Oh yes! Photopia! Great stuff. I've never been a great fan of interactive fiction (mainly because Zork and its sequels constantly stumped me when I played them on the venerable C64), but Photopia was truly an experience. I remember getting the chills when I finished it.
The great thing about Photopia is that for one, its puzzles are always obvious. So much so, that most of the time they don't even classify as traditional IF puzzles. There are some gems, however. Especially the IF mainstay, a maze, is done simply beautifully. Photopia focuses completely on story and that is a Good Thing by all accounts.
Another great (but very different) piece of IF is Winchester's Nightmare by Nick Montfort. I also enjoyed Narcolepsy (also by Adam Cadre and winner of the 2003 XYZZY award for best writing), although I never finished it.
When, by the way, did we have an America where boobs and swear words were on TV? I don't remember it.
You people really should try to have a democratic republic without all the hypocrisy sometime, it's not that bad.
Chapter 243 of my new book, Things We All Fricking Know But Like To Pretend We Don't For Some Reason covers the obvious reality that maybe children should get some scope on the universe before they engage in activities that make them parents.
Oh yeah, I completely forgot that parents have no influence on their children and the second they see a boob or (heaven forbid!) hear the work "fuck" on the air, they immediately become lust-driven sex addicts.
For the love of jebus, TURN THE GODDAMN TV OFF if you think the programming is bad for your children. It's YOUR responsibility as the parent to monitor what you child is watching.
it is MY right to do whatever I want in this country - it is MY responsibility to make others safe and NOT infringe on the well being and laws of this country!
Sorry, but that's not how it goes. The only guranteed rights and freedoms that are granted to you in "this country" (by which I assume you mean the United States) are the ones granted by the constitution. Everything else can be (and is most cases IS) restricted by other people around you, which is represented by your government, ultimately on federal level. Being allowed to drive an automobile without seatbelt is not, by any stretch of imagination, covered by your constitution. Therefore, if using seatbelts is enforced via legislation, it is simply a restriction of your rights done by your peers via the proxy that is your government. It is not communism or socialism, but democracy, which I think (and I think you'll agree) is the best system of government from a multitude of bad choices.
Since nobody seems to have mentioned it yet, Kohina is a net radio that broadcasts true old school videogame tunes. The active playlist is not overly large , but quality, not quantity is the order of the day. Lots of Commodore 64 classics from Hubbard, Galway, Daglish et al, but also lots of really kicking arcade tunes and music from obscure Japanese console games. Great stuff for listening while writing code!
I doubt anyone who learned English as a second language would be able to read the scrambled words as easily as most Slashdotters.
I have to disagree. My first language is Finnish, but I had no trouble in reading the posted text. Only some words (mostly long (8+ letters) like iprmoetnt) had to be read twice, but they too got "error-corrected" just fine, no deciphering needed.
Addendum: when previewing this, I actually realized that there was a typo in "iprmoetnt" in the original!
Something that has always fascinated me - can ayone provide a definition of "art".
This reminds me of a quote: "anything that is put up for display and cannot be pissed into is art". I cannot remember who it was that uttered this, but there you go.
Of course, the reasoning (such as it is) behind is the fact that anything that is put up for display and labeled as art actually becomes art. Therefore any object (or thing) can become art if the artist decides it is art. For example, a toilet seat by itself is not art, but when stripped of its general usefulness (i.e. put for display), placed in nonconventional surroundings and labeled as art it - for some reason - becomes art. Not necessarily good art, but art nevertheless.
The more interesting questions in my opinion is why some pieces of artwork are considered to be "better" than others.
Okay, some of the following might sound blatantly obvious, but I just thought it might be worthwhile to mention some things that should be kept in mind when asking things from geeks.
First of all: most of the time the trouble isn't that people aren't willing to help. Instead, the problem lies in the fact that people asking things are not asking the right questions (which is most of the time because they have been lazy and not done the basic stuff like reading the tutorials or FAQs). People do not like to act as helpdesks, but they DO generally like to help out.
