Are no consoles great in their first year? I'm not so sure, but I'll accept that at face value.
Should the Wii be held to some higher standard? I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that the article's biggest disappointment was the Wii's lineup. My experience, as someone who's got lots of stuff going on, is that they may be right. But hey, I'm just one person and as I said, I've not paid a lot of attention.
And you're right, you havent paid a lot of attention lately.
Yes. That's why I said it. That sort of statement by me is meant to open up conversation by people who have paid attention. Since you've paid more attention than me, why don't you outline some of the great Wii moments of 2007?
I remember when Spore was the next huge thing to hit gaming, and every game show had breathless gamers watching previews. Then we waited. And waited. And waited.
Years passed.
Still no Spore! It's an ambitious game, yes, but once you hit the third or fourth year of development, it starts seeming like it'll never get here. Games with extremely long dev times have a history of disappointing. I reckon "No Spore This Year" should be on the list as a disappointment of 2007.
The article's biggest letdown of 2007 was the poor third-party lineup for the Wii.
The Wii's the only next-gen console my wife and I own, and while we've played a lot of the tennis game, some Zelda, some of the first Rabbids game but no other titles have really grabbed our interest. I bought one of those 'maze in the air' games that came out early on, lent it to a friend and haven't cared to ask for it back.
The lineup (outside Nintendo) seems pretty weak, but I've not paid a lot of attention lately.
You should be modded down, not because of your obvious flamebait, but because you've fallen for a story that's just not true.
The real Steve Jobs doesn't know anything about this (thinks it's a joke) and the EFF don't know anything about this (and denied that they'd ever say they only represent people they like). Hell, all the proof you need is in the FSJ posts, but like a lot of other Slashdotters, you've jumped in half cocked, foaming at the mouth to decry the evil of Apple and been modded +5 insightful for posting a flamebait rant.
I just can't believe the bullshit story has been taken seriously by so many people here. I thought this was meant to be the smart crowd.
The guy who writes the satirical site filled with generally humorous content and who relies on some advertising revenue generated by his outrageous stories, or the guy who runs the actual company.
Great links. One about Think Secret, who illegally solicited NDA material and published it, one speculation about what Apple might do, two about O'Grady's Power Page, which published sections of Apple's service manuals online and one about removing a post on their own forums.
Yup, that's evil right there.
Maybe they should have come to an arrangement with Power Page, who published the manual pages to prove a heatsink problem (if memory serves), but the others are all fine.
Apple can do whatever they like on their forums, as can Slashdot, Ars and any other site. If the issues were posted somewhere else, Apple can't touch them. What's the issue here?
Think Secret was a crap site publishing information sometimes gained illegally, and Apple sued for the leaker's name. Ciarelli refused to give it up, escalating the whole thing. If Ciarelli was legally clear, would he have accepted an agreement to shut down? Of course not! Ciarelli knew his case would fold in court and settled for something to save himself. He knowingly violated an NDA (which is actionable under Californian law I believe, even if he didn't sign it himself) and just managed to get away with it by shutting his site down. To be honest, I can't manage to feel upset that Think Secret is no more. It was one of those sites that made so many wrong predictions that I was amazed it got any right at all. We know now why a couple of predictions were on the money though.
As for speculation on what Apple might do, well that's not worthy of comment is it?
So when the GUI is new and innovative, and Apple licenced some concepts from Xerox and developed many others on its own (aided greatly by Jef Raskin, their employee and the creator of much of the GUI concept), you're okay with Microsoft ripping the entire UI off and making a few cosmetic changes? You don't mind one company shamelessly ripping off another?
Apple were right to sue then, and only a lack of fortitude on their part lost the case.
Then we hit your real clanger - Apple are just as bad as Microsoft. Well, that's just so much bullshit, isn't it? You're basing that on nothing more than your own intuition, which we've seen is faulty when applied to legal issues. Maybe they would be as bad, maybe not but there's no way you can call it from here.
Did you spot that the whole damned story about suing FSJ was a complete fabrication by FSJ? I suspect not, as that'd take away one tiny fragment of your reasoning to hate Apple.
It's a joke, although many Slashdotters seem to want to burn a Steve Jobs effigy. Who needs to read the story when the headline and summary are so incendary?
