I know this is Slashdot, but have you *tried* the new IIS that comes with Windows 2003? It is possible, you know, for Microsoft to put out really good software at times.
Re:"Girly" subject matter is not the answer
on
10 Gateway Games
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· Score: 1
There are already some games with very realistic characters, both male and female. Interestingly, the two best examples I can think of are both adventure games: The Longest Journey (and its sequel) and Syberia (and its sequel.) It would be great to see more of these, and in more genres.
My personal gripe are games where your sex doesn't matter to the story of the game, and yet there's still no way to select 'male' or 'female' avatar. This was the only weak part of System Shock 2, that you're assumed to be male even though at no point does anybody in the game refer to your sex. (Doom 3 is a more recent example of this problem-- why can't you select a female marine? It's not like anybody refers to you by name, or by sex.)
An example of a FPS done right is Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force where you could select a female avatar if you wanted. The writers of the game purposely chose a name ("Alex") that works for both sexes so that the dialog didn't have to be re-recorded.
(Now obviously, some games rely on the hero being male for plot points, Half-Life 2. And some games are historical games in environments where there were simply no women around, like pretty much all WWII games.)
OK, so I go to the XP machine and I can't find anything on the Start Menu for the printer. No problem, I know that you can get to it in Control Panels. Where the hell has Control Panels gone? *sigh* Ok, now I found it. So now I open the printer interface. Can you believe there's no new features added but now the whole interface for something as simple as printing is so obfuscated by Microsoft's insistence that everything needs to be a web interface that it takes me another 10 minutes wrestling with where all the options have gone because they're not in a normal window but a damn web page.
What the hell mutant Windows XP were you running? Printers and Faxes is right on the Start menu, whether you're using the new-style XP one, or the old-style 2000 one. All the printer properties are kept in a dialog box like they've always been, there's not a web page in sight.
Bullshit. Wasting time is wasting time, whether it's in front of a computer posting on/. or in front of a TV watching The Price Is Right.
What you're rallying against doesn't have anything to do with TV, it has to do with *you* (personally) considering less of your time "wasted." That's fine for you, but there are millions of people out there who don't consider TV wasting time, they consider it recreation. You saying you don't watch TV isn't going to change their mind, and it's certainly not making you sound like a better person for it-- in fact, it makes you sound like a snob.
No shit. The "I don't have a TV and I'm a better person" bullshit is like the online equilivant of those annoying people at parties that do nothing but name-drop. "Yes, well, when I was talking to Bill Gates the other day, giving him some advice about how business and home life,..."
Shut up already. I don't know what's worse, the constant posting of "I don't have a TV" bullshit, or the fact that this tired drivel gets modded up.
None of my PCs have had a disk drive in 5 years. And no Apple computers have had one since 1998.
Your assumptions are kind of out-of-date.
Besides, even if your plan WAS used, the floppy drive in today's Dell *still* can't read anything bigger than 1.4 MB... so you'd have to replace the floppy drive, which is a LOT hardware than just plugging something into a USB port.
If you think USB memory sticks are fragile sticking out of the USB port, just buy a $4 USB extension cord and lay it down on your desk. Isn't that a little bit cheaper and easier than replacing the floppy drive on millions of computers?
That's not my only complaint. There are little quirks and bugs all over that make it non-spatial. The Open File dialogs, for instance, aren't even close. The icons on the desktop don't update when I save a file to the desktop unless I manually refresh it.
And what I describe is not a "rare bug," it happened like three times a day when I was trying to use Finder in "Aqua" mode. (I'm not going to call it spatial mode.) It happened enough to make me give up trying to use Finder at all and pretty much stick with DragThing, Quicksilver, and having shitloads of files on the desktop.
But the main complaint is this: How does version 10 of a thing have less features than version 9? OS X Finder removed so many features from the OS 9 Finder, it's just sad. Thankfully, Apple has added most of them back in-- it's just lacking spatial features and tabbed folders now.
You're saying that 90% of people never use Track Changes-- ok, but what about the people who *do* use it?
Look, if you don't want to use Word XP because you don't use all the features, that's fine. There are tons of word processors out there. But to say that Microsoft shouldn't have added those features because not a lot of people use them is stupid. If anything, it's an argument that people buy more software than they need, not any argument against Microsoft.
