The G4 powerbook looks completely unique, in it's own class
Ever got your paws on one of these? That curved handle along the top is also made of the same plastic, with no where near the kind of strength it should have for a machine of it's weight.
you stupid shite.
1) the original poster was talking about the G4 PowerBook, not the iBook. what? you don't know anything about the G4 PowerBook? i'd suggest this informative website.
2) that "curved handle" on the iBook has a steel core, which in fact has more than "the kind of strength it should have for a machine of it's[sic] weight". in fact, Apple recommends looping your laptop antitheft cable through the iBook handle to secure it.
apparently, when you say that "form should follow function", you mean that "form should look exactly like every single other desktop computer built during the past ten years".
nonono - i believe the poster is referring to the FASA Starship Combat game, which consists of nothing but highly detailed, turn-based tactical starship combat.
pretty cool, and well balanced (and very well backed up by a massive fleet registry, containing tons of ships that were never seen on the screen - wanna see what happens when a few Orion raiders ambush a Federation fleet tender escorted by an aging destroyer?).
unfortunately, my only quibbles with the game were that a) shields fluctuated way too much from round to round - it was commonplace for a volley from one ship to completely blast away an entire arc of another ship's shields in one shot, and then for that same arc to spring back into existence a round later, which completely destroyed the whole tension-building Star Trek device of the navigator calling out "Shields at 78%... 64%... falling to 52%, Captain!", and that b) firing phasers took up way too much of your ship's resources, which tended to cause small fleet actions to degenerate into photon torpedo duels.
but all these weaknesses were easily rectified with a few house rules, as well as rules for inertia that made maneuvering a LOT more fun...
I *really* resent supposedly intelligent people...bla bla bla...arguing that because someone may be a little slow off the mark they should lose the right to vote.
that's not the contention.
the point is that people who are "a little slow off the mark" should TAKE THE TIME to check their work carefully to make sure they don't fuck up. in fact, EVERYONE voting should be taking special care - hey, if i hadn't been reading my own ballot carefully, i would have voted the wrong way on one of the referenda!
but someone who doesn't vote carefully, and then bitches because they didn't vote the way they thought they had, gets little (not none, but little) of my sympathy.
erm, and did they just not see the LARGE BLACK ARROWS pointing to the hole they were supposed to punch? that ballot was plenty simple - i was expecting something really confusing.
the problem is that these voters acted as if the ballot was designed the way THEY would have designed it, without regard for the way the ballot was ACTUALLY designed. this is a common failing of the elderly.
Red hat is famous for pushing new tech into the limelight...If not for red hat, we'd all be a few versions back.
would that necessarily be a bad thing? i've been following Red Hat since 4.2 through their little song and dance (first we release a completely broken *.0, then we release a *.1 that fixes some things but breaks many others, and then we finally release a *.2 that works kinda ok).
i don't think Red Hat should be responsible for jamming the latest and greatest untested tech down everyone's throats. people who want the bleeding edge can go get it themselves - personally, what i'm looking for in a distro is stability and functionality. let somebody else test the innovations, and when most of the kinks are worked out, then i'll use them. i can wait until then.
Time == aforementioned American current affairs mag, also publishes large amount of other stuff
Warner Bros. == film/animation studio, which later became Warner Cable, cable tv provider - distributes lots of media content
Time Warner == result of merger between previous two
AOL - sizeable ISP that serves a large portion of the net's population; also provides almost all instant messaging service via AIM/ICQ
AOL/Time Warner == truly massive media entity formed (or about to be formed? someone correct me) by the combination of all of the above. resulting octopus will have a tentacle in nearly every pie.
