No, I'm afraid I can't. This is just a figure I remember from my most active days (~1995) when searching the mud listing sites. There were many thousands on each of them, and they didn't overlap entirely.
The figure wasn't really meant as a scientific fact. I'm sorry if it looked that way. The magnitude, however, I'm sure is correct.
And Everquest is sticking around while MUDs are shutting down. Coincidence?
That doesn't really prove anything. The number of muds are statistics. I don't know how many there are around nowadays, but there used to be at least more than ten thousand. Everquest is one. One. In other words, it's impossible to base any statistics on it. Either it's there, or it's not. It happens to be there, but if even if it wasn't, it could still be seen as an anomaly.
That's not how budgets work in real companies: salaries, benefits, expenses, and capital are all different pots of money.
Maybe you should find another selection of "real companies" to look at. As far as my employers go, spending an amount of money lesser than or equal to the cost of having me spending the extra time necessary without the material said amount would have bought, has not been a problem.
I have worked for companies with 15, 35, 200, 3000 and 130000 employees (five different positions). I'm sure at least one of them qualifies as "real".
In real companies, the decision to open source something comes at the end of the development process, not at the beginning.
That, I can't really argue with:) I'm sure that's the most common way, yes. The reason I did mention the no-cost license was for non corporate driven open source development. I'm sorry I didn't state that clearer.
The cost of a QT license amounts to roughly the same money it takes to have a decent developer working for a week or two. And this is ONLY if you're going to sell the end result. This could hardly be a problem for any serious product development company.
- action game where I can play a spy or a soldier?
I guess Deus Ex qualifies. A couple of years old, but not having looked at games in a decade, I'm sure you don't mind. Easily the best game I've played. First person shooter with a cool story line, a nice skill system, really cool settings and truckload of conspiracy theories. I absolutely love it.
- driving game where I can race around in cool cars?
Not my area, I'm afraid. NEXT.
- D&D style game so I can re-live my pubescent RPG days?
Not really my area either, as I've grown a bit tired of the D&D style of RPGs. But a very good RPG is Morrowind. It's so open and non linear it's just silly, the setting and scenery is astonishing and the character development system is very appealing (you train skills when you use them, rather than just collect a bunch of xp you allocate between skills).
To be honest, I'd say that Deus Ex and Morrowind both are the peaks of what gaming has come to in the later years. If you really want to get an understanding of how far from Pacman the game concept has developed (apart from cool graphics - if that's what you want I guess picking the latest title from ID (whichever it currently happens to be) is the thing to do) in the last five years, those are the titles to get.
Besides, Morrowind can easily kill off a month alone.
I'm sure Morrowind is available on the X-Box. I doubt Deus Ex is... Both are really PC titles.
- Python has 'break' and 'continue' like C. But these only affect the innermost loop. Is there a way to break out of an enclosing loop? (In Perl you can label a loop and then say 'next LABEL', etc.)
Usually solved by a try/except clause when needed - which it seldom is.
- How can I pass a variable by reference?
EVERYTHING is a reference. You pass nothing but references. If you call foo(bar), foo will have a reference to the exact same object as bar pointed to. The fact that you can not modify a string passed to a function is because strings are immutable.
- Python advertises its support for first-class functions, but I can't seem to get closures to work.
Can't really comment on this I'm afraid. lambdas are very simple, yes. You can define functions within functions - and they will (in 2.2.1) be able to read from, but not write to the name space of the enclosing function, IIRC.
- Is there a do/while statement in Python?
No. The Python philosophy is usually "Have one way to do it." do/while doesn't really solve problems a simple while clause doesn't solve. Keep it simple.
Well... I think that what make these particular Norwegians innovative (in the true sense of word, rather than the perverted Redmond sense) is that they were first. I love Mozilla and prefer it over Opera, but that's still not reason enough to deny the Opera team the credits for this innovation.
Some of those would qualify as mythological creature iff (if and only if) you base your view of mythology on the contents of bestiaries of various role playing games, rather than the other way around...
The fact of the matter is what is now available enables 99% of the users to do what they want to get done.
The fact of the matter is that type writers enabled 99% of their users to do what they wanted to get done. Did they really need a word processor? Hell, yeah! Just because what we have now works, that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. If that reasoning had ruled, we'd still be throwing stones at passing deers from our caves for food.
