The word's ancient (and Greek) and does not imply functional programming. The Monad shell follows an object oriented approach. The Wikipedia article on MSH explains this. There's an external link to what might just be a video I've seen before: a developer demos Monad and the way objects, rather than plain text, are piped between commands... or whatever; I'm not the one to explain this.
What about this is hypocritical, though? It's his stuff and therefore his decision what to share of it or how to go about doing it. When I share a piece of music I wrote it needn't imply I think everything else ought to be "freeware" as well.
how about a/. interview with trent, one of industrial music's pioneering kings? i'd love to ask him that question myself.
Didn't Pretty Hate Machine come out in 1989? Industrial music had been around for a dozen years or more at that time. I wouldn't call PHM industrial anyway; reminds me more of new wave/synth pop with a gothic twist (and a hint of Skinny Puppy and/or EBM maybe, whatever).
Using guitars wasn't his idea either, was it?
Not that it matters what it's called (or what I call it, IANAHistorian), I'm not using the "industrial" label as a seal of approval.
I've tried that for a while, but could not delete subdirectories on any of the drives mounted as directories except
(a) when referring to them by their original drive letters,
or
(b) by circumventing the recycle bin, i.e. from the command line or by configuring Explorer to delete stuff directly.
Doesn't seem right to me. Is that normal? Perhaps the recycle bin is "broken"? I've asked around but got no answers (except some repeating the workarounds mentioned above. I wanted a solution though, not workarounds.)
It matters to me. It's easier to ctrl-tab between browser tabs only than to alt-tab through everything. If you're using the mouse, there're extra clicks unless everything's maximised or you don't mind a cluttered desktop. The taskbar too gets cluttered fast since it hosts all sorts of things, not just browser windows; unreadable with too many "tasks". With taskbar grouping enabled, there're yet more clicks involved. Furthermore I like to be able to "reload all tabs" if I have my regular set of news/community sites open.
Sure, if you don't mind that, it's obviously not a problem for you.
I agree about Adblock; what a relief. Doesn't seem to matter to many casual users though. Not that they want to punch the monkey but it doesn't seem to annoy them "the same way". Not sure.
(Garth Jennings, mh? Relative of Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, worst poet of the universe?)
A lot of comments here point out that no version of HHGG has been like the others, that this inconsistency is something like HHGG's only constant, that what works for a radio play might not work for a book or a movie. This is true, of course. (I guess it's also telling that the part I liked best about the TV show were the guide entries - longish stretches of "Douglas Adams text". Still - the TV show, for all its flaws, was flawed rather than wrong, even though Marvin, Trillian, Zaphod, Slartibartfast's "car" etc. etc. are nothing like I'd imagined them.)
The problem, IMHO, isn't that the movie won't be exactly like the radio play, or book, or TV show, or even the Infocom game. They already exist, no need to duplicate them. And I can certainly see HHGG doing well with lots of special effects and "polish". The problem is that it might be bad as a movie, and not "in the spirit" of HHGG.
It's too early to tell, and I've probably got my own individual idea of what's "in the spirit" of it -- but to me there's a sense of vastness and interconnectedness and paranoia and darkness to HHGG, and a sadness that makes it so much more "sensitive" than, say, Spaceballs or Galaxy Quest or, I suspect, this movie. The Vogons, Arthur's colleagues, Russell, Fenchurch, Wonko the Sane, the man in the hut who "rules" the universe, the gift of the dolphins. It's funny, sure... but wistful, too, and idealistic in an often-been-disappointed kinda way, and it makes a point.
HHGG feels big. And sometimes the jokes are almost as depressing as they're funny. Remember the Golgafrinchams - a jab at modern life, yes, but also a piece of the whole "42" puzzle in that they (i.e. we) derailed the program that was to find the question to the answer. That's why Arthur pulls "six by nine" out of his Scrabble bag: 54, not 42. Eventually, of course, the Vogons came and blew it up anyway - not so much for a hyperspace bypass but for a conspiracy of psychiatrists, afraid that The Question might put them out of business. That's very HHGG. Nose jokes and slapstick aren't necessarily.
