HAHAHAH! Don't feed the troll:) But who said: - my camera in 2004 took 20M pics? It went from 2MB JPEGS to 8MB RAW to 15MB RAW to 20MB RAW over the years. - I don't have OTHER means to keep older pictures - there's a real reason to keep very very old "crappy" pictures (1-2 years ago), and not only the good ones.
But obviously, the fact I didn't write a 3-tome novel with graphs and an accompanying DVD with examples of the process seems to be a problem:)
I once filled the full 750GB with a 1-week long event, taking a full 64GB load every night (before you call me bonkers on my math skills, consider there's intermediate files, work copies, and that I still need to keep the good ones from before anyways)
I am a semipro photographer. One raw picture is >20M, and I tend to take between 500 and 2000 pictures for an event.
I keep all pictures. All of them. With the usual exceptions of the black ones or a very blurry ceiling.
My computer is also a laptop. I removed the useless DVD drive to host a second hard drive, only for the pictures. That gives me 750gb for pics.
I also have a 2TB external hard drive, and a general backup 4TB drive.
The workflow I use is as follows: - I put all my pictures on my computer. - Once transferred, I plug and copy all the new pictures on my 2TB, never removing anything from there, only adding. - I then process the pictures, adjust them, do whatever needs to be done. I sort them in 3 buckets (deleted, meh, good). - I copy the working copies for the good ones to the 2TB also. - I delete the deleted/meh from my laptop, only keeping the good ones. - I do a general incremental rsync backup of my laptop to my 4TB.
For me that's enough protection, I always have my "good" pictures with me on my laptop, and have access to everything else on my dump drive.
For fires and burglars, I also have a second encrypted 2TB at work. I can safely recreate everything else from that part...
So far it has served me well, and I haven't lost anything. I've been burned badly in the past after crashing a HD while doing a backup, and having 6 HDD failing me in the same year (yeah, lan partys will do that to your gear) so I am very anal about my data.
I agree. I had to update eventually to get the latest PSN stuff... it took me 2 months before updating, in that time, I purchased a 360 and I bought most games I missed on the 360. Lost revenue. Now I got the choice and they just lost the equivalent of 50% of their revenues from me.
I am a game programmer, I code as a living, in fact I own part of a successful gaming company. I wanted to stay up front to PS3 development and have fun with it, to see what I could do with it (even with their stupid ganked environment). Now I can't...
Then, the key, they kill its import rights... now everyone and their moms can unlock them, with game loaders and stuff... Won't take long before emulation will be perfect and undetectable. Sorry for not losing sleep over that. Sympathy level = 0%.
I don't condone piracy, I never did and never will, I gain most of my pay because gamers purchase my games. But when companies are doing jackasses of themselves and are evil to their purchasers, I have no sympathy. Same that I don't have sympathy for RIAA/MPAA.
1 - If they were all open about their efforts on a day-to-day basis, the other companies would simply copy them, make a 90% "good enough" version just before them and then Apple would simply lose their creative edge. 2 - They have marketing campaigns to make us WANT a new product. Meaning gaining momentum until the product actually ships. 3 - All companies are doing that. Only because Apple is successful in making campaigns doesn't mean the other companies aren't doing it themselves. -- and if it was more profitable in advertising in advance, they'd certainly do it. Like they did for many Mac OS X releases. And yes, the latest Google Phone was also tight lipped... the latest Palm was tight lipped... and the developer in his basement developing the latest revolution in whatever he is doing is also (usually) tight lipped about his project.
I am using IMAP from my various e-mail providers, including gmail, dreamhost, and other, depending on where the mails come from. Some are company-related, some are personal, some are from projects. I long gave up hosting my own email server when everyone is happy providing that service for either free or a small price.
But if he wants IMAP, he can still get any old netbook and install whatever he wants, like I said in the 2 other possibilities. Only telling it's USUALLY useless to host its own everything.
We went from having 2 computers with a server and a laptop to having 2 laptops, a base station and no cables. With today's 1TB 2.5 HDD and easy sharing through wireless N, it's relatively simple, efficient and in the past 3 years, we saved a crapload of money since we don't even come near a 500W power supply recent towers (nearly) require. When we wish to have access to our data from home without our computers, we leave them open and they are shared through our router. Otherwise, we have our computer with us, so we don't need to connect to them;)
However, for your question, most vendors have small busyboxes with potential to plug a 2.5" USB-powerede external HDD, with hacking potential for more. If you want more (as you advertise), go to your local cheap used hardware store, get a netbook someone got tired of, and put additional HD. It should solve your problem.
I personally am very vocal about my hate of purchased anti-viruses for end users.
Most of the home user computers I've seen use some kind of outdated anti-virus technology that wasn't updated in ages. They purchase the computer, they got a 90 days free AV deal, then weeks before it ends up, they are asked to subscribe to this crap for some kind of amount, they say "later", next reboot "later", next reboot "later", next reboot GAAAH "never! there!", and they are stuck with that piece of crap that slows down their computer than gives them a false impression of security "because they got Norton installed", even if they totally forgot they even had to subscribe.
Even worse are the computers with some outdated version of the software that isn't even updated anymore, like they got this 3 year old version of (example) Symantec they purchased, asked for the year update, then got a message about that brand new (shiny) version with more features. They said no because they aren't doing anything fancy with their computers. Now they are stuck with some 3 year old solution that isn't updated anymore. How appropriate.
