After they went from making games in house to being just another publisher and then just an agency that licensed the star wars names for games.
This happened in the late 1990's when the X-wing series went from being produced in house and moved to Totally Games. (I don't remember if that was Xwing vs. Tie Fighter or Xwing Alliance). Later on I noticed that they weren't even publishing games. Games were being released by Activision or EA.
I know the space combat sim died 10 and going on 15 years ago. That's why I've spent as much as I have looking forward to Star Citizen.
I wish I could mod you up. 8 years ago I started a project for a client that turned into a company that I sold 2 years ago. I didn't make millions, but made enough to buy a house and a farm that pays me enough rent to cover my living expenses allowing me to work with other startups without having to worry about paying the bills. [Marrying a corporate attorney with an MBA helps too]
At any rate that was at the height of the RoR craze. I was in a college town, actually in law school after spending a few years as a DB/400 admin, but loved computers and databases however knew that my skills with AS/400, AIX, and Perl were at the end of their life.
I was hired to do a project over the summer after 1L. It was going to take me a couple weeks between the end of classes in early May and when my summer internship started in June plus give me a few thousand $$$ for the next semester.
Well we were set up at the university business incubator and there were a couple developer shops in there, or people trying to be developers. So we'd see each other talk shop and after all they were always looking for new business to help them pay the bills while they worked on their own "big ideas". A couple of them were big Ruby on Rails guys. So I went to their office and they were showing me how they could write a blog in 15 minutes and how easy Ruby was. I shrugged and said, "Okay, this is just like perl modules & CPAN or PHP & PEAR". Then I got lectured on how it was nothing like CPAN or PEAR. I rolled my eyes a bit and then began asking questions about security and scalability.
After all I had worked with clients in the financial and medical sectors. My summer job/internship (I was being paid $20 an hour) was with a medical supply company that needed to bring its business & software (20 year old DOS program) into compliance with new Medicaid/Medicare regulations & procedures. Security and scaling were concerns in those industries.
I remember asking the Ruby guys about how they scaled their MySQL database. I was leaning towards PostgreSQL for my project, but hey maybe they knew something I didn't. The RoR guys shrugged and said, "Oh, see with media temple that all happens automagically". I knew they had no idea what the hell they were talking about when it came to infrastructure.
As I got to going around to more developer conferences as well as interviewing programmers to work for us it seems like I heard the exact same things from Ruby evangelists until about 2009. Then suddenly it seemed like I didn't hear jack about Ruby nor did I see it on resumes.
I ended up doing the project for my client in PostgreSQL & PHP deployed on FreeBSD servers. Worked well enough that I didn't go back to law school. Version 2 involved an API written in Perl of all things and process $250k a day in orders until we sold the company in 2010 without a problem.
My Xbox 360 is now a glorified Netflix player. I was looking at Battlefield 4 and the next gen consoles. Frankly I'm BSD fan and the PS4 intrigues me.
12 Years ago I switch to mac for my primary computer platform. As a computer, especially, for work it's done it's job extremely well as I worked around *iux environments and had MS Office. I own a total of 3 games: Knights of the Old Republic (bought on a may 4th deal), Wing Commander Privateer (GOG/Dosbox), and Falcon 4 Allied Force.
When I wanted to play games, that's what I got the Xbox for. But @ $500 for a console it begs the question of whether or not it's time to go back to the PC. Especially with Star Citizen coming out. SC runs okay on my MBP (I have Windows 7 via Bootcamp). But for $500 I can upgrade the home PC (new PSU & Graphics card, has a quad core 3Ghz CPU & 16GB of Ram) and get a decent quality HOTAS & Pedel set up.
Actually it's not against the law. Apple has a monopoly on iPhones. They do not have anywhere near a monopoly in the mobile phone market where Samsung is now outselling them plus the other android markets.
It's like buying a Gillette razor and then complaining that they won't allow you to use Bic blades on the razor.
