Just commenting for fun, like a few others... I'm one of those people who you can google for and the first several pages are mostly, if not all me. ^_^;
My father is of Hindu descent, so for both my sister and I our parents took us to a pandit (ie. Hindu priest type guy), who assigned a name based on what time and date we were born.
I used to want a Western name like everyone else when I was a kid, but now I'm glad I have this name. I really don't know what kind of names I'll give to my children if I have them, but I won't go for what may embarrass them in later life. (The other person that turns up in googling for me is also an Indian artist, so that's pretty cool!)
That's where games like Dance Dance Revolution (hope I got the name right...) changes the variables. DDR is technically feasible in the home, but not really all that practical. Not to mention the social implications of playing it in a public place. Then there's a cop shooter game.. grr I can't remebmer the name, I think it had 911 in the title though. What's different about it is that there are motion sensors that can track your body movement, so if you duck out of the way you can avoid being shot. I have difficulty imaginging that game being faithfully ported to a Playstation.
Funny you should mention that... DDR and Police 24/7 are both made by Konami, whose Australian division is entirely devoted to producing poker machines.
There is actually a home version of Police 24/7 in Japan, with a video camera that senses your movement (you play standing between it and a white wall). I think Konami's home version philosophy is that you should practice the game for free at home and then come to the arcade to show off.:D
I completely agree with you there... in fact, I recently blogged about the issue myself. I kept proper deadtree diaries for years and they have things in them I wouldn't dare breathe to someone I couldn't share a bed with. With regards to "publishing for one person", I just can't buy it. You want to write stuff for yourself, there's your hard drive (or god forbid, paper).
My blog is quite clean compared to my diaries, acting more as an update for friends and people who see my art and might want more of an insight into how I think, without writing me scarymail. (Though in its own way, scarymail is nice too.) Unlike a lot of blogs I've encountered, though, I try not to write several times a day or whine about anything and everything that grabs me. Instead I themed the diary and forced myself to write about food, to space out the entries and get me to think things through before writing it all out.
The results have been interesting at times... I posted a review of a favourite cafe near me and a waitress who worked there replied to it. It turned out that Googling for that cafe actually places my blog entry above the cafe's site.;)
As to the article, I thought it was quite an interesting read. Unfortunately, as the scale of the group increases further you see these power laws applying to small sections of the society as well as the society in total. If you learn to climb, you keep doing it... if not, you're left behind looking for a way.
From a vague memory of the last major/. article about Google, don't they have a censored realtime display of searches scrolling behind their reception desk?
And what you're thinking of is Metaspy - it still has that uncensored option.;D
Some background info first: I'm using an Optus prepaid phone here in Australia. The lack of a contract and upkeep fees means that call airtime is very pricey (A$1/minute) compared to an SMS (A30c/message). Optus users also pay to receive their voicemail (A50c/minute), whereas receiving an SMS is free. I'll go out on a limb here and say that more people here have a mobile phone than regular internet access, and as a result SMS is a hugely popular form of communication. ICQ supporting SMS has been wonderful, because sending from it is free!:)
I probably send and/or receive 3-4 messages on any given day. Very, very occasionally my phone or ICQ will say the message was not delivered, and resending it usually works (unless I've run out of credit on my phone). At about the same rate of incidence is messages taking up to two days to arrive, either being sent or received by me. Much rarer are the times where the messages just disappear into the ether... I'd say that's probably happened two or three times since I've had a mobile (about four years). So it's not all that flaky... if something is critical, I'll call rather than message, but for the most part it's a very efficient way of communicating on the run.
For people ripping on the spelling and typing difficulty of SMS... a good majority of people here use Nokia phones. The 3210 and above have a weird SMS typing function that uses single keypresses and an internal dictionary to figure out what words you want, making writing a message in plain English much easier than using BS leetspeak. (Sure, you can turn off that function at will and leet away, but people like that would write their assignments or tax return in leet if they could...) I think the bad-spelling-in-SMS thing has been perpetuated by marketers who put together phone promos and competitions and try to look 'cool' by using shitty shorthand.
