I dont know that "more story-based games" is a bad thing. For all the flak Modern Warfare 2 got, I thought it was an incredible game (not having played other CoD titles)-- not because of replayability or multiplayer, but because it was immersive (great graphics, compelling voice acting, responsive ally AI that felt natural) and the story was good.
And you act like we dont have games like SSB Brawl, or New Super Mario, or the Wii console, or the Wii sports games, etc (clearly all I have is a Wii:P )
Tell me, how is amazon SUPPRESSING media by simply refusing to sell it? Is refusing to promote or sell something "suppressing" it?
If so, MSNBC is censoring because they dont espouse republican viewpoints as well as democratic ones, and fox is censoring because they dont promote viewpoints that support the democrats. Everyone must support, sell, and spread all viewpoints at all times, or else they are censoring. Is that how it works?
The "outrage", as you put it, is because inflationary language like this not only unnecessarily stirs up outrage over minor issues (a store refusing to sell content that it finds objectionable is frankly a right I would defend as much as my personal right to free speech), but it also causes "outrage fatigue" and makes it harder to stir people up for LEGITIMATE issues of censorship (book burning, etc).
A vendor refusing to sell certain content in THEIR store-- space that they have to pay for and maintain-- is now "censorship"?
Is this what is known as "inflationary language"? Good grief, so what word should we now use for government-enforced book burnings, since "censorship" has been devalued to the point of worthlessness?
The problem is that games authors don't match replayability with making money.
Because replayability isnt the end-all be-all. One of the best RPG's I ever played (Golden Sun 1&2 for the GBA) has very limited replability, and very limited multiplayer; however the experience was incredible, the visuals were sharp, and the plot brought it all together. Likewise, Zelda games have never had multiplayer (with a very few exceptions, like 4 swords), but have always been about the story, or the gameplay. Replayability in those mostly came from the awesome experience of it, and the solid gameplay,
I guess what Im driving at is, you cant just say "we need to add a dash of replayability". It flows naturally from solid gameplay (and controls), and sometimes from a great story.
As for your complaints about commercial games, it is the nature of capitalism that there will be 80 bad products and 20 good products in a market of 100 products. This has always been the case in the video game market; there have been scores of dreadful games even going back to NES and earlier. Indy games arent a panacea either-- theres a reason you dont hear of many of them, and its not because theyre all hidden gems. Great games continue to be published every year, you just have to look for them.
Ever since around 2001 ish game developers have just created clones and sequels ad nauseum because they allowed publishers and marketers to too heavily influence game
Every few years I hear people talk about how there are no more good games, to which I remark that they must not be looking very hard. If you look around on Steam or at the Humble Bundle's dev's works, you will find that there are a lot of good ones floating around; and even in the major publisher circles there are good games: WoW / TBC, StarCraft 2, Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime trilogy, Super Smash brothers, Zelda Windwaker, on and on. I could probably list at least 100 games from the last 10 years that are ridiculously good and at least on par with games from the 90s (which is a major concession from me, since I consider the SNES to be the pinnacle of awesomeness).
This was a lot more reasonable than your first post, where you explicitly asserted that everyone was treatable in "hours, not years". The blog you linked contradicts that explicitly, btw.
IMHO, not good enough to not release the entire platform
How about this for rationale: Its their code and they dont owe you a darn thing.
Seriously, someone comes out with a new semi-revolutionary embedded device OS (revolutionary in that it took the market by storm and is reasonably open / easy to root), and then they release the source for the first several releases. But when they miss one, people act like theyre OWED something. You know what? Go use one of the OTHER open-source phone OSes if you feel so strongly about it.
Seriously, this sense of entitlement bugs the heck out of me. The world doesnt owe you a thing.
Now as a psychotherapist, I know that everyone is helpable and in hours rather than years.
Forgive me if I am skeptical, but it seems to be rather at odds with reality where people can struggle with depression for years-- either all other psychotherapists are inept at their job, or you are grossly underestimating what it can be like.
I dont mean to doubt that people can be talked and coached through it, it just really sounds like an exaggeration to say that you can help everyone "in hours" unless you mean simply starting the process.
What information is the Chrome browser collecting that IE9 with google suggestions doesnt collect? Or that other browser's malicious page detection, or translation services dont collect?
As for "more secretive",... Wrench -->Options --> under the hood. Uncheck the top several checkboxes, and turn off anything which offers a cloud-based service (cloud print). Grats, all of those "secretive" tracking features are now disabled.