So my suggestion for all the computer users: don't use a bundled anti-virus unless you get explained what's the deal pay their due diligence everytime they are asking for it. Then, they are very good (usually vastly superior) products. -- Instead, use some free anti-virus, like AVG, that will automatically update everyday, and won't become outdated, and you won't have a popup message asking for money or else... Use spybot for the lesser evils. There, you are free of pains.
Seriously, the company I work for has facilities in China and everything we don't specifically buy and install is pirated over there.
I will have to agree with you. My friend has a company branch there, and at first, all computers came with all illegal software, although the invoices were saying it came with Windows, it was a pirated version that couldn't even software update (talk about a bad hack:) ).
My friend had to go to the store, ask for "real" Windows, he got told multiple times it was real, it's not a copy, no one here never sold any "official and legal" Windows. They finally agreed to (get this) order 5 copies, that took 2 weeks to receive, and finally he got his real Windows.
That's the tip of the iceberg. Untold hardware changes ("But I asked for this", "this is the same" or "this is better"), specific requests for legal versions getting preinstalled cracked versions, and so on.
You know what, we're frowning today at this practice, but in Windows 3.1 times, it was always like this in here too, and that's not too far away. When you purchased a computer, you seldom had any official version of your software. Everyone I knew had some Autocad version dangling around (why, I dunno!), and the hardware was (and sometimes still is) a black box of arcane things.
If you account for the experience you gathered, add the other platforms or products you are offering (leveraging Ecto in your case), and the full "suite" of tools, it then becomes a nice stepping stone for the future products. Any company relying on only one product isn't very smart, and you definitely are doing more things.
However, the pricing is whineable because Apple made the iTMS the way it is, and meaning it rewards the cheaper apps instead of rewarding the top notch apps. And because people think most of everything that sells and that's good is either free or 0,99$ (A whiner would say: hey, look at the top apps, they're mostly all 0,99$ -- proof!)...
lmao! It is certainly all black or all white for you isn't it?
VERY HYPOTHETICAL (and frankly totally out of the reality): 1 million copies worth of $5 would still make it 5 millions bucks no? If we leverage our work on 10 other markets and 4 products, it's even better, meaning our 1000 hours of work are split in 40x 25 hours. So for an iPhone version that took us 25 hours, we'd be making 5 million dollars? You can keep your Nike:)
Thaaat's right, I forgot the rule: don't feed the trolls:)
Hey, Zarf, who says my app is good or bad compared to Ocarina for example? Man-power and man-hours might be a good factor, but it's not the sole factor for crappiness or goodness for an app. You might have the best idea in the world, taking 2 minutes to code, and that will make you rich beyond imaginings, while I might work my #($(# off for months in a row, only to get a bad software.
For the "other ideas", yeah. Well, you can still make a living out of an iPhone app, but any developer who will put all its eggs in one basket is still stupid anyways. So there are other ways:)
I'm an iPhone developer. My company have been in the top sellers in US and Canada. And I agree, with some reserve, to what is being written.
If you look at the games that are produced on the iPhone, they are very good, frankly, many of them have many hours of replay value, many of the apps are top notch, and compared to other phones, they are of insane quality. And for a game that we sell more than $20 on any PC, and even more on consoles, we can only barely nudge a $5 on the iPhone, for nearly the same production quality. That's thousands and thousands of man-hour of work, sold at $5. Think about that. Even then, we got average results: either the comments were raving on our game, either people were giving one star and saying it was way too expensive. That's total bull. And that's what's pissing off people creating solid applications.
When the iPhone started, some games (like Monkey Ball) were $10. Some productivity apps were $10 to $15. I paid for a few $10 software, and they were with ample merit. Omnifocus is such a tool, real great, well made, even the v1 was excellent. Then, the top sellers became $5 software. Now it's mostly $1 software.
And that's where I put my grumpy developer shell on the shelf. Frankly, I congratulate $1 games and free games and $1 leisure and productivity tools. They make sure we are not paying $5 like on other phones to get a total piece of crap snorted out by a subcontract firm in 2 weeks. They make sure if we want to pay $5, it's for a good reason. That a software becomes a meme and gets sold by the thousands for 2 weeks and then get replaced by the following meme, I congratulate them. The only reason we are noticing these is because the way the ITMS works "free" and "pay" tops, and nothing else.
Many good applications cost much more, and hopefully they are getting their own crowd and their own push, with their own publicity. Like on PC with freewares and sharewares and commercial software, you pay mostly by merit.
Of course the psychology of words will make you believe this is horrible, when in fact, 82% can tell the difference!
Then, like said elsewhere, a properly upscaled good-resolution SD is very potent. What is crap is the digital signals we're being fed.
A story that happened to me. I used to listen to Paramount channel for ST:V a few years ago (god I'm old), and this was the only digital channel I used to have. Sometimes, I couldn't listen to some shows immediately, so I time-shifted them on a VHS, in EP (that's the 8 hours per cassette mode, young folks;) ), and even then, with quality degraded, I could still see the digital scans when scenes were changed, or during space-blacks! Now that my boobtube provider is putting approximately 3 times the amount of channels into the same QAM, quality is even worse than before.
heh, I agree with what was written in your discussion there (can't reply there anymore).
One thing I hate in games are either things that I have absolutely ZERO friggin chance of deducing by myself (like the crates - best example ever), or games where I am fearful of exploring due to these stupid cutscenes happening... Like I have a labyrinth, I am trying to explore the labyrinth to the fullest of its extent, getting most of the hidden treasures, and I get cut up by the end boss and the world crumbles from that point on. Gaaaah!
