"People are talking about the psp, but I thinkt there are three critical issues to remove this.... Second Usability, stylus, no one wants to type with the square buttong (sticky? cough)."
Ugh. I agree. I can't believe that people were screaming "Gimmick!" with the DS's touch screen, then turned right around and said it was cool that the PSP does web browsing.
I will say this on behalf of the PSP, though, its screen is over 400 pixels wide. The DS is around 250. From a screen point of view, the PSP would be a much more desirable device for that purpose. But from an input point of view, the DS wins hands down.
Maybe I need to turn in my nerd license, but I'm just having a trouble sporting an underwear tent over either system wirelessly web browsing. Maybe I'm just spoiled because I have a TabletPC.
"Why do you people want to put linux on everything under the sun?"
I don't mind that so much, but what does drive me nuts is when people go apeshit when a computing product comes out designed NOT to have Linux run on it. I'd be more impressed if they did it with some sort of goal in mind they actually intend to achieve.
With that said, though, there is some reason behind it. Running Linux means custom apps. If there's some cheap way a programmer can make something he's done more useful, eh I can sort of go along with that. Somebody earlier mentioned wanting to run Linux on the DS so he could use it to wirelessly SSH into his computers. Frankly, I'd think he was nutty except he'd save $100 to buy a PocketPC or Palm to do it.
I agree, sometimes it's just plain silly. But, once in a while (like in this case), it can actually mean doing something cool and doing it more cheaply than you could otherwise. Right now I'm itching for a $150'ish wireless device with a touch screen that I can do email and Instant Messaging with. If that hack comes out on the DS, you can bet I'll whip out my CC. I'd have games to play, too! Wee!
"Without the exceedingly high cost, and the overwhelming complaints, I'd bu... Oh, and the lack of good launch titles, the company not being particularly willing to replace defective products,
I'd love to own a PSP.
Did I mention the absolutely insane cost of a 1 gig memory chip?"
I can honestly say I'm none-too-hot on the PSP. But I think Nintendo did make a brilliant move. The GameCube uses roughly the same size discs as the PSP. Maybe in a year or two we'll get a portable Game Cube? Successor to the GBA?
This might be less exciting by then if PSP has a stellar library. But... I dunno. I like the idea of a portable system that plays the main console's games. One of the things that stinks about portable games is their $30 price tag. Usually that results in lower production values, if you know what I mean.
"According to this logic, Slashdot should run every article over and over again in case someone missed it."
Sorry, no, my logic doesn't imply that. An occasional re-run is a far cry from rapidly repeating each story. Anybody who has ever watched TV before should have figured this out.
"I'd appreciate it if you would read what I wrote before responding."
I did, actually. Frankly, that answer, and the one you just posted isn't doing it for me. You're holding Slashdot's professionalism in too high regard, plus you're letting yourself getting worked up over something extremely frivilous. Slashdot could just as easily not post the story and you'd be none the wiser. Don't get me wrong, it'd be kinda nice if Slashdot never duped, but the 'damage' it's causing in it's current format is so minimal it's extremely pointless. I could understand if Slashdot guaranteed a new story every n minutes and occasionally ran dupes, I'd be a lot more sympathetic in that case. However, this is simply not the case. Sorry.
"Using fuzzy matching it could easily pick up all articles about Opera recently but even just using exact text matching it could have picked up this particular dupe."
If they wrote all that code to do all that, what would be the benefit? Less dupes? What good would that do? What if there's a detail in Slashdot's architecture that makes that not so easy? (Don't forget that Slashdot has all kinds of processes in place to keep the server load down.) Then there's the matter of making that work. Can it be done without any down time? If not, then is the down time worth it? I doubt it. I remember the last time/. went down a few hours. I thought there'd be a riot. What if this system is somewhat flawed the first time around (it's a law of software development) and it prevents other stories from making it through? I can see that happening right now. Some dupes aren't actually dupes at all, they're updates. You'll find similar links there. All this work, and the benefit is... no dupes? Do you realize how fucking easy it'd be to just ignore the story? " If there is something similar on the site or the queue then you don't add the new submission to the queue. It would add five minutes of effort to each article post."
