Unless the assumption is that any significant portion of the OS X user base actually uses the shell, I doubt there will be many that even notice.
I still view OS X as a definite non-unix. It's right up there with say, windows+cygwin. A non-unix kernel with some unix userland stuff sprinkled on top.
And to address the "But it's the best integrated Unix desktop ever!" argument, tell me why the tar that ships with it breaks all the filesystem meta information (which many mac apps still rely on, in my experience). I've heard similar problems with the rest of the user space utils (i.e., cp)
I didn't find the second one to be officially horrible, but then I didn't find the first to be brilliant, either.
I'm not sure that I agree with the industry's angle (as mentioned here) that too much communication between potential ticket-buyers is causing the problem.
This just seems like a run-of-the-mill marketing stunt to me. What the fuck would any viewer care if the movie is being released in one, five or eighty countries?
This sounds more like marketing scum sitting around saying things like "Hey! Let's try to leverage that one-world-unification thing that worked so well back when we were writing ID4!"
Of course, these are the same braindead 'tards that figured there was nothing better than throwing a three-for-one trailer in front of Episode I for Titan A.E., Fight Club, and Anna and the King. At the time, I said AatK was forgettable because nobody there would ever bother watching it (I still don't know for certain: I never saw it. Fucking period piece remake that it was.) Titan A.E. would be the most geek-friendly and get the most draw from that crowd (I understand that it didn 't. Didn't bother with that one either.) and Fight Club just looked awful from that trailer. Another braindead marketing move showing it off as yet another Brad Pitt vehicle (with all of the banality of something as artistic and intellectual as say, "The Fast and the Furious"). The only one of the three that I saw, and I've become a fan of Chuck Palahniuk's books since.
The movie industry has as much to blame for supporting films that nobody would care about, much less knowing how to spread the word about the (potentially) worthwhile ones. They've got no incentive to change, because thus far, they've been able to make enough money off the crapshow of the week.
Capitalism is supposed to be about supply and demand. It doesn't work if we consistently fall for the artificial stimulation of demand that is marketing.
You sound bitter and jealous; you don't use a Mac, you don't own an iPod, you don't use OS X, you don't use iTunes, you don't buy music from the music store...
Does it bother you that Apple customers are generally happy with what they buy and purchase? Does that strike you as wrong?
I don't use these things because I've found they really don't work out so well for what I need. You, being a satisfied Apple customer, is no skin off my back...in fact, the only irritant related to that is how many "satisfied apple customers" will always tell me how [insert problem here] can be solved by [insert apple product name here], even when it can't.
I just find it a bit silly that so many people get their collective panties in a bunch defending the honor of some company. Is this about justifying your own purchases, or do you just feel like they can do no wrong?
There's a setting somewhere in the slashdot prefs: Collapse Sections (or something like that). Everything looks like it hits the front page. So no, I didn't realize I was treading on hallowed "section only" ground.
Troll, idiot, misunderstood idealist....whatever. You're the one vigourously defending a product you didn't envision, design, build, create....you bought it. Consumerism, yeah!
I'm not flamebaiting, contrary to the effect your claim had on the moderators.
Here's the basic problem: The original Walkman might have had the added bonus of truly being the first product of it's kind, but that in itself does not matter. In a couple of years the average person will think that the iPod was the first.
If I'm reading that right, it sounds like you're saying that it doesn't matter who came first or who did what when, just how the marketers went and revised history in their favor.
Which gets back to what I've been trying to assert: The iPod's success isn't about being innovative, it's about marketing better.
I was an early adopter on the Diamond Rio. The stock 32MB was enough to hold a full cd (provided that you aren't a 'tard and oversampling), and I managed to get by with even lesser quality considering I was just putting it through the cassette deck in my car. The only thing that stopped me from using it was when somebody smashed my window and ran off with it.
As for pre-iPod mp3 players with larger capacity, I can't help but think of the Creative Nomad, which was at several GB (I think 6 or 10 in the early days. I never bought one) in capacity, and roughly the same form-factor as a portable cd player (i.e., the discman, which was the last "innovative" leap in portable music, created by Sony (not phillips) that's most often attributed to creating a market for portable music (the walkman) to begin with).
I'm not sure where Archos fits in, but my recollection is that they also beat Apple to the market with a reasonably sized, high-capacity mp3 player.
