Well, the planet was the second level, and there were only two levels, and the first was very, very short. So, if you didn't finish the game, I'm not suprised you didn't make it past the second level, and the first planet level. And, frankly, yeah, it's not by any means an original game. If you own a N64 or a GameCube, you've played the 3D-Nintendo platformer before.
However, Metroid Prime is probably the best expression of its game type so far. Complex world, totall genius power ups, coolest boss monsters, sweet graphics effects. If you care for the genre at all, you probably love Metroid Prime.
Now, I grant that it's not as cool as Pac Man. Although, your flash game isn't nearly as cool as Pac Man either. And though I've never before played "dungeon dice" (whatever the fuck that is), after trying it a few times I can easily imagine why a shot of tequila would make it more bearable.
As for the homebrewed database idea I have to be honest. I find that a little nuts myself, no offence meant. I don't use or require one. Since I am compiling specifically on my machine I can also control the install path.
Err, no offence, by if you have a directory that contains a link to every package installed, that IS a homebrewed database. Similarly, if you have a notebook and a number two pencil with a list of every package you have installed, that's a database too.
You have a homebrewed database which isn't as efficient as a regular package manager, because your datbase is badly implemented that it depends on your file locations. You don't have dependency management, because you can accidentally uninstall (err, rm -r) a package that other packages depend on, without any warning. You have a system thats not documented or transparent for the other half dozen sysadmins on the boxes you run. And, finally, if your dependency checking is nothing but "well, it compiled, so it probably works", then you're really not doing depency management at all. And, you have a system that makes it difficult to robustly move a compiled package from a stage server to a production server.
If you have a production system with no compiler that may be up for years, with a dozen sysadmins hired, fired, and hit by busses during the uptime, then you're going to have difficulty with a hodge-podge package management system like you describe.
On the other hand, you do describe the machines as "your machines", so you probably have of room to play with them, and it really may not matter if they go down. For example, if you get sick and die, is there anyone who is going to care more about the services your machines provide than they care about you? If not, then go ahead and run them any way you feel like running them. If so, you're probably doing that person a grave disservice running the machines as if they were yours.
As a Slackware person I have to agree. I find "./configure; make; make install" easy and it does seem to avoid the majority of the dependancy problems.
No dependancies? No probems. Otherwise, I can't see how it avoids any problems, much less the majority of them.
And, of course, someone is going to point out that making a homebrewed database of everything you have installed, along with keeping around enough to do a "make uninstall" when you upgrade a package, is kinda like having a home-brewed package manager anyhow. Only, probably not as efficent or documented.
That's the attraction of the large, community-supported distos like Debian and Gentoo - they have enormous package databases that make it _easier_ to install stuff than under Windows.
I've never understood this. Why would redhat, gentoo, debian, etc. all require seperate package collections? Why wouldn't they all have exactly the same collection?
Well, if you think libertarians like Bush, then you're beyond all reason.
Regardless, neither party is doing this to help Kerry. They're doing it because many of us don't have a lot of faith in the election "system" in the United States. If this helps improve the process, it's worth a thousand times what they're spending to do it.
Hot Water Heater is a bit more specific than it needs to be, and is moderately inaccurate since it can also be set to make water merely warm.
It's also wildly inaccurate because a water heater normally heats cold water.
I suppose a water heater technically hot water too, in addition to cold water and warm water. But, even then, having your hot water heated is a bit of a misnomer, because that's really not what it does either.
Are there engineers that actually have seen lets say an iraqi rope bridge that has been mortared around 5 times and can tell if it holds a humvee or not ?
A rope bridge? Do you think Iraq looks like an Indiana Jones set?
Actually, if you read the article, they ARE the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC) is a part of the USACE.
And, they absolutely positively are doing geek things. It's just that for a very small number of people, "geek things" has been coopted to mean "spent the afternooon installing a commerically available water cooling system on my commercially available motherboard."
According to the census, there were 75,684 farm operators in North Carolina in 2002. Of those, farming was the primary occupation of 31,669, and only occupation of 26,420.
North Carolina has 8.4 million people.
In North Carolina, fewer than 1 in 100 people are farmers, even under the most liberal definition of farmer.
I grew up in rural wisconsin, where every third person was somehow connected to dairy farming. And believe me, the vast majority of those people were not farmers. The ratio is probably even smaller today.
