I think his whole point is that the barrier to entry is now so low that college and even high-school kids can easily have a number of high-quality apps out by the time they're ready to get a job.
This is a good way of filtering out people who're book smart but not really motivated or enthusiastic about it.
Technologically, the barrier to entry has been low for quite some time. There was nothing stopping you from throwing together something simple in QBASIC or getting your hands on a few floppies worth of Linux and development tools. Software development isn't the kind of thing that requires hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of heavy machinery to get into... Just about any computer will do the job, and you can get your hands on the software for free.
But that doesn't mean there aren't other, non-technical barriers to entry.
The biggest, most obvious barrier to entry that I can see is simply time.
Nobody wants to train anybody any more. They want to be able to hire and fire at will and they know that they are not capable of fostering loyalty when they feel no responsibility to their employees. There's no point in spending money to train someone who is just going to go somewhere else, and that's what they will do.
Very true.
Folks are treated as interchangeable parts. Hire somebody to fit some role, and you expect them to do their job on day 1. If they aren't working out, fire them and hire someone in to do the job they weren't.
Used to be that skilled labor was the backbone of our economy... Folks who didn't necessarily have college degrees or anything fancy like that, but who'd been doing their jobs long enough that they actually knew what they were doing and were worth more because of it. You could actually stay with a single company for a while, learning as you went, getting raises and promotions along the way.
These days you're lucky if you work in one place long enough to learn where the restroom is. And if you want a promotion or a raise, you've got to go get hired somewhere else.
We hire inexperiences developers regularly. They're called JUNIOR DEVELOPERS and they require extra time. That's why they make less money than a medior or senior developer.
Yup.
They get on-the-job training, so they learn how to do things right and they have the experience to get a decent job later on.
You get some cheap (relatively speaking) labor to crank out the simple/repetitive stuff.
All good ideas...for people with tons of free time. When you get a job doing this stuff, you get 8-10 hours a day to do it. I'm hard pressed to think of any time outside of my work hours that I have 8-10 hour blocks of time to do stuff for fun.
Exactly.
It's all well and good to tell people they ought to have prior experience... And that they ought to be coding on OSS projects or something in their spare time... But spare time is something I've just now discovered - at the age of 34.
There's a reason why they consider 12 credits "full time" (at least here in the US) - if you're taking classes that are even remotely challenging you'll be putting several hours of work outside of the classroom into every single hour of work in the classroom. And then you throw in a job on top of that... Doesn't leave much time for OSS projects.
Then I graduated, and got a job at Electronics Boutique, because nobody would hire me in anything even remotely IT-related. It was part time, hourly work... Which meant absolutely no benefits, a schedule that would change wildly from one day to the next, and no sick time. I was constantly dropping everything to cover for someone. Had to take every hour I could get to make ends meet.
Then I grabbed a second job, because EB wasn't working out - taught things like Microsoft Word at a local community college. Prepping for class... Teaching the class... Office hours... Grading... All in addition to working at EB.
Then I finally got a job in IT. Worked for one of the local repair shops for a while. Quickly moved through the ranks from bench technician to lead network engineer (a fancy title to make up for the lack of pay). I don't know how much overtime I put in there... Came in early, worked through lunch, worked late, came in on the weekends...
My current job is the first one where I can actually leave work at 5:00 on a routine basis. It's the first one where I don't wind up working weekends on a routine basis. It's the first one where I actually have some time to myself at the end of the day. Time I could spend doing some OSS coding...
Except that my days of writing software are long behind me. I've got experience now, but it isn't in software. I've wound up on the sysadmin side of things. Yes, I write scripts fairly frequently... But I sure as hell couldn't be trusted to do anything substantial.
And I graduated with a Computer Science degree that was very heavy on programming. I originally intended to write code. But nobody would hire me. The local repair shop only hired me because they figured I could probably replace a HDD without drooling all over it first.
And, what you've failed to realize, is that most people think this is a good thing.
No shopping around. Don't have to go out to the store. No discs to keep track of. Just click a button and your software appears.
Funny how this is generally considered a good thing with Steam, but the Apple-haters will be out in full force denouncing this (proven successful with Steam) strategy.
I really don't have a problem with either the Apple App Store or Steam.
Pretty much every game I've purchased in the last couple of years has come through Steam. It's very convenient for me.
But I do have other choices with my games. I could go out and buy a disc. You cannot do that with your iPhone... And the concern is that, if Apple has its way, you won't be able to do that on your Mac anymore either.
I don't think anyone is claiming that app-stores in general are a bad thing. It's just that Apple has in the past proven that they are more than willing to set up a platform so that their app-store is the ONLY method for getting software on the device. The other players you mention have not done that.
Yet.
Consider it like a kitchen knife. I use kitchen knives all the time - they're wonderful tools with a lot of utility. If Wolfgang Puck asks to borrow one I wouldn't regard that with a bit of suspicion. If Charles Manson asked for one though, there's going to be an issue.
