Most people just don't realize how much of a coping mechanism gaming can become. And trust me, I speak from personal experience, as someone who tried to get a family member away from a game, but they wouldn't budge. They'd get up at 10:00 AM and sleep at 4:00 AM, and do basically nothing but play this game.
Basically, they were dealing with a loss of their own, and that was their way of dealing with it. It took over: Their health and money problems took a toll, and they ended up passing away at a relatively young age.
You know, I get bitter every time someone comes up with this "personal responsibilty" crap that comes up every time something related to an addiction comes up. THEY TRIED THAT -- THE ADDICTION IS TOO MUCH, AND THEY NEED HELP.
I'm just angry that our society is molded in such a way that people who need help get laughed at if it's a certain kind of ailment. I just hope your family doesn't have to go through what mine did.
My feeling is Apple's stuck between a rock and a hard place; they really don't feel they can come up with a major innovation until they can start moving the line to a new processor. Because IBM did nothing to make G5s possible on the Powerbook, it weakened the entire line.
Jesus, G5s have been around for two years, and we've seen no room for portable innovation in terms of horsepower.
That said, adding shitloads of new features like the ones you're suggesting kinda goes against Apple's core minimalism philosophy. It's not conservatism, it's not fucking with a good thing too much.
I can't believe how fucking wrongheaded this statement is. It basically emphasizes that no growth should happen in user interface design.
By this logic, we should all still be writing on cave walls, walking around naked. I should still be designing newspapers on a linotype machine and have headlines going six layers deep.
I think what you MEANT to say was this: Don't sacrifice convention for the sake of art. That's entirely reasonable and does not take away from evolution in interface design.
The fundamental you speak of is just not very fundamental if all it does is force us into a black hole where there's no room for growth.
My god, you're fucking closed-minded and conservative to new ideas.
Some guy didn't know he couldn't right click, so he lost a giant project?
Goddamn, buddy, your coworker is just a moron who you didn't train enough.
This isn't Apple's fault. They don't cause trouble. Instead, your utter lack of training of the staff caused it.
How much productivity would've been lost if you had a two-hour basic training session for members of your staff? Not much, and it would've saved lots of trouble.
Jesus Christ, don't blame Apple for your shortcomings.
"No offense, but do you really think you know more about the best way to run a TV network than they do? Do you really think it's so simple that you can come up with a better plan just by thinking about it for a couple of minutes in your armchair?"
From my reading on the subject, TV is mortified of losing Nielsen ratings, which is why they haven't improved the ratings system. If they switch to TiVo ratings, will the ratings show a huge wathershed? Even if that isn't the case, they don't want to take that chance.
Take a look at premium cable TV networks like HBO and Showtime, and you'll see the solution. The advertising model doesn't exist on HBO, and look what they have -- some of the best shows on television. You'd never be able to do a show like "Bullshit" on broadcast.
Finallly, all I said about the topic was that the system was flawed and looked at what the series is doing now rather than what it could be doing in a few years. And television is going out of its way not to improve it. Neilsen families still fill out paper booklets.
I simply feel, along with lots of fans of great shows that died before their time like The Job and Greg the Bunny, that television wants to eat its dessert before it eats breakfast, lunch and dinner. And that's what's killing them.
Personally, my beef with TV is that good shows are getting cancelled because the terrible ratings system focuses on the cream of the ratings crop rather than what has the most potential to grow. They're focusing on empty ratings at the cost of long-term success.
If they could modify the formula so that the shows with potential could get as much playing time as those that are already hits, I would be all for it right now. The crap factor is just terrible on TV right now.
"I'm sick of morons getting modded up for anti-oil baron FUD. Oh my God, the world's gonna collapse because James D. Rockefeller is sucking up all the oil."
Does this sound pathetic and wrong to you? Because it does to me. And this mindset is what we're running into here.
Parent, get off your high horse and see that this decision needed to be made because we've gone far too long acting as if MS is invincible to the court of law, and instead of making decisions that damage MS as much as MS damaged Netscape or Real by playing unfairly to get their standards out there.
It isn't fair to companies that came up with the winning formulas first that they get punished because all MS has to do to combat them is put their competing technology into a product that the consumer was going to buy whether or not the technology was in there.
Call it anti-MS FUD all you want, but the fact of the matter is, not holding feet to the fire and looking on as if what MS has done to get ahead was ethical is just motherfucking wrong. The consumer loses nothing by having to download a ten-meg program off the web instead of having it bundled and set as default through no action of theirs.
