It doesn't matter if its spelt correctly in every instance as long as your point comes across.
Quite true. The odd typo doesn't matter. However, if you have too many typos, a lot of people will simply stop reading what you have to say, however interesting the content might be. And your point WON'T come across.
Bad news - "different than" is an acceptable usage in American English. "Different to" has a similar status in British English. "Different from" is required in formal written English, but that's not what Slashdot uses.
If you want to nitpick the title, try the point that it's fairly obvious that a video game is going to be easily distinguishable from the United States of America. (Adding "Version" to the end of the sentence would resolve that little ambiguity.)
There are a number of things an author can't write into a story without a narrator.
Who said first-person narrative precludes the use of a narrator? Consider a case like Wuthering Heights, where the story is not only related in the first person, but through multiple layers of first-person narrators. It demonstrates that most of the benefits an omniscient narrator could provide - insights into motivations and consequences, and a broader perspective on events - are still available simply by having the main events narrated by a witness some time after they actually occurred.
[First-person narrative] also limits all knowledge of the world to the interpretation of one character.
I'm afraid I can't imagine what gave you that idea. Multiple narrators are a very common device in first-person novels. Another example may be called for - I assume you have at least read Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, right? Remember how he even brings a dead character's voice in to provide some vital information that none of the others knows?
Very difficult to write a good story in first person.
It's very difficult to write a good story, period. First person isn't much more difficult than third person. It's just that it's considerably easier to write a bad story in the third person.
Second person is a more interesting case... the only examples I can think of off-hand are text adventure games, and I can't think of many of those that had literary pretensions.
HTML email is simpler than plain text, because plain text email just confuses people as to why they can type in different styles in other programs like Word, but not in their email. HTML email allows them to do what they expect to be able to do.
The difference, and the reason that word processors are not evil but HTML email is, is that people generally have the sense not to use green Comic Sans MS on a pink background in Word.
Ultima 1-7 were nothing but the same game with better animations. They had the same interaction, etc.
I deduce you've never played any of them, or at least, not in close proximity and not recently. You certainly wouldn't say that if you'd ever compared them side by side.
Summary: the earlier games are vastly different from Ultima 7. 1, 2, and 3 are similar to one another but far more primitive than the later games, and very different in style: 1 includes laser guns and a space-ship, while 2 is set on a recognisable Earth! 4 and 5 are the next level up; 4 is particularly innovative in its gameplay, and it's my second favourite of the series (after Serpent Isle). But they're all far less interactive, and far less story-driven, than 6 and 7.
Were you to show 1 and 7 to someone unfamiliar with the series, they probably wouldn't guess there was any connection at all. They're about as similar as Catacomb Abyss is to Halflife 2.
It's worth mentioning a few other features that aren't as common in other languages. The main ones for me are structural subtyping (basically what Python types call "duck typing", but guaranteed sound at compile-time) and an excellent debugger with a "rewind" function letting you take your code back to an earlier state and try a different execution path.
The syntax is a bit odd at first, and knowing it is unlikely to get anyone a job, but it's a nice language to use for personal projects...
Am I right in thinking that if the original BASIC language had been released under the GPL, this nonsense would never have happened?
No.
The derivative works the GPL covers are those that are literally derived from the original source code, not those that merely look or behave in the same way.
If I were to reimplement every feature of the Linux kernel by myself, without including any of the copyrightable elements of the actual Linux source code, I would be able to distribute my version under any license I liked, even something horrible like Microsoft's EULAs, and Linus would have no way of stopping me. The GPL on the original source code would be irrelevant.
It's comments like this that make me think that computer science should be taught as an engineering discipline.
That distinction is already made. You have computer scientists (people who do research into cool type systems and write lots of papers), and you have software engineers (people who work with existing tools and write big systems in the "real world"). Both sorts do valuable work, but in completely different ways and with completely different goals. And I don't think the choice of terminology was a coincidence.
English speakers (at least the grammatical ones) are familiar with a handful of verb inflections -- singular vs. plural; present or past tense -- but Old English actually inflected the nouns of a sentence as well, to indicate the subject and the predicate. You could say either "Dick hit Jane" or "Jane hit Dick" and the noun inflection, not the word order, determined who actually got hit. I'm no linguist, but I believe there are contemporary languages with similar features.
