I actually prefer Apple's ~/Library/* layout. Dotfiles are nice because they don't show up in the file manager but they also suck because they don't show up in the file manager. Also, if you use ls -a ~ you get a screenful of dotfiles mixed with regular directories. Apple did a very sane thing (probably done by NeXT before) by giving you one regular directory where all the administrative stuff goes. It doesn't clutter up your home directory and it allows you to easily interact with the files within without having to jump through hoops. It also mimics the global Library and the difference between a globally-installed plugin and one installed for just one user is whether it's installed into/Library or ~/Library.
I wonder if a reasonably competent lawyer could make a legal argument that, as the publishing of your name on Twitter is clearly a punishment, you can't be tried for your charge due to already having been found guilty and punished for the same act before. If that flied, it could lead to a seriously unfavorable scenario if the first one to successfully try it were someone who happened to kill someone with his car.
Plus, if a person is found innocent on DUI but has his name published, can he sue the police for libel? It may not be a good idea if you sue the police where you live (I hear some local police forces can become quite vengeful) but if you don't expect to come to the area again it might be quite attractive to squeeze a couple thousand bucks out of the overeager cops.
I also doubt that I'll be using a 3 GHz C2D in 2019 but that doesn't keep me from buying one today. Planning ahead is okay but I wouldn't anticipate the web to become 50% bulkier within the next three years - and even if it did I'm fairly certain that the ISP would happily allow one to upgrade to a faster plan.
Oral-B is another offender. I don't know about the USA but in Germany they run advertisements that make Star Trek look like Fisher-Price. Seriously. They need a goddamn holodeck just to look at people brushing their teeth and then their massive transhuman knowledge of oral hygiene coalesces into a product called the "Oral-B Triumph". And they market it like they just brought about world peace by manufacturing an electric toothbrush.
Well, like sugarplum fairies who are roughly spherical, made of rock, have a mass of several quadrillion tons and are orbiting a gas giant. If you consider that, the comparison is very apt.
It's a definition thing. Metric butts are smaller than imperial butts but the metric buttload is actually not defined through the butt at all, for consistency reasons. Instead the metric buttload is specified for a butt that exactly fills out one square meter when seated - which is quite a bit larger than even the imperial butt.
Both ext2 IFSes are fairly fragile. It's pretty easy to either mess them up through another driver or to have them introduce file system errors on their own. I used them for a while but have moved away from them; using NTFS offers the same compatibility, gives you a journal and allows you to use the drive on computers that aren't yours.
I've had problems with UDF. Apart from needing to drop to the shell to create a volume using it on OS X all the way up to parts of the system locking up when trying to unmount the volume. I think it was plain 2.01.
UDF works fine for DVDs but I don't know any OS that makes it a first-class regular file system. In my experience ntfs-3g is more reliable and much less painful to work with.
Nobody should be able to complain about proper Capitalization in the english Language. The Rules are just completely arbitrary, unlike those in - for instance - German. For that Matter, is the english Sentence Structure also weird and could a Reworking use. See? Everything is that Way much easier to read.
Or for running science-related apps on computers without a NVIDIA GPU. As far as I can tell, computational science is all about CUDA. Even in courses about GPGPU computing you get brief rundowns á la "CUDA is [15 minute explanation]. Then there's also OpenCL and Sh but nobody uses those" and requirements like "everyone needs to use CUDA. If you don't have a supported NVIDIA GPU please buy one or drop the course" because the lecturer is convinced that teaching anything but CUDA would be a waste of time for everyone.
I don't know if things are different elsewhere but in the science sector CUDA has massive brand recognition whereas OpenCL doesn't.
Hurd is not half an operating system, it's one-and-a-half an operating system. In fact, this is plain to see from this excerpt of the core design spec:
WHO'S AN OS AND A HALF? HURD'S AN OS AND A HALF! BERSERKER PACKIN' OS AND A HALF!
THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH UNIX THAT HURD CAN'T FIX... WITH ITS HANDS!
HURD'S COOKING WITH GAS! IT'S GOTTA HANDFUL OF X11 AND A HEADFUL OF MAD. YEAH, THAT'S YOUR GRAPHICS SERVER, BABY! DIG IT! WHO'S THE MAN? HURD'S THE MAN! HURD'S A BAD MAN! HOW BAD? REAL BAD! IT'S A 12.0 ON A 10.0 SCALE OF BADNESS!
