### Of course, there's always games that can only work in 3D but look crappy because of tech (read: Starfox).
Interesting that you mention it, I consider the original StarFox(SNES) still to be the best looking game of the series, the enemy design is cool especially because the 3d power was extremly limited in that day. They created some great looking extremly-low polygon models there. The other games in the series on the other side with their more realistic models just can't keep up with the originality of the first one. That said I wouldn't mind a Starfox that would run at constant 60fps and at a better resolution, but if I could chose between the untextured 3d models of the SNES and those of the later games, I'd always pick the SNES ones, they simply looked a hell of a lot more interesting.
The throuble is that still to many deveolpers go for a realistic look when it comes to textures and lighting, while a more minimalistic look can often look a lot more interesting.
Metacity already does that, it was one of the reason why I switched away from Sawfish, since that one never got the windows positioned where I left them.
I agree that there are too many sequels and what is worse those sequels are coming out *way* to quickly. I don't mind getting a new Mario every five years, heck Gameboy hadn't had a new Mario for around 12 years, but when a sequels comes out even before I made it trough the predecessor things are really going wrong.
Anyway, the list of games you give is quite a bit off: ResidentEvil4 is a completly different game from ResidentEvil3 or any of the other former ResidentEvil titles, different controls, different settings, completly different gameplay, story doesn't connect to the previous games, its now an action game where it before was an horror adventure game. PaperMario2 on the other side is the same as PaperMario, higher resolution and new story aside. FireEmblem is a port of an old NES game, so is Metroid Zero Mission (beside Prime the series hasn't changed at all since SuperMetroid), DeusEx2 is just a flawed successor of the briliant DeusEx. And while Prime and Pikmin might have been fresh, they got a successor quickly after the original release. And some of the other games you list also have a '2' in their name... Well, I guess you are right that there are too many successors, since half the game you list as 'fresh' are successors of previous titles...
Re:Maybe an OSS future isn't that bright afterall
on
Nessus Closes Source
·
· Score: 1
### OSS is never going to win in the long run because developers have families to support and will not slit the throat of the goose that lays the golden eggs
I agree with you that OpenSource isn't the magic-bullet that many people claim it is, especially 'OpenSource' as a business model is basically suicide, however in the long run OpenSource will win. Sure, some OpenSource programmers might turn into ClosedSource programmers because they need the money, but for each one that leaves you get a new one jumping in. OpenSource progress is always happening, it might be extremly slow at times, but many OpenSource software has already aproached a point of simply being 'good enough' and once there it will start to put commercial developers out of business, if they want or not. Office tools, browser and such are basically done these days, sure there are still new features implemented every now and then, but the differences between them is so small that most people won't even notice, so people will use whichever is the cheapest, which will be the OpenSource one. There is of course software on the market that requires constant redevelopment, extremest example would be games, which OpenSource has a hard time to follow, but normal 'software in boxes' won't have that much of a future if you can get the same for free. The joy of OpenSource is that once release it will stay free *forever*, meaning you can't remove it from the market no matter what you try, if it is popular enough it will find new deveolpers sooner or later.
### What I wanted was essentially a GBA with a properly backlit large screen and with a SNES style control layout
Buy a DS, it still supports all the GBA games and if you want buy a flashcard in addition, which allows you to play original GB games as well, there is even a SNES emulator for the GBA which runs at basically 100% of the original speed as far as I can tell, its however still rather buggy and doesn't play much games, but as a proof-of-concept its quite impressive.
### Or ls, cp, rm, mkdir, cat, sort,... ? Or make, tar, emacs,... ? These are all GNU products.
One problem with these tools is that they haven't evolved much at all in the last years. GNU has added a bunch of additional options to the tools back then compared to the commercial Unixes which made those tools popular, however that seems to have stopped long ago and all those tools are now still completly text-based, disconnected from all the progress that has been made in other areas. I wish GNU would move a little bit with the times and adopt some more advanced OO-based way of handling command line tools, options to output XML instead of just plain text, something along the lines of XMLterm. If GNU would do that, maybe people would have a easier time recognizing that they are important and making progress, today GNU simply seems to much a thing of the past.
### Why? Consider a very simple test: Take your "Apache/Samba/KDE/Xorg/GNU/Linux" system and try ripping out each of the named components.
