### The only question is, will everyone be willing to relearn how to type?
Typing text via mobile phones and 0-9 Numpads seems to be pretty popular, PDAs often use different text input as well, so people don't seem to have that much throuble with relearning. The throuble is that with desktop computers you simply don't have enough force to push them to relearn it, Dvorak or other new layouts might be better than Qwerty, but they are not that much better and neither do they provide any other significant benefit, instead using Dvorak layout can be quite confusing a lot of times since keyboard shortcuts might be hard to reach and games might end up unplayable with Dvorak layout, so people stay with what they got. On PDAs and mobile phones you are limited to what you got, so you often simply can't chose Qwerty instead but learn to life with what you got.
In the end I doubt that we can say goodbye to Qwerty anytime soon, heck, I would already be *very* happy if we could finally get rid of those sucky numpads or at the very least make them detachable to get the mouse a lot closer to the right arm, but not even that seems to happen, only very few keyboards provide that feature. In the end I think one of the throuble is that keyboards these days are often simply very cheap, very cheap, so if you can have a standard keyboard for 10EUR, people have a hard time to skip that and buy a better one for 50EUR or really good one for 300EUR (Kinesis and friends). If alternative layouts would be much cheaper and easier obtainable they still might not kill Qwerty, but at least more people might give them a try.
### The important thing is that you can pick up items from your surrounding and use them to further the plot.
Yep, and that is really one of the nicest aspects of the game, its not just those items that are relevant for puzzle solving which you can interact with like in most normal adventures, but also tons of 'useless' items you can use, you can get a drink, wash your hands, use the toilet, switch on the tv, the radio, read mail, watch in a mirror, close the window, etc. While some of these stuff fills your depression-meter a bit, its for most part rather useless for overall progress, but it gives a great way of a real living world, since one isn't completly limited to advance-the-story kind of puzzles, but can simply use the environment as a normal person would do.
In the ends its not like MonkeyIsland and friends, but it still tells a story and has great characters, which are for me one of the key aspects of a adventure game (some Myst players might disagree..) and given the story it just feels the perfect right way to actually tell the story. The action never feels forced, its always part of the story.
### I can honestly say it is. It's an adventure - a real one at that, not the action-adventure kind we've been served ever since Sierra went down and Lucasarts stopped doing (good) adventures.
Well, thats not really true, its neither a classic adventure (no real puzzles, no inventory) nor some action-adventure (no dungeons, no monsters to squish, etc. but plenty of action), its mostly something quite different, 'interactive movie' is probally the most acurat name. Its kind of an like adventure with action sequences done right.
### You play the part of the one being possessed, and the two detectives who chase him. The story is extremely rich and unfolds at a great pace, and the three main characters are very well fleshed out.
Yep, the end however feels rather rushes, two month worth of story get 'told' in a 5sec cutscene near the end, which is kind of annoying, since some important things happen in that time.
### The characters have emotions, and you have to keep them from being too depressed, which admittedly, is a bit hard at times. It's very dark, very moody, and a very adult oriented adventure.
The "depressed" thing however feels pretty anoying and pointless, since it neither influence the story nor very hard to keep it up, it only makes you "Game Over" if it reaches zero. In some situations its actually easier to keep it up, then to lower it, since succeeding action sequences lowers it, while failing it causes no penalty, it makes sense story wise, but gameplay wise its quite annoying.
### It's definitely not for kids.
It also has sex scenes that make 'hot coffee' look like cold cofee... got however cut in the US version;)
I would recomment it as well, its not without fault and I can understand why some people might not like it, for me however it was one of the best games of the year. The nice thing about the game is that you can't really get stuck like in normal adventure games, so the whole gameflow is extremly smooth. And while the 'puzzles' might not be hard, they ensure that the player has always something todo, you basically never end up watching a cutscene, since you are always keep busy, either by 'puzzeling' your way through a scene or by pressing the button combinations on the screen in an action sequense. In the end the game keeps you busy for pretty much exactly 7h of gameplay, its not much, but a second replay is worth it, not because the story can turn turn out totally different, since it can't, its all linear, but because there are plenty little details that one might have missed on a first play, its also interesting to do things differently so see how they turn out. It might not be for people who expect Myst-like puzzles, but for the rest who is open to new gameplay ideas its definitvly worth a try.
