The PARC computer had 3 but in useability studies it found that people perfered the 1 button mouse.
Usability studies from 30 years ago, when people were still having trouble with the abstraction of a video screen instead of working right on a real sheet of paper.
Fewer and fewer people are so unfamiliar with computers that multiple mouse buttons confuse them.
So, when they choose not to play Beethoven or Rammstein on "Lite Hits FM", it's censorship?
Give your head a shake. Censorship (in this obvious context -- boneheaded pedantic dictionary definitions aside) implies the denial of freedom. NO ONE'S freedom is being denied here. People don't have a RIGHT to hear the songs on that list from those radio stations.
How could the common person get any understanding what slashdot's ideology is?
Yes! Everyone, please. Pick a pigeonhole into which every last user on slashdot can be conveniently grouped, and then ensure that your posts never deviate from that philosophy.
Dealing with a collection of people who have different values is too confusing.
If history is any indicator, they'll make one or two expensive expansion devices which will be supported by 1 good game, and 10-15 utterly horrid games that were produced only to take advantage of the "expansion gimmick".
The expansion device will become a hallmark of the true diehard videogame afficionado of the given era.
e.g.:
"Hey, do you remember the (Atari 2600 / Colecovision / Sega Master System / Gamecube)! That was so much fun!"
"Don't waste my time, Dude. I had the (Starpath Supercharger / ADAM / 32X / <Gamecube Expansion>)!"
Not to suggest that helping the authorities out isn't a good idea, but I don't see what the point of this is. No one entered the building and planeted a bomb. They flew a plane into the building. Why would one of the terrorists be in the area at the time of the collision? If they are as organized a group as they appear to be, they wouldn't have risked casualties (assuming they're fundamentalist and not merely suicidal) or the security risks of having a member of the group identified.
The game where those cute little guys can fall off cliffs, be fried by flamethrowers, blown up, drowned, decapitated, and squished?
Don't forget the button that, when clicked, caused all remaining lemmings to stop, hold their hands up to their terrorized shaking heads, and shout "Armageddon!" before exploding.
One afterthought -- if you're looking for a modern sim game, have a look at Sega's F355 Challenge. It's perhaps even more hardcore of a sim that Hard Drivin', and the graphics are... slightly better.
I used to love playing classic driving games (Remember Hard Drivin, anyone?), but now all the arcade driving games are totally, well 'arcade like'..
I think you mean "classic driving game", then. Hard-(and it's sequel Race-)Drivin' were the only simulator-like driving games I can recall. And apart from a few Japanese flight sim games, that was about it for realism in the arcades.
They were never terribly popular. They were very different from anything else in the arcades, and few people wanted to invest the time it took to get good at the game. I did, and got middlin' good at it. (6-700,000 point range on Hard Drivin') I'm still astonished at how far ahead of it's time that game was.
Re:Beauty for beauty's sake makes crappy software
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 2
As a developer, I would add another goal:
Software has to:
Meet user requirements
Require minimum effort on the developer's part.
Even if you're under work-to-rule when delivering a system, that second requirement makes elegance important. Writing thoughtful, elegant code is simply easier in the long run.
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. -- Larry Wall
I imagine it's simply that philosophers aren't "exciting" enough for all the ADD-afflicted American audiences.
Interesting bit from IMDB on the movies:
The title of the source novel in the UK was "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" and the movie will bear the same title for the UK release. All scenes where the stone is mentioned by name will be filmed/looped accordingly to produce two different versions of the film to adapt to the title.
I had to check out what all the fuss was about and read the first book.
Why not go back and read some of Joanne Rowling's English term papers from grade 5, and then use those to comment on whether the 4th book in the series is worthy of the prize.
My home PC seems to keep up quite nicely: Pentium 233MHz, 2MB video card, 64MB RAM.
There is no need for a huge powerhouse PC for almost all non-game, non-DVD home applications to run quite nicely
That "huge powerhouse" he described is the lowest-end new machine you can buy. Try to buy a new machine like yours -- you'll be paying MORE, because the parts are antique and aren't stocked in many places.
People shouldn't have been that impressed with MP3. The concept of lossy compression algorithms was already in common use, in the form of JPEG compression of image data. (Now, I recall how impressed we were with JPEG back in the GIF days...) Getting 10:1 compression was pretty much the expected result of applying the same principles to audio data.
