Probably because I have non-english Vista. It seems to me that Vista expects me to type the "friendly name" of the app. So typing "c" or "cm" does not offer "cmd". I always have to type in all of "eventvwr", "regedit", "notepad", "write", "explorer" - the programs I use most. Finding the program by typing the executable name never works. Annoying as hell.
CMD works every time for me. Start button, type "CMD", hit enter. I don't remember if it shows up on the auto-complete list or not, but it works the same way it did with the Run box before. (Except takes one less click.)
That said, of COURSE Vista looks at the friendly name of the application. I don't even KNOW the actual executable name of 99% of the applications I use on a day-to-day basis. I don't know them, and I shouldn't have to know them, and Vista doesn't make me know them-- woot! If you want to use Word, you hit Start and type "WORD", not "msword03.exe" or whatever the hell the actual executable name is.
It sounds to me that you're just stuck in a DOS mentality, and you've never snapped your brain into the way modern computers work. Seriously.
Another pet peeve is that explorer is lying about file and directory names. Some clever brain in MS thinks that showing "user friendly" localized name of c:\users is a good idea. Removing hidden Desktop.ini helps. Try finding that in Help.
You haven't made a case for why this isn't a good idea. Help is designed for neophytes; if you even know your HD is lettered C:, then you're more advanced for Windows Help.
Also, honestly, does it really matter if you can do random_task_X faster in Vista?
Holy crap, that's the POINT of this THREAD. The great-great grandparent asked what in Vista was quicker/easier than XP. You must have the shortest attention span on Earth.
People haven't been around long enough to remember the exact same hate-spewing as we had with XP. The real irony is that, then, Slashdotters were griping that XP, saying that Windows 2000 was so much better-- now that Vista is out, somehow they prefer *XP* instead of Windows 2000.
Gee, could it be they actually *tried* the OS and liked it? Gasp! Shock! Horror!
Anyway, it's just part of the Slashdot background-noise. Just learn to automatically filter out comments about how crappy Vista is, especially when written by people who've never used Vista in their lives.
Yah, seriously... what the hell's the big deal about getting the same console commands on Xbox that PC players already have? It doesn't strike me as anything particularly harmful.
Verizon only does it in select areas. Presumably the select areas where they got the most complaints, or legal action from local governments, I dunno. Point is, I can't get Verizon dry-loop where I live.:(
Verizon doesn't offer their "dry-loop" DSL in Snohomish County, WA. I have no clue what determines which areas they offer it in, and which they don't.
Of course, you're right that this question is a total waste of time with no location. Here's a better one:
Since I've already eliminated Speakeasy (not serving my area) and Clearwire (doesn't work with gaming), are there any dry-loop DSL-only plans in Snohomish County, WA from any carriers?
I know a lot of Slashdotters gripe about this, but I really like being able to hit Start (or Command-Space IRC on Mac) and just type "christmas pa" and get all my christmas party information in one list, instantly. I don't really care if it all runs 1% slower at all other times.
As I've stated, it's all about attitude. My solutions are easier and more realistic than yours. But then again if people (well, let's be realistic here, when we're talking about lazy and stubborn we're really talking Americans). Electric cars is certainly an intellectually lazy argument that is unsustainable.
If your solution doesn't take into effect human nature and psychology, it's flawed. CircleTimesSquare is right on this one, you're living in a fantasy land.
(The weird thing is you hint that you might understand this in the above-quoted text. In one line you say your plan is "more realistic", then in the second line you say "people are too lazy and stubborn to do it." Which is it, man?)
Sure, it would be *great* if everybody decided to move closer to where they work so they could bike to work. Assuming this hypothetical situation happens, how many decades do you think it would take to move companies/people until this was possible? How many decades did it take to create the suburbs and densely-populated business districts in the first place? Do you seriously think that the American people can stick to this hypothetical plan for so long instead of just saying "fuck it, we can just drive."?
And you're also talking about a mass relocation of people. Let's ignore that every American has the right to live and move wherever the hell they want, and go back to your history books and look up how that's worked out in the past. Hm, interesting, every mass relocation in history seems to also have created famine and death.
And even in your utopia, what happens to the people who can't ride a bike? Even if a man only lives 20 blocks from work, he'll reach an age where biking is simply impractical. What does he do then, just starve to death cold and alone in his crappy little apartment he left the suburbs for? (Oh, and we can ignore the fact that biking is already simply impractical in large swathes of the northern half of the country during half the year.)
the french and japanese have been doing it for decades, deriving most of their energy from nuclear
So has the US... practically our entire Navy runs on nuclear power, and has (safely) for over 50 years now.