### There's no foreign substance being ingested, inhaled or injected.
The throuble is that the body is quite good at producing the addiction causing substances all by himself. It doesn't really make that much of a different if you get addicted to some foreign substance or your own body chemicals, in the end you end up with a good chemical imbalance in your body and have great throuble breaking away from the patterns you have learned to produce said substances.
### If it's merely psychological, then only you hold responsibility for what goes on in your head.
Human can't control whats happening in their head and the question of responsibilty is also not really worth to discuss about, since it simply doesn't help. Instead one should search for what is causing these reaction in people, how to prevent it from happening in the first place and how to help those that already have problem.
### Lab rats don't have the intelligence to say to themselves "You know what? Maybe playing a game for twenty days straight isn't a good idea". Human beings do.
What makes you believe so? Humans might have a little bit more brain then a rat, but they get addicted in pretty much the same way. Its one thing to come up with the idea "plenty of gaming is not good for you", but its a whole different manner to actually stop playing so.
### Sure, MS could sell the first batch for $700 and drop the price immediately to $500. Problem is, they can only get away with this trick once, if that---once everyone knows that just have to wait a couple months and the price drops a couple hundred bucks
Over here in Europe MS already tried that trick with the original XBox, it started out at 480EUR if I remember correctly and then droped very quickly down to 300EUR. Didn't seem to work out that well, so MS gave all those that bought the XBox for 480EUR three games for free, so that nobody got angry at them.
Re:The Revo strategy makes more sense to me now
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The Shadow of Kong
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· Score: 1
Many TVs that display HDTV don't suppert the full resolution, they simply downscale it to something that isn't much better then SDTV. HDTV will for sure catch on, but TV that really can display the full resolution are still very expensive and will probally stay so for quite a while. So till real HDTV is available on a large scale will take at least some years.
### And this is completely ignoring the demongraphic data
Nintendo is targeting the families, children and non-gamer, folks that most likly will not have HDTV anytime soon, especially children will be the very last to get access to a HDTV in their rooms.
In the end it simply doesn't matter anyway, games are what matters not the technology.
### Using generic names like "Text Editor" instead of Gedit but then the name Gedit every place else (discussion, documentation etc) is doing things right?
Might be worth to call it "Text Editor (gedit)" in the menu, but calling it 'Text Editor' is the right thing todo, its a editor for text so why give it some funky name in the menu so that nobody can find it? The Gnome people do such things with an open mind, ie. what would be the easiest for a computer who hasn't used linux for a decade expect and search for. It might be a little bit confusing to you who might have known gedit for years, but for the rest of the people gedit means exactly nothing, ok, you can 'edit' something with it, but what? A better fix then just changing the menu name might actually be to rename 'gedit' to 'gnome-text-editor'
### Doing things the right way is having to check in three different places to for various system interface/administration programs?
Not sure what you are refering to here.
### Doing things the right way is having no user-configurable way to do a simple task like change the color of your window background, selected menu items or widgets.
That will certainly come sooner or later, just not implemented yet, but its again a poweruser-feature, normal people most often simply don't change their theme colors, since the default ones are fine, which is why that task has probally little priority. And as a poweruser you can always hack yourself a theme together if you really need it, Gnome doesn't limit you here, they just don't want to clubber the interface without a good reason.
### Putting system administration tools as a submenu of a menu titled "Desktop" is doing things right?
Where else should they go? Maybe Application, but Desktop->Administration sounds fine to me, since it clearly seperates the normal work from the toying around with settings, its also right above the Preferences menu which makes sense.
### Hacking your way through some Windows Registry-esque program (Gconf) in order to change settings for desktop icons or how a Nautilus window appears is doing things right?
Well, I have to say that I consider Nautilus a piece of junk, no matter if spartial or not or whatever, it should be replaced since it does neither something interesting nor is especially good at doing so. GConf on the other side is nice, it gives you quick and documented accesses to many settings, has command line tools to manipulate the settings and changes propagate to the applications mostly in realtime, even allows you to search through the settings, something that you can't in a normal gui dialog. It of course isn't perfect, it would for example be nice to jump directly from an application to its gconf subtree, but having stored configs in a way where you have docu and can manipulate them both interactivly and via scripts is very nice. But again, normal users don't toy with gconf, they find the important settings in the preferences dialog of the app.
