Steve Jobs also said during their recent shareholder meeting that they accept any PCs, not just Macs, in this recycling program. "We also take switchers."
Obviously I don't know if you're genuine and what you say about Hamitsu is true, but amen to the call for getting rid of mystical reverence for this stuff. If anything, your post shows that there is always another viewpoint when it comes to press pieces on martial arts declaring someone to be the best of something. I doubt Hamitsu is some unbeatable foe just because his teacher was "the last fighting ninja."
There's a lot of mystical reverence given to ninjas in the west. I'm sure what happened was impressive but would be less god-like if we saw a video. The article makes him seem like an invincible deity or something. Ninjitsu is more down-to-earth than that, you know? A form of stealthy military and danger avoidance training. They make it seem like people go to this place to train and become mythic ninjas who are inhumanly invincible. I guess I don't like any kind of deification in the press.
Couldn't the master sniper take out the bodyguard and target? I bet he could even shoot the handcuff chain. Ninja-boy's job would just to be in the room when it happens and sneak out with the briefcase.
You're greatly diminishing the skills of a trained sniper. It's not "merely carrying and firing a long range rifle" any more than ninjitsu is merely the art of wearing black clothes in a dark room and carrying smoke bombs. Snipers are trained assassins that also observe your movements--usually not even in the same room--and launch a surprise attack by killing you with one shot without you knowing someone's crosshair was on the back of your head.
I was hanging out one night with some friends, talking about nothing in particular, and somehow I was on the topic of possible secret government hybrid projects. I mentioned they could create real life freak mutant turtles, four of them. One of the guys there said they wouldn't be freaks, our generation would worship them as demigods. I look back on my pop culture obsessed generation and realize, my god, we really would worship four half-man, half-mutant turtles as demigods.
Re:Nintendo's Wii akin to Chevrolet's Nova?
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 1
Last I checked, SCO wasn't doing too well despite the massive amount of press they received in the tech media.
Although by your reasoning, I guess we should expect Gamecube sales to spike once the Wii is released.
My favorite aspect of Wal-mart is how all my friends complain about their evil work practices, but when I mention that nobody is forcing you to work at Wal-mart and you do have a choice to leave, I'm cut off and hit with some example of their evil. It's annoying when people argue emotion instead of facts. If you don't like Wal-mart don't shop or work there. But I know it's cool and hip, especially on Slashdot, to hate popular things like Wal-mart. I guess it makes you enlightened or something.
I've seen this argument posted before about other things in the news, and it doesn't fly. "There's no such thing as bad press" is totally wrong.
SCO sometimes had two articles a day on the Slashdot front page, and that didn't help them. I fail to see how discussing Nintendo's horrible marketing decisions somehow translate to positive buzz.
So, remind me again... why is this name bad?
Because nobody will know how to pronounce it. Because soccer moms will be trying to spit out this weird combination of letters that never appear together in the English language, and I guarantee they will always say it as "why." Because it looks and sounds stupid. Because it sounds diminished and weak compared to its codename, Revolution. Because it will look completely ridiculous to hear a narrator on a TV ad saying "UbiSoft presents...Red Cell, only for Wii." Because it confuses the general public and makes the hardcore gamers laugh. Because Nintendo was doing everything right with their new system up until this point. One thing's for sure, I'll never get my hopes up about a Nintendo console again--I keep getting burned with some surprise aspect that sucks.
Re:Depends on how they spin it
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
It's a classic example of a design-by-committee name. You just know a group of top execs in suits sat in a conference room, put a list of bullet points on the wall that the name had to describe, and overthought names like "Wii" with amusing talking points like "it's not about you and me, it's about Wii." The i's are supposed to be people? I mean, I don't get any of the points Nintendo made about the name. The fact they had to explain it in a page-long press release says a lot.
Defenders are saying it's memorable and pronounceable. No, it's not. I guarantee every soccer mom asking for this thing in the store will confusingly pronounce it "why." Do you that to be the first word out of your new customers' mouths?
