I meant something slightly different. I meant that as global temperatures rise, we may see really strange and extreme new behavior in the weather that has never been seen or predicted before. Lets say that City X can cope fine with Y amount of rainfall per hour. Lets say that City X has not experienced more rainfall than Y in the last 200 years also. Lets also say that given City X's geographic location, experts predict that the WORST possible rainfall City X may experience is no more than 1.5 x Y per hour. What happens when City X actually gets hammered with 6 x Y rainfall per hour for 5 hours straight one fateful day? That may seem unlikely TODAY - the models may tell you its not going to happen - but may not be quite as unlikely 15 years from now. Weather is a complex system. Once that system starts to go off-balance, nobody really knows how it will start to behave.
Keep the compiler, keep all the powerful capabilities of C++, and add an alternative syntax - a friendlier one - that people who struggle with C++ can more easily learn and more easily manage. Back in the days of Flash, Actionscript first had one syntax, and then got a 2nd alternative syntax. You could use either one. The same can be done with C++. Create a new syntax for use in the 2020s and beyond. Don't destroy everything that makes C++ great in the process. There is your "new" language - C+++.
There are lots of studies estimating just how bad climate change may get if global temperatures go up by X degrees, or Y degrees, or Z degrees by the year 2050, or 2100 or beyond. One problem with these predictive studies, however, is that nobody actually KNOWS with any certainty how climate will behave once you cross a certain temperature treshold that may exist and that we may not be aware of at all. Some experts say "As long as we can keep warming below 2 degrees C by the year 2100, the worst effects should be mitigated". Except that a climate system this huge and this complex and potentially this poorly understood cannot be accurately simulated on any existing supercomputer we have anywhere in the world today. We may find that in just a few years - maybe 2025, maybe 2030, maybe 2035 - we cross an "invisible temperature line" after which seriously catastrophic weather events start to occur all over the world with a severity and ferocity that nobody thought was possible, and that nobody can do anything whatsoever to mitigate, unless someone invents an actually working "weather control" technology in the next 10 years or so. Meteorologists can usually predict large scale weather events/problems a few days ahead of time today. But if the behavior of the entire system shifts and destabilizes in idiosyncratic ways, you may find that really scary weather events materialize in places where they have never happened before, and without anyone being able to foresee where and when the event will occur. Imagine a world where on a perfectly normal day, a Superstorm suddenly builds, and you have maybe 30 minutes of warning time before it hits where you are.
I don't know who Microsoft think they are. First the murky telemetry in Windows 10 that cannot be switched off. Then Microsoft Office becomes a cloud only tool. Next, Microsoft's CEO is pushing all sorts of "YOU OWN NOTHING" cloud crap - your games, apps, software all go cloud-only. And now I go to a bricks-and-mortar store and Microshaft of all companies tracks what I'm putting in my shopping cart? F you, Microsoft. Privacy invaders. Data thieves. Conscience free arm-twisters. Cleptomaniacs. I am not shopping at ANY store that has the Microsoft system in it.
Lots of applications require large datasets to be loaded - for example, architectural CAD, where you may have a 3D model of a shopping center with 92 different shops and 400 different windows in it. Until now, those datasets could only be opened on expensive desktop CAD workstations that weigh 40 lbs and that you cannot easily take to a construction site or to a client meeting. So these 128GB laptops are aimed at that - going to a construction site or a client's office and opening and manipulating very large CAD or scientific data sets. 6 CPU cores is a bit low for that, but its mostly the GPU that gets used, and its a lot better than having to move a large desktop workstation to a presentation or construction site.
The biggest CAD/3D models these days are for 3D buildings - like a new factory, airport or shopping center. Those CAD files can very easily become bigger than 64GB and not fit in RAM anymore. If you need to go to the construction site with a 98GB CAD model that can be inspected, how do you do that without a laptop that has 128GB RAM? Do you take a 35,000 USD dual Xeon CAD workstation with 3 GPUs that weighs 40 to 50 lbs and carry it to the construction site in a van? That's what these new laptops are for. Opening huge 3D CAD files away from the office desk - and very likely at a construction site.
CAD and 3D models are getting really huge these days. Particularly in architectural visualization. So if you need to load the 3D CAD model of an entire car engine, or the highly complex 3D model of an entire shopping center, you may very well run out of RAM if you only have 64GB. In architectural visualization, you may be loading a building model that has dozens of rooms or hundreds of windows and other details. 128GB is not unusual to work on such monster scenes, and it has never been available in mobile form until today. So there are real world uses for that much RAM.
