I had been going to make a really funny, insightful comment here - but unfortunately this long-awaited event has been delayed until the third quarter of 2007 at the very earliest.
... Cue mass tagging of this article as 'itsacrap'?;-)
The idea of powering things from seemingly worthless waste matter isn't new - there's that Swedish train powered by methane from fermented cow offal, for example. I know sewage works produce a lot of methane anyway, so it's possibly just a matter of collecting it in a cost-effective manner...
Land-fill sites might be next. I've seen small flares stuck into the ground, burning off excess methane, to stop it collecting to dangerous, explosive levels. Once again, it's a matter of whether it's cost-effective to collect this otherwise free gas.
Re:I Really Like Ruby and Rails
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I think the best part is the logo with the shadow and reflection. It's like he can't decide between Web 1.0 bubble or Web 2.0 bubble! Use them both!
Actually, it's the output from one of the GIMP's logo scripts - they're instantly recognisable after a while.;-)
I wonder if there is a parallel to be drawn between accessibility concerns and perhaps multi-language sites? If your country of origin (and of hosting?) has bilingualism laws are they a template to establish the same/similar laws for accessibility?
Until recently, good old ISO-8859-15 was just about good enough in terms of character encoding, but now with all the new member states and their weird-and-wonderful accented letters, full-blown Unicode is necessary. Recent programming I've done has had to be fully UTF-8 clean - and it's really satisfying when a fully-automated email system manages to send someone's name with all accents intact.
I've had no problems at all with the original Half-Life, and its sequel, on a dual-core machine.
From a modding point of view, the Source map compilation tools are fully SMP-aware - so I guess someone at Valve knows about multithreaded programming. Seeing both processors pegged at 100% is great, as is hearing the whooshing noise from my laptop's fans. No belching of flames quite yet, fortunately.
(Actually, the compilation tools will scale up to running in a distributed manner - apparently at Valve, even the receptionist's PC contributes processor time. But the necessary glue code isn't available for us modders, alas.)
Stuff I've built generally meets all the relevant accessibility guidelines - except I wasn't deliberately aiming for them.
If you keep to standards and don't defecate non-semantic pseudo-HTML from your crutch of a WYSIWYG editor, then it's really easy. Alt tags are required by HTML 4 and XHTML - they're not optional. Non-Javascript alternatives reduce support costs - for instance, you don't have able-bodied twits phoning up, asking why a particular section of their website doesn't work just because they disabled half of the features in their browsers when bored.
Check your website using lynx, or some other excessively simple browser. If the pages are still perfectly navigable and understandable, then you're doing okay. Being unable to write HTML or design websites isn't an excuse.
That, or you're a troll / hypocrite / astroturfer.:p
Nah, just a awkward, non-upgrading PC gamer who's entertained by all the different varieties of console fanboys.
In one corner, you have the Xbox360 fans crowing over how wonderful it is to have a space-heater complete with high resolutions, downloadable software and online capabilities - and soon the ability for people to write (severely limited) homebrew stuff. PC users look back, slightly bemused - yes, those are good things, but they're not exactly new...;-)
Then you've got the PS3 fans, wowed by Mullet Gear Franchise n and some completely fabricated, pre-rendered 'gameplay' trailers. Sony seems to be repeatedly shooting itself in both feet over a machine which might be slightly more powerful than an Xbox 360, but will probably turn out just like its predecessor - a bastard to program, and filled with annoying restrictions in inconvenient places. The machine may also be a loss-leader to attempt to promote some of Sony's other technologies - HDTV and Blu-Ray. Neither of which are exactly necessary for armchair gaming.
Finally, there's the Wii fans, proclaiming that their machine has deliberately naff graphics (it's all about the gameplay!), as if graphics and gameplay were mutually exclusive. If that was the case, shouldn't the Wii have a simple, dumb framebuffer and flat-shaded polygons at most? The GPU's pixel shaders are an affront to the gameplay Dogme! Yes, the controller looks rather interesting, and the platform will have a couple of great, genre-defining games (just like the other two consoles) - but there will also be plenty of dross, using the controller as an utter gimmick.
So basically, third-parties like myself get utterly infuriated by all the in-fighting between the fanboys, and never get round to buying any of the consoles - being unable to justify new hardware for the handful of new games that look interesting for each platform...;-)
On top of that, it's clocked at somewhere between 800 MHz and 1 Ghz...so saying it's 3-4x more powerful than Gekko is about right, and probably conservative. I'm sure the GPU is better than the GC's by about that amount.
