... that they made absolutely no effort to refute the rumor. At this point, I think it's pretty safe to say that their only objection is to how the guy said what he did, but they still are going to proceed with it.
You do realize that Jobs was the one who said "people don't know what they want"? Apple is the #1 perpetrator of dictating to users what they "should" want.
No, that just gives them ammunition. They can see download counts, look for unauthorized server connections, etc. From this, they deduce that the reason their titles aren't selling well is because of piracy, not because of the way they're designing their games and treating their users. And what does that lead to? More extreme anti-piracy measures, of course!
Don't play them at all. Just avoid them altogether. Instead play games from companies that Get It. Then they'll have nobody to blame but themselves.
The point is that it shifts the blame slightly. With age verification, they have the ability to say "we restrict based on age, THAT KID is the one who lied, blame them!".
If the entire market went down, there would be no reason to fire him in 2009. EA going down was expected at that time, the reason he got fired is because he was completely unable to bring it back up again while the market has completely recovered and is hitting new records.
No, the hard part is getting people to pay for things that they're used to getting for free. Slashdot has a rabid anti-ad base, so of course ideas like this are popular here, but give any typical person the choice between a free, ad-supported site and one that uses microtransactions and the vast majority of people will choose the former.
"Free" is always the right price point from a user's perspective, and people have shown time and time again that, even with very heavy strings attached, they'll choose a free option over a paid one (even here! go ahead and look up the statistics about how many people pay to disable ads). For-pay only works when there's no viable alternative.
Why else would the internet have evolved this way? This is the model that most benefits both users and site owners.
Honest question: do you know anything about online advertising?
The reason it's so popular and successful is that it's trackable - you can see, for every dollar spent on advertising, what the return is on that investment. This makes it trivial to address the problem of "wasted" advertising funds since you have a direct connection between any specific ad/placement combination and a customer's purchases.
Online ads are so successful and profitable because they're the first form of advertisement where you can actually prove it's working.
The idea of lobbying, in itself, is not bad. Corporate lobbying, even, isn't necessarily bad. Corporations are just a group of people, and they're having a small set of people bring their concerns before the government representatives. This can be done for very good things, as well - Google lobbies very heavily for a free and open internet, and has been instrumental in things like shutting down SOPA.
The real problem comes in when less honest entities confuse "lobbying" and "bribing", and when (on purpose or by design) they confuse the lobbyist's interest with the public interest.
This is just the start - what are you going to do when the technology progresses further and this is all built into a contact lens? Or a cybernetic eyeball? Power and storage technologies will have increased greatly by then as well, so in 20 years you could have people trading in their biological eyes for electronic ones that are always recording, can zoom, provide facial recognition, etc.
The march of technology is not going to stop just because some are uncomfortable with it, and the visibility of that technology is only going to get lower. At some point the world is going to have to accept that public = public domain, simply because they won't have much of a choice. Today's notion of "privacy" isn't going to last much further into the future.
At my job, almost every tool I use is an internal webapp, and I SSH / NX into my workstation from my laptop to get a command line, run Eclipse, etc. I could replace my Thinkpad with a Pixel and still run at 100% capacity. (it's a bit overkill for my needs, but the Thinkpad wasn't exactly cheap, either)
Many, many, many people have computers at work only for use with internal webapps and document editing (which can be done through webapps). Why wouldn't the Pixel work for them?
Why? I can see how this would be disastrous in multiplayer, but in single player, being able to buy things to avoid having to grind for them isn't bad, assuming:
1) The cost is reasonable. 2) They don't screw with the game mechanics to make people more likely to want to purchase things. 3) The same content can be unlocked with effort/talent rather than money.
I can think of several games (JRPGs are notoriously bad with this) where to get a certain item or to get to a certain boss, the process was basically "spend 10 hours doing mindless tasks". Currently, there are two choices: don't see the content, or spend valuable time on meaningless tasks unlocking it. Microtransactions provide a third choice.
Again, I want to reiterate that this should always be OPTIONAL, and that the mechanics of the game shouldn't be changed to force people into it. Traditional games should not be turned into Zynga abusefests.
Things in the legal world are not cut and dry. They need flexibility to deal with people who commit the same crimes but under different circumstances, and it's impossible to write all those circumstances into law.
