I'm not a Microsoft employee, and God knows I get as pissed off as anyone by the general shoddiness of Windows but, in their defense, they face the same problem mentioned in the article that developers face, namely compatibility issues, except 100 times worse.
If you try to design a game/OS that supports every known keyboard, mouse, monitor, video card, sound card, joystick and fucking VR helmet known to man, you're going to have to make compromises, cut corners, generally throw the Tao of Programming out the window and kludge together what you can.
This is never the case for a console. It won't have a separate graphics/sound card; it'll be made by one company and it'll be integrated right into the motherboard. If the HD is replaceable it will be specially made for the X-box and it will plug in as easily as a games cartridge. There is no need to make it conform to any more than one standard, ditto kb/mouse/control pad design, just like the PSX, DC and N64. The only PC thing about it will be the motherboard which would work just fine if it wasn't for all the stoopid peripherals stuck onto it.
In short, everything will be far more simply/uniformly designed and will be as likely to crash as any other console, ie, just about never.
Having said all that, I still wouldn't buy one because I don't fancy lugging X-box + hi-res TV around my pal's house if I want a game of lag-free multiplayer [insert FPS of choice here].
A nice view of a garden or park; big, comfy reclining chair to allow you out your feet up on the desk whilst idly surfing; room for two monitors, mouse; all cables at the back securely out of the way of flailing feet; some sort of foot-rest for intermediate slouching...
Enough space between desks that they can't see me dossing (American: goofing off:-P), but that I don't have to get out my chair if I want to ask a question.
Oh, and a vending machine, and someone to bring me tea.
Before I started replying to this post's grandparent I checked to see if there was anything that had already summed up what I had on my mind and I found it on the post above with Score:0
Yes it's flamey but it's a very valid on-topic point made well, particularly the last line. For every kid who was bullied in school and then went on to be a nerd, there are 10 others who were also bullied and didn't and you don't hear THEM whining. I've had just about enough of the Geek Inferiority Complex ; if you want the Grown-Ups to take you seriously you have to start acting like one.
Alas, they don't listen to us not because our knowledge and opinions are more than worthwhile, but because when the techno-elite deign to address a "suit", too often the attitude is that of a spoilt teenager ie: "I'm not going to do this and you can't make me cos I'm cleverer than you!"
Same teenager then gets all indignant when he's grounded.
More than anything, the social impasse between the knows and the know-nowts stems from one side's perplexed frustration at the other's clear expertise in the field and sheer unwillingness to share it.
Most people can handle Linux/BSD et al if only they're shown; lack of knowledge of computing does NOT make you an idiot and vice versa. You can't give out about "lusers" in one breath and then refuse to help them not be lusers the next. I'm lucky in that I've quite a lot of helpful übergeek pals but I still know sod all about the intricacies of the various open OSes in comparison to most/. readers, so I can see both sides of the fence and it really isn't surprising that suits/lusers react to nerds with such hostility.
A little manners and patience would go a long way to making life easier
Interesting link - good to see at least one half-decent argument on the side of the men in grey.
Don't forget that more privacy = more opportunities for random scumbags to screw us around and MUCH less chance of them ever being caught. Question is: which of the two ends of the privacy scale is potentially more damaging?
Nobody has to use the new features but you know they will anyway; maybe not professional web-developers but every other geocities/tripod/hometown dork will. And if Todd's pals need IE 5.5 to see his funkotronic calendar then they'll use 5.5 too and they'll have all the cool, new and easy features on their pages and then the professionals will realise that since 90% of their viewing audience are the IE-5.5-using Todds they'll just go 'fuck it' and start designing for that browser...maybe not all of them at first, but eventually.
CSS = Cascading Style Sheets; a way of defining the look of a HTML document either in the head or in a separate.css file. One file can be referred to by as many pages as you want which makes uniform formatting, especially for a big site, beautifully simple. Even leaving aside all the tricks you can do with them when you throw JavaScript into the equation they are VERY useful to the point of being indispensible.
As long as there is more than one browser in the market there has to be a uniform standard and if one group is going to set that standard down it might as well be the W3C - impotent in the face of the MS capitalist pigs though they may be.
No standards would mean that gradually the Web would begin to fragment into different areas, each viewable only by specific browsers. A standard set by one company means that all the other competition will be squeezed out; said company gains full control over the direction of the Web - and then they start charging for browsers, server-side technology and ultimately their own Web language.
