My kids go apeshit for anything with Wario or Donkey Kong or Starfox in it.
They know who Samus Aran is. They never took to Spyro or Crash Bandicoot.
All the Nintendo characters have had saturday morning cartoons.
What anyone's personal opinion is of the games is pretty much irrelevant. My kid was clamoring for Paper Mario 2, even though he never played Paper Mario because, in his words, "those kind of games (RPGS) are boring". He has Mario Golf and Mario Tennis, even though he thinks the sports depicted are "dumb".
In short, Nintendo knows how to market to children. Sony doesn't.
Frankly, they look like two different consoles for two different markets. I'll probably own a PSP, while the kids own DS's, just like I play the XBox and PS2, while the kids mainly play their Gamecube.
That said, I loved the last Zelda, think Metroid Prime blows Halo out of the water, and thought Super Mario Sunshine was great. But like I said, individual opinions don't mean shit. 8 year olds don't watch X-Play or read reviews in Gamepro magazine.
More like born out of spite for a joint Nintendo/Sony project called "Playstation X" that has nothing in common, technically with the playstation that hit shelves.
My point is that Playstation had a couple years to really dig-in to the market, before the N64 was out, and it hurt Nintendo, and got Playstation a lot of name recognition.
Nintendo's exclusive titles can easily carry the company, though. Sony and MSFT don't have anything to put up against Zelda, Mario, Pokemon, Donkey Kong, Kirby, Starfox - at least not in the minds of kids.
Sega once knew how to play the same game as the big N, and could answer with stuff like Sonic, but those days are long gone.
It's also worth mentioning that every kid in the US, at least, already owns a GBA, and already has an assload of games that will play on the DS.
So when they inevitably lose/destroy the GBA (mine have been through about a half dozen so far), the SP will be the likely replacement.
Also, it was the GBA SP's battery life I was praising. I'm quite impressed with it, and I generally always have the backlight on. Not that the original unit had bad battery life, either.
Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago
on
A History of Icons
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· Score: 1
Not many people living in desert states like Arizona or Texas would. Lot's of people don't know how to swim, and have never been on a boat.
Everyone who speaks a latin language knows what a question mark means.
It makes as much sense as a picture of a dog because seeing eye dogs "help people find their way".
I get the metaphor they're making, it's just stupid and unintuitive.
Many have come to challenge Nintendo in the handheld market, and many have died.
Sony is no doubt the most serious contender, but they have some problems, the way I see it:
- First party development. Face it, N makes good games that sell well. Sony relies on third parties. Until Sony has an answer to Pokemon, Mario and DK, there are millions of kids with 0 interest in PSP (and that's a big market wrt handhelds).
- The discs. The drive will suck batteries, and if it's anything like any DiscMan I've owned, it'll skip with even the slightest bump. Unlike a serial-reading cd discman, you can't buffer everything in their ESP system, either.
- The battery life. From what I hear, the DS battery life is on par with the GBA, which is outstanding. I've never had the battery die in my GBA, and I played it both ways on a 5 hour direct flight (forgot the charger.. didn't need it).
We'll see in the end. IMO, if Nintendo was a couple years earlier to market with N64, PSX never would have gotten a foothold, and would be in my "obsolete console collection", next to 3DO and Jaguar.
Either way, competition is good, and I'm looking forward to being able to afford to get both for my kids by christmas time. Right now, they're all about the DS, and couldn't give a rats ass about the PSP, for the first reason I mentioned.
Of course, the compiled regex will likely be faster than any parsing library you write. So it all depends what you're doing.
For some sort of system that processes umpteen billion transactions per second, they can be a godsend. For parsing a.conf file once every six months when the machine is rebooted, it's a waste of time.
It's all about knowing how and when to use the tool. A pneumatic nailgun can save a carpenter hours on a jobsite, but it's a waste of time to set it all up if you only need to knock in one nailhead that's popped through the drywall.
All you need is regexlib.com and a copy of Regulator (I believe thats the free as in beer one) that will break out a regex into english steps like "capture (" "capture 3 or more 0's", and so on...NET has a regex facility that's slicker than greased pigeon shit, so I've been making heavy use of it lately.
Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago
on
A History of Icons
·
· Score: 1
The XP calc icon looks like a calculator to me, even in "small icons" mode on the start menu.
But then, I have a relatively modern machine and dont run 640x480x256 any more.
I think KDE is honestly the worst culprit for icons that dont look anything like what they're supposed to be.
