I'm still on the look out for true "one button games" -- Mario Party has a few, including a clever one where you have to limbo...each button press is a hop plus a lean back, but you're leaning back up at the same right...click too fast you topple, too slow and you rise too hight and don't make it under.
I also made some REAL one button games: http://kisrael.com./features/gb.html these are games ENTIRELY played within a single grey HTML pushbutton...I change the captions via javascript to make some cute little games.
Heh, like Hotblack Desiato in Restaurant at the End of the Universe who was spending a year legally dead, "for tax reasons".
The "$100 for a couple thousand years" is a profoundly optimistic viewpoint...come to think about it, that wouldn't even pay for your icebox maintenence.
heh...in my experience it's the "digital artist, 3D animator, web designer, and otherwise technological creative type...." who are fond of the 9pt courier...or smaller. And lock it in so you can't readily resize it.
I'm no luddite, but I do value content over presentation to a certain extent...in this case w/ the flash links I was annoyed shift-click and ctrl-click didn't do what I expected...if you're going to "roll your own" when it comes to links, it's nice to get the details right.
Does anyone else see how this could end up with Microsoft effectively having no good reason for the average person to leave XP unless they buy a new PC? Why would a business want to move to Longhorn if it is a warmed over rehash of Windows XP?/i? Despite the quite possibly very true anecdotes of XP over Win2000 you cite, it doesn't feel like upgrades have ever been a major piece of the pie for Windows. At home, and with a 10 year career programming, I can think of maybe one time where I got the new OS without getting a new PC. I don't know if the #s back up my observation.
Seriously, I think for a lot of people the main advantage to XP over 98, say - at least of what a non-geek user thinks of at purchase time - was the eye candy, all that blue fisher price look and feel. Once you get into it you do see a lot of cool things, and increased stability, but still.
Of course, I still go back to the "classic" look and feel, because thats now what subconciously reads as "computer blah blah" to me...anything shinier distracts me just a tad.
Yeah, that's a REALLY good point. I can think of ONE possible use of that, capturing just certain columns when doing a dir, but then you could just do dir/b. It is unmitigated retardation.
Well, for a lot of "power users" the goal is to get the keyboard as effecient as possible, measuredin keystrokes as well as mental energy. F7 helps me make more sense of its (too me) counter intuitive behavior, but I think I still strongly prefer the "flat history" approach.
Oh, I see, I guess I had a mental model that involved parsing the path string to determine what ".." "meant" as opposed to parsing the command string to determine A. the file but then B. asking the system what ".." above that file "means".
Actually, I think ".." should always be in the context of a current working directory or an explicitly listed path, so I could envision an ambiguous system that wouldn't have a problem w/ hardlinks or symlinks.
Because I know I can type "cd", drag a file from explorer onto a cmd window, and then add \.. to the end and go to that directory rather than deleting the filename. This isn't as needed now that I have the Address bar when I'm viewing a folder and can just copy that.
cp -R `dirname somefile`../newdir dirname somefile | ls
does the thing.... more versatile What does it do actually? Is that anything like what I just described? It seems like dirname somefile | ls wouldn't do anything because dirname somefile isn't a command?
I tried making a few diretories and files in UNix and running these commands on 'em...I gotta say it wasn't making much sense to me.
I do admit it's a mismatch in the mental model for uparrow.
Your metaphor of it as "editing the (document) list of executed commands" helps it make more sense, but still, it seems strange to me.
For starters, it seems a little arbitrary how the behavior changes just if I modify a command or don't modify a command...if I don't modify the command, it doesn't get added to the bottom. There's a logic there but it seems inconsistent.
I guess the "power" of it is so that it avoids the "up up up up return, up up up up return" kind of method of repeating a previous batch of commands, but in practice I prefer a more consistent approach to "history" with each executed command added to the bottom whether it was constructed from the history itself...if I have so many commands that it's hard to remember how many ups, I should just put it in a batch/shell file anyway.