Actually, I don't really have a problem with this. I think it's completely fair to ask that Editors do this. I really don't think it's fair to tar and feather them if they don't, though. A.) Human error will always happen, B.) Whoop-de-fuck. There's a dupe. Let's light our torches and sharpen our pitchforks.
"They can disclaim all they want and I will still be unhappy that they don't give a shit about the quality of their work."
Alrighty. You're unhappy with the service. Because you're unhappy with the service, you're now making other people unhappy about it. You worry about people wasting time reading a dupe story, but you're ignoring the fact that people are wasting your time reading your complaint about it.
" But one typically does so only after a particular situation has gotten intolerable."
Right. So now your goal is to make it intolerable for others? I can honestly say that my biggest complaint about dupes is all the complaining about dupes. I know I'm not alone here.
"Slashdot's "editors" are apathetic and lazy"
They cranked out almost 80 stories in 2 days. Those lazy bastards.
"Admittedly the dupe only wastes a second of my time but when you multiply that second across a tens of thousands of users it is actually quite costly."
Err.. okay. I have two problems with this argument:
1.) What does the total number of seconds lost across 10's of thousands of people have to do with anything? I'm sorry, but this is one of the weakest rationalizations I have ever heard. If Slashdot delays are so bad, you would have a super long list of things that gall you.
2.) Why isn't there an accounting of the people who didn't catch the original stories? The 1 second lost by you may be gained by me because I don't sit on Slashdot reading every single story.
Maybe I just don't have a lot of sympathy for you because often times I catch the 'dupe' without seeing the original.
"Ultimately it is just the lack of professionalism and respect for the audience that is galling."
What's so galling about it? Why is this galling, but Slashdot posting a story you already read on Yahoo news isn't? Don't answer just yet, think about it. I mean, you've mentioned that you are offended by Editors not constantly reading up on Slashdot, but have you taken any consideration at all into how the system works? They get tons of story submissions a day. In order to make Slashdot work, they probably queue up the story for publishing. In this case, it's possible for two seperate people to okay a story. Heck, even if it's the same editor, how can you expect him to be the memory man? Slashdot is very active. In the last two days there have been seventy seven articles posted. (I know this because I subscribe to the RSS feed.) How can they not have dupes?
Eh forget everything I just said. What I find most comical about this rant about dupes is that Slashdot actually disclaims that there may be dupes. If this is so fricken unacceptable, then why even bother hanging around? I mean, if you go to McDonald's, and there's a sign saying "You may be kicked in the balls", can you really get mad about somebody attempting a field goal?
"All this bullshit and they STILL are posting dupes."
They're probably doing that because people needlessly bitch about them.
I find it amusing, really. A lot of you act like somebody spit in your face when a dupe is posted. Never mind that not everybody may have seen it the first time around, I can't believe some of you get so bent out of shape about it. If it's old news, move on. Not a big deal.
It never happens that way though, does it? No no no, you've just got to come in and bitch about it. Bitch! Bitch!! Bitch!!! Dupe! Dupe!! DUPE!!! I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the dupes today were intentional just to have a little fun with you loudmouths with no sense of proportion.
"Am I the only one who's had enough of this today?"
Why are you even coming back to Slashdot today, then?
Honestly. I'll never understand all this April Fool's day bitching. If you can't take a day off of Slashdot, then you've got a great deal more to bitch about.
"If anything, he didn't embellish enough. The athletics department at my school recently sent out a ~9MB email to the entire campus, on the occasion of an upcoming basketball game."
Okay, this happened once. This is a far cry from the implication that everybody runs around doing this.
"is cmyk. My boss is ready to buy 5 licenses for Adobe CS2, and I'd love to save him a few grand."
Just remember that his saving a few grand is going to cost YOU. The good news, though, is that what it costs you depends on what you do with the app. Me, personally, I create textures with Photoshop, and GIMP is sorely missing out on the transfer modes that I need. Hopefully with that example, you'll understand how my math works.
