Game of Thrones Author George R R Martin Writes with WordStar on DOS 522
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Ryan Reed reports that when most Game of Thrones fans imagine George R.R. Martin writing his epic fantasy novels, they probably picture the author working on a futuristic desktop (or possibly carving his words onto massive stones like the Ten Commandments). But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using '80s word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan. 'I actually like it,' says Martin. 'It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.' 'I actually have two computers,' Martin continued. 'I have a computer I browse the Internet with and I get my email on, and I do my taxes on. And then I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine, not connected to the Internet.'"
Amen, brother Amen! (Score:5, Insightful)
'It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.'
Amen, brother, Amen!
Re:Amen, brother Amen! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hallelujah! Trying to select text and it grabs the whole word, or worse, some programs grab the whole word plus a space. Why do I want trailing spaces with everything I paste?
As a developer thinking about how I can "help" the user, I always favor the perspective that the user knows what they want.
Some developers make the "they can disable this feature" excuse. The frustrating thing is every time you get a new desktop/phone/upgrade/update you find yourself disabling the same options again and again. Only a small handful of products remember these kinds of settings across devices/installs.
Re:Amen, brother Amen! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is because, as a developer, you're a user who understands and knows what you want. Microsoft is writing software for the kind of people who'd type google into the google search bar to get to google.
Re:Amen, brother Amen! (Score:5, Funny)
Type 'Google' into Bing bar to get Google to search for 'Hotmail' to look at their email and then forward it to their grandchildren.
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At least they're no longer printing it all out and sending it through the USPS. Progress is being made.
Re:Amen, brother Amen! (Score:4, Funny)
I have a fax-through-email service. I had to talk my wife out of using it to send someone some forms back to a person who had emailed her the forms to sign :)
Re: (Score:3)
- ocr the forms.
- change font to comic sans
- fill out forms in pale yellow
- print forms
- scan forms
-- attach to email
Re:Amen, brother Amen! (Score:5, Interesting)
When she finds a picture on the internet that she wants to keep, she downloads it to her hard drive, attaches it to an email, then sends it to herself. I kid you not. I've tried to explain how things should be done, but learned the hard way that it's not worth it. Instead we've just switched her to Thunderbird, since Outlook Express couldn't handle that many emails. Thunderbird is holding up under the strain quite nicely. Boy was it hard to get her used to it, though. Probably spent 20+ hours one the phone helping her find the 'forward' button and her address book.
Re:Amen, brother Amen! (Score:5, Informative)
This should be a clue to everyone how important ease of use is. I know that skilled computer users love following 5 pages of directions linked between 8 different websites written by 4 different people to accomplish 1 simple task (looking at you Linux), but for most people, that's a pain in the ass.
Name 1 way to back up her emails and pictures on a remote server that requires fewer mouse clicks than forwarding them herself with email. "I've tried to explain how things should be done" -- first rule of UI design, "don't make me think".
Re:Amen, brother Amen! (Score:5, Interesting)
I definitely appreciate how projects like Lubuntu have given us the ability to 'hold back time', as it were, for folks who simply cannot handle change. And as a bonus, I successfully converted someone to Linux. Man, I prefer supporting Linux boxes over Windows. So much easier to fix.
Re: Amen, brother Amen! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Name 1 way to back up her emails and pictures on a remote server that requires fewer mouse clicks than forwarding them herself with email."
Dropbox - drag, drop, done. Single click.
Re:Amen, brother Amen! (Score:5, Insightful)
I email myself all the time.
I keep backups of most of my data, of course, but email is the most easily-searched, most easily-accessed, and most redundant system I have...and it takes zero additional thought on my part for it to behave in this way.
Additional redundancy is also simple: If something is Really Important to me, I can send it to myself at multiple independent email servers with ridiculous ease.
I've been doing it this way since I discovered IMAP something close to 20 years ago.
The fact that someone is using a tool in a way that you didn't intend should not be taken to indicate that such behavior is wrong, and if IMAP were totally unsuited it wouldn't handle multiple concurrent clients of different types, much less folders, much less generally-sane handling of attachments, much less [...].
(Granted, this is for stuff that is not secret to me -- just important to me. I don't have many secrets, and any that I do have certainly aren't anywhere near the Internet or any other network.)
Re:Amen, brother Amen! (Score:5, Informative)
So when a user who doesn't know what they want copies a temporary password from an email and pastes it in to a login form is supposed to know to remove the trailing space the Microsoft software so helpfully included?
