What really pisses me off about any system that has stupid taskbar grouping on is that when I clicked the 'grouped' button, I only have a list of the window titles to guide me as to which one I want. o I want 'Command Prompt', 'Commant Prompt', 'Command Prompt', 'Command prompt - cygwin' or 'Command Prompt - cygwin'? hrm...
Why not, eg, set it up so the title contains $PWD? That's how my Cygwin prompts work. When I click on the "grouped" button, I have the terribly difficult task of deciding - do I want '/', '/usr/local/src', '/cygdrive/c/Downloads', or '/var/spool/mail'?
How simple life is when we don't go out of our way to make things difficult for ourselves...
Hah, VGA is primitive in comparision to a lovely Hercules mono card. Now that was real luxury. Better text fonts, sharper image, ahhh memories.
Eh? VGA could do 640x480 with 16 colours no problem, and that easily looks better than Hercules' 720x348 mono - particularly as vertical resolution is so much more important for most applications. Word processing, spreadsheets... it's all portrait layout and columns unless you're editing widescreen movies.
Heck, even EGA could handle 640x350, and that's STILL nearly the same resolution as Hercules' mono display - but in colour!
Don't get me wrong, I too have fond memories of playing Sopwith in shades of amber using a CGA emulator, but frankly I think your rose-tinted spectacles are interfering with your hindsight.;)
You are getting into the differences between open source and free software. The word "open" only implies ability to see into. What you are complaining about is lack of freedom to use that code you saw.
I don't think you know what open source means. In technical usage, "open source" means licensed under an OSI approved license meeting the Open Source Definition. The mere ability to see the source does not qualify it as OSI-certified(tm) open source. The word "open" therefore implies far more than you acknowledge.
The fact that Joe Average might think Shared Source means the same as open source does not magically alter the technical definition of open source. What Joe Average thinks is completely irrelevant. Joe Average thinks that pi is "three point one four", but I hope you don't use that definition for any important calculations...
I'm as British as apple pi...umm bangers and mash.
I'll have you know apple pie is as British a pudding as they come - we were baking them before the Pilgrim Fathers even set sail. Where did you think you Americans got it from?
Yeah, I remember when that came out and the only place I could play it was at school when the IT guys weren't looking - I only had EGA graphics at home, and the only guy I knew with VGA only had an 8088, and it needed a 286. Man, ID have always been so unreasonable with their hardware demands.
true 3D environments, a few new tricks with graphics cards etc., but where's the real revolutionary change?
If you think Doom 3 is just Quake with a few minor graphical enhancements, you need your eyes examined. Go and play Quake 1 again if you don't believe me, we always remember graphics as looking better than they really did.
The reason you're not amazed by Doom 3, but you were by Quake, is that ID aren't the only players any more. Now that we've had dozens of FPSes since ID's last release, all constantly evolving, our eyes are already accustomed to modern graphics.
If the last game you'd played was Quake 3, and now you had Doom 3, I guarantee you wouldn't be asking where the revolutionary change was.
Funny how everyone took that comment as anti-American. Here I was assuming "*those* people" was meant to be a reference to those "add i-n-c-h-e-s to your manhood" spams...
(Speaking as someone who thinks in inches despite never having set foot on US soil.)
Stallman's gulity (sic) of choosing a nonstandard word-type for the meaning of free he wants. "free [action]" means liberty. "free [noun]" means zero-cost.
America is a free country. I am a free man.
Can you produce for me a native English speaker who, seeing those sentences, will "presmue (sic) that they are talking about something-for-nothing"?
(Please imagine it's indented properly because slashdot's ecode likes to strip spaces)
I see this almost every day, and I really don't understand why people make this claim. Look - here's your example, using ecode tags, and indented properly:
What magic did I use to achieve that result? Why, I put two spaces at the start of each line that I wanted indented, just like you'd expect. It's hardly rocket science.
This happens in Windows also, where is the gui dialog to edit the tab completion character for the command line?
Here. Or here for Windows XP users (select TweakUI from the list on the right).
Feel free to wonder why it's not in the standard distribution... but please don't go claiming you have to use the registry editor to do something when Microsoft do in fact provide a GUI to configure that option.
I also like OCaml (learned it in school), although it has a missing feature: you can't for instance define a union type with a member that would have a set of the same type e.g.:
type t = A of a | B of t Set won't work...
