Re:Hunters is overrated, bad idea
on
A DS In Every Pot
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Its like the developers were sitting around scratching their heads on how to use the touch screen and picked the worst control scheme imaginable. Is there some law that requires all DS games to use the touchscreen? Just because its there doesn't mean you have to use it, especially if you don't have good reason to.
I don't know - the thing about using the touchscreen for aiming in Metroid is that it gives you a level of control on par with mouse-look on a PC FPS. That's not something you can attain with a normal console controller - certainly not a D-pad, but not even an analog thumbstick will reliably give you that level of control.
I think that is a damn good reason to use the touchscreen. If you don't want to use the touchscreen - I believe there is an option for that, too.
The only time touchscreen control has really bugged me is in Mario 64. The game was made for analog controls, so there are places where not using the touchscreen is a major handicap. But using the touchscreen is awkward because of the way they set it up - the "center" position of the control is not stable, but rather follows your stylus around the screen.
But, yes, there is a law that requires DS games to use either the touchscreen or the microphone for something. An inordinate number of DS games include play challenges which in some way involve blowing on something, scratching something, or operating a slingshot.:)
I think it's worth doing a thing well even if it's not especially innovative. GH is a lot of fun. Is it somehow less fun as a result of being derivative of Guitar Freaks? Of course not.
I'm not trying to specially qualify my comments by saying this - I merely feel like sharing my background on the subject. From 2000 until early 2002 I was a professional programmer working on the XMap Handheld (AKA Solus) mapping product for PalmOS. I followed the product line pretty closely for a few years, from the tail-end of OS3 up until the period in which OS5 was being introduced to developers. It's a system that I love for various reasons but lately I've felt that it has some real issues that need to be addressed.
Top on the list is PACE - the m68k emulator/translator that runs on all the ARM-based OS5 devices. It's fantastic that they were committed to providing this level of backward-compatibility. The problem is (and I could be quite mistaken here, if my knowledge is as outdated as I would hope it is) that as far as I know they never rolled out a full-fledged way to write fully-fledged ARM applications. PalmOS6 came out in 2003 (according to Wikipedia) but no devices use it - including the recent and upcoming Treo models. The only way to get native ARM code into a Palm app these days is with "PACE Native Objects" - chunks of native ARM code stuck into an emulated m68k application. The result is that people still mostly write m68k code for their Palms, even though the platform moved to ARM years ago.
Next is the lack of a multitasking, protected environment for programs. There's a limited capacity for multitasking (IIRC the underlying OS for both OS 1-4 and OS5 both provide this support, but PalmOS operates on top of this layer, providing the entire environment within one "process" and not enabling access to that functionality) Sure, I believe in the "Zen of Palm" and all that - I think the PalmOS design makes sense in many ways in that it limits the portable device from accumulating a lot of cruft in the dynamic heap by essentially limiting it to one application at a time - but I am also a bit of a tech nerd and it does bug me that they haven't modernized this thing. A reboot shouldn't be necessary when an application crashes. And if a particular application is better implemented through real multi-threading as opposed to having execution jump all over the place in a single thread, then that's how it should be done.
Then there's internationalization. I know the importance of this will be quite a lot less for the majority of people - but I greatly enjoy the ability to properly represent and process foreign text using Unicode. I find the continued lack of it on PalmOS to be disappointing.
Internationalization and PACE were the two main factors that almost stopped me from buying a new PalmOS device to replace my defective and long-ailing Tungsten T2. (It's only defective because I bought a refurbished device from overstock.com, and it's always had issues.) The availability of things like an up-to-date Python interpreter on Windows Mobile was also a big draw. In the end, however, I decided that Palm is still the right portable platform for me, so I'll be receiving a Treo 650 soon.:)
Here's the problem... People don't like itunes because it's essentially a gateway to the itunes store.
Yeah, I felt the same way before I used iTunes, and that was one reason I resisted switching to iTunes even after I got an iPod shuffle. I particularly hated having the iTunes links so pervasive - a link in the play libraries list and more links in the playlist itself (as icons next to songs)...
