Global Agenda creators Hi-Rez have acquired the rights to make an MMO using the Tribes IP. Given that their previous offering was already tribes-like, they were clearly fans, so maybe they'll do something nice with it.
The numbers I have are specifically smart phones. I can't find the sales figures for the iPod Touch immediately, so I don't know how it compares to the 7 million unit deficit in smart phone sales figures.
I suspect it is academic. With current growth trends, even if Android isn't outselling the iPhone+iPod combined sales figures yet, it will soon.
Given that Android devices are already outselling iOS devices, even if that is an issue, it is eventually going to swing in Android's direction. Developers, as a general rule, are going to go where cost versus return is, and the bigger the sales lead Android gets, the more games you'll see on it.
The hard part was getting enough features and developers that they could outsell iOS. Now they just have to make sure they don't lose their momentum and the 3rd party developer issue solves itself.
And what about the business trips I get sent on for work? Are you planning on paying my way through life when I lose my job because I refuse to travel by plane?
Yeah, if we're not careful, we'll end up like socialist countries such as Norway who consistently end up on the top of the list on the Human Development Index. That would be terrible.
Somehow I don't think having Mr. Vending Machine tell all of us fat people here in the U.S. that we should maybe get a diet drink is really going to fly. I am therefore dubious of the cultural portability of this concept.
And if a mega-corporation gets to the point where it can hire a private military force that is more powerful than that of the government? Corporations only do not have police power for as long as it takes for their budget to significantly exceed the government's ability to spend money on the military. And if one corporation gets big enough, they can significantly impact the government's bottom line, as well, so the possibility is not as absurd as you might think.
Man, I'd love to spend a day living in your world, where dogmatic statements about free markets can controvert hundreds of years of evidence and you can't understand why nobody else thinks the same way.
The easiest thing to do is go back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization. Why do you think that virtually all of the oldest civilizations were hereditary dictatorships? They all formed in completely free markets with absolutely no government interference. That is the logical conclusion of a regulation free market.
Or you could look a little closer in history and figure out when the advent of anti-trust law in the U.S. was. Are you going to tell me that U.S. Steel and Standard Oil were creations of the government? Or how about even more recent. Please explain to me how the government made Microsoft engage in anti-competitive behavior.
They should teach Libertarianism in Religious Studies classes.
Yes, if you are trying to sell me on your ability to moderate my user experience for my benefit, you have to actually protect me from security issues. If you can't figure out a way to change it from the OS end, you pull the app until they fix it themselves. If the only apps you actually pull from your app store are because they compete with one of your other services, I have no use for your app store.
I don't get how Apple's position in this is defensible. The whole iOS platform is sold as a locked down walled garden that, and I quote, "just works." This specific incident demonstrates two things to us:
1.) The application approval process doesn't actually protect us as users. We've all known this for a while, and by itself it actually isn't that big a deal.
2.) Apple's bottom line is the only thing the walled garden is protecting. If an application gets through the approval process but turns out to actually have a security flaw, that shouldn't be a big deal in a controlled market environment because you can either pull the application or change the environment to mitigate the issue. That obviously is not what is happening.
So yes, for those of you who are asking, we are actually upset that the iOS platform is both too closed and too permissive. We're complaining because it is closed in all the ways that hurt the consumer and yet isn't closed in any of the ways we were told it would help us. It is the worst of both worlds.
Not to diminish the complexity of version control or anything, but I'd rather have a programmer that knows how to design an algorithm and needs help getting it checked in than a lousy programmer who knows his way around SVN well enough to check in his crap code.
Of course there are people with CS degrees that can't design an algorithm and vice-versa, but they are really trying to teach the more important part of the equation. If you can figure out the core theory behind computer, I'm confident that you'll be able to eventually navigate the software development process; I'm not sure the reverse is always true.
It isn't really that surprising to me. Computer science and software engineering are not identical disciplines. Computer Science programs on a core level are about data structures, algorithms, and the theory behind why we program things the way we do. The actual specifics of a development cycle, while obviously important if you want to put any of that to practical use outside of research positions, are disjoint from those concepts.
You can make an argument that more people should be learning Software Engineering instead of Computer Science, but that's really a different discussion.