That's because Set is a module, not a type. Sets are done with functors, you need to instantiate Set.Make with a module whose signature matches Set.OrderedType.
It's possible to do exactly what you want using recursive modules - in fact, this is the example the OCaml Reference Manual gives for recursive modules:
module A:
sig
type t = Leaf of string | Node of ASet.t
val compare: t -> t -> int
end = struct
type t = Leaf of string | Node of ASet.t
let compare t1 t2 =
match (t1, t2) with
(Leaf s1, Leaf s2) -> Pervasives.compare s1 s2
| (Leaf _, Node _) -> 1
| (Node _, Leaf _) -> -1
| (Node n1, Node n2) -> ASet.compare n1 n2
end and ASet: Set.S with type elt = A.t = Set.Make(A)
As for the lack of overloading, in the few cases where it's actually useful you can normally achieve the same effect by wrapping your types in objects, since OCaml conveniently separates object typing from inheritance.
The turing test is nonsense. It tests if you can create a electronic clone of the current human answerer, not 'intelligence'.
Um, no. It tests if it is possible to tell which of the human and the machine is the human, not if it is possible to tell them apart. A Turing test in which the human played the part of an educated New Yorker, and the machine responded like a barely literate Asian immigrant, might still result in the machine being identified as the human, if it responded sufficiently realistically.
Similarly, if the turing test was conducted in chinese, and you asked me to fill in the part of the computer, I would also fail it.
On the contrary. A human responding with "I'm sorry, I don't understand", and "Don't you speak English?", might well be more convincing to a Chinese observer than a computer attempting to write Chinese and producing nonsense and non-sequiturs. (Or was that meant to be a clever reference to the Chinese Room rebuttal of the Turing test?)
Since you have demonstrated that you fail to understand the whole point of the Turing test, allow me to explain. It is not intended as the One True Arbiter of Intelligence. Turing never claimed that anything which passed his test would be intelligent, or that anything which failed would not be intelligent.
What the test shows is that it may make sense to describe as intelligent anything which is able to mimic the behaviour of something known to be intelligent sufficiently well as to be indistinguishable from the real thing: that is, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it may be reasonable, as a working hypothesis, to assume that it's a duck.
Until games that encourage multiple solutions and alternate styles of play (stealth vs. shooting, etc.) are the norm I think the gamers can't be held responsible for dealing with problems in predictable ways.
The sad thing is that they had that, in the original Deus Ex. The skill point system rewarded you for solving puzzles in inventive ways: sometimes it was even possible to get the skill points from multiple solutions in one game, but even if it wasn't, you'd try all the approaches to see which was most beneficial. So people explored and experimented.
Unfortunately they decided to streamline the sequel, and skill points were one of the things they deemed superfluous. So out they went, and with them the incentive to be creative and inquisitive. And then, after they'd gone to all that effort to turn a unique game into a conventional stealth shooter, they actually had the gall to be surprised when people started playing it like one?
MSN was not created by Microsoft as an application for the Internet. It was created as compitition (or replacement) for the Internet. They couldn't stand the fact that people would be using something they couldn't control.
Nonsense. On the "evil" scale, the MSN story barely ranks above Microsoft Bob.
If you look at the context of the time when MSN was first created, you'll find that most people were using other proprietary networks like Compuserve and AOL. That's what MSN was mimicking and trying to compete with. It was nothing to do with "replacing the Internet" - the Internet simply wasn't a big deal back then. MSN was about beating AOL. And Microsoft didn't even approach that in an abusive-monopoly way - the default Windows 95 desktop had an MSN icon, sure, but it also had AOL and Compuserve icons right next to that.
Now, it turned out that MS were too late to the party, because it was about that time that the proprietary networks started offering web access, though they kept their incompatible bulletin boards and email systems for several more years. And the rest is history - the web took off, Compuserve were bought out by AOL who themselves gradually turned into a normal ISP, and MSN ended up as a portal.
Ooooh. It looks like fixing this "problem" will be a little more difficult than you implied. Without knowing WHAT HARDWARE was giving the problem, we won't know WHAT DRIVERS need fixing.
Well, maybe you should, like, read the article, where he says he posted the specs in the discussion area? A couple of minutes browsing there, and what do we find?