Now if Google said, anyone who makes an Android phone must use a qualified Google-Cable, oh and only Motorola phones have this cable connector because we own motorola mobility.
I don't think people understand how quickly things break down. If there is mass panic, there police aren't going to be there. Just ask the people who lived in Koreatown in LA 20 years ago.
I live in an upscale volvo driving neighborhood. I've gotten dirty looks from neighbors carrying a rifle case to and from my car to go to the range before. They've even ask, and in once case, demanded to know why I own firearms.
First answer, most of my guns I inherited from my grandfather. Some of them even belonged to my great grandfather. He bought me my M1903 springfield, from the government, when I was 10 thanks to the Civilian Marksmanship Program.
Secondly, I'm under no illusion of what would happen if social services break down. Not likely, but not impossible. That's why I keep a water purifier around along with a generator, 50 gallons of fuel, and guns with ammo. Although that used to be 2 boxes per gun. (Basically enough that if I wanted to go shooting at the rage and didn't have time to buy ammo on the way). Now after this past year I've started stockpiling ammo. I used to buy a small case of 125 rounds of.223 a year. I've been buying that a week for the last 2 months.
If things got that bad I have the family farms I could retreat to down in the country that has its own fresh water supplies. I know the farmers down in there, they know me from years of overseeing and doing some work on the farms. I even know the sheriff. Guess what one of their plans are for their county emergency plan? It's a four page muster of volunteers to form a county Militia to be deputized in the event of extreme emergency. My name is on that muster.
I tell people that up here in the suburbs and I think it blows some of their minds that there, in fact, still government organized militias still on the books and outside of the national guard in this country.
By whose measurement? It's almost impossible to compare the US and most of Europe because the two do not collect the same data. The best guess I've seen is that if you compared the US to the UK using FBI rates, that the US averages 466 violent crimes per 100k and the UK is somewhere around 750 per 100k.
I think it depends. Most days if I am going to be doing a presentation or any type of coding work, like today, then I want my laptop. But I did buy a waterproof cover for my iPad and have used it to work on presentations in the bathtub or even shower. Although usually this is more revising than actual creation. I can't do much outside of edit text or order of presentation slides. If I need to add video, sound, or fancy images, I'm doing that on the laptop.
Has Blender stopped making major UI changes every six months? Because that was what was happening a few years ago. I enjoyed doing 3D as a hobby. Got started with Lightwave in College, but at $3k at the time it was a little pricy for me. Blender was free and while it took more tweaking to get similar results it could be done and it was fun. For me the hobbyist Blender 2.25 ~ 2.41 was great.
Well then Blender began making huge UI changes every few months. By the time I'd relearn it, update files, it would change again. Which meant hours of going back and redoing old shots. And given that I only had a few hours every week I said screw and bought a copy of Lightwave 9 for around $1000.
What amazed me most was while there were new features it took me about a sunday afternoon to relearn myself with the UI of lightwave 9. Frankly it hadn't changed that much since the days of 5.6 I used in College. Lightwave 9 was about 10 years after 5.6. A consistent UI for a decade. Whether it was a good/bad ui is up for debate, but at least it was consistent.
Oh, there is a way to win a middle east conflict. Genghis Khan figured this out during his life time and the same principle still applies. If you are going to fight a war in the middle east: leave no survivors. They seem to understand, and respect, unadulterated violence and little else.
The violence over there only ends with mushroom clouds. At this point I'm convinced of that. Whom ends up nuking whom first/last whatever I don't know. I just don't see anyway of really preventing the powers that be from getting ahold of nuclear weapons. And those powers seem to be bat shit crazy enough to use them too.
It's kinda of like the reddit fake it till you make it. If you have a business or product with 50k likes vs. 1000 likes people start to look at things differently. No one says how you got the 50k likes, but it leaves the impression to people that there is a rabid fan base.
