Macros for MUDs have been around for *ages*. I guess the only thing stopping MMORPGs from getting macros is that the games companies concerned own the code to their MMORPGs and aren't generally keen on anyone else knowing the hooks into it.
On the same lines, there's no point studying literature or film, bcos it's all just "this book is good because it had nice pictures with it" or "this film is good because it had lots of explosions". Or user interface design, bcos that's just "yeah, it looks kinda pretty".
Resolving *why* something is fun is a *huge* bastard topic, and it's one that most games companies aren't currently concerned with bcos they're too busy copying each other or remaking the standards - more FPS, more platform games (in 3-D now instead of the old sideways scrollers), more sports sims, etc. Please remember that The Sims was written off bcos no-one in management thought it would be "fun". There still isn't a definitive answer on what makes something "fun".
The analogy to film is pretty accurate. 80-some years back, film had been going for roughly 20 years, and there still wasn't any studied answer on what made a "good" film. Now computer games have been going for roughly 20 years (disregarding "Colossal Caves" and similar, which never reached a mass audience), so these guys will very much be pioneering their field in the same way film students were, way back when film studies first started.
Learning physics or poli sci has little or no relevance to being a good programmer. The industry would be *very* poorly served by your people.
Software, as with all other engineering and science disciplines, is a fundamentally practical subject. You can parrot-learn all the theory in the world, but it won't teach you a damn thing if you can't apply it. I know of one person on my course (electronic engineering) who by the fourth year still couldn't design a simple circuit using the stuff taught on the course, but she graduated with a 2:1 all the same (that's an English grade: English degrees graduate with "First", "Upper Second" (2:1), "Lower Second" (2:2), "Third", bare "Pass" and "Fail). She was a great parrot-learner, but I would no way want to be working with her after uni!
That's the reason all sci and eng courses have projects. They're to get you to internalise what you've learnt, in the context of your chosen career progression. Projects *are* to teach you about what you'll need after uni, bcos they're the last chance you'll get to make big mistakes without any major impact. Sure, playing the games won't teach you about the programming, but it'll give you the context in which you use your knowledge. Just using a PC won't teach you how to code a user interface, but it'll give you a damn good idea of what works and what doesn't.
Personally, I'm disturbed by the currently-fashionable view that university is not to actually teach you anything. If you're not supposed to go to uni to learn stuff, what the hell use is it?! I don't buy the whole "you go to uni to learn how to learn" thing - you go to uni to learn the basics of a subject. You won't learn everything there, but you'll learn enough that you can build on that foundation.
Do you always throw all your existing code away when you move to version 2 of an app?
If you know for sure that you're *never* going to change to a new platform, then great. However the reality of corporate software tools is that they don't last a short time - rather, they hang around for ages bcos the management won't approve money to create a new tool when the old one kind of does the job. Given this context, multi-platform support makes sense, bcos you don't know how long any given platform will be around.
Also remember that this isn't just corporate apps. A lot of ppl on/. have their own pet projects - they're writing programs which fill some need they have and which they intend to release as Open Source. (I'm one of these - check the link for details of my "GunFire" project. Shameless plug!;-) If you've written a program to fill a niche and you think that a whole load of other ppl could benefit from using your program, it'd be a bit silly to restrict yourself to a single platform. Instead you plan your design so you can make your code multi-platform, and then you can reach the widest possible target audience.
If it's got 32K+ of games, it must either be PC-based, Mac-based or based on some obsolete platform such as the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, etc. (Note that it's significant all of these platforms have keyboards, so gamers can write games, instead of being reliant on a company to write them for you. No console ever got as many games as computers with keyboards.) Java/Flash may be an option, but the only Java/Flash games available are little web-based things - they are not anything that anyone would pay for when compared to modern PC/console games.
It is not physically possible to create 32K+ of games before release - most companies are lucky to get a half-dozen games by the time their console ships. Let's assume they're basing it on a PC or a Mac and getting legacy games, since any other system will suck so badly by current standards that it's not even worth talking about.
