Don't just go to a gym because you feel like you need to go to a gym. Experiment with different activities until you find one you really enjoy. I was lucky enough to discover rollerblading when i started college. When i started putting on weight after college it was easy to convince myself to go rollerblading more often because it was something i enjoyed.
On the downside it's not much fun to go rollerblading in the winter, even in a place like California, so i tended to lose ground for four or five months of the year until i was introduced to rock climbing by a friend. Now during the winter i go to the climbing gym more and rollerblade less, and during the summer i rollerblade more and go to the gym less. And as an added bonus the local climbing gym has a small room in back with various exercise equipment. I never was willing to sign up at a regular gym just to use their equipment, but as long as i've already got a membership at the climbing gym i find myself using the equipment there more and more.
So in short the more active things you can find to do that you actually enjoy the easier it is to set up a regular exercise schedule. If you look at exercise as something you loathe but need to force yourself to do, you're naturally going to find excuses not to do it.
An article about astronomical observations of a gas and so far we've already got three fart jokes and one random insult. I see Slashdot is living up to form.
(And what did Phil Plait ever do to you AC? Or do you have an irrational grudge against any scientists who actually tries to educate laypeople?)
Because they're astronomers and not astro-physicists or physicists.
If you mean why are they observing nearby stars instead of whatever observations you think would help astro-physicists and physicists with the kind of research you think is important, that would be because not everyone has your priorities.
1: It's quite possible that knowing what's immediately around us will prove of more practical value than high level physics. High level physics _might_ enable fantastic new technologies. Or it might not. Or it might, but at a much later date. We might end up launching unmanned probes and generation ships to nearby systems long before we get anything of practical benefit from high level physics.
2: If you want to base it on pure knowledge instead of practical results, why can't some people be more curious about what's around us than about esoteric forms of matter? Maybe finding out more about local systems (the ones we can observe most easily) will give us better ideas about where to look for alien intelligence, and wouldn't finding another intelligent race be just as amazing as figuring out what/where the dark matter is?
3: Return on investment. There is plenty of investment into high level physics. How do you think the Higgs Boson was (probably) found? But we've already picked a lot of the low hanging fruit in that area. Clearly the explosion in exoplanet data in recent years means technology has advanced to the point where such discoveries are fairly easy. No one knows for sure what we need to do to find the dark matter, but we know what we need to do to find more/more about exoplanets, so it's almost a guaranteed return on investment.
Look, there were a lot of early aviation pioneers, and they all helped contribute to the field. Having nationalistic fights over which of them was "first" under some specific criteria isn't important. What's important is remembering that the Mario brothers kicked the Wright brothers' asses.
Not a nasty, dirty, wet cave, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy cave with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-cave, and that means comfort.
I've heard a story or two like that from a couple coworkers before. Except in their case it was at a software company that was going through a series of long and agonized death throes. Somehow in one of the very early sets of layoffs HR managed to eliminate one or more managers without laying off or reassigning the people who were reporting to them.
They said the office turned into a kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland, with silent, deserted corridors. The employees would sneak into their offices in the morning, shut the door, and stay there for the entire day hoping no one would notice they had nothing to do and no one in charge of them. The smart ones of course spent that time forwarding their resumes around to other companies.
I sure hope you're joking. At least i'm totally boggled by the idea that increasing the throughput on shoveling food into your mouth could be the highest priority. I already eat too fast as it is, and i don't really need to focus on having _more_ time to sit and watch the other people at the table eat after having finished all my own food.
That said though, cutting a piece at a time is definitely more time efficient. (So perhaps i should switch to your method to slow myself down?) When cutting all at once you have to stab the meat with the fork, cut the piece, unstab the piece so you can move onto cutting the next piece, and then stab it a second time when you're ready to move it to your mouth. If you do it a piece at at time you stab the piece, cut it, and immediately transfer it to your mouth. That's two less fork operations per piece of meat that need to be performed.
As for putting the knife down so you can switch the fork to your primary hand, SRSLY? I'm equally skilled at handling a fork with either hand. Forking food into your mouth isn't exactly a high-dexterity operation. I don't gain any speed benefit from using the fork in my right hand instead of my left, i only lose time from making the switch. It seems like the "cut all the meat at once" strategy is just a poor attempt to minimize the downsides of a fundamentally inefficient method.
All and all though, this is a stupid debate, and we're all dumber for having participated it =P (And i definitely include myself in that statement.)
