I gotta say though, half of the fun was the music. Where did all the good video game music go anyway? Tetris, Super Mario Bros, Frogger, Zelda.
Yeah, these days, game music plays less important role, and that's sad. These days, they pay attention to graphics, graphics, graphics and maybe even gameplay if they have time to develop that.
By the way, the only great Tetris music can be found from the Commodore 64 version. No stupid rearrangements of Russian folk-songs, instead a loooong slow piece literally full of magic...
I can't remember the last time a game's theme music was stuck in my head all day.
I can. Last time I played MechWarrior 2. No wait, after that - Myth III. =)
I was once working on a web application. (Regrettably not visible to general population...)
I worked on one database feature and, of course, added something to delete the record from the database. The app (written in PHP) took two parameters, id=xxxx as the deletable record ID, and confirm=1 to actually delete (without that parameter, it presented a confirmation form).
Now, PHP uses the God's Chosen Way of presenting "true" values - almost any string is equivalent to "true".
So, my confirmation parameter was:
confirm=If a thousand suns were to rise together one morning, that light would be a little like the glory of the Lord, for I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.
I know, it's stupid, but you need certain amount of drama if you're going to delete something from the database permanently =)
Personally, I'm not that thrilled to buy a separate MP3 player. I already have a portable CD player/radio, so I have my travel music (and with a CD-R drive, I can load gigabytes of uncompressed audio to the device =)
However, I already have a GBA, and using it to play MP3s and stuff would be a decent enough idea! No need to reserve any more space from my belt to use this, and the price difference with the other MP3 players is just about right, too =)
A great time saver for lazy game programming teams.
Basically, it's a tool for helping people to find company for multi-user games. Back in the day, games didn't have in-game server lists and things like that (QuakeWorld and like are a good examples); The program lets you find servers to play on and launch the game to go directly to that server.
Less relevant now that game companies implement this internally, but some game companies still think "what the heck, let's just implement 'connect to that IP' and let GameSpy or other such tools to do the rest"...
The Suncom TAC-2 is, as proven by all scientific tests, completely indestructable. (I wish PC sticks would have this sort of durability. =) I don't even remember how many years I have had this thing and it's still kicking. Wow.
Does anyone else find it ironic that people are getting infected through a program called GameSPY?
And even more so that people are suggesting a program called "The All-Seeing Eye" as the replacement?
Of course, this isn't funny in itself. GameSpy is a double agent, and the all-seeing eye can't see everything because I keep my webcam unplugged when I run Windows. =/
What I don't understand is that the bright people in movie industry decided to release new E.T. games (for many platforms - I think separate games for GameBoy Color and GameBoy Advance!) along with the 20th anniversary release of the movie! Didn't they learn the first time that you can't make a good and decent and well-selling game about this movie? No. Way. I suppose that's the movie industry's sinister plan to drive Sony and Nintendo to bankruptcy...
(I'm constantly reminded of the experiment in Finnish: a robot did understand "general" Finnish, but blew its fuses when confronted with Savo dialect... "Päevee. Päevee?" *BOOM* (this movie reference is probably extremely obscure to foreigners and probably somewhat obscure to younger people in Finland, too =) )
I thought KaZaa just gave you viruses(virii??) and adware?
Yes, that is correct. While it's true that average KaZaA program uses 90% of your average T1 to distribute ads to recipient computer and to distribute banner ads to another computers, the remaining 10% can actually be used to transport a lot of other interesting (if dubiously legal) things.
Had I known you could get sheep...
As one wolf to another: They're still much easier to get from shop. Honest. A bit more expensive, but definitely better quality. I guess the problem is that not many sheep-sharing people use the dewool(1) compression system - maybe because Winzip doesn't support it yet? =(
My thoughts exactly. I have heard several opinions that state that Japanese is better suited for machine translations than most western languages.
And, also, some linguists think that English is definitely not the best language to start thinking of building universal language processors, for the specific reasons you listed. Grammar is not the most easiest to understand (I've been using the language for way over a decade and I still dont' get how some of the prepositions work...) and - ewww, take that ortography back where it came from, please, I'd rather not discuss it while I'm eating.
You build a tool to process a boring language and get a neat end result; you start building an "universal" tool, starting from English and end up creating a monster. This is not intended as a flame, but I'd say that English is not the best language for any job - but it gets used because often it does the job somehow while others may not even get started. Consistent with Internet philosophies, no wonder it's number 1 =)
...