Wolfgang Puck creeps me the hell out. Charles Manson didn't actually kill anyone with his own hands. I think I'd trust him with that kitchen knife before I'd trust Wolfgang.
Apple has already destroyed my trust in them. The locked down situation on their mobile devices isn't a "What if", a "You know, they might . ..", or any other situation. It's real, it's here. They did it. I don't trust them anymore. End of story.
Fair enough. I'm not suggesting that you should trust Apple. Or anyone else, for that matter.
But you need to keep in mind that, while Jobs is one hell of a control freak, they wouldn't be doing nearly as well if they were selling devices nobody wanted to buy.
Look at the success of the iPod/iTunes marriage. There were other MP3 players out before the iPod. Devices and software with all sorts of wonderful features. But the addition of iTunes made it simple enough and safe enough for anybody to use it. And folks flocked to the device. Not because it offered wonderful specs or terrific features or unbridled freedom - but because there was basically one way to get your music.
We see the walled garden as a limitation. We want to make sure the wall isn't too high, and there's lots of doors and windows in the wall, and we're allowed to tear down the wall if we want to.
Lots of other folks see the walled garden as a good thing. They don't even want to know what's on the other side of the wall. Hell, they'd probably be happier if everything had a wall around it.
Apple/Jobs isn't having to force this walled garden on people. They're embracing it. And then they're complaining when other platforms don't offer a walled garden of their own.
Seriously, Skype has been a grudgingly-necessary eyesore for years, and yet we don't seem to have a widely-accepted and/or functionally-equivalent OSS project in the wild. How can this be?
There are plenty of OSS alternatives out there...
All sorts of VoIP softphones, text chat programs, videoconferencing apps...
But that's kind of the problem. Skype is a single company and a single app. There isn't any confusion or choice. You say "I'm on Skype" and folks know how they can get in touch with you. You say "I use Ekiga" and they look at you like you've grown a third eye.
Well, the summary mentions a router because the article mentions a router because the court case involved a router because the guy worked for Cisco and borrowed a router from work but that router has now gone missing...
Wtf happened to setting up a regular run of the mill telephone modem and calling task manager. Wow guys does it really need to cost $200 to pull this off? I bet most of you have access to an old analog modem or two, and a computer. Fresh install Win XP have the thing place the call, that night slick it, or install a new drive, lose the modem. Why a router?
Or just a regular dial-up modem, a Linux box, and a shell script...
Cary police investigators have theorized that Brad Cooper, an engineer in Voice over Internet Protocol, had the expertise and ability to use the router to stage a remote call from his home phone to his cellphone so that it appeared that Nancy Cooper, 34, was alive on the morning that she disappeared
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
The router in question is a Cisco 3825S, which he apparently borrowed from work.
If the guy worked at Cisco, in VoIP, I have absolutely no doubt that he could actually do what they claim. I could probably manage it myself if I had the right hardware and spent some time looking through documentation.
But it seems kind of silly to borrow a relatively expensive router from work to fake a call to try to prove your innocence...
Like you, I'm thinking he could probably accomplish this in a much simpler manner. Get some cheap little Linksys VoIP router, like the ones you get when you sign up with Vonage. Or just a regular dial-up modem, a Linux box, and a shell script.
It seems to me that if he was thinking ahead enough to borrow that router from work to cover his ass, you'd think he might realize that there'd be a paper trail involved in borrowing that router, and that his ass wouldn't be so nicely covered.
True, but a cheep router is handy for it because you can use it then toss it in the dump. There are many out there that are relatively cheep and can be modded with custom firmware.
Set a router up with the right firmware, configuration, and connections and I can easily see a VoIP engineer using it for that general purpose, then tossing it in a dumpster never to be seen again.
It was a Cisco 3825S - which retails for a couple thousand dollars.
are android and ios Office and Outlook integration implementations tight enough to render BB's edge in those fields irrelevant?
In my opinion, BB's got no edge in those fields.
BB requires a BES if you want to sync your calendar wirelessly. Yes, BES Express is now free. You still need a box to install it on, and it's still another piece of software to maintain.
Droid will do a wireless calendar sync right out of the box. No extra hardware or software.
I don't have an iOS device, but I'm told that they sync up just as easily as the Droid does.
And as far as Office support goes... It works. I've opened plenty of Office 2007 and 2010 documents on my Droid with no trouble at all.
Well, obviously something like this can be abused...
But if you look at the actual module you'll see that it is intended to combat trolls.
Not automated spambots... Not the well-behaved members of your community... But trolls. The folks who intentionally post garbage just to get a reaction.
Sure, banning trolls is the typical response. But it's also rather obvious when you've been banned, and somebody who is determined to troll your boards can simply create a new account. This module will hopefully dissuade the troll from spending much time on your board, while not making it obvious that you're trying to get rid of them.