I have no desire to learn MSML which is why I'll be boycotting MSIE 5.5
If the game looks more like real life (or at least more like the Matrix), it's easier to get involved.
Up to a point. As far as 3-D FPSs go, basic representation is enough, and the emphasis should always be on the gameplay, one of the reasons why Quake 1 is still far more involving than either of its successors. The blocky little moonwalking men in Quake (or even Doom's sprites) are just targets to hit. If you spend any amount of time admiring beautifully textured skins or the curved arches or the fog, lens flare et al you're dead.
As the post above yours pointed out, most hardcore gamers turn the detail right down anyway. Graphically and gameplay-wise, the most important thing is framerate...
If I hear that printer story ONE MORE TIME! I even had the pleasure of hearing the man himself tell it at a talk; talk about a 30 second anecdote dragged out to 10 minutes...eeuughhh...
Back on topic, just how much can two companies (ie MS Inc and Windows Inc) cooperate before it's called collusion?
Did anyone actually even pay attention to the storyline for Quake? Just wondering...
I believe it went something like this: The Government (tm) were developing a method for interdimensional travel (like you do), involving jumping from so-called slipgate to slipgate, and then this big nasty, codenamed Quake (boo, hiss) suddenly got their hands on all of them and started doing, like, evil stuff. About halfways through the game we learn Quake's true identity (Shub-Niggurath) and the hunt for the Great Jelly-Like One continues from there.
Jesus it was pathetic! Still the best multiplayer game bar none though, IMHO.
On that note, a basic question: how many hits does Slashdot get daily? And is there a file somewhere containing the total number of hits since the site's inception?
And which of this multitude of diverse ethnic backgrounds are now part of the US? Holy shit! All of them, with a few ex-slaves thrown in! Yous haven't been out of Europe all that long, boys...
Nicely put, but alas those on Capitol Hill (and an unfortunately large and influential proportion of their electorate) have not yet grasped the bizarre concept of "personal responsibility".
I'd rather not have your laws enforced in my country all the same, pal.
In terms of enforcing legality of what is already on the Internet, I believe that the US, being responsible for all the.coms,.nets and.orgs has by far the worst record. The amount of vetting that any company has to go through to get a.ie URL (for example) is pretty substantial, but it's consistent, fair and means that there will never be a www.hotchicks.ie or anything similar.
This problem originated in the US and, short of reclaiming every single.com as their own, there isn't a damn thing they can do about it.
Command recognition has been around for a fair while now and it is growing more refined all the time. Even the most complicated game won't have any more than 10 basic commands followed by any number of arguments. This isn't anywhere near as complicated as the likes of IBM's Via-Voice, which is full-on dictation software, and I can't really see there being much - if any - learning time for the computer involved
Having said that, perhaps they might be wise to explore the possibility of releasing a couple of different expansion packs to account for different accents (of English alone); there could well be a few pronounciation discrepancies between, say, Decko from north Dublin and Cletus from Arkansas...:-)
Now, far be it from me to be cynical but this comes only days after Microsoft's lawyers asked/. to remove some posts which were deemed to be a breach of copyright. If I remember correctly, Hemos's replying mail made the point that/. had no ownership of and took no responsibility for its readers' posts - which left us with the little paradox surrounding posts being used in Jon Katz's separately published tome Geeks and consequently those in Hellmouth.
/.'s intentions with regard to the publication of Hellmouth are of course honourable but at the same time you should realise that the boys at Andover are, more than likely, simply clearing their house before they and M$ do battle in the courts.
Whether anything can/will be done about Geeks is another question...how ironic it would be if JK of all people were responsible for the closure of Slashdot (and that's speaking as someone who has a fair bit of time for the man)
Of course the RIAA was going to try stomp on Napster and win. You couldn't really expect the American government to uphold what is, in effect, blatant piracy. According to the letter of the law it's no more legal to copy and redistribute MP3s than it is to sell copied tapes or CDs out of the back of a truck.
We'll ignore the fact that the MP3 revolution may well have boosted sales of CDs since its inception and that nobody at Napster or MP3.com was benefiting from anything other than unrelated advertising and that MP3 gives people a chance to sample a much wider range of music than before etc etc (this has been said many many times already...)
What I reckon will happen now is that, while many will be discouraged from going to the trouble of finding anonymous MP3 servers without the guiding hand of Napster to cling onto, the true music lovers may well welcome this, since for a start it will clear out an awful lot of the substandard scratchy, tinny, scrambled shite put up on Napster by people with 33.6Ks claiming to be on T3s. I do like the idea of listening to any tune I can think of for free before I buy the CD, but I was never a fan of Napster.