Konami UK also has a fitness division, to cater for the burgeoning home fitness market (or so they say. I'd link, but their site unfortunately seems to be down at the moment). Konami Sports in Japan operates three brand-name fitness clubs.
I adore Konami's willingness to stretch the idea of the video game interface. Their kooky-arse custom cabinets make my arcade visits worthwhile.:D Even games like Police 24/7 (Keisatsukan) give you a hell of a workout because you're always moving and engaging with the game in an active way.
I think girls are more scared off by the rampant superiority complexes in IT than anything else. I can't talk to the head IT worker here because he thinks I'm stupid. I asked for an address (for my laptop) on the company network and he replied, "So you'll need that for a computer?" I couldn't help but choke back a grimace. I also have friends in engineering degrees who speak degradingly of "pretty girls in engineering", who can never be truly intelligent or have a good reason to be in their degree.
I really feel for the girls who have posted in this thread and seriously love (and are good at!) what they do. I think I would have followed an IT path myself if I hadn't been bloody-mindedly convinced that I could make a career out of drawing (and I have). But even though art is viewed as a "feminine" field, I'd say illustration is not - I am the only girl in my section at work. In the history of my company I've been the only female artist to stay for a significant period, and the second female artist ever.
In every part of my life, I'm clashing with guys who are convinced that they must be more intelligent than me by default, because I am female. Whether they are or not is not something I care about, but that attitude itself stinks. Any comment along the lines of "you're good, for a girl" is not a compliment, it's a hideous insult. It's easier to sit in the corner and let them think I'm a stupid Mac user than it is to try and convince them that I am not deficient just because I have ovaries. Believe me, I try, but sometimes it's just not worth the effort.
By the way, if any of you have the presence of mind to admit that girls can do what you can do, and not place barriers on a girl because you think she's good-looking, you may actually get lucky. Girls who are dedicated to what they do tend to appreciate the same quality in their geek boys.;)
What's really unique about doujinshi is that it doesn't promote directly copying the styles of other artists. Instead, it encourages artists to draw existing characters in their own style, creating original scenarios and storylines that they'd like to see. It's visual fanfic, rather than copyart. Since most doujinshika create manga in groups ('circles'), it also provides you with artistic peers who like the same stuff you do and can provide you with a way of artistic exchange.
Creating good characters is the hard part of original art, so doujinshi provides a way of honing your art skills by providing the characters. This doesn't just apply to manga, either - there are doujinshi for manga, anime, games, music artists/groups and TV shows like ER. There's also a section of original doujinshi, since the term itself just applies to the "fan-published" nature of the medium.
Blizzard have, to an extent, embraced this flavour of fandom. They support fansites, as long as fans create their own material rather than using official screenshots or scans of the manual. They at least understand that killing off web fandom would considerably hurt their own revenue.
I signed up for Rocketmail in about 1997. It was a really rocking free webmail system, especially once Hotmail was getting really popular.
Then Yahoo bought it and my Rocketmail became my Yahoo!Mail account. I forgot to log in for three months because it's not one of my main accounts, and Yahoo had deactivated the account. Since it's a Rocketmail account, they refuse to activate it again.
Now, I don't want to abandon my Yahoo profile (I use it for groups, etc). However, there's no way to attach a primary e-mail account to this address because I have to sign up again to get one. Like everyone else, mailing for help doesn't work - they made me change my password and I was no better off than before. If there's a person at the other end there, they're not awake.
Never mind opting-in entire mailing lists (also the fruits of a buyout) for loads of spam. Screw you and the horse you rode in on, Yahoo...
I can't believe game designers are holding up games for comparison, ie. games that they essentially want Miyamoto to update. Geez... if he wants to come up with such a game, he'll do it in his own time and it won't be like any other game ever released. And to do and refine the very concept of something like that, you need plenty of time to think - you can't just pull it out of your arse.
People confusing the aesthetic with the content of a game is the exact same reason I saw parents taking their 8-year-olds to the South Park movie. Those so-called "children's games" aren't that easy, either... I'm stuck on about sixty shines in Super Mario Sunshine...