I know most of what I just mentioned takes place "later", after whatever the movie tries to cover. But the whole Magrathea, Earth Mk.II, Deep Thought, Mice, 42 plot doesn't. And the review doesn't make it look like those responsible for the movie had made much of an effort to preserve it, or to come up with something else that makes some HHGG-ish sort of sense. That I care about, not the number of Zaphod-Heads or towel references or whether Marvin looks like a Pokémon or a stack of spraypainted cardboard boxes. That's just decoration.
Geez. I really hope it'll be more than just a sequence of throwaway gags.
Or that MJ Simpson is way off the mark and the movie's nothing like that at all.
I think I'll enjoy the eyecandy, at least.
As for the Nokia phone bits, dunno. Could be product placement, but then again, aren't cellphones simply something like today's digital watches?
Then I found that none of their games would play without write ability to the game directory in 'Program Files'. So guess what? They are administrators, too.
Can't you just make the games directory user-writable? Works for me, so far. Games and emulators rarely behave so they get their own playground directories; no need, usually, to run them with administrator privileges. (Alright, so it doesn't with Diablo II, and I don't have a lot of "big" games. I suppose your mileage varies, then...)
If you ever had an Amiga or spent some time within earshot of one, you know they perpetually "click" their empty disk drive(s). The head's moving between tracks 0 and 1, eager to mount something.
I don't usually talk to computers, but I swear my A1200 instantly obeyed the one time I hissed at it to stop the damn clicking already. It hadn't crashed, and the disk drive was still working and recognising disk insertion - it just wasn't clicking anymore. Must've been the Intuition in its ROM, I dunno.
I never dared to repeat that "experiment", though; it would only have shattered my illusions.
Nobody wants a crippled OS, but I really prefer the ability to remove programs I don't need from what I thought was an operating system, not an application suite.
Install it by default if you will, or give me a little checklist ("Also install: [x] Windows Media Player, [x] Outlook Express, [x] Messenger,...), or at least make it uninstallable -- just don't force me to keep it (them). That way, I could decide, at install-time or later, what I want and what I don't. Users who aren't sure what any of it means could simply use the defaults.
They can leave in the backend stuff -- I want to be able to play videos and if 3rd party apps can rely on this functionality, fine -- but I don't need that sprawling shopping mall of a media player on my system (not Real or Quicktime either). I admittedly don't know too much about the innards of Windows, but is it really so hard to remove the WMP GUI while keeping the underlying functionality (codecs, DirectShow, whatever)?
Actually, once your voice box has grown to produce that deeper, more resonant adult male voice, castration won't help return it to what it used to be. But maybe you were referring to girlfriends/wives forcing their partners to undergo voice therapy, what do I know;)
Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 1
It's for the OEM version, which can't be used to upgrade anything AFAIK. It is a full version - you're just not allowed to transfer it to another PC, unless, I suppose, that one's nigh-identical from a WPA point of view. I've changed video cards, RAM, drives on an OEM XP PC without ever having to phone in, but I'm not so sure what would've happened if I'd changed the mainboard or some such more "PC-identifying" part. Moreover, you aren't entitled to MS tech support; it's the OEM that's supposed to support you. Finally, there's no box or anything, just a booklet shrinkwrapped with a CD.
Or maybe I'm misreading everything by now, I should be in bed.
Amiga icons were fixed-size in that there was no way to scale them. A drawer window could easily turn into a cluttered mess because all those variably-sized icons refused to line up properly, "clean up" or no "clean up". It was alright for games and goofy GUI fun, but on systems with as many files as anything recent tends to have I really prefer having icons that are all the same size, with that size being something specified by me. (Then again, for anything like that you'd probably want a list view, for which the Amiga had no icons anyway.) I loved the Amiga, but I never thought Workbench was all that great.
The pink razor industry employs mind control rays and has successfully removed even the slightest hint of body hair from the public's idea of female (and, by now, male) beauty. I'm just waiting for the Toenail Removal Craze.
