You'll probably smack an unemployed IT professional in the back of the head.
That's a contradictory statement. They're unemployed. They're no longer a professional. It may be hard for many readers of this website to accept, but the majority of Eye-Tee (I resent how everybody who touches a computer for a living is lumped into that category, BTW) workers from the past decade have been underqualified, but managed to stay in their positions because they weren't really needed. Now that costs are being cut, and operator tasks are being automated, only the truly skilled of these people are keeping their jobs.
Look around you and tell me how many talented software designers (not programmers or testers) you see that are unemployed. I know lots that have lost their jobs, but none that have been unemployed for more than a few weeks.
People were outsourcing programming jobs since the early 90's. Now that the base of employees has shrunk, the percentages are up and the unemployed former below-average programmers and bit jockeys are being replaced by RAD tools and Indian programmers, people are starting to notice.
I agree that none of this is good for people who are unemployed, but the problem isn't going to magically go away. Those jobs aren't coming back. They aren't needed. These people need to look elsewhere. That's just how it is.
(My appologies if I ended up replying more to the parent of your comment than yours...)
Let's leave their understanding of the issue and legal position out of it for a moment. Statistically speaking, practically nobody has ripped DVDs at home.
Let's not forget here that this isn't about your rights to rip of creators of content, but your rights to use content you've paid for in the manner you choose.
Quite honestly, if all you want is to be able to watch movies for free, I don't understand why you even care what the outcome if this trial is. If you're willing to break copyright law, why do you care if copy protection circumvention is illegal. If you are going to break one law to save a few bucks, why not two?
Give it a few more weeks. You'll start to not care if you make it to the TV in time for your favorite shows... You'll spend entire evenings away from the TV comfortable in the knowledge that you won't miss the only chance to catch that show you like. Live TV will slowly slip from usage. That's the best thing about TiVo. You can both watch TV *and* not have it rule your life. It just takes some time for it to sink in....
Not that hard. I guess we could all switch to RedHat though. Then we could be comfortable in the knowledge that the version string is more recent by default, even though most of the code is from an archaic version. Not that you'd know what is in there with out manually checking, since their kernel release notes, um, shall we say, leave some to be desired.
they may find not only public sentiment totally against them, but some seriously powerful lobbying interests pulling out the big guns to launch attacks on them.
I know it may not seem like this from a slashdot reader's perspective, but public sentiment is very much for Microsoft, not against it.
For every geek they piss off, there's 10 investors that love them.
I was laughing for a good five minutes after that one. Please, give me a break. The teachers I know all get every national and local holiday off. In most jobs there are 7 holidays per year. There are more than 7 holidays in the 9 month school year. Then, on top of the two month summer break there are two vacation weeks during the school year too! You're just plain wrong here.
Such as mold so bad that some sensitive students get sick. Or, the heating system is so old, that they have to turn in on onl after the temperature outside is under 50 F and they have to leave it on all winter, until March, because it is far to expensiv to be turning it on or off just because it is 80 outside.
I was talking about age alone, not lack of maintnence. It almost universally costs less to renovate or maintain a building than to replace one; especially if you don't neglect it for decades. Stupid decisions in the past do not justify additional stupid decisions in the future.
My mother has been teaching in an elemetary school here in South Texas for 25+ years, and she sure as hell doesn't earn 60k. She get's more in the area of 40k, which isn't very much when you consider that teachers are some of the most important influences on the development of any child.
I clearly wasn't describing the salary levels in every district. The cost of living here (eastern MA) is higher than that in south texas, so naturally the pay is higher here. $40k is well above the national average for annual salary, and I don't know many teachers that don't either take a second job during the summer or take a few months off. In fact, in my town, teachers that work during the summer are paid hourly on top of their school year salary. As for the "important part in our children's development" crap, perhaps you'd have a point if teacher's salarys were in any way tied to performance, but the unions would have none of that.
You sound like a grumpy old man whose mailbox got smashed in a couple of times, so he decides to hold his own personal grudge against all kids. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some journal entries to do.
I'm 26 years old. I make $90,000 a year, yet I can't afford to buy a house within an hours ride of my job. I wish I had a mailbox to get smashed and a house to grow old and bitter in. Instead I work 3 times as much as the principal of the local high school and make less money. He's got an antique sports car and I've got a junker with multiple hundreds of thousands of miles on it. If I did manage to purchase a house at the going rate, including property taxes I would be giving just shy of 50% of my money to the govenrment every year. I can't even afford to have kids to send to the local schools. Now do you see why I'm a little pissed off at wasted money, and why some families may move to the area for a little while for the eduacation and then move away afterward?
