I bought it quickly, I forgot to check. I listened to it, it's pretty good if you like that sort of thing.
I was fuming when I discovered it was copy protected. The information was on the packaging, but there's no warning on the front and it's not exactly screaming out on the back. It's _not_ an audio CD according to trademark law and, while I can't return it because I was warned in advance (if badly), I'm very angry.
The retailer have received a letter explaining my position and telling them I'd never have bought it if I knew and would buy very little protected music, simply because I listen to well clear 90% of my music on my work PC. With this album I have to drag the CD in to do that, the application they provide doesn't integrate with anything else, puts out terrible sound quality and frequently crashes. If anyone can tell me where I can find contact details for the label, I'll point out exactly the same to them.
This customer feels deceived and has no desire to be deceived again. The retailer knows they'll lose the sale next time, the label will as soon as I can find how to contact them. Ditto the band.
I've seen copyright protection, I don't like it and I'm quite prepared to tell others why it's wrong.
I started with a Palm III. Nice machine in many ways but really limited by an over-small screen and Graffiti. I never got more than 30wpm on it and tended to have very poor accuracy even with training - it's just too sensitive to small changes and I found by playing with giraffe that there were some basic errors in its topography software.
Nearly 4 years later, I _love_ my PDA and can't imagine doing without it. It's a Psion 5mx.
The upright machines have screens small enough that you can't read any colume of data on them and a data entry system that gets fiddly if you're writing anything longer than a shopping list. A keyboard can be fitted, yes, but you have to take it out of your pocket, build the thing and then find a table. In a few hours I'll be at my church with my Psion, taking sermon notes with the Psion resting on my knees.
An upright looks better in the shops because it's cheaper, smaller and appears easier to use on the move - but long-term use shows you've got to be really keen to make it worthwhile, they don't actually fit particularly comfortably in your shirt pocket and that they're far from ideal as anything other than readers. A colour-screened keyboard machine like most of the WinCE machines equally looks better in the shops but is too expensive and eats batteries. WinCE in general tends to look better because they've got more memory and faster processors - but, just like old Windows v anything else battles, poorer design means it _needs_ those higher spec components to be usable - and the trade-off is in lower battery life.
The Psion, when you actually give it a try, has a keyboard I can touchtype on at little less speed than a desktop keyboard, battery life of 2-3 weeks normal use on 2 AAs and a screen I can really read sensible amounts of data on. I've regularly typed notes in meetings and so on on it with no difficulties. It still fits in a jacket pocket, it's cheaper and it's got a pretty good default software bundle. OK, the synchronisation software was, erm, sub-optimal;-) but in all other respects it's just great.
And it died because the marketers consistently tried to sell machines that look better in the shops but don't actually work as well day-to-day, and the sector's now dying because people are stuck with these poor machines and realising they're poor.
Someone, please, buy up Psion's keyboard patent and build a modern 5 that can sync. It won't be too expensive and it'll just be a lovely machine that will make PDAs worthwhile again.
Wedding photography, by definition, isn't moving subjects, far away subjects or really low light all that often. She can therefore live without the really fast lenses and has no particular need for much above 100mm. Were I a pro I'd still rather have higher quality optics than them - I've got about that value of lenses as a starter outfit for an enthusiastic amateur!
Pretty much any other pro sector will want better lenses than that, and more.
Mozilla isn't set up to be end-user software at all. It's set up to be a stable proof of concept from which other developers can take all sorts of cool programs and make their own applications - as with Netscape 7.
It so happens that it makes a nice end-user browser too, but that's not the (official) primary development goal.
Whether it was already in place by August 1934 when Hitler had been Chancellor for under a year I don't know off the top of my head, but later German polls (they had a lot of referenda) were emphatically not free or fair. Returning officers were all Gestapo or Nazi party and ballots were pre-printed in agreement with the Government position. If you wanted to disagree you had to take your ballot (having just provided your name and address to the Gestapo) and take your ballot into the booth to amend. If you agreed, you just had to post it.
In other ways Russia and the US both have potential parallels with 1930s Germany which doesn't fill me with joy...
(Assuming this is correct, of course - may be a big assumption...)
Did they learn _nothing_ from Thomas Penfield Jackson? At all?
