...and other games that use Ogg Vorbis: Operation Flashpoint. This great game had support for Vorbis even before Vorbis 1.0 - music files from the game say Vendor: Xiphophorus libVorbis I 20010225 (1.0 beta 4)...
I've also been told that Serious Sam series use it (at least since The Second Encounter).
Like many others, I've found that every click counts.
Then why are you using mouse at all? All of the cool kids are using hotkeys! Firebird has plenty of 'em!
First, if you're using FAT16, you've got other problems. Second, do your eally have millions of bookmarks? Even thousands? And how much disk space is that wasting?
I just mentioned it was a problem in FAT16 days. It is far less of a problem in FAT32 or NTFS. =)
But still, to me, convenience of syncing a single file across the network is alone worth the trouble.
As for file management to manage the bookmarks - managing the bookmark metadata still needs shell extensions to manage the bookmark details like comments and such, so aside of using already provided file manager to move the files around, there's really no other benefit from having stuff in files.
And I still think syncing a single file is far easier than syncing lots of them.
AHh, now you sound like a talk radio host who waves his hand at something he doesn't understand or would rather not touch.
Yeah, frankly, I don't get it. You got that far things right. However, you are wrong if you think I'm dismissing this because of that!
To me, all of the things you mentioned seemed like excuses. Microsoft suddenly gave people ability to embed HTML stuff everywhere. People suddenly noted they could do cool stuff with it, as long as you ignore the creaking sound on the background. It works, but to me, it never sounded any better than other bubblegum fix solutions.
Thus, everything people do with the HTML sound like tricks and gimmicks. No matter how cool and clever they may be, I always look at them and the first thought that surfaces would be "yeah, but a stand-alone app for that would be far cooler."
In other words, why people do things like this with web browser when there are better tools available?
I hope that's a better explanation. Apologies for not coming up with a better one before.
But, you see, then I would have two browsers on my system because IE would still be integrated into the OS for the things I use it for.
Now who's worried about disk space? =) Personally, on Windows platforms, I use Firefox for web browsing and IE for things that only IE is supposed to do, like WindowsUpdate and stuff. Since one can't supposedly get rid of it, it can be there. To me, it's just another useless piece of Windows bloat. If you can think of something cool to use that for, that's fine.
But to me, Firefox is good for browsing the Web. IE is, as you said, good for messing around with the Windows interface. Similarly, on GNOME, I have a GNOME Help Browser, which is pretty good for browsing help files (yes, with its own tiny little HTML renderer). I have GNOME Dictionary which is good for dictd lookups. There are good tools for every task. I could do all three from a web browser, but I don't necessarily need to.
Yeah, there's multiple apps that can do the same thing. These are just slight overlaps of functionality, though - just because an application has expanded enough that it can read e-mail doesn't mean it would immediately be the perfect mail reader. Doing dictionary lookups from web browser would need CGI request handling or client-side hackery, and HTML conversions. GNOME Dictionary merely formats lookup results, being more efficient at actual dictionary lookups than a web browser would be, but it would also suck at HTML rendering.
A kind of a hazy recollection from a local Nintendo mag: I seem to remember some comment from around the release of Super Mario Bros 3 (regarding SMB1, I think?) regarding how the NES assembly code kept spinning in his head all the time through the development. Of course, I can't remember the source, the game, and I'm not even half sure of the developer in question. =) But yes, still, Miyamoto is more of a design god.
Yeah! And what about programming? Some time after UNIVAC, people who programmed started their programs with massively epic-sounding Words of Power, like PROGRAM. Even mentioning that stuff aloud made those Old Computers make fearsome noises. That had style.
These days, "main()" just doesn't sound like the same, and many popular languages don't even have specifically labelled entry point. I mean, where is the glory these days, dammit?
1. I can re-arrange the toolbars to my satisfaction.
Can do. View - Toolbars - Customize
2. I can cleverly size my toolbars such that extra items are hidden behind a pop-out button so I can effectively make quick 1-click menues.
I can cleverly pick necessary stuff so that there's no need for anything to be hidden behind pop-out anything...
3. The unbeatable *real* Google Toolbar
...which may sound neat, but can't get me tempted away from bookmark keywords, which is so far the most flexible searching thing I've ever seen, and all I need is the location bar - "g whatever" searches google, "imdb whatever" searches IMDB, "dict word" searches dictionary.com, "wayback url" gets the archived versions of the page... There's more to world than just Google, you know =)
4. The Favorites are arranged as files & folders so I can manipulate them easily
That was pure pain on the FAT16 days, please don't remind me. Millions of files eating away the precious diskspace.
