If Nintendo keeps attacking flash cart vendors, what geek would be able to buy one in order to use a GBA as a music player or PDA? They'd buy an iPaq or Zaurus PDA instead.
But what would they buy to, you know, play GBA games, either official or homebrew? Emulation is often pretty bad compared to the real thing.
Know why I like Nintendo consoles? They're actually produced for playing games. I got a GBA to play games, a Palm m100 for PDA stuff, and a portable CD player for music.
Multiple widgets, each doing their job well, are better than a single widget that does none of the things well.
An omnipotent portable widget is an abomination. Every widget, no matter how multi-purpose they are, are good for one thing, or at most two. For example, my Nokia 9110 is great for sending SMS and doing dial-up terminal - but my Palm has far better PDA functionality. Palm sucks as a web browser though. Both widgets have extremely crappy games, and since I have a GBA already, I see no point in buying a latest and greatest Java phone to play games (unless N-Gage's price drops through the floor or something).
Besides, what kind of "geek" will dare to go out with less than three different portable widgets? =)
(And besides... GBA as a PDA? Not without a keyboard or a pressure-sensitive display. Not thrilled about trying to type Graffiti letters with the d-pad.)
You're right about flash cart stuff though - those should be more easily available without persecution.
As for GCN+GBA expensiveness - that's two consoles in one, and no GCN game should require GBA connectivity. (Final Fantasy fanboys can shut up already about their overrated series. I'm not listening. La la la la, can't hear you...)
"John Graham-Cumming invented the Banana Wumpus Driver. At age 13 he realized that he was attracted to women and spent his entire life in pursuit of sexual encounters with various women until he finally married..."
[Applying the template from "Predictable Slashdot Humor in Nutshell" (1st edition, O'Reilly, 2004), vol. 1, ch. 1, section 2, paragraph 1]
Ooooo, a geek experiencing several sexual encounters and/or getting married? Hell, yes, that is noteworthy.
Umm. Take another look at your average Linux kernel changelog. You'll find tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of entries like "Fix invalid dentry when race in mkdir between two clients" and "Do not return buffer if request has already timed out"... and, of course, the eternal favorite, "Fix compile error".
I'm pretty sure the kernel folks just love to hear that the kernel compiles again, and as such, it is a datum worth noting in the final release's changelog. Wow. But, you know, I don't care - I'm just a Linux user, I expect a released kernel to compile, for Christ's sake. Tell something in the changelog that doesn't bore me to death. Tell something that matters.
Yeah, the changelogs aren't useful for Average Users. But the thing is, they aren't very useful for Clueful Users either because they flood us with useless trivia that is too shallowly explained to get us interested anyway. Suppose some USB thingy was broken in last release, I want to know if it works again - to find out about that, I need to wade through notes about drivers I don't care about, try to guess which part of the link between the physical device and the murky depths of the computer and the depths of the kernel within was actually broken.
Suppose it was a problem with the keyboard - was it in the HID layer? The UHCI drivers? Kernel's idea of "keyboard"? The i2whateverthehellitwas thingies I still don't know what they do but I had to enable them anyway since it seemed like a good idea? I don't know. It's difficult to guess, and the changelog could describe changes to any of these systems. What I really wanted to hear was "USB HID woes with your shitty VIA Apollo mobo have been fixed, if things seem flaky enable the bandwidth option" - A detailed enough description not buried randomly in trivia, but in the nicely labelled USB section of the changelog.
The kernel changelogs have tons and tons and tons of little bits that have changed over time. Somewhere buried in middle are the interesting bits - and by interesting bits, I mean things in the changelog like "[PATCH] laptop mode".
Here's what I wish to hear in a changelog: Tell us what is new, tell us what's improved, tell us what isn't going to work today, tell us what didn't work yesterday but works today. But don't tell us things I don't need to hear.
yeah, I was thinking it started around late 1999-2000.
I remember that The Dot-Com Bust was something like this: Microsoft was declared a monopoly. Then companies started to go boom. Slashdot ran a story that notoriously said the "economy" was bad. Or something like that.
I think "enjoy DLLs" in this sense means something similar to "experience the DLL Hell first-hand".
My observation is that DLLs in Windows have extremely cryptic names and tend to have strange version issues between applications if you're not careful. Luckily, this problem is almost gone in recent Windowses.
