Now would be an excellent time to announce a re-release of the first Guitar Hero with the improved GH2 engine (HOPOs and practice mode ftw) and maybe the bonus songs that the X360 people get. At least The Trooper. Anyone care to start an online petition - in the unlikely case such a thing might actually have an effect?
I bought PS2 just for GH1/2, but I'm not about to do the same again for future GH titles with X360. I would, however, buy a GH re-release without thinking twice.
A couple of tips, in case someone might not be familiar with these...
Running as a plain old User privileges may be good for some situations, but I run my XP box with Power User privileges for a bit more power. This option is not presented by the Control Panel applet, but is available through Computer Management, opened by right-clicking My Computer and selecting Manage. Once there, go to System Tools -> Local Users and Groups -> Groups. Double-click Power Users on the right-side window and add your user account to the group.
For more info on the differences between the privilege levels, see here.
If you use applications that require admin privileges, either use the Run as... command from the right-click menus of the shortcuts (or the runas command inside the cmd shell), or modify the shortcuts permanently so clicking them always produces the dialog for entering alternate credentials: right-click an icon, choose Properties, click Advanced inside the Shortcut tab and check the box labeled Run with different credentials.
But with PHP5's, Object Oriented features, a standard framework might emerge.
Indeed, one might. So far, not looking so good on that front. All the frameworks I've encountered so far have seemed cumbersome or tedious somehow (I glanced at Prado just now; the advantages of their approach aren't readily apparent, I'd say. The demos are unimpressive, using some god-awful javascript: pseudo protocol links for updates and deletes, which really puts the internals of the framework into serious question).
It seems that PHP is bereft of any real, exciting developments on the framework front. There are a lot of frameworks, but I guess the reason why none stand out like Rails does with Ruby is simply that none are good enough, providing no significant added value.
You have to ask yourself: why a PHP framework? What such significant advantages would one of the existing frameworks provide that learning its ins and outs wouldn't be a waste of time and energy? If you're looking to automate some of the drudgework of form processing, for example, I suggest you roll a minimalist "frameworklet" - or simply "component" - yourself (if that's plausible in your situation) for that specific purpose, making it generic enough to be reusable, but not so generic that you end up fitting your projects to the tools instead of vice versa, which often happens with frameworks.
I've found minimalism to work really well with PHP. Frameworks that try to be all things to all people mostly end up being more trouble than they're worth. It may very well be faster and more efficient (and more fun) to code a small component for a specific purpose than trying to work with an existing solution. Your own solution will be tailored to fit your application and will work as your mind wants it to work, not the way the framework creator sees fit for himself.
It's a Unixy approach, I think: combine small tools in inventive ways to accomplish even the largest tasks. Of course, with tools of your own creation, you wouldn't have to deal with inconsistent APIs, a thousand syntaxes and wholly different philosophies across these tools. Write a custom session handler here, a generic input validator there... Even if you create these tools for a specific project, you will most likely find yourself reusing them in future projects, too, with possible minor customizations.
An example: when I first wanted a lightweight way of separating the business logic from the display logic for a project, I coded a single class that did the template stuff, using standard PHP with no additional burdens. Smarty etc. were readily available options, but PHP is already a templating language, and separate template engines would just have added excess bloat to the mix. My solution wasn't as feature-rich, of course, but it did exactly what it had to in the parameters set by the project specs. I've successfully and rapidly reused the code (and more importantly, the overall technique) in several later projects. Besides templating, I've had similar good experiences with an extensible input validation system I cooked up once, adjusting and refining it to later projects.
The way I see it is this: languages like Ruby and Python benefit from good web frameworks, since they're non-web-specific languages, and these frameworks make their use a lot more convenient in web programming. PHP, on the other hand, is very much a web programming language at heart. Ignore the "PHP suxx0rz!" trolls, it is a good tool for that purpose. (Even though it's capable of more, it's rarely - if ever - the best choice in those circumstances.) The best a framework would do with PHP is addressing clear shortcomings of the language in some way, but you don't really need a full-fledged framework to fight these annoyances. I find the "invented here" mini-component approach superior.