And even on these modern days, there are problems - what do you think is easier to process by script, copy around, backup, or sync over network?
5. I can embed HTML in my TaskBar to accomplish all sorts of useful things (wallet-size photoalbum, dictuinary, phone number lookup, etc.)
Gimmicks. All gimmicks. Isn't that what Perl is for? =) I prefer to do silly tricks like this on tools that are more up to the task, thank you very much.
My browser is not just a browser. It bleeds into my operating system and vice-versa. I'm not blindly pro-Microsoft, I just happen to take advantage of the integration Microsoft chose to thrust upon us.
And I use browser as a building block of the whole. The browser does just what it's expected to do, in perfect harmony with everything else in the system. What the browser doesn't do is handled by other programs that bloody well do. What Microsoft doesn't get that in order to make things flexible and powerful, you don't need to melt everything into an unholy combination.
Well, first of all, from the developer perspective: The Windows C/C++ APIs are just plain horrible to look at. They're ugly, offensive and just plain bureaucratic-looking. And there's million of different APIs that do almost the same thing. When I see some Windows app source code, I'm forced to just stare in horror. I haven't looked at C#/.NET, but I heard they've improved things somewhat. About damn time. It will still take time until Windows API can possibly be as practical as GTK+ or as elegant as *STEP/Cocoa...
"The GUIDs are coming! THE GUIDS ARE COMING! AAAARGH! RUUUUUUUUUN!!!!!" I see those damn GUIDs every time I look under the hood of any app. Mysterious numbers everywhere. It is as if the files collectively screamed, "I'm not a 49384203843294823043942803, I'm a resident DLL number 6!
Another reason: Eight-dot-threeisms. I'm not sure if Win2K/XP have improved their system directories any, but I cringe every time I see Win98 c:\windows\system. "Um, let's see, what does MSEBTL32.DLL do?" "Well, it's the Microsoft E-commerce Bit Toggling Library for Win32. Duh." *NIXes at least have mostly descriptive names for their libraries ("libecommercebittwiddle.so.1.2.0"), MacOSX has things in bundles. Windows OS file organization looks like a mess.
Windows' guts are pain to the eyes.
Then, from an user point of view: When Windows works, it's beautiful. When it doesn't work, it's just about the most frustating thing to work with. It can helpfully tell that something is wrong, but damn me if I ever find out what actually seems to be the problem.
Nor is IETF known for making tons of "standards", they publish "requests for comments". (81 STDs, not even all of them real, vs. 3542 RFCs, though not all of those are "real" either...)
Really, the argument that W3C doesn't create "standards" is pretty weak. They just chose to call their standards "recommendations" just not to annoy anyone.
To me, it's a standard if a) there's a comprehensive specification, preferrably from one authoritative source and b) everyone else decides to follow that specific specification, even if some follow it better than others.
No matter what W3C says, you could call W3C's Recommendations de-facto standards, just like you could call a RFC-specified (but not STD-level) protocol "standardized". True, they're not strictly standardized by any major standardization bodies, but who cares? The nature of the Internet has always been to rely on flexible, community-created specifications rather than expecting commitees to work on the things for ages.
Basically, it's a portable game console - er, a cheap toy for really small kids who aren't old enough to be trusted a real Game Boy. Has bright colored plastic, lo-rez display, d-pad and two buttons, and IR port. It uses cartridges.
Sun executives: "Well, let's open up the Java a little bit. Let's put some of the code under a free license. Nothing important, really, but enough to make us look good."
(A day later in a Sun press auditorium)
Sun spokesguy: (still reading the paper he's been given a moment ago) "...mmm... it says here that we're opening up Java."
Press guy in the front row: "So Java will be open source?"
Sun spokesguy: (reads something from the paper quickly) "Yeah!"
Everyone in the auditorium: "Cool!"
That evening, hundreds of thousands of developers flock to the website and rush to download the whole thing as Sun's Java guys open the download server, joining the celebrations.
The next day:
Sun executives: "Ummmm... what the hell we've done?"
Or without extensions: Unison. Efficient and fast, multi-platform synchronization of files or whole directory trees over practically every imaginable transmission medium (but who cares as long as it does SSH =). All you need is the executable on both ends.
