Well, the subject of the article is the potential failure of the Wii, so I made a point about that and ignored the entire "the GC didn't fail!" argument, because it would basically have been offtopic. The story isn't about whether the GC and N64 were profitable or not, after all.
But you're quite correct, not much use arguing about it. I'll cease now.
Ummm, so selling slightly fewer units than the Xbox and making money is a failure, while shipping slightly more and losing money is a success? I find your inherent statement that the Gamecube was a failure a little unreal... and I've never owned one.
It's certainly not *my* inherent statement. I'm perfectly aware that Nintendo always did very well financially, and personally, I've had lots of fun with my Gamecube. I consider myself a pretty casual gamer too, I simply don't find enough time to be gaming all the time.
I was merely going along with the tone of the article, which suggested that the N64 and the GC had failed because they were picked up by relatively few gamers. It's TFA you should be arguing against rather than me.
It seems to me that TFA is just trying to cash in on the current Wii frenzy. It's the old trick: Write something controversial, watch it get slashdotted before long, and watch the ad revenue flow in.
Personally, I'm unconvinced. IMHO, the Gamecube failed due to two points. It was underpowered compared to the XBox and the PS2, but yet didn't have enough innovative features to really differentiate itself from the competition. And, secondly, there weren't all that many games for it. The N64, too, suffered from this.
With the Wii, Nintendo has already taken care of those points upfront. Not only are we going to have tons of classic games from older consoles, a lot of vendors have also already pledged support for the Wii. And as for being underpowered, well, yes, the Wii isn't as powerful as the XBox360 and the PS3, but the sheer freshness of its gameplay and its innovative games should more than make up for it. Especially since the Wii is being marketed as the "console for everyone". If Nintendo's strategy works, a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise have bought a console will buy a Wii, and they won't care about sheer raw power. And neither will Nintendo fanboys.
So I don't see why the Wii should suffer from the same problems as the N64 and the Gamecube.
KDE and GNOME merging would be a horrible idea.
First, for technical reasons: GNOME is constructed on GTK, mostly in C (and, lately, C# / Mono). KDE is built on QT and mostly C++. If both projects somehow merged, you'd either end up with having to throw one of the toolkits out of the window, or you'd end up having a desktop environment that requires two toolkits. Yes, you might argue that most modern Linux desktops have both toolkits installed already anyway. But a desktop environment that is built on more than one base just wouldn't make a lot of sense and would most likely be cumbersome to develop for. The fact that you'd have two programming languages (albeit related ones) probably wouldn't help that much, either.*
And as for just dropping one of the toolkits and languages - you'd have to more or less re-write roughly a gazillion applications from scratch just to fit into the new scheme. Hmm. I've heard of better ideas.
You could say the same about Human Interface Guidelines. You'd definitely need to throw one set out of the window, and make non-trivial changes to the interfaces of countless programmes.
* Yes, I do know that other languages are occasionally involved, and some projects already do mix C and C++ in some ways. I'm simplifying things a bit here on purpose.
Then, there's the fact that the two projects follow a completely different design mentality. Now, me, personally, I've never liked GNOME much. There's some elements I like and it's definitely "tidier" than KDE in many ways and there's lots of delicious eyecandy, but there's also tons of stuff I dislike. I hate that stupid menu bar at the top, I hate the awful file dialogues, I hate the way preferences are dumbed down, I consider Nautilus to be useless both in spatial and in browser mode, gEdit is a sorry excuse for a text editor in my eyes. KDE on the other hand - I love the way I can set it up just the way I like it, I find it much more usable than GNOME, IOSlaves and the high degree of integration between the different programmes have made my life much easier, JuK is a nice little jukebox, Konqueror a gorgeous file manager and web browser, Kopete is much nicer than gAIM nowadays, Kate is the best text editor I've ever seen - and so on, and so on. Remember, that's just my personal preference, I'm definitely not trying to start a flamewar. Because for everyone who agrees with me, there's someone who prefers GNOME for his own personal reasons and hates KDE. And that's OK. Choice is one of the best things about FOSS. Somehow merging GNOME and KDE would destroy much of that choice.
So, do I advocate the Linux desktop being fragmented forevermore? Actually, I don't, even though I think a KDE/GNOME merger would be terrible. I think what we need is not one unified desktop, we need standards that most Linux desktops adhere to. We need the different desktops to be as interoperable as possible. To a large degree, they already are - I can run gAIM or GIMP under KDE just fine. And things are getting better still. If you haven't heard of it yet, you should check out the impressive desktop standardisation work of The Portland Project.
