And if his home has been broken into, is it still his fault? These days, most organizations treat the questioning of their practices as a threat, which is usually to be eliminated. Besides, had there been a better procedure, this wouldn't have even been a risk.
Yes, leaving the tapes in his car was stupid, but so is the operation to begin with, and if you say he should have left, you're obviously not a 22-year old trying to make it in Ohio's abysmal job market.
If women don't want IT jobs that require you to be on call literally every moment of the day, everyday, all year without some assistance, I think they're pretty smart.
Yeah, yeah, "global economy means new requirements for business", "give the client their value's worth", etc... bullshit.
America has one of the most -if not the most- unhealthy work ethic in world. The IT and web-tech fields reign as king among the most grueling professional jobs out there. When I was working contracts for several years, the vast majority of the companies burn out their employees within two years. I worked with a lot of permanent employees getting paid 45K a year in the Detroit area to work 14-16 hours a day M-F and at least 20 hours over the weekend with no overtime pay. And this was for a web design firm. For myself and most of the people I've worked with, no amount of perks can account for giving your life to your company. Loyalty is one thing; indentured servitude is quite another.
Good ol' Jackie T hasn't wasted any time on that. He's advocating a change in rating from T to MA because that shouldn't be portrayed as normal compared to hetero-teenage kissing.
"To say that a PC sold without an OS will undoubtedly be used to pirate Windows is an absurd stance, and so forcing PC makers to sell PCs with Windows pre-installed in order to avoid such piracy is not valid."
Indeed, welcome to the digital equivalent of the great BetaMax debate. Enabling the capacity for criminal activity is, by no means, commiting the actual act. If I find a company with a really nice special, but no sans-OS option, I look for a pre-installed Linux. That usually costs next to nothing and I can just overwrite it with my own distro or my legitimate copy of Windows.
Microsoft and anti-piracy can be almost as bad as *AAs and DRM. The only reason that Microsoft gets anywhere is because grandma doesn't want to pay the kind of money Apple is asking to check her email. (By the way, don't give me your "I taught a 98 year-old quadrapalegic to use Linux..." stories: They are not the standard-- FUD is).
I'm just waiting for The OS Wars to be settled with giant robots in space (^_^)
Re:Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
on
Office Delayed, Too
·
· Score: 1
Honestly, I can't see it happening until OO.o gets a lot faster. I've tried all the speed optimization techniques for it, and yet still, on an AMD 64 3000 with 1GB of RAM (600 free at the time), OO.o was still slugging along like a quadrapalegic through mud compared to things like Abiword or even MS Office. I love open source and OO.o has a lot of potential, but I just don't see it going mainstream at its current pace.
I went to school at The Art Instititute of Pittsburgh (just a short bus ride away) and had done a few internship projects at CMU. I'd seen Valerie, and while I understand that this is about the advancement of robotics, AI and such, there was another fundamental flaw with it. (Please keep in mind, I'm not knocking it, this is just one gripe):
The animations from the head could have used a serious visit from someone skilled in 3D animation. If we're talking about creating an experience like that of dealing with an actual receptionist, the visuals of the roboceptionist need to look a little more advanced than pre-Lawnmowerman. I reiterate: the idea and execution had many aspects that were very interesting about how it worked, but when trying to create a robot that functions like a person (in limited scope), it would be nice to see equal attention paid to the 'human' side of it as the robotic instead of looking like something from an 80's sci-fi movie.
"Why the hell is everybody so hot and bothered about Widgets all of a sudden? I bought a Konfabulator license way back when..."
You need to remember, that 'back when' and 'bought' are in your logic. Now that Konfabulator is free, widgets have become a more viable way to spruce up your desktop. I checked out Konfabulator a while ago as well, but I didn't want to pony up any sum of money for it. Now that it's free, it's the cat's pajamas. I see the widget craze as a double-edged sword:
Pro: You can put all sorts of cool shit on your desktop and have a lot of infomation without having to go to a page. I use the weather widget all the time as well as the to-do that syncs with my sunbird calendar. RSS reader widgets can tell you if a site is worth visiting right now or if there's no good stories/threads at the minute. Searching on the desktop is keen as well, depending on how much you use things like the PHP documentation search widget for specific things (otherwise, I'd rather use Google Desktop Search).
Con: You need 9GB of RAM to run half of the crap you want.
At some point, the users with lower-end systems will feel the stinging chill of a computer crippled by fancy things to play with on their desktop.