A typical conversation with a Windows fans on this topic goes something like this:
"Linux has DLL version number in *filename*? Uh, bleah. What a stupid idea."
"Right. You go updating your MS Enterprise BS Visual Studio Runtime Control Library (msebsvsrtctl.dll), I'll install a new version of libSDL-1.2.so right along the libSDL-1.1.so, thank you very much."
Actually, no, this is different from Level of Detail and mipmaps.
I'm talking about actually blurring the far-away objects, applying more blur as you go farther from the camera.
This simulates the depth of field effect from photographs and vision in general. (depth of field is defined as the depth of "sharp" area when the lens is focused on specific distance.) Most computer games draw everything sharp, which looks slightly unnatural.
Depth blurring is doable in computer games, but is usually not done because it increases the complexity of rendering - for example, you have to decide what the player is actually "looking" at the time, you can't simply blur everything that's too far away.
You could be attacking a bad guy but their site is running off zombied machines in a hospital so you just shut down their network and killed a few people.
Some nitpicking - if someone manages to zombie a hospital machine, that means someone is already in danger of dying. Which is precisely why hospitals don't put their critical computer systems in a public network and tend to have pretty high security standards on those as well =)
Warcraft III wasn't impressive because I had gotten used to a completely free camera in Myth 2 and 3. =)
Truth to be told, since Half-Life, no game has really managed to impress me with 3D graphics stuff. It was the first game to have great 3D-accelerated stuff for me, and after that, everything has looked more or less "really impressive". If you crank up the details in just about any 3D game after that, everything looks really nice. Some games only stuck into my mind as being especially beautiful (Max Payne, Myth III, Morrowind...) but there are also games that are technically rather "ugly" but nevertheless more than tolerable (Operation Flashpoint in general looks pretty bad, especially texture-wise, but graphics are still used to express things. Wow, lipsync and all.)
The most recent game that amazed me graphically was Starfox Adventures. Great graphics overall, but it was the first game where I saw fur-like fur (at least in the closeups in cutscenes and menu, not in the actual game). Also, when going into combat, you get *depth of field effect*. Thingies in close combat are sharp, background gets blurry. Wonder why more games don't use simple tricks like this =)
those old DOS games without the speed limiters will trully fly on a 3gighz pentium...
On a 486 and higher, an unpatched DOS Ultima II crashes on startup with message "Division by zero" due to a speed calibration problem.
I haven't tried, but on a 3 gigahertz Pentium, it'll probably die with "Division by some less-zero-than-zero number that the mathematicians don't have a concept for" error.
well, compared to *click* *click* *go away and make a cup of tea while an entirely preconfigured package installs itself*
Are you kidding? It's usually more like *click* *click* *go away for a hour-long coffee break* *find out the installer was interrupted a minute after you left, at 5%, to ask a stupid question*
Yeah, but collision stuff isn't useful just for games. All sorts of animations could benefit from them. Thanks to game engine effort we now have things like Actions that make complex animations far easier.
Besides, it's strange to assume it was the game engine that kept innovation out. Are you suggesting all this stuff that has been added to Blender wouldn't have got added if people had had their game engine? You know, people actually use this program for other uses besides creating games - like, you know, 3D graphics modelling and rendering! Maybe they added the stuff because, you know, the source code was suddenly available?
I think Blender will keep growing better, with game engine or not.
"yIn" is "life", "tlhap" would be "take"; perhaps a bit too literal and subject to misinterpretation by humans. "Suq" would be "aquire, obtain, get". "yI-" is the imperative verb prefix (for "you-it" sentences). Klingon follows the object-subject sentence structure, so a very literal translation would be "Life - get it!"
Of course, it's possible to leave out the imperative prefix in a desperate situation where giving full commands is bad: "yIn Suq" (sounds suspiciously like "you suck" if you're in middle of a phaser fire exchange). Or, even leave out the verb entirely: "yIn". Federation ship captains might use the similar command form "Life!", uttered with same tones as "(On) visual!" or "Evasive maneuvers!"
(Disclaimer: Been a while since I did anything in the language. =)
Yeah, but are Tolkien's Elvish languages "marketed"?
You can go into any self-respecting Internet bookstore and order your copy of Marc Okrand's The Klingon Dictionary. Hell, I got mine from a regular bookstore, right out of the fantasy/sci-fi department. Paramount probably gets some pennies out of that book's sales.
