Anybody out there stick with the Netscape product?
I've fairly regularly seen little Netscape 'N' logos as the favourites icon in Safari. I can't imagine anyone intentionally setting it to such a thing, so are they from Netscape servers where the icon is still set to the default?
but Halo for the X-Box did, and the game was only beatable at it's highest difficulty on Co-Op anyway.
What? Legendary 'impossible'?
I've completed most of Halo PC in Legendary (excluding the Library, of course) and while it's horribly difficult, it's actually a brilliant challenge, and great fun. And I'm a pretty terrible player, too.:-)
A lot of people whinge about single-player games, but I usually prefer them - I'm pretty crap at multiplayer stuff, as there's always that perfect-shot teenager with nanosecond reflexes waiting to kill me time after time.
With decent AI in a single-player game, I find it much fairer to play against as the monsters tend not to leap around in some highly unrealistic manner, spouting off obscenities, and I usually have a moment to think tactically...
Thus, I'm really looking forwards to Half-Life 2 - it looks like it has way better AI than a lot of other recent releases. Yes, the game's development has had some almost farcical problems, but it looks like it's all coming together. I don't mind about the delays, as long as it's worth playing in the end.
1512 GMT (11:12 a.m. EDT) Altitude is 250,000 feet. Craft appears to be in a tumble from the tracking cameras.
1512.01 GMT (11:12.01 a.m. EDT) I soiled my underpants!
I really thought it was all going horribly wrong, but it was a huge relief when the wings went into that feathered mode - an indication that the pilot was alive, well, and fully in control...
One thing they're going to need if/when they start commercial flights is sickbags. Plenty of sickbags.
That was an interesting read.... it's just a story though, the original seems to be a story written by Thomas Lera
That version has a more complete ending, for anyone disappointed by the rewrite, although I think I much prefer the newer web-journal version.
And I must confess that the normal, caving claustrophobia of the story is what I found most terrifying - I hate to think what it would have been like for the real-life record-breakers mentioned in the hallowed Article.:-)
Anyway, from my experience, there's no metadata available in the documents - it's very difficult to automatically (and accurately) extract data like abstract, author, version, contributors etc. All the kinds of things that are extremely useful in finding the information you need...
If anyone's got some failsafe manner of doing the above, I'd love to know. Otherwise, all those PDFs and Word documents are going to have to be indexed by hand, as (sadly) there are some places Google just isn't allowed.
Counter-Strike only became particularly popular after it went on sale in shops in a similar manner, despite being a free-to-download modification for years...
Steam is an interesting variation, but I still reckon the majority of sales for HL2 will be in boxed form. There's a huge number of people out there without broadband, or who simply don't follow games sites and similar, who will still purchase the game.
There's already work to create a standard for PDF to support very long-lived documents that must be available "forever" to arbitrary platforms.
Actually, normal PDF is already used in the EU for electronic 'archival' of documents, but it does have the problems of it being essentially a read-only, print-destined 'dump' of a document and its formatting.
So, you might be able to open the documents of today in years to come, but it'll be damned difficult to actually find anything, at least not without some advanced Google-style PDF indexing...
And the most likely need is IMHO their own document storage -- there are real advantages to storing your humungous amount of documents in a well-documented standard format.
Speaking as someone who's spent the last few weeks working in Microsoft Office on documentation for an EU project, some standardised, more cross-platform document format would be incredibly useful.
Where I am is about as far as you can get from being inside the big EU monolith, but out here the documents tend to be a bit ad-hoc in their formatting. There are standard templates (which people interpret in different ways, of course) but no real use of metadata to help organise things. It seems that more time is spent in mangling things into looking right ('well, it looks like a contents page') rather than relying on higher-level document structure.
For a document-sharing collaboration site I designed for the project, I have to copy-and-paste the document information and abstract out of NeoOfficeJ when I'm uploading something. Getting my PHP to fish the relevant metadata fields straight out of a Word document would be lovely, but with such a horrible format it's kind of impractical...
