Triple-booting OS X, Ubuntu and Windows 7 on a Mac Mini here. There's no secret Evil Apple chip in their machines. I'm not drinking any kool-aid, but at the same time, don't drink the stink-water and assume the worst just because it's Apple (booga-booga!)
I don't care how good your algorithm is if it's written in an obtuse, unmaintainable manner.
There are plenty of coders (especially those new to the profession) who don't understand the value of tidy code. The smart ones quickly understand and tend to ask for some tips. That's the first (and for me, primary) reason for having a Coding Standards document.
The second reason is to reduce friction when viewing each others' code. Local vars should be 'someVariable'. Instance vars should be '_anotherVariable'. Methods should be 'SomeFunction'. I physically twitch when I see underscores in variable names.
But, a Coding Standards document should be clear on 'must-do' vs recommendations. We state that you should split multiple-clause IF statements tidily to avoid excessive horizontal scrolling. But we only provide recommendations on how to do brace placement.
Every single point in a Coding Standards document should have a defensible reason to be there.
Our CS doc is in a Wiki which lets us have a comment section for each page (and there aren't many pages overall). If anyone wants to ask why something's in there, or suggest an alternative, they're free to. The doc's existed for 9 years and is largely unchanged other than to add explanations and extra languages. We most recently added some docs on SQL stored procedure styling, since ours were abysmal - copying and pasting SQL from Management Studio's view designer is a 'go back and do it again whilst we laugh at you' offence now:)
Now, I'm not a huge fan of nuclear power. Not for the usual "GAAAH! RADIATION! WASTE! YOU'RE MAKING GAIA CRY!" reasons, but because humanity (and more precisely, human bureaucracy) is often far too gaffe-prone to be trusted. Running a nuclear plant isn't amenable to cost-cutting or tight-fisted cost-benefit assessment.
But the way the affected reactors and their operators have performed has been almost perfect. Consider the fact that the buildings themselves are intact after what nature just threw at them. Pretty astounding. Sure, by the look of it, we've already breezed through several failure modes, but reaction has been halted and sea-water is readily available to keep the thing cooled without the core making a bid for freedom. Still, as I understand it, worst-case is the core splurges itself over the inner containment floor and eventually cools anyway.
Of course, there'll be a post-mortem over why standard cooling couldn't be restored, the results of which will be interesting (and no doubt, instructive).
My office are pretty good at remembering to shut down their machines at the end of the day. Our WSUS updates are configured to install updates when the user shuts down, so we don't need to wake them at night.
But should I need to get into a machine remotely, here's what I do:
- Connect in to our VPN - Start a Terminal Server session on one of the servers local to the machine I want to wake. - Fire off a Wake-On-LAN magic packet to that machine - Start pinging the hosts' name so I can tell when it's up and running.
Not too difficult in the end, especially if you batch-file the task.
I'm not really a Halo fan. Completed the first one on the PC, never played 2 and only played 3 because I wanted Crackdown.
Having said that, I'd expect the final release to have much better graphics than the demo -- and not because they've still got a few months to work on it. Basically, the H3 beta had to be delivered via Xbox Live. So, they had to keep the download size reasonable. Now, if you're looking to strip stuff out of a game, your choices are limited. Simplify the map layouts or alter the game engine and you're (a) making way too much work for yourself and, (b) not really giving an accurate representation of how the game behaves.
The only real way to reduce a game's size without upsetting the aims of the demo/beta is to seriously drop the size and quantity of the world's textures. Possibly drop the complexity of some non-critical models too.
I've seen this happen before. Compare the Xbox Live demos of Crackdown and Forza 2 -- both demos are significantly crappier-looking than their full retail counterparts.
So, whilst I'm not expecting anything jaw-dropping from Halo 3 once it's out, I'd certainly expect it to look significantly crisper and slicker than the beta.
