But if he throws in his girlfriend it's likely to get her very wet and probably scare the fish to death.. unless they're like my goldfish, in which case they'll try to eat her (so I may have scored 92% on the Evil Genius test, that doesn't mean my goldfish should act like piranha, but would they listen? Wait until they see the anti-piranha trap...)
Either way, I doubt either the goldfish or the girlfriend would be too happy about the girlfeind in-throwing idea...
It's stupid to get wrapped up in a franchise so much that when it goes a different direction, you get enraged.
I'd agree in general, but Thief is a little.. different. Part of the point behind it was to get the player wrapped up in it: a lot of its atmosphere depended on it. And it worked, it worked so well that when LGS died the community mourned but carried on. Not only are there still a large number of people making missions for it, in many cases of better quality than the original missions, and several immensely ambitious projects are effectively creating new Thief games in the Dark engine. The fans of the game know how it works, what makes it work well and how to improve the game to make the final part of the trilogy the best of the series. These are people who know Thief as well or better than most, if not all, of the team working on T3. If T3 ends up in the same mess as DX2, with dodgy graphics quality, painful framerate, tiny areas, rediculous level mechanics and all the other criticisms that were leveled at Dx2 (and, so far, very little has been released that would seem to suggest it won't) there will be a lot of very angry Thief fans, because that wouldn't be taking the franchise in a different direction, it would be gutting it.
If you can save files somewhere (most schools give you space on a central fileserver) then you can install Fire.* - download to filespace, unpack, run program. No full-blown Windows Installer access required.
And you're looking at the issue from the wrong perspective. Most admins couldn't care less what home users see when they type in the wrong URL: a search engine is a good as anything and probably the right thing to do for most people. What they do object to is the fact that wildcard DNS resolution breaks a lot of things end users never see but admins have to deal with on a daily basis - the resolution failure should be handled by the browser, not at the DNS level where there are times when you want a name that doesn't exist to not resolve.
I wouldn't mind meetings like that. Seriously. what I get is no coffee, no biscuits, the people are people I see every day and I need to spend the time paying very close attention to make sure I don't end up with yet another job to add to my 4-dimensional priority-queue based schedule.
Refreshment-accompanied, novel, low work meetings would be job heaven!
Yeah, if there's going to write viruses, they might at least have the decency to put some thought into it and make sure it doesn't have any bugs in it for goodness sake...
(note: this is a joke, I don't think we should be teaching children how to write viruses properly of course)
How big would a multistory with 140 acres of parking room be? I just can't escape the feeling that they'd be able to protect the cars far more effectively, be able to implement better security and increase the amount of green space around the factory by ripping up 140 acres of tarmac, building a roofed multistory and landscaping the remaining ground.
I doubt it - from a quick look at the program I was interested in (Toaster Paint) it looks like it's all 68k assembler. Porting even bits of it would not be an easy job at all.
Bill Thompson is a regular at this one - check some of his previous missives to get a good grasp of his general tone. The only explanations I've been able to come up with are that either he is as naive as a concussed duckling and really, truly believes that governments aren't populated with liars, cheats and control freaks or he is being paid to put forward ideas that no rational computer expert would in the hope that the unwashed masses will support things like government control, palladium and so on.
You're quite right - they should have to share a cell with a psychotic nymphomaniac ex-English teacher with a viagra addiction and a habit of violence towards anyone who spells incorrectly.
You could argue that there aready is a simple engine that could do it - the Dark Engine used for T1 and T2. The graphics quality isn't incredible, but the sound modelling is unmatched. It doesn't have realistic physics, but that's not a big problem in the first two games. If someone sat down and overhauled the graphics pipeline and removed or increased some of the fixed limits (the Dark engine has a number of built-in restrictions on sound sources, lights and brushes (terrain and sound "room")) then it would be quite possible to make a very good sequel in it.
But I guess it wouldn't work on the ----ing Xbox so they won't use it. Bloody consoles.
Actually you can. Quick google will bring up US makes digital signatures legally binding from Silicon.com in November 1999. Even assuming that the judge is an utter bonehead over four years behind the law, this would be brought up in court.
This would be true IF people were patenting anything new, but usually in these cases they aren't: they're patenting something people have been doing for ages but haven't patented because nobody has ever really seen the point in doing it (strange as it may seem, some people actually don't mind others using their ideas - they actually prefer to build a reputation or business based on doing things well rather than suing the hell out of anyone else who tries the same thing). Or they are patenting a trivial modification to something eveyone has been doing for ages. Or they are patenting something that has been done by hand and they're automating it. And even in situations where they might, perhaps, maybe have lined up more than two braincells and come up with something novel, the patent applications are so unbelivably broad, so uttely vague and mebulous, that once granted they can effectively land-grab a wide range of things as opposed to the tiny little idea they patented.
