Informative gives Karma but Funny doesn't. Therefore, people who appreciate the post and wish to give the user some karma will choose Informative.
What I don't understand is why anyone would care... Slashdot Karma is competing with Kool-Aid Fun Points for score that has the least impact on my life.
Well, sure, Series of Tubes works fine. What I'm wondering is, at the level at which you can say the internet is a series of tubes, how can you say that it isn't a truck? I think trucks works just as well if not better than tubes since the internet is really comprised of discreet packets not a continuous flow.
The internet is a like a truck that you dump things on, but if what you're sending is too big to fit on a single truck you have to split it up into separate trucks that are each sent individually and if the roads are congested your trucks will show up late. The trucks may choose different routes to the destination and show up out of order, and some trucks may get in a collision and thus not get delivered at all so you need a way to account for each truck and re-ship the pieces that went missing. Some roads don't allow large trucks so then the truck's load needs to be split up onto two smaller ones. And so on and so on.
Really, the reason he gets made fun of is that if you read everything he said, he obviously has no idea what he's talking about. Series of tubes is a decent analogy by accident.
I gotta say I really like the idea of a game that combines the Star Wars universe with the world's most famous bike race. If they can pull it off, that is, and I have to wonder if the iPhone is really going to be the best target for this... wait...
Doom RPG, Wolfenstein RPG? Okay, since I can't really imagine what that would look like ("you shoot the pinkie demon with the rocket launcher and hit for 100 damage"?), it does sound somewhat creative. Maybe, I guess. Not nearly as cool as "Tour de Force" though...:(
Sure, sure, and if your primary concern when going to movies is that you're seeing the most popular one so you won't feel left out, then ticket sales is the best metric for you.
In all other cases, it's really not a very good metric.
Don't blame GameFAQs, the puzzles have always been of the impenetrable use-live-weasel-on-airliner-after-setting-fire-to-cake-in-sweden variety that everybody hates.
Wait, wait... That sounds like the puzzle from Anderson McShroomie 2 where you had to crash the airliner into the lit cake to create the mold for the key to the Egyptian Tomb that I spent WEEKS trying to solve and never could.
And you're telling me the weasel had to be alive?! I knew the weasel had something to do with it, but my weasel was dead because I'd drowned it in a toilet boil three scenes earlier. If the weasel had to be alive, why did it give me points for drowning the weasel?!
I can think of plenty of things where shipping them across the world in 90 minutes would be advantageous. I disagree that the internet has decreased shipping (the opposite in fact), but certainly most things aren't going to be worth the cost until it comes down a great deal. But here are some things that absolutely would be worth the cost today:
1) Initial wafer lots. With fabs thousands of miles away from the engineers who designed the parts, the longer it takes for samples to arrive and any possible bugs found could mean literally millions wasted on bad wafer starts. Turn around time on this kind of thing is critical.
2) Executives. For the big-wigs, video conferencing just doesn't cut it. They still fly the traditional way. Being able to hold meetings on the other side of the world without ruining their circadian rhythms would be very much worth the price.
Okay, that's actually all I've got right now... There's potential here, but with current prices no mass market to be sure. Maybe enough to marshal economies of scale? I don't know.
I also think Myst qualified as a puzzle game. Although it wasn't puzzles in the traditional sense, it still had clues and things to solve.
I'm not sure I understand... Myst's "turn the knobs the right way and push the buttons in the right order to make the doohikey do its thing" style is pretty much what I consider the definition of traditional puzzles.
I think this explains perfectly well why the "old-school" style of puzzle game, ala Sierra and Lucas Arts, have gone by the wayside and it'll be a while till they come back.
I say "think" because my proxy blocked the link. Basically, if it describes a puzzle in which you have to create a disguise by using cat hair and scotch tape to make a mustache in order to imitate a guy who doesn't have a mustache, then you're at the right place.:P
I think it was Kings Quest 6 that basically broke my brain for puzzle games. At least Space Quest made me chuckle while making me do random retarded things.
In the dustbin of fairly lame characters where they belong?
I mean, not that The Blob is the greatest character ever, or for that matter the inexplicable inclusion of Toad in X-Men, but really I can't blame them for changing the canon. Would I rather see any of those 3 characters, or would I rather see Deadpool and Gambit? Deadpool and Gambit, please! Though you never know, maybe they'll play some bit parts.
The only character that I would be sorely saddened to see stripped from the storyline of Wolvie's origin would be Sabertooth. He's a great character in his own right, essential to Logan's psychology, and the perfect foil for his "berserker trying to maintain control and do the right thing" mentality. But apparently I don't have to worry in this regard.
