There's an great old AD&D book, called "World Building" or something like that, and it helped me immensely as I was doing stuff like this for fiction. It talked, I believe, about the difference between top-down world creation vs. "create as you go" creation. It's easier to create exciting and new landscapes and situations when you use the latter, but you might run into problems. You eliminate those problems by creating, say, the ecosystems and weather and geography first, and then the politics and histories, etc. But that might lead to less exciting stuff at first and it might be a lot of work in vain if you never get a chance to use more than a small patch of grass before you realize nobody's interested.
More than that, it's a probably the best thing you can do. My dad was in advertising before it was all done on computers, and the artists used to know to look away for at least five minutes or so per hour to rest their eyes. Probably even more necessary now even though it might be much harder to look away from the pretty lights than it is from a drafting board.
Adobe ImageStyler which was discontinued and became Adobe LiveMotion which was very recently discontinued-- they make mockups a breeze for me. It would be nice if it still worked, but the last version on Mac works fine under Panther, and I'm sure the Windows version was current when discontinued.
The main working window is a canvas and I end up creating most of my finished images using the program, though I almost never use the HTML output for finished and web-ready sites. But the reason I'm recommending it is how quickly you can lay things out and publish them to sloppy HTML.
As for which one to get--I think ImageStyler was the best since I use almost no features of LiveMotion, which I believe added mostly Flash-based stuff, and I prefer to use Macromedia Flash for that type of work. I only switched because LiveMotion was carbonized.
ImageStyler was only $100 or so when it came out and no upgrade path was offered to LiveMotion. So I can imagine that it should be easy to find a good deal on Ebay.
Yeah. California law says you split your fortune down the center in divorce and, since more than half of the Lucas fortune was tied up in Lucasfilm, he had to sell off parts of the company or else he wouldn't have been able to retain sole ownership over his company.
People don't get rid of their monitors as fast as they get rid of other stuff. During a time period when I upgraded my computer almost every year, I stuck with the same CRT monitor I bought in college. Now it's seven years old and my computers last longer, but I still use the monitor. It's a 17" Dell CRT, bought refurbished in 1997 for somewhere between $150-250. Heck, I even switched to the Mac platform in 2001 and I'm still using the monitor.
It's the monitors that need backward compatibility. Unless I'm a hardcore gamer, I'm not going to buy a new monitor just so I can get the latest and greatest video card to work. Come to think of it, I used the same ATI graphics card through most of that time as well. It's in my current and last Windows machine, which I bought in early 2000 and have managed to keep booting up once a month or so. The ATI card I bought in 1998.
I've seen this one touted for years on AV and home theatre fora. It's $189 retail but it's been around long enough that you might find it under $50 used.
First off, I added that line as a joke. Have you ever heard of the urban legend that says that an oil company has a patent on a design for an ultra-efficient car and whenever anyone is about to come up with a design that's similar, they are able to close down its development?
You mean, the power companies are going to force Intel to make their chips more wasteful, causing progress to halt and people to buy fewer Intel chips? Yeah, sure.
No, I don't think power companies will have any direct contact with Intel, but I think they would take the same position regardless.
I don't see Intel having much incentive for energy-efficient chips so long as consumers are interested in speed and power--in much the same way that US consumers are more likely to pay more for a less-efficient larger car with more power than an energy-efficient car. A focus on energy-efficiency will likely be a shift in resources for Intel, and, if so, will likely work against "growth" in speed and power in the short term.
So I'd say if there's going to be encouragment or discouragement towards more energy-efficient chips, then it will likely come from a political level (rightly or wrongly, successfully or unsuccessfully). Automobile companies have balked at and/or fought against legislation such as gradual percentage increases in fuel efficiency, and, if any political body takes a similar interest in the efficiency of microprocessors, I see Intel taking a similar position.
Don't cars still use less than 50% of the energy they consume and the rest is released as heat? If we haven't figured that out yet on a longer timeline, then how long do they expect this to take? And if it is realistic, then how much more powerful are oil companies politically than electric power companies that the latter are going to just stand by and let this happen?
Since this has come up and I haven't found any info elsewhere, are there any good resources online for installing Linux on VirtualPC (which versions work best, etc)? I'd also like to install MS DOS but I wouldn't have a clue how to get them off floppy disks and onto VirtualPC (I'm in OS X). If I buy a floppy reader, can VirtualPC recognize this as the A: drive? I currently run Windows 98 in VirtualPC and WindowsMe on a desktop computer. I don't want use a PowerPC version of Linux because I don't want to dualboot either computer. Any advice would be appreciated.