Actually I recently read, likely on everything2, that it all began with a war-related silk stocking shortage that happened to occur at a time of reduced skirt length. Until then nobody really cared about leg hair. Though I'm sure it would've happened anyway... artificiality is quite traditional when it comes to what's considered desirable in a woman, no?
Sure, smooth skin does feel good, but all this freaking out about next-to-nothing still seems "EEEWW! Girl Germs!"-level childish to me. Sigh.
Yes, I've seen a friend of mine play it (assuming the "Siboot II" on your linked page is the same as or at least similiar to "Trust and Betrayal - Legend of Siboot"). It looked interesting, although I can't say I understood it. I'm not into strategy games usually so I sort of forgot about it again. Thanks for the reminder.
Racter (1984) was an Eliza-like "conversation game". I think some reviewer at the time was fooled into thinking it had a kind of plot - the "AI" attempting to figure out whether it has a soul, something in that general direction. I don't think that was in there anywhere, it was probably just a simple-minded chatterbot. It would on occasion come up with amusingly poetic turns of phrase, but there didn't seem to be anything to find out.
I've often wished for something more realistic - more intelligent, more "stateful". Something that's capable of remembering facts, something that can get angry, silly, tired, wistful,... something that doesn't merely react but has its own agenda. Something that interferes with my "computer life" - emails me, IMs me, even reads my files and remarks on their contents. What I think it doesn't have to be capable of is natural language parsing. Just skip that part if it doesn't work out. Use symbols if you must; restrict grammar and vocabulary to some sort of parse-able subset... just don't pretend you understand when you're basically just remixing my input and pouncing on isolated keywords.
Captain Blood (1988) had conversations with aliens in an iconic language called Bluddian. You could only use words the game actually knew (by clicking their icons) so at least you weren't tricked into thinking you could say anything you want and be understood. On the other hand, conversations still weren't very intelligent and "destroy planet" could easily yield the same answer as "you tell me planet coordinates". I think. Hm.
Closest I can think of was Galatea (2000), wherein you'd converse with Pygmallion's "awakened" statue. It didn't use full sentences at all; you were basically either "asking" or "telling" about subjects of your (or her) choosing and the program turned these into full sentences (Input: tell galatea about her artist; Output: "The artist," you say gently. "It says on the placard that he has committed suicide." [...]). It wasn't like looking up stuff in a book though: there was an actual plot, and she didn't take too kindly to being prodded or otherwise treated like a machine. It was quite touching, actually, and worth several replays.
That said, on my XP SP2 machine, new windows get the keyboard focus.
Tried TweakUI? It's one of the Powertoys (all of which should have been included with a default install IMHO...). I didn't notice if it's working or not - so I suppose it is.
Bow, Nigger, Possessing Barbie, or Game Girl Advance's much-linked-to Rez piece really helped me consider games as something more than just products again.
Some of these articles seemed* marred by overly confusing writing, some were a wee bit too self-indulgent (I don't really want to hear all about your living situation, and maybe I don't fully understand how gaming can be a lifestyle), but I do like the idea: depict one possible narrative out of the many that a game might provide in cooperation with its players from the point of view of such a player. Show me what it's like to play that particular game, what it feels like, what kind of environment it provides. Makes games seem interesting again - just like when I was 10 or 11 or so and thought I could do anything I want in adventure games.
Beyond all the stuff one might usually think of as art, beyond the music, images, animation and prose, videogames are interactive narratives of a kind not seen before. Whether it's by design or due to technical limitations or combinatorial explosion issues, you're often encouraged (or forced) to play a certain way, to deal with somebody else's situations in ways that aren't entirely yours either. And yet, thanks to the simulationist(/-ish) aspect of video games, you identify, to some extent, with your avatar - much more than in other kinds of games (gamebooks and role-playing games aside). You're much more likely to develop a desire to talk to HL2 characters or to leave the road and explore the countryside in a racing game than to have your chess "characters" argue their way out of being taken. And your Monopoly "character", too, is much farther from Avatar-hood than your MUD/MOO/MassivelyMultiplayerOnlineWhatever persona. (Those weren't the most appropriate comparisons maybe.)
