With video games costing tens of millions to develop nowdays, $600,000 for a multiplatform 3D game seems like a very low figure. Will they really be able to pull this off?
Money raised on Kickstarter is not supposed to fully fund the development, just, as the name suggests, to "kick start" it. The game should pay for itself from sales made after the development is finished -- as most other games do.
As long as you fill it with tons of ads, that's cool with me. I love slashvertisements! Maybe you can even couch a few of them in "product reviews"? That may squeak a few more ads in front of people, what do you say?
In the video, they explicitly said they are going to run slashvertisements. Maybe if you WTFV...oh nevermind.
It is the other way around man. Facebook is much more intrusive and connected to you r life than Google ever will be. You, my friend, are either trolling or just defunct of critical thinking skills.
Depends on how you use Google and Facebook. Facebook knows who your friends are, but if you use Gmail and Google Talk, Google knows a lot about that too. If you have 3rd party cookies on, Facebook knows about every site with Like button that you visit, but Google has Google Ads and Analytics (as well as the +1 button), which probably cover even more sites. For most people, Google knows everything they search for. For me, this information would cover what I'm working on, what I'm buying and where I'm living (I often search for websites of local businesses on Google) and probably more.
Now, if you post every little detail of your life on Facebook, that would probably be quite a lot of information too. But most people don't post as much (for me, it's only about 2% of people in my friend list), and from the ocassional interesting article or funny video, thay can't get as much information. Not to mention that if the video is on YouTube, Google will probably know you watched it too.
As a programmer, I don't agree. Sometimes I write a program just to get a specific result (e.g. writing a backup script so that I don't have to backup manually every day), but very often, programming is the ultimate goal -- I often find myself rewriting perfectly working code just to see if I can do it more elegantly, or I take part in programming contests (with no prizes) because I enjoy solving the (often very abstract) programming problems.
Because if Facebook says something is only visible to "Me and My Friends", you'd expect them to be actually telling the truth.
Of course you and I know better now.
If your friends can access your photos on Facebook, they can save them to their hard drives and then e-mail them to whoever they decide to -- or upload them to their Facebook accounts and share with whomever they want (even set them as "public"). This is no different -- by reporting your photos, your friends have decided to share these photos with Facebook employees.
Actually "NP"-hard problems ARE polynomial. NP stands for non-deterministic polynomial. It is polynomial, but the grade of the polynomialis is not constant.
If the grade of the polynomial is not constant (ie. there is a variable in some exponent), it is no longer a polynomial.
As much as I hate Sony, I don't see anything wrong with this. Same (infinite) supply, raised demand = raised price. If anyone is to "blame" here, then it's the bunch of hypocrites who buy music only because the singer just died.
We should not "boycott" Sony (well, we should, but not for this), we just shoudn't buy their (or anyone else's) music unless we actually like it (in which case we most definitely should not wait until the singer dies).
I don't know about Java, not being a coder in it myself, but in C you can inline small function calls so they don't pushpop.
Whoever reads the code still has to pushpop (mentally) to understand what it does. Many programmers underestimate how much it adds to readability if you're able to just read a chunk of code line by line instead of jumping back and forth (often between multiple files).
What really surprises me is why so many companies bought their domains from GoDaddy in the first place. I can understand if an unexperienced user buys a domain or two from them, not knowing that there are alternatives (maybe even being impressed by their "add an antivirus to your domain for only $19.99 more"-style advertising), but anyone who knows what they are doing should be immediately turned off by GoDaddy's horrible interface and all the bullshit you have to go through to register a domain there. It's not even cheaper than alternatives. Or is there something I'm missing?
Understanding and acting on meaning? Within a context? That is the hard part. That is the part Apple has lots of great data for now that Google really doesn't have
You'd be surprised how many people use natural language in Google search. Granted, parsing something like "why do men have nipples" is not the biggest NLP problem, but Google's experience should still be far from negligible.
Can we please spare the bad analogies for comments?
Sure there is variety between users (which TFA accounted for, by the way), but usability tests (done right) usually show quite a bit of objective facts (e.g. something is consistently hard to find, etc.).