I spent the last year working with emerging fashion designers. It's an industry that thrives on appearances even if there is nothing underneath. My clients were attempting to build likes and interest organically a few at a time. One of them decided to spent $150 on "likes" and followers and got around 20k I believe. Once they got that number, they went from getting 1 or 2 new likes a day to 15 - 20 new likes a day even after the campaign stopped. Same with followers which led them being noticed by a few boutiques around the country leading to picking up 6 new boutiques ordering about $3,500 worth of merchandise for Spring 2014. They found the collection via instagram or pinterest and then contacted the designer. Compared to many other forms of marketing they have tried over the past two years, by far it's been the biggest ROI. Which frankly, surprised me, because I thought it was wasted money at the time.
Once people see that a lot of people "like" something, they are more inclined to like it themselves or explore the product/service further. It's all there to create an illusion. It's the bandwagon effect.
I have a feeling that very soon we'll see people offering "qualified likes" for more $$$.
The ad will detect you using firefox, block the page with a full screen ad that says "Get Google Chrome to continue viewing this site" - Google (AKA the Internet Ad Company).
It was over for blackberry. Mr. CEO could now check his email on the exchange server, sync his calendars, and the rest without the purchase and maintenance of an extra (and rather expensive) Blackberry Enterprise Server. Once that happened, it was game over for Blackberry.
Once Android licensed Exchange it was much the same way.
I run a couple Wordpress sites for people and ran into massive spam problems. Askimet solved many of the comment spams, but not user registration. Eventually found a plug in that inserts random questions like What is the fourth word of the sentence." Or What colour is the sky? That has effectively blocked 99.9% of splog spam.
You mean iWork's Syncing between computers & iOS versions/devices? Yeah, it may work for home users but not for businesses. I learned this the hardway. The iOS versions don't have all the templates compared to the dektops and the ability to share and edit bewteen multiple people doesn't work unless you are all on the same iTunes account. Unfortunately they don't really offer a small business edition of iCloud. I wish they did.
We've ended up with SkyDrive & Office365. It's not without it's own set of problems, but overall meets our needs extremely well. And with the SkyDrive App on iOS we can show powerpoint presentations and edit online if need be from iPads, etc..
The Irony is that Microsoft and Apple both need each other. And Microsoft has started to become far better about opening up support for other devices. With the surface being a no go, MS really needs to revaluate creating a version of Office for iPad.
More likely market saturation rather than competition. Basically at this point most people who want a tablet have one. And unlike phones, people don't seem to be as in a rush to replace them with the latest and greatest. I know a lot of people who bought iPads as attempted laptop replacements and found that it almost worked. I know I went out and got a new laptop.
Ironically I'm on my iPad at the moment waiting for people to arrive and get a meeting started. The presenation and everything is on the iPad. I left the laptop at the office yesterday and felt no need to drive downtown to get it for this meetin this morning. The iPad will work just fine.
As the parent said: Apple created an easy to use GUI and made it work. He didn't say just the Printer Dialog in OSX. Remember the world of printing in Linux prior to Apple taking over CUPS? I do. As much as it's cool to rip apple on/. these days, the next time you can easily attach and use a printer in *iux remember to thank the folks at Apple.
I wonder if Google has realized that Samsung is now the greatest threat to Android and not Apple. I know in building mobile Apps we've changed our policy from testing on the Google Devices, additional handset QA extra to testing "Android" on Galaxy SIII, S4, and Galaxy Tab as that's now what most of our clients now identify as "Android".
Samsung is not a small company and I'm wondering how long it will be until they say, "So long and thanks for the OS. We're forking and replacing your services with our own."
When there is a tornado warning my phone alerts me 3 - 5 minutes before the sirens in the neighborhood go off. That 3 - 5 minutes can mean the difference between getting to the basement and living, being horribly injured as friends of mine in Joplin were, or being dead. I'll leave the feature on.
Honestly at this point between iTunes, Netflix, and the XBox Marketplace chances are I can stream the movie I want to see whether it is a new release or older film. And of the older films, chances are I already own it on DVD or Blu-Ray.
Slashdot Mirror
After they went from making games in house to being just another publisher and then just an agency that licensed the star wars names for games.
