Re:I tend to agree with the arcticle...
on
Salon on the XBox
·
· Score: 2
And the new games on the horizon?
WarCraft III, Doom III, Return to Castle Wolfenstein...
Umm... okay, I am looking forward to WarCraft III (as I sit here playing Diablo II), but man, is it retread time, or what?
It sorta reminds me of the video game arcade scene now. BORING. All they have out there are 1) fighting games, and 2) racing games. Period. That's it. Where is all the originality? Remember back in the 80's? Tempest? Centepede? Asteroids? Robotron? Star-Gate? Super Miss Pac-Gal? A billion different visions and ideas, tons of varying game-play... and it all boiled away into fighting and racing games. No wonder women aren't into arcade games any more (man, they used to be! Remember Crystal Castles? Aracknid? Dig-Dug? Or hell, even on the PC... remember Lemmings?)
Sigh. The reason the revenues are stagnant is because the games suck and the ideas are boring. We need fresh new blood! New ideas! New Concepts! Something more *abstract* could be nice!
Think about trying to play something like WarCraft II without a mouse. A joystick just doesn't cut it for somethings.
Descent III? Well, the controller might be okay for that... I guess. I dunno. Can you get all the motions (roll, pitch, yaw, strafe left-right, strafe up-down, forward, reverse) plus the ancillary controls (select weapons effectively/quickly, fire primary, fire secondary) all on a game controller?
You could do something like Half-Life on a console like that, I'm sure. No problem. But the more complicated or thoughtful games? How would you do SimCity, RollerCoaster Tycoon, or games like that? And not make them maddeningly limited?
Or will the XBox allow a mouse-interface and keyboard?:-)
Not *really*. I mean, you could say "COM" is language neutral too, but what MS is doing goes way beyond that from what little I understand.
And in particular, they hide all the 'plumbing' that is COM or CORBA (via attributed programming) so that, regardless of the language, you don't need to worry about the boilerplate stuff.
My main worry, of course, is performance. We'll just have to wait and see on that one.
"Global Warming" refers to the world-wide AVERAGE temperature. THAT is what is going up. Is this such a hard concept to understand? Global warming doesn't in any way mean that every spot on the globe gets warmer... it means that those spots that get cooler are more than offset by places that get warmer, and that lows are offset by more extreme highs.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is skyrocketing. Detailed measurements taken over the past 50 years plus data points extracted from ice-cores over the last thousand years show that, effective with the industrial revolution, carbon-dioxide (a greenhouse gas) has gone up dramatically. Looking at a graph of the measurements is quite striking and very difficult to argue with. There was a great (and fairly balanced) show on PBS that covered all of this.
It just kills me to see the way people assume that 'global warming' (that is, warming on a global scale) translates into universal warming at every point on the globe. Um, no. Not even close. "Global Warming" can, in fact, lead to much harsher winters. And not every spot on the earth has to expeirence absolute warmer temperatures over the previous year, each and every day. Yeesh.
Um... C# lets you import and use objects written in C++ or VB as well as those in C#. In fact, that's part of the whole point of the.Net thing. It's "language neutral". You write in the language you're most comfortable with. Others can then use your objects in the language THEY are most comfortable with. (as long as there's a language wrapper that uses the common runtime... so far, I'm only aware of "Managed C++", C#, and VB... though they talked about COBOL, Fortran, Perl, Pascal, etc. being ported to use the runtime)
Writing in C# (or using 'Managed C++' which also buys you garbage collection) allows you to write COM objects and to interoperate with other languages (C#, Managed C++, VB, ??) transparently. The whole.Net thing is about a common runtime platform, where the language itself doesn't matter. Got an object written in VB? You can inheret from it and extend it in C#. And vice-versa. You can pass data transparently back and forth (though gawd knows what is going on underneat the covers as far as a performance hit). I think all strings are Unicode underneath... as long as you never have to fiddle with BSTRs again, I'll be very happy.
