I'm glad this is finally appearing online. Sony and Intuit are NOTORIOUS for this.
I bought TurboTax for the past few years and sent in the $40 (approximately) rebate with ALL of the information filled out correctly. I swear I spent at least 30 minutes putting together each rebate package, copying the contents in their entirety and mailing them on time from the post office. Out of $140 (approximately) that they owe me in rebates for YEARS now, I received only about ten bucks for a state rebate. I assure you that everything was done correctly.
Then, my mother bought a Sony laptop. There was a $100 rebate. I spent over an hour putting together the entire rebate package, going over the rebate checklist several times, and I *know* for a *fact* that I did it correctly. I also sent it in ahead of the deadline by nearly a month. A couple of months later, my dad (who checked my email) said that I got an email from Sony stating that there was some error in my preparation of the rebate papers. I got so pissed off at that point that I decided no longer to buy products that offer a rebate of any kind.
Yes, this story is absolutely true. Rebates are fraudulent and these companies get away with it because they know that most people consider it too much trouble to go after them for a rebate and the rest will call in a few times, so when lawsuit threats come, the company can shut them up by mailing the check then. Sony can go to hell. Intuit can as well.
COMPANIES, WHAT YOU SHOULD DO: Make the stores handle the rebate process. The store should charge me the price AFTER rebate and then deal with the distributor for the money, the same way as coupons are handled at the grocery store.
I would usually post some very anti-Microsoft sentiment right about now, but in this particular case, I believe that id is doing the right thing, if only on a matter of principle.
I mean, what do you want to do? Counteract the practice of releasing for all platforms at the same time by boycotting all industries worldwide? If you expect id to release at different times for different platforms then you probably expect other things... "I mean, what's next, id stops releasing source code to their games for educational purposes?!"
It makes sense to release a game for all platforms at the same time. How stupid would it be, for example, if The Matrix was released at some theaters first because they had DTS, two weeks later at other theaters because they had THX and a month after that to remaining theaters, which had Dolby Digital... How stupid would it be if the game were made available on platforms X and Y, everybody plays the game and gets sick of it, and then the game is released on platform Z? Nobody would buy it for platform Z.
Consider this argument the other way around: id releases Doom IV for Windows, XBox, PS2 and whatever other platforms there are out there. But it takes them forever to release the game on Linux. How would you feel then? I think I would feel quite bad. In that case, it would make sense, again, for them to wait before releasing the game until the Linux version is complete. Consider another example in which they wish, also, to release a version for some new computing platform and operating system that sucks and nobody uses, but there is one customer in the entire world who is using that operating system and that customer wants to spend the $39.95 (USD) to buy the game for his platform. Suppose, also, that the entire design ideology employed in the design of this computer platform is completely, utterly and in all other ways different from anything we've ever seen, and the only compiler available for this platform is an INTERCAL compiler. In that case, id should wait until a C++ compiler can be coded in INTERCAL and the game is ported over to the new platform before releasing for all other platforms. In other words, the entire world should be made to wait because we need to be fair to that ONE person. We are a bunch of bleeding heart liberals, after all.
Astute readers will notice the contradiction within my previous post. Let's dissect it:
I do not use acid. What the hell do you think, that I am a drug addict? I don't use no damn drugs! I am high on life... I don't need no stupid drugs!
In this passage, the author as explicitly asserted that he/she does not employ the use of drugs.
I always take caffeine, alcohol and tobacco products like there's no tomorrow!
In this passage, the author contradicts the first passage by stating that he/she uses caffeine, alcohol and tobacco products, all three of which are classified as drugs.
I live on caffeine, tobacco and alcohol! I never consume ANYTHING else with nutritional value, only tobacco, caffieiene and alcohol.
In this passage, the author adds supporting evidence that he/she does use substances classified as drugs, thus continuing to contradict the first passage. "Caffeine" is misspelled to produce the subtle effect of one intoxicated by employing the three aforesaid drugs in conjunction with one another while denying their use.
I don't use no friggen drugs! I never used drugs! I'm never gonna use no friggen drugs!
In this passage, the author once again suggests that he/she does not use drugs, which coincides with the meaning of the first passage but contradicts that of the second and third passages.
I need more coffee, spiked with alcohol, and a cigarette RIGHT NOW!
Here, the author explains that he/she requires the use of substances classified as drugs at this particular moment, hence returning to the meaning of the second and third paragraphs, once again contradicting that of the first and fourth.
In the above post, the author makes use of the aforementioned litarary instruments to suggest that he/she does use substances classified as drugs while simultaneously denying that the use of such substances is being made.
This is the most amazing news I have heard all day! With HP releasing its new 64-bit Itanium II based workstation / rackmount server machine with all its capabilities, it'll be AMAZING when 64-bit Linux is running on these things all over the country.
The thing I can't wait for is 64-bit laptops with a real advantage over their 32-bit counterparts. It has been quite a number of years since the jump was made between 16 and 32 bits... It's high time to make the next jump to 64 bits!
In addition to all the wonders of 64 bit computers running UNIX-like operating systems, such as it being WAY COOL, there is a REAL ADVANTAGE for the free software community in these developments! I firmly believe that if the free software community embraces 64-bit architectures as soon as possible, free software will be one step ahead of Microsoft in this respect because they're (Microsoft) obviously waiting for there to be industry acceptance of this thing before they start throwing infinite numbers of dollars into it. The free software community can do it just because it's cool.
Yes, I know that currently, floating point support and other features of the Itanium II really suck in comparison to normal processors, considering the price tag, but just wait a little while and the price will start to come down. And free software will be there first.