Or when you've gone to the pain of selecting only the word and not the trailing space, then select part of another word to paste over, it helpfully inserts a space that you must then delete.
I'm so glad I don't know what I want.
Re:Amen, brother Amen! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've done that, intentionally. Do you know why? Because between Microsoft deciding that anything that isn't at least a second level domain is a search request intended for bing and Time Warner deciding that anything that isn't immediately properly resolveable should be DNS redirected to their own god-awful search-like landing page, that can be the most reliable way to get to where I actually want to go.
I usually have set my DNS to OpenDNS, but if I've rebuilt the machine or traveled and stayed somewhere that mysteriously breaks my manually-specified DNS server, I may have reverted the notebook to use whatever is automatically set by DHCP.
I usually uncheck software's constant attempts to make [insert name here] my new default search agent, or to activate some added search suggestion do-hickey, but I'm not perfectly vigilant.
Nevermind that this browser will automatically assume "www." and that browser will automatically assume ".com" and maybe, but not consisntently, if you type "google" you'll actually get to the Google front page.
The kind of people who type google into the google search bar to get google are the kind of people who are not so technologically savvy that they can consistently prevent the ever-loving war to redirect any user typing something into what should be a URL entry field to some random "search engine" because user traffic = middleman $$$.
THE UNIFIED SEARCH AND ADDRESS BAR IS TEH DEVIL.
The Bing toolbar, Google toolbar, or what have you can be ugly clutter, but it can't be subtly screwed with by the other devils.
And that is why you get people typing google into the google search bar to get to google.
Re: (Score:3)
Your problem is only that you don't know how to change the default search engine. I sympathize, but it's still not the devil.
The unified address / search bar is mostly a great improvement. Telling clueless users which of the two text fields to type an address into was a nightmare. Typos in URLs were a nightmare. Wasted screen space was a negative, too.
On mobile, Dolphin works great. It's extremely easy to change the search engine used when you type into t
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Start typing the first 3 letters of the search, and you'll find it in the drop-down list... Not too hard.
Typing "google" into search not a bad idea ... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is because, as a developer, you're a user who understands and knows what you want. Microsoft is writing software for the kind of people who'd type google into the google search bar to get to google.
You know, typing a domain name into search is not a terrible thing to do. It is a valid strategy to avoid domain name typos that may land you on a malware site.
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Absolutely. Especially when the domain is part of that lovely new "let's intentionally misspell or leave out a couple of letters or use some random third-world domain suffix as the last couple letters" breed of domains that makes it impossible to tell if you've typed it correctly by looking at it.
First time you go to a new domain: get there through a search engine link. Much less chance of accidentally winding up at a site that's gonna do naughty things. Subsequent visits, you should have the right one in y
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It does lead to hilarious results sometimes. I recall a ReadWriteWeb article that BREIFLY became the top search result for "facebook login" on google. The chaos was amazing.
http://readwrite.com/2010/02/10/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login
The comment section is riddled with people asking how to get to facebook, or why did facebook change their login, asking help with logging in on this "new" login page. It was epic. The comments are still up if you want to read them
They had to put a notice near the to
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No, Microsoft is writing software for an impressive "new features" list, so the management will buy the damn thing over and over again. Featuritis is the natural result of enough cycles of that.
Re:No. Simply No. (Score:4)
but here's the thing:
I've not heard anyone describe functionality added to MS Office since Office 2000. Excel has it's uses, but what have they done to it since, except forced people to learn new places for buttons?
Re: No. Simply No. (Score:3, Informative)
Not that I am in love with Microsoft, but Excel has added quite a few "minor" functions since 2000 that dramatically increase usability.
For example, Excel 2007 introduced filtering and sorting by colors. And formats. Coupled with the existing conditional formatting, it significantly improved the ability of the software to sort based on any criteria, without using extra columns.
Going back a bit further, a key feature introduced in Excel 2003 was the ability to import xml datasets, and to set up templates qu
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Hallelujah! Trying to select text and it grabs the whole word, or worse, some programs grab the whole word plus a space. Why do I want trailing spaces with everything I paste?
I'm not going to name names, but I recently saw something worse than that: copy a few words of text, paste, and it inserts A FUCKING LEADING LINE BREAK! Argh! If I wanted the text on the next line, then I would fucking put it there!!!