3. Limit the # of posts per story. We shouldn't need a (-1 redundant) tag.
why, so that the only people who can post to a story are the freaks who reload slashdot every three minutes and spout off knee-jerk replies to every story in the hope of getting close to the top? that would make posting a privilege limited to those who can type quickly.
i propose an alternative solution: limit the number of posts per story per person, and make the limit be the same for everyone (except perhaps slashdot staff, so that they can answer posted questions). this would compel people to think carefully about their ideas before posting, as well as limiting the number of stupid-joke posts.
you're worried that you'll think of a really good idea but be unable to post it because of having used up all your posts for that article already? don't flatter yourself; someone else will think of the same great idea soon enough, and will post it. i can't think of anyone on slashdot these days who comes up with thoughts so original that any number of others couldn't duplicate them.
we've already (hopefully) learned to discipline ourselves with the use of a limited number of mod points. why not apply the same discipline to posts?
Post, post, and post some more, and you never know your karma. So why bother to construct an intelligent comment?
oh, i dunno. maybe because you are interested in the topic being discussed, and would like to know what others think of your ideas? maybe because you're actually interested in carrying on a discussion about subjects you enjoy?
even with invisible karma, people who care about the discussion will still do their best to post intelligently, and the trolls will still spew. the spew will still get modded down, and the intelligent comments will still get modded up. if the only reason you're posting is so that your karma can increase, i suspect slashdot wouldn't be particularly hurt by your departure.
this is a simplistic plan that i've seen a number of times before.
it fails to take into account the fact that "smart" does not indicate an aptitude for all fields. someone who can design and troubleshoot a network will not necessarily be good at coordinating employees, attracting investors, wooing clients, or managing finances. what's more, the techie will not necessarily even have an easy time learning those skills! both fields of work require a specialized set of skills.
besides, not everyone WANTS to be self-employed. as a consultant, i've worked under:
a) good managers who kept me well-supplied with interesting and appropriate tasks, thus maximizing my productivity and keeping me happy
b) bad managers who meddled constantly in what i was doing, preventing me from getting much accomplished and generally pissing me off
and c) apathetic managers who were either unwilling or unable to actually do any management, leaving me to find my own tasks, which resulted in my working sporadically and ineffectually while my morale and motivation went to zero.
i do far and away my best work when i'm a member of a small, well-managed organization. i have neither the aptitude nor the inclination for politicking, scheduling, and long-term planning - i'd much rather be presented with a specific task and given the materials necessary to solve it.
i'm not sure that i would be a good manager, given the opportunity. i know from personal experience that good managers exist, and also that some of these good managers would probably make lousy engineers.
imho, the main cause of employee dissatisfaction with managers is that employees just bitch to each other when they're unhappy. they may complain to the offending manager, but that guy has no incentive to relay complaints to his superiors! either top-level executives have to spend time interacting with employees in order to pick up on complaints (an unlikely scenario), or employees need to start learning to go over the head of their immediate superior and complain to the superior's bosses.
Yes, and the reason for this is because they only sold 10 --- yes, TEN --- copies of the latest major Wraith supplement in the first year... I believe it was called "The Great War".
i bought it! i bought it! i bought it!
and about 30% of it was completely illegibile due to being printed in this heinous heavy black medieval Gothic font. but the rest of it was not terrible.
personally, i'm just bummed they didn't make The Great War similar to the Wild West werewolf expansion, which could stand on its own as a game manual instead of requiring the original manual as well. feh.
well, in this case the quote is an excellent summation of the article's message, namely that if we blindly and "zealously" embrace any company that claims to support open source, we risk losing some of our freedom when these companies reveal that they have selfish motives. and the title sums up the most dangerous part of the quote, thus the part we should be most mindful of.
you do realize that the label "men of zeal" is not a complimentary one in the context of this article, right? the author is not saying "wow, look at those great men of zeal who are fighting for freedom", but rather, "watch out! among you are men of zeal who will unwittingly weaken your cause! don't be like them!"
also, bear in mind that gender-neutral speech is a relatively recent convention, having originated within the past few decades. any thinker or writer born before then was not fortunate enough to know that in order to avoid offending modern audiences, he or she would have to avoid using gender-specific terms. does this mean that i, or any other writer, am supposed to be barred from using quotes from any of the past fifteen centuries of human thought, just because those poor savages were barbaric enough to use "he" as a pronoun meaning "anyone"? or am i, some schmuck from the twentieth century, supposed to presume to edit the words of people much wiser and more thoughtful than i, just to bring them in line with the conventions of today?