Bush and others like him won't be in the Whitehouse for ever. As soon as there's a DoJ who are actually prepared to enforce anti-trust laws rather than mistakenly believing that monopolies are good for innovation and the economy, any company that has amassed a portfolio that simply stops anyone interoperating with their systems will get taken down, quickly.
It's rather frustrating to see continued blatant monopoly abuse from MS. Hopefully, a sensible DoJ will eventually have so much ammunition from the last few years that MS' break-up becomes utterly inevitable.
Example user here, FWIW. And I've got a 2MB line at my office so I'm well used to BB.
Whenever I look at it for home, though, it just seems a waste of money though. I honestly don't routinely use the net for much more than e-mail and catching up on a few news sites, none of which tax a 56k line. Equally, living in my current flat I can't put up a satellite dish - which means if I want digital TV I have to have NTL cable (tip - don't, they're terrible) - which pretty much comes with a free phone line. So, if I want ADSL it'll cost me a fortune because it'll come bundled with another phone line. And if I want a cable modem then it has to be with a company whose DNS server periodically can't find Google or the BBC. And I'd have to have a 12 month contract, and I want to move within 12 months.
No, modems aren't great, but unless you want to download more than a few megabytes or are in a real hurry, they're perfectly adequate. Just leave it sitting there, read the page you just loaded in the background, tell it to download your e-mail then wander off and start preparing dinner. Come back and they're there, all ready to read. So why, exactly, would I want to spend nearly UKP200 per year to get a faster service that I'd rarely benefit from from a company I don't trust to run an egg and spoon race?
Great little program - you give each track on your machine a rating either in the library or when it's playing (can be done through a systray icon if you don't want to switch to its interface) and it then effectively does a weighted random shuffle within that library, automatically adding files to the end whenever they're needed.
No complaints over here - I've got a library of well over 3000 songs and it means I can just leave it running and forget about it. When I want albums I can have them but most of the time it gives me variety, which is far more enjoyable when I'm working IMHO.
Because it's cheaper to network it. If they can stick in a DSL or even ISDN line to get it new ads then they've saved a fortune over sending out a tech to change CDs ever few weeks. Add in remote diagnostics and they'll save a packet.
Now, I can't see this running over the net or WiFi unless they're _really_ stupid but, having said that, we've seen VB cash machines so who knows?
Unless it was changed since I was last over there, they're present by the ton in towns, though. And, back then, stupid numbers of flyposters trying to get you to go to Minitel porn sites (hmm, don't want to imagine how that worked) - presumably now net sites instead?
Swings and roundabouts IMHO. A prettier countryside in compensation for towns (where I actually spend my time...) where I want blinkers.
Oh, OT, can someone go round and paint all the old villages? There's tons that look like they haven't had a single building repainted since D Day!
Apparently was partially ported then abandoned - very sad. I would absolutely buy it the second I saw it.
For those of you who don't know, in theory it's a standard Gauntlet clone. Top down maze based 2D shoot-em-up. Always 2 player cooperative and if you're alone, the computer plays as the second player. Yeah, you'll comfortably beat the computer player but it's far from a liability.
What this doesn't tell you is the superb atmosphere it creates and sheer, manic speed. The basic premise is all about some primitive Victorian era steam powered computer (the eponymous Chaos Engine) going wrong and causing a rift in time, leading to all sorts of dinosaurs and weird monsters appearing, and you being part of the gang of mercenaries who are cleaning them up. All have different balances between strength, speed and weaponry, and you can buy power ups after levels to improve performance quite markedly. Everything really looks Victorian - lots of analogue dials, brass plaques and heavy engineering. Being a Bitmap Brothers game, it's very heavy on stats at the end of each section. It'll tell you how much you've cleared, how much of the available cash you got, level times, kill rates and so on, and show the breakdown of you against the computer player or your friend.
The monsters? They just keep running at you, hard, thick and fast. I remember several levels where I was averaging around one kill per second - seriously - and I wasn't that great at it. It's just constant running flat out through the levels, taking out huge lines of monsters running towards you - many of which drop powerups or cash behind them.
