For the people who use desktops as their main computer(s) but would like something to read books/idly browse the web from the couch, etc, $500-$1000 is ridiculous.
And I think there's a large enough market of these sort of people.
Then again, I'm in development, not sales, so I'm probably wrong.
Looking at the articles and pics of it, it does indeed have a colour screen.
And your statement brings out my real question:
If india can make a working tablet for $35 that, while probably underpowered, can do web, email, and wordprocessing,
Why are the big companies cheapest products $200 or more?
Hopefully, after (if) these get rolled out in India, the other manufacturers will start competing a little harder.
Also, if this Indian tablet supports flash, I'll have a nice little chuckle.
Hehe, I have a job, a wife, and a house/apartment. Few friends, though (Pro Tip: don't move countries to marry your girlfriend, you'll probably come to despise her after a couple of years (like most marriages, imho) and you'll have no friends/family to fall back on)
I still have no life.
Sounds to me like the company just looks at GS without checkign out raid experience or actual skill:/
WoW should have taught you thet.
You're just gonna have to grind...
Hehe, I used to run the old 40man raids in one of the top guilds pushing new content.
I now run a (much smaller, albeit) group of people at a company.
Running the hardcore raids taught me how to be hard on people, which has been invaluable in my job.
Before I started running raids on WoW I was hard-pressed to be hurtful to anyone, and while it still is difficult, I learned the necessity of it.
It also taught me (as a Warr/Prot/Tank and Priest/Disc/Healer) that others could be more knowledgable of their specific skills (ie. Feral/Druid/DPS) than I, and how to respect that.
As a quick example of the above, I am responsible for a couple of graphic desiners, and while I studied the principles at university, and have passing skill and familiarity with the process, I don't know as much about it (let alone more) than they do, even if they are resources I need to manage.
I also learned that you have to make 'hard decisions' and that standing by them, right or wrong, and taking the responsibility is more valuable than backing down/not making the decisions in a timely fashion.
But, on the same note, I think being the captain of a football team, or a coach, or organising a sucessful college frat party may give a lot of the same skills. I was just never captain of a sports team (although I was in a half a dozen when I was younger) and never in a frat (I didn't go to school/uni in the USA), so I learned somewhere else
Sure, none of these activities (WoW Included) taught me much of how to be a development manager, but it did teach me some generic management related skills I have managed to apply to many aspects of my job.
I wouldn't have even posted this, but for your italic emphasis in your post about how there was nothing of value...
I play WoW, and I'm a skinny, employeed loser.
I'd much prefer being fat and unemployed and able to play games all day.
I'd still be a loser, but I'd get to eat whatever I want whenever I want to, and have a ton more free time.
I think you'll find that 'fat unemployed' losers are the cliche minority. Most of us have noone to support us being fat and unemployed
If you're talking about teenagers, well, most of them are unemployed anyway, and depending on where you live, etc, most of them are fat also, either from diet, or watching too much TV/Sitting on the computer (for whatever reason) too long, etc.
And, honestly, almost everyone is a 'loser' from someone's perspective.
You'll probably find, however, that most people (not all) in hiring positions are 15-20 years behind the times themselves, or have focused on career to the exclusion of having time for hobbies like computer gaming.
So 'the times' themselves are really 15-20 years in lag. MMO gaming has really only been around for ~10 years, so it'll be another 5-10 years before this kind of quality gets any significant level of recognition.
I'm thinking in 10 years there will probably still be the same kind of MMO involvement (and I'll be level 230 in WoW), and this kind of thing may be a little more commonplace, however, when random person X is applying for a professional job, odds are this person will have a lot of relevant qualifications to that specific job.
Odds are small, however, that this person will be one of the few that is a guild leader in an MMO (Even assuming half the people in the world play MMOs, which is a huge amount, I can't find a figure online, but there's about 7 billion people in the world, and 11 million WoW accounts, meaning that less then 0.2% of the worlds population plays WoW, I figure when you factor in age demographics of people applying for jobs, and add in other MMOs you might get that up to 1 or 2% chance that the person plays an MMO.
