Quoting this page: There is a lot of debate over the origins "20" portion of the VIC-20 name but the Commodore Executive responsible for the VIC's development, and the author of The Home Computer Wars, Michael Tomczyk, stated repeatedly that he choose the name simply because he thought it "sounded good". (For extra credit, why didn't they call it "VIC" in Germany?)
I just love (well, okay, *like*) the look of these GUIs. All the TrueColor-and-we've-gotta-prove-it "3D" glitz everyone's compulsively indulging in these days seems so silly compared to the screenshots on that Xerox Star page, or Apple's earlier offerings, or, heck, Win 3.11, pre-OS2 Amigas, GEM, GEOS,...all were so much calmer and classier than anything in use these days. Ahwell./me stares at Fisherprice-themed XP desktop full of happy KDE icons
Sadly, there's no mention of GEOS for the Apple 2 series of computers, which also enjoyed this fine precursor of GUIs to come.
So does the Commodore Plus/4. Seems you can (still?) order copies on "real" disks for $5 or EUR 10 provided you already own the C 64/128 version, for whatever weird reasons. Above-linked site doesn't seem to take this new status of GEOS into account, though.
Well, not that anybody cared... I still like the Plus/4, that's all.
Not as much as IV and VIII, but a lot more than VI and *gasp* II.
I know, I know. Something's wrong with me. I knew that before I saw the movie, though. I don't even know exactly why I like it. It's mostly quite stupid, really *squirms in chair*.
And I thought it's not God they find, it's a malevolent imprisoned entity impersonating God.
Not that I'm saying Alien and Blade Runner are bad movies, or that Star Trek is better ~ but it's about something different, isn't it? Star Trek is a utopia to some extent. It expresses a belief that we can "make it" ~ that we can create a future that isn't entirely gritty, corrupt and mercyless. I must admit I like that ~ in principle. There's enough shit going on right now and here.
I don't really believe in this utopia, and it's hardly *my* utopia, and I don't much like what they *did* with it ~ the nigh-sterile environment, stilted speechifying, how annoyingly well-adjusted most of the "good guy" characters are, how appallingly unromantic the sparse romantic interludes are. They have all this technology, and it has so little effects on the realms of the sensual? The artistic? Do they even have their own music, or is it all about jazz on the holodeck? Et cetera. I'd actually prefer somthing more..."steampunk", even if that's probably gritty and dirty again ~ but it wouldn't have to be. Star Trek's just stopped being futuristic since the average blue-light-emitting-and-no-moving-parts Trek gadget looks hardly more interesting than a Gamecube (Xbox would be too gritty.)
But still, I'm kinda glad it's not just transplanting our existing urban decay and tough/bitter/jaded/fallen hero stereotypes into space. Star Trek was, at least occasionally, science fiction ~ TNG episodes like "Emergency" or "I, Borg" or Voyager's "Blink of an Eye" are just a few that come to mind that have a certain something I can't usually find elsewhere (then again, that might be due to my TV sitting in the basement, where it can stay forever as far as I am concerned). They require some amount of idealism or even "caring", even if what it ends up as is more like bland, high horse morality, unfortunately.
All that is of course subjective rambling and most of it is only nominally a reply to your post. Eh.
I liked Lexx (though S4 was a letdown). Fallible, emotionally damaged, perpetually improvising outcasts who never asked to do any of what they're doing, in charge of a planet-obliterating dragonfly-ship set loose upon a universe so utterly deranged you can hardly take its negativity *seriously* ~ very welcome antidote to Trek.
Sleep paralysis has been more than "just that" for me, and for a while I could induce it willingly to "play" with the state. I was also dealing with anxiety and depression and such, so I guess my mind was sort of generally willing to mix up the inside and outside worlds and whatnot. Had mild hallucinations, too.
