New outside Graphics Engine for PSx?

[Shiv Mathur]

@ Hardy   --   :mrgreen:

It probably started in America.

[Hardy Heinlin]

No, it started in Austria or Germany ten years ago, mainly in chat rooms. Many German speakers think the English "at" has the same meaning as the German "an".

My allergy, however, is rather visual than lingual :-)

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P.S.: I mean the usage of @ when adressing a person. Of course, when using "at" for a place or a value (@FL310), it's something completely different.

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

_Hardy: we can use visually less imposing characters   :mrgreen:

With many chat-type programs, like Skype, you can set up alerts that leave the chat going in the background and only pop up alert boxes if some string appears in the discussion. I regularly make use of the string "jeroen" to allow people to attract my attention if I have pushed the discussion to the background. If the convention "@jeroen" would be followed by everybody in the discussion when they want to address that person, and not just talk about him/her ("an hour ago, jeroen said that...") it would become useful.

And I also tend to use @somebody more and more when making action point lists, especially if they are embedded in meeting minutes. I used to underline names where needed, but underlining becomes related to clickable links in modern texts. The visually strong @ sign works well for these purposes.

Interesting details from Wikipedia:

On some online forums without proper threaded discussions, @ is used to denote a reply; for instance: "@Jane" to respond to a comment Jane made earlier.

In microblogging (such as Twitter and Laconica-based microblogs), @ before the user name is used to send publicly readable replies (e.g. "@otheruser: Message text here"). The blog and client software can automatically interpret these as links to the user in question. This use of the @ symbol was also recently rolled out to Facebook users on September 15, 2009.

[Hardy Heinlin]

The visually strong @ sign

That's the point. It's strong and looks like a bullet, a gun hole, a fist, an excrement, placed or thrown at the neck of a person to get attention. Not so nice for my taste :-)

Sure, it is more and more used to adress a person. But also note that this Wikipedia article is a mess. It has very few sources and most of it is original research of Wiki editors (everybody can edit it).


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P.S.: Of course, I'm not saying that everyone who uses the @ has the above intentions :-) (e.g. sometimes it's used to express a distance to the person). And: Not everything I say needs to be taken seriously :-)

[Will]

Interesting.  I interpret it phonetically rather than visually.  Instead of "looking like a fist," I read it as "sounding like the word 'at'."  Although, now that Hardy has called my attention to it's shape, I think it looks like a Spiegelei.

[Shiv Mathur]

Or ... now th@ Hardy has called my @tention to it's shape ...

Sorry - just being silly, which I enjoy !
Shiv

[Hardy Heinlin]

I read it as "sounding like the word 'at'."

At Will:

:-) What verb would you, as a native English speaker, combine with "at"? Talk at you, speak at you ...? Shouldn't that be "talk to" or "speak to" ... or a "question for" instead "question at"?

The only verbs I combine with "at" are "shout at", "point at", "throw at" ...


Cheers,

@-@ardy

[Will]

For Hardy:  Meanings are mutable.  "Jim was speaking at John" implies a mild hostility on Jim's part; it implies a deliberate interpersonal distance.  However, the meaning if "@John" in my mind, is this: "The following is for John," which is affectively/emotionally neutral.

I suppose we could combine the brevity of "@" with the affect-neutrality of "For" by using a 4.

4Jeroen: What do you think?

Will

[Shiv Mathur]

What's wrong with:

"Jeroen, what do you think?" ?

Shiv

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

A funny thing: I always thought that the Dutch alternative word for the @ sign, "apestaartje", was a nice play on the  "a" and the monkey tail. I just learned from the Wikipedia article that "monkey tail" seems also an accepted English term, but without the obvious "a" starting vowel.

Shiv: nothing wrong, but if people are in a hurry or otherwise challenged for precise reading it is easier to miss such an in-line reference.