Moore's Law called, and it wants its vague 10x improvement over five years back. Ignoring the massive, law-confounding improvements in processor and GPU designs over those years, obviously.
In a predictable manner, I'll get modded down for this - but if you buy a Wii, you have to realise your money's going towards a rather spendidly interesting new controller. And Nintendo's profits - this ain't a loss-leader. The console itself is seriously downgraded, and frankly a bit naff compared with what could have been possible if the budget was aimed solely at it.
And Nintendo? Yes, I know you're (quite sensibly) avoiding the minuscule HDTV market, but some anti-aliasing would have been nice? Running at a low resolution means the jaggies become painfully obvious.
(To the moderators, again - the game might be wonderful, but if you're spending 70 blissful hours marred only by the digital equivalent of Vaseline smeared over the screen, wouldn't you have preferred it if Nintendo had reduced their profit on the console by, say, $20 - and gave you much clearer graphics in the process? The art looks great, the GPU... doesn't.)
Erm... It's now on sale through Telltale Games' entirely non-GameTap online store. Works just fine with a non-USA IP address and credit card. Plus it's more like a purchase over Steam - it's not a silly subscription service. Pay your $8.95 (plus tax) and it'll unlock the game for you, permanently.
(Incidentally, the 'demo version' is the whole game, but you can't progress beyond a certain point - it just needs the magical unlocking....)
It's a shame that nobody outside America can enjoy this game.
Oh bugger.
I'm in Belgium, and enjoyed it last night. I guess someone ought to tell their non-Gametap online ordering system to ignore such filthy non-American countries as the one I'm in?
My not-quite-top-end gaming PC has an 85 watt power supply.
It's still got an Intel Core Duo and a fairly nippy ATi graphics card - it's also got a built-in screen. Okay, it's a 15in MacBook Pro, but still...;-)
Microsoft really had an amazing strategy with their online classic game downloads, but it looks like Nintendo is going to take it to the next level - and I for one will happily shell out a wii amount of cash for their golden oldies.
Will it be possible to download an old game for free if you already have the physical cartridge?
Actually, this Mac user decided to installed Windows XP on his MacBook Pro, and discovered he had a completely serviceable Windows gaming machine hidden away in his work laptop.
Considering I switched to Mac laptops to escape the horrors of getting Linux to work on random PC laptop hardware anyway...;-)
I've got a Nokia 1100. It cost about 60, well over six months ago.
In real-world terms, the battery still lasts well over a week (even in marginal reception areas like where I lived in Britain) and gives far too many hours of talk-time for my needs. The predictive text thing works quickly and efficiently (and the default dictionary isn't filled with txt-spk crap), and it's generally cheap and cheerful.
No, it doesn't have a camera (I've got an EOS 350D with chunky lenses for that;-) ), it doesn't surf the interweb (MacBook Pro, anyone?) and its most advanced feature is an LED flashlight which switches on when the 'C' button is held down.
I really like the user interface on it, and it's probably the best phone I've had so far. Despite being given heaps of apparently vastly superior hand-me-downs by family members. It seems to be working on outliving their new phones, too...
To laymen like me, this sounds rather cryptic. Could any of you web gurus please elaborate, and/or list other advantages of XHTML?
With it being XML, it's easier to read with other tools - using an XML library makes it trivially easy to write code to turn an XHTML web-page into a highly structured, tree-like associative array which contains everything the original page contains.
In layman-speak - instead of mashing through the 'view source' equivalent (one big string), it becomes a mightily detailed tree, with every section of the page as another branch, twig or leaf. And to keep with the arboreal metaphor - when one has finished with one's web-page topiary, pruning or grafting, it's really easy to convert it back into XHTML - without losing anything in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully Minerva Episode 3 before HL2 Episode 2? ;)
;-)
Heh. Ideally before Christmas, although that's possibly pushing things just a bit...
Definitely before Valve's release, anyhow. I'm not quite running on Valve Time...
I had been going to make a really funny, insightful comment here - but unfortunately this long-awaited event has been delayed until the third quarter of 2007 at the very earliest.
Sorry.
Actually, it was simply some quickly-typed padding to disguise the real intent of my comment - which was to get the 'itsacrap' tag in use. Successes:
Twisting the Slashdot populace to my nefarious will? Absolutely!
O RLY?
(Testing, testing, 1 2 3, testing...)
... Cue mass tagging of this article as 'itsacrap'? ;-)
The idea of powering things from seemingly worthless waste matter isn't new - there's that Swedish train powered by methane from fermented cow offal, for example. I know sewage works produce a lot of methane anyway, so it's possibly just a matter of collecting it in a cost-effective manner...
