You sit down, play and lose. You get up and you are full with that warm fuzzy feeling inside which wispers into your ears that the world is not so perversely against you, because the game has proven that things can be much, much worse
Actually, the great thing about Nethack is that it shows that the world is not pervesely against you, you can almost always win if you don't do something dumb--marvin's ascended 23 in a row, and several top players win over half their games.
It's just that it's really easy to do something dumb; I think I'm pretty decent and I still manage to kill myself more than 80% of the time before delivering the amulet to the gods. But it's very rare (although not unheard of) that the RNG puts you in a situation where you're going to die despite playing well. (It's much more common that your earlier actions or lack of knowledge about what your options are put you in such a situation).
Play the annual nethack tournament starting 31 Oct: google "devnull nethack"!
The problem is that you're at the mercy of the vendor. Some are very good. Some don't care. Some may care, but for whatever reason (layoffs, turnover, old code, 3rd-party binary libraries) can't fix your problem.
I've had at least one case where I was able to strace a vendor library, figure out the problem, send them a detailed description of the problem and solution--it was an obvious problem in the arguments to bind(2), which basically narrowed it down to 1 line of code for them and they _should_ have been able to fix it in seconds with that info.
It was like dealing with a black hole. Luckily it was a simple enough problem that an LD_PRELOAD hack could work around it, but when the vendor won't help you can be royally screwed.
So the lesson is to pick your vendors carefully, and always have an exit strategy if things change (they get bought out, discontinue the product line, etc). At least make sure you have a way to get at your data to move to a new system if necessary.
There's no reason to die from lack of food in nethack. Ever. Not only is the dungeon practically lousy with food sources, there are rings of slow digestion, wands/scrolls of create monster, and as a last resort, prayer. I mean, there are crazy people who successfully ascend with the amulet, without eating anything at all, for the entire game!
Eating monster corpses whenever you kill something that isn't poisonous and you aren't satiated will get you a long way. Save your food for when you need it, and if you have no other options then you can pray.
Other off-the-wall ideas: Amulet of life saving will reset your hunger if you starve to death with it on. Polymorphing yourself resets your hunger (best when paired with polymorph control). One guy did a liquid diet--potions of fruit juice and so forth give some minimal nutrition.
They should disclose immediately. There are clear steps you can take for your own protection (cancel online access if possible, close accounts, etc). The longer they wait before disclosing, the more vulnerable you are.
The argument that they need time to fix the system before disclosing is a common one from places that don't care about security; they hate full-disclosure lists, favor only vendor disclosure, etc. And the "we need time to fix it" argument is a core part of their anti-security stance; it ignores the fact that even if the particular bug isn't fixed, there are almost always steps you can take to mitigate your risk. It also gives them less incentive to fix things quickly since the problem is public.
OK, now they have been cheated into buying PS3s with DRM, which will - in the not to distant future - not allow them to use the product they bought with their first- or second-gen HD-TV.
With all due respect, you're totally missing the point of GC.
No, you are. Not all the garbage collection world is mark/sweep.
The point of GC is to free the programmer from concerns about explicit resource deallocation. There are many possible approaches to that, all with different semantics.
In a language with GC, objects are assumed to exist after you create them indefinitely
In _some_ languages with GC, objects are assumed to exist indefinitely. In some, there are time-bounds on collection. In some, there are ways to force immediate collection--objects may not deallocate at any specific time when the GC runs, but there's some sort of call that forces it to collect garbage "right now". In some languages, the rules for when objects get collected are more deterministic.
Claiming that all GCs lack rules about when objects are deallocated is simply wrong.
(also, GC is not necessarily about objects--all kinds of resources can be GC'd)
Resource deallocation by deterministic destruction is fundamentally and theoretically incompatible with indefinite object lifetimes.
Yes. But not all methods of GC limit their model to indefinite object lifetimes. Those that do _not_ have such a limitation are far more useful to the programmer than those that do--almost all aspects of programming are made easier if the system behaves deterministically rather than arbitrarily.
The tension is a speed tradeoff that is particularly visible in certain shared-object systems (low-level multithreaded languages can see a big speed penalty from deterministic object deallocation). None of those arguments apply particularly well to Python, which semantically _does_ guarantee enough synchronization in other areas that the speed cost of deterministic GC is nearly zero.
