Nonsense. First, Blizzard already has the real name associated with an account. If they want, they can already do all that data-mining you're so concerned about. The publishing of the RealID names on the forum are completely unrelated to this.
Second, the forums only show your name. Not what characters you belong to. Not even what server you play on (disclaimer: you do have the option to associate with a character, but its not on by default).
So how is any of this not just tinfoil hat ravings?
I agree, my experience has been the opposite. In practice I've found that the less anonymity there is, the more cordial the discussion, not the reverse.
If you're keeping in touch with them in-game, this has zero impact on you. If you're using the official forums to do so, well, you're doing it with an audience anyways, but yeah, you might want to avoid that.
By default it does not associate any post with a particular in-game character. So while they'd know you were female on the forums, there'd be no way to know that any given character belonged to you unless you choose to do so.
That'd be a nice perk, but I suspect this will also be good for customers. It'd be nice to be able to post on the forums without someone telling me to 'go die in a fire'. Hopefully, posting under their real name will discourage that kind of crap. If it helps reduce the asshat incidence level at all, it would be fantastic.
They already have the name in this case. They're only changing it so that when you post, that name is displayed instead of a pseudonym. I can't see how this move could possibly be perceived as benefiting Blizzard sales or marketing in any way. If it did, they'd already be able to do it.
Actually, you have to enter your age to post on the forums, so if you're a minor you can only do so if you lie about your age. At that point, it's their own fault.
Wheres the innovation?And really? an App store? For WIndows?
Well, as others have pointed out, they've actually had this since XP I believe. I think one of the Service Packs added the Catalog link. If not, Vista certainly had one, they just weren't aggressive on pushing it.
Truth is, their big headline is only news because of how Apple abuses their phone app store. Otherwise the headline would be "Windows 8 Leak Reveals Nothing of Note".
Rapid Startup times? Every OS I have boots in less than 30 seconds.. Last time I booted windows it took 5 mins.
I know you're exaggerating for effect, but I don't find the boot time of Windows 7 to be any worse or better than anything else. I'm not measuring with a stopwatch though, so maybe its a few seconds slower or faster, I have no idea. I just know I fire up OSX or Linux and don't feel like I get to a ready-to-go desktop much faster (if at all).
If Apple really was interested in stability, it'd a lot easier to swallow, but every time they update their licensing they put the lie to that sentiment.
Some people may not like it but a lot of the public seems not to mind at all, so far - because Apple has been careful about making user restrictions as invisible as possible.
Which is part of the danger, since its not just apps that Apple censors (at random), but apparently what gets sold in things like the book store (less random, which is worse). When the public is unaware that they're being censored, that makes the censorship all the more potent. I'm pretty anyone who'd want a book banned would salivate at the opportunity to ban a book to the point that most people don't know it even exists.
Insane cab drivers kill people. He just chose to use guns. As witnessed by recent mass killings in China, he could have easily used a knife. Sadly people in England are (A) disarmed and (B) pacified to the point where they expect the government to save them, so even a knife wielding crazy would have racked up a body count.
Anti gun groups beat the same drum over and over and over and over again. No logic, just fear, fear, and more fear.
Quoted for irony. And I'd take facing someone with a knife over a gun any day.
That's kind of an ironic statement frankly. Often I've noticed that mere suggestion that the Constitution has any kind of flaw or that the founders were not somehow perfect to cause an incredible number of people to take umbrage. Which very close to the effect you get when you suggest the Bible isn't literal or might need some historical context.
None of that is to say the Constitution isn't a powerful document or that its framers weren't some smart guys, but good lord, no one and nothing is perfect. As others have pointed out, Amendments are proof of that. They should even be proof that Amendments themselves aren't necessarily above reproach;)
That's pretty narrow-minded. Yes, this was a flop, but are you really saying that anything that Bing comes up with is automatically a terrible idea to add to Google just because of where it originated? If Bing added a killer feature, Google should ignore it because it would 'make number 1 more like number 2'?
Rupert has voluntarily removed himself & his 'papers' from the search pool for news aggregators? Wow, that's the first thing he's ever done that I didn't think was a complete dick move.
