I don't think I said anything about how commonplace it was; the original poster was saying they didn't understand why oriental was considered offensive to some, and I was explaining why. I'm not saying that everyone would find it offensive, or at least be offended to the same degree. But personally at least, I wouldn't go out of my way to use the term "oriental" since I wouldn't know what someone's particular view on the term would be.
The land of the rising sun is a name that the Japanese have given to their own land, not someone else's definition or name of their land. It's pretty different.
The term "asian" isn't really about specificity, so I don't think the trouble you cited is really relevant. It is only "troubling" in the same way that European or African is similarly "less specific".
Again, it's not so much that they are in the "Eastern" part of the map. The idea of calling it the Orient is based on its position RELATIVE to Europe. That is why some would find it offensive, because it is basically using a term that is, by definition, Eurocentric.
"Westerner" isn't really commonly used as a term as far as I'm aware, although when I have seen references to "the West", it's also actually still often a Eurocentric term, inherently (it's a term that Westerners basically use for themselves). So the comparison isn't really identical.
This was actually answered above you. The reason that it is seen as offensive is because it is defining them in relation to where they are from Europe. Thus, it is the definition of a Eurocentric term for describing someone else. This is one of those things where you wouldn't necessarily see anything wrong with it, but from a cultural standpoint, hopefully you can sort of see why Asians wouldn't specifically like to be called by a name that just defines them relative to their position on the map compared to Europe.
The sleep function helps to some degree, but it's not so much that I'm worried about losing progress, etc. as much as that most of the games I play on the PSP are really ones I play for a more significant period of time. I mean, for example, if I'm playing Valkyrie Profile Lenneth, I'm normally not planning on just turning my PSP on and playing it for 10 minutes while waiting for something, etc.
Again, this is true for me with some DS games too. It's not really a knock on either of these systems, just what I'm looking for in terms of games "on the go". Ultimately I use my PSP more just when I'm at home and want to play a PSP specific game, but the "portability" factor just doesn't come into play for me.
You know, that's not exactly fair, to say the original gameboy was the "single worst hand-held of its time". One thing to remember is that the GameBoy was pretty groundbreaking when it first came out. Prior to the gameboy, hand-held gaming was primarily stuff like Nintendo's Game & Watch stuff, those Tiger Electronics single game LCD handhelds, etc. As a kid, I remember just the idea of having cartridges to swap out to be able to play different games was pretty cool, and the graphics were certainly an improvement over LCD games where everything was "fixed".
The rest of your point is of course accurate, but it also wasn't "just" games. The GameGear, for example, was something that people said "oh, it's so superior to the gameboy; it has color, a backlit screen, more powerful hardware, etc.". But the GameGear also had terrible battery life, and the screen quality wasn't all that great and tended to have a lot of problems with ghosting and appearing washed out. I never did play a TurboGrafix Express or Atari Lynx, but I recall hearing they also had similar issues. And of course, the GameBoy's huge game library helped a lot too.
Nintendo has been criticized to some degree for being "behind the times" with the GameBoy/GBC/GBA/DS/etc. compared to its competition, and certainly from a pure technical point, there have often been more superior devices out there. But I think Nintendo has generally had a tendency to wait until they can really perfect something before they put it out there. So, for example, the original GBA launched without backlighting, but the GBA SP finally did add it in, and pretty well (and Nintendo has continued to make improvements to backlighting quality) and without the huge sacrifice in battery life.
I think the current "battle" between the DS and PSP also highlights another, newer factor in this competition. The approach of the PSP really seems to be, for the most part, to offer a true "portable" PlayStation experience, with the main selling point being that you can play the exact same kinds of games as you would on your console at home.
But what has really been shown here is that, to some degree, the games people want to play on a console at home aren't always the games they want to play on a handheld. I think Nintendo has a really good grasp on what a lot of people actually use a handheld gaming device for.
You often hear people now say that the PSP's problem is "no good games", but I don't think this is necessarily it. I own both a DS and PSP, and actually have a fair number of games for both. And they actually have been putting out some really nice PSP games, and lately I've been enjoying Syphon Filter Dark Mirror and Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth and even Tekken: Dark Resurrection. But the thing is, I play these games at home most of the time, and I treat them more like "console games". I don't carry my PSP around with me and play them for a few minutes or something like that while I'm waiting for something. So I don't think it's that the PSP doesn't have "good games"; it has some great games. It's just that it has a lot of games that aren't necessarily well suited for "on the go" gaming.