Redundant? Do you honestly think that on-line console gaming is going to take off without people hosting their own matches like they do with Quake and every other PC game ever made to run on the net?
"Why would they do that when they could charge you monthly to connect to their game servers?"
*sigh*
Do you realize that the whole reason that Nintendo isn't on-line right now is that they DON'T want to do business that way? (It's this exact reason that a lot of people are under the mistaken impression that Nintendo is anti-online.)
a.) It's not all that profitable, especially considering the maintenance involved.
b.) It's not all that popular. Only a small fraction of PS2 or XBOX users actually pay for the service.
c.) Quality of service issues making charging for it that much more difficult.
If you want to make free on-line gaming work, game developers were need to make it so that a PC can host their games. I doubt many people will want to dedicate a Revolution system towards hosting games 24x7.
Slashdot Mirror
"The parents Sig is actualy part of his post , he copys parts of storys and karma whores to get his sig seen"
Whoop-de-fuck. Turn sigs off if you're that offended by it.
"People are talking about the psp, but I thinkt there are three critical issues to remove this.... Second Usability, stylus, no one wants to type with the square buttong (sticky? cough)."
Ugh. I agree. I can't believe that people were screaming "Gimmick!" with the DS's touch screen, then turned right around and said it was cool that the PSP does web browsing.
I will say this on behalf of the PSP, though, its screen is over 400 pixels wide. The DS is around 250. From a screen point of view, the PSP would be a much more desirable device for that purpose. But from an input point of view, the DS wins hands down.
Maybe I need to turn in my nerd license, but I'm just having a trouble sporting an underwear tent over either system wirelessly web browsing. Maybe I'm just spoiled because I have a TabletPC.
"Why do you people want to put linux on everything under the sun?"
I don't mind that so much, but what does drive me nuts is when people go apeshit when a computing product comes out designed NOT to have Linux run on it. I'd be more impressed if they did it with some sort of goal in mind they actually intend to achieve.
With that said, though, there is some reason behind it. Running Linux means custom apps. If there's some cheap way a programmer can make something he's done more useful, eh I can sort of go along with that. Somebody earlier mentioned wanting to run Linux on the DS so he could use it to wirelessly SSH into his computers. Frankly, I'd think he was nutty except he'd save $100 to buy a PocketPC or Palm to do it.
I agree, sometimes it's just plain silly. But, once in a while (like in this case), it can actually mean doing something cool and doing it more cheaply than you could otherwise. Right now I'm itching for a $150'ish wireless device with a touch screen that I can do email and Instant Messaging with. If that hack comes out on the DS, you can bet I'll whip out my CC. I'd have games to play, too! Wee!
"Actually, I recently managed to install Linux on a cubic metre of fresh air. I'd take photos, but it admittedly looks a bit unimpressive..."
The stupid thing about that project is the lack of interface. I mean, what can we possibly do with only the characters 2, O, and H?
"Without the exceedingly high cost, and the overwhelming complaints, I'd bu... Oh, and the lack of good launch titles, the company not being particularly willing to replace defective products,
I'd love to own a PSP.
Did I mention the absolutely insane cost of a 1 gig memory chip?"
I can honestly say I'm none-too-hot on the PSP. But I think Nintendo did make a brilliant move. The GameCube uses roughly the same size discs as the PSP. Maybe in a year or two we'll get a portable Game Cube? Successor to the GBA?
This might be less exciting by then if PSP has a stellar library. But... I dunno. I like the idea of a portable system that plays the main console's games. One of the things that stinks about portable games is their $30 price tag. Usually that results in lower production values, if you know what I mean.
"According to this logic, Slashdot should run every article over and over again in case someone missed it."
/. went down a few hours. I thought there'd be a riot. What if this system is somewhat flawed the first time around (it's a law of software development) and it prevents other stories from making it through? I can see that happening right now. Some dupes aren't actually dupes at all, they're updates. You'll find similar links there. All this work, and the benefit is... no dupes? Do you realize how fucking easy it'd be to just ignore the story?
