... and when you have mates over, do they all crowd round you monitor whilst taking turns to use the chair? Don't get me wrong, I like PC gaming as much as anyone (BF2 being my current favourite); but for social gaming you can't beat friends, beers, sofas, a big TV and the console of your choice.
Its only now with multiple cores that real multitasking can occur.
Yes, because before multi-cored CPUs came along there was no way for one computer to run more than one process concurrently. If only the world's computer scientists had thought of a way to put more than one single-cored CPU in a single computer!
Oh wait, they did that (at least) three decades ago.
That looks similar to Wing War, a VR1 powered arcade game from Sega. It was a contemporary of Virtua Racing but had a variety of aircraft (everything from biplanes to Harriers) that you could fly in a city based arena. The game was basically a one on one airbourne deathmatch and in two player mode it was awesome.
I remember it being mentioned as a potential Dreamcast port back when the console appeared to have a future. Nothing ever came of it though.
It is available as a MAME ROM but to my lasting disappointment it's in an unplayable form (and has been so for a while).
The labor theory of value treats everyone's labor as equal, AFAICT. I, however, am perfectly happy to let the value of a writer's labor, an artist's, a musician's, a barber's, a mechanic's, and the labor of anyone else who performs a service be set by the market in real life
Fair enough, I'll call off McCarthy. However the population in general has no right to force content producers to sell/provide their works in any particular way. I like the service idea, but if someone wants to sell their music as a heavily restrict product then that's their prerogative. No-one apart from the copyright holder has a right to see, hear or otherwise use a copyrighted work.
What I am opposed to however is copyright holders manipulating the legal system to prop up a failing business model. Laws designed for physical property cannot and should not be applied to noncorporeal works.
I like your idea and see where you're coming from; however I cannot support forcing content producers to behave in a certain way. No matter how desirable that may be.
That sounds suspiciously like the Labour Theory of Value. That the worth of something is dependent solely on the amount of labour put in to creating it. It's one of the pillars of Marxism and has proved to be an catastrophic failure when put in to practice.
Personally I think that media companies can put whatever restrictions they like on the media they publish. However I do not believe that copyright infringement should be a criminal offence (it's clearly not theft, rather a slight increase of supply outside that intended by the owner). Instead it should be up to the copyright holder to recover any losses through the civil courts. If you, or anyone else, doesn't like the restrictions placed upon a copyrighted work - then don't buy/license it.
How is NCSOFT liable in my opinion? If they left a known bug within the game that led to the loss of this in-game item that has precarious if unsanctioned real life value, then shouldn't they be considered liable?
No, absolutely not. Why? Because the players don't own any of the 'items'. All the data on the servers, including the items held by players, are the property of NCSOFT. They are entitled to do what they want with said property, regardless of whether the items have some real-world sale value.
I believe this is the case for all persistant online games, with the possible exception of Second Life.
Bulldog are excellent until something goes wrong - then, for want of a more original phrase, you're utterly fucked. You will never be allowed to speak to anyone useful, the financial department never answer the phone, the waiting period for the technical team is measured in epochs and the call centre staff can't even pronounce such complex words as "Battersea" and "January".
Bulldog recently billed me two hundred pounds for three months service (which should only be about a hundred quid). In the last fortnight I have sent more emails than I can remember and phoned their finance department over a hundred times. To date I've yet to received a response to my emails (aside from the automatic "Your mail is important to us" response) or get through to a member of their finance staff.
Bulldog were great when I started to use them a couple of years ago. But since they were bought out by Cable & Wireless they've been absolutely awful. Even if you have to pay a little (or a lot) more you should use another ISP as Bulldog are the fucking pits.
I guess I'm lucky then - my employers pay well and treat the programming/systems staff with the same (high) level of respect as the non-technical employees. There's no out-sourcing, no contractors, no PHBs, no pointless HR rules and a completely casual work place.
