Yes, pygame has been around for a while. It's a similar thing - an SDL wrapper for Python. But it is vastly superior because it is Python. Why would you want to write anything in Perl?
Perl programmers are just Python programmers who haven't yet seen the light. Perl is the BASIC of the late 90s: unfortunately, like some kind of zombie, it keeps staggering about spreading poor programming practices and unreadable code, and no-one can destroy it. For God's sake, stop writing Perl and learn Python. It will take you two hours and you will never go back.
Additionally, what IS a web-based OS? Apart from being a buzzword, anyway.
Is this an OS that boots over a network? Is it a framework for building applications that are partly server-side and partly client-side? How is this different from present-day web applications like Google Maps?
And, most importantly, what is the benefit of a web-based OS?
Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself.
I don't foresee anyone trying to stop you from doing that.
Read up on TCPA, because that what RMS is fighting against. It's DRM for every application on your machine, turning your general-purpose computer into something resembling a games console. It's the total opposite of the idea of free software: if you have any freedom at all, that's up to the makers of the applications you use.
Here, for perhaps the first and only time, you may be lucky that your country is run by fundamentalist Christians. The same logic that drives them to kill abortionists and ban good science also tells them about the Mark of the Beast. Whatever the mark was supposed to be, its aim was exactly the same as the aim of a mandatory ID card: centralisation of control.
Some police departments are using DRM in cameras to prove that photographic evidence has not been tampered with.
Why does that need DRM? Surely a digital signature would be just as good. RMS isn't opposed to using signatures and encryption - he's just opposed to technological and legal measures to prevent the user getting access to the keys!
If you've ever worked in IT, you know how dangerous users can be. Imagine never having to remove gator from someone's computer again, while still giving them privileges to manage their own system.
That sounds like an issue with the security of the operating system: users being able to install stuff without approval from IT. Can't see how DRM would do anything to help with that.
Google used to be good, but now they are Evil. Not quite as evil as Microsoft, though! They are extremely evil! But Apple are great. They can do no wrong! Even their DRM is brilliant! In Soviet Russia, I could think of something funny to say.
Pandora's service is DRM-free - they just send you 128kbit MP3s, which you can easily copy using (for instance) tcpflow. I discovered this the other day while trying to figure out a good way to record the songs I liked. Another interesting thing about the service is each "station" only appears to play about a gigabyte of music (compressed). About half the tracks I've captured have been played at least twice.
To add to this - the 360 is a full TCPA system. It is designed from the ground up to only run signed code, and the procedures for verifying code have been very well thought out. The master public key is indeed burned into the hypervisor ROM within the CPU. The only hope for getting the 360 to run code that's not been approved by Microsoft will involve exploiting bugs in the code that they ship.
Sadly, this is the bleak future for PCs as well.. if the industry gets its way, they will all be like this, only running centrally approved "trusted" code. At that point, it will affect everyone - not just people wanting to put pirated games on their new console.
One interesting thing about your idea is that it provides a natural way to split the game down into what Blizzard would call "realms": one per ship or planet. There is never a situation where a realm needs to be in contact with more than a small number of other realms (when ships dock, for instance). Thus, the game universe will scale to any number of players just by adding more servers. I don't think WoW does this very well.. ideally, you want all players to be in the same universe, not in various parallel universes.
This is a point that has bothered me for a while. We can both agree that "chav" is a bad label, being ill-defined. However, we probably both know who is meant, so I will continue to use it for a bit longer.
Chavs are a relatively new group. I don't think there are historical parallels for chavs in recent history. During the Victorian era, chavs did not exist, because working-class people were expected to work. Those incapable of working were dependant on charity, and were forced to conform by this.
For all of the complaints that could be made about the unfairness of the Victorian era, one of the positive things that came from it was a well-defined social structure. The structure was elitist and aspirational - if you are at a low level, then you aspire to be at a higher level. Thus, working-class people aspire to be middle-class, and so on.
This attitude has existed under the surface of British culture ever since. But there is one group that it does not apply to - the chavs. Their aspirations are to riches and superstardom, not respectability and social status. Morality is unknown to them.