It's a shame that I can't trust it to even shut down reliably. Thinking about it, that's my reaction to many of Windows' proclamations - "Yeah, sure, you may say that... but what are you really going to do?"
Meh. All part of the daily hand-holding that is the Windows XPerience. It's like a toddler who's mostly able to walk, but you still have to keep an eye on him just in case he wanders into oncoming traffic.
Absolutely. It's far more common in the UK to refer to a company in the plural, even in newspapers and official writing.
Using the singular looks funny to me (being British). A company is nothing without the people who comprise it, so corporations' names are simply tags for the group of people who comprise that corporation. 'Scientologists are...', 'Microsoft are...'. Although 'Microsoft' isn't a plural, it's a label that refers to many individuals whose day-to-day actions define 'Microsoft'.
Ah... you're describing my daily morning game of Russian Roulette.
I stubbornly refuse to shut down using any other manner than the one I find most convenient: Hibernate.
It'll work fine for a while. Long enough for comfort to begin to set in. But there's always that little increase in my pulse-rate when I drop my laptop into the docking station on my desk and hit the power button. The Resuming Windows bar moves across the screen. Fingers are crossed, and I turn to face Mecca whilst gripping a rabbit's paw for good luck. The screen goes black. Will my desktop appear? The wind's northerly, so the chances are good. Woohoo! It's worked! I've dodged the bullet this time...
However, every now and then... not often enough for me to abandon hibernation, but just often enough to keep things interesting... The machine will sit with the Resuming Windows bar full, or at the black screen after the bar... and go no further. I'll go get a coffee and sometimes it'll go through to the desktop. But then there's the times when it'll just be stuck there. Hold the power button, turn it back on, tell it not to delete restoration data and try again... No joy? Shut down again. Pull the USB connections and try again. Fails? Pull the ethernet cable and try again. No luck? Try plugging things into different USB ports...
Eventually, it'll work. But sometimes this feature is just plain borked. Completely unable to diagnose exactly what's causing it. Sometimes the saved session will have no apps open - just the bare desktop - and it'll still fail to resume. Totally random as far as I can see, which suggests it's something deep down in the crapitude of Windows' internals that's locking... something freaky going on with device initialisation I suppose.
Of course, being a Windows dev whose frequently eye-deep in XP's guts, I look at these problems as a father whose wayward son just won't get a clue would. It's just how it is. But... from an end-user point of view, if you're going to have a suspend and resume feature (be it sleep, hibernate, etc) it must work right 99.9999999% of the time. It simply must -- it's a critical time for the user's data, and the feature must behave as described. Either that, or the description of the feature should carry a caveat right there in the UI that activates it.
This is a sentiment I've held since environmentalism became a mainstream topic... The tree-huggers have it backwards: the Earth doesn't need saving or protecting, mankind does.
For all our ego, sophistication, technology and intelligence we are fragile creatures. We can only comfortably exist in a narrow range of climates (which, fortunately for us at present the Earth provides in abundance). Western-style civilisation in particular needs a monumental amount of effort to exist in anything but mild climates. Even as you move to the upper ranges of present climates, the amount of energy, infrastructure and maintenance required to sustain Western-style civilisation increases dramatically. Of course, there's a Catch-22 there: Adverse climates = more energy required to sustain our way of life. More energy production = more contribution to the warming of the planet. We have not yet created a widely-adoptable way out of this situation.
The Earth is big and old, and there's more 'not-human' on it than there is human. It'll get along just fine after we've eventually screwed ourselves.
They're people who buy TVs, clothes, insurance (house, car and pet), credit cards, furniture, DVD players, internet access, mobile phones (Tesco are also an MVNO) and pretty much everything under the sun from a supermarket such as Tesco.
I'm actually quite happy to see this happen. For Windows users, there's a triumvirate of Microsoft (OS, apps), Symantec ('security') and PC World (for the purchases). For the layman computer user, It's always the same product, bought from the same places.