In fact, that's why Hurd is late - it's so much more than just one OS that it's that much harder to code. I mean, most of the developers don't even comprehend why rip_and_tear(your_guts) always stalls until the night_train server is ready.
Well, they could have taken C++, added proper string support, changed it from a compiled into a platform-agnostic interpreted language, hidden complicated parts like the heavy reliance on the preprocessor and pointers, added easier array and dictionary management and then added a completely new standard library...
But by then their web-friendly C++ (Let's call it C++Web) would look nothing like real C++ and would most likely be incompatible in many ways. At best, I'd expect a situation like between C and C++ - C++Web could interpret C++ code but you culdn't call C++Web code from C++ without jumping through hoops. The advantage is negligible.
C++ and PHP are designed to do different things in different ways. While one could bolt things onto C++ until it becomes easy to use for web development, the result would be suficiently different from vanilla C++ that the fact that there's still C++ somewhere in there becomes entirely meaningless. And at that point you can just declare your language to be independent of C++, which allows you to toss out cruft you don't need.
C++ is much too slow and carries too much of an overhead. And it usually requires an operating system on a general-purpose processor. You could go to hand-optimized binary code written directly for the processor but that still leaves us with inefficiencies.
Imagine if every website was implemented as an ASIC. Then we could talk about efficient datacenters. Maybe, if you're relly strapped for cash, you could implement each website in an FPGA. But that should only be a stopgap measure until you can afford a proper implementation.
Except Apple turns a profit in Germany despite the fact that our telco market has razor-thin margins. And this is in a country where Nokia dominates the mobile phone market so you can't even assume that people just don't know about Maemo-based smartphones.
Apple's stack works not because of vendor lock-in but because it delivers the kind of experience the users want. At least that's my impression.
Actually, due to second-hand exposure through American media, most Europeans should know about Wal-Mart. We even had it in Germany for a while but they sold off their assets because (ironically) the Wal-Mart business model was too expensive over here.
In fact, there's a perfectly valid reason for all involved charities to be pissed off - Chase is using them for PR in ways they don't deserve. Winning a public popularity contest gives exposure to a charity and can be used for good PR. Coming up first in a rigged poll is not going to make your charity look quite as good. Chase is trying to milk their donation for PR not just in the usual way ("look, we give money to charities we like") but also by making it appear that they care about your opinion while they actually don't.
No charity wants to be associated with dishonesty.
No, the video camera records everyone the same way. Remember, "to discriminate" means that you treat things differently based one some property they have. If the game uses your health record to determine whether you get to choose your avatar that's discrimination - it uses a known property of yours to decide how to treat you. If it decides to let you pick your avatar you were discriminated in favor of; if it doesn't let you pick your avatar you were discriminated against.
The problem is that most people don't want to be the target of obvious discrimination as it's pretty easy to discriminate in bad ways (such as denying service to people of a faith you don't agree with). Thus, certain kinds of discrimination are discriminated against by the law. Patenting a framework that enables exactly that kind of discrimination sounds, well, bold. At best nobody cares; at worst Microsoft ends in PR hell as minority groups (including ones for the "minority" of women) tear them a new one and the media gleefully bring stories that portray Microsoft as antisemitic, racist, sexist and whatever else they can come up with.
Discrimination based on weight is known but not highly politicized. Discrimination based on sex and religion is and the mere suggestion sounds like the nightmare of every PR department.
Good call. We also need OS-based discrimination. For example the economy could work like this:
If you run the game on Windows, all items in the game will be twice as expensive and you will have access to exclusive antivirus items that keep your other items from randomly breaking (while lowering all your stats).
If you run it on Linux, you won't be able to use the in-game currency at all.
If you run it on Mac OS you can't buy anything but the most expensive item of every kind.
If you run it on an iPhone, everytime you try to put something on the market, it will take three months to be processed and may or may not be rejected.
Well, you should've thought of that before you were conceived. Had you chosen a different set of genes you might not be too heavy to play video games.
I wonder what they'd do if a body builder tries to play. "Unhealthy body mass detected. Assigning insultingly overweight avatar and imposing equally insulting gameplay restrictions... now."
