V-Twin was the basis for the summarize feature, I think there's still an SDK up for it.
Personally, I liked PowerTalk. A system-wide, integrated mail and collaboration framework with a standardized mailing interface.
Even if the implementation is done with LDAP, PGP, and Sendmail now, I really wish they'd bring back those APIs for application code. The "digital signing" concept integrated into the API was better integrated than Apple File Security in Mac OS 9, and better than anything in OS X right now. Remember being able to verify a document's signiature from the Get Info window? The Keychain is the only concept that survived.
QuickDraw GX (here or here) was WAY ahead of its time. Although a lot of its features found their way into ATSUI with Unicode, QDGX still had soul. I still don't know of any program that can do all the really really fancy and obscure ligatures properly.
Probably my FAVORITE technology was/is Apple Guide. There's nothing quite like a help system that draws coach marks on the screen when telling you how to perform a step. That plus hilighting proper menu options in red, and the fact that it wasn't glacially slow once it became PowerPC native, made it a really amazing conversion tool.
Balloon Help was quirky and fun. I don't really understand why they replaced something so cool with something as lame as Tooltips. =(
QuickDraw 3D and Apple Data Detectors had some cool concepts too. Maybe we should get them to re-write Data Detectors using Perl regexps:)
For those of who weren't programming Macs back in the Day (remember APDA?), Apple had an award-winning quarterly technical journal called "develop" which had lots of neat articles in it with a fun and offbeat tone. Sort of like O'Reilly and Associates has now. They stopped putting it out in '97 amid all the hemoraging, but all the issues are available here.
Anyway, there's a pretty informative article explaining all about Copland here.
It's simply about compatibility. With companies sending Word (.doc) files all over the place every day, Apple had to recognize those dot-three extensions as valid document types.
OS 9 was more intelligent about that though. It performed the recognition *at the time the foreign file was introduced into the file system*. When something was downloaded from the internet, decompressed from a non-Mac archive, or copied or opened from a foreign file system (ie, Unix or MS-DOS), *that* was when the File Extension/MIME Type recognition would kick in, assign the right 4-character TYPE code, and assign the default Creator code for that type. Once the file exists in the Mac filesystem, this automatic behavior stops.
Similar behavior occurs when copying or sending data to a foreign file system (well, it should). The Mac does a lookup on the appropriate.xxx extension and mime-type for a specific TYPE code (and for a specific Creator code, if that entry exists) and renames the file with the appropriate extension. If nothing is found, leave it unchanged if it only has a data fork, flatten it into MacBinary and add ".bin" if it has a resource fork.
By dealing with meta-data at the point/time of entry, it allows the system to remain compatable with other OS's, but still allows someone working natively on a Mac to not have to deal with idiosynchrasies and restrictions they don't have to.
I agree... the Metadata usage in OS X is a step backwards. But it's actually that they're coming from the Mac method (type/creator codes) to the Windows method (with the unix layer using the unix method, obviously). They really should have added "chtype" and "chcreator" utilities ao the BSD layer - and submitted mods to "ls" to optionally display that info from the command line. =(
I can't back this up or anything, but from working in a university computer lab for a year or two I've noticed that many Mac users -do- routinely have one hand on the keyboard and the other hand on the mouse. Combined with the ease of Command-(key) combinations, I've generally seen those users perform tasks quicker than those using keyboard-only or mouse-only methods.
Also, anecdotally, ask any first-person shooter gamer what the best interface is and most will say that keyb+mouse is the most efficient.
Also, you may not like photorealistic graphics, but at long, *long* last, computer users can be assumed to be using 32-bit color. The pain and suffering caused to application developers and end users by the least common denominator graphics system being paletted are long gone -- 16 color icons can finally die.
I just hope that this doesn't lead to a garish display of color akin to the Win 3.1 era. One of the cool things about Systems 7-8.1 is that icon designers had a relatively limited but *consistent* pallette to work from. So all icons had a somewhat related look to them (since they were working from the same palette). In OS 8.5 they allowed 32bit icons, but most were just subtle re-shadings of the existing icons with the existing palettes.
I guess now Apple is aiming for visual consistancy just *form* instead of form and color (aside from the recommendation for Utility icons - all greyscale).
Anyone who wants their MP3s to play without skipping whenever they scroll down a page in netscape, anyone who wants to do something other than watch progress bars crawl while copying files, anyone who wants to use the computer for other things while 3d studio renders in the background.
