My favorite Adventure game of all time was a Lucas Art's game "Day of the Tenticle". Excellent gameplay. Excellent wit. However, it was basically a DOS game and with modern hardware it is very difficult to get running properly. I used to love Infocom games. If someone whould come out with a new "Monkey Island" or "Infocom" or "Grim Fandango" type game with quality puzzles and stories, I would buy one every month.
I never did get into the King's Quest games or other Serria games because I felt the movement was "too slow" and many of the puzzles too arbitary.
There's nothing like the way you could zoom through an infocom game with commands like:
> w; w; u; e; n; d; look
and the next thing you knew, you were 6 rooms over working on a new puzzle. Too many of the graphical adventure games want to slow you down with the pretty graphics.
I write a thesis that concludes Linux is superior to windows. Now someone comes by, changes some to the statistics and then changes the conclusions to say Linux Sucks. Sure, they now add their name to the paper, but my name is still on it. By the GPL they don't even have to explicitly denote what they changed, just that they changed it. Now when someone reads my paper, they could very easily get the idea that I'm pro-Windows and anti-Linux when they are reading a paper I've authored but have never read.
Until you show me a provision of the GPL that mandates all changes be highlighted, commented, denoted, separated, supplied in a patch, etc..., it will be impossible for the reader to know where person A's ideas stop and person B's ideas start.
If you GPLed your thesis, anyone could then rewrite the whole thing, change your conclusions to something you don't agree with, change the rev number, keep your name on it, and republish it without your permission. That would truely suck.
All of a sudden anyone could attribute any quote to your work by just reving the docutment.
Come on, the thought that on-line gambling will threaten Las Vegas is totally wacked! The only area online can even come close to threatening Vegas is in the area of sports betting and then you are only hurting once aspect of their business. As of right now, we already have full casinos sprouting up all over this country. Is it hurting Las Vegas? I don't think so. Vegas is still building new casinos.
Vegas has three things these other places don't have.
Atmosphere: It almost feels like Disney in most casinos and Vegas has some of the best entertainment in the world!
Reputation: You see the dealers and machines in front of you. You don't have to worry much about being cheated because they are making too much money being honest. Can you say the same about on-line? You have no way to get the warm-fuzzies it is not rigged.
Sports-betting: Vegas is the only place to legally place a bet on sports. Until that changes, there will always be people flocking to vegas.
Here is a list of false claims on computer products the FTC should be investigating!
- 56K modems that will never see that speed, even under the best of conditions.
- Rebates that never come back, or take 6 months to get back.
- Free PC that are not free.
- Ads with monitors that are not showing pictures generated on that monitor.
- Pictures of Computer systems with a price, yet when you read the fine print, you get almost nothing in the picture.
- Saleing any software which can't even do what's listed on the box. I hate buying a game, (or any other ap or os) and the first thing I have to do to make it "stable" is to download a 600 meg patch off the web.
- Online stores that claim to have a product in stock which goes to back order after they charge your credit card.
As someone who has spent much time trying to convert drawing between AutoCad and Microstation, I can tell you that there is not a single product on the market that comes close. None even attempt to guarentee they can convert the files.
Yes, the basics of the DWG files are well understood. But I guarentee you if you take a professional engineering AutoCad drawing with all the different layers and all the "smarts" attributed to the different elements, and you try to convert it to any format, you WILL lose most of the "smart" information stored in the DWG file. You will also probably have problems with the different layers and linewidths, colors, etc...
DWG is not a good example unless all you trying to do with the.DOC file is read the plain text. However if you wish to recreate the entire rich document with all annotaions, footnotes, headers, footers, graphics, etc... your going to be in for a major task. Microsoft even has difficulties converting large, rich word files.
I'm not sure I have an answer to any of those questions. What I would like to know is instead of the government paying ridiculous high prices for people to live in overpopulated, overpriced areas, wouldn't it make more sense to pay some of those people to relocate to cheaper areas?
Well, for the most part I don't think the gov't should be paying for people to live anywhere. If you can't afford it, move to somewhere you can afford. Then, if Silicon Valley can't get new employees because noone can afford the houseing, either the the houseing prices will come down, some companies in Silicon Valley will move, or Salaries will go up. Any way you look at it, the problem is solved. The only persons served by the gov't helping pay the houseing cost are the one who currently own houses are are attempting to sell them.
Nobody reads the license agreement before they hit 'OK'. Is this good for the consumer? No! Is this what corporate america wants? Yes!
