Yeah, when i saw this in the print version it struck me as a giant batch of wishful thinking, powered by a way overstrained metaphor (80s computer networks vs. the later internet)
The only way this works is by boiling everything down to the lowest common denominator, and taking out the unique worldmaking which makes each game spcial.
Like someone else said, this might be an XboxLive-ish "gamer tag" across games, or maybe even some kind of shared standard UI for First Person games, but beyond that, it's just too many nights spent reading "Snow Crash"
I always put my Windows box to "Classic" mode in short order.
To me, UIs aren't "interesting" so I like to keep them as minimally distracting as possible. The less time it takes for my brain to say "this is a pushbutton" the better off I am.
I've found that younger people are a bit less conservative about this stuff, and seem to embrace funky looking buttons faster.
So I'm just turning into an old fogey...
Some of the effects though...like making dropdown menus scroll down or fade in just take time. I understand how a total n00b might be impressed or even appreciate the connection (being less "jarring" than something just popping up) but it seems like a large cumulative time waiting for menus to open.
heh, as long as we're strolling down memory lane... I was a pretty early adopter of laptops in the classroom... in 1992-1995 I had this pretty cheap Tandy 1100FD...no hard drive, the floppy was only 720K, but it had a decent text processor hardwired on for quick startup, was pretty durable, and the "oversized gameboy" CGA screen did its duty.
95-96 I had a tiny TIAC laptop w/ trakball, now with 16! shades of grey, good enough to run Win 3.1... i could finally do diagrams w/o resorting to ASCII! I got so good at doodling w/ the trackball I did the logo/mascot for the schools "dorm wired for net" project.
Anyway, a lot of kids had laptops even then, but you mostly saw them in the library, I was a bit of a freak for hauling mine into class. Also, I kind of worried about the distraction of the sound of the keys for the other students. Ah well, for the most part the Profs were pretty accepting. It let me take notes I could read later, and that was the important thing.
I was thinking of some wacky technology ways of dealing with this, like having every site have some sort of metadata proclaiming its "real world location", with the implication that THAT'S what "obscenity" metrics will be used.
And then browsers could be tuned to recognize that data and shun sites from an area with "too liberal" obscenity standards.
Of course, then there's questions of where "there" is. Is it where the server is physically hosted? i have no idea where some of my rented webspace actually resides...
Anyway, yes, this is a blatantly dumb and unworkable idea, but in its own way is no dumber than some of what we're seeing happen with the courts.
Personally, I think there's very little that can be universally considered obscene. My litmus test is, if meaningful consent can be given by all parties involved, it probably can't be considered "obscene" in the legal sense. (Which is why kiddy porn is egregious) Obviously there's a lot you might not want your kids or even yourself to see, but that's a different kind of obscenity.
I was psyched, I got a new job and a powerful laptop from it, so I thought I'd finally be able to handle some modernish games...my 2002 $700 PC and 2004 $850 laptop couldn't even handle Vice City, so I tend to stick with consoles..
So I download the Darwinia demo....and it crashes almost immediately. Awesome. Reminds me of why I stick to consoles for my gaming. PCs just have too many wildcards hardware wise.
I think it might not be as ambiguous as you imply...frankly I think the problem is the extra typing, shell languages tend to be pretty concise (especially Unix...) and like you say if there is ambiguity, it could ask for clarification...and ideally you'd be able to say "the latter, and remember that as the default for that phrase"
Of course not all shells are created equal...I heard in some you can do something like "move *.log *.log.bak" and it knows you mean. (Admittedly I'm playing fast and loose with shell, built-in shell commands, and then commonly available commands, but still.)
I haven't looked into it much but the previous poster may well be right that Apple Script is similar to what I'm thinking of.
Actually, I think I already came up with a decent example of where both GUIs and CLIs falter in file manipulation, working with a certain files in a tree, but preserving the directory structure...off the top of my head, I couldn't figure out how to do that without writing a perl script.
I always thought it would be interesting to attach a Infocom/Inform like parser to a File Explorer / DOS shell type thing, so you could type stuff like > move all files from c:\wherever\ and below that end with.jpg to c:\backup\, preserving the directory structure
That shouldn't be too hard, actually, we have systems that can speak Turing-able English so long as you restrict the subject domain...and once you had that, it should be trivial-ish to get the right speech recongnition component in place, if you wanted to go that route...
