The PS2 had Firewire ports. Think of the potential for fast external storage, connectivity to video cameras... and they never delivered on any of it.
The PS2 had USB. Think of the potential for hooking up a mouse and keyboard, or even a trackball and a graphics tablet, and playing strategy and adventure games that needed something other than a joystick for input. I had a keyboard plugged into my PS2, but the only thing I ever saw use it was Action Replay for entering game cheat codes.
The PS2 had a slot for a hard drive. They never delivered on that either, it was up to Squaresoft to bundle hard drives with the one game that actually used it. And then Sony stabbed them in the back by redesigning the PS2 to not have hard drive capabilities.
The same crap about streaming media was spouted as a reason to buy the PS2. Yet Sony failed to deliver on that promise too, and it was left to third parties to actually implement streaming MP3 client software and MPEG-4 movie players. Sony could be selling movies via the Internet to watch on your hard-drive-equipped PS2 today if they had wanted to.
Look back to the original PlayStation. They released a mouse and keyboard for that. It was used by perhaps a handful of games, then discontinued.
Look at Yaroze on PSOne and Linux on PS2. Amazing potential for opening up the market to independent game makers and hobbyists. And again, a total failure to deliver, leaving us with a games market where nobody will fund anything unless it's a $10m+ FPS.
The only actual delivering on potential we've seen has been EyeToy, and that's a gimmick; they haven't even shipped EyeToy Chat in the US yet.
I love my PS2, it's my main console, especially now Nintendo and third parties have pretty much given up on GameCube. But you'd have to be an idiot to buy a PS3 based on what it might potentially do. It's the same story every generation--they overspec the hardware, and fail to use most of the capabilities they built into it. And then they come out with a second generation console that eliminates the stuff they aren't using.
Oh, the international shipping on Amazon is totally screwy. If I order from amazon.co.uk, and the item is "shipped from the US", and I'm in the US, it still tries to charge me international shipping.
Yeah, it's not like Sony hasn't been doing this for a while. They've been running TV and web ads about cartoon squirrels wanting to fuck the PSP; that failed to generate enough outrage to get free publicity, so they've just turned up the offensiveness a bit.
(Also, is racial sensitivity the reason why Apple make sure the black MacBook is more expensive than the white one?)
Apparently to most of my fellow Americans, Holland is just a magical place filled with Pot, wooden shoes, dikes (Is levy the new PC word?) and Windmills.
Of course religious types won't support taking away their ability to interfere with government on religious grounds. So what?
The point is, either marriage is a religious process defined by the church, or it's a civil process defined by law. So far we've been using the same word for both and just ignoring the question. The question can't be ignored any longer.
As for paperwork--it's easier to get married than to buy a car, so I think we could stand a little more paperwork.
If you want marriage to be defined by what your religion says, then detach it from all the benefits previously enumerated. Make it so that people get married in church if they want, and then if they want legal recognition they also get a civil partership, or whatever you want to call it.
Until then, you can't expect people not to want marriage.
I doubt it was the government, because they want to see him punished as a way of showing that they're "tackling" the problem.
Not as much as they want to keep the current administration's close links to ENRON and the scandal out of the newspapers.
Maybe Ken was disappointed that his $1.1m to the Bush campaign hadn't worked as a Get Out Of Jail Free card. Maybe he was planning on writing some tell-all memoirs.
Hmm, I wonder which high ranking official has a dad who was in the CIA and doubtless knows a bunch of Stan Smith types?
I'm not trying to argue a conspiracy theory here, just pointing out that there's plenty of circumstantial evidence to construct one with. It'll be interesting to see the toxicology reports; I'm already wondering if Ken Lay had a history of heart trouble or not.
Now let's imagine you've invented a machine that can duplicate gasoline 10x via some kind of fast breeder process, but it's limited to 10x and uses up the original input.
Clearly if you're allowed to use your invention, the gasoline price will plummet due to massive gas copying, and there will be no motivation for people to dig oil out of the ground. Therefore we must immediately pass a law to prohibit use of your invention, raid the homes of people suspected of gasoline copying, and put locks on people's gas tanks that can only be unlocked by the oil companies.
I've played many hours of GTA, and it's a great game, but I've had zero emotional response to the "plot".
Whereas "The Dig", the Lucasarts adventure, had me yelling "No!" at the screen because I was so upset by something that happened. Actual emotional involvement. And I'm not being nostalgic; I didn't play The Dig until a few years ago.
Reading GamePro's coverage of E3, the thing that struck me was that almost all the games for the 360 and PS3 were boring FPSs with better graphics. The Wii was the only console that had significant variety.
Now, it may be that the magazine was just filling space with whatever had the most impressive screenshots... but if the PS3 lineup really is mostly FPSs, Sony could find themselves in trouble, as most FPS fans seem to be PC gamers like you.