At first, for the first couple years, it was merely frightening. It caught me several times per night, perhaps several nights per week ~ I was paralysed, could neither open my eyes nor move nor shout. Breathing was flat and rapid, and a strange "electric tingling" ran through my body. Panicking only seemed to make it worse. There was no dreaming going on in that stage, though reality would sometimes "appear" around me, subtly altered ~ different curtains, my friend not sleeping next to me, things like that.
It eventually stoppped. A couple years later, it came back full force (after a tragic event ~ not sure there's a correlation there). It was more "violent" now, sounds resembling wind and distant thunder and blurry smears of spectral colours accompanied the paralysis, yet I was hardly scared anymore. At last I could *move*! Except I wasn't ~ I was simply going out of body. This is hard to describe, and I cannot think of any analogies that would come closer than, say, "moving through a low-energy 'Star Trek' force field". It was so *physical* ~ to feel your limbs move, to eject yourself from your body, sometimes so gradually that you could feel your head, then your neck, then your torso "disengage" themselves from their flesh...
Sometimes, though, it was a nightmare. Devils tearing me outside of my body to devour my miserable soul, that sort of thing ~ I'm glad I never believed in any of that. One of those "involuntary ones" was sheer bliss though. I felt like I was dissolving ~ nothing ever came close to that.
Maybe because the universe has, in the meantime, expanded ~ effectively accelerating the speed at which objects move away from each other? Only guessing.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
Can't help it ~ that sounds like hell to me. What if you happen to be un-average? (Or just can't stand all the fuss people make about gender as a "personality assessment tool"?) Then you're seriously stuck. Bored in some classes, failing miserably in others. Because you have the wrong set of naughty bits for your brain or personality. And any attempt to jump the fence would probably be met with derision from either side. There's enough finger-pointing at "freaks" already.
Or maybe I'm painting it black again. But you yourself said there are many, many exceptions (to whatever skills whatever gender possesses to whatever degree on average, or,...eh, whatever).
At least Spheres of Chaos and PomPom's Mutant Storm are also available for Linux and others (Mac, RISC OS), as all the garagegames stuff linked to by my "grandparent" is also available for Windows. Thought I'd mention that.
Here's some for Windows that I've personally found interesting.
PomPom have neato modernized clones/rehashes of Defender/Uridium and Robotron. Both are extremely pretty in that they don't fall into the now-standard be-as-naturalistic-as-possible trap ~ the graphics have an abstract and psychedelic feel to it that fit the simplistic arcade game concepts well.
"Egoboo is a 3d dungeon crawling adventure in the spirit of NetHack. It uses OpenGL and SDL. It should run on any Wintel, Unix, and MacOS X system." (I don't really see the Nethack semblance, but oh well. It's kinda wacky in a lovable sorta way.)
Starscape has some Asteroids-ish arcade sequences wrapped inside something more complex. Looks good.
Digital Eel's Strange Adventures In Infinite Space is a 2D Elite-esque space game (obviously) with, I thought, an emphasis on playability rather than complexity or sophisticated-ness. Link is to the screenshots page, they work as a description.
Spheres of Chaos might be a game but it looks quite like an early Amiga demoscene effort to me ~ psychedelic, chaotic, colourful and completely abstract. Something for the Jeff Minter fans maybe?
I agree, in a way. I haven't actually played any other games except Nethack and a few text adventures that few people are likely to even know about so who am I to have an opinion..
Freelancer was so much fun for a week or so ~ and *very* comfortable to play half-consciously while talking about wholly unrelated things on the phone. Then, as I was through with the ultra-linear storyline, it just sort of fell apart. Shoot ships, sell things, buy gear, how boring. Nothing much left to discover except for hidden bases and wrecks because (nearly?) all of the truly plot-related discovering takes place in cut scenes with no way to advance the plot or figure stuff out on your own.
Still, much fun for a while. But way too little overlap between the "13 missions" and the actual "freelancing".
