Furthermore I'd point out that a for/next loop will not "sleep" the processor - ie, give up time to other processes. It will instead hog all CPU until the loop is finished.
AND using a set number in a for/next loop is a bad idea anyhow, given vagarities in processor speed, OS overhead and whatnot - much better to use the RTC, along these lines:
StartTime=Timer while Timer-StartTime<30 'While fewer than 30 seconds have passed... application.processmessages 'or whatever the BASIC specific command would be wend
Of course, this fails on midnight rollover, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the student.
Shouldn't THEY pay YOU to find problems in the stories?
Just the other day I made this very observation when I emailed an editor pointing out a grammatical error (usage of "your" instead of "you're") in a Mysterious Future post.
Alas, no reply offering employment along these lines. Still, hope springs eternal.
Obviously with minimal effort many dupes could be avoided, but I think it's unreasonable to complain when your lead time was only 10 minutes. Do you know how many emails these people get on a regular basis?
I don't know what the total time between "Mysterious Future" and "General" posting was, but it warn't a whole lot longer than the 10 minutes.
Next time I'll try to make my email stand out more. Which subject line do you think will get noticed first:
"IT'S A FSCKING DUPE YOU MORAN"
or
"NATALIE PORTMAN NAKED AND PETRIFIED DUPE DUPE DUPE HOT GRITS"
Is one of the benefits of being a Slashdot subscriber NOT having to see duplicate stories on the front page?
As a subscriber I can answer this with an authoritive "no fscking way".
You do get to see articles before they "go live" to the hoi-polloi, and you can even e-mail the editor if you think there's a problem with the article (say, if you know it's a dupe from about 48 hours ago).
You can see for yourself just how well this all works out.
You're right, of course - back in my day we'd the punch the contents of paper hex dumps through the front panel of the processor LIKE REAL MEN, and we enjoyed it, by God.
And we didn't use those puny 5 1/4" floppies, no, our disks were EIGHT BIG INCHES!
I mean can you imagine how many truckloads of punch cards you would need to install windows XP?
Let's assume we need all of a 650Meg ISO image to instal Windows XP. That's 650x1024^2 or 681,574,400 byes. A standard Hollerith punch card can hold 80 bytes, so we need 8,519,680 cards.
Big assumption here, if someone has better data please chime in - but I'm going to assume 75 Hollerith cards stack to one inch, so we're talking 113,596 or so inches worth of cards, 9,466 feet.
Assuming a semi trailer is 28 feet long, that's 338 stacks. Which is as far as I'm going to take it, but it's not a full truckload.
However one should never underestimate the bandwidth of a truckload of tapes.
The original series had 65 million viewers during it's first episode. The new series had about 4 million.
That was then. This is now. Back then the primary video delivery system for most people was a set of rabbit ears (or, if you were really upscale, a Rota-Tenna on the roof). When your channel lineup consists of 6 stations, a friggin' test pattern will get ratings.
Plus the network hyped the living begeesus out of the series. What was it up against, Mork and Mindy? Three's Company? The Star Wars Holiday Special?
Having lived through the 70's I can tell you with onitoligical certitude that US television at the time was a vast, vile, steaming heap of crap.
Assuming, of course, that it's not interested in getting back to the carrier. Which would be a bad assumption for a fighter craft, I think:)
So 1/4 total fuel to get accelerate to "top speed", 1/4 to decelerate to zero, 1/4 for "top speed" back to the carrier, and the last 1/4 to keep from making a big mess on the flight deck:)
But your point is right on, given fuel constraints, there certainly is a "top speed".
(I guess the "maximum range" would depend on how big a lunch the pilot packs before they leave)
Could be worse. I distinctly remember on Lost in Space there was a shot of the Jupiter II coming in for a landing on the Planet du Jour. Then when it was time to take off for space, same scene, but run the film backwords.
Am I the only person on the planet who remembers the original Battlestar Galactica as being a steaming pile of crap? Aside from being a rather blatant attempt by Glen Larceny (who also brought us Tron^w Automan and American Werewolf^w Manimal), the plots were the utmost juvenile tripe.
My theory is that you had to be about ten at the time to think BG was actually cool. Once you're past the nostalgia, does it really stand up? There was an awful lot of silliness involved. For example, the man who single handedly sold the humans out to the Cylons got what ammounted to kitchen duty. That'll teach him!
While I haven't seen all of the new BG, what I have seen I've liked very much.
And one thing I will say for Glen Larson: putting Erin Gray in spandex ("Buck Rogers") was, indeed, friggin' genius. Kudos for that.
Whem I was a kid, I thought the sign on cigarette machines (yeah, back when they sold'em from machines) that said "Not for sale to minors" was because of Black Lung.
If you can live without the hardcopy, you can check usenet (alt.binaries.e-book.rpg), or your favorite P2P service for the Core Rules CDs, which had all the core books in electronic (RTF & HTML, IIRC) format.
1) As has already been mentioned, "Strict" D&D games are, in my experience, rarer than hen's teeth. Every game I've been in has had it's own nice littly comfy hodgepodge of "official" rules and homebrew. In fact I remember doin' THAC0 long before it became canon.