Precisely this. In fact, in my segment we'd actually buy 8, 10 or 12 Core laptops or even more if we could actually get them. The battery is indeed used mostly to move the laptop about without having to switch it off. Kind of like an Uninterruptable Power Supply for those 20 - 30 minutes where you might not have power coming out of a wall socket, or where you are moving location.
On a 17 inch laptop, the difference between 1080HD and 4K is immediately visible. Much smaller and finer details in true 4K videos and games, icons and text with no aliasing whatsoever, and even 1080HD video renders slightly better and sharper on a 4K UHD screen. So the difference is there if you have sharp eyesight. On 15 inch you're pushing things a bit, but even there, 4K video should look sharper overall than at 1080HD.
People doing CAD, 3D/CGI, Scientific Computing, GPGPU/HighPerformanceComputing use monster workstations every day - Dual Xeon 8, 12 or 16 Core, multiple Nvdia Titan GPUs, 64 to 256GB RAM and so on. That's what you need for today's 3D DCC and CAD design workflows. Anything lower, and everything slows down to a crawl and you don't make your deadlines. These new laptops don't even satisfy what is really needed - at least 8 to 12 CPU cores and room for 2+ powerful GPUs - but will be good enough to get work done on the go. That's the segment they are aimed at - the one that cannot get anything much done on quadcore core i7 CPUs and mobile GPUs.
Valve does not not give a damn about its users, never has, and will definitely NOT force ANY developer to provide a Windows 7 version of any older game. Valve will just shrug their shoulders when people who love older games scream that they don't work anymore. These are the people who brought you boxed games in stores that contain only 1 DVD in the box, remember? Steam killed everybody's ability to buy a full, boxed game with complete install discs. Deliberately. For extra profit.
Microsoft's CEO is currently driving a big push towards an absolutely terrifying "YOU OWN NOTHING" model of cloud computing. Everything - games, media, apps, office and productivity software is supposed to run in the Cloud only, and nothing will install or run locally anymore. Valve's role in all this was to create a completely unnecessary Cloud DRM service - Steam - that nobody asked for or needed, and essentially RAM IT DOWN YOUNG PEOPLE'S THROATS. Young gamers - maybe 500 to 700 million of them now - were supposed to get used to a forced SAAS model of using software while they are young, where there is always a Steam/UPlay/Origin client or similar and no games run at all if you don't have that digital umbilical chord reaching into a cloud DRM service. The reason they did this to gamers is to get them used to the idea that ALL COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE needs to be tied into a Steam like cloud service. Basically, Microsoft is SHITTING all over computing as we from the 1980s/1990s knew it, and Valve either works with them to make it happen, or is actually secretly a Microsoft Company of sorts. What these guys want is a cloud computing model where the paying consumer has ZERO CONTROL over anything anymore - the cloud service allows you to do something, or it doesn't. They are all in on it judging by all the recent cloud news - MS, Nvidia, Valve, Ubisoft and many others. Given how used the Young Ones are now to Steam, Origin and so forth, that cloud strategy will actually happen successfully, until someone with really good lawyers goes to court and shoots the whole thing down. The whole thing can only be described as diabolical if you love computing as it has always been.
How would one take naked airbaths like Benjamin Franklin AND squish ones toes like Nicola Tesla, all in the noble pursuit of becoming a genius, when one is outside where fellow citizens can see what one is doing AND vital equipment that has no business being paraded around outdoors? So the case FOR staying indoor at all times, always, and never going outside ever is rock-solid. It is the only surefire way to become a true genius. I believe the Japanese call staying indoors constantly "Cocooning". THAT is why the Japanese are so smart! (Takes his PS4 and puts it in the microwave)
YOU are the malicious app in the "Play Store". But more seriously - if you are smart enough to create an Android App, why bother with hacking/phishing/scamming at all? Build something useful and sell it as every other decent programmer would. Make money honorably. A lot of the malware, malicious apps, hacking tools and similar originates in Eastern Europe and Russia these days. And its all built by decently smart people who can actually program a computer. So the question one more time: If you are smart enough to scam, aren't you smart enough to create something legit and make your money that way? Without ruining somebody else's life or breaking all sorts of laws in the process? But it seems that the computing culture in EE/RU is all about doing what should not be done. The internet is one great big see of credit cards, bank accounts, social security numbers, gullible consumers to these people. The sad thing is that they are ruining the region's future in legit software as well. If some smart people in Russia someday made a great OS that can compete with Windows or Linux, would anybody in their right mind actually use it? Would you install a Russian OS on even a single computer in your company? THAT is what these people are doing to their future. Even if a decade from now the culture changes and they start building legit stuff, nobody is going to use it. Because it came from Eastern Europe and Russia.