But to get yourself properly aquaintated with the Tolkien's languages, you need to... ummm... as far as I know, there is no widely marketed books or references. If there were, it probably wouldn't sell very well. (Or maybe it would.)
Besides, Klingon was most likely designed to be simple enough to be learnable, yet expressive enough. Tolkien's languages, I've heard, are far too complex to just pick up and say something in. Tolkien cared about subtlety and history of the language, and he sure as hell made it just as difficult to work with as any dead language that is not completely researched. Okrand tried a to-the-point approach for a to-the-point alien race.
Yeah, I knew. I recently heard Commodore wasn't very kind to companies it got tech from... they apparently had some moves that even Microsoft thinks are too evil to do =) (One story was that they purposefully didn't pay their bills, which lead to companies going bankrupt and Commodore then bought them cheap.)
Of course, it's pretty lucky Microsoft isn't getting credit for the BASIC interpreter. I mean, those BASICs at the time that proudly displayed "(c) Microsoft" were really cool (think of Spectravideo or MSX). Commodore BASIC was crap in comparison.
Until the late 1990s, I was under the impression Microsoft was doing good BASIC interpreters until I heard Commodore BASIC was of their doing =)
Remember, that was about old BASIC dialects, not the embraced-and-extended-for-the-love-of-god-and-good -of-the-mankind Microsoft dialects.
Yeah, it's possible to do OO coding in Commodore 64 BASIC v2 if you do it right. *sigh*
Still, writing structured programs would be very cool if BASIC interpreters of those days would have supported things like return values, local variables and subroutine arguments... (You can GOSUB 2390 all you want, just don't expect the language to pass data around.)
BASIC coders should never leave home without a BASIC expander that had RENUM command. Type "RENUM", let it crunch for a few minutes, and tadah.
My favorite was the one I had - The Final Cartridge 3 for Commodore 64. It even had some weird spacing setting or something. Can't remember.
I could do some cool stuff with it. Joining two program files more or less safely was a piece of cake: RENUM 1000, DSAVE"PART1", DLOAD"PART2", RENUM 2000, DAPPEND"PART1", ORDER, RENUM, DSAVE"MERGEDPROGGY"
Actually, such features have been implemented in some games.
Super Smash Bros. Melee gives a "Stale Moves" penalty if you use only a few different attacks. (However, it can also give "Specialist" or "Dedicated Specialist" bonuses for people who use a few or only one special attack...)
Why Fourth Generation, when we can just leap to the Fifth Generation! That's the future! Oooooh! Can't wait to use all that speech recognition and AI and programming in Prolog! =)
P.S. Lets put Python into Mozilla/XUL (Javascript *is* a big drag)
Better yet, let's make the whole thing language-independent. At this "high level", it should be possible to shake away this "language" thing, and use whatever language has been implemented on the level below.
Personally, I'd rather see Java, Perl and Ruby down there, rather than just Python. I'd hate to think that yet another perfectly nice platform has been lost to the Indenter Infidels. =)
Wow! Hand-held minicomputers! Digital/Compaq/HP/whoever the hell has them nowadays makes hand-held versions of DEC PDPs? That's completely l33t! I want a hand-held VAX so I can screw SCO by running the proto-ancient BSD UNIX on that!
People so frequently forget that the computers we commonly use these days are technically "microcomputers"... =)
Well, um, it can take bitmap images in various formats (JPEGs, PNGs, the other usual stuff - not GIMP's xcf format, which nobody uses anyway). That's all that's needed to integration, really =)
Apparently Scribus 1.2 will allow people to launch GIMP to directly edit an image from Scribus, and some other support may be planned for later...
What I really appreciate more is the really freaking cool ability to import SVG vector files into Scribus-editable objects (unless I misinterpreted when I did this last time, which was coincidentally the first time for me =)
It'll be a cold day in hell when Bill Gates will sponsor OOo for schools!
I think that back in the day, when MSIE 4 had already been released, Gates Foundation gave money to some big Finnish library or whatever. In the news clip, almost all of the library computers had Netscape Navigator 4 on the screen. Well, they did run that on Windows though, but still... And it also made me wonder for how long NN stayed there... =)
Scribus is an excellent application. I could easily put it in the same category as Mozilla Firefox, XEmacs, GIMP, Blender, Audacity and Eclipse as an example of well-engineered open source application that is good enough to get any real work done.
