And for some anecdotal evidence, check college dorm rooms. You'll see GameCubes with Smash Bros. and Mario Kart all over the place, next to their PS2 and/or XBox.
Or go to an anime convention, and witness the 10-to-1 ratio of Nintendo DS to Sony PSP.
Just because Nintendo is far more successful in Japan doesn't mean that they're failing elsewhere. That's like saying some city is dry because some other city gets more rain.
If your not doing anything wrong what are you worried about?
I'm worried about those in power having a different opinion of wrong than me. Especially since those in power are above the law, with a few exceptions.
Why must everyone think Wikipedia is of a pass/fail nature? Just because some parts of Wikipedia don't work doesn't make it entirely a failure. Some of Wikipedia is excellent, depending on how you use it.
There's just browsing around to burn time. You could stumble on Shallow Water Blackout and read around for a bit, learning about something totally useless. But who knows, maybe one day it could help break the ice with that hot swimmer chick at the beach.
Then there's also the launching point. The article could give external links to assist in future research.
Finally, there are some topics for which the false information rate would be ridiculously low. Consider some highly technical sorts of articles, like maybe Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. As an individual with some knowledge of data communications, I would be able to spot a grotesque error, similar to the drought one above. And why would anyone go and insert a subtle error? I would think most people who are malicious enough to edit articles with harmful intent would not be skilled enough in the art to construct a non-grotesque error. Not only that, but with the huge amount of highly technical articles, one could spend days adding subtle errors everywhere. Even if there was a subtle error, I'm sure I could find it if I was actually implementing QAM. The details there would be more than enough to get me close. Bonus: there's a citation at the bottom!
Finally, perhaps this could help alleviate some of the Parent's concern. Don't let people anonymously edit WikiPedia entries that were have been edited more than n times, and give certain users a sort of karma to keep their entries from being edited. Or perhaps a combination of the above, and an email notification system for when an entry made by a user is edited, so they can go check it out. With the aforementioned system, it would become a great burden to attack an article, because they would have to keep registering with a new name to be able to edit it, because the higher-karma would prevent the same lower-karma from repeatedly editing the same material.
One issue is that there shouldn't be any graphical representation of Muhammad. Reason being that they don't want it to be possible to idolize him.
Yet, by threatening to kill anyone who insults the Prophet, or going out of their way to deface web sites, I believe they have succeeded in idolizing him.
I also theorize that this is just an excuse to attack the West in general. A lot of Western countries had nothing to do with the cartoons, and yet they are also targets for violence.
What does the mangling matter to me? What if I'm in a computer lab at college, or what if I go use a friend's computer, and I want to use the computer speakers to play my music, without disconnecting them from the PC? You're fucked if you have an iPod, because it is a huge hassle to deal with if your campus or friend's PC doesn't have iTunes. Just like I couldn't listen to my friend's music on my laptop being streamed from his iPod.
It is NOT JUST AN INTERFACE! It is an external hard drive that is capable of playing music. If the filenames are mangled, how am I supposed to add just my Lacuna Coil songs to the Windows Media Playlist?
Why must I manage the files? I don't need to manage ANYTHING. If I want to listen to Lacuna Coil, I right click on the folder "Lacuna Coil", and click "queue-it-up", and BAM! All my Lacuna Coil is ready to go. How is that a hassle? How is that fretting over details? How is that wasting time? The only "time" it takes is to tunnel down to the folder(s) I'm interested in.
I'm glad the iPod has minimal fuss for you. However, my method has minimal fuss for me and the purposes for which I use it.
I also question how having video makes it suck more. You don't have to use the video. It's a bonus, not a requirement. Last time I checked, having extra features that you aren't forced to use doesn't take away from a product, if anything it just doesn't add to it. Note that you said "pointless fluff", and not "detrimental fluff".
Oh, what's that? Opinion? Wrong. It is a fact that I have felt massive frustration and spent 90 minutes of wrestling with software in dealing with the single iPod I've ever dealt with in my entire life. Now you're probably going to think "wow, what an idiot, he couldn't figure out how to use an iPod", but that 90 minutes of frustration was trying to find a program which is capable of reading the mangled folder structure so that I could play the damn music through my computer.
It is a fact that I use my Archos effortlessly and with minimal hassle and have done so ever since the day I opened it. But I guess for some people, browsing a hard drive with Windows Explorer is difficult.
I'm a fucking moron? Retard? Do I sense an Encounter of the Fanboy?