There are two and a half things that bug the hell out of me with the current CLI:
1. The tab completion behavior (the 'half' part of my 2 1/2 gripes is sometimes you have to fiddle with a registry setting to turn on tab completion). A unix shell (well, the one I'm used to, not even sure which) will complete only up to the point where its unique, and then I can hit Ctrl-D to see possible completions. A lot more predictable than tabbing through all completions that might fit what you've typed...the distinction between "characters I typed myself" and "characters showing up because I'm cycling through" has no visual cue, even though it completely controls what files get shown.
2. up arrow behavior. It took me a while to finally "get" the logic of Windows...if you type command A, then command B, then command C, then arrow back up to B and run that, pressing down will then take you to C and up will take you to A. I think that it's meant to cover a long sequence of commands that you do over and over, so you don't have to keep uparrowing, but just pressing down once per repeated command, but its much harder to keep a mental model of.
Both of these things are classic Window's trade off of predictability for perceived "user friendliness". I think hackers often prefer predicitability and ease of mental modeling, since they can always make it easier by some scripting or whatever.
On the other hand, I like that I can add "\.." to the end of a filename and get to its directory. That's something that seems logical to me that Unix shells don't generally do.
Well, with emulators and such, its gotten a little easier, plus there's a great support community there. I've tried to add to it with my 2600 101 tutorial and assorted other tools. A decent debugger is still pending, however.
Did you complete a game? Even obscure 2600 games get attention with the community on atariage.com... love to know what it is, even if in retrospect it doesn't feel like your finest programming hour, but especially if it does...:-)
I wrote my own 2600 homebrew game, got it released by AtariAge.com w/ promotional T-shirts and everything.
Anyway, one thing that intrigues me these days isn't advanced gameplay on the 2600 -- its 2600-like gameplay in modern settings, minigames...especially those found in "party" compilations.
Ugh, I always disable all those extra clicks/drag functions on the touchpad. Drags are too hard to do, extraneous clicks too easy.
Different strokes (so to speak) I wish I could still get a marble trackball on my laptop, I find them the easiest to use...I even learned how to doodle with one.
Agreed. I was dismayed to see how my BestOf GameCube list looked a lot like BestOf N64 -- Just a lot less originality over all. Some of that is because N64 was a more fundamental shift from the SNES, but still, it does feel like they're coasting.
I started Halo 2 on easy, I got to the point where my character (now the heretic or whatever) cleared out a hanger and I had no idea idea where to go. I was sick of being lost in the game by that point...playing co-op, we even had trouble figuring out the first big courtyard place where the first off-ship battle happens. Too few visual references...I know I'm a wuss gamer but I was still wondering, I have this frickin' supercomputer AI babe in my helmet, couldn't she throw me a map or at least give some verbal hints?
Jeez. After reading all the griping about Matrix 2 and 3, and then all the kvetching about Ep.1 and 2 and even 3, which was really pretty decent though far from flawless...I gotta say, you geeks are the whiniest MFers on the face of the earth when it comes to your beloved franchises, just total nattering nabobs of negativity when it comes to flicks following the footsteps of truly monumental movies.
Every one of these films were worth my ten bucks if for the great special effects alone. Sure, none of them quite lived up to hopes for where the story could go, and some had non-trivial plot or goofiness or pacing issues, but DAMN you guys bitch bitch bitch! Compared to typical summer shlockbusters, every one of these sequels is frickin' ART.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, thanks for the Plug :-)
I'm still on the look out for true "one button games" -- Mario Party has a few, including a clever one where you have to limbo...each button press is a hop plus a lean back, but you're leaning back up at the same right...click too fast you topple, too slow and you rise too hight and don't make it under.
I also made some REAL one button games:
http://kisrael.com./features/gb.html
these are games ENTIRELY played within a single grey HTML pushbutton...I change the captions via javascript to make some cute little games.
Heh, like Hotblack Desiato in Restaurant at the End of the Universe who was spending a year legally dead, "for tax reasons".
The "$100 for a couple thousand years" is a profoundly optimistic viewpoint...come to think about it, that wouldn't even pay for your icebox maintenence.
heh...in my experience it's the "digital artist, 3D animator, web designer, and otherwise technological creative type...." who are fond of the 9pt courier...or smaller. And lock it in so you can't readily resize it.