Scribus is, however, a little bit of a quirk-express. The user interface is not yet completely free of small things that tend to be annoying. For one thing, it's slow (though nowhere near as slow as some pre-1.0 versions - and Freetype integration has greatly helped with this too, with faster and better-looking font rendering) and some details lag behind (the property dialog could use some really heavy improvements).
I think the UI situation is just similar to GIMP 1.0 - it took until 1.2 until the UI was really good and until 2.0 until it was superb. Yet, like GIMP 1.0, it's completely usable for what it's designed for!
So, in conclusion, I'll be hoping that we'll get into the "GIMP 1.2" level soon what comes to the UI. It is really good as it is right now, though.
"We develop source behind closed doors, and we're making profit!" "That sucks! Let's do development in public!" "Good idea! Hey, looks like your vaguely legal application is under fire. What are you going to do?" "Errrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmm.... P2P?" "Weren't you listening?"
Progress isn't always progress, you know... and P2P still isn't the magic solution to everything.
You can always go "underground" when developing a project distributedly. "Open source" doesn't necessarily have to mean "you can check out bleeding edge code from anonymous CVS" or something!
If you need hints, just ask the Nethack devteam how they manage a gigantic open source application - and as far as I can tell, they don't even use a revision control system. Or maybe they just need to take a few notes on how the proprietary software is developed.
I know, I know, it's completely counter-intuitive. First, we thought that developing open source code had to be open and "bazaar-like", yet it seems that for some projects, like these projects that have questionable legal status, it's better to have an old-fashioned development methodology combined with an open-source license.
Why not use the best of the existing methods for your work - confidentiality of development given by the tried and true "commercial" processes, and free unlimited distribution of the results given by open-source licenses?
And if you insist you can always stick that P2P thing to the distribution part of the development process. That is where it works best right now.
One idea might be to use distributed version control systems like Arch, with each developer's repository published through some semi-secret channel. Not sure how well that thing would work if there would be no "root" repository though...
Exactly! "Let's Kill the Zombies Before They Eat Our Brains" movies are almost impossible to screw up, even if you have a relatively large budget... I thought Resident Evil was decent enough example of the genre. Just don't ask how close it was to the game, though, never played them =)
The only bad thing is that for some reason I'm constantly reminded of the movie every time I open up the map in Metroid Prime...
Slashdot Mirror
But what would they buy to, you know, play GBA games, either official or homebrew? Emulation is often pretty bad compared to the real thing.
Know why I like Nintendo consoles? They're actually produced for playing games. I got a GBA to play games, a Palm m100 for PDA stuff, and a portable CD player for music.
Multiple widgets, each doing their job well, are better than a single widget that does none of the things well.
An omnipotent portable widget is an abomination. Every widget, no matter how multi-purpose they are, are good for one thing, or at most two. For example, my Nokia 9110 is great for sending SMS and doing dial-up terminal - but my Palm has far better PDA functionality. Palm sucks as a web browser though. Both widgets have extremely crappy games, and since I have a GBA already, I see no point in buying a latest and greatest Java phone to play games (unless N-Gage's price drops through the floor or something).
Besides, what kind of "geek" will dare to go out with less than three different portable widgets? =)
(And besides... GBA as a PDA? Not without a keyboard or a pressure-sensitive display. Not thrilled about trying to type Graffiti letters with the d-pad.)
You're right about flash cart stuff though - those should be more easily available without persecution.
As for GCN+GBA expensiveness - that's two consoles in one, and no GCN game should require GBA connectivity. (Final Fantasy fanboys can shut up already about their overrated series. I'm not listening. La la la la, can't hear you...)
[Applying the template from "Predictable Slashdot Humor in Nutshell" (1st edition, O'Reilly, 2004), vol. 1, ch. 1, section 2, paragraph 1]
Ooooo, a geek experiencing several sexual encounters and/or getting married? Hell, yes, that is noteworthy.
Umm. Take another look at your average Linux kernel changelog. You'll find tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of entries like "Fix invalid dentry when race in mkdir between two clients" and "Do not return buffer if request has already timed out"... and, of course, the eternal favorite, "Fix compile error".
I'm pretty sure the kernel folks just love to hear that the kernel compiles again, and as such, it is a datum worth noting in the final release's changelog. Wow. But, you know, I don't care - I'm just a Linux user, I expect a released kernel to compile, for Christ's sake. Tell something in the changelog that doesn't bore me to death. Tell something that matters.
