That said, from the way you've phrased things, I wonder (note the difference!) whether or not you realize that the tri-bit critique was mine.
On second read, I withdraw this question: it is absurd, as in other parts of the post you challenge the choices as my own, rather than those of some arbitrary article author. My apologies. It's been a long day.
Since the critique hinges in part on poor copy-editing involved
You misunderstand. The critique hinges solely on the bargain basement content; the continued commentary on the quality of the editing involved is mere tangential slander intended as catharsis.
The Bard's Tale was released several years after Wizardry. I'm also fairly sure that Wizardry II beelongs to the early 80s.
You are correct: it's from 1982. However, I believe I was relatively clear about my uncertainty regarding the dates involved. You have convinced me to research and specify.
per se is latin (being a literal translation of the Aristotelian kath'auto), and thus has no sharp accent on the last word.
Many things which were imported into English from French in the 1500s had various alterations made to their spellings; the British liked to add "ue" to things ending in 'g', and are famous for adding "u" everywhere. Per se, as clearly documented by Bierce, is an aberration: the accent was added after the import from the French, and Bierce explicitly guesses that this was the error of an Englishman during the acceptance of the word. The canonical example of the import of the term is some or another of Sir Walter Raleigh's essays (I've had this argument before, and am too bored to follow it through again, though I'm sure my not doing so will incite anger, and maybe not undeservedly so. My forward apologies and candor about being blasé.)
Nonetheless, that shouldn't actually matter. That you're willing later to address your own argument in terms of fallacy, I feel confident that when it's pointed out that you should realize this as a clear instance of a straw man.
There is no disgrace in someone which is not an author making such a mistake, but there is shame in a professional being caught so often by an amateur. By correlary the parallel embarrasment to me would be someone which wasn't a programmer catching me writing void main(), or some such similar device of pure programming evil. On those grounds this may also be seen as false analogy on grounds of similarity required between skill level of amateurs and professionals, which itself might be refactored as false premise; if one feels particularly cruel, this can be seen as secundum quid (this man should be embarrassed by a writing error, therefore everyone should be embarrassed by writing errors.) Besides, there's a fallacy of scale here: (possibly) misplacing an accent isn't nearly of the scale of multiple-instance sequences of sentence fragments, misplaced commas, misconjugation and failures of definition.
Of course, this can all be seen as my engaging in a fallacy of relativism, in that I am attempting to dodge what you percieve as an error based on my not being an author; that would be a valid viewpoint with which I could not argue, though I would disagree on grounds that such a supposition would represent dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid. Unfortunately, the matter is clearly one of opinion.
Furthermore, I'm willing to wager that more than one person had to read that before it went online, though for the sake of IGN I hope that they simply allow their editors far too much leeway in self-checking.
To wit, kath auto is not a contracted or glottalized word; rather it is two seperate words. So, if you're happy to point out an accent, accept my pointing out an apostrophe.;)
First sentence: which fail: should be "who fail"
That's not actually as clear as you suggest it to be. American english especially under the guidelines established by the Chicago Manual of Style make clear that either is acceptable, and that they mean subtly different things: who refers to the group, and which refers to each individual seperately. It's roughly parallel to referring to people or persons, though unfortunately less obvious. It's worth noting that though this isn't the typical use in everyday life, it is the typical use in academia, and is hi
Well, I suppose there's that. Nonetheless, typing is a pain, and one misses out on stuff like a touchscreen, which on such a size-limited device can matter. Still, it's got built-in cell access, and if you're going to carry a phone, PDA and gaming platform, that very well could be important.
That said, I'm a total DS fanboy. My DS will be doing the whole PDA gig as soon as we get software onto it, and whereas I admittedly only have 'net access there when at a hotspot, frankly I'm not the sort to go online at remote anyway.
But I just picked up Pathways to Glory. It's impressive, an excellent game of considerable depth.
Interesting. That's counter to what I was told, but I'll give it a shot.
Pocket Kingdoms also looks like a first-rate title.
That's because they've got good advertisers. The game is awful.
The way I look at it is - I need a phone, don't you? Why not this one?
Because my phone cost me thirty bucks and didn't tie me into a service contract, meaning that I was able to shop around for good rates; the idea that a free N-Gage is actually free belies a failure to grasp amortized costs. Besides, the controls are a hassle, it's huge, and in my opinion it's hard on the eyes.
