Twenty seconds...that's too much for you to suffer through?
Fuck, get a drink or take a piss. You probably won't have time to do either.
If this is the level of inconvenience that would cause anyone to get upset, they need to see a shrink because they have issues.
Well, yeah. Except I stick the disc in to the machine, wander off to get a drink, or a snack, or take a piss, and when I get back the DVD is stuck on a language select screen, which is only there so that it can better serve me the copyright warning. So I still have to wait around to get to that screen, or come back and wait through the copyright messages. On a disc I've bought.
Then there are the discs that start playing the feature automatically after a short period of time, because, I dunno, they think some people are too stupid to work out how to start it running? So I stick the disc in the machine, go to get a drink, snack, or have a piss, and before I get back the film starts and I have to skip back to where I want to be.
No, on the level of frustration it's not particularly high, but it is a frustration. I only wander away from the machine because it has lots of unskippable crap. I have been conditioned to start a disc before I'm ready to watch it. This isn't right, and certainly not when I've been a good little consumer and paid for the product. I should be able to get myself ready, then start the disc, in much the same way that I do with a computer game, book, bath, car, washing machine, cooker, board game, any-other-thing. I have yet to find that I need to prime a toilet twenty seconds before I need to use it, just so that it flushes there and then and doesn't have me standing near my own filth waiting for it to be ready.
Then you get product placement like in I, Robot, where products are not just in the world but featured, talked about, shoved in your face in a blatant attempt to influence your purchases. Rather than being immersed in a real world, we are snapped back in to our own world full of obvious advertising.
I suppose product placement isn't bad in itself, it's how product placement is used that determines how it is perceived. Populating a world with items increases the verisimilitude of the circumstances, making it too obvious reminds us we are only the pawns of big corporations.
Lower prices on 2.0GHz chips. This will increase sales, but means giving up on the money of those people who really need (or think they need) the extra speed and are willing to pay for it.
Oh, boo-fucking-hoo. They have advanced their manufacturing process to give superior yields, and rather than offer these yields to more people they want to suck the market for as much money as possible by artificially restricting demand. Yes, they're a business and that's their job, but those are still weasel words apologising for a corporation who are stitching up the public.
Why shouldn't I seperate my online persona(s) from my real life identity? What problem is Blizzard trying to solve here?
The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People are less likely to act like an asshole if they don't have anonymity to hide behind. The only people who will be idiots any more are those who are idiots already.
But what is 'anonymity' on the internet anyway? If someone is thousands of miles away in a different country and I am never likely to meet them, see them, or even bump in to them in a different on-line game, how does knowing their real name affect their idea of personal responsibility?
I fear the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory will still apply when real names are used, because most people will remain effectively anonymous.
I guess the 21/6 rationale is that some people call it "the twenty-first of June." Those people are wrong. It is "June twenty-first," or if you prefer, "June twenty-one." Do those people call the time "the thirty-seventh of three p.m."? I think not.
And do you call the full date 'two thousand and ten June twenty-one'? I think not.
Your 'one and only' correct date format makes sense for computers but not for people. I do not ASCII-sort dates in my head and I seem to prefer more specific information first before the more general.
I'll stick with 21st June 2010. You can do what you like.
People say Ubisoft shouldn't treat them like criminals.
No one is saying that. Go ahead, treat the pirates like criminals, find them and prosecute the fuckers. What everyone is saying is: don't treat paying customers like criminals.
When DRM seriously and significantly inconveniences the people who have legitimately bought the game, there is a fundamental problem with the protection scheme being used. You don't need to stop a legitimate customer from using the product, nor do you need to remind him that pirating games is illegal and shouldn't be done. Customers know this already!
Target pirates. Stop them. But you're fools for doing it in a way that annoys legitimate customers.
the industrial capitalists just found new ways to put us (and now our wives too, who are no longer required for housework thanks to all these appliances) to work for their own insatiable greed
Whose greed? Speak to your parents or grandparents and find out what they had when growing up, or trying to raise a family. Having the husband work and wife stay at home meant few luxuries, and certainly not a big house with bedrooms for everyone, two cars, and plenty of disposable income for entertainment and eating out.
Part of the reason why more women are working these days is because families want and expect to have nice things and a high standard of living. The labour saving devices have indeed made life simpler and less work-intensive, and if people were happy to live simply the 'age of new enlightenment' would be here.
But technology has also offered other opportunities, including making impressive things look affordable, and wanting to take advantage of the new technology, as well as wanting to keep up with the Joneses, has pushed more of us in to wanting to earn a living.