Now, I don't want to defend this joker, but that statement is just not right...
Great. I guess I'll come home and sleep in your bed then, and browse slashdot from your computer. It's a good thing that you cook for me. Pasta preferred. I've got some ketchup, and there's absolutely no way I'm gonna let you get away with not cooking pasta for me and all my friends now that I've been generous enough to bring ketchup!
It's his tree. Live with what he does with it, or use another. Or fork it yourself. How hard is it to understand that it's ok for people to do what they want with their stuff?
If you look closer at the actual bug list, you'll notice that few of those are what would normally be labelled "bugs". To begin with, there are lots and lots of duplicates. Second, there's a lot of feature requests, which is something completely different. I'm not sure I find it a good idea to report both bugs and feature/improvement requests in the same forum, but that's the path they've chosen. It's also possible to see some of these reports contradict eachother. Specifically the feature requests - I can't remember a good example, but think "I want ctrl-i to execute function foo" vs "I want ctrl-i to execute function bar". And don't forget the few outright lies you find in there.
I wouldn't want to guess at the actual real bug/noise ration in the reports on Mozilla, but I can guarantee that they're far less than 200k.
The static ones are easy, if you have the URL - which I assume you have if it's your pages.
The dynamic ones should be fairly trivial to convert into static ones (i.e. save HTML to disc as well as send back to client) in some sort of debug mode, with at least all common methods for creating dynamic web pages I know of (PHP, ASP, JSP, CGI modules to PERL/Python &c). Now that you have static pages, see above.
It takes a couple of lines of code in your web code, plus a small script that generates URLs for the validator. What more do you need?
Oh... and just for those disbelievers, here's the pdf's to the manuals for the slightly louder of the Intellistations
Nope:
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 07:45:25 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
404 Not Found
Not Found The requested URL/library/dokumentacja/6889uypc.pdf was not found on this server.
A former colleague of mine encountered a gem in Win95. Unfortunately, I have no screen shot, but and it's not really an error message, but anyway;
While, I believe, double clicking on a directory icon in the explorer in order to open it, a dialog box occurs: "The files in this directory are corrupt. Do you want to move these files to the trashcan? [OK]"
Only one button, OK, was providing for answering this fatal question...
Which reminds me of a wonderful message I got when I was installing a version of Rational's UML modelling package Rose back in... 97 I guess. No screenshot here either, and I probably remember the exact wording wrong, but something along the lines of: "Rational Rose has detected that UNKNOWN is installed on your computer. Do you want to uninstall UNKNOWN before continuing? [OK] [Cancel]"
Normal HTML tags. The ones you may use are listed below the submit/preview buttons when you're writing your post. Most are on the format <XX> where XX is a combination of letters describing what you want. E.g. <b>bold</b> makes the text bold. Have a look at some HTML Tutorial or check out w3'sHTML pages.
The fact that type-ahead works with non-links too (start your search by typing / (slash)), it shouldn't be much trouble. It's usually fairly easy to locate a unique, or at least unusual word near the link in question, and then tab or shift-tab once or twice in order to get to the link you want.
I'm trying this very feature out atm (using Phoenix though), and it works well, even on slashdot (takes a couple of "clicks" to get used to, but that's all).
If the aim of Mozilla is to get a sizeable userbase and encourage developers to avoid writing for IE only then the first thing they should do is make it easy for the common computer user to do this sort of stuff without having to resort to editing text files.
Good point, but remember that this is the first time we see this feature. I wouldn't expect it to be finished yet (and if you can't live with non finished stuff - don't run betas). I can't speak for the Mozilla team of course, but being a GUI Application developer, I can tell that sometimes you choose between implementing a feature and providing a rough interface to it, or not implementing it at all - as providing a nice "user friendly" (whatever that means) interface would take twice, three or a hundred times longer.
I would expect there to be a nice point and click interface by the time this leaves beta...
