When people are building their first websites, they may go way overboard with the presentation, often not even very good at that. I have looked at such sites, and told the people that they've wasted time on making bells and whistles (and annoying ones at that) but not done any real content. Original content is the substance people want from the web.
...and then I give snopes.com as an example of Bad Web Design which is excusable because they actually have lots and lots and lots of interesting content on the site! It's a wonderful site content-wise, but the presentation could use some work...
Yeah, Ultima 7 is wonderful. I used to just merely like the game until I actually started playing it seriously, at which point I realized it really, absolutely, totally rules. Not only has the Ultima series generally had extremely original plots, but U7 is particularly nice in this respect.
Since I've played next to no JRPGs (Some bits of FF7, a hugish chunk of Breath of Fire), I've yet to see a JRPG that has the option of Baking Bread. Bet it's there somewhere, but it sure is in U7 =)
And while JRPGs generally have Quite Epic Weapons, none will, or ever has, the equivalent of the Hoe of Destruction. =)
Shame the U7BG game font is nearly unreadable. Glad we have Exult now - the first thing I'll do when I get back from vacation is a shapes patch that gives it an actually readable screen text =)
Okay, BuyMusic.com doesn't work with Galeon so I can't check if they have actually working payment options for filthy foreigners like me (credit cards and international bank transfers are right out!) and Apple's offering isn't much better ("We would, but international music licensing rights yadda yadda yadda"), but I'd like to share something.
First there was Sonera Plaza MP3 Store. Yeah, they sell MP3s. I think it was 160kb/s, one even had a samplerate of 48kHz. The problem was, they have like 3 artists with them, two locally widely known ones (Apulanta and Tehosekotin), none of which I liked. I downloaded the two songs which I liked. Payment was the cool part - I could pay with an SMS message and it was billed in the cellphone bill.
Sonera Plaza doesn't seem to have that service anymore. Or, at least I couldn't find it from their site with a cursory glance. Maybe it's buried somewhere. I don't know. It wasn't particularly easy to find back in the day and they sure aren't making it any easier to find.
But one thing is sure: If I only find the right CD-R from my shelf, I can still play the MP3 files all right. And I did burn them on audio CD too =)
Next, a far bigger service sprang up, done by the local record companies. It was called Emma.fm. They had a VERY wide selection of Finnish music. Likewise, good payment options (SMS was among them, too, and also credit accounts for more hardcore users...).
And all of that crap was in WMA format!
Okay, so I paid for the single song I was interested in getting at that time, and got this mysterious wma file that I couldn't play on Linux and not particularly easily in Windows either. I didn't seem to be able to download the "license key". (IIRC the purchase entitled me to get 5 license keys... which would sound like a generous offer if only ogg/mp3 wouldn't need any keys to operate, ever.)
So I went to AudioGalaxy and downloaded the MP3 from a fellow user. (Hey, I paid for it. They got the money. I got the song. Just not what they planned, but... well, everyone was happy.)
Nowadays, Emma.fm is closed down due to "lack of interest"! Wonder what I should do with this unlicensed.wma file now... at least they could refund the unused credits and licenses, but what about the future licenses???
The lesson learned: The need for license keys in case either side (the user's system or the digital music provider) is the thing that kills all interest in any WMA providers. I won't use any of this rubbish ever.
Let's just get Apple's store here, allow me to use it on Linux (or at least Windows) and let me pay with SMS. Then we'll take a look at where I concentrate my legit music purchases...
You may use it to design aircraft and test it before going ahead and actually building it. For you it's a tool.
For me, an eyeglass-wearing geek with no chance to ever fly a plane for real, it's a way to get entertainment. Slip Mike Oldfield's "Five Miles Out" to the CD player, jump on a plane (sometimes a Cessna, sometimes something outrageous), and fly around. Hell, I don't even know how to land, never bothered to learn. For me, it's a game.
It may not be a game, but sure as hell it can be used as one.
