1) You are using a much stricter definition of running the game well than I think is appropriate from a market-analysis standpoint. People with a few-years-old machine are likely not the type to define their self-worth by their framerates, so pretty much anything that isn't actively swapping or crashing will allow them to enjoy the game.
2) That 2.5% share that you cite presumably includes office machines, which are pretty much outside the scope of a discussion of the market for games. If we assume that a much higher percentage of office machines use Windows, and that most people will one machine at work and one at home, that figure pretty much doubles immediately. If we assume that some people have multiple work machines (a desktop and a laptop, for example), or that this figure may include servers, the number goes higher still.
3) A direct comparison of Windows versus mac installed base is not meaningful, because the game market for each is not equally saturated. If you write a game for Windows, you are competing for that larger installed base with every other game developer publishing titles in your genre. Whereas if you write a mac game, you have a good shot at acquiring close to 100% of users who have any interest in your genre at all.
I would be very surprised if less than 10% of WoW's subscribers are on macs. My actual guess would be somewhere in the 20%-30% range. And 20% of the popularity of WoW is enough to make any other game a shining success.
WoW would be something you put one your resume, but I don't think it would be seen in the same light as Bioshock or Half-life2. World of Warcraft isn't even in the top 10 of MMORPG.com's game rating list: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/sort/rating/gam e. It's a bit odd, that it is played by the masses but the masses except there are many better games.
As far as I know, every game you mention or refer to is Windows-only. Which is, I suspect, a big part of why they're all less successful than WoW.
There are somewhere around 20-30 million mac users with machines recent enough to run WoW well, and no good access to all of the games that you tout as being superior. It seems very likely that the semi-gamer subset of those 20-30 million people makes up a big part of WoW's 8 million subscribers.
This is the big thing that all of the Blizzard émigrés failed to take with them, and an important part of why none of their more recent ventures have been a real challenge to Blizzard's offerings.
While I'm sure that this set of features is very important to you, I think that your assessment of how many people share your particular desires represents some impressive projection.
I (and, it seems, the poster to whom you're responding) want an elegant, usable _telephone_. A telephone that will spend nearly all its time in one nation, being used for fewer than six hours of conversation per day. I don't think I'm projecting too far to suggest that this is a very common usage pattern.
I don't have a whole lot of use for a camera, gps, modular storage, or the ability to buy new music living in my pocket. I don't know what seven gpss you're carrying around, but that's seven more than my life seems to require.
I have confidence in Apple's ability to design a device that performs one function well. If I occasionally use it to take a picture or two, or cart around some files, or check directions when I'm lost, that'll be a nice little lagniappe. But miniscule details of the way it does those ancillary things are leagues away from being "fatal flaws" in my book.
The whole point of an interview is to find the scope of a candidate's knowledge.
Uh, no it isn't. And you're not going to FIND the scope during an interview anyway -- at most you can pursue only a very few lines of questioning deeply.
An interview gives you *an idea* of what someone is like, and an idea of what kind of stuff they know, but only generally.
For a developer, learning how to interview well is orthogonal to producing results. Guess which one matters, and which one you won't know about until AFTER the hire.
If you believe that an interview can give only the vaguest general idea of a candidate's abilities, and that any attempt to learn more is doomed, what is it that you suggest potential employers should do? Just hire everyone who walks in the door, and expect to fire most of them in a few months?
And if you don't feel that the point of an interview is to find the scope of a candidate's knowledge, what is the point? Why should one bother with them at all?
Their style of questions was grilling you more and more and going deeper and deeper into the questions and technicalities until you failed. Started as what is TCP and UDP to going down and down and down the stack, syncookies, handshakes, how it works, to how sequence numbers are generated and more to more obscure points... At one point I couldn't answer anymore.
The whole point of an interview is to find the scope of a candidate's knowledge. And the only way to find those boundaries is to exceed them.
So, yes, any meaningful interview should include questions that you can't answer. That doesn't mean that you've failed, that just means that the interview has produced some information.
It's not a contest between the interviewer and candidate, and attempting to find questions you can't answer is not intended as a personal affront to you. Interviewing is a cooperative process in which both parties are trying to come to an understanding of how good a fit the candidate and position are for one another.