As far as RPG goes, interestingly enough, I haven't been plagued with problems with Kingdom Hearts 2, I found it relatively cool and fun to play, with good puzzles but not too complex, although the story is kind of weird. There's Vagrant Story, with nice puzzles. There's also Dark Cloud 2, with many many interesting puzzles and challenges, however that game is LO-OOO-OOOONG! Recently, I haven't played something that's interesting RPG-wise.
GameFaqs made games easy for some, meaning game creators added some challenges that can ONLY be solved by zealots, which pissed off people, meaning most people use walkthrough for the puzzles. (I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy, where you need NOT to get 4 crates to get the best weapon in the game)
Some challenges are absurd, or blocks the user and are required to continue to play, which means people tend to get to the Faqs again after a period of time.
Some "puzzle" games are all the same crap (I'm looking at you, website I need to change the address to continue by looking at the source code)... meaning people get annoyed by these puzzles.
But frankly, I _love_ a good puzzle game, and I _love_ to solve challenges, when they can be really solved, like all the friends I know.
But you are right, I hate cheap-@$$ puzzles, I hate copycats of all the same style, and I hate looking at a game for a good hour and not being able to figure out what to do at that point. Up your game while creating your puzzle game and you will have people happy to figure out all the intricacies out of it.
I agree one part of the equation is to keep data live on a server, and it does serve a purpose. However, having all data constantly live, at these sizes, usually means having everything in one place, on one network.
2 obvious dangers: - A single virus/hacker could wipe all data including these live backups. - A single fire/flood would mean losing all these data forever.
Hence the multiple copies at multiple places idea. At our work, we have one live copy on a server, live copies on many machines, 3 rotated copies in a bank vault, 1 copy in someone's place.
I have my whole music collection (from 250+ CDs, some few iTunes, a crapload of eMusic, and a few hundred vinyls I had the luxury to reencode) on a hard disk.
At the quality they are, it takes in the vicinity of 50 something DVDs. Not only did I had to burn these all (with verify) but I had to restore them once. In a year, I had 6 hard disk crash on me, including two in mirror raid, 12 hours apart (yes I was really pissed off) and a hard drive that decided to crash just while I was doing its first backup on DVD.
Frankly, DVDs and CDs, you can take your time verifying the data, making sure you can read them back. You can also store them in a place where nothing will break them. Even with some bad data here and there, you can usually get most of your data back quite easily. A crashing hard drive will get you to a hefty price tag if you want to get your data back, as the actuators will probably clog, and the motor might decide not to spin that day.
I would agree with you that TWO hard drives, from two different brands, put in two different places, would make a suitable backup for a few years. Every 2 years, I would get one of the backups and verify the whole thing, only to make sure... and after 8 years, I would certainly reinvest in a newer hard drive, just in case. But hard drives are very suitable, indeed.
Again, this is inaccurate. It has the _POTENTIAL_ to be more secure, but it isn't.
For example, old parchmints were printed on what could be most accurately described as "towels". They're dirty, they are chipping, you wash them, and dry them out.
Most modern printing facilities have the following problems: - Acid paper. Unless especially purchased, you throw your paper in some acid removal bath, you will eventually get the good old "yellow paper" syndrome, after even 10 years. Worst papers will dry out and chip out, and make them irrecoverable after a tiny few years. - Fading inks. The worst culprits are of course thermal printers, as you are even suggested by the retailers to xerox your invoices if you want to have a chance of getting something else than a white piece of paper... But even in the ink realms, many tests were made, and most are getting washed out after a few years.
Frankly, since the '70s, our generation will probably be totally washed out to archaeologists.
People who say HDD have their heads in the sand. 20 years. Think about that. 1988. SCSI-1 40 pins. Nearing the end of MFM/RLE. Parallel.
People who say CDs and DVDs again have their heads in the sand. That's the Floppy Era.
The best format IMHO is the "current" format. DVDs + HDDs along with a live copy on your computer. DVDs and HDDs should be at two of your friend's houses.
5-10 years later, once one of the formats is obsolete (EXT3 is now EXT8, DVDs are now expensive again in drug stores), it's time to copy these to the new "current" format, and repeat the process.
There's a sort of in-between state, too, though. Most of the code I write is because I personally want it. I GPL it (or whatever) because I like sharing, and maybe other people might find it useful. So in that sense it's "for other people," but only in a loose manner. If other people want new features, I'll be happy to code them if 1) I personally think I'd find it useful, or 2) it seems like a fun feature to hack on. I'm very very unlikely to add a feature that I personally don't want and will not enjoy writing the code for. If it's something that I don't think will be a big maintenance burden, I'd probably accept a patch from someone else. True... I don't have a lot of f/oss contributions, but what I tend to do in projects falls in that range too. Our company doesn't really work with tight-lip service, but mostly work in communal system where if something needs to be added, it only requires defending it with one of the project manager, then the feature can be added. I tend to be quite overprotective of the project in general, but hey it works. So I guess your vision represents a good balance.