Revolution was the best name for a console. Daring and memorable. If it's too big to pronounce for some Japanese speakers, they could have shortened it to Revo. Wii has just sealed the deal in its destruction--it doesn't matter what the console is like because its image is shot. You wouldn't buy an iPod if it was called an "iAzz." A brand name conveys a message and an image about the product itself and the company behind it, and Wii conveys a sense of bizarreness and out-of-touch marketing.
It's not even one of those names that's trying way too hard to be hardcore, like the "XBox 360." It's just plain bizarre and weird. The Wii? "I'm gonna go buy a Wii."
If they're so insistent on getting rid of the Revolution codename, maybe they should have just called the thing *the* Nintendo, and made their company name the brand name. You know, the way we all referred to the NES back in the day--"I'm going to buy a Nintendo."
Don't forget, this is Think Secret, who hasn't been right about anything for nine months now. Where is our touchscreen video iPod, our Mac mini PVR, our "iPhone," etc.?
It's weird how in tech journalism, you can get away with being wrong about nearly everything for almost a year and still get your stories read.
Because that's a flawed analogy. Architecture and presentation existed back then as they do today. You simply find the old styles endearing.
On the web, there were limitations in bandwidth and technology specification (HTML and CSS) that prevented the full potential of style in the 90s, so retaining a visual look from 1998 means ugly, crippled design that was tolerated because it was the best way we had to present data.
You're essentially wanting a return to table-based layouts, blink tags, frame-based layouts, and other horridness. "Golden age" of Internet growth? You're romanticizing big time.
I forgot to mention a big point. Adding up all of Nintendo's game systems, both console and handheld, Nintendo is actually #1 in market share in Japan compared to if you add up all of Sony's game systems. It's no wonder they're the only ones who don't sell at a loss, and it's an interesting fact that the press has yet to mention.
Xbox had its problems (especially in Japan), but Microsoft went from 0% market share to beating out Nintendo's Gamecube, a company with established name.
No they didn't, they tied with Nintendo at the #2 slot with 15% market share, and inched ahead at the very end. But Nintendo sold more Gamecubes last quarter than Microsoft sold XBox 360s, and in Japan, Microsoft is a non-player, which is important since so many console developers are over there.
I've been noticing many tech writers talking about how the 360 is "taking the nation by storm" and "everyone has to have one," but I don't know anyone who has one, I've never actually seen one in any store, and I'm beginning to seriously doubt that demand is that great considering Sony's, what, 70-80% market dominance? Everyone is waiting for the PS3, which will give three generations of Playstation gaming in one console and will probably be my very first Playstation purchase. And, of course, there's the Revolution, which is placing itself as the cheap secondary console everyone buys for the classic Nintendo games.
Seriously, these companies do not have your interest at heart in anything other feeding their stockholders.
Yeah, because capitalism is bad! Down with "the corporations!" Screw the content holders, they don't have any rights over distribution of their content. Right?
What amuses me is that people go through so much trouble to program and develop ways to distribute copyrighted material, then act surprised and upset when content holders use technology in the opposite way to protect those materials. Are you guys the only ones allowed to use technology on the Internet or something?
If people can use Bittorrent to download movies, I don't see why movie makers can't make movies you can't copy. Cause and effect. But I know this doesn't jive with the freeloader movement who thinks they're entitled to everything because it's on Piratebay.
Well the fact that Microsoft and the like use the words "Trusted Computing" and "Digital Rights Management" should clue you into the fact that they are using loaded phrases.
What does that have to do with a valid counterargument against them? When I see "Treacherous Computing," I know it's just going to be a bunch of loaded rhetoric trying to scare me into thinking my computer is magically going to shut me out. It's alarmism.
Intel is pushing a technology called Treacherous Computing
Honestly, I stopped reading at this point. If alarmist propaganda is all that you have to offer as a valid counterargument against TPM, there's no point in bothered with the rest of your opinion.
It's almost as bad as using the dollar sign in Micros...oh, I see lyou did that too. Yeah, great argument! A dollar sign! Sure pursuaded me.
You're saying that even though the page's author specifically said 10 pixels, that this problem is, in fact, the fault of the user agent for doing what the author said?
