What I find tragic is that people actually do say "it's tragic that we're still using the same tools as we used 20 years ago".
Why wouldn't we be? We're pretty much the same people as we were 20 years ago. We still speak the same languages, wear the same clothes, drive vehicles that are only cosmetically different, perform very similar jobs. Sure, our computers are a bit faster, but there's no need to fundamentally change your interface just because there are more transistors behind it.
The thunderbird extension that lets me compose replies in Emacs using emacsclient.
Good start. Next step is to ditch Thunderbird completely and read your mail with one of the many Emacs packages designed for that purpose. Gnus is good, if you can cope with learning a new set of keybindings.
Meta-pipe is a great one -- it's "pipe region to external command"
I use M-| all the time. The prefix argument form, C-u M-|, is particularly useful -- it replaces the region with the output of the shell command. Ever wondered why there's a sort-lines function but not a unique-lines? Because for anything other than basic sorting, you can just do something like C-u M-| sort -u!
If you're using ksh (the real UNIX interactive shell), there's a handy cd foo bar syntax. If you're in/opt/foo/bin and you do cd foo bar, you wind up in/opt/bar/bin, without having to think about how many../s you need to put in.
For an RPG it has huge immersion breaking holes in it.
Ah, so totally unlike the original Fallout, then, which merely had huge immersion-breaking holes in it? Like how you could shoot a guy in a bar, and then walk into the hotel next door, and there he is, still alive! Brilliant stuff.
At least with the securom protection on this game, he can always play the game if he keeps his disc undamaged. If the steam servers go away, you're fucked.
And if you break the disc, you're also fucked. Or if someone burgles your house and steals it. Or if your computer dies and you can no longer get a replacement that will play the game. Or if you're unjustly accused of a murder you didn't commit and end up in jail for life. Or if there's a nuclear apocalypse that knocks out all electricity sources. Hey, hypotheticals are fun, aren't they?
Back in the real world, we have no way of knowing how likely it is that the Steam servers will go away, or how likely it is that if they do, Valve will keep their promise to unlock all the DRM at that point -- just as we have no way of knowing how likely an individual is to lose or break the disc. In short, there is no way of judging whether Steam or CD is actually a safer way to buy the game, so the only sensible approach is to choose based on personal convenience today, not unknowable hypothetical things that might go wrong tomorrow.
You can't kill the "storyline critical" NPCs either. Unlike Fallout 1/2 (or Arcanum). But exactly like Oblivion (as in, it works in exactly the same way). Guess why...
Hmm, tricky one. My guess would be "because games are meant to be fun; accidentally getting your game into a no-win situation isn't fun; and the majority of people who pay for games care about being able to win them, while only a tiny and sick minority care about being able to murder everyone". Am I right?
But Bioshock had to go to great lengths to make the killing of Little Sisters as un-graphic as they reasonably could. Basically it happened off-screen.
Would people be happy if Fallout 3 let you shoot kids, but only in non-gory ways, and forced your character to shut his eyes while they died? No, the minority of fans who care would still be bitching about the lack of gore -- "I can make an adult's head explode, I should be able to make a kid's head explode!" Imitating Bioshock would not have made anyone any happier. Realistically, there was no way they could handle children that would have pleased everyone, so I can't really blame them for going for the option that will please the mass market.
very inconvenient, console-centric UI, particuraly inventory
I'm guessing it's a while since you played Fallout, right? Because the inventory interface in Fallout was utterly dreadful. Ahh, what could be more fun than paying for $50,000-worth of weapons by transferring bottlecaps 999 at a time?
Slow walking and slow jumping.
Walking was slow in Fallout as well, and you couldn't jump at all.
Skills redone TES-style with ranges from 0 to 100
Good lord, how dreadful! And vastly inferior to the authentic Fallout, which had ranges from 0% to 100% instead.
Real-time combat as crappy as it always was in TES: do you remember how you could swing the sword at an enemy at your arm's length and not hit anything because your skill is not high enough?
Um, no, that was a Morrowind issue. In Oblivion, if you can reach it, you can hit it.
Weapons get damaged when used
Wait, that makes gameplay more sophisticated than it was in Fallout...
In Oblivion, my main problem with the console interface was magic. It just didn't work. To do any kind of spell switching -- and you had to do that all the time, e.g., between attack spells, shielding yourself, and healing spells -- you had to switch to the menu, scroll through an ever growing list of spells (IIRC there was no way to delete old ones), "equip" the other spell, switch back, cast it, etc.
Or you could, you know, just bind each spell to a hotkey...
Until you find out that it is also possible to skip the "buy the Disc" part.
Why would I want to do that? I don't want the movie companies to go bust -- I want them to keep making a profit so they keep making movies for me to watch. I am very happy to give them money in exchange for products I can use in the ways I want to use them. Currently that means I buy DVDs, because I can watch those on my Linux PC and copy them onto my netbook.