Well first of all, just to be clear, when i say it's easier than getting people to buy a published game, i mean "easier than getting a game of this type through the publishing process and then getting enough of us to buy it in stores to make the publisher interested in doing it again."
Like you said, fair or not, the market was not deemed big enough for traditional publishers to support these kinds of games. You can blame whoever you want, publishers for blindly following trends, the FPS crowd for providing a trend to follow, the money people for choosing to focus on a smaller number of "sure thing" blockbusters, whatever. The empirical evidence is that this style of game used to be published much more frequently, but for whatever reason it has mostly died off in the traditional marketplace.
Likewise the empirical evidence currently seems to indicate that these games _can_ survive via Kickstarter, indie developers, and other alternate methods. I think part of it is bypassing the need to convince publishers that the sales will be "large enough" to risk funding it, and part of it is bypassing the need to convince GameStop the sales will be large enough to take shelf space away from Modern Call of Halo 14. But in the case of Kickstarter at least i also think part of it is putting us as the purchasing audience on the spot. "You want this game? Fine. Put up the money right now. Not a month from now when you've finished off whatever game you're playing at the moment. Not six months from now when it hits the bargain bin. And especially not off the used rack for $5 off. Give the money directly to us up front, right now."
Perhaps i'm attempting to draw conclusions from a too small set of anecdotal data, but it seems like in some ways it's easier to kickstart these things than it is to get people to buy a published game that's already been through the development process.
I've contributed to Wasteland 2 and several other smaller game projects that looked particularly interesting to me, and i'll probably contribute to this too. Several of the games i've contributed to have already come, either in full or demo form, and i don't think i've played more than about 5-10 minutes total of all of them. Not because i'm not interested, i've just been busy.
Ni No Kuni is an awesome game. Or at least it sure looks awesome, and i've heard good things about it from friends. I've been interested in it for quite awhile. After the usual long wait for Japanese games it finally came out in the US about a month ago. Have i bought a copy yet? Nope. I don't have the time to play it right now, and it will still be there a few weeks, or a few months, or even a few years from now, in used format if nothing else. And the odds are it will only get cheaper as time goes on. I realize that i probably ought to buy a new copy sooner rather than later, just to encourage the development of those kinds of games, and maybe that motivation will manage to overcome the apathy about performing a task for which i will receive no immediate reward, but maybe not.
On the other hand the Kickstarter games require an up-front investment. If i want to be sure the game will exist for me to play in the future i need to put money down _now_. Even if the goal has already been met there are usually stretch goals, or at the very least one can generally calculate that the higher the funding the higher quality the game will eventually be.
And it certainly doesn't hurt that you can usually jump into a Kickstarter at a very low level. It looks like for Torment i can get a copy of the game for just $20. But if the tiers are structured intelligently then once i've decided i'm going to pledge _something_ it's often easy to talk myself up the ladder. "If i just add $5/$10/whatever more then i can get this extra cool thing!" And of course it's much easier to feel a connection with the developer when you're contributing to their campaign, unlike when you hand some cash over to a random GameStop employee. That's a pretty intangible benefit, but it does exit.
I realize that a big part of the "problem" here is just my own laziness at putting off buying new games, but Kickstarter definitely seems like a very neat solution to the "problem" in my particular case.
What's even funnier though is that it isn't even true! A quick google check for video games released in February 2003 led to this page which shows there were more than 30 PC games released that month. I didn't even have to go through all of them to find 10 other games that got better scores according to GameRankings. And that's just counting PC games! (Although to be fair, MoO 3 wasn't the _worst_ game to come out that month either. There were two or three that managed to outscore it at sucking, and another two or three that came pretty close.)
We can hope... but as it stands now, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the end of the SimCity series -- Maxis' version of Master of Orion III, if you will.
Hey! That's unfair!
In the case of Master of Orion 3 an always-on requirement that prevented you from playing the game at all would have been a great feature.
This is one of the dumbest questions ever. People don't generally go around boycotting things because of stuff they agree with. As much as people seem to think boycotting Card because of his expressed views is a dumb idea, unilaterally boycotting _any_ artist who expressed _any_ ideas, regardless of what those ideas were, would clearly be even dumber.
Everyone is free to express whatever opinions they want, but if they insist on doing so loudly, using whatever platform their fame and money enables them, then they should expect to be judged by the court of popular opinion. Maybe what they believe isn't what most of the population that peruses their art believes, in which case they can probably expect some negative effect. Maybe what they believe dovetails with what their market believes and they'll be lauded for it. Maybe they'll decide to express beliefs other than what they actually believe in order to pander to their perceived market. (Which would probably work out well, right until they slipped up and everyone found out what they really thought.) Or maybe they'll keep their mouths shut in public and just let their art speak for itself. It's up to them.