Very true. However, when I was in engineering school, I had to take one ethics/legal class. In that class they gave us a couple of examples of warning labels and products liability. Basically companies had started putting so many warning labels on products to limit liability that people had stop reading the warning labels. There were even some court cases that found against the companies because the jury found that a "reasonable" person would not read through so many warnings. (Example where ladders and lawn mowers. - Ladders have more warning labels than you can shack a stick at and there was this person who used a lawn mower to trim his hedges with disastrous results.)
Shouldn't the same principles apply to software licenses? If they make the licenses so long and tedious that you need a lawyer to understand them that the average person can no longer read the licenses and know what they are agreeing to, will they continue to remain valid?
If it is true the gov't is helping to pay for the expensive housing due their high cost, then the gov't is part of the problem! If noone can afford to move to SV, the value of the houses will come down. However, if the gov't continues to assist lower income (and 50$ is by no means lower income in my books!) then the people who are selling homes shall continue to reap great rewards at tax payers expense.
quack
Re:Business plan is not broken
on
Tivo Hacking?
·
· Score: 1
And honestly, if you're 30hrs behind in your TV watching, are you likely to ever catch up?
Unless of course your Tivo is recording programming for 2 or 3 people. Or you want to record at a level higher than the minimal. Or you want to save a movie for a friend/self while your out of town.
I can see many reasons for a 30 hour Tivo. I have the 14 hour version and I don't think its enough.
Humm.. What's wrong with this troll??? I won't even try to count the ways. But you are wrong about the rights to carry a gun. A teenager, in most cities in the country, can not carry a gun in a mall. Furthermore, few people can leagally carry a gun on school grounds. Thank the Feds for this after the UT clock tower incident. Yes. It is against federal law to carry a gun on campus. You don't have to be a liberal to know that. I'm not a liberal BTW. I'm just pointing out the law. If you don't like the law, change it.
frequent physical fighting Assult is against the law.
significant vandalism or property damage Vandalism is against the law.
increase in use of drugs or alchohol Drug use is against the law.
increasing risk-taking behavior Define?
detailed plans to commit acts of violence. Conspiracy to commit a crime is against the law.
announcing threats or plans for hurting others Conspiracy is against the law.
enjoying hurting animals Minor offense, but still against the law. Call PETA!
carrying a weapon Against the law.
Let's see. All the warning signs are criminal activities. Shouldn't the police be involved? It appears to me if WAVE doesn't report these findings to the police, then they are aiding and abeding a potental, known, criminal.
Anyways, what ever happened to a right to see ones accusers?
I understand that ads generate revenue and that ticketmaster would be upset by people bypassing ads. However, the "offending" deep linking still takes the user to a page containing a banner, and ticketmaster will still receive a service charge, so what are they complaining about?
This one is easy. If they make you travel a maze of 5 web pages to find the "deep-link" your looking for, they can place numerous ads on each page. Since they get pay by the number of people who see each ad, they want you to visit every page so you can see every ad 5 times so they can charge 5 times as much. The problem here is, if you make to hard for me to find what I'm looking for, I will stop looking. Also, if I don't click on the banner ad the first time I see it, what makes you think I will the 5th time I see it?
I once had someone link their ebay auction to a picture on my server (without my permession.) What I did was wait until he had one bid (so he couldn't modicfy the auction) and then replaced the picture with some pornography. You'd be supprised at how many hits he started to get!
In retrospect, I spamed my server more by changeing the picture, but I think it was worth it.
If your afraid someone is deep linking your site, and you don't like it, just change your links. It's not that hard. And if the Japanese ruling holds any water, you may be able to get them into legal trouble depending on what part of they world they/you are from. *smile*
Summary: A photon has both energy and momentum, which are dependant on frequency. They may or may not be massless, but if they do have mass, it's less than 10e-45 kg (or somewhere in that vicinity, I don't know the exact upper limit we've calculated so far... it's small)
Question: Why did you put a Kilo (10e3) on a gram unit that is so small? Are you trying to make it look even smaller?
I just bought the NEC-LCD1525X. It looks great! It's main advantage is it will accept both analog and digital inputs and has connectors for all three of the standard Digital formats (DVI, DFP, and P&D).
This is ideal because digital video cards are harder to find and if you want to buy the monitor now, you won't be locked down as to what type of video card to get once you either get the money or can find the right card.
No, Not really. Credit information changes constantly. Loans get paid off. New loans are applied for. People move. Buy houses. Get diviorced. It won't take long before the information is so out of date with no way to verify it that it will soon become worthless.