Also, if you take a look at the module itself, you'll see that by default it will not crash IE6. That's simply an option that can be enabled if you're feeling particularly malicious.
The problem isn't so much in getting from point A to point B in space, as it is with getting to space in the first place.
Let's say you want to send something to Mars. You've got a 1-ton payload... And then it takes 1 ton of fuel to make the trip from Earth orbit to Mars. So you need to lift 2 tons into Earth orbit.
Of course... If you had an orbital gas station you could just lift 1 ton into orbit, and then fuel up at the gas station.
Is it that hard...to set up a password? I've never had much of a problem, and I'm a Luddite.
It shouldn't be... But, yes, it can be that hard to set up a password.
There can be issues with the router's web UI - maybe it doesn't like whatever browser you're using, or some plugin you've got installed in that browser.
There can be issues with your computer - random crap and viruses that you've picked up along the way.
There can be issues with user education - maybe that warning from the self-signed certificate on the router scared him away.
I think it's hilarious how much hate I see for 3D stuff here on Slashdot...
I wasn't around for the silent vs. talky motion picture transition... Or the mono vs. stereo music recording transition... But I have to assume there were similar arguments being made.
It's a new technology. There are some bugs to be worked out. There aren't a whole lot of standards and interoperability yet. It is being used in some places purely as a gimmick. But that doesn't mean it's all a scam.
When I go to the movies with folks they don't generally talk about whether a movie was 3D or not - they talk about whether it was good or not. There are good movies in 3D, and there are bad movies in 3D.
I've got my Curve 8520. Emails are absolutely flawless - talking to my gmail.com account while sending emails using my business domain (which is actually using google). Talks to my google calendar well too.
Over the years, I've had to support a number of folks using various BBs to talk to various email servers.
Setup was always kind of a pain. Varied a little bit from one version of the software to another... From one carrier to another... But their wizard was always a little cumbersome. And if you didn't do it right you'd get spammed with synchronization messages. And sometimes you'd wind up with a second email address somehow.
These days I'm just supporting co-workers on an Exchange server. Getting them to talk to the Exchange server securely, using SSL, is a bit of a trick. You have to run through their wizard and intentionally set it up wrong. When it doesn't connect right it gives you the option of specifying your settings manually. Then you can tell it exactly how you want to connect.
Once you are connected and talking to the Exchange server, even looking at an email message in Outlook will cause the BB to think it's new. So you wind up re-downloading old messages all the time. This has been an issue for a couple years now, and the only consistent solution I've seen is "buy a BES."
As far as calendar sync goes... Well, it doesn't. Unless you've got a BES (or things changed very dramatically in the last year or so) you'll need to plug your phone in to your computer in order to sync your calendar. This is a huge pain for us, because it means we have to install the BB client software on random computers around the hospital... And configure it... And then folks need to keep track of their USB cables and remember to plug in periodically.
On my Droid, I just set up a "corporate sync" account. You have to enter the settings manually, because the wizard doesn't work right (why do these wizards never work right?)... And the manual settings button isn't immediately obvious... But at least you don't have to intentionally do it wrong to make it show up. Once the account is set up it'll pull down my email, calendar, and contacts all wirelessly. No need to plug in at all.
they got best email integration for phone . BBM is pretty good . Yes they still got soe work to do in App space and it takes awefully long time to re boot the device but hey its not that bad if you ask me . they have got a Legeacy to support too.
Best email integration for a phone?
Maybe if you're willing to pay for an Enterprise Server... I've never worked any place that ran one of those. Might be absolutely wonderful if you run your own BES. But if you're trying to do without a BES? Painful.
Both my Droid and the iPhones I've had to support work far better than any BlackBerry I've ever touched. Email setup is painless. Email synchronization is flawless. Navigating your messages works great. Sending, receiving... All superior to the BlackBerry.
I know a lot of people that bought a copy of Half-Life just to play the CounterStrike mod.
Yup. Hell, CounterStrike was popular enough that they released it as a boxed game itself.
And Portal started out as a mod too.
The problem is that games these days are generally designed for consoles first, and then ported to the PC. And consoles aren't real good platforms for writing mods, so making your game open and friendly to modding isn't a priority.
And then there's the appeal of DLC... Instead of letting folks make their own mods, you lock your game down and make people pay you for mods...
It's kind of funny. When I first started playing video and computer games as a kid in the 80's, arguably a lot of the content for Nintendo and PC was not worth the 40-60 that they were charging. The games were, overall, smaller, less technologically advanced, there were less art assets, and simpler art assets, smaller levels, etc.
To a large degree, that was a limitation of the hardware.
You just weren't going to put full-motion video, speech, high-poly models, and whatever else on an NES. Just wasn't going to happen. The cartridge only had a few MB of storage. The machine only had a few K of RAM. It could only handle a few colors. Those were just limitations of the hardware.