Lets say that the total cost of developing my app is 70 currency units - 5 programmers worked on it, I had to pay them and myself a salary for 2 years. And the app then sells for 100 currency units on the Microsoft Store - that is the equilibrium price for this app - giving me 30 currency units max profit per sale. If Microsoft then takes 15 currency units from that "for use of the app store", I am left with 50% or "half" of the profit I would have made per unit sold without use of the store. Depending on how many units I sell at 100 units a pop, that may be hundreds of thousands of Dollars or millions of Dollars Microsoft took from me, or more, for the simple privilege of using their "Store Cloud". Does that make economic sense? Giving up a whopping 50% of the potential profit margin for an app to MS, for a little product page on their App store?
A zero-configuartation-neded multi-platform NES software emulator with resolution upconversion plus say the Top 40 NES ROMs from that era, with a 19.95 option to get 2 original feeling plastic NES gamepads that plug together into 1 USB port, making the whole thing an 80 Dollar outing. That would have been a very cool option for many who want to relive their childhood/youth every now and then. Far better than credit card + online registration + cloud service use + keeping track of monthly payments and so forth. The only good thing about the service they are proposing that I can see is it isn't too expensive. Still, gamers from that era intensely dislike the cloud. Where you could bring in the cloud would be that this emulator has an online store where you can get additional NES ROMs at whatever price using your credit card.
That... is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
If the tech industry was serious about IOT - tens or hundreds of millions of home devices that are internet connected - they should have gotten together, pooled a few Billion dollars of R&D money, and researched ways to make unauthorized access to these IOT products fucking-difficult-to-near-impossible. There are plenty of smart nerds on the market who could actually have pulled this off, given enough funding and other resources. Instead, tens millions of devices with shoddy security were sold in a worldwide rush to make profit, and organized crime, home-dwelling hackers, govt-sponsored cyber armies and others are looking at a fabulous IOT landscape that is full of low hanging fruit - access this device here, hack this device there, grab the private data from that IP camera there, attack a website with this device over here. IOT is a bad failure in this respect. Don't take someone's money and then put something in that person's home that has ***t security. But everybody did it anyway. Tragic.
If you are advertising a product or service of any kind online, and making "promises" as to the "benefits" of throwing your "real world money" at it will have for you, shouldn't there be a solid record - a name, an ID number, a contact email and phone number, a valid business or personal address - of who the hell you are? If it is possible to buy online advertising anonymously - no ID of any kind required, just transfer some money somehow - you just made life super-easy for any kind of scammer selling any kind of scam online, whether political, or financial, or otherwise. So in my view, the verified ID information of SOMEONE who is behind the ad in question should be there, and it should be possible to QUERY that information as well. If I, as a person, am being subjected to hundreds of unwanted ads a day, some legit, some scams, shouldn't I have the right to be able to lookup who placed the ad? You're putting YOUR ad in MY webbrowser after all. Why wouldn't I be able to look up who placed or paid for the ad with a simple click?
The biggest problem with all of these messaging apps - they can all pretty much send the exact same text, images, videos, documents, emojis and so forth - is that often, specific people try to pressure you into communicating with them over a specific service of their choice. For example, for years TONS of people - none of them very computer literate - have been trying to coax me into WhatsApping with them, and each time were terribly surprised when I say "I don't do WhatsApp. I don't trust them." There may be 20 better alternatives. Question is, can you talk to the people you need to talk to over them? People who use WhatsApp for example, in my experience, don't even bother responding to an invite to join another service like Telegram. They are happy in WhatsApps walled garden, and "don't understand" why you wouldn't just honor their invite to join WhatsApp as well. Of course these are also people who think "its OK to put all your private information into Facebook". The messenger app/service - centralized, decentralized - doesn't matter at all as long as it can do what it is supposed to do. Question is, what do you do when you CANNOT persuade other people to talk to you over that service, and they keep going "Why don't you just install WhatsApp, man? Everbody is on there... Why don't you join as well?".