I wish Christians would stop telling me the that their belief are the Absolute Truth (tm) if they aren't sure and their beliefs are evolving over time.
That's funny. I'm not religious in the least and I haven't killed a single person or experimented on a single prisoner of war.
In fact, if you do the research, I think you will find that a-religious people are way under-represented in our country's prison system. There isn't a single solid metric that you can come up with to demonstrate that religion and what most people would consider moral behavior are even positively correlated much less causally so.
The problem is that in the culture of a fundamentalist suicide bomber, politics and religion are inextricably linked. They targeted the towers to hurt our country, but we're the great devils of the west, and they are going to be rewarded in the afterlife for doing damage to us, which ultimately brings it back full circle to a religious motive.
Not to say I want to jump on the bandwagon of saying that religion in all forms is wrong or evil (though I am a strong agnostic). It is just that when you put people in the position to say authoritatively what is going to happen to a follower for all of eternity in an afterlife, you give them incredible and terrible power. Even the most psychotic dictator doesn't have that kind of pull. And you know what they say about the correlation between power and corruption.
Or in other words, I would say that religion does not cause people to do terrible things, but leaders in organized religions do.
The benefit to Netflix or Hulu over a torrent or youtube is that you get material that you'd have to break copyright law to obtain through these other venues. We pay for it because it is convenient and legal.
Just because there will eventually be a cost curve doesn't mean it will happen to be on a timeline that works out the best for humanity. There are several factors at play here, and while those of us worrying about the issue don't think that we'll pull up to a gas station one day and get told that the world is all out, there may be significant economic impact on the world when the market changes on a core piece of our infrastructure.
For one thing, we use petroleum for a lot more than just moving cars around. Petroleum is used, for instance, in the manufacture of most frequently used types of plastic. So even if we find replacements in time for some products, we'll still end up getting hit a lot harder on other technologies.
Also, we run into serious waste if petroleum based products are used or made by infrastructure that is designed to last longer than the time it takes for people to start largely jumping ship to alternate energy to when they stop. In other words, if petroleum's biggest price climb occurs over a 5 year period and people swap away from petroleum based vehicles primarily during that time, we end up with a large stock of vehicles that are less than 5 years old even though most people except their cars to last more than 10.
The end goal of those of us trying to figure these things out is to make sure that the change is more gradual than the market would otherwise dictate so that we don't have to deal with economic problems from abrupt market shifts. We don't leave it up to the "smarter" people because their actions will largely be dictated by the same market we are trying to not let govern the situation in the first place and they will therefore not do anything that does not generate profit in the next 5 years.
Wait, I have to watch keynotes to know that according to Apple, they have revolutionized digital distribution?
They weren't the first to market with all (any?) of those things. Just off the top of my head, Rhapsody has been around longer for music distribution and the App store doesn't do anything that cell phone stores and/or *nix repositories like apt and yum haven't been doing for ages. How can you criticize Google for making incremental improvements when that's been Apple's entire business model for years?
I use an iPhone 3G and I can tell you with 100% certainty that it pisses me off. For a while, something would end up running on it even with no applications open that would cause it to heat up to be hot to the touch and have about 1.5 hours of battery life. I constantly have basic applications like Google maps crash on it. My battery is getting worn and there is no easy way to swap it out. And more damning than anything else, the cell reception sucks.
And before you blame my phone network, my other phone is also on AT&T, so I have something to directly compare it against. How can somebody sell a phone that costs hundreds of dollars that can't even do well the one thing all phones should unequivocally be able to do? I shouldn't have to switch to my Samsung phone that came free with service to make a phone call.
Your definition of "innovation" seems to be "taking existing ideas that already have niche markets and polishing them into toys with wider market appeal for yuppies."
It's not like there weren't smart phones, tablet computers, or MP3 players before Apple got into the game. And those are really only things I can think that anybody could really claim they have innovated in the past decade. But if what Google has done to webmail and web searches are merely incremental and not true innovation, then I can't imagine how anything Apple has done is any better for any honest definition of innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
Global Agenda creators Hi-Rez have acquired the rights to make an MMO using the Tribes IP. Given that their previous offering was already tribes-like, they were clearly fans, so maybe they'll do something nice with it.
