I think I'm one of about four people in the world, but I actually rather liked the junctioning system. It did feel as if it allowed much more customization of your abilities than, say, the materia system.
My only real objection was that that idea of actually casting any of your spells was ludicrous, since they were so much more effective when just junctioned to your other abilities. It would have been nice to see more balance between those two uses.
WoW has some good things going for it, but I'm not at all sure that it's the best game of its genre.
It is, however, the best game of its genre that will run on any operating system I'm willing to use.
I've been quite curious as to what percentage of WoW-players are mac-users. My guess is that it's quite high indeed, perhaps somewhere between a quarter and a third. There are what, around fifteen million macs recent enough to run it well in use today? Some nontrivial portion of those fifteen million will be used by people who have some interest in gaming, but have very few games available to them. Blizzard is one of the few companies that has had the sense to capitalize on this market, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised to hear that a million or two of those fifteen are also a million or two of Blizzard's six.
Uh, all films that weren't explicitly shot and edited for imax look like crap on an imax screen. Trying to put 16:9 content on a nearly 1:1 screen means that you either get the whole thing in tiny form, or that you cut off nearly half the content.
User B (evul hacker with root on box foo):
foo# SSH_AGENT_PID=XXXX; export SSH_AGENT_PID
foo# SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-YYYY/ZZZZ; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
Uh, this is hardly the only way that someone with root on the machine from which you're authenticating can obtain your credentials. Far more effective than this would be for them to simply take your private key file and grab your passphrase as you enter it; that would allow them to use these credentials forever in the future, rather than being limited to when you have an agent running on their machine.
So... how does this even remotely approach being news? Yes, if you type your passwords into a machine on which someone else has root, you have given those passwords to them! The horror! I had no idea!
The best thing I can say about this article summary is that it did not misrepresent the actual piece. The article itself was also muddled tripe, filled with semi-true and completely-irrelevant noise like "in unix, everything is a file..."
It appears that the author is just a firewall admin who's offended that ssh can be used to thwart his precious acls, and invested in giving the tool a bad name.
Pff, that's not nearly as silly as the converse. I once had a phone with a standard grid keypad that used pulse dialing. So you could dial much more quickly than with a rotary phone, and be rewarded with sitting and listening to clicking for fifteen seconds while it translated the number into pulses.
I guess it was that phone that taught me how to dial by hand with the cradle switch, so it did have some redeeming value. But it didn't make it any less silly.
I also used and loved zip drives for a while, but their fatal flaw was what came to be affectionately known as the "click of death"; the head becoming so far misaligned that it would slide off the edge of the disk with a loud repetitive clicking sound.
And if that was just the way old drives failed, that wouldn't have been such a big deal. The problem was the that click of death was, quite literally, contagious: the drives used tracks on disks to recalibrate their head placement.
This meant that one bad drive would write disks with misaligned tracks, which could then be put into a previously-healthy drive, causing it to misalign its heads to the bad tracks, at which point it would write bad tracks to other disks, which when put into other drives would misalign their heads...
Yes, it's amazing how often "printer version" means "sane and less offensive to actual humans version."
And if it's a site from which you read content more than a couple of times, there's a better solution than manually clicking on the printer version each time: use the uri transmogrifier of your choice (I love Pith Helmet.) to automatically turn urls into their printer-version form.
Really, there's one solution to the virus problem that will be far more comprehensive, effective, long-lived, and affordable than any anti-virus software ever will be: don't use Windows.
Linux has some limitations as a desktop platform, but it's still a vastly better choice than Windows ever has been. And considerably better than either one would be macosx; you get the accessibility and interface consistency of a good desktop environment, and the manageability, automation, and security of a good unix environment.
The only real argument for using Windows in any context is gaming. I assume that's not a motivator for your non-profit organization, so there's really no reason to set yourself up for failure by relying on so delicate and limited a tool as Windows.
Some very unfortunate Apple customers have had their SuperDrive refuse to burn
at over 2x. This issue is not media related, as there are multiple brands of
DVD media that will refuse to be detected by the drive at its true rating.
I haven't heard of this problem before (I don't burn dvds terribly often), but the situation sounds very different from what you assert. It sounds as if some people are having problems burning at higher speeds; that's unfortunate, but it's quite different from a "scam" by apple.
