> RMS would do himself well to shave that ridiculous beard
Why is it ridiculous, anyway? I don't know RMS, never met him... but I bet if you asked him "Why do you have that beard?", he'd give an answer not too different from my own answer... "That's the way it grows, and I have better things to do in life than worry about hair growing on my face".
What's ridiculous about letting the hair grow how it wants? If you disagree with his ideals, I hope it's not for a childish reason like "He looks funny" or "I bet he smells bad"...
> I personally like sticking to PC titles, which have always outdone and outperformed any console.
Nitpick: not *always*... compare early CGA PC games to consoles of the same era. PCs back then usually displayed 4 colors, one of which was a hideous pink/magenta... Even the Atari 2600 can do 128 colors (with limitations, and lower res than 4-color CGA, but on a crappy 1970s TV the res didn't matter so much).
If you mean "in the last 10 years" though, you've got a point... unless you're talking about the "bang for the buck" factor. Buying a "serious" gaming PC and keeping its hardware up to date has got to be more expensive than buying a new console every couple of years.
> But like others here have said, its 100% subjective to what you like so a trade study would only give statistics, not an evaluation of an intangible.
Agree 100%. I love the 2600, but I wouldn't expect to show it to someone raised on the SNES or Xbox and expect them to be impressed at all...
Then a reporter asked about the availability of a left-handed version. After a two second pause, the audience was told that it works either way.
In all seriousness... does anyone make a leftie version of the curved style of mouse? I've made it a point to ask the sales people at places like Microcenter or CompUSA, and they always give me a blank look... I end up having to physically demonstrate why the standard ones don't work left-handed ("Here, you try it").
Try the Trackman Marble that you roll with your thumb instead.
Does anyone else get a sore thumb from these? I managed to get pretty accurate with one, but had to quit using it after a couple of weeks... it just hurt too much.
Switched to a Kensington Expert trakball, have never looked back. It even has enough buttons for Missile Command:)
> There's no way I have time to teach the major differences between Java and C# and also teach how to use something as complicated as Visual Studio in 10 weeks.
The whole point of a GUI is that it's supposed to be easy to use... anyone who knows programming can figure out whatever IDE you throw at him with little or no training, unless maybe the IDE is designed to be difficult to use (not a major design goal for IDEs in general...)
Of course, there's no universal metric for "easy to use". I'd probably have a hard time not pulling all my hair out if I had to switch from vim to Visual Studio overnight... but, being a professional, I could do it if required (and, being a professional, you'd never hear a word of complaint from me while I was on the clock).
> I see that not even mentioning IDEs in classes or that there are other options out there is a disservice to students that want to get a job after they graduate.
Rightly or wrongly, most CS professors would cringe if they heard you say their job is to prepare their students to get jobs...
> Likewise for "scrolling", it is likely game developers just talked about "following", or "moving" or other ways of describing the background movement. I don't have any evidence to back this up, just a vague sense of being aware of the games long before I ever heard those terms used to describe them.
Well, the Atari 400/800 computers, designed 1978-79 and released in 1979, had references to the term "scrolling" in its system equates (a couple of registers called HSCROL and VSCROL). The names HSCROL and VSCROL presumably came from the hardware designers...
Also, the book "De Re Atari" (published 1981) has a whole chapter on scrolling, that mentions the HSCROL and VSCROL registers.
I'm sure Atari didn't invent the term, it's just the earliest usage of it that I remember.
> Therefore I will only buy... Star Wars (ORIGINAL) trilogy DVDs.
I bought mine a year ago. Bootleg? Yes. But I had been waiting for a long time, and Lucas sounded like he meant it... so I don't feel bad about paying for a bootleg DVD (transferred from the laserdisc edition, very nice quality).
How many times will I pay for the same movie? Let's see...
Half-price kids' tickets to all 3 movies when I was a kid
Bought original trilogy on VHS (pre-special edition). The tapes wore out from repeated viewing over the years.
Full-price adult tickets to all 3 movies when they were re-released in the 1990s. Saw each movie at least twice, except Jedi (sorry, I hate Ewoks).