Absolutely. Maybe you didn't read the article, but it's talking about scaling for resolution-independent interfaces. If the user agent treats a px literally as a px, then everything shrinks when you get on a 1920w 15" screen, like on the Dell XPS laptop owned by the author.
The W3C would seem to agree with you in that they state that 1px in CSS isn't actually supposed to correspond to exactly 1 display pixel, but this doesn't extend to imagery or other display elements not styled with px units in CSS.
Which is why images are upscaled, and the article provides methods for including higher-fidelity versions in CSS in the event your image is resized. Also, SVG is provided.
For the second time, you're bitching about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the article. Using points instead of pixels doesn't change the fact that using a 1920w 15" screen means your text will be smaller, as will your graphics. Using 12pt instead of 12px does nothing to change that.
The article has to do with the difference between system pixels and device pixels. OS X Leopard (and Vista) will be using a resolution-independent UI that allows scaling. The article proposes several methods for allowing higher-fidelity images in the event your image is upscaled, and it also provides SVG.
What I'm saying is that you shouldn't have used the stupid 12px font and tiny adorable GIF highlights in the first place.
I already addressed px, but image resizing is exactly what the damn article is addressing. You're saying that web designers shouldn't have used images in the first place? Please, get a clue.
It's an issue because as monitors gain more and more screen fidelity, you want to use those extra pixels to increase text and graphics readability, not shrink them because your interface is tied to the ancient concept of relying on little square things called pixels. And when you scale up, you want to be able to use higher fidelity images so that they're not blurry from the scaling. This isn't about sites requiring a certain DPI for readability. It's about making it so when you're using a 1920 resolution in a 19" screen (as in the article author's Dell XPS laptop), you can still read the damn thing.
In other words, if you truly understood the issue, you wouldn't be saying that since it has nothing to do with the web site author. It's the interface displaying the web page that needs to compensate for the high DPI of the user's display so that a unit of distance is always the same no matter how many pixels.
Quoth the article:
On a screen with 1920×1200 resolution the Web site is going to be tiny, taking up less than 50% of the screen's width and half the screen's height. In terms of absolute size, the text will be much smaller and harder to read.
Now this may not be a huge problem yet, but as displays cram more and more pixels into the same amount of space, if a Web browser (or any other application for that matter) naively continues to say that one pixel according to the app's concept of pixels is the same as one pixel on the screen, then eventually you have text and images so small that they're impossible to view easily.
But hey, you're right, nobody needs higher DPI. We should all have to read things using a magnifying glass and rely forever on pixels and absolute sizes and assumptions that a system pixel is the same as a device pixel. And nobody'll ever need more than 640kb.
The distance of a meter isn't increasing, last I checked. So no, your silly meter comparison doesn't apply and comes off as rather ignorant of the issue being discussed in the article. Screen resolutions, on the other hand, are increasing.
Pixels come in system pixels and device pixels, and they aren't the same. Displays are packing more pixels into the same space. DPI is going up, but interfaces are still pixel-based. So the window you're looking at to view this comment might be 50% of its size if you plugged in a monitor that had a higher DPI. The more DPI in a display, the more device pixels you have for increased fidelity. Vector-based resizing is taking advantage of that to increase fidelity so that it's like you're reading a printed page, and WebKit is giving image authors options for increasing image fidelity.
Basically, moving off absolute pixel based interfaces has been a long time coming and is one of the last big things needed to move onto next-gen UIs.
Quoth the article:
On a screen with 1920×1200 resolution the Web site is going to be tiny, taking up less than 50% of the screen's width and half the screen's height. In terms of absolute size, the text will be much smaller and harder to read.
Now this may not be a huge problem yet, but as displays cram more and more pixels into the same amount of space, if a Web browser (or any other application for that matter) naively continues to say that one pixel according to the app's concept of pixels is the same as one pixel on the screen, then eventually you have text and images so small that they're impossible to view easily.
But hey, if you think everyone should be forced to stick with pixel-based interfaces instead of vector-based ones, so that you need a magnifying glass to see anything on a 1920-width 15" display, have at it.
Scaling is the right approach, but it's the user (*not* the developer) who should be in control.
