I think that with the taskbar, Windows leapfrogged Mac, and the thing is still better than the Doc.
Yes, I've gotten into huge dumb arguments about how shortsighted I am for not realizing that seperating "launch new apps" from "return to running app" is just retrograde idiocy that stops me from grokking a truly object-centered way of thinking. Whatever. Having every running "task" visible and one click away, vs putting launching new things 2 clicks away, works really well IMO.
Couldn't find the referenece, but does anyone remember one of the Douglas Adam's book where it describes how radios had evolved from super primitive knobs and dials to touchpads, to finally you just need to wave in the general direction of the thing, so you needed to keep maddeningly still in your seat if you wanted to keep listening to the same station?
That's where I'm worried Apple might be going, this mouse is somewhere in the middle of that evolution.
(Seriously, I have to be careful when buying a PC mouse these days, stick with the cheap stuff because the mid-range ones have dozens of little buttons and dials and knobs and there's no place to let your damn fingers rest without hitting 'back' in your browsers turning on your MP3 player or what not...but at least then all the buttons are distinct.)
I get paid to program Java. Sometimes for the web. But whenever I see a popular site with incredibly slow response times (early Friendster, several inranets) there's a 3/4 chance that I'll look up to the URL and see a.jsp or.do that indicates it's a Java site.
And PHP is showing up more and more often...when I looked at it in 1992 it seemed definately not ready for prime time, bug-wise, and even weird conceptual stuff like having to reset an array to walk it twice, but now it seems to be making huge strides. I prefer Perl, but there is something neat in how all the libraries are RIGHT FRICKIN' THERE with PHP.
From the article: Sony really was the driving force behind the more complex use of three dimensions. Early attempts like Mario 64, for example, are hardly comparable--in terms of intricacy--to their Sony contemporaries like Tomb Raider
I haven't played Tomb Raider that much, but do you think that's an accurate summation?
I played both. I give the nod to the Xbox version:
A. The difficulty level of DC was just WAY too damn high. I finally got past the "Times Square" level only to get stuck, stuck, stuck on the next one. I think they addressed that pretty well in the sequel
B. going back to the original after the Xbox...it feels kind of slow, sluggish, and choppy relative to the update.
Frankly I didn't miss the patterns" at all...if they had anything to do with the look of the graffiti that showed up, great. But it was just left, right, loop left, loop right, blah blah blah.
I give the original credit for...well, being original! But I think the sequel was a solid improvement by almost any measure.
I disagree. I think the original arcade game was SUCH a quarter sucker, the game mechanic was just inferior to the NES version.
It looked much nicer, but that was about it. And in terms of cultural impact, hands down the NES version is the one that towers above the others...and it deserves it.
The original game had such a nice framing device for its story, where it turns out to be a tale told by Super Joe...
This isn't meant to be a troll, and I have brought this up on the firefox msg boards:
Its interesting that Firefox has the same inferior keyboard control and window history behavior that good old Netscape 4.7 had.
I mean, it has tabbing through links, but then go back with alt-arrow, and the link you were on is no longer tab selection.
Shift-click to open a new window in IE, and the new window has the history of its parent...I find this VERY useful in navigation under some circumstances. Plus, ctrl-N opens a clone of the parent, including history...again, it's not too hard to come up with scenarios where this is useful behavior. I know some purists like that Ctrl-n goes to the homepage, and other purists like that ctrl-t opens a 'blank' tab...but I think both "new window" and "new tab" should have 3 options: blank, homepage, or clone of current window.
Only tabbed browsing and the much superior ctrl-F behavior keeps me with Firefox. And the general smugness of not quite being so much of MS's bitch.
And I wish to high heaven that they would return the ability to search textareas with ctrl-F!!
To be fair I never tried 'em, but I heard they dropped one of my favorite features; even on a 486 the use of sprites for enemies let 'em keep those enemies around as corpses, fallen monsters sprinkled like breadcrumbs showing you the path you had taken...seriously, WAY too many FPS just let dead bodies fade away....
Very true. As a Java/Perl coder who then dived into 6502 (well, 6507 but who's counting) to make his own Atari homebrew, as well as made a tutorial and some other stuff, I have to say my initial reaction was...
