Oddly enough while I was writing that post, long before I hit "submit," I considered it likely (which is to say virtually certain) that someone such as yourself would come along and critcise my criticism and use/defintion of the word "ironic", even to the point of making the claim that it was ironic that I missused the word in correcting OP's use of the word.
I hit "submit" because I did not find that prospect undesirable.
at least by your definition, your first sentence doesn't even qualify for proper use of "ironically enough"
I admit I didn't expect this particular criticism, however, my second sentence making that very claim. It's illustration by negative example and the first sentence was recursively "caused" by the second.
you overrestrict the definition of ironic to a subset of irony
That would be because ironic is a subset of irony, and there are even subsets of ironic.I recognized the idea of subsets by supplying two possible defintions of ironic, neither of which are over restricted and both of which you will find in the O.E.D. They are not "mine."
Most people who believe certain definitions of ironic to be "over restricted" do so because they do not understand the definition of ironic. Definitions are, by nature, restrictive. Otherwise anything could mean anything, as per Humpty Dumpty, and even he simply supplied alternate, restrictive defintions.
amusingly your initial use of the word is a correct use of ironic assuming that you might reasonably expect the poster to have read your post in the other thread, prior to writing his.
One may, of course, assume anything one likes to "prove" something. The result is only as true as the assumptions. There is no particular reason to make your assumption, and the fact that I bothered to point out the previous post gives supporting evidence that I did not make such assumptions, considering such an assumption to be unreasonable. Also it is whether or not I made such an assumption that would be relevant, not whether you assume that assumption. There is still the issue of whether or not I would consider the end result as undesirable. I don't.
There's another reason why such an assumption might be unreasonable. Said post does not exist.
Ironically enough I expected you to criticise me on that point, which I would have found desirable, but you did not, which I find undesirable.
Well, I guess I would agree with that on the basis of its being a bit a tautology. You can't actually lie without having information.
While such is certainly not always the case it's my experience that it is not unheard of for a publisher to announce a release date when the information they have is that there is no way in hell it will ever actually be released on that date. It may well be good marketing to make the claim, however.
Anyway, this is not exactly like the "transmission on the floor" example -- Carmack is a good enough engineer not to be 2 years off in his estimates unless there was a good reason to be.
I hope I didn't in any way give the impression that I was implying that Carmack or id were in any way similar to my "transmission on the floor" example. Activision taking preorders for a specific date might be vaguely like that, but certainly not id.
I thought I had rather explicitly said that Carmack was more like a mechanic who is intelligent enough, and forthright enough, to tell you up front that his estimate is only reading tea leaves (although his reading of the tea leaves may be considerably more accurate than "Norm"'s) and that he'll be able to tell you the actual cost and time of completion when the job is done. Take it or leave it.
While ID may have never put out a release date, Activision sure did, many times.
Ah, but Acitvision was the subject of neither the article or my own post.
A publisher's projected release date isn't typically an educated guess. It's what might be called in the colloquial, "Lying", and should be treated as such.
Seeing a confirmed date on a reporting site, heck even on ID's site, seems like reading portents in the tea leaves.
People often complain that auto repair cost estimates bear no relationship to the actual final cost. Anyone who has ever been on the other side of the wrench knows why though. Making a cost estimate is very much reading tea leaves. You never really know what's really in need of repair until you start taking the bugger apart. Until then you're just making an educated (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the actual mechaninc) guess. Sometimes you get it right and look good, but that's really pretty close to coincidence.
(Certain transmission shops, especially those beginning with the letter "A", have turned this fact into orginized fraud. They won't give you an estimate until they've taken the tranny apart to look at it, but that means that at the point they give you the "estimate" your car is in their hands with its guts scattered across their floor. Unless you're the sort who knows, and is willing, to start screaming "Put my car back together and give it to me, NOW! Or I'm calling the cops and the Attorney General" you're pretty much stuck just paying whatever they ask. And of course you can't prove that when it gets put back together it's more broken than when it came in).
Release dates are just estimates. Shit can always go wrong, and usually does.
In the case of id (sic), however, they are, as Ignignot says, generally pretty good about not giving a release date until the game is actually in the can.
