Actually, I think it's a little simpler than that.
One of the most fundamental behaviours that evolution demands is successful reproduction. That's actually surprisingly complex thing to enforce in instinct: you don't need to just have a generic desire to fuck things, you need to pair that with a very strong ability to find the correct things to fuck. That means a whole lot of code to recognize members of the correct species and gender, and react very differently to them.
This produces strong and complex responses to entities that appear to straddle or blur these lines. This is why transgendered people, anthropomorphic animals, and homosexual sex produce such strong and mixed reactions in people: they tickle this deeply ingrained border between what is fuckable and what is not. (Please note that I'm not taking a moral stance on any of these, or trying to suggest that they represent "mistakes of evolution" or any such nonsense.)
Something that blurs the line between human and not (and particularly a human of your desired gender) seems as if it would obviously trigger this same response.
I can't imagine any game being good enough to make it worth involving Windows in my life.
The no-monthly-fee thing certainly doesn't make up for it; I'd be perfectly willing to pay as much as I do now for a WoW subscription, or indeed several times as much. The time I invest in the game is the real cost; a few dollars here and there pale in comparison to that.
So why is racism OK in the fantasy setting and you are
totally hyper about it in the fantasy setting when its
applied to meatspace races. Try subsistiting Horde for
Chinese and vice versa and tell me whats the
difference.
The same reason that killing people in the game is okay, and killing people in the real world is not: objective reality is more important than voluntary fantasy.
Even if the majority of professional farmers are Chinese, that's very different from the majority of Chinese players being professional farmers. Do you seriously believe that those million and a half people have nothing better to do than sell you gold?
Almost everything about Guild Wars sounds fantastic to me... except its reliance on Windows.
I tried at one point mailing their support group to ask about timelines for a grownup-computers version, but got the message bounced saying that they don't accept mail from people who don't already have an account. How... informative that must be for them.
So WoW continues to win with me not only because it's good, but because it's acually available for real operating systems.
Standards compliance is a good guideline, but it is not law.
This may be the best embodiment of the concept "short-sighted" that I've ever seen.
Disregard for standards and a narrow focus on your current and intended audience got us Progidy and Compuserve. Focusing on standards, and leaving open the places and ways in which content are delivered got us the Internet and the Web.
I agree almost completely, but I think that your depiction is in fact slightly too generous. id indeed is responsible for some great innovation in game technology, but that's about as close to a good game as tcp is.
My personal favorite for actual game design has always been Bungie. I don't believe that id has, to this day, come out with a game that's the equal of Marathon.
...a filibuster has never been used to stop a vote on a judge on the Senate floor. Until now, of course.
......what?
Right, with the exception of the nomination of Richard Paez to the 9th circuit court on March 8th of 2000? Or Marsha Berzon, Harvie Wilkinson, Stephen Breyer, or Lee Sarokin?
On the first of those occasions, Republican Senator Smith of New Hampshire asserted:
"But don't pontificate on the floor of the Senate and tell me that somehow I am violating the Constitution of the United States of America by blocking a judge or filibustering a judge that I don't think deserves to be on the circuit court because I am going to continue to do it at every opportunity I believe a judge should not be on that court. That is my responsibility. That is my advise and consent role, and I intend to exercise it."
Well, itunes does actually depend on quicktime. Quicktime is the set of libraries that does things like, say, decoding mp3 and aac, which one might consider to be a teeny bit important to itunes's functioning. The actual itunes application is just a little playlist manager, quicktime is where all the interesting stuff happens.
And this is actually the sane and reasonable way to do things: handling media formats is a global enough thing that you want some centralized libraries to do it, rather than writing it into each app independently. Complaining that itunes requires quicktime is akin to complaining that firefox requires tcp.
This seems like a substantially different case than forcing one to install an IM client along with a music player. They may offer hooks to talk to one another, and that's great, but neither logically depends on the other.
This is still the best reason to read slashdot comments: ironic misspellings. Nothing better than seeing someone assert that jwz is "disallusioned" when the story is, in fact, an allusion to him.
