I would rather a company aims for greatness and comes out with a few nitpick-worthy bugs, than have it aim for mediocrity and succeed.
I think many people would disagree with your charge that BioWare has poor support. Their developers post frequently (around 5 times or more per day) in their forums, discussing everything from plot points to scripting to technical issues. They are very friendly and quick to answer questions. Do they sometimes have a messed-up priority list for bug fixes? Perhaps (the shield-wielding monk bug comes to mind), but overall these are minor points when you take into account how ambitious they are. And they are willing to tell you repeatedly (as opposed to just ignoring you) that they believe your bug is not important enough to fix yet.
An example of BioWare's excellence is the NWScript language, which, though largely undocumented and requiring a little bit of adventure to get working, is very flexible and full of features. No other $30 game building tool has that kind of complexity. It is powerful enough that very sophisticated creature AIs have been built with it in the user community.
As far as single player games go, few RPG fans would deny the excellence of the writing in BioWare's RPGs (those that do deny it, though, do so with fervor). Both KoTOR or the Baldur's Gate saga offer a satisfying and deep single-player experiencee. Some may bring up Black Isle's Planescape: Torment as a game that exceeded those two in depth, but remember that Torment would not have been possible without BioWare's Infinity Engine---another great technical innovation on their part, one that (uselessly) made Interplay a good fraction of their profits.
And now, Black Isle Take 2 owes its existence to BioWare---both with KOToR 2 and NWN 2. Six years ago, Black Isle gave BioWare a chance---and now the tables are turned. I think it's great to see a friendship like that, even from a distance.
And yes, the NWN single-player experience wasn't up to par with the BioWare storytelling standard, though they claimed it was. Let's hope Obsidian does a good job with respect to that.
You can expect a darker tone in KoTOR II compared to the original. The guys at Obsidian have experience designing morbid games such as Planescape: Torment. They are very good at what they do, and we can expect an outstanding storyline, but I wonder if it'll be too dark for my taste.
They are hard workers. One of the developers read a ton of star wars novelizations (yuck), just so he wouldn't duplicate a story that was done before.
Still, I am suspicious. These are also the people who put out the Icewind Dale series of bland dungeon crawls. I think, though, that it was due to pressure by their former employer, and not their own volition.
I saw someone suggesting an expert mode. It has been tried, and it doesn't work. But why should we have it? The only thing it leads to is more confusion.
This is an attitude that I have never understood. Excuse me, just WHY is it that an expert mode "doesn't work?" I would be totally happy with GNOME if an "advanced settings" buttons existed somewhere to tweak the desktop's default behavior. Either the GNOME developers feel that having options is not good, or they are too lazy to make those options available in a user-friendly manner.
Either way, I am turned off. And so are a lot of other people.
Pop-ups and pop-unders can be easily cured by Mozilla or other popup blockers without having to give up javascript. Java can be turned on and off easily via a preference pane.
But what about Flash? For the users who hate 90% of Flash content (ads) but are very interested in 10% of it (for example, New York Times multimedia presentations), there is no easy solution. No preference pane that allows you to turn it on and off quickly. Luckily the Mozilla's flashblock can take care of this problem, but IE users are stuck with tons of undesired content.
Oh, c'mon. If our government can build cruise missiles that can reliably fly through the goalposts of a football field after being launched from hundreds of miles away, I don't think they'd be using Bronze age technology for storing our vital public records.
Really? Then how about the
IRS's ancient setup? (It's a local cache of a Dec '03 NYT article about the IRS's upgrading woes)
Here's an excerpt:
The I.R.S. says it can still process returns and send out refunds on time, but its dependence on the 1960's-era Assembler and Cobol computer languages makes it difficult to investigate and resolve taxpayers' problems. Finding a record using the existing system can take a week; the new system is supposed to do the job in seconds.
