Really, it's just more cognitive tax. The old interface probably wasn't great either, but people had already spent the time learning it and understanding how they need to approach their tasks. Then the interface is replaced with a new one that has about the same level of complexity as the old one (because they both do the same thing at the end of the day), but now people have to go back and re-learn their application. And it may not be a convenient time for them, at least with regular applications you can put off upgrading until you've got time to explore the new version and grok it.
Of course the best way to cheese off those old users is to "simplify" the interface, which generally means removing features they were using without offering an alternative. Apple is bad about this, and has released some truly useless mail clients for people who do more than just write letters to Grandma for example.
The takeaway I have is that after EA buys a studio, it has maybe a 50/50 shot of their next game release being good, and after that it's all over. I've seen this time and time again with Westwood, Bioware, Bullfrog, Pandemic, Playfish, and more. EA is in the business of buying up studios, and then choking them to death in order to make a quick buck, and it has made them the biggest video game publisher in the world. They have more in common with sharky wall street banks than your traditional game company.
Ok, so you have the checksums on the server. That's great, how is that going to help you insure that the client has not been modified? Are you going to ask the client machine for the checksums and just trust what it sends you is accurate?
So now the touchscreen is way below where the rest of the control area, isn't that going to be awkward for games that combine stylus input with button presses?
If your code is open source, file checksums are no hurdle at all. I mean if someone is modifying your code, what's going to stop them from modifying the stored checksum as well?
Young people with an idea and drive but maybe not a lot of experience seem to be the bread and butter of Venture Capital. You can complain all you want that the ideas may not pan out or the inexperienced developers make make a messy system, but that's the nature of the beast. Sometimes they'll have a billion dollar idea and everybody wins. Nobody ever said VC was a low risk business.
So you wanted to give money away, fine. But you then asked the project to lie about it and potentially put themselves at risk for fraud by asking them to make up some sort of invoice for a service that they weren't prepared to provide, like "support".
Also, the fact that many open source projects are basically volunteer efforts means that they aren't really setup to pay people for their work. They would have to work out the taxes and it could end up being a relatively huge amount of effort for a fairly small payoff ($5,000 covers a developer for maybe a month).
That said, there are some big projects that should have been able to figure out something. Apache for instance has their own foundation. So does X (although they apparently aren't very good at doing taxes), Mozilla, and some others. However, none of them are likely to want to talk to you once you start prattling on about fake invoices. If you want to donate, just donate. That way you can write it off of your taxes as well. If management doesn't like that, then that's their problem. You shouldn't have to do something shady and possibly illegal to support open source.
Radioisotope batteries is a strange prediction no matter how you look at it. I guess he figured he had a clever way of dealing with the Nuclear Waste issue, but it is hard to imagine a world where people readily accept radioactive material into their house, to be stored next to their food. It's not like the dangers of radioactivity were unknown in the 1960s, and the worlds mindset was already colored by the atomic bombs from 20 years earlier and the horrible aftermath. Plus, it's not like the power grid was a strange and novel concept. People already had power delivered directly to their houses, why would they bother with a dangerous and troublesome technology like RTGs?
Were you living in a particularly old and poor point of town? By 2002 double pane windows were commonplace on everything except old construction. Replacing the windows on 50 year old houses is really expensive, so poor people don't do it, which causes them to waste a ton of money on heating and cooling so they can't afford to replace the windows. It's a viscous cycle. Houston is especially bad because it is both hot and humid there for much of the year.
What he didn't foresee was genetic manipulation of food crops. He looked at the corn and soybeans of his day and said that it would never feed a planet, and he was right. What he didn't expect was that we would make better (higher producing) corn and soybeans instead of switching everybody to Vegemite.
Yeah, I find it hard to believe that in a population of 25,000 applicants (who paid $625,000 in total to take the test), not a single one managed to get over 50% in math and 75% in English, especially when the previous years had at least a modest acceptance rate. This smells an awful lot like corruption on the testing staff. Granted, you wouldn't expect much from a group of students who grew up in wartime in an impoverished country, but even then there should be a small handful that had motivated parents that taught them enough language and math to pass a basic entrance exam.
Enterprise just killed me when they would have this big long speech about the need for readiness and make Count Bakula say a line like: "We need some sort of alerting the crew about danger, maybe with light, a colored light, maybe we should make it red, so it could be known as a red alert."
I'm not a mentally handicapped 3 year old, Enterprise.
I don't know, when I'm in taxis they seem to communicate quite a bit with each other, although the method of communication appears to rely entirely on shouted insults and rude hand gestures.
I'm guessing a fair bit of the price is from the software to convert all of that into a 3D printable model. Still, I would have liked to have seen an overhead laser for that price.