I'm quite willing to separate the artist from the art, as long as the artist doesn't insist on using the fame and money that comes with the success of their art to promote political causes i strongly disagree with. If an artist chooses to loudly proclaim their politics and donate money to political causes they're going to have to accept that people are going to judge them based on it and it may very well have an effect on their sales.
Does it suck that they can't be both politicians and artists at the same time without catching some flak for it? A little. But from time to time everyone has to make choices about what they really want out of life because various desires conflict with each other. Card made his choice, and he has to live with the consequences. If i am ever lucky enough to become a famous artist (fat chance, but still) then i will also get to choose between keeping my voice down about my politics or accepting that i would likely be boycotted by the religious right. And you know what? I'd consider myself damn lucky to be in the position where i was faced with that dilemma.
There are a number of artists who i happen to know have political views i disagree with (not to mention an unknown number more who've been quiet enough that i don't even know i disagree with them) but because they don't push those views on others, either in their art or in public forums, i still purchase and enjoy their art.
And since it doesn't seem like it's been mentioned yet, Google can't even stop Amazon, another American company that has to follow all the US rules on copyright and patents, from making their own incredibly successful fork of Android and cutting Google out of the revenue stream entirely. Why does China, who generally takes a "look the other way" attitude even when actual copyright and patent issues are involved, feel like they need to be concerned in this case?
There are already a number of Android forks in China, including one by the Chinese search giant Baidu, who has also replaced Google as the default search engine in most of the Android phones there.
Hmmm, GP says they'd rather avoid people when they're stressed and tired and not in the mood.
You then respond by getting judgmental. You toss out a platitude about the benefits of human interaction and then proceed to insult them. Cause there's nothing like being snide to encourage human interaction. (I guess being insulted could technically count as "invigorating", not so sure about the "refreshing" part though.)
You know, just going by the sample comments, i think i'd rather talk to the GP when the GP is in the mood to talk, and just avoid you. Unless you want to make the defense that you're currently stressed and tired and not really up to decent human interaction at the moment?
I'm a pedant. I don't like seeing claims unverified or falsehoods left unchallenged in general. I don't really approve of the attitude "well that's not true, but it's not that big a deal so let's just let it slide." Of course it doesn't help in this specific case that Apple and its fans tend to aggravate me by making a big deal out of "new" features that their competitors have already had for awhile.
The more important question is, why do you care? You say it's not that important, and yet you felt compelled to jump into the conversation anyways and stick with it for a second reply. I would think that arguing about whether people should be arguing about something you think isn't important would be even less important than the original argument.
From TFS: "This can be a $6 billion opportunity for Apple, with plenty of opportunity for upside if they create something totally new like they did with the iPod"
I don't care if Apple makes a device that's new or not, but i am not just willing to credit Apple for doing things they didn't do (nor apparently is the person who started this sub-thread.) I'm willing to grant Apple fans all the correct superlatives they want. Were the iPod and iPhone well designed? Sure. Were they marketed well and did they make tons of money? Yeah. Were they something totally new? No.
And i don't agree with diluting the term "something totally new" to "the first version of this kind of product that had exceptional sales."
I realize that you are not the person who wrote the original article (at least i presume not) but as a community Apple fans seem to have a habit of moving the goalposts. Apple fan #1 says "[awesome thing #1] about Apple". Someone points out that [awesome thing #1] isn't actually true, at which point Apple fan #2 responds "well that doesn't matter, because of [awesome thing #2] about Apple".
I'm not saying [awesome thing #2] necessarily isn't true or isn't relevant to Apple as a whole, but Apple fans using it as an argument in response to a rebuttal of some totally different [awesome thing] is not really germane. Either defend [awesome thing #1] if you think it is true, or leave the argument alone if you agree it isn't.
Okay, i just recently defended Jobs as being a brilliant marketer, a douchebag, but a brilliant marketer. So as much as i hate Apple i'm willing to give them credit where credit is due. And yes, making an "easy to use" "slick" device with a good marketing campaign is a GREAT business strategy. However that does not make the device in question totally new. Many companies have benefited from Second mover advantage. All of them did a great job of taking a product that already existed, ironing out the bugs, adding some basic improvements, and selling it well.