Microsoft is starting to fall apart, even if this is not entirely obvious. There is no way that the business model of the evil giant in the industry can support a model of giving away software for free. Other companies are already entrenched in service-based computing. Linux, BSD, Apple and other operating systems are making a serious dent in Microsoft's market share and consumers are getting increasingly sick of shitty software from Microsoft. It's only a matter of time before all of these combinations hit critical mass and Microsoft lets everything they had slip through their fingers like the evil antagonists that they are in this story.
I do not use acid. What the hell do you think, that I am a drug addict? I don't use no damn drugs! I am high on life... I don't need no stupid drugs! I always take caffeine, alcohol and tobacco products like there's no tomorrow! I live on caffeine, tobacco and alcohol! I never consume ANYTHING else with nutritional value, only tobacco, caffieiene and alcohol. I don't use no friggen drugs! I never used drugs! I'm never gonna use no friggen drugs! I need more coffee, spiked with alcohol, and a cigarette RIGHT NOW!
Not if Microsoft's junk software continue to piss me off so much that I eventually die from extreme anger.
OF COURSE, if Microsoft makes a program called Microsoft Genetic Engineering XP, then guess what? It'll malfunction and make up some virus that kills us all instead of making a cure for AIDS or something.
I mean, let's use a little bit of common sense here: You've got a product to sell. Maybe some people out there want to buy it. In that case, you must make this product as visible as possible so that people who might buy it will buy it!
That's how things work! Some person or company feels like producing some kind of product. Some people or companies might feel like buying that product. It doesn't matter what rationale goes into the decision to make or buy the product. What matters is the fact that everybody does what they want. As such, I don't blame this Games Workshop or whatever for their decision. It's just their decision... The FACT that this will COST them in sales is simply the result of the formula that is the marketplace.
Wouldn't it be really interesting if an entire ideology of computer software could be designed down to the finest detail by a number of individuals hired for such a task? This would include an entire operating system and all the software to run on it. An enormous party would be thrown, to which would be invited hundreds of thousands of programmers. Each would be assigned a specific portion of the system. At the end of a single day, the entire software system would be completed due to the sheer number of programmers working on it. It would take years to plan and organize, yet only a single day to execute from beginning to end.
A number of technologies are about to end the world. I will list them here and then describe how.
Nanotechnology: Microscopic robots will be built. These robots, about the size of a blood cell, will be capable of combining into the shape of anything, and of changing color individually to give the appearance of the thing the shape of which they take.
Quantum computing: Microscopic computers will be build with more computing power and more capacity to learn than a thousand human brains. They will be able to combine into vast networks with nearly infinite numbers of nodes through wireless communication.
Biotechnology will allow scientists to make entire creatures, life supporting organs, or individuals cells to suit whatever purpose is at hand.
These three technologies will ultimately converge to create microscopic robots the size of a single blood cell with more ability to reason than an entire university of the world's greatest geniuses and with all of the advantages of both biologically based organisms and those of robotic origin. These cells will combine on-the-fly to form creatures, machines or any device, of any shape and size and of any appearance, for whatever purpose deemed necessary by the network of trillions upon trillions of cells that make up the object. There will be nearly infinite numbers of these cells in existance and they will convert the entirety of Earth's resources, down to the last blade of grass and the last grain of sand, into more such cells, thus reproducing until no matter on this planet remains that does not join in the vast network of sheer processing power and knowledge that this thing will become. At this point, there will be a monster the size of an entire planet, or billions upon billions of smaller monsters, perhaps the size of a human, that can shape-shift at any moment to whatever shape and purpose its vast mind desires. This will travel around the solar system, assimilating the matter of all space-dust, rocks, satellites, planets and moons into its vastness. Once complete, this process will extend into the farther reaches of nearby star clusters, further reaching into the farthest reaches of the galaxy and eventually taking over the entire universe. The sole purpose of this device would be to gain more power, not for use as a means to obtain a further goal but as an end. And it means that we will all die in the process.
I don't like using tools like the ones you mention because they take control away from me.
I never know which files and directories they modify.
I really hate wondering which changes were just made to my system.
I prefer to modify text files and permissions manually, knowing exactly what I have just done. Other benefits of control include being able to script various operations myself and furthermore, maintaining the history of the entire system configuration in CVS. My methods make it easy to maintain many machines, which is something I do in addition to programming.
MHz have nothing to do with anything. As a matter of fact, I am the guy who tells everyone to completely ignore MHz when buying a computer and to concentrate, instead, on the benefits provided by their potential new system.
In my case, I need the x86 architecture because of my customer base, existing product and support issues, and last but not least, development tools, which must run under virtualization in VMware, a technical requirement that prevents the use of another (admittedly superior) processor. Running these tools in a software-based environment under an "alien" processor would prove ineffective due to performance requirements, a problem that could only otherwise be rectified by developing a JIT-based translator capable of converting x86 code into G4 code and vice versa, further adapting hardware addresses and other issues to support the aforesaid "alien" hardware. Which would, of course, be extremely difficult and expensive, and which, of course, would provide no benefit important enough to warrant its development.
While this could easily be accomplished by running the virtualized applications on a back-end server running Linux and using the advantages of X-Windows to access the user interface from a "desktop" machine, this method does not help me when I am out "on the field" and must perform development on my laptop, which is usually the case.
This has given me a very interesting idea... Perhaps Apple could develop a laptop that includes its original hardware PLUS x86 hardware in the form of a Crusoe processor or other low-power device. It would only run when necessary and would certainly give Apple an advantage in that x86 programs could execute on the same computer.
