I think it's utterly disgraceful to suggest that a seasoned development team like Bungie would skimp on plot advancement and wrap up a long-awaited sequel with a shoddy, half-heated cliffhanger in order to meet deadlines - of course Halo 3 will have a re
I can't tell the difference between a machine running with this XMS memory and one with normal DDR SDRAM.
And there was me still having difficulty telling the difference between EMS and XMS memory - does anyone else feel that computer technology is leaving them behind?
I built myself a new PC earlier this year. Half the acronyms had changed since I'd built my previous one...;-)
Everyone* knows that the naming rules for Darths are to take an English word beginning with 'in', remove the 'in' and replace it with 'Darth'. 'In-Vader', 'In-Sidious', and all that.
So, for your Great Leader Bush, I suggest Darth Coherent. Or maybe Darth Continent.
Darth Credulous?
(Spider Blog: No sign of the spider since last update - I think it's gone... sniff!)
However, with Gentoo, the keys move around. So, for example, in OpenOffice.org, because I have to type "O" a lot, the "O" is right there where the "D" is in a QWERTY keyboard. The "Q", on the other hand, is assigned to F2, because I rarely need it.
It sounds a bit similar to that new Microsoft keyboard, you know the one where it moves the keys round depending on which are most frequently used, and begins to hide those that haven't been used for a while.
Although it's probably a bit too revealing of (personal, as opposed to Unicode) character for some - a colleague's keyboard consists solely of the keys 'O', 'M', 'G', 'W', 'T' and 'F'.
I suppose it could be worse - the manager's keyboard is now a completely blank piece of plastic.
(Spider Blog: The spider has gone! It had made itself at home on a bank statement for several hours, but after I came back from lunch it was no longer there. More updates as things happen!)
Not to be anal, but isn't it cyan, magenta, yello (CMY)? Blue is part of RGB. There is a difference IIRC.
Even if it is a three-colour CMY ink cartridge, that's not particularly advanced - my fairly basic Epson Stylus Photo 1290 uses five-colour CcMmY cartridges along with the separate black one, the lower-case initials being lighter versions of the 'pure' colours.
From my own experience with cheap photo paper and cheap, non Epson ink in off-the-shelf cartridges - the colours are awful, the printing can be fuzzy, and I've no idea how long the printouts will last. So I just stick with the Epson stuff...
(Oh, and Spider Blog: when I started work this morning, the spider was waiting on my mouse-mat (actually a coffee-stained iBook manual). I moved my friendly arachnid out the way, and it's currently trundling around some paperwork on my desk. Wahey!)
There's always the possibility of closing that lid...
The aforementioned spider has since moved away from my iBook, and is currently sat on a wound-up ethernet patch cable that's also on my desk. It's been there for the last hour or so.
Ooh! It just wiggled its pedipalps around, and it's on the move again!
(I can't believe I'm writing a spider-blog, but it's already got more factual content than The Fabled Article...;-) )
And that's old news, look at the post date: Monday, February 28 2005 @ 10:27 AM EST.
Old, fake news too, from the same Dana as has done various Visual Hacks on assorted Macintoshes.
The site's somewhat dead at the moment, but it's a great read when it's up and running - so long as one's tongue is kept firmly in cheek...;-)
(Off-topic: there's a spider currently walking across my iBook's screen. It started near the bottom and now it's sat at the top, just under the 'Window' menu. Oooer!)
ALWAYS, always, always, check your hardware for linux compatibility, even if you are running windows (just so you have the option to swap in the future). This means sometimes you have to avoid the very bleeding edge, but it's more about investing a few google searches into hardware before you buy.
Actually, this sort of thinking applies to whatever operating system you're using.
Plenty of hardware has absolutely dire and/or semi-functioning drivers for Windows too - it's a good idea to be very careful in your purchases so you can be sure you don't end up with hardware that looks good on paper, but in reality isn't...
I note that the latest Nvidia drivers for Linux have added 'initial support for Xinerama + OpenGL' - in other words, I gather you can have a single OpenGL context spanned over multiple graphics cards.
See Appendix V in the drivers README - I haven't tried it, but it sounds like you'll be able to expand to three or more heads, so long as the resulting window is less than 4096 pixels across.
Any use? I've only got experience with OpenGL on a single, dual-head graphics card thanks to Twinview, but I have to admit that works brilliantly for me. Who knows what this new thing is like.:-)
This gets them around the console tax in Europe(like they tried and failed to do with YaBasic on the PS2)
I think this should be in Big and Bold lettering - I really wouldn't be surprised if it's all an attempt to get it classified as a computer rather than an entertainment system.
Still, it's a rather nifty thing to do, and I hope it's a decent, properly supported system that people will end up with...