Of course shit can still happen in the distribution channel, and that's out of id's hands, so even if it's in the can the actual release date can still get pushed back a week or two, so it's still an estimate, but at least it's a pretty damned educated one not likely to slip too far.
Ironically enough I was just writing about the meaning of irony over in the "Microsoft owns your galvanic skin response" thread.
What's wrong with that sentence? There is no irony. "Oddly" enough, or "Funnily" enough would have been correct, or "Coincidentally."
OP was implying the possibility of causality between the court ruling and the announcement. If I drop a ball and it falls, that is not irony. His use of the word "Oddly" was ironic, he meant to imply it wasn't odd at all, but you cannot substitute the word "ironic" for a word spoken ironically.
It's "Yeah, right," not "Ironic, ironic."
An ironic event is one where something desirable happens, but in such a manner that something undesirable is the result. This announcement takes something undesirable and adds something undesirable to it.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice and The Porridge Pot are children's cautionary tales that are based on ironic situations. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. Getting it turns out to suck, but that isn't what makes it irony. What makes it irony is that you wished for it.
An example of irony would be someone who had successfully promoted an airline privacy law who subsequently died on a flight because medical information about him that could have saved his life couldn't be released to the person capable of saving it.
Dying just because you happened to get on the flight that crashed that day isn't ironic, it just sucks.
Now I've got "that song" running through my head. Arrrrrrrrrrgh! Somebody shoot me.
You forgot to include the definition of irony and that's why he doesn't understand sarcasm. Most people seem to think that irony means something akin to "odd" as opposed to saying the opposite of what you really mean.
As in: "Yeah, right."
Literalists innately do not understand irony, thus can't understand sarcasm.
Re:At least it's not a "For Dummies" book
on
Linux for Non-Geeks
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Sympathetic magic is the belief that like effects like. Stick a pin in the likeness of someone and he'll feel pain, break a stick to protect against snakes, etc.
Ultimately this was applied to words as well. The practice of "spelling" comes out of the belief that a word for something "is" that something, in the same manner that a voodoo doll "is" the person it represents. There is an innate "sympathy" between the noun and the thing it represents. A modern psuedo scientist might call them an "entangle pair" on his website trying to sell you secret mystical books of power (a grammar).
So the idea that I'm trying to convey is that I am not influenced by the book being assigned to "dummies" or that it has the spelling "dummies" on its cover. It has no hold on or power over me. I may purchase it, borrow it from the library, read it, absorb its contents, but that does not in any way make me, or imply that I am, a "dummy" because that is just an arbitrary sound/collection of letters arbitrarily assigned by some marketing geek (in the pejoritive sense of the word) who believes in sympathetic magic.
Plus I have this magic crystal that some gypsy women sold me to protect me from "dummies" books.
I don't suffer the editions that treat me like a dummy gladly, however. Some of their authors apparently don't have a magic crystal.
KFG
Re:At least it's not a "For Dummies" book
on
Linux for Non-Geeks
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Since I'm intelligent enough not to believe in sympathetic magic I feel no particular aversion.
1. Military resources can not be used for domestic law enforcement.
George Washington was the first President to use military resources for domestic law enforcement. He was not the last. I believe you are confusing "can not" for "should not."
And of course any persons declared to be in rebellion are no longer considered a civil issue by the goverment. We've had some experience with that situation too.
Minor things can be catastrophic things at 3.2G, though.
Just ask Ayrton Senna da Silva. You can end up dead easily enough without leaving the surface of the earth.
Doesn't mean I wouldn't jump at a chance to take a demo ride with Schumi or Sir Jackie.
Shit happens, but mostly, on a day to day basis, it doesn't. It's a fucking crap shoot out there, or even if you stay home in bed. Might as well compute some odds, take a few calculated risks, and have a bit of fun before you die.
Or even while you're dying. You really can you know. I doesn't have to suck at all.
That doesn't mean I don't want to see my 100th or some such, but even then, I'd rather die by falling off Denali than lying in some hospital bed with tubes stuck in me.
So please God/whoever/whatever, if you only grant me one wish in this life, make it that in my final hours I'm doing something I love, which might only mean granting me the strength to escape from my hospital bed, crawl into the woods somewhere, sit down with my back to a tree where I can feel the grass, smell the air, see the sky, and die with some fucking dignity, even if that does mean dying a bit "early."
