Well, Nintendo isn't flaw-free, but still least buggy of all things I've tried. At worst, I've had startup flaws due to crap in the connectors (But then again, really no system is immune to crap in the game media - ahem, no dual meaning intended). The weirdest surprise was when one GBA game was identified as a DS game accessory pak. I was, like, "oh, DS games can be extended, what a wonderful platform this is" =)
I've only witnessed a Nintendo game crash once, when using quake power in Star Fox Adventures. And that happened only once.
Yup. I thought the graphical installer was a bit silly though, they could have just gone for "untar this to wherever the hell you want this, create symlinks or stick it to the path if you want, and then run oowriter or whatever".
But as everyone knows, binary releases are only for those who are waiting for their distribution to get up to the speed. I just twiddled my thumbs and used 1.1 until today when I noticed 2.0 was in Debian too. =)
(By the way, as a consolation I can say anyone suggesting "umm, try Alien" with 30 RPMs, when the instructions also specifically say "pick the ones that apply to your distribution", is definitely nuts. =)
To me, Alpha Centauri. Civ1 was cool, Civ2 was almost perfect, but SMAC was perfect game-wise *and* had the user interface just right *and* had cool, interesting sci-fi stuff.
Plus there was an actual Linux version (as opposed to Civ which only had those CTP knockoffs).
Of course, there are the disadvantages, with MSIE only, and Word, but there's always PortableFirefox and PortableOpenOffice!
Do they really mandate what software should be bought and used on those things? I have a vague recollection of Gates Foundation giving money to some Finnish libraries years and years ago. I vaguely remember Bill himself visiting the place, touring the place with that perma-smile of his, and watching people use Netscape on these brand new computers. =) The Local Microsoft Yesman in the "holy war" newsgroup said that of course it didn't matter what software they ran!
Here I was, happily writing stuff with XEmacs, but somehow, there was something missing from my coding stuff and things started to feel a bit wooden.
Weirdly enough, when I grabbed RDT, things started to look surprisingly bright and writing code was not that boring anymore. There are some emacsisms that I miss, but otherwise, this thing is really great. Eclipse was clearly made for bigger projects and it worked just fine when I got the crazy tendency to split my code across zillion little files! Wish XEmacs had this good file browser...
(And the silly little Ruby project I've worked on lately was Miller's Quest.)
I think the author of the article and 95% of the posters here miss one simple fact. Games are not art, they are games. Entertainment that allows you to play.
And what exactly is the difference between "art" and "entertainment"? I thought "art" was something someone created that succeeds evoking emotions in the observer; "entertainment" was merely a form of art that has been, while creating it, calculated to produce specific kind of emotional response appropriate to the type and genre of the artwork in question (e.g., horror movies should be horrifying and puzzle games perplexing) and has generally been polished to be "marketable" (i.e., the artist hasn't created it just for their own fun, but also to amuse others) - with common course of action being charging money for the stuff, or something.
Popular culture is art just as much as high culture, you know. Whether or not it is, or can be, good art is another issue. =)
Now you can be sure that {almost*} nobody visiting your site has JavaScript enabled, so there is no chance of this affecting them.
Or, as thousands of sites who still block by user-agent seemingly don't know, nobody is visiting the site.
People are lazy. What do you think is more likely - that they turn off Javascript which seems to have worked just fine so far and not broken anything, or decide to never, ever click on that link that leads to your site?
::shocked that anyone would consider 1GHz computer inadequate for anything::
I've ran a reasonably modern GNOME desktop on a P3-600MHz machine just smoothly without any problems, so I don't think you'll have any problems with a 1GHz machine. Unless you want to play Doom 3 or something.
(I wouldn't consider even getting an operating system / GUI environment that needs whole gigahertz for itself. Would suck knowing that my 3000+ Athlon would chomp 1000 MHz just to run the OS =/ )
Yeah, guess why I really wanted to use these Linux instent message systems? They actually have sensible UIs. Fast, clear, coherent, sensible, unintrusive, no advertising crap.
The only thing in Windows IMs that got me to drool was Exodus, which was far cooler Jabber client than anything on GNOME at the time. I humbly ate my GNOME fanaticism and installed Psi to get rid of this horrible feeling. =)
I didn't reply to this last night. I had to go to sleep and see if I had been dreaming. It's day already and the article is still here, so I guess I'm not dreaming.
Okay, so I don't know anything about specific features of Xara X, but from what I've understood, it's a widely sold package with a lot of those cool "pro" features.
All I can say is... wow. To me, this is definitely in league of Netscape / StarOffice / Blender opensourcing. I expect that in a year after this is out, we have one killer OSS vector package, or two killer packages if these news that they're cooperating with Inkscape are true. (I was about to ask about how hot their SVG support is. Apparently not very excellent at the moment, if they're sponsoring an SVG converter project.) This is definitely a great day for OSS graphics!
I think they are more than well aware that people want 16 bits per channel support. Too bad there's been too many hurdles on their way. You probably want to go for the FilmGimp/Cinepaint for 16bpc.
Also there'll be still no trace of color models other than 8bitRGB/Gray/Indexed. They were supposed to develop a whole new framework for colorspace management and port the GIMP to it, but apparently all of the developers who knew anything about colorspace stuff choked to death when they tried to pronounce the name of the framework, so the project's been in limbo for years. Man, I'd kill for L*a*b.
But at least they'll get good CMS stuff! I think GIMP already uses littlecms, just there's no GUI for it, but sweet that it's coming in next release =)
You can run Mono in almost any version of Windows.
Damn, don't give us false hope! For a while, I was almost thrilled, you know, "what if Mono ran on Win98SE, as Microsoft's.NET runtime sure won't?" but now that I checked the website, looks like it doesn't. Grr.
(This in regards to getting some Modern Software to run on the machines of people who just refuse to upgrade their perfectly working 98SE systems. But who am I to shove Modern Software there anyway, all they asked for was OpenOffice.org, Firefox and RealPlayer...)
I hate the new layout. Old layout with the map on left was better.
Well, the cool news is that Google Maps seems to have at least the locations of Finnish cities down. Still no road/street/service maps but at least it thinks it knows where I am and can give satellite view of the cities. Pretty cool if it can find some small towns.
Which is kind of bad, I kind of enjoyed panning around the map and looking at clues on where I was supposed to go. It was real fun trying to find my old home town just by following the waterways. Needed some *effort* to find the place. All the while them foreigners had wussy tools like high-resolution satellite images or map layer or full location search. Oh well, the future will be brighter for everyone! At least we don't need to learn geography the hard way! =)
Do you want the Svansbo or the Dalsfor installation?
Yeah, Swedish stuff will do. Can't use much of Finnish stuff, really, they'd only be known for the specific terminology uttered by the installers - leading to "Perkele" databases.
Can you imagine it? People are still playing a game that was released a whole six months ago? Unprecedented! Completely unheard of! Truly, a landmark in history of Internet gaming!
I don't have objections to Guild Wars or such, just happy that they're building a strong community. Yet, I find it a bit odd that in general, nowadays, some people might consider it weird to play a game that was released more than 2 months ago. Are we really heading to "throwaway entertainment" culture in video games too, or what?
Do call me back when Guild War reaches five-year limit though, like Neverwinter Nights will in next summer, still at the moment as lively as ever =)
Most of the changes happened in Python API, for which documentation is automatically generated and is up to date as of 2.37 (I don't think 2.37a changed anything).
The user interface changes weren't that major, the old documentation should be more or less good enough to figure out most of the functionality in the new versions too (I think; I'm pretty sure the new stuff is documented somewhere though, just not in the manual yet).
How do Blender's animation tools stand up to Maya's?
Just a personal opinion, and this from someone who hasn't used Maya: Blender is great for modeling, and the animation tools are pretty nice and getting better all the time - but they're hardly what I would call "simple to use". The character animation stuff is powerful but the UI is pretty arcane - and I think it doesn't yet have all of the cool stuff other apps have. It does need some smoothing before it really starts to make sense.
"Did that ever take a *damned* long time." People have waited this movie for years, it was out in the midnight local time and Slashdot publishes an article full 23 hours later. Is this still News for Nerds? Get some priorities! =)
Anyways, enjoy the movie - I pre-ordered the DVD and I've only watched it three and half times, but even based on such flimsy conclusions I can say I seriously think this thing just rules, one of the best scifi special effect movies I've seen, parody or not.
What I find it interesting is that the website also has the.srt subtitles *and* a fairly detailed explanation from the translator on the intricacies of the translation - I sure hope this will make fan-provided translations a little bit better. Right now, I'm waiting for them to release the kind-of-promised SW:ITP soundtrack. This movie has some damn good music.
Thunderbird has been a great proggy for my use, though one thing seems to bug me: just about every POP/IMAP client seems to support some form of external filtering in Linux, Thunderbird doesn't, what gives? If only I could run spamassassin and clamav...
I *could* go for fetchmail + local mta + procmail, but I'm so damn *lazy* and Thunderbird has a nice GUI...
I don't personally have any problems with words "blog" and "weblog". That in itself is a good distinctive word for this kind of sites, even if you're not speaking generally of "news sites" or "online journals" or anything. I might describe last.fm a "music charts system with tagging and weblog features" and not even blink.
The derivant words drive me crazy though. I'm a blogger but if you call me a "multi-blogger" or something, I might get violent. =)
But if I use an idiot proof content-management system to "type" my web page instead of "coding" it, I'm then creating a blog.
Nope. A weblog is a type of a site. CMSes just happen to be the most convenient way of managing them.
I was writing my first "Blog by a Clueless Teenager Geek"-type of site in 1998 in raw HTML with nothing but emacs in my side, it just happens to be hell to maintain =)
Once you start putting pictures and links on your blog, you're making a webpage...
Umm, what is exactly wrong with adding pictures and links to blogs - just using the web technologies as it's meant to be used? And in case you didn't notice, "weblog" originally meant just that: people linking to sites and pages they've found. Hell, these days, people write blogs that do nothing but link to some article (in another blog or elsewhere) and say "hey, my thoughts exactly". Hell, Slashdot is a blog that does usually nothing but link.
But aside that, it's getting again to the question of what's the proper feature set. Text editors are meant for "physical" work with text. Word processors have features that assist in producing text. Well, like I said, Emacs would rock in this respect - a text editor with tons of helpful features, too bad I keep hitting M-q.
Where are all of the word processors that do word processing?
When I start writing some awful-or-maybe-even-good stories in OpenOffice.org, it fortunately remembers already the window size and Optimal Zoom, and then I go zap-better font, zap-Online Layout (no damn pagination),... and sooner or later, I have a word processing that is almost good for - horrors - word processing.
With WYSIWYG, people spend wayyyyy too much time worrying about the formatting of the documents while writing. I wish there would be a word processor that didn't waste time on this. A word processor meant for writing instead of spending time getting the formatting right when it will suck anyway.
In my mind, there's always the difference between writing stuff and publishing it. I want to write the stuff. I have some really, really good software if I want to lay out the text (both LaTeX and Scribus, woohoo); I don't, I repeat, don't need that baggage in the word processor.
LyX is pretty good, it would just great if it was less... er, clumsy at times. And it's pretty much LaTeX only too. =(
<waxing-lyrical>The coolest word processors, which were really good for writing specificially, in my opinion, were found in the DOS era; WordPerfect 5.1 felt so frosty. I used to use that, and also one word processor from some Nordic company (marketed in Finland by Amersoft); cool because I lately found most of the docs I wrote with it and the work files were in mostly-plain text format so no worries here about interoperability =)</waxing-lyrical>
I actually use OO.o only because of style support (ie, I can so not worry about them until later) and automagical typography (like en/em dashes and correct quotes). And also the fact that apparently "soft" wordwrap is an abomination before eyes of Saint Ignucius and thus Emacsen don't do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Nintendo isn't flaw-free, but still least buggy of all things I've tried. At worst, I've had startup flaws due to crap in the connectors (But then again, really no system is immune to crap in the game media - ahem, no dual meaning intended). The weirdest surprise was when one GBA game was identified as a DS game accessory pak. I was, like, "oh, DS games can be extended, what a wonderful platform this is" =)
I've only witnessed a Nintendo game crash once, when using quake power in Star Fox Adventures. And that happened only once.
Yup. I thought the graphical installer was a bit silly though, they could have just gone for "untar this to wherever the hell you want this, create symlinks or stick it to the path if you want, and then run oowriter or whatever".
But as everyone knows, binary releases are only for those who are waiting for their distribution to get up to the speed. I just twiddled my thumbs and used 1.1 until today when I noticed 2.0 was in Debian too. =)
(By the way, as a consolation I can say anyone suggesting "umm, try Alien" with 30 RPMs, when the instructions also specifically say "pick the ones that apply to your distribution", is definitely nuts. =)
To me, Alpha Centauri. Civ1 was cool, Civ2 was almost perfect, but SMAC was perfect game-wise *and* had the user interface just right *and* had cool, interesting sci-fi stuff.
Plus there was an actual Linux version (as opposed to Civ which only had those CTP knockoffs).
I didn't like Civ3 interface much... =/
Do they really mandate what software should be bought and used on those things? I have a vague recollection of Gates Foundation giving money to some Finnish libraries years and years ago. I vaguely remember Bill himself visiting the place, touring the place with that perma-smile of his, and watching people use Netscape on these brand new computers. =) The Local Microsoft Yesman in the "holy war" newsgroup said that of course it didn't matter what software they ran!
Here I was, happily writing stuff with XEmacs, but somehow, there was something missing from my coding stuff and things started to feel a bit wooden.
Weirdly enough, when I grabbed RDT, things started to look surprisingly bright and writing code was not that boring anymore. There are some emacsisms that I miss, but otherwise, this thing is really great. Eclipse was clearly made for bigger projects and it worked just fine when I got the crazy tendency to split my code across zillion little files! Wish XEmacs had this good file browser...
(And the silly little Ruby project I've worked on lately was Miller's Quest.)
Actually, Emacs is still at version 1.21.x. They just dropped the first "1." when they released it to the public, for the sake of convenience.
But in general, version numbers are pretty damn useless anyway.
(Disclaimer: I'm an XEmacs fan who also uses quite a bit of Vim and also trying to use Eclipse =)
And what exactly is the difference between "art" and "entertainment"? I thought "art" was something someone created that succeeds evoking emotions in the observer; "entertainment" was merely a form of art that has been, while creating it, calculated to produce specific kind of emotional response appropriate to the type and genre of the artwork in question (e.g., horror movies should be horrifying and puzzle games perplexing) and has generally been polished to be "marketable" (i.e., the artist hasn't created it just for their own fun, but also to amuse others) - with common course of action being charging money for the stuff, or something.
Popular culture is art just as much as high culture, you know. Whether or not it is, or can be, good art is another issue. =)
Or, as thousands of sites who still block by user-agent seemingly don't know, nobody is visiting the site.
People are lazy. What do you think is more likely - that they turn off Javascript which seems to have worked just fine so far and not broken anything, or decide to never, ever click on that link that leads to your site?
::shocked that anyone would consider 1GHz computer inadequate for anything::
I've ran a reasonably modern GNOME desktop on a P3-600MHz machine just smoothly without any problems, so I don't think you'll have any problems with a 1GHz machine. Unless you want to play Doom 3 or something.
(I wouldn't consider even getting an operating system / GUI environment that needs whole gigahertz for itself. Would suck knowing that my 3000+ Athlon would chomp 1000 MHz just to run the OS =/ )
Yeah, guess why I really wanted to use these Linux instent message systems? They actually have sensible UIs. Fast, clear, coherent, sensible, unintrusive, no advertising crap.
The only thing in Windows IMs that got me to drool was Exodus, which was far cooler Jabber client than anything on GNOME at the time. I humbly ate my GNOME fanaticism and installed Psi to get rid of this horrible feeling. =)
I didn't reply to this last night. I had to go to sleep and see if I had been dreaming. It's day already and the article is still here, so I guess I'm not dreaming.
Okay, so I don't know anything about specific features of Xara X, but from what I've understood, it's a widely sold package with a lot of those cool "pro" features.
All I can say is... wow. To me, this is definitely in league of Netscape / StarOffice / Blender opensourcing. I expect that in a year after this is out, we have one killer OSS vector package, or two killer packages if these news that they're cooperating with Inkscape are true. (I was about to ask about how hot their SVG support is. Apparently not very excellent at the moment, if they're sponsoring an SVG converter project.) This is definitely a great day for OSS graphics!
I think they are more than well aware that people want 16 bits per channel support. Too bad there's been too many hurdles on their way. You probably want to go for the FilmGimp/Cinepaint for 16bpc.
Also there'll be still no trace of color models other than 8bitRGB/Gray/Indexed. They were supposed to develop a whole new framework for colorspace management and port the GIMP to it, but apparently all of the developers who knew anything about colorspace stuff choked to death when they tried to pronounce the name of the framework, so the project's been in limbo for years. Man, I'd kill for L*a*b.
But at least they'll get good CMS stuff! I think GIMP already uses littlecms, just there's no GUI for it, but sweet that it's coming in next release =)
Damn, don't give us false hope! For a while, I was almost thrilled, you know, "what if Mono ran on Win98SE, as Microsoft's .NET runtime sure won't?" but now that I checked the website, looks like it doesn't. Grr.
(This in regards to getting some Modern Software to run on the machines of people who just refuse to upgrade their perfectly working 98SE systems. But who am I to shove Modern Software there anyway, all they asked for was OpenOffice.org, Firefox and RealPlayer...)
I hate the new layout. Old layout with the map on left was better.
Well, the cool news is that Google Maps seems to have at least the locations of Finnish cities down. Still no road/street/service maps but at least it thinks it knows where I am and can give satellite view of the cities. Pretty cool if it can find some small towns.
Which is kind of bad, I kind of enjoyed panning around the map and looking at clues on where I was supposed to go. It was real fun trying to find my old home town just by following the waterways. Needed some *effort* to find the place. All the while them foreigners had wussy tools like high-resolution satellite images or map layer or full location search. Oh well, the future will be brighter for everyone! At least we don't need to learn geography the hard way! =)
Yeah, Swedish stuff will do. Can't use much of Finnish stuff, really, they'd only be known for the specific terminology uttered by the installers - leading to "Perkele" databases.
Can you imagine it? People are still playing a game that was released a whole six months ago? Unprecedented! Completely unheard of! Truly, a landmark in history of Internet gaming!
I don't have objections to Guild Wars or such, just happy that they're building a strong community. Yet, I find it a bit odd that in general, nowadays, some people might consider it weird to play a game that was released more than 2 months ago. Are we really heading to "throwaway entertainment" culture in video games too, or what?
Do call me back when Guild War reaches five-year limit though, like Neverwinter Nights will in next summer, still at the moment as lively as ever =)
Most of the changes happened in Python API, for which documentation is automatically generated and is up to date as of 2.37 (I don't think 2.37a changed anything).
The user interface changes weren't that major, the old documentation should be more or less good enough to figure out most of the functionality in the new versions too (I think; I'm pretty sure the new stuff is documented somewhere though, just not in the manual yet).
Just a personal opinion, and this from someone who hasn't used Maya: Blender is great for modeling, and the animation tools are pretty nice and getting better all the time - but they're hardly what I would call "simple to use". The character animation stuff is powerful but the UI is pretty arcane - and I think it doesn't yet have all of the cool stuff other apps have. It does need some smoothing before it really starts to make sense.
Actually, don't worry that much - I never watched B5 either, I still managed to like this thing a lot, and I now want to see B5 badly =)
"Did that ever take a *damned* long time." People have waited this movie for years, it was out in the midnight local time and Slashdot publishes an article full 23 hours later. Is this still News for Nerds? Get some priorities! =)
Anyways, enjoy the movie - I pre-ordered the DVD and I've only watched it three and half times, but even based on such flimsy conclusions I can say I seriously think this thing just rules, one of the best scifi special effect movies I've seen, parody or not.
What I find it interesting is that the website also has the .srt subtitles *and* a fairly detailed explanation from the translator on the intricacies of the translation - I sure hope this will make fan-provided translations a little bit better. Right now, I'm waiting for them to release the kind-of-promised SW:ITP soundtrack. This movie has some damn good music.
Thunderbird has been a great proggy for my use, though one thing seems to bug me: just about every POP/IMAP client seems to support some form of external filtering in Linux, Thunderbird doesn't, what gives? If only I could run spamassassin and clamav...
I *could* go for fetchmail + local mta + procmail, but I'm so damn *lazy* and Thunderbird has a nice GUI...
I don't personally have any problems with words "blog" and "weblog". That in itself is a good distinctive word for this kind of sites, even if you're not speaking generally of "news sites" or "online journals" or anything. I might describe last.fm a "music charts system with tagging and weblog features" and not even blink.
The derivant words drive me crazy though. I'm a blogger but if you call me a "multi-blogger" or something, I might get violent. =)
Nope. A weblog is a type of a site. CMSes just happen to be the most convenient way of managing them.
I was writing my first "Blog by a Clueless Teenager Geek"-type of site in 1998 in raw HTML with nothing but emacs in my side, it just happens to be hell to maintain =)
Umm, what is exactly wrong with adding pictures and links to blogs - just using the web technologies as it's meant to be used? And in case you didn't notice, "weblog" originally meant just that: people linking to sites and pages they've found. Hell, these days, people write blogs that do nothing but link to some article (in another blog or elsewhere) and say "hey, my thoughts exactly". Hell, Slashdot is a blog that does usually nothing but link.
Yeah. Shame there hasn't been an entry that won both the ICFP and IOCCC. =)
What's that? I'm a Linux user. =)
But aside that, it's getting again to the question of what's the proper feature set. Text editors are meant for "physical" work with text. Word processors have features that assist in producing text. Well, like I said, Emacs would rock in this respect - a text editor with tons of helpful features, too bad I keep hitting M-q.
Where are all of the word processors that do word processing?
When I start writing some awful-or-maybe-even-good stories in OpenOffice.org, it fortunately remembers already the window size and Optimal Zoom, and then I go zap-better font, zap-Online Layout (no damn pagination), ... and sooner or later, I have a word processing that is almost good for - horrors - word processing.
With WYSIWYG, people spend wayyyyy too much time worrying about the formatting of the documents while writing. I wish there would be a word processor that didn't waste time on this. A word processor meant for writing instead of spending time getting the formatting right when it will suck anyway.
In my mind, there's always the difference between writing stuff and publishing it. I want to write the stuff. I have some really, really good software if I want to lay out the text (both LaTeX and Scribus, woohoo); I don't, I repeat, don't need that baggage in the word processor.
LyX is pretty good, it would just great if it was less... er, clumsy at times. And it's pretty much LaTeX only too. =(
<waxing-lyrical>The coolest word processors, which were really good for writing specificially, in my opinion, were found in the DOS era; WordPerfect 5.1 felt so frosty. I used to use that, and also one word processor from some Nordic company (marketed in Finland by Amersoft); cool because I lately found most of the docs I wrote with it and the work files were in mostly-plain text format so no worries here about interoperability =)</waxing-lyrical>
I actually use OO.o only because of style support (ie, I can so not worry about them until later) and automagical typography (like en/em dashes and correct quotes). And also the fact that apparently "soft" wordwrap is an abomination before eyes of Saint Ignucius and thus Emacsen don't do that.