If pr0n is copyrighted, how come they don't put copy protection on the tapes/DVDs?:P
Because "copy protection" is stupid? Because having a copy protection isn't a legal requirement for work being copyrighted, and licensing copy protection costs money?
Copy protection has usually been only a big headache. I have seen games work very badly due to SecuRom, so badly that the game developers just had to remove it in a patch. I bought a CD that worked fine in my ~2000 crappy portable CD player but skips and jumps in my ~1990 CD/radio/tape deck, due to Cactus Dada Shield.
And I have witnessed people getting confused when they plug a DVD player to an old, Macrovisionless TV and finding out that only a few of the DVDs have good picture, all others are unwatchable due to "copy protection".
I'm a GNOME fan and won't touch anything written with Qt/KDE... but Scribus is an exception to the rule, simply because it's so damn good I simply ignore the toolkit.
Scribus is definitely one of my favorite programs to work with. Though, I'm not sure if it's perfect yet (I did a project with 0.6 or 0.8 or something like that and PDF exports had quirks and text zoom was Freaking Blocky[tm])... hope 1.0 has fixed these small annoyances. It's always nice to see a program improving before my eyes!
Along with KaZaALite (and Napster and AudioGalaxy, which don't count as p2p though), one of the few p2p apps that I've actually got to work and they work beautifully, without dog-slow downloads, and the searches actually work. And since it needs CVS checkout and compilation, the network is almost guaranteed to have Geeky Stuff in it.
New stuff also supports simultaneous connection to Gnutella, out of box.
Re:I was hoping they'd bring back the hardware.
on
Tulip to Relaunch C64
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· Score: 1
Yeap, PPOT rules, and remix.kwed.org is one of the few places I get music from =)
Still, SID chip has such an unique sound that I have to love.
(If only I still had an ISA bus to use my HardSid card...)
I guess it was precisely for the reasons you listed why the format didn't catch on. The only upside was the general convenience of having a CD instead of tape, same benefits as usual...
Also there might have been the reason that tape games were "copy protected" by using quieter voice that didn't copy well (that caused several load errors unless the tape drive read head was precisely aligned, but later twin tape systems nevertheless did copy the tape effortlessly...) and putting stuff on CD might have made mass piracy a little bit easier... =)
I never saw any more of this stuff than this single CD that came with the adapter.
Re:I was hoping they'd bring back the hardware.
on
Tulip to Relaunch C64
·
· Score: 1
Exactly. SID rules, and it should definitely get back in the production!
My view of the perfect world: Creative Labs mass-producing SID chips and putting one on every new sound card of theirs =)
Re:What's in store for a moderm C64?
on
Tulip to Relaunch C64
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· Score: 3, Informative
Games on tape are replaced with a CD rom... AUDIO CD roms:)
*Yawn*... that was already done for Commodore 64 around late '80s, if I remember correctly. There was an adapter that plugged in the tape drive connector, and the cable was plugged in CD player audio out.
And everyone was amazed on how much stuff you could fit on the CD, even when this particular method wasted space tremendously compared to plain old data CDs. =)
Cut the XP rewards to about one-fifth where they are in 3rd Ed. It's supposed to be D&D, not NWN.
Ehm. Just a note - NWN by default already gives only 10% of XP the D&D rules say it should give - the explanation is that the games tend to have 10x the amount of encounters of average PnP game, too.
(Module creators can change the XP scale. I've seen a few otherwise competently made modules where the creator had thought "Hmm. wonder why this thing is set to only 10%?" and heaved it to 100%. The end result, my friend, would have made The Original Monty-Haulers gasp. =)
Besides, as a DM in pen-and-paper games I have had to adjust the XP rewards slightly to both directions anyways depending on the situation, anyway (not yet DMed a 3e game far enough so I don't know how much it needs adjusting though), so XP differences go without saying. =)
"...to enter the adult industry"? Look, the old law of technology: After any given technology is out of initial testing, someone is going to use it for pornography. So it's not a wonder they've already done that.