Would I fly in this thing? Shit yeah. Who knows, it might well result in my having a great story to tell my grandkids about, instead of getting hit by a car while crossing the street for a popsicle if I'd stayed home.
Life is not certain. Death is. Stop worrying about it so much.
Another point to consider: do you think tech support will help you, in the eventuality that the game has random problems?
Sure, why not? I'll just call up Looking Glass, Dynamix, Papyrus. ..
Oh, well. Looks like I'm on my own anyway.
I must admit that I did actually call Microsoft for game support once and they quite pleasantly told me to reboot and if that didn't work reinstall, have a nice day.
What he means is that once any code has left the US US restrictions no longer apply to that code at that non US location. It need only "escape" once, through some means or other, and then it is "free."
Why would the Iraqis download Linux from the US when they can download the French Mandrake from Paris, Prague, or Dresden?
You ain't lived until you've asked a woman for her driver's license in order to accept her check and she pulls a bottle of Chianti and a one pound jar of Vaseline out of her purse while she's looking for it.
This is where you were supposed to notice that it's pretty much the same readership as/.
Where do you think I first heard of Penny Arcade?
And I wouldn't be so crude as to make that sort of comment about/. readers here on/. (well, most of the time anyway), I'd go over to the Penny Arcade forum to do that.
And quite frankly, the whole issue is starting to get uncomfortably self-referential (I have made pottery though).
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly enough while I was writing that post, long before I hit "submit," I considered it likely (which is to say virtually certain) that someone such as yourself would come along and critcise my criticism and use/defintion of the word "ironic", even to the point of making the claim that it was ironic that I missused the word in correcting OP's use of the word.
I hit "submit" because I did not find that prospect undesirable.
at least by your definition, your first sentence doesn't even qualify for proper use of "ironically enough"
I admit I didn't expect this particular criticism, however, my second sentence making that very claim. It's illustration by negative example and the first sentence was recursively "caused" by the second.
you overrestrict the definition of ironic to a subset of irony
That would be because ironic is a subset of irony, and there are even subsets of ironic.I recognized the idea of subsets by supplying two possible defintions of ironic, neither of which are over restricted and both of which you will find in the O.E.D. They are not "mine."
Most people who believe certain definitions of ironic to be "over restricted" do so because they do not understand the definition of ironic. Definitions are, by nature, restrictive. Otherwise anything could mean anything, as per Humpty Dumpty, and even he simply supplied alternate, restrictive defintions.
amusingly your initial use of the word is a correct use of ironic assuming that you might reasonably expect the poster to have read your post in the other thread, prior to writing his.
One may, of course, assume anything one likes to "prove" something. The result is only as true as the assumptions. There is no particular reason to make your assumption, and the fact that I bothered to point out the previous post gives supporting evidence that I did not make such assumptions, considering such an assumption to be unreasonable. Also it is whether or not I made such an assumption that would be relevant, not whether you assume that assumption. There is still the issue of whether or not I would consider the end result as undesirable. I don't.
There's another reason why such an assumption might be unreasonable. Said post does not exist.
Ironically enough I expected you to criticise me on that point, which I would have found desirable, but you did not, which I find undesirable.
KFG
I would say "informed lying"
Well, I guess I would agree with that on the basis of its being a bit a tautology. You can't actually lie without having information.
While such is certainly not always the case it's my experience that it is not unheard of for a publisher to announce a release date when the information they have is that there is no way in hell it will ever actually be released on that date. It may well be good marketing to make the claim, however.
Anyway, this is not exactly like the "transmission on the floor" example -- Carmack is a good enough engineer not to be 2 years off in his estimates unless there was a good reason to be.
I hope I didn't in any way give the impression that I was implying that Carmack or id were in any way similar to my "transmission on the floor" example. Activision taking preorders for a specific date might be vaguely like that, but certainly not id.
I thought I had rather explicitly said that Carmack was more like a mechanic who is intelligent enough, and forthright enough, to tell you up front that his estimate is only reading tea leaves (although his reading of the tea leaves may be considerably more accurate than "Norm"'s) and that he'll be able to tell you the actual cost and time of completion when the job is done. Take it or leave it.