Maze design was superb. Genuinely challenging with a lot of dynamic elements, keys and switches, but always ultimatlely both navigable and learnable. And the sound effects whenever you activated a node and started that torus bounding up and down its shaft while the lightning crackled, picked up a key or even opened the final level gate. I remember one where you open the final gate to get out (and hear the speech telling you this) right in the middle of a major battle section a fair way from the exit and where you haven't come close to seeing it yet. Just brilliant, and slightly worrying when you're playing.
That music. Fast techno - not something I'd normally like at all but it fitted the atmosphere so well. Constantly pushing, driving you on, fitting in so well with the pace of the game.
It sounds silly but the level coding system! Used alphanumeric level codes to allow easy resumes without worrying about save games (remember, consoles or pre-HDD computers) but they didn't just kick you in at the level, they accurately saved your game state. There was genuine purpose to going back and replaying the early levels to get a better level code to take you forwards.
I'd love to see something new like that. Short levels (2-3 minutes maximum) once you've learnt them but you could be 5-10 minutes in a level learning it. Well balanced difficulty, great level variety, structure to bring you back again and again to find that last bonus and pace of a type we seem to have abandoned in the mad rush to go 3D. It's the sort of game you can play in small chunks but keep going back to again and again. In other words, ideal handheld territory as far as I'm concerned.
On a much simpler level, I pine for a port of that old Spectrum classic Deathcase 3D! First person 3D motorbike based shoot-em-up in 9K (seriously) - you were riding headlong through a randomly generated forest chasing two other bikes and trying to shoot them with a gun mounted on your handlebars - so, you can aim right but not if there's a tree ahead and to the right... If you shoot those two bikes it becomes night and the screen turns dark for the same challenge, shoot those two bikes and it's day again but the forest is thicker, and thicker, and thicker until you're steering on reflex alone. There's bonus vehicles that appear on the horizon every now and then, and shooting them can get you a big bonus but they're far fr
Two silly stories spring to mind. Both are from memory so I can't give precise details and have probably got others wrong. Oh well, they're still funny:-)
First was a warship patrolling in the Arctic during one of the world wars (think first), and saw an enemy ship in the distance - so fired a torpedo. Problem was, the torpedo's rudder mechanism wasn't designed to handle the cold water and jammed. Described a beautiful arc while the ship carried on steaming ahead and hit the ship that had fired it in the engine room, putting it out of commission for the rest of the war.
Second was a training vessel running exercises in Portsmouth harbour in the UK. Fairly old ship with a mechanical signalling device from bridge to engine rooms - which jammed at half speed astern, and when attempting to unjam it was stuck on full astern. So, first mate sent down to engine room to countermand the order - made no headway against most of the ship's company bailing out having realised what was happening in a fairly small space too late to stop it. The ship rammed a concrete jetty at something like 15 knots in reverse. This compressed it by several feet and resulted in the only injury - one unfortunate seaman was halfway through a deck hatch at the point of impact and the pressure difference this caused shot him out like a bullet from a gun and quite a way into the air.
If enough e-mail runs through a single clearing house, you get all sorts of benefits if you put your mind to it. Identification of legitimate / dodgy e-mail servers and filtering based on that, auto virus analysis and blocking, significantly better spam filtering and detection just to name three off the top of my head. To my eyes, compression across mailboxes is a massive no-brainer and the resultant dictionary analysis you could do would be absolutely fascinating - and very, VERY valuable. I suspect this is why they want to keep your mail after you've deleted it and shut your account.
Any e-mail server worth its salt really ought to be detecting multiple simultaneous mails with no practical difference in their content and at least shuffling them into a low priority queue. Given that we're routinely seeing Exchange delete the mail body here, though, I'm happy it doesn't fall into the specified category;-)
(Hmm, DoJ - how come you've let MS sell one crappy product, Exchange, by the ton by giving away another crappy one, Outlook, with something they've already obtained a monopoly in? Isn't that pretty much textbook abuse?)
I instantly thought of compression when I saw this. So much of what they collect will be flat-out identical like mass forwards, spam, newsletters, mailing lists and so on. Much of the rest will have significant identical components, like common footers. Why are we assuming they're not compressing across the database? I know I would investigate that if setting this sort of thing up, and as the projects using gzip as a tool to assess similarity have discovered, it can potentially provide much useful fringe data.