(And for extra irony, if you were using osx, you'd get handy inline spellchecking in all your applications!)
Traditionally Apple has done all their own logic boards, and I don't see any reason to expect that to change now.
Apple's goal here is not to make machines that are interchangeable with Dell/HP/homebuilt systems, it's just to have a cpu architecture that will--definitionally--never fall behind what most competing systems use. But they'll still be "Macs" in all other ways.
Apple's already got a couple major cash cows....they're called the iPod and the iTunes music store.
The music store almost precisely breaks even; its purpose is to entice people into ipods, and thus into macs.
I've heard conflicting things about how much profit they actually clear on ipods. While they obviously sell lots of units, the margins are very slim indeed. Again, they're not exactly loss leaders, but "lesser profit leaders".
So no, Apple's profit really is deeply bound to mac sales. But they do have a whooole lot of cash sitting in the bank; I would imagine that they've decided that it's worthwhile to weather a rough couple of years of decreased hardware sales in order to never again have their machines be viewed as slower than intel systems.
So you're saying that Windows can be made secure as long as you never allow users to install software or customize their machine, put it behind a firewall that probably interferes with some traffic they'd like to send, and saddle them with the burdensome, resource-sucking, false-positivey wonder of antivirus software? Sounds glorious.
Even if we grant that all of the above actually results in security (which, for the record, I won't), doesn't it strike you as categorically inferior to an environment in which you can allow users to use their machines as they desire and still generally be secure?
Actually, this is consistent with the fact that everything Obi-Wan and Yoda ever tell Luke is false, whereas everything Vader and Palpatine ever tell him is the truth.
Actually, the last several scenes of the movie should have never existed. They showed us nothing new at all, just rushed us through a quick tour of scenes to tell us what we already knew. Yes his injuries lead to the suit, yes Luke and Leia get sent to Tattoine and the Organas, yes the empire made a death star after this.
If they movie had simply ended about twenty minutes earlier it would have still been fairly bad, but much improved.
(First off, I can't believe that I'm actually defending any part of this craptacular movie. But the ways in which it was craptastic are different, so I'll at least give it its due.)
Palpatine seemed to have a look of concentration at a few points during the controlled crash. I got the impression that he was probably using his abilities to control their descent as much as he could without giving himself away to the jedi.
What I've always wondered is this: copyright allows for quoting from works. Using a modified BitTorrent client/server, shouldn't it be possible quote only up to the legal portion of a piece of property to any given IP address?
The "fair use" clause doesn't just freely allow distribution of a given percentage of a work for any reason. It allows for excerpts to be used specifically for purposes like reviews of the material, discussion and comparison against other works, and a handful of miscellaneous purposes like satire. In short, it is context-dependent, and your intent is key.
The US Copyright Office clarifies that among the considerations for fair use applicability is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." I don't imagine that the RIAA would have a hard time arguing that a hundred people cooperatively publishing a unique 1% of a song each would have the exact same market effect as a the publication of the song by a single source.
While I really do not wish to descend to ad hominem, it sounds as if the important thing that potential clients should learn from viewing your site is that your work fails to hold up well in the face of variety of client rendering choices.
One of the fundamental design goals of the Web has always been that content is paramount, and presentation is a set of flexible suggestions. The clearest example of this is the "strong" tag. Not bold, not italicized, not underlined, not big and red and blinking, just however the individual user and renderer decide to portray emphasis. If you choose to create content which intentionally thwarts (or even just deals poorly) with this diversity of portrayal, then you have chosen to not participate in the World Wide Web; you are merely creating immutable brochures that you happen to deliver over http.
when you go to an art museum to you rearrange how the art is displayed?
No, as that would enforce my alterations on other people. But if I choose to go to the gallery wearing tinted glasses, it's none of the artist's business.
Webservers have a tendency to serve up things they don't understand as text/plain or application/octet-stream; depending on the actual file, these types are often very incorrect.