Where does it say the user will have no control? Presumably, OS X Leopard, like Windows, will let you set your interface DPI.
Is there something I missed in the article that is making people bitch? This isn't the first post I've seen from someone complaining that control over their beloved DPI is being taken away when it's not.
Slashdot Mirror
Since this is an AMD problem, expect lots of justifications and defensiveness compared to if this was an Intel problem.
Steve Jobs also said during their recent shareholder meeting that they accept any PCs, not just Macs, in this recycling program. "We also take switchers."
Obviously I don't know if you're genuine and what you say about Hamitsu is true, but amen to the call for getting rid of mystical reverence for this stuff. If anything, your post shows that there is always another viewpoint when it comes to press pieces on martial arts declaring someone to be the best of something. I doubt Hamitsu is some unbeatable foe just because his teacher was "the last fighting ninja."
You realize you're probably the coolest dude to ever post on Slashdot, right?
I can just hear Splinter's old voice narrating your post..."I trained, many years ago, under Grand Master Hatsumi..."
Yes, I realize that makes me another dorky westerner.
There's a lot of mystical reverence given to ninjas in the west. I'm sure what happened was impressive but would be less god-like if we saw a video. The article makes him seem like an invincible deity or something. Ninjitsu is more down-to-earth than that, you know? A form of stealthy military and danger avoidance training. They make it seem like people go to this place to train and become mythic ninjas who are inhumanly invincible. I guess I don't like any kind of deification in the press.
Couldn't the master sniper take out the bodyguard and target? I bet he could even shoot the handcuff chain. Ninja-boy's job would just to be in the room when it happens and sneak out with the briefcase.
You're greatly diminishing the skills of a trained sniper. It's not "merely carrying and firing a long range rifle" any more than ninjitsu is merely the art of wearing black clothes in a dark room and carrying smoke bombs. Snipers are trained assassins that also observe your movements--usually not even in the same room--and launch a surprise attack by killing you with one shot without you knowing someone's crosshair was on the back of your head.
I was hanging out one night with some friends, talking about nothing in particular, and somehow I was on the topic of possible secret government hybrid projects. I mentioned they could create real life freak mutant turtles, four of them. One of the guys there said they wouldn't be freaks, our generation would worship them as demigods. I look back on my pop culture obsessed generation and realize, my god, we really would worship four half-man, half-mutant turtles as demigods.
Last I checked, SCO wasn't doing too well despite the massive amount of press they received in the tech media.
Although by your reasoning, I guess we should expect Gamecube sales to spike once the Wii is released.
My favorite aspect of Wal-mart is how all my friends complain about their evil work practices, but when I mention that nobody is forcing you to work at Wal-mart and you do have a choice to leave, I'm cut off and hit with some example of their evil. It's annoying when people argue emotion instead of facts. If you don't like Wal-mart don't shop or work there. But I know it's cool and hip, especially on Slashdot, to hate popular things like Wal-mart. I guess it makes you enlightened or something.
I've seen this argument posted before about other things in the news, and it doesn't fly. "There's no such thing as bad press" is totally wrong.
SCO sometimes had two articles a day on the Slashdot front page, and that didn't help them. I fail to see how discussing Nintendo's horrible marketing decisions somehow translate to positive buzz.
So, remind me again... why is this name bad?
Because nobody will know how to pronounce it. Because soccer moms will be trying to spit out this weird combination of letters that never appear together in the English language, and I guarantee they will always say it as "why." Because it looks and sounds stupid. Because it sounds diminished and weak compared to its codename, Revolution. Because it will look completely ridiculous to hear a narrator on a TV ad saying "UbiSoft presents...Red Cell, only for Wii." Because it confuses the general public and makes the hardcore gamers laugh. Because Nintendo was doing everything right with their new system up until this point. One thing's for sure, I'll never get my hopes up about a Nintendo console again--I keep getting burned with some surprise aspect that sucks.
It's a classic example of a design-by-committee name. You just know a group of top execs in suits sat in a conference room, put a list of bullet points on the wall that the name had to describe, and overthought names like "Wii" with amusing talking points like "it's not about you and me, it's about Wii." The i's are supposed to be people? I mean, I don't get any of the points Nintendo made about the name. The fact they had to explain it in a page-long press release says a lot.
