The author of the article keeps referencing HotOrNot.com and how wonderful it is that people can't rate you from external sources. Well, Digg is very different from HotOrNot... Has the author not noticed that half the pages on the Internet have a fat DIGG THIS button on them? Even behemoths like YouTube and the New York Times have prominent links to Digg on virtually all of their content. Digg not only has no security against people voting on articles externally, it actively encourages it, which is the secret behind its exponential growth. As long as people can vote on articles from external sites, Digg will be susceptible to gaming, and it would be ridiculous for Digg to remove this feature and therefore remove literally billions of external links pointing to it.
Hmm... A few gamed stories every once in a while or billions of incoming links from some of the top sites on the internet? What a dilemma.
He means visually. As in, you would resize the window and instead of a smooth, live resize, the window would only be drawn in the new position every few seconds. The refreshing issue that you are talking about is still present, especially on network drives. There is absolutely no way to manually tell a finder window to refresh its contents, which makes it a pain to debug remote scripts on your web server, for instance, if they create or rename files.
I am pretty sure that Vista's virtual memory system would not page the cached memory and just overwrite it instead of trying to save it, which would totally negate the entire point of this optimization.
That is a very flawed view. For the sake of example, lets say you have a cool video game that you are selling for $50 a piece and you sell 100 copies a week, netting a nice $5000 / week. I approach you and offer you $6,000 for the rights to sell your program for one week. Assuming your logic, "Wow!" you say, "I can't lose! My cashflow will increase by $1000!"
Now during this week, I start selling your program for $3 a piece on my website, GameHeist. Through a combination of marketing efforts (bundling with other games, donations to charity, puzzles, extremely low price, etc.) you watch as this website gets featured on Slashdot, on Digg, on forums, in newspapers, in blogs. In fact, news of this ridiculous price gets around to pretty much the entire PC game community. I sell a hundred thousand copies of your game.
Ok, the crazy week is over. You made $6000 instead of your usual $5000, so it was all worth it. Now you will go back to your usual $5000/week, right? Wait, what's this? No one is buying your game anymore? Well, considering everyone and their grandma has already bought your game during the $3 deal, no. There is hardly any potential customers left who did not just buy it from GameHeist.
I'm not saying that this is the case in MacHeist, but just showing you how cashflow is not a very smart metric to use in this case.
I am very skeptical. My question is, how can they afford that much bandwidth? Given that their target market consists largely of P2P users, how can they tunnel all of a heavy bittorrent user's encrypted traffic for only $6.50 a month? It sounds to me like they should get into the ISP business or file hosting business instead...
I changed the Expose key directly to the Fn key, that is, hitting Fn is like hitting F9. On a Mac you never really use the F keys, so Fn is pretty useless anyways. Best move I ever did.:)
Very misleading headline... The article is about how 5% of blogs are about news in the real world, as opposed to emo LiveJournal/Xanga stuff. Calling anyone with a website who writes about something they saw on TV a journalist is kind of strange.
It is my own opinion. I don't claim to represent every single independent developer; there certainly are plenty of "official" indie organizations to try and do that. I didn't even think the term "indie" was contested. Since when does it have such a complicated definition?
As for Lugaru 2 "squeezing every last penny" out of Lugaru, I feel like you're taking my statements out of context. I could explain how my brother came to decide that Lugaru 2 was going to be his next game, but I have a feeling you don't really care.
My twin brother made the independent game Lugaru. I am developing Lugaru 2 with him.
a) "Should you design for Macs? Probably. How about Linux? Probably not."
How about designing for computers and then trivially porting it to Mac, Windows, and Linux. Lugaru gets about 65% Mac, 30% Windows, and 5% Linux. If Wolfire followed this guys advice then instead of talking to Ryan Gordon and getting a Linux port in a matter of days, we'd be out 5% of our sales and Linux users would be screwed out of another game. This also goes to show you that for an independent developer, Windows is not necessarily the best platform. The tiny, tight-knit community of Mac users is much easier to break into than pissing into the wind that is the Windows game market.
b) "the all-important topic of Search Engine Optimization"
Search engine optimization is not for game developers. Unless you're running one of those giant portals with like 200 mini java games, you shouldn't even think about SEO. A strong, well designed website is critical (yeah, Wolfire isn't the best example of that right now - we're trying to find a web designer) but realistically, you will get 98% of your hits from game sites linking to you, magazines mentioning you, forum word of mouth, etc. No one seriously goes into google and types "3d ninja ragdoll rabbit game downloadable game linux shareware" which is what you would have to type to pull up a review of Lugaru. People find their games through download sites, not search engines.
c) blogging, "motivational pyramid", power of sequels, cross-selling items, etc.