I won't adopt the suggestion of buying BDs and downloading ripped copies, because that is illegal in my jurisdiction (UK) and they've just started suing P2P users over here too. Instead, I'll continue to cheer on these reverse-engineering efforts, and one day soon I hope it'll be possible to do everything with BDs that I can do with DVDs today.
Which is perfectly good. I didn't buy my first DVD though until the protection was broken and I have no intention of buying anything BD until it is broken. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Who wants to buy a BD movie until they can pull a copy to a DVD for portable players off in the rest of the house, the in car players, etc. Until we can yank clips out of one. Until we can play then on our non-Windows machines.
Well said! And we need more people to say this. We need the public and the media to understand that a significant number of the people who cheer on efforts such as this have no interest in "stealing" stuff -- we want DRM gone so we can buy things secure in the knowledge that we will be able to use them!
Yeah, but have you considered you can leave your work in the "cloud" and only downloaded it when you need it?
Yeah, if you trust the "cloud".
Personally I kind of like to have control over my work, instead of trusting total strangers to look after it and not lose it or accidentally give it to other people. But maybe I'm just old-fashioned?
So a piece of software optimized for a very specific, limited platform can run faster than software written for a very general and not very well defined platform. This ought to be a no-brainer.
I eagerly await your implementation of Crysis for the Atari 2600. I'm sure that developing for such a very specific, limited platform will easily enable you to make it run faster than the version written for the very genereal, not very well defined PC platform.
But overall, that still shows XP to have better performance, so why should someone buy the more recent, very slightly inferior product when they can get the better one, and probably have an install disk for the better one lying around?
Yeah, why on earth would someone want to take the easy route and stick with the OS that came set up on their computer, when they could gain at least one whole frame per second if they waste hours installing an older OS?
I'm not a Microsoft fan at all. The only thing I use Windows for is games that won't run in WINE. But the version of Windows I play games in is Vista, and I haven't had any issues with it. Most of the criticisms I've seen have been either inaccurate or inconsequential. (How quickly we forget how unpopular the now-beloved XP was when it first came out!)
Despite the fact that the homebrew can't do a lot of crazy things, it does allow users to replay some old games that they may not have had played years without having to repurchase them. Sometimes people just want to be able to play through A Link to the Past again without having to rebuy the game.
And, what, the homebrew magically adds a SNES port to your Wii? Or are you just downloading a ROM and playing the game in an emulator, in which case why the heck do you need to go to such lengths when you can just do exactly the same thing on a PC?
...um, what exactly is the point you're trying to make? That PHP sucks because it isn't C#, Java, or Python? Languages do have different syntax. Deal with it.
PHP sucks because it's poorly designed, encourages bad programming practice, and makes good programming practice difficult. The syntax, however, isn't particularly out of the ordinary.
(I do agree that \ is a very bad choice, though. The keyboard I'm typing this on doesn't even have a backslash key -- I have a choice of Fn-Z or Compose-/-/, neither of which is very easy to type. Thankfully I don't use PHP, so the problem won't arise.)
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What I find tragic is that people actually do say "it's tragic that we're still using the same tools as we used 20 years ago".
Why wouldn't we be? We're pretty much the same people as we were 20 years ago. We still speak the same languages, wear the same clothes, drive vehicles that are only cosmetically different, perform very similar jobs. Sure, our computers are a bit faster, but there's no need to fundamentally change your interface just because there are more transistors behind it.
"C-x z". Then subsequent presses of "z" repeat the same command again.
(You could have found that out for yourself by typing "C-h w repeat"...)
Even easier: set one of your keys up as Compose (also known as Multi_key). Then you can type accented characters in any program, not just Emacs.
Good start. Next step is to ditch Thunderbird completely and read your mail with one of the many Emacs packages designed for that purpose. Gnus is good, if you can cope with learning a new set of keybindings.
Notepad has precisely one useful trick, documented here.
I use M-| all the time. The prefix argument form, C-u M-|, is particularly useful -- it replaces the region with the output of the shell command. Ever wondered why there's a sort-lines function but not a unique-lines? Because for anything other than basic sorting, you can just do something like C-u M-| sort -u!
Pray tell, how exactly does one use a GUI tool to edit a file when the reason they're editing that file is that their GUI doesn't work?
Not that it's really necessary to edit xorg.conf these days, now that everything's controlled by HAL instead.
If you're using ksh (the real UNIX interactive shell), there's a handy cd foo bar syntax. If you're in /opt/foo/bin and you do cd foo bar, you wind up in /opt/bar/bin, without having to think about how many ../s you need to put in.
Ah, so totally unlike the original Fallout, then, which merely had huge immersion-breaking holes in it? Like how you could shoot a guy in a bar, and then walk into the hotel next door, and there he is, still alive! Brilliant stuff.
