I played Crackdown and Viva Pinata back to back this weekend. I guess I'm a freak.;)
The important thing is that I like plain good games. If that means I play, say, Prince of Persia one minute and Spyro: Enter the Dragon the next, well, there you go. I'm not a snob.
Nope; I played Tradewars and a bunch of other games on BBSes. I also played MUDs before MMORPGs came out. Thanks for assuming I'm an idiot though.
The reality is that the Xbox Live real-time voice-comm experience doesn't compare at all with the text-based turn-based communication on BBSes. There's also a limiting factor, in that only a small subset of the population had computers, modems, heard of BBSes at the time, and knew how to connect.
You're comparing Apples to Oranges. I think the main purpose of your post is to say "wow you young turks are idiots who don't know anything about BBSes, and I'm so cool I do"... since it doesn't really refute the original post.
Nitpickers corner: Considering how old the Internet is, I seriously doubt anybody was gaming online before it. Before the popularization of the Internet, sure.
When you were playing on a Commodore 64, you didn't even *have* Internet multiplayer. So it seems to me that the fact that the Internet multiplayer feature exists at all makes the game much better than its C-64 equivalent.
Additionally, you don't *have* to play online now. You choose to. (Sure, there are some games that require online play, like MMORPGs and some FPS games.)
I don't even need to go back that far, the 90's had a lot of fantastic games that I still play and have a lot more fun with than running another damn WoW instance, or another round of Countersrike: OMGSNIPERFAGZ!!LAWLZ Edition.
So don't play those type of games. You act as if the entire game industry consists of Counterstrike clones and MMORPGs.
The answer to almost all nostalgia-motivated questions like this is no, things were not better in the past. The human mind has an amazing capability to remember good things and forget bad things, so while there were many good games in the past, there were also many terrible games in the past and the percentage of good games is a constant.
Ok, I like how this assumption exists that if Microsoft owned a sophisticated low-end to high-end advertising service, as Google now does with DoubleClick's acquisition, that Microsoft would immediately turn it into an abusive monopoly and Google won't. What's the difference between the two? Other than the standard "Slashdot hates Microsoft."
If anything, Google will find it much easier to slip monopolistic abuses past regulators and customers because of the following reason: 1) For the most part, their 'product' is invisible. It's not something you see on store shelves, and it all exists digitally 2) Their product is also in a market that's only existed for maybe ten years, because there's no history, people have no comparison of what is 'normal' activity and what is 'monopolistic.' 3) While Google has many competitors in that marketplace, none of them get a lot of press. Or any press at all, aside from trade journals.
For the record, Microsoft doesn't really have anything to compete with Google in the advertising space right now. The only part of Google's model they've replicated is providing free services that are ad-supported, but that's all. All of MSN's ads are provided by one of those companies which, while it owns a significant portion of the market, isn't getting any press. (I won't name it for obvious reasons.)
There have been way more than two major outages. The Seattle area had a major outage just last year... Mercer Island was without power for almost two weeks. Wasn't there a big outage in St. Louis last year as well? California had some rather famous blackouts in 2000 or 2001. I bet there's at least one major outage every year.
But in those cases none of the high-voltage transmission lines were affected. If you dynamited one of those towers, it would take a heck of a lot more than two weeks to restore it, and it would knock out power to a lot more people. I don't know where you live, but I live a stone's throw from some of those power lines. I know people who use power line maintenance roads for off-roading in their 4x4s. It's technically trespassing, but, again, those roads are hardly ever patrolled.
Much more delicate than the Internet is the power grid it relies on.
High-voltage transmission lines are frequently in the middle of nowhere, with no patrollers or police nearby, yet easily accessible from any SUV by just driving down the service road. A single stick of dynamite is probably sufficient to take down a single tower. The grid (as was shown by the outage on the east coast a couple years ago) is not very redundant, so only a few towers would need to be prepared in this manner. The bombs could be set off from a cellphone with little risk of an attacker being captured, and it would take weeks to repair.