Because software with the physical box will appear in stores. If you want Linux to get more users, you'll need Linux software to appear on store shelves.
Because you can go to any website and download the software without even thinking about what distrobution you're using. Or, for that matter, having to open up a *second* application and search for the software *again* in it, and install from there.
Thirdly, because commercial software developers will never support your apt system. They want to put an installer on their website that Joe User can download quickly and install.
That's because 90,000 of those projects are text editors.
The big problem here is that when people "get an itch" they don't "scratch" it by finding an existing project, but instead they start TextEditProPlus2005Extreme as a new project. There's a huge duplication of effort in the open source world.
The "elite" projects are projects that have had corporate support (to get the 'boring' work done; Netscape for Firefox, Sun for OpenOffice) and are relatively unique in the open source world. There aren't very many office suites in open source, so kOffice and OpenOffice get a lot of attention.
Don't forget free Remote Desktop. That's definately a feature any geek would like.
Someday I'm going to figure out where all these "Windows 2000 is better than Windows XP" trolls come up and shut them up once and for all. The only possible way in which XP is worse than 2000 is that the default theme is a little gaudy-- but guess what? Another feature XP added is better theme-ability so you can change it!
I agree with you completely; a lot of software *does* suck, but for the most part software has been getting better and better and better-- not worse.
Hell, even Lotus Notes, the HELLHOLE of user interfaces, now (version 6.5.1) plays nice with multiple users in WindowsXP and OS X and correctly registers itself as the default mail handler. Sure, the address book still sucks ass, but the product is still getting better more than it's getting worse.
Look at operating systems. OS X is tons better than OS 9 (in general, even though the Finder sucks.) Nobody sane would use Windows 98 over Windows XP, unless they *really* hated activation (which has nothing to do with software quality.)
The entire premise of this article is mistaken. The question isn't whether open source applications will jump ahead as proprietary software falls back, the question is whether open source software can keep apace of the improvements in the proprietary equilivants. And products like Firefox, OpenOffice, and Nvu give me a lot of hope that this could happen.
Oh, well, since *you* don't use revision tracking or VBscript, I guess Microsoft should just remove them from the product and those huge corporations that use it on a daily basis will be screwed.
Why do you have to take a perfectly good and informative post and reply to it with your immature "my penis is bigger than yours" open-source defense? You're utterly missing the point of his post.
Look: 1) A server crashing because it's low on memory is a bug which needs to be fixed. Period. Slow performance means "buy more memory" not sudden crashes.
2) If GAIM claims to run on *nix, it should be tested on *nix. Now maybe the version of GAIM he downloaded only claimed to run on Redhat, that's a possibility. But if it claimed to run on every *nix and it didn't work on a SGI, then that is a bug. Period.
It doesn't matter what Windows developers do. The point is OS-neutral. Lots of Mac programmers also don't do any version checking and their software will crash when you try to run it in OS X 10.1. And it happens on Linux with the GAIM example. And it happens on Windows. Don't make this into a fucking platform war when it has nothing to do with the platform used.
God this happens every time somebody criticizes something about the open source community. There's this whole squad of geeks that comes out of the woodwork and goes, "well, it's buggy on Windows too!" as if that was some sort of defense for Linux being buggy.
Look, bugs need to be fixed whether or not your competitor has the same bug! How the hell will Linux ever pull ahead of Windows if you don't make an effort to make it better than Windows?
Sorry about the boldface, but this attitude pisses me off.
No. Even when you turn off metal windows, OS X Finder's idea of "spatial" is about the same as Windows 95's idea of "spatial." 1 folder -> 1 window is not spatial; it's a lot more than that. OS X Finder fucks it up, even as it pretends to act spatial.
In addition, when you turn off metal windows they seem to get randomly turned back on for no apparent reason all the time. For instance, double-clicking a disk image will frequently (but not always) open it up in a metal window even if you have metal windows off for the rest of the system. In addition, sometimes windows opened from aliases in the Dock will open as metal for no apparent reason.
My theory is that it was built by the NeXT guys who, like the Microsoft Windows users around here, have absolutely no idea what "spatial file system" means and so they just try to fudge something.
Since when was Microsoft's implementation of anything ever the best one?
If you want to see a *good* spatial navigation system, look at MacOS 1.0-9.2.2... it seemed to work for almost 20 years for Apple, and their users loved them for it.
