I've also found the drivers to be unstable (playing Neverwinter Nights, never tried UT) and a load of trouble. My last two laptops have both had ATI cards, the first a radeon 9000, and my current a FireGL2 (really a radeon 9600).
Really I had no choice since I had already decided to by a thinkpad, and they only came with ATI cards or integrated graphics. I just boot to windows to play games so that's no problem, but I really find X sluggish without the hardware acceleration. The propriatary ATI drivers for linux don't play nice with hibernate/suspend whiuch sucks, and also didn't work with the xrender extensions when I tried them.
I probably won't buy a thinkpad next time mostly due to the non-existant support to connect it to my monitor via DVI (this is really awful, and the VGA connecter has very bad quality!), and the fact that I find myself using linux more often and they still have ATI cards.
The main problem I face is that I don't trust the build quality of the majority of laptops these days. I have used many brands and so far the only quality ones I have used are the T model IBMs and the G4 Powerbooks from Apple. The IBMs lack simple simple things (like DVI support) and use older components, but have an excellent build quality and feel. The powerbooks seem good (I have never owned one only used them) but I can't play my windows games, so they are out. Hopefully the mactel will be able to run windows and linux, and if the build quality is closer to the G4 rather than the G3 that will probably be my next choice.
I think that is what I find unique about the series - no one, I mean no one, is safe. Everytime I think I know what will happen next, someone get hurt/maimed/killed. And characters are not as black and white as you may think. It is an interesting read.
It's funny how in the later books you start to like the characters that you thought were terrible in the earlier books. When I re-read the first one I couldn't hel but feel Ned was an idiot.
Why cant they release the paperback version at the same time?
In Germany they do have paperback versions, but to be honest they don't seem that much cheaper then the hardcover I got from Amazon in the UK because they divide them into 2 books each. Not sure exactly how much but I bought the first 6 (3 in the English version, I had been reading the English versions but she refused to) for my girlfriend for about 90 euro. It's certainly the most expensive "novel" I've bought:-)
I am not the original poster but I would think he means the execution of Eddard Stark. At least it did disappoint me, but on the other hand you now know that not even a main character with his own chapter headings is save.
I thought it might be that part, but for me that was the deal maker not the deal breaker:-) When I re-read the first book I was looking at it a little different, I was thinking he was an idiot to get himself in that position.
Kind of like I do reading "A Game of Thrones" despite the fact that I loved the book.
Just to satisfy my curiosity what scene is it that ruins the book for you? I can't remember anything that spoils it but I did read the current 4 of the books at once. Yeah, that was a looong read:)
Except that the tax department has the power of God.
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1
Try passing a function/method as an argument to another function (GUI callback for example)
Without using strange patterns that only exist as crutches to the language.
Not the OP and I don't quite follow you here, by "strange patterns" do you mean the reflection API? I haven't used it to do this, but I don't imagine it would be too hard. For example if you know you have a class Bar with a method "foo" with no arguments and you want to pass it then you could do something like the following:
Bar bar = new Bar();
Method foo = bar.getClass().getMethod("foo", new Class[] {});
callFoo(foo, bar);
public void callFoo(Method m, Object o) {
m.invoke(o, new Object[] {});
}
That's off the top of my head, in reality there are probably a bunch of exceptions that need to be handled/thrown. It's not as terse as python and there are some extra things; you have to pass the method and the object, and you have to provide signatures (since python lacks method overloading and java does have overloading, it obvious you need to pass a signature).
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, maybe you did:)
All the primative types are (or at least can be used as) objects, but even more interestingly classes, modules, methods etc are *first class* objects which means you can manipulate them quite a lot.
I had to remove a lot of the output from dir because it set of slashdot's junk filter, but I guess you can get the picture.
>>> x = 5
>>> x.__add__(3).__mul__(2)
16
>>> class foo:
>>>>>> def bar():
>>>>>>>>> pass
>>> f = foo()
>>> dir(f)
['__doc__', '__module__', 'bar']
>>> s = "a string"
>>> dir(s)
['__add__', '__class__'...]
>>> dir(5)
['__abs__', '__add__'...]
>>> dir(foo.bar)
['__call__', '__class__'...]
You're forgetting that in the EU, you can work anywhere because you're an EU citizen. Just like how a US citizen can work anywhere in the US without restriction. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison. I'd say labor mobility was worse in the EU than the US as you don't necessarily speak the same language.
agreed
I couldn't go get a job in Italy very easily, for example, as I can only swear in Italian (I'm an EU citizen, too).
