Is this an RPG is the sense of a `rôle-playing game', that is, a shared experience with coöperative story-telling drawing upon the skills and imagination of the players to pretend to be something they're not? Is this a mere video `game' masquerading as an RPG--you know, just a pseudo-random `roll-playing game' involving rolls of the dice rather than a `rôle-playing game' involving play-acting using alternate personæ?
This is probably revealing of my complete naïveté in these matters, but so be it. It's a real question, and I'd like to know the answer. I honestly don't know which kind of RPG (roll or rôle) it is, and would like to.
I believe I can attribute much of my early interest in computing to gaming experiences during my tender years. I was employee number nineteen or so working for the notorious Gary Gygax back in Lake Geneva at TSR Hobbies during junior and senior high school. I hated the tedious mechanics of die rolls, although delighted in inventing new formulæ for various gaming systems. I wanted some kind of mathematical basis for all the endless systems (combat, magic, etc), but didn't want to think about it once it got running.
That way everyone could really get into their assumed rôles. Group story-telling was always what RPGs were really about, and where they were at their best. It didn't matter whether you were playing Dungeons and Dragons, Boot Hill, Empire of the Petal Throne, Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha, In the Labyrinth, Rune Quest, Chivalry and Sorcery, Space Opera, or any of the other classic RPGs. It was the childlike wonder of dynamically invented worlds that made these games truly excellent. It's like the `make believe' games children have always played, and which adults sometimes play as well.
I was also wondering whether someone might have a regular tarball of this stuff that actually comes with files that aren't SCREAMING AT YOU, Makefiles that actually work, source code that isn't polluted with spurious carriage returns all over it, READMEs that bother describe what the thing is for or how to build it? A Configure script and and patches that let it compile under standard C would be nice, too.
I guess I'm spoiled by begin used to:
$ tar zxf foopack-1.00.tar.gz $ cd foopack-1.00 $ sh configure $ make all test && sudo make install
I've always wondered why programs that get autoconfed don't come with a makefile that knows to automatically run configure the first time if it hasn't been run before. That way you can "just type make".
(PS: I am fully aware that my spelling in this posting has the air of Wardour Street about it. I was trying to exaggerate the visual distinction between rolls and rôles, so decided to go with the flow.:-)
Now after all of this was said and done, you realized that your life would be a lot easier if you made a few modifications to your nifty compiler. The extensions would not be ANSI C compatible, but they could be turned off. After all, the chances of you using a different compiler than the one you created (which runs on every platform ever) are very slim.
The default should be Standard C, not Stallman C. You should have to take special steps to get the non-standard (deftly avoiding sub-standard and super-standard) behaviour. Don't make the default non-portable. This is embrace and extend.
Also: it's really quite reasonable to expect code to build under a different compiler than the original one that you built the program for.
From my experience all C compilers want to lock you down to one platform or another.
That problem, clearly severe, is why we have specs and standards to which conformance can be measured. If a compiler for a standarized language locks you in to that compiler rather than to a standard, then this is a major snafu. Standard C should be source-compatible. It doesn't matter whose compiler you use.
Man, there should be a word for "fucking idiot who wrongly miscorrects something that's already right".
There more or less is. It's called paradiorthosis, which is defined as an improper or false correction. By analogy with mitosis, osmosis and narcosis, I suppose that could produce words such as paradiorthoses (the plural), paradiorthotic, paradiorthoticism, and paradiorthotically. I'm not sure what you'd call the particular idiot who customarily committed the foul act. A paradiorthotician or paradiorthotist, perhaps.
But I can virtually guarantee you that having a word for it won't make the problem go away.:-)
This is very easy to explain. Imagine three ten-{dollar,pound} notes. Now, trade these in for pennies. The 2000th penny came from the second note, not from the third one.
Moreover, the media, should they ever catch wind of this, will surely refer to it as a `hacking incident', as they have before in similar situations. It would be unfortunate to see Freenix and hacking tied together that way.
For various reasons either obvious or opaque to you, strftime() does not exist in Perl.
That's not true.
% perl -MPOSIX -e 'print strftime("It is now %A the %d of %B in %Y here.\n", localtime())'
It is now Saturday the 01 of January in 2000 here.
As for your cut-and-paste remarks, that can be attributed to how many desperate nonprogrammers use perl who wouldn't dream of trying to use C++. They're doing the best they can, but nobody ever told them the "right" way.