Of course, the Navy doesn't have to go through 60,000 "environmental reviews" before digging a ditch, nor do they has as much a concern about "Not In My Backyard" weenies, since they already own tons of land.
BTW, that key to the left of Z on your keyboard is called a shift key. That's how people are making the big letters. FYI.
Name me one circumstance where you might be writing PYTHON code on an router or old Ultrasparc. You could just write the code from your computer and send it to the device over the network. Assuming you have a router which includes a Python interpreter in the first place.
If you cant think up a scenario where you can't depend on having a SPECIFIC editor available, you are still a student and are ignorant.
Yeah, and for the 0.00001% of the time I might spend in this hypothetical scenario, I can hit the goddamned Tab key. But that's no excuse for using a shitty editor when you're *not* writing code on a router.
Then use an editor that doesn't make them! Sheesh. This whole thread is a lot of people justifying being OCD and assholes to co-workers because they use shitty code editors. If you can't make "your" editor do what you want, you need to find another editor.
You can do almost every type of programming in Javascript (it doesn't have true OO support, but you can simulate it pretty easily), and the students can see the results instantly in a web browser by just hitting refresh. In addition, it has a C-like syntax, meaning that they can translate their learning almost directly to C, C++, C#, Java, and others. That's what I'd recommend.
This is not a good thing: by definition x86 code is not portable across platforms.
By definition? Which definition are you using here? I don't see anything in the definition of "x86" that would imply it's not portable across platforms; in fact, I know that there are several platforms it's portable across because I've used them (OS X, x86 Linux, and Windows).
And yet (at this moment) 304 comments have been attached to it. Spawning God-knows how many ad impressions for Slashdot.
Articles like this are just the media's version of "trolling for responses." If you responded to the moronic article, you lost. (Yes, including me.) All you're doing is telling Slashdot: hey, run more shit articles! Those shit articles are really popular!
When inserting code after a blank line, I end up having to hit tab 2-4 times, sometimes more, before I insert that new line (or after, whatever). Some editors flat don't have an option to do it for you, and it's not always worth or possible it to fire up (or even install) your preferred one. It's just a pain in the ass. Extra keystrokes, they add up.
You could just use an editor that works right.
Besides, aren't you being a little OCD in getting antsy in the pantsy over my preferences?
Nope. I don't give a shit if you're OCD or not, I just didn't know if you'd realized it. Trying to do you a favor.
For what it's worth, I still think you're OCD, and I also think you need to find a good editor and just stick with it. All of your concerns would disappear if you had an editor that didn't suck, and then you used only it.
Don't forget that while you're rewriting it, you have no actively-developed version ready to go. If a competitor springs up and starts wiping the floor with your old version, there's nothing you can do to speed that new version out the door, until it's finished.
EA responded with something other than just kicking you in the nuts? That's pretty impressive; those bastards are evil. I'm amazed they didn't just respond with, "we won't release the code, because we hate everybody, especially our customers."
It's not FUD, and it's not my whitespace that I'm worried about. I'm an absolute nazi about getting it right (tabs for indents, spaces for alignment!).
One issue with it is, it's a pain in the ass to get most code editors to leave it alone. Granted, that's a flaw in the code editors, but it doesn't change the reality that if you sit down at some terminal that you haven't carefully configured, editors do all kinds of funky things to your whitespace. Expand tabs to spaces. Strip blank line indentation--I know Python ignores that, but it's still a pain in the ass sometimes. Changes indent levels because of a line continuation. Whatever. Cut/paste code, all sorts of things that you can't see changes. It only gets worse when working with someone who isn't anal about their whitespace, or is anal in a slightly different way.
If this is seriously a problem for you, you're bordering on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. And I'm not even kidding around; you actually care whether a blank line is tabbed or not?
If you could get past the OCD, your life would be a whole lot easier if you just let the editor do the tabbing and spacing for you. And you'd work better with others, to boot.
1) Quake or Unreal games don't have any limits on running. I'm not sure about ET as I only played a little ET Pro but I think it didn't have any limits either.
And? It's still pointless to have a mode in the game where you move faster, but there's no limit to how much its used. Why bother? Why not just always have your character move the faster speed? It was a bad game mechanic; the "run" mechanic only works if there's some limit to it.
2) There are good reasons that you can only deploy on certain places. I also don't agree that they take too long or are easy to destroy. They are that way because of balance issues.
