Nintendo designed the Wiimote to what they felt would be appropriate safety standards when used responsibly and with a modicum of common sense. How exactly it is their fault that a bunch of people are far too overzealous for their own good?
Look, Nintendo clearly designed the thing with an inaccurate sense of what "normal usage" was going to be. I don't think it's at all a big deal, don't think they should have any legal liability and commend them for fixing it so quickly. But presenting it as "WII EVEN BETTERER THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT! LAWS OF PHYSICS TO BE REDEFINED!" is still worth a laugh.
I did straight-up RTFA, and would suggest that Gamasutra and Zonk each inserted their own preposterously positive spin on top of Nintendo's already preposterously positive spin. I mean, just the part I quoted is 89% Zonk, and 4% of the remaining 11% is a word he inserted into a supposed quote from Iwata.
People are evidently 'even more excited' by playing the little white console than the company anticipated, and they're investigating the possibility that the straps aren't strong enough.
Even by Zonk standards, this is some impressive spinning -- it's not a defect, it's just that the fantasticness of the Wii is so all-encompassing that the designers couldn't have anticipated how much players would love it!
Microsoft should have come up with that: "Players are so exhilarated by the 360 that they can sometimes set the carpet on fire!"
Gamespot reports on the airing of the Halo 3 Teaser trailer on Monday Night Football...
Hah, I may not read any of the gam3rz journalism that's always linked here, but for once I'm ahead of the story! Next thing, Gamespot will be reporting that Tony Kornheiser doesn't know a single thing about any sport that any vaguely interested fan doesn't know.
And I don't think anyone involved with the Human Genome Project would say their software (at least at the time of the big race to "complete") was anything near "quality". There were some brilliant individual hacks but the overall pipeline was slapped together in a panicked rush.
Who said cancer was a chaotic system? Do very small changes in input parameters cause exponentially large deviations in output values?
My understanding of chaos theory comes from Jurassic Park, so I can't speak to the larger question, but tumor development has enormous positive feedback because of the runaway growth of cancer cells. So I can imagine that small changes in, say, DNA repair efficiency, could lead to large changes in outcome.
(By the way, as with most Roland stories, this one is not uninteresting but not remotely as revolutionary as the press release makes it out to be. In general, those university press releases he relies on so heavily tend to be exaggerated to the point of plain dishonesty.)
1) As always, there's a total lack of understanding here of how police states work. You think the Saudi or Myanmanmar police are going to look at your computer and say "Gee, what with your 1337 circumvention software, I guess we can't make a case against you! Have a nice day!"?
2) On the other hand, I'm sure there *are* plenty of people who could make enthusiastic use of web browsing from some stranger's IP. But I'm sure they'd never get you in serious trouble, right?
How do you spend £534,710 on installing OpenOffice and Firefox on 230 Windows computers, and playing around with Suse for a year, anyway?
My impression is that they've been messing around with trials of different replacement technologies, agree that Firefox and Open Office are clear wins and are still trying to decide on spots where Linux would make sense. The money is probably mostly salaries of people putting in full- or part-time work on it.
But, yeah -- that "based on the special rates" bit is brain-dead, even by the usual standards of statistical illiteracy around here.
And thus I'm one of the people who just got screwed because Novell and Microsoft colluded to engineer a way for Novell to welsh on the agreement that comes with my software.
Sorry, the agreement that comes with your software requires them to pay Hula developers how, exactly?
And as others have pointed out, you're repeatedly tossing around an ethnic slur...
The writer compares the build quality of a 20 year-old IBM XT to the modern Motorola Razr phone...
And if you compare my new washing machine to a 20 year-old umbrella, you'd reach the opposite conclusion. How about comparing the Razr to a Walkman or a Swatch, not to a cinderblock of a product from a mainframe maker?
If people just turned out the freaking lights when they left the room, it would cost them essentially zero effort, save them money and make a genuinely useful contribution to the environment, whatever the details of global warming turn out to be. It's like some people can't imagine any useful activity that doesn't involve denouncing someone else.
I really don't understand the constant stream of second life stories that get put up here...There are games vastly more popular (let us use WoW as an example) that don't get nearly the press time (and they get more than enough coverage)
I have zero interest in playing Second Life myself, but the explicit blurring of real-world and virtual economics is fascinating. It certainly strikes me as News For Nerds in a way that whiny demands for gold farming crackdowns are not.