Today, we would be just as skeptical of a new audio algorithm advertising 50:1 compression over MP3 -- which is effectively what these people are asking us to believe, since their ratios are versus existing compression schemes, not raw data.
But given that some large percentage of our genome is identical from person to person, I imagine we could be stored as a diff from a "reference human" in far less space than that.
-1 Troll, +2 insightful. Garriot's vision has always been beyond the technical ability of the engines in his games. It would in fact be a good thing for him to license a solid engine, which he could use to do what he's good at -- the world design & gameplay.
That's what I'm running on at the moment. ...Some people use laptops where RAM isn't as cheap or as easy to obtain as you think.
You don't run a typical machine. Like I said, a low-end machine is a nice extra test, but it's still not relevant to most people. Using an extremely high-end machine is almost as bad, but at least those results get more relevant over time, instead of less.
Am I the only person who finds it daft that my machine runs a web and database server with ease but has trouble running the browser. Isn't this the wrong way round?
Not really. "Server" does make people think of big machines, but that's only because it has to scale. Server software can in general be smaller and simpler than client software, as it is more specialized, and doesn't have to deal with video, input devices, etc. A browser is the worst-case scenario for a client, because they have everything but the kitchen sink built in now, and are VERY "smart" with respect to the traditional client-server model.
No kidding. You might include a low end machine for an extra data point, but having it as the only machine is just plain idiotic. The tests are useless if they're not run on typical hardware. Especially with the price of RAM where it is -- testing apps on memory-contrained machines is pointless.
Fortt's love affair with XP's built in instant message is a good sign his is smoking whatever Ballmer was smoking before the recent Monkey Boy episode.
Here's a link for those who haven't witnessed this incredible spectacle. Warning: make you're you're not sipping coffee over your keyboard while viewing.
Re:Did Katz just subscribe to some LOTD service?
on
Seanbaby.com
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Doesn't matter to me, I think it's worth a story just to introduce it to people who haven't read it yet.
Seanbaby is one of a very few sites that is pee-yourself-laughing funny ALL the time. His articles are the sarcastic writing equivalent of a Jackie Chan fight scene: line after line of constant attack where the sheer creativity is as impressive as the damage dealt, and you're left amazed that it all came out of one head.
Slashdot Mirror
"Choose providers who can handle this sort of load balancing, like Akamai."
p ofthering_fs.zip"><IMG SRC="http://a772.g.akamai.net/7/772/51/a8a1a3fc413 633/www.apple.com/trailers/newline/fellowship_of_t he_ring/images/index_18.gif" WIDTH=99 HEIGHT=23 border="0"></a>
Here's the HTML of the link to the file:
<a href="http://squeeze.sorenson.com/video/fellowshi
Note that they ARE using Akamai -- for the 449 byte image used for the link. It's only the 30 Meg movie that's on the dial-up iMac.
Usability studies from 30 years ago, when people were still having trouble with the abstraction of a video screen instead of working right on a real sheet of paper.
Fewer and fewer people are so unfamiliar with computers that multiple mouse buttons confuse them.
So, will we see U.S. military commanders marrying into influential Afghani families?
Okay, thanks. Move along.
What am I talking about? I'm talking about the Tuskeegee Airmen, The Navajo Code Talkers, and the Japanese "Nisei" who fought in Europe.
Give your head a shake. Censorship (in this obvious context -- boneheaded pedantic dictionary definitions aside) implies the denial of freedom. NO ONE'S freedom is being denied here. People don't have a RIGHT to hear the songs on that list from those radio stations.
Yes! Everyone, please. Pick a pigeonhole into which every last user on slashdot can be conveniently grouped, and then ensure that your posts never deviate from that philosophy.
Dealing with a collection of people who have different values is too confusing.
The expansion device will become a hallmark of the true diehard videogame afficionado of the given era.
e.g.:
"Hey, do you remember the (Atari 2600 / Colecovision / Sega Master System / Gamecube)! That was so much fun!"
"Don't waste my time, Dude. I had the (Starpath Supercharger / ADAM / 32X / <Gamecube Expansion>)!"
"Woah. Hardcore."
