Except no one would have ever said that. The Super Nintendo was five years old when the Playstation touched down in America and well on its way out. Meanwhile there was no question that one of the five or six cd-based video game consoles that were coming into being at about that time were "the future". The Super Nintendo was still selling surprisingly well for a console of its age at that point, but there was no doubt it was being replaced. And the Playstation was as much as a credible contender to be that replacement as anything else, if not more likely.
Actually I quite agree. I'm personally just not impressed by the PSP but I'm really glad Sony made it, because I can see it's forcing Nintendo to improve their products to stay ahead. The market is richer for its presence. In specific I honestly am not sure if we'd have ever seen the DS if there were never a PSP-- the DS might have just stayed a neglected research product within Nintendo. And that would be too bad because I have a DS and I like it.
Ah yes. Who can forget the Sony Playstation's handy defeating of the Atari Jaguar, the 3D0, the CD-I, and the Saturn? If Sony can outlast this guantlet, surely they can defeat anyone.
Wait, no, that isn't it at all. The only reason Sony got anywhere with the original Playstation was everything else at the time fucking sucked. The Jaguar and Saturn were jokes, the N64 wasn't what consumers wanted and only had like three good games max (all by Nintendo), and Nintendo was such a jackass in the mid 90s under the old CEO that nobody wanted to work with them.
Sony's takeover of the video game industry in the mid 90s and their capable defending since of the ground they took shows an enormous degree of business saavy. What it doesn't show is skill. Sony grabbed the market in the startling way they did less because of what they did right than because of what everyone else did wrong; all their competitors were either incompetent or, in Nintendo's case, incompetent and repulsive.
Well, the handheld and media player markets that Sony is trying to slip somewhere indeterminately between right now are a good bit different from the video game industry when the Playstation was released. The media player market is extremely rich right now, and on the video game side the PSP (unlike the Playstation) actually has a viable competitor; Nintendo is no longer particularly repulsive to developers, and they're even doing things lately that you could almost call competent, sometimes. Meanwhile, frankly, looking at the Playstation, the Playstation 2, and the PSP, the first two of these are just plain good products. The third... how shall I put this... seems to me rather lacking, and doesn't really seem to serve any utility at all unless you really want a Video iPod and don't mind spending lots of money on memory sticks. This seems likely to be a bit of a hard sell given alternative systems with a fair degree of quality really do exist.
I'll agree the person you quote is being silly; I don't think there's any reason to think that Nintendo can magically and eternally defend itself from all challenges to the Game Boy. But if you look at the products on the market right now... meh, I think it's pretty safe to say they can defend themselves against the PSP.
Everyone keeps hearing "dinosaur dna" and thinking "cloning". That seems like a bit of a long shot. And I think concentrating on this is overlooking the real value here.
If they find any dinosaur DNA just think of what could be done with that. Mostly what I'm thinking about here is ancestry analysis. Our understanding of the exact way evolutionary processes have behaved contains much that is based on similarity and guesswork. It seems if we could get solid information on what now-living organisms that dinosaurs were related to and to what extent-- or what dinosaurs were related to each other and how, if more soft tissue can be found in other fossils-- it seems this could verify science's understanding of paleobiology (sic?) and the evolutionary tree, or change it, in an unprecedented way. Has anything of this sort-- DNA from living tissue that old-- ever been found before, has there ever been any comparable way we have been able to perform genetic testing on a sample of that age?
This is even aside from what that DNA and any found proteins can tell us about how dinosaurs looked and behaved...
"Evolutionary theory" predates mendelian genetics and is not dependent on it. Mendelian genetics is simply the best available explanation for how evolution happens and the one best supported by evidence to have actually occurred.
There is no such thing as "microevolution". It's a term invented by people trying to reconcile theology with science, has no definition which is either consistently applied or consistent with any sort of evidentially grounded theory, and has no place in a non-theological discussion. I'm sure there are better terms for whatever it was you were actually trying to express.