Personally, my old fav for many years on PC (that I still haven't finished) was Daggerfall. In case you don't know, it's the prequel to Morrowind. Daggerfall itself is actually the second in the Elder Scrolls series, which was started with Arena when PC games had two colors: pea soup green and a sort of fucia that should be outlawed. I have high hopes for Oblivion, but there's something in me that worries that Bethesda could degenerate the series into a world that appears to be fantastic with no real substance. I could be way off base on that, but I have that suspicion for almost any good game series these days. Just look at Final Fantasy.
Neopets combines a lot of the known elements that can make a website 'sticky'. As a web designer, I'm pretty aware of why. Just look at how successful things like Pokemon and Tamogachi pets were. However, these don't require you to take your save card or deck everywhere, you don't need to have some stupidly large object dangling from your keychain, and you can access them almost anywhere. This is just to start (concerning the convenience of them) off.
Not only that, but in schools, I read a lot of school studies about kids getting in trouble for playing Yahoo games or AOL games in classes with computers in front of them. With Neopets, you get all those games with a new skin and it appears to give you rewards for them as well. Even if kids end up buying the merchandise later, a big reason that Neopets does so well is because they have so many things that appear to reward you for using their web services with no fees up front. And their so damn cute!
I should know, I've seen people kicked out of computer labs in college for playing on Neopets when people were trying to finish their finals. Its rather creepy.
I get the joke behind the parent post, but I can actually say it with a pretty high level of seriousness.
About the most 'pop' artist I've bought a CD from was Nickelback, but they've been a disappointment since 'The Long Road' so I feel pretty safe on the CD front. Just looking at the kind of music-based podcasts I listen to will show you that most of the artists I listen to are self-sufficient. As for the few mainstream songs I do get these days, I'll pony up the dollar for a download on iTunes considering I listen to all of this on my iPod at work more than anywhere else.
(Warning: What you are about to read is purely sarcastic...except for where it isn't)
Actually, the Recording Industry A**holes of America have struck gold this time! Do you have any idea how many times I have grown to hate a perfectly good song because some tone deaf moron could just look up the lyrics and try to imitate Brittney Spears? I can't tell you how much it grates my nerves to hear the greatest songs of our generation being brutalized by people just because they know the words!
Now, the RIAA can keep everyone in the dark so everyone can just sit and listen peacefully without being forced to endure someone's immitation of scratching their nails across a chalkboard. An experience that would otherwise be followed by them asking you if they should go on American Idol. Next, artists will be sued for publishing their lyrics as well so there will be no distractions between their corporate mind sex attempting to portray society/culture and my ears.
Actually, being the RPG addict that I am, I'm waiting to get my grubby little nubbies on Magna Carta for the PS/2. It's getting harder and harder to find RPGs with original stories that aren't just plain stupid anymore.
Well my idea of Christmas-ish time is a little different thant the commercial one. I don't even think about Christmas until after Thanksgiving. That's just me and my view of things, and so feel free to disagree with it.
On the other hand, marketing tactics are almost always rumors even after the marketing drive is over. No company like to say why they did it because nobody wants to feel like the sucker for buying into someone else's ploy. From any reasonable business standpoint (note the word reasonable, I'm not saying there isnt' any other answer. And nobody's really said anything contrarily logical yet), no company would want to half-ass a product launch from a shortage. It's almost always better to wait and do things right when you still have a roughly six month window to establish yourself too firmly for the next competitor to throw you off.
And honestly: No, it's not because it's Microsoft that I am hesitant about the 360. To tell the truth, I like how the 360 looks so far, but $400 for a system when my expectations for a console aren't as high as yours. Most current console/portable games have disappointed the hell out of me, and I'm hoping that '3rd-gen' can bring something with more substance than another 90 Madden titles and rehashed FPS'. Call me jaded if you will, but I'm just trying not to buy the system that's over-loaded with unoriginal garbage for games after it's first year.
Besides, I still have a small monster of a gaming PC with no lack of good games for it. So while I wait and see what looks good, I have things to keep me entertained.
So instead of waiting until the Christmas-ish time to make everyone's gaming season merry and bright, they decided to tease us with a mediocre launch of a paltry sum of systems? Some of which were even admittedly defective, and still haven't been replaced.