It seems ludicrous to me that NASA is on a 15-year time table...given the vastness of time in a cosmological sense, shouldn't NASA be considering 100-year or 1000-year timetables?
Unfortunately, if you want to look at things on the scale of cosmological time, we don't even exist. Human beings have been around for a blink of the eye of the universe, and unless we get our backsides off this damp ball of rock as soon as possible there's every chance that within another blink, we won't exist anymore. Between climate change (not even human-caused - the "comfortable" Earth we know is just a fleeting hospitible break between the planet's normal fire and ice), potential self-destruction, impact events and a dozen other risks, our continued persistence in keeping all our eggs in one basket is nothing short of asking for annihilation. How many other "intelligent" species would sit there and watch as enough rock and ice to wipe out life plunges into a planet that is, comparitively, just next door and do nothing? We did when Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter. My only comfort is that, should the human race be wiped out while confined to Earth by its own lack of vision and sense, it'll be a service to galactic evolution.
Well, in this case, my prefered option would be long draw-out and inventive torture of the board and associated lackeys followed by a nuclear stike on SCO's HQ, but that's only because I love them so much.
Of course, changing the law would be a good route, but before you do that you'd probably need to follow the advice of Dick from Shakespeare's King Henry VI: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." because while the legal profession remains in its current form, it will do everything possible to work against timely processing of expensive cases, even if the judges support it (are judges paid per case or per hour?)
Slashdot Mirror
But if he throws in his girlfriend it's likely to get her very wet and probably scare the fish to death.. unless they're like my goldfish, in which case they'll try to eat her (so I may have scored 92% on the Evil Genius test, that doesn't mean my goldfish should act like piranha, but would they listen? Wait until they see the anti-piranha trap...)
Either way, I doubt either the goldfish or the girlfriend would be too happy about the girlfeind in-throwing idea...
It is harder to make Thief levels with the lights on actually - you need the dark to be able to check that the lighting in game is correct. ;)
It's stupid to get wrapped up in a franchise so much that when it goes a different direction, you get enraged.
I'd agree in general, but Thief is a little.. different. Part of the point behind it was to get the player wrapped up in it: a lot of its atmosphere depended on it. And it worked, it worked so well that when LGS died the community mourned but carried on. Not only are there still a large number of people making missions for it, in many cases of better quality than the original missions, and several immensely ambitious projects are effectively creating new Thief games in the Dark engine. The fans of the game know how it works, what makes it work well and how to improve the game to make the final part of the trilogy the best of the series. These are people who know Thief as well or better than most, if not all, of the team working on T3. If T3 ends up in the same mess as DX2, with dodgy graphics quality, painful framerate, tiny areas, rediculous level mechanics and all the other criticisms that were leveled at Dx2 (and, so far, very little has been released that would seem to suggest it won't) there will be a lot of very angry Thief fans, because that wouldn't be taking the franchise in a different direction, it would be gutting it.
... where we can't install a single thing
If you can save files somewhere (most schools give you space on a central fileserver) then you can install Fire.* - download to filespace, unpack, run program. No full-blown Windows Installer access required.
And you're looking at the issue from the wrong perspective. Most admins couldn't care less what home users see when they type in the wrong URL: a search engine is a good as anything and probably the right thing to do for most people. What they do object to is the fact that wildcard DNS resolution breaks a lot of things end users never see but admins have to deal with on a daily basis - the resolution failure should be handled by the browser, not at the DNS level where there are times when you want a name that doesn't exist to not resolve.
I wouldn't mind meetings like that. Seriously. what I get is no coffee, no biscuits, the people are people I see every day and I need to spend the time paying very close attention to make sure I don't end up with yet another job to add to my 4-dimensional priority-queue based schedule.
Refreshment-accompanied, novel, low work meetings would be job heaven!
Yeah, if there's going to write viruses, they might at least have the decency to put some thought into it and make sure it doesn't have any bugs in it for goodness sake...
(note: this is a joke, I don't think we should be teaching children how to write viruses properly of course)
Wasn't it a book before being a film?