Resource deallocation by deterministic destruction is fundamentally and theoretically incompatible with indefinite object lifetimes. "With," on the other hand, is compatible in every way.
Yes, that's exactly the (bogus) argument. There are 2 alternatives: 1. Allow nondeterministic GC, and force the programmer to use something like "with" to compensate--in other words, force explicit resource management on top of your garbage collection scheme; or 2. Mandate deterministic GC rules in the language definition.
The standard Python implementation already does deterministic GC, and mandating such behavior for alternative Python implementations would make the language much more programmer-friendly than requiring explicit resource management on the programmer's part.
It makes far more sense to me to make alternative implementations somewhat more difficult than to make them easier at the cost of making them behave differently, and making code less portable between them--especially when the different behaviour is also far less useful to the programmer.
It's to provide automated management by the contextmanager, akin to what Ruby does throughout the language and the stdlib: ensure that you don't forget to release a resource, ensure that you don't forget to close a file, ensure that you don't forget to release a lock
Actually upon further reflection the "with" statement is nice in the case of database transactions where finalization is different in the face of exceptions from without.
But a lot of the PEP deals with things that are non-issues in current CPython:
def foo():
lock = threading.Lock(...)
# do stuff here that needs the lock
can easily unlock automatically as soon as you return from foo, and more complex things like:
for fname in [ "foo", "bar", "baz" ]:
for line in open(fname, "r"): ...
will close each file at the end of its pass through the loop without needing an intermediate name bound to the open call in a with statement a la
for fname in [ "foo", "bar", "baz" ]:
with open(fname, "r") as this_file:
for line in this_file: ...
In these cases, "with" just buys implementation flexibility so that things like Jython can be half-assed about GC and run it at random times, instead of giving the programmer deterministic guarantees on when objects are collected.
Indeed, much of the advocacy on Python lists about "with" has been that it allows resource finalization on looser GC implementations, without anyone willing to admit that it requires additional programmer care and makes things more brittle than simply requiring the GC to act in a predictable manner.
So I withdraw my blanket objection to "with", but maintain that keeping deterministic GC is a big boon to the programmer and should be made an explicit language guarantee and not an implementation detail (newer Python implementations like pypy are already using less programmer-friendly GCs by default since they aren't required to have more useful GC semantics).
IMO, "with" is a gross hack that forces the programmer to repeat scope information. The proper solution to the problems it tries to solve is to mandate (the current CPython actual behavior) ref-counting semantics from the GC, or at least force local variable collection at function return time. Function definitions already provide scope; with provides a duplicate (but more fragile) way for the programmer to indicate variable lifespans.
What about it doesn't make sense? Starflight and Star Control II are different games. One draws a lot of ideas from the other but they're not the same game.
Your assertion that Star Control II is basically a remake of Starflight with updated graphics, plus new races and maps, is a load of crap. I have played and finished both games, so I do know what I'm talking about in gameplay terms
I don't really know how to respond to this, other than that you must be either misremembering or you're just being polemical. This isn't some controversial theory, it was widely known and acknowledged at the time and the web is littered with reviews like http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/star-control -ii/reviews/reviewerId,67734/
Compare, say, the ship data screens. Or the starmap navigation. Or the outer planetary system navigation screen, or the inner system navigation screen. Or the planetary exploration (which is simplified in SC2 but similar, it's clearly the most different of the bunch). Or the spaceport screen.
Indeed, for just about every interface screen in starflight, you can go look at the _same_ screen in SC2--which you can do because the latter's a remake of the former. And when you do, it looks like a graphically updated version of the same thing, because it is.
I don't know of any quotes from any of the developers at all, let alone related to this, but I'd be pretty shocked if they didn't say freely that it's a remake. I'd also be surprised if anyone had bothered to ask something so obvious (you don't see interviewers asking "So, is this new 'Doom II' game at all related to 'Doom'?).
Well, actually you still always lose. But at least you'll get past the first level, after having learned the most important rule - don't fight, run.
The key is make sure you learn something every time you die, and make sure you apply that lesson to future games. The first ascension is by far the hardest.