It's not the open-source geek in me that says this, but as someone who has seen good and bad marketing: I can't buy that story. They want to keep the problems to a controlled population so they don't have to pull a massive recall across the nation. The thing that I can't quite get is why they did this for hype (which I'm still convinced of, until intelligently rebuked) when they could have waited a little longer to make everything go smoothly. They still would have been several months ahead of Sony.
This is why I never buy new systems until at least 6 months after release. I'll let everyone else go through the beta-testing machines and titles before I toss a few hundred dollars into something that could end up sucking for another few years. (and that goes equally for Sony and Nintendo)
Yeah, the vast majority of these people are probably spammers. On the other hand......how many of them could be registered by people who didn't want their personal information posted like a digital 'kick me' sign without paying extra for privacy services? I don't know how it is now, but when I got my domain, I didn't find any registrar that would privatize your information for free like you can unlist yourself from the phone book (in the US anyway) without any charge.
Granted, I'm not trying to change the story, but I'm not willing to believe that every piece of falsified domain info must be a spammer.
Both are generalizations that don't always fit the models that development teams are cast into.
Some software behemoths can make some pretty damn good software or at least have a pretty responsive team for fixing bugs that can (and will always) arise. But some open source software I've worked with has completely alienated me because the organization of it was so abyssmal that nothing ever really got done to crawl out of alpha 0.0.0.halfapercent.9 despite all the phenomenal talent pooled between the developers.
Stereotypes are dangerous so pick your poison, should you decide to follow that route.
A mighty fine point. I think there's two methods to achieve this end:
1. Allow more customization of the platform. Seriously, there needs to be more to this device than movies, mostly crappy or just plain ported games (giving the sensation of deja vu), and a handful of mp3s that are fighting for space with your save files. The only problem is that the hardware Sony has already locked themselves into with this device limits some of the expansion capability of it unless they want to turn it into a gamer's PDA and completely change marketing tactics. Not only that, but Sony pigeon-holed themselves with their die-hard efforts to stop emulation on the PSP. If they ease up on this front, it will take a miracle for it to be perceived as them doing anything besides turning 179 degrees and all but directly endorsing roms for the PSP. Even still, I'm rather horrified to see how long the PSP has been out and Sony is only 'considering' an RSS reader for it. There's a pretty clear line between protection and unfounded, overboard paranoia: The PSP system software is a pure result of the latter.
2. While I would be kind of stoked to have a sort of gamer's PDA (as long as it was done well) integrated into a gaming device, it wouldn't be worth a damn thing on the platform unless they actually have real Games to boast. They've already got sequels to some relatively mediocre 'original' titles as is, and almost everything else is a near-direct port from PS(1|2). Give us something worth playing on the commute to school or during our break at work. Hell, give us something worth playing for a good long while at end. The fact that I see exponentially more UMD titles on the shelves than games tells me that this was a failed attempt at being a portable universal media player with guest appearances from interactive titles. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the cell phone bubble in which everyone was trying to turn your mobile device into a camera, iPod, phone, and toaster all-in-one! If you're going to make a gaming platform with other features, remember that GAMES are the primary focus of it, and leave movies and mp3s as secondary concerns for development teams.
Too bad it's too early to abandon the project and start anew. </gripe></bitch></whine></bemoaningtheirsadfate>
...in the workshop, of course. I make no claim to the number of defective units and I've heard everything from EB employees saying "Everyone that bought one loves it" to another EB across town (literally) mentioning that they're waiting to exchange 4 of them and 5 other customers are just going to deal with an occasional scrambled screen of death.
From such a wide range of results though, I would assume that MS is doing what they can to ensure that the next batch will:
a) replace all defective units with less returns b) have the staff rechecking current models for defects (I'm sure they were stashing them away to create hype) c) have enough left over from the second wave of preorders and replacements to sell one or two extra
I think the major point of the article is that AJAX is currently being used (like a lot of upstart web technologies) in many places were it just confuses things more than needed. Give it time, and people will stop using it just for the sake of jumping on the new craze bandwagon and we'll find out where it shines and where it should never go.
Personally, I think it's great for UI tricks and acynchronous form actions (checking for currently used user names, submitting to a shoutbox, and so on). If people think AJAX itself is bad, they should see the comments on Digg to AJAX articles. There are more comments like "If I see one more damn article on this..." than there are dupe notification comments here on Slashdot!
I think this new use of JavaScript has great potential, but the real message of the article can be gleaned in the first few paragraphs: Don't go overkill.