The hardware is a new (Dec 2003 mfg) P4 from Intel; 3.2GHz, 1GB or RAM; Nvidia video, onboard sound and NIC. The onboard NIC is detected fine by Linux. The onboard sound is not.
As detected by various sniffers:
sisoft sandra: Model : D865GLC Intel ICH4 Audio Device : Sound Adapter (Enabled) Chipset: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P Device Name : SoundMAX Digital Audio
[btw:several distros specifically claim compatibility with Intel ICH4; but they did not work on this system. I alluded to this in the text.]
Belarc: SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio D865GLC Intel
In Japanese, the word for look or see is _not_ different in each sentence. The same word is used; it is just conjugated differently. It can go from base to super honorific to passive using the same character. So the the video presentation of this lesson could be achieved with a GOP that transmits the kanji for miru (look/see) once, and only the changes in conjegation are transmitted for subsequent frames.
Unfortunately you are incorrect. While many Japanese verbs express honorific levels only through conjugation, "miru" is not one of them.
The base form of "see" is "miru", which is written with the character U+898b. However, the honorific form is "goran ni naru", in which the "see" is the "ran", which is written with U+89a7. And the humble form is "haiken suru", where "haiken" is written U+62dd U+898b.
(When, incidentally, is Slashdot going to support Unicode?)
It really irritates me when people describe anything that isn't Intel as 'proprietary'. Being the most widely sold processor, doesn't make something non-proprietary.
You're missing the point. The reason an Apple Mac is "proprietary hardware" is nothing to do with the processor: it's that it's damn hard to run MacOS on anything but a genuine Apple Mac. Likewise, the reason Wintel isn't "proprietary" is that you can buy a machine to run Windows on from anyone you like, or build your own if the fancy takes you.
XWing: Alliance was great! Same engine, solid storyline, and the first time you get to see a super-star destroyer.
The SSD had previously appeared in Balance of Power, the X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter expansion disk.
X-Wing: Alliance was good, but it suffered from some tedious missions (most of the "family" stuff), as well as the usual X-Wing series "oops, you just played a half-hour mission and made a tiny mistake at the end, now you have to do it all over again" syndrome.
At least it wasn't as poorly balanced as the original... I never did get past the fourth mission of X-Wing without cheating.
Slashdot Mirror
What really pisses me off about any system that has stupid taskbar grouping on is that when I clicked the 'grouped' button, I only have a list of the window titles to guide me as to which one I want. o I want 'Command Prompt', 'Commant Prompt', 'Command Prompt', 'Command prompt - cygwin' or 'Command Prompt - cygwin'? hrm...
Why not, eg, set it up so the title contains $PWD? That's how my Cygwin prompts work. When I click on the "grouped" button, I have the terribly difficult task of deciding - do I want '/', '/usr/local/src', '/cygdrive/c/Downloads', or '/var/spool/mail'?
How simple life is when we don't go out of our way to make things difficult for ourselves...
Hah, VGA is primitive in comparision to a lovely Hercules mono card. Now that was real luxury. Better text fonts, sharper image, ahhh memories.
;)
Eh? VGA could do 640x480 with 16 colours no problem, and that easily looks better than Hercules' 720x348 mono - particularly as vertical resolution is so much more important for most applications. Word processing, spreadsheets... it's all portrait layout and columns unless you're editing widescreen movies.
Heck, even EGA could handle 640x350, and that's STILL nearly the same resolution as Hercules' mono display - but in colour!
Don't get me wrong, I too have fond memories of playing Sopwith in shades of amber using a CGA emulator, but frankly I think your rose-tinted spectacles are interfering with your hindsight.
You are getting into the differences between open source and free software.
The word "open" only implies ability to see into.
What you are complaining about is lack of freedom to use that code you saw.
I don't think you know what open source means. In technical usage, "open source" means licensed under an OSI approved license meeting the Open Source Definition. The mere ability to see the source does not qualify it as OSI-certified(tm) open source. The word "open" therefore implies far more than you acknowledge.
The fact that Joe Average might think Shared Source means the same as open source does not magically alter the technical definition of open source. What Joe Average thinks is completely irrelevant. Joe Average thinks that pi is "three point one four", but I hope you don't use that definition for any important calculations...
I'm as British as apple pi...umm bangers and mash.
I'll have you know apple pie is as British a pudding as they come - we were baking them before the Pilgrim Fathers even set sail. Where did you think you Americans got it from?
