I understand and agree with your general strategy, but I know that as a kid in this situation, I respected my parents rules far more than I would have respected some device. If my mom had resorted to a physical device to control my TV-watching or C64-playing, I would have felt nothing wrong with circumventing it with physical means.
So long as the restriction was in the moral realm of what was expected of me, it seemed unacceptable to attempt to undermine the requirements.
In short, I feel that such physical devices are likely to come across as disrespsectful, and are thus less likely to be honored by kids. If you DO decide to use such a tool, be sure to introduce it properly and to present the settings you program it with in the same way you would present your normal requirements of your kids.
The problem with Cheapass games is that.. well.. they're rather cheapass. They're really just not that good as games.
Most cheapass games are strong on the humour and theme department, but somewhat weak on the actual gameplay. They're typically a fair amount of fun for two or three plays, but after that they get dull and are no longer interesting to play. They often suffer from poor balancing issues and players may not have any chance to win or have much effect on the game. Some of them, despite these flaws, are certainly worth playing, but I cringe at the thought of buying a cheapass game without playing it first, as I'll probably just end up throwing it out or giving it away.
The contention that these games are just as good as full production games like Medina or LÃwenhurz and so on is wrongheaded to say the least.
The reviews of Enter the Matrix from a number of experienced gamesr whose opinions I trust go like this.
It is a good game, not a great game, and it is not without its flaws. However, it will provide a fun, enjoyable experience if you're willing to give it a chance, with an approachable control scheme which allows you to do lots of neat things, a fun hacking interface, and a lot of interesting movie tie-in stuff.
The critics are focusing on the flaws rather than the enjoyability.
This isn't very well considered. You sugest that video games are violent because people are violent.
What percentage of time do you spend in your day being violent? What percentage of time do video game experiences spend on violence? I would guess the percentages are something like 0.5% and 80%.
Alternatively, look at other forms of entertainment, be they books, movies, tv shows, theatre, etc. Sure, people complain about movies and tv being violent, but it isn't anything like the 80% of the time that video games achieve. Why is it higher for video games than other mediums? Your platitudes do nothing to address this fact.
You also employ the straw man that video games didn't cause cain to kill able and various other nonsense. I simply asked: Have you actually considered why video games are so disproportionately violent and whether this is a good thing, or are you simply going to spout the party line that it's completely meaningless because you think it is?
You all say, of course, that video games are not causing people to murder folks, and it's true that the video-game blamers are a shrill bunch.
But have any of you stopped to wonder why it is that video games are often so violent?
Sure, tension is a good element to a storyline or scene, and games fall along those lines like a short comic book or a single action sequence in a movie, but the majority of videogames involve beating, maiming, and killing (from cartoony to graphicaly unpleasant) as their main activity in an endless way. Is this the nature of the medium, or is there a choice being made here (perhaps without considering it.)
Also, how about the drift from cartoony cute conflict towards the GHOUL engine from Raven Software where you can shoot off people's arms and have them realistically bleed and/or fail to function (which game is this again?) Sure, increasing graphics capability and sophisticated programming makes this possible, but doesn't it make nearly infinitely many other things possible as well?
I guess what I'm saying is the video-game blamers are often ill-considered and poorly reasoned, but they're not inventing this stuff from whole cloth, and it might be something that could actually be improved for the good of the game industry and the gamers both, nevermind the sideline nannypants whingers.
Functional languages operate on functions as their unit of data. They pass, create, return, and operate on functions.
Procedural languges pass numbers, text, etc, instead of functions.
Functional programming feels like functional manipulation in mathematics, wheras procedural feels like a little machine scribbling on paper bits;-)
Do a google search. Here's an example link. http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld /tutfct nl.htm
The name isn't intuitive, but if your CS professor _really_ calls C a functional language, she or he is just plain wrong, and you might want to inform him or her about this.
Oh, and the great-grandparent post which brought this up here is wrong on about another 30 issues as well. Please mod it down.:-(
I don't think anyone's confused about CD Players though. The CD player is just a means to get to the CDs, where we think of the printers, razors, and game consoles as the devices themselves.
As for my PS2, I bought five games for 40 bucks, and one more for 20, so i've still got 120 dollars to equal the console price. In my (specialized) case, I'd say say the opening cost of the PS2 was a good chunk of change.
