The numbers I'm quoting are for an individual title (most titles follow the same path, but don't get coverage). When you're looking at the possibility of developing an individual title for the PC, Those are the numbers you care about. The NPD numbers you are quoting are for every title in the industry. Those include a LOT of deep discount titles on clearance, which are more of a sign of decay than health.
Also, I try not to compare NPD numbers from different articles. They're a precise enough organization that one may include accessory sales, another may include handheld or iPhone sales, etc. But journalists tend to blur those important distinctions away and present them as just "total sales!" Sourcing with NPD, I've found, is important. Comparing across different sources of NPD numbers (or different organization's numbers) will just lead to madness.
Also, the NPD is not always right. I'd put their normal margin of error at +- %20. At least they tend to be consistent in the direction which they're off in.
Here's an NPD figure. The US retail console games market was 10 billion dollars in 2009. The retail software game market was 500 million. That pegs the retail pc market at 5% of the overall retail market. Taking into account digital download, and you're still shy of 1 billion. That's still less than %10 of the console market. Add in WoW, and you're up to %20 of the console market. But again, you'll go broke chasing WoW.
While NPD is struggling to categorize digital download sales on consoles, their estimates put retail to digital sales at 9 to 1. Numerically then, digital downloads on consoles are even bigger than digital downloads on PC's. We'll have to see if they're financially as such if those numbers are released (6 grand for a report from NPD is a little pricey to just satisfy some curiosity).
I can't get into as many hard figures as I would like, since I've been privy to figures that aren't public. But the public figures are bad enough on their own.
You can survive on the PC market with some creativity, luck, and timing. But the PC market is quickly becoming like the Arcade market in the 90's: second string.
And it wasn't always this way. Before the release of this generation of systems, PC gaming was the reputation to beat. Like Arcades, for a while nothing could touch PC gaming for visuals, flexibility, and raw power. It had been in a little decline since RTS's and FPS's had fadded away, but online was definitely driving adoption. And, of course, who wouldn't want the mature development tools of a PC? Then this swath of networked online consoles came along, and you could play games in high definition that beat out 1,000 PC's for visuals, and you could play with all of your friends. Also, people moved on from gaming friendly desktops to laptops that took a huge power hit for convenience and durability. And the 360's dev tools are pretty much based directly on PC dev tools, so there wasn't much loss there. If anything, not having to target many different configurations has made this generation of consoles actually easier to develop on than PC's, for once.
Nobody wants to see PC's fading from prominence. But for the moment, that's where things are headed.
I wonder about that. With Flash titles, low-ball graphics in WoW, 20 year-old-games still being played, web games, facebook games, etc... It seems like PC gaming might actually be defined by laptops, no barrier to entry, mouse and keyboard, and online. The enthusiast desktops are just becoming a niche compared to Zingya at work.
How about this one: on its opening month, Modern Warfare 2 moved an impressive 6 million combined on 360 and PS3 in North America, but only 170,000 on PC. If we presume that there is an additional %50 for digital sales, the PC is still seeing less than 10% of the sales of the 360 and PS3 averaged together.
As someone who deals with publishers regularly, you expect a PC title to sell about %10 of what an identical console title will move. Breaking 150k on a PC is a strong achievement. 150k on a console would be beyond a failure.
There are some complicating factors in PC, though. For one, per-unit sales do not map nearly as cleanly with money spent or profitability. There are a lot of titles in the $5 clearance aisle that move on impulse, and buffer up the raw number sold without actually helping developers to eat. There are titles that move better on PC than on console due to interface and other questions. Flight Simulators, RTS, and MMO's, while the floor fell out of all of them a while back, they still do better on PC's than consoles. Sadly, though, the upper end a PC-only game can realistically expect to move these days is about 500k units, which is a break-even point for a moderately conservatively budgeted title.
World of Warcraft also sucks up a genuinely stupid amount of user dollars every year. It is in and of itself 1 Billion dollars per year. But it's really not fair to assess the income potential of future games on that particularly freakishly large nugget (many companies have gone broke trying). And when you're talking about the overall "health" of the PC gaming industry, it is hindering development rather than helping.