This is a good thing. Now we only need to wait six months to hopefully see a decrease in direct spam.
This sounds interesting if your using unique keywords for something like a family web site and you have a unique sername. However, what will happen when I havea site that needs to use "Hot", "Sex", "Babes", "XXX", "Nude" for my keywords? How many other sites are going to have the exact same keywords? Or more seriously, how about "Smith", "Family", "Web", "Page"?
Until Amazon stops with these silly patent claims, they should not be expecting to see any of my money. There are plenty of other vendors who provide a similar service for a similar price. They need to be aware that once we get used to purchasing from a different vendor, Amazon will no longer be the first place we look for books.
Bring on the puzzles, but not too many, to quickly. Each one should be given ample time to be savered, solved and discussed.
Good puzzles of all kinds are great ways to excersise the mind.
There should be two simple ground rules:
All puzzles should have answers that the poster has verified before hand. There is nothing worse than the puzzles floating around the internet that have no answers. Major brain drain.
Puzzles should not be too easy (nor too hard) for the slashdot crowd. If the puzzles can be answered in 5 minutes, then where is the challenge. Likewise, if they can't be solved, why bothered.
I personally like.deb files. They are easy to use for both installs and uninstalls. However, dpkg and dselect try to be smart and won't download a package you currently have installed if you have the most up-to-date version.
I would like to see a package checking program. Something that will check the packages installed and verify all required files are indeed installed and maybe even if they are corrupted. Then, this program will either reinstall the complete packages or atleast the affected files.
With the advent of algore2000, will we soon see Al Gore claiming to have Invented (or even to have re-invented) Political Campaigning on the Internet in much the same fashion he claimed to have invented the Internet?
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite Adventure game of all time was a Lucas Art's game "Day of the Tenticle". Excellent gameplay. Excellent wit. However, it was basically a DOS game and with modern hardware it is very difficult to get running properly. I used to love Infocom games. If someone whould come out with a new "Monkey Island" or "Infocom" or "Grim Fandango" type game with quality puzzles and stories, I would buy one every month.
I never did get into the King's Quest games or other Serria games because I felt the movement was "too slow" and many of the puzzles too arbitary.
There's nothing like the way you could zoom through an infocom game with commands like:
> w; w; u; e; n; d; look
and the next thing you knew, you were 6 rooms over working on a new puzzle. Too many of the graphical adventure games want to slow you down with the pretty graphics.
Quack
Here is an example of the problem as I see it.
I write a thesis that concludes Linux is superior to windows. Now someone comes by, changes some to the statistics and then changes the conclusions to say Linux Sucks. Sure, they now add their name to the paper, but my name is still on it. By the GPL they don't even have to explicitly denote what they changed, just that they changed it. Now when someone reads my paper, they could very easily get the idea that I'm pro-Windows and anti-Linux when they are reading a paper I've authored but have never read.
Until you show me a provision of the GPL that mandates all changes be highlighted, commented, denoted, separated, supplied in a patch, etc..., it will be impossible for the reader to know where person A's ideas stop and person B's ideas start.
Quack
Do you really want this?
If you GPLed your thesis, anyone could then rewrite the whole thing, change your conclusions to something you don't agree with, change the rev number, keep your name on it, and republish it without your permission. That would truely suck.
All of a sudden anyone could attribute any quote to your work by just reving the docutment.
Quack
Come on, the thought that on-line gambling will threaten Las Vegas is totally wacked! The only area online can even come close to threatening Vegas is in the area of sports betting and then you are only hurting once aspect of their business. As of right now, we already have full casinos sprouting up all over this country. Is it hurting Las Vegas? I don't think so. Vegas is still building new casinos.
Vegas has three things these other places don't have.
Atmosphere: It almost feels like Disney in most casinos and Vegas has some of the best entertainment in the world!
Reputation: You see the dealers and machines in front of you. You don't have to worry much about being cheated because they are making too much money being honest. Can you say the same about on-line? You have no way to get the warm-fuzzies it is not rigged.
Sports-betting: Vegas is the only place to legally place a bet on sports. Until that changes, there will always be people flocking to vegas.
Quack
Here is a list of false claims on computer products the FTC should be investigating!
- 56K modems that will never see that speed, even under the best of conditions.
- Rebates that never come back, or take 6 months to get back.
- Free PC that are not free.
- Ads with monitors that are not showing pictures generated on that monitor.
- Pictures of Computer systems with a price, yet when you read the fine print, you get almost nothing in the picture.