neither of these are particularly appealing options.
i'm sorry to go on at such length about this, but you seem to have missed the message of the essay and latched onto a small portion of it that only has meaning if you inflate it out of proportion. in picking his title, Oberg decided that making a strong, thought-provoking literary reference was more important than being bland and inoffensive and diluting the message.
i'm sorry for the people who were so horrified by the title that they couldn't bring themselves to read the actual article; it's their loss. they have imposed their own blinkers upon themselves, and they're responsible for what they don't see. i'm uncomfortable with any social pressure that limits what an author can and cannot say in an attempt to convey a message.
in the end, what's a writer's most important goal? to get the point across, or not to offend?
someone i know has written a small ncurses-based astrosmash clone that is known to compile on Digital UNIX and Linux (and i'm trying to build it on MacOS X).
Why 'Men'? Why not 'People'? You're leaving out half the population there with your title.
i suspect that the reason Oberg chose that title was not to offend one half of the population, but rather to make reference to the Louis Brandeis quote with which he ends the article, namely:
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evilminded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal and wellmeaning but without understanding." --Justice Louis D. Brandeis
it's a shame Brandeis is dead, because otherwise you might be able to ask him why he didn't choose to use more gender-neutral wording. but it's a little unfair to slam the author for making a literary reference (especially when he was considerate enough to provide the reference at the end of the article).
-steve
Re:Seems to be a good tool for internet blackmail
on
Pretty Poor Privacy
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it's a semantic debate, but it's a very simple one.
parrot-like repetition of the stupid Blue's News interview, which added nothing useful to the discussion
yes, yes, i know that's what the interview said.
idiot.
1) Zartman is a PR guy. his job is to say whatever makes his employer (or employer's owner) look good.
2) wrt the quote you posted, it seems likely that Zartman is either misinformed or lying (or blowing smoke, if you're feeling generous, which i'm not). i mean, c'mon! "The development team has a ton of options to consider" - since when? do you think the development team at bungie came up with the idea for Halo and then sat around deciding whether or not they were going to eventually release an IRIX version???? bungie has always released for Mac, and recently they've begun to release for Windows as well. i can certainly see them making a foray into the world of modern consoles, but i can't see them seriously considering NOT RELEASING a game in a non-console version - unless someone were twisting their arm.
i'm not even going to give my opinion of the Microsoft press release and its credibility.
I also doubt the ownership of Bungie will decrease the quality of their products. Microsoft's games division often puts out some good stuff like the Age of Empires series and the Close Combat series
you do realize that "Microsoft's games division" had nothing to do with the creation of the Close Combat series, yes?
CC1 and CC2 (not sure about 3) were created by a company called Atomic Games, which is not a division of Microsoft, but rather an separate company. once the finished product existed, Microsoft bought the rights and distributed the game. so if you have a gratifying mental image of a bunch of coders in Seattle working hard to make good real-time WWII tactical combat games, it's a fantasy.
Given the choice between Q3A and UT, I'll take UT. It's even more polished than Q3A, IMHO.
i tend to agree with you. i find UT's bots to be more challenging opponents than Q3A's, for when there's nobody to DM against.
my only complaint with UT is that i've never successfully managed to play an Internet game that wasn't lagged to the point of unplayability (and i'm connecting over a cable modem). has anyone else had this problem? i'm running the most recent version of UT for Mac.
on the other hand, UT does have my favorite sniper weapon of all time, bar none.
I think the thing about Doom that kept me on the edge of my seat was the storyline. A sci-fi story that leads (literally) straight to Hell is just awesome.
Did anyone actually even pay attention to the storyline for Quake? Just wondering...
oh my word. reading this post made me feel ill.
