Can't be helped. You have to give the computer a way of understanding characters.
Indeed... But why have the numeric equivalence in the programming language? 'A' is not equivalent to 65 except in the particular context of a character set that defines that equivalence. Keep characters characters and keep numbers numbers.
Java Characters *are* a uniform size. Every character is a 16 bit Unicode character.
But Unicode doesn't fit into 16 bits. UTF-16 is a variable-width encoding. So I guess maybe Java supports UCS-2, and the BMP subset of Unicode? Or else it supports UTF-16 and your assertion is false. But in any case my point is simply that in international character sets the idea of what constitutes a "single character" is somewhat muddled, because what may be a single glyph may be multiple data characters - I don't think intermixing the two ideas is an especially good idea in a high-level programming language.
Because characters aren't numbers.
on
Java Puzzlers
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think the whole notion of a "character" type being assigned a numerical value is dubious in the first place. That's not to say the idea of a character coding that translates between characters and numbers isn't sensible, but the character itself is not a number - it's a character. I like Python's approach to the solution - there simply is no "atomic" character type (defining such a thing when character sets have characters that aren't uniform size is questionable anyway)
So given that characters aren't numbers, is it really so hard to imagine that people see that code and can't readily guess what sort of number a character is? I guess one could say that the character set is indexed with non-negative integers, so the character type should be non-negative - but a logical derivation isn't the same as a plain fact, and other languages aren't so sensible in those kinds of decisions...
There are a multitude of problems in merging the two "theories".
For starters, one has nothing to do with the other. ID is the philosophical belief that everything was somehow orchestrated. Evolution is a scientific theory (backed by overwhelming observational data) to describe our best understanding of the world we live in.
ID as a philosophy serves as a point for philosophical discussion. It's a worthy thing to discuss, but it isn't science. ID as a "theory" relies on numerous assumptions - including that the designer, for whatever reason, has chosen not to make their existence known through obvious means. So we can't prove or disprove the idea that someone created the universe, nor derive from the mechanical workings of the universe as it's observed any evidence in favor of or against ID.
Science doesn't present a complete understanding of the world (and universe) around us, but it represents the best practical knowledge of it we've been able to infer through rigorous observation and testing processes and logical calculation. It is the process of centuries of work, generations' work built upon the recorded work of previous generations, as we gradually come to understand, bit by bit, the world around us in ways we can examine, test, and apply to real endeavours. So far, of course, it doesn't provide "reasons" for why the universe is, why we exist, if there's a purpose to it all, etc. That is the domain of philosophy.
Personally I think "intelligent design" is flawed as a theory because it's a product of our own egotism. Here's why:
First: there's the assumption that, in the thousands of years humans have been accumulating knowledge, that anything we haven't explained fully must come from something beyond the "mundane workings of the universe". But the reality is that the universe is vast - of course there are still mysteries, we've barely even left our own planet. Yet, we claim that these mysteries are so remarkable that they must have been planned - simply because we cannot explain them. We even claim that we ourselves are so unique, so inexplicable and so complex, that we cannot be a normal product of a vast and complex universe.
Second: There's the other assumption that, since we've assumed that creation must have been the product of some great force beyond the normal workings of the universe, that it must be a process somewhat like ourselves - an intelligence. We claim to be significant enough that some great force must have created us, and then we determine that that force must have been something like ourselves - because we believe ourselves to be the very definition of intelligence, of capability and the capacity to do great things. But the universe is so vast in time and space, and our world so tiny and our history so short in relation to it, that many things greater than ourselves could come and go with little significance. And yet, we plant a larger image of ourselves at the center of it all? I don't buy it.
(And what meaning does "he" have when you refer to a god, when there are no goddesses or other gods? Does god have a penis? If so, what does he do with it? He certainly didn't put it in virgin Mary... It seems a very stupid thing to be insistent about. I always thought that as a "creator" an analogy with the female made more sense - though sex and gender are still meaningless concepts in beings that don't breed sexually...)
