Aethaeryn · HackerTrans

14 jaar geledendiscuss

It's called svbtle and the theme is part of a blog network.

https://svbtle.com/

14 jaar geledendiscuss

There's Lisp:

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830867

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3151751

[3] http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=lis...

There's just not enough Lisp.

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

  > To be clear, your phrasing seems to present this as a novel
  > approach, though it is not.

Obviously, the idea of a strategy game[a] in a browser is as old as web browsers themselves. I even played a few in the mid-2000s.[b] There's lots of them, written in PHP, and with a fairly static experience.[c] There's a reason, though, that when asked for my inspirations, I'll name desktop games like Civilization II rather than browser games.

The novel thing isn't the idea, it's the opportunity that HTML 5 gives for the execution of the idea. I'm not original. I'm just lucky enough to be at the right place and the right time. My particular execution of the ultimately older-than-computers[1] idea is possible only because of <canvas>.[d]

Digital portable media players existed as far back as 1979 and MP3 players go back to about 1997,[2] but the iPod didn't take off until 2005.[3] It's possible to have the right idea, but years too early and with poor execution.[e]

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[a] Don't just limit it to space. There's plenty of non-space ones, too! There's usually not that big of a difference in how a browser game is played based on the setting.

[b] My observation in footnote a of my previous post that a once-a-day refresh would stress the server is something I experienced in one of the games I played.

[c] Many of them are better than anything Zynga has written, though.

[d] My game was originally going to be a desktop game. That's not very interesting compared to the challenge of doing it in HTML 5 and JavaScript.

[e] The poor execution is often due to being years (or decades) too early.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_game

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Media_Player

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.sv...

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

  > The 'hanging out' part was key, and I am convinced that if
  > Blizzard could figure out a way for folks to sit down and play
  > cards or checkers or something it would be popular.

The problem with Zynga is that they built up casual games around a general purpose social network. I agree that social-oriented minigames would provide a much better user experience if they were built around a larger game environment, like a high-quality MMO. People who form groups in games want to be able to socialize, so social mini-games built around such a game is a good idea.

Another advantage, of course, is that you don't necessarily have to tie your full real life identity to your social identity. This allows people to be freer about what they can say or do, and might be more appealing.[a]

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[a] Yes, an argument can be made that attaching one's RL name to a post makes abuse less likely, but I believe that effective moderation of a community is a much stronger factor in having a quality community than simply requiring real names. I've seen places on the Internet where people were happy to flame using their full name and identity because of no moderators. On the other hand, HN is a good example of a civil online environment where real names are not required.

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

  > I suspect because there just isn't a big enough market for games
  > of that nature. Maybe there is a handful of us out there. Maybe a
  > relatively small handful, but one that's willing to pay a fair
  > amount for a really great, truly strategic global power game. I
  > dunno. Maybe it's worth organizing, or Kickstarting, or what have
  > you. If any game devs out there are reading this and are
  > interested, know that there's a niche crossing its fingers for
  > you.

I'm actually working on an in-browser MMO strategy game set in space that will try to balance around long run[a] strategy and diplomacy instead of just constantly-at-war deathmatches. Of course, relying on humans rather than AI does help.

I suspect that the market is bigger than the big publishers are willing to take a risk on, especially if it was written to be run within browsers (including mobile browsers) and was fun to play.

I have considered Kickstarter, but it seems like most Kickstarter game projects fail unless they go viral first so there's definitely a major risk[b] in going public too early.

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[a] One way to make the games last a long time (perhaps indefinitely) is to make it a slow-playing game, such as using Civilization-style simultaneous turns that refresh by default once a day. This would also put more focus on forming alliances, socializing, and making strategies. Of course, the issue with this is that there would be a massive surge of traffic on the servers during turn refresh times.

[b] The main risk of Kickstarter is the uncertainty in receiving funds. I could underestimate costs on purpose and have a decent chance of being funded, but with an insufficient amount, or I could provide the "real" amount and have a very high chance of getting no money at all, even though a little bit would go a long way. Neither outcome seems ideal, especially when people would assume that "funded" means that the game is ready to be released given a certain amount of time.

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

Please do not be a contrarian who buys ZNGA. You will probably lose money.

