It doesn't translate well. "Sounds bigger" isn't a great transliteration; it means sounds more important. Lean towards "imposing."
If I remember correctly, it's a nasty comment thrown at a british parliament member which had a tendency to quote senators in the pompous effort to make himself seem learned and wise, by another parliament member which was witty and mean.
To continue the process of observation by the root of problems, I believe that the real issue is that the customers are so fucking lazy. If they'd spend less time worrying about what it says on the back of the box (gee, the 2k4 edition has 20 new resume templates) and more time worrying about what reviewers say about convenience, interoperability and stability, then the market pressure would no longer be to get new versions with flashy widgets and gouraud-shaded bevels out there, but instead to stabilize and sanitize codebases and finally start behaving like real engineers.
One of the luxuries of the open source model is that many developers, which are free to do what they want, desire such development, refinement, and refactoring. One of the problems with the current business model is that the managers know damned well that what sells is the "ooh aah" factor, not Good Software (tm).
As long as you're laying blame, remember that the developers getting these things out the door aren't lazy at all. We're overworked, underfunded, and underscheduled. In more cases than I'm confortable being aware of, it's a herculean effort and a local miracle that half of this software works at all. It's always the guy at the helm that gets the finger pointing, and in a market economy, It's All The Consumer's Fault.
Now if only a linux distro would get a non-stupid name.
Though that's certainly neat, it's not much for bang for the buck, especially when you consider the interconnects. You'd get better cycles/$ from remaindered alphas. Also, alphas are sexier.
> There's still a chance the market could flop > over like a bunch of fish...
Yeah, and there's also a chance that TV could go away. Personally, I don't think either event is particularly likely.
> 1) Too many systems = too many options for > consumers.
Sorry. When the market crashed, it was Atari and Atari. And nobody else.
> 2) Too many clone games = not enough original > titles
Close. It wasn't that there were too many unoriginal titles. It was that almost every game out there sucked balls, that many of them outright didn't work, that there was no quality control, and that because it was a new medium people wondered if pac-man was a fluke and there really wasn't anything else coming out of those systems.
I think by now we've shown that not the case. Video games are no longer the gee-whiz new wonder that maybe won't make it through next season; they're referenced in every form of pop culture, and something that nearly everyone under the age of 25 grew up with (and quite a few people under the age of 35.)
Yes, the video game market could crash. But not for the old reasons.
As far as having a game system with 400 original games, that'd be great. The Gamecube has about a dozen (the PS2 has about triple that, and the XBox has four that I count.) Original games are all well and good, but when it comes down to it, my favorite console games are always the fighting games, and the last really innovative fighting game was Tekken 2. OTOH, I still play Tekken 4 like it was my life support.
Yes, if you could find a system with 400 original games, that'd be great. In my opinion, there aren't 400 original games total, across *all* platforms. What the GameCube needs is good cheap games to get its library to not peter out after three months if you're interested in only one or two genres, and to give a reason to charge $40 for games (it's not so bad when you have the option of buying cheaper ones; then, instead of beiung overpriced, the new games are 'premium'.)
It's all about how things are viewed.
As far as needing the N-Gage to have too many systems, I think you might want to look at the market. There are more systems now than at any point other than the late nineties in history. Hint: slashdot doesn't cover the ones that aren't new and interesting to geeks.
Tekken Tag/4, Grand Theft Auto, Twisted Metal: Black, Final Fantasy X, Baldur's Gate, Devil May Cry, Gran Turismo 3, Myst 3, MGS2, Midnight Club, Onimusha, Silent Hill 2, Test Drive and Red Faction are crap games?
Okay, well, you've got me on Red Faction. Otherwise, jesus, what games do *you* play?
This is one of the big problems with Big N's extremely strict game quality control. It was a good idea when people were still reeling from the demise of the 2600, but by now we're all used to the idea that video games aren't going away and that they're a good investment.
The problem is that N isn't getting enough games. Not only is it hurting the current market, but they also don't have a backlog of games to sell at reduced prices, a la the now 300+ title "PS2 Greatest Hits" line. (I do find it telling that Sony's value line for their current console is larger than N's entire catalog for their current console.)
