Okay. Apparently localhost is now blocked, at least it didn't give me the reply you guys got. But 127.0.0.1 still works. Since they're reading the Slashdot comments, I guess they'll take care of that at some point close by, though.:)
No, you're wrong. You might have your own little definition of sci-fi, which I'm sure makes a lot of sense - I might even agree! - but that does not change the fact that it's different from the (admittedly vague) definition most people have. And most people would classify Star Wars as science fiction. Language is the one thing where the majority is always right - it tends to be wrong about mostly everything else.
"While a relatively small game as defined by player count"
ATITD has a small user base compared to massively multiplayer games like EverQuest or DAoC. Of course player count is only one way to define a game's size, you could also refer to depth or amount of content.
"A Tale in the Desert was a rather robust experiment into just how much crafting a massive online gamer would like to do"
Crafting is one of the things nearly all MMRPGs have - a crafter refines resources and builds new items from them. The amount of crafting an MMRPG has varies, in ATITD it was basically the focus of the gameplay (along with social interaction). In other MMRPGs that would be combat.
The wording "a massive online gamer" should probably be "a gamer of massively multiplayer online games", although that's a fairly obvious mistake.
So in conclusion, due to the focus on crafting, ATITD was in a way an experiment if players would be content with this gameplay style. Since it was a very thorough experiment, it was also robust. It was an experiment because nobody tried that before, at least not to the extremes ATITD did.
I think some continental Europeans would also be offended if Scots were called Europeans. Not that I would. And I really don't think there are any significant differences that don't also exist within continental Europe.
"(Of course, I'd feel better if Kerry showed some sign of caring too, but at least I don't think he'll go out of his way to start yet another war just for the hell of it.)"
Main Entry: warmonger Pronunciation: 'wor-"m&[ng]-g&r, -"mä[ng]- Function: noun
: one who urges or attempts to stir up war : JINGO
Is it? Who cares? There are plenty of idiots to fill their places. Certainly more than 3 years ago.
one major terrorist state has been liberated
Mission accomplished, eh? Not exactly the impression you get watching the news.
and either Syria or Iran will also fall if Bush gets the second term
They will "fall"? What's entailed by that? Nation-wide anarchy? Terrorism? Tens of thousands killed by weaponry, hundreds of thousands starved to death? Proliferation of arms that were previously in the hands of the respective government? Sounds great.
They were in the middle of a World War and probably didn't want to spend any resources on stuff like this. And when you've got V2 rockets going off daily this probably loses some of its apparent threat.
I agree, it still doesn't mean it's a 'perfect' copy, which is the crux of the RIAA's argument.
Why wouldn't it mean that? I mean, it's purely a matter of how you define "perfect". It's not a bit-for-bit copy of a CD, no. But how is that relevant? Music production and reception is (typically) analogue to begin with, so you could argue that there is no such thing as a perfect copy, certainly not in the reduced precision of any digital medium. But then the term "perfect copy" would be fairly useless. And in fact, I'd probably say there is some merit to this: there is no such thing as a perfect copy of a piece of music. There's always some sort of loss when compared to the original. However, perfection is not a binary state, it's a range, and a subjective one to boot. CDs are considered by nearly all people to be "perfect enough" copies of music. FM radio is less perfect, as are tapes. And of course, MP3 at 320 kbps is also "perfect enough" for nearly all people, while MP3 at 64k probably is not.
I think it'd be more correct to refer to fidelity in this context instead of whether one copy is perfect or not.
* Except Greece, where presumably it's still pronounced "pseu".
It's also pronounced that way in German-language countries. And I could imagine Scandinavian languages also pronounce it that way, I'm not certain, though.
As you say, CS: Source will be free for people who own HL2. I think it will also be free for the folks who bought CS: Condition Zero. On the other hand, if you're not part of either crowd, it'll also be possible to buy CS: Source as a standalone game. I'm certain it won't be full price, though.
