and, whilst i was aware of the expression for a long time, it was not until playing Age of Kings (Conquerors exp.) that i found out what it really meant.
and who said realtime strategy can't be informative!
ironically AOK was naturally produced by microsoft (although programmed by ensemble of course)
bollox. are the other gaming consoles now somehow open source? nintendo dolphin, sony playstation, etc., etc.?
let's read between the lines here:
"I did it because I thought people should have the choice to run the software they want on the hardware of their choice. Especially if that choice is LindowsOS, which only runs on PCs, and with which, according to our own hardware database, we only 'believe' most of the products available in the entire IT world are compatible, having obviously no time to check out important things like HW compatibility when cracking the Xbox would be more fun and gain more publicity (check out http://www.lindows.com/lindows_hwsw_compatibility. php?company_id=187&category_id=2 for example. Challenge: try and find a product which lindows.com actually KNOWS is compatible). Oh, and we also require you to connect to lindows.com to update the OS. So the OS is, in a sense, closed. Quote:
"Can I use Click-N-RunTM to install software from the Click-N-Run Warehouse on machines not running LindowsOS? Because Click-N-RunTM relies on technology built into the actual operating system, it requires LindowsOS and its native web browser to operate.
Where do the software titles found in the Click-N-Run Warehouse come from? Lindows.com simply provides the marketplace to house applications that others develop. "Publishers" place the software in our warehouse, decide how to describe the software program, what price to charge, and so on. (Visit http://publish.lindows.com for details on how you can publish software titles in the Click-N-Run Warehouse.)"
To be honest, the guy mentioning printing it all out and saving it that way wasn't so far off the mark. You might not be able to search through the stuff, but at least you will still have it in the far future.
Acts of Parliament in England are still transcribed onto parchment. Yep. Here's a link for the disbelieving.
And if you want to know how durable it is, well I've personally read stuff from the 1300s on manuscript, not a bad shelf life for data at all. Digital-age media are great for saving data, and especially in compressed form, but they are *really* crap at storing it for long periods of time.
You may have no data that'll be interesting in 10 years time, and I dare say the current environment produces a signal-to-noise ratio way lower than was true in the dark ages (for example), but we are going to be pretty ignorant of 2002 in 2102 if our digital media are only capable of managing a 10-year life span.
It will mean continual copying of data onto more durable storage media, and the checking of said data's integrity. It sounds as though 'librarian' will once more become a sought-after and prestigious occupation.:=)
"Most religions (yes, sweeping generalisation from a non-expert) are, at their very core, about living your life properly and generally being a nice person (tm). Dunno about you, but to me, that seems to be a pretty smart thing."
The point of religions is therefore..? A prop for the weak and a rod for the powerful.
"Because by-and-large (yes, there are exceptions and I acknowledge that), people choose to believe in "religion X".
I would suggest that most people do *not* choose, to wit:
"I personally don't believe in religion (I'd probably class myself as agnostic if I had to), but I would never deny anyone the choice to be religious (whatever form that takes). "
With the obvious exception of Buddhism, amongst the world's major religions, it is the community that counts, not the individual. How many Christians become monks or nuns for example? Remember Marx.
And, what's more, as a non-believer in one of the world's major religions, one is truly in the minority. As a true non-believer, i.e. an Athiest, the minority becomes vanishingly small.
If, in this scenario, you think that your opinion as an Atheist/Agnostic interests anyone, you are fooling yourself.
The typical human being on this planet is poor, ill-educated and hungry, and has little time to spend evenings, alcohol-fuelled or not, discussing religion.
i thought your article was spot on, but with reference to your.sig and at the risk of being seen as horribly insensitive at this particular moment in time (my point is however a general one):
Guns don't kill people Snipers kill people
dude - the gun helps, don't you think?
somewhat surprisingly, there *is* a connection between firearms deaths and firearms themselves.
For those interested, 'planet' comes from the Greek 'planetos', meaning 'wanderer'. They were named so since in comparison with the 'stars', they were perceived to 'wander' about the sky (the term is especially striking when one considers the retrograde motion of planets further out than Earth).
"Either there is no such thing as right an wrong, or it is most definitely not up to your own personal ethical code. To admit that right and wrong are a matter of preference is to destroy any useful definition of right and wrong."
Not so. Right and wrong are usually defined as just that. Either:
a) legally. the right or the wrong was decided by a group of people with law-making powers based on a consensus of their personal opinions on the matter.
b) socially. the group of people have no law-making rights, but they -- as a group -- label a course of action as right or wrong.
Moreover, any legal system that uses a jury is admitting that in many cases, the 'right' or 'wrong' of an action can only be judged from personal opinion, i.e. the most prevailing opinion of 12 people.
