What pissed me off about it (and the new Battlestar Galactica did this, too) is that the space scenes were filmed with, what appeared to be, a man holding a steadicam. That makes no damned sense. Why is someone filming this with a steadicam? Where are they standing?
The steadicam was designed to do point-of-view shots, i.e., when the film shows a descent down the stairs it looks as if you are walking down the stairs behind the actors. What does this mean if you use it in a space setting? That the audience is sitting outside the ship in a space suit? Even if they are, how can you use a steadicam in microgravity? (You can't.)
Anyway, those effects were just dumb. I know this'll get modded down, but I thought Firefly was mediocre at best (and yes, I *have* seen many the episodes in more-or-less the correct order.) I'm also not a fan of Buffy, but there you have it.
I read an story a few months ago about how id was going to start an entirely new franchise. Since they've sent the next Wolfenstein game to another developer (no doubt using the Doom 3 engine), this would probably refer to whatever new idea they want to try out.
Since I had a Macintosh 'back in the day', I'm not much of a Doom fan. But if I just read "Doom 3" as "Marathon 4", I can understand why it gets people so excited.;-)
http://www.livejournal.com/users/thesparque/21116. html
Chapelle's Law of Reality Television Chapelle's Law of Reality Television is as follows:
If a person brings up as a joke any idea for a reality television show, it will be adopted and aired within approximately one year's time.
Evidence: During the first season of Chapelle's Show on Comedy Central, a skit aired in which Chapelle parodies the popular television show "Trading Spaces" with a show called "Trading Spouses." Coming this summer on the Fox Network is a show called "Trading Spouses," modeled exactly after the Chapelle's Show skit.
Science in Action: Chapelle's Law having been discovered, I will now attempt an experiment to prove it.
You know what would be hilarious? If they did a show like The Bachelorette or something, except it was all women. And they could do it on HBO or Showtime or something so they could show all the good stuff.
Oh yeah. Just like BMX XXX, right? Oh... wait... I guess gamers *do* have a sense of taste that's more mature than "boobies = good." Don't be such a cynic.
By the time 2001: A Space Odyssey was made in 1967-1968, landing on the moon was a no-brainer. They'd already done tons of test flights and it was pretty much just a matter of getting the men up there.
Then again, I've never seen a futuristic show where someone was playing games or controlling a car with their mind with the exception of the movie Firefox, but then it was a jet and not a car.
It was a typo. He meant to type Michael Jackson... isn't that the stereotyped pedophile?
Criminy, people. PeeWee Herman was arrested for jacking off in a porno theater. Doesn't this bring up a few interesting points? 1) Why the hell were the police in the porno theater? 2) Why the hell was PeeWee arrested and not the other 25 MILLION men who do this all the time? 3) What the hell is the problem here?
That poor guy had his career basically ruined because a cop who was whacking off in a porno theater happened to see a celebrity whacking off in a porno theater and wanted to get on the evening news. Fuck that.
Yeah. I don't really care. I don't use Linux because the usability sucks ass, remember?
What's really interesting, though, is how the CLI usability is just as bad as the GUI usability. Sure it's POWERFUL, but why wouldn't a line like:
dirlist -allvars -find 'foo' -> foo.txt
Be just as powerful and a hell of a lot more readable? The crappy interfaces in Linux go right to the core... that moronic "priesthood of technology" attitude Unix users created for job security. That's NOT the way you design a computer, unless you purposely want to be an asshole. For Linux to fix its interface, it first has to fix its culture. Linux programmers don't write good interfaces because they want to point to some arcane mumbo-jumbo and say "hey, I'm smarter than you because I know what this means and you don't!" Is there any other explanation for Perl?
Some Windows programmers are the same way, but Microsoft seems to have mostly whipped them into shape.
Well, you ALREADY have the tools you need in the Linux world, so why not just be quiet in this discussion and let the people who LIKE things like Apple's Expose, or having a consistant look-and-feel, or being able to use their computer without 16 desktops. (16 desktops? What the hell could you possibly fill *16* desktops with? Weirdo.)
Seriously, that's being Mr. Missing The Point again. There's no shortage of 87 virtual desktop, changing themes on the fly, yada yada desktops in the Linux world. Let's work on an interface normal people can you, and you'll just choose not to use it, ok?
