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There is no actual difference between story telling and gameplay. In that they are both experiences with the exact same structure (This one). Else it would not be fun.

Only that one is formed by defining generalized laws that allow movement inside the fun area, while the other is pre-scripted to the mindset of the writer.

The whole discussion about games “lacking stories” is pointless. Games are a generalization of pretty much everything we do for fun. Films, stories, art, sports, interesting contraptions, toys, learning... they are are subsets and aspects of what a game is.
So instead, it’s more correct to say, that stories lack freedom. And actually there is a free gradient between the two.

Also there is no big need to describe gameplay. As it’s actually always coming down to being the exact same thing. As in all stories too. That pattern is well known. Since the mechanics must work in that certain way, to be a game (or story) and to be fun.

The reason is, that they never learned how to do that.

But luckily there’s a book that can solve that:
http://navid.radiantempire.com/pix/Lustiges/TfTfD.png

...when their detector’s alarm goes off, and in big red letters displays the IP addresses of their own network as the main terror threat to the nation. ;)

Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the biggest terrorist in the world?
Dang! I just shattered like that... ;)

...it’s just that you’re so ugly that you’re ashamed. ;)

I mean who wants to look at that b-e-a-utiful teethwork? Or the wonderful curvature of those two-ton cheeks?

Now of course you can also attack my country, but then I’d have to show you this: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pix/Lustiges/deutschland_fick_ja.jpg :D

Were they also jewish and part of a clan for tolerance and understanding?

Basement cat would totally buy that.

Looks like another limited system based on standard notational systems. Nowadays I prefer music automatons that create highly dynamic loops. Stuff that you can build in Reaktor, and that you control with lots of MIDI controllers and analog inputs (read: microphone, instruments). My music scores would look like those of Aphex Twin: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/pix/Lustiges/aphex_twin.jpg ^^

Frankly, tab bars are just a stopgap for crappy window managers.
And buttons? Sorry, but they are just horribly inefficient. because they are a very small area that you have to hit, and are usually non-self-explanatory images.
Mouse gestures are a much better solution. So much, that my Firefox right now does not have any navigational buttons at all:
http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/my-firefox.png
(The Icons on the right are just state displayers (they highlight, when enabled), and mostly associated to sidebar panels. I can’t remember clicking on them. Too inefficient.)

P.S.: I also banished the window bar buttons you see on that screenshot. They can’t compete with being able to Win-Click anywhere on the window, to do those actions.

What does the Bible have to do with reality, or history?

Also, for the quality of a story, feel-good or screwups/holes is not the question. If you take a scale of the greatness of an experience (which is a superordinate concept to feel-good vs screwups/holes), and render a graph over time, that’s what you should get, for it to be the optimal interest curve: http://navid.radiantempire.com/kb/9/65558.php

IANARCD (I am not a roller coaster designer), but I'll bet if I were I would disagree with you. A good roller coaster will take the rider through anticipation and build-up, followed by some excitement, then a few twists and turns, more build-up, more excitement, leading to a (hopefully) fulfilling conclusion.

That is not a story. That’s just an excitement curve. Something that is common for all entertainment experiences. Here is my primitive (non-auto-recursive) attempt at drawing such a graph for 3 levels: http://navid.radiantempire.com/kb/9/65558.php (With a bit of German. The Google translation makes no sense.)
A story is more. Roller coaster designers would not disagree, as I have the whole concept of those parts of an experience from Jesse Schell, who used to be a roller coaster designer, and is (among other things) at the Entertainment Technology Center of the Carnegie Mellon university nowadays.

Not in the address bar. Which is why i disabled the useless space-taking separate search field, and am using this layout: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/my-firefox.png (No, I don’t have to black out anything. I made sure to kill the session and you can get the e-mail anyway. ^^)

P.P.S.: Oh great. I linked to my staging server, which you can never reach. Try this one instead: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/tnc.html

I’ll claim to be a black Mexican lesbian far-right jew, including the appropriate profile photo.

Let me look in the pirate dictionary...

AAR
AARR
AARRARR
AARRGNAH
AARRGGG... ah, there it is.
AARRGGG: Screamed right between sliding down a rope, and bleeding to death on the saber of an enemy pirate that you landed on.