### These are doing things right?
Nobody said that Gnome is perfect right now, it certainly is not and still could need improvments in a lot of areas, but certain things are much cleaner and easier than in KDE for example. KDE solves lots of things via configurabilty, while Gnome people try to get rid of as much configuration as possible and simply to it right by default.
### Second, you can install mode software any place you want on a Unix system, including your home directory or/tmp or any other place it will fit, because for the most part Unix utilities are not irrevocably tied to a specific directory,
That is however only true for source, binaries under Linux have quite often their location hardcoded, moving them to a different directory is impossible without either ugly hacks (hex editor) or less ugly hacks (envirorment variables, command line parameter, etc.). Binaries that are truly relocatable are pretty seldomly under Linux, some of the big packages (Mozilla and the like) provide it, but even they often only via install scripts that install some startup script that sets the right command line arguments. True relocation would require to use/proc/self/exe or different means to find out the location of the binary, that however is sadly not standardized across different Unixes, which is why very few actually use it. The 'spread everything across dozens of directories' approach of installing software in Unix makes relocation also quite a bit more complicated, since it gets ugly if one tries to keep a software in its own directory (useless foo/share/foo/ directories and such).
Linus is right and thats why I use Gnome
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Torvalds Says 'Use KDE'
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Linus is absolutly right about Gnome being dominated by 'interface nazis', but thats also exactly the reason why I like Gnome. As oposed to most other OpenSource software Gnome isn't build by stacking layers of layers of hacks on top each other, but instead Gnome developers often take a step back and redo stuff the right way, not just the way people got used to. Sure thats always causing a lot of flameswars and discussion, but its also a necessary thing if you want to end up with something that is actually a good interface and not just one which you have getting used to. So, yep, switching from Gnome1.4 to Gnome2, from Sawfish to Metacity, from old filedialog to new and soon from Galeon to Epiphany was quite painfull at times, but at the end of the day, I got almost all features back that I need and a whole lot of useless stuff cleaned up.
Of course it might be nice if some of the new stuff would be introduces a bit more gently and probally more backward compatible, at least for the time when the new stuff isn't 100% ready for prime time, but the stuff that gets done is almost always worth doing. Oh well, and I would like if they would finally drop Nautilus and use something that isn't just broken-by-design, but maybe that will happen one day anyway...
Those that want all the bells and whistles and configurability should simply use KDE, which really looks and feels for most part like a standard Windows interface on steroids, for me however all that configurabilty is simply useless most of the time, I prefer something that 'works at default' and doesn't offload the creation of a usable interface to the user.
While drawing maps yourself can be fun, its most often more annoying then good for a game. What I however would like to see is the ability to extent the auto-draw map with custom self written information, so that one can mark places which one might one to revisit, secrets that are only unlockable later with the right extra, etc. The DS already has a touchscreen, so it would be simply to add, memory might be a bit of an issue, but it should be doable.
While I'll agree that Dawn of Sorrow is a pretty good game, I find its mostly the same as Aria of Sorrow all over again, plenty of enemies are the same, plenty of souls that you can collect are the same and the weapons are also nothing really new. The graphics are quite a bit better then on the GBA, but the touchscreen additions are pretty minimal. Yet, its still a good game and it shows that 2D games are always plenty of fun when done right, I just wish we would get a fresh titles in that genre instead of just continuing stuff that goes back into the days of the NES.
One thing I am wondering, why doesn't the PSP have a way to run Java programms? A Java environment could give the PSP the protection that Sony wants and at the same time allow easy homebrew development. It would also be a easy way to kill most firmware hacking, since a Java environment would be much easier to work with. Is there any special reason why Sony hasn't gone that route? For me that would kind of be a killer-feature and make me buy a PSP.
### Errr you realise that there are SNES and NES emulators for the Nintendo handhelds as well right?
Not sure how well the PSP SNES Emulator works, but SNESDS, a SNES emulator for NintendoDS, is not really that usable, its a good proof of concept, but not really much more, havn't tested the SNES emu for GBA, might be more solid, but GBA lacks a few buttons.
Beside from that Nintendo handhelds have no way to load ROMs, you need extra hardware to accomplish that and that hardware is quite expensive (~100EUR), which brings you in terms of cost to a similar level as the PSP, which can load homebrew ROMs without extra hardware, given that you have the right firmware installed.