The WhatsApp developers kept going on and on about how they hate datamining, storing user data, selling user data to advertisers and so on. "We'll never be like the services that just track their users for gathering personal data, targeting advertising" bla bla bla bla bla. Lots of people bought into that. Then Facebook offered the devs Billions, and they sold out immediately. WhatsApp is part of Zuckerborg's personal data stealing empire now. Part of 1984-book.This of course sent millions of people over to rival service Telegram. And guess what - Telegram is just as good as WhatsApp for casual communication, without being owned by Facebook. If anybody is in trouble, its WhatsApp, not Telegram. Its WhatsApp that has become completely untrustworthy as a personal communication tool, or even worse, a business communication tool, not Telegram - or at least not yet. Maybe Telegram will get bought out as well. Oh well, how hard is it to code a rival to Telegram - another alternative will just spring up, and people will move again.
Imagine some kind of quasi-intelligent software technology that lets you manage all the scattered pieces of your digital life in one slick UI. Your photos/videos. Your emails. Your office documents and source code files. Your daily task list. Your games and apps and movies and music. Phonecalls you should make. People you should meet up with. Places you want to visit or dine at. Websites and blogs and social media accounts you should check for news or information or research on. Things you have to pay for. Things you have to file or send off to somewhere. Things you have to physically do. Things you are waiting to be delivered to you. Pretty much anything you have to do or want to do in any given week of your work and leisure time. But not a stupid "cloud service" where all this sits on somebody else's datacenter servers half a world away where it is datamined to death, or is accessed through some stupid smartspeaker device that is also tethered into the internet, peeking into your home and work and general life all the time. A fluid, intelligently designed visual user interface that sits firmly on your computing devices/home server of choice, does not constantly send collected info about you to some faceless corporation, and can keep track of pretty much anything in your life for you, and even launch 3rd party software for you when you click on a task, or intelligently automate many tasks for you, such as ordering flowers for your wife from a particular internet site on Tuesday, or waiting for a certain stock to hit a certain value level and then buying 500 Dollars worth of that stock. Your server side coding, UI design and data science experience would probably be perfect for creating something like that. A sort of Super-UI through which you can perform and keep track of a hundred different necessary tasks, but one that gives you peace of mind because all data is local - not sent to 3rd parties over the internet. If I had your particular skills, I'd probably build something like that.
The people who finance AAA Console and PC games insist on having the same 6 types of game made over and over again. Same game mechanics. Same storylines. Same types of characters. Same game engines, 3D graphics styles and graphical effects. Same physics engines. Same online modes. Same Steam/Origin/Uplay DRM tether. Same in-game purchases, loot boxes and other crap. They have taken a Stallion that was very beautiful and muscular and could run really fast, and beaten it to death with metal pipes to make profit, pretty much. Its the same crap over and over with minor variations. Its frustrating and boring and expensive at the same time. Mobile gaming on the other hand allows people - some of whom have no experience of the gaming of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s at all - to relive the magic of the 8 Bit / 16 Bit / 32 Bit gaming of that era. The games are fun, colorful, experimental, diverse, challenging and satisfying. I am reminded of a time when one day you'd get something like Midwinter 2, then Mortville Manor, then R-Type or New Zealand story, then Speedball 2 or Ski Or Die, then Powermonger or Flood, then It Came From the Desert, then Alone In The Dark, then SimAnt, then Car and Driver or Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade or Lemmings or Cannon Fodder or or or or.... Both people who were not born yet when those games were made, and older people who were not into computer gaming back then, are getting to relive something very much like that Golden Age of Gaming where small teams made greatly satisftying games with little to no corporate interference. PC and Console is in pathetic shape right now by comparison. No innovation. No experimentation. No freedom to try new things. No "customer is King" attitude. No regard for what gamers actually want. Very high expense though - both the games and the hardware. PC and Console is going to drop to about 24% of the market in the next 5 years in my estimationg. Many older gamers I know have stopped upgrading their PCs and only touch their Consoles occasionally. They do game on smartphones and tablets increasingly though. The AAA game developers have pretty much committed Harakiri, while thousands of smaller mobile developers are thriving.