There is most certainly no hard + fast right and wrong: merely differing opinions on what is and what is not right or wrong in a given context. When you say:
"In the context of a given situation, each one of these actions is either right, wrong, or optional according to the one correct moral code..."
You mean:
"In the context of a given situation, each one of these actions is either right, wrong, or optional according to the previaling 'correct' moral code at that point".
(Deliberately extreme) example:
One declares the sexual abuse of children to be so wrong that it should be punished by death. Then we postulate the case where the discovered abuser of said children is currently president of a country which will almost certainly descend into civil war without his leadership, a war certain to cost millions of lives. The cost of those lives must be weighed against the lives of those, say, 10 people whose childhood -- and possibly the rest of their lives -- were ruined by the actions of this president in his private life. Which course of action is correct: accuse and execute, or cover-up?
Deciding questions like that -- being ABLE to decide questions like that -- makes us human. Obeying one moral code makes us robots.
yup, here in hamburg one can get 2 litre beersteins, although only in and around the reeperbahn, so it seems as though it's done for tourism mostly. one of the bars actually has 'diner' in the name, so one might even suggest they're luring americans in!
things is, anyone drinking from one (and of course my irish friend had to try the 1,5 litre variety) looks like a child, the thing's so insanely large.
"the only shaky argument the US officials had was that ElcomSoft was making the software available for US citizens to purchase (even though the server itself was in Russia)." (emphasis added)
you have heard of this phenomenon called 'e-commerce', that uses the 'internet', right?
talking about wacky programs, how about some of these from the programs page (http://www.darpa.mil/dso/programs.htm), with notes:
Accelerated Insertion of Materials = shooting people (high velocity rounds favoured).
Unconventional Pathogen Countermeasures = saying 'bless you' when someone sneezes.
Water Harvesting = ummm... i guess they're still trying to get the water grown from seed first. i guess to date only hydroponic tests have proven successful...
my absolute favourite is, however, 'Palm Power' - is this the crushing of all those other PDAs like the insignificant worms they are, or is it more of a kung-fu style 'upgrade' like you get in arcade games? i guess the infantry will have to pick up a flashy thing to get it...
speaking of which, i recommend the following: every p2p tool initiates 10 http 80 connections to the riaa's site every 5 minutes, to ensure an ongoing DoS against them.
hell you could even have it as a bandwith throttle setting:
"RIAA website http connection setting: use xx% (recommended 10-20%) of my bandwidth to initiate new HTTP connections to the RIAA website":=)
nalfy
PDF = Parsing Doesn't Function?
on
Think Python
·
· Score: 1
well i'm not sure about the HTML version, but have you any light to shed on the fact that the PDF books (at least the c++ and python books) are not legible? at least on windows? (i'm here at work -- using win 2k, adobe acrobat 5.0).
with the c++ one i get a message saying the document's empty, with the python one i can't get past page 1.
i thought acrobat was supposed to be a platform-independent format?;)
i know this is a troll, but i thought it would be informative to point out two benefits of moz as regards ram and the development cycle.
development cycle-wise, mozilla with its mere 4 years is 2 years faster than IE (6 years from IE3 to IE6), and 4 years faster than opera (8 years), both of which are closed-source, commerical products.
and as for being a ram hog, IE uses 10MB of ram for every page it loads on my win2k box here in the office. moz starts with about 30-odd, and adds about 0.5 MB per new page.
right you are. anyone with a bit of a background in classical music knows that there are piles of stuff waiting out there that most of the game-playing world hasn't heard. most of the *world* in fact. midifying some of it would be an excellent idea.
i wonder if there isn't already a companion project to lilypond or mutopia for MIDI or other simple versions of classical tunes..?
Slashdot Mirror
and, whilst i was aware of the expression for a long time, it was not until playing Age of Kings (Conquerors exp.) that i found out what it really meant.
and who said realtime strategy can't be informative!
ironically AOK was naturally produced by microsoft (although programmed by ensemble of course)
yrs,
nalfy.
bollox. are the other gaming consoles now somehow open source? nintendo dolphin, sony playstation, etc., etc.?
. php?company_id=187&category_id=2 for example. Challenge: try and find a product which lindows.com actually KNOWS is compatible). Oh, and we also require you to connect to lindows.com to update the OS. So the OS is, in a sense, closed. Quote:
let's read between the lines here:
"I did it because I thought people should have the choice to run the software they want on the hardware of their choice. Especially if that choice is LindowsOS, which only runs on PCs, and with which, according to our own hardware database, we only 'believe' most of the products available in the entire IT world are compatible, having obviously no time to check out important things like HW compatibility when cracking the Xbox would be more fun and gain more publicity (check out http://www.lindows.com/lindows_hwsw_compatibility
"Can I use Click-N-RunTM to install software from the Click-N-Run Warehouse on machines not running LindowsOS?