They have 3,000 employees,[1] even though their business model revolves largely around cloning[a] games that are simple enough for very small teams to create.[2] They're losing money; their EPS is -1.30.[3][4] Just because they have cash from investors doesn't mean that the business model will make significant money in the long run and it's made more complicated by the fact that they have a very heavy dependence on Facebook.[5]

They're also dependent on casual gamers (who don't have much loyalty or will to pay) and current trends.[b] Apparently, only 2% of their customers pay for their games.[5] Their stock market valuation seems largely mapped to their active user count[6] (and also Facebook's share prices[5]) rather than their financials.[c] In fact, I can't even say that they're overvalued because that involves looking at the P/E and with a negative EPS, I can't really do an apples-to-apples P/E comparison of Zynga against companies that are actually listed as profitable. Is a -3.8 P/E overvalued?[4] It certainly is risky!

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[a] They also buy some companies behind popular games too, like OMGPOP. This isn't necessarily a good idea.[7]

[b] The use of the term "game craze" in the title of the parent article implies that part of the reason ZNGA has a valuation in the billions is because of the current trendiness of Facebook games. The problem with relying on trendiness for investments is that when there's something even trendier (i.e. mobile apps), all the investor money that chases trendy stuff could simply go there instead.

[c] It was a popular dot-com bubble plan to focus on market share with a free product at a sustained financial loss.[8] Of course, it's too early to tell if ZNGA will sustain its losses in the long run because its stock is too young. Still, it's very risky.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zynga

[2] https://s3.amazonaws.com/nbpromo/dearzynga.jpg

[3] http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:ZNGA

[4] http://data.cnbc.com/quotes/ZNGA

[5] http://beta.fool.com/buffettbeater/2012/06/11/dont-get-zynge...

[6] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/zynga-falls-on-ugly-faceboo...

[7] http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/05/04/draw-somet...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble#Bubble_growth

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

You can also find out about the important changes from:

  C-h r m antinews RET

This provides a changelog in the opposite direction, which is entertaining:

  For those users who live backwards in time, here is information about
  downgrading to Emacs version 23.4.  We hope you will enjoy the greater
  simplicity that results from the absence of many Emacs 24.1 features.

-----

It can be found online here:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ant...

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

What reference would you recommend instead?

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

I'm actually surprised by the lack of rigor in many of the sources I checked. It's obvious that b != 0 is necessary because otherwise you can't get results like line segments having an infinite number of points, and hence equal to the amount of points in a line.[1] The thing is, a lot of common references seem to leave out that the endpoints can't be equal.[2] It's so obvious that it's just implied, but it's dangerous to treat mathematics like that!

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[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LineSegment.html

[2] Just saying 'two distinct endpoints' instead of 'two endpoints' would work, so it's literally just one word that makes a big difference!

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

  > A zero-length line segment is a point.

The Wikipedia definition of a line segment says that it is bound by two endpoints.[1] It provides a reference to Planet Math that goes into specifics.[2] In this page, it is made clear that the two endpoints cannot be equal. Planet Math provides an equation for a closed[3] line segment:

  L = {a + tb | t in [0, 1]}

This means that a line segment can be expressed as all of the points a + tb, where t is the range [0, 1] (which contains 0, 1 and all the points between them). It also limits a, b as real or complex numbers with b != 0. In other words, any line segment is just "morphing" the basic 0 to 1 range, with a shifting it and b scaling it.

Now, since b can't be 0, and 0 != 1, you're not going to get the endpoints of the range 0 and 1 to equal each other no matter how you scale them with b or shift them with a.[4] In other words, line segments will always have length.

Because you cannot get the endpoints to equal each other, a point cannot be thought of as a line segment under what appears to be the common definition.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_segment

[2] http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/LineSegment.html

[3] Open is the exact same thing, except with (0, 1) instead of [0, 1] and it doesn't include the points 0 and 1.

[4] Of course, if b = 0 was allowed, you could just say that points are where b = 0 for all a.

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

I think that the overall list of 'fastest companies to IPO' might be skewed by the dot-com bubble companies that were fast to IPO but failed soon afterwards thanks to having no real business model or income.

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

Your link is to blogspot.ca, this link is to blogspot.com.ar. To HN's software, they seem like two entirely different websites even though the content is identical.

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

  > White on solid color is what basic metro tiles look like, though, and
  > the offenders are the parties who shove their faux-3D logo into the
  > tile without adapting it to the platform.

Why didn't Microsoft anticipate this and require that icons be plain white silhouettes on top of a solid color when placed on a tile? That way, the third-party applications would match the Microsoft applications in appearance.