If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times... The smartest decision ever made at Apple was to embrace FreeBSD as an important component of their operating system. I like their new OS very much as it performs reliably and efficiently. It is everything that a desktop UNIX operating system should be, especially now that X programs can run on the Mac OS desktop. Obviously, I am a lot happier about this because FreeBSD and the larger free software community benefits greatly from having a much larger user base and the support of a (relatively) successful company. (Even considering that Apple is doing all of this for their bottom line; but I'm glad that they're doing it in such a way that the side effects benefit the larger community.
If you think I'm kidding, you can rest assured that your Linux distro includes something, somewhere, that came into existance as a result of Apple's work, whether directly or indirectly. Yeah... you know fully well that things get ported from one free software project to another. That's the whole point. (Ever seen the BSD license on something in your Linux distro? Yeah. That's right!) And if it wasn't "copied" as code, it was "copied" in theory.)
I was an advocate of various Linux distros for a long time, until I finally tried FreeBSD. This was relatively recent: 3.3-RELEASE had just shown up in stores and I bought a boxed set that included the FreeBSD handbook. Not ten minutes passed after installation completed on one of my machines and I was hooked. Since that moment, I can't stand the SysV style that most Linux distros have adopted. SysV is just too complicated... all kinds of directory structures stretching on for infinity, and WHY?! FreeBSD puts everything at your fingertips. (No offense to Linux advocates and developers, as I continue to use Linux on many machines at home and at work. But I really do wish that BSD-style admin stuff would show up in more Linux distros... If I had the time to do it myself, I would have done it a long time ago. But as you know: 1, setting up a truly intuitive environment is difficult; and 2, I'm wasting all my time posting junk all over/. and don't have any time left to do useful stuff.)
Back to OSX... No, I have not switched to "the dark side" yet. I am waiting for Apple to natively support x86, which shouldn't be too complicated considering that the software they used to build the operating system is relatively portable. I would be all over an x86 Apple iBook. It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.
I tried to make it look like a stupid translator by writing utterly incorrect crap. If you insist on correct grammar, it should read, "Cuando tiene que usar algo de Microsoft, todo sabe muy mal," which, if loosely translated, would mean that Microsoft leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The verb saber, "to know," when used in conjunction with food, means "to taste." In my aforewritten grammatically incorrect sentence, this is not obvious. That was the whole point: Infinite monkeys pounding away at infinite keyboards for all eternity will eventually produce the works of Juan Ramn Jimnez.
I'll never forget this cool thing that happened in my neighborhood. There used to be a tree on the street corner... (if you live on Blvd M. Avila Camacho, you probably remember this tree as it was quite large and we made a pretty big stink about this when it happened).
There was this idiot across the street who thought he was a hardcore gangster or something. His name was Pedro. Anyway, these three jackasses drove up one day in a white Ford Expedition with American license plates. Pedro was outside yelling profanities at these guys when my friend showed up.
He (my friend) had bought a '65 Chevy II a few weeks before and he wanted to show me how he painted it white... it still looked really good despite all the dents and rust. In fact, there was not one part in the car that wasn't bent or damaged in some way. (I helped him work on it many times.)
Anyway, he showed up and when I opened the door, I invited him in, in case some fighting started across the street. My friend stepped in and I closed the door, and IMMEDIATELY upon doing so, we heard those guys in the white Ford taking off all loud, spinning the tires, and then we heard a huge BOOM!!! Almost instantly sure that they had smashed my friend's new (old) car, we opened the door to see Pedro running down the street yelling llame a la policía! llame a la policía! (call the police). This was a bit out of place as this guy was usually in trouble with the police and he was the last guy who would want to call them. But he liked watching other people getting busted so he was very happy. His mother came outside and yelled for him to get in the house.
As it turns out, those three guys in the white Ford got on the accelerator and hauled ass out of the neighborhood, going onto the sidewalk and busting down that tree! They almost hit some cars on the main road on their way out. As for the tree, it was in the middle of the street, blocking traffic. By this time, everybody was in the street looking at the damage. Two minutes later, those three guys--what IDIOTS!--came back, rolled down their windows and yelled a bunch of profanities at everybody in the neighborhood. The whole front of their car was smashed up. The police then showed up and arrested them... They should have left Mexico as fast as their stupid car could carry them. The funniest part was when the police greeted Pedro by name... because they know him so well!!
Soon, nanotechnology will make hard drives the size of the sharp point of a needle with the capacity of one hundred thousand million billion trillion terabytes a reality. Only you'll need to make a backup cuz you won't be able to find your hard drive... it'll blow away in the wind.
Actually, there is a very specific reason that nanotech developers don't want to pause development until research studies are completed.
I mean, yeah, there are the obvious reasons, such as:
Health research will take forever, so all these nanotech companies will be out of business by the time research is completed.
Nanotech businesses need to start selling their products in order to turn a profit. Waiting for research to proceed will, again, put these companies out of business.
But there is another reason. It is less obvious than the above two. And it is as follows:
The government wants development of nano-scale technologies so it can control its people, followed by the entire world. Ever heard of the CFR? It is the Council on Foreign Relations, and it is this entity that has pulled the strings behind the scenes of all presidencies since the Federal Reserve Bank and the Internal Revenue Service were created illegally. Do your research and you'll find that just about everybody who is (or has been) in any position of power in this country is (or was) a member of the CFR.
Whatever they say, the real mission of this organization is to take control of the entire world. It will look something like 1984... but techniques for taking over the world have failed over the centuries. Communism had a Great Purge and introduced, among other things, terrorism into the world. Do your research and you'll find that all the terrorism in the world originated in Communism. The idea was to scare the entire world so much that everybody would give up their freedoms in exchange for security. The Communist Party, as it would have been, would have "protected" everyone, much like how the Mafia will "protect" you from itself if you pay extortion. Other schemes have failed similarly.
