I thought Wave was great. Yes, it was just a combination of a bunch of other tools that people were using, but there is something to be said for unification of those tools into one cohesive whole. I, for instance, am glad that my phone is also a camera and a calendar. The big problem with Wave was that it was slow and buggy. It would crash constantly and if you had over 50 posts on a wave, it would become unusable. Also, it was hard to get people to know when an update on the Wave was posted. By the time they implemented e-mail notifications, people already moved back to what they were used to and didn't want to deal with the bugginess. I wish they stuck around with it and gave it a chance to catch on.
a $10 drop across the board for new console games would go a long way. $60 is WAY too much for a console game.
I don't believe this to be true. A $10 drop across the board might give a slight increase in sales in the short term, but after a short while, people will consider $50 too much for a console game. Again, the solution consumers will propose is "Just drop it another $10 and we'll buy it!" Games today are a ridiculously good value for the amount of entertainment you're getting out of them. A $60 game will usually give you at least 20 hours of gameplay on top of the infinite amount of time you could (usually) play online. Just taking the base single player experience, you're already getting 13 times the amount of entertainment at only 5 times the cost of a movie ticket (calculating 90 minutes/movie @ $12/ticket).
My issue is that games give you too much value. I'm a 28 year old with a full-time job and a limited amount of time on my hands and can play a game for a few hours a week if I'm lucky. If game developers gave me a game that can be completed in 6 - 10 hours and cost half as much, I'd be purchasing more games because I would be more confident I can actually finish them and get my money's worth in entertainment. As it stands, I usually purchase a $60 game and don't have a chance to complete it until the next AAA title comes out, so it makes me more hesitant to purchase more of the big titles. This is something movies do well. When I'm sitting down to watch a movie, I know exactly how much time I need to invest in order to feel the satisfaction of finishing it.
My demographic doesn't seem to be one that the game industry gives a crap about. They just keep cramming more and more stuff into the games and making them longer for higher budgets, and at the end they only appeal to the 13-17 year old who has 6 hours a day to spend in front of a television/computer for recreation. Usually the only games I actually get to play these days are the casual ones that allow you to play 10 minutes at a time. I want something in-between and I'm willing to pay for it.
Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that. If you know about evolution, then you know that there is pretty much no difference and no line between the chicken that hatches from the egg, and the animal that made the egg in the first place. The only reason we could even call a chicken a chicken and a red Junglefowl a red Junglefowl (this animal being the known direct ancestor of the modern chicken) is that at some point, a group of red Junglefowl got separated from the species and evolved and bred into what we now call chickens. It is only the separation and hundreds of years of non-interbreeding that creates speciation. So, the paradox remains. The chicken egg could not have been created by a non-chicken and a chicken couldn't have been born without hatching from the egg.
Trying to solve the paradox through an evolution trick doesn't work because evolution is about small changes over hundreds or thousands of years. If a chicken hatches from the egg of a species that we don't consider a chicken, then we could toss the theory of evolution out the window.
Obama isn't being reamed on this because of ideology. It's the Republican ideology of "Drill Baby Drill!" and it's the Democrats who have been against off-shore drilling. This disaster could only have helped Obama.
What this means is that an eBook that the author was quite happy to sell for $2.29 or $2.49 is now going to cost you $2.99 from everybody.
Or it could make the book $1.99, right? Why is there an automatic round up? I don't see how this is really Apple's fault. Your publisher has the option to make it any dollar amount they want it to be, but they're choosing to make it cost more for the consumer, and they're using Apple as a scapegoat for it. How about this - everything that's over 2.50 gets rounded up to 2.99 and everything under 2.50 gets rounded down to 1.99 and split the difference? It's not like the means of production are any indication of price anymore. In the online world, it's practically ALL profit, and by putting their books on the Apple bookstore, they now have an extra 20 million potential customers. I'll just chalk this price increase to the continued greed of the publishing industry.
