I think it's too big to be very good as a portable device, but also too small to be as useful as a real computer. Because it's so big, there's no reason to not just use a netbook instead (which will be more functional, and cost less).
If you really dislike the iPad, it would be far more effective to harp on how the device simply isn't useful, not how it restricts freedom. The iPad has far bigger problems than the usual Apple lockdown, like its awkward form factor and price making it a device with the disadvantages of both a smartphone and a netbook, but the advantages of neither.
Presumably because different people are voicing the opinions? There are plenty of comments in this story saying that Flash is evil, spawn of the devil, violater of web pages, scourge of the internet and mortal enemy of standards-based web.
Myself, I don't give a rat's ass about any of that (and will never understand why anyone would), so yes, I would consider non-support of Flash to be a negative thing.
Of course, this device is a solution in search of a problem, with or without Flash. It's too big to really be a good portable device, at which point you may as well use a real computer (which is far more useful and powerful), or a netbook (which is more useful, powerful, and cheaper). This device will have only two good uses: replacing e-book readers, and letting hardcore Trek geeks have one of those data pads (once someone figures out how to give it an LCARS interface).
It's true that $54k is quite a bit of money, but I don't think it's valid to say that just because you can buy a particular house for that much, that "$54,000 would buy a house in her neighborhood". That statement generally is understood to mean that the amount you quote is the typical price of an item, not the lowest you can find.
No, you weren't the only one. I thought it was a pretty good game.
And I agree with your second point, as well. The people who rip on the second two Matrix movies obviously don't know a good movie when it hits them in the face, because both were quite good (the third one ranks as one of my favorite movies ever). There were some silly moments, but if you look past them at the whole movie, that was great.
The reality is that most Firefox users are those who migrated from IE; mostly likely IE6 and IE7, both woefully stagnant examples of a browser. Firefox was a big step up...
Eh. That depends entirely on when you tried it (and your needs, of course). FF 1.0, for example, was a piece of shit. I downloaded it, found that it wouldn't render half of my sites properly (and rendered slowly, to boot), and never went back to FF. Not all that long thereafter (although I don't recall exactly how long), IE 7 became available in beta form, and it added the only thing IE ever lacked for me, which was tabs. So I really wouldn't agree that FF was a step up from IE at all. It was a huge step down in its early incarnations, and while I've found it doesn't render as badly as it did back then... it simply doesn't offer anything useful that IE can't do.
However, in the last 18 months, it has been seriously lagging behind other browsers (IE aside).
I don't know if the FF devs have fixed this yet, but when IE 8 came out, FF was certainly seriously lagging behind IE. The reason? IE separated tabs into processes, and FF didn't. I hope they've fixed it since then, but the moment IE had that feature didn't and FF didn't, FF was in automatic last place (imo).
If you really think that all companies are populated with rational managers who will be convinced by their IT staff's reasons, rather than just listen to "I don't want my damn password to be 12 characters long", you are blissfully ignorant, my friend. I hope for your sake your luck holds out, but don't kid yourself that management listening to IT's advice depends wholly on the quality of the IT department.
First, you're quite correct that I'm not joking. However, I think that first of all, your example of a great night of sex being ruined is very inaccurate. In that instance, the original experience is never coming back. However, my point is that with something like a movie, the original experience is always there at your fingertips. No one is forcing you to accept a newer version, after all. In fact, people ignoring disliked changes to a beloved piece of fiction is fairly common.
Second, it's not that I don't sympathize with the Han shot first crowd, it's that I don't see what they're complaining about at all. I consider that scene such a minor, minor detail that it's more or less irrelevant. No matter which way that scene plays out, Han is a selfish, bad-ass scoundrel. In neither version of the movie can he be, at any point, called a noble character (until the end, of course). I would be understanding if there was a major change in his character, but my problem with the majority reaction to this (and everything else fans complain about in the special edition) is that in my opinion, there is no real difference.
There were a large number of missions, different craft, and of course STAR WARS! Back when Star Wars was still awesome -- before the "Special Editions" and crappy prequels. Back when the three movies you bought on VHS were the same as what was released originally in the theaters. I think some Slashdotters are starting to forget how cool Star Wars was back then. To fly in an imperial fighter, chasing after Rebel X-Wings and those damn fast A-Wings, after the music kicked in was awesome.