I never said that iTunes mangled the files on my computer. In your defense, I didn't specify that it mangled only the files when syncing them to the iPod. Indeed, I was also unaware that you had to tell iTunes to stop mangling files that they transferred over to the iPod. I've never used an iPod or iTunes because I never bought into that fashion crap; I had superior hardware four years ago. And you know what I use to sync my music? Drag and drop.
There is no reason to mangle the names except to prevent people from looking at the music on the iPod as if it were a hard drive. Why should there be a difference between storing the music on the hard drive and "syncing" it?
Music files are, indeed, treated like files, yes? Why must the iPod mangle the filenames in order to show artist/album/song during playback?
The iPod is just a fashion statement with great pain taken to make it idiot-proof. My Archos had larger storage and better functionality four years ago, before this iPod "revolution". What better functionality? I've been able to stream video from my Archos to a TV for FOUR YEARS. When did the Video iPod come out? I can't remember, because I didn't give a fuck since I could already do that.
And the click wheel? I prefer the Archos interface because it resembles the DVD navigation system, which is intuitive enough for me, and the other millions of people who use a DVD player. And I can operate it with gloves on! Haha!
iTunes functions just fine as the best music management software without you having to use anything with DRM.
I have an issue with this. A friend of mine had a bunch of songs on his iPod. He told me the mp3 filenames were mangled if you used iTunes to manage the music. I told him "That can't be, mp3s dont have DRM, the files should just be available."
Sure enough, we plugged the iPod into my laptop, and I started browsing the directory structure, and everything was COMPLETELY mangled. I mean, worse than how compilers mangle some function calls. Filenames appeared to be random strings of alphanumeric characters, and songs from the same album were separated across MULTIPLE subfolders!
I dunno about you, but to me any software that mangles the names of my music when transferring to a music player that functions as an external hard drive is hardly "the best music management software."
Thanks, but I'll copy my intact hierarchial folder setup (music/artist/album/01-trackname.mp3) directly over to my Archos.
What is with these haters who always go "this is not news, move along"?
Remind me again who cares if you think it's news? I think it's interesting.
In your defense, you aren't as vicious as some posters. But still, come on. It's not even funny like some of the other things that get repeated for EVERY ARTICLE EVER POSTED.
I would be willing to give the point that the active vocabulary of the average Japanese person is larger than the active vocabulary for the average American.
Reason being that we have things like white trash to bring our average down. Even the lamest Japanese (NEET, I believe they're referred as) had to make it though high school, and their educational system is from what I've heard way more intense than ours.
I have to wonder, though, how much of Japanese can be generated by the combination of those basic written symbols you spoke of, and if that's like using prefixes in English. For instance, is cool one symbol, and uncool another symbol? I'm not sure whether that would count as two words to someone counting the words in English, but it sure sounds like you're counting that as two "words" in written Japanese.
And IIRC, I once read something about the Japanese using repitition for emphasis. Repeating "Sugoi!" over and over would be like saying "super-duper-awesome-spectacu-fantastic!" or something along those lines.
I stand corrected on the existence of pronouns in Japanese. They do in fact have many pronouns, and the honorific/formal/informal issue means that there's a bunch of different ways to say the same thing depending on context.
However, the main point was that they don't often use them. The subject/focus/topic is usually understood or defined explicitly.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but English is supposed to have one of the largest vocabularies of all languages, because we butcher^Wborrow words from many other languages. Also, terms from medicine, engineering, and science work their way into mainstream usage. That, and English has Germanic and Latin roots.
I haven't found any definitive comparisons on the size of vocabulary. Could you please provide a citation for Japanese having more vocabulary than English? Especially if you qualify it as "by far".
What's an example of a subject that can't be used as a focus?
Haha, this thread is turning into an informal Japanese lesson.
Makes me wish I had some kind of material besides fansubs to learn from. I'm fascinated by all this language stuff; nasal sounds, voiced/voiceless, etc etc. Focus is a totally new concept, and it makes some kind of intuitive sense but I can't limit the meaning because I have nothing to compare against what is and isn't a focus. It all seems like a subject to me.
So if the subject is understood, do you still need the wa particle? i.e.
wa nan desu ka?
I wouldn't imagine so. Particles always need a word to be attached to, right?
At least I was mostly right in my statement. Having totally forgotten ka is the question particle and been repeatedly pwned on the slashdot comments, I will never forget again.
Ah, the elusive nan desu ka...now I understand a bit more.
Arigato, Golias-sensei.