But, at the time, that was still pretty impressive. Metroid, with its chunky graphics and crappy color palette and simplistic gameplay was, arguably, just as awesome and groundbreaking for its time as Portal was more recently.
And we didn't really expect storylines and narratives at the time, either. Repetitive gameplay was the name of the game. Something like Contra or Super Mario Brothers was long not because there was an epic storyline with dialogue and character development... But because they were brutally hard and unforgiving. One wrong step and you were dead. A couple deaths and you were starting over from scratch.
To a certain degree, the nature of the beast has changed. It's far faster/cheaper/easier to throw together some repetitive 8-bit gameplay than it is to develop an engaging narrative with realistic characters and beautiful visuals. To a certain degree, it makes sense that as the cost of producing a video game goes up, we're either going to pay more or get less. I understand that.
But I'm not really buying a video game because I want to look at pretty graphics or experience an epic storyline or whatever... I can go to an art gallery if I just want visuals, I can read a book if I just want storyline... What I'm looking for in a game is an entertaining diversion. A way to waste some time and have fun doing it. And that doesn't necessarily require top-of-the-line graphics, or an epic storyline, or whatever. You don't have to spend tons of money on absolutely every asset in the game.
Looking at something like Dragon Age, for example... Do you really need to hire voice actors for absolutely every bit of dialogue in the game? Does every single NPC need to have a distinct voice and vocabulary? Could you maybe get away with just popping up a chat bubble and some text for the random babble around town? Or just leave out some of that random babble entirely?
For that matter, why not keep cashing in on the assets you already have? NeverWinter Nights had a fantastic game engine that BioWare used to turn out three very solid games as well as several "premium" modules. The modding community turned out some absolutely epic stuff. I played that game for, literally, years. I certainly got my money's worth. And each module or expansion cost BioWare less to make, because the assets were already there.
It seems like developers keep trying to re-invent the wheel... And trying to be absolutely top-of-the-line in pretty much all respects... And somewhere along the line they forget that people are paying them money to be entertained for a few hours... And you wind up with a very shiny product that's over with (because it isn't fun after a couple hours, or you've run out of gameplay, or whatever) far too quickly. And then people feel like they wasted their money.
I think its alright to have a few different systems in the world. Sure, there is an attractiveness to consolidation. But what are we going to do when we encounter aliens? Demand that they switch to the metric system? I'm actually serious. I'm not saying it will happen tomorrow or even in the next decade or century, but eventually it will. There is a lot to be said for having a tolerance for the differences among cultures and retaining those differences.
It isn't so much consolidation on metric... As the fact that metric makes sense. It's all base-10. It's all just a matter of shifting decimal points around. There's none of this weirdness you get in imperial...
How many millimeters in a centimeter? 10. How many centimeters in a meter? 100. How many meters in a kilometer? 1,000.
How many inches in a foot? 12. How many feet in a yard? 3. How many yards in a mile? 1,760.
And let's not even get into converting from simple linear distance to volumes... Then you have to start worrying about wacky stuff like quarts and gallons and pints and whatnot...
'If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps. How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it? They're used to 99 cents. As I said, it's an uncertain time in the industry. But it's an exciting time for whoever picks the right path and wins.'
I've got a Droid, but I'm not a big mobile gamer. I'm used to spending $50 on a video game for my PC, or Nintendo, or whatever.
And what's killing you [in the traditional games business] is that your games are not really worth it.
Used to be that I'd buy a game for $50 and get 20+ hours of gameplay - not counting multiplayer. And I'm not talking about an RPG either... RPG's would be a good 60+ hours of gameplay.
I remember playing the first Unreal, or Quake, or Marathon, or Half-Life - and they all took me over a week of late nights to finish.
And then you'd have multiple hours of multiplayer on top of that... Usually with some terrific mods bolted on... And then some mods for the single player... Often the modding community would double or even triple the gameplay you got from your original purchase...
Now you shell out $60 for a game and get 5-10 hours of gameplay, plus the multiplayer. Then they'll start releasing more single player content, and multiplayer map packs, and skins, and whatever else as DLC. And the game will be designed around consoles, so there'll be very limited support for modding.
$50 for 20-80 hours of gameplay... Compared to $60 for 5-20 hours of gameplay...
Is it any wonder you're having a hard time selling your games?
Slashdot Mirror
I think his whole point is that the barrier to entry is now so low that college and even high-school kids can easily have a number of high-quality apps out by the time they're ready to get a job.
This is a good way of filtering out people who're book smart but not really motivated or enthusiastic about it.
Technologically, the barrier to entry has been low for quite some time. There was nothing stopping you from throwing together something simple in QBASIC or getting your hands on a few floppies worth of Linux and development tools. Software development isn't the kind of thing that requires hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of heavy machinery to get into... Just about any computer will do the job, and you can get your hands on the software for free.
But that doesn't mean there aren't other, non-technical barriers to entry.
The biggest, most obvious barrier to entry that I can see is simply time.
