Once some less clunky human-interface devices arrive on the scene, the possibilities for new computer games and genres will open up.
I must say, I'm a Catan fan and like the jsettlers (java imp you can get off sourceforge) interface. Easy to read, simple to use.
So along comes MSN with big press release from Mayfair and MSN that they're going to develop an online version which will be added to the stable of games on MSN. I tried it. Gawd. Clunky to the extreme. There's a decent example out there of a nice interface, even if not officially sanctioned (developed as part of a doctoral study), but puts the big roll-out to shame.
So, are newer interfaces for everything better? Not necessarily so and it's amazing how bad some still can be with great examples to follow available.
"Smart-phone sales are about 15 percent of the market now (around 100 million units), but with their faster growth should outnumber PCs by 2008."
My cell phone tries to help me with spelling out words as I type in letters. Invariably the doesn't have the option of there but comes up with some pretty wild stuff I didn't think was in the english language or jargon dictionary. Seems every 'smart' thing I get, I spend a while un-smarting it. Notably these days is my (relatively) new digital SLR which does auto-noise suppression, which isn't very helpful if you're taking low-light pictures, because everything looks like 'noise' to it's little brain.
As Picasso said, "Good artists borrow from the work of others, great artists steal."
That was about the only useful information I got FTA.
Now off to go and steal some artworks...
Unfortunately what *I* seem to see is the stealing of a lot of ideas which really don't have that much day-to-day value OR are really bad, annoying ideas. Whereas really good ideas seem to have been lost.
I really couldn't give a care about a 3D desktop or pretty icons. I really want to know why the heck some task keeps dying and what I can do about it. (In *nix operating systems this is usually pretty easily sorted, but with Windows I don't have clue number 1 unless I get one of those An error occured. [Send it] [Cancel] requestors. Where's the log on this alleged operating system?
How many light bulbs does it take to change the world? No wait, that's not right...
The problem is people use these little efficient doodads to feel good about doing something green. Then they go out and buy a power-sucking plasma TV.
Electrical use is way up since the 80's. Possibly because we all have tonnes more electronics bits to plug in and nearly everyone has a PC which adds a certain minimum for the hours its on. If you had a few lamps burning around the house which added up to the energy consumption of most desktop PCs you'd notice it right away and wonder why it's necessary. Alas, we sit at our keyboards and type merrily away (there's that batsard, ackthpt again, oi if only I had the mod points to bury him.) oblivious to the power consumption of our tin box full of CPU, DDR-RAM, HD, Whizzo Video Card De-Luxe, etc. Quite possibly we even have a reading lamp going beside us in the evening (I don't know about you, but at my age I get a headache looking at a glowing screen in the dark.) Plus there's all these little black plastic cubes and rectangles to run all manner of gizmo, which all add up.
On another thought. I've got these wicked little LED flashlights which run for 130 hours on a battery the size of an aspirin. When will I see these in my house, rather than a fluorescent lamp?
Why not just buy a color laser? They are fairly cheap these days. I have a color laser, and a sprinkling of B&W lasers. I pretty much only use the color laser. When I have the need to do pure B&W, I use the older lasers, but in general I forget t change which printer it prints to.
I'll probably get a photo grade colour printer and a laser printer. This is the printer I bought with my laptop back in 1999. It still prints very nicely, but these bouts of paying the Ink Tax are getting on my nerves.
I'm perplexed how my original post was modded Funny. I suppose it may read that way to some, to me it wasn't a terribly funny experience, perhaps due to its recency. I may laugh about it next week. I'm also wondering how someone saw it as flamebait.
Illegal collusion to fix the market - Wouldn't happen to be intended to delay the adoption of the new players until next year would it, by which time maybe they will figure out how to actually sell a usable product...
There was no way in heck I was going to get one of these damn things anyway.
But now, now I feel I must have one! Aaarrrggghhhhh!
They are driving themselves insane out at sea, they were all psyched to go into battle with some kick ass frikkin laser beams on their heads now they have to continue practicing with mop-handles tied on.
