For some reason makes me think of the classic Best of's iirc Dragon magazine prints, Blue, Silver, Gold, Platinum (?).
Perhaps that review's distillation evokes the in-between-time of AD&D and 2E.
Possibly, taking the freedom of feats (when you get them), with the Conceptually and Spiritually, of the classes portrayed within those Dragon magazine pages (useful *Abilities* at specific levels), along with the mechanics that were in place prior to the atrocious Unearthed Arcana and awesome Oriental Adventures.
That certainly sounds interesting (at least), although D&D 3E was (at its core) really good too in the beginning. Yet it didn't take long at all for the warts to spread like wildfire.
I really can't see them ditching "feats" - even Paizo's Pathfinder suffers from being saddled with "Feats & Specialty Classes".
I think the key difference between (3E+ Style) Feats & Specialty Classes vs the 2nd-Edition class splat-books boils down to RolePlaying. The former (feats et al) try and cover all possible actions/RP opportunites, whereas the 2E splat books provided settings, optional rules, specialties and additional mechanics --- and since it was limited by "Proficiencies" the whole shebang was (somewhat) kept in check. Feats&SC proved to be popular and took on a life of it's own and added a whole 'nother meta-game with yet another obfuscating layer of min-maxing --- things that other gaming systems build in from the beginning with reasonable limits via Quirks/Talents/Curses/Advantages/Disadvantages.
Definitely a lot of truth there. But... come on - opening a PDF is a breeze (in win8) -- it's just is a full-screen "app". At least we *CAN* open a PDF without Adobe or yet another 3rd party tool.
Mine was in '87, $5 to $6 / hr for selling bingo tickets.
McDonalds pay was less iirc, $4 to $5 / hr. If you were less than 18, there was some loophole where Students could be paid ~3.50.
My decade may be off by 5 years, but that still doesn't change the end result by much ~20% (1.78 instead of 1.96).
There's an interesting chart kicking around that shows wealth distribution/incomes from the 1930's to 2010. There is a decided shift that occurs beginning in the 1970's, but it is much more pronounced from 1980 onwards.
Prior to the shift, the total is split in 5 pieces Top-20%, Next-20%, etc. Each group has nearly the same rate of increase (wealth/income). At some point in the last 30 years that growth - that can be neatly split into pieces falls apart. One has to split out the top 1% or 0.1% and THEN break the groups down into pieces to see the catastrophic effect this redistribution of wealth has had.
My explanation is poor, but along with other economic indicators, including the nearly frozen minimum wage rate, things are not looking all that great for the bulk of the populace in North America.
It's pretty much the same at Google. Contractors have to take 6 months to a year off after an employment term. It would seem any of the tech-sector companies that utilize contractors play the same song and dance.
Especially that last bit of the "elusive promise of a hire" - which just fucks the employee since they wont really be prepared for not having a job at the end of the choreographed BS.
$35,000 was a decent Salary in 1980.
Lets inflate that 2% per year over 34 years. ( x 1.96)
Merely adjusted for inflation, that should be:
~$59,000 (from $30,000) to ~$69,000 (from $35,000)
$5/hr was also the median minimum wage for student-like jobs in 1980-85 (~10,500/yr). Over three decades later most States don't even have a minimum wage at $10 or above.
That's one of the prime reasons I don't bother with most FPS-like games. Movement/directional schemes are almost exclusively tied to your mouse report rate. Many of the Action/RPG's have similar movement schemes as well, unfortunately.
If the Ribbons in MS's various products were even remotely configurable/customizable, they wouldn't nearly be such an atrocity to me at least (maybe others?).
MS has almost always had customizable toolbars, floaty-undockable, multiple toolbars and drop down menu's that hide unused features.
Vs. the Ribbons: Hide/Display and can't change.
If you try and make a custom Ribbon, you can't accomplish the same layout due to placement and sizing restrictions.
Performing an action via Toolbar or Drop-Down menu, doesn't change your menus or interface. Whereas the Ribbon requires - changing to a "specialty" ribbon, finding said function on the ribbon, clicking, changing back to "Home".
Conceptually the ribbon is good, but when it's implementation comes with the complete removal of previous functionality it completely goes against the flexibility that we've become accustomed to over the years, and feels like a slap in the face.
