Plus, I would bet that most people are getting their Wii points through a store rather than direct from Nintendo, and I have to imagine that the store gets a cut of that.....(searches).... according to this website retailers pay nintendo $17 for a 2000 point card.
Let me advise you that this is not as good a defense as you think. I did the same thing, and a company that I tried to quit from sent the "debt" (that I did not renew and tried to cancel) into collection, which to this day shows up on my credit record. I don't know if what they did is legal, but I can tell you it's been a huge pain in my ass to try to get this cleared up.
And follow the link to the creditnet.com message board. That forum is VERY good at helping to get credit reports cleaned up. Getting invalid derogatory info off you credit report is usually a piece of cake, and if it is difficult they can tell you how to get a quick $1K out of the company that reported it (there are government regulations they have to follow, and if they don't you get free money). If the debt reported is valid, there is still a decent chance to get it removed (either because the company doesn't maintain proper documentation or fails to follow government mandated procedures for responding to complaints/inquiries).
I'd much rather climb a mountain actually - you can gain a lot from it (read what some of the folks who climbed the everest a few times and such have to say about it). Whereas installing piping that'll likely ruin my computers or house, costing lots of money (and wasting time)
Yeah, as opposed to climbing Everest, where about 5% of climbers die. Some people like putting their life on the line. Others would rather safely build water cooling systems.
in the process just doesn't seem to benefit me in any way, shape or form.
If it doesn't benefit you, then don't do it. For others, it benefits them to learn how to accomplish things, even if they are trivial in the grand scheme of things. And sometimes they aren't so trivial. Doing trivial things because they are fun and interesting sometimes lands people jobs or is unknowingly the start to building a successful business.
Yes, one has to do something with their time. I chose to spend most of my free time....Playing guitar....But wasting my time with this thing? No way. Life's too short to waste time on that.
Wait....so among your free time activities is playing guitar, and you want to tell a person who builds a water cooler for fun that he's wasting his time? Look at your own activities and maybe you'll realize that everyone wastes some of their time on something pointless but (to them) fun. You obviously get some enrichment from learning to play/compose. He gets enrichment from learning to build.
Thats a good idea, but won't always solve all of your problems. Here's a problem I experienced recently with one of our web apps.
We have a web event calendar where people can schedule events (for far into the future). When people input an event, they specify the date/time it will begin/end. The application then converts the date/time into a unix timestamp and stores it in the database. Later, when an event is being viewed, the timestamp is converted back to a textual date/time.
The conversion from local time to timestamp is done via PHP functions, which uses the systems timezone file. The OS patch to fix this problem simply updates the timezone file and everything should automatically work.
This is fine and dandy for most things, but I ran into one small glitch. For any events that are scheduled between the new start of DST and the old start of DST (roughly a 3 week period), if they were created BEFORE the patch was applied, they are now off by 1 hour AFTER the patch is applied.
The 1 hour difference is simple enough, and I might not have even noticed...or if I had, I probably would have just blamed it on user error when entering the data. However, this caused a strange side effect. The application built a secondary index to simplify searching for events. The index consisted of the event_id and the starting timestamp truncated to midnight. Of course, for those events in that 3 week period that were created before the patch was applied, they now had an index timestamp that was actually 1 AM. Of course, this caused events to mysteriously disappear from the calendar. You could search for them, but not see them when browsing.
I wasted a good couple of hours on this problem (thinking at first that it was isolated to a single event) before I finally did an analysis of the entire index and discovered that almost all events in that 3 week period were wrong. Then it instantly dawned on me what had happened.
The GE CFL bulbs that you will find at most hardware stores, target, kmart, etc all seem to have this problem. It annoyed me too, but I eventually got used to it.
Then I went to upgrade some more bulbs in the house and picked up a different brand from Costco. I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure they were Philips. Those ones are INSTANT on.
I wish I could replace the rest of the GE bulbs in the house with these Philips ones, but I just can't justify replacing working bulbs. I had a "brilliant" idea though. Most of my light fixtures in the house have multiple bulbs operated by a single switch. So, I thought that if I mixed and matched the Philips & GE bulbs it would make it better. I'd have a small amount of instant light, and then it would be full on in about a 1/2 second. Big mistake....the delay is now even more noticeable than before.
I'm almost positive you are misunderstanding what you are seeing.
When you enable POP on your gmail account, the default setting is to enable POP-ing of only messages that come in from that point forward. By default, your existing email isn't POP-able. So when Gmail says "POP is enabled for all mail that has arrived since 12/17/05", that is probably the date when you enabled POP on your account.