And the fact that Office apps are mostly loaded into memory at boot, thus providing the illusion of speed when they're 'opened', hasn't been pointed out to you?
Got some more information on that? I searched for it, and I found:
Microsoft Office Startup - Microsoft Office Startup preloads some.DLL files to help speed the launch of Microsoft Office. Also places icon in System Tray.
Apart from the fact that I've never seen this - but then, I'm using Office 2000 - preloading some DLL files is still far from being "mostly loaded at boot". Note that my winword also takes 2 seconds (I measured it) the first time I start it. Subsequent starts are instant. So, yeah, 2 seconds are not really an illusion of speed, they just are that fast. I guess.
The unofficial debs linked to from the site you linked to - which incidently is the first result when searching for "mplayer debian" - worked fine for me. Took me all of 3 minutes to install mplayer, without a whole lot of Debian experience incidently. I certainly wouldn't call that almost impossible.:) OTOH maybe I just had a streak of luck...
Both 2000 and XP have a command line application called netstat - I'd have thought it imitates the GNU netstat...? It certainly was useful to me a couple of times.
These are nice and I had fun reading them, but to be honest I don't think they're less complicated than the original one some ancestor post mentioned. In fact, the original one was simple enough that I understood it with 9th grade maths, while yours I only understand because I've had (or am having) some maths in college.:)
The point is that choice has it's problems, apart from all the positive sides it has. I certainly can sympathise with his claims. Take mostly any major Linux application and there will be at least two main software choices any countless minor ones: KDE or Gnome, or one of a thousand small WM/desktop environments? Sendmail or postfix? Redhat or SuSE, Debian or Gentoo? Vim or Emacs, Nano or Joe? Mplayer or Xine? And along with these choices come lots of other aspects: different software distribution schemes in both source and binary form, different core user interfaces, different configuration styles - XML config? GUI? plain? two out of three?
Sure, some of these are inconsequential - I don't think there's any problem with having two l33t text editors and a lot of editors for the rest of us. But for some things it'd be really, really nice if they were standardized. In my eyes, that's first and foremost the packaging system and the configuration, although especially the latter is probably extremely difficult to standardise in a meaningful way - note that "put system settings in/etc and individual settings in ~/.programname" is not a meaningful standard.:)
For example the proof I showed depends upon the sceptic accepting that 8.999999... = 9 for it to work -
If that was true, it would not be a proof in any meaningful sense - circular arguments don't prove anything. But I really don't see how this applies to the proof you gave.
Actually, now that I thought about some more, I do, in a way. The key equality in question is: 0.999... x 10 = 9.999... For this to "work" you have to accept that the part after the decimal point of both numbers is equal, ie that the left side doesn't have one more 9 than the right side, as would be the case if there were only a finite number of nines and not an infinite amount. So in order for this proof to make sense you have to understand there is such a thing as an infinite amount of periodic numbers after the decimal point.
So yeah. I still disagree, this is not a circular argument, and you don't have to accept 0.999... = 1 for the proof to work. (In fact, I didn't know about it and was quite astounded when I first stumbled on this on an Internet forum 4 or 5 years ago, but the proof made sense.) You do have to accept that 0.999... does mean that the series of nines never ends, and of course infinity is a hard concept to really understand. And it still feels weird to me that 1 and 0.999... are effectively just two different notations of absolutely the same number, just like 1/2 and 0.5 are.
The dangerous bit isn't with the AIM side of this exploit. The dangerous bit is with the browser side.
Not really. A browser seeing an internet protocol it doesn't know how to use basically has two choices: ignore it or let somebody else worry about it. Ignoring it is not a Good Thing, since there clearly are cases where externel URLs are useful (mail:, news:, ed2k:, irc:, and so on). And considering there already is a database of protocols and installed programs that handle them in the Windows registry it makes a lot of sense to use it and let the program associated with the protocol deal with it.