KFG
While ID may have never put out a release date, Activision sure did, many times.
Ah, but Acitvision was the subject of neither the article or my own post.
A publisher's projected release date isn't typically an educated guess. It's what might be called in the colloquial, "Lying", and should be treated as such.
KFG
Seeing a confirmed date on a reporting site, heck even on ID's site, seems like reading portents in the tea leaves.
People often complain that auto repair cost estimates bear no relationship to the actual final cost. Anyone who has ever been on the other side of the wrench knows why though. Making a cost estimate is very much reading tea leaves. You never really know what's really in need of repair until you start taking the bugger apart. Until then you're just making an educated (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the actual mechaninc) guess. Sometimes you get it right and look good, but that's really pretty close to coincidence.
(Certain transmission shops, especially those beginning with the letter "A", have turned this fact into orginized fraud. They won't give you an estimate until they've taken the tranny apart to look at it, but that means that at the point they give you the "estimate" your car is in their hands with its guts scattered across their floor. Unless you're the sort who knows, and is willing, to start screaming "Put my car back together and give it to me, NOW! Or I'm calling the cops and the Attorney General" you're pretty much stuck just paying whatever they ask. And of course you can't prove that when it gets put back together it's more broken than when it came in).
Release dates are just estimates. Shit can always go wrong, and usually does.
In the case of id (sic), however, they are, as Ignignot says, generally pretty good about not giving a release date until the game is actually in the can.
Of course shit can still happen in the distribution channel, and that's out of id's hands, so even if it's in the can the actual release date can still get pushed back a week or two, so it's still an estimate, but at least it's a pretty damned educated one not likely to slip too far.
KFG
Ironically enough I was just writing about the meaning of irony over in the "Microsoft owns your galvanic skin response" thread.
What's wrong with that sentence? There is no irony. "Oddly" enough, or "Funnily" enough would have been correct, or "Coincidentally."
OP was implying the possibility of causality between the court ruling and the announcement. If I drop a ball and it falls, that is not irony. His use of the word "Oddly" was ironic, he meant to imply it wasn't odd at all, but you cannot substitute the word "ironic" for a word spoken ironically.
It's "Yeah, right," not "Ironic, ironic."
An ironic event is one where something desirable happens, but in such a manner that something undesirable is the result. This announcement takes something undesirable and adds something undesirable to it.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice and The Porridge Pot are children's cautionary tales that are based on ironic situations. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. Getting it turns out to suck, but that isn't what makes it irony. What makes it irony is that you wished for it.
An example of irony would be someone who had successfully promoted an airline privacy law who subsequently died on a flight because medical information about him that could have saved his life couldn't be released to the person capable of saving it.
Dying just because you happened to get on the flight that crashed that day isn't ironic, it just sucks.
Now I've got "that song" running through my head. Arrrrrrrrrrgh! Somebody shoot me.
KFG
You forgot to include the definition of irony and that's why he doesn't understand sarcasm. Most people seem to think that irony means something akin to "odd" as opposed to saying the opposite of what you really mean.
As in: "Yeah, right."
Literalists innately do not understand irony, thus can't understand sarcasm.
KFG
3 years ago the economy went to shit...
3 years ago CD sales went down....
Think that's a coincidence.
Didn't we tell you that piracy would destroy the economy?
KFG
Am I on Candid Camera?
KFG
Sympathetic magic is the belief that like effects like. Stick a pin in the likeness of someone and he'll feel pain, break a stick to protect against snakes, etc.
Ultimately this was applied to words as well. The practice of "spelling" comes out of the belief that a word for something "is" that something, in the same manner that a voodoo doll "is" the person it represents. There is an innate "sympathy" between the noun and the thing it represents. A modern psuedo scientist might call them an "entangle pair" on his website trying to sell you secret mystical books of power (a grammar).
So the idea that I'm trying to convey is that I am not influenced by the book being assigned to "dummies" or that it has the spelling "dummies" on its cover. It has no hold on or power over me. I may purchase it, borrow it from the library, read it, absorb its contents, but that does not in any way make me, or imply that I am, a "dummy" because that is just an arbitrary sound/collection of letters arbitrarily assigned by some marketing geek (in the pejoritive sense of the word) who believes in sympathetic magic.