This model has existed (as far as I know, commenting just on the UK, since that's where I live) since the beginning of the current era of computer use. The potential for Tesco to disrupt this most certainly exists. Tesco have a good track record - profit has risen from £1bn/year to £2.2bn/year in just a few years on top of well-executed moves into offering diverse ranges and expanding abroad. This will raise some eyebrows at Redmond and Wherever-the-hell-Symantec-are-based. As I noted above, every 'walk-in' PC store here offers the same old stuff no matter what. Tesco will be exposing competing products in a way that the retail PC sector hasn't yet seen (over here, at least).
Sure, it's not Open Source, and the software may not even be all that good. But I can see it selling in large numbers.
The arguement that foreigners dont do as good of work only works for the begginging of any phase of outsourcing. Many americans believed that "jap cars" were inferior to American cars. We now know that they are engineered at least as good if not better than American cars. Some people still hold the xenophobic view that American cars are somehow impossibly better becuase Americans are infallable.
Your reference there is flawed. Japanese cars aren't built by Japanese firms as a cost-saving exercise for American companies. They're built by successful Japanese firms, with excellent research and development who produce a product that's of high quality and is in demand around the world. Their success is driven by the skills of their own people.
Outsourcing is usually (always?) undertaken as a cost-saving exercise. The idea is that a US-based firm can produce the same product/service they're already producing, but at a lower cost to themselves. With this comes the inevitable quality issues, not to mention the fact that we're underpinning the foundation of the outsourced-nations' crappy treatment of their working population.
You might be right that you have only heard the horror stories or maybe you only remember the horror stories. Maybe outsourcing does lead to worse products all the time these days but as the education of India goes up they will be doing just as high quality of workmanship as we will.... and as India develops, their cost of living will rise in line with their quality of life, and they'll start requiring the sort of pay that their skills should earn. Over here in the UK, there's already cases of 'reverse-outsourcing', where Indian firms set up call-centres amongst the poorest areas of the UK.
I practice something called Cardboard Cut-out User Support. It goes something like this:
- I receive phone call: "Help! The management system's crashing when I run the Audit Report!" - I wander downstairs and stand behind the user: "OK.. show me what you just did." - User repeats process. This time, inexplicably, it works fine. - User: "Oh. Thanks!" - Me: "Good stuff."
Why "Cardboard Cut-out Support"? Because all the user really needed was a life-size cardboard version of me perched behind them to make their software behave. Why does it work? Is it because of an aura or something? Who knows...
I think your parent post is stuck in the Mac world of 7 years ago.
The iMac '5 Flavors' existed only for a short period -- released Jan 1999, discontinued October 1999. The iMac was before then only available in that pale Bondi Blue, and after that, mostly in Graphite, Snow or Indigo (barring the craptacular and thankfully short-lived Early 2001 Dalmatian and Flower-Power models... egads!)
Likewise, the Blue & White G3 PowerMac towers were only produced between January and August 1999. Between then and the arrival of the aluminium G5 machine, the G4 towers were clad in subdued graphite.
How anyone can claim that any of Apple's designs in the past five years haven't been simple and clean is beyond me. How on earth could you make a machine more simple than the G5 iMac?
It's been around here (the UK) for about 15 years if not more.
It also provides services such as searching for stations based on genre, and automatic switch-over to channels when they broadcast travel news (road updates, etc). When the news about the travel finishes, the radio switches back to your previous station or (if you were listening to one) a CD -- all on standard FM. This is great for car radios, all of which have featured RDS for what seems like forever.
I wonder if DAB Digital Radio has similar abilities?
Has this stuff really become that run-of-the-mill to you?
There's been over 100 successful shuttle missions. Every single one of these is astonishing to me, even though I may agree with plenty of the criticisms of the programme. There's a visceral joy in seeing these things do their stuff -- ageing, expensive and cumbersome though they may be.
I cannot for a second understand how [i]anything[/i] to do with spaceflight -- even the simplest satellite deployment -- could be classed as mundane.