Gamasutra article on the issue from the end of October
Then they discarded 95/98
That's a funny way of describing the Windows ME production process, but after a couple of seconds thought, I think it is accurate.
The numbers I have are specifically smart phones. I can't find the sales figures for the iPod Touch immediately, so I don't know how it compares to the 7 million unit deficit in smart phone sales figures.
I suspect it is academic. With current growth trends, even if Android isn't outselling the iPhone+iPod combined sales figures yet, it will soon.
It is both. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1466313
Given that Android devices are already outselling iOS devices, even if that is an issue, it is eventually going to swing in Android's direction. Developers, as a general rule, are going to go where cost versus return is, and the bigger the sales lead Android gets, the more games you'll see on it.
The hard part was getting enough features and developers that they could outsell iOS. Now they just have to make sure they don't lose their momentum and the 3rd party developer issue solves itself.
And what about the business trips I get sent on for work? Are you planning on paying my way through life when I lose my job because I refuse to travel by plane?
Sexy.
Yeah, if we're not careful, we'll end up like socialist countries such as Norway who consistently end up on the top of the list on the Human Development Index. That would be terrible.
Somehow I don't think having Mr. Vending Machine tell all of us fat people here in the U.S. that we should maybe get a diet drink is really going to fly. I am therefore dubious of the cultural portability of this concept.
And if a mega-corporation gets to the point where it can hire a private military force that is more powerful than that of the government? Corporations only do not have police power for as long as it takes for their budget to significantly exceed the government's ability to spend money on the military. And if one corporation gets big enough, they can significantly impact the government's bottom line, as well, so the possibility is not as absurd as you might think.
Man, I'd love to spend a day living in your world, where dogmatic statements about free markets can controvert hundreds of years of evidence and you can't understand why nobody else thinks the same way. The easiest thing to do is go back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization. Why do you think that virtually all of the oldest civilizations were hereditary dictatorships? They all formed in completely free markets with absolutely no government interference. That is the logical conclusion of a regulation free market. Or you could look a little closer in history and figure out when the advent of anti-trust law in the U.S. was. Are you going to tell me that U.S. Steel and Standard Oil were creations of the government? Or how about even more recent. Please explain to me how the government made Microsoft engage in anti-competitive behavior. They should teach Libertarianism in Religious Studies classes.
Yes, if you are trying to sell me on your ability to moderate my user experience for my benefit, you have to actually protect me from security issues. If you can't figure out a way to change it from the OS end, you pull the app until they fix it themselves. If the only apps you actually pull from your app store are because they compete with one of your other services, I have no use for your app store.
I don't get how Apple's position in this is defensible. The whole iOS platform is sold as a locked down walled garden that, and I quote, "just works." This specific incident demonstrates two things to us:
1.) The application approval process doesn't actually protect us as users. We've all known this for a while, and by itself it actually isn't that big a deal.
2.) Apple's bottom line is the only thing the walled garden is protecting. If an application gets through the approval process but turns out to actually have a security flaw, that shouldn't be a big deal in a controlled market environment because you can either pull the application or change the environment to mitigate the issue. That obviously is not what is happening.
So yes, for those of you who are asking, we are actually upset that the iOS platform is both too closed and too permissive. We're complaining because it is closed in all the ways that hurt the consumer and yet isn't closed in any of the ways we were told it would help us. It is the worst of both worlds.
Not to diminish the complexity of version control or anything, but I'd rather have a programmer that knows how to design an algorithm and needs help getting it checked in than a lousy programmer who knows his way around SVN well enough to check in his crap code.
Of course there are people with CS degrees that can't design an algorithm and vice-versa, but they are really trying to teach the more important part of the equation. If you can figure out the core theory behind computer, I'm confident that you'll be able to eventually navigate the software development process; I'm not sure the reverse is always true.
It isn't really that surprising to me. Computer science and software engineering are not identical disciplines. Computer Science programs on a core level are about data structures, algorithms, and the theory behind why we program things the way we do. The actual specifics of a development cycle, while obviously important if you want to put any of that to practical use outside of research positions, are disjoint from those concepts.
You can make an argument that more people should be learning Software Engineering instead of Computer Science, but that's really a different discussion.