I agree with you that the priorities are off, but even considering only the Internet, priorities are off. The Internet can't function without the power grid, and the power grid is a lot more delicate than most people know.
I've been reading this site for years, and yet I'm constantly impressed by the quality exhibited.
For instance, in a story about how resistant the Internet is to attack, the editors apparently decided to demonstrate what a possible attack might look like.
I don't know about anyone else, but I've just about had it with this whole lefty/righty, liberal/conservative bullshit. I'm not any of those. I side with the truth but the truth doesn't have many friends these days.
Political organizations on both sides of the political spectrum are monitoring speeches, public appearances, radio and TV shows waiting for the other side to make a mistake. This isn't limited to a "leftish" group, they're all doing it. Truth be told it was organizations you might consider "rightish" started it
I don't care about left/right, liberal/conservative bullshit! BUT THE RIGHT STARTED IT!!!
1) Because the 24-hour news networks are so starved for actual news that they'll report every moronic thing like this as if it was critically important, even though nobody actually cares. If there had been (say) a bridge collapse that killed 50 people in Utah the day this "news" broke, nobody who have ever heard that Don Imus said except his fans.
2) Because companies that advertise with his show don't bother to stand up against the press, but instead pull their advertising so that they can get some imagined PR boost. Of course, they also never survey their customers to see how many actually like the show.
3) Because the show's owners/managers saw that sponsors were leaving (unaware or uncaring that the sponsors aren't actually saying the show is bad, they're just trying to get a PR boost) and fired him without bothering to examine whether he was acting against his job description (he wasn't; shock jocks are supposed to say shocking things), or whether he was breaking any FCC rules (he wasn't.)
Congratulations! You've just seen how to ruin any radio/TV show! All you need is some guy with a blog to listen for your most offensive moment, and a really slow news day!
What I'm saying is that I don't believe something is real until I have proof of it.
Is discrimination real? Maybe, maybe not... I don't know. But I haven't seen any proof one way or the other. I've seen "feel good" specials where Tyra Banks dresses up as an ugly person, and that's about it.
Problem is... they aren't us. The proof of discrimination here is in your post... you expect them to behave like you
That's not proof of anything. Assuming I did expect people to behave like me, how does that constitute proof that discrimination is real?
, and you judge them by your own personal standards when they don't... but your own personal standards are biased to favor the way you are.
Who else's standards could I judge them by? I don't have access to other people's brains... while your apparent telepathy is impressive, not everybody has it.
Imagine you're an introvert. You get overwhelmed quickly in groups of people and can't keep up with the conversation. Does that mean any problems you have are "all in your mind"? Introversion has physical causes, different neural pathways are used. A true introvert can't particpate the way you might, or I do.
Prove it. The "physical causes" part.
In any case, nothing's stopping the introvert from expressing their opinion in some other way other than conversations among large groups of people. Writing, for instance, is much more influential than large groups of people will ever be. So even assuming you're right about their being a physical cause of introversion, that problem is very easily solved.
Look, I'm glad that you've solved the "wow everybody should be equal and butterflies and happy bunnies" viewpoint you seem to have here, but the simple fact is that people are not equal. Some people are introverts, some people are not. Women converse in one way, men converse in another. There's nothing wrong with that.
Please go to a video store and rent The Incredibles and Harrison Bergeron (or read the short story.) Watch both before returning to this debate. There's no point in crippling everybody in some futile attempt to make everybody equal.
I'm from Washington, the "show me" state. Ok, it's not, but I thought that would be funny.
Look, if you can PROVE discrimination, than please do so. Getting upset over stuff that could all be in your imagination is stupid. For instance:
And what's really funny, talk about women's issues. The guys will 9 times out of 10 dominate the discussion.
So? If the women there cared about the issues, then they'd dominate the discussion, right? It's entirely inconceivable that the women in this conversation simply do not care and aren't interested?
Or maybe you're saying that men shouldn't be allowed to talk about women's issues, even if they cared about it passionately, because they are not women? Now there's a slippery slope.
Could it be, could it just possibly be that YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, SINCE YOU ARE NOT IN IT?