AC wrote:
God, you guys are the worst. I've been saying all along: if you want Joe User on Linux, you're going to end up with a shitty default UI -- keep it hobbiest, so we can do what we like -- but NOOOooo. Gotta make "desktop penetration" a goal. Gotta "bring down MS". Couldn't let a good thing be. So now you have all these "user-friendly" efforts going on that are exactly what Joe User would benefit from, and GUESS WHAT? They suck for power users. Thats how it works. As they say, if you sleep with dogs...
I think the real issue here is that GNOME has slowly evolved into a creature that resists customization. It's not just Nautilus---it's apps such as gnome-terminal too (and that one isn't as easily configurable). "We'll take away your options, it'll be good for you," has become the GNOME credo.
Grandmas rarely click on a "Expert settings" buttons. Power users often do. What do you gain by denying power users access to that button? Nothing. But you risk losing the support of your community of peers.
After all, Joe User doesn't give a damn about GNOME, KDE, or Windows---they're all the same to him. But GNOME's peers, and that includes many slashdots, do care, and it is self-destructive for GNOME to snub them so openly.
I would bet that Yahoo and Hotmail are already searching through their users' email and storing the results for ads. They just haven't made the fact public like Google has.
The computer game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic had better developed characters, dialog, and story than all the Star Wars movies combined. Clearly BioWare, the company who made the game, has a better sense of the Star Wars universe than does George Lucas himself. It's so evident that they retain the sense of wonder that Lucas himself has lost.
Engineers design programs that work for them, not for end users.
I'm not so sure about that. Check out this this article by Alexander Larsson. He seems to be saying that the new GNOME UI is the engineer's perception of what new end users like. Here's a quote:
People have argued (and I'm inclined to agree) that the object
oriented methaphor (hereafter called oo), is easier to understand for
new users. The argument is that the direct graphical representation
and manipulation makes it easier for people to understand the concept of
directories.
There may be additional reasons for their choice of the spatial interface. I hope so, because in my experience, the typical end user is much happier with the traditional navigational interface. I would wager that most of us hate pop-ups of any kind.
I also agree with the above posters who said that such a dramatic change from a previous version should have been optional in the new version.
I have been using Linux for scientific computing since 1994, when I wrote my college thesis using LaTeX. That was within a Slackware installation. I am currently running Redhat 9. While I do compile my own C programs every week, I am no OS expert---I have always used the "out-of-the-box" installation without doing much system administration.
I would like to try Gentoo, but this is what I am afraid of: I don't know anything about vixie-cron, at, or ntp (besides maybe seeing their names on the redhat bootup screen for 5 seconds). I am afraid that I will have to spend a lot of time figuring out which of these very basic, system-level packages to download.
So here is my question: given that I know how to compile things, but don't know very much about system administration at all, will I be able to have a fully functioning system (and I mean fully---I want to use my CD-RW and X11) just by following the instructions on the Gentoo site?
In other words, how will I know which packages I need to emerge to get my system fully functioning?
Funny, on slashdot GPL violators are on step below Charles Manson, while copyright infringers of music, movies, and software are somewhere below jaywalkers.
That is because the GPL is a weapon for neutralizing copyright. It uses a copyright to thwart the practice of copyright itself. That is the beauty of it. The poison becomes its own antidote.
Think about it. If all reproducible works were GPL'd, then for most purposes copyright would be meaningless.
GPL supporters dislike GPL violators because they slow the working of the antidote.
I remember reading H. Pennington's manifesto on the Metacity window manager (which is or at least recently was GNOME's default). He basically said, "You've grown up now, so you don't need all the extra features" (paraphrasing).
Maybe I don't need all the extra features of fwvm, but I and many others would like some features beyond the very basic, like window rings, selectively disappearing title bars, etc. Now I know it's easy enough to install sawfish or fvwm and get some of that back, but they're not as nicely integrated into GNOME as Metacity.
I know the whole point of GNOME is to make X11 easy to use for newcomers, but they shouldn't let "ease of use" stop them from incorporating some of the great ideas that were featured in previous "experts-only" software like ??wm. Why not have an "advanced options" button that frees up a whole bunch of new settings that are normally hidden and might be scary to newbies? (And also have a "return to beginner mode" button which hides all those options and returns them to their default values in case someone ventures beyond the range of their expertise).
