I disagree. My OS X box is easy-as-hell to use and most of the reason is because the programs are just files I can take anywhere I want. You can use what you want, of course, but if the open source community is trying to increase usability, maybe they should use the OS that *already* has the best usability as a model to emulate, eh?
The MacOS philosophy is KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
A single program requiring 40,000 files all in different directories is not simple, it's complicated. It means you have to have an installer. Then it means you have to have an uninstaller. Then it means you have to have some mechanism to keep track of where all those files are. Then it means that even when you have all these, you can't just move the files where ever you want because the program will stop working.
That's not simple. The OS X way is.
HD is cheap. RAM is fairly cheap. Usability is more important than both.
You just... don't create applications with dependencies in them. It really is that simple.
You have all the libraries built-in to the OS install that you can rely on always being there. Any other libraries you need, you just take your own copy with you in your application bundle and call it from there. Sure, you might end up with duplicate copies of libraries, but who gives a crap? Disk space is cheap as hell.
BTW, next time someone asks if Linux is ready for the home user's desktop, I'm pasting a link to this post. "Tough luck, buy another video card," in my opinion, does not constitute "ready for the desktop."
The other problem with that is that a majority of open source applications never reach 1.0 or, if they do, they have so many bugs and quirks that they shouldn't have.
The current "stable" version of VirtualDub is 1.5.10. Despite that, it doesn't work at all with my Hauppage WinTV PVR 250 card. When I try to run the program, it says that the capture card is in use even if it is the only application running. Should a product that literally does not work be labelled as "1.5.10?" Not in my opinion... if it's above version 1.0, and I have the correct Hauppage drivers, then it should at least be able to record video, right?
And of course, VirtualDub when it does run has a terrible UI that's bordering on utterly unusable. I would call this product at best 1.0alpha. It's obvious that the UI isn't finished, and it's obvious that they did not test with a wide range of video capture cards, and it certainly doesn't deserve to be above 1.0.
And I'm not mentioning the hundreds of projects on SourceForge that never hit 1.0 in the first place.
Yeah, it couldn't have had anything to do with Saddam being a mass-murderer who over the last decade had killed hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians.
Man, I hate that argument. Just because Saddam did not have WMD does not mean we should have sat idly by and let him kill hundreds of thousands of people! Preventing genocide is *always* a good thing, regardless of the justification used. The liberals in this country are so obsessed over the stupid issue of WMD that they are ignoring the clear benefit to our invasion, saving a culture from destruction.
Get over the WMD, man. That ship has sailed. Focus on what is IMPORTANT.
You need to know a difference between a video game presented for titillation and a video game intended to be serious. I mean, obviously, Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball is not a serious sports game, and yes it does have ridiculously-proportioned women in it and that's just fine with me. But those same women taken to another game, one meant to be taken more seriously, would be extremely distracting. What if you were playing ESPN NFL 2004, intended to re-create a TV broadcast of football, and the Dead or Alive women came on as cheerleaders? They would be entirely out-of-place and it would really detract.
So, yeah. FAKK2 probably belongs in the same category as Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball or Rumble Roses.
I assume that it was some sort of compromise among a programmer who was INSISTENT that the user should be able to choose for each help file and an interface designer who said that it was stupid. It's also stupid in the following ways:
1) It's in a wizard format, even though there's only one step. If there's only one step, why not a simple dialog? 2) Both the text of the dialog, and the text of the radio buttons proclaim that minimize database size is preferred.
Of course, in a normal OS there would be a single setting OS-wide for database type and in an Apple OS there'd be no setting at all. After all, since "minimize database size" is recommended by the programmer, why bother with the other one?
And in a really well-done system, that work would be done in the background starting when the help file was delivered to the HD and the index would be complete LONG before the user started using the help file.
Grandparent's remark needs to be more specific... he could be referring to Kerrigan, and his comments would apply (sometimes.) But the 'normal' units in the game, the medic and the dropship, don't seem any sleazier than normal to me. Nothing like the bartender in Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, anyway.
And yes, the dropship pilot is nearly the identical voice and a lot of duplicate dialog, to the pilot in Aliens. It's an obvious homage/tribute.