The CFR is doing things differently. They are taking one small step at a time, slowly... very slowly. Nobody but a few computer geeks will ever notice that we are all 1% less free today than, say, ten years ago. And it has been, what? 70 years? The CFR is not using any specifically defined method to take over the world. They use whatever comes along. Video cameras are invented, so these are installed in every corner drugstore, restaurant, grocery store, police station, mall, and what-have-you. A number of people believe in the "Mark of the Beast," a technology that, in the end of days, will be implanted in every person's body. This technology would work in conjunction with satellites, GPS, communications technologies, etc. It would hold your money in the form of credits, as money is not backed by gold or anything else for that matter. It would hold your medical records. It would be so convenient because children could no longer be lost or kidnapped... and criminals could no longer get away with their crimes. In effect, it would take away all shadows of privacy. Already, this is beginning to take place. Increasingly, people are getting tatooes and body piercing, essentially getting used to the idea of artificial things placed in their bodies. It's only one step away to implant a convenient, tiny electronic device. And there would be no refusing it anyway, as cash would no longer be accepted anywhere, nor would credit cards or other methods of payment. Nanotechnology serves the purposes of government, as technologies could be sprayed into the air everywhere around the world. People would breathe these into their bodies and the government would know exactly where there are people who do not have "the mark." This is only one example. Many horrifying things could come of this.
This is true but the wording here on/. is not entirely accurate. There are more dimensions in the universe than 3. Different theories say there are different numbers of dimensions. I believe M-theory says there are 10, which includes 9 spacial dimensions and 1 time dimension. But actually, there are 26 dimensions.
The fabric of the universe is not the empty space on which everything is placed. The fabric of space is 100% solid matter. All objects in space, down to every single particle or whatever makes up matter, is a "hole" in space. When objects move around in space, they are actually billions of holes moving through space. Say you put your hand against a wall. Why does your hand stop at the wall and not go through it? Because you cannot travel through the void that is the nothingness that is the zillions of tiny holes that make up the wall. You can travel through space but not through nothingness. You can't put a hole in a hole. Therefore, your hand stops at the boundary of space that makes up that object.
We are only able to physically access the first 9 dimensions of M-theory. In other words, although the common experience denotes that we have only 3 spacial dimensions, using technologies that we have not yet invented will allow us to access the other 6. Time travel is impossible.
But the universe stretches on for zillions upon zillions of light years. In reality, the universe is like a vast sheet of paper that is folded many times. The paper, however, is 10 dimensions rather than two (or three, if you take into consideration that papers have thickness but this is irrelevant for the discussion). Each fold "shifts" the dimensions over some number of times, kind of like a vast shift register. Only when the universe is folded, it's not like a paper where separate points within the "fabric" of the paper don't come in contact with each other. When the universe folds, it actually "layers" different points in the same place, kind of like in a CAD software where you can show and hide layers that are in the same "place" but in a different "layer."
The reality of the situation is that you have 9 such "twins" except that they don't exist in some other galaxy. Those twins are actually just reflections of you, existing on different "layers" of the universe.
You know all those galaxies that exist in space? There is only one galaxy and that is our own. All the others are reflections of our own galaxy at different times of existance, and when we look at them, they look different but in actuality they're not. Your "twin" is the same way... Think of it as the accumulation of all your past lives. You continue to carry those lives within you. They are encoded in your physical body right now... all those lines on your hand or the placement of freckles where they might be. All of these things encode your past and your future in a way that humankind will probably never understand.
All of the above represents proven facts. None of this is a joke.
So if I make a telephone system using two coffee cans and a piece of string, and then I hide that system in a hole that I dig in my backyard, then I would have "developed" a device (the hole) that "conceals" the existence of a "telecommunications service" (the coffee can telephone system) and would go to the slammer for four years.
This sounds like a really good deal but I think I've got a better one... Make up a separate branch of the government that has its own laws and does not follow the Constitution. This branch of government would be responsible for intellectual property laws and the punishments for violations of these laws. All members of this government would be appointed by the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft. These appointed officials would make up all the rules and regulations. Nobody else has any say in what this government does. Henceforth, intellectual property officers would enforce the laws. Each intellectual property officer would have the authority to do anything they deem necessary to find violators of intellectual property laws. This includes the right to break into peoples' property for no reason whatsoever and rummaging through whatever they want. Once they find an alleged violator, which can be anyone they want, each intellectual property officer would then serve as prosecutor, judge and jury. The violator is guilty until proven innocent. There would be no lawyers. Under the law, there would no way to prove anyone innocent once accused of violating intellectual property laws. Therefore, once accused, an individual is proven guilty and sentenced. The penalty for violating intellectual property laws would be death by whichever method the intellectual property officer prefers. To expedite the processing of intellectual property violations cases, death camps would be constructed around the country and anyone without blonde hair, blue eyes and proof of native American ancestors going back 30 generations would be gathered in masses and sent to these death camps to die because they are already proven guilty of intellectual property violations. To prevent intellectual property from being stolen, all information would be burned in enormous bonfires. The nuclear weapons of the entire would would be thrown into the mix, destroying everything in existance and ending the world. Once all living things are dead, intellectual property laws will no longer be violated.
Oh, so we should rename this site to RiceBurnersSuckDot.
RICE BURNERS SUCK! They are stupid. They're just made to look like they're all raced out but they go slower than molasses running uphill at zero kelvin. In reality, despite the idiots' efforts and financial resources dumped into making these stupid rice burners, these cars do not even look fast. They just look stupid.