I think the big problem is that a game can't be a subjective dungeon master. It doesn't know how to reward character development for character sake. In pen and paper RPGs, the GM can make the judgment call if a choice or activity is award-worthy (with XP or anything else) when it can't be measured by progress toward a goal. Even if the goal is life (like the Sims, which I admit I've never played), is it possible for the computer to detect for and allow every possible character development choice?
Now if a human being is on the other end, as is possible with multiplayer RPGs... are there any RPGs out there where one person "plays" the game master and other players play player characters, allowing for endless possibilities? If so, do they and can they bring anything to the table (so to speak) that pen and paper RPGs lack?
Microsoft, damnit, you don't announce that you want to be cool. You act like you don't care if you're cool or not, and then they come to you. You'll never be cool if everybody knows you want to be cool. Geeze, didn't you ever go to high school?
I remember trying to play Pool of Radiance (the original DOS game) on a much faster Windows machine. The fight sequences happened so fast that you couldn't tell what was going on. If you ever set your characters to "auto" (in other words: having the computer decide what your characters were going to do), you could never "catch" it again by hitting ESCAPE in time and you were doomed to play the rest of the game with the preference set that way. I don't remember how I got around it, but it seems to me that this kind of thing can cause more problems than it can help.
Is there any problems with the current Xbox loading or playing speeds? (I don't have one, so I don't know). I mean: unless you're installing Linux on it and you need a real fast machine, what problem is this a solution for?
Alex.
Re:As long as we're dreaming here...
on
The Bionic Office
·
· Score: 1
Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. The conference table shot reminded me of a scene from The Usual Suspects.
Alex.
As long as we're dreaming here...
on
The Bionic Office
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Pixar's environment to this place.
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/May/05302003/friday/f ri day.asp
But it's still nicer than my old cubicle. I'm pretty thankful that I work out of my apartment now.
Alex.
Pro advice for comic book writers
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What advice would you give for new writers to the comic book field? Do you recommend trying to break into the more mainstream field and then carve out a niche once influence and a bibliography have been established? Or should a writer do the work he or she wants to do from the beginning at the risk of never having enough influence to get his or her work seen or even realized? Along the same lines, what, from your vantage, is the state of underground and alternative comics, and what kind of practices can be implemented by newcomers to move comics as a medium in a direction you'd like to see it go? (probable answer: be less longwinded)
I live pretty far inland (Raleigh, NC region), though we are in the storm's path. I hear it got pretty bad ten years ago (was that Hugo? I lived in Cleveland/Akron, OH at the time) even in this area though. Bad storms. Power outages. Trees falling on houses and cars, and even big objects getting lifted up and thrown on top of other big objects.
Not much I can do about the heavy objects, but it's always humid so I always do what I can to keep electronics cool and dry.
It's common sense, I think, to keep some food and water in the apartment for any kind of emergency (not just this, Y2K, and Ashcroft's code oranges), so there's really nothing new I feel I can do.
I might do laundry on Thursday though. I was stuck in a five day power outage here last year and, being from the north I thought "this storm's going to be bad" meant that a lot of places were closed because the roads weren't plowed and nobody knew how to drive in snow. So I figured I'd put off doing dishes and laundry and such for when there was no place else to go. But then I was stuck for five days with dirty clothes and no heat. Live and learn.
Here's hoping everyone makes it through this one okay.
I took it as funny. My response was meant to be funny as well. So do we both suck at reading comments or do we both suck at writing them? I'll put a [grin] here, lest there be any doubt.
What I mean is: even if you have the CD (or even Kareoke CD) of the songs you want to use with the game, you'll have to (a) buy them again in the "expansion disc" format and (b) hope they come out with your songs in the expansion disc format in the first place. I doubt we're going to see Moxy Fruvous or Eddie from Ohio on the list anytime soon.
Actually, it is.
At least wait until you've heard me sing before you judge.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an great old AD&D book, called "World Building" or something like that, and it helped me immensely as I was doing stuff like this for fiction. It talked, I believe, about the difference between top-down world creation vs. "create as you go" creation. It's easier to create exciting and new landscapes and situations when you use the latter, but you might run into problems. You eliminate those problems by creating, say, the ecosystems and weather and geography first, and then the politics and histories, etc. But that might lead to less exciting stuff at first and it might be a lot of work in vain if you never get a chance to use more than a small patch of grass before you realize nobody's interested.