I've *never* had a problem with skipping MP3's in the background on any halfway decent hardware. My beige G3 puts along just fine playing in the background while I do other stuff. Likewise, since OS 8 (and especially OS 8.5) I routinely copy files in the background while doing other stuff in the foreground.
How many home users are rendering 3-D Studio scenes? If you're doing that, you're probably using a render farm of some type, in which case you'll want it to be done ASAP, in which case you're not going to be doing other stuff on the machine and you actually *want* the app to hog the entire CPU.
That's nice, assuming your apps are all perfectly written. The problem is when an app crashes in an infinite loop, the OS never gets a chance to recover.
While I agree there were stability problems, that particular one could usually be solved by a Force Quit (Cmd-Opt-Esc IIRC). In any event, that was no worse than Win9x.
>> I would rather have a machine that crashes occasionally rather than one that I don't understand how to use.
That's your opinion.
Actually, judging by the upgrade rate, that's the opinion of a lot of other Mac users too:/ Moving to OS X for daily use means "re-learning" a lot of that power user ability they'd built up.
maybe it's just me, but i seldom pay attention to what's at the top of the screen. i pay attention to what's inside my windows, and more occasionally to what's around the edges of my windows. my attention points are all fairly close to what i'm doing, not way off at the top of my screen.
in fact, my eyes are more likely to droop down towards the bottom of the screen. which may be why that's a good place for my gnome/kde panels, launchers and toolbars, and might have something to do with why i never seem to use that extra top-right corner panel i made in gnome that i thought would be so useful...
That's because you're used to the Windows (and Win-clones like KDE, GNOME) way of doing things. Long-term windows users naturally gravitate towards the lower (usually lower-left) portion of the screen as a result of using the Start menu and task bar all the time.
If you watch or talk to long-term Mac users, you'll find they naturally gravitate towards the upper portion of the screen for "control". (Side note: the Trash Can is purposefully placed far away from here (lower right) to prevent accidents.)
Mac users will look to the upper-left corner for "control" of the machine (Apple menu, File menu) and the upper-right for disk access, process management, or Help (Default disk location, App Menu under OS 9, Help menu).
Not necessarily "better" (except for the trash can thingy), just different. It does make a good reason to maintain the top-of-screen menubar though.
...you still have to shell out extra cash for an unencumbered mouse.
The included mouse is perfectly un-encumbered. Unlike on Windows, on the Mac the contextual menu is not required for ANYTHING. By design, there's *nothing* you can do with a contextual menu that you can't do in some other fashion. It's there for those that would like an additional means of accessing functionality.
Furthermore, the "official means" of accessing contextual menus is "modifier-click", specifically Control-click, not "click in some other way." Most people who decide to purchase multi-button mice map their second buttons to a Control-click, but it's not required.
Once you get used to it, Keyboard+Mouse control is actually a little faster than Multibutton-Mouse control.
Heh. Granted we're talking about home users here, who don't require five nines availability, but one of the major barriers to the Mac's acceptance has always been its crashiness.
I would rather have a machine that crashes occasionally rather than one that I don't understand how to use. The classic Mac OS had an easy, gradual curve from new user to power user. This means that with a *little bit* of effort, a user was eventually empowered to administer and customize their own system.
Windows by compariason has a hard curve for learning how to administer a system. Indeed, it seems to be designed to prevent newer or regular users from being about to effectively diagnose or administer a system without having to hit the books.
That's the difference. And that's why Mac OS 9 was great.
Cooperative multitasking was a mistake when they built the first Mac, and it's was a mistake all the way up to OS 9.
How many home users truly need pre-emptive multitasking? Home users (until broadband internet came about) are not running servers and don't have to deal with massively parallel processes cause by hundreds of users. As a home user, I want my computer to figure out that the video app I'm messing with in front should take priority over other apps, without having to mess with "nice" values manually.
"Multitasking" in the MultiFinder sense is important, sometimes the apps know what a better division of resources is than the OS does.
Actually, it's on the right in the US too (I'm just dumb.)
Never having driven a left-hand car, or on the left side of the road, I can't speak from personal experience here. But the few British people I've known here in the States have ranted for a quite a while about having to switch back and forth and it taking getting used to.
And in an emergency, it had *better* be second nature!
Isn't it nice how you can get into almost anyone else's car and you pretty much know how to drive it? How the accellerator is always on the left, the gearshift is somewhere in the middle?