Hey guys, I got a great idea.
on
Windows XP N a Bust
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So, Microsoft has a monopoly on a portion of the market. Let's force them, after they've already created this monopoly due to unfair business practices, to undo it through a third product nobody will buy.
Wastes your time in mind. Why would anyone buy a product with less in it when there's already an established product with more, when the more is really shitty? Tell me. I want to know.
The EU's decision, let's face it, was really fucking stupid and will do no good for anyone. Perhaps, instead, they should've done something more crippling, like take out Media Player in EVERY version and force people to download it. But no, that would hurt Microsoft more than not at all.
Why do we need some voice telling us the name of the article when we can read it ourselves?
But instead of being willing to understand it, we have a few lonely holdouts who don't want to touch Flash with a 5-meg pole, which is all it takes to download it.
Dude, Flash has over 90% of the audience. It's as heavily-used as PDF and comes standard with most web browsers. If you can't view a page with Flash on it, that's your fault for not spending five minutes to download it.
You apparently don't understand this operating system one bit, are using an old version, and think that it's Apple's fault that you don't understand it.
First of all, YOUR MOST IMPORTANT APPS ARE AVAILABLE TO YOU IF YOU UPGRADE. If you converted to OSX without upgrading to OSX native apps, you're just stupid.
Secondly, you've only been using it a month, and it sounds like with a lot of resistance. Take some time to understand it before you bash it.
Finally, understand the architecture differences between OSX and UNIX before you screw with UNIX on OSX. It might be a little eye-opening for you.
You should really think harder about making the OS work for you, rather than complaining about it all the time.
"Hey guys, I got a great idea!"
"What's that, Bill?"
"Well, I've been downloading copies of Napoleon Dynamite off of this site called Suprnova.org using this awesome new technology called Bittorrent!"
"What does it do?"
"Well, guys, you won't believe it: It decentralizes the process completely -- no ugly middleman file-sharing program to get in the way! Think we can harness it?"
... six months later...
"Well, Bill, here we go, we created this technology called Avalanche, it's just like WMA! 30% better and it uses the patented Microsoft DRM!"
"Damn bitches, watch this shit take over the market!"
... six months later...
"What the hell, guys? Why is Apple having so much more luck with their video-distribution technology?"
"Umm...... because we completely missed the point of what BitTorrent's all about........ we added a degree of middleman DRM to make sure that nobody was stealing the new Counting Crows album."
"Well, here's what I'll do, guys. I'll mass-market the fuck out of this, and we'll still be winners anyway! I mean, I've been doing that since 1990, why can't I succeed at it now?"
... twelve months later...
"What do you mean that I'm losing money on this grand experiment? If anyone should be able to push through the status quo, I should! Goddamn it, what the hell happened to that PDF killer I made that wasn't cross-compatible with everything?"
"Well, Bill, your mom always told me that you couldn't keep your hands out of the cookie jar."
"Fuck you guys... I'm going to play in the ball room in my mansion."
* Bill_Gates has left #bad_ideas
NO CARRIER
Uh-oh, sounds like the arrogant MIT student is getting ticked off that someone had an idea!
Seriously man, don't knock it until you've seen its potential. I mean christ, how is this even marked as +2 informative still? He admits three things in his post:
1. He's arrogant and doesn't like the idea
2. He hasn't read the article
3. He HASN'T EVEN READ THE ENTIRE POST, LET ALONE THE LINK, because he thinks the guy is getting an engineering PhD.
And he has the gall to call this the second-lamest thing he's seen all day. Personally, I think his post is the lamest thing I've seen all day, because it's such a blind dismissal of new technology. If you've actually done your homework and read up on computer history, you'd know that doing that is the dumbest possible thing you could do in this industry. You might as well throw the crow in the oven, because you'll be eating it in a couple of hours.
I can see what this guy's saying. Most of Disney's best works are rip-offs of tales that have been in the public domain for hundreds of years.
Place one finger on the mouse, though, you get your hand chopped off. On top of that, Disney is ruining copyright for everyone else for their benefit.
It's not stealing, sure, but I think Disney has gotten as close to it as possible without actually doing it. I think I'd calling it "raping and pillaging" instead.
You want to use open source software for a newspaper? You must be insane!