Are you not so smart anymore from watching TV? If you want something that holds water get a bucket from Home Depot, or a Nalgene bottle or something. Not a book! But if you really want to replace those lost electrolytes you should drink Gatorade...
I have this great MP3 tune I could send them. Sure, most of the verses are nonsense like "This function is void, it takes two parameters, the first is 't', the encrypted title key" and so on, but it has this great chorus that goes like "I hate the DMCA, it steps on me and I'm not free"...
I mean, it's all good, and it's very nice. It's both good and nice. I think the goodness and niceness together of this article as well as the resulting good and nice discussion should be recognized, both for the fact that it is nice and also because it's good.
"No longer trapped in a single room..."
on
20 Years of NES
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· Score: 1
Referring to SMB and the establishment of the platform genre, they mention -
"No longer were players trapped inside a single, claustrophobic room..."
What about Pitfall?
(Me:) The fact that they're still using backslashes is another. (Arbitrary? Sure, but backslashes are in a different place on almost every keyboard - none of them as convenient as underneath the semicolon. It's like the design decision was made to make it less convenient to deal with a hierarchical filesystem.)
(Not me:) If you would have said that it just messes with you because you are used to the forward slash and backslashes are just ugly, it would have been less of a "reaching" kind of argument.
Nevertheless, on my keyboard the backslash key is not an especially easy key to hit without looking. It's the same size as the surrounding keys and nowhere near the home row. Its position on different keyboards is nowhere near as stable as more common characters like the slash. So don't go telling me that I'm lazy. I am, but that's beside the point and has nothing to do with keyboarding.
Will the Linux guys at that point stop bashing MS? Will you consider using the MS OS? Now I understand you don't trust them, but how will you respond if you can't say their product sucks? Will the comments be, "Ya they make the best OS, but they are evil?" Or will you continue to say that "Windows is just crap because they don't share the kernel source?"
I certainly have enough anti-Microsoft feelings (call it what you like) that it angers me that they've made something that should so perfectly have been a Unix invention and made a useful implementation (apparently) first.
The thing you've got to recognize about the supremely anti-MS zealots is, there's no point asking them this question, because you've already answered it by filtering down your target audience for the question. It's not "Linux guys" who are senselessly bashing MS, it's MS bashers who bash MS. And yes, there are valid reasons to bash MS, but I think you're meaning to address people who will do so irrationally and to the point of defying logic. Logically, how can you not be trolling, if you're first accusing Linux users of all being anti-MS zealots (insulting, I must say), and second asking the zealots to respond to a question to which a zealot's answer would be completely predictable? It's not important, who you expected to answer and who did answer are two different sets of people - but it sort of bugged me so I felt like raising the point.
As for whether I'll use this shell - there are some aspects I'm not happy with. The apparent lack of real tie-in to serialization for instance (there seems to be no default serialization format - things have to go through a filter to XML, etc. as far as I can tell) The fact that they're still using backslashes is another. (Arbitrary? Sure, but backslashes are in a different place on almost every keyboard - none of them as convenient as underneath the semicolon. It's like the design decision was made to make it less convenient to deal with a hierarchical filesystem.) But I'm very glad to see this kind of powerful approach to CLI computing becoming a de-facto standard. I welcome the day when msh will be pre-installed (I hope) on any Windows computer I may need to do business with, and I welcome the day when Linux will sport something comparable. Hopefully something better rather than a mere clone - but I'm sure the need to have something msh-compatible will be there...