A game designer, given free rein, wields considerably power here, power that could be used to make a point or to thoroughly engage/enrichen/mess with players' minds. For a simple example, consider an FPS that tries to make you feel really awful about all that killing - and yet killing is all you can do, other than quit in disgust. It's a reaction some not-so-desensitized people exhibit anyway, but what if that was the effect it's supposed to have? What if killing wasn't all you can do, but your on-screen avatar had an instinctual life of its own, thwarting your attempts to clear up a terrible "misunderstanding"? (There have been a few text adventures that made you feel what it's like to be unable to act different in a given situation - domestic abuse or social anxiety, for example. I wouldn't call them games, and they didn't exactly have a lot of "replay value", but they do prove (to me that video "games" could be all kinds of things they usually aren't. Those "things" needn't be all grim and serious either, I just couldn't think of anything else.)
So I like NGJ because it often explores these boundaries - between you-the-player and you-your-avatar, between actions in the game-world and their relevance in the real one - and for the sheer joy of gaming it (sometimes) manages to get across. This immersion is something traditional, more "descriptive" reviews sometimes seem to lack. And maybe there's some starry-eyed wishful thinking involved, a desire for games to be something more, but... oh, well. That desire has always been the primary reason I've been interested in games. (Some games I've played because they had pretty snowfall. So? Anything wrong with that?)
I don't think it's just sheep (re: "public education")... I can think of a number of intelligent, creative and independent individuals who wouldn't know where to start fixing problems; they might not even know whether something (e.g. a gradual slowdown or occasional BSOD) is a (fixable) problem. As long as the blue "e" works at all, they probably won't care about its drawbacks any more than I'm excited about fixing my bike: I don't know what exactly is wrong with it, I don't know how to find out, I don't have the right tools -- so as long as it gets me from A to B and blocks most popups, I'll tolerate the funny noises it makes. Ohwell. Cmdr. Obvious out
1) "IE is the official browser. It's MS, like Windows. They're made for each other. MS is a Real Company, even if it's a borderline-evil Real Company and geeks make fun of it. I'm not sure some freebie could be as trustworthy or solid."
2) "My Computer isn't me, it's not an extension of my brain. I may use it to talk to friends, to work, to be creative, to do research, to have fun - but the computer itself (the OS, the hardware) is still boring and confusing. It's a foreign country -- when in Rome..."
3) "My Computer IS an extension of my brain! I resent being told what to run on it."
4) "I like to keep it simple. I know there are replacements for everything. I've got better things to do than learn about features I may never even use."
5) "I've got Norton."
6) "I can't really tell the difference between decent software and malware. Why is the decent software so invisible and why do its websites look so simple and its instructions so complicated? Why isn't it advertised like Comet Cursor?"
7) "Computers are weird. They crash once (or twice or five times) a day and pop up incomprehensible errors. It's a law of nature. It's annoying, but not as annoying as understanding the reasons is boring and complicated."
Though I don't know if that fits "your" IE users. But when I think about "mine", those are some of the ideas that spring to mind. Sometimes I almost think they have a point, so I shut up until they ask me for help. Which almost never happens, for reasons that might look like the ones above.
Ever offered to set it up for them, import their bookmarks, install Flash and Adblock and perhaps that "View this page in IE" extension - so they can see for themselves? Though you didn't make them sound like they needed a helping hand.
Slashdot Mirror
The word's ancient (and Greek) and does not imply functional programming. The Monad shell follows an object oriented approach. The Wikipedia article on MSH explains this. There's an external link to what might just be a video I've seen before: a developer demos Monad and the way objects, rather than plain text, are piped between commands... or whatever; I'm not the one to explain this.
You can play the hhgg.z3 "story file" loaded by the java applet with any Z-Code interpreter, of which there are roughly five hundred.
The BBC also has an illustrated Flash version.
