Any canucks got any good sugestings for online canadina based stores? Only decent one i know so far is tigerdirect.ca
NCIX has worked fairly well for me so far. A large selection and the prices seem to be fairly reasonable.
Re:So Call Me Old And Cranky
on
Effective C#
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The principles may be the same, but the details can differ greatly when it comes down to the specific syntax and behaviour of operations.
Someone may be an expert at high-level OO design, but when it comes to programming in C++ specifically, he might not know about things like the utility of auto_ptr, that it's a bad idea to throw an exception from a destructor, why destructors should often be virtual, dangerous cases where an unexpected temporary object might get created and changed instead of the intended one, etc... That was where the value of the Effective C++ books was for me.
Just to add another ditto, I'm still getting a lot of use out of my old PII-400, too.
Running Slackware 10, it acts as a file server, mail filter, web server, general-Linux-fiddling box, and recently even as a MythTV PVR (albeit with hardware acceleration help via a WinTV card and XvMC).
Second, and most importantly for any audiophiles out there, what happens to the sound quality? God knows how much money is spent on expensive speaker cables, so what happens when it goes wireless?
It would almost certainly be a digital encoding, so there would be no quality loss at all as long as there's enough signal strength.
Of course that probably won't stop some people from buying a Monster Air Ionizer, for "reduced quantum harmonic interference for your wireless signals!"...
Will someone explain to me the point of building a $3500 Windows-based gaming system when you can buy a console for 10% of the price and have better graphics, a far bigger screen, a better selection of games, and none of the problems associated with, well, Windows?
Well, there's the obvious utility of being able to do more than games, of course.
But besides that, there has in the past been a somewhat different 'flavour' to gaming on home computers than there was on the consoles. Console RPGs have had completely different styles and mechanics than those of CRPGs. Strategy games were far more common and in-depth on the PCs. Simulators could use the extra CPU power to get better realism. There was less of a limit in how much of a world state you could save. More long-distance multiplayer options were available. And so on and so forth, and some people simply preferred that PC style of gaming.
With consoles getting so much closer to PCs in ability though, and the console/PC styles merging or disappearing, you may very well be correct about the future. PC gaming isn't going to drop dead overnight either though, as there's still a lot of inertia behind it.
Even better would be a diesel/electric hybrid engine, but then you're looking at a *very* niche market. A better diesel infrastructure is needed in either case.
Yeah, if you look at the page source, they use a whole bunch of spaces in order to pad out the URL, so you don't see the "@curvet.co.kr/..." portion on the status bar (on some browsers, anyway). The lesson, of course, is that even the status bar isn't always reliable.
The Hotmail one tripped me up too, since I wasn't sure if *everything* under *.msn.com was really trustworthy. For all I knew it could have been some MSN user's home page about to redirect me to another fraudulent site.
It's better to be too cautious, though.
To be fair, the scope of the problem is a bit different. We have our election once every few years with just one choice to make, but from what I hear the U.S. elections are a bit more complex, often with oodles of local initiatives and such to be voted on at the same time.
The pencil-and-paper method works when you can hand-count all of the ballots quickly, but it might not scale well enough when you've got a dozen different choices per person. And people are always wanting the election results *right now* dammit!...
Ditto. I bought a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive from HP a year and a half or so ago, based on their strong reputation and my own great experiences with their calculators.
Unfortunately, the first unit I got was defective, completely failing to recognize any CDs at all. Although they did replace it fairly quickly, it still continues to be one of the flakiest drives I've ever seen, occasionally failing to recognize discs again, going into spurts where it just spins continually and won't stop or eject, overheating quickly and generating errors if I try to rip multiple CDs in a row...
Although I shouldn't let one experience with one product completely sour me on them, I'm definitely at least wary now.
Somewhere things went terribly wrong for Jobs and company.
Although I wasn't a developer around that era, from what I've heard it was mostly because Apple was extremely tight-fisted over access to development tools and APIs. They still primarily wanted the Mac to be taken seriously as a business and education computer, so it was tough to convince them to even let you try to write games for it.
I've had mixed results. I've only bought two Copy Controlled CDs so far (EMI has been releasing them for a while now up here in Canada, but I'm not sure if it's the same system), and cdparanoia ripped one of them just fine, but threw a major hissy fit on the first track of the other. SCSI-level transport errors, big gaps of silence, not recognizing the CD being inserted at all...
That second one did *eventually* rip cleanly after a dozen or so attempts though, ejecting and reloading it a bunch, and my drive has occasionally been cranky, so I'm not certain whether it was the copy protection or not.
Slackware was my first introduction to Linux, too. Back then the only real choice was either Slackware or FreeBSD, and other people on campus recommended at least 8 megs of RAM for FreeBSD. Since I only had 4, Slack it was...
