As someone who played every Zelda and every Final Fantasy out there, I must say that yes, they are 30x more fun than Angry Birds and any free/freemium/5$ RPG I found on the app market.
My point isn't that *you* don't value this - my point is there are many folks not like yourself who might not value it as much - if that ratio of non-gamers to gamers (who might disagree about 30 $.99 apps vs. 1 copy of Zelda) is anywhere near 5:1 or over, the price disruption is likely to happen.
This sucks for gamers and companies like Nintendo who face declining profits for those great games - but it's foolish to ignore the market at large - which has been greatly expanded by Android/iOS as touch-based devices with low development entry costs disrupt the talent scene.
Contrary to the Apple Fanboy mantra, the iPad is not the be-all and end-all of everything electronic. Any gamer will tell you that there is no substitute for tactile buttons. Sure touch screens and motion sensors have their place, but when you want quick and responsive interaction, you can't go past physical buttons.
Yes, but you can download games using the App Store, and have a 10" screen to play them... oh, and games cost $.99 or maybe $5. A "real gamer" might shy from it, but for every "real gamer" there's 10x casual games. Sad thing is, Nintendo envisioned this back in 2007 with their Wii - not built to satsify hardcore gamers, but great at a party.
Nintendo's (and Sony's) mobile gaming market has be severely disrupted in both price and technology. Yes, a $30 Zelda game is probably a great game, but is it really 30x more fun than Angry Birds on a large iPad display? That's not even covering those freemium role playing games where you can pay $0 and spend hours enjoyably - again, on a much larger screen than the DS.
An absurd statement if I ever heard one. To claim that there is something inherently evil about corporations is just silly.
Corporations do not have "do good" in their charter, they are amoral. Sometimes their competitive nature leads to the public good, just as often it does not.
You cannot assume that an entity that doesn't have the public interest in their charter but instead requires profitability to act in the public good, that's all.
Don't confuse amorality with immorality, and never make the mistake that a coporation has to be moral by default.
They announced the Slate days before the iPad to preempt Apple, and that device never sold (much less shipped). They even had HP lined up to do the manufacturing.
Color me skeptical.
Microsoft does not the luxury of covering up it's past fuck-ups when announcing future product. I sure as hell don't. It's called a reputation. For the mobile/tablet market, Microsoft has a lot of bad karma to clean up.
Microsoft--for once--actually designed this for their own hardware
Is this for sure? I don't see any pricing or availability - will this be sold by Microsoft, or an PC manufacturer? (note the picture on microsoft's website is simply a rendering, not actual product).
With Zune, MSFT's front-running competitor was Apple. With Xbox, it was Sony and Nintendo. Now, it's Apple again. This does not bode well for MSFT's ability to win through.
Are you sure this is about Apple? Perhaps Microsoft is aiming to cut Android off at the knees, and then barter with Apple to share dominance? I see this as more "wow, the Asus transformer would make a great Win8 device, but Android (and Chrome) needs to be removed first".
I currently have a 750GB HD and 60GB SSD in my middle-aged Macbook Pro, which is doing fantastic, but with the recently low price of the 512GB Crucial M4 [1] which is now $.80/GB, I can ditch the spinning rust, archive some media to my large-ish NAS (this is not that painful even with large files using a dual-band N router), and be completely silent.
Many users simply can't afford to buy the new model every year.
But many can, and those are Apple customers.
It can be made affordable by selling your existing previous-year machine to folks who really can't afford to trade-up every year...Those who may not be able to do that, they can get by quite well by buying a year or two old sturdy laptop (unibody macbooks are quite sturdy) at a significant discount and keeping it for a couple of years. A 2008 unibody Macbook will still run the latest (unreleased) OSX version well.
In the windows world, this economics doesn't make as much sense due to the quick obsolescence of hardware, but in the Mac world, it's quite doable.
I predict Windows 8 will be the largest clusterfuck yet and the walled garden approach will backfire on them in the most spectacular way.
I also predict that Windows8 (at least RT) will be a prodigious fail, but it won't be due to the walled garden... no the users love App Stores.
