Re:if you are into this ....
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 1
Halcyon Days was really enjoyable. I paid for it and got my floppy when it first came out:-)
"Ultimate History" wasn't so great though...it was too anecdotal, not enough of a narrative. It was interesting how it traced the roots all the way back to pre-pinball days however.
Re:Commander Keen cutting edge?
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 1
Yes, cutting edge in terms of the PC world only, which brought 1990 PCs up to the level of 1984 NES.
I try to make most of my games "speed aware", using timers rather than bare loops, but it's very hard to test, since you don't have access to that super-fast hardware when you're writing the damn game.
And the old 8-bit mags, COMPUTE! and it's computer-specific variaints, Antic for the Atari 8-bits...
the concept of getting sent a monthly issue with plenty of odd little programs to type-in or if you were lucky enough to get it all on disk...that was pretty cool.
I mean, not as cool as the web, which is one of many reasons that these things won't be coming back anytime soon, but still cool.
Anyone remember the "Adventures of Alfredo" series? This tiny little stickfigure would have all sorts of random little adventures in his stick figure world. Back in the old black-and-white Palm Pilot days, I thought it would be cool to try and remake those, though I couldn't get hold of the original programs for comparison (and would likely need to mo'slo the heck out of any computer to see 'em). You could probably remake them as java applets...it probably wouldn't be hard (or that inefficient, really) to do 'em as animated GIFs...it was kind of a precursor to that brief "stick figure death theater" minifad that was kicking around for a bit.
pretty good read
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It was a pretty good read.
Interesting seeing how badly PCs lagged consoles in terms of gaming...the sidescrolling of Commander Keen was considered a technical breakthru, even though it started as a demo level of Mario Bros 3 as a proof-of-concept, and was basically the same thing the NES had been doing since the mid-early 80s...in fact, it was a while until PCs could play games that the C=64 and Apple II could, never mind the Amiga and Atari ST.
DOOM and, possibly to a lesser extent, Wing Commander really put the PC ahead of the consoles (at least for many genres) for a long while. I think the tide has turned now. (though YMMV depending on what genres you like--I'm just very glad not to have to worry about 3D cards and compatability and what not.)
Well I've been using a new Tungsten C for a couple of weeks. The unit is fantastic, the one downer: Graffiti2 (aka Jot). Gah, that does suck.
I forgot about that. I'm glad the SJ22 has had a sip of that particular kool-aid.
F@(|# Xerox and their petty ass lawsuit. Graffiti was at least 10 times better than their unistrokes crap...the brainstorm that these one-stroke characters COULD LOOK REAL LETTERS is so much smarter than the hyroglyphic crap Xerox was playing with, it's a real innovation and I hope Xerox burns in hell.
A useful link to a previously mentioned scientific american article, a clarification of an interesting digression, and one opinion that the 1 in pa1mOne is kind of dumb...a rather uncontroversial opinion.
Gah, I wish I knew what these moderator's were thinking.
Though I almost feel like a poser talking about it, like geeks who find some odd comfort in thinking of themselves as "a bit autistic, maybe". It really doesn't interfere with my day to day life much, just now and then. With passwords and what not. And I have to be damn careful typing out "Phone number made of letters", like 1-800-M-A-T-T-R-E-S.
So that's why you read slashdot and not kuro5hin... Heh, good point. Though in that case the h after the 5 changes things as bit. Maybe it all rounds down to a bit of a "J" sound rather than F or the proper "sh"
Did he link to the articles (w/o a direct frontpage link), or just copy the text?
The latter is much worse than the first, IMO.
Most well-designed sites have a big old link to the frontpage on every article. And if you want to put in a frontpage link just to be nice, it should probably be only around the name of the publication, not a big sentence.
I only have a touch of it...when I was 5 I'd write my name Kirk as Ki4k, (I think because the 4 has an "R" sound) and I would read the promo for "The Fifth Elment", "It Mu5t Be Found" and ask "it muft be found? what the hell is that?"
"pa1mOne" doesn't trigger quite as much, but it's still really stupid.
Try to make the link that people are actually going to want to click larger the pointless, gratuitous "top of site" link that nobody wants to click on
The Guardian is running an article "The Guardian is running an" links to the frontpage of the site. "article" links to the article.
And there's no space between them, to show you it's two different links before you click.
(Like Myron Krueger said "If people were going to use computers all day, everyday, the design of such machines was not solely a technical problem-- it was also an aesthetic one. A lousy interface would mean a lousy life." Same goes for linking, darn it.)
Re:Stage One of Going Down the Toilet
on
Palm Reveals New Name
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Charge $299 for an Palm-based product which has less than half the processing power and half the capabilities of comparable PocketPC devices, and expect people to buy it.
