I buy 200-ish count binders, which hold 8 CD's per page. It's great for music CD's, because I slip the liner notes in behind the CD, giving every CD a specific place.
I do the same for my DVD's and computer CD/CDRs. It's so much less hassle than the cases, takes up less space, and easier to look through than a shoebox.
... which is the reason, I guess, that MS Project is such a joy to use? That we can now be thankful that when Word crashes now it saves a useful recovery document 50% of the time? That Word:Mac v.X is the only non-beta program under OSX that crashes on me more than once a month? (Yes, that's more than the Safari Beta, with Word:Mac at a crash per 7 uses or so.) That Longhorn, scheduled to arrive in 2005, will be implementing features from OSX from 2001, like using a 3D accelerator as a 2D compositing engine, and calling them revolutionary?
I'm an IT guy for a medical company. I spend 90% of my time helping my colleagues work around bugs in Office and related applications. I can't tell you the number of times someone has come to me flustered because their formatting was eaten after deleting a single line, or resizing a table. And is it just me, or did page numbering get more retarded in Office 2K2? Edits not done to sections or page breaks or the header/footer change the numbering? WTF?!
I won't even get into issues of workflow and UI design, aside from saying that Microsoft shot itself in the foot by making the workflow of Word:Mac a thousand times better than Word PC 2K2.
If Microsoft really does have genious coders working for it, they've yet to produce code to their potential.
There are many things to consider when choosing a 3D package. Most of it really comes down to taste and money. I don't much like nurbs or metaballs -- I prefer to have control over a control mesh, so I use polymesh smoothing / subsurface modeling, for which Blender works wonderfully. But you'll need to experiment with many different packages and find what works right for you. Strangely, whatever you first choose will likely end up being your preference, so choose your initial foray wisely.
However, I'm going to advocate Blender whole-heartedly. It's got most of the important features, support for external renderers, and what's more, it's totally cross-platform. I can model on my Mac and render on my unix box while I'm at work. You can't do that with any commercial package I know, not at prices that a hobbiyst will be able to afford.
Further, the community *is* great, and once you get past the hurdle of the UI you'll realize it's really powerful software. Don't believe me? http://membres.lycos.fr/garbager/ That's what can be done with free tools.
Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of devkit advance and start hacking. Many, many success stories of breaking into the industry have been heard from hobbyist hackers who produced a tiny demo showing promise, even on the GBA. You'd be surprised how many 2D game programming techniques translate almost unchanged into the 3D realm. If you're interested in 3D console programming, tho, pick up a dreamcast and get the devkit for that.
On hardware design: I have no idea.
On Japanese: Another big move in the industry is to have localised versions of games come out closer and closer together. Wouldn't it be nice if a game could hit a Japanese market at the same time it hits the American and European ones? This requires knowledge of internationalization practices. Japanese is one of the harder languages to support, programmatically, so building support for it into your games will give you a good grounding and excellent experience. Release a demo that parses and displays UTF8 strings on the gameboy advance. You'll be hired, I guarantee it.*
NTT DoCoMo did something like this using their cell phones a while back... I don't know if it was IR based, though, but a number of people adopted the ability to use a cell phone to pay at convenience stores, etc.
My issue would be with IR signal jacking. Ever changed the channel on your tv by aiming the remote away from it and into a mirror? What's to stop someone from using an IR sniffer device, to pick up random reflected transmissions?
An oft-overlooked game on GC is Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. If you see it, grab it. It's what every incarnation of Resident Evil should have been, and what's more, it has tolerable voice acting!
If you like puzzle games, GC's Super Monkey Ball (1, not 2) is great. 2 is more stunt- and multiplayer-centric, which prolly won't appeal to you unless you're also throwing a large party while your wife is gone. ^_^;;
On PC/Mac I've always liked the Civilization games, and Civ III isn't bad, though FreeCiv (freeciv.org) is cool if you don't mind monkeying around to get it working. It's got a good learning curve tho, so it's not really a pick-up-and-play. If you have a Mac handy, iConquer (http://homepage.mac.com/azc/iConquer/) is really cool, and easy to pick up and put down.
On PS2, I'm gonna start a flamewar by suggesting Ridge Racer V. I enjoyed it a lot, even though it's very limited in scope and a lot of people / reviewers said it blew.