For example, the lifesaver thing brings up help? That's just not intuitive, since anyone with experience on any GUI would be hunting for something with a big question mark on it.
That's up there with Quaaludes in the "fantasy drugs they warned me about in high school but don't really exist" category.
If someone offered me PCP I'd probably buy it, and mount it behind glass, just to show it off to people.
Seriously, I've never seen or heard a firsthand account of PCP in my life. Only crazy anti-drug propoganda about people trying to fly off the Sears tower, and shit like that.
It's Hasbro's game, and Hasbro's money, and I bet many of those 100,000 players thought (as in were deliberately tricked into believing) they were playing official Scrabble.
Fuck Jared and his Subway subs. He'll always be fat on the inside.
It might be a good idea to come up with a completely new board graphic that still functionally was the same, and to rewrite the rules from scratch, making sure that they didn't match the language in the official rules, and to come up with a completely unrelated name. Just as scrabble is a made up word, just make up a totally new word.
If they did that, nobody would hit their site and generate ad revenue, when they pop onto Google and type in "Scrabble".
It's a trademark issue, not copyright. There are tons of other online scrabble clones. I know, because my mother plays them obsessively.
You *have* to take action to enforce trademarks, or lose them. The "Scrabble" name is worth something to Hasbro. The game could have been nothing like real Scrabble, and they'd still probably have to send out a notice, just in case.
This is like the much-publicized case where Disney sent a C&D to some Florida pre-school for painting Mickey, Donald et al, on their walls. It was a big PR stinkfest, and Hanna Barbera stepped in and gave them permission to use their characters. It made Disney look like a bunch of heartless bastards, and HB look like saviors.
Now, we all know Disney does some evil shit, but in this case, they really didn't have a choice in the matter. Disney can't afford to lose the trademarks they have on Mickey and company.
As we all know (don't we?), a corporation has to defend it's trademark or else it will lose it.
Scrabble is not patented nor copyrighted, well maybe the text of the instruction manual is copyright, but that's not the issue.
Hasbro has no choice in this matter.
Yahoo! did fine with a different name. These guys pretty much piggybacked on the more familiar Scrabble name to get hits from google, and thus advertising revenue.
The problem when I poke through a firewall like that (I can easily tunnel over SSL or HTTP to my home box, which is bridged to the office lan), is that every site has some guy who sits there watching traffic, and eventually he'll go on a rampage because it looks like I'm "up to something".
In this case it was easier to walk outside. Besides, it was a sunny state, and the Uni girls were out and about in their sun-day bests.
They could have called it anything else, and still had the same game with the same rules, and not had a problem.
By calling the site Scrabble.com they were asking for it.
They could have called it WordFun.com, or something else. But then, without the scrabble name, they'd have a hard time getting hits and membership, (and ad revenue) without piggybacking on Hasbro's success, wouldn't they?
Until you're behind a firewall that won't let you through, which I was all last week.
It was ridiculous, I was working at this cities administration building, and they provide (in tandem with the local university) free wifi outside, which won't penetrate through the walls.
I had to keep running outside to connect to my home office' vpn, to get to the stuff I needed, as I too, am one of those "I can do it all remotely" types.
Lesson learned, next time I pack it all up to take with me. Of course, in my case, that means a portable 80 gig drive, since I couldn't fit all our stuff on flash.
You can rag on them all you want, but we need more spelling and grammar nazi's in the US.
I do government contract work, and correspond with all sorts of bigshot muckety-mucks from cities across the US, from city IT managers to police and fire chiefs, mayors, judges and city attorneys.
Coming from a Canadian living in the US: It's downright sad that Americans are not taught to read or write, and lack basic communication skills. Or maybe they're taught, and forget, because the general culture doesn't place any importance on proper use of language. After all, deriding someone for using slang isn't "PC".
I shouldn't have to recieve an email, only to play phone-tag all day to find out what the fuck they're talking about.
This one particular dork tries to make everything read more "official" by Capitalizing Every Word In Every Sentence.
Gah, beurocrats. All they do is have meetings and set up phone conferences all day.
The parent makes a sensible argument. 256 megs ram, and what, a 1.2 or 1.4ghz processor? Even with the 512 meg made-to-order option, that's not enough for me.
I'd really love to be able to switch to a mac mini, because that would mean all I did all day was surf the 'net and write email. Unfortunately in my world, it just won't cut it.