Bought special edition trilogy on VHS (actually, this was a gift for someone else)
So I've already paid for these movies approximately 4 times each. I don't feel the least bit bad about owning a bootleg, at this point.
>If an installer has to pre-set a password, it should handle it only in encrypted form. The lack of a "use this encrypted password" rather than a "put the plain password in here" option in the Linux "passwd" command has been a deficit for many years.
passwd(1) may not have such an option, but useradd(8) and usermod(8) both do. From the man page:
-p passwd The encrypted password, as returned by crypt(3).
These are the standard useradd/usermod commands from the shadow suite, should be
present on all Linux distros. If I understand your post correctly, usermod -p [blah] username will do what you want...
The fact that installers are being written by people who don't know this is kind
of chilling (what else don't they know?)...
No article on console controllers is (in my very biased opinion!) complete without
mention of the almighty
Wico Command Control,
the Cadillac of joysticks.
They don't make 'em like that any more:(
(I have no affiliation with the site I linked to; they're just the first google result
with a decent picture)
> 1. It didn't center. At all. You had to move it back into place if you wanted to stop your character.
This isn't 100% true. While there were no springs to center the stick, the rubber "boot" that surrounded the stick
was intended to serve the same purpose. If you ever manage to score a brand-new 5200
stick, you'll see what I mean. Unfortunately, the design has a couple of problems:
The cheap rubber part wears out quickly. It's possible to replace, but not so easy to
find an affordable replacement part (even back then, it cost almost as much as replacing
the controller). As the rubber boot wears, the stick gets so it only returns part of
the way to the center. Eventually, the rubber gets so stretched that it has no effect
at all, and you have a completely non-centering stick.
Another major problem is that (for whatever reason) the pot values drift over time (actually, the cheap pots they used had a lot of variance in the first place).
Even when the rubber boot is still able to physically center the stick, you get a situation where the pots are out of calibration, so the physical center will actually
mean "slightly down and to the left" or similar. This is *especially* frustrating when combined with a dead rubber boot: you have to manually center the stick, but you have to remember that the "center" is actually slightly up and to the right (or whatever) instead of being the actual center position. It's also annoying when the boot still
works, but at least its pseudo-centering action will get you close.
Most 5200 games were ported from the Atari 800 series computers, which used 2600-style digital directional sticks, so the "analogness" of the 5200 stick was usually completely ignored: most games read the analog value and converted it to a digital direction. Different games have different amounts
of "dead zone", so the effect can vary from game to game.
Atari should have put routines in the 5200 BIOS to read the pots and convert to a digital value. That way all the games could have treated the controller the same way... but then, they should have scrapped the 5200 stick before it ever got past the prototype stage:)
My guess is that, on paper anyway, the 5200 stick design appeared to combine the best
aspects of the 2600 joysticks and paddles. Lots of 2600 gamers (myself included) find
it highly annoying to have to switch controllers, so combining the two must have looked
like a win.
3 of the original 4 SG1 team members are still on the show. It's already lasted past the 9th season seeing as how the current season is season 10. Is the show in decline? Yeah. Is it ready to call it quits? Not yet.
I think of SG-1 as the American equivalent of Dr. Who: its universe is broad and not all the
details are nailed down, so literally anything's possible. The show can reinvent itself
every few seasons: cast changes, shift of focus from Goa'u'ld to the Ori, the Air Force
building FTL spacecraft instead of being totally dependent on the gate...
...and I have to admit, it was great to see Crichton and Aeryn... uhh, Browder and Black,
working together again. Hopefully we'll see more of Claudia Black in the next season.
This is the first I've heard of an SG-1 game, though, and it's already cancelled. Blah.
There is no wireless Model M, so I don't use wireless.;)
The very first thing I thought when I saw this article about a wireless USB hub was
"Hey, now I can have a wireless Model M!":)
Of course it isn't really wireless (would have wire going from keyboard to PS/2 => USB adaptor, then to wireless hub), but it
does mean I can use a model M on the HTPC in the living room without trailing 20' of
extension cable across the floor.
However, a full-sized model M has a decent amount of empty space inside it... from the pics in TFA,
it looks like it might be possible to squeeze this thing into a model M case (might have to be
the large-sized model M 3270 version, the one with all the extra function keys). You'd have a
wireless real keyboard!