I also find it amusing that you translated rootkit into how the Japanese would probably say it. Such is the price they pay for ending all their "syllables" but one with a vowel.
Actually, desu ka is used to end a sentence. It's kind of like a verbalized period. It roughly correlates to the "be" verbs in English.
Japanese language is really cool. Verbs always come at the end (hence why desu ka is like a verbalized period - verb at the end of the sentence), and they have very few pronouns and don't use them nearly as much as we do. Their language is VERY dependent on contextual clues. The same word could be used to reference the self, another person, or an inanimate object; in order to differentiate, the circumstance must be taken into account, which may include something like them pointing at the object the word is referencing.
I couldn't even fake being fluent, but my stab in the dark would be
rootkit wa nani desu ka?
The wa particle comes after the word rootkit to signify that rootkit is the subject of the sentence. This is because Japanese can use subject-object-verb or object-subject-verb. So instead of "Joe hit John", it would be "Joe John hit". The particle wa is attached to the subject so that the listener knows who hit who. There's more particles, but I forget most of them.
Nani is roughly translated as what, but there's a few ways to say what.
Indeed, the analog sticks are analog. The DualShock 2's analog sticks suck, in fact. They don't return to center very well when compared to the analog sticks on a Mad Catz controller.
Each analog stick reports two 8-bit values, one for each axis. 0x7F is supposed to be center, but I've seen center go from 0x70 to 0x90. Mad Catz are dead on 0x7F.
But I wasn't talking about the analog sticks, I was talking about the Analog button, as the guy who replied to your post earlier stated.
A real geek would write a BigInt class and overload all the mathematical operators.
They'd probably also write a BigFixedPoint class to handle the cents as well, which would have two BigInts; one for each side of the decimal point. It would also need some more overloading of those mathematical operators.
L3, R3, Start, Select, and Analog are digital-only. The controller doesn't report the state of the Analog button, though; it's used to force the internal circuit to change state, which will cause the PS2 to query it for why it changed.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Nintendo is failing outside of Japan?
Courtesy of http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/teardowns
And for some anecdotal evidence, check college dorm rooms. You'll see GameCubes with Smash Bros. and Mario Kart all over the place, next to their PS2 and/or XBox.
Or go to an anime convention, and witness the 10-to-1 ratio of Nintendo DS to Sony PSP.
Just because Nintendo is far more successful in Japan doesn't mean that they're failing elsewhere. That's like saying some city is dry because some other city gets more rain.
I'm worried about those in power having a different opinion of wrong than me. Especially since those in power are above the law, with a few exceptions.
Why must everyone think Wikipedia is of a pass/fail nature? Just because some parts of Wikipedia don't work doesn't make it entirely a failure. Some of Wikipedia is excellent, depending on how you use it.
There's just browsing around to burn time. You could stumble on Shallow Water Blackout and read around for a bit, learning about something totally useless. But who knows, maybe one day it could help break the ice with that hot swimmer chick at the beach.
Then there's also the launching point. The article could give external links to assist in future research.
Finally, there are some topics for which the false information rate would be ridiculously low. Consider some highly technical sorts of articles, like maybe Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. As an individual with some knowledge of data communications, I would be able to spot a grotesque error, similar to the drought one above. And why would anyone go and insert a subtle error? I would think most people who are malicious enough to edit articles with harmful intent would not be skilled enough in the art to construct a non-grotesque error. Not only that, but with the huge amount of highly technical articles, one could spend days adding subtle errors everywhere. Even if there was a subtle error, I'm sure I could find it if I was actually implementing QAM. The details there would be more than enough to get me close. Bonus: there's a citation at the bottom!
Finally, perhaps this could help alleviate some of the Parent's concern. Don't let people anonymously edit WikiPedia entries that were have been edited more than n times, and give certain users a sort of karma to keep their entries from being edited. Or perhaps a combination of the above, and an email notification system for when an entry made by a user is edited, so they can go check it out. With the aforementioned system, it would become a great burden to attack an article, because they would have to keep registering with a new name to be able to edit it, because the higher-karma would prevent the same lower-karma from repeatedly editing the same material.
One issue is that there shouldn't be any graphical representation of Muhammad. Reason being that they don't want it to be possible to idolize him.
Yet, by threatening to kill anyone who insults the Prophet, or going out of their way to deface web sites, I believe they have succeeded in idolizing him.
I also theorize that this is just an excuse to attack the West in general. A lot of Western countries had nothing to do with the cartoons, and yet they are also targets for violence.