Sorry, no, my logic doesn't imply that. An occasional re-run is a far cry from rapidly repeating each story. Anybody who has ever watched TV before should have figured this out.
"I'd appreciate it if you would read what I wrote before responding."
I did, actually. Frankly, that answer, and the one you just posted isn't doing it for me. You're holding Slashdot's professionalism in too high regard, plus you're letting yourself getting worked up over something extremely frivilous. Slashdot could just as easily not post the story and you'd be none the wiser. Don't get me wrong, it'd be kinda nice if Slashdot never duped, but the 'damage' it's causing in it's current format is so minimal it's extremely pointless. I could understand if Slashdot guaranteed a new story every n minutes and occasionally ran dupes, I'd be a lot more sympathetic in that case. However, this is simply not the case. Sorry.
"Using fuzzy matching it could easily pick up all articles about Opera recently but even just using exact text matching it could have picked up this particular dupe."
If they wrote all that code to do all that, what would be the benefit? Less dupes? What good would that do? What if there's a detail in Slashdot's architecture that makes that not so easy? (Don't forget that Slashdot has all kinds of processes in place to keep the server load down.) Then there's the matter of making that work. Can it be done without any down time? If not, then is the down time worth it? I doubt it. I remember the last time
" If there is something similar on the site or the queue then you don't add the new submission to the queue. It would add five minutes of effort to each article post."
Actually, I don't really have a problem with this. I think it's completely fair to ask that Editors do this. I really don't think it's fair to tar and feather them if they don't, though. A.) Human error will always happen, B.) Whoop-de-fuck. There's a dupe. Let's light our torches and sharpen our pitchforks.
"They can disclaim all they want and I will still be unhappy that they don't give a shit about the quality of their work."
Alrighty. You're unhappy with the service. Because you're unhappy with the service, you're now making other people unhappy about it. You worry about people wasting time reading a dupe story, but you're ignoring the fact that people are wasting your time reading your complaint about it.
" But one typically does so only after a particular situation has gotten intolerable."
Right. So now your goal is to make it intolerable for others? I can honestly say that my biggest complaint about dupes is all the complaining about dupes. I know I'm not alone here.
"Slashdot's "editors" are apathetic and lazy"
They cranked out almost 80 stories in 2 days. Those lazy bastards.
"Microsoft suing 117 Phish fans is not a joke?"
Nope, dumb phuck.
"just in case NASA are reading"
Ack! How many NASAs are there??!?
"It weighs more than Bush's brain."
:P
Tee hee giggle snort. Uh huh.
If you're going to try for a funny, try soemthing where people have to figure it out. Example:
"Mr. Bush was pleased to find that science could finally measure what makes him such a strong leader!"
Okay, not all that funny, but at least it leaves a little more to the imagination.
"Admittedly the dupe only wastes a second of my time but when you multiply that second across a tens of thousands of users it is actually quite costly."
Err.. okay. I have two problems with this argument:
1.) What does the total number of seconds lost across 10's of thousands of people have to do with anything? I'm sorry, but this is one of the weakest rationalizations I have ever heard. If Slashdot delays are so bad, you would have a super long list of things that gall you.
2.) Why isn't there an accounting of the people who didn't catch the original stories? The 1 second lost by you may be gained by me because I don't sit on Slashdot reading every single story.
Maybe I just don't have a lot of sympathy for you because often times I catch the 'dupe' without seeing the original.
"Ultimately it is just the lack of professionalism and respect for the audience that is galling."
What's so galling about it? Why is this galling, but Slashdot posting a story you already read on Yahoo news isn't? Don't answer just yet, think about it. I mean, you've mentioned that you are offended by Editors not constantly reading up on Slashdot, but have you taken any consideration at all into how the system works? They get tons of story submissions a day. In order to make Slashdot work, they probably queue up the story for publishing. In this case, it's possible for two seperate people to okay a story. Heck, even if it's the same editor, how can you expect him to be the memory man? Slashdot is very active. In the last two days there have been seventy seven articles posted. (I know this because I subscribe to the RSS feed.) How can they not have dupes?
