I was part of the audience the other week for the filming of the last episode for this season. The laughing? It's real, and this season round some of it will be from me.
Though obviously it takes a long time to film and so things don't flow as seamlessly as the TV episode itself, and perhaps they reuse laughs from one take over the top of acting from another take...it's still actually real. The writer came out to the audience and specifically talked about laugh tracks - he said he filmed in front of a live audience so that a) he was sure enough things were funny and b) because the actors could spark off the reactions.
I'm not going to give anything away about it, but we saw two episodes - one already filmed and edited, the other was being filmed on the night. They are both great, so tune in and have a watch this time.
No, really this time. This particular title I wouldn't be getting anyway, but my young kids use the PS3 and I don't let them on to the Playstation Network - they're just not old enough yet.
Now, if more titles start to insist on a connection to the network whilst playing then these will be titles my kids can't play. Final Fight...not too fussed. Other ones though would be a problem. Little Big Planet is their current favourite game, the middle one just went through Ghostbusters too. Had a connection been required they wouldn't have been able to play either. Lost sales for the platform, lost games for the kids. Not a good thing.
"Ever wondered what was so bad about NULL pointer exceptions?..."
Nothing. Because if they're an exception, they've been safely caught by the platform's exception handling mechanism. This article isn't about exceptions, it's about dereferencing your actual raw NUL pointers themselves in languages that either don't have the exception mechanism or where it simply hasn't been used.
First, props to the quality of old time hardware. Do you think you could still play games on contemporary machines, almots 3 decades in the future?
Another detail about Asteroids - it's a game you really can't emulate without specialist hardware. Yeah you can load up the ROM in MAME and it plays nicely enough, but the true Asteroids machine had vector monitor hardware. This really makes a difference to the feel of the thing and those beautifully glowing intense bullets look vastly better on the real thing than when played on standard raster hardware.
I have a MAME cab and an ArcadeVGA adapter to power a Hanterax 20" screen - it makes even 320x128 look fantastic. But Asteroids is something it simply can't get right - without a vector monitor, you're stuffed.
I do not understand why these non-gamers or casual gamers think about changing the games all the time. I am an hardcore gamer and I will buy the product. Go save the real world not our fantastic world.
Non-gamer - I've seen the TED talk she did, and she is most definitely a gamer of the 'hardcore' variety. Was actually quite funny to feel her relief when she realised some of the audience were gamers too and were getting some of the references she was making.
You're definitely insulting those of us who worked on it.
Can't speak for MacOS 8 as I left the Mac at 7.5.3, to return with a 12" Powerbook when OS X 10.2 Jaguar came out. Even at the time though, a few of us in the mixed Mac/PC shop I worked at called System 7.5 'the shareware edition', because it really did just seem like what we'd already sorted our System 7 installs to be. Wikipedia seems to confirm this too: look at the System 7.5 section here (search on 'Capone') and see the number of features which originated in shareware. 7.5 was a paid upgrade.
Can't speak for 8 and 9, but 7.5 was definitely shareware...err...'inspired'.
OK so it suffers from the tinsy problem of being fictional, but that would be cool if made. Thinking about it, perhaps there really is a market for something like that made from a Mini-ITX board?
Cheers,
Ian
Yeah, there were no 'else' constructs. If you wanted an else, you had to do it yourself with a couple GOTOs. Also, the worst part about line numbers was when you decided to add something later, and there weren't enough lines. A program that had been refactored this way a few times could literally move randomly through the source code.
I never owned a Beeb, though I had several friends that did. I used them at school a lot too, and their BASIC was extraordinarily advanced. The ELSE statement was there, as was the standar(ish) GOSUB, but you could also define true procedures which returned values etc. (DIM PROC), and there was a clean way of dropping down to the 'OS' proper (OSCLI statements).
In addition, it also solved the line number problem you mentioned. It had a renumber command so that everything would become properly spaced out again. I remember the style of coding you're describing from my C64 efforts - the C64 was actually MS BASIC and it was dreadful, anyone wanting to do decent high-levle coding used to get the Simon's BASIC cartridge.
As a whole though, the BBC simply had the best BASIC of any 8-bit I encountered. That's not too surprising given its background and use as a teaching tool, but they did it very well indeed.
Now that "real" pirates are back on the world stage, maybe we can get rid of this dumb use of the word pirate?
Look - the term pirate has been in use to describe copying software for decades. Once upon a time in my reckless* youth, I copied software too and I called it pirating. I got it from people calling themselves pirates, as released by groups like the Pompey Pirates. The word wasn't forced on us by some manipulating media, we wanted to be called pirates.
