Actually, I'm avoiding the current crop of iPods, because I'm still waiting for Apple do come up with a gapless playback version.
However, I'm extremely pro-sweatshop. Japan and South Korea both owe a great deal of their current prosperity to having taken advantage of wage gaps in the past. It's the very best and most sure way for a poor country to pull itself up by the bootstraps and become a place where people can eventually live comfortable lives.
Buddhism and Zen came from the east, yes... But so did Shinto and gunpowder.
Life in ancient China was pretty shitty for everybody who wasn't the Emperor, and Buddha himself had a pretty fucking miserable life, which drove and informed most of his teachings about humility and acceptance.
I, on the other hand, am very happy and content, living in my suburban house on a French land-lot style yard in a straight row with many other houses. My air and water are clean, my food is delicious, my TV set is huge, and life is wonderful.
Sometimes you gotta stop re-watching "Koyaanisoatsi" and just go outside and fire up the BBQ grill, especially on a nice day like today. Happiness has nothing to do with culture, and everything to do with your state of mind.
I stand corrected. Some of the other posts in the thread had lead me to believe these are Taiwanese factories. Never mind.
But of course, if these are factories in China, then they are a HUGE step up from any other kind of life these workers could have. Those who try to crack down on sweatshops in China are not doing those workers any favors.
Of course, in mainland China, $50 a month (which, as it turns out after RTFA, is the wage after food and lodging, not before) is an even greater amount of money, relative to the cost of living.
Every time "voodoo" economics is brought up, nobody ever explains just how the upper 5% of the population will ever manage to "trickle down" anywhere near as effectively as middle class could do it.
BY INVESTMENT
Rich people don't put their money in pillow cases. (Well, maybe some do.) Rich people put their money into ventures which will allow their wealth to not only grow at a pace which matches or exceeds inflation, but also allows them to live off the profits & interest without dipping in to the principal. Any rich person would be foolish to live any other way.
This investment is what makes a healthy economy even possible.
In order to have a middle class, you need businesses to start up. In order for that to happen, you need an investor class to front the money.
Without rich people in your country, you have nobody to borrow from and nobody to bring in as investors. In other words, no way to raise the money to start a business. Off to the sweatshop with you, your vocational skills are useless to the world.
So no rich people means no middle class, which means poverty all around. That's the underlying concept behind supply-side economics. No voodoo required.
and you're trying to apply it to people living in an authoritarian kleptocracy where you until recently had to get permission from the government to move anywhere?
Um... You do know that Taiwan is a liberal democracy, right?
You seem to have them confused with the People's Republic of China.
The next time some troll complains about how oh-so-very hard the iPod battery is to swap out, you can point out that old ladies in Taiwanese factories are installing those batteries by hand for $50 a month.
How hard can it be, if cheap, uneducated, sweatshop laborers that can manage it? How stupid must you be, if you can't?
According to the CIA World Factbook, Taiwan has an unemployment rate under 5%, with 0.9% of the population living below the poverty line.
If the job is half as bad as this report makes it out to be, then everybody doing it is a complete tard for not changing jobs. Which do you suppose is the case?
The clue lies in the complaint that "half" their pay goes back to the company for food and lodging. So... $25 a month is enough to have a roof over your head and food in your belly? Well, that extra $25 a month they are socking away must be quickly amassing to be a small fortune! Shit, most American kids out of college would *love* to be able to live off only *half* of their paychecks!
I think the reason for the fanatic dedication to a particular console brand is the need for consumers to justify to themselves the huge investment they made in their purchase. All of the consoles are expensive, and with a halfway decent selection fo games and accessories you're looking at several thousand dollars invested. Nobody wants to feel as though they made a "mistake", and that the other guy's product might have been the better choice.
Really? Compared to the cost of a good mountain bike, or the cost of of hockey gear, or the cost of a serious "gamer" PC, all of the consoles (including the insanely priced PS3) are actually fairly cheap, as recreation devices go.