What about this is hypocritical, though? It's his stuff and therefore his decision what to share of it or how to go about doing it. When I share a piece of music I wrote it needn't imply I think everything else ought to be "freeware" as well.
/. interview with trent, one of industrial music's pioneering kings? i'd love to ask him that question myself.
how about a
Didn't Pretty Hate Machine come out in 1989? Industrial music had been around for a dozen years or more at that time. I wouldn't call PHM industrial anyway; reminds me more of new wave/synth pop with a gothic twist (and a hint of Skinny Puppy and/or EBM maybe, whatever).
Using guitars wasn't his idea either, was it?
Not that it matters what it's called (or what I call it, IANAHistorian), I'm not using the "industrial" label as a seal of approval.
I've tried that for a while, but could not delete subdirectories on any of the drives mounted as directories except
(a) when referring to them by their original drive letters,
or
(b) by circumventing the recycle bin, i.e. from the command line or by configuring Explorer to delete stuff directly.
Doesn't seem right to me. Is that normal? Perhaps the recycle bin is "broken"? I've asked around but got no answers (except some repeating the workarounds mentioned above. I wanted a solution though, not workarounds.)
It matters to me. It's easier to ctrl-tab between browser tabs only than to alt-tab through everything. If you're using the mouse, there're extra clicks unless everything's maximised or you don't mind a cluttered desktop. The taskbar too gets cluttered fast since it hosts all sorts of things, not just browser windows; unreadable with too many "tasks". With taskbar grouping enabled, there're yet more clicks involved. Furthermore I like to be able to "reload all tabs" if I have my regular set of news/community sites open.
Sure, if you don't mind that, it's obviously not a problem for you.
I agree about Adblock; what a relief. Doesn't seem to matter to many casual users though. Not that they want to punch the monkey but it doesn't seem to annoy them "the same way". Not sure.
(Garth Jennings, mh? Relative of Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, worst poet of the universe?)
A lot of comments here point out that no version of HHGG has been like the others, that this inconsistency is something like HHGG's only constant, that what works for a radio play might not work for a book or a movie. This is true, of course. (I guess it's also telling that the part I liked best about the TV show were the guide entries - longish stretches of "Douglas Adams text". Still - the TV show, for all its flaws, was flawed rather than wrong, even though Marvin, Trillian, Zaphod, Slartibartfast's "car" etc. etc. are nothing like I'd imagined them.)
The problem, IMHO, isn't that the movie won't be exactly like the radio play, or book, or TV show, or even the Infocom game. They already exist, no need to duplicate them. And I can certainly see HHGG doing well with lots of special effects and "polish". The problem is that it might be bad as a movie, and not "in the spirit" of HHGG.
It's too early to tell, and I've probably got my own individual idea of what's "in the spirit" of it -- but to me there's a sense of vastness and interconnectedness and paranoia and darkness to HHGG, and a sadness that makes it so much more "sensitive" than, say, Spaceballs or Galaxy Quest or, I suspect, this movie. The Vogons, Arthur's colleagues, Russell, Fenchurch, Wonko the Sane, the man in the hut who "rules" the universe, the gift of the dolphins. It's funny, sure... but wistful, too, and idealistic in an often-been-disappointed kinda way, and it makes a point.
HHGG feels big. And sometimes the jokes are almost as depressing as they're funny. Remember the Golgafrinchams - a jab at modern life, yes, but also a piece of the whole "42" puzzle in that they (i.e. we) derailed the program that was to find the question to the answer. That's why Arthur pulls "six by nine" out of his Scrabble bag: 54, not 42. Eventually, of course, the Vogons came and blew it up anyway - not so much for a hyperspace bypass but for a conspiracy of psychiatrists, afraid that The Question might put them out of business. That's very HHGG. Nose jokes and slapstick aren't necessarily.
I know most of what I just mentioned takes place "later", after whatever the movie tries to cover. But the whole Magrathea, Earth Mk.II, Deep Thought, Mice, 42 plot doesn't. And the review doesn't make it look like those responsible for the movie had made much of an effort to preserve it, or to come up with something else that makes some HHGG-ish sort of sense. That I care about, not the number of Zaphod-Heads or towel references or whether Marvin looks like a Pokémon or a stack of spraypainted cardboard boxes. That's just decoration.