The trick is to avoid software houses and consultancies. Writing in-house software is much more rewarding (in all senses of the term) and much less stressful. I've also found the standards are much higher with in-house coders which makes my own work much easier.
Eight characters? Indents should be two or four, if you can't see them properly I'd suggest a visit to the opticians.
As for tabs - there's no place for tabs in source code. Always use spaces. Spaces look the same in any fixed width font on any platform, tabs do not.
I agree about you with the editors though. Notepad is good for nothing. There are plenty of free alternatives that have an expanded feature set - such as being able to render '\n' as a line-break.
Right - will people stop using fucking analogies! None of them are any help and almost all of them simply serve to bias the argument. Analogical thinking is the idiot's alternative to logic and should be avoided at all costs.
As for the topic at hand; WiFi access points already have a mechanism to determine whether people may connect to them or not. If the owner of an access point does not wish the general public to use it, then they should enable encryption or some other form of access control (e.g. MAC addresses). If the owner leaves their access point completely open then they are responding to the "may I use this" challenge with "OK".
If, for some reason, they must have an open network, but don't wish others to use it then they should take steps to prevent their signal from leaving their property (e.g. using special wall insulation).
Yes, but the grandparent post did make a valid and highly important point. Both Baseball and the Grateful Dead really, really suck. In terms of entertaining ways to pass the time they rank along side being tortured by Iraqi insurgents or dying of cancer. They are two of only a few activities that would be improved by a suicide bomber.
I'm going the same way - I want a ultra-thin laptop, no larger than 12" that has a Unix-like operating system and WiFi.
I spent an age trying to get my Toshiba laptop working with an Orinoco PCMCIA card. In the end I had to give up on Gentoo (which I use for all my other machines) and install Ubuntu. But even that is more than a little bollocks. It works but I can't switch in and out of promiscuous at will. Once Kismet has been started I have to reboot to be able to connect to any networks. Plus I have better things to do with my life than spend days arsing about with the four million different WiFi driver models that currently exist under Linux.
A 12" PowerBook, whilst over priced, seems to be the answer. I can develop all my Linux/Solaris applications on it, using the same tools - while having access to WiFi in a painless manner.
The only draw-back (which may be a show stopper) is the lack of a PCMCIA slot (which bloody 10" VAIOs manage to fit in) which prevents me using a 3G card for those times when WiFi isn't possible.
So if anyone knows of a laptop that...
Runs a Unix-esque operating system.
Is very small - no larger than 12" diagonally and no more than three pounds in weight.
Has WiFi that actually works. Perfectly. Out of the box. Without any fiddling other than to specify my network information.
What makes KDE 'slow' (note that I've had no problems running it on old hardware) is that it tries to do too much. Changing the language it's implemented in is not going to speed it up.
Incidentally, C++ is an excellent language for OO coding, as are Java, Objective-C and Python (there are probably others that I haven't used). 99.999% of the 'problems' that programming languages are claimed to have are the result of inexperienced, incompetent and down right crap programmers. Thankfully increased competition in the job market has removed a large number of them from the industry. Hopefully the next few years will account for the rest of them.
My then employers trialled Solaris x86 in 2000 - to cut a long story short it was awful. It wouldn't run on any laptop we had in the building, and would only run on a desktop once we'd replaced much of the hardware with obsolete stuff people had at home. It was not only slow but would randomly restart without being init 6'd. Not exactly the five nines reliability we'd come to expect and require from our Sparc machines.
On the upside the utter failure of Solaris x86 meant that our management had no choice but to rollout Linux; which was nice. A later employer (c. 2002) actually bought a couple of the those Tadpoles - they were as powerful as an Ultra 5 and about as portable. No airline would allow them anywhere near carry-on luggage and they had to go in the hold (not what you want with twenty thousand dollar computers). Luckily they were so heavily it was a question of whether the plane survived carrying them, rather than the other way round.
Nevertheless, it *did* happen, so the parent's claim of "absolutely zero" is bogus.