One cannot blame individual chavs for this. It would be easy to take the view that each person has free will, and is thus able to choose whether to be a ruffian or a gentleman (to use the Victorian terms). However, in a very real sense, it is society that is to blame.
The Victorian system was founded upon morality and respect for authority. These began to crumble during the 1950s and 1960s - on all levels of society, the system was under scrutiny. The parts that were marked as unfair were removed. This social change was applied to improve the lot of all members of society: particularly the poorest. Some were good: the NHS appeared, with social security. But other well-intentioned changes were to prove more problematic. For instance, grammar schools disappeared at this time. The Church declined, taking with it the moral structure of society.
Ironically, this revolution has actually made life worse for the poorest members of society, as we can see from all the Chavs. How can the children of chavs choose any other path through life? Their parents are unlikely to be good role models. There is no escape any more: no guidance, no grammar school, no support, no church, no aspirational ideas. Education is boring. Work is boring too, but hey, you can always sell drugs instead. Then you can buy a bigger TV or go to Falaraki. This is not a fair society: it is a society in which you are a chav, unless your parents are rich.
This affects politics in the UK. There is now so much crime that draconian police-state measures such as ASBOs, detention without trial and ID cards start to sound palatable to people. These measures won't help, of course. The ideal society is self-policing - but that requires everyone to have a good understanding of what's right and what's wrong. Now, our society is so far from being self-policing that the police and justice system are not very effective in deterring crime.
The solution? We need to get chavs to stop being chavs, to appreciate the value of respectability and morals, to have an interest in education and self-improvement. I don't know how this can be achieved... it would require a massive culture shift.
What's wrong with a laughter track?
on
IT Crowd On-line
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why is a laughter track a bad thing? Bearing in mind that the laughter you hear on this show is the sound of the studio audience, watching the show as it was recorded, and not "canned".
Today, it is fashionable to make comedy shows without an audience. However, this is not because there is anything wrong with a laughter track. Here, for example, is a list of successful English shows with laughter tracks.
Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) executives announced today that Google technology is to power the Nazi database of "undesirables". After long negotiations with Herr Hitler, Chancellor of Nazi Germany, the terms of the contract to run the 18bn DM database have been finalised. Google has successfully beaten IBM to the contract: a Nazi spokesman cited the superior efficiency of Google's Linux-based platform over IBM's Hollerith punch-card system.
A Google spokesman commented: "Allowing Google technology to aid a fascist programme of genocide isn't a step we took lightly. For several years, we've debated whether entering the Nazi market at this point in history could be consistent with our mission and values. But then, the Nazis offered us a lot of money. Then the debate changed. Put simply, how can we provide the greatest access to information about undesirables to the largest number of SS Commandants?"
"Selling our technology to evil fascists clearly compromises our vision. But restricting their access to information about Jews, Communists, and other undesirables compromises our vision still further."
The Google database system will go live in the Reichstag server room within a year, just in time to support planned military action in Europe. Future plans include a "RaceRank" feature, which will evaluate whether or not an individual is a true member of the Master Race, and the "Enigma" DRM system, developed by Google Germany as a new generation of unbreakable cipher.
multitask like Windows and MacOS didn't know how to do until 1999 or later
Minor point - didn't the Amiga use co-operative multitasking without protected memory? By Windows 95, Microsoft had started using pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection, although it still didn't work very well!
Still, I agree with the spirit of your post. Amiga deserved a lot better than they got. It's rather sad.
I find it weird that this has happened, to be honest. These days, Blizzard should rightly be very paranoid about breaking WoW. Downtime and crappy server performance drive away players. I think that they have taken some steps to avoid the worst problems by rolling out new content on a regional basis, so that one region can test out the new content before it goes worldwide, but that doesn't seem to have helped here. Why wasn't this tested properly?
My thoughts exactly... this is a really scary game. I can't quite believe it - it's everywhere, everyone seems to play it, and they all play it constantly. I feel like I've woken up in the future and everyone is on heroin now. It's weird and frightening.