I have nothing against kids, and I have nothing against good education. I am against blatant waste of taxpayer money that goes completely unchecked because it's "for the children." As I said before, clean up your act first, the public school system needs to cut out the waste. Then it can have more money. Also, some school districts clearly are under funded, and don't have the cash to waste. Sure, give them more money, but don't try to sell the "schools need more money" argument as a general philosophy. It is not universally applicable.
Check out this great article by Neal Stephenson in wired. It talks about running an even longer cable. Beware though. He's in his typical verbose form. The article is 56 pages long.
For those of us who build their own boxe[s], I'm sure that we'll be choosing to disable everything related to DRM and then some.
Don't be so sure....
Look at all the case modding FPS gamers out there that build their own machines just to make it look cool. You can bet they'll turn that DRM switch on the first time they need it to run the fancy video card needing shoot em' up du-jour.
Your best bet is to open the unit up and purchase an exact replacement. I don't know enough about iPods to tell you which kind of battery is in each model, but I can tell you that you'll never go wrong by double checking the part number on the original battery first!
Or, by the same exact battery from DigiKey for $23.
Whenever you see somebody selling a battery for too much, don't forget that they need to buy it from somewhere, and they need to make a profit. Most industrial rechargeable batteries you'll find on replacement sites are sourced through DigiKey or Newark, and the manufacturer's markings are usually left intact on the original battery. Just head over to one of those sites and type in the part number. You'll usually see a 50%+ savings. This goes for UPS batteries too!
Custom BIOS code is no new thing. Perhaps now, more people will use it...
It's annoying beyond belief to me that the most common general purpose hardware platform around has such brain-dead firmware. It's nice to know that this may not last. It's too bad that they're choosing to disregard all the work Intel put into EFI though. That should be the future....
Either way, you should expect Pheonix alternatives to start gaining development support should Pheonix decide to make the "trusted computing" features mandatory. Judging by how thier software works now though, it will be the motherboard manufacturer that will decide which features are compiled into the BIOS you get, and which features can't be turned off. I'll bet that you'll see some big name brand machines from manufacturers that are in Microsoft's pocket ship with this in a permenant "on" position, and the enthusiast motherboard market to ship with this feature easily to disable.
Re:The main issue with XML is performance
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
Yeah. Use more memory and a faster processor.
They make most of their consumer OS money through OEM sales anyway, so why not take advantage of all that under utilized power.
Nobody knows better than Microsoft that it's buzzwords that sell software. There's probably only 1 in a thousand users that actually even begin to take advantage of any features made available by the changes that they put into their back end software these days. Their design decisions are all purely marketing related. Fooling yourself into thinking there's novel technological progress behind any of their decisions or that they're technology driven in the slightest way is short sighted, and quite honestly it would be bad business for them to work that way.
Believe me, if Microsoft does announce some novel way to accelerate XML parsing or does manage to improve performance beyound that of everybody else, it'll be because marketing made it a product requirement, not because they're sitting around brainstorming about text parsing for fun in the engineering department.
Or, are you one of the "armchair administrators" that see this as a simple problem?
If "armchair administrator" means "person who pays the tab", then yes. I never said this was a simple problem, but the difficulties are political and personal, not techincal or (nessicarily) financial.
Your laundy list of horror stories is so far away from the typical public school situation in the US that it's almost laughable, but more importantly, none of those nightmares you described stands as any reason to fix the problems I describe that waste money and destroy communities. In fact, some of them are in support of my arguments from my perspective; I think that a healthy community plays an important role of the development of a child, and thus has an effect on their behavior in the classroom.
Standing around saying it's a hard problem neither solves anything or justifies the addition of cash to the situation.
I disagree with your original point that teachers are overpaid. Even if they were averaging $60k for 9 months work (which isn't the case anywhere in my state), it's still not enough. We should pay teachers enough that real world professionals are fighting each other to get a good paying teaching job.
Clearly different districts pay their teachers differently. There is one universal problem though. Money goes to seniority first. You can't pay new teachers enough because you're busy paying old teachers more than enough. There are plenty of private and parochial non-union schools out there that prove this is the case.
doesn't seem to have helped because it's a mantra, and the funding doesn't actually get improved.
Hah.