Arharr Jim lad! Ye've got me in mind of an old shanty, sung when we pirates gather.
"It was on the good ship Venus..."
Arr! What d'ye mean ye've heard it before! Ya scurvy dog! I'd keelhaul ya but I'd rather stitch yer guts up to the mizzen mast and chase ya 'round till yer insides are outside, ya dog!
If it were really about obscurity, we'd never have seen the pre-OS X viruses at all. They did exist, so something else happened when OS X was introduced. There are no real viruses today for OS X, when an obscurity argument should posit a tiny fraction of the Windows viruses.
I reckon it's more that the virus and malware writers out there just aren't up to the task of writing something that will really hit the OS X platform. Clearly the current hit rate of zero means that they're not good enough.
And yes, I am daring them to do it. As a Mac user, it'll only improve security.
But no, I really don't think they're up to it. Malware authors are mostly script kiddies with a handful of actual talent. Sadly even they are just not good enough and that pure lack of ability is what will keep OS X more secure.
I don't recall them suing anyone over spoiling the CEO's "big surprise". (Which is really what this is all about, Steve Jobs personal vendetta).
No, this is about trade secrets. The big surprise was a product that the never released (some iPod called Asteroid). It's not a personal vendetta, and I'm pretty sure you'd find the US legal system not so sympathetic to personal vendettas being carried out via the courts.
You need to understand that radiocarbon dating and isochron dating are two different methods of dating an object, although both are based in radiometric dating. A rebuttal of radiocarbon dating is not a rebuttal of radiometric dating or other methodologies, and further a specialist can easily show just about anything to a lay-person, without it necessarily being true.
I'd say that Milton's a crank scientist, but if you believe him can you outline where you disagree with Richard Dawkin's review of Milton's book?
You have to wonder when just about every other person in a profession disagrees with you if it's more likely that you're wrong or that they're all wrong.
Sadly the Telstra privatisation was bungled from start to finish. As soon as 51% of the shares left the government, the board they appointed turned around and flicked the finger to the government. They feel that as a private company they should have no obligation to the government beyond those defined by laws. They had a very hostile relationship with a government that privatised them but still expected them to toe a policy line.
Which would be fine if they were not created with tax dollars. Even that would be acceptable at some level if they didn't own the entire damned network as well!
The government, driven by a privatisation ideology, effectively [i]gave away the entire taxpayer funded network to a private company[/i].
Optus are laying a few cables here and there, but the network is effectively Telstra's. The ISPs and other telecom companies pay Telstra, or customers can choose Telstra directly and pay more (oddly they're rarely competitive).
I'd have been thrilled to see the government keep the network and privatise the company. That'd ensure a level playing field. Or privatise the network as a seperate company unrelated to Telstra. That'd fit with their "government stays out of business" mantra, despite the 10 billion dollars Telstra was giving back in profits each year. Either option would have provided real competition in the industry.
Sadly the bozos who ran the Communications Ministry just didn't think any of this would happen. After years of literally retarded IT policy under Richard Alston (well known for a while as the world's biggest luddite), we suffered years of utter inability under Helen Coonan (who drove the privatisation, brilliantly relaxed media ownership to encourage diversity but resulted in less, and recently introduced an Internet filtering app paid for with $80M in tax dollars that was completely hacked in 30 mins by a high school kid). Under the new Labor government, anyone put in the role would be better. I'd argue that random choices made by a die throw or Magic 8-Ball would have given us a better communications industry than we've got now. Surely no-one could do any worse.
I recall that Christopher Tolkien was a lot more involved with the stories than you'd think. JRRT bounced the stories off him while he was serving in WWII, using his feedback to rewrite the books. He compiled the thirteen volume History of Middle Earth series, The Silmarillion (okay, perhaps not such a great example) and the new Children of Húrin.
He didn't contribute to The Lord of the Rings enough to get a credit, and the later works he did contribute to were still his father's notes, but he was a factor in the books. Whether he deserves money by virtue of being the heir of JRRT is another matter. He's not unconnected with the original two stories and enabled everything done posthumously. You could make a very solid case that he is due money by virtue of his work, not just his status as heir.