That is a very bogus argument, when I remove my Athlon Processor my system doesn't boot either, that however doesn't mean that I start calling by OS 'Athlon', same for Bios, Grub and other stuff. When you want to play the game that way you have to do it the other way around, ie. which components can I replace without noticing. I can replace my Athlon with a Pentium, still boots, my Grub can be replaced with Lilo, still boots, Linux and GNU can be replaced with FreeBSD, Busybox or some other Unix, still everything fine and I won't even notice till I run 'uname'. Xorgs can be replaced with a old copy of XFree86, might still work, but replacing KDE with TWM makes it kind of obvious that things changed. Linux and GNU are just implementation details which the normal user won't even notice, yes they are important core parts, but parts which are hidden deep down below. So saying "I run GNU/Linux" is ultimativly not really very meaningfull in most situations and saying "I run Debian GNU/Linux" on the other side actually has some usefull information in it, same with "I run KDE". Just saying "I run Linux" is fine with me too, since Linux has become a general buzzword for all OpenSource stuff.
### GNU is the operating system. It is the environment in which the Linux user lives.
Sorry, but that is simply wrong. The environment in which Linux users live in these days is KDE, Gnome or Fluxbox or whatever, there might be a few 'command-line hippies' left that use a 'true' GNU environment, but for the majority the GNU stuff simply is a non-issue, an implementation detail hidden somewhere deep down below which you could switch to BSD Userland and hardly anybody would ever notice it. Even GCC is no longer maintained by GNU people and the C++ parts of it didn't origin from GNU either as far as I know. So calling the OS which people use GNU is equally wrong to calling it 'Linux', to make it correct you might wanna call it Linux/GNU/Xorg/KDE/Samba/Apache or simply call it by the name of the distribution as the paper suggested.
### RMS and Co. finally addressed the "weakness" I once wondered about in the existing GPL: how strictly does one define "linking" in this age of webservices.
ACK, I agree the real weak spot of the GPL is the 'linking' stuff. The problem is that the whole license is heavily tweaked towards C programms, as soon as you go to more dynamic programming languages, scripting language or bash scripts the whole thing becomes rather unclear, since no C-like linking is ever performed there, unless those languages byte-compile, which again makes the thing even more complicated, same of course with web-services and other uses that happen without 'real' linking.
### but Sony, please, please, just let us run our homebrew apps.
ACK, especially since the piracy argument is pretty much void, I mean a 1GB memory stick costs around 100EUR, I can get two original games for that price and it might not even enough to hold a single complete game. So to make it work you either need to limit yourself to those games that don't use much diskspace or cutout the cutscenes and other space consuming stuff. So piracy might still be there, but its really far less attractive then say for the PS1 where a 20cent CDR will do for a complete game, so I can hardly see how it should be a big problem on the larger scale.
Comparing it to Lemmings is a bit of a stretch, but yes, it has been done before, namely in PrinceOfPersia and AnotherWorld/OutOfThisWorld, Ico just put a pretty similar gameplay into 3D. So Ico didn't actually invent anything totally new, but on the other side I have a very hard time finding a game beside AnotherWorld/OutofThisWorld that gets close to Ico, the complete lack of HUD, a story told without the use normal language, the extremly dense athmosphere, etc. It has been done before, but only like once or twice in the last 15 years and never in 3D as far as I remember, enough for me to call it innovative, even so it was more of a rebirth, then a new invention.
Beside from that there are two key components that Ico had, that I haven't seen before in games. First of the lighting, no idea if it was real HDR rendering or some form of faked-HDR, but I have never before seen in a game such beautifull sunshine. Second part is the girl, while other games before had buddies before, very few integrated them into the gameplay so well as Ico. Ico might not have invented the 'buddy', but it was one of the first games to make them popular.
### What can you do in Emacs that you can'd do in, for instance, BBEdit?
Emacs can read usenet, run tetris, has type-ahead search, has a buildin 'doctor', has an info reader, send mail, run a shell, read Slashdot and a whole lot of other crazy stuff, this is possible because Emacs at its core is a Lisp-Machine, so its actually quite a bit closer to an simple OS then to just a text editor, so its extremly flexible and extensible, way bejoint the scripting support seen in many other applications.