As somebody who lives in a town that has had outragous tax increases every year since the late eighties, let me tell you that it's more than a mantra. The problem is that the money doesn't go to teachers and books alone, it goes to the school. Then a huge chunk is paid to school administrators, is used to expand the sports program, renovate buildings, and by the time the additonal money gets down to the teachers and books, the teachers that already are overpaid (yes, overpaid. $60k/9 months is overpaid, and that's the average around here... many make more than that here) get raises and no progress has been made.
I refuse to believe that students learn better in a new building than in one built in 1970. I refuse to believe that raising my taxes again is going to improve the local schools when last time they increased the schools funding they used the money to build a football field. I resent parents voting for things with long term costs so they can have their little brats go to the best school possible, and then move to a town with lower taxes promptly after said brats graduate from high school, and I resent it because it destroys the community; something i believe is every bit as important as the number of teachers and books in the school. It's sad when all the retired residents of your town are forced to sell the houses their families have owned for generations because some self-focused parents have no concept of the long term concequences.
Instead of throwing money at the problem we should be making the hard decisions and fixing the problems that make educating a child in a public school so expensive. That means standing up to teachers unions in communities where the teachers are overpaid. That means not nescicarily trying to win the state basketball championship. That means staying in that building even though it's an ugly relic of a past generation. That means not hiring administrators back on at an hourly rate and into a useless position after they retire and get their pension. When you can convince me you've stopped wasting money, you can try to convince me you need more.
However, there are some things in the Final Fantasy series which are damn near impossible to figure out without one - I'd refer specifically to Final Fantasy VII as the trendsetter for this.
Bull. Final Fantasy VII in particular went out of the way to make sure you could do every little thing with in-game info only. There were multiple clues in the game about how to find and how to get Knights of the Round. It stopped short only of spelling it out for you. Perhaps you weren't able to put the pieces together, but it was possible. What fun is it if the answers are handed to you with no deduction required? Besides, you said yourself that it's absurdly over powered. Don't you think that it's fitting that you have to gather an absurd number of informational tidbits from many characters throughout the game in order to put the pieces together and figure it out?
do you honestly think I want to have to take notes while I try playing through Final Fantasy X?
Then play the game and enjoy the plot. You only need to do the extra work to get the extras in the game. I don't see how pushing buttons in the order it says in the strategy guide makes the game more of a fun escape from the real world. It takes away all feeling of acomplishment. If I want to follow step-by-step instructions, I'd go get a manufacturing job and get paid for it. If you really can't handle it, then go pick another game type... Don't go encourage changes in a game type that millions of people actually enjoy as it is.
It's obvious that some of us have a different idea of fun than others.... You don't see me laughing at what you like to do though... Then again, I don't know what types of games you like. Perhaps I would laugh.
Sure, go ahead and boil my statement down into something it doesn't say. If you don't like a particular type of thing, then you are ill equipped to offer an objective opinion on something of that type relative to other things of the same type. End of story.
Next time you want to go rewording somebody's statements you should first make sure you have a firm grasp on comprehension. Once you have that down we can talk about interpreting subtlty in the context of a discussion (this particular discussion spans years and forums). Soon there after maybe we can have you reading at a sixth grade level.
Let's see if I can spell this out for you so I don't go off thinking you were right dispite me returning your obnoxious insults...
The post contained the phrase: a large (and welcome) step away from [...] past Final Fantasies. This means said poster was not talking about the "faults" of "something" (your words), but of the relative difference between the game he was discussing and others in the series. He was also exposing his bias in an historically long running argument over this particular game style and its merits. This is the implied knowledge derived from the context of my statement. Now, in my statement the subject at the end: don't pretend that you can say anything objective about them, refers to the class of object I was referencing at the beginning of the sentence, not the object itself as you changed it to in your (mis-)rewording.
Everything you needed to do to get the gold Chocobo and the Nights of the Round materia was dictated to you by a guy in the mountains... (It's been a long time for me too) You just ahd to write down what he said each time you visited, and after about 25 or so visits you had full instructions on how to get your gold chocobo. No guide, and no trial and error required.
This is the case for all the extras in the Final Fantasy games. You need to be observant, and you need to take notes, but you don't need a guide.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll probably smack an unemployed IT professional in the back of the head.
That's a contradictory statement. They're unemployed. They're no longer a professional. It may be hard for many readers of this website to accept, but the majority of Eye-Tee (I resent how everybody who touches a computer for a living is lumped into that category, BTW) workers from the past decade have been underqualified, but managed to stay in their positions because they weren't really needed. Now that costs are being cut, and operator tasks are being automated, only the truly skilled of these people are keeping their jobs.