WHAT STORYLINE??!? kill some demons. kill some more demons. damn, the demons are getting bigger and meaner - must be getting near Hell! oh yeah, and there was some vague mention of a moonbase or something.
have you ever played Half-Life? have you ever played any of the Marathon series? Pathways into Darkness? hell, have you ever played one of the Tomb Raider games?
Doom lives on in my mind as the shining example of a game entirely devoid of storyline. id discovered that this lack failed to deter people from buying it, and they haven't looked back since (except for maybe Quake 2, kinda sorta).
y'all have got to be kidding me. this is something to get excited about? more important, this is something to get Paul Steed fired about?
i've played Doom 1, Doom 2, and Final Doom, and i must confess i thought they all sucked. the same repetitive gameplay over and over and over... find gold key to open gold door. compensate for tougher enemies by shooting them with a bigger gun. when you get bored with that, engage in twitchy, strategyless deathmatch with friends. no storyline to speak of, no challenging AI, and butt-ugly levels.
i realize that this game essentially created the FPS genre (yeah, there was Wolfenstein before, but Doom definitely eclipsed it). i'm all for giving historically important games their due, but do we really have to sit through YA-Doom? (yes, i know i don't have to buy it. but i will be deprived of whatever game id would have been creating while they were wasting their time on Doom 3.)
then again, it's possible that Doom looks so shabby to me because my first FPS was Marathon. i suppose if you didn't know any better, Doom looked kinda cool. wow! we can have rooms that aren't perfect rectangular solids!
1)PC's need to ship with Windows in order to be competitive. Period. If the average consumer is shopping at dell.com and can't find a PC that comes pre-loaded with the worlds most widely used OS, they shop elsewhere. Dell sinks.
And this is no one's fault but dells if they choose to do so. They have an option to bundle windows. No one has forced them. It is their choice. To do otherwise might be an unprofitable choice that might even lead to certain destruction of dell, but it is their choice.
actually, this is not true. corporations are not like individuals.
dell is a for-profit corporation. thus, its management are obligated (to whom? to the board of directors who appointed them. and to whom are the board obligated? to the shareholders. this is how corporations work.) to act in a profit-maximizing fashion, whether or not they might like to act otherwise.
if dell's management were to reject a Microsoft licensing deal and fail to negotiate another one, they would be accountable to the shareholders at the end of the financial year, if not at the end of the quarter. the stockholders have invested their money in dell; the management and the board of directors are obligated not to take unprofitable choices that might even lead to certain destruction of dell.
I would make more sence to say, maybe, have the icons there, and have the color change from grey to green (or red etc..) when the mouse is over it. That way. The user knows what it is. And they get feedback when they hover over it. Instead of the user having to "check" each one untill they find the right button.
and how do you suppose color-blind people know whether to stop or go at stoplights? because the red light is ALWAYS on top and the green light is ALWAYS on the bottom.
i predict that by the end of my first hour of using Aqua i will have learned that the close button is ALWAYS on the far left and the minimize button is ALWAYS on the far right (or whatever the convention ends up being), and so i will never again have to check which is which.
this is why consistency in UI, and standards such as the Human Interface Guidelines, are a Good Thing.
personally, i'm glad Apple is moving away from icons with Aqua. the whole new look will be a real kick in the arse even for lifelong Mac users, a way to bid goodbye to the tired old interface. i'm looking forward to it - one of the reasons i use a Mac is because i like using a system that feels different from the one the majority uses.
Slashdot Mirror
The G4 powerbook looks completely unique, in it's own class
Ever got your paws on one of these? That curved handle along the top is also made of the same plastic, with no where near the kind of strength it should have for a machine of it's weight.
you stupid shite.
1) the original poster was talking about the G4 PowerBook, not the iBook. what? you don't know anything about the G4 PowerBook? i'd suggest this informative website.
2) that "curved handle" on the iBook has a steel core, which in fact has more than "the kind of strength it should have for a machine of it's[sic] weight". in fact, Apple recommends looping your laptop antitheft cable through the iBook handle to secure it.
apparently, when you say that "form should follow function", you mean that "form should look exactly like every single other desktop computer built during the past ten years".
it's your loss.