B5 took the viewpoint that the explosions were part of the score, FWIW - the battles were normally pretty heavily scored, and they decided to add audible explosions for effect. They weren't claiming they'd really be there.
I'm a trumpeter, and you can make a basic brass instrument out of almost anything. All you need is a tube of some description with a bore somewhere between the diameter of your little finger and, say 3-4 inches. If you can seal the end with some form of bung so you can get an airtight seal for a mouthpiece, all the better. This way I've played kettles, teapots, chairs, relay batons, hoovers and hoses. I've seen a rifle played, open at the breach. Sound quality and range aren't normally great but hey, you're probably doing this for effect anyway so work out something you _can_ play on it and just do that.
Anyway, I was on the staff at a kid's summer holiday club and we had a Roman theme that year. I normally ran a silly games slot, and so this year I was being an incompetent dril sargeant setting all sorts of challenges. I had a colander for my helmet, a tray for a breastplate and a soup ladle tucked into my belt. Every day, to announce my presence, I'd whip out this huge home-made post horn and play the _worst_ fanfare you can imagine, and that would signal the start of proceedings.
It was a 2m long length of 15mm plastic pipe. I then made an expanded polystyrene bung at one end to seal a mouthpiece in place and jammed the largest kitchen funnel I could find into the other end - which, happily, fitted very neatly. Being plastic and having polystyrene for a critical interface this thing resonated absolutely horribly, had no useful tone and a really odd range. It wasn't rigid so flopped around all over the place and if I wasn't very careful when putting the mouthpiece in I knocked the bung out. You could get a really, really bad fanfare on it, though, which was most of the point of the exercise and it did get a laugh:-)
I wouldn't recommend this particular construction for anyone after music not comedy but we did finish the week with a duet of the Prince of Denmark's March on a kettle and a teapot. You can actually get quite a good note out of them, and even use the lid to modulate volume! Tiring to play though.
For the most part, the web applications I work on don't have complex enough user interface requirements that the differences are that significant, but most of the time I've taken the exact opposite approach.
Essentially, because MSIE butchers the standards, I know from experience that if I develop and test my code using MSIE it often barfs on anything else. If I code on Moz, because it's pretty well standards compliant, 99% of the time it works straight out of the box in IE too.
I'd still develop under Moz if that wasn't true, though. To get a context menu item that'll tell me * What form fields are around and what values they have * What images the page contains * What links the page contains
saves a _lot_ of hassle. Can they please fix the bug, though, that causes a new HTTP request if I want to view the source? Why can't it just use cached HTML?
Reading their description of KMOS, I suspect they're trying to sell to mobile phones and the embedded market. For which AOS is pretty well suited - small, fast, proven. No memory protection or virtual memory are advantages in those markets because they also drop the lower overhead.
In any case, though, I think it's very sad to think that Windows _or_ Unix is the peak of OS evolution. Speaking personally, I'd rather deal with _neither_. AmigaOS has features that I miss to this day and neither OS seems to be growing in a direction that makes me think I'll get them back any time soon. BeOS, Plan 9, Smalltalk, Oberon, AmigaOS, Neutrino - all interesting platforms that have things to teach us and move things forwards.
My strong suspicion is that nothing will happen in the consumer market and that this is the final nail in an already pretty solid coffin. I hope I'm wrong, though, because there are so many nice things that can be done with OSs that aren't being served by current trends and look extremely unlikely to ever be so served.
Oh well. If anyone knows where I can get voodoo dolls for Irving Gould or Medhi Ali....;-)
Slashdot Mirror
E-mail addresses aren't supposed to be case sensitive but can be, occasionally. However, most servers aren't.
If you're behind a case-insensitive server, any will work. If you're not it won't. Personally, I always use all lower case just in case.
So, you were both right but his approach was guaranteed to work whereas yours was merely almost certain to work.
Evo
Motor Sport (who don't have a website, sorry)
Autosport
plus, occasionally,
Guardian Weekend (who don't seem to have a specific site)
Esquire
Fundamentally, though, I want well-written, beautifully illustrated stories about fast cars and I'm happy! I don't ask for much :-)
Yes, I was one of them (in the UK).
I bought it quickly, I forgot to check. I listened to it, it's pretty good if you like that sort of thing.
