I was going to type up a list of things I like about Vista compared to XP, but, you know what? Your post was so inflammatory and insulting that I'm just going to give one reason to prefer Vista over any other OS out there:
No offense to Patrick Stewart, I love the guy, but he is willing to lend his voice to almost anything. He's in American Dad, for example. He did the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He did Bambi II. He did Demon Stone, which was actually pretty good now that I think about it...
Please. People said the same thing about Windows 2000, and people said the same thing about Windows XP. And people will say the same thing about Windows 2012, or whatever the hell the next version is.
Even if the majority of people don't like Vista now, the majority of people will be running Vista in two years.
Personally, I think Vista's pretty damned good. Good enough that I replaced my Mac with a Vista computer, and I haven't missed it at all. (I've had some problems with third party programs that didn't support Vista but should have, but you can't blame Microsoft for those.)
Actually it is the PERFECT retort, because it shows just how out-of-touch Microsoft is. Teenagers don't care about value, because they have no concept of what value is.
That's a stretch. I'd love to see someone post about how their 13-year-old loved the visual effects in Ubuntu and the replies saying the exact opposite of the one above.
The features she liked, like Gadgets, you may not like. But 1) You don't represent the entire world, you can't say definitely that there is no value in Gadgets, and 2) You can't really say there's no value in Gadgets anyway if you haven't even tried them first. (I'm guessing you haven't.)
And so they communicate this desire by... getting rid of them.
Look, if the admins want the trivia integrated into the main articles so badly, why don't they just do it? Isn't the whole point of the site that anybody can edit it?
This is certainly not the basis for the site. The wiki is not a collection of random information, it is and has to be culled to keep it encyclopedia-like. Maybe this will not always be the case, perhaps in the future articles on cheats and key sequencies in videogames will be welcomed, but for the time being articles with little merit will be deleted.
I think this sums up the problem most people have with Wikipedia, in two sentences. An article I write on the movie Godzilla: Final Wars (as an example) could easily be considered non-notable by the staff of Wikipedia, but for Godzilla fans it's extremely notable (being both the 50th anniversary Godzilla film, and the last Godzilla film for at least a couple decades while Toho retires the character.) Whether or not a Wikipedia editor just happens to be a Godzilla fan would be the only criteria for whether it's kept or not, and that's assuming that editor even had a chance to look at the page.
Obviously, that's a bad example, because that movie is on Wikipedia. But the point remains.
It's not that they delete things that aren't notable, it's that the criteria are so... unevenly applied.
I don't want to trot out the tired old Pokemon example again, but it's so easily applied. There are tons of Wiki pages dedicated to describing every Pokemon, while Viva Pinata (another video game with tons of fictional animals) isn't allowed to have more than one page. And, of course, at the same time they're aggressively deleting the trivia section of movies, books, and games because trivia isn't "encyclopedic."
That all said, I do believe they need to encourage the creation and expansion of "encyclopedic" topics... there are tons of historical events and figures that have far too little coverage. But deleting content isn't the right way to go about it, not in my opinion. I say have hundreds of Pokemon pages, have thousands of them. But at the same time, make sure that your coverage of the important native American leader Weetamoo ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weetamoo ) has a full bio. (For example; there are tons of articles like this that are extremely important topics, but have too little coverage.)
First you complain that HL doesn't have a story, but then you say that cutscenes and dialogue are boring? Sounds to me like you don't even want a story.
No, I want a story. I loved the Halo story, because I could actually get into it and I cared about the characters. Half-Life 2 doesn't have that at all... it never answers any damned questions about anything. Maybe there's a story buried in there somewhere, I dunno, I couldn't find it. When you are "betrayed" in HL2, I didn't feel shocked or surprised, I yawned.
And for the record, the first time I played through it, I did listen to the extrodinarily long and dull "not-a-cut-scene" in Barney's hideout, but it only takes one playthrough to realize that none of that dialog matters at all to the rest of the game.
