> The original one was the "guy who strapped a JTOW rocket to his car"
JATO - stands for Jet Assisted Take-Off. Anyway, the guy who purports to tell the Real Story of The Rocket Car sure spins a good (long!) yarn. Don't know if that one's actually real or not, but it's certainly plausible.
> I think Snopes [...] should have a "Darwin Awards" special every year.
They do, actually. Well, it pops up in their RSS feed whenever these things make the rounds. The Darwin Awards are never really awarded, it's just that random groups of credulous dumbasses start forwarding various "funny stories" emails en masse and they just paste "Darwin Awards" on them. I don't know, maybe these were "official", I can't bring myself to care anymore. I swear there are even dupes from previous years on the list.
Heard it, no doubt snopes has as well. The Darwin awards aren't even trying anymore.
These awards are like listening to that crusty old "story teller" uncle at reunions. Everyone has heard the storits a hundred times before, everyone knows they're bullshit, but we just humor him because we've only got to go through it once a year if that.
Debian seems to do fine with just one elected board. I dare say a lot better than Gentoo, in fact. Possibly because if someone doesn't do their job, they're out.
And Robbins? Isn't he the same guy who returned to Gentoo like MacArthur to the Phillipines, only to leave one day later? I agree that the Gentoo board needs replacement too, but he ain't the guy for it either.
Imagine I created a simple "hello world" dynamic page: something that when given a number as parameter, would return "the double of $num is $double". Imagine you would call it with http://whatever/get_double?num=10. How many req/sec would you expect on a decent machine with your favourite CGI language or web framework?
As fast as squid could return the cached pages. I would judge a framework by how easy it is to tag a controller method as being fully deterministic, and therefore generating an ETag off the request data alone, setting the expiration to never. I don't want to have to have a deep understanding of the cache architecture or do it by hand, I just want to say "deterministic" somewhere and have the framework do the rest. Bonus points for handling cache coherency for database CRUD operations or other nondeterministic operations in a way that still doesn't make me do it by hand.
Pretty much all the "agile" frameworks are 10 tons of fail when it comes to this test.
> How about this, you scrap 3.0/5 and go back to 1st edtion?
Here's an idea: why don't you go ahead and do that? Nothing's stopping you. The rest of us would like a ruleset that's reasonably relevant, with oh, I dunno, clerics that don't swoon at the use of sharp pointy things?
> Come on, magic using dwarves, evil rangers, and wizards carrying swords. That goes against the very core of the game.
That goes against the core of your game. The one that most people have abandoned. Heck, the genre that most people have abandoned as a relic of the 70's and 80's, actually.
> How many 720p sets or even 1080i sets still don't have an HDMI connection?
Still don't? I'd say damn near zero. Even the 720p-only TV I got years ago (well it does 1080i but it has to downscale) has one hdmi input, most tv's these days have at least two.
> I can't decide who's going to be marching on corporate america first with torches and pitchforks -- the early-adopters of HD, or those screwed out of TV when we switch to digital in Feb of 2009.
The latter of course. The early adopters are gamblers that have been burned before. The people still on broadcast analog tend to think that reception over rabbit ears is enshrined in the Constitution.
> I believe the generally accepted answer to this question was René Descartes'. Cogito ergo sum.
I've always liked the Cogito argument, though at least you came to his actual conclusion ("If I'm not real, it's a perfect simulation") as opposed to the pop-philosophy argument of "I really do exist because I think".
Possibly the latter interpretation comes from his "proof" for the existence of God, which seemed to boil down to "I can't stand the idea that God doesn't exist, therefore he does".
Clever title, but "Pissy Foul-Mouthed Drama Queen Makes Histrionic Exit from Rails" would have been more accurate. I don't much care for rails either, but I do hope any other project he hops onto doesn't look to him for their public face.
> Not to criticize OLPC, but I think they should just keep the "Give One, Get One" program going.
I don't. By OLPC's own admission, many have been getting DOA or flakey laptops, there is no support, and the cost of dealing with hardware problems on an ad-hoc basis could drive them under. I don't begrudge their program or technology, I'm just pointing out that G1G1 cannot ignore market realities -- and shouldn't participate in it unless they're prepared to jack up the price in order to afford it.
