131–140 of 224 posts
On the one hand, as a technologist, this pisses me off because we've advanced so far in the field of word processing. Autocorrect, holding more than 40 pages in memory, cut/paste, etc. Why does this Luddite persist in the old ways?!?!?! But as a writer who knows the pains of distraction... maybe he's on to something?
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I completely agree, but the inability to edit doesn't explain the advantage (if any) of the wordstar/ms-dos editor crowd.
Right. You identified the prime characteristic for the CUI crowd: no context switching. Though Wordstar purportedly was superior for text manipulation. Robert J. Sawyer wrote an article [1] on why he still uses it. Made me want to learn it, but I realize that if I'm going to put effort into learning a tool, I'd likely want it to be Emacs instead. (I currently use Scrivener.) [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-te…
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Surely someone can write this fellow a program to convert to ASCII and a USB floppy drive to move the files, or better yet, an SD card IDE drive for his old PC.
He could probably have used a modern PC with internet connectivity too. I'm guessing convenience wasn't the point. (If it's a machine from the 90s, it might not even have USB.)
There's something to be said for the focused nature of older technology. If you were to set me the task of writing something long-form, and told me the faster and better I did it the more I would be rewarded, I'd be doomed with a modern laptop or a smartphone. My favorite writing tool is, frankly, an IBM TransNote from 2001.
DOS is the perfect place for “Dune”. The 30yo game, that is.
Yes, there's nothing like 2 straight hours of "Building". "Deploying" "Sandworm Attack!" To get you into the Dune mood :)
It even has clips from David Lynch's movie.
Sigh, I remember getting the CD-ROM version with my first multimedia PC and playing this game...
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I think if you've read the book, it's a good watch. But the movie does very little character building, or maybe it tries to do too much of it too fast. Without the preset idea of what the characters are about, I could see how the movie might be a bit flat.
Too fast? The movie is longer than the original and only part of the story is included. How much slower can they make the story playout?
The original is a dense 200,000 word novel, not the 1984 movie you seem to be referencing, which itself a cut a lot.
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You mean as a new type of mass marketed device rather than someone's hobby business that could fail and they wouldn't be economically impacted? Based on the fact that this is not new in the slightest, and the last 20 years is full of people mocking DOS because it's from an era long gone by but then discovering very specific niche industries or suddenly-well-known individuals still using DOS applications... No. No we…
For DOS specifically, there is a market. So much of one that I can buy PCs with FreeDOS preinstalled. DOS, specifically, is used in many embedded applications that do not require multitasking (digital display boards, point of sale systems, etc.). That's not exactly addressing the question, but one of the things that makes a successful business is finding a niche and exploiting it and though there may not be a mass ma…
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Eh, you can get that distraction-free experience with modern technology if you want it. When I want to focus on writing, I have a Vim setup that gives me a screen with a cursor. I run that full screen, turn off notifications and whatnot, and get to it. And when I'm done I can go back to using my modern technology to do everything else I want with the content, whether it's formatting/typesetting, sharing, etc. There's…
Sounds like he just wants to open a program, not build his life around it.
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I was considering to watch it this weekend. So you advise against it?
The problem with the David Lynch version was it was so edited and short that key scenes were missing, making it confusing as heck to understand what was happening and why if you hadn't read the book. But he kept the internal monologues. The problem with this newer version is it cuts the internal monologues, so much of the context, history, and character building is gone. But it keeps pretty much every scene. Unfortun…
Yet, oddly, the reviews I’m reading are saying central scenes of the portion of the book the new film covers that were included in the Lynch film have been omitted from this one.
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To be fair, even if I'm reading on my Kindle, my phone is still doing all that. I can DND my phone, but then it would have the same effect if I'm reading on the phone.
On Android, DND still pops up notifications and stuff. Anyone know if there is any easy way to turn that off? I get so distracted and that certainly doesn't help
This will prevent notifications from popping up and also not remove any existing notifiation from the notification bar.
(I'm using Samsung; YMMV).