Also, PC as a gaming platform is permeated by flash and other downloadable mini titles, many ad-or-microtransaction supported. These do not bridge over to consoles well, which is where developers actually pay the rent. It takes a very different title, development methodology, and mindset to even survive on the PC side of things.
Overall though, it's difficult to make a giant blockbuster-sized game on the PC and expect to make your money back. Blizzard is one of the last developers trying it, with Starcraft and Diablo rehashes coming out soon. But, again, Blizzard is raking in 1 BILLION dollars a year from WoW. They can afford to take risks like that. Other than them, there is an updated Civilization soon, and then nothing but console ports as far as the eye can see. And even those are becoming thinner, as chasing the last 100k in sales might not offset the additional development and supply chain costs.
Poke around http://www.vgchartz.com/ for a while and see how a PC release generally does against a console release. Their numbers aren't thorough, and sometimes they're off by a lot, but they're usually in the right ballpark. I don't see anything released in the past few years that broke 2 million units on the PC.
Great! They should be buying up those $35 netbooks floating around India. You know, from all of those companies chomping at the bit to meet the technological educational needs of India's broke youth. As opposed to trying to make as big a profit as possible.
It's a very different perspective when you're someone that is fundamentally ignored by a capitalist market.
I had a friend who was working on dynamically changing advertising screens, but the costs were prohibitive. Assuming a retail markup, a 70 dollar screen-with-wifi jammed under a big block of plexiglass might enable them to do a lot.
Similarly, museums and tours could hand people tablets as they came in, and collect them on the other side. One broke? Whatever, just grab another one off a rack.
A touchscreen computer this small would be great for Point Of Sale in Mexico, as people who normally conduct all transactions in cash from their pocket struggle to deal with new digital reporting regulations.
Easy menu updating at small restaurants, interactive mall layout maps... at that price, it's cheap enough to really spark another evolution in the integration of computers to everybody's lives.
how the hell do they think they can do it in less than 25%?
It's being overseen, designed, and manufactured in India. All of the benefits of outsourcing with none of the overhead.
Joking aside, a $35 tablet would probably hit $100 on a real market, after company and retailer profit. Further, being a government with educational institute ties the development cost is entirely eaten, and not reflected in the price. Add in real packaging and materials and a marketing campaign, and you might actually be pretty close to a $150 retail mark.
If you look at the photos, it's a color screen. 2 GB of memory isn't going to blow anyone away, but that's comparable to the OLPC I have sitting here. The processor probably won't either, but this is Linux we're talking about. If you can't scale a Linux install to run well on slow hardware, you don't deserve to be manufacturing millions of units that everybody's going to surf on.
As a side note, the biggest electronics makers can't throw together a desktop computer that's better than one we assemble ourselves off the shelf. They're notoriously bad at making alterations to operating systems. And their goal is not to drive prices down, but to find reasons to keep prices high. Why would they even attempt to release a $35 tablet?
Have you seen modern hardware? Below a thershold, the lower the cost, the less power it uses. Sure, a cheap laptop using a desktop Intel processor will use more power than a cheap laptop using the latest Laptop Enhanced (tm) processor. But I assure you, a nice little dirt cheap C3 Erza will hardly be noticed by anything.
I'm not a programmer (at least, not a good one), but I was under the impression that one of the major fine-lines in the GPL is how linking occurs: if you link like something is a library call, you're fine. But if things are compiled together, you fall under the purvey of the GPL.
How does the GPL deal with interpreted languages? If there isn't any cross-compiling that takes place, where does one piece of software end and another begin?
It is definitely the biggest problem. But you make it sound like A.I.: something that has been worked on and has remained elusive for a half-century. Realistically speaking, precision close-range acrobatic RC flight has been worked on at MIT for about 7 years. A lot of that has been in groundwork that, unlike AI, actually seems to work.
Wind is a major problem. But it seems premature to say that the project "wont work" because of it. Maybe it needs an internal accelerometer to judge wind offset. Maybe it needs to drop some chaff and do some velocity calculations. Maybe we need to increase the amount of control systems over a regular aircraft to give the computer the tools to deal with wind. Or maybe it just keeps moving until it finds a spot without a lot of wind. Wind doesn't seem like the death of the project.
