If your DSL company is jerking you around, you can often switch to Covad or Speakeasy or some other provider and tell your phone company where they can stick it.
Yeah, then you can pay $150 every time Covad manages to screw up your installation and blame it on you instead of accepting that providing utility-like services means you should act like a utility.
I had to take four days off of work over the course of a month to get Covad to install my DSL, because they kept calling the wrong phone number when they arrived. When it was finally done, I got stuck with a $150 charge because I had asked them over the phone at one point if they had a key to the secured, QWest-marked utility room at my apartment building. Despite every other utility in my city (and they are effectively a utility, whether they acknowledge it or not) having a key to that room, Covad said they didn't. I told them I'd have to reschedule to get a copy from my building manager, who was not in that day. Apparently telling them this beforehand so they didn't have to come out counts as "no access".
Thanks, guys. I didn't even know my building *had* a secure wiring closet until that day (I found it while walking around waiting for the tech to show up), because with QWest I didn't *need* to know. Covad cost me so much time and money that it would have been considerably cheaper for me to just buy a punchdown tool and tone generator for the line tracing and done the work myself.
Anyway, IMO it's just not worth it. Since I can't get that money refunded, I'm going to switch to a local ISP that uses QWest lines. If it were $50, then okay, I'd write it off as a misunderstanding. But $150 per incident? That's insulting. You don't see me billing them $300+ for every day off they cost me.
The AR codes were the only reason I finished that race. It's also worth buying one because you can use it to unlock parts that are not accessible any other way. IIRC, you had to bring your memory card to some special event in Japan to get them legitimately, and they let you build some cool vehicles.
I agree - a Gameshark/Action Replay was the only reason I didn't shelf Devil May Cry, for example.
It's annoying that it's the *only* way sometimes, though. When Metroid Prime 2 came out, I got to the end before there were any Action Replay cheats discovered for it, and had to wait a few days because the final boss was stupidly difficult and I wasn't having fun.
The only gaming-related thing that annoys me more than overly difficult games are developers that refuse to acknowledge they're a problem. Hey guys, I'm the one that bought the game. If you're going to put in something ridiculously difficult, add a difficulty setting or at least cheat codes. I am looking at you, Capcom (for DMC), Relic (for Homeworld 2), and whoever made the Red Odyssey expansion to Battlezone.
Start from scratch (sort of) and forget backwards compatibility for once.
Yeah, good idea. It's not like big corporations (you know, the source of most of MS' money) use Windows in part because of its legacy support. If there's one thing that would ensure that continued income flow, it's forcing all those corporations to buy new versions of every commercial application they own, as well as rewriting custom programs whose source code may no longer exist and/or finding replacements.
On MacOS = 9, you would fix that by editing the resource fork. I ended up in a couple of situations like you describe and it was one of the things that I really loathed about MacOS. It's one thing to use that method of ID'ing files, but not giving users an easy way to bypass it is stupid.
Apple might have introduced a better way in X. I haven't worked with it much.
AutoIt is great for automating installations of software. You can compile all the installation files into the AutoIt file, and have AutoIt set permissions and copy files during the installation.
What software are you installing that either:
- Doesn't consist of an MSI / InstallShield package which supports unattended installs by default. or - Doesn't require anything more than copying files around?
Scripting out keypresses and mouse clicks sounds like a good way to end up with a buggy installer.
Right, because modern legal language like the kind used to write EULAs and NDAs is so superior to the Constitution, which can be read and understood by normal people.
Just because modern Americans tend to be so petty and self-serving that they demand things be explained with a page of words instead of a sentence does not mean that's how things should be done.
There are plenty of sugar-free-but-caffeine-laden soda pops on the market. I usually have black tea or Diet Mountain Dew in the mornings because there's free coffee at work and I don't like to drink the same thing all day.
FWIW, the C64 version linked in a post below is (AFAIK) the best version, as it has content and features not in the other releases. They all have the same basic gameplay, the C64 vesion just lets you do more and has nicer graphics.
Plus it has the copyright or something in the screen overscan area, which I remember was a l33+ programming trick at the time.
Yeah. I don't play online games, but of the five people I know who play WoW, two are women. Also, the biggest MUD freak evar that I knew of back in the olden days was too. Is it maybe closer to a balance gender-wise than other games because of the social aspect?
Because no user input should ever be executed. (snip) People should use parametric SQL statements. No excuses.
Agreed, however:
In this manner, no escaping is ever necessary.
You're still going to have problems in languages like Javascript that have methods like "eval()". I don't know if PHP has one (I'm just starting to look at it this week, I'm not a fan of web development in general), but if it does, all the SQL escaping in the world won't necessarily matter. You can't escape for multiple different languages simultaneously unless you reduce the character set down to something like alphanumeric + period and comma.