Plus I have this magic crystal that some gypsy women sold me to protect me from "dummies" books.
I don't suffer the editions that treat me like a dummy gladly, however. Some of their authors apparently don't have a magic crystal.
KFG
Since I'm intelligent enough not to believe in sympathetic magic I feel no particular aversion.
YMMV
KFG
I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yeah. Right.
KFG
1. Military resources can not be used for domestic law enforcement.
George Washington was the first President to use military resources for domestic law enforcement. He was not the last. I believe you are confusing "can not" for "should not."
And of course any persons declared to be in rebellion are no longer considered a civil issue by the goverment. We've had some experience with that situation too.
KFG
you may substitute a mirror instead.
KFG
Distro nuts need not apply.
You are perceiving the issue through a mirrot. The primary complaint is not from distro nuts, but choice nuts.
Yes, that would include the choice not to use Linux.
KFG
Maybe that is because I am an American. ;)
And you believe you can personally guaruntee which way they point?
KFG
Probably a lot of poor people are going to die.
Let them eat cake?
KFG
Minor things can be catastrophic things at 3.2G, though.
Just ask Ayrton Senna da Silva. You can end up dead easily enough without leaving the surface of the earth.
Doesn't mean I wouldn't jump at a chance to take a demo ride with Schumi or Sir Jackie.
Shit happens, but mostly, on a day to day basis, it doesn't. It's a fucking crap shoot out there, or even if you stay home in bed. Might as well compute some odds, take a few calculated risks, and have a bit of fun before you die.
Or even while you're dying. You really can you know. I doesn't have to suck at all.
That doesn't mean I don't want to see my 100th or some such, but even then, I'd rather die by falling off Denali than lying in some hospital bed with tubes stuck in me.
So please God/whoever/whatever, if you only grant me one wish in this life, make it that in my final hours I'm doing something I love, which might only mean granting me the strength to escape from my hospital bed, crawl into the woods somewhere, sit down with my back to a tree where I can feel the grass, smell the air, see the sky, and die with some fucking dignity, even if that does mean dying a bit "early."
Would I fly in this thing? Shit yeah. Who knows, it might well result in my having a great story to tell my grandkids about, instead of getting hit by a car while crossing the street for a popsicle if I'd stayed home.
Life is not certain. Death is. Stop worrying about it so much.
KFG
Another point to consider: do you think tech support will help you, in the eventuality that the game has random problems?
.
Sure, why not? I'll just call up Looking Glass, Dynamix, Papyrus. .
Oh, well. Looks like I'm on my own anyway.
I must admit that I did actually call Microsoft for game support once and they quite pleasantly told me to reboot and if that didn't work reinstall, have a nice day.
KFG
Well, look, unless the US is willing to actually invade France for. . . .oh. Ummmmmmmmmmmm, nevermind. My bad.
KFG
What he means is that once any code has left the US US restrictions no longer apply to that code at that non US location. It need only "escape" once, through some means or other, and then it is "free."
Why would the Iraqis download Linux from the US when they can download the French Mandrake from Paris, Prague, or Dresden?
KFG
What happened to the demo scene anyway?
It was replaced by the release candidate act. I can't wait until the final release play.
KFG
You ain't lived until you've asked a woman for her driver's license in order to accept her check and she pulls a bottle of Chianti and a one pound jar of Vaseline out of her purse while she's looking for it.
KFG
"Would you drive any better if i shoved that cell phone up your ass?"
Well, maybe if you put it where their brains are they might have something worth talking about and shit.
KFG
Now only if they could make wearable clothes...
The ancient Greeks and Egyptions had it pretty much down, and it's been all downhill every since.
Fashion's a bitch, and then she wears it.
KFG
This is where you were supposed to notice that it's pretty much the same readership as /.
/. readers here on /. (well, most of the time anyway), I'd go over to the Penny Arcade forum to do that.
Where do you think I first heard of Penny Arcade?
And I wouldn't be so crude as to make that sort of comment about
And quite frankly, the whole issue is starting to get uncomfortably self-referential (I have made pottery though).
KFG