I'm having difficulty with the conclusions the author of this story has drawn. He's comparing console games with the quarter swallowers from the 80's. He mentions grief as a result of seeing the words "Game Over". Of course there was grief. "Game Over" means "Not only do I need another quarter, it also means I have to start over from the beginning!" Modern games didn't become easier just for kicks, they became easier because game developers got rid of that frustration. Some game developers even figured out how to guide you through their games by taking giving you little 'exercises' to perform to strengthen your skillset. Super Mario 64 comes to mind. (Good time for this to come up really, as I'm playing it now on my DS.) There was a platform I needed to reach in order to advance in the level. It would have taken a fairly daring jump from another platform to get to it. But then I noticed something a little peculiar. There are a few coins in that level right next to that platform that go straight up! The implication being that I can jump from the ground and get all of them. I worked it out, they were telling me I should do a backflip from there. Wee! It worked! Now the backflip is part of my arsenal and I use it regularly to get to other hard-to-reach areas. I'm pulling off neat little trcks to get through the game, and that's quite satisfying.
San Andreas is another game that used this idea. Seemingly unimportant little missions rewarded me with techniques to simplify the more complex ones down the line. On the PS2 version of this game, manually aiming your gun is not a great experience with that controller. You end up relying on the targetting system to take care of your foes. One mission, though, was pretty obnoxious. You were standing behind a fence and you had to shoot out a fuse box or something to open it. That was mildly annoying, but not much later in the game I found myself taking advantage of the manual shooting in the game to take out enemy cars. Didn't like that mission, but I did like what I gained from it.
I don't miss the difficulty of games from earlier eras. They usually felt difficult because the control was clumsy, not because you had to be a master of technique to get through. Not all games fell into this category, though. Super Mario Brothers was a great ride. It was, however, an arcade game, not an adventure like Super Mario 3 was. SMB3's goal wasn't for me to hand over all of my quarters. SMB3 was arguably a much better game.
Modern games may have lost some of the appeal of older games, but is this really worth the bitching?
"What's wrong with wanting to crush the competition? That's what capitalism's all about."
Nothing. Unfortunately, others are bound to throw the words "convicted monopolist" as if that really has anything to do with what's going on today. What they don't understand is that Microsoft would have to make a better serach engine than Google on order to take them down. Oh that would be horrible.
The comment I'm bitching about is at +5. Pity the mods don't put their points to better use. As if Slashdot's staff is reading +5 Insightful posts and saying "Oh, hey, he's right. Let's fire Zonk." In their place, I'd be saying "Hey, when Zonk posts, he generates a lot of comments! That's a lot of ads served!"
Oh right, like there's a big difference between the two. I hate to break it to you, but 'news for nerds' often means "there's a new blinkie device we can all go buy."
If you really want news for nerds, then I suggest actually going to a real news site. Google's got a great news site. If there's a topic you're interested in, you can often find sites that specialize on that topic. If you want a discussion board with semi geeky topics, then Slashdot's perfect. You can even filter out Zonk's stories if he bugs you so much.
I'm not terribly interested in defending Slashdot here. I'm just sick of the endless bitching. Sadly, I cannot filter that out.
I refuse to RTFA because it's obviously an ad for the Onion. They make their money by serving ads while I read their amusing parodies. Well I, for one, refuse to read anything that isn't pasted to me in clear text completely sanitized of ads and recommended to me by a disinterested 3rd party. I know it seems a bit hypocritical of me to post a comment on an ad-supported site about how I won't read the article of another ad-supported site, but I really love the prestige of having the word 'Insightful' appear next to my nick.
"Who knew so many were too lazy to raise real pets?"
"My sentiments exactly."
Uh huh. Betcha anything that most of the 250,000 people that purchased Nintendogs already have pets.
I have to be honest, I'm really sick of your assumptions about why people are buying that game. I don't know why you think the game is a good substitute for a real animal. I also don't know why you think this is somehow an alternative. FIf you don't mind my being brutally honest here, you sound just as idiotic as that group that's against Rockstar's Bully. Loud claims with nothing substantiative to back them up.