Nothing. I repeat: Nothing beats Qalculate!! (It’s so hot, Firefox’s spell checker suggests “Ejaculate”!)
If you go any bigger, you “explode” into a math suite, and not a calculator anymore.

Ignore the silly screenshot with the “button” view. Most calculator software tries to imitate a physical calculator, with buttons and LED displays. Which is just an EPIC FAILure in UI design. This screenshot shows a real usage example of Qalculate!:
http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/Haskell-Synth-Entwicklung.png (The BG contains a Haskell programming editor and a sound analyzer. Yes, I’m still a noob at this. ;)

Actually, Dreamweaver is quite good at dynamic layouts and assisting you in proper website creation. The HTML is usually pretty clean.

But static HTML is so last millenium. ^^

Look at the code of that page (Warning: This was never finished, so expect bugs.), and count the number of HTML tags in there, compared to the actual content. ;))

I just founded the NRLA, you insensitive clod!
We plan to merge with the GaBJeKTaU.

Nah, I think joining this group still beats that.

(In case you're unsure: The tolerance and understanding part is the objectionable part. ;)

Bah. GNAA is SO out! These guys on the other hand, are all the craze right now.

Wait until he joins the Gay Black Jewish Klansmen for Tolerance and Understanding!

I agree that classic cars have (emotional) value for most of us.

But your argument makes no sense. By that rule, child raping chainsaw murdering Arabian black Jewish gay Nazi women would be the best, and make us smile the most, because they are so rare. ;)

It rather is, because they are a piece of old art. Designs that you can't buy anymore. Technology that shows us what we once did badly or even better.

There's no reason to not include the crash test into that beauty.

Can we now stop the web economy bullshit generator and go back to news for actual nerds instead of pointy-haired "IT deciders"?

(Apropos, I did start a WebOS (warning: never finished alpha version) back in 2003/2004, so if there ever would have been a time for it, we (or at least me) would have long passed it. ;)

You never got the idea, did you?

The idea is to be able to grow your own tools for your needs, adapt the computer to *you*, actually *use* the computer for its intended purpose (a *programmable* universal machine), instead of just playing with the programs of others.

I for example had the wish to say that I want to keep a song on a online radio station *after* I heard it. So I hooked up StreamRipper and a tiny script to delete all files by default, except for when I wanted to keep them. Over time thin grew into a full-featured tool to keep songs, even when ads were between them, also while the track was playing, with Amarok integration, and the ability to run Amarok and StreamRipper on two different computers, with the stream redirected trough an ssh tunnel.
Try that with Windows!! :)

And that is why I could not live without the a Linux/Unix system anymore. I'd feel crippled.

They are both downloads. the only difference that with one, it stays longer on the computer. So the question should be: "How long do you (want to) keep your music?". Which of course is dependent on the music itself.

I listen to Shoutcast radios, for which I happen to have made a StreamRipper extension to decide to only keep what I want to keep, before or after I listened to it. With remote control, and Amarok integration. It's working well for me, but feel free to do with it whatever you like: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/armSR4amarok&listen.stream.tar.bz2
The only rule — apart from the GPL license — is, to tell me when you improved it, or found a bug. :)
(There. That is the power of Linux! Have an idea? Let it grow! Let it grow around you. Yeah, that should be the Linux slogan: "Linux: Let your ideas grow!" Or something alike. :)

Yeah, the shame of avoiding DLL- *and* dependency hell crushes me. Thank you for understanding it.
And that horribly beautiful desktop of mine*... I mean how can I live with that? I should shoot myself right now, in front of an Apple shrine.

___
* Aliasing enabled to make it harder to read the shameful things. ;)

Hey, so the old name of Captain Obvious in "Nostradamus"?
Did he also work for Fürst Bismark, and at that time, look like this?
http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/pix/danke_hauptmann.jpg

Well, I already did persistent JavaScript-only connections in 2003-2005. I used an object tag, and then requested a page. that page did never end, and continued to include new JSON snippets which immediately executed. When it got too big, the response ended with a location.refresh().
A second object tag included a form with a "never ending" POST.