Yeah, the changelogs aren't useful for Average Users. But the thing is, they aren't very useful for Clueful Users either because they flood us with useless trivia that is too shallowly explained to get us interested anyway. Suppose some USB thingy was broken in last release, I want to know if it works again - to find out about that, I need to wade through notes about drivers I don't care about, try to guess which part of the link between the physical device and the murky depths of the computer and the depths of the kernel within was actually broken.
Suppose it was a problem with the keyboard - was it in the HID layer? The UHCI drivers? Kernel's idea of "keyboard"? The i2whateverthehellitwas thingies I still don't know what they do but I had to enable them anyway since it seemed like a good idea? I don't know. It's difficult to guess, and the changelog could describe changes to any of these systems. What I really wanted to hear was "USB HID woes with your shitty VIA Apollo mobo have been fixed, if things seem flaky enable the bandwidth option" - A detailed enough description not buried randomly in trivia, but in the nicely labelled USB section of the changelog.
The kernel changelogs have tons and tons and tons of little bits that have changed over time. Somewhere buried in middle are the interesting bits - and by interesting bits, I mean things in the changelog like "[PATCH] laptop mode".
Here's what I wish to hear in a changelog: Tell us what is new, tell us what's improved, tell us what isn't going to work today, tell us what didn't work yesterday but works today. But don't tell us things I don't need to hear.
yeah, I was thinking it started around late 1999-2000.
I remember that The Dot-Com Bust was something like this: Microsoft was declared a monopoly. Then companies started to go boom. Slashdot ran a story that notoriously said the "economy" was bad. Or something like that.
I think "enjoy DLLs" in this sense means something similar to "experience the DLL Hell first-hand".
My observation is that DLLs in Windows have extremely cryptic names and tend to have strange version issues between applications if you're not careful. Luckily, this problem is almost gone in recent Windowses.
A typical conversation with a Windows fans on this topic goes something like this:
"Linux has DLL version number in *filename*? Uh, bleah. What a stupid idea."
"Right. You go updating your MS Enterprise BS Visual Studio Runtime Control Library (msebsvsrtctl.dll), I'll install a new version of libSDL-1.2.so right along the libSDL-1.1.so, thank you very much."
Actually, no, this is different from Level of Detail and mipmaps.
I'm talking about actually blurring the far-away objects, applying more blur as you go farther from the camera.
This simulates the depth of field effect from photographs and vision in general. (depth of field is defined as the depth of "sharp" area when the lens is focused on specific distance.) Most computer games draw everything sharp, which looks slightly unnatural.
Depth blurring is doable in computer games, but is usually not done because it increases the complexity of rendering - for example, you have to decide what the player is actually "looking" at the time, you can't simply blur everything that's too far away.
Some nitpicking - if someone manages to zombie a hospital machine, that means someone is already in danger of dying. Which is precisely why hospitals don't put their critical computer systems in a public network and tend to have pretty high security standards on those as well =)
Warcraft III wasn't impressive because I had gotten used to a completely free camera in Myth 2 and 3. =)
Truth to be told, since Half-Life, no game has really managed to impress me with 3D graphics stuff. It was the first game to have great 3D-accelerated stuff for me, and after that, everything has looked more or less "really impressive". If you crank up the details in just about any 3D game after that, everything looks really nice. Some games only stuck into my mind as being especially beautiful (Max Payne, Myth III, Morrowind...) but there are also games that are technically rather "ugly" but nevertheless more than tolerable (Operation Flashpoint in general looks pretty bad, especially texture-wise, but graphics are still used to express things. Wow, lipsync and all.)
The most recent game that amazed me graphically was Starfox Adventures. Great graphics overall, but it was the first game where I saw fur-like fur (at least in the closeups in cutscenes and menu, not in the actual game). Also, when going into combat, you get *depth of field effect*. Thingies in close combat are sharp, background gets blurry. Wonder why more games don't use simple tricks like this =)
On a 486 and higher, an unpatched DOS Ultima II crashes on startup with message "Division by zero" due to a speed calibration problem.
I haven't tried, but on a 3 gigahertz Pentium, it'll probably die with "Division by some less-zero-than-zero number that the mathematicians don't have a concept for" error.
