I'll hand in my nerd ID card if you so deem it necessary, but I for one amd damn tired of anything related to HHGTTG.
As the article submitter, please accept my sincerest apologies. If there are any other topic that you, or anyone else, would not like aired, please let me know and I will not post articles relating to them in the future.
If they're really going to redo the game, I hope they rework some of the more obtuse puzzles to make them a little less frustrating to the general populace.
They could easily have destroyed the game, but somehow it didn't. When the babel-fish twanged off into the wrong place for the umpteen billionth time, or you didn't know how to get the Vogon captain to recite the second verse of his magnum opus, it was your fault. It truly showed what it was like to be Arthur Dent, with what appeared to be the entire universe ganging up against him for some utterly arbitrary reason...
I originally discovered an illicit copy of the game many years ago on a bunch of old floppy disks being thrown out of a cupboard at my father's workplace. I never knew of its official Douglas Adams roots until years later, but from playing it I knew it was something special. I managed to get a lot of the way through - the version I had found didn't have any hints, which I suppose was quite impressive. More recently, a friend lent me another, um, copy which did have hints, and I finally got round to finishing it.
Annoying ending, but an excellent, if mind-breakingly difficult, game.:-)
Another lean, but surprisingly modern, full-featured document processor is Papyrus. It's commercial, but available as a (paid-for) 5MB download - for Windows, OS/2, Mac OS X and (still, amazingly) Atari TOS.
I grew up on Papyrus 3 on my old Atari ST, and it's a beautiful program - sadly, there's one major problem, in that it's currently only available in German. An English translation of the latest version is apparently being worked on, but it's been at 'very soon' for months...
I just noticed on that picture that the electric cord goes into the back of the screen through a hole in the stand. This is guaranteed by Murphy to be eventually pulled out when you tilt the screen backwards.
If the Quicktime VR is anything to go by, it doesn't need that power cord anyway!:-)
256MB is very stingy - I recently upgraded my iBook G4 from 256MB to 640MB, and it's like a whole new machine. It makes a huge difference everywhere, and Firefox takes a few seconds instead of twenty-plus to start, iPhoto is actually usable, and the Finder isn't swapped to disk whenever I even think of clicking on something else.
Even just 512MB would make a huge difference in a machine like the new iMac, and from looking at the back-off view, it's just some sort of DIMMs in there, not the more expensive laptop SODIMMs...
Looking at it, the new iMac does look somewhat influenced by the iBook. Definitely not a bad thing, and it makes a change from the giant PC-style cases of everyone else!
Calendar, eh? Let's have a look at what I've written in PHP. It's got that modulus operator, it's got logic, it's got variable names longer than a single character...
But these few lines in particular show its true nature:
Still, Mr. Linford added that spam activity had been increasing overseas and that spammers in other countries, especially Russia, were expected to move quickly to fill any gaps left if spammers in the United States are shut down or scared off.
Presumably these overseas spammers will often be acting on behalf of, um, 'legitimate business ventures' in the US - I can't really see, for example, the volume of Russian-language-specific spam increasing too much, as they must be running out of Russian speakers to spam, and I seriously doubt those Americans peddling h3rba1 v1@gra are going to shut up shop because they can't advertise in their traditional manner.
Is there any US legislation which can work back to get any Americans using foreign organisations to send their junk email for them? Or will this be the next step in the never-ending battle against our favourite pink pig-derived luncheon meat?
This is a potentially interesting line of study in psychology but it's handled by people with such outrageous bias (and worse, complete obliviousness to their biases) that almost everything they generate is garbage.
For some reason, I'm reminded of the Slashdot moderation system.;-)
There are 'night maps' based on the Earthlights image - they're probably a bit bright when seen in Celestia, especially when compared with the day side of the Earth, but they look utterly lovely.:-)
Once you've built your perfect Earth, you can work on kitting out the rest of your ideal Solar System with the other stuff people have posted on the Celestia Motherlode...
The funny part was, though, he'd used correction fluid to blank out our names (I did it as a joint project) and every occurence of 'us,' 'we,' and so on throughout the piece and replaced it with his handwritten name and appropriate pronouns. He popped it into a photocopier, and his essay was done.
