Hell how about maybe making downloading a felony and give uploaders a mandatory jail sentence. The more extreme the more likely the lazy ass stupid sheep that still put up with this garbage will stop buying the crap the RIAA is peddling and learn that music is a personal experience not just accepting what some dude in a suit with lots of money thinks you should listen to. I stopped buying CD's and stopped listening to the radio years ago, if more stood up and did the same you would find that the RIAA would be rendered powerless pretty quickly. Just like politics, lots of people want to bitch and complain but very few have the balls to actually do their part...then they use the excuse that no one else is so why bother.
I would agree if it were straight forward, so far what I have seen under 10.1 has been less than stellar, most of the major flash sites and applets that I see people quoting as "needs" don't work properly. Website animations are fine and advertising now works for the most part...but thats stuff I would normally try to block or skip over. Unfortunately the more complex stuff is mostly mapped to a keyboard mouse layout so its generally broken right off the bat.
This is the same whiney argument I hear from gamers who think the Wii is the devil. The slate computers that are coming out now are focused on the non technical and a certain segment of the geek community feels slighted. Many seem to be offended that in the end the lack of usb, memory card slots, camera and whatever features geeks cried about didn't really matter, couple that with the lack of a "real OS" being seen as a plus by the majority of people actually buying the devices and suddenly the "geek" is out of the support loop. Many geeks talk about their utopian society where everyone is technically adept and support requirements are minimal but very few actually want it.
There is no one to really blame but ourselves, just like hardcore gamers, our demands and expectations made us an unfavorable market, catering to the "casual" is less expensive, less demanding and far more profitable.
The belief that any plans to place advertising into ebooks would result in lower prices is fooling themselves. Look at what has happened in the video game market, not only have in game ads become the norm but many of the newer games that use them are coming out at higher prices. The likely scenario is that ads will be thrown in gradually, prices will stay the same and ad free versions will be offered for a higher premium.
The problem with modern game settings is that someone is always going to be offended. Even in the best most fair cases its still the digital equivalent of picking at scabs. I know many just pass it off as a game, but I will admit that it makes me uncomfortable to trivialize the current situation in the middle east knowing that I have friends and family that are playing the "game" every day and don't get several lives and power up's to do so. EA is of course correct in that if there are people playing one side there have to be people playing the other side as well...the question is should we really be playing at all?
Im usually not pro regulation, but in this case I cant see how doing nothing is pro-consumer. The arguments about regulation stifling innovation would have made more sense 15 years but today its usually just small companies creating stuff that gets bought up by the big companies. The costs are already passed to the consumers so its not like regulation would make that any different, if anything it would encourage the companies to actually become competitive and put some effort into support and network quality rather than just sitting back and enjoying their monopoly knowing that in many areas you have no choice.
In the area I live, I have 2 choices for Internet access, Time Warner or AT&T, i can opt for 3rd parties for DSL but have to pay local loop and access charges that make 3rd party solutions more than twice as expensive. Many parts of town have one or the other but not both. The rural areas south of me have no choice other than hughes net since the cable and phone companies don't feel expansion out that way is worth their time and money. Both the cable and phone company bundle their services to the point where the "cheap" access ($30 a month) is barely better than dial up. The area is so over subscribed and even on a good day in the off peak hours I rarely get half the advertised speeds. I support my clients via vpn connections and regularly do offsite backups, etc. I was forced to move from a residential connection to a business class because according to the cable company I used too much bandwidth. I now pay around $100 a month for a slower connection than I had 5 years ago and each year sees an increase in prices of at least a couple bucks.
I was involved in a project years back to attempt to bring municipal wifi to our downtown area, the cable and phone companies pitched a fit and managed to block it. 3 years ago a second cable company tried to expand into the area, it too was blocked.
The US model of telecommunications is extremely flawed IMHO, between locked carriers, subsidized phones, local carrier monopolies, and free reign to change the "rules" at any time the current model is a mess and as is there is absolutely no hope of it getting better.