Instead, UI changes and other annoyances will kill their approach, and it looks like the whole Oracle vs. Android thing is going nowhere, so while Android kills the low-end, Apple will clean up on the high end. The middle is not going to be a comfortable place to be, even for the likes of Microsoft... if it were, maybe the Amazon Kindle Fire would be doing better - but it's sales are off quite a bit since it's launch, despite Amazon's continued improvement of their device.
Microsoft, with Windows8 is trying to have it's cake and eat it as well. Their attempt to straddle the fence between desktop and tablet markets is going to earn them a sore crotch.
Apparently this interface can do 10 Gbps, and that sounds like a good start.
That's bidirectional 10Gbps per channel or 20Gbps each way. Apple's implementation on their MBPs are effectively pushing 4 PCIe lanes over the wire (their MB Air implementation only pushes 2).
I might not be the biggest iOS fan in existence, but you'd be hard pressed to find me a company besides Apple that would have been capable of generating demand for a new computing form factor and a new OS for the paradigm at the same time. If Microsoft released WindowsRT back in 2004 and had capacitive touch and 802.11g and an App Store and an unlocked EDGE cellular modem and sold it at $499...it would have bombed then too because the immediate reaction would be "running Office 2003/Quickbooks/AutoCAD/$WINDOWS_SOFTWARE doesn't work!" or similar complaints regarding hitting 16x16 pixel toolbar icons with a finger and being productive.
It all comes down to a particularly relevant quote from Alan Kay [1]: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."
Apple is able to create demand because they aren't beholden to anyone to invent the future. Sure they won't sell products for which technology doesn't yet exist, but Microsoft as a pure software venture has been willfully *blind* to what's possible. (this is changing for them in a big way - Kinnect, but probably not fast enough for them to maintain dominance in computing).
Iâ(TM)m horrified. Absolutely shocked. I tell you, this is the final nail in Microsoft and Visual Studioâ(TM)s coffin. Oh, and âoeMy eyes, it burns! The goggles do nothing!â
That's not all. Try clicking on one of the images - they don't go away when you click away - you ahve to "click [x] to close" them. Modal image popups = bad jQueryUI usage pattern.
TFA may have a point, but it's a needle buried beneath it's own haystack of usability issues.
I had to reply to undo misapplied moderation, but this is indeed the desired outcome.
The endgame of business-method or software patent wars and non-state players (ie, NPEs aka trolls) and the "invention" of submarine patents really undermines any sort of "peace"... either we devolve into patent-based feudalism or the whole system becomes needs to be re-formed so we can "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
Your supreme court agrees you have no expectation of privacy on a public road, now shut the hell up and enjoy your "freedom".
My right to privacy does not mean that I have no expectation of accountability - especially in terms of city governance, if the city will not avow of the cameras, then how do I know who to impeach or vote out of office in the next election for misuse of funds?
Sounds more like they are either making shit up to try and get new bites for advertising (my bet) or they suck at design.
No, but they are realistic - I'd say as a customer, if you want IE support, that's a *feature*, and it will cost you - heavily. Trimming that "option" should reduce your costs and delivery time.
I'd like to read more details about what $100,000 worth of IE-specific development would buy, though
Boring pixel perfect rendering to make the artists happy. Blah.
This. So very this. I'm involved in a web project right now where both IE support AND pixel-perfect rendering are apparently vital (it took us about a month to convince the spec designers of the concept of "your fonts are not the user's fonts" and "Illustrator is NOT a web design tool"). We're actually expected to maintain pixel-perfectness in an automated testing environment. Seriously, half our development time has been wasted trying to figure out how to test this with an art department breathing down our necks with pixel-measuring tools for a web application.
So you can see why I posted anonymously.
Isn't this what Flash/ActionScript was supposed to be perfect for? Well, except for the lack of mobile support.
a minority of people has time to vote, the rest of the people have to work to keep their families together
A really interesting book that looks at direct voting (sci-fi, future-tech) is Alistair Reynold's The Prefect [1]. The author posits a future where a small part of the populace does indeed dominate issue-based direct voting (and have a greater than 1:1 proportional vote weight) but that their weighting is tied to outcomes, thus providing a "feedback loop" into the mix. Interesting take.