Does she want a philosophical discussion about open v. proprietary? No. It's just got to work.
Right. I agree entirely that she doesn't want that discussion, but that is pretty much the point. Unless and until the average user is educated about the implications of open vs. proprietary software we will continue to suffer the chains of proprietary software.
I believe this is Stallman's entire argument, one that he believes has already shaped much of the past two decades by the insistence of having access to open software.
Super Mario Brothers was improved by its release as part of Super Mario All Stars.
No it wasn't. The graphics were better, I'll admit that, but the control system was also tweaked, resulting in lower inertia for Mario and making a lot of the fluid gameplay either less challenging or too difficult to replicate from the original. Changing direction in mid-jump was less challenging, giving greater options to avoid enemies. But the timings of jumps and turns relied on the higher-inertia Mario, and changing this made the classic tactics obsolete.
Even the improved graphics affected gameplay. The parallax introduced between the foreground and background may have been a cosmetic improvement, but it inadvertently revealed blocks in the later worlds that were originally hidden by the similar-looking background palette. Those hidden blocks could foil jumps if you didn't know they were there, but by being obvious in the remake they were made redundant.
Super Mario All-stars was a good idea, but it shows that making a prettier game doesn't translate in to a better game, nor indeed a faithful reproduction of the earlier game. I'll always return to the original for my SMB fix.
My understanding of Godwin's law is not that referencing Nazis is bad (after all, they were a part of history). He just observed that eventually, if a fight goes on long enough, someone will make reference to them. He did not opine if that was bad or good.
I believe the idea was that once Nazis are mentioned in an argument there will be no more useful information imparted. Invoking Godwin's Law is bad from the point of view of having a reasoned argument, but good in that any sane people involved can recognise quickly what is happening and move on.
Godwin's Law also doesn't apply when actually discussing Nazis, only when a comparison is unduly made to Nazis or Hitler.
Not a perfect driver, but I'll compare my record with nearly every bicyclist I've ever seen on the road
Maybe you're only comparing your record to cyclists you've noticed. The ones acting like idiots tend to leave an impression, much like the car-driving idiots.
Just to give a real world comparison, in most places it'd be perfectly legal for me to sit on my front porch and cuss out everyone who happens to walk down the street.
Yeah, you'd be annoying, but it's not a particularly relevant real-world example. The researcher was in a specific PvP zone that was designed for two opposing sides to get together and battle.
It seems to me that a better real-world example would be if a boxing ring were set-up in a gym with notices and warnings stating that anyone who steps in to the ring can be boxed by anyone else in the ring. It may be that after time familiar faces end up creating a social group in the boxing ring and spend their time chatting, but they really cannot complain if someone new comes along and starts boxing them.
The refusal on the part of LucasFilm to do a new, anamorphic transfer of the original editions makes the version that's included on those DVDs not worth buying.
That's what I thought too, until I bought and watched them.
It's true that the transfer is rubbish, but they are the theatrical releases of the films! It really doesn't matter that there are video artefacts everywhere and the sound isn't 5.1, because I am watching the films as I remember them, with no background slapstick or out-of-place CGI characters to distract me.
It is how I remember Star Wars to be, and that is the important point.
That's true, but I don't think his point was that Naxxramas wasn't new content to most people and more that it was old content that was tweaked, showing that there was little 80th level content created specifically for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
From that point of view, it may well be that the creative energies have been diverted away from World of Warcraft to different projects and the life of the game may now be quite limited.
Rather than fighting other players for spawns you could have teamed-up with them to complete the goal cooperatively, an essential part of what makes the game appealing.
You also make it sound like combat never changes, which suggests you didn't train new abilities as you gained levels. Combat is quite simplistic at lower levels because, as you say, the game is training you. When you progress you get stronger and more diverse abilities that lead to more subtle combinations of attacks.
But, really, don't look at other players as the enemy, but allies to be made for now and for the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Racism is not the origin of that term. Calling a spade a spade, instead of an earth moving tool, is just pointing out that you are plain-speaking.
You mean, more deprecated tags?
Twenty seconds...that's too much for you to suffer through?
Fuck, get a drink or take a piss. You probably won't have time to do either.
If this is the level of inconvenience that would cause anyone to get upset, they need to see a shrink because they have issues.
Well, yeah. Except I stick the disc in to the machine, wander off to get a drink, or a snack, or take a piss, and when I get back the DVD is stuck on a language select screen, which is only there so that it can better serve me the copyright warning. So I still have to wait around to get to that screen, or come back and wait through the copyright messages. On a disc I've bought.