I see you've neglected to cover Java and Javascript, too.
I don't see how people who don't know libraries in Perl are any different that people who don't know libraries in C. I already mentioned this code:
printf("Y2K will begin on %s %d, 19%02d\n", $months[$t->mon], $t->mday, $t->year);
In both those programs, the result is:
Y2K will begin on January 1, 19100
Sure, I could have used strftime() in both of them. Or, I could have learned about what localtime() returns. But both require one thing: RingTFM. People don't do that. It doesn't matter the language. So they suffer.
I think you are mistaken to say that Perl is any more prone to this than C. Both have a year back from struct tm that is offset from 1900 making it easy to screw up, and both provide strftime if you know about it.
The only way you could get a -ii plural in Latin is if there were a -ius singular. For example, from radius you get radii and from genius, genii. The more common situation, that of second declension masculines, is just -us going to -i, as in abacus becoming abaci, or focus becoming foci. (We shan't get into corpus becoming corpora.)
Note also that Latin had more than one meaning for anus. One takes the meaning you're assuming here, and is a second declension masculine. However, another, which had a different meaning, was 4th not 2nd declension, so formed its plural the way status and apparatus did -- by converting the vowel in the -us from a short to a long u, which changed pronunciation but not spelling.
nd I was in Bourke Street Mall (ie the centre of the city) watching a big LED screen count down to the year 2000. We didn't have a Y2K problem, but when the countdown rolled over, the following message appeared: Happy New Millenium That is exactly what the screen read... no typos here... just a small Y2K problem!
No typos? Don't be to sure of yourself. I can plainly se a speling eror there on your scren.:-)
Practical example: the man page for ln says that the syntax is "ln (source) (destination)". Of course, the "source" is actually what the link is POINTING TO, and the "destination" is the name of the link. Most people (including me) thought that it was the other way around, and made a mistake the first few times around. If the man page had an example section that showed "Example: ln -s/usr/src/linux-2.2.0 linux creates a link called linux pointing at the directory/usr/src/linux-2.2.0", then most of us wouldn't have made a mistake the first time around.
files have the same inode; that is,/bin/[ is essentially an alias for the test(1) command. This hard link exists so test(1) may be invoked from shell scripts, for example, using the if [] construct.
Yup, those are the OpenBSD manpages. No matter how you look at it, the BSD manpages are tremendously better than the Linux ones. There are 5x more of them, and those that are there cover 5x as much. For example, compare tty(4) with what you have on Linux. The Linux manpages are really an embarrassment. I've posted precise data on this before.
Theres nothing wrong with stealing if someone was charging too much anyway. They were imoral, and you just wont give in to there extorsion. I'll rip off CDs and games until they're all free. That's what we're trying to do here.
Thanks for being honest about being a sociopath.
Alas!
This, ladies and gents, is the ugly face that all too often shows up when legitimate enterprises are confronted by activists. They seem like vandals and rogues. We're going to have to work very hard to distance ourselves from these people's image. An "it's ok to steal from the rich people" (im)morality is not going to enamour free software or free information movements to the power establishments.
1969 is hardly the early part of the 20th century. And it's not like we're talking about 1469, either. Nor were those sources disreputable. Spelling certainly didn't just recently settle down, you know.
As an experiment, go look up "hybris" in a web search engine. You may be surprised.
Anyone notice that Perl guys have excellent language skills?
Think of it as the strong anthropomorphic principle applied to programming languages: perhaps those without at least some knack for languages are doomed to forever misunderstand the rich tapestry of Perl, unable to perceive the sublime but subtle connections linking apparently disparate elements into a unified and ingeniously woven cloth.
Don't be surprised that the guy's wrong. He's probably just a dumb American.:-) But that begs the question: what nationality is Tom Christiansen? Danish?
Not all Americans are "dumb", you know. They're often just a bit "under-educated" by classical norms still occasionally found in some places in the world, some families, and some schools. And I actually mean standards somewhat more modern than the venerable trivium and quadrivium.:-)
But yes, I do hold an American passport, as have my dad's family since they came over from Denmark much earlier this century. (My mom's family used to hold British passports while they lived here in America -- way back in the early 1620s.:-)
So yes, I'm an American. Always have been. (Although I haven't always lived in America.) I'm just, um, "over-educated" by today's norms, at least in certain areas. Languages are one such area; it's a hobby of mine. Of course, I'm also under-educated in other areas considered normal, but this is also by choice (more or less).