Microsoft fucked it up by: 1) Not providing window management tools. (i.e. in MacOS you can command-click to open a folder which automatically closes the parent folder at the same time.) 2) Not providing file access tools. (i.e. in MacOS you could place files in the Apple menu more easily that you could place things in the Start menu. You can also, for instance, click and hold on a folder icon to 'drill down' to your destination, then close all parent windows to keep your screen tidy.) 3) Not permanently saving window settings. (Windows 95 only saves the settings of like the most recently-used 200 windows, not EVERY window on the system ALL the time.)
How about this? I'm a commercial software vendor wanting to sell software for Linux. I want it to run on as many distrobutions, window managers, configurations as possible, right? But I also don't want it to appear in "repositories," because I have trade-secret code in my product that I can't reveal, and therefore I don't feel comfortable letting somebody else see my product's source code so they can "repackage" it. So I figure my users can install off CD.
But, oh wait... unless the CD is custom-tailored for Ubuntu, SuSE, Redhat, Slackware, Gentoo, God-Knows-What, how could that possibly work? I can only sell my software to a particular known configuration, because Linux doesn't have its act together enough to be able to install software that hasn't been "repackaged" by somebody working for the distrobution.
Wonderfalls, Firefly, Space: Above and Beyond all sucked ass. I'm sorry, but they were cancelled because the shows didn't pull in enough viewers, not because of Fox's "political views." (BTW, that's one of the more insane conspiracy theories I've seen on the Internet in a long while... do you perchance have a homepage with a long rant discussing the TimeCube in various fonts and colors?)
I never watched Buffy, but MASH was only cancelled after it *had* run it's course. That show was on forever. Hell, I wish they'd have cancelled The Simpsons 5 years ago when it had run its course-- the new episodes suck.
Slashdot Mirror
Good job stealing that joke from Red Dwarf without credit.
Don't forget the muscle relaxant-- the "Wines of Estonia" article in the in-flight magazine.
I know this is Slashdot, but have you *tried* the new IIS that comes with Windows 2003? It is possible, you know, for Microsoft to put out really good software at times.
There are already some games with very realistic characters, both male and female. Interestingly, the two best examples I can think of are both adventure games: The Longest Journey (and its sequel) and Syberia (and its sequel.) It would be great to see more of these, and in more genres.
My personal gripe are games where your sex doesn't matter to the story of the game, and yet there's still no way to select 'male' or 'female' avatar. This was the only weak part of System Shock 2, that you're assumed to be male even though at no point does anybody in the game refer to your sex. (Doom 3 is a more recent example of this problem-- why can't you select a female marine? It's not like anybody refers to you by name, or by sex.)
An example of a FPS done right is Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force where you could select a female avatar if you wanted. The writers of the game purposely chose a name ("Alex") that works for both sexes so that the dialog didn't have to be re-recorded.
(Now obviously, some games rely on the hero being male for plot points, Half-Life 2. And some games are historical games in environments where there were simply no women around, like pretty much all WWII games.)
OK, so I go to the XP machine and I can't find anything on the Start Menu for the printer. No problem, I know that you can get to it in Control Panels. Where the hell has Control Panels gone? *sigh* Ok, now I found it. So now I open the printer interface. Can you believe there's no new features added but now the whole interface for something as simple as printing is so obfuscated by Microsoft's insistence that everything needs to be a web interface that it takes me another 10 minutes wrestling with where all the options have gone because they're not in a normal window but a damn web page.
What the hell mutant Windows XP were you running? Printers and Faxes is right on the Start menu, whether you're using the new-style XP one, or the old-style 2000 one. All the printer properties are kept in a dialog box like they've always been, there's not a web page in sight.
I think you were drunk that day.
Bullshit. Wasting time is wasting time, whether it's in front of a computer posting on /. or in front of a TV watching The Price Is Right.
What you're rallying against doesn't have anything to do with TV, it has to do with *you* (personally) considering less of your time "wasted." That's fine for you, but there are millions of people out there who don't consider TV wasting time, they consider it recreation. You saying you don't watch TV isn't going to change their mind, and it's certainly not making you sound like a better person for it-- in fact, it makes you sound like a snob.
No shit. The "I don't have a TV and I'm a better person" bullshit is like the online equilivant of those annoying people at parties that do nothing but name-drop. "Yes, well, when I was talking to Bill Gates the other day, giving him some advice about how business and home life, ..."
