“The worst-case scenario is that it doesn’t work and we’re no worse off”
No, the worse case scenario is that criminality adapts and becomes not only harder to combat because criminals are motivated to think outside of the box, but also harder to avoid (i.e. by avoiding high-crime areas because criminals now know to cover larger areas). In this scenario, crime may go down slightly as the less resourceful criminals get swept up, but crime also becomes a more widespread problem as criminals attempt to avoid the expected patterns.
I don't think touch/tilt is limited to "very casual games". Rather, I think that they work very well for very different styles of gaming. For anything that requires precise pointing (for targeting or placing objects), touch works pretty well. I much prefer tilt for steering a driving game than using a d-pad. However, anything that requires a D-pad or fast button reaction is (for me) pretty much un-playable with touchscreen buttons.
IMO, touch/tilt gaming appears to have tremendous momentum because it has been able to capitalize on perviously un-tapped potential in game types that were never fully explored on other handhelds. They represented a chance for devs try ideas that had not been possible or worth pursuing, and delivered novel experiences. However, as you well note, touch/tilt suffers from similar limitations. There are many types of games that can not be executed well without buttons.
I think that handheld consoles are much more likely to absorb the control features of smartphones than the other way around (especially anything from Apple).
That's like asking whether getting an MBA in your 20s will be more beneficial from both career and competence perspectives than spending 10 years building actual businesses.
Their complaint is that impression before the make the offer is that if they make your app free you'll be getting 20% of the list still and that's the impression amazon app store users have too.
The part that I emphasized seems to me to be the only issue of contention -- the supposed value of users believing that developers get 20% of list if they download an app for free. To a developer, these are people who don't want to pay you anything out of their own pocket. Their value is what, now?
Amazon told them in advance that they would get 0% of revenue (which would be $0, anyway). Amazon repeated this when they asked for confirmation. They recieved $0.
The only problem is an apparent error in the reporting which stated $54,800 in revenue on $0 of sales. But that is the only contradiction here.
Is this a good deal for developers? I don't know. Is Amazon screwing developers out of promised revenue with "secret back-door deals"? I see no evidence here.
. . . and the rationale "The number one reason we did this was because we were told it wouldn’t be possible” is THE reason why we as mankind are still innovative (okay, "because I can" is similar important)
Its also the reason why we are plagued by old problems that are either boring or mostly afflict the poor or otherwise powerless, while much of mankind's innovation is focused on re-solving glamours or lucrative problems, creating attention-seeking gimmicks and other stupid-human-tricks.
My boss is a planetary geologist and a member of the Mars Exploration Rover team, and when the nominal 90 day mission ended, I asked him how long the work we did with each rover would take a competent human geologist to do. He replied, "a hard afternoon's worth of effort."
Even if that is true, what do you think will happen first even if we were committed to devoting serious resources to the endeavor?
1) More efficient remote robots 2) Practical human travel to Mars
Which will provide more practical benefit to life on Earth (or, potentially, on Mars)?
I used to think that was a good idea, but the car I have now with the steering wheel controls have such a bar across the steering wheel to house them all that I can't really drive comfortably with the 9-3 hand position required to use them.
The obvious solution is to add more buttons for steering input.
To people who actually use a product, their experiences using the said product likely far outweighs stupid quotes by CEO's they've never dealt with.
Question: among the average consumer, what percentage do you believe exploits the breadth of features in their chosen phone such that the experience could be distinguished among any alternative that is remotely functionally equivalent.
In other words, I would wager that most smart phone users rarely do much beyond basic features such as phone calls, texting, email, clock/alarm, browsing, very simple gaming. Among these, in which area does Apple really excel? Superior calling? Not a claim I have ever heard. Text-based communications? Not much wiggle room there, unless you happen to dislike on-screen keyboards. Clock/alarm? Please. Browsing? Games (with no physical buttons)?
Certainly, many people could be very happy with how all of these features work on their iPhone. The point is, where is there any opportunity for significant "experience" differentiation? I contend that there is very little. And if there isn't, what does drive brand appeal, if not marketing, perceived status symbolization and other factors that fellow brand-adherents are unlikely to acknowledge with much relish.
Every utterance that Apple makes is designed to sell you their next "revolutionary" product. Apple consumers are conditioned to believe a) that the next release will be waaaaay better than what they have now and b) support for what they have now will soon sunset anyway (or it will break or degrade in some way that is inconveniently expensive to fix), so its pointless to resist.
And sure, every consumer product company does this. Lest I be called an Apple "hater", note that I am acknowledging their superiority in this racket!
They're assuming that everyone has cheap, reliable, easily available broadband.
That flawed assumption being that a any businesses target market is "everyone".
All Netflix needs to have determined is that they can achieve their goals within the subset of the market that has cheap, reliable, easily available broadband.
