If Google is making a good effort to set up things in such a way that people can't just copy whole books and make off with them, then there's a good chance that a court might hold that what they're doing is no more illegal than, say, the New York Public Library having lots of book and having photocopiers that people can take them to.
I can't believe any unbiased court is going to fall for that. There are numerous obvious and fundamental differences, starting with the facts that Google is ultimately doing it for profit, not just to provide a public service, and that an automated on-line system that offers easy access to large parts of a work is far more accessible that a system that requires physically attending a library and manually copying every page, which surely amplifies any argument about damaging the value of the original work.
That's what the publishers are afraid of, and that was Google's leverage to negotiate with them.
I suspect that Google's real leverage was that a lot of publishers privately wonder whether this is really doing their bottom line any harm and whether it might not be in their long term interests to turn a blind eye even if their copyrights are technically being infringed. As long as Google is required to provide an opt-out, thus giving the publishers a safety net if they accept the practice and then the data shows that they really are losing out, the publishers have relatively little to lose by agreeing AFAICS.
The flaw with your scheme is that the first, unfunded work will serve as the example by which the author is judged. It is also the one that is going to be produced in spare hours after the day job that pays the bills, written without the assistance of a professional editor, etc. Rare indeed is the author who can produce their best work under those conditions.
Oh, come on. That book is based on Wheildon's earlier research, which dates from nearly 30 years ago, before we had access to modern eye-tracking technology and related experimental techniques. Moreover, that original research was never published in a peer-reviewed journal, and it has subsequently been criticised both for its apparently unsound methodology and for its reliance on subjective reporting rather than objectively measurable results. Numerous other studies have observed that actual measured performance in their reading experiments did not corrolate well with the personally reported preferences of test subjects.
And it still doesn't support your original argument that serifs lead the eye from one letter to another.
Yes, I cherry picked the ones that supported my claim, and you cherry picked the ones that supported yours.
Every empirical study I know from recent years that has considered human reading behaviour has come down in support of the saccadic pattern. Every. Single. One.
No cherry picking is required. To the best of my knowledge, no even moderately recent study supports your argument that serifs lead the reader's eye from one letter to the next. None, at all, not even one.
I don't see how to be any clearer than that. If you disagree, all you need to do is cite just one study that backs up your claim, from any time since we started using the experimental methods like eye tracking that I mentioned before. Go ahead; I'll wait.
As for the wider question of whether serifs are more readable or not: again, no cherry picking is required. No study of reading by the general population, as far as I am aware, has shown more than a tiny difference between serifs and sans serifs in either direction. A few reach the point of using the magic word "signficant" one way or another, but only just. Many don't reach a significant result at all.
If you want to claim that some studies show a very small advantage for serifs while others show a small advantage for sans serifs and most draw no firm conclusion either way, that's fine, I'll agree with you. But that's not what you wrote, in bold italics, with a completely wrong argument to back it up.
I'm sorry, but how on earth do you think any reference, from among those I posted or otherwise, supports your claim that serifs lead the eye from one letter to the next? Numerous studies support the saccadic pattern, showing that you don't actually move from one letter to the next at all, in direct contradiction to your original claim.
This is tiresome. You seem to be one of those people who isn't interested in the facts or learning anything new, and who will dig in and defend a claim even though it's well known to be just a popular myth. Instead of spending a few minutes with Google finding out for yourself, or providing the slightest shred of actual evidence to support your own position, you have simply latched on to a couple of convenient summaries of relatively recent research findings that I happened to quote, cherry picked evidence even there, and then ignored the fact that essentially all of the serious studies found that if there was any significant difference between the readability of serif and sans serif work for a general audience, it was at most a small difference in whichever direction. Your bold claim that serifs are better simply doesn't stand up, and no amount of statistical sophistry, hand-waving dismissals or cheap ad hominem attacks will change that.
Anyway, enough now. If you can't even understand why your original claim was overstated and have no desire to improve your understanding or challenge your own beliefs, there's little point in continuing this discussion.
I prefer serifs for reading large blocks of text. I cannot say if this is because I grew up reading serifed fonts, or there is an actually a benefit to serifs and readability.
And yet that's essentially what you did say.
