Nintendo is trying to scale shipments based on the store's sales. Bigger stores get more, small local stores get very few.
Calling bigger stores is pointless, I've done a LOT of this. Wiis don't get stocked, they get sold. They are sold the same morning they're pulled off the truck. If you're not calling them from inside the store, you're not getting one. Even calling the morning prior to the shipment, they will say, "Check in the morning." because they're not allowed to say if it's in stock.
Sometimes they are in stock, but they are not allowed to be sold until a predetermined nation-wide sell date, like 12/17 for Best Buy. This is to help promote a sale day. When this is the case, they aren't allowed to say that they're in stock either.
The only time a Wii can be purchased in this area is at 3am. The camp-outs still continue in full-force here. If it's so easy for you to get it, go get it then and sell it. Easy 200 bucks for about an hour of work.
If the reader would play through HL:Episode One in dev commentary mode, you get a lot of information on how much revision they had to make regarding Alyx Vance.
-Realism. The original Alyx had problems with appearing lifelike. Graphically, she looked pretty realistic, but was like a dead body on strings which can be very disturbing. So some adjustments were made to make her feel alive. Things like breathing, blinking, and fidgeting are important to fill the illusion.
-Crafted affection. Alyx Vance's lines were edited to make sure she never eggs the player on or teases too much. Originally she'd tell you what to do but this bossiness irritated players, instead she just shows the way and the developers tried to make it seem like your solutions were your idea. They want you to feel like you're in the lead, not being pulled around by the hand.
-Voice and facial features. They hired on some serious researchers of facial communication for help in developing the technology that allows for the face motions. When synched with the proper emotional cues from voice actors, the two sources of communication support each other. Seeing Alyx freak out and hug herself after the train-crash with the mutilated slaves made me want to look for a hug or shoulder-pat button.
The people working at Valve are well aware of one of the most popular interactions with NPCs. Gunshot to the forehead. Players tend to try and just blow away NPCs "just to see". I realized towards the end of HL:Episode One, was that this may have been the first time that I didn't really feel like trying to shoot an NPC in the face.
I enjoyed FF8 even though most people seem to hate it. I got the no-fight item at level 8 so I could go through the game just to see the plot and background story without getting held back by the game mechanics.
Some games have a great story to tell, and like great stories from a book, they can evoke emotion.
Well, the undergrad courses do explain what the parent post said. What the parent post spoke of is a fundamental concept behind game theory, which the GP doesn't have right. So the GP's level of understanding can't really be blamed on undergrad courses but simply not understanding game theory at all.
P.S. (I'm not trying to insinuate anything about the GP's intelligence, it's just that GP is wrong on this. It happens to everybody.)
I've never met a Windows fanboi, though I'm sure they're out there. However, the Non-MS to MS fanboi ratio is staggeringly high.
There are a TON of windows users, but very very few windows fans. There's a big difference there.
Some reasons: 1) They don't know of any alternatives, so in their world, there are none. Nobody's a fan of oxygen, they just use it. They don't root for it. 2) They're stuck with it. Similar to the first, but they are aware of alternatives, they just don't know how they can switch over while holding onto the features they've grown attached to. 3) They don't care. The resident OS on their box isn't everything to them. It's a tool, and it gets used.
These people don't have reasons to like Microsoft, they just use the product.
I could care less whether microsoft lives or dies in 2007. I just want the damn computer to "just work". I don't want to re-learn OSes and their interfaces, the can-dos and can't-dos. It should just work. Why doesn't my graphics card work? I don't want to ask that question, it should just work right off the bat with the absolute minimum of effort. If FOSS can kill Windows forever by providing a better alternative. I STILL wouldn't be a fan. I would just use it.
The reason you have to "sell" the other OSes is because it's asking extra effort from people who don't see a reason to expend extra effort. The relative utility gained by them is just not worth the hassle. I do play games on the PC(this may change due to PC hardware cycle costs) and I don't want to go through workarounds to play. It might work for some, but that's not good enough. The damn games are buggy enough without throwing unnecessary variables at the game that's assuming it's running on windows.