Good thing they have an OS and UI that people actually enjoy using.
Though I just bought a wonder $180 Sony SJ-22; terrific screen and the UI/OS I love. I think Sony is more of a threat to Palm hardware than the PocketPC is.
"The new name is characterized in two colors - deep red for the word 'palm' and vibrant orange for 'One,' reflecting the subbrand colors for the company's Tungsten line of solutions for mobile professionals and business and its Zire line of solutions for consumers and multimedia enthusiasts, respectively."
Come on, from Pro/Personal, III, V, Zire, Tungston, m, these guys have changed branding more often than their underwear. This is what they want to bank on?
No explanation given for the lame l->1 conversion.
What the hell is the point? "Palm" had some of the strongest name recongition in the business...it was impressive that they were able to stake out "Palm" (remember Microsot's "Palm PCs"?) Maybe they're worried about Xerox- or Kleenex-style dillution of their name?
Any way, that l -> 1 switch is awful. I have a touch of synthaenasia, and I'm not alone, so I "hear" the "1" in "pa1m" as "o", so it reads "paom one".
I need to research this, thought someone might know off the top of their heads... Windows XP, I got hit by a trojan hiding as an.SCR, (yeah yeah, revenge of pr0n), a pretty nasty one that pulled crap like shutting down task manager as soon as I brought it up. I think it might have disabled windows update. is there a way to tell if it is actually disabled, and how to get it back?
going back to the original idea, how cool would it be to have a lava lamp inside the case, maybe helping out all those heatsinks by converting heat into lava-moving power...with a window so you can see it as it generated all the random numbers you needed.
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin." --John von Neumann
Anyway, I'm not really trying to be "profund"--I was having moderate but disruptive anxiety attacks, and by thinking about the issues and learning about certain materialist philosophies, I was able to calm myself down. I wrote it down so I could retrace those steps in the future, and publicize it in a very limited way so that other people who are having similar problems dealing with it might find it useful.
And if you were immortal, you would have no need for unmanned spacecraft or highly advanced communications? This may explain why an immortal society wouldn't space travel, but doesn't explain why there is no evidence.
Maybe like Larry Niven's "Pierson's Puppeteers" race--they're scared! They realize there might be some big bad aliens out there that they don't know about, so they take great care not to broadcast or probe to the big wide galaxy or universe...
Despite all the promising technologies, I think we have to admit there's a decent chance all of the people reading this will be dead in a century or two.
So if you don't believe in the afterlife (or you might but you're not positive) and the idea of maybe not living forever really bothers you, I've put togther a document that might help: Dealing With Mortality: A Skeptic's Guideor: Kirk's Big Fun Pages O' Inevitable Death.
When I wrote it, I thought it might be the most important thing I had ever written (maybe I still feel that way) and that's why I've been plugging it via my.sig ever since.
Coming in a day late (well, almost) and a dollar short:
Heh, from an "A-life" perspective, RoboSweep is almost interesting. Roomba uses (I would guess) something akin to real AI, where as RoboSweep--at best--has the same kind of "strucutral intelligence" that insects and the like have evolved. It's surprising some of the task-specific intelligence you can demonstrate even without a brain if your physical structures and reflexes are good enough.
"As seen on TV" can really run the spectrum of total crap to great products. My Aunt and Uncle love their showtime rotisserie oven. It really lives up to its promises. But you should probably beware any product marketed as "just like the expensive one, but much cheaper!"--the laws of getting more or less what you're paying for still apply.
What's wrong with a bit of metaconversation on slashdot?
Anyway, the formatting's pretty useless. Compared to the size of the answers and the comments, the questions are really small potatoes, and making them links instead of embedding them is just distracting.
Nintendo: I'm your target market. I'm a 27 year old male, I have a LOT of money. I spend a lot on video games. I don't have a Game Cube and I don't want a Game Cube. Why? Your controller sucks and you've only got two games I want to play (Metroid and Zelda).
Stop making kids games. Start making games targetted at me. Until you do so, all my money is going to continue going to so Sony, Microsoft, and my PC. You can't win this war without my demographic.
blah blah frickin' blah. The controller is the best one out there now. It's also the very best system for multiplayer. (In the gather folks together sense, not the the networked sense, where it's clearly lacking.)
So given that your demographic is whiny losers who can't appreciate a good game or a recognize a complex game unless it has lots of blood and guts and sex and have no friends to play video games with, well, I can't blame Nintendo for not catering to your every whim.
Slashdot Mirror
Halcyon Days was really enjoyable. I paid for it and got my floppy when it first came out :-)
"Ultimate History" wasn't so great though...it was too anecdotal, not enough of a narrative. It was interesting how it traced the roots all the way back to pre-pinball days however.