Exactly--Illustrator uses the Carbon APIs, which are not native OS X APIs, they're a kludge that Apple created so developers such as Adobe and Microsoft wouldn't have to rewrite their software using Cocoa.
I'm not sure I agree that Carbon isn't a native API. Sure, it was a wrapper to let people port to OSX, but my memory (admittedly dim) from when OSX launched is that the Cocoa Apple was pushing was for Java (though the Objective C was available)? At any rate, I wouldn't argue that it's not the 'old' API now, but certainly when OSX launched I'd have considered it as 'native' as anything else. Just because it worked on OS9 as well doesn't mean it did call native stuff ultimately. Still, I suppose at worst that's semantics.
CS5, yes--roughly ten years after the announcement of OS X and it's advanced Cocoa API set. While it's certainly understandable that Adobe wouldn't want jump right into a rewrite of applications as complex as AI or Photoshop, they could have at least worked on it incrementally over a series of releases.
Heh. No, that's fair too. Its hard to say they didn't have warnings that Carbon was -- ultimately -- doomed. But Apple did say they were going to port Carbon to 64-bit. They just changed their mind. Ultimately, that's their call to make, but I remember at the time I was pretty surprised. I don't think anyone but Adobe was significantly put out by that decision, which was the first real sign to me that maybe Adobe & Apple weren't as friendly as I'd previously thought (or at least, as friendly as they'd been).
They did exactly that. During Apple's low ebb in the late Nineties and once again shortly after the Second Coming of Steve and the announcement of OS X Adobe essentially--and publicly--wrote off the Mac platform and began concentrating on Windows development, even threatening to drop Mac development entirely if Apple didn't offer an alternative to rewriting their apps to Cocoa. That's where Carbon came from. It wasn't a part of the original plan for OS X APIs.
Carbon started in OS8.1 and was intended to provide a migration path to OS9 and 'future systems'. I'm pretty sure it was always intended to be the bridge between OS9 and OSX. I'm not sure you can blame Adobe for its inclusion in OSX, but I could be wrong:) I do remember Adobe & Apple fighting over migration to OSX -- though over what I can't recall. Adobe was refusing to port to Carbon until Apple gave them something, but that was after OSX shipped so it couldn't have been Carbon that Apple anted up in the end. I also remember it was early enough in OSX's life that writing for Cocoa would have been financially irresponsible -- there were a lot more OS9s than OSXs out there at that point.
No argument there, either. Adobe has been on Jobs' shit list for a long time now and that no doubt has something to do with the 64-bit Carbon decision. I think that Jobs lost patience with Adobe's foot-dragging when it came to switching over to Cocoa and when it became apparent that 64-bit Carbon was going to take too much time and money to implement, he decided to make it Adobe's problem rather than Apple's. From his viewpoint, it makes sense. He's answerable to Apple's BoD and stockholders, not Adobe. Like it or not, it was a logical business decision, although his grudge against Adobe probably made it easier for him.
I agree that his job isn't to make Adobe happy, well, at least in as much as it doesn't hurt the company. That's part of what I don't get. Isn't Adobe really the only big vendor out there making software for Apple (besides Apple itself)? I mean, sure there are a few more, but my experience in the workplace has been that if there's an Apple on someone's desk it's usually so they can run Adobe software; otherwise, they get a PC (obviously this doesn't apply to home users). Not that Apple should let Adobe push them around, but picking a fig
Before I begin, let me just preface this by saying: I don't like Flash. So don't think I'm some Adobe apologist here. I can't stand Flash, and I've got my fingers crossed that Flash ultimately gets replaced by more open standards.
That said, I'm not sure where you get that they don't write to native OSX APIs, that's definitely not true. I've been the main developer on one of the most advanced Illustrator plugins on the market, and AI definitely uses Carbon -- and they've spent most of the CS5 release cycle porting everything to Cocoa (because what the world really needed was a side-wise move from C++ to Objective C)! They did release an app or two testing the waters with Qt, but PS & AI are definitely 'native apps' in every sense of the word. Maybe some of their others aren't (I can't speak to Flex or Premiere or any others) but I'm not sure where you got that idea.