Are you kidding? It's usually more like *click* *click* *go away for a hour-long coffee break* *find out the installer was interrupted a minute after you left, at 5%, to ask a stupid question*
Yeah, but collision stuff isn't useful just for games. All sorts of animations could benefit from them. Thanks to game engine effort we now have things like Actions that make complex animations far easier.
Besides, it's strange to assume it was the game engine that kept innovation out. Are you suggesting all this stuff that has been added to Blender wouldn't have got added if people had had their game engine? You know, people actually use this program for other uses besides creating games - like, you know, 3D graphics modelling and rendering! Maybe they added the stuff because, you know, the source code was suddenly available?
I think Blender will keep growing better, with game engine or not.
Actually, more like "yIn yISuq".
"yIn" is "life", "tlhap" would be "take"; perhaps a bit too literal and subject to misinterpretation by humans. "Suq" would be "aquire, obtain, get". "yI-" is the imperative verb prefix (for "you-it" sentences). Klingon follows the object-subject sentence structure, so a very literal translation would be "Life - get it!"
Of course, it's possible to leave out the imperative prefix in a desperate situation where giving full commands is bad: "yIn Suq" (sounds suspiciously like "you suck" if you're in middle of a phaser fire exchange). Or, even leave out the verb entirely: "yIn". Federation ship captains might use the similar command form "Life!", uttered with same tones as "(On) visual!" or "Evasive maneuvers!"
(Disclaimer: Been a while since I did anything in the language. =)
Yeah, but are Tolkien's Elvish languages "marketed"?
You can go into any self-respecting Internet bookstore and order your copy of Marc Okrand's The Klingon Dictionary. Hell, I got mine from a regular bookstore, right out of the fantasy/sci-fi department. Paramount probably gets some pennies out of that book's sales.
But to get yourself properly aquaintated with the Tolkien's languages, you need to... ummm... as far as I know, there is no widely marketed books or references. If there were, it probably wouldn't sell very well. (Or maybe it would.)
Besides, Klingon was most likely designed to be simple enough to be learnable, yet expressive enough. Tolkien's languages, I've heard, are far too complex to just pick up and say something in. Tolkien cared about subtlety and history of the language, and he sure as hell made it just as difficult to work with as any dead language that is not completely researched. Okrand tried a to-the-point approach for a to-the-point alien race.
Piri Reis' map,
Sorry to burst bubbles here, but it ain't no antarctica without ice. Piri Reis only drew the coast of South America a bit weirdly.
Here's a good commentary on the matter, with pictures and discussion.
Here's a writeup about it. There's also My writeup on Buache map, which is a simiar "Antarctica without ice" story.
Yeah, I knew. I recently heard Commodore wasn't very kind to companies it got tech from... they apparently had some moves that even Microsoft thinks are too evil to do =) (One story was that they purposefully didn't pay their bills, which lead to companies going bankrupt and Commodore then bought them cheap.)
Of course, it's pretty lucky Microsoft isn't getting credit for the BASIC interpreter. I mean, those BASICs at the time that proudly displayed "(c) Microsoft" were really cool (think of Spectravideo or MSX). Commodore BASIC was crap in comparison.
Until the late 1990s, I was under the impression Microsoft was doing good BASIC interpreters until I heard Commodore BASIC was of their doing =)
Remember, that was about old BASIC dialects, not the embraced-and-extended-for-the-love-of-god-and-good -of-the-mankind Microsoft dialects.
Yeah, it's possible to do OO coding in Commodore 64 BASIC v2 if you do it right. *sigh*
Still, writing structured programs would be very cool if BASIC interpreters of those days would have supported things like return values, local variables and subroutine arguments... (You can GOSUB 2390 all you want, just don't expect the language to pass data around.)
BASIC coders should never leave home without a BASIC expander that had RENUM command. Type "RENUM", let it crunch for a few minutes, and tadah.
My favorite was the one I had - The Final Cartridge 3 for Commodore 64. It even had some weird spacing setting or something. Can't remember.
I could do some cool stuff with it. Joining two program files more or less safely was a piece of cake: RENUM 1000, DSAVE"PART1", DLOAD"PART2", RENUM 2000, DAPPEND"PART1", ORDER, RENUM, DSAVE"MERGEDPROGGY"
Actually, such features have been implemented in some games.
