Niemand

I once got to visit the work place of a friend's parent, who was a photographer, and while I don't know if food photography was any specialty of that studio, what they were working on at the time was advertising photographs for chocolate. They had a truly impressive pile of various types of the client's chocolates all of which were apparently real. So, at least in that situation heat was apparently not an issue that concerned them.

Originally Posted By: Neossokrass Why can't we have both again? With Firefox or with Safari on Mac OS you can. (Requires Greasemonkey or SIMBL+Greasekit.)

The problem appears to be that UBB gets overexcited and, having already turned the unicode value into an HTML entity, it then escapes the ampersand at the start of the HTML entity itself as an HTML entity, leaving the orphaned remainder to be interpreted as text. ⌥⌘⎋⇧⨯ EDIT: And to make matters even better, it doesn't screw this up when displaying previews of entries which contain non-ascii unicode, but does once the data is stored.

It works just fine for me on Snow Leopard in both windowed and fullscreen modes. I've never reformatted my hard-drive, so If I remember correctly that means it's case-insensitive.

2000 what now?

My experience with Halo is that it's actually quite fun if you're playing with a group of friends, in person, and not taking it too seriously, in which respect it's not all that different from many other games. Playing games against random strangers whom you've never seen before and will never see again seems to make most games a poorer experience.

Quote: You actually can't know what the number is and why you're calculating it to an arbitrary precision at the same time. Ah so if we have a math problem "Find the cube roots of -1: x^3=-1", and we define operators A and B which behave in this manner: A |x> = "Because my math homework is due tomorrow" |x> B |x> = {i, 1/2 + i*sqrt(3)/2, -1/2 - i*sqrt(3)/2} |x> we inevitably find [A,B]!=0. I'd be curious to know if you can derive representations of these operators which correspond to the observables 'value' and 'reason for computation', Alorael. Also, are A and B really hermitian, given that their eigenvalues apparently include English phrases and sets?

Well, you do have to take some advanced courses to learn about relativistic corrections to arithmetic. (Mine have only touched on it so far.) Among other results, it turns out that numbers which are purely real in one reference frame can become complex in other reference frames. That's why grade school students do their math work while sitting quietly at desks; being in the rest frame of the problems makes them behave classically.

Quote: No, I presumed that life on earth would respond in predictable ways. A sentient computer, if it existed, would not, as it would have to be fundamentally different than life on earth; it would be alien to us. Why? You seem to continue on insisting that a computer construction cannot be identical to a physically realized, biological one, yet you have no basis for this. What is there about an existing, terrestrial life-form that couldn't be equivalently described by a computer? Quote: Absolutely incorrect. Are you saying that a dog or cat has different desires, fears, needs, etc, than a human? I don't think so. Counterexample: I have yet to see any dog or cat feel a desire to argue on an internet forum. Perhaps what you mean is that they have the same fundamental needs and desires, survival, procreation, and so on, but that isn't what you've said. An while a computer program would not necessarily feel that same fundamental set of needs, it could be told to. Programs are a blank slate, without required behavior until the writer defines it. If I'm a smart enough programmer to thoroughly define what I mean by 'the behavior of a human', then I can make a program which exhibits exactly that. Quote: I think what you are trying to say is that if, in theory, you could magically add together a bunch (like quadrillions) of molecules exactly in the right place, you would get a cell, and then x6 to the 16 power to get a human body. But then you'd have a human body, not a computer. No, then you would have a description of a human body, stored in a computer. (Having not 'magically' combined molecules, as real human bodies do, but instead simply combined descriptions of molecules, again stored in the computer.) The only physical object would still be a computer. However, that computer would have the knowledge if given a set of described inputs to describe the output that the human body being simulated would generate. It could take an input like 'Hearing the sound of the words "What did you do today"' and compute the body's response to be 'the sound of the the words "I pondered the meaning of life"'. Sitting at the keyboard of a computer set up in this way, you could converse with it just as you would with a human, but there would be no other human, only a computer.

As Nalyd pointed out some while back, there's no reason that life should be required for intelligence. What could a biological computer do that a silicon microchip computer could not? If I've stuck together enough nonliving components, and the resulting complex thinks in the same manner a human does, it seems to me a genuine intelligence rather than the mockery you seem to suggest it would be.