"I think there's some sci-fi book where the loser and his lawyer dies. That might work too, but I don't think most people would go for that."
Unfortunately, I think too many of these intellectually defunct cases win, in which case, the winner should be killed with thier legal team. There are people that will go for it, but lawyers won't. It's the same reason why the lawyers that give law a bad name vote against any legislation that would fine a lawyer for bringing a case that is an ultimate waste of time and heated breath.
Keep in mind, I don't have an actual prejudice against all lawyers, but there's a saying that 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad reputation. I'm not buying that percentage, but enough rotten apples have spoiled the bunch (i.e. Jack Thompson) in the public eye. In the realm of ethics for legal practice, the current situation should be given some greater scrutiny. Just look at all the sour legal BS in technology patents and copyright. I think any career should have a strong ethical review of some sort, but law takes the cake because most violations of said ethics usually have to pursue recourse through the courts.
For all the nay-sayers that think the motion based control in Nintendo games is childish, gimmicky or stupid: They said the same thing about DDR. I'm married and have an 8-year old son, and my wife and I compete with our son's friends in DDR still.
Suffice to say, you gotta drop the hardcore gamer image sometimes to rediscover what's fun. I can't wait to the NR game line up.
Then again, innovation in the earlier days of gaming was easier in certain ways. Consider this:
The limitation on what the hardware was capable of was exponentially lower than it is now, but......games were not as normal. We expect to use about 10-12 buttons for any given game without including directional pad functions these days. It was always scary to take that bold leap forward, but they hadn't tried as much back then. Now, we complain when a sequel doesn't behave exactly as its predecessor with more features and better graphics with a direct link to the previous plotline.
Just as the 360 has games that lack originality, so do a lot of popular titles for the xbox or ps2. I practically weep when I hear PC users begging for a port of another banal sequel/rehash of a console title (not really, but it's disheartening none the less). It's funny to read about musicians and their fans pining for the end of the current record label system because it's quite similar to my pining for an end to the pop-culture game trash that makes it rather difficult to find an original game for any system.</gripe></bitch></moan>
Slashdot Mirror
And if his home has been broken into, is it still his fault? These days, most organizations treat the questioning of their practices as a threat, which is usually to be eliminated. Besides, had there been a better procedure, this wouldn't have even been a risk.
Yes, leaving the tapes in his car was stupid, but so is the operation to begin with, and if you say he should have left, you're obviously not a 22-year old trying to make it in Ohio's abysmal job market.
I'm just hoping that I can run XP on a Vista computer. Maybe there's still hope for Vista...
</bitterresentmentfromgamingonVista>
I think they're giving Vista an "A" for effort.
If women don't want IT jobs that require you to be on call literally every moment of the day, everyday, all year without some assistance, I think they're pretty smart.
Yeah, yeah, "global economy means new requirements for business", "give the client their value's worth", etc... bullshit.
America has one of the most -if not the most- unhealthy work ethic in world. The IT and web-tech fields reign as king among the most grueling professional jobs out there. When I was working contracts for several years, the vast majority of the companies burn out their employees within two years. I worked with a lot of permanent employees getting paid 45K a year in the Detroit area to work 14-16 hours a day M-F and at least 20 hours over the weekend with no overtime pay. And this was for a web design firm. For myself and most of the people I've worked with, no amount of perks can account for giving your life to your company. Loyalty is one thing; indentured servitude is quite another.
Good ol' Jackie T hasn't wasted any time on that. He's advocating a change in rating from T to MA because that shouldn't be portrayed as normal compared to hetero-teenage kissing.
Indeed, welcome to the digital equivalent of the great BetaMax debate. Enabling the capacity for criminal activity is, by no means, commiting the actual act. If I find a company with a really nice special, but no sans-OS option, I look for a pre-installed Linux. That usually costs next to nothing and I can just overwrite it with my own distro or my legitimate copy of Windows.
Microsoft and anti-piracy can be almost as bad as *AAs and DRM. The only reason that Microsoft gets anywhere is because grandma doesn't want to pay the kind of money Apple is asking to check her email. (By the way, don't give me your "I taught a 98 year-old quadrapalegic to use Linux..." stories: They are not the standard-- FUD is).