Doesn't really change the fact that Apple had neither the first small mp3 player, the first portable hard disk mp3 player, nor the first small AND hard disk mp3 player. They've just been marketing better.
A selection of some achievements, like (in no particular order): iPod, G5, iBook, mainstream acceptance of wireless technologies (something that still keeps x86 users in a computer equivalent of middle ages), mainstream acceptance of an Unix-based desktop system just proves you're wrong.
iPod. Wow. What a technological leap. There's how many other mp3 players out there, including quite a few that were out before the iPod ever hit the market, at a lower price? To be fair, they did innovate on that one. It costs more. It has firewire.
G5. Not really an Apple innovation. Also known as IBM's PPC 970 chip.
iBook. It's a laptop. Big deal.
Mainstream acceptance of wireless technologies. They threw in a 802.11 card (although it's been my experience that they just threw in an antenna and a proprietary slow in anything that isn't a laptop). They also pioneered appletalk, and we all know how prevalent that is these days.
Mainstream acceptance of a Unix-based desktop system. Oh, which to pick on, whether the estimated market share really means "mainstream" or whether OS X is really unix... I don't know their numbers right now (my brain's telling me ~5%), so I'll go with the latter. OS X is not unix (even if they did get the right to call it so from the Open Group). It's the Mach kernel. Not unix. It's the FreeBSD userland. Well, ok, that is unix. It's a bunch of proprietary crap piled on top with a retarded feature list and stupid marketing names. Ok, that's probably pretty unix-like too (from the balkanization of unix vendors). Doesn't change the fact that mainstream acceptance means that nobody really plays with the unix-like parts, they just list it off as a feature that they don't really understand.
But no, I don't see how you've proven me wrong. Jobs came back and saved the company by issueing the "Everything must be clad in the most god-awful plastic" directive. Which got enough people to shut up and buy, thus keeping the company afloat. Marketing is steering the ship over there, which is why we get stuff like "itunes: sort of like any other mp3 player, but from apple, thus better! shut up and buy!"
My biggest beef with apple is that they've lost the vision. It isn't about technology. It's about selling candy coated crap and getting everyone to believe it's the best thing ever. They need more people like Wozniak, and fewer like Jobs.
I'm not a Mac user. I don't really care much for OS X. I used to like Apple (and defended them for years when the big argument was Apple vs. IBM), but I'm convinced that Steve Jobs had done good to keep Apple alive, but done poorly with everything else. And for what it's worth, it's crap like "They changed their logo!" (though, to a larger degree, the dissemination of propaganda ("They built a cluster in Virginia! It's so much better than everything else!" or "Some school in Japan is switching from linux to mac! Here comes the tidal wave of switchers(tm)!") that makes me think that the Apple community is still the greatest obstacle that Apple would have to overcome if they wanted to push anything in significant numbers or regain any sort of techie credibility.
I'll avoid picking on your difficulties with grammar and spelling because there are many times where my fingers get ahead of my brain, but having read some of your other comments, I feel compelled to point out: It can be distracting.
First, the "slippery slope" is still an informal fallacy. There's no guarantee that one step will lead to another, will lead to another, ad infinitum. But even with that in mind, there's still something to be said for volunteering every bit of information to the powers that be. The weak argument is that deluging the government in information will mean that there will be too much noise to filter out versus usable signal. The stronger argument is that we've got a bad record on the subject, think about the Salem witchhunt, McCarthyism, etc.
And I don't agree that this is all about protecting the status quo, but that if there's an expectation of privacy (which isn't that unreasonable if you believe in the privacy policies provided by the companies we deal with), you'd hope they'd actually mean it.
The other big difficulty is where accountability fits in: Should we turn in everyone that's ever made a statement that the government isn't perfect? Someone that thinks taxes are too high? That things could be done better? Yes, it's easier when the question is about somebody that's making overt threats, but we're operating on a system that's based on precedent, thus making the slippery slope less falacious. My feeling is that it's better to avoid it altogether, and let the tradition reign: If they want the information, they can go through the system, with its checks and balances, and get a warrant.
