The thing is, not everyone who gets arrested normally gets put on that list. It's not supposed to be a comprehensive list of everyone who's ever been arrested, or everyone who's ever been charged, or even everyone who's ever been convicted of a crime. It's supposed to be a list of dangerous criminals. Now it's not.
I cannot conceive of feeling functional without virtual desktops. I learned the habit on the Amiga, where the natural model was for each application to have its own screen, and to just page back and forth between them.
Why on EARTH would I have applications sharing screen space if I don't have to? Full screen, bigass fonts, and LET ME FOCUS ON WHAT I'M DOING.
I have spent months and months trying to track down usable virtual desktops for OS X. (FWIW, "You Control Desktops" is the one I ended up with on 10.4, and if you're not getting Leopard, I recommend it as a viable desktop switcher.)
Basically, if they'd done nothing but add Spaces, I'd grumble a bit but I'd buy the upgrade. Yes, it matters that much. We're talking a feature that roughly doubles my effective productivity on any platform; I am simply not functional without it.
Add to that the death of nearly all of the inconsistent UI displays (FINALLY), and we have an upgrade worth getting; I just wish the title bar were still opaque, and the dock didn't suck. (I'll be using the right-hand dock, yes.)
The development environment is buffed. That they ended up not doing Java 6 with the release has pissed off a lot of Java people, but Java 5 is still improved over what was in Tiger.
64-bit native support? Another BIG win for me.
Rumor has it that Mail will no longer utterly destroy all incoming meeting invitations, too, which would be a big plus for me -- $DAYJOB is gonna send me calendar invites, and I can make them or not, but if I pick "not", they might stop paying me.
While it's true that a CD can never represent all of the details found on a vinyl record, most of the details it's not reproducing [b]are not part of the original music[/b] -- they're just errors introduced by shoddy media.
I think I'll stick with media that don't wear out from being used, thanks.
I just don't get it. His company holds spurious patents, and no matter how often he says things like "that's just defensive", his company has sued other companies for alleged infringements, when those companies were not suing him or his company. That is what we would normally call an "offensive" use of the patent system.
If Bezos is a patent reformer, the RIAA is a copyright reformer.
Theodore Sturgeon once said that 90% of everything is crud. (People usually misquote him on that last word.) He's right; most games suck. Now, just like always.
But then you get stuff like Zack & Wiki on Wii, or Geometry Wars on XBox, and you'll note that, in fact, people are still doing cool games.
The problem here is not that there are no good games. Okami was a brilliant, revolutionary, game. All twenty or so people who bought it were utterly bowled over by it, but it came out during the next-gen launch, so it got ignored.
So, if you wanna see good games: Get out there and get Zack & Wiki. (IGN has some pretty solid reviews, and I'm sure other sites do as well.) Get out there and buy Okami for Wii when it shows up. Keep an eye out for sleeper hits, and games that didn't quite fit into a genre, and play them, and if they're any good, tell people about them.
If we bought decent games, people would make more of them. If we buy more copies of Barbie Changes Clothes, But You Never See Her Naked than we do of Grim Fandango or Planescape: Torment, then it is our own damn fault that we get crap games.
I am a serious, devoted, gamer. I have put in plenty of 80+-hour weeks of gaming. I have written games. I have written patches for games. Bioware liked my bug reports (think "over 180 bugs with detailed citations to rulebooks and/or reproducers") so much that they gave me a free copy of BG2. I own about a dozen console systems, and an average of about 15-20 games for each of them.
I love the Wii. It's the best thing I've seen in video gaming in at least twenty years.
This is not just for casuals; it's just that it's not aimed at the very narrow market (18-24 year old boys) that MS and Sony are fighting over -- the "hardcore" gamers who play a couple specific genres a lot, and feel like they'll attract more girls if they are violent and play games with a lot of cussing.