I wish I could still use Opera 12.x - I've run into far too many JavaScript problems. Go to any sitepoint article that has "disqus" comments, each Opera (sitepoint) tab will consume 12-20% of the CPU; other sites are worse than that.
Opera would of been much better off either replacing their JS engine, or Hooking up with FF to bring out a browser that is stable with lots of tabs, and still has a usable (non-lagged UI). FF is getting their with the multi-process Nightly.
I think if Mozilla would stop pulling options out of the browser, and leave the infrastructure in place (Add-On Bar, Status Bar options) without forcing users to recover removed features via Extensions they could very well be on track to be the best browser: both in terms of Stability (with heavy tab usage) and customization --- the new "Customize" option is a page out of Opera's playbook, and its pretty damned cool.
I think if I could of gotten drivers for my last PC upgrade, I might still be running Win2k. Windows 2000 was a Rock-Stable OS that I used from 2004-2010/2011. It didn't take that long to acclimate to Windows 7, so it was a worthy upgrade. Win8 is "ok", I really hate the control it has removed from the user - in so many small ways, along with hiding things - just to make it difficult.
e.g. After applying Win 8.1 update, you have to bounce around until you realize it *IS* possible to login without a fucking MSN/Hotmail/Live/whateverthehell login.
Or when you try to download and run an installer from IE... blocked outright, until you realize clicking on "details" will allow you a button to override that block.
Another poster mentioned discoverability and how Win8 basically shits all over that concept. On that I totally agree. Some things are just a complete pain in the ass.
Windows 8 would be fine if the Start Screen was moderately customizable. Even Windows 7's Start Menu was degraded - you could no longer custom-arrange folders, like you could in pretty much every other MS OS.
The Start Screen - if it allowed SubFolders - when clicked open's a blank Start Screen that you could organize. Assign a hotkey to said SubFolder. Instead we have a single Start Screen, and horizontal scrolling bullshit.
Even Stardock's Fences allows for multiple "desktops" as such - although that too doesn't allow you to organize your Fenced icons at all, making it nearly useless. Along with it's "pin a folder view to the desktop, which sounded really awesome... except it's just a crippled directory view with - yep - no sorting option or any of explorer's Menu's/or toolbars.
I've been testing out ReviverSoft's Start Menu Reviver 2. It's decent, but lacks in a few key areas:
No "normal" right-click context menu on the replaced start-button - which normally shows most of the utilities/tools that a power-user would need to access.
No way to customize where it appears; with a TaskBar on the left, it appears to the right. If one could make it appear on top of the TaskBar, and change the left-column buttons, it would allow for two clicks - without moving the mouse to still open the Start Screen --- instead click the replaced start button, move the mouse to find the Start Screen "button" - if yer actually trying to get to the start screen, instead of Reviver's start menu.
Or even allow assigning Shift+Win to display the Start Screen.
Other than that, I think it's probably better than Stardock's Start8 or even "classic-shell" which has far too many quirks.
November last year, I got a HP 17" (non-touch), AMD A8-5550M, 8GB Ram, 640GB HD, with Windows 8, for $450.
Granted the touchpad mostly sucks, and the keyboard layout is non-optimal even with the NumPad. But it was $450. I just use an external keyboard sometimes, and mouse.
If the 14" even has a SSD - and not just basic flash-ram, a 64GB SSD should be about equivalent with a 500-650GB HD. A touch screen tends to add nearly a $100 to a laptop... but with only 2GB of ram, and a standard dimension screen, I don't see how that can be worth much more than $250-$300.
Monitors are a dead end. Real 3D or "natural resolutions" will come from hologram-like tech. Of course unlikely most of us will live to see that advance.
Opera did this - maybe still does - who knows only the sheep and clueless haven't abandoned that sinking ship. Wasn't a big deal, it was just a handful of bookmarks, and ~9 Speed Dial items, that most "geeks" replaced.
They should of just gone forward with it, bring in some extra non-google sponsored-directly revenue, and let people change the defaults from a clean install as they wish.