Best not to think about it really, and have a nice relaxing smoke of crack.
And then never mentioned again. And in any case, it is wrong to say kWh per year. Kilowatts per hour, per year? The time units cancel out - the value should be specified in watts.
This article is very poor. Power consumption is given using energy units (Wh) without any reference to the amount of time taken to consume that energy. For instance:
electrical equipment in sleep mode used roughly 7TWh of energy and emitted around 800,000 tonnes of carbon
He has calculated that the CO2 emissions from electrical equipment being left on standby are equivalent to 1.4 million long-haul flights.
Per second? Day? Month? Year? The units are never fully specified, except once in the title of the graph.
It's just lazy to write articles like this. The figures are all there for "shock value", but they are meaningless.
Additionally, there is no mention of the fact that energy "wasted" by a standby device is just heat, and thus offsets the energy that you would otherwise "waste" in your gas boiler or electric heater.
It's good to have lots of alpha and beta testers - and WoW does do this: there are test realms available. However, remember how paranoid the WoW staff must be about serious bugs that somehow slip through testing. They lost a lot of players during the "Corrupted Blood" incident: that was a serious bug that slipped through testing. If they can test it on a massive scale using one of their regions before deploying in the rest, then you bet they'll take it. We're all beta testers in Europe.
Perhaps you don't like RMS's clearly political meddling here - what is he doing, trying to control what the GPL is all about, and making it oppose DRM?
Well, it's not really a change. In spirit, the GPL has always opposed DRM. DRM, like proprietary software, takes away the control and freedom of choice that an end user should enjoy, and gives it to someone else. The GPL has always stood against the effects of proprietary software, on behalf of programmers and expert users. Now, it stands against those effects on behalf of every computer user too. Companies have an ethical choice when it comes to DRM, and I do hope that the actions of the FSF will serve to highlight this.
I'm amazed at the sheer number of MMO players that there seem to be on here. Does everyone play? It's like I've been asleep for 10 years, woken up and found that everyone else is on heroin now. Really weird... really scary.
I guess that I'm saying it's not just a game. To a lot of people, it's a lifestyle choice. See you all in rehab!
Eve online states that they have a single universe except for a separate universe for chinese players for "legal reasons". They don't explain what those reasons are, tho, so it might be something unrelated.
One good reason for dividing the game into regions is that it makes it possible to test new code without doing a world-wide rollout that could prove disastrous if there were any show-stopper bugs. For instance, WoW is now at version 1.9.2 in Europe, but I believe it's still at 1.8.x in the US. The new patches are being tested in Europe first - and the folks in the States will never have to suffer through 1.9.0 and 1.9.1, both of which had unpleasant little bugs! EVE may well have cottoned on to the same idea, using China as a test bed.
Slashdot Mirror
Perl programmers are just Python programmers who haven't yet seen the light. Perl is the BASIC of the late 90s: unfortunately, like some kind of zombie, it keeps staggering about spreading poor programming practices and unreadable code, and no-one can destroy it. For God's sake, stop writing Perl and learn Python. It will take you two hours and you will never go back.
Is this an OS that boots over a network? Is it a framework for building applications that are partly server-side and partly client-side? How is this different from present-day web applications like Google Maps?
And, most importantly, what is the benefit of a web-based OS?
- Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself.
- Or play World of Warcraft.
Can you really have a proper job and play WOW?Read up on TCPA, because that what RMS is fighting against. It's DRM for every application on your machine, turning your general-purpose computer into something resembling a games console. It's the total opposite of the idea of free software: if you have any freedom at all, that's up to the makers of the applications you use.
Here, for perhaps the first and only time, you may be lucky that your country is run by fundamentalist Christians. The same logic that drives them to kill abortionists and ban good science also tells them about the Mark of the Beast. Whatever the mark was supposed to be, its aim was exactly the same as the aim of a mandatory ID card: centralisation of control.
Why does that need DRM? Surely a digital signature would be just as good. RMS isn't opposed to using signatures and encryption - he's just opposed to technological and legal measures to prevent the user getting access to the keys!