I mean, really. This game throws Death, Pestilence and Famine against you at the final level - after you've fough through Hell twice and elemental planes once. By what twisted logic is that balanced ?-)
Of course, by that point you're War incarnate yourself. Gehennom, the planes, and Astral (the final level) aren't highly dangerous to most characters who make it there (exceptions for people trying speed ascensions, pacifists, and other odd conducts), as long as you excercise reasonable caution.
You know, I've always wondered...is it actually possible to finish Nethack without reading spoilers?
I believe it's possible but I've never heard of it happening.
Someone (who was posting as he went along--google "Ellora the Archer") made it pretty deep into Gehennom before their cat stepped on the keyboard and messed it up--he had all of the core resistances and was playing very carefully, I guess the major question is would he have figured out how to do the invocation (there's an oracle message about that which he may or may not have gotten already, but he was returning to the oracle regularly).
My best was getting to Gehennom unspoiled back when entering without fire resistance killed you; if I'd done that one version later, I would've had a chance to go pretty far (but I believe I lacked magic resistance, and I certainly didn't know it existed, so I would've been killed by Rodney in all likelihood had I survived that far).
Rogue-likes are fun, but my problem with them is the extreme repetitiveness. You start the game, do some stuff, go on, get killed, you have to start over no matter how far you went.
That's what makes them fun--you have to learn to live, not just save and keep loading every time you mess up. There are a zillion ways to play the early game if you _really_ get bored anyway.
For instance, try "dive for victory"--only explore long enough to grab a pickaxe and a musical instrument (many elves start with the latter), then dig straight down to the castle. Guillotine the occupants and grab the wand of wishing.
Or try the "protection racket" play as a pacifist and have your pet do the fighting. Make it to Minetown at XL:1 and you can buy cheap protection to get to naked AC 0.
The former is _very_ dangerous but the payoff is huge (at least 4 wishes after spending one on charging). If you pull it off it's almost a guaranteed ascension for decent players.
The latter is somewhat worse odds than playing it straight, but good players can manage it 80% of the time or so; when you do, you're pretty well set for a while.
Good list, I would just replace Nethack with Nethack+, which was a patch the prevented you from dying in lack of food.
Food is the early game clock in nethack. Learning proper food management isn't hard, and by forcing new players to eat a lot of different monsters they start learning which ones give them valuable resistances quickly.
Calling Star Control II "a relatively uninspired remake of Starflight" is like calling Starcraft a relatively uninspired remake of Dune II.
This makes no sense to me--Dune II and Starcraft are different games. One draws a lot of ideas from the other, but they're not the same game.
Star Control II is _literally_ a remake of Starflight. They got the orignal Starflight programmers and designer back and updated the graphics/sound and added arcade sequences. They left the ship upgrades, overall game mechanics, planetary exploration, and navigation the same, but changed the names of the alien races and redid the maps.
X-Com is phenomenal, great pick. As much as I enjoyed Dune II, it's almost criminal that RTSs have displaced turn-based strategy games for the most part.
Star Control II is just a relatively uninspired remake of starflight; a graphics facelift is always nice, but the inferior gameplay and lack of originality put it well of the list for me.
This list is pretty darned good. It's not what I would pick, but it's all things that I considered before making my list above (except Diablo II which is Nethack without any of the depth or strategy but with some pretty graphics)
Seriously. It's been in constant development for decades now, game play (and balance) continues to improve, and it's the ultimate in learning curves--insanely difficuly but incredibly fun when you first start playing, excellent learning curve all the way through where you can get further and further with just exploration, and with time you can learn to win more than half the time and yet it's still fun.
1. Nethack
2. X-com UFO Defense
3. Grand Theft Auto III
4. Doom/Wolfenstein 3D (I'm undecided)
5. Starflight
Honorable mentions (unsorted): Contra, Archon, Hitman, Ultima IV, Counterstrike, Autoduel, Dune II, Tetris, Civilization, Bard's Tale, World of Warcraft, Simcity, Wing Commander
I'm curious though... what do these pledges actually mean? Are they legally binding?
In particular, anyone have any idea to what degree does this constitute an estoppel against future patent litigation against web services implementations?
That, and the general trend in the last ten years to make any of Arnold's movies into Hollywood Schlock. Starring in a major role, he hasn't made anything decent since T2.
