Unless your role is a merchant or a bandit (killing to loot your victim), or you're doing the equivalent of beating on sticks that fight back, these are Roll Playing Games.
Really, there aren't many, but MMORPG's are a start. NWN, in particular, gives the user a choice of environment, so that's the one that I prefer. There are quite a few servers that solve both your obsessive clicking problem (diablo-like "action" servers) or something that requires some actual thought with some action ("Story" or "RolePlay"), and something akin to the palace, with weapons and spells ("Social").
One thing about O'Reilly that I actually like is their adoption, but lack of fanaticism for Open Source.
Next time you visit their website to buy anything, when you hit the secure cart, take a good look at what they're using (in the URL, I tried to HEAD request them via https, but I wasn't having any luck). It's windows, folks. At least, if it's not windows, they've gone to a disturbing effort to use ASP in Linux (which, as a web application programmer, I see no need for with current solutions like PHP and JSP).
Have you done any inquiry on why this might be the case, regarding Word files? Perhaps their editors have special macros that they use, or something along those lines. What about templates, etc, etc. I really don't use word processors, so I'm not going to judge one way or another, but there is probably a reason, be it good or not, and I doubt it's because of some silly political stance.
The thing that bothers me, specifically with alzheimer's patients, is that at least the ones that I've met (3, to be exact, two of them I am related to), cannot comprehend such a thing to make a valid decision on it.
Who's going to make that decision for them? I mean, if I were to make the decision NOW that if I were to be affected by alzheimers to have this operation done to me, that would be fine.
But what about the people who have it now? And what about testing this? Who are going to be the guinea pigs?
I care not of the religious problems with this, but I have a problem with the morality of forced choices in this regard. This bothers me immensely.
I think the argument is (since long, long ago, I was doing tech support too), that sometimes it's hard enough to get people to POINT AND CLICK over the phone, much less, type things.
Read your shell script (or even better, a perl script) out loud, and that might just give you the slightest on how hard it might be to do something like that over hte phone.
Of course, to provide a counter-argument to this one, something that I do with a couple of linux-using friends is set them up with sshd and an account for me, tell them to get on the net and discover their ip address, and do it myself.
Re:64 Bit is good for Multiplayer online games....
on
More on 64-bit Gaming
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· Score: 1
Repeat after me.
SPARC is slow, and Sun is expensive.
OTOH, support is a really, really nice thing. Those sun machines (at least ours) almost never go down.
On windows, I plug my mouse in, and it works. I plug my gamepad/joystick in, and it works. I throw the cd in, and I can get right into the game. Games flip resolutions/refresh without effort, depending on the monitor, you never even need to align the screen (Thanks, Viewsonic!).
XFree86 4.x is really making great strides in this department, and Linux 2.6 is going to resolve a lot of the USB issues (some of which you can alleviate now, if you don't mind recompiling your kernel -- and no, I don't use RedHat so that keeps kudzu pretty much out of the picture).
Autoplaying cd's is something that's not going to happen for a long time -- *I* don't mind, but a lot of people (read: gamers in particular, who want the shortest path to the game) are going to.
Frankly, I'm more than happy to have my wintendo machine and my workstation, which of course, runs linux.
Personally, I'd rather not have a mobile at all, but work requires that I do, so I make the most of it.
I like SMS for the fact that I can get a quick answer out of someone (if they choose to answer) without making a giant interruption out of thier current situation.
Commonly, a text message of "NWN?" will be shared amongst myself, two co-workers, and a mutual friend of ours. Generally we don't respond unless we're up for playing. "Beer?" is also applicable, but not as often (thank god:).
SMS is nice, but I'll find that if I have something that's going to be expressed in more than 3 words, I'd rather just call them.
One thing that I hate more than anything is getting called in the car, TELLING the other person that I'm in the car, and they don't care. I don't live in a large city anymore, so car time is generally pretty short, and I can call you back when I get OUT OF THE CAR, DAMNIT!:)
Please mod this back up -- this is a good discussion!