- Saleing any software which can't even do what's listed on the box. I hate buying a game, (or any other ap or os) and the first thing I have to do to make it "stable" is to download a 600 meg patch off the web.
- Online stores that claim to have a product in stock which goes to back order after they charge your credit card.
- This list could go on.. and on.. and on...
Quack
As someone who has spent much time trying to convert drawing between AutoCad and Microstation, I can tell you that there is not a single product on the market that comes close. None even attempt to guarentee they can convert the files.
.DOC file is read the plain text. However if you wish to recreate the entire rich document with all annotaions, footnotes, headers, footers, graphics, etc... your going to be in for a major task. Microsoft even has difficulties converting large, rich word files.
Yes, the basics of the DWG files are well understood. But I guarentee you if you take a professional engineering AutoCad drawing with all the different layers and all the "smarts" attributed to the different elements, and you try to convert it to any format, you WILL lose most of the "smart" information stored in the DWG file. You will also probably have problems with the different layers and linewidths, colors, etc...
DWG is not a good example unless all you trying to do with the
Quack
I'm not sure I have an answer to any of those questions. What I would like to know is instead of the government paying ridiculous high prices for people to live in overpopulated, overpriced areas, wouldn't it make more sense to pay some of those people to relocate to cheaper areas?
Well, for the most part I don't think the gov't should be paying for people to live anywhere. If you can't afford it, move to somewhere you can afford. Then, if Silicon Valley can't get new employees because noone can afford the houseing, either the the houseing prices will come down, some companies in Silicon Valley will move, or Salaries will go up. Any way you look at it, the problem is solved. The only persons served by the gov't helping pay the houseing cost are the one who currently own houses are are attempting to sell them.
Quack
Nobody reads the license agreement before they hit 'OK'. Is this good for the consumer? No! Is this what corporate america wants? Yes!
Very true. However, when I was in engineering school, I had to take one ethics/legal class. In that class they gave us a couple of examples of warning labels and products liability. Basically companies had started putting so many warning labels on products to limit liability that people had stop reading the warning labels. There were even some court cases that found against the companies because the jury found that a "reasonable" person would not read through so many warnings. (Example where ladders and lawn mowers. - Ladders have more warning labels than you can shack a stick at and there was this person who used a lawn mower to trim his hedges with disastrous results.)
Shouldn't the same principles apply to software licenses? If they make the licenses so long and tedious that you need a lawyer to understand them that the average person can no longer read the licenses and know what they are agreeing to, will they continue to remain valid?
Quack
If it is true the gov't is helping to pay for the expensive housing due their high cost, then the gov't is part of the problem! If noone can afford to move to SV, the value of the houses will come down. However, if the gov't continues to assist lower income (and 50$ is by no means lower income in my books!) then the people who are selling homes shall continue to reap great rewards at tax payers expense.
quack
And honestly, if you're 30hrs behind in your TV watching, are you likely to ever catch up?
Unless of course your Tivo is recording programming for 2 or 3 people. Or you want to record at a level higher than the minimal. Or you want to save a movie for a friend/self while your out of town.
I can see many reasons for a 30 hour Tivo. I have the 14 hour version and I don't think its enough.
Quack
Humm.. What's wrong with this troll??? I won't even try to count the ways. But you are wrong about the rights to carry a gun. A teenager, in most cities in the country, can not carry a gun in a mall. Furthermore, few people can leagally carry a gun on school grounds. Thank the Feds for this after the UT clock tower incident. Yes. It is against federal law to carry a gun on campus. You don't have to be a liberal to know that. I'm not a liberal BTW. I'm just pointing out the law. If you don't like the law, change it.
Quack
frequent physical fighting
Assult is against the law.
significant vandalism or property damage
Vandalism is against the law.
increase in use of drugs or alchohol
Drug use is against the law.
increasing risk-taking behavior
Define?
detailed plans to commit acts of violence.
Conspiracy to commit a crime is against the law.
announcing threats or plans for hurting others
Conspiracy is against the law.
enjoying hurting animals
Minor offense, but still against the law. Call PETA!
carrying a weapon
Against the law.
Let's see. All the warning signs are criminal activities. Shouldn't the police be involved? It appears to me if WAVE doesn't report these findings to the police, then they are aiding and abeding a potental, known, criminal.
Anyways, what ever happened to a right to see ones accusers?
Quack
I understand that ads generate revenue and that ticketmaster would be upset by people bypassing ads. However, the "offending" deep linking still takes the user to a page containing a banner, and ticketmaster will still receive a service charge, so what are they complaining about?