Personally, while Blade Runner is a good movie, it seems to me it's just yet another "we built it, and now it goes bad and kills people" movie that we've seen a million times before. Whether it's a replicant in Blade Runner, Skynet in Terminator, or robots in I, Robot, it's all basically the same plot over and over.
I don't think that's a particularly accurate characterization of Blade Runner. While it's true that the big flashy action scenes were replicants killing people, the whole point was that they weren't just mindless or evil killing machines embodying a metaphor for technology gone too far. The point was nearly the opposite of that; they were, fundamentally, human. Humans whose situation and capabilities exceeded their emotional maturity, and who were failing to deal with that in the way that humans are wont to do.
They were in fact the most terrifying of all things: extremely powerful children. Blade Runner has less in common with Terminator than with Lord of the Flies.
It's important to think of this as two problems: energy source, and energy storage.
Part of what makes petroleum hard to compete with is its incredible energy density. If you stop to think for a moment about the idea of propelling a few tons of steel twenty or fifty miles even through all of the ridiculous inefficiencies of an internal combustion engine, it becomes clear exactly how much energy is in that gallon of gasoline.
The big downfall of pure-electric cars has always been that electric batteries are absolute rubbish for energy density when compared to petroleum. It takes nearly a ton of electric battery to hold the same amount of energy one gets out of a gallon of gasoline.
I'm sad to say it, but petroleum addresses the energy storage problem vastly better than any other available solution. When combined with its convenience as an energy source (it is, literally, just sitting there waiting to be picked up), it is clearly, by any single-point-in-time measure, the best choice to drive vehicles.
Which is unfortunate, because it has some serious downsides in the longer term. But "the longer term" is generally an externality, not something that a market can incorporate well on its own.
I did in fact follow your link and take a brief look around. It was enough to confirm that it was: not something of which I had heard by another name; not something that seemed important enough to feel bad about not having heard of, and; not something that seemed interesting enough that I really wanted to look into it much further.
So I'm afraid that I must stand by my assertion that your accusation of non-geekery simply based upon having not heard of one tiny and uninteresting project was not justified.
Y'know, "clarifying" a bunch of phones of which no one has ever heard by saying that one of them is something else of which no one has ever heard does not really help much.
My geek card has tenure. I just have no idea what you're talking about.
You may notice that a large portion of http://www.apple.com/safari/ is taken up with bar graphs, representing benchmarks, which include Opera. By their measures Opera is actually the slowest by far at "html" rendering, and the second-fastest at "javascript" rendering--behind Safari.
Obviously companies cook their own benchmarks, so it's very possible that they chose bits of javascript which Safari handles particularly well. But they at least have acknowledged Opera as another option, and there's at least some evidence that Safari may perform better than it.
I enjoyed Jobs's sniping at recent Windows versioning:
"We've got a basic version, which is going to cost $129. We've got a Premium version, which is going to cost $129. We've got a Business version, $129. We've got an Enterprise version, $129. And we've got the Ultimate version, we're throwing everything into it, it's $129. We think most people will buy the Ultimate version."
I bet that if you were to enumerate the benefits of CSS, they would all be benefits to the site author or admin. But those benefits to the author come at the expense of greater complexity and lesser functionality to the site's readers. It would also reduce server load if they just mailed out photocopies of the site once a month, but the quality of service provided to the users would go rather downhill.
Your comment about 1996 seems to imply that newer is categorically better. I would suggest that while there's some tendency in that direction, there are very many examples of new technologies that in fact steps backward. In my experience, the sullying of html with css is among them.
I assure you that my comment was sincere, not trolling.
My browser of choice is w3m. w3m handles everything I want out of the web, which does not extend to CSS.
The previous html and frames version of slashdot worked perfectly. These days, however, slash decides to just spew out all of its content in a useless linear order, then use CSS to arrange it on the pager later. Which means that those of us who use non-CSS-speaking browsers get to scroll through a few pages of navbar and similarly useless crap before reaching any of the actual content on any slashdot page.
Perhaps you'll see why I consider this to be a huge usability downgrade. The CSS version provides absolutely nothing new except reduced functionality.