This happened in the late 1990's when the X-wing series went from being produced in house and moved to Totally Games. (I don't remember if that was Xwing vs. Tie Fighter or Xwing Alliance). Later on I noticed that they weren't even publishing games. Games were being released by Activision or EA.
I know the space combat sim died 10 and going on 15 years ago. That's why I've spent as much as I have looking forward to Star Citizen.
I wish I could mod you up. 8 years ago I started a project for a client that turned into a company that I sold 2 years ago. I didn't make millions, but made enough to buy a house and a farm that pays me enough rent to cover my living expenses allowing me to work with other startups without having to worry about paying the bills. [Marrying a corporate attorney with an MBA helps too]
At any rate that was at the height of the RoR craze. I was in a college town, actually in law school after spending a few years as a DB/400 admin, but loved computers and databases however knew that my skills with AS/400, AIX, and Perl were at the end of their life.
I was hired to do a project over the summer after 1L. It was going to take me a couple weeks between the end of classes in early May and when my summer internship started in June plus give me a few thousand $$$ for the next semester.
Well we were set up at the university business incubator and there were a couple developer shops in there, or people trying to be developers. So we'd see each other talk shop and after all they were always looking for new business to help them pay the bills while they worked on their own "big ideas". A couple of them were big Ruby on Rails guys. So I went to their office and they were showing me how they could write a blog in 15 minutes and how easy Ruby was. I shrugged and said, "Okay, this is just like perl modules & CPAN or PHP & PEAR". Then I got lectured on how it was nothing like CPAN or PEAR. I rolled my eyes a bit and then began asking questions about security and scalability.
After all I had worked with clients in the financial and medical sectors. My summer job/internship (I was being paid $20 an hour) was with a medical supply company that needed to bring its business & software (20 year old DOS program) into compliance with new Medicaid/Medicare regulations & procedures. Security and scaling were concerns in those industries.
I remember asking the Ruby guys about how they scaled their MySQL database. I was leaning towards PostgreSQL for my project, but hey maybe they knew something I didn't. The RoR guys shrugged and said, "Oh, see with media temple that all happens automagically". I knew they had no idea what the hell they were talking about when it came to infrastructure.
As I got to going around to more developer conferences as well as interviewing programmers to work for us it seems like I heard the exact same things from Ruby evangelists until about 2009. Then suddenly it seemed like I didn't hear jack about Ruby nor did I see it on resumes.
I ended up doing the project for my client in PostgreSQL & PHP deployed on FreeBSD servers. Worked well enough that I didn't go back to law school. Version 2 involved an API written in Perl of all things and process $250k a day in orders until we sold the company in 2010 without a problem.
My Xbox 360 is now a glorified Netflix player. I was looking at Battlefield 4 and the next gen consoles. Frankly I'm BSD fan and the PS4 intrigues me.
12 Years ago I switch to mac for my primary computer platform. As a computer, especially, for work it's done it's job extremely well as I worked around *iux environments and had MS Office. I own a total of 3 games: Knights of the Old Republic (bought on a may 4th deal), Wing Commander Privateer (GOG/Dosbox), and Falcon 4 Allied Force.
When I wanted to play games, that's what I got the Xbox for. But @ $500 for a console it begs the question of whether or not it's time to go back to the PC. Especially with Star Citizen coming out. SC runs okay on my MBP (I have Windows 7 via Bootcamp). But for $500 I can upgrade the home PC (new PSU & Graphics card, has a quad core 3Ghz CPU & 16GB of Ram) and get a decent quality HOTAS & Pedel set up.
Actually it's not against the law. Apple has a monopoly on iPhones. They do not have anywhere near a monopoly in the mobile phone market where Samsung is now outselling them plus the other android markets.
It's like buying a Gillette razor and then complaining that they won't allow you to use Bic blades on the razor.
Now if Google said, anyone who makes an Android phone must use a qualified Google-Cable, oh and only Motorola phones have this cable connector because we own motorola mobility.