-transiit
(for what it's worth, beer has been banned in the past, and there are groups out there that want fatty foods prohibited. For every cause, a nutball. =)
n. oral defamation, in which someone tells one or more persons an untruth about another, which untruth will harm the reputation of the person defamed. Slander is a civil wrong (tort) and can be the basis for a lawsuit. Damages (payoff for worth) for slander may be limited to actual (special) damages unless there is malicious intent, since such damages are usually difficult to specify and harder to prove. Some statements, such as an untrue accusation of having committed a crime, having a loathsome disease or being unable to perform one's occupation, are treated as slander per se since the harm and malice are obvious and therefore usually result in general and even punitive damage recovery by the person harmed. Words spoken over the air on television or radio are treated as libel (written defamation) and not slander on the theory that broadcasting reaches a large audience as much as if not more than printed publications.
1) If we're going to call a line like "You are so smug" defamation, then let's also throw in "I think you are misguided on this issue." or "I disagree with you."
2) I think this was pretty far from 'malicious'
3) If you'd noticed that the argument was backed up with further reasoning, thus there was 'debate' and not just 'slander'
Or was this a "Ha! I can avoid a reasonable argument by making baseless accusations!" sort of thing?
And I like the hookshot. There was an old NES game (Maybe SNES. I don't remember) that a friend of mine had where you got extensive use of something like it. I thought it was pretty darn cool (and it made sense in a side scroller).
But I still some of these things you're mentioning are just cop-outs. Special boots? Couldn't you have just designed the level to not need them? (This presumes that a fundamental aspect to a Zelda game is that you can't tell Link to jump at any time).
Are you saying Zelda wouldn't be fun if they didn't make you go through menial tasks (just about every mini-game they've added to latter-day zeldas, or the search for the magic boots)?
-transiit
(Don't get me started on how much I hate the cut-screen every time you succeed with the hookshot in Windwaker. Once, ok. Twice, maybe. Every time, gack.)
I never had an NES or SNES. So I'm not wildly familiar with the pre-Zelda64 experience.
So I tried out Zelda: A Link to the Past tonight, just for the purposes of research, and auto-jumping annoyed me there too. I'll agree with you that it wasn't as sensitive or bothersome as the later Zeldas, I still found it irritating.
Here's my big complaint: If you must demand auto-jump, then make it ubiquitous. I was wandering around Z:LttP and thought it was really stupid that you could happily jump off a cliff, but not on to a tree stump. Are we trying for an immersive environment, or not?
So while Zelda might have a better storyline than others, or just generally get stuff right that so many others get wrong (I do appreciate the attention to making sure you never get stuck in an infinite failure loop, see Wasteland for an example of how to do this wrong), but I'm still going to stick by my belief that auto-jumping is just a bad idea.
If the goal was to fix the problems with games that put too much emphasis on dexterity with jumping, this is a solution, but not necessarily the right one. Just crank up the thresholds and make jumping less of a chore rather than wasting cycles guessing when jumping is appropriate.
Hell, if I wanted a game that was mostly about annoying the player, I'd go grab an emulator and fire up Marble Madness.
Yeah, and I bet you never made it past the Fire temple in Zelda64. =)
I've been playing Super Mario Sunshine lately, and I'm now taking a break because of the stupidity of the jumping puzzles.
I've not yet gotten into Zelda: Wind Waker because every time I watch the girlfriend playing it, I notice the same trend in stupid jumping puzzles, but without control over your jumps.
I tried playing Knights of the Old Republic tonight and walked away from it after the six hundredth explanatory message about how if you use the trigger buttons and then hit "a", you can consider looking at an object you might want to pick up. I've not written it off yet, but it was annoying.
The last game I played that I remember being really impressive as far as being approachable (playable?) with the least amount of bullshit was Super Smash Brothers. No fancy combos. Everything was documented. Straightforward fun. Too bad Super Smash Bros. Melee didn't do as well with that standard.
Possibly even better that you were (at least the last time I was regularly conversing with you), appreciative of Slackware, often citing the fine granularity of control it gave you over the system.
In that context, I find it strange that you think auto-jumping would be an acceptable behavior, even in something as trivial as a game. =)
Not only does it violate physics (which wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't one standard for jumping and one standard for hover), but it adds unnecessary complexity to the game.
I was happy going through Mario64 where I had basic rules to live by: Jump. Triple Jump. Backwards Jump. Long jump. Ground Pound.
Super Mario Sunshine added extra crap, some of which is useful, some is just awful. The jump-really-high-rocket-pack is a godsend, mostly because it kills much of the stupid jump monotony of the game. The run-fast (I forgot the official nomenclature) pack is stupid. Yoshi having to constantly eat fruit or disappear is retarded.
