Then, there are the astro-moderators, who will mod-down obvious anti-Microsoft comments. These are quite common but usually get hammered out in meta-moderation.
Your paranoid babble currently stands at +4. Where's your evidence?
# XXX TODO read as a parameter, for other numbered beasts $NUMBER_OF_THE_BEAST = 666; @nums = map(ord, split(//, $ARGV[0])); @ops = qw(+ -); # or whatever you want if ($deriv=inferno(undef, @nums)) {
foreach (@nums) { print chr($_), "\t$_\n" };
print "$deriv\nCoincidence? I think not!\n" }
sub inferno {
my($n, @nums) = @_;
if ($#nums == -1) {
int($n) == $NUMBER_OF_THE_BEAST ? " = $NUMBER_OF_THE_BEAST" : 0;
} else {
for $op (@ops) {
my($deriv);
if ($deriv=inferno(eval("$n$op$nums[0]"), @nums[1..$#nums])) {
return("$op$nums[0]$deriv");
}
}
} }
Suppose Coca-Cola offered to pay Joe Blogpack $2,500 to do a column talking about a dead rat found in a storage container at a Pepsi bottling facility, how quickly do you think he would jump?
Hell, some folks might do it for free, which would probably be better for Coca-Cola since it would be perfectly deniable. The word "blowback" mean anything to you? Can you imagine what would happen to Coke if and when their shenanigans came to light?
Right, anyone who isn't in line with the slashbot groupthink MUST be a paid shill of Microsoft. Or perhaps you're just being trolled. And have lost. Badly.
Maybe mods are tired of seeing the same old canards and have marked them down as redundant or more appropriately overrated
Get over your paranoid persecution complex. You simply aren't that important.
Yunno... if the game mechanics prevent you from performing any "forbidden" actions, then what's the point? Since there's no free will, neither is there any need for any guiding principles like the eightfold path or the ten commandments or the new covenant at all. Compliance would just be automatic -- it's not like your heart needs to be commanded to beat.
I tried aiming this sort of argument at the fundamentalists who want to impose their religion as political governance, but found it fairly useless, as it's an intellectual argument aimed at a force powered by blind ignorance and stupidity. You can't put out a fire with a sword.
Even though most asian languages just happen to have a one-syllable word for every syllable in the language, that doesn't mean the reverse is true, that every syllable in a word is related to the single-syllable word. The syllables don't mean anything by themselves. It's like that old saw of "assume" being made up of "ass", "you" (hey it's the syllable, right?), and "me". That bit about the chinese word for "crisis" being formed from "danger" and "opportunity" is basically the same way.
Of course, the chinese *do* enjoy wordplay, much like that "assume" bit (my favorite silly phrasing is "assuming makes an ass of u and ming"), so you'll sometimes see these patterns "discovered" anyway. One great example is a chinese story that makes perfect sense written down, but read aloud, every word is "Shiu" (with different tonalities). It doesn't make any sense even to Chinese, it's like that "had had had had had had had had" brainteaser... it's meant to be a sort of tongue twister.
It doesn't point to some exotic holistic school of thought, just a linguistic principle of economy in assigning common words to single syllables, and even overloading them based on contextual rules that would make Larry Wall blush (and he's got a degree in linguistics).
Of course, Nintendo is a deliberately coined name, and sort of like "Agilent" (it's "agile" and "talent", right?) so it's certainly meant to convey the gist of some meaning. Given the fact that they made playing cards for like a hundred years before getting into electronics, my guess is on the latter (casino) interpretation.
But languages aren't (yet) composed entirely of brand names, so try not to read too much meaning into the pieces of words. It's like postmodernism, if you cut everything up into too-small pieces, you have mush, not components.
Wow. I'm glad I left before the demise of donut wednesdays. I think I was at the very last keg party too, or close to it (hardly a "kegger bash", a fairly subdued affair actually, but the keg of Fat Tire was generous).
Where I work never had such gimmicks either, but it's one thing to not have them, another to lose them and know it's to keep the executive bonuses paid.