I'm also assuming that less than 1% of MMO players are leaders of significant guilds, which brings us back to something like 1/1000 job applicants (and I think that is very generous) would have any sort of gaming experience that helps them do their job. Assuming every one of them put it on their resume, most companies would see this rarely, if at all, as compared to 'relevant qualifications' they'd see in the majority of applicants.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: I doubt it will ever be relevant, especially when you consider the odds that the hiring individual has firsthand knowledge (or even anecdoral) of the value... I thinking when it all comes down (and if the math were accurate) it'd be a proverbial '1 in a million' chance that guild leadership (or similar) factored in to a job application.
I think that if Apple released any version of their OS for other hardware, hackers would use it as a tool to get the official Mac OS to work on other hardware, then there'd be comparisons on how cheap hardware performs as compared to Mac hardware, and suddenly Mac would be looking even more overpriced than it already is... and I don't see Apple taking that risk.
The difference between Google and Apple is that Google appears to care more about us and less about their bottom line than Apple does.
Sure, it could be spin-doctoring, but looking at where and how Google spends it's money as compared to Apple, and looking at the effort Apple puts into marketing as compared to Google, I'm thinking the picture is fairly clear to most of us.
Besides. Google is an advertising company, yet it consistantly expands our freedom/access. Apple is not an advertising company, yet consistantly limits/binds it's customers...
And this is why I prefer to watch pirated video streamed off the net of DVDs I own over the DVDs themselves.
Then again, I don't own a HDTV, so I'm not losing picture quality.
I also recently signed up to netflix, as it streams (older seasons) of TV shows at full quality, without any annoying forced ads/previews. (Even watching TV shows on that I own seasons of on DVD for the same reason) I just wish they had the latest released seasons, and even current TV.
I don't mind watching ads for stuff I get free (I haven't clicked the 'Disable Advertising' checkbox that slashdot has been offering me for the last few months due to somethingorother, as/. is free (I don't subscribe) so I don't spit them their ads, but when I pay for something... thats a whole other story.
I do understand that pricing is sometimes subsidised by advertising, so you pay less than you would for something with a little advertising, but that just irritates me. If I'm going to pay for it I'll pay full price for no ads/DRM/whatever, thankyouverymuch.
I put 'wake up and smell the coffee' in quotes. (with an extra quote in the middle as I wasn't yet fully woken/smellerized when I posted it)
a) I wasn't literally implying a caffeine fix, just that their thinking become clearer throughout the day (in fact, this process has become slightly slower for me since I quit caffeine)
b) Even if I did mean it literally, I don't think inhaling the scent of coffee gives you much of a caffeine fix/addiction
If I was modded up for suggesting caffeine as the cause, you can take it off (although I guess there may be a little truth in that aspect); If I was modded up for the actual meaning of the observation, then 'Glad someone read and understood my post'.
I think it's much more likely that people try to be more optomistic in the morning, but gradually become more realistic as they finally 'wake up and 'smell the coffee'
The problem with it is that it works.
The more people you get to see your listing, the mor eclick on it, and the more that end up giving you their money (through whatever method)
Thus, modern SEO works to give their customers the best value for their money, which, currently, is higher matches for their chosen keywords.
Do keep in mind, however, that these keywords typically have to be fairly relevant for the rest of it to work. The best SEO companies don't go about rating 'home improvment' type sites for, say, 'money market' keywords...
In the end, SEO of this type is really self-perpetuating - A company needs to SEO because companies SEO which they do because companies SEO which they... - you get the picture.
The benefit of all this is that in order to stay useful, search engine companies (like Google) have to work really hard to constantly improve (which helps us).
The down-side is it's really hard to get into the SEO business. (Even Microsoft is barely keeping it's ankles wet).
There is some truth in that, but it's a poor argument at best.
Good programmers squeeze the best they can out of their code. Look at successful games that are on both PC and console, and see how they perform on comparable hardware...
The reason you see some evidence of this is because one of the (down?)sides of having an open platform is that anyone can easily write for it, from hobbyists all the way through to professionals, which means you're going to see a lot of poor performance at the low end on the curve.
I do agree that having a standard environment to program for is very nice for a programmer, but it is still limiting.
The companys (both hardware and software) that will suceed in an open environment will be the ones who don't employ lazy programmers, or those that can box everything in to pre-selected hardware.