For example, GNU Ispell was originally developed for English, and as a result, there was a little bit of problems when they tried to make it work with Finnish. Unlike English, Finnish is a synthetic language where most grammar forms are formed with suffixes. (The now-traditional haiku example of seven syllables, "juoksentelisinkohan", would mean "I wonder if I should run" - perfect word for describing the stressful life =)
The end result of early Ispell experiments was that the program did take a list of Finnish words, and list of Finnish suffixes, but *any* combination of these was recognized as a valid word, and some completely valid words made using these were rejected!
The experts then said that the best language to start building the spellchecker for might be some Inuit language, forgot which... They wandered to the back room muttering something about agglutination =)
Ditching VGA might sound like a noble goal. Until you try to put the card in the machine and boot. Linux needs at least text mode, and Windows seems to fall back to VGA if it can't find drivers for anything else... (at least that's what happened in 98, NTs probably handle this diffenently =)
At least implement the VGA text modes, or else you need to install the drivers blind... May be your thing, but not mine! =)
I personally only have my Nokia 9110, Palm m100, wallet, CD player with case that holds 40 CDs, GBA in separate case,...a SLR... and in bag a pocket camera, film rolls, sketch book, pencil case, calculator, a bad Leathermanoid, Mini Maglite, bunch of batteries...
I'm no match in front of your technological superiority! You're able to beat my PDA typing speed with that keyboard... *drool*
Yeah, sorry, I suppose a modem is still within the realm of possibility... but not a NIC.
(I have to ask my father how well the 64k-ISDN-through-USB works for him... I was pretty skeptical to hear of the USB CDRW he bought, but at least I've seen one USB CD-R drive that worked pretty nicely, even when 4x isn't exactly my idea of "fast" =)
Actually, I think most PCs already include this chip. The contents of the RAM get copied to it every time the programs crash. Should I tell the newbies where their unsaved Word docs went?
Yes, USB definitely has its uses, too... It's very good for devices that don't use high data rates (keyboards, joysticks, Zip drives, webcams, etc), and undoubtedly USB2 will be good for simple cases like simply connecting an external storage to computer.
(...people who use USB to connect a modem or a NIC are either insane, ignorantly brave or Soon Wishing They'd Just Got Plain Old Hardware. =)
Firewire is still very interesting for all of the complex cases you described... and, of course, if you really want all that the speed.
This is kinda OT, but since a bunch of the article used Rosegarden as an example, I'm curious: does anyone have comments on Rosegarden as opposed to GNU Lilypond?
Rosegarden is a music sequencer/notation thing. It works in X11. It can export to variety of typesetting formats.
Lilypond is, on the other hand, just a music typesetting system - but it can, if so desired, also produce MIDI files.
Rosegarden's weakness is that it lets you actually put notes on staves (click click!) and export to MIDI beautifully, but it doesn't really do adequeate job at typesetting.
Lilypond's weakness is that it doesn't have a GUI - it just reads text file and produces a DVI file through TeX (than can then be dvips'ed or dvipdf'ed). However, the textual format brings its advantages, such as that it's mostly human-readable =)
I'm not a professional musician, or even an amateur one (I don't have a Vast Knowledge of the music theory, and the only instrument I can play well is my throat - hey, wolves are supposed to know how to sing =) but I found that using Rosegarden to notate, then midi2ly'ing and editing the produced source, is a wonderful way of making beautiful expressions of melody - and it's immediately fit to be included in E2.
PS. GTK+ isn't so bad - especially with Glade. I use Glade with Perl, and it just rocks - The thing produces the GUI (bare GTK+ or with GNOME), all I need to provide are the signal handler functions... The reason GTK+ looks cryptic is that C wasn't really designed for OO and some macros are required =)
MULE is nice because it has "cyrillic-translit" input mode; I don't need a keyboard overlay, I just type the Latin approximation and out comes Cyrillic!
You realize that not everyone can - or are willing - to get a credit card?
In some countries, it is entirely possible to live without having a credit card! We have this low-level concept of "cash"; you know, pieces of hard-to-forge paper and circular metal thingies that can be exchanged for goods and services.
Many many many interesting sites out there offer excellent services, but I can't pay them because I don't have a credit card - and international money transfers (particularly those to outside EU) are *painful*. So, I'm mostly limited to domestic stores with cash-on-delivery.
I certainly hope, though, that the Warcraft II datafile compatibility is there. The Debian version only seemed to support the free data files that had many, many missing pieces.
I could have tolerated that, but I just thought it was a really big shame they couldn't get Bill Roper to do the human voices - the sounds weren't anywhere near the intent of WCII =)
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By the way, the only great Tetris music can be found from the Commodore 64 version. No stupid rearrangements of Russian folk-songs, instead a loooong slow piece literally full of magic...