On top of all that, I've long harboured the suspicion that he pretty much wrote the history series by himself. It's the way that the early books came out with newly unearthed notes and later books expanded on those notes, as if he was unearthing layers of notes in convenient book-sized chunks - "Oh look! another version of story X. Better publish that right away!". The story of Húrin and his kids is a good example - there are half a dozen versions scattered throughout the books! Why not research it thoroughly and present a final version, with all the notes on how it came to be? In fairness, he did that for the LotR stories, just not for the much larger Silmarillion stories.
I was trying to get you to at least attack the points I originally made. That was the point of the second post. You haven't said why you were right, just that you were. Well, I was around at the time and I know you're wrong.
You assume I'm an Apple zealot, but I've said nothing to indicate that. You're projecting onto me (ew!). Look back at my original post. I made no value judgements about Apple beyond supporting the five-year Office deal. Somehow from that you deduced (incorrectly) that I'm a zealot, a fanboi, a rabid, foaming at the mouth, unthinking drone too worried about appearance and style to think about what I need from equipment or indeed to think at all.
I know the old joke about astronomers seeing one event and assuming all other events are the same, but this is ridiculous.
I won't post a reply to this thread. I assume you'll be replying because your other posts (here and in this topic) indicate a need to get a last word in. You'll convince yourself that you've won again and dealt with another bozo fanboi through sheer logic and the brilliance of your arguments. Except you've presented neither, and I think we both know it.
But well done, you've convinced me not to bother replying again. You've won, on those terms!
Weak and sad. Your continual casting of debate into "zealots versus me" will ensure you bring out only zealots.
You might be having fun, but clearly you're a zealot in your own way, and can't accept any error or fault on your part. You're every bit as blind as the most deluded Apple fan that you deride, and you use crudity where none is needed, weakening your post.
Still, thanks for playing. I note you can't disagree with any points, and you really are a troll.
Here's to -1 troll mods for you forever! (raises coffee cup)
No, you're wrong about Microsoft keeping Apple solvent.
Apple were being called "beleaguered" and "struggling" by a media hooked on those terms but the fact is that had around 2 billion dollars in cash reserves, were just about to launch the iMac, the iPod was in the works and the company was working hard on getting OS X into a public beta state. The company was struggling to get past the crap left by a bunch of poor CEOs and to raise their image, but not struggling financially.
You would have heard a lot of the Apple fans booing Gates when his video appeared on stage, if you'd seen a clip. Many of the more zealot-y people were very upset indeed about any deal, or Microsoft's money (which was settling a few patent disputes and a bit of stolen Quicktime code). I liked the idea of certainty around Office releases, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't alone in that.
Microsoft's $150M in non-voting stock was reparations and a gesture, and they made a very tidy profit when the sold a few years later. Of course, if they'd held on that money would have been worth quite a few billion by now - Apple's stock was around $16 (from memory) and while it's now around $190 it has split a few times. They'd have made more profit than their entertainment division has in its entire life.
But I guess all that doesn't fit your poor memory and doesn't help you throw around terms like "overly smug Apple fanbois." You were correctly moderated as "-1 troll" although I'd like to think you can learn better.
Wrong way around. Wind is driven by ocean currents.
And I'm in the Southern Hemisphere. We're having record heat here in Australia as well as droughts. Winters are weaker, summers longer and hotter. Sydney is getting Brisbane's weather, Melbourne is getting Sydney's and Hobart is getting Melbourne's.
Antarctic ice increasing? Tell that to the Ross Ice Shelf.
They're clearly both bad, and no sensible person would claim otherwise. I certainly didn't, and I love your little snippy remark there trying to imply that I did. Nice.
Here's a newsflash for you - one is infinitely worse than the other, and I use the word "infinitely" literally.
If you equate a blowjob with a few hundred thousand people slaughtered in a war based on lies (or at best wilful misinformation) then I'd hate to know anything about your sex life.
Lies are bad, but you have to look at what the lies were used in aid of to determine how bad they are.
Slashdot Mirror
Are no consoles great in their first year? I'm not so sure, but I'll accept that at face value.
Should the Wii be held to some higher standard? I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that the article's biggest disappointment was the Wii's lineup. My experience, as someone who's got lots of stuff going on, is that they may be right. But hey, I'm just one person and as I said, I've not paid a lot of attention.
And you're right, you havent paid a lot of attention lately.