There's a lot of good games out for the Wii right now. If you like 2D fighters (and what "real" gamer doesn't at least sometimes?), Guilty Gear is a solid choice. There's lots of games. Some of them aren't exactly smack dab in the middle of a well-established, well-understood, genre. That's okay! They can be fun without being easily categorized.
I have a dozen Wii games and two PS3 games. About ten of those Wii games are more fun than either of the PS3 games, thus far.
So... While it's true that many people buying Wiis aren't "gamers", many of them are. Perhaps more importantly, since a gamer is just someone who plays games, they are becoming gamers, and they are enlarging the overall game market. Everybody wins. (BTW, I have to dispute your age range; our nephew has loved the Wii since he was about 3 1/2. He has even made us take him real-bowling, despite the fact that he isn't strong enough to roll a ball fast enough for it to actually make it down the lane.)
Apparently, Capcom sold 750,000 copies of RE4 for Wii -- despite the title having been popular, and thus played pretty widely already, on both the PS2 and Gamecube.
So I think this only makes sense. I hope we start seeing more original content, but then, one of the things that the Wii needs is for people to make enough money while learning to use it that they can do more games for it.
Yes, there's standards. They're probably imperfect, but this stuff is not hard; Target's got things like graphical buttons with no alt text, where the graphic is just a picture of some words. VERY easy to fix.
It's also, and this may matter more to you, stupid.
A cooperative society walks all over an uncooperative society. Hint: You will never, not in your whole life, be worth as much to us as Stephen Hawking. We'd rather accommodate him than you.
Reviews and a dollar won't get you a bag of chips. I don't care whether a game scores 90 or higher in someone's review list; I care whether it's fun, and for fun, the Wii has enough games.
Does the Xbox have more? I don't know and don't care. A weak lineup is a lineup that leaves me with nothing to play. The Wii has enough games that I have never, not since launch day, had nothing to play on the Wii.
The Xbox has a lot of highly ranked games that are the same damn shooter over and over and over, and the same racers, and the same sports games. Whatever. I played those already in the 80s.
I can entertain the notion of something bad happening, but I'd want to talk about things we have some kind of evidence for. "What if third parties never start putting real effort in and keep producing shovelware" would be an excellent concern to raise, because there's substantial evidence that third parties are just blowing off development.
"What if suddenly the laws of physics change, and Wii systems start overheating because 19W becomes a lot" is not a realistic concern.
"What if all these people are secretly not buying games, even though games are selling well, but somehow they aren't selling to actual owners, and actual owners never play the system anymore and won't buy games" is closer to the physics thing than the third party shovelware thing.
I don't know what your gaming tastes are like, but the Wii has plenty of appeal to hardcore gamers.
Not, mind you, to college-age kids who want to impress people with how manly and old they are without having to talk to an actual girl. Just to gamers.
See, hardcore gamers don't give a fuck about what's got the most impressive graphics, or how many polygons there are. They want to PLAY GAMES. They play games with character displays, they play games with polygons, they play games with sprites, they play whatever's got gameplay. And to gamers, the Wii is a veritable paradise right now, offering an insane variety of gameplay choices, many of them really new, some of them familiar but spiffed up a bit.
The people whining about the Wii's "bad" selection of games are people who think that reading romance novels day in and day out, and refusing to read anything else, makes you a "hardcore reader".
It's discussing the "possibility" based on completely unevidenced speculation. This guy I know heard some other guy say that he could imagine that maybe some people don't play with their Wiis anymore. Also, in one of the slowest commercial periods in Japan, the Wii's sales are slightly down.
Games are selling pretty well when there's some games out. As Capcom has made it clear, their sales have been good enough (750k of RE4 Wii, and that's just a remake) to make them move Monster Hunter 3 from PS3 to Wii.
This is the absolute worst time for Wii. We're getting all the "learn to use this dev kit, maybe make some minigames or something" titles that were shoveled out when all the software houses realized that it was a runaway success and tried to jump on the bandwagon. Same crap the DS has always gotten, and the PS2 got too. We will start seeing more and more of the real games that have depth and gameplay. Look at the Pro Evolution Soccer gameplay videos, showing off the best controls they've ever done, and look how excited they are. Look at Monster Hunter 3 (which looks glorious, given the hardware) moving from PS3 to Wii.