And despite your suspicions of my knowledge, no, I really do not consider the ajaxy comment interface to be superior to loading pages. You seem to imply that loading pages is some terrible thing that one should want to avoid. I would suggest instead that we just serve pages that are not so festooned with ecmascript and whatnot that loading them is a slow process.
You're a rare weirdo. Much of the web won't work without scripting, or at least won't work well.
On the contrary: if it doesn't work without scripting, it didn't work well in the first place. I haven't seen anything done with javascript that I actually ever want to have happen on my machine anyway.
You're missing out on the nicer wiki/blog editors, live updates to the price of a computer purchase as you add/remove components, tolerable web mail interfaces, and (if your CPU is fast) the experimental slashdot interface.
I suspect that I'm far happier with vim than with any javascript editor, thanks. I'm perfectly capable of managing the simple arithmetic of prices changing as I add and remove items. Given that there are no tolerable webmail interfaces, there's really nothing there to be lost. And slashdot has, sadly, been going in the wrong direction usability-wise for some time now. This hideous CSS-laden version of slash is a big step down from the previous pure html version, and the new new version is worse still. None for me, thanks.
Re:Apple will still need lots of luck
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FCC Approves iPhone
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· Score: 4, Funny
Mac versions. And not bad ports, not Wine hackery, not months- or years-delayed half-efforts. Blizzard has always mantained mac versions as first-class citizens among all their products: full feature and performance parity, full interoperability, and synchronized releases. And this has served them incredibly well.
There are somewhere between fifteen and twenty million macs in use right now that are recent enough to run WoW. Even though these are people who have not chosen their platform to maximize the number of games available to them, let's say that one in ten has at least some interest in gaming occasionally.
That's about two million potential customers for whom there is very little product competition. A market that size is about a quarter of WoW's total playerbase, and far larger than most games ever see.
Blizzard is one of the few companies that has been bright enough to catch on to the value of making big-scale games for this incredibly ripe market, and I suspect that it has been a big contributor to their success. With luck, a few other big game authoring companies will figure out this trick as well.
And, it being so close to the star, there might be a big radiation problem, forcing humans to go underground. But that wouldn't be too bad, because it would make gravity a bit less of a problem.
You have a pretty generous definition of either "underground" or "a bit".
Its diameter appears to be around 20,000Km. To reduce net gravity to 1G, you'd need to go just over 10,000Km deep. Which is awfully close to being as deep as Australia is--from Europe. Reducing net gravity by 1% would require a couple orders of magnitude deeper excavation than humans have ever accomplished on Earth. And would, of course, have to be performed with only the tools that you've hauled five parsecs, in 2.25G of gravity.
I'm not saying don't go, or don't be excited. You just might want to scratch this one bullet point off your pitch to nasa.
I'd say the conclusion they'd like you to reach is that macs are so much less susceptible to viruses that they don't require worrying about.
And fortunately, that conclusion is correct. You'll notice that these are all pre-emptive fixes to bugs that apple or white hats have discovered, not emergency patches for ongoing exploitation. I'd hazard a guess that the total number of macs compromised by these issues outside of a testing environment is zero.
I'm sorry that your sister was affected by the one mac virus that has ever had even a tiny spread in the wild in the past, well, ever. (Symmantec's estimation of the total number of infections is "0-49". Probably not accurate, but remember that this is an entity that has an incentive to _exaggerate_ virus threats.) But one anecdote of one incredibly rare virus that did minimal damage, was easily detected and removed, and saw a quick extinction does not bring into dispute the idea that macs are extremely virus-un-prone.
The post to which I replied cited the convenience of being able to access email "anywhere". And further implied by his comment about not having to do any smtp/pop/imap setup that this "anywhere" includes machines that he hasn't used before and won't use again.
Which I find a little bit crazy. That, of necessity, involves giving the authentication credentials for your email account to all of these random, untrusted machines.
So if one is at all concerned about keeping their passwords to themselves, I can't really see that the "from anywhere" feature gets you anything.
You're correct that the burden of proof is still on the accuser. But keep in mind that the bar is much lower for civil cases than criminal cases. Criminal law requires the "beyond a reasonable doubt" level of proof of which you may be thinking: that it's an absolute certainty that the accused did commit the crime.
