Even if it meant what some people seem to think it means ("By compiling source with this program, you transfer the right to distribute that source in ASCII format to Borland"), they're still granting you permission to include your source in non-compiled form in your executable, with a handy little "Write source to disk" button. The problem which did not exist has been solved.
Safer? Yeah, until you get clever and teach it that it's name is "Pig", and set the stop playing command to "Die!". And then get pulled over by a motorcycle cop in a quiet neighborhood with your stereo blaring and start screaming over it to try to get it to shut up.
"In digital communications you define reserved characters, that *never* occur within signal content - think start/stop bits, or markup tags. At first glance this appears impossible. Forgive me if I'm overlooking technical solutions to the above issues."
Yeah, what big_hairy_mama forgot to mention was that you must be capable of producing a hypersonic whistle in order to "wake up" the player. There's also a subsonic signal, but that's generally only good after a trip to Taco Bueno.
Epilogue: I checked - Dragonheart was nominated - it lost to Independence day. Still, they should have honored it specifically for breaking the ground Lucas so dreadfully trod with Jar Jar.
Uh... Yeah, a completely CGI character interacting with real actors was pretty groundbreaking. Goddamnit, Dragonheart should have won that bloody award. It was a better movie than TPM, to boot.
For that matter, if TPM deserved it, why didn't Toy Story 2 get nominated?
TPM was nothing any three geeks and a renderfarm couldn't have come up with. TPM didn't do anything that hadn't been done before, they just did it better. Most of the effects were just computer-enhanced versions of effects found in A New Hope or Jason and the Argonauts.
I'm not saying The Matrix was that much more. I'm just saying that no _new_ ground was broken in TPM.
Uh. You're a year late, d00d. Lola Rennt was released 20 August 1998, making it ineligible for the 2000 Academy Awards. Sad, but true - foreign films which are widely released in America but not in the same year they come out get reamed. (Didn't get released U.S. until 18 June 1999.)
You know, I hated Pascal all through my DOS days. I kept hating it out of habit until Delphi came back. Delphi has so _totally_ changed my mind - C/C++ is great for the hardcore who either write entire projects by themselves, or who know how to write a comment, but for working on projects with many contributors, lots of whom hate writing comments, Pascal borders on self-documenting.
"That's why you try to get what is called a refund it works wonders and a nice little complaint letter is also good."
That's great. That's not what people did. People just turned their PSX off when it overheated. Guess they're not as enlightened as you'd hoped.
As for your claims about the durability of things that spin, which you demand that I do the research to back up... Every 3-year-old Atari I used had a busted power connector. Every 3-year-old original NES I used had a busted cartridge slot, and generally faulty cartridge connectors. The only device I have had fail due to failure-to-rotate-properly has been an 8-year-old floppy drive. Admittedly, I've seen a number of power supply fans where the dust and hair got so thick that they could no longer spin - but how well does your cartridge do when you get an eighth-inch of dust on it?
As for why I must be an idiot for buying a GameBoy, well, I mean, I just can't get worked up over spending $3000 just to improve my load times on a lame FPS. Different strokes, and all that. It's also a good deal more portable than any $30 486 I've seen. And you're just kind of dumb, aren't you?
No, you're right - in the past, people just sat back and took it when buggy consoles were released. I mean, the first wave of PSX were just awful.
On the other hand, systems have become incredibly more durable. I can count on one finger the number of post-NES console systems that I have seen with problems caused by wear. Pretty good compared to the old "Jiggle the power cable, it'll come on eventually" days. Or the "Yeah, it's like that - blow on the cartridge and stick it back in. Oh, yeah, there's a trick to getting the cartridge slot to stay down. Let me get that..." days.
Even the GameBoy is a lot better than when it first came out - I have one that's almost two years old, now, and every single pixel still works. Compare that to the old ones, where after you'd had it for a month, at least one column was guaranteed to go out.
Re:X-Files == Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
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X-Files FPS Episode
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· Score: 1
"I stopped watching the X-Files after the 6th episode. (Yes, it took me that long.)"
Uh... I don't know about most fans of the series, but in my mind the first six episodes were awful compared to the good ones. I think it took them two seasons to realize that research is necessary even for shows about unrealistic phenomena.
That's kind of like saying, "Man, I hate Doonesbury. I stopped reading it after the first month."
Wow. So far offtopic, but I just had to share the Satori.
This hints at why Linux has competed so well with MS to this point. The MS model is to promise features better than the competition which are not deliver, and then as soon as the competition is out of business, announce that they won't deliver.
"Their IDE is not as good as Microsoft's and not as many people use Delphi as use Visual Basic."
I hope to god this is just a troll, and that no one believes that this statement has any meaning. More people use AOL than Linux. More people use COBOL than Visual Basic. More people use condoms than ML. (Ok, I made that last one up. No idea what the actual statistics on that are.)