Spies are nothing more than criminals with a government badge. Their job, explicitly is go and break laws.
I don't think people understand how quickly things break down. If there is mass panic, there police aren't going to be there. Just ask the people who lived in Koreatown in LA 20 years ago.
I live in an upscale volvo driving neighborhood. I've gotten dirty looks from neighbors carrying a rifle case to and from my car to go to the range before. They've even ask, and in once case, demanded to know why I own firearms.
First answer, most of my guns I inherited from my grandfather. Some of them even belonged to my great grandfather. He bought me my M1903 springfield, from the government, when I was 10 thanks to the Civilian Marksmanship Program.
Secondly, I'm under no illusion of what would happen if social services break down. Not likely, but not impossible. That's why I keep a water purifier around along with a generator, 50 gallons of fuel, and guns with ammo. Although that used to be 2 boxes per gun. (Basically enough that if I wanted to go shooting at the rage and didn't have time to buy ammo on the way). Now after this past year I've started stockpiling ammo. I used to buy a small case of 125 rounds of .223 a year. I've been buying that a week for the last 2 months.
If things got that bad I have the family farms I could retreat to down in the country that has its own fresh water supplies. I know the farmers down in there, they know me from years of overseeing and doing some work on the farms. I even know the sheriff. Guess what one of their plans are for their county emergency plan? It's a four page muster of volunteers to form a county Militia to be deputized in the event of extreme emergency. My name is on that muster.
I tell people that up here in the suburbs and I think it blows some of their minds that there, in fact, still government organized militias still on the books and outside of the national guard in this country.
By whose measurement? It's almost impossible to compare the US and most of Europe because the two do not collect the same data. The best guess I've seen is that if you compared the US to the UK using FBI rates, that the US averages 466 violent crimes per 100k and the UK is somewhere around 750 per 100k.
I think it depends. Most days if I am going to be doing a presentation or any type of coding work, like today, then I want my laptop. But I did buy a waterproof cover for my iPad and have used it to work on presentations in the bathtub or even shower. Although usually this is more revising than actual creation. I can't do much outside of edit text or order of presentation slides. If I need to add video, sound, or fancy images, I'm doing that on the laptop.
Has Blender stopped making major UI changes every six months? Because that was what was happening a few years ago. I enjoyed doing 3D as a hobby. Got started with Lightwave in College, but at $3k at the time it was a little pricy for me. Blender was free and while it took more tweaking to get similar results it could be done and it was fun. For me the hobbyist Blender 2.25 ~ 2.41 was great.
Well then Blender began making huge UI changes every few months. By the time I'd relearn it, update files, it would change again. Which meant hours of going back and redoing old shots. And given that I only had a few hours every week I said screw and bought a copy of Lightwave 9 for around $1000.
What amazed me most was while there were new features it took me about a sunday afternoon to relearn myself with the UI of lightwave 9. Frankly it hadn't changed that much since the days of 5.6 I used in College. Lightwave 9 was about 10 years after 5.6. A consistent UI for a decade. Whether it was a good/bad ui is up for debate, but at least it was consistent.
Oh, there is a way to win a middle east conflict. Genghis Khan figured this out during his life time and the same principle still applies. If you are going to fight a war in the middle east: leave no survivors. They seem to understand, and respect, unadulterated violence and little else.
The violence over there only ends with mushroom clouds. At this point I'm convinced of that. Whom ends up nuking whom first/last whatever I don't know. I just don't see anyway of really preventing the powers that be from getting ahold of nuclear weapons. And those powers seem to be bat shit crazy enough to use them too.
It's kinda of like the reddit fake it till you make it. If you have a business or product with 50k likes vs. 1000 likes people start to look at things differently. No one says how you got the 50k likes, but it leaves the impression to people that there is a rabid fan base.