But is it realy fair to compare standerd save dialog with that of Notepad?
Certainly... shouldn't Notepad be using the standard save dialog? (That's one of the other things mentioned. Why create your own dialog when the system-standard ones already exist?)
Even SimpleText (the old Mac equivelent to Notepad) has this right.
For those of you that missed the link at the beginning of the article, take a look at Apple's full Aqua HI Guidelines (or in PDF format). It has *tons* of specific examples and screenshots useful for some of the theory and design behind the current GUI.
I have to agree with the earlier post that OS X is somewhat of a step backward in usability overall. Although I do appreciate some of the innovations (sheets,...) I still find the standard OS 8/9 "platinum" interface to be easier to understand. (It's an interesting comparasion.)
I don't know -- once Apple gets its butt in gear and gives me a SPACIAL FINDER and uses METADATA PROPERLY I might feel different.:)
Yes, breaking the second law of thermodynamics would be an important milestone, unfortunately, it's just not gonna happen.
He's NOT breaking the second law! This is NOT a true "perpetual motion device", contrary to the labels being given to it. Look at what the claims actually are and you'll see that the amount of entropy in the universe is still going up just as expected.
Doesn't that clearly contradict the second law of thermodynamics? You don't get more energy out of a closed system than you put in, right? - As for Tesla, he did a lot of cool shit, and never once did he claim to break the second law of thermodynamics.
Where exactly does it state that this is a closed system? Read the site, not the spin.
Seriously... if his system works as he says it can, this will be quite an important milestone (once they have the bearings issue worked out). We should be *encouraging* this kind of research, not laughing at it.
Considering this is a website "for Nerds" I'd expect a better reaction out of people. Tesla had a lot of breakthrough concepts regarding electricity and the ability to sucking power out of one's environment.
We should be promoting this kind of reasearch (you know, the kind large corporations might not take to kindly to). WTF is it that we'll bitch about the **AA putting down the little guy, but we're pooh-poohing someone who's trying to stand up to Big Oil and the Automakers?
Oh come on Windows had premeptive multi tasking and nice true type fonts by late 94.
Not sure if that's a joke or not, but...
System 7 introduced TrueType in 1990. True, true preemptive multitasking didn't arrive on the Mac until OS X (unless you count Copland), but some would argue that in a single-user environment, pre-emptive multitasking isn't all that it's cracked up to be in terms of real-world uses. Sometimes you WANT apps to "self-coordinate" their process time.
I wouldn't want my school's 30,000-user Solaris box running in cooperative multitasking, but a personal machine won't be getting that kind of use anyway.
This would have been when Windows 3.1 was the best Redmond had to offer, but I'm not sure the MacOS of that era would have been much better.
Geez, are you kidding? System 7 was FAR AND AWAY better than 3.1 ever was. I remember reading a compariason of System 7 to Win 3.1 in a MacUser issue from back in '90. System 7 formed the basis of the Mac's OS for almost 10 years, and though it was showing a little bit of age as it progressed, it was still a remarkable OS.
Re:But can you ask it for directions?
on
Shop Till It Drops
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· Score: 2
Probably should have ordered that better =)
In CA, cigarette vending machines are (IIRC) illegal. Firdt they were restricted to only being allowed in bars or over 18 establishments, to keep minors from buying them, then they were outlawed completely later on.
I have to agree with the critics on this one. This might be a good idea in a few select locations (high crime, etc...) but for the most part it's too dehumanizing for american culture.
Besides, of the "four C's" mentioned in the article (cigarettes, cold drinks, candy, and coffee) three of them already have dedicated vending machines, and the fourth did for a long time until they became illegal (at least in CA). There's still a place for convenience stores.
Even at 2:30am in the morning, when I stop in for a coffee and some sort of warm snack in the middle of a road trip, the small amount of human interaction I receive there is important.
Re:Doom Patch to follow?
on
Tenebrae Quake
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Don't forget ZDoom. I'm waiting for the next rev of that to come out so they can all start synchronizing their codebases. OpenGLJBoomZDoom. Yeah.
A simple way to think of it is this: Movement through space is represented as distance/time. How would one represent movement through time? It should be time/, but there is nothing to put in the denominator.
This is the first original thing I've read all day here!
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the archive of Apple's official Hotsauce (aka Project X) homepage, which is what you're thinking of. Yeah, even Yahoo was up on the Meta-Content Framework deal.
