She was once quoted by Old Man Murray, when talking about why adventure games aren't popular anymore, as saying something along the lines of, "Well, back then, you had to be at least somewhat intelligent to use a computer. Nowadays, a lot more average people feel they should own one."
Besides, everyone knows that the old Sierra adventure games sucked. LucasArts' adventure games were 100x better.
PNG images will only get better compression ratios than JPEG on images that have large areas that are the same color, such as a mostly black image with a few (small) planets in it.
Under most circumstances, for actual pictures, using JPEG instead of PNG will result in smaller files.
For those not in the know, it should've been "Consume." and "Marry and Reproduce."
They're from the John Carpenter film They Live, in which aliens are trying to take over the planet, and have bribed some human leaders into helping. The aliens masquerade as humans, and insert subliminal messages into advertisements. Roddy Piper, who plays the protagonist, finds a special pair of sunglasses that allow him to see things as they really are. There's a scene where he walks outside and sees some billboards. Then he puts on the sunglasses, and sees what the billboards really say: one says "Consume", another says "Marry and reproduce".
Many Linux users don't even register at Linux Counter.
I never did, until just now. If anything, the Linux Counter graph would be an underestimate because the only people it shows are those who both a)knew about it, and b)cared enough to register.
This particular Ask Slashdot is retarded. It's like the people who ask, "Why do they make Macs and PCs different?"
People are imperfect, and therefor anything created by people will be imperfect. Thusly, hardware and software will always have bugs.
It is possible to write software that doesn't crash very often, but that depends on:
Stable hardware
All software layers under the program must be stable (such as the OS, system libraries, windowing system, drivers, etc.)
Knowledgeable programmer(s)
Good coding practices and the proper choice of programming language for the task (and yes, C can be a "safe" language, if people would just use "safe" library functions like snprintf() instead of sprintf(), fgets() instead of fscanf(), strncat() instead of strcat(), etc.)
A well-though-out design that is as uncomplicated as possible (i.e. not having a separate daemon to handle configuration info for programs *ahem* GNOME *ahem*).
A programming team that can resist the urge to add extraneous features. A program should do one thing and do it well.
Time. No program is bug-free right off the bat. Sufficient time for testing and debugging must be given.
You're right. Very few bands record their music together, because then the sounds are "married" to each other: once recorded, you can't go back and boost the volume on the lead singer without increasing the volume on the backup singers, because the lead singer's microphone would also be (slightly) recording the backup singers.
It's not out of the question that they could record the music at the same time, but each person would have to be in a different sound booth, and the lyrics would have to be recorded separately if the lead singer is also the lead guitarist (to prevent the singer's mic from picking up him strumming the guitar).
Item: the universe has matter that can't be seen from earth using our current technology!
Item: retarded scientists conclude that because we can't see it, regardless of why (too small, too far away, maybe obscured by some other object, maybe it just isn't reflective enough (like many objects in our own solar system), etc.), it must be some mysterious new type of matter! WIMP! MACHO! Dark matter! Crazy death x-ray xeno mega matter!
The suite number was probably the suite number for the particular Mailboxes Etc. place that your PMB was at.
I used to work at a little Mom & Pop postal place, and people would often confuse the suite number for the store with their box number, so we'd get stuff like
Joe Smith
1111 S. Somestreet, #118 Tempe, AZ 85283
And we'd have to look in the computer to see what the box # for that person was (118 was the suite number, not the box number), when it should have been
Joe Smith
1111 S. Somestreet Suite 118, PMB 205 (or #205, or PO 205, in practice the USPS didn't seem to care) Tempe, AZ 85283
Except that another factor in who got the plague and who didn't was hygiene.
People who didn't have fleas or live in flea-infested areas were much less likely to contract the plague.
I also remember reading that people who were around horses a lot were much less likely, but I don't remember why, and that could just be either BS or coincidence.
I used to have one (I probably still have it stashed away somewhere), and after about half an hour of gaming I would have to stop - my thumb was just too sore to continue.
Anyone who uses the X Window system without a 3 button mouse is missing out, and some programs require a mouse with 3 buttons, such as Maya (the SGI, Linux, and Windows version do; dunno 'bout the Mac version, but it probably requires one too).
Solaris is not the only proprietary Unix that works best with a 3 button mouse; practically any Unix system that runs X Windows will benefit from having 3 buttons on the mouse.