What Pidgin is getting here is a very vocal disagreement, someone slamming the door and doing "their stuff" on their side. I don't think it's a service to the community to be so obnoxious personally. Agreed, totally. I find myself in a weird position of defending the situation as it is, but not wanting to defend the behavior of the Pidgin devs. (After seeing how they behave on IRC and on mailing lists, both in how they treat others and how I've been treated, I have zero interest in defending their behavior.) Some of them are very egotistical and tactless, and treat their users like shit. But their software is popular given its long history (and given the fact that, several years ago, it was really your only choice if you wanted a decent multi-protocol IM client), so everyone more or less puts up with them. Glad we agree on most major points.:) Kudos to your patience too, not all people tend to discuss points without resorting to some conversational terrorism tactics that only derails the discussion without goal.
On topic, that's not the first time I've seen this kind of behavior, it becomes quite clear after a while that people with a strong grip tend to get these power positions. I've had once in a while the need to manage open communities and I call them "the cattle", meaning if you give them a direction, they will go there but if you don't, everything simply stagnates and dies down on its own. Once you get a few "dogs" running around, it gives the cattle reason to move from their comfort zone and actually do something for the community, in the intended direction.
From what I've seen, Alpha "dogs" are usually self-proclaimed, since everyone else is busy minding their own grass grazing, they tend to stand out, get picked up quickly as community leaders and get a bunch of devout followers. I've seen this in bulletin boards, in OSS projects (Strangely, OpenBSD comes to mind, but I didn't participate in that one), in group projects and of course in WoW guilds. Of course, when comes time of a disagreement, these alpha will scream and claw their way out, as if their lives depended on this. This is also why I tend _not_ to participate or argument in the patches I am sending. I find something weird, I tell the group, send what I've done (if I could find the bug) and that's the extent of my participation, thank you for all the fish. If the patch isn't applied, I apply it everytime I update the code.
At work, I use the "if you can defend the idea, you can do it" system. I protect, but then I know I cannot do all the things myself, and I also need to accept digressions. We are blessed with people who are not asocial dorks, so we can ask them to argument a little. Then, we're 2 totally opposite programmers managing this, and usually, the meet-in-the-middle works well for the project, as I tend to overthink stuff, while the other tend to be overgeneralist.
That's the thing though -- "requiring" doesn't exist when you're talking about unpaid OSS. The Pidgin developers don't lose revenues if they don't implement a feature their users want. The "minor revolution" of a fork in this case doesn't really hurt the Pidgin developers. In fact, it might end up *helping* them by getting more people involved with the code base (going under the reasonably safe assumption that the fork doesn't diverge to fundamental new directions). True. It is a helping hand, OSS software has no requirement, and frankly, it shouldn't have. If there is any incitative to get paid because a company is using that particular piece of software for them to get paid, and if the general movement is not considered a momentum in the good direction, then they should involve themselves in the project, and pay the guy for all his work.
It goes back to the fundamental question of who is your client though. If you are doing your piece of work for yourself, then you are your sole client, and everyone else can simply buzz off. If you are doing this for other people also, then they are as much a client as yourself, and they must be satisfied too.
I once wanted to start now what is called a Wiki, but back then it was a novel idea. I tried to get my friends involved, and they all wanted to grab the project and bring it to their ideals. The fact I was ready to discuss meant the project never started, since no one agreed on the direction. Everyone were saying "well it's a great idea, but shouldn't you blah blah blah". So again, I do understand there must be a central direction, and someone in charge. Some egos will get bruised that's for sure. That might be the case, it did happen also to g++ compiler, it branched, and eventually they merged. However, to be able to recognize something is not adequate for most people is a huge step. The best example are skins, and firefox that still got a crapload of hidden parameters you can use to tweak the way firefox behaves. This is the same principle.
... because if you don't, game designers/programmers use a different engine, you lose money, and go out of business. If the Pidgin devs don't do what their users want, maybe they lose a few users. So what? Maybe they lose 60% of their users. So what? What you're saying makes complete and total sense for a company selling a software product, but doesn't necessarily apply to an OSS project with significant unpaid contributions. This is right. However, the "so what" is getting many egos from many people bruised at the same time, since many contributors will post elements in the best intentions to better that software because they find it exemplary. At work, we are using a lot of oss (all legally, mind you, I'm anal on the subject) for many tasks, and when we find odd behaviors, we usually patch it and send the patch to the vendor (except if it requires going through too many hoops), and they decide what they want to do with it. We don't have that particular project's vision so our patch might break a lot of things. Some react correctly (Zlib comes to mind), some react by telling our option is debatable, but is not an option, which we find fine (mesa for example), some flatly ignore what we're doing for versions and versions, that is their prerogative, and we've done our part, but these are the ones we don't like since they frankly don't care about us.
OSS has the opportunity that if someone wants to take weeks of his time to make a complete makeover of a project, he can fork Pidgin (for example) and then make a cleaned-up code base version. Then, Pidgin can accept or not that new code base, and they can coexist or not, or they can lend themselves code. Eventually, if they both work well, they can merge. This is a good fork. What Pidgin is getting here is a very vocal disagreement, someone slamming the door and doing "their stuff" on their side.
I don't think it's a service to the community to be so obnoxious personally.
On the other hand, new features might have a large cost, and that might be because, yes, the code base is a total mess. But it also might be that the developer just didn't envision the need for that particular feature, and the existing architecture/infrastructure just isn't there or isn't easily usable for that particular unforseen use case. I wouldn't call it a design "flaw" per se (though in some cases it may be); it would be foolish to think that any software design can be general enough to be suitable for any possible feature. True. We are doing computer games. My usual answer is "our engine is not meant to create a word processor. If it is, then we've missed the boat".