But it did not work so great, so I changed it to single "packets" (form submissions and receivings). Which also allowed them to be done in a single object tag.
Then I went so far to abstract it into a network socket and lay a file system on top of it. The server was PHP. (Company requirement.)
I even had a compression and a encryption module. But since the whole thing was already very slow, and there was no actual point to it, I left them out.

The result was this mock "OS" including a "kernel", a widget library, and starting to get what you would expect from a OS.
Mind you that this is a early alpha, because the project got canceled when I left the company. Nobody else in the company understood or cared to understand how it worked.
Since the company is officially really really dead, I think it's OK to put it out there. :)

Yay. iPhone fanbois got mod points again. Sorry fanbois. Fact is fact is fact.

Go on. Compare to cold hard data.
Take a list of features (eg from Xonio), including the quality (eg camera resolution, memory, etc.) and the freedoms (eg to install what you want, have Java, have no jail, etc). And then compare it to the latest and best from Nokia, Samsung etc.
Now if the newest iPhone comes even pretty close in features, you can come here, and I pay you a couple of beers!

Then, compare their prices! Now if the iPhone is also cheaper, THEN I'll pay you a whole evening of going out and drinks.

Now do the same with the iMac PC compared to my custom built PC, and the iPod MP3 player compared to a set of MP3 players of my choice out of the local electronics store. Feature- and price-wise.

It may be hard to believe from inside the reality distortion bubble you created to be able to justify being the idiot who bought those things, but they are still a very bad deal.

And if you ignore cold hard facts, then maybe you can be persuaded by her: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/pix/lolcats/FactCat.png ^^

I agree with everything, *but* the "bleepy shit" thing. Go tell that to Aphex Twin's face. ^^

You are new to Linux desktops, are you?
Here, looks literally are exchangeable. And I mean everything. If you can see it, you can change it. Opposed to most other OSes.
So the look really is a very bad indicator for the overall quality. It's more an indicator for the stylistic competence of the person who chose the visuals for your distribution.
My theme for example, is a wild mix of KDE, Gnome and Compiz Fusion. Can you see anything that resembles anything even close to the original design of those packages? :D (Yes, I left some things in the original style, because I liked them, and left anti-aliasing off, so you can't read everything. :P)

Wow, respect! I know how incredibly hard it is to get back on track! You have my full respect! And from the notion of "quackery", I know that you really know what psychatry is. ^^
I hope they soon are able to base psychology on a proper neurologic foundation, and can then throw away what we call psychatry, and many of thosp pseudo-therapies of psychology, and actually cure people, instead of just muting their brain functionaliy or talking and talking without results.

About the music: If you think your stuff is crazy, you clearly do not know Aphex Twin. check out the videos to "Windowlicker" and "Come to daddy", then the teaser video "Rubber Johnny" and the track "Omgyjya Switch 7" from the album "Druqs". Then look at this picture: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/pix/aphex_twin.jpg

And he is called one of the greatest geniuses of electronic music!

Then think about stuff like Marilyn Manson or Eisregen (German gothic psycho "band").

All in all, I think you're good, no matter what music you do. :D

Look up the track "The Wrongstars -- Drink 'til She's Beautiful". I only has one paragraph of text in it, but that one describes it perfectly. And in a fitting Russian (think GTA4, but stronger) accent too:

(Click for the audio sample.)

She dansed, an she dansed,
an I drrank, and I drrank,
an den she was BEAUUUTIFUL!

Look up the track "The Wrongstars -- Drink 'til She's Beautiful". I only has one paragraph of text in it, but that one describes it perfectly. And in a fitting Russian (think GTA4, but stronger) accent too:

(Click for the audio sample.)

She dansed, an she dansed,
an I drrank, and I drrank,
an den she was BEAUUUTIFUL!

Look up the track "The Wrongstars -- Drink 'til She's Beautiful". I only has one paragraph of text in it, but that one describes it perfectly. And in a fitting Russian (think GTA4, but stronger) accent too:

(Click for the audio sample.)

She dansed, an she dansed,
an I drrank, and I drrank,
an den she was BEAUUUTIFUL!

Look up the track "The Wrongstars -- Drink 'til She's Beautiful". I only has one paragraph of text in it, but that one describes it perfectly. And in a fitting Russian (think GTA4, but stronger) accent too:

(Click for the audio sample.)

