Sounds like an attempt to milk the cash cow to me. I suspect the only way these micro expansions will work out is if they also come with a micro price.
When I was working in Germany an an intern, I had people speak to me in English at first when I started the internship, because they knew I was American. I spoke pretty good German, and I wanted to speak only German, so instead of trying to convince them not to speak English, I just listened to what they were saying and responded in German. After a few weeks of speaking only German with them, nobody bothered to speak to me in English any more.
My English skills did come in handy there. Someone was speaking with some technical support in Ireland, and couldn't understand the tech support's strong Irish accent. They figured that since my native language was English, I might do better, so they had me speak to tech support. The problem was that the guy's Irish accent was so incredibly strong, that I could scarcely understand him either. I eventually got the information we needed, but I had to get the tech support guy to repeat himself a lot.
When I worked in Germany, we wrote all our code using English variable and function names, even though I was the only one there whose first language was English. I think that was because English is pretty standard when it comes to programming. Major programming languages all use English keywords, and much documentation is in English. I think a programmer would have a difficult time not knowing any English. Some of the people I worked with had better English skills than others, but they all knew at least enough to get by. I did see a good amount of code (unrelated to work) that used German variable and function names, but it was definitely the minority.
Interestingly enough, we wrote all our comments in German. I thought this was a pretty good balance. I could code like I normally do with English names, and explain what was happening in German. It lead to pretty readable and standardized code with useful explanations in the native language.
When I worked in Germany, it seemed to be common to write code in English. The keywords (this was C++) were of course the same, but where I worked the variable and function names were also in English. The comments that explained what was happening, however, were in German. That was the way I coded as well. I'd write code like I normally did, but I would write my comments in German.
I did see some code written in Germany that used German variable names, but English seemed to be much more common.
As for word order, I never heard of any problems with programming languages. My coworkers would sometimes get word order wrong when speaking English, but I never saw any programming-related problems. I think that natural languages are much more difficult to get right than programming languages.
I suspect that mastadons had a harder time hiding from people, reproduced at a much slower rate than the other animals, and had issues with their food supply relating to the change of climate at the end of the last ice age (they no doubt required a lot of food to survive). That combined with steady human predation no doubt drove them to extinction. However, I don't think humans were the primary cause of mammoth extinction. I imagine that if they reproduced as quickly as horse or deer, and ate much less food, they would still be around today.
What I find strange is that horses became extinct in the Americas, but not in Eurasia. I don't see any cause for that to happen.
Canada would seem to throw a chain saw into the theory that this is driven by population density.
That's what I thought at first, but then I remembered that 80-90% of Canada's population is within 100 miles of the U.S. border, mostly living in urban areas. Canada's population density may be low as a whole, but Canada can be divided into huge areas where there are hardly any people and small areas where there are lots of people. I think it's for this reason that it's easier to get broadband to more people in Canada.
I think it's more than public art. It's probably related to the US Postal Service's Star Wars publicity campaign. They are selling all sorts of special Star Wars stamps and post offices are filled with Star Wars posters.
It wouldn't surprise me if they were also installing R2D2 mailboxes around the country.
The United States was a rough place back then. I recall an incident that occurred in Congress (I think in the Senate) back in the 1840's or 1850's, where one senator got really angry with another, and severely beat the other senator with a cane right there on the Senate floor. Backwoodsmen-types who were elected to Congress from the newer states on the frontier tended to be particularly prone to rowdy behavior.
It seems to me like there are two invalid assumptions here.
1. 100% of Microsoft's legal fees revolve around Windows and have nothing to do with any of their other numerous products. 2. 100% of Microsoft's legal fees are spent for patent-related reasons.
It seems to me like that it would be better to figure out the amount of money spent on patent-related subjects and then divide by the total sales numbers. Then there would be a bit of work to do dividing that up proportionally among the products depending on what % of the total sales numbers each product contributes.
Only then could we come up with a proper "Patent Tax" number for Windows.
Ironically, the last time I climbed Mount Whitney I found that the summit had excellent coverage. I couldn't get a signal while climbing up the mountain, but once at the top, it seemed that everyone had a signal. I'm guessing that because the summit is so high it is within line-of-sight of numerous towers down in the valleys.
It's a bit hard to talk on the phone, however, when even after sitting around for 5 minutes you are still panting because the air is so thin up there.:)
Try ordering it from Nintendo.com. I did just that before Christmas, and I got the component cables within a week (well before Christmas day). You won't have to run all over trying to track one down.
I ended up getting a second remote/nunchuk direct from Nintendo too; However, I ordered at the beginning of December and didn't get them until about 5 days before Christmas.
Wii Sports is a lot of fun, especially with multiple players. Other good games are Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz and Rayman: Raving Rabbids. I own all of these and Zelda, and even though I play a lot of Zelda, my favorite so far is Rayman. The mini games are simple, but very fun. The sense of humor of the game is great. The rabbits say and do such silly things, that I almost forget what I'm doing sometimes because I'm laughing so much.