To be fair, there are also DS games I use like that too........ Advance Wars, for example, isn't a game I normally just play "on the go". But I think this is the fundamental issue with the PSP right now.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I could swear I remember seeing a WoW dating site recently (it seemed to make the rounds of the various gaming blogs, etc.). I can't remember if it turned out to be a joke or not, but I do remember the obvious comments about it, and in particular the male:female ratio.
Re:The War of the News & Products
on
The Zune Cometh
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· Score: 5, Insightful
There's a pretty big flaw in this comparison though. The TV ads you talked about do not have their origins hidden, etc. They are clearly television ads, it is clearly identified who paid for the ad (Apple), and anyone who sees it can clearly tell it is a standard paid for ad.
Now, stuff like this digg thing, is pretty different. Setting up anonymous blogs, etc. to give the impression that the story is independent and not coming from the company paying for it and doing the marketing is something different. Same thing with slashvertisements.
Not necessarily saying anything is better or worse, but I think there's a pretty big distinction to be made between things that are clearly identified as advertisements, and things that are not clearly identified as advertisements in order to give the impression that they are something else.
I imagine "thru" breaks all sorts of rules, but that seems to be the one that has come into popular use. I think it became popular in road signs as a way to shorten throughway to thruway, and somehow that led to "thru" by itself becoming a popular replacement for through.
Yeah, I do agree that would be the sort of silly thing about "speech to text" in a phone, but I mainly mentioned it since I have heard other people offer it as an idea.
Right, that's actually sort of what I was thinking of really. I fully understand and accept that the English language has changed dramatically over the centuries, especially compared to Old English, and that it's a common thing for the language to continue to change and evolve based on how people actually use it.
I'm mainly just thinking that it would be kind of a shame if the language (at least the spelling, and some of the grammar), does turn into textspeak as a standard characteristic of the language.
Then again, who knows, maybe it is more efficient?
That a generation or two from now, the entire English language is going to primarily be reduced to textspeak and leetspeak or something.
One thing that would give me hope though is that textspeak is really only required right now because with so many modern phones, text input is still cumbersome, so it is a necessity. Seemingly when new technologies come into place which would make text entry more efficient (maybe better predictive text input, speech-to-text built into phones, etc.) textspeak won't even be needed.
Of course it isn't contrived.
There was a forum thread on MacRumors, and he was one of the first people to pick up his MBP from an Apple Store. People started asking him questions, and he went ahead and set up a separate website where he could post answers, screenshots, 3DMark scores, etc. based on the various tests people asked of him.
He isn't answering "hundreds of questions almost instantaneously"; he asked people to send him things they wanted to find out (i.e. temperatures, clockspeed of the X1600, etc.) and went ahead and put them up.
Well, to me at least, the information he's been providing has been useful.... in particular the determination of the clockspeed of the X1600, which shows it to be clocked much closer to stock speeds than the old MBP's.
A lot of this is not information that can be easily gleaned elsewhere, and what is notable as far as I'm concerned is that he was one of the first people to get his C2D MBP and actually run all these tests and answer all these questions people asked of him.
He's put a lot of time into it, and I see no problem with him putting some google ads up as well.
It's not necessarily a complete 180 though. A lot of those PPC vs. Intel debates were back when Intel was making the Pentium IV, and before they had gone down the path of the Pentium M, which led to Core Duo, and now Core 2 Duo.
The old Pentium IV stuff was a dead-end, and the criticism of them was spot on. And the proof is in the fact that Intel did change their direction on processors.
I thought I read a review of one of the more recent Office 2007 betas that said that MS had to remove the native PDF safe, but they were making a plug-in available to save in that format. Something along those lines.
This sort of reminds of when the DS and PSP first came out. I remember the local EBgames manager was constantly trying to convince me that the PSP was going to destroy the DS, how pathetic the DS was, how the PSP was the future, etc.
I guess it's easy to understand why they thought this at the time, but they've really done an about face now, and it's nice to walk in there and be able to buy a DS game without getting a bunch of dirty looks from the employees.
What double standard are you talking about? Isn't this the same society where a man who sleeps with a lot of women is a stud, but a woman who sleeps with a lot of men is a slut?
Well, a lot of people "put up with" pan and scan for a variety of reasons; in some cases they didn't have much choice (only "full screen" versions of certain movies were easily available). In other cases, a lot of consumers were convinced that "pan and scan" was better because they didn't like those "black bars" at the bottom and top of their screen.