MP3 will never quite be stomped out and let's just hope that the RIAA (which surely leads the way for most national music authorities) draws the line at this point, so that the few of us that remain can continue to help the sales of our favourite obscure artist.
Okay, we're way down along a totally off-topic thread at this point but sod it. I just have a minor off-off-topic pointrelated to this:
Americans cherish the right to own guns because this is a young country whose citizens remember governmental oppression, and the right to own guns is a symbolic representation of the fact that americans will not allow their freedom to be taken from them again
Come off it; there are a hell of a lot younger countries than yours, some located a lot closer to their original oppressors than yours who have much stricter gun laws because they recognise the simple fact that if guns are freely available, they will be freely used and vice versa. The US's right to bear arms is an archaic law that stems back to right after the War of Independence when there was a total lack of law enforcement or protection from thieves, highwaymen etc and the only way a person could have any hope of surviving was by carrying a gun. Not even with the most overblown exaggeration can you claim this to be the case now. The Catch-22 now is that because of those self same laws, the US has one of the highest gun-related death rates in the world, but all you have to do is lose the guns, and voilà!
have recently been trying to read up on XML and XHTML. (is that slightly redundant?)
They're not the same thing. XML is a meta mark-up language that can be (and is) used to define any number of mark-up languages like XHTML, MathML, SVG, WML (W=WAP) etc. Indeed, you could theoretically write your own version of HTML through XML, but better to stick to the one that has already been defined, namely XHTML.
It's worth learning XML because it is going to happen; the software support (not even including MS) is coming on-line. The sooner we can get rid of.doc the better.
Re comments above about Word compatibility issues, I've had the best fun on occasion trying to open a file created in Mac Word '98 subsequently in PC '97 or 2K. At this stage, I've resorted to laying out projects etc in HTML (!) or else the truly non-proprietary document type: good ol' ASCII:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a Microsoft employee, and God knows I get as pissed off as anyone by the general shoddiness of Windows but, in their defense, they face the same problem mentioned in the article that developers face, namely compatibility issues, except 100 times worse.
If you try to design a game/OS that supports every known keyboard, mouse, monitor, video card, sound card, joystick and fucking VR helmet known to man, you're going to have to make compromises, cut corners, generally throw the Tao of Programming out the window and kludge together what you can.
This is never the case for a console. It won't have a separate graphics/sound card; it'll be made by one company and it'll be integrated right into the motherboard. If the HD is replaceable it will be specially made for the X-box and it will plug in as easily as a games cartridge. There is no need to make it conform to any more than one standard, ditto kb/mouse/control pad design, just like the PSX, DC and N64. The only PC thing about it will be the motherboard which would work just fine if it wasn't for all the stoopid peripherals stuck onto it.
In short, everything will be far more simply/uniformly designed and will be as likely to crash as any other console, ie, just about never.
Having said all that, I still wouldn't buy one because I don't fancy lugging X-box + hi-res TV around my pal's house if I want a game of lag-free multiplayer [insert FPS of choice here].
A nice view of a garden or park; big, comfy reclining chair to allow you out your feet up on the desk whilst idly surfing; room for two monitors, mouse; all cables at the back securely out of the way of flailing feet; some sort of foot-rest for intermediate slouching...
Enough space between desks that they can't see me dossing (American: goofing off :-P), but that I don't have to get out my chair if I want to ask a question.
Oh, and a vending machine, and someone to bring me tea.
Katz is opressing geeks. (Score:1, Flamebait)
That's beautiful - nothing like quality flamebait :)
Before I started replying to this post's grandparent I checked to see if there was anything that had already summed up what I had on my mind and I found it on the post above with Score:0
Yes it's flamey but it's a very valid on-topic point made well, particularly the last line. For every kid who was bullied in school and then went on to be a nerd, there are 10 others who were also bullied and didn't and you don't hear THEM whining. I've had just about enough of the Geek Inferiority Complex ; if you want the Grown-Ups to take you seriously you have to start acting like one.
Alas, they don't listen to us not because our knowledge and opinions are more than worthwhile, but because when the techno-elite deign to address a "suit", too often the attitude is that of a spoilt teenager ie: "I'm not going to do this and you can't make me cos I'm cleverer than you!"
Same teenager then gets all indignant when he's grounded.
More than anything, the social impasse between the knows and the know-nowts stems from one side's perplexed frustration at the other's clear expertise in the field and sheer unwillingness to share it.