[a] inherently more expensive due to their monolithic construction [b] underpowered as compared to desktops (cpuwise, gpuwise, whether comparing strongest models of each or same-costing models of each, you name it)
Web and multimedia capable PCs have been pretty cheap for quite a while now...and laptops aren't much more expensive. The "underpowered" aspect just doesn't matter except for gamers and hard core multimedia users. Plus you can lounge in bed, the living room, or look impressive in the coffee shop.
[c] much-more-expensive-to-fix (tried replacing the fan on your laptop CPU lately?) [d] mechanically expire much sooner (from the keyboard to the optical drive to the plastic shell) [e] more limited in storage capacity (you can stick in less drives, which are also smaller (and more expensive) due to form factor) [f] unupgradeable in some avenues (CPU, in most cases GPU, etc).
Dude, you're talking like it's a decade ago. For many people, computers are closed boxes. Use it 'til it gets too annoying or breaks, then get a new one.
If you're time isn't free, than ultimately it's cheaper that way for many people.
Right now I have an embaressment of riches in terms of laptops...an ugly but super powerful windows box from work, a cheap iBook, and a cheap windows laptop I got before the iBook. And I have no idea what all those people in the airport were doing with their laptops out, but they seemed to be happy with 'em...I prefered a paperback myself....
So pick only two: 1) Against outsourcing 2) For trade 3) Have a coherent point of view
Listen, I don't know much about economics, but couldn't there be a rational middle ground of "for trade, but not for quite as much importing as we're doing"? I mean, the trade deficit and INCREDIBLY low % of savings we in the USA have...I mean, there's got to be some questions of sustainability about that, right?
Similarly, with outsourcing...I think that we're "lucky" that it's been proven not to be a panacea, that it brings big logistical and management problems to the fore, and that in some circumstances will produce outrageously crappy code (not that we can't brew our own crap here at home as well.) There seems to be a potential for a "race to the bottom" kind of condition that could hurt techworkers here, and ultimately, the number of people we have with the kind of disposable income that seems to suit the rest of the economy so well.
Heh. In the late 80s my pharmacist boss convinced me his car had that feature...I knew the technology was a reach, but he put on a convincing demo...didn't realize he was just using his Caddilac's builtin steering wheel controls
I'd never try and put in directions when the car was moving though - just pull over, type the details, and drive on afterwards. News-flash: driving without looking at the road (no matter what gizmo is involved) is not a good idea...
It's called multitasking. If you need to input something, break that task into chunks, checking the road between each chunk. It takes a little discipline, but it seems less dangerous than pulling over to the side of the highway all the damn time.
I don't see a reason why the route for the NAV system should be set or modified while the car is in motion. The idea can also be applied here: Don't even let the driver create the distraction.
That is the most retarded kind of lawyer-friendly nannythink possible.
For me, route changes come up ALL the goddamn time when I'm on the road. Driving is rarely predetermined.
Frankly, me finding a goddamn place to pullover and come to a dead stop on the highway shoulder to change the f'in target destination sounds about 10 times more distracting than tapping a few controls. I'm not fiddling with the damn thing for the hell of it.
Maybe we should make it so you can't change the radio station when the car is in motion. I mean, you pretty much know what you want to listen to when you head out, right?
Or climate controls...just set it, forget it, right? Pulling over to set the defrost when your window is fogging up is a small price to pay for less distracted driving.
Screw that. I will work to NEVER, EVER buy a GPS system that can't be rerouted while in motion. As long as there's one brand of "sit on the dashboard" nav that lets me do that, that's the one that will get my money. (Sit on the dashboard units are more economical anyway, though they're less good when the signal is blocked)
Overall you're right. Some marketing guy probably thought it was better to get a smaller piece of a bigger pie.
Though they surprise me sometimes...not so much for raw breadboarding part, but for other little connectory bits, sometimes they're still better than most of the other consumer electronic stores.
With all due respect to anonymous coward, I think the idea of RS having an one single (and usually wrong) answer for every question, but trying to apply it anyway is funnier than the slant rhyme of "Blank Stares" and "answers".
Actually I think I transcribed it wrong from my friend who mentioned the "cellphone plans"...it's got, not have. Ah well! I thought I was FP for a while too, maybe I should have taken the time to check twice.