At least he had some sense.
Many years ago, in some written test at primary school, one particularly enterprising person decided to copy my answers as I wrote them, peering over my shoulder. Unfortunately, he was a bit over-enthusiastic in what he copied, and put my name at the top of his paper as well.
I think the teacher must have peed herself laughing when it came to marking said tests...
Sadly, durable stuff is likely to outlive its usefulness.
I've got an old Toshiba laptop somewhere - powered by a 7.14MHz 8086. The machine is heavily built and works fine, has decent battery life and, apart from being a bit grubby and yellowed, works just the same as it did when new.
Except it's almost entirely useless when it comes to working alongside modern computers. It and my modern iBook have no ports, disks or anything in common. I'd need a third computer to get data between the two.
Then there's digital cameras. I've got a Fuji FinePix 6900 Zoom, which I've had for a bit over two years now. It still takes really good photos, and continues to work extremely well, but I have a feeling I'll be replacing it because of obsolescence rather than it breaking.
I'm eyeing up Canon DSLRs, looking at new things they can do which my camera can't - new advances that simply hadn't been (affordably) available when my camera was designed. Long, low-noise exposures, high-capacity rechargeable AA batteries, higher resolution, and so on...
Technology advances ridiculously quickly. Yes, you can stick around with something prehistoric, but unless you have very limited needs you're likely to constantly lust after what's you're missing on a newer device. I'm not advocating disposable hardware, but at times I understand why things now are rarely (over-) engineered to last. By the time they break, they'll be dinosaurs surrounded by smaller, faster, cheaper descendants...
I'm terribly sorry, front-page typos always annoy me*. Please, please, please can people use web browsers with spell-checkers, like Konqueror, Safari et al?:-)
(* Yes, for the sake of my sanity and/or blood pressure, I should probably stop visiting Slashdot!)
I think iTunes on MacOS X is a Carbon application, ie based on an updated version of the old Macintosh APIs. If it's anything like Quicktime for Windows, the Windows version of iTunes probably makes use of what's effectively a Carbon layer for Windows.
Just because there might be BSD stuff underneath everything on MacOS X doesn't mean everything directly uses the BSD APIs...
Halo? What's your opinion of it? I downloaded a cracked pre-release copy of it from suprnova and it didn't seem very good so I reasonably concluded that the official release would also be bad.
Pretty decent. Runs fine on my prehistoric PC, and is good fun - except the map design can get very, very monotonous in places. The good bits are brilliant, the bad bits are plain bad. The Covenant AI's excellent to play against, however. The, um, other AI, less so.
Similarly, I won't be buying Doom 3 because the demo version they released a couple of years ago was very poor IMO.
Hardly a demo version - it was a leaked alpha which ATI had for testing purposes. Not for the general public at all.
I'm waiting for a real demo to be released before deciding if I should buy Doom 3 or not - I keep clear of leaked stuff as if it was the plague...
Slashdot Mirror
It's not to hard to imagine a container that could be impervious to such an explosion and would land in the ocean harmlessly.
They had enough problem launching Cassini with similarly encapsulated plutonium - I seriously doubt they'll be able to launch worthwhile amounts of nuclear waste without some kind of protests...
Earth rotates in just under 24 hours. Forty times that is 36 minutes. That's something in low orbit.
:-)
Except a low orbit for an Earth mass, Earth radius is about 90 minutes.
Someone want to figure out the required planet radius for a 36 minute orbit, assuming a similar density to Earth? I can't find my calculator...
Later, he admitted that he could also have put a text label on both buttons, but back then he thought that were ugly.
;-)
'LEFT' and 'RIGHT'?
I can imagine the jokes about Mac users that would have ensued...
I'll hand in my nerd ID card if you so deem it necessary, but I for one amd damn tired of anything related to HHGTTG.
;-)
As the article submitter, please accept my sincerest apologies. If there are any other topic that you, or anyone else, would not like aired, please let me know and I will not post articles relating to them in the future.