It happened because there was no alternative at the time! Had there been a reliable Solaris x86 port before 2003 there would never have been a Tadpole - companies would have used Intel based laptops and saved a fortune. No company is going to purchase expensive PPC laptops to run Linux when a cheap Intel driven one will do the same or better.
IBM (or anyone else bar Apple) will not release a PPC laptop because other than running OSX there's nothing they do better than a Pentium-M. Aside from you and a handful of other PPC fetishists there is no market for what you're proposing.
but it didn't stop companies like Tadpole from making Sparc laptops.
Yes, and the cost of filling that niche was that the cheapest Tadpole is (or at least was when I last checked) an order of magnitude more expensive than the most expensive Thinkpad. Tadpole's filled a niche - namely Solaris software vendors selling very expensive software who needed a portable demonstration plaform, cost be damned.
To the best of my knowledge there are no niches for a PPC Linux portable that costs far more than an otherwise identical IA-32 Linux portable (and they would, as the RRD cost would have to be spread over about ten units) - especially as Linux runs best on IA-32 where as Solaris, until recently, was only any good on Sparcs.
The BBC shouldn't be competing with commercial companies - it should be providing content that commercial networks either can't or won't do. Given the narrow focus of commercial television and radio this means anything that targets a minority (be it social, economic, religous and/or ethnic). As such you could probably justify the Cult website and there is no ITV/Sky equivalent.
What the BBC should not be doing is spending money on broadcasting sports, soap operas, by-the-numbers drama, blockbuster films and yet more tedious reality TV. These are already provided by the multitude of commercial channels available. Any reduction in spending on these areas is a step in the right direction. Sadly I think the Beeb will end up doing the opposite and mainly trimming the minority programming it should be specialising on, and pumping all its cash in to more Test The Nation Moron Specials and Yet Another Working Class Soap.
There is no "better" language out of PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby. It depends on what you're doing, your background in programming and the time you have available for coding.
I use Python, Perl and PHP. PHP for web sites, Perl for text-mangling or scripts that need to be fairly fast, and Python for any other high-level work (C and/or C++ handles the low level work).
This "one true language" talk is total bullshit and people that perpetuate this myth should be ranked along side the kids who fill online forums with endless arguments about which console making multi-nation is the best.
Good point, except that the JVM developers have continually proven themselves to be less than stellar. If I have to rely on someone elses code to that extent I expect it to be written by people at least as good as me or my colleagues. I've seen nothing from the Java platform that suggests that's the case.
Ah, the Amstrad 3" disk - the pricy, non-standard alternative to the 3.5" floppy. This wasn't just present in the Spectrum +3; the CPC 664/6128 (which shared much of its hardware with the +3) could read these disks, as could the late-80s PCWs.
Obviously all these machines are at least as old as the Spectrum, but as long as at least one can be found it should be possible to recover the data.
This isn't flamebait, it's the truth. The UK would be a much better place if all our politians were wiped out in some kind of terrorist attack/lucky accident.
I got a ticket from a camera for running a red light once. If I lived in that town I would have seriously considered taking out the camera. I'm surprised that I don't hear about people doing this in the UK.
Well, I don't have much sympathy for you as I completely agree with ticketing people for running a red. It's not like you got flagged for doing seventy in a sixty limit, you completely ignored a signal to stop.
Almost 2/3rds of people didn't think the competition was worse. Problem is, they didn't agree on which of the competition was best.
Yes. If only there was a electoral system that resulted in governmental representation that was proportional to the number of votes cast. However it's clear that such a system doesn't exist, otherwise our freedom loving junta^h^h^h^h^h government would have implemented it already!
Errr... it translates to that in British English as well. The Liberals* haven't been liberal since the the 1970s.
* - By which I'm the Liberal Democrats, the Liberal Party (those who refused to join up with the Social Democrats) is still pretty liberal.... and yes, I'm now so far off topic I've fired off the flares and switched on the emergency beacon.