Great link. Retrogaming is a huge source of fun for me. My only bent is I'm starting to expect that retrogaming be crossplatform (not sure if this is out of any logic, or just the fact that it isn't very hard). I'm sad I'm going to miss out on this linux-land.
You can call me crazy if you like, but I don't just consider the rebate to be nonexistent, I actually avoid purchasing any product which has an associated rebate. I don't like putting up with the half truths and bullshit, and I don't like the vendors thinking this is a reasonable tactic, so I don't buy products pushed in this way.
This attitude is informed by a life of no rebates ever being honored by any vendor at any time. Though I've only tried 10 or so in my life, so I guess that's a bit of a broad conclusion, I'm not willing to put up with the harangue.
Yes, you can refer to collectives as a singular, but he doesn't.
"these criterion"
There's nothing to argue about here, it's like "these orange". It's a simple lack of agreement, and an error. If he had said "this criterion" to refer to the collection of both elements, that would be reasonable, if somewhat awkward in context.
If you think something is say, incorrect, or uninsightful, or just downright pointless (the opposite of many of the plus moderations) then you pick "overrated". Which is true, if it is indeed any of those things.
Re:Legacy-free computing? Apple's way ahead, as us
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
It's kind of a silly discussion, but I'll contribute to it in a nitpicky way.
ps2 vs adb
They aren't even similar. Sure, they've got a similar hole, but the signalling comes from a different school of thought entirely. ADB was prior and waaay more elegant. There is, however, the often-encountered elegance/price tradeoff here. PC keyboard was 30$, while the mac keyboards were 120 and up (for full keyboard) circa 1990-2.
plug n play
Awul awful awful. A horror upon the land. Luckily PCI has none of these problems. The horror known as "ISA PnP" should never have existed as PCI came first. As far as who got this right first though, I have to say that adding a SCSI controller, memory, and hard drive to my amiga consisted of: attaching the external unit. That's it.
ISA -> PCI
ISA in and of itself was another holy horror. Well, maybe it was good when invented (unsure here) but it ceratinly WAY outlived its usefulness. The mac transitioned to PCI around late 1995, while the PC world was definitely using it around 18 months earlier. The mac world changed over more uniformly, of course.
Open Firmware
Open Firmware is far better than EFI will ever hope to be. Apple helped defeat the usefulness of it of course by incompletely implementing it in a braindead fashion for years, while Sun had to carry the torch. Sad that. They mostly do a decent job here these days with a few occasional glitches. The relative closedness of the mac hardware base limits the utility of Open Firmware a bit, it would be much more of a boon to the unpleasant PC world.
IDE vs SCSI
The PC world was highly disk controller format agnostic for a long time, until IDE became clearly reasonably fast for largely cheap. There really wasn't much of a point for SCSI over IDE on a PC due to (see above) ISA. Unfortunately (again) mac did not (quite) implement the SCSI standard spec, with their own connector style and their own slightly different command set issues. The Mac certainly reaped benefits from taking the Cadillac of io busses as standard, however. Hooking up CDROMs, Zips, etc, to a non-scsi PC was amazingly painful before ATAPI came along.
Floppy drives
Thank you thank you apple for helping to bury these beasts. Ding fscking dong the witch is dead.
Boot off alternate media
A nice touch, although it really used to piss me off if my mac booted off a syquest that I left in the drive. The Amiga, blessedly came with selectable boot order and a menu to arbitrarily chose a boot volume. The IBM PC learned to boot off CDROMS in any mass capacity in what? 1997?
I think it's pretty reasonable to believe the stated installation requirements given with software. That the vendor provides misinformation about the requirements does not earn any brownie points in the simplicity and clarity arena. At least, it doesn't in my book.
The big advantage of Linux installation over Windows installation, in my experience, is that I don't have to dork around with all these brain-dead installers and web pages all of which are full of misinformation and poorly-crafted installers. If I want a linux soundcard to work, it's generally just 'alsaconf' and I'm done. One command, one action, one minute.
Primarily this disparity has to do with how coordinated the Windows drivers are with Microsoft central (not very) and how often the Linux releases are made to include new card support (often!)
Having watched both in the theatres, the dub is superior both for its own excellence and the less than perfect subtitling. None of the voices are out of character, and the acting is great.
