TV networks creating compelling programming so that viewers will watch it. They all compete to give maximum ad value to advertisers (lowering the price of ads, increasing the viewers to the network, etc.) Which group (viewers or advertisers) is their "real" customers?
Point is, lots of industries serve as middle-men between different customers. Apple isn't doing anything new or revolutionary.
Remember the gem about how Mac OS gets fewer viruses because fewer computers run it? That applies too. How many music tracks has Apple sold with Fairplay compared with music tracks with Microsoft's DRM? Tons more.
As evidenced by those games ported to Xbox, nothing about adventure games requires "point and click."
And I still say it's kind of daft to argue that Nintendo will "save the adventure genre" because the Wii will have 1 adventure game when the Xbox had several and nobody proclaimed that Microsoft was "saving the adventure genre." If you're going to make some proclamation about some company saving some genre of games, you might do a teeny bit of research to find which company already supports that genre the most.
Except it's not designed to be a "little girl's game." It's designed to be the next Pokemon phenomenon. Thus the associated cartoon. Whether it makes that goal or not, who knows, but it's a damned good game anyway.
I don't think most people consider Zelda an adventure game.
But Xbox 1 had both Syberia and Dreamfall (and perhaps Syberia II, I'm not 100% sure), those were great adventure games, and people weren't saying that Microsoft had "saved the adventure genre." This article is just more breathless Nintendo praise without much fact behind it.
Did the Game Cube have *any* adventure titles? Why would the author assume the Wii would? (And why ignore the Xbox, which has a proven record of adventure titles?)
A better argument is one expressed a few posts ago which sums to:
If great modern adventure games like The Longest Journey, Dreamfall, Syberia, Syberia II and Indigo Prophecy were basically ignored by the gaming press, what makes him think anything can "save" the adventure genre? All of those games were well-done and very entertaining.
Frankly the adventure genre is only dead in the first place because the gaming press mostly ignores new adventure games that come out, for some reason. I think it's all just nostalgia-- what people want isn't "adventure games" but they want "my childhood as I was playing Kings Quest VI". You can't package that in a box and sell it in stores. Nostalgia is a powerful force.
Take a look at open-source software. It's collaborative, usually high-quality,
Uh, some open source projects are. Most are not. In fact, the vast majority are not.
and responsive to people's wants and needs
Oh yeah, THAT explains why GIMP doesn't do the CMYK color model. That explains why most of the time copying and pasting of anything except text between applications (and sometimes within applications) doesn't work.
I'm not going to delve any further off-topic, but suffice it to say that you're making a few bad assumptions at the beginning of your mega-paragraph there.
Why do people obsess about the incongruities in gilligan's island?
People are too busy obsessing over how Smurfs reproduce than to worry about Gilligan's Island.
But, come to think of it... why DID so many space missions land there? And what was up with the WWII landing strip and abandoned bomber that they didn't notice until years had passed? How *do* you power a radio with coconuts?
And robots playing the Harlem Globetrotters? That's ridiculous... everyone knows robots can't jump.
To be fair, though, a lot of that is probably due to you being an insane wacko who things God delivers personal messages and whose resume mainly consists of a brag about how good at Starcraft you are.
Why are there certain data types like int, float, etc?
That's actually a language feature. Some languages, like ECMA-script/Javascript/ActionScript/whatever other names the same language goes by basically has no variable types. Or, more specifically, the variable type is the type of whatever the last thing you stuck into that variable is.
JS variables are often defined as empty strings (var test = '') even if you know they're going to later contain Objects, or Floats, or whatever.
You're forgetting the minor detail that your computer is also *doing* about 200 times more than it was when running Word Perfect 5. Ignoring all the background tasks that DOS didn't run, DOS-based software didn't do real-time spell-checking, it didn't do any sort of auto-formating or anything. It didn't support drag&drop text editing, or mail merging documents with a database or other data source or any of the thousands of other things that Word 2003 does that WordPerfect 5 doesn't. And of course it only had to update a max of 320x200 pixels each time something on the screen changed.
Oh yeah, next time I buy my grandma I'm going to tell her to use OS/400 on it. You make it sound as if OS/400 is the ideal situation in every circumstance. It's not. It's not even remotely close. Sorry.
OS/400 may do all that handy stuff, but what good does "keep the UI responsive" do if the UI is a piece of crap? I've used IBM products, from AS/400 Client Access (the GUI tool to access all those perfect OS/400 apps) to Lotus Notes, and IBM can't write a decent UI if their life depended on it.