I've seen this happen to Mac OS X (and Classic before it), that in their quest to make a pure and simple interface they leave out a bunch of useful features. Then "Shareware" folks come along (OSS has not quite captured the Cocoa, non-BSD crowd). They write a bunch of "Haxies" that perform all the little necessary tasks that ought to have been there to begin with, and charge $10 for them.
I'm not saying that'll happen to GNOME. I'm just saying, why not include the kitchen sink, and hide in a place that makes it difficult for newbies to hurt themselves (or get turned off)?
What is wrong with you people? I thought this was supposed to be a community of GNU/Linux users. Don't tell me that everyone here is using graphical word processors. Are emacs and latex now restricted just to academic use?
A fanatical support team, editable macros, and a psychologist. Emacs has it all. Don't tell me that either OO or M$O have kill-rectangle, either.
The only thing going against emacs is that it's difficult to learn. But hey, you've already installed Linux on your machine and even configured your multimedia player. Come out of the cave and see the beauty of the ideal.
The now defunct Breakthrough Propulsion Project
on
A Deep Space Primer
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Some of us like solar system exploration just fine, but already have our imaginations fixed on what it would take to get to the other stars. Rocks from Mars may be exciting, but getting to Alpha Centauri would be even more exciting, to say the least.
NASA used to have a project devoted to seriously studying what it would take to achieve interstellar travel. Unfortunately, funding for it got cut off in 2002. However, they did manage to publish several papers and still have their results online at the BPP site.
Here is a quote from the abstract of one of their papers:
To travel to our neighboring stars as practically as envisioned by science fiction, breakthroughs in science are required. One of these breakthroughs is to discover a self-contained means of propulsion that requires no propellant. To chart a path toward such a discovery, seven hypothetical space drives are presented to illustrate the specific unsolved challenges and associated research objectives toward this ambition. One research objective is to discover a means to asymmetrically interact with the electromagnetic fluctuations of the vacuum. Another is to develop a physics that describes inertia, gravity, or the properties of spacetime as a function of electromagnetics that leads to using electromagnetic technology for inducing propulsive forces. Another is to determine if negative mass exists or if its properties can be synthesized. An alternative approach that covers the possibility that negative mass might not exist is to develop a formalism of Mach's Principle or reformulate ether concepts to lay a foundation for addressing reaction forces and conservation of momentum with space drives.
Slashdot Mirror
I would rather a company aims for greatness and comes out with a few nitpick-worthy bugs, than have it aim for mediocrity and succeed.
I think many people would disagree with your charge that BioWare has poor support. Their developers post frequently (around 5 times or more per day) in their forums, discussing everything from plot points to scripting to technical issues. They are very friendly and quick to answer questions. Do they sometimes have a messed-up priority list for bug fixes? Perhaps (the shield-wielding monk bug comes to mind), but overall these are minor points when you take into account how ambitious they are. And they are willing to tell you repeatedly (as opposed to just ignoring you) that they believe your bug is not important enough to fix yet.
An example of BioWare's excellence is the NWScript language, which, though largely undocumented and requiring a little bit of adventure to get working, is very flexible and full of features. No other $30 game building tool has that kind of complexity. It is powerful enough that very sophisticated creature AIs have been built with it in the user community.
As far as single player games go, few RPG fans would deny the excellence of the writing in BioWare's RPGs (those that do deny it, though, do so with fervor). Both KoTOR or the Baldur's Gate saga offer a satisfying and deep single-player experiencee. Some may bring up Black Isle's Planescape: Torment as a game that exceeded those two in depth, but remember that Torment would not have been possible without BioWare's Infinity Engine---another great technical innovation on their part, one that (uselessly) made Interplay a good fraction of their profits.
And now, Black Isle Take 2 owes its existence to BioWare---both with KOToR 2 and NWN 2. Six years ago, Black Isle gave BioWare a chance---and now the tables are turned. I think it's great to see a friendship like that, even from a distance.