I had to do a major upgrade to a 25 gig database last week. The server was aging, and had no free space to pull it off, so I had to migrate it all to my laptop, with a 160 gig external drive, and do it there. Even though it has a gig of ram, it still choked (created 7 gigs of swap) and took 2 days to pull it off. I left it sitting on the hotel air conditioner overnight, for fear of the poor little guy melting.
Yeah, I'd love to be able to pull off the "switch", mainly because I hate working 16 hour days on the road and would love to be able to shrug clients off and say "my computer doesn't do computer stuff, you can only buy music with it"
Well to be honoust: Since I bought my Gamecube and Xbox, I only use them for gaming. Except for iTunes I never boot to windows anymore. So a mac would be the perfect solution to this. And I really think I'm not the only one.
Perfect solution to a problem that doesn't exist. You can already run iTunes, why blow more $$$, unless you just need to feel like you have the "complete set", or are even trendier than everyone else with an iPod?
The iPod is a fashion statement, that's all. I've used one, and listened to one, and I can hear how weak it is reproducing bass.
Frankly, it's not very good at it's primary function. I don't why "geeks" care about it. I fully understand it's appeal to hipsters, and how it might get them to buy a mac to be "even cooler", but I dont see how it can impress anyone who's into audio or computers.
Plastic will ignite faster and be much harder to extinguish than wood.
The hottest pentium wouldn't even char even the softest woods, yet I've seen plastic chassis that have literally melted.
Plastic is used because it's cheap and easy to mass produce, not because it's safer or better.
That's why 50 years ago a TV set was a fine piece of furniture, and today people try to "stealth" the ugly grey or black box by hiding them in an armoire in your living room.
Which, IMO, is silly, because armoire's look stupid in the living room. Who the hell keeps their clothes in the living room? It's like hiding the TV in a washing machine.
Slashdot Mirror
They aren't selling 'em to you.
My kids go apeshit for anything with Wario or Donkey Kong or Starfox in it.
They know who Samus Aran is. They never took to Spyro or Crash Bandicoot.
All the Nintendo characters have had saturday morning cartoons.
What anyone's personal opinion is of the games is pretty much irrelevant. My kid was clamoring for Paper Mario 2, even though he never played Paper Mario because, in his words, "those kind of games (RPGS) are boring". He has Mario Golf and Mario Tennis, even though he thinks the sports depicted are "dumb".
In short, Nintendo knows how to market to children. Sony doesn't.
Frankly, they look like two different consoles for two different markets. I'll probably own a PSP, while the kids own DS's, just like I play the XBox and PS2, while the kids mainly play their Gamecube.
That said, I loved the last Zelda, think Metroid Prime blows Halo out of the water, and thought Super Mario Sunshine was great. But like I said, individual opinions don't mean shit. 8 year olds don't watch X-Play or read reviews in Gamepro magazine.
More like born out of spite for a joint Nintendo/Sony project called "Playstation X" that has nothing in common, technically with the playstation that hit shelves.
My point is that Playstation had a couple years to really dig-in to the market, before the N64 was out, and it hurt Nintendo, and got Playstation a lot of name recognition.
Nintendo's exclusive titles can easily carry the company, though. Sony and MSFT don't have anything to put up against Zelda, Mario, Pokemon, Donkey Kong, Kirby, Starfox - at least not in the minds of kids.
Sega once knew how to play the same game as the big N, and could answer with stuff like Sonic, but those days are long gone.
It's also worth mentioning that every kid in the US, at least, already owns a GBA, and already has an assload of games that will play on the DS.
So when they inevitably lose/destroy the GBA (mine have been through about a half dozen so far), the SP will be the likely replacement.
Also, it was the GBA SP's battery life I was praising. I'm quite impressed with it, and I generally always have the backlight on. Not that the original unit had bad battery life, either.
Not many people living in desert states like Arizona or Texas would. Lot's of people don't know how to swim, and have never been on a boat.
Everyone who speaks a latin language knows what a question mark means.
It makes as much sense as a picture of a dog because seeing eye dogs "help people find their way".
I get the metaphor they're making, it's just stupid and unintuitive.
Many have come to challenge Nintendo in the handheld market, and many have died.
Sony is no doubt the most serious contender, but they have some problems, the way I see it:
- First party development. Face it, N makes good games that sell well. Sony relies on third parties. Until Sony has an answer to Pokemon, Mario and DK, there are millions of kids with 0 interest in PSP (and that's a big market wrt handhelds).