Slashdot Mirror
I meant something slightly different. I meant that as global temperatures rise, we may see really strange and extreme new behavior in the weather that has never been seen or predicted before. Lets say that City X can cope fine with Y amount of rainfall per hour. Lets say that City X has not experienced more rainfall than Y in the last 200 years also. Lets also say that given City X's geographic location, experts predict that the WORST possible rainfall City X may experience is no more than 1.5 x Y per hour. What happens when City X actually gets hammered with 6 x Y rainfall per hour for 5 hours straight one fateful day? That may seem unlikely TODAY - the models may tell you its not going to happen - but may not be quite as unlikely 15 years from now. Weather is a complex system. Once that system starts to go off-balance, nobody really knows how it will start to behave.
Keep the compiler, keep all the powerful capabilities of C++, and add an alternative syntax - a friendlier one - that people who struggle with C++ can more easily learn and more easily manage. Back in the days of Flash, Actionscript first had one syntax, and then got a 2nd alternative syntax. You could use either one. The same can be done with C++. Create a new syntax for use in the 2020s and beyond. Don't destroy everything that makes C++ great in the process. There is your "new" language - C+++.
There are lots of studies estimating just how bad climate change may get if global temperatures go up by X degrees, or Y degrees, or Z degrees by the year 2050, or 2100 or beyond. One problem with these predictive studies, however, is that nobody actually KNOWS with any certainty how climate will behave once you cross a certain temperature treshold that may exist and that we may not be aware of at all. Some experts say "As long as we can keep warming below 2 degrees C by the year 2100, the worst effects should be mitigated". Except that a climate system this huge and this complex and potentially this poorly understood cannot be accurately simulated on any existing supercomputer we have anywhere in the world today. We may find that in just a few years - maybe 2025, maybe 2030, maybe 2035 - we cross an "invisible temperature line" after which seriously catastrophic weather events start to occur all over the world with a severity and ferocity that nobody thought was possible, and that nobody can do anything whatsoever to mitigate, unless someone invents an actually working "weather control" technology in the next 10 years or so. Meteorologists can usually predict large scale weather events/problems a few days ahead of time today. But if the behavior of the entire system shifts and destabilizes in idiosyncratic ways, you may find that really scary weather events materialize in places where they have never happened before, and without anyone being able to foresee where and when the event will occur. Imagine a world where on a perfectly normal day, a Superstorm suddenly builds, and you have maybe 30 minutes of warning time before it hits where you are.
I don't know who Microsoft think they are. First the murky telemetry in Windows 10 that cannot be switched off. Then Microsoft Office becomes a cloud only tool. Next, Microsoft's CEO is pushing all sorts of "YOU OWN NOTHING" cloud crap - your games, apps, software all go cloud-only. And now I go to a bricks-and-mortar store and Microshaft of all companies tracks what I'm putting in my shopping cart? F you, Microsoft. Privacy invaders. Data thieves. Conscience free arm-twisters. Cleptomaniacs. I am not shopping at ANY store that has the Microsoft system in it.
Lots of applications require large datasets to be loaded - for example, architectural CAD, where you may have a 3D model of a shopping center with 92 different shops and 400 different windows in it. Until now, those datasets could only be opened on expensive desktop CAD workstations that weigh 40 lbs and that you cannot easily take to a construction site or to a client meeting. So these 128GB laptops are aimed at that - going to a construction site or a client's office and opening and manipulating very large CAD or scientific data sets. 6 CPU cores is a bit low for that, but its mostly the GPU that gets used, and its a lot better than having to move a large desktop workstation to a presentation or construction site.
I'd love a Dual AMD EPYC 2 X 32 Core laptop. =)
The biggest CAD/3D models these days are for 3D buildings - like a new factory, airport or shopping center. Those CAD files can very easily become bigger than 64GB and not fit in RAM anymore. If you need to go to the construction site with a 98GB CAD model that can be inspected, how do you do that without a laptop that has 128GB RAM? Do you take a 35,000 USD dual Xeon CAD workstation with 3 GPUs that weighs 40 to 50 lbs and carry it to the construction site in a van? That's what these new laptops are for. Opening huge 3D CAD files away from the office desk - and very likely at a construction site.
CAD and 3D models are getting really huge these days. Particularly in architectural visualization. So if you need to load the 3D CAD model of an entire car engine, or the highly complex 3D model of an entire shopping center, you may very well run out of RAM if you only have 64GB. In architectural visualization, you may be loading a building model that has dozens of rooms or hundreds of windows and other details. 128GB is not unusual to work on such monster scenes, and it has never been available in mobile form until today. So there are real world uses for that much RAM.