Well, SF could *still* use more female characters, not that we're still in the 1950s. Not as love interests, not as eye candy, not even as female tough guys, just... real women. Whatever that means. If it's anything like "real men" I'm not sure I want to know.:) Of course most TV/theatrical "SF" is just heroic fantasy in space. Neither "science" nor "speculative" fiction. I think there's a lot of SF novels that would make good movies, but they'd probably not draw much interest. Not violent/rude/cool enough, I don't know (Arthur C Clarke's "The City and The Stars", Tanith Lee's "Drinking Sapphire Wine", Haruki Murakami's "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World" could all be visually stunning as well as intriguing, but barely anything gets blown up. Maybe if they were classics like "1984", but they're not, of course.)
Not to mention the role-playing game and the... uhm... Iron Maiden single/video. Looks like another interesting show I'll probably never actually get to see!
I'm watching "Fellowship" again right now and noticed I already treat it like a tourist visiting a museum: the scenery is stunning -- the landscapes, Hobbiton, Rivendell, Moria... -- as a movie, however, it doesn't thrill me much. It's like with games such as Nightmare Creatures or Silent Hill II that I took a stroll in, admired the snow or fog or whatever, and subsequently forgot about.
Ooh, that one was called "Invasion of the Worm-Faces" when I read it. (Only in German.) Why publishers attempt to make you feel guilty about your bookshelf I don't claim to know..
Surely another alternative would be ignoring them altogether. They do not, after all, produce air, water or anything else anyone actually needs. (Okay, so I watched The Little Mermaid just yesterday and am a freaking hypocrite. *considers posting anonymously... nah.*)
... but doesn't *everyone* disable/uninstall messenger service?
(How do you uninstall it?) Actually, on the MS support newsgroups, at least one of the more vocal and experienced regulars keeps telling people who suggest newbies to do just that that that's bad and wannabe-hacker-like advice since the messenger service is used for important alerts to the admin or something or other (which never happened to me, but I'm not on a LAN and perhaps that's why.)
([...] tiny personal firewall, which they used to give out ver 2 of for free.)
Kerio Personal Firewall is more or less the same product and it's free for home and personal use.
ad 1 - XP Professional would be the XP "Gold" listed under "affected software". I haven't seen it called "Gold" before, but once you follow the link, their naming scheme reverts to the familiar "Home" and "Professional" editions.
You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details. aspx?di splaylang=de&FamilyID=F02DA309-4B0A-4438-A0B9-5B67 414C3833 (mind the gap!)
[...] but if you click twice on the clock a calender pops up with a whole bunch of other neato options.
Actually, the calendar doesn't pop up for non-administrators (unfortunately), since the calendar that would otherwise have popped up is actually the date/time control panel.
Then again, he's been wondering why he can install <stuff> without entering the (or rather, "a") root password. *shrug*... "my" restricted users never had write access to %windir% or %programfiles% by default, hence the RUNAS command/"run as..." shell extension. (Not that a lot of software won't run just fine elsewhere and without making changes to the registry or whatever.)
Or perhaps he's simply (and ever so subtly) making fun of computer-illiterate Windows users expecting everything else to work the same way?
Funny. I always thought it was the other way round: He was poking fun at fans who insisted THHGTTG be all about robots and spacecraft.
Then again, "So Long..." _is_ my favourite in the series...precisely because it is a little calmer and, dare I say it, romantic in its quirky, wistful fashion.
What I'm dreading is a movie that focuses on the "jokes" alone. Then again, if they at least get them _right_, that'd be something too. But there's always been more to it than breakneck pace "gags". In the comparatively mediocre and not-quite-so-funny "Life...", I liked the thoughtful moments best -- Trillian and how she relates to the Krikkit warlords (or Haktar), for example.
And "Mostly Harmless" was sort of bitter, weary and brooding throughout. That, too, was a sellout? Hm.
Slashdot Mirror
Quoting this page: There is a lot of debate over the origins "20" portion of the VIC-20 name but the Commodore Executive responsible for the VIC's development, and the author of The Home Computer Wars, Michael Tomczyk, stated repeatedly that he choose the name simply because he thought it "sounded good". (For extra credit, why didn't they call it "VIC" in Germany?)