One of the other nice things of Emacs is that its 100% keyboard driven, every little feature is accessible via the keyboard, be it the file-manager, the mail reader or whatever. Sure, a additional GUI would be nice (the one that is their is extremly primitve and best switched off), but having absolutly everything accessible via keyboard gives quite a nice workflow, since one never has to grab the mouse, unless one wants to.
That said, Emacs isn't perfect, most IDEs have more powerfull features than Emacs when it comes to code completion or graphics (Emacs tends to use ASCII art where others use a proper tree-view). The GUI of Emacs is basically non-existant and the default configuration just sucks in many parts. So if you are already familiar with something else and have your workflow worked out, there is little need to switch, but if you are searching for an editor that basically solves every editing problem you will ever have, isn't tided to a single programming language and extremly customizable, even so it has some rough edges here and there, Emacs is quite a good choice.
There is really little that comes close to Emacs as a whole, but when you see each part of it on its own its often possible to find better alternatives.
### Emacs also comes with a built-in tutorial that is a good interactive introduction to Emacs.
It not only comes with a tutorial, the editor itself is completly self-documenting.
Don't know what a key combo means: 'C-h k' then enter the combo Don't know what a function means: 'C-h f' then the function name Don't know whats available: 'C-h a' to search through all commands Wanna know what other commands are hiding behind 'C-x...': 'C-x C-h' to get a list
All the stuff you get as results is hyperlinked and Emacs even allows you to let you click through all that docu down the the actual line of source that performs the function. This self-documentation is something that I miss in almost every other app that is around these days and shows that Emacs, for all its problems, is still quite a few years ahead in some areas bejoint other 'state of the art' applications that people use these days.
Ironically with the apearance of kedit, gedit, eclipse and friends, Emacs is now actually one of the *fastest* starting editors on my system. That however tells little about the speed of Emacs and more about the slowness of the rest...
### Are there really people out there who look at a video game controller and say "oh my god, that's so scary, I cannot possibly fathom it! run away!!"
Sort answer? Yes. There are actually people on this planet that want to have fun while playing video games and want to have that instantly, not after 10 hours getting used to the controller. Heck, even myself, with a good solid 20 years of computer and video gaming, needed a few hours to get adopted to the XBox controller, and I am still pressing the wrong buttons every now and then (bad, bad analog-stick-click buttons).
Just look in an arcade, are all those people incapable of playing video games? Hell, no, they are just playing them, but they play different kinds of games then the guy who is sitting at home infront of his XBox or PS2.
### No one is forcing anything on you. I think the fact that you have to put some attention to what you code is actually a feature, not a bug.
Of course Python is forcing me todo the indention, without indention a Python programm simply can't work, a C programm however can. Anyway, the point is that restructuring a Python programm is made *A LOT* harder by the fact that the structure is lost on every copy&paste operation that goes into a different block level, any language that has explicit begin/end block marker has absolutly zero problems with it.
### Just give Python a try and see by yourself if the benefits outweigh (or not) this "downside".
Thanks, but I already moved to Ruby. Python is a language that looks pretty when not looking close at it, but I found working with it extremly annoying, since far to often it made the job harder not easier.
### The fact that the same information is being represented in two ways-- as the brace structure, and as the indentation-- is the problem that auto-indenters are designed to solve. This problem does not exist in python.
True, that problem doesn't exist in Python, the problem that exist in Python however is *FAR* worse. While code that gets crudly copy&pasted into C might not look pretty, its easily fixed with a single button press, code that gets crudly copied in Python actually does break and does the *wrong* thing and one has to manually fix it and one has to notice it in the first place.
I have really done little in programming that is more painfull then refactoring in Python, since one constantly breaks code all over the place, which in other languages simply doesn't happen.
The throuble is that Python represents its structure in form that is constantly broken by routine operations (copy&paste, search&replace,...) in a text editors, none-whitespace language on the other side have a structure that is extremly robust against those same operation and basically impossible to break.
Hm, SuperCard is 60$, SuperPass is 20$ and you need a SD or CF-Card in addition and even with all that you have a whole bunch of oversized cards sticking out of the DS, neither cheap nor easy in my book.