1) Not only newbies, but experienced computer users will shut down their computers when not in use to save power. Computers aren't the most expensive thing in the world, but if I could save $5 a month by keeping it off, I'd be stupid not to. I love Windows XP's Hibernate function for this exact reason.
2) Laptops. Even people who keep their desktop on all the time will most likely reboot their laptops a lot more often. Maybe they swapped out batteries, or maybe their battery can't keep the laptop running throughout the entire bus trip in sleep mode.
Have you SEEN Ocean's 12? I agree that Blade: Trinity is dreck and that National Treasure is a pretty pointless cookie-cutter adventure picture, but Ocean's 12 is as great as Ocean's 11, which is pretty amazing to me considering the huge cast. It also bends the rules of filmmaking in innovative and unique ways. Watch it before you decry it.
Alyx is a good step forward, but credit where credit is due.
What about The Longest Journey? Do you think April is a Booby McBoob? What about Syberia? What about Beyond Good and Evil?
Then again, think about what these games have in common: They're adventure games. You know, the genre that has been "dead" for years? I don't know why gamers avoid adventure games like the plague recently (and then proclaim the genre dead), but in this field at least adventures are way ahead of the curve.
BTW, I think the worst Boobie McBoob is either in Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance where the first NPC you talk to has had some intensive plastic surgery, or in MechAssault.
If a game I really want to play comes out for more than one console simultaneously, I tend to get the PS2 or Gamecube version instead of the X-Box version.
Even if the XBox version has better graphics or more features? (Which 95% of the time it does. Except in the cases of Godzilla games.)
I've played Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time on all platforms, and I can tell you without a doubt that the XBox version is the best all-around. The controls are superior, the graphics are much superior, and it includes both the original 2D Prince of Persia games as unlockables instead of just the first.
Did you write the whole blog entry without using the shift key like this comment? Thank God I didn't read it, that crap gives me a headache.
In either case, I don't get your assertion. In what way is Windows less viable than Linux for development of open source desktop software? Or MacOS X, for that matter? Honestly, I would think that either of those platforms would be *better* for development because they have (more) strict GUI guidelines that the open source coders could follow and the Linux usability would benefit as well.
Ok, it's never been done before, but... then again... what good is it? From the user's perspective?
I'm entirely with the grandparent. The problem with Linux/Unix users is that they always think from the machine's perspective.
One of the most basic rules of interface design is never to impose a *technical* decision on your users. The worst offender, and one that's never been fixed, is Microsoft's Help Reader... when you try to search for something in Help, it asks if you want to index the database by size or search quality... and me, the user, is sitting here going, "I don't goddamn care, JUST DO THE SEARCH"
My car doesn't tell me that because of the low temperature this morning it had to adjust the fuel-air mixture so that it could start up the first crank, because my car is smart enough to realize that I don't CARE. I turn the key, and it's running.
In any case, ask a typical user what kernel they like best, and they'll give the same answer: "I don't care, as long as I can get my work done."
Setting up a web interface to a stable database, even if you're using an easy language like PHP, would take weeks of effort... and you'd still end up with a shitty end product, most likely. One with maybe a third the features of QuickBooks. How do you print out checks with magnetic ink through a web interface? Sure, there's probably some way... by creating a.gif image of the bar-code on the fly, perhaps, but man that's a ton of work, and where's the guarantee that those electric check readers will read it?
In short, either the grandparent poster doesn't use Quickbooks and has no clue what it's capable of, or he's some kind of super programming genius who can replicate millions of man-hours of coding in only a few weeks with only PHP and MySQL, or he's full of crap. I vote on option 3 there.
For awhile, they were the only game in town for seeing Star Trek: The Next Generation on TV. I haven't watched in a long while (as I'm currently going through a 'Seinfeld' phase on TBS), but I assume they're still showing Star Trek, right?
If I give up the email address I've owned since 1997, then THE SPAMMERS HAVE ALREADY WON!
Seriously, though, I finally did trash the address that was posted all over Usenet and the web long before the spam problem was a problem and moved to a webmail address. Alas, a 'friend' doing one of those free iPod scams got me on some spammer's list, but at least the volume has been low so far.
This is the kind of story where there's no really interesting comments because the vast majority of Slashdotters are huge Nintendo fans, and any post even mentioning another game console in a positive fashion is likely to be modded down. Anybody opposed to the article will not post because posting in a topic like this is utterly useless. (I mean, people thought that the politics comments were biased... it's nothing to the gaming section.)