Besides, it's not just weight. They've also patented games discriminating based on age, sex, religion and a number of other things that just scream "someone please sue us".
I do need internet while downloading the app (whether directly or through the PC) but not while using it. And many apps don't need data access all the time - for instance, an app that does currency conversion or shows the TV programme only needs it to fetch the new rates/programme once in a while.
When I'm outside an area with WLAN coverage, web apps simply break. Native apps work with a day-old data set at worst.
Of course there are apps that only make sense with constant data access but those apps don't constitute 100% of all useful apps. There are even apps that don't need the internet at all - for example unit conversion apps for anything but currencies. Or, as found on my iPod, a white noise generator (very useful when trying to sleep in noisy conditions).
Well, the drop rate-enhancing class could be useful for crafting, as well. It would then essentially be the class carrying most of the player-based economy. Make it worthwhile to do so (for example by handing out EXP for crafting and foraging and making that part of the game interesting in general) and yu have an interesting class that appeals to players who don't neccessarily want to go on killing sprees all the time.
Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSX is good at this. Casting takes time during which the caster is almost completely defenseless. The enemies are often smart enough to go after any casters stupid enough to remain in range and a few solid hits will take down a Black Mage. Tanking only works by forcing the enemy to stay too far away to hit the caster. Also, most spells are friend-foe agnostic; if you stand next to a caster targetting you he can end up frying himself with his own attack. If you stand next to their tank, the spell will hit the tank as well.
Add something like that to an MMORPG. When a caster casts a powerful spell, they can't do anything (movement and the entire interface are locked except for a button that aborts the spell (but still makes you pay the casting cost)). eling spells always need a casting time. If you get hit while casting, there's a chance that your spell gets interrupted. Spells don't distinguish between friend or foe; big-AOE damage spells are something you direct away from your party and big-AOE healing spells are for long-range battle and for between engagements. Casting characters are always priority targets, healers even more so. Enemies who want to use powerful spells also have a casting time.
Suddenly, things change a bit. Tanks are of limited use as they also need to be able to deal enough damage to interrupt enemy spellcasters quickly. There need to be fast frontline fighters who can quickly run back to protect the casters if enemies make it past them. You need ranged fighters capable of harrassing enemy spellcasters at range but also capable of somehow evading enemy ranged attacks. Your casters also need to make sure they don't accidentally fry the fighters in front and they need small, fast non-AOE spells for self defense; maybe you even have casters specializing on short-range defense.
Suddenly combat becomes more than managing aggro. You need a tactic and the team needs to be able to respond to a variety of conditions or you find that (for example) while your fighters are holding up most of the enemies, two enemy archers have sneaked past their lines and are laying waste to the casters' concentration. With the attack spells drying up, the fighters need whatever the healers can get through to survive and the offensive casters get shot to pieces before they can dispose of the archers.
Then again, that would make the MMORPG somewhat cerebral and I can't imagine a game that requires you to think being that successful.
At the table, playing, and playing out a role different from your real character is part of the fun, but playing dumb is hard, and playing more intellegent and charismatic than you (as a player) are, is even harder.
Yeah... I remember one character of mine. Not very intelligent, even less talkative. Except when confronted with some kind of holy place, in which case he would transform into Daniel Jackson. It's hard to keep a character from straying from the original concept in play, especially when that concept runs counter to how one normally is.
As for GMing that requires the players to act out things: I know of two good ways of doing that. Firstly, make things easier or harder depending on the stat. If the player has a ridiculously high Charisma and wants to talk someone into something, the GM will consider that person persuaded after a single flimsy pseudo-argument. Meanwhile, a character with rock-bottom Charisma will find the same person extremely hard to persuade. That way you get to act out interaction but high stats are still useful.
Alternatively you can go the way White Wolf did: Roll as normal and award stunt dice for good roleplaying. You optionally act out the haggling/persuation/whatever but require the roll. Depending on how well the player acted it out (or described what he did) you can award a bonus. Thus, players can get by with "I try to seduce the guard" and a roll but if they describe in detail how they coo innuendo-laden lines at the guard while "accidentally" revealing a bit too much cleavage they will find the actual roll much easier.
(For haggling it might be better to roll first and use that to determine the final result, simply due to the nature of the act.)