In short, I don't see a framework "enabling" significantly better ways to do web programming in PHP, unlike with Ruby or Python. For PHP, a framework will probably be more trouble than it
Let's see. It can't be the two factual statements in the OP about the female and male sexual response cycles. Nothing lewd or disgusting about them, surely.
So, it has to be the bit about the cunnilingus. But it's odd; all the OP did was present a non-graphic, non-descriptive, passing mention of the subjective experience of practicing cunnilingus while kneeling on a hardwood floor.
Granted, it was gratuitous and didn't add any real information to the preceding description of the female sexual response cycle. But it's not like it presented any vivid images of clitoral tongue-slapping with all the groans and moans and drool and flowing vaginal juices, unlike that sentence just there very intentionally did.
No real reason for this post, prudes who consider something as mild as the OP "lewd and disgusting" just annoy me to no end.
One lost job is a tragedy, 13 000 lost jobs are a statistic.
This is exactly why I *never* want to work for a large corporation. Smaller shops are hardly immune to going under, but at least they don't suffer from these sorts of near-cataclysmic random-act-of-God-like massive workforce cuts. I know I feel safer in a small firm (or I did, until I quit and started earning a living by entrepreneurial means). At least in them downsizing is not "like printing money", as it was well put in an old Dilbert strip.
The "slippery slope" arguments associated with national ID's for the US always amuse me to some extent. I live in Finland, where everyone has some sort of "national ID" (or a multinational ID, even, for those of us with the new style EU driver's licenses), not biometric or RFID equipped, though. The same goes, I believe, with all of Scandinavia and at least most of Europe.
Sure, our country, its associated government, and the life and people here in general are in many respects very different from the USA, but no one here ever even thinks to protest the existence of national ID's. It simply doesn't cause any problems here in anyone's daily life (and no, it's not intellectual laziness or submission to the Big Brother, either - people here like complaining about the tiniest "issues" and are very keen on bashing the government when necessary). Quite the contrary, it's considered a good thing to be able to verify who you are when you want to, as well as to be able to know with reasonable (not perfect) certainty that the person you are in contact is in fact who you think he is.
I mean, sure you have to present the ID from time to time, like when opening bank accounts, or when buying alcohol and looking like you're underage, or making purchases over 50 euros in value with a credit card or a creditless "bank card" (I don't know an equivalent English term for that one, that's a direct translation), or somesuch. There simply is no tracking or snooping into our lives through ID cards. You can walk the streets and interact with people with near-total anonymity, pay in cash, etc. The driver's licenses in our pocket don't change that.
A much worse form of espionage are the regular customer membership cards for various large retail chains - now there's efficient tracking for ya. And they're by no means alien to the USA, but I haven't seen much hubbub about those, even though they are solely a tool for consumer behavior analyzation.
The fact that everyone has a nationally standardized means of identifying themselves doesn't automatically lead to all these worst-case scenarios presented in this thread and who knows how many others in past threads on the subject.
Then again, maybe even average US citizens have some valid reasons to actually fear the emergence of national IDs, dunno. I suppose this thread will bring them out.
Magna Cum Laude may well be crap, but implying that the two immortal adventure game classics, LSL2 and LSL3, wouldn't be funny and equally good or (preferably) better than LSL1, is just plain ignorant.
And let's not forget LSL7, or: "OMG, an actual parser-driven game in this day and age?" To me that game was thoroughly enjoyable, a delightful blast from the past, not encumbered with any gratuitous 3D bullshit "because everyone is doing all 3D now, we have to as well", and something of a swansong for the genre, too; after finishing it I couldn't help thinking that that was it - adventure games like this were a dying breed. LSL7 is a modern day classic, an excellent game in itself, not just because of its nostalgic value, hailed by many even beyond LSL3 and closely rivalling LSL2.
Yes, I sorely miss the golden age of Sierra and Lucasarts/Lucasfilm Games:-(. Guess I'll just have to replay Larrys, Space Quests, DOTT and Monkey Islands every couple of years to fill the void.