The truth is that I'm not much of a gamer. If I can't pass a level in three or four tries, I just get pissed off at it. But then I also consider games as an entertaining distraction rather than a rite of passage or some sort of big pissing contest.
Twenty levels of reasonably straight-forward play (even easy) is so much more fun than five levels of training to be an automaton.
Right around the time you offer up anything to indicate he was arrested only based on his appearance.
Pretty lucky guess, if he's pleading guilty and that's all they had to go on when they picked him up.
-transiit
Oh, and I've noticed you've given up on your usual bifurcation sig (You know, shit like "Support transgaming or you're against games on linux".) Too many people call you on the informal fallacy, or just going for what you see as the popular sentiment?
I've got nothing against debian (well, perhaps dselect is a bit crufty), but I'll agree that apt is quite the little charmer, especially if you're responsible for large numbers of machines that you need to keep up to date.
As for the really high-speed/low-drag sort of window managers, I've found pwm to be rather nice (I like being able to group windows.), and during the occassional flight of fancy, I'll use ion (the most obsessive compulsive window manager ever. All the space on your screen is used at all times. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work out so hot, especially when dealing with programs that make a lot of assumptions about window-sizing)
I've been on an XFCE kick for a while, although I'm a bit nervous about the upcoming (days?) version 4. We'll see (and to be fair, I've not been watching too closely. Things could be fine.)
There seems to be a definite disconnect, though. You can have modern luxuries like anti-aliased fonts, or you can have the "bad old days of editing rc files by hands." (which I remember as the good old days. Spend a bit of time getting it set up right at first, be happy and feel productive.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's been done before. As far as I can tell, the current scoreboard is as follows:
The good: Perl
The bad: C#
The ugly: PL/1
-transiit
Unless the assumption is that any significant portion of the OS X user base actually uses the shell, I doubt there will be many that even notice.
I still view OS X as a definite non-unix. It's right up there with say, windows+cygwin. A non-unix kernel with some unix userland stuff sprinkled on top.
And to address the "But it's the best integrated Unix desktop ever!" argument, tell me why the tar that ships with it breaks all the filesystem meta information (which many mac apps still rely on, in my experience). I've heard similar problems with the rest of the user space utils (i.e., cp)
Or, of course, the complete disregard for the Unix filesystem hierarchy standard
-transiit
Be sure to drink your ovaltine.
I'm reserving judgement.
I didn't find the second one to be officially horrible, but then I didn't find the first to be brilliant, either.
I'm not sure that I agree with the industry's angle (as mentioned here) that too much communication between potential ticket-buyers is causing the problem.
This just seems like a run-of-the-mill marketing stunt to me. What the fuck would any viewer care if the movie is being released in one, five or eighty countries?
This sounds more like marketing scum sitting around saying things like "Hey! Let's try to leverage that one-world-unification thing that worked so well back when we were writing ID4!"
Of course, these are the same braindead 'tards that figured there was nothing better than throwing a three-for-one trailer in front of Episode I for Titan A.E., Fight Club, and Anna and the King. At the time, I said AatK was forgettable because nobody there would ever bother watching it (I still don't know for certain: I never saw it. Fucking period piece remake that it was.) Titan A.E. would be the most geek-friendly and get the most draw from that crowd (I understand that it didn 't. Didn't bother with that one either.) and Fight Club just looked awful from that trailer. Another braindead marketing move showing it off as yet another Brad Pitt vehicle (with all of the banality of something as artistic and intellectual as say, "The Fast and the Furious"). The only one of the three that I saw, and I've become a fan of Chuck Palahniuk's books since.
The movie industry has as much to blame for supporting films that nobody would care about, much less knowing how to spread the word about the (potentially) worthwhile ones. They've got no incentive to change, because thus far, they've been able to make enough money off the crapshow of the week.
Capitalism is supposed to be about supply and demand. It doesn't work if we consistently fall for the artificial stimulation of demand that is marketing.
-transiit
That's awful.
So are you the clothes you wear?
Are you the car you drive?
Does it not seem wrong to buying an identity?
-transiit
You sound bitter and jealous; you don't use a Mac, you don't own an iPod, you don't use OS X, you don't use iTunes, you don't buy music from the music store...
Does it bother you that Apple customers are generally happy with what they buy and purchase? Does that strike you as wrong?
