First, I think there's a big problem with games that permit (or even require) mind-numbing, repetitive activities in order to advance your character. Hey, this is the computer age--we all know that mind-numbing repetitive actions should be automated. I suggest that the banned player find a more well-designed game that's hard enough so you have to concentrate on it--and can't box 3 characters at once. (I have high hopes for the forthcoming offering from Sigil Games.)
Second, what counts as "unattended activity"? Heck, sometimes my character (who's still stuck in EQ1) meditates while his puppeteer is off taking care of biological needs. Sometimes his meditation skills even improve while he does this. Is that "botting"? Sometimes I'm not paying much attention when I'm playing because my wife is yelling in one ear, or I'm half asleep--or I go comatose and my head hits the keyboard. Is that "unattended"? How do you measure the degree to which a player is attending to the game? The answer should be: you don't, you just make sure that if he isn't paying attention, he dies.
The book's 335 pages are organized into a dozen chapters, following an introduction and a few other standard sections, including a forward written by ImageMagick's principal architect, Christy, who briefly explains the...
Please, the word is Foreword, not "Forward". I don't want to be a grammar nazi, but I've seen this particular word substitution so often that Im afraid we're getting near the point where the sheer quantity of errors is going to confuse everybody. Heck, sometimes I think I'm wrong about this...I've actually seen books that have a section in front called "Forward".
I remember reading about a proposal to use private/public keys as a form of authentication in a Scientific American article several decades ago. Why haven't we adopted such a system? Obviously, we'd need an infrastructure that supplies the keys in a secure and confidential manner, and methods of exchanging keys that don't involve typing in 256-character alphanumeric strings...but would finding solutions to these problems be so hard?
This is a genuine question--I don't know much about cryptography, so I'd welcome some informative discussion about this issue.
Banks and merchants have no pressing reason to prevent identity theft. You see, they don't pay for its consequences, we do. For them, fraud is just part of the cost of doing business, and guess who winds up covering that cost--we the customers. Interest rates on credit cards are calculated to cover the risk of fraud, and prices take into account the losses suffered by merchants through theft. It's all part of a system in which commercial institutions write the rules to protect their interests--at our expense.
Your comment gave me an idea...I think separate servers for "hard-core" and "casual" (i.e. working stiff) players might be a good idea. However, I don't think they should be differentiated by making one easy and the other hard. How about limiting playing time for the "casual" server? If you decide to sign on to a casual server, you get max 20 hours of play a week. If you exceed your time limit, you get booted. This means everyone on the server is competing under the same handicap--you won't have to worry about some unemployed loser living in mom's basement spending 3 straight weeks online to become an in-game god...if someone is better than you are, that's because they're a better player.
To be really precise about it, you're perceiving the result of a breakdown of photochemical dyes in your retinal photoreceptors that was triggered by light reflected off a hypothetical object you call a "chair" a little while ago. That retinal event triggered some optical nerve activity, which was relayed to your brain, there triggering further neural firings that caused you to think you were seeing a chair.
I second your assessment of the Garmin 2620--it works wonderfully. The only drawback is that the people who publish the map seem to live on a different planet from the ones who sell the device. I've had a hard time getting map updates (though Garmin is very good about emailing me about firmware updates)--getting updated maps for my 3 year old 2620 involves remembering some code that allegedly came with the unit, and jumping through a bunch of hoops--not to mention paying about $70. Also, the map isn't updated nearly often enough--mine still doesn't show new roads that were completed a year ago.
On the plus side, the device itself is easy to use, rugged and very reliable. Since I'm severly dysgeographic, I get lost constantly--luckily I can fall back on my trusty Garmin to route me home (well, via the roads it knows about, anyway).
--Dysgeographics of America: We would unite, if we could find each other.
Er...the solution to your dilemma is rather simple, isn't it? Do what I do: give them a fake name and a throwaway email address. The paper gets to count you (multiple times!) and you don't get spam.
