It's been there for a while. It first appeared in Slackware 8.0 in the contrib portion of the distro:
Mon Apr 2 15:30:09 PDT 2001 contrib/java/: Added Java(TM) 2 SDK, Standard Edition,
Version 1.3.0_02. Thanks to Sun Microsystems for
allowing us to include this with Slackware.
It was moved to the official, standard set of Slackware packages in Slackware 9.1:
Tue Aug 12 12:49:36 PDT 2003 d/j2sdk-1_4_2-i586-1.tgz: Added Sun's Java(TM) 2 Software Development Kit,
Standard Edition, Version 1.4.2 (from j2sdk-1_4_2-linux-i586.bin).
Note that Slackware is a bit more relaxed with license requirements than most other distros. Most of the software is under the GPL, BSD and the like, but there are some exceptions, including Java and, for example, Xv, which is shareware.
If I recall correctly they wrote the first MS-DOS manuals using troff/nroff on their own flavor of Unix, so they definitely knew what Unix was, what directories were, and how they were separated on major OS available at the time.
I tried For a Change very briefly, it is very interesting. The writing is intriguing. I'll have to play it more seriously.
Dan Schmidt, by the way, worked in the game industry, at Looking Glass Studio, a name I'm sure many slashdotters are familiar with. He has a great anecdote about commenting code here:
Just to clarify: the way Photopia is told is very non-linear (fragments of a story that only make sense when the last one is revealed), but the gaming experience itself is very linear. Actually, it is so linear that some people have argued that Photopia is not a game but a merely a story where you press Next regularly. (This is wrong: there are puzzles, though not very hard.)
Photopia is very powerful, a dramatic short story that haunts you for a long time. Another of my best gaming memories.
Spider and Web is memorable for the extraordinary way the story is told, and for the impact this has on the main puzzle. Understanding and "solving" it at exactly the right time is one of the gaming memories I'm most fond of.
Gregory Montoir started writing an open-source interpreter for the Another World data files in 2004, but was contacted by Eric Chahi who asked him to stop, because he was planning to release the Hi-Res edition for the PC (err, Windows actually). Gregory agreed and pulled the sources (and kept working on other projects, such as a similar interpreter for Flashback).
His work was not completely lost however: two ports to less popular hardware platforms were created using the interpreter, and Eric Chachi allowed them to be distributed in binary form. This is how the GP32 and Dreamcast ports came to be. However, it seems the Dreamcast port is mostly abandoned, and was very buggy to begin with.
The only link to something that looks like a Dreamcast binary I could find (the page says it is buggy and doesn't allow the game to be completed): http://dcreload.free.fr/ficherawdc.php
By the way, the interpreter for the Flashback data files is here (it works very well under Linux, the game can be finished, it has nice graphics modes; great work!): http://cyxdown.free.fr/reminiscence/
Games are getting ported to mobile devices
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It looks like more and more "abandoned" games are being ported to mobile devices, the low resolution, low power of which is a good match to the capabilities of the computers they were developed on, that many years ago.
Currently, it mostly contains classical Amiga titles, ported to Symbian-compatible phones. I guess in a couple of years it will also contains PC games from the mid-nineties, as mobile devices keep improving.
If I was owning the rights to a famous computer game of yore, I sure would be very cautious, today more than ever, not to miss an opportunity to license it again. Today is a bad day for abandonware.
Another World is no longer abandonware
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Another World (aka Out Of This World in the US), a technological predecessor to Flashback and a great, mythical game on its own, lost its abandonware status a few days ago when a High Resolution Collector's Edition was released by its author, Eric Chahi. It is currently being sold online for 7 euros, a demo is available. You can also play the official Gameboy Advance port, if you have an emulator or a flashable game cartridge.
I don't think the attitude is snobbishness, I think it's fear of being found out to be non-omniscient.
I'm sure it's more snobbishness than fear of being found non-omniscient, but it's also two more things:
Not wanting to be disturbed from one's quiet daily chatty IRC routine (that applies to somewhat useless nerds that cling to a project to the embarrassment of its developers).
Time is scarce, and helping someone is only rewarding the first few times. Afterwards it becomes a chore, and nobody likes to do chores, especially when there are so much more interesting stuff to do on the project (that applies to most project developers).
IMHO, what this is is nothing more than Just Another ailing Tech Site that is trying to bump up their hits by posting some crazy article that speculates some crazy stuff and then get it on a site that will generate some traffic. Hell, the name of the guy who reported this is a freaking LINK to that crappy sites front page.