None of the other games so far have appealed to me much (although Elebits could be alright), but there are definitely some good ones coming next year.
It's a lot more difficult to level up at work. You usually need an enormous amount of experience to level up. Some poor saps never level up at all, not even after 20 years of grinding. Others level up quickly, not because they have the necessary experience, but because they're good buddies with the guild leader. That makes it much more frustrating than WoW.
If I got a pay raise after a week of grinding, I'd sure enjoy work a lot more.
Re:Be sure to *look* at them first
on
Plasma or LCD?
·
· Score: 1
I bought my flat panel way back when the lowest response times available were 30ms, which seems downright sluggish nowadays. Even at that refresh rate I have never noticed any artifacts or ghosting when I play games. I have no doubt that an 8 ms refresh rate would be even nicer, but I sure prefer my current flat panel to a CRT.
Flat panels are sure a lot nicer and cheaper than they used to be. I imagine I'll get another one a few years down the road. I still have only CRT televisions, primarily due to financial reasons (and me not watching a lot of TV). By the time I get around to buying a flat panel HDTV television, they will be a lot better and way cheaper.
Agreed. Apple is doing very well, and a few options scandals aren't going to affect the overall profitability of the company. Those who were dumping stock because a minor bit of bad news were thinking very short-term. There were obviously a lot of people who were aware of the long-term prospects of Apple and snatched up stock at cheaper prices, resulting in the stock ending up at about the same place it started yesterday.
I would have bought some this morning if I had the free cash. It was like a sale on Apple stock.
1. They wanted to concentrate on gameplay rather than the visual elements 2. They wanted it to be simple to get the non-gamers interested in the Wii. 3. They're probably planning to release an actual Mario Tennis/Golf game a couple years down the road that has much more to it than the tennis game in Wii Sports.
It's true. I was playing Mario Kart on my son's Nintento DS about 6 months ago and I discovered that I could race with other people who were looking to play at the same time. There weren't any people waiting to play in my region, but when I selected the option to look for players worldwide, I ended up racing several people with names comprised of Japanese characters.
I lost to the Japanese players, but it sure was fun being able to play Mario Kart with some random people on the other side of the world. I hope the inevitable Wii version offers the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like an attempt to milk the cash cow to me. I suspect the only way these micro expansions will work out is if they also come with a micro price.
When I was working in Germany an an intern, I had people speak to me in English at first when I started the internship, because they knew I was American. I spoke pretty good German, and I wanted to speak only German, so instead of trying to convince them not to speak English, I just listened to what they were saying and responded in German. After a few weeks of speaking only German with them, nobody bothered to speak to me in English any more.
My English skills did come in handy there. Someone was speaking with some technical support in Ireland, and couldn't understand the tech support's strong Irish accent. They figured that since my native language was English, I might do better, so they had me speak to tech support. The problem was that the guy's Irish accent was so incredibly strong, that I could scarcely understand him either. I eventually got the information we needed, but I had to get the tech support guy to repeat himself a lot.
...they arrive in a series of tubes! That's why we must limit bribes: they clog up the tubes.
...was that Duke Nukem Forever wasn't released in 2007. I was sure that this year was the year!
Real ID is in its death throes, and any signs of life are just last gasps.
Didn't Cheney say the same thing about the insurgency in Iraq a couple years ago?
When I worked in Germany, we wrote all our code using English variable and function names, even though I was the only one there whose first language was English. I think that was because English is pretty standard when it comes to programming. Major programming languages all use English keywords, and much documentation is in English. I think a programmer would have a difficult time not knowing any English. Some of the people I worked with had better English skills than others, but they all knew at least enough to get by. I did see a good amount of code (unrelated to work) that used German variable and function names, but it was definitely the minority.
Interestingly enough, we wrote all our comments in German. I thought this was a pretty good balance. I could code like I normally do with English names, and explain what was happening in German. It lead to pretty readable and standardized code with useful explanations in the native language.
When I worked in Germany, it seemed to be common to write code in English. The keywords (this was C++) were of course the same, but where I worked the variable and function names were also in English. The comments that explained what was happening, however, were in German. That was the way I coded as well. I'd write code like I normally did, but I would write my comments in German.
I did see some code written in Germany that used German variable names, but English seemed to be much more common.
As for word order, I never heard of any problems with programming languages. My coworkers would sometimes get word order wrong when speaking English, but I never saw any programming-related problems. I think that natural languages are much more difficult to get right than programming languages.
I suspect that mastadons had a harder time hiding from people, reproduced at a much slower rate than the other animals, and had issues with their food supply relating to the change of climate at the end of the last ice age (they no doubt required a lot of food to survive). That combined with steady human predation no doubt drove them to extinction. However, I don't think humans were the primary cause of mammoth extinction. I imagine that if they reproduced as quickly as horse or deer, and ate much less food, they would still be around today.
What I find strange is that horses became extinct in the Americas, but not in Eurasia. I don't see any cause for that to happen.
Canada would seem to throw a chain saw into the theory that this is driven by population density.
