Trouble is, different games have different requirements for their questions; Trivial Pursuit is a simple question and answer, Jeopardy is an answer then question combination, some would prefer a multiple choice format, and games like Taboo are a separate animal entirely. Writing for all these different games would be like cross platform software; it would make the task more difficult, but the advantages are clear as well. If questions added for one game could be easily ported to other game formats, considerable effort could be saved in having to go out and find new trivia questions. How best to implement that is an interesting connundrum, though.
For example, ever run out of trivia questions in your version of Trivial Pursuite? Or used up all the word cards in Taboo... etc etc.
I think in the event of running out of data for your board game, it would be nice to download more. (And this would make a cool website.)
You know, I came up with this idea just two days ago, after discovering how lame the new questions are in the Trivial Pursuit 20th Aniversary Edition. It's really time these questions got open sourced.
What I had in mind was a system whereby people could go to a website and contribute trivia questions. After some human screening, the questions would go into a database, which would then be used to generate PDF files of Trivial Pursuit Cards that could be freeley downloaded and printed at the users home computer. Alternately, users could pay 10 bucks to have a deck of pre-printed Trivial Pursuit cards sent their house.
I'm interested in starting this project over at Sourceforge. Anyone else like the idea?
Do I recall correctly that, back when it was still in funding mode, it was supposed to be called "Space Station Freedom"? What's the story behind that, do our international partners object to honoring Freedom?
And is the next space station supposed to be "Beta", or what? I'm not sure I'd want to fly on a space station thats still in beta. Though I suppose it would be better than alpha.
Namibia has the beauty of many other African countries, but retains a heavy German influence, so things are generally much nicer, functional, and better maintained. When I visited the capital, Windhoek, I was impressed by its wide streets with actual street lights and working parking meaters (in stark contrast to many other African capitols such as Dar es Salaam and Kampala.) Maybe thats in part due to the sparse population. In character, Windhoek reminded me of Madison, Wisconsin, ploped down on the edge of the Kalahari desert.
There are many things to see in Namibia, including the rare desert elephants of the Skeleton Coast, the vast game park at the Etosha Pan, and reputedly the largest sand dunes in the world in the area of Sossusvlei park.
If you do go, I highly recommend a stay at the Swartfontein Guest Farm. They have great home cooked Italian food, and its the only place I've ever stayed where they let me ride along on a wildebeast culling.
BTW, there were no democracies (at least in their current incarnation) in Europe in the Middle Ages.
Thats not entirely true. The city-state of Ragusa - now Dubrovnik - on the Adriatic Coast, democratically elected new rulers on a monthly basis for centuries on end before it's destruction by Napolionic forces in the early 19th century.
WinPenguins is a great little ap that will have tiny little Tux characters crawling all over a Windows desktop. Not only is it great Linux brand placement, but its a huge hit with the kids.
If you have reason to believe that the company that ripped you off would be likely rip off the Venture Capitalists as well, then the right thing to do would be to warn the investors to prevent that from happening. It's called good citizenship.
it's bought and paid for by corporate interests that have no interest in the state, just in how many seats they can buy for their favorite party.
A lot of corporate interests tend to buy seats for both partys... they don't necessarily have a favorite, they just want to be down with whomever is in control.
That's one of the many reasons why I refuse to vote for Democrats or Republicans.
Thanks for the info. I have been looking into it, and I think I'll go for the cheapo i50sx for now, and spring for something nicer when it comes time to buy the wife a cell.
I would definitely prefer something in color, but I need it next week, and not later this summer. Looks like Nextel/Motorola is what's fitting my needs now... so they get my business. Still, something in my heart would prefer a Nokia.
With phones running PalmOS or M$-Whatever-its-called-this-week (and Linux, as soon as you nerds get around to it), I see no need for J2ME as a platform. You want software? Use the thousands [palmgear.com] of applications already written for Palm (and likewise for the M$ solution).
The variety of OS's available for cellphones is exactly why running J2ME is a good thing. Spanning the different platforms underlines the whole point of Java's write once, run anywhere concept.
It's great that there are thousands of Palm applications.... but what happens when I want to run them on a Linux phone? Java apps are nice because you theoretically don't have to care about stuff like that.
I'm a Java programmer about to be in the market for a cell phone... does anyone have any recommendations for nice Java enabled phone that would be well suited for hacking* on? Not major application development here, mostly just for screwing around....