On XBox, don't take the Splinter Cell hype at face value, and Halo's only good multiplayer; the second half of the game sees you revisiting all the levels you just finished, but backwards, basically. It's amazing up until that point. A better bet for a simple weekend treat would be the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game. A good beat-em-up, and besides, you get to use pool cues as weapons.
On gameboy advance: Advance Wars (I or II). That'll keep you busy for the rest of your mortal life. ^_^;; If you don't mind the translating, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (currently only available on import from Japan) is incredible, though difficult.... and I'm spent.
Project Builder does have templates for console applications, and if you don't use cocoa (IE, stick to libc and posix libs) the resulting code is quite portable to a regular unix system (although you'll have to write your own makefile).
The best part about it is that PB can be extended with new templates, including console program templates. I'm sure someone out there has already created a few and released them as a free download. You may need to spend some time developing console templates for separate "RAD" tasks, but in the end it'd save you a lot of time.
I find it funny that AOL and MSN are fighting e-mail based spam, when using their clients to connect to the internet pops up more spam windows than anywhere else. Hell, you have to dismiss ads on AOL just to sign off.
Not that that bothers me. I dialup through earthlink. ^_^;;
Well, I can't honestly say I'd pay for such a service, but even being able to do simple regex stuff like "There.*gun and gunshot.*who shot who" would be nice. I find that most of my regexp searches, even in grep, are just looking for parts of a sentence or code block using.* .
However, the above comment on how most people wouldn't be using regex in your engine is a valid one. You'd prolly want to pass off non-regex searches to a more suited engine (ie google), while handling the real searches yourself. Also, the idea of starting small -- like indexing the library of congress, gutenberg, about.com -- may be best. Then you'll have a good idea of the load of searching them alone. Kind of a test run.
The spam thing above is interesting too. I can't admit to totally understanding it (I have to write each regex I do looking in a book; they're just not second nature to me), but what would happen if someone wrote one that takes both normal e-mail addresses and spamfiltered ones (dookie at 3drealms dot org)? Google is pretty good on a lot of things about not censoring content (china's issues aside -- I said pretty good, not perfect), so if you were going to make a search engine like this you'd have to be okay with the level of power you'll be giving to both good citizens and the rest.
Did anyone else notice that Linux DRM is very much opt-in? You may not be able to read signed documents or listen to signed mp3's, but the world's functioned without up until this point just fine. If you don't like DRM, recompile the kernel with DRM removed.
Anyway, everyone's pretty much mentioned the important stuff, but they left out Ableton Live. A pal of mine owns a license, and lets me play with it from time to time. Great little software package, and I hear it interfaces with the Propellerheads' Reason, though neither of us own Reason so I couldn't speak on the usefulness of that.
Also, search for Deck and Peak. They come in LE versions, for $99 at the Apple store (or cheaper online, if you dare to Google); while a lot of people will downtalk the LE versions (and I know you did ask about pro software), if budget is a consideration the LE versions work just fine.
The only time my OS X machines crash is when I'm connected to windows shares. Isn't that neat?
I just hate how the security patches kill my uptime. 5 days 18:04 since I last rebooted on my iBook, and I think that was the last security patch, too.
I recommend buying one when you can afford it. I own two iBooks, one of which is fairly new, but on the old one I got an extended warranty for peace of mind. I'll get one on the new powerbook when it's normal year is about up.
If you've ever had to get a screen fixed under a normal warranty or have a hard drive replaced *and* recover the data on it, you'll find the extension invaluable. Heck, I even bought one for my game cube, and wouldn't you know it -- it stopped reading discs after the 90 days were up on the normal one.
However, I'd say on about 90% of the things I buy, when I get an extended warranty I don't use it. On a regular PC it's basically worthless because you can swap out broken parts for a lot cheaper (like my franken redhat box -- it's made from so many pieces you'd never recognize it).
I don't mind telling you that I use Bash under linux, but before I found out about fink on mac os x I used the default tcsh, and hey -- it's great. It's actually become my preference. This may sound strange, but little things like the way it handles environment variables is what cinched it for me.
The other thing most people forget about vietnam is that people living today are still suffering for our involvement there -- half-american kids left behind when men went home to their "real" wives, people crippled for life by crossfire or leftover bombs / land mines.
I too hope the war will be over soon, but... for starters, the US ground troops are outnumbered currently, and regardless of our technical superiority (which is being touted, but not displayed), Hussein must have something up his sleeve to be so blatantly brazen in his refusal to flee. Also, there were statements made not five minutes after the first attack saying the war would take longer than projected. I suppose that's what happens when projection include "mass enemy defections."