Yes. That's why I said it. That sort of statement by me is meant to open up conversation by people who have paid attention. Since you've paid more attention than me, why don't you outline some of the great Wii moments of 2007?
I remember when Spore was the next huge thing to hit gaming, and every game show had breathless gamers watching previews. Then we waited. And waited. And waited.
Years passed.
Still no Spore! It's an ambitious game, yes, but once you hit the third or fourth year of development, it starts seeming like it'll never get here. Games with extremely long dev times have a history of disappointing. I reckon "No Spore This Year" should be on the list as a disappointment of 2007.
Wither Spore?
The article's biggest letdown of 2007 was the poor third-party lineup for the Wii.
The Wii's the only next-gen console my wife and I own, and while we've played a lot of the tennis game, some Zelda, some of the first Rabbids game but no other titles have really grabbed our interest. I bought one of those 'maze in the air' games that came out early on, lent it to a friend and haven't cared to ask for it back.
The lineup (outside Nintendo) seems pretty weak, but I've not paid a lot of attention lately.
You should be modded down, not because of your obvious flamebait, but because you've fallen for a story that's just not true.
The real Steve Jobs doesn't know anything about this (thinks it's a joke) and the EFF don't know anything about this (and denied that they'd ever say they only represent people they like). Hell, all the proof you need is in the FSJ posts, but like a lot of other Slashdotters, you've jumped in half cocked, foaming at the mouth to decry the evil of Apple and been modded +5 insightful for posting a flamebait rant.
I just can't believe the bullshit story has been taken seriously by so many people here. I thought this was meant to be the smart crowd.
Yeah, who to believe?
Fake Steve Jobs or the real one...
The guy who writes the satirical site filled with generally humorous content and who relies on some advertising revenue generated by his outrageous stories, or the guy who runs the actual company.
Hmmm... tough call...
Great links. One about Think Secret, who illegally solicited NDA material and published it, one speculation about what Apple might do, two about O'Grady's Power Page, which published sections of Apple's service manuals online and one about removing a post on their own forums.
Yup, that's evil right there.
Maybe they should have come to an arrangement with Power Page, who published the manual pages to prove a heatsink problem (if memory serves), but the others are all fine.
Apple can do whatever they like on their forums, as can Slashdot, Ars and any other site. If the issues were posted somewhere else, Apple can't touch them. What's the issue here?
Think Secret was a crap site publishing information sometimes gained illegally, and Apple sued for the leaker's name. Ciarelli refused to give it up, escalating the whole thing. If Ciarelli was legally clear, would he have accepted an agreement to shut down? Of course not! Ciarelli knew his case would fold in court and settled for something to save himself. He knowingly violated an NDA (which is actionable under Californian law I believe, even if he didn't sign it himself) and just managed to get away with it by shutting his site down. To be honest, I can't manage to feel upset that Think Secret is no more. It was one of those sites that made so many wrong predictions that I was amazed it got any right at all. We know now why a couple of predictions were on the money though.
As for speculation on what Apple might do, well that's not worthy of comment is it?
So when the GUI is new and innovative, and Apple licenced some concepts from Xerox and developed many others on its own (aided greatly by Jef Raskin, their employee and the creator of much of the GUI concept), you're okay with Microsoft ripping the entire UI off and making a few cosmetic changes? You don't mind one company shamelessly ripping off another?
Apple were right to sue then, and only a lack of fortitude on their part lost the case.
Then we hit your real clanger - Apple are just as bad as Microsoft. Well, that's just so much bullshit, isn't it? You're basing that on nothing more than your own intuition, which we've seen is faulty when applied to legal issues. Maybe they would be as bad, maybe not but there's no way you can call it from here.
Did you spot that the whole damned story about suing FSJ was a complete fabrication by FSJ? I suspect not, as that'd take away one tiny fragment of your reasoning to hate Apple.
You're not at all disturbed by the fact that this was all a bit of satire on FSJ's part, and the story just isn't true then?
No, that'd slow down your rant against Apple, and we can't allow that!
It's a joke, although many Slashdotters seem to want to burn a Steve Jobs effigy. Who needs to read the story when the headline and summary are so incendary?
It's not a very good joke either.
Arharr Jim lad! Ye've got me in mind of an old shanty, sung when we pirates gather.