Land-fill sites might be next. I've seen small flares stuck into the ground, burning off excess methane, to stop it collecting to dangerous, explosive levels. Once again, it's a matter of whether it's cost-effective to collect this otherwise free gas.
I think the best part is the logo with the shadow and reflection. It's like he can't decide between Web 1.0 bubble or Web 2.0 bubble! Use them both!
;-)
Actually, it's the output from one of the GIMP's logo scripts - they're instantly recognisable after a while.
The good news is that he doesn't have an index.php, unlike certain other sites...
in other news sony have revised the number of PS3s being distributed to 5, 3 to North america and 2 to Tokyo
;-)
The good news is that this is an increase on previous estimates...
I wonder if there is a parallel to be drawn between accessibility concerns and perhaps multi-language sites? If your country of origin (and of hosting?) has bilingualism laws are they a template to establish the same/similar laws for accessibility?
;-)
Poor you. Welcome to the EU, where there's something like twenty different languages!
Until recently, good old ISO-8859-15 was just about good enough in terms of character encoding, but now with all the new member states and their weird-and-wonderful accented letters, full-blown Unicode is necessary. Recent programming I've done has had to be fully UTF-8 clean - and it's really satisfying when a fully-automated email system manages to send someone's name with all accents intact.
So... Two languages, you say?
I've had no problems at all with the original Half-Life, and its sequel, on a dual-core machine.
From a modding point of view, the Source map compilation tools are fully SMP-aware - so I guess someone at Valve knows about multithreaded programming. Seeing both processors pegged at 100% is great, as is hearing the whooshing noise from my laptop's fans. No belching of flames quite yet, fortunately.
(Actually, the compilation tools will scale up to running in a distributed manner - apparently at Valve, even the receptionist's PC contributes processor time. But the necessary glue code isn't available for us modders, alas.)
Stuff I've built generally meets all the relevant accessibility guidelines - except I wasn't deliberately aiming for them.
If you keep to standards and don't defecate non-semantic pseudo-HTML from your crutch of a WYSIWYG editor, then it's really easy. Alt tags are required by HTML 4 and XHTML - they're not optional. Non-Javascript alternatives reduce support costs - for instance, you don't have able-bodied twits phoning up, asking why a particular section of their website doesn't work just because they disabled half of the features in their browsers when bored.
Check your website using lynx, or some other excessively simple browser. If the pages are still perfectly navigable and understandable, then you're doing okay. Being unable to write HTML or design websites isn't an excuse.
That, or you're a troll / hypocrite / astroturfer. :p
;-)
;-)
Nah, just a awkward, non-upgrading PC gamer who's entertained by all the different varieties of console fanboys.
In one corner, you have the Xbox360 fans crowing over how wonderful it is to have a space-heater complete with high resolutions, downloadable software and online capabilities - and soon the ability for people to write (severely limited) homebrew stuff. PC users look back, slightly bemused - yes, those are good things, but they're not exactly new...
Then you've got the PS3 fans, wowed by Mullet Gear Franchise n and some completely fabricated, pre-rendered 'gameplay' trailers. Sony seems to be repeatedly shooting itself in both feet over a machine which might be slightly more powerful than an Xbox 360, but will probably turn out just like its predecessor - a bastard to program, and filled with annoying restrictions in inconvenient places. The machine may also be a loss-leader to attempt to promote some of Sony's other technologies - HDTV and Blu-Ray. Neither of which are exactly necessary for armchair gaming.
Finally, there's the Wii fans, proclaiming that their machine has deliberately naff graphics (it's all about the gameplay!), as if graphics and gameplay were mutually exclusive. If that was the case, shouldn't the Wii have a simple, dumb framebuffer and flat-shaded polygons at most? The GPU's pixel shaders are an affront to the gameplay Dogme! Yes, the controller looks rather interesting, and the platform will have a couple of great, genre-defining games (just like the other two consoles) - but there will also be plenty of dross, using the controller as an utter gimmick.
So basically, third-parties like myself get utterly infuriated by all the in-fighting between the fanboys, and never get round to buying any of the consoles - being unable to justify new hardware for the handful of new games that look interesting for each platform...
On top of that, it's clocked at somewhere between 800 MHz and 1 Ghz...so saying it's 3-4x more powerful than Gekko is about right, and probably conservative. I'm sure the GPU is better than the GC's by about that amount.
... doesn't.)
Moore's Law called, and it wants its vague 10x improvement over five years back. Ignoring the massive, law-confounding improvements in processor and GPU designs over those years, obviously.