I think the success of wide screen has at least something to do with consumers becoming a bit more savvy about buying movies....... I think that more consumers have gotten used to the idea of the black bars (one reason why I think television has become more willing to show "widescreen" TV shows even on standard def broadcasts), and they also seem to have more of a realization that "pan and scan" was not as good, causing a lot of the original film to be unseen.
You mentioned VHS, but it's not like the whole "widescreen vs. full screen" issue stopped with VHS and the advent of DVD. Even today you can still find some movies releases in both Full Screen and Widescreen versions. But I think you'll find that the "full screen" versions of some movies are more likely to end up in the "bargain bin" sooner, as more people are rejecting it.
Conceivably some people will put up with "pan and scan" if they have older devices like the Zen Vision M or 5G iPod.
But I think that anyone actually concerned about watching full length movies on the go is more likely to buy a Zen Vision W or a new widescreen video iPod.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I said anything about how commonplace it was; the original poster was saying they didn't understand why oriental was considered offensive to some, and I was explaining why. I'm not saying that everyone would find it offensive, or at least be offended to the same degree. But personally at least, I wouldn't go out of my way to use the term "oriental" since I wouldn't know what someone's particular view on the term would be.
The term "asian" isn't really about specificity, so I don't think the trouble you cited is really relevant. It is only "troubling" in the same way that European or African is similarly "less specific".
"Westerner" isn't really commonly used as a term as far as I'm aware, although when I have seen references to "the West", it's also actually still often a Eurocentric term, inherently (it's a term that Westerners basically use for themselves). So the comparison isn't really identical.
This was actually answered above you. The reason that it is seen as offensive is because it is defining them in relation to where they are from Europe. Thus, it is the definition of a Eurocentric term for describing someone else. This is one of those things where you wouldn't necessarily see anything wrong with it, but from a cultural standpoint, hopefully you can sort of see why Asians wouldn't specifically like to be called by a name that just defines them relative to their position on the map compared to Europe.
Again, this is true for me with some DS games too. It's not really a knock on either of these systems, just what I'm looking for in terms of games "on the go". Ultimately I use my PSP more just when I'm at home and want to play a PSP specific game, but the "portability" factor just doesn't come into play for me.
The rest of your point is of course accurate, but it also wasn't "just" games. The GameGear, for example, was something that people said "oh, it's so superior to the gameboy; it has color, a backlit screen, more powerful hardware, etc.". But the GameGear also had terrible battery life, and the screen quality wasn't all that great and tended to have a lot of problems with ghosting and appearing washed out. I never did play a TurboGrafix Express or Atari Lynx, but I recall hearing they also had similar issues. And of course, the GameBoy's huge game library helped a lot too.
Nintendo has been criticized to some degree for being "behind the times" with the GameBoy/GBC/GBA/DS/etc. compared to its competition, and certainly from a pure technical point, there have often been more superior devices out there. But I think Nintendo has generally had a tendency to wait until they can really perfect something before they put it out there. So, for example, the original GBA launched without backlighting, but the GBA SP finally did add it in, and pretty well (and Nintendo has continued to make improvements to backlighting quality) and without the huge sacrifice in battery life.
I think the current "battle" between the DS and PSP also highlights another, newer factor in this competition. The approach of the PSP really seems to be, for the most part, to offer a true "portable" PlayStation experience, with the main selling point being that you can play the exact same kinds of games as you would on your console at home.
But what has really been shown here is that, to some degree, the games people want to play on a console at home aren't always the games they want to play on a handheld. I think Nintendo has a really good grasp on what a lot of people actually use a handheld gaming device for.
You often hear people now say that the PSP's problem is "no good games", but I don't think this is necessarily it. I own both a DS and PSP, and actually have a fair number of games for both. And they actually have been putting out some really nice PSP games, and lately I've been enjoying Syphon Filter Dark Mirror and Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth and even Tekken: Dark Resurrection. But the thing is, I play these games at home most of the time, and I treat them more like "console games". I don't carry my PSP around with me and play them for a few minutes or something like that while I'm waiting for something. So I don't think it's that the PSP doesn't have "good games"; it has some great games. It's just that it has a lot of games that aren't necessarily well suited for "on the go" gaming.
To be fair, there are also DS games I use like that too........ Advance Wars, for example, isn't a game I normally just play "on the go". But I think this is the fundamental issue with the PSP right now.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I could swear I remember seeing a WoW dating site recently (it seemed to make the rounds of the various gaming blogs, etc.). I can't remember if it turned out to be a joke or not, but I do remember the obvious comments about it, and in particular the male:female ratio.