The PC version didn't feel quite right to me for some reason... no idea why!
But yeah, the bow tie things are a pain once they get to the edge of the web. Usually being slightly angled towards them lets you kill 'em with the regular particle laser. However, by the point in the game when they're overwhelming you enough to reach the edge, you should've picked up enough powerups to have the jump ability. So, you leap up off the web, and rain particle fire down on the little bastards. When things get totally insane, you're leaping between safe parts of the web, navigating purely by instinct, firing madly, laughing insanely.... and all the while peering through a never-ending wave of exploding-particle score indicators! AWESOME!!!!:-)
Man, now I want to go play it... but it's 11pm here, I've got work tomorrow... and if I start, I won't stop for at least 4 hours.
(btw, I completed all 100 levels in standard mode to enable 'Beastly Mode'. I only got about 20 levels in on that and finally got beaten).
I'm one of the... *counts on fingers *... 8 people in the world who bought an Atari Jaguar.
Tempest 2000 on that is fucking amazingly fun to play. Play it with the jag hooked up to an amp capable of Pro-Logic II (heh, it's the best you're gonna get from a 2-channel source) and enjoy. For added entertainment, imbibe your intoxicant of choice before playing.
I've half-followed PUBPAT since its creation. I don't think I fully grasped how useful it would be when it first emerged.
It's since showed itself to be absolutely vital in the midst of this software patent madness. It's good that there's lawyers out there ready to go in to bat for us developers. No matter how smart we think we are, and regardless of how much we'd like the system to just go away and stop bothering us, it isn't going to just yet. So PUBPAT are there for us, fighting a fight that must be fought, even if it is crazy that things have got to this stage in the first place.
Assuming PUBPAT continues its fine work, it will rapidly find itself as a sort of guardian angel of the software developer -- be they OSS, FS, or even commercial writers.
Slashdot Mirror
You heard wrong.
Triple-booting OS X, Ubuntu and Windows 7 on a Mac Mini here. There's no secret Evil Apple chip in their machines. I'm not drinking any kool-aid, but at the same time, don't drink the stink-water and assume the worst just because it's Apple (booga-booga!)
See, the flip-side is:
I don't care how good your algorithm is if it's written in an obtuse, unmaintainable manner.
There are plenty of coders (especially those new to the profession) who don't understand the value of tidy code. The smart ones quickly understand and tend to ask for some tips. That's the first (and for me, primary) reason for having a Coding Standards document.
The second reason is to reduce friction when viewing each others' code. Local vars should be 'someVariable'. Instance vars should be '_anotherVariable'. Methods should be 'SomeFunction'. I physically twitch when I see underscores in variable names.
But, a Coding Standards document should be clear on 'must-do' vs recommendations. We state that you should split multiple-clause IF statements tidily to avoid excessive horizontal scrolling. But we only provide recommendations on how to do brace placement.
Every single point in a Coding Standards document should have a defensible reason to be there.
Our CS doc is in a Wiki which lets us have a comment section for each page (and there aren't many pages overall). If anyone wants to ask why something's in there, or suggest an alternative, they're free to. The doc's existed for 9 years and is largely unchanged other than to add explanations and extra languages. We most recently added some docs on SQL stored procedure styling, since ours were abysmal - copying and pasting SQL from Management Studio's view designer is a 'go back and do it again whilst we laugh at you' offence now :)
Now, I'm not a huge fan of nuclear power. Not for the usual "GAAAH! RADIATION! WASTE! YOU'RE MAKING GAIA CRY!" reasons, but because humanity (and more precisely, human bureaucracy) is often far too gaffe-prone to be trusted. Running a nuclear plant isn't amenable to cost-cutting or tight-fisted cost-benefit assessment.