Moral of the story: Patience:)
Technology used in similar project...
on
What's with Zipcar?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I've been involved in the development of a similar project, which has not hit the market yet (and probably never will, due to other factors than technology). We didn't go for the "wave your card in from of the windshield" approach, but used SMS(!) for communication. Essentially, there was a GPS receiver and a GSM module in the car, and a box stuffed with our custom software. The user made a booking on a website. When he was by the car, he sent an SMS to our server, which analyzed the SMS (for passphrase, phone number, correct car id etc), and if the SMS passed the tests an encrypted unlock request was sent to the car. Similar approach was used when locking the car. The stuff was combined with GPS so, yes, we could keep track of the cars - but that info was SMS based too - we sen't a "please tell us your position" SMS to the car, which then replied with GPS coordinates. So, I guess that if you managed to unlock the car (which was non-trivial, you'd have to hack our encryption scheme and protocol - tricky but possible), and then trash the GSM module you'd be safe. OTOH, the cars we were using (or rather, supposed to use this with) were highly peculiar (as in they certainly stood out in a crowd) electric driven things that had a range of 90 km, so it wouldn't really do you much good.
It was a rather cool project, actually:) To bad it never took off, but nice to hear that someone else got things through the non technical stumbling blocks of such a huge project...
I say just don't use the service if you dont want to abide by the terms.
In essence I agree... but:) The fact that they suspect that I would disable certain technologies (not having studied their specific infernal ways of stuffing ads up my nose, I'm only guessing) I would guess these technologies include things such as JavaScript, Java applets, Flash, Shockwave and... simplest of all, images.
Now, this indicates that they assume that I'm using this technology in the first place. What if I'm browsing in Lynx? What if I haven't downloaded this and that plugin? Does browsing in Lynx violate their terms? Does not spending several hours on my 14k4 modem downloading the latest JRE violate their terms?
If you put something up on the web, expect people to request the data - through any tools they choose. If you specifically don't want them to do that, wrap the data in some way so it's only available to the people you want to see it...
Slashdot Mirror
Could you provide some basis for your statistics?
No, I'm afraid I can't. This is just a figure I remember from my most active days (~1995) when searching the mud listing sites. There were many thousands on each of them, and they didn't overlap entirely.
The figure wasn't really meant as a scientific fact. I'm sorry if it looked that way. The magnitude, however, I'm sure is correct.
And Everquest is sticking around while MUDs are shutting down. Coincidence?
That doesn't really prove anything. The number of muds are statistics. I don't know how many there are around nowadays, but there used to be at least more than ten thousand.
Everquest is one. One. In other words, it's impossible to base any statistics on it. Either it's there, or it's not. It happens to be there, but if even if it wasn't, it could still be seen as an anomaly.
That's not how budgets work in real companies: salaries, benefits, expenses, and capital are all different pots of money.
:) I'm sure that's the most common way, yes. The reason I did mention the no-cost license was for non corporate driven open source development. I'm sorry I didn't state that clearer.
Maybe you should find another selection of "real companies" to look at. As far as my employers go, spending an amount of money lesser than or equal to the cost of having me spending the extra time necessary without the material said amount would have bought, has not been a problem.
I have worked for companies with 15, 35, 200, 3000 and 130000 employees (five different positions). I'm sure at least one of them qualifies as "real".
In real companies, the decision to open source something comes at the end of the development process, not at the beginning.
That, I can't really argue with
The cost of a QT license amounts to roughly the same money it takes to have a decent developer working for a week or two. And this is ONLY if you're going to sell the end result. This could hardly be a problem for any serious product development company.
- action game where I can play a spy or a soldier?
I guess Deus Ex qualifies. A couple of years old, but not having looked at games in a decade, I'm sure you don't mind. Easily the best game I've played. First person shooter with a cool story line, a nice skill system, really cool settings and truckload of conspiracy theories. I absolutely love it.
- driving game where I can race around in cool cars?
Not my area, I'm afraid. NEXT.
- D&D style game so I can re-live my pubescent RPG days?
Not really my area either, as I've grown a bit tired of the D&D style of RPGs. But a very good RPG is Morrowind. It's so open and non linear it's just silly, the setting and scenery is astonishing and the character development system is very appealing (you train skills when you use them, rather than just collect a bunch of xp you allocate between skills).
To be honest, I'd say that Deus Ex and Morrowind both are the peaks of what gaming has come to in the later years. If you really want to get an understanding of how far from Pacman the game concept has developed (apart from cool graphics - if that's what you want I guess picking the latest title from ID (whichever it currently happens to be) is the thing to do) in the last five years, those are the titles to get.
Besides, Morrowind can easily kill off a month alone.