Because Click-N-RunTM relies on technology built into the actual operating system, it requires LindowsOS and its native web browser to operate.
Where do the software titles found in the Click-N-Run Warehouse come from? Lindows.com simply provides the marketplace to house applications that others develop. "Publishers" place the software in our warehouse, decide how to describe the software program, what price to charge, and so on. (Visit http://publish.lindows.com for details on how you can publish software titles in the Click-N-Run Warehouse.)"
as said, a load of bollox.
Nalfy.
To be honest, the guy mentioning printing it all out and saving it that way wasn't so far off the mark. You might not be able to search through the stuff, but at least you will still have it in the far future.
:=)
Acts of Parliament in England are still transcribed onto parchment. Yep. Here's a link for the disbelieving.
And if you want to know how durable it is, well I've personally read stuff from the 1300s on manuscript, not a bad shelf life for data at all. Digital-age media are great for saving data, and especially in compressed form, but they are *really* crap at storing it for long periods of time.
You may have no data that'll be interesting in 10 years time, and I dare say the current environment produces a signal-to-noise ratio way lower than was true in the dark ages (for example), but we are going to be pretty ignorant of 2002 in 2102 if our digital media are only capable of managing a 10-year life span.
It will mean continual copying of data onto more durable storage media, and the checking of said data's integrity. It sounds as though 'librarian' will once more become a sought-after and prestigious occupation.
Ook, indeed.
Nalfy.
I'll be brief:
The point of religions is therefore..? A prop for the weak and a rod for the powerful.
I would suggest that most people do *not* choose, to wit:
With the obvious exception of Buddhism, amongst the world's major religions, it is the community that counts, not the individual. How many Christians become monks or nuns for example? Remember Marx.
And, what's more, as a non-believer in one of the world's major religions, one is truly in the minority. As a true non-believer, i.e. an Athiest, the minority becomes vanishingly small.
If, in this scenario, you think that your opinion as an Atheist/Agnostic interests anyone, you are fooling yourself.
The typical human being on this planet is poor, ill-educated and hungry, and has little time to spend evenings, alcohol-fuelled or not, discussing religion.
i thought your article was spot on, but with reference to your .sig and at the risk of being seen as horribly insensitive at this particular moment in time (my point is however a general one):
;)
Guns don't kill people
Snipers kill people
dude - the gun helps, don't you think?
somewhat surprisingly, there *is* a connection between firearms deaths and firearms themselves.
nalfy.
p.s. please ignore if you were being ironic.
For those interested, 'planet' comes from the Greek 'planetos', meaning 'wanderer'. They were named so since in comparison with the 'stars', they were perceived to 'wander' about the sky (the term is especially striking when one considers the retrograde motion of planets further out than Earth).
Nalfy.
"Either there is no such thing as right an wrong, or it is most definitely not up to your own personal ethical code. To admit that right and wrong are a matter of preference is to destroy any useful definition of right and wrong."
Not so. Right and wrong are usually defined as just that. Either:
a) legally. the right or the wrong was decided by a group of people with law-making powers based on a consensus of their personal opinions on the matter.
b) socially. the group of people have no law-making rights, but they -- as a group -- label a course of action as right or wrong.
Moreover, any legal system that uses a jury is admitting that in many cases, the 'right' or 'wrong' of an action can only be judged from personal opinion, i.e. the most prevailing opinion of 12 people.
There is most certainly no hard + fast right and wrong: merely differing opinions on what is and what is not right or wrong in a given context. When you say:
"In the context of a given situation, each one of these actions is either right, wrong, or optional according to the one correct moral code..."
You mean:
"In the context of a given situation, each one of these actions is either right, wrong, or optional according to the previaling 'correct' moral code at that point".
(Deliberately extreme) example:
One declares the sexual abuse of children to be so wrong that it should be punished by death. Then we postulate the case where the discovered abuser of said children is currently president of a country which will almost certainly descend into civil war without his leadership, a war certain to cost millions of lives. The cost of those lives must be weighed against the lives of those, say, 10 people whose childhood -- and possibly the rest of their lives -- were ruined by the actions of this president in his private life. Which course of action is correct: accuse and execute, or cover-up?
Deciding questions like that -- being ABLE to decide questions like that -- makes us human. Obeying one moral code makes us robots.