One difference I perceive between msh and what would be a Unix-ish solution, perhaps, is the degree to which the shell is expected to be a primary means of interfacing with the system. Microsoft needed to provide a shell through which users needing automatable, in-depth control of details of the system could do so, efficiently. They also wanted an environment in which people could "explore" the available APIs for things the shell could access. They made that. But based on some design decisions I don't think it was meant to be used as a primary UI for people who simply prefer CLI, nor as a general-purpose scripting language like Python. I expect a Unix solution would at least be made to work nicely as the user's primary means of working with the system, and possibly be a fully-fledged programming language on its own, too. (msh seemed to only fall short of the second one by lacking the ability to define classes)
I like the fact that Linux stores all the settings in text files. This means that you can change the setting with any text editor of your choice. Also, there is a huge library of tools available at the command line. Not just stuff that was thought up by the people who made your command line (bash, csh, zsh), but also anybody else who made just about any other utility.
I disagree. Stashing stuff in plaintext files is a cheap design decision, grossly inefficient. The only reason why plaintext is easy to work with is because it formats nicely on a text display. Anything else (including the primary users of the data - the programs) has to parse and re-serialize it. And then because the datatype of the file is not rigorously defined, most often no two programs in Unix will have the same syntax in their text config files.
Pulling data out of a delimited text file starts out easy, but to get it complete and to get it right gets complicated. What about escape characters? What about when you start supporting line splits?
What I believe is needed in the solution, and what it seems.NET and msh are providing, is a "common language". I've long hoped for such a thing in Unix (and it's a little discouraging that Microsoft got there first), and have tried to work out some kind of a design for such a thing, but being lazy (and busy) I never got anywhere with it. But look at what a "common language" for shell-level data representation can do. How do you find a value? How do you store it? How do you display it? In a shell like bash, and reading text files, you have to parse the file to find your data, filter the results somehow (either using an intermediate syntax, which must be parsed again from textual form to perform the filtering, or else by using an outside tool like Perl or Python to store the data in intermediate forms and perform filtering) - then to store it, in Bash you could write it out as text again or store it in a (textual) environment variable - either way requiring the data to be written out as text and then parsed in again, later.
If the entire environment were one big playground for, say, Python, it'd be a whole different ballgame. When you get a data value from a program, object, or file attribute, it's in a form the shell can really understand. If you ask for a file size, you get a big int, which can be added to, divided, etc. If you ask for a list of filenames from a tool like "find", you get an array of some sort - not a delimited list which must be interpreted and chopped according to whitespace, null characters, etc., but a data value which itself describes the boundary between one value and the next. And as for storing values, serialization would be as simple as treating a filename as a bindable value. You want to store that 2000x2000 matrix of double-precision floating point numbers that you got from a circuit simulator to a file in your home directory? In such an environment it's something you could simply do. Obviously this is for a "generic form" of serialization, rather than for something "optimal" - but for a shell that actually supports some set of datatypes and a generic method for serializing them, it's still much more efficient than going to text.
Making the shell into a complete, dynamic, modern programming language has other benefits, as the article shows. A shell like that could work well for GUI scripting - it has the same strengths for GUI-wrangling as languages like Python have - though it doesn't look like they've set up for that yet.
That's much like what msh is, from the sound of it. The shell supports datatypes beyond "string". There are callable objects that operate using these datatypes. And there's probably enough OS-level support to tie right into every new feature in Windows.
I am jealous. I am sick with anger that I didn't try my hardest to get there first. And I regret that I must grudgingly embrace msh as the best general-purpose CLI I've yet seen.
A) Hack your Nintendogs to introduce new behavior in online play, viz., your NintendRhodesianRidgeback runs down and eats NintendChihuahuas and McToyPoodles. Packet Injection attacks to replace Mario with something, uh, a little less "Kid-friendly" (play fair now)
It seems Nintendo already accounted for this possibility, and for now, at least, it's not practical.
Normally in wireless multi-boot modes, the Nintendo DS will only accept cryptographically signed code. Someone's managed to alter one of the WMB games in such a way that it'll still be accepted by the DS (WiFiMe - they managed to inject a call to make CPU execution jump to the GBA cartridge slot) but without cracking the protection scheme for real, WMB'ing homebrew or hacked code will be impractical.