It sounds obvious, but before even considering asking a question from someone, do your research first. Really! It can be a pain, it can be time-consuming, but people can tell if you haven't read up on the subject (and consequently feel like you are trying to use them as helpdesks). It also is good for the future: you might read something that is not entirely relevant for the current task at hand but is just the ticket for some future problem. Read the documentation (even if a README file is all there is, read it). Do the basic Google searches (I find pasting error messages to a Google Groups search sometimes does wonders). Read some tutorials on the matter. If you are trying to set up NFS you will want to know how the damn thing is ultimately supposed to work. In fact, do the reading even before you start to fiddle around with anything new. This might seem elementary, but I've seen SO MANY people just jumping right into configuring a new piece of software of which they do not even grasp the basic concepts and then complain because it doesn't work.
If something isn't working and, play around. Consider what might be causing the error or malfunction. Make up theories: "it doesn't compile because my libsuchandsuch is of a wrong version", "the error on startup is because the program cannot connect to the database", "it seems it cannot find the config file although it is there". When asking your questions, you might even want to present these theories so the people considering your question can see that you have actually thought about the problem.
Be specific. Know the versions and flavors of your programs, compilers, kernels and daemons (and be sure to mention the relevant ones of these when asking your question!). Ask yourself what it is you are actually doing: you are not "configuring Apache" you are "setting up an HTTP server". You are not "trying to build a firewall", you are "trying to block all TCP connections from 192.168.4.2".
Make (at least mental) notes of the things you have tried and how they have changed the symptoms. Even if it doesn't seem like much to you that an error message changes if you fiddle with a configuration option, a guru might know exactly what is going on from that simple piece of information. If you are asking your question in a real-time discussion (IRC, telephone, face-to-face etc) have these notes handy so that you can provide more information if the person you are asking from needs it. Do not dump all of it on them at once.
Of course, if you are posting to a forum or the Usenet, observe the netiquette. Do not assume that your question will be answered. Your question might generate a lot of discussion, but you might still be without an answer to your question. Do not despair. Fiddle around with the problem some more and try to find more clues as to what is going on, then post a new question with the new information.
Do not just barge into a discussion forum, a Usenet group or IRC channel (etc) and immediately fire away your question. Lurk around for a while. Participate in the discussion. Know the people on the list/group/forum/channel. People like to help their acquaintances, but someone random just asking a question is easily overlooked, especially if the forum has been around for a long time.
If you actually get an answer to your question and it solves your problem, great! But do not forget the community that gave you the answer: make further use of the notes you have a
Sorcerers was the first PC demo group and the first group to create text mode demos ever.
Well, at least the first one that did demoscene stuff on the PC textmode. What Sorcerers are more famous (or at least SHOULD be, goddamnit!) for is the fact that they were the first PC demo group to have sampled music on their demos. The quality was horrible, but it was there. The reason people remember Atom is because of the sampled tune that played in the background (it was actually composed by Fox of Sorcerers (who now is a comparatively famous Finnish piano player, btw)). The text-mode-demo-with-sampled-music series from Sorcerers included (at least) Atom, Nope, Argh! and probably some others that I forget.
IIRC, the music used in these demos was actually sampled using a cassette deck of a VIC-20 plugged into the PC. Great stuff.
Oh man, this brings back memories of the Good Old Days. Maybe someday I'll get back into creating the Sorcerers webpage to properly document all this. I do know that BCG does have all the demos stored away somewhere...
But then again, almost nobody has the hardware required to run that stuff anymore (good luck trying under any incarnation of Windows!)...
Really makes me wonder how many games used only a fraction of the cartridges total space. On one hand you have a lot of really easy to beat, small games and then you have games like FF3 and ChronoTrigger, which takes a really long time to beat.
I really don't understand what you mean here. There was no fixed size for either SNES or NES cartridges. They had as much memory as the developers decided to stick in their game (of course, more memory used meant more expensive carts). If you wanted to use more than 64k of ROM for NES carts (and most developers certainly did!), you simply used a memory mapper of some kind that did the relevant bankswitching for you and stuck as much memory in the cart as you needed. In theory there is no limit on the size of a NES cart, you'll just need a suitable memory mapper so you can access all the ROM banks you put in.