My take on this is that if I were to release an animated.gif under the GPL, it's possible I'm also promising to keep the raw frames on file and send them to anyone asking for them. If I draw something in BMP format, and it undergoes a lossy compression, say to.JPG at 80% quality, maybe that would count, with the.BMP as 'source code'. I don't see how the GPL is intended to cover such situations, but if it somehow does, it opens up a whole new can of worms.
The GPL describes "source code" as "the preferred format for editing" (or some such phrase). How does that apply? Easy.
Nobody really "draws something in BMP format". You draw it in Photoshop or GIMP, using objects, layers, filters, and so on. So the source code is the native Photoshop file with all the layers intact. Or as another example, many modern icons are bitmapped versions of vector graphics, so there it would be the vectors from which the bitmap was generated.
That is to say, what the person who created the product worked with = "source code". If you created a GPL'd 3D scene by dotting every single pixel in by hand, then you can distribute it as a PNG file quite happily... but if you rendered it in a 3D package, you'd better include the original models and textures.
The thing about the H2G2 universe, though, is that everything changes, nothing is definite, and many things that exist in one of the versions of the story (radio, tv, book, computer game, movie, whatever) completely contradict the way things are in the other versions. That's the way Douglas Adams wanted it to be.
No. The thing about the H2G2 universe is that Douglas Adams was constantly tweaking it around so it was never the same twice. That doesn't give Disney the right to come up with a version that not only totally contradicts every single one of Adams' versions, but also totally contradicts everything the man's legions of fans can possibly believe the man himself would ever have come up with.
It's having paid a lot of money for the movie rights that gives them that right.
They don't need fans to apologise for them - our job is to bitch about it for months and then go and see the movie anyway.:p
Yes, but so does "of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession" (Lev. 25:45). Yup, you have a biblical right to enslave tourists' children. Or, in other words - not everything the Old Testament says is suitable as a handbook of modern morality.
More to the point, blanket statements like "thou shalt not steal" are only meaningful if you define "steal". Let's not have the whole "is copyright infringement theft" flamewar again, please - just please acknowledge that even among people who do consider copyright infringement to be theft, most people would at least consider the possibility that purchasing one copy of Windows and installing it on two computers is not exactly in the same (im)moral league as bank robbery.
lex/flex and bison/yacc are rather antiquated, you may want to check out terence parr's antlr (formerly pccts) instead. this allows you to implement your compiler+interpreter in your language of choice, rather than being forced to use c. my compiler classes all required that we used lex/yacc, so that's what i did; however, i would have really liked to have the option of doing it all in java or c++.
If I read the ANTLR pages correctly, it will only permit you to use your language of choice if your language of choice happens to be C++, C#, or Java. That's rather restricted compared to the range of lex/yacc clones you can find out there; they exist for just about any major programming language you care to mention.
Since God makes lightning, we have to declare war on God too.
Ah, but which God? Zeus has claimed responsibility, so we should probably invade Greece next. But evidence of hammer-marks on the scene has led some of our top CIA theologians to suggest that the attacks were actually carried out by Thor - and those socialist Scandinavian countries do make a very tempting target. Meanwhile, the DHS are pointing the finger at one Allah, who is alleged to have links to al-Qaida...
" it's just that not all applications are written in QT, just as not all Gnome apps are written in GTK. So, you get some apps that don't fall in line with the look and feel of the rest of the OS. "
So you're agreeing with me, but not with where I am placing the blame? Fair enough, maybe blaming KDE isn't fair, but it's still a huge problem.
And the EXACT SAME PROBLEM exists on MacOS X when you use applications that weren't designed for the OS X desktop. Run an OS 9 app in Classic - and it looks different and isn't properly integrated with the desktop! Run a Unix app in X, like Openoffice.org - and it looks different and isn't properly integrated with the desktop!
Why is it okay for OS9 or X applications to look different on OSX, but not okay for Gnome applications to look different on KDE?
Please, somebody, give me a truly valid reason why spaces are better than tabs, empirically. Thanks.
Every editor worth using has a function that makes it automatically insert spaces when you press Tab - but very few have functions that make them automatically insert tabs when you press Space.