I agree that affordable broadband is far from ubiquitous. Netflix's apparently desired business model will certainly count me out. But that may or may not mean anything with resect to the wisdom of their assumptions.
The article doesn't appear to compare these statistics with non-shift workers in the same field. I'm sure that shift work has its own issues, but the gist of the article is that shift work also correlates to "voiced daily concerns" about fairly common maladies among office workers. How does the 43% who complain daily about their weight, for example, compare to non-shift workers?
You misunderstand the definition of "right." In the US Constitution it means a person has the choice to do something free from government interference. You *may* own a gun, if you so desire. You may say, or write, whatever you wish without restriction. You may associate with whomever you choose. Nowhere in there does it say that the method to exercise that right will be provided, only that it is allowed without interference.
Not so fast. True, in certain instances, the understood "right" is as you describe. However, take the Sixth Amendment:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Every "right" guaranteed in the Sixth Amendment is provided by the government to the citizen exercising them.
Where does that have to do with broadband? I don't know. If The Constitution has anything to do with it, it is certainly going to be open to interpretation.
Not to mention you know how easily clothes get torn while working?
Not that easily when you do the kind of "work" that goes in to cooking up these kinds of ideas.
Wearable computers -- an idea prized by the type of people who move as little as possible and don't mind wearing the same ill-fitting clothes day after day.
So what's wrong with racial profiling if it accurately (e.g. passes statistical tests) for predicting crime rates in certain areas?
What is wrong with it is that law enforcement doesn't detain statistics about certain areas for questioning.
Racial profiling sounds reasonable enough until you are subjected to invasive, sometimes aggressive and always insulting interrogation simply because of the way you look (especially if the red-flag characteristics are things that you can't change).
Yes, you care about the name, 'cause when it goes wrong, you need to be able to call back and refer to "I talked to Suzy" - it once in a while does help.
When the name is an obvious pseudonym, and a generic one at that, I have little confidence that it will be useful for future reference.
If it helps, you were probably going to get help anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
“The worst-case scenario is that it doesn’t work and we’re no worse off”
No, the worse case scenario is that criminality adapts and becomes not only harder to combat because criminals are motivated to think outside of the box, but also harder to avoid (i.e. by avoiding high-crime areas because criminals now know to cover larger areas). In this scenario, crime may go down slightly as the less resourceful criminals get swept up, but crime also becomes a more widespread problem as criminals attempt to avoid the expected patterns.
I don't think touch/tilt is limited to "very casual games". Rather, I think that they work very well for very different styles of gaming. For anything that requires precise pointing (for targeting or placing objects), touch works pretty well. I much prefer tilt for steering a driving game than using a d-pad. However, anything that requires a D-pad or fast button reaction is (for me) pretty much un-playable with touchscreen buttons.
IMO, touch/tilt gaming appears to have tremendous momentum because it has been able to capitalize on perviously un-tapped potential in game types that were never fully explored on other handhelds. They represented a chance for devs try ideas that had not been possible or worth pursuing, and delivered novel experiences. However, as you well note, touch/tilt suffers from similar limitations. There are many types of games that can not be executed well without buttons.
I think that handheld consoles are much more likely to absorb the control features of smartphones than the other way around (especially anything from Apple).
Other reports are claiming that the device is extremely light and almost feels like that one is holding a plastic toy.
So now mobile devices that are light weight are assumed to be cheap? Interesting.
Interesting. I'm glad I asked!
Usability, yes. Career, no.
That's like asking whether getting an MBA in your 20s will be more beneficial from both career and competence perspectives than spending 10 years building actual businesses.
Just asking.
Can we please keep the pointless posts to a minimum?
Their complaint is that impression before the make the offer is that if they make your app free you'll be getting 20% of the list still and that's the impression amazon app store users have too.
The part that I emphasized seems to me to be the only issue of contention -- the supposed value of users believing that developers get 20% of list if they download an app for free. To a developer, these are people who don't want to pay you anything out of their own pocket. Their value is what, now?
Amazon told them in advance that they would get 0% of revenue (which would be $0, anyway). Amazon repeated this when they asked for confirmation. They recieved $0.
The only problem is an apparent error in the reporting which stated $54,800 in revenue on $0 of sales. But that is the only contradiction here.
Is this a good deal for developers? I don't know. Is Amazon screwing developers out of promised revenue with "secret back-door deals"? I see no evidence here.
. . . and the rationale "The number one reason we did this was because we were told it wouldn’t be possible” is THE reason why we as mankind are still innovative (okay, "because I can" is similar important)
Its also the reason why we are plagued by old problems that are either boring or mostly afflict the poor or otherwise powerless, while much of mankind's innovation is focused on re-solving glamours or lucrative problems, creating attention-seeking gimmicks and other stupid-human-tricks.
We are we so foolish as to allow this over and over again?
Big money is made when even bigger money moves from one place to another.