If you've ever worked in IT, you know how dangerous users can be. Imagine never having to remove gator from someone's computer again, while still giving them privileges to manage their own system.
That sounds like an issue with the security of the operating system: users being able to install stuff without approval from IT. Can't see how DRM would do anything to help with that.
Troll!? You mean I actually have to contribute something?? This is harder than it looks.
Oh well, here goes.
Google used to be good, but now they are Evil. Not quite as evil as Microsoft, though! They are extremely evil! But Apple are great. They can do no wrong! Even their DRM is brilliant! In Soviet Russia, I could think of something funny to say.
How do I level up?
Pandora's service is DRM-free - they just send you 128kbit MP3s, which you can easily copy using (for instance) tcpflow. I discovered this the other day while trying to figure out a good way to record the songs I liked. Another interesting thing about the service is each "station" only appears to play about a gigabyte of music (compressed). About half the tracks I've captured have been played at least twice.
Sadly, this is the bleak future for PCs as well.. if the industry gets its way, they will all be like this, only running centrally approved "trusted" code. At that point, it will affect everyone - not just people wanting to put pirated games on their new console.
One interesting thing about your idea is that it provides a natural way to split the game down into what Blizzard would call "realms": one per ship or planet. There is never a situation where a realm needs to be in contact with more than a small number of other realms (when ships dock, for instance). Thus, the game universe will scale to any number of players just by adding more servers. I don't think WoW does this very well.. ideally, you want all players to be in the same universe, not in various parallel universes.
This is a point that has bothered me for a while. We can both agree that "chav" is a bad label, being ill-defined. However, we probably both know who is meant, so I will continue to use it for a bit longer.
Chavs are a relatively new group. I don't think there are historical parallels for chavs in recent history. During the Victorian era, chavs did not exist, because working-class people were expected to work. Those incapable of working were dependant on charity, and were forced to conform by this.
For all of the complaints that could be made about the unfairness of the Victorian era, one of the positive things that came from it was a well-defined social structure. The structure was elitist and aspirational - if you are at a low level, then you aspire to be at a higher level. Thus, working-class people aspire to be middle-class, and so on.
This attitude has existed under the surface of British culture ever since. But there is one group that it does not apply to - the chavs. Their aspirations are to riches and superstardom, not respectability and social status. Morality is unknown to them.
One cannot blame individual chavs for this. It would be easy to take the view that each person has free will, and is thus able to choose whether to be a ruffian or a gentleman (to use the Victorian terms). However, in a very real sense, it is society that is to blame.
The Victorian system was founded upon morality and respect for authority. These began to crumble during the 1950s and 1960s - on all levels of society, the system was under scrutiny. The parts that were marked as unfair were removed. This social change was applied to improve the lot of all members of society: particularly the poorest. Some were good: the NHS appeared, with social security. But other well-intentioned changes were to prove more problematic. For instance, grammar schools disappeared at this time. The Church declined, taking with it the moral structure of society.
Ironically, this revolution has actually made life worse for the poorest members of society, as we can see from all the Chavs. How can the children of chavs choose any other path through life? Their parents are unlikely to be good role models. There is no escape any more: no guidance, no grammar school, no support, no church, no aspirational ideas. Education is boring. Work is boring too, but hey, you can always sell drugs instead. Then you can buy a bigger TV or go to Falaraki. This is not a fair society: it is a society in which you are a chav, unless your parents are rich.
This affects politics in the UK. There is now so much crime that draconian police-state measures such as ASBOs, detention without trial and ID cards start to sound palatable to people. These measures won't help, of course. The ideal society is self-policing - but that requires everyone to have a good understanding of what's right and what's wrong. Now, our society is so far from being self-policing that the police and justice system are not very effective in deterring crime.
The solution? We need to get chavs to stop being chavs, to appreciate the value of respectability and morals, to have an interest in education and self-improvement. I don't know how this can be achieved... it would require a massive culture shift.
Today, it is fashionable to make comedy shows without an audience. However, this is not because there is anything wrong with a laughter track. Here, for example, is a list of successful English shows with laughter tracks.