V-Twin was the basis for the summarize feature, I think there's still an SDK up for it.
Personally, I liked PowerTalk. A system-wide, integrated mail and collaboration framework with a standardized mailing interface.
Even if the implementation is done with LDAP, PGP, and Sendmail now, I really wish they'd bring back those APIs for application code. The "digital signing" concept integrated into the API was better integrated than Apple File Security in Mac OS 9, and better than anything in OS X right now. Remember being able to verify a document's signiature from the Get Info window? The Keychain is the only concept that survived.
QuickDraw GX ( here or here) was WAY ahead of its time. Although a lot of its features found their way into ATSUI with Unicode, QDGX still had soul. I still don't know of any program that can do all the really really fancy and obscure ligatures properly.
Probably my FAVORITE technology was/is Apple Guide. There's nothing quite like a help system that draws coach marks on the screen when telling you how to perform a step. That plus hilighting proper menu options in red, and the fact that it wasn't glacially slow once it became PowerPC native, made it a really amazing conversion tool.
Balloon Help was quirky and fun. I don't really understand why they replaced something so cool with something as lame as Tooltips. =(
QuickDraw 3D and Apple Data Detectors had some cool concepts too. Maybe we should get them to re-write Data Detectors using Perl regexps
Arrgh.. the OS that Could Have Been... Try the old Apple Advanced Technology Research Group website for more stuff.
For those of who weren't programming Macs back in the Day (remember APDA?), Apple had an award-winning quarterly technical journal called "develop" which had lots of neat articles in it with a fun and offbeat tone. Sort of like O'Reilly and Associates has now. They stopped putting it out in '97 amid all the hemoraging, but all the issues are available here.
Anyway, there's a pretty informative article explaining all about Copland here.
It's simply about compatibility. With companies sending Word (.doc) files all over the place every day, Apple had to recognize those dot-three extensions as valid document types.
OS 9 was more intelligent about that though. It performed the recognition *at the time the foreign file was introduced into the file system*. When something was downloaded from the internet, decompressed from a non-Mac archive, or copied or opened from a foreign file system (ie, Unix or MS-DOS), *that* was when the File Extension/MIME Type recognition would kick in, assign the right 4-character TYPE code, and assign the default Creator code for that type. Once the file exists in the Mac filesystem, this automatic behavior stops.
Similar behavior occurs when copying or sending data to a foreign file system (well, it should). The Mac does a lookup on the appropriate
By dealing with meta-data at the point/time of entry, it allows the system to remain compatable with other OS's, but still allows someone working natively on a Mac to not have to deal with idiosynchrasies and restrictions they don't have to.
I agree... the Metadata usage in OS X is a step backwards. But it's actually that they're coming from the Mac method (type/creator codes) to the Windows method (with the unix layer using the unix method, obviously). They really should have added "chtype" and "chcreator" utilities ao the BSD layer - and submitted mods to "ls" to optionally display that info from the command line. =(
Try this article at ArsTechnica for more insight: Metadata, The Mac, and You.
I can't back this up or anything, but from working in a university computer lab for a year or two I've noticed that many Mac users -do- routinely have one hand on the keyboard and the other hand on the mouse. Combined with the ease of Command-(key) combinations, I've generally seen those users perform tasks quicker than those using keyboard-only or mouse-only methods.
Also, anecdotally, ask any first-person shooter gamer what the best interface is and most will say that keyb+mouse is the most efficient.
YMMV...
Also, you may not like photorealistic graphics, but at long, *long* last, computer users can be assumed to be using 32-bit color. The pain and suffering caused to application developers and end users by the least common denominator graphics system being paletted are long gone -- 16 color icons can finally die.
I just hope that this doesn't lead to a garish display of color akin to the Win 3.1 era. One of the cool things about Systems 7-8.1 is that icon designers had a relatively limited but *consistent* pallette to work from. So all icons had a somewhat related look to them (since they were working from the same palette). In OS 8.5 they allowed 32bit icons, but most were just subtle re-shadings of the existing icons with the existing palettes.
I guess now Apple is aiming for visual consistancy just *form* instead of form and color (aside from the recommendation for Utility icons - all greyscale).
Anyone who wants their MP3s to play without skipping whenever they scroll down a page in netscape, anyone who wants to do something other than watch progress bars crawl while copying files, anyone who wants to use the computer for other things while 3d studio renders in the background.