Perl or PHP for Atari Games....HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, yeah, good luck with that.
Trust me, with 4-8K Rom and 128 *bytes* of RAM...you're not going to get very far with that.
If this energy today was instead put into hacking a game api into some modern device that everyone has _now_, that would not only be geekily cool, it would also potentially be useful, or at least used.
It will be used. AtariAge has a thriving community of coders and wannabes.
As to "this energy"...look, other people are doing that. This is something different. Maybe "inferior" by your way of reckoning, because it's retro rather than current. But like with lots of OSS, people "scratch their own itch".
At this point, it only exists for the sake of doing it in the first place.
That's what geekery is all about!
If that gets the people involved off, that's great! Truly, it is! However, _I'm_ not about to start jumping up and down about it.
There's an active homebrew community to whom this is a really interesting development. You were completely dismissive because it's a nostalgia system, and your wet blankets were misplaced. It's cooler than a lot of other things that gets published on the games section of slashdot.
2600 is an interesting challenge for geeks, and this is the first time something like this has had a serious effort applied to it...unless you count the old Basic Programming cart.
So much of geekdom "just seems kind of sad really" if you're not on that wavelength. I'd suggest reading Levy's book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution"
* BASIC is pretty easy to parse * BASIC's linear structure maps well to the resource starved 6507 ASM Atari games are based on.
Tied in with the second point is how Atari Basic is always going to be a subset of a "real language" anyway. I mean, he could have gone for a C-like syntax, but to me it "feels" more logical to have a stripped down BASIC syntax than a stripped down C.
So with all the potential jokes to be made, the best you could come up with was THAT political potshot? Smuggling around a wildly unpopular and wrongheaded ban on alcohol?
The anonymous coward who said "Arrrr" was funnier than you. That isn't even in the same room as funny.
And of all the reasons to dislike the Kennedies, that has to be SO far down on the list, so even the comment's political agenda isn't well-served.
Good point. I like trackballs a lot...I wish it was a standard option for laptops, I think even small ones are easier to use than touchpads and the little nipple joysticks.
Various platforms have had mice for a while now...SNES and DC come to mind. Neither made that much of a splash or received much support, but nor have they come out of the box (which is similar to why 4 player gaming is such a small niche on PS2, but more of a mainstay on Xbox and GC; PS2's 4 player ability needs something that doesn't come with the base unit)
But you have an ergonomics problem. Controllers can be used while leaning back in a comfy chair. A mouse, you need to be a desk or stooped over your coffee table. I don't agree that it's lack of mice that have stopped consoles from putting the final nails in PC gaming's coffin.
It's a hard sell. Explaining why there's a mouse in the box would be almost a marketing nightmare...unless it came with a keyboard, and then you're talking about pushing an entirely different marketting strategy anyway.
Hm. I see your point, but it still feels more RPG-y to me. Like, it feels more like, say, "Gargoyles Quest" than "Space Quest". I will admit it's all a bit subjective and debateable.
Whatever Star Control 2 is, I think we can all agree is it's a brilliant game.
Well, I'm not a big RPG fan, but I think SC2 qualifies...it has that "feel", in terms of its emphasis on going to many locales, exploring, and talking to various people. And things. Along with a storyline that unfolds. To that extent it has more in common with an RPG than most "adventure/action" games, even if it's not monsterously stat based, lacks turn-by-turn combat (the two things I dislike in most RPGs), and you're confined to your ship rather than have an avatar walking around.
Chess, a small-scale tactical turn-based strategy game, attempts to adopt the age-old "easy to learn, difficult to master" parameter made popular by Tetris. But the game's cumbersome play mechanics and superficial depth and detail all add up to a game that won't keep you busy for long.
--A Review of Chess by Greg Kasavin. Written from the perspective of a computer wargamer, as if Chess was a new game. Funny stuff, check it out.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that with the taskbar, Windows leapfrogged Mac, and the thing is still better than the Doc.
Yes, I've gotten into huge dumb arguments about how shortsighted I am for not realizing that seperating "launch new apps" from "return to running app" is just retrograde idiocy that stops me from grokking a truly object-centered way of thinking. Whatever. Having every running "task" visible and one click away, vs putting launching new things 2 clicks away, works really well IMO.