What does the amount of screen space taken have to do with the process priority?
(The correct answer is: it doesn't. World of Warcraft and Civilization 4, to name only two examples, run at the exact same framerate in windowed mode as they do full-screen.)
As for the principle of a game designer catering to a "customer," that completely disregards games being art, and I imagine you would agree that an artist is just as understandably a servant of his own inspiration as he is of his patrons.
Bunk.
The vast, vast, vast majority of artists are creating commercial products. For every one art-consumed painter laboring away in his one-bedroom apartment, there's a dozen guys out there making cartoons, comics, magazine layouts, 3D animation, greeting cards, designing rings or silverware, TV commercials, writing romance novels, etc etc.
Do you seriously believe that all of those people would be doing creative work if there was no money in it? Do you believe that, say, the movie Metropolis is not art because Fritz Lang charged admission to see it? Do you believe that H.R. Giger is "less" of an artist because he designed monsters for movies?
5) Cameras can get annoying, quite true, so getting them right is important. One thing I am wondering: On a TV/movie set walls are often removed to make room for the camera, allowing the camera to be placed in location that are outside of the room itself and would be physically impossible if the room would be real. Games on the other side basically never do this, instead they let the camera collide with the fourth wall. Any reason for this? Or any games that do otherwise (aside from top-down RPGs that leave away the roof)?
The only game I've ever played that did this was Oni by Bungie.
I'd love it if World of Warcraft added this feature, since the camera gets so cramped in smaller rooms (or inside huts, or other indoor areas that quests require) that you can't see anything beside your own character's backside. Even worse if you play a Tauren, who are fricken' huge, or a druid that can shift into bear form (also fricken' hug.) It makes you tempted to play a gnome just to avoid the camera issues.
Re:A good example of piss poor usability in a game
on
Gaming Usability 101
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· Score: 1
BF2142 is a hive of bugs and crap. I bought it at an encouragement of a friend ("You'll like it, it's like Tribes-- no Tribes *worked*") and ended up basically tossing it in the trash after attempting to play it only a few dozen times. It's terrible. When it actually runs long enough to get into a game, it is actually not a bad game-- but then you get to the next round and suddenly you lost all your unlocks for no reason, or the server crashes and you lose all your experience points, or you get booted and the friend's list stops working so you can't find your buddy again, then you go back to playing Xbox.
I think the main point is, "make it damned easy to start the game." What specific button it is isn't important.
For instance, don't make me decide whether to send Xbox Live invites, then decide what game mode I want to play, then decide what character I want to play, then decide which level you want to start at, and then strand me at the equipment buying screen, and then play a long cutscene. Make it so the default button to start (A or Start) the game just starts. Some games get this horribly wrong, and it takes ages to get to the actual gameplay. (Sonic the Hedgehog for Xbox 360, I'm looking at you!)
I would argue that Half-Life doesn't have a story, only a setting. Unless you consider, "our magical device exploded and now aliens teleport all over and kill people, oh also there's a guy in a suit" a story.
That said, one of the things I hated about Half-Life 2 was the loooong stretch of time in Barney's hideout where you can't do anything but dink around while the characters are all running their mouths. If they're going to talk about something I don't care about for a long time, making me retain control of my character only makes it seem like a longer time. The other risk with the Half-Life approach is that you might not be looking at the relevant point in the environment while the cut-scene occurs.
(Take, for example, the first level of Halo 2. In one of the fights on the space station, you can hear the radio broadcast of a ship in the background as it gets invaded, and then explodes from a bomb. You're supposed to be looking out the window to see the explosion, but the first two times I played it through, I wasn't looking out the window and therefore had no clue why the radio chatter was there.)
Free? Learning SQL can take weeks, at least to become as proficient at it as most people are at spreadsheets. Additionally, adding Perl/Python/PHP is going to take weeks more to learn, and even if you've learned all of it, there's still no GUI you can use to make quick tweaks to, or chart the data before you send it on its way.