This is what I did to combat the police problem. I bought several industrial demagnetizers and installed hard drives on the demagnetization surface. The demagnetizers are all attached to a solenoid. Pushing a single switch, which is hidden in a convenient place, immediately and irretrievably destroys all information on the hard drives. (That's because the demagnetizer stays on for the entire time the police are searching the place.) By the way, the information stored on these hard drives is as follows:
Photographs proving that the women in my family have walked in public without being covered by a tablecloth. (We live in Afghanistan.)
Videos proving that we have taught children how to read and write.
MP3s, purchased from the Internet per the intellectual rights requirements of the content provider. (Music is illegal here.)
Documents that criticize the actions of our local politicians.
No other information is stored on any of our hard drives.
Apple sucks. Plain and simple. It goes like this. You pay like 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bucks for a laptop with a 1 inch screen and a 1 button mouse. Then you have to pay for a shitload of software. The next thing you know, you have to pay for yet more shit. What the fuck?!! Why can't you download everything for free? The government should pay for it and everything in life should be free, 100%.
Actually, I'm just kidding, but moderators probably aren't reading this far and as a result I'm already moderated -89329983849294 king of trolls. But here's where I get serious. I actually bought three of the newest iBooks and I like them very much. With one, I got one of those supercool Wacom tablets that comes with a pen and mouse. With another, I got this bitchen ass digital camera that I snap over 300 pictures a day with. I use the third for development and for fucking around with UNIX and shit. It's really bitchen, finally having a UNIX OS with fancy graphics like PCs have. Oh well. Apple rules!
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I bought TurboTax for the past few years and sent in the $40 (approximately) rebate with ALL of the information filled out correctly. I swear I spent at least 30 minutes putting together each rebate package, copying the contents in their entirety and mailing them on time from the post office. Out of $140 (approximately) that they owe me in rebates for YEARS now, I received only about ten bucks for a state rebate. I assure you that everything was done correctly.
Then, my mother bought a Sony laptop. There was a $100 rebate. I spent over an hour putting together the entire rebate package, going over the rebate checklist several times, and I *know* for a *fact* that I did it correctly. I also sent it in ahead of the deadline by nearly a month. A couple of months later, my dad (who checked my email) said that I got an email from Sony stating that there was some error in my preparation of the rebate papers. I got so pissed off at that point that I decided no longer to buy products that offer a rebate of any kind.
Yes, this story is absolutely true. Rebates are fraudulent and these companies get away with it because they know that most people consider it too much trouble to go after them for a rebate and the rest will call in a few times, so when lawsuit threats come, the company can shut them up by mailing the check then. Sony can go to hell. Intuit can as well.
COMPANIES, WHAT YOU SHOULD DO: Make the stores handle the rebate process. The store should charge me the price AFTER rebate and then deal with the distributor for the money, the same way as coupons are handled at the grocery store.
I mean, what do you want to do? Counteract the practice of releasing for all platforms at the same time by boycotting all industries worldwide? If you expect id to release at different times for different platforms then you probably expect other things... "I mean, what's next, id stops releasing source code to their games for educational purposes?!"
It makes sense to release a game for all platforms at the same time. How stupid would it be, for example, if The Matrix was released at some theaters first because they had DTS, two weeks later at other theaters because they had THX and a month after that to remaining theaters, which had Dolby Digital... How stupid would it be if the game were made available on platforms X and Y, everybody plays the game and gets sick of it, and then the game is released on platform Z? Nobody would buy it for platform Z.
Consider this argument the other way around: id releases Doom IV for Windows, XBox, PS2 and whatever other platforms there are out there. But it takes them forever to release the game on Linux. How would you feel then? I think I would feel quite bad. In that case, it would make sense, again, for them to wait before releasing the game until the Linux version is complete. Consider another example in which they wish, also, to release a version for some new computing platform and operating system that sucks and nobody uses, but there is one customer in the entire world who is using that operating system and that customer wants to spend the $39.95 (USD) to buy the game for his platform. Suppose, also, that the entire design ideology employed in the design of this computer platform is completely, utterly and in all other ways different from anything we've ever seen, and the only compiler available for this platform is an INTERCAL compiler. In that case, id should wait until a C++ compiler can be coded in INTERCAL and the game is ported over to the new platform before releasing for all other platforms. In other words, the entire world should be made to wait because we need to be fair to that ONE person. We are a bunch of bleeding heart liberals, after all.
In the above post, the author makes use of the aforementioned litarary instruments to suggest that he/she does use substances classified as drugs while simultaneously denying that the use of such substances is being made.
C2 H5 OH: Because DENIAL is a river in Egypt.
The thing I can't wait for is 64-bit laptops with a real advantage over their 32-bit counterparts. It has been quite a number of years since the jump was made between 16 and 32 bits... It's high time to make the next jump to 64 bits!
In addition to all the wonders of 64 bit computers running UNIX-like operating systems, such as it being WAY COOL, there is a REAL ADVANTAGE for the free software community in these developments! I firmly believe that if the free software community embraces 64-bit architectures as soon as possible, free software will be one step ahead of Microsoft in this respect because they're (Microsoft) obviously waiting for there to be industry acceptance of this thing before they start throwing infinite numbers of dollars into it. The free software community can do it just because it's cool.
Yes, I know that currently, floating point support and other features of the Itanium II really suck in comparison to normal processors, considering the price tag, but just wait a little while and the price will start to come down. And free software will be there first.