Yah; the coders were too lazy to have the engine determine where things would fit (you know, that Tribes had perfected a decade ago), so they just hard-coded locations into the maps.
As for your last point, just because a game (or music or movie or whatever) is popular doesn't mean it's any good.
It is if a large portion of the "good"-ness of the game depends on there being a lot of players! Are you saying that World of Warcraft would be a good game if there were only 5 players on each server?
Look, you like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. I get it. But that doesn't make it a good game; in fact, I'd argue it just means you haven't played enough games of that genre to get a sense of which are good and which aren't.
Well, ok, but let's go through the details: 1) The Run system had no stamina/energy meter, meaning your character could run until the cows come home. 2) The deployable system was plain retarded. You could only place items where you the developers saw fit (in a very inflexible grid system), deployment took an *extremely* long time, and deployables were virtually trivial to destroy. 3) Humans had many more vehicles than the alien race. Combine this with point 1, and vehicles were almost insignificant for the alien race. (You could run as fast as drive, when you consider the backtracking it took to run back to the vehicle station.) 4) The missions were confusing. How many times did you see people in the "portal" missions hanging out at the wrong side of the portal with no clue where the action was? 5) The ending of the majority of maps were almost never in doubt. Some maps the humans had a strong advantage, some the aliens had a strong advantage, I don't think a single one was actually well-balanced.
I'm not comparing the game with Battlefield. (Speaking of buggy games, Battlefield: 2142 was a turd!) Like I said above, I'd consider Tribes the golden standard in this genre of games, and ETQW ain't even close to being Tribes.
But all that aside, the proof is in the pudding. Log on and look at how many people are playing it, Xbox *or* PC-- no players = bad game.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because I have non-english Vista. It seems to me that Vista expects me to type the "friendly name" of the app. So typing "c" or "cm" does not offer "cmd". I always have to type in all of "eventvwr", "regedit", "notepad", "write", "explorer" - the programs I use most. Finding the program by typing the executable name never works. Annoying as hell.
CMD works every time for me. Start button, type "CMD", hit enter. I don't remember if it shows up on the auto-complete list or not, but it works the same way it did with the Run box before. (Except takes one less click.)
That said, of COURSE Vista looks at the friendly name of the application. I don't even KNOW the actual executable name of 99% of the applications I use on a day-to-day basis. I don't know them, and I shouldn't have to know them, and Vista doesn't make me know them-- woot! If you want to use Word, you hit Start and type "WORD", not "msword03.exe" or whatever the hell the actual executable name is.
It sounds to me that you're just stuck in a DOS mentality, and you've never snapped your brain into the way modern computers work. Seriously.
Another pet peeve is that explorer is lying about file and directory names. Some clever brain in MS thinks that showing "user friendly" localized name of c:\users is a good idea. Removing hidden Desktop.ini helps. Try finding that in Help.
You haven't made a case for why this isn't a good idea. Help is designed for neophytes; if you even know your HD is lettered C:, then you're more advanced for Windows Help.
Also, honestly, does it really matter if you can do random_task_X faster in Vista?
Holy crap, that's the POINT of this THREAD. The great-great grandparent asked what in Vista was quicker/easier than XP. You must have the shortest attention span on Earth.
I have stuff I can't replace on my computers.
You could try backing up your files. Did that ever occur to you? Mozy is like $5 a month, seriously.
People haven't been around long enough to remember the exact same hate-spewing as we had with XP. The real irony is that, then, Slashdotters were griping that XP, saying that Windows 2000 was so much better-- now that Vista is out, somehow they prefer *XP* instead of Windows 2000.
Gee, could it be they actually *tried* the OS and liked it? Gasp! Shock! Horror!
Anyway, it's just part of the Slashdot background-noise. Just learn to automatically filter out comments about how crappy Vista is, especially when written by people who've never used Vista in their lives.
Yah, seriously... what the hell's the big deal about getting the same console commands on Xbox that PC players already have? It doesn't strike me as anything particularly harmful.
Verizon only does it in select areas. Presumably the select areas where they got the most complaints, or legal action from local governments, I dunno. Point is, I can't get Verizon dry-loop where I live. :(
Verizon doesn't offer their "dry-loop" DSL in Snohomish County, WA. I have no clue what determines which areas they offer it in, and which they don't.
Of course, you're right that this question is a total waste of time with no location. Here's a better one:
Since I've already eliminated Speakeasy (not serving my area) and Clearwire (doesn't work with gaming), are there any dry-loop DSL-only plans in Snohomish County, WA from any carriers?