The level of payment to executives and executive benefits is higher at the United Way.
Yep. That's one of the two reasons I refuse to donate to them. If I'm going to donate to a "charity," they had better be sending as much of that money as possible on to the actual people in need, not lining executives' pockets and sending big contributors on fancy vacations.
The other is their insulting method of "partnering" with big companies to make it seem like you're required as an employee to donate.
However, what happened was that someone else humiliated her in public. *She did nothing wrong*. As such, what happened has no bearing whatsoever on her reputation; it only affects her dignity. As such, it is wrong and improper for anyone to publish this material. However, the press are usually a bunch of fuckers who are only interested in money, and will happily destroy private lives to obtain material for their publications.
I think where your argument falls apart is where you imply that "public" and "private" are the same thing. You were on a roll until then, though.
I think if my avatar was attacked by flying penis' during a CNN interview, I would be mortified. I expect she feels this way. I think asserting an individual would NOT feel embarrassed and belittled is fanciful.
Really? I would be annoyed if my *real* self were attacked by *real* flying penises during a CNN interview, but in a video game? Especially one with incredibly crappy graphics? That's just funny.
For starters, try, oh, I dunno, a newer RC, if you were part of the test, or...wait for it...the release version?
Seriously. I'm running the release with a WRT54G and it works fine. The only networking complaint I have is that there isn't a hack yet to disable the asinine TCP connection limit like there was for XP.
Interesting. Yes, what I was getting at is that I prefer higher colour temperatures, for similar reasons to you. I'll see if I can dig up a CFL like that.
The real hitch, as the article hints, is that the releases are contradictory. For instance, the Mac version of small caps is different from others.
That's not that big of a deal. I've been reverse engineering some graphics and sound formats from my favourite videogame series (Legacy of Kain), and there are a lot of contradictions between different games in the series, or even the same game on different platforms.
Sure, you end up with some semi-ugly code, but at long as you can confidently determine *which* version of the rules to use, it works. In this case, it's the figuring out the rules part that I think would suck. Decoding parts of games I like is fun. Figuring out pixel spacing for obscure obsolete versions of Word isn't.
The XML should be general enough to encompass any kind of typesetting. It is the importing program's task to figure out what the old format wanted things to look like.
No argument there. The "spec" MS has published is stupid. But I do think if they published an accurate one, there are people willing to build giant switch statements into OO.o or whatever that would follow the published rules for interpreting all the different quirks of the MS file format. Not for the XML files, but to import.doc or whatever and convert it to a sane format.
There's nothing wrong with saving in a file format that matches your internal representation, in fact, it's a darn good idea (see.ABW for AbiWord,.DOC for Word,.WPD for WordPerfect I would also wager is the same idea).
I would argue that when it's taken to the extreme of Office prior to 2007, it *is* a bad thing. AFAIK, the old Word format is more or less a (very) partial RAM dump (which is why you can often find all sorts of interesting stuff in Word files that the authors think they've deleted). That makes for faster dev times, but because the load and save functions don't really "understand" the content of the file, IMO the developers made things a lot harder for themselves in the big picture. I imagine reproducing issues in testing is a particular nightmare.
Nobody in OSS is going to have the patience to rebuild the same level of backwards compatibility
I'm sure there are plenty of people that would do it if they had access to the dev docs that Microsoft works from.
The hitch here is that *not* having them means tons and tons of reverse engineering, and that's only after tracking down every release of every version of every MS Office ever. Reverse engineering can be fun, but I have a hard time imagining that figuring out character spacing in the Mandarin version of Office 5 would fall into that category.
As long as people are happy with the 'colder' light they produce
This is the thing that always kills the fluorescent deal for me. I like lights that tend toward the blue-violet end of the spectrum (like white LEDs), or broad spectrum, like the "natural light" type incandescents. Fluorescents are on the opposite side, at least to my eyes. They make things look sickly, IMO.
It's been a couple of years since I've looked into CFL bulbs, but I have trouble believing that they've changed that much.
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If your DSL company is jerking you around, you can often switch to Covad or Speakeasy or some other provider and tell your phone company where they can stick it.
Yeah, then you can pay $150 every time Covad manages to screw up your installation and blame it on you instead of accepting that providing utility-like services means you should act like a utility.