Actually, they decided the creme brulee hypothesis was wrong - the first thing the lander hit was a rock, which it then slid off, which gave a similar reading to the impactometer as creme brulee.
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
I realize that PHP can be cool at times, but one has to use the right tool for the job at hand.:-)
That was precisely the reason I chose PHP - because it was absolutely the wrong tool for the job.
Well, maybe not quite as bad as some. Anyone want a port to Javascript? BBC Basic? Befunge?;-)
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 2, Funny
On a slightly different topic, one wishlist item that I would like to see in PHP is Abstract Database Access.
Actually, what I'd like to see is bitwise-operations on strings - my Ogg Vorbis decoder written in PHP is currently languishing at just a bare-bones Ogg demuxer 'cos unpacking all the Vorbis packets proved just too fiddly...
It is interesting that they are now trying to implement a command line competitive with BASH....what year is this again?
The year is 1973. Apple Computations Inc. have just announced that they are switching to the cutting-edge Zilog Z80 architecture for their range of low-cost pocket calculators; Sony Industrial Consumer Electronics are making use of an innovative new Integrated Circuit for their Alpha-Max-3 video system which contains at least five separate transistors; the Duke Nukem Forever board-game has been given a favourable reception at the Entertaining Entertainment Exposition at the Crystal Palace, London, and now Micro-Soft-Ware are designing their new, BASIC-derived timesharing shell for competing against the burgeoning MULTICS.
Yet Mac OS X has none of these problems thanks to its amazing.APP application scheme, and IOKit interface which tracks files by INode instead of path.
I do like the.app application bundles (reminiscent of applications on Acorn's RISC OS!) but I wouldn't say everything was lovely - such drag-and-drop bundles don't work so well when something needs to install frameworks, drivers or whatever.
For instance, I've yet to find out the proper way of removing something that's been installed by an installer package. Is there one? It doesn't seem to be like, say, RPM where I can easily remove a package (or get a list of packages which depend on it) - it all seems to go a bit... manual...
It's not as if applications don't use that system for installation, either - I recently installed iLife '05 (yeah, I'm slow) and it appears to have spread files out all over the place. Not as bad as your average Linux application admittedly, but I'm not sure how one would go about tracking them all down. (Okay, so I'm not likely to remove it, but I'm using it as an example, okay?)
But surely I'm just missing some terribly obvious utility?
Man that looks like an awesome game. Where can I download it?
I think the text-adventure port of Doom 3 is still languishing in development hell, but there's always Interactive Fiction Quake, although the graphics admittedly aren't quite the same...
I wonder if the experiments in simulating the human brain will come in handy with making an AI.
AI for a computer game? Hardly.
One of the most effective, fun game AIs I've played against recently is that in Halo - it's probably no more advanced than that in some other games, but it has some great application of smoke-and-mirrors and does a good job of presenting obvious cause-and-effect behaviours to the player.
Kill a Covenant Elite, and all the lowly grunts nearby will panic and try to run and hide. But to actually shoot that Elite, it's probably taking cover behind a rock, waiting for you to attack - it doesn't just meander into combat, shooting blindly.
All sorts of things like this - simple 'IF foo THEN bar' behaviours which the player can learn, understand and anticipate can be great, so long as they're fun to play against. Some hyper-intelligent enemy that can figure out precisely where the player is and attack unseen might be programmatically more advanced, but isn't necessarily more fun to play against.
In-the-field tactics are probably best left to the game AI, but higher-level, map-specific scripted strategies can give the illusion of some overall plan behind the enemies' actions (plus they can be designed to be fun to fight against, rather than being whatever the AI might extrude - fun, crap or otherwise).
Neural networks or whatever might be more 'realistic', but they won't necessarily be better to play against...
I think you insulted a capitalist there, comrade Thud457!
All together now,
The people's flag is deepest red, It shrouded oft our martyred dead, And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold, Their hearts blood dyed its every fold. Then raise the scarlet standard high.
Within its shade we'll live and die, Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We'll keep the red flag flying here!
Ahem. Bring it on, bourgeois capitalist moderator scum!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Will it have a real ending?
I think it's utterly disgraceful to suggest that a seasoned development team like Bungie would skimp on plot advancement and wrap up a long-awaited sequel with a shoddy, half-heated cliffhanger in order to meet deadlines - of course Halo 3 will have a re
I can't tell the difference between a machine running with this XMS memory and one with normal DDR SDRAM.
;-)
And there was me still having difficulty telling the difference between EMS and XMS memory - does anyone else feel that computer technology is leaving them behind?
I built myself a new PC earlier this year. Half the acronyms had changed since I'd built my previous one...
Vader is Dutch for "father."