Nobody wants to train anybody any more. They want to be able to hire and fire at will and they know that they are not capable of fostering loyalty when they feel no responsibility to their employees. There's no point in spending money to train someone who is just going to go somewhere else, and that's what they will do.
Very true.
Folks are treated as interchangeable parts. Hire somebody to fit some role, and you expect them to do their job on day 1. If they aren't working out, fire them and hire someone in to do the job they weren't.
Used to be that skilled labor was the backbone of our economy... Folks who didn't necessarily have college degrees or anything fancy like that, but who'd been doing their jobs long enough that they actually knew what they were doing and were worth more because of it. You could actually stay with a single company for a while, learning as you went, getting raises and promotions along the way.
These days you're lucky if you work in one place long enough to learn where the restroom is. And if you want a promotion or a raise, you've got to go get hired somewhere else.
We hire inexperiences developers regularly. They're called JUNIOR DEVELOPERS and they require extra time. That's why they make less money than a medior or senior developer.
Yup.
They get on-the-job training, so they learn how to do things right and they have the experience to get a decent job later on.
You get some cheap (relatively speaking) labor to crank out the simple/repetitive stuff.
All good ideas...for people with tons of free time. When you get a job doing this stuff, you get 8-10 hours a day to do it. I'm hard pressed to think of any time outside of my work hours that I have 8-10 hour blocks of time to do stuff for fun.
Exactly.
It's all well and good to tell people they ought to have prior experience... And that they ought to be coding on OSS projects or something in their spare time... But spare time is something I've just now discovered - at the age of 34.
There's a reason why they consider 12 credits "full time" (at least here in the US) - if you're taking classes that are even remotely challenging you'll be putting several hours of work outside of the classroom into every single hour of work in the classroom. And then you throw in a job on top of that... Doesn't leave much time for OSS projects.
Then I graduated, and got a job at Electronics Boutique, because nobody would hire me in anything even remotely IT-related. It was part time, hourly work... Which meant absolutely no benefits, a schedule that would change wildly from one day to the next, and no sick time. I was constantly dropping everything to cover for someone. Had to take every hour I could get to make ends meet.
Then I grabbed a second job, because EB wasn't working out - taught things like Microsoft Word at a local community college. Prepping for class... Teaching the class... Office hours... Grading... All in addition to working at EB.
Then I finally got a job in IT. Worked for one of the local repair shops for a while. Quickly moved through the ranks from bench technician to lead network engineer (a fancy title to make up for the lack of pay). I don't know how much overtime I put in there... Came in early, worked through lunch, worked late, came in on the weekends...
My current job is the first one where I can actually leave work at 5:00 on a routine basis. It's the first one where I don't wind up working weekends on a routine basis. It's the first one where I actually have some time to myself at the end of the day. Time I could spend doing some OSS coding...
Except that my days of writing software are long behind me. I've got experience now, but it isn't in software. I've wound up on the sysadmin side of things. Yes, I write scripts fairly frequently... But I sure as hell couldn't be trusted to do anything substantial.
And I graduated with a Computer Science degree that was very heavy on programming. I originally intended to write code. But nobody would hire me. The local repair shop only hired me because they figured I could probably replace a HDD without drooling all over it first.
And, what you've failed to realize, is that most people think this is a good thing.
No shopping around. Don't have to go out to the store. No discs to keep track of. Just click a button and your software appears.
Funny how this is generally considered a good thing with Steam, but the Apple-haters will be out in full force denouncing this (proven successful with Steam) strategy.
I really don't have a problem with either the Apple App Store or Steam.
Pretty much every game I've purchased in the last couple of years has come through Steam. It's very convenient for me.
But I do have other choices with my games. I could go out and buy a disc. You cannot do that with your iPhone... And the concern is that, if Apple has its way, you won't be able to do that on your Mac anymore either.
I don't think anyone is claiming that app-stores in general are a bad thing. It's just that Apple has in the past proven that they are more than willing to set up a platform so that their app-store is the ONLY method for getting software on the device. The other players you mention have not done that.
Yet.
Consider it like a kitchen knife. I use kitchen knives all the time - they're wonderful tools with a lot of utility. If Wolfgang Puck asks to borrow one I wouldn't regard that with a bit of suspicion. If Charles Manson asked for one though, there's going to be an issue.
Wolfgang Puck creeps me the hell out. Charles Manson didn't actually kill anyone with his own hands. I think I'd trust him with that kitchen knife before I'd trust Wolfgang.
Apple has already destroyed my trust in them. The locked down situation on their mobile devices isn't a "What if", a "You know, they might . . .", or any other situation. It's real, it's here. They did it. I don't trust them anymore. End of story.
Fair enough. I'm not suggesting that you should trust Apple. Or anyone else, for that matter.
But you need to keep in mind that, while Jobs is one hell of a control freak, they wouldn't be doing nearly as well if they were selling devices nobody wanted to buy.