But the thing is, you can turn all that shit off. preferences->parental control->Disable Music Store. Done and done.
It's purpose is to get you to buy apples's drm laden music from their proprietary service.
Ugh... Please learn the difference between a contraction and a posessive pronoun, as well as how to turn a name into its posessive form...
hopefully most of us have gone through enough pda's to realize they are nearly useless by now
I think you need to understand that we each define for ourselves whether the thing is "useless". For you, a PDA very well may be useless. I feel my PDAs have been very useful. I use mine mostly to keep notes and track various bits of data (mainly on projects I'm working on or am thinking about starting). Paper could do this, naturally, but I enjoy the advantages of the digital storage - including, but not limited to, the more compact physical size (relative to how much paper it'd take to record all of that data I've accumulated), the ability to import data from other sources (like scanned drawings that may have originally been larger in size) and the ability to organize and summarize the data.
One problem here is that pocket-sized devices are being expected to perform the same tasks as desktop machines with 19" or larger monitors. No matter how many pixels you have, a physically small screen is still a major limitation. I believe these devices are great for some jobs, fantastic especially in the fact that they're small enough that you really can take them with you anywhere you go (the same is not true of even the smallest laptops) - but the tradeoff is that the way you interact with them needs to be a bit different, too.
So yeah, you can't expect a 240x240 or 320x320 screen to perform well with the typical webpage designed for 800x600 or better... You can't expect a tiny little thumb-board to be as quick or easy as a full-size 80-key keyboard... You can't watch Homestar Runner on it. And you can't expect a power-efficient ARM to perform on par with a modern Pentium with its many heatsinks and fans. But you can toss the damn thing in your coat pocket and have it ready when you need it. You can get more than three hours of use out of it on a single charge, and you can carry it around all day without some heavy shoulder-bag weighing you down. And then you'll wind up somewhere away from home, maybe, and want to take a note, play a game, or access the internet... and it won't be as nice an experience as the home PC setup or even a laptop, you won't be able to do everything you'd have been able to do with a laptop, but you will have the thing with you, so you won't be just sitting there wishing you had some kind of computer handy.
As for Verizon crippling... what are you referring to? I've heard of (but not seen convincing evidence of) EVDO data rate limitations, I know they want to make people pay an extra $15/month for "tethering" the thing to a laptop as a wireless modem, and they offer neither an option to disable SMS nor an option that makes it free to receive SMS (meaning if someone spams you via SMS you foot the bill.) But to my knowledge they're not impeding the software functions of the device itself. Certainly nothing like the charges I've heard that Sprint disables Bluetooth or the like...
The Palm 700p is supposedly on its way. That'll take care of two out of three of your complaints, at least.
A wise man once told me, "When a business deal is being made, the buyer is in control. The buyer brings $$$$ to the table. Nothing happens in a business deal unless $$$$ changes hands. Therefore, nothing will happen unless the buyer allows it to happen."
Did the wise man actually say "dollar-sign dollar-sign dollar-sign dollar-sign" when he was telling you this?
These days, users become subscribers so that they can get first post and fool the moderators into thinking that what they wrote was insightful. Rather than discuss, as mentioned in the article, how a witty title that perhaps employs humor or puns is rewritten to something mundane so that a search engine can pick up on common keywords, people these days are engaging in what Linus Torvalds calls little more than a public wanking session trying to post comments more insightful than the rest.
We don't all do that.
I, for one*, prefer to find posts that have been highly ranked (thus increasing the visibility of my reply), post a reply (usually with a slightly different subject line, to attract even more attention amidst the sea of other posts also trying to siphon attention off the same parent - but most of them having the same subject line) and go for humor.
In all seriousness I know that all that doesn't do a damn bit of good for Slashdot's serious discussion of the topic... But what can I say? It's fun. Like a game.
