JVM's have a fixed cost to develop them, just as Dalvik has a fixed cost to develop new and exciting features like JIT's and better GC's. IBM has J9, BEA (now Oracle) has JRocket, Sun (now Oracle) has Hotspot. Instead of writing their own customized JVM's they've decided to collaborate (I assume) to cut costs and streamline the JVM's presentation and roll-out to customers. How is this some super secret attack on Android?
Harmony is open and will remain open for the foreseeable future. Its not like BEA/Oracle/IBM were big supporters of harmony before this deal was inked... The question being is if Dalvik's JVM its susceptible to software patents which will now be tested (again?) in court with Google.
Correction: If by attack, you mean that they are making a better product faster, then you can make that giant leap, but really, J9 and JRocket are really server targeted JVM's, so I think the alliance is really to make a better server JVM. Maybe they're seeing increased competition with.NET or the scripting web platforms and they want to step up their games, who knows.
You answered your own question. Besides this sassy response you do have a point, though i must say that the end of Disc 1 FFVII was the most emotionally jarring scene I've ever experienced from a video game.
NO, the bedrock of the series is great. What they need is fresh pumping blood from new people to say, hey, we're going to take the series in a *gasp* new direction. As derivative Nintendo rererereremakes are, at least they still make them fun. Final fantasy needs a reboot Fallout style.
Oh man, I got open beta and quit after 2 days. Thank the gods that I never paid for it! Once I got the painfully frustrating patcher finished, and once I got to the point where I could figure out the damn controls (after caving to get a damn gamepad for my PC RPG), I was confronted with a straight-forward kill quest. The map was poor, but I eventually figured out where to go. Oh, look there's a squirrel. I'm going to kill it. Fire fire fire, I die..... . Nothing happens, and there's no indication of how I can respawn if there even is a respawn in this. Wow, deleted.
This was pretty much the worst gameplay experience I've had in years. There's no wonder it was such a short dance.
Re:Don't build fast changing tech into the TV
on
Apple vs. Google TVs
·
· Score: 1
I don't follow. If you are in the market to buy a new TV, you will get Google's product for -basically- free. Its a product differentiator at this point which will most likely be used strategically to up sell against some competitor's offering. Thats is IF you're buying a new TV. If you aren't in the market because you just bought a $2000 TV 2 years ago (like me) I could either be SOL or just buy the Logitech box and get all the benefits of the integrated unit and pay for the privilege. Maybe in 4-5 years if I give my TV a refresh I'll choose to get a Google TV built into the TV instead of dealing with the minor hassle of having yet another box lying in my device rack.
lol someone can't count. Poster said 1000 -k-bit line which is 1Mb/sec or 125MB/sec which is a far from great internet connection, and probably just below the low water mark on streaming content, well, maybe it could just squeak through the minimum specs with buffering. I wouldn't want to watch them through. The content will be highly compressed or highly buffered which are both annoying trade-offs.
As for the HDMI/Composite thing, the TV is almost certainly 480i, and I'm not sure if the dongle quoted by parent has down-scaling built in or if you can change the output signal on either of the devices below 720. It sounds highly dubious that a $10 converter would be able to down-scale. Something to look into when you're making your decisions anyways.
Um, the logitech box is running Linux under the hood, so until we see the tear down to prove otherwise, the device could get updates for the foundation of the system in the future at any point. My PS3 which I pretty much just use for Media consumption (BluRay/DLNA) get regular updates to improve my use cases with the device. The fact that the platform supports applications means there's going to be an ecosystem outside of a Google/Logitech's control/interest. This specific model may not last for 10 years with of "3D-mega-HD-whatever", but it will work for the tech that has been developed for today's media consumption needs. I personally don't see a form factor larger than 1080p taking off any time within this decade. The FPS and a small amount of CPU/GPU overhead computation goes up with any type of 3D tech, but I don't think its a herculean step into 3D. Hell PS3 added 3D sourcing support as a patch to their system and that's a 4 year old product.
Also, can you really build a cheap PC of comparable specs for under $300? Really? We're talking about CPU,Mobo,Video,Case,Power,HD,LAN,WIFI,IR blaster,Wireless keyboard/mouse here. I'm not sure of the true underlying specs of the box, so maybe a fair comparison of throwing a 5 year old Intel is feasible(if you can find a retail channel), but who knows. Oh, you wanted windows? Ding that's another $130. Oh, did I mention you have to put everything together and make sure everything works just right? I've built several HTPC's over the years and there are always annoyances that I either live with or ultimately cave and buy some other piece of hardware that didn't suffer from the same problem. All that, and you still don't have the transparent video in/out mode that the TV features allowing us to overlay real underlying content while surfing/playing or whatever.
Oh, and since this is a conduit device, you don't even need to change inputs when you want to look something up on the internet. Just start typing away. The only thing I really miss since moving to a PS3 over a PC as my media content device has been a decent web browser (PS3's browser is worse than bad). I don't know if I'll be an early adopter or not considering that I turfed Cable a while back, so the incentive for me is slightly less compelling than the average consumer.
Not to beat a dead horse on the issue, but Apple would never support such a model unless it was specifically shoehorned into their application store model. Since games can't run code from downloaded sources, there can be no boot-strap hub for iPhoneDownloadPlay in the case of iPhone anyways.
I realize that the quote may be a little far fetching or out of context, but really? Even if mobile phones did have the same capabilities of my PC/consoles, would you really want to play serious games spending half your fingers holding the thing? Crappy sound or at best stereo headphone speaker sound? 3-5 inch screens? Even tablets with their adequately larger screens suffer from the problems of holding the device, and touch covering up the picture. If you 'solve' it with joysticks and holders, you lose the portability benefit, and we're back to what's the point. I definitely like mobile games in either phone or portable console styling, but its delusional to think that the use case for video games will stride so far from today's gaming climate. Oh, Fallout New Vegas is getting released for an iPhone! I'm totally lining up for it. Lets not even touch the caveats of trying to run 'real' network multiplayers through modern carrier cell networks. I never even want to run it through my flaky Wifi.
I can see them using it as a retail market tool, like hey this week apps X,Y,Z are 30% off. Go rush out and get them!!! Type of things that use the power of their marketing channel as a way of enticing sales. Still, I'd like some form of control over the powers that Amazon wields in this way.
Maybe they want to move into LCD tablets to at least have a product on parity with the iPad. If one really wanted eInk they get the standard models. If they want consumption then Amazon has that covered as well. Amazon now sells digital Movies, Music, soon apps, etc... having 'a store' to sell them all on an android device is compelling.
Search for 'Puzzle' in the market. Some douche uses puzzle as their developer name and apparently Google's search is so bad that it always ranks the developer name first, so you get pages and pages of this idiot's crappy waste of space applications. Yeah, the market is broken.
Until yesterday I couldn't legitimately sell applications on the market. This was an outstanding issue FOR YEARS. I don't have faith in Google's market and I welcome any competition in the ecosystem. If you don't want to sell on Amazon or Hanster, or whatever the other stores are then don't and live with the fewer sales.
"What happens if cellular carriers want to hop in this pool?" Nothing has changed since android started. If AT&T really wanted to reinvent their utterly failed business of hosting a carrier locked store, they could have done it from the beginning. If they want to restrict the stock Google experience market (crappy experience but definitive) or maybe a 3rd party repository 'hacked to make all apps free' repository then that's their business. If you have the ability (AKA you're not in rural USA), switch carriers if it annoys you so much.
That would be a neat idea to implement, but I think ultimately the mass of transactions(fees per), wire transactions, charge backs, tax trails, etc.. would weigh down the system to the point that nobody would bother to implement it.
Most of the item sets' "combined bonus" also has weakness. Pyros can move 10% faster and take 10% higher DMG. That seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me. The soldier one doesn't have a tradeoff, but its basically a tactical turret killer to begin with and not suited for all purposes use.
"Information collection by ads should be governed by a different set of permissions than the app presenting the ads. Ad-supported apps are fine, but the user should know what ads are doing on the network independent of the app."
I think that is the strategy of 'Google ads' being served through apps, but I'm not sure if they've actually done that yet. AdMob (which is now Google as well) definitely needs internet and possibly coarse location if the dev wants to allow for geo sensitive ads. It would be nice to have:
App A relies on feature: AdMob (Google Inc.) Admob requires:
[X] FULL_INTERNET
[ ] (optional) COARSE_GEO_LOCATION
As a user, I think it'd be great to have the ability to nuke privileges to certain functions that I don't think that the app should have. Inversely, I think as a developer this would be incredibly frustrating. Taking away the ability to perform functions that very well could be a core function of the app would cause no end of frustration to debug and fix. Plus, bad reviews and crashes relating to stupid permissions filtering just increases the support head-ache of releasing apps.
I think a happy solution would be to have apps that have mandatory and permissive permissions. Mandatory permissions must always be in place, but permissive ones can be turned on/off when first installed and later through the application settings menu. That means that I can release a piece of software that integrates with their address book if they want that integration, but if they don't want it, then they have the option of turning it off.
Another nice feature for developers would be a small space to describe why they need a given system permission
Thirdly, the other annoyance is that by supporting the Android 1.5 platform, it automatically assigns permissions for internet and write external. Both permissions make it difficult to have something like a tip calculator or fart app that doesn't look like spyware.
AdMob uses the -coarse- sensitive location for ads when you want to serve up something thats location sensitive like 'Eat at McDonalds in "My City" at abc blvd.' but that's pretty much it. All they really need is the coarse location setting which gives a general approximation of where the individual is at in order to target ads for the best experience. That's is a location sensitive ad, and it was the choice of the app developer to allow it. The app developer wants more money from their ads, but its not lkike any of them control how that data is collected or used. If you have a problem with the 'data leak' then don't connect to the internet without 3rd party proxies in between and don't install any applications, because invariably some of them are leaking data back to somewhere all the time. Hell, I'm typing this from Firefox which pretty much calls home on a daily basis. I don't bother to check on the bits flying across the wire, they could be leaking a key log for all I know. If you don't want geo sensitive ads served to your device then don't use that person's app. Is there something evil or nefarious about the DEVELOPERS of these apps? No. Moving along...
wow, its.99. Your lunch probably costs 5x as much. The return policy gives you the ability to return apps that are really bad. If YOU don't think an app isn't worth the money then by all means don't buy them. I always find the opposite; good apps get released for free with no way besides annoying ads to monetize the developers for their work.
1. Ditch the goal of moving Symbian to anything beyond dumb phones with cameras 2. Change the name of Meego to ANYTHING ELSE 3. Release Meego completely OSS and don't hamper people wanting to go in and tinker 4. Start rolling out both (Official stock) Android and Meego on devices and allow for the devices to switch back and forth between the two 5. Release a marketing campaign to choose 'the next look of Nokia' 6. Analyze which OS is getting better market traction and phase out the loser 7.Profit More!
Maybe they're only reviewing games they want to play? That would definitely skew the results across the board. Frankly Slashdot reviews are only relevant to me at all because of the comments.
Pardon Me? Does Google segment data based on nationality? The origin of the individual(s) being investigated have no bearing as to their nation of origin, or are you more interested in just the raw population numbers of the country? Exactly what type of correlation are you trying to build? A given nation's government officials are probably don't limit their requests to simply inner-nationals, so wouldn't that make the proportion of people / size of community / etc.. numbers irrelevant compared to information requests as a whole? The raw number in itself tells us how motivated a given government is in policing or investigating the actions of individuals on or using the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
JVM's have a fixed cost to develop them, just as Dalvik has a fixed cost to develop new and exciting features like JIT's and better GC's. IBM has J9, BEA (now Oracle) has JRocket, Sun (now Oracle) has Hotspot. Instead of writing their own customized JVM's they've decided to collaborate (I assume) to cut costs and streamline the JVM's presentation and roll-out to customers. How is this some super secret attack on Android?
Harmony is open and will remain open for the foreseeable future. Its not like BEA/Oracle/IBM were big supporters of harmony before this deal was inked... The question being is if Dalvik's JVM its susceptible to software patents which will now be tested (again?) in court with Google.
Correction: If by attack, you mean that they are making a better product faster, then you can make that giant leap, but really, J9 and JRocket are really server targeted JVM's, so I think the alliance is really to make a better server JVM. Maybe they're seeing increased competition with .NET or the scripting web platforms and they want to step up their games, who knows.
"I grew up"
You answered your own question. Besides this sassy response you do have a point, though i must say that the end of Disc 1 FFVII was the most emotionally jarring scene I've ever experienced from a video game.
NO, the bedrock of the series is great. What they need is fresh pumping blood from new people to say, hey, we're going to take the series in a *gasp* new direction. As derivative Nintendo rererereremakes are, at least they still make them fun. Final fantasy needs a reboot Fallout style.
Oh man, I got open beta and quit after 2 days. Thank the gods that I never paid for it! Once I got the painfully frustrating patcher finished, and once I got to the point where I could figure out the damn controls (after caving to get a damn gamepad for my PC RPG), I was confronted with a straight-forward kill quest. The map was poor, but I eventually figured out where to go. Oh, look there's a squirrel. I'm going to kill it. Fire fire fire, I die... .. . Nothing happens, and there's no indication of how I can respawn if there even is a respawn in this. Wow, deleted.
This was pretty much the worst gameplay experience I've had in years. There's no wonder it was such a short dance.
I don't follow. If you are in the market to buy a new TV, you will get Google's product for -basically- free. Its a product differentiator at this point which will most likely be used strategically to up sell against some competitor's offering. Thats is IF you're buying a new TV. If you aren't in the market because you just bought a $2000 TV 2 years ago (like me) I could either be SOL or just buy the Logitech box and get all the benefits of the integrated unit and pay for the privilege. Maybe in 4-5 years if I give my TV a refresh I'll choose to get a Google TV built into the TV instead of dealing with the minor hassle of having yet another box lying in my device rack.
And this is in their best interest why?
lol someone can't count. Poster said 1000 -k-bit line which is 1Mb/sec or 125MB/sec which is a far from great internet connection, and probably just below the low water mark on streaming content, well, maybe it could just squeak through the minimum specs with buffering. I wouldn't want to watch them through. The content will be highly compressed or highly buffered which are both annoying trade-offs.
As for the HDMI/Composite thing, the TV is almost certainly 480i, and I'm not sure if the dongle quoted by parent has down-scaling built in or if you can change the output signal on either of the devices below 720. It sounds highly dubious that a $10 converter would be able to down-scale. Something to look into when you're making your decisions anyways.
Um, the logitech box is running Linux under the hood, so until we see the tear down to prove otherwise, the device could get updates for the foundation of the system in the future at any point. My PS3 which I pretty much just use for Media consumption (BluRay/DLNA) get regular updates to improve my use cases with the device. The fact that the platform supports applications means there's going to be an ecosystem outside of a Google/Logitech's control/interest. This specific model may not last for 10 years with of "3D-mega-HD-whatever", but it will work for the tech that has been developed for today's media consumption needs. I personally don't see a form factor larger than 1080p taking off any time within this decade. The FPS and a small amount of CPU/GPU overhead computation goes up with any type of 3D tech, but I don't think its a herculean step into 3D. Hell PS3 added 3D sourcing support as a patch to their system and that's a 4 year old product.