### you don't need low-latency to read your e-mail.
I for one prefer to be able to scroll precisly through my mail instead of everything happening with a one second delay and thus often opening the wrong mails. Latency is a *big* issue with SSH, its less of an issue if the machine you are connecting to is only a few feet away, but if you connect to a machine at the other end of the world, as you often do with normal webpages, it becomes a huge issue.
### A text-only program can have the exact same functionality as a graphical one and often times more.
It can never have more, since graphical interfaces can do everything that text one do. Its also not about 'pretty colors' its about using a line where you need a line and not a piece of ASCII art constructed out of -, + and |'s. SSH has definitivly its uses and does what it does very well, but its neither a AJAX replacment or very usefull for general purpose webservices.
### What is so wrong with saving application functionality for protocols designed to handle it like SSH and Telnet?
The complete lack of any graphical abilities of both them aside, they also suffer from *HUGE* latency problems, since each keypress get transmitted instantly and becomes only visible once the server has send it back to you. With simple Webforms or AJAX on the other side most of the input is done on client side and only high-level requests are send to the server, applications are thus far more responsible then your standard programm via ssh/telnet. That said I wouldn't mind some alternative to AJAX, since the webbrowser is really not that great for applications for numerous reasons, but so far its the best we have and any alternative would have a hard time getting as widespread use as browsers have today.
Maybe Nintendos great secret is that the Revolution fits into a standard 5 1/4" slot , its after all not much larger then a normal DVD drive already...
I consider the Uncanny Valley to be mostly a myth, or at least not a two dimensional graph, sure, there is some CGI art that looks creepy, but that has little todo with how photorealistic it is, its simply badly done CGI. There is a problem of having imbalanced capabilities, say photorealistic faces, but no realistic face animation, which just doesn't look good, but all this is solvable with a little bit more affort. As long as all aspect of some piece of CGI art are balanced there shouldn't be any problem with it and last not least one can always go a step back from trying total photorealism when the capabilites are not there yet, Advent Children for example isn't anywhere near comic-characters, but neither completly photorealistic, yet still looks fantastic.
### When I watch a movie I'm seeing other people do things. When I'm playing a game, I'm forming those thought patterns in my brain, and conditioning myself to follow through on them.
While that might have some impact, I think another major difference is simply time. A movie is around 2 hours, while a game can be played for around 20 hours or more. When you for example sit down and watch a whole tv series from DVD from start to end or something like Lord of the Rings which keeps you busy for equal periods of time as a normal game it has equally mind-altering effects like a game.
Forks are good and healthy, sure sometimes its annoying, but sooner or later most forks will either collapse or merge back into the original. The strong point of the GPL is that it ensures that forks can always be merged back into the mainline.
### The reason for me is that it is always easier to fork than to advocate to an existing team for some change.
Depends, maintaining a fork can be an annoying amount of work, which is why most people will avoid it unless they have good reasons for that.
GPL should definitvly not try anything to limit forks, since that would restrict important freedoms, it should however ensure that forks can be merged back into the mainline and that is actually problematic with GPLv3, since if some piece of software is "GPLv2(or later)", gets forked and converted to GPLv3 while the mainline gets converted to GPLv2(only), the GPLv3 pieces can't be merged back unless the authors agree to all switch to the same license.
The 'Free' when people talk about the GPL refers to the freedom of the user and GPL does a much better job at protecting that then public domain, with public domain everybody can just take it add whatever restrictions he wants to it and redistribute, the GPL ensures that the user always gets the same freedom. Beside from that public domain is a concept that is not available in all countries, so public domain is a bit problematic.
### To the extent that the GPL places a condition on the end user's ability to make copies, derivative works, and distribute software, it is the same as any other EULA.
The major difference is that the GPL *gives* you rights (to modify and distribute), while a EULA *removes* your rights (right to use software for specific purpose, etc). The GPL doesn't restrict you, it gives you right you wouldn't have without it.
### BTW, how is the GPL *not* an EULA? Doesn't it impose conditions on the use of software as a condition of use?
GPL doesn't limit how you use the software, neither does it require that you publish modifications, the GPL only kicks in when you distribute your software, as long as you don't distribute it you can do whatever you want. And distribution isn't 'use' since copyright laws says otherwise, has nothing todo with the GPL itself.
