To add to your list above, my personal favourite, the Brillant Paula Bean. Which is quite apt actually - its the complete opposite of what happened in the article...
Voodoo3? Lord no. I don't think duke was ever an accelerated game. An opengl patch came along I think, and then some higher res texture packs... from the site:
System Requirements
486DX2/66 with 8 megabytes of memory and VGA graphics. We STRONGLY recommend a good Pentium with 16Mb of memory and PCI local bus video.
For the SVGA modes, a VESA compliant video card is required.
I was thinking this morning that if (playing as Duke) I could grab a wounded pigcop by the neck and then proceed to bash his face in with the butt of a weapon and then kick the dying corpse backwards and shoot it again to finish it off, complete with appropriate spasming, then that would almost guarantee sales - daikatana-esque failings or not.
oh oh oh - and if there was a corny dialogue synced to the smashing of the face that would be awesome:
dear god no. Tapestry is a pile of poo and should be skirted if ever come upon.
I work day in and day out with this spectacularly under-documented, over engineered, verbose, often incomprehensible, brittle framework. While it is possible to do most web development you can think of in it, and it does go to great lengths to provide elaborate abstractions for the mundane tasks of forms, validation, widgets (components), parameter passing and so forth, these abstractions are often leaky and not at all extensible. This is a framework for Java enthusiasts only.
My biggest gripe is that it is ugly ugly ugly. From the sparse documentation, to the vague naming conventions, to the horrific url's that are generated, it's even an embarrassment to have it staining my resume.
Take a dip in the Django pool and then compare the two. Django will redefine any web developers ideas on how things should be done and how well they can be done.
I agree that, while other people are the first and most profound level of influence people will have (especially young people), it's good to have a stock of material to direct these people to.
I was a failure at maths sadly and am only now just beginning to hunt down resources for my own development - and some of the delightful bits of fiction that have led me in this direction are: Contact, A Beautiful Mind, Primer, the authors Vernor Vinge, Robert, Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke.. not hard science, but they certainly get me excited about learning.
Transitioning from windows to linux I couldn't find a decent alternative to Winamp - XMMS and Beep just didn't cut it. I found them to be unpolished, ugly and XMMS skipped and stuttered atrociously. But I found mpd (music played daemon) and gmpc (gnome music player client) a really excellent, small and intuitive pair of programs to use - of course there are other clients for mpd, but gmpc is my first choice.
I've taken to simply having a cup of tea in the morning, leaving for work and having a pigs ear and a bottle of gatorade while I wait for the bus to whisk me away onto the second leg of my journey.
A pigs ear is a big, roughly oval, flat pastry with a thin sticky glaze on top. Wonderful.
My resolution for 2006 was to stop procrastinating and simply DO IT (whatever 'IT' happened to be). The poster should read this essay - it sounds like his diversionary tactics result from a lack of focus/attention. The moment you realize you're procrastinating, it's easier to stop it and get that work done.
Otherwise, it's the usual: save more, strive for happiness, learn a new skill, etc.
"on the up side, as a business, you can then claim a computer, power, internet connection and monthly fees against the business's income as expences."
excellent point - artists in the AU have a similar deal. we can declare ourselves as a business and claim our materials/rent/etc, however if we decide not to, we're classified as hobbyists and can have a large percentage of any transaction withheld until the end of the financial year etc.
As our income can be wildly variable, heaps one year, almost nothing the next, if we do declare ourselves other than hobbyists, then it's recognized that artists usually have to supplant their income with a regular job wherein we can then offset our art expenses against the tax we pay on our regular 9-5.
I wonder if those who make the virtual money also have these similar benefits.
The first DVD I ever owned was a MiB special edition that I won in some competition about a year before I actually got a DVD player to watch it... One of the fun eggs on the DVD is the audio commentry by Tommy Lee Jones and the director done MST3k-style - the subtitles track is them sitting in chairs in silhouette, pointing things out and just generally watching the movie. This is a very cool hack and can be done because the subtitles on a dvd is not text but a smaller movie overlaid and synched.