And yes, the NWN single-player experience wasn't up to par with the BioWare storytelling standard, though they claimed it was. Let's hope Obsidian does a good job with respect to that.
You can expect a darker tone in KoTOR II compared to the original. The guys at Obsidian have experience designing morbid games such as Planescape: Torment. They are very good at what they do, and we can expect an outstanding storyline, but I wonder if it'll be too dark for my taste.
They are hard workers. One of the developers read a ton of star wars novelizations (yuck), just so he wouldn't duplicate a story that was done before.
Still, I am suspicious. These are also the people who put out the Icewind Dale series of bland dungeon crawls. I think, though, that it was due to pressure by their former employer, and not their own volition.
I saw someone suggesting an expert mode. It has been tried, and it doesn't work. But why should we have it? The only thing it leads to is more confusion.
This is an attitude that I have never understood. Excuse me, just WHY is it that an expert mode "doesn't work?" I would be totally happy with GNOME if an "advanced settings" buttons existed somewhere to tweak the desktop's default behavior. Either the GNOME developers feel that having options is not good, or they are too lazy to make those options available in a user-friendly manner.
Either way, I am turned off. And so are a lot of other people.
Pop-ups and pop-unders can be easily cured by Mozilla or other popup blockers without having to give up javascript. Java can be turned on and off easily via a preference pane.
But what about Flash? For the users who hate 90% of Flash content (ads) but are very interested in 10% of it (for example, New York Times multimedia presentations), there is no easy solution. No preference pane that allows you to turn it on and off quickly. Luckily the Mozilla's flashblock can take care of this problem, but IE users are stuck with tons of undesired content.
Oh, c'mon. If our government can build cruise missiles that can reliably fly through the goalposts of a football field after being launched from hundreds of miles away, I don't think they'd be using Bronze age technology for storing our vital public records.
Really? Then how about the IRS's ancient setup? (It's a local cache of a Dec '03 NYT article about the IRS's upgrading woes)
Here's an excerpt:
The I.R.S. says it can still process returns and send out refunds on time, but its dependence on the 1960's-era Assembler and Cobol computer languages makes it difficult to investigate and resolve taxpayers' problems. Finding a record using the existing system can take a week; the new system is supposed to do the job in seconds.
AC wrote:
God, you guys are the worst. I've been saying all along: if you want Joe User on Linux, you're going to end up with a shitty default UI -- keep it hobbiest, so we can do what we like -- but NOOOooo. Gotta make "desktop penetration" a goal. Gotta "bring down MS". Couldn't let a good thing be. So now you have all these "user-friendly" efforts going on that are exactly what Joe User would benefit from, and GUESS WHAT? They suck for power users. Thats how it works. As they say, if you sleep with dogs...
I think the real issue here is that GNOME has slowly evolved into a creature that resists customization. It's not just Nautilus---it's apps such as gnome-terminal too (and that one isn't as easily configurable). "We'll take away your options, it'll be good for you," has become the GNOME credo. Grandmas rarely click on a "Expert settings" buttons. Power users often do. What do you gain by denying power users access to that button? Nothing. But you risk losing the support of your community of peers.
After all, Joe User doesn't give a damn about GNOME, KDE, or Windows---they're all the same to him. But GNOME's peers, and that includes many slashdots, do care, and it is self-destructive for GNOME to snub them so openly.
I would bet that Yahoo and Hotmail are already searching through their users' email and storing the results for ads. They just haven't made the fact public like Google has.
The computer game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic had better developed characters, dialog, and story than all the Star Wars movies combined. Clearly BioWare, the company who made the game, has a better sense of the Star Wars universe than does George Lucas himself. It's so evident that they retain the sense of wonder that Lucas himself has lost.
mrklin is right. There is less caffeine in espresso than in brewed coffee, but is more intense in flavor.
Engineers design programs that work for them, not for end users.