To sum it all up: A merger would be near-impossible to pull off and a crappy idea because it requires lots of re-writing, destroys choice and makes things more difficult for developers. However, common standards are extremely useful. IMHO, the Linux desktop is already heading the right way as it is, no matter whether you use GNOME or KDE or something else!
Honestly, this seems to me like the sort of solution that only makes things more complicated than the original problem, and yet still doesn't really address a major issue - some articles contain misinformation which is believed to be true by most people, so they'd just flag it as correct.
As for the problem of vandalism, that can be fought more effectively by having "stable" versions of Wiki articles which have been verified as unvandalised.
Making the ad accessible hasn't got much to do with making the shop more accessible - yes, I agree. In the same way, whether Target makes its website accessible or not has little to do with Target making its actual shops accessible. Remember, the website isn't actually *the business*. Okay, you might argue that you can also buy things directly over the Target website, so wouldn't that make it a part of the business? Depends how you look at it - but then again, lots of ads, posters, flyers, etc. contain direct order information, or website URLs or phone numbers that can be used to buy something or get further information about a service. Thus, I'd say that - at least for places like Target, who don't rely on the internet completely for their business and have actual real life shops - a website is very roughly equal to flyers, ads, posters, whatever. Even if making their printed advertising material more accessible would take more effort than making their website accessible. Plus, I wouldn't put "not being able to use Target's website" on the same level as "hardly being able to partake in public life", even though it is an obvious inconvenience.
Once again, I do strongly believe that making websites accessible to as wide an audience as possible is an excellent practice. But the idea of a government just stepping in and forcing you to do so doesn't appeal to me in the least, especially if you consider that in general, having the government messing around with internet matters has rarely yielded good results.
Of course it's sensible to have a website that is accessible by the visually impaired - but should you be forced to do so by law? That bit doesn't make much sense at all to me. At the end of the day, it's *your* website, and it's *your* decision to whom you want to make it easily accessible. If you decide to leave out potential customers who are blind - your own fault.
I mean, if that's a perfectly sensible ruling, why don't we go a step further and create a law for all advertising materials, catalogues, flyers, posters, to be also readable in braille? And why don't we require everyone to subtitle their TV ads with respect to the deaf?
Then, would this only concern Target's website? Or only the websites of big businesses? Or only business websites? Or every single website out there? What would the criteria be?
Don't get me wrong, I very much approve of making content accessible to the visually (or similarly) impaired. But I don't think it's the governments job to *force* you to do so.
While I do agree with your basic point somewhat, I think you're misunderstanding the point the original poster is trying to make. The way I read it, he's not suggesting that the law should go after the "Chinese/Romanian/Kenyan/Palestinian/et al malware authors", but rather the businesses that ultimately try to profit from the malware and try to advertise through spamming.
> This has in my experience been proven unfounded with Yahoo, Google, eBay and slashdot as examples. Bring on the ads.
That's different. Yahoo, Google, eBay, Slashdot, etc. show ads as part of a website. You can just ignore them, you can still access the content of the website you're looking at while the ads are on-screen (and nowadays, you can easily block them if they bother you that much, too).
YouTube would most likely have to integrate their ads with their videos. An ad before a video starts actually *keeps* you from looking at the content you want, actively takes away your time and can't be ignored (and probably not blocked without blocking the actual video, either). In other words, it'd be far more annoying and intrusive than the ads on the websites you mentioned.
Excuse me, but IMHO, you most certainly *can*. Teachers rarely can, but that bit isn't up to them, anyway. It's up to the parents. Children are naturally curious and eager to learn. If you are a parent, you can encourage your child to ask questions, you can answer the questions, you can capture your child's interest, you can teach your child to use its mind. You can do all sorts of stuff to teach your children that learning can be fun and rewarding very early on. The sad fact, however, is that many parents today don't tend to do that - they'd rather leave their children to be raised mainly by the franchises of the media and big corporation - Disney, Barbie, the X-Box, Britney Spears, you just name it. By the time these parents' children get to school, it's already too late.
(PS: I'm not advocating trying to push your children to success as hard as possible. It's been time and time again before that putting too much pressure on them is very likely to backfire. I'm not about pushing children, I'm on about teaching them to follow their natural curiosity and nurturing their natural instinct for learning.)
Seriously though, that's why I wrote "organised gambling" in my original posting. I'm aware that humans have always loved to make a bet or roll a dice. But casinos, one-armed bandits or even organised high-stakes card games came along centuries after alcoholic beverages did.
> Is online gambling the Alcohol Prohibition of the 21st century?
Online gambling is hardly the alcohol prohibition of the 21st century - organised gambling isn't nearly as widespread and deeply rooted in Western culture as consuming alcohol is.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the subject of the article is the potential failure of the Wii, so I made a point about that and ignored the entire "the GC didn't fail!" argument, because it would basically have been offtopic. The story isn't about whether the GC and N64 were profitable or not, after all.