Eh forget everything I just said. What I find most comical about this rant about dupes is that Slashdot actually disclaims that there may be dupes. If this is so fricken unacceptable, then why even bother hanging around? I mean, if you go to McDonald's, and there's a sign saying "You may be kicked in the balls", can you really get mad about somebody attempting a field goal?
"All this bullshit and they STILL are posting dupes."
They're probably doing that because people needlessly bitch about them.
I find it amusing, really. A lot of you act like somebody spit in your face when a dupe is posted. Never mind that not everybody may have seen it the first time around, I can't believe some of you get so bent out of shape about it. If it's old news, move on. Not a big deal.
It never happens that way though, does it? No no no, you've just got to come in and bitch about it. Bitch! Bitch!! Bitch!!! Dupe! Dupe!! DUPE!!! I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the dupes today were intentional just to have a little fun with you loudmouths with no sense of proportion.
"First, about 19 dupes ThinkGeek stories (yes, I know, they varied ever so slightly) and now this."
Strange things happening on April 1st!? Wanna what's spooky? Every year around the end of October, I get harrassed by a bunch of kids!
"Am I the only one who's had enough of this today?"
Why are you even coming back to Slashdot today, then?
Honestly. I'll never understand all this April Fool's day bitching. If you can't take a day off of Slashdot, then you've got a great deal more to bitch about.
"If anything, he didn't embellish enough. The athletics department at my school recently sent out a ~9MB email to the entire campus, on the occasion of an upcoming basketball game."
Okay, this happened once. This is a far cry from the implication that everybody runs around doing this.
"You get a 2 line email, that is like 1.5MB+ in size with all the formatting crap, dancing images....etc."
1.5mb? Don't you think you're embellishing on your point just a tad? That's akin to me complaining about RedHat coming on 450 CDs.
"These NEVER get old. Really. Seriously. Okay, I give up."
What, you can't go a day without Slashdot? 364 days a year isn't quite enough?
"Am I the only one who think she has a horse face?"
Just to be clear: Did you say horse, or whore's?
"$1 to the first editor that stops posting April Fools articles. One i can handle, all of them is rediculous...again."
Slashdot posts stories every single f'ing day of the year except April 1st. You've got 3 options:
1.) Accept it and laugh.
2.) Use this ONE day to not bother with Slashdot.
3.) Bitch about it like a whiney brat.
... anybody got the video of Paris typing "man mount"?
"is cmyk. My boss is ready to buy 5 licenses for Adobe CS2, and I'd love to save him a few grand."
Just remember that his saving a few grand is going to cost YOU. The good news, though, is that what it costs you depends on what you do with the app. Me, personally, I create textures with Photoshop, and GIMP is sorely missing out on the transfer modes that I need. Hopefully with that example, you'll understand how my math works.
"Maybe, but if the pig won't charge you $500 for the privilege of taking it out to dinner... ;)"
So... you'd date a pig to save $500?
"Quiet you pig-fucker."
Hey fat ass, don't say pig-fucker in front of Jesus!
Redundant? Do you honestly think that on-line console gaming is going to take off without people hosting their own matches like they do with Quake and every other PC game ever made to run on the net?
"Why would they do that when they could charge you monthly to connect to their game servers?"
*sigh*
Do you realize that the whole reason that Nintendo isn't on-line right now is that they DON'T want to do business that way? (It's this exact reason that a lot of people are under the mistaken impression that Nintendo is anti-online.)
a.) It's not all that profitable, especially considering the maintenance involved.
b.) It's not all that popular. Only a small fraction of PS2 or XBOX users actually pay for the service.
c.) Quality of service issues making charging for it that much more difficult.
If you want to make free on-line gaming work, game developers were need to make it so that a PC can host their games. I doubt many people will want to dedicate a Revolution system towards hosting games 24x7.