I just love (well, okay, *like*) the look of these GUIs. All the TrueColor-and-we've-gotta-prove-it "3D" glitz everyone's compulsively indulging in these days seems so silly compared to the screenshots on that Xerox Star page, or Apple's earlier offerings, or, heck, Win 3.11, pre-OS2 Amigas, GEM, GEOS, ...all were so much calmer and classier than anything in use these days. Ahwell. /me stares at Fisherprice-themed XP desktop full of happy KDE icons
So does the Commodore Plus/4. Seems you can (still?) order copies on "real" disks for $5 or EUR 10 provided you already own the C 64/128 version, for whatever weird reasons. Above-linked site doesn't seem to take this new status of GEOS into account, though.
Well, not that anybody cared... I still like the Plus/4, that's all.
I...
ilikedstartrekv.
Not as much as IV and VIII, but a lot more than VI and *gasp* II.
I know, I know. Something's wrong with me. I knew that before I saw the movie, though. I don't even know exactly why I like it. It's mostly quite stupid, really *squirms in chair*.
And I thought it's not God they find, it's a malevolent imprisoned entity impersonating God.
Not that I'm saying Alien and Blade Runner are bad movies, or that Star Trek is better ~ but it's about something different, isn't it? Star Trek is a utopia to some extent. It expresses a belief that we can "make it" ~ that we can create a future that isn't entirely gritty, corrupt and mercyless. I must admit I like that ~ in principle. There's enough shit going on right now and here.
..."steampunk", even if that's probably gritty and dirty again ~ but it wouldn't have to be. Star Trek's just stopped being futuristic since the average blue-light-emitting-and-no-moving-parts Trek gadget looks hardly more interesting than a Gamecube (Xbox would be too gritty.)
I don't really believe in this utopia, and it's hardly *my* utopia, and I don't much like what they *did* with it ~ the nigh-sterile environment, stilted speechifying, how annoyingly well-adjusted most of the "good guy" characters are, how appallingly unromantic the sparse romantic interludes are. They have all this technology, and it has so little effects on the realms of the sensual? The artistic? Do they even have their own music, or is it all about jazz on the holodeck? Et cetera. I'd actually prefer somthing more
But still, I'm kinda glad it's not just transplanting our existing urban decay and tough/bitter/jaded/fallen hero stereotypes into space. Star Trek was, at least occasionally, science fiction ~ TNG episodes like "Emergency" or "I, Borg" or Voyager's "Blink of an Eye" are just a few that come to mind that have a certain something I can't usually find elsewhere (then again, that might be due to my TV sitting in the basement, where it can stay forever as far as I am concerned). They require some amount of idealism or even "caring", even if what it ends up as is more like bland, high horse morality, unfortunately.
All that is of course subjective rambling and most of it is only nominally a reply to your post. Eh.
I liked Lexx (though S4 was a letdown). Fallible, emotionally damaged, perpetually improvising outcasts who never asked to do any of what they're doing, in charge of a planet-obliterating dragonfly-ship set loose upon a universe so utterly deranged you can hardly take its negativity *seriously* ~ very welcome antidote to Trek.
Sleep paralysis has been more than "just that" for me, and for a while I could induce it willingly to "play" with the state. I was also dealing with anxiety and depression and such, so I guess my mind was sort of generally willing to mix up the inside and outside worlds and whatnot. Had mild hallucinations, too.
At first, for the first couple years, it was merely frightening. It caught me several times per night, perhaps several nights per week ~ I was paralysed, could neither open my eyes nor move nor shout. Breathing was flat and rapid, and a strange "electric tingling" ran through my body. Panicking only seemed to make it worse. There was no dreaming going on in that stage, though reality would sometimes "appear" around me, subtly altered ~ different curtains, my friend not sleeping next to me, things like that.
