like that, simply because SMB was probably the hugest game ever created at that point, with the possible exception of the Zelda games. I have roms for all the Mario and Zelda games, so I'll compare them and see. I suspect that SMB3 is larger than even quite a few snes games.
Some of the exploits were left in on purpose or purposefully included in the first place as 'easter eggs'. Some of them were obvious coding errors.
The reset items trick was something that a few players did after beating the game to start over with all the inventory intact. If you timed your reset to hit just before the game credits stopped, you could usually do this.
Another was the keypad combination that would let you reenter any non-moving area, even destroyed castles. Since hammer brothers dissapeared after you killed them and airships took you to the next level, this would obviously not work.
If you won an airship level while wearing the Frog, Tanuki, or Hammer suit, the king would greet you with a non-standard text string.
Many places in the game, there are 'infinite lives' locations. The first one that comes to mind is the mushroom sprouting pipe in 1-2, I think. If you had a leaf, (and a racoon tail), you could float down. If you timed it right, you could float down just slow enough to land on a mushroom, kill him, jump off, and float down again on top of the next one. If you had your timing down, you could run out the level timer doing this, racking up massive extra lives... to a total of 99, I think. Unlike the 'Eternal Turtle' exploit in SMB1 (In 3-1 and 7-1... doesn't seem to work in 'Allstars'), the life counter in SMB3 did not roll over at 128, so you could get as many lives as you wanted this way. Another location was in the desert world. You could throw a turtle shell into the space between two pipes and then watch mushrooms walk into it. Each mushroom would eventually be worth an extra life.
The one that strikes me as the most obvious coding error was in the end-of-game encounter with Bowser/King Koopa. For those in the know, depending on which route you took through his castle, Bowser had a different difficulty. There were either three or four layers of blocks for him to punch through, depending on how you reached him. In reality, however, there were two Bowsers in the game, one for each location. Here's the trick, though. The two areas they fought in (one with three layers of blocks and one with four layers of blocks) were connected. If you could fly, you could travel back and forth between the two, and have both alive at the same time. If both of them were alive, neither one could shoot fire!
Ah, them were the days, when you were intent on finding *all* the secrets of a game and had months on end to do so.
The version I played in the Choice 10 machine was indistinguishable from the version I played at home... very odd since it was 5 or 6 months early. I never got past world 4 on the Choice 10, (The giant world), so it's entirely possible that it just didn't include those later worlds (5-8).
After I bought the cart, I started coming across a 'new' version of the game on other choice 10 machines. This version allowed you to select a level before you started playing... a primitive bone to throw to people who wanted to save their progress, I guess. This feature was also implimented on the short-lived SNES Choice machines I saw. The machine I saw only had Super Mario World, F-Zero, and Mario Tennis in it, but you could select any level, any track, or any opponent from all 3 games.
Verteiron, where was the Hastings you rented from located?
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the agreement you sign when you agree to take credit transactions or install credit card POS mechanisms in your place of business is that you will be liable for all transactions charged back to you by the creditor. These are typically simply called 'chargebacks' or 'reversals'. While the credit company may be involved in these and may have an agreement to limit store liability, the store suffers the brunt of fraudulent credit card transactions. These are usually handled in a manner similar to hot check writing or shoplifting... i.e.: police involvement.
This is the thought running through the head of each of the male supreme court justices right now.
"Hmmm... How do I rule on this so that *I* can still view porn?"
Promise - What we Got
EngSoc from Orwell's '1984' - Department of Homeland Security
Doublespeak, also from '1984' - Politically Correct Speech
Debate over Human Cloning from 'Brave New World' - Current debate over Human Cloning and Stem Cell Research.
All-Powerful CIA/FBI from 'Snow Crash' - Patriot Act enchanced federal bureaus.
I could go one for quite some time...
Large financial organizations are typically *just* moving away from COBOL based apps running on VMS and SCO to Java and C apps running on Solaris on Sun Hardware.
Now imagine this... a custom linux computer interface whittled down to fit in 300 or so megabytes and configured to boot properly and DHCP across a wide array of hardware. The other 400 are for you to store your files and settings for later use. Set it up with a few essentials - text editor, web browser of your choice, various clients, *maybe* some basic compiler tools.
Take the CD anywhere you chose to and use your own interface/desktop from any PC in the world that will let you have access to the CDROM drive and the reset switch.
While I personally think that patents are repugnant, Google has fallen down on the 'just' side of using the patent laws the way they were intending to be used. They're not trying to bilk people out of vast sums of money ala British Telecom's hyperlink patent or Amazon's 1-click buy patent. They have a unique process that they've carefully guarded and have built a business around.