Slashdot Mirror
I actually prefer Apple's ~/Library/* layout. Dotfiles are nice because they don't show up in the file manager but they also suck because they don't show up in the file manager. Also, if you use ls -a ~ you get a screenful of dotfiles mixed with regular directories. Apple did a very sane thing (probably done by NeXT before) by giving you one regular directory where all the administrative stuff goes. It doesn't clutter up your home directory and it allows you to easily interact with the files within without having to jump through hoops. It also mimics the global Library and the difference between a globally-installed plugin and one installed for just one user is whether it's installed into /Library or ~/Library.
I wonder if a reasonably competent lawyer could make a legal argument that, as the publishing of your name on Twitter is clearly a punishment, you can't be tried for your charge due to already having been found guilty and punished for the same act before. If that flied, it could lead to a seriously unfavorable scenario if the first one to successfully try it were someone who happened to kill someone with his car.
Plus, if a person is found innocent on DUI but has his name published, can he sue the police for libel? It may not be a good idea if you sue the police where you live (I hear some local police forces can become quite vengeful) but if you don't expect to come to the area again it might be quite attractive to squeeze a couple thousand bucks out of the overeager cops.
Well, that's the potential offenders' own fault. They really shouldn't have been suspicious in Texas.
I also doubt that I'll be using a 3 GHz C2D in 2019 but that doesn't keep me from buying one today. Planning ahead is okay but I wouldn't anticipate the web to become 50% bulkier within the next three years - and even if it did I'm fairly certain that the ISP would happily allow one to upgrade to a faster plan.
Oral-B is another offender. I don't know about the USA but in Germany they run advertisements that make Star Trek look like Fisher-Price. Seriously. They need a goddamn holodeck just to look at people brushing their teeth and then their massive transhuman knowledge of oral hygiene coalesces into a product called the "Oral-B Triumph". And they market it like they just brought about world peace by manufacturing an electric toothbrush.
Well, like sugarplum fairies who are roughly spherical, made of rock, have a mass of several quadrillion tons and are orbiting a gas giant. If you consider that, the comparison is very apt.
It's a definition thing. Metric butts are smaller than imperial butts but the metric buttload is actually not defined through the butt at all, for consistency reasons. Instead the metric buttload is specified for a butt that exactly fills out one square meter when seated - which is quite a bit larger than even the imperial butt.
Both ext2 IFSes are fairly fragile. It's pretty easy to either mess them up through another driver or to have them introduce file system errors on their own. I used them for a while but have moved away from them; using NTFS offers the same compatibility, gives you a journal and allows you to use the drive on computers that aren't yours.
I've had problems with UDF. Apart from needing to drop to the shell to create a volume using it on OS X all the way up to parts of the system locking up when trying to unmount the volume. I think it was plain 2.01.
UDF works fine for DVDs but I don't know any OS that makes it a first-class regular file system. In my experience ntfs-3g is more reliable and much less painful to work with.
Nobody should be able to complain about proper Capitalization in the english Language. The Rules are just completely arbitrary, unlike those in - for instance - German. For that Matter, is the english Sentence Structure also weird and could a Reworking use. See? Everything is that Way much easier to read.
I propose to embiggen the English language by finally accepting anonirrespectivelessful as a proper word.
Or for running science-related apps on computers without a NVIDIA GPU. As far as I can tell, computational science is all about CUDA. Even in courses about GPGPU computing you get brief rundowns á la "CUDA is [15 minute explanation]. Then there's also OpenCL and Sh but nobody uses those" and requirements like "everyone needs to use CUDA. If you don't have a supported NVIDIA GPU please buy one or drop the course" because the lecturer is convinced that teaching anything but CUDA would be a waste of time for everyone.
I don't know if things are different elsewhere but in the science sector CUDA has massive brand recognition whereas OpenCL doesn't.
Hurd is not half an operating system, it's one-and-a-half an operating system. In fact, this is plain to see from this excerpt of the core design spec:
WHO'S AN OS AND A HALF? HURD'S AN OS AND A HALF! BERSERKER PACKIN' OS AND A HALF!
THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH UNIX THAT HURD CAN'T FIX... WITH ITS HANDS!