"Do the editors get a sense of pride in downing other people's servers? I mean, Slashdot probably points people to places such that they get 1000x their usual visit traffic, which means that they are simply unprepared for such an unpredictable load spike."
No kiddin. You'd think people would know better than to post information on the internet. They wouldn't want hordes of people seeing it.
Flamebait? Troll?! I spend nearly every day reading modded up comments about how Americans are fat and arrogant, but a silly French joke... no no no, can't have that. It really sucks that Americans have to have a sense of humor but nobody else does.
"ABC News is reporting on new evidence that has emerged suggesting Neanderthals co-existed with anatomically modern humans for at least 1,000 years in central France, before gradually disappearing about 28,000 to 30,000 years ago. But why did they disappear?"
"Surely this simple rule isn't beyond the tech-heads here? For those of us that care about English this is as jarring a syntax error as anything that would barf a compiler. So do our parsers a favour and LEARN this simple rule."
Every single time a comment like yours flies across my screen I am reminded of Hermoine saying "... or worse, expelled."
"Why don't consumers buying/wearing fake branded products get arrested?"
They're (supposedly) going after the uploaders, not the downloaders. Unfortunately, when they go after sites like Suprnova, what they're doing is more like going after the yellow pages for having the phone numbers listed for businesses that sell fake branded products.
It's a pity they've got their heads up their collective asses. I'd be happy to pay for on-line content if they'd provide a reasonable service. You'd think iTunes would have taught them a lesson.
"So ya, you may be able to READ it, but not CHANGE it."
Given that the tax forms I download every year, I consider that a blessing.
It's also nice that it's easy to convert documents such as manuals over to PDF. This is quite handy when buying second hand stuff. Okay, you can't edit a PDF (though you CAN fill out a form in PDF and save the options you've filled in. Again, PDF is a blessing for tax forms.) but there's still plenty of reason for it to hang around for quite a while.
I'm a hard core Opera zealot. However, I also know what a pain in the ass it is to switch based on somebody pounding it into your head. Every little difference is a huge annoyance. (Heck, I recently converted a friend of mine from IE to Opera, and he kicked and screamed most of the time. When FireFox has most of the functionality, it's bound to be even harder.) The fact is, if you like FireFox, there isn't a whole heck of a lot of reason to switch. So don't worry, I'm not here to tell you that you should switch.
You do sound interested in why Opera has a following, so I figured I'd share my input. I've used Opera exclusively for about 3 years now. (whenever version 6 came out.) I also have FireFox installed and I do use it somewhat frequently. (Note: The reason I say I use both but I use Opera exclusively is that I keep FF around because it has its own cookies. I help maintain web forum so having a seperate browser with a 'peon' logged in is eaiser than doing a lot of logging in and out. If I didn't do this regularly, I doubt I'd have FF around.) I have not, however, gone extension hunting so please understand my point isn't to point out what Opera has that FireFox hasn't, but rather what Opera has that I enjoy.
- To start with, yes, Opera is significantly more responive. That's been mentioned so I'll skip it.
- Opera has a very friendly UI. Don't like the way tabs are arranged? No prob, drag them into the order you like. You can make shortcuts ANYWHERE, quite intuitively I might add. (click and drag, done.) Don't like one of the buttons, right click and click "Remove". Etc. When somebody like me has used Opera for a long time, using FireFox is somewhat painful. Though the facilities for performing these options are there, they take more digging to find them.
- Opera has a really nice zoom feature that literally magnifies the whole page. I expect FireFox has an extension for this, but its' not there by default. Honestly, when Opera has all this stuff available right away, it sounds almost masochistic to go hunting for extensions. I wouldn't be offended if you called me ignorant for that. I can tell you that I have gone extension hunting for FireFox, but I can also tell you that I couldn't believe how much junk there was to sift through when looking for a particular feature. I'm spoiled and I reinstall rather frequently. It's quite refreshing to just have one file to go download and you're done. (In other words, I can get back up to speed in Opera rather quickly...)