There's enough games for people with jobs to play games on Wii all the time they have available and still have plenty left to play, and there's more coming out. No worries for me!
It seems exceedingly unlikely. They are still selling out pretty fast, although I've seen them in stock a few times now. Most of the people I know who want one will get one when they see it, but won't go looking.
That was how I finally got a CPU module problem diagnosed -- demonstrated that the problem went away if I booted my laptop from the desktop's hard drive, but the desktop couldn't do things. One CPU module swap later, everything was fine.
I do embedded Linux work sometimes. I also have some servers.
BIOS: 5 seconds, minimum, often 10 or 20. Linux or BSD, from the initial jump into kernel code to running init: If it's more than 2 seconds, something's very wrong, or a driver has "issues".
I think in embedded land, our assumption is that we should be able to get from the first jump into kernel code to running userland in half a second or less on virtually any real hardware.
And, frankly, since the OS has to reinitialize everything anyway, the BIOS time is pretty much mostly wasted.
When I originally wrote the article (October 2005), I wasn't aware of EFI. (That article got delayed MUCH longer than usual in the editing process, for reasons beyond anyone's control.)
No, I don't know that much about what's happened in the field in the year and a month or so since this article went up, a month or so after I wrote it. I've been busy.
I don't know that I think it becomes moral to lie under these circumstances. If I ever got called for jury duty (I haven't), and were directly asked, I would tell the truth. If I were asked about the basis for my vote, and it was jury nullification, I'd say that, too.
The entire point of such a thing is not to try to evade whatever punishments the courts might attempt to apply for jury nullification, but rather, to do the right thing anyway. It's sort of like civil disobedience, only it's not actually disobedience.
There's no other word for it. Sony's vision of the PS3 is flickering around. Every month, they declare a new vision, and then, if they aren't ahead of the 360 at the end of the month, they try something totally different.
I cannot believe they're doing this. Think of all the people who, having seen 100% backwards compatibility advertised since before the PS2 launched, are going to get a PS3 assuming it will let them play PS2 games. Maybe they own the games already; maybe they just plan to get the best ones. And then... Whoops. Not on THIS model. Just on other models.
It's crazy, and it's stupid. The fanboys were all dismissing this, attacking it as "FUD" from "xbots", and so on... And now many of them are trying to pretend it's reasonable now that it's actually happening, but no.
That's stupid. Letting someone do a parody (which you have no real choice about, ultimately) has no impact on your IP rights.
This is like saying that it makes sense for Rockstar to demand that people from EA not drive within three miles of their building, because there's so many EA employees that if they all parked in the Rockstar parking lots, there wouldn't be any spaces left.
The problem is that, every time you guys use actual words to describe a proposed law, it ends up being a law that bans QoS in any circumstance where someone might pay for QoS.
In short, QoS is relevant because it's what the laws people actually propose would ban. I am aware that most advocates of "net neutrality" aren't thinking in those terms. However, the law doesn't care what you were thinking about when you wrote it, and the courts generally enforce the law that got written, not the vague and unspecified prohibition against "bad" traffic limitations that the people signing the petitions wanted.
You may say that trying to prevent customers from killing average subscriber speed isn't the same as demanding that Google pay you money -- but most attempts to legislate against the latter would prevent the former.
In fact, as of yet, I haven't seen a proposed law advocated for this that wouldn't ban me from dropping packets from spammers, if it were actually enforced as written.
Frankly, in the end, I just don't think this is something where I want governments trying to get the rules right.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, not everyone who gets arrested normally gets put on that list. It's not supposed to be a comprehensive list of everyone who's ever been arrested, or everyone who's ever been charged, or even everyone who's ever been convicted of a crime. It's supposed to be a list of dangerous criminals. Now it's not.