Most major newspapers use proprietary software such as CCI because of its ability to balance copy flow and design. With a craptacular open source program like Scribus, all you're going to get is a headache because copy flow is so fragmented.
Also, what newspaper do you work at anyway? I design newspapers for a living too. Maybe we should chat.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, they were dealing with a loss of their own, and that was their way of dealing with it. It took over: Their health and money problems took a toll, and they ended up passing away at a relatively young age.
You know, I get bitter every time someone comes up with this "personal responsibilty" crap that comes up every time something related to an addiction comes up. THEY TRIED THAT -- THE ADDICTION IS TOO MUCH, AND THEY NEED HELP.
I'm just angry that our society is molded in such a way that people who need help get laughed at if it's a certain kind of ailment. I just hope your family doesn't have to go through what mine did.
Now you have a PR nightmare on your hands.
No, not true. If it were, why did my mac mini come with a OS9 install disc?
Just a clarification for your agrument: The mini is still bootable from classic, along with most of the laptops, so that day still hasn't come yet.
My feeling is Apple's stuck between a rock and a hard place; they really don't feel they can come up with a major innovation until they can start moving the line to a new processor. Because IBM did nothing to make G5s possible on the Powerbook, it weakened the entire line.
Jesus, G5s have been around for two years, and we've seen no room for portable innovation in terms of horsepower.
That said, adding shitloads of new features like the ones you're suggesting kinda goes against Apple's core minimalism philosophy. It's not conservatism, it's not fucking with a good thing too much.
And hey, since Wal-mart is selling this, I think it might just give the iPod a run for its money.
I'm currently in an all-PC shop myself, except for a few macs for photographers, web people, and ad folks. Us designers get crappy Dells. :(
I can't believe how fucking wrongheaded this statement is. It basically emphasizes that no growth should happen in user interface design.
By this logic, we should all still be writing on cave walls, walking around naked. I should still be designing newspapers on a linotype machine and have headlines going six layers deep.
I think what you MEANT to say was this: Don't sacrifice convention for the sake of art. That's entirely reasonable and does not take away from evolution in interface design.
The fundamental you speak of is just not very fundamental if all it does is force us into a black hole where there's no room for growth.
My god, you're fucking closed-minded and conservative to new ideas.
Some guy didn't know he couldn't right click, so he lost a giant project?
Goddamn, buddy, your coworker is just a moron who you didn't train enough.
This isn't Apple's fault. They don't cause trouble. Instead, your utter lack of training of the staff caused it.
How much productivity would've been lost if you had a two-hour basic training session for members of your staff? Not much, and it would've saved lots of trouble.
Jesus Christ, don't blame Apple for your shortcomings.
"No offense, but do you really think you know more about the best way to run a TV network than they do? Do you really think it's so simple that you can come up with a better plan just by thinking about it for a couple of minutes in your armchair?"
From my reading on the subject, TV is mortified of losing Nielsen ratings, which is why they haven't improved the ratings system. If they switch to TiVo ratings, will the ratings show a huge wathershed? Even if that isn't the case, they don't want to take that chance.
Take a look at premium cable TV networks like HBO and Showtime, and you'll see the solution. The advertising model doesn't exist on HBO, and look what they have -- some of the best shows on television. You'd never be able to do a show like "Bullshit" on broadcast.
Finallly, all I said about the topic was that the system was flawed and looked at what the series is doing now rather than what it could be doing in a few years. And television is going out of its way not to improve it. Neilsen families still fill out paper booklets.
I simply feel, along with lots of fans of great shows that died before their time like The Job and Greg the Bunny, that television wants to eat its dessert before it eats breakfast, lunch and dinner. And that's what's killing them.
If you actually read the story, you'll see that the bulk of this happened after Windows came out, which was far less than 20 years ago.
Personally, my beef with TV is that good shows are getting cancelled because the terrible ratings system focuses on the cream of the ratings crop rather than what has the most potential to grow. They're focusing on empty ratings at the cost of long-term success.
If they could modify the formula so that the shows with potential could get as much playing time as those that are already hits, I would be all for it right now. The crap factor is just terrible on TV right now.
Does this sound pathetic and wrong to you? Because it does to me. And this mindset is what we're running into here.
Parent, get off your high horse and see that this decision needed to be made because we've gone far too long acting as if MS is invincible to the court of law, and instead of making decisions that damage MS as much as MS damaged Netscape or Real by playing unfairly to get their standards out there.
