Good grief, can we whore some liberal blogs a little more?
Yes, poor little opressed conservative, you only control the US presdency, the congress, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, the big news channels... And Slashdot has only published news from Free Republic in the science section a couple of times. When will the injustices against you end?
Public radio isn't frothing at the mouth liberal enough for Slashdot now?
I see someone frothing at the mouth, but it isn't public radio.
I urge you all to buy Psychonauts if you liked those, it is chock full of Tim Schafer goodness! When I heard that it was going to released on consoles, I thought "nah, pass", especially since the previews seemed to pitch it like a platformer. Well, after it won numerous end of year awards for plot, artwork, music, best adventure game, "best game no-one played", game of the year etc on several sites I decided to buy it when it finally was launched for the PC in Europe (a couple of weeks ago).
It is brilliant! I'd say it is 50% adventure game, 50% platformer. All that brilliant scenery in Day of the Tentacle or Sam and Max that you longed to explore, but you couldn't, because it was just 2D? Now you can! First game in ages that had me laughing out loud too, several times. ("Aaah! It's Goggalore!" "What a magical lady." "I am a construction worker. These are my tools. Look at that lady - She has rather large breasts.")
There are some fairly complex psychological concepts being dealt with here and there too, once you see past the jokes.
It is not perfect though. I got the "grinding to a halt" bug a few times that some report on AMD64 systems, and the last levels where a bit of a bore when there were long difficult sections you had to get past and no save points. I still think you should buy it though. Best game I played in years.
Something like ruby is what apple needs to compete with.net.
Sorry, I was a bit quick to answer in my previous post, I completely missed you point. Here comes second try:
People who like Apple are hardly going to be swayed to PCs by.Net of all things. There are plenty of programming environments both for desktop apps and enterprise things, such as Objective C, Java and others.
Neither are.Net developers likely to swarm to Macs because of Ruby.
So while Ruby for Mac is a nice thing by all means for Mac developers, this does nothing for overall marketshare, which will depend on completely different things.
Something like ruby is what apple needs to compete with.net.
It is not like there is only room for a single programming language on a platform...
Besides, Apple already uses Java, for instance it built the highly successful WebObjects around it. If, against all odds,.Net would completely wipe out Java there is always Mono.
If that is a summary of the plots of the rest of his books, I'm glad I gave up in disgust after reading Da Vinci Code. He sounds worse than Michael Crichton, if that is even possible.
Most GUI libraries built on top of the winapi at least let you get the window handle from their widget implementations so that you can get straight through to win32 and do your hacking there (possibly fkcuing up the lib, since it doesn't know about your updates, but that's another issue:) ). This is not the case with Java
Perhaps because platform independence is one of the goals of Java, and so they can't assume that everyone is running Windows?
The patent was filed on 9 February 2001, five years after the original Flash application, FutureWave Splash, was introduced in May 1996."
And seven years after the applet of Duke waving in 1995, soon followed by the 3D rotatable molecule applet demod by Gosling, both pretty rich for their time.
What really seems to have been discovered is that there aren't sharks 5,280 feet below sea-level. The original study suspects this is because there's no fish to eat down there, which is a pretty obvious fact considering there's no light down there and very high water pressure.
There ARE fish there, but not in enough numbers to sustain sharks. Check here, or even better, see David Attenburoughs fantastic series The Blue Planet.
This is a bad sign for the sharks, the oceans and of course, journalists during slow news cycles.
Actually, if some shark species are threatened by extinction, that is bad news for all of us.
The savage overexploatation of our oceans is a terrible shame. I get furious when I read about EU subsedies keeping huge Spanish and British fishing fleets running.
2.5 minutes. That's 150 seconds. Try something: Sit there and count off 150 seconds. That's rather a long freakin' time to be waiting for a video to start, no? It takes less time to make a bag of microwave popcorn.
I agree, that is annoying. But I think that sort of validates my point too - these 150 seconds only feel unbearably long if you sit there passively and stare at the screen. If you pop the film in and then play with the kid for little while, that time will fly by.
(What was up with the troll modifyer btw? Really grouchy moderator.)
There was a 2 and a half minute non-skipable copyright notice before the main feature. You try explaining that one to a 2 year old...