I used textbooks.com a few years back. Prices were 1/2 to 1/4 the MSRP on used, and you would get something like 50%+ back for a new book if you returned it at the end of the semester.
Amazon used books is also decent. And you need to keep an eye out for the school's own book drive --- usually run by the student council - for good deals on next semesters books.
What they should do. Is just make windows WORK like every other version in recent memory.
--- The visual appearance/display/theme/skin/whatever should be customizable. Give users the option of the contextual-free flat pastel shit that is Windows 8 Modern, or Win 7 Aero, or WinXP/2K Classic Mode or whatever.
If MS can fix that for Windows 9; actually clean some of the legacy cruft out, things might not be so bad.
I mean can you imagine if the "Uninstall Dialog" actually showed you PROGRAMS you installed... instead of Programs, pre-loaded-bloatware, MS Hotfixes, and "Platforms (.NET, etc)."
Not surprising that SlashDot revenue is decreasing over time. Before I disabled ads completely (flash is off by default) the ads being shown here, apart from the amazon crap that displays stuff I've recently viewed on Amazon, were 3rd rate companies that you wouldn't even see advertising on CNET.
The straw that broke the camel's back, was when Opera prevented a pop-up from Slashdot...when the tab was in the background (not the active tab). Fuck that noise, JS disabled completely on slashdot.
Their videos tended to be on Much Music on Friday nights - late 80's/early 90's. Anything non-mainstream was fair game - it might of even been called "Alternative"-something-or-other. Music from Ministry, Skinny Puppy - were all classified at that point as "Industrial".
IIRC most indie/used CD stores in Nova Scotia - that carried that "kind" of music would also likewise have an "Industrial" section.
The odd time you might find Skinny Puppy in the "Metalz" section - if that was the case - the store in general probably did a poor job categorizing any of their music by genre at all.
I'm sure one could argue over Synth-this-Electro-that, or even put NiN in the same general group...but I wouldn't. Industrial (alternative, being unnecessary) to me (and maybe others) was akin to Metal+ModulatedVoice(sometimes)+CreativeSamples+...
I think one would be hard-pressed to be more specific with a genre for Skinny Puppy, beyond "Industrial" that would accurately fit all the songs on a given album without just shoehorning.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah! verrrrrrry interesting :-)
For some reason makes me think of the classic Best of's iirc Dragon magazine prints, Blue, Silver, Gold, Platinum (?).
Perhaps that review's distillation evokes the in-between-time of AD&D and 2E.
Possibly, taking the freedom of feats (when you get them), with the Conceptually and Spiritually, of the classes portrayed within those Dragon magazine pages (useful *Abilities* at specific levels), along with the mechanics that were in place prior to the atrocious Unearthed Arcana and awesome Oriental Adventures.
That certainly sounds interesting (at least), although D&D 3E was (at its core) really good too in the beginning. Yet it didn't take long at all for the warts to spread like wildfire.
I really can't see them ditching "feats" - even Paizo's Pathfinder suffers from being saddled with "Feats & Specialty Classes".
I think the key difference between (3E+ Style) Feats & Specialty Classes vs the 2nd-Edition class splat-books boils down to RolePlaying. The former (feats et al) try and cover all possible actions/RP opportunites, whereas the 2E splat books provided settings, optional rules, specialties and additional mechanics --- and since it was limited by "Proficiencies" the whole shebang was (somewhat) kept in check. Feats&SC proved to be popular and took on a life of it's own and added a whole 'nother meta-game with yet another obfuscating layer of min-maxing --- things that other gaming systems build in from the beginning with reasonable limits via Quirks/Talents/Curses/Advantages/Disadvantages.
I think it was like an unholy merging of WOW and MtG-CCG-like-mechanics with D&D's setting and backstory.
Definitely a lot of truth there. But... come on - opening a PDF is a breeze (in win8) -- it's just is a full-screen "app". At least we *CAN* open a PDF without Adobe or yet another 3rd party tool.
Mine was in '87, $5 to $6 / hr for selling bingo tickets. McDonalds pay was less iirc, $4 to $5 / hr. If you were less than 18, there was some loophole where Students could be paid ~3.50.
My decade may be off by 5 years, but that still doesn't change the end result by much ~20% (1.78 instead of 1.96).