I'm strictly reformed these days, and have been for quite some time. Every piece of shareware registered, absolutely no illegally copied anything, licenses abound (where necessary). I firmly believe in doing this the right way, especially since with the massive explosion of good quality open-source software (and cheap educational licenses - the 'poor student' argument rarely holds now either) there's really no excuse at all for copying now. But I still know what the word 'pirate' means in the context of software - it's a firmly established piece of the lexicon and it's not going away.
I, at least, was pretty confused for a couple of seconds as to why pirates would do any sort of software trickery.
No, you weren't. You are saying that for pure pretence reasons, as you quite clearly know what's meant. Statements like that don't help your cause.
You're asking people to accept that they exist at the whim of some other business and through rules that they can't influence or control. Would you put your own business at that level of dependence? Why should a publisher?
Google may be superficially good for a publisher today, but the reality is that they lose influence and control over their own product. They become commodity suppliers to Google, and that's no good to them. It may or may not be good for you-the-consumer, but that's not the viewpoint being argued.
Are there major countries outside of Europe that use the European system? I'm not advocating for one over the other here, just trying to follow your argument.
Interesting one - I would guess, though I don't know and am happy to be shown evidence either way, that former French and Spanish (and Dutch?) colonies might show mainland European ways and former British ones might show US/British ways. Those geographically close to the States might have moved across too.
Totally unproven hypothesis though so if someone has the time to look it up and I'd be interested.
In matters of custom, the more universally recognized method is the right one.
OK then - here you go. I await the US and Britain's change to the 'universal' standard with interest.
If you want to implement a new worldwide custom then that's fine but I suspect you will need a very good justification and not simply the desire to do something new.
New? Err...no, no this isn't new. It's centuries old. What's happened here is some US-centric programmer has forgotten to do a locale conversion. Happened to me too about ten years back when I unwisely sent.csv to Switzerland.
I never understood why the hell Europeans swap periods and commas. Grammatically it doesn't even make sense...A period ends a sentence or statement, which to me should imply a whole number. A comma is simply a separator, used within sentences. So why would it be used to separate decimals?
See, that argument doesn't make 'sense' either. If a comma is a separator, why not use it to separate decimals? Answer: no reason, it is completely and utterly arbitrary. You're arguing that the point of view you're used to is somehow intrinsicly 'right' - it isn't, it's just usage and custom.
It would be like writing a sentence this way:
Somehow, I suspect mainland Europe knows what it's like to write a sentence including thousands sperators and decimal separators...
I'm British - I use "," to separate thousands and "." to separate decimals, but that doesn't make me 'right' - it really is just usage and custom, there isn't anything to really recommend one way over the other.
Everyone is speaking of trickery to get the users. I switched my homepage over by choice - and I'm a Mac Safari user.
Reason? Much against my expectation, I found I liked the daily pictures rather than the blank of Google. I fully expected to prefer the clean look of Google (after all, it was that rather than quality of results which made me move from Alta Vista to Google many years ago.) but instead I found it was time for a change and I like the different appearance and the tagging they do I find interesting.
Search quality results - variable. Some good, some not so. It's no effort to just click the search box top-right and start using Google instead however, so effectively by having Bing as the homepage with a quickly accessible Google search I've got quick access to two potential sets of results.
So yes, I switched over for the pretty pictures. Yes, that's a shallow reason. It's doing no harm however, and I like it.
>>...the London black cab drivers...
>...Hey! It's African American dude!
You know, I knew somebody was going to say that...
For those who don't know (and think you did know and are just making the joke...), a black cab driver here literally refers to the colour of the cab, and is used as opposed to mini-cab drivers who don't have the same rules and regulations (in this case, have no need to pass The Knowledge).
If like me, you live in a small European country, where within the country there is practically no need for the GPS because you know most of the country by heart. Thus the only reason for using a car GPS navigation is when you leave the country.
What about cities you've never been to before, or even just areas or shops close by that you've never been to before? Or what if you're in a place you know perfectly well how to drive to, but don't know where the nearest doctor/petrol station/whatever is - ie. a POI which will be marked on your GPS?
I live in the UK and yep, I found my standalone TomTom very useful when driving in France. But I also find it useful when I go about four miles away into the nearest town if I'm looking for a shop on a street I've never been to before. Or fifty miles to some city I can drive to the centre of but have no idea where the particular concert hall or whatever is. I also live close to London and work in there - the only people with a complete knowledge of how to drive round London are the London black cab drivers who've done The Knowledge test - mere mortals such as myself don't stand a chance of ever learning it all.