> So it's really keeping track of some bright gloves; a webcam isn't the most sensitive of cameras, so distinguishing between a bright glove that is just touching the virtual fretboard and shaking around because there isn't actually anything there and a bright glove that is trying the hammer on and pull off is probably very difficult. It sounds to me from the article that it basically tracks crude movement.
...but you strum with your right hand, and you hammer-on/pull-off with your left (vice versa for left-handed players). It can't tell
which hand is which?
Actually, from reading the article... it looks like this isn't a realistic simulation of playing
a real guitar. For one thing, it's not chromatic: you're stuck in whichever pentatonic minor
scale the software uses. Also, "strumming wildly" isn't how you do "blues bends" on a real guitar at all...
The article also says "As a player moves their left hand along the neck of their virtual guitar, the computer will run through the scale"... which sounds like it's just using horizontal motion to
decide what note to play. Probably it doesn't even look at what "frets" your fingers are on, or even consider your fingers separately at all (I bet it just uses hand position, and you could play with your fist closed if you wanted).
I might be misinterpreting things, though... Anyone here actually seen this beast in person yet?
> The problem with a hierarchy is that only one "attribute" can be assigned to the file: that is the file path. Any other attributes the file may have are within the file, not the file system, and result in a click on the "find files" button which iteratively reads all files in the selected path looking for matches.
(Forgive the slashcode-generated space in the path)
Lots of "attributes" there: the fact that the file is "media", the fact that it's music, the name of the artist, album, and track. Also the track number...
Also, the same file might appear under another name (a symlink). If Primus had a greatest hits album, I might have:
Well, actually, Ball Blaster was an early leaked version of Ball Blazer (which was one of
the first games Lucas Arts ever released). Ball Blaster was leaked to the Atari BBS scene some months before Ball Blazer was released... it was playable, but lacked the computer player's AI (so it was two-player only). And yes, everyone thought the "Ball Blaster" name was hilarious back then, too...
>As far as I can see (IANAL), back with the Linksys router GPL fiasco, Linksys probably would have been completely within letter of the GPL to have required you to send in a copy of the receipt showing that you purchased a Linksys router, thereby proving you had legally received a licensed copy of provided GPL'd code in binary form
Interesting, but raises a few questions.
If I bought one of these routers used... would the original manufacturer be in any way obligated to provide me source, or does the seller have to? Seems like it'd be the seller to me, but IANAL.
If the proof-of-purchase requirement for source code becomes standard industry practice, that's going to make it annoying to sell used hardware that has embedded GPL'ed firmware: the burden of providing the source code would rest with the original owner (since he's the one providing the secondhand buyer with the object code in firmware).
Means that, even if the original owner doesn't care about getting source code, he'd have to save his proof of purchase anyway, and transfer it to whoever he sells it to, or else he's stuck with it and can't sell it used?
I know, this is kind of ridiculous, and has probably been discussed elsewhere, but to me it's a new thought (I just had it for the first time ever).
Also... do proofs-of-purchase have expiration dates or such? (I haven't paid attention to such a thing since I was a kid, collecting them from cereal boxes so I could get a decoder ring...)
> Now "they have to be 18 to go in this chat" is a good defense if they get busted.
Not likely. "She had to be 18 to get into this club" definitely isn't a valid defense. Go ask Rob Lowe some time...
However, I agree with your overall point: banning all under 18's from chat rooms is an extreme measure.
Of course, last I checked, Yahoo had absolutely no way to verify your age, and I doubt they're going to be able to, for a free service. Requiring a credit card number doesn't really help: lots of kids have access to Daddy's credit cards (with or without Daddy's knowledge). Even if the credit card thing was 100% accurate, I doubt Yahoo would want to spend the extra money it'd take for them to verify the card numbers. Any other age-verification scheme (AdultCheck, etc) would have the same drawback: Yahoo chat isn't really a moneymaker (the "free" services have to be subsidized by the for-pay services they offer), so no real money can be spent on age verification just to let Random Joe User use it...