I'm not sure how well suited it would be for students specifically, but I've found O'Reilly's Learning Python, 2nd Edition to be an excellent book for, well, learning Python.
I recently completed reading it from cover to cover, and while I didn't yet even code the examples myself (I plan to do that on my second read), every chapter felt like a series of revelations.
Highly recommended. Combine that with other books (Dive into Python looks very nice) and a few extra resources, and you and/or your students should be positively churning out code. A couple of nice ones:
Well, if I'm going to learn Java properly, this might be as good a time as any. So far I've only scratched the surface with some trivial GUI apps a year and a half ago. Sure looks like I need to know it if I want to get a programming job around here (at least in Finland, it's Java, VB, C++ or C#, or another line of work - which sucks since I'm currently a PHP/Python man myself; and of the given alternatives, I'm only interested in Java).
Getting a job would mean I'd have to learn J2EE as well (absolutely no one here is hiring plain J2SE people), and I honestly don't know how to go about it. Just looking at the TOC of Sun's J2EE tutorial is overwhelming with the enormous acronym soup, and judging by the articles I've read and by the quick glances I've taken at the types of literature available, learning it well seems to be nothing less than an impossible task.
I remember seeing a graph depicting the ever-increasing requirements of a typical J2EE programmer compared to the actual skill levels of the current programmers. The gap is huge and ever widening, and I just know I'd be just one more lousy underperforming J2EE guy with my insufficient knowledge. Is it practically possible to learn the stuff in any other way besides doing it for a living, moving on up slowly from basic J2SE? Anyone here taken the leap, and how?
I mean, you can't possibly know all that is J2EE properly. But what should one concentrate on, and roughly in what order? There's just TOO MUCH material, too many separate technologies, the practical purposes of which however overlap somewhat, and... I don't know, it's just too huge for my puny mind.
And to go with the topic of the front page post even slightly: what does the new release of Java mean in the context of J2EE programming? What, if any, portions of the existing literature and other material does the new release make obsolete? And for J2SE literature, is there any fresh stuff that would be written with Java 5 in mind?
Sigh... It's when things like this go through your mind that you wish you'd just be interested in something like plumbing as a career option, instead of programming. At least you'd always have work.
Here's hoping some sort of preview clips find their way to the net some time soon.
I'm having mixed feelings about the prospect of a full-blown Firefly movie. One side of me is skipping and jumping with joy, but my more skeptical side is wary of several things, even though I've learned to trust God^H^H^HJoss Whedon implicitly.
The original two-part pilot for Firefly was about the length of a full feature film, and yet it only introduced the characters, the universe and some of the backstory. The movie will have to do the introductions all over again, since I'm thinking they'll try to lure in more than just the fans of the TV series. How is the movie going to relate to the aired episodes? Is it a complete retelling? How much time will there be to tell a decent story that would satisfy an already-converted Firefly fan? Or how big a priority is that, anyway?
Maybe the film SHOULD be directed at the average moviegoer at the cost of mildly displeased fans. I mean, if the ultimate goal is to draw crowds large enough for the network to bring back the series (is it?), then maybe the hardcore fans should accept a "lesser" film than they'd hoped for, in the interest of this goal.
It remains to be seen how many compromises Whedon ends up making to cater to both interests: fans AND average moviegoers, many of whom may not have any prior contact to Firefly. I'm just afraid that the end result will be a film that tries to cater to so many various tastes and expectations that it ends up pleasing nobody.
I have no doubts that the movie will be entertaining and a pleasure to watch, at some level - it's just that I'm afraid I'll have to pretend the series never existed to feel that way.
Well, Whedon usually manages to surprise me positively, so in any case I remain carefully optimistic.
2004 - HDTV capture coming soon to a bittorrent stream near you!!!
You mean like the ones that various TV-rip groups have been releasing at least for about a year and a half now?
A quick search at NFOrce Entertainment returns this as the first "officially" released HDTV rip (unless my search was horribly flawed, which is quite possible), but it seems that onwards from December 2002 the HDTV rips gradually became commonplace.