PSP on the other side looks better, home-brewn stuff works out of the box via memstick when you have the right firmware, no need for additional modules or hacks. Plus its quite a bit faster then DS and allows SNES games at full speed from what I heard.
But in the end neither of them are really good for homebrew stuff, since the manufactors try their best to make it hard.
### I don't get it, why does it seem so many alt-os projects are forever trying to emulate the look and feel of a Windows environment?
Because its a lot easier to get contributors that way. When I write a new app its a heck of a lot easire to I say "Here look at Photoshop, something like that we will do", then to try to explain some revolutionary new concept which nobody has heard before, let alone that nobody can yet tell if it will work in the end. You might not like that, neither do I, but its the way it is.
Yes, I know, I however think it might have been possible to make a one-size-fits-all controller, so that one wouldn't need to have two controllers around. When it comes to keeping things simple, I consider different controllers for different things not exactly a good thing, especially when they still share a lot of similarities.
The new controller looks nice and all for new games, but given that the Revolution is also meant for retro gaming I am quite a bit disapointed. The new controller seems only able to play NES games and even for those it looks rather arkward due to its different thickness on both ends. For SNES, N64 and Gamecube games it simply lacks the required buttons, even with the AnalogStick add-on, which would mean one would basically have to fall back to the Gamecube controller for those games.
I kind of think that having a Gamecube-like controller broken up into two pieces would have been the better idea.
Even with the Analog Stick you would still lack a hell of a lot of buttons compared to the other controllers, when my counting is correct there are only four buttons usefull for action on the controller, while PS3 and XBox360 have 8 or 10.
### Demonstrated by the fact the controller has to support Gamecube games.
Where is demonstrated that the controller supports Gamecube games? It might be possible to refit some games to it, but as far as I can see thats it, the Revolution has Gamecube controller ports for a reason I guess. SNES and N64 games don't seem to be playable with this controller either.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other side the lack of content control is what made the C64, Amiga and last not least the PC extremly popular.
### Of course, there's always games that can only work in 3D but look crappy because of tech (read: Starfox).
Interesting that you mention it, I consider the original StarFox(SNES) still to be the best looking game of the series, the enemy design is cool especially because the 3d power was extremly limited in that day. They created some great looking extremly-low polygon models there. The other games in the series on the other side with their more realistic models just can't keep up with the originality of the first one. That said I wouldn't mind a Starfox that would run at constant 60fps and at a better resolution, but if I could chose between the untextured 3d models of the SNES and those of the later games, I'd always pick the SNES ones, they simply looked a hell of a lot more interesting.
The throuble is that still to many deveolpers go for a realistic look when it comes to textures and lighting, while a more minimalistic look can often look a lot more interesting.
Metacity already does that, it was one of the reason why I switched away from Sawfish, since that one never got the windows positioned where I left them.
I agree that there are too many sequels and what is worse those sequels are coming out *way* to quickly. I don't mind getting a new Mario every five years, heck Gameboy hadn't had a new Mario for around 12 years, but when a sequels comes out even before I made it trough the predecessor things are really going wrong.
Anyway, the list of games you give is quite a bit off: ResidentEvil4 is a completly different game from ResidentEvil3 or any of the other former ResidentEvil titles, different controls, different settings, completly different gameplay, story doesn't connect to the previous games, its now an action game where it before was an horror adventure game. PaperMario2 on the other side is the same as PaperMario, higher resolution and new story aside. FireEmblem is a port of an old NES game, so is Metroid Zero Mission (beside Prime the series hasn't changed at all since SuperMetroid), DeusEx2 is just a flawed successor of the briliant DeusEx. And while Prime and Pikmin might have been fresh, they got a successor quickly after the original release. And some of the other games you list also have a '2' in their name... Well, I guess you are right that there are too many successors, since half the game you list as 'fresh' are successors of previous titles...