I haven't spent as much time as I'd like with Python... Although I'd like to. I don't think I could justify using it for web stuff, though. (Although the zope guys seem to have no problem with it)
I can't stand PHP. If I were to choose one thing, it would have to be auto-vivifying variables. Frankly, I don't need the language helping undermine the security of my applications.
I have found Pike to be an interesting place to fill the PERL gap where I would consider Python another contender. Pike is type-safe, or not, depending on how you write your application. The greatest thing is that you can specify multiple, specific types for a variable, and the VM will check it. Pike also beats the pants off all the above languages in terms of speed.
With mod_perl, I still think you can do more with the web than with PHP, even if it only takes a little longer.
I don't want to be over-corrective, and I certainly don't like getting into language vs. language, but this whole argument is poorly formed.
Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
Personally, I wouldn't recommend any language that is meant for programming for a specific medium (and do not provide the argument that PHP can be used for non-web scripting -- that's just ludicrous) to be a good idea. You lose a lot of core knowledge while learning a language that is meant for that.
After all, would you really want to teach someone 'programming' by giving them a PL/SQL manual? I think not.
The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk. We all know that Perl's OO still needs work (whether or not OO is all that great is another discussion.) Hopefully Perl will be patched up so it supports such must-have OO features like introspection, reflection, self-replication and ontological data-points.
Yes, the OO in PERL is horrible. But, OO is a design methodology, one which is supported (or mandated) by some languages. For instance, take a look at the berkeley DB code. It's very OO, and pure C.
Hell, it's easy to write procedural Java, too.
Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.) Perl seems limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL, and its really a kludge for the later. I've heard that this will be fixed in upcoming versions of Perl though.
Take another look. Tim Bunce, creator of DBI for perl (DataBase Interface), wrote the DBD::Oracle driver -- IIRC, this was the first DBD for DBI, which makes your point moot.
In our shop, we use Berkeley DB and Oracle, and a very minor touch of Pg and MySQL. Almost all of this is done w/ PERL.
Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used. While it won't be replacing assembly or C, its definitely faster than Perl in almost every case, particularly in regex which has long been Perl's strongest point. I'm sure there are cases where Perl is equal to PHP, but I can't think of any at the moment.
Do a search for 'doug bagley's language shootout'. You'll find that PHP is a much harder sell after you read this. If you want to argue about interpreter startup, take a look at mod_perl for apache. They are very comparable.
Portability. I can take PHP code off my Linux box and plop it onto an IIS server, or even one of those new Macintosh servers and have it run without having to change a single line of code. Try doing this with Perl! Its as though it was written in assembly, Perl requires that much rewriting.
I have done this a few times, and never had a problem with it. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, just that I've never had that problem. Perl on IIS also supports COM, which means you can do quite a bit with it on the windows side. You can also script it just like PHP, mixed inside the HTML (you can do it on UNIX with embperl, AxKit, and I think mason).
Graphics. PHP comes with a nice little graphics library. While I wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice) its adequate for most web pages, and should be considered as a substitute for Flash for certain things. Perl lacks a graphics library of any kind.
GD. PerlMagick. I'm going to ignore the rest of your comment (as you obviously have no clue what performance means). I wouldn't use Perl to write Doom III, either.:)
Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc. Under Perl you're extremely limited in what you can do. This is because Perl isn't OO (so you can't create Node classes, for example, usefull in a linked list) and because it lacks pointers. Some of you may notice that PHP lacks pointers, but look deeper! Behind the scenes, hidden from the user pointers are used. Because of this, PHP can support complex data structures.
Um.... You are referring to references. If PHP uses real pointers in it's scripting, garbage-collection-based language I would be SERIOUSLY amazed.
Regardless, PERL supports these too, but who the hell needs linked lists in a language which has built-in structures? If you want good examples of how various trees work, check out Mastering Algorithms in PERL, or spend 20 minutes and figure them out yourself -- it's not that hard:)
On this though, one has to have intimate knowledge and experience with the PERL reference-counting GC to pull off queues and any form of circularly-linked structure without creating a lot of extra overhead.