Opera apparently has gone a middle route for some time now, since it allows you to specify trusted external protocols and associated applications. Protocols not on that list are ignored (I assume). This works very well, but of course it's really quite redundant, the same things already in the registry. Unfortunately there are protocols in the registry that shouldn't be, such as the shell thingie discussed some weeks ago.
No, the fault really totally lies with AIM in this case. For one thing, it should be blindingly obvious that having urls like aim:goaway?message=x are really insane, even if they worked as advertised without any bugs: it effectively allows any site you visit to set you AIM status. And potentially other things depending on what other commands the protocol knows (aim:run?)... And of course the buffer overflow is also an AIM bug.
Repeating Decimal on MathWorld. 1/2 = 0.5 = 0.49999... - I'm not sure what's philosophical about it, it's perhabs a bit counter-intuitive, but many things in Maths can be so, and as far as I know the equality is a proven fact and not really open for philosophical discussion...?
One might actually consider variable stars as messages from outer space...
Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars with periods less than ~3.75s. When they were first discovered at the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, England, their origin was unknown and they were thought to possible be signals from extraterrestrials. As a result, the first pulsar was named LGM-1, with LGM standing for "Little Green Men."
Well, from what I gather, Windows XP has both the GUI as well as a set of quite powerful administrative command line tools. I don't know anybody who uses the latter (I'm sure many people do), but that doesn't mean they don't exist... I guess a key difference is that you use the tools to administrate instead of editing files in/etc. Note that I really mean it when I say "from what I gather" and "I guess". Maybe someone else knows this stuff for a fact.
... why the sudden rush to download it from all manner of unsavory sources?
I'm downloading it, but I don't understand why anyone would download it from anywhere but Microsoft. There's really no need for a torrent, I doubt it's faster via BT and I don't really care if it's increasing Microsoft's bandwidth fees. It's not like there was such a thing as/.ing Microsoft...
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, it works for me too. But it didn't half an hour ago... I swear! Or maybe I just made some mistake. Damn, and I was feeling so smart. ;)
Okay. Apparently localhost is now blocked, at least it didn't give me the reply you guys got. But 127.0.0.1 still works. Since they're reading the Slashdot comments, I guess they'll take care of that at some point close by, though. :)
...Opera support...
Note that Opera 7.6 (currently in beta/development) has enhanced Gmail support. I just saw there is actually an entire website devoted to Gmail on Opera.
No, you're wrong. You might have your own little definition of sci-fi, which I'm sure makes a lot of sense - I might even agree! - but that does not change the fact that it's different from the (admittedly vague) definition most people have. And most people would classify Star Wars as science fiction. Language is the one thing where the majority is always right - it tends to be wrong about mostly everything else.
I was about to post exactly the same thing. The fact that it's "logical" behaviour has no bearing on its moral aspects.
Java is a lot simpler than C++.
Amen to that.
"While a relatively small game as defined by player count"
ATITD has a small user base compared to massively multiplayer games like EverQuest or DAoC. Of course player count is only one way to define a game's size, you could also refer to depth or amount of content.
"A Tale in the Desert was a rather robust experiment into just how much crafting a massive online gamer would like to do"
Crafting is one of the things nearly all MMRPGs have - a crafter refines resources and builds new items from them. The amount of crafting an MMRPG has varies, in ATITD it was basically the focus of the gameplay (along with social interaction). In other MMRPGs that would be combat.
The wording "a massive online gamer" should probably be "a gamer of massively multiplayer online games", although that's a fairly obvious mistake.
So in conclusion, due to the focus on crafting, ATITD was in a way an experiment if players would be content with this gameplay style. Since it was a very thorough experiment, it was also robust. It was an experiment because nobody tried that before, at least not to the extremes ATITD did.
HTH.
I think some continental Europeans would also be offended if Scots were called Europeans. Not that I would. And I really don't think there are any significant differences that don't also exist within continental Europe.