She dansed, an she dansed,
an I drrank, and I drrank,
an den she was BEAUUUTIFUL!

Well, I think this graphic explains it very well.

Copying a floppy NEVER was "piracy", and never will be!

First and foremost, it as fair use.

THEN, in case you are giving it to someone, without having a license to do so, is copyright infringement. Which has nothing do to with stealing, killing, sinking ships, or anything like that!

And then it STILL does not hurt anybody, when that other person would not have bought it anyway.
Which by definition makes it no crime.
A real crime has to hurt somebody in some way. Everything else is no crime, but a law that only exists to give some people an unfair advantage.
Which makes that law, that is hurting the people that are punished because of it, by definition a crime.

This is how things really look. But it seems you have already bought their newspeak dictionary.
Which makes me want to sink some "ships", killing some people. Especially those with the **AA on their flags.

Read my words: OBJECT tag!

I used it exactly like the video tag back in the days. No need to specify any plugin. No need to even choose between video, audio, etc. Just use

<object data="my_video.mkv">Your browser can not display MKV videos. If your computer can play it, try <a href="my_video.mkv">downloading it</a>.</object>

and it works with any plugin that supports the mime type of that data. Optionally you can define that mime type yourself in the object tag (in case the web-server does not know it). And if you want, yo can even define an interpreter executable, including its mime type. (This allows for java viewers for example.)

You can even do something like AJAX with it, by making it one pixel big, invisible, and then send POSTs by loading a page with a form into the object, input the data via JavaScript, submit the form, and then run a callback in the resulting page, to load in the JSON data. I find it even more efficient than XML requests. The only problem is, that you have to serialize the posted data yourself. (But the toSource() function helps much with this!)
I did this back in 2004, and even before (when it did only work in the old Mozilla), as you can see in this early Alpha that I got running again.

Well, I think the most important thing will be, how strict the browsers will actually be.
If they are just as strict as with XHTML 1.1, then we will get easily parsable, nicely crawlable (eg. by Google) and always properly rendered pages, no matter if it's XML or not. (Although it is sad, that it is not SGML anymore, as I read.)
If they are as "forgiving" (read: crappy messes of interpreters that foster laziness and stupidity) as HTML 4 Transitional browser engines, then we can say goodbye to Google's search quality, to consistent and performant rendering, and to quality in general.

I with there were a markup language, with all the best of SGML, XML and XHTML 2, updated for today.
HTML 5 is by no definition even close to that. (A separate video and audio tag? For *what*? We already have a perfectly flexible object tag, as you can see in in this early alpha that I made in 2004: http://navid.radiantempire.com/windogs/ [Try the file named "Lycos" in the folder. It does not even use AJAX to use the file system on the server, because THAT WORD DID NOT EXIST BACK THEN! :])

Ask this cat: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/pix/lolcats/funny-pictures-basement-cat-listens-to-backwards-messages.jpg
She can help you with that.

What? Moo?

No, it was his German brother: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/pix/danke_hauptmann.jpg

Who would have thunk of that?

And guess what: This is the case for all websites, which do not sell real products or services that are worth money.

I also add: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/danke_hauptmann.jpg

Yes, it might have a good performance and be stable. But, *yuck*, why does it have to be so butt-ugly? ^^
I mean the window border, and the whole widget set look like Windows 3.1, with an even worse color scheme.
You might say it is not that important. And I agree. But it looks like it was intentionally made to look ugly and outdated.

Compare this to my desktop: http://navid.radiantempire.com/pub/Desktop-2009.0-cube.png
(I only turned it that way, and disabled anti-aliasing, to quickly anonymize everything. Usually I just use the cube to have the 4 desktops, and to pseudo-lock the system by turning it to the upper screen. [Good luck finding the custom keyboard/mouse combo to unlock it or to get to a console. ^^])

I am no fan of useless effects. But I must say, the green, semi-transparent summer-park-feeling really pleases the eyes, and fits the early heat of spring nicely. I am an emotionally sensitive person, and the design influences the feeling when I work with something. So no offense, but with the style of MaXX, I would get depressive.

P.S.: Yes, the bottom image is Larry the cow. Bonus points for reading the caption. :)