I'd submit that True Lies meets or exceeds the bar set by "decent". Not an all time great, but a fun film.
No, but it's okay to talk about poor policy with people who accept a company's policy and profit from it. The idea that the corporation is an entity unto itself controlled only by people in central offices where the front-line workers have no responsibility is BS. Every worker at a company has some responsibility for the company's actions and policies, especially the policies they enforce themselves.
Sure a few GNU apps have some beels and whistles, like the GNU grep and NU awk, but these are mostly just fluff and could easily be added to the BSD userland if anyone actually cared much about the feature.
Nobody's bothered to add them to the BSD userland because there's no advantage in doing so; it's easier just to build and install the GNU utilities.
I've never seen a BSD development box (as opposed to a production box that developers aren't using on a daily basis) that didn't have at least grep and a few other GNU replacements installed.
Heck, if the government wants...they can take your property away via imminent(sic?) domain for a interstate. (or more recently, for private development!)
At least in the US you have this backward. Historically, taking land for private development was the norm for decades if not centuries (contrary to what media uproar after the recent Kelo v. New London case would have you believe). See Berman v. Parker, Luxton v. North River Bridge, Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, etc. Even before the US was formed such takings were considered legitimate.
It's only recently (in June) that the use of eminent domain was banned by executive order "for the purpose of advancing the economic interest of private parties to be given ownership or use of the property taken." (whether such an order is binding remains untested).
While property laws regarding physical property have had centuries to sort themselves out via the legal system, Intellectual property has only had about a full half century to sort itself out.
Much bigger nit:
Intellectual property laws have been a big part of at least European legal systems for centuries as well.
Copyright law in Western law goes back at least to 1557 when the Stationer's Company was granted monopoly over publishing and the right to regulate copyright, and modern-style laws go back to the 1709 Statute of Anne.
Patent law goes back to the Venetian Statute of 1474, crown letters patent granted in England from the late 1400s-1623, and the Statute of Monopolies passed in England in 1623 (the latter of which looks very much like the US Constitutional guarantees, being the first patent law to allow only new inventions to be patented, limiting the duration of patents, etc).
I'm less familiar with trade marks, service marks, and trade dress, but they all go back far longer than a half a century as well.
Slashdot Mirror
You sit down, play and lose. You get up and you are full with that warm fuzzy feeling inside which wispers into your ears that the world is not so perversely against you, because the game has proven that things can be much, much worse
Actually, the great thing about Nethack is that it shows that the world is not pervesely against you, you can almost always win if you don't do something dumb--marvin's ascended 23 in a row, and several top players win over half their games.
It's just that it's really easy to do something dumb; I think I'm pretty decent and I still manage to kill myself more than 80% of the time before delivering the amulet to the gods. But it's very rare (although not unheard of) that the RNG puts you in a situation where you're going to die despite playing well. (It's much more common that your earlier actions or lack of knowledge about what your options are put you in such a situation).
Play the annual nethack tournament starting 31 Oct: google "devnull nethack"!
The problem is that you're at the mercy of the vendor. Some are very good. Some don't care. Some may care, but for whatever reason (layoffs, turnover, old code, 3rd-party binary libraries) can't fix your problem.
I've had at least one case where I was able to strace a vendor library, figure out the problem, send them a detailed description of the problem and solution--it was an obvious problem in the arguments to bind(2), which basically narrowed it down to 1 line of code for them and they _should_ have been able to fix it in seconds with that info.
It was like dealing with a black hole. Luckily it was a simple enough problem that an LD_PRELOAD hack could work around it, but when the vendor won't help you can be royally screwed.
So the lesson is to pick your vendors carefully, and always have an exit strategy if things change (they get bought out, discontinue the product line, etc). At least make sure you have a way to get at your data to move to a new system if necessary.
There's no reason to die from lack of food in nethack. Ever. Not only is the dungeon practically lousy with food sources, there are rings of slow digestion, wands/scrolls of create monster, and as a last resort, prayer. I mean, there are crazy people who successfully ascend with the amulet, without eating anything at all, for the entire game!
Eating monster corpses whenever you kill something that isn't poisonous and you aren't satiated will get you a long way. Save your food for when you need it, and if you have no other options then you can pray.