The people running pirated versions of Windows can simply d/l their updates from TechNet, optionally with the aid of the freely available Baseline Security Analyzer tool, which conveniently provides direct TechNet links for all the vulnerabilities it discovers. No CD key checks there that I know of. Of course, this approach requires a certain level of sophistication and know-how, but in a sense, pirates are already allowed access to the updates.
I've seen a couple of TechNet update pages, though, that don't provide direct download links, but instead refer to Windows Update (or WU Catalog).
Not that I'd know any of this from experience or anything...
Slashdot Mirror
Now would be an excellent time to announce a re-release of the first Guitar Hero with the improved GH2 engine (HOPOs and practice mode ftw) and maybe the bonus songs that the X360 people get. At least The Trooper. Anyone care to start an online petition - in the unlikely case such a thing might actually have an effect?
I bought PS2 just for GH1/2, but I'm not about to do the same again for future GH titles with X360. I would, however, buy a GH re-release without thinking twice.
A couple of tips, in case someone might not be familiar with these...
Running as a plain old User privileges may be good for some situations, but I run my XP box with Power User privileges for a bit more power. This option is not presented by the Control Panel applet, but is available through Computer Management, opened by right-clicking My Computer and selecting Manage. Once there, go to System Tools -> Local Users and Groups -> Groups. Double-click Power Users on the right-side window and add your user account to the group.
For more info on the differences between the privilege levels, see here.
If you use applications that require admin privileges, either use the Run as... command from the right-click menus of the shortcuts (or the runas command inside the cmd shell), or modify the shortcuts permanently so clicking them always produces the dialog for entering alternate credentials: right-click an icon, choose Properties, click Advanced inside the Shortcut tab and check the box labeled Run with different credentials.
But with PHP5's, Object Oriented features, a standard framework might emerge.
Indeed, one might. So far, not looking so good on that front. All the frameworks I've encountered so far have seemed cumbersome or tedious somehow (I glanced at Prado just now; the advantages of their approach aren't readily apparent, I'd say. The demos are unimpressive, using some god-awful javascript: pseudo protocol links for updates and deletes, which really puts the internals of the framework into serious question).
It seems that PHP is bereft of any real, exciting developments on the framework front. There are a lot of frameworks, but I guess the reason why none stand out like Rails does with Ruby is simply that none are good enough, providing no significant added value.
You have to ask yourself: why a PHP framework? What such significant advantages would one of the existing frameworks provide that learning its ins and outs wouldn't be a waste of time and energy? If you're looking to automate some of the drudgework of form processing, for example, I suggest you roll a minimalist "frameworklet" - or simply "component" - yourself (if that's plausible in your situation) for that specific purpose, making it generic enough to be reusable, but not so generic that you end up fitting your projects to the tools instead of vice versa, which often happens with frameworks.
I've found minimalism to work really well with PHP. Frameworks that try to be all things to all people mostly end up being more trouble than they're worth. It may very well be faster and more efficient (and more fun) to code a small component for a specific purpose than trying to work with an existing solution. Your own solution will be tailored to fit your application and will work as your mind wants it to work, not the way the framework creator sees fit for himself.
It's a Unixy approach, I think: combine small tools in inventive ways to accomplish even the largest tasks. Of course, with tools of your own creation, you wouldn't have to deal with inconsistent APIs, a thousand syntaxes and wholly different philosophies across these tools. Write a custom session handler here, a generic input validator there... Even if you create these tools for a specific project, you will most likely find yourself reusing them in future projects, too, with possible minor customizations.
An example: when I first wanted a lightweight way of separating the business logic from the display logic for a project, I coded a single class that did the template stuff, using standard PHP with no additional burdens. Smarty etc. were readily available options, but PHP is already a templating language, and separate template engines would just have added excess bloat to the mix. My solution wasn't as feature-rich, of course, but it did exactly what it had to in the parameters set by the project specs. I've successfully and rapidly reused the code (and more importantly, the overall technique) in several later projects. Besides templating, I've had similar good experiences with an extensible input validation system I cooked up once, adjusting and refining it to later projects.