Hmm, merging Machinima and Porn... well, the only example that springs into mind (and that I have seen) is "Metal Pr0n Solid 2: Sons of Libido", but I bet this practice is actually far more widespread than that single example. =)
While we're at it, everyone should check out The Holimion Trailer, for a NWN module. This stuff was certainly epic, something that isn't often seen in rest of the NWN but that is possible. Yippee - flying dragons, real war, stuff from the front lines, special effects that bring the NWN engine to knees... and the Koreans weird idea of English =) And most of the bits and pieces in this are available as custom content for the game, too.
(If you try to find that one from P2P... SHA1: 536844f26e6779961585858d7cdf472c23139429, MD5: 11072fef23deb5dfc27025bba0a518fc.)
Re:Impaired
on
X11 in ASCII
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· Score: 2, Informative
Um, first a confession that I didn't RTFA, so if this is different, then I'm Wrong. =)
But if this is what I guessed this was - something like AAlib that directly maps groups of pixels to "nearest" ASCII symbol and ANSI color that (very vaguely indeed) matches closest the cover and color - then this is nearly useless for people with braille terminals. Heck, it's almost useless for people with working eyesight...
Actually it just might work if the blind person in question would be a supergenius that can easily say that "jhejkrhwkjfhskf" is supposed to be a part of a shaded picture, and an end result of photo digitization, JPEG compression artifacts, inefficient image scaling algorithms used in the app, and rough conversion to ASCII. But on the other hand, it doesn't take a genius to say the picture is messy. =)
There's also the problem that the screen changes and that is difficult to describe in speech. So, again it may be the case that the blind persion may figure out that "ehrjhwk#%jfdsk##", after being spewed through braille or speech synthesis, means the Mouse, truly, doth move, but again it's quite unlikely.
Well, I used to think motherboard audio was acceptable until I finally put my old soundcard into my new computer. Suddently everything started to sound better. =) Tried mb audio with new speakers and it sounded horrible. And there's always differences between soundcards too - my ancient SB16PnP was hissy, Vortex2 had almost no bg noise, and SBLive is not quite as noiseless but pretty good anyway.
Usually, it seems that the motherboard soundcards are very very good when used with the crap speakers that come with computers - bad sound all over is tolerable. Put in a good sound card and you need to get better speakers - or the other way around.
Sure, I won't get Frozen Throne. I'll be waiting for Myth IV: The Take2 Heresy or something instead.
Je-sus. The bnetd case was at least marginally justifiable, but this case just proves that Blizzard has gone full 180 from what they once stood for.
I look back at the days when they encouraged all sorts of Warcraft II modding, and see that now they're going after these projects too, a sure sign that they're not truly getting the idea anymore. Sad. Really really sad. I have absolutely no sympathies toward Blizzard left.
Amazing, considering that the NWN Linux Client is on Beta 6 and not yet official...
But they promised it would be "official" within, um, a week from last week? I suppose this is their way of getting two flies with one swat, er, a press release: SoU is out, and simultaneously Linux Client is officially out of Beta. And they can pay less for their press release writers. =)
- WWWWolf, greatly angered(tm) by the fact that here, the release date isn't 18th, it's goddamn 27th...
FWIW, the word is that the 1.30 Linux version will be shipped on the SoU CD afterall, with an installer too =) And the Mac tech demo was just released too.
Anyway, I recommend checking out the Vault's top lists. I personally recommend the In the Company of Thieves series, so far so fun. Also lots of other good mods... Elegia Eternum, The Vethboro Dragon (probably far more fun with multiple players and a competent DM), Lone Wolf series. I'm currently playing The Cave of Songs which seems pretty good. And I tend to always advertise Lizard Raids on the Shining Plains for some reason, I just loved it no matter how buggy it was. Great story. =)
Oh, come on, read the site. The release date "April 1, 2000" and the text of the "Free Object-Oriented License" should have been good enough of clues. =)
Hard to improve on this really, perhaps using LZIP to shrink the size of the payload.