If you go into the settings and check the box that says "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)" it should reset that to the date of your earliest message.
The reason for this behavior is the Google isn't a true POP account. A true POP account would delete the messages from the server after you POP them. Google can do that [insert data retention concerns here], but it also can keep the copy in your Inbox (for accessing through the web interface) or it can archive it.
When it does either of the latter, for all practical purposes, the mail is gone from the POP interface but still exists on the system. So google has to have some internal way to differentiate these messages. It does so by remembering the date of the last POP download, and when a POP client connects, it pretends like anything from before that date doesn't exist.
So what you are seeing is the date that the 'last POP download' flag was initialized to, which is the date that POP was enabled on your gmail account.
What the heck are you talking about? W would be the same as one of the other 3 axes, or simply a combined transformation about those axes. Every single possible movement in 3D space can be defined perfectly well using 3 axes. If you want to start defining arbitrary axes based on combined transformations, then you can create a lot more than 4 or 6...try infinite.
"The jury of your peers" is about keeping a ruling class from passing judgment on the masses.
And how does a jury prevent that if they are supposed to follow the instructions of the judge. The ruling class makes the law, and the judge instructs the jury that they have to follow those laws to the letter. "No, we aren't MAKING you jump through the hoops. We're only making the hoops and then telling you that you HAVE to jump through them." I believe the founding fathers intent for the jurors to recognize the hoops and refuse to jump through them.
So you'd rather buy a company from someone who really knows how to put on a show...who buys things that aren't practical for the sole purpose of impressing other people? Then how would you know that the company you are about to buy doesn't just have some pretty front end slapped on it, and it's really in shambles at the core?
Most of the rich people in this world aren't people with insane wealth or lottery winners. They are people of ordinary means who know how to not squander what they have and instead turn it into something impressive. You'd be impressed with how many millionaires there are living in ordinary subdivisions driving simple cars that are probably a little beyond their time, but still serve their purpose well enough.
He's not selling the company because he wants to get rid of it. He's selling it because he needs money for his legal defense. How does giving the proceeds to his children accomplish his goal?
... Google for "jury nullification" if you want more info.
That's one of those things that's always seemed so obvious to me (even before I learned the term for it), that I don't really know why more people never realized it. The judge deals with the law for a living. On the other hand, as a normal citizen, I'm only familiar with a few laws, and then the rest just comes from my "common sense".
So, why would it make any sense to bring in a panel full of people who are (likely) LESS educated on matters of law than the judge, and then let THEM be the ones to follow the law to the letter? That makes no sense. In most cases, the judge is the person in the courtroom who is best suited to be the issuing judgements bases solely on the letter of the law.
So what point does bringing in a jury serve? Well, it could serve either of 3 purposes: 1) A dog and pony show (which is what the whole 'follow the judges instructions' thing seems like to me) 2) A chance to get a verdict based on the jury's misunderstanding of law 3) A chance to get a verdict based on what (a small sampling of) society feels is right.
Now seriously...which of those 3 seems most likely to be the founding fathers' intent?
It would not be possible to have an absolute pointer that would work on all TVs
Actually, it would be possible. You would need to have IR sensors at opposite corners of the TV. The Wiimote already knows it's own roll, so the biggest problem would be dealing with your angle to the side or above/below the TV. Having 4 IRs (one for each corner) might make that a lot easier.
Interestingly, I seem to recall that this is how the Wii worked when it was first announced (2 sensors in opposite corners). I was actually surprised when it came out, and the reviews showed a sensor bar. I can only assume they switched to a single bar since it was a lot more practical for the real world. Sticking things to the corner of you TV would probably turn people off. A sensor bar on top of it, though, actually looks fine (if you even notice it at all).
It can actually sense (at least) 4-Axis motion, do to the ability of the remote to sense a spin along it's centerline.
Ummm...no, that would still be the 3rd axis, running from you to the tv (if you are holding it in a normal remote control orientation), and the movement would be known as roll. The other rotations (and axis) are yaw (around the axis from floor to ceiling) and pitch (along the axis from your left to your right). The other 3 degrees of freedom are the translations along those same 3 axis.
Please, for the love of god. Give us some fresh meat.
Have you tried Animal Crossing or Pikmin? Those are both relatively fresh (2 titles each) and both incredibly fun. With Animal Crossing, I can see how it definitely has limited appeal for many gamers, but I think Pikmin could be great for almost anyone.