One big problem is that guns are easier to aim in games than in real life. Have you played Counterstrike recently? I've been headshot in that game so many freaking times in ways that wouldn't be possible in the real world. They know exactly how fast you move, exactly how high your head is. Aiming happens using a functionally massless mouse with no other real-world factors in account. And battles happen far, far closer in than they would in real life. Oh and you probably want a lot more action-to-camping in a videogame than you would in real life, which means a larger rate of fire with more than realistic ammo available.
People can (and do) rack up thousands of hours of practice at combat in these games, which leads to a horrific skill delta between new players and established ones. The main way to offset the above factors is to add degrees of randomality to the outgoing bullet spray.
All of the powerline powering systems I've seen breach the outer shell of the line with a metal hook.
There is no way in hell that's getting approved for domestic usage. A: it would be sued out of existence amazingly quickly, and B: there are enough government-owned places around domestically that you could just plug the things in.
Further, you'd have to either have someone watch all of that video (and we're tremendously backed up on audio recordings as-is), or process it somehow in a searchable format. Something like this would make sense to replace human tails in certain circumstances, and could be helpful in backing up helicopters in pursuit cases. But overall, there aren't enough police for a full police state. We just have way too much data as-is.
The story references a military story, where they talk about developed technologies that deform the wings into limp hanging detritus. That should diffray the issue of wind once attached to a line.
MIT students have actually been developing robot planes like this for years. They can prop-hang and take off vertically. They can hook vertically onto walls. They can fly quickly around indoors. Wind, then, is just one more problem to tackle.
All Google probably sniffed was some g-mail conversations, some google voice, some chrome browsing sessions, a photograph or two uploaded to picasa, lots of YouTube videos, and maybe some facebook activity that they've already spidered.
I totally agree that they should throw out the data, and that harvesting over wi-fi should be considered an off-limits. But this is Google we're talking about. Anyone who thinks Google doesn't already have large chunks of this data from their network, their advertising serving network, or their huge web of affiliates sending them data, is very optimistic.
How dare they collect private information like MAC addresses! Those carefully shielded numbers are there for an important purpose: to be kept safe from prying eyes, hidden behind a shield of apparently unlocked wireless networks.
Asses.
WRT network content: If you decide that a regular house isn't good enough for you so you buy a fully glass house, then don't hang up any curtains, what the heck did you expect to happen? "Oh look, this big bad corporation took photographs of my completely glass house! They don't have any intent to do anything with it. We must sue them before they do that!" Why do you people think that your computer warns you every time you connect to an unsecured network that everyone can see all of your bits! The reason they could photograph you naked in public is because YOU WERE NAKED IN PUBLIC. Normally I have some sympathy for non-tech users getting things wrong, but this one is just long-running and stupid.
As a side note, it seems a little odd that people are freaking out that Google might have their e-mails, the websites they visited, etc. That's like complaining that General Petraeus might have improperly bought a slingshot at a fair. Google pretty much knows the gender of your next child. If they saw you remotely streaming Wrestlemania IV, Amazon probably already told them what you rated it and that you keep re-reading Twilight on your Kindle. While I'm uncomfortable with individual corporations having so much data about people, they've already got it. I'm just expecting the day that I get an e-mail from Google saying that they've automatically updated my calendar with the date I made over Google voice, they called the repairman about the noise in the car, and I have six months until an undiscovered cancer kills me. Sniffing my wireless network won't give them anything they're probably not already collecting from this Chrome browser. Of course, my wireless network isn't completely naked because I actually read the 20 point font easy setup card that came with the damned thing.
Windows may have negative value to people here on Slashdot. But if you're an executive for whom computers isn't your core business, Windows = business and Apple = schoolkids. Windows implies solid integration with Outlook, your windows shared files, doc files, etc. When you try to open that 30MB excel spreadsheet containing 5,000 separate sheets and every aspect of your business, it will open fine. (I've seen people with these. I accidentally erased one once.). Meeting invites will get through just fine, unlike that hippie kid in marketing with the Macintosh. And since you already know Windows thanks to that training seminar you went to, you should be fine with this.
Really, the competitor for a "Windows" based smartphone is the Blackberry, not the iPhone. And while RIM has been doing an all around good job, if you've been using a blackberry for years there are enough quirks that you'd probably want to switch to something easier to use and better.