Probably from
"(Of course, I'd feel better if Kerry showed some sign of caring too, but at least I don't think he'll go out of his way to start yet another war just for the hell of it.)"
Main Entry: warmonger
Pronunciation: 'wor-"m&[ng]-g&r, -"mä[ng]-
Function: noun
: one who urges or attempts to stir up war : JINGO
Al Qaeda is in shambles
Is it? Who cares? There are plenty of idiots to fill their places. Certainly more than 3 years ago.
one major terrorist state has been liberated
Mission accomplished, eh? Not exactly the impression you get watching the news.
and either Syria or Iran will also fall if Bush gets the second term
They will "fall"? What's entailed by that? Nation-wide anarchy? Terrorism? Tens of thousands killed by weaponry, hundreds of thousands starved to death? Proliferation of arms that were previously in the hands of the respective government? Sounds great.
They were in the middle of a World War and probably didn't want to spend any resources on stuff like this. And when you've got V2 rockets going off daily this probably loses some of its apparent threat.
I agree, it still doesn't mean it's a 'perfect' copy, which is the crux of the RIAA's argument.
Why wouldn't it mean that? I mean, it's purely a matter of how you define "perfect". It's not a bit-for-bit copy of a CD, no. But how is that relevant? Music production and reception is (typically) analogue to begin with, so you could argue that there is no such thing as a perfect copy, certainly not in the reduced precision of any digital medium. But then the term "perfect copy" would be fairly useless.
And in fact, I'd probably say there is some merit to this: there is no such thing as a perfect copy of a piece of music. There's always some sort of loss when compared to the original. However, perfection is not a binary state, it's a range, and a subjective one to boot. CDs are considered by nearly all people to be "perfect enough" copies of music. FM radio is less perfect, as are tapes. And of course, MP3 at 320 kbps is also "perfect enough" for nearly all people, while MP3 at 64k probably is not.
I think it'd be more correct to refer to fidelity in this context instead of whether one copy is perfect or not.
* Except Greece, where presumably it's still pronounced "pseu".
It's also pronounced that way in German-language countries. And I could imagine Scandinavian languages also pronounce it that way, I'm not certain, though.
As you say, CS: Source will be free for people who own HL2. I think it will also be free for the folks who bought CS: Condition Zero. On the other hand, if you're not part of either crowd, it'll also be possible to buy CS: Source as a standalone game. I'm certain it won't be full price, though.
And the fact that Office apps are mostly loaded into memory at boot, thus providing the illusion of speed when they're 'opened', hasn't been pointed out to you?
.DLL files to help speed the launch of Microsoft Office. Also places icon in System Tray.
Got some more information on that? I searched for it, and I found:
Microsoft Office Startup - Microsoft Office Startup preloads some
Apart from the fact that I've never seen this - but then, I'm using Office 2000 - preloading some DLL files is still far from being "mostly loaded at boot". Note that my winword also takes 2 seconds (I measured it) the first time I start it. Subsequent starts are instant. So, yeah, 2 seconds are not really an illusion of speed, they just are that fast. I guess.
The unofficial debs linked to from the site you linked to - which incidently is the first result when searching for "mplayer debian" - worked fine for me. Took me all of 3 minutes to install mplayer, without a whole lot of Debian experience incidently. I certainly wouldn't call that almost impossible. :) OTOH maybe I just had a streak of luck...
Both 2000 and XP have a command line application called netstat - I'd have thought it imitates the GNU netstat...? It certainly was useful to me a couple of times.
These are nice and I had fun reading them, but to be honest I don't think they're less complicated than the original one some ancestor post mentioned. In fact, the original one was simple enough that I understood it with 9th grade maths, while yours I only understand because I've had (or am having) some maths in college. :)
The point is that choice has it's problems, apart from all the positive sides it has. I certainly can sympathise with his claims. Take mostly any major Linux application and there will be at least two main software choices any countless minor ones: KDE or Gnome, or one of a thousand small WM/desktop environments? Sendmail or postfix? Redhat or SuSE, Debian or Gentoo? Vim or Emacs, Nano or Joe? Mplayer or Xine? And along with these choices come lots of other aspects: different software distribution schemes in both source and binary form, different core user interfaces, different configuration styles - XML config? GUI? plain? two out of three?