HURD'S COOKING WITH GAS! IT'S GOTTA HANDFUL OF X11 AND A HEADFUL OF MAD. YEAH, THAT'S YOUR GRAPHICS SERVER, BABY! DIG IT! WHO'S THE MAN? HURD'S THE MAN! HURD'S A BAD MAN! HOW BAD? REAL BAD! IT'S A 12.0 ON A 10.0 SCALE OF BADNESS!
In fact, that's why Hurd is late - it's so much more than just one OS that it's that much harder to code. I mean, most of the developers don't even comprehend why rip_and_tear(your_guts) always stalls until the night_train server is ready.
Well, they could have taken C++, added proper string support, changed it from a compiled into a platform-agnostic interpreted language, hidden complicated parts like the heavy reliance on the preprocessor and pointers, added easier array and dictionary management and then added a completely new standard library...
But by then their web-friendly C++ (Let's call it C++Web) would look nothing like real C++ and would most likely be incompatible in many ways. At best, I'd expect a situation like between C and C++ - C++Web could interpret C++ code but you culdn't call C++Web code from C++ without jumping through hoops. The advantage is negligible.
C++ and PHP are designed to do different things in different ways. While one could bolt things onto C++ until it becomes easy to use for web development, the result would be suficiently different from vanilla C++ that the fact that there's still C++ somewhere in there becomes entirely meaningless. And at that point you can just declare your language to be independent of C++, which allows you to toss out cruft you don't need.
C++ is much too slow and carries too much of an overhead. And it usually requires an operating system on a general-purpose processor. You could go to hand-optimized binary code written directly for the processor but that still leaves us with inefficiencies.
Imagine if every website was implemented as an ASIC. Then we could talk about efficient datacenters. Maybe, if you're relly strapped for cash, you could implement each website in an FPGA. But that should only be a stopgap measure until you can afford a proper implementation.
Except Apple turns a profit in Germany despite the fact that our telco market has razor-thin margins. And this is in a country where Nokia dominates the mobile phone market so you can't even assume that people just don't know about Maemo-based smartphones.
Apple's stack works not because of vendor lock-in but because it delivers the kind of experience the users want. At least that's my impression.
Actually, due to second-hand exposure through American media, most Europeans should know about Wal-Mart. We even had it in Germany for a while but they sold off their assets because (ironically) the Wal-Mart business model was too expensive over here.
In fact, there's a perfectly valid reason for all involved charities to be pissed off - Chase is using them for PR in ways they don't deserve. Winning a public popularity contest gives exposure to a charity and can be used for good PR. Coming up first in a rigged poll is not going to make your charity look quite as good. Chase is trying to milk their donation for PR not just in the usual way ("look, we give money to charities we like") but also by making it appear that they care about your opinion while they actually don't.
No charity wants to be associated with dishonesty.
No, the video camera records everyone the same way. Remember, "to discriminate" means that you treat things differently based one some property they have. If the game uses your health record to determine whether you get to choose your avatar that's discrimination - it uses a known property of yours to decide how to treat you. If it decides to let you pick your avatar you were discriminated in favor of; if it doesn't let you pick your avatar you were discriminated against.
The problem is that most people don't want to be the target of obvious discrimination as it's pretty easy to discriminate in bad ways (such as denying service to people of a faith you don't agree with). Thus, certain kinds of discrimination are discriminated against by the law. Patenting a framework that enables exactly that kind of discrimination sounds, well, bold. At best nobody cares; at worst Microsoft ends in PR hell as minority groups (including ones for the "minority" of women) tear them a new one and the media gleefully bring stories that portray Microsoft as antisemitic, racist, sexist and whatever else they can come up with.
Discrimination based on weight is known but not highly politicized. Discrimination based on sex and religion is and the mere suggestion sounds like the nightmare of every PR department.
Good call. We also need OS-based discrimination. For example the economy could work like this:
If you run the game on Windows, all items in the game will be twice as expensive and you will have access to exclusive antivirus items that keep your other items from randomly breaking (while lowering all your stats).
If you run it on Linux, you won't be able to use the in-game currency at all.
If you run it on Mac OS you can't buy anything but the most expensive item of every kind.
If you run it on an iPhone, everytime you try to put something on the market, it will take three months to be processed and may or may not be rejected.
Brillant!
Well, you should've thought of that before you were conceived. Had you chosen a different set of genes you might not be too heavy to play video games.