Given that these types are so often incorectly applied, apple made the interesting choice to basically just consider them "unknown" as far as the server is concerned, and try to figure them out on the client side. So if it ends in.html and contains a lot of text and html-like tags, safari will assume that you're yet another bolloxed up webserver and treat it as an html file.
I have pretty mixed feelings about this choice. In theory, it's bad that you're intentionally disregarding what the server is claiming, even if it was the admin's intent. In practice, it's often good to disregard what the server is saying, because the server is often misconfigured.
In an ideal world, webservers would use a different mime type for unrecognized than for things that are explicitly matched. If apache only used text/plain for things that really are text/plain, and served up anything it didn't understand as stuff/hellifiknow, then client could make another pass at figuring things out without any risk of stepping on the server's decision.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think it's a little simpler than that.
One of the most fundamental behaviours that evolution demands is successful reproduction. That's actually surprisingly complex thing to enforce in instinct: you don't need to just have a generic desire to fuck things, you need to pair that with a very strong ability to find the correct things to fuck. That means a whole lot of code to recognize members of the correct species and gender, and react very differently to them.
This produces strong and complex responses to entities that appear to straddle or blur these lines. This is why transgendered people, anthropomorphic animals, and homosexual sex produce such strong and mixed reactions in people: they tickle this deeply ingrained border between what is fuckable and what is not. (Please note that I'm not taking a moral stance on any of these, or trying to suggest that they represent "mistakes of evolution" or any such nonsense.)
Something that blurs the line between human and not (and particularly a human of your desired gender) seems as if it would obviously trigger this same response.
You forgot to add to the list of attributes:
* Windows only
I can't imagine any game being good enough to make it worth involving Windows in my life.
The no-monthly-fee thing certainly doesn't make up for it; I'd be perfectly willing to pay as much as I do now for a WoW subscription, or indeed several times as much. The time I invest in the game is the real cost; a few dollars here and there pale in comparison to that.
Even if the majority of professional farmers are Chinese, that's very different from the majority of Chinese players being professional farmers. Do you seriously believe that those million and a half people have nothing better to do than sell you gold?
Almost everything about Guild Wars sounds fantastic to me... except its reliance on Windows.
I tried at one point mailing their support group to ask about timelines for a grownup-computers version, but got the message bounced saying that they don't accept mail from people who don't already have an account. How... informative that must be for them.
So WoW continues to win with me not only because it's good, but because it's acually available for real operating systems.
Disregard for standards and a narrow focus on your current and intended audience got us Progidy and Compuserve. Focusing on standards, and leaving open the places and ways in which content are delivered got us the Internet and the Web.
My personal favorite for actual game design has always been Bungie. I don't believe that id has, to this day, come out with a game that's the equal of Marathon.
Right, with the exception of the nomination of Richard Paez to the 9th circuit court on March 8th of 2000? Or Marsha Berzon, Harvie Wilkinson, Stephen Breyer, or Lee Sarokin? On the first of those occasions, Republican Senator Smith of New Hampshire asserted:
"Today is the maiden voyage of Airbus's new A380. It's a jet of titanic........ It's a jet of gargantuan proprotions."
In my experience, there's no stronger confirmation possible for any statement than Dave Winer disagreeing with it.
Well, itunes does actually depend on quicktime. Quicktime is the set of libraries that does things like, say, decoding mp3 and aac, which one might consider to be a teeny bit important to itunes's functioning. The actual itunes application is just a little playlist manager, quicktime is where all the interesting stuff happens.
And this is actually the sane and reasonable way to do things: handling media formats is a global enough thing that you want some centralized libraries to do it, rather than writing it into each app independently. Complaining that itunes requires quicktime is akin to complaining that firefox requires tcp.
This seems like a substantially different case than forcing one to install an IM client along with a music player. They may offer hooks to talk to one another, and that's great, but neither logically depends on the other.
(And for extra irony, if you were using osx, you'd get handy inline spellchecking in all your applications!)
After reading the writeup, my first reaction was, "Someone is selling stain-resistant nanopants? Sweet!"
I'm sure that Eddie Bauer et al will be grateful for the wonderful free advertising this has afforded their product.
Traditionally Apple has done all their own logic boards, and I don't see any reason to expect that to change now.
Apple's goal here is not to make machines that are interchangeable with Dell/HP/homebuilt systems, it's just to have a cpu architecture that will--definitionally--never fall behind what most competing systems use. But they'll still be "Macs" in all other ways.
The music store almost precisely breaks even; its purpose is to entice people into ipods, and thus into macs.
I've heard conflicting things about how much profit they actually clear on ipods. While they obviously sell lots of units, the margins are very slim indeed. Again, they're not exactly loss leaders, but "lesser profit leaders".
So no, Apple's profit really is deeply bound to mac sales. But they do have a whooole lot of cash sitting in the bank; I would imagine that they've decided that it's worthwhile to weather a rough couple of years of decreased hardware sales in order to never again have their machines be viewed as slower than intel systems.
Even if we grant that all of the above actually results in security (which, for the record, I won't), doesn't it strike you as categorically inferior to an environment in which you can allow users to use their machines as they desire and still generally be secure?
Actually, this is consistent with the fact that everything Obi-Wan and Yoda ever tell Luke is false, whereas everything Vader and Palpatine ever tell him is the truth.
Speaking of the communicator-throwing scene, can you imagine Sir Alec Guinness saying "yeah" if his life depended on it?
Actually, the last several scenes of the movie should have never existed. They showed us nothing new at all, just rushed us through a quick tour of scenes to tell us what we already knew. Yes his injuries lead to the suit, yes Luke and Leia get sent to Tattoine and the Organas, yes the empire made a death star after this.
If they movie had simply ended about twenty minutes earlier it would have still been fairly bad, but much improved.
(First off, I can't believe that I'm actually defending any part of this craptacular movie. But the ways in which it was craptastic are different, so I'll at least give it its due.)
Palpatine seemed to have a look of concentration at a few points during the controlled crash. I got the impression that he was probably using his abilities to control their descent as much as he could without giving himself away to the jedi.
The US Copyright Office clarifies that among the considerations for fair use applicability is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." I don't imagine that the RIAA would have a hard time arguing that a hundred people cooperatively publishing a unique 1% of a song each would have the exact same market effect as a the publication of the song by a single source.
While I really do not wish to descend to ad hominem, it sounds as if the important thing that potential clients should learn from viewing your site is that your work fails to hold up well in the face of variety of client rendering choices.
One of the fundamental design goals of the Web has always been that content is paramount, and presentation is a set of flexible suggestions. The clearest example of this is the "strong" tag. Not bold, not italicized, not underlined, not big and red and blinking, just however the individual user and renderer decide to portray emphasis. If you choose to create content which intentionally thwarts (or even just deals poorly) with this diversity of portrayal, then you have chosen to not participate in the World Wide Web; you are merely creating immutable brochures that you happen to deliver over http.
Webservers have a tendency to serve up things they don't understand as text/plain or application/octet-stream; depending on the actual file, these types are often very incorrect.
.html and contains a lot of text and html-like tags, safari will assume that you're yet another bolloxed up webserver and treat it as an html file.
Given that these types are so often incorectly applied, apple made the interesting choice to basically just consider them "unknown" as far as the server is concerned, and try to figure them out on the client side. So if it ends in
I have pretty mixed feelings about this choice. In theory, it's bad that you're intentionally disregarding what the server is claiming, even if it was the admin's intent. In practice, it's often good to disregard what the server is saying, because the server is often misconfigured.
In an ideal world, webservers would use a different mime type for unrecognized than for things that are explicitly matched. If apache only used text/plain for things that really are text/plain, and served up anything it didn't understand as stuff/hellifiknow, then client could make another pass at figuring things out without any risk of stepping on the server's decision.