/etc and individual settings in ~/.programname" is not a meaningful standard. :)
Sure, some of these are inconsequential - I don't think there's any problem with having two l33t text editors and a lot of editors for the rest of us. But for some things it'd be really, really nice if they were standardized. In my eyes, that's first and foremost the packaging system and the configuration, although especially the latter is probably extremely difficult to standardise in a meaningful way - note that "put system settings in
For example the proof I showed depends upon the sceptic accepting that 8.999999... = 9 for it to work -
If that was true, it would not be a proof in any meaningful sense - circular arguments don't prove anything. But I really don't see how this applies to the proof you gave.
Actually, now that I thought about some more, I do, in a way. The key equality in question is: 0.999... x 10 = 9.999...
For this to "work" you have to accept that the part after the decimal point of both numbers is equal, ie that the left side doesn't have one more 9 than the right side, as would be the case if there were only a finite number of nines and not an infinite amount. So in order for this proof to make sense you have to understand there is such a thing as an infinite amount of periodic numbers after the decimal point.
So yeah. I still disagree, this is not a circular argument, and you don't have to accept 0.999... = 1 for the proof to work. (In fact, I didn't know about it and was quite astounded when I first stumbled on this on an Internet forum 4 or 5 years ago, but the proof made sense.) You do have to accept that 0.999... does mean that the series of nines never ends, and of course infinity is a hard concept to really understand. And it still feels weird to me that 1 and 0.999... are effectively just two different notations of absolutely the same number, just like 1/2 and 0.5 are.
The dangerous bit isn't with the AIM side of this exploit. The dangerous bit is with the browser side.
Not really. A browser seeing an internet protocol it doesn't know how to use basically has two choices: ignore it or let somebody else worry about it. Ignoring it is not a Good Thing, since there clearly are cases where externel URLs are useful (mail:, news:, ed2k:, irc:, and so on).
And considering there already is a database of protocols and installed programs that handle them in the Windows registry it makes a lot of sense to use it and let the program associated with the protocol deal with it.
Opera apparently has gone a middle route for some time now, since it allows you to specify trusted external protocols and associated applications. Protocols not on that list are ignored (I assume). This works very well, but of course it's really quite redundant, the same things already in the registry. Unfortunately there are protocols in the registry that shouldn't be, such as the shell thingie discussed some weeks ago.
No, the fault really totally lies with AIM in this case. For one thing, it should be blindingly obvious that having urls like aim:goaway?message=x are really insane, even if they worked as advertised without any bugs: it effectively allows any site you visit to set you AIM status. And potentially other things depending on what other commands the protocol knows (aim:run?)... And of course the buffer overflow is also an AIM bug.
Repeating Decimal on MathWorld. 1/2 = 0.5 = 0.49999... - I'm not sure what's philosophical about it, it's perhabs a bit counter-intuitive, but many things in Maths can be so, and as far as I know the equality is a proven fact and not really open for philosophical discussion...?
Well, from what I gather, Windows XP has both the GUI as well as a set of quite powerful administrative command line tools. I don't know anybody who uses the latter (I'm sure many people do), but that doesn't mean they don't exist... I guess a key difference is that you use the tools to administrate instead of editing files in /etc. Note that I really mean it when I say "from what I gather" and "I guess". Maybe someone else knows this stuff for a fact.
... why the sudden rush to download it from all manner of unsavory sources?
/.ing Microsoft...
I'm downloading it, but I don't understand why anyone would download it from anywhere but Microsoft. There's really no need for a torrent, I doubt it's faster via BT and I don't really care if it's increasing Microsoft's bandwidth fees. It's not like there was such a thing as