As the article clearly explains, irony is one of the basic tools underlying most sarcasm. There are other ways to be sarcastic: repeating other people's statements in ugly tones, refusing to dignify statements or questions with legitimate or differing answers, et cetera. Nonetheless, that the definition of irony sounds so close to that of sarcasm isn't coincidental: in my estimation, well over three quarters of sarcasm is based at least in part on irony.
but they surpassed 1 million sold quite a while back
If you would read the articles I provided links to, the claim of over a million units which they made in february of '04 was a lie. Yes, you are remembering correctly; they did say that. They just weren't telling the truth.
They've been caught lying about their sales figures for the N-Gage no fewer than six times. Do us the courtesy of not accusing nonsense until you've at least read the linked articles.
and Nokia has a long term strategy here
Yes, shutting the platform down. Two of their seven internal development teams have been let go over the last three weeks. Could be coincedence. I doubt it, though.
Nokia has been lying about their sales the whole time. As of Feb '04 they claimed to have shipped 600,000 units, even though after its first two weeks on the market they claimed 400,000 units, and claimed two weeks later to have doubled that. It seems a year later, a quarter of that sold inventory evaporated.
Nobody in the industry was fooled. Unfortunately I can't link you to the speculation which I really want to give you, but the rumor is that Nokia never actually shipped half a million units, and that less than five percent of them have been sold, whereas an unheard of ninety percent have been returned by retailers. To give you a sense of scale, that famously bad Atari 2600 E.T. game which many people claim as the worst game in history not only outshipped and outsold the N-Gage in its entirety, but also had a lower return rate.
Listenharder. There are more hits for the phrase "n-gage sucks" than there were confirmed walmart sales of the device the world over in two years of carrying the monstrosity.
If it were anywhere but Ohio, I'd agree with you, but this is a good example of the spotlight fallacy: Ohians are afraid of blinkenlights, and cannot practically use the N-Gage since their homes don't have electricity to charge the devices.
Chances are he brought it back because he didn't know how to get it to turn back on.
What are you, a grass-roots advertiser? There is no phone in history which has been as thoroughly and universally mocked as the N-Gage. Even though three quarters of its game library are ports of very old games, somehow only three managed to maintain any level of quality (fifa soccer, worms and puyo pop, the latter two of which aren't exactly rocket science to write.)
(can you script your gba with python? DIDN'T THINK SO!)
Yes, actually, you can. The amateur gameboy community currently runs C, C++, Pascal, Object Pascal, Java, Forth, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Lua and god only knows how many flavors of assembly.
Weren't you just telling someone else not to speak up about things they didn't know shinola about?
does nintendo offer a sdk for download for free? no.
To licensed developers, the SDK has been free since about June of last year, on the heels of the announcements about the DS in order to cause incentives for startups to continue producing software for the legacy platform. Of course, if you'd ever been to WarioWorld.com, you'd know that.
does sony offer sdk for psp for normal people? no.
Isn't this a bit premature? They haven't even released it to two of their three markets, and every single Sony gaming platform in history has had development hardware sold to average Joes, something no other gaming platform producer - including Nokia - can claim.
What they probably should have done is license something that was alreay in the market, like a GBA or something.
Yeah, because if there's one thing Nintendo wants it's an OEM to dissolve its hardware market. There's a reason that only one company has ever released a re-branded Big N platform, and there's also a reason that Nintendo fought Panasonic's contract clauses as hard as they did.
I couldn't see how a new platform like this would hit anything other than a small, unsustainable, niche market.
Yes, yes. The same was said of the ColecoVision, 2600, the NES, the Neo Geo, the PlayStation and the DS. The general premise is solid: the cellular phone network is a sensible and appropriate vehicle for nationwide gaming, and if it were leveraged in a non-ridiculous fashion, would do very well.
Had the N-Gage not sucked so thoroughly, I believe that three quarters of the people decrying it as an impossible and stupid plan would currently be nodding their heads, mentioning how they sagely predicted its success all along.
Well said, Bierce, well said. For what it's worth, the Nokia design team for the N-Gage hardware alone was almost 200 people, let alone the seven seperate development teams they had. Hell, their E3 staff was almost a hundred.
actually you're just pulling stuff from your ass
In that respect he's not alone.
of course, if you don't know anything about nokia you could assume so
This from someone which thinks a N-Gage is a 3650 plus ram, and doubts that Nokia maintains what would in the industry be considered a bare bones staff? You sir need to get an altimeter for your horse, before the FAA takes you down as a flight risk.