"It was on the good ship Venus..."
Arr! What d'ye mean ye've heard it before! Ya scurvy dog! I'd keelhaul ya but I'd rather stitch yer guts up to the mizzen mast and chase ya 'round till yer insides are outside, ya dog!
If it were really about obscurity, we'd never have seen the pre-OS X viruses at all. They did exist, so something else happened when OS X was introduced. There are no real viruses today for OS X, when an obscurity argument should posit a tiny fraction of the Windows viruses.
I reckon it's more that the virus and malware writers out there just aren't up to the task of writing something that will really hit the OS X platform. Clearly the current hit rate of zero means that they're not good enough.
And yes, I am daring them to do it. As a Mac user, it'll only improve security.
But no, I really don't think they're up to it. Malware authors are mostly script kiddies with a handful of actual talent. Sadly even they are just not good enough and that pure lack of ability is what will keep OS X more secure.
I don't recall them suing anyone over spoiling the CEO's "big surprise". (Which is really what this is all about, Steve Jobs personal vendetta).
No, this is about trade secrets. The big surprise was a product that the never released (some iPod called Asteroid). It's not a personal vendetta, and I'm pretty sure you'd find the US legal system not so sympathetic to personal vendettas being carried out via the courts.
You need to understand that radiocarbon dating and isochron dating are two different methods of dating an object, although both are based in radiometric dating. A rebuttal of radiocarbon dating is not a rebuttal of radiometric dating or other methodologies, and further a specialist can easily show just about anything to a lay-person, without it necessarily being true.
I'd say that Milton's a crank scientist, but if you believe him can you outline where you disagree with Richard Dawkin's review of Milton's book?
You have to wonder when just about every other person in a profession disagrees with you if it's more likely that you're wrong or that they're all wrong.
If a bullshot is a mocked-up image for the game package or ads, what's the 3D animated mock-up called?
As soon as his nationality became an impediment to his power, he dropped it. He's now as Aussie as sushi, as true-blue as a croissant.
As an Australian, I apologise to you for Rupert Murdoch.
We're very, very sorry.
Sadly the Telstra privatisation was bungled from start to finish. As soon as 51% of the shares left the government, the board they appointed turned around and flicked the finger to the government. They feel that as a private company they should have no obligation to the government beyond those defined by laws. They had a very hostile relationship with a government that privatised them but still expected them to toe a policy line.
Which would be fine if they were not created with tax dollars. Even that would be acceptable at some level if they didn't own the entire damned network as well!
The government, driven by a privatisation ideology, effectively [i]gave away the entire taxpayer funded network to a private company[/i].
Optus are laying a few cables here and there, but the network is effectively Telstra's. The ISPs and other telecom companies pay Telstra, or customers can choose Telstra directly and pay more (oddly they're rarely competitive).
I'd have been thrilled to see the government keep the network and privatise the company. That'd ensure a level playing field. Or privatise the network as a seperate company unrelated to Telstra. That'd fit with their "government stays out of business" mantra, despite the 10 billion dollars Telstra was giving back in profits each year. Either option would have provided real competition in the industry.
Sadly the bozos who ran the Communications Ministry just didn't think any of this would happen. After years of literally retarded IT policy under Richard Alston (well known for a while as the world's biggest luddite), we suffered years of utter inability under Helen Coonan (who drove the privatisation, brilliantly relaxed media ownership to encourage diversity but resulted in less, and recently introduced an Internet filtering app paid for with $80M in tax dollars that was completely hacked in 30 mins by a high school kid). Under the new Labor government, anyone put in the role would be better. I'd argue that random choices made by a die throw or Magic 8-Ball would have given us a better communications industry than we've got now. Surely no-one could do any worse.
I recall that Christopher Tolkien was a lot more involved with the stories than you'd think. JRRT bounced the stories off him while he was serving in WWII, using his feedback to rewrite the books. He compiled the thirteen volume History of Middle Earth series, The Silmarillion (okay, perhaps not such a great example) and the new Children of Húrin.
He didn't contribute to The Lord of the Rings enough to get a credit, and the later works he did contribute to were still his father's notes, but he was a factor in the books. Whether he deserves money by virtue of being the heir of JRRT is another matter. He's not unconnected with the original two stories and enabled everything done posthumously. You could make a very solid case that he is due money by virtue of his work, not just his status as heir.