I'm no luddite, but I do value content over presentation to a certain extent...in this case w/ the flash links I was annoyed shift-click and ctrl-click didn't do what I expected...if you're going to "roll your own" when it comes to links, it's nice to get the details right.
Party games are a great example of old school, pick up and play gameplay in a modern setting.
I have pipedreams of building my own for DreamCast, cribbing from Mario Party and Fuzion Frenzy...
Does anyone else see how this could end up with Microsoft effectively having no good reason for the average person to leave XP unless they buy a new PC? Why would a business want to move to Longhorn if it is a warmed over rehash of Windows XP?/i?
Despite the quite possibly very true anecdotes of XP over Win2000 you cite, it doesn't feel like upgrades have ever been a major piece of the pie for Windows. At home, and with a 10 year career programming, I can think of maybe one time where I got the new OS without getting a new PC. I don't know if the #s back up my observation.
Seriously, I think for a lot of people the main advantage to XP over 98, say - at least of what a non-geek user thinks of at purchase time - was the eye candy, all that blue fisher price look and feel. Once you get into it you do see a lot of cool things, and increased stability, but still.
Of course, I still go back to the "classic" look and feel, because thats now what subconciously reads as "computer blah blah" to me...anything shinier distracts me just a tad.
Yeah, that's a REALLY good point. I can think of ONE possible use of that, capturing just certain columns when doing a dir, but then you could just do dir/b. It is unmitigated retardation.
Oh, didn't realize it was a command, I thought it was the equivalent of "somefile" but for a directory.
Learn something new everyday. Still doesn't get at why I like doing pathoffile\filename\..
Well, for a lot of "power users" the goal is to get the keyboard as effecient as possible, measuredin keystrokes as well as mental energy. F7 helps me make more sense of its (too me) counter intuitive behavior, but I think I still strongly prefer the "flat history" approach.
Oh, I see, I guess I had a mental model that involved parsing the path string to determine what ".." "meant" as opposed to parsing the command string to determine A. the file but then B. asking the system what ".." above that file "means".
Actually, I think ".." should always be in the context of a current working directory or an explicitly listed path, so I could envision an ambiguous system that wouldn't have a problem w/ hardlinks or symlinks.
Yeah, I was going to suggest that site.
And, IMO, the ulitmate casual gamer game:
isketch -- Pictionary as played by 10 people in a chatroom and refereed by a computer...ADDICTIVE STUFF.
I know I might be being a little dense but could you explain why its Unix's symlinks/hardlinks that make this harder to implement or more ambiguous?
why?
../newdir
Because I know I can type "cd", drag a file from explorer onto a cmd window, and then add \.. to the end and go to that directory rather than deleting the filename. This isn't as needed now that I have the Address bar when I'm viewing a folder and can just copy that.
cp -R `dirname somefile`
dirname somefile | ls
does the thing....
more versatile
What does it do actually? Is that anything like what I just described? It seems like
dirname somefile | ls
wouldn't do anything because dirname somefile isn't a command?
I tried making a few diretories and files in UNix and running these commands on 'em...I gotta say it wasn't making much sense to me.
I do admit it's a mismatch in the mental model for uparrow.
Your metaphor of it as "editing the (document) list of executed commands" helps it make more sense, but still, it seems strange to me.
For starters, it seems a little arbitrary how the behavior changes just if I modify a command or don't modify a command...if I don't modify the command, it doesn't get added to the bottom. There's a logic there but it seems inconsistent.
I guess the "power" of it is so that it avoids the "up up up up return, up up up up return" kind of method of repeating a previous batch of commands, but in practice I prefer a more consistent approach to "history" with each executed command added to the bottom whether it was constructed from the history itself...if I have so many commands that it's hard to remember how many ups, I should just put it in a batch/shell file anyway.