In this case, I happened to know the etymon whence we derive our modern word in English, and realized immediately that the Y made complete sense. I checked the OED (it pays to have first-rate reference books) and found that both forms were admissible and documented.
I am trying to understand why the ability to play a disc on the operating system of one's choice suddenly became some inalienable right, an essential freedom guaranteed by Creator and Constitution--as some seem to think it.
Why would I say that this is not *desirable*? Of course it is. I desire a lot of things to run on my Unix systems that don't. But to pin the banner of freedom on it, as though it were some Bill of Rights thing, like the right to free association or freedom of religion or freedom of the press--well, I just don't understand.
Hybris isn't a word AFAIK (And my dictionary knows for that matter) I belive the word you're looking for is "hubris."
First of all, "hybris" actually *is* a word. It's in the OED as a synonym for "hubris". Four citations are given:
1920 Public Opinion 27 Aug. 195/2 - During one of these the oppressor, possessed of place and power, imagined in his hybris, that he might extend his arm across the ocean.
1929 Encycl. Brit. XXII. 53/1 - Themis is the servant or companion of Zeus... Her opposite is Hybris, insolent encroachment upon the rights of others.
1949 Horizon Aug. 87 - Hybris means believing that you are a god, i.e., that you cannot suffer; pride means a defiant attempt to become a god.
1969 Commonweal 22 Aug. 524 - America, like all earlier empires, is going to march to the brink of hybris and plunge in.
The reason for the confusion is that the Greek letter upsilon was sometimes transliterated into the Latin character set as a "u", sometimes as a "y". Thinking of words like "hygiene", "chyme", "neophyte", "hyacinth", "phylum", "psychology", "physics", "gynecology", and "halcyon", and you'll see why "hybris" is not an unreasonable spelling.
I note that the citations for "hubris" extend back only through 1884.
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This is probably revealing of my complete naïveté in these matters, but so be it. It's a real question, and I'd like to know the answer. I honestly don't know which kind of RPG (roll or rôle) it is, and would like to.
I believe I can attribute much of my early interest in computing to gaming experiences during my tender years. I was employee number nineteen or so working for the notorious Gary Gygax back in Lake Geneva at TSR Hobbies during junior and senior high school. I hated the tedious mechanics of die rolls, although delighted in inventing new formulæ for various gaming systems. I wanted some kind of mathematical basis for all the endless systems (combat, magic, etc), but didn't want to think about it once it got running.
That way everyone could really get into their assumed rôles. Group story-telling was always what RPGs were really about, and where they were at their best. It didn't matter whether you were playing Dungeons and Dragons, Boot Hill, Empire of the Petal Throne, Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha, In the Labyrinth, Rune Quest, Chivalry and Sorcery, Space Opera, or any of the other classic RPGs. It was the childlike wonder of dynamically invented worlds that made these games truly excellent. It's like the `make believe' games children have always played, and which adults sometimes play as well.
I was also wondering whether someone might have a regular tarball of this stuff that actually comes with files that aren't SCREAMING AT YOU, Makefiles that actually work, source code that isn't polluted with spurious carriage returns all over it, READMEs that bother describe what the thing is for or how to build it? A Configure script and and patches that let it compile under standard C would be nice, too.
I guess I'm spoiled by begin used to:
I've always wondered why programs that get autoconfed don't come with a makefile that knows to automatically run configure the first time if it hasn't been run before. That way you can "just type make".
Also: it's really quite reasonable to expect code to build under a different compiler than the original one that you built the program for.
That problem, clearly severe, is why we have specs and standards to which conformance can be measured. If a compiler for a standarized language locks you in to that compiler rather than to a standard, then this is a major snafu. Standard C should be source-compatible. It doesn't matter whose compiler you use.Or at least, it shouldn't.
There more or less is. It's called paradiorthosis, which is defined as an improper or false correction. By analogy with mitosis, osmosis and narcosis, I suppose that could produce words such as paradiorthoses (the plural), paradiorthotic, paradiorthoticism, and paradiorthotically. I'm not sure what you'd call the particular idiot who customarily committed the foul act. A paradiorthotician or paradiorthotist, perhaps.
But I can virtually guarantee you that having a word for it won't make the problem go away. :-)
Just a whimsical thought. :-)
Happy Antemillennium!