Then there are the discs that start playing the feature automatically after a short period of time, because, I dunno, they think some people are too stupid to work out how to start it running? So I stick the disc in the machine, go to get a drink, snack, or have a piss, and before I get back the film starts and I have to skip back to where I want to be.
No, on the level of frustration it's not particularly high, but it is a frustration. I only wander away from the machine because it has lots of unskippable crap. I have been conditioned to start a disc before I'm ready to watch it. This isn't right, and certainly not when I've been a good little consumer and paid for the product. I should be able to get myself ready, then start the disc, in much the same way that I do with a computer game, book, bath, car, washing machine, cooker, board game, any-other-thing. I have yet to find that I need to prime a toilet twenty seconds before I need to use it, just so that it flushes there and then and doesn't have me standing near my own filth waiting for it to be ready.
Um, BBC1 HD is just a mirror of BBC1, but in HD. Auntie couldn't have shown a BBC2 programme in HD except on BBC HD.
Been done.
Then you get product placement like in I, Robot, where products are not just in the world but featured, talked about, shoved in your face in a blatant attempt to influence your purchases. Rather than being immersed in a real world, we are snapped back in to our own world full of obvious advertising.
I suppose product placement isn't bad in itself, it's how product placement is used that determines how it is perceived. Populating a world with items increases the verisimilitude of the circumstances, making it too obvious reminds us we are only the pawns of big corporations.
Lower prices on 2.0GHz chips. This will increase sales, but means giving up on the money of those people who really need (or think they need) the extra speed and are willing to pay for it.
Oh, boo-fucking-hoo. They have advanced their manufacturing process to give superior yields, and rather than offer these yields to more people they want to suck the market for as much money as possible by artificially restricting demand. Yes, they're a business and that's their job, but those are still weasel words apologising for a corporation who are stitching up the public.
this seminal event was corrupted by the presence of hardcore pornography
And yet you, oh 'member of the moral community', are fine with using the word 'seminal', which originates from 'semen'.
For shame!
Oxford English Dictionary entry for 'automagically'.
It's a figure of speech, sir, and quite comprehensible given the context.
Can someone add a hyphen between the first two words, please? The headline is difficult to parse without it.
Why shouldn't I seperate my online persona(s) from my real life identity? What problem is Blizzard trying to solve here?
The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People are less likely to act like an asshole if they don't have anonymity to hide behind. The only people who will be idiots any more are those who are idiots already.
But what is 'anonymity' on the internet anyway? If someone is thousands of miles away in a different country and I am never likely to meet them, see them, or even bump in to them in a different on-line game, how does knowing their real name affect their idea of personal responsibility?
I fear the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory will still apply when real names are used, because most people will remain effectively anonymous.
I guess the 21/6 rationale is that some people call it "the twenty-first of June." Those people are wrong. It is "June twenty-first," or if you prefer, "June twenty-one." Do those people call the time "the thirty-seventh of three p.m."? I think not.
And do you call the full date 'two thousand and ten June twenty-one'? I think not.
Your 'one and only' correct date format makes sense for computers but not for people. I do not ASCII-sort dates in my head and I seem to prefer more specific information first before the more general.
I'll stick with 21st June 2010. You can do what you like.
Irregardless of your beliefs,
Uh-huh.
the phrase was used in a perfectly crommulent way.
Not really. 'Begging the question': we have answers on Language Log.
People say Ubisoft shouldn't treat them like criminals.
No one is saying that. Go ahead, treat the pirates like criminals, find them and prosecute the fuckers. What everyone is saying is: don't treat paying customers like criminals.
When DRM seriously and significantly inconveniences the people who have legitimately bought the game, there is a fundamental problem with the protection scheme being used. You don't need to stop a legitimate customer from using the product, nor do you need to remind him that pirating games is illegal and shouldn't be done. Customers know this already!
Target pirates. Stop them. But you're fools for doing it in a way that annoys legitimate customers.
the industrial capitalists just found new ways to put us (and now our wives too, who are no longer required for housework thanks to all these appliances) to work for their own insatiable greed
Whose greed? Speak to your parents or grandparents and find out what they had when growing up, or trying to raise a family. Having the husband work and wife stay at home meant few luxuries, and certainly not a big house with bedrooms for everyone, two cars, and plenty of disposable income for entertainment and eating out.