I still far prefer the open environment.
btw, I'm a professional programmer, and I have worked with many other programmers over the last 10 years. Yes, there's a ton of lazy programmers out there, but I don't think they'd be any better working on open or closed platforms. The good programmers will do the best they can with either.
I would like to see a more standardised cap put on what 'reccomended system requirements' the industry aims for as a whole, however.
Well. XBox and PS, etc, are really just customised PCs running customised OSes.
Sounds to me like he's basically looking to 'open-source' the platform.
I'm sure there'll be minimum requirements and standards, and, should this pick up like he seems to hope, you'll basically end up with a gaming console that happens to be upgradeable and open.
So it will be cheaper to buy to begin with for the same performance, and open ended to allow incermental upgrades.
The games developed would be like standard PC games, with configurable levels of detail. The mor epower you have, the more detail you turn on.
As it's looking at running on a TV, the resolution will be fairly low (even in HD, as compared to a PC) meaning it will already run faster than most current PC setups.
Yes, he's surely out to make money. Good for him. He's taking an approach I can get behind.
I really hope he suceeds, as it will give both the PC hardware and software industries in general reason to innovate faster again.
Yes, it will mean that to benefit from the advances you'll need to fork out more money than you would in the long run with a console, however that will be your choice if you want to take advantage of the innovation that is generated.
If you don't want to take advantage, then don't buy the upgrades, don't get the newest games. Stick with the low base that the consoles will have, and you've lost nothing. Those who can afford a few extra bucks will drive the industry forward, and in 6 years time it will be much further along than it would have been otherwise, and even those who can't afford the high prices will reap those rewards.
It's pretty clear what will happen if Blizzard goes through with this:
Everyone who doesn't want their real names publicized will stop posting on Blizzard's forums, and third-party forums will take off.
Then, either Blizzard will revoke the requirement of displaying real names, or save a lot of money in hosting costs.
I suspect the latter.
Honestly, it is within Blizzards rights to require whatever they like (just not retro-actively) and this will give them less heavily trafficed forums with a lot lot less trolling and flaming.
Those who care about their privacy will suffer, having to go to third party forums, but Blizzards forums will become a friendlier more open place that gets overloaded much less often.
As much as I hate the required privacy breech required to post in future (And I won't be posting there myself) I can't really fault them on it.
Sure, there'll be a few people who get stalked and such, but that really isn't on Blizzard, that's on the socially retarded few who do such stalking.. It's illegal (well, depending on if they go far enough to be a problem) and a problem for the authorities.
Although I limit my personal exposure on the internet myself, I find it sad that I feel this is necessary. And I don't blame Blizzard for it.
In an attempt to anticipate those who disagree (and I am sure there are many) I'll propose this:
Blizzard adds an option to hide your personal information, and also an option to hide all posts from people who have chosen this option. They're smart enough to figure out a way to integrate this, and could probably take a few cues from the/. forums we're participating in now.
Now, I know I'm being an insensitive clod, so feel free to correct me.
Well, obviously this was inspired by greed on my part.
I'm greedy for a product, greedy enough that I'm willing to watch a certain amount of advertisments to get it. Also greedy enough to pay for it on DVD a lot of the time (I have ~5,000 DVDs, if you include TV series DVDs).
There's some shows I'm not greedy enough to buy, but I am greedy enough to watch advertisments through, and these I will either watch on public TV (if available), if not, I'll watch on HULU (if available) and if not, I'd watch on ninjavideo (if available) or download.
Thus, the best method for the studoes is to put them all into on-demand, but unfortunatly there's only very recent shows there. I'm sure there is some reason they have for this, I just don't know what it could be. Can't be space consideration can it? Not with todays storage costs.
Anyhows, I'm talking about them marketing their shows just as they always have, but marketing all of them, not just the most recent.
On the flip side, due to this, I'll be switching from blockbuster online to netflix, as it seems to have a few of the shows available for streaming, and
So blockbuster losing another customer, netflix gaining one, and I'm going to spend $10 a month to stream what I expect will be over 200 hours a month of tv and movies ad-free (yeah, I'm a couch potato, and while I'm at work, my wife and daughter are couch potatoes, bigtime).