Super Smash Bros. Melee gives a "Stale Moves" penalty if you use only a few different attacks. (However, it can also give "Specialist" or "Dedicated Specialist" bonuses for people who use a few or only one special attack...)
Why Fourth Generation, when we can just leap to the Fifth Generation! That's the future! Oooooh! Can't wait to use all that speech recognition and AI and programming in Prolog! =)
Better yet, let's make the whole thing language-independent. At this "high level", it should be possible to shake away this "language" thing, and use whatever language has been implemented on the level below.
Personally, I'd rather see Java, Perl and Ruby down there, rather than just Python. I'd hate to think that yet another perfectly nice platform has been lost to the Indenter Infidels. =)
Wow! Hand-held minicomputers! Digital/Compaq/HP/whoever the hell has them nowadays makes hand-held versions of DEC PDPs? That's completely l33t! I want a hand-held VAX so I can screw SCO by running the proto-ancient BSD UNIX on that!
People so frequently forget that the computers we commonly use these days are technically "microcomputers"... =)
Well, um, it can take bitmap images in various formats (JPEGs, PNGs, the other usual stuff - not GIMP's xcf format, which nobody uses anyway). That's all that's needed to integration, really =)
Apparently Scribus 1.2 will allow people to launch GIMP to directly edit an image from Scribus, and some other support may be planned for later...
What I really appreciate more is the really freaking cool ability to import SVG vector files into Scribus-editable objects (unless I misinterpreted when I did this last time, which was coincidentally the first time for me =)
I think that back in the day, when MSIE 4 had already been released, Gates Foundation gave money to some big Finnish library or whatever. In the news clip, almost all of the library computers had Netscape Navigator 4 on the screen. Well, they did run that on Windows though, but still... And it also made me wonder for how long NN stayed there... =)
(Note: I'm not complaining, just hoping aloud =)
Scribus is an excellent application. I could easily put it in the same category as Mozilla Firefox, XEmacs, GIMP, Blender, Audacity and Eclipse as an example of well-engineered open source application that is good enough to get any real work done.
Scribus is, however, a little bit of a quirk-express. The user interface is not yet completely free of small things that tend to be annoying. For one thing, it's slow (though nowhere near as slow as some pre-1.0 versions - and Freetype integration has greatly helped with this too, with faster and better-looking font rendering) and some details lag behind (the property dialog could use some really heavy improvements).
I think the UI situation is just similar to GIMP 1.0 - it took until 1.2 until the UI was really good and until 2.0 until it was superb. Yet, like GIMP 1.0, it's completely usable for what it's designed for!
So, in conclusion, I'll be hoping that we'll get into the "GIMP 1.2" level soon what comes to the UI. It is really good as it is right now, though.
"We develop source behind closed doors, and we're making profit!" "That sucks! Let's do development in public!" "Good idea! Hey, looks like your vaguely legal application is under fire. What are you going to do?" "Errrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmm.... P2P?" "Weren't you listening?"
Progress isn't always progress, you know... and P2P still isn't the magic solution to everything.
You can always go "underground" when developing a project distributedly. "Open source" doesn't necessarily have to mean "you can check out bleeding edge code from anonymous CVS" or something!
If you need hints, just ask the Nethack devteam how they manage a gigantic open source application - and as far as I can tell, they don't even use a revision control system. Or maybe they just need to take a few notes on how the proprietary software is developed.
I know, I know, it's completely counter-intuitive. First, we thought that developing open source code had to be open and "bazaar-like", yet it seems that for some projects, like these projects that have questionable legal status, it's better to have an old-fashioned development methodology combined with an open-source license.
Why not use the best of the existing methods for your work - confidentiality of development given by the tried and true "commercial" processes, and free unlimited distribution of the results given by open-source licenses?
And if you insist you can always stick that P2P thing to the distribution part of the development process. That is where it works best right now.
One idea might be to use distributed version control systems like Arch, with each developer's repository published through some semi-secret channel. Not sure how well that thing would work if there would be no "root" repository though...
Exactly! "Let's Kill the Zombies Before They Eat Our Brains" movies are almost impossible to screw up, even if you have a relatively large budget... I thought Resident Evil was decent enough example of the genre. Just don't ask how close it was to the game, though, never played them =)
The only bad thing is that for some reason I'm constantly reminded of the movie every time I open up the map in Metroid Prime...