For the record, anyone with a scrollwheel on their mouse has a 5 button mouse.
I hate to tell you this, but actor's don't watch themselves as they're doing the scene. If the director will let them (they sometimes don't, for varying reasons), they actor's can watch a recording from the camera's video tap after they've done the scene.
Plus, having Andy Serkis actually on set, and recording his mo-cap data right there during the scene means that the other actors can react to Gollum. Remember, good actors don't act, they react, playing off each other's actions and emotions during the scene.
Maybe George Lucas should take an "Acting For TV & Film" class. Good directors understand how to get the best performances from their actors, sometimes bending over backwards to do it, and the best way to understand how to get great performances from actors is to understand how actors do their thing.
If you actually understood real acting and real directing (not just George Lucas style directing), you'd understand why.
The reason is, of course, that a decent actor will often be able to give you more than you expected. They will try to get inside the head of their character and will be able to point out things (perhaps dialog) that the character wouldn't actually say or do, and suggest replacements that will often make a scene 10 times better.
Often, a director who is good with actors will let the actors play the scene their way for the first take or two, giving them little or no direction until the 3rd take or so, just so that they can see what the actor's natural way of doing the scene is.
The best actors don't act, they react. They play off each other, using the other actor's emotions to build their own. This will almost always produce acting that is far better than an actor sitting all by themselves in a recording studio (for animated films, whether traditional or CG, the different actors usually record their lines separately, according to their schedules).
And while an animator may be a great animator, able to move a character so that its walking motion is indistinguishable from the real thing, they aren't actors. They understand animating, not acting, and probably won't ever get inside the heads of the characters they're animating or argue with the director that the character would never walk that way, or say that line, or whatever.
While the actor arguing with the director may sound like a bad thing, and when done on the set it usually is, an actor who is able to act like a professional instead of an overpaid child will bring up any, erm, "differences of oppinion" with the director during the script readings and the rehearsals, not on the set. Likewise, a director who is also a professional and not an egomaniac will listen to the actor's suggestions, even if they ultimately don't use them, and when they do use them, the film is often better because of it.
The director or actors will sometimes think of something right there on the set that he or she never would have otherwise thought of. For example, the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy is confronted by the guy with the big ass sword. Originally a big fight scene had been planned, but Harrison Ford was sick that day, and didn't feel like doing a big scene. He went to Steven Spielberg and asked him if they could simplify the scene, and they came up with the idea of just having Indy pull out his gun and shoot the swordsman, like a real person would have done. This also added a bit of comedy to the scene, because Harrison Ford had a "Yeah? So what?" look on his face right as he whipped out his pistol and blew away the guy with the sword. Had the movie been CG, they never would have thought of it, since even a sick person can sit in a recording studio and say their lines into a microphone.
Let's also keep in mind that these are rough animations, and making the actors time their performance to the CG animation won't usually produce as good of acting as letting the actors do their thing and then timing the CG animation to it. Of course, George Lucas doesn't care about that, he pays very little attention to actors and only seems to care about eye candy.
When did butt become a dirty word? My proposal for fuckfuckfuckfuck (or fuckfuck++), where instructions don't have to be 4 letters long:
fuck: increment the pointer shit: decrement the pointer bitch: increment the byte at the pointer scat: decrement the byte at the pointer cock: output the byte at the pointer cunt: input a byte at store it in the byte at the pointer damn: jump past the matching "dick" if the byte at the pointer is zero prick: jump back to the matching "damn"
When the U.S. firms produce movies, they get all the net profits.
Sorry, but that isn't true. The money from box office sales gets split between the exhibitor (aka the movie theater) and whoever is left.
For the first week a movie is out, and maybe a few weeks after, the exhibitor gets 10% of box office sales, with the rest going to the distributor. After that (or if the movie isn't being released by a big studio) the split is usually around 50/50.
Regardless of how much the distributor gets percentage wise, they have to split it up further still, with the distributor usually taking 50% of whatever the exhibitor doesn't get. Other parties may include the studio that made the film, any production companies involved, and any big name actors who've demanded money "off the back end" (read: a percentage of the *net* box office sales), etc.
Even when the studio that made the film also owns the company distributing the film, they will sometimes treat the distributor as a separate company, because they'll get more money that way (since the distributor takes 50% of whatever the exhibitor doesn't get, and then the studio takes 50% of whatever is left after that, plus a 12% "studio overhead" charge, the production companies often get screwed, which is why they seem to come and go so quickly).