You're right: $40 is too much. N needs more games in order to fix this.
Amusingly, you probably own one of my games, and I posted that from work at my current (non-gaming) job. It's just that I remember how much I hated what the marketroids did to my baby, and I'm commiserating.
Why not take some of that anger and do something useful with it, like write a game of your own, or take a shower?
You stop getting low-grade geeks. "What do you mean it doesn't taste like a burger? Grade F meat is still meat!"
It hasn't been hard to set up consumer electronics for years. When I bought a commodity box for my mother, I plugged it in, hooked the color-coded picture-demarcated mouse and keyboard plugs into the back, and hooked the monitor into the back. Then, I plugged the monitor in, and wham! Done. EVerything was magically ready to go. Even had a little bit of music on the machine.
Might want to spend $15,000 on getting a writer that doesn't have to bum ideas from Bravo!.
It's kind of a shame that Koei has fallen into naming their games to take up the popular trends - that is, after Tactics Ogre spawned FF: Tactics - considering that they've been running strategy games on console gaming hardware longer than almost anybody else still alive. Their historic characters happen to be the same ones chosen for their other games - nobunaga's ambition, rise of an emperor, genghis khan, romance of the three kingdoms, et cetera - and they were a foundation experience in strategy gaming for an entire generation raised without Tom Jolly, Ravensburger, or other *real* physical game makers.
But, hey, everyone's gotta earn lunch money, I guess.
There's a progressive distance from the number you think in your head when you hear "giga" and from the number that comes up for Gibi. By tera, the error is just shy of 10%.
Right: I should also mention that the US Government has already settled the issue, more than a decade ago: a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes; the number 1,073,741,824 is a gibibyte; there's kibi, mebi, gibi, etc. Mathworld, everything2, and Wikipedia all have good explanations. The IEEE, ASTM, ANSI, IEC, and NIST all have officially ratified the words (IEC 60027-2, www NIST, etc)
So, I wonder, is there a formal proceeding for being laughed out of court?
Volume ratings (baud, bits per second, space) that don't have usage expectations have always been base 10, and for good reason.
People tend to forget that there are other things in the world than the eight bit byte. People will get into huge arguments over that a byte is always eight bits, and won't shut up until you show them something like Foldoc: Byte, Knuth1 pp125, K&R1 pp34, etc. Hell, some people will keep trying to argue the point (don't you love those guys that tell you that language is mobile, and that therefore five year old slang, or misunderstandings that they and their friends have, or some other atrocity is legitimate?)
People also tend to forget that these units have been in use since considering a byte to be eight bits was a risk at best, and that changing the system which has been in place for almost half a century would balk far more expectations than the one litigant which couldn't be bothered to do their homework, either before shopping or before filing suit.
Come on, how many of you here are old school enough to remember what that 8 in N,8,1 meant? How many of you remember dialing E,7,0? Was that for nothing? I was still calling Atari Hydra BBSes in the early nineties. That's not exactly ancient history. If the defense lawyers need proof that those systems were and still are common (embedded, these days, but still,) tell them to crack out the term programs that come standard with their favorite OS, or the AT command set.
It is not appropriate to assume that the space measurements of a device which is not itself allowed to assume the alignment requirements of the host align with your expectations. Period. The boxes of hard drives and modems have been reading the full numbers since the 1980s. It is not the manufacturer's fault that the plaintiff was not acquainted with old, appropriate practice that predates the standards that the plaintiff is inappropriately attempting to hold the manufacturer to.
Frankly, even if they were right, this would be a stupid, frivolous lawsuit. I hope they have to pay the manufacturer's legal bills. This litigation-happy society has got to go.
I love how this guy completely ignores the original poster's question, instead making asumpions about his skill, makes a few snide comments, tells him to get rid of a legitimate tool instead of how to patch it like the guy wanted, and still gets modded +4 informative.
I'd answer, 'xcept I'm not a Linux user, so I don't actually know.
Of course, I didn't read this until Monday, so my pointing out that he's referring to Bill Blass' Pinball Construction Set (which EA ignominiously pulled from their catalog) will probably fall on deaf ears.
How hard would it have been for him to actually look into what he was purchasing?