As a person who went to art school, I could say you're right and wrong. Art school and this game design school if done right isn't just a sheet of paper but a product as well. I came out with a demo reel from my school as well as a degree. The question you proposed should really be "Who would you publish, some guy who spent 4 years getting a degree and has programmed and released an innovative game over the internet as part of the curriculum and has good grades and references that shows he gets along well with people? Or a guy who programmed and released a game just as innovative over the internet but really has no other credentials or anybody to vouch for him as a person since he was in his mom's basement the whole time?" Both of those people achieved results, and the guy in his mom's basement is 30 - 60k richer since he's not burdened with school debt, but working at a company is a team effort and the people skills you learn in school as well as the connections go a long way in securing a job just as much as the results you're talking about.
Sounds like a laptop or netbook would also be perfect for her. What you have is a false dichotomy. "Having 1 PC in the house" vs "Having a PC and an iPad" aren't the only 2 choices, especially considering the iPad isn't able to watch flash video except off of YouTube and a couple of other popular sites and that's one of the functions you said your wife needs.
As long as you don't directly copy any of the art, assets, code or writing, you're free to do whatever the hell you want. Even ripping off the setting as long as you change the names is fair game. Doing tile for tile remakes of the levels (if it has such a thing) might be pushing the boundaries, so I'd stay clear of that too, but pretty much any game mechanic has been copied a million times over so you're safe ripping that off to your hearts content. That's what the professionals do, too.
If there was a market for it, tech companies would be tripping over themselves trying to get to it. Unfotunately, there isn't. If you believe there is, then go get some venture capital and release an open gaming system and you'll be a millionaire instead of waiting for Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo to do it for you. One product isn't monopolizing the market. In the video game world, there's 3 companies who have each decided that they will be making more money if they release closed systems. Video games are a pretty good example of what I'm talking about since Atari not having any standards for their shovel ware releases back in the 80's created the huge video game crash that Nintendo had to revive with a very closed system and a single company being the gate keeper to all of their software... sound familiar?
If you want an open computer, they have them available. Purchase an android, or windows platform laptop/mobile device. The success of the iPhone and iPad shows that most people don't care about how closed their electronic devices are. Just like they wouldn't hack their toasters, most people just want to use their computer devices exactly what they were meant to be used for - in the case of the iPad - e-mail, web browsing, and watching movies through Apple approved distribution methods. If it really bothered them, they wouldn't be putting in 500 bucks (min) for their electronic toy. I hate how most anti-Apple computer people keep spouting "choice! Choice! CHOICE!" as their tag line against Apple making a closed system and as if they cared about consumer choice. The people are making their choice, you're just trying to deny Apple their choice in making a closed system that they feel people want.
As the cell phone market has shown and the iPad will show, closed systems are the only way to get wide acceptance for electronic devices. In many areas in the world, there's wider mobile phone adoption than there is PC adoption. Most people don't want to program computers, or even download and use third party software because they don't have a consistent brand identity that they trust. But guess what? Computers will always need programmers, so while there is a huge market opening up for non-programmable, content viewing devices, there will always be another smaller market for programmable, open, content creating devices. They can't close off the whole computer industry because then there will be no one to make the content they're trying to sell.
I use Yelp all the time, and I've found great restaurants and other services through there. As for the reviews, it's just like Amazon, you get a gerneral consensus with the average rating, and then you read a couple positive reviews, a couple negatives ones, and then make up your mind based on them. I don't understand how a shady algorithm would make you trust Yelp reviews any less because of their display algorithm
Kevin Smith has made a career out of self-deprecation and dick and fart jokes. To take one of his quotes and put it in some real-world context is pretty ridiculous as you could see him for yourself in pretty much all of his movies, some that aren't his, and in countless photos easily accessible on the internet. His self description is a gross exaggeration - that's what he does. He's overweight, yes, but he also followed along with SWA policies, fit in the seat, passed the armrest test and could buckle his seatbelt. Your opinion on this matter is not informed by the facts of the case but just with your prejudice against overweight people and probably a good bit toward your prejudice against celebrities as well.
If you've payed attention to the story, he buys 2 seats because he's antisocial, not because he needs the extra space. And I don't blame him for that, if I were a celebrity and had a lot of money, I'd buy 2 seats too. Also, he fit in his seat, didn't need a seatbelt extension and passed the armrest test. This whole thing is a big black eye for SWA, as their employees didn't even enforce the proper policies and SWA's PR is still maintaining that they're right in the matter, no matter how many false apologies they're issuing.