Best regards,
Ford Prefect
(NB: Yes, I'm the article submitter. Go me!)
:-)
If they're really going to redo the game, I hope they rework some of the more obtuse puzzles to make them a little less frustrating to the general populace.
They could easily have destroyed the game, but somehow it didn't. When the babel-fish twanged off into the wrong place for the umpteen billionth time, or you didn't know how to get the Vogon captain to recite the second verse of his magnum opus, it was your fault. It truly showed what it was like to be Arthur Dent, with what appeared to be the entire universe ganging up against him for some utterly arbitrary reason...
I originally discovered an illicit copy of the game many years ago on a bunch of old floppy disks being thrown out of a cupboard at my father's workplace. I never knew of its official Douglas Adams roots until years later, but from playing it I knew it was something special. I managed to get a lot of the way through - the version I had found didn't have any hints, which I suppose was quite impressive. More recently, a friend lent me another, um, copy which did have hints, and I finally got round to finishing it.
Annoying ending, but an excellent, if mind-breakingly difficult, game.
Another lean, but surprisingly modern, full-featured document processor is Papyrus. It's commercial, but available as a (paid-for) 5MB download - for Windows, OS/2, Mac OS X and (still, amazingly) Atari TOS.
I grew up on Papyrus 3 on my old Atari ST, and it's a beautiful program - sadly, there's one major problem, in that it's currently only available in German. An English translation of the latest version is apparently being worked on, but it's been at 'very soon' for months...
I just noticed on that picture that the electric cord goes into the back of the screen through a hole in the stand. This is guaranteed by Murphy to be eventually pulled out when you tilt the screen backwards.
:-)
If the Quicktime VR is anything to go by, it doesn't need that power cord anyway!
256MB is very stingy - I recently upgraded my iBook G4 from 256MB to 640MB, and it's like a whole new machine. It makes a huge difference everywhere, and Firefox takes a few seconds instead of twenty-plus to start, iPhoto is actually usable, and the Finder isn't swapped to disk whenever I even think of clicking on something else.
Even just 512MB would make a huge difference in a machine like the new iMac, and from looking at the back-off view, it's just some sort of DIMMs in there, not the more expensive laptop SODIMMs...
Looking at it, the new iMac does look somewhat influenced by the iBook. Definitely not a bad thing, and it makes a change from the giant PC-style cases of everyone else!
But these few lines in particular show its true nature:It's still completely unreadable. Argh!
How to write obfuscated code in Perl...
- Web browser - Chimera. Has an Athena-based X11 user interface, supports modern GIF images, and can retrieve data from HTTP, FTP and Gopher servers.
- C compiler - various exist, including the Tiny C Compiler. Other possibilities for porting include Sozobon C Compiler and Open Watcom.
Hope that helps!The US is still the biggest source of spam [theregister.co.uk] on the net, pumping out nearly 3 times as much as its closest competitor.
;-)
They're number one! They're number one! Woo-yay!
Ahem.
From the article:
Still, Mr. Linford added that spam activity had been increasing overseas and that spammers in other countries, especially Russia, were expected to move quickly to fill any gaps left if spammers in the United States are shut down or scared off.
Presumably these overseas spammers will often be acting on behalf of, um, 'legitimate business ventures' in the US - I can't really see, for example, the volume of Russian-language-specific spam increasing too much, as they must be running out of Russian speakers to spam, and I seriously doubt those Americans peddling h3rba1 v1@gra are going to shut up shop because they can't advertise in their traditional manner.
Is there any US legislation which can work back to get any Americans using foreign organisations to send their junk email for them? Or will this be the next step in the never-ending battle against our favourite pink pig-derived luncheon meat?
This is a potentially interesting line of study in psychology but it's handled by people with such outrageous bias (and worse, complete obliviousness to their biases) that almost everything they generate is garbage.
;-)
For some reason, I'm reminded of the Slashdot moderation system.
(Ooops - down I go, again!)
What? Does this mean voting Republican could be classified as a mental illness?
;-)
Perhaps some kind of medication could get that recalcitrant amygdala up and running again.