Defenders are saying it's memorable and pronounceable. No, it's not. I guarantee every soccer mom asking for this thing in the store will confusingly pronounce it "why." Do you that to be the first word out of your new customers' mouths?
Revolution was the best name for a console. Daring and memorable. If it's too big to pronounce for some Japanese speakers, they could have shortened it to Revo. Wii has just sealed the deal in its destruction--it doesn't matter what the console is like because its image is shot. You wouldn't buy an iPod if it was called an "iAzz." A brand name conveys a message and an image about the product itself and the company behind it, and Wii conveys a sense of bizarreness and out-of-touch marketing.
It's not even one of those names that's trying way too hard to be hardcore, like the "XBox 360." It's just plain bizarre and weird. The Wii? "I'm gonna go buy a Wii."
If they're so insistent on getting rid of the Revolution codename, maybe they should have just called the thing *the* Nintendo, and made their company name the brand name. You know, the way we all referred to the NES back in the day--"I'm going to buy a Nintendo."
Don't forget, this is Think Secret, who hasn't been right about anything for nine months now. Where is our touchscreen video iPod, our Mac mini PVR, our "iPhone," etc.?
It's weird how in tech journalism, you can get away with being wrong about nearly everything for almost a year and still get your stories read.
Because that's a flawed analogy. Architecture and presentation existed back then as they do today. You simply find the old styles endearing.
On the web, there were limitations in bandwidth and technology specification (HTML and CSS) that prevented the full potential of style in the 90s, so retaining a visual look from 1998 means ugly, crippled design that was tolerated because it was the best way we had to present data.
You're essentially wanting a return to table-based layouts, blink tags, frame-based layouts, and other horridness. "Golden age" of Internet growth? You're romanticizing big time.
I forgot to mention a big point. Adding up all of Nintendo's game systems, both console and handheld, Nintendo is actually #1 in market share in Japan compared to if you add up all of Sony's game systems. It's no wonder they're the only ones who don't sell at a loss, and it's an interesting fact that the press has yet to mention.
Xbox had its problems (especially in Japan), but Microsoft went from 0% market share to beating out Nintendo's Gamecube, a company with established name.
No they didn't, they tied with Nintendo at the #2 slot with 15% market share, and inched ahead at the very end. But Nintendo sold more Gamecubes last quarter than Microsoft sold XBox 360s, and in Japan, Microsoft is a non-player, which is important since so many console developers are over there.
I've been noticing many tech writers talking about how the 360 is "taking the nation by storm" and "everyone has to have one," but I don't know anyone who has one, I've never actually seen one in any store, and I'm beginning to seriously doubt that demand is that great considering Sony's, what, 70-80% market dominance? Everyone is waiting for the PS3, which will give three generations of Playstation gaming in one console and will probably be my very first Playstation purchase. And, of course, there's the Revolution, which is placing itself as the cheap secondary console everyone buys for the classic Nintendo games.
Seriously, these companies do not have your interest at heart in anything other feeding their stockholders.
Yeah, because capitalism is bad! Down with "the corporations!" Screw the content holders, they don't have any rights over distribution of their content. Right?
What amuses me is that people go through so much trouble to program and develop ways to distribute copyrighted material, then act surprised and upset when content holders use technology in the opposite way to protect those materials. Are you guys the only ones allowed to use technology on the Internet or something?
If people can use Bittorrent to download movies, I don't see why movie makers can't make movies you can't copy. Cause and effect. But I know this doesn't jive with the freeloader movement who thinks they're entitled to everything because it's on Piratebay.
Well the fact that Microsoft and the like use the words "Trusted Computing" and "Digital Rights Management" should clue you into the fact that they are using loaded phrases.
What does that have to do with a valid counterargument against them? When I see "Treacherous Computing," I know it's just going to be a bunch of loaded rhetoric trying to scare me into thinking my computer is magically going to shut me out. It's alarmism.