If you go to a store called a car dealership and purchase a Toyota, after watching other people drive out of the shop in cars, and are handed for your $18,000 a submarine sandwich, wouldn't you be pissed?
Oh, wait, you didn't read what was going on, so that probably makes no sense to you. Register.com, a domain registrar, allowed him to pay money for a domain. However, over the course of over four months they never redirected it away from their IPs, despite being repeatedly provided with the correct IPs, and they had the unmitigated gall to tell him that all he'd paid for was to have the name propogated to DNS servers; they kept his domain name and pointed it at the worst kind of egregious ads (with popovers, popunders *and* popafters) for more than four months, after he'd advertised it, doing significant damage to hius anme recognition, wasting tremendous money, and ensuring a large block of traffic would never bother to return.
How much harm did them pointing his page back to their stuff hurt him if he wasn't even smart enough to know it was there?
He was smart enough. He repeatedly petitioned for months. How much harm did it do him? Paid nonrepeater traffic is permanently lost. It's a Zionist movement site; it's not gonna get a ton of traffic in the first place. I'd say the damage was tremendous and irreperable.
Meanwhile, I use register.com specifically for their...
Blah blah blah, who cares? So you got a Toyota from the Toyota dealership. Why are you harassing the guy with the sandwich about this fine car dealership which you use for tune ups and acting the ass? (And for that matter, what are you, advertising for them? Swing from their hairs a bit harder and you get a sack to take home...)
The guy that filed this frivilous lawsuit should be ashamed of himself.
Why does nobody ever complain about frivolous slashdot comments, you clueless (I was admonished to use this word in my slashdot harassments recently) fucktard?
Aside from extreme cases like Boonga Boonga, which isn't really a playable game as much as a novelty, are we forgetting about Panic!, Master Red, Wizball, Gorf, Qix?
I mean, Kid Icarus is arguably as weird as this is. You fight an eggplant, for the measurable sake of crap.
I don't accept the Nadarite 'corporations baaad' ideology you are spouting
Read much into what people are saying? I said no such thing. What I said was that the market economy provides niches for companies which behave badly, and that as a result there are always going to be a few greedy fucks ruining it for everyone else.
Accountability hinges on a good definition of spam. As soon as you have one that people don't argue over, you may remount your high horse.
Naderite. Sheesh. Try harder with the slander. I think you missed a spot.
No but almost everyone is advocating that ISPs should take action to make sure their users do not spam. The principal here is perimeter security, just as every enterprise should have a firewall every enterprise should be responsible for their spammy customers.
In my opinion, this quote is the essential SPAM problem. Most people believe that the ISP should be held responsible for stopping their SPAMming users. In general, they do.
You cannot expect an ISP moral behavior issue to be the solution, though. The capitalist model is in direct competition with expectations of moral behavior. There will always be an ISP which sees SPAMmers as a customer base. Unfortunately, the only answer that could involve ISPs would need to be legal.
I'm not suggesting that this makes AMTP inappropriate. Quite the opposite: it'll make the ISPs' jobs easier, and will moderately reduce SPAM from clueless ISPs (there are many) and from ISPs where SPAMmer customers are more proficient the administrators.
That said, what I am saying is that this is not a solution. This is, rather, a tool. The supposition that ISP good grace is the one final answer seems naive to me. Whereas I don't have a practical better answer, I do think we need to be focussing less on patches for the current system and more on a replacement system that eliminates some of the current problems at their outset.
Let the market decide where and when it's economically feasible to lay new power lines
I'm guessing you've never needed broadband outside of major metropolitan areas, or perhaps don't realize that nonurban people do in fact need electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't translate well. "Sounds bigger" isn't a great transliteration; it means sounds more important. Lean towards "imposing."
If I remember correctly, it's a nasty comment thrown at a british parliament member which had a tendency to quote senators in the pompous effort to make himself seem learned and wise, by another parliament member which was witty and mean.
To continue the process of observation by the root of problems, I believe that the real issue is that the customers are so fucking lazy. If they'd spend less time worrying about what it says on the back of the box (gee, the 2k4 edition has 20 new resume templates) and more time worrying about what reviewers say about convenience, interoperability and stability, then the market pressure would no longer be to get new versions with flashy widgets and gouraud-shaded bevels out there, but instead to stabilize and sanitize codebases and finally start behaving like real engineers.