Hewlett-Packard has deployed a large team consisting of many scientists and many more lawyers... [HP have] a market share of more than 50 percent in the US HP depends heavily on the sale of ink to make profit after sometimes selling their printers at a loss in order to lock in the ink resale.
Two days ago I was attempting to print a B&W document on my HP inkjet printer and it paused.. printed a line and paused.. then stuck. I form-fed the sheet it had stalled on and found
a large amount (at HP rates, about $4 worth) of ink pooled on the paper, as if it had taken a widdle and forgot where it was before this well-timed potty break. After cancelling the print job and powering down and up again the printer, I tried again. Same results. Perhaps they could explain why this is happening.
It's simple, sir, HP depend upon your regular purchase of ink and you haven't bought enough recently to ensure sustained profits. It's another of our patented business processes. Get out and buy some more, there's a good chap.
Add in your disk drives, ram and motherboards. Oh, and make it 3 diskdrives. More than 80
Ah, but I got an LCD monitor, see? And that cut my power bill down a bit from the old Cathod Ray Tube and Thyroid Irradiator.
I've got more on my desktop than an entire room full of mainframes from the day I started in programming, by orders of magnitude. And it all runs on less than a Mr. Coffee
I'm one of those weasels who keeps everything to a minimum and stare, slack-jawed, when my monthly bill comes in over $20.
You can get that in any colour you like
on
3 Terabytes, 80 Watts
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Can I get that petabyte in Cornflower Blue?...As long as it's not silver, black or grey, I'm fine with adding another petabyte to my current configuration. If only my file system could handle it...
You can get that in any colour you like, as long as it's Beige
3200 Watts for 120 Terra bytes - that's like two hand-held hair dryers!
Kids these days... we used to have these things called Mainframes. They had special 240v wiring, with BIG power cables. You could hear the circuitbreaker box HUM when you walked past. This is all a pittance.
Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 1
Now, imagine a toolbar w/ these "most used" tools.
Windows already does something like this in ranking apps on the Start menu
It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Consider the obvious advantages to an operating system that actually morphed and adapted to the needs of the users instead of the other way around. Not only is there no such OS like this, the very idea goes against much of what we are currently seeing in the current OS options in the market.
I don't know about the parent, but when I build a kernel I don't just default to everything. I build for what I'll need. If that changes significantly then I'll do another with different options and settings.
While it may seem novel to "morph" to what's currently needed, it's not really so revolutionary an idea. It once was that operating systems
cleared out unused libraries from memory (rather unlike the way Windows behaves, by loading 385 MB of junk you just might need during a session) and
dynamically adjust the amount of processor priority and time (Priority and Run Burst) each task is assigned as needed depending upon system load, etc.
Some things appear to have gone backward as we've got more dependent on ooh, shiny! features, whistles and bells.
Maybe like NASA digging up how they once did the Apollo Moon missions, to relearn, it's time for some of the
people who do operating systems today to look back at how we did things 20-30 years ago.
Finally Star Trek is gaining the academic recognition it so richly deserves. Having Trekology as an official subject for a BS degree should be coming up soon at all major mail order universities. Live long and prospers.
Maybe some day those who embrace the Federation's Ideals can be accepted on a jury or even in public office.
stardate 2006.828 i've successfully been elected to the town school board. the squabbling is terrible and nothing ever gets done. i've never felt in need of a phaser so much in my life.
Hey, at four or five rant posts per typo the, "Add random typo to inflame user interest," chapter seems to have been well read as well as put to good use.
That would be the "More Revenue Through Typos" chapter
strategy guides have created more difficult games.
Strategy guides have been with us for a very long time indeed, almost as long as we've had games. I did a little research, and the earliest reference I can find to what I think qualifies as an 'official' strategy guide, are the 'hintbooks' published by Infocom in support of their adventure games.
I remember those, form the early 80's. When you had to buy Invisi-Clues to solve InfoCom games. It struck me that some of these puzzles were
so far from obvious you were going to fail without the booklets and their magic markers (which made the clues visible.) Why would I put this object in there?