Let's pretend that there is an independant film, My Big Fat Beer Gut. At the box office, it rakes in $50 million dollars, which is considered to be a huge success for just about any independant film. Now, since it was a real independant film (not just some "independant" studio which is actually owned by a huge corporation, like how Miramax is owned by Disney), there is just the distributor and the production company.
Since the film wasn't made by a big Hollywood studio, the distributor can't get a 90/10 deal with the theaters, so the theaters take 50%. Of the $25 million left, the distributor takes 50%, leaving the production company with $12.5 million dollars. The production company is responsible for paying back the film's financial investors (of which there are often several), often having to pay them back in full before getting to see a dime. After that, the production company has to pay the film's financial investors whatever percentage of the profits that they've agreed to (you didn't think the investors put up all that money, just so they could break even, did you?).
Worse, the situation is often much more complicated with foreign films, which leaves more places for distributors and studios to play accounting games. Movie studios are often as bad as recording companies when it comes to playing accounting games.
I'm pretty sure that there was a command to list THE* directory's contents, but I haven't used CP/M in an age and a half.
*There was no heirarchial directory structure in CP/M. In fact, CP/M had no concept of directories. Everything just got lumped together on the disk, and when you listed the disk's contents you got EVERYTHING.
That's the whole point. She was not at all surprised that WinXP wouldn't run on her creaky old hardware, but was aghast that Linux wouldn't run very well on it either.
Slashdot Mirror
Roberta Williams is an elitist snob.
She was once quoted by Old Man Murray, when talking about why adventure games aren't popular anymore, as saying something along the lines of, "Well, back then, you had to be at least somewhat intelligent to use a computer. Nowadays, a lot more average people feel they should own one."
Besides, everyone knows that the old Sierra adventure games sucked. LucasArts' adventure games were 100x better.
Except that GIFs can only have 8-bit indexed color, which means you've got a maximum of 256 different colors.
Both PNG and JPEG support 24-bit true color (which uses 8 bits for each channel, and is not indexed), giving a maximum of around 16.7 million colors.
PNG images will only get better compression ratios than JPEG on images that have large areas that are the same color, such as a mostly black image with a few (small) planets in it.
Under most circumstances, for actual pictures, using JPEG instead of PNG will result in smaller files.
It's also the movie that Duke Nukem 3D stole the line "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." from.
For those not in the know, it should've been "Consume." and "Marry and Reproduce."
They're from the John Carpenter film They Live, in which aliens are trying to take over the planet, and have bribed some human leaders into helping. The aliens masquerade as humans, and insert subliminal messages into advertisements. Roddy Piper, who plays the protagonist, finds a special pair of sunglasses that allow him to see things as they really are. There's a scene where he walks outside and sees some billboards. Then he puts on the sunglasses, and sees what the billboards really say: one says "Consume", another says "Marry and reproduce".
Oh, and according to Linux Counter, there are 18 million users estimated.
Many Linux users don't even register at Linux Counter.
I never did, until just now. If anything, the Linux Counter graph would be an underestimate because the only people it shows are those who both a)knew about it, and b)cared enough to register.
People are imperfect, and therefor anything created by people will be imperfect. Thusly, hardware and software will always have bugs.
It is possible to write software that doesn't crash very often, but that depends on:
Stable hardware
All software layers under the program must be stable (such as the OS, system libraries, windowing system, drivers, etc.)
Knowledgeable programmer(s)
Good coding practices and the proper choice of programming language for the task (and yes, C can be a "safe" language, if people would just use "safe" library functions like snprintf() instead of sprintf(), fgets() instead of fscanf(), strncat() instead of strcat(), etc.)
A well-though-out design that is as uncomplicated as possible (i.e. not having a separate daemon to handle configuration info for programs *ahem* GNOME *ahem*).
A programming team that can resist the urge to add extraneous features. A program should do one thing and do it well.
Time. No program is bug-free right off the bat. Sufficient time for testing and debugging must be given.
Actually, that IS what that quote is saying.
If the virus sees the file "uninstall.pky" in whatever your Windows directory is, it removes itself.
The update simply puts a file called "uninstall.pky" in the Windows directory, causing the virus to uninstall itself.