It's ok to lie to software, man. You don't give your real name when you perform a Windows installation on your PC, do you?
...similar in size and shape to a typical matchbox.
Now when is the last time you saw a matchbox, let alone a "typical" one? Seems to me they're getting pretty rare in the US these days. Perhaps it's time to shift to a different paradigm. But then again, I've heard people ask "Bigger than a breadbox?" when playing Twenty Questions, and I only saw a breadbox maybe once in my life when I was a kid.
I see, Verizon is building a vast fiber-optic network, and has suddenly made the astounding discovery that it's not being paid for its trouble. Uh huh.
Has it occurred to this dolt that if it weren't for services like Google, there would be no reason to use all that network capacity? Everybody already pays for net access. If it's not enough, then why is Verizon still in the business?
Look, I play RPGs because I want to escape the stress of the real world. Anything that disturbs my immersion into the fantasy world is a bummer. The last thing I want is to play in a fantasy where real-world factions are fighting their culture wars. What's next--a George Bush fan-guild? A guild for liberal pro-choice Democrats? --Believe me, I would drop any online RPG that tolerated this kind of thing in an instant. And I think that's the line Blizzard should have taken--it's not the particular politics of the proposed guild that was objectionable, but the fact that it was politically controversial at all. The policy should be: anything that breaks game immersion is verboten. Get a clue, Blizzard, or get lost.
How come we never see headlines like this? Why is it that when some company doesn't perform exactly as the "analysts" predict, it's always the company that gets pummeled? Surely it's obvious that it's statistically likely that some "analysts" aren't very good at their jobs, or that no one is infallible when it comes to predicting the future. There's very little about the stock market that seems rational to me, but this aspect strikes me as particularly nutzo.
Hmmm. How does one get to be an "analyst"? I'd love a job where no one ever told me I was wrong.
I RTFA, and I'm not clear on what they're trying to sell, and at what price. The "mini" is the 3 key-keyboard, that much is clear. Why I would want a 3 key keyboard is way notclear...sounds about as useful as the "mail" and "web" special keys on those "multimedia, internet-ready" keyboards. Why buy a keyboard that takes up real estate and that performs functions I could just as easily initiate by double clicking and icon on the screen, or picking from a menu?
Under the "Description" section they show the "mini" keyboard and a small picture of a full size keyboard with measurements of width=118 mm, depth=51.8 mm, height=18 mm, key=32×32 mm; that's clearly a regular-sized keyboard. So are they taking pre-orders for the mini plus regular keyboards?
Well, under "Answers" they show a big drawing of a regular keyboard (which will apparently be released at the end of 2006), and the mini, which is claimed to be ready for release in May 2006. Directly under this graphic of both devices is the following text:
Price and availability
The price of the keyboard is $100 until April 2, 2006. The keyboard will be available for pre-order this week.
After April 2, 2006 the price will be higher.
Keyboards ready for shipment will arrive on May 15.
This makes me guess that maybe I'm just getting 3 keys for $100 in May. Maybe. Then again, maybe I get the 3 keys in May, and the rest for Christmas. Dunno.
And what are the capabilities of the big keyboard? Will every key have the dynamic keycaps, or will just a small bank of special keys have this capability? I'd love to have a keyboard with dynamic keycaps--I've wanted one for a long time. But is this what they are working on? Dunno.
I'm just guessing (in the absence of facts), but could it be that I'm being asked to underwrite the development of the big keyboard by just buying 3 keys for a hundred bucks in may? I don't theeeeenk so.
I have it on good authority that the WW3C is about to release a Recommendation to deprecate the glyph "X", consequent to the many complaints about its over-use. It is not yet clear which character will be selected as successor to the ex-X in its role as coolness signifier, but a groundswell of support for the Unicode character 0x129F has begun to manifest itself.
