I don't know, it still needs a few things - a high-score table would be cool - it could rack up the alcohol units for each customer. First to get through 50 bottles of scotch without killing themselves wins a free plush Linux penguin...
You know, if Google decided to search for a specific META tag that gives the geographic location of a company, then I'm betting a lot of designers/companies would add it immediately (and update old sites). If they announced this new tag I'd certainly update some sites!
At the moment, it would be a bit hit and miss to try to search for an address in a page to generate the database programmatically.
Ok, so it's not that flexible, and the non-volatile storage can only manage to keep 3 high-scores, but my Centipede arcade machine is still working with the original boards and monitor! Well, I have recapped it and replaced some of the 2116 4bit RAM, but still - not bad for a machine that was running over 12 hours a day for 13 years without a crash, before I bought it...
Still no brainfuck developer jobs out there... [sigh] Damnit, I suppose I'll have to go learn one of these new fangled languages now. I doubt I'll be making 500,000K a year with this "C++" business though...
Anyone who's spent any time working with Sun's Wireless Toolkit to develop for mobile devices will have witnessed pretty serious memory leakage firsthand. I know I do! After starting an emulator 10-20 times to test code it's using so much RAM that it's necessary to kill and restart the Toolkit to get anything like reasonable performance back again!
I'll agree that Java makes memory management much simpler, (I've spent a lot of time hacking x86 assembler, Pascal, C and C++ over the years) but bad programming can lead to leaks just as well. You tend to discover leaks pretty quickly with a mobile phone that has only 200K of RAM to play with though;-)
I'm not sure where you are geographically, but over here in the UK the old red phoneboxes would be far too heavy to install in a house without major reinforcement for the floor. I'm guessing they were solid steel/iron, with about a million coats of paint each over the graphitti/urine;-)
I know it would never happen, but I'd like a DVD player that had a hard drive with space to cache say 10-15 of the most recently watched films so I didn't have to wait for menus and swap disks.
Even if the hardware "expired" a copy after a week or so (to prevent permanent copies of rented films) it would still be useful.
Based on an old idea (Cryptonomicon)
on
H2O/IP
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This is reminiscent of an idea used in the "first computer" developed in the book Cryptonomicon. The RAM is a series of tubes holding mercury, which store values based upon waves introduced into the tubes which closed electical circuits (if I remember rightly). It'd be cool to see one actually working;-)
Ok, so it looked far worse than the original, but personally I was amazed they managed it at all, given the miserable hardware the 2600 had! The machine was designed to display 2 player sprites, 2 missile sprites, a ball and a playfield which was basically a vertical line, unless the video chip was preloaded each X scanlines. Remember, the machine had 128 BYTES of work RAM and NO graphics RAM, so the entire background and sprites had to be redrawn by the program every frame.
It's no wonder the ghosts flickered, it must have been impossible for the little 8 bit CPU to manage to keep everything on screen all the time at 25pfs...
There's an old article about programming the 2600 here which may open a few eyes!
The app is written in C. I wonder about the wisdom about an app that is compiled to a single phone. Especially a phone that has not even been released
Well although I use Java for phone games, I can see that C would be a better bet for this. (A) because it will run faster on the relatively slow processor, and (B) because MAME is written in C already, so it would need to be completely rewritten for Java, rather than ported with most of the existing code unchanged!!
This story reminds me of the vid clip I saw on this page. Totally pointless, but very cool - I've never seen anything chop through wood quite so quick - and the sound it makes it almost worth the effort...
I still think RMS should have pushed to get a cameo role in one of the LOTR films... Might need some makeup to look more believable, but you know, they can work miracles these days...
I, for one, think that if you find an entire race of people hooked up to a machine for the entirety of their lives, thinking that is living, and a good way to spend their existence, then that entire race of people needs a boot up its ass.
I think you're trying to sell this idea to the wrong crowd, dude...
Working with the internet is not about making a "reasonably guarantee" that someone can see something. It's about using standards to absolutely guarantee that anyone can see anything.
You can never "guarantee" that anyone can see anything on the web. I could write a browser that only supported a 10x10pixel screen mobile device - could I still see your site?
If you stick with basic bread'n'butter html/CSS only sites, then you have a reasonable chance of being accessable to the vast majority of people, but once you break out of that mold, there are compromises. There are some *great* DHTML/Flash sites around which just would not work; even slightly; using html. This is not a bad thing, it depends on the audience the designer was aiming for. One size does NOT fit all.