Also, can you really build a cheap PC of comparable specs for under $300? Really? We're talking about CPU,Mobo,Video,Case,Power,HD,LAN,WIFI,IR blaster,Wireless keyboard/mouse here. I'm not sure of the true underlying specs of the box, so maybe a fair comparison of throwing a 5 year old Intel is feasible(if you can find a retail channel), but who knows. Oh, you wanted windows? Ding that's another $130. Oh, did I mention you have to put everything together and make sure everything works just right? I've built several HTPC's over the years and there are always annoyances that I either live with or ultimately cave and buy some other piece of hardware that didn't suffer from the same problem. All that, and you still don't have the transparent video in/out mode that the TV features allowing us to overlay real underlying content while surfing/playing or whatever.
Oh, and since this is a conduit device, you don't even need to change inputs when you want to look something up on the internet. Just start typing away. The only thing I really miss since moving to a PS3 over a PC as my media content device has been a decent web browser (PS3's browser is worse than bad). I don't know if I'll be an early adopter or not considering that I turfed Cable a while back, so the incentive for me is slightly less compelling than the average consumer.
Not to beat a dead horse on the issue, but Apple would never support such a model unless it was specifically shoehorned into their application store model. Since games can't run code from downloaded sources, there can be no boot-strap hub for iPhoneDownloadPlay in the case of iPhone anyways.
I realize that the quote may be a little far fetching or out of context, but really? Even if mobile phones did have the same capabilities of my PC/consoles, would you really want to play serious games spending half your fingers holding the thing? Crappy sound or at best stereo headphone speaker sound? 3-5 inch screens? Even tablets with their adequately larger screens suffer from the problems of holding the device, and touch covering up the picture. If you 'solve' it with joysticks and holders, you lose the portability benefit, and we're back to what's the point. I definitely like mobile games in either phone or portable console styling, but its delusional to think that the use case for video games will stride so far from today's gaming climate. Oh, Fallout New Vegas is getting released for an iPhone! I'm totally lining up for it. Lets not even touch the caveats of trying to run 'real' network multiplayers through modern carrier cell networks. I never even want to run it through my flaky Wifi.
I downloaded it just to mess with you!
I can see them using it as a retail market tool, like hey this week apps X,Y,Z are 30% off. Go rush out and get them!!! Type of things that use the power of their marketing channel as a way of enticing sales. Still, I'd like some form of control over the powers that Amazon wields in this way.
Maybe they want to move into LCD tablets to at least have a product on parity with the iPad. If one really wanted eInk they get the standard models. If they want consumption then Amazon has that covered as well. Amazon now sells digital Movies, Music, soon apps, etc... having 'a store' to sell them all on an android device is compelling.
Search for 'Puzzle' in the market. Some douche uses puzzle as their developer name and apparently Google's search is so bad that it always ranks the developer name first, so you get pages and pages of this idiot's crappy waste of space applications. Yeah, the market is broken.
Until yesterday I couldn't legitimately sell applications on the market. This was an outstanding issue FOR YEARS. I don't have faith in Google's market and I welcome any competition in the ecosystem. If you don't want to sell on Amazon or Hanster, or whatever the other stores are then don't and live with the fewer sales.
"What happens if cellular carriers want to hop in this pool?"
Nothing has changed since android started. If AT&T really wanted to reinvent their utterly failed business of hosting a carrier locked store, they could have done it from the beginning. If they want to restrict the stock Google experience market (crappy experience but definitive) or maybe a 3rd party repository 'hacked to make all apps free' repository then that's their business. If you have the ability (AKA you're not in rural USA), switch carriers if it annoys you so much.
That would be a neat idea to implement, but I think ultimately the mass of transactions(fees per), wire transactions, charge backs, tax trails, etc.. would weigh down the system to the point that nobody would bother to implement it.