In fact, I kinda wonder about why anyone would make their first PS3 title a FPS. Maybe it's just that those are so easy to crank out and a relatively safe bet in the US market, which is why id software have given up any hope of originality and just squat and drop another FPS every year or two.
I was saying "right wing Libertarians" because they're the ones who dominate the Libertarian party in the USA, to the extent that many American libertarians deny that Socialist Libertarianism even exists.
As an American I would like to opt out of Social Security, farm subsidies, K-12 public schools, and public television.
Apart from Social Security, that's all chump change.
Take public television. The total budget there is $380m for 2006, and there are 122,721,000. If we pretend that PBS is funded only by individual taxes and not corporate tax, that still makes your share of the funding a piddling $3.10. Hardly worth your time to whine about it, I'd think.
Me, I'd rather opt out of the stupid Iraq and Afghanistan wars and get back $3500.
in the obvious trivial way it blows up, because you can't apply a SimpleDateFormat to a calendar. Instead you have to extract the TimeZone from the Calendar, apply the TimeZone to the SimpleDateFormat, extract the Date from the Calendar, and finally ask the SimpleDateFormat to format the Date.
And going the other way is similarly ugly. You can't just construct a Calendar from a Date and TimeZone, or even from y/m/d/h/m/s numbers. No, you have to obtain a GregorianCalendar, look up a TimeZone (because 'Z' isn't recognized so you have to convert it to 'GMT'), apply the TimeZone to the Calendar, get a Date from your SimpleDateFormat's parse routine, and pass that to the Calendar.
Of course, I realize that a lot of this is because the original Date API wasn't thought through carefully enough. So they deprecated practically all of it, replaced it with Calendar, and added a way to get a Date in and out of a Calendar. Except the replacement Calendar API hasn't managed to replace everything, and there are simple things like formatting dates that still require the old objects--so you get an ugly mix.
This is the problem with a lot of Java, in fact. Hence 4 different kinds of array, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
The PS2 had Firewire ports. Think of the potential for fast external storage, connectivity to video cameras... and they never delivered on any of it.
The PS2 had USB. Think of the potential for hooking up a mouse and keyboard, or even a trackball and a graphics tablet, and playing strategy and adventure games that needed something other than a joystick for input. I had a keyboard plugged into my PS2, but the only thing I ever saw use it was Action Replay for entering game cheat codes.
The PS2 had a slot for a hard drive. They never delivered on that either, it was up to Squaresoft to bundle hard drives with the one game that actually used it. And then Sony stabbed them in the back by redesigning the PS2 to not have hard drive capabilities.
The same crap about streaming media was spouted as a reason to buy the PS2. Yet Sony failed to deliver on that promise too, and it was left to third parties to actually implement streaming MP3 client software and MPEG-4 movie players. Sony could be selling movies via the Internet to watch on your hard-drive-equipped PS2 today if they had wanted to.
Look back to the original PlayStation. They released a mouse and keyboard for that. It was used by perhaps a handful of games, then discontinued.
Look at Yaroze on PSOne and Linux on PS2. Amazing potential for opening up the market to independent game makers and hobbyists. And again, a total failure to deliver, leaving us with a games market where nobody will fund anything unless it's a $10m+ FPS.
The only actual delivering on potential we've seen has been EyeToy, and that's a gimmick; they haven't even shipped EyeToy Chat in the US yet.
I love my PS2, it's my main console, especially now Nintendo and third parties have pretty much given up on GameCube. But you'd have to be an idiot to buy a PS3 based on what it might potentially do. It's the same story every generation--they overspec the hardware, and fail to use most of the capabilities they built into it. And then they come out with a second generation console that eliminates the stuff they aren't using.
Oh, the international shipping on Amazon is totally screwy. If I order from amazon.co.uk, and the item is "shipped from the US", and I'm in the US, it still tries to charge me international shipping.
Yeah, it's not like Sony hasn't been doing this for a while. They've been running TV and web ads about cartoon squirrels wanting to fuck the PSP; that failed to generate enough outrage to get free publicity, so they've just turned up the offensiveness a bit.
(Also, is racial sensitivity the reason why Apple make sure the black MacBook is more expensive than the white one?)
You forgot porn.
It's 2006, not 1999. Do try to keep up.
Of course religious types won't support taking away their ability to interfere with government on religious grounds. So what?
The point is, either marriage is a religious process defined by the church, or it's a civil process defined by law. So far we've been using the same word for both and just ignoring the question. The question can't be ignored any longer.
As for paperwork--it's easier to get married than to buy a car, so I think we could stand a little more paperwork.
For books, CDs and video games I'm buying more and more from Amazon Marketplace. Prices are typically better than eBay/half.com.
If you want marriage to be defined by what your religion says, then detach it from all the benefits previously enumerated. Make it so that people get married in church if they want, and then if they want legal recognition they also get a civil partership, or whatever you want to call it.
Until then, you can't expect people not to want marriage.