Where's the in-game hint there I should try such a thing? After all, there were probably 1.07e22 possible combinations...
I don't remember a strategy guide for Space Invaders, but one for patterns to Pac-Man was a near best seller.
Ya know I always find a strategy guide for things like Final Fantasy just because some puzzles are just ridiculous and I have no interest in trial & erroring for an hour when I'd rather kill monsters. But there really is somethign to this.
Well, you seem to have hit the nail on the head with the video games -- you're getting pretty poor return on your entertainment dollar if
you beat the game the day you bought it, thanks to a guide which tells you where to get the Spear and Magic Helmet you need and where the
wabbit is hiding so you can kill him. Everyone is in a big hurry these days. Some is just impatience ("I want my reward, now!") and some of it is competitive ("George has already got the magic carpet from the Genie? Crap! I need to catch up to him!")
I thought a Simpson's episode did a bit of fable (complete with moral) where Bart wanted some video game incredibly bad, then when he could
just about get the game, some rude kid shows up in a shop and tells his mother the game is passe and he doesn't want it, he wants something else now. There's
something about traveling in the herd which makes people need to succeed and buy these things.
I'm so happy to be out of most of these newer games and having lots of fun with old games (even infocom invisiclues can now be found in the internet:-)
Just goes to show what you can do without corporations owning your lawmakers.
I suppose any day now some vested external interest will claim this is denying them hard earned income and try to sway the Danish parliament to ban this or at the very least put it under the supervision of an oligarchy.
Ah! The memories. When I was but a tad my dad would take the family in the stationwagon from Midland to Minneapolis, via Ludington to Manitowoc (famous now for aluminium cookware) on the C & O ferries.
The SS Badger may hark from those days, it looks like it does. Back then there was a lot of traffic across the lake from Wisconsin, where automobile furniture (seats) and body parts were transported to Detroit
with the assistance of several of these large boats which could hold several rail cars in their holds. They'd also take on automobiles and passengers for a nominal fee. They ran like clockwork, regardless of the weather
and crossings in poor considtions could be the kind you spent clutching a paper bucket. I found chewing gum helped.
Nice to see they still run them. If the weather's fair I would consider a drive to Ludington (or Manitowoc) just for the ride. Ludington's a nice place
to visit and camp.
When I realized all the venting was actually causing my heat problems after an Athlon64 upgrade, I went out and got a case that's practically the best design I've yet to see - the Antec P180. If you're looking for a bland case, this is it. But at the same time, if you're looking for cool and quiet? This is -definitely- it.
Proper venting was one of the primary reasons we steered away from a lot of the design on the shelves. More fans and holes != better ventilation. My Lian Li cabinet has a simple approach: Air comes in the front, exits the back. Some of these cases have air going every which way, which defeats the purpose of effective cooling. Air could come in and go right out without accomplishing anything, while something off to the side cooks. A lot of these things are sucker bait, there's no doubt about it.
Alienware isn't about the "fastest". True, they have fast systems, but it's more about the 'bling' factor.
They're target market is upper middle class, specifically the middle age men who like to game and have disposable income and the kids with rich parents.
I'm building a PC for a friend and we went to pick out a cabinet. For my money I picked out a Lian Li cabinet years ago, black anodised aluminium, modular with a window in the side (which I could take or leave) It's a peach for setting up, getting into quickly, etc. I was practical with my choice and so is my friend. Something which does the job and isn't ostentatious.
Gawd...
The cabinets you can get at the stores these days are BLING! The Dragon was laughable, there were a few others which looked like some Transformers theme and of course some pink outfit which would fit right in with My Little Pony figures all around it.
We managed to find a fairly decent modular aluminium cabinet, but we both left laughing at the stuff people were getting. One was buying a Dragon cabinet at Fry's when we left. I guess the people who make those things are laughing all the way to the bank. Funny stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Once some less clunky human-interface devices arrive on the scene, the possibilities for new computer games and genres will open up.
I must say, I'm a Catan fan and like the jsettlers (java imp you can get off sourceforge) interface. Easy to read, simple to use.