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Shut the fuck up and go read a basic grammar text
Which will show that you're a pretentious fuckwit?
They is the standard gender-neutral personal pronoun (as opposed to "it" the gender-neutral non-personal pronoun). People who insist on writing "he or she," "he/she," or any other stilted monstrosity are the linguistic equivalent of Kanye West--baselessly arrogant and pretentious.
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I never used EDLIN with DOS, only with CP/M. I really hated it. :)
IBM's BASIC editor was the first WP program I used on DOS; I'm still using the PWB Editor that came with Macro Assembler 4. :)
I still have a machine that can play Duke3d and Leisure Suit Larry, lol. :)
To have to duck around here, you have to say "EMACS can't..." and follow that up with pretty much anything. :)
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Anyone remember Display Write from IBM? I had both Display Write and a "lite" version that I generally preferred. When the ribbon on my dot-matrix printer started to wear out after the third time round I just made all the text bold and turned on double printing.
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Ducks! Where? I love ducks.
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pfff... Edlin is too bloated, I prefer to use COPY CON
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If you got a mild downhill, it's party! The car runs forever in neutral
From what I've heard, it's better to keep the car in gear while you're coasting. Modern engines can shut down fuel to the pistons if inertia is able to keep them going so you're literally using no fuel. If you put it into neutral it can't do that.
But your whole strategy of accelerating then coasting sounds suspect. Are you sure you're actually saving any fuel doing that? I would think the acceleration part outweighs the coasting part.
or they have another lane they can pass you, as such and idiot who can't drive, by. This whole livin on the edge of being annoying to others
What makes you think you're on the edge? There are people out there who fe
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Most people that drive like idiots do so inadvertantly. You, on the other hand, do so with great deliberation.
You make me wish I had a huge manly unaerodynamic truck to run you off the road with.
Just get yourself an electric bicycle and be done with it.
Re:Amen, brother Amen! (Score:4, Funny)
I was just thinking this would be something a Raspberry Pi would be perfect for.
In fact, if Wordperfect was still around in a reasonable condition, they could just sell the complete package in a box (just add keyboard and monitor). Or they could just sell the SD card.
The 1970s are returning ... (Score:3)
I was just thinking this would be something a Raspberry Pi would be perfect for.
In fact, if Wordperfect was still around in a reasonable condition, they could just sell the complete package in a box (just add keyboard and monitor). Or they could just sell the SD card.
So mainframes are resurrected via the cloud and now dedicated word processors will be resurrected via pis. The 1970s are returning. :-)
Also credits the dude that keeps it running (Score:5, Interesting)
In one of his books, he also gives credit to the guy that keeps that outdated system running.
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I hope he has 50 kaypros or whatever stored in nitrogen somewhere... that can't go on forever.
Re:Also credits the dude that keeps it running (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope he has 50 kaypros or whatever stored in nitrogen somewhere... that can't go on forever.
I don't see why not. DOS runs fine on modern machines. At some point he may have to switch to emulation, but IA32 emulators should be around for a very very long time.
Re:Also credits the dude that keeps it running (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope he has 50 kaypros or whatever stored in nitrogen somewhere... that can't go on forever.
I don't see why not. DOS runs fine on modern machines. At some point he may have to switch to emulation, but IA32 emulators should be around for a very very long time.
I think you could keep a DOS computer running for the rest of G R.R. Martin's natural life... I think I could keep one running for the rest of my natural life and I'm in my 30's. Hardware was a lot less complex and a bit more over-engineered than it is today. Computers weren't low cost commodity items back then.
However, I dont think emulation is the right way to replace a dos computer, virtualisation is better. You can install DOS in a VMWare VM easily, whilst emulation like DOSBOX is very good, its still has some issues, a VM will get around most, if not all issues you have with dosbox.
But I'd bet the reason G R.R. Martin has 2 computers with one elusively for writing is more about a habit than an OS. I think he wants his writing computer to be free of distractions and separate from his general use/entertainment computer.
Re:Also credits the dude that keeps it running (Score:5, Funny)
Poor guy has to dick with GRRM's autoexec.bat and config.sys every time he adds a new feast scene.
Why do people still pay money for basic software (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do people still pay money for software performing most basic tasks like Word 365? Nowadays, they have millions of alternatives.