Ok, the texts are annoying, and I just whined a bit about that myself further down, but come on. A two year old, just play a bit with him as the texts roll by. Make funny faces, toss a ball, tickle him.
If waiting 2,5 minutes for a film to start seems unbearable to him, should he even be watching TV?
I'm really looking forward to the day when I can get sued for just owning a DVD player that allows me to bypass commercials, inane FBI warnings, and ads for studios and technologies like THX.
We've not been so successful at manipulating nature thus far,
Actually, we have been pretty successful when it comes to screwing it up. That is what we are worried about.
For heavens sake, why is everyone so arrogant to think that our species is capable of uprooting the climate cycle of a [b]planet[/b]?
I think this falls under the fallacy "Well, *I* don't understand that, so it can't be true". Look, moon and earth, same distance from sun. Earth - warm. Moon - cold. Difference? Greenhouse gasses. Now we on earth have been adding an enormous amount of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere the last 50-100 years. So we might suspect that things might get warmer.
I agree with you that China is much much worse than the US, and I applaud the senator for trying to make companies try to take responsibility for their actions. However, when it comes to personal freedoms, under the current US administration things have taken a sharp turn for the worse, that is why I feel I have to comment this statement:
When was the last time the FBI showed up at someone's house simply for running a blog criticizing the US government?
Appearently you can get an intimidating visit for having an anti-Bush poster on your wall, or saying something negative about him at the gym.
It was defenitely more informative, thanks for that. Why my link was less "real" than yours though, I don't understand. Boinboing was threatened to be sued, so I believe that they might have been first with revealing Starforce for what it is?
I was about the download the demo for Battle for Middle Earth 2 the other day, only to read that the goddamn DEMO comes with the StarForce malware.
According to Wikipedia, Ubi Soft, Digital Jesters and Codemasters routinely use StarForce on new games. Forget about consoles, THIS is what might kill PC gaming permanently.
VIC 20 was my first, the predecessor to the Commodore 64 (which I also got). We were green with envy for the kids whose parents had gotten them a Commodore 128.
Then... Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, then I got my first PC, an IBM BlueLightning, specifically to play Doom. Unfortunately all I did on all of those machines was play games. Had I started programming earlier...
Another reason for flame wars online, especially with regards to games, and on Slashdot, programming languages -
A friend who studied psychology talked to me about the "crafty consumer" phenomenon. If we have purchased something we have looked forward to, we will disregard negative things about this and might even become angry if friends point out flaws in the product to us. This is because we all want to think that we are crafty consumers who have made the smart choice. Of course, WE would never fall for advertising, we think. So when evidence mounts that the purchase wasn't as good as we thought, we resist facing it until the evidence is overwhelming. Then it is a blow to our self-esteem and might even cause a depression ("Maybe I'm not as smart as I thought I was... and all that money wasted...").
This can be even more amplified here on Slashdot when someone criticizes something that we have spent a lot of time and intellectual effort to grasp. When someone bash our favourite language, we think our anger comes because we feel "love" for the language, but it has probably more to that with the fact that it is a blow against our major source of pride - our intellectual capabilites. And if the language is not as good as we thought, it might take a long time to learn a new language as well. So in time of economic downturn the stress of increased job insecurity, we get angrier and defensive more easily. See my sig...:-)
Well done. I wish I could say I already knew, and was testing if the Slashdot mod system could be trusted. But I didn't know, I was just lazy and hadn't done the research.
Kudos. Ok, now my original post REALLY deserves negative mod points.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
There is an updated version created by IBM called Robocode, teaches Java and AI. Now released as Open Source.
Good grief, can we whore some liberal blogs a little more?
Yes, poor little opressed conservative, you only control the US presdency, the congress, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, the big news channels... And Slashdot has only published news from Free Republic in the science section a couple of times. When will the injustices against you end?
Public radio isn't frothing at the mouth liberal enough for Slashdot now?
I see someone frothing at the mouth, but it isn't public radio.
I urge you all to buy Psychonauts if you liked those, it is chock full of Tim Schafer goodness! When I heard that it was going to released on consoles, I thought "nah, pass", especially since the previews seemed to pitch it like a platformer. Well, after it won numerous end of year awards for plot, artwork, music, best adventure game, "best game no-one played", game of the year etc on several sites I decided to buy it when it finally was launched for the PC in Europe (a couple of weeks ago).