Precisely this. In fact, in my segment we'd actually buy 8, 10 or 12 Core laptops or even more if we could actually get them. The battery is indeed used mostly to move the laptop about without having to switch it off. Kind of like an Uninterruptable Power Supply for those 20 - 30 minutes where you might not have power coming out of a wall socket, or where you are moving location.
On a 17 inch laptop, the difference between 1080HD and 4K is immediately visible. Much smaller and finer details in true 4K videos and games, icons and text with no aliasing whatsoever, and even 1080HD video renders slightly better and sharper on a 4K UHD screen. So the difference is there if you have sharp eyesight. On 15 inch you're pushing things a bit, but even there, 4K video should look sharper overall than at 1080HD.
People doing CAD, 3D/CGI, Scientific Computing, GPGPU/HighPerformanceComputing use monster workstations every day - Dual Xeon 8, 12 or 16 Core, multiple Nvdia Titan GPUs, 64 to 256GB RAM and so on. That's what you need for today's 3D DCC and CAD design workflows. Anything lower, and everything slows down to a crawl and you don't make your deadlines. These new laptops don't even satisfy what is really needed - at least 8 to 12 CPU cores and room for 2+ powerful GPUs - but will be good enough to get work done on the go. That's the segment they are aimed at - the one that cannot get anything much done on quadcore core i7 CPUs and mobile GPUs.
Valve does not not give a damn about its users, never has, and will definitely NOT force ANY developer to provide a Windows 7 version of any older game. Valve will just shrug their shoulders when people who love older games scream that they don't work anymore. These are the people who brought you boxed games in stores that contain only 1 DVD in the box, remember? Steam killed everybody's ability to buy a full, boxed game with complete install discs. Deliberately. For extra profit.
Microsoft's CEO is currently driving a big push towards an absolutely terrifying "YOU OWN NOTHING" model of cloud computing. Everything - games, media, apps, office and productivity software is supposed to run in the Cloud only, and nothing will install or run locally anymore. Valve's role in all this was to create a completely unnecessary Cloud DRM service - Steam - that nobody asked for or needed, and essentially RAM IT DOWN YOUNG PEOPLE'S THROATS. Young gamers - maybe 500 to 700 million of them now - were supposed to get used to a forced SAAS model of using software while they are young, where there is always a Steam/UPlay/Origin client or similar and no games run at all if you don't have that digital umbilical chord reaching into a cloud DRM service. The reason they did this to gamers is to get them used to the idea that ALL COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE needs to be tied into a Steam like cloud service. Basically, Microsoft is SHITTING all over computing as we from the 1980s/1990s knew it, and Valve either works with them to make it happen, or is actually secretly a Microsoft Company of sorts. What these guys want is a cloud computing model where the paying consumer has ZERO CONTROL over anything anymore - the cloud service allows you to do something, or it doesn't. They are all in on it judging by all the recent cloud news - MS, Nvidia, Valve, Ubisoft and many others. Given how used the Young Ones are now to Steam, Origin and so forth, that cloud strategy will actually happen successfully, until someone with really good lawyers goes to court and shoots the whole thing down. The whole thing can only be described as diabolical if you love computing as it has always been.
How would one take naked airbaths like Benjamin Franklin AND squish ones toes like Nicola Tesla, all in the noble pursuit of becoming a genius, when one is outside where fellow citizens can see what one is doing AND vital equipment that has no business being paraded around outdoors? So the case FOR staying indoor at all times, always, and never going outside ever is rock-solid. It is the only surefire way to become a true genius. I believe the Japanese call staying indoors constantly "Cocooning". THAT is why the Japanese are so smart! (Takes his PS4 and puts it in the microwave)
YOU are the malicious app in the "Play Store". But more seriously - if you are smart enough to create an Android App, why bother with hacking/phishing/scamming at all? Build something useful and sell it as every other decent programmer would. Make money honorably. A lot of the malware, malicious apps, hacking tools and similar originates in Eastern Europe and Russia these days. And its all built by decently smart people who can actually program a computer. So the question one more time: If you are smart enough to scam, aren't you smart enough to create something legit and make your money that way? Without ruining somebody else's life or breaking all sorts of laws in the process? But it seems that the computing culture in EE/RU is all about doing what should not be done. The internet is one great big see of credit cards, bank accounts, social security numbers, gullible consumers to these people. The sad thing is that they are ruining the region's future in legit software as well. If some smart people in Russia someday made a great OS that can compete with Windows or Linux, would anybody in their right mind actually use it? Would you install a Russian OS on even a single computer in your company? THAT is what these people are doing to their future. Even if a decade from now the culture changes and they start building legit stuff, nobody is going to use it. Because it came from Eastern Europe and Russia.