As a professional journalist, I can tell you that they use that information you input to profile you and sell it to advertisers. Try posting a google cache link next time instead.
So what? I always sign up as cmdrtaco@slashdot.org anyway;-)
Trust me, you need to have a mechanism in place to stop the spammer's spider sucking up all your bandwidth or it'll get really expensive to do this!
I've written a perl script that does the same for my site, and it's set up to only allow links down to 4 layers deep from the first page (pages are randomly generated, but each bogus URL includes a depth key=>value pair hidden in the mess.
Also ensure any random email addresses really are random (as much as possible). I have the script perform an nslookup on the domains it generates to make sure they don't resolve - it also slows down page generation significantly, which is another bonus...
That you consider goatecx a porn site is somewhat disturbing...
Re:excellent promotion for alternate browsers
on
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
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· Score: 2
It shouldn't be that difficult to watch for this:
if(window.open() called && mouseLeft !pressed)
blockAdSpam();
or the equivelent. Normally the left button would still be pressed when the window.open() call was made on a legitimate link. Other than that, a whitelist of sites that should be allowed access to the window.open() method could be created.
A good IT department will audit this (at least for the users that reside in the office... that goes for plain-view passwords, etc) and penalize users who do not [lock machine when leaving it unattended]
I used to have great fun with people who did this at a previous job where the majority of machines were Sun/Linux. One guy constantly left his machine logged in, so I'd sneak over and drop the security on his X server (xhost +), then have great fun randomly opening apps on his machine across the room. Since he was a hardcore Windows man (he was working as a Perl programmer, and didn't have any interest in the operating system) he had no idea what was going on.
Oh yeah, I also set up a cron job to open Netscape, pointed at the famous goatcx site at lunch every day on his machine for a while...
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, the Linux "killer app" emerges
I don't know, it still needs a few things - a high-score table would be cool - it could rack up the alcohol units for each customer. First to get through 50 bottles of scotch without killing themselves wins a free plush Linux penguin...
You know, if Google decided to search for a specific META tag that gives the geographic location of a company, then I'm betting a lot of designers/companies would add it immediately (and update old sites). If they announced this new tag I'd certainly update some sites!
At the moment, it would be a bit hit and miss to try to search for an address in a page to generate the database programmatically.
Ok, so it's not that flexible, and the non-volatile storage can only manage to keep 3 high-scores, but my Centipede arcade machine is still working with the original boards and monitor! Well, I have recapped it and replaced some of the 2116 4bit RAM, but still - not bad for a machine that was running over 12 hours a day for 13 years without a crash, before I bought it...
Still no brainfuck developer jobs out there... [sigh] Damnit, I suppose I'll have to go learn one of these new fangled languages now. I doubt I'll be making 500,000K a year with this "C++" business though...
Thus we renamed all of the jump entries in the jump tables (remember those?)
Yeah, I've always considered them to be "switch blocks for *real* programmers".
Cut him some slack, he was using Windows calculator.exe.
he stole it out right. if some guy robs me I would hope that he gets the book thrown at him.
What if he stole the book?
Anyone who's spent any time working with Sun's Wireless Toolkit to develop for mobile devices will have witnessed pretty serious memory leakage firsthand. I know I do! After starting an emulator 10-20 times to test code it's using so much RAM that it's necessary to kill and restart the Toolkit to get anything like reasonable performance back again!
;-)
I'll agree that Java makes memory management much simpler, (I've spent a lot of time hacking x86 assembler, Pascal, C and C++ over the years) but bad programming can lead to leaks just as well. You tend to discover leaks pretty quickly with a mobile phone that has only 200K of RAM to play with though
Why not just turn them into toilets, and handy pinboards for ladies of the night to ply their wares? Oh wait...
I'm not sure where you are geographically, but over here in the UK the old red phoneboxes would be far too heavy to install in a house without major reinforcement for the floor. I'm guessing they were solid steel/iron, with about a million coats of paint each over the graphitti/urine ;-)
I know it would never happen, but I'd like a DVD player that had a hard drive with space to cache say 10-15 of the most recently watched films so I didn't have to wait for menus and swap disks.
Even if the hardware "expired" a copy after a week or so (to prevent permanent copies of rented films) it would still be useful.