It is brilliant! I'd say it is 50% adventure game, 50% platformer. All that brilliant scenery in Day of the Tentacle or Sam and Max that you longed to explore, but you couldn't, because it was just 2D? Now you can! First game in ages that had me laughing out loud too, several times.
("Aaah! It's Goggalore!"
"What a magical lady."
"I am a construction worker. These are my tools. Look at that lady - She has rather large breasts.")
There are some fairly complex psychological concepts being dealt with here and there too, once you see past the jokes.
It is not perfect though. I got the "grinding to a halt" bug a few times that some report on AMD64 systems, and the last levels where a bit of a bore when there were long difficult sections you had to get past and no save points. I still think you should buy it though. Best game I played in years.
Something like ruby is what apple needs to compete with .net.
.Net of all things. There are plenty of programming environments both for desktop apps and enterprise things, such as Objective C, Java and others.
.Net developers likely to swarm to Macs because of Ruby.
Sorry, I was a bit quick to answer in my previous post, I completely missed you point. Here comes second try:
People who like Apple are hardly going to be swayed to PCs by
Neither are
So while Ruby for Mac is a nice thing by all means for Mac developers, this does nothing for overall marketshare, which will depend on completely different things.
Something like ruby is what apple needs to compete with .net.
.Net would completely wipe out Java there is always Mono.
It is not like there is only room for a single programming language on a platform...
Besides, Apple already uses Java, for instance it built the highly successful WebObjects around it. If, against all odds,
If that is a summary of the plots of the rest of his books, I'm glad I gave up in disgust after reading Da Vinci Code. He sounds worse than Michael Crichton, if that is even possible.
Most GUI libraries built on top of the winapi at least let you get the window handle from their widget implementations so that you can get straight through to win32 and do your hacking there (possibly fkcuing up the lib, since it doesn't know about your updates, but that's another issue :) ). This is not the case with Java
Perhaps because platform independence is one of the goals of Java, and so they can't assume that everyone is running Windows?
Someone should take this guy to the bar and explain it to him over a 'free beer'.....
The guy you mention from the article is actually a woman. I supposet this is sort of a reverse Crying Game.
WWWillem: "God, that is a relief. I was really attracted to you, and I was hoping it was just the beer..."
This is the sort of messed up situation that causes well adjusted gay men to run screaming for the closet. (Thanks to MST3K for that joke..)
You didn't read/understand the patent or the story linked to. (WOW how unusual)
:-)
You are right, I didn't read the article, but it wasn't the patent I was commenting on but that line from the Slashdot story.
Also, the duke wave applet was 1994 actually, I did a typo. I was waiting for someone to reply to me so I wouldn't have to reply to myself.
The patent was filed on 9 February 2001, five years after the original Flash application, FutureWave Splash, was introduced in May 1996."
And seven years after the applet of Duke waving in 1995, soon followed by the 3D rotatable molecule applet demod by Gosling, both pretty rich for their time.
What really seems to have been discovered is that there aren't sharks 5,280 feet below sea-level. The original study suspects this is because there's no fish to eat down there, which is a pretty obvious fact considering there's no light down there and very high water pressure.
There ARE fish there, but not in enough numbers to sustain sharks. Check here, or even better, see David Attenburoughs fantastic series The Blue Planet.
This is a bad sign for the sharks, the oceans and of course, journalists during slow news cycles.
Actually, if some shark species are threatened by extinction, that is bad news for all of us.
The savage overexploatation of our oceans is a terrible shame. I get furious when I read about EU subsedies keeping huge Spanish and British fishing fleets running.
But you do make it sound like my brother is one of those no-time-for-the-kids-make-them-watch-movies-instea d parents.
Yes, I realise that, and I do apologize. As someone who doesn't have kids of his own, it is easy to come with neatly wrapped solutions.
2.5 minutes. That's 150 seconds. Try something: Sit there and count off 150 seconds. That's rather a long freakin' time to be waiting for a video to start, no? It takes less time to make a bag of microwave popcorn.
I agree, that is annoying. But I think that sort of validates my point too - these 150 seconds only feel unbearably long if you sit there passively and stare at the screen. If you pop the film in and then play with the kid for little while, that time will fly by.