I won't pretend that I have any great insider knowledge of Adobe's secret plans or strategies, but I do have nearly a decade of being part of their pre-releases and under numerous NDAs. I also know a dozen or so employees, including a few who do a substantial amount of the work of writing some of their most popular products. I can't tell you with 100% certainty, but my impressions second-hand have been very strongly that -- at least in the last few years -- Apple has been screwing Adobe nearly constantly. I don't know if Adobe erred somewhere in the past or shifted in some subtle way that suggested they were more interested in Windows or what. Whether they did at this point seems kind of irrelevant. Jobs is brilliant -- no question about that -- but he's also an incredible headcase. I have a sense that once you get on his bad side -- deserved or not -- its damned near impossible to get off it. And to give him credit, he seems to be consistent about it, even if they're long time supporters (remember ATI?).
Bottom line though is that if you want proof, look no farther than the 64-bit Carbon debacle. Adobe had a lot riding on that and they had to suck it up when Apple came out and said "Oh yeah, we're not porting Carbon to 64-bit like we said we would." That's the main reason Adobe had to port everything to Cocoa, just to get the 64-bit PS running (and, perhaps, lay the groundwork for a 64-bit AI). I was pretty amazed when Adobe very tactfully avoided calling Apple out for screwing them (and believe me, they were super pissed off -- rightfully so IMHO). I'm sure there was corporate politics involved, but it sure felt like Adobe was being a better friend to Apple than Apple was to them.
Oh, and my experience is the opposite of what you guys are saying about 'written for PC'. I've had to deal with AI's window structure on Windows and let me tell you: it is anything but 'designed for Windows'. Its byzantine and insane, and obviously structured to emulate the Mac's window structure. It causes me more headaches than you could count. Granted, I only have to deal with it because our plugin requires some things that go beyond the scope of a normal plugin, but still, it's a pain. It goes well, well, well beyond just structuring things so they can have floating panels and what not. Just fire up Spy++ sometime and take a look at the windows Adobe dumps into the space when an application launches -- its crazy!
Sometimes you get the reverse as well. A buddy of mine was one of the people behind Qualcomm's Brew and they put him in charge of co-op hiring. He was very entertained when -- 3 months after Brew was released -- he got a resumé submitted to him that indicated the student had "2 years experience with Brew". I remember he was very excited to meet that fellow, and was looking forward to quizzing him on his 'deep Brew experience'.
And, of course, sometimes there are other mistakes in the requirements. I got a co-op job once because I was only person interviewed who asked about one of the job requirements. "I'm quite familiar with the WIN32 API," I said, "But what is the WIN31 API? Do you mean Windows 3.1?" (Back then, this was actually relevant).
No significant add-on every does well for a console for a very simple reason: if its not built-in to the core system, game designers are very leery of designing around it.
You just have to look at the history of the market. The best example is controllers. There were 4+ controller add-ons for the NES, SNES, Sega Master System, Genesis -- all relegated to the fringes of profitability. Why spend development time making a 4-player mode when there probably wasn't going to be more than 10% of the market who could even had the capability? And what fraction of that will buy your game? It was just plain 'ol 'bad return on investment'.
Flash forward to the N64; 4 controllers! What happens? Practically every game has 4-player modes, because you *know* the system has the capability. Sony & Microsoft saw it was a good idea and followed suit. Ironic, given what we're talking about -- more history repeating itself;)
That isn't to say its not worth making add-ons like this. The fact that they keep making them suggests to me that enough money is being made to make them worthwhile. But I've yet to see an after-market add-on that more than a fraction of games on that system supported.
I assume Sony knows this, so they're probably just putting a toe in the water to see if its worth building this into their next-gen system. They'll probably make some money off this, but there's no way in hell this is going to steal much market share from the Wii -- there simply won't be many decent games. If the Wii has taught as anything, its that shoehorning motion control into a game doesn't really work; to work right the game needs to really be designed with motion control in mind. Unfortunately, I suspect that's what we'll see of most PS3 Move games: it will be an afterthought.
This is probably a stupid question, but marketshare of what? Does the tablet industry even really exist yet? You're right about Apple, but I thought they generally waited until there was something to capture. Neither the iPhone nor iPod created a market, they just took over what was there.
What's actually there to take right now in the tablet space? Or is the tablet market is bigger than I give it credit?