I wonder what they'd do if a body builder tries to play. "Unhealthy body mass detected. Assigning insultingly overweight avatar and imposing equally insulting gameplay restrictions... now."
Besides, it's not just weight. They've also patented games discriminating based on age, sex, religion and a number of other things that just scream "someone please sue us".
I do need internet while downloading the app (whether directly or through the PC) but not while using it. And many apps don't need data access all the time - for instance, an app that does currency conversion or shows the TV programme only needs it to fetch the new rates/programme once in a while.
When I'm outside an area with WLAN coverage, web apps simply break. Native apps work with a day-old data set at worst.
Of course there are apps that only make sense with constant data access but those apps don't constitute 100% of all useful apps. There are even apps that don't need the internet at all - for example unit conversion apps for anything but currencies. Or, as found on my iPod, a white noise generator (very useful when trying to sleep in noisy conditions).
Well, the drop rate-enhancing class could be useful for crafting, as well. It would then essentially be the class carrying most of the player-based economy. Make it worthwhile to do so (for example by handing out EXP for crafting and foraging and making that part of the game interesting in general) and yu have an interesting class that appeals to players who don't neccessarily want to go on killing sprees all the time.
Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSX is good at this. Casting takes time during which the caster is almost completely defenseless. The enemies are often smart enough to go after any casters stupid enough to remain in range and a few solid hits will take down a Black Mage. Tanking only works by forcing the enemy to stay too far away to hit the caster. Also, most spells are friend-foe agnostic; if you stand next to a caster targetting you he can end up frying himself with his own attack. If you stand next to their tank, the spell will hit the tank as well.
Add something like that to an MMORPG. When a caster casts a powerful spell, they can't do anything (movement and the entire interface are locked except for a button that aborts the spell (but still makes you pay the casting cost)). eling spells always need a casting time. If you get hit while casting, there's a chance that your spell gets interrupted. Spells don't distinguish between friend or foe; big-AOE damage spells are something you direct away from your party and big-AOE healing spells are for long-range battle and for between engagements. Casting characters are always priority targets, healers even more so. Enemies who want to use powerful spells also have a casting time.
Suddenly, things change a bit. Tanks are of limited use as they also need to be able to deal enough damage to interrupt enemy spellcasters quickly. There need to be fast frontline fighters who can quickly run back to protect the casters if enemies make it past them. You need ranged fighters capable of harrassing enemy spellcasters at range but also capable of somehow evading enemy ranged attacks. Your casters also need to make sure they don't accidentally fry the fighters in front and they need small, fast non-AOE spells for self defense; maybe you even have casters specializing on short-range defense.
Suddenly combat becomes more than managing aggro. You need a tactic and the team needs to be able to respond to a variety of conditions or you find that (for example) while your fighters are holding up most of the enemies, two enemy archers have sneaked past their lines and are laying waste to the casters' concentration. With the attack spells drying up, the fighters need whatever the healers can get through to survive and the offensive casters get shot to pieces before they can dispose of the archers.
Then again, that would make the MMORPG somewhat cerebral and I can't imagine a game that requires you to think being that successful.
Yeah... I remember one character of mine. Not very intelligent, even less talkative. Except when confronted with some kind of holy place, in which case he would transform into Daniel Jackson. It's hard to keep a character from straying from the original concept in play, especially when that concept runs counter to how one normally is.
As for GMing that requires the players to act out things: I know of two good ways of doing that. Firstly, make things easier or harder depending on the stat. If the player has a ridiculously high Charisma and wants to talk someone into something, the GM will consider that person persuaded after a single flimsy pseudo-argument. Meanwhile, a character with rock-bottom Charisma will find the same person extremely hard to persuade. That way you get to act out interaction but high stats are still useful.
Alternatively you can go the way White Wolf did: Roll as normal and award stunt dice for good roleplaying. You optionally act out the haggling/persuation/whatever but require the roll. Depending on how well the player acted it out (or described what he did) you can award a bonus. Thus, players can get by with "I try to seduce the guard" and a roll but if they describe in detail how they coo innuendo-laden lines at the guard while "accidentally" revealing a bit too much cleavage they will find the actual roll much easier.
(For haggling it might be better to roll first and use that to determine the final result, simply due to the nature of the act.)