Regarding your overall premise, I agree - well, I guess my.sig pretty much shows my stance. Anyone who deals with any level of system security (web or otherwise) should really be appalled at the idea of no paper trail. Bits are too easy to flip.
I'm not really sure what facebook could do with a phone.
I could. If even 90% of the people or organizations you call would have their number listed in Facebook (of course, with whatever privacy controls are in place), then Facebook could disintermediate the dial-by-number and even the "dial-by-stale-contacts-list" - You could just say "Call Marie" and it would go and find out a) which Marie you wanted to call based on your network, and b) what her best number to reach is (assuming she's sharing that information with you).
This would be a killer feature... not all the pieces are in place (I sure as hell don't have my contact info on FB), but FB is placed better to pull this off than Google, Amazon, Microsoft. It would also reinforce Facebooks dominance in social - maybe I'd be forced to update my contact details there if it became ubiquitous.
It seems like the 2TB desktop (ie, 3.5") disk is about $110. That's not so bad, considering I bought one for $95 about a year ago, before the floods. A 3TB is $160, about the same as last year from my recollection.
Of course, if you're buying 4x (say to build or replace a NAS), then you do see a noticeable cost difference, but it's not even 25% more.
A 16% (or even 37%) margin is does not indicate windfall profits or ludicrous extortion.
You actually just called out major flaw in the US election system. We no longer vote for the best candidate, and they no longer run on the 'I am best platform.'
This is actually a flaw in almost every system that uses plurality voting [1]. Very few elections (in the world) use an election method that doesn't result in effectively a binary choice due to the spoiler effect[2]
Ok, replying to myself because I shot my mouth off without reading TFA....
For one, Siri can be used to write e-mails or text messages. So, in theory, Apple could be storing confidential IBM messages.
So it's stuff like this, that wouldn't be sent through Google or Bing, that she is concerned about. That actually makes a teensy, tiny grain of sense for a change...
But you could have done the same with Android speech input or the Nuance Dragon iPhone app.
Until this, few phones sent your audio to a third party. The telco had to have the audio stream, but they don't store it. Telcos are regulated in this area. Even for wiretaps, US telcos don't store audio; they forward it in real time to law enforcement or security agencies.
Then Apple comes along. It starts storing all your audio and recognizing as much of it as possible, escaping liability through a vague EULA. That has to be a concern. How do you know when it's listening? And will you know when Apple changes the rules to something like "we collect all your voice input to improve the quality of voice recognition"?
So you're saying that Google Voice doesn't process the audio running over it's service? How would you know? It's been out for years.
What about Android voice input? Hell, even on the iPhone you had Dragon apps by Nuance to do search processing - both of these have been around for years and send voice data (over your data connection) to a remote server - they even send contact details to refine the analysis.
Imagine the machines that run 75% of the world's stock markets becoming illegal overnight. Such a decision would essentially bring the computing industry and every industry that depends on it to a grinding halt.
Don't assume that our (and most other non-connected people/business) pain will be shared by our banker and government "friends". They have before [1] and probably will again, exempt themselves from horrible laws, decisions, and other externalities, while continuing to profit handsomely:
The provision, which my colleague Edward Wyatt detailed in an article ahead of the House’s vote on the bill last month, has only one purpose: to allow the banking industry to skirt paying for certain important patents involving “business methods."
They (and their bought government cronies) will simply evade disaster (and in the process bet for/against, profiting from others' misery).
All Taxes are regressive. The rich can always avoid some (most) taxes, while the poor cannot avoid any.
[cite needed] Taken to it's logical extreme your statement simply does not compute - especially when nutjobs are complaining about the fact that over 50% of the populace doesn't pay taxes [1]. Fact is, only flat dollar and flat percentage taxes are regressive. Progressive tax is progressive, unless you cap it (like FICA).
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who played every Zelda and every Final Fantasy out there, I must say that yes, they are 30x more fun than Angry Birds and any free/freemium/5$ RPG I found on the app market.
My point isn't that *you* don't value this - my point is there are many folks not like yourself who might not value it as much - if that ratio of non-gamers to gamers (who might disagree about 30 $.99 apps vs. 1 copy of Zelda) is anywhere near 5:1 or over, the price disruption is likely to happen.