Looking for a model that is
1) Reasonably inexpensive 2) Preferably supported by Sprint PCS (which looks like its going to be my carrier of choice.)
Any ideas?
* By hacking, of course I mean in the I-like-to-play-with-code sense, not in the evil, screw-with-other-peoples systems sense.
Statistics draw an incomplete picture. The American life expectancy is not entirely a function of the quality of the US healthcare system. Its also affected by the fact that we are the fattest nation on the planet, among other things.
Also, the life expectancy statistic is disproportionately affected by the infant mortality rate.... if you take the average of someone who lives 90 years, and someone who lives for two hours, you get a life expectancy of 45 years... a more realistic measure for common lifespans of the society might be to calculate life expectancy for those who live past the age of 2, or so.
I'd like to know what other social issues affect infant mortality before simply pointing the finger and calling the American healthcare system a "complete failure."
A comprimise solution might be to store the lookup tables on disk in something like a Berkley.db file? While it would be substantially slower to retrieve data from the disk than directly from RAM, it could still be faster than doing your cpu intensive calculations.
It would make your memory overhead problem go away, though it brings up the new issue of disk space....
Slashdot Mirror
Trouble is, different games have different requirements for their questions; Trivial Pursuit is a simple question and answer, Jeopardy is an answer then question combination, some would prefer a multiple choice format, and games like Taboo are a separate animal entirely. Writing for all these different games would be like cross platform software; it would make the task more difficult, but the advantages are clear as well. If questions added for one game could be easily ported to other game formats, considerable effort could be saved in having to go out and find new trivia questions. How best to implement that is an interesting connundrum, though.
Where would I find such logs? What are the licensing restrictions on such things?
For example, ever run out of trivia questions in your version of Trivial Pursuite? Or used up all the word cards in Taboo... etc etc.
I think in the event of running out of data for your board game, it would be nice to download more. (And this would make a cool website.)
You know, I came up with this idea just two days ago, after discovering how lame the new questions are in the Trivial Pursuit 20th Aniversary Edition. It's really time these questions got open sourced.
What I had in mind was a system whereby people could go to a website and contribute trivia questions. After some human screening, the questions would go into a database, which would then be used to generate PDF files of Trivial Pursuit Cards that could be freeley downloaded and printed at the users home computer. Alternately, users could pay 10 bucks to have a deck of pre-printed Trivial Pursuit cards sent their house.
I'm interested in starting this project over at Sourceforge. Anyone else like the idea?
'nuff said.
"Space Station Alpha", what a boring name.
Do I recall correctly that, back when it was still in funding mode, it was supposed to be called "Space Station Freedom"? What's the story behind that, do our international partners object to honoring Freedom?
And is the next space station supposed to be "Beta", or what? I'm not sure I'd want to fly on a space station thats still in beta. Though I suppose it would be better than alpha.
Namibia has the beauty of many other African countries, but retains a heavy German influence, so things are generally much nicer, functional, and better maintained. When I visited the capital, Windhoek, I was impressed by its wide streets with actual street lights and working parking meaters (in stark contrast to many other African capitols such as Dar es Salaam and Kampala.) Maybe thats in part due to the sparse population. In character, Windhoek reminded me of Madison, Wisconsin, ploped down on the edge of the Kalahari desert.
There are many things to see in Namibia, including the rare desert elephants of the Skeleton Coast, the vast game park at the Etosha Pan, and reputedly the largest sand dunes in the world in the area of Sossusvlei park.
If you do go, I highly recommend a stay at the Swartfontein Guest Farm. They have great home cooked Italian food, and its the only place I've ever stayed where they let me ride along on a wildebeast culling.
Arguable, but lines of code has everything to do with maintainablity.
BTW, there were no democracies (at least in their current incarnation) in Europe in the Middle Ages.
Thats not entirely true. The city-state of Ragusa - now Dubrovnik - on the Adriatic Coast, democratically elected new rulers on a monthly basis for centuries on end before it's destruction by Napolionic forces in the early 19th century.
WinPenguins is a great little ap that will have tiny little Tux characters crawling all over a Windows desktop. Not only is it great Linux brand placement, but its a huge hit with the kids.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if, 150 years from now, the correct spelling of "you" actually is "u".
Hey, why not? In the world of personal pronouns, "U" makes a good counterpoint to "I"....
Way to post an unobfuscated email address on the net... better let hitsquad@debian.org know that they are in for a mountain of spam.
of course, if the spammers can be tracked, they could make great target practice while waiting around for the bequest acceleration orders to roll in.