Re:Good distinction...
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Decentralization
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You can always have elements of both in each of those analogies, but you'd only know that if you'd experienced it.;) By your analogies, all true geeks, photographers and musicians are gainfully unemployed. (Well, that's how I'm interpreting it anyway.)
There are plenty of "true artists" working in commercial realms out there. You tend to end up bringing your methodologies to your workplace, and learning things from the workplace to use in your pursuit of "pure art" in your spare time.
If you're rich or live with your parents/on welfare you can stick to "pure art" alone, but some people feel better working, paying taxes and eating something other than instant noodles...
Yeah, but giving out the bobble heads doesn't equate to ten-dollar bills... your average bobble head isn't worth more than a US dollar. I say this as someone designing that crap for a living.:)
Thankfully, I think they've spared us the counterfeit sunglasses, dead pens and desktop clocks this year... a drinks night, a day out and a barbecue have been just fine. No real days off for the holidays, but meh... that's asking too much of this place.
Re:Chu Mei-Feng at #20
on
Web Zeitgeist
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· Score: 1
If you'd read their vague explanation you'd see that Mei-Feng was female...
It's true, though, there are so many sites out there that aren't in Western fonts - not just Asian sites, either. The only gaps in the language barrier tend to be company websites and sites by the educated and enterprising.
And addressing him as "Rich" and "Mr. Rich" to boot, when his full name is quite clear on the site? That doesn't exactly scream "professional" or "lawyer" to me either...
Methinks this borders on fraud, which is commonly accepted as illegal.
(BTW, another feature that would be great to see in mail clients would be datestamping of the actual time the message was downloaded. Many spammers, and innocent people with misconfigured clocks, send emails with wild dates that are not to be trusted. You can see this in yearly archives of GNU "mailman" mailing lists! Datestamping emails as they are downloaded will also keep mailboxes in order when sorted by date, as newly arrived messages will always be at the bottom, instead of being scattered throughout the inbox. But sorting by spam probability will probably become more popular than sorting by date....)
Outlook Express has this feature. The "View... Columns" option lets you get rid of the Sent column and add a Received column. Click on your Received column, and voila! Sorted!:D
I think one of the variants trawls your browser cache for e-mail addresses as well as your address book. This one stumped me for a while too, since two of my reasonably-well-guarded addresses receive a lot more virus mail than they do spam.
Because (discounting flagrant lies on her part) at some point, some poor sod receiving her e-mails forgot to untick the "Yes, send me promotional e-mails from a 3rd party" box. Your average user is usually not informed that this equals incessant spam for the rest of their lives. This is vaguely legitimate, as opposed to bots harvesting e-mails off the web, spammers guessing addresses or spammers taking addresses from member directories, etc.
(I was going to use "people" instead of "spammers" but I find that a bit of a stretch.)
Re:Did somone steal the story?
on
Go Go Gadget Minisaw
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· Score: 2, Informative
The ABC is a government owned and publicly funded company, and SMH is owned by Fairfax. Considering that they're often at each other's throats over journalistic methods and political leanings, it's fairly safe to say that they're not affiliated in any way.:)
The SMH article credits the AFP, which I can only assume stands for Associated French Press... so both papers have just gotten their story from the same news agency, explaining the common quotes. Happens all the time!
I'd wager that the majority of people who make homebrew GBA apps also buy GBA games and are longtime Nintendo fans.
And I'd wager that the majority of people who buy flash kits from Lik-Sang did so to download roms and have bought few, if any, games since.
I modchip my consoles, but I do buy domestic release games. And all units like modchips and flash kits have their honourable uses. Unfortunately, it's the pirating majority that these companies are worried about. Weird how the PS2 copy protection was easier to crack than the region protection...
Slashdot Mirror
Just commenting for fun, like a few others... I'm one of those people who you can google for and the first several pages are mostly, if not all me. ^_^;
My father is of Hindu descent, so for both my sister and I our parents took us to a pandit (ie. Hindu priest type guy), who assigned a name based on what time and date we were born.
