"This is a case of the latter with regards to mentioning it completely out of context just to get it in. It instantly put me off reading the rest of the review."
Ah... so you didn't like part of the message so you ignored the whole thing. So.. um... isn't that the general complaint about religious people with extreme views?
Personally I'd miss the formatting features of HTML. Bold, Italic, etc. I'm a little surprised there hasn't been a middle ground estbalished at some point. You know... pretty text, no exploits. Well, I can dream. In the mean time, gotta give kudos to GMail. One of my favorite features is that it disables images until you turn them on. That's a feature Outlook 2000 could have used.
"Why bother with a crummy rust ball when I can have a whole star named after me??!!"
For the simple reason that our future overlords at Omicron Persei 8 will never know about your claim. When they get to Mars, though, they'll find that disk and know that Hugh Jass was there! It'll be a great story to tell while you're working in the mines.
"Is it just me or do most of the stories that get posted by Zonk involve a/. user who is link whoring their companies and/or blogs?"
Yeah, it's a huge surprise that a site that posts user submitted stories ends up with submissions from people excited about a product. What an evil horror. Thanks for bringing this to our attention! We wouldn't want to read about products that cost money!! That'd be like advertising!!!
So... um.. anyway, why'd you bring that up in this particular story?
It has been suggested before, but try re-calibrating your remote. I have 3 friends with Wii's, at least two of them would have bitched non-stop if they had the problem you're having.
A couple of years ago there were phones that basically had a PocketPC shoe-horned into them. A friend of mine had one but he had serious stability issues with it. He wasn't the type go to around downloading everything to it, so I suspsect that out of the box it just wasn't a great machine. Since then, there have been a couple of OS updates and more elegent hardware developed for it. (The Treo 700w, for example.) I just wanted to ask: Has it gotten better? Or is the Palm version still the preferred way to go?
"Like driving around bumpy roads with a hot cup of coffee between your legs? "
Question: Suppose in this hypothetical situation that the lids were really weak, something a little foresight would have cured? They'd work adequately for walking out of Starbucks with them, but were just weak enough that a standard car bump would burst them open. What would the opinion be, then?
I know it sounds like it, but I'm not setting up an argument against Nintendo. I'm just reading a lot of extreme opinions here where I expected more shades of gray. I think it's great, for example, that Chrstimas Tree lights have fuses in them to minimize problems with putting too many of them in a chain. But from what I'm reading, most here would think they shouldn't have those fuses. I think I'm missing a critical ingredient of the line of thought and was hoping for clarification. (As opposed to getting into a debate about whether Nintendo's responsible or not. I can cut that off right now: I think a class action suit in this context is unfounded and likely fueled by greed.)
I can understand being annoyed by that. I would be, too. That's not what I've got a stick up my butt about, though. Opera hasn't had ads since version 8. In version 7, they had Google text-ads. In version 6, they had animated.GIFs and they flirted with Flash ads. I can sympathize with annoyance over that. For a week or so, there was an ad coming through Opera that had sound to it. Only... you couldn't turn it off. There was some stupid ad with a guy talking and you had to close and re-open Opera to get it to cycle to another ad. They almost lost me there, but people complained and the company that makes Opera pulled the ad. After that, there were no more audible ads. As far as I'm concerned, the 'adware crap' problem died when 7 came out with their switch to Google's text-ads. But I realize that's still a problem with some people... fine... but 8 came out well over a year ago and had no more ads in it. In other words, it's old news.
Suppose I said "I won't use Linux because it doesn't support USB." There was a time that was true. My annoyance over a bad experience with it, though, was not enough to explain my self-imposed ignorance of the current state of it.
Opera follows open web standards, which are the goal for clean code on ALL web sites. So, in essence, unless someone is still dumb enough to code their site for IE and IE only, ALL web browsers work just fine with it.
I'm an Opera fanboy, but I don't think this is always a problem of coding specifically for IE. Opera works quite well on 98% of the sites I visit. Occassionally I bump into one that doesn't work in Opera, but works just fine in Firefox. Maybe Opera does 'support all the standards' and FF has a few IE-like nicities, as opposed to failing to implement an obscure feature that some sites use. I cannot really say I know. I do know that Google Maps works better in FF than Opera. Don't get me wrong, it's quite usable and useful in Opera, but in FF it's a little more interactive with the mouse. I don't think this is due to a lack of effort on Google's part to support Opera.