I've used Opera since version 3 and it followed me in my transition to Linux too, so it's a much loved and trusted tool that I never want to see disappear. I do have some suggestions that could be helpful.
I'm probably not an exception when it comes to having loads and loads of tabs open all the time. I use Opera every day for almost everything and at time of writing I have 142 tabs open - needless to say it can get a bit sluggish...links, bookmarks, notes, history and email all have their own 'quick find' fields (on the sidebar), the 'windows' pane should also get a 'quick find' for us heavy users - just searching the page title or even it's meta data would be enough imho.
Chaining these quick searches together would be cool too - being able to search email, windows, newsfeeds, history for keywords and have a clearly delineated resultset returned would be magical.
For some reason I can't get a 'feeds' pane on the sidebar unless I set up a mail account (may have changed in O9), but I can get it from the mail toolbar under 'Feeds'...
Saving a page with attachements saves everything into one directory which gets messy quickly - firefox does this action rather handily by saving attachments and such into a seperate directory...
Opacity (is this supported in 9?), curved edges and generally more CSS3 support - gecko has these already but I assume they're waiting until they have better CSS3 support to rename them to something other than their current proprietry names (mozilla-something). If support for curved edges is there it will force IE to catch up because users don't want to know they're missing out on all that fancy cool hip stuff. Also I bloody well hate all those silly image hacks.
Better download support - bittorrent is cool, but your standard download will not auto-resume if it loses the connection.
A bit of web2.0-ness: ability to tagging emails/feeds/bookmarks combined with the chained search to sort/rank/filter results.
A single-click backup that saves a 'snapshot' of browser state (interface setup/bookmarks/open windows/shortcuts) that can be retrieved and restored from a remote location - this would enable roaming profiles and I can get Opera setup with a single login or soemthing from an alien computer and have it work perfectly. Of course it gets scrubbed on some sort of logout. It would also allow fairly transition tool to those who run multiple versions of Opera over multiple OS's
Not for the casual user, but a 'summary' feature that sums up available internal/external links, resources (images/plugins/downloads) and a list of previously visited pages of this domain - currently these can be accessed via the 'links' and 'history' panes, but a summary feature (a usermode css hack?) that could be displayed on the page or exported to a file would be handy for those who want to understand a saved page or an older page in context. I'm sure this could probably be done with the user-javascript plugin engine too.
Also on Linux I have this weird spacing problem in textfields and such - it might be a problem with my actual box (it has lots of problems atm), but nothing else is acting this way.. is this being addressed or should I send a bugreport?
w3003
This conference could go a long way into exploring one of the uncracked parts of the teenage psyche. Teenagers want hot girls with large boobies, so why aren't they buying those games?
Because you can't kill them. As an antisocial horndog nothing gets the blood going more than being able to enjoy virtual women on both scales - extreme violence and extreme sexuality, and one can do that without any guilt or remorse simply because it's a heightened and removed experience to everyday reality. This is not real, it's entertainment.
It could explain why Duke3D (bless his zombie bones) was so damn popular - amazing level of interaction, esp. with strippers (shake em baby) who you could then kill and spawn more things to destroy (pipe bombs in the spawn areas:) It's the same with all the various GTA incarnations, even the original top down GTA - theres nothing quite like making police cars squish people by forcing them onto the pavements. Or paying hookers then running them over.
It might also be related to the uncanny valley more than bloodlust - I've noticed with more recent games, as the in-game women become more lifelike and belivable (HL2), there is a real distaste in killing them, or having them killed. With older or less realistic games the NPCs are all similar, they all gib the same way - even the screaming is the same... and one grows somewhat hardened (bored?) with it all.
Or hell, despite the tits they could just be shite for games.
Regarding the article, I'm waiting for a more mature approach to adult games - it's a sure sign of growing up when boobs, bums and giblets just don't do it anymore.
S: It took me a day or two to lay down the basic architecture, the design of it, and then it was a few weeks of hacking. Its about 10 to 15 thousand lines of code.
JJ: Its all in PERL script, so its pretty straightforward.