As for all this business about "how do they keep everyone else out?"... Come on, I thought Slashdot readers were smarter than that. First off, they're doing this so DSes can do a few particular things: 1: Download WMB demos 2: Download bonus game content (for Nintendogs, Pokemon, etc.) 3: Access game servers for multiplayer on DS titles
The first one requires no internet access at all. In the second case the DS may not be speaking TCP/IP at all - so the free access can be limited to DS protocols, and specifically handle relaying a few pre-determined protocols to a few pre-determined hosts on the internet. So if someone wants to take their laptop into McDonalds, make it speak Mario Kart's network language and access the Mario Kart game server, that may be possible. They could then use that power to... cheat at Mario Kart, that's about it, really.
Well it all comes back to the fact that he's Scottish - a fact which had been hinted at throughout the TV show, in numerous and subtle ways. So obviously his ability to work with a Macintosh (McIntosh) would be rather enhanced.
Can the parent be modded up any further? Please? If not, then "Score: 5, funny" will just have to do...
It really sums up a lot of the complaints I had about Ep. 3's ending: it seemed like they dedicated all this time to tying up all the loose ends so the continuity would work. Ep. 3 starts and there's no rebellion, no twins, no Darth Vader mask, no empire, and C-3PO still remembers everything that ever happened to Anakin Skywalker. Then after the duel on the lava farm planet (I can only assume those flying robots were harvesting precious lava to fuel the planet's booming lava lamp industry...) they lay it all out at once. Vader gets cased up, the twins are born and named and the mother promptly dies, we're treated to every insignificant detail showing how they wind up where they wind up, how Yoda winds up going to Dagobah (which is essentially just "Go to Dagobah now, I will.") - all these things which anyone with half a brain could have figured out by connecting the dots between the original movies and the prequels... The only bit that doesn't fit that description is the C-3PO thing, but that was something which didn't fit so they had to stick in an explanation or people would complain...
Basically, I feel like the prequels didn't do a whole lot to make themselves fit with the original movies as part of a continuing story - a more sensible prequel strategy would have been for the end of Ep. 3 to lead directly into the opening of Star Wars - but they didn't do it that way so instead they needed to treat us to 15-odd minutes of tying up loose ends...
Not to mention the fact that Grievous never actually defeated anybody in the movie. It was disappointing, he was supposed to be this cyborg badass but all he did was get his ass handed to him by Obi-Wan.
You know what's frustrating about all this, though? Someone could make a fantastically innovative game that's also a whole lot of fun, but that doesn't mean it'll sell.
Nintendo has the advantage of its characters' "star power" to sell weird games - and I love that, because it means they can crank out some weird shit and it'll actually sell, and players will try out a gaming experience they might have otherwise ignored. You can do that when Mario, Kirby, Donkey Kong, etc. are yours to command. For the rest of the world it's more of a risk.
(One example of this is Harmonix, makers of the games Frequency and Amplitude - they found in their testing that players enjoy both games once they actually sit down and play them - but getting people to actually do so in the first place was the tough part. I think this is an example that indicates that the interest in innovation is there in the industry, but it's difficult to get an innovative project made because it's hard to sell.)
I love the idea of the DS as a system for developers to try new things. This is one of the main reasons I'm interested in the system. I'm rather skeptical of how many titles will be put out for the system that'll really make good use of the touch-screen and mic (and I don't like the notion of talking into my game system on a bus or whatever.) but I'm hopeful.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking to save yourself a trip to the Realdoll store, are you?
Can't be helped. You have to give the computer a way of understanding characters.
Indeed... But why have the numeric equivalence in the programming language? 'A' is not equivalent to 65 except in the particular context of a character set that defines that equivalence. Keep characters characters and keep numbers numbers.
Java Characters *are* a uniform size. Every character is a 16 bit Unicode character.