Yeah, it's safe. It's basically like a web-based simcity, and overall looks like a cool fun game concept. But apparently they have some kind of "affiliate program" or whatever that pays you by the page hit, so everyone is spamming them all over the intertubes, pissing everyone off, and myminicity isn't doing a thing about it (hell they created the problem in the first place). Supposedly it's against their TOS, but hey rule #1 about spammers. So now I pretty much wait for them to go out of business, and welcome any suggestions on how to hurry that along.
i guess its a lot easier to throw around a term like "neo-con" that dumbly lumps people into a group then to actually parse each individuals perspective in the group as to their beliefs.
We tried that. And they said "those liberals can't agree on anything."
The "genetic memory" thing is woven throughout the story, and affects the design and tone from start to finish. Everyone was most certainly on the same page about it, and it wasn't something "thrown in". Did I like it? Not particularly. It's an artistic element I happened to disagree with, but it's still a well-crafted one.
What did more to ruin the immersion was the constant impingement of the "techie" HUD interface -- even when all the interface elements were turned off -- by constant tutorial popups and "game" elements, like a running count of towers climbed, generic citizens saved (largely to shut off the annoying looping dialog), and so forth. Most of all, the overall disconnected feeling of it all. Kill some guards, do a pickpocket mission, kill some more guards, do an eavesdrop, kill even more guards, do another generic pickpocket. Rack up a body count of a hundred and huh, still no one notices you as long as you sit on a bench for ten seconds?
Bah. The fighting's kind of fun, but frankly Prince of Persia did that better.
> the PS3 is going to have some unmatchable visuals.
It already does -- take a look at the new Ratchet and Clank. Heavenly Sword is pretty awesome too, tho much of it is simply high-def cutscenes.
When I bought my PS2, it was so I could get at the great catalog of PS2 games. The sales guy said about XBox games: "you either shoot it, drive it, or it's a sport". But now it's the 360 that has the variety. Heck, they even scored Culdcept Saga, a game that has gotten my non-gamer gf addicted from the demo alone.
And then there's movies. I think I'm spending more time watching movies on my xbox than playing games (at least as *my* game time is concerned, as it's otherwise tied up with Zuma by the aforementioned girlfriend.) Sony had the platform and the clout to make the PS3 into an ultimate movie distribution device, and they're still holding out to do that "someday", but frankly, they've utterly squandered that opportunity, and may now lose it outright to Vudu, a box that costs as much as a PS3!
Firing Kuratagi wasn't enough -- Sony continues to spin gold into shit, and shows no signs of changing course anytime soon.
Boy is it pretty. And smooth. And climbing things is fun for the first half-hour or so.
The voice acting is... okay. Actually everyone's good except for Altair himself, but I have heard worse.
But seriously, I was looking forward to being immersed in the role of an assassin stalking his target patiently, taking just the right moment to strike, then blazing a bloody trail out of town. But nope, I get to listen to "Thief! I'll have your hand for that!" over and over and over and over and over again until I get sick of it and decide to have my two-dozenth very high-profile swordfight in the middle of the street -- which the guards will mercifully forget all about when I walk away for a couple minutes to climb the next Generic View Point Tower.
> I don't like Perl so much anymore, but it had a really cool feature where instead of writing "object.method(args)", you could write "method object args".
This is called "indirect object" syntax, and it's really frowned upon in modern perl code due to the ambiguities it causes. Construction with my $x = new Foo was one of the last holdouts, but even that has largely given way to my $x = Foo->new.
Slashdot Mirror
> We'll see what our governments have to say about that.
Something along the lines of "More! More! Harder! Deeper!" is my guess.
If they don't care, perhaps you need to take a moment to see why it is they don't care?
Perhaps they only use two or three apps and they work fine for them.
Perhaps they've never had a problem because they don't tinker much and don't install random junk.
Perhaps they use their computer an hour a week.
Perhaps they don't feel like a new learning project.
Perhaps they're turned off by the FOSS culture.
Seriously, get to know your audience, and stop preaching at them.