Whatever you gain by compressing something that small,...
You made an adequate and well thought of point.
However, LZIP, the compressor the original poster mentioned, is an advanced compression scheme that, on its maximum possible compression level, uses a mathematical method known as uninvertability of collapsed matrix (or something) that makes all decompression systems unnecessary.
Using less advanced compression methods (UPX, for example) would indeed generate larger executables...
Slashdot Mirror
When people are building their first websites, they may go way overboard with the presentation, often not even very good at that. I have looked at such sites, and told the people that they've wasted time on making bells and whistles (and annoying ones at that) but not done any real content. Original content is the substance people want from the web.
...and then I give snopes.com as an example of Bad Web Design which is excusable because they actually have lots and lots and lots of interesting content on the site! It's a wonderful site content-wise, but the presentation could use some work...
Yeah, Ultima 7 is wonderful. I used to just merely like the game until I actually started playing it seriously, at which point I realized it really, absolutely, totally rules. Not only has the Ultima series generally had extremely original plots, but U7 is particularly nice in this respect.
Since I've played next to no JRPGs (Some bits of FF7, a hugish chunk of Breath of Fire), I've yet to see a JRPG that has the option of Baking Bread. Bet it's there somewhere, but it sure is in U7 =)
And while JRPGs generally have Quite Epic Weapons, none will, or ever has, the equivalent of the Hoe of Destruction. =)
Shame the U7BG game font is nearly unreadable. Glad we have Exult now - the first thing I'll do when I get back from vacation is a shapes patch that gives it an actually readable screen text =)
Okay, BuyMusic.com doesn't work with Galeon so I can't check if they have actually working payment options for filthy foreigners like me (credit cards and international bank transfers are right out!) and Apple's offering isn't much better ("We would, but international music licensing rights yadda yadda yadda"), but I'd like to share something.
First there was Sonera Plaza MP3 Store. Yeah, they sell MP3s. I think it was 160kb/s, one even had a samplerate of 48kHz. The problem was, they have like 3 artists with them, two locally widely known ones (Apulanta and Tehosekotin), none of which I liked. I downloaded the two songs which I liked. Payment was the cool part - I could pay with an SMS message and it was billed in the cellphone bill.
Sonera Plaza doesn't seem to have that service anymore. Or, at least I couldn't find it from their site with a cursory glance. Maybe it's buried somewhere. I don't know. It wasn't particularly easy to find back in the day and they sure aren't making it any easier to find.
But one thing is sure: If I only find the right CD-R from my shelf, I can still play the MP3 files all right. And I did burn them on audio CD too =)
Next, a far bigger service sprang up, done by the local record companies. It was called Emma.fm. They had a VERY wide selection of Finnish music. Likewise, good payment options (SMS was among them, too, and also credit accounts for more hardcore users...).
And all of that crap was in WMA format!
Okay, so I paid for the single song I was interested in getting at that time, and got this mysterious wma file that I couldn't play on Linux and not particularly easily in Windows either. I didn't seem to be able to download the "license key". (IIRC the purchase entitled me to get 5 license keys... which would sound like a generous offer if only ogg/mp3 wouldn't need any keys to operate, ever.)
So I went to AudioGalaxy and downloaded the MP3 from a fellow user. (Hey, I paid for it. They got the money. I got the song. Just not what they planned, but... well, everyone was happy.)
Nowadays, Emma.fm is closed down due to "lack of interest"! Wonder what I should do with this unlicensed .wma file now... at least they could refund the unused credits and licenses, but what about the future licenses???
The lesson learned: The need for license keys in case either side (the user's system or the digital music provider) is the thing that kills all interest in any WMA providers. I won't use any of this rubbish ever.
