At that kind of striking distance, I can see the possibility of a Wii price drop to $150 for epic marketing potential. Why pay $150 for just the motion controller when you can get a whole motion-controlled console for the same price?
I'm not saying Nintendo will necessarily drop the price in response to Natal, or even if it should. But the price will come down eventually -console prices always do- and when that happens, expect marketing like this.
What I remember (growing up in the 80's) is very much in line with what was said here. Defending yourself against a bully results in getting the same punishment as a bully.
My experience (early-90s) was slightly different: defending yourself against a bully gets you punished worse than the bully, assuming the bully is punished at all. Few things will more effectively teach a person how to hate.
You're a level of indirection down from what I was talking about. I was referring not to the REST API (which is indeed a nice one, though isn't initial uploading -i.e. resource creation- supposed to be handled through POST, not PUT?), but to the Python library they seem to have included for interfacing to REST. Far from making things easier, they appear to have actually complicated matters in that library.
It's not free software if you can only use it for some things (for which reason labeling this license ('permissive' is an absolute joke). Open-Source I'll grant, but please don't lump it in with the FLOSS acronym.
It's also not particularly unique. Extending the 'no-harm' clause of the license to animals is an interesting novelty, but such clauses are not at all unprecedented.
It's not as though it's a serious attempt to influence software development anyway -few PETA things are ever anything more than publicity stunts, and this is no different- so why isn't this in Idle?
This looks like a nice low-level API for doing really interesting and complicated things. Unfortunately, they neglected to include a high-level API to deal with what will be by far the most common use cases. Sure, it's not so difficult to implement an upload_file(filepointer, uri) function with this, but given the huge proportion of developers using this library that are going to need exactly this sort of function, do we really need all of them reinventing the wheel?
Powerful and complex functionality is good, but the most common use cases got that way for a reason. Specifically accounting for them, even if only through a set of basic frontend functions, brings major productivity boosts to the programmers that use your library. It is a thing worth doing, and it sounds like the Google folks neglected to do that in this case.
Yeah, the Firefox devs are in a real bind. If only there were some way that they could fork off a new "Mozilla browser" project from the existing base, with the goal of being a fast and light alternative to its bloatware progenitor.
Yes, and this is a serious problem. There is no such thing as an apolitical view of history, as among other things, every viewpoint has its own judgments of the same events. There is no way to teach history independently of those judgments; the best you can do is point out where the judgments are and hope that the students will figure out what to take with a grain of salt and what not to.
To block "deviating from the accepted teachings" is really nothing more than an attempt to cement one's own judgments into the curriculum. I'm no fan of what Texas is doing here, but this particular solution is not an acceptable way of blocking it. Go back to the drawing board.
Heck; I'll give you a new hook. Go after the bit about the US being "chosen by God as a beacon" as a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, because if it's not a case of a government entity (the school board) establishing a civic religion, I don't know what is.
Negative freedoms: the biggest load of BS to infect pop sociology in the last century. When someone claims to offer or desire "freedom from" anything, run for the hills, because they are either too naive to understand the costs or too traumatized to care. Neither viewpoint is healthy.
The point of the menubar is not to contain commonly-used options, but to contain both the common ones in a discoverable manner. Right-click menus and toolbars are best used solely for shortcuts to commonly-used options (which is why customizability of these things is nice, since definitions of 'commonly-used' differ). Ribbons lack the advantage of discoverability, which is what makes them a very bad step back UI-wise. Sure, they look cool, but they just don't do usability very well, and the trivial space savings of taking out the menubar tend to be gobbled right back up by MOAR BUTTONZ anyway.
To put it another way: menu bars function as an index, while well-designed toolbars and right-click menus function as bookmarks. Ribbons hybridize this in pretty much the worst possible way: bookmarking every option to the point where there is no sense in having bookmarked them in the first place, but without the index to make it discoverable.
Change is good. Gratuitous change usually isn't. Ribbons are an example of this: marketing-driven UI design created to wow the crowd with something New And Different, but without much if any actual reasoning behind it.
Because Firefox's long-standing responsiveness issues are rooted in deep architectural problems, and nobody from mozilla is willing to admit they f-ed up so badly they need to rethink the whole thing.
The folks doing deCOMtamination, as they call it, would like to have a word with you.
Untrue. The Wii's attach rate for games is actually in second this generation: behind the 360, to be sure, but ahead of the PS3.
The reason the PS2 did so well was because of all the games sold for it. It still makes Sony money because of that.
Actually, the PS2 now makes Sony money because of the hardware. There simply aren't enough new games coming out to turn Sony much if any profit at all, software-wise.
As for units sold, Nintendo is actually selling more per game, on average, than the PS2 did. A significantly higher proportion of games turn a profit, as well: some 40% for the Wii, as opposed to 30-35% for the PS2.
The 3DS is proof enough that Nintendo can be foolish to cut the legs off of a system at its peak, but twice in a row? Nintendo isn't that stupid.