I propose we tag such stories with "trafficwhore".
from a French translation, that was poor to begin with
Care to argue that? I may not have the best of litterary taste, but the French translation (which I read this past week-end, just before Mr. Lem died) seemed fine to me. Clearly better than many other translations I've read.
Any links to texts explaining why the French translation is poor are welcomed.
You can simply use SQLite to read the data. The standard implementation comes with a proof-of-concept command line utility called sqlite which you can use to perform SQL queries on whatever SQLite database you want. You can probably script it, if not, sqlite is available wrapped in *plenty* of scripting languages (e.g. pysqlite for Python) which will allow you to develop tools to work on the database.
Surely, for the individual who just wants to copy some URLs from a text file, things have gone worse.
But for everything else, things have gone much better! It is now much easier to develop innovative tools on top of the bookmarks and history databases. History which, by the way, was almost totally unexploitable before that. Queries, stats, etc. People can go crazy!:)
I've done that in the past, it's good enough to measure a "big" appliance while it works, it's however much more tedious when it comes to measuring their standby consumption.
Still, it allowed me to discover that my parent's house burns around 100 W at idle, which disturbed me and left me wanting to know more.
Thanks a lot for the model name! I looked it up with Google and found a French store carying a localized version with a 25% discount. I just ordered one for 28.5 euros, shipping included!:)
Does anybody know of similarly cheap models for Europe? They would need to support 220-240 V @ 50 Hz, and the standard (almost) European plug. I did some search back in December but was only able to find $150 models... Way too much for me.
By the way, have look at this Electricity around the world page. The huge amount of different plug shapes is maddening.
One would expect that being about open-source and all, and with a purpose of helping open-source developers improve the quality of their code, they would publish the report on a governement website somewhere. C'mon, where's the link?
In between machine-drying and good-old unassisted line-drying, I have become quite fond of fan-assisted line-drying. Nothing fancy: just a classical electric fan (about 20 inches in diameter), rotating towards the clothes at power level 1 (out of 3), left on while I go to work.
At about 40 W for 10 hours, this uses maybe one third the energy of a typical drying-machine run, and gets most of my clothes dry in one day (including fragile stuff that cannot go in a dryer), in an apartment that is otherwise rather tightly shut down during winter. Neat.:)
I use XOSL on all my machines, it has the best GUI of all the bootloaders I've seen (GAG is a joke in comparison), and most of the features I need.
Unfortunately, its author tried to start the development of a new version on SourceForge, apparently failed, and disappeared without releasing the source code. That was five years ago, nothing has moved since then. Thankfully, the PC architecture has not evolved much, so XOSL still works well. I could use a good support for USB drives, though.:-/
While I haven't verified this myself, and can't provide links to confirm this, a good friend of mine says that when Google first launched Google Maps with worldwide coverage, he looked at a nearby French military base and was surprised that everything was plainly visible -- buildings, airport lanes, maybe some vehicles. When he checked again a few months later, things were blanked out. It seems someone somewhere made the appropriate phone calls.
So, Google is willing to help governments hide sensitive locations, and I would be surprised India gets a different treatment -- it's just a matter of providing the appropriate info.
Hopefully, this won't get abused (blank countries, anyone?), but so far with the U.S.A. and at least France, such blanking has been done with the right balance.
whitespace has meaning in Python. (...) a programming language choice that introduces unnecessary barriers to blind students
How is that a barrier? I would expect non-blind people to have more problems with whitespace (they can hardly see if there's three or four spaces) than blind people (their interfaces should say each whitespace, or their fingers should feel them). Unless of course their interfaces collapse whitespace, in which case they should be improved.
Admittedly, I don't know much (almost nothing) about such interfaces, but I'm genuinely curious about the problems you say Python is causing.
(Note that Python doesn't care about the size of indentation: one-space indentation is ok.)
looking at those rules, I really doubt it would ever block something you wanted.
They block a great number of site that talk about ADSL. That's a very classic error French users do, who then go complain that they can't access http://adsl.free.fr/, the homepage of the broadband plan of a major ISP here (and clearly the best for techies who don't have huge wads of money).
Except in reality the Slashdot team members became employees of OSTG when they sold the site. They have a manager, they have tasks set before them, and these are OSTG tasks, not Slashdot tasks. They work on Newsforge, too, on Freshmeat code, etc.