I was fuming when I discovered it was copy protected. The information was on the packaging, but there's no warning on the front and it's not exactly screaming out on the back. It's _not_ an audio CD according to trademark law and, while I can't return it because I was warned in advance (if badly), I'm very angry.
The retailer have received a letter explaining my position and telling them I'd never have bought it if I knew and would buy very little protected music, simply because I listen to well clear 90% of my music on my work PC. With this album I have to drag the CD in to do that, the application they provide doesn't integrate with anything else, puts out terrible sound quality and frequently crashes. If anyone can tell me where I can find contact details for the label, I'll point out exactly the same to them.
This customer feels deceived and has no desire to be deceived again. The retailer knows they'll lose the sale next time, the label will as soon as I can find how to contact them. Ditto the band.
I've seen copyright protection, I don't like it and I'm quite prepared to tell others why it's wrong.
I started with a Palm III. Nice machine in many ways but really limited by an over-small screen and Graffiti. I never got more than 30wpm on it and tended to have very poor accuracy even with training - it's just too sensitive to small changes and I found by playing with giraffe that there were some basic errors in its topography software.
;-) but in all other respects it's just great.
Nearly 4 years later, I _love_ my PDA and can't imagine doing without it. It's a Psion 5mx.
The upright machines have screens small enough that you can't read any colume of data on them and a data entry system that gets fiddly if you're writing anything longer than a shopping list. A keyboard can be fitted, yes, but you have to take it out of your pocket, build the thing and then find a table. In a few hours I'll be at my church with my Psion, taking sermon notes with the Psion resting on my knees.
An upright looks better in the shops because it's cheaper, smaller and appears easier to use on the move - but long-term use shows you've got to be really keen to make it worthwhile, they don't actually fit particularly comfortably in your shirt pocket and that they're far from ideal as anything other than readers. A colour-screened keyboard machine like most of the WinCE machines equally looks better in the shops but is too expensive and eats batteries. WinCE in general tends to look better because they've got more memory and faster processors - but, just like old Windows v anything else battles, poorer design means it _needs_ those higher spec components to be usable - and the trade-off is in lower battery life.
The Psion, when you actually give it a try, has a keyboard I can touchtype on at little less speed than a desktop keyboard, battery life of 2-3 weeks normal use on 2 AAs and a screen I can really read sensible amounts of data on. I've regularly typed notes in meetings and so on on it with no difficulties. It still fits in a jacket pocket, it's cheaper and it's got a pretty good default software bundle. OK, the synchronisation software was, erm, sub-optimal
And it died because the marketers consistently tried to sell machines that look better in the shops but don't actually work as well day-to-day, and the sector's now dying because people are stuck with these poor machines and realising they're poor.
Someone, please, buy up Psion's keyboard patent and build a modern 5 that can sync. It won't be too expensive and it'll just be a lovely machine that will make PDAs worthwhile again.
They're cheap lenses...
Wedding photography, by definition, isn't moving subjects, far away subjects or really low light all that often. She can therefore live without the really fast lenses and has no particular need for much above 100mm. Were I a pro I'd still rather have higher quality optics than them - I've got about that value of lenses as a starter outfit for an enthusiastic amateur!
Pretty much any other pro sector will want better lenses than that, and more.
How about 14?. Sure I've seen 22MP before as long as you accepted it being permanently tied to a PC.
In any case, the number of pro photographers shooting to a target print size bigger than a broadsheet newspaper page isn't exactly huge, is it?
Not quite what our original poster meant.
Mozilla isn't set up to be end-user software at all. It's set up to be a stable proof of concept from which other developers can take all sorts of cool programs and make their own applications - as with Netscape 7.
It so happens that it makes a nice end-user browser too, but that's not the (official) primary development goal.
(Aside from mentioning Godwin...)
Whether it was already in place by August 1934 when Hitler had been Chancellor for under a year I don't know off the top of my head, but later German polls (they had a lot of referenda) were emphatically not free or fair. Returning officers were all Gestapo or Nazi party and ballots were pre-printed in agreement with the Government position. If you wanted to disagree you had to take your ballot (having just provided your name and address to the Gestapo) and take your ballot into the booth to amend. If you agreed, you just had to post it.
In other ways Russia and the US both have potential parallels with 1930s Germany which doesn't fill me with joy...