Upper case before lower case is the standard Unix way of sorting. Note, I didn't say "Mac OS X", nor did I say "Linux". Unix or Unix work-alikes do it that way. They *all* do it that way barring some strange option.
So all of Unix is wrong, ok.
I'm at work, so I don't have my Mac OS X box with me, but open a Terminal window and type ls in the directory those files with mixed case are in.
You're right, Bash is wrong also. Well, it might be correct-- I don't know whether "ls" claims to sort by alphabetical order or not. If it does claim to sort in alphabetical order, then yes, it's wrong.
Of course, if Apple chooses what you consider to be a poor method of sorting, well, don't blame gnome.
Finder sorts correctly. Every other OS X app I have sorts correctly. Apple doesn't choose that method, none of their apps sort that way. (Except Bash running in Terminal, which Apple didn't write.) Why *shouldn't* I blame the one program that's wrong?
Heck, case sensitivity is pretty new (and very optional) under Mac OS X, so only Unix-core-based programs are going to even understand the difference between A and a.
What are you talking about? You're saying that OS X apps, when working with text, are liable to forget which case each letter is supposed to be? Even Linux apps, written by total cretins, understand the difference between A and a. Or do you frequently open Open Office documents AnD SEe tEXt liKe ThiS?
The person who blamed gnome is very probably wrong and ignorant, and if s/he didn't attempt to report it to them, a lamer.
So you think the *developers* of Inkscape, who use Gnome's libraries for file open dialogs, are wrong when they blame this bug on Gnome? WTF? If the developer doesn't know who to blame for the bug, who would? (For the record, it was reported to Gnome.)
In summary: Probably gnome did it right (respect what the OS does) even though you are right, it should not sort upper case separately from lower case.
I don't know why you keep saying that the OS does it that way. No application in OS X, including Finder, sorts that way. The OS does not sort that way. Macintosh never has, since I started using it with System 6 to the present, it never has. Please get that concept out of your head. OS X does not sort that way.
It isn't anyone's fault,
It's "nobody's fault" in the sense that Gnome didn't bother to do any sort of usability QA and therefore a nasty usability error snuck into production code. But I'd still blame the Gnome people for not catching and fixing this most basic "low-hanging fruit" bug years and years ago.
Yet it's the correct solution. That's how Macintosh applications have *always* done it, and they didn't have "DLL hell" in the first place. Shared libraries, except those shipped with the OS, are simply unreliable and pointless to maintain. The disk space savings don't matter, and haven't in years.
This is the "Import" dialog in the OS X port of Inkscape. Notice how, when sorting by name, apparently "Zzyzx.jpg" comes *before* "albinopeacock.jpg". When I reported this bug to the Inkscape developers, they told me that it's a Gnome bug and so there's nothing they could do about it.
And of course I'm ignoring the millions of other things wrong with that open dialog when running in Mac OS X. They didn't even slightly spend any effort getting it to look and work like a Macintosh open dialog. But I can even forgive that.
Not being able to alphabetize a list of files, that's unforgivable. The most basic level of usability QA would have caught this bug in Gnome five years ago... it's obvious that nobody involved with the Gnome project gives a flying crap about usability, despite all the tough talk.
I'm a Mac user. Using something "as consistent as Windows" would be a huge step down, and using something that's "pretty much identical to Windows" does not appeal to me.
I mean, I use Windows when I have to, but I certainly don't enjoy it. That said, I still think Windows (the OS) is superior to Linux usability-wise, although a lot of Windows applications are bottom-of-the-barrel UI-wise.
I don't agree with you. If you're looking at your map, you're still playing the game. Hitting Start will pause the game, if that's what you want to do. Hell, getting attacked while using the PDA in games like System Shock II is half the fun.
Speaking of WOW, you might as well argue that looking at the map in WOW would stop a gryphon you're on to stop flying unless you close the map again.
Slashdot Mirror
TV networks creating compelling programming so that viewers will watch it. They all compete to give maximum ad value to advertisers (lowering the price of ads, increasing the viewers to the network, etc.) Which group (viewers or advertisers) is their "real" customers?
Point is, lots of industries serve as middle-men between different customers. Apple isn't doing anything new or revolutionary.
Remember the gem about how Mac OS gets fewer viruses because fewer computers run it? That applies too. How many music tracks has Apple sold with Fairplay compared with music tracks with Microsoft's DRM? Tons more.
In what way is The Longest Journey "action" of any form?
And I was just mentioning adventure games ON CONSOLES. Xbox, specifically. There are tons released for PC every year.
