proper adj. Abbr. prop. 1. Characterized by appropriateness or suitability; fitting. 2. Called for by rules or conventions; correct. 3. Strictly following rules or conventions, especially in social behavior; seemly.
I think meaning two works very well for what I was trying to say. However, I would agree that the term "correct" would more commonly be used in this context.
Oh, come on, pointing out grammar and spelling errors is like shooting fish in a barrel... and it's a barrel packed with sardines. And you have a cannon.
It's obvious people like Hemos don't care about speaking proper English, or they are so hyped up on caffeine or kernel code or whatever and make an outrageous number of typos. Anyhow, pointing out the problems just seems to waste bandwidth. I suggest we all just sit back relax and float downstream and enjoy the stories and discussion.
System Shock is comparable to System Shock 2 minus about 8 years of graphics advances. Both games have a very interesting story, great music and sound effects and create an atmosphere of creepiness that adds a lot to the fun. Also, the level designs actually made sense... more so in SS2. You were in a place where people lived and worked, not just a maze.
Both games had a good inventory interface (in fact SS's interface was pretty innovative at the time... a little difficult to use at times, but still very good IMO). SS2 lost the cyberspace stuff, but really that was just a glorified shoot-em-up video game and not too much fun.
Both games, but especially SS2 added role-playing elements that made the game much more involving. Especially when, in SS2, you had lots of options for developing different skills.
The games offer lots of exciting action, but also please the rougelike fanatic in me too.
> STORY! A story so engrossing that, until Half Life, no PC-based FPS could even begin to challenge.
Obviously you never played System Shock. The developers of System Shock (Irrational, IIRC) proved that unlike those guys at ego (er, id), they could do something other than push polygons and make crude homosexual innuendo.
I've never seen Marathon, but once the initial (well-deserved) amazement at the graphics technology of Doom wore off, you come to the realization that's it's a pretty dull game. That's why taking the idea and adding a real story to it was necessary for me to to actually consider purchasing a FPS game.
To me, Doom was interesting enough to finish the 10-level freebee, but not to buy. System Shock was worth buying and finishing.
Exactly. Does anyone remember how Quake was first described? It was nothing like the warned-over Doom with better graphics and still more dull, brown labyrinths it ended up as.
17 years is a limited time. This is how long copyrights lasted at one point, IIRC.
Now it's 90 years after the death of the author. That's still a limited time.
When Disney buys Congress in 2038 or whenever to keep its cartoons from going into public domain, the new limit of 1 billion years will still be a limited time. That's a problem with the Constitution (actually, it's not, it's modern law-makers). If it's not spelled out explicitly (and sometimes even when it is), law-makers feel they can deconstruct the language to make it say anything they mean.
My only experience is on a laptop which usually doesn't have any peripherals stuck to it, so once I see the desktop, I'm good to go. In any event, even if what you say is true for a more loaded machine, it's still better than sitting there watching it "Applying Security Changes..." or whatever it says for 2 minutes with Win2k, while the OS steps out back for a smoke.
XP may only be NT 5.1, but for what I use it (and Win2k) for, it does the job.
The first thing I did with XP was turn off that ugly, stupid, round, bouncy, primary-color assault they call "Aqua", wait... whatever they call it. Like almost every visual UI change uSoft has done in the past 10 years, it only chews up more screen real estate with wasted pixels.
Once that was changed, I had a reasonably lean, nice-looking UI with the benefits of the enhancements to the task bar (very nice!) and the start panel (kinda cool, but pointless IMO, also that can be turned off too). And on a laptop, ClearType is worth the upgrade price alone.
Now, configuring is another matter. For instance, I still can't always get volumes to share on my home network the way I want them to on the first try, but then again Joe Worduser isn't going to be doing those kinds of things.
OTOH, XP boots radically faster than Win2k on my IBM i-series laptop (Celeron 433, 192 MB RAM) and shuts down faster too.
Now going from 9x to NT/2K/XP, that takes some re-training:-)
Mostly in unlearning that you have to reboot your computer every hour.
You're going about this all wrong, AC. You're applying logic to the question. Stop it. Hasn't legal precedent WRT intellectual property taught you that logic is not required or even desired when rendering decisions?