Not as much as they want to keep the current administration's close links to ENRON and the scandal out of the newspapers.
Maybe Ken was disappointed that his $1.1m to the Bush campaign hadn't worked as a Get Out Of Jail Free card. Maybe he was planning on writing some tell-all memoirs.
Hmm, I wonder which high ranking official has a dad who was in the CIA and doubtless knows a bunch of Stan Smith types?
I'm not trying to argue a conspiracy theory here, just pointing out that there's plenty of circumstantial evidence to construct one with. It'll be interesting to see the toxicology reports; I'm already wondering if Ken Lay had a history of heart trouble or not.
Now let's imagine you've invented a machine that can duplicate gasoline 10x via some kind of fast breeder process, but it's limited to 10x and uses up the original input.
Clearly if you're allowed to use your invention, the gasoline price will plummet due to massive gas copying, and there will be no motivation for people to dig oil out of the ground. Therefore we must immediately pass a law to prohibit use of your invention, raid the homes of people suspected of gasoline copying, and put locks on people's gas tanks that can only be unlocked by the oil companies.
Right?
I've played many hours of GTA, and it's a great game, but I've had zero emotional response to the "plot".
Whereas "The Dig", the Lucasarts adventure, had me yelling "No!" at the screen because I was so upset by something that happened. Actual emotional involvement. And I'm not being nostalgic; I didn't play The Dig until a few years ago.
"What do you mean, 18 years and it's still President Bush?"
And don't forget that Corel also dropped all its Mac support at around the time it dropped its Linux support.
Java? Profiler?
If performance was important I wouldn't have written the code in Java to start with.
FPS is the least interesting genre for me.
Reading GamePro's coverage of E3, the thing that struck me was that almost all the games for the 360 and PS3 were boring FPSs with better graphics. The Wii was the only console that had significant variety.
Now, it may be that the magazine was just filling space with whatever had the most impressive screenshots... but if the PS3 lineup really is mostly FPSs, Sony could find themselves in trouble, as most FPS fans seem to be PC gamers like you.
In fact, I kinda wonder about why anyone would make their first PS3 title a FPS. Maybe it's just that those are so easy to crank out and a relatively safe bet in the US market, which is why id software have given up any hope of originality and just squat and drop another FPS every year or two.
I was saying "right wing Libertarians" because they're the ones who dominate the Libertarian party in the USA, to the extent that many American libertarians deny that Socialist Libertarianism even exists.
What do you feel the war in Afghanistan achieved?
If right-wing Libertarianism is so freakin' great, why is it that Liberal high-tax Massachusetts is where you all have to go to get a job?
Well, duh. He's from New Hampshire.
That should have been "and there are 122,721,000 US taxpayers".
Apart from Social Security, that's all chump change.
Take public television. The total budget there is $380m for 2006, and there are 122,721,000. If we pretend that PBS is funded only by individual taxes and not corporate tax, that still makes your share of the funding a piddling $3.10. Hardly worth your time to whine about it, I'd think.
Me, I'd rather opt out of the stupid Iraq and Afghanistan wars and get back $3500.
Me three, except I've been lucky enough to be able to find the time to reimplement most of my personal collection of handy Perl scripts in Ruby.
The replacements are about 2x slower, but I'll make that tradeoff to not have to deal with Perl syntax again.
Perl 6 is going in entirely the wrong direction. More operators? More syntax to remember? It's turning into the C++ of scripting languages. No thanks.
RubyGems and RubyForge. Happy to help.
DOS, original Windows, OS/2, NT, CE... Oh well, maybe 6th time lucky?
I know that. But when you go
dFormat.format(calendar);
in the obvious trivial way it blows up, because you can't apply a SimpleDateFormat to a calendar. Instead you have to extract the TimeZone from the Calendar, apply the TimeZone to the SimpleDateFormat, extract the Date from the Calendar, and finally ask the SimpleDateFormat to format the Date.
And going the other way is similarly ugly. You can't just construct a Calendar from a Date and TimeZone, or even from y/m/d/h/m/s numbers. No, you have to obtain a GregorianCalendar, look up a TimeZone (because 'Z' isn't recognized so you have to convert it to 'GMT'), apply the TimeZone to the Calendar, get a Date from your SimpleDateFormat's parse routine, and pass that to the Calendar.
Of course, I realize that a lot of this is because the original Date API wasn't thought through carefully enough. So they deprecated practically all of it, replaced it with Calendar, and added a way to get a Date in and out of a Calendar. Except the replacement Calendar API hasn't managed to replace everything, and there are simple things like formatting dates that still require the old objects--so you get an ugly mix.
This is the problem with a lot of Java, in fact. Hence 4 different kinds of array, and so on.
In Ruby, it's
d1 = Date.parse("2006-08-05T12:13:14Z")
puts d1.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%T%z")
That's my benchmark for "trivial".