I'm sure Morrowind is available on the X-Box. I doubt Deus Ex is... Both are really PC titles.
- Python has 'break' and 'continue' like C. But these only affect the innermost loop. Is there a way to break out of an enclosing loop? (In Perl you can label a loop and then say 'next LABEL', etc.)
Usually solved by a try/except clause when needed - which it seldom is.
- How can I pass a variable by reference?
EVERYTHING is a reference. You pass nothing but references. If you call foo(bar), foo will have a reference to the exact same object as bar pointed to. The fact that you can not modify a string passed to a function is because strings are immutable.
- Python advertises its support for first-class functions, but I can't seem to get closures to work.
Can't really comment on this I'm afraid. lambdas are very simple, yes. You can define functions within functions - and they will (in 2.2.1) be able to read from, but not write to the name space of the enclosing function, IIRC.
- Is there a do/while statement in Python?
No. The Python philosophy is usually "Have one way to do it." do/while doesn't really solve problems a simple while clause doesn't solve. Keep it simple.
A dozen comments will give you the most excellent GoogleFight
How could I possibly resist?
Now we know for sure...
Well... I think that what make these particular Norwegians innovative (in the true sense of word, rather than the perverted Redmond sense) is that they were first. I love Mozilla and prefer it over Opera, but that's still not reason enough to deny the Opera team the credits for this innovation.
Some of those would qualify as mythological creature iff (if and only if) you base your view of mythology on the contents of bestiaries of various role playing games, rather than the other way around...
Rust Monster? Gelatinous Cube?
C'mon...
I mean, really. I know that we've been getting sillier lately, but this? Not exactly News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Is it?
I wouldn't know about "Stuff that matters", but if it isn't "News for Nerds", then who's it for?
The fact of the matter is what is now available enables 99% of the users to do what they want to get done.
The fact of the matter is that type writers enabled 99% of their users to do what they wanted to get done. Did they really need a word processor?
Hell, yeah! Just because what we have now works, that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. If that reasoning had ruled, we'd still be throwing stones at passing deers from our caves for food.
Now, I don't want to defend this joker, but that statement is just not right...
Great. I guess I'll come home and sleep in your bed then, and browse slashdot from your computer. It's a good thing that you cook for me. Pasta preferred. I've got some ketchup, and there's absolutely no way I'm gonna let you get away with not cooking pasta for me and all my friends now that I've been generous enough to bring ketchup!
It's his tree. Live with what he does with it, or use another. Or fork it yourself. How hard is it to understand that it's ok for people to do what they want with their stuff?
If you look closer at the actual bug list, you'll notice that few of those are what would normally be labelled "bugs".
To begin with, there are lots and lots of duplicates. Second, there's a lot of feature requests, which is something completely different. I'm not sure I find it a good idea to report both bugs and feature/improvement requests in the same forum, but that's the path they've chosen. It's also possible to see some of these reports contradict eachother. Specifically the feature requests - I can't remember a good example, but think "I want ctrl-i to execute function foo" vs "I want ctrl-i to execute function bar".
And don't forget the few outright lies you find in there.
I wouldn't want to guess at the actual real bug/noise ration in the reports on Mozilla, but I can guarantee that they're far less than 200k.
Did anyone else realize that you need to buy the commercial ($300) version to develop open-source applications?
Nope. But then again, I only looked at their Pricing and licensing page. Care to give us a link to the the page where you got your info?
it came out eight months ago (april 3rd)
02-10-27 - 02-04-03 = 00-06-24
Seven, maybe... but definately not eight.
The static ones are easy, if you have the URL - which I assume you have if it's your pages.
The dynamic ones should be fairly trivial to convert into static ones (i.e. save HTML to disc as well as send back to client) in some sort of debug mode, with at least all common methods for creating dynamic web pages I know of (PHP, ASP, JSP, CGI modules to PERL/Python &c). Now that you have static pages, see above.
It takes a couple of lines of code in your web code, plus a small script that generates URLs for the validator. What more do you need?
Oh... and just for those disbelievers, here's the pdf's to the manuals for the slightly louder of the Intellistations
/library/dokumentacja/6889uypc.pdf was not found on this server.
Nope:
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 07:45:25 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
404 Not Found
Not Found
The requested URL
Apache/1.3.22 Server at www.asso.pl Port 80
what hellhole do you people live in that CD's cost 18 dollars?