There are a few cultural modifications in terms of the family roles, and possibly elsewhere, but they are minor, nonessential, and actually succeeded in that they allowed me to be much more easily drawn into the film.
That said, the subtitleing isn't bad if you have stadium seating at your theatre. At a low angle, it is painful to try to read around the heads of others doing the same. The words are low and not all that large. It probably also would be excellent for the japanophile watching at home.
It is; it often denotes that the bug has been fixed between the time it was reported and the time the QA person got to look at it.
If they're actually testing a later version, that's a good starting point, given that they indicate what they're testing with, etc. In personal experience "Works 4 Me" usually involves a complete failure to duplicate the documented problem conditions, and a further failure to indicate the conditions under which the developer tested it. Even given that the version numbers may differ, this is a datapoint, not necessarily the end of the bug.
So, if a bug gets marked INVALID, it almost always is.
Hm.. maybe you're right. The only times I've seen this kind of willful ignorance is in design defects. The best example for mozilla is backspace for "back", which is just fugly.
I wonder if there's a better way to dialog regarding design defects than a bug tracking system. Sometimes it's clear the developer doesn't _want_ that dialog, but it's clearly not a very good medium for it.
There is some obligation. Sure, the developers don't have to fix the bugs you want fixed when you want them. But as an honest, well-meaning, well-researched bug submitter, there is an obligation for the developers to treat you reasonably.
To me, treating bug submitters reasonbly involves the following three things
1) Assume that the bug submitter isn't making the problem up. They may have misidentified it, or made a small error in description, etc. but they aren't inventing it out of whole cloth. If you follow this assumption up with a read of well-researched and documented bug description information, then you should assume the problem is likely correctly identified, and treat it as such. 2) "Works 4 ME!!" is not a problem resolution. It is a reasonable explanation of why a problem isn't going to be fixed too quickly: hard to troubleshoot what you have to imagine. It isn't proof the bug doesn't work. 3) If the truth is that it's low priority, that's fine, but don't go to a lot of effort to discredit the submitter/problem to justify your low priority classification. That's rude and a waste of time.
So it cuts both ways. Developers who can't give basic respect to bug submissions aren't going to get any value out of them, and there is an obligation to provide this basic respect. The bug submitters don't write them up just to waste their own time.
-------
Secondarily, if the bug is marked "INVALID", this means it's probably invalid. But the developer can be wrong. Through the last several software houses I've worked out, I've seen rampant miscategorization and misclassification of bugs by lazy developers. I think pointing out genuine errors and/or lies is acceptable and helpful, and helps avoid data corruption of the defect tracking system. That said, for this to have any value it has to be reasonably applied, and with tact.
I'm tempted to repeat you, stating "No you're wrong", but instead I've danced aroudn it!
Certainly the code morphing technology should theoretically allow them to execute an arbitrary binary instruction set, but in reality they targetted this system at x86. The goal of the project was to build a more efficient processor. All the tomfoolery about alternate instruction sets was so much speculation on the part of slashdot editors, others.
Also the Linux Kernel itself has all kinds of horrible FURRINERS behind it! Major contributions to the SCSI layer, the VM, and so on have been contributed by engineers from France, Germany.
Clearly you should dump the whole arab-loving operating system! It logically follows doesn't it?
Are you trying to install SuSE Packages on SuSE? If so, why aren't you just using the update service to make them automaticially bling onto your drive?
If you're trying to install SuSE packages on some other distribution, you're an idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand and agree with your general strategy, but I know that as a kid in this situation, I respected my parents rules far more than I would have respected some device. If my mom had resorted to a physical device to control my TV-watching or C64-playing, I would have felt nothing wrong with circumventing it with physical means.
So long as the restriction was in the moral realm of what was expected of me, it seemed unacceptable to attempt to undermine the requirements.
In short, I feel that such physical devices are likely to come across as disrespsectful, and are thus less likely to be honored by kids. If you DO decide to use such a tool, be sure to introduce it properly and to present the settings you program it with in the same way you would present your normal requirements of your kids.
The problem with Cheapass games is that.. well.. they're rather cheapass. They're really just not that good as games.