Because the user doesn't go to the site, the virus does. The virus downloads updates to itself from a set of specific URLs.
Some smart people figured out at least one of these URLs, and asked GeoCities to give them control of the account for it.
GeoCities complied, and the people put an uninstaller in place of the update that the virus would have downloaded on its own.
The user of the infected system has nothing to do with it.
You can get OpenMotif, which is the real Motif IIRC, slowly transitioning to open-source.
Why people even bother with Lesstif when OpenMotif is available is beyond me.
You're right. Very few bands record their music together, because then the sounds are "married" to each other: once recorded, you can't go back and boost the volume on the lead singer without increasing the volume on the backup singers, because the lead singer's microphone would also be (slightly) recording the backup singers.
It's not out of the question that they could record the music at the same time, but each person would have to be in a different sound booth, and the lyrics would have to be recorded separately if the lead singer is also the lead guitarist (to prevent the singer's mic from picking up him strumming the guitar).
Item: the universe has matter that can't be seen from earth using our current technology!
Item: retarded scientists conclude that because we can't see it, regardless of why (too small, too far away, maybe obscured by some other object, maybe it just isn't reflective enough (like many objects in our own solar system), etc.), it must be some mysterious new type of matter! WIMP! MACHO! Dark matter! Crazy death x-ray xeno mega matter!
I used to work at a little Mom & Pop postal place, and people would often confuse the suite number for the store with their box number, so we'd get stuff like
1111 S. Somestreet, #118
Tempe, AZ 85283
And we'd have to look in the computer to see what the box # for that person was (118 was the suite number, not the box number), when it should have been
1111 S. Somestreet
Suite 118, PMB 205 (or #205, or PO 205, in practice the USPS didn't seem to care)
Tempe, AZ 85283
Except that another factor in who got the plague and who didn't was hygiene.
People who didn't have fleas or live in flea-infested areas were much less likely to contract the plague.
I also remember reading that people who were around horses a lot were much less likely, but I don't remember why, and that could just be either BS or coincidence.
This monkey has less than 4 asses. It's useless to me!
They suck for gaming.
I used to have one (I probably still have it stashed away somewhere), and after about half an hour of gaming I would have to stop - my thumb was just too sore to continue.
X Windows can handle something like 5 buttons.
Anyone who uses the X Window system without a 3 button mouse is missing out, and some programs require a mouse with 3 buttons, such as Maya (the SGI, Linux, and Windows version do; dunno 'bout the Mac version, but it probably requires one too).
Solaris is not the only proprietary Unix that works best with a 3 button mouse; practically any Unix system that runs X Windows will benefit from having 3 buttons on the mouse.
For the record, anyone with a scrollwheel on their mouse has a 5 button mouse.
I hate to tell you this, but actor's don't watch themselves as they're doing the scene. If the director will let them (they sometimes don't, for varying reasons), they actor's can watch a recording from the camera's video tap after they've done the scene.
Plus, having Andy Serkis actually on set, and recording his mo-cap data right there during the scene means that the other actors can react to Gollum. Remember, good actors don't act, they react, playing off each other's actions and emotions during the scene.
Maybe George Lucas should take an "Acting For TV & Film" class. Good directors understand how to get the best performances from their actors, sometimes bending over backwards to do it, and the best way to understand how to get great performances from actors is to understand how actors do their thing.
The only problem is that this won't ever happen.
If you actually understood real acting and real directing (not just George Lucas style directing), you'd understand why.
The reason is, of course, that a decent actor will often be able to give you more than you expected. They will try to get inside the head of their character and will be able to point out things (perhaps dialog) that the character wouldn't actually say or do, and suggest replacements that will often make a scene 10 times better.
Often, a director who is good with actors will let the actors play the scene their way for the first take or two, giving them little or no direction until the 3rd take or so, just so that they can see what the actor's natural way of doing the scene is.
The best actors don't act, they react. They play off each other, using the other actor's emotions to build their own. This will almost always produce acting that is far better than an actor sitting all by themselves in a recording studio (for animated films, whether traditional or CG, the different actors usually record their lines separately, according to their schedules).
And while an animator may be a great animator, able to move a character so that its walking motion is indistinguishable from the real thing, they aren't actors. They understand animating, not acting, and probably won't ever get inside the heads of the characters they're animating or argue with the director that the character would never walk that way, or say that line, or whatever.