Basically, everything that was asked for was corrected, and the outside "experts" were persuaded, conjoled, and flat out told what they wanted was a windows-like interface that acted like Palm OS, but in a more windows-98 like way.
I just recently helped a guy out with his PocketPC (Dell Axim), first exposure I had to PocketPC. He had a bunch of maps in the internal memory and wanted to move them to the flash card instead. So I started tapping around... folders, files, looked straight forward. Couldn't find a "move" or "copy" function anywhere. Maybe there's one, but I managed to get to get a keyboard display, which had "cut" and paste. So I selected the files, did "cut", went to the folder on the flash card, did "paste", and lo and behold, that windows idiom worked.
And it failed halfway through, because one of the files was "open", in that I had the map reader application "running", and had previously viewed that map with it, and apparently it just keeps the file open until the app is closed. And it didn't copy over any of the rest after that file.
That goddam PDA OS really is like Windows. And not in a good way.
I think you're talking about Interix, now SFU. SFU is really quite complete -- many people in fact prefer it to cygwin (but not being open source, it doesn't quite have the traction of cygwin among the unix faithful)
> Btw, you wouldn't happen to know how to do something like provide ICS dial-up access without logging in, would you? Or how about sharing a drive through smb as a non-Admin? How about just fiddling with ICS settings as a non-Admin?
Does it not work if you start explorer as an admin and launch the control panel from there? If you're familiar enough with the control panels, you can launch 'em directly from the commandline. More direct approaches are available for those who care to plumb the depths of the registry and/or WMI.
LGPL still compels you to distribute the source with binaries if you modified that which was directly under the LGPL, just not whatever you link it with. This would definitely count as falling under the LGPL. I don't think they'll need arm-twisting though, I imagine he'll be eager to release the patches to KHTML asap.
One, RunAs (far as I'm aware) doesn't allow you to msi components or explorer to do some tasks.
I'm not aware of any limitations there. I in fact used to use runas to install MSI packages all the time (before I got lazy and just switched to an admin user... bad me). There aren't really any other "components" to MSI -- a package is just a MSDE database, you can even query it with SQL. There are a few things like "System Volume Information" that are unavailable even to administrators (so why the HELL does it always show up in explorer, is my question), but that's more to do with the fact that the REAL superuser in windows is SYSTEM, not Administrator.
do note that this is technically possible to do in X too, but it's a lot less trivial given that you can't directly input code into a text field and instead have to send events to the proper area of the window and hope that the programs doesn't filter out "invalid" data.
Not trivial, eh? Those of us who never left a sudo su - session open in a terminal, raise your hand.
The real answer is to switch between desktops using cool switch or the like
I presume you mean login sessions with fast switch (something I haven't figured out how to turn on in XP Professional) since it's otherwise possible to enumerate all the Desktops in a Windowstation. Cool switch is the name for alt-tab.
Runas is not the pile of shit, the installer is. Most of those broken installers will fail if you rename the Administrator account. Is microsoft to blame for stupid installers that can't use the *excruciatingly* well-documented APIs for this sort of thing? Go complain at the folks who wrote the installer.
I can write a unix installer that requires root but will fail if your uid 0 isn't named root, or you merely used su instead of "su -". I've even *seen* installers that do idiotic things like if [ `whoami` != root ]...
The other thing that takes out berthas nicely is, of course, nukes. Yes, there's ABM's, but you can pretty well overwhelm them as well. I loved the ever-escalating arms race of TA... I just wish it didn't stop at the small nukes, I sort of wanted it to get all the way up to real armageddon causing weapons (short of the Core Contingency weapon anyway). Gives people an incentive to wipe out the other guy, before *everything* is blown away.
Ahh, but you see, to edit a story submission would involve, well, editing, which is something the editors won't stoop to do. I mean, journalism is all about running submissions verbatim, isn't it?
Re:Such Innovation In a Time of Little
on
We Love Katamari
·
· Score: 1
"Planescape Torment", a USA RPG regarded as highly creative, fulfills 4 out of those 7.