I still use it on my server simply because I got used to upgrading and installing packages manually, and Slackware puts minimal interference between me and the package's own standard configuration methods.
But...Those blogs are screwing with search engine results.
That's a problem for the search engines to deal with. Someone should never have to think to themselves "Oh, should I really be writing this? It might interfere with search engine queries..."
It is a problem though; I keep getting hits on things like monthly archive pages from completely unrelated queries just because the words appeared in two different entries... I often start searches at Google Groups instead since the individual articles will at least be more tightly focused.
I had a similar situation where a grandmother died and we wanted to make copies of a nice photo we had of both grandparents together. All we had of it was a proof though, and nobody we talked to was willing to enlarge it.
It wasn't that we were cheapskates or cheats, we just had no idea who took the original photo. I wound up just scanning it and getting regular prints made from the scanned image. It's technically a copyright violation, but I think I can live with it...
XviD is based upon MPEG-4 though, which uses various patents and has license fees associated with it. They might not have cracked down on XviD or any of the others yet, but there's always that doubt...
Anyone else remember the old Autoduel game from Origin Systems? That always seemed like it would make a nice base for a multiplayer version.
Tournaments divided into different weight/price classes, missions where you could possibly be interfered with by other players (it could even be their mission to stop you), salvage scrap from your victims for cash or parts...
I'd prefer the older rules though, circa Car Wars Deluxe; it looks like they've dumbed it down a bit lately to keep the rules simpler and quicker to play, but of course computers would have no problem with the original complexity.
I'm not really 'off' Windows because I do still use it, primarily for gaming and a few other minor things (e.g., a TV tuner device I got for free only has Windows drivers). I do a number of other things that I'm not about to move to Windows though, for a couple main reasons:
1. Remote access. From an ssh terminal I can log in and check on my Linux server and do pretty much anything I need to via terminal-based apps. I really don't want to have to run a full remote desktop session just to take care of that.
2. Available tools. I have a bunch of custom scripts I use to manage things, and when putting those scripts together I often need some extra tool to do something. Chances are much better that the tool already exists and will be installed or available in an automated, scriptable form on a Linux box than it will be on a Windows box. For example, I recently used a shell script to drive the generation of an animated gif using the pbmutils and 'whirlgif', and all I had to do was tweak variables in the script to experiment with different values for cropping, panning, scaling, quantization, frame selection, and timing, and rerun the script to generate a new gif.
(Sure, you can run Perl and cygwin and do a lot of the same on Windows, but why switch to Windows just to make it behave like a UNIX system? I may as well just go the other way and start doing my gaming under WINE...)
The goal here is to get the user to think "Hey, I wasn't expecting this! Hmmm, if I wasn't expecting it, then I better cancel it..." People tend to become complacent and click Yes/OK to any old 'plain' dialog that comes along, though, so wording that has a bit of a warning tone to it and an attention-grabbing graphic might get them to take notice.
Of course then the danger is that they might be too cautious and cancel it when they should have let it run, and then their app or web page doesn't work, but at least that's a safer failure mode.
I doubt anybody really thinks to themselves "Hey, I've got a hankering for a good salad. Where's the nearest McDonald's?"
It's probably more like "Ugh, I'm sick of the neighbourhood Subway, but the only other place open and/or nearby is a McDonald's. Damn. Well, what's the *least* horrible thing on the menu..."
For something like a URL bar, most browsers I'm aware of will let you hit Alt-A to go to the start of the line and then Alt-K to delete the current URL, without destroying the current selection.
Any app more complex than that really should be providing their own copy/paste functionality. The automatic-copy-on-highlight only uses *one* of the X selection buffers...
In EQ, 'casual' players are pretty much everyone else who doesn't qualify as a high-end 'raiding' player, regardless of how much time they actually put in. A *true* casual player who only puts in 2-3 hours a week would probably still be level 30 or 40 and completely oblivious to all these high-end expansion-oriented problems.
> How EQ could become more of a grind and time sink, I cannot fathom.
Apparently how they did it in the last expansion pack was to make death frequent via extremely-heavy-hitting critters, made corpse recovery long and painful, and progression through some areas requiring spending time collecting trinkets every time through, and from the sounds of it OoW is to be more of the same.
That is at least different from the previous packs' philosophy of 'sit in this one spot for hours and hours until the special Goranga Accountant appears'. Then again, at least you didn't have to be part of a life-consuming raiding guild in order to even be at that spot...
I still play EQ on and off, but nowhere near as much as I used to. The heavy time requirements, the necessity of the raiding lifestyle to progess, fragmentation of my friends among a half-dozen 'uber' guilds because of differing restrictions, and being left doing LDoN groups with random idiots over and over again have sucked a lot of the fun out of it.