Mod parent down: his insights don't bear up to facts. Arrogance isn't knowledge, and the grandparent poster did not deserve the attitude he was given, whether or not he was incorrect.
Then again, N-Gage really could be a dying platform.
In order to be dying, it would need to once have been alive. This platform has been a two-generation mess, a debacle in nearly every aspect of its design, from its ludicrous control scheme and low quality screen to such excellent design decisions as placing the game cart underneath the battery. Even after the first industrial design joke should have taught them their lesson, they released a second sub-mediocre hardware spasm the likes of which made the Zodiac and Gizmodo teams giggle.
It would be pleasant if you would stop with the personal attacks. That's three posts in a row that you've made unfounded disparaging comments, and given the ignorance you've shown of the various topics you've claimed to have studied, I think I've been quite generous.
Nor do I have time to respond to this one.
How convenient for you.
it's the only part of your rant I can see as I type
Presumably because you haven't the fortitude of character to read the rest, for fear of having to face being shown the door in no uncertain terms? It doesn't take very long to read a screen page of text. You're not fooling anyone: maybe you didn't realize it, but slashdot tracks the time of your posts. You were on the site for at least half an hour after you "didn't have time to respond" in both instances.
Spare me telling me you don't have time to reply in your next reply: if you've got nothing to say, stop saying it.
That's probably because you haven't read the HTML and CSS specs, wherein a browser is not required to redo the layout of a page when an image whose size was not provided ahead of time is loaded.
As the great great grandparent post suggests, even though resizing the base font twice fixes the problem because it forces an immediate re-layout, the problem is Slashdot's piss poor HTML. It's worth pointing out that I've mentioned not only the problem but the solution more than once, and I'm almost certain that I'm not the only one.
Before you start placing blame, become familiar with the standard; this is not Gecko's fault. Besides, if Slashdot would catch up to 1998 as far as HTML goes it wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
This sig, in its attempt to be clever, is secretly ironic.
Not even remotely. (I hope you aren't going to suggest a structure paradox wherein the irony is the misuse of the word irony; that doesn't work, intended secrecy or no.)
Perhaps "materialist" would have been a better word than "atheist".
As someone which you accuse of being unfamiliar with religion, it is my great joy to teach you simple words like "agnostic," "skeptic," "praxist," "platonicist," "idealist" and "realist." A materialist is someone fascinated with ownership and wealth. Get a dictionary.
I'm familiar with western non-theistic ethical systems having surveyed a number of them back in school.
And yet you don't know what a skeptic is?
We covered all the major philosophers from Plato to Sartre and Wittgenstein.
Somehow I doubt that: both Sartre and Wittgenstein put quite a bit of effort into seperating atheism, agnosticism, theism, seminarianism, realism and materialism. Anyone which actually read either of those two authors wouldn't have made the egregious error above. (Besides, Wittgenstein is hardly one of the major philosophers of his day.)
There was little agreement among them as to even what "the good" is
Sartre was famous for stating that there was no such thing as "the good," something with which Wittgenstein agreed. Plato believed that Good was an ideal created by belief systems and relegated to the plane of ideals. None of those three authors you claim to have read support this statement in any way.
The professor had an interesting method: she would get a sense for the consensus opinion of the class and then argue against it
That's called the Socratian method. If you're as familiar with philosophers as you claim to be, you'll recognize that this is the principle on which Plato formalized The Academy, having learned the Socratian method from Aristotle. Read some Empedoxles, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Eumenides or Leucippus for fundamental clue. Democritus was famous for disagreeing so strongly with this method that while developing Leucippian Atomism he went to the kings of each Mycenae and Macedon attempting to prevent the spread of the method, suggesting that it was a mechanism of aesthesis rather than noesis, and that conceptual ideals (which he later crystallized into idols) were the more appropriate way to forward concepts.
This is moot in any event. No materialist I've ever spoken with has ever referred to any of these systems.
That's because materialists are investment bankers. Still, given that you probably meant agnostics, let's point out that yes, agnostics rarely hinge their beliefs on Buddhism, or in fact any other faith; since you claim to have studied Sartre, you will realize how damning this tautology is.
Of course, being a bastard, I'm more inclined to suppose that this is another instance of the Spotlight Fallacy, in which reasonable people refuse to talk to zealots like you.