If Excel can handle the rows, if Excel gives all the data transformation abilities you need, if Excel runs it all in a reasonable amount of time-- it IS the right tool. End of story.
If he already has a $150 copy of Excel that works just fine for the job, in what way is a vastly more time consuming database "the right tool for the job?" It sounds to me like he already has the right tool for the job, he would just prefer to run the right tool in Linux.
I hate these "well it can't do that because it's not the way I would do that" replies. How about making OpenOffice work for EVERYBODY, including people who don't want to spend months learning database administration and SQL? If a database is really that much better, then it'll fall into place. Obviously, the reason the parent's using Excel in the first place is that Excel is good enough for the job and a database wouldn't provide anything better.
(The only databases I know of where you can add data directly to cells, Excel-like, are SQL Server and Access anyway. SQL Server is a lot more expensive, and I doubt anybody would argue that Access is better over Excel for any task.)
Christ, it's a goddamned piece of software. Have some perspective, and stop comparing ANY of this to the sacrifices made by Gandhi for the freedom of his people.
Look, you're not on a hunger strike, in fact I'd guess the average weight of the Linux fanbase is much higher than the general population, you're not giving up anything, since by your own assertion Linux works just as well as Windows does, and the very worse than can happen if you "lose" this "fight" is that you have to go to the store and buy an iMac.
Maybe you can use the power of the interwebs and link me to some of this "hard data." I've never seen any, and I know for a fact that Microsoft hasn't released any.
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to type up a list of things I like about Vista compared to XP, but, you know what? Your post was so inflammatory and insulting that I'm just going to give one reason to prefer Vista over any other OS out there:
Specifically to spite assholes like you.
No offense to Patrick Stewart, I love the guy, but he is willing to lend his voice to almost anything. He's in American Dad, for example. He did the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He did Bambi II. He did Demon Stone, which was actually pretty good now that I think about it...
Please. People said the same thing about Windows 2000, and people said the same thing about Windows XP. And people will say the same thing about Windows 2012, or whatever the hell the next version is.
Even if the majority of people don't like Vista now, the majority of people will be running Vista in two years.
Personally, I think Vista's pretty damned good. Good enough that I replaced my Mac with a Vista computer, and I haven't missed it at all. (I've had some problems with third party programs that didn't support Vista but should have, but you can't blame Microsoft for those.)
Actually it is the PERFECT retort, because it shows just how out-of-touch Microsoft is. Teenagers don't care about value, because they have no concept of what value is.
That's a stretch. I'd love to see someone post about how their 13-year-old loved the visual effects in Ubuntu and the replies saying the exact opposite of the one above.
The features she liked, like Gadgets, you may not like. But 1) You don't represent the entire world, you can't say definitely that there is no value in Gadgets, and 2) You can't really say there's no value in Gadgets anyway if you haven't even tried them first. (I'm guessing you haven't.)
And so they communicate this desire by... getting rid of them.
Look, if the admins want the trivia integrated into the main articles so badly, why don't they just do it? Isn't the whole point of the site that anybody can edit it?
Maury,
This is certainly not the basis for the site. The wiki is not a collection of random information, it is and has to be culled to keep it encyclopedia-like. Maybe this will not always be the case, perhaps in the future articles on cheats and key sequencies in videogames will be welcomed, but for the time being articles with little merit will be deleted.
I think this sums up the problem most people have with Wikipedia, in two sentences. An article I write on the movie Godzilla: Final Wars (as an example) could easily be considered non-notable by the staff of Wikipedia, but for Godzilla fans it's extremely notable (being both the 50th anniversary Godzilla film, and the last Godzilla film for at least a couple decades while Toho retires the character.) Whether or not a Wikipedia editor just happens to be a Godzilla fan would be the only criteria for whether it's kept or not, and that's assuming that editor even had a chance to look at the page.
Obviously, that's a bad example, because that movie is on Wikipedia. But the point remains.