This is very easy to explain. Imagine three ten-{dollar,pound} notes. Now, trade these in for pennies. The 2000th penny came from the second note, not from the third one.
Moreover, the media, should they ever catch wind of this, will surely refer to it as a `hacking incident', as they have before in similar situations. It would be unfortunate to see Freenix and hacking tied together that way.
I see you've neglected to cover Java and Javascript, too.
I don't see how people who don't know libraries in Perl are any different that people who don't know libraries in C. I already mentioned this code:
It's easy to make the same screw up in Perl: In both those programs, the result is: Sure, I could have used strftime() in both of them. Or, I could have learned about what localtime() returns. But both require one thing: RingTFM. People don't do that. It doesn't matter the language. So they suffer.I think you are mistaken to say that Perl is any more prone to this than C. Both have a year back from struct tm that is offset from 1900 making it easy to screw up, and both provide strftime if you know about it.
The only way you could get a -ii plural in Latin is if there were a -ius singular. For example, from radius you get radii and from genius, genii. The more common situation, that of second declension masculines, is just -us going to -i, as in abacus becoming abaci, or focus becoming foci. (We shan't get into corpus becoming corpora.)
Note also that Latin had more than one meaning for anus. One takes the meaning you're assuming here, and is a second declension masculine. However, another, which had a different meaning, was 4th not 2nd declension, so formed its plural the way status and apparatus did -- by converting the vowel in the -us from a short to a long u, which changed pronunciation but not spelling.
Happy antemillennium. :-)
The only important question is this: does the 8th person sit at the end of 2nd table or the start of the 3rd one?
Once you figure that out, everything is clear. I suspect that even hamburger flipsters can handle this one.
It wasn't really a "bug". Just an amusement. But I'm sure it happened here in America, too, since we were still English then. :-)
ObHackery: perl -pe y/a-z//s
Yup. We'll see this all over the place, again and again. Whoever uses a struct tm unaltered is subject to this.
Alas!
This, ladies and gents, is the ugly face that all too often shows up when legitimate enterprises are confronted by activists. They seem like vandals and rogues. We're going to have to work very hard to distance ourselves from these people's image. An "it's ok to steal from the rich people" (im)morality is not going to enamour free software or free information movements to the power establishments.
Then again, I do wonder the xmame people think of all this.
Thanks, Chris.
As an experiment, go look up "hybris" in a web search engine. You may be surprised.
Oh, ok; maybe not. :-)
But yes, I do hold an American passport, as have my dad's family since they came over from Denmark much earlier this century. (My mom's family used to hold British passports while they lived here in America -- way back in the early 1620s. :-)
So yes, I'm an American. Always have been. (Although I haven't always lived in America.) I'm just, um, "over-educated" by today's norms, at least in certain areas. Languages are one such area; it's a hobby of mine. Of course, I'm also under-educated in other areas considered normal, but this is also by choice (more or less).
In this case, I happened to know the etymon whence we derive our modern word in English, and realized immediately that the Y made complete sense. I checked the OED (it pays to have first-rate reference books) and found that both forms were admissible and documented.
Why would I say that this is not *desirable*? Of course it is. I desire a lot of things to run on my Unix systems that don't. But to pin the banner of freedom on it, as though it were some Bill of Rights thing, like the right to free association or freedom of religion or freedom of the press--well, I just don't understand.
- 1920 Public Opinion 27 Aug. 195/2 - During one of these the oppressor, possessed of place and power, imagined in his hybris, that he might extend his arm across the ocean.
- 1929 Encycl. Brit. XXII. 53/1 - Themis is the servant or companion of Zeus... Her opposite is Hybris, insolent encroachment upon the rights of others.
- 1949 Horizon Aug. 87 - Hybris means believing that you are a god, i.e., that you cannot suffer; pride means a defiant attempt to become a god.
- 1969 Commonweal 22 Aug. 524 - America, like all earlier empires, is going to march to the brink of hybris and plunge in.
The reason for the confusion is that the Greek letter upsilon was sometimes transliterated into the Latin character set as a "u", sometimes as a "y". Thinking of words like "hygiene", "chyme", "neophyte", "hyacinth", "phylum", "psychology", "physics", "gynecology", and "halcyon", and you'll see why "hybris" is not an unreasonable spelling.I note that the citations for "hubris" extend back only through 1884.