Oh, I don't know about this. I'm from New Zealand but I have a British passport. I've worked in Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands so far without having an excellent command of the language. When I was working in Germany I had collegues from Australia, Spain and The Netherlands working with me. When I was in The Netherlands I worked with people from Scotland, Ireland, and France. And when I was in Belgium I worked with people from: New Zealand, Australia, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece, Romania, France and probably a lot more.
Basically what I wanted to say is that amoung professionals there is a lot of mobility in Europe despite the language problems.
You might think that it's a particularly great book, but in general people seem to like it. It's up there with other fantasy books like Lord of the Rings, A Song of Fire and Ice, Dune and Discworld *.
The book Enders Game probably wasn't the strongest of the series (IIRC it was expanded from a short story to fill the requirements of the second book in the series), however if all you took away from reading it was a shallow story about beating bullies then it seems to me you may be a poor reader.
Actually my thinkpad T41p mysteriously crashes (to the point of needing a powerdown) every time I load up Wolfenstein:ET:-(
This is with the default drivers/install (all updated but it's been happening since I got it 6 months ago). I haven't had any other games crash, and since I use linux on it 90% of the time (I don't use windows for anything but games) it doesn't really bother me. They are still fantastic machines.
I know how PKI works and I always assumed trillian was susceptible to a MITM attack, but when you called it snake oil I was expecting you to tell me it used XOR or something:)
I don't know how trillian encryption works, for all I know the pub keys are stored and distributed by cerulean studios making a MITM attack less likely, or perhaps it's just point to point encryption.
I can't verify the encryption, and I don't know the system, but that's a pretty different situation than calling it "snake oil" like you did.
Oh, I'm quite aware of the same thing going on here too. I didnt mean to say it was *only* Germany.. It was just an easy example.
The point I was trying to get accross is that Germany isn't really an easy target. It's actually quite liberal. If you wanted an easy target you could have (for instance) chosen one of many muslim countries and their stance on pornography.
I'm not trying to beat you down here, I just wanted to correct a misconception I think you have over the Germans. I grew up in New Zealand and I used to think down similar lines, but then I worked in Germany for a few years and realised that the people were much more educated about WW2 than anyone else I knew. Mostly because they had it forced upon them every year in school. Anglo-Saxon people do lack a bit of history here, for instance allied war crimes like the bombing of Dresden.
Its still wrong too. Banning expression of ideas is wrong. Be them 'hate' or 'love'. Religions have plenty of hate in them, where does the line get drawn?
Well I have to disagree with you here, I think the banning of ideas is clearly wrong, but the banning of the _expression_ of ideas is justified in many cases. This is of course a tautology because every action (selling/writing a book, washing your feet, murdering a neighbour) can be considered the expression of an idea, and unless you are an anarchist I think it's fair to say some expressions should not be allowed.
On the subject of publications (which I am guessing you really meant) I think it's a grey area. I'm not for the supression of information or opinions, however it is naive to think that words are not powerful things in themselves. To this end I wouldn't feel it right that books on how to make weapons are banned, and I wouldn't feel it's right for someone to ban a book that described their hatred for a particular race of people. However a book that advocated, and pushed for the destruction of a particular race is a different thing. (see free speech vs incitement to riot).
In the end I think a society as a whole (read: not special interest groups and individuals with agendas) has the right to form their own rules about what can and can't be banned within that society. Now this is neither the right solution nor a fair solution, but at the moment I think it's the best solution.
Horses for courses really. PDF is great for printing out or reading on a screen capable of displaying an A4.
For reading books (on PocketPC at least) MS reader seems to be the best app, with html being a close second, word being 3rd and txt and pdf are terrible to use.
If I had an A4 size screen though, I bet PDF would be perfect.
"we cant have nazi stuff available to our citizens... nope... history is bad".
Your comment is quite spurious, "nazi stuff" is not banned outright, it is perfectly legal in a historical context.
If you are using the symbols to promote a hate site, that's quite a different matter. However I would remind you that there are publications which are quite legal in Germany, but banned in the USA.
re: the euro key. My old (300-celery laptop, can't remember how old) Toshiba does have in to AltGr-4 (UK keyboard) but my 2 year old Gericom has it on AltGr-e as does my new IBM thinkpad (with a German keyboard). It's not present with the US keyboard which is a shame because the German keyboard is terrible for programming. When I was working in The nNetherlands and Belgium it was on AltGr-e.
So from the keyboards I've seen the German, Dutch and Belgian ones seem to have in AltGr-e. The only (admittidly old) UK board has it in AltGr-4 so it may be a case of the UK going it's own way again:)
I'm not going to comment on the length of the report beyond saying it sounds typically EU.