Comment: I bought an XBox because the GameCube couldn't play DVDs and I wanted HDTV support.
Reply: You don't need to play DVDs, you have a DVD player which is better and they are cheap anyway! Also you don't need HDTV support because nobody owns a HDTV and even if they do, there are about 3 games on GameCube that kind-of support 480p a little bit if you hit the right code on the menu maybe.
Reply: Mini$haft makes the XBox and they frequently pass the time in their office by impaling children on spikes and sticking their heads outside their corporate headquarters. Even thought the company name is "Microsoft," I type it as "Mini$shaft" because it was clever and funny when I was in third grade, and therefore it's still clever and funny now... right?
Uh, your computer has hardware problems. When Windows encounters unstable hardware, it'll stop using that hardware. (Meaning, if your video card overheats and begins acting erratic, the image on screen might freeze... Windows is still running, but it's no longer using your unstable video card and it may look as if the computer is hard-locked.)
But if you're getting BIOS errors (like "no system disk found"... and BTW what the heck makes you think that's Windows' fault? Windows hadn't even booted before it came up), and you're getting hard-locks, then you have hardware problems on that computer.
The reason most Linux users have a better experience than most Windows users is not because the Linux kernel is more inherantly stable, it's because they build their own computers using high quality hardware they picked out themselves. In general, Windows users are using $300 Tiny Computers using a motherboard from China and insufficient cooling... of course their computer is going to be less stable.
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I disagree. My OS X box is easy-as-hell to use and most of the reason is because the programs are just files I can take anywhere I want. You can use what you want, of course, but if the open source community is trying to increase usability, maybe they should use the OS that *already* has the best usability as a model to emulate, eh?
The MacOS philosophy is KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
A single program requiring 40,000 files all in different directories is not simple, it's complicated. It means you have to have an installer. Then it means you have to have an uninstaller. Then it means you have to have some mechanism to keep track of where all those files are. Then it means that even when you have all these, you can't just move the files where ever you want because the program will stop working.
That's not simple. The OS X way is.
HD is cheap. RAM is fairly cheap. Usability is more important than both.
You just ... don't create applications with dependencies in them. It really is that simple.
You have all the libraries built-in to the OS install that you can rely on always being there. Any other libraries you need, you just take your own copy with you in your application bundle and call it from there. Sure, you might end up with duplicate copies of libraries, but who gives a crap? Disk space is cheap as hell.
Oh, and BTW, Wolf5K doesn't work in Safari. Of course this is all off-topic, despite some moderator marking the original post as 'interesting.'
Uh, that's great, but weren't we talking about Google Suggest?
BTW, next time someone asks if Linux is ready for the home user's desktop, I'm pasting a link to this post. "Tough luck, buy another video card," in my opinion, does not constitute "ready for the desktop."
I think that would be a good move. You didn't "here" me demanding it because that was not the topic, not because I don't agree with it.
Communist China I don't, however, are they are an order of magnitude more stable than the other countries you mention.
To continue your off-topic discussion...
The other problem with that is that a majority of open source applications never reach 1.0 or, if they do, they have so many bugs and quirks that they shouldn't have.
The current "stable" version of VirtualDub is 1.5.10. Despite that, it doesn't work at all with my Hauppage WinTV PVR 250 card. When I try to run the program, it says that the capture card is in use even if it is the only application running. Should a product that literally does not work be labelled as "1.5.10?" Not in my opinion... if it's above version 1.0, and I have the correct Hauppage drivers, then it should at least be able to record video, right?
And of course, VirtualDub when it does run has a terrible UI that's bordering on utterly unusable. I would call this product at best 1.0alpha. It's obvious that the UI isn't finished, and it's obvious that they did not test with a wide range of video capture cards, and it certainly doesn't deserve to be above 1.0.
And I'm not mentioning the hundreds of projects on SourceForge that never hit 1.0 in the first place.
Yeah, it couldn't have had anything to do with Saddam being a mass-murderer who over the last decade had killed hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians.