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Any canucks got any good sugestings for online canadina based stores? Only decent one i know so far is tigerdirect.ca
NCIX has worked fairly well for me so far. A large selection and the prices seem to be fairly reasonable.The principles may be the same, but the details can differ greatly when it comes down to the specific syntax and behaviour of operations.
Someone may be an expert at high-level OO design, but when it comes to programming in C++ specifically, he might not know about things like the utility of auto_ptr, that it's a bad idea to throw an exception from a destructor, why destructors should often be virtual, dangerous cases where an unexpected temporary object might get created and changed instead of the intended one, etc... That was where the value of the Effective C++ books was for me.
I tried to share some music using this scheme, but all of the peers suddenly went away.
Just to add another ditto, I'm still getting a lot of use out of my old PII-400, too.
Running Slackware 10, it acts as a file server, mail filter, web server, general-Linux-fiddling box, and recently even as a MythTV PVR (albeit with hardware acceleration help via a WinTV card and XvMC).
Second, and most importantly for any audiophiles out there, what happens to the sound quality? God knows how much money is spent on expensive speaker cables, so what happens when it goes wireless?
It would almost certainly be a digital encoding, so there would be no quality loss at all as long as there's enough signal strength.
Of course that probably won't stop some people from buying a Monster Air Ionizer, for "reduced quantum harmonic interference for your wireless signals!"...
Will someone explain to me the point of building a $3500 Windows-based gaming system when you can buy a console for 10% of the price and have better graphics, a far bigger screen, a better selection of games, and none of the problems associated with, well, Windows?
Well, there's the obvious utility of being able to do more than games, of course.
But besides that, there has in the past been a somewhat different 'flavour' to gaming on home computers than there was on the consoles. Console RPGs have had completely different styles and mechanics than those of CRPGs. Strategy games were far more common and in-depth on the PCs. Simulators could use the extra CPU power to get better realism. There was less of a limit in how much of a world state you could save. More long-distance multiplayer options were available. And so on and so forth, and some people simply preferred that PC style of gaming. With consoles getting so much closer to PCs in ability though, and the console/PC styles merging or disappearing, you may very well be correct about the future. PC gaming isn't going to drop dead overnight either though, as there's still a lot of inertia behind it.Even better would be a diesel/electric hybrid engine, but then you're looking at a *very* niche market. A better diesel infrastructure is needed in either case.
Yeah, if you look at the page source, they use a whole bunch of spaces in order to pad out the URL, so you don't see the "@curvet.co.kr/..." portion on the status bar (on some browsers, anyway). The lesson, of course, is that even the status bar isn't always reliable.
The Hotmail one tripped me up too, since I wasn't sure if *everything* under *.msn.com was really trustworthy. For all I knew it could have been some MSN user's home page about to redirect me to another fraudulent site. It's better to be too cautious, though.
To be fair, the scope of the problem is a bit different. We have our election once every few years with just one choice to make, but from what I hear the U.S. elections are a bit more complex, often with oodles of local initiatives and such to be voted on at the same time.
The pencil-and-paper method works when you can hand-count all of the ballots quickly, but it might not scale well enough when you've got a dozen different choices per person. And people are always wanting the election results *right now* dammit!...
Ditto. I bought a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive from HP a year and a half or so ago, based on their strong reputation and my own great experiences with their calculators.
Unfortunately, the first unit I got was defective, completely failing to recognize any CDs at all. Although they did replace it fairly quickly, it still continues to be one of the flakiest drives I've ever seen, occasionally failing to recognize discs again, going into spurts where it just spins continually and won't stop or eject, overheating quickly and generating errors if I try to rip multiple CDs in a row...
Although I shouldn't let one experience with one product completely sour me on them, I'm definitely at least wary now.
Somewhere things went terribly wrong for Jobs and company.
Although I wasn't a developer around that era, from what I've heard it was mostly because Apple was extremely tight-fisted over access to development tools and APIs. They still primarily wanted the Mac to be taken seriously as a business and education computer, so it was tough to convince them to even let you try to write games for it.I've had mixed results. I've only bought two Copy Controlled CDs so far (EMI has been releasing them for a while now up here in Canada, but I'm not sure if it's the same system), and cdparanoia ripped one of them just fine, but threw a major hissy fit on the first track of the other. SCSI-level transport errors, big gaps of silence, not recognizing the CD being inserted at all...
That second one did *eventually* rip cleanly after a dozen or so attempts though, ejecting and reloading it a bunch, and my drive has occasionally been cranky, so I'm not certain whether it was the copy protection or not.
Personally I think the G5s should have come with three drive bays standard and let you set up a RAID-5 array. Power users like reliability too...
Slackware was my first introduction to Linux, too. Back then the only real choice was either Slackware or FreeBSD, and other people on campus recommended at least 8 megs of RAM for FreeBSD. Since I only had 4, Slack it was...