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### The only question is, will everyone be willing to relearn how to type?
Typing text via mobile phones and 0-9 Numpads seems to be pretty popular, PDAs often use different text input as well, so people don't seem to have that much throuble with relearning. The throuble is that with desktop computers you simply don't have enough force to push them to relearn it, Dvorak or other new layouts might be better than Qwerty, but they are not that much better and neither do they provide any other significant benefit, instead using Dvorak layout can be quite confusing a lot of times since keyboard shortcuts might be hard to reach and games might end up unplayable with Dvorak layout, so people stay with what they got. On PDAs and mobile phones you are limited to what you got, so you often simply can't chose Qwerty instead but learn to life with what you got.
In the end I doubt that we can say goodbye to Qwerty anytime soon, heck, I would already be *very* happy if we could finally get rid of those sucky numpads or at the very least make them detachable to get the mouse a lot closer to the right arm, but not even that seems to happen, only very few keyboards provide that feature. In the end I think one of the throuble is that keyboards these days are often simply very cheap, very cheap, so if you can have a standard keyboard for 10EUR, people have a hard time to skip that and buy a better one for 50EUR or really good one for 300EUR (Kinesis and friends). If alternative layouts would be much cheaper and easier obtainable they still might not kill Qwerty, but at least more people might give them a try.
### The important thing is that you can pick up items from your surrounding and use them to further the plot.
Yep, and that is really one of the nicest aspects of the game, its not just those items that are relevant for puzzle solving which you can interact with like in most normal adventures, but also tons of 'useless' items you can use, you can get a drink, wash your hands, use the toilet, switch on the tv, the radio, read mail, watch in a mirror, close the window, etc. While some of these stuff fills your depression-meter a bit, its for most part rather useless for overall progress, but it gives a great way of a real living world, since one isn't completly limited to advance-the-story kind of puzzles, but can simply use the environment as a normal person would do.
In the ends its not like MonkeyIsland and friends, but it still tells a story and has great characters, which are for me one of the key aspects of a adventure game (some Myst players might disagree..) and given the story it just feels the perfect right way to actually tell the story. The action never feels forced, its always part of the story.
### I can honestly say it is. It's an adventure - a real one at that, not the action-adventure kind we've been served ever since Sierra went down and Lucasarts stopped doing (good) adventures.
;)
Well, thats not really true, its neither a classic adventure (no real puzzles, no inventory) nor some action-adventure (no dungeons, no monsters to squish, etc. but plenty of action), its mostly something quite different, 'interactive movie' is probally the most acurat name. Its kind of an like adventure with action sequences done right.
### You play the part of the one being possessed, and the two detectives who chase him. The story is extremely rich and unfolds at a great pace, and the three main characters are very well fleshed out.
Yep, the end however feels rather rushes, two month worth of story get 'told' in a 5sec cutscene near the end, which is kind of annoying, since some important things happen in that time.
### The characters have emotions, and you have to keep them from being too depressed, which admittedly, is a bit hard at times. It's very dark, very moody, and a very adult oriented adventure.
The "depressed" thing however feels pretty anoying and pointless, since it neither influence the story nor very hard to keep it up, it only makes you "Game Over" if it reaches zero. In some situations its actually easier to keep it up, then to lower it, since succeeding action sequences lowers it, while failing it causes no penalty, it makes sense story wise, but gameplay wise its quite annoying.
### It's definitely not for kids.
It also has sex scenes that make 'hot coffee' look like cold cofee... got however cut in the US version
I would recomment it as well, its not without fault and I can understand why some people might not like it, for me however it was one of the best games of the year.
The nice thing about the game is that you can't really get stuck like in normal adventure games, so the whole gameflow is extremly smooth. And while the 'puzzles' might not be hard, they ensure that the player has always something todo, you basically never end up watching a cutscene, since you are always keep busy, either by 'puzzeling' your way through a scene or by pressing the button combinations on the screen in an action sequense. In the end the game keeps you busy for pretty much exactly 7h of gameplay, its not much, but a second replay is worth it, not because the story can turn turn out totally different, since it can't, its all linear, but because there are plenty little details that one might have missed on a first play, its also interesting to do things differently so see how they turn out. It might not be for people who expect Myst-like puzzles, but for the rest who is open to new gameplay ideas its definitvly worth a try.