I am the "admin" for my family network (4PCs, connected via router, 1 WPA-PSK secured wireless connection to the router) and I try my best to keep things running smoothly and securely. A couple of months ago, my 15 year old daughter downloaded a virus via the MS IM thing. I had to restore her system from backup--that virus was eeeeevil. To her credit, she's been very careful since then, and I actually trust her not to do it again (her mother is a different story...). However, it bugs me that I don't have any control of what comes in via IM. For example, you can't just turn off the IM port--the damn things will use any open port, including 80. There's no way to exclude particular IM clients or senders...no control at all. (I'm just a control freak when I'm in sys admin mode...really). So what to do?
...the First Amendment protects our right to write something that annoys someone else.
It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing anonymous political pamphlets.
Please note that,once again, it was a conservative justice who championed freedom of speech. A true conservative is a friend of liberty; please don't oppose a supreme court nomination just because you disagree with the nominee on a single issue--on which he may have expressed an opinion decades ago. Once you're in the Supreme Court, you're untouchable and beholden to no one--and more often than not, that has brought out the best in the Justices, and they have grown to fill the office.
Here's a question for those (many) who are wiser than I. I don't like the idea of having my actions tracked by cookies, but what has always really concerned me about them is that I have no control over what information is recorded in those cookies and--in effect--made public. I'm talking more about stupidity than malevolence here. Suppose I order something from some dumb vendor, and his web page decides to record my name, address, credit card number or even--horrors!--my top secret Social Security Number in cleartext. If someone wrote a cookie like that, any server I visit could read it, couldn't they? Or am I paranoid? Never mind that last...of course I'm paranoid...but am I right?
I'd suggest not listening to the jihadists here saying flat-out, "web sites should be resolution independent," as it's pretty obvious most of them aren't professional web designers who have to deal with a variety of layout needs -- BUSINESS needs that dictate how much and what kind of content, textual and graphical, that need to be on a web page sometimes.
Just what do you mean by "BUSINESS" needs? I wish you'd been a bit more specific about exactly what would justify resolution-dependent web design. Are you talking about business intranets, where everyone uses the same monitors set to the same resolution? I've never seen a business like that, but they must exist, I suppose. I still don't see why that would make it a good idea to code for that specific resolution--the moment you finish your design, somebody in the office will buy a new huge LCD montor...and then you'll get complaints that your web pages are broken.
Or are you talking about fancy corporate websites run by people who want them looking just like their printed marketing brochures? If you're designing for them, by all means take their money. But then why would you be asking about what monitor resolution most normal people use? There's only one monitor you're interested in--the one sitting on the desk of the guy who signs the check. Nobody else will ever give a flying rodent's nether parts about your web page.
Yeah, and I (briefly) held a night job as high volume xerox machine operator back in the 60s (or was that the 70s? Damn memory has been funky ever since)...the machines used counters like these, and I used to er...smoke stuff... turn out the lights and watch the pretty numbers. ooh. cool. What you didn't want 60,000 copies of this?
Re:In defense of print statements
on
Pro Perl Debugging
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I programmed Perl for years and used nothing but print statements to diagnose my code. Then my boss took mercy on me and bought me a copy of the Active State Perl Developer Kit. This thing comes with a debugger that is actually easy to use--and it works! Wow. The program executes inside a window that allows me to step through the code, shows me variables I selected to be "watched", lets me set breakpoints by clicking on a line number...I haven't written a print statement since. Wait...maybe that's why I'm not getting any output...
Disclaimer: I don't work for Active State, I don't own any piece of them and I'm not getting paid for writing this.
Very interesting post. Unfortunately, the state of Texas seems to ignore its own studies and statistics. Every workday, I drive 2 x 30 minutes on the George Bush tollway (that's 45 minutes each way if I actually try to make it to work by 9AM instead of 10). The posted limit on the stretch I travel (between Richardson and Irving) is never higher than 60 mph. It often drops to 50 for no perceptible reason, and goes down to 45 in the vicinity of toll gates (makes sense if you have to stop to pay, but not if you are in the "toll tag" lanes where you just drive through).