So it's based on a PC/Mac, and it's a console giving you access to the zillions of existing PC/Mac games, plus access to all the games written by hobbyists and uploaded to servers. WTF does that give us which we don't already have?
I've had a look round at PC pricing. I can now buy a low-end PC for £300 which has enough horsepower to do desktop stuff, and can run older games such as Q3 at a reasonable rate. If that's all these guys are giving us, why the hell should anyone buy a console?
Re putting a money slot in it, if I'm going to pay for an arcade machine then I want to be playing an arcade game. No-one will pay to play Solitaire on this thing. The only thing you might get money for is "adult content", and even then you'd never make it bcos (a) you wouldn't get ppl browsing for that in public places, and (b) that £300 PC will browse quite happily and pull up more adult content than you can shake a stick (or anything else;-) at.
What, no John Wyndham (Midwich Cuckoos, Chrysalids, Day of the Triffids, etc)? No William Horwood (two Duncton Wood trilogies, although the first book is the best)?
I've so far avoided L Ron Hubbard's stuff on principle. I don't want to fund a radical Christian cult, thanks all the same.
Terry Brooks is very much "Tolkein-Lite" in his Shannara books. The first two Shannara books are pretty good (Sword and Elfstones), the rest are sequel hell. IIRC he's got some new series out ("Dark Knight" or something) - anyone got feedback on that?
King's Dark Tower series is great for the first three books, but Wizard and Glass drops the average standard a bit - it's OK, but it's not as sharp as the other three.
And you're a bit previous with putting Order of the Phoenix on the Harry Potter list, aren't you?;-P
Hell, if you can start with something which the reader thinks is a cliche and then surprise the reader with something they really weren't expecting, isn't that the *definition* of good writing?
As a quick PS, if you check the back of "Snow Crash" there's a quick few pages about how he wrote the book. Originally it was intended to be a comic-book-style graphic adventure on the Mac, but the computer power wasn't up to it and the storyline just kind of spiralled. You're right, that style does show though.
Re the intriguing idea generator (great phrase!:-) that really gets some use in Cryptonomicon, which works almost on a fractal basis. He goes along, and at some point he goes off on an extended aside, and the aside goes off on asides, and so on. Very wierd, but I like that style of writing - in RL, ppl do tend to do "free-association"-type stuff, so these asides give you more depth of how their minds work.
Re "Cryptonomicon", you mean the chapter where out of the blue they get ambushed by some minor character for not much reason, and then they get the gold with some crap method (won't give away how they do it, if you haven't read the book, but for sure there's going to be more gold left in there than comes out!)
"Zodiac" is the only one I can think of with a decent conclusion. They get the boat and the evidence, the cops take down the corporation, ST gets another trophy on the front of his Zode, all concluded fairly satisfactorily.
Simple answer is that states are represented by voltage ranges. If a voltage is in one range, the state is TRUE. If it's in another range, it's FALSE.
The neat thing with that is that it can only be TRUE or FALSE. There may be an indeterminate state in the middle which is neither, but at that point the receiving chip will hold the current state until the input voltage goes to TRUE or FALSE.
Now consider that you have three states. Say one state is 0-1V, another state is 2-3V and the third is 4-5V. It's impossible to go from the first state to the third state without passing through the second state. So how does your receiving chip know whether you really wanted the second state, or whether you're just en route to the third state? Simple answer is that it can't, so you'd need to have some requirement like staying in a state for some length of time before the state's confirmed. This would be a complete pain in the arse, so no-one ever tried doing this.
There's also a compatibility issue. Electronics derived from relay logic, and relays can only be on or off, so there was a bunch of legacy material already on Boolean logic.
My problem with this article is that it's describing the scenario as a "perfect storm", ie. it only happened bcos a whole bunch of unlikely things occurred together at precisely the wrong time, and there wasn't anything ppl could do about it.
In fact, as you've shown, the project went into freefall, and no-one at any oversight level had the balls to say so. As usual, it seems they committed the standard IT sin of saying "let's put all this incompatible data together, with a new architecture, a new interface and a new team", which has a well-tested track record of producing failures.