(building on parent, mostly in reply to the GP) The infallibity of God is a very sticky point with Creationists and many christians in general as well. Imagining him to be supremely intelligent is much easier to accept than "perfection" as that gives the idea some room for error. But assuming perfection would indicaate zero room for evolution since any change should be unnecessary.
But the infallibility of God is a necessary belief in order to accept the Bible at face value, since that would be the only thing protecting it from error. Conceding an imperfect supreme being would cause much of their faith to become so contestable that there would be little left to believe in at all.
If the creation part of the Bible can't be immediately accepted as true, then every part of it must be subject to inspection. This causes their current foundation of belief to unravel unless this inspection is ignored.
That is why evolution is so difficult to incorporate into Creationism even though they initially appear to be reconcilable(sp?).
If an imperfect God leaves the doctrine to be questioned, then so much must be proved before acceptance that you're basically left with Deism rather than Christianity.
I wonder if there has been any testing of this. I've noticed quite a few tall asians in the U.S that seem oddly out of place in comparison to the reputation of asian height in asia.
I'm not particularly tall at 5'11, but I note that I'm a good 3 inches taller than my father. Between my father and his 2 brothers, they all resulted in 5 boys born in america and all of them taller than their fathers, myself being the only one under 6 feet.
I'd like to see some data on the results of an American lifestyle has in comparison to other lifestyles. Possibly an increase in height at the cost of a shorter lifespan? Of course it'd be exceedingly difficult to get some definitive conclusion, but the results would be interesting to me nonetheless.
My Xbox was only 6 days old, bought on Black Friday. Brand new, unmodded.
This update bricked it.
They want YOU to pay the shipping to send it back for the problem that THEY caused. They only pay the shipping to send it back to you. Then you're without it for 2 weeks.
Dell pays for both trips when returning their monitors. They send the brand new working monitor immediately via express mail too.
Same here. Bought it black friday, it got bricked 6 days later by this update. Whee.
It was not modded.
They want YOU to pay the shipping to repair the problem that THEY created with the patch.
Luckily, after trying microsoft I returned it to walmart. They just check the contents and then issue a full credit to my card including tax.
My roommate had also bought an xbox360 just 2 months ago, he too had to return it within 2 weeks.
Returning my Dell monitor had them send me a brand new monitor via express delivery. I keep that, and send the broken one back in the same box. That same box contains an incomplete airbill that I'm to finish filling out. I call a number and put the box outside the doorstep. Then the shipping company picks up the box and bill off my doorstep. I only get billed if I don't return the broken monitor. THAT is how they should handle their returns.
It's pretty hard to say. Even if we assume that it's for revenge rather than avoiding the drag on the jailing budget by keeping them alive(perhaps we can put them into work camps to pay for their stay and send any surplus profits to the victim's family?) revenge is highly desired.
Is revenge more desirable than say, entertainment? I'm not suggesting that we play with the convicted for entertainment purposes, but I'm referring to the cost of entertainment.
For example, the computer I'm typing this on is worth at least a couple hundred dollars. Those couple hundred dollars can save a couple kids from starving but I don't really care. They die because I prefer having a computer over saving their lives. Human lives aren't priceless, they're just hard to define.
I don't think I have an answer for "How many executed innocents per million murderers are you going to accept in your quest for what is essentially revenge ?" but I can say for sure that my answer won't be zero.
Don't get me wrong, I love the Wii for its controls. But I hate the weak graphics. I like gameplay, but I'm not going to pretend that graphics don't matter. I'd rather have both. I understand that they're focused on the controller this generation and that's great.
But I was hoping that the following generation would come in 4 years and would maintain the fun controls while packing in some respectable power behind it. I sure hope I won't have to wait 6 years for the Wii's sequel.
Basically it had people who could influence probability. This allowed them to influence probability that they can increase their ability to influence probality...so that in effect, this allowed them to manipulate reality.
Also, humanity chooses a single reality by experiencing it.
Of course, manipulating odds is a ridiculous longshot, which would mean alternate dimensions where it fails, and then humanity collapses it by experiencing it. So the protagonist ends up causing ultimate genocide by collapsing the longshots. And thus aliens put a shield around Earth to stop humans from experiencing the universe and thus destroying everything.
If we could send information back to ourselves, it could present a tipping point.