Ex: how would you sentence: 1) someone who committed a premeditated murder because they were crazy 2) someone who committed a premeditated murder because they knew the target was going to kill their family 3) someone who committed a premeditated murder because they were paid to do it 4) someone who committed a premeditated murder because of gang-related reasons 5) someone who committed a premeditated murder because they just like to kill
It runs ChromeOS, not just Chrome. There's a difference there, though it's subtle. Also, there's no reason you couldn't install Linux on this thing. People are already doing it with current computers.... but there's no reason this Chrome be a "real OS". Do a quick search for Native Client and you'll see. I've played Bastion in my browser using it, and if I wasn't in Chrome, I'd have no reason to believe it wasn't native. As more and more applications get written using it, this distinction will become nonexistent.
you'd have thought they could've done better than a Celeron and 4.25 hours of battery life
Look at the newest Samsung one, then: ARM processor and 6-8 hours battery life. I have one and it's a great little piece of equipment.... and the 10" form factor was terrible. Screen too small for keeping at arm's length, and don't even get me started on the reduced-size keyboards.
1) Assurance that you'll actually get paid instead of completely ripped off. 2) Assurance that you won't be found out and brought up on legal charges. 3) The publicity that comes with Google publishing your name as someone who's better than they are at finding vulnerabilities. 4) The money.
The notable thing is that he's the one threatening patent lawsuits. Whatever you think of the situation itself, this is far and away the most dickish thing present.
Companies cannot move money around easily. If a US company made their profits in an Irish subsidary, that money has to stay with the Irish subsidary. They can't bring it back into the US without paying a giant repatriation tax.... so actually it's quite similar to your example.
They weren't really no-shows, either. Who do you think is providing the software that runs on those phones? The same big name companies that were supposedly "absent".
... it's not a console. It's a gaming PC in a convenient form factor for putting in an entertainment center and hooking up to your TV. There are many people out there who don't want to go through the hassle of putting together their own PC, and existing premade / custom gaming PCs are much more expensive than this.
Sending it out with Linux preinstalled is a gamble, but they've already said that there will be nothing preventing people from putting Windows on it. And if anyone can pull off jumpstarting Linux as a gaming platform, it's Valve.
Slashdot Mirror
... that they made absolutely no effort to refute the rumor. At this point, I think it's pretty safe to say that their only objection is to how the guy said what he did, but they still are going to proceed with it.
You do realize that Jobs was the one who said "people don't know what they want"? Apple is the #1 perpetrator of dictating to users what they "should" want.
No, that just gives them ammunition. They can see download counts, look for unauthorized server connections, etc. From this, they deduce that the reason their titles aren't selling well is because of piracy, not because of the way they're designing their games and treating their users. And what does that lead to? More extreme anti-piracy measures, of course!
Don't play them at all. Just avoid them altogether. Instead play games from companies that Get It. Then they'll have nobody to blame but themselves.
I guarantee you that PayPal is already sending the government all the information that they're asking for.
The point is that it shifts the blame slightly. With age verification, they have the ability to say "we restrict based on age, THAT KID is the one who lied, blame them!".
If the entire market went down, there would be no reason to fire him in 2009. EA going down was expected at that time, the reason he got fired is because he was completely unable to bring it back up again while the market has completely recovered and is hitting new records.
The screen is larger, but the overall dimensions of the phone are actually very slightly smaller.
No, the hard part is getting people to pay for things that they're used to getting for free. Slashdot has a rabid anti-ad base, so of course ideas like this are popular here, but give any typical person the choice between a free, ad-supported site and one that uses microtransactions and the vast majority of people will choose the former.
"Free" is always the right price point from a user's perspective, and people have shown time and time again that, even with very heavy strings attached, they'll choose a free option over a paid one (even here! go ahead and look up the statistics about how many people pay to disable ads). For-pay only works when there's no viable alternative.
Why else would the internet have evolved this way? This is the model that most benefits both users and site owners.
Honest question: do you know anything about online advertising?
The reason it's so popular and successful is that it's trackable - you can see, for every dollar spent on advertising, what the return is on that investment. This makes it trivial to address the problem of "wasted" advertising funds since you have a direct connection between any specific ad/placement combination and a customer's purchases.
Online ads are so successful and profitable because they're the first form of advertisement where you can actually prove it's working.
The idea of lobbying, in itself, is not bad. Corporate lobbying, even, isn't necessarily bad. Corporations are just a group of people, and they're having a small set of people bring their concerns before the government representatives. This can be done for very good things, as well - Google lobbies very heavily for a free and open internet, and has been instrumental in things like shutting down SOPA.
The real problem comes in when less honest entities confuse "lobbying" and "bribing", and when (on purpose or by design) they confuse the lobbyist's interest with the public interest.