Man, I hate that argument. Just because Saddam did not have WMD does not mean we should have sat idly by and let him kill hundreds of thousands of people! Preventing genocide is *always* a good thing, regardless of the justification used. The liberals in this country are so obsessed over the stupid issue of WMD that they are ignoring the clear benefit to our invasion, saving a culture from destruction.
Get over the WMD, man. That ship has sailed. Focus on what is IMPORTANT.
GPS system with navigation and color LCD screen = $500+. Available at high-end electronics stores or pre-installed in some vehicles.
Map = $3. Available at any gas station, most of which not only have local maps but highway/freeway maps of the entire US and North America.
You need to know a difference between a video game presented for titillation and a video game intended to be serious. I mean, obviously, Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball is not a serious sports game, and yes it does have ridiculously-proportioned women in it and that's just fine with me. But those same women taken to another game, one meant to be taken more seriously, would be extremely distracting. What if you were playing ESPN NFL 2004, intended to re-create a TV broadcast of football, and the Dead or Alive women came on as cheerleaders? They would be entirely out-of-place and it would really detract.
So, yeah. FAKK2 probably belongs in the same category as Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball or Rumble Roses.
I assume that it was some sort of compromise among a programmer who was INSISTENT that the user should be able to choose for each help file and an interface designer who said that it was stupid. It's also stupid in the following ways:
1) It's in a wizard format, even though there's only one step. If there's only one step, why not a simple dialog?
2) Both the text of the dialog, and the text of the radio buttons proclaim that minimize database size is preferred.
Of course, in a normal OS there would be a single setting OS-wide for database type and in an Apple OS there'd be no setting at all. After all, since "minimize database size" is recommended by the programmer, why bother with the other one?
And in a really well-done system, that work would be done in the background starting when the help file was delivered to the HD and the index would be complete LONG before the user started using the help file.
Woooosh!
That is the sound of the entire point of my post passing far over your head where you will never grasp it. Apparently.
For the record, I *do* own both an XBox and a Gamecube, but that has NOTHING to do with what I posted. Read it again.
Grandparent's remark needs to be more specific... he could be referring to Kerrigan, and his comments would apply (sometimes.) But the 'normal' units in the game, the medic and the dropship, don't seem any sleazier than normal to me. Nothing like the bartender in Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, anyway.
And yes, the dropship pilot is nearly the identical voice and a lot of duplicate dialog, to the pilot in Aliens. It's an obvious homage/tribute.
That, and plus:
1) Not only newbies, but experienced computer users will shut down their computers when not in use to save power. Computers aren't the most expensive thing in the world, but if I could save $5 a month by keeping it off, I'd be stupid not to. I love Windows XP's Hibernate function for this exact reason.
2) Laptops. Even people who keep their desktop on all the time will most likely reboot their laptops a lot more often. Maybe they swapped out batteries, or maybe their battery can't keep the laptop running throughout the entire bus trip in sleep mode.
Have you SEEN Ocean's 12? I agree that Blade: Trinity is dreck and that National Treasure is a pretty pointless cookie-cutter adventure picture, but Ocean's 12 is as great as Ocean's 11, which is pretty amazing to me considering the huge cast. It also bends the rules of filmmaking in innovative and unique ways. Watch it before you decry it.
Alyx is a good step forward, but credit where credit is due.
What about The Longest Journey? Do you think April is a Booby McBoob? What about Syberia? What about Beyond Good and Evil?
Then again, think about what these games have in common: They're adventure games. You know, the genre that has been "dead" for years? I don't know why gamers avoid adventure games like the plague recently (and then proclaim the genre dead), but in this field at least adventures are way ahead of the curve.
BTW, I think the worst Boobie McBoob is either in Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance where the first NPC you talk to has had some intensive plastic surgery, or in MechAssault.
If a game I really want to play comes out for more than one console simultaneously, I tend to get the PS2 or Gamecube version instead of the X-Box version.
Even if the XBox version has better graphics or more features? (Which 95% of the time it does. Except in the cases of Godzilla games.)
I've played Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time on all platforms, and I can tell you without a doubt that the XBox version is the best all-around. The controls are superior, the graphics are much superior, and it includes both the original 2D Prince of Persia games as unlockables instead of just the first.
Did you write the whole blog entry without using the shift key like this comment? Thank God I didn't read it, that crap gives me a headache.