This unenforceable ban on under-18's sounds like purely a Cover Your Ass move on their part. Likely it won't help, in case of a real lawsuit, but I'm no lawyer.
> Apple gave people free, reliable and supported unix based on top of BSD instead.
If you're talking about OSX here, you're wrong for both definitions of free: It costs money (so not free as in beer), and I can't get the source, modify, and redistribute (so not free as in speech, either).
It's worse than that, even: I can't run it at all without buying a machine from Apple to run it on.
Granted, it's a neat OS, and lots of people like it for good reasons... but don't go calling it "free". Apple doesn't.
I doubt you're talking about Darwin by itself (the "BSD" part of OSX). I don't see how it could be considered a better "desktop OS" than Free/Net/OpenBSD or Linux. It's just another *NIX... you can run X11 on it, but you could already do that on any of the above.
Gnu was not essential to Linux as to what most people claim here. Posix was already free and surely Linus would have used Posix and another c compiler freely available for Linux.
Uhh. You are aware that POSIX is a standard, not an implementation? It's a document (well, more than one document) that standardizes how various parts of a UNIX-like system should interact, what APIs they should support, etc. It's written in English (or anyway in human language).
It is not compilable code, any more than the ISO C89 standard is...
Also it's not free: you have to pay for a copy of the POSIX standards (at least, you did last time I looked. It's been a while since I checked, though).
Having a highly similar to virtually identical interface for two programs that perform the same function would be a Godsend for anyone who ever has to use both of them.
I don't know whether this is just me or not, but I find it maddening to switch between two user interfaces that are similar but not quite the same. Not too long ago, I switched from Opera to Firefox... I went through a period of cursing and threatening to delete both of them. I have the same problem with languages: After using Perl for a few years, I had to use PHP for a project... the languages have similar syntax, and it drove me crazy every time I'd write "split" instead of "explode" in PHP. Another one is Java vs. C: I can't tell you how many times I tried to test whether an int was zero or not with "if(myInt)", which of course won't compile in Java... and I *knew* the difference, but my fingers (or brainstem?) kept trying to do what they always had done.
I don't use either the Gimp or Photoshop much, so can't say whether one's got a better UI... but if they're going to be different, they should be *wildly* different. If they're going to be the same, well, that would be better for all concerned... but as you said, expect a lawsuit:(
I don't understand why people buy the food and then complain about its quality and cost.
Me either. I bring in my own food (well, gummi bears, potato chips, candy bars... not sure they count as "food", but close enough).
I'm not the only person I know who "sneaks" stuff into theaters. My mother does it, and she's a pretty respectable solid citizen. Her excuse is that they don't serve Tab in theaters (which is true, because it tastes like stale cough syrup).
Regardless of what theater owners want you to believe, it's not illegal. The worst that can happen is that you get thrown out of the theater, but that's never happened to anyone I know. The only way to catch someone at it would be to search everyone at the door, which would be bad for business, so they don't do it.
The theaters have abused their monopoly on food and drinks for a long time now. 20 years ago, the concessions were overpriced, but not by so much: maybe twice the price of the same item elsewhere. Most people considered the extra expense worth the convenience... these days, everything seems to cost 4-5 times what it would anywhere else, and to a lot of people, it's no longer worth it. The "captive market" status of theater audiences is just a social convention, and as such can change...
The three of us easily watch 20 movies/month, with brings the time-to-pay-for-itself of my home theatre down to 5 months
You numbers look good, but where do you find that many *good* movies? You're watching them at a much greater rate than they're being created.
Of course, with the home theater, you aren't stuck watching only what's popular this week. You have a much wider spectrum to choose from... even so, I can't imagine being able to watch 20 movies a month without running out of good stuff pretty quick.
Way back when I was in high school we had a computer lab with 4 Apple ][s and they had some BASIC programming classes. There were ~4 of us between the 2 sessions of class who had Apples at home and knew more about them than the teacher. He was very cool about it, and it didn't make him uncomfortable at all. Instead, if he got hung up on something he'd even ask one of us during the middle of his class (e.g. what's the poke to click the speaker).