Re:Why do people still pay money for basic softwar (Score:5, Insightful)
Compatibility: we want our documents to look same if we hand them to somebody else. It's not easy to match MS-Word's layout engine bug-for-bug in another product.
Proved by the fact Word isn't Word compatible (Score:4, Interesting)
> It's not easy to match MS-Word's layout engine bug-for-bug in another product.
I saw proof of that a few weeks ago. My mother's new computer, with a.new version of Word, couldn't open her existing Word files. I had to open them in LibreOffice and save them using the newest version of the newest Word format using LibreOffice. Then Word could open them.
So yes, in my experience LibreOffice is more compatible with Word than Word is.
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Ironically one thing I like about Open/Libre office is that it behaves *very* similarly to Office of about 6-7 years ago in terms of UI which I think was a pretty damn optimal UI.
Well other than the lack of outline mode. Which , annoyingly apple's Pages dropped recently too.
And whi
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Actually I think people overestimate how often "Office" is used in office settings. A lot of whats used tends to be specialty and/or niche apps specific to a certain task. We have around 550 computer users in our organization. Maybe 15% of them use Word and/or Excel. The rest have a specific application (or set of apps) that pertains to their job function. Since we've already switched to Gmail for email we're considering just having the majority of the users utilize Google Docs for the occasional time t
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I think people overestimate how well their own office situation extrapolates to the entire world.
And.... (Score:5, Funny)
..it takes him 5 years to write a novel. Now we know why.
Shut up..... (Score:5, Funny)
Every time someone complains about how long he takes to write a book he kills another Stark!
Re: (Score:2)
Every time someone complains about how long he takes to write a book he kills another Stark!
So that's how we got the Red Wedding...
Re:And.... (Score:5, Funny)
He keeps loosing his new chapters. If you're going to try for a second side on your floppies with a hole punch, you take your chances.
640k isn't enough for everybody (Score:3)
You can't fit even the shortest of his books into 640K of RAM. AGoT clocks in at 298k words, which is going to take up considerably more than 640k.
I suspect he's probably got each chapter in a separate file. And if I remember correctly the CP/M version of Wordstar had an overlay feature that was a kind of primitive virtual memory. So yeah, I believe it's possible, and there's a lot to be said for Just A Plain Glorified Typewriter. (I got to review the draft of a book by one of the Mac's original designers; it was done in double-spaced Courier with crude hand-drawn illustrations. The formatting was to be done by those who did formatting.)
I'm increasingly using Google Docs for my work because I like the fact that it doesn't allow, and thus doesn't require, much formatting. Less time fiddling is more time working.
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Word processors and editors have supported paging parts of large documents to disk since the 1970s.
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Maybe, but unless a 25 year old with a hat has reinvented that in a browser, it doesn't count.
Re:640k isn't enough for everybody (Score:5, Insightful)
Shit like that is one of the many reasons someone might like the "old" way. It was faster/better. He's writing, not doing a global search and replace (which would be painful on something like that),
I have no idea of that's how wordstar did it, but I used some that did, I just don't remember which, as most didn't survive the transition to Windows, so they are gone. No need to indicate experience with Write when nobody has heard of it and will assume I made an error.
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It can be faster to load more than what is immediately required.
Especially these days when the latency of requests takes significantly longer than the data transfer.
With reasonably modern RAM it still takes 10ns to select a column. That's the time it takes to transfer 160 bytes over a 64bit bus.
If you only needed to read one byte and *may* need to read the next few a bit later one, moving them all to the CPU cache can make things much faster, instead of slowing down your memory bandwidth by 100x or so.
Re:640k isn't enough for everybody (Score:5, Informative)
Wordstar probably has it's own swap file. Most of the heavy-duty DOS word processors did.
640k stopped being a real limitation with DOS 5.0 and the EMS/XMS standards. As long as the words and interface elements currently on the screen fit into 640k, you are fine. Also, if you are in a text-only mode (with a flashing square for a mouse cursor), there are memory hacks that can give you up to 720k of conventional ram, at the expense of losing all graphics ability.
Re: (Score:3)
With the 286 processor anot
Re:640k isn't enough for everybody (Score:4, Informative)
Dos can access a lot more than 640k - the limit on real mode access is 1mb.
True! So, if DOS can access 1 MB, where does the 640K limit come from? Long story short, it's because IBM's BIOS sucked.