There's an interesting chart kicking around that shows wealth distribution/incomes from the 1930's to 2010. There is a decided shift that occurs beginning in the 1970's, but it is much more pronounced from 1980 onwards.
Prior to the shift, the total is split in 5 pieces Top-20%, Next-20%, etc. Each group has nearly the same rate of increase (wealth/income). At some point in the last 30 years that growth - that can be neatly split into pieces falls apart. One has to split out the top 1% or 0.1% and THEN break the groups down into pieces to see the catastrophic effect this redistribution of wealth has had.
My explanation is poor, but along with other economic indicators, including the nearly frozen minimum wage rate, things are not looking all that great for the bulk of the populace in North America.
It's pretty much the same at Google. Contractors have to take 6 months to a year off after an employment term. It would seem any of the tech-sector companies that utilize contractors play the same song and dance.
Especially that last bit of the "elusive promise of a hire" - which just fucks the employee since they wont really be prepared for not having a job at the end of the choreographed BS.
A 9" Nook HD, with Google Play now included (without hacking) is $179.99. The older version with 16GB on-board flash can be had for about $50 less.
$35,000 was a decent Salary in 1980.
Lets inflate that 2% per year over 34 years. ( x 1.96)
Merely adjusted for inflation, that should be:
~$59,000 (from $30,000) to ~$69,000 (from $35,000)
$5/hr was also the median minimum wage for student-like jobs in 1980-85 (~10,500/yr). Over three decades later most States don't even have a minimum wage at $10 or above.
Excellent. Now all the social-media pokes and teddy-bears can have collectible value.
That's one of the prime reasons I don't bother with most FPS-like games. Movement/directional schemes are almost exclusively tied to your mouse report rate. Many of the Action/RPG's have similar movement schemes as well, unfortunately.
I thought Nginx was created by Igor Sysoev?
If the Ribbons in MS's various products were even remotely configurable/customizable, they wouldn't nearly be such an atrocity to me at least (maybe others?).
MS has almost always had customizable toolbars, floaty-undockable, multiple toolbars and drop down menu's that hide unused features.
Vs. the Ribbons: Hide/Display and can't change.
If you try and make a custom Ribbon, you can't accomplish the same layout due to placement and sizing restrictions.
Performing an action via Toolbar or Drop-Down menu, doesn't change your menus or interface. Whereas the Ribbon requires - changing to a "specialty" ribbon, finding said function on the ribbon, clicking, changing back to "Home".
Conceptually the ribbon is good, but when it's implementation comes with the complete removal of previous functionality it completely goes against the flexibility that we've become accustomed to over the years, and feels like a slap in the face.
I wish I could still use Opera 12.x - I've run into far too many JavaScript problems. Go to any sitepoint article that has "disqus" comments, each Opera (sitepoint) tab will consume 12-20% of the CPU; other sites are worse than that.
Opera would of been much better off either replacing their JS engine, or Hooking up with FF to bring out a browser that is stable with lots of tabs, and still has a usable (non-lagged UI). FF is getting their with the multi-process Nightly.
I think if Mozilla would stop pulling options out of the browser, and leave the infrastructure in place (Add-On Bar, Status Bar options) without forcing users to recover removed features via Extensions they could very well be on track to be the best browser: both in terms of Stability (with heavy tab usage) and customization --- the new "Customize" option is a page out of Opera's playbook, and its pretty damned cool.
Best Response. Funny and Insightful.
I think if I could of gotten drivers for my last PC upgrade, I might still be running Win2k. Windows 2000 was a Rock-Stable OS that I used from 2004-2010/2011. It didn't take that long to acclimate to Windows 7, so it was a worthy upgrade. Win8 is "ok", I really hate the control it has removed from the user - in so many small ways, along with hiding things - just to make it difficult.
e.g. After applying Win 8.1 update, you have to bounce around until you realize it *IS* possible to login without a fucking MSN/Hotmail/Live/whateverthehell login.
Or when you try to download and run an installer from IE... blocked outright, until you realize clicking on "details" will allow you a button to override that block.
Another poster mentioned discoverability and how Win8 basically shits all over that concept. On that I totally agree. Some things are just a complete pain in the ass.