I don't have time to respond you your entire diatribe
You wrote five long paragraphs after saying this. Smells like an excuse to me; this is quite nicely fortified by that you've ignored every single criticism I've made of you, hoping instead to just talk about things you want to discuss and to ignore the earlier ignorances you floated, as if you're unable to face what you said. This is fortified by the argumentum ad hominem which follows. Luckily, I'm under no such restriction.
I can tell a 5-year-old that his spinach has vitamins that will help him grow, and he'll eat it for that reason?
I never said that. All I said was that it was your responsibility to explain edicts that you give to others. (That said, my child at five years old listened to me when I told her things. Maybe that's because I took the time to treat her like an intelligent individual, capable of grasping concepts like "spinach is good for you," which honestly isn't that difficult.)
Do you actually think 5-year-olds are motivated by rationalisms
When you treat them rationally when raising them, yes. I've got two kids that came out just fine that way. Naive as you may think it, it's also drawn from experience.
and that by giving him a reason he doesn't really understand (no, sorry, 5-year-olds don't understand nutrition)
Maybe yours doesn't. Stop treating him or her like an idiot, and things might change. "Hey daddy, why is that man fat?" "Because he eats too much and of the wrong things. That's why I keep making you eat the spinach." That said, spinach is actually pretty good, if you know better than to overcook it; my five year old never actually fought the issue. At all. Ever.
Talk to me after you've had one or two of your own.
I already did, captain guesses a lot.
There's a difference between refusing to explain your reasoning, and realizing that an explanation won't achieve your goals.
Fatalism doesn't excuse you from proper behavior.
Certainly you should be forthcoming if it's appropriate.
At any point you've given someone a command, an explanation is not only appropriate, but ethically required.
You'd think that this is the time when you'd most want to explain your reasoning, but how much will that really mean to a room full of high-school students half of which are only in the course to fill out their schedules?
Quite a bit. As the son of a college professor, I'm intimately familiar with the lives of a number of students whose lives were changed by finding out that a curricular requirement turned out to be their life's drive.
That said, none of this is important. If you really think that you're excused from standing up for the things you say just because you doubt explanations will do any good, well, then I understand the tone you've taken with the rest of this letter, guessing about whether I ahve children and so forth; frankly you're contemptuous. If you give a thousand commands and explain them all, and if only one of those explanations gets through to someone, then you've still done good, at the cost of ten or fifteen seconds of being an adult after being pompous.
You could explain until you're blue in the face and you'll only make an impression on a minority.
This is a non-sequitor: the issue is your ethical requirements, not their upshots.
If you read my post more carefully anyway, you'll find I suggested nothing like a blanket "harrass[ment](!)" of GOTOs.
You didn't have to suggest it: you began the harassment yourself by simply blanket stating that they're wrong, which is simply incorrect, no matter how many ways you want to spin it as a different issue.
It's more worthwhile to save it for the advanced classes where the students actually give a damn.
I replied in another chain. Frankly, there was nothing in your response worth replying to. It was a bunch of baseless useless self aggrandizement and backpedalling.
You know, out of the three industries I've worked in, programmers have by far been the least prone to complaint. Granted this balks a stereotype, and may be cultural - the industries I've worked in map directly to the cities I've lived in. Still, I worry that the tendency of mobs to agree has worsened your perception of an occupation unduly; the bulk of the programmers I've had the pleasure to know were, probably because it's their occupation, problem solvers. Amusingly, the only two programmers I've known which were prone to complaint were also the two which couldn't solve their own bugs.
Again, it might just be coincidence. (As far as cutting them a check on the spot, maybe work with them a bit; I've also had problem employees with that sort of attitude because their previous employer's behavior taught them to distrust me without knowing me. Set your boundaries, but give them a chance, y'know? Some people, once their bubbles are burst, turn into reliable trustable workers despite early attitude problems.)
Slashdot Mirror
Why do I always run out of mod points right before I read a comment that really deserves to be modded up?
Because I have bad luck. I appreciate the compliment.
That said, from the way you've phrased things, I wonder (note the difference!) whether or not you realize that the tri-bit critique was mine.
On second read, I withdraw this question: it is absurd, as in other parts of the post you challenge the choices as my own, rather than those of some arbitrary article author. My apologies. It's been a long day.
Since the critique hinges in part on poor copy-editing involved
;)
You misunderstand. The critique hinges solely on the bargain basement content; the continued commentary on the quality of the editing involved is mere tangential slander intended as catharsis.