Pretty sure that after netflix takes it's cut they're going to be making less than they would if they gave it to me for free and stuck it full of commercials. (Especially as they would be able to offer all their shows, giving a larger range of choice, and probably thus more of it watched)
But that's just me. I suspect the majority of the 'expected custom' they were losing to the shut down sites will just go to other sites/megavideo/torrents/find something else to do (videogames, etc).
They could have been making money this whole time just by following the same kinds of business plans the pirates (pirate suppliers/direction givers/robin hoods/whoevers) have been using.
If only the movie studios would throw full support behind hulu or similar and provide us free streams of old TV shows and movies supported by ads (the new ones, sure, keep those back or add more advertising to them).
We have TV/basic cable with it's shows supported by ads. This includes on-demand, with a very small subset of only the very recent shows and movies that is ad-supported (and subscription channels that are not ad-supported).
If they could just get with the times, and take an approach similar to ninjavideo (Which had a ton of TV series, and the entire series, from years back) in an easily navigable format, supported by ads (not so much like ninjavideo here, adblock killed it's ads dead - something more like hulu) And i think they'd kill piracy dead, and still make their profits.
The problem is that they're too greedy. They want to make more money than the market supports, thus the piracy.
The thing is, if they did embrace ad-supported delivery of all the tv shows and movies like ninjavideo did, they would probably end up coming close to their same profits, if not beating them.
I'll be sticking with FireFox not only for it's web development addons, but because, of all things, Chrome has no addon (let alone inbuilt) support for Google Bookmarks (just a standard bookmarking hack which doesn't give even close to the same functionality), which continues to baffle me. And as I use many different computers all over the place (home, work, mobile), having my bookmarks go with me is essential.
When I can get my google bookmarks working properly in Chrome, I'll use it by default, and switch to FireFox for web development. Until then, I only use chrome if I want to quickly go to youtube to watch a video, or something.
There's also dozens of issues I have with little UI things like how Chrome highlights the current tab, etc, which are no doubt personal preferences of mine.
Normal English strongly implies it does. If you say to someone I have several pieces of fruit and one of them is a banana, when in fact two of them are bananas, most people would call that lying. One could argue that strictly speaking the statement was true: you did have one banana, you just also had an additional banana, but that level of honesty is only tolerated in politicians. If you had said "at least one of which is a banana" that would be fine, otherwise the statement is deliberately misleading.
By the same standards, stating that one child was born on a tuesday also implies the other child was not born on a tuesday, regardless of gender.
You cant twist it both ways to state that it implied "the other child was not born on tuesday unless it was a girl".
Consistancy is key.
As such I would say the odds remain unchanged (assumed 50/50).
I have no points to mod you up, but I was planning to make a similar post if noone else had (till I read yours just now).
I used to run a MUD. This was back in the '80s.
This is actually where I started programming. I learned C and rewrote the codebase from the ground up.
Then, in the 90's I ported it all into PHP to run on the web. This was how I got started in PHP
I haven't worked on it since the 90's, I'm currently a fulltime web developer working in PHP, with all the regular associated technologies: Javascript, Apache, MySQL, XSLT, etc.
While I never had any serious hacking of the game, There were bug exploit type hacking (item duping, etc) that happened from time to time.
Anyone who tells you you can make your application secure is a liar:) Sure, you can close up the most obvious holes, but I think we all know it is impossible to make a system completly secure. Look at Windows, Mac OSX, games like WoW, etc.
While it's right to be considering the issues and doing your level best to prevent security holes, and a lot of the advice here is decent, and some really good, your primary defense is backups. Back up everything, particularly the data the game uses. When things go wrong (and unless you're amazingly lucky, they will), you can do a restore/rollback/whatever, and while that will upset a few users, they won't quit, and they won't lose respect for the game.
Log all you can, but unless there is money involved, don't spend more money to achieve security for logfiles, etc. Just do your best on your budget, and go with that.
Until you have an average of 500+ players on at any given time, and over 100,000 active users, ironclad security is not expected. (Yes, I pulled those figures out of a hat, but you know what they say about made up statistics)
Any case. Back the data up, and everything else is secondary.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but I was speculating on the assumption that it was, which is why I stated "If India can..."
Time will tell. I hope they succeed.