2002:
http://www.kisrael.com/vgames/egm100.2002.html
1997:
http://www.kisrael.com/vgames/egm100.html
In 2002 I did some comparisons of how the list looked vs 1997...
Couldn't find the referenece, but does anyone remember one of the Douglas Adam's book where it describes how radios had evolved from super primitive knobs and dials to touchpads, to finally you just need to wave in the general direction of the thing, so you needed to keep maddeningly still in your seat if you wanted to keep listening to the same station?
That's where I'm worried Apple might be going, this mouse is somewhere in the middle of that evolution.
(Seriously, I have to be careful when buying a PC mouse these days, stick with the cheap stuff because the mid-range ones have dozens of little buttons and dials and knobs and there's no place to let your damn fingers rest without hitting 'back' in your browsers turning on your MP3 player or what not...but at least then all the buttons are distinct.)
I get paid to program Java. .jsp or .do that indicates it's a Java site.
Sometimes for the web.
But whenever I see a popular site with incredibly slow response times (early Friendster, several inranets) there's a 3/4 chance that I'll look up to the URL and see a
And PHP is showing up more and more often...when I looked at it in 1992 it seemed definately not ready for prime time, bug-wise, and even weird conceptual stuff like having to reset an array to walk it twice, but now it seems to be making huge strides. I prefer Perl, but there is something neat in how all the libraries are RIGHT FRICKIN' THERE with PHP.
From the article:
Sony really was the driving force behind the more complex use of three dimensions. Early attempts like Mario 64, for example, are hardly comparable--in terms of intricacy--to their Sony contemporaries like Tomb Raider
I haven't played Tomb Raider that much, but do you think that's an accurate summation?
I played both. I give the nod to the Xbox version:
A. The difficulty level of DC was just WAY too damn high. I finally got past the "Times Square" level only to get stuck, stuck, stuck on the next one. I think they addressed that pretty well in the sequel
B. going back to the original after the Xbox...it feels kind of slow, sluggish, and choppy relative to the update.
Frankly I didn't miss the patterns" at all...if they had anything to do with the look of the graffiti that showed up, great. But it was just left, right, loop left, loop right, blah blah blah.
I give the original credit for...well, being original! But I think the sequel was a solid improvement by almost any measure.
I disagree. I think the original arcade game was SUCH a quarter sucker, the game mechanic was just inferior to the NES version.
It looked much nicer, but that was about it. And in terms of cultural impact, hands down the NES version is the one that towers above the others...and it deserves it.
The original game had such a nice framing device for its story, where it turns out to be a tale told by Super Joe...
This isn't meant to be a troll, and I have brought this up on the firefox msg boards:
Its interesting that Firefox has the same inferior keyboard control and window history behavior that good old Netscape 4.7 had.
I mean, it has tabbing through links, but then go back with alt-arrow, and the link you were on is no longer tab selection.
Shift-click to open a new window in IE, and the new window has the history of its parent...I find this VERY useful in navigation under some circumstances. Plus, ctrl-N opens a clone of the parent, including history...again, it's not too hard to come up with scenarios where this is useful behavior. I know some purists like that Ctrl-n goes to the homepage, and other purists like that ctrl-t opens a 'blank' tab...but I think both "new window" and "new tab" should have 3 options: blank, homepage, or clone of current window.
Only tabbed browsing and the much superior ctrl-F behavior keeps me with Firefox. And the general smugness of not quite being so much of MS's bitch.
And I wish to high heaven that they would return the ability to search textareas with ctrl-F!!
Could you uuencode everything and make a .txt? Or some similar procedure? Maybe embed it in a doc?
Just some thoughts.
Yes, that was the joke...think about what must be supporting those body parts that you likely are thinking of...
get it now?
To be fair I never tried 'em, but I heard they dropped one of my favorite features; even on a 486 the use of sprites for enemies let 'em keep those enemies around as corpses, fallen monsters sprinkled like breadcrumbs showing you the path you had taken...seriously, WAY too many FPS just let dead bodies fade away....
I've been consulting with Fred Quimby a bit to make the Semi-Official Batari BASIC homepage:
http://alienbill.com/2600/basic/
It will contain the latest builds along with sample code, screenshots, and future documentation.