This one is easy. If they make you travel a maze of 5 web pages to find the "deep-link" your looking for, they can place numerous ads on each page. Since they get pay by the number of people who see each ad, they want you to visit every page so you can see every ad 5 times so they can charge 5 times as much. The problem here is, if you make to hard for me to find what I'm looking for, I will stop looking. Also, if I don't click on the banner ad the first time I see it, what makes you think I will the 5th time I see it?
Quack
I once had someone link their ebay auction to a picture on my server (without my permession.) What I did was wait until he had one bid (so he couldn't modicfy the auction) and then replaced the picture with some pornography. You'd be supprised at how many hits he started to get!
In retrospect, I spamed my server more by changeing the picture, but I think it was worth it.
If your afraid someone is deep linking your site, and you don't like it, just change your links. It's not that hard. And if the Japanese ruling holds any water, you may be able to get them into legal trouble depending on what part of they world they/you are from. *smile*
Quack
Summary: A photon has both energy and momentum, which are dependant on frequency. They may or may not be massless, but if they do have mass, it's less than 10e-45 kg (or somewhere in that vicinity, I don't know the exact upper limit we've calculated so far... it's small)
Question: Why did you put a Kilo (10e3) on a gram unit that is so small? Are you trying to make it look even smaller?
Quack
I just bought the NEC-LCD1525X. It looks great! It's main advantage is it will accept both analog and digital inputs and has connectors for all three of the standard Digital formats (DVI, DFP, and P&D).
This is ideal because digital video cards are harder to find and if you want to buy the monitor now, you won't be locked down as to what type of video card to get once you either get the money or can find the right card.
Quack
No, Not really. Credit information changes constantly. Loans get paid off. New loans are applied for. People move. Buy houses. Get diviorced. It won't take long before the information is so out of date with no way to verify it that it will soon become worthless.
This is a good thing. Now we only need to wait six months to hopefully see a decrease in direct spam.
Quack
This sounds interesting if your using unique keywords for something like a family web site and you have a unique sername. However, what will happen when I havea site that needs to use "Hot", "Sex", "Babes", "XXX", "Nude" for my keywords? How many other sites are going to have the exact same keywords? Or more seriously, how about "Smith", "Family", "Web", "Page"?
How will it help me if my URL changes?
quack
Until Amazon stops with these silly patent claims, they should not be expecting to see any of my money. There are plenty of other vendors who provide a similar service for a similar price. They need to be aware that once we get used to purchasing from a different vendor, Amazon will no longer be the first place we look for books.
Quack
Good puzzles of all kinds are great ways to excersise the mind.
There should be two simple ground rules:
All puzzles should have answers that the poster has verified before hand. There is nothing worse than the puzzles floating around the internet that have no answers. Major brain drain.
Puzzles should not be too easy (nor too hard) for the slashdot crowd. If the puzzles can be answered in 5 minutes, then where is the challenge. Likewise, if they can't be solved, why bothered.
Good Luck
Steven
- Signal to noise ratio too low. Too many full page adds.
- The cheap paper/ink leads to black hands and sometime clothes.
- Major hassle dealing with build-up of old papers.
- Low on details. Most articles seem very superficial.
- Anything Important I already "know" more about then the paper has in print.
- Extreem local slant on sports coverage. (i.e. local team can do no wrong...)
- Very little technical news that is not insultingly dumbed down.
Now, to be fair... the problems with on-line newsFor me, the problems of the newspaper outway the problems with the net and thus prevent me from buying a paper for my house.
quack
You can reinstall packages with "apt-get --reinstall install foopkg".
Which version of apt do you have? When I use the --reinstall option I get:
E: Command line option --reinstall is not understood.
Or where you trying to make a joke?
Quack
I personally like .deb files. They are easy to use for both installs and uninstalls. However, dpkg and dselect try to be smart and won't download a package you currently have installed if you have the most up-to-date version.
I would like to see a package checking program. Something that will check the packages installed and verify all required files are indeed installed and maybe even if they are corrupted. Then, this program will either reinstall the complete packages or atleast the affected files.
Any Ideas/Suggestions?
Quack
With the advent of algore2000, will we soon see Al Gore claiming to have Invented (or even to have re-invented) Political Campaigning on the Internet in much the same fashion he claimed to have invented the Internet?
Quack
Ok... We've all heard the news, the rumors, and the FUD. But does anyone know when this all takes place? When ANDN becuase LNUX? Thanks.
Quack