- Opera, IMHO, is a lot friendlier as a full screen browser. FireFox has a tendancy to want to open stuff outside of FireFox. To some this is a blessing, to me it's annoying. On my single screen setup at home, I prefer to have one browser maximized. On my dual screen setup at work, I like to have Opera manually sized to one screen, and nothing ever leaves that screen. I doubt a lot of people share my pickiness over this, but to me it's a blessing.
- Opera's side bar is quite useful. FireFox has one too, but it appears it only supports bookmarks and history. (again, extensions may make this more useful...) Opera has little icons down the side indicating what the sidebar will do, so I switch a lot. Sometimes it's for the transfer window (i.e. when I'm downloading lots of files.) Sometimes it's for the email client. Sometimes it's for bookmarks. I have lots of quick access there.
- Opera has a notes feature that I love dearly. It's sort of like bookmarks, only it stores whatever you have highlighted and clicked. I use this a lot for the plugin development I'm doing for Lightwave. I highlight and 'copy to note' the interesting tidbit of info. Then it stays in the sidebar. I can click on a note and see the text that I copied. If I double click, it opens the page where it found it. This is what bookmarks should be. Even if the site's gone, I still have the info I copied.
"Yes, but the fact that you can add all of those features (including that "Tab Groups" feature you wanted and more) to Firefox with Extensions is what makes Firefox so great."
Yeah, if you have one computer. If you work across 3 like I do (Desktop, laptop, work station) then keeping track of all these extensions is a real chore.
Kudos to the Firefox team for making it extensible, kudos to the Opera team for cooking up a great set of features that are ripe and ready to go.
"It would be nicer if they actually *were* text ads, though. I sometimes use Opera as an alternative to Mozilla, and so far, all the ads I've seen have been graphical."
Opera has used Google's text ads since version 7. I would recommend you double check your settings for that. I think you can set it to graphical ads, but the default is text.
"I mean, why pay when you gan get a free alternative elsewhere?"
Because the little Google text ads aren't very obtrusive and Opera's actually a really nice browser?
Frankly, I'm glad Opera is ad supported. You're right, $40 for a browser these days is a hard sell. However, Opera's making money, in return they're making a good product, and they've been around for 10 years. Ad support != evil evil bad bad bad.
"The only real use for complex partitions is under Linux or if you are sharing files accross different operating systems on one PC."
Wrong. An unfortunate fact of life for Windows users is that we have to reinstall our OS's every few months. Why? Bloat. The registry gets cluttered and everything becomes slow. The only real way to deal with it is to do a wipe on it and start over. If Windows is on its own partition it makes the task a hell of a lot easier.
On a side note, I always keep a partition ready so I can quickly install a second copy of Windows in case something breaks. Though I cannot really say I've needed it in the last 3 years or so, shit happens.
Okay, I'm not '99%' of users. However, if I were setting up a machine for even a casual user, I'd still put Windows on its own partition. You're right that a partition can fill and cause problems, but I don't know many people who have 120gig drives. Give them a fixed swap size and a shortcut that'll clear their temp directory, and for the most part this isn't a huge issue. I wouldn't criticize somebody for partitioning their drive.
"Is it me, or does it seem like these nifty handheld things from (Sony and Nintendo) are not catching on very fast?"
I'd hardly call 10 million units between the two companies as 'slow acceptance rate'. Part of me wonders if you know more gamers now than you did back when the GameBoy came out.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is a nano diamond ring, you cant see it but will you marry me?"
First they joke about making me into a purse, then they joke about making me into a ring. Well, I'm not telling you all my middle name!
I'm having difficulty with the conclusions the author of this story has drawn. He's comparing console games with the quarter swallowers from the 80's. He mentions grief as a result of seeing the words "Game Over". Of course there was grief. "Game Over" means "Not only do I need another quarter, it also means I have to start over from the beginning!" Modern games didn't become easier just for kicks, they became easier because game developers got rid of that frustration. Some game developers even figured out how to guide you through their games by taking giving you little 'exercises' to perform to strengthen your skillset. Super Mario 64 comes to mind. (Good time for this to come up really, as I'm playing it now on my DS.) There was a platform I needed to reach in order to advance in the level. It would have taken a fairly daring jump from another platform to get to it. But then I noticed something a little peculiar. There are a few coins in that level right next to that platform that go straight up! The implication being that I can jump from the ground and get all of them. I worked it out, they were telling me I should do a backflip from there. Wee! It worked! Now the backflip is part of my arsenal and I use it regularly to get to other hard-to-reach areas. I'm pulling off neat little trcks to get through the game, and that's quite satisfying.