Why does Apple get a special brand of outrage every time it releases a product? Where's the outrage when Microsoft, Sony, AND Nintendo all announced that you can't program for their powerful computers unless you bought a very expensive kit, and even then your product couldn't be released without going through a thorough review process and paying more substantial sums? Oh yeah, nobody cared because that was par for the course for consoles over the last 20 years and anyway, it's just a game system. Where, even, was the outrage when Amazon and Barnes and Noble announced that you can't program applications for their eBook readers? Oh, it's just meant to read books. So now Apple comes out with a similar device but this one reads books, plays games, browses the web, plays music and movies, and allows anybody to program pretty much anything for it for a fairly low price with the added functionality of easy distribution and pay system... and HOLY FUCKING SHIT THEY'RE NOT LETTING US INSTALL TIDDLYWINKS 3D ON IT BY OURSELVES AND LOAD IT WITH ALL THE APPLICATIONS WE COULD GET OFF DOWNLOAD.COM!! WHERE'S MY PITCHFORK!?!?!!!!
The iPhone and iPod Touch opened up a floodgate of hungry customers toward simple, single purpose applications. I'd think that the developers on this site would be going apeshit over the fact that now there will be millions of more paying customers with easy access to your software and with backward compatibility toward a device that already has over 20 million users, but instead, you're busy bitching about how you can't "do what you want with it." What more do you want? The ability to install GCC on it? Guess what, it's give and take... if you want the freedom of installing any application that your heart deems worthy, then you're going to pay for it by not having the casual market care about the device because it's too complicated for them... and there are plenty of devices like that out for you already.
A couple of years ago everyone realized the computer was on it's way to becoming an appliance like your toaster or microwave, and were pretty optimistic about it. Well, the future is now... and people still complain about it. As others have stated, this isn't a general all-purpose computer, and it's not meant to be. Jobs was right when he said the netbook doesn't do anything better. It only does things smaller and, with every passing generation of the netbook, they're increasing the size of the device until it's indistinguishable from a laptop. The iPad is in practice what the original netbook was supposed to be - a device just for surfing the net, watching videos, reading books, playing games, and looking at photos. It's a useful appliance. All the Apple hate is pretty ridiculous, as with this they are progressing technology. Without the iPad, we'd see 10 more years of netbooks getting bigger, phones getting smaller, and Microsoft releasing Slate PCs as if they're new. If the iPad takes off, which it probably will, in 2 years time everybody will be scrambling to get a iPad like device out there, and enough of them will run existing OSes that you can install programs to and hack to your hearts content and you know what? They all won't compete with the iPad because people don't want freedom in computing... they want an appliance that they can rely on not to get viruses and have their kids come fix every 2 months.
If Newsday is one of the only for-pay newspapers online and higher profile newspapers like NY Times are still giving their news away for free, is it any surprise that there aren't many subscribers to the for-pay paper? From the sound of it, their pricing scheme was also way too expensive. Five bucks a week? Sounds like they're pricing it as if they still have to send it to the printing presses. Drop the price to 10 bucks a month - max, and maybe make a tiered pricing model, giving away some stuff for free. Otherwise, why would I even visit the site and how would I know it's worth the price of admission?
Maybe a pay-as-you-go system where you pay a micro payment per article will also be viable in the future.
So my profession dictates everything about me, huh? Every person in the computer graphics industry is a hipster, every programmer or IT guy is a nerd, every manager is a pointy headed idiot, right? What does that make anonymous internet trolls?