Even if you ignore that, nothing happens in a vacuum. If we're harnessing the kinetic energy of waves to generate electricity, we're stealing wave force. While that may not have obvious repercussions like, say, strip mining, who knows what environmental effects that could have?
Wind power is the same way, but it's hard to say how much (if any) impact this leeching has. But it's naive to assume there's no impact at all.
Despite accusations that Nintendo had nothing to offer the hardcore gamer in terms of announcements at the show... What exactly does this mean? I consider myself a pretty 'hardcore' gamer, but I love Mario Kart. Does loving somehow Mario Kart exclude from this '1337' label? I always assumed a 'hardecore gamer' meant someone who played a lot of games & spent a lot of their time playing games. I didn't realize it also carried some sort of implication about what kinds of games they play. I mean, if some kid plays Pokemon ever waking minute of his life, I'd call that pretty hardcore.
I know it's trendy to clap our hands with glee that Vista is apparently not being taking up with the gusto Microsoft hoped, but what the hell does this story have to do with that?
In the latest sign that Microsoft expects to support its Windows XP operating system for the foreseeable future...
You know how Microsoft made their case for OOXML weaker by stacking the deck at every opportunity? It works that way for other things too. If something's wrong, don't keep tossing in arguments that are stupid, that undermines your case. Making comments like that make you seem peevish, and your opinion or argument suffers by association.
Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.
So, because there are so few Firefox users, it's okay to ban the browser? Wouldn't the argument for why one might ignore any 'problem' associated with Firefox users blocking ads be the same? Namely that there aren't enough users to worry about?
Which is it? Are there too few Firefox users to worry about blocking, or are there enough that it's impacting the bottom line? You can't have it both ways.
Yeah, I went & read the Wiki on you guys & Freespace and I'm pretty sure that's what I'm mixing up. That must have been around the same time someone declared the Freespace franchise dead (at the time? hopefully?:) and I got the two combined in my head or something.
I guess my recollections were in error -- though I have this vivid memory of going to some page that talked about bankruptcy or something. Maybe your parent company sold you or something? Or I'm just on crack, also possible.
I'm glad to hear you're still out there though! That gives me hope that someday Freespace 3 might get made, though I suspect it'll require a few space sims to do well enough to warrant a business case:P
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. First, Blizzard already has the real name associated with an account. If they want, they can already do all that data-mining you're so concerned about. The publishing of the RealID names on the forum are completely unrelated to this.
Second, the forums only show your name. Not what characters you belong to. Not even what server you play on (disclaimer: you do have the option to associate with a character, but its not on by default).
So how is any of this not just tinfoil hat ravings?
I agree, my experience has been the opposite. In practice I've found that the less anonymity there is, the more cordial the discussion, not the reverse.
Cue: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
If you're keeping in touch with them in-game, this has zero impact on you. If you're using the official forums to do so, well, you're doing it with an audience anyways, but yeah, you might want to avoid that.
By default it does not associate any post with a particular in-game character. So while they'd know you were female on the forums, there'd be no way to know that any given character belonged to you unless you choose to do so.
That'd be a nice perk, but I suspect this will also be good for customers. It'd be nice to be able to post on the forums without someone telling me to 'go die in a fire'. Hopefully, posting under their real name will discourage that kind of crap. If it helps reduce the asshat incidence level at all, it would be fantastic.
They already have the name in this case. They're only changing it so that when you post, that name is displayed instead of a pseudonym. I can't see how this move could possibly be perceived as benefiting Blizzard sales or marketing in any way. If it did, they'd already be able to do it.
Actually, you have to enter your age to post on the forums, so if you're a minor you can only do so if you lie about your age. At that point, it's their own fault.
Wheres the innovation?And really? an App store? For WIndows?
Well, as others have pointed out, they've actually had this since XP I believe. I think one of the Service Packs added the Catalog link. If not, Vista certainly had one, they just weren't aggressive on pushing it.
Truth is, their big headline is only news because of how Apple abuses their phone app store. Otherwise the headline would be "Windows 8 Leak Reveals Nothing of Note".
Rapid Startup times? Every OS I have boots in less than 30 seconds.. Last time I booted windows it took 5 mins.