One of the luxuries of the open source model is that many developers, which are free to do what they want, desire such development, refinement, and refactoring. One of the problems with the current business model is that the managers know damned well that what sells is the "ooh aah" factor, not Good Software (tm).
As long as you're laying blame, remember that the developers getting these things out the door aren't lazy at all. We're overworked, underfunded, and underscheduled. In more cases than I'm confortable being aware of, it's a herculean effort and a local miracle that half of this software works at all. It's always the guy at the helm that gets the finger pointing, and in a market economy, It's All The Consumer's Fault.
Now if only a linux distro would get a non-stupid name.
Though that's certainly neat, it's not much for bang for the buck, especially when you consider the interconnects. You'd get better cycles/$ from remaindered alphas. Also, alphas are sexier.
> There's still a chance the market could flop
> over like a bunch of fish...
Yeah, and there's also a chance that TV could go away. Personally, I don't think either event is particularly likely.
> 1) Too many systems = too many options for
> consumers.
Sorry. When the market crashed, it was Atari and Atari. And nobody else.
> 2) Too many clone games = not enough original
> titles
Close. It wasn't that there were too many unoriginal titles. It was that almost every game out there sucked balls, that many of them outright didn't work, that there was no quality control, and that because it was a new medium people wondered if pac-man was a fluke and there really wasn't anything else coming out of those systems.
I think by now we've shown that not the case. Video games are no longer the gee-whiz new wonder that maybe won't make it through next season; they're referenced in every form of pop culture, and something that nearly everyone under the age of 25 grew up with (and quite a few people under the age of 35.)
Yes, the video game market could crash. But not for the old reasons.
As far as having a game system with 400 original games, that'd be great. The Gamecube has about a dozen (the PS2 has about triple that, and the XBox has four that I count.) Original games are all well and good, but when it comes down to it, my favorite console games are always the fighting games, and the last really innovative fighting game was Tekken 2. OTOH, I still play Tekken 4 like it was my life support.
Yes, if you could find a system with 400 original games, that'd be great. In my opinion, there aren't 400 original games total, across *all* platforms. What the GameCube needs is good cheap games to get its library to not peter out after three months if you're interested in only one or two genres, and to give a reason to charge $40 for games (it's not so bad when you have the option of buying cheaper ones; then, instead of beiung overpriced, the new games are 'premium'.)
It's all about how things are viewed.
As far as needing the N-Gage to have too many systems, I think you might want to look at the market. There are more systems now than at any point other than the late nineties in history. Hint: slashdot doesn't cover the ones that aren't new and interesting to geeks.
Tekken Tag/4, Grand Theft Auto, Twisted Metal: Black, Final Fantasy X, Baldur's Gate, Devil May Cry, Gran Turismo 3, Myst 3, MGS2, Midnight Club, Onimusha, Silent Hill 2, Test Drive and Red Faction are crap games?
Okay, well, you've got me on Red Faction. Otherwise, jesus, what games do *you* play?
This is one of the big problems with Big N's extremely strict game quality control. It was a good idea when people were still reeling from the demise of the 2600, but by now we're all used to the idea that video games aren't going away and that they're a good investment.
The problem is that N isn't getting enough games. Not only is it hurting the current market, but they also don't have a backlog of games to sell at reduced prices, a la the now 300+ title "PS2 Greatest Hits" line. (I do find it telling that Sony's value line for their current console is larger than N's entire catalog for their current console.)
You're right: $40 is too much. N needs more games in order to fix this.
Amusingly, you probably own one of my games, and I posted that from work at my current (non-gaming) job. It's just that I remember how much I hated what the marketroids did to my baby, and I'm commiserating.
Why not take some of that anger and do something useful with it, like write a game of your own, or take a shower?
The game "Dynasty Tactics 2" is shipped to stores.
Reread.
You stop getting low-grade geeks. "What do you mean it doesn't taste like a burger? Grade F meat is still meat!"