Obviously you're perfectly entitled to your personal opinion and whatever subjective preferences you like; I have never argued otherwise. I just said that the research contradicts your generalised, unqualified, doubly-emphasised objective statement, which on balance it clearly does.
Your entire argument is a strawman. At no point did I, or anyone else other than yourself that I can see, say anything about "flowing better" or "conveying a sense of industry" or even using "some shitty ugly typeface" for that matter.
All I said was that this objective claim:
Serif fonts are easier to read, especially large blocks of text. The serifs "lead your eyes" from one letter to the next, and help your eye group the words.
was wrong. And both the explanation and the conclusion are objectively wrong, as demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt by a large body of solid research, some of which I've directed you towards in this thread.
Perhaps you didn't notice the link I posted to Alex Poole's site, where one of the first paragraphs says "In 2003 as part of my master’s degree I reviewed over 50 empirical studies in typography and found a definitive answer" [emphasis added]? It then goes on to describe that work in a lot more detail, complete with numerous citations. I've read some of Alex's work, and I've read quite a few of the other pieces of works he cites. You obviously haven't, but hey, if you prefer to trust in "another huge swath of scary subjective human experience" rather than empirical data collected across a broad set of scientific experiments, knock yourself out.
However, I suggest that you would be more convincing to others if, instead of attempting exactly the kind of unsourced pseudo-science you seem to be accusing me of and then throwing in a strawman or two at the end, you actually bothered to read the work I pointed to before. We don't have to guess at how these effects work or appeal to old wives' tales from the 1800s. We have detailed, properly conducted experiments using techniques like eye tracking and even updating text on a screen as fast as someone is actually reading it to determine what we really do see and how much our brain is filling in for us. Here's another page that describes some more experiments on related topics, which provide further examples of how the people researching this field reach the kinds of conclusions they do.
Serif fonts are easier to read, especially large blocks of text. The serifs "lead your eyes" from one letter to the next, and help your eye group the words.
Actually, that's an old theory that has been solidly debunked on both counts at this point.
For a start, based on experimental research, we know that people don't actually move their eyes continuously across the text as we read. Instead, our eyes make short jumps called saccades, fixating on one point on the line and then another a few characters further along. That immediately makes any argument based on serifs "guiding" anything suspect.
Yes it takes great skill to attend meetings, sign cheques and provide "vision". He didn't build shit. Thousands of programmers employed by him did.
I wonder, what would the career of someone who did know what they were doing look like to you?
This is a guy who appears to have started out as an enthusiastic programmer, climbed through the ranks in his early career, and ultimately founded and developed a company that has effectively pioneered a new model for developing and using software, reaching a market cap of over $20B along the way. And presumably he didn't have thousands of programmers working for him when he founded that company.
But what exactly is he trying to say? Online cloud based collaboration is the future. That is what everyone is saying these days.
Well, it seems he's been saying it for a decade or two, so I don't know what point you're trying to make there. He hasn't just argued for "X as a Service" models, he has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they can work for customers and be wildly profitable for suppliers at the same time.
I don't know the guy personally. I've never worked with him. I don't know if he's a good man in real life, or whether he treats his people well at work. I have no interest in defending someone against justified criticism. But I do believe in fairness, and I don't like seeing people attacked without cause. Going by what I found with a bit of Googling, his business is extremely successful, and I can see that he seems to get credit for his philanthropy and his company has featured prominently on lists of the "based places to work" kind, so it doesn't sound like he's doing too badly.
Basically, this guy seems to have had many geeks' dream career, and he seems like a decent person too. It's really sad that some people here just seem to want to hate on him. Is there something I didn't find that makes people dislike him, or is it just envy?
One of the great things about high profile CEOs is that when they say controversial things, you can look them up and decide how much credibility they really have. So, I did.
It turns out that this particular "random salesman CEO" started out selling computer games while still at high school, worked as an assembly language programmer at a little company called Apple, made VP of another little company called Oracle at the age of 26, and has since built arguably the most successful cloud computing company in the world and turned himself into a billionaire.
You might not agree with his personal philosophy of software or this prediction of the future, but by some metrics Marc Benioff probably has more clue than everyone else commenting in this discussion put together.