In fact, according to the 2000 Census, fewer than 2% of the jobs in Wisconsin were "farmer or farm manager", and from experience I'd guess far less than half of those folks could honestly say that farming was their primary source of income.
I would be interested to know what percentage of PhD's got their doctorates in fields with no earning potential outside of the University.
In my experience, exactly zero percent. I can think of no academic field without earning potential outside the university. None.
Now, It may be interesting to know what percentage of phD recipients have no earning potential outside the university. There is probably a strong correlation with individual degree programs, and possibly a weak correlation with the degree field.
A smart person will not only be able to recognize that his talents are valuable, but be able to convince people with money that his talents are valuable. Recognize that not every degree candidate has any interest in doing that, though, and more importantly, not every degree candidate is very smart.
Liberals LOVE threatening to leave when their horse finishes last, so DO IT and leave us to fail miserably in our "fascism" and "right-wing extremism".
This election really wasn't about liberal values vs. conservative values, at least not in a way that would be recognizable to the nation even ten years ago. This election was, in many ways, a referendum on a fundemental change in the political landscape of America, with the new dividing line between liberal values and moral values.
Frankly, for a lot of us here in the blue states (liberal and conservative alike), the issues that matter to the moral values crowd just seem alien. Most of us honestly believed that this election was going to firmly and decisively prove that only a very small, very vocal group of people really give a damn about about moral value issues. We believed that the moral values crowd would be swept off the national stage, and the country go back to the debate between old fashioned liberal versus conservative values.
We were wrong.
I'm guessing that y'all in the red states have known how important "moral values" are for years. In the blue states, we were completely blindsided by it, and it scares the shit out of most of us. The fact is, nearly a third of the electorate believes that "moral values" are an important issue. We honestly had no idea it mattered to anyone, and most of us us are scratching our heads trying to figure out why it would matter to anyone.
The issues that suddenly matter suprise us. In the blue states, we might disagree on abortion, or same-sex unions, or the words "under God" in the pledge of allegience, but for the most part we really just don't give a shit about them. They may all get talked about on the "news" networks, but we view them as filler in between the ceasless prattle about the Peterson trial. They're certainly not an issue that anyone would base a vote on.
It turns out that same-sex marriage is a very important issue in America. In the blue states, we had no idea that anyone gave a damn.
It turns out that the words "under God" in the Plege of Allegience is a very important issue in America. In the blue states, we just can't see how it really matters.
It turns out that public displays of The Ten Commandments is a very important issue in America. In the blue states, we might individually be for or against it, but collectively we really just don't care.
It turns out that abortion is a very important issue in America. In the blue states, we may have strong feelings one way or the other, but for the most part we thought the issue was decided twenty years ago.
In other words, this election heralds the arrival of a whole new set of important issues on the national political stage. And, frankly, in the blue states the fact that any of these issues are even being discussed scares the living shit out of us.
When I woke up this morning, it was to the news that the United States of America is not the country that I thought it was when I went to bed last night.
Yep. They're just a barrier to entry. No matter how much barriers to entry hurt everone in reality, they are percieved to hurt struggling startups more than established businesses. And, no matter how beneficial competition may be in reality, startups are percieved as hurting established businesses.
It's important to remember that much legislation with short-term benefits to specific established businesses but long-term damage to all businesses is called "pro-business legislation." Given a hundred existing businesses, ninety-nine of them will lobby to reduce competition in their sector.
They'd also cactch the fallacy of trusting a single piece of media and one geographic location. For all I know, a flash memory may be more reliable than a hard drive. But, both are incredibly unreliable compared to a transactional database with geographicly diverse redundancy.
Note to everyone: there are companies that make very good money building databases with mathematically proven transactions, secure logging, and multiple geographic locations for redundant servers.
If my vote is being cast electronically, I want to know that once the transaction is committed, nothing short of global thermonuclear war is going to spoil that record. Any volatile local storage, whether a disk or flash ram, is really just not acceptable.
Of course, in this case it's really not an electronic ballot as we normally think of it. The ballot itself is the piece of paper. The electronics do nothing but tabulate those ballots. They just happen to run the tabulator constantly through the day, instead of all at once at the end of the night.
Regardless, I really like paper. Certainly, paper ballots run the risk of being spoiled through mishandling. But, paper ballots can be physically monitored by relatively untrained staffers. It's comparatively difficult to monitor electrons going through wires.