Bosnia and Afghanistan aside, there are some other important things to consider here:
- Iraq is in a strategically important place. It supplies 2% of the world's total oil, but the surrounding region supplies 25%. Also important to note right now is that many fuel cell projects and the electric car project have been recently abandoned.
- The current attack is unilateral, and technically still illegal. By participating in the UN the US agreed to be bound by their mandates, and the UN has as yet not agreed on the use of force. Nobody's really standing up to the US because everybody's afraid of the bully.
- America may be the "land of the free," but the President came on TV and said that he wouldn't listen to the cries of the protesters. Hmm... people speak out, and he acknowledges it and ignores it? Very democratic.
- There are a few other strange things so far. Like Bush labeling his war against Terrorism a "Crusade" and offending the Arab world. Like Bush calling this war a holy war, and praising god each time he speaks, when the US is supposed to have a distinct separation of church and state. (He also specifically started offering more money to faith-based NGO's for support in other countries, for no real reason.) Like the use of the term Blitzkrieg to describe strikes in the gulf after being compared to Hitler by that german politican.
Firstly, I will say in Microsoft's defense that the only thing they ever did right was the original Sidewinder joypad. I used it for years with win games, dos games, and emulators -- worked perfectly with all.
A standard gaming controller, distributed with new PC's, is not a bad thing. The keyboard and mouse are great for FPS games, but any time things go over the shoulder or oldschool platformer the keyboard/mouse combo tends to lack. Wanna know why the PC didn't get a port of Sly Cooper, or something equally fun? It's not just that Sony ownz it for the forseeable future -- the PC market has been overloaded with RTS and FPS games because that's really all it's good at with its controller set. Add in a standard gamepad which all developers could count on in the same way you can cound on a keyboard to have 80+ keys (laptops) and a mouse to have 2 buttons, and suddenly I think we'd be seeing a lot more platformer / puzzler / fighting games on PC again. When you think about it, who else but Microsoft has the power in the PC industry to throw something like this together?
As for "levels"... I don't like the idea of Microsoft implementing them, but I think they'd be a good thing. The largest problem in PC gaming is the fact that developers never have time to get used to a select set of specs before the next set comes out and gamers are clamoring for games that use the latest and greatest hardware. Look at UT2K3. Does it play any better, really, than UT? Not really. Could the same gameplay have been squeezed out of lesser hardware? Most certainly. Why didn't the developers try to fit more graphics into lesser hardware with more clever optimizations and geometry? Because they didn't have to. The reason Conker's Bad Fur Day on the N64 looked like a Dreamcast game was because the developers had been working with the hardware for 5 years, and knew exactly how to squeeze that last bit of power out of it.
Levels on a PC would do the same. If a developer knows exactly how much power a PC is going to have, they don't have to worry about whether or not their pretty particle engine will make the game drop frames on your machine -- they just boot up their own level XX machine and test. If a bunch of people out there have Level 1 PC's, chances are there will be a lot of Level 1 games produced for that demographic, and as many people don't go out and upgrade all the time, it'd be safe to assume that the Level 1 Demographic would be around for at least a couple of years, not unlike a standard console.
Then again, what do I care? Warcraft III plays great on my iBook, my Redhat PC's in parts, and for real gaming I hit up my Game Cube.
After reading Ringworld when I was young, and discovering there was a PC game out, I rushed to the store with parents in tow to pick it up. I have to say I was horribly disappointed; good adventure games were hard to find, but this one really didn't do either the genre or your books justice. Why, do you think, a universe as rich as what you've created has been so hard pressed to produce a truly good game? What did you think of the Ringworld PC game after its release?
It'd be trivial to bind a command to a key that allows the bookmarking of a file (ie, saving of a line number to.#filename or some such), and another jump-to-bookmark function as well. Heck, if you were feeling particularly l33t, you could extend normal text mode to do it for you (ebook-find-file automatically jumping to bookmarked line). As for fonts, it's quite simple to either change the fonts in XEmacs or (as I prefer) simply up the font size on your terminal emulator.
The nice part about emacs is that you can also write a quick script to remove useless text, like the license stuff at the beginning, since most of it is standard cut-and-paste. Not that you'd want to distribute such an edited copy, but for your own personal use. Plus, it's not like you have to go download emacs from some site...