Look at the success of the iPod/iTunes marriage. There were other MP3 players out before the iPod. Devices and software with all sorts of wonderful features. But the addition of iTunes made it simple enough and safe enough for anybody to use it. And folks flocked to the device. Not because it offered wonderful specs or terrific features or unbridled freedom - but because there was basically one way to get your music.
We see the walled garden as a limitation. We want to make sure the wall isn't too high, and there's lots of doors and windows in the wall, and we're allowed to tear down the wall if we want to.
Lots of other folks see the walled garden as a good thing. They don't even want to know what's on the other side of the wall. Hell, they'd probably be happier if everything had a wall around it.
Apple/Jobs isn't having to force this walled garden on people. They're embracing it. And then they're complaining when other platforms don't offer a walled garden of their own.
Seriously, Skype has been a grudgingly-necessary eyesore for years, and yet we don't seem to have a widely-accepted and/or functionally-equivalent OSS project in the wild. How can this be?
There are plenty of OSS alternatives out there...
All sorts of VoIP softphones, text chat programs, videoconferencing apps...
But that's kind of the problem. Skype is a single company and a single app. There isn't any confusion or choice. You say "I'm on Skype" and folks know how they can get in touch with you. You say "I use Ekiga" and they look at you like you've grown a third eye.
It isn't just Apple doing this - Microsoft is rolling out an app store of their own, BlackBerry has an app store, Google's got an Android app store...
And, what you've failed to realize, is that most people think this is a good thing.
No shopping around. Don't have to go out to the store. No discs to keep track of. Just click a button and your software appears.
Sure, I want to be able to install my own software without having to jailbreak/hack/crack/whatever my devices... But I'm in the minority these days.
Apple isn't forcing this on anybody, people are begging them for it.
Why does everyone say router router router?
Well, the summary mentions a router because the article mentions a router because the court case involved a router because the guy worked for Cisco and borrowed a router from work but that router has now gone missing...
Wtf happened to setting up a regular run of the mill telephone modem and calling task manager. Wow guys does it really need to cost $200 to pull this off? I bet most of you have access to an old analog modem or two, and a computer. Fresh install Win XP have the thing place the call, that night slick it, or install a new drive, lose the modem. Why a router?
Or just a regular dial-up modem, a Linux box, and a shell script...
Cary police investigators have theorized that Brad Cooper, an engineer in Voice over Internet Protocol, had the expertise and ability to use the router to stage a remote call from his home phone to his cellphone so that it appeared that Nancy Cooper, 34, was alive on the morning that she disappeared
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
The router in question is a Cisco 3825S, which he apparently borrowed from work.
If the guy worked at Cisco, in VoIP, I have absolutely no doubt that he could actually do what they claim. I could probably manage it myself if I had the right hardware and spent some time looking through documentation.
But it seems kind of silly to borrow a relatively expensive router from work to fake a call to try to prove your innocence...
Like you, I'm thinking he could probably accomplish this in a much simpler manner. Get some cheap little Linksys VoIP router, like the ones you get when you sign up with Vonage. Or just a regular dial-up modem, a Linux box, and a shell script.
It seems to me that if he was thinking ahead enough to borrow that router from work to cover his ass, you'd think he might realize that there'd be a paper trail involved in borrowing that router, and that his ass wouldn't be so nicely covered.
But maybe I'm just over-thinking it...
True, but a cheep router is handy for it because you can use it then toss it in the dump. There are many out there that are relatively cheep and can be modded with custom firmware.
Set a router up with the right firmware, configuration, and connections and I can easily see a VoIP engineer using it for that general purpose, then tossing it in a dumpster never to be seen again.
It was a Cisco 3825S - which retails for a couple thousand dollars.
are android and ios Office and Outlook integration implementations tight enough to render BB's edge in those fields irrelevant?
In my opinion, BB's got no edge in those fields.
BB requires a BES if you want to sync your calendar wirelessly. Yes, BES Express is now free. You still need a box to install it on, and it's still another piece of software to maintain.
Droid will do a wireless calendar sync right out of the box. No extra hardware or software.
I don't have an iOS device, but I'm told that they sync up just as easily as the Droid does.
And as far as Office support goes... It works. I've opened plenty of Office 2007 and 2010 documents on my Droid with no trouble at all.
Will someone please define the word "chemical" for us?
My college chemistry professor defined a "chemical" as everything .
Literally.
The dictionary definition I remember seeing was ridiculously all-encompassing like "made of molecules".
Well, obviously something like this can be abused...
But if you look at the actual module you'll see that it is intended to combat trolls.
Not automated spambots... Not the well-behaved members of your community... But trolls. The folks who intentionally post garbage just to get a reaction.
Sure, banning trolls is the typical response. But it's also rather obvious when you've been banned, and somebody who is determined to troll your boards can simply create a new account. This module will hopefully dissuade the troll from spending much time on your board, while not making it obvious that you're trying to get rid of them.