Look around you and tell me how many talented software designers (not programmers or testers) you see that are unemployed. I know lots that have lost their jobs, but none that have been unemployed for more than a few weeks.
People were outsourcing programming jobs since the early 90's. Now that the base of employees has shrunk, the percentages are up and the unemployed former below-average programmers and bit jockeys are being replaced by RAD tools and Indian programmers, people are starting to notice.
I agree that none of this is good for people who are unemployed, but the problem isn't going to magically go away. Those jobs aren't coming back. They aren't needed. These people need to look elsewhere. That's just how it is.
(My appologies if I ended up replying more to the parent of your comment than yours...)
Don't underestimate the damage it can do to your windows installation.
I would *strongly* recommend doing a backup before trying any of the code from the ext2fsd project on sourceforge.
What a stupid question.
Let's leave their understanding of the issue and legal position out of it for a moment. Statistically speaking, practically nobody has ripped DVDs at home.
Let's not forget here that this isn't about your rights to rip of creators of content, but your rights to use content you've paid for in the manner you choose.
Quite honestly, if all you want is to be able to watch movies for free, I don't understand why you even care what the outcome if this trial is. If you're willing to break copyright law, why do you care if copy protection circumvention is illegal. If you are going to break one law to save a few bucks, why not two?
i'm not sure exactly how they made $$ on the deal
From paymybills.com: This is no longer an active web site.
Looks like they didn't.
Give it a few more weeks. You'll start to not care if you make it to the TV in time for your favorite shows... You'll spend entire evenings away from the TV comfortable in the knowledge that you won't miss the only chance to catch that show you like. Live TV will slowly slip from usage. That's the best thing about TiVo. You can both watch TV *and* not have it rule your life. It just takes some time for it to sink in....
Um.
apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.22
Not that hard. I guess we could all switch to RedHat though. Then we could be comfortable in the knowledge that the version string is more recent by default, even though most of the code is from an archaic version. Not that you'd know what is in there with out manually checking, since their kernel release notes, um, shall we say, leave some to be desired.
they may find not only public sentiment totally against them, but some seriously powerful lobbying interests pulling out the big guns to launch attacks on them.
I know it may not seem like this from a slashdot reader's perspective, but public sentiment is very much for Microsoft, not against it.
For every geek they piss off, there's 10 investors that love them.
Ok first of all:
Teachers [...] get very very few vacation breaks
I was laughing for a good five minutes after that one. Please, give me a break. The teachers I know all get every national and local holiday off. In most jobs there are 7 holidays per year. There are more than 7 holidays in the 9 month school year. Then, on top of the two month summer break there are two vacation weeks during the school year too! You're just plain wrong here.
Such as mold so bad that some sensitive students get sick. Or, the heating system is so old, that they have to turn in on onl after the temperature outside is under 50 F and they have to leave it on all winter, until March, because it is far to expensiv to be turning it on or off just because it is 80 outside.
I was talking about age alone, not lack of maintnence. It almost universally costs less to renovate or maintain a building than to replace one; especially if you don't neglect it for decades. Stupid decisions in the past do not justify additional stupid decisions in the future.
My mother has been teaching in an elemetary school here in South Texas for 25+ years, and she sure as hell doesn't earn 60k. She get's more in the area of 40k, which isn't very much when you consider that teachers are some of the most important influences on the development of any child.
I clearly wasn't describing the salary levels in every district. The cost of living here (eastern MA) is higher than that in south texas, so naturally the pay is higher here. $40k is well above the national average for annual salary, and I don't know many teachers that don't either take a second job during the summer or take a few months off. In fact, in my town, teachers that work during the summer are paid hourly on top of their school year salary. As for the "important part in our children's development" crap, perhaps you'd have a point if teacher's salarys were in any way tied to performance, but the unions would have none of that.
You sound like a grumpy old man whose mailbox got smashed in a couple of times, so he decides to hold his own personal grudge against all kids. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some journal entries to do.
I'm 26 years old. I make $90,000 a year, yet I can't afford to buy a house within an hours ride of my job. I wish I had a mailbox to get smashed and a house to grow old and bitter in. Instead I work 3 times as much as the principal of the local high school and make less money. He's got an antique sports car and I've got a junker with multiple hundreds of thousands of miles on it. If I did manage to purchase a house at the going rate, including property taxes I would be giving just shy of 50% of my money to the govenrment every year. I can't even afford to have kids to send to the local schools. Now do you see why I'm a little pissed off at wasted money, and why some families may move to the area for a little while for the eduacation and then move away afterward?