Yup, ISBN 0751511382 written by Craig Thomas
How big would a multistory with 140 acres of parking room be? I just can't escape the feeling that they'd be able to protect the cars far more effectively, be able to implement better security and increase the amount of green space around the factory by ripping up 140 acres of tarmac, building a roofed multistory and landscaping the remaining ground.
I doubt it - from a quick look at the program I was interested in (Toaster Paint) it looks like it's all 68k assembler. Porting even bits of it would not be an easy job at all.
I never said I supported the current situation, did I? Just that Mr Thompson's "solutions" tend to be even worse than the problem.
Bill Thompson is a regular at this one - check some of his previous missives to get a good grasp of his general tone. The only explanations I've been able to come up with are that either he is as naive as a concussed duckling and really, truly believes that governments aren't populated with liars, cheats and control freaks or he is being paid to put forward ideas that no rational computer expert would in the hope that the unwashed masses will support things like government control, palladium and so on.
No, but someone does tend to leave a very bright light on sometimes.
But do they disappear when you complete a line?
We better watch out for slashdot comments appearing in spam now.. ;)
You're quite right - they should have to share a cell with a psychotic nymphomaniac ex-English teacher with a viagra addiction and a habit of violence towards anyone who spells incorrectly.
You could argue that there aready is a simple engine that could do it - the Dark Engine used for T1 and T2. The graphics quality isn't incredible, but the sound modelling is unmatched. It doesn't have realistic physics, but that's not a big problem in the first two games. If someone sat down and overhauled the graphics pipeline and removed or increased some of the fixed limits (the Dark engine has a number of built-in restrictions on sound sources, lights and brushes (terrain and sound "room")) then it would be quite possible to make a very good sequel in it.
But I guess it wouldn't work on the ----ing Xbox so they won't use it. Bloody consoles.
Just use very, very sharp CDs...
If you can't get thru try sending him a postcard. .. to try slashdotting his front door as well?
Actually you can. Quick google will bring up US makes digital signatures legally binding from Silicon.com in November 1999. Even assuming that the judge is an utter bonehead over four years behind the law, this would be brought up in court.
What's the DBUS ?
/., I said something silly instead.
It's dthing you get on to go to work in when you don't want to get dcar out of dgarage mon.
Or, put another way, I don't have a fscking clue so, in the greatest tradition of
This would be true IF people were patenting anything new, but usually in these cases they aren't: they're patenting something people have been doing for ages but haven't patented because nobody has ever really seen the point in doing it (strange as it may seem, some people actually don't mind others using their ideas - they actually prefer to build a reputation or business based on doing things well rather than suing the hell out of anyone else who tries the same thing). Or they are patenting a trivial modification to something eveyone has been doing for ages. Or they are patenting something that has been done by hand and they're automating it. And even in situations where they might, perhaps, maybe have lined up more than two braincells and come up with something novel, the patent applications are so unbelivably broad, so uttely vague and mebulous, that once granted they can effectively land-grab a wide range of things as opposed to the tiny little idea they patented.
It seems ludicrous to me that NASA is on a 15-year time table...given the vastness of time in a cosmological sense, shouldn't NASA be considering 100-year or 1000-year timetables?
Unfortunately, if you want to look at things on the scale of cosmological time, we don't even exist. Human beings have been around for a blink of the eye of the universe, and unless we get our backsides off this damp ball of rock as soon as possible there's every chance that within another blink, we won't exist anymore. Between climate change (not even human-caused - the "comfortable" Earth we know is just a fleeting hospitible break between the planet's normal fire and ice), potential self-destruction, impact events and a dozen other risks, our continued persistence in keeping all our eggs in one basket is nothing short of asking for annihilation. How many other "intelligent" species would sit there and watch as enough rock and ice to wipe out life plunges into a planet that is, comparitively, just next door and do nothing? We did when Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter. My only comfort is that, should the human race be wiped out while confined to Earth by its own lack of vision and sense, it'll be a service to galactic evolution.
The Thief games sold very well - read Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem On Looking Glass Studios by James Sterrett for detailed reasons for why LGS went under. The "they didn't sell well" argument is a myth.
Well, in this case, my prefered option would be long draw-out and inventive torture of the board and associated lackeys followed by a nuclear stike on SCO's HQ, but that's only because I love them so much.
Of course, changing the law would be a good route, but before you do that you'd probably need to follow the advice of Dick from Shakespeare's King Henry VI: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." because while the legal profession remains in its current form, it will do everything possible to work against timely processing of expensive cases, even if the judges support it (are judges paid per case or per hour?)
And it has been raining in Manchester for the past week, I think I'm starting to develop webbing between my toes...