San Andreas is another game that used this idea. Seemingly unimportant little missions rewarded me with techniques to simplify the more complex ones down the line. On the PS2 version of this game, manually aiming your gun is not a great experience with that controller. You end up relying on the targetting system to take care of your foes. One mission, though, was pretty obnoxious. You were standing behind a fence and you had to shoot out a fuse box or something to open it. That was mildly annoying, but not much later in the game I found myself taking advantage of the manual shooting in the game to take out enemy cars. Didn't like that mission, but I did like what I gained from it.
I don't miss the difficulty of games from earlier eras. They usually felt difficult because the control was clumsy, not because you had to be a master of technique to get through. Not all games fell into this category, though. Super Mario Brothers was a great ride. It was, however, an arcade game, not an adventure like Super Mario 3 was. SMB3's goal wasn't for me to hand over all of my quarters. SMB3 was arguably a much better game.
Modern games may have lost some of the appeal of older games, but is this really worth the bitching?
"What's wrong with wanting to crush the competition? That's what capitalism's all about."
Nothing. Unfortunately, others are bound to throw the words "convicted monopolist" as if that really has anything to do with what's going on today. What they don't understand is that Microsoft would have to make a better serach engine than Google on order to take them down. Oh that would be horrible.
The comment I'm bitching about is at +5. Pity the mods don't put their points to better use. As if Slashdot's staff is reading +5 Insightful posts and saying "Oh, hey, he's right. Let's fire Zonk." In their place, I'd be saying "Hey, when Zonk posts, he generates a lot of comments! That's a lot of ads served!"
"I want news, not ads for nerds."
Oh right, like there's a big difference between the two. I hate to break it to you, but 'news for nerds' often means "there's a new blinkie device we can all go buy."
If you really want news for nerds, then I suggest actually going to a real news site. Google's got a great news site. If there's a topic you're interested in, you can often find sites that specialize on that topic. If you want a discussion board with semi geeky topics, then Slashdot's perfect. You can even filter out Zonk's stories if he bugs you so much.
I'm not terribly interested in defending Slashdot here. I'm just sick of the endless bitching. Sadly, I cannot filter that out.
I refuse to RTFA because it's obviously an ad for the Onion. They make their money by serving ads while I read their amusing parodies. Well I, for one, refuse to read anything that isn't pasted to me in clear text completely sanitized of ads and recommended to me by a disinterested 3rd party. I know it seems a bit hypocritical of me to post a comment on an ad-supported site about how I won't read the article of another ad-supported site, but I really love the prestige of having the word 'Insightful' appear next to my nick.
"Who knew so many were too lazy to raise real pets?"
"My sentiments exactly."
Uh huh. Betcha anything that most of the 250,000 people that purchased Nintendogs already have pets.
I have to be honest, I'm really sick of your assumptions about why people are buying that game. I don't know why you think the game is a good substitute for a real animal. I also don't know why you think this is somehow an alternative. FIf you don't mind my being brutally honest here, you sound just as idiotic as that group that's against Rockstar's Bully. Loud claims with nothing substantiative to back them up.
The worst part is, as I've tried to point out to you before, Nintendo is working to promote responsible treatment of dogs..
You'll pardon me for thinking you need to STFU.
"That's the problem though, isn't it? Now *nobody* can see it."
Only because a lot of people did see it. It's not Slashdot's fault their website wasn't set up to handle the load.
"It's against the EULA to open a Mac mini, and certanly against the NDA. Apple will sue."
It's amazing that you could see the pictures at all considering your anus is in the way.