The Start Screen - if it allowed SubFolders - when clicked open's a blank Start Screen that you could organize. Assign a hotkey to said SubFolder. Instead we have a single Start Screen, and horizontal scrolling bullshit.
Even Stardock's Fences allows for multiple "desktops" as such - although that too doesn't allow you to organize your Fenced icons at all, making it nearly useless. Along with it's "pin a folder view to the desktop, which sounded really awesome... except it's just a crippled directory view with - yep - no sorting option or any of explorer's Menu's/or toolbars.
I've been testing out ReviverSoft's Start Menu Reviver 2. It's decent, but lacks in a few key areas:
November last year, I got a HP 17" (non-touch), AMD A8-5550M, 8GB Ram, 640GB HD, with Windows 8, for $450. Granted the touchpad mostly sucks, and the keyboard layout is non-optimal even with the NumPad. But it was $450. I just use an external keyboard sometimes, and mouse.
If the 14" even has a SSD - and not just basic flash-ram, a 64GB SSD should be about equivalent with a 500-650GB HD. A touch screen tends to add nearly a $100 to a laptop... but with only 2GB of ram, and a standard dimension screen, I don't see how that can be worth much more than $250-$300.
Monitors are a dead end. Real 3D or "natural resolutions" will come from hologram-like tech. Of course unlikely most of us will live to see that advance.
Opera did this - maybe still does - who knows only the sheep and clueless haven't abandoned that sinking ship. Wasn't a big deal, it was just a handful of bookmarks, and ~9 Speed Dial items, that most "geeks" replaced. They should of just gone forward with it, bring in some extra non-google sponsored-directly revenue, and let people change the defaults from a clean install as they wish.
I used textbooks.com a few years back. Prices were 1/2 to 1/4 the MSRP on used, and you would get something like 50%+ back for a new book if you returned it at the end of the semester. Amazon used books is also decent. And you need to keep an eye out for the school's own book drive --- usually run by the student council - for good deals on next semesters books.
Yes! And get rid of the import-restriction on sugar while they're at it.
What they should do. Is just make windows WORK like every other version in recent memory.
--- The visual appearance/display/theme/skin/whatever should be customizable. Give users the option of the contextual-free flat pastel shit that is Windows 8 Modern, or Win 7 Aero, or WinXP/2K Classic Mode or whatever.
If MS can fix that for Windows 9; actually clean some of the legacy cruft out, things might not be so bad.
I mean can you imagine if the "Uninstall Dialog" actually showed you PROGRAMS you installed... instead of Programs, pre-loaded-bloatware, MS Hotfixes, and "Platforms (.NET, etc)."
Not surprising that SlashDot revenue is decreasing over time. Before I disabled ads completely (flash is off by default) the ads being shown here, apart from the amazon crap that displays stuff I've recently viewed on Amazon, were 3rd rate companies that you wouldn't even see advertising on CNET.
The straw that broke the camel's back, was when Opera prevented a pop-up from Slashdot...when the tab was in the background (not the active tab). Fuck that noise, JS disabled completely on slashdot.
I thought I recognized her name... Alice Hill
--> http://www.alicehill.com/
--> http://www.realtechnews.com/
Which is in some way connected to http://www.digitalreviews.net/
Their videos tended to be on Much Music on Friday nights - late 80's/early 90's. Anything non-mainstream was fair game - it might of even been called "Alternative"-something-or-other. Music from Ministry, Skinny Puppy - were all classified at that point as "Industrial".
IIRC most indie/used CD stores in Nova Scotia - that carried that "kind" of music would also likewise have an "Industrial" section.
The odd time you might find Skinny Puppy in the "Metalz" section - if that was the case - the store in general probably did a poor job categorizing any of their music by genre at all.
I'm sure one could argue over Synth-this-Electro-that, or even put NiN in the same general group...but I wouldn't. Industrial (alternative, being unnecessary) to me (and maybe others) was akin to Metal+ModulatedVoice(sometimes)+CreativeSamples+...
I think one would be hard-pressed to be more specific with a genre for Skinny Puppy, beyond "Industrial" that would accurately fit all the songs on a given album without just shoehorning.