I'm constantly amazed by failures of IT projects being categorised as "one-off" events. History has shown that the *success* of a major IT project is a one-off event, and can only be achieved by major effort and good organisation. And in general, the guys at the coal face know full well that the project is screwed, but the layers of management filter out the bad news, so it ends up that managers don't know quite how bad it is until the iceberg actually hits. Some software guru (Yourdon?) said only half-jokingly that the chance of success is in inverse proportion to the cost of the project, and above some cost (or some number of people) the project is basically doomed to fail.;-)
Sure - our company changed over from WP in the mid-90s as well, so "I feel your pain".;-) Thing is though, WP was a *superb* program for power users but it had a massive learning curve. Your typical person wanting to just type up their resume or write a letter was just left in the cold. MS Word got the interface sorted so you could pick it up really easily.
That's typically the problem - unless the interface is easy to use, you're going to get blown away by other programs. To be honest, that's why I think MS's choices for XP are so odd - at a time when other OSes like Linux have finally got reasonably user-friendly front ends developed, MS have decided to produce some bizarre Tellytubbies interface. The XP backend is rock-solid, but the default front-end is just lousy. You'd think they'd learnt some lessons from how they themselves stomped over other programs a few years back.
The general concensus in CS (last time I looked) is that a language with fewer rules is easier to learn. The language should just specify the important requirements: maths, comparisons, type/class definitions/declarations, etc. The concepts are then easy. After you've got the concepts down solidly, it's easy to understand the libraries where much of the reusable functionality lives.
It's not a boy's club, any more than philosophy and English are girl's clubs.
(As an aside, why is no-one concerned that a typical English class at uni will have like 20 women and 1 or 2 guys? Or nursing? Or looking after kids and keeping house, for that matter? Or is gender disparity no longer a problem when it's men who aren't taking up something in the same numbers?)
It's certainly an environment for cloistered geeks, however the gender of the geeks is not pre-determined by the tools. I think more important is the "focus" argument - a really good researcher in the engineering/science field is absorbed in their work almost to the exclusion of social interaction, outside interests, and sometimes personal hygiene. In general, men are willing to make that sacrifice, women aren't. Which one is the better for that decision is open for discussion.
MS Office. Since Win3.11 days, MS Office has generally been easier to use than other similar apps. It's usually been fairly expensive too. But it has a *massive* market share, and the revenue from the Office suite is basically subsidising everything else in MS - operating systems make a small profit, Office makes an enormous profit, and everything else MS makes is actually making significant losses. And Office had to establish this position over the dead bodies of many other well-entrenched packages.
Also IE. Netscape sucked, IE worked, prices were the same (free). At the time of the big argument over this, I was using Netscape out of principle. About 6 months later, I decided I couldn't stand the pain anymore and switched back to IE. Let's be honest here - Netscape lost bcos they had a worse product.
Much software is basically bloody complicated, not because of screwups by the coder but just by the nature of the problem it's solving. Even word processors with an "intuitive" user interface take a while to find your way around, hence there are books like "Word for Dummies" (is that ever a true title!;-) and the like, although every effort has been taken to make the interface easy to use.
Although books and courses say "here's how to use XYZ package", what you *really* learn (if you're doing it right) is the nature of the underlying need that the software is meeting - all the rest is just button-pressing. Learning how that kind of stuff works takes time, so you can either dedicate a bunch of time yourself to do it, or you can pay someone who's already got the skills to come and do it for you. All the information's available, the only issue is whether you have the time/inclination/skills to use it. And that's a decision you've made for yourself.
Of course, you do need to make sure that the information for experienced ppl *does* exist, otherwise no-one will be able to use it at all! That's where things die in the "four-people-in-the-world-understand-it" oblivion...
As far as the "viable alternative" goes, that comes from having this stuff available and anyone else being able to add things to it. If you want another status window, you can put in a suggestion and maybe someone will pick it up, in both OSS and closed-source. But in OSS, if you're a good coder then you can add that status window yourself. The "moral" issue is with the control of the original software, not with the support of it.
The Black Sun is fiction though. Body language and interpretation thereof are culture-specific, so it's quite possible to unconsciously offend that way, or to take offence where none was meant, or to just completely misinterpret the meaning where a gesture means different things in different cultures.