But you're quite correct, not much use arguing about it. I'll cease now.
Ummm, so selling slightly fewer units than the Xbox and making money is a failure, while shipping slightly more and losing money is a success? I find your inherent statement that the Gamecube was a failure a little unreal... and I've never owned one.
It's certainly not *my* inherent statement. I'm perfectly aware that Nintendo always did very well financially, and personally, I've had lots of fun with my Gamecube. I consider myself a pretty casual gamer too, I simply don't find enough time to be gaming all the time.
I was merely going along with the tone of the article, which suggested that the N64 and the GC had failed because they were picked up by relatively few gamers. It's TFA you should be arguing against rather than me.
It seems to me that TFA is just trying to cash in on the current Wii frenzy. It's the old trick: Write something controversial, watch it get slashdotted before long, and watch the ad revenue flow in.
Personally, I'm unconvinced. IMHO, the Gamecube failed due to two points. It was underpowered compared to the XBox and the PS2, but yet didn't have enough innovative features to really differentiate itself from the competition. And, secondly, there weren't all that many games for it. The N64, too, suffered from this.
With the Wii, Nintendo has already taken care of those points upfront. Not only are we going to have tons of classic games from older consoles, a lot of vendors have also already pledged support for the Wii.
And as for being underpowered, well, yes, the Wii isn't as powerful as the XBox360 and the PS3, but the sheer freshness of its gameplay and its innovative games should more than make up for it. Especially since the Wii is being marketed as the "console for everyone". If Nintendo's strategy works, a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise have bought a console will buy a Wii, and they won't care about sheer raw power. And neither will Nintendo fanboys.
So I don't see why the Wii should suffer from the same problems as the N64 and the Gamecube.
KDE and GNOME merging would be a horrible idea. First, for technical reasons: GNOME is constructed on GTK, mostly in C (and, lately, C# / Mono). KDE is built on QT and mostly C++. If both projects somehow merged, you'd either end up with having to throw one of the toolkits out of the window, or you'd end up having a desktop environment that requires two toolkits. Yes, you might argue that most modern Linux desktops have both toolkits installed already anyway. But a desktop environment that is built on more than one base just wouldn't make a lot of sense and would most likely be cumbersome to develop for. The fact that you'd have two programming languages (albeit related ones) probably wouldn't help that much, either.* And as for just dropping one of the toolkits and languages - you'd have to more or less re-write roughly a gazillion applications from scratch just to fit into the new scheme. Hmm. I've heard of better ideas. You could say the same about Human Interface Guidelines. You'd definitely need to throw one set out of the window, and make non-trivial changes to the interfaces of countless programmes. * Yes, I do know that other languages are occasionally involved, and some projects already do mix C and C++ in some ways. I'm simplifying things a bit here on purpose. Then, there's the fact that the two projects follow a completely different design mentality. Now, me, personally, I've never liked GNOME much. There's some elements I like and it's definitely "tidier" than KDE in many ways and there's lots of delicious eyecandy, but there's also tons of stuff I dislike. I hate that stupid menu bar at the top, I hate the awful file dialogues, I hate the way preferences are dumbed down, I consider Nautilus to be useless both in spatial and in browser mode, gEdit is a sorry excuse for a text editor in my eyes. KDE on the other hand - I love the way I can set it up just the way I like it, I find it much more usable than GNOME, IOSlaves and the high degree of integration between the different programmes have made my life much easier, JuK is a nice little jukebox, Konqueror a gorgeous file manager and web browser, Kopete is much nicer than gAIM nowadays, Kate is the best text editor I've ever seen - and so on, and so on. Remember, that's just my personal preference, I'm definitely not trying to start a flamewar. Because for everyone who agrees with me, there's someone who prefers GNOME for his own personal reasons and hates KDE. And that's OK. Choice is one of the best things about FOSS. Somehow merging GNOME and KDE would destroy much of that choice. So, do I advocate the Linux desktop being fragmented forevermore? Actually, I don't, even though I think a KDE/GNOME merger would be terrible. I think what we need is not one unified desktop, we need standards that most Linux desktops adhere to. We need the different desktops to be as interoperable as possible. To a large degree, they already are - I can run gAIM or GIMP under KDE just fine. And things are getting better still. If you haven't heard of it yet, you should check out the impressive desktop standardisation work of The Portland Project. To sum it all up: A merger would be near-impossible to pull off and a crappy idea because it requires lots of re-writing, destroys choice and makes things more difficult for developers. However, common standards are extremely useful. IMHO, the Linux desktop is already heading the right way as it is, no matter whether you use GNOME or KDE or something else!