I still use it on my server simply because I got used to upgrading and installing packages manually, and Slackware puts minimal interference between me and the package's own standard configuration methods.
But...Those blogs are screwing with search engine results.
That's a problem for the search engines to deal with. Someone should never have to think to themselves "Oh, should I really be writing this? It might interfere with search engine queries..."
It is a problem though; I keep getting hits on things like monthly archive pages from completely unrelated queries just because the words appeared in two different entries... I often start searches at Google Groups instead since the individual articles will at least be more tightly focused.I had a similar situation where a grandmother died and we wanted to make copies of a nice photo we had of both grandparents together. All we had of it was a proof though, and nobody we talked to was willing to enlarge it.
It wasn't that we were cheapskates or cheats, we just had no idea who took the original photo. I wound up just scanning it and getting regular prints made from the scanned image. It's technically a copyright violation, but I think I can live with it...
XviD is based upon MPEG-4 though, which uses various patents and has license fees associated with it. They might not have cracked down on XviD or any of the others yet, but there's always that doubt...
Anyone else remember the old Autoduel game from Origin Systems? That always seemed like it would make a nice base for a multiplayer version.
Tournaments divided into different weight/price classes, missions where you could possibly be interfered with by other players (it could even be their mission to stop you), salvage scrap from your victims for cash or parts...
I'd prefer the older rules though, circa Car Wars Deluxe; it looks like they've dumbed it down a bit lately to keep the rules simpler and quicker to play, but of course computers would have no problem with the original complexity.
I'm not really 'off' Windows because I do still use it, primarily for gaming and a few other minor things (e.g., a TV tuner device I got for free only has Windows drivers). I do a number of other things that I'm not about to move to Windows though, for a couple main reasons:
1. Remote access. From an ssh terminal I can log in and check on my Linux server and do pretty much anything I need to via terminal-based apps. I really don't want to have to run a full remote desktop session just to take care of that.
2. Available tools. I have a bunch of custom scripts I use to manage things, and when putting those scripts together I often need some extra tool to do something. Chances are much better that the tool already exists and will be installed or available in an automated, scriptable form on a Linux box than it will be on a Windows box. For example, I recently used a shell script to drive the generation of an animated gif using the pbmutils and 'whirlgif', and all I had to do was tweak variables in the script to experiment with different values for cropping, panning, scaling, quantization, frame selection, and timing, and rerun the script to generate a new gif.
(Sure, you can run Perl and cygwin and do a lot of the same on Windows, but why switch to Windows just to make it behave like a UNIX system? I may as well just go the other way and start doing my gaming under WINE...)
The goal here is to get the user to think "Hey, I wasn't expecting this! Hmmm, if I wasn't expecting it, then I better cancel it..." People tend to become complacent and click Yes/OK to any old 'plain' dialog that comes along, though, so wording that has a bit of a warning tone to it and an attention-grabbing graphic might get them to take notice.
Of course then the danger is that they might be too cautious and cancel it when they should have let it run, and then their app or web page doesn't work, but at least that's a safer failure mode.
I doubt anybody really thinks to themselves "Hey, I've got a hankering for a good salad. Where's the nearest McDonald's?"
It's probably more like "Ugh, I'm sick of the neighbourhood Subway, but the only other place open and/or nearby is a McDonald's. Damn. Well, what's the *least* horrible thing on the menu..."
Ctrl-A and Ctrl-K, of course. I've got too much Alt on the brain at the office...
For something like a URL bar, most browsers I'm aware of will let you hit Alt-A to go to the start of the line and then Alt-K to delete the current URL, without destroying the current selection.
Any app more complex than that really should be providing their own copy/paste functionality. The automatic-copy-on-highlight only uses *one* of the X selection buffers...
> Casual Everquest Player is an oxymoron.
In EQ, 'casual' players are pretty much everyone else who doesn't qualify as a high-end 'raiding' player, regardless of how much time they actually put in. A *true* casual player who only puts in 2-3 hours a week would probably still be level 30 or 40 and completely oblivious to all these high-end expansion-oriented problems.
> How EQ could become more of a grind and time sink, I cannot fathom.
Apparently how they did it in the last expansion pack was to make death frequent via extremely-heavy-hitting critters, made corpse recovery long and painful, and progression through some areas requiring spending time collecting trinkets every time through, and from the sounds of it OoW is to be more of the same.
That is at least different from the previous packs' philosophy of 'sit in this one spot for hours and hours until the special Goranga Accountant appears'. Then again, at least you didn't have to be part of a life-consuming raiding guild in order to even be at that spot...
I still play EQ on and off, but nowhere near as much as I used to. The heavy time requirements, the necessity of the raiding lifestyle to progess, fragmentation of my friends among a half-dozen 'uber' guilds because of differing restrictions, and being left doing LDoN groups with random idiots over and over again have sucked a lot of the fun out of it.