This is reminiscent of an idea used in the "first computer" developed in the book Cryptonomicon. The RAM is a series of tubes holding mercury, which store values based upon waves introduced into the tubes which closed electical circuits (if I remember rightly). It'd be cool to see one actually working ;-)
Ok, so it looked far worse than the original, but personally I was amazed they managed it at all, given the miserable hardware the 2600 had! The machine was designed to display 2 player sprites, 2 missile sprites, a ball and a playfield which was basically a vertical line, unless the video chip was preloaded each X scanlines. Remember, the machine had 128 BYTES of work RAM and NO graphics RAM, so the entire background and sprites had to be redrawn by the program every frame.
It's no wonder the ghosts flickered, it must have been impossible for the little 8 bit CPU to manage to keep everything on screen all the time at 25pfs...
There's an old article about programming the 2600 here which may open a few eyes!
The app is written in C. I wonder about the wisdom about an app that is compiled to a single phone. Especially a phone that has not even been released
Well although I use Java for phone games, I can see that C would be a better bet for this. (A) because it will run faster on the relatively slow processor, and (B) because MAME is written in C already, so it would need to be completely rewritten for Java, rather than ported with most of the existing code unchanged!!
This story reminds me of the vid clip I saw on this page. Totally pointless, but very cool - I've never seen anything chop through wood quite so quick - and the sound it makes it almost worth the effort...
I still think RMS should have pushed to get a cameo role in one of the LOTR films... Might need some makeup to look more believable, but you know, they can work miracles these days...
I, for one, think that if you find an entire race of people hooked up to a machine for the entirety of their lives, thinking that is living, and a good way to spend their existence, then that entire race of people needs a boot up its ass.
I think you're trying to sell this idea to the wrong crowd, dude...
I think what is the worst is that they are releasing two sequels the same year. Whatever happened to waiting, speculation, and hype?
;-)
Yeah, because look how well that idea worked for the dot.com industry
Working with the internet is not about making a "reasonably guarantee" that someone can see something. It's about using standards to absolutely guarantee that anyone can see anything.
You can never "guarantee" that anyone can see anything on the web. I could write a browser that only supported a 10x10pixel screen mobile device - could I still see your site?
If you stick with basic bread'n'butter html/CSS only sites, then you have a reasonable chance of being accessable to the vast majority of people, but once you break out of that mold, there are compromises. There are some *great* DHTML/Flash sites around which just would not work; even slightly; using html. This is not a bad thing, it depends on the audience the designer was aiming for. One size does NOT fit all.
As a professional journalist, I can tell you that they use that information you input to profile you and sell it to advertisers. Try posting a google cache link next time instead.
;-)
So what? I always sign up as cmdrtaco@slashdot.org anyway
(only kidding... it's cowboy neil)
Trust me, you need to have a mechanism in place to stop the spammer's spider sucking up all your bandwidth or it'll get really expensive to do this!
I've written a perl script that does the same for my site, and it's set up to only allow links down to 4 layers deep from the first page (pages are randomly generated, but each bogus URL includes a depth key=>value pair hidden in the mess.
Also ensure any random email addresses really are random (as much as possible). I have the script perform an nslookup on the domains it generates to make sure they don't resolve - it also slows down page generation significantly, which is another bonus...
Seems like there is a Santa Claus after all... ;-)
That you consider goatecx a porn site is somewhat disturbing...
It shouldn't be that difficult to watch for this:
if(window.open() called && mouseLeft !pressed)
blockAdSpam();
or the equivelent. Normally the left button would still be pressed when the window.open() call was made on a legitimate link. Other than that, a whitelist of sites that should be allowed access to the window.open() method could be created.
A good IT department will audit this (at least for the users that reside in the office... that goes for plain-view passwords, etc) and penalize users who do not [lock machine when leaving it unattended]
I used to have great fun with people who did this at a previous job where the majority of machines were Sun/Linux. One guy constantly left his machine logged in, so I'd sneak over and drop the security on his X server (xhost +), then have great fun randomly opening apps on his machine across the room. Since he was a hardcore Windows man (he was working as a Perl programmer, and didn't have any interest in the operating system) he had no idea what was going on.
Oh yeah, I also set up a cron job to open Netscape, pointed at the famous goatcx site at lunch every day on his machine for a while...