Most cheapass games are strong on the humour and theme department, but somewhat weak on the actual gameplay. They're typically a fair amount of fun for two or three plays, but after that they get dull and are no longer interesting to play. They often suffer from poor balancing issues and players may not have any chance to win or have much effect on the game. Some of them, despite these flaws, are certainly worth playing, but I cringe at the thought of buying a cheapass game without playing it first, as I'll probably just end up throwing it out or giving it away.
The contention that these games are just as good as full production games like Medina or LÃwenhurz and so on is wrongheaded to say the least.
Okay Here I am at the prompt:
1.sysdrive:l> _
Let's try the test
1.sysdrive:l> ls
Speak-Handler 4212 ----rw-d 28-Mar-89 14:09:34
Aux-Handler 2448 ----rw-d 03-May-89 18:07:36
FastFileSystem 12248 ----rw-d 08-May-89 09:33:20
Disk-Validator 1848 ----rw-d 13-Aug-88 18:07:48
Pipe-Handler 3332 ----rw-d 28-Mar-89 17:27:46
Port-Handler 1364 ----rw-d 13-Aug-88 18:07:41
Newcon-Handler 7532 ----rw-d 13-Aug-88 18:07:52
Ram-Handler 6464 ----rw-d 13-Aug-88 18:08:08
Shell-Seg 7116 --p-rw-d 13-Aug-88 18:08:04
9 files - 129 blocks used
1.sysdrive:l>
So, is it Unix? I call it AmigaDOS.
The reviews of Enter the Matrix from a number of experienced gamesr whose opinions I trust go like this.
It is a good game, not a great game, and it is not without its flaws. However, it will provide a fun, enjoyable experience if you're willing to give it a chance, with an approachable control scheme which allows you to do lots of neat things, a fun hacking interface, and a lot of interesting movie tie-in stuff.
The critics are focusing on the flaws rather than the enjoyability.
This isn't very well considered. You sugest that video games are violent because people are violent.
What percentage of time do you spend in your day being violent? What percentage of time do video game experiences spend on violence? I would guess the percentages are something like 0.5% and 80%.
Alternatively, look at other forms of entertainment, be they books, movies, tv shows, theatre, etc. Sure, people complain about movies and tv being violent, but it isn't anything like the 80% of the time that video games achieve. Why is it higher for video games than other mediums? Your platitudes do nothing to address this fact.
You also employ the straw man that video games didn't cause cain to kill able and various other nonsense. I simply asked: Have you actually considered why video games are so disproportionately violent and whether this is a good thing, or are you simply going to spout the party line that it's completely meaningless because you think it is?
Ill-considered reactionary to the core.
You all say, of course, that video games are not causing people to murder folks, and it's true that the video-game blamers are a shrill bunch.
But have any of you stopped to wonder why it is that video games are often so violent?
Sure, tension is a good element to a storyline or scene, and games fall along those lines like a short comic book or a single action sequence in a movie, but the majority of videogames involve beating, maiming, and killing (from cartoony to graphicaly unpleasant) as their main activity in an endless way. Is this the nature of the medium, or is there a choice being made here (perhaps without considering it.)
Also, how about the drift from cartoony cute conflict towards the GHOUL engine from Raven Software where you can shoot off people's arms and have them realistically bleed and/or fail to function (which game is this again?) Sure, increasing graphics capability and sophisticated programming makes this possible, but doesn't it make nearly infinitely many other things possible as well?
I guess what I'm saying is the video-game blamers are often ill-considered and poorly reasoned, but they're not inventing this stuff from whole cloth, and it might be something that could actually be improved for the good of the game industry and the gamers both, nevermind the sideline nannypants whingers.
Functional languages operate on functions as their unit of data. They pass, create, return, and operate on functions.
;-)
d /tutfct nl.htm
:-(
Procedural languges pass numbers, text, etc, instead of functions.
Functional programming feels like functional manipulation in mathematics, wheras procedural feels like a little machine scribbling on paper bits
Do a google search. Here's an example link.
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gaul
The name isn't intuitive, but if your CS professor _really_ calls C a functional language, she or he is just plain wrong, and you might want to inform him or her about this.
Oh, and the great-grandparent post which brought this up here is wrong on about another 30 issues as well. Please mod it down.
Fuck you moderators, I know Simon and I know where he learned his english and a personal joke isn't "overrated" at 1 when hot grits is "funny".