I don't remember offhand how this was done one the SNES (the 16-bit processor of the SNES could access much more memory at once than the 8-bit NES one), but the same kind of system could have been used there as well.
Of course, this was exactly the beauty of game cartridges: the developers could stick whatever they damn pleased into the cart. Memory was of course the number one thing, but adding actual hardware to the cart to aid the main system was possible too. On the SNES, some games had DSP processors added (Pilotwings is one of the earliest examples, but most of us can certainly remember Super Mario Kart). Star Fox had some polygon-pushing stuff added to the cart (props to Argonaut Software for that). And in the very early days Konami added extra sound hardware to their Salamander cart on the MSX. I don't remember any NES game offhand that used this technique of adding extra hardware to the cart. I am pretty confident that this was done, but cannot remember any game offhand. It would have been technologically possible, at the very least.
Your district's natural resources are there for slash-and-burn style exploitation by your district's largest political contributer to your political fund.
I can't help but thinking that that is exactly what all the candidates are actually saying beneath the sugar-coated fluff that are their campaign speeches.
Wow. I just finished my reinstallation of OS X and this pops up on Slashdot. Anyway...
I got myself a G4 as a workstation about six months back. Being new to both OS X and the Mac world, I chose to format my partitions as UFS. BAD move. A lot of software simply refused to work (Mozilla being an example) if started from an UFS partition. Others (like the Harpoon 3 Demo) worked if I did some tweaking. Since OS9 doesn't know anything about UFS volumes, I was deprived of Classic apps as well (not that I have really needed any, but anyway). All this was a pain in the ass, though. For a long time I thought the software I tried was badly coded, but soon realized that it was due to my partitions being UFS only.
Today I finally found the time to repartition as HFS+ and everything works like a charm. Finally I have a decent browser instead of that Microsoft crap.:-)
To summarize: don't do it, unless you really, REALLY, REALLY know what you are doing.
...they fired whatever company they hired to create their pages in the first place. I don't think it was an attack on the linux community in the first place, it was merely incompetance.
I don't think the company that created the site is to blame. People who ordered the site just wanted all kinds of Flash-y multimedia junk to attract the masses. Basically, if the people ordering the pages want something, then it is created, no matter how incompatible or non-standard it is. Money talks.
The saddest thing in commercial web-content creation is the fact that the design decisions of web pages are often done by people who don't have the faintest idea about what's feasible, not to mention accessable.
I think it mainly boils down to the fact that some marketing people (shudder!) tend associate web pages with commercials: the flashier (no pun intended) it is, the better.
Oh wow. A PDA/cell-phone combo (insert vague interest). Now if only someone would tell me how on earth this is supposed to be a better idea than a Nokia 9110.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes! Photopia! Great stuff. I've never been a great fan of interactive fiction (mainly because Zork and its sequels constantly stumped me when I played them on the venerable C64), but Photopia was truly an experience. I remember getting the chills when I finished it.
The great thing about Photopia is that for one, its puzzles are always obvious. So much so, that most of the time they don't even classify as traditional IF puzzles. There are some gems, however. Especially the IF mainstay, a maze, is done simply beautifully. Photopia focuses completely on story and that is a Good Thing by all accounts.
Another great (but very different) piece of IF is Winchester's Nightmare by Nick Montfort. I also enjoyed Narcolepsy (also by Adam Cadre and winner of the 2003 XYZZY award for best writing), although I never finished it.
And who provides that are carriers, not phone manufacturers like Nokia
But I understand your point.
When, by the way, did we have an America where boobs and swear words were on TV? I don't remember it.
You people really should try to have a democratic republic without all the hypocrisy sometime, it's not that bad.
Chapter 243 of my new book, Things We All Fricking Know But Like To Pretend We Don't For Some Reason covers the obvious reality that maybe children should get some scope on the universe before they engage in activities that make them parents.
Oh yeah, I completely forgot that parents have no influence on their children and the second they see a boob or (heaven forbid!) hear the work "fuck" on the air, they immediately become lust-driven sex addicts.