I know a lot of Slashdotters gripe about this, but I really like being able to hit Start (or Command-Space IRC on Mac) and just type "christmas pa" and get all my christmas party information in one list, instantly. I don't really care if it all runs 1% slower at all other times.
Yeah, but he had to leave the Greenpeace organization before, or because, he expressed his beliefs about nuclear power. That's not a promising sign.
As I've stated, it's all about attitude. My solutions are easier and more realistic than yours. But then again if people (well, let's be realistic here, when we're talking about lazy and stubborn we're really talking Americans). Electric cars is certainly an intellectually lazy argument that is unsustainable.
If your solution doesn't take into effect human nature and psychology, it's flawed. CircleTimesSquare is right on this one, you're living in a fantasy land.
(The weird thing is you hint that you might understand this in the above-quoted text. In one line you say your plan is "more realistic", then in the second line you say "people are too lazy and stubborn to do it." Which is it, man?)
Sure, it would be *great* if everybody decided to move closer to where they work so they could bike to work. Assuming this hypothetical situation happens, how many decades do you think it would take to move companies/people until this was possible? How many decades did it take to create the suburbs and densely-populated business districts in the first place? Do you seriously think that the American people can stick to this hypothetical plan for so long instead of just saying "fuck it, we can just drive."?
And you're also talking about a mass relocation of people. Let's ignore that every American has the right to live and move wherever the hell they want, and go back to your history books and look up how that's worked out in the past. Hm, interesting, every mass relocation in history seems to also have created famine and death.
And even in your utopia, what happens to the people who can't ride a bike? Even if a man only lives 20 blocks from work, he'll reach an age where biking is simply impractical. What does he do then, just starve to death cold and alone in his crappy little apartment he left the suburbs for? (Oh, and we can ignore the fact that biking is already simply impractical in large swathes of the northern half of the country during half the year.)
Anyway, the point here is: think it THOUGH man.
the french and japanese have been doing it for decades, deriving most of their energy from nuclear
So has the US... practically our entire Navy runs on nuclear power, and has (safely) for over 50 years now.
Of course, the Navy doesn't have to go through 60,000 "environmental reviews" before digging a ditch, nor do they has as much a concern about "Not In My Backyard" weenies, since they already own tons of land.
BTW, that key to the left of Z on your keyboard is called a shift key. That's how people are making the big letters. FYI.
1. more nuclear power plants
As long as Greenpeace is the largest environmental lobby, this is pretty much a fantasy.
When those Greenpeace jerks accost me on the sidewalks after work wanting me to sign some shit or another, the conversation always goes like this:
Them: "Excuse me, do you have a few minutes for Greenpeace?"
Me: "Does Greenpeace still oppose nuclear power?"
Them: "Yes, but--"
Me: "Then no."
I hate those bastards.
This thread is ridiculous.
Name me one circumstance where you might be writing PYTHON code on an router or old Ultrasparc. You could just write the code from your computer and send it to the device over the network. Assuming you have a router which includes a Python interpreter in the first place.
If you cant think up a scenario where you can't depend on having a SPECIFIC editor available, you are still a student and are ignorant.
Yeah, and for the 0.00001% of the time I might spend in this hypothetical scenario, I can hit the goddamned Tab key. But that's no excuse for using a shitty editor when you're *not* writing code on a router.
Then use an editor that doesn't make them! Sheesh. This whole thread is a lot of people justifying being OCD and assholes to co-workers because they use shitty code editors. If you can't make "your" editor do what you want, you need to find another editor.
You can do almost every type of programming in Javascript (it doesn't have true OO support, but you can simulate it pretty easily), and the students can see the results instantly in a web browser by just hitting refresh. In addition, it has a C-like syntax, meaning that they can translate their learning almost directly to C, C++, C#, Java, and others. That's what I'd recommend.
This is not a good thing: by definition x86 code is not portable across platforms.
By definition? Which definition are you using here? I don't see anything in the definition of "x86" that would imply it's not portable across platforms; in fact, I know that there are several platforms it's portable across because I've used them (OS X, x86 Linux, and Windows).
And yet (at this moment) 304 comments have been attached to it. Spawning God-knows how many ad impressions for Slashdot.
Articles like this are just the media's version of "trolling for responses." If you responded to the moronic article, you lost. (Yes, including me.) All you're doing is telling Slashdot: hey, run more shit articles! Those shit articles are really popular!
That's why you check-in whitespace changes separately from code changes, and log them as such.