Okay, longer story:
Everyone was supposed to use the BIOS for basic operations including writing text to the screen. But the BIOS was poorly designed; the only way it had to write to the screen was to write one character at a time per call into the BIOS. And calling into the BIOS was kind of slow (remember we are talking about computers three orders of magnitude slower than current computers... 4.7 MHz processor).
Since the BIOS was too slow, people didn't use it. Instead, they figured out the address of the screen buffer in the graphics card, and just wrote the desired text directly into the buffer. So much faster!
But this meant that all the most popular software for DOS was not using the BIOS, and had a particular hardware dependency hard-coded. And the standard address for the frame buffer just happened to be 640K. (Well, there were two addresses, depending on whether the user had a mono or color card, but 640K was the lower of the two.) The address was chosen back in the days when RAM was really expensive, and computers might only have 64K or even less. So, nobody saw a problem coming... and besides, everyone was going to be using the BIOS, right? So you should be able to move the graphics card, change the BIOS, and all the software still would work. Whoops.
With the benefit of hindsight, what should have happened was: a DOS program uses the BIOS to query the address of the frame buffer, so the graphics card can move around anywhere in memory. And the BIOS should have had a "write whole string" function from the beginning. (Much later versions of the BIOS had a "write whole string" function but I don't think any popular software ever used it, as it was not available in the giant installed base of old DOS computers.)
The Good Old Days! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Man rages against machine because he can't figure out how to set options.
Re:The Good Old Days! (Score:5, Insightful)
I still miss Reveal Codes.
Re:The Good Old Days! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Reveal Codes" is why it took me zero seconds to learn HTML. It took longer to wrap my head around "save it here, with this name, something.htm (Windows 3.1 FTW), then go to your browser and 'file -> open' that file to see it" than figuring out how tags work. I was like "oh, it's just like reveal codes" and then I just had to learn the tags themselves. Marked-up plain text is one of the greatest things in computerdom.
Also (Score:5, Funny)
'I have a computer I browse the Internet with and I get my email on, and I do my taxes on. And then I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine, not connected to the Internet.
And for the ultimate in security, he also uses 8" floppies. [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:3)
The computer beside me has a 5.25" floppy drive; I needed it to read some old disks from 1988. They still work fine. :)
The 3.5" disk copies were trash...
He thinks it is not connected to the internet ... (Score:4, Funny)
. . . but curiosity got the better of those eager NSA employee fans, who have bugged the computer to know what will happen before the rest of the world . . .
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. . . but curiosity got the better of those eager NSA employee fans, who have bugged the computer to know what will happen before the rest of the world . . .
So that explains the *Beep* *Boop* *Hiss* sound he hears every time he boots up his computer these days....
Re:He thinks it is not connected to the internet . (Score:5, Insightful)
All you need to do is intercept a shipment of a VGA cable
RAGEMASTER: (see image above, right) A concealed $30 device that taps the video signal from a target's computer's VGA signal output so the NSA can see what is on a targeted desktop monitor. It is powered by a remote radar and responds by modulating the VGA red signal (which is also sent out most DVI ports) into the RF signal it re-radiates; this method of transmission is codenamed VAGRANT. RAGEMASTER is usually installed/concealed in the ferrite choke of the target cable
Same here, but more modern. (Score:3)
Not "obsolete" (Score:5, Insightful)
What does "obsolete" mean? If his writing instrument does what he needs it to do and he's happy using it, then more power to him. Who's to tell him he can't use it, or an IBM Selectric, or even a quill pen and vellum? Nothing is obsolete if it still works for your needs.
Re: (Score:3)
obsolete
adjective
1. no longer produced or used; out of date.
"the disposal of old and obsolete machinery"
synonyms: outdated, out of date, outmoded, old-fashioned, démodé, passé, out of fashion;
I think you might have had a pedantism fail.
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It's called a printer. Back in the mists of time, there used to be devices you could connect to your computer to make words and images appear on paper. Yes, ordinary sheets of paper!
If it ain't broke, don't fix it (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's working for him, then this makes sense.
What a non-story!
P.S. I assume that no words or names in his fantasy world have any accents or any characters not in the basic ASCII set. DOS WordStar is notably lacking in support for extended characters of any sort. (In fact DOS WordStar uses the high bits of characters for its own purposes, so it cannot ever work with anything beyond 7-bit ASCII.)
http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/WordStar [archiveteam.org]
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P.S. I assume that no words or names in his fantasy world have any accents or any characters not in the basic ASCII set.