- The discs. The drive will suck batteries, and if it's anything like any DiscMan I've owned, it'll skip with even the slightest bump. Unlike a serial-reading cd discman, you can't buffer everything in their ESP system, either.
- The battery life. From what I hear, the DS battery life is on par with the GBA, which is outstanding. I've never had the battery die in my GBA, and I played it both ways on a 5 hour direct flight (forgot the charger.. didn't need it).
We'll see in the end. IMO, if Nintendo was a couple years earlier to market with N64, PSX never would have gotten a foothold, and would be in my "obsolete console collection", next to 3DO and Jaguar.
Either way, competition is good, and I'm looking forward to being able to afford to get both for my kids by christmas time. Right now, they're all about the DS, and couldn't give a rats ass about the PSP, for the first reason I mentioned.
Of course, the compiled regex will likely be faster than any parsing library you write. So it all depends what you're doing.
.conf file once every six months when the machine is rebooted, it's a waste of time.
For some sort of system that processes umpteen billion transactions per second, they can be a godsend. For parsing a
It's all about knowing how and when to use the tool. A pneumatic nailgun can save a carpenter hours on a jobsite, but it's a waste of time to set it all up if you only need to knock in one nailhead that's popped through the drywall.
All you need is regexlib.com and a copy of Regulator (I believe thats the free as in beer one) that will break out a regex into english steps like "capture (" "capture 3 or more 0's", and so on.. .NET has a regex facility that's slicker than greased pigeon shit, so I've been making heavy use of it lately.
The XP calc icon looks like a calculator to me, even in "small icons" mode on the start menu.
But then, I have a relatively modern machine and dont run 640x480x256 any more.
I think KDE is honestly the worst culprit for icons that dont look anything like what they're supposed to be.
For example, the lifesaver thing brings up help? That's just not intuitive, since anyone with experience on any GUI would be hunting for something with a big question mark on it.
There are plenty of free icon editors out there.
Thing is, there are bajillions of free icons out there too, so we've never wasted time drawing our own.
Nobody cares much about them anyways, they only care if the button the icon is sitting on works when they click it.
Angel Dust, huh?
That's up there with Quaaludes in the "fantasy drugs they warned me about in high school but don't really exist" category.
If someone offered me PCP I'd probably buy it, and mount it behind glass, just to show it off to people.
Seriously, I've never seen or heard a firsthand account of PCP in my life. Only crazy anti-drug propoganda about people trying to fly off the Sears tower, and shit like that.
I blame the abundance of Spam from the UK squarely on Monty Python.
Now they want to bring "Spam A Lot" to the US? I don't think so, Nigel.
Time to dump some tea into the harbour.
It's Hasbro's game, and Hasbro's money, and I bet many of those 100,000 players thought (as in were deliberately tricked into believing) they were playing official Scrabble.
Fuck Jared and his Subway subs. He'll always be fat on the inside.
It might be a good idea to come up with a completely new board graphic that still functionally was the same, and to rewrite the rules from scratch, making sure that they didn't match the language in the official rules, and to come up with a completely unrelated name. Just as scrabble is a made up word, just make up a totally new word.
If they did that, nobody would hit their site and generate ad revenue, when they pop onto Google and type in "Scrabble".
It's a trademark issue, not copyright. There are tons of other online scrabble clones. I know, because my mother plays them obsessively.
You *have* to take action to enforce trademarks, or lose them. The "Scrabble" name is worth something to Hasbro. The game could have been nothing like real Scrabble, and they'd still probably have to send out a notice, just in case.
This is like the much-publicized case where Disney sent a C&D to some Florida pre-school for painting Mickey, Donald et al, on their walls. It was a big PR stinkfest, and Hanna Barbera stepped in and gave them permission to use their characters. It made Disney look like a bunch of heartless bastards, and HB look like saviors.
Now, we all know Disney does some evil shit, but in this case, they really didn't have a choice in the matter. Disney can't afford to lose the trademarks they have on Mickey and company.
Yes it would.
As we all know (don't we?), a corporation has to defend it's trademark or else it will lose it.
Scrabble is not patented nor copyrighted, well maybe the text of the instruction manual is copyright, but that's not the issue.
Hasbro has no choice in this matter.
Yahoo! did fine with a different name. These guys pretty much piggybacked on the more familiar Scrabble name to get hits from google, and thus advertising revenue.
The problem when I poke through a firewall like that (I can easily tunnel over SSL or HTTP to my home box, which is bridged to the office lan), is that every site has some guy who sits there watching traffic, and eventually he'll go on a rampage because it looks like I'm "up to something".