What if you're training filtering applications to automatically discover and block child porn? You'd want to talk to the police first, obviously, but you have a strong legitimate reason in having it there. By you having it for non-nefarious reasons, in order to help stop it, the world would have significantly less of it going around.
US courts have ordered many services to implement filtering systems for copyrighted material. For those to work, they need to know what the copyrighted material to be blocked is. If you rule that copyright filtering systems can't itself have copies of the material, the copyright blocking systems stop working (to some degree or another). This is exactly the sort of situation that falls under fair use. Otherwise the court orders to implement filtering would have to be overturned, and there would be significantly more infringement going on.
I'm not saying invisible. I'm just saying acceptably bad. The Sega Master System displayed 3D video on 60hz sets. Was it perfect? No, it looked like it flickered a bit. But that seems inline with the expected image degredation that you would expect with split-screen (or in this case, double screen) gaming. That was enough to make it work.
Now, a big thing with 2 player gaming might be that the period of black is triply long. 5, 15, 5, 15 so to speak. Brighter sets and darker ambient rooms would help counteract this effect. But I'm not convinced it will be so bad as to kill any possibility of success. Remember, your game is going to look like ass already anyway, since you're effectively doubling the load on the system. You're do split-screen gaming not for visual fidelity, but because it is a heck of a lot more fun to play with a 2nd real person in the room.
Check out Pixar's Toy Story 3. It's the most mature usage of 3D I've ever seen. And by that, I mean you almost never notice it. It's like background music: it heightens the experience subtly without abusively sticking out.
I would like to see some sort of study where one group of people saw a well-produced 3D film, one group saw the same film in 2D, and they rated the emotional impact. Personally, I'm guessing the 3D group would say that there was more impact, but wouldn't attribute it to the 3D.
Slashdot Mirror
slowDownAndCrashSoICanSellAnUpgrade();
The numbers I'm quoting are for an individual title (most titles follow the same path, but don't get coverage). When you're looking at the possibility of developing an individual title for the PC, Those are the numbers you care about. The NPD numbers you are quoting are for every title in the industry. Those include a LOT of deep discount titles on clearance, which are more of a sign of decay than health.
Also, I try not to compare NPD numbers from different articles. They're a precise enough organization that one may include accessory sales, another may include handheld or iPhone sales, etc. But journalists tend to blur those important distinctions away and present them as just "total sales!" Sourcing with NPD, I've found, is important. Comparing across different sources of NPD numbers (or different organization's numbers) will just lead to madness.
Also, the NPD is not always right. I'd put their normal margin of error at +- %20. At least they tend to be consistent in the direction which they're off in.
Here's an NPD figure. The US retail console games market was 10 billion dollars in 2009. The retail software game market was 500 million. That pegs the retail pc market at 5% of the overall retail market. Taking into account digital download, and you're still shy of 1 billion. That's still less than %10 of the console market. Add in WoW, and you're up to %20 of the console market. But again, you'll go broke chasing WoW.
While NPD is struggling to categorize digital download sales on consoles, their estimates put retail to digital sales at 9 to 1. Numerically then, digital downloads on consoles are even bigger than digital downloads on PC's. We'll have to see if they're financially as such if those numbers are released (6 grand for a report from NPD is a little pricey to just satisfy some curiosity).
I can't get into as many hard figures as I would like, since I've been privy to figures that aren't public. But the public figures are bad enough on their own.
You can survive on the PC market with some creativity, luck, and timing. But the PC market is quickly becoming like the Arcade market in the 90's: second string.
And it wasn't always this way. Before the release of this generation of systems, PC gaming was the reputation to beat. Like Arcades, for a while nothing could touch PC gaming for visuals, flexibility, and raw power. It had been in a little decline since RTS's and FPS's had fadded away, but online was definitely driving adoption. And, of course, who wouldn't want the mature development tools of a PC? Then this swath of networked online consoles came along, and you could play games in high definition that beat out 1,000 PC's for visuals, and you could play with all of your friends. Also, people moved on from gaming friendly desktops to laptops that took a huge power hit for convenience and durability. And the 360's dev tools are pretty much based directly on PC dev tools, so there wasn't much loss there. If anything, not having to target many different configurations has made this generation of consoles actually easier to develop on than PC's, for once.