I'm pretty sick of the ridiculous assertion that anybody who buys a mac is a hipster. I'm a CG artist. I've been raised around computers since my parents bought me and my brother a commodore 64c. I bought Windows 95 the day that it came out. I install Ubuntu every major release and have used Windows 7 RC and every Windows that has come before it. For the past 2 years, though, my primary machine has been a Mac. For me, it's not about the aesthetics, but about the practicality. It works faster, and better. I'm a lot more productive on it and I actually enjoy using it a lot more than both Linux or Windows. When I use Windows at work and have to change some obscure network preference, it takes me a few minutes to find the hidden window inside the obscure preference panel. When I need to do the same thing on Mac OS, I can usually find what I need in 30 seconds. That's practicality. Hipsters might be the face behind Apple fanaticism but most of the people who I've convinced to buy Macs weren't hipsters but regular non-computer people who want a nice, easy, clean operating system that doesn't get bogged down with the bullshit that Windows does. My girlfriend bought a macbook last year and I haven't had to help her with it at all, meanwhile my neighbor's Windows XP machine has been destroyed by spyware and malware to an almost unusable state. That's practicality. If all Apple had to offer was a pretty way to minimize Windows, nobody would be interested. Ubuntu has better eye candy than Mac OS at this point. It's got flashy cube desktop switchers and transparent windows and a bunch of other flashy shit that people love seeing on YouTube but then don't use because it's not practical.
I could even say the same thing about the iPhone. 3 years ago I only had a cell phone to make emergency calls and I rarely used it. Then the iPhone came out and I didn't want to join in on the hype so I bought a Palm Treo. The thing was absolute fucking garbage. It crashed 3 or 4 times a day and even after over 10 years of Palm OS being on the market, there wasn't a single application that I was interested in. The 3G came out and I decided to switch to iPhone. Now it's glued to my hand. It's changed the way I live my life. I need a restaurant nearby, I look to my iPhone. I want to look up something that we're talking about in everyday conversation, I check my iPhone. Yeah, other phones now have similar features, but Apple paved the way for it. Other smart phones focused on getting your e-mail to you wherever you are. Apple focused on getting the internet to you wherever you are. Now people constantly ask me to check my iPhone for some information. That's practicality. I don't give a shit that it looks pretty. It's a plus, but again, if all Apple could do was make a nice looking phone then they'd be out of business. No, they made a phone that's useful and that's why they've taken up half of the cell phone market-share. It's not just hipsters buying them.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought Wave was great. Yes, it was just a combination of a bunch of other tools that people were using, but there is something to be said for unification of those tools into one cohesive whole. I, for instance, am glad that my phone is also a camera and a calendar. The big problem with Wave was that it was slow and buggy. It would crash constantly and if you had over 50 posts on a wave, it would become unusable. Also, it was hard to get people to know when an update on the Wave was posted. By the time they implemented e-mail notifications, people already moved back to what they were used to and didn't want to deal with the bugginess. I wish they stuck around with it and gave it a chance to catch on.
a $10 drop across the board for new console games would go a long way. $60 is WAY too much for a console game.
I don't believe this to be true. A $10 drop across the board might give a slight increase in sales in the short term, but after a short while, people will consider $50 too much for a console game. Again, the solution consumers will propose is "Just drop it another $10 and we'll buy it!" Games today are a ridiculously good value for the amount of entertainment you're getting out of them. A $60 game will usually give you at least 20 hours of gameplay on top of the infinite amount of time you could (usually) play online. Just taking the base single player experience, you're already getting 13 times the amount of entertainment at only 5 times the cost of a movie ticket (calculating 90 minutes/movie @ $12/ticket).
My issue is that games give you too much value. I'm a 28 year old with a full-time job and a limited amount of time on my hands and can play a game for a few hours a week if I'm lucky. If game developers gave me a game that can be completed in 6 - 10 hours and cost half as much, I'd be purchasing more games because I would be more confident I can actually finish them and get my money's worth in entertainment. As it stands, I usually purchase a $60 game and don't have a chance to complete it until the next AAA title comes out, so it makes me more hesitant to purchase more of the big titles. This is something movies do well. When I'm sitting down to watch a movie, I know exactly how much time I need to invest in order to feel the satisfaction of finishing it.
My demographic doesn't seem to be one that the game industry gives a crap about. They just keep cramming more and more stuff into the games and making them longer for higher budgets, and at the end they only appeal to the 13-17 year old who has 6 hours a day to spend in front of a television/computer for recreation. Usually the only games I actually get to play these days are the casual ones that allow you to play 10 minutes at a time. I want something in-between and I'm willing to pay for it.
Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that. If you know about evolution, then you know that there is pretty much no difference and no line between the chicken that hatches from the egg, and the animal that made the egg in the first place. The only reason we could even call a chicken a chicken and a red Junglefowl a red Junglefowl (this animal being the known direct ancestor of the modern chicken) is that at some point, a group of red Junglefowl got separated from the species and evolved and bred into what we now call chickens. It is only the separation and hundreds of years of non-interbreeding that creates speciation. So, the paradox remains. The chicken egg could not have been created by a non-chicken and a chicken couldn't have been born without hatching from the egg.
Trying to solve the paradox through an evolution trick doesn't work because evolution is about small changes over hundreds or thousands of years. If a chicken hatches from the egg of a species that we don't consider a chicken, then we could toss the theory of evolution out the window.
Yeah, but the people who sue casinos are probably willing to take that bet.
Obama isn't being reamed on this because of ideology. It's the Republican ideology of "Drill Baby Drill!" and it's the Democrats who have been against off-shore drilling. This disaster could only have helped Obama.
They're reaching for the super early adopters. Man are they gonna be pissed when the iPhone 4G comes out in a few months at a tenth of the price.
What this means is that an eBook that the author was quite happy to sell for $2.29 or $2.49 is now going to cost you $2.99 from everybody.
Or it could make the book $1.99, right? Why is there an automatic round up? I don't see how this is really Apple's fault. Your publisher has the option to make it any dollar amount they want it to be, but they're choosing to make it cost more for the consumer, and they're using Apple as a scapegoat for it. How about this - everything that's over 2.50 gets rounded up to 2.99 and everything under 2.50 gets rounded down to 1.99 and split the difference? It's not like the means of production are any indication of price anymore. In the online world, it's practically ALL profit, and by putting their books on the Apple bookstore, they now have an extra 20 million potential customers. I'll just chalk this price increase to the continued greed of the publishing industry.
As a person who went to art school, I could say you're right and wrong. Art school and this game design school if done right isn't just a sheet of paper but a product as well. I came out with a demo reel from my school as well as a degree. The question you proposed should really be "Who would you publish, some guy who spent 4 years getting a degree and has programmed and released an innovative game over the internet as part of the curriculum and has good grades and references that shows he gets along well with people? Or a guy who programmed and released a game just as innovative over the internet but really has no other credentials or anybody to vouch for him as a person since he was in his mom's basement the whole time?" Both of those people achieved results, and the guy in his mom's basement is 30 - 60k richer since he's not burdened with school debt, but working at a company is a team effort and the people skills you learn in school as well as the connections go a long way in securing a job just as much as the results you're talking about.
Brain the size of a planet and they have em doing simple sorting.
Sounds like a laptop or netbook would also be perfect for her. What you have is a false dichotomy. "Having 1 PC in the house" vs "Having a PC and an iPad" aren't the only 2 choices, especially considering the iPad isn't able to watch flash video except off of YouTube and a couple of other popular sites and that's one of the functions you said your wife needs.
Here's a great response from Kotaku writer Brian Ashcroft which pretty much hits the nail on the head.
As long as you don't directly copy any of the art, assets, code or writing, you're free to do whatever the hell you want. Even ripping off the setting as long as you change the names is fair game. Doing tile for tile remakes of the levels (if it has such a thing) might be pushing the boundaries, so I'd stay clear of that too, but pretty much any game mechanic has been copied a million times over so you're safe ripping that off to your hearts content. That's what the professionals do, too.
If there was a market for it, tech companies would be tripping over themselves trying to get to it. Unfotunately, there isn't. If you believe there is, then go get some venture capital and release an open gaming system and you'll be a millionaire instead of waiting for Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo to do it for you. One product isn't monopolizing the market. In the video game world, there's 3 companies who have each decided that they will be making more money if they release closed systems. Video games are a pretty good example of what I'm talking about since Atari not having any standards for their shovel ware releases back in the 80's created the huge video game crash that Nintendo had to revive with a very closed system and a single company being the gate keeper to all of their software... sound familiar?