I know you're exaggerating for effect, but I don't find the boot time of Windows 7 to be any worse or better than anything else. I'm not measuring with a stopwatch though, so maybe its a few seconds slower or faster, I have no idea. I just know I fire up OSX or Linux and don't feel like I get to a ready-to-go desktop much faster (if at all).
If Apple really was interested in stability, it'd a lot easier to swallow, but every time they update their licensing they put the lie to that sentiment.
Some people may not like it but a lot of the public seems not to mind at all, so far - because Apple has been careful about making user restrictions as invisible as possible.
Which is part of the danger, since its not just apps that Apple censors (at random), but apparently what gets sold in things like the book store (less random, which is worse). When the public is unaware that they're being censored, that makes the censorship all the more potent. I'm pretty anyone who'd want a book banned would salivate at the opportunity to ban a book to the point that most people don't know it even exists.
Insane cab drivers kill people. He just chose to use guns. As witnessed by recent mass killings in China, he could have easily used a knife. Sadly people in England are (A) disarmed and (B) pacified to the point where they expect the government to save them, so even a knife wielding crazy would have racked up a body count.
Anti gun groups beat the same drum over and over and over and over again. No logic, just fear, fear, and more fear.
Quoted for irony. And I'd take facing someone with a knife over a gun any day.
That's kind of an ironic statement frankly. Often I've noticed that mere suggestion that the Constitution has any kind of flaw or that the founders were not somehow perfect to cause an incredible number of people to take umbrage. Which very close to the effect you get when you suggest the Bible isn't literal or might need some historical context.
None of that is to say the Constitution isn't a powerful document or that its framers weren't some smart guys, but good lord, no one and nothing is perfect. As others have pointed out, Amendments are proof of that. They should even be proof that Amendments themselves aren't necessarily above reproach ;)
That's pretty narrow-minded. Yes, this was a flop, but are you really saying that anything that Bing comes up with is automatically a terrible idea to add to Google just because of where it originated? If Bing added a killer feature, Google should ignore it because it would 'make number 1 more like number 2'?
Rupert has voluntarily removed himself & his 'papers' from the search pool for news aggregators? Wow, that's the first thing he's ever done that I didn't think was a complete dick move.
Thanks Rupert!
TWITTER BEFORE ZOD!
Exactly--Illustrator uses the Carbon APIs, which are not native OS X APIs, they're a kludge that Apple created so developers such as Adobe and Microsoft wouldn't have to rewrite their software using Cocoa.
I'm not sure I agree that Carbon isn't a native API. Sure, it was a wrapper to let people port to OSX, but my memory (admittedly dim) from when OSX launched is that the Cocoa Apple was pushing was for Java (though the Objective C was available)? At any rate, I wouldn't argue that it's not the 'old' API now, but certainly when OSX launched I'd have considered it as 'native' as anything else. Just because it worked on OS9 as well doesn't mean it did call native stuff ultimately. Still, I suppose at worst that's semantics.
CS5, yes--roughly ten years after the announcement of OS X and it's advanced Cocoa API set. While it's certainly understandable that Adobe wouldn't want jump right into a rewrite of applications as complex as AI or Photoshop, they could have at least worked on it incrementally over a series of releases.
Heh. No, that's fair too. Its hard to say they didn't have warnings that Carbon was -- ultimately -- doomed. But Apple did say they were going to port Carbon to 64-bit. They just changed their mind. Ultimately, that's their call to make, but I remember at the time I was pretty surprised. I don't think anyone but Adobe was significantly put out by that decision, which was the first real sign to me that maybe Adobe & Apple weren't as friendly as I'd previously thought (or at least, as friendly as they'd been).
They did exactly that. During Apple's low ebb in the late Nineties and once again shortly after the Second Coming of Steve and the announcement of OS X Adobe essentially--and publicly--wrote off the Mac platform and began concentrating on Windows development, even threatening to drop Mac development entirely if Apple didn't offer an alternative to rewriting their apps to Cocoa. That's where Carbon came from. It wasn't a part of the original plan for OS X APIs.