Civil suits generally require merely "a preponderance of the evidence". In other words, that it seems more likely that the accusation is true than that it's untrue. So the argument for proving reverse engineering could be as simple as, "It took our world-class engineers years to create this product, and this other group claims to have reimplimented it over three months in their spare time. It's much less likely that they're all savants than that they're just lying, and stole our stuff."
(I'm not suggesting that this is necessarily a good or valid argument, just that it could conceivably be enough to satisfy the lower bar of proof required by a civil suit.)
Having access to my email from anywhere in the world at any time...
I believe you meant "having access to my email from any computer I'm willing to give my authentication credentials". For me, that already narrows things to my own machines, so I don't really see much advantage here. I'm completely mystified by people who are willing to just spray their passwords into friends' machines, cafe machines, or any other unstrusted devices.
If Thunderbird has problems with that, that's a problem with Thunderbird, not with mail applications as a whole.
It looks as if I've got around 68,000 messages in my various mailboxes in macosx's mail.app right now, and have no difficulty searching them quickly. (For example, a full-text search that matched 1,100 of those 68,000 messages just took me about three seconds.)
Don't dismiss an entire category of applications just because the one implementation you've used is a bad one.
Slashdot Mirror
Three things:
1) You are using a much stricter definition of running the game well than I think is appropriate from a market-analysis standpoint. People with a few-years-old machine are likely not the type to define their self-worth by their framerates, so pretty much anything that isn't actively swapping or crashing will allow them to enjoy the game.
2) That 2.5% share that you cite presumably includes office machines, which are pretty much outside the scope of a discussion of the market for games. If we assume that a much higher percentage of office machines use Windows, and that most people will one machine at work and one at home, that figure pretty much doubles immediately. If we assume that some people have multiple work machines (a desktop and a laptop, for example), or that this figure may include servers, the number goes higher still.
3) A direct comparison of Windows versus mac installed base is not meaningful, because the game market for each is not equally saturated. If you write a game for Windows, you are competing for that larger installed base with every other game developer publishing titles in your genre. Whereas if you write a mac game, you have a good shot at acquiring close to 100% of users who have any interest in your genre at all.
I would be very surprised if less than 10% of WoW's subscribers are on macs. My actual guess would be somewhere in the 20%-30% range. And 20% of the popularity of WoW is enough to make any other game a shining success.
As far as I know, every game you mention or refer to is Windows-only. Which is, I suspect, a big part of why they're all less successful than WoW.
There are somewhere around 20-30 million mac users with machines recent enough to run WoW well, and no good access to all of the games that you tout as being superior. It seems very likely that the semi-gamer subset of those 20-30 million people makes up a big part of WoW's 8 million subscribers.
This is the big thing that all of the Blizzard émigrés failed to take with them, and an important part of why none of their more recent ventures have been a real challenge to Blizzard's offerings.
While I'm sure that this set of features is very important to you, I think that your assessment of how many people share your particular desires represents some impressive projection.
I (and, it seems, the poster to whom you're responding) want an elegant, usable _telephone_. A telephone that will spend nearly all its time in one nation, being used for fewer than six hours of conversation per day. I don't think I'm projecting too far to suggest that this is a very common usage pattern.
I don't have a whole lot of use for a camera, gps, modular storage, or the ability to buy new music living in my pocket. I don't know what seven gpss you're carrying around, but that's seven more than my life seems to require.
I have confidence in Apple's ability to design a device that performs one function well. If I occasionally use it to take a picture or two, or cart around some files, or check directions when I'm lost, that'll be a nice little lagniappe. But miniscule details of the way it does those ancillary things are leagues away from being "fatal flaws" in my book.
If you believe that an interview can give only the vaguest general idea of a candidate's abilities, and that any attempt to learn more is doomed, what is it that you suggest potential employers should do? Just hire everyone who walks in the door, and expect to fire most of them in a few months?
And if you don't feel that the point of an interview is to find the scope of a candidate's knowledge, what is the point? Why should one bother with them at all?
The whole point of an interview is to find the scope of a candidate's knowledge. And the only way to find those boundaries is to exceed them.
So, yes, any meaningful interview should include questions that you can't answer. That doesn't mean that you've failed, that just means that the interview has produced some information.