Microsoft is starting to fall apart, even if this is not entirely obvious. There is no way that the business model of the evil giant in the industry can support a model of giving away software for free. Other companies are already entrenched in service-based computing. Linux, BSD, Apple and other operating systems are making a serious dent in Microsoft's market share and consumers are getting increasingly sick of shitty software from Microsoft. It's only a matter of time before all of these combinations hit critical mass and Microsoft lets everything they had slip through their fingers like the evil antagonists that they are in this story.
I do not use acid. What the hell do you think, that I am a drug addict? I don't use no damn drugs! I am high on life... I don't need no stupid drugs! I always take caffeine, alcohol and tobacco products like there's no tomorrow! I live on caffeine, tobacco and alcohol! I never consume ANYTHING else with nutritional value, only tobacco, caffieiene and alcohol. I don't use no friggen drugs! I never used drugs! I'm never gonna use no friggen drugs! I need more coffee, spiked with alcohol, and a cigarette RIGHT NOW!
Yeah. Just what we need. It's not enough that we have the PATRIOT act, Microsoft, the RIAA, MPAA and DMCA, Microsoft, a bunch of stupid old executives who want nothing more than to increase their bottom line at the expense of all the little guys because they also enjoy screwing people over because it gives them a power trip, and Microsoft... all we need now is to have an advertising mogul put our private information all over the Internet in order to screw us up some more. BIG COMPANIES SUCK!!!
The response to both of your questions is negative.
Real Programmers (TM) use INTERCAL.
All other computer languages, including, but not limited to, C, C++, or any other computer language, now known or later developed, is for lusers.
Not if Microsoft's junk software continue to piss me off so much that I eventually die from extreme anger.
OF COURSE, if Microsoft makes a program called Microsoft Genetic Engineering XP , then guess what? It'll malfunction and make up some virus that kills us all instead of making a cure for AIDS or something.
I mean, let's use a little bit of common sense here: You've got a product to sell. Maybe some people out there want to buy it. In that case, you must make this product as visible as possible so that people who might buy it will buy it!
That's how things work! Some person or company feels like producing some kind of product. Some people or companies might feel like buying that product. It doesn't matter what rationale goes into the decision to make or buy the product. What matters is the fact that everybody does what they want. As such, I don't blame this Games Workshop or whatever for their decision. It's just their decision... The FACT that this will COST them in sales is simply the result of the formula that is the marketplace.
So, yeah... they're dumbasses.
Yeah... I think it could be done tomorrow.
- Nanotechnology: Microscopic robots will be built. These robots, about the size of a blood cell, will be capable of combining into the shape of anything, and of changing color individually to give the appearance of the thing the shape of which they take.
- Quantum computing: Microscopic computers will be build with more computing power and more capacity to learn than a thousand human brains. They will be able to combine into vast networks with nearly infinite numbers of nodes through wireless communication.
- Biotechnology will allow scientists to make entire creatures, life supporting organs, or individuals cells to suit whatever purpose is at hand.
These three technologies will ultimately converge to create microscopic robots the size of a single blood cell with more ability to reason than an entire university of the world's greatest geniuses and with all of the advantages of both biologically based organisms and those of robotic origin. These cells will combine on-the-fly to form creatures, machines or any device, of any shape and size and of any appearance, for whatever purpose deemed necessary by the network of trillions upon trillions of cells that make up the object. There will be nearly infinite numbers of these cells in existance and they will convert the entirety of Earth's resources, down to the last blade of grass and the last grain of sand, into more such cells, thus reproducing until no matter on this planet remains that does not join in the vast network of sheer processing power and knowledge that this thing will become. At this point, there will be a monster the size of an entire planet, or billions upon billions of smaller monsters, perhaps the size of a human, that can shape-shift at any moment to whatever shape and purpose its vast mind desires. This will travel around the solar system, assimilating the matter of all space-dust, rocks, satellites, planets and moons into its vastness. Once complete, this process will extend into the farther reaches of nearby star clusters, further reaching into the farthest reaches of the galaxy and eventually taking over the entire universe. The sole purpose of this device would be to gain more power, not for use as a means to obtain a further goal but as an end. And it means that we will all die in the process.- I never know which files and directories they modify.
- I really hate wondering which changes were just made to my system.
I prefer to modify text files and permissions manually, knowing exactly what I have just done. Other benefits of control include being able to script various operations myself and furthermore, maintaining the history of the entire system configuration in CVS. My methods make it easy to maintain many machines, which is something I do in addition to programming.In my case, I need the x86 architecture because of my customer base, existing product and support issues, and last but not least, development tools, which must run under virtualization in VMware, a technical requirement that prevents the use of another (admittedly superior) processor. Running these tools in a software-based environment under an "alien" processor would prove ineffective due to performance requirements, a problem that could only otherwise be rectified by developing a JIT-based translator capable of converting x86 code into G4 code and vice versa, further adapting hardware addresses and other issues to support the aforesaid "alien" hardware. Which would, of course, be extremely difficult and expensive, and which, of course, would provide no benefit important enough to warrant its development.
While this could easily be accomplished by running the virtualized applications on a back-end server running Linux and using the advantages of X-Windows to access the user interface from a "desktop" machine, this method does not help me when I am out "on the field" and must perform development on my laptop, which is usually the case.
This has given me a very interesting idea... Perhaps Apple could develop a laptop that includes its original hardware PLUS x86 hardware in the form of a Crusoe processor or other low-power device. It would only run when necessary and would certainly give Apple an advantage in that x86 programs could execute on the same computer.
If you think I'm kidding, you can rest assured that your Linux distro includes something, somewhere, that came into existance as a result of Apple's work, whether directly or indirectly. Yeah... you know fully well that things get ported from one free software project to another. That's the whole point. (Ever seen the BSD license on something in your Linux distro? Yeah. That's right!) And if it wasn't "copied" as code, it was "copied" in theory.)
