The idea was that Microsoft discouraged navigating your HD as much as possible. Especially from the command line, but even the Program Files directory comes up by default with a "You shouldn't be here, click here to break your system" type message. The problem is that the folder names in "Program Files" and the names on the Start menu often don't match, and neither of them are the name of the application you originally installed. Half of the time it's something like Program Files\Big Long Name Soft\Project Wordiness\Your Application's Directory\YourApplication.exe which is stored in the start menu as Project Wordiness\YourApplication.exe or some such. WinXP makes this even more interesting with it's "you really shouln't leave the start menu" mentality.
I sure hope they don't try to emulate the completely broken way Palm handles file management. By dumping any sort of file management from the OS, they left all of the work on the application developers to manage files. Every application works differently and there are all sorts of unintended consequences that arise. Like removing one of your two ebook readers also deletes all of your ebooks(!!!). Also, it is frequntly not possible to beam just a document (or in do anything with a document for that matter) if the application doesn't support it. That's why Beambox was written, but the flat nature of the file system makes it a pain to use.
My biggest concern with this new system is that if you fail to generate good keywords (I suspect this will be a big problem) it is going to be hard to browse through a likely directory to find the file. It is also going to be a bit more difficult to do housecleaning (usually I notice that some forgotten directory won't be needed anymore and delete it, but with this system you should never see files you aren't specifically looking for). It seems to me that this system is going to be a bit less tolerant of poor organization, which could prove to be a headache for real users.
The DirecTV exclusive was a fluke. In the early 1990s, rumors circulated that the NFL would stop free, over-the-air broadcasts and move its product to cable pay-per-view. Congress threatened antitrust retaliation. The NFL responded by making a big public commitment to free broadcast, while granting a monopoly on residential pay-per-view to the brand-new service called DirecTV, then being promoted as something anyone easily could receive.
Damn you Congress. Damn you DirectTV. Damn you NFL. You are indirectly responsible for the constant pre-emption of Futurama! You had a chance to do something about it in the early 90's and you managed to screw it up.
While videoconferencing isn't so easy on Cablemodem/DSL because of the upload cap (damn you Comcast and your 16 KB/s upload cap!) trading movies online is extremely feasable these days. Just look at the usenet. It's time for you to dump that old crappy modem and upgrade to something with real bandwidth.
Er, I'd hope we aren't going to be living the the Star Trek future were nobody is allowed to make backups. I'd imagine the possible (probable?) loss of the (no doubt very expensive) robot would limit the amount it is used. It's probably not good economic sense to loose five 100 million dollar robots trying to pull some homeless drunk out of burning building.
Hold on a second. My parents recently got a new Mac and I had the chance to try out iPhoto. While it is a nice application (somewhat limited in what it can do) the Redeye was a HUGE disappointment for me. Basically, it just completely remove the red in whatever area you have selected. All previously "red" eyes turn black. There's no slider to adjust how much red you want removed, it just removes all of it. The effect was rather disconcerting when I changed red eyes into big black craters. As it is, I left the redeye in because it just looked less freaky than what iPhoto did.
I agree with you there. I never really liked the "level" abstraction myself. I much prefer skill based systems like you mentioned.
One more thing I think is outdated is the "HP" system. I've never liked the idea that you can be thwacked by a sword and suffer no ill effects, then get scratched by a dagger and die. I'd much prefer something closer the the Silouette "wound" system, where when you are attacked four things can happen:
You are nicked for basically no damage. It's a scratch/bruise/etc. This is the desired result (for you) if you're wearing sufficent armor
You suffer a light wound, which is actually fairly nasty. This is a deep cut, fractured bone, or other such injury. It is not life threatening, but it will slow you down. This includes injuries to "good guy" areas. If you don't treat the wound, it can grow worse (get infected) over time. Your character's fighting ability is reduced a fair degree with a light injury, and if you suffer multiple light injuries they can turn into a deep wound.
Deep wounds generally involve internal bleeding or other debilitating injury. You will grow worse fairly rapidly with a deep wound and can die. Except for despiration moves, your character is in no shape to fight anymore. In fact it will take some time in the hospital before you're fighting again
Finally, if you are really poorly prepared/unlucky, you might just get overkilled. This represents fatal injuries like being blown up, sniped, gunned down, etc...
While this system is maybe a little to gritty for "heroic" RPGs, I know I'd buy a game that did this (I bought Bushido Blade, and I still love it).
Er, if it has already been passed around as a newsletter to apparently all Dominos in the country, then it's a good bet the information is no longer any sort of secret.
I've never liked the idea of making the average citizen try to determine what is sensitive (classified is easy, it has the classification level clearly marked on it) with no training or guidance. Military and government personell should be able to make these kind of determinations, but your average citizen should not be trusted with this.