* "I, for one, welcome our boring headline overlords" would be the standard joke mandated here... but I don't do that.
He said "pro-capitalist". The difference is that he didn't say the FDA itself as an organization was capitalist, but rather that it favors or promotes capitalist agendas, or supports those with such agendas.
Then it should refer to "the first transmission of ASCII boobs", not "the first ASCII boobs" being transmitted on their network... Unless, of course, they went digging, found the very first ASCII boobs, and transmitted them...
Nonsense... ASCII boobs date back at least to the teletype era... I'm sure some enterprising young engineer found ways to make punchcard boobs before that.
I tend to think that the problem with CGI from a creative standpoint is that it's a relatively new tool - there's a certain novelty factor attached to it (filmmakers can create effects that would be difficult or impossible before for various reasons) and in the creative sense it hasn't quite matured, I think.
The problem IMO is that it's overused. It's opened the floodgates, so that all kinds of movies can have all kinds of effects that might have been too costly to justify before - the problem is the decisions on when to use and when not to use these effects haven't reached a point where they're made for the right reasons. If an effect doesn't look good enough to be in the forefront of a film, it shouldn't be. That doesn't mean the effect has no value as a background piece. It's the same way with a costume or prop - if it doesn't look good enough when filmed up close, don't film it up close. I think in particular the "rag-doll" effects when a character gets thrown around tend to fall into this category.
I have a bit of a sentimental stake in this, myself - as someone who spends a great deal of time building models, I mourn the fact that the role of physical models in films has been diminshed. But even in the "good old days" the situation wasn't perfect... just look at all the abuse the Starship Enterprise model went through in the movies - having that beautiful paintjob, which was promptly ruined for the second film (I'm referring to the dullcoat, though the botched battle damage certainly played a part, too), abused in the fifth film, etc...
I love the DS, for a while I didn't think I was going to get the DS or the PSP, but ultimately the DS won me over - mainly it just seemed like the more interesting platform to me - as someone who is interested in making games I felt like the dual screens and touch sensor had more potential for interesting game development than the raw power of the PSP did. And I've had loads of fun with my DS since I got it - and I haven't even bought Advance Wars yet. My main problem with the PSP was always the limited selection of games that interested me. Darkstalkers seemed moderately interesting, Armored Core would have been interesting if it was about piloting robots instead of watching the AI pilot a robot, and I thought "Mercury" was excellent when I played it - a perfect example of what can be accomplished when you combine a good game premise with hardware capable of doing the thing right. But for the most part I didn't feel like there was too much on the PSP worth my attention - especially for such a big bulky thing (I seem to have gotten past the "bulkiness" issues, since I bought a DS which is pretty much the same size).
I would say the PSP is picking up speed as a gaming platform, though. "Mega Man Powered Up"? How about "Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter"... That is a game I find really tempting. Capcom seems to be giving the platform some much-needed attention lately.
As for the DS - when I'm playing it I'm usually not bothered by the technical limitations. I don't care that a lot of the background objects in Mario Kart aren't actually 3-D, for instance... I am moderately bothered by the fact that the system can't manage full-framerate 3-D on both screens at once, which seems to often make one screen be almost wasted... But when I look at the platform as a developer, considering projects I might write for the device, I start to feel more constrained by the limitations. The DS simply would not be capable of something like Armored Core. (well, I guess it could do the equivalent of Armored Core 1...) As a 3-D platform it's very limited - I almost feel that you have to see the DS as a 2-D platform. And their decision to give the system only 4MB RAM seems almost insane. What would 16MB or 32MB have cost them? It's hard to believe that it would have been a significant cost, and since DS cartridges aren't memory-mapped it seems like a foolish choice to me to limit the RAM space so drastically.
I think maybe Nintendo is looking at games transitioning from being a total specialty to more generally "electronic toys". The super-low-end electronic games (such as the TV game joysticks) in the $10-$20 range have reached the point of SNES quality, or better. The super-high-end consoles still exist, naturally - I think they're predicting a spectrum of home gaming, in which there has to be a middle player in between the two extremes for now, and in which in the next generation the distinction between the high and middle ranges may disappear altogether.
Well, sure, there was a lot of info to read, but just think how much we learned about Snapper Lawn Mowers and their superiority over other lawn mowers?
Apparently you've never seen a slashvertisement before.
I don't know what you mean by that, but I can tell you this: I'm going to rush right out and buy a Snapper lawn mower right away! It sounds like a really fantastic product! I'd hate to wind up with one of those other, inferior lawn mowers for less money.
Secondly, the students in, for example, grade ten wont be moving into an office job for at least three years, if not six. For promary school users it is even further. That means the technology they are currently learning will be SIX YEARS OR MORE OUT OF DATE.
When I was a kid I learned computing on Commodore 64s. I later moved on to DOS and Windows 3.1...
All of the above are now technologies so old as to be utterly laughable. But you know what? I still learned things. I learned some BASIC on the C64 and wrote a few programs. I took a class on Pascal and learned to code better. I no longer code in BASIC or Pascal but that was the start of an ongoing learning process. The arena changes as time goes on, but that doesn't mean what I've learned is valueless. The particular processes for solving problems with the computer are much the same today.
No, but from time to time I call it "Deutschland"...
Refusing to integrate foreign language terms when talking about foreign stuff is just another way of propagating ignorance.
It's pretty simple. If you translate "Nihon Keizai Shinbun" you've complicated the process of identifying the citation. If you don't leave that redundant "newspaper" qualifier in there, then the people who don't know any Japanese won't know what kind of publication it is. Is that so complicated?
Slashdot Mirror
Its like the developers were sitting around scratching their heads on how to use the touch screen and picked the worst control scheme imaginable. Is there some law that requires all DS games to use the touchscreen? Just because its there doesn't mean you have to use it, especially if you don't have good reason to.
:)
I don't know - the thing about using the touchscreen for aiming in Metroid is that it gives you a level of control on par with mouse-look on a PC FPS. That's not something you can attain with a normal console controller - certainly not a D-pad, but not even an analog thumbstick will reliably give you that level of control.
I think that is a damn good reason to use the touchscreen. If you don't want to use the touchscreen - I believe there is an option for that, too.
The only time touchscreen control has really bugged me is in Mario 64. The game was made for analog controls, so there are places where not using the touchscreen is a major handicap. But using the touchscreen is awkward because of the way they set it up - the "center" position of the control is not stable, but rather follows your stylus around the screen.
But, yes, there is a law that requires DS games to use either the touchscreen or the microphone for something. An inordinate number of DS games include play challenges which in some way involve blowing on something, scratching something, or operating a slingshot.
Ever been to play-asia? lik-sang?
"Replacements"... they are not needed.
I think it's worth doing a thing well even if it's not especially innovative. GH is a lot of fun. Is it somehow less fun as a result of being derivative of Guitar Freaks? Of course not.
Oh, and the game port wasn't a serial port.
What makes Palm OS obsolete, in your opinion?
:)
I'm not trying to specially qualify my comments by saying this - I merely feel like sharing my background on the subject. From 2000 until early 2002 I was a professional programmer working on the XMap Handheld (AKA Solus) mapping product for PalmOS. I followed the product line pretty closely for a few years, from the tail-end of OS3 up until the period in which OS5 was being introduced to developers. It's a system that I love for various reasons but lately I've felt that it has some real issues that need to be addressed.
Top on the list is PACE - the m68k emulator/translator that runs on all the ARM-based OS5 devices. It's fantastic that they were committed to providing this level of backward-compatibility. The problem is (and I could be quite mistaken here, if my knowledge is as outdated as I would hope it is) that as far as I know they never rolled out a full-fledged way to write fully-fledged ARM applications. PalmOS6 came out in 2003 (according to Wikipedia) but no devices use it - including the recent and upcoming Treo models. The only way to get native ARM code into a Palm app these days is with "PACE Native Objects" - chunks of native ARM code stuck into an emulated m68k application. The result is that people still mostly write m68k code for their Palms, even though the platform moved to ARM years ago.
Next is the lack of a multitasking, protected environment for programs. There's a limited capacity for multitasking (IIRC the underlying OS for both OS 1-4 and OS5 both provide this support, but PalmOS operates on top of this layer, providing the entire environment within one "process" and not enabling access to that functionality) Sure, I believe in the "Zen of Palm" and all that - I think the PalmOS design makes sense in many ways in that it limits the portable device from accumulating a lot of cruft in the dynamic heap by essentially limiting it to one application at a time - but I am also a bit of a tech nerd and it does bug me that they haven't modernized this thing. A reboot shouldn't be necessary when an application crashes. And if a particular application is better implemented through real multi-threading as opposed to having execution jump all over the place in a single thread, then that's how it should be done.
Then there's internationalization. I know the importance of this will be quite a lot less for the majority of people - but I greatly enjoy the ability to properly represent and process foreign text using Unicode. I find the continued lack of it on PalmOS to be disappointing.
Internationalization and PACE were the two main factors that almost stopped me from buying a new PalmOS device to replace my defective and long-ailing Tungsten T2. (It's only defective because I bought a refurbished device from overstock.com, and it's always had issues.) The availability of things like an up-to-date Python interpreter on Windows Mobile was also a big draw. In the end, however, I decided that Palm is still the right portable platform for me, so I'll be receiving a Treo 650 soon.
Here's the problem... People don't like itunes because it's essentially a gateway to the itunes store.
Yeah, I felt the same way before I used iTunes, and that was one reason I resisted switching to iTunes even after I got an iPod shuffle. I particularly hated having the iTunes links so pervasive - a link in the play libraries list and more links in the playlist itself (as icons next to songs)...
But the thing is, you can turn all that shit off. preferences->parental control->Disable Music Store. Done and done.
It's purpose is to get you to buy apples's drm laden music from their proprietary service.
Ugh... Please learn the difference between a contraction and a posessive pronoun, as well as how to turn a name into its posessive form...
He meant the other slashdotter who he was quoting was anonymous, dur-hey.
That's ridiculous. My brain doesn't have an off sw
hopefully most of us have gone through enough pda's to realize they are nearly useless by now
I think you need to understand that we each define for ourselves whether the thing is "useless". For you, a PDA very well may be useless. I feel my PDAs have been very useful. I use mine mostly to keep notes and track various bits of data (mainly on projects I'm working on or am thinking about starting). Paper could do this, naturally, but I enjoy the advantages of the digital storage - including, but not limited to, the more compact physical size (relative to how much paper it'd take to record all of that data I've accumulated), the ability to import data from other sources (like scanned drawings that may have originally been larger in size) and the ability to organize and summarize the data.
Too small... for what, exactly?
One problem here is that pocket-sized devices are being expected to perform the same tasks as desktop machines with 19" or larger monitors. No matter how many pixels you have, a physically small screen is still a major limitation. I believe these devices are great for some jobs, fantastic especially in the fact that they're small enough that you really can take them with you anywhere you go (the same is not true of even the smallest laptops) - but the tradeoff is that the way you interact with them needs to be a bit different, too.
So yeah, you can't expect a 240x240 or 320x320 screen to perform well with the typical webpage designed for 800x600 or better... You can't expect a tiny little thumb-board to be as quick or easy as a full-size 80-key keyboard... You can't watch Homestar Runner on it. And you can't expect a power-efficient ARM to perform on par with a modern Pentium with its many heatsinks and fans. But you can toss the damn thing in your coat pocket and have it ready when you need it. You can get more than three hours of use out of it on a single charge, and you can carry it around all day without some heavy shoulder-bag weighing you down. And then you'll wind up somewhere away from home, maybe, and want to take a note, play a game, or access the internet... and it won't be as nice an experience as the home PC setup or even a laptop, you won't be able to do everything you'd have been able to do with a laptop, but you will have the thing with you, so you won't be just sitting there wishing you had some kind of computer handy.
As for Verizon crippling... what are you referring to? I've heard of (but not seen convincing evidence of) EVDO data rate limitations, I know they want to make people pay an extra $15/month for "tethering" the thing to a laptop as a wireless modem, and they offer neither an option to disable SMS nor an option that makes it free to receive SMS (meaning if someone spams you via SMS you foot the bill.) But to my knowledge they're not impeding the software functions of the device itself. Certainly nothing like the charges I've heard that Sprint disables Bluetooth or the like...
The Palm 700p is supposedly on its way. That'll take care of two out of three of your complaints, at least.
A wise man once told me, "When a business deal is being made, the buyer is in control. The buyer brings $$$$ to the table. Nothing happens in a business deal unless $$$$ changes hands. Therefore, nothing will happen unless the buyer allows it to happen."
Did the wise man actually say "dollar-sign dollar-sign dollar-sign dollar-sign" when he was telling you this?
Yes, but you can only grow green laser pointers, which are illegal as their only legitimate purpose is to blind airline pilots.
These days, users become subscribers so that they can get first post and fool the moderators into thinking that what they wrote was insightful. Rather than discuss, as mentioned in the article, how a witty title that perhaps employs humor or puns is rewritten to something mundane so that a search engine can pick up on common keywords, people these days are engaging in what Linus Torvalds calls little more than a public wanking session trying to post comments more insightful than the rest.
We don't all do that.
I, for one*, prefer to find posts that have been highly ranked (thus increasing the visibility of my reply), post a reply (usually with a slightly different subject line, to attract even more attention amidst the sea of other posts also trying to siphon attention off the same parent - but most of them having the same subject line) and go for humor.
In all seriousness I know that all that doesn't do a damn bit of good for Slashdot's serious discussion of the topic... But what can I say? It's fun. Like a game.
* "I, for one, welcome our boring headline overlords" would be the standard joke mandated here... but I don't do that.
He said "pro-capitalist". The difference is that he didn't say the FDA itself as an organization was capitalist, but rather that it favors or promotes capitalist agendas, or supports those with such agendas.
Then it should refer to "the first transmission of ASCII boobs", not "the first ASCII boobs" being transmitted on their network... Unless, of course, they went digging, found the very first ASCII boobs, and transmitted them...
(Heh, boobies.) (.)(.)
Nonsense... ASCII boobs date back at least to the teletype era... I'm sure some enterprising young engineer found ways to make punchcard boobs before that.
I tend to think that the problem with CGI from a creative standpoint is that it's a relatively new tool - there's a certain novelty factor attached to it (filmmakers can create effects that would be difficult or impossible before for various reasons) and in the creative sense it hasn't quite matured, I think.
The problem IMO is that it's overused. It's opened the floodgates, so that all kinds of movies can have all kinds of effects that might have been too costly to justify before - the problem is the decisions on when to use and when not to use these effects haven't reached a point where they're made for the right reasons. If an effect doesn't look good enough to be in the forefront of a film, it shouldn't be. That doesn't mean the effect has no value as a background piece. It's the same way with a costume or prop - if it doesn't look good enough when filmed up close, don't film it up close. I think in particular the "rag-doll" effects when a character gets thrown around tend to fall into this category.
I have a bit of a sentimental stake in this, myself - as someone who spends a great deal of time building models, I mourn the fact that the role of physical models in films has been diminshed. But even in the "good old days" the situation wasn't perfect... just look at all the abuse the Starship Enterprise model went through in the movies - having that beautiful paintjob, which was promptly ruined for the second film (I'm referring to the dullcoat, though the botched battle damage certainly played a part, too), abused in the fifth film, etc...