Probably suggested already, but Celestia will provide glorious renderings of the Earth, complete with some ridiculously high-resolution texture maps.
:-)
There are 'night maps' based on the Earthlights image - they're probably a bit bright when seen in Celestia, especially when compared with the day side of the Earth, but they look utterly lovely.
Once you've built your perfect Earth, you can work on kitting out the rest of your ideal Solar System with the other stuff people have posted on the Celestia Motherlode...
The funny part was, though, he'd used correction fluid to blank out our names (I did it as a joint project) and every occurence of 'us,' 'we,' and so on throughout the piece and replaced it with his handwritten name and appropriate pronouns. He popped it into a photocopier, and his essay was done.
At least he had some sense.
Many years ago, in some written test at primary school, one particularly enterprising person decided to copy my answers as I wrote them, peering over my shoulder. Unfortunately, he was a bit over-enthusiastic in what he copied, and put my name at the top of his paper as well.
I think the teacher must have peed herself laughing when it came to marking said tests...
Sadly, durable stuff is likely to outlive its usefulness.
I've got an old Toshiba laptop somewhere - powered by a 7.14MHz 8086. The machine is heavily built and works fine, has decent battery life and, apart from being a bit grubby and yellowed, works just the same as it did when new.
Except it's almost entirely useless when it comes to working alongside modern computers. It and my modern iBook have no ports, disks or anything in common. I'd need a third computer to get data between the two.
Then there's digital cameras. I've got a Fuji FinePix 6900 Zoom, which I've had for a bit over two years now. It still takes really good photos, and continues to work extremely well, but I have a feeling I'll be replacing it because of obsolescence rather than it breaking.
I'm eyeing up Canon DSLRs, looking at new things they can do which my camera can't - new advances that simply hadn't been (affordably) available when my camera was designed. Long, low-noise exposures, high-capacity rechargeable AA batteries, higher resolution, and so on...
Technology advances ridiculously quickly. Yes, you can stick around with something prehistoric, but unless you have very limited needs you're likely to constantly lust after what's you're missing on a newer device. I'm not advocating disposable hardware, but at times I understand why things now are rarely (over-) engineered to last. By the time they break, they'll be dinosaurs surrounded by smaller, faster, cheaper descendants...
Note the 'UK'. :-)
It's 'nonexistent', dagnabbit!
:-)
I'm terribly sorry, front-page typos always annoy me*. Please, please, please can people use web browsers with spell-checkers, like Konqueror, Safari et al?
(* Yes, for the sake of my sanity and/or blood pressure, I should probably stop visiting Slashdot!)
SIGGRAPH booth babes?
I think iTunes on MacOS X is a Carbon application, ie based on an updated version of the old Macintosh APIs. If it's anything like Quicktime for Windows, the Windows version of iTunes probably makes use of what's effectively a Carbon layer for Windows.
Just because there might be BSD stuff underneath everything on MacOS X doesn't mean everything directly uses the BSD APIs...
Don't forget the tractors!
Halo? What's your opinion of it? I downloaded a cracked pre-release copy of it from suprnova and it didn't seem very good so I reasonably concluded that the official release would also be bad.
Pretty decent. Runs fine on my prehistoric PC, and is good fun - except the map design can get very, very monotonous in places. The good bits are brilliant, the bad bits are plain bad. The Covenant AI's excellent to play against, however. The, um, other AI, less so.
Similarly, I won't be buying Doom 3 because the demo version they released a couple of years ago was very poor IMO.
Hardly a demo version - it was a leaked alpha which ATI had for testing purposes. Not for the general public at all.
I'm waiting for a real demo to be released before deciding if I should buy Doom 3 or not - I keep clear of leaked stuff as if it was the plague...
Isn't that a sign that it might be time to move away from '98 then?
:-)
Quite probably. I'll be building a new PC pretty soon, and it'll probably have something 'hip' and 'modern' like Windows 2000 for games...
Stuff like the Halo Editing Kit and the version of Softimage XSI for Half-Life 2 needs an NT-based operating system anyway, so I really should upgrade.
Anyone know where I can get Win2000 cheaply in the UK? Suprnova need not apply...