Er, Urban Legends are frequently taught as "common knowledge", it doesn't mean everybody else should teach them too. As much as everybody wants to see America fail, you're going to have to come up with a better counterexample than this.
May I suggest going online and searching out Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It's a TV series based on the GitS manga that includes the Fuchikomas (though they get translated as Tachikomas), and more character development all around. At least 4 episodes are currently available through your regular fansub channels.
It's sad to hear that the Japanese aren't paying for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, because it is a fabulous series. Unfortunatly the Fansub community hasn't been very generious with the episodes thus far (only 4 are out AFAIK), so maybe it goes downhill later on.
Personally, I think the Trolls have taken to Tivo articles because people seem to take the bait really easily. There are TONS of trolls out on here today, perhaps because Tivo enthusiasts try to be so helpful?
I've always wanted a -1 Wrong moderation, or even -1 Stupid. Some of these posts just don't fit in the normal moderation categories (besides perhaps "Overrated" which is so vague as to be completely useless. I've never used an Overrated because it just doesn't provide any sort of useful feedback to the poster.
I have a suggestion for you: Networking. Floppies today suck because the floppy is a dead technology. Nobody is willing to put the effort into building a high quality floppy because very few people use their floppy drive anymore. The explosive growth of personal networking has made sneakernet obsolete.
I want unlimited bandwidth. Unfortunatly I'm not willing to put my entire paycheck into it every month. I think if we figured out some way to offer huge amounts of cheap bidirectional bandwidth, we'd start to see some real revolutions that use lots of bandwidth. Besically, people are going to eventually fill any pipe you give them, sort of like hard drives. Unfortunatly bandwidth today isn't cheap for the consumer, so people have to stay conservative with their internet useage (you should see the flames people get on Slashdot for downloading free unix ISOs about clogging up the internet for everybody else.)
Seriously, I just downloaded the complete Windows Talkback build in a little less than 15 seconds a couple of minutes ago. Mozilla is hosted on fast servers.
Re:What desktop users want to know..
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
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· Score: 2
Er, you missed the point. Below a certain price point on hardware, the corner cutting begins to effect the hardware in a seriously detrimental way. If you buy the $600 computer, you are probably going to pay more in the long run than the guy who paid $800, because he can keep his computer 4 years whereas yours is breaking down after only a year. Worse, if you try to upgrade your $600 system, you often find that there is no driver support for the crap hardware in any OS beyond what it shipped with. Also, support is generally terrible on extremly low end hardware like that, not that it helps because you will have very little warentee anyway (the people who build these things know that they break down a lot). It's certainly true that you don't need to spend $2000 on a computer to read email, but if you go for the abolute bottom barrel system, you are going to get what you pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's NPR, which barely recieves any money from the government anymore.
The idea was that Microsoft discouraged navigating your HD as much as possible. Especially from the command line, but even the Program Files directory comes up by default with a "You shouldn't be here, click here to break your system" type message. The problem is that the folder names in "Program Files" and the names on the Start menu often don't match, and neither of them are the name of the application you originally installed. Half of the time it's something like Program Files\Big Long Name Soft\Project Wordiness\Your Application's Directory\YourApplication.exe which is stored in the start menu as Project Wordiness\YourApplication.exe or some such. WinXP makes this even more interesting with it's "you really shouln't leave the start menu" mentality.
I sure hope they don't try to emulate the completely broken way Palm handles file management. By dumping any sort of file management from the OS, they left all of the work on the application developers to manage files. Every application works differently and there are all sorts of unintended consequences that arise. Like removing one of your two ebook readers also deletes all of your ebooks(!!!). Also, it is frequntly not possible to beam just a document (or in do anything with a document for that matter) if the application doesn't support it. That's why Beambox was written, but the flat nature of the file system makes it a pain to use.
My biggest concern with this new system is that if you fail to generate good keywords (I suspect this will be a big problem) it is going to be hard to browse through a likely directory to find the file. It is also going to be a bit more difficult to do housecleaning (usually I notice that some forgotten directory won't be needed anymore and delete it, but with this system you should never see files you aren't specifically looking for). It seems to me that this system is going to be a bit less tolerant of poor organization, which could prove to be a headache for real users.
While videoconferencing isn't so easy on Cablemodem/DSL because of the upload cap (damn you Comcast and your 16 KB/s upload cap!) trading movies online is extremely feasable these days. Just look at the usenet. It's time for you to dump that old crappy modem and upgrade to something with real bandwidth.
Er, I'd hope we aren't going to be living the the Star Trek future were nobody is allowed to make backups. I'd imagine the possible (probable?) loss of the (no doubt very expensive) robot would limit the amount it is used. It's probably not good economic sense to loose five 100 million dollar robots trying to pull some homeless drunk out of burning building.