I love the DS, for a while I didn't think I was going to get the DS or the PSP, but ultimately the DS won me over - mainly it just seemed like the more interesting platform to me - as someone who is interested in making games I felt like the dual screens and touch sensor had more potential for interesting game development than the raw power of the PSP did. And I've had loads of fun with my DS since I got it - and I haven't even bought Advance Wars yet. My main problem with the PSP was always the limited selection of games that interested me. Darkstalkers seemed moderately interesting, Armored Core would have been interesting if it was about piloting robots instead of watching the AI pilot a robot, and I thought "Mercury" was excellent when I played it - a perfect example of what can be accomplished when you combine a good game premise with hardware capable of doing the thing right. But for the most part I didn't feel like there was too much on the PSP worth my attention - especially for such a big bulky thing (I seem to have gotten past the "bulkiness" issues, since I bought a DS which is pretty much the same size).
I would say the PSP is picking up speed as a gaming platform, though. "Mega Man Powered Up"? How about "Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter"... That is a game I find really tempting. Capcom seems to be giving the platform some much-needed attention lately.
As for the DS - when I'm playing it I'm usually not bothered by the technical limitations. I don't care that a lot of the background objects in Mario Kart aren't actually 3-D, for instance... I am moderately bothered by the fact that the system can't manage full-framerate 3-D on both screens at once, which seems to often make one screen be almost wasted... But when I look at the platform as a developer, considering projects I might write for the device, I start to feel more constrained by the limitations. The DS simply would not be capable of something like Armored Core. (well, I guess it could do the equivalent of Armored Core 1...) As a 3-D platform it's very limited - I almost feel that you have to see the DS as a 2-D platform. And their decision to give the system only 4MB RAM seems almost insane. What would 16MB or 32MB have cost them? It's hard to believe that it would have been a significant cost, and since DS cartridges aren't memory-mapped it seems like a foolish choice to me to limit the RAM space so drastically.
I think maybe Nintendo is looking at games transitioning from being a total specialty to more generally "electronic toys". The super-low-end electronic games (such as the TV game joysticks) in the $10-$20 range have reached the point of SNES quality, or better. The super-high-end consoles still exist, naturally - I think they're predicting a spectrum of home gaming, in which there has to be a middle player in between the two extremes for now, and in which in the next generation the distinction between the high and middle ranges may disappear altogether.
Well, sure, there was a lot of info to read, but just think how much we learned about Snapper Lawn Mowers and their superiority over other lawn mowers?
Apparently you've never seen a slashvertisement before.
I don't know what you mean by that, but I can tell you this: I'm going to rush right out and buy a Snapper lawn mower right away! It sounds like a really fantastic product! I'd hate to wind up with one of those other, inferior lawn mowers for less money.
Now if only I had a lawn...
Call it "Star Wars". People like Star Wars, so they'll like SDI more if it's called by that name.
Secondly, the students in, for example, grade ten wont be moving into an office job for at least three years, if not six. For promary school users it is even further. That means the technology they are currently learning will be SIX YEARS OR MORE OUT OF DATE.
When I was a kid I learned computing on Commodore 64s. I later moved on to DOS and Windows 3.1...
All of the above are now technologies so old as to be utterly laughable. But you know what? I still learned things. I learned some BASIC on the C64 and wrote a few programs. I took a class on Pascal and learned to code better. I no longer code in BASIC or Pascal but that was the start of an ongoing learning process. The arena changes as time goes on, but that doesn't mean what I've learned is valueless. The particular processes for solving problems with the computer are much the same today.
Do you call Germany "Bundesrepublik Deutschland"?
No, but from time to time I call it "Deutschland"...
Refusing to integrate foreign language terms when talking about foreign stuff is just another way of propagating ignorance.
It's pretty simple. If you translate "Nihon Keizai Shinbun" you've complicated the process of identifying the citation. If you don't leave that redundant "newspaper" qualifier in there, then the people who don't know any Japanese won't know what kind of publication it is. Is that so complicated?
I also do not live in China, and I also think the Chinese government is just fine.
Is anal sex "gay-friendly sex"?
If you do it right...