Really? It could be argued that a public school law signed less than 7 years ago is "largely responsible for our corrupt, money hungry and materialistic society today"?
On the assumption that, what, its effects began immediately after enactment and the world is ruled by people 25 and younger? (Since that would make them 18 and younger 7 years ago and thus just barely plausibly affected by the act.)
We'll leave alone the assumption that our society is more corrupt, money hungry and materialistic today than ever before.
In our efforts to "convince society that critical thinking and evaluation skills" are important, we might should start with yours, which seem to be nearly nonexistent.
What about if they saw the demand a year ago and made plans to bump production by 80%? But what if that additional production came nowhere near meeting demand?
Because that's what happened:
http://www.wired.com/gaming/hardware/news/2007/11/wii_shortage
When they started a year ago they had 1M per month capacity, now they're cranking out 1.8M per month and still running way behind demand.
Crackdown, for example, has a series of unskippable logos when you put the disc in. At the end of those you get to "press start" and then you get the loading screen.
Thank god for pic in pic so I can watch tv and still see when the game is finished with its unskippable logos and has finally actually loaded.
Actually, when you ship in a broken box to be fixed you ship only the actual box, you remove the hard-drive and any peripherals you might have like a memory card. So you're data should be fine on the hard-drive or your memory card.
If it locked up in the middle of your game session you'll probably lose that session's worth of data but, really, that's kind of unavoidable.
I was afraid that it would be a month or more, as you've stated, that it would mean weeks worth of waiting on shipping and fixing and god-only knows what. I mean, it was a free fix and you get what you pay for, right?
But the guy on the phone swore that they use 2-day (I think it was) shipping and that the turn-around time in the shop was less than 5 days. And he was right. I got the box a couple of days after my convo with him and shipped it out on a Friday, had a new working (so far...) model back by the next Friday. Call it 10 days total without a box. Not ideal, certainly, but pretty respectable. I was pleased.
It's a program that allows you to easily save a copy of just about anything (certainly anything on the web...) with links to the original and everything else. The notes are automatically stored in chronological order for browsing. You can also apply tags to your liking and it has full search capabilities as well. It's free for the regular version, if you want to import handwritten notes and have them be searchable as well there's a charge.
It's awesome and I think fits your needs exactly, or at least I use it to meet the needs you described and I've had no problems with it.
Now if I could just force myself to go back and do something with the research later...
P.S. There's a writer in The Atlantic named James Fallows who has a column on useful technology tools. That's where I first learned of Evernote. He had several other suggestions to fit the bill in that column and more generally, he's usually worth a read.
"there's no reason not to think there won't be"?
on
Crackdown Review
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· Score: 1
I know I'm late to the party (damn you pesky changes in work filter software!) but I have to ask what this particular mangling of English means: "there's no reason not to think there won't be".
I'm generally a fan of yours, Zonk, but trying to wrap my head around "there's no reason not to think there won't be" is giving me a nose bleed. That's a triple negative man! C'mon!
And because of that triple-negative goodness, it's a meaningless phrase! "There's no reason to think there won't be a sequel" means that there probably will be a sequel. I think that's what you were going for, because adding that third negation makes it very unclear and probably the opposite of what you intended.
Sorry to rant, I'm not usually a grammar nazi but this one was off the charts...
I don't know, with the kind of PR statements and decisions that come out of Sony HQ these days, a meteor impact might actually improve the company's performance...
The sixaxis was overshadowed by the Wii's revolutionary controller, but it's still a very cool feature and makes the XBox 360's controller look disabled by comparison
But doesn't the 360 controller's vibrate function make the sixaxis controller look disabled by comparison?
What's wrong with being a dinosaur? Dinosaurs evolved into the point they're at for a reason.
Should the earth spontaneously start over with small, rat-like warm-blooded mammals?