It's not that they delete things that aren't notable, it's that the criteria are so... unevenly applied.
I don't want to trot out the tired old Pokemon example again, but it's so easily applied. There are tons of Wiki pages dedicated to describing every Pokemon, while Viva Pinata (another video game with tons of fictional animals) isn't allowed to have more than one page. And, of course, at the same time they're aggressively deleting the trivia section of movies, books, and games because trivia isn't "encyclopedic."
That all said, I do believe they need to encourage the creation and expansion of "encyclopedic" topics... there are tons of historical events and figures that have far too little coverage. But deleting content isn't the right way to go about it, not in my opinion. I say have hundreds of Pokemon pages, have thousands of them. But at the same time, make sure that your coverage of the important native American leader Weetamoo ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weetamoo ) has a full bio. (For example; there are tons of articles like this that are extremely important topics, but have too little coverage.)
First you complain that HL doesn't have a story, but then you say that cutscenes and dialogue are boring? Sounds to me like you don't even want a story.
No, I want a story. I loved the Halo story, because I could actually get into it and I cared about the characters. Half-Life 2 doesn't have that at all... it never answers any damned questions about anything. Maybe there's a story buried in there somewhere, I dunno, I couldn't find it. When you are "betrayed" in HL2, I didn't feel shocked or surprised, I yawned.
And for the record, the first time I played through it, I did listen to the extrodinarily long and dull "not-a-cut-scene" in Barney's hideout, but it only takes one playthrough to realize that none of that dialog matters at all to the rest of the game.
Hey baby...
I got a 65,000-square-foot, five-story data center with a 4.5-ton steel door... IN MY PANTS!
What does the amount of screen space taken have to do with the process priority?
(The correct answer is: it doesn't. World of Warcraft and Civilization 4, to name only two examples, run at the exact same framerate in windowed mode as they do full-screen.)
As for the principle of a game designer catering to a "customer," that completely disregards games being art, and I imagine you would agree that an artist is just as understandably a servant of his own inspiration as he is of his patrons.
Bunk.
The vast, vast, vast majority of artists are creating commercial products. For every one art-consumed painter laboring away in his one-bedroom apartment, there's a dozen guys out there making cartoons, comics, magazine layouts, 3D animation, greeting cards, designing rings or silverware, TV commercials, writing romance novels, etc etc.
Do you seriously believe that all of those people would be doing creative work if there was no money in it? Do you believe that, say, the movie Metropolis is not art because Fritz Lang charged admission to see it? Do you believe that H.R. Giger is "less" of an artist because he designed monsters for movies?
But if you've remapped the controls to the point where they are unusable, how would you get back into the menu to make them usable again?
Have you ever encountered a game where re-mapping the IN-GAME controls also remaps the MENU controls? Seriously?
And what can player 1 do while player 2 is piddling around on the controller mapping screen?
Over the net, you can leave the lobby and join another game. In real life, you can smack him. In either case, you can yell, "hurry the hell up!"
5) Cameras can get annoying, quite true, so getting them right is important. One thing I am wondering: On a TV/movie set walls are often removed to make room for the camera, allowing the camera to be placed in location that are outside of the room itself and would be physically impossible if the room would be real. Games on the other side basically never do this, instead they let the camera collide with the fourth wall. Any reason for this? Or any games that do otherwise (aside from top-down RPGs that leave away the roof)?
The only game I've ever played that did this was Oni by Bungie.
I'd love it if World of Warcraft added this feature, since the camera gets so cramped in smaller rooms (or inside huts, or other indoor areas that quests require) that you can't see anything beside your own character's backside. Even worse if you play a Tauren, who are fricken' huge, or a druid that can shift into bear form (also fricken' hug.) It makes you tempted to play a gnome just to avoid the camera issues.