In this case it was easier to walk outside. Besides, it was a sunny state, and the Uni girls were out and about in their sun-day bests.
Scrabble is a trademark. Everyone knows that.
They could have called it anything else, and still had the same game with the same rules, and not had a problem.
By calling the site Scrabble.com they were asking for it.
They could have called it WordFun.com, or something else. But then, without the scrabble name, they'd have a hard time getting hits and membership, (and ad revenue) without piggybacking on Hasbro's success, wouldn't they?
My heart is not bleeding.
Until you're behind a firewall that won't let you through, which I was all last week.
It was ridiculous, I was working at this cities administration building, and they provide (in tandem with the local university) free wifi outside, which won't penetrate through the walls.
I had to keep running outside to connect to my home office' vpn, to get to the stuff I needed, as I too, am one of those "I can do it all remotely" types.
Lesson learned, next time I pack it all up to take with me. Of course, in my case, that means a portable 80 gig drive, since I couldn't fit all our stuff on flash.
You can rag on them all you want, but we need more spelling and grammar nazi's in the US.
I do government contract work, and correspond with all sorts of bigshot muckety-mucks from cities across the US, from city IT managers to police and fire chiefs, mayors, judges and city attorneys.
Coming from a Canadian living in the US: It's downright sad that Americans are not taught to read or write, and lack basic communication skills. Or maybe they're taught, and forget, because the general culture doesn't place any importance on proper use of language. After all, deriding someone for using slang isn't "PC".
I shouldn't have to recieve an email, only to play phone-tag all day to find out what the fuck they're talking about.
This one particular dork tries to make everything read more "official" by Capitalizing Every Word In Every Sentence.
Gah, beurocrats. All they do is have meetings and set up phone conferences all day.
What in the blue hell are you talking about?
I suppose you're so eager to defend Apple, you don't even bother reading what you're responding to.
You'll get modded up for it too. Slashdot's a funny place. Not "ha-ha" funny, but "Pauly Shore" funny.
What's your point?
The parent makes a sensible argument. 256 megs ram, and what, a 1.2 or 1.4ghz processor? Even with the 512 meg made-to-order option, that's not enough for me.
I'd really love to be able to switch to a mac mini, because that would mean all I did all day was surf the 'net and write email. Unfortunately in my world, it just won't cut it.
I had to do a major upgrade to a 25 gig database last week. The server was aging, and had no free space to pull it off, so I had to migrate it all to my laptop, with a 160 gig external drive, and do it there. Even though it has a gig of ram, it still choked (created 7 gigs of swap) and took 2 days to pull it off. I left it sitting on the hotel air conditioner overnight, for fear of the poor little guy melting.
Yeah, I'd love to be able to pull off the "switch", mainly because I hate working 16 hour days on the road and would love to be able to shrug clients off and say "my computer doesn't do computer stuff, you can only buy music with it"
Well to be honoust: Since I bought my Gamecube and Xbox, I only use them for gaming. Except for iTunes I never boot to windows anymore. So a mac would be the perfect solution to this. And I really think I'm not the only one.
Perfect solution to a problem that doesn't exist. You can already run iTunes, why blow more $$$, unless you just need to feel like you have the "complete set", or are even trendier than everyone else with an iPod?
The 50 dollar flash based mp3 player I bought for my kid *sounds* better than the iPod.
It's a fashion statement, a fad that will die off.
Remember when anything but a "Sony" walkman branded you as a "follower" and not a "trendsetter"?
I'm not bitter about it, I could care less. Our whole economy is largely based on the "fools and their money" maxim.
The iPod is a fashion statement, that's all. I've used one, and listened to one, and I can hear how weak it is reproducing bass.
Frankly, it's not very good at it's primary function. I don't why "geeks" care about it. I fully understand it's appeal to hipsters, and how it might get them to buy a mac to be "even cooler", but I dont see how it can impress anyone who's into audio or computers.
Plastic will ignite faster and be much harder to extinguish than wood.
The hottest pentium wouldn't even char even the softest woods, yet I've seen plastic chassis that have literally melted.
Plastic is used because it's cheap and easy to mass produce, not because it's safer or better.
That's why 50 years ago a TV set was a fine piece of furniture, and today people try to "stealth" the ugly grey or black box by hiding them in an armoire in your living room.
Which, IMO, is silly, because armoire's look stupid in the living room. Who the hell keeps their clothes in the living room? It's like hiding the TV in a washing machine.