Even if apple were completely immoral and willing to engage in blatant scammery, this wouldn't even make financial sense. Intentionally compromising the performance of their products in order to make a few bucks here and there on blank dvds seems like a pretty silly notion.
You're right, it's quite ridiculous. Cheap printers are ranging between 600 and 1400 dpi, and we're still piddling around with displays at 100ish dpi.
What would video editing have to do with this? More precise displays should appeal to anyone who simply wants things to be depicted with greater clarity.
Perhaps you have a fetish for seeing individual pixels, but that sounds like a personal problem.
FASA's strength was always creating fun, compelling (if derivative) settings. And their weakness was always in creating rules systems to actually enact a game in those settings.
(Battletech and Shadowrun were littered with tables of numbers that never quite lined up into a sane equation, supposed rules that could never really be applied in practice, and huge gaping optimization holes. I couldn't begin to tell you how many different groups of people I met who were playing "Shadowrun", by which they meant playing "a game set in the Shadowrun universe, but we rewrote all of the rules from the ground up because FASA's were so awful". I suspect that Shadowrun has been the most-rewritten game in history.)
So I'd be perfectly happy with a game that kept the setting and feel of Shadowrun, but used completely new game mechanics. But substantially altering the universe means throwing away the one genuinely good thing the game had going for it.
I actually watched Colbert's bit before the impersonator bit, and both of them before seeing the slashdot story. So, yes.
Colbert's piece was mostly quite good, though the pacing was a little off. I think he could've done with a little bit more direct excoriation of the press for their uninquisitiveness, and the pre-filmed bit with Helen Thomas was funny, but far too long for how much joke was actually in there.
But I'm a big fan of the Report, so I probably came to this piece with very high expectations, thus guaranteeing at least mild disappointment.
Scarce indeed are the things for which I'm willing to praise George II. But one of those very few is his willingness to condone and even participate in mockery of him. The act itself was only moderately funny, but the fact that Bush was willing to play along is likable.
Of course, the cynical side of me says that this has nothing to do with Bush one way or the other; that Rove has correctly foreseen that this is an act that would make even a Bush-loather such as me inclined to give him some credit, just told him to do it whether he liked it or not. Certainly it does take the "nukular" barb away from Bush's detractors when he uses it on himself.
And I suppose that the fact that it kept to small issues like his speaking skills--rather than more substantial matters like his military adventurism--does imply that this was less good-natured self deprecation, and more staged campaigning.
Do you mean to ask how far things can scale "vertically", by buying progressively bigger individual machines? That's an easy one: never far enough.
Even if you can magically get a single system that's big enough for your needs forever, you'll still pay orders of magnitude too much money for it, and get no added reliability through redundancy.
Any application that requires a solitary, unique, big server is just definitionally broken. It needs to be redesigned to allow it to be spread over an arbitrary number of small systems in geographically diverse locations. For reliability, your serving infrastructure needs to be at least n+1 at every layer to allow for planned maintenance, unexpected failures, and site-destroying disasters. And for scale, it needs to allow you to continue to plug in more batches of cheap little machines and get more throughput.
And ironically, this sounds as if it violates one of Apple's very good HIG rules: label the buttons with what they'll actually do, don't give them generic names like "yes" and "no" and have a lot of text in the dialog explain which does what.
Hard to love any interface that forces me to click "Cancel" in order to convey "Yes, continue doing the thing that I already asked for."
I can't speak to whether or not the article is astroturf, but I can confirm that it's perfectly reasonable for a skilled computer user to have no history with Windows.
I've been using computers for a couple of decades now, going back to the Atari ST. A mixture of macs and linux on my desk since the atari days (in fact, often linux on macs, before osx).
I've been a professional unix sysadmin for about the past dozen years. Primarily linux, with a smattering of solaris, irix, freebsd, and tru64. I've sysadminned for everything from 15-person pre-VC startups to Yahoo and Google.
Really? Sorry to hear that they serve you some gimped version of the page. The one they give me includes things like:
Remote Spotlight search Leveraging the revolutionary Spotlight technology in Mac OS X Tiger, the new Remote Spotlight capability in Apple Remote Desktop 3 can perform lightning fast searches on remote client systems running Mac OS X v10.4 or later. Summary results for each client are updated instantly as results are returned. View details on results, or refine searches even further using additional qualifiers. Results can be viewed on remote client systems, copied back to your administrator system, or deleted.