"Do the editors get a sense of pride in downing other people's servers? I mean, Slashdot probably points people to places such that they get 1000x their usual visit traffic, which means that they are simply unprepared for such an unpredictable load spike."
No kiddin. You'd think people would know better than to post information on the internet. They wouldn't want hordes of people seeing it.
Flamebait? Troll?! I spend nearly every day reading modded up comments about how Americans are fat and arrogant, but a silly French joke ... no no no, can't have that. It really sucks that Americans have to have a sense of humor but nobody else does.
"ABC News is reporting on new evidence that has emerged suggesting Neanderthals co-existed with anatomically modern humans for at least 1,000 years in central France, before gradually disappearing about 28,000 to 30,000 years ago. But why did they disappear?"
They surrendered?
"I am the big bad troll for asking if this is an article or an ad? I thought /. posted news for nerds. This seems to be just an ad for an IMAX movie."
So... you're interested in it if it's not an ad, but you aren't interested if it is an ad...?
"Surely this simple rule isn't beyond the tech-heads here? For those of us that care about English this is as jarring a syntax error as anything that would barf a compiler. So do our parsers a favour and LEARN this simple rule."
Every single time a comment like yours flies across my screen I am reminded of Hermoine saying "... or worse, expelled."
"Why don't consumers buying/wearing fake branded products get arrested?"
They're (supposedly) going after the uploaders, not the downloaders. Unfortunately, when they go after sites like Suprnova, what they're doing is more like going after the yellow pages for having the phone numbers listed for businesses that sell fake branded products.
It's a pity they've got their heads up their collective asses. I'd be happy to pay for on-line content if they'd provide a reasonable service. You'd think iTunes would have taught them a lesson.
"So ya, you may be able to READ it, but not CHANGE it."
Given that the tax forms I download every year, I consider that a blessing.
It's also nice that it's easy to convert documents such as manuals over to PDF. This is quite handy when buying second hand stuff. Okay, you can't edit a PDF (though you CAN fill out a form in PDF and save the options you've filled in. Again, PDF is a blessing for tax forms.) but there's still plenty of reason for it to hang around for quite a while.
"To rephrase, why ought I migrate to Opera?"
I'm a hard core Opera zealot. However, I also know what a pain in the ass it is to switch based on somebody pounding it into your head. Every little difference is a huge annoyance. (Heck, I recently converted a friend of mine from IE to Opera, and he kicked and screamed most of the time. When FireFox has most of the functionality, it's bound to be even harder.) The fact is, if you like FireFox, there isn't a whole heck of a lot of reason to switch. So don't worry, I'm not here to tell you that you should switch.
You do sound interested in why Opera has a following, so I figured I'd share my input. I've used Opera exclusively for about 3 years now. (whenever version 6 came out.) I also have FireFox installed and I do use it somewhat frequently. (Note: The reason I say I use both but I use Opera exclusively is that I keep FF around because it has its own cookies. I help maintain web forum so having a seperate browser with a 'peon' logged in is eaiser than doing a lot of logging in and out. If I didn't do this regularly, I doubt I'd have FF around.) I have not, however, gone extension hunting so please understand my point isn't to point out what Opera has that FireFox hasn't, but rather what Opera has that I enjoy.
- To start with, yes, Opera is significantly more responive. That's been mentioned so I'll skip it.
- Opera has a very friendly UI. Don't like the way tabs are arranged? No prob, drag them into the order you like. You can make shortcuts ANYWHERE, quite intuitively I might add. (click and drag, done.) Don't like one of the buttons, right click and click "Remove". Etc. When somebody like me has used Opera for a long time, using FireFox is somewhat painful. Though the facilities for performing these options are there, they take more digging to find them.
- Opera has a really nice zoom feature that literally magnifies the whole page. I expect FireFox has an extension for this, but its' not there by default. Honestly, when Opera has all this stuff available right away, it sounds almost masochistic to go hunting for extensions. I wouldn't be offended if you called me ignorant for that. I can tell you that I have gone extension hunting for FireFox, but I can also tell you that I couldn't believe how much junk there was to sift through when looking for a particular feature. I'm spoiled and I reinstall rather frequently. It's quite refreshing to just have one file to go download and you're done. (In other words, I can get back up to speed in Opera rather quickly...)