Not to suggest that helping the authorities out isn't a good idea, but I don't see what the point of this is. No one entered the building and planeted a bomb. They flew a plane into the building. Why would one of the terrorists be in the area at the time of the collision? If they are as organized a group as they appear to be, they wouldn't have risked casualties (assuming they're fundamentalist and not merely suicidal) or the security risks of having a member of the group identified.
Don't forget the button that, when clicked, caused all remaining lemmings to stop, hold their hands up to their terrorized shaking heads, and shout "Armageddon!" before exploding.
One afterthought -- if you're looking for a modern sim game, have a look at Sega's F355 Challenge. It's perhaps even more hardcore of a sim that Hard Drivin', and the graphics are ... slightly better.
I think you mean "classic driving game", then. Hard-(and it's sequel Race-)Drivin' were the only simulator-like driving games I can recall. And apart from a few Japanese flight sim games, that was about it for realism in the arcades.
They were never terribly popular. They were very different from anything else in the arcades, and few people wanted to invest the time it took to get good at the game. I did, and got middlin' good at it. (6-700,000 point range on Hard Drivin') I'm still astonished at how far ahead of it's time that game was.
Software has to:
Even if you're under work-to-rule when delivering a system, that second requirement makes elegance important. Writing thoughtful, elegant code is simply easier in the long run.
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. -- Larry Wall
Interesting bit from IMDB on the movies:
The title of the source novel in the UK was "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" and the movie will bear the same title for the UK release. All scenes where the stone is mentioned by name will be filmed/looped accordingly to produce two different versions of the film to adapt to the title.
Why not go back and read some of Joanne Rowling's English term papers from grade 5, and then use those to comment on whether the 4th book in the series is worthy of the prize.
There is no need for a huge powerhouse PC for almost all non-game, non-DVD home applications to run quite nicely
That "huge powerhouse" he described is the lowest-end new machine you can buy. Try to buy a new machine like yours -- you'll be paying MORE, because the parts are antique and aren't stocked in many places.
People shouldn't have been that impressed with MP3. The concept of lossy compression algorithms was already in common use, in the form of JPEG compression of image data. (Now, I recall how impressed we were with JPEG back in the GIF days...) Getting 10:1 compression was pretty much the expected result of applying the same principles to audio data.
Today, we would be just as skeptical of a new audio algorithm advertising 50:1 compression over MP3 -- which is effectively what these people are asking us to believe, since their ratios are versus existing compression schemes, not raw data.
But given that some large percentage of our genome is identical from person to person, I imagine we could be stored as a diff from a "reference human" in far less space than that.
-1 Troll, +2 insightful. Garriot's vision has always been beyond the technical ability of the engines in his games. It would in fact be a good thing for him to license a solid engine, which he could use to do what he's good at -- the world design & gameplay.
You don't run a typical machine. Like I said, a low-end machine is a nice extra test, but it's still not relevant to most people. Using an extremely high-end machine is almost as bad, but at least those results get more relevant over time, instead of less.
Am I the only person who finds it daft that my machine runs a web and database server with ease but has trouble running the browser. Isn't this the wrong way round?
Not really. "Server" does make people think of big machines, but that's only because it has to scale. Server software can in general be smaller and simpler than client software, as it is more specialized, and doesn't have to deal with video, input devices, etc. A browser is the worst-case scenario for a client, because they have everything but the kitchen sink built in now, and are VERY "smart" with respect to the traditional client-server model.
No kidding. You might include a low end machine for an extra data point, but having it as the only machine is just plain idiotic. The tests are useless if they're not run on typical hardware. Especially with the price of RAM where it is -- testing apps on memory-contrained machines is pointless.
In IE, at least, you could use an URL like:
http://www.linux.org...(lots of spaces)...@goatse.cx/
and it's indistinguishable on a mouseover from a valid url, because the status bar truncates the url when the spaces make it too long.
Here's a link for those who haven't witnessed this incredible spectacle. Warning: make you're you're not sipping coffee over your keyboard while viewing.
Seanbaby is one of a very few sites that is pee-yourself-laughing funny ALL the time. His articles are the sarcastic writing equivalent of a Jackie Chan fight scene: line after line of constant attack where the sheer creativity is as impressive as the damage dealt, and you're left amazed that it all came out of one head.
Uh, yeah, look out Neal Stephenson, the metaverse has arrived.