There already exist Android watches, and watch add-ons for Android smartphones. The only novel thing about the iWatch that i've heard so far, if it's true, is the use of a flexible screen to make it in the form of a slap bracelet. But slap bracelets have been around since the 80s and slap bracelet watches have been around for awhile too. If slap bracelet watches already exist, and smart watches already exist, combining the two may be cool, but i'm not entirely sure it's novel. Even so i think it would be more innovation than went into the iPod (again, if it's true.)
Look, i'm with you on the douchebag thing, but what the GP was pointing out was that Jobs did an amazing job (er, so to speak) of selling product. Love him or hate him, Jobs was good at marketing and trying to deny that won't fool anyone but yourself. Whether he did that by figuring out what the consumer wanted or by convincing the consumer they wanted what he had is outside the scope of this discussion.
The thing is there are two ways of selling a product, convincing the market that what you have is better, or convincing the market that what your competitors have is worse. It's often easier to take the second path, because it's usually easier to knock something down than to build something up. However it's also a riskier path. Sometimes when you try to knock down the competitor instead of deciding to buy your product the market ends up thinking you're a bully or an asshole.
And it can get really problematic if you're also selling a product that shares traits with the competitor's product that you're knocking. If your company sells cars and motorcycles, then _maybe_ you can get away with telling people "you should buy our motorcycles, because cars suck" if you can restrict your message to people you know are inclined to like motorcycles. But if the message starts leaking into channels populated by the people who usually buy cars it may not go over so well. Telling people they should buy your motorcycles because motorcycles are awesome, and your motorcycles are especially awesome is safer, but it requires more talent (and a better product) to make that message stick.
That's a very bold claim! GUIs are only very good at one thing, suggesting context to the user.
I think you're lumping all the babies into one basket to throw out with the bathwater. I like CLIs, but if you want to have multiple windows that is a GUI, and being able to have multiple windows is incredibly useful. (I know you can "fake" multiple windows in CLI, i've done it before with emacs and such, but it's a pretty limited both in the number of "windows" you can create and in functionality of those windows.) GUIs are much better for multi-tasking, you can have one task going in one window and keep an eye on it while working in another window. If you're comparing two bits of code you can have them both open in separate windows side by side. Having all the tasks you have going visible in the taskbar for easy context switching is also incredibly useful.
I realize you're mainly railing against the practice of entering commands and information via pressing GUI buttons as opposed to typing in commands on the keyboard, but you're painting the entire CLI vs GUI thing in very absolute black and white terms, and reality is much more grey. Either you don't like multitasking in windowed environments, even if the windows are all CLIs, which i don't think most people would agree with, or you're defining the features of a GUI as "the parts i don't think are necessary."
It's not just that, but the Nook and the brick and mortar stores have at least _some_ synergy together. The one thing Amazon doesn't have is a physical storefront where you can go browse books. I will on occasion go to B&N, browse through the shelves until i find a book i like, and then buy the ebook on my Nook if the price isn't too bad. There are definitely ways that B&N could work on encouraging that relationship.
They could add a cheap camera to the Nook tablet (at least i don't think it has one already?) so you could scan the barcode of a book and have it take you straight to that page on the B&N site so you could purchase it right away without having to do a search. Maybe they could start stocking "preview" versions of books, a thin thing with the first 20 or so pages of a book so you could sample it and then scan the barcode if you liked it. That would let them pack a lot of books into limited shelf space and maybe eliminate the problem where you find something that looks interesting, but it turns out to be the third book in the series and they don't have the first two in the store.
But if you split the two companies then you've got a brick & mortar store that's going to struggle alone in the same market that Borders failed in, and an online store and ebook device that will be going up against Amazon and the Kindle alone with no clear competitive advantage. (Aside from geeks like me who like _slightly_ less DRM and companies that haven't gone insane with patenting everything that moves.)
The primary plot of Robert J Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax is about a quantum rift that allows travel between our world and one where the Neanderthals ended up out-competing Homo Sapiens. However it postulates the Neanderthals developing a very different society from ours, including exactly the kind of "record your entire life" technology you're talking about.
The books make it sound like a great thing... if your entire society and legal system is set up to deal with it. Trying to get there from our current society however would involve a lot of pain and difficulty, both because of the personal expectations of privacy and our current nosy legal system.
(Note that the above wikipedia link is quite detailed. If you've got the time and interest it would be better to skip that and read the books.)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't just go to a gym because you feel like you need to go to a gym. Experiment with different activities until you find one you really enjoy. I was lucky enough to discover rollerblading when i started college. When i started putting on weight after college it was easy to convince myself to go rollerblading more often because it was something i enjoyed.