Here are some reasons I prefer Perl over PHP:
Namespaces
No Auto-Vivifying variables (read BUGTRAQ if you want more info on why these are bad)
Clean seperation regarding MVC, without extra work
Can be used for more than the web (Realistically!)
With mod_perl, significantly more finer-grained control over apache processes
You can at least fake function overloading in perl
Things I hate about both languages:
No attempt at typing, at all. (well, perl does at the XS level, but it's a hack)
No ability to compile to any form of byte-code or machine-code (read: bypassing the interpreter for speed)
Don't kid yourself -- the i810 uses your system RAM too. In fact, you can configure how much it uses by going to CMOS (on most systems I have used). I think the default is 16 or 12.
Actually, C-Dilla is the scheme that Intuit used for TurboTax. There was an earlier article on slashdot that pointed to another article (sorry, I'm not going to search for it) that pointed this out. It's a very interesting read, and you should probably check it out.
It's the job of the maintainer(s) to handle this. Nothing will replace viewing the source in the end. Documentation is a big step, and comments are too, but the source is the final word.
I know the true anime fanboys will wretch at this name....
But the first anime that I saw was Akira. Admit it, that's what it was for quite a few of you, too.
I was already a big fan of animation, and scenes like the motorcycle riding on the bridge in the beginning, with the light tracers on the bikes, that impressed me. The falling buildings did too.
The story was hard to follow at first and I really wasn't impressed with it until the second time I watched it.
What really, really did it for me was the end of the movie. Where Tetsuo turns into the giant flesh beast.
I would be really, really impressed if I see that in CGI (that is, the transformation of a real, moving, live actor into the flesh beast) in the next 5 years. I'm sure it could be done, but the intracicy (sp?) of the work would have to be detailed and well-coordinated with the actor to be realistic.
There aren't any new laws, but if you read the old law....
What defines something as paraphenilia is if it's MOST COMMON USE is that for consuming an illegal drug.
Ashcroft is using a loophole in the law to arrest these people.
He's, at least, from the articles that I read (I don't know if it's the/. one or not) he's arresting those with hide-a-pipe stuff, IE, credit card pipes, stealth pipes, etc. This is really stretching the boundaries of the law, but I think it could be argued that they serve a purpose for smoking illegal goods by the way that they're designed.
Also, the fact that a lot of headshops nowadays have been getting QUITE in-your-face about what the product is used for is not making things any better.
Myself, I was going to have a 40k LOC E-Commerce site for a headshop (professional glass blower, haven't smoked in nearly a year but his stuff I'd put on my mantle just for show) up this weekend.
I think we're delaying the project for a little while.:)
Samurai Jack is 99% action and 1% story. It was intended to be that way, from the start.
The team that will work on the star wars episodes is what made the cartoon network famous.
Genndy Tartakovsky, Samurai Jack creator, also was the creator of Dexter's Lab. He has also directed many Powerpuff Girls episodes. (Unfortunately, to get at all the "good" dexter 'toons you have to watch the early ones... Even the animation team is different now)
If he's involved, the creator of PPG, Craig McCraken, will almost definately be involved. These guys have done more with plot to (american) mainstream cartoons than warner, disney combined. In my mind, only Matt Groening should be up there with them.
They are both Hanna Barbera cartoonists, which has traditionally meant cheap, plot-driven cartoons (and saying scooby doo was plot-driven is quite a stretch)... They have bridged the gap between artistic talent and writing talent.
Given their past work, they are both probably fans of the genre and will do as much justice to it as Lucas will let them.
Slashdot Mirror
We use postini at work and it's great.
:)
:)
It also has the great effect of filtering mom's everpresent 'give someone a hug' forwarded emails as spam too.