Geez. I really hope it'll be more than just a sequence of throwaway gags.
Or that MJ Simpson is way off the mark and the movie's nothing like that at all.
I think I'll enjoy the eyecandy, at least.
As for the Nokia phone bits, dunno. Could be product placement, but then again, aren't cellphones simply something like today's digital watches?
Then I found that none of their games would play without write ability to the game directory in 'Program Files'. So guess what? They are administrators, too.
Can't you just make the games directory user-writable? Works for me, so far. Games and emulators rarely behave so they get their own playground directories; no need, usually, to run them with administrator privileges. (Alright, so it doesn't with Diablo II, and I don't have a lot of "big" games. I suppose your mileage varies, then...)
try http://slashdot.org/zoo.pl?op=check&uid=<uid> -- it'll take you to your "relationship" page for that user. I don't know if there's a better way.
If you ever had an Amiga or spent some time within earshot of one, you know they perpetually "click" their empty disk drive(s). The head's moving between tracks 0 and 1, eager to mount something.
I don't usually talk to computers, but I swear my A1200 instantly obeyed the one time I hissed at it to stop the damn clicking already. It hadn't crashed, and the disk drive was still working and recognising disk insertion - it just wasn't clicking anymore. Must've been the Intuition in its ROM, I dunno.
I never dared to repeat that "experiment", though; it would only have shattered my illusions.
(End of boring story.)
Nobody wants a crippled OS, but I really prefer the ability to remove programs I don't need from what I thought was an operating system, not an application suite.
...), or at least make it uninstallable -- just don't force me to keep it (them). That way, I could decide, at install-time or later, what I want and what I don't. Users who aren't sure what any of it means could simply use the defaults.
Install it by default if you will, or give me a little checklist ("Also install: [x] Windows Media Player, [x] Outlook Express, [x] Messenger,
They can leave in the backend stuff -- I want to be able to play videos and if 3rd party apps can rely on this functionality, fine -- but I don't need that sprawling shopping mall of a media player on my system (not Real or Quicktime either). I admittedly don't know too much about the innards of Windows, but is it really so hard to remove the WMP GUI while keeping the underlying functionality (codecs, DirectShow, whatever)?
Actually, once your voice box has grown to produce that deeper, more resonant adult male voice, castration won't help return it to what it used to be. But maybe you were referring to girlfriends/wives forcing their partners to undergo voice therapy, what do I know ;)
It's for the OEM version, which can't be used to upgrade anything AFAIK. It is a full version - you're just not allowed to transfer it to another PC, unless, I suppose, that one's nigh-identical from a WPA point of view. I've changed video cards, RAM, drives on an OEM XP PC without ever having to phone in, but I'm not so sure what would've happened if I'd changed the mainboard or some such more "PC-identifying" part. Moreover, you aren't entitled to MS tech support; it's the OEM that's supposed to support you. Finally, there's no box or anything, just a booklet shrinkwrapped with a CD.
Or maybe I'm misreading everything by now, I should be in bed.
Amiga icons were fixed-size in that there was no way to scale them. A drawer window could easily turn into a cluttered mess because all those variably-sized icons refused to line up properly, "clean up" or no "clean up". It was alright for games and goofy GUI fun, but on systems with as many files as anything recent tends to have I really prefer having icons that are all the same size, with that size being something specified by me. (Then again, for anything like that you'd probably want a list view, for which the Amiga had no icons anyway.) I loved the Amiga, but I never thought Workbench was all that great.
Actually, a dialog box is telling me the file's too large for Notepad.
As the subject said, why do i have to pay for the windows version when i want the linux version?
;)
Not sure, but they don't provide tech support for the Linux version either. Perhaps it's just not a "full" product to them? *shrug*
And why are there no screenshots?