There's a lot more use for a GPS than just switching countries or driving huge distances.
"There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."
Nonsense. Doom wasn't supposed to be story-driven game, it was an action game. You grabbed your minigun, charged into a room you'd never seen before and blasted away. You even had a chance of surviving. There are no story lessons from Doom because there weren't supposed to me.
It's exactly the lack of immediate mindless action that's put me off gaming for a long time after. I want gaming, not cinematic experiences. If you prefer cinema that's fine and there's room for both, but for me all the plot-driven stuff is a turn-off. I still want to grab a minigun and charge into a room blasting widly in a totally unrealistic fashion as strange creatures fall in front of me. Shortly before being overwhelmed by ridiculous odds, of course.
When I do play acrade games, I tend to head MAMEwards. Plot-driven stuff just doesn't do it for me at all - if it does for you then that's fine and I'm certainly not criticising it, I'm just saying there's more than one type of gamer and Doom appealed to me in a way that almost none of the other FPS stuff has. That's precisely because it has little story or plot.
Re-emerge? BBC iPlayer, in its desktop not Flash-streaming form, is already a DRM'd p2p distribution system. Has been very successful though not as much as the straight Flash-based service from what I can tell.
At my work the sysadmin refuses to upgrade from SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition...despite the fact that we have a budget (and need)... The execs are now pushing it because we're getting deadlocks constantly, but the admin insists that if everyone would stop using the database to do anything, we'd be fine, and refuses to upgrade.
Thing is, they clearly don't find it perfectly reasonable. I must say I have misgivings about it also. So we agree - give 'em what they want, turn it off. It's just that it seems we have come to the same conclusions for entirely different reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
I was part of the audience the other week for the filming of the last episode for this season. The laughing? It's real, and this season round some of it will be from me.
Though obviously it takes a long time to film and so things don't flow as seamlessly as the TV episode itself, and perhaps they reuse laughs from one take over the top of acting from another take...it's still actually real. The writer came out to the audience and specifically talked about laugh tracks - he said he filmed in front of a live audience so that a) he was sure enough things were funny and b) because the actors could spark off the reactions.
I'm not going to give anything away about it, but we saw two episodes - one already filmed and edited, the other was being filmed on the night. They are both great, so tune in and have a watch this time.
Cheers,
Ian
8, 6, and 4. I think I'd be looking at about 10-12 (depending on how maturely they're handling things at 10) before allowing them on.
Cheers,
Ian
No, really this time. This particular title I wouldn't be getting anyway, but my young kids use the PS3 and I don't let them on to the Playstation Network - they're just not old enough yet.
Now, if more titles start to insist on a connection to the network whilst playing then these will be titles my kids can't play. Final Fight...not too fussed. Other ones though would be a problem. Little Big Planet is their current favourite game, the middle one just went through Ghostbusters too. Had a connection been required they wouldn't have been able to play either. Lost sales for the platform, lost games for the kids. Not a good thing.
Cheers,
Ian
Was it ever rejected? I can find references to Opera saying Apple might not let it in, but nothing definitive.
Cheers,
Ian
"Ever wondered what was so bad about NULL pointer exceptions?..."
Nothing. Because if they're an exception, they've been safely caught by the platform's exception handling mechanism. This article isn't about exceptions, it's about dereferencing your actual raw NUL pointers themselves in languages that either don't have the exception mechanism or where it simply hasn't been used.
Cheers,
Ian
First, props to the quality of old time hardware. Do you think you could still play games on contemporary machines, almots 3 decades in the future?
Another detail about Asteroids - it's a game you really can't emulate without specialist hardware. Yeah you can load up the ROM in MAME and it plays nicely enough, but the true Asteroids machine had vector monitor hardware. This really makes a difference to the feel of the thing and those beautifully glowing intense bullets look vastly better on the real thing than when played on standard raster hardware.
I have a MAME cab and an ArcadeVGA adapter to power a Hanterax 20" screen - it makes even 320x128 look fantastic. But Asteroids is something it simply can't get right - without a vector monitor, you're stuffed.
Cheers,
Ian
I do not understand why these non-gamers or casual gamers think about changing the games all the time. I am an hardcore gamer and I will buy the product. Go save the real world not our fantastic world.
Non-gamer - I've seen the TED talk she did, and she is most definitely a gamer of the 'hardcore' variety. Was actually quite funny to feel her relief when she realised some of the audience were gamers too and were getting some of the references she was making.
Cheers,
Ian
You're definitely insulting those of us who worked on it.