Pachter is still just butthurt over the fact that gaming isn't going the way he predicted, all because, as it turns out, graphics really don't matter. He thought it did, and it cost him dear, so now he's out to do anything he can to tank the Wii, and this is only the latest in his long string of failed attempts to do so.
People don't necessarily want games that are easier to win; they just want games that are easier to play. Gratuitous complexity is a fundamental design flaw: if the player isn't doing something interesting within five minutes of starting a new game, something is wrong. Similarly, if the player hasn't mastered all of the basic mechanics -i.e. every mechanic necessary to complete the game's main plot- within one hour, something is wrong. This does not mean that the game should be easy, only that the player should be able to do what's needed. It's still up to them to pull it off.
The scary part here is that I'm sure plenty of people here are surprised. I wasn't ready to trust Microsoft, and I'm sure many others here weren't either, but an astonishing number of people -including some people in very high places, and yes, Mr. de Icaza, I am looking at you- were. Enough that there were flamewars any time anything remotely.NET-related or Mono-related came up.
Hopefully, we'll be able to get on with our lives now. This has happened before, and will probably happen again, and the community always survives. Some very interesting tools will either die or need to be ported, but that's always how it goes.
Seriously. The headline for this should read "Moore's Law will Die Without GPUs, Says GPU Maker."
Or, to put it another way, the GPU maker keeps invoking Moore's Law, but I do not think it means what he thinks it means. You can't double semiconductor density by increasing the number of chips involved.
Most of Cocoa is proprietary. As a developer you get access to the headers, but not the source code of most of the Cocoa frameworks. Apple owns them and can change both interface and implementation at will, and frequently does - though they try to keep the interfaces (i.e., the headers) stable.
Owning the code, keeping it from view, and changing it at will - meets my definition of proprietary.
Most of Apple's implementation of Cocoa is proprietary. Cocoa itself is not.
Maybe you were thinking of the open source clone GNUStep? Apple's platforms don't use GNUStep.
The point of standards is that it doesn't matter whose implementations you use. Other platforms could use GNUStep if they so chose, or even write their own clones. Cocoa is no more proprietary in this regard than, say, X11.
For some reason expressing an opinion results in ad hominem attacks anywhere I go anymore. "Oh well, that's user fixable, so you're retarded. Thus your are wrong."
There's a very real difference between changing a default option (while leaving the original options in place) versus containing critical bugs and flaws that must be fixed by the user. Switching a distro because your pet option is no longer the default is overreacting, plain and simple, especially when the process to change said option has been trivial for years. Spend two minutes to change it back to your preferred setting and get on with your life. It'll take much less time and effort than an OS switch.
Slashdot Mirror
At that kind of striking distance, I can see the possibility of a Wii price drop to $150 for epic marketing potential. Why pay $150 for just the motion controller when you can get a whole motion-controlled console for the same price?
I'm not saying Nintendo will necessarily drop the price in response to Natal, or even if it should. But the price will come down eventually -console prices always do- and when that happens, expect marketing like this.
You're a level of indirection down from what I was talking about. I was referring not to the REST API (which is indeed a nice one, though isn't initial uploading -i.e. resource creation- supposed to be handled through POST, not PUT?), but to the Python library they seem to have included for interfacing to REST. Far from making things easier, they appear to have actually complicated matters in that library.
It's not free software if you can only use it for some things (for which reason labeling this license ('permissive' is an absolute joke). Open-Source I'll grant, but please don't lump it in with the FLOSS acronym.
It's also not particularly unique. Extending the 'no-harm' clause of the license to animals is an interesting novelty, but such clauses are not at all unprecedented.
It's not as though it's a serious attempt to influence software development anyway -few PETA things are ever anything more than publicity stunts, and this is no different- so why isn't this in Idle?
This looks like a nice low-level API for doing really interesting and complicated things. Unfortunately, they neglected to include a high-level API to deal with what will be by far the most common use cases. Sure, it's not so difficult to implement an upload_file(filepointer, uri) function with this, but given the huge proportion of developers using this library that are going to need exactly this sort of function, do we really need all of them reinventing the wheel?
Powerful and complex functionality is good, but the most common use cases got that way for a reason. Specifically accounting for them, even if only through a set of basic frontend functions, brings major productivity boosts to the programmers that use your library. It is a thing worth doing, and it sounds like the Google folks neglected to do that in this case.
If this is true, then Facebook is committing fraud. Shut them down.
Yeah, I don't see it as all that much of a loss either, but someone asked, so I answered.
Visited links would look the same as unvisited ones.
Yeah, the Firefox devs are in a real bind. If only there were some way that they could fork off a new "Mozilla browser" project from the existing base, with the goal of being a fast and light alternative to its bloatware progenitor.
Yes, and this is a serious problem. There is no such thing as an apolitical view of history, as among other things, every viewpoint has its own judgments of the same events. There is no way to teach history independently of those judgments; the best you can do is point out where the judgments are and hope that the students will figure out what to take with a grain of salt and what not to.