Which ones? There's of course "key item" quests, though not quite the same as collecting all Nine Curios Of Godlike Power or Five Trinkets Of Doom. The Transcendant One's form is pretty malevolent, I wouldn't call it angelic. The game is full of organizations, but none of them have big agendas, such let alone rebel against the "government" (the Lady of Pain).
It's economy of description: why mention something if you aren't going to show it later?
In theater jargon, it's called "Chekov's Law": If there is a gun on the wall in Act 1, it will be fired by Act 3.
Anyway, all drama follows certain forms. There's several books (you'd think we'd only need one) that attempt to enumerate them, and they tend to boil down to about a dozen or so, with variations bringing the total up to about 30-40. And yes, "defeating an evil plot at the brink of its successful outcome" is probably one of those devices. But categorization is a function of our classification ability, which lets us fit specific things into archetypical forms. The conversion is always lossy, sometimes terribly so.
JRPG's tend to follow form about as much as most RPG's (Torment was fairly different -- my first time through, I ended up talking TTO to death with no combat), and while there are exceptions in JRPG-land, they're harder to find because they are buried under mounds of mass-produced entertainment ground out like so many cheap sausages. It's just a bigger market there.
One could bemoan that there's nothing new under the sun, but Ecclesiastes already said it, so why bother?
Hello. I question. Look, if you need comments to explain the code flow because your method spans four screens and has six levels of conditionals in two levels of loops, all the comments in the world won't help you.
Especially if you change the code and now the comments are wrong
I have had the joy of maintaining lovingly commented code with all these huge blocks at the start showing what args get passed and what happens, and I can't understand a god damned thing about what it's doing, because the code all looks like
It's wonderfully colorful and evocative language... I only wish it were true. IBM Legal will do what is best for IBM, and if it means not drawing out the execution of SCO and coming to some meagre settlement after which SCO withdraws all claims, they are not only inclined to do so, they are more or less obligated.
My thinking is that Novell might just decide to buy out ("buy back" might be more appropriate) what's left when IBM is done with SCO. It won't be much -- it wasn't much before the suits -- but it'll consolidate the ownership of Unix a little more, and anyone still running OpenServer is certainly a ripe migration target.
SCO will go out with a whimper, not a bang. I'm Joe Q. Pundit, and I approve this message.
Re:Such Innovation In a Time of Little
on
We Love Katamari
·
· Score: 1
Well, I was going to mention the retread plots starring the annoying bratty teenagers, but the movies sure are purty, as eye-candy goes. The gameplay is... well, suffice to say I'm no fan of turn-based combat, no matter how flashy.
I'm told Phantom Brave is a rare exception to the turn-based combat doldrums (though cutesy enough to give you fits), so I might pick that up when I can find a used copy.
Bullshit. MCI profits from spammers. You're talking out of your ass. You think they care about the monthly dialup access fees from spammers? AOL until recently had Carl Hutzler, one of the most respected names in anti-spam, who has turned AOL around and made them one of the leaders in anti-spam, from outbound port 25 blocking to SPF. Ask anyone on NANAE.. hell, ask the kooks, they'll tell you AOL has a fraction of the spam problem anyone else does, and their main complaint is only bounce spam, which they've nearly eliminated this year. Carl has since moved on (got promoted I think) and left two more in his stead who hopefully will continue to be as effective as him.
MAPS is run by some righteous little twits driving their fiefdom of an RBL into irrelevance at flank speed. Most responsible admins have moved on to some subset of SORBS, Blitzed OPM, and the Spamhaus XBL, with perhaps SPEWS turned on for advisory data only.
You on the other hand just think you're hot shit because you don't like AOL.
You have got to be kidding. GTA has some of the most diabolically complex control schemes out there, and I say "some", because it has several control schemes. Although GTA:SA finally gives you characters with real motivations and not charicatures, it's still a really violent game that constantly punishes you for slipping (you get run over, shot, crash, etc).
Funny thing, I think my GF would like Burnout... something about a game where you're supposed to crash spectacularly would probably bring out something in her... not sure if it would be altogether sweet and nice tho 8-/
Re:"Girly" subject matter is not the answer
on
10 Gateway Games
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> P.S. I'd love to be a game designer! What do I need to do to become one?