Either you can prove there's something to it, or you can't. Give me some proof of something.
Telling me I can't understand it without turning into a minority or a woman is moronic, that just means that minorities can't communicate it. If they can't communicate it, my hunch is that it's all in their mind.
Someone get me the world's smallest violin. Why don't you just grow up and thicken your skin like everybody else who isn't a whiny liberal has done. When there's some real racism or discrimination directed against you (as in, actions, not words), THEN you can go make a stink about it, ok?
I don't give a crap if somebody wants to call me whitey or a honkey or whatever other term they might use, because my ego doesn't depend on what random people think about me. I genuinely don't give a crap. Why do you? What difference does it make what word someone uses?
That said, if some actual discrimination happened, I'd be all for you fighting it. Say your paycheck was lower after you told your boss you were gay; that's actionable. Getting upset over words is stupid.
"Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Remember that from 1st grade? Make it your motto.
I think the real ironic thing is that he's a shock-jock. That's what he's *supposed* to do. That's exactly what CBS hired him to do in the first place!
The real problem is that 24-hour news networks are so starved for real news that they actually run stories like this instead of saying, "why the hell are you telling me this stuff?" like they should be doing. Imagine the headline: "Shock jock says something moderately more shocking than he has in the past!" Wow, that'll bring in the viewers!
So does every advertising network. It's great for targeting ads so when you visit a site you don't see (if you're a guy) tampon ads, you only see ads relevant to the sites you visit regularly. Personally I'm a fan of them considering they're not really tracking anything I care about, and I don't really like seeing ads for things like tampons.
This Classic user has been using Macs since 1989 and I don't find it 'fingernails on a chalkboard'. In fact, I find the column view to be amazing, and do almost all my Findering in that. It's especially wonderful for moving around in deep server hierarchies, which really shows the limits of a spatial system.
I'm not complaining that they added non-spatial browsing modes. If you like column view, great!
But to break the spatial browsing mode in the process of adding is is bad. I don't get why the Apple fans replying to my post don't agree that: 1) Removing features from version 10 that were present in version 9 is bad. 2) Breaking features in version 10 that worked well in version 9 is bad.
When you sum it all up, that's all I'm complaining about.
The article I read had a great quote from the Congressman who initiated this program (whose name I can't remember, unfortunately.) He said that you can't possibly secure a system you don't know about, which is why the first metric is whether all networks/servers in use by the agency are documented in a centralized manner. It seems like a great first step to me.
Text clippings on 9 or X use both a different text encoding and a different line break character, and they have a filename extension now also ("textClipping"), but in the Finder you can still refer to them as "clippings" in your AppleScripts so that is how the convenience was implemented, at the expense of someone with numerous old text clippings to convert. The free TextWrangler from Bare Bones can convert your clippings to new ones.
Let me see if I understand this correctly.
Finder silently deleted my data because... AppleScript can refer to text clippings as "clippings?" WTF? I have no clue what you're trying to tell me here.
Regardless of what technological improvement was made, there is no excuse for silently deleting a user's data. I don't know why I even have to say that; isn't that a given for ALL computers EVERYWHERE?
Well, in spatial mode, a window is a presentation of a folder and therefore a folder *is* a window, and therefore Command-N makes sense to make new folders. And to get even more pointlessly picky, Command-N means "New Document" which may, or may not, mean a new window as well. (Typically it does, but there are applications where it does not.) Given that meaning, creating a folder also makes sense.
That all said, it's not a huge deal and I've gotten used to it. It still bugs me, but I can cope... the network problems are the big beef I have, really.
Nobody should tolerate the crappy network performance and other bugs in Finder. My statement about Windows and Linux users was specifically about messy UI design.
Slashdot Mirror
I played Crackdown and Viva Pinata back to back this weekend. I guess I'm a freak. ;)
The important thing is that I like plain good games. If that means I play, say, Prince of Persia one minute and Spyro: Enter the Dragon the next, well, there you go. I'm not a snob.
Nope; I played Tradewars and a bunch of other games on BBSes. I also played MUDs before MMORPGs came out. Thanks for assuming I'm an idiot though.