Also, if you take a look at the module itself, you'll see that by default it will not crash IE6. That's simply an option that can be enabled if you're feeling particularly malicious.
The problem isn't so much in getting from point A to point B in space, as it is with getting to space in the first place.
Let's say you want to send something to Mars. You've got a 1-ton payload... And then it takes 1 ton of fuel to make the trip from Earth orbit to Mars. So you need to lift 2 tons into Earth orbit.
Of course... If you had an orbital gas station you could just lift 1 ton into orbit, and then fuel up at the gas station.
Is it that hard...to set up a password? I've never had much of a problem, and I'm a Luddite.
It shouldn't be... But, yes, it can be that hard to set up a password.
There can be issues with the router's web UI - maybe it doesn't like whatever browser you're using, or some plugin you've got installed in that browser.
There can be issues with your computer - random crap and viruses that you've picked up along the way.
There can be issues with user education - maybe that warning from the self-signed certificate on the router scared him away.
Guilty until proven innocent.
Not true.
"Guy not actually a pedophile" stories aren't nearly as sensational.
The original story probably got plastered all over the place... And there'll probably be hardly any attempt to correct the story.
He'll have a hell of a time clearing his name with anyone who happened to hear it or see his picture in the original story.
nah, you're just not grasping how "3D" works currently. If you did, you would not be bringing up mono vs. stereo. I will attempt to explain....
So... What you're saying is that a technology in its infancy does not work as well as a technology that's been around for decades?
...and you have the makings of a craptacular movie experience.
Hmmm... That explains why bad movies didn't exist before this newfangled 3D stuff came out.
I think it's hilarious how much hate I see for 3D stuff here on Slashdot...
I wasn't around for the silent vs. talky motion picture transition... Or the mono vs. stereo music recording transition... But I have to assume there were similar arguments being made.
It's a new technology. There are some bugs to be worked out. There aren't a whole lot of standards and interoperability yet. It is being used in some places purely as a gimmick. But that doesn't mean it's all a scam.
When I go to the movies with folks they don't generally talk about whether a movie was 3D or not - they talk about whether it was good or not. There are good movies in 3D, and there are bad movies in 3D.
Really.
I've got my Curve 8520. Emails are absolutely flawless - talking to my gmail.com account while sending emails using my business domain (which is actually using google). Talks to my google calendar well too.
Over the years, I've had to support a number of folks using various BBs to talk to various email servers.
Setup was always kind of a pain. Varied a little bit from one version of the software to another... From one carrier to another... But their wizard was always a little cumbersome. And if you didn't do it right you'd get spammed with synchronization messages. And sometimes you'd wind up with a second email address somehow.
These days I'm just supporting co-workers on an Exchange server. Getting them to talk to the Exchange server securely, using SSL, is a bit of a trick. You have to run through their wizard and intentionally set it up wrong. When it doesn't connect right it gives you the option of specifying your settings manually. Then you can tell it exactly how you want to connect.
Once you are connected and talking to the Exchange server, even looking at an email message in Outlook will cause the BB to think it's new. So you wind up re-downloading old messages all the time. This has been an issue for a couple years now, and the only consistent solution I've seen is "buy a BES."
As far as calendar sync goes... Well, it doesn't. Unless you've got a BES (or things changed very dramatically in the last year or so) you'll need to plug your phone in to your computer in order to sync your calendar. This is a huge pain for us, because it means we have to install the BB client software on random computers around the hospital... And configure it... And then folks need to keep track of their USB cables and remember to plug in periodically.
On my Droid, I just set up a "corporate sync" account. You have to enter the settings manually, because the wizard doesn't work right (why do these wizards never work right?)... And the manual settings button isn't immediately obvious... But at least you don't have to intentionally do it wrong to make it show up. Once the account is set up it'll pull down my email, calendar, and contacts all wirelessly. No need to plug in at all.
they got best email integration for phone . BBM is pretty good . Yes they still got soe work to do in App space and it takes awefully long time to re boot the device but hey its not that bad if you ask me . they have got a Legeacy to support too .
Best email integration for a phone?
Maybe if you're willing to pay for an Enterprise Server... I've never worked any place that ran one of those. Might be absolutely wonderful if you run your own BES. But if you're trying to do without a BES? Painful.
Both my Droid and the iPhones I've had to support work far better than any BlackBerry I've ever touched. Email setup is painless. Email synchronization is flawless. Navigating your messages works great. Sending, receiving... All superior to the BlackBerry.
I know a lot of people that bought a copy of Half-Life just to play the CounterStrike mod.
Yup. Hell, CounterStrike was popular enough that they released it as a boxed game itself.
And Portal started out as a mod too.
The problem is that games these days are generally designed for consoles first, and then ported to the PC. And consoles aren't real good platforms for writing mods, so making your game open and friendly to modding isn't a priority.
And then there's the appeal of DLC... Instead of letting folks make their own mods, you lock your game down and make people pay you for mods...