Didn't slashdot recently run a series of vignettes from game industry insiders, who didn't exactly play it up as a funhouse? You can try searching for them... good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Then, there are the astro-moderators, who will mod-down obvious anti-Microsoft comments. These are quite common but usually get hammered out in meta-moderation.
Your paranoid babble currently stands at +4. Where's your evidence?
Just so we don't have to go through all the numerological hurdles to "prove" this, why don't we just use a perl script
Suppose Coca-Cola offered to pay Joe Blogpack $2,500 to do a column talking about a dead rat found in a storage container at a Pepsi bottling facility, how quickly do you think he would jump?
Hell, some folks might do it for free, which would probably be better for Coca-Cola since it would be perfectly deniable. The word "blowback" mean anything to you? Can you imagine what would happen to Coke if and when their shenanigans came to light?
Speaking of malaria ...
Of course, since it's associated with Bill Gates, it must be a bad thing, right?
Right, anyone who isn't in line with the slashbot groupthink MUST be a paid shill of Microsoft. Or perhaps you're just being trolled. And have lost. Badly.
Maybe mods are tired of seeing the same old canards and have marked them down as redundant or more appropriately overrated
Get over your paranoid persecution complex. You simply aren't that important.
Pre-emptive strikes would be disallowed.
... if the game mechanics prevent you from performing any "forbidden" actions, then what's the point? Since there's no free will, neither is there any need for any guiding principles like the eightfold path or the ten commandments or the new covenant at all. Compliance would just be automatic -- it's not like your heart needs to be commanded to beat.
Yunno
I tried aiming this sort of argument at the fundamentalists who want to impose their religion as political governance, but found it fairly useless, as it's an intellectual argument aimed at a force powered by blind ignorance and stupidity. You can't put out a fire with a sword.
Even though most asian languages just happen to have a one-syllable word for every syllable in the language, that doesn't mean the reverse is true, that every syllable in a word is related to the single-syllable word. The syllables don't mean anything by themselves. It's like that old saw of "assume" being made up of "ass", "you" (hey it's the syllable, right?), and "me". That bit about the chinese word for "crisis" being formed from "danger" and "opportunity" is basically the same way.
... it's meant to be a sort of tongue twister.
Of course, the chinese *do* enjoy wordplay, much like that "assume" bit (my favorite silly phrasing is "assuming makes an ass of u and ming"), so you'll sometimes see these patterns "discovered" anyway. One great example is a chinese story that makes perfect sense written down, but read aloud, every word is "Shiu" (with different tonalities). It doesn't make any sense even to Chinese, it's like that "had had had had had had had had" brainteaser
It doesn't point to some exotic holistic school of thought, just a linguistic principle of economy in assigning common words to single syllables, and even overloading them based on contextual rules that would make Larry Wall blush (and he's got a degree in linguistics).
Of course, Nintendo is a deliberately coined name, and sort of like "Agilent" (it's "agile" and "talent", right?) so it's certainly meant to convey the gist of some meaning. Given the fact that they made playing cards for like a hundred years before getting into electronics, my guess is on the latter (casino) interpretation.
But languages aren't (yet) composed entirely of brand names, so try not to read too much meaning into the pieces of words. It's like postmodernism, if you cut everything up into too-small pieces, you have mush, not components.
Wow. I'm glad I left before the demise of donut wednesdays. I think I was at the very last keg party too, or close to it (hardly a "kegger bash", a fairly subdued affair actually, but the keg of Fat Tire was generous).
Where I work never had such gimmicks either, but it's one thing to not have them, another to lose them and know it's to keep the executive bonuses paid.
Basically, everything that was asked for was corrected, and the outside "experts" were persuaded, conjoled, and flat out told what they wanted was a windows-like interface that acted like Palm OS, but in a more windows-98 like way.
... folders, files, looked straight forward. Couldn't find a "move" or "copy" function anywhere. Maybe there's one, but I managed to get to get a keyboard display, which had "cut" and paste. So I selected the files, did "cut", went to the folder on the flash card, did "paste", and lo and behold, that windows idiom worked.