It hasn't been hard to set up consumer electronics for years. When I bought a commodity box for my mother, I plugged it in, hooked the color-coded picture-demarcated mouse and keyboard plugs into the back, and hooked the monitor into the back. Then, I plugged the monitor in, and wham! Done. EVerything was magically ready to go. Even had a little bit of music on the machine.
Might want to spend $15,000 on getting a writer that doesn't have to bum ideas from Bravo!.
It's kind of a shame that Koei has fallen into naming their games to take up the popular trends - that is, after Tactics Ogre spawned FF: Tactics - considering that they've been running strategy games on console gaming hardware longer than almost anybody else still alive. Their historic characters happen to be the same ones chosen for their other games - nobunaga's ambition, rise of an emperor, genghis khan, romance of the three kingdoms, et cetera - and they were a foundation experience in strategy gaming for an entire generation raised without Tom Jolly, Ravensburger, or other *real* physical game makers.
But, hey, everyone's gotta earn lunch money, I guess.
... anyone which reads the Jargon File has known this for a decade, and anyone which reads Niven knows that Finagle got Finagled.
</insidejoke>
Right, the "for good reason" part. (sigh)
2 7,776
1
1,024
1,048,576
1,073,741,824
1,099,511,6
There's a progressive distance from the number you think in your head when you hear "giga" and from the number that comes up for Gibi. By tera, the error is just shy of 10%.
Right: I should also mention that the US Government has already settled the issue, more than a decade ago: a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes; the number 1,073,741,824 is a gibibyte; there's kibi, mebi, gibi, etc. Mathworld, everything2, and Wikipedia all have good explanations. The IEEE, ASTM, ANSI, IEC, and NIST all have officially ratified the words (IEC 60027-2, www NIST, etc)
So, I wonder, is there a formal proceeding for being laughed out of court?
Volume ratings (baud, bits per second, space) that don't have usage expectations have always been base 10, and for good reason.
.
People tend to forget that there are other things in the world than the eight bit byte. People will get into huge arguments over that a byte is always eight bits, and won't shut up until you show them something like Foldoc: Byte, Knuth1 pp125, K&R1 pp34, etc. Hell, some people will keep trying to argue the point (don't you love those guys that tell you that language is mobile, and that therefore five year old slang, or misunderstandings that they and their friends have, or some other atrocity is legitimate?)
People also tend to forget that these units have been in use since considering a byte to be eight bits was a risk at best, and that changing the system which has been in place for almost half a century would balk far more expectations than the one litigant which couldn't be bothered to do their homework, either before shopping or before filing suit
Come on, how many of you here are old school enough to remember what that 8 in N,8,1 meant? How many of you remember dialing E,7,0? Was that for nothing? I was still calling Atari Hydra BBSes in the early nineties. That's not exactly ancient history. If the defense lawyers need proof that those systems were and still are common (embedded, these days, but still,) tell them to crack out the term programs that come standard with their favorite OS, or the AT command set.
It is not appropriate to assume that the space measurements of a device which is not itself allowed to assume the alignment requirements of the host align with your expectations. Period. The boxes of hard drives and modems have been reading the full numbers since the 1980s. It is not the manufacturer's fault that the plaintiff was not acquainted with old, appropriate practice that predates the standards that the plaintiff is inappropriately attempting to hold the manufacturer to.
Frankly, even if they were right, this would be a stupid, frivolous lawsuit. I hope they have to pay the manufacturer's legal bills. This litigation-happy society has got to go.
I love how this guy completely ignores the original poster's question, instead making asumpions about his skill, makes a few snide comments, tells him to get rid of a legitimate tool instead of how to patch it like the guy wanted, and still gets modded +4 informative.
I'd answer, 'xcept I'm not a Linux user, so I don't actually know.
Of course, I didn't read this until Monday, so my pointing out that he's referring to Bill Blass' Pinball Construction Set (which EA ignominiously pulled from their catalog) will probably fall on deaf ears.
almost as good as the old Geo Metro 3-cylinder car. ;)
What you're forgetting is that the Toyota gets that kind of mileage at >15mph. (Okay, so the Metro did 22 downhill, you know what I'm getting at.)
What are you yapping about? +3 informative.