-steve
nonono - i believe the poster is referring to the FASA Starship Combat game, which consists of nothing but highly detailed, turn-based tactical starship combat.
pretty cool, and well balanced (and very well backed up by a massive fleet registry, containing tons of ships that were never seen on the screen - wanna see what happens when a few Orion raiders ambush a Federation fleet tender escorted by an aging destroyer?).
unfortunately, my only quibbles with the game were that a) shields fluctuated way too much from round to round - it was commonplace for a volley from one ship to completely blast away an entire arc of another ship's shields in one shot, and then for that same arc to spring back into existence a round later, which completely destroyed the whole tension-building Star Trek device of the navigator calling out "Shields at 78%... 64%... falling to 52%, Captain!", and that b) firing phasers took up way too much of your ship's resources, which tended to cause small fleet actions to degenerate into photon torpedo duels.
but all these weaknesses were easily rectified with a few house rules, as well as rules for inertia that made maneuvering a LOT more fun...
-steve
Maybe there is an easier way, I will try and find it. But I miss the app switcher.
dude.
command-tab, shift-command-tab. switch apps using the keyboard.
and I think most American's would feel the same way if they knew exactly how many crimes are considered felonies
no.
the solution is to change which crimes are considered felonies, not to allow felons to vote. social contract.
-steve
I *really* resent supposedly intelligent people...bla bla bla...arguing that because someone may be a little slow off the mark they should lose the right to vote.
that's not the contention.
the point is that people who are "a little slow off the mark" should TAKE THE TIME to check their work carefully to make sure they don't fuck up. in fact, EVERYONE voting should be taking special care - hey, if i hadn't been reading my own ballot carefully, i would have voted the wrong way on one of the referenda!
but someone who doesn't vote carefully, and then bitches because they didn't vote the way they thought they had, gets little (not none, but little) of my sympathy.
-steve
erm, and did they just not see the LARGE BLACK ARROWS pointing to the hole they were supposed to punch? that ballot was plenty simple - i was expecting something really confusing.
the problem is that these voters acted as if the ballot was designed the way THEY would have designed it, without regard for the way the ballot was ACTUALLY designed. this is a common failing of the elderly.
-steve
Red hat is famous for pushing new tech into the limelight...If not for red hat, we'd all be a few versions back.
would that necessarily be a bad thing? i've been following Red Hat since 4.2 through their little song and dance (first we release a completely broken *.0, then we release a *.1 that fixes some things but breaks many others, and then we finally release a *.2 that works kinda ok).
i don't think Red Hat should be responsible for jamming the latest and greatest untested tech down everyone's throats. people who want the bleeding edge can go get it themselves - personally, what i'm looking for in a distro is stability and functionality. let somebody else test the innovations, and when most of the kinks are worked out, then i'll use them. i can wait until then.
-steve
Time == aforementioned American current affairs mag, also publishes large amount of other stuff
Warner Bros. == film/animation studio, which later became Warner Cable, cable tv provider - distributes lots of media content
Time Warner == result of merger between previous two
AOL - sizeable ISP that serves a large portion of the net's population; also provides almost all instant messaging service via AIM/ICQ
AOL/Time Warner == truly massive media entity formed (or about to be formed? someone correct me) by the combination of all of the above. resulting octopus will have a tentacle in nearly every pie.
hth,
steve
3. Limit the # of posts per story. We shouldn't need a (-1 redundant) tag.
why, so that the only people who can post to a story are the freaks who reload slashdot every three minutes and spout off knee-jerk replies to every story in the hope of getting close to the top? that would make posting a privilege limited to those who can type quickly.
i propose an alternative solution: limit the number of posts per story per person, and make the limit be the same for everyone (except perhaps slashdot staff, so that they can answer posted questions). this would compel people to think carefully about their ideas before posting, as well as limiting the number of stupid-joke posts.
you're worried that you'll think of a really good idea but be unable to post it because of having used up all your posts for that article already? don't flatter yourself; someone else will think of the same great idea soon enough, and will post it. i can't think of anyone on slashdot these days who comes up with thoughts so original that any number of others couldn't duplicate them.
we've already (hopefully) learned to discipline ourselves with the use of a limited number of mod points. why not apply the same discipline to posts?