"The proprietary LifeGem creation process creates diamonds from the true essence of our loved ones, the carbon."
DECKER "The crews of the previous Enterprises were also carbon units. In what way is the life form in your vessel different?
ILIA "Carbon units are not true life forms".
See: here.
tee-hee.
nalfy.
yup, here in hamburg one can get 2 litre beersteins, although only in and around the reeperbahn, so it seems as though it's done for tourism mostly. one of the bars actually has 'diner' in the name, so one might even suggest they're luring americans in!
things is, anyone drinking from one (and of course my irish friend had to try the 1,5 litre variety) looks like a child, the thing's so insanely large.
nalfy
"the only shaky argument the US officials had was that ElcomSoft was making the software available for US citizens to purchase (even though the server itself was in Russia)." (emphasis added)
you have heard of this phenomenon called 'e-commerce', that uses the 'internet', right?
nalfy
talking about wacky programs, how about some of these from the programs page (http://www.darpa.mil/dso/programs.htm), with notes:
... i guess they're still trying to get the water grown from seed first. i guess to date only hydroponic tests have proven successful...
Accelerated Insertion of Materials = shooting people (high velocity rounds favoured).
Unconventional Pathogen Countermeasures = saying 'bless you' when someone sneezes.
Water Harvesting = ummm
my absolute favourite is, however, 'Palm Power' - is this the crushing of all those other PDAs like the insignificant worms they are, or is it more of a kung-fu style 'upgrade' like you get in arcade games? i guess the infantry will have to pick up a flashy thing to get it...
nalfy
lol, just as i was about to write the same sort of thing.
made me laugh. a lot.
i'm off to mod myself down.
nalfy
Quoth the poster: "We had stayed up all night talking politics and philosophy, and had gone out onto the balcony so I could smoke." [emphasis added]
QED.
"so now i'm wondering what the catch is."
;)
the fact that i only get database support as ODBC?
"ODBC
Abbreviation of Open DataBase Connectivity, a standard database access method developed by Microsoft Corporation."
[pcwebopedia.com]
and don't suggest that i install ODBC drivers for unix
nalfy.
speaking of which, i recommend the following: every p2p tool initiates 10 http 80 connections to the riaa's site every 5 minutes, to ensure an ongoing DoS against them.
:=)
hell you could even have it as a bandwith throttle setting:
"RIAA website http connection setting: use xx% (recommended 10-20%) of my bandwidth to initiate new HTTP connections to the RIAA website"
nalfy
well i'm not sure about the HTML version, but have you any light to shed on the fact that the PDF books (at least the c++ and python books) are not legible? at least on windows? (i'm here at work -- using win 2k, adobe acrobat 5.0).
;)
with the c++ one i get a message saying the document's empty, with the python one i can't get past page 1.
i thought acrobat was supposed to be a platform-independent format?
nalfy
great .sig!
one thing i can't work out -- if sealand's 7 nautical miles off the coast of britain, and its territorial waters cover a 12 nautical mile arc...
is sealand claiming part of britain's coastline or what?
nalfy
i know this is a troll, but i thought it would be informative to point out two benefits of moz as regards ram and the development cycle.
development cycle-wise, mozilla with its mere 4 years is 2 years faster than IE (6 years from IE3 to IE6), and 4 years faster than opera (8 years), both of which are closed-source, commerical products.
and as for being a ram hog, IE uses 10MB of ram for every page it loads on my win2k box here in the office. moz starts with about 30-odd, and adds about 0.5 MB per new page.
thanks for listening,
nalfy.
what's that then?
english to sumerian?
*g
ed
well said that man.
although: i thought TESB was better than the first film to be honest. more plot and less cardboardy characters.
what opensource games have that commercial ones don't:
:=)
-- NetHack
-- Angband and its million and 1 variants.
oh, you were talking about games with a graphical interface. graphics ain't everything though
nalfy
right you are. anyone with a bit of a background in classical music knows that there are piles of stuff waiting out there that most of the game-playing world hasn't heard. most of the *world* in fact. midifying some of it would be an excellent idea.
i wonder if there isn't already a companion project to lilypond or mutopia for MIDI or other simple versions of classical tunes..?
nalfy.
And Lo! the definition of all that is wrong with the use of Flash on the web is revealed:
:=)
"... teens and preteens w/out a job who are looking to do a bit of flash work for a friends web site"
I personally have no problem with Macromedia going after such lawbreakers as much as they want if it keeps amateur animated gunk off the web
Nalfy.
... you tell us all this neat stuff and then don't mention his name?!
for those not in the know: Vernor Vinge. Most famous for his essay on the Singularity.
google: +vernor +vinge +singularity
nalfy