I don't think anyone's confused about CD Players though. The CD player is just a means to get to the CDs, where we think of the printers, razors, and game consoles as the devices themselves.
As for my PS2, I bought five games for 40 bucks, and one more for 20, so i've still got 120 dollars to equal the console price. In my (specialized) case, I'd say say the opening cost of the PS2 was a good chunk of change.
Queen's english :-(
I believe it is "while" in the queens english too! ;-)
Great link. Retrogaming is a huge source of fun for me. My only bent is I'm starting to expect that retrogaming be crossplatform (not sure if this is out of any logic, or just the fact that it isn't very hard). I'm sad I'm going to miss out on this linux-land.
You can call me crazy if you like, but I don't just consider the rebate to be nonexistent, I actually avoid purchasing any product which has an associated rebate. I don't like putting up with the half truths and bullshit, and I don't like the vendors thinking this is a reasonable tactic, so I don't buy products pushed in this way.
This attitude is informed by a life of no rebates ever being honored by any vendor at any time. Though I've only tried 10 or so in my life, so I guess that's a bit of a broad conclusion, I'm not willing to put up with the harangue.
Yes, you can refer to collectives as a singular, but he doesn't.
"these criterion"
There's nothing to argue about here, it's like "these orange". It's a simple lack of agreement, and an error. If he had said "this criterion" to refer to the collection of both elements, that would be reasonable, if somewhat awkward in context.
There are three negative moderation items.
Troll.
Flamebait.
Overrated.
If you think something is say, incorrect, or uninsightful, or just downright pointless (the opposite of many of the plus moderations) then you pick "overrated". Which is true, if it is indeed any of those things.
It's kind of a silly discussion, but I'll contribute to it in a nitpicky way.
ps2 vs adb
They aren't even similar. Sure, they've got a similar hole, but the signalling comes from a different school of thought entirely. ADB was prior and waaay more elegant. There is, however, the often-encountered elegance/price tradeoff here. PC keyboard was 30$, while the mac keyboards were 120 and up (for full keyboard) circa 1990-2.
plug n play
Awul awful awful. A horror upon the land. Luckily PCI has none of these problems. The horror known as "ISA PnP" should never have existed as PCI came first. As far as who got this right first though, I have to say that adding a SCSI controller, memory, and hard drive to my amiga consisted of: attaching the external unit. That's it.
ISA -> PCI
ISA in and of itself was another holy horror. Well, maybe it was good when invented (unsure here) but it ceratinly WAY outlived its usefulness. The mac transitioned to PCI around late 1995, while the PC world was definitely using it around 18 months earlier. The mac world changed over more uniformly, of course.
Open Firmware
Open Firmware is far better than EFI will ever hope to be. Apple helped defeat the usefulness of it of course by incompletely implementing it in a braindead fashion for years, while Sun had to carry the torch. Sad that. They mostly do a decent job here these days with a few occasional glitches. The relative closedness of the mac hardware base limits the utility of Open Firmware a bit, it would be much more of a boon to the unpleasant PC world.
IDE vs SCSI
The PC world was highly disk controller format agnostic for a long time, until IDE became clearly reasonably fast for largely cheap. There really wasn't much of a point for SCSI over IDE on a PC due to (see above) ISA. Unfortunately (again) mac did not (quite) implement the SCSI standard spec, with their own connector style and their own slightly different command set issues. The Mac certainly reaped benefits from taking the Cadillac of io busses as standard, however. Hooking up CDROMs, Zips, etc, to a non-scsi PC was amazingly painful before ATAPI came along.
Floppy drives
Thank you thank you apple for helping to bury these beasts. Ding fscking dong the witch is dead.
Boot off alternate media
A nice touch, although it really used to piss me off if my mac booted off a syquest that I left in the drive. The Amiga, blessedly came with selectable boot order and a menu to arbitrarily chose a boot volume. The IBM PC learned to boot off CDROMS in any mass capacity in what? 1997?
I think it's pretty reasonable to believe the stated installation requirements given with software. That the vendor provides misinformation about the requirements does not earn any brownie points in the simplicity and clarity arena. At least, it doesn't in my book.
The big advantage of Linux installation over Windows installation, in my experience, is that I don't have to dork around with all these brain-dead installers and web pages all of which are full of misinformation and poorly-crafted installers. If I want a linux soundcard to work, it's generally just 'alsaconf' and I'm done. One command, one action, one minute.