As someone who taught himself LaTeX at university, it all seems like a bit of a step backwards.:-)
Will some improved OpenOffice be suitable, in an attempt to get people to concentrate more on document organisation rather than presentation? Who knows - but I'm going to read up on XML and the OpenOffice file format, just in case...
I never understood why someone stealing the source code caused a delay before.
Right. You're working on something, you're falling behind, you're not going to meet the announced release date, when - BLAM - a large proportion of what you were working on, private stuff definitely not for distribution, gets distributed all over the internet.
Your office network turns out to be completely untrustworthy, as are most of the machines on it (who knows what could have been installed without your knowledge) - basically, you don't have a clue what's safe and what's not.
Put simply, all work has to cease. While rabid fanboys, crackers and 'warez dudes' are all busy dissecting your unfinished work.
Must be pretty dispiriting, yes?
Even when things did get back to normal, people at Valve must have reckoned their game just wasn't right for release. After all the complaints recently about other games being released 'unfinished', I'm glad they at Valve had the guts to delay the game, and fix whatever they saw was wrong with it. Maybe they really weren't happy with the gameplay, maybe it needed some dedicated tuning - who knows.
The release candidate is out. Valve may have finished the game. It's already partially distributed over Steam. I wouldn't be surprised if the game is out pretty soon - assuming this latest hassle blows over, which it most likely will...
The above post actually comes just after my post on the subject, not before. 'Stephendl' obviously copied mine, only for it to be swept back through an eddy in the space-time continuum. Please moderate accordingly.
I had a play on it yesterday - I've no idea how they built it, but they seem to have some unholy alliance of Flash, Z-code and XML running it all. It's pretty cool, too - it's the same old game, but with added graphics...
And what happens when you've got multiple tabs open from the same site? When you happen to have similar page names? Duh.
In Safari, if you have two tabs open with similar names, it just shows the different sections.
There's a site I developed which uses some (perhaps excessively) descriptive page titles, and Safari works fine with it. For instance, the following page titles:
'Thingy Workgroup Site - Calendar for Smarch 2004' 'Thingy Workgroup Site - Advanced Search - User Profiles' 'Thingy Workgroup Site - Advanced Search - Database Records'
Are labelled in the tabs as:
'Calendar for Smarch 2004' 'Search - User Profiles' 'Database Records'
It's not perfect, but it's far better than just 'Thingy Workgroup Si...' as the title of each tab.
Whenever my cable net goes out, I feel like I've suddenly just awakened. I go read, I do things around the house, go outside... it's a pretty startling change.
A more interesting variation is when your network connection works fine, but your (only) monitor is very much dead. This has happened to me. However, I still managed to telnet into a BBS and post messages, having inadvertently memorised all the necessary key-presses.
Thinking about it, I should have printed out some man-pages and got Festival up and running...
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody out there stick with the Netscape product?
I've fairly regularly seen little Netscape 'N' logos as the favourites icon in Safari. I can't imagine anyone intentionally setting it to such a thing, so are they from Netscape servers where the icon is still set to the default?
but Halo for the X-Box did, and the game was only beatable at it's highest difficulty on Co-Op anyway.
:-)
What? Legendary 'impossible'?
I've completed most of Halo PC in Legendary (excluding the Library, of course) and while it's horribly difficult, it's actually a brilliant challenge, and great fun. And I'm a pretty terrible player, too.
A lot of people whinge about single-player games, but I usually prefer them - I'm pretty crap at multiplayer stuff, as there's always that perfect-shot teenager with nanosecond reflexes waiting to kill me time after time.
With decent AI in a single-player game, I find it much fairer to play against as the monsters tend not to leap around in some highly unrealistic manner, spouting off obscenities, and I usually have a moment to think tactically...
Thus, I'm really looking forwards to Half-Life 2 - it looks like it has way better AI than a lot of other recent releases. Yes, the game's development has had some almost farcical problems, but it looks like it's all coming together. I don't mind about the delays, as long as it's worth playing in the end.