This is just the start - what are you going to do when the technology progresses further and this is all built into a contact lens? Or a cybernetic eyeball? Power and storage technologies will have increased greatly by then as well, so in 20 years you could have people trading in their biological eyes for electronic ones that are always recording, can zoom, provide facial recognition, etc.
The march of technology is not going to stop just because some are uncomfortable with it, and the visibility of that technology is only going to get lower. At some point the world is going to have to accept that public = public domain, simply because they won't have much of a choice. Today's notion of "privacy" isn't going to last much further into the future.
Why not?
At my job, almost every tool I use is an internal webapp, and I SSH / NX into my workstation from my laptop to get a command line, run Eclipse, etc. I could replace my Thinkpad with a Pixel and still run at 100% capacity. (it's a bit overkill for my needs, but the Thinkpad wasn't exactly cheap, either)
Many, many, many people have computers at work only for use with internal webapps and document editing (which can be done through webapps). Why wouldn't the Pixel work for them?
Why? I can see how this would be disastrous in multiplayer, but in single player, being able to buy things to avoid having to grind for them isn't bad, assuming:
1) The cost is reasonable.
2) They don't screw with the game mechanics to make people more likely to want to purchase things.
3) The same content can be unlocked with effort/talent rather than money.
I can think of several games (JRPGs are notoriously bad with this) where to get a certain item or to get to a certain boss, the process was basically "spend 10 hours doing mindless tasks". Currently, there are two choices: don't see the content, or spend valuable time on meaningless tasks unlocking it. Microtransactions provide a third choice.
Again, I want to reiterate that this should always be OPTIONAL, and that the mechanics of the game shouldn't be changed to force people into it. Traditional games should not be turned into Zynga abusefests.
Things in the legal world are not cut and dry. They need flexibility to deal with people who commit the same crimes but under different circumstances, and it's impossible to write all those circumstances into law.
Ex: how would you sentence:
1) someone who committed a premeditated murder because they were crazy
2) someone who committed a premeditated murder because they knew the target was going to kill their family
3) someone who committed a premeditated murder because they were paid to do it
4) someone who committed a premeditated murder because of gang-related reasons
5) someone who committed a premeditated murder because they just like to kill
It runs ChromeOS, not just Chrome. There's a difference there, though it's subtle. Also, there's no reason you couldn't install Linux on this thing. People are already doing it with current computers. ... but there's no reason this Chrome be a "real OS". Do a quick search for Native Client and you'll see. I've played Bastion in my browser using it, and if I wasn't in Chrome, I'd have no reason to believe it wasn't native. As more and more applications get written using it, this distinction will become nonexistent.
you'd have thought they could've done better than a Celeron and 4.25 hours of battery life
Look at the newest Samsung one, then: ARM processor and 6-8 hours battery life. I have one and it's a great little piece of equipment. ... and the 10" form factor was terrible. Screen too small for keeping at arm's length, and don't even get me started on the reduced-size keyboards.
It's not just about the money. You get:
1) Assurance that you'll actually get paid instead of completely ripped off.
2) Assurance that you won't be found out and brought up on legal charges.
3) The publicity that comes with Google publishing your name as someone who's better than they are at finding vulnerabilities.
4) The money.
The notable thing is that he's the one threatening patent lawsuits. Whatever you think of the situation itself, this is far and away the most dickish thing present.
The people where? I have literally never seen a Huawei or ZTE device in real life.
Companies cannot move money around easily. If a US company made their profits in an Irish subsidary, that money has to stay with the Irish subsidary. They can't bring it back into the US without paying a giant repatriation tax. ... so actually it's quite similar to your example.
They weren't really no-shows, either. Who do you think is providing the software that runs on those phones? The same big name companies that were supposedly "absent".
Exactly. People still have freedom of the press, the problem is that they're pissing off the person who owns their press.
That's what you get when you sell out to a large media company.
Knowing how bitcoin schemes tend to work, one of two things is going to happen:
1) The poker site will be a scam and will steal everyone's bitcoins.
2) The poker site will be hacked and everyone's bitcoins will be stolen.
I'm sure the three people using windows rt are grateful.
... it's not a console. It's a gaming PC in a convenient form factor for putting in an entertainment center and hooking up to your TV. There are many people out there who don't want to go through the hassle of putting together their own PC, and existing premade / custom gaming PCs are much more expensive than this.
Sending it out with Linux preinstalled is a gamble, but they've already said that there will be nothing preventing people from putting Windows on it. And if anyone can pull off jumpstarting Linux as a gaming platform, it's Valve.