I just recently helped a guy out with his PocketPC (Dell Axim), first exposure I had to PocketPC. He had a bunch of maps in the internal memory and wanted to move them to the flash card instead. So I started tapping around
And it failed halfway through, because one of the files was "open", in that I had the map reader application "running", and had previously viewed that map with it, and apparently it just keeps the file open until the app is closed. And it didn't copy over any of the rest after that file.
That goddam PDA OS really is like Windows. And not in a good way.
I think you're talking about Interix, now SFU. SFU is really quite complete -- many people in fact prefer it to cygwin (but not being open source, it doesn't quite have the traction of cygwin among the unix faithful)
> Btw, you wouldn't happen to know how to do something like provide ICS dial-up access without logging in, would you? Or how about sharing a drive through smb as a non-Admin? How about just fiddling with ICS settings as a non-Admin?
Does it not work if you start explorer as an admin and launch the control panel from there? If you're familiar enough with the control panels, you can launch 'em directly from the commandline. More direct approaches are available for those who care to plumb the depths of the registry and/or WMI.
LGPL still compels you to distribute the source with binaries if you modified that which was directly under the LGPL, just not whatever you link it with. This would definitely count as falling under the LGPL. I don't think they'll need arm-twisting though, I imagine he'll be eager to release the patches to KHTML asap.
One, RunAs (far as I'm aware) doesn't allow you to msi components or explorer to do some tasks.
... bad me). There aren't really any other "components" to MSI -- a package is just a MSDE database, you can even query it with SQL. There are a few things like "System Volume Information" that are unavailable even to administrators (so why the HELL does it always show up in explorer, is my question), but that's more to do with the fact that the REAL superuser in windows is SYSTEM, not Administrator.
I'm not aware of any limitations there. I in fact used to use runas to install MSI packages all the time (before I got lazy and just switched to an admin user
do note that this is technically possible to do in X too, but it's a lot less trivial given that you can't directly input code into a text field and instead have to send events to the proper area of the window and hope that the programs doesn't filter out "invalid" data.
Not trivial, eh? Those of us who never left a sudo su - session open in a terminal, raise your hand.
The real answer is to switch between desktops using cool switch or the like
I presume you mean login sessions with fast switch (something I haven't figured out how to turn on in XP Professional) since it's otherwise possible to enumerate all the Desktops in a Windowstation. Cool switch is the name for alt-tab.
Runas is not the pile of shit, the installer is. Most of those broken installers will fail if you rename the Administrator account. Is microsoft to blame for stupid installers that can't use the *excruciatingly* well-documented APIs for this sort of thing? Go complain at the folks who wrote the installer.
...
I can write a unix installer that requires root but will fail if your uid 0 isn't named root, or you merely used su instead of "su -". I've even *seen* installers that do idiotic things like if [ `whoami` != root ]
How is this different from su?
Oh, wait. It isn't. Never mind.
CAPTAIN OBVIOUS STRIKES AGAIN! Psst -- we're talking about windows here.
Interix also has sudo.
The other thing that takes out berthas nicely is, of course, nukes. Yes, there's ABM's, but you can pretty well overwhelm them as well. I loved the ever-escalating arms race of TA ... I just wish it didn't stop at the small nukes, I sort of wanted it to get all the way up to real armageddon causing weapons (short of the Core Contingency weapon anyway). Gives people an incentive to wipe out the other guy, before *everything* is blown away.
Ahh, but you see, to edit a story submission would involve, well, editing, which is something the editors won't stoop to do. I mean, journalism is all about running submissions verbatim, isn't it?
"Planescape Torment", a USA RPG regarded as highly creative, fulfills 4 out of those 7.
Which ones? There's of course "key item" quests, though not quite the same as collecting all Nine Curios Of Godlike Power or Five Trinkets Of Doom. The Transcendant One's form is pretty malevolent, I wouldn't call it angelic. The game is full of organizations, but none of them have big agendas, such let alone rebel against the "government" (the Lady of Pain).