I used to want a Western name like everyone else when I was a kid, but now I'm glad I have this name. I really don't know what kind of names I'll give to my children if I have them, but I won't go for what may embarrass them in later life. (The other person that turns up in googling for me is also an Indian artist, so that's pretty cool!)
That's where games like Dance Dance Revolution (hope I got the name right...) changes the variables. DDR is technically feasible in the home, but not really all that practical. Not to mention the social implications of playing it in a public place. Then there's a cop shooter game.. grr I can't remebmer the name, I think it had 911 in the title though. What's different about it is that there are motion sensors that can track your body movement, so if you duck out of the way you can avoid being shot. I have difficulty imaginging that game being faithfully ported to a Playstation.
:D
Funny you should mention that... DDR and Police 24/7 are both made by Konami, whose Australian division is entirely devoted to producing poker machines.
There is actually a home version of Police 24/7 in Japan, with a video camera that senses your movement (you play standing between it and a white wall). I think Konami's home version philosophy is that you should practice the game for free at home and then come to the arcade to show off.
Aruze's a pachinko company and they bought SNK.... gaming (poker machines et al) and arcade cabinets have an awful lot in common.
Hopefully this'll work out well. Sammy have already published Guilty Gear X and X+ as well as the King of Fighters games for GBA.
I completely agree with you there... in fact, I recently blogged about the issue myself. I kept proper deadtree diaries for years and they have things in them I wouldn't dare breathe to someone I couldn't share a bed with. With regards to "publishing for one person", I just can't buy it. You want to write stuff for yourself, there's your hard drive (or god forbid, paper).
;)
My blog is quite clean compared to my diaries, acting more as an update for friends and people who see my art and might want more of an insight into how I think, without writing me scarymail. (Though in its own way, scarymail is nice too.) Unlike a lot of blogs I've encountered, though, I try not to write several times a day or whine about anything and everything that grabs me. Instead I themed the diary and forced myself to write about food, to space out the entries and get me to think things through before writing it all out.
The results have been interesting at times... I posted a review of a favourite cafe near me and a waitress who worked there replied to it. It turned out that Googling for that cafe actually places my blog entry above the cafe's site.
As to the article, I thought it was quite an interesting read. Unfortunately, as the scale of the group increases further you see these power laws applying to small sections of the society as well as the society in total. If you learn to climb, you keep doing it... if not, you're left behind looking for a way.
From a vague memory of the last major /. article about Google, don't they have a censored realtime display of searches scrolling behind their reception desk?
;D
And what you're thinking of is Metaspy - it still has that uncensored option.
This shows that quality comes at a cost
Man, for a moment there I thought you were complaining about the dupes too.
Some background info first: I'm using an Optus prepaid phone here in Australia. The lack of a contract and upkeep fees means that call airtime is very pricey (A$1/minute) compared to an SMS (A30c/message). Optus users also pay to receive their voicemail (A50c/minute), whereas receiving an SMS is free. I'll go out on a limb here and say that more people here have a mobile phone than regular internet access, and as a result SMS is a hugely popular form of communication. ICQ supporting SMS has been wonderful, because sending from it is free! :)
I probably send and/or receive 3-4 messages on any given day. Very, very occasionally my phone or ICQ will say the message was not delivered, and resending it usually works (unless I've run out of credit on my phone). At about the same rate of incidence is messages taking up to two days to arrive, either being sent or received by me. Much rarer are the times where the messages just disappear into the ether... I'd say that's probably happened two or three times since I've had a mobile (about four years). So it's not all that flaky... if something is critical, I'll call rather than message, but for the most part it's a very efficient way of communicating on the run.
For people ripping on the spelling and typing difficulty of SMS... a good majority of people here use Nokia phones. The 3210 and above have a weird SMS typing function that uses single keypresses and an internal dictionary to figure out what words you want, making writing a message in plain English much easier than using BS leetspeak. (Sure, you can turn off that function at will and leet away, but people like that would write their assignments or tax return in leet if they could...) I think the bad-spelling-in-SMS thing has been perpetuated by marketers who put together phone promos and competitions and try to look 'cool' by using shitty shorthand.