Carbon started in OS8.1 and was intended to provide a migration path to OS9 and 'future systems'. I'm pretty sure it was always intended to be the bridge between OS9 and OSX. I'm not sure you can blame Adobe for its inclusion in OSX, but I could be wrong :) I do remember Adobe & Apple fighting over migration to OSX -- though over what I can't recall. Adobe was refusing to port to Carbon until Apple gave them something, but that was after OSX shipped so it couldn't have been Carbon that Apple anted up in the end. I also remember it was early enough in OSX's life that writing for Cocoa would have been financially irresponsible -- there were a lot more OS9s than OSXs out there at that point.
No argument there, either. Adobe has been on Jobs' shit list for a long time now and that no doubt has something to do with the 64-bit Carbon decision. I think that Jobs lost patience with Adobe's foot-dragging when it came to switching over to Cocoa and when it became apparent that 64-bit Carbon was going to take too much time and money to implement, he decided to make it Adobe's problem rather than Apple's. From his viewpoint, it makes sense. He's answerable to Apple's BoD and stockholders, not Adobe. Like it or not, it was a logical business decision, although his grudge against Adobe probably made it easier for him.
I agree that his job isn't to make Adobe happy, well, at least in as much as it doesn't hurt the company. That's part of what I don't get. Isn't Adobe really the only big vendor out there making software for Apple (besides Apple itself)? I mean, sure there are a few more, but my experience in the workplace has been that if there's an Apple on someone's desk it's usually so they can run Adobe software; otherwise, they get a PC (obviously this doesn't apply to home users). Not that Apple should let Adobe push them around, but picking a fig
Before I begin, let me just preface this by saying: I don't like Flash. So don't think I'm some Adobe apologist here. I can't stand Flash, and I've got my fingers crossed that Flash ultimately gets replaced by more open standards.
That said, I'm not sure where you get that they don't write to native OSX APIs, that's definitely not true. I've been the main developer on one of the most advanced Illustrator plugins on the market, and AI definitely uses Carbon -- and they've spent most of the CS5 release cycle porting everything to Cocoa (because what the world really needed was a side-wise move from C++ to Objective C)! They did release an app or two testing the waters with Qt, but PS & AI are definitely 'native apps' in every sense of the word. Maybe some of their others aren't (I can't speak to Flex or Premiere or any others) but I'm not sure where you got that idea.
I won't pretend that I have any great insider knowledge of Adobe's secret plans or strategies, but I do have nearly a decade of being part of their pre-releases and under numerous NDAs. I also know a dozen or so employees, including a few who do a substantial amount of the work of writing some of their most popular products. I can't tell you with 100% certainty, but my impressions second-hand have been very strongly that -- at least in the last few years -- Apple has been screwing Adobe nearly constantly. I don't know if Adobe erred somewhere in the past or shifted in some subtle way that suggested they were more interested in Windows or what. Whether they did at this point seems kind of irrelevant. Jobs is brilliant -- no question about that -- but he's also an incredible headcase. I have a sense that once you get on his bad side -- deserved or not -- its damned near impossible to get off it. And to give him credit, he seems to be consistent about it, even if they're long time supporters (remember ATI?).
Bottom line though is that if you want proof, look no farther than the 64-bit Carbon debacle. Adobe had a lot riding on that and they had to suck it up when Apple came out and said "Oh yeah, we're not porting Carbon to 64-bit like we said we would." That's the main reason Adobe had to port everything to Cocoa, just to get the 64-bit PS running (and, perhaps, lay the groundwork for a 64-bit AI). I was pretty amazed when Adobe very tactfully avoided calling Apple out for screwing them (and believe me, they were super pissed off -- rightfully so IMHO). I'm sure there was corporate politics involved, but it sure felt like Adobe was being a better friend to Apple than Apple was to them.
Oh, and my experience is the opposite of what you guys are saying about 'written for PC'. I've had to deal with AI's window structure on Windows and let me tell you: it is anything but 'designed for Windows'. Its byzantine and insane, and obviously structured to emulate the Mac's window structure. It causes me more headaches than you could count. Granted, I only have to deal with it because our plugin requires some things that go beyond the scope of a normal plugin, but still, it's a pain. It goes well, well, well beyond just structuring things so they can have floating panels and what not. Just fire up Spy++ sometime and take a look at the windows Adobe dumps into the space when an application launches -- its crazy!