Put this thing's GUI on menu, start it up and synchronize, go to the other place, use all you want, get back home, hit synchronize again, and it's up to date.
(Huh? giFT with Fasttrack is like Windows with Apache: Something that works beautifully but that doesn't quite fit in the marketed picture =)
Try mldonkey's g2gui (done in Java with Eclipse SWT toolkit). Very slick, beats the hell out of the default GTK+ 1.x GUI. The only problem is that it's slightly slow to start (at least for me). I totally dropped xmule and went with mldonkey after this, there was no excuse not to =)
And mldonkey folks are apparently working on adding support for giFT frontends (Yay! Do searches from giftcurs! *drool*) and also support for OpenFT!
As I see it, SVG is "The Future." As for "real world", I believe SVG will be in the "real world" pretty quickly, and it's already gaining a lot of foothold, which can only be a good thing.
It works fine as an editable format that can be worked on in many different applications without losing any data in between (EPS is just an intermediate format that loses editing-related information) - there's common stuff that specifies the image data and additional, program-specific stuff can be added with additional XML namespaces (sodipodi and inkscape both do this).
Also, you can put any kind of XML metadata inside SVG, for example, Dublin Core elements, Creative Commons tags, you name it. You can do that much hot "semantic web" stuff in it, I suppose.
SVG also interfaces nicely with web browsers, right through the DOM. (At least in theory. Let's wait until Mozilla finally gets SVG out of the alpha, and Microsoft to catch up within a decade or two =) Think Flash, but without a stone wall between the plugin and the browser.
Also, SVG supports graphically stuff that's pretty hard to find in PS world. I still have slight problems getting alpha blending to work beautifully in EPS files (at least in OSS apps!), but I've not had any problems with that in SVG.
SVG is technically easy to work with. It's just XML with some plain-text sublanguages (like path declarations). It is not a Turing-complete language like PS, but it's rather purely just data, so it's probably far easier to work with. Yeah, in this respect, it's perhaps not as "powerful" as PS, but I've mostly seen PS's "power" being used only in gimmicky situations. Algorithms may get you to the stars, but Data gets you pretty damn far in real world.
Well, it's a GTK+ app, so "Fully Skinnable Interface" is most yawn-inducingly Already There. The OSS world got over the "oo, this is Fully Skinnable" phase years and years ago, and is now focusing on producing high quality software. Or that's the theory. =)
Because your wants exceed your capability to satisfy them.
Not so fast to the "duh" conclusions, please. I have the wants, but I also have the capability - the capability just happens to be stretched over longer period of time than with other people. I can buy all the games I want, provided that they stay on market. They often don't.
You know, I'm a Poor Student. This is not an excuse to buy second hand games, but rather, the fact that I can't afford all games I want every month is. Why?
The new games don't stay on store shelves long enough!
The game retailing seems like an extremely cut-throat thing. There's zillions of new games coming out all the time and the stores just won't keep up long.
I recently wanted to buy one (just released) game. It took a few months for me to scrape up the money for it. Went to the store. "Well, we had it a few weeks ago, not anymore..."
If I find a game that's even slightly more marginal and not immediately mega-popular, I may as well forget trying to find it two months later from anything besides the very largest of the large shops. They do, however, sometimes show up in bargain bins and especially the second hand sections.
So, a little bit of an advice: Make fewer games, and better; keep them on sale for a longer time.
The Perl 5 string concatenation operator (full stop) has changed into an underscore in Perl 6. The reason was given ages ago - The full stop is now for a method call, like in many other programming languages. Yeah, I thought it looked ugly the first time I saw that. I don't really care.
I suspect (in other words, guess) the difference with "&&" and "and" will be the same as it is currently: They have different precedence. ("and" being tighter than "&&".) I don't really know.
I recently decided to stop drinking soft drinks and go for water (Mountain Valley Spring Water),
Ouch. If the tap water is drinkable, I don't see any reason not to drink it. It tastes just as good and doesn't have the mark of a multinational corporation on the side. =)
I don't see why people rather drink water that's been shipped across half the country - or even from outside of the country. Must be the kewlness factor. Me, on the other hand, I'm rather happy that the local lakes and rivers and like haven't been polluted to hell and back =)
since the article includes blosxom, people should also be aware of blojsom,
(The following is not intended as troll =)
THANK YOU. I always thought Blosxom was great software, but had a stupid name (I hate all of the millions of terms that have been derived from "blog"). Now I know there's a related app with even more stupid name, so Blosxom isn't that bad anyway.