They probably have a set number of hours per day to work on Slashdot, and do not have enough time to properly wade through the huge flow of incoming stories, and no, OSTG probably cannot hire more "editors".
That's good old business as usual: not enough employees, not enough money, not enough time, too much work to do.
Slashdot Mirror
If I recall correctly they wrote the first MS-DOS manuals using troff/nroff on their own flavor of Unix, so they definitely knew what Unix was, what directories were, and how they were separated on major OS available at the time.
I tried For a Change very briefly, it is very interesting. The writing is intriguing. I'll have to play it more seriously.
Dan Schmidt, by the way, worked in the game industry, at Looking Glass Studio, a name I'm sure many slashdotters are familiar with. He has a great anecdote about commenting code here:
How not to comment code (Ultima Underworld example)
http://www.dfan.org/writing/comment.html
Just to clarify: the way Photopia is told is very non-linear (fragments of a story that only make sense when the last one is revealed), but the gaming experience itself is very linear. Actually, it is so linear that some people have argued that Photopia is not a game but a merely a story where you press Next regularly. (This is wrong: there are puzzles, though not very hard.)
Photopia is very powerful, a dramatic short story that haunts you for a long time. Another of my best gaming memories.
Spider and Web is memorable for the extraordinary way the story is told, and for the impact this has on the main puzzle. Understanding and "solving" it at exactly the right time is one of the gaming memories I'm most fond of.
Gregory Montoir started writing an open-source interpreter for the Another World data files in 2004, but was contacted by Eric Chahi who asked him to stop, because he was planning to release the Hi-Res edition for the PC (err, Windows actually). Gregory agreed and pulled the sources (and kept working on other projects, such as a similar interpreter for Flashback).
His work was not completely lost however: two ports to less popular hardware platforms were created using the interpreter, and Eric Chachi allowed them to be distributed in binary form. This is how the GP32 and Dreamcast ports came to be. However, it seems the Dreamcast port is mostly abandoned, and was very buggy to begin with.
More information here:
http://cyxdown.free.fr/raw/
The only link to something that looks like a Dreamcast binary I could find
(the page says it is buggy and doesn't allow the game to be completed):
http://dcreload.free.fr/ficherawdc.php
By the way, the interpreter for the Flashback data files is here
(it works very well under Linux, the game can be finished, it has nice graphics modes; great work!):
http://cyxdown.free.fr/reminiscence/
It looks like more and more "abandoned" games are being ported to mobile devices, the low resolution, low power of which is a good match to the capabilities of the computers they were developed on, that many years ago.
Check this page for example:
http://www.magic-productions.fr/mobile_games.php
Currently, it mostly contains classical Amiga titles, ported to Symbian-compatible phones. I guess in a couple of years it will also contains PC games from the mid-nineties, as mobile devices keep improving.
If I was owning the rights to a famous computer game of yore, I sure would be very cautious, today more than ever, not to miss an opportunity to license it again. Today is a bad day for abandonware.
Another World (aka Out Of This World in the US), a technological predecessor to Flashback and a great, mythical game on its own, lost its abandonware status a few days ago when a High Resolution Collector's Edition was released by its author, Eric Chahi. It is currently being sold online for 7 euros, a demo is available. You can also play the official Gameboy Advance port, if you have an emulator or a flashable game cartridge.
h tm
= us
a nworld.inc
Official Website (still being translated; download links at the bottom of the page)
http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/index.
Official Website in French (lots of very interesting details about the making of the game)
http://www.anotherworld.fr/
Buying the Game
http://www.magic-productions.fr/aw/index.php?lang
Official Gameboy Advance Port
http://www.foxysofts.com/index.php?l=content/gba/
An Excellent Review (from an excellent site)
http://www.idlethumbs.net/display.php?id=13
An Excellent Interview (from same site)
http://www.idlethumbs.net/display.php?id=44
I'm sure it's more snobbishness than fear of being found non-omniscient, but it's also two more things:
Thanks to whoever modded the parent Informative. You made my day! :-D
I propose we tag such stories with "trafficwhore".
Care to argue that? I may not have the best of litterary taste, but the French translation (which I read this past week-end, just before Mr. Lem died) seemed fine to me. Clearly better than many other translations I've read.
Any links to texts explaining why the French translation is poor are welcomed.