;-)
I saw a bit of a Star Wars film with Flemish subtitles a few years ago - talk about giving the ending away...
Darth Stupideous sounds better
No, no, no!
Everyone* knows that the naming rules for Darths are to take an English word beginning with 'in', remove the 'in' and replace it with 'Darth'. 'In-Vader', 'In-Sidious', and all that.
So, for your Great Leader Bush, I suggest Darth Coherent. Or maybe Darth Continent.
Darth Credulous?
(Spider Blog: No sign of the spider since last update - I think it's gone... sniff!)
However, with Gentoo, the keys move around. So, for example, in OpenOffice.org, because I have to type "O" a lot, the "O" is right there where the "D" is in a QWERTY keyboard. The "Q", on the other hand, is assigned to F2, because I rarely need it.
It sounds a bit similar to that new Microsoft keyboard, you know the one where it moves the keys round depending on which are most frequently used, and begins to hide those that haven't been used for a while.
Although it's probably a bit too revealing of (personal, as opposed to Unicode) character for some - a colleague's keyboard consists solely of the keys 'O', 'M', 'G', 'W', 'T' and 'F'.
I suppose it could be worse - the manager's keyboard is now a completely blank piece of plastic.
(Spider Blog: The spider has gone! It had made itself at home on a bank statement for several hours, but after I came back from lunch it was no longer there. More updates as things happen!)
Not to be anal, but isn't it cyan, magenta, yello (CMY)? Blue is part of RGB. There is a difference IIRC.
Even if it is a three-colour CMY ink cartridge, that's not particularly advanced - my fairly basic Epson Stylus Photo 1290 uses five-colour CcMmY cartridges along with the separate black one, the lower-case initials being lighter versions of the 'pure' colours.
If I printed a bit more, I'd buy one of those continuous ink flow systems as mentioned earlier - but they're terribly expensive!
From my own experience with cheap photo paper and cheap, non Epson ink in off-the-shelf cartridges - the colours are awful, the printing can be fuzzy, and I've no idea how long the printouts will last. So I just stick with the Epson stuff...
(Oh, and Spider Blog: when I started work this morning, the spider was waiting on my mouse-mat (actually a coffee-stained iBook manual). I moved my friendly arachnid out the way, and it's currently trundling around some paperwork on my desk. Wahey!)
There's always the possibility of closing that lid...
;-) )
The aforementioned spider has since moved away from my iBook, and is currently sat on a wound-up ethernet patch cable that's also on my desk. It's been there for the last hour or so.
Ooh! It just wiggled its pedipalps around, and it's on the move again!
(I can't believe I'm writing a spider-blog, but it's already got more factual content than The Fabled Article...
To discourage spiders, make sure you have a proper robots.txt file.
I've put a robots.txt in Apache's root directory, but I think that only works against actively crawling spiders.
This one appears to have got stuck, and yes, it's still there...
And that's old news, look at the post date: Monday, February 28 2005 @ 10:27 AM EST.
;-)
Old, fake news too, from the same Dana as has done various Visual Hacks on assorted Macintoshes.
The site's somewhat dead at the moment, but it's a great read when it's up and running - so long as one's tongue is kept firmly in cheek...
(Off-topic: there's a spider currently walking across my iBook's screen. It started near the bottom and now it's sat at the top, just under the 'Window' menu. Oooer!)
ALWAYS, always, always, check your hardware for linux compatibility, even if you are running windows (just so you have the option to swap in the future). This means sometimes you have to avoid the very bleeding edge, but it's more about investing a few google searches into hardware before you buy.
Actually, this sort of thinking applies to whatever operating system you're using.
Plenty of hardware has absolutely dire and/or semi-functioning drivers for Windows too - it's a good idea to be very careful in your purchases so you can be sure you don't end up with hardware that looks good on paper, but in reality isn't...
Of course, esp. with NVidia, Linux drivers to support such a quad-headed setup with full 3D acceleration on all heads might be nonexistant.
Ahem!
Very much existent, with Nvidia, on Linux!
I note that the latest Nvidia drivers for Linux have added 'initial support for Xinerama + OpenGL' - in other words, I gather you can have a single OpenGL context spanned over multiple graphics cards.
:-)
See Appendix V in the drivers README - I haven't tried it, but it sounds like you'll be able to expand to three or more heads, so long as the resulting window is less than 4096 pixels across.
Any use? I've only got experience with OpenGL on a single, dual-head graphics card thanks to Twinview, but I have to admit that works brilliantly for me. Who knows what this new thing is like.
This gets them around the console tax in Europe(like they tried and failed to do with YaBasic on the PS2)
I think this should be in Big and Bold lettering - I really wouldn't be surprised if it's all an attempt to get it classified as a computer rather than an entertainment system.