Then, the goal of a piece of software is usually not to be self-centered but actually to follow what their clients are requiring. If there's one comment of someone saying "it would be cool to do this", it usually can be ignored if the requested feature requires a lot of code shuffling. If it sparks a minor revolution, I think developers should take notice.
Oh, agreed, definitely. It's just that the cost in refactoring (both in the actual implementation, and the testing and bug-fixing in the refactored version) might be much higher than the benefit you get for adding the feature that prompts the refactoring. My guess is a particular piece of software should be refactored once every now and then, its innards should be rewritten. And usually, that moment becomes painfully clear the day you are constantly tweaking and nudging stuff to make it work as intended, instead of taking time to code new cool stuff.
So far, after 3 years of work on an engine, I'd guess we're at 4 major rewrites, last one being a few months ago. Most of the code have been changed, and we are following what game designers and programmers are telling us, even if it means rewriting large chunks of code. If they have good arguments and if we can't defend ourselves against their arguments, then it means their way wins. Even our best intentions are getting nailed and we bite our lips, cringe, and rewrite to follow what they want. There's leadership, and I sometimes say "no because... no", but it's quite rare.
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HAHAHAH! Don't feed the troll :) But who said:
- my camera in 2004 took 20M pics? It went from 2MB JPEGS to 8MB RAW to 15MB RAW to 20MB RAW over the years.
- I don't have OTHER means to keep older pictures
- there's a real reason to keep very very old "crappy" pictures (1-2 years ago), and not only the good ones.
But obviously, the fact I didn't write a 3-tome novel with graphs and an accompanying DVD with examples of the process seems to be a problem :)
I once filled the full 750GB with a 1-week long event, taking a full 64GB load every night (before you call me bonkers on my math skills, consider there's intermediate files, work copies, and that I still need to keep the good ones from before anyways)
I am a semipro photographer. One raw picture is >20M, and I tend to take between 500 and 2000 pictures for an event.
I keep all pictures. All of them. With the usual exceptions of the black ones or a very blurry ceiling.
My computer is also a laptop. I removed the useless DVD drive to host a second hard drive, only for the pictures. That gives me 750gb for pics.
I also have a 2TB external hard drive, and a general backup 4TB drive.
The workflow I use is as follows:
- I put all my pictures on my computer.
- Once transferred, I plug and copy all the new pictures on my 2TB, never removing anything from there, only adding.
- I then process the pictures, adjust them, do whatever needs to be done. I sort them in 3 buckets (deleted, meh, good).
- I copy the working copies for the good ones to the 2TB also.
- I delete the deleted/meh from my laptop, only keeping the good ones.
- I do a general incremental rsync backup of my laptop to my 4TB.
For me that's enough protection, I always have my "good" pictures with me on my laptop, and have access to everything else on my dump drive.
For fires and burglars, I also have a second encrypted 2TB at work. I can safely recreate everything else from that part...
So far it has served me well, and I haven't lost anything. I've been burned badly in the past after crashing a HD while doing a backup, and having 6 HDD failing me in the same year (yeah, lan partys will do that to your gear) so I am very anal about my data.
I agree. I had to update eventually to get the latest PSN stuff... it took me 2 months before updating, in that time, I purchased a 360 and I bought most games I missed on the 360. Lost revenue. Now I got the choice and they just lost the equivalent of 50% of their revenues from me.
I am a game programmer, I code as a living, in fact I own part of a successful gaming company. I wanted to stay up front to PS3 development and have fun with it, to see what I could do with it (even with their stupid ganked environment). Now I can't ...
Then, the key, they kill its import rights ... now everyone and their moms can unlock them, with game loaders and stuff... Won't take long before emulation will be perfect and undetectable. Sorry for not losing sleep over that. Sympathy level = 0%.
I don't condone piracy, I never did and never will, I gain most of my pay because gamers purchase my games. But when companies are doing jackasses of themselves and are evil to their purchasers, I have no sympathy. Same that I don't have sympathy for RIAA/MPAA.
1 - If they were all open about their efforts on a day-to-day basis, the other companies would simply copy them, make a 90% "good enough" version just before them and then Apple would simply lose their creative edge. ... the latest Palm was tight lipped ... and the developer in his basement developing the latest revolution in whatever he is doing is also (usually) tight lipped about his project.
2 - They have marketing campaigns to make us WANT a new product. Meaning gaining momentum until the product actually ships.
3 - All companies are doing that. Only because Apple is successful in making campaigns doesn't mean the other companies aren't doing it themselves. -- and if it was more profitable in advertising in advance, they'd certainly do it. Like they did for many Mac OS X releases. And yes, the latest Google Phone was also tight lipped
I mean, it's business management 101.
I am using IMAP from my various e-mail providers, including gmail, dreamhost, and other, depending on where the mails come from. Some are company-related, some are personal, some are from projects. I long gave up hosting my own email server when everyone is happy providing that service for either free or a small price.
But if he wants IMAP, he can still get any old netbook and install whatever he wants, like I said in the 2 other possibilities. Only telling it's USUALLY useless to host its own everything.
We went from having 2 computers with a server and a laptop to having 2 laptops, a base station and no cables. With today's 1TB 2.5 HDD and easy sharing through wireless N, it's relatively simple, efficient and in the past 3 years, we saved a crapload of money since we don't even come near a 500W power supply recent towers (nearly) require. When we wish to have access to our data from home without our computers, we leave them open and they are shared through our router. Otherwise, we have our computer with us, so we don't need to connect to them ;)
However, for your question, most vendors have small busyboxes with potential to plug a 2.5" USB-powerede external HDD, with hacking potential for more. If you want more (as you advertise), go to your local cheap used hardware store, get a netbook someone got tired of, and put additional HD. It should solve your problem.