### OSS is never going to win in the long run because developers have families to support and will not slit the throat of the goose that lays the golden eggs
I agree with you that OpenSource isn't the magic-bullet that many people claim it is, especially 'OpenSource' as a business model is basically suicide, however in the long run OpenSource will win. Sure, some OpenSource programmers might turn into ClosedSource programmers because they need the money, but for each one that leaves you get a new one jumping in. OpenSource progress is always happening, it might be extremly slow at times, but many OpenSource software has already aproached a point of simply being 'good enough' and once there it will start to put commercial developers out of business, if they want or not. Office tools, browser and such are basically done these days, sure there are still new features implemented every now and then, but the differences between them is so small that most people won't even notice, so people will use whichever is the cheapest, which will be the OpenSource one. There is of course software on the market that requires constant redevelopment, extremest example would be games, which OpenSource has a hard time to follow, but normal 'software in boxes' won't have that much of a future if you can get the same for free. The joy of OpenSource is that once release it will stay free *forever*, meaning you can't remove it from the market no matter what you try, if it is popular enough it will find new deveolpers sooner or later.
### What I wanted was essentially a GBA with a properly backlit large screen and with a SNES style control layout
Buy a DS, it still supports all the GBA games and if you want buy a flashcard in addition, which allows you to play original GB games as well, there is even a SNES emulator for the GBA which runs at basically 100% of the original speed as far as I can tell, its however still rather buggy and doesn't play much games, but as a proof-of-concept its quite impressive.
### Or ls, cp, rm, mkdir, cat, sort, ... ? Or make, tar, emacs, ... ? These are all GNU products.
One problem with these tools is that they haven't evolved much at all in the last years. GNU has added a bunch of additional options to the tools back then compared to the commercial Unixes which made those tools popular, however that seems to have stopped long ago and all those tools are now still completly text-based, disconnected from all the progress that has been made in other areas. I wish GNU would move a little bit with the times and adopt some more advanced OO-based way of handling command line tools, options to output XML instead of just plain text, something along the lines of XMLterm. If GNU would do that, maybe people would have a easier time recognizing that they are important and making progress, today GNU simply seems to much a thing of the past.
### Why? Consider a very simple test: Take your "Apache/Samba/KDE/Xorg/GNU/Linux" system and try ripping out each of the named components.
That is a very bogus argument, when I remove my Athlon Processor my system doesn't boot either, that however doesn't mean that I start calling by OS 'Athlon', same for Bios, Grub and other stuff. When you want to play the game that way you have to do it the other way around, ie. which components can I replace without noticing. I can replace my Athlon with a Pentium, still boots, my Grub can be replaced with Lilo, still boots, Linux and GNU can be replaced with FreeBSD, Busybox or some other Unix, still everything fine and I won't even notice till I run 'uname'. Xorgs can be replaced with a old copy of XFree86, might still work, but replacing KDE with TWM makes it kind of obvious that things changed. Linux and GNU are just implementation details which the normal user won't even notice, yes they are important core parts, but parts which are hidden deep down below. So saying "I run GNU/Linux" is ultimativly not really very meaningfull in most situations and saying "I run Debian GNU/Linux" on the other side actually has some usefull information in it, same with "I run KDE". Just saying "I run Linux" is fine with me too, since Linux has become a general buzzword for all OpenSource stuff.
### GNU is the operating system. It is the environment in which the Linux user lives.
Sorry, but that is simply wrong. The environment in which Linux users live in these days is KDE, Gnome or Fluxbox or whatever, there might be a few 'command-line hippies' left that use a 'true' GNU environment, but for the majority the GNU stuff simply is a non-issue, an implementation detail hidden somewhere deep down below which you could switch to BSD Userland and hardly anybody would ever notice it. Even GCC is no longer maintained by GNU people and the C++ parts of it didn't origin from GNU either as far as I know. So calling the OS which people use GNU is equally wrong to calling it 'Linux', to make it correct you might wanna call it Linux/GNU/Xorg/KDE/Samba/Apache or simply call it by the name of the distribution as the paper suggested.
### RMS and Co. finally addressed the "weakness" I once wondered about in the existing GPL: how strictly does one define "linking" in this age of webservices.
ACK, I agree the real weak spot of the GPL is the 'linking' stuff. The problem is that the whole license is heavily tweaked towards C programms, as soon as you go to more dynamic programming languages, scripting language or bash scripts the whole thing becomes rather unclear, since no C-like linking is ever performed there, unless those languages byte-compile, which again makes the thing even more complicated, same of course with web-services and other uses that happen without 'real' linking.