But Unicode doesn't fit into 16 bits. UTF-16 is a variable-width encoding. So I guess maybe Java supports UCS-2, and the BMP subset of Unicode? Or else it supports UTF-16 and your assertion is false. But in any case my point is simply that in international character sets the idea of what constitutes a "single character" is somewhat muddled, because what may be a single glyph may be multiple data characters - I don't think intermixing the two ideas is an especially good idea in a high-level programming language.
I think the whole notion of a "character" type being assigned a numerical value is dubious in the first place. That's not to say the idea of a character coding that translates between characters and numbers isn't sensible, but the character itself is not a number - it's a character. I like Python's approach to the solution - there simply is no "atomic" character type (defining such a thing when character sets have characters that aren't uniform size is questionable anyway)
So given that characters aren't numbers, is it really so hard to imagine that people see that code and can't readily guess what sort of number a character is? I guess one could say that the character set is indexed with non-negative integers, so the character type should be non-negative - but a logical derivation isn't the same as a plain fact, and other languages aren't so sensible in those kinds of decisions...
There are a multitude of problems in merging the two "theories".
For starters, one has nothing to do with the other. ID is the philosophical belief that everything was somehow orchestrated. Evolution is a scientific theory (backed by overwhelming observational data) to describe our best understanding of the world we live in.
ID as a philosophy serves as a point for philosophical discussion. It's a worthy thing to discuss, but it isn't science. ID as a "theory" relies on numerous assumptions - including that the designer, for whatever reason, has chosen not to make their existence known through obvious means. So we can't prove or disprove the idea that someone created the universe, nor derive from the mechanical workings of the universe as it's observed any evidence in favor of or against ID.
Science doesn't present a complete understanding of the world (and universe) around us, but it represents the best practical knowledge of it we've been able to infer through rigorous observation and testing processes and logical calculation. It is the process of centuries of work, generations' work built upon the recorded work of previous generations, as we gradually come to understand, bit by bit, the world around us in ways we can examine, test, and apply to real endeavours. So far, of course, it doesn't provide "reasons" for why the universe is, why we exist, if there's a purpose to it all, etc. That is the domain of philosophy.
Personally I think "intelligent design" is flawed as a theory because it's a product of our own egotism. Here's why:
First: there's the assumption that, in the thousands of years humans have been accumulating knowledge, that anything we haven't explained fully must come from something beyond the "mundane workings of the universe". But the reality is that the universe is vast - of course there are still mysteries, we've barely even left our own planet. Yet, we claim that these mysteries are so remarkable that they must have been planned - simply because we cannot explain them. We even claim that we ourselves are so unique, so inexplicable and so complex, that we cannot be a normal product of a vast and complex universe.
Second: There's the other assumption that, since we've assumed that creation must have been the product of some great force beyond the normal workings of the universe, that it must be a process somewhat like ourselves - an intelligence. We claim to be significant enough that some great force must have created us, and then we determine that that force must have been something like ourselves - because we believe ourselves to be the very definition of intelligence, of capability and the capacity to do great things. But the universe is so vast in time and space, and our world so tiny and our history so short in relation to it, that many things greater than ourselves could come and go with little significance. And yet, we plant a larger image of ourselves at the center of it all? I don't buy it.
(And what meaning does "he" have when you refer to a god, when there are no goddesses or other gods? Does god have a penis? If so, what does he do with it? He certainly didn't put it in virgin Mary... It seems a very stupid thing to be insistent about. I always thought that as a "creator" an analogy with the female made more sense - though sex and gender are still meaningless concepts in beings that don't breed sexually...)
Oh wait, I know this one! I've heard this joke before....
In Corporate America, DMCA circumvents you!
Did I get it right? It's my first time... Be gentle...
Are you not so smart anymore from watching TV? If you want something that holds water get a bucket from Home Depot, or a Nalgene bottle or something. Not a book! But if you really want to replace those lost electrolytes you should drink Gatorade...