And while Tivo may or may not win a challenge that they violated the spirit of the GPL, just the publicity of such a challenge may be enough to have them change their ways.
That's actually one of the biggest reasons I'd be wary of using the GPL for a commercial product. With other licenses, you can follow the legal requirements and be pretty confident of being left alone. With the GPL (even if all the code is yours to begin with!) you have to deal with bad publicity every time some dope decides you're in violation, a sleepy Slashdot editor posts a "GPL Violayshun!!!!" story and the mob eventually diverts to the "Violating the spirit of the GPL!" line once it's explained to them that there is absolutely no legal issue.
If a contract participate violates the spirit of the contract but not the letter, can that be used as a basis for a contract dispute?
My understanding is that (under US law, anyway -- you don't say where you and your pot are) if you draft a contract, you're expected to address and clarify all your own concerns. Courts take a dim view of your discovering new subtleties or "violations of spirit" in your own words, as you had ample opportunity to make them clear to begin with. The other party gets more benefit of the doubt if he has a similar complaint against you, though.
A few years back, Eric S. Raymond (or, as everyone else calls him, ESR), wrote a lengthy paper about this community...If business analysts are simply the ugly hunch-backed minions of the Bad Guy then who is next on the list?
Patrick -- Eric Raymond is a pompous, clunky, pandering buffoon of a writer. Modeling your prose style on his is like learning spelling from CmdrTaco.
Since no one will bother to RTFA -- the "choices" he's criticizing aren't configuration choices (which is also a valid debate), but redundant (or basically redundant) ways of performing the same action via multiple routes.
That said, the KDE and GNOME guys can return to ranting at each other...
Not saying you're wrong, but can you point to some evidence against his assertion, which seems to be self-evidently true?
Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear
on
Office 2007 UI License
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You can copy any UI that you want to.
This isn't about (AFAICT, and I'm not clicking through their legal stuff from work) "copying", it's about the licensing terms for their library. Which, for the benefit of the "dying rattle breaths of a behemoth unable to compete today" guy, are the same terms they've always used.
Between 1972 and 2004, dropout rates have fallen drastically.
I was going to say -- the use of words like "epidemic" without a shred of context tells you at least as much about the problems with education in America as the free-floating numbers do. I'm not even going to get into the ironies of "Of course, another question that should be asked is: Is High School really the problem, or is it America's Educational system as a whole?"
So, you think that the government deciding what games should be developed is going to lead to better games than the government trying to keep certain people from buying certain games...?
One may wonder if they paid for initial training of their workforce making the first 200 more expensive than the rest but the article does not say whether or not this occurred.
If they were genuinely slow-witted enough to make such a calculation, how do you figure their chances of maintaining a large Unix install base. And if your figure is significantly greater than zero, what does that say about the intelligence required to be a Unix admin?
Slashdot Mirror
Look, Nintendo clearly designed the thing with an inaccurate sense of what "normal usage" was going to be. I don't think it's at all a big deal, don't think they should have any legal liability and commend them for fixing it so quickly. But presenting it as "WII EVEN BETTERER THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT! LAWS OF PHYSICS TO BE REDEFINED!" is still worth a laugh.
I did straight-up RTFA, and would suggest that Gamasutra and Zonk each inserted their own preposterously positive spin on top of Nintendo's already preposterously positive spin. I mean, just the part I quoted is 89% Zonk, and 4% of the remaining 11% is a word he inserted into a supposed quote from Iwata.
Even by Zonk standards, this is some impressive spinning -- it's not a defect, it's just that the fantasticness of the Wii is so all-encompassing that the designers couldn't have anticipated how much players would love it!
Microsoft should have come up with that: "Players are so exhilarated by the 360 that they can sometimes set the carpet on fire!"
Hah, I may not read any of the gam3rz journalism that's always linked here, but for once I'm ahead of the story! Next thing, Gamespot will be reporting that Tony Kornheiser doesn't know a single thing about any sport that any vaguely interested fan doesn't know.