I don't use these things because I've found they really don't work out so well for what I need. You, being a satisfied Apple customer, is no skin off my back...in fact, the only irritant related to that is how many "satisfied apple customers" will always tell me how [insert problem here] can be solved by [insert apple product name here], even when it can't.
I just find it a bit silly that so many people get their collective panties in a bunch defending the honor of some company. Is this about justifying your own purchases, or do you just feel like they can do no wrong?
I don't get it.
-transiit
There's a setting somewhere in the slashdot prefs: Collapse Sections (or something like that). Everything looks like it hits the front page. So no, I didn't realize I was treading on hallowed "section only" ground.
Troll, idiot, misunderstood idealist....whatever. You're the one vigourously defending a product you didn't envision, design, build, create....you bought it. Consumerism, yeah!
-transiit
I'm not flamebaiting, contrary to the effect your claim had on the moderators.
Here's the basic problem:
The original Walkman might have had the added bonus of truly being the first product of it's kind, but that in itself does not matter. In a couple of years the average person will think that the iPod was the first.
If I'm reading that right, it sounds like you're saying that it doesn't matter who came first or who did what when, just how the marketers went and revised history in their favor.
Which gets back to what I've been trying to assert: The iPod's success isn't about being innovative, it's about marketing better.
And you fell for it.
-transiit
I was an early adopter on the Diamond Rio. The stock 32MB was enough to hold a full cd (provided that you aren't a 'tard and oversampling), and I managed to get by with even lesser quality considering I was just putting it through the cassette deck in my car. The only thing that stopped me from using it was when somebody smashed my window and ran off with it.
As for pre-iPod mp3 players with larger capacity, I can't help but think of the Creative Nomad, which was at several GB (I think 6 or 10 in the early days. I never bought one) in capacity, and roughly the same form-factor as a portable cd player (i.e., the discman, which was the last "innovative" leap in portable music, created by Sony (not phillips) that's most often attributed to creating a market for portable music (the walkman) to begin with).
I'm not sure where Archos fits in, but my recollection is that they also beat Apple to the market with a reasonably sized, high-capacity mp3 player.
Doesn't really change the fact that Apple had neither the first small mp3 player, the first portable hard disk mp3 player, nor the first small AND hard disk mp3 player. They've just been marketing better.
You've been conned.
-transiit
A selection of some achievements, like (in no particular order): iPod, G5, iBook, mainstream acceptance of wireless technologies (something that still keeps x86 users in a computer equivalent of middle ages), mainstream acceptance of an Unix-based desktop system just proves you're wrong.
iPod. Wow. What a technological leap. There's how many other mp3 players out there, including quite a few that were out before the iPod ever hit the market, at a lower price? To be fair, they did innovate on that one. It costs more. It has firewire.
G5. Not really an Apple innovation. Also known as IBM's PPC 970 chip.
iBook. It's a laptop. Big deal.
Mainstream acceptance of wireless technologies. They threw in a 802.11 card (although it's been my experience that they just threw in an antenna and a proprietary slow in anything that isn't a laptop). They also pioneered appletalk, and we all know how prevalent that is these days.
Mainstream acceptance of a Unix-based desktop system. Oh, which to pick on, whether the estimated market share really means "mainstream" or whether OS X is really unix... I don't know their numbers right now (my brain's telling me ~5%), so I'll go with the latter. OS X is not unix (even if they did get the right to call it so from the Open Group). It's the Mach kernel. Not unix. It's the FreeBSD userland. Well, ok, that is unix. It's a bunch of proprietary crap piled on top with a retarded feature list and stupid marketing names. Ok, that's probably pretty unix-like too (from the balkanization of unix vendors). Doesn't change the fact that mainstream acceptance means that nobody really plays with the unix-like parts, they just list it off as a feature that they don't really understand.
But no, I don't see how you've proven me wrong. Jobs came back and saved the company by issueing the "Everything must be clad in the most god-awful plastic" directive. Which got enough people to shut up and buy, thus keeping the company afloat. Marketing is steering the ship over there, which is why we get stuff like "itunes: sort of like any other mp3 player, but from apple, thus better! shut up and buy!"
My biggest beef with apple is that they've lost the vision. It isn't about technology. It's about selling candy coated crap and getting everyone to believe it's the best thing ever. They need more people like Wozniak, and fewer like Jobs.