Quote: You are taking two fundamentally disparate things (sentience and computers), and attempting to compare them each other. It just doesn't compute. No I'm not. I'm not saying that computers are equivalent to sentience, I'm saying that computers could be used to implement sentience. We regularly simulate all sorts of things with computers. I have a gamma ray telescope on my computer. Okay, so it doesn't actually catch real gamma rays, but it catches simulated ones and generates the same output as the real telescope it was based on. Parts of that telescope happen to be other computers, but the simulation also encompasses mirrors, photo-multiplier tubes, and a huge volume of air which are the working parts of the telescope. A human brain is made up a of various components with regular behaviors. We don't yet fully understand all of those behaviors, but if we did, we could just program a computer to behave like an appropriate number of neurons with impulses traveling among them. It might not be a very efficient way to implement an artificial intelligence, but if done correctly it would do the same things that a human brain does, and so if a human brain is intelligent, so to is this hypothetical program. How is it that you think your Frankenstein analogy applies?

The difference between us developing computerized intelligences and faster than light spaceships is that we are aware of no physical object, anywhere, that moves faster than light, whereas physical objects which exhibit intelligent thought are well documented (that is, human brains). We don't yet know how to duplicate one, but it's plausible that eventually an AI could be built sort of by brute force, just duplicating the operation of a human brain. We can't duplicate a faster-than-light asteroid in order to say that we've built a faster-than-light spacecraft.

Offensive spells decrease drastically in usefulness at high levels. Their damage output grows slowly as caster skill (and not much faster for spell level), while creatures' hitpoints, and perhaps more importantly, creatures' Dexterity is also increasing. From the docs Dexterity = Level / 3 + 1 for a creature, and Magic Resistance is proportional to DEX/4, so Magic Resistance is proportional to Level/12. This is trivial at low levels, but I think it accounts in part for the often disappointing results of spells directed at high level monsters. I however, like and use offensive Mage spells often; they are very much worthwhile for the vast majority of scenarios which currently exist.

That might work; you'd have to be careful about the range of messages, though, as you only want one door to respond per request. Also, it's important to note that it would take a full round to get a result. You might also have to be careful if you have multiple creatures querying multiple doors; the creatures mustn't overwrite the 'to whom to respond' flag, and depending on how the doors respond (although it wouldn't be a problem if they do so using messages) they also mustn't overwrite each others' responses. I do like the elegance of message in that it provides a way to get the game to figure out which terrain script is the relevant one (and in the same action communicate the signal to it). EDIT: Considering more carefully my own comment above about broadcast range, I think that it may be a significant (but by no means unsolvable) problem to this approach. Suppose the creature is standing on a space with a closed door facing it from each of two (or more) of the directly adjacent spaces. Any message which reaches on door must also reach the other, so the creature need to be able to either make clear which door it is addressing, or receive and distinguish the replies from both doors.

Yeah, now that I'm wider awake I'm fairly certain that there's no practical way to do this. The stumbling blocks include: inability to get the number of the script, if any, on a space, inability to check what script a given terrain script is (is it good 'ol door, or is it wackydoor, which is the same but with memory cell usage mixed up?), and inability to check a scripts memory cells from another script (even though there is a call to blindly set them). I can envision a series of workarounds, but they would involve creating a chunk of code likely running well into the hundreds of lines and running a major risk of hitting the node execution limit. @Ishad Nha: Even that wouldn't be sufficient, as it would only eliminate stumbling block 2, leaving 1 and 3. Thuryl's suggestion is the closest to being practical, I think. It shifts some of the burden into the town script (in the implementation I envision) which would have to be hard-coded to write a big block of door information into a reserved section of SDFs during the INIT_STATE (you would theoretically need 300 flags for this, two coordinates and a lock flag for each of up to 100 doors), which would be rather cumbersome to maintain (although it could in theory be auto-generated by a special tool). Then, the creature script would still have to do a bunch of slow work to search the list stored in the SDFs. That is, the code in the creature script itself would be mercifully short, but would necessarily have a running time linear in the number of doors in the town. SInce the idea was to use this as part of a path finding routine, which would itself be very slow and have a high node execution count, that might be a problem. On the other hand, there might be a clever way to break such a path finding routine into steps, so that it wouldn't go over the allowed node count and would have some interestingly realistic behaviors, like running over to a door first and then checking to see if it is locked.

Sort of thinking out loud here, but I can't determine whether this is easy and I'm forgetting how to do it, or it's just impossible: Supposing that I've discovered that some space in a town is a closed door terrain (suppose here that I'm a creature script), can I find out whether the door is locked?

Arcane Summon often isn't bound by that rule, I'd say, which is also the reason that it's the only summoning spell I use. I don't think I'd endorse it as a good use of a singleton's skill points and spell points, however.