Sometimes you get the reverse as well. A buddy of mine was one of the people behind Qualcomm's Brew and they put him in charge of co-op hiring. He was very entertained when -- 3 months after Brew was released -- he got a resumé submitted to him that indicated the student had "2 years experience with Brew". I remember he was very excited to meet that fellow, and was looking forward to quizzing him on his 'deep Brew experience'.
And, of course, sometimes there are other mistakes in the requirements. I got a co-op job once because I was only person interviewed who asked about one of the job requirements. "I'm quite familiar with the WIN32 API," I said, "But what is the WIN31 API? Do you mean Windows 3.1?" (Back then, this was actually relevant).
No significant add-on every does well for a console for a very simple reason: if its not built-in to the core system, game designers are very leery of designing around it.
You just have to look at the history of the market. The best example is controllers. There were 4+ controller add-ons for the NES, SNES, Sega Master System, Genesis -- all relegated to the fringes of profitability. Why spend development time making a 4-player mode when there probably wasn't going to be more than 10% of the market who could even had the capability? And what fraction of that will buy your game? It was just plain 'ol 'bad return on investment'.
Flash forward to the N64; 4 controllers! What happens? Practically every game has 4-player modes, because you *know* the system has the capability. Sony & Microsoft saw it was a good idea and followed suit. Ironic, given what we're talking about -- more history repeating itself ;)
That isn't to say its not worth making add-ons like this. The fact that they keep making them suggests to me that enough money is being made to make them worthwhile. But I've yet to see an after-market add-on that more than a fraction of games on that system supported.
I assume Sony knows this, so they're probably just putting a toe in the water to see if its worth building this into their next-gen system. They'll probably make some money off this, but there's no way in hell this is going to steal much market share from the Wii -- there simply won't be many decent games. If the Wii has taught as anything, its that shoehorning motion control into a game doesn't really work; to work right the game needs to really be designed with motion control in mind. Unfortunately, I suspect that's what we'll see of most PS3 Move games: it will be an afterthought.
This is probably a stupid question, but marketshare of what? Does the tablet industry even really exist yet? You're right about Apple, but I thought they generally waited until there was something to capture. Neither the iPhone nor iPod created a market, they just took over what was there.
What's actually there to take right now in the tablet space? Or is the tablet market is bigger than I give it credit?
Even if you ignore that, nothing happens in a vacuum. If we're harnessing the kinetic energy of waves to generate electricity, we're stealing wave force. While that may not have obvious repercussions like, say, strip mining, who knows what environmental effects that could have?
Wind power is the same way, but it's hard to say how much (if any) impact this leeching has. But it's naive to assume there's no impact at all.
I know it's trendy to clap our hands with glee that Vista is apparently not being taking up with the gusto Microsoft hoped, but what the hell does this story have to do with that?
In the latest sign that Microsoft expects to support its Windows XP operating system for the foreseeable future...You know how Microsoft made their case for OOXML weaker by stacking the deck at every opportunity? It works that way for other things too. If something's wrong, don't keep tossing in arguments that are stupid, that undermines your case. Making comments like that make you seem peevish, and your opinion or argument suffers by association.
Let me get this straight:
Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.So, because there are so few Firefox users, it's okay to ban the browser? Wouldn't the argument for why one might ignore any 'problem' associated with Firefox users blocking ads be the same? Namely that there aren't enough users to worry about?
Which is it? Are there too few Firefox users to worry about blocking, or are there enough that it's impacting the bottom line? You can't have it both ways.
Yeah, I went & read the Wiki on you guys & Freespace and I'm pretty sure that's what I'm mixing up. That must have been around the same time someone declared the Freespace franchise dead (at the time? hopefully? :) and I got the two combined in my head or something.
At any rate, like I said -- I'm glad I was wrong!
I guess my recollections were in error -- though I have this vivid memory of going to some page that talked about bankruptcy or something. Maybe your parent company sold you or something? Or I'm just on crack, also possible.
:P
I'm glad to hear you're still out there though! That gives me hope that someday Freespace 3 might get made, though I suspect it'll require a few space sims to do well enough to warrant a business case