This speed limit makes no sense--we are talking about a perfectly straight section of 8 lane highway--and everyone knows it makes no sense. So most people drive somewhere between 70 and 80 (I'm on the high end of the scale)--and that seems like a prudent speed to me. The risk of driving on the Bush is increased by three factors:
Idiots who try to "enforce the law" by driving 60 mph in the left lane.
Idiots who careen in and out of lanes trying to pass everyone else, and who are pissed off that some people are impeding them from driving 120 mph
Idiots in police cars who pick off their quota of "speeders", thereby creating general contempt for the law and those who enforce it, and endangering the public by creating a potential road hazard and distraction
I think that the technical community has failed in its responsibility to explain the implications of "internet governance" to the average non-techie. Maybe if the parties to this dispute had a better understanding of just how the internet is "governed", the dispute would go away, and the U.N. could talk about something important--like making sure those $100 laptops actually get into the hands of people who need them.
I'm not an expert myself--I'm a tech writer. I would like to take a whack at formulating a simple analogy of what "internet governance"--in its present form--is; an analogy that can be understood even by average politicians. Maybe others could help clarify and correct my explanation. Here goes:
The U.S., through ICANN, doesn't control the internet any more than the publisher of a telephone book controls the phone system. All we (the US) do is publish a phone book, and we let everyone use it for free. If you (the customer) ask us for a number, we give you one (we do charge a very small fee for that service). If we didn't, if we got choosy about who we give numbers to, then people would stop using our book. If that happened, maybe somebody else would turn out a reliable phone book--or maybe phone numbers would become useless because a bunch of people are publishing phone books with different numbers in them.
Now, do you really want to "fix" how this works? Do you want to turn the simple job of assigning phone numbers and publishing them to a committee? --Worse yet, an international committee with huge and conflicting political agendas?
Yeah, I agree. The motherboard makers are doing the same thing. I currently own a mobo called something like 8KNP6g-SLI Premimum Ultra (actually, I have no idea what it's called--whenever I have to remember the name of my mobo, I refer to the little piece of cardboard I ripped off the carton it came in that had the name printed on it.) I think this is deliberate--the manufacturers want you as confused as possible--that way you can't comparison shop.
Slashdot Mirror
Second, what counts as "unattended activity"? Heck, sometimes my character (who's still stuck in EQ1) meditates while his puppeteer is off taking care of biological needs. Sometimes his meditation skills even improve while he does this. Is that "botting"? Sometimes I'm not paying much attention when I'm playing because my wife is yelling in one ear, or I'm half asleep--or I go comatose and my head hits the keyboard. Is that "unattended"? How do you measure the degree to which a player is attending to the game? The answer should be: you don't, you just make sure that if he isn't paying attention, he dies.
Please, the word is Foreword, not "Forward". I don't want to be a grammar nazi, but I've seen this particular word substitution so often that Im afraid we're getting near the point where the sheer quantity of errors is going to confuse everybody. Heck, sometimes I think I'm wrong about this...I've actually seen books that have a section in front called "Forward".
This is a genuine question--I don't know much about cryptography, so I'd welcome some informative discussion about this issue.
Banks and merchants have no pressing reason to prevent identity theft. You see, they don't pay for its consequences, we do. For them, fraud is just part of the cost of doing business, and guess who winds up covering that cost--we the customers. Interest rates on credit cards are calculated to cover the risk of fraud, and prices take into account the losses suffered by merchants through theft. It's all part of a system in which commercial institutions write the rules to protect their interests--at our expense.
Your comment gave me an idea...I think separate servers for "hard-core" and "casual" (i.e. working stiff) players might be a good idea. However, I don't think they should be differentiated by making one easy and the other hard. How about limiting playing time for the "casual" server? If you decide to sign on to a casual server, you get max 20 hours of play a week. If you exceed your time limit, you get booted. This means everyone on the server is competing under the same handicap--you won't have to worry about some unemployed loser living in mom's basement spending 3 straight weeks online to become an in-game god...if someone is better than you are, that's because they're a better player.