That said, I've never had a false positive. bugtraq and other mailing lists still get through. Covalent spam that I get from OSCON 2002 doesn't.
haven't you heard of xmessage? :)
Unless your role is a merchant or a bandit (killing to loot your victim), or you're doing the equivalent of beating on sticks that fight back, these are Roll Playing Games.
Really, there aren't many, but MMORPG's are a start. NWN, in particular, gives the user a choice of environment, so that's the one that I prefer. There are quite a few servers that solve both your obsessive clicking problem (diablo-like "action" servers) or something that requires some actual thought with some action ("Story" or "RolePlay"), and something akin to the palace, with weapons and spells ("Social").
One thing about O'Reilly that I actually like is their adoption, but lack of fanaticism for Open Source.
Next time you visit their website to buy anything, when you hit the secure cart, take a good look at what they're using (in the URL, I tried to HEAD request them via https, but I wasn't having any luck). It's windows, folks. At least, if it's not windows, they've gone to a disturbing effort to use ASP in Linux (which, as a web application programmer, I see no need for with current solutions like PHP and JSP).
Have you done any inquiry on why this might be the case, regarding Word files? Perhaps their editors have special macros that they use, or something along those lines. What about templates, etc, etc. I really don't use word processors, so I'm not going to judge one way or another, but there is probably a reason, be it good or not, and I doubt it's because of some silly political stance.
In response to two responses to my responses (heh), I noticed that .... about 2 seconds after I hit submit. :)
Please, please... Someone mod this up. :)
The thing that bothers me, specifically with alzheimer's patients, is that at least the ones that I've met (3, to be exact, two of them I am related to), cannot comprehend such a thing to make a valid decision on it.
Who's going to make that decision for them? I mean, if I were to make the decision NOW that if I were to be affected by alzheimers to have this operation done to me, that would be fine.
But what about the people who have it now? And what about testing this? Who are going to be the guinea pigs?
I care not of the religious problems with this, but I have a problem with the morality of forced choices in this regard. This bothers me immensely.
I think the argument is (since long, long ago, I was doing tech support too), that sometimes it's hard enough to get people to POINT AND CLICK over the phone, much less, type things.
Read your shell script (or even better, a perl script) out loud, and that might just give you the slightest on how hard it might be to do something like that over hte phone.
Of course, to provide a counter-argument to this one, something that I do with a couple of linux-using friends is set them up with sshd and an account for me, tell them to get on the net and discover their ip address, and do it myself.
Repeat after me.
SPARC is slow, and Sun is expensive.
OTOH, support is a really, really nice thing. Those sun machines (at least ours) almost never go down.
Lets face it, guys.
On windows, I plug my mouse in, and it works. I plug my gamepad/joystick in, and it works. I throw the cd in, and I can get right into the game. Games flip resolutions/refresh without effort, depending on the monitor, you never even need to align the screen (Thanks, Viewsonic!).
XFree86 4.x is really making great strides in this department, and Linux 2.6 is going to resolve a lot of the USB issues (some of which you can alleviate now, if you don't mind recompiling your kernel -- and no, I don't use RedHat so that keeps kudzu pretty much out of the picture).
Autoplaying cd's is something that's not going to happen for a long time -- *I* don't mind, but a lot of people (read: gamers in particular, who want the shortest path to the game) are going to.
Frankly, I'm more than happy to have my wintendo machine and my workstation, which of course, runs linux.
Well, unless this has changed pretty recently, HLDS doesn't actively take advantage of SMP, so this point might be moot.
This is pretty close to the way I handle it.
:).
:)
Personally, I'd rather not have a mobile at all, but work requires that I do, so I make the most of it.
I like SMS for the fact that I can get a quick answer out of someone (if they choose to answer) without making a giant interruption out of thier current situation.
Commonly, a text message of "NWN?" will be shared amongst myself, two co-workers, and a mutual friend of ours. Generally we don't respond unless we're up for playing. "Beer?" is also applicable, but not as often (thank god
SMS is nice, but I'll find that if I have something that's going to be expressed in more than 3 words, I'd rather just call them.