1512.01 GMT (11:12.01 a.m. EDT)
I soiled my underpants!
I really thought it was all going horribly wrong, but it was a huge relief when the wings went into that feathered mode - an indication that the pilot was alive, well, and fully in control...
One thing they're going to need if/when they start commercial flights is sickbags. Plenty of sickbags.
"The revolution won't be televised, it wi- Buffering..."
Regardless, I've got no work to do this afternoon. How cool is that?
I'm confused; is 'Windows Sans WMP' a font of some sort?
I got Gill Sans free with my iBook. Is Windows Sans similar?
Call that a handheld?
That was an interesting read.... it's just a story though, the original seems to be a story written by Thomas Lera
:-)
That version has a more complete ending, for anyone disappointed by the rewrite, although I think I much prefer the newer web-journal version.
And I must confess that the normal, caving claustrophobia of the story is what I found most terrifying - I hate to think what it would have been like for the real-life record-breakers mentioned in the hallowed Article.
You mean that it's harder to use Google to search for data in PDF's than it is to use Google to search for data in Word files? Or HTML files?
:-)
If you glue my previous comment on the front, it'll probably make more sense...
Anyway, from my experience, there's no metadata available in the documents - it's very difficult to automatically (and accurately) extract data like abstract, author, version, contributors etc. All the kinds of things that are extremely useful in finding the information you need...
If anyone's got some failsafe manner of doing the above, I'd love to know. Otherwise, all those PDFs and Word documents are going to have to be indexed by hand, as (sadly) there are some places Google just isn't allowed.
The program you linked to, only runs on obsolete platforms.
Dang thing won't install on my Sinclar Spectrum - do I need the even older ZX-81 for it to run properly?
At the moment, anyone wanting to do serious photographic processing on linux, has to use something like Cinepaint.
... Which is a fork of the Gimp (albeit v1.x) to work with 16-bit (or greater) colour depth...
Imagemagick?
You could probably do something along those lines with a really simple shell script (heh), which could live on her desktop as a little icon.
Drag the images on, and watch the new files magically appear...
OK, let's think about this. Why would a company with the marketshare of Valve ever make a deal with a publisher?
Because they want to sell some games?
Possibly out of date, but here's an overview of the different Half-Life 2 SKUs. Apparently, they expect a very significant proportion of the sales to be the base, single-player-only version, as this will be distributed in Wal-Mart and similar.
Counter-Strike only became particularly popular after it went on sale in shops in a similar manner, despite being a free-to-download modification for years...
Steam is an interesting variation, but I still reckon the majority of sales for HL2 will be in boxed form. There's a huge number of people out there without broadband, or who simply don't follow games sites and similar, who will still purchase the game.
There's already work to create a standard for PDF to support very long-lived documents that must be available "forever" to arbitrary platforms.
Actually, normal PDF is already used in the EU for electronic 'archival' of documents, but it does have the problems of it being essentially a read-only, print-destined 'dump' of a document and its formatting.
So, you might be able to open the documents of today in years to come, but it'll be damned difficult to actually find anything, at least not without some advanced Google-style PDF indexing...
And the most likely need is IMHO their own document storage -- there are real advantages to storing your humungous amount of documents in a well-documented standard format.
:-)
Speaking as someone who's spent the last few weeks working in Microsoft Office on documentation for an EU project, some standardised, more cross-platform document format would be incredibly useful.
Where I am is about as far as you can get from being inside the big EU monolith, but out here the documents tend to be a bit ad-hoc in their formatting. There are standard templates (which people interpret in different ways, of course) but no real use of metadata to help organise things. It seems that more time is spent in mangling things into looking right ('well, it looks like a contents page') rather than relying on higher-level document structure.
For a document-sharing collaboration site I designed for the project, I have to copy-and-paste the document information and abstract out of NeoOfficeJ when I'm uploading something. Getting my PHP to fish the relevant metadata fields straight out of a Word document would be lovely, but with such a horrible format it's kind of impractical...