Look at the app list. He's clearly writing them with a script. One app for every sound in his stock sounds folder. One app for every link in his bookmarks file. That sort of thing. There are a few oddball apps here and there that probably took a couple of hours to crank out, but this guy is not spending real time on the vast majority of his works. He's clearly using a spray and pray approach, hoping that enough random $0.99 downloads of apps that just load the mobile version of the webpage you could have gotten with the browser or play a single sound will give him a steady income.
It's also important to remember that of all of the projects announced, maybe 10% of them will make it to release. So working on something that someone else has announced interest in doesn't mean much. There are a bajillion minecraft clones out there that claim they will do it better, but I've yet to see one that works as well as the original. Often times they'll have a couple of features the developer really wanted, like realistic water physics, but utterly fall down in many other ways (no mobs, horrendous performance, etc...)
Notch loves doing demos and one-offs. He's also really good at it, which is why you'll see him at every "Code something over the weekend for Charity!" type events. He's got millions of euros now that says he can do that if he wants.
The premise of the game was that someone set the "sleep time" on his cold sleep device but got the byte order wrong and was sent so far forward in time that the universe is almost completely through its lifecycle and is deep into the heat death. Of course that was preliminary, he never developed the storyline much.
Most of the focus seemed to be on the in-game computer thing, which was neat but Notch never seemed to have a very good idea what he wanted to do with the rest of the game. I think he lost interest when he couldn't figure out a way to make it a game.
Minecraft is kind of like a MMO. Each patch brings out some new feature (Horses! Upside down stairs! Hoppers!), except that they never ask you for any more money. It's best played with a group of people too.
That's just them telling you how much faster they plan for tuition to rise compared to inflation. Basically, the investment income they can make on that money won't keep up with the cost of school (it hasn't for many years now) and they don't want to be holding the bag in the end.
This assumes that tuition can grow without bound however, which we know to be false. Eventually it's going to hit a wall where enrollment suffers due to the extreme tuition rates and they'll have to stop.
Well, the alternative is to have only a High School diploma. Unless you're a super self-starter that's going to make his own business from the ground up, that High School diploma is not going to get you very far.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, it's just more cognitive tax. The old interface probably wasn't great either, but people had already spent the time learning it and understanding how they need to approach their tasks. Then the interface is replaced with a new one that has about the same level of complexity as the old one (because they both do the same thing at the end of the day), but now people have to go back and re-learn their application. And it may not be a convenient time for them, at least with regular applications you can put off upgrading until you've got time to explore the new version and grok it.
Of course the best way to cheese off those old users is to "simplify" the interface, which generally means removing features they were using without offering an alternative. Apple is bad about this, and has released some truly useless mail clients for people who do more than just write letters to Grandma for example.
The takeaway I have is that after EA buys a studio, it has maybe a 50/50 shot of their next game release being good, and after that it's all over. I've seen this time and time again with Westwood, Bioware, Bullfrog, Pandemic, Playfish, and more. EA is in the business of buying up studios, and then choking them to death in order to make a quick buck, and it has made them the biggest video game publisher in the world. They have more in common with sharky wall street banks than your traditional game company.
Ok, so you have the checksums on the server. That's great, how is that going to help you insure that the client has not been modified? Are you going to ask the client machine for the checksums and just trust what it sends you is accurate?
So now the touchscreen is way below where the rest of the control area, isn't that going to be awkward for games that combine stylus input with button presses?
If your code is open source, file checksums are no hurdle at all. I mean if someone is modifying your code, what's going to stop them from modifying the stored checksum as well?
Young people with an idea and drive but maybe not a lot of experience seem to be the bread and butter of Venture Capital. You can complain all you want that the ideas may not pan out or the inexperienced developers make make a messy system, but that's the nature of the beast. Sometimes they'll have a billion dollar idea and everybody wins. Nobody ever said VC was a low risk business.
So you wanted to give money away, fine. But you then asked the project to lie about it and potentially put themselves at risk for fraud by asking them to make up some sort of invoice for a service that they weren't prepared to provide, like "support".
Also, the fact that many open source projects are basically volunteer efforts means that they aren't really setup to pay people for their work. They would have to work out the taxes and it could end up being a relatively huge amount of effort for a fairly small payoff ($5,000 covers a developer for maybe a month).
That said, there are some big projects that should have been able to figure out something. Apache for instance has their own foundation. So does X (although they apparently aren't very good at doing taxes), Mozilla, and some others. However, none of them are likely to want to talk to you once you start prattling on about fake invoices. If you want to donate, just donate. That way you can write it off of your taxes as well. If management doesn't like that, then that's their problem. You shouldn't have to do something shady and possibly illegal to support open source.