SPACES SPACES SPACES!
I cannot conceive of feeling functional without virtual desktops. I learned the habit on the Amiga, where the natural model was for each application to have its own screen, and to just page back and forth between them.
Why on EARTH would I have applications sharing screen space if I don't have to? Full screen, bigass fonts, and LET ME FOCUS ON WHAT I'M DOING.
I have spent months and months trying to track down usable virtual desktops for OS X. (FWIW, "You Control Desktops" is the one I ended up with on 10.4, and if you're not getting Leopard, I recommend it as a viable desktop switcher.)
Basically, if they'd done nothing but add Spaces, I'd grumble a bit but I'd buy the upgrade. Yes, it matters that much. We're talking a feature that roughly doubles my effective productivity on any platform; I am simply not functional without it.
Add to that the death of nearly all of the inconsistent UI displays (FINALLY), and we have an upgrade worth getting; I just wish the title bar were still opaque, and the dock didn't suck. (I'll be using the right-hand dock, yes.)
The development environment is buffed. That they ended up not doing Java 6 with the release has pissed off a lot of Java people, but Java 5 is still improved over what was in Tiger.
64-bit native support? Another BIG win for me.
Rumor has it that Mail will no longer utterly destroy all incoming meeting invitations, too, which would be a big plus for me -- $DAYJOB is gonna send me calendar invites, and I can make them or not, but if I pick "not", they might stop paying me.
While it's true that a CD can never represent all of the details found on a vinyl record, most of the details it's not reproducing [b]are not part of the original music[/b] -- they're just errors introduced by shoddy media.
I think I'll stick with media that don't wear out from being used, thanks.
Yes, it does.
On the other hand, then they're installed and working. WIN!
I just don't get it. His company holds spurious patents, and no matter how often he says things like "that's just defensive", his company has sued other companies for alleged infringements, when those companies were not suing him or his company. That is what we would normally call an "offensive" use of the patent system.
If Bezos is a patent reformer, the RIAA is a copyright reformer.
Theodore Sturgeon once said that 90% of everything is crud. (People usually misquote him on that last word.) He's right; most games suck. Now, just like always.
But then you get stuff like Zack & Wiki on Wii, or Geometry Wars on XBox, and you'll note that, in fact, people are still doing cool games.
The problem here is not that there are no good games. Okami was a brilliant, revolutionary, game. All twenty or so people who bought it were utterly bowled over by it, but it came out during the next-gen launch, so it got ignored.
So, if you wanna see good games: Get out there and get Zack & Wiki. (IGN has some pretty solid reviews, and I'm sure other sites do as well.) Get out there and buy Okami for Wii when it shows up. Keep an eye out for sleeper hits, and games that didn't quite fit into a genre, and play them, and if they're any good, tell people about them.
If we bought decent games, people would make more of them. If we buy more copies of Barbie Changes Clothes, But You Never See Her Naked than we do of Grim Fandango or Planescape: Torment, then it is our own damn fault that we get crap games.
I sort of disagree.
I am a serious, devoted, gamer. I have put in plenty of 80+-hour weeks of gaming. I have written games. I have written patches for games. Bioware liked my bug reports (think "over 180 bugs with detailed citations to rulebooks and/or reproducers") so much that they gave me a free copy of BG2. I own about a dozen console systems, and an average of about 15-20 games for each of them.
I love the Wii. It's the best thing I've seen in video gaming in at least twenty years.
This is not just for casuals; it's just that it's not aimed at the very narrow market (18-24 year old boys) that MS and Sony are fighting over -- the "hardcore" gamers who play a couple specific genres a lot, and feel like they'll attract more girls if they are violent and play games with a lot of cussing.
There's a lot of good games out for the Wii right now. If you like 2D fighters (and what "real" gamer doesn't at least sometimes?), Guilty Gear is a solid choice. There's lots of games. Some of them aren't exactly smack dab in the middle of a well-established, well-understood, genre. That's okay! They can be fun without being easily categorized.