Now, stuff like this digg thing, is pretty different. Setting up anonymous blogs, etc. to give the impression that the story is independent and not coming from the company paying for it and doing the marketing is something different. Same thing with slashvertisements.
Not necessarily saying anything is better or worse, but I think there's a pretty big distinction to be made between things that are clearly identified as advertisements, and things that are not clearly identified as advertisements in order to give the impression that they are something else.
I imagine "thru" breaks all sorts of rules, but that seems to be the one that has come into popular use. I think it became popular in road signs as a way to shorten throughway to thruway, and somehow that led to "thru" by itself becoming a popular replacement for through.
Yeah, as I was reading your response, the increasingly common shortening of "through" to "thru" came to mind.
Yeah, I do agree that would be the sort of silly thing about "speech to text" in a phone, but I mainly mentioned it since I have heard other people offer it as an idea.
I'm mainly just thinking that it would be kind of a shame if the language (at least the spelling, and some of the grammar), does turn into textspeak as a standard characteristic of the language.
Then again, who knows, maybe it is more efficient?
One thing that would give me hope though is that textspeak is really only required right now because with so many modern phones, text input is still cumbersome, so it is a necessity. Seemingly when new technologies come into place which would make text entry more efficient (maybe better predictive text input, speech-to-text built into phones, etc.) textspeak won't even be needed.
At least that's what I hope for.
Jeremy Soule
Bethesda in particular promoted his soundtrack for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
Where on Apple's site does it tell you the clock-speed of the X1600 in the new MBP's (or even the old ones for that matter)?
Of course it isn't contrived. There was a forum thread on MacRumors, and he was one of the first people to pick up his MBP from an Apple Store. People started asking him questions, and he went ahead and set up a separate website where he could post answers, screenshots, 3DMark scores, etc. based on the various tests people asked of him. He isn't answering "hundreds of questions almost instantaneously"; he asked people to send him things they wanted to find out (i.e. temperatures, clockspeed of the X1600, etc.) and went ahead and put them up.
Well, to me at least, the information he's been providing has been useful.... in particular the determination of the clockspeed of the X1600, which shows it to be clocked much closer to stock speeds than the old MBP's. A lot of this is not information that can be easily gleaned elsewhere, and what is notable as far as I'm concerned is that he was one of the first people to get his C2D MBP and actually run all these tests and answer all these questions people asked of him. He's put a lot of time into it, and I see no problem with him putting some google ads up as well.
It's not necessarily a complete 180 though. A lot of those PPC vs. Intel debates were back when Intel was making the Pentium IV, and before they had gone down the path of the Pentium M, which led to Core Duo, and now Core 2 Duo. The old Pentium IV stuff was a dead-end, and the criticism of them was spot on. And the proof is in the fact that Intel did change their direction on processors.
Umm, iTunes 7.0.1. runs just fine on my PC and it isn't anything special these days.... Athlon 64 3400+, 1.5 gigs of RAM.....
I thought I read a review of one of the more recent Office 2007 betas that said that MS had to remove the native PDF safe, but they were making a plug-in available to save in that format. Something along those lines.
I guess that's better than naming it Spread'em.
I guess it's easy to understand why they thought this at the time, but they've really done an about face now, and it's nice to walk in there and be able to buy a DS game without getting a bunch of dirty looks from the employees.
What double standard are you talking about? Isn't this the same society where a man who sleeps with a lot of women is a stud, but a woman who sleeps with a lot of men is a slut?
That's true, people might have forgotten it was the anniversary of 9/11 if they didn't see it on Slashdot.
I think the success of wide screen has at least something to do with consumers becoming a bit more savvy about buying movies....... I think that more consumers have gotten used to the idea of the black bars (one reason why I think television has become more willing to show "widescreen" TV shows even on standard def broadcasts), and they also seem to have more of a realization that "pan and scan" was not as good, causing a lot of the original film to be unseen.
You mentioned VHS, but it's not like the whole "widescreen vs. full screen" issue stopped with VHS and the advent of DVD. Even today you can still find some movies releases in both Full Screen and Widescreen versions. But I think you'll find that the "full screen" versions of some movies are more likely to end up in the "bargain bin" sooner, as more people are rejecting it.
Conceivably some people will put up with "pan and scan" if they have older devices like the Zen Vision M or 5G iPod.
But I think that anyone actually concerned about watching full length movies on the go is more likely to buy a Zen Vision W or a new widescreen video iPod.
-Zadillo