Re:The rest of the launch lineup can go to hell...
on
Two Weeks with the Wii
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· Score: 1
Super Monkey Ball AND Rayman RR AND Trauma Center.
From the various reviews, and from my playing of Trauma Center DS, SMB and Trauma Center are awesome single-player games, but TC has no multiplayer to speak of and SMB's multiplayer seems sorely lacking (especially compared to previous iterations of the serie).
Rayman, on the other hand, looks so-so from a single player point of view, but completely awesome for multiplayer.
Revenue? Talk.origins isn't about revenue, there ain't even a single ad on the whole website (apart from a link to The Panda's Thumb on the website, which ain't really an ad) and the site is strictly non-commercial...
So yeah, a revenue of $0 is likely to be considerably lower than the cost of having a google employee auditing the Archive.
The Wii sorta reminds me of the gamecube, it was popular at first
In japan at least, the GC's lauch was far less impressive than the Wii is. Now we'll see how that spans on the long run.
I'm sure everyone is buying it cuz of the new controller.
Yeah, no one is buying it cause the games are actually fun to play, and the reports we're hearing that it is are just illusions and figments of our imaginations.
Once people get over it, they'll see how shitting the graphics are, and the games.
Indeed, just as they stopped buying DSs when they realized how worse than the PSP's the graphics were, and how shitty the games were.
Oh, wait...
If nintendo were to stop making consoles
Dude? Nintendo is ending what's one of their most profitable years ever, they raised their financial expectations because they did so much better than what they'd forecasted, and every single Wii is sold for a profit. Even if the Wii somehow stopped selling right now, they won't be in any kind of trouble, and would just start working on their next console.
Nintendo isn't going to go third party anytime soon, keep dreaming dude.
The DS isn't popular simply because of the touch screen. It's because it took over from the GBA with better graphics
Wrong, the DS started picking up steam when the DS Lite was released, more than a year after the original DS started being available, and the original DS rarely saw the kind of sales the DS:Lite generates. Want to know why the DS is popular? Animal Crossing, the Brain Age serie, Nintendogs, and NSMB. Not GBA.
Plus the DS is in good way to pass the GBA sales in Japan, the DSL has already sold in 39 weeks more than the GBASP sold in 3 years.
No, the DS is not popular "because it took over from the GBA", it's popular because it has original games making original use of the original input method, and it appeals to new markets such as women and people over 40 years old. When the DS:L was launched in Japan, those watching the launches noticed something never seen before: there were women (of any age) and erlerly in the waiting line, that was something that had pretty much never been seen. And it's repeating for the Wii.
Back then, you had to use your imagination to interpret what the screen was actually showing you
How is that a bad thing?
Were you in an epic battle with an ancient dragon at the bottom of a distant dungeon? Or were you a pixelated little cartoon character who hopped up and down when he attacked the pink blob which sort of looked like a dragon.. or maybe a lizard.. who knows.
You should download a few SNES roms, you'll find out that dragons were quite recognizable.
The first Wii game using the Wii-DS connectivity should be Pokemon Battle Revolution, with links to the DS' Pokemon Diamond and Pokemon Pearl games. I don't know how the DS' will be used though, probably just to get your pokemons into BR
Europe is the territory where Nintendogs sold the most period. The DS is extremely successful here in sonyland, and from what I've heard it looks like a fair lot of the launch units have been reserved already (the FNAC Montparnasse in Paris told a friend that they could pre-order a Wii, but would be put on the 20th shipment because the 8th was sold out already, and that was last weekend)
Also you shouldn't rely on nextgenwars numbers, they're as innacurate as they may be (even though they seem pretty ok on that single one, as Nintendo announced 600k sold in NA, and the Wii's 400k launch units got sold out first day in japan)
This "revolutionary" (aka: gimmicky) input method they came up with will work well for very few games, and even then only where the game is extremely simple in nature.
Don't you think it funny that we've seen exactly this kind of comments (you even managed to leave out "remote" so there's nothing to edit) when the DS was launched?
And we all know how it's ending, the DS has been out of stock for 11 months straight in Japan, wiping the floor with the PSP every single week, it's more or less obliterating the PSP in Europe, and even the USA are starting to move faster and faster towards DSmination...