### There's no foreign substance being ingested, inhaled or injected.
The throuble is that the body is quite good at producing the addiction causing substances all by himself. It doesn't really make that much of a different if you get addicted to some foreign substance or your own body chemicals, in the end you end up with a good chemical imbalance in your body and have great throuble breaking away from the patterns you have learned to produce said substances.
### If it's merely psychological, then only you hold responsibility for what goes on in your head.
Human can't control whats happening in their head and the question of responsibilty is also not really worth to discuss about, since it simply doesn't help. Instead one should search for what is causing these reaction in people, how to prevent it from happening in the first place and how to help those that already have problem.
### Lab rats don't have the intelligence to say to themselves "You know what? Maybe playing a game for twenty days straight isn't a good idea". Human beings do.
What makes you believe so? Humans might have a little bit more brain then a rat, but they get addicted in pretty much the same way. Its one thing to come up with the idea "plenty of gaming is not good for you", but its a whole different manner to actually stop playing so.
### Sure, MS could sell the first batch for $700 and drop the price immediately to $500. Problem is, they can only get away with this trick once, if that---once everyone knows that just have to wait a couple months and the price drops a couple hundred bucks
Over here in Europe MS already tried that trick with the original XBox, it started out at 480EUR if I remember correctly and then droped very quickly down to 300EUR. Didn't seem to work out that well, so MS gave all those that bought the XBox for 480EUR three games for free, so that nobody got angry at them.
Many TVs that display HDTV don't suppert the full resolution, they simply downscale it to something that isn't much better then SDTV. HDTV will for sure catch on, but TV that really can display the full resolution are still very expensive and will probally stay so for quite a while. So till real HDTV is available on a large scale will take at least some years.
### And this is completely ignoring the demongraphic data
Nintendo is targeting the families, children and non-gamer, folks that most likly will not have HDTV anytime soon, especially children will be the very last to get access to a HDTV in their rooms.
In the end it simply doesn't matter anyway, games are what matters not the technology.
### Using generic names like "Text Editor" instead of Gedit but then the name Gedit every place else (discussion, documentation etc) is doing things right?
Might be worth to call it "Text Editor (gedit)" in the menu, but calling it 'Text Editor' is the right thing todo, its a editor for text so why give it some funky name in the menu so that nobody can find it? The Gnome people do such things with an open mind, ie. what would be the easiest for a computer who hasn't used linux for a decade expect and search for. It might be a little bit confusing to you who might have known gedit for years, but for the rest of the people gedit means exactly nothing, ok, you can 'edit' something with it, but what? A better fix then just changing the menu name might actually be to rename 'gedit' to 'gnome-text-editor'
### Doing things the right way is having to check in three different places to for various system interface/administration programs?
Not sure what you are refering to here.
### Doing things the right way is having no user-configurable way to do a simple task like change the color of your window background, selected menu items or widgets.
That will certainly come sooner or later, just not implemented yet, but its again a poweruser-feature, normal people most often simply don't change their theme colors, since the default ones are fine, which is why that task has probally little priority. And as a poweruser you can always hack yourself a theme together if you really need it, Gnome doesn't limit you here, they just don't want to clubber the interface without a good reason.
### Putting system administration tools as a submenu of a menu titled "Desktop" is doing things right?
Where else should they go? Maybe Application, but Desktop->Administration sounds fine to me, since it clearly seperates the normal work from the toying around with settings, its also right above the Preferences menu which makes sense.
### Hacking your way through some Windows Registry-esque program (Gconf) in order to change settings for desktop icons or how a Nautilus window appears is doing things right?
Well, I have to say that I consider Nautilus a piece of junk, no matter if spartial or not or whatever, it should be replaced since it does neither something interesting nor is especially good at doing so. GConf on the other side is nice, it gives you quick and documented accesses to many settings, has command line tools to manipulate the settings and changes propagate to the applications mostly in realtime, even allows you to search through the settings, something that you can't in a normal gui dialog. It of course isn't perfect, it would for example be nice to jump directly from an application to its gconf subtree, but having stored configs in a way where you have docu and can manipulate them both interactivly and via scripts is very nice. But again, normal users don't toy with gconf, they find the important settings in the preferences dialog of the app.