As a Python guy this sort of thing makes me laugh;)
Can I configure it to automatically open new tabs when I type an address in the address bar?
yes and no. In an open tab, write the new URL in the address bar and do shift+enter - it opens the address in a new tab. using ctrl+shift+enter instead will open the address in a new tab in the background (current tab keeps focus).
There is part of an interview with Sophia Stewart (linked from the wikipedia article) that helps understand the similarities a bit better.
She sounds a little hysterical in the first two questions, but her illustration of the differences between the movies is quite interesting... especially that Arnie quote;)
"In my experience, children who learn math when they want to, and they're good and ready, will digest YEARS of material in a matter of days or weeks."
I got left behind in maths from the very start of high school, I got only so far before all the abstract concepts were simply not taking root, even with extra schooling. It just became this malaise of numbers and nonsense from year 8 (when HS starts in Australia) to halfway through year 10 when I was finally able to stop it forever. Maths was torture, I would fail everything and I had no interest in it whatsoever. We had these huge maths tomes we were supposed to work through every semester, "from page 216 to 309 today, then pages 310, 312 to 324 for homework!". pfft, nuts to that - I had been left behind long ago and I just didn't care.
"Classroom based education is a system whereby naturally curious, intelligent children are forced to sit in a boring classroom, and forced to stand in line, in preparation for a mundane manufacturing job..."
goddamn right. I'm sure something of HS stuck, but I honestly cannot remember most of it: they were just long years of tedium, looking out of the window and waiting for lunch. What I do remember however was towards the end of year 12 (last year of HS in Aust.) was my questioning of everything... from good and bad and right and wrong, to why these kids were popular, and why I was picked on... I really took off at that point, and came into my own, and now, six years down the track and finishing my BA of Software Engineering after completing my BA of Visual Arts & Applied Design, I'm looking for courses on absolute basic maths... because I want to learn it now.
I'm surprised I got as far as I did in HS and passed it so well, because I don't feel like I deserved the marks I got, everything was halfarsed because I just had no enthusiasm for any of it.
I will not be sending my kids to any HS because I feel it is fundamentally broken, unrewarding and flawed, from the teachers to the curriculum to the grades. Alternatives must exist.
The dedicated blog discusses more than just two cases. The original article (the much longer one at legal affairs) discusses in depth the common practise of incest and rape in the closeted communities, and the insufficient punishment (if any) that inevitably leads to continuing abuse. The abc article is a followup to the original article about the sentencing of one of the perpetrators (a brother), the go article is indeed covering the same ground as the original, but is much shorter and more to the point.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how far this could be taken in association with this type of work: http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/videoenhancement/videoEnhancement.htm
To add to your list above, my personal favourite, the Brillant Paula Bean. Which is quite apt actually - its the complete opposite of what happened in the article...
System Requirements
Coward. Your priorities show a distinct lack of strength in your convictions.
And the drop-bears.
I was thinking this morning that if (playing as Duke) I could grab a wounded pigcop by the neck and then proceed to bash his face in with the butt of a weapon and then kick the dying corpse backwards and shoot it again to finish it off, complete with appropriate spasming, then that would almost guarantee sales - daikatana-esque failings or not.
oh oh oh - and if there was a corny dialogue synced to the smashing of the face that would be awesome:
"Hail."*smash*
"To.
*smash*
"The."
*smurch*
"King."
*kick*
"Baby."
*gunfire*
dear god no. Tapestry is a pile of poo and should be skirted if ever come upon.
I work day in and day out with this spectacularly under-documented, over engineered, verbose, often incomprehensible, brittle framework. While it is possible to do most web development you can think of in it, and it does go to great lengths to provide elaborate abstractions for the mundane tasks of forms, validation, widgets (components), parameter passing and so forth, these abstractions are often leaky and not at all extensible. This is a framework for Java enthusiasts only.
My biggest gripe is that it is ugly ugly ugly. From the sparse documentation, to the vague naming conventions, to the horrific url's that are generated, it's even an embarrassment to have it staining my resume.