This makes me ill. Part of the charm of indy games is that they are not made to squeeze every last penny out of a game. The good ones are made more for fun by the developer as a hobby. More often than not, if you treat it as a soulless business you will fail, but if you stick to your indy roots, you will succeed. Your blog should not be a place where you try to plug all of your games and entice people to purchase everything, they should be a community where you keep your fans in the loop. My brother and I both are approaching 1000 posts on our forums and business is never even mentioned.
Ever wonder what that prominently placed "problem?" popup menu was for on Digg? The GoDaddy article was removed simply because enough people used that to report it as "ok, this is lame" and inaccurate. The article basically falsely accused GoDaddy of buying domains that people expressed interest in on their site. According to the vast majority of the comments on the article, the reality is that it was other registrars who intercept GoDaddy's queries (which are necessarily sent to many services in order to see if the domain is taken, iirc). Since GoDaddy is a darling company of many, and the article was patently incorrect and defamatory, many people (as you could see in the comments) reported the article as lame or inaccurate. Hence, it was removed. Oh yeah, GoDaddy isn't even a sponsor of Digg.
As for the other allegations, I have no idea, but if you're going to bash on a rival site, at least do some research before you post false information. Too bad there's no way to report crappy articles on Slashdot...
Is this repeatable? E.g. if you were sitting in a controlled room for 10 minutes, once where a cell phone (connected) was next to your head, and once where the cell phone was off, would you be able to tell which one was a call and which one was dead? If so, I think you could make quite a story.
I really wish Google would allow you to search for characters like +,;, [], etc. It is virtually impossible to search for source because it simply drops all of your symbols.
The thing is that once you graduate from $10/month shared hosting plans, the $X/gigabyte model doesn't really apply anymore. Slashdot certainly has a dedicated internet connection, instead of paying for bandwidth on a meter. It's unlikely that their pipe is completely saturated, so I am sure that they have tons of bandwidth to spare.
ID Software = indie? Are you kidding me? They have publishing deals coming out of their ass, games in all sorts of stores, internation distribution, an incorporated company, etc. They are the antithesis to "indie."
Check out my sig, if you want to see a real indie developer.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but SSH is something that can easily be emulated using AJAX and a third party "application" will be available shortly.
They have not publicly stated their reasons, but that was my immediate guess.
Firefox earns an annual revenue of $52 million due to the Google search bar and such. Apple wants in.
The author of the article keeps referencing HotOrNot.com and how wonderful it is that people can't rate you from external sources. Well, Digg is very different from HotOrNot... Has the author not noticed that half the pages on the Internet have a fat DIGG THIS button on them? Even behemoths like YouTube and the New York Times have prominent links to Digg on virtually all of their content. Digg not only has no security against people voting on articles externally, it actively encourages it, which is the secret behind its exponential growth. As long as people can vote on articles from external sites, Digg will be susceptible to gaming, and it would be ridiculous for Digg to remove this feature and therefore remove literally billions of external links pointing to it.
Hmm... A few gamed stories every once in a while or billions of incoming links from some of the top sites on the internet? What a dilemma.
He means visually. As in, you would resize the window and instead of a smooth, live resize, the window would only be drawn in the new position every few seconds. The refreshing issue that you are talking about is still present, especially on network drives. There is absolutely no way to manually tell a finder window to refresh its contents, which makes it a pain to debug remote scripts on your web server, for instance, if they create or rename files.
Try using it for accessing network resources...
I am pretty sure that Vista's virtual memory system would not page the cached memory and just overwrite it instead of trying to save it, which would totally negate the entire point of this optimization.
That is a very flawed view. For the sake of example, lets say you have a cool video game that you are selling for $50 a piece and you sell 100 copies a week, netting a nice $5000 / week. I approach you and offer you $6,000 for the rights to sell your program for one week. Assuming your logic, "Wow!" you say, "I can't lose! My cashflow will increase by $1000!"
Now during this week, I start selling your program for $3 a piece on my website, GameHeist. Through a combination of marketing efforts (bundling with other games, donations to charity, puzzles, extremely low price, etc.) you watch as this website gets featured on Slashdot, on Digg, on forums, in newspapers, in blogs. In fact, news of this ridiculous price gets around to pretty much the entire PC game community. I sell a hundred thousand copies of your game.
Ok, the crazy week is over. You made $6000 instead of your usual $5000, so it was all worth it. Now you will go back to your usual $5000/week, right? Wait, what's this? No one is buying your game anymore? Well, considering everyone and their grandma has already bought your game during the $3 deal, no. There is hardly any potential customers left who did not just buy it from GameHeist.
I'm not saying that this is the case in MacHeist, but just showing you how cashflow is not a very smart metric to use in this case.
I am very skeptical. My question is, how can they afford that much bandwidth? Given that their target market consists largely of P2P users, how can they tunnel all of a heavy bittorrent user's encrypted traffic for only $6.50 a month? It sounds to me like they should get into the ISP business or file hosting business instead...