Part of the reason why more women are working these days is because families want and expect to have nice things and a high standard of living. The labour saving devices have indeed made life simpler and less work-intensive, and if people were happy to live simply the 'age of new enlightenment' would be here.
But technology has also offered other opportunities, including making impressive things look affordable, and wanting to take advantage of the new technology, as well as wanting to keep up with the Joneses, has pushed more of us in to wanting to earn a living.
Does she want a philosophical discussion about open v. proprietary? No. It's just got to work.
Right. I agree entirely that she doesn't want that discussion, but that is pretty much the point. Unless and until the average user is educated about the implications of open vs. proprietary software we will continue to suffer the chains of proprietary software.
I believe this is Stallman's entire argument, one that he believes has already shaped much of the past two decades by the insistence of having access to open software.
Super Mario Brothers was improved by its release as part of Super Mario All Stars.
No it wasn't. The graphics were better, I'll admit that, but the control system was also tweaked, resulting in lower inertia for Mario and making a lot of the fluid gameplay either less challenging or too difficult to replicate from the original. Changing direction in mid-jump was less challenging, giving greater options to avoid enemies. But the timings of jumps and turns relied on the higher-inertia Mario, and changing this made the classic tactics obsolete.
Even the improved graphics affected gameplay. The parallax introduced between the foreground and background may have been a cosmetic improvement, but it inadvertently revealed blocks in the later worlds that were originally hidden by the similar-looking background palette. Those hidden blocks could foil jumps if you didn't know they were there, but by being obvious in the remake they were made redundant.
Super Mario All-stars was a good idea, but it shows that making a prettier game doesn't translate in to a better game, nor indeed a faithful reproduction of the earlier game. I'll always return to the original for my SMB fix.
My understanding of Godwin's law is not that referencing Nazis is bad (after all, they were a part of history). He just observed that eventually, if a fight goes on long enough, someone will make reference to them. He did not opine if that was bad or good.
I believe the idea was that once Nazis are mentioned in an argument there will be no more useful information imparted. Invoking Godwin's Law is bad from the point of view of having a reasoned argument, but good in that any sane people involved can recognise quickly what is happening and move on.
Godwin's Law also doesn't apply when actually discussing Nazis, only when a comparison is unduly made to Nazis or Hitler.
Not a perfect driver, but I'll compare my record with nearly every bicyclist I've ever seen on the road
Maybe you're only comparing your record to cyclists you've noticed. The ones acting like idiots tend to leave an impression, much like the car-driving idiots.
"Importantly, it won't require the hardware upgrades that Vista demanded, partially because the hardware has caught up"
So the new OS won't need hardware upgrades because the hardware was already upgraded for the previous OS? That's some twisted logic.
Just to give a real world comparison, in most places it'd be perfectly legal for me to sit on my front porch and cuss out everyone who happens to walk down the street.
Yeah, you'd be annoying, but it's not a particularly relevant real-world example. The researcher was in a specific PvP zone that was designed for two opposing sides to get together and battle.
It seems to me that a better real-world example would be if a boxing ring were set-up in a gym with notices and warnings stating that anyone who steps in to the ring can be boxed by anyone else in the ring. It may be that after time familiar faces end up creating a social group in the boxing ring and spend their time chatting, but they really cannot complain if someone new comes along and starts boxing them.
The refusal on the part of LucasFilm to do a new, anamorphic transfer of the original editions makes the version that's included on those DVDs not worth buying.
That's what I thought too, until I bought and watched them.
It's true that the transfer is rubbish, but they are the theatrical releases of the films! It really doesn't matter that there are video artefacts everywhere and the sound isn't 5.1, because I am watching the films as I remember them, with no background slapstick or out-of-place CGI characters to distract me.
It is how I remember Star Wars to be, and that is the important point.
That's true, but I don't think his point was that Naxxramas wasn't new content to most people and more that it was old content that was tweaked, showing that there was little 80th level content created specifically for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
From that point of view, it may well be that the creative energies have been diverted away from World of Warcraft to different projects and the life of the game may now be quite limited.
Rather than fighting other players for spawns you could have teamed-up with them to complete the goal cooperatively, an essential part of what makes the game appealing.
You also make it sound like combat never changes, which suggests you didn't train new abilities as you gained levels. Combat is quite simplistic at lower levels because, as you say, the game is training you. When you progress you get stronger and more diverse abilities that lead to more subtle combinations of attacks.
But, really, don't look at other players as the enemy, but allies to be made for now and for the future.