Put it this way, atleast it doesn't look like a shitty version of Netscape Communicator4x with missing buttons and other signs of gayness.
I thought the only valid sign of 'gayness' was a person making love to another person of the same sex. I doubt that applies to 'missing buttons', or to a browser at all.
So what the hell is this homophobic use of 'gayness' doing here? Cut it out, please.
CompuServe tried FreeBSD for a while, and essentially abandoned it (some few things on the CompuServe service were running on it for a while). They also migrated some stuff to NT. Dunno what they're running now, that they're really AOL...
I actually find it very depressing that we probably won't have a close enounter with Pluto in my lifetime... I've seen and witnessed all the other planetary explorations. But even as a child, I wanted to know more about Pluto... I wanted to SEE its surface and know more about it. We frankly know very very little about it.
I'd love to see a 'mission goal' of having an orbiter around each and every planet, sending back data and information and high-res photographs. And while the physics of it make putting something in orbit around Pluto nearly impossible (at least in a given human's lifetime;-), I'd still like to at LEAST have a decent fly-by!
Actually, I thought the point of revoluion was just within earth's circumference.
Ah well. The POINT is, the moon does not orbit the earth, it orbits the sun as a 'partner' of earth. The moon is never falling AWAY from the sun at any point in its orbit, and that's the crucial detail. It's always falling TOWARD the sun, just as the earth is. That's why it's frequently refered to as the "Earth-Moon (or Terra-Luna) System".
I'd say via my experience that the stability of WinNT is in the 'months' range, and from all I've seen and heard, Win2k is far more stable than NT 4 was.
The greatest cause of crashes in NT are buggy device drivers (as you mentioned, but which MS doesn't always have control over, you understand), and marginal hardware (I've 'fixed' an NT installation that seemed to crash every other day by replacing the memory... a 'marginal' chip with memory errors will cause a Blue Screen pretty quickly. I'm actually GLAD about this... it's one area where I WANT the OS to be rather strict, and not try to hobble onwards with erronious values from flakey memory).
After all, Win2K is pretty darn stable. Memory is locked down tight (no 'dangerous memory management' there).
I believe the instability in Win9x comes from two places in general: legacy support (DOS and 16 bit underpinnings that still exist), and sloppy coding.
WinNT/Win2K don't have so much of the legacy underpinning (though they do have a lot of stuff for compatibility with 'older' windows apps and games and such). And the systems are markedly more stable.
And more advanced users, such as yourself, can turn it off. But newbie users get along fine and the things they user most are easiest to find and access.
Make the interface usable for EVERYONE? Provide options for more experienced users to turn off things that 'get in their way'?
Meanwhile, a new user doesn't have to have a clue about how to edit and manipulate and organize the start bar if they don't want to. Boom. They just get their work done without having to learn something 'unnecessary' to them.
Which is fine until a program can do about a hundred different things. Then you spend all your time 'reading around' all the options you DON'T USE (but which someone else might).
Of course, that's a problem regardless of the basis of the UI... as things grow to become more powerful, how do you make that power available to the user in an easy to use, and easy to find way? Gawd knows EMACs has tons of features, but even with all the help/appropos/etc, it's still not easy to find exactly what you want/need unless you've "always" used it...
I'm not sure what GUI you're describing, but it doesn't sound much like anything I've been using for the last several years. Besides most things being intuitively obvious, there are pop-up tool tips or baloon help or whatever to get you going when it's not. Yeah, yeah, and a CLI has 'man pages', but sit a 'normal' person down at a unix terminal and see how productive they are. Or add a new app, for which there isn't a man page. It's really fun reading through twelve screens of man page junk to find out one one little thing does...
GUIs are by definition more intuitive, easier to learn, easier to use... and there is no 'by definition' that they are less powerful. (after all, for every bad GUI you can point to, I can point to lots of bad CLIs... MS-DOS anyone?)
