I agree that it's not meant to be the same as the book/tv series/radio, but appear to have:
- took out almost all reference to the Guide itself - Removed most of the funny parts, which were mostly in the narration and asides rather than the main storyline. No towels? No convincing prosser to replace dent in front of the bulldozer? Not even a cup of tea AFAICS.
- Unnecessarily changed extremely funny lines to be less funny. The best example from the review being the whale monologue: ending the speech with "I wonder if it will be friends with me? *splat*" is much, much funnier than "I wonder if it will be friends with me? Hello, ground. *splat*". The trailing thought left by the first version is much funnier than the unnecessary repetition of something from earlier in the speech (I think I'll call it ground).
But who watches the adverts on TV anyway? At most I see two or three second snippets as I flick channels waiting for them to finish. There's generally at least one other program on that's interesting enough to watch for three minutes.
I think you missed the point somewhat. He's meant to be an excruciatingly bad boss - I love it, but I have to watch it from behind the sofa because Brent is so awful.
I was very surprised when they decided to make a US version. I think that kind of humour doesn't cross the pond well. It's reasonably common here - Alan Partridge, for example, where Partridge is an embarrassingly bad and socially-inept chat show host and radio DJ.
Should be interesting to see what happens to "Little Britain" if it does finally go to the US.
Once you hit lvl 60, and have all of your set items, it is essentially the end of personal achievemen
Aren't games meant to be fun and require player skill? I think this every time I see an MMORPG article: there's lots of discussion of items and levels and how once the levels run out it's no fun, but no mention of tactics or actually enjoying *playing* the game. Surely there's more to the game than getting equipment and increasing numbers?
Maybe there just isn't any "News for Nerds" out there this week, hence the dupes. I mean, the technology world is so slow moving news is hard to come by. Hang on a minute, Technocrat has a load of interesting stories.
Not true, if my experience was anything to go by. I did a little bit for a now-defunct dotcom and a university paper. It's the old problem of taking something you enjoy doing and adding deadlines: suddenly, it becomes much less fun.
Sure, testing out steering wheels with Sega Rally 2 or playing pre-releases of great new games is fun. Having to spend days playing games you really don't like (Gabriel Knight springs to mind) or games that are just crap, and then writing something interesting about them, from the perspective of somebody who likes that sort of game, is not.
It wasn't really a huge amount of work so far, although I think all the fiddly bits of testing and special cases to come will take a while to sort out. If I didn't spend all day reading Slashdot I'd probably have finished months ago;)
Fortunately, I had written an easily-resizable text display to start with, so I'd already done most of the heavy work.
Eventually. Many, many people have requested HiRes+ support already, and I've virtually finished support for it. I just need to find time to finish it off and prepare a release.
Did you enable laptop_mode? I find that running the default laptop_mode script (in linux/Documentation/laptop_mode.txt) with "noatime" set in fstab for all partitions reduced disk activity hugely.
Whatever's sensible, I guess. In my Free software work (PalmOS text editor) I use a lot of unsigned 16-bit integer values, for example, so if the number of characters that fit across the screen becomes 65,000, then I've probably done something like "x=3-5" and overflowed x.
Yes, of course. Almost all functions should have at least one assert (ErrFatalDisplayIf in PalmOS) in the debug build, IMO. I generally add sanity checks as well - if I know an integer argument should never be much above 200, assert that it's not.
In what way is apt-get install kde not one command? Those are three commands to install kde from three different distros (Debian-based, Arch and Redhat-based).
It just annoys me that so many Gentoo users seem to think that dependency resolution is only present in emerge, when in fact pretty much every distro has it as well.
1) I like spatial browsing. There's an option in the nautilus preferences dialog to turn it off, or you can just have "file browser" on you panel like I do.
2-3) yes, something should be done. Recursive file permissions have been a feature request in bugzilla for 5 years now, no idea why they haven't fixed it.
4) Generally shift-click and control click selection work fine in file dialogs: opening multiple files in gEdit, or adding multiple wallpapers at once, for example.
5) I quite like the file dialog. It's seems to be generally the application's responsibility to give the dialog a sensible starting directory: certainly gEdit, for example, always opens the open dialog in the directory of the current file on my sytem.
6) Sound-juicer is a bit option-poor, I agree. It works very nicely, as long as you just want to rip music quickly and not bother fiddling too much. The KDE version, where you set the options globally in some well-hidden preferences dialog isn't much better. I'd like to at least see a select bit-rate/quality box added.
I think a lot of the problem is just lack of developer-hours. It's a shame they're still using pure C as well and don't seem to be doing much test-driven development.
The bridge his best book? I'd have chosen the Wasp Factory or Espedair Street, personally.