> The original one was the "guy who strapped a JTOW rocket to his car"
JATO - stands for Jet Assisted Take-Off. Anyway, the guy who purports to tell the Real Story of The Rocket Car sure spins a good (long!) yarn. Don't know if that one's actually real or not, but it's certainly plausible.
> I think Snopes [...] should have a "Darwin Awards" special every year.
They do, actually. Well, it pops up in their RSS feed whenever these things make the rounds. The Darwin Awards are never really awarded, it's just that random groups of credulous dumbasses start forwarding various "funny stories" emails en masse and they just paste "Darwin Awards" on them. I don't know, maybe these were "official", I can't bring myself to care anymore. I swear there are even dupes from previous years on the list.
Heard it, no doubt snopes has as well. The Darwin awards aren't even trying anymore.
These awards are like listening to that crusty old "story teller" uncle at reunions. Everyone has heard the storits a hundred times before, everyone knows they're bullshit, but we just humor him because we've only got to go through it once a year if that.
Debian seems to do fine with just one elected board. I dare say a lot better than Gentoo, in fact. Possibly because if someone doesn't do their job, they're out.
And Robbins? Isn't he the same guy who returned to Gentoo like MacArthur to the Phillipines, only to leave one day later? I agree that the Gentoo board needs replacement too, but he ain't the guy for it either.
Imagine I created a simple "hello world" dynamic page: something that when given a number as parameter, would return "the double of $num is $double". Imagine you would call it with http://whatever/get_double?num=10. How many req/sec would you expect on a decent machine with your favourite CGI language or web framework?
As fast as squid could return the cached pages. I would judge a framework by how easy it is to tag a controller method as being fully deterministic, and therefore generating an ETag off the request data alone, setting the expiration to never. I don't want to have to have a deep understanding of the cache architecture or do it by hand, I just want to say "deterministic" somewhere and have the framework do the rest. Bonus points for handling cache coherency for database CRUD operations or other nondeterministic operations in a way that still doesn't make me do it by hand.
Pretty much all the "agile" frameworks are 10 tons of fail when it comes to this test.
Wow, what a nice usable interface. Well, at least you can set it through a central policy. Oh wait.
Or how ill-specified the standards are that this is what has to pass for a validation suite.
> Zend is working hard to increase the level of professionalism of the PHP community.
I'd be satisfied if they just worked to improve the damn language.
no_i_really_mean_it_mysql_really_escape_strings()
> How about this, you scrap 3.0/5 and go back to 1st edtion?
Here's an idea: why don't you go ahead and do that? Nothing's stopping you. The rest of us would like a ruleset that's reasonably relevant, with oh, I dunno, clerics that don't swoon at the use of sharp pointy things?
> Come on, magic using dwarves, evil rangers, and wizards carrying swords. That goes against the very core of the game.
That goes against the core of your game. The one that most people have abandoned. Heck, the genre that most people have abandoned as a relic of the 70's and 80's, actually.
> the cost of replacing them every 25 years as they degrade.
And current turbines last forever?
> How many 720p sets or even 1080i sets still don't have an HDMI connection?
Still don't? I'd say damn near zero. Even the 720p-only TV I got years ago (well it does 1080i but it has to downscale) has one hdmi input, most tv's these days have at least two.
> I can't decide who's going to be marching on corporate america first with torches and pitchforks -- the early-adopters of HD, or those screwed out of TV when we switch to digital in Feb of 2009.
The latter of course. The early adopters are gamblers that have been burned before. The people still on broadcast analog tend to think that reception over rabbit ears is enshrined in the Constitution.
> I believe the generally accepted answer to this question was René Descartes'. Cogito ergo sum.
I've always liked the Cogito argument, though at least you came to his actual conclusion ("If I'm not real, it's a perfect simulation") as opposed to the pop-philosophy argument of "I really do exist because I think".
Possibly the latter interpretation comes from his "proof" for the existence of God, which seemed to boil down to "I can't stand the idea that God doesn't exist, therefore he does".
> I call nepotism! ;)
I think I'm detecting the pattern better than you. I call kumquat for the next one.
Apparently so are some of its former developers.
Clever title, but "Pissy Foul-Mouthed Drama Queen Makes Histrionic Exit from Rails" would have been more accurate. I don't much care for rails either, but I do hope any other project he hops onto doesn't look to him for their public face.