Let's say we reach the point of sending a word in morse code. That word could be a vital clue to solving a big problem in the achievement of the feat itself. Thus, we can solve the problem more easily on the path to sending that word back to ourselves. The result is that with this slightly easier development, we can now send 2 words, 3 words, a sentence, a page, a document....
And then after this "continues", the moment when we learn how to send even small bits of/useful/ information regarding the research, that could become the moment when all humanly achievable research is unveiled simultaneously.
Of course, this would assume that along the way, the information received doesn't cause us to obliterate ourselves and prevent us from ever sending any messages back in time at all.
As long as the jail itself isn't a particularly rough one, 5 months and $3000 doesn't sound too unreasonable. 3 months would be better though. I still heavily resent the *AAs for being such jerks about it, but some sort of (appropriate) punishment for copyright infringement is a good thing.
Reading the parent's post made me recall this footnote from my economics classes. It's a theory that when you pay your employees well(i.e, better than the average competitor), you'll find advantages in that employee's performance. If you're in a good job and know you're being treated like you're a good employee, the theory is that this serves to discourage you from being a bad employee since you're risking the loss of a good thing.
There's other reasons involved in this theory too though. If your compensation is that of a good employee, you're expected to be worthy of it, and your conscience may urge you to live up to such expectations.
Of course, there's diminishing returns from doing this, but the point is...
If an employee is important enough to possibly damage a company with negligence or malice, maybe that employee should be treated a little better to encourage them to put more effort in to avoid such things from happening. Economically, the additional compensation should reflect the chance of the damage times the cost of the damage if it were to occur, but it's not something easily measured.
How are the voice actors in Japan treated? What's their fame and wage for the work they do?
American stuff tends to hire alot of actors for voice parts, and where they don't, they get extremly bad work. Even these well-known movie/tv actors don't always do a good job in voice acting. It seems like there are very few american voice actors who have made it a priority to do a good job with it. The difference really is noticable, dubbing sounds just AWFUL next to original japanese voice talent.
These developers really can't scrub up enough money to hire a good voice actor? They've spent millions and millions on amazing art, graphics, and programmers, plus advertising...and then you get jarred out of an immersive new world by the nasal droning of a crappy VA? 500 is all they can spend trying to get good talent? I'm sure if these companies paid better they could find better voice actors. They should feel pretty lucky to find a decent one on such crappy pay.
Like someone else said before. There's nothing wrong with taking their school's quality into account. But there is something wrong in rejecting a better candidate because they come from a less prestigious school.
Whether or not it was worth the price isn't relevant, but whether or not it produces a higher-quality graduate on average is what HR cares about. They'll look at resumes and compare them, and the nice degree gets your foot in the door. There's a limited amount of people that a company can feasibly interview for a position, so they find ways to whittle down the pile to the ones that are more likely to be hired and then interview those. So if there's two identical employees, but one with a better school, they'll want to take the guy from a better school for an interview.
And the schooling matters less and less as experience is accumulated. The nice school helps you start off higher in your career, giving you a bit of a headstart, but even with a mediocre school and intelligence you should hopefully get where you're going too. That's the difference you're paying all that money for(whether or not it's worth it will still be up to the individual and their industry).
If you're really smart but have a bad school, it's a shame, but they have no way of knowing that. They'll have to filter you out based on the likelihood that a graduate from a mediocre school isn't as effective as a graduate from a prestigious school. Again, with job experience this will matter less since that will be an alternate means of proving your value.
There's no question that there are flaws in this process, but the hiring managers had to weigh their available interviewing time and immediate need for an employee against these flaws and the result is that many will end up considering schools as part of the filtering process. A nice way to combat this is to make a nice cover letter with your best accomplishments and then your schooling becomes less pertinent.
Slashdot Mirror
The phone is equally useless around here.
Nintendo is trying to scale shipments based on the store's sales. Bigger stores get more, small local stores get very few.
Calling bigger stores is pointless, I've done a LOT of this. Wiis don't get stocked, they get sold. They are sold the same morning they're pulled off the truck. If you're not calling them from inside the store, you're not getting one. Even calling the morning prior to the shipment, they will say, "Check in the morning." because they're not allowed to say if it's in stock.