Because you didn't look here
The pink razor industry employs mind control rays and has successfully removed even the slightest hint of body hair from the public's idea of female (and, by now, male) beauty. I'm just waiting for the Toenail Removal Craze.
Actually I recently read, likely on everything2, that it all began with a war-related silk stocking shortage that happened to occur at a time of reduced skirt length. Until then nobody really cared about leg hair. Though I'm sure it would've happened anyway... artificiality is quite traditional when it comes to what's considered desirable in a woman, no?
Sure, smooth skin does feel good, but all this freaking out about next-to-nothing still seems "EEEWW! Girl Germs!"-level childish to me. Sigh.
Yes, I've seen a friend of mine play it (assuming the "Siboot II" on your linked page is the same as or at least similiar to "Trust and Betrayal - Legend of Siboot"). It looked interesting, although I can't say I understood it. I'm not into strategy games usually so I sort of forgot about it again. Thanks for the reminder.
Racter (1984) was an Eliza-like "conversation game". I think some reviewer at the time was fooled into thinking it had a kind of plot - the "AI" attempting to figure out whether it has a soul, something in that general direction. I don't think that was in there anywhere, it was probably just a simple-minded chatterbot. It would on occasion come up with amusingly poetic turns of phrase, but there didn't seem to be anything to find out.
... something that doesn't merely react but has its own agenda. Something that interferes with my "computer life" - emails me, IMs me, even reads my files and remarks on their contents. What I think it doesn't have to be capable of is natural language parsing. Just skip that part if it doesn't work out. Use symbols if you must; restrict grammar and vocabulary to some sort of parse-able subset... just don't pretend you understand when you're basically just remixing my input and pouncing on isolated keywords.
I've often wished for something more realistic - more intelligent, more "stateful". Something that's capable of remembering facts, something that can get angry, silly, tired, wistful,
Captain Blood (1988) had conversations with aliens in an iconic language called Bluddian. You could only use words the game actually knew (by clicking their icons) so at least you weren't tricked into thinking you could say anything you want and be understood. On the other hand, conversations still weren't very intelligent and "destroy planet" could easily yield the same answer as "you tell me planet coordinates". I think. Hm.
Closest I can think of was Galatea (2000), wherein you'd converse with Pygmallion's "awakened" statue. It didn't use full sentences at all; you were basically either "asking" or "telling" about subjects of your (or her) choosing and the program turned these into full sentences (Input: tell galatea about her artist; Output: "The artist," you say gently. "It says on the placard that he has committed suicide." [...]). It wasn't like looking up stuff in a book though: there was an actual plot, and she didn't take too kindly to being prodded or otherwise treated like a machine. It was quite touching, actually, and worth several replays.
That said, on my XP SP2 machine, new windows get the keyboard focus.
Tried TweakUI? It's one of the Powertoys (all of which should have been included with a default install IMHO...). I didn't notice if it's working or not - so I suppose it is.
Bow, Nigger, Possessing Barbie, or Game Girl Advance's much-linked-to Rez piece really helped me consider games as something more than just products again.
Some of these articles seemed* marred by overly confusing writing, some were a wee bit too self-indulgent (I don't really want to hear all about your living situation, and maybe I don't fully understand how gaming can be a lifestyle), but I do like the idea: depict one possible narrative out of the many that a game might provide in cooperation with its players from the point of view of such a player. Show me what it's like to play that particular game, what it feels like, what kind of environment it provides. Makes games seem interesting again - just like when I was 10 or 11 or so and thought I could do anything I want in adventure games.
Beyond all the stuff one might usually think of as art, beyond the music, images, animation and prose, videogames are interactive narratives of a kind not seen before. Whether it's by design or due to technical limitations or combinatorial explosion issues, you're often encouraged (or forced) to play a certain way, to deal with somebody else's situations in ways that aren't entirely yours either. And yet, thanks to the simulationist(/-ish) aspect of video games, you identify, to some extent, with your avatar - much more than in other kinds of games (gamebooks and role-playing games aside). You're much more likely to develop a desire to talk to HL2 characters or to leave the road and explore the countryside in a racing game than to have your chess "characters" argue their way out of being taken. And your Monopoly "character", too, is much farther from Avatar-hood than your MUD/MOO/MassivelyMultiplayerOnlineWhatever persona. (Those weren't the most appropriate comparisons maybe.)