For the people who use desktops as their main computer(s) but would like something to read books/idly browse the web from the couch, etc, $500-$1000 is ridiculous. And I think there's a large enough market of these sort of people.
Then again, I'm in development, not sales, so I'm probably wrong.
Looking at the articles and pics of it, it does indeed have a colour screen.
And your statement brings out my real question:
If india can make a working tablet for $35 that, while probably underpowered, can do web, email, and wordprocessing,
Why are the big companies cheapest products $200 or more?
Hopefully, after (if) these get rolled out in India, the other manufacturers will start competing a little harder.
Also, if this Indian tablet supports flash, I'll have a nice little chuckle.
Hehe, I have a job, a wife, and a house/apartment. Few friends, though (Pro Tip: don't move countries to marry your girlfriend, you'll probably come to despise her after a couple of years (like most marriages, imho) and you'll have no friends/family to fall back on)
I still have no life.
Sounds to me like the company just looks at GS without checkign out raid experience or actual skill :/
WoW should have taught you thet.
You're just gonna have to grind...
Hehe, I used to run the old 40man raids in one of the top guilds pushing new content.
I now run a (much smaller, albeit) group of people at a company.
Running the hardcore raids taught me how to be hard on people, which has been invaluable in my job.
Before I started running raids on WoW I was hard-pressed to be hurtful to anyone, and while it still is difficult, I learned the necessity of it.
It also taught me (as a Warr/Prot/Tank and Priest/Disc/Healer) that others could be more knowledgable of their specific skills (ie. Feral/Druid/DPS) than I, and how to respect that.
As a quick example of the above, I am responsible for a couple of graphic desiners, and while I studied the principles at university, and have passing skill and familiarity with the process, I don't know as much about it (let alone more) than they do, even if they are resources I need to manage.
I also learned that you have to make 'hard decisions' and that standing by them, right or wrong, and taking the responsibility is more valuable than backing down/not making the decisions in a timely fashion.
But, on the same note, I think being the captain of a football team, or a coach, or organising a sucessful college frat party may give a lot of the same skills. I was just never captain of a sports team (although I was in a half a dozen when I was younger) and never in a frat (I didn't go to school/uni in the USA), so I learned somewhere else
Sure, none of these activities (WoW Included) taught me much of how to be a development manager, but it did teach me some generic management related skills I have managed to apply to many aspects of my job.
I wouldn't have even posted this, but for your italic emphasis in your post about how there was nothing of value...
I play WoW, and I'm a skinny, employeed loser.
I'd much prefer being fat and unemployed and able to play games all day.
I'd still be a loser, but I'd get to eat whatever I want whenever I want to, and have a ton more free time.
I think you'll find that 'fat unemployed' losers are the cliche minority. Most of us have noone to support us being fat and unemployed
If you're talking about teenagers, well, most of them are unemployed anyway, and depending on where you live, etc, most of them are fat also, either from diet, or watching too much TV/Sitting on the computer (for whatever reason) too long, etc.
And, honestly, almost everyone is a 'loser' from someone's perspective.
You'll probably find, however, that most people (not all) in hiring positions are 15-20 years behind the times themselves, or have focused on career to the exclusion of having time for hobbies like computer gaming.
So 'the times' themselves are really 15-20 years in lag. MMO gaming has really only been around for ~10 years, so it'll be another 5-10 years before this kind of quality gets any significant level of recognition.
I'm thinking in 10 years there will probably still be the same kind of MMO involvement (and I'll be level 230 in WoW), and this kind of thing may be a little more commonplace, however, when random person X is applying for a professional job, odds are this person will have a lot of relevant qualifications to that specific job.
Odds are small, however, that this person will be one of the few that is a guild leader in an MMO (Even assuming half the people in the world play MMOs, which is a huge amount, I can't find a figure online, but there's about 7 billion people in the world, and 11 million WoW accounts, meaning that less then 0.2% of the worlds population plays WoW, I figure when you factor in age demographics of people applying for jobs, and add in other MMOs you might get that up to 1 or 2% chance that the person plays an MMO.