Hawkins wanted a company that embraced the artistic vision behind the film company, United Artists, a firm founded by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, et al. Bing Gordon proposed "Electronic Artists," but Steve Hayes countered, "We're not the artists, they are..." meaning that EA was a publisher and not a developer. (In fact, EA's first in-house game was Skate or Die produced in 1987.)
Ultra may have made the very much inferior port to the NES...after seeing Metroid on the NES and not the C=64, it was interesting to see how much better Skate or Die was on the computer vs the console.
on the C=64 I thought it looked almost as good as an Amiga game, but the NES version was absolutely nothing special.
Yeah, the ECA days...that cube, sphere, pyramid logo was damn clever.
And the games...man. Archon, Skate or Die, Realm of Impossibility...in those really cool "album cover" like boxes...plus the respect they gave to the game programmers as artists (hence, Electronic ARTS...) That was an amazing time.
I don't know. If I logic something out, I can justify my reasoning to myself and others after the fact.
Plus, I see a lot of people hold beliefs I disagree with strongly, because it "feels right". I mean a ton of people believe firmly in all sorts of mutually incompatible relgious belief because it just feels right to them-- I guess the thing is it's hard to seperate our subconcious reasoning from our deeply-instilled prejudices and habits. In the long run, that kind of groupthink probably benefits from the whole "wisdom of crowds" kind of thing, but in the short run it seems like it presents a lot of problems.
that's one thing that will often be unrealistic about sci-fi warfare settings; especially the starfighter type games I love so well...humans probably aren't going to be in the loop like they are with modern technology.
On the one hand in the military you get training; on the other hand, enemies aren't clearly labeled on some kind of HUD or radar, more often than not one shot will take anyone out of combat at least for a while if not permanently, and there is no do-over.
I imagine little real life combat has anything to do with running around, everyone is your enemy, and if you're clever you can get 'em before they get you. Catching the enemy when they're unawares and not looking for a fight has to be the best strategy. Which doesn't make me like "stealth" games any more than I do now, which is to say not much...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, when i saw this in the print version it struck me as a giant batch of wishful thinking, powered by a way overstrained metaphor (80s computer networks vs. the later internet)
The only way this works is by boiling everything down to the lowest common denominator, and taking out the unique worldmaking which makes each game spcial.
Like someone else said, this might be an XboxLive-ish "gamer tag" across games, or maybe even some kind of shared standard UI for First Person games, but beyond that, it's just too many nights spent reading "Snow Crash"
I always put my Windows box to "Classic" mode in short order.
To me, UIs aren't "interesting" so I like to keep them as minimally distracting as possible. The less time it takes for my brain to say "this is a pushbutton" the better off I am.
I've found that younger people are a bit less conservative about this stuff, and seem to embrace funky looking buttons faster.
So I'm just turning into an old fogey...
Some of the effects though...like making dropdown menus scroll down or fade in just take time. I understand how a total n00b might be impressed or even appreciate the connection (being less "jarring" than something just popping up) but it seems like a large cumulative time waiting for menus to open.
heh, as long as we're strolling down memory lane...
I was a pretty early adopter of laptops in the classroom...
in 1992-1995 I had this pretty cheap Tandy 1100FD...no hard drive, the floppy was only 720K, but it had a decent text processor hardwired on for quick startup, was pretty durable, and the "oversized gameboy" CGA screen did its duty.
95-96 I had a tiny TIAC laptop w/ trakball, now with 16! shades of grey, good enough to run Win 3.1... i could finally do diagrams w/o resorting to ASCII! I got so good at doodling w/ the trackball I did the logo/mascot for the schools "dorm wired for net" project.
Anyway, a lot of kids had laptops even then, but you mostly saw them in the library, I was a bit of a freak for hauling mine into class. Also, I kind of worried about the distraction of the sound of the keys for the other students. Ah well, for the most part the Profs were pretty accepting. It let me take notes I could read later, and that was the important thing.
I was thinking of some wacky technology ways of dealing with this,
like having every site have some sort of metadata proclaiming its "real world location", with the implication that THAT'S what "obscenity" metrics will be used.
And then browsers could be tuned to recognize that data and shun sites from an area with "too liberal" obscenity standards.
Of course, then there's questions of where "there" is. Is it where the server is physically hosted? i have no idea where some of my rented webspace actually resides...
Anyway, yes, this is a blatantly dumb and unworkable idea, but in its own way is no dumber than some of what we're seeing happen with the courts.