I didn't mean dying in the sense that no-one is making money, I meant dying in the sense that fewer and fewer good, innovative, fun games are being produced by the industry heavyweights. They're all about console ports and online-only and DLC and the same big name franchises year after year these days, and most of that isn't good for gamers.
Most of the interesting/innovative/fun games today seem to be on a much smaller scale, things like puzzle games or quirky indie titles. That's fine, but we're talking about the power of PCs here, and those kinds of titles are unlikely to stretch today's hardware and continue to drive the kind of upgrade cycle we've seen for many years.
Who are Jon Peddie Research, apart from people trying to sell reports about the gaming market? All you've posted there are some articles that say some guys I've never heard of estimated some things.
And in fact, even those articles don't actually support your claim: if there were really 50M+ hardcore gamers spending $1,000+ per year on equipment, how is the entire market only worth an estimated $23.6B in 2012? Surely it should be worth more than $50B just from the enthusiasts' contribution, plus a lot more still from everyone else who's buying but not at the same kind of level.
Also, the articles you cited seem to be predicting an almost 50% rise in this market in the next 3 years, while just about everyone else seems to think the PC market as a whole is barely growing this year; just google something like "global pc market".
So once again, where do all these figures come from? I'm not going to drop $7,500 for these reports to see what the sources were or what the researchers actually said.
The upgrade treadmill is driven by the 50+ million and growing hardcore gamer and enthusiasts out there who spend $1k per year or more on their PC hobby.
That's a mighty strong claim to make without backing it up. Where do you get those figures from?
If your argument was true, the publishers wouldn't port their console games to Win32, would they?
You can apologise for piracy as much as you want, but you can't credibly deny that games studios take far fewer risks on new titles with innovative gameplay today than they did a few years ago, while carbon copy FPSes ported from consoles and this year's editions of solid sports franchises are being churned out more than ever. The big studios are consolidating on the safe bets, where they expect to make a decent return even given 90+% levels of piracy, and they're running away from almost anything that isn't tried and tested.
Very true. If phones are basically still mobile communication devices, and tablets are basically information consumption devices, then the current levels of performance are more than sufficient for most users and will probably remain so. These kinds of hardware aren't well-suited to more demanding applications. While I suspect we will continue to see innovation in different kinds of device and almost certainly in more integration and ease of connection between devices, the idea that the PC era is at an end because someone invented the smartphone is a bit silly, really.
Games naturally remain the driver of performance for home users.
But since much of the serious PC gaming industry is dying under the weight of piracy, a lot of the big name PC games today are either console ports or MMOGs, neither of which is even close to pushing state-of-the-art PC hardware to its limits in most cases. It seems unlikely this will change until the next generation of consoles arrives.
Also, it seems like these days it's not so much the graphics limiting gaming performance as the rest of the code. A single core on a CPU today is a similar speed to those of several years ago and gaming software is notoriously bad at keeping up with the potential of multicore systems, so again, there's little in the gaming world that is really pushing the boundaries of today's current hardware, never mind driving further improvements.
Desktop and laptop PCs have simply passed the point where even an entry-level model is sufficient for everyday home and business tasks like reading e-mail, web browsing, working on office documents and database applications, and playing audio/video files.
As soon as that happened, the upgrade treadmill was doomed. That sucks for the businesses who were happily coasting along knowing that every 2–3 years someone was going to pay them more money just to get a faster PC and all the preinstalled software that would come with it. It's good news for everyone who actually uses these devices, though, at least until the industry responds by doing shady things that build in obsolescence and try to keep the treadmill running artificially.
Oh, I have colleagues I work with: people I talk to at my clients, or more day-to-day there are other contractors who work on different parts of the project. But usually everyone has been brought in to work on a specific part of a system, and it's just not the same as working in the same place and on the same part of a system as others on a team.
There's nothing wrong with starting as a freelancer.
I respectfully disagree.
As a freelancer, you need to be able to operate with a degree of autonomy. You need to be able to take general direction from a client, work out what it is that they need, and provide it. You need to find your own tools, and develop your own skills.