So along comes MSN with big press release from Mayfair and MSN that they're going to develop an online version which will be added to the stable of games on MSN. I tried it. Gawd. Clunky to the extreme. There's a decent example out there of a nice interface, even if not officially sanctioned (developed as part of a doctoral study), but puts the big roll-out to shame.
So, are newer interfaces for everything better? Not necessarily so and it's amazing how bad some still can be with great examples to follow available.
"Smart-phone sales are about 15 percent of the market now (around 100 million units), but with their faster growth should outnumber PCs by 2008."
My cell phone tries to help me with spelling out words as I type in letters. Invariably the doesn't have the option of the re but comes up with some pretty wild stuff I didn't think was in the english language or jargon dictionary. Seems every 'smart' thing I get, I spend a while un-smarting it. Notably these days is my (relatively) new digital SLR which does auto-noise suppression, which isn't very helpful if you're taking low-light pictures, because everything looks like 'noise' to it's little brain.
That was about the only useful information I got FTA.
Now off to go and steal some artworks...
Unfortunately what *I* seem to see is the stealing of a lot of ideas which really don't have that much day-to-day value OR are really bad, annoying ideas. Whereas really good ideas seem to have been lost.
I really couldn't give a care about a 3D desktop or pretty icons. I really want to know why the heck some task keeps dying and what I can do about it. (In *nix operating systems this is usually pretty easily sorted, but with Windows I don't have clue number 1 unless I get one of those An error occured. [Send it] [Cancel] requestors. Where's the log on this alleged operating system?
Most of mine consists of:
And that's usually on a pretty good day. Right now I'm experiencing a lot more gremlins than usual.
How many light bulbs does it take to change the world? No wait, that's not right...
The problem is people use these little efficient doodads to feel good about doing something green. Then they go out and buy a power-sucking plasma TV.
Electrical use is way up since the 80's. Possibly because we all have tonnes more electronics bits to plug in and nearly everyone has a PC which adds a certain minimum for the hours its on. If you had a few lamps burning around the house which added up to the energy consumption of most desktop PCs you'd notice it right away and wonder why it's necessary. Alas, we sit at our keyboards and type merrily away (there's that batsard, ackthpt again, oi if only I had the mod points to bury him.) oblivious to the power consumption of our tin box full of CPU, DDR-RAM, HD, Whizzo Video Card De-Luxe, etc. Quite possibly we even have a reading lamp going beside us in the evening (I don't know about you, but at my age I get a headache looking at a glowing screen in the dark.) Plus there's all these little black plastic cubes and rectangles to run all manner of gizmo, which all add up.
On another thought. I've got these wicked little LED flashlights which run for 130 hours on a battery the size of an aspirin. When will I see these in my house, rather than a fluorescent lamp?
Why not just buy a color laser? They are fairly cheap these days. I have a color laser, and a sprinkling of B&W lasers. I pretty much only use the color laser. When I have the need to do pure B&W, I use the older lasers, but in general I forget t change which printer it prints to.
I'll probably get a photo grade colour printer and a laser printer. This is the printer I bought with my laptop back in 1999. It still prints very nicely, but these bouts of paying the Ink Tax are getting on my nerves.
I'm perplexed how my original post was modded Funny. I suppose it may read that way to some, to me it wasn't a terribly funny experience, perhaps due to its recency. I may laugh about it next week. I'm also wondering how someone saw it as flamebait.
Illegal collusion to fix the market - Wouldn't happen to be intended to delay the adoption of the new players until next year would it, by which time maybe they will figure out how to actually sell a usable product...
There was no way in heck I was going to get one of these damn things anyway.
But now, now I feel I must have one! Aaarrrggghhhhh!
They are driving themselves insane out at sea, they were all psyched to go into battle with some kick ass frikkin laser beams on their heads now they have to continue practicing with mop-handles tied on.
I think it's detente
Blame all those pacifists in the pacific!
none for me, none for you
Hewlett-Packard has deployed a large team consisting of many scientists and many more lawyers ... [HP have] a market share of more than 50 percent in the US HP depends heavily on the sale of ink to make profit after sometimes selling their printers at a loss in order to lock in the ink resale.