Sure the mammals are smaller, more agile, and better able to survive clamatous events, but that's the only thing unique about them. The dinosaurs enormous size and incredible power have evolved over the years to meet the needs of the widest area of terrain types and I think their current form is, while maybe not perfect, a lot better for most uses than a little rat body.
Sure these mammals are good at the little niches they've managed to find but I think it's going to be dinosaurs for a long time to come...
Eloquent and concise but it doesn't actually respond to the question about how "Untitled, TBD, TBA" is any more meaningful than saying "AND a bag of chips!!!"
Doesn't much matter anyways, I just looked at your history and discovered that you are my old friend the Anonymous Sony Shill appearing under a new guise. I thought it sounded like it might be you, but now I'm sure. And I'm psyched! I missed you! Your idiotic, Sony astoturfing posts are the highlight of any games section article.
And now I have an easy way to make sure I don't miss any of your lunacy! How grand!
Could you please explain to those of us who are not paid Sony astroturfers how an "Untitled" game from a studio that is "To Be Determined" with the release date "To Be Announced" is not just a transparent attempt to inflate the length of your "exclusives" list but actually represents "confirmed by publishers exclusive titles currently in development"?
Unlike the fellow above, I actually hope Sony is not paying you, because I would hope they'd get more for their money than a list of "Untitled" exclusives...
But when over 20 of your "exclusive" titles are called "Untitled", isn't that going to get a little confusing to consumers?
How will we know which of the "Untitled" are worth buying? Especially when a bunch of them are from that "TBD" studio?
It's a bit silly to count "exclusive" titles that are still so nebulous that they have projected names but no projected sale date.
It's completely ridiculous to count "exclusive" titles that have no name or release date, but you think might be made at some point by a studio.
But dude, seriously, you just make yourself look like a total douche (even more than splitting your post to avoid "read more") when you start including un-named titles with no release date from un-named studios...
Think the population of the US will go for a roughly 50% reduction in their standard of living? With no increase forever after?
Also, I'm curious as to why you think KWh per person in the United States, which has fairly stringent emissions controls, would understate emissions per person while the KWh per person in China, which has some environmental regulation but virtually nonexistant enforcement, would overstate it?
Seems to me a quick visit to Beijing and Houston would counter that. Houston is on the more heavily polluted side of the spectrum in the U.S. but is orders of magnitude less smoggy than Beijing, despite no doubt significantly higher levels of energy usage.
I love your PS3 astroturfing! Really though, you should make an account. Astroturfing is much more effective when it comes from a "real" person, rather than an anonymous coward. Not that you're reality-disregarding style isn't as identifiable as a fingerprint!
You keep quoting these ridiculously low shipment numbers for the Wii without any attribution! At least go ahead and make a blog so you have something to link to and aren't insulting your audience by assuming that they'll take the word of an anonymous poster in the face of the rest of the press!
You see, back here in reality no one has been talking about Nintendo shipping less than they promised and they promised 2 million for launch, 4 million by the end of the year, they are not "aiming to reach 2 million by the middle of January". Despite your sterling credentials as an anonymous astroturfer I can't take your made up facts about nintendo without attribution.
People have, however, been talking about how Sony may well have reduced their shipments to the 250k range, due to ccontinuing manufacturing problems. (I guess they weren't actually stockpiling systems starting last march like you claimed they were at the time! Gee imagine an anonymous sony astroturfer feeding obviously false misinformation in a post! I'm shocked!).
So, to sum up, here in reality Nintendo had a successful launch, shipping and selling 2 million units as promised and have the manufacturing capicity available to continue producing units and meet their stated goal of 4 million units by the end of the year. Sony successfully sold out every unit they manage to make which is at most 400k. With luck (and no further monopolization of scarce blu-ray drives by the blu-ray player manufacturers...) they may meet their stated goal of 1m units by the end of the year, but going by their recent track record in meeting their stated goals, smart money would have to be against them.