Let's just get Apple's store here, allow me to use it on Linux (or at least Windows) and let me pay with SMS. Then we'll take a look at where I concentrate my legit music purchases...
Depends on what you use it for.
You may use it to design aircraft and test it before going ahead and actually building it. For you it's a tool.
For me, an eyeglass-wearing geek with no chance to ever fly a plane for real, it's a way to get entertainment. Slip Mike Oldfield's "Five Miles Out" to the CD player, jump on a plane (sometimes a Cessna, sometimes something outrageous), and fly around. Hell, I don't even know how to land, never bothered to learn. For me, it's a game.
It may not be a game, but sure as hell it can be used as one.
Because "copy protection" is stupid? Because having a copy protection isn't a legal requirement for work being copyrighted, and licensing copy protection costs money?
Copy protection has usually been only a big headache. I have seen games work very badly due to SecuRom, so badly that the game developers just had to remove it in a patch. I bought a CD that worked fine in my ~2000 crappy portable CD player but skips and jumps in my ~1990 CD/radio/tape deck, due to Cactus Dada Shield.
And I have witnessed people getting confused when they plug a DVD player to an old, Macrovisionless TV and finding out that only a few of the DVDs have good picture, all others are unwatchable due to "copy protection".
Scribus is definitely one of my favorite programs to work with. Though, I'm not sure if it's perfect yet (I did a project with 0.6 or 0.8 or something like that and PDF exports had quirks and text zoom was Freaking Blocky[tm])... hope 1.0 has fixed these small annoyances. It's always nice to see a program improving before my eyes!
A program to melt the raving lunatic's heart!
No need to be stuck with inches. Scribus also does millimeters, picas, and points.
Nobody would claim Scribus would be good enough to compete with Quark unless it woudld do mm and pt. Duh. It's like that CMYK thing.
Next question, please?
giFT.
Along with KaZaALite (and Napster and AudioGalaxy, which don't count as p2p though), one of the few p2p apps that I've actually got to work and they work beautifully, without dog-slow downloads, and the searches actually work. And since it needs CVS checkout and compilation, the network is almost guaranteed to have Geeky Stuff in it.
New stuff also supports simultaneous connection to Gnutella, out of box.
Still, SID chip has such an unique sound that I have to love.
(If only I still had an ISA bus to use my HardSid card...)
Yep, the show was called "Silikoni". Computer-related stuff and programs for C64 and Spectrum.
Hmm, the only mention of the program according to Google is here...
I guess it was precisely for the reasons you listed why the format didn't catch on. The only upside was the general convenience of having a CD instead of tape, same benefits as usual...
Also there might have been the reason that tape games were "copy protected" by using quieter voice that didn't copy well (that caused several load errors unless the tape drive read head was precisely aligned, but later twin tape systems nevertheless did copy the tape effortlessly...) and putting stuff on CD might have made mass piracy a little bit easier... =)
I never saw any more of this stuff than this single CD that came with the adapter.
Exactly. SID rules, and it should definitely get back in the production!
My view of the perfect world: Creative Labs mass-producing SID chips and putting one on every new sound card of theirs =)
*Yawn*... that was already done for Commodore 64 around late '80s, if I remember correctly. There was an adapter that plugged in the tape drive connector, and the cable was plugged in CD player audio out.
And everyone was amazed on how much stuff you could fit on the CD, even when this particular method wasted space tremendously compared to plain old data CDs. =)
Ehm. Just a note - NWN by default already gives only 10% of XP the D&D rules say it should give - the explanation is that the games tend to have 10x the amount of encounters of average PnP game, too.