DVD's will be defined as whatever will end up making the MPAA/RIAA/Bill Gates/the Illuminati/the Stonecutters/Ted Turner the most money.
It's definitely one of my favorites, although I really have to wonder if that movie was meant to be a bit of a joke. Those whole scene with the little girl almost getting mustard on Aram Fingal's brain is probably the first clue. I dunno, I guess Raul Julia lost a bet or something.
Well, then I'm looking forward to Gandalf with a goofy-looking crepe beard, the computer effects to look all pixelly and chroma-key'ey (a la Electro-woman and Dyna-girl), orc makeup being cheap latex Halloween masks and spray-painted football helmets and a cameo by the Daleks.
Did anyone ever see "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" produced, IIRC by public TV station WGBH and starring Raul Julia? Hot 'n' fancy computer graphics by a hacked Intellivision from what I can tell.
Well, what I was trying say was that I have found very few Windows 9x programs that don't run under XP RC2. (I don't have the shipping version yet.)
I would bet that Myst and Riven work fine. DOS games are lot more iffy, although I can vouch that the old IBM classic "Alley Cat" from 1984 runs under XP.:)
I have found the occasional lack of backwards compatibility of NT is far outweighed by having a real OS that is pretty stable, and all Microsoft-bashing aside, doesn't suck.
If you are at all a technically oriented user, then go with XP. If all you do is surf, e-mail and play a few games, then 98 is passable.
Don't panic, Col Panic. This coincidence... and it is just that (look at the symbols... most of them are heavily charged with meaning, especially the religious ones, a coincidence like that is bound to occur)... has been known in public for years.
I think this first made the e-mail/newsgroups rounds about 1994.
Nevertheless, I can it would be little unsettling to discover it now given recent events.
Since installing XP on my laptop, I almost never have to boot into Windows 98 for games any more, which is after all, the _only_ sane reason to use Windows 98 (err, Windows 4.1)
As far as the new look-and-feel: a couple of quick clicks and your desktop no longer looks like the Candyland game.
One would think. However, software companies traditionally require license agreements that absolve them of all blame no matter how egregious the problem or negligent the company was in not preventing it.
While it is generally agreed that these kinds of things wouldn't hold up in court, I get the impression that many of the recent legislative products excreted by a Congress who is bought and paid for by the software and entertainment conglomerates are leading to a world where software companies are immune to any legal action based on the fitness or lack thereof of their products for any purpose.
And from the looks of SSSCA, it seems they want to make Open Source software alternatives illegal.
This is a reply to the Titanic comment which is a sibling to this comment's parent, but/. is having a formkeys problem today, and I thought my post was worth putting in.
Wasn't it later determined that the Titanic sank because they forgot to adequately shield a heat exhaust vent, which led to a chain reaction that sunk the boat?
The way I see it, as long as you have some Jeff Goldblum-type with an Apple laptop, no computer system is safe.
The problem with this is that the RIAA types want to use encryption to enforce a scheme that users generally think of as unfair, especially since it gives them fewer rights than they have enjoyed in the past. The sooner they stop shoring up the crumbling edifice of trying to extend monopoly on physical distribution to a monopoly on digital distribution, the sooner they can find a way to do business which won't piss off the majority of their customers. I don't have any problems buying and paying for music in order to listen to it, but I expect certain rights with what I purchase, and I also expect that increases in technology should result in lower prices. Music CD's are not significantly cheaper than when I first saw them for sale in the mid-80's. This is total gravy for the music industry and I'm getting really tired of paying it, especially since I buy a lot of music.
You can get blank CD's 2-3 for a dollar, tell me again why a music CD costs $17? If $14 of that went to the artists, I wouldn't even mind that, but from what I understand only about a buck or two goes to the geniuses that actually create the product, the rest is skimmed off by middlemen whose jobs mostly involves perpetuating their jobs.
Re:This makes a twisted sort of sense
on
Bert Is Evil
·
· Score: 1
Not only that, but his "girlfriend" Daisy has the same last name as he does!
If you're going to gripe about spelling in Slashdot, it's like peeing in the ocean.