Wolfenstein - new machine
Yeah, I remember when that came out and the only place I could play it was at school when the IT guys weren't looking - I only had EGA graphics at home, and the only guy I knew with VGA only had an 8088, and it needed a 286. Man, ID have always been so unreasonable with their hardware demands.
true 3D environments, a few new tricks with graphics cards etc., but where's the real revolutionary change?
If you think Doom 3 is just Quake with a few minor graphical enhancements, you need your eyes examined. Go and play Quake 1 again if you don't believe me, we always remember graphics as looking better than they really did.
The reason you're not amazed by Doom 3, but you were by Quake, is that ID aren't the only players any more. Now that we've had dozens of FPSes since ID's last release, all constantly evolving, our eyes are already accustomed to modern graphics.
If the last game you'd played was Quake 3, and now you had Doom 3, I guarantee you wouldn't be asking where the revolutionary change was.
Funny how everyone took that comment as anti-American. Here I was assuming "*those* people" was meant to be a reference to those "add i-n-c-h-e-s to your manhood" spams...
(Speaking as someone who thinks in inches despite never having set foot on US soil.)
Stallman's gulity (sic) of choosing a nonstandard word-type for the meaning of free he wants. "free [action]" means liberty. "free [noun]" means zero-cost.
America is a free country. I am a free man.
Can you produce for me a native English speaker who, seeing those sentences, will "presmue (sic) that they are talking about something-for-nothing"?
Why can I not drag the URL bar (and google bar) up to the menu bar like I can in IE?
Huh? You can. Right click on menu bar, click "customise", drag URL bar up to menu bar.
I see this almost every day, and I really don't understand why people make this claim. Look - here's your example, using ecode tags, and indented properly:What magic did I use to achieve that result? Why, I put two spaces at the start of each line that I wanted indented, just like you'd expect. It's hardly rocket science.
This happens in Windows also, where is the gui dialog to edit the tab completion character for the command line?
Here. Or here for Windows XP users (select TweakUI from the list on the right).
Feel free to wonder why it's not in the standard distribution... but please don't go claiming you have to use the registry editor to do something when Microsoft do in fact provide a GUI to configure that option.
type t =
A of a |
B of t Set
won't work...
That's because Set is a module, not a type. Sets are done with functors, you need to instantiate Set.Make with a module whose signature matches Set.OrderedType.
It's possible to do exactly what you want using recursive modules - in fact, this is the example the OCaml Reference Manual gives for recursive modules:As for the lack of overloading, in the few cases where it's actually useful you can normally achieve the same effect by wrapping your types in objects, since OCaml conveniently separates object typing from inheritance.
The turing test is nonsense. It tests if you can create a electronic clone of the current human answerer, not 'intelligence'.
Um, no. It tests if it is possible to tell which of the human and the machine is the human, not if it is possible to tell them apart. A Turing test in which the human played the part of an educated New Yorker, and the machine responded like a barely literate Asian immigrant, might still result in the machine being identified as the human, if it responded sufficiently realistically.
Similarly, if the turing test was conducted in chinese, and you asked me to fill in the part of the computer, I would also fail it.
On the contrary. A human responding with "I'm sorry, I don't understand", and "Don't you speak English?", might well be more convincing to a Chinese observer than a computer attempting to write Chinese and producing nonsense and non-sequiturs. (Or was that meant to be a clever reference to the Chinese Room rebuttal of the Turing test?)
Since you have demonstrated that you fail to understand the whole point of the Turing test, allow me to explain. It is not intended as the One True Arbiter of Intelligence. Turing never claimed that anything which passed his test would be intelligent, or that anything which failed would not be intelligent.
What the test shows is that it may make sense to describe as intelligent anything which is able to mimic the behaviour of something known to be intelligent sufficiently well as to be indistinguishable from the real thing: that is, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it may be reasonable, as a working hypothesis, to assume that it's a duck.
Until games that encourage multiple solutions and alternate styles of play (stealth vs. shooting, etc.) are the norm I think the gamers can't be held responsible for dealing with problems in predictable ways.
The sad thing is that they had that, in the original Deus Ex. The skill point system rewarded you for solving puzzles in inventive ways: sometimes it was even possible to get the skill points from multiple solutions in one game, but even if it wasn't, you'd try all the approaches to see which was most beneficial. So people explored and experimented.
Unfortunately they decided to streamline the sequel, and skill points were one of the things they deemed superfluous. So out they went, and with them the incentive to be creative and inquisitive. And then, after they'd gone to all that effort to turn a unique game into a conventional stealth shooter, they actually had the gall to be surprised when people started playing it like one?
MSN was not created by Microsoft as an application for the Internet. It was created as compitition (or replacement) for the Internet. They couldn't stand the fact that people would be using something they couldn't control.
Nonsense. On the "evil" scale, the MSN story barely ranks above Microsoft Bob.
If you look at the context of the time when MSN was first created, you'll find that most people were using other proprietary networks like Compuserve and AOL. That's what MSN was mimicking and trying to compete with. It was nothing to do with "replacing the Internet" - the Internet simply wasn't a big deal back then. MSN was about beating AOL. And Microsoft didn't even approach that in an abusive-monopoly way - the default Windows 95 desktop had an MSN icon, sure, but it also had AOL and Compuserve icons right next to that.
Now, it turned out that MS were too late to the party, because it was about that time that the proprietary networks started offering web access, though they kept their incompatible bulletin boards and email systems for several more years. And the rest is history - the web took off, Compuserve were bought out by AOL who themselves gradually turned into a normal ISP, and MSN ended up as a portal.
I have people who I communicate with only through email. How am I supposed to check if something arrived?
;)
Wasn't that question answered yesterday?
I mean, L Ron Fucking Hubbard, how can you ban the replication of a self-replicating device!
In other news, NanoCorp is reported to be suing everyone in the world. Fortunately the grey goo is spreading faster than their subpoenas.
Well, maybe you should, like, read the article, where he says he posted the specs in the discussion area? A couple of minutes browsing there, and what do we find?
Enough detail for you?
In Japanese, the word for look or see is _not_ different in each sentence. The same word is used; it is just conjugated differently. It can go from base to super honorific to passive using the same character. So the the video presentation of this lesson could be achieved with a GOP that transmits the kanji for miru (look/see) once, and only the changes in conjegation are transmitted for subsequent frames.
Unfortunately you are incorrect. While many Japanese verbs express honorific levels only through conjugation, "miru" is not one of them.
The base form of "see" is "miru", which is written with the character U+898b. However, the honorific form is "goran ni naru", in which the "see" is the "ran", which is written with U+89a7. And the humble form is "haiken suru", where "haiken" is written U+62dd U+898b.
(When, incidentally, is Slashdot going to support Unicode?)
I'm still waiting for Spacewar! 2
You missed it. It was called "Star Control"...
But, hell, most of them are still using C or C++: the most backward, cryptic, and unproductive languages imagineable.
You obviously don't have much of an imagination.
It really irritates me when people describe anything that isn't Intel as 'proprietary'. Being the most widely sold processor, doesn't make something non-proprietary.
You're missing the point. The reason an Apple Mac is "proprietary hardware" is nothing to do with the processor: it's that it's damn hard to run MacOS on anything but a genuine Apple Mac. Likewise, the reason Wintel isn't "proprietary" is that you can buy a machine to run Windows on from anyone you like, or build your own if the fancy takes you.
Does that make sense?
XWing: Alliance was great! Same engine, solid storyline, and the first time you get to see a super-star destroyer.
The SSD had previously appeared in Balance of Power, the X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter expansion disk.
X-Wing: Alliance was good, but it suffered from some tedious missions (most of the "family" stuff), as well as the usual X-Wing series "oops, you just played a half-hour mission and made a tiny mistake at the end, now you have to do it all over again" syndrome.
At least it wasn't as poorly balanced as the original... I never did get past the fourth mission of X-Wing without cheating.
Bleh, fubar'd the maths in the C and Pascal versions. I know how many syllables there are in a haiku, honest...
/. to let me post...)
(Spotted it immediately, now I just have to wait for
(* x (* x (* x 1))))
(+ (cube-of 2) 9)
Evaluate that to get the number of syllables in a haiku. ^_^
So? You can write one of those in any language, if you choose which symbols to pronounce arbitrarily and mess with the maths enough.
In ML we can use the exact same algorithm:In C we use a different process but the same principle (forgive the indent style, none of the standard ones fit on three lines):Pascal?