The way I see it is this: languages like Ruby and Python benefit from good web frameworks, since they're non-web-specific languages, and these frameworks make their use a lot more convenient in web programming. PHP, on the other hand, is very much a web programming language at heart. Ignore the "PHP suxx0rz!" trolls, it is a good tool for that purpose. (Even though it's capable of more, it's rarely - if ever - the best choice in those circumstances.) The best a framework would do with PHP is addressing clear shortcomings of the language in some way, but you don't really need a full-fledged framework to fight these annoyances. I find the "invented here" mini-component approach superior.
In short, I don't see a framework "enabling" significantly better ways to do web programming in PHP, unlike with Ruby or Python. For PHP, a framework will probably be more trouble than it
Let's see. It can't be the two factual statements in the OP about the female and male sexual response cycles. Nothing lewd or disgusting about them, surely. So, it has to be the bit about the cunnilingus. But it's odd; all the OP did was present a non-graphic, non-descriptive, passing mention of the subjective experience of practicing cunnilingus while kneeling on a hardwood floor. Granted, it was gratuitous and didn't add any real information to the preceding description of the female sexual response cycle. But it's not like it presented any vivid images of clitoral tongue-slapping with all the groans and moans and drool and flowing vaginal juices, unlike that sentence just there very intentionally did. No real reason for this post, prudes who consider something as mild as the OP "lewd and disgusting" just annoy me to no end.
One lost job is a tragedy, 13 000 lost jobs are a statistic.
This is exactly why I *never* want to work for a large corporation. Smaller shops are hardly immune to going under, but at least they don't suffer from these sorts of near-cataclysmic random-act-of-God-like massive workforce cuts. I know I feel safer in a small firm (or I did, until I quit and started earning a living by entrepreneurial means). At least in them downsizing is not "like printing money", as it was well put in an old Dilbert strip.
Sure, our country, its associated government, and the life and people here in general are in many respects very different from the USA, but no one here ever even thinks to protest the existence of national ID's. It simply doesn't cause any problems here in anyone's daily life (and no, it's not intellectual laziness or submission to the Big Brother, either - people here like complaining about the tiniest "issues" and are very keen on bashing the government when necessary). Quite the contrary, it's considered a good thing to be able to verify who you are when you want to, as well as to be able to know with reasonable (not perfect) certainty that the person you are in contact is in fact who you think he is.
I mean, sure you have to present the ID from time to time, like when opening bank accounts, or when buying alcohol and looking like you're underage, or making purchases over 50 euros in value with a credit card or a creditless "bank card" (I don't know an equivalent English term for that one, that's a direct translation), or somesuch. There simply is no tracking or snooping into our lives through ID cards. You can walk the streets and interact with people with near-total anonymity, pay in cash, etc. The driver's licenses in our pocket don't change that.
A much worse form of espionage are the regular customer membership cards for various large retail chains - now there's efficient tracking for ya. And they're by no means alien to the USA, but I haven't seen much hubbub about those, even though they are solely a tool for consumer behavior analyzation.
The fact that everyone has a nationally standardized means of identifying themselves doesn't automatically lead to all these worst-case scenarios presented in this thread and who knows how many others in past threads on the subject.
Then again, maybe even average US citizens have some valid reasons to actually fear the emergence of national IDs, dunno. I suppose this thread will bring them out.
And let's not forget LSL7, or: "OMG, an actual parser-driven game in this day and age?" To me that game was thoroughly enjoyable, a delightful blast from the past, not encumbered with any gratuitous 3D bullshit "because everyone is doing all 3D now, we have to as well", and something of a swansong for the genre, too; after finishing it I couldn't help thinking that that was it - adventure games like this were a dying breed. LSL7 is a modern day classic, an excellent game in itself, not just because of its nostalgic value, hailed by many even beyond LSL3 and closely rivalling LSL2.