I actually have two iBooks, one running pure OS X and one running Yellowdog. Let me tell you, Yellowdog on an iBook is a sweet thing. When it comes down to it, you want a full-featured laptop that's easy on the wallet. That R505 vaio is cute, but the screen's tiny and it uses an external CD drive. On top of that, regardless of what the specs say its battery life is only about 3-3.5 hours. The iBooks I have get an average of 4 hours per full charge (I get damned close to five if I'm careful, sometimes).
On top of that, the apple hardware is, as many other slashdotters have mentioned, pretty high quality. I bought my first iBook because a friend of mine accidentally shoved his out of a second story window. The battery shot out, but he put it back in and, aside from a few scratches on the case, it worked fine. Plus, you can find a dual-usb with firewire ibook for under a thou these days, with a CDRW if you're lucky. The emperorlinux guys are selling machines for twice that without a removable media drive.
Also, the thing about Mac Linux being closer to the hardware is true. Unlike installing Redhat on my PC, I didn't have to screw around with source tarballs to get my hardware to work. Just a thought if you like things to be easy.
I've found the best places to look are on sites for RPG engines, like Verge. Generally there are links to sites with literally oodles of tile banks. You may also want to try DIV Arena and, of course, the Freecraft and FreeCiv projects, both of which offer free art assets.
Hope this helps. Oh, done a google for SpriteLib lately? Or Ari Feldman?
I don't know how much you're willing to spend, but the current entry-level titanium powerbook G4 supports 1Gig of ram, and they were running a promotion where if you buy it you can get double ram for 40$ more. If you don't like mac os x you can install yellowdog linux or any of the other ppc-happy linux distros. Someone above mentioned $2000 for a toshiba, and what I'm talking about will run you $2300 (about). Does that break the bank?
I didn't see anything there saying that you use or particularly enjoy MSN Messenger, do you? Personally, I hate it. All M$ programs end up linking into its shared libs for some odd reason, meaning that if it or IE or explorer go down, the ship goes down.
Copy and paste this into your "Run..." :
RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove
Make sure Messenger is not running first, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
I buy 200-ish count binders, which hold 8 CD's per page. It's great for music CD's, because I slip the liner notes in behind the CD, giving every CD a specific place.
I do the same for my DVD's and computer CD/CDRs. It's so much less hassle than the cases, takes up less space, and easier to look through than a shoebox.
... which is the reason, I guess, that MS Project is such a joy to use? That we can now be thankful that when Word crashes now it saves a useful recovery document 50% of the time? That Word:Mac v.X is the only non-beta program under OSX that crashes on me more than once a month? (Yes, that's more than the Safari Beta, with Word:Mac at a crash per 7 uses or so.) That Longhorn, scheduled to arrive in 2005, will be implementing features from OSX from 2001, like using a 3D accelerator as a 2D compositing engine, and calling them revolutionary?
I'm an IT guy for a medical company. I spend 90% of my time helping my colleagues work around bugs in Office and related applications. I can't tell you the number of times someone has come to me flustered because their formatting was eaten after deleting a single line, or resizing a table. And is it just me, or did page numbering get more retarded in Office 2K2? Edits not done to sections or page breaks or the header/footer change the numbering? WTF?!
I won't even get into issues of workflow and UI design, aside from saying that Microsoft shot itself in the foot by making the workflow of Word:Mac a thousand times better than Word PC 2K2.
If Microsoft really does have genious coders working for it, they've yet to produce code to their potential.
I'm going to lay it to you straight.
There are many things to consider when choosing a 3D package. Most of it really comes down to taste and money. I don't much like nurbs or metaballs -- I prefer to have control over a control mesh, so I use polymesh smoothing / subsurface modeling, for which Blender works wonderfully. But you'll need to experiment with many different packages and find what works right for you. Strangely, whatever you first choose will likely end up being your preference, so choose your initial foray wisely.
However, I'm going to advocate Blender whole-heartedly. It's got most of the important features, support for external renderers, and what's more, it's totally cross-platform. I can model on my Mac and render on my unix box while I'm at work. You can't do that with any commercial package I know, not at prices that a hobbiyst will be able to afford.
Further, the community *is* great, and once you get past the hurdle of the UI you'll realize it's really powerful software. Don't believe me? http://membres.lycos.fr/garbager/ That's what can be done with free tools.
Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of devkit advance and start hacking. Many, many success stories of breaking into the industry have been heard from hobbyist hackers who produced a tiny demo showing promise, even on the GBA. You'd be surprised how many 2D game programming techniques translate almost unchanged into the 3D realm. If you're interested in 3D console programming, tho, pick up a dreamcast and get the devkit for that.