The biggest problem I see is that the carriers want the best of both worlds, they want us to pay for their buildouts and upgrades through tiffs and tax incentives, but then want to be the sole provider as well. Rather than spend money expanding capacity, they throw in caps to artificially increase capacity while at the same time advertise streaming media, online gaming and other bandwidth intensive things as the reason to get them in the first place. I cant see things really improving until something changes.
No wonder people still believe the brown note myth. If there are enough suckers to believe this someone should really market these "beats" played backwards as a way to sober up their musically high children...
Well surely if music can make you high then the myth of the brown note cant really be a myth. Seriously if they believe that someone should just come up with one that plays backwards and tell the concerned parents that it will sober their kids up.
Cant wait to see mythbusters get ahold of this one.
The capacity limits are of their own doing though. Back years ago I was an engineer for a wireless company, we had formulas for oversubscribing but were regularly told to ignore them. Profits are far more preferred to infrastructure. Of course that same company took a huge hit and went on a rather rapid decline for the last 6-7 years...they appear to be turning around but only because of investment in infrastructure and better capacity due to a greatly reduced subscriber rate.
Consumers cant be expected to meter their usage when they are constantly bombarded with "look our wireless can stream movies and music and you can video chat with grandma", perhaps comercials for data services should be required to have big warnings like cigarette packs (Warning usage of this service as advertised could result in excessive billing).
At least on the surface it sounds like Nature has far more to loose in this venture in creative pricing than UC does. Loosing editorial staff, reviewers and submissions because you want to charge them more to provide your content just sounds rather backwards.
So where were you when HP Pushed their slates last time around? It failed and it wasnt HP's first attempt in fact it was its 3rd. Others have tried as well like Motion Computing, Panasonic and AIS. None have ever been able to garner more than a niche market. Geeks say they want them but they dont actually buy and use them in enough numbers to really make it worth a manufacturers time and money.
I have a couple HP TC1100's here, they have 1.2ghz centrinos, 2 gigs of ram, 160 gig harddrives, shipped with xp tablet edition but they can run windows 7 as well as any netbook, but they collect dust now since they are just not practical. Im hoping to get my ipad in a couple weeks, it does just enough to be useful, has a decent battery life, and is simple enough my wife and kids and use it without having to bug me about if its ok to click on this or that.
Because Microsoft does not make its own hardware...it licenses its software to other vendors. If MS were to release a self contained PC/OS of their own they would be allowed to lock it down as tightly as they wanted.
My point is that buying another product sends a message to the company far more than raving like a lunatic....most of the time all the does is get people who might be open to an "informed decision" tune out as the ranters just get labeled as haters.
Im sure Apple is well aware that some people want flash...guess what....they don't care...they have a roadmap for their products if your not a target consumer it really doesn't matter to them, but you can bet that if the iphone sales dropped and Apple found flash as a primary reason they would bend over backwards to get it running on them.
Its the lack of objectivity that polarizes people...usually against the ranter. Its nothing like voting is more akin to the Taliban thinking that sending in a suicide bomber will get more people on their side.
I dont understand why people seem insistent that everything they want should be included in a companies product, its not like there are not other choices. There are tons of phones and tablets out there to choose from, if Flash is a sticking point, why not get a competitors product? If say the Droid started outselling the iPhone don't you think Apple would get the hint and suddenly find Flash was important? If it doesn't happen would you also be able to summize the the masses really don't care? Its a path Apple has chosen, if you don't agree, find something else, its pretty simple.
You say that as if its a bad thing...I would bet that the majority of gamers would rather have a less expensive console purely for gaming than the expensive swiss army knife consoles we have today....why do you think the Wii is absolutely crushing the PS3 and 360.
wow that wasn't misleading at all
on
DIY 80GB iPod Touch
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Where's the hack? Reads more like a commercial to me.