How hard would it have been for him to actually look into what he was purchasing?
If you go to a store called a car dealership and purchase a Toyota, after watching other people drive out of the shop in cars, and are handed for your $18,000 a submarine sandwich, wouldn't you be pissed?
Oh, wait, you didn't read what was going on, so that probably makes no sense to you. Register.com, a domain registrar, allowed him to pay money for a domain. However, over the course of over four months they never redirected it away from their IPs, despite being repeatedly provided with the correct IPs, and they had the unmitigated gall to tell him that all he'd paid for was to have the name propogated to DNS servers; they kept his domain name and pointed it at the worst kind of egregious ads (with popovers, popunders *and* popafters) for more than four months, after he'd advertised it, doing significant damage to hius anme recognition, wasting tremendous money, and ensuring a large block of traffic would never bother to return.
How much harm did them pointing his page back to their stuff hurt him if he wasn't even smart enough to know it was there?
He was smart enough. He repeatedly petitioned for months. How much harm did it do him? Paid nonrepeater traffic is permanently lost. It's a Zionist movement site; it's not gonna get a ton of traffic in the first place. I'd say the damage was tremendous and irreperable.
Meanwhile, I use register.com specifically for their...
Blah blah blah, who cares? So you got a Toyota from the Toyota dealership. Why are you harassing the guy with the sandwich about this fine car dealership which you use for tune ups and acting the ass? (And for that matter, what are you, advertising for them? Swing from their hairs a bit harder and you get a sack to take home...)
The guy that filed this frivilous lawsuit should be ashamed of himself.
Why does nobody ever complain about frivolous slashdot comments, you clueless (I was admonished to use this word in my slashdot harassments recently) fucktard?
Of course, if you'd bothered to read before weighing in, you'd've found out that your 48 hours was in fact over four months.
Kinda makes things seem a bit different, no?
Ah, yes, sue the lawyers. Then, goe financially toe to toe with the banks, and declare war on the military.
... oh, hell, nevermind.
It's like getting into a grits eating competition with slashdot's idea of
It's just you.
Aside from extreme cases like Boonga Boonga, which isn't really a playable game as much as a novelty, are we forgetting about Panic!, Master Red, Wizball, Gorf, Qix?
I mean, Kid Icarus is arguably as weird as this is. You fight an eggplant, for the measurable sake of crap.
I don't accept the Nadarite 'corporations baaad' ideology you are spouting
Read much into what people are saying? I said no such thing. What I said was that the market economy provides niches for companies which behave badly, and that as a result there are always going to be a few greedy fucks ruining it for everyone else.
Accountability hinges on a good definition of spam. As soon as you have one that people don't argue over, you may remount your high horse.
Naderite. Sheesh. Try harder with the slander. I think you missed a spot.
It's amusing how many of the schemes listed in this page can be neatly subsumed and correlated within the single word "Wiki."
Thanks, Ward. You're still the man.
No but almost everyone is advocating that ISPs should take action to make sure their users do not spam. The principal here is perimeter security, just as every enterprise should have a firewall every enterprise should be responsible for their spammy customers.
In my opinion, this quote is the essential SPAM problem. Most people believe that the ISP should be held responsible for stopping their SPAMming users. In general, they do.
You cannot expect an ISP moral behavior issue to be the solution, though. The capitalist model is in direct competition with expectations of moral behavior. There will always be an ISP which sees SPAMmers as a customer base. Unfortunately, the only answer that could involve ISPs would need to be legal.
I'm not suggesting that this makes AMTP inappropriate. Quite the opposite: it'll make the ISPs' jobs easier, and will moderately reduce SPAM from clueless ISPs (there are many) and from ISPs where SPAMmer customers are more proficient the administrators.
That said, what I am saying is that this is not a solution. This is, rather, a tool. The supposition that ISP good grace is the one final answer seems naive to me. Whereas I don't have a practical better answer, I do think we need to be focussing less on patches for the current system and more on a replacement system that eliminates some of the current problems at their outset.
Let the market decide where and when it's economically feasible to lay new power lines
I'm guessing you've never needed broadband outside of major metropolitan areas, or perhaps don't realize that nonurban people do in fact need electricity.