-steve
Post, post, and post some more, and you never know your karma. So why bother to construct an intelligent comment?
oh, i dunno. maybe because you are interested in the topic being discussed, and would like to know what others think of your ideas? maybe because you're actually interested in carrying on a discussion about subjects you enjoy?
even with invisible karma, people who care about the discussion will still do their best to post intelligently, and the trolls will still spew. the spew will still get modded down, and the intelligent comments will still get modded up. if the only reason you're posting is so that your karma can increase, i suspect slashdot wouldn't be particularly hurt by your departure.
-steve
this is a simplistic plan that i've seen a number of times before.
it fails to take into account the fact that "smart" does not indicate an aptitude for all fields. someone who can design and troubleshoot a network will not necessarily be good at coordinating employees, attracting investors, wooing clients, or managing finances. what's more, the techie will not necessarily even have an easy time learning those skills! both fields of work require a specialized set of skills.
besides, not everyone WANTS to be self-employed. as a consultant, i've worked under:
a) good managers who kept me well-supplied with interesting and appropriate tasks, thus maximizing my productivity and keeping me happy
b) bad managers who meddled constantly in what i was doing, preventing me from getting much accomplished and generally pissing me off
and c) apathetic managers who were either unwilling or unable to actually do any management, leaving me to find my own tasks, which resulted in my working sporadically and ineffectually while my morale and motivation went to zero.
i do far and away my best work when i'm a member of a small, well-managed organization. i have neither the aptitude nor the inclination for politicking, scheduling, and long-term planning - i'd much rather be presented with a specific task and given the materials necessary to solve it.
i'm not sure that i would be a good manager, given the opportunity. i know from personal experience that good managers exist, and also that some of these good managers would probably make lousy engineers.
imho, the main cause of employee dissatisfaction with managers is that employees just bitch to each other when they're unhappy. they may complain to the offending manager, but that guy has no incentive to relay complaints to his superiors! either top-level executives have to spend time interacting with employees in order to pick up on complaints (an unlikely scenario), or employees need to start learning to go over the head of their immediate superior and complain to the superior's bosses.
-steve
(most likely because standard Mac OS X will not have an X server IIRC)
MacOS X will not have an X server as an integral component: however, a company called Tenon produces an X server that will run on MacOS X.
-steve
Yes, and the reason for this is because they only sold 10 --- yes, TEN --- copies of the latest major Wraith supplement in the first year... I believe it was called "The Great War".
i bought it! i bought it! i bought it!
and about 30% of it was completely illegibile due to being printed in this heinous heavy black medieval Gothic font. but the rest of it was not terrible.
personally, i'm just bummed they didn't make The Great War similar to the Wild West werewolf expansion, which could stand on its own as a game manual instead of requiring the original manual as well. feh.
-steve
well, in this case the quote is an excellent summation of the article's message, namely that if we blindly and "zealously" embrace any company that claims to support open source, we risk losing some of our freedom when these companies reveal that they have selfish motives. and the title sums up the most dangerous part of the quote, thus the part we should be most mindful of.
you do realize that the label "men of zeal" is not a complimentary one in the context of this article, right? the author is not saying "wow, look at those great men of zeal who are fighting for freedom", but rather, "watch out! among you are men of zeal who will unwittingly weaken your cause! don't be like them!"