On hardware design: I have no idea.
On Japanese: Another big move in the industry is to have localised versions of games come out closer and closer together. Wouldn't it be nice if a game could hit a Japanese market at the same time it hits the American and European ones? This requires knowledge of internationalization practices. Japanese is one of the harder languages to support, programmatically, so building support for it into your games will give you a good grounding and excellent experience. Release a demo that parses and displays UTF8 strings on the gameboy advance. You'll be hired, I guarantee it.*
(* not a guarantee.)
NTT DoCoMo did something like this using their cell phones a while back... I don't know if it was IR based, though, but a number of people adopted the ability to use a cell phone to pay at convenience stores, etc.
My issue would be with IR signal jacking. Ever changed the channel on your tv by aiming the remote away from it and into a mirror? What's to stop someone from using an IR sniffer device, to pick up random reflected transmissions?
An oft-overlooked game on GC is Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. If you see it, grab it. It's what every incarnation of Resident Evil should have been, and what's more, it has tolerable voice acting! If you like puzzle games, GC's Super Monkey Ball (1, not 2) is great. 2 is more stunt- and multiplayer-centric, which prolly won't appeal to you unless you're also throwing a large party while your wife is gone. ^_^;; On PC/Mac I've always liked the Civilization games, and Civ III isn't bad, though FreeCiv (freeciv.org) is cool if you don't mind monkeying around to get it working. It's got a good learning curve tho, so it's not really a pick-up-and-play. If you have a Mac handy, iConquer (http://homepage.mac.com/azc/iConquer/) is really cool, and easy to pick up and put down. On PS2, I'm gonna start a flamewar by suggesting Ridge Racer V. I enjoyed it a lot, even though it's very limited in scope and a lot of people / reviewers said it blew. On XBox, don't take the Splinter Cell hype at face value, and Halo's only good multiplayer; the second half of the game sees you revisiting all the levels you just finished, but backwards, basically. It's amazing up until that point. A better bet for a simple weekend treat would be the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game. A good beat-em-up, and besides, you get to use pool cues as weapons. On gameboy advance: Advance Wars (I or II). That'll keep you busy for the rest of your mortal life. ^_^;; If you don't mind the translating, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (currently only available on import from Japan) is incredible, though difficult. ... and I'm spent.
I hate their new clickthroughs. If you add ?fromint=1 to any IGN URL, there's no clickthrough. Please remember this when linking to IGN.
Actually, this isn't far off...
Project Builder does have templates for console applications, and if you don't use cocoa (IE, stick to libc and posix libs) the resulting code is quite portable to a regular unix system (although you'll have to write your own makefile).
The best part about it is that PB can be extended with new templates, including console program templates. I'm sure someone out there has already created a few and released them as a free download. You may need to spend some time developing console templates for separate "RAD" tasks, but in the end it'd save you a lot of time.
I find it funny that AOL and MSN are fighting e-mail based spam, when using their clients to connect to the internet pops up more spam windows than anywhere else. Hell, you have to dismiss ads on AOL just to sign off.
Not that that bothers me. I dialup through earthlink. ^_^;;
Well, I can't honestly say I'd pay for such a service, but even being able to do simple regex stuff like "There.*gun and gunshot.*who shot who" would be nice. I find that most of my regexp searches, even in grep, are just looking for parts of a sentence or code block using .* .
However, the above comment on how most people wouldn't be using regex in your engine is a valid one. You'd prolly want to pass off non-regex searches to a more suited engine (ie google), while handling the real searches yourself. Also, the idea of starting small -- like indexing the library of congress, gutenberg, about.com -- may be best. Then you'll have a good idea of the load of searching them alone. Kind of a test run.
The spam thing above is interesting too. I can't admit to totally understanding it (I have to write each regex I do looking in a book; they're just not second nature to me), but what would happen if someone wrote one that takes both normal e-mail addresses and spamfiltered ones (dookie at 3drealms dot org)? Google is pretty good on a lot of things about not censoring content (china's issues aside -- I said pretty good, not perfect), so if you were going to make a search engine like this you'd have to be okay with the level of power you'll be giving to both good citizens and the rest.
Did anyone else notice that Linux DRM is very much opt-in? You may not be able to read signed documents or listen to signed mp3's, but the world's functioned without up until this point just fine. If you don't like DRM, recompile the kernel with DRM removed.
So many audio people, so little mac.
Anyway, everyone's pretty much mentioned the important stuff, but they left out Ableton Live. A pal of mine owns a license, and lets me play with it from time to time. Great little software package, and I hear it interfaces with the Propellerheads' Reason, though neither of us own Reason so I couldn't speak on the usefulness of that.
Also, search for Deck and Peak. They come in LE versions, for $99 at the Apple store (or cheaper online, if you dare to Google); while a lot of people will downtalk the LE versions (and I know you did ask about pro software), if budget is a consideration the LE versions work just fine.
The only time my OS X machines crash is when I'm connected to windows shares. Isn't that neat?
I just hate how the security patches kill my uptime. 5 days 18:04 since I last rebooted on my iBook, and I think that was the last security patch, too.
I recommend buying one when you can afford it. I own two iBooks, one of which is fairly new, but on the old one I got an extended warranty for peace of mind. I'll get one on the new powerbook when it's normal year is about up.
If you've ever had to get a screen fixed under a normal warranty or have a hard drive replaced *and* recover the data on it, you'll find the extension invaluable. Heck, I even bought one for my game cube, and wouldn't you know it -- it stopped reading discs after the 90 days were up on the normal one.
However, I'd say on about 90% of the things I buy, when I get an extended warranty I don't use it. On a regular PC it's basically worthless because you can swap out broken parts for a lot cheaper (like my franken redhat box -- it's made from so many pieces you'd never recognize it).
I don't mind telling you that I use Bash under linux, but before I found out about fink on mac os x I used the default tcsh, and hey -- it's great. It's actually become my preference. This may sound strange, but little things like the way it handles environment variables is what cinched it for me.
The other thing most people forget about vietnam is that people living today are still suffering for our involvement there -- half-american kids left behind when men went home to their "real" wives, people crippled for life by crossfire or leftover bombs / land mines.
I too hope the war will be over soon, but... for starters, the US ground troops are outnumbered currently, and regardless of our technical superiority (which is being touted, but not displayed), Hussein must have something up his sleeve to be so blatantly brazen in his refusal to flee. Also, there were statements made not five minutes after the first attack saying the war would take longer than projected. I suppose that's what happens when projection include "mass enemy defections."
Bosnia and Afghanistan aside, there are some other important things to consider here:
- Iraq is in a strategically important place. It supplies 2% of the world's total oil, but the surrounding region supplies 25%. Also important to note right now is that many fuel cell projects and the electric car project have been recently abandoned.
- The current attack is unilateral, and technically still illegal. By participating in the UN the US agreed to be bound by their mandates, and the UN has as yet not agreed on the use of force. Nobody's really standing up to the US because everybody's afraid of the bully.
- America may be the "land of the free," but the President came on TV and said that he wouldn't listen to the cries of the protesters. Hmm... people speak out, and he acknowledges it and ignores it? Very democratic.
- There are a few other strange things so far. Like Bush labeling his war against Terrorism a "Crusade" and offending the Arab world. Like Bush calling this war a holy war, and praising god each time he speaks, when the US is supposed to have a distinct separation of church and state. (He also specifically started offering more money to faith-based NGO's for support in other countries, for no real reason.) Like the use of the term Blitzkrieg to describe strikes in the gulf after being compared to Hitler by that german politican.
Firstly, I will say in Microsoft's defense that the only thing they ever did right was the original Sidewinder joypad. I used it for years with win games, dos games, and emulators -- worked perfectly with all.
A standard gaming controller, distributed with new PC's, is not a bad thing. The keyboard and mouse are great for FPS games, but any time things go over the shoulder or oldschool platformer the keyboard/mouse combo tends to lack. Wanna know why the PC didn't get a port of Sly Cooper, or something equally fun? It's not just that Sony ownz it for the forseeable future -- the PC market has been overloaded with RTS and FPS games because that's really all it's good at with its controller set. Add in a standard gamepad which all developers could count on in the same way you can cound on a keyboard to have 80+ keys (laptops) and a mouse to have 2 buttons, and suddenly I think we'd be seeing a lot more platformer / puzzler / fighting games on PC again. When you think about it, who else but Microsoft has the power in the PC industry to throw something like this together?
As for "levels"... I don't like the idea of Microsoft implementing them, but I think they'd be a good thing. The largest problem in PC gaming is the fact that developers never have time to get used to a select set of specs before the next set comes out and gamers are clamoring for games that use the latest and greatest hardware. Look at UT2K3. Does it play any better, really, than UT? Not really. Could the same gameplay have been squeezed out of lesser hardware? Most certainly. Why didn't the developers try to fit more graphics into lesser hardware with more clever optimizations and geometry? Because they didn't have to. The reason Conker's Bad Fur Day on the N64 looked like a Dreamcast game was because the developers had been working with the hardware for 5 years, and knew exactly how to squeeze that last bit of power out of it.
Levels on a PC would do the same. If a developer knows exactly how much power a PC is going to have, they don't have to worry about whether or not their pretty particle engine will make the game drop frames on your machine -- they just boot up their own level XX machine and test. If a bunch of people out there have Level 1 PC's, chances are there will be a lot of Level 1 games produced for that demographic, and as many people don't go out and upgrade all the time, it'd be safe to assume that the Level 1 Demographic would be around for at least a couple of years, not unlike a standard console.
Then again, what do I care? Warcraft III plays great on my iBook, my Redhat PC's in parts, and for real gaming I hit up my Game Cube.
Audacity is pretty good, and for linux too. Can't believe it missed the cut.
Hello,
After reading Ringworld when I was young, and discovering there was a PC game out, I rushed to the store with parents in tow to pick it up. I have to say I was horribly disappointed; good adventure games were hard to find, but this one really didn't do either the genre or your books justice. Why, do you think, a universe as rich as what you've created has been so hard pressed to produce a truly good game? What did you think of the Ringworld PC game after its release?
Why does this strike me as the American answer to Di Gi Charat?
Someone already mentioned Emacs, but...
It'd be trivial to bind a command to a key that allows the bookmarking of a file (ie, saving of a line number to .#filename or some such), and another jump-to-bookmark function as well. Heck, if you were feeling particularly l33t, you could extend normal text mode to do it for you (ebook-find-file automatically jumping to bookmarked line). As for fonts, it's quite simple to either change the fonts in XEmacs or (as I prefer) simply up the font size on your terminal emulator.
The nice part about emacs is that you can also write a quick script to remove useless text, like the license stuff at the beginning, since most of it is standard cut-and-paste. Not that you'd want to distribute such an edited copy, but for your own personal use. Plus, it's not like you have to go download emacs from some site...
I actually have two iBooks, one running pure OS X and one running Yellowdog. Let me tell you, Yellowdog on an iBook is a sweet thing. When it comes down to it, you want a full-featured laptop that's easy on the wallet. That R505 vaio is cute, but the screen's tiny and it uses an external CD drive. On top of that, regardless of what the specs say its battery life is only about 3-3.5 hours. The iBooks I have get an average of 4 hours per full charge (I get damned close to five if I'm careful, sometimes).
On top of that, the apple hardware is, as many other slashdotters have mentioned, pretty high quality. I bought my first iBook because a friend of mine accidentally shoved his out of a second story window. The battery shot out, but he put it back in and, aside from a few scratches on the case, it worked fine. Plus, you can find a dual-usb with firewire ibook for under a thou these days, with a CDRW if you're lucky. The emperorlinux guys are selling machines for twice that without a removable media drive.
Also, the thing about Mac Linux being closer to the hardware is true. Unlike installing Redhat on my PC, I didn't have to screw around with source tarballs to get my hardware to work. Just a thought if you like things to be easy.
I've found the best places to look are on sites for RPG engines, like Verge. Generally there are links to sites with literally oodles of tile banks. You may also want to try DIV Arena and, of course, the Freecraft and FreeCiv projects, both of which offer free art assets.
Hope this helps. Oh, done a google for SpriteLib lately? Or Ari Feldman?
... and I'm spent.
I don't know how much you're willing to spend, but the current entry-level titanium powerbook G4 supports 1Gig of ram, and they were running a promotion where if you buy it you can get double ram for 40$ more. If you don't like mac os x you can install yellowdog linux or any of the other ppc-happy linux distros. Someone above mentioned $2000 for a toshiba, and what I'm talking about will run you $2300 (about). Does that break the bank?
I didn't see anything there saying that you use or particularly enjoy MSN Messenger, do you? Personally, I hate it. All M$ programs end up linking into its shared libs for some odd reason, meaning that if it or IE or explorer go down, the ship goes down. Copy and paste this into your "Run..." : RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove Make sure Messenger is not running first, of course.