-transiit
I'm not a Mac user. I don't really care much for OS X. I used to like Apple (and defended them for years when the big argument was Apple vs. IBM), but I'm convinced that Steve Jobs had done good to keep Apple alive, but done poorly with everything else. And for what it's worth, it's crap like "They changed their logo!" (though, to a larger degree, the dissemination of propaganda ("They built a cluster in Virginia! It's so much better than everything else!" or "Some school in Japan is switching from linux to mac! Here comes the tidal wave of switchers(tm)!") that makes me think that the Apple community is still the greatest obstacle that Apple would have to overcome if they wanted to push anything in significant numbers or regain any sort of techie credibility.
-transiit
I also work in california, and to their credit, my employer made this very clear upfront, citing this specific passage.
For their courtesy, I don't check my personal email, post to my weblog, work on personal projects, sleep, run pyramid schemes, etc. from work.
Thus, they pay me to work on their stuff, and I do. And then I go home and work on other stuff, which largely helps keep me sane.
-transiit
I'll avoid picking on your difficulties with grammar and spelling because there are many times where my fingers get ahead of my brain, but having read some of your other comments, I feel compelled to point out: It can be distracting.
First, the "slippery slope" is still an informal fallacy. There's no guarantee that one step will lead to another, will lead to another, ad infinitum. But even with that in mind, there's still something to be said for volunteering every bit of information to the powers that be. The weak argument is that deluging the government in information will mean that there will be too much noise to filter out versus usable signal. The stronger argument is that we've got a bad record on the subject, think about the Salem witchhunt, McCarthyism, etc.
And I don't agree that this is all about protecting the status quo, but that if there's an expectation of privacy (which isn't that unreasonable if you believe in the privacy policies provided by the companies we deal with), you'd hope they'd actually mean it.
The other big difficulty is where accountability fits in: Should we turn in everyone that's ever made a statement that the government isn't perfect? Someone that thinks taxes are too high? That things could be done better? Yes, it's easier when the question is about somebody that's making overt threats, but we're operating on a system that's based on precedent, thus making the slippery slope less falacious. My feeling is that it's better to avoid it altogether, and let the tradition reign: If they want the information, they can go through the system, with its checks and balances, and get a warrant.
-transiit
(for what it's worth, beer has been banned in the past, and there are groups out there that want fatty foods prohibited. For every cause, a nutball. =)
From dictionary.law.com
1) If we're going to call a line like "You are so smug" defamation, then let's also throw in "I think you are misguided on this issue." or "I disagree with you."
2) I think this was pretty far from 'malicious'
3) If you'd noticed that the argument was backed up with further reasoning, thus there was 'debate' and not just 'slander'
Or was this a "Ha! I can avoid a reasonable argument by making baseless accusations!" sort of thing?
-transiit
Great, so how many people are going to die from cancer thanks to your diesel engine?
Not nearly enough.
Me, I'm still holding out hope that the black plague will make a big comeback.
-transiit
Yeah, so I'm beating a dead horse.
And I like the hookshot. There was an old NES game (Maybe SNES. I don't remember) that a friend of mine had where you got extensive use of something like it. I thought it was pretty darn cool (and it made sense in a side scroller).
But I still some of these things you're mentioning are just cop-outs. Special boots? Couldn't you have just designed the level to not need them? (This presumes that a fundamental aspect to a Zelda game is that you can't tell Link to jump at any time).
Are you saying Zelda wouldn't be fun if they didn't make you go through menial tasks (just about every mini-game they've added to latter-day zeldas, or the search for the magic boots)?
-transiit
(Don't get me started on how much I hate the cut-screen every time you succeed with the hookshot in Windwaker. Once, ok. Twice, maybe. Every time, gack.)
Disney finally remembered they have a theme park in California.
Nevermind. Lucky's going to florida. Now the only attractions are the peeling paint and the disintegrating rides.
-transiit
Cop-out.
I never had an NES or SNES. So I'm not wildly familiar with the pre-Zelda64 experience.
So I tried out Zelda: A Link to the Past tonight, just for the purposes of research, and auto-jumping annoyed me there too. I'll agree with you that it wasn't as sensitive or bothersome as the later Zeldas, I still found it irritating.
Here's my big complaint: If you must demand auto-jump, then make it ubiquitous. I was wandering around Z:LttP and thought it was really stupid that you could happily jump off a cliff, but not on to a tree stump. Are we trying for an immersive environment, or not?