[Will]

Shiv, not that I feel strongly about this... but in a thread like this one, just throwing your name at the beginning of my post, like I just did, makes it feel a little like I've hijacked the thread for our personal conversation.  That's opposed to starting with '4Shiv,' or '@Shiv,' which is an acknowledgement that this is a personal communication taking place within a larger conversation.  Perhaps '@Shiv' really means "Greetings everyone in the thread, this message is for Shiv."

Like I said though, I don't feel strongly about it.  

I'm guessing that most people here don't use Twitter?  With Twitter, '@' actually directs a message to the feed of a particular person, like '#' identifies searchable tag words.

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

I will use Twitter when I have sufficient material to tweet.

I also don't have a YouTube channel, for the same reason.

I don't have a Facebook page, as in .nl most people (still) have a Hyves page, and next to this I don't have sufficient material to populate the friends garden with.

So I just remain old-fashioned at (!) www.hoppie.nl for now  :mrgreen:

[Hardy Heinlin]

By the way (here's again a slight topic shift) ... "Hijacking a thread", as it's sometimes called in the Internet, is, for my taste, not a bad thing per se. I think it's not bad at all. A comment like this, or my other comment before, is nothing but an additional thought in a discussion, and food for more. Since this forum has intentionally only two sections with two very vague topic palettes, it helps spin an idea or a thought further and further without the need to interrupt this creative process by any categorical thinking.

I think, "hijacking a thread" is only frustrating if an asking guy hopes for an answer, sees a reply, reads the reply and is surprised that the reply has nothing to do with the original question. But as long as the original question is not being ignored, or maybe if it's not even an urgent question, then it's ... well, not so frustrating :-)


Regards,

|-|ardy

[Holger Wende]

@

Hello,

You may call me old fashioned but I still prefer "letter style" emails and forum posts, i.e. including proper address and greeting at the end.

Of course I understand that rapidly typewriting in e.g. chat rooms to keep up with the communication might require to abbreviate as much as possble and symbols to easily identify certain chat sections.

But what about a post without any address? Is this better/worse than a post starting with @name, ...
Just a thought from an old-fashioned man    

Best regards, Holger

[Holger Wende]

My allergy, however, is rather visual than lingual :-)

Hi Hardy,

Maybe the following helps to have a more "positive" feeling about this "strong" symbol.
Other countries use quite friendly names for the @-sign:

Greece: To pap'aki' (duck)
Czech Republic: zavináč (rollmop, Rollmops)
Turkey: gul (rose)

Found at Leo

Regards, Holger

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Ha. I like "rolmops". Most people would be totally offended by this typical Dutch specialty.

[Richard McDonald Woods]

@Richard: Out of curiosity, what does the PMDG<>MSFS connection have to do with PSX?  Can't they be separate? In other words, can't you use a PSX<>Outerra/Flightgear rig with BAV?  Or is BAV somehow dependent on MSFS?

@Will,
BAV have Pegasus which is the link between MSFS and the BAV flight server. We also cannot get away from the fact that there is a great deal of airport scenery available for MSFS. I guess that MSFS will continue to be a major element of users' rigs for several years yet.

I cannot believe that there will be any pre-PSX release activity to support PSX directly. So, to enable the use of PSX in a MSFS environment, it will be necessary to continue to make Pegasus think that MSFS is the 'aircraft', when it is really PSX. This will be achieved by the successor to Visual744.

This combination, I am sure, will enable some penetration of PSX into the existing MSFS base. I shall certainly be a leader into this with BAV.

Cheers, Richard

[Will]

Hi, just curious, are there any 3rd party visual solutions being considered that don't require a second networked computer?  I had been thinking that was the way everyone was envisioning the PSX platform when it's built, but I don't know what the state of the art is these days.

[Hardy Heinlin]

If that 3rd party scenery generator window fills only half of the screen or less (which I assume will be the case if you want to see the PSX panels at the same time), and if that single computer is a fast duo or quad core, then the frame rate should be good, I assume. PSX doesn't take all resources, and its network system works also on one single computer (you can run multiple PSX instances on one computer).

Cheers,

|-|ardy

[Will]

Aha, okay.  Good to know you've got all bases covered.