Hell yeah. I basically won't see movies anymore except at the Alamo Drafthouse. Basically the same setup you describe, with tables between rows of seats. Having real food and beer makes the experience so much better by itself. But then factor in the extra leg room, and the fact that to get at the two empty seats in the middle of the row you don't have to climb over other people, and it's simply awesome. Also, for some reason people tend to be quieter there than at other theaters. Maybe because they have Chuck Norris threaten to choke you unconscious if you talk.
Oh, plus the downtown one has all kinds of fun stuff, like MST-styled movie riffings, sing-alongs, kung-fu marathons, and so on and so forth.
Do you want a cookie for this? Marx (you read him, have not you?) has "condemned" businessmen long ago by exposing the simple fact (quoting by memory): they make nice things not out of benevolence, but out of the desire for profit. If it were profitable for them to make shredded glass, they would've been making shredded glass.
Well gee, if I had known that you were already aware that your stated belief that market success was a good metric for saying what the best product was was flagrant non-factual bullshit, I never would have bothered saying something so obvious. So no, I don't want a cookie, I want you to stop saying BS you know isn't true. Market success != good product. It's not even the 'best' available metric. You know it, I know it, Marx knew it, the business person pushing the product knows it.
"Nonsense"? Very well, then -- we already have the system, you want: various organizations try to test/evaluate new products and issue their opinions. The "enforcement arm", banning "schlock" from the market, is the only "missing part".
It's nonsense because nobody was asking for an enforcement arm to prevent a bad product from being sold in the first place.
And yes, we do have the system of reviewers. And I say THAT, despite its many faults (mostly concerning bias which the businessman putting forward the product is never free from), is the best available metric for what is the best product. At the end of the day, which do you think is the better judge of, say, the quality of a car: The sales totals for that car, or the Consumer Reports review of that car? I say the latter, without hesitation.
Yes, of course. But, at the end, a product's success will still be measured by its market success -- among "the masses".
And therefore that's the best metric? No. Not at all. It's a stand-in for a good metric used by the apathetic. And you're apparently aware of this. So why you said otherwise, I'll never know or care. But at least we both agree it was wrong.
Market success is what has always driven business people.
Yes, but business people don't fool themselves into thinking market success == good product. No, they are quite well aware that they are often trying to achieve market success with an inferior product. They are well aware that they are essentially tricking people into buying it. If they weren't aware, they wouldn't be able to work around the product's flaws with marketing.
The point is that the business people are driven by money, and they are well aware of the obvious fact that making money doesn't necessarily mean making the best product by any metric. It means making money. That's all.
Only completely credulous consumers, the kind that thinks the quality of an OS is proven by number of installations, actually believe this is a good metric of quality. The business men selling it know that it isn't, but "quality" isn't something they care about other than the extent to which it affects sales. And hey if advertising can increase the apparent quality of the item to cover the gap, then that's just fine.
Would you suggest that a product which is garbage but has a good advertising campaign is actually a better product? Because the advertising drove the sales, and you're saying market success == best product, so this is a natural consequence of that line of thinking.
There is simply no better criteria known today -- the only alternative is having some sort of committee, that would review products (from toothpicks to movies) and decide, whether or not to let them be sold. I assure you, that system would suck much more...
Only because of that "decide whether or not to let them be sold" nonsense.
If more people actually read independent reviews of products, and used that to decide whether or not to buy a product, then yes this system would be much better. Because schlock that only gets sold because some marketing department came up with a clever way of making the product not look like crap would be less successful.
Eh... Wolvie had been doing his thing since the 70s. It's not like he was forgotten about until the 90s, he was already an extremely popular Marvel character.
No. Wolverine didn't ruin comics in the 90s. Comics in the 90s ruined themselves.
At least the VPN codes shouldn't be that important. What possible damage can somone do VPNing into a network that has probably been completely obliterated by now?
I'm guessing here (of course I didn't RTFA, not that I anticipate it being in there), but I'd assume that they use an RSA dongle or some such meaning that just having the password wouldn't be enough.
Wow, that's an amazing vista. You sure were lucky, especially since from what friends from alaska have told me, it's more typical to grow up with this view out their window.
Slashdot Mirror
Informative gives Karma but Funny doesn't. Therefore, people who appreciate the post and wish to give the user some karma will choose Informative.
What I don't understand is why anyone would care... Slashdot Karma is competing with Kool-Aid Fun Points for score that has the least impact on my life.
Only if you think everything is binary like pregnant/not-pregnant.
The Internet is not a toilet that you can just dump into. It is a series of bricks that are shat.
Well, sure, Series of Tubes works fine. What I'm wondering is, at the level at which you can say the internet is a series of tubes, how can you say that it isn't a truck? I think trucks works just as well if not better than tubes since the internet is really comprised of discreet packets not a continuous flow.