Remember that the differences came down to just a few hundred votes in some states during the 2000 elections.
Also remember that the level of support a canidate expects to recieve is going to very widely from county to county, and even polling place to polling place. If the election is anything like 2000, reducing the number of votes cast by even 5% at even a dozen polling places will change the outcome of elections.
Random errors like this have the potential to spoil the entire election, and the immediate effect would be devestating.
On the other hand, if we make it through these elections without documented random errors destroying the entire process, we have a bigger problem to worry about. Both canidates have spent millions of dollars to determine exactly which counties and polling places matter to them the most. And, a major public strategy of both campaigns this year is to employ armies of lawyers and campaign staffers to increase the "friction" at the small handful of polling locations that are unfavorable to their campaign. Simultaneously, both parties are working furiously to lubricate the polling locations that are favorable to them.
People are going to prison this year for fraudulant voter registration drives designed to increase friction at a small number of polling locations. Other efforts, like the Florida felony voter list, are diabolical and almost comic-book like in their evilness.
But in the end, both canidates would probably sell their own mother to have a chance to spoil all the votes from just a dozen hand-picked voting machines. I hope that neither campaign takes positive steps to cause a voting machine to fail. But, I pray to God that if a campaign does sabotage a voting machine that they are not caught. I honestly question if the country could survive that right now.
It's probably just superstition, but removing a single chad seems much less ambiguous than the various bubble-filling exercises
Unfortunately, removing a second chad is remarkably simple and is a wonderful way to spoil a ballot.
Of course, someone with access to the ballots can selectively spoil bubble-ballots too. I suspect they're more difficult to spoil accidentally-on-purpose without being caught by an election monitor, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Way to be on top of the news, guys. I think you've managed to beat the Daily Nebraskan to the story.
Well, the planet was the second level, and there were only two levels, and the first was very, very short. So, if you didn't finish the game, I'm not suprised you didn't make it past the second level, and the first planet level. And, frankly, yeah, it's not by any means an original game. If you own a N64 or a GameCube, you've played the 3D-Nintendo platformer before.
However, Metroid Prime is probably the best expression of its game type so far. Complex world, totall genius power ups, coolest boss monsters, sweet graphics effects. If you care for the genre at all, you probably love Metroid Prime.
Now, I grant that it's not as cool as Pac Man. Although, your flash game isn't nearly as cool as Pac Man either. And though I've never before played "dungeon dice" (whatever the fuck that is), after trying it a few times I can easily imagine why a shot of tequila would make it more bearable.
So, a program compiled for one distro may not work on the other.
That's my point. Believe me, I understand the technical reasons. I just fail to understand why anyone would put up with the pathetic state of affairs.
Or, in the interest of even greater accuracy, he might have even posted "pumps 230 gallons per minute."
Dude, you are aware that soda is really, really, really fucking bad for you, right? The shit is probably worse for you than cigarettes.
As for the homebrewed database idea I have to be honest. I find that a little nuts myself, no offence meant. I don't use or require one. Since I am compiling specifically on my machine I can also control the install path.
Err, no offence, by if you have a directory that contains a link to every package installed, that IS a homebrewed database. Similarly, if you have a notebook and a number two pencil with a list of every package you have installed, that's a database too.
You have a homebrewed database which isn't as efficient as a regular package manager, because your datbase is badly implemented that it depends on your file locations. You don't have dependency management, because you can accidentally uninstall (err, rm -r) a package that other packages depend on, without any warning. You have a system thats not documented or transparent for the other half dozen sysadmins on the boxes you run. And, finally, if your dependency checking is nothing but "well, it compiled, so it probably works", then you're really not doing depency management at all. And, you have a system that makes it difficult to robustly move a compiled package from a stage server to a production server.
If you have a production system with no compiler that may be up for years, with a dozen sysadmins hired, fired, and hit by busses during the uptime, then you're going to have difficulty with a hodge-podge package management system like you describe.
On the other hand, you do describe the machines as "your machines", so you probably have of room to play with them, and it really may not matter if they go down. For example, if you get sick and die, is there anyone who is going to care more about the services your machines provide than they care about you? If not, then go ahead and run them any way you feel like running them. If so, you're probably doing that person a grave disservice running the machines as if they were yours.
As a Slackware person I have to agree. I find "./configure; make; make install" easy and it does seem to avoid the majority of the dependancy problems.