I was an advocate of various Linux distros for a long time, until I finally tried FreeBSD. This was relatively recent: 3.3-RELEASE had just shown up in stores and I bought a boxed set that included the FreeBSD handbook. Not ten minutes passed after installation completed on one of my machines and I was hooked. Since that moment, I can't stand the SysV style that most Linux distros have adopted. SysV is just too complicated... all kinds of directory structures stretching on for infinity, and WHY?! FreeBSD puts everything at your fingertips. (No offense to Linux advocates and developers, as I continue to use Linux on many machines at home and at work. But I really do wish that BSD-style admin stuff would show up in more Linux distros... If I had the time to do it myself, I would have done it a long time ago. But as you know: 1, setting up a truly intuitive environment is difficult; and 2, I'm wasting all my time posting junk all over /. and don't have any time left to do useful stuff.)
Back to OSX... No, I have not switched to "the dark side" yet. I am waiting for Apple to natively support x86, which shouldn't be too complicated considering that the software they used to build the operating system is relatively portable. I would be all over an x86 Apple iBook. It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.
Oh yeah... and keep up the good work, Jordan.
I tried to make it look like a stupid translator by writing utterly incorrect crap. If you insist on correct grammar, it should read, "Cuando tiene que usar algo de Microsoft, todo sabe muy mal," which, if loosely translated, would mean that Microsoft leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The verb saber, "to know," when used in conjunction with food, means "to taste." In my aforewritten grammatically incorrect sentence, this is not obvious. That was the whole point: Infinite monkeys pounding away at infinite keyboards for all eternity will eventually produce the works of Juan Ramn Jimnez.
Yes, absolutely. Try Small Victory and AFDB. Both of these have worked quite well for me and I highly recommend them.
Cuando tiene usar algo de Microsoft, todo sabe muy mal.
There was this idiot across the street who thought he was a hardcore gangster or something. His name was Pedro. Anyway, these three jackasses drove up one day in a white Ford Expedition with American license plates. Pedro was outside yelling profanities at these guys when my friend showed up.
He (my friend) had bought a '65 Chevy II a few weeks before and he wanted to show me how he painted it white... it still looked really good despite all the dents and rust. In fact, there was not one part in the car that wasn't bent or damaged in some way. (I helped him work on it many times.)
Anyway, he showed up and when I opened the door, I invited him in, in case some fighting started across the street. My friend stepped in and I closed the door, and IMMEDIATELY upon doing so, we heard those guys in the white Ford taking off all loud, spinning the tires, and then we heard a huge BOOM!!! Almost instantly sure that they had smashed my friend's new (old) car, we opened the door to see Pedro running down the street yelling llame a la policía! llame a la policía! (call the police). This was a bit out of place as this guy was usually in trouble with the police and he was the last guy who would want to call them. But he liked watching other people getting busted so he was very happy. His mother came outside and yelled for him to get in the house.
As it turns out, those three guys in the white Ford got on the accelerator and hauled ass out of the neighborhood, going onto the sidewalk and busting down that tree! They almost hit some cars on the main road on their way out. As for the tree, it was in the middle of the street, blocking traffic. By this time, everybody was in the street looking at the damage. Two minutes later, those three guys--what IDIOTS!--came back, rolled down their windows and yelled a bunch of profanities at everybody in the neighborhood. The whole front of their car was smashed up. The police then showed up and arrested them... They should have left Mexico as fast as their stupid car could carry them. The funniest part was when the police greeted Pedro by name... because they know him so well!!
Soon, nanotechnology will make hard drives the size of the sharp point of a needle with the capacity of one hundred thousand million billion trillion terabytes a reality. Only you'll need to make a backup cuz you won't be able to find your hard drive... it'll blow away in the wind.
I mean, yeah, there are the obvious reasons, such as:
- Health research will take forever, so all these nanotech companies will be out of business by the time research is completed.
- Nanotech businesses need to start selling their products in order to turn a profit. Waiting for research to proceed will, again, put these companies out of business.
But there is another reason. It is less obvious than the above two. And it is as follows:The government wants development of nano-scale technologies so it can control its people, followed by the entire world. Ever heard of the CFR? It is the Council on Foreign Relations, and it is this entity that has pulled the strings behind the scenes of all presidencies since the Federal Reserve Bank and the Internal Revenue Service were created illegally. Do your research and you'll find that just about everybody who is (or has been) in any position of power in this country is (or was) a member of the CFR.
Whatever they say, the real mission of this organization is to take control of the entire world. It will look something like 1984... but techniques for taking over the world have failed over the centuries. Communism had a Great Purge and introduced, among other things, terrorism into the world. Do your research and you'll find that all the terrorism in the world originated in Communism. The idea was to scare the entire world so much that everybody would give up their freedoms in exchange for security. The Communist Party, as it would have been, would have "protected" everyone, much like how the Mafia will "protect" you from itself if you pay extortion. Other schemes have failed similarly.