Lets say that the total cost of developing my app is 70 currency units - 5 programmers worked on it, I had to pay them and myself a salary for 2 years. And the app then sells for 100 currency units on the Microsoft Store - that is the equilibrium price for this app - giving me 30 currency units max profit per sale. If Microsoft then takes 15 currency units from that "for use of the app store", I am left with 50% or "half" of the profit I would have made per unit sold without use of the store. Depending on how many units I sell at 100 units a pop, that may be hundreds of thousands of Dollars or millions of Dollars Microsoft took from me, or more, for the simple privilege of using their "Store Cloud". Does that make economic sense? Giving up a whopping 50% of the potential profit margin for an app to MS, for a little product page on their App store?
A zero-configuartation-neded multi-platform NES software emulator with resolution upconversion plus say the Top 40 NES ROMs from that era, with a 19.95 option to get 2 original feeling plastic NES gamepads that plug together into 1 USB port, making the whole thing an 80 Dollar outing. That would have been a very cool option for many who want to relive their childhood/youth every now and then. Far better than credit card + online registration + cloud service use + keeping track of monthly payments and so forth. The only good thing about the service they are proposing that I can see is it isn't too expensive. Still, gamers from that era intensely dislike the cloud. Where you could bring in the cloud would be that this emulator has an online store where you can get additional NES ROMs at whatever price using your credit card.
That... is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep, No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd.
If the tech industry was serious about IOT - tens or hundreds of millions of home devices that are internet connected - they should have gotten together, pooled a few Billion dollars of R&D money, and researched ways to make unauthorized access to these IOT products fucking-difficult-to-near-impossible. There are plenty of smart nerds on the market who could actually have pulled this off, given enough funding and other resources. Instead, tens millions of devices with shoddy security were sold in a worldwide rush to make profit, and organized crime, home-dwelling hackers, govt-sponsored cyber armies and others are looking at a fabulous IOT landscape that is full of low hanging fruit - access this device here, hack this device there, grab the private data from that IP camera there, attack a website with this device over here. IOT is a bad failure in this respect. Don't take someone's money and then put something in that person's home that has ***t security. But everybody did it anyway. Tragic.
If you are advertising a product or service of any kind online, and making "promises" as to the "benefits" of throwing your "real world money" at it will have for you, shouldn't there be a solid record - a name, an ID number, a contact email and phone number, a valid business or personal address - of who the hell you are? If it is possible to buy online advertising anonymously - no ID of any kind required, just transfer some money somehow - you just made life super-easy for any kind of scammer selling any kind of scam online, whether political, or financial, or otherwise. So in my view, the verified ID information of SOMEONE who is behind the ad in question should be there, and it should be possible to QUERY that information as well. If I, as a person, am being subjected to hundreds of unwanted ads a day, some legit, some scams, shouldn't I have the right to be able to lookup who placed the ad? You're putting YOUR ad in MY webbrowser after all. Why wouldn't I be able to look up who placed or paid for the ad with a simple click?
The biggest problem with all of these messaging apps - they can all pretty much send the exact same text, images, videos, documents, emojis and so forth - is that often, specific people try to pressure you into communicating with them over a specific service of their choice. For example, for years TONS of people - none of them very computer literate - have been trying to coax me into WhatsApping with them, and each time were terribly surprised when I say "I don't do WhatsApp. I don't trust them." There may be 20 better alternatives. Question is, can you talk to the people you need to talk to over them? People who use WhatsApp for example, in my experience, don't even bother responding to an invite to join another service like Telegram. They are happy in WhatsApps walled garden, and "don't understand" why you wouldn't just honor their invite to join WhatsApp as well. Of course these are also people who think "its OK to put all your private information into Facebook". The messenger app/service - centralized, decentralized - doesn't matter at all as long as it can do what it is supposed to do. Question is, what do you do when you CANNOT persuade other people to talk to you over that service, and they keep going "Why don't you just install WhatsApp, man? Everbody is on there... Why don't you join as well?".