also, bear in mind that gender-neutral speech is a relatively recent convention, having originated within the past few decades. any thinker or writer born before then was not fortunate enough to know that in order to avoid offending modern audiences, he or she would have to avoid using gender-specific terms. does this mean that i, or any other writer, am supposed to be barred from using quotes from any of the past fifteen centuries of human thought, just because those poor savages were barbaric enough to use "he" as a pronoun meaning "anyone"? or am i, some schmuck from the twentieth century, supposed to presume to edit the words of people much wiser and more thoughtful than i, just to bring them in line with the conventions of today?
neither of these are particularly appealing options.
i'm sorry to go on at such length about this, but you seem to have missed the message of the essay and latched onto a small portion of it that only has meaning if you inflate it out of proportion. in picking his title, Oberg decided that making a strong, thought-provoking literary reference was more important than being bland and inoffensive and diluting the message.
i'm sorry for the people who were so horrified by the title that they couldn't bring themselves to read the actual article; it's their loss. they have imposed their own blinkers upon themselves, and they're responsible for what they don't see. i'm uncomfortable with any social pressure that limits what an author can and cannot say in an attempt to convey a message.
in the end, what's a writer's most important goal? to get the point across, or not to offend?
-steve
someone i know has written a small ncurses-based astrosmash clone that is known to compile on Digital UNIX and Linux (and i'm trying to build it on MacOS X).
source code can be found here.
support a larval hacker! if you grab the source and build astrosmash, send the author an email!
-steve
Why 'Men'? Why not 'People'? You're leaving out half the population there with your title.
i suspect that the reason Oberg chose that title was not to offend one half of the population, but rather to make reference to the Louis Brandeis quote with which he ends the article, namely:
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evilminded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal and wellmeaning but without understanding." --Justice Louis D. Brandeis
it's a shame Brandeis is dead, because otherwise you might be able to ask him why he didn't choose to use more gender-neutral wording. but it's a little unfair to slam the author for making a literary reference (especially when he was considerate enough to provide the reference at the end of the article).
-steve
slashdot has a registration. users are not required to log in before they can view the site; however, they have the option to activate their accounts for increased functionality.
it's a semantic debate, but it's a very simple one.
-steve
parrot-like repetition of the stupid Blue's News interview, which added nothing useful to the discussion
yes, yes, i know that's what the interview said.
idiot.
1) Zartman is a PR guy. his job is to say whatever makes his employer (or employer's owner) look good.
2) wrt the quote you posted, it seems likely that Zartman is either misinformed or lying (or blowing smoke, if you're feeling generous, which i'm not). i mean, c'mon! "The development team has a ton of options to consider" - since when? do you think the development team at bungie came up with the idea for Halo and then sat around deciding whether or not they were going to eventually release an IRIX version???? bungie has always released for Mac, and recently they've begun to release for Windows as well. i can certainly see them making a foray into the world of modern consoles, but i can't see them seriously considering NOT RELEASING a game in a non-console version - unless someone were twisting their arm.
i'm not even going to give my opinion of the Microsoft press release and its credibility.
-steve
I also doubt the ownership of Bungie will decrease the quality of their products. Microsoft's games division often puts out some good stuff like the Age of Empires series and the Close Combat series
you do realize that "Microsoft's games division" had nothing to do with the creation of the Close Combat series, yes?
CC1 and CC2 (not sure about 3) were created by a company called Atomic Games, which is not a division of Microsoft, but rather an separate company. once the finished product existed, Microsoft bought the rights and distributed the game. so if you have a gratifying mental image of a bunch of coders in Seattle working hard to make good real-time WWII tactical combat games, it's a fantasy.
-steve
Given the choice between Q3A and UT, I'll take UT. It's even more polished than Q3A, IMHO.
i tend to agree with you. i find UT's bots to be more challenging opponents than Q3A's, for when there's nobody to DM against.
my only complaint with UT is that i've never successfully managed to play an Internet game that wasn't lagged to the point of unplayability (and i'm connecting over a cable modem). has anyone else had this problem? i'm running the most recent version of UT for Mac.
on the other hand, UT does have my favorite sniper weapon of all time, bar none.