If you have reason to believe that the company that ripped you off would be likely rip off the Venture Capitalists as well, then the right thing to do would be to warn the investors to prevent that from happening. It's called good citizenship.
Let's see:
50 Terabytes, that 50 * 1024 = 51200 Gigabytes
* 1024 = 52,428,800 Megabytes
52,428,800 / 1.44 Megs per floppy = 36,408,889 floppys
Yesterday I saw a ten pack of neon floppys for $3.50 at WalMart, so at 35 cents per floppy that's
36,408,889 * $0.35 = $12,743,111.15
So, less than $13 million bucks for all the storage you need! I'd like to see EMC match that deal.
What? You want disk drives with that? Oh....
your sig doesn't work on my box, Win XP with cygwin perl 5.8.0
' t modify single ref constructor in scalar assignment at -e line 1, near "q#:
is it me or you?
d:\>perl -e"\$_=q#: 13_2: 12/'{>: 8_4) (_4: 6/2'-2; 3;-2'\2: 5/7\_/\7: 12m m::#;
s#:#\n#g;s#(\D)(\d+)#\$1x\$2#ge;print
Can
13_2: 12/'{>: 8_4) (_4: 6/2'-2; 3;-2'\2: 5/7\_/\7: 12m m::#;"
it's bought and paid for by corporate interests that have no interest in the state, just in how many seats they can buy for their favorite party.
A lot of corporate interests tend to buy seats for both partys... they don't necessarily have a favorite, they just want to be down with whomever is in control.
That's one of the many reasons why I refuse to vote for Democrats or Republicans.
i'd give Win ME a D-, not a D+. It had a few new features, but all of them were half-assed and it crashed twice as much as 98.
Certainly, if I had to install that OS series again(and God willing, I won't have to), I'd go with Windows 98 Second Edition.
"The DMCA was designed to promote a safe and legal online world while advancing the dynamic change that is synonymous with the Internet."
"dynamic change", as opposed to what, hmmm, static change?
Redundant pricks.
1/0 is defined as undefined, I think that just means no one has ever figured out the right answer.
They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
Thanks for the info. I have been looking into it, and I think I'll go for the cheapo i50sx for now, and spring for something nicer when it comes time to buy the wife a cell.
I would definitely prefer something in color, but I need it next week, and not later this summer. Looks like Nextel/Motorola is what's fitting my needs now... so they get my business. Still, something in my heart would prefer a Nokia.
Thanks,
Bobby
With phones running PalmOS or M$-Whatever-its-called-this-week (and Linux, as soon as you nerds get around to it), I see no need for J2ME as a platform. You want software? Use the thousands [palmgear.com] of applications already written for Palm (and likewise for the M$ solution).
The variety of OS's available for cellphones is exactly why running J2ME is a good thing. Spanning the different platforms underlines the whole point of Java's write once, run anywhere concept.
It's great that there are thousands of Palm applications.... but what happens when I want to run them on a Linux phone? Java apps are nice because you theoretically don't have to care about stuff like that.
I'm a Java programmer about to be in the market for a cell phone... does anyone have any recommendations for nice Java enabled phone that would be well suited for hacking* on? Not major application development here, mostly just for screwing around....
Looking for a model that is
1) Reasonably inexpensive
2) Preferably supported by Sprint PCS (which looks like its going to be my carrier of choice.)
Any ideas?
* By hacking, of course I mean in the I-like-to-play-with-code sense, not in the evil, screw-with-other-peoples systems sense.
Statistics draw an incomplete picture. The American life expectancy is not entirely a function of the quality of the US healthcare system. Its also affected by the fact that we are the fattest nation on the planet, among other things.
Also, the life expectancy statistic is disproportionately affected by the infant mortality rate.... if you take the average of someone who lives 90 years, and someone who lives for two hours, you get a life expectancy of 45 years... a more realistic measure for common lifespans of the society might be to calculate life expectancy for those who live past the age of 2, or so.
I'd like to know what other social issues affect infant mortality before simply pointing the finger and calling the American healthcare system a "complete failure."
A comprimise solution might be to store the lookup tables on disk in something like a Berkley .db file? While it would be substantially slower to retrieve data from the disk than directly from RAM, it could still be faster than doing your cpu intensive calculations.
It would make your memory overhead problem go away, though it brings up the new issue of disk space....
go to Graceland, Memphis Tennessee.