Inversions marked the time when I pretty much stopped reading Sci-fi: I'm not sure why, I guess I just got bored. Having just seen the travesty the Sci-Fi channel made out of Earthsea and being reminded of how much I loved Sci-fi/fantasy *books*, I'm off to Amazon.
I think Excession was the last really good Iain M Banks book I read. His sci-fi seems to have gone the same way as his mainstream fiction: it all became a bit samey after a while. Excession was excellent, though.
Stationary windows will take just as much CPU in '3d' as they do in 2d - basically nothing. It's not like it's redrawing at 100fps or anything. Things like redrawing after exposing a part of a window will likely take less CPU, as the graphics card can just draw the relevant part of the window's texture to the screen without having to regenerate it.
I imagine resolution won't be much of a problem. For actual 3d work, there is all sorts of complexity that limits the fill rate - overdraw, lots of textures, fogging, geometry etc. This is a very simple 3d system: flat projection, little geometry.
A (say) 2000x2000 resolution screen is only 4 million pixels - cards like the geforce 2mx (which is ~$30 or so?) will do 500 million/second theoretical.
1) It's a tech demo. Nobody is suggesting wobbly windows are going to improve productivity. Given a wide range of possible effects like this, however, creative people can come up with nice ideas to make your desktop more usable. Decoupling the screen display and window contents rendering allows all sorts of cool things.
2) It runs on old crappy hardware, so no, you won't need to go and buy an Nvidia 69999FX-eXtreme to run it
3) It's not 'bloat' (whatever that is), it's just using the hardware and X-server abilities to their full. By shifting much of the rendering to the graphics card, you could actually lower CPU usage. I'm sure a thousand openbox/console/ion/ratpoison users are waiting to post "I don't need this". To which I say "well go back to your teletype then".
I run Ubuntu Warty as a server and it seems to be fine, although there have been a few teething problems in updates. Security updates have been timely, but one kernel update broke the NFS server for several weeks, leaving the only alternatives as downgrade to the previous insecure kernel or have no NFS.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that it's not meant to be the same as the book/tv series/radio, but appear to have:
- took out almost all reference to the Guide itself
- Removed most of the funny parts, which were mostly in the narration and asides rather than the main storyline. No towels? No convincing prosser to replace dent in front of the bulldozer? Not even a cup of tea AFAICS.
- Unnecessarily changed extremely funny lines to be less funny. The best example from the review being the whale monologue: ending the speech with "I wonder if it will be friends with me? *splat*" is much, much funnier than "I wonder if it will be friends with me? Hello, ground. *splat*". The trailing thought left by the first version is much funnier than the unnecessary repetition of something from earlier in the speech (I think I'll call it ground).
There's always the BBC - no adverts at all.
But who watches the adverts on TV anyway? At most I see two or three second snippets as I flick channels waiting for them to finish. There's generally at least one other program on that's interesting enough to watch for three minutes.
I think you missed the point somewhat. He's meant to be an excruciatingly bad boss - I love it, but I have to watch it from behind the sofa because Brent is so awful.
I was very surprised when they decided to make a US version. I think that kind of humour doesn't cross the pond well. It's reasonably common here - Alan Partridge, for example, where Partridge is an embarrassingly bad and socially-inept chat show host and radio DJ.
Should be interesting to see what happens to "Little Britain" if it does finally go to the US.
I like the way you slip Coupling in there with the good TV just to pad out the list.
Oh wait, were you serious? Coupling is 'up' there with "Two pints of lager" as unfunny sitcoms go.
Once you hit lvl 60, and have all of your set items, it is essentially the end of personal achievemen
Aren't games meant to be fun and require player skill? I think this every time I see an MMORPG article: there's lots of discussion of items and levels and how once the levels run out it's no fun, but no mention of tactics or actually enjoying *playing* the game. Surely there's more to the game than getting equipment and increasing numbers?
What, the picture of a cat with a crosshair pointing at it didn't give it away?
Maybe there just isn't any "News for Nerds" out there this week, hence the dupes. I mean, the technology world is so slow moving news is hard to come by. Hang on a minute, Technocrat has a load of interesting stories.
game reviewer might not be so bad though.
Not true, if my experience was anything to go by. I did a little bit for a now-defunct dotcom and a university paper. It's the old problem of taking something you enjoy doing and adding deadlines: suddenly, it becomes much less fun.
Sure, testing out steering wheels with Sega Rally 2 or playing pre-releases of great new games is fun. Having to spend days playing games you really don't like (Gabriel Knight springs to mind) or games that are just crap, and then writing something interesting about them, from the perspective of somebody who likes that sort of game, is not.
It wasn't really a huge amount of work so far, although I think all the fiddly bits of testing and special cases to come will take a while to sort out. If I didn't spend all day reading Slashdot I'd probably have finished months ago ;)
Fortunately, I had written an easily-resizable text display to start with, so I'd already done most of the heavy work.