I have a dozen Wii games and two PS3 games. About ten of those Wii games are more fun than either of the PS3 games, thus far.
So... While it's true that many people buying Wiis aren't "gamers", many of them are. Perhaps more importantly, since a gamer is just someone who plays games, they are becoming gamers, and they are enlarging the overall game market. Everybody wins. (BTW, I have to dispute your age range; our nephew has loved the Wii since he was about 3 1/2. He has even made us take him real-bowling, despite the fact that he isn't strong enough to roll a ball fast enough for it to actually make it down the lane.)
Apparently, Capcom sold 750,000 copies of RE4 for Wii -- despite the title having been popular, and thus played pretty widely already, on both the PS2 and Gamecube.
So I think this only makes sense. I hope we start seeing more original content, but then, one of the things that the Wii needs is for people to make enough money while learning to use it that they can do more games for it.
Yes, there's standards. They're probably imperfect, but this stuff is not hard; Target's got things like graphical buttons with no alt text, where the graphic is just a picture of some words. VERY easy to fix.
It's not a popular opinion because it's evil.
It's also, and this may matter more to you, stupid.
A cooperative society walks all over an uncooperative society. Hint: You will never, not in your whole life, be worth as much to us as Stephen Hawking. We'd rather accommodate him than you.
Nice use of anonymous coward status!
Reviews and a dollar won't get you a bag of chips. I don't care whether a game scores 90 or higher in someone's review list; I care whether it's fun, and for fun, the Wii has enough games.
Does the Xbox have more? I don't know and don't care. A weak lineup is a lineup that leaves me with nothing to play. The Wii has enough games that I have never, not since launch day, had nothing to play on the Wii.
The Xbox has a lot of highly ranked games that are the same damn shooter over and over and over, and the same racers, and the same sports games. Whatever. I played those already in the 80s.
I can entertain the notion of something bad happening, but I'd want to talk about things we have some kind of evidence for. "What if third parties never start putting real effort in and keep producing shovelware" would be an excellent concern to raise, because there's substantial evidence that third parties are just blowing off development.
"What if suddenly the laws of physics change, and Wii systems start overheating because 19W becomes a lot" is not a realistic concern.
"What if all these people are secretly not buying games, even though games are selling well, but somehow they aren't selling to actual owners, and actual owners never play the system anymore and won't buy games" is closer to the physics thing than the third party shovelware thing.
I don't know what your gaming tastes are like, but the Wii has plenty of appeal to hardcore gamers.
Not, mind you, to college-age kids who want to impress people with how manly and old they are without having to talk to an actual girl. Just to gamers.
See, hardcore gamers don't give a fuck about what's got the most impressive graphics, or how many polygons there are. They want to PLAY GAMES. They play games with character displays, they play games with polygons, they play games with sprites, they play whatever's got gameplay. And to gamers, the Wii is a veritable paradise right now, offering an insane variety of gameplay choices, many of them really new, some of them familiar but spiffed up a bit.
The people whining about the Wii's "bad" selection of games are people who think that reading romance novels day in and day out, and refusing to read anything else, makes you a "hardcore reader".
It's discussing the "possibility" based on completely unevidenced speculation. This guy I know heard some other guy say that he could imagine that maybe some people don't play with their Wiis anymore. Also, in one of the slowest commercial periods in Japan, the Wii's sales are slightly down.
DISASTER HAS STRUCK!
Games are selling pretty well when there's some games out. As Capcom has made it clear, their sales have been good enough (750k of RE4 Wii, and that's just a remake) to make them move Monster Hunter 3 from PS3 to Wii.