But the way the affected reactors and their operators have performed has been almost perfect. Consider the fact that the buildings themselves are intact after what nature just threw at them. Pretty astounding. Sure, by the look of it, we've already breezed through several failure modes, but reaction has been halted and sea-water is readily available to keep the thing cooled without the core making a bid for freedom. Still, as I understand it, worst-case is the core splurges itself over the inner containment floor and eventually cools anyway.
Of course, there'll be a post-mortem over why standard cooling couldn't be restored, the results of which will be interesting (and no doubt, instructive).
They dressed up in sailor outfits? Terrifying.
My office are pretty good at remembering to shut down their machines at the end of the day. Our WSUS updates are configured to install updates when the user shuts down, so we don't need to wake them at night.
But should I need to get into a machine remotely, here's what I do:
- Connect in to our VPN
- Start a Terminal Server session on one of the servers local to the machine I want to wake.
- Fire off a Wake-On-LAN magic packet to that machine
- Start pinging the hosts' name so I can tell when it's up and running.
Not too difficult in the end, especially if you batch-file the task.
Trumpet Winsock.
*smirk*
*resumes watching Alien, Aliens, then Alien 3... but not Alien Resurrection... the suckiest of the Alien films and the only one not made in the UK*
I'm not really a Halo fan. Completed the first one on the PC, never played 2 and only played 3 because I wanted Crackdown.
Having said that, I'd expect the final release to have much better graphics than the demo -- and not because they've still got a few months to work on it. Basically, the H3 beta had to be delivered via Xbox Live. So, they had to keep the download size reasonable. Now, if you're looking to strip stuff out of a game, your choices are limited. Simplify the map layouts or alter the game engine and you're (a) making way too much work for yourself and, (b) not really giving an accurate representation of how the game behaves.
The only real way to reduce a game's size without upsetting the aims of the demo/beta is to seriously drop the size and quantity of the world's textures. Possibly drop the complexity of some non-critical models too.
I've seen this happen before. Compare the Xbox Live demos of Crackdown and Forza 2 -- both demos are significantly crappier-looking than their full retail counterparts.
So, whilst I'm not expecting anything jaw-dropping from Halo 3 once it's out, I'd certainly expect it to look significantly crisper and slicker than the beta.
Usually, I react by sitting and watching it.
It's a shame that I can't trust it to even shut down reliably. Thinking about it, that's my reaction to many of Windows' proclamations - "Yeah, sure, you may say that... but what are you really going to do?"
Meh. All part of the daily hand-holding that is the Windows XPerience. It's like a toddler who's mostly able to walk, but you still have to keep an eye on him just in case he wanders into oncoming traffic.
Absolutely. It's far more common in the UK to refer to a company in the plural, even in newspapers and official writing.
Using the singular looks funny to me (being British). A company is nothing without the people who comprise it, so corporations' names are simply tags for the group of people who comprise that corporation. 'Scientologists are...', 'Microsoft are...'. Although 'Microsoft' isn't a plural, it's a label that refers to many individuals whose day-to-day actions define 'Microsoft'.
"Proprietary" does not mean what you seem to think it means...
LONE STAR!
Ah... you're describing my daily morning game of Russian Roulette.
I stubbornly refuse to shut down using any other manner than the one I find most convenient: Hibernate.
It'll work fine for a while. Long enough for comfort to begin to set in. But there's always that little increase in my pulse-rate when I drop my laptop into the docking station on my desk and hit the power button. The Resuming Windows bar moves across the screen. Fingers are crossed, and I turn to face Mecca whilst gripping a rabbit's paw for good luck. The screen goes black. Will my desktop appear? The wind's northerly, so the chances are good. Woohoo! It's worked! I've dodged the bullet this time...
However, every now and then... not often enough for me to abandon hibernation, but just often enough to keep things interesting... The machine will sit with the Resuming Windows bar full, or at the black screen after the bar... and go no further. I'll go get a coffee and sometimes it'll go through to the desktop. But then there's the times when it'll just be stuck there. Hold the power button, turn it back on, tell it not to delete restoration data and try again... No joy? Shut down again. Pull the USB connections and try again. Fails? Pull the ethernet cable and try again. No luck? Try plugging things into different USB ports...
