Hannibal

Man I wish I had a gig of memory :(We're getting a bit offtopic, but ah well :) :?: Have you tried running it with even 256mb RAM? :P Runs fine on my laptop which runs 384MB RAM. It also runs Ubuntu Linux, that might make the difference. :P

Wait, where is Web 2.0? Need-more-buzzwords keyword please? This is the new millenium, you want to be learning Ruby on Rails, or Python, or JavaScript. Perl if you must, C is always handy, but stay away from Java and PHP because they'll be more dead than Latin before you can say "taxonomy" 3 times in a row without breaking your tongue. Welcome to the new web, where a site without Ajax, Fitt's law and a spiffy new declarative XML framework (OpenLaszlo, Backbase, Javeline, Google Webkit, etc.) is a LOSER! You don't know XSLT? Wait, how did you get that job again? -- Disclaimer: There was only a tiny bit of sarcasm in the above. And in this, for that matter.

Umm... so... do you always misspell NSA as NASA? Never mind the fact that you misunderstood the entire book, from what I can tell (or just didn't actually read it). The spoiler someone else in this topic gave was much better than yours (albeit not entirely accurate either, at least it wasn't as skewed as this). And GhostRanger is right - the books are written in accessible English, it's not Brown's fault that someone happened to think they were good enough to be published, and then lots of people decided they were good enough to read. The impact of the Da Vinci Code has been much larger than the facts underlying it deserve (very few of them are actually facts), but that doesn't change the fact that it's thought to be an entertaining read by lots of people. I don't see how that is any reason to hate it. The fuss the church AND the atheist fanatics going "see! see!" are making is way over the top, but that's media and extremists for you.

I'd be ready to describe you as being insane for wanting to run anything other than Mac OS on a Mac... Anyway. On Linux, check how 'nice' the java process is being (priorities and such). You should be able to get a slightly better performance that way. You might also be able to do the same on Mac, I'm not sure. Have you tried using different browsers on Mac? (Safari, Camino, iCab, Firefox, etc.)

Opera has that feature stock :P Firefox will too, in the next release.

I doubt many of the folks in here are perl junkies. Doesn't mean they're not out there, just that there won't be many of them around here. I'm not too good at perl, and besides, haven't played RS for... 2 years now. So it's not so useful to me - but I don't doubt there will be people who appreciate it in due time :-)

There are plenty of conservative Christians that condemn gambling though, for it's done for greed, and greed is a Bad Thing . Googling around will show lots of people calling themselves "Real Christians" and condemning gambling to various degrees.

I've seen people run Ubuntu on their PSP. You can run a webbrowser on Ubuntu. You can run Java on Ubuntu. You can run Runescape in a webbrowser with Java support. Conclusion: it's possible.

Hrm, I don't entirely agree with your definition of Kantianism though... Kant wrote that you should always do the thing which, by inference, you would want to become a universal law. For example, if you are faced with the decision to lie or speak the truth, you would speak the truth because you'd want it to be a universal law that everybody would always speak the truth, and you would definitely not want it to be a universal law that everybody was always free to lie when they wanted to. According to wikipedia: "Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature."

There are dozens already, and they actually tried adding it in time for Firefox 1.5 but failed because there were too many problems with it (memory leaks and whatnot - they tried integrating an existing extension). Either way, it will be in Firefox 2 (Ben Goodger just blogged about it). Transparent PNG support mostly works. It's not entirely up to the level of some other browsers, I think, but it's better than IE6 and should handle your average transparent PNG's okay. They fixed some css bugs, but by far not all of them.

I've used IE7. I'm a Firefox fan, I'll admit that, so there's no need to take anything I say too serious. However, I wrote some general criticism on http://gijs.codingo.org/blog/2006/02/ie-7/ . Rendering seems to have improved slightly over IE6 but is in general still pretty crap compared to Opera/Firefox/Safari engines.

So, I got a pcmcia card for my linux laptop. I got one with an Atheros-G chipset. There are good drivers for this card under Linux (http://www.madwifi.org), and I would really recommend the chipset - it's been able to do everything I've asked from it for now, including logging in on heavily secured wireless on my university for which special software was required. So yeah.

So. In Iran, a few homosexual people were hung (as in, killed by being hung) in public, in a football stadium to be precise. Suppose there were 10000 people present and just 5 murdered that way. These 10000 people had a brilliant time, popcorn and everything. Does that make it morally right to sacrifice those five lives for the entertainment of thousands? Another example. Suppose you are a doctor in a hospital. There are two patients you can choose to help, but due to time constraints you can only help one. The first patient lives alone, looks repulsive, does repulsive things, has no job, and is generally not a very well-accepted member of society. He has no friends or relatives. The other patient is the opposite of that - he's married, has children, lots of friends, and organizes fairs to help the poor in the neighbourhood and such. Now, suppose you have to operate on both of these men. For the repulsive, single man, you have a 99% chance of saving his life. For the family man, you have a 1% chance of saving his life. If you don't operate on one of them, they face certain death. What do you pick? Utilitarianism makes these questions hard, while if you would consider any human life valuable, the decision would be obvious.

Mm, so I thought it was ALICE, but it turned out I mixed up - ALICE was based on ELIZA. ALICE dates back to 1995, according to Wikipedia (it has articles about both).

It's called ELIZA, and it was made in 1966, so not quite 5-6 years ago :-).

The code seems very inefficient though. You loop over each square 9 times... A more efficient way would be to use lists and splice those, but I don't know how easy that is in C++. Another way would be to have a fixed number 9! (which happens to be 3628800) and divide by the number in each field. In the end you should have 1 remaining, and if you don't, something is wrong :) . You would need to take care to catch errors or allow for floating point numbers in the variable though (so not just integers), or the division screws up if it goes bad :)

Sorry to hear about your loss Sluggy :(

Boom!

IQ is such a biased measurement utility anyway. Though I guess internet tests fall in the most idiotic category of them, even official tests are highly influenced by culture and education - in other words, they don't really give you any idea how 'intelligent' someone is, as in brain capacity or whatever. They just tell you how well someone is able to make a test like that.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Irfanview Best. Image converter. Ever. That is, if you don't have Photoshop. If you also want to do image editing, try http://www.gimp.org

APT (Debian's package management thing, also on Ubuntu and I think on Fedora as well) takes care of dependencies. It's brilliant, really :-)

apt-get upgrade And whereas you need two reboots to install a game that requires a new version of directX, and possibly another to get a better driver for your graphics card, most package managers on Linux do all of that for you, automatically, without a restart. True. Macs are easier to use for your average Grandma too, so they'd probably get to the market before someone has finally managed to create a usable version of Linux. Like, newb-usable.

Did you just say you liked Java? :|

Yay! What about all the other people whining? :)

So do we have a real source for this supposed science fair project? Because right now it fits perfectly in my "heard it before, known to be false" bin.