Very true. As a Java/Perl coder who then dived into 6502 (well, 6507 but who's counting) to make his own Atari homebrew, as well as made a tutorial and some other stuff, I have to say my initial reaction was...
Perl or PHP for Atari Games....HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, yeah, good luck with that.
Trust me, with 4-8K Rom and 128 *bytes* of RAM...you're not going to get very far with that.
If this energy today was instead put into hacking a game api into some modern device that everyone has _now_, that would not only be geekily cool, it would also potentially be useful, or at least used.
It will be used. AtariAge has a thriving community of coders and wannabes.
As to "this energy"...look, other people are doing that. This is something different. Maybe "inferior" by your way of reckoning, because it's retro rather than current. But like with lots of OSS, people "scratch their own itch".
At this point, it only exists for the sake of doing it in the first place.
That's what geekery is all about!
If that gets the people involved off, that's great! Truly, it is! However, _I'm_ not about to start jumping up and down about it.
There's an active homebrew community to whom this is a really interesting development. You were completely dismissive because it's a nostalgia system, and your wet blankets were misplaced. It's cooler than a lot of other things that gets published on the games section of slashdot.
You. Just. Don't. Get. It.
And thanks for clearly labeling your sarcasm.
2600 is an interesting challenge for geeks, and this is the first time something like this has had a serious effort applied to it...unless you count the old Basic Programming cart.
So much of geekdom "just seems kind of sad really" if you're not on that wavelength. I'd suggest reading Levy's book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution"
I'm guessing two reasons:
* BASIC is pretty easy to parse
* BASIC's linear structure maps well to the resource starved 6507 ASM Atari games are based on.
Tied in with the second point is how Atari Basic is always going to be a subset of a "real language" anyway. I mean, he could have gone for a C-like syntax, but to me it "feels" more logical to have a stripped down BASIC syntax than a stripped down C.
Leave the Kennedy family out of this.
So with all the potential jokes to be made, the best you could come up with was THAT political potshot? Smuggling around a wildly unpopular and wrongheaded ban on alcohol?
The anonymous coward who said "Arrrr" was funnier than you. That isn't even in the same room as funny.
And of all the reasons to dislike the Kennedies, that has to be SO far down on the list, so even the comment's political agenda isn't well-served.
Yeesh.
Good point. I like trackballs a lot...I wish it was a standard option for laptops, I think even small ones are easier to use than touchpads and the little nipple joysticks.
Various platforms have had mice for a while now...SNES and DC come to mind. Neither made that much of a splash or received much support, but nor have they come out of the box (which is similar to why 4 player gaming is such a small niche on PS2, but more of a mainstay on Xbox and GC; PS2's 4 player ability needs something that doesn't come with the base unit)
But you have an ergonomics problem. Controllers can be used while leaning back in a comfy chair. A mouse, you need to be a desk or stooped over your coffee table. I don't agree that it's lack of mice that have stopped consoles from putting the final nails in PC gaming's coffin.
It's a hard sell. Explaining why there's a mouse in the box would be almost a marketing nightmare...unless it came with a keyboard, and then you're talking about pushing an entirely different marketting strategy anyway.
Does anyone have a summary of the 8 things blackberry is supposedly infringing on?
Stupid patents...they're a relic from an age of much slower innovation and a less dynamic evolutionary landscape.
Hm. I see your point, but it still feels more RPG-y to me. Like, it feels more like, say, "Gargoyles Quest" than "Space Quest". I will admit it's all a bit subjective and debateable.
Whatever Star Control 2 is, I think we can all agree is it's a brilliant game.
Well, I'm not a big RPG fan, but I think SC2 qualifies...it has that "feel", in terms of its emphasis on going to many locales, exploring, and talking to various people. And things. Along with a storyline that unfolds. To that extent it has more in common with an RPG than most "adventure/action" games, even if it's not monsterously stat based, lacks turn-by-turn combat (the two things I dislike in most RPGs), and you're confined to your ship rather than have an avatar walking around.
--A Review of Chess by Greg Kasavin. Written from the perspective of a computer wargamer, as if Chess was a new game. Funny stuff, check it out.
Another example of neat simplistic one button action is Arcadia...it's an exercise in multitasking, trying to take on 4 very simple games at once...