There is innovation for Facebook customers. Big data analysis is complex and costly. They even design their own servers.
What you see as a Facebook user is just a tiny part of the business. Still, new features are added all the time. The talk these days is about suicide prevention. Face recognition seems like a cool thing to do from an average user point of view. Fake news is supposedly fixed or reduced now. Shadow profiles and user tracking may rival some three letter agencies.
Alphabet innovation these days include many changes in YouTube: not paying out to copyright holders, messing with the kids, and infuriating content creators and advertisers at the same time.
Is this one of these MBA things where you try to get the optimum short term benefit at the cost of long term investments? I understand that sometimes you need to cut your losses short, but to sack so many people because some manager took the wrong bet?
Let us assume every non subscriber is a pirate and a lost sale. And let us not count that series that people talk about are delivered mainly through internet video on demand subscription channels.
In ye olde days, audio was transmitted separately. Nowadays, it goes through HDMI from sources to AV equipment, including soundboard, that mux the signals. TVs feed the remaining sources, that is broadcast and TV applications, through ARC, the Audio Return Channel. I understand ARC is bandwidth limited, thus new equipment will include eARC whenever the new HDMI spec is delivered. So, everything is routed through HDMI these days, so why bother with other cables?
It might also be a race to the bottom: appliances are cheaper, so not popular features get dropped. Many TVs might not receive analogue video anymore.
That is because these days, a game like Destiny 2 for PC comes with an activation code in the form of a cardboard optical disc. Once used, you cannot give away the game to a third party. It is odd that a game that is online only like Destiny 2 did come in a disc for console and with an activation code for PC. After all, consoles are like underpowered but cheaper PCs these days. Games require patches from almost the first day the game goes live.
Let me inform you that online passes are not used anymore. According to Wikipedia, 2013 is the year it was last used by few major publishers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Publishers had a change of heart and went for season passes and online only games mixed with a lot of pre-order bonuses.
I had to look up the online passes thing, as I have not paid for what people call AAA game for a while. I remember the Cerberus Network for Mass Effect 2, a not worthy feature if you ask me. By the time I played that game, all patches were out. And the game was cheaper to boot.
Of course they did not ask publishers. But it is not only Gamestop being greedy these days, it is the publishers deal too. They did not give enough slack to gamestop (revenue per new unit on the shelf is low), so Gamestop ended up reinventing itself as a large second hand retail store chain. A new game at $60 ends up being rebought at $25 and resold at $55 ("sold" probably meaning licensed and "resold" meaning probably unlawfully licensed). And in order to make sure you do not leave the food chain, you get a bonus in store-only credit. The publishers came back with the idea of one-off DLCs, like EA's Online Pass. That is folks, even if you paid Sony or Microsoft for online play, if you bought a second hand disc, you had to spend another $10 for online play for a single game.
The publisher way of doing things nowadays is microtransactions (includes loot boxes) and season passes that cannot be transferred. Heck, loot boxes sometimes contain consumable items so that you require constant use of your credit card in order to be competitive. Even games like FIFA 2018 contain consumable items when you pay for the premium delivery. Publishers might not care of lost sales due to Gamestop second hand market (that is in no way piracy and can be accounted for as lost sale as people are willing to pay 90% of retail price for a second hand game where a pirate probably will not pay anything even if able), publishers just care of continued revenue going their way. 2017 is becoming the year of microtransactions and loot boxes. Let's celebrate!
By the way, it is 40 to 60$/yr for online play for Sony and Microsoft.
VPN only makes sense if you want to keep a connection secure or obfuscate the connection you are making by relaying messages to another server. It does not make much sense to pay for a VPN service just for the sake of paying for it. And VPN does not help keeping you anonymous from Facebook, you know.
The powerful consoles are now x86 based. The are still differences, like how memory is GDDR and shared with the GPU. But I am sure that developers do not need to take their time to code for different CPUs anymore.
The ribbon in MS Word is MS way to enforce how to use the tool. The tool is so complex, it needs various modes of operation. The default mode is all about writing text and applying styles (note: I used other tools like Lyx and Adobe Framemaker that favour the use of styles, and I hate the notion of letting the users cherry pick fonts without using styles). The review mode is all about adding Notes and tracking changes.
