I think we will be hearing more about odd animal behavior in the near future. The animal world IS changing...I recommend you watch Planet Earth BBC (last disk about Conservation). (60 Minutes recently had a bit on Global Warming, and keep your eyes out for The 11th Hour. http://wip.warnerbros.com/11thhour/)
Absolutely! I played the first one, not the second, even though it came highly recommended; I didn't seem to have the time. Starflight came on two floppies; I mean the kind that bend! It had something like 400 planets with terrain. The universe felt massive and yet played on an IBM XT with no hard drive. Genius! I hope one of the authors reads this so I can thank them for a game I enjoyed greatly.
I would like to play Starflight II if it is possible... DOSBox? I may have the disks zipped but not the original decoder.
Maybe someone will open the Ark in San Francisco and everybody parties with the glowing spirits until they get fried by lightning or melted. You can substitute San Francisco with Des Moines, if you like.
But don't get your hopes up. I predict a new, young, lame character being introduced, and not the return of the Ark.
Though the Net is great for finding specs and answer to specific problems; I still find the most coherent knowledge in books. Visit the tech section at the library or book store and browse from something interesting. The author wrote to book to be understood, as compared to source code which was written to be obfuscated!
About ten years ago as I drove from Las Vegas to Phoenix, I acquired the tailgating moron from...what's deeper than Hell?
She liked to ride my ass at 60mph, at 70mph, at 80mph...so I tried 45mph, 40mph, 35mph... I pulled halfway off the road on the right and waved my arms for her to pass. She didn't; she wouldn't. I sped up to 90mph and left her in my dust then I cruised at 70mph. She appeared in my mirror within 5 minutes and the cycle began again. I slowed down drastically and pulled right and waved my arm out the window. No pass?! I sped up to 90mph! (Who was the maniac here, me or her?) Finally, maybe 20 minutes later, in our third cycle of events, zipping along bumper to bumper at an exhilarating 45mph, I saw her passenger wake up. They had some sort of exchange and she passed me.
By the way, the passenger was male. Is that relevant? Dunno. Maybe if he had been driving, I would have no story to tell.
I have a Sony DSLR Alpha-100 and I consider it a great buy. It has taken some amazing photographs! (I'm slightly disappointed with the sensitivity and noise in low light but I'm not convinced that other brands do significantly better.) Also, the Sony earphones I purchased ten or more years still sound great. I don't own any other Sony products (and I have no intention to purchase a PS3 or any other game consoles until the consoles out perform PC games and offer a level of control on par with keyboard/mouse).
Maybe user error can explain why your battery exploded.:)
We must stop this progression of intelligence before we are left with Bills, Beavis's, Buttheads, and Teds who understand how to get laid! The future would have no humor.
I also enjoyed playing Dragon's Lair. First, I watched other people spend their money and I learned all the basic rooms. Then, by paying attention to the hints (flashing objects) and making intelligent choices, one could make progress. After memorization, the game required instant recognition of dangerous rooms and quick action. Many of the rooms looked similar and the game would sometimes serve a mirror image (actions flipped left/right).
The dragon's lair itself always brought a crowd, and for a 12 year old kid, that was an ego boost.
I would agree on all points, and add one more group of causes for bugs: morons and crack-heads.
Ok, maybe that's obvious...but not to management. I worked for a company whose tiger-team of contract labor consisted of: a drug abuser, a dead beat dad, an imbecile, and one really nice guy of no special education. Of the four, the crack-head hoodwinked management into thinking he was crack-coder, a virtuoso. He used 8 lines of code to copy a (double) into a (long) using sscanf() (instead of just using the cast).
No, I'm not one of the four, nor management!:)
On the topic of "bounty development," Kodak in 1998 offered a prize for coders to develop scripts for their new digital cameras (DC260) so the idea has been around at least that long. --- I took the competition to mean that Kodak and FlashPoint couldn't figure out anything interesting to do with a CPU in a camera. Or maybe they just didn't know what to do with their scripting language which sucked as badly as a high school science fair project. I wasn't about to spend any time using it...but I must have had the wrong documentation because somehow someone managed to write a motion detection program that took a picture when the image changed by some measure. They won first prize. (All the rest of the submissions where HTML generation scripts which shouldn't be done on the camera, in my opinion). --- One would think that all cameras would be customizable/programmable these days. In case someone in the camera industry is reading this: I certainly would like a motion detection option. I would also like to program movement detection and focus calculations for myself.
A robot ship with higher acceleration is a more likely answer for colonization. See my previous comment: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl? sid=135790 &cid=11342128
I'm not sure about humans, more specifically our brains, living for centuries otherwise. Boredom, schizophrenia, cynicism...that would be one crotchety populus.
If humans intend to colonize distant planets, light years away, then one possible delivery method may be a robot ship carrying frozen seeds and embryos. (Lifeforms could not survive the journey.)
This would require that robots have the knowledge and ethics to raise humans and (re)create a civilization.
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512TB?! Sweet!
That's too long to wait! How about I just call you tomorrow? We can talk about gophers, clouds, formica...
What on earth would you do?! If you had more money you could buy more wallets! Take care of that messy piling up problem.
What's with all the Insightful, Informative, and Interesting comments? When a student gets taser'd its FUNNY. Entertain me!