> Not to criticize OLPC, but I think they should just keep the "Give One, Get One" program going.
I don't. By OLPC's own admission, many have been getting DOA or flakey laptops, there is no support, and the cost of dealing with hardware problems on an ad-hoc basis could drive them under. I don't begrudge their program or technology, I'm just pointing out that G1G1 cannot ignore market realities -- and shouldn't participate in it unless they're prepared to jack up the price in order to afford it.
> Most people could use the EeePC as their main computer.
With 800x480 resolution, this thing can't even show the photos I send my mom. Really, that screen is the deal-breaker.
Yeah, it's safe. It's basically like a web-based simcity, and overall looks like a cool fun game concept. But apparently they have some kind of "affiliate program" or whatever that pays you by the page hit, so everyone is spamming them all over the intertubes, pissing everyone off, and myminicity isn't doing a thing about it (hell they created the problem in the first place). Supposedly it's against their TOS, but hey rule #1 about spammers. So now I pretty much wait for them to go out of business, and welcome any suggestions on how to hurry that along.
Can we just IP-ban anyone who posts a myminicity link?
i guess its a lot easier to throw around a term like "neo-con" that dumbly lumps people into a group then to actually parse each individuals perspective in the group as to their beliefs.
We tried that. And they said "those liberals can't agree on anything."
The "genetic memory" thing is woven throughout the story, and affects the design and tone from start to finish. Everyone was most certainly on the same page about it, and it wasn't something "thrown in". Did I like it? Not particularly. It's an artistic element I happened to disagree with, but it's still a well-crafted one.
What did more to ruin the immersion was the constant impingement of the "techie" HUD interface -- even when all the interface elements were turned off -- by constant tutorial popups and "game" elements, like a running count of towers climbed, generic citizens saved (largely to shut off the annoying looping dialog), and so forth. Most of all, the overall disconnected feeling of it all. Kill some guards, do a pickpocket mission, kill some more guards, do an eavesdrop, kill even more guards, do another generic pickpocket. Rack up a body count of a hundred and huh, still no one notices you as long as you sit on a bench for ten seconds?
Bah. The fighting's kind of fun, but frankly Prince of Persia did that better.
> the PS3 is going to have some unmatchable visuals.
It already does -- take a look at the new Ratchet and Clank. Heavenly Sword is pretty awesome too, tho much of it is simply high-def cutscenes.
When I bought my PS2, it was so I could get at the great catalog of PS2 games. The sales guy said about XBox games: "you either shoot it, drive it, or it's a sport". But now it's the 360 that has the variety. Heck, they even scored Culdcept Saga, a game that has gotten my non-gamer gf addicted from the demo alone.
And then there's movies. I think I'm spending more time watching movies on my xbox than playing games (at least as *my* game time is concerned, as it's otherwise tied up with Zuma by the aforementioned girlfriend.) Sony had the platform and the clout to make the PS3 into an ultimate movie distribution device, and they're still holding out to do that "someday", but frankly, they've utterly squandered that opportunity, and may now lose it outright to Vudu, a box that costs as much as a PS3!
Firing Kuratagi wasn't enough -- Sony continues to spin gold into shit, and shows no signs of changing course anytime soon.
Boy is it pretty. And smooth. And climbing things is fun for the first half-hour or so.
... okay. Actually everyone's good except for Altair himself, but I have heard worse.
The voice acting is
But seriously, I was looking forward to being immersed in the role of an assassin stalking his target patiently, taking just the right moment to strike, then blazing a bloody trail out of town. But nope, I get to listen to "Thief! I'll have your hand for that!" over and over and over and over and over again until I get sick of it and decide to have my two-dozenth very high-profile swordfight in the middle of the street -- which the guards will mercifully forget all about when I walk away for a couple minutes to climb the next Generic View Point Tower.
Talk about a wasted opportunity.
> I don't like Perl so much anymore, but it had a really cool feature where instead of writing "object.method(args)", you could write "method object args".
This is called "indirect object" syntax, and it's really frowned upon in modern perl code due to the ambiguities it causes. Construction with my $x = new Foo was one of the last holdouts, but even that has largely given way to my $x = Foo->new.