Going back to the OP, it is hard to cram every function a tool does these days in a GUI. I hope no solution resembles Google Docs: instead of showing GUI elements, the user is left with a search widget. It reminds me of the Tom Hank's movie where he is playing one of those adventure games of the 80's and the protagonist had issues discovering which command to type. My proposal is to have focused workflow based GUIs that are highly specialized. I have seen this implemented in expensive tools, and it works.
If you can make it last 8 hours, you can use it all day. I still remember when laptops only lasted about 2 or 3 hours without plugging it in. This bus one looks promising.
Sorry lads I got the example using a car the other way around.
How about we compare sales commissions to a common one in the US that is paying the waiters and waitress with tips? After all, the costumer is paying either directly through tips or through sales commissions. I imagine it will put a lot of stress not to have a steady income like I have. Also, I do not get hefty bonuses either.
We read about TVs that ceased to function after firmware upgrades, IP cameras that build botnets, virus like stuxnet that were drafted for specific targets, massive DDOS attacks... The world out there surely does not look pretty. If you need me, I will be at the internet attack shelter.
None of the Google applications listed there are optional, as far as I can tell: Search, Maps, Play and Mail. Phone is not listed, though.
I do not understand what "penetration of the US mobile app audience" means in this case, and I am not going to give my data in order to download the whitepaper. I need to ask for your help, Slashdot reader.
What I fear is that the service will be focused on movie rental, as movies is where 4K excels. And not on watch-as-much-as-you-can subscription scheme. My reasoning is that the subscription scheme only shows movies and TV shows that are older than four years. Most recent 4K shows are on Netflix, HBO or whatever else, and not in this service. Heck, even shows like Breaking Bad were removed from the service. Movies older than 4 years (licensing becomes cheaper the older the movie is) have not been mastered for consumer in 4K as there was no easy way to deliver that content four years ago.
By looking at today's pricing for Fast & Furious 8, SD rent is 4EUR, HD rent is 5EUR, HD "buy" is 10EUR. My assumption is that either 4K is going to be at 6EUR, or if they are benevolent, at the same price as HD. It is cheaper than going to the movies, not considering the TV set price.
I know that Rakuten streaming service, formerly Wuaki, has been eclipsed by Amazon Prime and Netflix. I fear it is not a good idea to have exclusive content on Samsung TVs when you aim to be on as many devices as possible. I hope there is a fat check in order to make Rakuten live longer.
I am not sure if you remember The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. It had paid for expansions that not only added content, the developers added a neat modification to the journal. The journal of the original game was organized by keywords while the new one is organized by quests. The first one was fairly difficult to follow, as you had to remember a lot of things for whatever thing you wanted to achieve. In my opinion, the journal system had to be fixed in order to make the game enjoyable. But the change to the system was only added to an expansion. So, this one was definitely a paid for fix.
And by the way, I am getting used to hear people say things like "base Twilight Imperium ed 3 is broken - you need to get the first expansion". As if!
I believe the consensus is that many people felt cheated after the hype train missed the station. Things like multiplayer were absent (it would have been OK if Sean Murray never mentioned anything like that), and from what I read a lot of people got bored after a few hours of doing the same chores again and again. If Sony had not been promoting the game as heavily as it did, nobody would have cared.
The thing of this slashdot topic is, Hello Games, a development house of around 10 persons, is putting a lot of effort in extending the game. I wonder if that is a fool's errand. People that were disappointed with the game will not be launching the game again (some have traded the disc already), so the question is if it is worth anybody's time to ask the few people that enjoyed the game to play it again. In my capitalist point of view, it does not make any sense if you want profit. So, they are trying to rebuild their reputation. Good luck with that.
Slashdot Mirror
What you see as a Facebook user is just a tiny part of the business. Still, new features are added all the time. The talk these days is about suicide prevention. Face recognition seems like a cool thing to do from an average user point of view. Fake news is supposedly fixed or reduced now. Shadow profiles and user tracking may rival some three letter agencies.
Alphabet innovation these days include many changes in YouTube: not paying out to copyright holders, messing with the kids, and infuriating content creators and advertisers at the same time.
Is this one of these MBA things where you try to get the optimum short term benefit at the cost of long term investments? I understand that sometimes you need to cut your losses short, but to sack so many people because some manager took the wrong bet?
Let us assume every non subscriber is a pirate and a lost sale. And let us not count that series that people talk about are delivered mainly through internet video on demand subscription channels.
It might also be a race to the bottom: appliances are cheaper, so not popular features get dropped. Many TVs might not receive analogue video anymore.