I can't translate that command-line, but it looks like it's just text files... sort by type, then rubber-band all the text files. If it's too long to rubber band, you select the top one, scroll down to the bottom one, then shift-click. You have all the text files selected. Now hit Command-C to copy all the filenames into the buffer. Open up TextEdit (or any word processor) and hit Command-V to paste the info in. Save where you want. I'm primarily a Mac user, but I'm 90% sure this works in Windows as well.
It sounds more complicated but, really, how often do you do that? I've used computers for fifteen years and needed to do that about three times. All of those times, I was able to use the procedure above easily.
What bothers me more is how Windows doesn't calculate folder sizes which makes it impossible to sort a Windows view by size. This was a real pain when, at work, we were asking, "who the hell is using up all that space on the file server?" I finally ended up having to download a shareware program to do this task that's extremely simple on MacOS.
Lotus Notes has about the worst GUI I've seen in an application that is so widely-used. And people wonder why businesses switch to Exchange Server and Outlook... sheesh!
And of course, into the conversation comes Mr. Misses The Point.
Why should he have to customize *anything* to get an interface that doesn't make people want to puke? You shouldn't be able to even customize it to make it worse, what would be the point?
Try a trackball. Seriously. A keyboard + trackball combo works, IMO, MUCH better than a keyboard + mouse combo. Trackballs are much easier to aim with than mouses.
Neverwinter Nights is just a ripoff of what the MUD community has been doing in text for years and years.
If you *really* care about an in-depth story and roleplay, check out Eternal Struggle MUD (www.esmud.com). The warning is that ES' combat system is crap, the entire MUD is based around roleplay (even levelling.) It's different, and it's the kind of thing no MMORPG maker would EVER take a risk on.
Yup. One of the simple joys of Descent was shooting out all the lights on accident then flying blind while trying to get out of the damned pitch-black room. I'm sure there's some difference between the two engines, but Descent did good lighting.
On Apple keyboards, the F12 key is clearly marked with the 'eject CD' icon. Many Windows laptops also do this, so I don't really see a complaint here... I guess because it's a desktop instead of a laptop?
As to XServe, they're not really all that relevant to this discussion, as 99% of users aren't involved with setting up servers.
I agree that Apple's user interfaces, and that of third party developers, has been going downhill ever since Quicktime 3.0 and MacOS 8.5. I'm with you on that point 100%.
But Apple *still* makes the most consistant user interface in the entire computing world. You think different window types are bad, but look at these BASIC problems in Windows that have never been fixed: 1) Task bar buttons cannot be moved once they are created. I want to group my Project A-related windows next to each other. Why can't I click the icon for one of these windows and drag it to the spot I want it? Clicking and dragging a task bar button doesn't do anything now, so where's the conflict in letting me move them? 2) Every window in Windows has a task bar button except control panel windows (for some moronic reason I've never understood. How many times have you minimized your browser to find the Display control panel still open from when you tried to change your screen resolution 3 hours ago?) 3) Windows has the capability of showing animated icons, but (in general) doesn't. See: Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Component Services, Computers, My Computer, Com+ Applications. See the animated icons?)
Anyway, I could go on for hours, but the point is that while Apple might be slipping downhill, they're still further up hill than Microsoft and Linux distributions are.
And projects like Mozilla who put their foot down and say "No, X will NOT be an option!" get criticized on Slashdot.org for not working with the community and trying to alienate people. (See: adding an option to do IE-style alt image tooltips.)
This cycle isn't a law, you just need a development team with the courage to say "no, you're wrong, it's better this way" and stick to their guns.
I'm a Mac user. Recently, I had to gzip a bunch of files I had sitting in a directory to upload to a Unix server. My first guess? I navigated into the directory and typed this:
tar * archive.tar.gz
Which I read as "put the files that match * (all files) into file archive.tar.gz"
That's all the information tar needs, right? It knows which files I want to compress up (by reading the * wildcard), it knows how I want to compress them (by reading the.tar.gz at the end of the file name)... why the hell wasn't it that simple?
Instead you have to give tar all kinds of moronic information that should be assumed. Yes, I want to -c CREATE an archive, that's why I typed "tar" instead of "untar." Yes I want to -f PUT IT IN A FILE, what else would I do with it?
Anyway. It's annoying. Someone use your open source mojo-powers and fix tar up for me.