My boss is a planetary geologist and a member of the Mars Exploration Rover team, and when the nominal 90 day mission ended, I asked him how long the work we did with each rover would take a competent human geologist to do. He replied, "a hard afternoon's worth of effort."
Even if that is true, what do you think will happen first even if we were committed to devoting serious resources to the endeavor?
1) More efficient remote robots
2) Practical human travel to Mars
Which will provide more practical benefit to life on Earth (or, potentially, on Mars)?
I used to think that was a good idea, but the car I have now with the steering wheel controls have such a bar across the steering wheel to house them all that I can't really drive comfortably with the 9-3 hand position required to use them.
The obvious solution is to add more buttons for steering input.
It is almost definitely going to have the A5 processor from the iPad, which will be a big bump in speed.
What percentage of consumers do you imagine would read through that entire sentence, much less understand its meaning?
To people who actually use a product, their experiences using the said product likely far outweighs stupid quotes by CEO's they've never dealt with.
Question: among the average consumer, what percentage do you believe exploits the breadth of features in their chosen phone such that the experience could be distinguished among any alternative that is remotely functionally equivalent.
In other words, I would wager that most smart phone users rarely do much beyond basic features such as phone calls, texting, email, clock/alarm, browsing, very simple gaming. Among these, in which area does Apple really excel? Superior calling? Not a claim I have ever heard. Text-based communications? Not much wiggle room there, unless you happen to dislike on-screen keyboards. Clock/alarm? Please. Browsing? Games (with no physical buttons)?
Certainly, many people could be very happy with how all of these features work on their iPhone. The point is, where is there any opportunity for significant "experience" differentiation? I contend that there is very little. And if there isn't, what does drive brand appeal, if not marketing, perceived status symbolization and other factors that fellow brand-adherents are unlikely to acknowledge with much relish.
Every utterance that Apple makes is designed to sell you their next "revolutionary" product. Apple consumers are conditioned to believe a) that the next release will be waaaaay better than what they have now and b) support for what they have now will soon sunset anyway (or it will break or degrade in some way that is inconveniently expensive to fix), so its pointless to resist.
And sure, every consumer product company does this. Lest I be called an Apple "hater", note that I am acknowledging their superiority in this racket!
They're assuming that everyone has cheap, reliable, easily available broadband.
That flawed assumption being that a any businesses target market is "everyone".
All Netflix needs to have determined is that they can achieve their goals within the subset of the market that has cheap, reliable, easily available broadband.
I agree that affordable broadband is far from ubiquitous. Netflix's apparently desired business model will certainly count me out. But that may or may not mean anything with resect to the wisdom of their assumptions.
I've seen forums that are far less geek-elitist than slashdot, talk about facebook as the new AOL.
Such as? And please link to the posts as well.
Just go to AOL keyword: Facebook
Deposits? Pneumatic tube to the abacus room.
The article doesn't appear to compare these statistics with non-shift workers in the same field. I'm sure that shift work has its own issues, but the gist of the article is that shift work also correlates to "voiced daily concerns" about fairly common maladies among office workers. How does the 43% who complain daily about their weight, for example, compare to non-shift workers?
You misunderstand the definition of "right." In the US Constitution it means a person has the choice to do something free from government interference. You *may* own a gun, if you so desire. You may say, or write, whatever you wish without restriction. You may associate with whomever you choose. Nowhere in there does it say that the method to exercise that right will be provided, only that it is allowed without interference.
Not so fast. True, in certain instances, the understood "right" is as you describe. However, take the Sixth Amendment:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Every "right" guaranteed in the Sixth Amendment is provided by the government to the citizen exercising them.
Where does that have to do with broadband? I don't know. If The Constitution has anything to do with it, it is certainly going to be open to interpretation.
Not to mention you know how easily clothes get torn while working?
Not that easily when you do the kind of "work" that goes in to cooking up these kinds of ideas.
Wearable computers -- an idea prized by the type of people who move as little as possible and don't mind wearing the same ill-fitting clothes day after day.
Sure they're safe. Go outside in the morning. See that big yellow ball in the sky? That's a fusion reactor.
That big, "safe", yellow ball that causes so much skin cancer?
So what's wrong with racial profiling if it accurately (e.g. passes statistical tests) for predicting crime rates in certain areas?
What is wrong with it is that law enforcement doesn't detain statistics about certain areas for questioning.
Racial profiling sounds reasonable enough until you are subjected to invasive, sometimes aggressive and always insulting interrogation simply because of the way you look (especially if the red-flag characteristics are things that you can't change).
Yes, you care about the name, 'cause when it goes wrong, you need to be able to call back and refer to "I talked to Suzy" - it once in a while does help.
When the name is an obvious pseudonym, and a generic one at that, I have little confidence that it will be useful for future reference.
If it helps, you were probably going to get help anyway.