The Bard's Tale was released several years after Wizardry. I'm also fairly sure that Wizardry II beelongs to the early 80s.
You are correct: it's from 1982. However, I believe I was relatively clear about my uncertainty regarding the dates involved. You have convinced me to research and specify.
per se is latin (being a literal translation of the Aristotelian kath'auto), and thus has no sharp accent on the last word.
Many things which were imported into English from French in the 1500s had various alterations made to their spellings; the British liked to add "ue" to things ending in 'g', and are famous for adding "u" everywhere. Per se, as clearly documented by Bierce, is an aberration: the accent was added after the import from the French, and Bierce explicitly guesses that this was the error of an Englishman during the acceptance of the word. The canonical example of the import of the term is some or another of Sir Walter Raleigh's essays (I've had this argument before, and am too bored to follow it through again, though I'm sure my not doing so will incite anger, and maybe not undeservedly so. My forward apologies and candor about being blasé.)
Nonetheless, that shouldn't actually matter. That you're willing later to address your own argument in terms of fallacy, I feel confident that when it's pointed out that you should realize this as a clear instance of a straw man.
There is no disgrace in someone which is not an author making such a mistake, but there is shame in a professional being caught so often by an amateur. By correlary the parallel embarrasment to me would be someone which wasn't a programmer catching me writing void main(), or some such similar device of pure programming evil. On those grounds this may also be seen as false analogy on grounds of similarity required between skill level of amateurs and professionals, which itself might be refactored as false premise; if one feels particularly cruel, this can be seen as secundum quid (this man should be embarrassed by a writing error, therefore everyone should be embarrassed by writing errors.) Besides, there's a fallacy of scale here: (possibly) misplacing an accent isn't nearly of the scale of multiple-instance sequences of sentence fragments, misplaced commas, misconjugation and failures of definition.
Of course, this can all be seen as my engaging in a fallacy of relativism, in that I am attempting to dodge what you percieve as an error based on my not being an author; that would be a valid viewpoint with which I could not argue, though I would disagree on grounds that such a supposition would represent dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid. Unfortunately, the matter is clearly one of opinion.
Furthermore, I'm willing to wager that more than one person had to read that before it went online, though for the sake of IGN I hope that they simply allow their editors far too much leeway in self-checking.
To wit, kath auto is not a contracted or glottalized word; rather it is two seperate words. So, if you're happy to point out an accent, accept my pointing out an apostrophe.
First sentence: which fail: should be "who fail"
That's not actually as clear as you suggest it to be. American english especially under the guidelines established by the Chicago Manual of Style make clear that either is acceptable, and that they mean subtly different things: who refers to the group, and which refers to each individual seperately. It's roughly parallel to referring to people or persons, though unfortunately less obvious. It's worth noting that though this isn't the typical use in everyday life, it is the typical use in academia, and is hi
It's not clear whether he's an advertiser or a blind fanboy, but either way, I gave up on replying to him; it's clear he's arguing from fantasy.
This article is actually worse than most of IGN's bilge.
which means it's a PDA replacement
Well, I suppose there's that. Nonetheless, typing is a pain, and one misses out on stuff like a touchscreen, which on such a size-limited device can matter. Still, it's got built-in cell access, and if you're going to carry a phone, PDA and gaming platform, that very well could be important.
That said, I'm a total DS fanboy. My DS will be doing the whole PDA gig as soon as we get software onto it, and whereas I admittedly only have 'net access there when at a hotspot, frankly I'm not the sort to go online at remote anyway.
Still, I see where you're coming from.
But I just picked up Pathways to Glory. It's impressive, an excellent game of considerable depth.
Interesting. That's counter to what I was told, but I'll give it a shot.
Pocket Kingdoms also looks like a first-rate title.
That's because they've got good advertisers. The game is awful.
The way I look at it is - I need a phone, don't you? Why not this one?
Because my phone cost me thirty bucks and didn't tie me into a service contract, meaning that I was able to shop around for good rates; the idea that a free N-Gage is actually free belies a failure to grasp amortized costs. Besides, the controls are a hassle, it's huge, and in my opinion it's hard on the eyes.