It's easy to make sites that work with both FF and Opera, but there are niggling issues here and there that still bring up a bit of trouble. I love Opera, but I cannot personally say it's as good at reaching all the sites on the web as FF is. It would be fair for me to say, though, that this is a problem I so rarely come across anymore that I agree with you that this is silliness on the side of the web developer. Getting their site to work with Opera would probably just require a couple of little tweaks. That is, of course, assuming that Opera 9 didn't already solve the problem. (I haven't exhaustively tested this yet, but a couple of sites I had trouble with in O8 worked beautifully in 9.)
I agree with the GP poster that it should make economic sense for them before they support Opera. I agree with you that better coding standards on their site would alleviate this problem with the added benefit of supporting other browsers like Safari. There's a happy medium in there somewhere. Honestly, I think the "have Opera and FF both installed" solution is that happy medium. That's what keeps me from sending nasty-grams twice a year when I hit a site Opera can't open.
That is not a contradiction. The strap is on the controller in the first place because the nature of the beast causes people to tempt fate. They shouldn't need a strap at all, afterall they'd be abusing it if they threw the remote sans strap. The reason it comes with one in the first place is that the remote is geared to those sorts of gestures.
"Even though people were inappropriately using a toaster as a hand warmer and the toaster manufacturer had very clear statements that the toaster is not to be used as a hand warmer, the toaster manufacturer should have known that as a heat source people might use it for this function; therefore, they bear some responsibility in my client's 2nd degree burns". It's no different than your argument, but I'll bet you would side with the toaster manufacturer, not the idiot who burned himself.
Umm, no, this is not similar to my argument. A better example is Christmas tree lights. You're not supposed to chain more than a given amount together. It says so very clearly. Yet, they still contain fuses to prevent them from overloading the circuit. The reason this is necessary is that the nature of the product tempts people to use it incorrectly.
"The Wiimote is either being used as instructed or it's not. There's no grey area here. "
Wrong. In that case a company could make a product as cheaply and un-safely as possible and all they'd have to do is put a disclaimer up. It doesn't work like that. Disclaimers are only part of the solution, not the complete answer.
But it is not really a screwup.. the straps perform perfectly with normal use.. it is the "over excited" players that break their straps. And it is also not wide spread issues.. I have only found a few (under 50) confirmed cases of the strap breaking.. and every one of the cases.. the user was whipping and throwing their arm everywhere.
I love Nintendo and I mostly agree with what you've said, but I do think Nintendo made a bit of a mis-step here. True, the owners are getting 'over excited' and they aren't using it correctly. I do feel, though, that Nintendo does share at least some of responsibility about it.
I don't imagine my opinion will be too popular, so I'll explain my thought process a little better. (Hopefully this'll prove at least that I'm not intentionally trying to troll.) I've been thinking about this a lot over the last week after being bombarded with pictures of broken TV's and black eyes. The first question I asked myself was: "How would I feel if this were Sony in Nintendo's shoes?" The answer is: "Geez, they're hyping up natural motion of the controller and it didn't occur to them to use thicker straps?!" I'm trying to be fair, I don't want to praise Nintendo for something I wouldn't forgive Sony for.
I think Nintendo should have included the thicker straps originally. But I have to be honest, this isn't exactly a big dramatic issue with me. If Nintendo had never responded to the breaking straps issue, I wouldn't have paid much attention to it. This is more of a 'hindsight is 20/20' thought than some opinion blown out of proportion.
"there are more important things than some jagoff cartoon"
I did an experiment where I spent a lot of time simply worrying about North Korea's nuke program. I read about it until my eyes bled. I bitched on various websites about it. I even had a T-Shirt made. In the end, the results were surprising: I couldn't stop the bomb!
So.. yeah.. Futurama makes more productive use of my time.
"...if they work "beyond their expected life", that's a testament to good engineering. but please don't grant these manufactured goods human qualities."
Slashdot Mirror
"Ironically, if I'd have just pirated the movie, I wouldn't be seeing that clip, as well as other annoying previews."
Every time I've watched one of those commercials at a theater I've heard a few people say "How do you download movies?"
"Nothing oblige you to be pitifully as ignorant as xenophobe."
a.) It was a joke.
b.) Lots of stereotypical comments are made about Americans on a daily basis.
Either develop a sense of humor or practice what you preach.
"It should be "People who have too much time on their hands" department. :P" ... said the guy posting on Slashdot.