Two days ago I was attempting to print a B&W document on my HP inkjet printer and it paused .. printed a line and paused .. then stuck. I form-fed the sheet it had stalled on and found
a large amount (at HP rates, about $4 worth) of ink pooled on the paper, as if it had taken a widdle and forgot where it was before this well-timed potty break. After cancelling the print job and powering down and up again the printer, I tried again. Same results. Perhaps they could explain why this is happening.
It's simple, sir, HP depend upon your regular purchase of ink and you haven't bought enough recently to ensure sustained profits. It's another of our patented business processes. Get out and buy some more, there's a good chap.
Add in your disk drives, ram and motherboards. Oh, and make it 3 diskdrives. More than 80
Ah, but I got an LCD monitor, see? And that cut my power bill down a bit from the old Cathod Ray Tube and Thyroid Irradiator.
I've got more on my desktop than an entire room full of mainframes from the day I started in programming, by orders of magnitude. And it all runs on less than a Mr. Coffee
I'm one of those weasels who keeps everything to a minimum and stare, slack-jawed, when my monthly bill comes in over $20.
Can I get that petabyte in Cornflower Blue?...As long as it's not silver, black or grey, I'm fine with adding another petabyte to my current configuration. If only my file system could handle it...
You can get that in any colour you like, as long as it's Beige
muah ha ha ha haaaa!
3200 Watts for 120 Terra bytes - that's like two hand-held hair dryers!
Kids these days... we used to have these things called Mainframes. They had special 240v wiring, with BIG power cables. You could hear the circuitbreaker box HUM when you walked past. This is all a pittance.
And they would need all that storage to record their utility bills.
Where do you live that 80 watts is a big drain on financial resources?
My CPU consumes 39 watts and I consider that loverly, compared to the old CPU which sucked 70+ watts.
You will get negative feedback on your ads?
eh, who?
Now, imagine a toolbar w/ these "most used" tools.
Windows already does something like this in ranking apps on the Start menu
Consider the obvious advantages to an operating system that actually morphed and adapted to the needs of the users instead of the other way around. Not only is there no such OS like this, the very idea goes against much of what we are currently seeing in the current OS options in the market.
I don't know about the parent, but when I build a kernel I don't just default to everything. I build for what I'll need. If that changes significantly then I'll do another with different options and settings.
While it may seem novel to "morph" to what's currently needed, it's not really so revolutionary an idea. It once was that operating systems cleared out unused libraries from memory (rather unlike the way Windows behaves, by loading 385 MB of junk you just might need during a session) and dynamically adjust the amount of processor priority and time (Priority and Run Burst) each task is assigned as needed depending upon system load, etc. Some things appear to have gone backward as we've got more dependent on ooh, shiny! features, whistles and bells.
Maybe like NASA digging up how they once did the Apollo Moon missions, to relearn, it's time for some of the people who do operating systems today to look back at how we did things 20-30 years ago.
Now all we need is a PhD thesis based on several years of reading slashdot.
I loved the jSettlers Ph.D. thesis. I even participated. :-)
all things in moderation .. or meta moderation.
Finally Star Trek is gaining the academic recognition it so richly deserves. Having Trekology as an official subject for a BS degree should be coming up soon at all major mail order universities. Live long and prospers.
Maybe some day those who embrace the Federation's Ideals can be accepted on a jury or even in public office.
stardate 2006.828 i've successfully been elected to the town school board. the squabbling is terrible and nothing ever gets done. i've never felt in need of a phaser so much in my life.
Hey, at four or five rant posts per typo the, "Add random typo to inflame user interest," chapter seems to have been well read as well as put to good use.
That would be the "More Revenue Through Typos" chapter
Well, it's clear that you're not spending the time working on your typing skills.
Well, that's what editors are for and why their paid the big bucks, eh?
oooohh, the Official Slashdot Editor Guide Odd, doesn't look like they've sold any copies, EVER
strategy guides have created more difficult games.