Nobody wants to see PC's fading from prominence. But for the moment, that's where things are headed.
I wonder about that. With Flash titles, low-ball graphics in WoW, 20 year-old-games still being played, web games, facebook games, etc... It seems like PC gaming might actually be defined by laptops, no barrier to entry, mouse and keyboard, and online. The enthusiast desktops are just becoming a niche compared to Zingya at work.
How about this one: on its opening month, Modern Warfare 2 moved an impressive 6 million combined on 360 and PS3 in North America, but only 170,000 on PC. If we presume that there is an additional %50 for digital sales, the PC is still seeing less than 10% of the sales of the 360 and PS3 averaged together.
As someone who deals with publishers regularly, you expect a PC title to sell about %10 of what an identical console title will move. Breaking 150k on a PC is a strong achievement. 150k on a console would be beyond a failure.
There are some complicating factors in PC, though. For one, per-unit sales do not map nearly as cleanly with money spent or profitability. There are a lot of titles in the $5 clearance aisle that move on impulse, and buffer up the raw number sold without actually helping developers to eat. There are titles that move better on PC than on console due to interface and other questions. Flight Simulators, RTS, and MMO's, while the floor fell out of all of them a while back, they still do better on PC's than consoles. Sadly, though, the upper end a PC-only game can realistically expect to move these days is about 500k units, which is a break-even point for a moderately conservatively budgeted title.
World of Warcraft also sucks up a genuinely stupid amount of user dollars every year. It is in and of itself 1 Billion dollars per year. But it's really not fair to assess the income potential of future games on that particularly freakishly large nugget (many companies have gone broke trying). And when you're talking about the overall "health" of the PC gaming industry, it is hindering development rather than helping.
Also, PC as a gaming platform is permeated by flash and other downloadable mini titles, many ad-or-microtransaction supported. These do not bridge over to consoles well, which is where developers actually pay the rent. It takes a very different title, development methodology, and mindset to even survive on the PC side of things.
Overall though, it's difficult to make a giant blockbuster-sized game on the PC and expect to make your money back. Blizzard is one of the last developers trying it, with Starcraft and Diablo rehashes coming out soon. But, again, Blizzard is raking in 1 BILLION dollars a year from WoW. They can afford to take risks like that. Other than them, there is an updated Civilization soon, and then nothing but console ports as far as the eye can see. And even those are becoming thinner, as chasing the last 100k in sales might not offset the additional development and supply chain costs.
Poke around http://www.vgchartz.com/ for a while and see how a PC release generally does against a console release. Their numbers aren't thorough, and sometimes they're off by a lot, but they're usually in the right ballpark. I don't see anything released in the past few years that broke 2 million units on the PC.
Great! They should be buying up those $35 netbooks floating around India. You know, from all of those companies chomping at the bit to meet the technological educational needs of India's broke youth. As opposed to trying to make as big a profit as possible.
It's a very different perspective when you're someone that is fundamentally ignored by a capitalist market.
I had a friend who was working on dynamically changing advertising screens, but the costs were prohibitive. Assuming a retail markup, a 70 dollar screen-with-wifi jammed under a big block of plexiglass might enable them to do a lot.
Similarly, museums and tours could hand people tablets as they came in, and collect them on the other side. One broke? Whatever, just grab another one off a rack.
A touchscreen computer this small would be great for Point Of Sale in Mexico, as people who normally conduct all transactions in cash from their pocket struggle to deal with new digital reporting regulations.
Easy menu updating at small restaurants, interactive mall layout maps... at that price, it's cheap enough to really spark another evolution in the integration of computers to everybody's lives.
how the hell do they think they can do it in less than 25%?
It's being overseen, designed, and manufactured in India. All of the benefits of outsourcing with none of the overhead.
Joking aside, a $35 tablet would probably hit $100 on a real market, after company and retailer profit. Further, being a government with educational institute ties the development cost is entirely eaten, and not reflected in the price. Add in real packaging and materials and a marketing campaign, and you might actually be pretty close to a $150 retail mark.