It's kind of funny. When I first started playing video and computer games as a kid in the 80's, arguably a lot of the content for Nintendo and PC was not worth the 40-60 that they were charging. The games were, overall, smaller, less technologically advanced, there were less art assets, and simpler art assets, smaller levels, etc.
To a large degree, that was a limitation of the hardware.
You just weren't going to put full-motion video, speech, high-poly models, and whatever else on an NES. Just wasn't going to happen. The cartridge only had a few MB of storage. The machine only had a few K of RAM. It could only handle a few colors. Those were just limitations of the hardware.
But, at the time, that was still pretty impressive. Metroid, with its chunky graphics and crappy color palette and simplistic gameplay was, arguably, just as awesome and groundbreaking for its time as Portal was more recently.
And we didn't really expect storylines and narratives at the time, either. Repetitive gameplay was the name of the game. Something like Contra or Super Mario Brothers was long not because there was an epic storyline with dialogue and character development... But because they were brutally hard and unforgiving. One wrong step and you were dead. A couple deaths and you were starting over from scratch.
To a certain degree, the nature of the beast has changed. It's far faster/cheaper/easier to throw together some repetitive 8-bit gameplay than it is to develop an engaging narrative with realistic characters and beautiful visuals. To a certain degree, it makes sense that as the cost of producing a video game goes up, we're either going to pay more or get less. I understand that.
But I'm not really buying a video game because I want to look at pretty graphics or experience an epic storyline or whatever... I can go to an art gallery if I just want visuals, I can read a book if I just want storyline... What I'm looking for in a game is an entertaining diversion. A way to waste some time and have fun doing it. And that doesn't necessarily require top-of-the-line graphics, or an epic storyline, or whatever. You don't have to spend tons of money on absolutely every asset in the game.
Looking at something like Dragon Age, for example... Do you really need to hire voice actors for absolutely every bit of dialogue in the game? Does every single NPC need to have a distinct voice and vocabulary? Could you maybe get away with just popping up a chat bubble and some text for the random babble around town? Or just leave out some of that random babble entirely?
For that matter, why not keep cashing in on the assets you already have? NeverWinter Nights had a fantastic game engine that BioWare used to turn out three very solid games as well as several "premium" modules. The modding community turned out some absolutely epic stuff. I played that game for, literally, years. I certainly got my money's worth. And each module or expansion cost BioWare less to make, because the assets were already there.
It seems like developers keep trying to re-invent the wheel... And trying to be absolutely top-of-the-line in pretty much all respects... And somewhere along the line they forget that people are paying them money to be entertained for a few hours... And you wind up with a very shiny product that's over with (because it isn't fun after a couple hours, or you've run out of gameplay, or whatever) far too quickly. And then people feel like they wasted their money.
I think its alright to have a few different systems in the world. Sure, there is an attractiveness to consolidation. But what are we going to do when we encounter aliens? Demand that they switch to the metric system? I'm actually serious. I'm not saying it will happen tomorrow or even in the next decade or century, but eventually it will. There is a lot to be said for having a tolerance for the differences among cultures and retaining those differences.
It isn't so much consolidation on metric... As the fact that metric makes sense. It's all base-10. It's all just a matter of shifting decimal points around. There's none of this weirdness you get in imperial...
How many millimeters in a centimeter? 10. How many centimeters in a meter? 100. How many meters in a kilometer? 1,000.
How many inches in a foot? 12. How many feet in a yard? 3. How many yards in a mile? 1,760.
And let's not even get into converting from simple linear distance to volumes... Then you have to start worrying about wacky stuff like quarts and gallons and pints and whatnot...
'If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps. How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it? They're used to 99 cents. As I said, it's an uncertain time in the industry. But it's an exciting time for whoever picks the right path and wins.'
I've got a Droid, but I'm not a big mobile gamer. I'm used to spending $50 on a video game for my PC, or Nintendo, or whatever.
And what's killing you [in the traditional games business] is that your games are not really worth it.
Used to be that I'd buy a game for $50 and get 20+ hours of gameplay - not counting multiplayer. And I'm not talking about an RPG either... RPG's would be a good 60+ hours of gameplay.
I remember playing the first Unreal, or Quake, or Marathon, or Half-Life - and they all took me over a week of late nights to finish.
And then you'd have multiple hours of multiplayer on top of that... Usually with some terrific mods bolted on... And then some mods for the single player... Often the modding community would double or even triple the gameplay you got from your original purchase...
Now you shell out $60 for a game and get 5-10 hours of gameplay, plus the multiplayer. Then they'll start releasing more single player content, and multiplayer map packs, and skins, and whatever else as DLC. And the game will be designed around consoles, so there'll be very limited support for modding.
$50 for 20-80 hours of gameplay... Compared to $60 for 5-20 hours of gameplay...
Is it any wonder you're having a hard time selling your games?