The WhatsApp developers kept going on and on about how they hate datamining, storing user data, selling user data to advertisers and so on. "We'll never be like the services that just track their users for gathering personal data, targeting advertising" bla bla bla bla bla. Lots of people bought into that. Then Facebook offered the devs Billions, and they sold out immediately. WhatsApp is part of Zuckerborg's personal data stealing empire now. Part of 1984-book.This of course sent millions of people over to rival service Telegram. And guess what - Telegram is just as good as WhatsApp for casual communication, without being owned by Facebook. If anybody is in trouble, its WhatsApp, not Telegram. Its WhatsApp that has become completely untrustworthy as a personal communication tool, or even worse, a business communication tool, not Telegram - or at least not yet. Maybe Telegram will get bought out as well. Oh well, how hard is it to code a rival to Telegram - another alternative will just spring up, and people will move again.
Good description of the game industry at present?
Imagine some kind of quasi-intelligent software technology that lets you manage all the scattered pieces of your digital life in one slick UI. Your photos/videos. Your emails. Your office documents and source code files. Your daily task list. Your games and apps and movies and music. Phonecalls you should make. People you should meet up with. Places you want to visit or dine at. Websites and blogs and social media accounts you should check for news or information or research on. Things you have to pay for. Things you have to file or send off to somewhere. Things you have to physically do. Things you are waiting to be delivered to you. Pretty much anything you have to do or want to do in any given week of your work and leisure time. But not a stupid "cloud service" where all this sits on somebody else's datacenter servers half a world away where it is datamined to death, or is accessed through some stupid smartspeaker device that is also tethered into the internet, peeking into your home and work and general life all the time. A fluid, intelligently designed visual user interface that sits firmly on your computing devices/home server of choice, does not constantly send collected info about you to some faceless corporation, and can keep track of pretty much anything in your life for you, and even launch 3rd party software for you when you click on a task, or intelligently automate many tasks for you, such as ordering flowers for your wife from a particular internet site on Tuesday, or waiting for a certain stock to hit a certain value level and then buying 500 Dollars worth of that stock. Your server side coding, UI design and data science experience would probably be perfect for creating something like that. A sort of Super-UI through which you can perform and keep track of a hundred different necessary tasks, but one that gives you peace of mind because all data is local - not sent to 3rd parties over the internet. If I had your particular skills, I'd probably build something like that.
The people who finance AAA Console and PC games insist on having the same 6 types of game made over and over again. Same game mechanics. Same storylines. Same types of characters. Same game engines, 3D graphics styles and graphical effects. Same physics engines. Same online modes. Same Steam/Origin/Uplay DRM tether. Same in-game purchases, loot boxes and other crap. They have taken a Stallion that was very beautiful and muscular and could run really fast, and beaten it to death with metal pipes to make profit, pretty much. Its the same crap over and over with minor variations. Its frustrating and boring and expensive at the same time. Mobile gaming on the other hand allows people - some of whom have no experience of the gaming of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s at all - to relive the magic of the 8 Bit / 16 Bit / 32 Bit gaming of that era. The games are fun, colorful, experimental, diverse, challenging and satisfying. I am reminded of a time when one day you'd get something like Midwinter 2, then Mortville Manor, then R-Type or New Zealand story, then Speedball 2 or Ski Or Die, then Powermonger or Flood, then It Came From the Desert, then Alone In The Dark, then SimAnt, then Car and Driver or Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade or Lemmings or Cannon Fodder or or or or.... Both people who were not born yet when those games were made, and older people who were not into computer gaming back then, are getting to relive something very much like that Golden Age of Gaming where small teams made greatly satisftying games with little to no corporate interference. PC and Console is in pathetic shape right now by comparison. No innovation. No experimentation. No freedom to try new things. No "customer is King" attitude. No regard for what gamers actually want. Very high expense though - both the games and the hardware. PC and Console is going to drop to about 24% of the market in the next 5 years in my estimationg. Many older gamers I know have stopped upgrading their PCs and only touch their Consoles occasionally. They do game on smartphones and tablets increasingly though. The AAA game developers have pretty much committed Harakiri, while thousands of smaller mobile developers are thriving.