So while Zelda might have a better storyline than others, or just generally get stuff right that so many others get wrong (I do appreciate the attention to making sure you never get stuck in an infinite failure loop, see Wasteland for an example of how to do this wrong), but I'm still going to stick by my belief that auto-jumping is just a bad idea.
If the goal was to fix the problems with games that put too much emphasis on dexterity with jumping, this is a solution, but not necessarily the right one. Just crank up the thresholds and make jumping less of a chore rather than wasting cycles guessing when jumping is appropriate.
Hell, if I wanted a game that was mostly about annoying the player, I'd go grab an emulator and fire up Marble Madness.
-transiit
Yeah, and I bet you never made it past the Fire temple in Zelda64. =)
I've been playing Super Mario Sunshine lately, and I'm now taking a break because of the stupidity of the jumping puzzles.
I've not yet gotten into Zelda: Wind Waker because every time I watch the girlfriend playing it, I notice the same trend in stupid jumping puzzles, but without control over your jumps.
I tried playing Knights of the Old Republic tonight and walked away from it after the six hundredth explanatory message about how if you use the trigger buttons and then hit "a", you can consider looking at an object you might want to pick up. I've not written it off yet, but it was annoying.
The last game I played that I remember being really impressive as far as being approachable (playable?) with the least amount of bullshit was Super Smash Brothers. No fancy combos. Everything was documented. Straightforward fun. Too bad Super Smash Bros. Melee didn't do as well with that standard.
-transiit
Even funnier that it regularly happens to me.
Possibly even better that you were (at least the last time I was regularly conversing with you), appreciative of Slackware, often citing the fine granularity of control it gave you over the system.
In that context, I find it strange that you think auto-jumping would be an acceptable behavior, even in something as trivial as a game. =)
-transiit
The hover FLUDD is completely fucking horrible.
Not only does it violate physics (which wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't one standard for jumping and one standard for hover), but it adds unnecessary complexity to the game.
I was happy going through Mario64 where I had basic rules to live by: Jump. Triple Jump. Backwards Jump. Long jump. Ground Pound.
Super Mario Sunshine added extra crap, some of which is useful, some is just awful. The jump-really-high-rocket-pack is a godsend, mostly because it kills much of the stupid jump monotony of the game. The run-fast (I forgot the official nomenclature) pack is stupid. Yoshi having to constantly eat fruit or disappear is retarded.
The truth is that I'm not much of a gamer. If I can't pass a level in three or four tries, I just get pissed off at it. But then I also consider games as an entertaining distraction rather than a rite of passage or some sort of big pissing contest.
Twenty levels of reasonably straight-forward play (even easy) is so much more fun than five levels of training to be an automaton.
-transiit
Right around the time you offer up anything to indicate he was arrested only based on his appearance.
Pretty lucky guess, if he's pleading guilty and that's all they had to go on when they picked him up.
-transiit
Oh, and I've noticed you've given up on your usual bifurcation sig (You know, shit like "Support transgaming or you're against games on linux".) Too many people call you on the informal fallacy, or just going for what you see as the popular sentiment?
Maybe you should say Ray Noorda _was_ the good guy. Now he's the head of the Canopy Group, the creeps pulling the strings behind SCO.
-transiit
Proudly running Slackware since 97.
I've got nothing against debian (well, perhaps dselect is a bit crufty), but I'll agree that apt is quite the little charmer, especially if you're responsible for large numbers of machines that you need to keep up to date.
As for the really high-speed/low-drag sort of window managers, I've found pwm to be rather nice (I like being able to group windows.), and during the occassional flight of fancy, I'll use ion (the most obsessive compulsive window manager ever. All the space on your screen is used at all times. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work out so hot, especially when dealing with programs that make a lot of assumptions about window-sizing)
-transiit
Seen it, haven't gotten around to trying it.
I've been on an XFCE kick for a while, although I'm a bit nervous about the upcoming (days?) version 4. We'll see (and to be fair, I've not been watching too closely. Things could be fine.)
There seems to be a definite disconnect, though. You can have modern luxuries like anti-aliased fonts, or you can have the "bad old days of editing rc files by hands." (which I remember as the good old days. Spend a bit of time getting it set up right at first, be happy and feel productive.)
-transiit