What does the mangling matter to me? What if I'm in a computer lab at college, or what if I go use a friend's computer, and I want to use the computer speakers to play my music, without disconnecting them from the PC? You're fucked if you have an iPod, because it is a huge hassle to deal with if your campus or friend's PC doesn't have iTunes. Just like I couldn't listen to my friend's music on my laptop being streamed from his iPod.
It is NOT JUST AN INTERFACE! It is an external hard drive that is capable of playing music. If the filenames are mangled, how am I supposed to add just my Lacuna Coil songs to the Windows Media Playlist?
Why must I manage the files? I don't need to manage ANYTHING. If I want to listen to Lacuna Coil, I right click on the folder "Lacuna Coil", and click "queue-it-up", and BAM! All my Lacuna Coil is ready to go. How is that a hassle? How is that fretting over details? How is that wasting time? The only "time" it takes is to tunnel down to the folder(s) I'm interested in.
I'm glad the iPod has minimal fuss for you. However, my method has minimal fuss for me and the purposes for which I use it.
I also question how having video makes it suck more. You don't have to use the video. It's a bonus, not a requirement. Last time I checked, having extra features that you aren't forced to use doesn't take away from a product, if anything it just doesn't add to it. Note that you said "pointless fluff", and not "detrimental fluff".
Oh, what's that? Opinion? Wrong. It is a fact that I have felt massive frustration and spent 90 minutes of wrestling with software in dealing with the single iPod I've ever dealt with in my entire life. Now you're probably going to think "wow, what an idiot, he couldn't figure out how to use an iPod", but that 90 minutes of frustration was trying to find a program which is capable of reading the mangled folder structure so that I could play the damn music through my computer.
It is a fact that I use my Archos effortlessly and with minimal hassle and have done so ever since the day I opened it. But I guess for some people, browsing a hard drive with Windows Explorer is difficult.
I'm a fucking moron? Retard? Do I sense an Encounter of the Fanboy?
I never said that iTunes mangled the files on my computer. In your defense, I didn't specify that it mangled only the files when syncing them to the iPod. Indeed, I was also unaware that you had to tell iTunes to stop mangling files that they transferred over to the iPod. I've never used an iPod or iTunes because I never bought into that fashion crap; I had superior hardware four years ago. And you know what I use to sync my music? Drag and drop.
There is no reason to mangle the names except to prevent people from looking at the music on the iPod as if it were a hard drive. Why should there be a difference between storing the music on the hard drive and "syncing" it?
Music files are, indeed, treated like files, yes? Why must the iPod mangle the filenames in order to show artist/album/song during playback?
The iPod is just a fashion statement with great pain taken to make it idiot-proof. My Archos had larger storage and better functionality four years ago, before this iPod "revolution". What better functionality? I've been able to stream video from my Archos to a TV for FOUR YEARS. When did the Video iPod come out? I can't remember, because I didn't give a fuck since I could already do that.
And the click wheel? I prefer the Archos interface because it resembles the DVD navigation system, which is intuitive enough for me, and the other millions of people who use a DVD player. And I can operate it with gloves on! Haha!
I have an issue with this. A friend of mine had a bunch of songs on his iPod. He told me the mp3 filenames were mangled if you used iTunes to manage the music. I told him "That can't be, mp3s dont have DRM, the files should just be available."
Sure enough, we plugged the iPod into my laptop, and I started browsing the directory structure, and everything was COMPLETELY mangled. I mean, worse than how compilers mangle some function calls. Filenames appeared to be random strings of alphanumeric characters, and songs from the same album were separated across MULTIPLE subfolders!
I dunno about you, but to me any software that mangles the names of my music when transferring to a music player that functions as an external hard drive is hardly "the best music management software."
Thanks, but I'll copy my intact hierarchial folder setup (music/artist/album/01-trackname.mp3) directly over to my Archos.
What is with these haters who always go "this is not news, move along"?
Remind me again who cares if you think it's news? I think it's interesting.
In your defense, you aren't as vicious as some posters. But still, come on. It's not even funny like some of the other things that get repeated for EVERY ARTICLE EVER POSTED.
I, for one, welcome our new shark overlords.
In Soviet Russia, shark evolves you!
for (int i=0; i<100; i++) printf("I will not mix personal life with business life...\n");
How about a Green Lap of Sterility?
I would be willing to give the point that the active vocabulary of the average Japanese person is larger than the active vocabulary for the average American.