That is because these days, a game like Destiny 2 for PC comes with an activation code in the form of a cardboard optical disc. Once used, you cannot give away the game to a third party. It is odd that a game that is online only like Destiny 2 did come in a disc for console and with an activation code for PC. After all, consoles are like underpowered but cheaper PCs these days. Games require patches from almost the first day the game goes live.
I had to look up the online passes thing, as I have not paid for what people call AAA game for a while. I remember the Cerberus Network for Mass Effect 2, a not worthy feature if you ask me. By the time I played that game, all patches were out. And the game was cheaper to boot.
The publisher way of doing things nowadays is microtransactions (includes loot boxes) and season passes that cannot be transferred. Heck, loot boxes sometimes contain consumable items so that you require constant use of your credit card in order to be competitive. Even games like FIFA 2018 contain consumable items when you pay for the premium delivery. Publishers might not care of lost sales due to Gamestop second hand market (that is in no way piracy and can be accounted for as lost sale as people are willing to pay 90% of retail price for a second hand game where a pirate probably will not pay anything even if able), publishers just care of continued revenue going their way. 2017 is becoming the year of microtransactions and loot boxes. Let's celebrate!
By the way, it is 40 to 60$/yr for online play for Sony and Microsoft.
And I live by the river
VPN only makes sense if you want to keep a connection secure or obfuscate the connection you are making by relaying messages to another server. It does not make much sense to pay for a VPN service just for the sake of paying for it. And VPN does not help keeping you anonymous from Facebook, you know.
Then MS can tell that Edge is saving battery compared to Chrome as it does not support cryptocurrency mining.
Now Chrome can detect that the installer for Adobe Acrobat Reader includes an installation of Chrome. Isn't this one ironic?
Things go south, and so he does. If I were an stakeholder, I would be worried about the future.
Just let me know. Because this internet is all a big mess as of now.
The powerful consoles are now x86 based. The are still differences, like how memory is GDDR and shared with the GPU. But I am sure that developers do not need to take their time to code for different CPUs anymore.
Going back to the OP, it is hard to cram every function a tool does these days in a GUI. I hope no solution resembles Google Docs: instead of showing GUI elements, the user is left with a search widget. It reminds me of the Tom Hank's movie where he is playing one of those adventure games of the 80's and the protagonist had issues discovering which command to type. My proposal is to have focused workflow based GUIs that are highly specialized. I have seen this implemented in expensive tools, and it works.
Sorry lads I got the example using a car the other way around.
How about we compare sales commissions to a common one in the US that is paying the waiters and waitress with tips? After all, the costumer is paying either directly through tips or through sales commissions. I imagine it will put a lot of stress not to have a steady income like I have. Also, I do not get hefty bonuses either.
We read about TVs that ceased to function after firmware upgrades, IP cameras that build botnets, virus like stuxnet that were drafted for specific targets, massive DDOS attacks... The world out there surely does not look pretty. If you need me, I will be at the internet attack shelter.
I do not understand what "penetration of the US mobile app audience" means in this case, and I am not going to give my data in order to download the whitepaper. I need to ask for your help, Slashdot reader.
I call them FAT.
By looking at today's pricing for Fast & Furious 8, SD rent is 4EUR, HD rent is 5EUR, HD "buy" is 10EUR. My assumption is that either 4K is going to be at 6EUR, or if they are benevolent, at the same price as HD. It is cheaper than going to the movies, not considering the TV set price.
I know that Rakuten streaming service, formerly Wuaki, has been eclipsed by Amazon Prime and Netflix. I fear it is not a good idea to have exclusive content on Samsung TVs when you aim to be on as many devices as possible. I hope there is a fat check in order to make Rakuten live longer.
And by the way, I am getting used to hear people say things like "base Twilight Imperium ed 3 is broken - you need to get the first expansion". As if!
The thing of this slashdot topic is, Hello Games, a development house of around 10 persons, is putting a lot of effort in extending the game. I wonder if that is a fool's errand. People that were disappointed with the game will not be launching the game again (some have traded the disc already), so the question is if it is worth anybody's time to ask the few people that enjoyed the game to play it again. In my capitalist point of view, it does not make any sense if you want profit. So, they are trying to rebuild their reputation. Good luck with that.
Most of the lists or videos that name X best things in the world, they do that as click bait. I prefer review round-ups.