It's economy of description: why mention something if you aren't going to show it later?
In theater jargon, it's called "Chekov's Law": If there is a gun on the wall in Act 1, it will be fired by Act 3.
Anyway, all drama follows certain forms. There's several books (you'd think we'd only need one) that attempt to enumerate them, and they tend to boil down to about a dozen or so, with variations bringing the total up to about 30-40. And yes, "defeating an evil plot at the brink of its successful outcome" is probably one of those devices. But categorization is a function of our classification ability, which lets us fit specific things into archetypical forms. The conversion is always lossy, sometimes terribly so.
JRPG's tend to follow form about as much as most RPG's (Torment was fairly different -- my first time through, I ended up talking TTO to death with no combat), and while there are exceptions in JRPG-land, they're harder to find because they are buried under mounds of mass-produced entertainment ground out like so many cheap sausages. It's just a bigger market there.
One could bemoan that there's nothing new under the sun, but Ecclesiastes already said it, so why bother?
One of my favorites, yes.
Hello. I question. Look, if you need comments to explain the code flow because your method spans four screens and has six levels of conditionals in two levels of loops, all the comments in the world won't help you.
Especially if you change the code and now the comments are wrong
I have had the joy of maintaining lovingly commented code with all these huge blocks at the start showing what args get passed and what happens, and I can't understand a god damned thing about what it's doing, because the code all looks like All generalisms are wrong.
It's wonderfully colorful and evocative language ... I only wish it were true. IBM Legal will do what is best for IBM, and if it means not drawing out the execution of SCO and coming to some meagre settlement after which SCO withdraws all claims, they are not only inclined to do so, they are more or less obligated.
My thinking is that Novell might just decide to buy out ("buy back" might be more appropriate) what's left when IBM is done with SCO. It won't be much -- it wasn't much before the suits -- but it'll consolidate the ownership of Unix a little more, and anyone still running OpenServer is certainly a ripe migration target.
SCO will go out with a whimper, not a bang. I'm Joe Q. Pundit, and I approve this message.
Well, I was going to mention the retread plots starring the annoying bratty teenagers, but the movies sure are purty, as eye-candy goes. The gameplay is ... well, suffice to say I'm no fan of turn-based combat, no matter how flashy.
I'm told Phantom Brave is a rare exception to the turn-based combat doldrums (though cutesy enough to give you fits), so I might pick that up when I can find a used copy.
AOL profits from these spammers and they know it.
.. hell, ask the kooks, they'll tell you AOL has a fraction of the spam problem anyone else does, and their main complaint is only bounce spam, which they've nearly eliminated this year. Carl has since moved on (got promoted I think) and left two more in his stead who hopefully will continue to be as effective as him.
Bullshit. MCI profits from spammers. You're talking out of your ass. You think they care about the monthly dialup access fees from spammers? AOL until recently had Carl Hutzler, one of the most respected names in anti-spam, who has turned AOL around and made them one of the leaders in anti-spam, from outbound port 25 blocking to SPF. Ask anyone on NANAE
MAPS is run by some righteous little twits driving their fiefdom of an RBL into irrelevance at flank speed. Most responsible admins have moved on to some subset of SORBS, Blitzed OPM, and the Spamhaus XBL, with perhaps SPEWS turned on for advisory data only.
You on the other hand just think you're hot shit because you don't like AOL.
You have got to be kidding. GTA has some of the most diabolically complex control schemes out there, and I say "some", because it has several control schemes. Although GTA:SA finally gives you characters with real motivations and not charicatures, it's still a really violent game that constantly punishes you for slipping (you get run over, shot, crash, etc).
... something about a game where you're supposed to crash spectacularly would probably bring out something in her ... not sure if it would be altogether sweet and nice tho 8-/
Funny thing, I think my GF would like Burnout
> P.S. I'd love to be a game designer! What do I need to do to become one?
... good luck.
Didn't slashdot recently run a series of vignettes from game industry insiders, who didn't exactly play it up as a funhouse? You can try searching for them