And if you're going to suggest someone should get a -5 Stupid for saying something wrong that is actually correct (Sting did sing in that song), what does that say about you?
If every post that had spelling mistakes or grammatical errors was modded down, very few posts would ever get seen. The best way to comment on spelling and grammar (and facts!) is to try to set a good example and not make mistakes yourself...
...otherwise your going to loose you're mind in this place.:)
Yes, you're absolutely right. It's an obvious ploy, but one that might be effective because bin Laden seems to lack Saddam Hussein's ignorance of how to use the media to get a message across.
Given that Afghanistan is nobody's friend anymore, and I suspect not just because they are afraid of the U.S. (they had precious few friends before 11 September), bin Laden's got to do something to help sway the rank and file Moslems (i.e., the non-terrorists) to his cause.
The secret masonic mind-control satellites are now controlled by the Boy Sprouts, which in turn are controlled by the Fred Birch Society which in turn are controlled by the Fnord Motor Company.
Don't forget your aluminum foil hat.
On a more serious note, suicidal fanaticism is not new in the world. No doubt technology has increased the potential damage such a person could do, but what happened on 11 September could have happened last year, or 1980 or even 1950 (with a different target, natch), but it didn't.
I guess the question I don't have an answer to is why now? The attack on September 11 was ostensibly in retaliation for U.S. support for Israel. Well, the U.S. has supported Israel since its inception.
No doubt the attack was planned for years, but why now? Is it because of George Dubya? It is because they finally _could_ pull it off, and would have done it years ago if they could?
There have been wackos in the Middle East spouting against the U.S. for years. Saddam promised us the "Mother of All Wars" and delivered a turkey shoot where his forces were surrendering to camera crews. Kaddafy got spanked by Reagan and we don't hear too much about him anymore.
Is there something fundamentally different or better (i.e., more effective) about bin Laden and his bunch or will they fade into obscurity once they get the good ol' Yankee smackdown. I mean how many people really want to throw their lives away just to make an irrational point, that they know won't change anything for them, just make a lot of other people miserable.
Yes, Microsoft has been bragging for years about they are making software easier and easier to use, but have failed completely to make certain tasks, like file extension association, among many others, not require a power user to understand, or an eidetic memory to remember where they hid the dialog box for all these features.
For filename extensions, Microsoft's brilliant idea was to automatically hide the file extensions in Windows 95 and above by default, meaning you have to rely on the stupid icons to know what your file type is, and things like the SirCam virus can come along and fool people into thinking they are viewing a JPG when they are in fact launching an executable that will bombard me with 200 copies of their "Jun 2000 Sales Report" or something.
Furthermore, until recently, you couldn't search or sort the filename extensions access through "Folder Options" by extension name. You had to know what they are called, or vgrep through a huge list of every file extension ever considered since DOS 1.0 (the list looks practically like.AAA,.AAB,.AAC, etc.) looking for your extension.
A simple example: I want to reassociate ".BMP" back to the SpiffoPaint program after the BogoPaint trial version stole it away. Prior to Windows 2000, you _had to know_ what file type name the extension is regsitered as (and many weren't obvious). Again that could be any old dumb thing the software developers (like Bogosoft above) decided to call it like "BogoPaint Document" or whatever. If you didn't know that, then good luck finding it by hand, Chester.
In the NT 4.0 days, I personally had to resort to using 4NT's file association feature (I think the NT Resource Kit had something too) because otherwise it was just too much trouble.
And as far as editing the regsitry goes, remember that Microsoft's first plan was to not allow users to edit the registry at all?
Given that I remember in the late 80's that I had to rewrite the installation batch files for most software I installed, the idea horrified me. Now in 2001, not being able to edit the regsitry still horrifies me.
"Where do you want to go today, and how lost are you going to be before getting there?"
Slashdot Mirror
From the American Heritage dictionary:
proper adj. Abbr. prop. 1. Characterized by appropriateness or suitability; fitting. 2. Called for by rules or conventions; correct. 3. Strictly following rules or conventions, especially in social behavior; seemly.
I think meaning two works very well for what I was trying to say. However, I would agree that the term "correct" would more commonly be used in this context.