### but Sony, please, please, just let us run our homebrew apps.
ACK, especially since the piracy argument is pretty much void, I mean a 1GB memory stick costs around 100EUR, I can get two original games for that price and it might not even enough to hold a single complete game. So to make it work you either need to limit yourself to those games that don't use much diskspace or cutout the cutscenes and other space consuming stuff. So piracy might still be there, but its really far less attractive then say for the PS1 where a 20cent CDR will do for a complete game, so I can hardly see how it should be a big problem on the larger scale.
### So where is the innovation?
Comparing it to Lemmings is a bit of a stretch, but yes, it has been done before, namely in PrinceOfPersia and AnotherWorld/OutOfThisWorld, Ico just put a pretty similar gameplay into 3D. So Ico didn't actually invent anything totally new, but on the other side I have a very hard time finding a game beside AnotherWorld/OutofThisWorld that gets close to Ico, the complete lack of HUD, a story told without the use normal language, the extremly dense athmosphere, etc. It has been done before, but only like once or twice in the last 15 years and never in 3D as far as I remember, enough for me to call it innovative, even so it was more of a rebirth, then a new invention.
Beside from that there are two key components that Ico had, that I haven't seen before in games. First of the lighting, no idea if it was real HDR rendering or some form of faked-HDR, but I have never before seen in a game such beautifull sunshine.
Second part is the girl, while other games before had buddies before, very few integrated them into the gameplay so well as Ico. Ico might not have invented the 'buddy', but it was one of the first games to make them popular.
### What can you do in Emacs that you can'd do in, for instance, BBEdit?
Emacs can read usenet, run tetris, has type-ahead search, has a buildin 'doctor', has an info reader, send mail, run a shell, read Slashdot and a whole lot of other crazy stuff, this is possible because Emacs at its core is a Lisp-Machine, so its actually quite a bit closer to an simple OS then to just a text editor, so its extremly flexible and extensible, way bejoint the scripting support seen in many other applications.
One of the other nice things of Emacs is that its 100% keyboard driven, every little feature is accessible via the keyboard, be it the file-manager, the mail reader or whatever. Sure, a additional GUI would be nice (the one that is their is extremly primitve and best switched off), but having absolutly everything accessible via keyboard gives quite a nice workflow, since one never has to grab the mouse, unless one wants to.
That said, Emacs isn't perfect, most IDEs have more powerfull features than Emacs when it comes to code completion or graphics (Emacs tends to use ASCII art where others use a proper tree-view). The GUI of Emacs is basically non-existant and the default configuration just sucks in many parts. So if you are already familiar with something else and have your workflow worked out, there is little need to switch, but if you are searching for an editor that basically solves every editing problem you will ever have, isn't tided to a single programming language and extremly customizable, even so it has some rough edges here and there, Emacs is quite a good choice.
There is really little that comes close to Emacs as a whole, but when you see each part of it on its own its often possible to find better alternatives.
### Emacs also comes with a built-in tutorial that is a good interactive introduction to Emacs.
...': 'C-x C-h' to get a list
It not only comes with a tutorial, the editor itself is completly self-documenting.
Don't know what a key combo means: 'C-h k' then enter the combo
Don't know what a function means: 'C-h f' then the function name
Don't know whats available: 'C-h a' to search through all commands
Wanna know what other commands are hiding behind 'C-x
All the stuff you get as results is hyperlinked and Emacs even allows you to let you click through all that docu down the the actual line of source that performs the function. This self-documentation is something that I miss in almost every other app that is around these days and shows that Emacs, for all its problems, is still quite a few years ahead in some areas bejoint other 'state of the art' applications that people use these days.
Ironically with the apearance of kedit, gedit, eclipse and friends, Emacs is now actually one of the *fastest* starting editors on my system. That however tells little about the speed of Emacs and more about the slowness of the rest...
### Are there really people out there who look at a video game controller and say "oh my god, that's so scary, I cannot possibly fathom it! run away!!"
Sort answer? Yes. There are actually people on this planet that want to have fun while playing video games and want to have that instantly, not after 10 hours getting used to the controller. Heck, even myself, with a good solid 20 years of computer and video gaming, needed a few hours to get adopted to the XBox controller, and I am still pressing the wrong buttons every now and then (bad, bad analog-stick-click buttons).