On the downside it's not much fun to go rollerblading in the winter, even in a place like California, so i tended to lose ground for four or five months of the year until i was introduced to rock climbing by a friend. Now during the winter i go to the climbing gym more and rollerblade less, and during the summer i rollerblade more and go to the gym less. And as an added bonus the local climbing gym has a small room in back with various exercise equipment. I never was willing to sign up at a regular gym just to use their equipment, but as long as i've already got a membership at the climbing gym i find myself using the equipment there more and more.
So in short the more active things you can find to do that you actually enjoy the easier it is to set up a regular exercise schedule. If you look at exercise as something you loathe but need to force yourself to do, you're naturally going to find excuses not to do it.
An article about astronomical observations of a gas and so far we've already got three fart jokes and one random insult. I see Slashdot is living up to form.
(And what did Phil Plait ever do to you AC? Or do you have an irrational grudge against any scientists who actually tries to educate laypeople?)
espouses church teachings on homosexuality, abortion and contraception
So nothing important is going to change then? Or am i misreading that?
Because they're astronomers and not astro-physicists or physicists.
If you mean why are they observing nearby stars instead of whatever observations you think would help astro-physicists and physicists with the kind of research you think is important, that would be because not everyone has your priorities.
1: It's quite possible that knowing what's immediately around us will prove of more practical value than high level physics. High level physics _might_ enable fantastic new technologies. Or it might not. Or it might, but at a much later date. We might end up launching unmanned probes and generation ships to nearby systems long before we get anything of practical benefit from high level physics.
2: If you want to base it on pure knowledge instead of practical results, why can't some people be more curious about what's around us than about esoteric forms of matter? Maybe finding out more about local systems (the ones we can observe most easily) will give us better ideas about where to look for alien intelligence, and wouldn't finding another intelligent race be just as amazing as figuring out what/where the dark matter is?
3: Return on investment. There is plenty of investment into high level physics. How do you think the Higgs Boson was (probably) found? But we've already picked a lot of the low hanging fruit in that area. Clearly the explosion in exoplanet data in recent years means technology has advanced to the point where such discoveries are fairly easy. No one knows for sure what we need to do to find the dark matter, but we know what we need to do to find more/more about exoplanets, so it's almost a guaranteed return on investment.
Look, there were a lot of early aviation pioneers, and they all helped contribute to the field. Having nationalistic fights over which of them was "first" under some specific criteria isn't important. What's important is remembering that the Mario brothers kicked the Wright brothers' asses.
Not a nasty, dirty, wet cave, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy cave with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-cave, and that means comfort.
I've heard a story or two like that from a couple coworkers before. Except in their case it was at a software company that was going through a series of long and agonized death throes. Somehow in one of the very early sets of layoffs HR managed to eliminate one or more managers without laying off or reassigning the people who were reporting to them.
They said the office turned into a kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland, with silent, deserted corridors. The employees would sneak into their offices in the morning, shut the door, and stay there for the entire day hoping no one would notice they had nothing to do and no one in charge of them. The smart ones of course spent that time forwarding their resumes around to other companies.
I sure hope you're joking. At least i'm totally boggled by the idea that increasing the throughput on shoveling food into your mouth could be the highest priority. I already eat too fast as it is, and i don't really need to focus on having _more_ time to sit and watch the other people at the table eat after having finished all my own food.
That said though, cutting a piece at a time is definitely more time efficient. (So perhaps i should switch to your method to slow myself down?) When cutting all at once you have to stab the meat with the fork, cut the piece, unstab the piece so you can move onto cutting the next piece, and then stab it a second time when you're ready to move it to your mouth. If you do it a piece at at time you stab the piece, cut it, and immediately transfer it to your mouth. That's two less fork operations per piece of meat that need to be performed.
As for putting the knife down so you can switch the fork to your primary hand, SRSLY? I'm equally skilled at handling a fork with either hand. Forking food into your mouth isn't exactly a high-dexterity operation. I don't gain any speed benefit from using the fork in my right hand instead of my left, i only lose time from making the switch. It seems like the "cut all the meat at once" strategy is just a poor attempt to minimize the downsides of a fundamentally inefficient method.
All and all though, this is a stupid debate, and we're all dumber for having participated it =P (And i definitely include myself in that statement.)
Well first of all, just to be clear, when i say it's easier than getting people to buy a published game, i mean "easier than getting a game of this type through the publishing process and then getting enough of us to buy it in stores to make the publisher interested in doing it again."