Yes, I sorely miss the golden age of Sierra and Lucasarts/Lucasfilm Games :-(. Guess I'll just have to replay Larrys, Space Quests, DOTT and Monkey Islands every couple of years to fill the void.
I recently completed reading it from cover to cover, and while I didn't yet even code the examples myself (I plan to do that on my second read), every chapter felt like a series of revelations.
Highly recommended. Combine that with other books (Dive into Python looks very nice) and a few extra resources, and you and/or your students should be positively churning out code. A couple of nice ones:
Python Sidebar (originally for Mozilla, but works on at least Opera as well)
Python 2.3 Quick Reference (utterly brilliant)
Getting a job would mean I'd have to learn J2EE as well (absolutely no one here is hiring plain J2SE people), and I honestly don't know how to go about it. Just looking at the TOC of Sun's J2EE tutorial is overwhelming with the enormous acronym soup, and judging by the articles I've read and by the quick glances I've taken at the types of literature available, learning it well seems to be nothing less than an impossible task.
I remember seeing a graph depicting the ever-increasing requirements of a typical J2EE programmer compared to the actual skill levels of the current programmers. The gap is huge and ever widening, and I just know I'd be just one more lousy underperforming J2EE guy with my insufficient knowledge. Is it practically possible to learn the stuff in any other way besides doing it for a living, moving on up slowly from basic J2SE? Anyone here taken the leap, and how?
I mean, you can't possibly know all that is J2EE properly. But what should one concentrate on, and roughly in what order? There's just TOO MUCH material, too many separate technologies, the practical purposes of which however overlap somewhat, and... I don't know, it's just too huge for my puny mind.
And to go with the topic of the front page post even slightly: what does the new release of Java mean in the context of J2EE programming? What, if any, portions of the existing literature and other material does the new release make obsolete? And for J2SE literature, is there any fresh stuff that would be written with Java 5 in mind?
Sigh... It's when things like this go through your mind that you wish you'd just be interested in something like plumbing as a career option, instead of programming. At least you'd always have work.
I'm having mixed feelings about the prospect of a full-blown Firefly movie. One side of me is skipping and jumping with joy, but my more skeptical side is wary of several things, even though I've learned to trust God^H^H^HJoss Whedon implicitly.
The original two-part pilot for Firefly was about the length of a full feature film, and yet it only introduced the characters, the universe and some of the backstory. The movie will have to do the introductions all over again, since I'm thinking they'll try to lure in more than just the fans of the TV series. How is the movie going to relate to the aired episodes? Is it a complete retelling? How much time will there be to tell a decent story that would satisfy an already-converted Firefly fan? Or how big a priority is that, anyway?
Maybe the film SHOULD be directed at the average moviegoer at the cost of mildly displeased fans. I mean, if the ultimate goal is to draw crowds large enough for the network to bring back the series (is it?), then maybe the hardcore fans should accept a "lesser" film than they'd hoped for, in the interest of this goal.
It remains to be seen how many compromises Whedon ends up making to cater to both interests: fans AND average moviegoers, many of whom may not have any prior contact to Firefly. I'm just afraid that the end result will be a film that tries to cater to so many various tastes and expectations that it ends up pleasing nobody.
I have no doubts that the movie will be entertaining and a pleasure to watch, at some level - it's just that I'm afraid I'll have to pretend the series never existed to feel that way.
Well, Whedon usually manages to surprise me positively, so in any case I remain carefully optimistic.
You might want to look into this: PHP 5 Migration for starters.
You mean like the ones that various TV-rip groups have been releasing at least for about a year and a half now?
A quick search at NFOrce Entertainment returns this as the first "officially" released HDTV rip (unless my search was horribly flawed, which is quite possible), but it seems that onwards from December 2002 the HDTV rips gradually became commonplace.
Anyway, old news :-).
For pretty much the same malicious reasons DDOS attacks are carried out, whatever those reasons may be in any given case.
I've seen a couple of TechNet update pages, though, that don't provide direct download links, but instead refer to Windows Update (or WU Catalog).
Not that I'd know any of this from experience or anything...