Personally, I think there's very little that can be universally considered obscene. My litmus test is, if meaningful consent can be given by all parties involved, it probably can't be considered "obscene" in the legal sense. (Which is why kiddy porn is egregious) Obviously there's a lot you might not want your kids or even yourself to see, but that's a different kind of obscenity.
I was psyched, I got a new job and a powerful laptop from it, so I thought I'd finally be able to handle some modernish games...my 2002 $700 PC and 2004 $850 laptop couldn't even handle Vice City, so I tend to stick with consoles..
So I download the Darwinia demo....and it crashes almost immediately. Awesome. Reminds me of why I stick to consoles for my gaming. PCs just have too many wildcards hardware wise.
I think it might not be as ambiguous as you imply...frankly I think the problem is the extra typing, shell languages tend to be pretty concise (especially Unix...) and like you say if there is ambiguity, it could ask for clarification...and ideally you'd be able to say "the latter, and remember that as the default for that phrase"
Of course not all shells are created equal...I heard in some you can do something like "move *.log *.log.bak" and it knows you mean. (Admittedly I'm playing fast and loose with shell, built-in shell commands, and then commonly available commands, but still.)
I haven't looked into it much but the previous poster may well be right that Apple Script is similar to what I'm thinking of.
Actually, I think I already came up with a decent example of where both GUIs and CLIs falter in file manipulation, working with a certain files in a tree, but preserving the directory structure...off the top of my head, I couldn't figure out how to do that without writing a perl script.
I always thought it would be interesting to attach a Infocom/Inform like parser to a File Explorer / DOS shell type thing, so you could type stuff like .jpg to c:\backup\, preserving the directory structure
> move all files from c:\wherever\ and below that end with
That shouldn't be too hard, actually, we have systems that can speak Turing-able English so long as you restrict the subject domain...and once you had that, it should be trivial-ish to get the right speech recongnition component in place, if you wanted to go that route...
If other nations get jealous of the camera and jets of this sattelite, will they have a bad case of Venus-envy?
You're thinking of your own needs and priorities.
People don't buy shiny tech for tax purposes.
To address your points:
[a] inherently more expensive due to their monolithic construction
[b] underpowered as compared to desktops (cpuwise, gpuwise, whether comparing strongest models of each or same-costing models of each, you name it)
Web and multimedia capable PCs have been pretty cheap for quite a while now...and laptops aren't much more expensive. The "underpowered" aspect just doesn't matter except for gamers and hard core multimedia users. Plus you can lounge in bed, the living room, or look impressive in the coffee shop.
[c] much-more-expensive-to-fix (tried replacing the fan on your laptop CPU lately?)
[d] mechanically expire much sooner (from the keyboard to the optical drive to the plastic shell)
[e] more limited in storage capacity (you can stick in less drives, which are also smaller (and more expensive) due to form factor)
[f] unupgradeable in some avenues (CPU, in most cases GPU, etc).
Dude, you're talking like it's a decade ago. For many people, computers are closed boxes. Use it 'til it gets too annoying or breaks, then get a new one.
If you're time isn't free, than ultimately it's cheaper that way for many people.
Right now I have an embaressment of riches in terms of laptops...an ugly but super powerful windows box from work, a cheap iBook, and a cheap windows laptop I got before the iBook. And I have no idea what all those people in the airport were doing with their laptops out, but they seemed to be happy with 'em...I prefered a paperback myself....
So pick only two:
1) Against outsourcing
2) For trade
3) Have a coherent point of view
Listen, I don't know much about economics, but couldn't there be a rational middle ground of "for trade, but not for quite as much importing as we're doing"? I mean, the trade deficit and INCREDIBLY low % of savings we in the USA have...I mean, there's got to be some questions of sustainability about that, right?
Similarly, with outsourcing...I think that we're "lucky" that it's been proven not to be a panacea, that it brings big logistical and management problems to the fore, and that in some circumstances will produce outrageously crappy code (not that we can't brew our own crap here at home as well.) There seems to be a potential for a "race to the bottom" kind of condition that could hurt techworkers here, and ultimately, the number of people we have with the kind of disposable income that seems to suit the rest of the economy so well.