Therefore, it's easier to configure your editor to insert the right sort of spacing whichever key you press if you're using spaces rather than tabs. Therefore, using spaces means you're less likely to end up with mixed indentation.
I don't know if you'll consider that a truly valid reason, but it's the best I can think of.
The downside to mapping your Tab key like that is that it makes writing Makefiles a real PITA...
Re:We have a technical term for it
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Now you know how they fixed it, so no need to read the article.
Thank you for the summary! I tried to RTFA, but I got tired of the tedious dumbed-down human interest after the first thousand words of breathless "Could the mission be saved, or was it too late?" tosh that these journalists always seem to feel they have to pad their word counts with.
I guess I should be glad they hadn't quite managed to turn it into One Man's Struggle Against the Establishment. And if the guy had got divorced or lost a child while he was working on Huygens, they'd probably have forgotten to put any science in the article at all...
Yes - it has adult content. Well done, you score 100% for observation.
Presumably you will now discount the game completely, and ignore the fact that the adult content represents a tiny fraction of an epic storyline, a feast of love, magic, and betrayal, steeped in mythology from around the world.
Funny how people can't see past the "anime porn" label where games which place sex within relationships and give it a meaningful place in the plot are concerned, yet have no qualms about playing the ones where screwing hookers is just a way of regaining health...
Slashdot Mirror
Windows hasn't been unstable since Windows 98 and that's 7-8 years old.
...except to deal with badly-behaved applications. But those are hardly Windows' fault.
You must have missed Windows Me, which makes Windows 98 look rock-solid.
Nobody who uses Win2k or XP has to keep pressing the beloved Ctrl-Alt-Delete-Vulcan-Nerve-Death-Grip key combination...
It doesn't matter if its spelt correctly in every instance as long as your point comes across.
Quite true. The odd typo doesn't matter. However, if you have too many typos, a lot of people will simply stop reading what you have to say, however interesting the content might be. And your point WON'T come across.
Bad news - "different than" is an acceptable usage in American English. "Different to" has a similar status in British English. "Different from" is required in formal written English, but that's not what Slashdot uses.
If you want to nitpick the title, try the point that it's fairly obvious that a video game is going to be easily distinguishable from the United States of America. (Adding "Version" to the end of the sentence would resolve that little ambiguity.)
There are a number of things an author can't write into a story without a narrator.
Who said first-person narrative precludes the use of a narrator? Consider a case like Wuthering Heights, where the story is not only related in the first person, but through multiple layers of first-person narrators. It demonstrates that most of the benefits an omniscient narrator could provide - insights into motivations and consequences, and a broader perspective on events - are still available simply by having the main events narrated by a witness some time after they actually occurred.
[First-person narrative] also limits all knowledge of the world to the interpretation of one character.
I'm afraid I can't imagine what gave you that idea. Multiple narrators are a very common device in first-person novels. Another example may be called for - I assume you have at least read Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, right? Remember how he even brings a dead character's voice in to provide some vital information that none of the others knows?
Very difficult to write a good story in first person.
It's very difficult to write a good story, period. First person isn't much more difficult than third person. It's just that it's considerably easier to write a bad story in the third person.
Second person is a more interesting case... the only examples I can think of off-hand are text adventure games, and I can't think of many of those that had literary pretensions.
HTML email is simpler than plain text, because plain text email just confuses people as to why they can type in different styles in other programs like Word, but not in their email. HTML email allows them to do what they expect to be able to do.
The difference, and the reason that word processors are not evil but HTML email is, is that people generally have the sense not to use green Comic Sans MS on a pink background in Word.
Ultima 1-7 were nothing but the same game with better animations. They had the same interaction, etc.
I deduce you've never played any of them, or at least, not in close proximity and not recently. You certainly wouldn't say that if you'd ever compared them side by side.
Summary: the earlier games are vastly different from Ultima 7. 1, 2, and 3 are similar to one another but far more primitive than the later games, and very different in style: 1 includes laser guns and a space-ship, while 2 is set on a recognisable Earth! 4 and 5 are the next level up; 4 is particularly innovative in its gameplay, and it's my second favourite of the series (after Serpent Isle). But they're all far less interactive, and far less story-driven, than 6 and 7.