Konami UK also has a fitness division, to cater for the burgeoning home fitness market (or so they say. I'd link, but their site unfortunately seems to be down at the moment). Konami Sports in Japan operates three brand-name fitness clubs.
:D Even games like Police 24/7 (Keisatsukan) give you a hell of a workout because you're always moving and engaging with the game in an active way.
I adore Konami's willingness to stretch the idea of the video game interface. Their kooky-arse custom cabinets make my arcade visits worthwhile.
I think girls are more scared off by the rampant superiority complexes in IT than anything else. I can't talk to the head IT worker here because he thinks I'm stupid. I asked for an address (for my laptop) on the company network and he replied, "So you'll need that for a computer?" I couldn't help but choke back a grimace. I also have friends in engineering degrees who speak degradingly of "pretty girls in engineering", who can never be truly intelligent or have a good reason to be in their degree.
;)
I really feel for the girls who have posted in this thread and seriously love (and are good at!) what they do. I think I would have followed an IT path myself if I hadn't been bloody-mindedly convinced that I could make a career out of drawing (and I have). But even though art is viewed as a "feminine" field, I'd say illustration is not - I am the only girl in my section at work. In the history of my company I've been the only female artist to stay for a significant period, and the second female artist ever.
In every part of my life, I'm clashing with guys who are convinced that they must be more intelligent than me by default, because I am female. Whether they are or not is not something I care about, but that attitude itself stinks. Any comment along the lines of "you're good, for a girl" is not a compliment, it's a hideous insult. It's easier to sit in the corner and let them think I'm a stupid Mac user than it is to try and convince them that I am not deficient just because I have ovaries. Believe me, I try, but sometimes it's just not worth the effort.
By the way, if any of you have the presence of mind to admit that girls can do what you can do, and not place barriers on a girl because you think she's good-looking, you may actually get lucky. Girls who are dedicated to what they do tend to appreciate the same quality in their geek boys.
What's really unique about doujinshi is that it doesn't promote directly copying the styles of other artists. Instead, it encourages artists to draw existing characters in their own style, creating original scenarios and storylines that they'd like to see. It's visual fanfic, rather than copyart. Since most doujinshika create manga in groups ('circles'), it also provides you with artistic peers who like the same stuff you do and can provide you with a way of artistic exchange.
Creating good characters is the hard part of original art, so doujinshi provides a way of honing your art skills by providing the characters. This doesn't just apply to manga, either - there are doujinshi for manga, anime, games, music artists/groups and TV shows like ER. There's also a section of original doujinshi, since the term itself just applies to the "fan-published" nature of the medium.
Blizzard have, to an extent, embraced this flavour of fandom. They support fansites, as long as fans create their own material rather than using official screenshots or scans of the manual. They at least understand that killing off web fandom would considerably hurt their own revenue.
I signed up for Rocketmail in about 1997. It was a really rocking free webmail system, especially once Hotmail was getting really popular.
Then Yahoo bought it and my Rocketmail became my Yahoo!Mail account. I forgot to log in for three months because it's not one of my main accounts, and Yahoo had deactivated the account. Since it's a Rocketmail account, they refuse to activate it again.
Now, I don't want to abandon my Yahoo profile (I use it for groups, etc). However, there's no way to attach a primary e-mail account to this address because I have to sign up again to get one. Like everyone else, mailing for help doesn't work - they made me change my password and I was no better off than before. If there's a person at the other end there, they're not awake.
Never mind opting-in entire mailing lists (also the fruits of a buyout) for loads of spam. Screw you and the horse you rode in on, Yahoo...
I can't believe game designers are holding up games for comparison, ie. games that they essentially want Miyamoto to update. Geez... if he wants to come up with such a game, he'll do it in his own time and it won't be like any other game ever released. And to do and refine the very concept of something like that, you need plenty of time to think - you can't just pull it out of your arse.
People confusing the aesthetic with the content of a game is the exact same reason I saw parents taking their 8-year-olds to the South Park movie. Those so-called "children's games" aren't that easy, either... I'm stuck on about sixty shines in Super Mario Sunshine...