The story about me getting suspended for turning up the brightness happened in middle school, when I was maybe 11. Later on, in high school, I had a couple of teachers like yours. My senior year there were 2 of us taking "Computer Programming IV". Apparently nobody thought anyone would take this class: there was no syllabus or anything. The teacher asked us, "What do you want to learn?". We told him, "Assembly", and he actually went out and bought us a copy of Turbo Assembler and a book or two out of his own pocket. He didn't know anything about the subject, so he just left us alone (we shared the lab with the juniors, who were learning BASIC). By the end of the year, we had written our own graphics library in x86 asm, and a Tetris game that used it (heh, and it blew the commercial PC Tetris game out of the water, too). That was the best computer class I ever took, even though the teacher knmew nothing about what we were learning... Instead, he acted like a good project manager: he had us set our own goals, then gave us grades based on whether we met them.
Of course, learning x86 assembly was reasonably easy, since I started on 6502 asm when I was 10:)
Maybe the teacher wanted you suspended anyway, and turned the brightness down all the way before the class started in anticipation that you would turn it back up?
I doubt it. She was afraid of all those alien-looking knobs and buttons and wires and things. Computers terrified her... Also, I can't remember whether we had assigned seats or not, but I think we didn't.
I was with you right up until the part about private schools vs. public. I see no reason to expect better from a private school. I went to Catholic schools until late in the sixth grade, and many of the teachers there were unbelievably harsh, cruel, and stupid, particularly the nuns. I never faced anything as bad when I later went to public schools.
Ack! I wasn't talking about Catholic schools! Those nuns are *scary*!
I'd have to be very picky about which private school... being private doesn't automatically make a school good, of course. But private schools aren't all the same... whereas public schools are all forced to be the same by government policy.
P.S. I hope you weren't serious when you said "Looking back on it now, I can see that I deserved *something* for disobeying a direct order...". No, you didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
> RMS would do himself well to shave that ridiculous beard
Why is it ridiculous, anyway? I don't know RMS, never met him... but I bet if you asked him "Why do you have that beard?", he'd give an answer not too different from my own answer... "That's the way it grows, and I have better things to do in life than worry about hair growing on my face".
What's ridiculous about letting the hair grow how it wants? If you disagree with his ideals, I hope it's not for a childish reason like "He looks funny" or "I bet he smells bad"...
> I personally like sticking to PC titles, which have always outdone and outperformed any console.
Nitpick: not *always*... compare early CGA PC games to consoles of the same era. PCs back then usually displayed 4 colors, one of which was a hideous pink/magenta... Even the Atari 2600 can do 128 colors (with limitations, and lower res than 4-color CGA, but on a crappy 1970s TV the res didn't matter so much).
If you mean "in the last 10 years" though, you've got a point... unless you're talking about the "bang for the buck" factor. Buying a "serious" gaming PC and keeping its hardware up to date has got to be more expensive than buying a new console every couple of years.
> But like others here have said, its 100% subjective to what you like so a trade study would only give statistics, not an evaluation of an intangible.
Agree 100%. I love the 2600, but I wouldn't expect to show it to someone raised on the SNES or Xbox and expect them to be impressed at all...
In all seriousness... does anyone make a leftie version of the curved style of mouse? I've made it a point to ask the sales people at places like Microcenter or CompUSA, and they always give me a blank look... I end up having to physically demonstrate why the standard ones don't work left-handed ("Here, you try it").
Does anyone else get a sore thumb from these? I managed to get pretty accurate with one, but had to quit using it after a couple of weeks... it just hurt too much.
Switched to a Kensington Expert trakball, have never looked back. It even has enough buttons for Missile Command :)
The whole point of a GUI is that it's supposed to be easy to use... anyone who knows programming can figure out whatever IDE you throw at him with little or no training, unless maybe the IDE is designed to be difficult to use (not a major design goal for IDEs in general...)
Of course, there's no universal metric for "easy to use". I'd probably have a hard time not pulling all my hair out if I had to switch from vim to Visual Studio overnight... but, being a professional, I could do it if required (and, being a professional, you'd never hear a word of complaint from me while I was on the clock).
> I see that not even mentioning IDEs in classes or that there are other options out there is a disservice to students that want to get a job after they graduate.