The reality is that the Xbox Live real-time voice-comm experience doesn't compare at all with the text-based turn-based communication on BBSes. There's also a limiting factor, in that only a small subset of the population had computers, modems, heard of BBSes at the time, and knew how to connect.
You're comparing Apples to Oranges. I think the main purpose of your post is to say "wow you young turks are idiots who don't know anything about BBSes, and I'm so cool I do"... since it doesn't really refute the original post.
Nitpickers corner: Considering how old the Internet is, I seriously doubt anybody was gaming online before it. Before the popularization of the Internet, sure.
When you were playing on a Commodore 64, you didn't even *have* Internet multiplayer. So it seems to me that the fact that the Internet multiplayer feature exists at all makes the game much better than its C-64 equivalent.
Additionally, you don't *have* to play online now. You choose to. (Sure, there are some games that require online play, like MMORPGs and some FPS games.)
I don't even need to go back that far, the 90's had a lot of fantastic games that I still play and have a lot more fun with than running another damn WoW instance, or another round of Countersrike: OMGSNIPERFAGZ!!LAWLZ Edition.
So don't play those type of games. You act as if the entire game industry consists of Counterstrike clones and MMORPGs.
The answer to almost all nostalgia-motivated questions like this is no, things were not better in the past. The human mind has an amazing capability to remember good things and forget bad things, so while there were many good games in the past, there were also many terrible games in the past and the percentage of good games is a constant.
Ok, I like how this assumption exists that if Microsoft owned a sophisticated low-end to high-end advertising service, as Google now does with DoubleClick's acquisition, that Microsoft would immediately turn it into an abusive monopoly and Google won't. What's the difference between the two? Other than the standard "Slashdot hates Microsoft."
If anything, Google will find it much easier to slip monopolistic abuses past regulators and customers because of the following reason:
1) For the most part, their 'product' is invisible. It's not something you see on store shelves, and it all exists digitally
2) Their product is also in a market that's only existed for maybe ten years, because there's no history, people have no comparison of what is 'normal' activity and what is 'monopolistic.'
3) While Google has many competitors in that marketplace, none of them get a lot of press. Or any press at all, aside from trade journals.
For the record, Microsoft doesn't really have anything to compete with Google in the advertising space right now. The only part of Google's model they've replicated is providing free services that are ad-supported, but that's all. All of MSN's ads are provided by one of those companies which, while it owns a significant portion of the market, isn't getting any press. (I won't name it for obvious reasons.)
There have been way more than two major outages. The Seattle area had a major outage just last year... Mercer Island was without power for almost two weeks. Wasn't there a big outage in St. Louis last year as well? California had some rather famous blackouts in 2000 or 2001. I bet there's at least one major outage every year.
But in those cases none of the high-voltage transmission lines were affected. If you dynamited one of those towers, it would take a heck of a lot more than two weeks to restore it, and it would knock out power to a lot more people. I don't know where you live, but I live a stone's throw from some of those power lines. I know people who use power line maintenance roads for off-roading in their 4x4s. It's technically trespassing, but, again, those roads are hardly ever patrolled.
To be fair, I like his video game articles, generally, although I sometimes disagree with his ratings.
Much more delicate than the Internet is the power grid it relies on.
High-voltage transmission lines are frequently in the middle of nowhere, with no patrollers or police nearby, yet easily accessible from any SUV by just driving down the service road. A single stick of dynamite is probably sufficient to take down a single tower. The grid (as was shown by the outage on the east coast a couple years ago) is not very redundant, so only a few towers would need to be prepared in this manner. The bombs could be set off from a cellphone with little risk of an attacker being captured, and it would take weeks to repair.
I agree with you that the priorities are off, but even considering only the Internet, priorities are off. The Internet can't function without the power grid, and the power grid is a lot more delicate than most people know.
I've been reading this site for years, and yet I'm constantly impressed by the quality exhibited.
For instance, in a story about how resistant the Internet is to attack, the editors apparently decided to demonstrate what a possible attack might look like.