Oh, come on, pointing out grammar and spelling errors is like shooting fish in a barrel... and it's a barrel packed with sardines. And you have a cannon.
It's obvious people like Hemos don't care about speaking proper English, or they are so hyped up on caffeine or kernel code or whatever and make an outrageous number of typos. Anyhow, pointing out the problems just seems to waste bandwidth. I suggest we all just sit back relax and float downstream and enjoy the stories and discussion.
It's not worth "loosing" your cool.
The scientists found a descrepancy with the Standard Model because they are in league with the Devil. Burn them! Burn them!
Er, what were you saying?
System Shock is comparable to System Shock 2 minus about 8 years of graphics advances. Both games have a very interesting story, great music and sound effects and create an atmosphere of creepiness that adds a lot to the fun. Also, the level designs actually made sense... more so in SS2. You were in a place where people lived and worked, not just a maze.
Both games had a good inventory interface (in fact SS's interface was pretty innovative at the time... a little difficult to use at times, but still very good IMO). SS2 lost the cyberspace stuff, but really that was just a glorified shoot-em-up video game and not too much fun.
Both games, but especially SS2 added role-playing elements that made the game much more involving. Especially when, in SS2, you had lots of options for developing different skills.
The games offer lots of exciting action, but also please the rougelike fanatic in me too.
> STORY! A story so engrossing that, until Half Life, no PC-based FPS could even begin to challenge.
Obviously you never played System Shock. The developers of System Shock (Irrational, IIRC) proved that unlike those guys at ego (er, id), they could do something other than push polygons and make crude homosexual innuendo.
I've never seen Marathon, but once the initial (well-deserved) amazement at the graphics technology of Doom wore off, you come to the realization that's it's a pretty dull game. That's why taking the idea and adding a real story to it was necessary for me to to actually consider purchasing a FPS game.
To me, Doom was interesting enough to finish the 10-level freebee, but not to buy. System Shock was worth buying and finishing.
Exactly. Does anyone remember how Quake was first described? It was nothing like the warned-over Doom with better graphics and still more dull, brown labyrinths it ended up as.
17 years is a limited time. This is how long copyrights lasted at one point, IIRC.
Now it's 90 years after the death of the author. That's still a limited time.
When Disney buys Congress in 2038 or whenever to keep its cartoons from going into public domain, the new limit of 1 billion years will still be a limited time. That's a problem with the Constitution (actually, it's not, it's modern law-makers). If it's not spelled out explicitly (and sometimes even when it is), law-makers feel they can deconstruct the language to make it say anything they mean.
>Quo bono?
He was the whiny-voiced guy in the mohair vest that sang with that tall gangly chick before she had a minimum 35% post-consumer recycled body.
Became a congressman and newest poster child for the Agony of Defeat(TM).
My only experience is on a laptop which usually doesn't have any peripherals stuck to it, so once I see the desktop, I'm good to go. In any event, even if what you say is true for a more loaded machine, it's still better than sitting there watching it "Applying Security Changes..." or whatever it says for 2 minutes with Win2k, while the OS steps out back for a smoke.
XP may only be NT 5.1, but for what I use it (and Win2k) for, it does the job.
The first thing I did with XP was turn off that ugly, stupid, round, bouncy, primary-color assault they call "Aqua", wait... whatever they call it. Like almost every visual UI change uSoft has done in the past 10 years, it only chews up more screen real estate with wasted pixels.
:-)
Once that was changed, I had a reasonably lean, nice-looking UI with the benefits of the enhancements to the task bar (very nice!) and the start panel (kinda cool, but pointless IMO, also that can be turned off too). And on a laptop, ClearType is worth the upgrade price alone.
Now, configuring is another matter. For instance, I still can't always get volumes to share on my home network the way I want them to on the first try, but then again Joe Worduser isn't going to be doing those kinds of things.
OTOH, XP boots radically faster than Win2k on my IBM i-series laptop (Celeron 433, 192 MB RAM) and shuts down faster too.
Now going from 9x to NT/2K/XP, that takes some re-training
Mostly in unlearning that you have to reboot your computer every hour.