Alex.
More than that, it's a probably the best thing you can do. My dad was in advertising before it was all done on computers, and the artists used to know to look away for at least five minutes or so per hour to rest their eyes. Probably even more necessary now even though it might be much harder to look away from the pretty lights than it is from a drafting board.
Alex.
Adobe ImageStyler which was discontinued and became Adobe LiveMotion which was very recently discontinued-- they make mockups a breeze for me. It would be nice if it still worked, but the last version on Mac works fine under Panther, and I'm sure the Windows version was current when discontinued.
The main working window is a canvas and I end up creating most of my finished images using the program, though I almost never use the HTML output for finished and web-ready sites. But the reason I'm recommending it is how quickly you can lay things out and publish them to sloppy HTML.
As for which one to get--I think ImageStyler was the best since I use almost no features of LiveMotion, which I believe added mostly Flash-based stuff, and I prefer to use Macromedia Flash for that type of work. I only switched because LiveMotion was carbonized.
ImageStyler was only $100 or so when it came out and no upgrade path was offered to LiveMotion. So I can imagine that it should be easy to find a good deal on Ebay.
Alex.
Yeah. California law says you split your fortune down the center in divorce and, since more than half of the Lucas fortune was tied up in Lucasfilm, he had to sell off parts of the company or else he wouldn't have been able to retain sole ownership over his company.
Alex.
And my original posting should have had failure in quotes, which I thought it did. Alex.
People don't get rid of their monitors as fast as they get rid of other stuff. During a time period when I upgraded my computer almost every year, I stuck with the same CRT monitor I bought in college. Now it's seven years old and my computers last longer, but I still use the monitor. It's a 17" Dell CRT, bought refurbished in 1997 for somewhere between $150-250. Heck, I even switched to the Mac platform in 2001 and I'm still using the monitor.
It's the monitors that need backward compatibility. Unless I'm a hardcore gamer, I'm not going to buy a new monitor just so I can get the latest and greatest video card to work. Come to think of it, I used the same ATI graphics card through most of that time as well. It's in my current and last Windows machine, which I bought in early 2000 and have managed to keep booting up once a month or so. The ATI card I bought in 1998.
Alex.
http://www.hometheatermaster.com/htm/products/mx-5 00.html
I've seen this one touted for years on AV and home theatre fora. It's $189 retail but it's been around long enough that you might find it under $50 used.
Alex.
First off, I added that line as a joke. Have you ever heard of the urban legend that says that an oil company has a patent on a design for an ultra-efficient car and whenever anyone is about to come up with a design that's similar, they are able to close down its development? You mean, the power companies are going to force Intel to make their chips more wasteful, causing progress to halt and people to buy fewer Intel chips? Yeah, sure.
No, I don't think power companies will have any direct contact with Intel, but I think they would take the same position regardless.
I don't see Intel having much incentive for energy-efficient chips so long as consumers are interested in speed and power--in much the same way that US consumers are more likely to pay more for a less-efficient larger car with more power than an energy-efficient car. A focus on energy-efficiency will likely be a shift in resources for Intel, and, if so, will likely work against "growth" in speed and power in the short term.
So I'd say if there's going to be encouragment or discouragement towards more energy-efficient chips, then it will likely come from a political level (rightly or wrongly, successfully or unsuccessfully). Automobile companies have balked at and/or fought against legislation such as gradual percentage increases in fuel efficiency, and, if any political body takes a similar interest in the efficiency of microprocessors, I see Intel taking a similar position.
Alex.
Don't cars still use less than 50% of the energy they consume and the rest is released as heat? If we haven't figured that out yet on a longer timeline, then how long do they expect this to take? And if it is realistic, then how much more powerful are oil companies politically than electric power companies that the latter are going to just stand by and let this happen?
Alex.
What's the fastest media reader out there? Are there firewire SD readers, etc, and are they much faster than their USB 1 counterparts?
Alex.
Since this has come up and I haven't found any info elsewhere, are there any good resources online for installing Linux on VirtualPC (which versions work best, etc)? I'd also like to install MS DOS but I wouldn't have a clue how to get them off floppy disks and onto VirtualPC (I'm in OS X). If I buy a floppy reader, can VirtualPC recognize this as the A: drive? I currently run Windows 98 in VirtualPC and WindowsMe on a desktop computer. I don't want use a PowerPC version of Linux because I don't want to dualboot either computer. Any advice would be appreciated.
Alex.