I'm also assuming that less than 1% of MMO players are leaders of significant guilds, which brings us back to something like 1/1000 job applicants (and I think that is very generous) would have any sort of gaming experience that helps them do their job. Assuming every one of them put it on their resume, most companies would see this rarely, if at all, as compared to 'relevant qualifications' they'd see in the majority of applicants.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: I doubt it will ever be relevant, especially when you consider the odds that the hiring individual has firsthand knowledge (or even anecdoral) of the value... I thinking when it all comes down (and if the math were accurate) it'd be a proverbial '1 in a million' chance that guild leadership (or similar) factored in to a job application.
Someone please mod parent up. Insightful, I tell you.
I think that if Apple released any version of their OS for other hardware, hackers would use it as a tool to get the official Mac OS to work on other hardware, then there'd be comparisons on how cheap hardware performs as compared to Mac hardware, and suddenly Mac would be looking even more overpriced than it already is... and I don't see Apple taking that risk.
The difference between Google and Apple is that Google appears to care more about us and less about their bottom line than Apple does.
Sure, it could be spin-doctoring, but looking at where and how Google spends it's money as compared to Apple, and looking at the effort Apple puts into marketing as compared to Google, I'm thinking the picture is fairly clear to most of us.
Besides. Google is an advertising company, yet it consistantly expands our freedom/access. Apple is not an advertising company, yet consistantly limits/binds it's customers...
This is a far cry from a pot/kettle metaphor.
And this is why I prefer to watch pirated video streamed off the net of DVDs I own over the DVDs themselves. /. is free (I don't subscribe) so I don't spit them their ads, but when I pay for something... thats a whole other story.
Then again, I don't own a HDTV, so I'm not losing picture quality.
I also recently signed up to netflix, as it streams (older seasons) of TV shows at full quality, without any annoying forced ads/previews. (Even watching TV shows on that I own seasons of on DVD for the same reason) I just wish they had the latest released seasons, and even current TV.
I don't mind watching ads for stuff I get free (I haven't clicked the 'Disable Advertising' checkbox that slashdot has been offering me for the last few months due to somethingorother, as
I do understand that pricing is sometimes subsidised by advertising, so you pay less than you would for something with a little advertising, but that just irritates me. If I'm going to pay for it I'll pay full price for no ads/DRM/whatever, thankyouverymuch.
I put 'wake up and smell the coffee' in quotes. (with an extra quote in the middle as I wasn't yet fully woken/smellerized when I posted it)
a) I wasn't literally implying a caffeine fix, just that their thinking become clearer throughout the day (in fact, this process has become slightly slower for me since I quit caffeine)
b) Even if I did mean it literally, I don't think inhaling the scent of coffee gives you much of a caffeine fix/addiction
If I was modded up for suggesting caffeine as the cause, you can take it off (although I guess there may be a little truth in that aspect); If I was modded up for the actual meaning of the observation, then 'Glad someone read and understood my post'.
I think it's much more likely that people try to be more optomistic in the morning, but gradually become more realistic as they finally 'wake up and 'smell the coffee'
The problem with it is that it works.
The more people you get to see your listing, the mor eclick on it, and the more that end up giving you their money (through whatever method)
Thus, modern SEO works to give their customers the best value for their money, which, currently, is higher matches for their chosen keywords.
Do keep in mind, however, that these keywords typically have to be fairly relevant for the rest of it to work. The best SEO companies don't go about rating 'home improvment' type sites for, say, 'money market' keywords...
In the end, SEO of this type is really self-perpetuating - A company needs to SEO because companies SEO which they do because companies SEO which they... - you get the picture.
The benefit of all this is that in order to stay useful, search engine companies (like Google) have to work really hard to constantly improve (which helps us).
The down-side is it's really hard to get into the SEO business. (Even Microsoft is barely keeping it's ankles wet).
There is some truth in that, but it's a poor argument at best.
Good programmers squeeze the best they can out of their code. Look at successful games that are on both PC and console, and see how they perform on comparable hardware...
The reason you see some evidence of this is because one of the (down?)sides of having an open platform is that anyone can easily write for it, from hobbyists all the way through to professionals, which means you're going to see a lot of poor performance at the low end on the curve.
I do agree that having a standard environment to program for is very nice for a programmer, but it is still limiting.
The companys (both hardware and software) that will suceed in an open environment will be the ones who don't employ lazy programmers, or those that can box everything in to pre-selected hardware.
