So what if the competitor doesn't, citing cost and "security" issues?
The genius of capitalism is that in the absence of a monopoly, eventually one competitor will out of short term greed.
Or what if only one ISP serves residences in a particular geographic area?
Having only one provider is of course the kind of monopoly condition that will prevent positive change. Fortunately, there's competition between cable and DSL now and hopefully WiFi and maybe broadband over powerlines in the future.
The problem isn't generating the puzzles. It's ranking them as "easy," "medium," or "hard." It's not hard to generate the puzzles, but since computers can't rank them, people will keep getting ones that are either too hard or too easy.
Besides, by limiting the number of puzzles, Nintendo leaves the door open to sell upgrade cartridges later. You may not like it, but it's good business.
Dude, do we really have to read an article about Mario's twenty-six year history? I read a bunch of articles last year about his twenty fifth anniversary, and I was glad to do it, but this is just too much. I don't think I need to read another history of Mario for a least four years. Anything else is just ridiculous.
Besides, we all need more time to gear up for the -1th anniversary of Spore.:p
Disgrace! Slashdot doesn't support the Euro sign.:( OK, everyone pretend like my last post said, Nint[euro sign]ndo. Why, oh why, do so many sites fail to use unicode?
adj 1: Like a pedant, overly concerned with formal rules and trivial points of learning; 2: Being showy of one's knowledge, often in a boring manner; 3: Often used to describe a person who emphasizes their knowledge through the use of vocabulary; 4: Being finicky or picky with language.
joke: n. 1. Something said or done to evoke laughter or amusement, especially an amusing story with a punch line. 2. A mischievous trick; a prank. 3. An amusing or ludicrous incident or situation.
recursion: n. Mathematics.
1. An expression, such as a polynomial, each term of which is determined by application of a formula to preceding terms.
2. A formula that generates the successive terms of a recursion.
This thread seems to be filled with people saying, "I don't know Japanese, but that won't stop me from spouting off nonsense as if I did."
I do know Japanese, and let me tell you that Wii is about 100 times easier for the Japanese to say than Revolution. Revolution comes out as re-bo-ru-u-shon in Japanese, which is just way too many syllables to expect people to say. Wii has the advantage of being much, much shorter, and to the Japanese eye, fairly straight forward to pronounce: Ui-i. True, ui isn't a usual sound in Japanese, but it's not an especially difficult one to say. If you search for it on google, you get about 7 million hits.
So, to all the people who are saying, "Maybe it's just a trick! I don't know anything about Japanese, but I heard they can't..." allow me to stop you there, and tell you to give it up. The name is Wii. It's a dumb name, but there it is. Nintendo likes it, and they aren't going to back down. Case closed.
It needn't be that tricky. Every application in OS X already has an info.plist describing it. Just put some information in there about which files to uninstall. When the app is dragged to the trash, ask the user, "Do you want to delete supporting files and preferences as well?" and put a details button on it to list which extra files will get binned.
Before they released Tiger, Apple explicitly told developers that 10.4 would have experimental support for scaling which would be made real in 10.5. So far, they seem to be on track to fulfill their promise.
I agree with you completely, but I'll chip in a little more. People seem to very easily confuse the question "Is it art?" with "Is it good art?" If you look around this discussion you can find several (up modded no less) examples in which the quality of the work is taken as a proxy for whether it "is art" or not.
The whole conversation is quite pointless.
A much more useful conversation -- can we enjoy games as deeply as we enjoy other kinds of art?
I wrote a paper in college arguing yes. Long story short: video games contain the same formal elements as other kinds of artwork, so there's nothing stopping you from enjoying them on that level, and on top of that the play elements that comprise the game are interesting and potentially enlightening.
Re:An idiotic idea that shows domain names are bro
on
Is It Time For .tel?
·
· Score: 1
It's already possible to find pretty much any company with a unique name via a google search. Unique names are already a requirement of domain name registration. So essentially, all that would be different is the power to name things would be devolved from ICANN to users more generally.
Re:An idiotic idea that shows domain names are bro
on
Is It Time For .tel?
·
· Score: 1
What trusted party would tag paypa1.com as paypal.com? If anything, the pages of phishers would quickly be tagged "phishers," "fraud," "danger," etc. Phishers already exist under the current system, so the question is if we can make a system that does better than the current system, not necessarily a perfect one.
Re:An idiotic idea that shows domain names are bro
on
Is It Time For .tel?