While the actor arguing with the director may sound like a bad thing, and when done on the set it usually is, an actor who is able to act like a professional instead of an overpaid child will bring up any, erm, "differences of oppinion" with the director during the script readings and the rehearsals, not on the set. Likewise, a director who is also a professional and not an egomaniac will listen to the actor's suggestions, even if they ultimately don't use them, and when they do use them, the film is often better because of it.
The director or actors will sometimes think of something right there on the set that he or she never would have otherwise thought of. For example, the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy is confronted by the guy with the big ass sword. Originally a big fight scene had been planned, but Harrison Ford was sick that day, and didn't feel like doing a big scene. He went to Steven Spielberg and asked him if they could simplify the scene, and they came up with the idea of just having Indy pull out his gun and shoot the swordsman, like a real person would have done. This also added a bit of comedy to the scene, because Harrison Ford had a "Yeah? So what?" look on his face right as he whipped out his pistol and blew away the guy with the sword. Had the movie been CG, they never would have thought of it, since even a sick person can sit in a recording studio and say their lines into a microphone.
Let's also keep in mind that these are rough animations, and making the actors time their performance to the CG animation won't usually produce as good of acting as letting the actors do their thing and then timing the CG animation to it. Of course, George Lucas doesn't care about that, he pays very little attention to actors and only seems to care about eye candy.
It's surprisingly tame, and very British.
s**g = shag
a**e = arse
k**b = knob
When did butt become a dirty word? My proposal for fuckfuckfuckfuck (or fuckfuck++), where instructions don't have to be 4 letters long:
fuck: increment the pointer
shit: decrement the pointer
bitch: increment the byte at the pointer
scat: decrement the byte at the pointer
cock: output the byte at the pointer
cunt: input a byte at store it in the byte at the pointer
damn: jump past the matching "dick" if the byte at the pointer is zero
prick: jump back to the matching "damn"
When the U.S. firms produce movies, they get all the net profits.
Sorry, but that isn't true. The money from box office sales gets split between the exhibitor (aka the movie theater) and whoever is left.
For the first week a movie is out, and maybe a few weeks after, the exhibitor gets 10% of box office sales, with the rest going to the distributor. After that (or if the movie isn't being released by a big studio) the split is usually around 50/50.
Regardless of how much the distributor gets percentage wise, they have to split it up further still, with the distributor usually taking 50% of whatever the exhibitor doesn't get. Other parties may include the studio that made the film, any production companies involved, and any big name actors who've demanded money "off the back end" (read: a percentage of the *net* box office sales), etc.
Even when the studio that made the film also owns the company distributing the film, they will sometimes treat the distributor as a separate company, because they'll get more money that way (since the distributor takes 50% of whatever the exhibitor doesn't get, and then the studio takes 50% of whatever is left after that, plus a 12% "studio overhead" charge, the production companies often get screwed, which is why they seem to come and go so quickly).
Let's pretend that there is an independant film, My Big Fat Beer Gut. At the box office, it rakes in $50 million dollars, which is considered to be a huge success for just about any independant film. Now, since it was a real independant film (not just some "independant" studio which is actually owned by a huge corporation, like how Miramax is owned by Disney), there is just the distributor and the production company.
Since the film wasn't made by a big Hollywood studio, the distributor can't get a 90/10 deal with the theaters, so the theaters take 50%. Of the $25 million left, the distributor takes 50%, leaving the production company with $12.5 million dollars. The production company is responsible for paying back the film's financial investors (of which there are often several), often having to pay them back in full before getting to see a dime. After that, the production company has to pay the film's financial investors whatever percentage of the profits that they've agreed to (you didn't think the investors put up all that money, just so they could break even, did you?).
Worse, the situation is often much more complicated with foreign films, which leaves more places for distributors and studios to play accounting games. Movie studios are often as bad as recording companies when it comes to playing accounting games.
I'm pretty sure that there was a command to list THE* directory's contents, but I haven't used CP/M in an age and a half.
*There was no heirarchial directory structure in CP/M. In fact, CP/M had no concept of directories. Everything just got lumped together on the disk, and when you listed the disk's contents you got EVERYTHING.
That's the whole point. She was not at all surprised that WinXP wouldn't run on her creaky old hardware, but was aghast that Linux wouldn't run very well on it either.