Yes, cutting edge in terms of the PC world only, which brought 1990 PCs up to the level of 1984 NES.
I try to make most of my games "speed aware", using timers rather than bare loops, but it's very hard to test, since you don't have access to that super-fast hardware when you're writing the damn game.
So it's like "The Soul of a New Machine", except it's about Doom. And it's not very good.
A little more like Levy's "Hackers", actually.
And I thought it was reasonably well-written...or at least not bad enough for me to notice anything amiss.
...you know, I miss the days of Softdisk.
And the old 8-bit mags, COMPUTE! and it's computer-specific variaints, Antic for the Atari 8-bits...
the concept of getting sent a monthly issue with plenty of odd little programs to type-in or if you were lucky enough to get it all on disk...that was pretty cool.
I mean, not as cool as the web, which is one of many reasons that these things won't be coming back anytime soon, but still cool.
Anyone remember the "Adventures of Alfredo" series? This tiny little stickfigure would have all sorts of random little adventures in his stick figure world. Back in the old black-and-white Palm Pilot days, I thought it would be cool to try and remake those, though I couldn't get hold of the original programs for comparison (and would likely need to mo'slo the heck out of any computer to see 'em). You could probably remake them as java applets...it probably wouldn't be hard (or that inefficient, really) to do 'em as animated GIFs...it was kind of a precursor to that brief "stick figure death theater" minifad that was kicking around for a bit.
It was a pretty good read.
Interesting seeing how badly PCs lagged consoles in terms of gaming...the sidescrolling of Commander Keen was considered a technical breakthru, even though it started as a demo level of Mario Bros 3 as a proof-of-concept, and was basically the same thing the NES had been doing since the mid-early 80s...in fact, it was a while until PCs could play games that the C=64 and Apple II could, never mind the Amiga and Atari ST.
DOOM and, possibly to a lesser extent, Wing Commander really put the PC ahead of the consoles (at least for many genres) for a long while. I think the tide has turned now. (though YMMV depending on what genres you like--I'm just very glad not to have to worry about 3D cards and compatability and what not.)
Well I've been using a new Tungsten C for a couple of weeks. The unit is fantastic, the one downer: Graffiti2 (aka Jot).
Gah, that does suck.
I forgot about that. I'm glad the SJ22 has had a sip of that particular kool-aid.
F@(|# Xerox and their petty ass lawsuit. Graffiti was at least 10 times better than their unistrokes crap...the brainstorm that these one-stroke characters COULD LOOK REAL LETTERS is so much smarter than the hyroglyphic crap Xerox was playing with, it's a real innovation and I hope Xerox burns in hell.
What the hell, -1 Flamebait??
A useful link to a previously mentioned scientific american article, a clarification of an interesting digression, and one opinion that the 1 in pa1mOne is kind of dumb...a rather uncontroversial opinion.
Gah, I wish I knew what these moderator's were thinking.
I'm pretty sure it qualifies as a form of it.
Though I almost feel like a poser talking about it, like geeks who find some odd comfort in thinking of themselves as "a bit autistic, maybe". It really doesn't interfere with my day to day life much, just now and then. With passwords and what not. And I have to be damn careful typing out "Phone number made of letters", like 1-800-M-A-T-T-R-E-S.
So that's why you read slashdot and not kuro5hin...
Heh, good point. Though in that case the h after the 5 changes things as bit. Maybe it all rounds down to a bit of a "J" sound rather than F or the proper "sh"
Did he link to the articles (w/o a direct frontpage link), or just copy the text?
The latter is much worse than the first, IMO.
Most well-designed sites have a big old link to the frontpage on every article. And if you want to put in a frontpage link just to be nice, it should probably be only around the name of the publication, not a big sentence.
Sorry, I spelled it incorrectly.
"Synesthesia".
Here is the article on it from
I only have a touch of it...when I was 5 I'd write my name Kirk as Ki4k, (I think because the 4 has an "R" sound) and I would read the promo for "The Fifth Elment", "It Mu5t Be Found" and ask "it muft be found? what the hell is that?"
"pa1mOne" doesn't trigger quite as much, but it's still really stupid.
Try to make the link that people are actually going to want to click larger the pointless, gratuitous "top of site" link that nobody wants to click on
The Guardian is running an article
"The Guardian is running an" links to the frontpage of the site.
"article" links to the article.
And there's no space between them, to show you it's two different links before you click.
(Like Myron Krueger said "If people were going to use computers all day, everyday, the design of such machines was not solely a technical problem-- it was also an aesthetic one. A lousy interface would mean a lousy life." Same goes for linking, darn it.)
Charge $299 for an Palm-based product which has less than half the processing power and half the capabilities of comparable PocketPC devices, and expect people to buy it.
Good thing they have an OS and UI that people actually enjoy using.