This sucks for gamers and companies like Nintendo who face declining profits for those great games - but it's foolish to ignore the market at large - which has been greatly expanded by Android/iOS as touch-based devices with low development entry costs disrupt the talent scene.
Contrary to the Apple Fanboy mantra, the iPad is not the be-all and end-all of everything electronic. Any gamer will tell you that there is no substitute for tactile buttons. Sure touch screens and motion sensors have their place, but when you want quick and responsive interaction, you can't go past physical buttons.
Yes, but you can download games using the App Store, and have a 10" screen to play them... oh, and games cost $.99 or maybe $5. A "real gamer" might shy from it, but for every "real gamer" there's 10x casual games. Sad thing is, Nintendo envisioned this back in 2007 with their Wii - not built to satsify hardcore gamers, but great at a party.
Nintendo's (and Sony's) mobile gaming market has be severely disrupted in both price and technology. Yes, a $30 Zelda game is probably a great game, but is it really 30x more fun than Angry Birds on a large iPad display? That's not even covering those freemium role playing games where you can pay $0 and spend hours enjoyably - again, on a much larger screen than the DS.
An absurd statement if I ever heard one. To claim that there is something inherently evil about corporations is just silly.
Corporations do not have "do good" in their charter, they are amoral. Sometimes their competitive nature leads to the public good, just as often it does not.
You cannot assume that an entity that doesn't have the public interest in their charter but instead requires profitability to act in the public good, that's all.
Don't confuse amorality with immorality, and never make the mistake that a coporation has to be moral by default.
They announced the Slate days before the iPad to preempt Apple, and that device never sold (much less shipped). They even had HP lined up to do the manufacturing.
Color me skeptical.
Microsoft does not the luxury of covering up it's past fuck-ups when announcing future product. I sure as hell don't. It's called a reputation. For the mobile/tablet market, Microsoft has a lot of bad karma to clean up.
Microsoft--for once--actually designed this for their own hardware
Is this for sure? I don't see any pricing or availability - will this be sold by Microsoft, or an PC manufacturer? (note the picture on microsoft's website is simply a rendering, not actual product).
With Zune, MSFT's front-running competitor was Apple. With Xbox, it was Sony and Nintendo. Now, it's Apple again. This does not bode well for MSFT's ability to win through.
Are you sure this is about Apple? Perhaps Microsoft is aiming to cut Android off at the knees, and then barter with Apple to share dominance? I see this as more "wow, the Asus transformer would make a great Win8 device, but Android (and Chrome) needs to be removed first".
I currently have a 750GB HD and 60GB SSD in my middle-aged Macbook Pro, which is doing fantastic, but with the recently low price of the 512GB Crucial M4 [1] which is now $.80/GB, I can ditch the spinning rust, archive some media to my large-ish NAS (this is not that painful even with large files using a dual-band N router), and be completely silent.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004W2JL3Y/ref=s9_simh_gw_p147_d2_g147_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-3&pf_rd_r=1ZFFKPT8NRYNA8KW97AW&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938811&pf_rd_i=507846
Many users simply can't afford to buy the new model every year.
But many can, and those are Apple customers.
It can be made affordable by selling your existing previous-year machine to folks who really can't afford to trade-up every year...Those who may not be able to do that, they can get by quite well by buying a year or two old sturdy laptop (unibody macbooks are quite sturdy) at a significant discount and keeping it for a couple of years. A 2008 unibody Macbook will still run the latest (unreleased) OSX version well.
In the windows world, this economics doesn't make as much sense due to the quick obsolescence of hardware, but in the Mac world, it's quite doable.
I predict Windows 8 will be the largest clusterfuck yet and the walled garden approach will backfire on them in the most spectacular way.
I also predict that Windows8 (at least RT) will be a prodigious fail, but it won't be due to the walled garden... no the users love App Stores.
Instead, UI changes and other annoyances will kill their approach, and it looks like the whole Oracle vs. Android thing is going nowhere, so while Android kills the low-end, Apple will clean up on the high end. The middle is not going to be a comfortable place to be, even for the likes of Microsoft... if it were, maybe the Amazon Kindle Fire would be doing better - but it's sales are off quite a bit since it's launch, despite Amazon's continued improvement of their device.