Shut up already. I don't know what's worse, the constant posting of "I don't have a TV" bullshit, or the fact that this tired drivel gets modded up.
And Attitude Problem Tetris, an old MacOS port. Not only would it give you bad pieces, but the program would swear at you.
None of my PCs have had a disk drive in 5 years. And no Apple computers have had one since 1998.
Your assumptions are kind of out-of-date.
Besides, even if your plan WAS used, the floppy drive in today's Dell *still* can't read anything bigger than 1.4 MB... so you'd have to replace the floppy drive, which is a LOT hardware than just plugging something into a USB port.
If you think USB memory sticks are fragile sticking out of the USB port, just buy a $4 USB extension cord and lay it down on your desk. Isn't that a little bit cheaper and easier than replacing the floppy drive on millions of computers?
That's not my only complaint. There are little quirks and bugs all over that make it non-spatial. The Open File dialogs, for instance, aren't even close. The icons on the desktop don't update when I save a file to the desktop unless I manually refresh it.
And what I describe is not a "rare bug," it happened like three times a day when I was trying to use Finder in "Aqua" mode. (I'm not going to call it spatial mode.) It happened enough to make me give up trying to use Finder at all and pretty much stick with DragThing, Quicksilver, and having shitloads of files on the desktop.
But the main complaint is this: How does version 10 of a thing have less features than version 9? OS X Finder removed so many features from the OS 9 Finder, it's just sad. Thankfully, Apple has added most of them back in-- it's just lacking spatial features and tabbed folders now.
Your argument still doesn't make any sense.
You're saying that 90% of people never use Track Changes-- ok, but what about the people who *do* use it?
Look, if you don't want to use Word XP because you don't use all the features, that's fine. There are tons of word processors out there. But to say that Microsoft shouldn't have added those features because not a lot of people use them is stupid. If anything, it's an argument that people buy more software than they need, not any argument against Microsoft.
Because software with the physical box will appear in stores. If you want Linux to get more users, you'll need Linux software to appear on store shelves.
Because you can go to any website and download the software without even thinking about what distrobution you're using. Or, for that matter, having to open up a *second* application and search for the software *again* in it, and install from there.
Thirdly, because commercial software developers will never support your apt system. They want to put an installer on their website that Joe User can download quickly and install.
That's because 90,000 of those projects are text editors.
The big problem here is that when people "get an itch" they don't "scratch" it by finding an existing project, but instead they start TextEditProPlus2005Extreme as a new project. There's a huge duplication of effort in the open source world.
The "elite" projects are projects that have had corporate support (to get the 'boring' work done; Netscape for Firefox, Sun for OpenOffice) and are relatively unique in the open source world. There aren't very many office suites in open source, so kOffice and OpenOffice get a lot of attention.
Don't forget free Remote Desktop. That's definately a feature any geek would like.
Someday I'm going to figure out where all these "Windows 2000 is better than Windows XP" trolls come up and shut them up once and for all. The only possible way in which XP is worse than 2000 is that the default theme is a little gaudy-- but guess what? Another feature XP added is better theme-ability so you can change it!
Haha great post!
I agree with you completely; a lot of software *does* suck, but for the most part software has been getting better and better and better-- not worse.
Hell, even Lotus Notes, the HELLHOLE of user interfaces, now (version 6.5.1) plays nice with multiple users in WindowsXP and OS X and correctly registers itself as the default mail handler. Sure, the address book still sucks ass, but the product is still getting better more than it's getting worse.
Look at operating systems. OS X is tons better than OS 9 (in general, even though the Finder sucks.) Nobody sane would use Windows 98 over Windows XP, unless they *really* hated activation (which has nothing to do with software quality.)
The entire premise of this article is mistaken. The question isn't whether open source applications will jump ahead as proprietary software falls back, the question is whether open source software can keep apace of the improvements in the proprietary equilivants. And products like Firefox, OpenOffice, and Nvu give me a lot of hope that this could happen.
Oh, well, since *you* don't use revision tracking or VBscript, I guess Microsoft should just remove them from the product and those huge corporations that use it on a daily basis will be screwed.
What a stupid post that was to read.
PoP: SoT and System Shock II are the two best storytelling games ever made.