BF2142 is a hive of bugs and crap. I bought it at an encouragement of a friend ("You'll like it, it's like Tribes-- no Tribes *worked*") and ended up basically tossing it in the trash after attempting to play it only a few dozen times. It's terrible. When it actually runs long enough to get into a game, it is actually not a bad game-- but then you get to the next round and suddenly you lost all your unlocks for no reason, or the server crashes and you lose all your experience points, or you get booted and the friend's list stops working so you can't find your buddy again, then you go back to playing Xbox.
Worst example: Sonic the Hedgehog for Xbox 360. (The new 3D one, not the old one on Xbox Live.)
Ugh. In fact, I think that game breaks every single usability rule in this article.
I think the main point is, "make it damned easy to start the game." What specific button it is isn't important.
For instance, don't make me decide whether to send Xbox Live invites, then decide what game mode I want to play, then decide what character I want to play, then decide which level you want to start at, and then strand me at the equipment buying screen, and then play a long cutscene. Make it so the default button to start (A or Start) the game just starts. Some games get this horribly wrong, and it takes ages to get to the actual gameplay. (Sonic the Hedgehog for Xbox 360, I'm looking at you!)
I would argue that Half-Life doesn't have a story, only a setting. Unless you consider, "our magical device exploded and now aliens teleport all over and kill people, oh also there's a guy in a suit" a story.
That said, one of the things I hated about Half-Life 2 was the loooong stretch of time in Barney's hideout where you can't do anything but dink around while the characters are all running their mouths. If they're going to talk about something I don't care about for a long time, making me retain control of my character only makes it seem like a longer time. The other risk with the Half-Life approach is that you might not be looking at the relevant point in the environment while the cut-scene occurs.
(Take, for example, the first level of Halo 2. In one of the fights on the space station, you can hear the radio broadcast of a ship in the background as it gets invaded, and then explodes from a bomb. You're supposed to be looking out the window to see the explosion, but the first two times I played it through, I wasn't looking out the window and therefore had no clue why the radio chatter was there.)
Bingo, free solution and far more flexible.
Free? Learning SQL can take weeks, at least to become as proficient at it as most people are at spreadsheets. Additionally, adding Perl/Python/PHP is going to take weeks more to learn, and even if you've learned all of it, there's still no GUI you can use to make quick tweaks to, or chart the data before you send it on its way.
If Excel can handle the rows, if Excel gives all the data transformation abilities you need, if Excel runs it all in a reasonable amount of time-- it IS the right tool. End of story.
If he already has a $150 copy of Excel that works just fine for the job, in what way is a vastly more time consuming database "the right tool for the job?" It sounds to me like he already has the right tool for the job, he would just prefer to run the right tool in Linux.
I hate these "well it can't do that because it's not the way I would do that" replies. How about making OpenOffice work for EVERYBODY, including people who don't want to spend months learning database administration and SQL? If a database is really that much better, then it'll fall into place. Obviously, the reason the parent's using Excel in the first place is that Excel is good enough for the job and a database wouldn't provide anything better.
(The only databases I know of where you can add data directly to cells, Excel-like, are SQL Server and Access anyway. SQL Server is a lot more expensive, and I doubt anybody would argue that Access is better over Excel for any task.)
When you start up the new pc, you would be taken to a screen where you can choose to
;)
Great idea! You can implement it using Windows Embedded.
Christ, it's a goddamned piece of software. Have some perspective, and stop comparing ANY of this to the sacrifices made by Gandhi for the freedom of his people.
Look, you're not on a hunger strike, in fact I'd guess the average weight of the Linux fanbase is much higher than the general population, you're not giving up anything, since by your own assertion Linux works just as well as Windows does, and the very worse than can happen if you "lose" this "fight" is that you have to go to the store and buy an iMac.
Seriously, get over yourselves.
You must be popular at parties.
Maybe you can use the power of the interwebs and link me to some of this "hard data." I've never seen any, and I know for a fact that Microsoft hasn't released any.
1) Most Xboxes run just fine. People don't go online and post "my Xbox 360 is still working today!"
2) It's been fixed for months, in any case.
Call me when Skaven is a playable race.