As a lot of people already suggested, try to automatically collect as much data as possible. But of course, that is usually not enough. For the data that has to come from the user, just make the form as specific as possible. So, for example, this is useless:
Please provide a description of the bug: ____________________________
A user who has never submitted a bug report would have no idea what to enter into a form like that. This is better, but still not nearly good enough:
Please describe what you were doing when this happened: __________________________________
You would probably get an answer like "I was trying to create a photo album." instead of step-by-step instructions to reproduce. Try something like this:
Please describe, step-by-step, what you were doing when this happened:
1. Start at this URL: ______________________
2. Click on _________________________
3. ___________________________
4. ___________________________
5. ___________________________
Describe in a few words what you expected to happen after the last step: ______________________
Describe in a few words what happened instead of the expected action: _______________________
Were you logged in at the time the problem occurred? [ ] Yes [ ] No
If yes, please specify your user name (optional): ________
...etc. Try to think of any relevant information that you're not able to collect automatically.
Your users will probably forgive you even if the form is long, if you don't make them think too much. Depending on how clever your users are, you might want to add some kind of motivational text (e.g. "the more information you provide, the better chance that we will be able to reproduce and fix the bug"), but there's a good chance that a user who submits a bug report already knows why they are doing it, so it would just feel patronizing.
Firefox (and Chrome, and IE, and Safari) copied pretty much everything from Opera.
This is just wrong. By now, each browser has copied a lot of features from the others, but all of the major browsers had a "killer feature" that caused a lot of people to switch and allowed it to gain traction.
Firefox: very lightweight, excellent extension support
Opera: rendering speed, some advanced features
Chrome: stability (separate process for each tab, plugin), JavaScript speed
IE, Safari: come preinstalled with the OS, well integrated
Note that none of this is unique to the particular browser anymore, and some of those don't even apply anymore.
One intriguing result was that Germans -- not renowned for their sense of humour -- found just about everything funny and did not express a strong preference for any type of joke.
Imagine that - an advert for a music player that focuses on a person enjoying music. Yeah, it was stylised, but when you look at the bare essence of the advert, it's about what the product can do for you, not brainwashing people into thinking they are buying a lifestyle.
There's more to an ad than its bare essence. Probably their most famous campaign presents Mac as "the cool guy" as opposed to PC. Most of the ads focus on features, but the message is still there. Even in the ads that focus on people using Apple products in various way, it's always cool people using them.
Now, I agree that Apple has a lot of high quality products, but there are other companies that sell high quality, well-designed products, and Apple is clearly trying to get an edge over them by "selling a lifestyle". There's nothing wrong with this, most companies that sell high quality products are trying to do that (with various levels of success) -- fashion ads are another good example (wearing Victoria's Secret lingerie doesn't make you a supermodel, but they'd like you to believe so anyway).
It's not even a public place, it's their private place. I don't see any problem with them tracking their customers, as long as they're on their property. If you don't like it (I don't), just don't shop (or don't park your car) there.
Also by the same guy: "Nine Current Flame Wars in Open Source", "FOSS, Business, and Psychopathy" and "Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?" (which IIRC was recently featured on Slashdot and described as bullshit as pretty much everyone who bothered to RTFA).
No thanks, I think I'll wait for an actual review.
https with self signed cert protects against passive eavesdropping, plain http does not
Mod this up! Passive eavesdroping is MUCH easier and much more common than active MITM attack (see Firesheep etc.). Nobody's saying that MITM is impossible, but I'd go so far as to say that the difference between plain HTTP and self-signed HTTPS is greater and more important than the difference between self-signed and CA verified HTTPS (and all the fake certificate scandals only confirm this).
Slashdot Mirror
If it encourages folks to upgrade to v8 or v9, I imagine microsoft would be pretty happy with it actually.
It doesn't. There's a screenshot in TFA -- they only link to Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera (in this order).
With video games costing tens of millions to develop nowdays, $600,000 for a multiplatform 3D game seems like a very low figure. Will they really be able to pull this off?