Why do you have to take a perfectly good and informative post and reply to it with your immature "my penis is bigger than yours" open-source defense? You're utterly missing the point of his post.
Look:
1) A server crashing because it's low on memory is a bug which needs to be fixed. Period. Slow performance means "buy more memory" not sudden crashes.
2) If GAIM claims to run on *nix, it should be tested on *nix. Now maybe the version of GAIM he downloaded only claimed to run on Redhat, that's a possibility. But if it claimed to run on every *nix and it didn't work on a SGI, then that is a bug. Period.
It doesn't matter what Windows developers do. The point is OS-neutral. Lots of Mac programmers also don't do any version checking and their software will crash when you try to run it in OS X 10.1. And it happens on Linux with the GAIM example. And it happens on Windows. Don't make this into a fucking platform war when it has nothing to do with the platform used.
God this happens every time somebody criticizes something about the open source community. There's this whole squad of geeks that comes out of the woodwork and goes, "well, it's buggy on Windows too!" as if that was some sort of defense for Linux being buggy.
Look, bugs need to be fixed whether or not your competitor has the same bug! How the hell will Linux ever pull ahead of Windows if you don't make an effort to make it better than Windows?
Sorry about the boldface, but this attitude pisses me off.
No. Even when you turn off metal windows, OS X Finder's idea of "spatial" is about the same as Windows 95's idea of "spatial." 1 folder -> 1 window is not spatial; it's a lot more than that. OS X Finder fucks it up, even as it pretends to act spatial.
In addition, when you turn off metal windows they seem to get randomly turned back on for no apparent reason all the time. For instance, double-clicking a disk image will frequently (but not always) open it up in a metal window even if you have metal windows off for the rest of the system. In addition, sometimes windows opened from aliases in the Dock will open as metal for no apparent reason.
My theory is that it was built by the NeXT guys who, like the Microsoft Windows users around here, have absolutely no idea what "spatial file system" means and so they just try to fudge something.
Since when was Microsoft's implementation of anything ever the best one?
If you want to see a *good* spatial navigation system, look at MacOS 1.0-9.2.2... it seemed to work for almost 20 years for Apple, and their users loved them for it.
Microsoft fucked it up by:
1) Not providing window management tools. (i.e. in MacOS you can command-click to open a folder which automatically closes the parent folder at the same time.)
2) Not providing file access tools. (i.e. in MacOS you could place files in the Apple menu more easily that you could place things in the Start menu. You can also, for instance, click and hold on a folder icon to 'drill down' to your destination, then close all parent windows to keep your screen tidy.)
3) Not permanently saving window settings. (Windows 95 only saves the settings of like the most recently-used 200 windows, not EVERY window on the system ALL the time.)
From reading your post I would just like to say that, in my opinion, you are still psychotic.
Wow. You need a hobby.
That's almost as bad as reading one of those "Hollywood Gossip" columns in a supermarket tabloid.
Also American Psycho. Highly recommended. (The movie version is a lot less disgusting than the book, but the translation is very good.)
Read this and be enlightened.
How about this? I'm a commercial software vendor wanting to sell software for Linux. I want it to run on as many distrobutions, window managers, configurations as possible, right? But I also don't want it to appear in "repositories," because I have trade-secret code in my product that I can't reveal, and therefore I don't feel comfortable letting somebody else see my product's source code so they can "repackage" it. So I figure my users can install off CD.
But, oh wait... unless the CD is custom-tailored for Ubuntu, SuSE, Redhat, Slackware, Gentoo, God-Knows-What, how could that possibly work? I can only sell my software to a particular known configuration, because Linux doesn't have its act together enough to be able to install software that hasn't been "repackaged" by somebody working for the distrobution.
That's a huge problem for Linux.
Wonderfalls, Firefly, Space: Above and Beyond all sucked ass. I'm sorry, but they were cancelled because the shows didn't pull in enough viewers, not because of Fox's "political views." (BTW, that's one of the more insane conspiracy theories I've seen on the Internet in a long while... do you perchance have a homepage with a long rant discussing the TimeCube in various fonts and colors?)
I never watched Buffy, but MASH was only cancelled after it *had* run it's course. That show was on forever. Hell, I wish they'd have cancelled The Simpsons 5 years ago when it had run its course-- the new episodes suck.