I have nothing against kids, and I have nothing against good education. I am against blatant waste of taxpayer money that goes completely unchecked because it's "for the children." As I said before, clean up your act first, the public school system needs to cut out the waste. Then it can have more money. Also, some school districts clearly are under funded, and don't have the cash to waste. Sure, give them more money, but don't try to sell the "schools need more money" argument as a general philosophy. It is not universally applicable.
Check out this great article by Neal Stephenson in wired. It talks about running an even longer cable. Beware though. He's in his typical verbose form. The article is 56 pages long.
Look again.
You're looking at the old iPod battery, not the new style for the slim iPods. Those have and 850mAh battery, and this is a 50 mAh improvement...
For those of us who build their own boxe[s], I'm sure that we'll be choosing to disable everything related to DRM and then some.
Don't be so sure....
Look at all the case modding FPS gamers out there that build their own machines just to make it look cool. You can bet they'll turn that DRM switch on the first time they need it to run the fancy video card needing shoot em' up du-jour.
Good question.
Your best bet is to open the unit up and purchase an exact replacement. I don't know enough about iPods to tell you which kind of battery is in each model, but I can tell you that you'll never go wrong by double checking the part number on the original battery first!
I botched the link.... Try this: DigiKey
Or, by the same exact battery from DigiKey for $23.
Whenever you see somebody selling a battery for too much, don't forget that they need to buy it from somewhere, and they need to make a profit. Most industrial rechargeable batteries you'll find on replacement sites are sourced through DigiKey or Newark, and the manufacturer's markings are usually left intact on the original battery. Just head over to one of those sites and type in the part number. You'll usually see a 50%+ savings. This goes for UPS batteries too!
Custom BIOS code is no new thing. Perhaps now, more people will use it...
It's annoying beyond belief to me that the most common general purpose hardware platform around has such brain-dead firmware. It's nice to know that this may not last. It's too bad that they're choosing to disregard all the work Intel put into EFI though. That should be the future....
Either way, you should expect Pheonix alternatives to start gaining development support should Pheonix decide to make the "trusted computing" features mandatory. Judging by how thier software works now though, it will be the motherboard manufacturer that will decide which features are compiled into the BIOS you get, and which features can't be turned off. I'll bet that you'll see some big name brand machines from manufacturers that are in Microsoft's pocket ship with this in a permenant "on" position, and the enthusiast motherboard market to ship with this feature easily to disable.
Yeah. Use more memory and a faster processor.
They make most of their consumer OS money through OEM sales anyway, so why not take advantage of all that under utilized power.
Nobody knows better than Microsoft that it's buzzwords that sell software. There's probably only 1 in a thousand users that actually even begin to take advantage of any features made available by the changes that they put into their back end software these days. Their design decisions are all purely marketing related. Fooling yourself into thinking there's novel technological progress behind any of their decisions or that they're technology driven in the slightest way is short sighted, and quite honestly it would be bad business for them to work that way.
Believe me, if Microsoft does announce some novel way to accelerate XML parsing or does manage to improve performance beyound that of everybody else, it'll be because marketing made it a product requirement, not because they're sitting around brainstorming about text parsing for fun in the engineering department.
Or, are you one of the "armchair administrators" that see this as a simple problem?
If "armchair administrator" means "person who pays the tab", then yes. I never said this was a simple problem, but the difficulties are political and personal, not techincal or (nessicarily) financial.
Your laundy list of horror stories is so far away from the typical public school situation in the US that it's almost laughable, but more importantly, none of those nightmares you described stands as any reason to fix the problems I describe that waste money and destroy communities. In fact, some of them are in support of my arguments from my perspective; I think that a healthy community plays an important role of the development of a child, and thus has an effect on their behavior in the classroom.
Standing around saying it's a hard problem neither solves anything or justifies the addition of cash to the situation.
I disagree with your original point that teachers are overpaid. Even if they were averaging $60k for 9 months work (which isn't the case anywhere in my state), it's still not enough. We should pay teachers enough that real world professionals are fighting each other to get a good paying teaching job.
Clearly different districts pay their teachers differently. There is one universal problem though. Money goes to seniority first. You can't pay new teachers enough because you're busy paying old teachers more than enough. There are plenty of private and parochial non-union schools out there that prove this is the case.
doesn't seem to have helped because it's a mantra, and the funding doesn't actually get improved.