Most people can handle Linux/BSD et al if only they're shown; lack of knowledge of computing does NOT make you an idiot and vice versa. You can't give out about "lusers" in one breath and then refuse to help them not be lusers the next. I'm lucky in that I've quite a lot of helpful übergeek pals but I still know sod all about the intricacies of the various open OSes in comparison to most /. readers, so I can see both sides of the fence and it really isn't surprising that suits/lusers react to nerds with such hostility.
A little manners and patience would go a long way to making life easier
And is it my imagination or did Enoch Root magically come back to life?
Interesting link - good to see at least one half-decent argument on the side of the men in grey.
Don't forget that more privacy = more opportunities for random scumbags to screw us around and MUCH less chance of them ever being caught. Question is: which of the two ends of the privacy scale is potentially more damaging?
My instinct says the latter...
The locked out ones take the much easier route of just getting and installing IE - it's not exactly difficult to get your hands on a free CD...
Nobody has to use the new features but you know they will anyway; maybe not professional web-developers but every other geocities/tripod/hometown dork will. And if Todd's pals need IE 5.5 to see his funkotronic calendar then they'll use 5.5 too and they'll have all the cool, new and easy features on their pages and then the professionals will realise that since 90% of their viewing audience are the IE-5.5-using Todds they'll just go 'fuck it' and start designing for that browser...maybe not all of them at first, but eventually.
I personally don't know what CSS is, but...
*mustnotflamemustnotflamennnnghhh...*
CSS = Cascading Style Sheets; a way of defining the look of a HTML document either in the head or in a separateAs long as there is more than one browser in the market there has to be a uniform standard and if one group is going to set that standard down it might as well be the W3C - impotent in the face of the MS capitalist pigs though they may be.
No standards would mean that gradually the Web would begin to fragment into different areas, each viewable only by specific browsers. A standard set by one company means that all the other competition will be squeezed out; said company gains full control over the direction of the Web - and then they start charging for browsers, server-side technology and ultimately their own Web language.
I have no desire to learn MSML which is why I'll be boycotting MSIE 5.5
If the game looks more like real life (or at least more like the Matrix), it's easier to get involved.
Up to a point. As far as 3-D FPSs go, basic representation is enough, and the emphasis should always be on the gameplay, one of the reasons why Quake 1 is still far more involving than either of its successors. The blocky little moonwalking men in Quake (or even Doom's sprites) are just targets to hit. If you spend any amount of time admiring beautifully textured skins or the curved arches or the fog, lens flare et al you're dead.
As the post above yours pointed out, most hardcore gamers turn the detail right down anyway. Graphically and gameplay-wise, the most important thing is framerate...
If I hear that printer story ONE MORE TIME! I even had the pleasure of hearing the man himself tell it at a talk; talk about a 30 second anecdote dragged out to 10 minutes...eeuughhh...
Back on topic, just how much can two companies (ie MS Inc and Windows Inc) cooperate before it's called collusion?
Come to think of it, I don't remember any one individual ever having laid claim to the decimal counting system - I'm phoning a lawyer right now...
Did anyone actually even pay attention to the storyline for Quake? Just wondering...
I believe it went something like this: The Government (tm) were developing a method for interdimensional travel (like you do), involving jumping from so-called slipgate to slipgate, and then this big nasty, codenamed Quake (boo, hiss) suddenly got their hands on all of them and started doing, like, evil stuff. About halfways through the game we learn Quake's true identity (Shub-Niggurath) and the hunt for the Great Jelly-Like One continues from there.
Jesus it was pathetic! Still the best multiplayer game bar none though, IMHO.
And one further obvious example: Kuwait. Uncle Sam will go to great lengths to hold onto his oil...
On that note, a basic question: how many hits does Slashdot get daily? And is there a file somewhere containing the total number of hits since the site's inception?
What a cool thought...
And which of this multitude of diverse ethnic backgrounds are now part of the US? Holy shit! All of them, with a few ex-slaves thrown in! Yous haven't been out of Europe all that long, boys...
I believe the Rosenbergs fried (eventually) for selling just such "secret information" to the Commies back in the 50s...
Nicely put, but alas those on Capitol Hill (and an unfortunately large and influential proportion of their electorate) have not yet grasped the bizarre concept of "personal responsibility".
I'd rather not have your laws enforced in my country all the same, pal.