The existence of a process which inhibits mutations does not "leave a gaping hole in" or even realistically impact the ability of mendelian genetics to explain even what you call "microevolution", as long as there is some process somewhere by which alleles may be accidentally altered, ever. Okay, so there's a mechanism which may in some species under some circumstances correct "errors"? What if the error corrector makes an error???
Uncovering contradictions in the operation of a scientific theory is an indication of flawed theory existing somewhere. However uncovering facts which complicate how that theory applies to the real world is an indication of a strong theory, because they show the theory is robust enough to accommodate complicating factors without breaking down into contradictions or epicycles. Uncovering complications in a theory's applications, as this paper uncovers complications in the mechanics of genetics as we know them, is a good thing because it means our understanding of how "stuff" operates has been tested and expanded; a theory whose applicability to the real world is not constantly being tested is a theory which perhaps cannot be trusted. Unfortunately the press, aided by a rather decent-sized faction of persons who actively wish to attack the idea of science, seems to often interpret such events as if they were a problem. It becomes difficult to meaningfully explain science to the public in such an environment, where positive events for scientific understanding necessary to the operation of the scientific process itself are so frequently popularly interpreted as negative events which cast doubt on the results of the scientific process.
The thumbnails all directly link to the place where they appeared, where the copyright line may be clearly seen in full. Whether that line is visible on google news doesn't matter; the courts at least in America seem to have been pretty clear that if you thumbnail an image linked somewhere else and link the original, this isn't publishing and any copyright issues that image may hold aren't relevant because only the actual host is publishing the image, you're just linking it.
if this were being done by a site that everyone loves to hate, I think people would tend to side with AFP.
No I think if this were anyone else we'd be instead of concentrating on "OMFG IT'S GOOGLE" concentrating on the real issue, which is that AFP is expecting the traditional concepts of fair use that every website that's ever excerpted something and then linked it-- you know, which google news didn't invent-- to be reordered for them.
If they allow their news to be disseminated without the appropriate fee being paid (as Google News is doing),
If a link, a headline and a half-paragraph quotation is "disseminating", we're all fucked.
Can't wait to see where we go next with this amazing new logic. "Amazon.com book reviews banned in france because people were quoting sentences from the books they reviewed, the book companies make their money by selling those books to customers, if they allow those sentences to be disseminated without the appropriate fee (as amazon.com book reviewers do) they will be cutting off their main source of revenue"...
Well I can't help but wonder if the AFP's customers-- you know, the actual news sites google links-- are going to be particularly happy that that the AFP just got them blacklisted from google.
I mean, if I ran a news site of some sort, and I found that one of my content providers was engaging in direct and successful lobbying efforts to get me kicked off google news because I'd been buying content from them, I'd definitely start looking for an alternate provider for that content immediately.
Is the difference between "classic" and "revamped" when they switched assistants from the lesbian from The Brady Bunch to the other girl, or was there a Beakman's World 2.0 I just wasn't aware of?
I hear PC gamers fretting all the time about whether their graphics cards are up to snuff, whether they're going to be able to run the hot new game coming out in two weeks... I never have to worry about any of that. My computer can't run any games at all (except World of Warcraft, which I don't really want), but I know I can go down to walmart and there's more games there than I've got money to buy or time to play, and all I have to do is put a disc in a machine and switch it on. I don't even have to sign off AIM or Skype.
Okay, if your conception of "games" is "first person shooters" then the PC is where it's at and what I'm saying is worthless, but as far as I'm concerned, my lifetime needs as far as first person shooters go was sated completely in 1998. And if first person shooters aren't your thing then commercial PC gaming probably isn't going to do much at all for you right now. There's some interesting stuff coming out of the PC shareware game community, but when was the last commercial PC gaming got a game like Katamari Damacy, or Wario Ware? There was a time in the past where the pc games lineup made being a mac user a bit depressing but at this point, pc gaming seems like it wouldn't be worth the bother even if my computer could run it. I've got all the games I want and then some.