After seeing the scrabble demo I couldnt help but think that cards games especially CCG's like Magic, Pokemon or whatever else is popular now could be a great use of this. Sort and manage your deck on the handheld then play the cards by "flicking" them towards the slate. Add in some animated "battles" and you could really have a cool new way to play without loosing the traditional gameplay elements. Booster packs could be sold online so you could customize the deck.
I really want to see an archon/battle chess refresh as well. Kinda weird to think of a slate as being a social object but now that its out there I can see the possibilities . I had always figured MS's surface would be the first out of the gate with something like that, but it looks like HP, Apple and Archos are beating them to the punch with the added bonus of portability.
Re:The end of homebrew
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
I remember those days...I had a Sinclair my father and I put together. I was the only person I knew with a computer, friends were impressed but though of it more as a toy than a tool. Sure gear today is less hands on, but its also more accessible to the masses and much more powerful and complex. Cars were once simple enough that just about anyone could tinker with them as well...but the performance, horsepower and luxuries we take for granted today were not available. Thats just the cost of progress. Would anyone really want to go back? I have a friend who is a bit of an elitist, he likes to ramble on about how much better it was back in the "good ol days" but fails to understand that without mass acceptance the things he likes such as facebook, aim, linked in, craigslist, etc, wouldn't exist.
Sure and they are free to lock it back...if thats a cat and mouse game you want to play its fine...but when you do so your pretty much on your own. Most people I see just whine about it rather than accept that.
Probably because there has to be enough of a market for it to justify the shelf space? It sounds nice to think that if Best Buy or whatever would make a space for say Linux games that the masses would just gravitate to it, but the reality is that store shelf space is a premium that cant be obtained without some marketing muscle or proven track record, neither of which can be said for any open platform.
While things like pandora are nice for us...for the masses they are just a lump of plastic with little purpose.
It became at topic at one of the GDC sessions, rumor there was that a lawsuit was coming and several key developers seemed pretty confident about it...thats why I said pending. I guess I should have said "possible".
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Hell how about maybe making downloading a felony and give uploaders a mandatory jail sentence. The more extreme the more likely the lazy ass stupid sheep that still put up with this garbage will stop buying the crap the RIAA is peddling and learn that music is a personal experience not just accepting what some dude in a suit with lots of money thinks you should listen to. I stopped buying CD's and stopped listening to the radio years ago, if more stood up and did the same you would find that the RIAA would be rendered powerless pretty quickly. Just like politics, lots of people want to bitch and complain but very few have the balls to actually do their part...then they use the excuse that no one else is so why bother.
I would agree if it were straight forward, so far what I have seen under 10.1 has been less than stellar, most of the major flash sites and applets that I see people quoting as "needs" don't work properly. Website animations are fine and advertising now works for the most part...but thats stuff I would normally try to block or skip over. Unfortunately the more complex stuff is mostly mapped to a keyboard mouse layout so its generally broken right off the bat.
This is the same whiney argument I hear from gamers who think the Wii is the devil. The slate computers that are coming out now are focused on the non technical and a certain segment of the geek community feels slighted. Many seem to be offended that in the end the lack of usb, memory card slots, camera and whatever features geeks cried about didn't really matter, couple that with the lack of a "real OS" being seen as a plus by the majority of people actually buying the devices and suddenly the "geek" is out of the support loop. Many geeks talk about their utopian society where everyone is technically adept and support requirements are minimal but very few actually want it.
There is no one to really blame but ourselves, just like hardcore gamers, our demands and expectations made us an unfavorable market, catering to the "casual" is less expensive, less demanding and far more profitable.
The belief that any plans to place advertising into ebooks would result in lower prices is fooling themselves. Look at what has happened in the video game market, not only have in game ads become the norm but many of the newer games that use them are coming out at higher prices. The likely scenario is that ads will be thrown in gradually, prices will stay the same and ad free versions will be offered for a higher premium.