I have this great MP3 tune I could send them. Sure, most of the verses are nonsense like "This function is void, it takes two parameters, the first is 't', the encrypted title key" and so on, but it has this great chorus that goes like "I hate the DMCA, it steps on me and I'm not free"...
Joan Baez would be proud.
I mean, it's all good, and it's very nice. It's both good and nice. I think the goodness and niceness together of this article as well as the resulting good and nice discussion should be recognized, both for the fact that it is nice and also because it's good.
Referring to SMB and the establishment of the platform genre, they mention - "No longer were players trapped inside a single, claustrophobic room..." What about Pitfall?
(Me:) The fact that they're still using backslashes is another. (Arbitrary? Sure, but backslashes are in a different place on almost every keyboard - none of them as convenient as underneath the semicolon. It's like the design decision was made to make it less convenient to deal with a hierarchical filesystem.)
(Not me:) If you would have said that it just messes with you because you are used to the forward slash and backslashes are just ugly, it would have been less of a "reaching" kind of argument.
Nevertheless, on my keyboard the backslash key is not an especially easy key to hit without looking. It's the same size as the surrounding keys and nowhere near the home row. Its position on different keyboards is nowhere near as stable as more common characters like the slash. So don't go telling me that I'm lazy. I am, but that's beside the point and has nothing to do with keyboarding.
Will the Linux guys at that point stop bashing MS? Will you consider using the MS OS? Now I understand you don't trust them, but how will you respond if you can't say their product sucks? Will the comments be, "Ya they make the best OS, but they are evil?" Or will you continue to say that "Windows is just crap because they don't share the kernel source?"
I certainly have enough anti-Microsoft feelings (call it what you like) that it angers me that they've made something that should so perfectly have been a Unix invention and made a useful implementation (apparently) first.
The thing you've got to recognize about the supremely anti-MS zealots is, there's no point asking them this question, because you've already answered it by filtering down your target audience for the question. It's not "Linux guys" who are senselessly bashing MS, it's MS bashers who bash MS. And yes, there are valid reasons to bash MS, but I think you're meaning to address people who will do so irrationally and to the point of defying logic. Logically, how can you not be trolling, if you're first accusing Linux users of all being anti-MS zealots (insulting, I must say), and second asking the zealots to respond to a question to which a zealot's answer would be completely predictable? It's not important, who you expected to answer and who did answer are two different sets of people - but it sort of bugged me so I felt like raising the point.
As for whether I'll use this shell - there are some aspects I'm not happy with. The apparent lack of real tie-in to serialization for instance (there seems to be no default serialization format - things have to go through a filter to XML, etc. as far as I can tell) The fact that they're still using backslashes is another. (Arbitrary? Sure, but backslashes are in a different place on almost every keyboard - none of them as convenient as underneath the semicolon. It's like the design decision was made to make it less convenient to deal with a hierarchical filesystem.) But I'm very glad to see this kind of powerful approach to CLI computing becoming a de-facto standard. I welcome the day when msh will be pre-installed (I hope) on any Windows computer I may need to do business with, and I welcome the day when Linux will sport something comparable. Hopefully something better rather than a mere clone - but I'm sure the need to have something msh-compatible will be there...
One difference I perceive between msh and what would be a Unix-ish solution, perhaps, is the degree to which the shell is expected to be a primary means of interfacing with the system. Microsoft needed to provide a shell through which users needing automatable, in-depth control of details of the system could do so, efficiently. They also wanted an environment in which people could "explore" the available APIs for things the shell could access. They made that. But based on some design decisions I don't think it was meant to be used as a primary UI for people who simply prefer CLI, nor as a general-purpose scripting language like Python. I expect a Unix solution would at least be made to work nicely as the user's primary means of working with the system, and possibly be a fully-fledged programming language on its own, too. (msh seemed to only fall short of the second one by lacking the ability to define classes)
I like the fact that Linux stores all the settings in text files. This means that you can change the setting with any text editor of your choice. Also, there is a huge library of tools available at the command line. Not just stuff that was thought up by the people who made your command line (bash, csh, zsh), but also anybody else who made just about any other utility.