It's not a contest between the interviewer and candidate, and attempting to find questions you can't answer is not intended as a personal affront to you. Interviewing is a cooperative process in which both parties are trying to come to an understanding of how good a fit the candidate and position are for one another.
I don't think that's a particularly accurate characterization of Blade Runner. While it's true that the big flashy action scenes were replicants killing people, the whole point was that they weren't just mindless or evil killing machines embodying a metaphor for technology gone too far. The point was nearly the opposite of that; they were, fundamentally, human. Humans whose situation and capabilities exceeded their emotional maturity, and who were failing to deal with that in the way that humans are wont to do.
They were in fact the most terrifying of all things: extremely powerful children. Blade Runner has less in common with Terminator than with Lord of the Flies.
It's important to think of this as two problems: energy source, and energy storage.
Part of what makes petroleum hard to compete with is its incredible energy density. If you stop to think for a moment about the idea of propelling a few tons of steel twenty or fifty miles even through all of the ridiculous inefficiencies of an internal combustion engine, it becomes clear exactly how much energy is in that gallon of gasoline.
The big downfall of pure-electric cars has always been that electric batteries are absolute rubbish for energy density when compared to petroleum. It takes nearly a ton of electric battery to hold the same amount of energy one gets out of a gallon of gasoline.
I'm sad to say it, but petroleum addresses the energy storage problem vastly better than any other available solution. When combined with its convenience as an energy source (it is, literally, just sitting there waiting to be picked up), it is clearly, by any single-point-in-time measure, the best choice to drive vehicles.
Which is unfortunate, because it has some serious downsides in the longer term. But "the longer term" is generally an externality, not something that a market can incorporate well on its own.
I did in fact follow your link and take a brief look around. It was enough to confirm that it was: not something of which I had heard by another name; not something that seemed important enough to feel bad about not having heard of, and; not something that seemed interesting enough that I really wanted to look into it much further.
So I'm afraid that I must stand by my assertion that your accusation of non-geekery simply based upon having not heard of one tiny and uninteresting project was not justified.
Y'know, "clarifying" a bunch of phones of which no one has ever heard by saying that one of them is something else of which no one has ever heard does not really help much.
My geek card has tenure. I just have no idea what you're talking about.
vim running on osx appears to offer everything you require. Enjoy.
You may notice that a large portion of http://www.apple.com/safari/ is taken up with bar graphs, representing benchmarks, which include Opera. By their measures Opera is actually the slowest by far at "html" rendering, and the second-fastest at "javascript" rendering--behind Safari.
Obviously companies cook their own benchmarks, so it's very possible that they chose bits of javascript which Safari handles particularly well. But they at least have acknowledged Opera as another option, and there's at least some evidence that Safari may perform better than it.
I enjoyed Jobs's sniping at recent Windows versioning:
"We've got a basic version, which is going to cost $129. We've got a Premium version, which is going to cost $129. We've got a Business version, $129. We've got an Enterprise version, $129. And we've got the Ultimate version, we're throwing everything into it, it's $129. We think most people will buy the Ultimate version."
I bet that if you were to enumerate the benefits of CSS, they would all be benefits to the site author or admin. But those benefits to the author come at the expense of greater complexity and lesser functionality to the site's readers. It would also reduce server load if they just mailed out photocopies of the site once a month, but the quality of service provided to the users would go rather downhill.
Your comment about 1996 seems to imply that newer is categorically better. I would suggest that while there's some tendency in that direction, there are very many examples of new technologies that in fact steps backward. In my experience, the sullying of html with css is among them.
I assure you that my comment was sincere, not trolling.
My browser of choice is w3m. w3m handles everything I want out of the web, which does not extend to CSS.
The previous html and frames version of slashdot worked perfectly. These days, however, slash decides to just spew out all of its content in a useless linear order, then use CSS to arrange it on the pager later. Which means that those of us who use non-CSS-speaking browsers get to scroll through a few pages of navbar and similarly useless crap before reaching any of the actual content on any slashdot page.
Perhaps you'll see why I consider this to be a huge usability downgrade. The CSS version provides absolutely nothing new except reduced functionality.