The problem with modern game settings is that someone is always going to be offended. Even in the best most fair cases its still the digital equivalent of picking at scabs. I know many just pass it off as a game, but I will admit that it makes me uncomfortable to trivialize the current situation in the middle east knowing that I have friends and family that are playing the "game" every day and don't get several lives and power up's to do so. EA is of course correct in that if there are people playing one side there have to be people playing the other side as well...the question is should we really be playing at all?
They were probably just worried that "prayer" might prove more effective than the typical geek squad employee and cut into business.
Im usually not pro regulation, but in this case I cant see how doing nothing is pro-consumer. The arguments about regulation stifling innovation would have made more sense 15 years but today its usually just small companies creating stuff that gets bought up by the big companies. The costs are already passed to the consumers so its not like regulation would make that any different, if anything it would encourage the companies to actually become competitive and put some effort into support and network quality rather than just sitting back and enjoying their monopoly knowing that in many areas you have no choice.
In the area I live, I have 2 choices for Internet access, Time Warner or AT&T, i can opt for 3rd parties for DSL but have to pay local loop and access charges that make 3rd party solutions more than twice as expensive. Many parts of town have one or the other but not both. The rural areas south of me have no choice other than hughes net since the cable and phone companies don't feel expansion out that way is worth their time and money. Both the cable and phone company bundle their services to the point where the "cheap" access ($30 a month) is barely better than dial up. The area is so over subscribed and even on a good day in the off peak hours I rarely get half the advertised speeds. I support my clients via vpn connections and regularly do offsite backups, etc. I was forced to move from a residential connection to a business class because according to the cable company I used too much bandwidth. I now pay around $100 a month for a slower connection than I had 5 years ago and each year sees an increase in prices of at least a couple bucks.
I was involved in a project years back to attempt to bring municipal wifi to our downtown area, the cable and phone companies pitched a fit and managed to block it. 3 years ago a second cable company tried to expand into the area, it too was blocked.
The US model of telecommunications is extremely flawed IMHO, between locked carriers, subsidized phones, local carrier monopolies, and free reign to change the "rules" at any time the current model is a mess and as is there is absolutely no hope of it getting better.
The biggest problem I see is that the carriers want the best of both worlds, they want us to pay for their buildouts and upgrades through tiffs and tax incentives, but then want to be the sole provider as well. Rather than spend money expanding capacity, they throw in caps to artificially increase capacity while at the same time advertise streaming media, online gaming and other bandwidth intensive things as the reason to get them in the first place. I cant see things really improving until something changes.
No wonder people still believe the brown note myth. If there are enough suckers to believe this someone should really market these "beats" played backwards as a way to sober up their musically high children...
Well surely if music can make you high then the myth of the brown note cant really be a myth. Seriously if they believe that someone should just come up with one that plays backwards and tell the concerned parents that it will sober their kids up.
Cant wait to see mythbusters get ahold of this one.
Not really...there is no payola on the internet
So how long until we see someone attempt to exploit this?
The capacity limits are of their own doing though. Back years ago I was an engineer for a wireless company, we had formulas for oversubscribing but were regularly told to ignore them. Profits are far more preferred to infrastructure. Of course that same company took a huge hit and went on a rather rapid decline for the last 6-7 years...they appear to be turning around but only because of investment in infrastructure and better capacity due to a greatly reduced subscriber rate.
Consumers cant be expected to meter their usage when they are constantly bombarded with "look our wireless can stream movies and music and you can video chat with grandma", perhaps comercials for data services should be required to have big warnings like cigarette packs (Warning usage of this service as advertised could result in excessive billing).
At least on the surface it sounds like Nature has far more to loose in this venture in creative pricing than UC does. Loosing editorial staff, reviewers and submissions because you want to charge them more to provide your content just sounds rather backwards.
So where were you when HP Pushed their slates last time around? It failed and it wasnt HP's first attempt in fact it was its 3rd. Others have tried as well like Motion Computing, Panasonic and AIS. None have ever been able to garner more than a niche market. Geeks say they want them but they dont actually buy and use them in enough numbers to really make it worth a manufacturers time and money.