When inserting code after a blank line, I end up having to hit tab 2-4 times, sometimes more, before I insert that new line (or after, whatever). Some editors flat don't have an option to do it for you, and it's not always worth or possible it to fire up (or even install) your preferred one. It's just a pain in the ass. Extra keystrokes, they add up.
You could just use an editor that works right.
Besides, aren't you being a little OCD in getting antsy in the pantsy over my preferences?
Nope. I don't give a shit if you're OCD or not, I just didn't know if you'd realized it. Trying to do you a favor.
For what it's worth, I still think you're OCD, and I also think you need to find a good editor and just stick with it. All of your concerns would disappear if you had an editor that didn't suck, and then you used only it.
Don't forget that while you're rewriting it, you have no actively-developed version ready to go. If a competitor springs up and starts wiping the floor with your old version, there's nothing you can do to speed that new version out the door, until it's finished.
EA responded with something other than just kicking you in the nuts? That's pretty impressive; those bastards are evil. I'm amazed they didn't just respond with, "we won't release the code, because we hate everybody, especially our customers."
It's not FUD, and it's not my whitespace that I'm worried about. I'm an absolute nazi about getting it right (tabs for indents, spaces for alignment!).
One issue with it is, it's a pain in the ass to get most code editors to leave it alone. Granted, that's a flaw in the code editors, but it doesn't change the reality that if you sit down at some terminal that you haven't carefully configured, editors do all kinds of funky things to your whitespace. Expand tabs to spaces. Strip blank line indentation--I know Python ignores that, but it's still a pain in the ass sometimes. Changes indent levels because of a line continuation. Whatever. Cut/paste code, all sorts of things that you can't see changes. It only gets worse when working with someone who isn't anal about their whitespace, or is anal in a slightly different way.
If this is seriously a problem for you, you're bordering on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. And I'm not even kidding around; you actually care whether a blank line is tabbed or not?
If you could get past the OCD, your life would be a whole lot easier if you just let the editor do the tabbing and spacing for you. And you'd work better with others, to boot.
You "miss" it? What's stopping you from buying and using it right now?
http://store.corel.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=10302&mpe_id=14404&jspStoreDir=Corel&intv_id=40553&partNumber=OL_WPOX4&evtype=CpgnClick&langId=-1&catalogId=10103&ddkey=ClickInfo
There, you can even download it if you don't want to wait for shipping.
1) Quake or Unreal games don't have any limits on running. I'm not sure about ET as I only played a little ET Pro but I think it didn't have any limits either.
And? It's still pointless to have a mode in the game where you move faster, but there's no limit to how much its used. Why bother? Why not just always have your character move the faster speed? It was a bad game mechanic; the "run" mechanic only works if there's some limit to it.
2) There are good reasons that you can only deploy on certain places. I also don't agree that they take too long or are easy to destroy. They are that way because of balance issues.
Yah; the coders were too lazy to have the engine determine where things would fit (you know, that Tribes had perfected a decade ago), so they just hard-coded locations into the maps.
As for your last point, just because a game (or music or movie or whatever) is popular doesn't mean it's any good.
It is if a large portion of the "good"-ness of the game depends on there being a lot of players! Are you saying that World of Warcraft would be a good game if there were only 5 players on each server?
Look, you like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. I get it. But that doesn't make it a good game; in fact, I'd argue it just means you haven't played enough games of that genre to get a sense of which are good and which aren't.
Well, ok, but let's go through the details:
1) The Run system had no stamina/energy meter, meaning your character could run until the cows come home.
2) The deployable system was plain retarded. You could only place items where you the developers saw fit (in a very inflexible grid system), deployment took an *extremely* long time, and deployables were virtually trivial to destroy.
3) Humans had many more vehicles than the alien race. Combine this with point 1, and vehicles were almost insignificant for the alien race. (You could run as fast as drive, when you consider the backtracking it took to run back to the vehicle station.)
4) The missions were confusing. How many times did you see people in the "portal" missions hanging out at the wrong side of the portal with no clue where the action was?
5) The ending of the majority of maps were almost never in doubt. Some maps the humans had a strong advantage, some the aliens had a strong advantage, I don't think a single one was actually well-balanced.
I'm not comparing the game with Battlefield. (Speaking of buggy games, Battlefield: 2142 was a turd!) Like I said above, I'd consider Tribes the golden standard in this genre of games, and ETQW ain't even close to being Tribes.
But all that aside, the proof is in the pudding. Log on and look at how many people are playing it, Xbox *or* PC-- no players = bad game.