Money raised on Kickstarter is not supposed to fully fund the development, just, as the name suggests, to "kick start" it. The game should pay for itself from sales made after the development is finished -- as most other games do.
As long as you fill it with tons of ads, that's cool with me. I love slashvertisements! Maybe you can even couch a few of them in "product reviews"? That may squeak a few more ads in front of people, what do you say?
In the video, they explicitly said they are going to run slashvertisements. Maybe if you WTFV...oh nevermind.
I appreciate they're up-front about it at least.
It is the other way around man. Facebook is much more intrusive and connected to you r life than Google ever will be. You, my friend, are either trolling or just defunct of critical thinking skills.
Depends on how you use Google and Facebook. Facebook knows who your friends are, but if you use Gmail and Google Talk, Google knows a lot about that too. If you have 3rd party cookies on, Facebook knows about every site with Like button that you visit, but Google has Google Ads and Analytics (as well as the +1 button), which probably cover even more sites. For most people, Google knows everything they search for. For me, this information would cover what I'm working on, what I'm buying and where I'm living (I often search for websites of local businesses on Google) and probably more.
Now, if you post every little detail of your life on Facebook, that would probably be quite a lot of information too. But most people don't post as much (for me, it's only about 2% of people in my friend list), and from the ocassional interesting article or funny video, thay can't get as much information. Not to mention that if the video is on YouTube, Google will probably know you watched it too.
I celebrate at 3/14 1:59:26. Good luck beating that in July!
As a programmer, I don't agree. Sometimes I write a program just to get a specific result (e.g. writing a backup script so that I don't have to backup manually every day), but very often, programming is the ultimate goal -- I often find myself rewriting perfectly working code just to see if I can do it more elegantly, or I take part in programming contests (with no prizes) because I enjoy solving the (often very abstract) programming problems.
Because if Facebook says something is only visible to "Me and My Friends", you'd expect them to be actually telling the truth.
Of course you and I know better now.
If your friends can access your photos on Facebook, they can save them to their hard drives and then e-mail them to whoever they decide to -- or upload them to their Facebook accounts and share with whomever they want (even set them as "public"). This is no different -- by reporting your photos, your friends have decided to share these photos with Facebook employees.
"NP" stands for "non-polynomial,"
Actually "NP"-hard problems ARE polynomial. NP stands for non-deterministic polynomial. It is polynomial, but the grade of the polynomialis is not constant.
If the grade of the polynomial is not constant (ie. there is a variable in some exponent), it is no longer a polynomial.
As much as I hate Sony, I don't see anything wrong with this. Same (infinite) supply, raised demand = raised price. If anyone is to "blame" here, then it's the bunch of hypocrites who buy music only because the singer just died.
We should not "boycott" Sony (well, we should, but not for this), we just shoudn't buy their (or anyone else's) music unless we actually like it (in which case we most definitely should not wait until the singer dies).
I don't know about Java, not being a coder in it myself, but in C you can inline small function calls so they don't pushpop.
Whoever reads the code still has to pushpop (mentally) to understand what it does. Many programmers underestimate how much it adds to readability if you're able to just read a chunk of code line by line instead of jumping back and forth (often between multiple files).
What really surprises me is why so many companies bought their domains from GoDaddy in the first place. I can understand if an unexperienced user buys a domain or two from them, not knowing that there are alternatives (maybe even being impressed by their "add an antivirus to your domain for only $19.99 more"-style advertising), but anyone who knows what they are doing should be immediately turned off by GoDaddy's horrible interface and all the bullshit you have to go through to register a domain there. It's not even cheaper than alternatives. Or is there something I'm missing?
What you described is one of the best methods to monetize open-source software that I have heard about. I'd like to see more, could you post a link?
I'll gladly contribute towards open-sourcing something, if there's anything I need!
Understanding and acting on meaning? Within a context? That is the hard part. That is the part Apple has lots of great data for now that Google really doesn't have
You'd be surprised how many people use natural language in Google search. Granted, parsing something like "why do men have nipples" is not the biggest NLP problem, but Google's experience should still be far from negligible.