Sorry, but after using a GUI a lot (with all its direct manipulation via mouse and left/right clicking, and with the ability to see lots of stuff at once), whenever I go back to a command command line I feel like I'm programming blindfolded with gloves on.
Typing long command lines with tons of arcane switches and options (which are different for every damn command) and where a simple easy-to-make typo can render an entire command 'invalid' is NOT a good UI.
You'd have to be an IDIOT to think so. Or at least an arrogant boob who's forgotten how much time and effort it took to get even remotely proficient at doing anything in a CLI.
However, I do think CLIs have their uses. They can definitely COMPLIMENT a GUI very well, as there are things it can do better, while there are things a GUI can do better as well. And frankly, somethings a GUI can't do well is just a weakness in the designs of current GUIs, and NOT an 'inherent limitation' of GUIs.
Windows 2000 attempts to do the 'scaling' thing. Menus (from teh app menu, and pop-up context menus) show the 'most common things'. If you don't see what you need, you can hover over a little 'arrow' which opens up the full menu. Select what you want. Next time you use that menu, that item is now part of the abbreviated menu. Menu items you use most are made available in short easy to see/find menus, while everything else is hidden-yet-easy-to-find so it doesn't clutter up and overwhelm users who don't need it.
It'll be interesting to see if that's necessarily a GOOD thing or not...
Slashdot Mirror
And the new games on the horizon?
WarCraft III, Doom III, Return to Castle Wolfenstein...
Umm... okay, I am looking forward to WarCraft III (as I sit here playing Diablo II), but man, is it retread time, or what?
It sorta reminds me of the video game arcade scene now. BORING. All they have out there are 1) fighting games, and 2) racing games. Period. That's it. Where is all the originality? Remember back in the 80's? Tempest? Centepede? Asteroids? Robotron? Star-Gate? Super Miss Pac-Gal? A billion different visions and ideas, tons of varying game-play... and it all boiled away into fighting and racing games. No wonder women aren't into arcade games any more (man, they used to be! Remember Crystal Castles? Aracknid? Dig-Dug? Or hell, even on the PC... remember Lemmings?)
Sigh. The reason the revenues are stagnant is because the games suck and the ideas are boring. We need fresh new blood! New ideas! New Concepts! Something more *abstract* could be nice!
- Spryguy
Think about trying to play something like WarCraft II without a mouse. A joystick just doesn't cut it for somethings.
:-)
Descent III? Well, the controller might be okay for that... I guess. I dunno. Can you get all the motions (roll, pitch, yaw, strafe left-right, strafe up-down, forward, reverse) plus the ancillary controls (select weapons effectively/quickly, fire primary, fire secondary) all on a game controller?
You could do something like Half-Life on a console like that, I'm sure. No problem. But the more complicated or thoughtful games? How would you do SimCity, RollerCoaster Tycoon, or games like that? And not make them maddeningly limited?
Or will the XBox allow a mouse-interface and keyboard?
- Spryguy
Not *really*. I mean, you could say "COM" is language neutral too, but what MS is doing goes way beyond that from what little I understand.
And in particular, they hide all the 'plumbing' that is COM or CORBA (via attributed programming) so that, regardless of the language, you don't need to worry about the boilerplate stuff.
My main worry, of course, is performance. We'll just have to wait and see on that one.
- Spryguy
"Global Warming" refers to the world-wide AVERAGE temperature. THAT is what is going up. Is this such a hard concept to understand? Global warming doesn't in any way mean that every spot on the globe gets warmer... it means that those spots that get cooler are more than offset by places that get warmer, and that lows are offset by more extreme highs.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is skyrocketing. Detailed measurements taken over the past 50 years plus data points extracted from ice-cores over the last thousand years show that, effective with the industrial revolution, carbon-dioxide (a greenhouse gas) has gone up dramatically. Looking at a graph of the measurements is quite striking and very difficult to argue with. There was a great (and fairly balanced) show on PBS that covered all of this.