I wish Christians would stop telling me the that their belief are the Absolute Truth (tm) if they aren't sure and their beliefs are evolving over time.
That's funny. I'm not religious in the least and I haven't killed a single person or experimented on a single prisoner of war.
In fact, if you do the research, I think you will find that a-religious people are way under-represented in our country's prison system. There isn't a single solid metric that you can come up with to demonstrate that religion and what most people would consider moral behavior are even positively correlated much less causally so.
The problem is that in the culture of a fundamentalist suicide bomber, politics and religion are inextricably linked. They targeted the towers to hurt our country, but we're the great devils of the west, and they are going to be rewarded in the afterlife for doing damage to us, which ultimately brings it back full circle to a religious motive. Not to say I want to jump on the bandwagon of saying that religion in all forms is wrong or evil (though I am a strong agnostic). It is just that when you put people in the position to say authoritatively what is going to happen to a follower for all of eternity in an afterlife, you give them incredible and terrible power. Even the most psychotic dictator doesn't have that kind of pull. And you know what they say about the correlation between power and corruption. Or in other words, I would say that religion does not cause people to do terrible things, but leaders in organized religions do.
The benefit to Netflix or Hulu over a torrent or youtube is that you get material that you'd have to break copyright law to obtain through these other venues. We pay for it because it is convenient and legal.
You still get BSOD, only now it stands for Blue Skin of Death when the jolt stops your breathing.
I always get a grin from comments are so bad that not only did they not RTFA, they didn't even bother to finish reading the 4 line summary.
Just because there will eventually be a cost curve doesn't mean it will happen to be on a timeline that works out the best for humanity. There are several factors at play here, and while those of us worrying about the issue don't think that we'll pull up to a gas station one day and get told that the world is all out, there may be significant economic impact on the world when the market changes on a core piece of our infrastructure. For one thing, we use petroleum for a lot more than just moving cars around. Petroleum is used, for instance, in the manufacture of most frequently used types of plastic. So even if we find replacements in time for some products, we'll still end up getting hit a lot harder on other technologies. Also, we run into serious waste if petroleum based products are used or made by infrastructure that is designed to last longer than the time it takes for people to start largely jumping ship to alternate energy to when they stop. In other words, if petroleum's biggest price climb occurs over a 5 year period and people swap away from petroleum based vehicles primarily during that time, we end up with a large stock of vehicles that are less than 5 years old even though most people except their cars to last more than 10. The end goal of those of us trying to figure these things out is to make sure that the change is more gradual than the market would otherwise dictate so that we don't have to deal with economic problems from abrupt market shifts. We don't leave it up to the "smarter" people because their actions will largely be dictated by the same market we are trying to not let govern the situation in the first place and they will therefore not do anything that does not generate profit in the next 5 years.
Wait, I have to watch keynotes to know that according to Apple, they have revolutionized digital distribution? They weren't the first to market with all (any?) of those things. Just off the top of my head, Rhapsody has been around longer for music distribution and the App store doesn't do anything that cell phone stores and/or *nix repositories like apt and yum haven't been doing for ages. How can you criticize Google for making incremental improvements when that's been Apple's entire business model for years?
I use an iPhone 3G and I can tell you with 100% certainty that it pisses me off. For a while, something would end up running on it even with no applications open that would cause it to heat up to be hot to the touch and have about 1.5 hours of battery life. I constantly have basic applications like Google maps crash on it. My battery is getting worn and there is no easy way to swap it out. And more damning than anything else, the cell reception sucks. And before you blame my phone network, my other phone is also on AT&T, so I have something to directly compare it against. How can somebody sell a phone that costs hundreds of dollars that can't even do well the one thing all phones should unequivocally be able to do? I shouldn't have to switch to my Samsung phone that came free with service to make a phone call.
Your definition of "innovation" seems to be "taking existing ideas that already have niche markets and polishing them into toys with wider market appeal for yuppies." It's not like there weren't smart phones, tablet computers, or MP3 players before Apple got into the game. And those are really only things I can think that anybody could really claim they have innovated in the past decade. But if what Google has done to webmail and web searches are merely incremental and not true innovation, then I can't imagine how anything Apple has done is any better for any honest definition of innovation.