In either case, I don't get your assertion. In what way is Windows less viable than Linux for development of open source desktop software? Or MacOS X, for that matter? Honestly, I would think that either of those platforms would be *better* for development because they have (more) strict GUI guidelines that the open source coders could follow and the Linux usability would benefit as well.
Ok, it's never been done before, but ... then again ... what good is it? From the user's perspective?
I'm entirely with the grandparent. The problem with Linux/Unix users is that they always think from the machine's perspective.
One of the most basic rules of interface design is never to impose a *technical* decision on your users. The worst offender, and one that's never been fixed, is Microsoft's Help Reader... when you try to search for something in Help, it asks if you want to index the database by size or search quality... and me, the user, is sitting here going, "I don't goddamn care, JUST DO THE SEARCH"
My car doesn't tell me that because of the low temperature this morning it had to adjust the fuel-air mixture so that it could start up the first crank, because my car is smart enough to realize that I don't CARE. I turn the key, and it's running.
In any case, ask a typical user what kernel they like best, and they'll give the same answer: "I don't care, as long as I can get my work done."
No, he was bluffing.
.gif image of the bar-code on the fly, perhaps, but man that's a ton of work, and where's the guarantee that those electric check readers will read it?
Setting up a web interface to a stable database, even if you're using an easy language like PHP, would take weeks of effort... and you'd still end up with a shitty end product, most likely. One with maybe a third the features of QuickBooks. How do you print out checks with magnetic ink through a web interface? Sure, there's probably some way... by creating a
In short, either the grandparent poster doesn't use Quickbooks and has no clue what it's capable of, or he's some kind of super programming genius who can replicate millions of man-hours of coding in only a few weeks with only PHP and MySQL, or he's full of crap. I vote on option 3 there.
For awhile, they were the only game in town for seeing Star Trek: The Next Generation on TV. I haven't watched in a long while (as I'm currently going through a 'Seinfeld' phase on TBS), but I assume they're still showing Star Trek, right?
If I give up the email address I've owned since 1997, then THE SPAMMERS HAVE ALREADY WON!
Seriously, though, I finally did trash the address that was posted all over Usenet and the web long before the spam problem was a problem and moved to a webmail address. Alas, a 'friend' doing one of those free iPod scams got me on some spammer's list, but at least the volume has been low so far.
This is the kind of story where there's no really interesting comments because the vast majority of Slashdotters are huge Nintendo fans, and any post even mentioning another game console in a positive fashion is likely to be modded down. Anybody opposed to the article will not post because posting in a topic like this is utterly useless. (I mean, people thought that the politics comments were biased... it's nothing to the gaming section.)
Comment: I bought an XBox because the GameCube couldn't play DVDs and I wanted HDTV support.
Reply: You don't need to play DVDs, you have a DVD player which is better and they are cheap anyway! Also you don't need HDTV support because nobody owns a HDTV and even if they do, there are about 3 games on GameCube that kind-of support 480p a little bit if you hit the right code on the menu maybe.
Reply: Mini$haft makes the XBox and they frequently pass the time in their office by impaling children on spikes and sticking their heads outside their corporate headquarters. Even thought the company name is "Microsoft," I type it as "Mini$shaft" because it was clever and funny when I was in third grade, and therefore it's still clever and funny now... right?
Mod: -3 Flamebait.
That's pretty much how it goes down every topic.
Well, you should have posted it to Slashdot nearly 3 years ago, then, and all this fame and glory would be about your project.
Uh, your computer has hardware problems. When Windows encounters unstable hardware, it'll stop using that hardware. (Meaning, if your video card overheats and begins acting erratic, the image on screen might freeze... Windows is still running, but it's no longer using your unstable video card and it may look as if the computer is hard-locked.)
But if you're getting BIOS errors (like "no system disk found"... and BTW what the heck makes you think that's Windows' fault? Windows hadn't even booted before it came up), and you're getting hard-locks, then you have hardware problems on that computer.
The reason most Linux users have a better experience than most Windows users is not because the Linux kernel is more inherantly stable, it's because they build their own computers using high quality hardware they picked out themselves. In general, Windows users are using $300 Tiny Computers using a motherboard from China and insufficient cooling... of course their computer is going to be less stable.