Dashboard widget Apple Remote Desktop 3 provides you with a new Dashboard widget that gives you an instant, at-a-glance view of the remote computers in your network. It's fully integrated with the Apple Remote Desktop administrative application, so a click on a particular computer will allow you to select and start working with any computer in the system.
Curtain Mode For those times when you want your actions to be hidden from the end user, there's Curtain Mode. This allows you to block the view behind a virtual curtain, while retaining full control of the screen. It's perfect for those working on public-facing systems.
I'll be here until about six, if there are any other pages you'd like me to copy and paste for you today.
Uh. I didn't say anything about whether he's a kook, anything about the validity of global warming, or indeed anything about Gore at all. I just said that the "invented the internet" thing is a misquotation and a mischaracterization.
Actually, a bit more context than that might have been helpful. Here's the actual question he was answering:
Wolf Blizter: I want to get to some of the substance of domestic and
international issues in a minute, but let's just wrap up a little bit
of the politics right now.
Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process,
support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former
colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he
doesn't necessarily bring to this process?
Which does seem to clarify that he was describing how his relationship to 'net compares to other politicians'. And it's not terribly absurd to claim that being a federal legislator who was advocating further development of the Internet in the 1980s does constitute being ahead of the game--for that particular game. I really don't think he was trying to convince anyone that he was Vint Cerf.
Some bloke with far more time available than I have seems to have gone into this in exhaustive detail, and in a way that doesn't appear to be especially biased.
That misquote just gets funnier and funnier over the decades, doesn't it?
(He helped in the creation of the Internet the only way that politicians ever do anything: he voted to fund it. And he never claimed to have done anything more than that.)
The ironic part is that Dell has always been very up-front about the fact that they do no research, pioneer no technologies, and create nothing new. Dell is all about execution, not creation: they manufacture devices based upon the technologies of others, deliver them to consumers, and do it with very low overhead.
Which is a perfectly fine thing for them to do. It's not heroic work, but neither is being a plumber, and we still like to have them around.
But I have to admit that my respect for any plumber would go down if he started trying to convince me that he's the one that actually discovered the Bernoulli Principle.
Well, even beyond that, why would you possibly use a hard-coded list of specific resolutions, however long?
As soon as you support more than one resolution, you (or your libraries) already need to handle scaling and talking about your polygons in portion-of-display units rather than number-of-pixels units. That work is already done, so why limit yourself to any number of specific resolutions, rather than just scaling to whatever pixel count and aspect ratio the display happens to have?
Do you really think that you can predict now the specs of every display that any person is ever going to use to run your game at any time in the future? This is nearly as absurd as people who chain their website design to absolute numbers of pixels.
Slashdot Mirror
An ironic thing to ask in this particular thread, don't you think?
My only real objection was that that idea of actually casting any of your spells was ludicrous, since they were so much more effective when just junctioned to your other abilities. It would have been nice to see more balance between those two uses.
You keep claiming this, despite everyone saying that it's not true, and ignoring all the requests to back up your accusation.
I've never been a big fan of the phrase "put up or shut up," but it's starting to feel more than a little appropriate here.
It is, however, the best game of its genre that will run on any operating system I'm willing to use.
I've been quite curious as to what percentage of WoW-players are mac-users. My guess is that it's quite high indeed, perhaps somewhere between a quarter and a third. There are what, around fifteen million macs recent enough to run it well in use today? Some nontrivial portion of those fifteen million will be used by people who have some interest in gaming, but have very few games available to them. Blizzard is one of the few companies that has had the sense to capitalize on this market, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised to hear that a million or two of those fifteen are also a million or two of Blizzard's six.Uh, all films that weren't explicitly shot and edited for imax look like
crap on an imax screen. Trying to put 16:9 content on a nearly 1:1 screen
means that you either get the whole thing in tiny form, or that you cut off
nearly half the content.
So... how does this even remotely approach being news? Yes, if you type your passwords into a machine on which someone else has root, you have given those passwords to them! The horror! I had no idea!