·
· Score: 1
You laugh, but wouldn't it be better if there were someway to make keywords scalable, wouldn't it be superior to the current system? Do you really envision us using this same busted ass system in 10, 20, 30 years? Or do you still tweak your config.sys, because "GUI is for wimps"?
An idiotic idea that shows domain names are broken
on
Is It Time For .tel?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is a moronic idea. I'm sure someone else in the thread has explained why by now. Here's my beef though: domain names are a fundamentally bad idea.
Think about it. Do we still need domain names? People made up the "I'm feeling lucky" ifl: protocol as a joke, but isn't it true? Can't we find anything with Google anyway? Why should we have to remember a particular address with a complicated system of slashes and characters to get to a particular page? Right now, my URL is http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183301&thresho ld=3&mode=thread&commentsort=0&op=Reply. But this is an implementation detail. Why am I, a consumer, being exposed to this? Irrelevant implementation details should be hidden from the user! Is what we're seeing now really so far removed from showing me slashdot's IP address? We cover up IP addresses with domain names, because we know it's too hard for people to remember a series of random numbers, but why can't we go the next logical step after this?
Here's what I'm proposing:
Let's extend ifl: or something like into a real protocol. A trusted source, or better a network of user selectable sources, assigns keywords to URLs based on tagging by users via hyperlinks to the source and delicious-like tags. Normally, the URL bar shows nothing but the title the site has given itself (in our case, "Slashdot") and the particular page being viewed ("Reply to thread"), but on request, the URL bar can generate a user shareable set of keyword tags for the site with hash codes for pages to prevent collision (think about the addresses generated snipurl and the like; "ifl:Slashdot/4bacc23"). For the purposes of bookmarks, traditional URLs can be stored, but since these URLs won't be exposed to users, Ford Motor company can use a23rf2.ifl and Ford Modeling Agency can use j737bdh.ifl, and no one will care, since it won't be possible to hijack a keyword without the agreement of the majority of users. (No more Whitehouse.coms!) Domain names can stick around, so that people are free to assign multiple IPs to the same site, but the concept will become a background detail that users need to know nothing about. Until the technology is built into all browsers, URL-to-ifl translator sites can fill in the gap: "go to http://ifl.com/Slashdot/4bacc23 or just ifl:Slashdot/4bacc23..." but since this won't be hard to integrate into browsers as a plug-in, I imagine it can be implemented quickly.
So, what do you guys think? Am I being naive about the possibility of the keyword space being kept pure without a registrar? Need I point out that the keyword space is *already* polluted, inspite of that barrier?
False dichotomy. We can stop wars, rapes, etc. in the world, while at the same time stopping disreputable art from poisoning the social sphere. Time is not so limited that doing one prevents doing the other. In fact, counter to your argument, most of those who object to such things in "fantasy land" do so out of fear that allowing base fantasies to be paraded in public will result in more suffering in the real world, once those fantasies affect people's minds.
Now, I do not, in fact, agree that a complicated hack to add nudity to GTA will result in an inevitable slide into moral anarchy, but I think that you have yet to show that getting upset at GTA prevents us from say, doing more to prevent domestic abuse. My fault with those who protest so loudly such things is that they have confused the symptoms with the disease. I submit that stopping all wars, poverty, tyranny, etc. is a task that is made difficult for the same reason that we human beings have a propensity to seek out violent or explicit imagery. The reason is that humans are naturally destructive, and must be trained well if they are to exhibit virtue towards others. As such, the time spent railing against these various artistic ills would be better spent by creating new ideals to inspire people to a life of virtue, and in so doing, hopefully make a positive impact against the ills that cause suffering in the world today. However, there is no reason, as such, that the endeavor must be delayed until those wasting their time on denouncing symptoms are made to direct their energies elsewhere. Rather, we can all begin both collectively and individually to model and practice virtue today instead of waiting for the tomorrow when our neighbors shall do likewise.
Shock advertising comes into play when someone always increases the viciousness of their ads in an attempt to compete in a market where the emotional rawness of your product is a major selling factor. Customers have two reactions. They can either leave gaming behind in disgust or they can learn to ignore the shock ads. Over time, the shock ads have increased in potency in order to reach an increasingly jaded, distrustful and hardcore audience.
Of course, non-gamers see gaming ads as well. They assume that the highly prevalent shock ads display the true nature of gaming. There are massive generation issues at work here, but gaming ads are structured in a way that deliberately and intentionally provokes an intense negative response from outsiders. A gamer would retort, "They are meant to be shocking, duh."