Of course, you can't be sure of any of that.
On the plus side, the device itself is easy to use, rugged and very reliable. Since I'm severly dysgeographic, I get lost constantly--luckily I can fall back on my trusty Garmin to route me home (well, via the roads it knows about, anyway).
--Dysgeographics of America: We would unite, if we could find each other.
It's ok to lie to software, man. You don't give your real name when you perform a Windows installation on your PC, do you?
FTFA:
Now when is the last time you saw a matchbox, let alone a "typical" one? Seems to me they're getting pretty rare in the US these days. Perhaps it's time to shift to a different paradigm. But then again, I've heard people ask "Bigger than a breadbox?" when playing Twenty Questions, and I only saw a breadbox maybe once in my life when I was a kid.
Has it occurred to this dolt that if it weren't for services like Google, there would be no reason to use all that network capacity? Everybody already pays for net access. If it's not enough, then why is Verizon still in the business?
Look, I play RPGs because I want to escape the stress of the real world. Anything that disturbs my immersion into the fantasy world is a bummer. The last thing I want is to play in a fantasy where real-world factions are fighting their culture wars. What's next--a George Bush fan-guild? A guild for liberal pro-choice Democrats? --Believe me, I would drop any online RPG that tolerated this kind of thing in an instant. And I think that's the line Blizzard should have taken--it's not the particular politics of the proposed guild that was objectionable, but the fact that it was politically controversial at all. The policy should be: anything that breaks game immersion is verboten. Get a clue, Blizzard, or get lost.
Hmmm. How does one get to be an "analyst"? I'd love a job where no one ever told me I was wrong.
Under the "Description" section they show the "mini" keyboard and a small picture of a full size keyboard with measurements of width=118 mm, depth=51.8 mm, height=18 mm, key=32×32 mm; that's clearly a regular-sized keyboard. So are they taking pre-orders for the mini plus regular keyboards?
Well, under "Answers" they show a big drawing of a regular keyboard (which will apparently be released at the end of 2006), and the mini, which is claimed to be ready for release in May 2006. Directly under this graphic of both devices is the following text:
This makes me guess that maybe I'm just getting 3 keys for $100 in May. Maybe. Then again, maybe I get the 3 keys in May, and the rest for Christmas. Dunno.
And what are the capabilities of the big keyboard? Will every key have the dynamic keycaps, or will just a small bank of special keys have this capability? I'd love to have a keyboard with dynamic keycaps--I've wanted one for a long time. But is this what they are working on? Dunno.
I'm just guessing (in the absence of facts), but could it be that I'm being asked to underwrite the development of the big keyboard by just buying 3 keys for a hundred bucks in may? I don't theeeeenk so.
I have it on good authority that the WW3C is about to release a Recommendation to deprecate the glyph "X", consequent to the many complaints about its over-use. It is not yet clear which character will be selected as successor to the ex-X in its role as coolness signifier, but a groundswell of support for the Unicode character 0x129F has begun to manifest itself.
I am the "admin" for my family network (4PCs, connected via router, 1 WPA-PSK secured wireless connection to the router) and I try my best to keep things running smoothly and securely. A couple of months ago, my 15 year old daughter downloaded a virus via the MS IM thing. I had to restore her system from backup--that virus was eeeeevil. To her credit, she's been very careful since then, and I actually trust her not to do it again (her mother is a different story...). However, it bugs me that I don't have any control of what comes in via IM. For example, you can't just turn off the IM port--the damn things will use any open port, including 80. There's no way to exclude particular IM clients or senders...no control at all. (I'm just a control freak when I'm in sys admin mode...really). So what to do?