Oh yeah, last point: of course there are more Wii's on ebay than PS3s! There are at least 5 times as many Wiis in the market as PS3s! Even if people were only half as likely to sell their Wii as PS3 we'd expect to see 2.5 times as many Wiis on ebay! Math is fun!
Anyways. I really should get back to work, and I really, really shouldn't keep feeding your trollish astroturfing, but your posts are just so great I can't help myself! I mean, usually I have to stop and talk to the Scientology recruiters in the subway stations to interact with someone so obviously divorced from reality!
I really love you anonymous sony astroturfer! Your copied, boilerplate rants that are so divorced from any semblance of reality are the high point of any video game article! And they appear in every video game article...
I know that you're being paid (or at least I hope you're being paid and aren't actually as stupid as you appear from your inane, fantasy-laden rantings!), but really, a review in the New York Times is hardly "trolling the net" for anything bad to say about the PS3.
It's the f-ing NEW YORK TIMES! It's not some random blog; it's not even some anonymous slashdot poster who either idiotically believes that Sony is busy packing PS3s on airplanes or else believes that we're stupid enough to believe it if he says it.
Maybe you should start saying that Sony is actually shipping each new PS3 to the stores on a first-class ticket on a major carrier held by a geisha girl who will personally deliver them! That's no less believable and at least involves geisha girls! Everybody loves geisha girls!
I think your theory only works if they decide to stop producing them before the guy who wants one and will buy the accessories gets one.
Otherwise, when you buy one Sony takes a $300 loss, but eventually they fabricate and sell one to the guy who will buy the accessories, games and what-not. And at that point they get to say, "hey look, our install base is huge, only a truly foolish game producing company wouldn't make a game for us!" And perhaps their software-sales to install-base ratio will be a bit lower than they might expect, but the huge install base will likely lure more development and thus people who might be on the fence will also fall into line and buy the unit, creating a cycle that leads to the success of the PS3.
If you don't buy the unit at all, you're right the guy who wants one for the games gets his much sooner and so Sony recoups their losses on that unit much sooner BUT they will sell far fewer units and thus perhaps lose the developer support or at the very least not dominate this console generation.
At least I hope they sell far fewer units, I hope there aren't too many people willing to shell out for this POS, but then again nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public...
I agree with all of the above posters' caveats about population density figuring heavily into our "lagging" broadband adoption.
I did feel that someone should point out that the graph purportedly showing us as have the 2nd highest number of broadband lines installed actually shows us as having the second highest number of broadband connections added in the 2Q of 2006.
Unless you somehow think there are only 2.5 million broadband users in the US, in which case we'd be far lower than 14 on the penetration list...
Slashdot Mirror
On the assumption that, what, its effects began immediately after enactment and the world is ruled by people 25 and younger? (Since that would make them 18 and younger 7 years ago and thus just barely plausibly affected by the act.)
We'll leave alone the assumption that our society is more corrupt, money hungry and materialistic today than ever before.
In our efforts to "convince society that critical thinking and evaluation skills" are important, we might should start with yours, which seem to be nearly nonexistent.
What about if they saw the demand a year ago and made plans to bump production by 80%? But what if that additional production came nowhere near meeting demand? Because that's what happened: http://www.wired.com/gaming/hardware/news/2007/11/wii_shortage When they started a year ago they had 1M per month capacity, now they're cranking out 1.8M per month and still running way behind demand.
One critic of the new capability cited concerns about censorship saying, "REDACTED"
Crackdown, for example, has a series of unskippable logos when you put the disc in. At the end of those you get to "press start" and then you get the loading screen.
Thank god for pic in pic so I can watch tv and still see when the game is finished with its unskippable logos and has finally actually loaded.
I sense much fear in you.
If it locked up in the middle of your game session you'll probably lose that session's worth of data but, really, that's kind of unavoidable.
I was afraid that it would be a month or more, as you've stated, that it would mean weeks worth of waiting on shipping and fixing and god-only knows what. I mean, it was a free fix and you get what you pay for, right?