Star Wars is still awesome. Let's ignore the fact that the much-criticized Special Editions don't actually really change anything, and that the prequels do an even better job at the point of Star Wars than the originals do (since Star Wars was always just a flimsy excuse for a plot so we could get to the good battle scenes... not to mention that I personally find "gradual, unknowing descent into evil" a hell of a lot more compelling of a story than "generic coming of age tale"). Even if we leave that aside, and you still have a vendetta against the new stuff for some reason, you can still just ignore it, and nothing has changed. If you're incapable of doing that, that's a result of your lack of mental discipline, not Star Wars magically becoming less awesome.
I'm not trying to unload on you personally, mind you, so much as I'm just frustrated with a large portion of the fan base's hypersensitivity to stuff and crying that Star Wars has somehow "been ruined", or that George Lucas "raped [their] childhood". Lucas didn't send agents into your home, confiscate your old copies of Star Wars, and replace them with new ones. The copies these people have are exactly the same as they've always been, but somehow they're ruined? Give me a break.
Well, I don't have an AOL address, but the answer to your question is probably yes, for one simple reason: anyone who is petty enough to judge someone on the basis of having an AOL address is someone who I probably don't want to work for. After all, it's only a matter of time until they start finding equally petty things to hold against me in the workplace.
I mean, seriously. I don't even get why anyone would care about this. If someone had something wildly unprofessional, like smoothpimpdaddy@pussycentral.com, yeah, that's worthy of discriminating against. An AOL address, however, is not. It's just a domain, FFS. It doesn't tell you anything about the person except that they had AOL e-mail at one point, and they have a reason to want to continue using it.
But it's one thing to be an asshole, and it's another thing to then classify hundreds millions of women as all self-centered money-grubbing liabilities.
You are, of course, absolutely correct. Even if every single woman you've known was worthless, it doesn't follow that all women are worthless. However, you're forgetting the way experience can shift your perspective. If you've experienced nothing but worthless women, it's very, very hard to keep in mind the fact that there might be worthwhile women out there. It's irrational, but unfortunately, we're not always rational creatures.
I know this first-hand. There was a time when I was so embittered by the worthless bitches that I had known (and the ones that I watched screw over my close friends) that, in truth, I had written off the entirety of women. I knew that there were possibly good women out there, but I didn't really believe it in my heart, despite what logic told me. The only thing that shifted my perspective was knowing a woman who is not only not worthless, but is in fact a wonderful person. Having that one counter-example gives me the perspective to say "Well, even if all the other women in existence are bitches, this one isn't. Maybe there are more like her." Without that counter-example, though, I would still have a thought process much like the GP expresses.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't condemn him too harshly. He might be a sexist pig, yes, but he also might have had a string of very bad experiences which make it damn near impossible for him to achieve the proper perspective on things. Personally, I sympathize with him and hope that he's fortunate enough to meet someone who will help him realize that his statements don't universally apply.
I had both my lower wisdom teeth taken out with just a local anesthetic (since it was cheaper and I didn't need a ride afterwards). It really wasn't bad (except for when I had the second one done, they didn't give me enough anesthetic at first which hurt like a motherfucker). They took what sounded like a small rotary saw and used it to cut the tooth in half, and then pulled it out. It feels pretty damn weird to have someone tugging on your jaw that hard, simply because your brain is going "this should hurt", but it doesn't actually hurt. It wasn't really all that unpleasant, though.
Now granted, the pain from the second time before they gave me enough anesthetic pretty much guaranteed that I'll get put under if my top wisdom teeth have to come out. A mistake like that probably won't get made again, but damn, it sure hurt bad enough to make even a small risk of that level of pain worth avoiding.
Except they aren't. Unless you're referring to a jurisdiction other than the US. They tell you to turn them off during landing and takeoff, but they're not banned.