Rightly or wrongly, most CS professors would cringe if they heard you say their job is to prepare their students to get jobs...
Well, the Atari 400/800 computers, designed 1978-79 and released in 1979, had references to the term "scrolling" in its system equates (a couple of registers called HSCROL and VSCROL). The names HSCROL and VSCROL presumably came from the hardware designers...
Also, the book "De Re Atari" (published 1981) has a whole chapter on scrolling, that mentions the HSCROL and VSCROL registers.
I'm sure Atari didn't invent the term, it's just the earliest usage of it that I remember.
I bought mine a year ago. Bootleg? Yes. But I had been waiting for a long time, and Lucas sounded like he meant it... so I don't feel bad about paying for a bootleg DVD (transferred from the laserdisc edition, very nice quality).
How many times will I pay for the same movie? Let's see...
So I've already paid for these movies approximately 4 times each. I don't feel the least bit bad about owning a bootleg, at this point.
passwd(1) may not have such an option, but useradd(8) and usermod(8) both do. From the man page:
These are the standard useradd/usermod commands from the shadow suite, should be present on all Linux distros. If I understand your post correctly, usermod -p [blah] username will do what you want...
The fact that installers are being written by people who don't know this is kind of chilling (what else don't they know?)...
Ugh. I'll go one better: Bring back leaf springs.
No article on console controllers is (in my very biased opinion!) complete without mention of the almighty Wico Command Control, the Cadillac of joysticks.
They don't make 'em like that any more :(
(I have no affiliation with the site I linked to; they're just the first google result with a decent picture)
> 1. It didn't center. At all. You had to move it back into place if you wanted to stop your character.
This isn't 100% true. While there were no springs to center the stick, the rubber "boot" that surrounded the stick was intended to serve the same purpose. If you ever manage to score a brand-new 5200 stick, you'll see what I mean. Unfortunately, the design has a couple of problems:
The cheap rubber part wears out quickly. It's possible to replace, but not so easy to find an affordable replacement part (even back then, it cost almost as much as replacing the controller). As the rubber boot wears, the stick gets so it only returns part of the way to the center. Eventually, the rubber gets so stretched that it has no effect at all, and you have a completely non-centering stick.
Another major problem is that (for whatever reason) the pot values drift over time (actually, the cheap pots they used had a lot of variance in the first place). Even when the rubber boot is still able to physically center the stick, you get a situation where the pots are out of calibration, so the physical center will actually mean "slightly down and to the left" or similar. This is *especially* frustrating when combined with a dead rubber boot: you have to manually center the stick, but you have to remember that the "center" is actually slightly up and to the right (or whatever) instead of being the actual center position. It's also annoying when the boot still works, but at least its pseudo-centering action will get you close.
Most 5200 games were ported from the Atari 800 series computers, which used 2600-style digital directional sticks, so the "analogness" of the 5200 stick was usually completely ignored: most games read the analog value and converted it to a digital direction. Different games have different amounts of "dead zone", so the effect can vary from game to game.
Atari should have put routines in the 5200 BIOS to read the pots and convert to a digital value. That way all the games could have treated the controller the same way... but then, they should have scrapped the 5200 stick before it ever got past the prototype stage :)
My guess is that, on paper anyway, the 5200 stick design appeared to combine the best aspects of the 2600 joysticks and paddles. Lots of 2600 gamers (myself included) find it highly annoying to have to switch controllers, so combining the two must have looked like a win.
I think of SG-1 as the American equivalent of Dr. Who: its universe is broad and not all the details are nailed down, so literally anything's possible. The show can reinvent itself every few seasons: cast changes, shift of focus from Goa'u'ld to the Ori, the Air Force building FTL spacecraft instead of being totally dependent on the gate...
This is the first I've heard of an SG-1 game, though, and it's already cancelled. Blah.
The very first thing I thought when I saw this article about a wireless USB hub was "Hey, now I can have a wireless Model M!" :)
Of course it isn't really wireless (would have wire going from keyboard to PS/2 => USB adaptor, then to wireless hub), but it does mean I can use a model M on the HTPC in the living room without trailing 20' of extension cable across the floor.