Though I just bought a wonder $180 Sony SJ-22; terrific screen and the UI/OS I love. I think Sony is more of a threat to Palm hardware than the PocketPC is.
more information from including the logo....my favorite quote
"The new name is characterized in two colors - deep red for the word 'palm' and vibrant orange for 'One,' reflecting the subbrand colors for the company's Tungsten line of solutions for mobile professionals and business and its Zire line of solutions for consumers and multimedia enthusiasts, respectively."
Come on, from Pro/Personal, III, V, Zire, Tungston, m, these guys have changed branding more often than their underwear. This is what they want to bank on?
No explanation given for the lame l->1 conversion.
This is so awful.
What the hell is the point? "Palm" had some of the strongest name recongition in the business...it was impressive that they were able to stake out "Palm" (remember Microsot's "Palm PCs"?) Maybe they're worried about Xerox- or Kleenex-style dillution of their name?
Any way, that l -> 1 switch is awful. I have a touch of synthaenasia, and I'm not alone, so I "hear" the "1" in "pa1m" as "o", so it reads "paom one".
If this is for real, this is so lame.
I need to research this, thought someone might know off the top of their heads... .SCR, (yeah yeah, revenge of pr0n), a pretty nasty one that pulled crap like shutting down task manager as soon as I brought it up. I think it might have disabled windows update. is there a way to tell if it is actually disabled, and how to get it back?
Windows XP, I got hit by a trojan hiding as an
No, the idea is that the heat from the chips would power the lamp. The lamp would just be a big, probably ineffecient heatsink basically.
going back to the original idea, how cool would it be to have a lava lamp inside the case, maybe helping out all those heatsinks by converting heat into lava-moving power...with a window so you can see it as it generated all the random numbers you needed.
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin."
--John von Neumann
Great, now I'll click on mailto:s and be taken to the hotmail site...
Man, don't know why my post rated an "offtopic".
Anyway, I'm not really trying to be "profund"--I was having moderate but disruptive anxiety attacks, and by thinking about the issues and learning about certain materialist philosophies, I was able to calm myself down. I wrote it down so I could retrace those steps in the future, and publicize it in a very limited way so that other people who are having similar problems dealing with it might find it useful.
And if you were immortal, you would have no need for unmanned spacecraft or highly advanced communications? This may explain why an immortal society wouldn't space travel, but doesn't explain why there is no evidence.
Maybe like Larry Niven's "Pierson's Puppeteers" race--they're scared! They realize there might be some big bad aliens out there that they don't know about, so they take great care not to broadcast or probe to the big wide galaxy or universe...
Despite all the promising technologies, I think we have to admit there's a decent chance all of the people reading this will be dead in a century or two.
.
.sig ever since.
So if you don't believe in the afterlife (or you might but you're not positive) and the idea of maybe not living forever really bothers you, I've put togther a document that might help: Dealing With Mortality: A Skeptic's Guide or: Kirk's Big Fun Pages O' Inevitable Death
When I wrote it, I thought it might be the most important thing I had ever written (maybe I still feel that way) and that's why I've been plugging it via my
Coming in a day late (well, almost) and a dollar short:
Heh, from an "A-life" perspective, RoboSweep is almost interesting. Roomba uses (I would guess) something akin to real AI, where as RoboSweep--at best--has the same kind of "strucutral intelligence" that insects and the like have evolved. It's surprising some of the task-specific intelligence you can demonstrate even without a brain if your physical structures and reflexes are good enough.
"As seen on TV" can really run the spectrum of total crap to great products. My Aunt and Uncle love their showtime rotisserie oven. It really lives up to its promises. But you should probably beware any product marketed as "just like the expensive one, but much cheaper!"--the laws of getting more or less what you're paying for still apply.
What's wrong with a bit of metaconversation on slashdot?
Anyway, the formatting's pretty useless. Compared to the size of the answers and the comments, the questions are really small potatoes, and making them links instead of embedding them is just distracting.
Nintendo: I'm your target market. I'm a 27 year old male, I have a LOT of money. I spend a lot on video games. I don't have a Game Cube and I don't want a Game Cube. Why? Your controller sucks and you've only got two games I want to play (Metroid and Zelda).
Stop making kids games. Start making games targetted at me. Until you do so, all my money is going to continue going to so Sony, Microsoft, and my PC. You can't win this war without my demographic.
blah blah frickin' blah. The controller is the best one out there now. It's also the very best system for multiplayer. (In the gather folks together sense, not the the networked sense, where it's clearly lacking.)
So given that your demographic is whiny losers who can't appreciate a good game or a recognize a complex game unless it has lots of blood and guts and sex and have no friends to play video games with, well, I can't blame Nintendo for not catering to your every whim.