2) D&D was the first RPG. Complaining about it's shortcomings is something akin to complaining about the meals served on the Kittyhawk flight:) Yes, it's got some stupid rules....well, actually, it's got a lot of stupid rules. In fact, it's probably got more stupid rules than smart ones, now that I think about it......but back to the point, the upside is that it's kinda a lowest-common-denominator for role-playing. And I don't mean that in a bad way, I'm just saying you may be hard-pressed to get into a Torg campaign, but somewhere there's always somebody playin' D&D.
Now if you'll pardon me I have to go polish my d20s.
Last I checked all the 2nd Edition books still worked. Just keep playin' what you like. Just because a company doesn't support the game any more doesn't mean the game goes away.
I find Nethack to be needlessly complicated, with one useless gee-gaw feature after another, eventually turning the entire RPG experience into a mishmash of nonsense.
Much cleaner and more to the point is the classic, Hunt the Wumpus:
I feel a draft! Bats nearby! You are in room 11 Tunnels lead to 10 12 19 Shoot, Move or Quit (S-M-Q)?
WotC has gotten a lot of flack for churning out books that are filled with prestige classes, feats, and spells... and not much else.
To be fair, this started a long time ago, under TSR's watch. After 2nd Edition came out it was one "Complete ____ Handbook" after another, and IMHO they were full of stuff that used to make for good articles in The Dragon magazine. But Dragon turned into a Supplement-of-the-Month ad, and TSR churned out so much crap... ah well, we all know where that lead.
On the upside, I was able to sell my "Core Rules II" cds on eBay for a damnsight more than I paid for them originally. Who knew those would appreciate in value!
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore I'd point out that a for/next loop will not "sleep" the processor - ie, give up time to other processes. It will instead hog all CPU until the loop is finished.
AND using a set number in a for/next loop is a bad idea anyhow, given vagarities in processor speed, OS overhead and whatnot - much better to use the RTC, along these lines:
StartTime=Timer
while Timer-StartTime<30 'While fewer than 30 seconds have passed...
application.processmessages 'or whatever the BASIC specific command would be
wend
Of course, this fails on midnight rollover, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the student.
Set phasers to "pedant".
Shouldn't THEY pay YOU to find problems in the stories?
Just the other day I made this very observation when I emailed an editor pointing out a grammatical error (usage of "your" instead of "you're") in a Mysterious Future post.
Alas, no reply offering employment along these lines. Still, hope springs eternal.
Obviously with minimal effort many dupes could be avoided, but I think it's unreasonable to complain when your lead time was only 10 minutes. Do you know how many emails these people get on a regular basis?
I don't know what the total time between "Mysterious Future" and "General" posting was, but it warn't a whole lot longer than the 10 minutes.
Next time I'll try to make my email stand out more. Which subject line do you think will get noticed first:
"IT'S A FSCKING DUPE YOU MORAN"
or
"NATALIE PORTMAN NAKED AND PETRIFIED DUPE DUPE DUPE HOT GRITS"
I'm open to suggestions.
The greatest fool is one who re-ups his subscription in light of this.
Which I won't.
Is one of the benefits of being a Slashdot subscriber NOT having to see duplicate stories on the front page?
As a subscriber I can answer this with an authoritive "no fscking way".
You do get to see articles before they "go live" to the hoi-polloi, and you can even e-mail the editor if you think there's a problem with the article (say, if you know it's a dupe from about 48 hours ago).
You can see for yourself just how well this all works out.
And I emailed the "editor" telling them it was a dupe a good 10 minutes before it went live.
Hello? [thump thump thump] Is this mic on? Come in, Rangoon...
what i posted first now what do i win?
:)
The sound of my hearty laughter, and my gratitude: I have now bookmarked "asciipr0n.com".
Double points if you can find some EBCDIC pr0n
You're right, of course - back in my day we'd the punch the contents of paper hex dumps through the front panel of the processor LIKE REAL MEN, and we enjoyed it, by God.
And we didn't use those puny 5 1/4" floppies, no, our disks were EIGHT BIG INCHES!
[insert Tim Allen grunts]
I mean can you imagine how many truckloads of punch cards you would need to install windows XP?
Let's assume we need all of a 650Meg ISO image to instal Windows XP. That's 650x1024^2 or 681,574,400 byes. A standard Hollerith punch card can hold 80 bytes, so we need 8,519,680 cards.
Big assumption here, if someone has better data please chime in - but I'm going to assume 75 Hollerith cards stack to one inch, so we're talking 113,596 or so inches worth of cards, 9,466 feet.
Assuming a semi trailer is 28 feet long, that's 338 stacks. Which is as far as I'm going to take it, but it's not a full truckload.
However one should never underestimate the bandwidth of a truckload of tapes.
Tapes were cheap (relatively), Winchester drives (ie, Hard Drives, Fixed Disks, DASD, etc) were expensive. Like $500/meg expensive.
:)
But then a meg was a lot of space back then... because pr0n was all really low-resultion stuff that came out on line printers.
Ok, who's going to be first to post a link to line-printer pr0n?