Can't speak for MacOS 8 as I left the Mac at 7.5.3, to return with a 12" Powerbook when OS X 10.2 Jaguar came out. Even at the time though, a few of us in the mixed Mac/PC shop I worked at called System 7.5 'the shareware edition', because it really did just seem like what we'd already sorted our System 7 installs to be. Wikipedia seems to confirm this too: look at the System 7.5 section here (search on 'Capone') and see the number of features which originated in shareware. 7.5 was a paid upgrade.
Can't speak for 8 and 9, but 7.5 was definitely shareware...err...'inspired'.
Cheers,
Ian
OK so it suffers from the tinsy problem of being fictional, but that would be cool if made. Thinking about it, perhaps there really is a market for something like that made from a Mini-ITX board? Cheers, Ian
DIM PROC
Argh. DEF PROC, not DIM PROC.
Cheers,
Ian
Yeah, there were no 'else' constructs. If you wanted an else, you had to do it yourself with a couple GOTOs. Also, the worst part about line numbers was when you decided to add something later, and there weren't enough lines. A program that had been refactored this way a few times could literally move randomly through the source code.
I never owned a Beeb, though I had several friends that did. I used them at school a lot too, and their BASIC was extraordinarily advanced. The ELSE statement was there, as was the standar(ish) GOSUB, but you could also define true procedures which returned values etc. (DIM PROC), and there was a clean way of dropping down to the 'OS' proper (OSCLI statements).
In addition, it also solved the line number problem you mentioned. It had a renumber command so that everything would become properly spaced out again. I remember the style of coding you're describing from my C64 efforts - the C64 was actually MS BASIC and it was dreadful, anyone wanting to do decent high-levle coding used to get the Simon's BASIC cartridge.
As a whole though, the BBC simply had the best BASIC of any 8-bit I encountered. That's not too surprising given its background and use as a teaching tool, but they did it very well indeed.
Cheers,
Ian
Now that "real" pirates are back on the world stage, maybe we can get rid of this dumb use of the word pirate? Look - the term pirate has been in use to describe copying software for decades. Once upon a time in my reckless* youth, I copied software too and I called it pirating. I got it from people calling themselves pirates, as released by groups like the Pompey Pirates. The word wasn't forced on us by some manipulating media, we wanted to be called pirates.
I'm strictly reformed these days, and have been for quite some time. Every piece of shareware registered, absolutely no illegally copied anything, licenses abound (where necessary). I firmly believe in doing this the right way, especially since with the massive explosion of good quality open-source software (and cheap educational licenses - the 'poor student' argument rarely holds now either) there's really no excuse at all for copying now. But I still know what the word 'pirate' means in the context of software - it's a firmly established piece of the lexicon and it's not going away.
I, at least, was pretty confused for a couple of seconds as to why pirates would do any sort of software trickery.
No, you weren't. You are saying that for pure pretence reasons, as you quite clearly know what's meant. Statements like that don't help your cause.
Cheers,
Ian
"The proverb warns that you should never bite the hand that feeds you, but maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself."
You're asking people to accept that they exist at the whim of some other business and through rules that they can't influence or control. Would you put your own business at that level of dependence? Why should a publisher?
Google may be superficially good for a publisher today, but the reality is that they lose influence and control over their own product. They become commodity suppliers to Google, and that's no good to them. It may or may not be good for you-the-consumer, but that's not the viewpoint being argued.
Cheers,
Ian
Are there major countries outside of Europe that use the European system? I'm not advocating for one over the other here, just trying to follow your argument.
Interesting one - I would guess, though I don't know and am happy to be shown evidence either way, that former French and Spanish (and Dutch?) colonies might show mainland European ways and former British ones might show US/British ways. Those geographically close to the States might have moved across too.
Totally unproven hypothesis though so if someone has the time to look it up and I'd be interested.
Cheers,
Ian
In matters of custom, the more universally recognized method is the right one.
.csv to Switzerland.
OK then - here you go. I await the US and Britain's change to the 'universal' standard with interest.
If you want to implement a new worldwide custom then that's fine but I suspect you will need a very good justification and not simply the desire to do something new.
New? Err...no, no this isn't new. It's centuries old. What's happened here is some US-centric programmer has forgotten to do a locale conversion. Happened to me too about ten years back when I unwisely sent
Cheers,
Ian
I never understood why the hell Europeans swap periods and commas. Grammatically it doesn't even make sense...A period ends a sentence or statement, which to me should imply a whole number. A comma is simply a separator, used within sentences. So why would it be used to separate decimals?
See, that argument doesn't make 'sense' either. If a comma is a separator, why not use it to separate decimals? Answer: no reason, it is completely and utterly arbitrary. You're arguing that the point of view you're used to is somehow intrinsicly 'right' - it isn't, it's just usage and custom.