I'm just waiting for The OS Wars to be settled with giant robots in space (^_^)
Honestly, I can't see it happening until OO.o gets a lot faster. I've tried all the speed optimization techniques for it, and yet still, on an AMD 64 3000 with 1GB of RAM (600 free at the time), OO.o was still slugging along like a quadrapalegic through mud compared to things like Abiword or even MS Office. I love open source and OO.o has a lot of potential, but I just don't see it going mainstream at its current pace.
I went to school at The Art Instititute of Pittsburgh (just a short bus ride away) and had done a few internship projects at CMU. I'd seen Valerie, and while I understand that this is about the advancement of robotics, AI and such, there was another fundamental flaw with it. (Please keep in mind, I'm not knocking it, this is just one gripe):
The animations from the head could have used a serious visit from someone skilled in 3D animation. If we're talking about creating an experience like that of dealing with an actual receptionist, the visuals of the roboceptionist need to look a little more advanced than pre-Lawnmowerman. I reiterate: the idea and execution had many aspects that were very interesting about how it worked, but when trying to create a robot that functions like a person (in limited scope), it would be nice to see equal attention paid to the 'human' side of it as the robotic instead of looking like something from an 80's sci-fi movie.
"Why the hell is everybody so hot and bothered about Widgets all of a sudden? I bought a Konfabulator license way back when..."
You need to remember, that 'back when' and 'bought' are in your logic. Now that Konfabulator is free, widgets have become a more viable way to spruce up your desktop. I checked out Konfabulator a while ago as well, but I didn't want to pony up any sum of money for it. Now that it's free, it's the cat's pajamas. I see the widget craze as a double-edged sword:
Pro: You can put all sorts of cool shit on your desktop and have a lot of infomation without having to go to a page. I use the weather widget all the time as well as the to-do that syncs with my sunbird calendar. RSS reader widgets can tell you if a site is worth visiting right now or if there's no good stories/threads at the minute. Searching on the desktop is keen as well, depending on how much you use things like the PHP documentation search widget for specific things (otherwise, I'd rather use Google Desktop Search).
Con: You need 9GB of RAM to run half of the crap you want.
At some point, the users with lower-end systems will feel the stinging chill of a computer crippled by fancy things to play with on their desktop.
Personally, my old fav for many years on PC (that I still haven't finished) was Daggerfall. In case you don't know, it's the prequel to Morrowind. Daggerfall itself is actually the second in the Elder Scrolls series, which was started with Arena when PC games had two colors: pea soup green and a sort of fucia that should be outlawed. I have high hopes for Oblivion, but there's something in me that worries that Bethesda could degenerate the series into a world that appears to be fantastic with no real substance. I could be way off base on that, but I have that suspicion for almost any good game series these days. Just look at Final Fantasy.
Neopets combines a lot of the known elements that can make a website 'sticky'. As a web designer, I'm pretty aware of why. Just look at how successful things like Pokemon and Tamogachi pets were. However, these don't require you to take your save card or deck everywhere, you don't need to have some stupidly large object dangling from your keychain, and you can access them almost anywhere. This is just to start (concerning the convenience of them) off.
Not only that, but in schools, I read a lot of school studies about kids getting in trouble for playing Yahoo games or AOL games in classes with computers in front of them. With Neopets, you get all those games with a new skin and it appears to give you rewards for them as well. Even if kids end up buying the merchandise later, a big reason that Neopets does so well is because they have so many things that appear to reward you for using their web services with no fees up front. And their so damn cute!
I should know, I've seen people kicked out of computer labs in college for playing on Neopets when people were trying to finish their finals. Its rather creepy.
I get the joke behind the parent post, but I can actually say it with a pretty high level of seriousness.
About the most 'pop' artist I've bought a CD from was Nickelback, but they've been a disappointment since 'The Long Road' so I feel pretty safe on the CD front. Just looking at the kind of music-based podcasts I listen to will show you that most of the artists I listen to are self-sufficient. As for the few mainstream songs I do get these days, I'll pony up the dollar for a download on iTunes considering I listen to all of this on my iPod at work more than anywhere else.
(Warning: What you are about to read is purely sarcastic...except for where it isn't)
Actually, the Recording Industry A**holes of America have struck gold this time! Do you have any idea how many times I have grown to hate a perfectly good song because some tone deaf moron could just look up the lyrics and try to imitate Brittney Spears? I can't tell you how much it grates my nerves to hear the greatest songs of our generation being brutalized by people just because they know the words!