Those aren't the best examples, because at some point you ARE expected to let go of a bowling ball or baseball.
A better, much more accurate comparison would be a ping pong (table tennis) paddle. It's very similar to a Wiimote in size/weight, how you hold it, how you flail it around as part of normal usage, that it's used in your home, and in the amount of damage that it can cause. Of course, many of those have grip tape wrapped around the handle, but certainly not all of them. And almost none of them that I've seen have any sort of wrist strap.
So, I wonder if a manufacturer has ever been sued over one of those? Wait....oh crap. I probably just gave a lawyer somewhere an idea.
And the temperature was only half the basis for the lawsuit. The other half was that they knew about the problem because several other people had suffered similar burns, yet they chose to maintain the unsafe temperature because it increased sales.
I, of course, know who Cliffy B is, but I haven't heard a whole lot from/about him lately. Maybe he still contributes a lot, but I really can't say, so I refrained from mentioning anything about him.
Iwata, on the other hand, has (in my opinion) contributed quite a lot today. As I said, he is heavily involved in the creative process. The article didn't just credit him for corporate achievements.
And he has given us Wii, something new and original and exciting. He has helped to give us The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess....DS must also be recognized and his work in personally bringing the marvellous Brain Age to market is testament to his drive to expand gaming as a market and as an idea
I'm not sure the extent of his involvement on the latter 2, my understanding is that he had considerable input and influence on the first 2. That's why I didn't think he deserved to be lumped in with the crud part of that list.
I'd give Satoru Iwata a bit more credit than that. He's not really your typical executive. He's a bit more of a geek than that. He got his start making games in high school, moved on to be a full time developer, and even these days he is still heavily involved in the creative process.
Overall, though, I can't say I disagree with your summary.
20. Jill Hamburger Best Buy
Jill Hamburger is vice president of gaming for Best Buy.....Her efforts in 2006 have sought to leverage the synergy between the new generation of consoles and Best Buy's other great interest right now - home theater and HDTV.
Oh yeah....people leveraging the synergy are always going to be influential. You've got to leverage the synergy these days.
However, if the cooperation is trying to screw us, and someone finds out (as will eventually happen anyway), the viral marketing works just as viral against the cooperation that started it.
I disagree. In many cases where you have viral marketing, it gets written about in newspaper articles and talked about on TV news reports. Then, when a few of us online figure out what's going on, we all get angry and annoyed, but the 99% of people that read it in the paper or saw it on the news NEVER find out the truth about it. Sure, that 1% of us that figures it out can try and spread the word, but you know how that turns out.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus, I would bet that most people are getting their Wii points through a store rather than direct from Nintendo, and I have to imagine that the store gets a cut of that.....(searches).... according to this website retailers pay nintendo $17 for a 2000 point card.
Let me advise you that this is not as good a defense as you think. I did the same thing, and a company that I tried to quit from sent the "debt" (that I did not renew and tried to cancel) into collection, which to this day shows up on my credit record. I don't know if what they did is legal, but I can tell you it's been a huge pain in my ass to try to get this cleared up.
p ?catid=52&threadid=154139
Read the following thread:
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/arcmessageview.ph
And follow the link to the creditnet.com message board. That forum is VERY good at helping to get credit reports cleaned up. Getting invalid derogatory info off you credit report is usually a piece of cake, and if it is difficult they can tell you how to get a quick $1K out of the company that reported it (there are government regulations they have to follow, and if they don't you get free money). If the debt reported is valid, there is still a decent chance to get it removed (either because the company doesn't maintain proper documentation or fails to follow government mandated procedures for responding to complaints/inquiries).
If it doesn't benefit you, then don't do it. For others, it benefits them to learn how to accomplish things, even if they are trivial in the grand scheme of things. And sometimes they aren't so trivial. Doing trivial things because they are fun and interesting sometimes lands people jobs or is unknowingly the start to building a successful business.
Wait....so among your free time activities is playing guitar, and you want to tell a person who builds a water cooler for fun that he's wasting his time? Look at your own activities and maybe you'll realize that everyone wastes some of their time on something pointless but (to them) fun. You obviously get some enrichment from learning to play/compose. He gets enrichment from learning to build.
Well, despite the fact that they announce it before and then later backed down, LG has said again that they are going to release one.
Thats a good idea, but won't always solve all of your problems. Here's a problem I experienced recently with one of our web apps.
We have a web event calendar where people can schedule events (for far into the future). When people input an event, they specify the date/time it will begin/end. The application then converts the date/time into a unix timestamp and stores it in the database. Later, when an event is being viewed, the timestamp is converted back to a textual date/time.