I personally am very vocal about my hate of purchased anti-viruses for end users.
Most of the home user computers I've seen use some kind of outdated anti-virus technology that wasn't updated in ages. They purchase the computer, they got a 90 days free AV deal, then weeks before it ends up, they are asked to subscribe to this crap for some kind of amount, they say "later", next reboot "later", next reboot "later", next reboot GAAAH "never! there!", and they are stuck with that piece of crap that slows down their computer than gives them a false impression of security "because they got Norton installed", even if they totally forgot they even had to subscribe.
Even worse are the computers with some outdated version of the software that isn't even updated anymore, like they got this 3 year old version of (example) Symantec they purchased, asked for the year update, then got a message about that brand new (shiny) version with more features. They said no because they aren't doing anything fancy with their computers. Now they are stuck with some 3 year old solution that isn't updated anymore. How appropriate.
So my suggestion for all the computer users: don't use a bundled anti-virus unless you get explained what's the deal pay their due diligence everytime they are asking for it. Then, they are very good (usually vastly superior) products. -- Instead, use some free anti-virus, like AVG, that will automatically update everyday, and won't become outdated, and you won't have a popup message asking for money or else... Use spybot for the lesser evils. There, you are free of pains.
EVERYONE in China massively pirates all software.
Seriously, the company I work for has facilities in China and everything we don't specifically buy and install is pirated over there.
I will have to agree with you. My friend has a company branch there, and at first, all computers came with all illegal software, although the invoices were saying it came with Windows, it was a pirated version that couldn't even software update (talk about a bad hack :) ).
My friend had to go to the store, ask for "real" Windows, he got told multiple times it was real, it's not a copy, no one here never sold any "official and legal" Windows. They finally agreed to (get this) order 5 copies, that took 2 weeks to receive, and finally he got his real Windows.
That's the tip of the iceberg. Untold hardware changes ("But I asked for this", "this is the same" or "this is better"), specific requests for legal versions getting preinstalled cracked versions, and so on.
You know what, we're frowning today at this practice, but in Windows 3.1 times, it was always like this in here too, and that's not too far away. When you purchased a computer, you seldom had any official version of your software. Everyone I knew had some Autocad version dangling around (why, I dunno!), and the hardware was (and sometimes still is) a black box of arcane things.
If you account for the experience you gathered, add the other platforms or products you are offering (leveraging Ecto in your case), and the full "suite" of tools, it then becomes a nice stepping stone for the future products. Any company relying on only one product isn't very smart, and you definitely are doing more things.
You get my point . It's a free market.
However, the pricing is whineable because Apple made the iTMS the way it is, and meaning it rewards the cheaper apps instead of rewarding the top notch apps. And because people think most of everything that sells and that's good is either free or 0,99$ (A whiner would say: hey, look at the top apps, they're mostly all 0,99$ -- proof!) ...
lmao! It is certainly all black or all white for you isn't it?
VERY HYPOTHETICAL (and frankly totally out of the reality): 1 million copies worth of $5 would still make it 5 millions bucks no? If we leverage our work on 10 other markets and 4 products, it's even better, meaning our 1000 hours of work are split in 40x 25 hours. So for an iPhone version that took us 25 hours, we'd be making 5 million dollars? You can keep your Nike :)
Thaaat's right, I forgot the rule: don't feed the trolls :)
Hey, Zarf, who says my app is good or bad compared to Ocarina for example? Man-power and man-hours might be a good factor, but it's not the sole factor for crappiness or goodness for an app. You might have the best idea in the world, taking 2 minutes to code, and that will make you rich beyond imaginings, while I might work my #($(# off for months in a row, only to get a bad software.
For the "other ideas", yeah. Well, you can still make a living out of an iPhone app, but any developer who will put all its eggs in one basket is still stupid anyways. So there are other ways :)
I'm an iPhone developer. My company have been in the top sellers in US and Canada. And I agree, with some reserve, to what is being written.
If you look at the games that are produced on the iPhone, they are very good, frankly, many of them have many hours of replay value, many of the apps are top notch, and compared to other phones, they are of insane quality. And for a game that we sell more than $20 on any PC, and even more on consoles, we can only barely nudge a $5 on the iPhone, for nearly the same production quality. That's thousands and thousands of man-hour of work, sold at $5. Think about that. Even then, we got average results: either the comments were raving on our game, either people were giving one star and saying it was way too expensive. That's total bull. And that's what's pissing off people creating solid applications.
When the iPhone started, some games (like Monkey Ball) were $10. Some productivity apps were $10 to $15. I paid for a few $10 software, and they were with ample merit. Omnifocus is such a tool, real great, well made, even the v1 was excellent. Then, the top sellers became $5 software. Now it's mostly $1 software.
And that's where I put my grumpy developer shell on the shelf. Frankly, I congratulate $1 games and free games and $1 leisure and productivity tools. They make sure we are not paying $5 like on other phones to get a total piece of crap snorted out by a subcontract firm in 2 weeks. They make sure if we want to pay $5, it's for a good reason. That a software becomes a meme and gets sold by the thousands for 2 weeks and then get replaced by the following meme, I congratulate them. The only reason we are noticing these is because the way the ITMS works "free" and "pay" tops, and nothing else.