Like you said, fair or not, the market was not deemed big enough for traditional publishers to support these kinds of games. You can blame whoever you want, publishers for blindly following trends, the FPS crowd for providing a trend to follow, the money people for choosing to focus on a smaller number of "sure thing" blockbusters, whatever. The empirical evidence is that this style of game used to be published much more frequently, but for whatever reason it has mostly died off in the traditional marketplace.
Likewise the empirical evidence currently seems to indicate that these games _can_ survive via Kickstarter, indie developers, and other alternate methods. I think part of it is bypassing the need to convince publishers that the sales will be "large enough" to risk funding it, and part of it is bypassing the need to convince GameStop the sales will be large enough to take shelf space away from Modern Call of Halo 14. But in the case of Kickstarter at least i also think part of it is putting us as the purchasing audience on the spot. "You want this game? Fine. Put up the money right now. Not a month from now when you've finished off whatever game you're playing at the moment. Not six months from now when it hits the bargain bin. And especially not off the used rack for $5 off. Give the money directly to us up front, right now."
Perhaps i'm attempting to draw conclusions from a too small set of anecdotal data, but it seems like in some ways it's easier to kickstart these things than it is to get people to buy a published game that's already been through the development process.
I've contributed to Wasteland 2 and several other smaller game projects that looked particularly interesting to me, and i'll probably contribute to this too. Several of the games i've contributed to have already come, either in full or demo form, and i don't think i've played more than about 5-10 minutes total of all of them. Not because i'm not interested, i've just been busy.
Ni No Kuni is an awesome game. Or at least it sure looks awesome, and i've heard good things about it from friends. I've been interested in it for quite awhile. After the usual long wait for Japanese games it finally came out in the US about a month ago. Have i bought a copy yet? Nope. I don't have the time to play it right now, and it will still be there a few weeks, or a few months, or even a few years from now, in used format if nothing else. And the odds are it will only get cheaper as time goes on. I realize that i probably ought to buy a new copy sooner rather than later, just to encourage the development of those kinds of games, and maybe that motivation will manage to overcome the apathy about performing a task for which i will receive no immediate reward, but maybe not.
On the other hand the Kickstarter games require an up-front investment. If i want to be sure the game will exist for me to play in the future i need to put money down _now_. Even if the goal has already been met there are usually stretch goals, or at the very least one can generally calculate that the higher the funding the higher quality the game will eventually be.
And it certainly doesn't hurt that you can usually jump into a Kickstarter at a very low level. It looks like for Torment i can get a copy of the game for just $20. But if the tiers are structured intelligently then once i've decided i'm going to pledge _something_ it's often easy to talk myself up the ladder. "If i just add $5/$10/whatever more then i can get this extra cool thing!" And of course it's much easier to feel a connection with the developer when you're contributing to their campaign, unlike when you hand some cash over to a random GameStop employee. That's a pretty intangible benefit, but it does exit.
I realize that a big part of the "problem" here is just my own laziness at putting off buying new games, but Kickstarter definitely seems like a very neat solution to the "problem" in my particular case.
Spearphishing. The deluxe (but easy) way to get unwary employees to put malware on your network.
Hey, if i want to put malware on my network it's even easier to just do it myself.
Ha! That's funny!
What's even funnier though is that it isn't even true! A quick google check for video games released in February 2003 led to this page which shows there were more than 30 PC games released that month. I didn't even have to go through all of them to find 10 other games that got better scores according to GameRankings. And that's just counting PC games! (Although to be fair, MoO 3 wasn't the _worst_ game to come out that month either. There were two or three that managed to outscore it at sucking, and another two or three that came pretty close.)
We can hope ... but as it stands now, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the end of the SimCity series -- Maxis' version of Master of Orion III, if you will.
Hey! That's unfair!
In the case of Master of Orion 3 an always-on requirement that prevented you from playing the game at all would have been a great feature.
This is one of the dumbest questions ever. People don't generally go around boycotting things because of stuff they agree with. As much as people seem to think boycotting Card because of his expressed views is a dumb idea, unilaterally boycotting _any_ artist who expressed _any_ ideas, regardless of what those ideas were, would clearly be even dumber.
Everyone is free to express whatever opinions they want, but if they insist on doing so loudly, using whatever platform their fame and money enables them, then they should expect to be judged by the court of popular opinion. Maybe what they believe isn't what most of the population that peruses their art believes, in which case they can probably expect some negative effect. Maybe what they believe dovetails with what their market believes and they'll be lauded for it. Maybe they'll decide to express beliefs other than what they actually believe in order to pander to their perceived market. (Which would probably work out well, right until they slipped up and everyone found out what they really thought.) Or maybe they'll keep their mouths shut in public and just let their art speak for itself. It's up to them.