The conversion from local time to timestamp is done via PHP functions, which uses the systems timezone file. The OS patch to fix this problem simply updates the timezone file and everything should automatically work.
This is fine and dandy for most things, but I ran into one small glitch. For any events that are scheduled between the new start of DST and the old start of DST (roughly a 3 week period), if they were created BEFORE the patch was applied, they are now off by 1 hour AFTER the patch is applied.
The 1 hour difference is simple enough, and I might not have even noticed...or if I had, I probably would have just blamed it on user error when entering the data. However, this caused a strange side effect. The application built a secondary index to simplify searching for events. The index consisted of the event_id and the starting timestamp truncated to midnight. Of course, for those events in that 3 week period that were created before the patch was applied, they now had an index timestamp that was actually 1 AM. Of course, this caused events to mysteriously disappear from the calendar. You could search for them, but not see them when browsing.
I wasted a good couple of hours on this problem (thinking at first that it was isolated to a single event) before I finally did an analysis of the entire index and discovered that almost all events in that 3 week period were wrong. Then it instantly dawned on me what had happened.
The GE CFL bulbs that you will find at most hardware stores, target, kmart, etc all seem to have this problem. It annoyed me too, but I eventually got used to it.
Then I went to upgrade some more bulbs in the house and picked up a different brand from Costco. I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure they were Philips. Those ones are INSTANT on.
I wish I could replace the rest of the GE bulbs in the house with these Philips ones, but I just can't justify replacing working bulbs. I had a "brilliant" idea though. Most of my light fixtures in the house have multiple bulbs operated by a single switch. So, I thought that if I mixed and matched the Philips & GE bulbs it would make it better. I'd have a small amount of instant light, and then it would be full on in about a 1/2 second. Big mistake....the delay is now even more noticeable than before.
Actually, that's configurable:
I'm almost positive you are misunderstanding what you are seeing.
When you enable POP on your gmail account, the default setting is to enable POP-ing of only messages that come in from that point forward. By default, your existing email isn't POP-able. So when Gmail says "POP is enabled for all mail that has arrived since 12/17/05", that is probably the date when you enabled POP on your account.
If you go into the settings and check the box that says "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)" it should reset that to the date of your earliest message.
The reason for this behavior is the Google isn't a true POP account. A true POP account would delete the messages from the server after you POP them. Google can do that [insert data retention concerns here], but it also can keep the copy in your Inbox (for accessing through the web interface) or it can archive it.
When it does either of the latter, for all practical purposes, the mail is gone from the POP interface but still exists on the system. So google has to have some internal way to differentiate these messages. It does so by remembering the date of the last POP download, and when a POP client connects, it pretends like anything from before that date doesn't exist.
So what you are seeing is the date that the 'last POP download' flag was initialized to, which is the date that POP was enabled on your gmail account.
What the heck are you talking about? W would be the same as one of the other 3 axes, or simply a combined transformation about those axes. Every single possible movement in 3D space can be defined perfectly well using 3 axes. If you want to start defining arbitrary axes based on combined transformations, then you can create a lot more than 4 or 6...try infinite.
"The jury of your peers" is about keeping a ruling class from passing judgment on the masses.
And how does a jury prevent that if they are supposed to follow the instructions of the judge. The ruling class makes the law, and the judge instructs the jury that they have to follow those laws to the letter. "No, we aren't MAKING you jump through the hoops. We're only making the hoops and then telling you that you HAVE to jump through them." I believe the founding fathers intent for the jurors to recognize the hoops and refuse to jump through them.
So you'd rather buy a company from someone who really knows how to put on a show...who buys things that aren't practical for the sole purpose of impressing other people? Then how would you know that the company you are about to buy doesn't just have some pretty front end slapped on it, and it's really in shambles at the core?
Most of the rich people in this world aren't people with insane wealth or lottery winners. They are people of ordinary means who know how to not squander what they have and instead turn it into something impressive. You'd be impressed with how many millionaires there are living in ordinary subdivisions driving simple cars that are probably a little beyond their time, but still serve their purpose well enough.
He's not selling the company because he wants to get rid of it. He's selling it because he needs money for his legal defense. How does giving the proceeds to his children accomplish his goal?
Uhhhh...I think that was "If I did it". Because, of course...he didn't actually do it. (or at least that's the story he's sticking with).