Microsoft, with Windows8 is trying to have it's cake and eat it as well. Their attempt to straddle the fence between desktop and tablet markets is going to earn them a sore crotch.
Apparently this interface can do 10 Gbps, and that sounds like a good start.
That's bidirectional 10Gbps per channel or 20Gbps each way. Apple's implementation on their MBPs are effectively pushing 4 PCIe lanes over the wire (their MB Air implementation only pushes 2).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)
I might not be the biggest iOS fan in existence, but you'd be hard pressed to find me a company besides Apple that would have been capable of generating demand for a new computing form factor and a new OS for the paradigm at the same time. If Microsoft released WindowsRT back in 2004 and had capacitive touch and 802.11g and an App Store and an unlocked EDGE cellular modem and sold it at $499...it would have bombed then too because the immediate reaction would be "running Office 2003/Quickbooks/AutoCAD/$WINDOWS_SOFTWARE doesn't work!" or similar complaints regarding hitting 16x16 pixel toolbar icons with a finger and being productive.
It all comes down to a particularly relevant quote from Alan Kay [1]:
"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."
Apple is able to create demand because they aren't beholden to anyone to invent the future. Sure they won't sell products for which technology doesn't yet exist, but Microsoft as a pure software venture has been willfully *blind* to what's possible. (this is changing for them in a big way - Kinnect, but probably not fast enough for them to maintain dominance in computing).
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Kay
Iâ(TM)m horrified. Absolutely shocked. I tell you, this is the final nail in Microsoft and Visual Studioâ(TM)s coffin. Oh, and âoeMy eyes, it burns! The goggles do nothing!â
That's not all. Try clicking on one of the images - they don't go away when you click away - you ahve to "click [x] to close" them. Modal image popups = bad jQueryUI usage pattern.
TFA may have a point, but it's a needle buried beneath it's own haystack of usability issues.
I had to reply to undo misapplied moderation, but this is indeed the desired outcome.
The endgame of business-method or software patent wars and non-state players (ie, NPEs aka trolls) and the "invention" of submarine patents really undermines any sort of "peace"... either we devolve into patent-based feudalism or the whole system becomes needs to be re-formed so we can "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
Your supreme court agrees you have no expectation of privacy on a public road, now shut the hell up and enjoy your "freedom".
My right to privacy does not mean that I have no expectation of accountability - especially in terms of city governance, if the city will not avow of the cameras, then how do I know who to impeach or vote out of office in the next election for misuse of funds?
Sounds more like they are either making shit up to try and get new bites for advertising (my bet) or they suck at design.
No, but they are realistic - I'd say as a customer, if you want IE support, that's a *feature*, and it will cost you - heavily. Trimming that "option" should reduce your costs and delivery time.
I'd like to read more details about what $100,000 worth of IE-specific development would buy, though
Boring pixel perfect rendering to make the artists happy. Blah.
This. So very this. I'm involved in a web project right now where both IE support AND pixel-perfect rendering are apparently vital (it took us about a month to convince the spec designers of the concept of "your fonts are not the user's fonts" and "Illustrator is NOT a web design tool"). We're actually expected to maintain pixel-perfectness in an automated testing environment. Seriously, half our development time has been wasted trying to figure out how to test this with an art department breathing down our necks with pixel-measuring tools for a web application.
So you can see why I posted anonymously.
Isn't this what Flash/ActionScript was supposed to be perfect for? Well, except for the lack of mobile support.
So the most effective hacker gets to determine the representative's positions?
I can just see the headlines now: "99% of the ballots were cast 2 seconds after polling was open!"
a minority of people has time to vote, the rest of the people have to work to keep their families together
A really interesting book that looks at direct voting (sci-fi, future-tech) is Alistair Reynold's The Prefect [1]. The author posits a future where a small part of the populace does indeed dominate issue-based direct voting (and have a greater than 1:1 proportional vote weight) but that their weighting is tied to outcomes, thus providing a "feedback loop" into the mix. Interesting take.