Honestly, this seems to me like the sort of solution that only makes things more complicated than the original problem, and yet still doesn't really address a major issue - some articles contain misinformation which is believed to be true by most people, so they'd just flag it as correct.
As for the problem of vandalism, that can be fought more effectively by having "stable" versions of Wiki articles which have been verified as unvandalised.
Actually, Limewire (and its fork, FrostWire) access the Gnutella network, IIRC.
And let's not forget... for Linux, there's the ever-excellent aMule client to access the network.
Making the ad accessible hasn't got much to do with making the shop more accessible - yes, I agree. In the same way, whether Target makes its website accessible or not has little to do with Target making its actual shops accessible. Remember, the website isn't actually *the business*.
Okay, you might argue that you can also buy things directly over the Target website, so wouldn't that make it a part of the business? Depends how you look at it - but then again, lots of ads, posters, flyers, etc. contain direct order information, or website URLs or phone numbers that can be used to buy something or get further information about a service. Thus, I'd say that - at least for places like Target, who don't rely on the internet completely for their business and have actual real life shops - a website is very roughly equal to flyers, ads, posters, whatever. Even if making their printed advertising material more accessible would take more effort than making their website accessible.
Plus, I wouldn't put "not being able to use Target's website" on the same level as "hardly being able to partake in public life", even though it is an obvious inconvenience.
Once again, I do strongly believe that making websites accessible to as wide an audience as possible is an excellent practice. But the idea of a government just stepping in and forcing you to do so doesn't appeal to me in the least, especially if you consider that in general, having the government messing around with internet matters has rarely yielded good results.
Of course it's sensible to have a website that is accessible by the visually impaired - but should you be forced to do so by law? That bit doesn't make much sense at all to me. At the end of the day, it's *your* website, and it's *your* decision to whom you want to make it easily accessible. If you decide to leave out potential customers who are blind - your own fault.
I mean, if that's a perfectly sensible ruling, why don't we go a step further and create a law for all advertising materials, catalogues, flyers, posters, to be also readable in braille? And why don't we require everyone to subtitle their TV ads with respect to the deaf?
Then, would this only concern Target's website? Or only the websites of big businesses? Or only business websites? Or every single website out there? What would the criteria be?
Don't get me wrong, I very much approve of making content accessible to the visually (or similarly) impaired. But I don't think it's the governments job to *force* you to do so.
While I do agree with your basic point somewhat, I think you're misunderstanding the point the original poster is trying to make. The way I read it, he's not suggesting that the law should go after the "Chinese/Romanian/Kenyan/Palestinian/et al malware authors", but rather the businesses that ultimately try to profit from the malware and try to advertise through spamming.
> This has in my experience been proven unfounded with Yahoo, Google, eBay and slashdot as examples. Bring on the ads.
That's different. Yahoo, Google, eBay, Slashdot, etc. show ads as part of a website. You can just ignore them, you can still access the content of the website you're looking at while the ads are on-screen (and nowadays, you can easily block them if they bother you that much, too).
YouTube would most likely have to integrate their ads with their videos. An ad before a video starts actually *keeps* you from looking at the content you want, actively takes away your time and can't be ignored (and probably not blocked without blocking the actual video, either). In other words, it'd be far more annoying and intrusive than the ads on the websites you mentioned.
> You can't teach an interest in learning.
Excuse me, but IMHO, you most certainly *can*. Teachers rarely can, but that bit isn't up to them, anyway. It's up to the parents.
Children are naturally curious and eager to learn. If you are a parent, you can encourage your child to ask questions, you can answer the questions, you can capture your child's interest, you can teach your child to use its mind. You can do all sorts of stuff to teach your children that learning can be fun and rewarding very early on.
The sad fact, however, is that many parents today don't tend to do that - they'd rather leave their children to be raised mainly by the franchises of the media and big corporation - Disney, Barbie, the X-Box, Britney Spears, you just name it. By the time these parents' children get to school, it's already too late.
(PS: I'm not advocating trying to push your children to success as hard as possible. It's been time and time again before that putting too much pressure on them is very likely to backfire. I'm not about pushing children, I'm on about teaching them to follow their natural curiosity and nurturing their natural instinct for learning.)
Good one...!
Seriously though, that's why I wrote "organised gambling" in my original posting. I'm aware that humans have always loved to make a bet or roll a dice. But casinos, one-armed bandits or even organised high-stakes card games came along centuries after alcoholic beverages did.
> Is online gambling the Alcohol Prohibition of the 21st century? Online gambling is hardly the alcohol prohibition of the 21st century - organised gambling isn't nearly as widespread and deeply rooted in Western culture as consuming alcohol is.