As the article clearly explains, irony is one of the basic tools underlying most sarcasm. There are other ways to be sarcastic: repeating other people's statements in ugly tones, refusing to dignify statements or questions with legitimate or differing answers, et cetera. Nonetheless, that the definition of irony sounds so close to that of sarcasm isn't coincidental: in my estimation, well over three quarters of sarcasm is based at least in part on irony.
but they surpassed 1 million sold quite a while back
If you would read the articles I provided links to, the claim of over a million units which they made in february of '04 was a lie. Yes, you are remembering correctly; they did say that. They just weren't telling the truth.
They've been caught lying about their sales figures for the N-Gage no fewer than six times. Do us the courtesy of not accusing nonsense until you've at least read the linked articles.
and Nokia has a long term strategy here
Yes, shutting the platform down. Two of their seven internal development teams have been let go over the last three weeks. Could be coincedence. I doubt it, though.
Gah! "Listen Harder" was supposed to follow the quote "Everything I've heard suggests that owners are pretty happy with the phones". My apologies.
Nokia has been lying about their sales the whole time. As of Feb '04 they claimed to have shipped 600,000 units, even though after its first two weeks on the market they claimed 400,000 units, and claimed two weeks later to have doubled that. It seems a year later, a quarter of that sold inventory evaporated.
Of course, you should check the date on that article at The Register - it's Feb 24, '04. In fact, just three weeks earlier they had lied and claimed to pass the million unit mark.
Nobody in the industry was fooled. Unfortunately I can't link you to the speculation which I really want to give you, but the rumor is that Nokia never actually shipped half a million units, and that less than five percent of them have been sold, whereas an unheard of ninety percent have been returned by retailers. To give you a sense of scale, that famously bad Atari 2600 E.T. game which many people claim as the worst game in history not only outshipped and outsold the N-Gage in its entirety, but also had a lower return rate.
Listen harder. There are more hits for the phrase "n-gage sucks" than there were confirmed walmart sales of the device the world over in two years of carrying the monstrosity.
If it were anywhere but Ohio, I'd agree with you, but this is a good example of the spotlight fallacy: Ohians are afraid of blinkenlights, and cannot practically use the N-Gage since their homes don't have electricity to charge the devices.
Chances are he brought it back because he didn't know how to get it to turn back on.
Maybe nobody let you in on the secret, so let me be the first. GBA software 3D looks better than N-Gage 3D despite the lack of hardware support.
Look up blueroses, yeti3d, c2, DRG, et cetera.
What are you, a grass-roots advertiser? There is no phone in history which has been as thoroughly and universally mocked as the N-Gage. Even though three quarters of its game library are ports of very old games, somehow only three managed to maintain any level of quality (fifa soccer, worms and puyo pop, the latter two of which aren't exactly rocket science to write.)
(can you script your gba with python? DIDN'T THINK SO!)
Yes, actually, you can. The amateur gameboy community currently runs C, C++, Pascal, Object Pascal, Java, Forth, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Lua and god only knows how many flavors of assembly.
Weren't you just telling someone else not to speak up about things they didn't know shinola about?
does nintendo offer a sdk for download for free? no.
To licensed developers, the SDK has been free since about June of last year, on the heels of the announcements about the DS in order to cause incentives for startups to continue producing software for the legacy platform. Of course, if you'd ever been to WarioWorld.com, you'd know that.
does sony offer sdk for psp for normal people? no.
Isn't this a bit premature? They haven't even released it to two of their three markets, and every single Sony gaming platform in history has had development hardware sold to average Joes, something no other gaming platform producer - including Nokia - can claim.
What they probably should have done is license something that was alreay in the market, like a GBA or something.
Yeah, because if there's one thing Nintendo wants it's an OEM to dissolve its hardware market. There's a reason that only one company has ever released a re-branded Big N platform, and there's also a reason that Nintendo fought Panasonic's contract clauses as hard as they did.
I couldn't see how a new platform like this would hit anything other than a small, unsustainable, niche market.
Yes, yes. The same was said of the ColecoVision, 2600, the NES, the Neo Geo, the PlayStation and the DS. The general premise is solid: the cellular phone network is a sensible and appropriate vehicle for nationwide gaming, and if it were leveraged in a non-ridiculous fashion, would do very well.