Now all I need to remember how to spell it. S before X, I think? =)
Personally, I'm thrilled - I'm a game collector and want to have every Ultima here, and I only have U1-8, UUW1 and SE here.
Of course, I'm pretty much aware that Ultima IX is garbage compared to just about any part of the series. Yet, when browsing the 500+ nitpicks about the game, I suddenly had felt the need to get the game and see how bad things were in Britannia. The site probably had completely the opposite effect to me than what was intended =)
I'm only hoping for a complete remake of the series, possibly with U8 and U9 completely rewritten.
The one with the "thou hast lost an eighth" was U4. Not played much U5 or U6, don't know if they're there.
Personally, I don't like U4 that much, but it's clearly one of the best in the series. It suffers from same problems as the NES-era RPGs, namely, you can't cram that Epic Stuff into such small space. Dialogues are rather... brief. I can only hope the U4 remakes some day flesh out complete (un U7 sense) dialogues for every NPC.
As they say in nitpicking, bugs don't count as nitpicks. U7 is a wonderful game if you get it working. People tend to agree that U9 isn't a wonderful game if you get it working. =)
The (fully patched) U7's only sin is that it's nearly impossible to run these days without external utilities. They can be easily arranged. And once you get going, it's The Best Damn CRPG Ever. It's brilliant, it's beautiful.
I haven't yet played much into U7 Part 2: Serpent Isle, but I can safely say that it's just as rulesome - even though it's far more linear.
Personally, I'm trying to start Yet Another Game-themed Blog. I was definitely thinking to use any of the widely-used engines, but there's just one problem with them: They need RDBMS (specifically, often only MySQL). My webhost can do MySQL but they charge extra for it (and, you know, being a PostgreSQL fan, it's kind of hard to accept that =). I wouldn't want to host this thing from my own box.
So, I'd just like to give some cheers to Blosxom folks. It's a very nice piece of software that doesn't need a RDBMS, is trivial to install and can also generate static pages. Sure, it doesn't have as much flexibility as some RDBMS-based things, but I wouldn't complain, it works wonderfully.
Now, if only I'd be able to come up with the content for the blog too... =)
Slashdot Mirror
...and other games that use Ogg Vorbis: Operation Flashpoint. This great game had support for Vorbis even before Vorbis 1.0 - music files from the game say Vendor: Xiphophorus libVorbis I 20010225 (1.0 beta 4)...
I've also been told that Serious Sam series use it (at least since The Second Encounter).
Then why are you using mouse at all? All of the cool kids are using hotkeys! Firebird has plenty of 'em!
I just mentioned it was a problem in FAT16 days. It is far less of a problem in FAT32 or NTFS. =)
But still, to me, convenience of syncing a single file across the network is alone worth the trouble.
As for file management to manage the bookmarks - managing the bookmark metadata still needs shell extensions to manage the bookmark details like comments and such, so aside of using already provided file manager to move the files around, there's really no other benefit from having stuff in files.
And I still think syncing a single file is far easier than syncing lots of them.
Yeah, frankly, I don't get it. You got that far things right. However, you are wrong if you think I'm dismissing this because of that!
To me, all of the things you mentioned seemed like excuses. Microsoft suddenly gave people ability to embed HTML stuff everywhere. People suddenly noted they could do cool stuff with it, as long as you ignore the creaking sound on the background. It works, but to me, it never sounded any better than other bubblegum fix solutions.
Thus, everything people do with the HTML sound like tricks and gimmicks. No matter how cool and clever they may be, I always look at them and the first thought that surfaces would be "yeah, but a stand-alone app for that would be far cooler."
In other words, why people do things like this with web browser when there are better tools available?
I hope that's a better explanation. Apologies for not coming up with a better one before.
Now who's worried about disk space? =) Personally, on Windows platforms, I use Firefox for web browsing and IE for things that only IE is supposed to do, like WindowsUpdate and stuff. Since one can't supposedly get rid of it, it can be there. To me, it's just another useless piece of Windows bloat. If you can think of something cool to use that for, that's fine.