On top of all that, I've long harboured the suspicion that he pretty much wrote the history series by himself. It's the way that the early books came out with newly unearthed notes and later books expanded on those notes, as if he was unearthing layers of notes in convenient book-sized chunks - "Oh look! another version of story X. Better publish that right away!". The story of Húrin and his kids is a good example - there are half a dozen versions scattered throughout the books! Why not research it thoroughly and present a final version, with all the notes on how it came to be? In fairness, he did that for the LotR stories, just not for the much larger Silmarillion stories.
No, it's more likely a few years after Jef Raskin's thesis paper (The Quick Draw System) outlined them.
What? You didn't think it all started at Xerox did you?
I was trying to get you to at least attack the points I originally made. That was the point of the second post. You haven't said why you were right, just that you were. Well, I was around at the time and I know you're wrong.
You assume I'm an Apple zealot, but I've said nothing to indicate that. You're projecting onto me (ew!). Look back at my original post. I made no value judgements about Apple beyond supporting the five-year Office deal. Somehow from that you deduced (incorrectly) that I'm a zealot, a fanboi, a rabid, foaming at the mouth, unthinking drone too worried about appearance and style to think about what I need from equipment or indeed to think at all.
I know the old joke about astronomers seeing one event and assuming all other events are the same, but this is ridiculous.
I won't post a reply to this thread. I assume you'll be replying because your other posts (here and in this topic) indicate a need to get a last word in. You'll convince yourself that you've won again and dealt with another bozo fanboi through sheer logic and the brilliance of your arguments. Except you've presented neither, and I think we both know it.
But well done, you've convinced me not to bother replying again. You've won, on those terms!
That is the best post I've ever seen today.
Thanks kuactet!
Weak and sad. Your continual casting of debate into "zealots versus me" will ensure you bring out only zealots.
You might be having fun, but clearly you're a zealot in your own way, and can't accept any error or fault on your part. You're every bit as blind as the most deluded Apple fan that you deride, and you use crudity where none is needed, weakening your post.
Still, thanks for playing. I note you can't disagree with any points, and you really are a troll.
Here's to -1 troll mods for you forever! (raises coffee cup)
No, you're wrong about Microsoft keeping Apple solvent.
Apple were being called "beleaguered" and "struggling" by a media hooked on those terms but the fact is that had around 2 billion dollars in cash reserves, were just about to launch the iMac, the iPod was in the works and the company was working hard on getting OS X into a public beta state. The company was struggling to get past the crap left by a bunch of poor CEOs and to raise their image, but not struggling financially.
You would have heard a lot of the Apple fans booing Gates when his video appeared on stage, if you'd seen a clip. Many of the more zealot-y people were very upset indeed about any deal, or Microsoft's money (which was settling a few patent disputes and a bit of stolen Quicktime code). I liked the idea of certainty around Office releases, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't alone in that.
Microsoft's $150M in non-voting stock was reparations and a gesture, and they made a very tidy profit when the sold a few years later. Of course, if they'd held on that money would have been worth quite a few billion by now - Apple's stock was around $16 (from memory) and while it's now around $190 it has split a few times. They'd have made more profit than their entertainment division has in its entire life.
But I guess all that doesn't fit your poor memory and doesn't help you throw around terms like "overly smug Apple fanbois." You were correctly moderated as "-1 troll" although I'd like to think you can learn better.
Wrong way around. Wind is driven by ocean currents.
And I'm in the Southern Hemisphere. We're having record heat here in Australia as well as droughts. Winters are weaker, summers longer and hotter. Sydney is getting Brisbane's weather, Melbourne is getting Sydney's and Hobart is getting Melbourne's.
Antarctic ice increasing? Tell that to the Ross Ice Shelf.
They're clearly both bad, and no sensible person would claim otherwise. I certainly didn't, and I love your little snippy remark there trying to imply that I did. Nice.
Here's a newsflash for you - one is infinitely worse than the other, and I use the word "infinitely" literally.
If you equate a blowjob with a few hundred thousand people slaughtered in a war based on lies (or at best wilful misinformation) then I'd hate to know anything about your sex life.
Lies are bad, but you have to look at what the lies were used in aid of to determine how bad they are.