Were you to show 1 and 7 to someone unfamiliar with the series, they probably wouldn't guess there was any connection at all. They're about as similar as Catacomb Abyss is to Halflife 2.
Offical Site (ocaml.org)
OCaml.org is NOT the official site. The official site is http://caml.inria.fr/.
It's worth mentioning a few other features that aren't as common in other languages. The main ones for me are structural subtyping (basically what Python types call "duck typing", but guaranteed sound at compile-time) and an excellent debugger with a "rewind" function letting you take your code back to an earlier state and try a different execution path.
The syntax is a bit odd at first, and knowing it is unlikely to get anyone a job, but it's a nice language to use for personal projects...
Am I right in thinking that if the original BASIC language had been released under the GPL, this nonsense would never have happened?
No.
The derivative works the GPL covers are those that are literally derived from the original source code, not those that merely look or behave in the same way.
If I were to reimplement every feature of the Linux kernel by myself, without including any of the copyrightable elements of the actual Linux source code, I would be able to distribute my version under any license I liked, even something horrible like Microsoft's EULAs, and Linus would have no way of stopping me. The GPL on the original source code would be irrelevant.
IANAPL either, but I deal with the damned things on a regular basis.
Hey, it's not nice to call them "things". Even patent lawyers are human!
It's comments like this that make me think that computer science should be taught as an engineering discipline.
That distinction is already made. You have computer scientists (people who do research into cool type systems and write lots of papers), and you have software engineers (people who work with existing tools and write big systems in the "real world"). Both sorts do valuable work, but in completely different ways and with completely different goals. And I don't think the choice of terminology was a coincidence.
English speakers (at least the grammatical ones) are familiar with a handful of verb inflections -- singular vs. plural; present or past tense -- but Old English actually inflected the nouns of a sentence as well, to indicate the subject and the predicate. You could say either "Dick hit Jane" or "Jane hit Dick" and the noun inflection, not the word order, determined who actually got hit. I'm no linguist, but I believe there are contemporary languages with similar features.
Such as Perl, for example?
My take on this is that if I were to release an animated .gif under the GPL, it's possible I'm also promising to keep the raw frames on file and send them to anyone asking for them. If I draw something in BMP format, and it undergoes a lossy compression, say to .JPG at 80% quality, maybe that would count, with the .BMP as 'source code'. I don't see how the GPL is intended to cover such situations, but if it somehow does, it opens up a whole new can of worms.
The GPL describes "source code" as "the preferred format for editing" (or some such phrase). How does that apply? Easy.
Nobody really "draws something in BMP format". You draw it in Photoshop or GIMP, using objects, layers, filters, and so on. So the source code is the native Photoshop file with all the layers intact. Or as another example, many modern icons are bitmapped versions of vector graphics, so there it would be the vectors from which the bitmap was generated.
That is to say, what the person who created the product worked with = "source code". If you created a GPL'd 3D scene by dotting every single pixel in by hand, then you can distribute it as a PNG file quite happily... but if you rendered it in a 3D package, you'd better include the original models and textures.
The thing about the H2G2 universe, though, is that everything changes, nothing is definite, and many things that exist in one of the versions of the story (radio, tv, book, computer game, movie, whatever) completely contradict the way things are in the other versions. That's the way Douglas Adams wanted it to be.
:p
No. The thing about the H2G2 universe is that Douglas Adams was constantly tweaking it around so it was never the same twice. That doesn't give Disney the right to come up with a version that not only totally contradicts every single one of Adams' versions, but also totally contradicts everything the man's legions of fans can possibly believe the man himself would ever have come up with.
It's having paid a lot of money for the movie rights that gives them that right.
They don't need fans to apologise for them - our job is to bitch about it for months and then go and see the movie anyway.
Does "thou shalt not steal" ring any bell :) ?
Yes, but so does "of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession" (Lev. 25:45). Yup, you have a biblical right to enslave tourists' children. Or, in other words - not everything the Old Testament says is suitable as a handbook of modern morality.