Fink worked great for me when all I wanted was SQLite and nothing else. I tried to install it myself, but the./configure had some sort of error and I couldn't figure it out for the life of me, but the MUD I develop for requires SQLite.
Fink was the answer. And, although SQLite was in the 'experimental' section, it still installed fine and works great.
I may be wrong, but I'm almost 100% sure the developer tools came free on CD-ROM with the retail 10.3 package. But that's a good point, if you have to download 500 MB, you can't really call it "free" or "easily available" considering how many people are still on dial-up connections.
As a minor correction, Office (sans Access) is cross-platform. It exists for Macintosh, and has since the Mac was brand-new. (There's also a Macintosh equilivant to Outlook called Entourage.)
The reason, IMO, that Microsoft does not make Linux software is twofold: 1) Every Linux machine is different, so it's very difficult to ensure a consistant experience. (Installion alone has to be a pain in the butt with all the differences in Linux distributions.) 2) Linux users, in general, don't buy software because they have this weird perception that everything should be free. Capital or lowercase f.
Comes with a great development environment using a very modern language/API. (Objective-C/Cocoa.) Also comes with a system-wide can-control-100%-of-what-a-user-can scripting language called AppleScript. You can embed AppleScripts into programs, or you can attach AppleScripts to folders to automate what happens when, say, a new file is added to that folder. You can even hit "record" and come up with some pretty good scripts just by performing the actions you want (like a macro system.)
Maybe he's just using the wrong computers. What I find interesting is that the article did mention that he spent some time at Apple... and now pretty much everything he's talking about, Apple has. (When's the last time you saw HP put out a free IDE or scripting environment?) Go figure.
I respect his vision, though. I've always thought the greatest loss to current computing is that there isn't a modern version of Rocky's Boots.
Slashdot Mirror
What pissed me off about it (and the new Battlestar Galactica did this, too) is that the space scenes were filmed with, what appeared to be, a man holding a steadicam. That makes no damned sense. Why is someone filming this with a steadicam? Where are they standing?
The steadicam was designed to do point-of-view shots, i.e., when the film shows a descent down the stairs it looks as if you are walking down the stairs behind the actors. What does this mean if you use it in a space setting? That the audience is sitting outside the ship in a space suit? Even if they are, how can you use a steadicam in microgravity? (You can't.)
Anyway, those effects were just dumb. I know this'll get modded down, but I thought Firefly was mediocre at best (and yes, I *have* seen many the episodes in more-or-less the correct order.) I'm also not a fan of Buffy, but there you have it.
Morrowind was also shipped wide-open for modders. As was Serious Sam and Serious Sam 2. Given a few minutes, I could think of a few more, no doubt.
I read an story a few months ago about how id was going to start an entirely new franchise. Since they've sent the next Wolfenstein game to another developer (no doubt using the Doom 3 engine), this would probably refer to whatever new idea they want to try out.
;-)
Since I had a Macintosh 'back in the day', I'm not much of a Doom fan. But if I just read "Doom 3" as "Marathon 4", I can understand why it gets people so excited.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/thesparque/21116. html
Chapelle's Law of Reality Television
Chapelle's Law of Reality Television is as follows:
If a person brings up as a joke any idea for a reality television show, it will be adopted and aired within approximately one year's time.
Evidence: During the first season of Chapelle's Show on Comedy Central, a skit aired in which Chapelle parodies the popular television show "Trading Spaces" with a show called "Trading Spouses." Coming this summer on the Fox Network is a show called "Trading Spouses," modeled exactly after the Chapelle's Show skit.
Science in Action: Chapelle's Law having been discovered, I will now attempt an experiment to prove it.
You know what would be hilarious? If they did a show like The Bachelorette or something, except it was all women. And they could do it on HBO or Showtime or something so they could show all the good stuff.
That would be so funny.
(they weren't my machines, I was just trying to shut down rouge APs).
Really? We only buy the beige ones here. They blend in better with the ceiling tiles.
(Why is rogue such a hard word for so many people to spell? R-O-G-U-E!)
Oh yeah. Just like BMX XXX, right? Oh... wait... I guess gamers *do* have a sense of taste that's more mature than "boobies = good." Don't be such a cynic.
By the time 2001: A Space Odyssey was made in 1967-1968, landing on the moon was a no-brainer. They'd already done tons of test flights and it was pretty much just a matter of getting the men up there.