Now, the RIAA can keep everyone in the dark so everyone can just sit and listen peacefully without being forced to endure someone's immitation of scratching their nails across a chalkboard. An experience that would otherwise be followed by them asking you if they should go on American Idol. Next, artists will be sued for publishing their lyrics as well so there will be no distractions between their corporate mind sex attempting to portray society/culture and my ears.
Oh happy days!
Actually, being the RPG addict that I am, I'm waiting to get my grubby little nubbies on Magna Carta for the PS/2. It's getting harder and harder to find RPGs with original stories that aren't just plain stupid anymore.
Well my idea of Christmas-ish time is a little different thant the commercial one. I don't even think about Christmas until after Thanksgiving. That's just me and my view of things, and so feel free to disagree with it.
On the other hand, marketing tactics are almost always rumors even after the marketing drive is over. No company like to say why they did it because nobody wants to feel like the sucker for buying into someone else's ploy. From any reasonable business standpoint (note the word reasonable, I'm not saying there isnt' any other answer. And nobody's really said anything contrarily logical yet), no company would want to half-ass a product launch from a shortage. It's almost always better to wait and do things right when you still have a roughly six month window to establish yourself too firmly for the next competitor to throw you off.
And honestly: No, it's not because it's Microsoft that I am hesitant about the 360. To tell the truth, I like how the 360 looks so far, but $400 for a system when my expectations for a console aren't as high as yours. Most current console/portable games have disappointed the hell out of me, and I'm hoping that '3rd-gen' can bring something with more substance than another 90 Madden titles and rehashed FPS'. Call me jaded if you will, but I'm just trying not to buy the system that's over-loaded with unoriginal garbage for games after it's first year.
Besides, I still have a small monster of a gaming PC with no lack of good games for it. So while I wait and see what looks good, I have things to keep me entertained.
So instead of waiting until the Christmas-ish time to make everyone's gaming season merry and bright, they decided to tease us with a mediocre launch of a paltry sum of systems? Some of which were even admittedly defective, and still haven't been replaced.
It's not the open-source geek in me that says this, but as someone who has seen good and bad marketing: I can't buy that story. They want to keep the problems to a controlled population so they don't have to pull a massive recall across the nation. The thing that I can't quite get is why they did this for hype (which I'm still convinced of, until intelligently rebuked) when they could have waited a little longer to make everything go smoothly. They still would have been several months ahead of Sony.
This is why I never buy new systems until at least 6 months after release. I'll let everyone else go through the beta-testing machines and titles before I toss a few hundred dollars into something that could end up sucking for another few years. (and that goes equally for Sony and Nintendo)
Yeah, the vast majority of these people are probably spammers. On the other hand... ...how many of them could be registered by people who didn't want their personal information posted like a digital 'kick me' sign without paying extra for privacy services? I don't know how it is now, but when I got my domain, I didn't find any registrar that would privatize your information for free like you can unlist yourself from the phone book (in the US anyway) without any charge.
Granted, I'm not trying to change the story, but I'm not willing to believe that every piece of falsified domain info must be a spammer.
...but mobs are hard to organize.
Both are generalizations that don't always fit the models that development teams are cast into.
Some software behemoths can make some pretty damn good software or at least have a pretty responsive team for fixing bugs that can (and will always) arise. But some open source software I've worked with has completely alienated me because the organization of it was so abyssmal that nothing ever really got done to crawl out of alpha 0.0.0.halfapercent.9 despite all the phenomenal talent pooled between the developers.
Stereotypes are dangerous so pick your poison, should you decide to follow that route.
A mighty fine point. I think there's two methods to achieve this end:
1. Allow more customization of the platform. Seriously, there needs to be more to this device than movies, mostly crappy or just plain ported games (giving the sensation of deja vu), and a handful of mp3s that are fighting for space with your save files. The only problem is that the hardware Sony has already locked themselves into with this device limits some of the expansion capability of it unless they want to turn it into a gamer's PDA and completely change marketing tactics. Not only that, but Sony pigeon-holed themselves with their die-hard efforts to stop emulation on the PSP. If they ease up on this front, it will take a miracle for it to be perceived as them doing anything besides turning 179 degrees and all but directly endorsing roms for the PSP. Even still, I'm rather horrified to see how long the PSP has been out and Sony is only 'considering' an RSS reader for it. There's a pretty clear line between protection and unfounded, overboard paranoia: The PSP system software is a pure result of the latter.