I'm not so sure about that. Check out this this article by Alexander Larsson. He seems to be saying that the new GNOME UI is the engineer's perception of what new end users like. Here's a quote:
People have argued (and I'm inclined to agree) that the object oriented methaphor (hereafter called oo), is easier to understand for new users. The argument is that the direct graphical representation and manipulation makes it easier for people to understand the concept of directories.
There may be additional reasons for their choice of the spatial interface. I hope so, because in my experience, the typical end user is much happier with the traditional navigational interface. I would wager that most of us hate pop-ups of any kind.
I also agree with the above posters who said that such a dramatic change from a previous version should have been optional in the new version.
I have been using Linux for scientific computing since 1994, when I wrote my college thesis using LaTeX. That was within a Slackware installation. I am currently running Redhat 9. While I do compile my own C programs every week, I am no OS expert---I have always used the "out-of-the-box" installation without doing much system administration.
I would like to try Gentoo, but this is what I am afraid of: I don't know anything about vixie-cron, at, or ntp (besides maybe seeing their names on the redhat bootup screen for 5 seconds). I am afraid that I will have to spend a lot of time figuring out which of these very basic, system-level packages to download.
So here is my question: given that I know how to compile things, but don't know very much about system administration at all, will I be able to have a fully functioning system (and I mean fully---I want to use my CD-RW and X11) just by following the instructions on the Gentoo site?
In other words, how will I know which packages I need to emerge to get my system fully functioning?
Funny, on slashdot GPL violators are on step below Charles Manson, while copyright infringers of music, movies, and software are somewhere below jaywalkers.
That is because the GPL is a weapon for neutralizing copyright. It uses a copyright to thwart the practice of copyright itself. That is the beauty of it. The poison becomes its own antidote.
Think about it. If all reproducible works were GPL'd, then for most purposes copyright would be meaningless.
GPL supporters dislike GPL violators because they slow the working of the antidote.
I remember reading H. Pennington's manifesto on the Metacity window manager (which is or at least recently was GNOME's default). He basically said, "You've grown up now, so you don't need all the extra features" (paraphrasing).
Maybe I don't need all the extra features of fwvm, but I and many others would like some features beyond the very basic, like window rings, selectively disappearing title bars, etc. Now I know it's easy enough to install sawfish or fvwm and get some of that back, but they're not as nicely integrated into GNOME as Metacity.
I know the whole point of GNOME is to make X11 easy to use for newcomers, but they shouldn't let "ease of use" stop them from incorporating some of the great ideas that were featured in previous "experts-only" software like ??wm. Why not have an "advanced options" button that frees up a whole bunch of new settings that are normally hidden and might be scary to newbies? (And also have a "return to beginner mode" button which hides all those options and returns them to their default values in case someone ventures beyond the range of their expertise).
I've seen this happen to Mac OS X (and Classic before it), that in their quest to make a pure and simple interface they leave out a bunch of useful features. Then "Shareware" folks come along (OSS has not quite captured the Cocoa, non-BSD crowd). They write a bunch of "Haxies" that perform all the little necessary tasks that ought to have been there to begin with, and charge $10 for them.
I'm not saying that'll happen to GNOME. I'm just saying, why not include the kitchen sink, and hide in a place that makes it difficult for newbies to hurt themselves (or get turned off)?
What is wrong with you people? I thought this was supposed to be a community of GNU/Linux users. Don't tell me that everyone here is using graphical word processors. Are emacs and latex now restricted just to academic use?
A fanatical support team, editable macros, and a psychologist. Emacs has it all. Don't tell me that either OO or M$O have kill-rectangle, either.
The only thing going against emacs is that it's difficult to learn. But hey, you've already installed Linux on your machine and even configured your multimedia player. Come out of the cave and see the beauty of the ideal.
NASA used to have a project devoted to seriously studying what it would take to achieve interstellar travel. Unfortunately, funding for it got cut off in 2002. However, they did manage to publish several papers and still have their results online at the BPP site.
Here is a quote from the abstract of one of their papers: