I'm going to glom first and second party together, as I'm never sure which ones are first or second.
The first party is Nintendo. The third party is any outside developer.
The second party is YOU. What Gamecube games did you release?:)
Kidding aside, Pikmin was one of the best games released this decade. Kind of like Katamari in its uniqueness, except no waiting for the usual long Sony load times. This factor alone has kept me a Nintendo fan - the PS1 was absolutely horrid for the amount of time you had to wait, and even in the best PS2 games (Grand Theft Auto, I'm looking at you) I'm often spending half of my playing times waiting for some stupid cutscene or the next level to load.
Quality over quantity in my book, any day. I'd be happy if Wii only ends up having 10 games I like, because as with the N64 and Gamecube, they'll be GOOD.
No matter the story here, someone on Slashdot always reminds me of why I'll always have a job in this industry.
Moving back on-topic, the answer is to teach using both. You'll have a fun time writing modern GUI apps with a command line - but then again, you'll have a real fun time supporting (and coding for) an AS/400 using only the GUI tools:) Each job has the appropriate tools.
Lamps in LCD projection sets are rated at 5-10,000 hours, minimum. To be replacing twice a year you'd have to leave your TV on 24/7, and have really bad luck with bulb life. Average expected life, with normal viewing habits (I dunno, 4-6 hours per day) should give you 4-6 YEARS of bulb life.
Yeah, replacing bulbs sucks, and they can be in the hundreds of dollars, and yup, they're not warrantied. But 4-6 months? I'd return that TV pronto. Something's either wrong with the TV, or you're running it inside of your oven. My Sony WEGA is over a year old, with 6-8 hours viewing daily, and it's as bright as ever. I've seen 3 year old models still with their original bulbs.
You mean you prefer cloudy and rainy 200 days out of the year?:)
BC is currently in a pretty good state, construction jobs are plenty due to the 2010 winter olympics. Otherwise it's always been a good place, except housing is insanely expensive. Lots of good paying jobs, which you need for that $3000/month mortgage.
I'll make a guess and assume you're in the US right now; I can't speak for the rest of the country but there are a TON of Americans moving up here right now - so it can't be as hard as it's been in the past. Always worth a look, eh?
Currently, Alberta, Canada. $12/hr to work at KFC, no lie. Things are a bit nuts here, admittedly. Immigrating here is actually relatively easy right now due to the insane price of oil. Companies are bringing in workers from Latin America, Asia, Africa, you name it. If you're able to perform or willing to learn pretty much any trade, you can find work (and get a company to "sponsor" you) with hardly any working. $30/hr and up for house framers is the norm right now. For IT work... it's highly in demand here, but it's a lot harder to do the immigration deal as we're still plowing our way through the dot-com bubble's legacy, ie: still filtering out the paper MCSEs.
The experiences with welfare recipients were in friendly Manitoba - these people exist by the tens of thousands there. It's not uncommon for high school girls to deliberately get themselves pregnant in order to collect welfare benefits.
the myth of the lazy jobless guy is just that -- a myth
You're funny.
Explain to me then, in a province with practically zero unemployment, how can there still be physically fit, mentally able people who don't work?
Explain how, when menial jobs that literally anyone could do are paying over $10/hr, and businesses are shutting down because they can't find enough warm bodies to do these jobs, there are thousands of welfare recipients?
For the record, I've personally known dozens of people who have either deliberately left the workforce, or stopped looking for work, just so they could collect unemployment/welfare benefits. There are tens of thousands of people in Canada perfectly capable of working, who could find a job tomorrow, that choose not to.
I don't have to look hard to find jobless people. I've offered my welfare-collecting friends jobs, and they usually turn them down. I've also ran a company where we went out of our way to hire "welfare moms" - we got a subsidy from the feds for the first 6 months, and if they could work, we kept them on. Over 75% of them ended up back on welfare, because many of them went back on their cocaine habit, others just didn't feel like getting up for 9am, and some plain just earned more money on welfare.
Believe me, there are plenty of lazy jobless people. Not all of them, maybe not even the majority, but there are plenty.
A millimeter is 10^-3 meters. A millionth of a millimeter is 10^-9 (a nanometer, hence the term "nanotechnology". 100 of these millionths would be 100x10^-9, or, 100 nanometers and smaller.
The smallest atom is helium
Hydrogen. Not that "size" has much meaning when discussing atoms, anyway.
The Neo Geo home system was never meant for the mainstream, however. The console itself cost over $500US at the time of its release
It's a console. It was an EXPENSIVE console, but it's still a console. I don't need to do research, I was alive then and very much into the console market at the time. Believe me, everyone considered this thing a very expensive Genesis (which from a technical standpoint is all it was). SNK's marketing was pretty clear on that (again, look at what you pasted).
If your definition of "console" is how something is marketed, you can also take out things like the 3DO and CD-i (home entertainment/multimedia machines), the NES (originally marketed as an Entertainment System), and most early 80s consoles past their first iterations. Every company back then added a keyboard and BASIC interpreter to their systems and tried selling them as personal computers.
They were still video game consoles. So was the NeoGeo.
The NeoGeo was most certainly a console. It came in a small form factor, with interchangable cartridges, independant controllers attached with long cables, and was designed to be plugged into a television set. It was the very definition of a video game console, just more expensive. It was marketed as a console, targetted at the wealthy ("play the hottest arcade games at home!", etc). The machine itself was entirely inappropriate as an arcade unit - the controllers alone would have broken given a few weeks in your average arcade. Plus, the whole television thing. It would have looked pretty 1972 to have your arcade running off TVs.
I will say that the Neo Geo would have been much better had it come as a stand up cabinet that allowed the games to be changed, for the money
This happened. It was called the MVS. But if you didn't want to buy a cabinet, you bought the NeoGeo - a home gaming console system.
In short, you either don't know what the hell you are talking about, or you don't understand what a video game console (or arcade game, for that matter) is.
By the time the PS3 is released, it will likely cost less than $500 CDN. It's entirely possible it might match the PS2 release price up here.
Canadian electronics geeks love high commodity prices! Personally, I'm drooling over the possibility of a sub-$200 Wii. My N64 cost me over $300 back when the dollar was hovering around 60 cents US. Add 10 years of inflation and the Wii is positively a steal.
SOX requires process control auditing. Meaning, when you say "this is how I create a user account", in a SOX audit you will have to show that that is in fact how you create a user account.
What is NOT audited is the fact that the new user account has root privledges - more specifically, SOX doesn't concern itself with WHY this is a problem. So long as your policy is "everyone has root", and you stick with it, you will pass a SOX audit.
In short, all Enron v2.0 has to do is write their processes to end up with cooking the books - and it will pass a SOX audit with flying colours.
The truth is that those controls can be anything you want them to be. Don't want to do backups? Just document why and be ready to explain it to the auditor. You are still in "compliance".
But that's exactly why SOX is in the end entirely useless!
I can set up a corporate policy whereby all C-level execs, plus a few select IT staff, have full root access on any machine, keys to any filing cabinet, personal shredders, you name it. I can have the policy state that none of our activities are audited, monitored, or logged in any fashion. We can run a billion dollar company this way for years.
You really think SOX will do sweet diddly to prevent another Enron?
SOX is to publicly traded companies as the Patriot Act is to terrorism. Entirely useless, and just designed to make people feel better, all the while causing severe grief and horribly costly side effects.
Slashdot frightens me sometimes. People seriously get themselves into a relationship where something as minor as a move would end it?
Millions of families move every year. To different communities, different cities, hell, even different countries. Amazingly enough, these families can actually stick together!
You have just described your government for the last 6 years.
"My" government just changed hands a couple of months back, for the first time in 13 years, thank you very much.
If you were referring to the U.S. government - if you really think they have a true democracy, I suggest you look up things such as emancipation, the right of women to vote, and pretty much any other minority rights issue. The U.S. might be fucked up right now, but it is anything but mob rule.
Oh, and for the record: republican forms of government predate labour unions by several centuries. Unions were able to form because of this - not the other way around.
By "moved around a bit", I was referring to moving to different positions within companies, as well as moving to different companies. Unless you work somewhere where there is only a single company with IT workers, and only a single job in that company, this isn't an issue. If you DO work in a place like that, you're an idiot for staying. What if the company goes out of business? No union will protect you from that.
Oh, and "traitor to my own DNA"? You do realize families can and do move, right? Children can go to another school, it won't kill them, really! I've also heard rumors that some people don't stay in the same city they were born in forever, they actually live away from their parents - shocking!
Maybe instead of making poor choices in life, and then being bitter forever, you should try planning ahead a little. Save up some money, don't get too attached to any one job/house/city. If you want to stick with one or more of those things, fine, but it's YOUR CHOICE.
When life doesn't go the way you planned (hey, stuff happens), get off your arse and make some changes for the better. Whining certainly won't get you anywhere.
Disclaimer: if you're living with your cancer-ridden mother who requires 18 hours of your time daily, and you have absolutely no disposable income (that means no TV, no beer, no car, no going out ever - your income exactly matches your rent and food bills), then you indeed have my sympathies. You're screwed.
If you end up with a lousy union that cripples your employer, you have only yourselves to blame.
Yup. You have 40,000 of the laziest, whiniest people to blame.
Unions are just about the worst form of democracy there is - take mob rule, combine with the uneducated masses, and add a good helping of fear mongering and other scare tactics.
I've seen a union go on strike for a fraction of a percent of salary. In one case, it would have taken the average employee over 10 years to earn back what they lost during the strike - strike pay is usually not 100% of your income. Yet the union membership overwhelmingly (80% plus) voted in favour of the strike, because the majority of members didn't really understand the numbers.
Unions to me are a big example of why I'd NEVER want to live in a true democracy. The lowest common denominator determines your fate.
And when adjusted for inflation, I've had nothing but raises for over a decade. Even if I had chosen to stay at the exact same job level, doing the exact same thing, I've have gotten a larger raise than the inflation rate, often by 50% or more. To help that out, I've moved around a bit, taken more challenging work, more responsibility, and have nearly doubled my salary in the past 5 years. Meanwhile, I've seen a steady stream of underperforming, whining, "it's always someone else's fault" employees be fired, laid off, and be outsourced.
Upon startup, Windows sends a 1-byte ping to a server within the microsoft.com domain
And what does Windows do when this ping packet gets dropped?
I ask this because I've ran Windows machines behind some very restrictive firewalls in the past which drop all ICMP type 0 and 8 packets (inbound and outbound), and these machines worked just fine. No booting issues, no network issues. In fact, many ISPs now do this as well.
Can anyone confirm this? I've never noticed a "1-byte ping" to anything within microsoft.com while sniffing my LANs.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you only read free books, newspapers, magazines? If you do, you're in the minority.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Haven't the past 60 years taught us antyhing?
Agreed, Nintendo has no issues with pretty much any kind of game on their system.
See: Resident Evil 4. Try comparing that game to Spongebob.
I'm going to glom first and second party together, as I'm never sure which ones are first or second.
:)
The first party is Nintendo.
The third party is any outside developer.
The second party is YOU. What Gamecube games did you release?
Kidding aside, Pikmin was one of the best games released this decade. Kind of like Katamari in its uniqueness, except no waiting for the usual long Sony load times. This factor alone has kept me a Nintendo fan - the PS1 was absolutely horrid for the amount of time you had to wait, and even in the best PS2 games (Grand Theft Auto, I'm looking at you) I'm often spending half of my playing times waiting for some stupid cutscene or the next level to load.
Quality over quantity in my book, any day. I'd be happy if Wii only ends up having 10 games I like, because as with the N64 and Gamecube, they'll be GOOD.
The CLi is dying anyway, and good riddance!
:) Each job has the appropriate tools.
No matter the story here, someone on Slashdot always reminds me of why I'll always have a job in this industry.
Moving back on-topic, the answer is to teach using both. You'll have a fun time writing modern GUI apps with a command line - but then again, you'll have a real fun time supporting (and coding for) an AS/400 using only the GUI tools
Lamps in LCD projection sets are rated at 5-10,000 hours, minimum. To be replacing twice a year you'd have to leave your TV on 24/7, and have really bad luck with bulb life. Average expected life, with normal viewing habits (I dunno, 4-6 hours per day) should give you 4-6 YEARS of bulb life.
Yeah, replacing bulbs sucks, and they can be in the hundreds of dollars, and yup, they're not warrantied. But 4-6 months? I'd return that TV pronto. Something's either wrong with the TV, or you're running it inside of your oven. My Sony WEGA is over a year old, with 6-8 hours viewing daily, and it's as bright as ever. I've seen 3 year old models still with their original bulbs.
You mean you prefer cloudy and rainy 200 days out of the year? :)
BC is currently in a pretty good state, construction jobs are plenty due to the 2010 winter olympics. Otherwise it's always been a good place, except housing is insanely expensive. Lots of good paying jobs, which you need for that $3000/month mortgage.
I'll make a guess and assume you're in the US right now; I can't speak for the rest of the country but there are a TON of Americans moving up here right now - so it can't be as hard as it's been in the past. Always worth a look, eh?
Currently, Alberta, Canada. $12/hr to work at KFC, no lie. Things are a bit nuts here, admittedly. Immigrating here is actually relatively easy right now due to the insane price of oil. Companies are bringing in workers from Latin America, Asia, Africa, you name it. If you're able to perform or willing to learn pretty much any trade, you can find work (and get a company to "sponsor" you) with hardly any working. $30/hr and up for house framers is the norm right now. For IT work... it's highly in demand here, but it's a lot harder to do the immigration deal as we're still plowing our way through the dot-com bubble's legacy, ie: still filtering out the paper MCSEs.
The experiences with welfare recipients were in friendly Manitoba - these people exist by the tens of thousands there. It's not uncommon for high school girls to deliberately get themselves pregnant in order to collect welfare benefits.
The tagging system is 'not reliable or dependable'.
the myth of the lazy jobless guy is just that -- a myth
You're funny.
Explain to me then, in a province with practically zero unemployment, how can there still be physically fit, mentally able people who don't work?
Explain how, when menial jobs that literally anyone could do are paying over $10/hr, and businesses are shutting down because they can't find enough warm bodies to do these jobs, there are thousands of welfare recipients?
For the record, I've personally known dozens of people who have either deliberately left the workforce, or stopped looking for work, just so they could collect unemployment/welfare benefits. There are tens of thousands of people in Canada perfectly capable of working, who could find a job tomorrow, that choose not to.
I don't have to look hard to find jobless people. I've offered my welfare-collecting friends jobs, and they usually turn them down. I've also ran a company where we went out of our way to hire "welfare moms" - we got a subsidy from the feds for the first 6 months, and if they could work, we kept them on. Over 75% of them ended up back on welfare, because many of them went back on their cocaine habit, others just didn't feel like getting up for 9am, and some plain just earned more money on welfare.
Believe me, there are plenty of lazy jobless people. Not all of them, maybe not even the majority, but there are plenty.
I can see why "keygen" is tough, because I can't think of many legitimate uses for either that, or warez or something...
Well, for one thing, this Slashdot story would be filtered, as would your comment, as would mine.
Yup, that's not inappropriate censorship, not at all!
100-millionths of a millimeter
A millimeter is 10^-3 meters. A millionth of a millimeter is 10^-9 (a nanometer, hence the term "nanotechnology". 100 of these millionths would be 100x10^-9, or, 100 nanometers and smaller.
The smallest atom is helium
Hydrogen. Not that "size" has much meaning when discussing atoms, anyway.
From your pasted quote:
The Neo Geo home system was never meant for the mainstream, however. The console itself cost over $500US at the time of its release
It's a console. It was an EXPENSIVE console, but it's still a console. I don't need to do research, I was alive then and very much into the console market at the time. Believe me, everyone considered this thing a very expensive Genesis (which from a technical standpoint is all it was). SNK's marketing was pretty clear on that (again, look at what you pasted).
If your definition of "console" is how something is marketed, you can also take out things like the 3DO and CD-i (home entertainment/multimedia machines), the NES (originally marketed as an Entertainment System), and most early 80s consoles past their first iterations. Every company back then added a keyboard and BASIC interpreter to their systems and tried selling them as personal computers.
They were still video game consoles. So was the NeoGeo.
The Neo Geo was not a console
The NeoGeo was most certainly a console. It came in a small form factor, with interchangable cartridges, independant controllers attached with long cables, and was designed to be plugged into a television set. It was the very definition of a video game console, just more expensive. It was marketed as a console, targetted at the wealthy ("play the hottest arcade games at home!", etc). The machine itself was entirely inappropriate as an arcade unit - the controllers alone would have broken given a few weeks in your average arcade. Plus, the whole television thing. It would have looked pretty 1972 to have your arcade running off TVs.
I will say that the Neo Geo would have been much better had it come as a stand up cabinet that allowed the games to be changed, for the money
This happened. It was called the MVS. But if you didn't want to buy a cabinet, you bought the NeoGeo - a home gaming console system.
In short, you either don't know what the hell you are talking about, or you don't understand what a video game console (or arcade game, for that matter) is.
How about Bonk's Adventure from the TurboGrafix 16?
Hey look, it was even listed in the article summary!
By the time the PS3 is released, it will likely cost less than $500 CDN. It's entirely possible it might match the PS2 release price up here.
Canadian electronics geeks love high commodity prices! Personally, I'm drooling over the possibility of a sub-$200 Wii. My N64 cost me over $300 back when the dollar was hovering around 60 cents US. Add 10 years of inflation and the Wii is positively a steal.
Sorry, I was mixing terminologies.
SOX requires process control auditing. Meaning, when you say "this is how I create a user account", in a SOX audit you will have to show that that is in fact how you create a user account.
What is NOT audited is the fact that the new user account has root privledges - more specifically, SOX doesn't concern itself with WHY this is a problem. So long as your policy is "everyone has root", and you stick with it, you will pass a SOX audit.
In short, all Enron v2.0 has to do is write their processes to end up with cooking the books - and it will pass a SOX audit with flying colours.
This sort of thing ALWAYS happens in the US in time of war.
Great, except for the fact that the US isn't currently at war.
So is it worse that the NSA does this or that big business does it?
Your local telco doesn't have the power to put you in Gitmo.
The truth is that those controls can be anything you want them to be. Don't want to do backups? Just document why and be ready to explain it to the auditor. You are still in "compliance".
But that's exactly why SOX is in the end entirely useless!
I can set up a corporate policy whereby all C-level execs, plus a few select IT staff, have full root access on any machine, keys to any filing cabinet, personal shredders, you name it. I can have the policy state that none of our activities are audited, monitored, or logged in any fashion. We can run a billion dollar company this way for years.
You really think SOX will do sweet diddly to prevent another Enron?
SOX is to publicly traded companies as the Patriot Act is to terrorism. Entirely useless, and just designed to make people feel better, all the while causing severe grief and horribly costly side effects.
Slashdot frightens me sometimes. People seriously get themselves into a relationship where something as minor as a move would end it?
Millions of families move every year. To different communities, different cities, hell, even different countries. Amazingly enough, these families can actually stick together!
You have just described your government for the last 6 years.
"My" government just changed hands a couple of months back, for the first time in 13 years, thank you very much.
If you were referring to the U.S. government - if you really think they have a true democracy, I suggest you look up things such as emancipation, the right of women to vote, and pretty much any other minority rights issue. The U.S. might be fucked up right now, but it is anything but mob rule.
Oh, and for the record: republican forms of government predate labour unions by several centuries. Unions were able to form because of this - not the other way around.
By "moved around a bit", I was referring to moving to different positions within companies, as well as moving to different companies. Unless you work somewhere where there is only a single company with IT workers, and only a single job in that company, this isn't an issue. If you DO work in a place like that, you're an idiot for staying. What if the company goes out of business? No union will protect you from that.
Oh, and "traitor to my own DNA"? You do realize families can and do move, right? Children can go to another school, it won't kill them, really! I've also heard rumors that some people don't stay in the same city they were born in forever, they actually live away from their parents - shocking!
Maybe instead of making poor choices in life, and then being bitter forever, you should try planning ahead a little. Save up some money, don't get too attached to any one job/house/city. If you want to stick with one or more of those things, fine, but it's YOUR CHOICE.
When life doesn't go the way you planned (hey, stuff happens), get off your arse and make some changes for the better. Whining certainly won't get you anywhere.
Disclaimer: if you're living with your cancer-ridden mother who requires 18 hours of your time daily, and you have absolutely no disposable income (that means no TV, no beer, no car, no going out ever - your income exactly matches your rent and food bills), then you indeed have my sympathies. You're screwed.
If you end up with a lousy union that cripples your employer, you have only yourselves to blame.
Yup. You have 40,000 of the laziest, whiniest people to blame.
Unions are just about the worst form of democracy there is - take mob rule, combine with the uneducated masses, and add a good helping of fear mongering and other scare tactics.
I've seen a union go on strike for a fraction of a percent of salary. In one case, it would have taken the average employee over 10 years to earn back what they lost during the strike - strike pay is usually not 100% of your income. Yet the union membership overwhelmingly (80% plus) voted in favour of the strike, because the majority of members didn't really understand the numbers.
Unions to me are a big example of why I'd NEVER want to live in a true democracy. The lowest common denominator determines your fate.
And when adjusted for inflation, I've had nothing but raises for over a decade. Even if I had chosen to stay at the exact same job level, doing the exact same thing, I've have gotten a larger raise than the inflation rate, often by 50% or more. To help that out, I've moved around a bit, taken more challenging work, more responsibility, and have nearly doubled my salary in the past 5 years. Meanwhile, I've seen a steady stream of underperforming, whining, "it's always someone else's fault" employees be fired, laid off, and be outsourced.
My anecdote trumps yours.
Upon startup, Windows sends a 1-byte ping to a server within the microsoft.com domain
And what does Windows do when this ping packet gets dropped?
I ask this because I've ran Windows machines behind some very restrictive firewalls in the past which drop all ICMP type 0 and 8 packets (inbound and outbound), and these machines worked just fine. No booting issues, no network issues. In fact, many ISPs now do this as well.
Can anyone confirm this? I've never noticed a "1-byte ping" to anything within microsoft.com while sniffing my LANs.