The best thing I can say about this article summary is that it did not misrepresent the actual piece. The article itself was also muddled tripe, filled with semi-true and completely-irrelevant noise like "in unix, everything is a file..."
It appears that the author is just a firewall admin who's offended that ssh can be used to thwart his precious acls, and invested in giving the tool a bad name.
Pff, that's not nearly as silly as the converse. I once had a phone with a standard grid keypad that used pulse dialing. So you could dial much more quickly than with a rotary phone, and be rewarded with sitting and listening to clicking for fifteen seconds while it translated the number into pulses.
I guess it was that phone that taught me how to dial by hand with the cradle switch, so it did have some redeeming value. But it didn't make it any less silly.
And if that was just the way old drives failed, that wouldn't have been such a big deal. The problem was the that click of death was, quite literally, contagious: the drives used tracks on disks to recalibrate their head placement.
This meant that one bad drive would write disks with misaligned tracks, which could then be put into a previously-healthy drive, causing it to misalign its heads to the bad tracks, at which point it would write bad tracks to other disks, which when put into other drives would misalign their heads...
You get the idea.
And if it's a site from which you read content more than a couple of times, there's a better solution than manually clicking on the printer version each time: use the uri transmogrifier of your choice (I love Pith Helmet.) to automatically turn urls into their printer-version form.
Really, there's one solution to the virus problem that will be far more comprehensive, effective, long-lived, and affordable than any anti-virus software ever will be: don't use Windows.
Linux has some limitations as a desktop platform, but it's still a vastly better choice than Windows ever has been. And considerably better than either one would be macosx; you get the accessibility and interface consistency of a good desktop environment, and the manageability, automation, and security of a good unix environment.
The only real argument for using Windows in any context is gaming. I assume that's not a motivator for your non-profit organization, so there's really no reason to set yourself up for failure by relying on so delicate and limited a tool as Windows.
Even if apple were completely immoral and willing to engage in blatant scammery, this wouldn't even make financial sense. Intentionally compromising the performance of their products in order to make a few bucks here and there on blank dvds seems like a pretty silly notion.
You're right, it's quite ridiculous. Cheap printers are ranging between 600 and 1400 dpi, and we're still piddling around with displays at 100ish dpi.
What would video editing have to do with this? More precise displays should appeal to anyone who simply wants things to be depicted with greater clarity.
Perhaps you have a fetish for seeing individual pixels, but that sounds like a personal problem.
FASA's strength was always creating fun, compelling (if derivative) settings. And their weakness was always in creating rules systems to actually enact a game in those settings.
(Battletech and Shadowrun were littered with tables of numbers that never quite lined up into a sane equation, supposed rules that could never really be applied in practice, and huge gaping optimization holes. I couldn't begin to tell you how many different groups of people I met who were playing "Shadowrun", by which they meant playing "a game set in the Shadowrun universe, but we rewrote all of the rules from the ground up because FASA's were so awful". I suspect that Shadowrun has been the most-rewritten game in history.)
So I'd be perfectly happy with a game that kept the setting and feel of Shadowrun, but used completely new game mechanics. But substantially altering the universe means throwing away the one genuinely good thing the game had going for it.
I actually watched Colbert's bit before the impersonator bit, and both of them before seeing the slashdot story. So, yes.
Colbert's piece was mostly quite good, though the pacing was a little off. I think he could've done with a little bit more direct excoriation of the press for their uninquisitiveness, and the pre-filmed bit with Helen Thomas was funny, but far too long for how much joke was actually in there.
But I'm a big fan of the Report, so I probably came to this piece with very high expectations, thus guaranteeing at least mild disappointment.
Scarce indeed are the things for which I'm willing to praise George II. But one of those very few is his willingness to condone and even participate in mockery of him. The act itself was only moderately funny, but the fact that Bush was willing to play along is likable.
Of course, the cynical side of me says that this has nothing to do with Bush one way or the other; that Rove has correctly foreseen that this is an act that would make even a Bush-loather such as me inclined to give him some credit, just told him to do it whether he liked it or not. Certainly it does take the "nukular" barb away from Bush's detractors when he uses it on himself.
And I suppose that the fact that it kept to small issues like his speaking skills--rather than more substantial matters like his military adventurism--does imply that this was less good-natured self deprecation, and more staged campaigning.