WoW is essentially the same as it's ever been, so it would be pretty hard to argue that it's Activision's fault in any case. And, like you reasonably note, one game you dislike doesn't mean you should give up on them. I really can't stand Starcraft, but I enjoyed Warcraft III a lot, so any fears I might have had (hypothetically) that Starcraft represented some kind of apocalypse of quality would have been ill-founded. No studio can please everyone with every game.
You're paying $50 per game when each has a full-length campaign (according to Blizzard). This is not nearly as bad as you're thinking. You're implying that it's as if a normal-length RTS was split into thirds and each sold at full price, but that's not the case at all.
If you think smash bros is nothing but button mashing, you've obviously never played against someone really good (and I happen to have some friends who are really good, much to my dismay as I'm not all that great). At lower skill levels, smash bros is a lot of button mashing, just like any fighting game is at low skill levels. With highly skilled players, though, smash bros is very much a "song and dance of multiple moves and mind games".
I have no idea, but it sure as hell isn't Google Voice alone doing it. When I make outbound calls using Google Voice on my Droid, it uses phone minutes, and the Google Voice app even tells you when you download it from the market that it can use phone minutes.
190MB for apps is not too shabby, the reason simply is, that the apps can store there data on the sd and almost all do it that way, so you end up with an average app size of 3-4 MB if at all. 190 MB is a lot in such an environment! [emphasis mine]
There's no need for an app to store the graphics in the same place that the app itself is stored. Plenty of developers may be used to delivering their app as a complete package, but that is not strictly necessary. Besides, the impression I got from the transcripts of the announcement was that they plan to develop a method of storing apps on the SD card, making this a non-issue (except in the meantime, while we still have to contend with limited app storage).
More importantly, as I recall Valve has in the past banned someone from playing online, which also locked them out of all their games. Not that I condone cheating online, but "nuke all the games they bought" is not the answer to that, and it really makes me uneasy that Valve would do such a thing.
The key word was local. He wants to know if he should give his developers admin rights on their machine, not to the entire network like you're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's too big to be very good as a portable device, but also too small to be as useful as a real computer. Because it's so big, there's no reason to not just use a netbook instead (which will be more functional, and cost less).
If you really dislike the iPad, it would be far more effective to harp on how the device simply isn't useful, not how it restricts freedom. The iPad has far bigger problems than the usual Apple lockdown, like its awkward form factor and price making it a device with the disadvantages of both a smartphone and a netbook, but the advantages of neither.
My sense of vocabulary is fail. Must be this ice cream.
I can honestly say that, before today, it never occurred to me to try to correlate those two events. Bravo!
Presumably because different people are voicing the opinions? There are plenty of comments in this story saying that Flash is evil, spawn of the devil, violater of web pages, scourge of the internet and mortal enemy of standards-based web.
Myself, I don't give a rat's ass about any of that (and will never understand why anyone would), so yes, I would consider non-support of Flash to be a negative thing.
Of course, this device is a solution in search of a problem, with or without Flash. It's too big to really be a good portable device, at which point you may as well use a real computer (which is far more useful and powerful), or a netbook (which is more useful, powerful, and cheaper). This device will have only two good uses: replacing e-book readers, and letting hardcore Trek geeks have one of those data pads (once someone figures out how to give it an LCARS interface).
It's true that $54k is quite a bit of money, but I don't think it's valid to say that just because you can buy a particular house for that much, that "$54,000 would buy a house in her neighborhood". That statement generally is understood to mean that the amount you quote is the typical price of an item, not the lowest you can find.
No, you weren't the only one. I thought it was a pretty good game.
And I agree with your second point, as well. The people who rip on the second two Matrix movies obviously don't know a good movie when it hits them in the face, because both were quite good (the third one ranks as one of my favorite movies ever). There were some silly moments, but if you look past them at the whole movie, that was great.
The reality is that most Firefox users are those who migrated from IE; mostly likely IE6 and IE7, both woefully stagnant examples of a browser. Firefox was a big step up...
Eh. That depends entirely on when you tried it (and your needs, of course). FF 1.0, for example, was a piece of shit. I downloaded it, found that it wouldn't render half of my sites properly (and rendered slowly, to boot), and never went back to FF. Not all that long thereafter (although I don't recall exactly how long), IE 7 became available in beta form, and it added the only thing IE ever lacked for me, which was tabs. So I really wouldn't agree that FF was a step up from IE at all. It was a huge step down in its early incarnations, and while I've found it doesn't render as badly as it did back then... it simply doesn't offer anything useful that IE can't do.