However, a full-sized model M has a decent amount of empty space inside it... from the pics in TFA, it looks like it might be possible to squeeze this thing into a model M case (might have to be the large-sized model M 3270 version, the one with all the extra function keys). You'd have a wireless real keyboard!
Actually, from reading the article... it looks like this isn't a realistic simulation of playing a real guitar. For one thing, it's not chromatic: you're stuck in whichever pentatonic minor scale the software uses. Also, "strumming wildly" isn't how you do "blues bends" on a real guitar at all...
The article also says "As a player moves their left hand along the neck of their virtual guitar, the computer will run through the scale"... which sounds like it's just using horizontal motion to decide what note to play. Probably it doesn't even look at what "frets" your fingers are on, or even consider your fingers separately at all (I bet it just uses hand position, and you could play with your fist closed if you wanted).
I might be misinterpreting things, though... Anyone here actually seen this beast in person yet?
Eh? I have a file whose path is:
(Forgive the slashcode-generated space in the path)Lots of "attributes" there: the fact that the file is "media", the fact that it's music, the name of the artist, album, and track. Also the track number...
Also, the same file might appear under another name (a symlink). If Primus had a greatest hits album, I might have:
...as a symlink to the original file. So that's two sets of "metadata" stored in paths.BTW, sorry about posting to such an old article, I forgot to hit submit before leaving work :)
Yes.
Well, actually, Ball Blaster was an early leaked version of Ball Blazer (which was one of the first games Lucas Arts ever released). Ball Blaster was leaked to the Atari BBS scene some months before Ball Blazer was released... it was playable, but lacked the computer player's AI (so it was two-player only). And yes, everyone thought the "Ball Blaster" name was hilarious back then, too...
More than you really wanted to know, isn't it? :)
Interesting, but raises a few questions.
If I bought one of these routers used... would the original manufacturer be in any way obligated to provide me source, or does the seller have to? Seems like it'd be the seller to me, but IANAL.
If the proof-of-purchase requirement for source code becomes standard industry practice, that's going to make it annoying to sell used hardware that has embedded GPL'ed firmware: the burden of providing the source code would rest with the original owner (since he's the one providing the secondhand buyer with the object code in firmware).
Means that, even if the original owner doesn't care about getting source code, he'd have to save his proof of purchase anyway, and transfer it to whoever he sells it to, or else he's stuck with it and can't sell it used?
I know, this is kind of ridiculous, and has probably been discussed elsewhere, but to me it's a new thought (I just had it for the first time ever).
Also... do proofs-of-purchase have expiration dates or such? (I haven't paid attention to such a thing since I was a kid, collecting them from cereal boxes so I could get a decoder ring...)
Not likely. "She had to be 18 to get into this club" definitely isn't a valid defense. Go ask Rob Lowe some time...
However, I agree with your overall point: banning all under 18's from chat rooms is an extreme measure.
Of course, last I checked, Yahoo had absolutely no way to verify your age, and I doubt they're going to be able to, for a free service. Requiring a credit card number doesn't really help: lots of kids have access to Daddy's credit cards (with or without Daddy's knowledge). Even if the credit card thing was 100% accurate, I doubt Yahoo would want to spend the extra money it'd take for them to verify the card numbers. Any other age-verification scheme (AdultCheck, etc) would have the same drawback: Yahoo chat isn't really a moneymaker (the "free" services have to be subsidized by the for-pay services they offer), so no real money can be spent on age verification just to let Random Joe User use it...
This unenforceable ban on under-18's sounds like purely a Cover Your Ass move on their part. Likely it won't help, in case of a real lawsuit, but I'm no lawyer.
If you're talking about OSX here, you're wrong for both definitions of free: It costs money (so not free as in beer), and I can't get the source, modify, and redistribute (so not free as in speech, either).
It's worse than that, even: I can't run it at all without buying a machine from Apple to run it on.
Granted, it's a neat OS, and lots of people like it for good reasons... but don't go calling it "free". Apple doesn't.
I doubt you're talking about Darwin by itself (the "BSD" part of OSX). I don't see how it could be considered a better "desktop OS" than Free/Net/OpenBSD or Linux. It's just another *NIX... you can run X11 on it, but you could already do that on any of the above.