Probably because thats been their business model for about a decade now?
Personally, Im more suspicious or wary of a service who does not seem to have a business model. How do you know DDG isnt logging your info? How do they fund their operations, if they dont get advertising revenue and its free?
At least Google is transparent about what they collect (and why), I have some reasonable expectation that theyre being truthful (due to their high visibility), and I can expect that their doors will still be open in a year (because they have a viable business model).
He also created a handle which included the company's name in it, which seems like it might be relevant. Im not sure what the law says about it, but seems like it cant help his case....
"Untruth" is not the defining characteristic of a strawman. Distorting the opposition's viewpoint into an easily refuted parody IS, and GP did not do that.
So whatever other problems his post contained, it did NOT contain any strawmen.
If someone is convinced that everything in life is meaningless, they are unlikely to have the perspective you present. It seems a little like telling someone who is depressed from a week of no sleep that they just need to "buck up"-- their mental state at that point will make your suggestion an impossibility. Depression can be like that-- you may understand objectively your depression, but that does not make it easy to simply say "Im going to stop being depressed now".
Also, a lot of people may not have the luxury of being able to afford what you suggest, and that may be part of the depression; or perhaps they are not able to leave their country (not everywhere lets you just "leave" like so many western countries do).
I dont want to justify suicide as a defensible or honorable or "right" option; but I think you trivialize what people can go through when you posit that they just need to do X to fix their problem. Theres a reason people are encouraged to seek others when they are depressed or suicidal-- sometimes people mentally trap themselves in a way that makes it nearly impossible to get out of alone. And theres a reason that people in that situation reach out only hesitantly-- its because that very state of mind makes people not want to try, or to burden others.
Slashdot is kind of like fallacies 101, with a different one on display every week. Its sort of interesting to come on and see if you can correctly name all the fallacies flying fast and loose around here.
I think this might be what we call a "straw man", but I feel like theres others packed into there as well.
Firefox developers should take responsibility for ALL instability
This sentiment would be like saying "Microsoft should take responsibility for ALL instability, even that caused by third party programs. Question, how would Mozilla (or Microsoft) do this? Do they vet all programs like Apple does, and deny some extensions the ability to run in firefox?
Why the hell would that not be hard-coded to "Hell no, do not ever track me!"
Because then noone would obey the DNT setting.
1. If you believe "Do Not Track" works, you also believe that clicking on "unsubscribe" links in mails as well as DRM works.
Aside from the huge fallacy at the end of that statement (seriously, wtf), unsubscribe DOES work for most "legitimate" spam-- which used to make up the vast majority of my inbox (microsoft newsletters, sales offers from cisco, sonicwall, hp, etc), until I unsubscribed.
Heres why it works, and why DNT will work-- if people DONT respect that, then they get blocked in a much harsher way globally-- for email, spam filters would no longer let Microsoft or Cisco newsletters thru if unsubscribes were ignored. Likewise, if DNT is ignored, im sure many people will resort to much more severe blocks-- adblock, noscript, whatever.
Which is a bummer, since getting more cakes was the entire point of rapid-release. Im sure we will be hearing Asa or whoever announce a return to longer releases-- perhaps once every 2 years, so they can get super large cakes.
Re:Version changes are the most visible evidence.
on
Firefox 9.0 Beta Available
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Mozilla Foundation is a rich, rich corporation.
Question: Where does their money come from? Would you say they have a "reliable income stream"? If you would, you probably dont know very much about them at all, since 90% of their income comes from search engine deals with one or two companies.
No one should make the mistake of thinking that work on Firefox is done mostly by volunteers.
Did you see $78.6 million worth of improvements in 2008?
And seriously, im not sure where youre going with this. Is this some "fight the man" thing? You can always vote with your wallet, by not paying for their free browser, I guess.
Honestly, what are you complaining about? It cant even be considered your money in a "trickle down" sense-- its coming from third parties for setting a default search engine. If its such a big deal to you, use IE9 or Opera or Chrome or Safari. Switching isnt hard, really-- I promise.
One condition of instability: Windows XP 32-bit with Service Pack 3, for example, becomes unstable when Firefox has taken all the available memory, and is beginning to require the OS to use virtual memory. It seems a reasonable guess that Microsoft will be slow to fix Windows instabilities since poor experiences encourage people to buy new versions
Yea, Mozilla should totally get right on fixing a Windows problem. Or are you just going way off topic, or speculating wildly? How do you even know whether this is a Windows, Firefox, or third party issue?