Somehow I do not think you're going to be really watching any videos on the 32MB memory stick, which doubles as your game memory card, that comes with the PSP $250 pack. And the larger memory stick duo pros are not cheap.
Keeping up with, then shooting, the joneses...
on
Yahoo buys Flickr
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Perhaps I'm excessively cynical, but I can't help but wonder if along with Flickr Yahoo is acquiring any patents that could be used to chase competing photo-sharing products out of the market... like Yahoo is doing to XFire already...
Its open to debate whether it was his intent with glasnost(openness) and perestroika(restructuring) to completely dismantle communist rule though that it was an inevitable result of relaxing the Soviet Union's grip on Eastern Europe and relaxing repression withint the U.S.S.R. As I recall his reforms started snowballing, the hard liners attempted a coup but it was to late, and in the power vacuum created by the coup Yeltsin and a popular uprising finished removing the Communists.
I guess this really is the interesting question-- what exactly was Gorbachev trying to do with the glasnost/perestroika thing? I seriously doubt his end goal was either what actually happened or the betterment of the Russian populace; it does seem more that his reforms got away from him than anything. But as for what his actual, specific personal motivations were, I've yet to see a serious evidence-grounded attempt to answer that question, nor am I sure where to look for one.
I don't give a shit. I'm sick of you and the rest of your trolling little clique. You've wasted an order of magnitude more space and reader time than this "Roland" whosit ever will, and unlike Mr. Pipquwhatever, you post your trash where I can't just skim past and not click the story if I'm not interested.
Putting a plagiarist, seeking ad revenue, on the front page posing as news is NOT OK.
Why the fuck not? Who cares? If he's plagiarizing, the people he is plagiarizing are free to take it up with him. Talk to them, not us.
At some point I'm going to start submitting all of my slashdot story submissions under the name of "Roland Piquepaille" instead of my own, just to piss you worthless mewling fanboys off.
I am sick of hearing about the idiot. Stop smearing the comment section with your obsession with him.
IE appears to retain 90% of the general market share. How would not following standards hurt them? After all, W3 standards complaince is only an issue to web developers; to the general public all that matters is whether it's compliant with existing pages. And to these people, IE is the standard.
It appears ignoring standards would do more to hurt Firefox than hurt IE at this stage. Which from Microsoft's perspective...
But it looks to me like the Soviet Union fell less because the citizenry got fed up, as it did because the government lost its capacity to maintain order. The citizenry, it seems, in the late 80s weren't any more empowered or oppressed than they were in the 40 years previous. The only thing that changed were the machines of oppression; and the change wasn't even in terms of getting more compassionate, it was in terms of efficacy at oppression.
For example I seem to remember-- again, could be wrong-- that while the soviet union had a massive standing army, by the end, that army wasn't getting paid.
I do not know anything personal and direct about the games industry. I am not in it. But I do know three things.
The people who were complaining and worried about the state of video games at GDC were people I respect. People who have made worthwhile and interesting games, people whose work I admire. This "Iron Realms" guy getting pissy at them? Uh, I've never heard of him or his company. It looks like they make MUD engines? Gee.
The people who were complaining and worried about the state of video games at GDC are not merely passively whining. They are actively trying to buck trends and find other ways of doing things.
I just, like an hour or so ago, got home from a long and unpleasant plane trip. I spent the better part of this time getting myself acquainted with a Nintendo DS game that came out this week called "Yoshi Touch and Go". This game is about as far from both the EA-style philosophies the GDC participants railed against and the "mainstream" as you can get, and it looks like the mainstream is going to shrivel up its nose confused at this game and ignore it completely. It ignores the conventional logic of the contemporary games industry at nearly every level.
And it is the most wonderful game I have played in years.
Now, I don't know if the games industry is going to take some path WIl Wright and Warren Spectre drag it down kicking and screaming, or if the EA megacorporate megabudget idiom will take over the industry completely; and either way, I don't know if "innovation", whatever the fuck that is, will result, or if it's a good thing. But looking at my Yoshi Touch and Go cartridge, I think that if what the game industry wants to go with the EA path rather than the Yoshi T&G sort of path, then it can fuck off and do it without me as a customer.