Do you mean to ask how far things can scale "vertically", by buying progressively bigger individual machines? That's an easy one: never far enough.
Even if you can magically get a single system that's big enough for your needs forever, you'll still pay orders of magnitude too much money for it, and get no added reliability through redundancy.
Any application that requires a solitary, unique, big server is just definitionally broken. It needs to be redesigned to allow it to be spread over an arbitrary number of small systems in geographically diverse locations. For reliability, your serving infrastructure needs to be at least n+1 at every layer to allow for planned maintenance, unexpected failures, and site-destroying disasters. And for scale, it needs to allow you to continue to plug in more batches of cheap little machines and get more throughput.
And ironically, this sounds as if it violates one of Apple's very good HIG rules: label the buttons with what they'll actually do, don't give them generic names like "yes" and "no" and have a lot of text in the dialog explain which does what.
Hard to love any interface that forces me to click "Cancel" in order to convey "Yes, continue doing the thing that I already asked for."
I've been using computers for a couple of decades now, going back to the Atari ST. A mixture of macs and linux on my desk since the atari days (in fact, often linux on macs, before osx).
I've been a professional unix sysadmin for about the past dozen years. Primarily linux, with a smattering of solaris, irix, freebsd, and tru64. I've sysadminned for everything from 15-person pre-VC startups to Yahoo and Google.
I've never used Windows. Why would I?
Really? Sorry to hear that they serve you some gimped version of the page. The one they give me includes things like:
Remote Spotlight search
Leveraging the revolutionary Spotlight technology in Mac OS X Tiger, the new Remote Spotlight capability in Apple Remote Desktop 3 can perform lightning fast searches on remote client systems running Mac OS X v10.4 or later. Summary results for each client are updated instantly as results are returned. View details on results, or refine searches even further using additional qualifiers. Results can be viewed on remote client systems, copied back to your administrator system, or deleted.
Dashboard widget
Apple Remote Desktop 3 provides you with a new Dashboard widget that gives you an instant, at-a-glance view of the remote computers in your network. It's fully integrated with the Apple Remote Desktop administrative application, so a click on a particular computer will allow you to select and start working with any computer in the system.
Curtain Mode
For those times when you want your actions to be hidden from the end user, there's Curtain Mode. This allows you to block the view behind a virtual curtain, while retaining full control of the screen. It's perfect for those working on public-facing systems.
I'll be here until about six, if there are any other pages you'd like me to copy and paste for you today.
Uh. I didn't say anything about whether he's a kook, anything about the validity of global warming, or indeed anything about Gore at all. I just said that the "invented the internet" thing is a misquotation and a mischaracterization.
Down boy.
Which does seem to clarify that he was describing how his relationship to 'net compares to other politicians'. And it's not terribly absurd to claim that being a federal legislator who was advocating further development of the Internet in the 1980s does constitute being ahead of the game--for that particular game. I really don't think he was trying to convince anyone that he was Vint Cerf.
Some bloke with far more time available than I have seems to have gone into this in exhaustive detail, and in a way that doesn't appear to be especially biased.
That misquote just gets funnier and funnier over the decades, doesn't it?
(He helped in the creation of the Internet the only way that politicians ever do anything: he voted to fund it. And he never claimed to have done anything more than that.)
The ironic part is that Dell has always been very up-front about the fact that they do no research, pioneer no technologies, and create nothing new. Dell is all about execution, not creation: they manufacture devices based upon the technologies of others, deliver them to consumers, and do it with very low overhead.
Which is a perfectly fine thing for them to do. It's not heroic work, but neither is being a plumber, and we still like to have them around.
But I have to admit that my respect for any plumber would go down if he started trying to convince me that he's the one that actually discovered the Bernoulli Principle.
Well, even beyond that, why would you possibly use a hard-coded list of specific resolutions, however long?
As soon as you support more than one resolution, you (or your libraries) already need to handle scaling and talking about your polygons in portion-of-display units rather than number-of-pixels units. That work is already done, so why limit yourself to any number of specific resolutions, rather than just scaling to whatever pixel count and aspect ratio the display happens to have?
Do you really think that you can predict now the specs of every display that any person is ever going to use to run your game at any time in the future? This is nearly as absurd as people who chain their website design to absolute numbers of pixels.