2) Version 7.0.1 sometimes stays in memory even though the GUI was closed.
Give it some time to flush and close the sqlite database. It should leave memory after about 10 seconds, tops, unless your computer is really awful.
Firefox often corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started.
Its sounding more and more like youve managed to hose your windows install, and are blaming it on firefox. Seriously, how is a userland app running with non-admin privileges going to "corrupt Microsoft Windows", hmmm?
4) The crashes and memory gobbling have been reported for more than 10 years, since version 0.9 of Mozilla Suite [evolt.org], before Mozilla began using the name Firefox. Firefox is still unstable even though the change reports for every version say there have been "stability improvements".
And apparently you never read the replies from the devs starting around 3.0-- Fix your damn plugins, extension memory leaks arent Mozilla's responsibility
Seriously, I have oodles of computers that I use, and I simply dont see this issue. I have a large suspicion that these few complaints I constantly see on slashdot are from people who either use messed up extensions, are blaming mozilla for wonky plugins, or have hardware / OS issues outside of Mozilla's control. Scores of people try to track down these "memory issues", and the verdict time and again seems to be "it doesnt look substantially different than any other browser".
FWIW, one of my coworkers used to run Firefox 3.x on XP with about 9 instances going, with about 20 tabs each, for days on end. Must have been working for him, one would think, and I dont think he had more than 2gb ram (Im sure he had some serious paging going on).
the US can pick you up from anywhere an render you directly to Gitmo
False, all the folks in gitmo were taken essentially from combat situations. There was one (?) citizen who ended up there, and there was a huge court battle over it (because its a military prison, and the guy was essentially an enemy combatant).
Honestly, people act like theyd prefer us to switch to "no quarter given" and stop taking prisoners.
Slashdot Mirror
I dont know that "more story-based games" is a bad thing. For all the flak Modern Warfare 2 got, I thought it was an incredible game (not having played other CoD titles)-- not because of replayability or multiplayer, but because it was immersive (great graphics, compelling voice acting, responsive ally AI that felt natural) and the story was good.
And you act like we dont have games like SSB Brawl, or New Super Mario, or the Wii console, or the Wii sports games, etc (clearly all I have is a Wii :P )
Tell me, how is amazon SUPPRESSING media by simply refusing to sell it? Is refusing to promote or sell something "suppressing" it?
If so, MSNBC is censoring because they dont espouse republican viewpoints as well as democratic ones, and fox is censoring because they dont promote viewpoints that support the democrats. Everyone must support, sell, and spread all viewpoints at all times, or else they are censoring. Is that how it works?
The "outrage", as you put it, is because inflationary language like this not only unnecessarily stirs up outrage over minor issues (a store refusing to sell content that it finds objectionable is frankly a right I would defend as much as my personal right to free speech), but it also causes "outrage fatigue" and makes it harder to stir people up for LEGITIMATE issues of censorship (book burning, etc).
A vendor refusing to sell certain content in THEIR store-- space that they have to pay for and maintain-- is now "censorship"?
Is this what is known as "inflationary language"? Good grief, so what word should we now use for government-enforced book burnings, since "censorship" has been devalued to the point of worthlessness?
Those just summaries / titles of the patents, presumably the full patents contain differences.
The problem is that games authors don't match replayability with making money.
Because replayability isnt the end-all be-all. One of the best RPG's I ever played (Golden Sun 1&2 for the GBA) has very limited replability, and very limited multiplayer; however the experience was incredible, the visuals were sharp, and the plot brought it all together. Likewise, Zelda games have never had multiplayer (with a very few exceptions, like 4 swords), but have always been about the story, or the gameplay. Replayability in those mostly came from the awesome experience of it, and the solid gameplay,
I guess what Im driving at is, you cant just say "we need to add a dash of replayability". It flows naturally from solid gameplay (and controls), and sometimes from a great story.
As for your complaints about commercial games, it is the nature of capitalism that there will be 80 bad products and 20 good products in a market of 100 products. This has always been the case in the video game market; there have been scores of dreadful games even going back to NES and earlier. Indy games arent a panacea either-- theres a reason you dont hear of many of them, and its not because theyre all hidden gems. Great games continue to be published every year, you just have to look for them.