I can. Last time I played MechWarrior 2. No wait, after that - Myth III. =)I worked on one database feature and, of course, added something to delete the record from the database. The app (written in PHP) took two parameters, id=xxxx as the deletable record ID, and confirm=1 to actually delete (without that parameter, it presented a confirmation form).
Now, PHP uses the God's Chosen Way of presenting "true" values - almost any string is equivalent to "true".
So, my confirmation parameter was:
confirm=If a thousand suns were to rise together one morning, that light would be a little like the glory of the Lord, for I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.
I know, it's stupid, but you need certain amount of drama if you're going to delete something from the database permanently =)
Less widgets = less stuff to carry.
Personally, I'm not that thrilled to buy a separate MP3 player. I already have a portable CD player/radio, so I have my travel music (and with a CD-R drive, I can load gigabytes of uncompressed audio to the device =)
However, I already have a GBA, and using it to play MP3s and stuff would be a decent enough idea! No need to reserve any more space from my belt to use this, and the price difference with the other MP3 players is just about right, too =)
Bah! Of course they did not land in the moon. How could they? The moon does not exist! The moon has to be some sort of absurd Liberal myth!...
=)
A great time saver for lazy game programming teams.
Basically, it's a tool for helping people to find company for multi-user games. Back in the day, games didn't have in-game server lists and things like that (QuakeWorld and like are a good examples); The program lets you find servers to play on and launch the game to go directly to that server.
Less relevant now that game companies implement this internally, but some game companies still think "what the heck, let's just implement 'connect to that IP' and let GameSpy or other such tools to do the rest"...
One of my relatives had an Odyssey - or, as it was known here, Philips Videopac.
It had a really wickedly good Pacman clone that my father fell in love with. awwww yeah, this was the stuff... =)
Yeah, C64 joysticks rock.
The Suncom TAC-2 is, as proven by all scientific tests, completely indestructable. (I wish PC sticks would have this sort of durability. =) I don't even remember how many years I have had this thing and it's still kicking. Wow.
And even more so that people are suggesting a program called "The All-Seeing Eye" as the replacement?
Of course, this isn't funny in itself. GameSpy is a double agent, and the all-seeing eye can't see everything because I keep my webcam unplugged when I run Windows. =/
And I don't need to pay extra to get the improved functionality...
What I don't understand is that the bright people in movie industry decided to release new E.T. games (for many platforms - I think separate games for GameBoy Color and GameBoy Advance!) along with the 20th anniversary release of the movie! Didn't they learn the first time that you can't make a good and decent and well-selling game about this movie? No. Way. I suppose that's the movie industry's sinister plan to drive Sony and Nintendo to bankruptcy...
Erm... if I remember correctly, the first photo had exposure time of about eight hours.
So, with the technology of the day, that sort of photos may have needed to wait for just a while... =)
Yes, written. =)
(I'm constantly reminded of the experiment in Finnish: a robot did understand "general" Finnish, but blew its fuses when confronted with Savo dialect... "Päevee. Päevee?" *BOOM* (this movie reference is probably extremely obscure to foreigners and probably somewhat obscure to younger people in Finland, too =) )
Yes, that is correct. While it's true that average KaZaA program uses 90% of your average T1 to distribute ads to recipient computer and to distribute banner ads to another computers, the remaining 10% can actually be used to transport a lot of other interesting (if dubiously legal) things.
As one wolf to another: They're still much easier to get from shop. Honest. A bit more expensive, but definitely better quality. I guess the problem is that not many sheep-sharing people use the dewool(1) compression system - maybe because Winzip doesn't support it yet? =(
My thoughts exactly. I have heard several opinions that state that Japanese is better suited for machine translations than most western languages.
And, also, some linguists think that English is definitely not the best language to start thinking of building universal language processors, for the specific reasons you listed. Grammar is not the most easiest to understand (I've been using the language for way over a decade and I still dont' get how some of the prepositions work...) and - ewww, take that ortography back where it came from, please, I'd rather not discuss it while I'm eating.
You build a tool to process a boring language and get a neat end result; you start building an "universal" tool, starting from English and end up creating a monster. This is not intended as a flame, but I'd say that English is not the best language for any job - but it gets used because often it does the job somehow while others may not even get started. Consistent with Internet philosophies, no wonder it's number 1 =)
...