Regarding your overall premise, I agree - well, I guess my .sig pretty much shows my stance. Anyone who deals with any level of system security (web or otherwise) should really be appalled at the idea of no paper trail. Bits are too easy to flip.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Prefect-Alastair-Reynolds/dp/0575078189
I'm not really sure what facebook could do with a phone.
I could. If even 90% of the people or organizations you call would have their number listed in Facebook (of course, with whatever privacy controls are in place), then Facebook could disintermediate the dial-by-number and even the "dial-by-stale-contacts-list" - You could just say "Call Marie" and it would go and find out a) which Marie you wanted to call based on your network, and b) what her best number to reach is (assuming she's sharing that information with you).
This would be a killer feature... not all the pieces are in place (I sure as hell don't have my contact info on FB), but FB is placed better to pull this off than Google, Amazon, Microsoft. It would also reinforce Facebooks dominance in social - maybe I'd be forced to update my contact details there if it became ubiquitous.
It seems like the 2TB desktop (ie, 3.5") disk is about $110. That's not so bad, considering I bought one for $95 about a year ago, before the floods. A 3TB is $160, about the same as last year from my recollection.
Of course, if you're buying 4x (say to build or replace a NAS), then you do see a noticeable cost difference, but it's not even 25% more.
A 16% (or even 37%) margin is does not indicate windfall profits or ludicrous extortion.
You actually just called out major flaw in the US election system. We no longer vote for the best candidate, and they no longer run on the 'I am best platform.'
This is actually a flaw in almost every system that uses plurality voting [1]. Very few elections (in the world) use an election method that doesn't result in effectively a binary choice due to the spoiler effect[2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_voting_system
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect
Ok, replying to myself because I shot my mouth off without reading TFA....
For one, Siri can be used to write e-mails or text messages. So, in theory, Apple could be storing confidential IBM messages.
So it's stuff like this, that wouldn't be sent through Google or Bing, that she is concerned about. That actually makes a teensy, tiny grain of sense for a change...
But you could have done the same with Android speech input or the Nuance Dragon iPhone app.
Until this, few phones sent your audio to a third party. The telco had to have the audio stream, but they don't store it. Telcos are regulated in this area. Even for wiretaps, US telcos don't store audio; they forward it in real time to law enforcement or security agencies.
Then Apple comes along. It starts storing all your audio and recognizing as much of it as possible, escaping liability through a vague EULA. That has to be a concern. How do you know when it's listening? And will you know when Apple changes the rules to something like "we collect all your voice input to improve the quality of voice recognition"?
So you're saying that Google Voice doesn't process the audio running over it's service? How would you know? It's been out for years.
What about Android voice input? Hell, even on the iPhone you had Dragon apps by Nuance to do search processing - both of these have been around for years and send voice data (over your data connection) to a remote server - they even send contact details to refine the analysis.
Your Apple-rant is unwarranted here.
Imagine the machines that run 75% of the world's stock markets becoming illegal overnight. Such a decision would essentially bring the computing industry and every industry that depends on it to a grinding halt.
Don't assume that our (and most other non-connected people/business) pain will be shared by our banker and government "friends". They have before [1] and probably will again, exempt themselves from horrible laws, decisions, and other externalities, while continuing to profit handsomely:
The provision, which my colleague Edward Wyatt detailed in an article ahead of the House’s vote on the bill last month, has only one purpose: to allow the banking industry to skirt paying for certain important patents involving “business methods."
They (and their bought government cronies) will simply evade disaster (and in the process bet for/against, profiting from others' misery).
[1] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/in-a-bill-wall-street-shows-clout/
All Taxes are regressive. The rich can always avoid some (most) taxes, while the poor cannot avoid any.
[cite needed] Taken to it's logical extreme your statement simply does not compute - especially when nutjobs are complaining about the fact that over 50% of the populace doesn't pay taxes [1]. Fact is, only flat dollar and flat percentage taxes are regressive. Progressive tax is progressive, unless you cap it (like FICA).
[1] http://blog.heritage.org/2012/02/19/chart-of-the-week-nearly-half-of-all-americans-dont-pay-income-taxes/