If you look at the photos, it's a color screen. 2 GB of memory isn't going to blow anyone away, but that's comparable to the OLPC I have sitting here. The processor probably won't either, but this is Linux we're talking about. If you can't scale a Linux install to run well on slow hardware, you don't deserve to be manufacturing millions of units that everybody's going to surf on.
As a side note, the biggest electronics makers can't throw together a desktop computer that's better than one we assemble ourselves off the shelf. They're notoriously bad at making alterations to operating systems. And their goal is not to drive prices down, but to find reasons to keep prices high. Why would they even attempt to release a $35 tablet?
Have you seen modern hardware? Below a thershold, the lower the cost, the less power it uses. Sure, a cheap laptop using a desktop Intel processor will use more power than a cheap laptop using the latest Laptop Enhanced (tm) processor. But I assure you, a nice little dirt cheap C3 Erza will hardly be noticed by anything.
I'm not a programmer (at least, not a good one), but I was under the impression that one of the major fine-lines in the GPL is how linking occurs: if you link like something is a library call, you're fine. But if things are compiled together, you fall under the purvey of the GPL.
How does the GPL deal with interpreted languages? If there isn't any cross-compiling that takes place, where does one piece of software end and another begin?
...is why lots of businesses won't touch open source software. It is stuff like this that gives ammunition to the FUD.
It is definitely the biggest problem. But you make it sound like A.I.: something that has been worked on and has remained elusive for a half-century. Realistically speaking, precision close-range acrobatic RC flight has been worked on at MIT for about 7 years. A lot of that has been in groundwork that, unlike AI, actually seems to work.
Wind is a major problem. But it seems premature to say that the project "wont work" because of it. Maybe it needs an internal accelerometer to judge wind offset. Maybe it needs to drop some chaff and do some velocity calculations. Maybe we need to increase the amount of control systems over a regular aircraft to give the computer the tools to deal with wind. Or maybe it just keeps moving until it finds a spot without a lot of wind. Wind doesn't seem like the death of the project.
One big problem is that guns are easier to aim in games than in real life. Have you played Counterstrike recently? I've been headshot in that game so many freaking times in ways that wouldn't be possible in the real world. They know exactly how fast you move, exactly how high your head is. Aiming happens using a functionally massless mouse with no other real-world factors in account. And battles happen far, far closer in than they would in real life. Oh and you probably want a lot more action-to-camping in a videogame than you would in real life, which means a larger rate of fire with more than realistic ammo available.
People can (and do) rack up thousands of hours of practice at combat in these games, which leads to a horrific skill delta between new players and established ones. The main way to offset the above factors is to add degrees of randomality to the outgoing bullet spray.
All of the powerline powering systems I've seen breach the outer shell of the line with a metal hook.
There is no way in hell that's getting approved for domestic usage. A: it would be sued out of existence amazingly quickly, and B: there are enough government-owned places around domestically that you could just plug the things in.
Further, you'd have to either have someone watch all of that video (and we're tremendously backed up on audio recordings as-is), or process it somehow in a searchable format. Something like this would make sense to replace human tails in certain circumstances, and could be helpful in backing up helicopters in pursuit cases. But overall, there aren't enough police for a full police state. We just have way too much data as-is.
This is student work we're talking about here. They're paying MIT for the opportunity to do MIT's research.
Spin the propeller up. Take off vertically. RC planes have enough power in the nose to do that.
The story references a military story, where they talk about developed technologies that deform the wings into limp hanging detritus. That should diffray the issue of wind once attached to a line.
MIT students have actually been developing robot planes like this for years. They can prop-hang and take off vertically. They can hook vertically onto walls. They can fly quickly around indoors. Wind, then, is just one more problem to tackle.
All Google probably sniffed was some g-mail conversations, some google voice, some chrome browsing sessions, a photograph or two uploaded to picasa, lots of YouTube videos, and maybe some facebook activity that they've already spidered.
I totally agree that they should throw out the data, and that harvesting over wi-fi should be considered an off-limits. But this is Google we're talking about. Anyone who thinks Google doesn't already have large chunks of this data from their network, their advertising serving network, or their huge web of affiliates sending them data, is very optimistic.