Check out those pictures of hot data-processing chixors! Man, 70s era DP babes. Be still, my heart.
The original series had 65 million viewers during it's first episode. The new series had about 4 million.
That was then. This is now. Back then the primary video delivery system for most people was a set of rabbit ears (or, if you were really upscale, a Rota-Tenna on the roof). When your channel lineup consists of 6 stations, a friggin' test pattern will get ratings.
Plus the network hyped the living begeesus out of the series. What was it up against, Mork and Mindy? Three's Company? The Star Wars Holiday Special?
Having lived through the 70's I can tell you with onitoligical certitude that US television at the time was a vast, vile, steaming heap of crap.
how do you figure?
Those Windows Updates aren't patching the operating system's popularity.
Assuming, of course, that it's not interested in getting back to the carrier. Which would be a bad assumption for a fighter craft, I think :)
:)
So 1/4 total fuel to get accelerate to "top speed", 1/4 to decelerate to zero, 1/4 for "top speed" back to the carrier, and the last 1/4 to keep from making a big mess on the flight deck
But your point is right on, given fuel constraints, there certainly is a "top speed".
(I guess the "maximum range" would depend on how big a lunch the pilot packs before they leave)
There was also a chance that you could plug a personal computer into the intarwebs and not have it pwned!!1! inside of twelve minutes.
I mean, as long as we're playing "What If" and all.
After all, some of very best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space 9 was done with his assistance.
One could very easily consider that "damning with faint praise". But then [o! Blasphemy!] I'm not a Trek fan.
Could be worse. I distinctly remember on Lost in Space there was a shot of the Jupiter II coming in for a landing on the Planet du Jour. Then when it was time to take off for space, same scene, but run the film backwords.
Roger Corman would be proud.
Am I the only person on the planet who remembers the original Battlestar Galactica as being a steaming pile of crap? Aside from being a rather blatant attempt by Glen Larceny (who also brought us Tron^w Automan and American Werewolf^w Manimal), the plots were the utmost juvenile tripe.
My theory is that you had to be about ten at the time to think BG was actually cool. Once you're past the nostalgia, does it really stand up? There was an awful lot of silliness involved. For example, the man who single handedly sold the humans out to the Cylons got what ammounted to kitchen duty. That'll teach him!
While I haven't seen all of the new BG, what I have seen I've liked very much.
And one thing I will say for Glen Larson: putting Erin Gray in spandex ("Buck Rogers") was, indeed, friggin' genius. Kudos for that.
Whem I was a kid, I thought the sign on cigarette machines (yeah, back when they sold'em from machines) that said "Not for sale to minors" was because of Black Lung.
Ok, you didn't hear this from me... [cough]
If you can live without the hardcopy, you can check usenet (alt.binaries.e-book.rpg), or your favorite P2P service for the Core Rules CDs, which had all the core books in electronic (RTF & HTML, IIRC) format.
I was not here. I did not say this.
Two points -
:) Yes, it's got some stupid rules....well, actually, it's got a lot of stupid rules. In fact, it's probably got more stupid rules than smart ones, now that I think about it... ...but back to the point, the upside is that it's kinda a lowest-common-denominator for role-playing. And I don't mean that in a bad way, I'm just saying you may be hard-pressed to get into a Torg campaign, but somewhere there's always somebody playin' D&D.
1) As has already been mentioned, "Strict" D&D games are, in my experience, rarer than hen's teeth. Every game I've been in has had it's own nice littly comfy hodgepodge of "official" rules and homebrew. In fact I remember doin' THAC0 long before it became canon.
2) D&D was the first RPG. Complaining about it's shortcomings is something akin to complaining about the meals served on the Kittyhawk flight
Now if you'll pardon me I have to go polish my d20s.
I do truly miss Second Edition AD&D.
Why? Did it go somewhere?
Last I checked all the 2nd Edition books still worked. Just keep playin' what you like. Just because a company doesn't support the game any more doesn't mean the game goes away.
Dice? Pshaw. I'll use the cut-out, numbered chits that came with my 1st edition boxed set! :)
:)
They went to chits after the sets that had dice. Noob
God, those dice were horrible. The d20 turned into a marble after about 3 games worth of rolling.
I find Nethack to be needlessly complicated, with one useless gee-gaw feature after another, eventually turning the entire RPG experience into a mishmash of nonsense.
Much cleaner and more to the point is the classic, Hunt the Wumpus:
I feel a draft!
Bats nearby!
You are in room 11
Tunnels lead to 10 12 19
Shoot, Move or Quit (S-M-Q)?
Now that is gaming.
WotC has gotten a lot of flack for churning out books that are filled with prestige classes, feats, and spells ... and not much else.
To be fair, this started a long time ago, under TSR's watch. After 2nd Edition came out it was one "Complete ____ Handbook" after another, and IMHO they were full of stuff that used to make for good articles in The Dragon magazine. But Dragon turned into a Supplement-of-the-Month ad, and TSR churned out so much crap... ah well, we all know where that lead.
On the upside, I was able to sell my "Core Rules II" cds on eBay for a damnsight more than I paid for them originally. Who knew those would appreciate in value!