Sometimes they are in stock, but they are not allowed to be sold until a predetermined nation-wide sell date, like 12/17 for Best Buy. This is to help promote a sale day. When this is the case, they aren't allowed to say that they're in stock either.
The only time a Wii can be purchased in this area is at 3am. The camp-outs still continue in full-force here. If it's so easy for you to get it, go get it then and sell it. Easy 200 bucks for about an hour of work.
I'd like to chime in on Alyx Vance.
If the reader would play through HL:Episode One in dev commentary mode, you get a lot of information on how much revision they had to make regarding Alyx Vance.
-Realism. The original Alyx had problems with appearing lifelike. Graphically, she looked pretty realistic, but was like a dead body on strings which can be very disturbing. So some adjustments were made to make her feel alive. Things like breathing, blinking, and fidgeting are important to fill the illusion.
-Crafted affection. Alyx Vance's lines were edited to make sure she never eggs the player on or teases too much. Originally she'd tell you what to do but this bossiness irritated players, instead she just shows the way and the developers tried to make it seem like your solutions were your idea. They want you to feel like you're in the lead, not being pulled around by the hand.
-Voice and facial features. They hired on some serious researchers of facial communication for help in developing the technology that allows for the face motions. When synched with the proper emotional cues from voice actors, the two sources of communication support each other. Seeing Alyx freak out and hug herself after the train-crash with the mutilated slaves made me want to look for a hug or shoulder-pat button.
The people working at Valve are well aware of one of the most popular interactions with NPCs. Gunshot to the forehead. Players tend to try and just blow away NPCs "just to see". I realized towards the end of HL:Episode One, was that this may have been the first time that I didn't really feel like trying to shoot an NPC in the face.
I enjoyed FF8 even though most people seem to hate it. I got the no-fight item at level 8 so I could go through the game just to see the plot and background story without getting held back by the game mechanics.
Some games have a great story to tell, and like great stories from a book, they can evoke emotion.
And if the reader still doesn't get it, the parent poster was being sarcastic.
Well, the undergrad courses do explain what the parent post said. What the parent post spoke of is a fundamental concept behind game theory, which the GP doesn't have right. So the GP's level of understanding can't really be blamed on undergrad courses but simply not understanding game theory at all.
P.S. (I'm not trying to insinuate anything about the GP's intelligence, it's just that GP is wrong on this. It happens to everybody.)
I've never met a Windows fanboi, though I'm sure they're out there. However, the Non-MS to MS fanboi ratio is staggeringly high.
There are a TON of windows users, but very very few windows fans. There's a big difference there.
Some reasons:
1) They don't know of any alternatives, so in their world, there are none. Nobody's a fan of oxygen, they just use it. They don't root for it.
2) They're stuck with it. Similar to the first, but they are aware of alternatives, they just don't know how they can switch over while holding onto the features they've grown attached to.
3) They don't care. The resident OS on their box isn't everything to them. It's a tool, and it gets used.
These people don't have reasons to like Microsoft, they just use the product.
I could care less whether microsoft lives or dies in 2007. I just want the damn computer to "just work". I don't want to re-learn OSes and their interfaces, the can-dos and can't-dos. It should just work. Why doesn't my graphics card work? I don't want to ask that question, it should just work right off the bat with the absolute minimum of effort. If FOSS can kill Windows forever by providing a better alternative. I STILL wouldn't be a fan. I would just use it.
The reason you have to "sell" the other OSes is because it's asking extra effort from people who don't see a reason to expend extra effort. The relative utility gained by them is just not worth the hassle. I do play games on the PC(this may change due to PC hardware cycle costs) and I don't want to go through workarounds to play. It might work for some, but that's not good enough. The damn games are buggy enough without throwing unnecessary variables at the game that's assuming it's running on windows.
(building on parent, mostly in reply to the GP)
The infallibity of God is a very sticky point with Creationists and many christians in general as well. Imagining him to be supremely intelligent is much easier to accept than "perfection" as that gives the idea some room for error. But assuming perfection would indicaate zero room for evolution since any change should be unnecessary.
But the infallibility of God is a necessary belief in order to accept the Bible at face value, since that would be the only thing protecting it from error. Conceding an imperfect supreme being would cause much of their faith to become so contestable that there would be little left to believe in at all.