The result is the individual game does OK, but the market as a whole stagnates because normal people don't want to be associated with such violent games.
This isn't the first time Cringley has predicted OS X on generic hardware see also his January 12th column.
"Here's how I believe it will work. Apple won't offer versions of OS X for generic Intel hardware because the drivers and the support obligation would be too huge. But just as you can buy a shrink-wrapped copy of 10.4 for your iMac, they'll gladly sell you a shrink-wrapped Intel version intended for an Intel Mac, but of course YOU CAN PUT IT ON ANY MACHINE YOU LIKE. The key here is to offer no guarantees and only limited support, patterned on the kind you get for most Open Source packages -- a web site, forums, download section. and a wiki. Apple will help users help themselves. With two to three engineers and some outreach to hackers and hardware makers, Apple could put together an unofficial program that could easily attract two to three million Windows users per year to migrate their old machines to the new OS. Imagine the profit margins of three engineers effectively generating $300-plus million per year in sales."
There's nothing new about his prediction in this week's column, he's just confirming that he still think it's going to happen, even though they released the reverse product from the one he said they would. In the same column he predicted "two new Intel Macs with huge plasma displays, but with keyboards and mice as options -- literally big-screen TVs that just happen to be computers, too" and an expanded.Mac service. The year is only a quarter out, so there's still time for him to have been right, but I'm still a little skeptical. Then again, it's Apple, so you never know what they'll do next. Last year at this time, who'd a believed in Intel iMacs?
That was making fun of a sensationalist news broadcast on the Philadelphia ABC affliate. The news people were serious... Well, maybe not completely serious since even they had to know they were full of shit and just making up crap for ratings, but serious enough.
Nintendo: You are all individuals! Fanboys: YES, YES, WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS! Nintendo: You are all different! Fanboys: YES, WE ARE ALL DIFFERENT! Lone Voice: I'm not. Person next to him: SHH!
*Rolls eys* You know Nintendo, if you go ahead and copy MS just this once, I think we'll forgive you anyway.
Well, allow me to answer as an Internet historian. I have been chronicling the history of the World Wide Web for over thirty years, and thus, I can say definitively that it seems to have been some sort of a website used in the earliest days of what was then called "electronic-snail-mail." While we can't be sure exactly what the site was like, we can speculate based on the name that it was some sort of messaging service where gay men, and possibly straight women, could receive notifications about the latest "hot males" available for their sexual gratification. While the records seem to indicate that this site was once popular, by 2004 no more records of contemporary references to its existence could be found. As with the ancient people of Easter Island or the colony at Roanoke, we can only speculate as to the reason for its disappearance, but some leading historians seem to believe it was overtaken in popularity by something called gayer-mail, or "gmail" for short. Others, however, subscribe to more far fetched theories indicating its destruction at the hands of venegful Amazons. Still other believe the site was merely a legend, like Suck.com, and never truly existed but like the rumored cities of gold in the new world.
Slashdot Mirror
The genius of capitalism is that in the absence of a monopoly, eventually one competitor will out of short term greed.
Having only one provider is of course the kind of monopoly condition that will prevent positive change. Fortunately, there's competition between cable and DSL now and hopefully WiFi and maybe broadband over powerlines in the future.
The problem isn't generating the puzzles. It's ranking them as "easy," "medium," or "hard." It's not hard to generate the puzzles, but since computers can't rank them, people will keep getting ones that are either too hard or too easy.
Besides, by limiting the number of puzzles, Nintendo leaves the door open to sell upgrade cartridges later. You may not like it, but it's good business.
Dude, do we really have to read an article about Mario's twenty-six year history? I read a bunch of articles last year about his twenty fifth anniversary, and I was glad to do it, but this is just too much. I don't think I need to read another history of Mario for a least four years. Anything else is just ridiculous.
:p
Besides, we all need more time to gear up for the -1th anniversary of Spore.
Disgrace! Slashdot doesn't support the Euro sign. :( OK, everyone pretend like my last post said, Nint[euro sign]ndo. Why, oh why, do so many sites fail to use unicode?