"This is a case of the latter with regards to mentioning it completely out of context just to get it in. It instantly put me off reading the rest of the review."
Ah... so you didn't like part of the message so you ignored the whole thing. So.. um... isn't that the general complaint about religious people with extreme views?
"Indeed. And who wants a computer-controlled windshield that can crash all on its own? That would be a true Blue Screen of Death!"
Exactly. I could install it on my Delorean, travel back to 1999, and find that joke funny!
"Email should be just text, period."
Personally I'd miss the formatting features of HTML. Bold, Italic, etc. I'm a little surprised there hasn't been a middle ground estbalished at some point. You know... pretty text, no exploits. Well, I can dream. In the mean time, gotta give kudos to GMail. One of my favorite features is that it disables images until you turn them on. That's a feature Outlook 2000 could have used.
"Who the hell uses Yahoo?"
I do. In a lot of cases, it's more Treo friendly than Google.
"Why bother with a crummy rust ball when I can have a whole star named after me??!!"
For the simple reason that our future overlords at Omicron Persei 8 will never know about your claim. When they get to Mars, though, they'll find that disk and know that Hugh Jass was there! It'll be a great story to tell while you're working in the mines.
"Is it just me or do most of the stories that get posted by Zonk involve a /. user who is link whoring their companies and/or blogs?"
Yeah, it's a huge surprise that a site that posts user submitted stories ends up with submissions from people excited about a product. What an evil horror. Thanks for bringing this to our attention! We wouldn't want to read about products that cost money!! That'd be like advertising!!!
So... um.. anyway, why'd you bring that up in this particular story?
I think this post COMPLETELY refutes the 'whocares' tag on this story.
It has been suggested before, but try re-calibrating your remote. I have 3 friends with Wii's, at least two of them would have bitched non-stop if they had the problem you're having.
A couple of years ago there were phones that basically had a PocketPC shoe-horned into them. A friend of mine had one but he had serious stability issues with it. He wasn't the type go to around downloading everything to it, so I suspsect that out of the box it just wasn't a great machine. Since then, there have been a couple of OS updates and more elegent hardware developed for it. (The Treo 700w, for example.) I just wanted to ask: Has it gotten better? Or is the Palm version still the preferred way to go?
"No offense, but the first blew chunks. I don't see how this can be improved."
Rimmerian Nitpick: If it blew chunks, wouldn't it stand to reason that it had plenty that was improvable?
"Like driving around bumpy roads with a hot cup of coffee between your legs? "
Question: Suppose in this hypothetical situation that the lids were really weak, something a little foresight would have cured? They'd work adequately for walking out of Starbucks with them, but were just weak enough that a standard car bump would burst them open. What would the opinion be, then?
I know it sounds like it, but I'm not setting up an argument against Nintendo. I'm just reading a lot of extreme opinions here where I expected more shades of gray. I think it's great, for example, that Chrstimas Tree lights have fuses in them to minimize problems with putting too many of them in a chain. But from what I'm reading, most here would think they shouldn't have those fuses. I think I'm missing a critical ingredient of the line of thought and was hoping for clarification. (As opposed to getting into a debate about whether Nintendo's responsible or not. I can cut that off right now: I think a class action suit in this context is unfounded and likely fueled by greed.)
"What kind of boring non-fucking porn do you watch?"
Spanking, foot fetish, and Univision.
A story comes along about a defense company funding shark development and the site lights up with countless ameteur attempts at SNL-quality writing.
I can understand being annoyed by that. I would be, too. That's not what I've got a stick up my butt about, though. Opera hasn't had ads since version 8. In version 7, they had Google text-ads. In version 6, they had animated .GIFs and they flirted with Flash ads. I can sympathize with annoyance over that. For a week or so, there was an ad coming through Opera that had sound to it. Only... you couldn't turn it off. There was some stupid ad with a guy talking and you had to close and re-open Opera to get it to cycle to another ad. They almost lost me there, but people complained and the company that makes Opera pulled the ad. After that, there were no more audible ads. As far as I'm concerned, the 'adware crap' problem died when 7 came out with their switch to Google's text-ads. But I realize that's still a problem with some people... fine... but 8 came out well over a year ago and had no more ads in it. In other words, it's old news.
Suppose I said "I won't use Linux because it doesn't support USB." There was a time that was true. My annoyance over a bad experience with it, though, was not enough to explain my self-imposed ignorance of the current state of it.