If the creation part of the Bible can't be immediately accepted as true, then every part of it must be subject to inspection. This causes their current foundation of belief to unravel unless this inspection is ignored.
That is why evolution is so difficult to incorporate into Creationism even though they initially appear to be reconcilable(sp?).
If an imperfect God leaves the doctrine to be questioned, then so much must be proved before acceptance that you're basically left with Deism rather than Christianity.
I wonder if there has been any testing of this. I've noticed quite a few tall asians in the U.S that seem oddly out of place in comparison to the reputation of asian height in asia.
I'm not particularly tall at 5'11, but I note that I'm a good 3 inches taller than my father. Between my father and his 2 brothers, they all resulted in 5 boys born in america and all of them taller than their fathers, myself being the only one under 6 feet.
I'd like to see some data on the results of an American lifestyle has in comparison to other lifestyles. Possibly an increase in height at the cost of a shorter lifespan? Of course it'd be exceedingly difficult to get some definitive conclusion, but the results would be interesting to me nonetheless.
Military research provides source material for ideas for FPS games. GRAW! Rainbow Six Vegas!
There's already way too many WWII games out there, Normandy can only be invaded so many times.
[/joking]
My Xbox was only 6 days old, bought on Black Friday. Brand new, unmodded.
This update bricked it.
They want YOU to pay the shipping to send it back for the problem that THEY caused. They only pay the shipping to send it back to you. Then you're without it for 2 weeks.
Dell pays for both trips when returning their monitors. They send the brand new working monitor immediately via express mail too.
Same here. Bought it black friday, it got bricked 6 days later by this update. Whee.
It was not modded.
They want YOU to pay the shipping to repair the problem that THEY created with the patch.
Luckily, after trying microsoft I returned it to walmart. They just check the contents and then issue a full credit to my card including tax.
My roommate had also bought an xbox360 just 2 months ago, he too had to return it within 2 weeks.
Returning my Dell monitor had them send me a brand new monitor via express delivery. I keep that, and send the broken one back in the same box. That same box contains an incomplete airbill that I'm to finish filling out. I call a number and put the box outside the doorstep. Then the shipping company picks up the box and bill off my doorstep. I only get billed if I don't return the broken monitor. THAT is how they should handle their returns.
It's pretty hard to say. Even if we assume that it's for revenge rather than avoiding the drag on the jailing budget by keeping them alive(perhaps we can put them into work camps to pay for their stay and send any surplus profits to the victim's family?) revenge is highly desired.
Is revenge more desirable than say, entertainment? I'm not suggesting that we play with the convicted for entertainment purposes, but I'm referring to the cost of entertainment.
For example, the computer I'm typing this on is worth at least a couple hundred dollars. Those couple hundred dollars can save a couple kids from starving but I don't really care. They die because I prefer having a computer over saving their lives. Human lives aren't priceless, they're just hard to define.
I don't think I have an answer for "How many executed innocents per million murderers are you going to accept in your quest for what is essentially revenge ?" but I can say for sure that my answer won't be zero.
I know that police have to get hit by tasers to use them, so they know what they're actually doing to someone and how much is called for.
I would hope that they apply the same policy to this tool.
Don't get me wrong, I love the Wii for its controls. But I hate the weak graphics. I like gameplay, but I'm not going to pretend that graphics don't matter. I'd rather have both. I understand that they're focused on the controller this generation and that's great.
But I was hoping that the following generation would come in 4 years and would maintain the fun controls while packing in some respectable power behind it. I sure hope I won't have to wait 6 years for the Wii's sequel.
Forrestf posted first @02:29pm
1 6/0337230
Pharmboy typo-critiques @02:55pm
Forrestf rebutts Pharmboy @02:36pm
It looks like the experiment was a success!
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/
Might need a time traveling information receiver first.
I read a book with this sort of theme.
Basically it had people who could influence probability. This allowed them to influence probability that they can increase their ability to influence probality...so that in effect, this allowed them to manipulate reality.
Also, humanity chooses a single reality by experiencing it.
Of course, manipulating odds is a ridiculous longshot, which would mean alternate dimensions where it fails, and then humanity collapses it by experiencing it. So the protagonist ends up causing ultimate genocide by collapsing the longshots. And thus aliens put a shield around Earth to stop humans from experiencing the universe and thus destroying everything.