### These are doing things right?
Nobody said that Gnome is perfect right now, it certainly is not and still could need improvments in a lot of areas, but certain things are much cleaner and easier than in KDE for example. KDE solves lots of things via configurabilty, while Gnome people try to get rid of as much configuration as possible and simply to it right by default.
### Why not just get a PS2... aren't all games ported to the PSP the exact same games anyways?
It are not the exakt same games, just very similar ones.
### Second, you can install mode software any place you want on a Unix system, including your home directory or /tmp or any other place it will fit, because for the most part Unix utilities are not irrevocably tied to a specific directory,
/proc/self/exe or different means to find out the location of the binary, that however is sadly not standardized across different Unixes, which is why very few actually use it. The 'spread everything across dozens of directories' approach of installing software in Unix makes relocation also quite a bit more complicated, since it gets ugly if one tries to keep a software in its own directory (useless foo/share/foo/ directories and such).
That is however only true for source, binaries under Linux have quite often their location hardcoded, moving them to a different directory is impossible without either ugly hacks (hex editor) or less ugly hacks (envirorment variables, command line parameter, etc.). Binaries that are truly relocatable are pretty seldomly under Linux, some of the big packages (Mozilla and the like) provide it, but even they often only via install scripts that install some startup script that sets the right command line arguments. True relocation would require to use
Linus is absolutly right about Gnome being dominated by 'interface nazis', but thats also exactly the reason why I like Gnome. As oposed to most other OpenSource software Gnome isn't build by stacking layers of layers of hacks on top each other, but instead Gnome developers often take a step back and redo stuff the right way, not just the way people got used to. Sure thats always causing a lot of flameswars and discussion, but its also a necessary thing if you want to end up with something that is actually a good interface and not just one which you have getting used to. So, yep, switching from Gnome1.4 to Gnome2, from Sawfish to Metacity, from old filedialog to new and soon from Galeon to Epiphany was quite painfull at times, but at the end of the day, I got almost all features back that I need and a whole lot of useless stuff cleaned up.
Of course it might be nice if some of the new stuff would be introduces a bit more gently and probally more backward compatible, at least for the time when the new stuff isn't 100% ready for prime time, but the stuff that gets done is almost always worth doing. Oh well, and I would like if they would finally drop Nautilus and use something that isn't just broken-by-design, but maybe that will happen one day anyway...
Those that want all the bells and whistles and configurability should simply use KDE, which really looks and feels for most part like a standard Windows interface on steroids, for me however all that configurabilty is simply useless most of the time, I prefer something that 'works at default' and doesn't offload the creation of a usable interface to the user.
While drawing maps yourself can be fun, its most often more annoying then good for a game. What I however would like to see is the ability to extent the auto-draw map with custom self written information, so that one can mark places which one might one to revisit, secrets that are only unlockable later with the right extra, etc. The DS already has a touchscreen, so it would be simply to add, memory might be a bit of an issue, but it should be doable.
While I'll agree that Dawn of Sorrow is a pretty good game, I find its mostly the same as Aria of Sorrow all over again, plenty of enemies are the same, plenty of souls that you can collect are the same and the weapons are also nothing really new. The graphics are quite a bit better then on the GBA, but the touchscreen additions are pretty minimal. Yet, its still a good game and it shows that 2D games are always plenty of fun when done right, I just wish we would get a fresh titles in that genre instead of just continuing stuff that goes back into the days of the NES.
One thing I am wondering, why doesn't the PSP have a way to run Java programms? A Java environment could give the PSP the protection that Sony wants and at the same time allow easy homebrew development. It would also be a easy way to kill most firmware hacking, since a Java environment would be much easier to work with. Is there any special reason why Sony hasn't gone that route? For me that would kind of be a killer-feature and make me buy a PSP.
### Errr you realise that there are SNES and NES emulators for the Nintendo handhelds as well right?
Not sure how well the PSP SNES Emulator works, but SNESDS, a SNES emulator for NintendoDS, is not really that usable, its a good proof of concept, but not really much more, havn't tested the SNES emu for GBA, might be more solid, but GBA lacks a few buttons.
Beside from that Nintendo handhelds have no way to load ROMs, you need extra hardware to accomplish that and that hardware is quite expensive (~100EUR), which brings you in terms of cost to a similar level as the PSP, which can load homebrew ROMs without extra hardware, given that you have the right firmware installed.