I think most of the fanboy-ism comes from the same forces which cause "right vs. left" political hating... It's the sports-fan mentality of "our side" vs. "your side." The urge to rally for the "home team" is overpowering to most people. Just about everybody has fallen in to that trap at one time or another, even with debates about things which cost you nothing, such as BSD vs. GNU licenses. It's just a natural (irrational) element of human behavior.
Nonsense. The 626 engine was one of the best and most reliable on the market at the time, and the B-series pick-up (before the buy-out) was vastly superior to the Ford Ranger by every measure. Mazda had a growing reputation for quality which was shot straight down the toilet when Ford took them over and turned all their trucks into pathetic re-badged Rangers.
I don't want a great developer asking my opinion of what the game should be like, any more than I want Imogen Heap asking me how to finish a phrase on a particular song she's working on. Make great art, and I'll buy it, fail to do so, and I'll pass on it. That's pretty solid feedback right there, no need for blogging.
Now, if you happen to really suck, you could probably benefit from customer input, but even after getting it, you'll still suck.
Also, Japanese companies don't want to be bought by Americans. I think they would put up a fight; I don't see the leaders "selling out to the West" like the Chinese do.
Excatly. This is why they fought so hard when Ford tried to take over Mazda.
Oh wait, I just remembered... They rolled out the red carpet for them.
Never mind.
I also don't see what Nintendo would gain from selling out to Apple...
Money.
I don't think it will happen, for the simple reason that Apple doesn't really have a reason to own a game company. If they wanted to be in your living room that badly, they could have shoved a TV tuner and an AGP-based graphics card into a slightly larger mini. Their focus seems to be on OS X and iLife, not games.
Did you read all the positive posts about this? I think a lot of people give a shit and are excited over a console that can play new and retro games, I know I am.
It's one thing to write on a web forum about how thrilled you are about retro gaming on the Wii, but the solid fact is that if you want to play Mario Karts, you can do it ***NOW*** simply by going to almost any shop or used record store and picking up an old console for mere pocket change... And that's only if you don't have one already collecting dust in your basement, (which a lot of the people saying that probably do.)
Since there isn't a huge run on used SNES systems going on right now, I'd say that excitement over the ability to play old games for it is nowhere nearly as high as some people seem to think.
Exactly. The whole "retro" thing is just a bone thrown to the fanboys. Nobody gives a shit whether you can play the original "Legend of Zelda" on a 2006 gaming console.
This is just further proof that Nintendo is no longer a console gaming company. They are a hand-held gaming company who also sells a console. They would like for you to buy a Wii to sync with your DS, but what matters most to them is that you buy the DS. That's where all the future growth of the gaming market is anyway. Instead of burning Mario Kart frames into your living room TV, you can play it while waiting in line for concert tickets. Instead of sitting at home playing video games, you can now play then any time you like, any place you like, as the mood strikes you (and decorum allows.)
The DS Lite and the PSP are already better consoles than what you could buy for your living room ten years ago, and it's only going to keep getting better.
Console gaming has reached its apex, though. We've already got full-blown computers creeping in to the living room. Media computers are becoming more console-like, and consoles are becoming more PC-like (with the addition of web browsers, media players, and... via hacks to day but by design someday soon... PVR functions.) The dedicated living-room game console is evolving into something completely different. For games, the handheld is where it's at. IMHO, YMMV, Yadda Yadda Yadda.
You know what, instead of trying to carefully craft games which lock me into conditioned response patterns via addiction, how about if game designers focused on making games which are actually enjoyable to play? That would be awesome.
If I want to be trained via stimulus/reward, I can hire a dominatrix. Some of them are probably more affordable than the PS3 will be.
The MacBook Pro is basically an iMac in a laptop enclosure. The MacBook is an iMac with a mediocre integrated GPU. Neither is particularly good for gaming.
But all three are "WoW-friendly". I know, because I've played it on a MacBook, and it runs just dandy. I also have a friend who has cheerfully pitched her "Game PC" into a closet in favor of playing WoW on the iMac. It actually kicks all kinds of ass as a gaming rig, as long as you're happy with the screen.