- Spryguy
It just kills me to see the way people assume that 'global warming' (that is, warming on a global scale) translates into universal warming at every point on the globe. Um, no. Not even close. "Global Warming" can, in fact, lead to much harsher winters. And not every spot on the earth has to expeirence absolute warmer temperatures over the previous year, each and every day. Yeesh.
- Spryguy
Um... C# lets you import and use objects written in C++ or VB as well as those in C#. In fact, that's part of the whole point of the .Net thing. It's "language neutral". You write in the language you're most comfortable with. Others can then use your objects in the language THEY are most comfortable with. (as long as there's a language wrapper that uses the common runtime... so far, I'm only aware of "Managed C++", C#, and VB ... though they talked about COBOL, Fortran, Perl, Pascal, etc. being ported to use the runtime)
Just FYI.
- Spryguy
Well, the advantages are allegedly many...
.Net thing is about a common runtime platform, where the language itself doesn't matter. Got an object written in VB? You can inheret from it and extend it in C#. And vice-versa. You can pass data transparently back and forth (though gawd knows what is going on underneat the covers as far as a performance hit). I think all strings are Unicode underneath... as long as you never have to fiddle with BSTRs again, I'll be very happy.
Writing in C# (or using 'Managed C++' which also buys you garbage collection) allows you to write COM objects and to interoperate with other languages (C#, Managed C++, VB, ??) transparently. The whole
- Spryguy
Well, one out of three ain't bad for one of your obvious mental agility :-)
- Spryguy
Put it this way, atleast it doesn't look like a shitty version of Netscape Communicator4x with missing buttons and other signs of gayness.
I thought the only valid sign of 'gayness' was a person making love to another person of the same sex. I doubt that applies to 'missing buttons', or to a browser at all.
So what the hell is this homophobic use of 'gayness' doing here? Cut it out, please.
- Spryguy
You're Hispanic!
- Spryguy
CompuServe tried FreeBSD for a while, and essentially abandoned it (some few things on the CompuServe service were running on it for a while). They also migrated some stuff to NT. Dunno what they're running now, that they're really AOL...
- Spryguy
Um, it's really easy to reconcile...
People are morons.
- Spryguy
I actually find it very depressing that we probably won't have a close enounter with Pluto in my lifetime... I've seen and witnessed all the other planetary explorations. But even as a child, I wanted to know more about Pluto... I wanted to SEE its surface and know more about it. We frankly know very very little about it.
;-), I'd still like to at LEAST have a decent fly-by!
I'd love to see a 'mission goal' of having an orbiter around each and every planet, sending back data and information and high-res photographs. And while the physics of it make putting something in orbit around Pluto nearly impossible (at least in a given human's lifetime
- Spryguy
Actually, I thought the point of revoluion was just within earth's circumference.
Ah well. The POINT is, the moon does not orbit the earth, it orbits the sun as a 'partner' of earth. The moon is never falling AWAY from the sun at any point in its orbit, and that's the crucial detail. It's always falling TOWARD the sun, just as the earth is. That's why it's frequently refered to as the "Earth-Moon (or Terra-Luna) System".
- Spryguy
I'd say via my experience that the stability of WinNT is in the 'months' range, and from all I've seen and heard, Win2k is far more stable than NT 4 was.
The greatest cause of crashes in NT are buggy device drivers (as you mentioned, but which MS doesn't always have control over, you understand), and marginal hardware (I've 'fixed' an NT installation that seemed to crash every other day by replacing the memory... a 'marginal' chip with memory errors will cause a Blue Screen pretty quickly. I'm actually GLAD about this... it's one area where I WANT the OS to be rather strict, and not try to hobble onwards with erronious values from flakey memory).
On the whole, it's a remarkably stable OS.
- Spryguy
No, Linus is quite clear why Linux was written. It was because DOS was a POS that didnt take advantage of the 386.