I've *never* had a problem with skipping MP3's in the background on any halfway decent hardware. My beige G3 puts along just fine playing in the background while I do other stuff. Likewise, since OS 8 (and especially OS 8.5) I routinely copy files in the background while doing other stuff in the foreground.
How many home users are rendering 3-D Studio scenes? If you're doing that, you're probably using a render farm of some type, in which case you'll want it to be done ASAP, in which case you're not going to be doing other stuff on the machine and you actually *want* the app to hog the entire CPU.
That's nice, assuming your apps are all perfectly written. The problem is when an app crashes in an infinite loop, the OS never gets a chance to recover.
While I agree there were stability problems, that particular one could usually be solved by a Force Quit (Cmd-Opt-Esc IIRC). In any event, that was no worse than Win9x.
>> I would rather have a machine that crashes occasionally rather than one that I don't understand how to use.
That's your opinion.
Actually, judging by the upgrade rate, that's the opinion of a lot of other Mac users too
maybe it's just me, but i seldom pay attention to what's at the top of the screen. i pay attention to what's inside my windows, and more occasionally to what's around the edges of my windows. my attention points are all fairly close to what i'm doing, not way off at the top of my screen.
in fact, my eyes are more likely to droop down towards the bottom of the screen. which may be why that's a good place for my gnome/kde panels, launchers and toolbars, and might have something to do with why i never seem to use that extra top-right corner panel i made in gnome that i thought would be so useful...
That's because you're used to the Windows (and Win-clones like KDE, GNOME) way of doing things. Long-term windows users naturally gravitate towards the lower (usually lower-left) portion of the screen as a result of using the Start menu and task bar all the time.
If you watch or talk to long-term Mac users, you'll find they naturally gravitate towards the upper portion of the screen for "control". (Side note: the Trash Can is purposefully placed far away from here (lower right) to prevent accidents.)
Mac users will look to the upper-left corner for "control" of the machine (Apple menu, File menu) and the upper-right for disk access, process management, or Help (Default disk location, App Menu under OS 9, Help menu).
Not necessarily "better" (except for the trash can thingy), just different. It does make a good reason to maintain the top-of-screen menubar though.
...you still have to shell out extra cash for an unencumbered mouse.
The included mouse is perfectly un-encumbered. Unlike on Windows, on the Mac the contextual menu is not required for ANYTHING. By design, there's *nothing* you can do with a contextual menu that you can't do in some other fashion. It's there for those that would like an additional means of accessing functionality.
Furthermore, the "official means" of accessing contextual menus is "modifier-click", specifically Control-click, not "click in some other way." Most people who decide to purchase multi-button mice map their second buttons to a Control-click, but it's not required.
Once you get used to it, Keyboard+Mouse control is actually a little faster than Multibutton-Mouse control.
Heh. Granted we're talking about home users here, who don't require five nines availability, but one of the major barriers to the Mac's acceptance has always been its crashiness.
I would rather have a machine that crashes occasionally rather than one that I don't understand how to use. The classic Mac OS had an easy, gradual curve from new user to power user. This means that with a *little bit* of effort, a user was eventually empowered to administer and customize their own system.
Windows by compariason has a hard curve for learning how to administer a system. Indeed, it seems to be designed to prevent newer or regular users from being about to effectively diagnose or administer a system without having to hit the books.
That's the difference. And that's why Mac OS 9 was great.
Cooperative multitasking was a mistake when they built the first Mac, and it's was a mistake all the way up to OS 9.
How many home users truly need pre-emptive multitasking? Home users (until broadband internet came about) are not running servers and don't have to deal with massively parallel processes cause by hundreds of users. As a home user, I want my computer to figure out that the video app I'm messing with in front should take priority over other apps, without having to mess with "nice" values manually.
"Multitasking" in the MultiFinder sense is important, sometimes the apps know what a better division of resources is than the OS does.
Actually, it's on the right in the US too (I'm just dumb.)
Never having driven a left-hand car, or on the left side of the road, I can't speak from personal experience here. But the few British people I've known here in the States have ranted for a quite a while about having to switch back and forth and it taking getting used to.
And in an emergency, it had *better* be second nature!
D'oh! Maybe I should wake up before I post
Isn't it nice how you can get into almost anyone else's car and you pretty much know how to drive it? How the accellerator is always on the left, the gearshift is somewhere in the middle?
That's called standardization, and it's good.