I think the big problem is that a game can't be a subjective dungeon master. It doesn't know how to reward character development for character sake. In pen and paper RPGs, the GM can make the judgment call if a choice or activity is award-worthy (with XP or anything else) when it can't be measured by progress toward a goal. Even if the goal is life (like the Sims, which I admit I've never played), is it possible for the computer to detect for and allow every possible character development choice?
Now if a human being is on the other end, as is possible with multiplayer RPGs... are there any RPGs out there where one person "plays" the game master and other players play player characters, allowing for endless possibilities? If so, do they and can they bring anything to the table (so to speak) that pen and paper RPGs lack?
Alex.
supress this article ASAP? Everyone has to use Windows. It's important. For our economy. Or something.
Alex.
the advanced technology of the Atari 2600
http://videogames.org/html/images/mindlink.gif
Alex.
Microsoft, damnit, you don't announce that you want to be cool. You act like you don't care if you're cool or not, and then they come to you. You'll never be cool if everybody knows you want to be cool. Geeze, didn't you ever go to high school?
Alex.
The Zoom PS04, the sequel to the PS02:
a rt nr/100006441/sid/!06082002/quelle/listen
http://www.musik-produktiv.de/shop2/shop04.asp/
Tascam and Korg also have palmtops, but the PS04 looks like it could become the real winner in nigh-palm-sized recording devices.
Alex.
The Dr. Bott antenna (which you just plug in and reboot and it works) isn't much more than the one they recommend.
Alex.
I remember trying to play Pool of Radiance (the original DOS game) on a much faster Windows machine. The fight sequences happened so fast that you couldn't tell what was going on. If you ever set your characters to "auto" (in other words: having the computer decide what your characters were going to do), you could never "catch" it again by hitting ESCAPE in time and you were doomed to play the rest of the game with the preference set that way. I don't remember how I got around it, but it seems to me that this kind of thing can cause more problems than it can help.
Is there any problems with the current Xbox loading or playing speeds? (I don't have one, so I don't know). I mean: unless you're installing Linux on it and you need a real fast machine, what problem is this a solution for?
Alex.
Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. The conference table shot reminded me of a scene from The Usual Suspects.
Alex.
Pixar's environment to this place.
f ri day.asp
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/May/05302003/friday/
But it's still nicer than my old cubicle. I'm pretty thankful that I work out of my apartment now.
Alex.
What advice would you give for new writers to the comic book field? Do you recommend trying to break into the more mainstream field and then carve out a niche once influence and a bibliography have been established? Or should a writer do the work he or she wants to do from the beginning at the risk of never having enough influence to get his or her work seen or even realized? Along the same lines, what, from your vantage, is the state of underground and alternative comics, and what kind of practices can be implemented by newcomers to move comics as a medium in a direction you'd like to see it go? (probable answer: be less longwinded)
Love your fiction and comics. Thanks.
I get most of my spam on Sunday and Monday. It'll probably even out when my spammers and your spammers trade lists with each other.
Alex.
I live pretty far inland (Raleigh, NC region), though we are in the storm's path. I hear it got pretty bad ten years ago (was that Hugo? I lived in Cleveland/Akron, OH at the time) even in this area though. Bad storms. Power outages. Trees falling on houses and cars, and even big objects getting lifted up and thrown on top of other big objects.
Not much I can do about the heavy objects, but it's always humid so I always do what I can to keep electronics cool and dry.
It's common sense, I think, to keep some food and water in the apartment for any kind of emergency (not just this, Y2K, and Ashcroft's code oranges), so there's really nothing new I feel I can do.
I might do laundry on Thursday though. I was stuck in a five day power outage here last year and, being from the north I thought "this storm's going to be bad" meant that a lot of places were closed because the roads weren't plowed and nobody knew how to drive in snow. So I figured I'd put off doing dishes and laundry and such for when there was no place else to go. But then I was stuck for five days with dirty clothes and no heat. Live and learn.
Here's hoping everyone makes it through this one okay.
Alex.
I took it as funny. My response was meant to be funny as well. So do we both suck at reading comments or do we both suck at writing them? I'll put a [grin] here, lest there be any doubt.
Alex.
What I mean is: even if you have the CD (or even Kareoke CD) of the songs you want to use with the game, you'll have to (a) buy them again in the "expansion disc" format and (b) hope they come out with your songs in the expansion disc format in the first place. I doubt we're going to see Moxy Fruvous or Eddie from Ohio on the list anytime soon.
Actually, it is.
At least wait until you've heard me sing before you judge.
Alex.