For the love of jebus, TURN THE GODDAMN TV OFF if you think the programming is bad for your children. It's YOUR responsibility as the parent to monitor what you child is watching.
it is MY right to do whatever I want in this country - it is MY responsibility to make others safe and NOT infringe on the well being and laws of this country!
Sorry, but that's not how it goes. The only guranteed rights and freedoms that are granted to you in "this country" (by which I assume you mean the United States) are the ones granted by the constitution. Everything else can be (and is most cases IS) restricted by other people around you, which is represented by your government, ultimately on federal level. Being allowed to drive an automobile without seatbelt is not, by any stretch of imagination, covered by your constitution. Therefore, if using seatbelts is enforced via legislation, it is simply a restriction of your rights done by your peers via the proxy that is your government. It is not communism or socialism, but democracy, which I think (and I think you'll agree) is the best system of government from a multitude of bad choices.
Oh, and I am not a citizen of the United States.
Since nobody seems to have mentioned it yet, Kohina is a net radio that broadcasts true old school videogame tunes. The active playlist is not overly large , but quality, not quantity is the order of the day. Lots of Commodore 64 classics from Hubbard, Galway, Daglish et al, but also lots of really kicking arcade tunes and music from obscure Japanese console games. Great stuff for listening while writing code!
This reminds me of a quote: "anything that is put up for display and cannot be pissed into is art". I cannot remember who it was that uttered this, but there you go.
Of course, the reasoning (such as it is) behind is the fact that anything that is put up for display and labeled as art actually becomes art. Therefore any object (or thing) can become art if the artist decides it is art. For example, a toilet seat by itself is not art, but when stripped of its general usefulness (i.e. put for display), placed in nonconventional surroundings and labeled as art it - for some reason - becomes art. Not necessarily good art, but art nevertheless.
The more interesting questions in my opinion is why some pieces of artwork are considered to be "better" than others.
Okay, some of the following might sound blatantly obvious, but I just thought it might be worthwhile to mention some things that should be kept in mind when asking things from geeks.
First of all: most of the time the trouble isn't that people aren't willing to help. Instead, the problem lies in the fact that people asking things are not asking the right questions (which is most of the time because they have been lazy and not done the basic stuff like reading the tutorials or FAQs). People do not like to act as helpdesks, but they DO generally like to help out.
It sounds obvious, but before even considering asking a question from someone, do your research first. Really! It can be a pain, it can be time-consuming, but people can tell if you haven't read up on the subject (and consequently feel like you are trying to use them as helpdesks). It also is good for the future: you might read something that is not entirely relevant for the current task at hand but is just the ticket for some future problem. Read the documentation (even if a README file is all there is, read it). Do the basic Google searches (I find pasting error messages to a Google Groups search sometimes does wonders). Read some tutorials on the matter. If you are trying to set up NFS you will want to know how the damn thing is ultimately supposed to work. In fact, do the reading even before you start to fiddle around with anything new. This might seem elementary, but I've seen SO MANY people just jumping right into configuring a new piece of software of which they do not even grasp the basic concepts and then complain because it doesn't work.
If something isn't working and, play around. Consider what might be causing the error or malfunction. Make up theories: "it doesn't compile because my libsuchandsuch is of a wrong version", "the error on startup is because the program cannot connect to the database", "it seems it cannot find the config file although it is there". When asking your questions, you might even want to present these theories so the people considering your question can see that you have actually thought about the problem.
Be specific. Know the versions and flavors of your programs, compilers, kernels and daemons (and be sure to mention the relevant ones of these when asking your question!). Ask yourself what it is you are actually doing: you are not "configuring Apache" you are "setting up an HTTP server". You are not "trying to build a firewall", you are "trying to block all TCP connections from 192.168.4.2".
Make (at least mental) notes of the things you have tried and how they have changed the symptoms. Even if it doesn't seem like much to you that an error message changes if you fiddle with a configuration option, a guru might know exactly what is going on from that simple piece of information. If you are asking your question in a real-time discussion (IRC, telephone, face-to-face etc) have these notes handy so that you can provide more information if the person you are asking from needs it. Do not dump all of it on them at once.