What, the "I'm too cheap to pay for it and I should be able to decide whether it's worth it before I buy it even though I wouldn't have bought it anyway because it's all commercialized overpriced unoriginal crap for which the artists aren't getting paid enough anyhow and it doesn't cost them anything when it's in digital form and besides information wants to be free as in beer and it's my right to be entertained for free because the evil greedy corporations are abusing copyrights in the US and so I'm standing up for my civil rights just like people did back in the 60's by sticking it to The Man" rationalization doesn't work for you?
Slashdot needs a "+1, Flamebait, But Not Wrong" mod, just for posts like yours.
Actually, I took a stupid and obvious question and pointed out how stupid and obvious it was by giving it exactly as much of an answer as it warranted. As Dr. Johnson said, "brevity is the soul of wit."
So, since more idiotic mods would rather waste their points on bitch-slapping me rather than elevating comments, I'll give you another opportunity by repeating it a third time. Anything which takes mod points out of their irresponsible hands is a good thing, so enjoy slapping the "Overrated" ratings on it again, bitches!
*repost*
Would what seems like a great idea actually be the death of free software?
No.
That was easy.
Oh, by the way, it doesn't really seem like that great of an idea, either.
Sorry, but he's dead on about the clickwheel. It flat-out sucks.
Weird. I consider the wheel to be one of the very best things about the iPod's hardware. I've never seen a better solution on any MP3 player ever.
Lack of gapless playback is a valid criticism. Lack of Ogg is a criticism that reveals you to be a pretentious ass, but at least it truthful.
Complaints about the click-wheel being hard to operate!? That's the stupidest damn thing I've heard all week, and I've been listening to talk radio today!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm avoiding the current crop of iPods, because I'm still waiting for Apple do come up with a gapless playback version.
However, I'm extremely pro-sweatshop. Japan and South Korea both owe a great deal of their current prosperity to having taken advantage of wage gaps in the past. It's the very best and most sure way for a poor country to pull itself up by the bootstraps and become a place where people can eventually live comfortable lives.
Buddhism and Zen came from the east, yes... But so did Shinto and gunpowder.
Life in ancient China was pretty shitty for everybody who wasn't the Emperor, and Buddha himself had a pretty fucking miserable life, which drove and informed most of his teachings about humility and acceptance.
I, on the other hand, am very happy and content, living in my suburban house on a French land-lot style yard in a straight row with many other houses. My air and water are clean, my food is delicious, my TV set is huge, and life is wonderful.
Sometimes you gotta stop re-watching "Koyaanisoatsi" and just go outside and fire up the BBQ grill, especially on a nice day like today. Happiness has nothing to do with culture, and everything to do with your state of mind.
I stand corrected. Some of the other posts in the thread had lead me to believe these are Taiwanese factories. Never mind.
But of course, if these are factories in China, then they are a HUGE step up from any other kind of life these workers could have. Those who try to crack down on sweatshops in China are not doing those workers any favors.
My bad.
Of course, in mainland China, $50 a month (which, as it turns out after RTFA, is the wage after food and lodging, not before) is an even greater amount of money, relative to the cost of living.
Every time "voodoo" economics is brought up, nobody ever explains just how the upper 5% of the population will ever manage to "trickle down" anywhere near as effectively as middle class could do it.
BY INVESTMENT
Rich people don't put their money in pillow cases. (Well, maybe some do.) Rich people put their money into ventures which will allow their wealth to not only grow at a pace which matches or exceeds inflation, but also allows them to live off the profits & interest without dipping in to the principal. Any rich person would be foolish to live any other way.
This investment is what makes a healthy economy even possible.
In order to have a middle class, you need businesses to start up. In order for that to happen, you need an investor class to front the money.
Without rich people in your country, you have nobody to borrow from and nobody to bring in as investors. In other words, no way to raise the money to start a business. Off to the sweatshop with you, your vocational skills are useless to the world.
So no rich people means no middle class, which means poverty all around. That's the underlying concept behind supply-side economics. No voodoo required.
and you're trying to apply it to people living in an authoritarian kleptocracy where you until recently had to get permission from the government to move anywhere?
Um... You do know that Taiwan is a liberal democracy, right?
You seem to have them confused with the People's Republic of China.