The internet is a like a truck that you dump things on, but if what you're sending is too big to fit on a single truck you have to split it up into separate trucks that are each sent individually and if the roads are congested your trucks will show up late. The trucks may choose different routes to the destination and show up out of order, and some trucks may get in a collision and thus not get delivered at all so you need a way to account for each truck and re-ship the pieces that went missing. Some roads don't allow large trucks so then the truck's load needs to be split up onto two smaller ones. And so on and so on.
Really, the reason he gets made fun of is that if you read everything he said, he obviously has no idea what he's talking about. Series of tubes is a decent analogy by accident.
I gotta say I really like the idea of a game that combines the Star Wars universe with the world's most famous bike race. If they can pull it off, that is, and I have to wonder if the iPhone is really going to be the best target for this... wait...
Doom RPG, Wolfenstein RPG? Okay, since I can't really imagine what that would look like ("you shoot the pinkie demon with the rocket launcher and hit for 100 damage"?), it does sound somewhat creative. Maybe, I guess. Not nearly as cool as "Tour de Force" though... :(
I disagree. After all, was it not the great patriot Patrick Henry who said: "Give me boobies, or give me death!"
Sure, sure, and if your primary concern when going to movies is that you're seeing the most popular one so you won't feel left out, then ticket sales is the best metric for you.
In all other cases, it's really not a very good metric.
Don't blame GameFAQs, the puzzles have always been of the impenetrable use-live-weasel-on-airliner-after-setting-fire-to-cake-in-sweden variety that everybody hates.
Wait, wait... That sounds like the puzzle from Anderson McShroomie 2 where you had to crash the airliner into the lit cake to create the mold for the key to the Egyptian Tomb that I spent WEEKS trying to solve and never could.
And you're telling me the weasel had to be alive?! I knew the weasel had something to do with it, but my weasel was dead because I'd drowned it in a toilet boil three scenes earlier. If the weasel had to be alive, why did it give me points for drowning the weasel?!
I hate adventure-puzzle games. :P
I can think of plenty of things where shipping them across the world in 90 minutes would be advantageous. I disagree that the internet has decreased shipping (the opposite in fact), but certainly most things aren't going to be worth the cost until it comes down a great deal. But here are some things that absolutely would be worth the cost today:
1) Initial wafer lots. With fabs thousands of miles away from the engineers who designed the parts, the longer it takes for samples to arrive and any possible bugs found could mean literally millions wasted on bad wafer starts. Turn around time on this kind of thing is critical.
2) Executives. For the big-wigs, video conferencing just doesn't cut it. They still fly the traditional way. Being able to hold meetings on the other side of the world without ruining their circadian rhythms would be very much worth the price.
Okay, that's actually all I've got right now... There's potential here, but with current prices no mass market to be sure. Maybe enough to marshal economies of scale? I don't know.
I also think Myst qualified as a puzzle game. Although it wasn't puzzles in the traditional sense, it still had clues and things to solve.
I'm not sure I understand... Myst's "turn the knobs the right way and push the buttons in the right order to make the doohikey do its thing" style is pretty much what I consider the definition of traditional puzzles.
Thanks for the correction (damn you proxy server), and yeah, OMM is a cornucopia of awesome articles.
Funnily enough, one of the guys from OMM was a writer for Portal. So I guess he got his chance to show how it should be done!
I think this explains perfectly well why the "old-school" style of puzzle game, ala Sierra and Lucas Arts, have gone by the wayside and it'll be a while till they come back.
I say "think" because my proxy blocked the link. Basically, if it describes a puzzle in which you have to create a disguise by using cat hair and scotch tape to make a mustache in order to imitate a guy who doesn't have a mustache, then you're at the right place. :P
I think it was Kings Quest 6 that basically broke my brain for puzzle games. At least Space Quest made me chuckle while making me do random retarded things.
Where is Maverick, Mastadon and Kestrel?
In the dustbin of fairly lame characters where they belong?
I mean, not that The Blob is the greatest character ever, or for that matter the inexplicable inclusion of Toad in X-Men, but really I can't blame them for changing the canon. Would I rather see any of those 3 characters, or would I rather see Deadpool and Gambit? Deadpool and Gambit, please! Though you never know, maybe they'll play some bit parts.
The only character that I would be sorely saddened to see stripped from the storyline of Wolvie's origin would be Sabertooth. He's a great character in his own right, essential to Logan's psychology, and the perfect foil for his "berserker trying to maintain control and do the right thing" mentality. But apparently I don't have to worry in this regard.
Except that Batman Begins was lame too.
Then on that basis I'm probably going to love the Wolverine movie.
Hell yeah. I basically won't see movies anymore except at the Alamo Drafthouse. Basically the same setup you describe, with tables between rows of seats. Having real food and beer makes the experience so much better by itself. But then factor in the extra leg room, and the fact that to get at the two empty seats in the middle of the row you don't have to climb over other people, and it's simply awesome. Also, for some reason people tend to be quieter there than at other theaters. Maybe because they have Chuck Norris threaten to choke you unconscious if you talk.