### you don't need low-latency to read your e-mail.
I for one prefer to be able to scroll precisly through my mail instead of everything happening with a one second delay and thus often opening the wrong mails. Latency is a *big* issue with SSH, its less of an issue if the machine you are connecting to is only a few feet away, but if you connect to a machine at the other end of the world, as you often do with normal webpages, it becomes a huge issue.
### A text-only program can have the exact same functionality as a graphical one and often times more.
It can never have more, since graphical interfaces can do everything that text one do. Its also not about 'pretty colors' its about using a line where you need a line and not a piece of ASCII art constructed out of -, + and |'s. SSH has definitivly its uses and does what it does very well, but its neither a AJAX replacment or very usefull for general purpose webservices.
### What is so wrong with saving application functionality for protocols designed to handle it like SSH and Telnet?
The complete lack of any graphical abilities of both them aside, they also suffer from *HUGE* latency problems, since each keypress get transmitted instantly and becomes only visible once the server has send it back to you. With simple Webforms or AJAX on the other side most of the input is done on client side and only high-level requests are send to the server, applications are thus far more responsible then your standard programm via ssh/telnet. That said I wouldn't mind some alternative to AJAX, since the webbrowser is really not that great for applications for numerous reasons, but so far its the best we have and any alternative would have a hard time getting as widespread use as browsers have today.
Maybe Nintendos great secret is that the Revolution fits into a standard 5 1/4" slot , its after all not much larger then a normal DVD drive already...
I consider the Uncanny Valley to be mostly a myth, or at least not a two dimensional graph, sure, there is some CGI art that looks creepy, but that has little todo with how photorealistic it is, its simply badly done CGI. There is a problem of having imbalanced capabilities, say photorealistic faces, but no realistic face animation, which just doesn't look good, but all this is solvable with a little bit more affort. As long as all aspect of some piece of CGI art are balanced there shouldn't be any problem with it and last not least one can always go a step back from trying total photorealism when the capabilites are not there yet, Advent Children for example isn't anywhere near comic-characters, but neither completly photorealistic, yet still looks fantastic.
Gamecubes had a tilted eject button, it was still working, but didn't really look very pretty.
### When I watch a movie I'm seeing other people do things. When I'm playing a game, I'm forming those thought patterns in my brain, and conditioning myself to follow through on them.
While that might have some impact, I think another major difference is simply time. A movie is around 2 hours, while a game can be played for around 20 hours or more. When you for example sit down and watch a whole tv series from DVD from start to end or something like Lord of the Rings which keeps you busy for equal periods of time as a normal game it has equally mind-altering effects like a game.
Forks are good and healthy, sure sometimes its annoying, but sooner or later most forks will either collapse or merge back into the original. The strong point of the GPL is that it ensures that forks can always be merged back into the mainline.
### The reason for me is that it is always easier to fork than to advocate to an existing team for some change.
Depends, maintaining a fork can be an annoying amount of work, which is why most people will avoid it unless they have good reasons for that.
GPL should definitvly not try anything to limit forks, since that would restrict important freedoms, it should however ensure that forks can be merged back into the mainline and that is actually problematic with GPLv3, since if some piece of software is "GPLv2(or later)", gets forked and converted to GPLv3 while the mainline gets converted to GPLv2(only), the GPLv3 pieces can't be merged back unless the authors agree to all switch to the same license.
The 'Free' when people talk about the GPL refers to the freedom of the user and GPL does a much better job at protecting that then public domain, with public domain everybody can just take it add whatever restrictions he wants to it and redistribute, the GPL ensures that the user always gets the same freedom. Beside from that public domain is a concept that is not available in all countries, so public domain is a bit problematic.
### To the extent that the GPL places a condition on the end user's ability to make copies, derivative works, and distribute software, it is the same as any other EULA.
The major difference is that the GPL *gives* you rights (to modify and distribute), while a EULA *removes* your rights (right to use software for specific purpose, etc). The GPL doesn't restrict you, it gives you right you wouldn't have without it.
### BTW, how is the GPL *not* an EULA? Doesn't it impose conditions on the use of software as a condition of use?
GPL doesn't limit how you use the software, neither does it require that you publish modifications, the GPL only kicks in when you distribute your software, as long as you don't distribute it you can do whatever you want. And distribution isn't 'use' since copyright laws says otherwise, has nothing todo with the GPL itself.