Well, it certainly seems THAT motivation has long since disappeared...
- Spryguy
Um, no, I don't think so.
After all, Win2K is pretty darn stable. Memory is locked down tight (no 'dangerous memory management' there).
I believe the instability in Win9x comes from two places in general: legacy support (DOS and 16 bit underpinnings that still exist), and sloppy coding.
WinNT/Win2K don't have so much of the legacy underpinning (though they do have a lot of stuff for compatibility with 'older' windows apps and games and such). And the systems are markedly more stable.
- Spryguy
Oooh, that's so hard. One extra level. Gee.
And more advanced users, such as yourself, can turn it off. But newbie users get along fine and the things they user most are easiest to find and access.
Explain to me again how this is a bad thing?
- Spryguy
Well, isn't that the whole point?
Make the interface usable for EVERYONE? Provide options for more experienced users to turn off things that 'get in their way'?
Meanwhile, a new user doesn't have to have a clue about how to edit and manipulate and organize the start bar if they don't want to. Boom. They just get their work done without having to learn something 'unnecessary' to them.
Again, sounds like the right direction, no?
- Spryguy
Which is fine until a program can do about a hundred different things. Then you spend all your time 'reading around' all the options you DON'T USE (but which someone else might).
... as things grow to become more powerful, how do you make that power available to the user in an easy to use, and easy to find way? Gawd knows EMACs has tons of features, but even with all the help/appropos/etc, it's still not easy to find exactly what you want/need unless you've "always" used it...
Of course, that's a problem regardless of the basis of the UI
- Spryguy
I'm not sure what GUI you're describing, but it doesn't sound much like anything I've been using for the last several years. Besides most things being intuitively obvious, there are pop-up tool tips or baloon help or whatever to get you going when it's not. Yeah, yeah, and a CLI has 'man pages', but sit a 'normal' person down at a unix terminal and see how productive they are. Or add a new app, for which there isn't a man page. It's really fun reading through twelve screens of man page junk to find out one one little thing does...
GUIs are by definition more intuitive, easier to learn, easier to use... and there is no 'by definition' that they are less powerful. (after all, for every bad GUI you can point to, I can point to lots of bad CLIs... MS-DOS anyone?)
- Spryguy
Sorry, but after using a GUI a lot (with all its direct manipulation via mouse and left/right clicking, and with the ability to see lots of stuff at once), whenever I go back to a command command line I feel like I'm programming blindfolded with gloves on.
Typing long command lines with tons of arcane switches and options (which are different for every damn command) and where a simple easy-to-make typo can render an entire command 'invalid' is NOT a good UI.
You'd have to be an IDIOT to think so. Or at least an arrogant boob who's forgotten how much time and effort it took to get even remotely proficient at doing anything in a CLI.
However, I do think CLIs have their uses. They can definitely COMPLIMENT a GUI very well, as there are things it can do better, while there are things a GUI can do better as well. And frankly, somethings a GUI can't do well is just a weakness in the designs of current GUIs, and NOT an 'inherent limitation' of GUIs.
- Spryguy
Windows 2000 attempts to do the 'scaling' thing. Menus (from teh app menu, and pop-up context menus) show the 'most common things'. If you don't see what you need, you can hover over a little 'arrow' which opens up the full menu. Select what you want. Next time you use that menu, that item is now part of the abbreviated menu. Menu items you use most are made available in short easy to see/find menus, while everything else is hidden-yet-easy-to-find so it doesn't clutter up and overwhelm users who don't need it.
It'll be interesting to see if that's necessarily a GOOD thing or not...
- Spryguy
Um, no... photons do not have 'rest mass' last I heard.
Also, last I heard, it took infinite energy to accelerate a particle with mass up to the speed of light.
So what gives?
- Spryguy
What I want to know is: how in the hell do neutrinos travel at the speed of light if they have mass?
- Spryguy