Of course, if you are posting to a forum or the Usenet, observe the netiquette. Do not assume that your question will be answered. Your question might generate a lot of discussion, but you might still be without an answer to your question. Do not despair. Fiddle around with the problem some more and try to find more clues as to what is going on, then post a new question with the new information.
Do not just barge into a discussion forum, a Usenet group or IRC channel (etc) and immediately fire away your question. Lurk around for a while. Participate in the discussion. Know the people on the list/group/forum/channel. People like to help their acquaintances, but someone random just asking a question is easily overlooked, especially if the forum has been around for a long time.
If you actually get an answer to your question and it solves your problem, great! But do not forget the community that gave you the answer: make further use of the notes you have a
Well, at least the first one that did demoscene stuff on the PC textmode. What Sorcerers are more famous (or at least SHOULD be, goddamnit!) for is the fact that they were the first PC demo group to have sampled music on their demos. The quality was horrible, but it was there. The reason people remember Atom is because of the sampled tune that played in the background (it was actually composed by Fox of Sorcerers (who now is a comparatively famous Finnish piano player, btw)). The text-mode-demo-with-sampled-music series from Sorcerers included (at least) Atom, Nope, Argh! and probably some others that I forget.
IIRC, the music used in these demos was actually sampled using a cassette deck of a VIC-20 plugged into the PC. Great stuff.
Oh man, this brings back memories of the Good Old Days. Maybe someday I'll get back into creating the Sorcerers webpage to properly document all this. I do know that BCG does have all the demos stored away somewhere...
But then again, almost nobody has the hardware required to run that stuff anymore (good luck trying under any incarnation of Windows!)...
I don't remember offhand how this was done one the SNES (the 16-bit processor of the SNES could access much more memory at once than the 8-bit NES one), but the same kind of system could have been used there as well.
Of course, this was exactly the beauty of game cartridges: the developers could stick whatever they damn pleased into the cart. Memory was of course the number one thing, but adding actual hardware to the cart to aid the main system was possible too. On the SNES, some games had DSP processors added (Pilotwings is one of the earliest examples, but most of us can certainly remember Super Mario Kart). Star Fox had some polygon-pushing stuff added to the cart (props to Argonaut Software for that). And in the very early days Konami added extra sound hardware to their Salamander cart on the MSX. I don't remember any NES game offhand that used this technique of adding extra hardware to the cart. I am pretty confident that this was done, but cannot remember any game offhand. It would have been technologically possible, at the very least.
*sigh*. The good old days...
[...]
Your district's natural resources are there for slash-and-burn style exploitation by your district's largest political contributer to your political fund.
I can't help but thinking that that is exactly what all the candidates are actually saying beneath the sugar-coated fluff that are their campaign speeches.
Ah well.
I got myself a G4 as a workstation about six months back. Being new to both OS X and the Mac world, I chose to format my partitions as UFS. BAD move. A lot of software simply refused to work (Mozilla being an example) if started from an UFS partition. Others (like the Harpoon 3 Demo) worked if I did some tweaking. Since OS9 doesn't know anything about UFS volumes, I was deprived of Classic apps as well (not that I have really needed any, but anyway). All this was a pain in the ass, though. For a long time I thought the software I tried was badly coded, but soon realized that it was due to my partitions being UFS only.
Today I finally found the time to repartition as HFS+ and everything works like a charm. Finally I have a decent browser instead of that Microsoft crap. :-)
To summarize: don't do it, unless you really, REALLY, REALLY know what you are doing.
Just my .02 €
I don't think the company that created the site is to blame. People who ordered the site just wanted all kinds of Flash-y multimedia junk to attract the masses. Basically, if the people ordering the pages want something, then it is created, no matter how incompatible or non-standard it is. Money talks.
The saddest thing in commercial web-content creation is the fact that the design decisions of web pages are often done by people who don't have the faintest idea about what's feasible, not to mention accessable.
I think it mainly boils down to the fact that some marketing people (shudder!) tend associate web pages with commercials: the flashier (no pun intended) it is, the better.
Oh wow. A PDA/cell-phone combo (insert vague interest). Now if only someone would tell me how on earth this is supposed to be a better idea than a Nokia 9110.