For example, GNU Ispell was originally developed for English, and as a result, there was a little bit of problems when they tried to make it work with Finnish. Unlike English, Finnish is a synthetic language where most grammar forms are formed with suffixes. (The now-traditional haiku example of seven syllables, "juoksentelisinkohan", would mean "I wonder if I should run" - perfect word for describing the stressful life =)
The end result of early Ispell experiments was that the program did take a list of Finnish words, and list of Finnish suffixes, but *any* combination of these was recognized as a valid word, and some completely valid words made using these were rejected!
The experts then said that the best language to start building the spellchecker for might be some Inuit language, forgot which... They wandered to the back room muttering something about agglutination =)
Ditching VGA might sound like a noble goal. Until you try to put the card in the machine and boot. Linux needs at least text mode, and Windows seems to fall back to VGA if it can't find drivers for anything else... (at least that's what happened in 98, NTs probably handle this diffenently =)
At least implement the VGA text modes, or else you need to install the drivers blind... May be your thing, but not mine! =)
"Please don't hurt me, Techno-Marick!"
I personally only have my Nokia 9110, Palm m100, wallet, CD player with case that holds 40 CDs, GBA in separate case, ...a SLR... and in bag a pocket camera, film rolls, sketch book, pencil case, calculator, a bad Leathermanoid, Mini Maglite, bunch of batteries...
I'm no match in front of your technological superiority! You're able to beat my PDA typing speed with that keyboard... *drool*
There's always a weakness...
Yeah, sorry, I suppose a modem is still within the realm of possibility... but not a NIC.
(I have to ask my father how well the 64k-ISDN-through-USB works for him... I was pretty skeptical to hear of the USB CDRW he bought, but at least I've seen one USB CD-R drive that worked pretty nicely, even when 4x isn't exactly my idea of "fast" =)
No, the interpreter needs to read the code...
Actually, I think most PCs already include this chip. The contents of the RAM get copied to it every time the programs crash. Should I tell the newbies where their unsaved Word docs went?
Yes, USB definitely has its uses, too... It's very good for devices that don't use high data rates (keyboards, joysticks, Zip drives, webcams, etc), and undoubtedly USB2 will be good for simple cases like simply connecting an external storage to computer.
(...people who use USB to connect a modem or a NIC are either insane, ignorantly brave or Soon Wishing They'd Just Got Plain Old Hardware. =)
Firewire is still very interesting for all of the complex cases you described... and, of course, if you really want all that the speed.
Denemo looks promising and it produces Lilypond directly. Very nice; another project with High Hopes From. =)
Rosegarden is a music sequencer/notation thing. It works in X11. It can export to variety of typesetting formats.
Lilypond is, on the other hand, just a music typesetting system - but it can, if so desired, also produce MIDI files.
Rosegarden's weakness is that it lets you actually put notes on staves (click click!) and export to MIDI beautifully, but it doesn't really do adequeate job at typesetting.
Lilypond's weakness is that it doesn't have a GUI - it just reads text file and produces a DVI file through TeX (than can then be dvips'ed or dvipdf'ed). However, the textual format brings its advantages, such as that it's mostly human-readable =)
I'm not a professional musician, or even an amateur one (I don't have a Vast Knowledge of the music theory, and the only instrument I can play well is my throat - hey, wolves are supposed to know how to sing =) but I found that using Rosegarden to notate, then midi2ly'ing and editing the produced source, is a wonderful way of making beautiful expressions of melody - and it's immediately fit to be included in E2.
PS. GTK+ isn't so bad - especially with Glade. I use Glade with Perl, and it just rocks - The thing produces the GUI (bare GTK+ or with GNOME), all I need to provide are the signal handler functions... The reason GTK+ looks cryptic is that C wasn't really designed for OO and some macros are required =)
XEmacs and MULE-UCS + GNU Recode, oh my =)
MULE is nice because it has "cyrillic-translit" input mode; I don't need a keyboard overlay, I just type the Latin approximation and out comes Cyrillic!
, ? (Sorry, my Russian is hopelessly rusted =)
*sigh*
You realize that not everyone can - or are willing - to get a credit card?
In some countries, it is entirely possible to live without having a credit card! We have this low-level concept of "cash"; you know, pieces of hard-to-forge paper and circular metal thingies that can be exchanged for goods and services.
Many many many interesting sites out there offer excellent services, but I can't pay them because I don't have a credit card - and international money transfers (particularly those to outside EU) are *painful*. So, I'm mostly limited to domestic stores with cash-on-delivery.
At least in last version of FreeCraft FCMP data I tried, the music was in .mod format =)
I could have tolerated that, but I just thought it was a really big shame they couldn't get Bill Roper to do the human voices - the sounds weren't anywhere near the intent of WCII =)