Intel is pushing a technology called Treacherous Computing
Honestly, I stopped reading at this point. If alarmist propaganda is all that you have to offer as a valid counterargument against TPM, there's no point in bothered with the rest of your opinion.
It's almost as bad as using the dollar sign in Micros...oh, I see lyou did that too. Yeah, great argument! A dollar sign! Sure pursuaded me.
You're saying that even though the page's author specifically said 10 pixels, that this problem is, in fact, the fault of the user agent for doing what the author said?
Absolutely. Maybe you didn't read the article, but it's talking about scaling for resolution-independent interfaces. If the user agent treats a px literally as a px, then everything shrinks when you get on a 1920w 15" screen, like on the Dell XPS laptop owned by the author.
The W3C would seem to agree with you in that they state that 1px in CSS isn't actually supposed to correspond to exactly 1 display pixel, but this doesn't extend to imagery or other display elements not styled with px units in CSS.
Which is why images are upscaled, and the article provides methods for including higher-fidelity versions in CSS in the event your image is resized. Also, SVG is provided.
For the second time, you're bitching about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the article. Using points instead of pixels doesn't change the fact that using a 1920w 15" screen means your text will be smaller, as will your graphics. Using 12pt instead of 12px does nothing to change that.
The article has to do with the difference between system pixels and device pixels. OS X Leopard (and Vista) will be using a resolution-independent UI that allows scaling. The article proposes several methods for allowing higher-fidelity images in the event your image is upscaled, and it also provides SVG.
What I'm saying is that you shouldn't have used the stupid 12px font and tiny adorable GIF highlights in the first place.
I already addressed px, but image resizing is exactly what the damn article is addressing. You're saying that web designers shouldn't have used images in the first place? Please, get a clue.
No, that's changing the monitor resolution. Setting the DPI in the INTERFACE is a totally different thing.
Again, there are system pixels and there are device pixels. There are two kinds.
It's an issue because as monitors gain more and more screen fidelity, you want to use those extra pixels to increase text and graphics readability, not shrink them because your interface is tied to the ancient concept of relying on little square things called pixels. And when you scale up, you want to be able to use higher fidelity images so that they're not blurry from the scaling. This isn't about sites requiring a certain DPI for readability. It's about making it so when you're using a 1920 resolution in a 19" screen (as in the article author's Dell XPS laptop), you can still read the damn thing.
In other words, if you truly understood the issue, you wouldn't be saying that since it has nothing to do with the web site author. It's the interface displaying the web page that needs to compensate for the high DPI of the user's display so that a unit of distance is always the same no matter how many pixels.
Quoth the article:
But hey, you're right, nobody needs higher DPI. We should all have to read things using a magnifying glass and rely forever on pixels and absolute sizes and assumptions that a system pixel is the same as a device pixel. And nobody'll ever need more than 640kb.
The distance of a meter isn't increasing, last I checked. So no, your silly meter comparison doesn't apply and comes off as rather ignorant of the issue being discussed in the article. Screen resolutions, on the other hand, are increasing.
Pixels come in system pixels and device pixels, and they aren't the same. Displays are packing more pixels into the same space. DPI is going up, but interfaces are still pixel-based. So the window you're looking at to view this comment might be 50% of its size if you plugged in a monitor that had a higher DPI. The more DPI in a display, the more device pixels you have for increased fidelity. Vector-based resizing is taking advantage of that to increase fidelity so that it's like you're reading a printed page, and WebKit is giving image authors options for increasing image fidelity.
Basically, moving off absolute pixel based interfaces has been a long time coming and is one of the last big things needed to move onto next-gen UIs.
Quoth the article:
But hey, if you think everyone should be forced to stick with pixel-based interfaces instead of vector-based ones, so that you need a magnifying glass to see anything on a 1920-width 15" display, have at it.
Scaling is the right approach, but it's the user (*not* the developer) who should be in control.
Where does it say the user will have no control? Presumably, OS X Leopard, like Windows, will let you set your interface DPI.
Is there something I missed in the article that is making people bitch? This isn't the first post I've seen from someone complaining that control over their beloved DPI is being taken away when it's not.