It would be like writing a sentence this way:
Somehow, I suspect mainland Europe knows what it's like to write a sentence including thousands sperators and decimal separators...
I'm British - I use "," to separate thousands and "." to separate decimals, but that doesn't make me 'right' - it really is just usage and custom, there isn't anything to really recommend one way over the other.
Cheers,
Ian
Everyone is speaking of trickery to get the users. I switched my homepage over by choice - and I'm a Mac Safari user.
Reason? Much against my expectation, I found I liked the daily pictures rather than the blank of Google. I fully expected to prefer the clean look of Google (after all, it was that rather than quality of results which made me move from Alta Vista to Google many years ago.) but instead I found it was time for a change and I like the different appearance and the tagging they do I find interesting.
Search quality results - variable. Some good, some not so. It's no effort to just click the search box top-right and start using Google instead however, so effectively by having Bing as the homepage with a quickly accessible Google search I've got quick access to two potential sets of results.
So yes, I switched over for the pretty pictures. Yes, that's a shallow reason. It's doing no harm however, and I like it.
Cheers,
Ian
>> ...the London black cab drivers... ...Hey! It's African American dude!
>
You know, I knew somebody was going to say that...
For those who don't know (and think you did know and are just making the joke...), a black cab driver here literally refers to the colour of the cab, and is used as opposed to mini-cab drivers who don't have the same rules and regulations (in this case, have no need to pass The Knowledge).
Cheers,
Ian
If like me, you live in a small European country, where within the country there is practically no need for the GPS because you know most of the country by heart. Thus the only reason for using a car GPS navigation is when you leave the country.
What about cities you've never been to before, or even just areas or shops close by that you've never been to before? Or what if you're in a place you know perfectly well how to drive to, but don't know where the nearest doctor/petrol station/whatever is - ie. a POI which will be marked on your GPS?
I live in the UK and yep, I found my standalone TomTom very useful when driving in France. But I also find it useful when I go about four miles away into the nearest town if I'm looking for a shop on a street I've never been to before. Or fifty miles to some city I can drive to the centre of but have no idea where the particular concert hall or whatever is. I also live close to London and work in there - the only people with a complete knowledge of how to drive round London are the London black cab drivers who've done The Knowledge test - mere mortals such as myself don't stand a chance of ever learning it all.
There's a lot more use for a GPS than just switching countries or driving huge distances.
Cheers,
Ian
Someday I want to invent an attack, but only because I want the privilege of naming it.
And some day I'd like to be hit by the attack you invent, because saying that I've been hit by an "all-knowing frog" attack would simply be cool.
Cheers,
Ian
"There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."
Nonsense. Doom wasn't supposed to be story-driven game, it was an action game. You grabbed your minigun, charged into a room you'd never seen before and blasted away. You even had a chance of surviving. There are no story lessons from Doom because there weren't supposed to me.
It's exactly the lack of immediate mindless action that's put me off gaming for a long time after. I want gaming, not cinematic experiences. If you prefer cinema that's fine and there's room for both, but for me all the plot-driven stuff is a turn-off. I still want to grab a minigun and charge into a room blasting widly in a totally unrealistic fashion as strange creatures fall in front of me. Shortly before being overwhelmed by ridiculous odds, of course.
When I do play acrade games, I tend to head MAMEwards. Plot-driven stuff just doesn't do it for me at all - if it does for you then that's fine and I'm certainly not criticising it, I'm just saying there's more than one type of gamer and Doom appealed to me in a way that almost none of the other FPS stuff has. That's precisely because it has little story or plot.
Cheers,
Ian
Twitter nothing. This morning they were threatened with being held in contempt of Parliament. That's when it dropped.
Cheers,
Ian
Re-emerge? BBC iPlayer, in its desktop not Flash-streaming form, is already a DRM'd p2p distribution system. Has been very successful though not as much as the straight Flash-based service from what I can tell.
Cheers,
Ian
At my work the sysadmin refuses to upgrade from SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition...despite the fact that we have a budget (and need)... The execs are now pushing it because we're getting deadlocks constantly, but the admin insists that if everyone would stop using the database to do anything, we'd be fine, and refuses to upgrade.
Re-apply the budget. Upgrade the admin instead.
Cheers,
Ian
Thing is, they clearly don't find it perfectly reasonable. I must say I have misgivings about it also. So we agree - give 'em what they want, turn it off. It's just that it seems we have come to the same conclusions for entirely different reasons.
Cheers,
Ian