Uhh. You are aware that POSIX is a standard, not an implementation? It's a document (well, more than one document) that standardizes how various parts of a UNIX-like system should interact, what APIs they should support, etc. It's written in English (or anyway in human language).
It is not compilable code, any more than the ISO C89 standard is...
Also it's not free: you have to pay for a copy of the POSIX standards (at least, you did last time I looked. It's been a while since I checked, though).
I don't know whether this is just me or not, but I find it maddening to switch between two user interfaces that are similar but not quite the same. Not too long ago, I switched from Opera to Firefox... I went through a period of cursing and threatening to delete both of them. I have the same problem with languages: After using Perl for a few years, I had to use PHP for a project... the languages have similar syntax, and it drove me crazy every time I'd write "split" instead of "explode" in PHP. Another one is Java vs. C: I can't tell you how many times I tried to test whether an int was zero or not with "if(myInt)", which of course won't compile in Java... and I *knew* the difference, but my fingers (or brainstem?) kept trying to do what they always had done.
I don't use either the Gimp or Photoshop much, so can't say whether one's got a better UI... but if they're going to be different, they should be *wildly* different. If they're going to be the same, well, that would be better for all concerned... but as you said, expect a lawsuit :(
Me either. I bring in my own food (well, gummi bears, potato chips, candy bars... not sure they count as "food", but close enough).
I'm not the only person I know who "sneaks" stuff into theaters. My mother does it, and she's a pretty respectable solid citizen. Her excuse is that they don't serve Tab in theaters (which is true, because it tastes like stale cough syrup).
Regardless of what theater owners want you to believe, it's not illegal. The worst that can happen is that you get thrown out of the theater, but that's never happened to anyone I know. The only way to catch someone at it would be to search everyone at the door, which would be bad for business, so they don't do it.
The theaters have abused their monopoly on food and drinks for a long time now. 20 years ago, the concessions were overpriced, but not by so much: maybe twice the price of the same item elsewhere. Most people considered the extra expense worth the convenience... these days, everything seems to cost 4-5 times what it would anywhere else, and to a lot of people, it's no longer worth it. The "captive market" status of theater audiences is just a social convention, and as such can change...
You numbers look good, but where do you find that many *good* movies? You're watching them at a much greater rate than they're being created.
Of course, with the home theater, you aren't stuck watching only what's popular this week. You have a much wider spectrum to choose from... even so, I can't imagine being able to watch 20 movies a month without running out of good stuff pretty quick.
The story about me getting suspended for turning up the brightness happened in middle school, when I was maybe 11. Later on, in high school, I had a couple of teachers like yours. My senior year there were 2 of us taking "Computer Programming IV". Apparently nobody thought anyone would take this class: there was no syllabus or anything. The teacher asked us, "What do you want to learn?". We told him, "Assembly", and he actually went out and bought us a copy of Turbo Assembler and a book or two out of his own pocket. He didn't know anything about the subject, so he just left us alone (we shared the lab with the juniors, who were learning BASIC). By the end of the year, we had written our own graphics library in x86 asm, and a Tetris game that used it (heh, and it blew the commercial PC Tetris game out of the water, too). That was the best computer class I ever took, even though the teacher knmew nothing about what we were learning... Instead, he acted like a good project manager: he had us set our own goals, then gave us grades based on whether we met them.
Of course, learning x86 assembly was reasonably easy, since I started on 6502 asm when I was 10 :)
Maybe the teacher wanted you suspended anyway, and turned the brightness down all the way before the class started in anticipation that you would turn it back up?
I doubt it. She was afraid of all those alien-looking knobs and buttons and wires and things. Computers terrified her... Also, I can't remember whether we had assigned seats or not, but I think we didn't.
Ack! I wasn't talking about Catholic schools! Those nuns are *scary*!
I'd have to be very picky about which private school... being private doesn't automatically make a school good, of course. But private schools aren't all the same... whereas public schools are all forced to be the same by government policy.
P.S. I hope you weren't serious when you said "Looking back on it now, I can see that I deserved *something* for disobeying a direct order...". No, you didn't.
"Deserve" is the wrong word; see my other reply.