But is it realy fair to compare
standerd save dialog with that of Notepad?
Certainly... shouldn't Notepad be using the standard save dialog? (That's one of the other things mentioned. Why create your own dialog when the system-standard ones already exist?)
Even SimpleText (the old Mac equivelent to Notepad) has this right.
For those of you that missed the link at the beginning of the article, take a look at Apple's full Aqua HI Guidelines (or in PDF format). It has *tons* of specific examples and screenshots useful for some of the theory and design behind the current GUI.
I have to agree with the earlier post that OS X is somewhat of a step backward in usability overall. Although I do appreciate some of the innovations (sheets,...) I still find the standard OS 8/9 "platinum" interface to be easier to understand. (It's an interesting comparasion.)
I don't know -- once Apple gets its butt in gear and gives me a SPACIAL FINDER and uses METADATA PROPERLY I might feel different.
Yes, breaking the second law of thermodynamics would be an important milestone, unfortunately, it's just not gonna happen.
He's NOT breaking the second law! This is NOT a true "perpetual motion device", contrary to the labels being given to it. Look at what the claims actually are and you'll see that the amount of entropy in the universe is still going up just as expected.
Doesn't that clearly contradict the second law of thermodynamics? You don't get more energy out of a closed system than you put in, right?
-
As for Tesla, he did a lot of cool shit, and never once did he claim to break the second law of thermodynamics.
Where exactly does it state that this is a closed system? Read the site, not the spin.
Well, I haven't witnessed any of it PERSONALLY, but if the information here is accurate, then I was say that's a start.
QUite frankly, I don't need clear and compelling evidence that this isn't a hoax to at least be interested in it.
Don't write off stuff just because you've already come to the conclusion that it can't be done.
Seriously... if his system works as he says it can, this will be quite an important milestone (once they have the bearings issue worked out). We should be *encouraging* this kind of research, not laughing at it.
Considering this is a website "for Nerds" I'd expect a better reaction out of people. Tesla had a lot of breakthrough concepts regarding electricity and the ability to sucking power out of one's environment.
We should be promoting this kind of reasearch (you know, the kind large corporations might not take to kindly to). WTF is it that we'll bitch about the **AA putting down the little guy, but we're pooh-poohing someone who's trying to stand up to Big Oil and the Automakers?
If God told me to do something, I'd sure as hell do it.
Oh come on Windows had premeptive multi tasking and nice true type fonts by late 94.
Not sure if that's a joke or not, but...
System 7 introduced TrueType in 1990. True, true preemptive multitasking didn't arrive on the Mac until OS X (unless you count Copland), but some would argue that in a single-user environment, pre-emptive multitasking isn't all that it's cracked up to be in terms of real-world uses. Sometimes you WANT apps to "self-coordinate" their process time.
I wouldn't want my school's 30,000-user Solaris box running in cooperative multitasking, but a personal machine won't be getting that kind of use anyway.
This would have been when Windows 3.1 was the best Redmond had to offer, but I'm not sure the MacOS of that era would have been much better.
Geez, are you kidding? System 7 was FAR AND AWAY better than 3.1 ever was. I remember reading a compariason of System 7 to Win 3.1 in a MacUser issue from back in '90. System 7 formed the basis of the Mac's OS for almost 10 years, and though it was showing a little bit of age as it progressed, it was still a remarkable OS.
Probably should have ordered that better =)
In CA, cigarette vending machines are (IIRC) illegal. Firdt they were restricted to only being allowed in bars or over 18 establishments, to keep minors from buying them, then they were outlawed completely later on.
I have to agree with the critics on this one. This might be a good idea in a few select locations (high crime, etc...) but for the most part it's too dehumanizing for american culture.
Besides, of the "four C's" mentioned in the article (cigarettes, cold drinks, candy, and coffee) three of them already have dedicated vending machines, and the fourth did for a long time until they became illegal (at least in CA). There's still a place for convenience stores.
Even at 2:30am in the morning, when I stop in for a coffee and some sort of warm snack in the middle of a road trip, the small amount of human interaction I receive there is important.
Don't forget ZDoom. I'm waiting for the next rev of that to come out so they can all start synchronizing their codebases. OpenGLJBoomZDoom. Yeah.
A simple way to think of it is this: Movement through space is represented as distance/time. How would one represent movement through time? It should be time/, but there is nothing to put in the denominator.
This is the first original thing I've read all day here!