If you want an open computer, they have them available. Purchase an android, or windows platform laptop/mobile device. The success of the iPhone and iPad shows that most people don't care about how closed their electronic devices are. Just like they wouldn't hack their toasters, most people just want to use their computer devices exactly what they were meant to be used for - in the case of the iPad - e-mail, web browsing, and watching movies through Apple approved distribution methods. If it really bothered them, they wouldn't be putting in 500 bucks (min) for their electronic toy. I hate how most anti-Apple computer people keep spouting "choice! Choice! CHOICE!" as their tag line against Apple making a closed system and as if they cared about consumer choice. The people are making their choice, you're just trying to deny Apple their choice in making a closed system that they feel people want.
As the cell phone market has shown and the iPad will show, closed systems are the only way to get wide acceptance for electronic devices. In many areas in the world, there's wider mobile phone adoption than there is PC adoption. Most people don't want to program computers, or even download and use third party software because they don't have a consistent brand identity that they trust. But guess what? Computers will always need programmers, so while there is a huge market opening up for non-programmable, content viewing devices, there will always be another smaller market for programmable, open, content creating devices. They can't close off the whole computer industry because then there will be no one to make the content they're trying to sell.
But it would be the one you wanted but never knew you did
The only joke is that Blizzard is announcing it. Unfortunately, this service is actually being released
I use Yelp all the time, and I've found great restaurants and other services through there. As for the reviews, it's just like Amazon, you get a gerneral consensus with the average rating, and then you read a couple positive reviews, a couple negatives ones, and then make up your mind based on them. I don't understand how a shady algorithm would make you trust Yelp reviews any less because of their display algorithm
You would if you're trying to sell papers
Kevin Smith has made a career out of self-deprecation and dick and fart jokes. To take one of his quotes and put it in some real-world context is pretty ridiculous as you could see him for yourself in pretty much all of his movies, some that aren't his, and in countless photos easily accessible on the internet. His self description is a gross exaggeration - that's what he does. He's overweight, yes, but he also followed along with SWA policies, fit in the seat, passed the armrest test and could buckle his seatbelt. Your opinion on this matter is not informed by the facts of the case but just with your prejudice against overweight people and probably a good bit toward your prejudice against celebrities as well.
If you've payed attention to the story, he buys 2 seats because he's antisocial, not because he needs the extra space. And I don't blame him for that, if I were a celebrity and had a lot of money, I'd buy 2 seats too. Also, he fit in his seat, didn't need a seatbelt extension and passed the armrest test. This whole thing is a big black eye for SWA, as their employees didn't even enforce the proper policies and SWA's PR is still maintaining that they're right in the matter, no matter how many false apologies they're issuing.
Why does Apple get a special brand of outrage every time it releases a product? Where's the outrage when Microsoft, Sony, AND Nintendo all announced that you can't program for their powerful computers unless you bought a very expensive kit, and even then your product couldn't be released without going through a thorough review process and paying more substantial sums? Oh yeah, nobody cared because that was par for the course for consoles over the last 20 years and anyway, it's just a game system. Where, even, was the outrage when Amazon and Barnes and Noble announced that you can't program applications for their eBook readers? Oh, it's just meant to read books. So now Apple comes out with a similar device but this one reads books, plays games, browses the web, plays music and movies, and allows anybody to program pretty much anything for it for a fairly low price with the added functionality of easy distribution and pay system... and HOLY FUCKING SHIT THEY'RE NOT LETTING US INSTALL TIDDLYWINKS 3D ON IT BY OURSELVES AND LOAD IT WITH ALL THE APPLICATIONS WE COULD GET OFF DOWNLOAD.COM!! WHERE'S MY PITCHFORK!?!?!!!!
The iPhone and iPod Touch opened up a floodgate of hungry customers toward simple, single purpose applications. I'd think that the developers on this site would be going apeshit over the fact that now there will be millions of more paying customers with easy access to your software and with backward compatibility toward a device that already has over 20 million users, but instead, you're busy bitching about how you can't "do what you want with it." What more do you want? The ability to install GCC on it? Guess what, it's give and take... if you want the freedom of installing any application that your heart deems worthy, then you're going to pay for it by not having the casual market care about the device because it's too complicated for them... and there are plenty of devices like that out for you already.