It means bigger, deeper games with more realism, immersion, and freedom for the developers and the players.
uh... what? You don't mean that the games we have now are somehow deeper and more immersive than those we used to have on the SNES or on floppies do you? Cause that's a lie and you know it.
All of this means BETTER gameplay, not worse like some people seem to be insinuating.
No, all it means is better graphics and potentially better AI, not potentially better gameplay. A new input method, on the other hand, does translate to the possibility of gameplay changes, for the better or for the worse.
Actually, if you watch Famitsu's pictures of the launch you'll see a frightening amount of women (that's like guys, but with more breasts and less penises, if you don't know what it means) for a japanese system launch.
although UTF-8 is also supported (Unicode generally, however, is a different matter)
Uh, UTF-8 is a Unicode Transformation Format, that's usually (that or UTF-16) what people talk about when they mention "Unicode". And Ruby definitely sucks at anything out of the ascii character space, be it inside or at the boundaries (interfacing with the outer world).
AFAIK stuff like load balancing or HTTPS are handled by HTTP servers/balancers/fronts (or at least TCP balancers for load balancing) and stuff, not by the language used to create the site... If you're going it an other way, you're likely to be doing it very wrong.
And apart from that, modern Ruby webapps actually have fairly good deployment solutions, e.g. Mongrel.
Mmm no, what google knows it's about is "the tool that fits the task best".
In this case -- the creator of the Python language having to build a webby app -- the obvious tool was much more likely to be Python than, say, Java. Or even actually good languages like Smalltalk, or Forth, or Erlang.
Of course, you are correct in your facts. I was just trying to point out the humor of those two central nations of Europe that have, historically, spent so much time spitting or shooting at one another, finally following each other's leads.
This is actually historically wrong, France and Germany have only been at odds since the XIXth century (two centuries), if you want nations "spitting or shooting at one another", check France versus UK, we've been warring each other for more than a thousand years, military peace between us is less than 150 years old, and not much's solved (Gal De Gaulle, for example, considered that the UK were not part of Europe and shouldn't ever be included in the european union)
I may be a lot of things, but an idiot, certainly not;-)
I didn't say "idiot", I said "IDiot" which is slightly different. But I admit having very badly phrased it as the part between parens was to be applied to the whole (religious guys / young earth creationists / IDiots) expression, not specifically to the last word.
I was merely asking for a definition of what the parent meant by "evolution".
Well I am the parent and I told you what I meant by "evolution" and how it relates to the origin of life (it doesn't).
since comparing evolution to creationism only makes sense in regards to the origin of life
I strongly disagree. Not a single evolutionary biologist ever said that evolution was about the origin of life (and neither did darwin, his landmark work was named The Origin of Species not The Origin of Life). And comparing evolution to creationism doesn't ever makes sense since creationism doesn't make sense in the first place.
That, I am not entirely comfortable agreeing with.
I sure hope you're not comfortable with evolution saying anything about the origin of life, because it definitely doesn't.
Obviously not, evolution only starts after life has started, evolution isn't the origin of life, or the universe, or anything, in fact. Evolution is the process by which life gets more complex over time.
The only ones who claim that "evolution is the origin of all that is" (or may be) are those who don't know jack about it, and there is no "theory" about evolution being the origin of "all that is".
And the "theory of evolution" is not about "evolution" (which is a fact), it's about how evolution works, it's a structure of ideas that tries to interpret the facts and explain how evolution works (and what it leads to).
An other things that the religious guys / young earth creationists / IDiots (such as you, as it seems) always miss (intentionally or not) is that when one talks about the Theory of Evolution, "Theory" is taken in the scientific acception of the term, not in the layman's. This means several things:
It's disprovable (but hasn't been disproved, or it would be a "discarded theory")
It explains things (it resolves problems instead of trying to magick them out)
It's based on facts and evidences
It's coherent with all facts and evidences
It doesn't contradict other theories, if it does one of them must be disproved, because (at least) one of them is incorrect
It allows us to make predictions about the future discoveries, and if the predictions are proved false then the theory is wrong and must either be corrected (to take new facts in account) or discarded. If a "theory" doesn't allow any prediction, then the crackpot index suddenly goes way up.