You can always have elements of both in each of those analogies, but you'd only know that if you'd experienced it. ;) By your analogies, all true geeks, photographers and musicians are gainfully unemployed. (Well, that's how I'm interpreting it anyway.)
There are plenty of "true artists" working in commercial realms out there. You tend to end up bringing your methodologies to your workplace, and learning things from the workplace to use in your pursuit of "pure art" in your spare time.
If you're rich or live with your parents/on welfare you can stick to "pure art" alone, but some people feel better working, paying taxes and eating something other than instant noodles...
Yeah, but giving out the bobble heads doesn't equate to ten-dollar bills... your average bobble head isn't worth more than a US dollar. I say this as someone designing that crap for a living. :)
Thankfully, I think they've spared us the counterfeit sunglasses, dead pens and desktop clocks this year... a drinks night, a day out and a barbecue have been just fine. No real days off for the holidays, but meh... that's asking too much of this place.
If you'd read their vague explanation you'd see that Mei-Feng was female...
It's true, though, there are so many sites out there that aren't in Western fonts - not just Asian sites, either. The only gaps in the language barrier tend to be company websites and sites by the educated and enterprising.
Ah, but can you propose to yourself? ;D
And addressing him as "Rich" and "Mr. Rich" to boot, when his full name is quite clear on the site? That doesn't exactly scream "professional" or "lawyer" to me either...
Methinks this borders on fraud, which is commonly accepted as illegal.
One thing immediately springs to mind as a PAL gamer who likes Japanese games...
Since GBA games aren't region-coded and Gamecubes are region-specific, I wonder if this item would limit the region you could play your GBA games in?
Bayesian filters to me, seem to work if you are a dull person without many changes in your life.
;)
Changes? You mean like having to find new friends and associates after all the current ones tag you as an arsehole?
(BTW, another feature that would be great to see in mail clients would be datestamping of the actual time the message was downloaded. Many spammers, and innocent people with misconfigured clocks, send emails with wild dates that are not to be trusted. You can see this in yearly archives of GNU "mailman" mailing lists! Datestamping emails as they are downloaded will also keep mailboxes in order when sorted by date, as newly arrived messages will always be at the bottom, instead of being scattered throughout the inbox. But sorting by spam probability will probably become more popular than sorting by date....)
:D
Outlook Express has this feature. The "View... Columns" option lets you get rid of the Sent column and add a Received column. Click on your Received column, and voila! Sorted!
I think one of the variants trawls your browser cache for e-mail addresses as well as your address book. This one stumped me for a while too, since two of my reasonably-well-guarded addresses receive a lot more virus mail than they do spam.
Because (discounting flagrant lies on her part) at some point, some poor sod receiving her e-mails forgot to untick the "Yes, send me promotional e-mails from a 3rd party" box. Your average user is usually not informed that this equals incessant spam for the rest of their lives. This is vaguely legitimate, as opposed to bots harvesting e-mails off the web, spammers guessing addresses or spammers taking addresses from member directories, etc.
(I was going to use "people" instead of "spammers" but I find that a bit of a stretch.)
The ABC is a government owned and publicly funded company, and SMH is owned by Fairfax. Considering that they're often at each other's throats over journalistic methods and political leanings, it's fairly safe to say that they're not affiliated in any way. :)
The SMH article credits the AFP, which I can only assume stands for Associated French Press... so both papers have just gotten their story from the same news agency, explaining the common quotes. Happens all the time!
I agree. Half the user images in the login screen are also present in MacOS9... now how would that work? :D
I'd wager that the majority of people who make homebrew GBA apps also buy GBA games and are longtime Nintendo fans.
And I'd wager that the majority of people who buy flash kits from Lik-Sang did so to download roms and have bought few, if any, games since.
I modchip my consoles, but I do buy domestic release games. And all units like modchips and flash kits have their honourable uses. Unfortunately, it's the pirating majority that these companies are worried about. Weird how the PS2 copy protection was easier to crack than the region protection...