Coming straight out of full-time education, I don't believe anyone has the experience to do that yet. You could be the most talented and enthusiastic person in the world, and perhaps a few years down the line you'd be a great freelancer, but at the start of your career you don't even know what you're missing yet. You can be completely sincere in your desire to do a good job, and still be utterly incompetent without even realising.
Even today, after working in a few jobs as an employee and now being freelance for a while, the thing I miss the most is still the shared experience/peer review side of things. That kind of interaction can be very educational even if that wasn't your original goal, and if you're going to fly solo you need to find a different way to maintain your awareness of the industry and develop your skills. That's difficult even for someone who knows roughly what they're missing, and I suspect it's impossible for someone who doesn't.
For what it's worth, I've heard similar stories here in Cambridge, where police have pulled someone over in the early hours for doing only 30 in a 30 limit (which used to be a 40 limit in some cases), apparently because they assumed anyone who wasn't speeding must have been trying to avoid attracting attention for other reasons.
As you say, it shows what even the cops think of the limits sometimes.
Unfortunately, in an attempt to be clever, you have revealed that you haven't actually done your homework.
Actually, what often happens with inappropriate 20mph limits, the kind that almost all drivers ignore, is that people who would be deterred from speeding with a more realistic 30mph limit know that if they do get caught in the 20 they're getting points anyway so they'll just as happily do 35 as 30. In other words, the number of people driving at dangerous speeds can actually go up with the lower limit.
This effect is well known to traffic engineers, and is probably the single strongest argument against just throwing 20mph zones down anywhere you feel like because the locals don't want you racing past their front door. The general guidelines say that you're not supposed to impose a 20 limit unless most traffic is already travelling not much faster and suitable traffic calming measures are also used. In other words, the limit is supposed to be mostly self-enforcing. Obviously that isn't the case with the kinds of roads around Cambridge that I mentioned before, as the police themselves have explained.
As for your note about democracy, you might like to consider that an overwhelming majority of drivers admit to breaking 20mph limits outside other people's homes, including many who campaign for a 20mph limit outside their own. It's just NIMBY hypocrisy, pure and simple.
If traffic is rarely smooth, then the road needs to be redesigned so that it is.
Actually, the kind of average speed cameras we're talking about are mostly used in two situations in the UK: on major trunk roads that become very congested at certain times of day, and at roadworks. Redesigning such roads isn't a trivial exercise and may not be possible at all. However, in each case, traffic flows much more smoothly, and therefore both safely and efficiently, when everyone is held to roughly the same (reduced) speed until the road opens up again and normal rules can be resumed.
I'm not sure, from what I've seen so far, whether these average speed cameras are part of the ANPR surveillance network that is reportedly keeping data for years. If so, there's no excuse for that as far as I can see. Once a car has gone past the second camera, you know how long it took to get there, and if it wasn't speeding then there's no need to keep any further records of when it went past the first camera. Once it's gone past the last camera in the set, there's no need to keep any record at all if no offence was observed.
But in terms of smoothing out traffic flows to keep it safer and more efficient for everyone, the average speed checks are among the most effective tools available. I'm pretty sceptical about both the way road traffic laws often seem to get made and the privacy implications of automated surveillance, but in this case, use of the cameras seems to be well justified.
Perhaps you are forgetting that the UK has a functioning democracy?
Not really, and road laws are a prime example.
If we made these laws on a democratic basis, we wouldn't have absurd situations like we have in Cambridge right now, where ironically it is the police themselves who have said there is no point in trying to enforce a reduction in speed limit to 20mph on a lot of roads at the moment because almost driver ignores them. The main people who seem to want those limits are people who live in the big, expensive houses along those roads, and a few local councillors primarily elected by such people. Our city council as a whole has a fairly poor reputation in terms of being blatantly anti-motorist, but given the tiny electorate for each councillor that means most people who use our roads don't actually get a vote on the people making the policy, we do not have a functioning democracy in this respect.
It's even worse on a national level, because this whole ANPR business seems to have been started on the quiet by the police themselves. Part of the controversy is because the whole surveillance operation had little if any oversight by elected officials at that stage and was effectively presented as a fait accompli.