Yeah, it's annoying. The point is that the encryption plugin can be used for any gaim account but can only talk to something else that uses the same type of encryption. So that means gaim-gaim encryption is available over any network, but unfortunately nothing but gaim (that I know of) uses that encryption for IM. However the method is open and non-propriatary so hopefully other clients will use it in the future (yeah right!).
...personally, I don't see the point of bothering with microsoft issues just to play ut2004, doom3 or quake 3 arena when those games run quite nicely on linux...
I'm unable to run Wolfenstein ET (Quake 3 engine) and Teamspeak together because they both want to monopolise the sound card (it's a laptop with an intel 8x0 chipset with only one hardware channel). Windows has done mixing in software for quite some time. Shame it actually requires 2 computers for me to play some games under linux.
My point was that although the games might run on linux for you, for me they are not a replacement for the wondows versions.
You may want to do this over SSL since then only the http connect can be seen. So the traffic and more importantly the shape of the traffic can't be determined, e.g. can't tell the difference between a proxy and a normal https session. This is the standard method I've seen people use to get around a restrictive corporate firewall, to use MSN/ICQ/IRC or various other programs. Not that I'm advocating breaking corp rules, just pointing out how it's done.
The rule is "the first civ you really get into is the best".
Well, not always:) I prefered civ2 over civ, although mabye that's because it was a lot faster on the PC than the Atari.
I was never a big fan of alpha centauri, it was probably a superior game to civ2 but I really wanted the game set on *earth* and no decent modpacks came out despite my predictions on the civ2 newsgroup. Civ 3 came out in my final year of university, so it was somewhat disastrous, but I loved it anyway. I picked up civ3conquests last year and it makes for a much, much better game so it's my new favorite. As long as civ4 is basically a version of civ3conquests which allows wide ranging scripting I see no reason why it won't quickly be my favorite.
Waste, corruption and unhappiness are crucial to the game.
It's only really a problem whilst you're in monarch/republic. If your empire is so big that corruption is a problem you can move to communism in the late-mid game. If you can time this with your golden age the benefits are insane, although holding off the golden age for so long is a bit difficult.
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I've also found the drivers to be unstable (playing Neverwinter Nights, never tried UT) and a load of trouble. My last two laptops have both had ATI cards, the first a radeon 9000, and my current a FireGL2 (really a radeon 9600).
Really I had no choice since I had already decided to by a thinkpad, and they only came with ATI cards or integrated graphics. I just boot to windows to play games so that's no problem, but I really find X sluggish without the hardware acceleration. The propriatary ATI drivers for linux don't play nice with hibernate/suspend whiuch sucks, and also didn't work with the xrender extensions when I tried them.
I probably won't buy a thinkpad next time mostly due to the non-existant support to connect it to my monitor via DVI (this is really awful, and the VGA connecter has very bad quality!), and the fact that I find myself using linux more often and they still have ATI cards.
The main problem I face is that I don't trust the build quality of the majority of laptops these days. I have used many brands and so far the only quality ones I have used are the T model IBMs and the G4 Powerbooks from Apple. The IBMs lack simple simple things (like DVI support) and use older components, but have an excellent build quality and feel. The powerbooks seem good (I have never owned one only used them) but I can't play my windows games, so they are out. Hopefully the mactel will be able to run windows and linux, and if the build quality is closer to the G4 rather than the G3 that will probably be my next choice.
I think that is what I find unique about the series - no one, I mean no one, is safe. Everytime I think I know what will happen next, someone get hurt/maimed/killed. And characters are not as black and white as you may think. It is an interesting read.
:-)
It's funny how in the later books you start to like the characters that you thought were terrible in the earlier books. When I re-read the first one I couldn't hel but feel Ned was an idiot.
Why cant they release the paperback version at the same time?
In Germany they do have paperback versions, but to be honest they don't seem that much cheaper then the hardcover I got from Amazon in the UK because they divide them into 2 books each. Not sure exactly how much but I bought the first 6 (3 in the English version, I had been reading the English versions but she refused to) for my girlfriend for about 90 euro. It's certainly the most expensive "novel" I've bought
I am not the original poster but I would think he means the execution of Eddard Stark. At least it did disappoint me, but on the other hand you now know that not even a main character with his own chapter headings is save.
:-) When I re-read the first book I was looking at it a little different, I was thinking he was an idiot to get himself in that position.
I thought it might be that part, but for me that was the deal maker not the deal breaker
Kind of like I do reading "A Game of Thrones" despite the fact that I loved the book.
:)
Just to satisfy my curiosity what scene is it that ruins the book for you? I can't remember anything that spoils it but I did read the current 4 of the books at once. Yeah, that was a looong read
Except that the tax department has the power of God.