Many good applications cost much more, and hopefully they are getting their own crowd and their own push, with their own publicity. Like on PC with freewares and sharewares and commercial software, you pay mostly by merit.
Of course the psychology of words will make you believe this is horrible, when in fact, 82% can tell the difference!
Then, like said elsewhere, a properly upscaled good-resolution SD is very potent. What is crap is the digital signals we're being fed.
A story that happened to me. I used to listen to Paramount channel for ST:V a few years ago (god I'm old), and this was the only digital channel I used to have. Sometimes, I couldn't listen to some shows immediately, so I time-shifted them on a VHS, in EP (that's the 8 hours per cassette mode, young folks ;) ), and even then, with quality degraded, I could still see the digital scans when scenes were changed, or during space-blacks! Now that my boobtube provider is putting approximately 3 times the amount of channels into the same QAM, quality is even worse than before.
heh, I agree with what was written in your discussion there (can't reply there anymore).
One thing I hate in games are either things that I have absolutely ZERO friggin chance of deducing by myself (like the crates - best example ever), or games where I am fearful of exploring due to these stupid cutscenes happening... Like I have a labyrinth, I am trying to explore the labyrinth to the fullest of its extent, getting most of the hidden treasures, and I get cut up by the end boss and the world crumbles from that point on. Gaaaah!
As far as RPG goes, interestingly enough, I haven't been plagued with problems with Kingdom Hearts 2, I found it relatively cool and fun to play, with good puzzles but not too complex, although the story is kind of weird. There's Vagrant Story, with nice puzzles. There's also Dark Cloud 2, with many many interesting puzzles and challenges, however that game is LO-OOO-OOOONG! Recently, I haven't played something that's interesting RPG-wise.
GameFaqs made games easy for some, meaning game creators added some challenges that can ONLY be solved by zealots, which pissed off people, meaning most people use walkthrough for the puzzles. (I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy, where you need NOT to get 4 crates to get the best weapon in the game)
Some challenges are absurd, or blocks the user and are required to continue to play, which means people tend to get to the Faqs again after a period of time.
Some "puzzle" games are all the same crap (I'm looking at you, website I need to change the address to continue by looking at the source code) ... meaning people get annoyed by these puzzles.
But frankly, I _love_ a good puzzle game, and I _love_ to solve challenges, when they can be really solved, like all the friends I know.
But you are right, I hate cheap-@$$ puzzles, I hate copycats of all the same style, and I hate looking at a game for a good hour and not being able to figure out what to do at that point. Up your game while creating your puzzle game and you will have people happy to figure out all the intricacies out of it.
Cheers!
I agree one part of the equation is to keep data live on a server, and it does serve a purpose. However, having all data constantly live, at these sizes, usually means having everything in one place, on one network.
2 obvious dangers:
- A single virus/hacker could wipe all data including these live backups.
- A single fire/flood would mean losing all these data forever.
Hence the multiple copies at multiple places idea. At our work, we have one live copy on a server, live copies on many machines, 3 rotated copies in a bank vault, 1 copy in someone's place.
Agreed, with some exceptions and caveats.
I have my whole music collection (from 250+ CDs, some few iTunes, a crapload of eMusic, and a few hundred vinyls I had the luxury to reencode) on a hard disk.
At the quality they are, it takes in the vicinity of 50 something DVDs. Not only did I had to burn these all (with verify) but I had to restore them once. In a year, I had 6 hard disk crash on me, including two in mirror raid, 12 hours apart (yes I was really pissed off) and a hard drive that decided to crash just while I was doing its first backup on DVD.
Frankly, DVDs and CDs, you can take your time verifying the data, making sure you can read them back. You can also store them in a place where nothing will break them. Even with some bad data here and there, you can usually get most of your data back quite easily. A crashing hard drive will get you to a hefty price tag if you want to get your data back, as the actuators will probably clog, and the motor might decide not to spin that day.
I would agree with you that TWO hard drives, from two different brands, put in two different places, would make a suitable backup for a few years. Every 2 years, I would get one of the backups and verify the whole thing, only to make sure... and after 8 years, I would certainly reinvest in a newer hard drive, just in case. But hard drives are very suitable, indeed.
True ^^ Been a while since I last connected one of those neolithic connectors!
Me 0 Lost Race 1 :)
Thanks for the reminder.
Again, this is inaccurate. It has the _POTENTIAL_ to be more secure, but it isn't.
For example, old parchmints were printed on what could be most accurately described as "towels". They're dirty, they are chipping, you wash them, and dry them out.
Most modern printing facilities have the following problems:
- Acid paper. Unless especially purchased, you throw your paper in some acid removal bath, you will eventually get the good old "yellow paper" syndrome, after even 10 years. Worst papers will dry out and chip out, and make them irrecoverable after a tiny few years.
- Fading inks. The worst culprits are of course thermal printers, as you are even suggested by the retailers to xerox your invoices if you want to have a chance of getting something else than a white piece of paper... But even in the ink realms, many tests were made, and most are getting washed out after a few years.
Frankly, since the '70s, our generation will probably be totally washed out to archaeologists.
hehehe :) This is precisely what I wrote.
1 DVD copy. 1 HD copy. 1 "live HD" copy. Update everytime there's a major change.
People who say HDD have their heads in the sand. 20 years. Think about that. 1988. SCSI-1 40 pins. Nearing the end of MFM/RLE. Parallel.