However, in the last 18 months, it has been seriously lagging behind other browsers (IE aside).
I don't know if the FF devs have fixed this yet, but when IE 8 came out, FF was certainly seriously lagging behind IE. The reason? IE separated tabs into processes, and FF didn't. I hope they've fixed it since then, but the moment IE had that feature didn't and FF didn't, FF was in automatic last place (imo).
If you really think that all companies are populated with rational managers who will be convinced by their IT staff's reasons, rather than just listen to "I don't want my damn password to be 12 characters long", you are blissfully ignorant, my friend. I hope for your sake your luck holds out, but don't kid yourself that management listening to IT's advice depends wholly on the quality of the IT department.
First, you're quite correct that I'm not joking. However, I think that first of all, your example of a great night of sex being ruined is very inaccurate. In that instance, the original experience is never coming back. However, my point is that with something like a movie, the original experience is always there at your fingertips. No one is forcing you to accept a newer version, after all. In fact, people ignoring disliked changes to a beloved piece of fiction is fairly common.
Second, it's not that I don't sympathize with the Han shot first crowd, it's that I don't see what they're complaining about at all. I consider that scene such a minor, minor detail that it's more or less irrelevant. No matter which way that scene plays out, Han is a selfish, bad-ass scoundrel. In neither version of the movie can he be, at any point, called a noble character (until the end, of course). I would be understanding if there was a major change in his character, but my problem with the majority reaction to this (and everything else fans complain about in the special edition) is that in my opinion, there is no real difference.
There were a large number of missions, different craft, and of course STAR WARS! Back when Star Wars was still awesome -- before the "Special Editions" and crappy prequels. Back when the three movies you bought on VHS were the same as what was released originally in the theaters. I think some Slashdotters are starting to forget how cool Star Wars was back then. To fly in an imperial fighter, chasing after Rebel X-Wings and those damn fast A-Wings, after the music kicked in was awesome.
Star Wars is still awesome. Let's ignore the fact that the much-criticized Special Editions don't actually really change anything, and that the prequels do an even better job at the point of Star Wars than the originals do (since Star Wars was always just a flimsy excuse for a plot so we could get to the good battle scenes... not to mention that I personally find "gradual, unknowing descent into evil" a hell of a lot more compelling of a story than "generic coming of age tale"). Even if we leave that aside, and you still have a vendetta against the new stuff for some reason, you can still just ignore it, and nothing has changed. If you're incapable of doing that, that's a result of your lack of mental discipline, not Star Wars magically becoming less awesome.
I'm not trying to unload on you personally, mind you, so much as I'm just frustrated with a large portion of the fan base's hypersensitivity to stuff and crying that Star Wars has somehow "been ruined", or that George Lucas "raped [their] childhood". Lucas didn't send agents into your home, confiscate your old copies of Star Wars, and replace them with new ones. The copies these people have are exactly the same as they've always been, but somehow they're ruined? Give me a break.
Well, I don't have an AOL address, but the answer to your question is probably yes, for one simple reason: anyone who is petty enough to judge someone on the basis of having an AOL address is someone who I probably don't want to work for. After all, it's only a matter of time until they start finding equally petty things to hold against me in the workplace.
I mean, seriously. I don't even get why anyone would care about this. If someone had something wildly unprofessional, like smoothpimpdaddy@pussycentral.com, yeah, that's worthy of discriminating against. An AOL address, however, is not. It's just a domain, FFS. It doesn't tell you anything about the person except that they had AOL e-mail at one point, and they have a reason to want to continue using it.
But it's one thing to be an asshole, and it's another thing to then classify hundreds millions of women as all self-centered money-grubbing liabilities.
You are, of course, absolutely correct. Even if every single woman you've known was worthless, it doesn't follow that all women are worthless. However, you're forgetting the way experience can shift your perspective. If you've experienced nothing but worthless women, it's very, very hard to keep in mind the fact that there might be worthwhile women out there. It's irrational, but unfortunately, we're not always rational creatures.