2. While I would be kind of stoked to have a sort of gamer's PDA (as long as it was done well) integrated into a gaming device, it wouldn't be worth a damn thing on the platform unless they actually have real Games to boast. They've already got sequels to some relatively mediocre 'original' titles as is, and almost everything else is a near-direct port from PS(1|2). Give us something worth playing on the commute to school or during our break at work. Hell, give us something worth playing for a good long while at end. The fact that I see exponentially more UMD titles on the shelves than games tells me that this was a failed attempt at being a portable universal media player with guest appearances from interactive titles. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the cell phone bubble in which everyone was trying to turn your mobile device into a camera, iPod, phone, and toaster all-in-one! If you're going to make a gaming platform with other features, remember that GAMES are the primary focus of it, and leave movies and mp3s as secondary concerns for development teams.
Too bad it's too early to abandon the project and start anew.
</gripe></bitch></whine></bemoaningtheirsadfate>
...in the workshop, of course. I make no claim to the number of defective units and I've heard everything from EB employees saying "Everyone that bought one loves it" to another EB across town (literally) mentioning that they're waiting to exchange 4 of them and 5 other customers are just going to deal with an occasional scrambled screen of death.
From such a wide range of results though, I would assume that MS is doing what they can to ensure that the next batch will:
a) replace all defective units with less returns
b) have the staff rechecking current models for defects (I'm sure they were stashing them away to create hype)
c) have enough left over from the second wave of preorders and replacements to sell one or two extra
That's no meager task.
</tinfoilhattery>
I think the major point of the article is that AJAX is currently being used (like a lot of upstart web technologies) in many places were it just confuses things more than needed. Give it time, and people will stop using it just for the sake of jumping on the new craze bandwagon and we'll find out where it shines and where it should never go.
Personally, I think it's great for UI tricks and acynchronous form actions (checking for currently used user names, submitting to a shoutbox, and so on). If people think AJAX itself is bad, they should see the comments on Digg to AJAX articles. There are more comments like "If I see one more damn article on this..." than there are dupe notification comments here on Slashdot!
I think this new use of JavaScript has great potential, but the real message of the article can be gleaned in the first few paragraphs: Don't go overkill.
"I think there's some sci-fi book where the loser and his lawyer dies. That might work too, but I don't think most people would go for that."
Unfortunately, I think too many of these intellectually defunct cases win, in which case, the winner should be killed with thier legal team. There are people that will go for it, but lawyers won't. It's the same reason why the lawyers that give law a bad name vote against any legislation that would fine a lawyer for bringing a case that is an ultimate waste of time and heated breath.
Keep in mind, I don't have an actual prejudice against all lawyers, but there's a saying that 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad reputation. I'm not buying that percentage, but enough rotten apples have spoiled the bunch (i.e. Jack Thompson) in the public eye. In the realm of ethics for legal practice, the current situation should be given some greater scrutiny. Just look at all the sour legal BS in technology patents and copyright. I think any career should have a strong ethical review of some sort, but law takes the cake because most violations of said ethics usually have to pursue recourse through the courts.
Fair enough, but at least it's built-in instead of having to download the extension.
I'm more psyched about the auto-patching. Hopefully, this will keep some parties quiet about their perceived lack of FF security.
For all the nay-sayers that think the motion based control in Nintendo games is childish, gimmicky or stupid: They said the same thing about DDR. I'm married and have an 8-year old son, and my wife and I compete with our son's friends in DDR still.
Suffice to say, you gotta drop the hardcore gamer image sometimes to rediscover what's fun. I can't wait to the NR game line up.
Then again, innovation in the earlier days of gaming was easier in certain ways. Consider this:
...games were not as normal. We expect to use about 10-12 buttons for any given game without including directional pad functions these days. It was always scary to take that bold leap forward, but they hadn't tried as much back then. Now, we complain when a sequel doesn't behave exactly as its predecessor with more features and better graphics with a direct link to the previous plotline.
The limitation on what the hardware was capable of was exponentially lower than it is now, but...
Just as the 360 has games that lack originality, so do a lot of popular titles for the xbox or ps2. I practically weep when I hear PC users begging for a port of another banal sequel/rehash of a console title (not really, but it's disheartening none the less). It's funny to read about musicians and their fans pining for the end of the current record label system because it's quite similar to my pining for an end to the pop-culture game trash that makes it rather difficult to find an original game for any system.</gripe></bitch></moan>