Oh, plus the downtown one has all kinds of fun stuff, like MST-styled movie riffings, sing-alongs, kung-fu marathons, and so on and so forth.
"I'm the best there is at what I do, and what I do ain't very nice."
Uh... prank phone calls?
Insurance fraud?
Throw me a bone here...
Do you want a cookie for this? Marx (you read him, have not you?) has "condemned" businessmen long ago by exposing the simple fact (quoting by memory): they make nice things not out of benevolence, but out of the desire for profit. If it were profitable for them to make shredded glass, they would've been making shredded glass.
Well gee, if I had known that you were already aware that your stated belief that market success was a good metric for saying what the best product was was flagrant non-factual bullshit, I never would have bothered saying something so obvious. So no, I don't want a cookie, I want you to stop saying BS you know isn't true. Market success != good product. It's not even the 'best' available metric. You know it, I know it, Marx knew it, the business person pushing the product knows it.
"Nonsense"? Very well, then -- we already have the system, you want: various organizations try to test/evaluate new products and issue their opinions. The "enforcement arm", banning "schlock" from the market, is the only "missing part".
It's nonsense because nobody was asking for an enforcement arm to prevent a bad product from being sold in the first place.
And yes, we do have the system of reviewers. And I say THAT, despite its many faults (mostly concerning bias which the businessman putting forward the product is never free from), is the best available metric for what is the best product. At the end of the day, which do you think is the better judge of, say, the quality of a car: The sales totals for that car, or the Consumer Reports review of that car? I say the latter, without hesitation.
Yes, of course. But, at the end, a product's success will still be measured by its market success -- among "the masses".
And therefore that's the best metric? No. Not at all. It's a stand-in for a good metric used by the apathetic. And you're apparently aware of this. So why you said otherwise, I'll never know or care. But at least we both agree it was wrong.
Market success is what has always driven business people.
Yes, but business people don't fool themselves into thinking market success == good product. No, they are quite well aware that they are often trying to achieve market success with an inferior product. They are well aware that they are essentially tricking people into buying it. If they weren't aware, they wouldn't be able to work around the product's flaws with marketing.
The point is that the business people are driven by money, and they are well aware of the obvious fact that making money doesn't necessarily mean making the best product by any metric. It means making money. That's all.
Only completely credulous consumers, the kind that thinks the quality of an OS is proven by number of installations, actually believe this is a good metric of quality. The business men selling it know that it isn't, but "quality" isn't something they care about other than the extent to which it affects sales. And hey if advertising can increase the apparent quality of the item to cover the gap, then that's just fine.
Would you suggest that a product which is garbage but has a good advertising campaign is actually a better product? Because the advertising drove the sales, and you're saying market success == best product, so this is a natural consequence of that line of thinking.
There is simply no better criteria known today -- the only alternative is having some sort of committee, that would review products (from toothpicks to movies) and decide, whether or not to let them be sold. I assure you, that system would suck much more...
Only because of that "decide whether or not to let them be sold" nonsense.
If more people actually read independent reviews of products, and used that to decide whether or not to buy a product, then yes this system would be much better. Because schlock that only gets sold because some marketing department came up with a clever way of making the product not look like crap would be less successful.
Eh... Wolvie had been doing his thing since the 70s. It's not like he was forgotten about until the 90s, he was already an extremely popular Marvel character.
No. Wolverine didn't ruin comics in the 90s. Comics in the 90s ruined themselves.
If they had been working on this movie say around 15-20 years ago, I think Clint Eastwood would have been perfect.
On the other hand, the odds of a comic adaptation not sucking at that time was around 1%. Now it's up at a lofty 10-20%. So it's a trade-off. :)
Oh and they're picking Hugh for the tie-in to the X-Men trilogy. That's a no-brainer.
Bah... I tested the link in "preview" and everything. They must have changed permissions. Damn them for ruining meh funneh.
Anyway, it was the second picture that shows up on http://images.google.com/images?q=moose%20butt
It was a moose butt.
At least the VPN codes shouldn't be that important. What possible damage can somone do VPNing into a network that has probably been completely obliterated by now?
I'm guessing here (of course I didn't RTFA, not that I anticipate it being in there), but I'd assume that they use an RSA dongle or some such meaning that just having the password wouldn't be enough.
It was perhaps the only time in my life I actually knew what it meant to "be at a loss for words"
I can believe it. I imagine I would have stared at him blankly for just long enough to realize he wasn't kidding before I had an aneurysm.
Who says TV isn't educational?
No kidding! I've learned the important lesson "Don't fuck with Summer Glau" from TV twice now!
Wow, that's an amazing vista. You sure were lucky, especially since from what friends from alaska have told me, it's more typical to grow up with this view out their window.