Had the N-Gage not sucked so thoroughly, I believe that three quarters of the people decrying it as an impossible and stupid plan would currently be nodding their heads, mentioning how they sagely predicted its success all along.
i doub that they even don't have
Well said, Bierce, well said. For what it's worth, the Nokia design team for the N-Gage hardware alone was almost 200 people, let alone the seven seperate development teams they had. Hell, their E3 staff was almost a hundred.
actually you're just pulling stuff from your ass
In that respect he's not alone.
of course, if you don't know anything about nokia you could assume so
This from someone which thinks a N-Gage is a 3650 plus ram, and doubts that Nokia maintains what would in the industry be considered a bare bones staff? You sir need to get an altimeter for your horse, before the FAA takes you down as a flight risk.
Mod parent down: his insights don't bear up to facts. Arrogance isn't knowledge, and the grandparent poster did not deserve the attitude he was given, whether or not he was incorrect.
Then again, N-Gage really could be a dying platform.
In order to be dying, it would need to once have been alive. This platform has been a two-generation mess, a debacle in nearly every aspect of its design, from its ludicrous control scheme and low quality screen to such excellent design decisions as placing the game cart underneath the battery. Even after the first industrial design joke should have taught them their lesson, they released a second sub-mediocre hardware spasm the likes of which made the Zodiac and Gizmodo teams giggle.
And sir, I ain't talkin' no side.
You're a very silly person.
It would be pleasant if you would stop with the personal attacks. That's three posts in a row that you've made unfounded disparaging comments, and given the ignorance you've shown of the various topics you've claimed to have studied, I think I've been quite generous.
Nor do I have time to respond to this one.
How convenient for you.
it's the only part of your rant I can see as I type
Presumably because you haven't the fortitude of character to read the rest, for fear of having to face being shown the door in no uncertain terms? It doesn't take very long to read a screen page of text. You're not fooling anyone: maybe you didn't realize it, but slashdot tracks the time of your posts. You were on the site for at least half an hour after you "didn't have time to respond" in both instances.
Spare me telling me you don't have time to reply in your next reply: if you've got nothing to say, stop saying it.
I think ... the final result should be correct.
That's probably because you haven't read the HTML and CSS specs, wherein a browser is not required to redo the layout of a page when an image whose size was not provided ahead of time is loaded.
As the great great grandparent post suggests, even though resizing the base font twice fixes the problem because it forces an immediate re-layout, the problem is Slashdot's piss poor HTML. It's worth pointing out that I've mentioned not only the problem but the solution more than once, and I'm almost certain that I'm not the only one.
Before you start placing blame, become familiar with the standard; this is not Gecko's fault. Besides, if Slashdot would catch up to 1998 as far as HTML goes it wouldn't be a problem in the first place.
This sig, in its attempt to be clever, is secretly ironic.
Not even remotely. (I hope you aren't going to suggest a structure paradox wherein the irony is the misuse of the word irony; that doesn't work, intended secrecy or no.)
Perhaps "materialist" would have been a better word than "atheist".
As someone which you accuse of being unfamiliar with religion, it is my great joy to teach you simple words like "agnostic," "skeptic," "praxist," "platonicist," "idealist" and "realist." A materialist is someone fascinated with ownership and wealth. Get a dictionary.
I'm familiar with western non-theistic ethical systems having surveyed a number of them back in school.
And yet you don't know what a skeptic is?
We covered all the major philosophers from Plato to Sartre and Wittgenstein.
Somehow I doubt that: both Sartre and Wittgenstein put quite a bit of effort into seperating atheism, agnosticism, theism, seminarianism, realism and materialism. Anyone which actually read either of those two authors wouldn't have made the egregious error above. (Besides, Wittgenstein is hardly one of the major philosophers of his day.)
There was little agreement among them as to even what "the good" is
Sartre was famous for stating that there was no such thing as "the good," something with which Wittgenstein agreed. Plato believed that Good was an ideal created by belief systems and relegated to the plane of ideals. None of those three authors you claim to have read support this statement in any way.
The professor had an interesting method: she would get a sense for the consensus opinion of the class and then argue against it
That's called the Socratian method. If you're as familiar with philosophers as you claim to be, you'll recognize that this is the principle on which Plato formalized The Academy, having learned the Socratian method from Aristotle. Read some Empedoxles, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Eumenides or Leucippus for fundamental clue. Democritus was famous for disagreeing so strongly with this method that while developing Leucippian Atomism he went to the kings of each Mycenae and Macedon attempting to prevent the spread of the method, suggesting that it was a mechanism of aesthesis rather than noesis, and that conceptual ideals (which he later crystallized into idols) were the more appropriate way to forward concepts.