And I don't think anyone involved with the Human Genome Project would say their software (at least at the time of the big race to "complete") was anything near "quality". There were some brilliant individual hacks but the overall pipeline was slapped together in a panicked rush.
My understanding of chaos theory comes from Jurassic Park, so I can't speak to the larger question, but tumor development has enormous positive feedback because of the runaway growth of cancer cells. So I can imagine that small changes in, say, DNA repair efficiency, could lead to large changes in outcome.
(By the way, as with most Roland stories, this one is not uninteresting but not remotely as revolutionary as the press release makes it out to be. In general, those university press releases he relies on so heavily tend to be exaggerated to the point of plain dishonesty.)
Between this and "Clinton Prosecutor Now Targeting Free Speech", they're really off to a quick start for a Sunday morning, no?
2) On the other hand, I'm sure there *are* plenty of people who could make enthusiastic use of web browsing from some stranger's IP. But I'm sure they'd never get you in serious trouble, right?
My impression is that they've been messing around with trials of different replacement technologies, agree that Firefox and Open Office are clear wins and are still trying to decide on spots where Linux would make sense. The money is probably mostly salaries of people putting in full- or part-time work on it.
But, yeah -- that "based on the special rates" bit is brain-dead, even by the usual standards of statistical illiteracy around here.
He is. The word is an anti-Welsh slur. The two facts are irrelevant to one another.
As for the legal issue, this guy hit it on the nose.
Sorry, the agreement that comes with your software requires them to pay Hula developers how, exactly?
And as others have pointed out, you're repeatedly tossing around an ethnic slur...
And if you compare my new washing machine to a 20 year-old umbrella, you'd reach the opposite conclusion. How about comparing the Razr to a Walkman or a Swatch, not to a cinderblock of a product from a mainframe maker?
If people just turned out the freaking lights when they left the room, it would cost them essentially zero effort, save them money and make a genuinely useful contribution to the environment, whatever the details of global warming turn out to be. It's like some people can't imagine any useful activity that doesn't involve denouncing someone else.
(I cringe at the thought of what useful information could have been stored in the neurons that were holding that shred of memory...)
I have zero interest in playing Second Life myself, but the explicit blurring of real-world and virtual economics is fascinating. It certainly strikes me as News For Nerds in a way that whiny demands for gold farming crackdowns are not.
That's actually one of the biggest reasons I'd be wary of using the GPL for a commercial product. With other licenses, you can follow the legal requirements and be pretty confident of being left alone. With the GPL (even if all the code is yours to begin with!) you have to deal with bad publicity every time some dope decides you're in violation, a sleepy Slashdot editor posts a "GPL Violayshun!!!!" story and the mob eventually diverts to the "Violating the spirit of the GPL!" line once it's explained to them that there is absolutely no legal issue.
My understanding is that (under US law, anyway -- you don't say where you and your pot are) if you draft a contract, you're expected to address and clarify all your own concerns. Courts take a dim view of your discovering new subtleties or "violations of spirit" in your own words, as you had ample opportunity to make them clear to begin with. The other party gets more benefit of the doubt if he has a similar complaint against you, though.
Patrick -- Eric Raymond is a pompous, clunky, pandering buffoon of a writer. Modeling your prose style on his is like learning spelling from CmdrTaco.
No, the link does but the summary has it backwards, which pretty much makes the OP's point.
That said, the KDE and GNOME guys can return to ranting at each other...
Not saying you're wrong, but can you point to some evidence against his assertion, which seems to be self-evidently true?
This isn't about (AFAICT, and I'm not clicking through their legal stuff from work) "copying", it's about the licensing terms for their library. Which, for the benefit of the "dying rattle breaths of a behemoth unable to compete today" guy, are the same terms they've always used.
I was going to say -- the use of words like "epidemic" without a shred of context tells you at least as much about the problems with education in America as the free-floating numbers do. I'm not even going to get into the ironies of "Of course, another question that should be asked is: Is High School really the problem, or is it America's Educational system as a whole?"
Enjoy Multicultural Non-competitive Curling '07!
If they were genuinely slow-witted enough to make such a calculation, how do you figure their chances of maintaining a large Unix install base. And if your figure is significantly greater than zero, what does that say about the intelligence required to be a Unix admin?