Take a look!
Bravo!
To reply to your sig, two spaces after a period only applies for monospaced fonts. With variable-width fonts, you only place one space after a period.
It has nothing to do with the Internet, it just has to do with the rise of variable-width fonts as program defaults.
Will Smith made a pretty successful career in music without swearing or misogyny. Just throwing that out there.
It's not necessarily *just* about the sales, there has to be something more to it.
I don't know about anyone else, but I've just about had it with this whole lefty/righty, liberal/conservative bullshit. I'm not any of those. I side with the truth but the truth doesn't have many friends these days.
Political organizations on both sides of the political spectrum are monitoring speeches, public appearances, radio and TV shows waiting for the other side to make a mistake. This isn't limited to a "leftish" group, they're all doing it. Truth be told it was organizations you might consider "rightish" started it
I don't care about left/right, liberal/conservative bullshit! BUT THE RIGHT STARTED IT!!!
Sheesh.
1) Because the 24-hour news networks are so starved for actual news that they'll report every moronic thing like this as if it was critically important, even though nobody actually cares. If there had been (say) a bridge collapse that killed 50 people in Utah the day this "news" broke, nobody who have ever heard that Don Imus said except his fans.
2) Because companies that advertise with his show don't bother to stand up against the press, but instead pull their advertising so that they can get some imagined PR boost. Of course, they also never survey their customers to see how many actually like the show.
3) Because the show's owners/managers saw that sponsors were leaving (unaware or uncaring that the sponsors aren't actually saying the show is bad, they're just trying to get a PR boost) and fired him without bothering to examine whether he was acting against his job description (he wasn't; shock jocks are supposed to say shocking things), or whether he was breaking any FCC rules (he wasn't.)
Congratulations! You've just seen how to ruin any radio/TV show! All you need is some guy with a blog to listen for your most offensive moment, and a really slow news day!
The fallacy there is that the ACLU, despite their name, really has nothing to do with individual freedom.
You didn't read what I typed at all.
What I'm saying is that I don't believe something is real until I have proof of it.
Is discrimination real? Maybe, maybe not... I don't know. But I haven't seen any proof one way or the other. I've seen "feel good" specials where Tyra Banks dresses up as an ugly person, and that's about it.
Problem is... they aren't us. The proof of discrimination here is in your post... you expect them to behave like you
That's not proof of anything. Assuming I did expect people to behave like me, how does that constitute proof that discrimination is real?
, and you judge them by your own personal standards when they don't... but your own personal standards are biased to favor the way you are.
Who else's standards could I judge them by? I don't have access to other people's brains... while your apparent telepathy is impressive, not everybody has it.
Imagine you're an introvert. You get overwhelmed quickly in groups of people and can't keep up with the conversation. Does that mean any problems you have are "all in your mind"? Introversion has physical causes, different neural pathways are used. A true introvert can't particpate the way you might, or I do.
Prove it. The "physical causes" part.
In any case, nothing's stopping the introvert from expressing their opinion in some other way other than conversations among large groups of people. Writing, for instance, is much more influential than large groups of people will ever be. So even assuming you're right about their being a physical cause of introversion, that problem is very easily solved.
Look, I'm glad that you've solved the "wow everybody should be equal and butterflies and happy bunnies" viewpoint you seem to have here, but the simple fact is that people are not equal. Some people are introverts, some people are not. Women converse in one way, men converse in another. There's nothing wrong with that.
Please go to a video store and rent The Incredibles and Harrison Bergeron (or read the short story.) Watch both before returning to this debate. There's no point in crippling everybody in some futile attempt to make everybody equal.
I'm from Washington, the "show me" state. Ok, it's not, but I thought that would be funny.
Look, if you can PROVE discrimination, than please do so. Getting upset over stuff that could all be in your imagination is stupid. For instance:
And what's really funny, talk about women's issues. The guys will 9 times out of 10 dominate the discussion.
So? If the women there cared about the issues, then they'd dominate the discussion, right? It's entirely inconceivable that the women in this conversation simply do not care and aren't interested?