At any rate, speaking as someone whose first Windows development experience came with Visual C++ 1.52c, I've got to say that Delphi is my favorite Win32 development app. I (re)learned Pascal to use Delphi.
A friend of mine once tried to exchange a palmtop with a bad ram chip in it to CompUSA. They didn't have any in stock, so he tried to return it. They told him he would have to pay a restocking fee.
But you are right - no commercial establishment is bound by law to accept returns on all product in the U.S.A. - many do not. Lottery tickets are generally not returnable, for instance. Lots of places don't accept software returns, either.
The thing is, many consumers prefer to do business with the BEST possible commercial establishment in terms of customer service, rather than simply going on the "Do they violate any federal laws?" metric. The fact that nothing is stopping CC from charging such a fee is not a valid reason to insist that people shop there when they could shop somewhere that charges no such fees.
In fact, you might say that "what is odd about that" is that many of their competitors do not generally charge such fees. Weird, eh?
Re:Please place all "I hate Jon Katz" Comments. .
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AOL Nation
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· Score: 0
Uh, dude... That doesn't leave anything but "First Post, Beyotch!" for the rest of the thread.
We already had our "AOL Time Warner" thread. It was good. Information was exchanged.
This is, functionally, a reposting of the "AOL Time Warner" thread with "I'm Jon Katz and I'm very important" prepended to it, and a high-school textbook worth of misinformation and conjecture thrown in after.
Although Katz's claim that there are things wrong with the media is correct, and although it is apparent on its face that there are things with large media, it does not follow that large media is worse than small or no media.
Point the second:
It is never established by Katz that AOL Time Warner is so large as to be damaging - only that it appears large because it is in a very obvious location.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if it meant what some people seem to think it means ("By compiling source with this program, you transfer the right to distribute that source in ASCII format to Borland"), they're still granting you permission to include your source in non-compiled form in your executable, with a handy little "Write source to disk" button. The problem which did not exist has been solved.
Your un-interpreted code is not a program. The code you wrote is yours. The code Borland wrote, included in the compiled executable, is not.
Safer? Yeah, until you get clever and teach it that it's name is "Pig", and set the stop playing command to "Die!". And then get pulled over by a motorcycle cop in a quiet neighborhood with your stereo blaring and start screaming over it to try to get it to shut up.
Or maybe that's just me.
"In digital communications you define reserved characters, that *never* occur within signal content - think start/stop bits, or markup tags. At first glance this appears impossible. Forgive me if I'm overlooking technical solutions to the above issues."
Yeah, what big_hairy_mama forgot to mention was that you must be capable of producing a hypersonic whistle in order to "wake up" the player. There's also a subsonic signal, but that's generally only good after a trip to Taco Bueno.
Or you can set it to stop every 20 seconds.
"Computer, keep playing."
Uh, dude, Linewars was fully 3d and had deathmatch capability.
I second.
I can, off the top of my head, think of five /. stories in the past couple of months that used aicn as a primary source.
1 of them turned out to be correct. 2 of the others were retractions of the other 2.
Epilogue: I checked - Dragonheart was nominated - it lost to Independence day. Still, they should have honored it specifically for breaking the ground Lucas so dreadfully trod with Jar Jar.
Uh... Yeah, a completely CGI character interacting with real actors was pretty groundbreaking. Goddamnit, Dragonheart should have won that bloody award. It was a better movie than TPM, to boot.
For that matter, if TPM deserved it, why didn't Toy Story 2 get nominated?
TPM was nothing any three geeks and a renderfarm couldn't have come up with. TPM didn't do anything that hadn't been done before, they just did it better. Most of the effects were just computer-enhanced versions of effects found in A New Hope or Jason and the Argonauts.
I'm not saying The Matrix was that much more. I'm just saying that no _new_ ground was broken in TPM.
Uh. You're a year late, d00d. Lola Rennt was released 20 August 1998, making it ineligible for the 2000 Academy Awards. Sad, but true - foreign films which are widely released in America but not in the same year they come out get reamed. (Didn't get released U.S. until 18 June 1999.)
You know, I hated Pascal all through my DOS days. I kept hating it out of habit until Delphi came back. Delphi has so _totally_ changed my mind - C/C++ is great for the hardcore who either write entire projects by themselves, or who know how to write a comment, but for working on projects with many contributors, lots of whom hate writing comments, Pascal borders on self-documenting.
"That's why you try to get what is called a refund it works wonders and a nice little complaint letter is also good."
That's great. That's not what people did. People just turned their PSX off when it overheated. Guess they're not as enlightened as you'd hoped.