This is moot in any event. No materialist I've ever spoken with has ever referred to any of these systems.
That's because materialists are investment bankers. Still, given that you probably meant agnostics, let's point out that yes, agnostics rarely hinge their beliefs on Buddhism, or in fact any other faith; since you claim to have studied Sartre, you will realize how damning this tautology is.
Of course, being a bastard, I'm more inclined to suppose that this is another instance of the Spotlight Fallacy, in which reasonable people refuse to talk to zealots like you.
I don't have time to respond you your entire diatribe
You wrote five long paragraphs after saying this. Smells like an excuse to me; this is quite nicely fortified by that you've ignored every single criticism I've made of you, hoping instead to just talk about things you want to discuss and to ignore the earlier ignorances you floated, as if you're unable to face what you said. This is fortified by the argumentum ad hominem which follows. Luckily, I'm under no such restriction.
I can tell a 5-year-old that his spinach has vitamins that will help him grow, and he'll eat it for that reason?
I never said that. All I said was that it was your responsibility to explain edicts that you give to others. (That said, my child at five years old listened to me when I told her things. Maybe that's because I took the time to treat her like an intelligent individual, capable of grasping concepts like "spinach is good for you," which honestly isn't that difficult.)
Do you actually think 5-year-olds are motivated by rationalisms
When you treat them rationally when raising them, yes. I've got two kids that came out just fine that way. Naive as you may think it, it's also drawn from experience.
and that by giving him a reason he doesn't really understand (no, sorry, 5-year-olds don't understand nutrition)
Maybe yours doesn't. Stop treating him or her like an idiot, and things might change. "Hey daddy, why is that man fat?" "Because he eats too much and of the wrong things. That's why I keep making you eat the spinach." That said, spinach is actually pretty good, if you know better than to overcook it; my five year old never actually fought the issue. At all. Ever.
Talk to me after you've had one or two of your own.
I already did, captain guesses a lot.
There's a difference between refusing to explain your reasoning, and realizing that an explanation won't achieve your goals.
Fatalism doesn't excuse you from proper behavior.
Certainly you should be forthcoming if it's appropriate.
At any point you've given someone a command, an explanation is not only appropriate, but ethically required.
You'd think that this is the time when you'd most want to explain your reasoning, but how much will that really mean to a room full of high-school students half of which are only in the course to fill out their schedules?
Quite a bit. As the son of a college professor, I'm intimately familiar with the lives of a number of students whose lives were changed by finding out that a curricular requirement turned out to be their life's drive.
That said, none of this is important. If you really think that you're excused from standing up for the things you say just because you doubt explanations will do any good, well, then I understand the tone you've taken with the rest of this letter, guessing about whether I ahve children and so forth; frankly you're contemptuous. If you give a thousand commands and explain them all, and if only one of those explanations gets through to someone, then you've still done good, at the cost of ten or fifteen seconds of being an adult after being pompous.
You could explain until you're blue in the face and you'll only make an impression on a minority.
This is a non-sequitor: the issue is your ethical requirements, not their upshots.
If you read my post more carefully anyway, you'll find I suggested nothing like a blanket "harrass[ment](!)" of GOTOs.
You didn't have to suggest it: you began the harassment yourself by simply blanket stating that they're wrong, which is simply incorrect, no matter how many ways you want to spin it as a different issue.
It's more worthwhile to save it for the advanced classes where the students actually give a damn.
Has it ever dawned on you that the reason nob
and you can't be bothered to reply
I replied in another chain. Frankly, there was nothing in your response worth replying to. It was a bunch of baseless useless self aggrandizement and backpedalling.
You know, out of the three industries I've worked in, programmers have by far been the least prone to complaint. Granted this balks a stereotype, and may be cultural - the industries I've worked in map directly to the cities I've lived in. Still, I worry that the tendency of mobs to agree has worsened your perception of an occupation unduly; the bulk of the programmers I've had the pleasure to know were, probably because it's their occupation, problem solvers. Amusingly, the only two programmers I've known which were prone to complaint were also the two which couldn't solve their own bugs.
Again, it might just be coincidence. (As far as cutting them a check on the spot, maybe work with them a bit; I've also had problem employees with that sort of attitude because their previous employer's behavior taught them to distrust me without knowing me. Set your boundaries, but give them a chance, y'know? Some people, once their bubbles are burst, turn into reliable trustable workers despite early attitude problems.)