Heh. In the late 80s my pharmacist boss convinced me his car had that feature...I knew the technology was a reach, but he put on a convincing demo...didn't realize he was just using his Caddilac's builtin steering wheel controls
:-)
He was a good showman
I'd never try and put in directions when the car was moving though - just pull over, type the details, and drive on afterwards. News-flash: driving without looking at the road (no matter what gizmo is involved) is not a good idea...
It's called multitasking. If you need to input something, break that task into chunks, checking the road between each chunk. It takes a little discipline, but it seems less dangerous than pulling over to the side of the highway all the damn time.
I don't see a reason why the route for the NAV system should be set or modified while the car is in motion. The idea can also be applied here: Don't even let the driver create the distraction.
That is the most retarded kind of lawyer-friendly nannythink possible.
For me, route changes come up ALL the goddamn time when I'm on the road. Driving is rarely predetermined.
Frankly, me finding a goddamn place to pullover and come to a dead stop on the highway shoulder to change the f'in target destination sounds about 10 times more distracting than tapping a few controls. I'm not fiddling with the damn thing for the hell of it.
Maybe we should make it so you can't change the radio station when the car is in motion. I mean, you pretty much know what you want to listen to when you head out, right?
Or climate controls...just set it, forget it, right? Pulling over to set the defrost when your window is fogging up is a small price to pay for less distracted driving.
Screw that. I will work to NEVER, EVER buy a GPS system that can't be rerouted while in motion. As long as there's one brand of "sit on the dashboard" nav that lets me do that, that's the one that will get my money. (Sit on the dashboard units are more economical anyway, though they're less good when the signal is blocked)
Ok, a "surprisingly big" piece of a bigger pie, then...I figured the #s had to add up for 'em.
That whole kind of store is interesting niche in the retail ecosphere... retaillers with smaller stores in malls and stripmalls vs bigger outlets.
I don't think the niche worked out too well for KB, but maybe RS has a better handle on it.
Overall you're right. Some marketing guy probably thought it was better to get a smaller piece of a bigger pie.
Though they surprise me sometimes...not so much for raw breadboarding part, but for other little connectory bits, sometimes they're still better than most of the other consumer electronic stores.
You have questions, we have Blank Stares
With all due respect to anonymous coward, I think the idea of RS having an one single (and usually wrong) answer for every question, but trying to apply it anyway is funnier than the slant rhyme of "Blank Stares" and "answers".
Actually I think I transcribed it wrong from my friend who mentioned the "cellphone plans"...it's got, not have. Ah well! I thought I was FP for a while too, maybe I should have taken the time to check twice.
"You have questions...we have cellphone plans."
Ultra may have made the very much inferior port to the NES...after seeing Metroid on the NES and not the C=64, it was interesting to see how much better Skate or Die was on the computer vs the console.
on the C=64 I thought it looked almost as good as an Amiga game, but the NES version was absolutely nothing special.
Yeah, the ECA days...that cube, sphere, pyramid logo was damn clever.
And the games...man. Archon, Skate or Die, Realm of Impossibility...in those really cool "album cover" like boxes...plus the respect they gave to the game programmers as artists (hence, Electronic ARTS...) That was an amazing time.
They way I've put it is "Customers don't know what they want 'til you build and show them what they don't."
I don't know. If I logic something out, I can justify my reasoning to myself and others after the fact.
Plus, I see a lot of people hold beliefs I disagree with strongly, because it "feels right". I mean a ton of people believe firmly in all sorts of mutually incompatible relgious belief because it just feels right to them-- I guess the thing is it's hard to seperate our subconcious reasoning from our deeply-instilled prejudices and habits. In the long run, that kind of groupthink probably benefits from the whole "wisdom of crowds" kind of thing, but in the short run it seems like it presents a lot of problems.
At the risk of taking things too lightly:
that's one thing that will often be unrealistic about sci-fi warfare settings; especially the starfighter type games I love so well...humans probably aren't going to be in the loop like they are with modern technology.
What?
It's a pretty good point.
On the one hand in the military you get training; on the other hand, enemies aren't clearly labeled on some kind of HUD or radar, more often than not one shot will take anyone out of combat at least for a while if not permanently, and there is no do-over.
I imagine little real life combat has anything to do with running around, everyone is your enemy, and if you're clever you can get 'em before they get you. Catching the enemy when they're unawares and not looking for a fight has to be the best strategy. Which doesn't make me like "stealth" games any more than I do now, which is to say not much...
Tape?
Was this on a 2600 or some other system?