How dare they collect private information like MAC addresses! Those carefully shielded numbers are there for an important purpose: to be kept safe from prying eyes, hidden behind a shield of apparently unlocked wireless networks.
Asses.
WRT network content: If you decide that a regular house isn't good enough for you so you buy a fully glass house, then don't hang up any curtains, what the heck did you expect to happen? "Oh look, this big bad corporation took photographs of my completely glass house! They don't have any intent to do anything with it. We must sue them before they do that!" Why do you people think that your computer warns you every time you connect to an unsecured network that everyone can see all of your bits! The reason they could photograph you naked in public is because YOU WERE NAKED IN PUBLIC. Normally I have some sympathy for non-tech users getting things wrong, but this one is just long-running and stupid.
As a side note, it seems a little odd that people are freaking out that Google might have their e-mails, the websites they visited, etc. That's like complaining that General Petraeus might have improperly bought a slingshot at a fair. Google pretty much knows the gender of your next child. If they saw you remotely streaming Wrestlemania IV, Amazon probably already told them what you rated it and that you keep re-reading Twilight on your Kindle. While I'm uncomfortable with individual corporations having so much data about people, they've already got it. I'm just expecting the day that I get an e-mail from Google saying that they've automatically updated my calendar with the date I made over Google voice, they called the repairman about the noise in the car, and I have six months until an undiscovered cancer kills me. Sniffing my wireless network won't give them anything they're probably not already collecting from this Chrome browser. Of course, my wireless network isn't completely naked because I actually read the 20 point font easy setup card that came with the damned thing.
Windows may have negative value to people here on Slashdot. But if you're an executive for whom computers isn't your core business, Windows = business and Apple = schoolkids. Windows implies solid integration with Outlook, your windows shared files, doc files, etc. When you try to open that 30MB excel spreadsheet containing 5,000 separate sheets and every aspect of your business, it will open fine. (I've seen people with these. I accidentally erased one once.). Meeting invites will get through just fine, unlike that hippie kid in marketing with the Macintosh. And since you already know Windows thanks to that training seminar you went to, you should be fine with this.
Really, the competitor for a "Windows" based smartphone is the Blackberry, not the iPhone. And while RIM has been doing an all around good job, if you've been using a blackberry for years there are enough quirks that you'd probably want to switch to something easier to use and better.
The pessimist in me wonders if these are just for the dwindling permanent staff members, or if the permatemps are getting one too.
I thought their market was people who didn't have access to the internet.
What if you're training filtering applications to automatically discover and block child porn? You'd want to talk to the police first, obviously, but you have a strong legitimate reason in having it there. By you having it for non-nefarious reasons, in order to help stop it, the world would have significantly less of it going around.
US courts have ordered many services to implement filtering systems for copyrighted material. For those to work, they need to know what the copyrighted material to be blocked is. If you rule that copyright filtering systems can't itself have copies of the material, the copyright blocking systems stop working (to some degree or another). This is exactly the sort of situation that falls under fair use. Otherwise the court orders to implement filtering would have to be overturned, and there would be significantly more infringement going on.
Sorry, a hash is a derivative work.
I'm not saying invisible. I'm just saying acceptably bad. The Sega Master System displayed 3D video on 60hz sets. Was it perfect? No, it looked like it flickered a bit. But that seems inline with the expected image degredation that you would expect with split-screen (or in this case, double screen) gaming. That was enough to make it work.
Now, a big thing with 2 player gaming might be that the period of black is triply long. 5, 15, 5, 15 so to speak. Brighter sets and darker ambient rooms would help counteract this effect. But I'm not convinced it will be so bad as to kill any possibility of success. Remember, your game is going to look like ass already anyway, since you're effectively doubling the load on the system. You're do split-screen gaming not for visual fidelity, but because it is a heck of a lot more fun to play with a 2nd real person in the room.
Check out Pixar's Toy Story 3. It's the most mature usage of 3D I've ever seen. And by that, I mean you almost never notice it. It's like background music: it heightens the experience subtly without abusively sticking out.
I would like to see some sort of study where one group of people saw a well-produced 3D film, one group saw the same film in 2D, and they rated the emotional impact. Personally, I'm guessing the 3D group would say that there was more impact, but wouldn't attribute it to the 3D.