Now that they've been awarded a patent for page-rank, it's required for them to make it public so that people can license it. You can't patent a trade secret and still have it be secret. People now have the opportunity to build new methods and innovate with Pagerank as a basis for that innovation. (Real innovation, not MS innovation.)
Again, I think that patents are a misstep. I think they allow too many Amazon and BT events to happen. Despite the fact that the patent system is horribly broken, Google is using patent laws responsibly here. Wait until they announce a patent on 'all search technology that lists search results on a web page' or something like that. *Then* you can start complaining about how broken the patent system is.
Tried it? Like it? Have problems with it?
I use Popfile at home. It seems like the perfect answer to spam. What's your take on Popfile and other Bayesian filtering methods?
Sure, up until someone cuts and pastes the plaintext of your document into an HTML editor and posts it to alt.cracked.office.drm.docs.
Sorry, Microsoft Outlook has determined that you don't have sufficient privaleges to delete the mail message: "See Hot Young Teens FREE!!!!! JYXX92D"
If you use Windows and Stardock Windowblinds, you quickly realize that there are very few 'Skins' that allow you to use Windows as efficiently as the default appearance. The same is true of Windows XP themes, Winamp 2 Skins and Winamp 3/Wasabi skins. Even if they are beautiful, they have to have enough visual similarity to the original, or else the user ends up feeling that ha has to re-learn the interface.
You have some of my favorites, Maxwell.
HOI, and Taming of the Horse in Particular.
All Ranma fans should read ToH. Vince rocks.
</animegeek>
There, see. I may have accused you at being at the pinnacle of geekdom, but I'm right there with you.
My god... I think we've found a new slot for inclusion on the Geek Hierarchy
People Who Draw Anime Webcomics
\/
People Who Read Anime Webcomics
\/
People Who Act in Radio Plays Based on Anime Webcomics
\/
Furries
http://www.nabiki.com/radioplay/
Radio plays made by people who write anime fanfiction. Yes, this is the *pinnacle* of geekdom!
I was just about to say the same thing.
Seriously, check out the MH Encyclopedia Brown stories. They're great and presented *perfectly*.
Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Missing Olympic Magic is the best one, IMHO. God, I hate Bob Costas.
If you cut the comedy from 'Office Space' and replace it with inane break-room small talk about 'Dark Ages of Camelot', 'Everquest', 'Star Wars' and the latest Comic-book adapted movie like 'Daredevil', 'X-Men', etc..., they're you're pretty damn close to the truth about software developers.
Oh, and Dilbert jokes repeated ad-nauseum. A real software developer isn't a software developer unless he has a Dilbert 'strip-a-day' calender and dozens of dilber strips tacked to the inside of his cub.
One of the things I've found with newspapers who get the Barry column is that they frequently cut it to shreads.
n ists/dave_barry/
I was reading the 2002 year in review. I couldn't immediately find it on the Miami Herald site, so I did a google search. The first result it returned was for... I think... the Phoenix paper. I read it and was kinda dissapointed. I felt like it wasn't as good and definitely wasn't as long as some of his previous years work.
Curious, because I wanted to compare, I looked 2001 on the Miami Herald site. It was there, and so was the 2002 in the search window. The 2002 article on the MH site was approximately twice as long as it was on the Phoenix site. They had edited pretty heavily... mostly to remove references harsh to the republican party or George Bush. Incensed, I checked it out in my local paper, which had also cut the article, but in different places.
If you want sraight Dave Barry, either buy the MH or check it out online at the MH website.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/colum
It also proves that a lot of people reach for the +1 informative button the second they see a link.
Follow those links before you moderate, people.
Limewire, if I'm not mistaken, is distributed in a binary executable format rather than a java class.
As long as the Freenet project continues distribute its main download in the form of a Java class and not platform specific binaries, it will *never* work well enough to be useful to people in the same manner that Kazaa, or even Gnutella are.
You can whine and kvetch all day long about how wondeful are, but the simple fact of the matter is that the fact that you have to install a virtual machine to run Freenet makes it useful only to people who understand how to install a virtual machine.
There are ways to compile Java to platform-specific binaries that don't require a virtual machine to run. The freenet project should make binaries like this available for download for PC and Macintosh. Doing otherwise is shooting themselves in the foot for the sake of shooting themselves in the foot.
Remember that SMB2 was not actually designed as a Mario Game. In Japan, the game was called 'Doki Doki Panic' and had different characters that were replaced with Mario characters for U.S. release. Note that despite being a *very* good platform game that it doesn't have the same 'jump, bounce, jump' mechanic that is the trademark of all the other Mario platform games.