I'm an Opera fanboy, but I don't think this is always a problem of coding specifically for IE. Opera works quite well on 98% of the sites I visit. Occassionally I bump into one that doesn't work in Opera, but works just fine in Firefox. Maybe Opera does 'support all the standards' and FF has a few IE-like nicities, as opposed to failing to implement an obscure feature that some sites use. I cannot really say I know. I do know that Google Maps works better in FF than Opera. Don't get me wrong, it's quite usable and useful in Opera, but in FF it's a little more interactive with the mouse. I don't think this is due to a lack of effort on Google's part to support Opera.
It's easy to make sites that work with both FF and Opera, but there are niggling issues here and there that still bring up a bit of trouble. I love Opera, but I cannot personally say it's as good at reaching all the sites on the web as FF is. It would be fair for me to say, though, that this is a problem I so rarely come across anymore that I agree with you that this is silliness on the side of the web developer. Getting their site to work with Opera would probably just require a couple of little tweaks. That is, of course, assuming that Opera 9 didn't already solve the problem. (I haven't exhaustively tested this yet, but a couple of sites I had trouble with in O8 worked beautifully in 9.)
I agree with the GP poster that it should make economic sense for them before they support Opera. I agree with you that better coding standards on their site would alleviate this problem with the added benefit of supporting other browsers like Safari. There's a happy medium in there somewhere. Honestly, I think the "have Opera and FF both installed" solution is that happy medium. That's what keeps me from sending nasty-grams twice a year when I hit a site Opera can't open.
"It is an adware-infested web browser that is actually slower than Firefox."
Wrong on both counts. I'd go into detail, but a cure for your ignorance is only 4.7 megabytes away.
That is not a contradiction. The strap is on the controller in the first place because the nature of the beast causes people to tempt fate. They shouldn't need a strap at all, afterall they'd be abusing it if they threw the remote sans strap. The reason it comes with one in the first place is that the remote is geared to those sorts of gestures.
Umm, no, this is not similar to my argument. A better example is Christmas tree lights. You're not supposed to chain more than a given amount together. It says so very clearly. Yet, they still contain fuses to prevent them from overloading the circuit. The reason this is necessary is that the nature of the product tempts people to use it incorrectly.
"The Wiimote is either being used as instructed or it's not. There's no grey area here. "
Wrong. In that case a company could make a product as cheaply and un-safely as possible and all they'd have to do is put a disclaimer up. It doesn't work like that. Disclaimers are only part of the solution, not the complete answer.
I love Nintendo and I mostly agree with what you've said, but I do think Nintendo made a bit of a mis-step here. True, the owners are getting 'over excited' and they aren't using it correctly. I do feel, though, that Nintendo does share at least some of responsibility about it.
I don't imagine my opinion will be too popular, so I'll explain my thought process a little better. (Hopefully this'll prove at least that I'm not intentionally trying to troll.) I've been thinking about this a lot over the last week after being bombarded with pictures of broken TV's and black eyes. The first question I asked myself was: "How would I feel if this were Sony in Nintendo's shoes?" The answer is: "Geez, they're hyping up natural motion of the controller and it didn't occur to them to use thicker straps?!" I'm trying to be fair, I don't want to praise Nintendo for something I wouldn't forgive Sony for.
I think Nintendo should have included the thicker straps originally. But I have to be honest, this isn't exactly a big dramatic issue with me. If Nintendo had never responded to the breaking straps issue, I wouldn't have paid much attention to it. This is more of a 'hindsight is 20/20' thought than some opinion blown out of proportion.
"there are more important things than some jagoff cartoon"
I did an experiment where I spent a lot of time simply worrying about North Korea's nuke program. I read about it until my eyes bled. I bitched on various websites about it. I even had a T-Shirt made. In the end, the results were surprising: I couldn't stop the bomb!
So.. yeah.. Futurama makes more productive use of my time.
"...if they work "beyond their expected life", that's a testament to good engineering. but please don't grant these manufactured goods human qualities."
Why?
" If it really was just some schmo who setup the site, why would it have an iota more credibility than anything else?"
Are you seriously asking why a satisfied customer would have an iota more credibility than a Sony paid advertisement?
"Ah, but you forget, it is now "cool" to hate Sony and talk about how much you hate them at every chance you get."
It wouldn't be cool to hate them if their products were more worthwhile.