The real thief is ¥amauchi's protege Mi¥amoto:
Have you ever noticed that 100 coins in Mario gets you an extra life? That man thinks money buys you eternal life! Well, that's just Nintndo for you.
pedantic
adj 1: Like a pedant, overly concerned with formal rules and trivial points of learning; 2: Being showy of one's knowledge, often in a boring manner; 3: Often used to describe a person who emphasizes their knowledge through the use of vocabulary; 4: Being finicky or picky with language.
joke: n. 1. Something said or done to evoke laughter or amusement, especially an amusing story with a punch line. 2. A mischievous trick; a prank. 3. An amusing or ludicrous incident or situation.
recursion: n. Mathematics.
1. An expression, such as a polynomial, each term of which is determined by application of a formula to preceding terms.
2. A formula that generates the successive terms of a recursion.
This thread seems to be filled with people saying, "I don't know Japanese, but that won't stop me from spouting off nonsense as if I did."
I do know Japanese, and let me tell you that Wii is about 100 times easier for the Japanese to say than Revolution. Revolution comes out as re-bo-ru-u-shon in Japanese, which is just way too many syllables to expect people to say. Wii has the advantage of being much, much shorter, and to the Japanese eye, fairly straight forward to pronounce: Ui-i. True, ui isn't a usual sound in Japanese, but it's not an especially difficult one to say. If you search for it on google, you get about 7 million hits.
So, to all the people who are saying, "Maybe it's just a trick! I don't know anything about Japanese, but I heard they can't..." allow me to stop you there, and tell you to give it up. The name is Wii. It's a dumb name, but there it is. Nintendo likes it, and they aren't going to back down. Case closed.
You apparently put your reply in the wrong place.
Computers no longer ship with an easy to use basic that gives instant results.
Mine did. Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app; % python.
See this hint.
.5 for tiny, 2 for big.
Short version:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.0
Replace 1.0 with
It needn't be that tricky. Every application in OS X already has an info.plist describing it. Just put some information in there about which files to uninstall. When the app is dragged to the trash, ask the user, "Do you want to delete supporting files and preferences as well?" and put a details button on it to list which extra files will get binned.
Before they released Tiger, Apple explicitly told developers that 10.4 would have experimental support for scaling which would be made real in 10.5. So far, they seem to be on track to fulfill their promise.
I agree with you completely, but I'll chip in a little more. People seem to very easily confuse the question "Is it art?" with "Is it good art?" If you look around this discussion you can find several (up modded no less) examples in which the quality of the work is taken as a proxy for whether it "is art" or not.
The whole conversation is quite pointless.
A much more useful conversation -- can we enjoy games as deeply as we enjoy other kinds of art?
I wrote a paper in college arguing yes. Long story short: video games contain the same formal elements as other kinds of artwork, so there's nothing stopping you from enjoying them on that level, and on top of that the play elements that comprise the game are interesting and potentially enlightening.
It's already possible to find pretty much any company with a unique name via a google search. Unique names are already a requirement of domain name registration. So essentially, all that would be different is the power to name things would be devolved from ICANN to users more generally.
What trusted party would tag paypa1.com as paypal.com? If anything, the pages of phishers would quickly be tagged "phishers," "fraud," "danger," etc. Phishers already exist under the current system, so the question is if we can make a system that does better than the current system, not necessarily a perfect one.
You laugh, but wouldn't it be better if there were someway to make keywords scalable, wouldn't it be superior to the current system? Do you really envision us using this same busted ass system in 10, 20, 30 years? Or do you still tweak your config.sys, because "GUI is for wimps"?
This is a moronic idea. I'm sure someone else in the thread has explained why by now. Here's my beef though: domain names are a fundamentally bad idea.
o ld=3&mode=thread&commentsort=0&op=Reply. But this is an implementation detail. Why am I, a consumer, being exposed to this? Irrelevant implementation details should be hidden from the user! Is what we're seeing now really so far removed from showing me slashdot's IP address? We cover up IP addresses with domain names, because we know it's too hard for people to remember a series of random numbers, but why can't we go the next logical step after this?