I'm quite willing to separate the artist from the art, as long as the artist doesn't insist on using the fame and money that comes with the success of their art to promote political causes i strongly disagree with. If an artist chooses to loudly proclaim their politics and donate money to political causes they're going to have to accept that people are going to judge them based on it and it may very well have an effect on their sales.
Does it suck that they can't be both politicians and artists at the same time without catching some flak for it? A little. But from time to time everyone has to make choices about what they really want out of life because various desires conflict with each other. Card made his choice, and he has to live with the consequences. If i am ever lucky enough to become a famous artist (fat chance, but still) then i will also get to choose between keeping my voice down about my politics or accepting that i would likely be boycotted by the religious right. And you know what? I'd consider myself damn lucky to be in the position where i was faced with that dilemma.
There are a number of artists who i happen to know have political views i disagree with (not to mention an unknown number more who've been quiet enough that i don't even know i disagree with them) but because they don't push those views on others, either in their art or in public forums, i still purchase and enjoy their art.
And since it doesn't seem like it's been mentioned yet, Google can't even stop Amazon, another American company that has to follow all the US rules on copyright and patents, from making their own incredibly successful fork of Android and cutting Google out of the revenue stream entirely. Why does China, who generally takes a "look the other way" attitude even when actual copyright and patent issues are involved, feel like they need to be concerned in this case?
There are already a number of Android forks in China, including one by the Chinese search giant Baidu, who has also replaced Google as the default search engine in most of the Android phones there.
cf. "Android is failing by succeeding in China"
The Google "control" of Android doesn't seem to be doing much to deter Chinese companies.
Hmmm, GP says they'd rather avoid people when they're stressed and tired and not in the mood.
You then respond by getting judgmental. You toss out a platitude about the benefits of human interaction and then proceed to insult them. Cause there's nothing like being snide to encourage human interaction. (I guess being insulted could technically count as "invigorating", not so sure about the "refreshing" part though.)
You know, just going by the sample comments, i think i'd rather talk to the GP when the GP is in the mood to talk, and just avoid you. Unless you want to make the defense that you're currently stressed and tired and not really up to decent human interaction at the moment?
I'm a pedant. I don't like seeing claims unverified or falsehoods left unchallenged in general. I don't really approve of the attitude "well that's not true, but it's not that big a deal so let's just let it slide." Of course it doesn't help in this specific case that Apple and its fans tend to aggravate me by making a big deal out of "new" features that their competitors have already had for awhile.
The more important question is, why do you care? You say it's not that important, and yet you felt compelled to jump into the conversation anyways and stick with it for a second reply. I would think that arguing about whether people should be arguing about something you think isn't important would be even less important than the original argument.
From TFS: "This can be a $6 billion opportunity for Apple, with plenty of opportunity for upside if they create something totally new like they did with the iPod"
I don't care if Apple makes a device that's new or not, but i am not just willing to credit Apple for doing things they didn't do (nor apparently is the person who started this sub-thread.) I'm willing to grant Apple fans all the correct superlatives they want. Were the iPod and iPhone well designed? Sure. Were they marketed well and did they make tons of money? Yeah. Were they something totally new? No.
And i don't agree with diluting the term "something totally new" to "the first version of this kind of product that had exceptional sales."
I realize that you are not the person who wrote the original article (at least i presume not) but as a community Apple fans seem to have a habit of moving the goalposts. Apple fan #1 says "[awesome thing #1] about Apple". Someone points out that [awesome thing #1] isn't actually true, at which point Apple fan #2 responds "well that doesn't matter, because of [awesome thing #2] about Apple".
I'm not saying [awesome thing #2] necessarily isn't true or isn't relevant to Apple as a whole, but Apple fans using it as an argument in response to a rebuttal of some totally different [awesome thing] is not really germane. Either defend [awesome thing #1] if you think it is true, or leave the argument alone if you agree it isn't.
Okay, i just recently defended Jobs as being a brilliant marketer, a douchebag, but a brilliant marketer. So as much as i hate Apple i'm willing to give them credit where credit is due. And yes, making an "easy to use" "slick" device with a good marketing campaign is a GREAT business strategy. However that does not make the device in question totally new. Many companies have benefited from Second mover advantage. All of them did a great job of taking a product that already existed, ironing out the bugs, adding some basic improvements, and selling it well.