You're going about this all wrong, AC. You're applying logic to the question. Stop it. Hasn't legal precedent WRT intellectual property taught you that logic is not required or even desired when rendering decisions?
DVD's will be defined as whatever will end up making the MPAA/RIAA/Bill Gates/the Illuminati/the Stonecutters/Ted Turner the most money.
It's definitely one of my favorites, although I really have to wonder if that movie was meant to be a bit of a joke. Those whole scene with the little girl almost getting mustard on Aram Fingal's brain is probably the first clue. I dunno, I guess Raul Julia lost a bet or something.
"Panel World: For all your panelling needs"
OK, here's the geek take:
Cesium: melts in your hands, not in your mouth
Rick
Were you saying "Boo" or "Boo-urns"?
WETA, the Washington DC public TV station?
Well, then I'm looking forward to Gandalf with a goofy-looking crepe beard, the computer effects to look all pixelly and chroma-key'ey (a la Electro-woman and Dyna-girl), orc makeup being cheap latex Halloween masks and spray-painted football helmets and a cameo by the Daleks.
Did anyone ever see "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" produced, IIRC by public TV station WGBH and starring Raul Julia? Hot 'n' fancy computer graphics by a hacked Intellivision from what I can tell.
Well, what I was trying say was that I have found very few Windows 9x programs that don't run under XP RC2. (I don't have the shipping version yet.)
:)
I would bet that Myst and Riven work fine. DOS games are lot more iffy, although I can vouch that the old IBM classic "Alley Cat" from 1984 runs under XP.
I have found the occasional lack of backwards compatibility of NT is far outweighed by having a real OS that is pretty stable, and all Microsoft-bashing aside, doesn't suck.
If you are at all a technically oriented user, then go with XP. If all you do is surf, e-mail and play a few games, then 98 is passable.
Don't panic, Col Panic. This coincidence... and it is just that (look at the symbols... most of them are heavily charged with meaning, especially the religious ones, a coincidence like that is bound to occur)... has been known in public for years.
I think this first made the e-mail/newsgroups rounds about 1994.
Nevertheless, I can it would be little unsettling to discover it now given recent events.
They eliminate "potentially offensive" words like "idiot" in case somebody tries to use Word2000 write a review of a Microsoft product.
Since installing XP on my laptop, I almost never have to boot into Windows 98 for games any more, which is after all, the _only_ sane reason to use Windows 98 (err, Windows 4.1)
As far as the new look-and-feel: a couple of quick clicks and your desktop no longer looks like the Candyland game.
One would think. However, software companies traditionally require license agreements that absolve them of all blame no matter how egregious the problem or negligent the company was in not preventing it.
While it is generally agreed that these kinds of things wouldn't hold up in court, I get the impression that many of the recent legislative products excreted by a Congress who is bought and paid for by the software and entertainment conglomerates are leading to a world where software companies are immune to any legal action based on the fitness or lack thereof of their products for any purpose.
And from the looks of SSSCA, it seems they want to make Open Source software alternatives illegal.
Welcome to the 21st century.
This is a reply to the Titanic comment which is a sibling to this comment's parent, but /. is having a formkeys problem today, and I thought my post was worth putting in.
Wasn't it later determined that the Titanic sank because they forgot to adequately shield a heat exhaust vent, which led to a chain reaction that sunk the boat?
The way I see it, as long as you have some Jeff Goldblum-type with an Apple laptop, no computer system is safe.
The problem with this is that the RIAA types want to use encryption to enforce a scheme that users generally think of as unfair, especially since it gives them fewer rights than they have enjoyed in the past. The sooner they stop shoring up the crumbling edifice of trying to extend monopoly on physical distribution to a monopoly on digital distribution, the sooner they can find a way to do business which won't piss off the majority of their customers. I don't have any problems buying and paying for music in order to listen to it, but I expect certain rights with what I purchase, and I also expect that increases in technology should result in lower prices. Music CD's are not significantly cheaper than when I first saw them for sale in the mid-80's. This is total gravy for the music industry and I'm getting really tired of paying it, especially since I buy a lot of music.