I changed the Expose key directly to the Fn key, that is, hitting Fn is like hitting F9. On a Mac you never really use the F keys, so Fn is pretty useless anyways. Best move I ever did. :)
Very misleading headline... The article is about how 5% of blogs are about news in the real world, as opposed to emo LiveJournal/Xanga stuff. Calling anyone with a website who writes about something they saw on TV a journalist is kind of strange.
Say it ain't so... Microsoft badmouthed Google? What's next, Dell badmouthing Apple? Oh wait...
It is my own opinion. I don't claim to represent every single independent developer; there certainly are plenty of "official" indie organizations to try and do that. I didn't even think the term "indie" was contested. Since when does it have such a complicated definition?
As for Lugaru 2 "squeezing every last penny" out of Lugaru, I feel like you're taking my statements out of context. I could explain how my brother came to decide that Lugaru 2 was going to be his next game, but I have a feeling you don't really care.
My twin brother made the independent game Lugaru. I am developing Lugaru 2 with him.
a) "Should you design for Macs? Probably. How about Linux? Probably not."
How about designing for computers and then trivially porting it to Mac, Windows, and Linux. Lugaru gets about 65% Mac, 30% Windows, and 5% Linux. If Wolfire followed this guys advice then instead of talking to Ryan Gordon and getting a Linux port in a matter of days, we'd be out 5% of our sales and Linux users would be screwed out of another game. This also goes to show you that for an independent developer, Windows is not necessarily the best platform. The tiny, tight-knit community of Mac users is much easier to break into than pissing into the wind that is the Windows game market.
b) "the all-important topic of Search Engine Optimization"
Search engine optimization is not for game developers. Unless you're running one of those giant portals with like 200 mini java games, you shouldn't even think about SEO. A strong, well designed website is critical (yeah, Wolfire isn't the best example of that right now - we're trying to find a web designer) but realistically, you will get 98% of your hits from game sites linking to you, magazines mentioning you, forum word of mouth, etc. No one seriously goes into google and types "3d ninja ragdoll rabbit game downloadable game linux shareware" which is what you would have to type to pull up a review of Lugaru. People find their games through download sites, not search engines.
c) blogging, "motivational pyramid", power of sequels, cross-selling items, etc.
This makes me ill. Part of the charm of indy games is that they are not made to squeeze every last penny out of a game. The good ones are made more for fun by the developer as a hobby. More often than not, if you treat it as a soulless business you will fail, but if you stick to your indy roots, you will succeed. Your blog should not be a place where you try to plug all of your games and entice people to purchase everything, they should be a community where you keep your fans in the loop. My brother and I both are approaching 1000 posts on our forums and business is never even mentioned.
So an x86 emulator is capable of running Vista, an x86 operating system? Sweet!
eMule is actually an eDonkey client.
Ever wonder what that prominently placed "problem?" popup menu was for on Digg? The GoDaddy article was removed simply because enough people used that to report it as "ok, this is lame" and inaccurate. The article basically falsely accused GoDaddy of buying domains that people expressed interest in on their site. According to the vast majority of the comments on the article, the reality is that it was other registrars who intercept GoDaddy's queries (which are necessarily sent to many services in order to see if the domain is taken, iirc). Since GoDaddy is a darling company of many, and the article was patently incorrect and defamatory, many people (as you could see in the comments) reported the article as lame or inaccurate. Hence, it was removed. Oh yeah, GoDaddy isn't even a sponsor of Digg.
As for the other allegations, I have no idea, but if you're going to bash on a rival site, at least do some research before you post false information. Too bad there's no way to report crappy articles on Slashdot...
Is this repeatable? E.g. if you were sitting in a controlled room for 10 minutes, once where a cell phone (connected) was next to your head, and once where the cell phone was off, would you be able to tell which one was a call and which one was dead? If so, I think you could make quite a story.
I really wish Google would allow you to search for characters like +, ;, [], etc. It is virtually impossible to search for source because it simply drops all of your symbols.
Quake 3 was released in '99 - 7 years ago. I remember playing that on a 400 MHz G4 with an ATI 128 and being pretty impressed.
Not if he's crouching while you jump or if he's holding something.
The thing is that once you graduate from $10/month shared hosting plans, the $X/gigabyte model doesn't really apply anymore. Slashdot certainly has a dedicated internet connection, instead of paying for bandwidth on a meter. It's unlikely that their pipe is completely saturated, so I am sure that they have tons of bandwidth to spare.
By that definition, Electronic Arts = Indie :/
ID Software = indie? Are you kidding me? They have publishing deals coming out of their ass, games in all sorts of stores, internation distribution, an incorporated company, etc. They are the antithesis to "indie."
Check out my sig, if you want to see a real indie developer.
That's what I thought too, but I still get marketing calls every once and a while. Apparently it is perfectly legal these days.