The other problem with Mage Spells specifically is that it isn't really useful above about 3 points unless you have the expensive character trait. So, I would recommend getting 3 points of Mage skill if there's nothing else you need desperately, but not bothering beyond that. That will let you use Bolt of Fire, Light, and Haste, as well as the less useful Spray Acid (also Call Beast, which is useless). Create Illusions is probably the worst of all the summoning spells, I'd argue: relatively high cost, for moderately powerful summons, but any enemy against which you would want to have summoned backup will likely be able to land at least one point of damage, disrupting the illusions instantly.

Many games will run, but not well, at or only a little above the stated minimum requirements, and similarly will run, but not well, somewhat below the stated minimum requirements.

The ornk's name has always given me the impression that it was supposed to be somewhat porcine.

There's no such thing as QT9. Version 7 was the previous one, despite the misleading naming of the newest version. Snow Leopard will optionally install QuickTime Player 7 (which is how i'm continuing to use it), but it isn't all that clear whether use of the Pro features depends on already having a license key (which I did) or not (which I lack convenient means to test). The cost for the Pro version has always been a bit silly, since the underlying QuickTime code is part of the system, and is present and usable whether the Player application presents an interface to it or not. Hopefully, as you say, they'll soon get around to restoring the interface.

Quote: I heard Snow Leopard might have included it for free? The article I read was a bit ambiguous though... or at least my memory of it is. To be honest, I forget to check whether QuickTime Player "X" had any useful export capabilities or not, and it offended me so greatly that I deleted it weeks ago. VLC is the worst media player I have ever used, and I've never looked into its abilities for transcoding. Quote: And produces executables that run properly on Windows? No, it's just Dev-C++ itself that runs. It gets partway through compilation and then one of the underlying GNU tools fails in some very obscure way. That's enough, however, for me to know that my syntax is correct enough to compile. (Actually, now that I've upgraded to OS 10.6 and CrossOver 8.0, it looks like the situation may have changed for the worse, compilation now jams up entirely, rendering Dev-C++ unresponsive.) EDIT: After temporarily restoring QuickTime Player "X" from a backup (thank you, Time Machine), it appears that export capabilities was a major part of what offended me. It has none to speak of. The Save As... and Save For Web... commands give you a dazzling array of options consisting of 'Movie', 'iPhone' (Yes, I'd like to turn this file into an iPhone, please.), and 'iPhone (Cellular)'. So, there's no distinction between QuickTime and QuickTime Pro anymore because the Pro features are basically gone, rather than because everyone gets them.

Is 'Avernum Universe' really appropriate for those?

As mentioned above, there aren't really any major downsides to upgrading to Snow Leopard. There are various little things changed here and there, which include many small improvements, as well as just alterations, which any given person may like or dislike. The disk space reclamation is nice, and the reworked Finder is a good deal more responsive, particularly when dealing with volumes mounted from remote servers. Other than that, it will be a while before there's much software which requires Snow Leopard, but it will happen eventually, as there are many nice toys and conveniences for developers that it adds. For video and audio transcoding I use Quicktime Pro; it cost $30, but is very convenient and due to extensibility via plugins I can transcode just about any format I come across into any other format I I want. (Which in practice means FLV | ogg | AVI | AIF -> MP4 for me.) For Windows games (and other programs) I use CrossOver and CrossOver Games, mainly because I got them for free and there aren't many Windows only games I'd care about playing. They aren't great in that they work well for some things, nominally for some, and not at all for others. Dev-C++ runs fine, while Visual C++ won't run at all; BoA runs well, Serious Sam runs well but has a 3D rendering glitch, and FF7 and Alpha Centauri are unusable because they aren't aware of the keyboard. (The above all refer to CrossOver 7.1, I haven't gotten around to downloading any of the updates since I first got it.) CrossOver is supposed to work a good deal better for the games/program it is specifically tuned to support, but I can't speak from my experience since I've never had or wanted to use any of the software on that list. I would say that If you want to run a lot of Windows programs and be certain that they will run properly, go with Parallels or VM Fusion, plus a copy of Windows. It's a good deal more expensive, but you should get your money's worth. If, like me, you don't care enough to spend significantly on it, you can try CrossOver or just Wine, but expect most attempts to fail.

I've been using the original ClickToFlash since the day day it mysteriously appeared (and disappeared). It is awesome. I forgot to mention above: Snow Leopard does have the guest account over-zealous deletion bug as well, but considering it took over a month for anyone to notice, I'm guessing virtually no one cares, because no one uses the guest account feature in the first place.