Ever since around 2001 ish game developers have just created clones and sequels ad nauseum because they allowed publishers and marketers to too heavily influence game
Every few years I hear people talk about how there are no more good games, to which I remark that they must not be looking very hard. If you look around on Steam or at the Humble Bundle's dev's works, you will find that there are a lot of good ones floating around; and even in the major publisher circles there are good games: WoW / TBC, StarCraft 2, Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime trilogy, Super Smash brothers, Zelda Windwaker, on and on. I could probably list at least 100 games from the last 10 years that are ridiculously good and at least on par with games from the 90s (which is a major concession from me, since I consider the SNES to be the pinnacle of awesomeness).
This was a lot more reasonable than your first post, where you explicitly asserted that everyone was treatable in "hours, not years". The blog you linked contradicts that explicitly, btw.
Hogwash, next youll be telling me that our founders were European in origin, or that France has a president.
IMHO, not good enough to not release the entire platform
How about this for rationale: Its their code and they dont owe you a darn thing.
Seriously, someone comes out with a new semi-revolutionary embedded device OS (revolutionary in that it took the market by storm and is reasonably open / easy to root), and then they release the source for the first several releases. But when they miss one, people act like theyre OWED something. You know what? Go use one of the OTHER open-source phone OSes if you feel so strongly about it.
Seriously, this sense of entitlement bugs the heck out of me. The world doesnt owe you a thing.
That doesnt look at all like a fractal, however, which doesnt really help with that suggestion.
Now as a psychotherapist, I know that everyone is helpable and in hours rather than years.
Forgive me if I am skeptical, but it seems to be rather at odds with reality where people can struggle with depression for years-- either all other psychotherapists are inept at their job, or you are grossly underestimating what it can be like.
I dont mean to doubt that people can be talked and coached through it, it just really sounds like an exaggeration to say that you can help everyone "in hours" unless you mean simply starting the process.
What information is the Chrome browser collecting that IE9 with google suggestions doesnt collect? Or that other browser's malicious page detection, or translation services dont collect?
As for "more secretive",...
Wrench -->Options --> under the hood. Uncheck the top several checkboxes, and turn off anything which offers a cloud-based service (cloud print). Grats, all of those "secretive" tracking features are now disabled.
Probably because thats been their business model for about a decade now?
Personally, Im more suspicious or wary of a service who does not seem to have a business model. How do you know DDG isnt logging your info? How do they fund their operations, if they dont get advertising revenue and its free?
At least Google is transparent about what they collect (and why), I have some reasonable expectation that theyre being truthful (due to their high visibility), and I can expect that their doors will still be open in a year (because they have a viable business model).
He also created a handle which included the company's name in it, which seems like it might be relevant. Im not sure what the law says about it, but seems like it cant help his case....
"Untruth" is not the defining characteristic of a strawman. Distorting the opposition's viewpoint into an easily refuted parody IS, and GP did not do that.
So whatever other problems his post contained, it did NOT contain any strawmen.
A few thoughts.
If someone is convinced that everything in life is meaningless, they are unlikely to have the perspective you present. It seems a little like telling someone who is depressed from a week of no sleep that they just need to "buck up"-- their mental state at that point will make your suggestion an impossibility. Depression can be like that-- you may understand objectively your depression, but that does not make it easy to simply say "Im going to stop being depressed now".
Also, a lot of people may not have the luxury of being able to afford what you suggest, and that may be part of the depression; or perhaps they are not able to leave their country (not everywhere lets you just "leave" like so many western countries do).
I dont want to justify suicide as a defensible or honorable or "right" option; but I think you trivialize what people can go through when you posit that they just need to do X to fix their problem. Theres a reason people are encouraged to seek others when they are depressed or suicidal-- sometimes people mentally trap themselves in a way that makes it nearly impossible to get out of alone. And theres a reason that people in that situation reach out only hesitantly-- its because that very state of mind makes people not want to try, or to burden others.
I dont think "strawmen" describes his post-- what idea did he set up for ridicule and then tear down?
Slashdot is kind of like fallacies 101, with a different one on display every week. Its sort of interesting to come on and see if you can correctly name all the fallacies flying fast and loose around here.
I think this might be what we call a "straw man", but I feel like theres others packed into there as well.
And Im sure all of that corn was food grade, right? Like, if the cows werent eating it, we could just throw it on the shelves?
Yea, no.