Smileys largely solve the problem by reducing body language to a set of agreed-upon gestures and emotional contexts. Emotes are somewhat culture-specific (eg. shaking your head may mean "no" or it may mean "yes", depending on which European country you're from) but also help out in this, since there's only a limited number of emotes available.
Text is the ultimate leveller. I don't know if you're some ultra-pretty girl, a sad geeky guy, or if you're in a wheelchair. If we can see these things, we discriminate against ppl based on their appearance. Without the barrier of appearance, we judge ppl based on their actions. This is no bad thing, IMO.
1. If you're point-and-clicking, long path names are not a problem. They're only a pain for the hard-core text-only fanatic. Besides, suppose it takes you a dozen clicks to get to a directory containing the files; how many attributes would you have to enter to find those files in a similar way?
2. Fair enough. But are any of these apps going to work with this new system. $5 says they won't...
3. Symlinks. Even Windows allows you the ability to use shortcuts. You can have any number of directories, each with shortcuts/symlinks/whatever (pick your OS; pick your naming convention) to the actual location of the files themselves. You have to remember to add the shortcuts to the relevant directories when you do it, but then with the other way you have to remember to set the right attributes as well.
Slashdot Mirror
It's OK, there isn't much oil in Europe compared to Iraq.
Grab.
OTOH, if you already have an F22, why would you want to bolt shit onto it so that it performs like the Wright Flyer?
Grab.
Macros for MUDs have been around for *ages*. I guess the only thing stopping MMORPGs from getting macros is that the games companies concerned own the code to their MMORPGs and aren't generally keen on anyone else knowing the hooks into it.
Grab.
On the same lines, there's no point studying literature or film, bcos it's all just "this book is good because it had nice pictures with it" or "this film is good because it had lots of explosions". Or user interface design, bcos that's just "yeah, it looks kinda pretty".
Resolving *why* something is fun is a *huge* bastard topic, and it's one that most games companies aren't currently concerned with bcos they're too busy copying each other or remaking the standards - more FPS, more platform games (in 3-D now instead of the old sideways scrollers), more sports sims, etc. Please remember that The Sims was written off bcos no-one in management thought it would be "fun". There still isn't a definitive answer on what makes something "fun".
The analogy to film is pretty accurate. 80-some years back, film had been going for roughly 20 years, and there still wasn't any studied answer on what made a "good" film. Now computer games have been going for roughly 20 years (disregarding "Colossal Caves" and similar, which never reached a mass audience), so these guys will very much be pioneering their field in the same way film students were, way back when film studies first started.
Grab.
Learning physics or poli sci has little or no relevance to being a good programmer. The industry would be *very* poorly served by your people.
Software, as with all other engineering and science disciplines, is a fundamentally practical subject. You can parrot-learn all the theory in the world, but it won't teach you a damn thing if you can't apply it. I know of one person on my course (electronic engineering) who by the fourth year still couldn't design a simple circuit using the stuff taught on the course, but she graduated with a 2:1 all the same (that's an English grade: English degrees graduate with "First", "Upper Second" (2:1), "Lower Second" (2:2), "Third", bare "Pass" and "Fail). She was a great parrot-learner, but I would no way want to be working with her after uni!
That's the reason all sci and eng courses have projects. They're to get you to internalise what you've learnt, in the context of your chosen career progression. Projects *are* to teach you about what you'll need after uni, bcos they're the last chance you'll get to make big mistakes without any major impact. Sure, playing the games won't teach you about the programming, but it'll give you the context in which you use your knowledge. Just using a PC won't teach you how to code a user interface, but it'll give you a damn good idea of what works and what doesn't.
Personally, I'm disturbed by the currently-fashionable view that university is not to actually teach you anything. If you're not supposed to go to uni to learn stuff, what the hell use is it?! I don't buy the whole "you go to uni to learn how to learn" thing - you go to uni to learn the basics of a subject. You won't learn everything there, but you'll learn enough that you can build on that foundation.
Grab.