Hah.
As somebody who lives in a town that has had outragous tax increases every year since the late eighties, let me tell you that it's more than a mantra. The problem is that the money doesn't go to teachers and books alone, it goes to the school. Then a huge chunk is paid to school administrators, is used to expand the sports program, renovate buildings, and by the time the additonal money gets down to the teachers and books, the teachers that already are overpaid (yes, overpaid. $60k/9 months is overpaid, and that's the average around here... many make more than that here) get raises and no progress has been made.
I refuse to believe that students learn better in a new building than in one built in 1970. I refuse to believe that raising my taxes again is going to improve the local schools when last time they increased the schools funding they used the money to build a football field. I resent parents voting for things with long term costs so they can have their little brats go to the best school possible, and then move to a town with lower taxes promptly after said brats graduate from high school, and I resent it because it destroys the community; something i believe is every bit as important as the number of teachers and books in the school. It's sad when all the retired residents of your town are forced to sell the houses their families have owned for generations because some self-focused parents have no concept of the long term concequences.
Instead of throwing money at the problem we should be making the hard decisions and fixing the problems that make educating a child in a public school so expensive. That means standing up to teachers unions in communities where the teachers are overpaid. That means not nescicarily trying to win the state basketball championship. That means staying in that building even though it's an ugly relic of a past generation. That means not hiring administrators back on at an hourly rate and into a useless position after they retire and get their pension. When you can convince me you've stopped wasting money, you can try to convince me you need more.
All bets are off with dual CPUs. The power saving features that matter aren't supported in an SMP configuration.
However, there are some things in the Final Fantasy series which are damn near impossible to figure out without one - I'd refer specifically to Final Fantasy VII as the trendsetter for this.
Bull. Final Fantasy VII in particular went out of the way to make sure you could do every little thing with in-game info only. There were multiple clues in the game about how to find and how to get Knights of the Round. It stopped short only of spelling it out for you. Perhaps you weren't able to put the pieces together, but it was possible. What fun is it if the answers are handed to you with no deduction required? Besides, you said yourself that it's absurdly over powered. Don't you think that it's fitting that you have to gather an absurd number of informational tidbits from many characters throughout the game in order to put the pieces together and figure it out?
do you honestly think I want to have to take notes while I try playing through Final Fantasy X?
Then play the game and enjoy the plot. You only need to do the extra work to get the extras in the game. I don't see how pushing buttons in the order it says in the strategy guide makes the game more of a fun escape from the real world. It takes away all feeling of acomplishment. If I want to follow step-by-step instructions, I'd go get a manufacturing job and get paid for it. If you really can't handle it, then go pick another game type... Don't go encourage changes in a game type that millions of people actually enjoy as it is.
It's obvious that some of us have a different idea of fun than others.... You don't see me laughing at what you like to do though... Then again, I don't know what types of games you like. Perhaps I would laugh.
Can I give you a stupidity award?
Here, let me reword that for you:
Sure, go ahead and boil my statement down into something it doesn't say. If you don't like a particular type of thing, then you are ill equipped to offer an objective opinion on something of that type relative to other things of the same type. End of story.
Next time you want to go rewording somebody's statements you should first make sure you have a firm grasp on comprehension. Once you have that down we can talk about interpreting subtlty in the context of a discussion (this particular discussion spans years and forums). Soon there after maybe we can have you reading at a sixth grade level.
Let's see if I can spell this out for you so I don't go off thinking you were right dispite me returning your obnoxious insults...
The post contained the phrase: a large (and welcome) step away from [...] past Final Fantasies. This means said poster was not talking about the "faults" of "something" (your words), but of the relative difference between the game he was discussing and others in the series. He was also exposing his bias in an historically long running argument over this particular game style and its merits. This is the implied knowledge derived from the context of my statement. Now, in my statement the subject at the end: don't pretend that you can say anything objective about them , refers to the class of object I was referencing at the beginning of the sentence, not the object itself as you changed it to in your (mis-)rewording.
I'm so glad you used that as an example.
Everything you needed to do to get the gold Chocobo and the Nights of the Round materia was dictated to you by a guy in the mountains... (It's been a long time for me too) You just ahd to write down what he said each time you visited, and after about 25 or so visits you had full instructions on how to get your gold chocobo. No guide, and no trial and error required.
This is the case for all the extras in the Final Fantasy games. You need to be observant, and you need to take notes, but you don't need a guide.