Other off-the-wall ideas:
Amulet of life saving will reset your hunger if you starve to death with it on.
Polymorphing yourself resets your hunger (best when paired with polymorph control).
One guy did a liquid diet--potions of fruit juice and so forth give some minimal nutrition.
Sony the Barbarian?
You mean Red Sony?
They should disclose immediately. There are clear steps you can take for your own protection (cancel online access if possible, close accounts, etc). The longer they wait before disclosing, the more vulnerable you are.
The argument that they need time to fix the system before disclosing is a common one from places that don't care about security; they hate full-disclosure lists, favor only vendor disclosure, etc. And the "we need time to fix it" argument is a core part of their anti-security stance; it ignores the fact that even if the particular bug isn't fixed, there are almost always steps you can take to mitigate your risk. It also gives them less incentive to fix things quickly since the problem is public.
There's no serious DRM on the PS3 output. HDMI/HDCP has been completely broken; see, for instance, http://apache.dataloss.nl/~fred/www.nunce.org/hdc
With all due respect, you're totally missing the point of GC.
No, you are. Not all the garbage collection world is mark/sweep.
The point of GC is to free the programmer from concerns about explicit resource deallocation. There are many possible approaches to that, all with different semantics.
In a language with GC, objects are assumed to exist after you create them indefinitely
In _some_ languages with GC, objects are assumed to exist indefinitely. In some, there are time-bounds on collection. In some, there are ways to force immediate collection--objects may not deallocate at any specific time when the GC runs, but there's some sort of call that forces it to collect garbage "right now". In some languages, the rules for when objects get collected are more deterministic.
Claiming that all GCs lack rules about when objects are deallocated is simply wrong.
(also, GC is not necessarily about objects--all kinds of resources can be GC'd)
Resource deallocation by deterministic destruction is fundamentally and theoretically incompatible with indefinite object lifetimes.
Yes. But not all methods of GC limit their model to indefinite object lifetimes. Those that do _not_ have such a limitation are far more useful to the programmer than those that do--almost all aspects of programming are made easier if the system behaves deterministically rather than arbitrarily.
The tension is a speed tradeoff that is particularly visible in certain shared-object systems (low-level multithreaded languages can see a big speed penalty from deterministic object deallocation). None of those arguments apply particularly well to Python, which semantically _does_ guarantee enough synchronization in other areas that the speed cost of deterministic GC is nearly zero.
Resource deallocation by deterministic destruction is fundamentally and theoretically incompatible with indefinite object lifetimes. "With," on the other hand, is compatible in every way.
Yes, that's exactly the (bogus) argument. There are 2 alternatives:
1. Allow nondeterministic GC, and force the programmer to use something like "with" to compensate--in other words, force explicit resource management on top of your garbage collection scheme; or
2. Mandate deterministic GC rules in the language definition.
The standard Python implementation already does deterministic GC, and mandating such behavior for alternative Python implementations would make the language much more programmer-friendly than requiring explicit resource management on the programmer's part.
It makes far more sense to me to make alternative implementations somewhat more difficult than to make them easier at the cost of making them behave differently, and making code less portable between them--especially when the different behaviour is also far less useful to the programmer.
Actually upon further reflection the "with" statement is nice in the case of database transactions where finalization is different in the face of exceptions from without.
But a lot of the PEP deals with things that are non-issues in current CPython:can easily unlock automatically as soon as you return from foo, and more complex things like:will close each file at the end of its pass through the loop without needing an intermediate name bound to the open call in a with statement a laIn these cases, "with" just buys implementation flexibility so that things like Jython can be half-assed about GC and run it at random times, instead of giving the programmer deterministic guarantees on when objects are collected.
Indeed, much of the advocacy on Python lists about "with" has been that it allows resource finalization on looser GC implementations, without anyone willing to admit that it requires additional programmer care and makes things more brittle than simply requiring the GC to act in a predictable manner.
So I withdraw my blanket objection to "with", but maintain that keeping deterministic GC is a big boon to the programmer and should be made an explicit language guarantee and not an implementation detail (newer Python implementations like pypy are already using less programmer-friendly GCs by default since they aren't required to have more useful GC semantics).