But the guy on the phone swore that they use 2-day (I think it was) shipping and that the turn-around time in the shop was less than 5 days. And he was right. I got the box a couple of days after my convo with him and shipped it out on a Friday, had a new working (so far...) model back by the next Friday. Call it 10 days total without a box. Not ideal, certainly, but pretty respectable. I was pleased.
It's a program that allows you to easily save a copy of just about anything (certainly anything on the web...) with links to the original and everything else. The notes are automatically stored in chronological order for browsing. You can also apply tags to your liking and it has full search capabilities as well. It's free for the regular version, if you want to import handwritten notes and have them be searchable as well there's a charge.
It's awesome and I think fits your needs exactly, or at least I use it to meet the needs you described and I've had no problems with it.
Now if I could just force myself to go back and do something with the research later...
P.S. There's a writer in The Atlantic named James Fallows who has a column on useful technology tools. That's where I first learned of Evernote. He had several other suggestions to fit the bill in that column and more generally, he's usually worth a read.
I'm generally a fan of yours, Zonk, but trying to wrap my head around "there's no reason not to think there won't be" is giving me a nose bleed. That's a triple negative man! C'mon!
And because of that triple-negative goodness, it's a meaningless phrase! "There's no reason to think there won't be a sequel" means that there probably will be a sequel. I think that's what you were going for, because adding that third negation makes it very unclear and probably the opposite of what you intended.
Sorry to rant, I'm not usually a grammar nazi but this one was off the charts...
I don't know, with the kind of PR statements and decisions that come out of Sony HQ these days, a meteor impact might actually improve the company's performance...
How will I make it go faster then?
But doesn't the 360 controller's vibrate function make the sixaxis controller look disabled by comparison?
Should the earth spontaneously start over with small, rat-like warm-blooded mammals?
Sure the mammals are smaller, more agile, and better able to survive clamatous events, but that's the only thing unique about them. The dinosaurs enormous size and incredible power have evolved over the years to meet the needs of the widest area of terrain types and I think their current form is, while maybe not perfect, a lot better for most uses than a little rat body.
Sure these mammals are good at the little niches they've managed to find but I think it's going to be dinosaurs for a long time to come...
Doesn't much matter anyways, I just looked at your history and discovered that you are my old friend the Anonymous Sony Shill appearing under a new guise. I thought it sounded like it might be you, but now I'm sure. And I'm psyched! I missed you! Your idiotic, Sony astoturfing posts are the highlight of any games section article.
And now I have an easy way to make sure I don't miss any of your lunacy! How grand!
Unlike the fellow above, I actually hope Sony is not paying you, because I would hope they'd get more for their money than a list of "Untitled" exclusives...
How will we know which of the "Untitled" are worth buying? Especially when a bunch of them are from that "TBD" studio?
It's a bit silly to count "exclusive" titles that are still so nebulous that they have projected names but no projected sale date.
It's completely ridiculous to count "exclusive" titles that have no name or release date, but you think might be made at some point by a studio.
But dude, seriously, you just make yourself look like a total douche (even more than splitting your post to avoid "read more") when you start including un-named titles with no release date from un-named studios...
"Untitled"? From "TBD" studio?
I LOVE that game!
Good thing I only have to wait until "TBA" for it...
Think the population of the US will go for a roughly 50% reduction in their standard of living? With no increase forever after?
Also, I'm curious as to why you think KWh per person in the United States, which has fairly stringent emissions controls, would understate emissions per person while the KWh per person in China, which has some environmental regulation but virtually nonexistant enforcement, would overstate it?
Seems to me a quick visit to Beijing and Houston would counter that. Houston is on the more heavily polluted side of the spectrum in the U.S. but is orders of magnitude less smoggy than Beijing, despite no doubt significantly higher levels of energy usage.
Riiiiiiiiidge Racer!
There's a selling point if ever I've heard one.