In Sweden and the UK (the only two nations in which I know the price situation) $18 is definately not much for a CD.
Although RIAA is a US organization, their pricing affects the rest of the world too...
A former colleague of mine encountered a gem in Win95. Unfortunately, I have no screen shot, but and it's not really an error message, but anyway;
While, I believe, double clicking on a directory icon in the explorer in order to open it, a dialog box occurs:
"The files in this directory are corrupt. Do you want to move these files to the trashcan? [OK]"
Only one button, OK, was providing for answering this fatal question...
Which reminds me of a wonderful message I got when I was installing a version of Rational's UML modelling package Rose back in... 97 I guess. No screenshot here either, and I probably remember the exact wording wrong, but something along the lines of:
"Rational Rose has detected that UNKNOWN is installed on your computer. Do you want to uninstall UNKNOWN before continuing? [OK] [Cancel]"
how do i write links and italics and so on?
Normal HTML tags. The ones you may use are listed below the submit/preview buttons when you're writing your post. Most are on the format <XX> where XX is a combination of letters describing what you want. E.g. <b>bold</b> makes the text bold.
Have a look at some HTML Tutorial or check out w3's HTML pages.
The fact that type-ahead works with non-links too (start your search by typing / (slash)), it shouldn't be much trouble. It's usually fairly easy to locate a unique, or at least unusual word near the link in question, and then tab or shift-tab once or twice in order to get to the link you want.
I'm trying this very feature out atm (using Phoenix though), and it works well, even on slashdot (takes a couple of "clicks" to get used to, but that's all).
If the aim of Mozilla is to get a sizeable userbase and encourage developers to avoid writing for IE only then the first thing they should do is make it easy for the common computer user to do this sort of stuff without having to resort to editing text files.
:)
Good point, but remember that this is the first time we see this feature. I wouldn't expect it to be finished yet (and if you can't live with non finished stuff - don't run betas). I can't speak for the Mozilla team of course, but being a GUI Application developer, I can tell that sometimes you choose between implementing a feature and providing a rough interface to it, or not implementing it at all - as providing a nice "user friendly" (whatever that means) interface would take twice, three or a hundred times longer.
I would expect there to be a nice point and click interface by the time this leaves beta...
Moral of the story: Patience
I've been involved in the development of a similar project, which has not hit the market yet (and probably never will, due to other factors than technology). We didn't go for the "wave your card in from of the windshield" approach, but used SMS(!) for communication. Essentially, there was a GPS receiver and a GSM module in the car, and a box stuffed with our custom software.
:) To bad it never took off, but nice to hear that someone else got things through the non technical stumbling blocks of such a huge project...
The user made a booking on a website. When he was by the car, he sent an SMS to our server, which analyzed the SMS (for passphrase, phone number, correct car id etc), and if the SMS passed the tests an encrypted unlock request was sent to the car. Similar approach was used when locking the car.
The stuff was combined with GPS so, yes, we could keep track of the cars - but that info was SMS based too - we sen't a "please tell us your position" SMS to the car, which then replied with GPS coordinates. So, I guess that if you managed to unlock the car (which was non-trivial, you'd have to hack our encryption scheme and protocol - tricky but possible), and then trash the GSM module you'd be safe. OTOH, the cars we were using (or rather, supposed to use this with) were highly peculiar (as in they certainly stood out in a crowd) electric driven things that had a range of 90 km, so it wouldn't really do you much good.
It was a rather cool project, actually
I say just don't use the service if you dont want to abide by the terms.
:) The fact that they suspect that I would disable certain technologies (not having studied their specific infernal ways of stuffing ads up my nose, I'm only guessing) I would guess these technologies include things such as JavaScript, Java applets, Flash, Shockwave and... simplest of all, images.
In essence I agree... but
Now, this indicates that they assume that I'm using this technology in the first place. What if I'm browsing in Lynx? What if I haven't downloaded this and that plugin?
Does browsing in Lynx violate their terms? Does not spending several hours on my 14k4 modem downloading the latest JRE violate their terms?
If you put something up on the web, expect people to request the data - through any tools they choose. If you specifically don't want them to do that, wrap the data in some way so it's only available to the people you want to see it...
Actually I'm Swedish, and not a native English speeker.
But point taken.