Hubert

Reply to Roadside Picnic is better because nobody in it understands the Zone in Books Stardock Forums

You are arguing about whether the book explains itself, and I think it does both, in two different places, and on purpose. Pillman's picnic explains the visitors. It does not explain the Zone. Those are separate questions and the novel keeps them well apart. Why they came and why they left without noticing anyone lived here is settled in that one conversation and settled fairly completely. What an empty is, why one route through kills you and the next one does not, what any of

Reply to MacCustomize? in OS Customization Stardock Forums

What usually kills a customisation tool is not the platform being hostile. It is the platform changing shape faster than one small company can follow. Flavours stopping where it did is the pattern rather than the exception. A tool hooks whatever the current version presents, the next version presents something slightly different, and the work restarts from a worse position each time. Nobody has to forbid anything for that to end badly. Windows skinning lasted as long as it has b

Reply to Elemental: Reforged v1.4 Update Now Available in Elemental News Stardock Forums

The AI section is most of this update, and most of that is bookkeeping rather than cleverness. Pioneers that settle instead of wandering, armies that stay together once they have set out, scouts that stop re-walking ground they have already seen, an AI that can count its own caravans. None of that is strategy. It is an opponent being able to carry out an intention. That is worth more than it sounds. War of Magic's AI did not frustrate me by outplaying me. It frustrated me by visibly fa

Reply to New MS Copilot centered OS Plans Leaked in Artificial Intelligence Stardock Forums

The Copilot shell is the part everyone is reacting to, and I think it is the least of it. A shell is replaceable. People here have been replacing or reskinning the Windows shell in one form or another since the Windows 98 days, and if Microsoft ships a chat box where the Start menu was, someone will ship a way to put the Start menu back. The line worth reading twice is the one pelaird quoted: Win3, no Win32. That is the part that would actually change anything. An OS without Win32 is n