ASIA: Your products are too expensive. We aren't going to give you money for them.
MICROSOFT: Hm. How about we give you a version of our product that does less, and you give us less money for it? ASIA: How about we use the version of your product that does more, and give you no money for it?
Slashdot Mirror
OK, thanks.
Does any of this have anything to do with "Dark Matter"? Or was "Dark Energy" just given a similar name because it sounds catchy?
Or is it all just those dang midicholorians again?
Except no one would have ever said that. The Super Nintendo was five years old when the Playstation touched down in America and well on its way out. Meanwhile there was no question that one of the five or six cd-based video game consoles that were coming into being at about that time were "the future". The Super Nintendo was still selling surprisingly well for a console of its age at that point, but there was no doubt it was being replaced. And the Playstation was as much as a credible contender to be that replacement as anything else, if not more likely.
Actually I quite agree. I'm personally just not impressed by the PSP but I'm really glad Sony made it, because I can see it's forcing Nintendo to improve their products to stay ahead. The market is richer for its presence. In specific I honestly am not sure if we'd have ever seen the DS if there were never a PSP-- the DS might have just stayed a neglected research product within Nintendo. And that would be too bad because I have a DS and I like it.
Ah yes. Who can forget the Sony Playstation's handy defeating of the Atari Jaguar, the 3D0, the CD-I, and the Saturn? If Sony can outlast this guantlet, surely they can defeat anyone.
Wait, no, that isn't it at all. The only reason Sony got anywhere with the original Playstation was everything else at the time fucking sucked. The Jaguar and Saturn were jokes, the N64 wasn't what consumers wanted and only had like three good games max (all by Nintendo), and Nintendo was such a jackass in the mid 90s under the old CEO that nobody wanted to work with them.
Sony's takeover of the video game industry in the mid 90s and their capable defending since of the ground they took shows an enormous degree of business saavy. What it doesn't show is skill. Sony grabbed the market in the startling way they did less because of what they did right than because of what everyone else did wrong; all their competitors were either incompetent or, in Nintendo's case, incompetent and repulsive.
Well, the handheld and media player markets that Sony is trying to slip somewhere indeterminately between right now are a good bit different from the video game industry when the Playstation was released. The media player market is extremely rich right now, and on the video game side the PSP (unlike the Playstation) actually has a viable competitor; Nintendo is no longer particularly repulsive to developers, and they're even doing things lately that you could almost call competent, sometimes. Meanwhile, frankly, looking at the Playstation, the Playstation 2, and the PSP, the first two of these are just plain good products. The third... how shall I put this... seems to me rather lacking, and doesn't really seem to serve any utility at all unless you really want a Video iPod and don't mind spending lots of money on memory sticks. This seems likely to be a bit of a hard sell given alternative systems with a fair degree of quality really do exist.
I'll agree the person you quote is being silly; I don't think there's any reason to think that Nintendo can magically and eternally defend itself from all challenges to the Game Boy. But if you look at the products on the market right now... meh, I think it's pretty safe to say they can defend themselves against the PSP.
Everyone keeps hearing "dinosaur dna" and thinking "cloning". That seems like a bit of a long shot. And I think concentrating on this is overlooking the real value here.
If they find any dinosaur DNA just think of what could be done with that. Mostly what I'm thinking about here is ancestry analysis. Our understanding of the exact way evolutionary processes have behaved contains much that is based on similarity and guesswork. It seems if we could get solid information on what now-living organisms that dinosaurs were related to and to what extent-- or what dinosaurs were related to each other and how, if more soft tissue can be found in other fossils-- it seems this could verify science's understanding of paleobiology (sic?) and the evolutionary tree, or change it, in an unprecedented way. Has anything of this sort-- DNA from living tissue that old-- ever been found before, has there ever been any comparable way we have been able to perform genetic testing on a sample of that age?
This is even aside from what that DNA and any found proteins can tell us about how dinosaurs looked and behaved...