- Opera, IMHO, is a lot friendlier as a full screen browser. FireFox has a tendancy to want to open stuff outside of FireFox. To some this is a blessing, to me it's annoying. On my single screen setup at home, I prefer to have one browser maximized. On my dual screen setup at work, I like to have Opera manually sized to one screen, and nothing ever leaves that screen. I doubt a lot of people share my pickiness over this, but to me it's a blessing.
- Opera's side bar is quite useful. FireFox has one too, but it appears it only supports bookmarks and history. (again, extensions may make this more useful...) Opera has little icons down the side indicating what the sidebar will do, so I switch a lot. Sometimes it's for the transfer window (i.e. when I'm downloading lots of files.) Sometimes it's for the email client. Sometimes it's for bookmarks. I have lots of quick access there.
- Opera has a notes feature that I love dearly. It's sort of like bookmarks, only it stores whatever you have highlighted and clicked. I use this a lot for the plugin development I'm doing for Lightwave. I highlight and 'copy to note' the interesting tidbit of info. Then it stays in the sidebar. I can click on a note and see the text that I copied. If I double click, it opens the page where it found it. This is what bookmarks should be. Even if the site's gone, I still have the info I copied.
- Opera's transfer window is quite ha
"Yes, but the fact that you can add all of those features (including that "Tab Groups" feature you wanted and more) to Firefox with Extensions is what makes Firefox so great."
Yeah, if you have one computer. If you work across 3 like I do (Desktop, laptop, work station) then keeping track of all these extensions is a real chore.
Kudos to the Firefox team for making it extensible, kudos to the Opera team for cooking up a great set of features that are ripe and ready to go.
"The difference is that Opera are not attempting to maintain an established monopoly."
The difference is that bitching about Microsoft gives you a +5 Insightful tag next to your posts.
"It would be nicer if they actually *were* text ads, though. I sometimes use Opera as an alternative to Mozilla, and so far, all the ads I've seen have been graphical."
Opera has used Google's text ads since version 7. I would recommend you double check your settings for that. I think you can set it to graphical ads, but the default is text.
"I mean, why pay when you gan get a free alternative elsewhere?"
Because the little Google text ads aren't very obtrusive and Opera's actually a really nice browser?
Frankly, I'm glad Opera is ad supported. You're right, $40 for a browser these days is a hard sell. However, Opera's making money, in return they're making a good product, and they've been around for 10 years. Ad support != evil evil bad bad bad.
"What I'm not inclined to is the hope that the CD will last that long! Damn things barely last 2-3 years on Earth, let alone the radiation in space."
Can't say anything about the radiation in space, but if it's sitting in a dark vacuum, it should be fine.
"Your feet. (Score:1, Informative)"
...????
Informative...?
Somebody with mod points read this and said "Hey! He's right!!"
"The only real use for complex partitions is under Linux or if you are sharing files accross different operating systems on one PC."
Wrong. An unfortunate fact of life for Windows users is that we have to reinstall our OS's every few months. Why? Bloat. The registry gets cluttered and everything becomes slow. The only real way to deal with it is to do a wipe on it and start over. If Windows is on its own partition it makes the task a hell of a lot easier.
On a side note, I always keep a partition ready so I can quickly install a second copy of Windows in case something breaks. Though I cannot really say I've needed it in the last 3 years or so, shit happens.
Okay, I'm not '99%' of users. However, if I were setting up a machine for even a casual user, I'd still put Windows on its own partition. You're right that a partition can fill and cause problems, but I don't know many people who have 120gig drives. Give them a fixed swap size and a shortcut that'll clear their temp directory, and for the most part this isn't a huge issue. I wouldn't criticize somebody for partitioning their drive.
"Is it me, or does it seem like these nifty handheld things from (Sony and Nintendo) are not catching on very fast?"
I'd hardly call 10 million units between the two companies as 'slow acceptance rate'. Part of me wonders if you know more gamers now than you did back when the GameBoy came out.