I had to take four days off of work over the course of a month to get Covad to install my DSL, because they kept calling the wrong phone number when they arrived. When it was finally done, I got stuck with a $150 charge because I had asked them over the phone at one point if they had a key to the secured, QWest-marked utility room at my apartment building. Despite every other utility in my city (and they are effectively a utility, whether they acknowledge it or not) having a key to that room, Covad said they didn't. I told them I'd have to reschedule to get a copy from my building manager, who was not in that day. Apparently telling them this beforehand so they didn't have to come out counts as "no access".
Thanks, guys. I didn't even know my building *had* a secure wiring closet until that day (I found it while walking around waiting for the tech to show up), because with QWest I didn't *need* to know. Covad cost me so much time and money that it would have been considerably cheaper for me to just buy a punchdown tool and tone generator for the line tracing and done the work myself.
Anyway, IMO it's just not worth it. Since I can't get that money refunded, I'm going to switch to a local ISP that uses QWest lines. If it were $50, then okay, I'd write it off as a misunderstanding. But $150 per incident? That's insulting. You don't see me billing them $300+ for every day off they cost me.
The AR codes were the only reason I finished that race. It's also worth buying one because you can use it to unlock parts that are not accessible any other way. IIRC, you had to bring your memory card to some special event in Japan to get them legitimately, and they let you build some cool vehicles.
I agree - a Gameshark/Action Replay was the only reason I didn't shelf Devil May Cry, for example.
It's annoying that it's the *only* way sometimes, though. When Metroid Prime 2 came out, I got to the end before there were any Action Replay cheats discovered for it, and had to wait a few days because the final boss was stupidly difficult and I wasn't having fun.
The only gaming-related thing that annoys me more than overly difficult games are developers that refuse to acknowledge they're a problem. Hey guys, I'm the one that bought the game. If you're going to put in something ridiculously difficult, add a difficulty setting or at least cheat codes. I am looking at you, Capcom (for DMC), Relic (for Homeworld 2), and whoever made the Red Odyssey expansion to Battlezone.
Start from scratch (sort of) and forget backwards compatibility for once.
Yeah, good idea. It's not like big corporations (you know, the source of most of MS' money) use Windows in part because of its legacy support. If there's one thing that would ensure that continued income flow, it's forcing all those corporations to buy new versions of every commercial application they own, as well as rewriting custom programs whose source code may no longer exist and/or finding replacements.
On MacOS = 9, you would fix that by editing the resource fork. I ended up in a couple of situations like you describe and it was one of the things that I really loathed about MacOS. It's one thing to use that method of ID'ing files, but not giving users an easy way to bypass it is stupid.
Apple might have introduced a better way in X. I haven't worked with it much.
AutoIt is great for automating installations of software. You can compile all the installation files into the AutoIt file, and have AutoIt set permissions and copy files during the installation.
What software are you installing that either:
- Doesn't consist of an MSI / InstallShield package which supports unattended installs by default.
or
- Doesn't require anything more than copying files around?
Scripting out keypresses and mouse clicks sounds like a good way to end up with a buggy installer.
Unfortunately, that site is totally bogus.
Mod parent up. I've seen tons of people pass that link around and it has nothing to do with 10 dimensions in the string theory sense at least.
Having said that, I'd certainly pay a few hundred bucks to run a 680x0 emulated AmigaDOS v2 or v3 in a window on my Macbook.
Does UAE not work on your Macbook?
THAT's why you need absolutes in laws
Right, because modern legal language like the kind used to write EULAs and NDAs is so superior to the Constitution, which can be read and understood by normal people.
Just because modern Americans tend to be so petty and self-serving that they demand things be explained with a page of words instead of a sentence does not mean that's how things should be done.
> I see the skin as a natural barrier, and would prefer to go Amish rather than be some ghoulish cyborg
Seconded.
You two both misspelled "totally awesome and sweet." You might consider a spelling-and-grammar implant.
There are plenty of sugar-free-but-caffeine-laden soda pops on the market. I usually have black tea or Diet Mountain Dew in the mornings because there's free coffee at work and I don't like to drink the same thing all day.
FWIW, the C64 version linked in a post below is (AFAIK) the best version, as it has content and features not in the other releases. They all have the same basic gameplay, the C64 vesion just lets you do more and has nicer graphics.
Plus it has the copyright or something in the screen overscan area, which I remember was a l33+ programming trick at the time.
Yeah. I don't play online games, but of the five people I know who play WoW, two are women. Also, the biggest MUD freak evar that I knew of back in the olden days was too. Is it maybe closer to a balance gender-wise than other games because of the social aspect?
Because no user input should ever be executed.
(snip)
People should use parametric SQL statements. No excuses.
Agreed, however:
In this manner, no escaping is ever necessary.