As someone who taught himself LaTeX at university, it all seems like a bit of a step backwards.
Will some improved OpenOffice be suitable, in an attempt to get people to concentrate more on document organisation rather than presentation? Who knows - but I'm going to read up on XML and the OpenOffice file format, just in case...
No to mention the fact that they've probably been paying for Valve to finish this, and if they don't see some return on it, then thats bad.
They haven't been paying - Half-Life 2 was apparently completely funded by Valve.
I never understood why someone stealing the source code caused a delay before.
Right. You're working on something, you're falling behind, you're not going to meet the announced release date, when - BLAM - a large proportion of what you were working on, private stuff definitely not for distribution, gets distributed all over the internet.
Your office network turns out to be completely untrustworthy, as are most of the machines on it (who knows what could have been installed without your knowledge) - basically, you don't have a clue what's safe and what's not.
Put simply, all work has to cease. While rabid fanboys, crackers and 'warez dudes' are all busy dissecting your unfinished work.
Must be pretty dispiriting, yes?
Even when things did get back to normal, people at Valve must have reckoned their game just wasn't right for release. After all the complaints recently about other games being released 'unfinished', I'm glad they at Valve had the guts to delay the game, and fix whatever they saw was wrong with it. Maybe they really weren't happy with the gameplay, maybe it needed some dedicated tuning - who knows.
The release candidate is out. Valve may have finished the game. It's already partially distributed over Steam. I wouldn't be surprised if the game is out pretty soon - assuming this latest hassle blows over, which it most likely will...
Is there anyone else (apart from me) who parses 'Atrac' as 'Eight-Track'?
What's a mattress?
Okay then...
BEEPcrkcrkcrk-BEEPcrkcrkcrk-KRCKaKRCK-BORP!
Grr. Pile of rubbish.
Dear moderators,
The above post actually comes just after my post on the subject, not before. 'Stephendl' obviously copied mine, only for it to be swept back through an eddy in the space-time continuum. Please moderate accordingly.
(Apologies!)
As trailed a few weeks ago, there's the updated version of the old Infocom interactive fiction version of the Guide.
I had a play on it yesterday - I've no idea how they built it, but they seem to have some unholy alliance of Flash, Z-code and XML running it all. It's pretty cool, too - it's the same old game, but with added graphics...
And what happens when you've got multiple tabs open from the same site? When you happen to have similar page names? Duh.
In Safari, if you have two tabs open with similar names, it just shows the different sections.
There's a site I developed which uses some (perhaps excessively) descriptive page titles, and Safari works fine with it. For instance, the following page titles:
'Thingy Workgroup Site - Calendar for Smarch 2004'
'Thingy Workgroup Site - Advanced Search - User Profiles'
'Thingy Workgroup Site - Advanced Search - Database Records'
Are labelled in the tabs as:
'Calendar for Smarch 2004'
'Search - User Profiles'
'Database Records'
It's not perfect, but it's far better than just 'Thingy Workgroup Si...' as the title of each tab.
Whenever my cable net goes out, I feel like I've suddenly just awakened. I go read, I do things around the house, go outside... it's a pretty startling change.
A more interesting variation is when your network connection works fine, but your (only) monitor is very much dead. This has happened to me. However, I still managed to telnet into a BBS and post messages, having inadvertently memorised all the necessary key-presses.
Thinking about it, I should have printed out some man-pages and got Festival up and running...
if you have a complaint on sound effects you might try to download the Trent Reznor sound effects.
;-)
I'd seen some link for this file somewhere - and I hadn't realised what it was. It was Reznor who did the (excellent) Quake sound, wasn't it?
Anyway, here's a Bittorrent copy from Filerush - I'll have a go to see if the demo can be 'persuaded' to use them...
Confusingly, Teletext (with a capital 'T') is a commercial teletext service which runs on the non-BBC channels - this is the one with all the adverts.
:-)
Teletext (with the 'T') was only really notable for Digitiser, anyway.