I know this first-hand. There was a time when I was so embittered by the worthless bitches that I had known (and the ones that I watched screw over my close friends) that, in truth, I had written off the entirety of women. I knew that there were possibly good women out there, but I didn't really believe it in my heart, despite what logic told me. The only thing that shifted my perspective was knowing a woman who is not only not worthless, but is in fact a wonderful person. Having that one counter-example gives me the perspective to say "Well, even if all the other women in existence are bitches, this one isn't. Maybe there are more like her." Without that counter-example, though, I would still have a thought process much like the GP expresses.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't condemn him too harshly. He might be a sexist pig, yes, but he also might have had a string of very bad experiences which make it damn near impossible for him to achieve the proper perspective on things. Personally, I sympathize with him and hope that he's fortunate enough to meet someone who will help him realize that his statements don't universally apply.
I had both my lower wisdom teeth taken out with just a local anesthetic (since it was cheaper and I didn't need a ride afterwards). It really wasn't bad (except for when I had the second one done, they didn't give me enough anesthetic at first which hurt like a motherfucker). They took what sounded like a small rotary saw and used it to cut the tooth in half, and then pulled it out. It feels pretty damn weird to have someone tugging on your jaw that hard, simply because your brain is going "this should hurt", but it doesn't actually hurt. It wasn't really all that unpleasant, though.
Now granted, the pain from the second time before they gave me enough anesthetic pretty much guaranteed that I'll get put under if my top wisdom teeth have to come out. A mistake like that probably won't get made again, but damn, it sure hurt bad enough to make even a small risk of that level of pain worth avoiding.
Except they aren't. Unless you're referring to a jurisdiction other than the US. They tell you to turn them off during landing and takeoff, but they're not banned.
The list is horribly organized. It lists PS3 and 360, but they're towards the bottom of the list, not with the other Madden '09 entries.
WoW is essentially the same as it's ever been, so it would be pretty hard to argue that it's Activision's fault in any case. And, like you reasonably note, one game you dislike doesn't mean you should give up on them. I really can't stand Starcraft, but I enjoyed Warcraft III a lot, so any fears I might have had (hypothetically) that Starcraft represented some kind of apocalypse of quality would have been ill-founded. No studio can please everyone with every game.
You're paying $50 per game when each has a full-length campaign (according to Blizzard). This is not nearly as bad as you're thinking. You're implying that it's as if a normal-length RTS was split into thirds and each sold at full price, but that's not the case at all.
Ah, fair enough. Sorry, I couldn't tell you were joking.
If you think smash bros is nothing but button mashing, you've obviously never played against someone really good (and I happen to have some friends who are really good, much to my dismay as I'm not all that great). At lower skill levels, smash bros is a lot of button mashing, just like any fighting game is at low skill levels. With highly skilled players, though, smash bros is very much a "song and dance of multiple moves and mind games".
I have no idea, but it sure as hell isn't Google Voice alone doing it. When I make outbound calls using Google Voice on my Droid, it uses phone minutes, and the Google Voice app even tells you when you download it from the market that it can use phone minutes.
190MB for apps is not too shabby, the reason simply is, that the apps can store there data on the sd and almost all do it that way, so you end up with an average app size of 3-4 MB if at all. 190 MB is a lot in such an environment! [emphasis mine]
There's no need for an app to store the graphics in the same place that the app itself is stored. Plenty of developers may be used to delivering their app as a complete package, but that is not strictly necessary. Besides, the impression I got from the transcripts of the announcement was that they plan to develop a method of storing apps on the SD card, making this a non-issue (except in the meantime, while we still have to contend with limited app storage).
Google Voice isn't VoIP.
More importantly, as I recall Valve has in the past banned someone from playing online, which also locked them out of all their games. Not that I condone cheating online, but "nuke all the games they bought" is not the answer to that, and it really makes me uneasy that Valve would do such a thing.
The key word was local. He wants to know if he should give his developers admin rights on their machine, not to the entire network like you're talking about.
Ah, I didn't realize that would do things concurrently. Good to know!