Most of the item sets' "combined bonus" also has weakness. Pyros can move 10% faster and take 10% higher DMG. That seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me. The soldier one doesn't have a tradeoff, but its basically a tactical turret killer to begin with and not suited for all purposes use.
"Information collection by ads should be governed by a different set of permissions than the app presenting the ads. Ad-supported apps are fine, but the user should know what ads are doing on the network independent of the app."
I think that is the strategy of 'Google ads' being served through apps, but I'm not sure if they've actually done that yet. AdMob (which is now Google as well) definitely needs internet and possibly coarse location if the dev wants to allow for geo sensitive ads. It would be nice to have:
App A relies on feature: AdMob (Google Inc.)
Admob requires:
[X] FULL_INTERNET
[ ] (optional) COARSE_GEO_LOCATION
As a user, I think it'd be great to have the ability to nuke privileges to certain functions that I don't think that the app should have. Inversely, I think as a developer this would be incredibly frustrating. Taking away the ability to perform functions that very well could be a core function of the app would cause no end of frustration to debug and fix. Plus, bad reviews and crashes relating to stupid permissions filtering just increases the support head-ache of releasing apps.
I think a happy solution would be to have apps that have mandatory and permissive permissions. Mandatory permissions must always be in place, but permissive ones can be turned on/off when first installed and later through the application settings menu. That means that I can release a piece of software that integrates with their address book if they want that integration, but if they don't want it, then they have the option of turning it off.
Another nice feature for developers would be a small space to describe why they need a given system permission
Thirdly, the other annoyance is that by supporting the Android 1.5 platform, it automatically assigns permissions for internet and write external. Both permissions make it difficult to have something like a tip calculator or fart app that doesn't look like spyware.
AdMob uses the -coarse- sensitive location for ads when you want to serve up something thats location sensitive like 'Eat at McDonalds in "My City" at abc blvd.' but that's pretty much it. All they really need is the coarse location setting which gives a general approximation of where the individual is at in order to target ads for the best experience. That's is a location sensitive ad, and it was the choice of the app developer to allow it. The app developer wants more money from their ads, but its not lkike any of them control how that data is collected or used. If you have a problem with the 'data leak' then don't connect to the internet without 3rd party proxies in between and don't install any applications, because invariably some of them are leaking data back to somewhere all the time. Hell, I'm typing this from Firefox which pretty much calls home on a daily basis. I don't bother to check on the bits flying across the wire, they could be leaking a key log for all I know. If you don't want geo sensitive ads served to your device then don't use that person's app. Is there something evil or nefarious about the DEVELOPERS of these apps? No. Moving along...
wow, its .99. Your lunch probably costs 5x as much. The return policy gives you the ability to return apps that are really bad. If YOU don't think an app isn't worth the money then by all means don't buy them. I always find the opposite; good apps get released for free with no way besides annoying ads to monetize the developers for their work.
1. Ditch the goal of moving Symbian to anything beyond dumb phones with cameras
2. Change the name of Meego to ANYTHING ELSE
3. Release Meego completely OSS and don't hamper people wanting to go in and tinker
4. Start rolling out both (Official stock) Android and Meego on devices and allow for the devices to switch back and forth between the two
5. Release a marketing campaign to choose 'the next look of Nokia'
6. Analyze which OS is getting better market traction and phase out the loser
7.Profit More!
Maybe they're only reviewing games they want to play? That would definitely skew the results across the board. Frankly Slashdot reviews are only relevant to me at all because of the comments.
*shrug* support developers for their hard work maybe?
Pardon Me? Does Google segment data based on nationality? The origin of the individual(s) being investigated have no bearing as to their nation of origin, or are you more interested in just the raw population numbers of the country? Exactly what type of correlation are you trying to build? A given nation's government officials are probably don't limit their requests to simply inner-nationals, so wouldn't that make the proportion of people / size of community / etc.. numbers irrelevant compared to information requests as a whole? The raw number in itself tells us how motivated a given government is in policing or investigating the actions of individuals on or using the internet.