Eventually. Many, many people have requested HiRes+ support already, and I've virtually finished support for it. I just need to find time to finish it off and prepare a release.
Two in one day. What editing skill that must require.
Did you enable laptop_mode? I find that running the default laptop_mode script (in linux/Documentation/laptop_mode.txt) with "noatime" set in fstab for all partitions reduced disk activity hugely.
Whatever's sensible, I guess. In my Free software work (PalmOS text editor) I use a lot of unsigned 16-bit integer values, for example, so if the number of characters that fit across the screen becomes 65,000, then I've probably done something like "x=3-5" and overflowed x.
Yes, of course. Almost all functions should have at least one assert (ErrFatalDisplayIf in PalmOS) in the debug build, IMO. I generally add sanity checks as well - if I know an integer argument should never be much above 200, assert that it's not.
In what way is apt-get install kde not one command? Those are three commands to install kde from three different distros (Debian-based, Arch and Redhat-based).
It just annoys me that so many Gentoo users seem to think that dependency resolution is only present in emerge, when in fact pretty much every distro has it as well.
1) I like spatial browsing. There's an option in the nautilus preferences dialog to turn it off, or you can just have "file browser" on you panel like I do.
2-3) yes, something should be done. Recursive file permissions have been a feature request in bugzilla for 5 years now, no idea why they haven't fixed it.
4) Generally shift-click and control click selection work fine in file dialogs: opening multiple files in gEdit, or adding multiple wallpapers at once, for example.
5) I quite like the file dialog. It's seems to be generally the application's responsibility to give the dialog a sensible starting directory: certainly gEdit, for example, always opens the open dialog in the directory of the current file on my sytem.
6) Sound-juicer is a bit option-poor, I agree. It works very nicely, as long as you just want to rip music quickly and not bother fiddling too much. The KDE version, where you set the options globally in some well-hidden preferences dialog isn't much better. I'd like to at least see a select bit-rate/quality box added.
I think a lot of the problem is just lack of developer-hours. It's a shame they're still using pure C as well and don't seem to be doing much test-driven development.
For example, to install kde 3.2, just type "emerge kde"
I'm not sure what you're saying: how is that different from:
The bridge his best book? I'd have chosen the Wasp Factory or Espedair Street, personally.
Inversions marked the time when I pretty much stopped reading Sci-fi: I'm not sure why, I guess I just got bored. Having just seen the travesty the Sci-Fi channel made out of Earthsea and being reminded of how much I loved Sci-fi/fantasy *books*, I'm off to Amazon.
I think Excession was the last really good Iain M Banks book I read. His sci-fi seems to have gone the same way as his mainstream fiction: it all became a bit samey after a while. Excession was excellent, though.
we have representatives from Scotland, England, and Ireland.
All of those in one entrant: Ian McDonald. From his web site:
born in 1960 in Manchester, England by an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland
Hearts, Hand and Voices (his second novel?) was one of my favourite sci-fi novels.
Stationary windows will take just as much CPU in '3d' as they do in 2d - basically nothing. It's not like it's redrawing at 100fps or anything. Things like redrawing after exposing a part of a window will likely take less CPU, as the graphics card can just draw the relevant part of the window's texture to the screen without having to regenerate it.
I imagine resolution won't be much of a problem. For actual 3d work, there is all sorts of complexity that limits the fill rate - overdraw, lots of textures, fogging, geometry etc. This is a very simple 3d system: flat projection, little geometry.
A (say) 2000x2000 resolution screen is only 4 million pixels - cards like the geforce 2mx (which is ~$30 or so?) will do 500 million/second theoretical.
A second pre-emptive comment:
1) It's a tech demo. Nobody is suggesting wobbly windows are going to improve productivity. Given a wide range of possible effects like this, however, creative people can come up with nice ideas to make your desktop more usable. Decoupling the screen display and window contents rendering allows all sorts of cool things.
2) It runs on old crappy hardware, so no, you won't need to go and buy an Nvidia 69999FX-eXtreme to run it
3) It's not 'bloat' (whatever that is), it's just using the hardware and X-server abilities to their full. By shifting much of the rendering to the graphics card, you could actually lower CPU usage. I'm sure a thousand openbox/console/ion/ratpoison users are waiting to post "I don't need this". To which I say "well go back to your teletype then".
It's not really a legal problem though,is it? Blocking access to pages based on referer is simple enough, I thought.
I run Ubuntu Warty as a server and it seems to be fine, although there have been a few teething problems in updates. Security updates have been timely, but one kernel update broke the NFS server for several weeks, leaving the only alternatives as downgrade to the previous insecure kernel or have no NFS.
Other than that it runs great.