Then again, I've never seen a futuristic show where someone was playing games or controlling a car with their mind with the exception of the movie Firefox, but then it was a jet and not a car.
In other words, whacha talkin' 'bout, Willis!?
It was a typo. He meant to type Michael Jackson... isn't that the stereotyped pedophile?
Criminy, people. PeeWee Herman was arrested for jacking off in a porno theater. Doesn't this bring up a few interesting points?
1) Why the hell were the police in the porno theater?
2) Why the hell was PeeWee arrested and not the other 25 MILLION men who do this all the time?
3) What the hell is the problem here?
That poor guy had his career basically ruined because a cop who was whacking off in a porno theater happened to see a celebrity whacking off in a porno theater and wanted to get on the evening news. Fuck that.
Yeah. I don't really care. I don't use Linux because the usability sucks ass, remember?
What's really interesting, though, is how the CLI usability is just as bad as the GUI usability. Sure it's POWERFUL, but why wouldn't a line like:
dirlist -allvars -find 'foo' -> foo.txt
Be just as powerful and a hell of a lot more readable? The crappy interfaces in Linux go right to the core... that moronic "priesthood of technology" attitude Unix users created for job security. That's NOT the way you design a computer, unless you purposely want to be an asshole. For Linux to fix its interface, it first has to fix its culture. Linux programmers don't write good interfaces because they want to point to some arcane mumbo-jumbo and say "hey, I'm smarter than you because I know what this means and you don't!" Is there any other explanation for Perl?
Some Windows programmers are the same way, but Microsoft seems to have mostly whipped them into shape.
Well, you ALREADY have the tools you need in the Linux world, so why not just be quiet in this discussion and let the people who LIKE things like Apple's Expose, or having a consistant look-and-feel, or being able to use their computer without 16 desktops. (16 desktops? What the hell could you possibly fill *16* desktops with? Weirdo.)
Seriously, that's being Mr. Missing The Point again. There's no shortage of 87 virtual desktop, changing themes on the fly, yada yada desktops in the Linux world. Let's work on an interface normal people can you, and you'll just choose not to use it, ok?
I can't translate that command-line, but it looks like it's just text files... sort by type, then rubber-band all the text files. If it's too long to rubber band, you select the top one, scroll down to the bottom one, then shift-click. You have all the text files selected. Now hit Command-C to copy all the filenames into the buffer. Open up TextEdit (or any word processor) and hit Command-V to paste the info in. Save where you want. I'm primarily a Mac user, but I'm 90% sure this works in Windows as well.
It sounds more complicated but, really, how often do you do that? I've used computers for fifteen years and needed to do that about three times. All of those times, I was able to use the procedure above easily.
What bothers me more is how Windows doesn't calculate folder sizes which makes it impossible to sort a Windows view by size. This was a real pain when, at work, we were asking, "who the hell is using up all that space on the file server?" I finally ended up having to download a shareware program to do this task that's extremely simple on MacOS.
Heh, no kidding. Two words for the grandparent:
Lotus Notes.
Lotus Notes has about the worst GUI I've seen in an application that is so widely-used. And people wonder why businesses switch to Exchange Server and Outlook... sheesh!
And of course, into the conversation comes Mr. Misses The Point.
Why should he have to customize *anything* to get an interface that doesn't make people want to puke? You shouldn't be able to even customize it to make it worse, what would be the point?
Try a trackball. Seriously. A keyboard + trackball combo works, IMO, MUCH better than a keyboard + mouse combo. Trackballs are much easier to aim with than mouses.
Neverwinter Nights is just a ripoff of what the MUD community has been doing in text for years and years.
If you *really* care about an in-depth story and roleplay, check out Eternal Struggle MUD (www.esmud.com). The warning is that ES' combat system is crap, the entire MUD is based around roleplay (even levelling.) It's different, and it's the kind of thing no MMORPG maker would EVER take a risk on.
Yup. One of the simple joys of Descent was shooting out all the lights on accident then flying blind while trying to get out of the damned pitch-black room. I'm sure there's some difference between the two engines, but Descent did good lighting.
On Apple keyboards, the F12 key is clearly marked with the 'eject CD' icon. Many Windows laptops also do this, so I don't really see a complaint here... I guess because it's a desktop instead of a laptop?