Still, it's a rather nifty thing to do, and I hope it's a decent, properly supported system that people will end up with...
It's "crême brulée," jackass.
;-)
Actually, it's 'crème brûlée', ass-jack.
Actually, they decided the creme brulee hypothesis was wrong - the first thing the lander hit was a rock, which it then slid off, which gave a similar reading to the impactometer as creme brulee.
... And before anyone asks, yes, they did indeed test the sensor against real crème brûlée!
I realize that PHP can be cool at times, but one has to use the right tool for the job at hand. :-)
;-)
That was precisely the reason I chose PHP - because it was absolutely the wrong tool for the job.
Well, maybe not quite as bad as some. Anyone want a port to Javascript? BBC Basic? Befunge?
On a slightly different topic, one wishlist item that I would like to see in PHP is Abstract Database Access.
Actually, what I'd like to see is bitwise-operations on strings - my Ogg Vorbis decoder written in PHP is currently languishing at just a bare-bones Ogg demuxer 'cos unpacking all the Vorbis packets proved just too fiddly...
It is interesting that they are now trying to implement a command line competitive with BASH....what year is this again?
The year is 1973. Apple Computations Inc. have just announced that they are switching to the cutting-edge Zilog Z80 architecture for their range of low-cost pocket calculators; Sony Industrial Consumer Electronics are making use of an innovative new Integrated Circuit for their Alpha-Max-3 video system which contains at least five separate transistors; the Duke Nukem Forever board-game has been given a favourable reception at the Entertaining Entertainment Exposition at the Crystal Palace, London, and now Micro-Soft-Ware are designing their new, BASIC-derived timesharing shell for competing against the burgeoning MULTICS.
Well, you did ask...
Yet Mac OS X has none of these problems thanks to its amazing .APP application scheme, and IOKit interface which tracks files by INode instead of path.
.app application bundles (reminiscent of applications on Acorn's RISC OS!) but I wouldn't say everything was lovely - such drag-and-drop bundles don't work so well when something needs to install frameworks, drivers or whatever.
... manual...
I do like the
For instance, I've yet to find out the proper way of removing something that's been installed by an installer package. Is there one? It doesn't seem to be like, say, RPM where I can easily remove a package (or get a list of packages which depend on it) - it all seems to go a bit
It's not as if applications don't use that system for installation, either - I recently installed iLife '05 (yeah, I'm slow) and it appears to have spread files out all over the place. Not as bad as your average Linux application admittedly, but I'm not sure how one would go about tracking them all down. (Okay, so I'm not likely to remove it, but I'm using it as an example, okay?)
But surely I'm just missing some terribly obvious utility?
I seem to remember it being titled "Ringworld"
;-)
Funny. I thought it was titled Consider Phlebas.
I bet it will be a text adventure.
This is Halo, remember?
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
>n
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
>e
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
>s
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. You are likely to get eaten by the Flood.
Etc. Etc. Ad nauseam...
Man that looks like an awesome game. Where can I download it?
I think the text-adventure port of Doom 3 is still languishing in development hell, but there's always Interactive Fiction Quake, although the graphics admittedly aren't quite the same...
I wonder if the experiments in simulating the human brain will come in handy with making an AI.
AI for a computer game? Hardly.
One of the most effective, fun game AIs I've played against recently is that in Halo - it's probably no more advanced than that in some other games, but it has some great application of smoke-and-mirrors and does a good job of presenting obvious cause-and-effect behaviours to the player.
Kill a Covenant Elite, and all the lowly grunts nearby will panic and try to run and hide. But to actually shoot that Elite, it's probably taking cover behind a rock, waiting for you to attack - it doesn't just meander into combat, shooting blindly.
All sorts of things like this - simple 'IF foo THEN bar' behaviours which the player can learn, understand and anticipate can be great, so long as they're fun to play against. Some hyper-intelligent enemy that can figure out precisely where the player is and attack unseen might be programmatically more advanced, but isn't necessarily more fun to play against.
In-the-field tactics are probably best left to the game AI, but higher-level, map-specific scripted strategies can give the illusion of some overall plan behind the enemies' actions (plus they can be designed to be fun to fight against, rather than being whatever the AI might extrude - fun, crap or otherwise).
Neural networks or whatever might be more 'realistic', but they won't necessarily be better to play against...
NetBSD's motto is "Of Course it Runs NetBSD!!" Back before I had a computer that could run Linux, I had NetBSD on an old mac.
:-)
Ooh, aren't we the pretentious one!
Back before I had a computer, I had NetBSD running on an old sofa. Beat that!
I think you insulted a capitalist there, comrade Thud457!
All together now,
Ahem. Bring it on, bourgeois capitalist moderator scum!