The best thing about this story:
The next time some troll complains about how oh-so-very hard the iPod battery is to swap out, you can point out that old ladies in Taiwanese factories are installing those batteries by hand for $50 a month.
How hard can it be, if cheap, uneducated, sweatshop laborers that can manage it? How stupid must you be, if you can't?
According to the CIA World Factbook, Taiwan has an unemployment rate under 5%, with 0.9% of the population living below the poverty line.
If the job is half as bad as this report makes it out to be, then everybody doing it is a complete tard for not changing jobs. Which do you suppose is the case?
The clue lies in the complaint that "half" their pay goes back to the company for food and lodging. So... $25 a month is enough to have a roof over your head and food in your belly? Well, that extra $25 a month they are socking away must be quickly amassing to be a small fortune! Shit, most American kids out of college would *love* to be able to live off only *half* of their paychecks!
Like here?
Especially considering that MAC equipment is way overpriced just to run windows on it.
Machine Access Code equipment is way overpriced? Holy shit, what's a network admin to do???
I think the reason for the fanatic dedication to a particular console brand is the need for consumers to justify to themselves the huge investment they made in their purchase. All of the consoles are expensive, and with a halfway decent selection fo games and accessories you're looking at several thousand dollars invested. Nobody wants to feel as though they made a "mistake", and that the other guy's product might have been the better choice.
Really? Compared to the cost of a good mountain bike, or the cost of of hockey gear, or the cost of a serious "gamer" PC, all of the consoles (including the insanely priced PS3) are actually fairly cheap, as recreation devices go.
I think most of the fanboy-ism comes from the same forces which cause "right vs. left" political hating... It's the sports-fan mentality of "our side" vs. "your side." The urge to rally for the "home team" is overpowering to most people. Just about everybody has fallen in to that trap at one time or another, even with debates about things which cost you nothing, such as BSD vs. GNU licenses. It's just a natural (irrational) element of human behavior.
Nonsense. The 626 engine was one of the best and most reliable on the market at the time, and the B-series pick-up (before the buy-out) was vastly superior to the Ford Ranger by every measure. Mazda had a growing reputation for quality which was shot straight down the toilet when Ford took them over and turned all their trucks into pathetic re-badged Rangers.
Game creation is an art form.
I don't want a great developer asking my opinion of what the game should be like, any more than I want Imogen Heap asking me how to finish a phrase on a particular song she's working on. Make great art, and I'll buy it, fail to do so, and I'll pass on it. That's pretty solid feedback right there, no need for blogging.
Now, if you happen to really suck, you could probably benefit from customer input, but even after getting it, you'll still suck.
Also, Japanese companies don't want to be bought by Americans. I think they would put up a fight; I don't see the leaders "selling out to the West" like the Chinese do.
Excatly. This is why they fought so hard when Ford tried to take over Mazda.
Oh wait, I just remembered... They rolled out the red carpet for them.
Never mind.
I also don't see what Nintendo would gain from selling out to Apple...
Money.
I don't think it will happen, for the simple reason that Apple doesn't really have a reason to own a game company. If they wanted to be in your living room that badly, they could have shoved a TV tuner and an AGP-based graphics card into a slightly larger mini. Their focus seems to be on OS X and iLife, not games.
Which may be a valid discussion, just not the one we were having.
Did you read all the positive posts about this? I think a lot of people give a shit and are excited over a console that can play new and retro games, I know I am.
It's one thing to write on a web forum about how thrilled you are about retro gaming on the Wii, but the solid fact is that if you want to play Mario Karts, you can do it ***NOW*** simply by going to almost any shop or used record store and picking up an old console for mere pocket change... And that's only if you don't have one already collecting dust in your basement, (which a lot of the people saying that probably do.)
Since there isn't a huge run on used SNES systems going on right now, I'd say that excitement over the ability to play old games for it is nowhere nearly as high as some people seem to think.
Exactly. The whole "retro" thing is just a bone thrown to the fanboys. Nobody gives a shit whether you can play the original "Legend of Zelda" on a 2006 gaming console.