But to me, Firefox is good for browsing the Web. IE is, as you said, good for messing around with the Windows interface. Similarly, on GNOME, I have a GNOME Help Browser, which is pretty good for browsing help files (yes, with its own tiny little HTML renderer). I have GNOME Dictionary which is good for dictd lookups. There are good tools for every task. I could do all three from a web browser, but I don't necessarily need to.
Yeah, there's multiple apps that can do the same thing. These are just slight overlaps of functionality, though - just because an application has expanded enough that it can read e-mail doesn't mean it would immediately be the perfect mail reader. Doing dictionary lookups from web browser would need CGI request handling or client-side hackery, and HTML conversions. GNOME Dictionary merely formats lookup results, being more efficient at actual dictionary lookups than a web browser would be, but it would also suck at HTML rendering.
A kind of a hazy recollection from a local Nintendo mag: I seem to remember some comment from around the release of Super Mario Bros 3 (regarding SMB1, I think?) regarding how the NES assembly code kept spinning in his head all the time through the development. Of course, I can't remember the source, the game, and I'm not even half sure of the developer in question. =) But yes, still, Miyamoto is more of a design god.
Yeah! And what about programming? Some time after UNIVAC, people who programmed started their programs with massively epic-sounding Words of Power, like PROGRAM. Even mentioning that stuff aloud made those Old Computers make fearsome noises. That had style.
These days, "main()" just doesn't sound like the same, and many popular languages don't even have specifically labelled entry point. I mean, where is the glory these days, dammit?
Can do. View - Toolbars - Customize
I can cleverly pick necessary stuff so that there's no need for anything to be hidden behind pop-out anything...
...which may sound neat, but can't get me tempted away from bookmark keywords, which is so far the most flexible searching thing I've ever seen, and all I need is the location bar - "g whatever" searches google, "imdb whatever" searches IMDB, "dict word" searches dictionary.com, "wayback url" gets the archived versions of the page... There's more to world than just Google, you know =)
That was pure pain on the FAT16 days, please don't remind me. Millions of files eating away the precious diskspace.
And even on these modern days, there are problems - what do you think is easier to process by script, copy around, backup, or sync over network?
Gimmicks. All gimmicks. Isn't that what Perl is for? =) I prefer to do silly tricks like this on tools that are more up to the task, thank you very much.
And I use browser as a building block of the whole. The browser does just what it's expected to do, in perfect harmony with everything else in the system. What the browser doesn't do is handled by other programs that bloody well do. What Microsoft doesn't get that in order to make things flexible and powerful, you don't need to melt everything into an unholy combination.
Yup, like sticking the ad inside an IFRAME or something. That would only refresh the IFRAME and keep the document itself right where it is.
And it has an added benefit that IFRAMEs, being less frequently used, stick out in Adblock's list which makes them easier to spot and kill =)
Well, first of all, from the developer perspective: The Windows C/C++ APIs are just plain horrible to look at. They're ugly, offensive and just plain bureaucratic-looking. And there's million of different APIs that do almost the same thing. When I see some Windows app source code, I'm forced to just stare in horror. I haven't looked at C#/.NET, but I heard they've improved things somewhat. About damn time. It will still take time until Windows API can possibly be as practical as GTK+ or as elegant as *STEP/Cocoa...
"The GUIDs are coming! THE GUIDS ARE COMING! AAAARGH! RUUUUUUUUUN!!!!!" I see those damn GUIDs every time I look under the hood of any app. Mysterious numbers everywhere. It is as if the files collectively screamed, "I'm not a 49384203843294823043942803, I'm a resident DLL number 6!
Another reason: Eight-dot-threeisms. I'm not sure if Win2K/XP have improved their system directories any, but I cringe every time I see Win98 c:\windows\system. "Um, let's see, what does MSEBTL32.DLL do?" "Well, it's the Microsoft E-commerce Bit Toggling Library for Win32. Duh." *NIXes at least have mostly descriptive names for their libraries ("libecommercebittwiddle.so.1.2.0"), MacOSX has things in bundles. Windows OS file organization looks like a mess.
Windows' guts are pain to the eyes.
Then, from an user point of view: When Windows works, it's beautiful. When it doesn't work, it's just about the most frustating thing to work with. It can helpfully tell that something is wrong, but damn me if I ever find out what actually seems to be the problem.
That said, it could be worse.
Nor is IETF known for making tons of "standards", they publish "requests for comments". (81 STDs, not even all of them real, vs. 3542 RFCs, though not all of those are "real" either...)