Try passing a function/method as an argument to another function (GUI callback for example)
Without using strange patterns that only exist as crutches to the language.
Not the OP and I don't quite follow you here, by "strange patterns" do you mean the reflection API? I haven't used it to do this, but I don't imagine it would be too hard. For example if you know you have a class Bar with a method "foo" with no arguments and you want to pass it then you could do something like the following:
Bar bar = new Bar();
Method foo = bar.getClass().getMethod("foo", new Class[] {});
callFoo(foo, bar);
public void callFoo(Method m, Object o) {
m.invoke(o, new Object[] {});
}
That's off the top of my head, in reality there are probably a bunch of exceptions that need to be handled/thrown. It's not as terse as python and there are some extra things; you have to pass the method and the object, and you have to provide signatures (since python lacks method overloading and java does have overloading, it obvious you need to pass a signature).
Yeah, maybe you did :)
All the primative types are (or at least can be used as) objects, but even more interestingly classes, modules, methods etc are *first class* objects which means you can manipulate them quite a lot.
I had to remove a lot of the output from dir because it set of slashdot's junk filter, but I guess you can get the picture.
>>> x = 5
>>> x.__add__(3).__mul__(2)
16
>>> class foo:
>>>>>> def bar():
>>>>>>>>> pass
>>> f = foo()
>>> dir(f)
['__doc__', '__module__', 'bar']
>>> s = "a string"
>>> dir(s)
['__add__', '__class__'...]
>>> dir(5)
['__abs__', '__add__'...]
>>> dir(foo.bar)
['__call__', '__class__'...]
Not everything can be used directly:
>>> 5.__add__(3)
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
You're forgetting that in the EU, you can work anywhere because you're an EU citizen. Just like how a US citizen can work anywhere in the US without restriction. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison. I'd say labor mobility was worse in the EU than the US as you don't necessarily speak the same language.
agreed
I couldn't go get a job in Italy very easily, for example, as I can only swear in Italian (I'm an EU citizen, too).
Oh, I don't know about this. I'm from New Zealand but I have a British passport. I've worked in Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands so far without having an excellent command of the language. When I was working in Germany I had collegues from Australia, Spain and The Netherlands working with me. When I was in The Netherlands I worked with people from Scotland, Ireland, and France. And when I was in Belgium I worked with people from: New Zealand, Australia, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece, Romania, France and probably a lot more.
Basically what I wanted to say is that amoung professionals there is a lot of mobility in Europe despite the language problems.
that's a fair point :)
You might think that it's a particularly great book, but in general people seem to like it. It's up there with other fantasy books like Lord of the Rings, A Song of Fire and Ice, Dune and Discworld *.
The book Enders Game probably wasn't the strongest of the series (IIRC it was expanded from a short story to fill the requirements of the second book in the series), however if all you took away from reading it was a shallow story about beating bullies then it seems to me you may be a poor reader.
* source THE INTERNET TOP 100 SF/FANTASY LIST
Thinkpads don't ... don't crash mysteriously...
:-(
Actually my thinkpad T41p mysteriously crashes (to the point of needing a powerdown) every time I load up Wolfenstein:ET
This is with the default drivers/install (all updated but it's been happening since I got it 6 months ago). I haven't had any other games crash, and since I use linux on it 90% of the time (I don't use windows for anything but games) it doesn't really bother me. They are still fantastic machines.
I know how PKI works and I always assumed trillian was susceptible to a MITM attack, but when you called it snake oil I was expecting you to tell me it used XOR or something :)
I don't know how trillian encryption works, for all I know the pub keys are stored and distributed by cerulean studios making a MITM attack less likely, or perhaps it's just point to point encryption.
I can't verify the encryption, and I don't know the system, but that's a pretty different situation than calling it "snake oil" like you did.
They are called french fries because of the way the potato is cut, not because they are french.
You must be thinking of Trillian encryption, which, last I checked, is snake oil.
Do you have any sources to back this up?
AFAIK there is no way to install XP on a usb drive. I have tried, googled extensivly and discussed it online and have never found a way.
Sorry guys, move out of the sticks.
I have a windows 2000 machine that has been up over 300 days.
Oh, I'm quite aware of the same thing going on here too. I didnt mean to say it was *only* Germany.. It was just an easy example.
The point I was trying to get accross is that Germany isn't really an easy target. It's actually quite liberal. If you wanted an easy target you could have (for instance) chosen one of many muslim countries and their stance on pornography.
I'm not trying to beat you down here, I just wanted to correct a misconception I think you have over the Germans. I grew up in New Zealand and I used to think down similar lines, but then I worked in Germany for a few years and realised that the people were much more educated about WW2 than anyone else I knew. Mostly because they had it forced upon them every year in school. Anglo-Saxon people do lack a bit of history here, for instance allied war crimes like the bombing of Dresden.