No dependancies? No probems. Otherwise, I can't see how it avoids any problems, much less the majority of them.
And, of course, someone is going to point out that making a homebrewed database of everything you have installed, along with keeping around enough to do a "make uninstall" when you upgrade a package, is kinda like having a home-brewed package manager anyhow. Only, probably not as efficent or documented.
That's the attraction of the large, community-supported distos like Debian and Gentoo - they have enormous package databases that make it _easier_ to install stuff than under Windows.
I've never understood this. Why would redhat, gentoo, debian, etc. all require seperate package collections? Why wouldn't they all have exactly the same collection?
Well, if you think libertarians like Bush, then you're beyond all reason.
Regardless, neither party is doing this to help Kerry. They're doing it because many of us don't have a lot of faith in the election "system" in the United States. If this helps improve the process, it's worth a thousand times what they're spending to do it.
Umm... Windows NT 3.51 and Windows NT 4.0 were both released for the PPC.
And, I'm guessing that they'll sell you a copy of Windows CE for PPC too, if you're willing to pay the bucks for it.
Hot Water Heater is a bit more specific than it needs to be, and is moderately inaccurate since it can also be set to make water merely warm.
It's also wildly inaccurate because a water heater normally heats cold water.
I suppose a water heater technically hot water too, in addition to cold water and warm water. But, even then, having your hot water heated is a bit of a misnomer, because that's really not what it does either.
Are there engineers that actually have seen lets say an iraqi rope bridge that has been mortared around 5 times and can tell if it holds a humvee or not ?
A rope bridge? Do you think Iraq looks like an Indiana Jones set?
Actually, if you read the article, they ARE the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC) is a part of the USACE.
And, they absolutely positively are doing geek things. It's just that for a very small number of people, "geek things" has been coopted to mean "spent the afternooon installing a commerically available water cooling system on my commercially available motherboard."
According to the census, there were 75,684 farm operators in North Carolina in 2002. Of those, farming was the primary occupation of 31,669, and only occupation of 26,420.
North Carolina has 8.4 million people.
In North Carolina, fewer than 1 in 100 people are farmers, even under the most liberal definition of farmer.
I grew up in rural wisconsin, where every third person was somehow connected to dairy farming. And believe me, the vast majority of those people were not farmers. The ratio is probably even smaller today.
In fact, according to the 2000 Census, fewer than 2% of the jobs in Wisconsin were "farmer or farm manager", and from experience I'd guess far less than half of those folks could honestly say that farming was their primary source of income.
I would be interested to know what percentage of PhD's got their doctorates in fields with no earning potential outside of the University.
In my experience, exactly zero percent. I can think of no academic field without earning potential outside the university. None.
Now, It may be interesting to know what percentage of phD recipients have no earning potential outside the university. There is probably a strong correlation with individual degree programs, and possibly a weak correlation with the degree field.
A smart person will not only be able to recognize that his talents are valuable, but be able to convince people with money that his talents are valuable. Recognize that not every degree candidate has any interest in doing that, though, and more importantly, not every degree candidate is very smart.
Math does not conform to a teacher's perception.
Every mathematician on earth, including all of your math professors, disagree with you.
Liberals LOVE threatening to leave when their horse finishes last, so DO IT and leave us to fail miserably in our "fascism" and "right-wing extremism".
This election really wasn't about liberal values vs. conservative values, at least not in a way that would be recognizable to the nation even ten years ago. This election was, in many ways, a referendum on a fundemental change in the political landscape of America, with the new dividing line between liberal values and moral values.
Frankly, for a lot of us here in the blue states (liberal and conservative alike), the issues that matter to the moral values crowd just seem alien. Most of us honestly believed that this election was going to firmly and decisively prove that only a very small, very vocal group of people really give a damn about about moral value issues. We believed that the moral values crowd would be swept off the national stage, and the country go back to the debate between old fashioned liberal versus conservative values.
We were wrong.
I'm guessing that y'all in the red states have known how important "moral values" are for years. In the blue states, we were completely blindsided by it, and it scares the shit out of most of us. The fact is, nearly a third of the electorate believes that "moral values" are an important issue. We honestly had no idea it mattered to anyone, and most of us us are scratching our heads trying to figure out why it would matter to anyone.