And despite your suspicions of my knowledge, no, I really do not consider the ajaxy comment interface to be superior to loading pages. You seem to imply that loading pages is some terrible thing that one should want to avoid. I would suggest instead that we just serve pages that are not so festooned with ecmascript and whatnot that loading them is a slow process.
Mac versions. And not bad ports, not Wine hackery, not months- or years-delayed half-efforts. Blizzard has always mantained mac versions as first-class citizens among all their products: full feature and performance parity, full interoperability, and synchronized releases. And this has served them incredibly well.
There are somewhere between fifteen and twenty million macs in use right now that are recent enough to run WoW. Even though these are people who have not chosen their platform to maximize the number of games available to them, let's say that one in ten has at least some interest in gaming occasionally.
That's about two million potential customers for whom there is very little product competition. A market that size is about a quarter of WoW's total playerbase, and far larger than most games ever see.
Blizzard is one of the few companies that has been bright enough to catch on to the value of making big-scale games for this incredibly ripe market, and I suspect that it has been a big contributor to their success. With luck, a few other big game authoring companies will figure out this trick as well.
A friend of mine managed to cover this in four words over a decade ago:
"Many computers--all friends."
You have a pretty generous definition of either "underground" or "a bit".
Its diameter appears to be around 20,000Km. To reduce net gravity to 1G, you'd need to go just over 10,000Km deep. Which is awfully close to being as deep as Australia is--from Europe. Reducing net gravity by 1% would require a couple orders of magnitude deeper excavation than humans have ever accomplished on Earth. And would, of course, have to be performed with only the tools that you've hauled five parsecs, in 2.25G of gravity.
I'm not saying don't go, or don't be excited. You just might want to scratch this one bullet point off your pitch to nasa.
I'd say the conclusion they'd like you to reach is that macs are so much less susceptible to viruses that they don't require worrying about.
And fortunately, that conclusion is correct. You'll notice that these are all pre-emptive fixes to bugs that apple or white hats have discovered, not emergency patches for ongoing exploitation. I'd hazard a guess that the total number of macs compromised by these issues outside of a testing environment is zero.
I'm sorry that your sister was affected by the one mac virus that has ever had even a tiny spread in the wild in the past, well, ever. (Symmantec's estimation of the total number of infections is "0-49". Probably not accurate, but remember that this is an entity that has an incentive to _exaggerate_ virus threats.) But one anecdote of one incredibly rare virus that did minimal damage, was easily detected and removed, and saw a quick extinction does not bring into dispute the idea that macs are extremely virus-un-prone.
Sure, and I apologize if I was unclear.
The post to which I replied cited the convenience of being able to access email "anywhere". And further implied by his comment about not having to do any smtp/pop/imap setup that this "anywhere" includes machines that he hasn't used before and won't use again.
Which I find a little bit crazy. That, of necessity, involves giving the authentication credentials for your email account to all of these random, untrusted machines.
So if one is at all concerned about keeping their passwords to themselves, I can't really see that the "from anywhere" feature gets you anything.
You're correct that the burden of proof is still on the accuser. But keep in mind that the bar is much lower for civil cases than criminal cases. Criminal law requires the "beyond a reasonable doubt" level of proof of which you may be thinking: that it's an absolute certainty that the accused did commit the crime.
Civil suits generally require merely "a preponderance of the evidence". In other words, that it seems more likely that the accusation is true than that it's untrue. So the argument for proving reverse engineering could be as simple as, "It took our world-class engineers years to create this product, and this other group claims to have reimplimented it over three months in their spare time. It's much less likely that they're all savants than that they're just lying, and stole our stuff."
(I'm not suggesting that this is necessarily a good or valid argument, just that it could conceivably be enough to satisfy the lower bar of proof required by a civil suit.)
So it gives you the ability to indiscriminately hand out your authentication credentials to any machine in the world? Sounds like a great feature.
If Thunderbird has problems with that, that's a problem with Thunderbird, not with mail applications as a whole.
It looks as if I've got around 68,000 messages in my various mailboxes in macosx's mail.app right now, and have no difficulty searching them quickly. (For example, a full-text search that matched 1,100 of those 68,000 messages just took me about three seconds.)
Don't dismiss an entire category of applications just because the one implementation you've used is a bad one.