I'm talking about Syberia and Dreamfall. I always kind of assumed Psychonauts was a platformer, but I haven't played it.
In any case, Syberia and Dreamfall are most certainly adventure games, don't use "point and click" and also do not suck. Try playing one.
As evidenced by those games ported to Xbox, nothing about adventure games requires "point and click."
And I still say it's kind of daft to argue that Nintendo will "save the adventure genre" because the Wii will have 1 adventure game when the Xbox had several and nobody proclaimed that Microsoft was "saving the adventure genre." If you're going to make some proclamation about some company saving some genre of games, you might do a teeny bit of research to find which company already supports that genre the most.
That's fine, but "light-hearted amusing little romp" isn't part of the definition of "adventure game."
Except it's not designed to be a "little girl's game." It's designed to be the next Pokemon phenomenon. Thus the associated cartoon. Whether it makes that goal or not, who knows, but it's a damned good game anyway.
I don't think most people consider Zelda an adventure game.
But Xbox 1 had both Syberia and Dreamfall (and perhaps Syberia II, I'm not 100% sure), those were great adventure games, and people weren't saying that Microsoft had "saved the adventure genre." This article is just more breathless Nintendo praise without much fact behind it.
Did the Game Cube have *any* adventure titles? Why would the author assume the Wii would? (And why ignore the Xbox, which has a proven record of adventure titles?)
A better argument is one expressed a few posts ago which sums to:
If great modern adventure games like The Longest Journey, Dreamfall, Syberia, Syberia II and Indigo Prophecy were basically ignored by the gaming press, what makes him think anything can "save" the adventure genre? All of those games were well-done and very entertaining.
Frankly the adventure genre is only dead in the first place because the gaming press mostly ignores new adventure games that come out, for some reason. I think it's all just nostalgia-- what people want isn't "adventure games" but they want "my childhood as I was playing Kings Quest VI". You can't package that in a box and sell it in stores. Nostalgia is a powerful force.
Take a look at open-source software. It's collaborative, usually high-quality,
Uh, some open source projects are. Most are not. In fact, the vast majority are not.
and responsive to people's wants and needs
Oh yeah, THAT explains why GIMP doesn't do the CMYK color model. That explains why most of the time copying and pasting of anything except text between applications (and sometimes within applications) doesn't work.
I'm not going to delve any further off-topic, but suffice it to say that you're making a few bad assumptions at the beginning of your mega-paragraph there.
Why do people obsess about the incongruities in gilligan's island?
People are too busy obsessing over how Smurfs reproduce than to worry about Gilligan's Island.
But, come to think of it... why DID so many space missions land there? And what was up with the WWII landing strip and abandoned bomber that they didn't notice until years had passed? How *do* you power a radio with coconuts?
And robots playing the Harlem Globetrotters? That's ridiculous... everyone knows robots can't jump.
Damn, well, there goes my day. Thanks.
A better question might be, "why does 'pant' have a singular name when you ONLY see them in pairs?"
I mean, it's not like I wake up in the morning, choose my right pant then choose my left pant.
To be fair, though, a lot of that is probably due to you being an insane wacko who things God delivers personal messages and whose resume mainly consists of a brag about how good at Starcraft you are.
So the theme you're getting at is, I think:
It's all somebody else's fault!
Not sure how helpful that is, but thanks for contributing.
Why are there certain data types like int, float, etc?
That's actually a language feature. Some languages, like ECMA-script/Javascript/ActionScript/whatever other names the same language goes by basically has no variable types. Or, more specifically, the variable type is the type of whatever the last thing you stuck into that variable is.
JS variables are often defined as empty strings (var test = '') even if you know they're going to later contain Objects, or Floats, or whatever.
You're forgetting the minor detail that your computer is also *doing* about 200 times more than it was when running Word Perfect 5. Ignoring all the background tasks that DOS didn't run, DOS-based software didn't do real-time spell-checking, it didn't do any sort of auto-formating or anything. It didn't support drag&drop text editing, or mail merging documents with a database or other data source or any of the thousands of other things that Word 2003 does that WordPerfect 5 doesn't. And of course it only had to update a max of 320x200 pixels each time something on the screen changed.
Oh yeah, next time I buy my grandma I'm going to tell her to use OS/400 on it. You make it sound as if OS/400 is the ideal situation in every circumstance. It's not. It's not even remotely close. Sorry.
OS/400 may do all that handy stuff, but what good does "keep the UI responsive" do if the UI is a piece of crap? I've used IBM products, from AS/400 Client Access (the GUI tool to access all those perfect OS/400 apps) to Lotus Notes, and IBM can't write a decent UI if their life depended on it.