To block "deviating from the accepted teachings" is really nothing more than an attempt to cement one's own judgments into the curriculum. I'm no fan of what Texas is doing here, but this particular solution is not an acceptable way of blocking it. Go back to the drawing board.
Heck; I'll give you a new hook. Go after the bit about the US being "chosen by God as a beacon" as a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, because if it's not a case of a government entity (the school board) establishing a civic religion, I don't know what is.
And I would put JFK into the "naive" category, particularly given the fundamental incompatibility of his first two freedoms with the last.
Negative freedoms: the biggest load of BS to infect pop sociology in the last century. When someone claims to offer or desire "freedom from" anything, run for the hills, because they are either too naive to understand the costs or too traumatized to care. Neither viewpoint is healthy.
The point of the menubar is not to contain commonly-used options, but to contain both the common ones in a discoverable manner. Right-click menus and toolbars are best used solely for shortcuts to commonly-used options (which is why customizability of these things is nice, since definitions of 'commonly-used' differ). Ribbons lack the advantage of discoverability, which is what makes them a very bad step back UI-wise. Sure, they look cool, but they just don't do usability very well, and the trivial space savings of taking out the menubar tend to be gobbled right back up by MOAR BUTTONZ anyway.
To put it another way: menu bars function as an index, while well-designed toolbars and right-click menus function as bookmarks. Ribbons hybridize this in pretty much the worst possible way: bookmarking every option to the point where there is no sense in having bookmarked them in the first place, but without the index to make it discoverable.
Change is good. Gratuitous change usually isn't. Ribbons are an example of this: marketing-driven UI design created to wow the crowd with something New And Different, but without much if any actual reasoning behind it.
The folks doing deCOMtamination, as they call it, would like to have a word with you.
Untrue. The Wii's attach rate for games is actually in second this generation: behind the 360, to be sure, but ahead of the PS3.
Actually, the PS2 now makes Sony money because of the hardware. There simply aren't enough new games coming out to turn Sony much if any profit at all, software-wise.
As for units sold, Nintendo is actually selling more per game, on average, than the PS2 did. A significantly higher proportion of games turn a profit, as well: some 40% for the Wii, as opposed to 30-35% for the PS2.
Welcome to Slashdot, Mr. Pachter. I hope you enjoy your time here.
The 3DS is proof enough that Nintendo can be foolish to cut the legs off of a system at its peak, but twice in a row? Nintendo isn't that stupid.
Pachter is still just butthurt over the fact that gaming isn't going the way he predicted, all because, as it turns out, graphics really don't matter. He thought it did, and it cost him dear, so now he's out to do anything he can to tank the Wii, and this is only the latest in his long string of failed attempts to do so.
People don't necessarily want games that are easier to win; they just want games that are easier to play. Gratuitous complexity is a fundamental design flaw: if the player isn't doing something interesting within five minutes of starting a new game, something is wrong. Similarly, if the player hasn't mastered all of the basic mechanics -i.e. every mechanic necessary to complete the game's main plot- within one hour, something is wrong. This does not mean that the game should be easy, only that the player should be able to do what's needed. It's still up to them to pull it off.
The scary part here is that I'm sure plenty of people here are surprised. I wasn't ready to trust Microsoft, and I'm sure many others here weren't either, but an astonishing number of people -including some people in very high places, and yes, Mr. de Icaza, I am looking at you- were. Enough that there were flamewars any time anything remotely .NET-related or Mono-related came up.
Hopefully, we'll be able to get on with our lives now. This has happened before, and will probably happen again, and the community always survives. Some very interesting tools will either die or need to be ported, but that's always how it goes.
On my personal top ten list of "Things I Wish Media Knew Computers Could Do," #1 is displaying entire articles on a single freaking page.
Seriously. The headline for this should read "Moore's Law will Die Without GPUs, Says GPU Maker ."
Or, to put it another way, the GPU maker keeps invoking Moore's Law, but I do not think it means what he thinks it means. You can't double semiconductor density by increasing the number of chips involved.
In Soviet Messaging, I seek YOU!
Oh, wait...
Most of Cocoa is proprietary. As a developer you get access to the headers, but not the source code of most of the Cocoa frameworks. Apple owns them and can change both interface and implementation at will, and frequently does - though they try to keep the interfaces (i.e., the headers) stable.
Owning the code, keeping it from view, and changing it at will - meets my definition of proprietary.
Most of Apple's implementation of Cocoa is proprietary. Cocoa itself is not.
Maybe you were thinking of the open source clone GNUStep? Apple's platforms don't use GNUStep.
The point of standards is that it doesn't matter whose implementations you use. Other platforms could use GNUStep if they so chose, or even write their own clones. Cocoa is no more proprietary in this regard than, say, X11.
There's a very real difference between changing a default option (while leaving the original options in place) versus containing critical bugs and flaws that must be fixed by the user. Switching a distro because your pet option is no longer the default is overreacting, plain and simple, especially when the process to change said option has been trivial for years. Spend two minutes to change it back to your preferred setting and get on with your life. It'll take much less time and effort than an OS switch.
Just one problem: Cocoa isn't proprietary.