-steve
I think the thing about Doom that kept me on the edge of my seat was the storyline. A sci-fi story that leads (literally) straight to Hell is just awesome.
Did anyone actually even pay attention to the storyline for Quake? Just wondering...
oh my word. reading this post made me feel ill.
WHAT STORYLINE??!? kill some demons. kill some more demons. damn, the demons are getting bigger and meaner - must be getting near Hell! oh yeah, and there was some vague mention of a moonbase or something.
have you ever played Half-Life? have you ever played any of the Marathon series? Pathways into Darkness? hell, have you ever played one of the Tomb Raider games?
Doom lives on in my mind as the shining example of a game entirely devoid of storyline. id discovered that this lack failed to deter people from buying it, and they haven't looked back since (except for maybe Quake 2, kinda sorta).
-steve
y'all have got to be kidding me. this is something to get excited about? more important, this is something to get Paul Steed fired about?
i've played Doom 1, Doom 2, and Final Doom, and i must confess i thought they all sucked. the same repetitive gameplay over and over and over... find gold key to open gold door. compensate for tougher enemies by shooting them with a bigger gun. when you get bored with that, engage in twitchy, strategyless deathmatch with friends. no storyline to speak of, no challenging AI, and butt-ugly levels.
i realize that this game essentially created the FPS genre (yeah, there was Wolfenstein before, but Doom definitely eclipsed it). i'm all for giving historically important games their due, but do we really have to sit through YA-Doom? (yes, i know i don't have to buy it. but i will be deprived of whatever game id would have been creating while they were wasting their time on Doom 3.)
then again, it's possible that Doom looks so shabby to me because my first FPS was Marathon. i suppose if you didn't know any better, Doom looked kinda cool. wow! we can have rooms that aren't perfect rectangular solids!
bah. such a loss, for so little potential gain.
-steve
1)PC's need to ship with Windows in order to be competitive. Period. If the average consumer is shopping at dell.com and can't find a PC that comes pre-loaded with the worlds most widely used OS, they shop elsewhere. Dell sinks.
And this is no one's fault but dells if they choose to do so. They have an option to bundle windows. No one has forced them. It is their choice. To do otherwise might be an unprofitable choice that might even lead to certain destruction of dell, but it is their choice.
actually, this is not true. corporations are not like individuals.
dell is a for-profit corporation. thus, its management are obligated (to whom? to the board of directors who appointed them. and to whom are the board obligated? to the shareholders. this is how corporations work.) to act in a profit-maximizing fashion, whether or not they might like to act otherwise.
if dell's management were to reject a Microsoft licensing deal and fail to negotiate another one, they would be accountable to the shareholders at the end of the financial year, if not at the end of the quarter. the stockholders have invested their money in dell; the management and the board of directors are obligated not to take unprofitable choices that might even lead to certain destruction of dell.
so no, in this case, they don't have a choice.
-steve
If they get blamed for an end user NOT following its instructions, well then something is really screwy with your company
words don't describe how true this statement is. that's why i'm so glad i'm a contractor.
-steve
I would make more sence to say, maybe, have the icons there, and have the color change from grey to green (or red etc..) when the mouse is over it. That way. The user knows what it is. And they get feedback when they hover over it. Instead of the user having to "check" each one untill they find the right button.
and how do you suppose color-blind people know whether to stop or go at stoplights? because the red light is ALWAYS on top and the green light is ALWAYS on the bottom.
i predict that by the end of my first hour of using Aqua i will have learned that the close button is ALWAYS on the far left and the minimize button is ALWAYS on the far right (or whatever the convention ends up being), and so i will never again have to check which is which.
this is why consistency in UI, and standards such as the Human Interface Guidelines, are a Good Thing.
personally, i'm glad Apple is moving away from icons with Aqua. the whole new look will be a real kick in the arse even for lifelong Mac users, a way to bid goodbye to the tired old interface. i'm looking forward to it - one of the reasons i use a Mac is because i like using a system that feels different from the one the majority uses.
-steve