Really, the argument that W3C doesn't create "standards" is pretty weak. They just chose to call their standards "recommendations" just not to annoy anyone.
To me, it's a standard if a) there's a comprehensive specification, preferrably from one authoritative source and b) everyone else decides to follow that specific specification, even if some follow it better than others.
No matter what W3C says, you could call W3C's Recommendations de-facto standards, just like you could call a RFC-specified (but not STD-level) protocol "standardized". True, they're not strictly standardized by any major standardization bodies, but who cares? The nature of the Internet has always been to rely on flexible, community-created specifications rather than expecting commitees to work on the things for ages.
Basically, it's a portable game console - er, a cheap toy for really small kids who aren't old enough to be trusted a real Game Boy. Has bright colored plastic, lo-rez display, d-pad and two buttons, and IR port. It uses cartridges.
Sun executives: "Well, let's open up the Java a little bit. Let's put some of the code under a free license. Nothing important, really, but enough to make us look good."
(A day later in a Sun press auditorium)
Sun spokesguy: (still reading the paper he's been given a moment ago) "...mmm... it says here that we're opening up Java."
Press guy in the front row: "So Java will be open source?"
Sun spokesguy: (reads something from the paper quickly) "Yeah!"
Everyone in the auditorium: "Cool!"
That evening, hundreds of thousands of developers flock to the website and rush to download the whole thing as Sun's Java guys open the download server, joining the celebrations.
The next day:
Sun executives: "Ummmm... what the hell we've done?"
...
Dateline: November 9, 1989
Or without extensions: Unison. Efficient and fast, multi-platform synchronization of files or whole directory trees over practically every imaginable transmission medium (but who cares as long as it does SSH =). All you need is the executable on both ends.
Put this thing's GUI on menu, start it up and synchronize, go to the other place, use all you want, get back home, hit synchronize again, and it's up to date.
(Huh? giFT with Fasttrack is like Windows with Apache: Something that works beautifully but that doesn't quite fit in the marketed picture =)
Try mldonkey's g2gui (done in Java with Eclipse SWT toolkit). Very slick, beats the hell out of the default GTK+ 1.x GUI. The only problem is that it's slightly slow to start (at least for me). I totally dropped xmule and went with mldonkey after this, there was no excuse not to =)
And mldonkey folks are apparently working on adding support for giFT frontends (Yay! Do searches from giftcurs! *drool*) and also support for OpenFT!
...and on their free time, people use Tile Molester for retrogame development. Graphics programs have to be aggggrrrrrressive. =)
As I see it, SVG is "The Future." As for "real world", I believe SVG will be in the "real world" pretty quickly, and it's already gaining a lot of foothold, which can only be a good thing.
It works fine as an editable format that can be worked on in many different applications without losing any data in between (EPS is just an intermediate format that loses editing-related information) - there's common stuff that specifies the image data and additional, program-specific stuff can be added with additional XML namespaces (sodipodi and inkscape both do this).
Also, you can put any kind of XML metadata inside SVG, for example, Dublin Core elements, Creative Commons tags, you name it. You can do that much hot "semantic web" stuff in it, I suppose.
SVG also interfaces nicely with web browsers, right through the DOM. (At least in theory. Let's wait until Mozilla finally gets SVG out of the alpha, and Microsoft to catch up within a decade or two =) Think Flash, but without a stone wall between the plugin and the browser.
Also, SVG supports graphically stuff that's pretty hard to find in PS world. I still have slight problems getting alpha blending to work beautifully in EPS files (at least in OSS apps!), but I've not had any problems with that in SVG.
SVG is technically easy to work with. It's just XML with some plain-text sublanguages (like path declarations). It is not a Turing-complete language like PS, but it's rather purely just data, so it's probably far easier to work with. Yeah, in this respect, it's perhaps not as "powerful" as PS, but I've mostly seen PS's "power" being used only in gimmicky situations. Algorithms may get you to the stars, but Data gets you pretty damn far in real world.
Well, it's a GTK+ app, so "Fully Skinnable Interface" is most yawn-inducingly Already There. The OSS world got over the "oo, this is Fully Skinnable" phase years and years ago, and is now focusing on producing high quality software. Or that's the theory. =)
Not so fast to the "duh" conclusions, please. I have the wants, but I also have the capability - the capability just happens to be stretched over longer period of time than with other people. I can buy all the games I want, provided that they stay on market. They often don't.