A game designer, given free rein, wields considerably power here, power that could be used to make a point or to thoroughly engage/enrichen/mess with players' minds. For a simple example, consider an FPS that tries to make you feel really awful about all that killing - and yet killing is all you can do, other than quit in disgust. It's a reaction some not-so-desensitized people exhibit anyway, but what if that was the effect it's supposed to have? What if killing wasn't all you can do, but your on-screen avatar had an instinctual life of its own, thwarting your attempts to clear up a terrible "misunderstanding"? (There have been a few text adventures that made you feel what it's like to be unable to act different in a given situation - domestic abuse or social anxiety, for example. I wouldn't call them games, and they didn't exactly have a lot of "replay value", but they do prove (to me that video "games" could be all kinds of things they usually aren't. Those "things" needn't be all grim and serious either, I just couldn't think of anything else.)
So I like NGJ because it often explores these boundaries - between you-the-player and you-your-avatar, between actions in the game-world and their relevance in the real one - and for the sheer joy of gaming it (sometimes) manages to get across. This immersion is something traditional, more "descriptive" reviews sometimes seem to lack. And maybe there's some starry-eyed wishful thinking involved, a desire for games to be something more, but... oh, well. That desire has always been the primary reason I've been interested in games. (Some games I've played because they had pretty snowfall. So? Anything wrong with that?)
</disorganised braindump>
(*I'm not a native speaker, so what do I know.)
Hee. You spelled it wrong again ;) (drop the second 'a')
Thank you.
I don't think it's just sheep (re: "public education")... I can think of a number of intelligent, creative and independent individuals who wouldn't know where to start fixing problems; they might not even know whether something (e.g. a gradual slowdown or occasional BSOD) is a (fixable) problem. As long as the blue "e" works at all, they probably won't care about its drawbacks any more than I'm excited about fixing my bike: I don't know what exactly is wrong with it, I don't know how to find out, I don't have the right tools -- so as long as it gets me from A to B and blocks most popups, I'll tolerate the funny noises it makes. Ohwell. Cmdr. Obvious out
1) "IE is the official browser. It's MS, like Windows. They're made for each other. MS is a Real Company, even if it's a borderline-evil Real Company and geeks make fun of it. I'm not sure some freebie could be as trustworthy or solid."
2) "My Computer isn't me, it's not an extension of my brain. I may use it to talk to friends, to work, to be creative, to do research, to have fun - but the computer itself (the OS, the hardware) is still boring and confusing. It's a foreign country -- when in Rome..."
3) "My Computer IS an extension of my brain! I resent being told what to run on it."
4) "I like to keep it simple. I know there are replacements for everything. I've got better things to do than learn about features I may never even use."
5) "I've got Norton."
6) "I can't really tell the difference between decent software and malware. Why is the decent software so invisible and why do its websites look so simple and its instructions so complicated? Why isn't it advertised like Comet Cursor?"
7) "Computers are weird. They crash once (or twice or five times) a day and pop up incomprehensible errors. It's a law of nature. It's annoying, but not as annoying as understanding the reasons is boring and complicated."
Though I don't know if that fits "your" IE users. But when I think about "mine", those are some of the ideas that spring to mind. Sometimes I almost think they have a point, so I shut up until they ask me for help. Which almost never happens, for reasons that might look like the ones above.
Ever offered to set it up for them, import their bookmarks, install Flash and Adblock and perhaps that "View this page in IE" extension - so they can see for themselves? Though you didn't make them sound like they needed a helping hand.
Here's a rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated thread from 1999 going into the details. JMS is posting as well. I suppose you might be especially interested in the 8th post down, by Paul Harper.
Whoa. Lowest-rated post for a(n arguably uninteresting) reference to the story's "dept."? *shrug*