Just look in an arcade, are all those people incapable of playing video games? Hell, no, they are just playing them, but they play different kinds of games then the guy who is sitting at home infront of his XBox or PS2.
### No one is forcing anything on you. I think the fact that you have to put some attention to what you code is actually a feature, not a bug.
Of course Python is forcing me todo the indention, without indention a Python programm simply can't work, a C programm however can. Anyway, the point is that restructuring a Python programm is made *A LOT* harder by the fact that the structure is lost on every copy&paste operation that goes into a different block level, any language that has explicit begin/end block marker has absolutly zero problems with it.
### Just give Python a try and see by yourself if the benefits outweigh (or not) this "downside".
Thanks, but I already moved to Ruby. Python is a language that looks pretty when not looking close at it, but I found working with it extremly annoying, since far to often it made the job harder not easier.
### Any text editor with a featureset larger than notepad.exe's can indent a selected block of code.
Yes, and those editors also have auto-indent, so why does Python force one to those non-automateable indentions in the first place?
### You just have to pay attention to this with python, just like you pay attention to braces in C.
One doesn't have to pay attention to braces, since they don't break with copy&paste.
### The fact that the same information is being represented in two ways-- as the brace structure, and as the indentation-- is the problem that auto-indenters are designed to solve. This problem does not exist in python.
...) in a text editors, none-whitespace language on the other side have a structure that is extremly robust against those same operation and basically impossible to break.
True, that problem doesn't exist in Python, the problem that exist in Python however is *FAR* worse. While code that gets crudly copy&pasted into C might not look pretty, its easily fixed with a single button press, code that gets crudly copied in Python actually does break and does the *wrong* thing and one has to manually fix it and one has to notice it in the first place.
I have really done little in programming that is more painfull then refactoring in Python, since one constantly breaks code all over the place, which in other languages simply doesn't happen.
The throuble is that Python represents its structure in form that is constantly broken by routine operations (copy&paste, search&replace,
Hm, SuperCard is 60$, SuperPass is 20$ and you need a SD or CF-Card in addition and even with all that you have a whole bunch of oversized cards sticking out of the DS, neither cheap nor easy in my book.
PSP on the other side looks better, home-brewn stuff works out of the box via memstick when you have the right firmware, no need for additional modules or hacks. Plus its quite a bit faster then DS and allows SNES games at full speed from what I heard.
But in the end neither of them are really good for homebrew stuff, since the manufactors try their best to make it hard.
### I don't get it, why does it seem so many alt-os projects are forever trying to emulate the look and feel of a Windows environment?
Because its a lot easier to get contributors that way. When I write a new app its a heck of a lot easire to I say "Here look at Photoshop, something like that we will do", then to try to explain some revolutionary new concept which nobody has heard before, let alone that nobody can yet tell if it will work in the end. You might not like that, neither do I, but its the way it is.
Yes, I know, I however think it might have been possible to make a one-size-fits-all controller, so that one wouldn't need to have two controllers around. When it comes to keeping things simple, I consider different controllers for different things not exactly a good thing, especially when they still share a lot of similarities.
The new controller looks nice and all for new games, but given that the Revolution is also meant for retro gaming I am quite a bit disapointed. The new controller seems only able to play NES games and even for those it looks rather arkward due to its different thickness on both ends. For SNES, N64 and Gamecube games it simply lacks the required buttons, even with the AnalogStick add-on, which would mean one would basically have to fall back to the Gamecube controller for those games.
I kind of think that having a Gamecube-like controller broken up into two pieces would have been the better idea.
Even with the Analog Stick you would still lack a hell of a lot of buttons compared to the other controllers, when my counting is correct there are only four buttons usefull for action on the controller, while PS3 and XBox360 have 8 or 10.
### Demonstrated by the fact the controller has to support Gamecube games.
Where is demonstrated that the controller supports Gamecube games? It might be possible to refit some games to it, but as far as I can see thats it, the Revolution has Gamecube controller ports for a reason I guess. SNES and N64 games don't seem to be playable with this controller either.
Right click the tab -> 'Close other Tabs', not idea if Firefox as a shortcut for that.