One thing that I hate more than anything is getting called in the car, TELLING the other person that I'm in the car, and they don't care. I don't live in a large city anymore, so car time is generally pretty short, and I can call you back when I get OUT OF THE CAR, DAMNIT!
Please mod this back up -- this is a good discussion!
I haven't spent as much time as I'd like with Python... Although I'd like to. I don't think I could justify using it for web stuff, though. (Although the zope guys seem to have no problem with it)
I can't stand PHP. If I were to choose one thing, it would have to be auto-vivifying variables. Frankly, I don't need the language helping undermine the security of my applications.
I have found Pike to be an interesting place to fill the PERL gap where I would consider Python another contender. Pike is type-safe, or not, depending on how you write your application. The greatest thing is that you can specify multiple, specific types for a variable, and the VM will check it. Pike also beats the pants off all the above languages in terms of speed.
With mod_perl, I still think you can do more with the web than with PHP, even if it only takes a little longer.
Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
Personally, I wouldn't recommend any language that is meant for programming for a specific medium (and do not provide the argument that PHP can be used for non-web scripting -- that's just ludicrous) to be a good idea. You lose a lot of core knowledge while learning a language that is meant for that.
After all, would you really want to teach someone 'programming' by giving them a PL/SQL manual? I think not.
The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk. We all know that Perl's OO still needs work (whether or not OO is all that great is another discussion.) Hopefully Perl will be patched up so it supports such must-have OO features like introspection, reflection, self-replication and ontological data-points.
Yes, the OO in PERL is horrible. But, OO is a design methodology, one which is supported (or mandated) by some languages. For instance, take a look at the berkeley DB code. It's very OO, and pure C.
Hell, it's easy to write procedural Java, too.
Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.) Perl seems limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL, and its really a kludge for the later. I've heard that this will be fixed in upcoming versions of Perl though.
Take another look. Tim Bunce, creator of DBI for perl (DataBase Interface), wrote the DBD::Oracle driver -- IIRC, this was the first DBD for DBI, which makes your point moot.
In our shop, we use Berkeley DB and Oracle, and a very minor touch of Pg and MySQL. Almost all of this is done w/ PERL.
Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used. While it won't be replacing assembly or C, its definitely faster than Perl in almost every case, particularly in regex which has long been Perl's strongest point. I'm sure there are cases where Perl is equal to PHP, but I can't think of any at the moment.
Do a search for 'doug bagley's language shootout'. You'll find that PHP is a much harder sell after you read this. If you want to argue about interpreter startup, take a look at mod_perl for apache. They are very comparable.
Portability. I can take PHP code off my Linux box and plop it onto an IIS server, or even one of those new Macintosh servers and have it run without having to change a single line of code. Try doing this with Perl! Its as though it was written in assembly, Perl requires that much rewriting.
I have done this a few times, and never had a problem with it. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, just that I've never had that problem. Perl on IIS also supports COM, which means you can do quite a bit with it on the windows side. You can also script it just like PHP, mixed inside the HTML (you can do it on UNIX with embperl, AxKit, and I think mason).
Graphics. PHP comes with a nice little graphics library. While I wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice) its adequate for most web pages, and should be considered as a substitute for Flash for certain things. Perl lacks a graphics library of any kind.
GD. PerlMagick. I'm going to ignore the rest of your comment (as you obviously have no clue what performance means). I wouldn't use Perl to write Doom III, either.
Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc. Under Perl you're extremely limited in what you can do. This is because Perl isn't OO (so you can't create Node classes, for example, usefull in a linked list) and because it lacks pointers. Some of you may notice that PHP lacks pointers, but look deeper! Behind the scenes, hidden from the user pointers are used. Because of this, PHP can support complex data structures.
Um.... You are referring to references. If PHP uses real pointers in it's scripting, garbage-collection-based language I would be SERIOUSLY amazed.