It's not far off but if you try and do that from A6 (105mm x 148mm) all the way up to A0 (841mm x 1189mm) you'll be a few mms out.
:-)
Moral - if you want to design something like this and make it nitpicker proof, scale from the base of the series
(Assuming this is correct, of course - may be a big assumption...)
Did they learn _nothing_ from Thomas Penfield Jackson? At all?
Bush and others like him won't be in the Whitehouse for ever. As soon as there's a DoJ who are actually prepared to enforce anti-trust laws rather than mistakenly believing that monopolies are good for innovation and the economy, any company that has amassed a portfolio that simply stops anyone interoperating with their systems will get taken down, quickly.
It's rather frustrating to see continued blatant monopoly abuse from MS. Hopefully, a sensible DoJ will eventually have so much ammunition from the last few years that MS' break-up becomes utterly inevitable.
Example user here, FWIW. And I've got a 2MB line at my office so I'm well used to BB.
Whenever I look at it for home, though, it just seems a waste of money though. I honestly don't routinely use the net for much more than e-mail and catching up on a few news sites, none of which tax a 56k line. Equally, living in my current flat I can't put up a satellite dish - which means if I want digital TV I have to have NTL cable (tip - don't, they're terrible) - which pretty much comes with a free phone line. So, if I want ADSL it'll cost me a fortune because it'll come bundled with another phone line. And if I want a cable modem then it has to be with a company whose DNS server periodically can't find Google or the BBC. And I'd have to have a 12 month contract, and I want to move within 12 months.
No, modems aren't great, but unless you want to download more than a few megabytes or are in a real hurry, they're perfectly adequate. Just leave it sitting there, read the page you just loaded in the background, tell it to download your e-mail then wander off and start preparing dinner. Come back and they're there, all ready to read. So why, exactly, would I want to spend nearly UKP200 per year to get a faster service that I'd rarely benefit from from a company I don't trust to run an egg and spoon race?
RoboDJ!!!!!
http://www.robodj.org/
Great little program - you give each track on your machine a rating either in the library or when it's playing (can be done through a systray icon if you don't want to switch to its interface) and it then effectively does a weighted random shuffle within that library, automatically adding files to the end whenever they're needed.
No complaints over here - I've got a library of well over 3000 songs and it means I can just leave it running and forget about it. When I want albums I can have them but most of the time it gives me variety, which is far more enjoyable when I'm working IMHO.
Won't they issue patents for perpetual motion machines?
(UK won't, FWIW)
Because it's cheaper to network it. If they can stick in a DSL or even ISDN line to get it new ads then they've saved a fortune over sending out a tech to change CDs ever few weeks. Add in remote diagnostics and they'll save a packet.
Now, I can't see this running over the net or WiFi unless they're _really_ stupid but, having said that, we've seen VB cash machines so who knows?
Unless it was changed since I was last over there, they're present by the ton in towns, though. And, back then, stupid numbers of flyposters trying to get you to go to Minitel porn sites (hmm, don't want to imagine how that worked) - presumably now net sites instead?
Swings and roundabouts IMHO. A prettier countryside in compensation for towns (where I actually spend my time...) where I want blinkers.
Oh, OT, can someone go round and paint all the old villages? There's tons that look like they haven't had a single building repainted since D Day!
Speedball 2's on the GBA! Bit harder on that tiny joypad but it's there.
Didn't remember the music was reactive, thanks!
Apparently was partially ported then abandoned - very sad. I would absolutely buy it the second I saw it.
For those of you who don't know, in theory it's a standard Gauntlet clone. Top down maze based 2D shoot-em-up. Always 2 player cooperative and if you're alone, the computer plays as the second player. Yeah, you'll comfortably beat the computer player but it's far from a liability.
What this doesn't tell you is the superb atmosphere it creates and sheer, manic speed. The basic premise is all about some primitive Victorian era steam powered computer (the eponymous Chaos Engine) going wrong and causing a rift in time, leading to all sorts of dinosaurs and weird monsters appearing, and you being part of the gang of mercenaries who are cleaning them up. All have different balances between strength, speed and weaponry, and you can buy power ups after levels to improve performance quite markedly. Everything really looks Victorian - lots of analogue dials, brass plaques and heavy engineering. Being a Bitmap Brothers game, it's very heavy on stats at the end of each section. It'll tell you how much you've cleared, how much of the available cash you got, level times, kill rates and so on, and show the breakdown of you against the computer player or your friend.