I still far prefer the open environment.
btw, I'm a professional programmer, and I have worked with many other programmers over the last 10 years. Yes, there's a ton of lazy programmers out there, but I don't think they'd be any better working on open or closed platforms. The good programmers will do the best they can with either.
I would like to see a more standardised cap put on what 'reccomended system requirements' the industry aims for as a whole, however.
Well. XBox and PS, etc, are really just customised PCs running customised OSes.
Sounds to me like he's basically looking to 'open-source' the platform.
I'm sure there'll be minimum requirements and standards, and, should this pick up like he seems to hope, you'll basically end up with a gaming console that happens to be upgradeable and open.
So it will be cheaper to buy to begin with for the same performance, and open ended to allow incermental upgrades.
The games developed would be like standard PC games, with configurable levels of detail. The mor epower you have, the more detail you turn on.
As it's looking at running on a TV, the resolution will be fairly low (even in HD, as compared to a PC) meaning it will already run faster than most current PC setups.
Yes, he's surely out to make money. Good for him. He's taking an approach I can get behind.
I really hope he suceeds, as it will give both the PC hardware and software industries in general reason to innovate faster again.
Yes, it will mean that to benefit from the advances you'll need to fork out more money than you would in the long run with a console, however that will be your choice if you want to take advantage of the innovation that is generated.
If you don't want to take advantage, then don't buy the upgrades, don't get the newest games. Stick with the low base that the consoles will have, and you've lost nothing. Those who can afford a few extra bucks will drive the industry forward, and in 6 years time it will be much further along than it would have been otherwise, and even those who can't afford the high prices will reap those rewards.
It's pretty clear what will happen if Blizzard goes through with this:
/. forums we're participating in now.
Everyone who doesn't want their real names publicized will stop posting on Blizzard's forums, and third-party forums will take off.
Then, either Blizzard will revoke the requirement of displaying real names, or save a lot of money in hosting costs.
I suspect the latter.
Honestly, it is within Blizzards rights to require whatever they like (just not retro-actively) and this will give them less heavily trafficed forums with a lot lot less trolling and flaming.
Those who care about their privacy will suffer, having to go to third party forums, but Blizzards forums will become a friendlier more open place that gets overloaded much less often.
As much as I hate the required privacy breech required to post in future (And I won't be posting there myself) I can't really fault them on it.
Sure, there'll be a few people who get stalked and such, but that really isn't on Blizzard, that's on the socially retarded few who do such stalking.. It's illegal (well, depending on if they go far enough to be a problem) and a problem for the authorities.
Although I limit my personal exposure on the internet myself, I find it sad that I feel this is necessary. And I don't blame Blizzard for it.
In an attempt to anticipate those who disagree (and I am sure there are many) I'll propose this:
Blizzard adds an option to hide your personal information, and also an option to hide all posts from people who have chosen this option. They're smart enough to figure out a way to integrate this, and could probably take a few cues from the
Now, I know I'm being an insensitive clod, so feel free to correct me.
Well, obviously this was inspired by greed on my part.
I'm greedy for a product, greedy enough that I'm willing to watch a certain amount of advertisments to get it. Also greedy enough to pay for it on DVD a lot of the time (I have ~5,000 DVDs, if you include TV series DVDs).
There's some shows I'm not greedy enough to buy, but I am greedy enough to watch advertisments through, and these I will either watch on public TV (if available), if not, I'll watch on HULU (if available) and if not, I'd watch on ninjavideo (if available) or download.
Thus, the best method for the studoes is to put them all into on-demand, but unfortunatly there's only very recent shows there. I'm sure there is some reason they have for this, I just don't know what it could be. Can't be space consideration can it? Not with todays storage costs.
Anyhows, I'm talking about them marketing their shows just as they always have, but marketing all of them, not just the most recent.
On the flip side, due to this, I'll be switching from blockbuster online to netflix, as it seems to have a few of the shows available for streaming, and So blockbuster losing another customer, netflix gaining one, and I'm going to spend $10 a month to stream what I expect will be over 200 hours a month of tv and movies ad-free (yeah, I'm a couch potato, and while I'm at work, my wife and daughter are couch potatoes, bigtime).