I have a couple HP TC1100's here, they have 1.2ghz centrinos, 2 gigs of ram, 160 gig harddrives, shipped with xp tablet edition but they can run windows 7 as well as any netbook, but they collect dust now since they are just not practical. Im hoping to get my ipad in a couple weeks, it does just enough to be useful, has a decent battery life, and is simple enough my wife and kids and use it without having to bug me about if its ok to click on this or that.
Because Microsoft does not make its own hardware...it licenses its software to other vendors. If MS were to release a self contained PC/OS of their own they would be allowed to lock it down as tightly as they wanted.
My point is that buying another product sends a message to the company far more than raving like a lunatic....most of the time all the does is get people who might be open to an "informed decision" tune out as the ranters just get labeled as haters.
Im sure Apple is well aware that some people want flash...guess what....they don't care...they have a roadmap for their products if your not a target consumer it really doesn't matter to them, but you can bet that if the iphone sales dropped and Apple found flash as a primary reason they would bend over backwards to get it running on them.
Its the lack of objectivity that polarizes people...usually against the ranter. Its nothing like voting is more akin to the Taliban thinking that sending in a suicide bomber will get more people on their side.
I dont understand why people seem insistent that everything they want should be included in a companies product, its not like there are not other choices. There are tons of phones and tablets out there to choose from, if Flash is a sticking point, why not get a competitors product? If say the Droid started outselling the iPhone don't you think Apple would get the hint and suddenly find Flash was important? If it doesn't happen would you also be able to summize the the masses really don't care? Its a path Apple has chosen, if you don't agree, find something else, its pretty simple.
You say that as if its a bad thing...I would bet that the majority of gamers would rather have a less expensive console purely for gaming than the expensive swiss army knife consoles we have today....why do you think the Wii is absolutely crushing the PS3 and 360.
Where's the hack? Reads more like a commercial to me.
After seeing the scrabble demo I couldnt help but think that cards games especially CCG's like Magic, Pokemon or whatever else is popular now could be a great use of this. Sort and manage your deck on the handheld then play the cards by "flicking" them towards the slate. Add in some animated "battles" and you could really have a cool new way to play without loosing the traditional gameplay elements. Booster packs could be sold online so you could customize the deck.
I really want to see an archon/battle chess refresh as well. Kinda weird to think of a slate as being a social object but now that its out there I can see the possibilities . I had always figured MS's surface would be the first out of the gate with something like that, but it looks like HP, Apple and Archos are beating them to the punch with the added bonus of portability.
I remember those days...I had a Sinclair my father and I put together. I was the only person I knew with a computer, friends were impressed but though of it more as a toy than a tool. Sure gear today is less hands on, but its also more accessible to the masses and much more powerful and complex. Cars were once simple enough that just about anyone could tinker with them as well...but the performance, horsepower and luxuries we take for granted today were not available. Thats just the cost of progress. Would anyone really want to go back? I have a friend who is a bit of an elitist, he likes to ramble on about how much better it was back in the "good ol days" but fails to understand that without mass acceptance the things he likes such as facebook, aim, linked in, craigslist, etc, wouldn't exist.
Thats a scary thought...better be careful about who we get to play Peter.
Sure and they are free to lock it back...if thats a cat and mouse game you want to play its fine...but when you do so your pretty much on your own. Most people I see just whine about it rather than accept that.
Probably because there has to be enough of a market for it to justify the shelf space? It sounds nice to think that if Best Buy or whatever would make a space for say Linux games that the masses would just gravitate to it, but the reality is that store shelf space is a premium that cant be obtained without some marketing muscle or proven track record, neither of which can be said for any open platform.
While things like pandora are nice for us...for the masses they are just a lump of plastic with little purpose.
It became at topic at one of the GDC sessions, rumor there was that a lawsuit was coming and several key developers seemed pretty confident about it...thats why I said pending. I guess I should have said "possible".