And if you break the disc, you're also fucked. Or if someone burgles your house and steals it. Or if your computer dies and you can no longer get a replacement that will play the game. Or if you're unjustly accused of a murder you didn't commit and end up in jail for life. Or if there's a nuclear apocalypse that knocks out all electricity sources. Hey, hypotheticals are fun, aren't they?
Back in the real world, we have no way of knowing how likely it is that the Steam servers will go away, or how likely it is that if they do, Valve will keep their promise to unlock all the DRM at that point -- just as we have no way of knowing how likely an individual is to lose or break the disc. In short, there is no way of judging whether Steam or CD is actually a safer way to buy the game, so the only sensible approach is to choose based on personal convenience today, not unknowable hypothetical things that might go wrong tomorrow.
Hmm, tricky one. My guess would be "because games are meant to be fun; accidentally getting your game into a no-win situation isn't fun; and the majority of people who pay for games care about being able to win them, while only a tiny and sick minority care about being able to murder everyone". Am I right?
But Bioshock had to go to great lengths to make the killing of Little Sisters as un-graphic as they reasonably could. Basically it happened off-screen.
Would people be happy if Fallout 3 let you shoot kids, but only in non-gory ways, and forced your character to shut his eyes while they died? No, the minority of fans who care would still be bitching about the lack of gore -- "I can make an adult's head explode, I should be able to make a kid's head explode!" Imitating Bioshock would not have made anyone any happier. Realistically, there was no way they could handle children that would have pleased everyone, so I can't really blame them for going for the option that will please the mass market.
I'm guessing it's a while since you played Fallout, right? Because the inventory interface in Fallout was utterly dreadful. Ahh, what could be more fun than paying for $50,000-worth of weapons by transferring bottlecaps 999 at a time?
Walking was slow in Fallout as well, and you couldn't jump at all.
Good lord, how dreadful! And vastly inferior to the authentic Fallout, which had ranges from 0% to 100% instead.
Um, no, that was a Morrowind issue. In Oblivion, if you can reach it, you can hit it.
Wait, that makes gameplay more sophisticated than it was in Fallout...
Or you could, you know, just bind each spell to a hotkey...
Why would I want to do that? I don't want the movie companies to go bust -- I want them to keep making a profit so they keep making movies for me to watch. I am very happy to give them money in exchange for products I can use in the ways I want to use them. Currently that means I buy DVDs, because I can watch those on my Linux PC and copy them onto my netbook.
I won't adopt the suggestion of buying BDs and downloading ripped copies, because that is illegal in my jurisdiction (UK) and they've just started suing P2P users over here too. Instead, I'll continue to cheer on these reverse-engineering efforts, and one day soon I hope it'll be possible to do everything with BDs that I can do with DVDs today.
Well said! And we need more people to say this. We need the public and the media to understand that a significant number of the people who cheer on efforts such as this have no interest in "stealing" stuff -- we want DRM gone so we can buy things secure in the knowledge that we will be able to use them!
Yeah, if you trust the "cloud".
Personally I kind of like to have control over my work, instead of trusting total strangers to look after it and not lose it or accidentally give it to other people. But maybe I'm just old-fashioned?
No, he wasn't talking about mere atheists. You need the athiest president you can find... the athier the better.
What do you mean? It runs on both kinds of computer, XP and Vista.
Wikipedia is not a direct democracy.
I eagerly await your implementation of Crysis for the Atari 2600. I'm sure that developing for such a very specific, limited platform will easily enable you to make it run faster than the version written for the very genereal, not very well defined PC platform.
Yeah, why on earth would someone want to take the easy route and stick with the OS that came set up on their computer, when they could gain at least one whole frame per second if they waste hours installing an older OS?
I'm not a Microsoft fan at all. The only thing I use Windows for is games that won't run in WINE. But the version of Windows I play games in is Vista, and I haven't had any issues with it. Most of the criticisms I've seen have been either inaccurate or inconsequential. (How quickly we forget how unpopular the now-beloved XP was when it first came out!)
And, what, the homebrew magically adds a SNES port to your Wii? Or are you just downloading a ROM and playing the game in an emulator, in which case why the heck do you need to go to such lengths when you can just do exactly the same thing on a PC?
"People with laptops" is a very, very tiny minority?
...um, what exactly is the point you're trying to make? That PHP sucks because it isn't C#, Java, or Python? Languages do have different syntax. Deal with it.
PHP sucks because it's poorly designed, encourages bad programming practice, and makes good programming practice difficult. The syntax, however, isn't particularly out of the ordinary.
(I do agree that \ is a very bad choice, though. The keyboard I'm typing this on doesn't even have a backslash key -- I have a choice of Fn-Z or Compose-/-/, neither of which is very easy to type. Thankfully I don't use PHP, so the problem won't arise.)