Its still wrong too. Banning expression of ideas is wrong. Be them 'hate' or 'love'. Religions have plenty of hate in them, where does the line get drawn?
Well I have to disagree with you here, I think the banning of ideas is clearly wrong, but the banning of the _expression_ of ideas is justified in many cases. This is of course a tautology because every action (selling/writing a book, washing your feet, murdering a neighbour) can be considered the expression of an idea, and unless you are an anarchist I think it's fair to say some expressions should not be allowed.
On the subject of publications (which I am guessing you really meant) I think it's a grey area. I'm not for the supression of information or opinions, however it is naive to think that words are not powerful things in themselves. To this end I wouldn't feel it right that books on how to make weapons are banned, and I wouldn't feel it's right for someone to ban a book that described their hatred for a particular race of people. However a book that advocated, and pushed for the destruction of a particular race is a different thing. (see free speech vs incitement to riot).
In the end I think a society as a whole (read: not special interest groups and individuals with agendas) has the right to form their own rules about what can and can't be banned within that society. Now this is neither the right solution nor a fair solution, but at the moment I think it's the best solution.
Horses for courses really. PDF is great for printing out or reading on a screen capable of displaying an A4.
For reading books (on PocketPC at least) MS reader seems to be the best app, with html being a close second, word being 3rd and txt and pdf are terrible to use.
If I had an A4 size screen though, I bet PDF would be perfect.
"we cant have nazi stuff available to our citizens... nope... history is bad".
Your comment is quite spurious, "nazi stuff" is not banned outright, it is perfectly legal in a historical context.
If you are using the symbols to promote a hate site, that's quite a different matter. However I would remind you that there are publications which are quite legal in Germany, but banned in the USA.
re: the euro key. My old (300-celery laptop, can't remember how old) Toshiba does have in to AltGr-4 (UK keyboard) but my 2 year old Gericom has it on AltGr-e as does my new IBM thinkpad (with a German keyboard). It's not present with the US keyboard which is a shame because the German keyboard is terrible for programming. When I was working in The nNetherlands and Belgium it was on AltGr-e.
:)
So from the keyboards I've seen the German, Dutch and Belgian ones seem to have in AltGr-e. The only (admittidly old) UK board has it in AltGr-4 so it may be a case of the UK going it's own way again
I'm not going to comment on the length of the report beyond saying it sounds typically EU.
Yeah, it's annoying. The point is that the encryption plugin can be used for any gaim account but can only talk to something else that uses the same type of encryption. So that means gaim-gaim encryption is available over any network, but unfortunately nothing but gaim (that I know of) uses that encryption for IM. However the method is open and non-propriatary so hopefully other clients will use it in the future (yeah right!).
...personally, I don't see the point of bothering with microsoft issues just to play ut2004, doom3 or quake 3 arena when those games run quite nicely on linux...
I'm unable to run Wolfenstein ET (Quake 3 engine) and Teamspeak together because they both want to monopolise the sound card (it's a laptop with an intel 8x0 chipset with only one hardware channel). Windows has done mixing in software for quite some time. Shame it actually requires 2 computers for me to play some games under linux.
My point was that although the games might run on linux for you, for me they are not a replacement for the wondows versions.
You may want to do this over SSL since then only the http connect can be seen. So the traffic and more importantly the shape of the traffic can't be determined, e.g. can't tell the difference between a proxy and a normal https session. This is the standard method I've seen people use to get around a restrictive corporate firewall, to use MSN/ICQ/IRC or various other programs. Not that I'm advocating breaking corp rules, just pointing out how it's done.
The rule is "the first civ you really get into is the best".
:) I prefered civ2 over civ, although mabye that's because it was a lot faster on the PC than the Atari.
Well, not always
I was never a big fan of alpha centauri, it was probably a superior game to civ2 but I really wanted the game set on *earth* and no decent modpacks came out despite my predictions on the civ2 newsgroup. Civ 3 came out in my final year of university, so it was somewhat disastrous, but I loved it anyway. I picked up civ3conquests last year and it makes for a much, much better game so it's my new favorite. As long as civ4 is basically a version of civ3conquests which allows wide ranging scripting I see no reason why it won't quickly be my favorite.
Waste, corruption and unhappiness are crucial to the game.
It's only really a problem whilst you're in monarch/republic. If your empire is so big that corruption is a problem you can move to communism in the late-mid game. If you can time this with your golden age the benefits are insane, although holding off the golden age for so long is a bit difficult.