.NET and msh are providing, is a "common language". I've long hoped for such a thing in Unix (and it's a little discouraging that Microsoft got there first), and have tried to work out some kind of a design for such a thing, but being lazy (and busy) I never got anywhere with it. But look at what a "common language" for shell-level data representation can do. How do you find a value? How do you store it? How do you display it? In a shell like bash, and reading text files, you have to parse the file to find your data, filter the results somehow (either using an intermediate syntax, which must be parsed again from textual form to perform the filtering, or else by using an outside tool like Perl or Python to store the data in intermediate forms and perform filtering) - then to store it, in Bash you could write it out as text again or store it in a (textual) environment variable - either way requiring the data to be written out as text and then parsed in again, later.
I disagree. Stashing stuff in plaintext files is a cheap design decision, grossly inefficient. The only reason why plaintext is easy to work with is because it formats nicely on a text display. Anything else (including the primary users of the data - the programs) has to parse and re-serialize it. And then because the datatype of the file is not rigorously defined, most often no two programs in Unix will have the same syntax in their text config files.
Pulling data out of a delimited text file starts out easy, but to get it complete and to get it right gets complicated. What about escape characters? What about when you start supporting line splits?
What I believe is needed in the solution, and what it seems
If the entire environment were one big playground for, say, Python, it'd be a whole different ballgame. When you get a data value from a program, object, or file attribute, it's in a form the shell can really understand. If you ask for a file size, you get a big int, which can be added to, divided, etc. If you ask for a list of filenames from a tool like "find", you get an array of some sort - not a delimited list which must be interpreted and chopped according to whitespace, null characters, etc., but a data value which itself describes the boundary between one value and the next. And as for storing values, serialization would be as simple as treating a filename as a bindable value. You want to store that 2000x2000 matrix of double-precision floating point numbers that you got from a circuit simulator to a file in your home directory? In such an environment it's something you could simply do. Obviously this is for a "generic form" of serialization, rather than for something "optimal" - but for a shell that actually supports some set of datatypes and a generic method for serializing them, it's still much more efficient than going to text.
Making the shell into a complete, dynamic, modern programming language has other benefits, as the article shows. A shell like that could work well for GUI scripting - it has the same strengths for GUI-wrangling as languages like Python have - though it doesn't look like they've set up for that yet.
That's much like what msh is, from the sound of it. The shell supports datatypes beyond "string". There are callable objects that operate using these datatypes. And there's probably enough OS-level support to tie right into every new feature in Windows.
I am jealous. I am sick with anger that I didn't try my hardest to get there first. And I regret that I must grudgingly embrace msh as the best general-purpose CLI I've yet seen.
Bak. Derk-derk-Allah. Derka derka, Mohammed Jihad. Baka sherpa-sherpa. Abaka-la.
A) Hack your Nintendogs to introduce new behavior in online play, viz., your NintendRhodesianRidgeback runs down and eats NintendChihuahuas and McToyPoodles.
... Come on, I thought Slashdot readers were smarter than that. First off, they're doing this so DSes can do a few particular things:
Packet Injection attacks to replace Mario with something, uh, a little less "Kid-friendly" (play fair now)
It seems Nintendo already accounted for this possibility, and for now, at least, it's not practical.
Normally in wireless multi-boot modes, the Nintendo DS will only accept cryptographically signed code. Someone's managed to alter one of the WMB games in such a way that it'll still be accepted by the DS (WiFiMe - they managed to inject a call to make CPU execution jump to the GBA cartridge slot) but without cracking the protection scheme for real, WMB'ing homebrew or hacked code will be impractical.
As for all this business about "how do they keep everyone else out?"
1: Download WMB demos
2: Download bonus game content (for Nintendogs, Pokemon, etc.)