You can simply use SQLite to read the data. The standard implementation comes with a proof-of-concept command line utility called sqlite which you can use to perform SQL queries on whatever SQLite database you want. You can probably script it, if not, sqlite is available wrapped in *plenty* of scripting languages (e.g. pysqlite for Python) which will allow you to develop tools to work on the database.
:)
Surely, for the individual who just wants to copy some URLs from a text file, things have gone worse.
But for everything else, things have gone much better! It is now much easier to develop innovative tools on top of the bookmarks and history databases. History which, by the way, was almost totally unexploitable before that. Queries, stats, etc. People can go crazy!
I've done that in the past, it's good enough to measure a "big" appliance while it works, it's however much more tedious when it comes to measuring their standby consumption.
Still, it allowed me to discover that my parent's house burns around 100 W at idle, which disturbed me and left me wanting to know more.
Thanks a lot for the reference! I chose to but the Energy Check 3000 instead, but it's good to know there are several alternatives available.
Thanks a lot for the model name! I looked it up with Google and found a French store carying a localized version with a 25% discount. I just ordered one for 28.5 euros, shipping included! :)
Does anybody know of similarly cheap models for Europe? They would need to support 220-240 V @ 50 Hz, and the standard (almost) European plug. I did some search back in December but was only able to find $150 models... Way too much for me.
By the way, have look at this Electricity around the world page. The huge amount of different plug shapes is maddening.
When you have an XML document, you can convert it to *any* other XML format with a simple XSLT stylesheet
Somehow, I feel the word simple is inappropriate here. XSLT style sheets are hairy beasts, powerful, but tough to master.
One would expect that being about open-source and all, and with a purpose of helping open-source developers improve the quality of their code, they would publish the report on a governement website somewhere. C'mon, where's the link?
In between machine-drying and good-old unassisted line-drying, I have become quite fond of fan-assisted line-drying. Nothing fancy: just a classical electric fan (about 20 inches in diameter), rotating towards the clothes at power level 1 (out of 3), left on while I go to work.
:)
At about 40 W for 10 hours, this uses maybe one third the energy of a typical drying-machine run, and gets most of my clothes dry in one day (including fragile stuff that cannot go in a dryer), in an apartment that is otherwise rather tightly shut down during winter. Neat.
I use XOSL on all my machines, it has the best GUI of all the bootloaders I've seen (GAG is a joke in comparison), and most of the features I need.
:-/
Unfortunately, its author tried to start the development of a new version on SourceForge, apparently failed, and disappeared without releasing the source code. That was five years ago, nothing has moved since then. Thankfully, the PC architecture has not evolved much, so XOSL still works well. I could use a good support for USB drives, though.
While I haven't verified this myself, and can't provide links to confirm this, a good friend of mine says that when Google first launched Google Maps with worldwide coverage, he looked at a nearby French military base and was surprised that everything was plainly visible -- buildings, airport lanes, maybe some vehicles. When he checked again a few months later, things were blanked out. It seems someone somewhere made the appropriate phone calls.
So, Google is willing to help governments hide sensitive locations, and I would be surprised India gets a different treatment -- it's just a matter of providing the appropriate info.
Hopefully, this won't get abused (blank countries, anyone?), but so far with the U.S.A. and at least France, such blanking has been done with the right balance.
whitespace has meaning in Python. (...) a programming language choice that introduces unnecessary barriers to blind students
How is that a barrier? I would expect non-blind people to have more problems with whitespace (they can hardly see if there's three or four spaces) than blind people (their interfaces should say each whitespace, or their fingers should feel them). Unless of course their interfaces collapse whitespace, in which case they should be improved.
Admittedly, I don't know much (almost nothing) about such interfaces, but I'm genuinely curious about the problems you say Python is causing.
(Note that Python doesn't care about the size of indentation: one-space indentation is ok.)
looking at those rules, I really doubt it would ever block something you wanted.
They block a great number of site that talk about ADSL. That's a very classic error French users do, who then go complain that they can't access http://adsl.free.fr/, the homepage of the broadband plan of a major ISP here (and clearly the best for techies who don't have huge wads of money).
Except in reality the Slashdot team members became employees of OSTG when they sold the site. They have a manager, they have tasks set before them, and these are OSTG tasks, not Slashdot tasks. They work on Newsforge, too, on Freshmeat code, etc.
They probably have a set number of hours per day to work on Slashdot, and do not have enough time to properly wade through the huge flow of incoming stories, and no, OSTG probably cannot hire more "editors".
That's good old business as usual: not enough employees, not enough money, not enough time, too much work to do.