6 months later, I was fired because "I was not making all my programming deadlines". Never mind that I had physical proof that the IT job they stuck me with was the cause, they wouldn't hear me out.
I'm assuming you took them to court over this. If you have physical proof that your employer was responsible for you missing deadlines, and said employer fired your over these deadlines then you've got a very strong case.
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... and when you have mates over, do they all crowd round you monitor whilst taking turns to use the chair? Don't get me wrong, I like PC gaming as much as anyone (BF2 being my current favourite); but for social gaming you can't beat friends, beers, sofas, a big TV and the console of your choice.
Oh wait, they did that (at least) three decades ago.
I remember it being mentioned as a potential Dreamcast port back when the console appeared to have a future. Nothing ever came of it though. It is available as a MAME ROM but to my lasting disappointment it's in an unplayable form (and has been so for a while).
What I am opposed to however is copyright holders manipulating the legal system to prop up a failing business model. Laws designed for physical property cannot and should not be applied to noncorporeal works.
I like your idea and see where you're coming from; however I cannot support forcing content producers to behave in a certain way. No matter how desirable that may be.
Personally I think that media companies can put whatever restrictions they like on the media they publish. However I do not believe that copyright infringement should be a criminal offence (it's clearly not theft, rather a slight increase of supply outside that intended by the owner). Instead it should be up to the copyright holder to recover any losses through the civil courts. If you, or anyone else, doesn't like the restrictions placed upon a copyrighted work - then don't buy/license it.
I believe this is the case for all persistant online games, with the possible exception of Second Life.
Bulldog recently billed me two hundred pounds for three months service (which should only be about a hundred quid). In the last fortnight I have sent more emails than I can remember and phoned their finance department over a hundred times. To date I've yet to received a response to my emails (aside from the automatic "Your mail is important to us" response) or get through to a member of their finance staff.
Bulldog were great when I started to use them a couple of years ago. But since they were bought out by Cable & Wireless they've been absolutely awful. Even if you have to pay a little (or a lot) more you should use another ISP as Bulldog are the fucking pits.
The trick is to avoid software houses and consultancies. Writing in-house software is much more rewarding (in all senses of the term) and much less stressful. I've also found the standards are much higher with in-house coders which makes my own work much easier.
As for tabs - there's no place for tabs in source code. Always use spaces. Spaces look the same in any fixed width font on any platform, tabs do not.
I agree about you with the editors though. Notepad is good for nothing. There are plenty of free alternatives that have an expanded feature set - such as being able to render '\n' as a line-break.
As for the topic at hand; WiFi access points already have a mechanism to determine whether people may connect to them or not. If the owner of an access point does not wish the general public to use it, then they should enable encryption or some other form of access control (e.g. MAC addresses). If the owner leaves their access point completely open then they are responding to the "may I use this" challenge with "OK".
If, for some reason, they must have an open network, but don't wish others to use it then they should take steps to prevent their signal from leaving their property (e.g. using special wall insulation).
Yes, but the grandparent post did make a valid and highly important point. Both Baseball and the Grateful Dead really, really suck. In terms of entertaining ways to pass the time they rank along side being tortured by Iraqi insurgents or dying of cancer. They are two of only a few activities that would be improved by a suicide bomber.
I spent an age trying to get my Toshiba laptop working with an Orinoco PCMCIA card. In the end I had to give up on Gentoo (which I use for all my other machines) and install Ubuntu. But even that is more than a little bollocks. It works but I can't switch in and out of promiscuous at will. Once Kismet has been started I have to reboot to be able to connect to any networks. Plus I have better things to do with my life than spend days arsing about with the four million different WiFi driver models that currently exist under Linux.
A 12" PowerBook, whilst over priced, seems to be the answer. I can develop all my Linux/Solaris applications on it, using the same tools - while having access to WiFi in a painless manner.