BERLIN: April 1st, 1937
Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) executives announced today that Google technology is to power the Nazi database of "undesirables". After long negotiations with Herr Hitler, Chancellor of Nazi Germany, the terms of the contract to run the 18bn DM database have been finalised. Google has successfully beaten IBM to the contract: a Nazi spokesman cited the superior efficiency of Google's Linux-based platform over IBM's Hollerith punch-card system.
A Google spokesman commented: "Allowing Google technology to aid a fascist programme of genocide isn't a step we took lightly. For several years, we've debated whether entering the Nazi market at this point in history could be consistent with our mission and values. But then, the Nazis offered us a lot of money. Then the debate changed. Put simply, how can we provide the greatest access to information about undesirables to the largest number of SS Commandants?"
"Selling our technology to evil fascists clearly compromises our vision. But restricting their access to information about Jews, Communists, and other undesirables compromises our vision still further."
The Google database system will go live in the Reichstag server room within a year, just in time to support planned military action in Europe. Future plans include a "RaceRank" feature, which will evaluate whether or not an individual is a true member of the Master Race, and the "Enigma" DRM system, developed by Google Germany as a new generation of unbreakable cipher.
Minor point - didn't the Amiga use co-operative multitasking without protected memory? By Windows 95, Microsoft had started using pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection, although it still didn't work very well!
Still, I agree with the spirit of your post. Amiga deserved a lot better than they got. It's rather sad.
If you have enjoyed morphine, you might like to try heroin now.
I find it weird that this has happened, to be honest. These days, Blizzard should rightly be very paranoid about breaking WoW. Downtime and crappy server performance drive away players. I think that they have taken some steps to avoid the worst problems by rolling out new content on a regional basis, so that one region can test out the new content before it goes worldwide, but that doesn't seem to have helped here. Why wasn't this tested properly?
Best not to think about it really, and have a nice relaxing smoke of crack.
And then never mentioned again. And in any case, it is wrong to say kWh per year. Kilowatts per hour, per year? The time units cancel out - the value should be specified in watts.
electrical equipment in sleep mode used roughly 7TWh of energy and emitted around 800,000 tonnes of carbon
He has calculated that the CO2 emissions from electrical equipment being left on standby are equivalent to 1.4 million long-haul flights.
Per second? Day? Month? Year? The units are never fully specified, except once in the title of the graph.
It's just lazy to write articles like this. The figures are all there for "shock value", but they are meaningless.
Additionally, there is no mention of the fact that energy "wasted" by a standby device is just heat, and thus offsets the energy that you would otherwise "waste" in your gas boiler or electric heater.
BBC News, go to the bottom of the class.
It's good to have lots of alpha and beta testers - and WoW does do this: there are test realms available. However, remember how paranoid the WoW staff must be about serious bugs that somehow slip through testing. They lost a lot of players during the "Corrupted Blood" incident: that was a serious bug that slipped through testing. If they can test it on a massive scale using one of their regions before deploying in the rest, then you bet they'll take it. We're all beta testers in Europe.
Well, it's not really a change. In spirit, the GPL has always opposed DRM. DRM, like proprietary software, takes away the control and freedom of choice that an end user should enjoy, and gives it to someone else. The GPL has always stood against the effects of proprietary software, on behalf of programmers and expert users. Now, it stands against those effects on behalf of every computer user too. Companies have an ethical choice when it comes to DRM, and I do hope that the actions of the FSF will serve to highlight this.
I guess that I'm saying it's not just a game. To a lot of people, it's a lifestyle choice. See you all in rehab!
One good reason for dividing the game into regions is that it makes it possible to test new code without doing a world-wide rollout that could prove disastrous if there were any show-stopper bugs. For instance, WoW is now at version 1.9.2 in Europe, but I believe it's still at 1.8.x in the US. The new patches are being tested in Europe first - and the folks in the States will never have to suffer through 1.9.0 and 1.9.1, both of which had unpleasant little bugs! EVE may well have cottoned on to the same idea, using China as a test bed.