Correct, the Lannisters, the Starks, the Targaryens, the Tyrells, the Greyjoys all plain English names... honestly it's a refreshing break from the high fantasy ThÃloündyir. (Oh right... neither does /.) In fact one of the main characters is named John Snow...
Re:If it ain't broke, don't fix it (Score:5, Funny)
Hye, don't knock ThÃloündyir, he was a major player in the fantasy series "The $JAk5-~T_8x7XP;Mnmw)+eQdHo'e'=Ue'y!0\HP_].Ax30{ of House B|knn_5_ctp%h$iizImAl\@*D*=9n"
Re:If it ain't broke, don't fix it (Score:5, Funny)
In fact one of the main characters is named John Snow...
You know nothing about Jon Snow!
Naming conventions of the other RR (Score:4, Informative)
the Lannisters, the Starks, the Targaryens, the Tyrells, the Greyjoys all plain English names
It is a common fantasy translation convention for the viewpoint character's culture to have plain English names. For example, the other well-known RR fantasy author based halflings' names on English naming patterns: Proudfoot, Baggins, Gamgee (from Gammidge, from earlier Gamwich), Brandybuck, etc. (No, Elijah Wood isn't related to Zak Bagans.)
honestly it's a refreshing break from the high fantasy [Unicode fail]
Tolkien's elves spoke a language analogus to Romance, and Romance languages have diacritics.
Re:If it ain't broke, don't fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
"WordStar is notably lacking in support for extended characters of any sort."
Like Slashdot 25 years later?
Re:If it ain't broke, don't fix it (Score:5, Funny)
DOS WordStar is notably lacking in support for extended characters of any sort.
If there's one thing Martin doesn't need, it's more characters.
some one is preparing reader (Score:2)
for a big delay. Oh... I was Just about to print the book when my ancient computer died. Oh well, talk to me in 5 years.
*giggles on his way to the bank*
1,000 trailer trucks filled with clay tablets ... (Score:5, Funny)
The publishers I've dealt with won't accept a written manuscript. You must submit it electronically.
The rules are different for you and I and GRRM. If he showed up at a publisher with a 1,000 trailer trucks filled with clay tablets for book 6 they would sign a deal and cut him a check.
The man (Score:2)
Whaaaaat? (Score:2)
He (gasp) uses an OLD version of Windows because it (gasp) DOES the JOB? He must be some kind of criminal!
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The Clippy version (Score:5, Funny)
"It looks like you're trying to write a newsletter about incestuous elves. Would you like assistance?"
Whatever works. (Score:2)
I'd be one to use WordPerfect 5, because of its bare minimum UI in edit mode.
Well I am shocked... (Score:2)
...that he does his own taxes.
Doesn't this Game of Thrones gig pay enough for him to hire an accountant?
Re: (Score:3)
You don't stay rich by doing you own taxes, either.
Re:Well I am shocked... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because you have money doesn't mean you need to throw it away on someone who does little more than primary school level maths.
The math is the easy part. But understanding the tax code: now that's a bitch.
writers write, right (Score:3)
When asked for advice on "how to become a writer" - most professional writers will come back with some form of "write something, then write something else, then write some more." A big part of the writing process is figuring out when, where, and how you are able to write. i.e. The tools you use to write shouldn't get in the way of your writing (the second most popular tip is "when you aren't writing - read")
if Mark Zuckerberg were to come out and say that he is using a Commodore 64 or TRS-80 to work on Facebook - that would be unusual...
Mr. Martin's writing process has the benefit of being almost 100% secure (maybe Quentin Tarantino needs a downgrade [reddit.com])
Auto-Guess == Auto-Mess (Score:3)
Although one can turn off Microsoft Word's annoying "auto-guess" and "smart replace" features, I've found you have to do it in two different places, do it to each replacement character or sequence, and finding those two places is not intuitive.
Ideally, Microsoft would make a single button for "turn off ALL auto-guess and auto-replacement features". But that's not the Microsoft way: they want you to become dependent on auto-guess such that you'll miss it on competitor products and come running back to Mother Microsoft.
Their stupid "smart quotes" with the forward and backward lean are probably the biggest pet-peeve auto-shit feature of MS. If you paste such text into different products, it often renders them all wrong. MS's solution: "Only use MS products with MS text and everything will be just fine".