Primarily this disparity has to do with how coordinated the Windows drivers are with Microsoft central (not very) and how often the Linux releases are made to include new card support (often!)
'Rules for "Diplomat" Piece'
[...]
'A witty saying proves nothing.'
Having watched both in the theatres, the dub is superior both for its own excellence and the less than perfect subtitling. None of the voices are out of character, and the acting is great.
There are a few cultural modifications in terms of the family roles, and possibly elsewhere, but they are minor, nonessential, and actually succeeded in that they allowed me to be much more easily drawn into the film.
That said, the subtitleing isn't bad if you have stadium seating at your theatre. At a low angle, it is painful to try to read around the heads of others doing the same. The words are low and not all that large. It probably also would be excellent for the japanophile watching at home.
Yes all true. Now, which of those is a _solution_?
Hint, none are, and a WFM with no further information is as useless from a developer as "It doesn't work" is from a bug submitter.
I'm not arguing against indicating when a problem cannot be reproduced, but against useless lack-of-effort on the other side of the fence.
It is; it often denotes that the bug has been fixed between the time it was reported and the time the QA person got to look at it.
If they're actually testing a later version, that's a good starting point, given that they indicate what they're testing with, etc. In personal experience "Works 4 Me" usually involves a complete failure to duplicate the documented problem conditions, and a further failure to indicate the conditions under which the developer tested it. Even given that the version numbers may differ, this is a datapoint, not necessarily the end of the bug.
So, if a bug gets marked INVALID, it almost always is.
Hm.. maybe you're right. The only times I've seen this kind of willful ignorance is in design defects. The best example for mozilla is backspace for "back", which is just fugly.
I wonder if there's a better way to dialog regarding design defects than a bug tracking system. Sometimes it's clear the developer doesn't _want_ that dialog, but it's clearly not a very good medium for it.
There is some obligation. Sure, the developers don't have to fix the bugs you want fixed when you want them. But as an honest, well-meaning, well-researched bug submitter, there is an obligation for the developers to treat you reasonably.
To me, treating bug submitters reasonbly involves the following three things
1) Assume that the bug submitter isn't making the problem up. They may have misidentified it, or made a small error in description, etc. but they aren't inventing it out of whole cloth. If you follow this assumption up with a read of well-researched and documented bug description information, then you should assume the problem is likely correctly identified, and treat it as such.
2) "Works 4 ME!!" is not a problem resolution. It is a reasonable explanation of why a problem isn't going to be fixed too quickly: hard to troubleshoot what you have to imagine. It isn't proof the bug doesn't work.
3) If the truth is that it's low priority, that's fine, but don't go to a lot of effort to discredit the submitter/problem to justify your low priority classification. That's rude and a waste of time.
So it cuts both ways. Developers who can't give basic respect to bug submissions aren't going to get any value out of them, and there is an obligation to provide this basic respect. The bug submitters don't write them up just to waste their own time.
-------
Secondarily, if the bug is marked "INVALID", this means it's probably invalid. But the developer can be wrong. Through the last several software houses I've worked out, I've seen rampant miscategorization and misclassification of bugs by lazy developers. I think pointing out genuine errors and/or lies is acceptable and helpful, and helps avoid data corruption of the defect tracking system. That said, for this to have any value it has to be reasonably applied, and with tact.
I'm tempted to repeat you, stating "No you're wrong", but instead I've danced aroudn it!
Certainly the code morphing technology should theoretically allow them to execute an arbitrary binary instruction set, but in reality they targetted this system at x86. The goal of the project was to build a more efficient processor. All the tomfoolery about alternate instruction sets was so much speculation on the part of slashdot editors, others.
Yes yes!
Also the Linux Kernel itself has all kinds of horrible FURRINERS behind it! Major contributions to the SCSI layer, the VM, and so on have been contributed by engineers from France, Germany.
Clearly you should dump the whole arab-loving operating system! It logically follows doesn't it?
Quack quack quack?
Are you trying to install SuSE Packages on SuSE? If so, why aren't you just using the update service to make them automaticially bling onto your drive?
If you're trying to install SuSE packages on some other distribution, you're an idiot.