The WITH statement is much more interresting
IMO, "with" is a gross hack that forces the programmer to repeat scope information. The proper solution to the problems it tries to solve is to mandate (the current CPython actual behavior) ref-counting semantics from the GC, or at least force local variable collection at function return time. Function definitions already provide scope; with provides a duplicate (but more fragile) way for the programmer to indicate variable lifespans.
What about it doesn't make sense? Starflight and Star Control II are different games. One draws a lot of ideas from the other but they're not the same game.
l -ii/reviews/reviewerId,67734/
Your assertion that Star Control II is basically a remake of Starflight with updated graphics, plus new races and maps, is a load of crap. I have played and finished both games, so I do know what I'm talking about in gameplay terms
I don't really know how to respond to this, other than that you must be either misremembering or you're just being polemical. This isn't some controversial theory, it was widely known and acknowledged at the time and the web is littered with reviews like http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/star-contro
Compare, say, the ship data screens. Or the starmap navigation. Or the outer planetary system navigation screen, or the inner system navigation screen. Or the planetary exploration (which is simplified in SC2 but similar, it's clearly the most different of the bunch). Or the spaceport screen.
Indeed, for just about every interface screen in starflight, you can go look at the _same_ screen in SC2--which you can do because the latter's a remake of the former. And when you do, it looks like a graphically updated version of the same thing, because it is.
I don't know of any quotes from any of the developers at all, let alone related to this, but I'd be pretty shocked if they didn't say freely that it's a remake. I'd also be surprised if anyone had bothered to ask something so obvious (you don't see interviewers asking "So, is this new 'Doom II' game at all related to 'Doom'?).
Well, actually you still always lose. But at least you'll get past the first level, after having learned the most important rule - don't fight, run.
The key is make sure you learn something every time you die, and make sure you apply that lesson to future games. The first ascension is by far the hardest.
I mean, really. This game throws Death, Pestilence and Famine against you at the final level - after you've fough through Hell twice and elemental planes once. By what twisted logic is that balanced ?-)
Of course, by that point you're War incarnate yourself. Gehennom, the planes, and Astral (the final level) aren't highly dangerous to most characters who make it there (exceptions for people trying speed ascensions, pacifists, and other odd conducts), as long as you excercise reasonable caution.
You know, I've always wondered...is it actually possible to finish Nethack without reading spoilers?
I believe it's possible but I've never heard of it happening.
Someone (who was posting as he went along--google "Ellora the Archer") made it pretty deep into Gehennom before their cat stepped on the keyboard and messed it up--he had all of the core resistances and was playing very carefully, I guess the major question is would he have figured out how to do the invocation (there's an oracle message about that which he may or may not have gotten already, but he was returning to the oracle regularly).
My best was getting to Gehennom unspoiled back when entering without fire resistance killed you; if I'd done that one version later, I would've had a chance to go pretty far (but I believe I lacked magic resistance, and I certainly didn't know it existed, so I would've been killed by Rodney in all likelihood had I survived that far).
Rogue-likes are fun, but my problem with them is the extreme repetitiveness. You start the game, do some stuff, go on, get killed, you have to start over no matter how far you went.
That's what makes them fun--you have to learn to live, not just save and keep loading every time you mess up. There are a zillion ways to play the early game if you _really_ get bored anyway.
For instance, try "dive for victory"--only explore long enough to grab a pickaxe and a musical instrument (many elves start with the latter), then dig straight down to the castle. Guillotine the occupants and grab the wand of wishing.
Or try the "protection racket" play as a pacifist and have your pet do the fighting. Make it to Minetown at XL:1 and you can buy cheap protection to get to naked AC 0.
The former is _very_ dangerous but the payoff is huge (at least 4 wishes after spending one on charging). If you pull it off it's almost a guaranteed ascension for decent players.
The latter is somewhat worse odds than playing it straight, but good players can manage it 80% of the time or so; when you do, you're pretty well set for a while.
Good list, I would just replace Nethack with Nethack+, which was a patch the prevented you from dying in lack of food.
Food is the early game clock in nethack. Learning proper food management isn't hard, and by forcing new players to eat a lot of different monsters they start learning which ones give them valuable resistances quickly.
Calling Star Control II "a relatively uninspired remake of Starflight" is like calling Starcraft a relatively uninspired remake of Dune II.