Take a dip in the Django pool and then compare the two. Django will redefine any web developers ideas on how things should be done and how well they can be done.
www.djangoproject.com
I was a failure at maths sadly and am only now just beginning to hunt down resources for my own development - and some of the delightful bits of fiction that have led me in this direction are: Contact, A Beautiful Mind, Primer, the authors Vernor Vinge, Robert, Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke .. not hard science, but they certainly get me excited about learning.
Transitioning from windows to linux I couldn't find a decent alternative to Winamp - XMMS and Beep just didn't cut it. I found them to be unpolished, ugly and XMMS skipped and stuttered atrociously. But I found mpd (music played daemon) and gmpc (gnome music player client) a really excellent, small and intuitive pair of programs to use - of course there are other clients for mpd, but gmpc is my first choice.
- mpd: http://www.musicpd.org/
- gmpc: http://www.musicpd.org/gmpc.shtml
And for debian/ubuntu users:A pigs ear is a big, roughly oval, flat pastry with a thin sticky glaze on top. Wonderful.
My resolution for 2006 was to stop procrastinating and simply DO IT (whatever 'IT' happened to be). The poster should read this essay - it sounds like his diversionary tactics result from a lack of focus/attention. The moment you realize you're procrastinating, it's easier to stop it and get that work done.
Otherwise, it's the usual: save more, strive for happiness, learn a new skill, etc.
excellent point - artists in the AU have a similar deal. we can declare ourselves as a business and claim our materials/rent/etc, however if we decide not to, we're classified as hobbyists and can have a large percentage of any transaction withheld until the end of the financial year etc.
As our income can be wildly variable, heaps one year, almost nothing the next, if we do declare ourselves other than hobbyists, then it's recognized that artists usually have to supplant their income with a regular job wherein we can then offset our art expenses against the tax we pay on our regular 9-5.I wonder if those who make the virtual money also have these similar benefits.
The first DVD I ever owned was a MiB special edition that I won in some competition about a year before I actually got a DVD player to watch it ... One of the fun eggs on the DVD is the audio commentry by Tommy Lee Jones and the director done MST3k-style - the subtitles track is them sitting in chairs in silhouette, pointing things out and just generally watching the movie. This is a very cool hack and can be done because the subtitles on a dvd is not text but a smaller movie overlaid and synched.
Chaining these quick searches together would be cool too - being able to search email, windows, newsfeeds, history for keywords and have a clearly delineated resultset returned would be magical.
For some reason I can't get a 'feeds' pane on the sidebar unless I set up a mail account (may have changed in O9), but I can get it from the mail toolbar under 'Feeds' ...
Saving a page with attachements saves everything into one directory which gets messy quickly - firefox does this action rather handily by saving attachments and such into a seperate directory...
Opacity (is this supported in 9?), curved edges and generally more CSS3 support - gecko has these already but I assume they're waiting until they have better CSS3 support to rename them to something other than their current proprietry names (mozilla-something). If support for curved edges is there it will force IE to catch up because users don't want to know they're missing out on all that fancy cool hip stuff. Also I bloody well hate all those silly image hacks.
Better download support - bittorrent is cool, but your standard download will not auto-resume if it loses the connection.
A bit of web2.0-ness: ability to tagging emails/feeds/bookmarks combined with the chained search to sort/rank/filter results.
A single-click backup that saves a 'snapshot' of browser state (interface setup/bookmarks/open windows/shortcuts) that can be retrieved and restored from a remote location - this would enable roaming profiles and I can get Opera setup with a single login or soemthing from an alien computer and have it work perfectly. Of course it gets scrubbed on some sort of logout. It would also allow fairly transition tool to those who run multiple versions of Opera over multiple OS's
Not for the casual user, but a 'summary' feature that sums up available internal/external links, resources (images/plugins/downloads) and a list of previously visited pages of this domain - currently these can be accessed via the 'links' and 'history' panes, but a summary feature (a usermode css hack?) that could be displayed on the page or exported to a file would be handy for those who want to understand a saved page or an older page in context. I'm sure this could probably be done with the user-javascript plugin engine too.