Can we please spare the bad analogies for comments?
Sure there is variety between users (which TFA accounted for, by the way), but usability tests (done right) usually show quite a bit of objective facts (e.g. something is consistently hard to find, etc.).
As a lot of people already suggested, try to automatically collect as much data as possible. But of course, that is usually not enough. For the data that has to come from the user, just make the form as specific as possible. So, for example, this is useless:
A user who has never submitted a bug report would have no idea what to enter into a form like that. This is better, but still not nearly good enough:
You would probably get an answer like "I was trying to create a photo album." instead of step-by-step instructions to reproduce. Try something like this:
...etc. Try to think of any relevant information that you're not able to collect automatically.
Your users will probably forgive you even if the form is long, if you don't make them think too much. Depending on how clever your users are, you might want to add some kind of motivational text (e.g. "the more information you provide, the better chance that we will be able to reproduce and fix the bug"), but there's a good chance that a user who submits a bug report already knows why they are doing it, so it would just feel patronizing.
Firefox (and Chrome, and IE, and Safari) copied pretty much everything from Opera.
This is just wrong. By now, each browser has copied a lot of features from the others, but all of the major browsers had a "killer feature" that caused a lot of people to switch and allowed it to gain traction.
Firefox: very lightweight, excellent extension support
Opera: rendering speed, some advanced features
Chrome: stability (separate process for each tab, plugin), JavaScript speed
IE, Safari: come preinstalled with the OS, well integrated
Note that none of this is unique to the particular browser anymore, and some of those don't even apply anymore.
This is consistent with what TFA says:
One intriguing result was that Germans -- not renowned for their sense of humour -- found just about everything funny and did not express a strong preference for any type of joke.
Imagine that - an advert for a music player that focuses on a person enjoying music. Yeah, it was stylised, but when you look at the bare essence of the advert, it's about what the product can do for you, not brainwashing people into thinking they are buying a lifestyle.
There's more to an ad than its bare essence. Probably their most famous campaign presents Mac as "the cool guy" as opposed to PC. Most of the ads focus on features, but the message is still there. Even in the ads that focus on people using Apple products in various way, it's always cool people using them.
Now, I agree that Apple has a lot of high quality products, but there are other companies that sell high quality, well-designed products, and Apple is clearly trying to get an edge over them by "selling a lifestyle". There's nothing wrong with this, most companies that sell high quality products are trying to do that (with various levels of success) -- fashion ads are another good example (wearing Victoria's Secret lingerie doesn't make you a supermodel, but they'd like you to believe so anyway).
How about just create domain names using letters A through F and get creative with IPv6 hexadecimal abbreviated addresses. ;)
I need to friend you on faceb00c::
The cars are parked in a public place,
It's not even a public place, it's their private place. I don't see any problem with them tracking their customers, as long as they're on their property. If you don't like it (I don't), just don't shop (or don't park your car) there.
The number of people on the planet with 6 monitors using gimp regularly would probably fit in my garage.
You mean, like, in decimal notation?
Also by the same guy: "Nine Current Flame Wars in Open Source", "FOSS, Business, and Psychopathy" and "Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?" (which IIRC was recently featured on Slashdot and described as bullshit as pretty much everyone who bothered to RTFA).
No thanks, I think I'll wait for an actual review.
https with self signed cert protects against passive eavesdropping, plain http does not
Mod this up! Passive eavesdroping is MUCH easier and much more common than active MITM attack (see Firesheep etc.). Nobody's saying that MITM is impossible, but I'd go so far as to say that the difference between plain HTTP and self-signed HTTPS is greater and more important than the difference between self-signed and CA verified HTTPS (and all the fake certificate scandals only confirm this).
splitting the monitor into smaller work spaces would at this point probably be more useful for most people.
My computer does that, it calls them "windows". I hear there's even an operating system named after them!
Book had a deep complex and interesting past that was never explored...
Actually, it was pretty well explored in the latest of Whedon's comic books.