The monsters? They just keep running at you, hard, thick and fast. I remember several levels where I was averaging around one kill per second - seriously - and I wasn't that great at it. It's just constant running flat out through the levels, taking out huge lines of monsters running towards you - many of which drop powerups or cash behind them.
Maze design was superb. Genuinely challenging with a lot of dynamic elements, keys and switches, but always ultimatlely both navigable and learnable. And the sound effects whenever you activated a node and started that torus bounding up and down its shaft while the lightning crackled, picked up a key or even opened the final level gate. I remember one where you open the final gate to get out (and hear the speech telling you this) right in the middle of a major battle section a fair way from the exit and where you haven't come close to seeing it yet. Just brilliant, and slightly worrying when you're playing.
That music. Fast techno - not something I'd normally like at all but it fitted the atmosphere so well. Constantly pushing, driving you on, fitting in so well with the pace of the game.
It sounds silly but the level coding system! Used alphanumeric level codes to allow easy resumes without worrying about save games (remember, consoles or pre-HDD computers) but they didn't just kick you in at the level, they accurately saved your game state. There was genuine purpose to going back and replaying the early levels to get a better level code to take you forwards.
I'd love to see something new like that. Short levels (2-3 minutes maximum) once you've learnt them but you could be 5-10 minutes in a level learning it. Well balanced difficulty, great level variety, structure to bring you back again and again to find that last bonus and pace of a type we seem to have abandoned in the mad rush to go 3D. It's the sort of game you can play in small chunks but keep going back to again and again. In other words, ideal handheld territory as far as I'm concerned.
On a much simpler level, I pine for a port of that old Spectrum classic Deathcase 3D! First person 3D motorbike based shoot-em-up in 9K (seriously) - you were riding headlong through a randomly generated forest chasing two other bikes and trying to shoot them with a gun mounted on your handlebars - so, you can aim right but not if there's a tree ahead and to the right... If you shoot those two bikes it becomes night and the screen turns dark for the same challenge, shoot those two bikes and it's day again but the forest is thicker, and thicker, and thicker until you're steering on reflex alone. There's bonus vehicles that appear on the horizon every now and then, and shooting them can get you a big bonus but they're far fr
Two silly stories spring to mind. Both are from memory so I can't give precise details and have probably got others wrong. Oh well, they're still funny :-)
First was a warship patrolling in the Arctic during one of the world wars (think first), and saw an enemy ship in the distance - so fired a torpedo. Problem was, the torpedo's rudder mechanism wasn't designed to handle the cold water and jammed. Described a beautiful arc while the ship carried on steaming ahead and hit the ship that had fired it in the engine room, putting it out of commission for the rest of the war.
Second was a training vessel running exercises in Portsmouth harbour in the UK. Fairly old ship with a mechanical signalling device from bridge to engine rooms - which jammed at half speed astern, and when attempting to unjam it was stuck on full astern. So, first mate sent down to engine room to countermand the order - made no headway against most of the ship's company bailing out having realised what was happening in a fairly small space too late to stop it. The ship rammed a concrete jetty at something like 15 knots in reverse. This compressed it by several feet and resulted in the only injury - one unfortunate seaman was halfway through a deck hatch at the point of impact and the pressure difference this caused shot him out like a bullet from a gun and quite a way into the air.
If enough e-mail runs through a single clearing house, you get all sorts of benefits if you put your mind to it. Identification of legitimate / dodgy e-mail servers and filtering based on that, auto virus analysis and blocking, significantly better spam filtering and detection just to name three off the top of my head. To my eyes, compression across mailboxes is a massive no-brainer and the resultant dictionary analysis you could do would be absolutely fascinating - and very, VERY valuable. I suspect this is why they want to keep your mail after you've deleted it and shut your account.
;-)
Any e-mail server worth its salt really ought to be detecting multiple simultaneous mails with no practical difference in their content and at least shuffling them into a low priority queue. Given that we're routinely seeing Exchange delete the mail body here, though, I'm happy it doesn't fall into the specified category
(Hmm, DoJ - how come you've let MS sell one crappy product, Exchange, by the ton by giving away another crappy one, Outlook, with something they've already obtained a monopoly in? Isn't that pretty much textbook abuse?)