Or maybe you're saying that men shouldn't be allowed to talk about women's issues, even if they cared about it passionately, because they are not women? Now there's a slippery slope.
Could it be, could it just possibly be that YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, SINCE YOU ARE NOT IN IT?
Either you can prove there's something to it, or you can't. Give me some proof of something.
Telling me I can't understand it without turning into a minority or a woman is moronic, that just means that minorities can't communicate it. If they can't communicate it, my hunch is that it's all in their mind.
Someone get me the world's smallest violin. Why don't you just grow up and thicken your skin like everybody else who isn't a whiny liberal has done. When there's some real racism or discrimination directed against you (as in, actions, not words), THEN you can go make a stink about it, ok?
I don't give a crap if somebody wants to call me whitey or a honkey or whatever other term they might use, because my ego doesn't depend on what random people think about me. I genuinely don't give a crap. Why do you? What difference does it make what word someone uses?
That said, if some actual discrimination happened, I'd be all for you fighting it. Say your paycheck was lower after you told your boss you were gay; that's actionable. Getting upset over words is stupid.
"Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Remember that from 1st grade? Make it your motto.
Feel free to mod this flamebait.
I think the real ironic thing is that he's a shock-jock. That's what he's *supposed* to do. That's exactly what CBS hired him to do in the first place!
The real problem is that 24-hour news networks are so starved for real news that they actually run stories like this instead of saying, "why the hell are you telling me this stuff?" like they should be doing. Imagine the headline: "Shock jock says something moderately more shocking than he has in the past!" Wow, that'll bring in the viewers!
So does every advertising network. It's great for targeting ads so when you visit a site you don't see (if you're a guy) tampon ads, you only see ads relevant to the sites you visit regularly. Personally I'm a fan of them considering they're not really tracking anything I care about, and I don't really like seeing ads for things like tampons.
This Classic user has been using Macs since 1989 and I don't find it 'fingernails on a chalkboard'. In fact, I find the column view to be amazing, and do almost all my Findering in that. It's especially wonderful for moving around in deep server hierarchies, which really shows the limits of a spatial system.
I'm not complaining that they added non-spatial browsing modes. If you like column view, great!
But to break the spatial browsing mode in the process of adding is is bad. I don't get why the Apple fans replying to my post don't agree that:
1) Removing features from version 10 that were present in version 9 is bad.
2) Breaking features in version 10 that worked well in version 9 is bad.
When you sum it all up, that's all I'm complaining about.
The article I read had a great quote from the Congressman who initiated this program (whose name I can't remember, unfortunately.) He said that you can't possibly secure a system you don't know about, which is why the first metric is whether all networks/servers in use by the agency are documented in a centralized manner. It seems like a great first step to me.
Text clippings on 9 or X use both a different text encoding and a different line break character, and they have a filename extension now also ("textClipping"), but in the Finder you can still refer to them as "clippings" in your AppleScripts so that is how the convenience was implemented, at the expense of someone with numerous old text clippings to convert. The free TextWrangler from Bare Bones can convert your clippings to new ones.
... AppleScript can refer to text clippings as "clippings?" WTF? I have no clue what you're trying to tell me here.
Let me see if I understand this correctly.
Finder silently deleted my data because
Regardless of what technological improvement was made, there is no excuse for silently deleting a user's data. I don't know why I even have to say that; isn't that a given for ALL computers EVERYWHERE?
A bug is a bug.
Well, in spatial mode, a window is a presentation of a folder and therefore a folder *is* a window, and therefore Command-N makes sense to make new folders. And to get even more pointlessly picky, Command-N means "New Document" which may, or may not, mean a new window as well. (Typically it does, but there are applications where it does not.) Given that meaning, creating a folder also makes sense.
That all said, it's not a huge deal and I've gotten used to it. It still bugs me, but I can cope... the network problems are the big beef I have, really.
Good job misquoting me.
Nobody should tolerate the crappy network performance and other bugs in Finder. My statement about Windows and Linux users was specifically about messy UI design.