In a predictable manner, I'll get modded down for this - but if you buy a Wii, you have to realise your money's going towards a rather spendidly interesting new controller. And Nintendo's profits - this ain't a loss-leader. The console itself is seriously downgraded, and frankly a bit naff compared with what could have been possible if the budget was aimed solely at it.
And Nintendo? Yes, I know you're (quite sensibly) avoiding the minuscule HDTV market, but some anti-aliasing would have been nice? Running at a low resolution means the jaggies become painfully obvious.
(To the moderators, again - the game might be wonderful, but if you're spending 70 blissful hours marred only by the digital equivalent of Vaseline smeared over the screen, wouldn't you have preferred it if Nintendo had reduced their profit on the console by, say, $20 - and gave you much clearer graphics in the process? The art looks great, the GPU
That map predates TFC. It was available in the original Team Fortress mod.
Yup - and was in TFC on release as an official map.
And a version looks like it's going to be in Team Fortress 2 - it's in the background for all the screenshots released so far.
Will that map ever die?
What? No Silent Cartographer?
Erm... It's now on sale through Telltale Games' entirely non-GameTap online store. Works just fine with a non-USA IP address and credit card. Plus it's more like a purchase over Steam - it's not a silly subscription service. Pay your $8.95 (plus tax) and it'll unlock the game for you, permanently.
(Incidentally, the 'demo version' is the whole game, but you can't progress beyond a certain point - it just needs the magical unlocking....)
It's a shame that nobody outside America can enjoy this game.
Oh bugger.
I'm in Belgium, and enjoyed it last night. I guess someone ought to tell their non-Gametap online ordering system to ignore such filthy non-American countries as the one I'm in?
My not-quite-top-end gaming PC has an 85 watt power supply.
;-)
It's still got an Intel Core Duo and a fairly nippy ATi graphics card - it's also got a built-in screen. Okay, it's a 15in MacBook Pro, but still...
Microsoft really had an amazing strategy with their online classic game downloads, but it looks like Nintendo is going to take it to the next level - and I for one will happily shell out a wii amount of cash for their golden oldies.
Will it be possible to download an old game for free if you already have the physical cartridge?
It neglected to mention actual native Linux games, such as DEFCON
;-) )
Has the Linux version of DEFCON actually been finished and released yet?
(Yes, I'm still waiting for the Mac release - so I can take proper advantage of the 'office' mode...
Actually, this Mac user decided to installed Windows XP on his MacBook Pro, and discovered he had a completely serviceable Windows gaming machine hidden away in his work laptop.
;-)
Considering I switched to Mac laptops to escape the horrors of getting Linux to work on random PC laptop hardware anyway...
As mentioned previously, my stunningly cheap-and-cheerful Nokia 1100 has one.
;-)
I discovered it by accident, too...
Text input looks far, far worse than the stunningly obsolete, first-generation-GSM Nokia I found in a cupboard once.
(Of the 'this SMS thing looks fun, but will anyone ever use it?' age...)
I've got a Nokia 1100. It cost about 60, well over six months ago.
;-) ), it doesn't surf the interweb (MacBook Pro, anyone?) and its most advanced feature is an LED flashlight which switches on when the 'C' button is held down.
In real-world terms, the battery still lasts well over a week (even in marginal reception areas like where I lived in Britain) and gives far too many hours of talk-time for my needs. The predictive text thing works quickly and efficiently (and the default dictionary isn't filled with txt-spk crap), and it's generally cheap and cheerful.
No, it doesn't have a camera (I've got an EOS 350D with chunky lenses for that
I really like the user interface on it, and it's probably the best phone I've had so far. Despite being given heaps of apparently vastly superior hand-me-downs by family members. It seems to be working on outliving their new phones, too...
XHTML is VERY strict. That makes it very easy to parse. But that same facet makes it very tough to write by hand.
;-)
I've found that writing valid XHTML is pretty similar to writing valid HTML 4.
If you're more used to writing something which resembles HTML 4, but is completely invalid - then you'll have problems.
To laymen like me, this sounds rather cryptic. Could any of you web gurus please elaborate, and/or list other advantages of XHTML?
With it being XML, it's easier to read with other tools - using an XML library makes it trivially easy to write code to turn an XHTML web-page into a highly structured, tree-like associative array which contains everything the original page contains.
In layman-speak - instead of mashing through the 'view source' equivalent (one big string), it becomes a mightily detailed tree, with every section of the page as another branch, twig or leaf. And to keep with the arboreal metaphor - when one has finished with one's web-page topiary, pruning or grafting, it's really easy to convert it back into XHTML - without losing anything in the process.