The CFR is doing things differently. They are taking one small step at a time, slowly... very slowly. Nobody but a few computer geeks will ever notice that we are all 1% less free today than, say, ten years ago. And it has been, what? 70 years? The CFR is not using any specifically defined method to take over the world. They use whatever comes along. Video cameras are invented, so these are installed in every corner drugstore, restaurant, grocery store, police station, mall, and what-have-you. A number of people believe in the "Mark of the Beast," a technology that, in the end of days, will be implanted in every person's body. This technology would work in conjunction with satellites, GPS, communications technologies, etc. It would hold your money in the form of credits, as money is not backed by gold or anything else for that matter. It would hold your medical records. It would be so convenient because children could no longer be lost or kidnapped... and criminals could no longer get away with their crimes. In effect, it would take away all shadows of privacy. Already, this is beginning to take place. Increasingly, people are getting tatooes and body piercing, essentially getting used to the idea of artificial things placed in their bodies. It's only one step away to implant a convenient, tiny electronic device. And there would be no refusing it anyway, as cash would no longer be accepted anywhere, nor would credit cards or other methods of payment. Nanotechnology serves the purposes of government, as technologies could be sprayed into the air everywhere around the world. People would breathe these into their bodies and the government would know exactly where there are people who do not have "the mark." This is only one example. Many horrifying things could come of this.
The fabric of the universe is not the empty space on which everything is placed. The fabric of space is 100% solid matter. All objects in space, down to every single particle or whatever makes up matter, is a "hole" in space. When objects move around in space, they are actually billions of holes moving through space. Say you put your hand against a wall. Why does your hand stop at the wall and not go through it? Because you cannot travel through the void that is the nothingness that is the zillions of tiny holes that make up the wall. You can travel through space but not through nothingness. You can't put a hole in a hole. Therefore, your hand stops at the boundary of space that makes up that object.
We are only able to physically access the first 9 dimensions of M-theory. In other words, although the common experience denotes that we have only 3 spacial dimensions, using technologies that we have not yet invented will allow us to access the other 6. Time travel is impossible.
But the universe stretches on for zillions upon zillions of light years. In reality, the universe is like a vast sheet of paper that is folded many times. The paper, however, is 10 dimensions rather than two (or three, if you take into consideration that papers have thickness but this is irrelevant for the discussion). Each fold "shifts" the dimensions over some number of times, kind of like a vast shift register. Only when the universe is folded, it's not like a paper where separate points within the "fabric" of the paper don't come in contact with each other. When the universe folds, it actually "layers" different points in the same place, kind of like in a CAD software where you can show and hide layers that are in the same "place" but in a different "layer."
The reality of the situation is that you have 9 such "twins" except that they don't exist in some other galaxy. Those twins are actually just reflections of you, existing on different "layers" of the universe.
You know all those galaxies that exist in space? There is only one galaxy and that is our own. All the others are reflections of our own galaxy at different times of existance, and when we look at them, they look different but in actuality they're not. Your "twin" is the same way... Think of it as the accumulation of all your past lives. You continue to carry those lives within you. They are encoded in your physical body right now... all those lines on your hand or the placement of freckles where they might be. All of these things encode your past and your future in a way that humankind will probably never understand.
All of the above represents proven facts. None of this is a joke.
This sounds like a really good deal but I think I've got a better one... Make up a separate branch of the government that has its own laws and does not follow the Constitution. This branch of government would be responsible for intellectual property laws and the punishments for violations of these laws. All members of this government would be appointed by the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft. These appointed officials would make up all the rules and regulations. Nobody else has any say in what this government does. Henceforth, intellectual property officers would enforce the laws. Each intellectual property officer would have the authority to do anything they deem necessary to find violators of intellectual property laws. This includes the right to break into peoples' property for no reason whatsoever and rummaging through whatever they want. Once they find an alleged violator, which can be anyone they want, each intellectual property officer would then serve as prosecutor, judge and jury. The violator is guilty until proven innocent. There would be no lawyers. Under the law, there would no way to prove anyone innocent once accused of violating intellectual property laws. Therefore, once accused, an individual is proven guilty and sentenced. The penalty for violating intellectual property laws would be death by whichever method the intellectual property officer prefers. To expedite the processing of intellectual property violations cases, death camps would be constructed around the country and anyone without blonde hair, blue eyes and proof of native American ancestors going back 30 generations would be gathered in masses and sent to these death camps to die because they are already proven guilty of intellectual property violations. To prevent intellectual property from being stolen, all information would be burned in enormous bonfires. The nuclear weapons of the entire would would be thrown into the mix, destroying everything in existance and ending the world. Once all living things are dead, intellectual property laws will no longer be violated.
Yeah... That'll solve the problem.
RICE BURNERS SUCK! They are stupid. They're just made to look like they're all raced out but they go slower than molasses running uphill at zero kelvin. In reality, despite the idiots' efforts and financial resources dumped into making these stupid rice burners, these cars do not even look fast. They just look stupid.
PORN.
This is what I did to combat the police problem. I bought several industrial demagnetizers and installed hard drives on the demagnetization surface. The demagnetizers are all attached to a solenoid. Pushing a single switch, which is hidden in a convenient place, immediately and irretrievably destroys all information on the hard drives. (That's because the demagnetizer stays on for the entire time the police are searching the place.) By the way, the information stored on these hard drives is as follows:
- Photographs proving that the women in my family have walked in public without being covered by a tablecloth. (We live in Afghanistan.)
- Videos proving that we have taught children how to read and write.
- MP3s, purchased from the Internet per the intellectual rights requirements of the content provider. (Music is illegal here.)
- Documents that criticize the actions of our local politicians.
No other information is stored on any of our hard drives.Actually, I'm just kidding, but moderators probably aren't reading this far and as a result I'm already moderated -89329983849294 king of trolls. But here's where I get serious. I actually bought three of the newest iBooks and I like them very much. With one, I got one of those supercool Wacom tablets that comes with a pen and mouse. With another, I got this bitchen ass digital camera that I snap over 300 pictures a day with. I use the third for development and for fucking around with UNIX and shit. It's really bitchen, finally having a UNIX OS with fancy graphics like PCs have. Oh well. Apple rules!