You know, I'm a Poor Student. This is not an excuse to buy second hand games, but rather, the fact that I can't afford all games I want every month is. Why?
The new games don't stay on store shelves long enough!
The game retailing seems like an extremely cut-throat thing. There's zillions of new games coming out all the time and the stores just won't keep up long.
I recently wanted to buy one (just released) game. It took a few months for me to scrape up the money for it. Went to the store. "Well, we had it a few weeks ago, not anymore..."
If I find a game that's even slightly more marginal and not immediately mega-popular, I may as well forget trying to find it two months later from anything besides the very largest of the large shops. They do, however, sometimes show up in bargain bins and especially the second hand sections.
So, a little bit of an advice: Make fewer games, and better; keep them on sale for a longer time.
100000 $1 hookerbots. After all, it's a distributed system.
And EFF is working to get the hookerbots somehow to participating countries where the hookerbots are illegal.
Bah. Timber Wolf Prime all the way. Though I have to say that new-fangled prime thing wasn't that bad.
The Perl 5 string concatenation operator (full stop) has changed into an underscore in Perl 6. The reason was given ages ago - The full stop is now for a method call, like in many other programming languages. Yeah, I thought it looked ugly the first time I saw that. I don't really care.
I suspect (in other words, guess) the difference with "&&" and "and" will be the same as it is currently: They have different precedence. ("and" being tighter than "&&".) I don't really know.
You may find the Exegesis on the operator issues helpful.
Ouch. If the tap water is drinkable, I don't see any reason not to drink it. It tastes just as good and doesn't have the mark of a multinational corporation on the side. =)
I don't see why people rather drink water that's been shipped across half the country - or even from outside of the country. Must be the kewlness factor. Me, on the other hand, I'm rather happy that the local lakes and rivers and like haven't been polluted to hell and back =)
(The following is not intended as troll =)
THANK YOU. I always thought Blosxom was great software, but had a stupid name (I hate all of the millions of terms that have been derived from "blog"). Now I know there's a related app with even more stupid name, so Blosxom isn't that bad anyway.
Now all I need to remember how to spell it. S before X, I think? =)
Personally, I'm thrilled - I'm a game collector and want to have every Ultima here, and I only have U1-8, UUW1 and SE here.
Of course, I'm pretty much aware that Ultima IX is garbage compared to just about any part of the series. Yet, when browsing the 500+ nitpicks about the game, I suddenly had felt the need to get the game and see how bad things were in Britannia. The site probably had completely the opposite effect to me than what was intended =)
I'm only hoping for a complete remake of the series, possibly with U8 and U9 completely rewritten.
U9 isn't "classic", correct =)
The one with the "thou hast lost an eighth" was U4. Not played much U5 or U6, don't know if they're there.
Personally, I don't like U4 that much, but it's clearly one of the best in the series. It suffers from same problems as the NES-era RPGs, namely, you can't cram that Epic Stuff into such small space. Dialogues are rather... brief. I can only hope the U4 remakes some day flesh out complete (un U7 sense) dialogues for every NPC.
As they say in nitpicking, bugs don't count as nitpicks. U7 is a wonderful game if you get it working. People tend to agree that U9 isn't a wonderful game if you get it working. =)
The (fully patched) U7's only sin is that it's nearly impossible to run these days without external utilities. They can be easily arranged. And once you get going, it's The Best Damn CRPG Ever. It's brilliant, it's beautiful.
I haven't yet played much into U7 Part 2: Serpent Isle, but I can safely say that it's just as rulesome - even though it's far more linear.
Can't say much about U8.
Personally, I'm trying to start Yet Another Game-themed Blog. I was definitely thinking to use any of the widely-used engines, but there's just one problem with them: They need RDBMS (specifically, often only MySQL). My webhost can do MySQL but they charge extra for it (and, you know, being a PostgreSQL fan, it's kind of hard to accept that =). I wouldn't want to host this thing from my own box.
So, I'd just like to give some cheers to Blosxom folks. It's a very nice piece of software that doesn't need a RDBMS, is trivial to install and can also generate static pages. Sure, it doesn't have as much flexibility as some RDBMS-based things, but I wouldn't complain, it works wonderfully.
Now, if only I'd be able to come up with the content for the blog too... =)