That's what I thought at first, but then I remembered that 80-90% of Canada's population is within 100 miles of the U.S. border, mostly living in urban areas. Canada's population density may be low as a whole, but Canada can be divided into huge areas where there are hardly any people and small areas where there are lots of people. I think it's for this reason that it's easier to get broadband to more people in Canada.
I think it's more than public art. It's probably related to the US Postal Service's Star Wars publicity campaign. They are selling all sorts of special Star Wars stamps and post offices are filled with Star Wars posters.
It wouldn't surprise me if they were also installing R2D2 mailboxes around the country.
Ah, I finally found a link to something talking about this incident
The United States was a rough place back then. I recall an incident that occurred in Congress (I think in the Senate) back in the 1840's or 1850's, where one senator got really angry with another, and severely beat the other senator with a cane right there on the Senate floor. Backwoodsmen-types who were elected to Congress from the newer states on the frontier tended to be particularly prone to rowdy behavior.
It seems to me like there are two invalid assumptions here.
1. 100% of Microsoft's legal fees revolve around Windows and have nothing to do with any of their other numerous products.
2. 100% of Microsoft's legal fees are spent for patent-related reasons.
It seems to me like that it would be better to figure out the amount of money spent on patent-related subjects and then divide by the total sales numbers. Then there would be a bit of work to do dividing that up proportionally among the products depending on what % of the total sales numbers each product contributes.
Only then could we come up with a proper "Patent Tax" number for Windows.
Ironically, the last time I climbed Mount Whitney I found that the summit had excellent coverage. I couldn't get a signal while climbing up the mountain, but once at the top, it seemed that everyone had a signal. I'm guessing that because the summit is so high it is within line-of-sight of numerous towers down in the valleys. It's a bit hard to talk on the phone, however, when even after sitting around for 5 minutes you are still panting because the air is so thin up there. :)
Try ordering it from Nintendo.com. I did just that before Christmas, and I got the component cables within a week (well before Christmas day). You won't have to run all over trying to track one down.
I ended up getting a second remote/nunchuk direct from Nintendo too; However, I ordered at the beginning of December and didn't get them until about 5 days before Christmas.
Wii Sports is a lot of fun, especially with multiple players. Other good games are Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz and Rayman: Raving Rabbids. I own all of these and Zelda, and even though I play a lot of Zelda, my favorite so far is Rayman. The mini games are simple, but very fun. The sense of humor of the game is great. The rabbits say and do such silly things, that I almost forget what I'm doing sometimes because I'm laughing so much.
None of the other games so far have appealed to me much (although Elebits could be alright), but there are definitely some good ones coming next year.
It's a lot more difficult to level up at work. You usually need an enormous amount of experience to level up. Some poor saps never level up at all, not even after 20 years of grinding. Others level up quickly, not because they have the necessary experience, but because they're good buddies with the guild leader. That makes it much more frustrating than WoW.
If I got a pay raise after a week of grinding, I'd sure enjoy work a lot more.
I bought my flat panel way back when the lowest response times available were 30ms, which seems downright sluggish nowadays. Even at that refresh rate I have never noticed any artifacts or ghosting when I play games. I have no doubt that an 8 ms refresh rate would be even nicer, but I sure prefer my current flat panel to a CRT.
Flat panels are sure a lot nicer and cheaper than they used to be. I imagine I'll get another one a few years down the road. I still have only CRT televisions, primarily due to financial reasons (and me not watching a lot of TV). By the time I get around to buying a flat panel HDTV television, they will be a lot better and way cheaper.
Agreed. Apple is doing very well, and a few options scandals aren't going to affect the overall profitability of the company. Those who were dumping stock because a minor bit of bad news were thinking very short-term. There were obviously a lot of people who were aware of the long-term prospects of Apple and snatched up stock at cheaper prices, resulting in the stock ending up at about the same place it started yesterday.
I would have bought some this morning if I had the free cash. It was like a sale on Apple stock.
Yeah, I read it as a free Wii as well. An "l" is sure close to an "i".
1. They wanted to concentrate on gameplay rather than the visual elements
2. They wanted it to be simple to get the non-gamers interested in the Wii.
3. They're probably planning to release an actual Mario Tennis/Golf game a couple years down the road that has much more to it than the tennis game in Wii Sports.
Ok, which one of you jokers modded the parent post as Informative!
It's true. I was playing Mario Kart on my son's Nintento DS about 6 months ago and I discovered that I could race with other people who were looking to play at the same time. There weren't any people waiting to play in my region, but when I selected the option to look for players worldwide, I ended up racing several people with names comprised of Japanese characters.
I lost to the Japanese players, but it sure was fun being able to play Mario Kart with some random people on the other side of the world. I hope the inevitable Wii version offers the same thing.
That explains why so many people like the taste of the Ugly Fruit.
Quite true. People could be doing something else that results in more pollution.
For example, when I'm not driving I go burn tires out in my back yard for fun. Driving more would result in less pollution in my case.