You can get blank CD's 2-3 for a dollar, tell me again why a music CD costs $17? If $14 of that went to the artists, I wouldn't even mind that, but from what I understand only about a buck or two goes to the geniuses that actually create the product, the rest is skimmed off by middlemen whose jobs mostly involves perpetuating their jobs.
Not only that, but his "girlfriend" Daisy has the same last name as he does!
And what about those "nephews"?
If you're going to gripe about spelling in Slashdot, it's like peeing in the ocean.
:)
And if you're going to suggest someone should get a -5 Stupid for saying something wrong that is actually correct (Sting did sing in that song), what does that say about you?
If every post that had spelling mistakes or grammatical errors was modded down, very few posts would ever get seen. The best way to comment on spelling and grammar (and facts!) is to try to set a good example and not make mistakes yourself...
...otherwise your going to loose you're mind in this place.
Yes, you're absolutely right. It's an obvious ploy, but one that might be effective because bin Laden seems to lack Saddam Hussein's ignorance of how to use the media to get a message across.
Given that Afghanistan is nobody's friend anymore, and I suspect not just because they are afraid of the U.S. (they had precious few friends before 11 September), bin Laden's got to do something to help sway the rank and file Moslems (i.e., the non-terrorists) to his cause.
The secret masonic mind-control satellites are now controlled by the Boy Sprouts, which in turn are controlled by the Fred Birch Society which in turn are controlled by the Fnord Motor Company.
Don't forget your aluminum foil hat.
On a more serious note, suicidal fanaticism is not new in the world. No doubt technology has increased the potential damage such a person could do, but what happened on 11 September could have happened last year, or 1980 or even 1950 (with a different target, natch), but it didn't.
I guess the question I don't have an answer to is why now? The attack on September 11 was ostensibly in retaliation for U.S. support for Israel. Well, the U.S. has supported Israel since its inception.
No doubt the attack was planned for years, but why now? Is it because of George Dubya? It is because they finally _could_ pull it off, and would have done it years ago if they could?
There have been wackos in the Middle East spouting against the U.S. for years. Saddam promised us the "Mother of All Wars" and delivered a turkey shoot where his forces were surrendering to camera crews. Kaddafy got spanked by Reagan and we don't hear too much about him anymore.
Is there something fundamentally different or better (i.e., more effective) about bin Laden and his bunch or will they fade into obscurity once they get the good ol' Yankee smackdown. I mean how many people really want to throw their lives away just to make an irrational point, that they know won't change anything for them, just make a lot of other people miserable.
I guess we will find out.
Yes, Microsoft has been bragging for years about they are making software easier and easier to use, but have failed completely to make certain tasks, like file extension association, among many others, not require a power user to understand, or an eidetic memory to remember where they hid the dialog box for all these features.
.AAA, .AAB, .AAC, etc.) looking for your extension.
For filename extensions, Microsoft's brilliant idea was to automatically hide the file extensions in Windows 95 and above by default, meaning you have to rely on the stupid icons to know what your file type is, and things like the SirCam virus can come along and fool people into thinking they are viewing a JPG when they are in fact launching an executable that will bombard me with 200 copies of their "Jun 2000 Sales Report" or something.
Furthermore, until recently, you couldn't search or sort the filename extensions access through "Folder Options" by extension name. You had to know what they are called, or vgrep through a huge list of every file extension ever considered since DOS 1.0 (the list looks practically like
A simple example: I want to reassociate ".BMP" back to the SpiffoPaint program after the BogoPaint trial version stole it away. Prior to Windows 2000, you _had to know_ what file type name the extension is regsitered as (and many weren't obvious). Again that could be any old dumb thing the software developers (like Bogosoft above) decided to call it like "BogoPaint Document" or whatever. If you didn't know that, then good luck finding it by hand, Chester.
In the NT 4.0 days, I personally had to resort to using 4NT's file association feature (I think the NT Resource Kit had something too) because otherwise it was just too much trouble.
And as far as editing the regsitry goes, remember that Microsoft's first plan was to not allow users to edit the registry at all?
Given that I remember in the late 80's that I had to rewrite the installation batch files for most software I installed, the idea horrified me. Now in 2001, not being able to edit the regsitry still horrifies me.
"Where do you want to go today, and how lost are you going to be before getting there?"