Radioisotope batteries is a strange prediction no matter how you look at it. I guess he figured he had a clever way of dealing with the Nuclear Waste issue, but it is hard to imagine a world where people readily accept radioactive material into their house, to be stored next to their food. It's not like the dangers of radioactivity were unknown in the 1960s, and the worlds mindset was already colored by the atomic bombs from 20 years earlier and the horrible aftermath. Plus, it's not like the power grid was a strange and novel concept. People already had power delivered directly to their houses, why would they bother with a dangerous and troublesome technology like RTGs?
Were you living in a particularly old and poor point of town? By 2002 double pane windows were commonplace on everything except old construction. Replacing the windows on 50 year old houses is really expensive, so poor people don't do it, which causes them to waste a ton of money on heating and cooling so they can't afford to replace the windows. It's a viscous cycle. Houston is especially bad because it is both hot and humid there for much of the year.
What he didn't foresee was genetic manipulation of food crops. He looked at the corn and soybeans of his day and said that it would never feed a planet, and he was right. What he didn't expect was that we would make better (higher producing) corn and soybeans instead of switching everybody to Vegemite.
Yeah, I find it hard to believe that in a population of 25,000 applicants (who paid $625,000 in total to take the test), not a single one managed to get over 50% in math and 75% in English, especially when the previous years had at least a modest acceptance rate. This smells an awful lot like corruption on the testing staff. Granted, you wouldn't expect much from a group of students who grew up in wartime in an impoverished country, but even then there should be a small handful that had motivated parents that taught them enough language and math to pass a basic entrance exam.
Enterprise just killed me when they would have this big long speech about the need for readiness and make Count Bakula say a line like: "We need some sort of alerting the crew about danger, maybe with light, a colored light, maybe we should make it red, so it could be known as a red alert."
I'm not a mentally handicapped 3 year old, Enterprise.
I think it is safe to say that they'll mostly ignore Enterprise, just like everybody else on Earth.
Google has millions of miles of driverless car experience already. This technology is closer than you think.
I don't know, when I'm in taxis they seem to communicate quite a bit with each other, although the method of communication appears to rely entirely on shouted insults and rude hand gestures.
I'm guessing a fair bit of the price is from the software to convert all of that into a 3D printable model. Still, I would have liked to have seen an overhead laser for that price.
Yeah, I can't figure out why "Billionaire buys previously used domain" to be breaking news.
Look at the app list. He's clearly writing them with a script. One app for every sound in his stock sounds folder. One app for every link in his bookmarks file. That sort of thing. There are a few oddball apps here and there that probably took a couple of hours to crank out, but this guy is not spending real time on the vast majority of his works. He's clearly using a spray and pray approach, hoping that enough random $0.99 downloads of apps that just load the mobile version of the webpage you could have gotten with the browser or play a single sound will give him a steady income.
It's also important to remember that of all of the projects announced, maybe 10% of them will make it to release. So working on something that someone else has announced interest in doesn't mean much. There are a bajillion minecraft clones out there that claim they will do it better, but I've yet to see one that works as well as the original. Often times they'll have a couple of features the developer really wanted, like realistic water physics, but utterly fall down in many other ways (no mobs, horrendous performance, etc...)
Notch loves doing demos and one-offs. He's also really good at it, which is why you'll see him at every "Code something over the weekend for Charity!" type events. He's got millions of euros now that says he can do that if he wants.
The premise of the game was that someone set the "sleep time" on his cold sleep device but got the byte order wrong and was sent so far forward in time that the universe is almost completely through its lifecycle and is deep into the heat death. Of course that was preliminary, he never developed the storyline much.
Most of the focus seemed to be on the in-game computer thing, which was neat but Notch never seemed to have a very good idea what he wanted to do with the rest of the game. I think he lost interest when he couldn't figure out a way to make it a game.
Minecraft is kind of like a MMO. Each patch brings out some new feature (Horses! Upside down stairs! Hoppers!), except that they never ask you for any more money. It's best played with a group of people too.
That's just them telling you how much faster they plan for tuition to rise compared to inflation. Basically, the investment income they can make on that money won't keep up with the cost of school (it hasn't for many years now) and they don't want to be holding the bag in the end.
This assumes that tuition can grow without bound however, which we know to be false. Eventually it's going to hit a wall where enrollment suffers due to the extreme tuition rates and they'll have to stop.
Well, the alternative is to have only a High School diploma. Unless you're a super self-starter that's going to make his own business from the ground up, that High School diploma is not going to get you very far.
Who will then take it out of the tuitions of the incoming students? It's a viscous cycle!