I instantly thought of compression when I saw this. So much of what they collect will be flat-out identical like mass forwards, spam, newsletters, mailing lists and so on. Much of the rest will have significant identical components, like common footers. Why are we assuming they're not compressing across the database? I know I would investigate that if setting this sort of thing up, and as the projects using gzip as a tool to assess similarity have discovered, it can potentially provide much useful fringe data.
B5 took the viewpoint that the explosions were part of the score, FWIW - the battles were normally pretty heavily scored, and they decided to add audible explosions for effect. They weren't claiming they'd really be there.
Hmm, wonder if anyone here saw me as that? :-)
:-)
I'm a trumpeter, and you can make a basic brass instrument out of almost anything. All you need is a tube of some description with a bore somewhere between the diameter of your little finger and, say 3-4 inches. If you can seal the end with some form of bung so you can get an airtight seal for a mouthpiece, all the better. This way I've played kettles, teapots, chairs, relay batons, hoovers and hoses. I've seen a rifle played, open at the breach. Sound quality and range aren't normally great but hey, you're probably doing this for effect anyway so work out something you _can_ play on it and just do that.
Anyway, I was on the staff at a kid's summer holiday club and we had a Roman theme that year. I normally ran a silly games slot, and so this year I was being an incompetent dril sargeant setting all sorts of challenges. I had a colander for my helmet, a tray for a breastplate and a soup ladle tucked into my belt. Every day, to announce my presence, I'd whip out this huge home-made post horn and play the _worst_ fanfare you can imagine, and that would signal the start of proceedings.
It was a 2m long length of 15mm plastic pipe. I then made an expanded polystyrene bung at one end to seal a mouthpiece in place and jammed the largest kitchen funnel I could find into the other end - which, happily, fitted very neatly. Being plastic and having polystyrene for a critical interface this thing resonated absolutely horribly, had no useful tone and a really odd range. It wasn't rigid so flopped around all over the place and if I wasn't very careful when putting the mouthpiece in I knocked the bung out. You could get a really, really bad fanfare on it, though, which was most of the point of the exercise and it did get a laugh
I wouldn't recommend this particular construction for anyone after music not comedy but we did finish the week with a duet of the Prince of Denmark's March on a kettle and a teapot. You can actually get quite a good note out of them, and even use the lid to modulate volume! Tiring to play though.
For the most part, the web applications I work on don't have complex enough user interface requirements that the differences are that significant, but most of the time I've taken the exact opposite approach.
Essentially, because MSIE butchers the standards, I know from experience that if I develop and test my code using MSIE it often barfs on anything else. If I code on Moz, because it's pretty well standards compliant, 99% of the time it works straight out of the box in IE too.
I'd still develop under Moz if that wasn't true, though. To get a context menu item that'll tell me
* What form fields are around and what values they have
* What images the page contains
* What links the page contains
saves a _lot_ of hassle. Can they please fix the bug, though, that causes a new HTTP request if I want to view the source? Why can't it just use cached HTML?
Reading their description of KMOS, I suspect they're trying to sell to mobile phones and the embedded market. For which AOS is pretty well suited - small, fast, proven. No memory protection or virtual memory are advantages in those markets because they also drop the lower overhead.
;-)
In any case, though, I think it's very sad to think that Windows _or_ Unix is the peak of OS evolution. Speaking personally, I'd rather deal with _neither_. AmigaOS has features that I miss to this day and neither OS seems to be growing in a direction that makes me think I'll get them back any time soon. BeOS, Plan 9, Smalltalk, Oberon, AmigaOS, Neutrino - all interesting platforms that have things to teach us and move things forwards.
My strong suspicion is that nothing will happen in the consumer market and that this is the final nail in an already pretty solid coffin. I hope I'm wrong, though, because there are so many nice things that can be done with OSs that aren't being served by current trends and look extremely unlikely to ever be so served.
Oh well. If anyone knows where I can get voodoo dolls for Irving Gould or Medhi Ali....
I've not tried streaming video but with audio off the BBC I found the exact reverse, FWIW.