This is a really big deal.
"Evolutionary theory" predates mendelian genetics and is not dependent on it. Mendelian genetics is simply the best available explanation for how evolution happens and the one best supported by evidence to have actually occurred.
There is no such thing as "microevolution". It's a term invented by people trying to reconcile theology with science, has no definition which is either consistently applied or consistent with any sort of evidentially grounded theory, and has no place in a non-theological discussion. I'm sure there are better terms for whatever it was you were actually trying to express.
The existence of a process which inhibits mutations does not "leave a gaping hole in" or even realistically impact the ability of mendelian genetics to explain even what you call "microevolution", as long as there is some process somewhere by which alleles may be accidentally altered, ever. Okay, so there's a mechanism which may in some species under some circumstances correct "errors"? What if the error corrector makes an error???
Uncovering contradictions in the operation of a scientific theory is an indication of flawed theory existing somewhere. However uncovering facts which complicate how that theory applies to the real world is an indication of a strong theory, because they show the theory is robust enough to accommodate complicating factors without breaking down into contradictions or epicycles. Uncovering complications in a theory's applications, as this paper uncovers complications in the mechanics of genetics as we know them, is a good thing because it means our understanding of how "stuff" operates has been tested and expanded; a theory whose applicability to the real world is not constantly being tested is a theory which perhaps cannot be trusted. Unfortunately the press, aided by a rather decent-sized faction of persons who actively wish to attack the idea of science, seems to often interpret such events as if they were a problem. It becomes difficult to meaningfully explain science to the public in such an environment, where positive events for scientific understanding necessary to the operation of the scientific process itself are so frequently popularly interpreted as negative events which cast doubt on the results of the scientific process.
which are different from the courts in France.
The courts in France are not where AFP is suing Google.
It's more like saying I should be able to remove KDE but still run Konqueror if I like.
And I certainly think I should.
The thumbnails all directly link to the place where they appeared, where the copyright line may be clearly seen in full. Whether that line is visible on google news doesn't matter; the courts at least in America seem to have been pretty clear that if you thumbnail an image linked somewhere else and link the original, this isn't publishing and any copyright issues that image may hold aren't relevant because only the actual host is publishing the image, you're just linking it.
if this were being done by a site that everyone loves to hate, I think people would tend to side with AFP.
No I think if this were anyone else we'd be instead of concentrating on "OMFG IT'S GOOGLE" concentrating on the real issue, which is that AFP is expecting the traditional concepts of fair use that every website that's ever excerpted something and then linked it-- you know, which google news didn't invent-- to be reordered for them.
If they allow their news to be disseminated without the appropriate fee being paid (as Google News is doing),
If a link, a headline and a half-paragraph quotation is "disseminating", we're all fucked.
Can't wait to see where we go next with this amazing new logic. "Amazon.com book reviews banned in france because people were quoting sentences from the books they reviewed, the book companies make their money by selling those books to customers, if they allow those sentences to be disseminated without the appropriate fee (as amazon.com book reviewers do) they will be cutting off their main source of revenue"...
Well I can't help but wonder if the AFP's customers-- you know, the actual news sites google links-- are going to be particularly happy that that the AFP just got them blacklisted from google.
I mean, if I ran a news site of some sort, and I found that one of my content providers was engaging in direct and successful lobbying efforts to get me kicked off google news because I'd been buying content from them, I'd definitely start looking for an alternate provider for that content immediately.
Is the difference between "classic" and "revamped" when they switched assistants from the lesbian from The Brady Bunch to the other girl, or was there a Beakman's World 2.0 I just wasn't aware of?
Beakman's World was more entertaining and more informative than either of those...
That's why I have a Gamecube.
I hear PC gamers fretting all the time about whether their graphics cards are up to snuff, whether they're going to be able to run the hot new game coming out in two weeks... I never have to worry about any of that. My computer can't run any games at all (except World of Warcraft, which I don't really want), but I know I can go down to walmart and there's more games there than I've got money to buy or time to play, and all I have to do is put a disc in a machine and switch it on. I don't even have to sign off AIM or Skype.