There are two and a half things that bug the hell out of me with the current CLI:
1. The tab completion behavior (the 'half' part of my 2 1/2 gripes is sometimes you have to fiddle with a registry setting to turn on tab completion). A unix shell (well, the one I'm used to, not even sure which) will complete only up to the point where its unique, and then I can hit Ctrl-D to see possible completions. A lot more predictable than tabbing through all completions that might fit what you've typed...the distinction between "characters I typed myself" and "characters showing up because I'm cycling through" has no visual cue, even though it completely controls what files get shown.
2. up arrow behavior. It took me a while to finally "get" the logic of Windows...if you type command A, then command B, then command C, then arrow back up to B and run that, pressing down will then take you to C and up will take you to A. I think that it's meant to cover a long sequence of commands that you do over and over, so you don't have to keep uparrowing, but just pressing down once per repeated command, but its much harder to keep a mental model of.
Both of these things are classic Window's trade off of predictability for perceived "user friendliness". I think hackers often prefer predicitability and ease of mental modeling, since they can always make it easier by some scripting or whatever.
On the other hand, I like that I can add "\.." to the end of a filename and get to its directory. That's something that seems logical to me that Unix shells don't generally do.
sure, my email is on http://kisrael.com/
Well, with emulators and such, its gotten a little easier, plus there's a great support community there. I've tried to add to it with my 2600 101 tutorial and assorted other tools. A decent debugger is still pending, however.
:-)
Did you complete a game? Even obscure 2600 games get attention with the community on atariage.com... love to know what it is, even if in retrospect it doesn't feel like your finest programming hour, but especially if it does...
Heh. Are you really an old Atari 2600 programmer?
I wrote my own 2600 homebrew game, got it released by AtariAge.com w/ promotional T-shirts and everything.
Anyway, one thing that intrigues me these days isn't advanced gameplay on the 2600 -- its 2600-like gameplay in modern settings, minigames...especially those found in "party" compilations.
Ugh, I always disable all those extra clicks/drag functions on the touchpad. Drags are too hard to do, extraneous clicks too easy.
Different strokes (so to speak) I wish I could still get a marble trackball on my laptop, I find them the easiest to use...I even learned how to doodle with one.
Agreed. I was dismayed to see how my BestOf GameCube list looked a lot like BestOf N64 -- Just a lot less originality over all. Some of that is because N64 was a more fundamental shift from the SNES, but still, it does feel like they're coasting.
The last board wasn't too bad if you got yourself fireproof--I'd recommend going to the desert to do the needed firetruck missions.
Yeah, absolute agreement.
Hardcore gamers are probably craving serious AI that can actually help train them for vs. human play or just generally be a challenge.
For casual gamers, it would be too much like real war where you never see the bullet that gets you.
Huh...I often think about the problem color blind people would have in certain games.
I count myself fortunate to not have any significant sense impairement, save for common sense. and some astigmatism.
No getting lost?
I started Halo 2 on easy, I got to the point where my character (now the heretic or whatever) cleared out a hanger and I had no idea idea where to go. I was sick of being lost in the game by that point...playing co-op, we even had trouble figuring out the first big courtyard place where the first off-ship battle happens. Too few visual references...I know I'm a wuss gamer but I was still wondering, I have this frickin' supercomputer AI babe in my helmet, couldn't she throw me a map or at least give some verbal hints?
Jeez. After reading all the griping about Matrix 2 and 3, and then all the kvetching about Ep.1 and 2 and even 3, which was really pretty decent though far from flawless...I gotta say, you geeks are the whiniest MFers on the face of the earth when it comes to your beloved franchises, just total nattering nabobs of negativity when it comes to flicks following the footsteps of truly monumental movies.
Every one of these films were worth my ten bucks if for the great special effects alone. Sure, none of them quite lived up to hopes for where the story could go, and some had non-trivial plot or goofiness or pacing issues, but DAMN you guys bitch bitch bitch! Compared to typical summer shlockbusters, every one of these sequels is frickin' ART.
I RTFA earlier today and I believe this is a huge mistake.
Spoken like a true slashdotter...most of us think RTFAing is a huge mistake too.