Pretty sure that after netflix takes it's cut they're going to be making less than they would if they gave it to me for free and stuck it full of commercials. (Especially as they would be able to offer all their shows, giving a larger range of choice, and probably thus more of it watched)
But that's just me. I suspect the majority of the 'expected custom' they were losing to the shut down sites will just go to other sites/megavideo/torrents/find something else to do (videogames, etc).
They could have been making money this whole time just by following the same kinds of business plans the pirates (pirate suppliers/direction givers/robin hoods/whoevers) have been using.
If only the movie studios would throw full support behind hulu or similar and provide us free streams of old TV shows and movies supported by ads (the new ones, sure, keep those back or add more advertising to them).
We have TV/basic cable with it's shows supported by ads. This includes on-demand, with a very small subset of only the very recent shows and movies that is ad-supported (and subscription channels that are not ad-supported).
If they could just get with the times, and take an approach similar to ninjavideo (Which had a ton of TV series, and the entire series, from years back) in an easily navigable format, supported by ads (not so much like ninjavideo here, adblock killed it's ads dead - something more like hulu) And i think they'd kill piracy dead, and still make their profits.
The problem is that they're too greedy. They want to make more money than the market supports, thus the piracy.
The thing is, if they did embrace ad-supported delivery of all the tv shows and movies like ninjavideo did, they would probably end up coming close to their same profits, if not beating them.
Don't you mean 'Where's megavideo?' it's the one hosting all the movies, right?
I'll be sticking with FireFox not only for it's web development addons, but because, of all things, Chrome has no addon (let alone inbuilt) support for Google Bookmarks (just a standard bookmarking hack which doesn't give even close to the same functionality), which continues to baffle me. And as I use many different computers all over the place (home, work, mobile), having my bookmarks go with me is essential.
When I can get my google bookmarks working properly in Chrome, I'll use it by default, and switch to FireFox for web development. Until then, I only use chrome if I want to quickly go to youtube to watch a video, or something.
There's also dozens of issues I have with little UI things like how Chrome highlights the current tab, etc, which are no doubt personal preferences of mine.
How is this "at the cost of the rest"? Please cite.
Normal English strongly implies it does. If you say to someone I have several pieces of fruit and one of them is a banana, when in fact two of them are bananas, most people would call that lying. One could argue that strictly speaking the statement was true: you did have one banana, you just also had an additional banana, but that level of honesty is only tolerated in politicians. If you had said "at least one of which is a banana" that would be fine, otherwise the statement is deliberately misleading.
By the same standards, stating that one child was born on a tuesday also implies the other child was not born on a tuesday, regardless of gender.
You cant twist it both ways to state that it implied "the other child was not born on tuesday unless it was a girl".
Consistancy is key.
As such I would say the odds remain unchanged (assumed 50/50).
I have no points to mod you up, but I was planning to make a similar post if noone else had (till I read yours just now).
:) Sure, you can close up the most obvious holes, but I think we all know it is impossible to make a system completly secure. Look at Windows, Mac OSX, games like WoW, etc.
I used to run a MUD. This was back in the '80s.
This is actually where I started programming. I learned C and rewrote the codebase from the ground up.
Then, in the 90's I ported it all into PHP to run on the web. This was how I got started in PHP
I haven't worked on it since the 90's, I'm currently a fulltime web developer working in PHP, with all the regular associated technologies: Javascript, Apache, MySQL, XSLT, etc.
While I never had any serious hacking of the game, There were bug exploit type hacking (item duping, etc) that happened from time to time.
Anyone who tells you you can make your application secure is a liar
While it's right to be considering the issues and doing your level best to prevent security holes, and a lot of the advice here is decent, and some really good, your primary defense is backups. Back up everything, particularly the data the game uses. When things go wrong (and unless you're amazingly lucky, they will), you can do a restore/rollback/whatever, and while that will upset a few users, they won't quit, and they won't lose respect for the game.
Log all you can, but unless there is money involved, don't spend more money to achieve security for logfiles, etc. Just do your best on your budget, and go with that.
Until you have an average of 500+ players on at any given time, and over 100,000 active users, ironclad security is not expected. (Yes, I pulled those figures out of a hat, but you know what they say about made up statistics)
Any case. Back the data up, and everything else is secondary.