Slashdot Mirror
If Google is making a good effort to set up things in such a way that people can't just copy whole books and make off with them, then there's a good chance that a court might hold that what they're doing is no more illegal than, say, the New York Public Library having lots of book and having photocopiers that people can take them to.
I can't believe any unbiased court is going to fall for that. There are numerous obvious and fundamental differences, starting with the facts that Google is ultimately doing it for profit, not just to provide a public service, and that an automated on-line system that offers easy access to large parts of a work is far more accessible that a system that requires physically attending a library and manually copying every page, which surely amplifies any argument about damaging the value of the original work.
That's what the publishers are afraid of, and that was Google's leverage to negotiate with them.
I suspect that Google's real leverage was that a lot of publishers privately wonder whether this is really doing their bottom line any harm and whether it might not be in their long term interests to turn a blind eye even if their copyrights are technically being infringed. As long as Google is required to provide an opt-out, thus giving the publishers a safety net if they accept the practice and then the data shows that they really are losing out, the publishers have relatively little to lose by agreeing AFAICS.
The flaw with your scheme is that the first, unfunded work will serve as the example by which the author is judged. It is also the one that is going to be produced in spare hours after the day job that pays the bills, written without the assistance of a professional editor, etc. Rare indeed is the author who can produce their best work under those conditions.
Oh, come on. That book is based on Wheildon's earlier research, which dates from nearly 30 years ago, before we had access to modern eye-tracking technology and related experimental techniques. Moreover, that original research was never published in a peer-reviewed journal, and it has subsequently been criticised both for its apparently unsound methodology and for its reliance on subjective reporting rather than objectively measurable results. Numerous other studies have observed that actual measured performance in their reading experiments did not corrolate well with the personally reported preferences of test subjects.
And it still doesn't support your original argument that serifs lead the eye from one letter to another.
Yes, I cherry picked the ones that supported my claim, and you cherry picked the ones that supported yours.
Every empirical study I know from recent years that has considered human reading behaviour has come down in support of the saccadic pattern. Every. Single. One.
No cherry picking is required. To the best of my knowledge, no even moderately recent study supports your argument that serifs lead the reader's eye from one letter to the next. None, at all, not even one.
I don't see how to be any clearer than that. If you disagree, all you need to do is cite just one study that backs up your claim, from any time since we started using the experimental methods like eye tracking that I mentioned before. Go ahead; I'll wait.
As for the wider question of whether serifs are more readable or not: again, no cherry picking is required. No study of reading by the general population, as far as I am aware, has shown more than a tiny difference between serifs and sans serifs in either direction. A few reach the point of using the magic word "signficant" one way or another, but only just. Many don't reach a significant result at all.
If you want to claim that some studies show a very small advantage for serifs while others show a small advantage for sans serifs and most draw no firm conclusion either way, that's fine, I'll agree with you. But that's not what you wrote, in bold italics, with a completely wrong argument to back it up.
I'm sorry, but how on earth do you think any reference, from among those I posted or otherwise, supports your claim that serifs lead the eye from one letter to the next? Numerous studies support the saccadic pattern, showing that you don't actually move from one letter to the next at all, in direct contradiction to your original claim.
This is tiresome. You seem to be one of those people who isn't interested in the facts or learning anything new, and who will dig in and defend a claim even though it's well known to be just a popular myth. Instead of spending a few minutes with Google finding out for yourself, or providing the slightest shred of actual evidence to support your own position, you have simply latched on to a couple of convenient summaries of relatively recent research findings that I happened to quote, cherry picked evidence even there, and then ignored the fact that essentially all of the serious studies found that if there was any significant difference between the readability of serif and sans serif work for a general audience, it was at most a small difference in whichever direction. Your bold claim that serifs are better simply doesn't stand up, and no amount of statistical sophistry, hand-waving dismissals or cheap ad hominem attacks will change that.
Anyway, enough now. If you can't even understand why your original claim was overstated and have no desire to improve your understanding or challenge your own beliefs, there's little point in continuing this discussion.
I prefer serifs for reading large blocks of text. I cannot say if this is because I grew up reading serifed fonts, or there is an actually a benefit to serifs and readability.
And yet that's essentially what you did say.