3: Access game servers for multiplayer on DS titles
The first one requires no internet access at all. In the second case the DS may not be speaking TCP/IP at all - so the free access can be limited to DS protocols, and specifically handle relaying a few pre-determined protocols to a few pre-determined hosts on the internet. So if someone wants to take their laptop into McDonalds, make it speak Mario Kart's network language and access the Mario Kart game server, that may be possible. They could then use that power to... cheat at Mario Kart, that's about it, really.
Well it all comes back to the fact that he's Scottish - a fact which had been hinted at throughout the TV show, in numerous and subtle ways. So obviously his ability to work with a Macintosh (McIntosh) would be rather enhanced.
What about everyone who wants to bash LISP syntax?
(a ()(((b))(c)())q ((m ()() x))(w))(l)(((z)))) cdr bddr) oh crap it's just too confusing.
Can the parent be modded up any further? Please? If not, then "Score: 5, funny" will just have to do... It really sums up a lot of the complaints I had about Ep. 3's ending: it seemed like they dedicated all this time to tying up all the loose ends so the continuity would work. Ep. 3 starts and there's no rebellion, no twins, no Darth Vader mask, no empire, and C-3PO still remembers everything that ever happened to Anakin Skywalker. Then after the duel on the lava farm planet (I can only assume those flying robots were harvesting precious lava to fuel the planet's booming lava lamp industry...) they lay it all out at once. Vader gets cased up, the twins are born and named and the mother promptly dies, we're treated to every insignificant detail showing how they wind up where they wind up, how Yoda winds up going to Dagobah (which is essentially just "Go to Dagobah now, I will.") - all these things which anyone with half a brain could have figured out by connecting the dots between the original movies and the prequels... The only bit that doesn't fit that description is the C-3PO thing, but that was something which didn't fit so they had to stick in an explanation or people would complain... Basically, I feel like the prequels didn't do a whole lot to make themselves fit with the original movies as part of a continuing story - a more sensible prequel strategy would have been for the end of Ep. 3 to lead directly into the opening of Star Wars - but they didn't do it that way so instead they needed to treat us to 15-odd minutes of tying up loose ends...
I agree and all, but do you really think it hasn't been said?
Not to mention the fact that Grievous never actually defeated anybody in the movie. It was disappointing, he was supposed to be this cyborg badass but all he did was get his ass handed to him by Obi-Wan.
It's a trap! At that close range we won't last long against those Star Destroyers!
Meh, don't I wish. I wound up getting a movie (camcorder'ed from the theater) in place of the porn...
Isn't "their" a preview button for comment titles?
Well, we haven't been attacked lately so I'd say the tiger-repelling fallacy-of-correllation-implies-causality rock is working quite nicely.
But as weapons go, this thing isn't much...
...Cuts through this tomato like it was a tin can!
Snaffles caps of bottles, jars, and the baby!
And boy does it catch fish!
You know what's frustrating about all this, though? Someone could make a fantastically innovative game that's also a whole lot of fun, but that doesn't mean it'll sell.
Nintendo has the advantage of its characters' "star power" to sell weird games - and I love that, because it means they can crank out some weird shit and it'll actually sell, and players will try out a gaming experience they might have otherwise ignored. You can do that when Mario, Kirby, Donkey Kong, etc. are yours to command. For the rest of the world it's more of a risk.
(One example of this is Harmonix, makers of the games Frequency and Amplitude - they found in their testing that players enjoy both games once they actually sit down and play them - but getting people to actually do so in the first place was the tough part. I think this is an example that indicates that the interest in innovation is there in the industry, but it's difficult to get an innovative project made because it's hard to sell.)
I love the idea of the DS as a system for developers to try new things. This is one of the main reasons I'm interested in the system. I'm rather skeptical of how many titles will be put out for the system that'll really make good use of the touch-screen and mic (and I don't like the notion of talking into my game system on a bus or whatever.) but I'm hopeful.