The issues that suddenly matter suprise us. In the blue states, we might disagree on abortion, or same-sex unions, or the words "under God" in the pledge of allegience, but for the most part we really just don't give a shit about them. They may all get talked about on the "news" networks, but we view them as filler in between the ceasless prattle about the Peterson trial. They're certainly not an issue that anyone would base a vote on.
It turns out that same-sex marriage is a very important issue in America. In the blue states, we had no idea that anyone gave a damn.
It turns out that the words "under God" in the Plege of Allegience is a very important issue in America. In the blue states, we just can't see how it really matters.
It turns out that public displays of The Ten Commandments is a very important issue in America. In the blue states, we might individually be for or against it, but collectively we really just don't care.
It turns out that abortion is a very important issue in America. In the blue states, we may have strong feelings one way or the other, but for the most part we thought the issue was decided twenty years ago.
In other words, this election heralds the arrival of a whole new set of important issues on the national political stage. And, frankly, in the blue states the fact that any of these issues are even being discussed scares the living shit out of us.
When I woke up this morning, it was to the news that the United States of America is not the country that I thought it was when I went to bed last night.
Or is that too geeky for /.
Sadly, yes. It's notepad vs. editpad for the slashdot crowd.
Especially if they call it in favor of the liberal AGAIN and are wrong AGAIN.
When did that happen? I just remember 2000, when they called it for George Bush (who is a republican, but most emphatically not conservative).
Yep. They're just a barrier to entry. No matter how much barriers to entry hurt everone in reality, they are percieved to hurt struggling startups more than established businesses. And, no matter how beneficial competition may be in reality, startups are percieved as hurting established businesses.
It's important to remember that much legislation with short-term benefits to specific established businesses but long-term damage to all businesses is called "pro-business legislation." Given a hundred existing businesses, ninety-nine of them will lobby to reduce competition in their sector.
They'd also cactch the fallacy of trusting a single piece of media and one geographic location. For all I know, a flash memory may be more reliable than a hard drive. But, both are incredibly unreliable compared to a transactional database with geographicly diverse redundancy.
Note to everyone: there are companies that make very good money building databases with mathematically proven transactions, secure logging, and multiple geographic locations for redundant servers.
If my vote is being cast electronically, I want to know that once the transaction is committed, nothing short of global thermonuclear war is going to spoil that record. Any volatile local storage, whether a disk or flash ram, is really just not acceptable.
Of course, in this case it's really not an electronic ballot as we normally think of it. The ballot itself is the piece of paper. The electronics do nothing but tabulate those ballots. They just happen to run the tabulator constantly through the day, instead of all at once at the end of the night.
Regardless, I really like paper. Certainly, paper ballots run the risk of being spoiled through mishandling. But, paper ballots can be physically monitored by relatively untrained staffers. It's comparatively difficult to monitor electrons going through wires.
Remember that the differences came down to just a few hundred votes in some states during the 2000 elections.
Also remember that the level of support a canidate expects to recieve is going to very widely from county to county, and even polling place to polling place. If the election is anything like 2000, reducing the number of votes cast by even 5% at even a dozen polling places will change the outcome of elections.
Random errors like this have the potential to spoil the entire election, and the immediate effect would be devestating.
On the other hand, if we make it through these elections without documented random errors destroying the entire process, we have a bigger problem to worry about. Both canidates have spent millions of dollars to determine exactly which counties and polling places matter to them the most. And, a major public strategy of both campaigns this year is to employ armies of lawyers and campaign staffers to increase the "friction" at the small handful of polling locations that are unfavorable to their campaign. Simultaneously, both parties are working furiously to lubricate the polling locations that are favorable to them.
People are going to prison this year for fraudulant voter registration drives designed to increase friction at a small number of polling locations. Other efforts, like the Florida felony voter list, are diabolical and almost comic-book like in their evilness.
But in the end, both canidates would probably sell their own mother to have a chance to spoil all the votes from just a dozen hand-picked voting machines. I hope that neither campaign takes positive steps to cause a voting machine to fail. But, I pray to God that if a campaign does sabotage a voting machine that they are not caught. I honestly question if the country could survive that right now.
It's probably just superstition, but removing a single chad seems much less ambiguous than the various bubble-filling exercises
Unfortunately, removing a second chad is remarkably simple and is a wonderful way to spoil a ballot.
Of course, someone with access to the ballots can selectively spoil bubble-ballots too. I suspect they're more difficult to spoil accidentally-on-purpose without being caught by an election monitor, though.