Obviously you're perfectly entitled to your personal opinion and whatever subjective preferences you like; I have never argued otherwise. I just said that the research contradicts your generalised, unqualified, doubly-emphasised objective statement, which on balance it clearly does.
Your entire argument is a strawman. At no point did I, or anyone else other than yourself that I can see, say anything about "flowing better" or "conveying a sense of industry" or even using "some shitty ugly typeface" for that matter.
All I said was that this objective claim:
Serif fonts are easier to read, especially large blocks of text. The serifs "lead your eyes" from one letter to the next, and help your eye group the words.
was wrong. And both the explanation and the conclusion are objectively wrong, as demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt by a large body of solid research, some of which I've directed you towards in this thread.
I didn't, but apparently Slashdot just uses a broken default stylesheet these days so you might not be able to see it. :-(
Perhaps you didn't notice the link I posted to Alex Poole's site, where one of the first paragraphs says "In 2003 as part of my master’s degree I reviewed over 50 empirical studies in typography and found a definitive answer" [emphasis added]? It then goes on to describe that work in a lot more detail, complete with numerous citations. I've read some of Alex's work, and I've read quite a few of the other pieces of works he cites. You obviously haven't, but hey, if you prefer to trust in "another huge swath of scary subjective human experience" rather than empirical data collected across a broad set of scientific experiments, knock yourself out.
However, I suggest that you would be more convincing to others if, instead of attempting exactly the kind of unsourced pseudo-science you seem to be accusing me of and then throwing in a strawman or two at the end, you actually bothered to read the work I pointed to before. We don't have to guess at how these effects work or appeal to old wives' tales from the 1800s. We have detailed, properly conducted experiments using techniques like eye tracking and even updating text on a screen as fast as someone is actually reading it to determine what we really do see and how much our brain is filling in for us. Here's another page that describes some more experiments on related topics, which provide further examples of how the people researching this field reach the kinds of conclusions they do.
Serif fonts are easier to read, especially large blocks of text. The serifs "lead your eyes" from one letter to the next, and help your eye group the words.
Actually, that's an old theory that has been solidly debunked on both counts at this point.
For a start, based on experimental research, we know that people don't actually move their eyes continuously across the text as we read. Instead, our eyes make short jumps called saccades, fixating on one point on the line and then another a few characters further along. That immediately makes any argument based on serifs "guiding" anything suspect.
Yes it takes great skill to attend meetings, sign cheques and provide "vision". He didn't build shit. Thousands of programmers employed by him did.
I wonder, what would the career of someone who did know what they were doing look like to you?
This is a guy who appears to have started out as an enthusiastic programmer, climbed through the ranks in his early career, and ultimately founded and developed a company that has effectively pioneered a new model for developing and using software, reaching a market cap of over $20B along the way. And presumably he didn't have thousands of programmers working for him when he founded that company.
But what exactly is he trying to say? Online cloud based collaboration is the future. That is what everyone is saying these days.
Well, it seems he's been saying it for a decade or two, so I don't know what point you're trying to make there. He hasn't just argued for "X as a Service" models, he has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they can work for customers and be wildly profitable for suppliers at the same time.
I don't know the guy personally. I've never worked with him. I don't know if he's a good man in real life, or whether he treats his people well at work. I have no interest in defending someone against justified criticism. But I do believe in fairness, and I don't like seeing people attacked without cause. Going by what I found with a bit of Googling, his business is extremely successful, and I can see that he seems to get credit for his philanthropy and his company has featured prominently on lists of the "based places to work" kind, so it doesn't sound like he's doing too badly.
Basically, this guy seems to have had many geeks' dream career, and he seems like a decent person too. It's really sad that some people here just seem to want to hate on him. Is there something I didn't find that makes people dislike him, or is it just envy?
One of the great things about high profile CEOs is that when they say controversial things, you can look them up and decide how much credibility they really have. So, I did.
It turns out that this particular "random salesman CEO" started out selling computer games while still at high school, worked as an assembly language programmer at a little company called Apple, made VP of another little company called Oracle at the age of 26, and has since built arguably the most successful cloud computing company in the world and turned himself into a billionaire.