A couple of years ago everyone realized the computer was on it's way to becoming an appliance like your toaster or microwave, and were pretty optimistic about it. Well, the future is now... and people still complain about it. As others have stated, this isn't a general all-purpose computer, and it's not meant to be. Jobs was right when he said the netbook doesn't do anything better. It only does things smaller and, with every passing generation of the netbook, they're increasing the size of the device until it's indistinguishable from a laptop. The iPad is in practice what the original netbook was supposed to be - a device just for surfing the net, watching videos, reading books, playing games, and looking at photos. It's a useful appliance. All the Apple hate is pretty ridiculous, as with this they are progressing technology. Without the iPad, we'd see 10 more years of netbooks getting bigger, phones getting smaller, and Microsoft releasing Slate PCs as if they're new. If the iPad takes off, which it probably will, in 2 years time everybody will be scrambling to get a iPad like device out there, and enough of them will run existing OSes that you can install programs to and hack to your hearts content and you know what? They all won't compete with the iPad because people don't want freedom in computing... they want an appliance that they can rely on not to get viruses and have their kids come fix every 2 months.
If Newsday is one of the only for-pay newspapers online and higher profile newspapers like NY Times are still giving their news away for free, is it any surprise that there aren't many subscribers to the for-pay paper? From the sound of it, their pricing scheme was also way too expensive. Five bucks a week? Sounds like they're pricing it as if they still have to send it to the printing presses. Drop the price to 10 bucks a month - max, and maybe make a tiered pricing model, giving away some stuff for free. Otherwise, why would I even visit the site and how would I know it's worth the price of admission?
Maybe a pay-as-you-go system where you pay a micro payment per article will also be viable in the future.
So my profession dictates everything about me, huh? Every person in the computer graphics industry is a hipster, every programmer or IT guy is a nerd, every manager is a pointy headed idiot, right? What does that make anonymous internet trolls?
I'm pretty sick of the ridiculous assertion that anybody who buys a mac is a hipster. I'm a CG artist. I've been raised around computers since my parents bought me and my brother a commodore 64c. I bought Windows 95 the day that it came out. I install Ubuntu every major release and have used Windows 7 RC and every Windows that has come before it. For the past 2 years, though, my primary machine has been a Mac. For me, it's not about the aesthetics, but about the practicality. It works faster, and better. I'm a lot more productive on it and I actually enjoy using it a lot more than both Linux or Windows. When I use Windows at work and have to change some obscure network preference, it takes me a few minutes to find the hidden window inside the obscure preference panel. When I need to do the same thing on Mac OS, I can usually find what I need in 30 seconds. That's practicality. Hipsters might be the face behind Apple fanaticism but most of the people who I've convinced to buy Macs weren't hipsters but regular non-computer people who want a nice, easy, clean operating system that doesn't get bogged down with the bullshit that Windows does. My girlfriend bought a macbook last year and I haven't had to help her with it at all, meanwhile my neighbor's Windows XP machine has been destroyed by spyware and malware to an almost unusable state. That's practicality. If all Apple had to offer was a pretty way to minimize Windows, nobody would be interested. Ubuntu has better eye candy than Mac OS at this point. It's got flashy cube desktop switchers and transparent windows and a bunch of other flashy shit that people love seeing on YouTube but then don't use because it's not practical.
I could even say the same thing about the iPhone. 3 years ago I only had a cell phone to make emergency calls and I rarely used it. Then the iPhone came out and I didn't want to join in on the hype so I bought a Palm Treo. The thing was absolute fucking garbage. It crashed 3 or 4 times a day and even after over 10 years of Palm OS being on the market, there wasn't a single application that I was interested in. The 3G came out and I decided to switch to iPhone. Now it's glued to my hand. It's changed the way I live my life. I need a restaurant nearby, I look to my iPhone. I want to look up something that we're talking about in everyday conversation, I check my iPhone. Yeah, other phones now have similar features, but Apple paved the way for it. Other smart phones focused on getting your e-mail to you wherever you are. Apple focused on getting the internet to you wherever you are. Now people constantly ask me to check my iPhone for some information. That's practicality. I don't give a shit that it looks pretty. It's a plus, but again, if all Apple could do was make a nice looking phone then they'd be out of business. No, they made a phone that's useful and that's why they've taken up half of the cell phone market-share. It's not just hipsters buying them.