The only draw-back (which may be a show stopper) is the lack of a PCMCIA slot (which bloody 10" VAIOs manage to fit in) which prevents me using a 3G card for those times when WiFi isn't possible.
So if anyone knows of a laptop that ...
Incidentally, C++ is an excellent language for OO coding, as are Java, Objective-C and Python (there are probably others that I haven't used). 99.999% of the 'problems' that programming languages are claimed to have are the result of inexperienced, incompetent and down right crap programmers. Thankfully increased competition in the job market has removed a large number of them from the industry. Hopefully the next few years will account for the rest of them.
On the upside the utter failure of Solaris x86 meant that our management had no choice but to rollout Linux; which was nice. A later employer (c. 2002) actually bought a couple of the those Tadpoles - they were as powerful as an Ultra 5 and about as portable. No airline would allow them anywhere near carry-on luggage and they had to go in the hold (not what you want with twenty thousand dollar computers). Luckily they were so heavily it was a question of whether the plane survived carrying them, rather than the other way round.
IBM (or anyone else bar Apple) will not release a PPC laptop because other than running OSX there's nothing they do better than a Pentium-M. Aside from you and a handful of other PPC fetishists there is no market for what you're proposing.
Yes, and the cost of filling that niche was that the cheapest Tadpole is (or at least was when I last checked) an order of magnitude more expensive than the most expensive Thinkpad. Tadpole's filled a niche - namely Solaris software vendors selling very expensive software who needed a portable demonstration plaform, cost be damned.
To the best of my knowledge there are no niches for a PPC Linux portable that costs far more than an otherwise identical IA-32 Linux portable (and they would, as the RRD cost would have to be spread over about ten units) - especially as Linux runs best on IA-32 where as Solaris, until recently, was only any good on Sparcs.
What the BBC should not be doing is spending money on broadcasting sports, soap operas, by-the-numbers drama, blockbuster films and yet more tedious reality TV. These are already provided by the multitude of commercial channels available. Any reduction in spending on these areas is a step in the right direction. Sadly I think the Beeb will end up doing the opposite and mainly trimming the minority programming it should be specialising on, and pumping all its cash in to more Test The Nation Moron Specials and Yet Another Working Class Soap.
I use Python, Perl and PHP. PHP for web sites, Perl for text-mangling or scripts that need to be fairly fast, and Python for any other high-level work (C and/or C++ handles the low level work).
This "one true language" talk is total bullshit and people that perpetuate this myth should be ranked along side the kids who fill online forums with endless arguments about which console making multi-nation is the best.
Good point, except that the JVM developers have continually proven themselves to be less than stellar. If I have to rely on someone elses code to that extent I expect it to be written by people at least as good as me or my colleagues. I've seen nothing from the Java platform that suggests that's the case.
Obviously all these machines are at least as old as the Spectrum, but as long as at least one can be found it should be possible to recover the data.
This isn't flamebait, it's the truth. The UK would be a much better place if all our politians were wiped out in some kind of terrorist attack/lucky accident.
Well, I don't have much sympathy for you as I completely agree with ticketing people for running a red. It's not like you got flagged for doing seventy in a sixty limit, you completely ignored a signal to stop.
That aside there is a movement to destroy speed cameras. Methods include explosives, burning tyres and angle grinders.
Yes. If only there was a electoral system that resulted in governmental representation that was proportional to the number of votes cast. However it's clear that such a system doesn't exist, otherwise our freedom loving junta^h^h^h^h^h government would have implemented it already!
Errr ... it translates to that in British English as well. The Liberals* haven't been liberal since the the 1970s.
* - By which I'm the Liberal Democrats, the Liberal Party (those who refused to join up with the Social Democrats) is still pretty liberal. ... and yes, I'm now so far off topic I've fired off the flares and switched on the emergency beacon.
I'm assuming you took them to court over this. If you have physical proof that your employer was responsible for you missing deadlines, and said employer fired your over these deadlines then you've got a very strong case.