.coms, .nets and .orgs has by far the worst record. The amount of vetting that any company has to go through to get a .ie URL (for example) is pretty substantial, but it's consistent, fair and means that there will never be a www.hotchicks.ie or anything similar.
.com as their own, there isn't a damn thing they can do about it.
In terms of enforcing legality of what is already on the Internet, I believe that the US, being responsible for all the
This problem originated in the US and, short of reclaiming every single
Command recognition has been around for a fair while now and it is growing more refined all the time. Even the most complicated game won't have any more than 10 basic commands followed by any number of arguments. This isn't anywhere near as complicated as the likes of IBM's Via-Voice, which is full-on dictation software, and I can't really see there being much - if any - learning time for the computer involved
Having said that, perhaps they might be wise to explore the possibility of releasing a couple of different expansion packs to account for different accents (of English alone); there could well be a few pronounciation discrepancies between, say, Decko from north Dublin and Cletus from Arkansas...:-)
Now, far be it from me to be cynical but this comes only days after Microsoft's lawyers asked /. to remove some posts which were deemed to be a breach of copyright. If I remember correctly, Hemos's replying mail made the point that /. had no ownership of and took no responsibility for its readers' posts - which left us with the little paradox surrounding posts being used in Jon Katz's separately published tome Geeks and consequently those in Hellmouth.
/.'s intentions with regard to the publication of Hellmouth are of course honourable but at the same time you should realise that the boys at Andover are, more than likely, simply clearing their house before they and M$ do battle in the courts.
:-)
Whether anything can/will be done about Geeks is another question...how ironic it would be if JK of all people were responsible for the closure of Slashdot (and that's speaking as someone who has a fair bit of time for the man)
Make me proud lads
Of course the RIAA was going to try stomp on Napster and win. You couldn't really expect the American government to uphold what is, in effect, blatant piracy. According to the letter of the law it's no more legal to copy and redistribute MP3s than it is to sell copied tapes or CDs out of the back of a truck.
We'll ignore the fact that the MP3 revolution may well have boosted sales of CDs since its inception and that nobody at Napster or MP3.com was benefiting from anything other than unrelated advertising and that MP3 gives people a chance to sample a much wider range of music than before etc etc (this has been said many many times already...)
What I reckon will happen now is that, while many will be discouraged from going to the trouble of finding anonymous MP3 servers without the guiding hand of Napster to cling onto, the true music lovers may well welcome this, since for a start it will clear out an awful lot of the substandard scratchy, tinny, scrambled shite put up on Napster by people with 33.6Ks claiming to be on T3s. I do like the idea of listening to any tune I can think of for free before I buy the CD, but I was never a fan of Napster.
MP3 will never quite be stomped out and let's just hope that the RIAA (which surely leads the way for most national music authorities) draws the line at this point, so that the few of us that remain can continue to help the sales of our favourite obscure artist.
Okay, we're way down along a totally off-topic thread at this point but sod it. I just have a minor off-off-topic pointrelated to this:
Americans cherish the right to own guns because this is a young country whose citizens remember governmental oppression, and the right to own guns is a symbolic representation of the fact that americans will not allow their freedom to be taken from them again
Come off it; there are a hell of a lot younger countries than yours, some located a lot closer to their original oppressors than yours who have much stricter gun laws because they recognise the simple fact that if guns are freely available, they will be freely used and vice versa.
The US's right to bear arms is an archaic law that stems back to right after the War of Independence when there was a total lack of law enforcement or protection from thieves, highwaymen etc and the only way a person could have any hope of surviving was by carrying a gun. Not even with the most overblown exaggeration can you claim this to be the case now. The Catch-22 now is that because of those self same laws, the US has one of the highest gun-related death rates in the world, but all you have to do is lose the guns, and voilà!
have recently been trying to read up on XML and XHTML. (is that slightly redundant?)
.doc the better.
:-)
They're not the same thing. XML is a meta mark-up language that can be (and is) used to define any number of mark-up languages like XHTML, MathML, SVG, WML (W=WAP) etc. Indeed, you could theoretically write your own version of HTML through XML, but better to stick to the one that has already been defined, namely XHTML.
It's worth learning XML because it is going to happen; the software support (not even including MS) is coming on-line. The sooner we can get rid of
Re comments above about Word compatibility issues, I've had the best fun on occasion trying to open a file created in Mac Word '98 subsequently in PC '97 or 2K. At this stage, I've resorted to laying out projects etc in HTML (!) or else the truly non-proprietary document type: good ol' ASCII