You might not agree with his personal philosophy of software or this prediction of the future, but by some metrics Marc Benioff probably has more clue than everyone else commenting in this discussion put together.
I didn't mean dying in the sense that no-one is making money, I meant dying in the sense that fewer and fewer good, innovative, fun games are being produced by the industry heavyweights. They're all about console ports and online-only and DLC and the same big name franchises year after year these days, and most of that isn't good for gamers.
Most of the interesting/innovative/fun games today seem to be on a much smaller scale, things like puzzle games or quirky indie titles. That's fine, but we're talking about the power of PCs here, and those kinds of titles are unlikely to stretch today's hardware and continue to drive the kind of upgrade cycle we've seen for many years.
Who are Jon Peddie Research, apart from people trying to sell reports about the gaming market? All you've posted there are some articles that say some guys I've never heard of estimated some things.
And in fact, even those articles don't actually support your claim: if there were really 50M+ hardcore gamers spending $1,000+ per year on equipment, how is the entire market only worth an estimated $23.6B in 2012? Surely it should be worth more than $50B just from the enthusiasts' contribution, plus a lot more still from everyone else who's buying but not at the same kind of level.
Also, the articles you cited seem to be predicting an almost 50% rise in this market in the next 3 years, while just about everyone else seems to think the PC market as a whole is barely growing this year; just google something like "global pc market".
So once again, where do all these figures come from? I'm not going to drop $7,500 for these reports to see what the sources were or what the researchers actually said.
The upgrade treadmill is driven by the 50+ million and growing hardcore gamer and enthusiasts out there who spend $1k per year or more on their PC hobby.
That's a mighty strong claim to make without backing it up. Where do you get those figures from?
If your argument was true, the publishers wouldn't port their console games to Win32, would they?
You can apologise for piracy as much as you want, but you can't credibly deny that games studios take far fewer risks on new titles with innovative gameplay today than they did a few years ago, while carbon copy FPSes ported from consoles and this year's editions of solid sports franchises are being churned out more than ever. The big studios are consolidating on the safe bets, where they expect to make a decent return even given 90+% levels of piracy, and they're running away from almost anything that isn't tried and tested.
Very true. If phones are basically still mobile communication devices, and tablets are basically information consumption devices, then the current levels of performance are more than sufficient for most users and will probably remain so. These kinds of hardware aren't well-suited to more demanding applications. While I suspect we will continue to see innovation in different kinds of device and almost certainly in more integration and ease of connection between devices, the idea that the PC era is at an end because someone invented the smartphone is a bit silly, really.
Games naturally remain the driver of performance for home users.
But since much of the serious PC gaming industry is dying under the weight of piracy, a lot of the big name PC games today are either console ports or MMOGs, neither of which is even close to pushing state-of-the-art PC hardware to its limits in most cases. It seems unlikely this will change until the next generation of consoles arrives.
Also, it seems like these days it's not so much the graphics limiting gaming performance as the rest of the code. A single core on a CPU today is a similar speed to those of several years ago and gaming software is notoriously bad at keeping up with the potential of multicore systems, so again, there's little in the gaming world that is really pushing the boundaries of today's current hardware, never mind driving further improvements.
Power isn't what matters. Useful power is.
Desktop and laptop PCs have simply passed the point where even an entry-level model is sufficient for everyday home and business tasks like reading e-mail, web browsing, working on office documents and database applications, and playing audio/video files.
As soon as that happened, the upgrade treadmill was doomed. That sucks for the businesses who were happily coasting along knowing that every 2–3 years someone was going to pay them more money just to get a faster PC and all the preinstalled software that would come with it. It's good news for everyone who actually uses these devices, though, at least until the industry responds by doing shady things that build in obsolescence and try to keep the treadmill running artificially.
Oh, I have colleagues I work with: people I talk to at my clients, or more day-to-day there are other contractors who work on different parts of the project. But usually everyone has been brought in to work on a specific part of a system, and it's just not the same as working in the same place and on the same part of a system as others on a team.
There's nothing wrong with starting as a freelancer.
I respectfully disagree.
As a freelancer, you need to be able to operate with a degree of autonomy. You need to be able to take general direction from a client, work out what it is that they need, and provide it. You need to find your own tools, and develop your own skills.