I love your PS3 astroturfing! Really though, you should make an account. Astroturfing is much more effective when it comes from a "real" person, rather than an anonymous coward. Not that you're reality-disregarding style isn't as identifiable as a fingerprint!
You keep quoting these ridiculously low shipment numbers for the Wii without any attribution! At least go ahead and make a blog so you have something to link to and aren't insulting your audience by assuming that they'll take the word of an anonymous poster in the face of the rest of the press!
You see, back here in reality no one has been talking about Nintendo shipping less than they promised and they promised 2 million for launch, 4 million by the end of the year, they are not "aiming to reach 2 million by the middle of January". Despite your sterling credentials as an anonymous astroturfer I can't take your made up facts about nintendo without attribution.
People have, however, been talking about how Sony may well have reduced their shipments to the 250k range, due to ccontinuing manufacturing problems. (I guess they weren't actually stockpiling systems starting last march like you claimed they were at the time! Gee imagine an anonymous sony astroturfer feeding obviously false misinformation in a post! I'm shocked!).
So, to sum up, here in reality Nintendo had a successful launch, shipping and selling 2 million units as promised and have the manufacturing capicity available to continue producing units and meet their stated goal of 4 million units by the end of the year. Sony successfully sold out every unit they manage to make which is at most 400k. With luck (and no further monopolization of scarce blu-ray drives by the blu-ray player manufacturers...) they may meet their stated goal of 1m units by the end of the year, but going by their recent track record in meeting their stated goals, smart money would have to be against them.
Oh yeah, last point: of course there are more Wii's on ebay than PS3s! There are at least 5 times as many Wiis in the market as PS3s! Even if people were only half as likely to sell their Wii as PS3 we'd expect to see 2.5 times as many Wiis on ebay! Math is fun!
Anyways. I really should get back to work, and I really, really shouldn't keep feeding your trollish astroturfing, but your posts are just so great I can't help myself! I mean, usually I have to stop and talk to the Scientology recruiters in the subway stations to interact with someone so obviously divorced from reality!
I know that you're being paid (or at least I hope you're being paid and aren't actually as stupid as you appear from your inane, fantasy-laden rantings!), but really, a review in the New York Times is hardly "trolling the net" for anything bad to say about the PS3.
It's the f-ing NEW YORK TIMES! It's not some random blog; it's not even some anonymous slashdot poster who either idiotically believes that Sony is busy packing PS3s on airplanes or else believes that we're stupid enough to believe it if he says it.
Maybe you should start saying that Sony is actually shipping each new PS3 to the stores on a first-class ticket on a major carrier held by a geisha girl who will personally deliver them! That's no less believable and at least involves geisha girls! Everybody loves geisha girls!
I just hate people who can't just let stuff slide without commenting on it.
Oh wait...
Otherwise, when you buy one Sony takes a $300 loss, but eventually they fabricate and sell one to the guy who will buy the accessories, games and what-not. And at that point they get to say, "hey look, our install base is huge, only a truly foolish game producing company wouldn't make a game for us!" And perhaps their software-sales to install-base ratio will be a bit lower than they might expect, but the huge install base will likely lure more development and thus people who might be on the fence will also fall into line and buy the unit, creating a cycle that leads to the success of the PS3.
If you don't buy the unit at all, you're right the guy who wants one for the games gets his much sooner and so Sony recoups their losses on that unit much sooner BUT they will sell far fewer units and thus perhaps lose the developer support or at the very least not dominate this console generation.
At least I hope they sell far fewer units, I hope there aren't too many people willing to shell out for this POS, but then again nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public...
I did feel that someone should point out that the graph purportedly showing us as have the 2nd highest number of broadband lines installed actually shows us as having the second highest number of broadband connections added in the 2Q of 2006.
Unless you somehow think there are only 2.5 million broadband users in the US, in which case we'd be far lower than 14 on the penetration list...
Mild?
Good lord, man, you're every game industry worker's dream!
You have to be kidding. You preorder everything? There's no way...