Also on Linux I have this weird spacing problem in textfields and such - it might be a problem with my actual box (it has lots of problems atm), but nothing else is acting this way .. is this being addressed or should I send a bugreport?
w3003
It could explain why Duke3D (bless his zombie bones) was so damn popular - amazing level of interaction, esp. with strippers (shake em baby) who you could then kill and spawn more things to destroy (pipe bombs in the spawn areas:) It's the same with all the various GTA incarnations, even the original top down GTA - theres nothing quite like making police cars squish people by forcing them onto the pavements. Or paying hookers then running them over.
It might also be related to the uncanny valley more than bloodlust - I've noticed with more recent games, as the in-game women become more lifelike and belivable (HL2), there is a real distaste in killing them, or having them killed. With older or less realistic games the NPCs are all similar, they all gib the same way - even the screaming is the same ... and one grows somewhat hardened (bored?) with it all.
Or hell, despite the tits they could just be shite for games.
Regarding the article, I'm waiting for a more mature approach to adult games - it's a sure sign of growing up when boobs, bums and giblets just don't do it anymore.
As a Python guy this sort of thing makes me laugh
Oooooh ~ a godbox of gaming. It would have to play my pirated japanese Jet Set Radio though.
KHAAAAAAAAAAAN!
seems to work fine on Opera 8.02
yes and no. In an open tab, write the new URL in the address bar and do shift+enter - it opens the address in a new tab. using ctrl+shift+enter instead will open the address in a new tab in the background (current tab keeps focus).
Hopes this helps some.
http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?
With GAIM I got it to work with:
Screen Name: (everything before the @gmail.com)
Server: gmail.com
Resource: Gaim
Password: (obvious..)
Alias: (leave blank)
Use TLS if available (checked) .. (unchecked)
Force old SSL (unchecked)
Allow plaintext auth
Port: 5222
Connect server: talk.google.com
And everything Just Works(tm)!
Put your money where your ears are... and consider donating. Registration for IT Conversations is free it seems, but bandwidth isn't.
She sounds a little hysterical in the first two questions, but her illustration of the differences between the movies is quite interesting ... especially that Arnie quote ;)
I would like to read that book of hers though...
I got left behind in maths from the very start of high school, I got only so far before all the abstract concepts were simply not taking root, even with extra schooling. It just became this malaise of numbers and nonsense from year 8 (when HS starts in Australia) to halfway through year 10 when I was finally able to stop it forever. Maths was torture, I would fail everything and I had no interest in it whatsoever. We had these huge maths tomes we were supposed to work through every semester, "from page 216 to 309 today, then pages 310, 312 to 324 for homework!". pfft, nuts to that - I had been left behind long ago and I just didn't care.
"Classroom based education is a system whereby naturally curious, intelligent children are forced to sit in a boring classroom, and forced to stand in line, in preparation for a mundane manufacturing job..."
goddamn right. I'm sure something of HS stuck, but I honestly cannot remember most of it: they were just long years of tedium, looking out of the window and waiting for lunch. What I do remember however was towards the end of year 12 (last year of HS in Aust.) was my questioning of everything ... from good and bad and right and wrong, to why these kids were popular, and why I was picked on ... I really took off at that point, and came into my own, and now, six years down the track and finishing my BA of Software Engineering after completing my BA of Visual Arts & Applied Design, I'm looking for courses on absolute basic maths ... because I want to learn it now.
I'm surprised I got as far as I did in HS and passed it so well, because I don't feel like I deserved the marks I got, everything was halfarsed because I just had no enthusiasm for any of it.
I will not be sending my kids to any HS because I feel it is fundamentally broken, unrewarding and flawed, from the teachers to the curriculum to the grades. Alternatives must exist.
</vent>
The dedicated blog discusses more than just two cases. The original article (the much longer one at legal affairs) discusses in depth the common practise of incest and rape in the closeted communities, and the insufficient punishment (if any) that inevitably leads to continuing abuse. The abc article is a followup to the original article about the sentencing of one of the perpetrators (a brother), the go article is indeed covering the same ground as the original, but is much shorter and more to the point.