Do you always throw all your existing code away when you move to version 2 of an app?
/. have their own pet projects - they're writing programs which fill some need they have and which they intend to release as Open Source. (I'm one of these - check the link for details of my "GunFire" project. Shameless plug! ;-) If you've written a program to fill a niche and you think that a whole load of other ppl could benefit from using your program, it'd be a bit silly to restrict yourself to a single platform. Instead you plan your design so you can make your code multi-platform, and then you can reach the widest possible target audience.
If you know for sure that you're *never* going to change to a new platform, then great. However the reality of corporate software tools is that they don't last a short time - rather, they hang around for ages bcos the management won't approve money to create a new tool when the old one kind of does the job. Given this context, multi-platform support makes sense, bcos you don't know how long any given platform will be around.
Also remember that this isn't just corporate apps. A lot of ppl on
Grab.
Ahead? Surely you mean "behind"...
;-) at.
If it's got 32K+ of games, it must either be PC-based, Mac-based or based on some obsolete platform such as the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, etc. (Note that it's significant all of these platforms have keyboards, so gamers can write games, instead of being reliant on a company to write them for you. No console ever got as many games as computers with keyboards.) Java/Flash may be an option, but the only Java/Flash games available are little web-based things - they are not anything that anyone would pay for when compared to modern PC/console games.
It is not physically possible to create 32K+ of games before release - most companies are lucky to get a half-dozen games by the time their console ships. Let's assume they're basing it on a PC or a Mac and getting legacy games, since any other system will suck so badly by current standards that it's not even worth talking about.
So it's based on a PC/Mac, and it's a console giving you access to the zillions of existing PC/Mac games, plus access to all the games written by hobbyists and uploaded to servers. WTF does that give us which we don't already have?
I've had a look round at PC pricing. I can now buy a low-end PC for £300 which has enough horsepower to do desktop stuff, and can run older games such as Q3 at a reasonable rate. If that's all these guys are giving us, why the hell should anyone buy a console?
Re putting a money slot in it, if I'm going to pay for an arcade machine then I want to be playing an arcade game. No-one will pay to play Solitaire on this thing. The only thing you might get money for is "adult content", and even then you'd never make it bcos (a) you wouldn't get ppl browsing for that in public places, and (b) that £300 PC will browse quite happily and pull up more adult content than you can shake a stick (or anything else
Grab.
What, no John Wyndham (Midwich Cuckoos, Chrysalids, Day of the Triffids, etc)? No William Horwood (two Duncton Wood trilogies, although the first book is the best)?
;-P
I've so far avoided L Ron Hubbard's stuff on principle. I don't want to fund a radical Christian cult, thanks all the same.
Terry Brooks is very much "Tolkein-Lite" in his Shannara books. The first two Shannara books are pretty good (Sword and Elfstones), the rest are sequel hell. IIRC he's got some new series out ("Dark Knight" or something) - anyone got feedback on that?
King's Dark Tower series is great for the first three books, but Wizard and Glass drops the average standard a bit - it's OK, but it's not as sharp as the other three.
And you're a bit previous with putting Order of the Phoenix on the Harry Potter list, aren't you?
Grab.
Hell, if you can start with something which the reader thinks is a cliche and then surprise the reader with something they really weren't expecting, isn't that the *definition* of good writing?
Grab.
As a quick PS, if you check the back of "Snow Crash" there's a quick few pages about how he wrote the book. Originally it was intended to be a comic-book-style graphic adventure on the Mac, but the computer power wasn't up to it and the storyline just kind of spiralled. You're right, that style does show though.
:-) that really gets some use in Cryptonomicon, which works almost on a fractal basis. He goes along, and at some point he goes off on an extended aside, and the aside goes off on asides, and so on. Very wierd, but I like that style of writing - in RL, ppl do tend to do "free-association"-type stuff, so these asides give you more depth of how their minds work.
Re the intriguing idea generator (great phrase!
Grab.
Re "Cryptonomicon", you mean the chapter where out of the blue they get ambushed by some minor character for not much reason, and then they get the gold with some crap method (won't give away how they do it, if you haven't read the book, but for sure there's going to be more gold left in there than comes out!)