As for your claims about the durability of things that spin, which you demand that I do the research to back up... Every 3-year-old Atari I used had a busted power connector. Every 3-year-old original NES I used had a busted cartridge slot, and generally faulty cartridge connectors. The only device I have had fail due to failure-to-rotate-properly has been an 8-year-old floppy drive. Admittedly, I've seen a number of power supply fans where the dust and hair got so thick that they could no longer spin - but how well does your cartridge do when you get an eighth-inch of dust on it?
As for why I must be an idiot for buying a GameBoy, well, I mean, I just can't get worked up over spending $3000 just to improve my load times on a lame FPS. Different strokes, and all that. It's also a good deal more portable than any $30 486 I've seen. And you're just kind of dumb, aren't you?
No, you're right - in the past, people just sat back and took it when buggy consoles were released. I mean, the first wave of PSX were just awful.
On the other hand, systems have become incredibly more durable. I can count on one finger the number of post-NES console systems that I have seen with problems caused by wear. Pretty good compared to the old "Jiggle the power cable, it'll come on eventually" days. Or the "Yeah, it's like that - blow on the cartridge and stick it back in. Oh, yeah, there's a trick to getting the cartridge slot to stay down. Let me get that..." days.
Even the GameBoy is a lot better than when it first came out - I have one that's almost two years old, now, and every single pixel still works. Compare that to the old ones, where after you'd had it for a month, at least one column was guaranteed to go out.
"I stopped watching the X-Files after the 6th episode. (Yes, it took me that long.)"
Uh... I don't know about most fans of the series, but in my mind the first six episodes were awful compared to the good ones. I think it took them two seasons to realize that research is necessary even for shows about unrealistic phenomena.
That's kind of like saying, "Man, I hate Doonesbury. I stopped reading it after the first month."
Wow. So far offtopic, but I just had to share the Satori.
This hints at why Linux has competed so well with MS to this point. The MS model is to promise features better than the competition which are not deliver, and then as soon as the competition is out of business, announce that they won't deliver.
Linux cannot be put out of business.
"Their IDE is not as good as Microsoft's and not as many people use Delphi as use Visual Basic."
I hope to god this is just a troll, and that no one believes that this statement has any meaning. More people use AOL than Linux. More people use COBOL than Visual Basic. More people use condoms than ML. (Ok, I made that last one up. No idea what the actual statistics on that are.)
At any rate, speaking as someone whose first Windows development experience came with Visual C++ 1.52c, I've got to say that Delphi is my favorite Win32 development app. I (re)learned Pascal to use Delphi.
A friend of mine once tried to exchange a palmtop with a bad ram chip in it to CompUSA. They didn't have any in stock, so he tried to return it. They told him he would have to pay a restocking fee.
But you are right - no commercial establishment is bound by law to accept returns on all product in the U.S.A. - many do not. Lottery tickets are generally not returnable, for instance. Lots of places don't accept software returns, either.
The thing is, many consumers prefer to do business with the BEST possible commercial establishment in terms of customer service, rather than simply going on the "Do they violate any federal laws?" metric. The fact that nothing is stopping CC from charging such a fee is not a valid reason to insist that people shop there when they could shop somewhere that charges no such fees.
In fact, you might say that "what is odd about that" is that many of their competitors do not generally charge such fees. Weird, eh?
Uh, dude... That doesn't leave anything but "First Post, Beyotch!" for the rest of the thread.
We already had our "AOL Time Warner" thread. It was good. Information was exchanged.
This is, functionally, a reposting of the "AOL Time Warner" thread with "I'm Jon Katz and I'm very important" prepended to it, and a high-school textbook worth of misinformation and conjecture thrown in after.
What you should really be concerned about is the possibility of a Looney Toons licensed AIM.
No, really.
(Yeah, it's the same Warner. Not the same as Kurt Warner, though.)
Oh, no - he made it quite clear that the free market is good for everyone, as long as it's good. It's only when it's bad that it must be controlled.
Point the first:
Although Katz's claim that there are things wrong with the media is correct, and although it is apparent on its face that there are things with large media, it does not follow that large media is worse than small or no media.
Point the second:
It is never established by Katz that AOL Time Warner is so large as to be damaging - only that it appears large because it is in a very obvious location.
Point the third:
Katz is a yutz.
2970 out of 2989 web sites indexed by Google agree - it's "Joxer the Mighty" to me.
If you are looking for someone to *ahem* pull off the geek, I must again suggest John Cusack. Whether as John Kelso, Himself, Narrator, Martin Q. Blank, Himself, or Scary Man, Cusack cannot be said to fail to pull off the geek.
Alternatively, might I suggest another fine Narrator/Himself, Edward Norton.
YM "Lower ASCII". HTH.
I am all about John Cusack as Peter Parker. The part where he has the right look goes great with the part where he can act.