(What was up with the troll modifyer btw? Really grouchy moderator.)
There was a 2 and a half minute non-skipable copyright notice before the main feature.
You try explaining that one to a 2 year old...
Ok, the texts are annoying, and I just whined a bit about that myself further down, but come on. A two year old, just play a bit with him as the texts roll by. Make funny faces, toss a ball, tickle him.
If waiting 2,5 minutes for a film to start seems unbearable to him, should he even be watching TV?
I'm really looking forward to the day when I can get sued for just owning a DVD player that allows me to bypass commercials, inane FBI warnings, and ads for studios and technologies like THX.
We've not been so successful at manipulating nature thus far,
Actually, we have been pretty successful when it comes to screwing it up. That is what we are worried about.
For heavens sake, why is everyone so arrogant to think that our species is capable of uprooting the climate cycle of a [b]planet[/b]?
I think this falls under the fallacy "Well, *I* don't understand that, so it can't be true". Look, moon and earth, same distance from sun. Earth - warm. Moon - cold. Difference? Greenhouse gasses. Now we on earth have been adding an enormous amount of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere the last 50-100 years. So we might suspect that things might get warmer.
I agree with you that China is much much worse than the US, and I applaud the senator for trying to make companies try to take responsibility for their actions. However, when it comes to personal freedoms, under the current US administration things have taken a sharp turn for the worse, that is why I feel I have to comment this statement:
When was the last time the FBI showed up at someone's house simply for running a blog criticizing the US government?
Appearently you can get an intimidating visit for having an anti-Bush poster on your wall, or saying something negative about him at the gym.
It was defenitely more informative, thanks for that. Why my link was less "real" than yours though, I don't understand. Boinboing was threatened to be sued, so I believe that they might have been first with revealing Starforce for what it is?
I was about the download the demo for Battle for Middle Earth 2 the other day, only to read that the goddamn DEMO comes with the StarForce malware.
According to Wikipedia, Ubi Soft, Digital Jesters and Codemasters routinely use StarForce on new games. Forget about consoles, THIS is what might kill PC gaming permanently.
Looks like someone forgot to take his medicines this morning, hmm?
If you don't have medicines, you should get some. Seriously.
how could you have had a vic20 or commodore 64 without programming? It is not possible.
I hang my head in shame....
I had both and can only recall 5 games on the 64 that were purchased and none on the vic20.
I bought loads of games actually. Bards Tale, Wasteland (the inspiration for Fallout), Elite, Infocom adventures, lots of US Gold games...
But yeah, I admin, most of it was pirated.
VIC 20 was my first, the predecessor to the Commodore 64 (which I also got). We were green with envy for the kids whose parents had gotten them a Commodore 128.
Then... Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, then I got my first PC, an IBM BlueLightning, specifically to play Doom.
Unfortunately all I did on all of those machines was play games. Had I started programming earlier...
Another reason for flame wars online, especially with regards to games, and on Slashdot, programming languages -
:-)
A friend who studied psychology talked to me about the "crafty consumer" phenomenon. If we have purchased something we have looked forward to, we will disregard negative things about this and might even become angry if friends point out flaws in the product to us. This is because we all want to think that we are crafty consumers who have made the smart choice. Of course, WE would never fall for advertising, we think. So when evidence mounts that the purchase wasn't as good as we thought, we resist facing it until the evidence is overwhelming. Then it is a blow to our self-esteem and might even cause a depression ("Maybe I'm not as smart as I thought I was... and all that money wasted...").
This can be even more amplified here on Slashdot when someone criticizes something that we have spent a lot of time and intellectual effort to grasp. When someone bash our favourite language, we think our anger comes because we feel "love" for the language, but it has probably more to that with the fact that it is a blow against our major source of pride - our intellectual capabilites. And if the language is not as good as we thought, it might take a long time to learn a new language as well. So in time of economic downturn the stress of increased job insecurity, we get angrier and defensive more easily. See my sig...
Well done. I wish I could say I already knew, and was testing if the Slashdot mod system could be trusted. But I didn't know, I was just lazy and hadn't done the research.
:-)
Kudos.
Ok, now my original post REALLY deserves negative mod points.