Think about it. Do we still need domain names? People made up the "I'm feeling lucky" ifl: protocol as a joke, but isn't it true? Can't we find anything with Google anyway? Why should we have to remember a particular address with a complicated system of slashes and characters to get to a particular page? Right now, my URL is http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183301&thresh
Here's what I'm proposing:
Let's extend ifl: or something like into a real protocol. A trusted source, or better a network of user selectable sources, assigns keywords to URLs based on tagging by users via hyperlinks to the source and delicious-like tags. Normally, the URL bar shows nothing but the title the site has given itself (in our case, "Slashdot") and the particular page being viewed ("Reply to thread"), but on request, the URL bar can generate a user shareable set of keyword tags for the site with hash codes for pages to prevent collision (think about the addresses generated snipurl and the like; "ifl:Slashdot/4bacc23"). For the purposes of bookmarks, traditional URLs can be stored, but since these URLs won't be exposed to users, Ford Motor company can use a23rf2.ifl and Ford Modeling Agency can use j737bdh.ifl, and no one will care, since it won't be possible to hijack a keyword without the agreement of the majority of users. (No more Whitehouse.coms!) Domain names can stick around, so that people are free to assign multiple IPs to the same site, but the concept will become a background detail that users need to know nothing about. Until the technology is built into all browsers, URL-to-ifl translator sites can fill in the gap: "go to http://ifl.com/Slashdot/4bacc23 or just ifl:Slashdot/4bacc23..." but since this won't be hard to integrate into browsers as a plug-in, I imagine it can be implemented quickly.
So, what do you guys think? Am I being naive about the possibility of the keyword space being kept pure without a registrar? Need I point out that the keyword space is *already* polluted, inspite of that barrier?
False dichotomy. We can stop wars, rapes, etc. in the world, while at the same time stopping disreputable art from poisoning the social sphere. Time is not so limited that doing one prevents doing the other. In fact, counter to your argument, most of those who object to such things in "fantasy land" do so out of fear that allowing base fantasies to be paraded in public will result in more suffering in the real world, once those fantasies affect people's minds.
Now, I do not, in fact, agree that a complicated hack to add nudity to GTA will result in an inevitable slide into moral anarchy, but I think that you have yet to show that getting upset at GTA prevents us from say, doing more to prevent domestic abuse. My fault with those who protest so loudly such things is that they have confused the symptoms with the disease. I submit that stopping all wars, poverty, tyranny, etc. is a task that is made difficult for the same reason that we human beings have a propensity to seek out violent or explicit imagery. The reason is that humans are naturally destructive, and must be trained well if they are to exhibit virtue towards others. As such, the time spent railing against these various artistic ills would be better spent by creating new ideals to inspire people to a life of virtue, and in so doing, hopefully make a positive impact against the ills that cause suffering in the world today. However, there is no reason, as such, that the endeavor must be delayed until those wasting their time on denouncing symptoms are made to direct their energies elsewhere. Rather, we can all begin both collectively and individually to model and practice virtue today instead of waiting for the tomorrow when our neighbors shall do likewise.
The result is the individual game does OK, but the market as a whole stagnates because normal people don't want to be associated with such violent games.
It began with the bloody letter S!
There's nothing new about his prediction in this week's column, he's just confirming that he still think it's going to happen, even though they released the reverse product from the one he said they would. In the same column he predicted "two new Intel Macs with huge plasma displays, but with keyboards and mice as options -- literally big-screen TVs that just happen to be computers, too" and an expanded
But it makes me look so cool and sophisticated.
Also, what kind of slashdot is it where Monty Python references get modded down? No kinda slashdot I want to know about.
That was making fun of a sensationalist news broadcast on the Philadelphia ABC affliate. The news people were serious... Well, maybe not completely serious since even they had to know they were full of shit and just making up crap for ratings, but serious enough.
...Nintendo is still totally doing its own thing.
Nintendo: You are all individuals!
Fanboys: YES, YES, WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS!
Nintendo: You are all different!
Fanboys: YES, WE ARE ALL DIFFERENT!
Lone Voice: I'm not.
Person next to him: SHH!
*Rolls eys* You know Nintendo, if you go ahead and copy MS just this once, I think we'll forgive you anyway.
Well, allow me to answer as an Internet historian. I have been chronicling the history of the World Wide Web for over thirty years, and thus, I can say definitively that it seems to have been some sort of a website used in the earliest days of what was then called "electronic-snail-mail." While we can't be sure exactly what the site was like, we can speculate based on the name that it was some sort of messaging service where gay men, and possibly straight women, could receive notifications about the latest "hot males" available for their sexual gratification. While the records seem to indicate that this site was once popular, by 2004 no more records of contemporary references to its existence could be found. As with the ancient people of Easter Island or the colony at Roanoke, we can only speculate as to the reason for its disappearance, but some leading historians seem to believe it was overtaken in popularity by something called gayer-mail, or "gmail" for short. Others, however, subscribe to more far fetched theories indicating its destruction at the hands of venegful Amazons. Still other believe the site was merely a legend, like Suck.com, and never truly existed but like the rumored cities of gold in the new world.