It changes, a scientific theory doesn't have to be static, when scientists discover new facts that don't quite fit the theory, they don't wrench the facts in the theory with a hammer, they change the theory so that it explains the new facts while still being coherent. If the theory breaks (can't explain the new facts, or can't be coherent with itself) then it should be discarded.
No scientific theory is an absolute truth, only 3 things in science are seen as absolute: facts, axioms and principles. Facts are facts, axioms and principles are taken for true but may be wrong (we would probably have discovered a long time ago if one of them was wrong though). Hypothesis and theories, on the other hand, aren't and will never be taken as being absolutely true. Even though some have a higher probability of being true (in an absolute sense) than others.
Do you realize thats the one thing they were told not to do. That is sacrifice their children, by fire, or any other means.
You look like you haven't read enough bibles. Please go read the fate of Jephthah's daugther in Judges 11, who god notably unluckier than Isaac, and much deader.
one thing that Evolution teaches is that men are just evolved creatures with no purpose.
Well no, evolution doesn't "teach" anything, evolution is a fact. The current theories of evolution, on the other hand, pretty much tell us this yes.
There is no higher morality
Yes and no. Many "moral requirements" vary from country to country, or person to person, yet some obvious stuff stays: killing people of the insider group without any reason for example (while killing people outside your "group" is not absolute at all), which can be inferred as coming from evolution: humans are social animals, they come from close-knit groups (tribes and the likes) which meant that killing fellow members of the tribe/group was a huge hit on their survival chance. Evolution would therefore have favored groups of people who didn't kill each other (not giving a fuck about killing people outside the families/camps/tribes/groups), hence the reason why it's pretty much universally considered immoral to kill close relatives, family members or people who're close to you in general, while most humans don't give a damn about people from an other country being slaughtered.
There therefore are some kinds of "moral absolute" coming straight from our evolutionary past.
The only check is what others would force upon me
It's funny how religious people always derive that humans can't grow up their own morals, their own personal morality, and that they must always have someone with a huge stick imposing arbitrary morals on them.
If anything, this mostly shows that religious nutjobs are nuts, and would like nothing more than to kill and maim everyone.
I find it bizarre that you religious guys find youself "quite sane" when your only desire is to kill, rape and eat fellow humans. Your guys truly are sickos.
I myself am a human, and an atheist, I have no "absolute morals" but I do have my own set of moral rules mostly derived from "don't do unto others what you don't want other to do unto you", and some other pretty logical "rules of thumb".
The argument of Dawkins on the case is one of probability: most people who brand themselves as atheists don't believe that god doesn't exist, they believe that god is extremely unlikely to exist, as in 10% chances that he doesn't exist, they are therefore atheists. Agnostics would be people that consider that each "choice" (existence and non-existence) is exactly as likely to be true (50/50).
Atheists just range from those who don't believe there is a god to those who believe there is no god, just like capitalists range from democrats to "republicans" (in the former sense of the word, not the current "neocon christianofascist far-right theocrat" one)
Stephen Dawkins goes into some detail about the question of Hitler's religious belief in his latest book if your interested.
I know, I've finished reading it a few days ago (and am now trying to get started with Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. I expect it'll be a good book to crack creationist stuff, especially skulls, the sucker's heavy as hell...)
Hitler was not an atheist, he paid a lot of lip service to christian faith, considered himself a christian, and drew upon the 2000 years or christian's hatred for jews. And a lot of german officers at the time (most of them, in fact) were christians. Should also be mentioned the good ol' SS belt buckle motto "Gott mit Uns" (God With Us)
Stalin's and Zedong's crimes were not caused by atheism, the issue there was the building of a personality cult (not completely unlike religion, very much like religions in fact, since they had absolute belief in the Leader (god), punishment for not believing in the Truth of the Party and thoughtcrimes (heresy), an ultimate land of plenty / worker's paradise / utopia (heaven?), and an utter failure to reach any of the professed goals (still no rapture?)) which secular religions could cause problems with, hence the systematic hunting of secular religions and religious persons. The same things happen in Korth Korea where the leader and his father are semi-deified.
medieval Christianity did not produce a Hitler
Have you considered that they didn't have the means to do it? And that low-scale slaughter were widespread at the time? Witch hunts, jews killings, various pogroms,... were not that rare, and no one cared.
it also provides a moral code that condemns the slaughter of innocents
Unless you're reading the Ancient Testament, that is, since most of it is about slaughtering everyone who doesn't believe in your own god, and sacrificing even your family members (by burning them, none the less) if your God asks you to...