It eventually stoppped. A couple years later, it came back full force (after a tragic event ~ not sure there's a correlation there). It was more "violent" now, sounds resembling wind and distant thunder and blurry smears of spectral colours accompanied the paralysis, yet I was hardly scared anymore. At last I could *move*! Except I wasn't ~ I was simply going out of body. This is hard to describe, and I cannot think of any analogies that would come closer than, say, "moving through a low-energy 'Star Trek' force field". It was so *physical* ~ to feel your limbs move, to eject yourself from your body, sometimes so gradually that you could feel your head, then your neck, then your torso "disengage" themselves from their flesh...
Sometimes, though, it was a nightmare. Devils tearing me outside of my body to devour my miserable soul, that sort of thing ~ I'm glad I never believed in any of that. One of those "involuntary ones" was sheer bliss though. I felt like I was dissolving ~ nothing ever came close to that.
I don't know what's going wrong there. But both IE and Firebird will run Sylpheed-Claws for me, as expected.
It will cower in the basement when my track is on. And since I hadn't even heard about this or about "opting out", I'll then be sued into oblivion.
Not that I think they'll play it, or that crushing death metal.
Maybe because the universe has, in the meantime, expanded ~ effectively accelerating the speed at which objects move away from each other? Only guessing.
Can't help it ~ that sounds like hell to me. What if you happen to be un-average? (Or just can't stand all the fuss people make about gender as a "personality assessment tool"?) Then you're seriously stuck. Bored in some classes, failing miserably in others. Because you have the wrong set of naughty bits for your brain or personality. And any attempt to jump the fence would probably be met with derision from either side. There's enough finger-pointing at "freaks" already.
...eh, whatever).
Or maybe I'm painting it black again. But you yourself said there are many, many exceptions (to whatever skills whatever gender possesses to whatever degree on average, or,
At least Spheres of Chaos and PomPom's Mutant Storm are also available for Linux and others (Mac, RISC OS), as all the garagegames stuff linked to by my "grandparent" is also available for Windows. Thought I'd mention that.
Blah,
~Bam D
PomPom have neato modernized clones/rehashes of Defender/Uridium and Robotron. Both are extremely pretty in that they don't fall into the now-standard be-as-naturalistic-as-possible trap ~ the graphics have an abstract and psychedelic feel to it that fit the simplistic arcade game concepts well.
"Egoboo is a 3d dungeon crawling adventure in the spirit of NetHack. It uses OpenGL and SDL. It should run on any Wintel, Unix, and MacOS X system." (I don't really see the Nethack semblance, but oh well. It's kinda wacky in a lovable sorta way.)
Starscape has some Asteroids-ish arcade sequences wrapped inside something more complex. Looks good.
Digital Eel's Strange Adventures In Infinite Space is a 2D Elite-esque space game (obviously) with, I thought, an emphasis on playability rather than complexity or sophisticated-ness. Link is to the screenshots page, they work as a description.
Spheres of Chaos might be a game but it looks quite like an early Amiga demoscene effort to me ~ psychedelic, chaotic, colourful and completely abstract. Something for the Jeff Minter fans maybe?
I agree, in a way. I haven't actually played any other games except Nethack and a few text adventures that few people are likely to even know about so who am I to have an opinion..
Freelancer was so much fun for a week or so ~ and *very* comfortable to play half-consciously while talking about wholly unrelated things on the phone. Then, as I was through with the ultra-linear storyline, it just sort of fell apart. Shoot ships, sell things, buy gear, how boring. Nothing much left to discover except for hidden bases and wrecks because (nearly?) all of the truly plot-related discovering takes place in cut scenes with no way to advance the plot or figure stuff out on your own.
Still, much fun for a while. But way too little overlap between the "13 missions" and the actual "freelancing".