I remember those, form the early 80's. When you had to buy Invisi-Clues to solve InfoCom games. It struck me that some of these puzzles were so far from obvious you were going to fail without the booklets and their magic markers (which made the clues visible.) Why would I put this object in there? Where's the in-game hint there I should try such a thing? After all, there were probably 1.07e22 possible combinations...
I don't remember a strategy guide for Space Invaders, but one for patterns to Pac-Man was a near best seller.
Ya know I always find a strategy guide for things like Final Fantasy just because some puzzles are just ridiculous and I have no interest in trial & erroring for an hour when I'd rather kill monsters. But there really is somethign to this.
Well, you seem to have hit the nail on the head with the video games -- you're getting pretty poor return on your entertainment dollar if you beat the game the day you bought it, thanks to a guide which tells you where to get the Spear and Magic Helmet you need and where the wabbit is hiding so you can kill him. Everyone is in a big hurry these days. Some is just impatience ("I want my reward, now!") and some of it is competitive ("George has already got the magic carpet from the Genie? Crap! I need to catch up to him!") I thought a Simpson's episode did a bit of fable (complete with moral) where Bart wanted some video game incredibly bad, then when he could just about get the game, some rude kid shows up in a shop and tells his mother the game is passe and he doesn't want it, he wants something else now. There's something about traveling in the herd which makes people need to succeed and buy these things.
I'm so happy to be out of most of these newer games and having lots of fun with old games (even infocom invisiclues can now be found in the internet :-)
Just goes to show what you can do without corporations owning your lawmakers.
I suppose any day now some vested external interest will claim this is denying them hard earned income and try to sway the Danish parliament to ban this or at the very least put it under the supervision of an oligarchy.
Ah! The memories. When I was but a tad my dad would take the family in the stationwagon from Midland to Minneapolis, via Ludington to Manitowoc (famous now for aluminium cookware) on the C & O ferries. The SS Badger may hark from those days, it looks like it does. Back then there was a lot of traffic across the lake from Wisconsin, where automobile furniture (seats) and body parts were transported to Detroit with the assistance of several of these large boats which could hold several rail cars in their holds. They'd also take on automobiles and passengers for a nominal fee. They ran like clockwork, regardless of the weather and crossings in poor considtions could be the kind you spent clutching a paper bucket. I found chewing gum helped.
Nice to see they still run them. If the weather's fair I would consider a drive to Ludington (or Manitowoc) just for the ride. Ludington's a nice place to visit and camp.
When I realized all the venting was actually causing my heat problems after an Athlon64 upgrade, I went out and got a case that's practically the best design I've yet to see - the Antec P180. If you're looking for a bland case, this is it. But at the same time, if you're looking for cool and quiet? This is -definitely- it.
Proper venting was one of the primary reasons we steered away from a lot of the design on the shelves. More fans and holes != better ventilation. My Lian Li cabinet has a simple approach: Air comes in the front, exits the back. Some of these cases have air going every which way, which defeats the purpose of effective cooling. Air could come in and go right out without accomplishing anything, while something off to the side cooks. A lot of these things are sucker bait, there's no doubt about it.
Alienware isn't about the "fastest". True, they have fast systems, but it's more about the 'bling' factor.
They're target market is upper middle class, specifically the middle age men who like to game and have disposable income and the kids with rich parents.
I'm building a PC for a friend and we went to pick out a cabinet. For my money I picked out a Lian Li cabinet years ago, black anodised aluminium, modular with a window in the side (which I could take or leave) It's a peach for setting up, getting into quickly, etc. I was practical with my choice and so is my friend. Something which does the job and isn't ostentatious.
Gawd...
The cabinets you can get at the stores these days are BLING! The Dragon was laughable, there were a few others which looked like some Transformers theme and of course some pink outfit which would fit right in with My Little Pony figures all around it.
We managed to find a fairly decent modular aluminium cabinet, but we both left laughing at the stuff people were getting. One was buying a Dragon cabinet at Fry's when we left. I guess the people who make those things are laughing all the way to the bank. Funny stuff.