Baggini, Julian (2003; Atheism: A Very Short Introduction.) classifies a form a Atheism hostile to religion. ie, "characterized by a desire to wipe out all forms of religious belief. Militant atheists tend to make one or both of two claims that moderate atheists do not. The first is that religion is demonstrably false or nonsense, and the second is that it is usually or always harmful.". Now, you may think that this is a rather radical minority view, but so is the view of fundamentalist who like to throw bombs on other people.
Except that, like, no one has been killed in the name of atheism. Ever.
I think he would cheer when someone would shoot the pope.
I don't think so, I am an atheist, I do consider that religions are actively harmful and that god (in the jew/christian/islamic meaning of the word) doesn't exist, yet there aren't many deaths I would cheer for, and the pope clearly isn't part of that small group.
And then, how about communist atheism?
Not "communist atheism", more like "atheistic communism", and the reason why people consider that USSR's communism is atheistic is because communism as implemented by the USSR is all-encompassing, and includes religions beliefs, hence may be weakened by "traditional" religions. This has nothing to do with atheism.
Furthermore, Islam is much, much more rigid and comprehensive than Christianity, or some other system.
Not really, no
Islam isn't just about religion, it also regulates day to day life and political and legal matters.
You missed the hundreds of years Europe spent under christian leadership, and the numerous right-wing christian extremists who're outspoken about making a theocracy of the USA haven't you?
If their hypothetic flaw is now patched, why don't they demonstrate their attack on an unpatched macbook unless "because they didn't find a flaw in the first place"?
You know, scientific method 101 says it's not ours to disprove that they found a flaw, it's theirs to prove they found one in the first place, which they've never done.
Slashdot Mirror
Super Monkey Ball AND Rayman RR AND Trauma Center.
From the various reviews, and from my playing of Trauma Center DS, SMB and Trauma Center are awesome single-player games, but TC has no multiplayer to speak of and SMB's multiplayer seems sorely lacking (especially compared to previous iterations of the serie).
Rayman, on the other hand, looks so-so from a single player point of view, but completely awesome for multiplayer.
Hey, how's that for failing at reading comprehension? I give myself an A- in Reading Comprehension Failure, anyone disagrees?
Revenue? Talk.origins isn't about revenue, there ain't even a single ad on the whole website (apart from a link to The Panda's Thumb on the website, which ain't really an ad) and the site is strictly non-commercial...
So yeah, a revenue of $0 is likely to be considerably lower than the cost of having a google employee auditing the Archive.
In japan at least, the GC's lauch was far less impressive than the Wii is. Now we'll see how that spans on the long run.
Yeah, no one is buying it cause the games are actually fun to play, and the reports we're hearing that it is are just illusions and figments of our imaginations.
Indeed, just as they stopped buying DSs when they realized how worse than the PSP's the graphics were, and how shitty the games were.
Oh, wait...
Dude? Nintendo is ending what's one of their most profitable years ever, they raised their financial expectations because they did so much better than what they'd forecasted, and every single Wii is sold for a profit. Even if the Wii somehow stopped selling right now, they won't be in any kind of trouble, and would just start working on their next console.
Nintendo isn't going to go third party anytime soon, keep dreaming dude.
Wrong, the DS started picking up steam when the DS Lite was released, more than a year after the original DS started being available, and the original DS rarely saw the kind of sales the DS:Lite generates. Want to know why the DS is popular? Animal Crossing, the Brain Age serie, Nintendogs, and NSMB. Not GBA.
Plus the DS is in good way to pass the GBA sales in Japan, the DSL has already sold in 39 weeks more than the GBASP sold in 3 years.