Eventually, it'll work. But sometimes this feature is just plain borked. Completely unable to diagnose exactly what's causing it. Sometimes the saved session will have no apps open - just the bare desktop - and it'll still fail to resume. Totally random as far as I can see, which suggests it's something deep down in the crapitude of Windows' internals that's locking... something freaky going on with device initialisation I suppose.
Of course, being a Windows dev whose frequently eye-deep in XP's guts, I look at these problems as a father whose wayward son just won't get a clue would. It's just how it is. But... from an end-user point of view, if you're going to have a suspend and resume feature (be it sleep, hibernate, etc) it must work right 99.9999999% of the time. It simply must -- it's a critical time for the user's data, and the feature must behave as described. Either that, or the description of the feature should carry a caveat right there in the UI that activates it.
This is a sentiment I've held since environmentalism became a mainstream topic... The tree-huggers have it backwards: the Earth doesn't need saving or protecting, mankind does.
For all our ego, sophistication, technology and intelligence we are fragile creatures. We can only comfortably exist in a narrow range of climates (which, fortunately for us at present the Earth provides in abundance). Western-style civilisation in particular needs a monumental amount of effort to exist in anything but mild climates. Even as you move to the upper ranges of present climates, the amount of energy, infrastructure and maintenance required to sustain Western-style civilisation increases dramatically. Of course, there's a Catch-22 there: Adverse climates = more energy required to sustain our way of life. More energy production = more contribution to the warming of the planet. We have not yet created a widely-adoptable way out of this situation.
The Earth is big and old, and there's more 'not-human' on it than there is human. It'll get along just fine after we've eventually screwed ourselves.
They're people who buy TVs, clothes, insurance (house, car and pet), credit cards, furniture, DVD players, internet access, mobile phones (Tesco are also an MVNO) and pretty much everything under the sun from a supermarket such as Tesco.
I'm actually quite happy to see this happen. For Windows users, there's a triumvirate of Microsoft (OS, apps), Symantec ('security') and PC World (for the purchases). For the layman computer user, It's always the same product, bought from the same places.
This model has existed (as far as I know, commenting just on the UK, since that's where I live) since the beginning of the current era of computer use. The potential for Tesco to disrupt this most certainly exists. Tesco have a good track record - profit has risen from £1bn/year to £2.2bn/year in just a few years on top of well-executed moves into offering diverse ranges and expanding abroad. This will raise some eyebrows at Redmond and Wherever-the-hell-Symantec-are-based. As I noted above, every 'walk-in' PC store here offers the same old stuff no matter what. Tesco will be exposing competing products in a way that the retail PC sector hasn't yet seen (over here, at least).
Sure, it's not Open Source, and the software may not even be all that good. But I can see it selling in large numbers.
Your reference there is flawed. Japanese cars aren't built by Japanese firms as a cost-saving exercise for American companies. They're built by successful Japanese firms, with excellent research and development who produce a product that's of high quality and is in demand around the world. Their success is driven by the skills of their own people.
Outsourcing is usually (always?) undertaken as a cost-saving exercise. The idea is that a US-based firm can produce the same product/service they're already producing, but at a lower cost to themselves. With this comes the inevitable quality issues, not to mention the fact that we're underpinning the foundation of the outsourced-nations' crappy treatment of their working population.
You might be right that you have only heard the horror stories or maybe you only remember the horror stories. Maybe outsourcing does lead to worse products all the time these days but as the education of India goes up they will be doing just as high quality of workmanship as we will.
Funny. I'd call it 'lying'.
If you have to think up a euphemism for what you're doing, it's probably wrong.
Unless it's funny, like 'bumping uglies' or 'dropping the kids off at the pool'
I often don't even have to smack the user.