I think we will be hearing more about odd animal behavior in the near future. The animal world IS changing...I recommend you watch Planet Earth BBC (last disk about Conservation). (60 Minutes recently had a bit on Global Warming, and keep your eyes out for The 11th Hour. http://wip.warnerbros.com/11thhour/)
Absolutely! I played the first one, not the second, even though it came highly recommended; I didn't seem to have the time.
Starflight came on two floppies; I mean the kind that bend! It had something like 400 planets with terrain. The universe felt massive and yet played on an IBM XT with no hard drive. Genius! I hope one of the authors reads this so I can thank them for a game I enjoyed greatly.
I would like to play Starflight II if it is possible... DOSBox? I may have the disks zipped but not the original decoder.
Maybe someone will open the Ark in San Francisco and everybody parties with the glowing spirits until they get fried by lightning or melted. You can substitute San Francisco with Des Moines, if you like.
But don't get your hopes up. I predict a new, young, lame character being introduced, and not the return of the Ark.
Though the Net is great for finding specs and answer to specific problems; I still find the most coherent knowledge in books. Visit the tech section at the library or book store and browse from something interesting. The author wrote to book to be understood, as compared to source code which was written to be obfuscated!
About ten years ago as I drove from Las Vegas to Phoenix, I acquired the tailgating moron from ...what's deeper than Hell?
She liked to ride my ass at 60mph, at 70mph, at 80mph...so I tried 45mph, 40mph, 35mph... I pulled halfway off the road on the right and waved my arms for her to pass. She didn't; she wouldn't. I sped up to 90mph and left her in my dust then I cruised at 70mph. She appeared in my mirror within 5 minutes and the cycle began again. I slowed down drastically and pulled right and waved my arm out the window. No pass?! I sped up to 90mph! (Who was the maniac here, me or her?) Finally, maybe 20 minutes later, in our third cycle of events, zipping along bumper to bumper at an exhilarating 45mph, I saw her passenger wake up. They had some sort of exchange and she passed me.
By the way, the passenger was male. Is that relevant? Dunno. Maybe if he had been driving, I would have no story to tell.
I have a Sony DSLR Alpha-100 and I consider it a great buy. It has taken some amazing photographs! (I'm slightly disappointed with the sensitivity and noise in low light but I'm not convinced that other brands do significantly better.) Also, the Sony earphones I purchased ten or more years still sound great. I don't own any other Sony products (and I have no intention to purchase a PS3 or any other game consoles until the consoles out perform PC games and offer a level of control on par with keyboard/mouse). Maybe user error can explain why your battery exploded. :)
We must stop this progression of intelligence before we are left with Bills, Beavis's, Buttheads, and Teds who understand how to get laid! The future would have no humor.
Today, Slashdot, tomorrow: flying cellophane Manga books emitting odors of Noboru Niitakayama.
They are going to put it in a cardboard box and poke a hole in the opposite side.
I also enjoyed playing Dragon's Lair. First, I watched other people spend their money and I learned all the basic rooms. Then, by paying attention to the hints (flashing objects) and making intelligent choices, one could make progress. After memorization, the game required instant recognition of dangerous rooms and quick action. Many of the rooms looked similar and the game would sometimes serve a mirror image (actions flipped left/right). The dragon's lair itself always brought a crowd, and for a 12 year old kid, that was an ego boost.
I see....so Core Force allows my spy gadgets to see you naked through your flat panel display.
Allow/Deny?
I would agree on all points, and add one more group of causes for bugs: morons and crack-heads. Ok, maybe that's obvious...but not to management. I worked for a company whose tiger-team of contract labor consisted of: a drug abuser, a dead beat dad, an imbecile, and one really nice guy of no special education. Of the four, the crack-head hoodwinked management into thinking he was crack-coder, a virtuoso. He used 8 lines of code to copy a (double) into a (long) using sscanf() (instead of just using the cast). No, I'm not one of the four, nor management! :)
On the topic of "bounty development," Kodak in 1998 offered a prize for coders to develop scripts for their new digital cameras (DC260) so the idea has been around at least that long.
---
I took the competition to mean that Kodak and FlashPoint couldn't figure out anything interesting to do with a CPU in a camera. Or maybe they just didn't know what to do with their scripting language which sucked as badly as a high school science fair project. I wasn't about to spend any time using it...but I must have had the wrong documentation because somehow someone managed to write a motion detection program that took a picture when the image changed by some measure. They won first prize. (All the rest of the submissions where HTML generation scripts which shouldn't be done on the camera, in my opinion).
---
One would think that all cameras would be customizable/programmable these days. In case someone in the camera industry is reading this: I certainly would like a motion detection option. I would also like to program movement detection and focus calculations for myself.
Steve Meretzky was cool enough to reply to a letter I sent him when I was in high school in the 80's. I loved his Infocom games. He is a hoopy frood.
A robot ship with higher acceleration is a more likely answer for colonization. See my previous comment:? sid=135790 &cid=11342128
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl
I'm not sure about humans, more specifically our brains, living for centuries otherwise. Boredom, schizophrenia, cynicism...that would be one crotchety populus.
If humans intend to colonize distant planets, light years away, then one possible delivery method may be a robot ship carrying frozen seeds and embryos. (Lifeforms could not survive the journey.)
This would require that robots have the knowledge and ethics to raise humans and (re)create a civilization.