No, the DS is not popular "because it took over from the GBA", it's popular because it has original games making original use of the original input method, and it appeals to new markets such as women and people over 40 years old. When the DS:L was launched in Japan, those watching the launches noticed something never seen before: there were women (of any age) and erlerly in the waiting line, that was something that had pretty much never been seen. And it's repeating for the Wii.
How is that a bad thing?
You should download a few SNES roms, you'll find out that dragons were quite recognizable.
The first Wii game using the Wii-DS connectivity should be Pokemon Battle Revolution, with links to the DS' Pokemon Diamond and Pokemon Pearl games. I don't know how the DS' will be used though, probably just to get your pokemons into BR
Europe is the territory where Nintendogs sold the most period. The DS is extremely successful here in sonyland, and from what I've heard it looks like a fair lot of the launch units have been reserved already (the FNAC Montparnasse in Paris told a friend that they could pre-order a Wii, but would be put on the 20th shipment because the 8th was sold out already, and that was last weekend)
Also you shouldn't rely on nextgenwars numbers, they're as innacurate as they may be (even though they seem pretty ok on that single one, as Nintendo announced 600k sold in NA, and the Wii's 400k launch units got sold out first day in japan)
Don't you think it funny that we've seen exactly this kind of comments (you even managed to leave out "remote" so there's nothing to edit) when the DS was launched?
And we all know how it's ending, the DS has been out of stock for 11 months straight in Japan, wiping the floor with the PSP every single week, it's more or less obliterating the PSP in Europe, and even the USA are starting to move faster and faster towards DSmination...
uh... what? You don't mean that the games we have now are somehow deeper and more immersive than those we used to have on the SNES or on floppies do you? Cause that's a lie and you know it.
No, all it means is better graphics and potentially better AI, not potentially better gameplay. A new input method, on the other hand, does translate to the possibility of gameplay changes, for the better or for the worse.
Actually, if you watch Famitsu's pictures of the launch you'll see a frightening amount of women (that's like guys, but with more breasts and less penises, if you don't know what it means) for a japanese system launch.
Oh really? I'll change it then
Uh, UTF-8 is a Unicode Transformation Format, that's usually (that or UTF-16) what people talk about when they mention "Unicode". And Ruby definitely sucks at anything out of the ascii character space, be it inside or at the boundaries (interfacing with the outer world).
AFAIK stuff like load balancing or HTTPS are handled by HTTP servers/balancers/fronts (or at least TCP balancers for load balancing) and stuff, not by the language used to create the site... If you're going it an other way, you're likely to be doing it very wrong.
And apart from that, modern Ruby webapps actually have fairly good deployment solutions, e.g. Mongrel.
Unicode in ruby still sucks though
Mmm no, what google knows it's about is "the tool that fits the task best".
In this case -- the creator of the Python language having to build a webby app -- the obvious tool was much more likely to be Python than, say, Java. Or even actually good languages like Smalltalk, or Forth, or Erlang.
This is actually historically wrong, France and Germany have only been at odds since the XIXth century (two centuries), if you want nations "spitting or shooting at one another", check France versus UK, we've been warring each other for more than a thousand years, military peace between us is less than 150 years old, and not much's solved (Gal De Gaulle, for example, considered that the UK were not part of Europe and shouldn't ever be included in the european union)
I didn't say "idiot", I said "IDiot" which is slightly different. But I admit having very badly phrased it as the part between parens was to be applied to the whole (religious guys / young earth creationists / IDiots) expression, not specifically to the last word.
Well I am the parent and I told you what I meant by "evolution" and how it relates to the origin of life (it doesn't).
I strongly disagree. Not a single evolutionary biologist ever said that evolution was about the origin of life (and neither did darwin, his landmark work was named The Origin of Species not The Origin of Life). And comparing evolution to creationism doesn't ever makes sense since creationism doesn't make sense in the first place.
I sure hope you're not comfortable with evolution saying anything about the origin of life, because it definitely doesn't.
Obviously not, evolution only starts after life has started, evolution isn't the origin of life, or the universe, or anything, in fact. Evolution is the process by which life gets more complex over time.
The only ones who claim that "evolution is the origin of all that is" (or may be) are those who don't know jack about it, and there is no "theory" about evolution being the origin of "all that is".