From TFA:
Please note that,once again, it was a conservative justice who championed freedom of speech. A true conservative is a friend of liberty; please don't oppose a supreme court nomination just because you disagree with the nominee on a single issue--on which he may have expressed an opinion decades ago. Once you're in the Supreme Court, you're untouchable and beholden to no one--and more often than not, that has brought out the best in the Justices, and they have grown to fill the office.
Here's a question for those (many) who are wiser than I. I don't like the idea of having my actions tracked by cookies, but what has always really concerned me about them is that I have no control over what information is recorded in those cookies and--in effect--made public. I'm talking more about stupidity than malevolence here. Suppose I order something from some dumb vendor, and his web page decides to record my name, address, credit card number or even--horrors!--my top secret Social Security Number in cleartext. If someone wrote a cookie like that, any server I visit could read it, couldn't they? Or am I paranoid? Never mind that last...of course I'm paranoid...but am I right?
Just what do you mean by "BUSINESS" needs? I wish you'd been a bit more specific about exactly what would justify resolution-dependent web design. Are you talking about business intranets, where everyone uses the same monitors set to the same resolution? I've never seen a business like that, but they must exist, I suppose. I still don't see why that would make it a good idea to code for that specific resolution--the moment you finish your design, somebody in the office will buy a new huge LCD montor...and then you'll get complaints that your web pages are broken.
Or are you talking about fancy corporate websites run by people who want them looking just like their printed marketing brochures? If you're designing for them, by all means take their money. But then why would you be asking about what monitor resolution most normal people use? There's only one monitor you're interested in--the one sitting on the desk of the guy who signs the check. Nobody else will ever give a flying rodent's nether parts about your web page.
Yeah, and I (briefly) held a night job as high volume xerox machine operator back in the 60s (or was that the 70s? Damn memory has been funky ever since) ...the machines used counters like these, and I used to er...smoke stuff... turn out the lights and watch the pretty numbers. ooh. cool. What you didn't want 60,000 copies of this?
Disclaimer: I don't work for Active State, I don't own any piece of them and I'm not getting paid for writing this.
This speed limit makes no sense--we are talking about a perfectly straight section of 8 lane highway--and everyone knows it makes no sense. So most people drive somewhere between 70 and 80 (I'm on the high end of the scale)--and that seems like a prudent speed to me. The risk of driving on the Bush is increased by three factors:
It must be a lot of fun to pull your leg, because this guy has been doing a lot of it...
I think that the technical community has failed in its responsibility to explain the implications of "internet governance" to the average non-techie. Maybe if the parties to this dispute had a better understanding of just how the internet is "governed", the dispute would go away, and the U.N. could talk about something important--like making sure those $100 laptops actually get into the hands of people who need them.
I'm not an expert myself--I'm a tech writer. I would like to take a whack at formulating a simple analogy of what "internet governance"--in its present form--is; an analogy that can be understood even by average politicians. Maybe others could help clarify and correct my explanation. Here goes:
The U.S., through ICANN, doesn't control the internet any more than the publisher of a telephone book controls the phone system. All we (the US) do is publish a phone book, and we let everyone use it for free. If you (the customer) ask us for a number, we give you one (we do charge a very small fee for that service). If we didn't, if we got choosy about who we give numbers to, then people would stop using our book. If that happened, maybe somebody else would turn out a reliable phone book--or maybe phone numbers would become useless because a bunch of people are publishing phone books with different numbers in them.
Now, do you really want to "fix" how this works? Do you want to turn the simple job of assigning phone numbers and publishing them to a committee? --Worse yet, an international committee with huge and conflicting political agendas?
Comments anyone?
Yeah, I agree. The motherboard makers are doing the same thing. I currently own a mobo called something like 8KNP6g-SLI Premimum Ultra (actually, I have no idea what it's called--whenever I have to remember the name of my mobo, I refer to the little piece of cardboard I ripped off the carton it came in that had the name printed on it.) I think this is deliberate--the manufacturers want you as confused as possible--that way you can't comparison shop.
I think you are trying to say something here. Try again.