Firefox developers should take responsibility for ALL instability
This sentiment would be like saying "Microsoft should take responsibility for ALL instability, even that caused by third party programs. Question, how would Mozilla (or Microsoft) do this? Do they vet all programs like Apple does, and deny some extensions the ability to run in firefox?
maybe they'll have fixed the memory leaks and quit shitting on extensions and plugins by then.
That is the most puzzling statement about Firefox I have ever seen. You have a browser with better extension support in mind?
Why the hell would that not be hard-coded to "Hell no, do not ever track me!"
Because then noone would obey the DNT setting.
1. If you believe "Do Not Track" works, you also believe that clicking on "unsubscribe" links in mails as well as DRM works.
Aside from the huge fallacy at the end of that statement (seriously, wtf), unsubscribe DOES work for most "legitimate" spam-- which used to make up the vast majority of my inbox (microsoft newsletters, sales offers from cisco, sonicwall, hp, etc), until I unsubscribed.
Heres why it works, and why DNT will work-- if people DONT respect that, then they get blocked in a much harsher way globally-- for email, spam filters would no longer let Microsoft or Cisco newsletters thru if unsubscribes were ignored. Likewise, if DNT is ignored, im sure many people will resort to much more severe blocks-- adblock, noscript, whatever.
Which is a bummer, since getting more cakes was the entire point of rapid-release. Im sure we will be hearing Asa or whoever announce a return to longer releases-- perhaps once every 2 years, so they can get super large cakes.
Mozilla Foundation is a rich, rich corporation.
Question: Where does their money come from? Would you say they have a "reliable income stream"? If you would, you probably dont know very much about them at all, since 90% of their income comes from search engine deals with one or two companies.
No one should make the mistake of thinking that work on Firefox is done mostly by volunteers.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/careers.html#feature-team
Thats the team. Anyone's guess how many people that is, and how many of them actually code, but I would wager far far more volunteers work on firefox than employees.
Did you see $78.6 million worth of improvements in 2008?
And seriously, im not sure where youre going with this. Is this some "fight the man" thing? You can always vote with your wallet, by not paying for their free browser, I guess.
Honestly, what are you complaining about? It cant even be considered your money in a "trickle down" sense-- its coming from third parties for setting a default search engine. If its such a big deal to you, use IE9 or Opera or Chrome or Safari. Switching isnt hard, really-- I promise.
One condition of instability: Windows XP 32-bit with Service Pack 3, for example, becomes unstable when Firefox has taken all the available memory, and is beginning to require the OS to use virtual memory. It seems a reasonable guess that Microsoft will be slow to fix Windows instabilities since poor experiences encourage people to buy new versions
Yea, Mozilla should totally get right on fixing a Windows problem. Or are you just going way off topic, or speculating wildly? How do you even know whether this is a Windows, Firefox, or third party issue?
2) Version 7.0.1 sometimes stays in memory even though the GUI was closed.
Give it some time to flush and close the sqlite database. It should leave memory after about 10 seconds, tops, unless your computer is really awful.
Firefox often corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started.
Its sounding more and more like youve managed to hose your windows install, and are blaming it on firefox. Seriously, how is a userland app running with non-admin privileges going to "corrupt Microsoft Windows", hmmm?
4) The crashes and memory gobbling have been reported for more than 10 years, since version 0.9 of Mozilla Suite [evolt.org], before Mozilla began using the name Firefox. Firefox is still unstable even though the change reports for every version say there have been "stability improvements".
And apparently you never read the replies from the devs starting around 3.0--
Fix your damn plugins, extension memory leaks arent Mozilla's responsibility
Seriously, I have oodles of computers that I use, and I simply dont see this issue. I have a large suspicion that these few complaints I constantly see on slashdot are from people who either use messed up extensions, are blaming mozilla for wonky plugins, or have hardware / OS issues outside of Mozilla's control. Scores of people try to track down these "memory issues", and the verdict time and again seems to be "it doesnt look substantially different than any other browser".
FWIW, one of my coworkers used to run Firefox 3.x on XP with about 9 instances going, with about 20 tabs each, for days on end. Must have been working for him, one would think, and I dont think he had more than 2gb ram (Im sure he had some serious paging going on).
the US can pick you up from anywhere an render you directly to Gitmo
False, all the folks in gitmo were taken essentially from combat situations. There was one (?) citizen who ended up there, and there was a huge court battle over it (because its a military prison, and the guy was essentially an enemy combatant).
Honestly, people act like theyd prefer us to switch to "no quarter given" and stop taking prisoners.