There already exist Android watches, and watch add-ons for Android smartphones. The only novel thing about the iWatch that i've heard so far, if it's true, is the use of a flexible screen to make it in the form of a slap bracelet. But slap bracelets have been around since the 80s and slap bracelet watches have been around for awhile too. If slap bracelet watches already exist, and smart watches already exist, combining the two may be cool, but i'm not entirely sure it's novel. Even so i think it would be more innovation than went into the iPod (again, if it's true.)
Look, i'm with you on the douchebag thing, but what the GP was pointing out was that Jobs did an amazing job (er, so to speak) of selling product. Love him or hate him, Jobs was good at marketing and trying to deny that won't fool anyone but yourself. Whether he did that by figuring out what the consumer wanted or by convincing the consumer they wanted what he had is outside the scope of this discussion.
The thing is there are two ways of selling a product, convincing the market that what you have is better, or convincing the market that what your competitors have is worse. It's often easier to take the second path, because it's usually easier to knock something down than to build something up. However it's also a riskier path. Sometimes when you try to knock down the competitor instead of deciding to buy your product the market ends up thinking you're a bully or an asshole.
And it can get really problematic if you're also selling a product that shares traits with the competitor's product that you're knocking. If your company sells cars and motorcycles, then _maybe_ you can get away with telling people "you should buy our motorcycles, because cars suck" if you can restrict your message to people you know are inclined to like motorcycles. But if the message starts leaking into channels populated by the people who usually buy cars it may not go over so well. Telling people they should buy your motorcycles because motorcycles are awesome, and your motorcycles are especially awesome is safer, but it requires more talent (and a better product) to make that message stick.
That's a very bold claim! GUIs are only very good at one thing, suggesting context to the user.
I think you're lumping all the babies into one basket to throw out with the bathwater. I like CLIs, but if you want to have multiple windows that is a GUI, and being able to have multiple windows is incredibly useful. (I know you can "fake" multiple windows in CLI, i've done it before with emacs and such, but it's a pretty limited both in the number of "windows" you can create and in functionality of those windows.) GUIs are much better for multi-tasking, you can have one task going in one window and keep an eye on it while working in another window. If you're comparing two bits of code you can have them both open in separate windows side by side. Having all the tasks you have going visible in the taskbar for easy context switching is also incredibly useful.
I realize you're mainly railing against the practice of entering commands and information via pressing GUI buttons as opposed to typing in commands on the keyboard, but you're painting the entire CLI vs GUI thing in very absolute black and white terms, and reality is much more grey. Either you don't like multitasking in windowed environments, even if the windows are all CLIs, which i don't think most people would agree with, or you're defining the features of a GUI as "the parts i don't think are necessary."
It's not just that, but the Nook and the brick and mortar stores have at least _some_ synergy together. The one thing Amazon doesn't have is a physical storefront where you can go browse books. I will on occasion go to B&N, browse through the shelves until i find a book i like, and then buy the ebook on my Nook if the price isn't too bad. There are definitely ways that B&N could work on encouraging that relationship.
They could add a cheap camera to the Nook tablet (at least i don't think it has one already?) so you could scan the barcode of a book and have it take you straight to that page on the B&N site so you could purchase it right away without having to do a search. Maybe they could start stocking "preview" versions of books, a thin thing with the first 20 or so pages of a book so you could sample it and then scan the barcode if you liked it. That would let them pack a lot of books into limited shelf space and maybe eliminate the problem where you find something that looks interesting, but it turns out to be the third book in the series and they don't have the first two in the store.
But if you split the two companies then you've got a brick & mortar store that's going to struggle alone in the same market that Borders failed in, and an online store and ebook device that will be going up against Amazon and the Kindle alone with no clear competitive advantage. (Aside from geeks like me who like _slightly_ less DRM and companies that haven't gone insane with patenting everything that moves.)
The primary plot of Robert J Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax is about a quantum rift that allows travel between our world and one where the Neanderthals ended up out-competing Homo Sapiens. However it postulates the Neanderthals developing a very different society from ours, including exactly the kind of "record your entire life" technology you're talking about.
The books make it sound like a great thing... if your entire society and legal system is set up to deal with it. Trying to get there from our current society however would involve a lot of pain and difficulty, both because of the personal expectations of privacy and our current nosy legal system.
(Note that the above wikipedia link is quite detailed. If you've got the time and interest it would be better to skip that and read the books.)