(Module creators can change the XP scale. I've seen a few otherwise competently made modules where the creator had thought "Hmm. wonder why this thing is set to only 10%?" and heaved it to 100%. The end result, my friend, would have made The Original Monty-Haulers gasp. =)
Besides, as a DM in pen-and-paper games I have had to adjust the XP rewards slightly to both directions anyways depending on the situation, anyway (not yet DMed a 3e game far enough so I don't know how much it needs adjusting though), so XP differences go without saying. =)
Here, go get one. =)
"...to enter the adult industry"? Look, the old law of technology: After any given technology is out of initial testing, someone is going to use it for pornography. So it's not a wonder they've already done that.
Hmm, merging Machinima and Porn... well, the only example that springs into mind (and that I have seen) is "Metal Pr0n Solid 2: Sons of Libido", but I bet this practice is actually far more widespread than that single example. =)
While we're at it, everyone should check out The Holimion Trailer, for a NWN module. This stuff was certainly epic, something that isn't often seen in rest of the NWN but that is possible. Yippee - flying dragons, real war, stuff from the front lines, special effects that bring the NWN engine to knees... and the Koreans weird idea of English =) And most of the bits and pieces in this are available as custom content for the game, too.
(If you try to find that one from P2P... SHA1: 536844f26e6779961585858d7cdf472c23139429, MD5: 11072fef23deb5dfc27025bba0a518fc.)
But if this is what I guessed this was - something like AAlib that directly maps groups of pixels to "nearest" ASCII symbol and ANSI color that (very vaguely indeed) matches closest the cover and color - then this is nearly useless for people with braille terminals. Heck, it's almost useless for people with working eyesight...
Actually it just might work if the blind person in question would be a supergenius that can easily say that "jhejkrhwkjfhskf" is supposed to be a part of a shaded picture, and an end result of photo digitization, JPEG compression artifacts, inefficient image scaling algorithms used in the app, and rough conversion to ASCII. But on the other hand, it doesn't take a genius to say the picture is messy. =)
There's also the problem that the screen changes and that is difficult to describe in speech. So, again it may be the case that the blind persion may figure out that "ehrjhwk#%jfdsk##", after being spewed through braille or speech synthesis, means the Mouse, truly, doth move, but again it's quite unlikely.
Usually, it seems that the motherboard soundcards are very very good when used with the crap speakers that come with computers - bad sound all over is tolerable. Put in a good sound card and you need to get better speakers - or the other way around.
Je-sus. The bnetd case was at least marginally justifiable, but this case just proves that Blizzard has gone full 180 from what they once stood for.
I look back at the days when they encouraged all sorts of Warcraft II modding, and see that now they're going after these projects too, a sure sign that they're not truly getting the idea anymore. Sad. Really really sad. I have absolutely no sympathies toward Blizzard left.
But they promised it would be "official" within, um, a week from last week? I suppose this is their way of getting two flies with one swat, er, a press release: SoU is out, and simultaneously Linux Client is officially out of Beta. And they can pay less for their press release writers. =)
- WWWWolf, greatly angered(tm) by the fact that here, the release date isn't 18th, it's goddamn 27th...
FWIW, the word is that the 1.30 Linux version will be shipped on the SoU CD afterall, with an installer too =) And the Mac tech demo was just released too.
Anyway, I recommend checking out the Vault's top lists. I personally recommend the In the Company of Thieves series, so far so fun. Also lots of other good mods... Elegia Eternum, The Vethboro Dragon (probably far more fun with multiple players and a competent DM), Lone Wolf series. I'm currently playing The Cave of Songs which seems pretty good. And I tend to always advertise Lizard Raids on the Shining Plains for some reason, I just loved it no matter how buggy it was. Great story. =)
Oh, come on, read the site. The release date "April 1, 2000" and the text of the "Free Object-Oriented License" should have been good enough of clues. =)
You made an adequate and well thought of point.
However, LZIP, the compressor the original poster mentioned, is an advanced compression scheme that, on its maximum possible compression level, uses a mathematical method known as uninvertability of collapsed matrix (or something) that makes all decompression systems unnecessary.
Using less advanced compression methods (UPX, for example) would indeed generate larger executables...