Hold on a second. My parents recently got a new Mac and I had the chance to try out iPhoto. While it is a nice application (somewhat limited in what it can do) the Redeye was a HUGE disappointment for me. Basically, it just completely remove the red in whatever area you have selected. All previously "red" eyes turn black. There's no slider to adjust how much red you want removed, it just removes all of it. The effect was rather disconcerting when I changed red eyes into big black craters. As it is, I left the redeye in because it just looked less freaky than what iPhoto did.
In response to this I have only one thing to say: "Eat Me".
In the words of Dilbert: "I don't care, I have Tivo."
I agree with you there. I never really liked the "level" abstraction myself. I much prefer skill based systems like you mentioned.
One more thing I think is outdated is the "HP" system. I've never liked the idea that you can be thwacked by a sword and suffer no ill effects, then get scratched by a dagger and die. I'd much prefer something closer the the Silouette "wound" system, where when you are attacked four things can happen:
While this system is maybe a little to gritty for "heroic" RPGs, I know I'd buy a game that did this (I bought Bushido Blade, and I still love it).
That wooshing sound you hear was the joke going directly over your head.
Er, if it has already been passed around as a newsletter to apparently all Dominos in the country, then it's a good bet the information is no longer any sort of secret.
I've never liked the idea of making the average citizen try to determine what is sensitive (classified is easy, it has the classification level clearly marked on it) with no training or guidance. Military and government personell should be able to make these kind of determinations, but your average citizen should not be trusted with this.
Er, Urban Legends are frequently taught as "common knowledge", it doesn't mean everybody else should teach them too. As much as everybody wants to see America fail, you're going to have to come up with a better counterexample than this.
Actually, the Wright Brothers had to design their own engine, since none of the available ones in 1903 had an acceptable power-to-weight ratio.
Check out some of the terrible gifts people have gotten over the years. It's enough to make a grown man cry.
May I suggest going online and searching out Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It's a TV series based on the GitS manga that includes the Fuchikomas (though they get translated as Tachikomas), and more character development all around. At least 4 episodes are currently available through your regular fansub channels.
It's sad to hear that the Japanese aren't paying for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, because it is a fabulous series. Unfortunatly the Fansub community hasn't been very generious with the episodes thus far (only 4 are out AFAIK), so maybe it goes downhill later on.
Personally, I think the Trolls have taken to Tivo articles because people seem to take the bait really easily. There are TONS of trolls out on here today, perhaps because Tivo enthusiasts try to be so helpful?
I've always wanted a -1 Wrong moderation, or even -1 Stupid. Some of these posts just don't fit in the normal moderation categories (besides perhaps "Overrated" which is so vague as to be completely useless. I've never used an Overrated because it just doesn't provide any sort of useful feedback to the poster.
I have a suggestion for you: Networking. Floppies today suck because the floppy is a dead technology. Nobody is willing to put the effort into building a high quality floppy because very few people use their floppy drive anymore. The explosive growth of personal networking has made sneakernet obsolete.
I want unlimited bandwidth. Unfortunatly I'm not willing to put my entire paycheck into it every month. I think if we figured out some way to offer huge amounts of cheap bidirectional bandwidth, we'd start to see some real revolutions that use lots of bandwidth. Besically, people are going to eventually fill any pipe you give them, sort of like hard drives. Unfortunatly bandwidth today isn't cheap for the consumer, so people have to stay conservative with their internet useage (you should see the flames people get on Slashdot for downloading free unix ISOs about clogging up the internet for everybody else.)
Yeah, 100,000 e-books is not a lot of work to go out and find. Man, the corporate apologists are really having a tough time today.
Hmm, no units, maybe it's Kelvin. That would be really impressive. :)
thank your lucky stars it isn't a Redhat mirror.
Seriously, I just downloaded the complete Windows Talkback build in a little less than 15 seconds a couple of minutes ago. Mozilla is hosted on fast servers.
Er, you missed the point. Below a certain price point on hardware, the corner cutting begins to effect the hardware in a seriously detrimental way. If you buy the $600 computer, you are probably going to pay more in the long run than the guy who paid $800, because he can keep his computer 4 years whereas yours is breaking down after only a year. Worse, if you try to upgrade your $600 system, you often find that there is no driver support for the crap hardware in any OS beyond what it shipped with. Also, support is generally terrible on extremly low end hardware like that, not that it helps because you will have very little warentee anyway (the people who build these things know that they break down a lot). It's certainly true that you don't need to spend $2000 on a computer to read email, but if you go for the abolute bottom barrel system, you are going to get what you pay for.
Yes, that's the show I want brought back on the Spice channel. The whole damn show was a tease.