Well, SF could *still* use more female characters, not that we're still in the 1950s. Not as love interests, not as eye candy, not even as female tough guys, just... real women. Whatever that means. If it's anything like "real men" I'm not sure I want to know. :) Of course most TV/theatrical "SF" is just heroic fantasy in space. Neither "science" nor "speculative" fiction. I think there's a lot of SF novels that would make good movies, but they'd probably not draw much interest. Not violent/rude/cool enough, I don't know (Arthur C Clarke's "The City and The Stars", Tanith Lee's "Drinking Sapphire Wine", Haruki Murakami's "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World" could all be visually stunning as well as intriguing, but barely anything gets blown up. Maybe if they were classics like "1984", but they're not, of course.)
Not to mention the role-playing game and the... uhm... Iron Maiden single/video. Looks like another interesting show I'll probably never actually get to see!
That'd be neat.
I'm watching "Fellowship" again right now and noticed I already treat it like a tourist visiting a museum: the scenery is stunning -- the landscapes, Hobbiton, Rivendell, Moria... -- as a movie, however, it doesn't thrill me much. It's like with games such as Nightmare Creatures or Silent Hill II that I took a stroll in, admired the snow or fog or whatever, and subsequently forgot about.
"Return of the Kong", perhaps?
*groan*
(Sorry, could not quite resist.)
Ooh, that one was called "Invasion of the Worm-Faces" when I read it. (Only in German.) Why publishers attempt to make you feel guilty about your bookshelf I don't claim to know..
Surely another alternative would be ignoring them altogether. They do not, after all, produce air, water or anything else anyone actually needs. (Okay, so I watched The Little Mermaid just yesterday and am a freaking hypocrite. *considers posting anonymously... nah.*)
I believe Antispy allows you to remove the "Instant Messenger" Messenger, not the "Windows Service" (NET SEND) Messenger.
(How do you uninstall it?) Actually, on the MS support newsgroups, at least one of the more vocal and experienced regulars keeps telling people who suggest newbies to do just that that that's bad and wannabe-hacker-like advice since the messenger service is used for important alerts to the admin or something or other (which never happened to me, but I'm not on a LAN and perhaps that's why.)
([...] tiny personal firewall, which they used to give out ver 2 of for free.)Kerio Personal Firewall is more or less the same product and it's free for home and personal use.
ad 1 - XP Professional would be the XP "Gold" listed under "affected software". I haven't seen it called "Gold" before, but once you follow the link, their naming scheme reverts to the familiar "Home" and "Professional" editions.
. aspx?di splaylang=de&FamilyID=F02DA309-4B0A-4438-A0B9-5B67 414C3833
You can download it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details
(mind the gap!)
ad 2 - "Nachrichtendienst" is the one, yes.
Actually, the calendar doesn't pop up for non-administrators (unfortunately), since the calendar that would otherwise have popped up is actually the date/time control panel.
Then again, he's been wondering why he can install <stuff> without entering the (or rather, "a") root password. *shrug*... "my" restricted users never had write access to %windir% or %programfiles% by default, hence the RUNAS command/"run as..." shell extension. (Not that a lot of software won't run just fine elsewhere and without making changes to the registry or whatever.)
Or perhaps he's simply (and ever so subtly) making fun of computer-illiterate Windows users expecting everything else to work the same way?
Funny. I always thought it was the other way round: He was poking fun at fans who insisted THHGTTG be all about robots and spacecraft.
...precisely because it is a little calmer and, dare I say it, romantic in its quirky, wistful fashion.
Then again, "So Long..." _is_ my favourite in the series
What I'm dreading is a movie that focuses on the "jokes" alone. Then again, if they at least get them _right_, that'd be something too. But there's always been more to it than breakneck pace "gags". In the comparatively mediocre and not-quite-so-funny "Life...", I liked the thoughtful moments best -- Trillian and how she relates to the Krikkit warlords (or Haktar), for example.
And "Mostly Harmless" was sort of bitter, weary and brooding throughout. That, too, was a sellout? Hm.