Coming straight out of full-time education, I don't believe anyone has the experience to do that yet. You could be the most talented and enthusiastic person in the world, and perhaps a few years down the line you'd be a great freelancer, but at the start of your career you don't even know what you're missing yet. You can be completely sincere in your desire to do a good job, and still be utterly incompetent without even realising.
Even today, after working in a few jobs as an employee and now being freelance for a while, the thing I miss the most is still the shared experience/peer review side of things. That kind of interaction can be very educational even if that wasn't your original goal, and if you're going to fly solo you need to find a different way to maintain your awareness of the industry and develop your skills. That's difficult even for someone who knows roughly what they're missing, and I suspect it's impossible for someone who doesn't.
For what it's worth, I've heard similar stories here in Cambridge, where police have pulled someone over in the early hours for doing only 30 in a 30 limit (which used to be a 40 limit in some cases), apparently because they assumed anyone who wasn't speeding must have been trying to avoid attracting attention for other reasons.
As you say, it shows what even the cops think of the limits sometimes.
Unfortunately, in an attempt to be clever, you have revealed that you haven't actually done your homework.
Actually, what often happens with inappropriate 20mph limits, the kind that almost all drivers ignore, is that people who would be deterred from speeding with a more realistic 30mph limit know that if they do get caught in the 20 they're getting points anyway so they'll just as happily do 35 as 30. In other words, the number of people driving at dangerous speeds can actually go up with the lower limit.
This effect is well known to traffic engineers, and is probably the single strongest argument against just throwing 20mph zones down anywhere you feel like because the locals don't want you racing past their front door. The general guidelines say that you're not supposed to impose a 20 limit unless most traffic is already travelling not much faster and suitable traffic calming measures are also used. In other words, the limit is supposed to be mostly self-enforcing. Obviously that isn't the case with the kinds of roads around Cambridge that I mentioned before, as the police themselves have explained.
As for your note about democracy, you might like to consider that an overwhelming majority of drivers admit to breaking 20mph limits outside other people's homes, including many who campaign for a 20mph limit outside their own. It's just NIMBY hypocrisy, pure and simple.
If traffic is rarely smooth, then the road needs to be redesigned so that it is.
Actually, the kind of average speed cameras we're talking about are mostly used in two situations in the UK: on major trunk roads that become very congested at certain times of day, and at roadworks. Redesigning such roads isn't a trivial exercise and may not be possible at all. However, in each case, traffic flows much more smoothly, and therefore both safely and efficiently, when everyone is held to roughly the same (reduced) speed until the road opens up again and normal rules can be resumed.
I'm not sure, from what I've seen so far, whether these average speed cameras are part of the ANPR surveillance network that is reportedly keeping data for years. If so, there's no excuse for that as far as I can see. Once a car has gone past the second camera, you know how long it took to get there, and if it wasn't speeding then there's no need to keep any further records of when it went past the first camera. Once it's gone past the last camera in the set, there's no need to keep any record at all if no offence was observed.
But in terms of smoothing out traffic flows to keep it safer and more efficient for everyone, the average speed checks are among the most effective tools available. I'm pretty sceptical about both the way road traffic laws often seem to get made and the privacy implications of automated surveillance, but in this case, use of the cameras seems to be well justified.
Perhaps you are forgetting that the UK has a functioning democracy?
Not really, and road laws are a prime example.
If we made these laws on a democratic basis, we wouldn't have absurd situations like we have in Cambridge right now, where ironically it is the police themselves who have said there is no point in trying to enforce a reduction in speed limit to 20mph on a lot of roads at the moment because almost driver ignores them. The main people who seem to want those limits are people who live in the big, expensive houses along those roads, and a few local councillors primarily elected by such people. Our city council as a whole has a fairly poor reputation in terms of being blatantly anti-motorist, but given the tiny electorate for each councillor that means most people who use our roads don't actually get a vote on the people making the policy, we do not have a functioning democracy in this respect.
It's even worse on a national level, because this whole ANPR business seems to have been started on the quiet by the police themselves. Part of the controversy is because the whole surveillance operation had little if any oversight by elected officials at that stage and was effectively presented as a fait accompli.