The original Famicom had support for floppy-disk based game data. If I understand correctly, the floppy for the real SMB 2 (Not SMB 2 USA, which was a different game with graphics replaced to be Mario characters) contained new levels and used the old game engine from the Mario 1 cartridge. The game was rereleased once entirely on cartridge in Japan when prices dropped. Since Japanese Famicom cartridges were a different size and slightly different shape from US NES cartridges, what your friend was playing was probably the game rom from the rerelease of SMB 2 Japan which had been very poorly mounted in a taped together cartridge that would fit the NES machine.
http://www.lineage2.com/
This is the 'New' version of the Korean game. It's in early beta phase, but has a steady following. Character models are *gorgeous*.
Ask Shigeru Miyamoto about the whistles. Most of them are in his game.
Most likely, this is a case of Japanese mythology leaking through into game design. (Same thing with the leaf that changes you into a Racoon.) A lot of Japanese mythology is based around music or performance of some kind, flutes in particular. They're frequently played by Yousei (fairies and elves) and Oni (Ogres and Demons). When the sun goddess Amaterasu hid herself in a cave, the other gods lured her out by holding a festival in front of the cave's opening. The key piece of the festival was beautiful young goddess Uzume, who sang, danced, and played a flute.
I recall one evening while me and my younger brother were playing SMB3, my brother threw this temper tantrum over one particular map somewhere around world 5 or so; in his rage he slammed his fist down on the desktop, near the NES. When he did, the NES reset the game and started him over at the intro screen. Pissed, he said a string of choice words and stomped off. I picked up the controller and started a new game, and on a whim checked Mario's inventory; it still retained all of my brother's items from his previous game ;-) So there I was, in the first world, with a few Tanoki suits, a Whistle, and a few other assorted not-supposed-to-haves. That was pretty cool ;-)
There were a few exploits like that, simply because SMB was probably the hugest game ever created at that point, with the possible exception of the Zelda games. I have roms for all the Mario and Zelda games, so I'll compare them and see. I suspect that SMB3 is larger than even quite a few snes games.
Some of the exploits were left in on purpose or purposefully included in the first place as 'easter eggs'. Some of them were obvious coding errors.
The reset items trick was something that a few players did after beating the game to start over with all the inventory intact. If you timed your reset to hit just before the game credits stopped, you could usually do this.
Another was the keypad combination that would let you reenter any non-moving area, even destroyed castles. Since hammer brothers dissapeared after you killed them and airships took you to the next level, this would obviously not work.
If you won an airship level while wearing the Frog, Tanuki, or Hammer suit, the king would greet you with a non-standard text string.
Many places in the game, there are 'infinite lives' locations. The first one that comes to mind is the mushroom sprouting pipe in 1-2, I think. If you had a leaf, (and a racoon tail), you could float down. If you timed it right, you could float down just slow enough to land on a mushroom, kill him, jump off, and float down again on top of the next one. If you had your timing down, you could run out the level timer doing this, racking up massive extra lives... to a total of 99, I think. Unlike the 'Eternal Turtle' exploit in SMB1 (In 3-1 and 7-1... doesn't seem to work in 'Allstars'), the life counter in SMB3 did not roll over at 128, so you could get as many lives as you wanted this way. Another location was in the desert world. You could throw a turtle shell into the space between two pipes and then watch mushrooms walk into it. Each mushroom would eventually be worth an extra life.
The one that strikes me as the most obvious coding error was in the end-of-game encounter with Bowser/King Koopa. For those in the know, depending on which route you took through his castle, Bowser had a different difficulty. There were either three or four layers of blocks for him to punch through, depending on how you reached him. In reality, however, there were two Bowsers in the game, one for each location. Here's the trick, though. The two areas they fought in (one with three layers of blocks and one with four layers of blocks) were connected. If you could fly, you could travel back and forth between the two, and have both alive at the same time. If both of them were alive, neither one could shoot fire!
Ah, them were the days, when you were intent on finding *all* the secrets of a game and had months on end to do so.
The version I played in the Choice 10 machine was indistinguishable from the version I played at home... very odd since it was 5 or 6 months early. I never got past world 4 on the Choice 10, (The giant world), so it's entirely possible that it just didn't include those later worlds (5-8).
After I bought the cart, I started coming across a 'new' version of the game on other choice 10 machines. This version allowed you to select a level before you started playing... a primitive bone to throw to people who wanted to save their progress, I guess. This feature was also implimented on the short-lived SNES Choice machines I saw. The machine I saw only had Super Mario World, F-Zero, and Mario Tennis in it, but you could select any level, any track, or any opponent from all 3 games.
Verteiron, where was the Hastings you rented from located?