MS's behavior often demonstrates the stupid side of capitalism: naive customer manipulation, standards-rigging, monopolies, long-term dependency, bait-and-switch, FUD PR, etc. (I'm not saying there are no upsides to capitalism, but MS sure does a bang-up job of reminding one about the down-sides; if they bother to look around.)
Dear developers: STOP HELPING ME! (Score:5, Insightful)
George Martin said it, but I feel like screaming this about a dozen times a day. Don't change my words, my punctuation, or my URL. Don't suggest sites I might want to visit, items I might find interesting, or settings more befitting someone my age. Don't give me the ability to change all things *trivial* (e.g. appearance) but nothing that matters. If you're going to help, help me fix real *problems* and not just appearances. ("Ohhh, Microsoft helped me fix my network problem!" - said No one, ever).
In short, BUZZ OFF (And get off my lawn).
20 years of editor development hasn't helped (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
or Scrivener that's designed for writers, write a section and store it away for later and assemble your bits, chapters, ideas afterwards.
Add a document management system and an inbuilt-;'snapshot' system and you have a lot ore power than, say, with Word.
Re:It kinda makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Some authors just keep using what they started with and refuse to progress over a sense of self-superiority. Nothing he is complaining about can't be disabled in Word. Plus he would have features that would greatly aid his writing. He's purposely creating risk unless he prints out his work on paper daily of losing what he wrote. He causes publishers headaches as they have to take his files convert them to something useable. He makes them millions so they allow his 'quirks' but he's probably one of a very v
Re: (Score:2)
KVM...
Keyboard? AT keyboard. check.
Video? VGA. check.
Mouse? serial mouse. check.
... so technically yes. Or is that not the KVM you expected?
Re: (Score:2)
Probabl8y a Model M.
Re: (Score:3)
You're right, software doesn't age, but attackers will eventually find security holes in that software. You can continue to run Windows XP if you wish, but don't expect that software to get patched or have any other support. Do you think Mr. Martin could possible get support for WordStar?
Re: (Score:2)
I do pretty much all of my text editing(coding etc) with JOE as well. I too started out as a Slackware user in the mid 90s. I had jumped straight from DOS(where I was used to WordStar) to Slackware, so JOE made me feel pretty much at home...20 years later, I'm still using JOE.
Re:somebody make a dragon for dos joke (Score:5, Funny)
When Smaug came to the Lonely Mountain, he Terminated and stayed resident.
Re:Dear George R R. Martin (Score:4, Interesting)
I would be hesitant about classifying him as a 'grumpy old man.' As the interview pointed out, he does use more modern software for non-writing tasks. He simply chooses to use an older computer for his writing because it does what he needs and it doesn't interfere with his work.
The thing with new computers, as with any other technology, is that they have benefits and drawbacks. Writers commonly cite distractions as a problem. These include everything from the urge to edit or format their writing to early, to temptations like the Internet. (Heck, some readers prefer printed books and dedicated ereaders to avoid distractions.) In other cases, writers don't want to mess with their workflow once they have figured out something that works. None of this involves being a grumpy old man, anti-technology, or whatever else you choose to label it as.
The other thing is that we're talking about production machines here. Many people avoid upgrading production machines because there is a lot of overhead to deal with. For example, turning off all of those features is something that you may have to perform with each software upgrade and it is almost certainly something that you have to perform with each hardware upgrade. If you are in the middle of a project, or picking up on an old project, data must be transferred between machines (in the case of hardware upgrades) and there may be issues with the portability of your files between different versions of the software (in the case of software upgrades). While the latter probably isn't an issue for a novelist upgrading between versions of their word processor, it is certainly true for an author who is switching word processors (which Martin would have had to do at some point if he wanted to stay current) and it is true for people who create more complex documents.
Now if Martin was griping about his publisher being unable to handle WordStar documents while expressing a fear of modern computers, you may have a point. The thing is, he isn't. Something tells me that the people who are translating his writing into a book aren't complaining about this quirk either -- if for no other reason than Martin's success.
Re: (Score:3)
One can tell you have probably never written anything longer than a snarky comment comprising of a handfull of sentences on /.
If by this you infer that Martin is a 'Grumpy old man' then you have to be, at least mentally and intellectually, a 'Hasty immature child'.
Wordperfect on DOS was close to perfect for writing. WordStar was not far behind and, in fact, provided the virtually standard program editor keystrokes on microcomputers for many years. You could write as the muse took you, never needing to faff