"Zodiac" is the only one I can think of with a decent conclusion. They get the boat and the evidence, the cops take down the corporation, ST gets another trophy on the front of his Zode, all concluded fairly satisfactorily.
Grab.
Simple answer is that states are represented by voltage ranges. If a voltage is in one range, the state is TRUE. If it's in another range, it's FALSE.
The neat thing with that is that it can only be TRUE or FALSE. There may be an indeterminate state in the middle which is neither, but at that point the receiving chip will hold the current state until the input voltage goes to TRUE or FALSE.
Now consider that you have three states. Say one state is 0-1V, another state is 2-3V and the third is 4-5V. It's impossible to go from the first state to the third state without passing through the second state. So how does your receiving chip know whether you really wanted the second state, or whether you're just en route to the third state? Simple answer is that it can't, so you'd need to have some requirement like staying in a state for some length of time before the state's confirmed. This would be a complete pain in the arse, so no-one ever tried doing this.
There's also a compatibility issue. Electronics derived from relay logic, and relays can only be on or off, so there was a bunch of legacy material already on Boolean logic.
Grab.
Tell you what, if I changed my name, I'd pick a first name I wanted to use! ;-) You can imagine the scene:-
Bridgekeeper: "What is your name?"
JHP: "Er, Jerkoff Hutton Pulitzer. No! wait! "
Grab.
(PS. Apologies to non-Monty Python fans.
Interesting stuff.
;-)
My problem with this article is that it's describing the scenario as a "perfect storm", ie. it only happened bcos a whole bunch of unlikely things occurred together at precisely the wrong time, and there wasn't anything ppl could do about it.
In fact, as you've shown, the project went into freefall, and no-one at any oversight level had the balls to say so. As usual, it seems they committed the standard IT sin of saying "let's put all this incompatible data together, with a new architecture, a new interface and a new team", which has a well-tested track record of producing failures.
I'm constantly amazed by failures of IT projects being categorised as "one-off" events. History has shown that the *success* of a major IT project is a one-off event, and can only be achieved by major effort and good organisation. And in general, the guys at the coal face know full well that the project is screwed, but the layers of management filter out the bad news, so it ends up that managers don't know quite how bad it is until the iceberg actually hits. Some software guru (Yourdon?) said only half-jokingly that the chance of success is in inverse proportion to the cost of the project, and above some cost (or some number of people) the project is basically doomed to fail.
Grab.
I have seen your House of Commons on C-SPAN
;-)
Hey, all he said was we had fair elections. No-one said our politicians had to behave sensibly when they got into office!
Grab.
Sure - our company changed over from WP in the mid-90s as well, so "I feel your pain". ;-) Thing is though, WP was a *superb* program for power users but it had a massive learning curve. Your typical person wanting to just type up their resume or write a letter was just left in the cold. MS Word got the interface sorted so you could pick it up really easily.
That's typically the problem - unless the interface is easy to use, you're going to get blown away by other programs. To be honest, that's why I think MS's choices for XP are so odd - at a time when other OSes like Linux have finally got reasonably user-friendly front ends developed, MS have decided to produce some bizarre Tellytubbies interface. The XP backend is rock-solid, but the default front-end is just lousy. You'd think they'd learnt some lessons from how they themselves stomped over other programs a few years back.
Grab.
Not really.
The general concensus in CS (last time I looked) is that a language with fewer rules is easier to learn. The language should just specify the important requirements: maths, comparisons, type/class definitions/declarations, etc. The concepts are then easy. After you've got the concepts down solidly, it's easy to understand the libraries where much of the reusable functionality lives.
Grab.
It's not a boy's club, any more than philosophy and English are girl's clubs.
(As an aside, why is no-one concerned that a typical English class at uni will have like 20 women and 1 or 2 guys? Or nursing? Or looking after kids and keeping house, for that matter? Or is gender disparity no longer a problem when it's men who aren't taking up something in the same numbers?)