Reason being that we have things like white trash to bring our average down. Even the lamest Japanese (NEET, I believe they're referred as) had to make it though high school, and their educational system is from what I've heard way more intense than ours.
I have to wonder, though, how much of Japanese can be generated by the combination of those basic written symbols you spoke of, and if that's like using prefixes in English. For instance, is cool one symbol, and uncool another symbol? I'm not sure whether that would count as two words to someone counting the words in English, but it sure sounds like you're counting that as two "words" in written Japanese.
And IIRC, I once read something about the Japanese using repitition for emphasis. Repeating "Sugoi!" over and over would be like saying "super-duper-awesome-spectacu-fantastic!" or something along those lines.
I stand corrected on the existence of pronouns in Japanese. They do in fact have many pronouns, and the honorific/formal/informal issue means that there's a bunch of different ways to say the same thing depending on context.
However, the main point was that they don't often use them. The subject/focus/topic is usually understood or defined explicitly.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but English is supposed to have one of the largest vocabularies of all languages, because we butcher^Wborrow words from many other languages. Also, terms from medicine, engineering, and science work their way into mainstream usage. That, and English has Germanic and Latin roots.
I haven't found any definitive comparisons on the size of vocabulary. Could you please provide a citation for Japanese having more vocabulary than English? Especially if you qualify it as "by far".
Imagine being a young male with a receeding hair line.
So is it age or recession of the hairline that distinguishes -kun from -san? =P
What's an example of a subject that can't be used as a focus?
Haha, this thread is turning into an informal Japanese lesson.
Makes me wish I had some kind of material besides fansubs to learn from. I'm fascinated by all this language stuff; nasal sounds, voiced/voiceless, etc etc. Focus is a totally new concept, and it makes some kind of intuitive sense but I can't limit the meaning because I have nothing to compare against what is and isn't a focus. It all seems like a subject to me.
"Dammit, Jim, I'm an engineer not a linguist!"
So if the subject is understood, do you still need the wa particle? i.e.
wa nan desu ka?
I wouldn't imagine so. Particles always need a word to be attached to, right?
At least I was mostly right in my statement. Having totally forgotten ka is the question particle and been repeatedly pwned on the slashdot comments, I will never forget again.
Ah, the elusive nan desu ka...now I understand a bit more.
Arigato, Golias-sensei.
I also find it amusing that you translated rootkit into how the Japanese would probably say it. Such is the price they pay for ending all their "syllables" but one with a vowel.
I've never seen a double u before.
I got pwned.
I thought there was a difference between a statement and a question but I couldn't remember it.
Hence the disclaimer about not really knowing Japanese. Watching fansubbed anime will only get you so far.
Actually, desu ka is used to end a sentence. It's kind of like a verbalized period. It roughly correlates to the "be" verbs in English.
Japanese language is really cool. Verbs always come at the end (hence why desu ka is like a verbalized period - verb at the end of the sentence), and they have very few pronouns and don't use them nearly as much as we do. Their language is VERY dependent on contextual clues. The same word could be used to reference the self, another person, or an inanimate object; in order to differentiate, the circumstance must be taken into account, which may include something like them pointing at the object the word is referencing.
I couldn't even fake being fluent, but my stab in the dark would be
rootkit wa nani desu ka?
The wa particle comes after the word rootkit to signify that rootkit is the subject of the sentence. This is because Japanese can use subject-object-verb or object-subject-verb. So instead of "Joe hit John", it would be "Joe John hit". The particle wa is attached to the subject so that the listener knows who hit who. There's more particles, but I forget most of them.
Nani is roughly translated as what, but there's a few ways to say what.
Indeed, the analog sticks are analog. The DualShock 2's analog sticks suck, in fact. They don't return to center very well when compared to the analog sticks on a Mad Catz controller. Each analog stick reports two 8-bit values, one for each axis. 0x7F is supposed to be center, but I've seen center go from 0x70 to 0x90. Mad Catz are dead on 0x7F. But I wasn't talking about the analog sticks, I was talking about the Analog button, as the guy who replied to your post earlier stated.
A real geek would write a BigInt class and overload all the mathematical operators.
They'd probably also write a BigFixedPoint class to handle the cents as well, which would have two BigInts; one for each side of the decimal point. It would also need some more overloading of those mathematical operators.
Not every button has analog sensitivity.
L3, R3, Start, Select, and Analog are digital-only. The controller doesn't report the state of the Analog button, though; it's used to force the internal circuit to change state, which will cause the PS2 to query it for why it changed.