Notice the X11 logo in the window? It's a Linux app running on OS X.
Upper case before lower case is the standard Unix way of sorting. Note, I didn't say "Mac OS X", nor did I say "Linux". Unix or Unix work-alikes do it that way. They *all* do it that way barring some strange option.
So all of Unix is wrong, ok.
I'm at work, so I don't have my Mac OS X box with me, but open a Terminal window and type
ls
in the directory those files with mixed case are in.
You're right, Bash is wrong also. Well, it might be correct-- I don't know whether "ls" claims to sort by alphabetical order or not. If it does claim to sort in alphabetical order, then yes, it's wrong.
Of course, if Apple chooses what you consider to be a poor method of sorting, well, don't blame gnome.
Finder sorts correctly. Every other OS X app I have sorts correctly. Apple doesn't choose that method, none of their apps sort that way. (Except Bash running in Terminal, which Apple didn't write.) Why *shouldn't* I blame the one program that's wrong?
Heck, case sensitivity is pretty new (and very optional) under Mac OS X, so only Unix-core-based programs are going to even understand the difference between A and a.
What are you talking about? You're saying that OS X apps, when working with text, are liable to forget which case each letter is supposed to be? Even Linux apps, written by total cretins, understand the difference between A and a. Or do you frequently open Open Office documents AnD SEe tEXt liKe ThiS?
The person who blamed gnome is very probably wrong and ignorant, and if s/he didn't attempt to report it to them, a lamer.
So you think the *developers* of Inkscape, who use Gnome's libraries for file open dialogs, are wrong when they blame this bug on Gnome? WTF? If the developer doesn't know who to blame for the bug, who would? (For the record, it was reported to Gnome.)
In summary: Probably gnome did it right (respect what the OS does) even though you are right, it should not sort upper case separately from lower case.
I don't know why you keep saying that the OS does it that way. No application in OS X, including Finder, sorts that way. The OS does not sort that way. Macintosh never has, since I started using it with System 6 to the present, it never has. Please get that concept out of your head. OS X does not sort that way.
It isn't anyone's fault,
It's "nobody's fault" in the sense that Gnome didn't bother to do any sort of usability QA and therefore a nasty usability error snuck into production code. But I'd still blame the Gnome people for not catching and fixing this most basic "low-hanging fruit" bug years and years ago.
Hypocrisy Illustrated!
one gets the impression that you are using that old Microsoft astroturfing tactic of mentioning very old and untrue factoids against Linux.
One paragraph later:
With the standard XP install one has to reboot a dozen times until all the hardware is recognized.
This has been another episode of "Hypocrisy Illustrated!" Have a nice day.
Yet it's the correct solution. That's how Macintosh applications have *always* done it, and they didn't have "DLL hell" in the first place. Shared libraries, except those shipped with the OS, are simply unreliable and pointless to maintain. The disk space savings don't matter, and haven't in years.
A picture's worth a thousand words:
_ disorder.png
http://schend.net/images/screenshots/alphabetical
This is the "Import" dialog in the OS X port of Inkscape. Notice how, when sorting by name, apparently "Zzyzx.jpg" comes *before* "albinopeacock.jpg". When I reported this bug to the Inkscape developers, they told me that it's a Gnome bug and so there's nothing they could do about it.
And of course I'm ignoring the millions of other things wrong with that open dialog when running in Mac OS X. They didn't even slightly spend any effort getting it to look and work like a Macintosh open dialog. But I can even forgive that.
Not being able to alphabetize a list of files, that's unforgivable. The most basic level of usability QA would have caught this bug in Gnome five years ago... it's obvious that nobody involved with the Gnome project gives a flying crap about usability, despite all the tough talk.
I'm a Mac user. Using something "as consistent as Windows" would be a huge step down, and using something that's "pretty much identical to Windows" does not appeal to me.
I mean, I use Windows when I have to, but I certainly don't enjoy it. That said, I still think Windows (the OS) is superior to Linux usability-wise, although a lot of Windows applications are bottom-of-the-barrel UI-wise.
Is there some way to turn this off in the options?
Yes.
but I'd rather just aim manually anyway.
Then turn auto-aim off in the options. Duh.
I don't agree with you. If you're looking at your map, you're still playing the game. Hitting Start will pause the game, if that's what you want to do. Hell, getting attacked while using the PDA in games like System Shock II is half the fun.
Speaking of WOW, you might as well argue that looking at the map in WOW would stop a gryphon you're on to stop flying unless you close the map again.