This is just further proof that Nintendo is no longer a console gaming company. They are a hand-held gaming company who also sells a console. They would like for you to buy a Wii to sync with your DS, but what matters most to them is that you buy the DS. That's where all the future growth of the gaming market is anyway. Instead of burning Mario Kart frames into your living room TV, you can play it while waiting in line for concert tickets. Instead of sitting at home playing video games, you can now play then any time you like, any place you like, as the mood strikes you (and decorum allows.)
The DS Lite and the PSP are already better consoles than what you could buy for your living room ten years ago, and it's only going to keep getting better.
Console gaming has reached its apex, though. We've already got full-blown computers creeping in to the living room. Media computers are becoming more console-like, and consoles are becoming more PC-like (with the addition of web browsers, media players, and... via hacks to day but by design someday soon... PVR functions.) The dedicated living-room game console is evolving into something completely different. For games, the handheld is where it's at. IMHO, YMMV, Yadda Yadda Yadda.
It's the game we were talking about, though. If you can't be bothered to follow the thread, at least glimpse at the subject line.
You know what, instead of trying to carefully craft games which lock me into conditioned response patterns via addiction, how about if game designers focused on making games which are actually enjoyable to play? That would be awesome.
If I want to be trained via stimulus/reward, I can hire a dominatrix. Some of them are probably more affordable than the PS3 will be.
This does NOT impact those who download illegally, it impacts those who download LEGALLY or purchace the CD and rip legally.
But thanks for playing, Mr. Trolling Shill.
-mcgrew (MRC="writable")
You must have missed the "The way I see it, this is yet another reason to pirate media instead of buying it." line that he was replying to.
Wow... using the "bold" tag is every bit as much fun as you made it look! Weeeeee!
The MacBook Pro is basically an iMac in a laptop enclosure. The MacBook is an iMac with a mediocre integrated GPU. Neither is particularly good for gaming.
But all three are "WoW-friendly". I know, because I've played it on a MacBook, and it runs just dandy. I also have a friend who has cheerfully pitched her "Game PC" into a closet in favor of playing WoW on the iMac. It actually kicks all kinds of ass as a gaming rig, as long as you're happy with the screen.
I prefer games that I can run native on Linux. Fortunately my favorites are available. If I used a MAC...
;)
So not big on network games, then? Even with Linux, it would be tough to get on line without a MAC.
Is that a mean or a median age? Big difference.
It's certainly been mean to by back and knees, sonny.
What, the "I'm too cheap to pay for it and I should be able to decide whether it's worth it before I buy it even though I wouldn't have bought it anyway because it's all commercialized overpriced unoriginal crap for which the artists aren't getting paid enough anyhow and it doesn't cost them anything when it's in digital form and besides information wants to be free as in beer and it's my right to be entertained for free because the evil greedy corporations are abusing copyrights in the US and so I'm standing up for my civil rights just like people did back in the 60's by sticking it to The Man" rationalization doesn't work for you?
Slashdot needs a "+1, Flamebait, But Not Wrong" mod, just for posts like yours.
Actually, I took a stupid and obvious question and pointed out how stupid and obvious it was by giving it exactly as much of an answer as it warranted. As Dr. Johnson said, "brevity is the soul of wit."
So, since more idiotic mods would rather waste their points on bitch-slapping me rather than elevating comments, I'll give you another opportunity by repeating it a third time. Anything which takes mod points out of their irresponsible hands is a good thing, so enjoy slapping the "Overrated" ratings on it again, bitches!
*repost*
Would what seems like a great idea actually be the death of free software?
No.
That was easy.
Oh, by the way, it doesn't really seem like that great of an idea, either.
Sorry, but he's dead on about the clickwheel. It flat-out sucks.
Weird. I consider the wheel to be one of the very best things about the iPod's hardware. I've never seen a better solution on any MP3 player ever.
Lack of gapless playback is a valid criticism.
Lack of Ogg is a criticism that reveals you to be a pretentious ass, but at least it truthful.
Complaints about the click-wheel being hard to operate!? That's the stupidest damn thing I've heard all week, and I've been listening to talk radio today!