That's one of those things that's always seemed so obvious to me (even before I learned the term for it), that I don't really know why more people never realized it. The judge deals with the law for a living. On the other hand, as a normal citizen, I'm only familiar with a few laws, and then the rest just comes from my "common sense".
So, why would it make any sense to bring in a panel full of people who are (likely) LESS educated on matters of law than the judge, and then let THEM be the ones to follow the law to the letter? That makes no sense. In most cases, the judge is the person in the courtroom who is best suited to be the issuing judgements bases solely on the letter of the law.
So what point does bringing in a jury serve? Well, it could serve either of 3 purposes:
1) A dog and pony show (which is what the whole 'follow the judges instructions' thing seems like to me)
2) A chance to get a verdict based on the jury's misunderstanding of law
3) A chance to get a verdict based on what (a small sampling of) society feels is right.
Now seriously...which of those 3 seems most likely to be the founding fathers' intent?
It would not be possible to have an absolute pointer that would work on all TVs
Actually, it would be possible. You would need to have IR sensors at opposite corners of the TV. The Wiimote already knows it's own roll, so the biggest problem would be dealing with your angle to the side or above/below the TV. Having 4 IRs (one for each corner) might make that a lot easier.
Interestingly, I seem to recall that this is how the Wii worked when it was first announced (2 sensors in opposite corners). I was actually surprised when it came out, and the reviews showed a sensor bar. I can only assume they switched to a single bar since it was a lot more practical for the real world. Sticking things to the corner of you TV would probably turn people off. A sensor bar on top of it, though, actually looks fine (if you even notice it at all).
It can actually sense (at least) 4-Axis motion, do to the ability of the remote to sense a spin along it's centerline.
Ummm...no, that would still be the 3rd axis, running from you to the tv (if you are holding it in a normal remote control orientation), and the movement would be known as roll. The other rotations (and axis) are yaw (around the axis from floor to ceiling) and pitch (along the axis from your left to your right). The other 3 degrees of freedom are the translations along those same 3 axis.
Please, for the love of god. Give us some fresh meat.
Have you tried Animal Crossing or Pikmin? Those are both relatively fresh (2 titles each) and both incredibly fun. With Animal Crossing, I can see how it definitely has limited appeal for many gamers, but I think Pikmin could be great for almost anyone.
The problem is that the Wii launch, constitutes almost the entire production from Nintendo game studios over the last couple years
Definitely true.....if you conveniently forget about the DS and the MANY great games that were made for it over the last 2 years.
"Shit. I paid 600 bucks for THIS ?"
There. I fixed it for you.
Those aren't the best examples, because at some point you ARE expected to let go of a bowling ball or baseball.
A better, much more accurate comparison would be a ping pong (table tennis) paddle. It's very similar to a Wiimote in size/weight, how you hold it, how you flail it around as part of normal usage, that it's used in your home, and in the amount of damage that it can cause. Of course, many of those have grip tape wrapped around the handle, but certainly not all of them. And almost none of them that I've seen have any sort of wrist strap.
So, I wonder if a manufacturer has ever been sued over one of those? Wait....oh crap. I probably just gave a lawyer somewhere an idea.
Oops. Bad wording on my part. Profits is what I meant to say. Thanks for correcting me.
And the temperature was only half the basis for the lawsuit. The other half was that they knew about the problem because several other people had suffered similar burns, yet they chose to maintain the unsafe temperature because it increased sales.
Iwata, on the other hand, has (in my opinion) contributed quite a lot today. As I said, he is heavily involved in the creative process. The article didn't just credit him for corporate achievements.
I'm not sure the extent of his involvement on the latter 2, my understanding is that he had considerable input and influence on the first 2. That's why I didn't think he deserved to be lumped in with the crud part of that list.
I'd give Satoru Iwata a bit more credit than that. He's not really your typical executive. He's a bit more of a geek than that. He got his start making games in high school, moved on to be a full time developer, and even these days he is still heavily involved in the creative process.
Overall, though, I can't say I disagree with your summary.
Oh yeah....people leveraging the synergy are always going to be influential. You've got to leverage the synergy these days.
However, if the cooperation is trying to screw us, and someone finds out (as will eventually happen anyway), the viral marketing works just as viral against the cooperation that started it.
I disagree. In many cases where you have viral marketing, it gets written about in newspaper articles and talked about on TV news reports. Then, when a few of us online figure out what's going on, we all get angry and annoyed, but the 99% of people that read it in the paper or saw it on the news NEVER find out the truth about it. Sure, that 1% of us that figures it out can try and spread the word, but you know how that turns out.