This is the absolute worst time for Wii. We're getting all the "learn to use this dev kit, maybe make some minigames or something" titles that were shoveled out when all the software houses realized that it was a runaway success and tried to jump on the bandwagon. Same crap the DS has always gotten, and the PS2 got too. We will start seeing more and more of the real games that have depth and gameplay. Look at the Pro Evolution Soccer gameplay videos, showing off the best controls they've ever done, and look how excited they are. Look at Monster Hunter 3 (which looks glorious, given the hardware) moving from PS3 to Wii.
There's enough games for people with jobs to play games on Wii all the time they have available and still have plenty left to play, and there's more coming out. No worries for me!
It seems exceedingly unlikely. They are still selling out pretty fast, although I've seen them in stock a few times now. Most of the people I know who want one will get one when they see it, but won't go looking.
That was how I finally got a CPU module problem diagnosed -- demonstrated that the problem went away if I booted my laptop from the desktop's hard drive, but the desktop couldn't do things. One CPU module swap later, everything was fine.
Wrong.
I do embedded Linux work sometimes. I also have some servers.
BIOS: 5 seconds, minimum, often 10 or 20.
Linux or BSD, from the initial jump into kernel code to running init: If it's more than 2 seconds, something's very wrong, or a driver has "issues".
I think in embedded land, our assumption is that we should be able to get from the first jump into kernel code to running userland in half a second or less on virtually any real hardware.
And, frankly, since the OS has to reinitialize everything anyway, the BIOS time is pretty much mostly wasted.
This isn't an x86 problem, it's a BIOS problem.
When I originally wrote the article (October 2005), I wasn't aware of EFI. (That article got delayed MUCH longer than usual in the editing process, for reasons beyond anyone's control.)
No, I don't know that much about what's happened in the field in the year and a month or so since this article went up, a month or so after I wrote it. I've been busy.
I don't know that I think it becomes moral to lie under these circumstances. If I ever got called for jury duty (I haven't), and were directly asked, I would tell the truth. If I were asked about the basis for my vote, and it was jury nullification, I'd say that, too.
The entire point of such a thing is not to try to evade whatever punishments the courts might attempt to apply for jury nullification, but rather, to do the right thing anyway. It's sort of like civil disobedience, only it's not actually disobedience.
There's no other word for it. Sony's vision of the PS3 is flickering around. Every month, they declare a new vision, and then, if they aren't ahead of the 360 at the end of the month, they try something totally different.
I cannot believe they're doing this. Think of all the people who, having seen 100% backwards compatibility advertised since before the PS2 launched, are going to get a PS3 assuming it will let them play PS2 games. Maybe they own the games already; maybe they just plan to get the best ones. And then... Whoops. Not on THIS model. Just on other models.
It's crazy, and it's stupid. The fanboys were all dismissing this, attacking it as "FUD" from "xbots", and so on... And now many of them are trying to pretend it's reasonable now that it's actually happening, but no.
That's stupid. Letting someone do a parody (which you have no real choice about, ultimately) has no impact on your IP rights.
This is like saying that it makes sense for Rockstar to demand that people from EA not drive within three miles of their building, because there's so many EA employees that if they all parked in the Rockstar parking lots, there wouldn't be any spaces left.
The problem is that, every time you guys use actual words to describe a proposed law, it ends up being a law that bans QoS in any circumstance where someone might pay for QoS.
In short, QoS is relevant because it's what the laws people actually propose would ban. I am aware that most advocates of "net neutrality" aren't thinking in those terms. However, the law doesn't care what you were thinking about when you wrote it, and the courts generally enforce the law that got written, not the vague and unspecified prohibition against "bad" traffic limitations that the people signing the petitions wanted.
You may say that trying to prevent customers from killing average subscriber speed isn't the same as demanding that Google pay you money -- but most attempts to legislate against the latter would prevent the former.
In fact, as of yet, I haven't seen a proposed law advocated for this that wouldn't ban me from dropping packets from spammers, if it were actually enforced as written.
Frankly, in the end, I just don't think this is something where I want governments trying to get the rules right.
The PSP Slim and FF7 Crisis Core got a week or so of the PSP outselling the DS about 3-1... But it may not last.