As to XServe, they're not really all that relevant to this discussion, as 99% of users aren't involved with setting up servers.
To sum up a complex argument:
What else out there is better?
(Note: Possibly BeOS. That's it.)
I agree that Apple's user interfaces, and that of third party developers, has been going downhill ever since Quicktime 3.0 and MacOS 8.5. I'm with you on that point 100%.
But Apple *still* makes the most consistant user interface in the entire computing world. You think different window types are bad, but look at these BASIC problems in Windows that have never been fixed:
1) Task bar buttons cannot be moved once they are created. I want to group my Project A-related windows next to each other. Why can't I click the icon for one of these windows and drag it to the spot I want it? Clicking and dragging a task bar button doesn't do anything now, so where's the conflict in letting me move them?
2) Every window in Windows has a task bar button except control panel windows (for some moronic reason I've never understood. How many times have you minimized your browser to find the Display control panel still open from when you tried to change your screen resolution 3 hours ago?)
3) Windows has the capability of showing animated icons, but (in general) doesn't. See: Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Component Services, Computers, My Computer, Com+ Applications. See the animated icons?)
Anyway, I could go on for hours, but the point is that while Apple might be slipping downhill, they're still further up hill than Microsoft and Linux distributions are.
And projects like Mozilla who put their foot down and say "No, X will NOT be an option!" get criticized on Slashdot.org for not working with the community and trying to alienate people. (See: adding an option to do IE-style alt image tooltips.)
This cycle isn't a law, you just need a development team with the courage to say "no, you're wrong, it's better this way" and stick to their guns.
I'm a Mac user. Recently, I had to gzip a bunch of files I had sitting in a directory to upload to a Unix server. My first guess? I navigated into the directory and typed this:
.tar.gz at the end of the file name)... why the hell wasn't it that simple?
tar * archive.tar.gz
Which I read as "put the files that match * (all files) into file archive.tar.gz"
That's all the information tar needs, right? It knows which files I want to compress up (by reading the * wildcard), it knows how I want to compress them (by reading the
Instead you have to give tar all kinds of moronic information that should be assumed. Yes, I want to -c CREATE an archive, that's why I typed "tar" instead of "untar." Yes I want to -f PUT IT IN A FILE, what else would I do with it?
Anyway. It's annoying. Someone use your open source mojo-powers and fix tar up for me.
Fink worked great for me when all I wanted was SQLite and nothing else. I tried to install it myself, but the ./configure had some sort of error and I couldn't figure it out for the life of me, but the MUD I develop for requires SQLite.
Fink was the answer. And, although SQLite was in the 'experimental' section, it still installed fine and works great.
I may be wrong, but I'm almost 100% sure the developer tools came free on CD-ROM with the retail 10.3 package. But that's a good point, if you have to download 500 MB, you can't really call it "free" or "easily available" considering how many people are still on dial-up connections.
As a minor correction, Office (sans Access) is cross-platform. It exists for Macintosh, and has since the Mac was brand-new. (There's also a Macintosh equilivant to Outlook called Entourage.)
The reason, IMO, that Microsoft does not make Linux software is twofold:
1) Every Linux machine is different, so it's very difficult to ensure a consistant experience. (Installion alone has to be a pain in the butt with all the differences in Linux distributions.)
2) Linux users, in general, don't buy software because they have this weird perception that everything should be free. Capital or lowercase f.
Wow. That's perhaps the best-written and most bias-free analysis of security difference between Linux and Windows I've ever read. Bravo.
Someone mod this guy up.
One word: MacOS
Comes with a great development environment using a very modern language/API. (Objective-C/Cocoa.) Also comes with a system-wide can-control-100%-of-what-a-user-can scripting language called AppleScript. You can embed AppleScripts into programs, or you can attach AppleScripts to folders to automate what happens when, say, a new file is added to that folder. You can even hit "record" and come up with some pretty good scripts just by performing the actions you want (like a macro system.)
Maybe he's just using the wrong computers. What I find interesting is that the article did mention that he spent some time at Apple... and now pretty much everything he's talking about, Apple has. (When's the last time you saw HP put out a free IDE or scripting environment?) Go figure.
I respect his vision, though. I've always thought the greatest loss to current computing is that there isn't a modern version of Rocky's Boots.