People who say CDs and DVDs again have their heads in the sand. That's the Floppy Era.
The best format IMHO is the "current" format. DVDs + HDDs along with a live copy on your computer. DVDs and HDDs should be at two of your friend's houses.
5-10 years later, once one of the formats is obsolete (EXT3 is now EXT8, DVDs are now expensive again in drug stores), it's time to copy these to the new "current" format, and repeat the process.
On topic, that's not the first time I've seen this kind of behavior, it becomes quite clear after a while that people with a strong grip tend to get these power positions. I've had once in a while the need to manage open communities and I call them "the cattle", meaning if you give them a direction, they will go there but if you don't, everything simply stagnates and dies down on its own. Once you get a few "dogs" running around, it gives the cattle reason to move from their comfort zone and actually do something for the community, in the intended direction.
From what I've seen, Alpha "dogs" are usually self-proclaimed, since everyone else is busy minding their own grass grazing, they tend to stand out, get picked up quickly as community leaders and get a bunch of devout followers. I've seen this in bulletin boards, in OSS projects (Strangely, OpenBSD comes to mind, but I didn't participate in that one), in group projects and of course in WoW guilds. Of course, when comes time of a disagreement, these alpha will scream and claw their way out, as if their lives depended on this. This is also why I tend _not_ to participate or argument in the patches I am sending. I find something weird, I tell the group, send what I've done (if I could find the bug) and that's the extent of my participation, thank you for all the fish. If the patch isn't applied, I apply it everytime I update the code.
At work, I use the "if you can defend the idea, you can do it" system. I protect, but then I know I cannot do all the things myself, and I also need to accept digressions. We are blessed with people who are not asocial dorks, so we can ask them to argument a little. Then, we're 2 totally opposite programmers managing this, and usually, the meet-in-the-middle works well for the project, as I tend to overthink stuff, while the other tend to be overgeneralist.
It goes back to the fundamental question of who is your client though. If you are doing your piece of work for yourself, then you are your sole client, and everyone else can simply buzz off. If you are doing this for other people also, then they are as much a client as yourself, and they must be satisfied too.
I once wanted to start now what is called a Wiki, but back then it was a novel idea. I tried to get my friends involved, and they all wanted to grab the project and bring it to their ideals. The fact I was ready to discuss meant the project never started, since no one agreed on the direction. Everyone were saying "well it's a great idea, but shouldn't you blah blah blah". So again, I do understand there must be a central direction, and someone in charge. Some egos will get bruised that's for sure. That might be the case, it did happen also to g++ compiler, it branched, and eventually they merged. However, to be able to recognize something is not adequate for most people is a huge step. The best example are skins, and firefox that still got a crapload of hidden parameters you can use to tweak the way firefox behaves. This is the same principle.
... because if you don't, game designers/programmers use a different engine, you lose money, and go out of business. If the Pidgin devs don't do what their users want, maybe they lose a few users. So what? Maybe they lose 60% of their users. So what? What you're saying makes complete and total sense for a company selling a software product, but doesn't necessarily apply to an OSS project with significant unpaid contributions. This is right. However, the "so what" is getting many egos from many people bruised at the same time, since many contributors will post elements in the best intentions to better that software because they find it exemplary. At work, we are using a lot of oss (all legally, mind you, I'm anal on the subject) for many tasks, and when we find odd behaviors, we usually patch it and send the patch to the vendor (except if it requires going through too many hoops), and they decide what they want to do with it. We don't have that particular project's vision so our patch might break a lot of things. Some react correctly (Zlib comes to mind), some react by telling our option is debatable, but is not an option, which we find fine (mesa for example), some flatly ignore what we're doing for versions and versions, that is their prerogative, and we've done our part, but these are the ones we don't like since they frankly don't care about us.OSS has the opportunity that if someone wants to take weeks of his time to make a complete makeover of a project, he can fork Pidgin (for example) and then make a cleaned-up code base version. Then, Pidgin can accept or not that new code base, and they can coexist or not, or they can lend themselves code. Eventually, if they both work well, they can merge. This is a good fork. What Pidgin is getting here is a very vocal disagreement, someone slamming the door and doing "their stuff" on their side.
I don't think it's a service to the community to be so obnoxious personally.
Then, the goal of a piece of software is usually not to be self-centered but actually to follow what their clients are requiring. If there's one comment of someone saying "it would be cool to do this", it usually can be ignored if the requested feature requires a lot of code shuffling. If it sparks a minor revolution, I think developers should take notice. Oh, agreed, definitely. It's just that the cost in refactoring (both in the actual implementation, and the testing and bug-fixing in the refactored version) might be much higher than the benefit you get for adding the feature that prompts the refactoring. My guess is a particular piece of software should be refactored once every now and then, its innards should be rewritten. And usually, that moment becomes painfully clear the day you are constantly tweaking and nudging stuff to make it work as intended, instead of taking time to code new cool stuff.
So far, after 3 years of work on an engine, I'd guess we're at 4 major rewrites, last one being a few months ago. Most of the code have been changed, and we are following what game designers and programmers are telling us, even if it means rewriting large chunks of code. If they have good arguments and if we can't defend ourselves against their arguments, then it means their way wins. Even our best intentions are getting nailed and we bite our lips, cringe, and rewrite to follow what they want. There's leadership, and I sometimes say "no because