It's certainly an environment for cloistered geeks, however the gender of the geeks is not pre-determined by the tools. I think more important is the "focus" argument - a really good researcher in the engineering/science field is absorbed in their work almost to the exclusion of social interaction, outside interests, and sometimes personal hygiene. In general, men are willing to make that sacrifice, women aren't. Which one is the better for that decision is open for discussion.
Grab.
The U.S. military and intelligence officials were apparently hoping that the Iraqis do not realize where the e-mails are coming from.
Although the sig "General Silas T. Bilious, Cheyenne Mountain. All your nukes are belong to us." did rather give it away...
Grab.
MS Office. Since Win3.11 days, MS Office has generally been easier to use than other similar apps. It's usually been fairly expensive too. But it has a *massive* market share, and the revenue from the Office suite is basically subsidising everything else in MS - operating systems make a small profit, Office makes an enormous profit, and everything else MS makes is actually making significant losses. And Office had to establish this position over the dead bodies of many other well-entrenched packages.
Also IE. Netscape sucked, IE worked, prices were the same (free). At the time of the big argument over this, I was using Netscape out of principle. About 6 months later, I decided I couldn't stand the pain anymore and switched back to IE. Let's be honest here - Netscape lost bcos they had a worse product.
Grab.
The key word in all that is "complex".
;-) and the like, although every effort has been taken to make the interface easy to use.
Much software is basically bloody complicated, not because of screwups by the coder but just by the nature of the problem it's solving. Even word processors with an "intuitive" user interface take a while to find your way around, hence there are books like "Word for Dummies" (is that ever a true title!
Although books and courses say "here's how to use XYZ package", what you *really* learn (if you're doing it right) is the nature of the underlying need that the software is meeting - all the rest is just button-pressing. Learning how that kind of stuff works takes time, so you can either dedicate a bunch of time yourself to do it, or you can pay someone who's already got the skills to come and do it for you. All the information's available, the only issue is whether you have the time/inclination/skills to use it. And that's a decision you've made for yourself.
Of course, you do need to make sure that the information for experienced ppl *does* exist, otherwise no-one will be able to use it at all! That's where things die in the "four-people-in-the-world-understand-it" oblivion...
As far as the "viable alternative" goes, that comes from having this stuff available and anyone else being able to add things to it. If you want another status window, you can put in a suggestion and maybe someone will pick it up, in both OSS and closed-source. But in OSS, if you're a good coder then you can add that status window yourself. The "moral" issue is with the control of the original software, not with the support of it.
Grab.
The Black Sun is fiction though. Body language and interpretation thereof are culture-specific, so it's quite possible to unconsciously offend that way, or to take offence where none was meant, or to just completely misinterpret the meaning where a gesture means different things in different cultures.
Smileys largely solve the problem by reducing body language to a set of agreed-upon gestures and emotional contexts. Emotes are somewhat culture-specific (eg. shaking your head may mean "no" or it may mean "yes", depending on which European country you're from) but also help out in this, since there's only a limited number of emotes available.
Text is the ultimate leveller. I don't know if you're some ultra-pretty girl, a sad geeky guy, or if you're in a wheelchair. If we can see these things, we discriminate against ppl based on their appearance. Without the barrier of appearance, we judge ppl based on their actions. This is no bad thing, IMO.
Grab.
On the contrary, Grab's Law states that any new PC CPU you can buy is adequate to run a PC for normal home use.
Grab.
Recommend the narcolepsy prog (assuming you're talking about repeats of Horizon on some other channel). The narcoleptic dog is absolutely hilarious!
Grab.
1. If you're point-and-clicking, long path names are not a problem. They're only a pain for the hard-core text-only fanatic. Besides, suppose it takes you a dozen clicks to get to a directory containing the files; how many attributes would you have to enter to find those files in a similar way?
2. Fair enough. But are any of these apps going to work with this new system. $5 says they won't...
3. Symlinks. Even Windows allows you the ability to use shortcuts. You can have any number of directories, each with shortcuts/symlinks/whatever (pick your OS; pick your naming convention) to the actual location of the files themselves. You have to remember to add the shortcuts to the relevant directories when you do it, but then with the other way you have to remember to set the right attributes as well.
Grab.