If we could send information back to ourselves, it could present a tipping point.
/useful/ information regarding the research, that could become the moment when all humanly achievable research is unveiled simultaneously.
Let's say we reach the point of sending a word in morse code. That word could be a vital clue to solving a big problem in the achievement of the feat itself. Thus, we can solve the problem more easily on the path to sending that word back to ourselves. The result is that with this slightly easier development, we can now send 2 words, 3 words, a sentence, a page, a document....
And then after this "continues", the moment when we learn how to send even small bits of
Of course, this would assume that along the way, the information received doesn't cause us to obliterate ourselves and prevent us from ever sending any messages back in time at all.
It would probably be easier to just reference the show "House".
Glad I'm not the only one who thought the same.
As long as the jail itself isn't a particularly rough one, 5 months and $3000 doesn't sound too unreasonable. 3 months would be better though. I still heavily resent the *AAs for being such jerks about it, but some sort of (appropriate) punishment for copyright infringement is a good thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiency_wage_hypot hesis
Reading the parent's post made me recall this footnote from my economics classes. It's a theory that when you pay your employees well(i.e, better than the average competitor), you'll find advantages in that employee's performance. If you're in a good job and know you're being treated like you're a good employee, the theory is that this serves to discourage you from being a bad employee since you're risking the loss of a good thing.
There's other reasons involved in this theory too though. If your compensation is that of a good employee, you're expected to be worthy of it, and your conscience may urge you to live up to such expectations.
Of course, there's diminishing returns from doing this, but the point is...
If an employee is important enough to possibly damage a company with negligence or malice, maybe that employee should be treated a little better to encourage them to put more effort in to avoid such things from happening. Economically, the additional compensation should reflect the chance of the damage times the cost of the damage if it were to occur, but it's not something easily measured.
How are the voice actors in Japan treated? What's their fame and wage for the work they do?
American stuff tends to hire alot of actors for voice parts, and where they don't, they get extremly bad work. Even these well-known movie/tv actors don't always do a good job in voice acting. It seems like there are very few american voice actors who have made it a priority to do a good job with it. The difference really is noticable, dubbing sounds just AWFUL next to original japanese voice talent.
These developers really can't scrub up enough money to hire a good voice actor? They've spent millions and millions on amazing art, graphics, and programmers, plus advertising...and then you get jarred out of an immersive new world by the nasal droning of a crappy VA? 500 is all they can spend trying to get good talent? I'm sure if these companies paid better they could find better voice actors. They should feel pretty lucky to find a decent one on such crappy pay.
There's no question that even the Bible would have a higher rating that Bully. Who's out there protecting kids from it's dangerous influences?
Like someone else said before. There's nothing wrong with taking their school's quality into account. But there is something wrong in rejecting a better candidate because they come from a less prestigious school.
Whether or not it was worth the price isn't relevant, but whether or not it produces a higher-quality graduate on average is what HR cares about. They'll look at resumes and compare them, and the nice degree gets your foot in the door. There's a limited amount of people that a company can feasibly interview for a position, so they find ways to whittle down the pile to the ones that are more likely to be hired and then interview those. So if there's two identical employees, but one with a better school, they'll want to take the guy from a better school for an interview.
And the schooling matters less and less as experience is accumulated. The nice school helps you start off higher in your career, giving you a bit of a headstart, but even with a mediocre school and intelligence you should hopefully get where you're going too. That's the difference you're paying all that money for(whether or not it's worth it will still be up to the individual and their industry).
If you're really smart but have a bad school, it's a shame, but they have no way of knowing that. They'll have to filter you out based on the likelihood that a graduate from a mediocre school isn't as effective as a graduate from a prestigious school. Again, with job experience this will matter less since that will be an alternate means of proving your value.
There's no question that there are flaws in this process, but the hiring managers had to weigh their available interviewing time and immediate need for an employee against these flaws and the result is that many will end up considering schools as part of the filtering process. A nice way to combat this is to make a nice cover letter with your best accomplishments and then your schooling becomes less pertinent.
It's udderly ridiculous!
*ducks*