You're still going to have problems in languages like Javascript that have methods like "eval()". I don't know if PHP has one (I'm just starting to look at it this week, I'm not a fan of web development in general), but if it does, all the SQL escaping in the world won't necessarily matter. You can't escape for multiple different languages simultaneously unless you reduce the character set down to something like alphanumeric + period and comma.
The level of payment to executives and executive benefits is higher at the United Way.
Yep. That's one of the two reasons I refuse to donate to them. If I'm going to donate to a "charity," they had better be sending as much of that money as possible on to the actual people in need, not lining executives' pockets and sending big contributors on fancy vacations.
The other is their insulting method of "partnering" with big companies to make it seem like you're required as an employee to donate.
D dddd dD D ddd dDD dddd dD D DdDD DDD ddD dDd DD DDD DD ddd dD dd Ddd dDdDdD
She didn't have any complaints about 'junk' characters though, CmdrTaco. Why do you hate Samuel Morse, and therefore freedom?
However, what happened was that someone else humiliated her in public. *She did nothing wrong*. As such, what happened has no bearing whatsoever on her reputation; it only affects her dignity. As such, it is wrong and improper for anyone to publish this material. However, the press are usually a bunch of fuckers who are only interested in money, and will happily destroy private lives to obtain material for their publications.
I think where your argument falls apart is where you imply that "public" and "private" are the same thing. You were on a roll until then, though.
I think if my avatar was attacked by flying penis' during a CNN interview, I would be mortified. I expect she feels this way. I think asserting an individual would NOT feel embarrassed and belittled is fanciful.
Really? I would be annoyed if my *real* self were attacked by *real* flying penises during a CNN interview, but in a video game? Especially one with incredibly crappy graphics? That's just funny.
And in the mean time he should do what... not have internet access?
How about not running a beta OS on your primary machine unless you're willing to accept the potential consequences?
For starters, try, oh, I dunno, a newer RC, if you were part of the test, or...wait for it...the release version?
Seriously. I'm running the release with a WRT54G and it works fine. The only networking complaint I have is that there isn't a hack yet to disable the asinine TCP connection limit like there was for XP.
Interesting. Yes, what I was getting at is that I prefer higher colour temperatures, for similar reasons to you. I'll see if I can dig up a CFL like that.
The real hitch, as the article hints, is that the releases are contradictory. For instance, the Mac version of small caps is different from others.
.doc or whatever and convert it to a sane format.
That's not that big of a deal. I've been reverse engineering some graphics and sound formats from my favourite videogame series (Legacy of Kain), and there are a lot of contradictions between different games in the series, or even the same game on different platforms.
Sure, you end up with some semi-ugly code, but at long as you can confidently determine *which* version of the rules to use, it works. In this case, it's the figuring out the rules part that I think would suck. Decoding parts of games I like is fun. Figuring out pixel spacing for obscure obsolete versions of Word isn't.
The XML should be general enough to encompass any kind of typesetting. It is the importing program's task to figure out what the old format wanted things to look like.
No argument there. The "spec" MS has published is stupid. But I do think if they published an accurate one, there are people willing to build giant switch statements into OO.o or whatever that would follow the published rules for interpreting all the different quirks of the MS file format. Not for the XML files, but to import
There's nothing wrong with saving in a file format that matches your internal representation, in fact, it's a darn good idea (see .ABW for AbiWord, .DOC for Word, .WPD for WordPerfect I would also wager is the same idea).
I would argue that when it's taken to the extreme of Office prior to 2007, it *is* a bad thing. AFAIK, the old Word format is more or less a (very) partial RAM dump (which is why you can often find all sorts of interesting stuff in Word files that the authors think they've deleted). That makes for faster dev times, but because the load and save functions don't really "understand" the content of the file, IMO the developers made things a lot harder for themselves in the big picture. I imagine reproducing issues in testing is a particular nightmare.
Nobody in OSS is going to have the patience to rebuild the same level of backwards compatibility
I'm sure there are plenty of people that would do it if they had access to the dev docs that Microsoft works from.
The hitch here is that *not* having them means tons and tons of reverse engineering, and that's only after tracking down every release of every version of every MS Office ever. Reverse engineering can be fun, but I have a hard time imagining that figuring out character spacing in the Mandarin version of Office 5 would fall into that category.
As long as people are happy with the 'colder' light they produce
This is the thing that always kills the fluorescent deal for me. I like lights that tend toward the blue-violet end of the spectrum (like white LEDs), or broad spectrum, like the "natural light" type incandescents. Fluorescents are on the opposite side, at least to my eyes. They make things look sickly, IMO.
It's been a couple of years since I've looked into CFL bulbs, but I have trouble believing that they've changed that much.