I practice something called Cardboard Cut-out User Support. It goes something like this:
- I receive phone call: "Help! The management system's crashing when I run the Audit Report!"
- I wander downstairs and stand behind the user: "OK.. show me what you just did."
- User repeats process. This time, inexplicably, it works fine.
- User: "Oh. Thanks!"
- Me: "Good stuff."
Why "Cardboard Cut-out Support"? Because all the user really needed was a life-size cardboard version of me perched behind them to make their software behave. Why does it work? Is it because of an aura or something? Who knows...
I think your parent post is stuck in the Mac world of 7 years ago.
The iMac '5 Flavors' existed only for a short period -- released Jan 1999, discontinued October 1999. The iMac was before then only available in that pale Bondi Blue, and after that, mostly in Graphite, Snow or Indigo (barring the craptacular and thankfully short-lived Early 2001 Dalmatian and Flower-Power models... egads!)
Likewise, the Blue & White G3 PowerMac towers were only produced between January and August 1999. Between then and the arrival of the aluminium G5 machine, the G4 towers were clad in subdued graphite.
How anyone can claim that any of Apple's designs in the past five years haven't been simple and clean is beyond me. How on earth could you make a machine more simple than the G5 iMac?
That's RDS.
It's been around here (the UK) for about 15 years if not more.
It also provides services such as searching for stations based on genre, and automatic switch-over to channels when they broadcast travel news (road updates, etc). When the news about the travel finishes, the radio switches back to your previous station or (if you were listening to one) a CD -- all on standard FM. This is great for car radios, all of which have featured RDS for what seems like forever.
I wonder if DAB Digital Radio has similar abilities?
Has this stuff really become that run-of-the-mill to you?
There's been over 100 successful shuttle missions. Every single one of these is astonishing to me, even though I may agree with plenty of the criticisms of the programme. There's a visceral joy in seeing these things do their stuff -- ageing, expensive and cumbersome though they may be.
I cannot for a second understand how [i]anything[/i] to do with spaceflight -- even the simplest satellite deployment -- could be classed as mundane.
The PC version didn't feel quite right to me for some reason... no idea why!
.... and all the while peering through a never-ending wave of exploding-particle score indicators! AWESOME!!!! :-)
But yeah, the bow tie things are a pain once they get to the edge of the web. Usually being slightly angled towards them lets you kill 'em with the regular particle laser. However, by the point in the game when they're overwhelming you enough to reach the edge, you should've picked up enough powerups to have the jump ability. So, you leap up off the web, and rain particle fire down on the little bastards. When things get totally insane, you're leaping between safe parts of the web, navigating purely by instinct, firing madly, laughing insanely
Man, now I want to go play it... but it's 11pm here, I've got work tomorrow... and if I start, I won't stop for at least 4 hours.
(btw, I completed all 100 levels in standard mode to enable 'Beastly Mode'. I only got about 20 levels in on that and finally got beaten).
Yak-cellent!
I'm one of the ... *counts on fingers * ... 8 people in the world who bought an Atari Jaguar.
Tempest 2000 on that is fucking amazingly fun to play. Play it with the jag hooked up to an amp capable of Pro-Logic II (heh, it's the best you're gonna get from a 2-channel source) and enjoy. For added entertainment, imbibe your intoxicant of choice before playing.
Woohoo!
I ran out of smack this morning, you insensitive clod!
I've half-followed PUBPAT since its creation. I don't think I fully grasped how useful it would be when it first emerged.
It's since showed itself to be absolutely vital in the midst of this software patent madness. It's good that there's lawyers out there ready to go in to bat for us developers. No matter how smart we think we are, and regardless of how much we'd like the system to just go away and stop bothering us, it isn't going to just yet. So PUBPAT are there for us, fighting a fight that must be fought, even if it is crazy that things have got to this stage in the first place.
Assuming PUBPAT continues its fine work, it will rapidly find itself as a sort of guardian angel of the software developer -- be they OSS, FS, or even commercial writers.