Regardless, PERL supports these too, but who the hell needs linked lists in a language which has built-in structures? If you want good examples of how various trees work, check out Mastering Algorithms in PERL, or spend 20 minutes and figure them out yourself -- it's not that hard
On this though, one has to have intimate knowledge and experience with the PERL reference-counting GC to pull off queues and any form of circularly-linked structure without creating a lot of extra overhead.
Here are some reasons I prefer Perl over PHP:
Things I hate about both languages:
Don't kid yourself -- the i810 uses your system RAM too. In fact, you can configure how much it uses by going to CMOS (on most systems I have used). I think the default is 16 or 12.
Actually, C-Dilla is the scheme that Intuit used for TurboTax. There was an earlier article on slashdot that pointed to another article (sorry, I'm not going to search for it) that pointed this out. It's a very interesting read, and you should probably check it out.
It's the job of the maintainer(s) to handle this. Nothing will replace viewing the source in the end. Documentation is a big step, and comments are too, but the source is the final word.
I know the true anime fanboys will wretch at this name....
But the first anime that I saw was Akira. Admit it, that's what it was for quite a few of you, too.
I was already a big fan of animation, and scenes like the motorcycle riding on the bridge in the beginning, with the light tracers on the bikes, that impressed me. The falling buildings did too.
The story was hard to follow at first and I really wasn't impressed with it until the second time I watched it.
What really, really did it for me was the end of the movie. Where Tetsuo turns into the giant flesh beast.
I would be really, really impressed if I see that in CGI (that is, the transformation of a real, moving, live actor into the flesh beast) in the next 5 years. I'm sure it could be done, but the intracicy (sp?) of the work would have to be detailed and well-coordinated with the actor to be realistic.
There aren't any new laws, but if you read the old law....
/. one or not) he's arresting those with hide-a-pipe stuff, IE, credit card pipes, stealth pipes, etc. This is really stretching the boundaries of the law, but I think it could be argued that they serve a purpose for smoking illegal goods by the way that they're designed.
:)
What defines something as paraphenilia is if it's MOST COMMON USE is that for consuming an illegal drug.
Ashcroft is using a loophole in the law to arrest these people.
He's, at least, from the articles that I read (I don't know if it's the
Also, the fact that a lot of headshops nowadays have been getting QUITE in-your-face about what the product is used for is not making things any better.
Myself, I was going to have a 40k LOC E-Commerce site for a headshop (professional glass blower, haven't smoked in nearly a year but his stuff I'd put on my mantle just for show) up this weekend.
I think we're delaying the project for a little while.
A good zeppelin fan would know that zeppelin offers no quarter. :)
We have a name for people like you....
"Rules Lawyers"
They are generally treated by the DM with this phrase:
"Let me see your character sheet really quick..."
<RRRRIPPPPPP>
Samurai Jack is 99% action and 1% story. It was intended to be that way, from the start.
The team that will work on the star wars episodes is what made the cartoon network famous.
Genndy Tartakovsky, Samurai Jack creator, also was the creator of Dexter's Lab. He has also directed many Powerpuff Girls episodes. (Unfortunately, to get at all the "good" dexter 'toons you have to watch the early ones... Even the animation team is different now)
If he's involved, the creator of PPG, Craig McCraken, will almost definately be involved. These guys have done more with plot to (american) mainstream cartoons than warner, disney combined. In my mind, only Matt Groening should be up there with them.
They are both Hanna Barbera cartoonists, which has traditionally meant cheap, plot-driven cartoons (and saying scooby doo was plot-driven is quite a stretch)... They have bridged the gap between artistic talent and writing talent.
Given their past work, they are both probably fans of the genre and will do as much justice to it as Lucas will let them.
Um, any good web developer knows that the majority of IE users are using whatever came with their system.
For a lot of people, that means IE 4/5.
Given the popularity of the Tungsten|T in our office, that's a really hard thing to say, heh.
Note that those of you who use fetchmail to gather from IMAP over SSL will be affected as well.