This makes no sense to me--Dune II and Starcraft are different games. One draws a lot of ideas from the other, but they're not the same game.
Star Control II is _literally_ a remake of Starflight. They got the orignal Starflight programmers and designer back and updated the graphics/sound and added arcade sequences. They left the ship upgrades, overall game mechanics, planetary exploration, and navigation the same, but changed the names of the alien races and redid the maps.
X-Com is phenomenal, great pick. As much as I enjoyed Dune II, it's almost criminal that RTSs have displaced turn-based strategy games for the most part.
Star Control II is just a relatively uninspired remake of starflight; a graphics facelift is always nice, but the inferior gameplay and lack of originality put it well of the list for me.
This list is pretty darned good. It's not what I would pick, but it's all things that I considered before making my list above (except Diablo II which is Nethack without any of the depth or strategy but with some pretty graphics)
Seriously. It's been in constant development for decades now, game play (and balance) continues to improve, and it's the ultimate in learning curves--insanely difficuly but incredibly fun when you first start playing, excellent learning curve all the way through where you can get further and further with just exploration, and with time you can learn to win more than half the time and yet it's still fun.
1. Nethack
2. X-com UFO Defense
3. Grand Theft Auto III
4. Doom/Wolfenstein 3D (I'm undecided)
5. Starflight
Honorable mentions (unsorted): Contra, Archon, Hitman, Ultima IV, Counterstrike, Autoduel, Dune II, Tetris, Civilization, Bard's Tale, World of Warcraft, Simcity, Wing Commander
I'm curious though... what do these pledges actually mean? Are they legally binding?
In particular, anyone have any idea to what degree does this constitute an estoppel against future patent litigation against web services implementations?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel
That, and the general trend in the last ten years to make any of Arnold's movies into Hollywood Schlock. Starring in a major role, he hasn't made anything decent since T2.
I'd submit that True Lies meets or exceeds the bar set by "decent". Not an all time great, but a fun film.
Actually, he wrote "Sart Proudly".
No, but it's okay to talk about poor policy with people who accept a company's policy and profit from it. The idea that the corporation is an entity unto itself controlled only by people in central offices where the front-line workers have no responsibility is BS. Every worker at a company has some responsibility for the company's actions and policies, especially the policies they enforce themselves.
I didn't consider myself particularly early to the game. I'd say that it's the 4 digit folks who are oldtimers.
Sure a few GNU apps have some beels and whistles, like the GNU grep and NU awk, but these are mostly just fluff and could easily be added to the BSD userland if anyone actually cared much about the feature.
Nobody's bothered to add them to the BSD userland because there's no advantage in doing so; it's easier just to build and install the GNU utilities.
I've never seen a BSD development box (as opposed to a production box that developers aren't using on a daily basis) that didn't have at least grep and a few other GNU replacements installed.
Heck, if the government wants...they can take your property away via imminent(sic?) domain for a interstate. (or more recently, for private development!)
At least in the US you have this backward. Historically, taking land for private development was the norm for decades if not centuries (contrary to what media uproar after the recent Kelo v. New London case would have you believe). See Berman v. Parker, Luxton v. North River Bridge, Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, etc. Even before the US was formed such takings were considered legitimate.
It's only recently (in June) that the use of eminent domain was banned by executive order "for the purpose of advancing the economic interest of private parties to be given ownership or use of the property taken." (whether such an order is binding remains untested).
While property laws regarding physical property have had centuries to sort themselves out via the legal system, Intellectual property has only had about a full half century to sort itself out.
Much bigger nit:
Intellectual property laws have been a big part of at least European legal systems for centuries as well.
Copyright law in Western law goes back at least to 1557 when the Stationer's Company was granted monopoly over publishing and the right to regulate copyright, and modern-style laws go back to the 1709 Statute of Anne.
Patent law goes back to the Venetian Statute of 1474, crown letters patent granted in England from the late 1400s-1623, and the Statute of Monopolies passed in England in 1623 (the latter of which looks very much like the US Constitutional guarantees, being the first patent law to allow only new inventions to be patented, limiting the duration of patents, etc).
I'm less familiar with trade marks, service marks, and trade dress, but they all go back far longer than a half a century as well.