Actually, isn't there still time to fix this now that it's apparent that it will mess with the user experience in a major way and degrade the basic aesthetics of the main screen?

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

It's not even the Windows XP-7 UI paradigm. Cosmetically, the look has been updated over the years, but the same fundamental elements have always been there: a start menu; a panel at the bottom with a start button, a clock, a place for minimized applications, etc.; a desktop where you can choose your own background and put shortcut icons; overlapping windows of familiar applications that have mostly stayed the same in their functions, such as Windows Explorer and Microsoft Office; and many other familiar features.

They've had this similar UI with minor, incremental changes for: Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

Yes, the familiar user interface that people are used to since August 1995 is going to suddenly change. If you're afraid of change, then it's been mostly comfortable for 17 years with Vista as the most radical makeover. Yes, there are now people who are adults who have used essentially the same graphical interface to their PC's OS for basically their entire life.

People didn't like Vista because it brought fairly radical change to many things, but to the average user who largely judges an application by its appearance, this is basically a completely different thing. It's basically Windows in name only to them. Microsoft might have had more success if they chose a different name and promoted it as a brand new OS to the average end user.

This is one massive psychology experiment done by Microsoft as to how far an average user can tolerate radical change. We'll see how it plays out. Based on some recent transitions in similar software with smaller user bases (e.g. the GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 transition), it probably isn't going to be pretty.

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

Yes. They should have saved the start button and tried to keep familiar concepts that they could then later slowly phase out in future releases.

One way that they could have gradually introduced Metro in a way that would keep familiarity of use to old users and almost total backwards compatibility would have been to replace the desktop with Metro (i.e. the wallpaper and desktop icons). They could have then kept the start menu and panel[1] at the bottom (and perhaps default it to have auto-hide on). They could have even allowed windows to open up over the metro tiles, and then the familiar 'Show Desktop' button on the panel would be how you get back to the full metro screen.

There wouldn't be two modes and they'd still have a very similar appearance to what Windows 8 actually looks like today without having to confuse people used to the old way of doing things. The tablet and mobile version would then not have the start menu and panel, but everything else would look and feel the same.

They could even have implemented it in a similar way to their ancient 'Active Desktop' technology, except fullscreen and without the traditional icons.[2]

[1] I'm using the Linux term here. I really have no clue what they call the bar at the bottom because I haven't used Windows regularly for many years.

[2] http://i.technet.microsoft.com/dynimg/IC193546.gif

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

You can hold down Alt and then the Suspend button magically becomes Shutdown in the GNOME 3 shell's menu.

Yes, it's not a very discoverable feature. You basically have to find out about it on the Internet somewhere.

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

  > I am not entirely certain how to shut off an OS X computer either.

Open up the terminal and type:

    sudo halt

(NOTE: In Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD, the man pages state that 'halt -p' should be used for a power off, but the OS X man page states that it's just 'halt' with no -p tag available.)

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

They're missing a few languages. For instance, Quicklisp.[1]

[1] http://www.quicklisp.org/beta/

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

I haven't had any issues with the multimonitors besides:

- The Fedora defaults for background image stretches a 1920x1080 picture across what is effectively 3840x1080 pixels. There doesn't appear to be an elegant way to set a background image for a multimonitor setup, so I just paste together two different 1920x1080 pictures to form a 3840x1080 picture when I need to set something as my background image.

- The panel defaults to being stretched across both screens so I needed to adjust its size. Very minor annoyance that this doesn't work by default.

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There's also a larger issue with fullscreen.

Fullscreen on most applications that try to launch fullscreen, especially games with SDL, appears to be broken. Apparently they see my displays as one large 3840x1080 monitor instead of two separate 1920x1080 monitors. They then throw some type of error about unsupported resolution and switch into windowed mode (or, rarely, they crash).

I set Ctrl+F11 as a custom hot key to force fullscreen, which seems to work on almost everything. So I launch things in windowed mode, drag the window to the monitor I want to use the application on, and then press Ctrl+F11 to make it take fullscreen on that monitor. If that for some reason doesn't work, I can maximize the screen and remove the Openbox window decoration.

VirtualBox is the one application I regularly use that seems to handle fullscreen okay without any effort on my part. RightCtrl+F makes the VM fullscreen on its current monitor without any issues and VirtualBox remembers this and has no issues launching into fullscreen, either. Thus, it's probably an issue with common libraries and not with LXDE itself.