More to the point, blanket statements like "thou shalt not steal" are only meaningful if you define "steal". Let's not have the whole "is copyright infringement theft" flamewar again, please - just please acknowledge that even among people who do consider copyright infringement to be theft, most people would at least consider the possibility that purchasing one copy of Windows and installing it on two computers is not exactly in the same (im)moral league as bank robbery.
lex/flex and bison/yacc are rather antiquated, you may want to check out terence parr's antlr (formerly pccts) instead. this allows you to implement your compiler+interpreter in your language of choice, rather than being forced to use c. my compiler classes all required that we used lex/yacc, so that's what i did; however, i would have really liked to have the option of doing it all in java or c++.
If I read the ANTLR pages correctly, it will only permit you to use your language of choice if your language of choice happens to be C++, C#, or Java. That's rather restricted compared to the range of lex/yacc clones you can find out there; they exist for just about any major programming language you care to mention.
Just a thought.
Since God makes lightning, we have to declare war on God too.
Ah, but which God? Zeus has claimed responsibility, so we should probably invade Greece next. But evidence of hammer-marks on the scene has led some of our top CIA theologians to suggest that the attacks were actually carried out by Thor - and those socialist Scandinavian countries do make a very tempting target. Meanwhile, the DHS are pointing the finger at one Allah, who is alleged to have links to al-Qaida...
Why in the world would a browser perform desktop searches?
Because a browser is where most people now go to perform full-text searches on large sets of documents (via Google).
If you think of it as treating 127.0.0.1 as just another part of the internet, it does make a certain amount of sense.
Intellectual property can't be considered property? Do you even read your own posts?
Why is is illogical to state that intellectual property can't be considered property?
Do you also consider sea monkeys to be monkeys?
" it's just that not all applications are written in QT, just as not all Gnome apps are written in GTK. So, you get some apps that don't fall in line with the look and feel of the rest of the OS. "
So you're agreeing with me, but not with where I am placing the blame? Fair enough, maybe blaming KDE isn't fair, but it's still a huge problem.
And the EXACT SAME PROBLEM exists on MacOS X when you use applications that weren't designed for the OS X desktop. Run an OS 9 app in Classic - and it looks different and isn't properly integrated with the desktop! Run a Unix app in X, like Openoffice.org - and it looks different and isn't properly integrated with the desktop!
Why is it okay for OS9 or X applications to look different on OSX, but not okay for Gnome applications to look different on KDE?
Please, somebody, give me a truly valid reason why spaces are better than tabs, empirically. Thanks.
Every editor worth using has a function that makes it automatically insert spaces when you press Tab - but very few have functions that make them automatically insert tabs when you press Space.
Therefore, it's easier to configure your editor to insert the right sort of spacing whichever key you press if you're using spaces rather than tabs. Therefore, using spaces means you're less likely to end up with mixed indentation.
I don't know if you'll consider that a truly valid reason, but it's the best I can think of.
The downside to mapping your Tab key like that is that it makes writing Makefiles a real PITA...
Now you know how they fixed it, so no need to read the article.
Thank you for the summary! I tried to RTFA, but I got tired of the tedious dumbed-down human interest after the first thousand words of breathless "Could the mission be saved, or was it too late?" tosh that these journalists always seem to feel they have to pad their word counts with.
I guess I should be glad they hadn't quite managed to turn it into One Man's Struggle Against the Establishment. And if the guy had got divorced or lost a child while he was working on Huygens, they'd probably have forgotten to put any science in the article at all...
Three words: Sony vs. Connectix. PJ did a nice summary on Groklaw recently if you weren't paying attention back when it actually happened.
Short form: if Apple want to shut this down, their best bet is to buy it out, 'cos the courts aren't necessarily going to be on their side.
Yes - it has adult content. Well done, you score 100% for observation.
Presumably you will now discount the game completely, and ignore the fact that the adult content represents a tiny fraction of an epic storyline, a feast of love, magic, and betrayal, steeped in mythology from around the world.
Funny how people can't see past the "anime porn" label where games which place sex within relationships and give it a meaningful place in the plot are concerned, yet have no qualms about playing the ones where screwing hookers is just a way of regaining health...
Treat it like any other collaborative work. I got away with a reference to "Takahashi et al., Xenogears (Costa Mesa, 1998)" in a paper, at any rate...