And the "theory of evolution" is not about "evolution" (which is a fact), it's about how evolution works, it's a structure of ideas that tries to interpret the facts and explain how evolution works (and what it leads to).
An other things that the religious guys / young earth creationists / IDiots (such as you, as it seems) always miss (intentionally or not) is that when one talks about the Theory of Evolution, "Theory" is taken in the scientific acception of the term, not in the layman's. This means several things:
You look like you haven't read enough bibles. Please go read the fate of Jephthah's daugther in Judges 11, who god notably unluckier than Isaac, and much deader.
Well no, evolution doesn't "teach" anything, evolution is a fact. The current theories of evolution, on the other hand, pretty much tell us this yes.
Yes and no. Many "moral requirements" vary from country to country, or person to person, yet some obvious stuff stays: killing people of the insider group without any reason for example (while killing people outside your "group" is not absolute at all), which can be inferred as coming from evolution: humans are social animals, they come from close-knit groups (tribes and the likes) which meant that killing fellow members of the tribe/group was a huge hit on their survival chance. Evolution would therefore have favored groups of people who didn't kill each other (not giving a fuck about killing people outside the families/camps/tribes/groups), hence the reason why it's pretty much universally considered immoral to kill close relatives, family members or people who're close to you in general, while most humans don't give a damn about people from an other country being slaughtered.
There therefore are some kinds of "moral absolute" coming straight from our evolutionary past.
It's funny how religious people always derive that humans can't grow up their own morals, their own personal morality, and that they must always have someone with a huge stick imposing arbitrary morals on them.
If anything, this mostly shows that religious nutjobs are nuts, and would like nothing more than to kill and maim everyone.
I find it bizarre that you religious guys find youself "quite sane" when your only desire is to kill, rape and eat fellow humans. Your guys truly are sickos.
I myself am a human, and an atheist, I have no "absolute morals" but I do have my own set of moral rules mostly derived from "don't do unto others what you don't want other to do unto you", and some other pretty logical "rules of thumb".
The argument of Dawkins on the case is one of probability: most people who brand themselves as atheists don't believe that god doesn't exist, they believe that god is extremely unlikely to exist, as in 10% chances that he doesn't exist, they are therefore atheists. Agnostics would be people that consider that each "choice" (existence and non-existence) is exactly as likely to be true (50/50).
Atheists just range from those who don't believe there is a god to those who believe there is no god, just like capitalists range from democrats to "republicans" (in the former sense of the word, not the current "neocon christianofascist far-right theocrat" one)
I know, I've finished reading it a few days ago (and am now trying to get started with Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. I expect it'll be a good book to crack creationist stuff, especially skulls, the sucker's heavy as hell...)
Have you considered that they didn't have the means to do it? And that low-scale slaughter were widespread at the time? Witch hunts, jews killings, various pogroms, ... were not that rare, and no one cared.
Unless you're reading the Ancient Testament, that is, since most of it is about slaughtering everyone who doesn't believe in your own god, and sacrificing even your family members (by burning them, none the less) if your God asks you to...
Except that, like, no one has been killed in the name of atheism. Ever.
I don't think so, I am an atheist, I do consider that religions are actively harmful and that god (in the jew/christian/islamic meaning of the word) doesn't exist, yet there aren't many deaths I would cheer for, and the pope clearly isn't part of that small group.
Not "communist atheism", more like "atheistic communism", and the reason why people consider that USSR's communism is atheistic is because communism as implemented by the USSR is all-encompassing, and includes religions beliefs, hence may be weakened by "traditional" religions. This has nothing to do with atheism.
Uh, no.
Not really, no
You missed the hundreds of years Europe spent under christian leadership, and the numerous right-wing christian extremists who're outspoken about making a theocracy of the USA haven't you?
If their hypothetic flaw is now patched, why don't they demonstrate their attack on an unpatched macbook unless "because they didn't find a flaw in the first place"?
You know, scientific method 101 says it's not ours to disprove that they found a flaw, it's theirs to prove they found one in the first place, which they've never done.
Or so that the company involved can and has to update it's flawed drivers and patch the flaws.
Yes.