GNOME 3 sometimes has problems similar to this, especially when games using SDL attempt to launch into fullscreen at the start. I prefer LXDE's workarounds to the ones I had to use in GNOME 3. I especially like LXDE+Openbox's ability to remove window decorations just by right clicking on the window title bar at the top and selecting the appropriate option.

Aethaeryn

14 jaar geledendiscuss

> It's not: https://extensions.gnome.org/

That's not user friendly customization:

(1) When there's something that's called "Remove Accessibility" on the front page that's indicative of a broader problem. A tiny little script to remove the accessibility menu (which most people probably don't use) from the top panel? Couldn't this be a simple checkbox integrated natively into GNOME 3 instead of a third party download? Why is the accessibility menu there by default in the first place if very few people are going to use it? Honestly, this is something I'd expect in a Microsoft product, not in a community-based open source project.

(2) I already mentioned in my previous post how customization depends on "random third party add-ons downloaded from the Internet via their website" so I am aware of this. It's not a counterpoint to my post.

(3) Compared to "App Stores" or even distributions' repositories, that website is a terribly designed way to download content.[1] It is not user friendly or modern. The only modern aspect is updating a desktop environment via a browser.

(3b) Is there even a way to automatically update these extensions? Can I see the source code? Where is the average rating display and the sort by ratings even though ratings and reviews exist? Why can't I sort by rating even though there are apparently ratings in the comment system? Is it curated or can anyone upload malware there? Is it a secure site or could someone circumvent the security measures easily? There are many more questions, mostly of design, quality, and trust. If you have a Linux (or BSD) distribution, you (hopefully) trust the software in its repositories.

(4) Speaking of a distro's repositories, shouldn't this kind of thing be managed in your distro's repositories? Well, it should except that GNOME 3 has so many problems, bad defaults, and (of course) missing options that could easily be placed in its configuration menus. There are simply too many necessary extensions, which forces this to happen. Many of these only do very tiny things that certainly wouldn't justify their own independent package, like "Alternative Status Menu" that merely separates Suspend, Hibernate, and Shutdown.[2] Yet again, just a line in a configuration GUI would be preferable.[3] (I mean the official configuration GUI, not the Tweak Tool.)

(5) Why do users have to trust random downloads from a browser? I mean, I suppose we could all code extensions ourselves and get rid of this trust issue, but this isn't emacs. This is meant to be a default desktop environment, the first thing a newbie Linux user will see. Not every single user of the OS is supposed to be computer professionals (especially given GNOME's new target audience). Programming shouldn't have to be a prerequisite to having a usable desktop enviornment. Wizards or configuration menus will be something the typical user is used to. Code integrated into the desktop will be faster, more reliable, trusted, installed and updated via yum/apt/etc., and so on. Many of these things are already toggled in hidden ways and could easily be configured explicitly through the official GUI in a way that's tested and trusted.

I could go on. I won't. It's too easy.[4]

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[1] There are probably hundreds or maybe thousands of people who read Hacker News (I'm not sure how many active users there are) who could code up a better website as a weekend project. Why does the largest desktop environment in the FOSS world have such a terrible way to download extensions?

[2] Yet another minor annoyance: shutdown is hidden by default behind the modifier key Alt. There is no easy built-in way to change this. When I used GNOME I had to Google command line magic to trick GNOME into thinking my computer was incapable of suspending to get the shutdown to display by default on the menu. Apparently the One True Way to deal with "turning off" your computer is to suspend it and pretend it's off.[5] And since Shutdown is capable of being displayed on the menu without a modifier key instead of Suspend when you do some command line magic, that means yet again it would be trivial to make it able to be toggled in a menu since the functionality already exists!

[3] I hope you're noticing a pattern here.

[4] There was a thread on Hacker News calling PHP a "fractal of bad design". GNOME 3's shell is certainly a fractal of bad design. My post was a broad overview of what is annoying about it for the sake of being concise. That might be surprising due to its length, but I was holding back the entire time I wrote it. I can go more in depth on various parts if challenged.

[5] There's one really annoying thing you'll notice about GNOME 3 shell's philosophy of there being one way to do things and no trivial way (downloading third-party scripts where a checkbox would do is not trivial) to change it. Remember the example of the accessibility menu being enabled by default: GNOME shell's way of doing things is rarely in line with the most common ways GNOME 2 was used. Thus, old GNOME users upgrading will have to actively fight against the defaults. That's about as close to being user hostile as you can get, almost literally being hostile.

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