Okay, if your conception of "games" is "first person shooters" then the PC is where it's at and what I'm saying is worthless, but as far as I'm concerned, my lifetime needs as far as first person shooters go was sated completely in 1998. And if first person shooters aren't your thing then commercial PC gaming probably isn't going to do much at all for you right now. There's some interesting stuff coming out of the PC shareware game community, but when was the last commercial PC gaming got a game like Katamari Damacy, or Wario Ware? There was a time in the past where the pc games lineup made being a mac user a bit depressing but at this point, pc gaming seems like it wouldn't be worth the bother even if my computer could run it. I've got all the games I want and then some.
I don't really care. I'd rather be a "pottymouth" than a fucking crapflooder.
Somehow I do not think you're going to be really watching any videos on the 32MB memory stick, which doubles as your game memory card, that comes with the PSP $250 pack. And the larger memory stick duo pros are not cheap.
Perhaps I'm excessively cynical, but I can't help but wonder if along with Flickr Yahoo is acquiring any patents that could be used to chase competing photo-sharing products out of the market... like Yahoo is doing to XFire already...
Its open to debate whether it was his intent with glasnost(openness) and perestroika(restructuring) to completely dismantle communist rule though that it was an inevitable result of relaxing the Soviet Union's grip on Eastern Europe and relaxing repression withint the U.S.S.R. As I recall his reforms started snowballing, the hard liners attempted a coup but it was to late, and in the power vacuum created by the coup Yeltsin and a popular uprising finished removing the Communists.
I guess this really is the interesting question-- what exactly was Gorbachev trying to do with the glasnost/perestroika thing? I seriously doubt his end goal was either what actually happened or the betterment of the Russian populace; it does seem more that his reforms got away from him than anything. But as for what his actual, specific personal motivations were, I've yet to see a serious evidence-grounded attempt to answer that question, nor am I sure where to look for one.
Me, I'm sick of Roland
I don't give a shit. I'm sick of you and the rest of your trolling little clique. You've wasted an order of magnitude more space and reader time than this "Roland" whosit ever will, and unlike Mr. Pipquwhatever, you post your trash where I can't just skim past and not click the story if I'm not interested.
Putting a plagiarist, seeking ad revenue, on the front page posing as news is NOT OK.
Why the fuck not? Who cares? If he's plagiarizing, the people he is plagiarizing are free to take it up with him. Talk to them, not us.
At some point I'm going to start submitting all of my slashdot story submissions under the name of "Roland Piquepaille" instead of my own, just to piss you worthless mewling fanboys off.
I am sick of hearing about the idiot. Stop smearing the comment section with your obsession with him.
IE appears to retain 90% of the general market share. How would not following standards hurt them? After all, W3 standards complaince is only an issue to web developers; to the general public all that matters is whether it's compliant with existing pages. And to these people, IE is the standard.
It appears ignoring standards would do more to hurt Firefox than hurt IE at this stage. Which from Microsoft's perspective...
But it looks to me like the Soviet Union fell less because the citizenry got fed up, as it did because the government lost its capacity to maintain order. The citizenry, it seems, in the late 80s weren't any more empowered or oppressed than they were in the 40 years previous. The only thing that changed were the machines of oppression; and the change wasn't even in terms of getting more compassionate, it was in terms of efficacy at oppression.
For example I seem to remember-- again, could be wrong-- that while the soviet union had a massive standing army, by the end, that army wasn't getting paid.
And it is the most wonderful game I have played in years.
Now, I don't know if the games industry is going to take some path WIl Wright and Warren Spectre drag it down kicking and screaming, or if the EA megacorporate megabudget idiom will take over the industry completely; and either way, I don't know if "innovation", whatever the fuck that is, will result, or if it's a good thing. But looking at my Yoshi Touch and Go cartridge, I think that if what the game industry wants to go with the EA path rather than the Yoshi T&G sort of path, then it can fuck off and do it without me as a customer.