It isn't fair to companies that came up with the winning formulas first that they get punished because all MS has to do to combat them is put their competing technology into a product that the consumer was going to buy whether or not the technology was in there.
Call it anti-MS FUD all you want, but the fact of the matter is, not holding feet to the fire and looking on as if what MS has done to get ahead was ethical is just motherfucking wrong. The consumer loses nothing by having to download a ten-meg program off the web instead of having it bundled and set as default through no action of theirs.
FYI, your sarcasm meter's broken, shithead.
Wastes your time in mind. Why would anyone buy a product with less in it when there's already an established product with more, when the more is really shitty? Tell me. I want to know.
The EU's decision, let's face it, was really fucking stupid and will do no good for anyone. Perhaps, instead, they should've done something more crippling, like take out Media Player in EVERY version and force people to download it. But no, that would hurt Microsoft more than not at all.
Why do we need some voice telling us the name of the article when we can read it ourselves?
But instead of being willing to understand it, we have a few lonely holdouts who don't want to touch Flash with a 5-meg pole, which is all it takes to download it.
Dude, Flash has over 90% of the audience. It's as heavily-used as PDF and comes standard with most web browsers. If you can't view a page with Flash on it, that's your fault for not spending five minutes to download it.
First of all, YOUR MOST IMPORTANT APPS ARE AVAILABLE TO YOU IF YOU UPGRADE. If you converted to OSX without upgrading to OSX native apps, you're just stupid.
Secondly, you've only been using it a month, and it sounds like with a lot of resistance. Take some time to understand it before you bash it.
Finally, understand the architecture differences between OSX and UNIX before you screw with UNIX on OSX. It might be a little eye-opening for you.
You should really think harder about making the OS work for you, rather than complaining about it all the time.
"What's that, Bill?"
"Well, I've been downloading copies of Napoleon Dynamite off of this site called Suprnova.org using this awesome new technology called Bittorrent!"
"What does it do?"
"Well, guys, you won't believe it: It decentralizes the process completely -- no ugly middleman file-sharing program to get in the way! Think we can harness it?"
"Well, Bill, here we go, we created this technology called Avalanche, it's just like WMA! 30% better and it uses the patented Microsoft DRM!"
"Damn bitches, watch this shit take over the market!"
"What the hell, guys? Why is Apple having so much more luck with their video-distribution technology?"
"Umm...... because we completely missed the point of what BitTorrent's all about........ we added a degree of middleman DRM to make sure that nobody was stealing the new Counting Crows album."
"Well, here's what I'll do, guys. I'll mass-market the fuck out of this, and we'll still be winners anyway! I mean, I've been doing that since 1990, why can't I succeed at it now?"
"What do you mean that I'm losing money on this grand experiment? If anyone should be able to push through the status quo, I should! Goddamn it, what the hell happened to that PDF killer I made that wasn't cross-compatible with everything?"
"Well, Bill, your mom always told me that you couldn't keep your hands out of the cookie jar."
"Fuck you guys... I'm going to play in the ball room in my mansion."
* Bill_Gates has left #bad_ideas
NO CARRIER
Seriously man, don't knock it until you've seen its potential. I mean christ, how is this even marked as +2 informative still? He admits three things in his post:
1. He's arrogant and doesn't like the idea
2. He hasn't read the article
3. He HASN'T EVEN READ THE ENTIRE POST, LET ALONE THE LINK, because he thinks the guy is getting an engineering PhD.
And he has the gall to call this the second-lamest thing he's seen all day. Personally, I think his post is the lamest thing I've seen all day, because it's such a blind dismissal of new technology. If you've actually done your homework and read up on computer history, you'd know that doing that is the dumbest possible thing you could do in this industry. You might as well throw the crow in the oven, because you'll be eating it in a couple of hours.
Place one finger on the mouse, though, you get your hand chopped off. On top of that, Disney is ruining copyright for everyone else for their benefit.
It's not stealing, sure, but I think Disney has gotten as close to it as possible without actually doing it. I think I'd calling it "raping and pillaging" instead.
I'll let the magazine's layout speak for itself.
Most major newspapers use proprietary software such as CCI because of its ability to balance copy flow and design. With a craptacular open source program like Scribus, all you're going to get is a headache because copy flow is so fragmented.
Also, what newspaper do you work at anyway? I design newspapers for a living too. Maybe we should chat.
That you, Fred?
That's the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. Not bad, cowboy. :D