I spent the last year working with emerging fashion designers. It's an industry that thrives on appearances even if there is nothing underneath. My clients were attempting to build likes and interest organically a few at a time. One of them decided to spent $150 on "likes" and followers and got around 20k I believe. Once they got that number, they went from getting 1 or 2 new likes a day to 15 - 20 new likes a day even after the campaign stopped. Same with followers which led them being noticed by a few boutiques around the country leading to picking up 6 new boutiques ordering about $3,500 worth of merchandise for Spring 2014. They found the collection via instagram or pinterest and then contacted the designer. Compared to many other forms of marketing they have tried over the past two years, by far it's been the biggest ROI. Which frankly, surprised me, because I thought it was wasted money at the time.
Once people see that a lot of people "like" something, they are more inclined to like it themselves or explore the product/service further. It's all there to create an illusion. It's the bandwagon effect.
I have a feeling that very soon we'll see people offering "qualified likes" for more $$$.
by what metric. Isn't Star Citizen up over $15M if you want to talk about raw numbers.
The ad will detect you using firefox, block the page with a full screen ad that says "Get Google Chrome to continue viewing this site" - Google (AKA the Internet Ad Company).
It was over for blackberry. Mr. CEO could now check his email on the exchange server, sync his calendars, and the rest without the purchase and maintenance of an extra (and rather expensive) Blackberry Enterprise Server. Once that happened, it was game over for Blackberry.
Once Android licensed Exchange it was much the same way.
I run a couple Wordpress sites for people and ran into massive spam problems. Askimet solved many of the comment spams, but not user registration. Eventually found a plug in that inserts random questions like What is the fourth word of the sentence." Or What colour is the sky? That has effectively blocked 99.9% of splog spam.
Problem with the pro is the price. I can buy a convertible ultra book for about the same price with more power and do the same thing.
You mean iWork's Syncing between computers & iOS versions/devices? Yeah, it may work for home users but not for businesses. I learned this the hardway. The iOS versions don't have all the templates compared to the dektops and the ability to share and edit bewteen multiple people doesn't work unless you are all on the same iTunes account. Unfortunately they don't really offer a small business edition of iCloud. I wish they did.
We've ended up with SkyDrive & Office365. It's not without it's own set of problems, but overall meets our needs extremely well. And with the SkyDrive App on iOS we can show powerpoint presentations and edit online if need be from iPads, etc..
The Irony is that Microsoft and Apple both need each other. And Microsoft has started to become far better about opening up support for other devices. With the surface being a no go, MS really needs to revaluate creating a version of Office for iPad.
He is the story now. What the governement is doing in terms of spying on its own people is now largely forgotten in the news cycles.
More likely market saturation rather than competition. Basically at this point most people who want a tablet have one. And unlike phones, people don't seem to be as in a rush to replace them with the latest and greatest. I know a lot of people who bought iPads as attempted laptop replacements and found that it almost worked. I know I went out and got a new laptop.
Ironically I'm on my iPad at the moment waiting for people to arrive and get a meeting started. The presenation and everything is on the iPad. I left the laptop at the office yesterday and felt no need to drive downtown to get it for this meetin this morning. The iPad will work just fine.
As the parent said: Apple created an easy to use GUI and made it work. He didn't say just the Printer Dialog in OSX. Remember the world of printing in Linux prior to Apple taking over CUPS? I do. As much as it's cool to rip apple on /. these days, the next time you can easily attach and use a printer in *iux remember to thank the folks at Apple.
I wonder if Google has realized that Samsung is now the greatest threat to Android and not Apple. I know in building mobile Apps we've changed our policy from testing on the Google Devices, additional handset QA extra to testing "Android" on Galaxy SIII, S4, and Galaxy Tab as that's now what most of our clients now identify as "Android".
Samsung is not a small company and I'm wondering how long it will be until they say, "So long and thanks for the OS. We're forking and replacing your services with our own."
More likely: CUPS is owned and supported by Apple. Can't be seen to using an Apple maintained system for printing with android now can we...
Ones that say that yes they do need a warrant. Meh, who am I kidding these days...
When there is a tornado warning my phone alerts me 3 - 5 minutes before the sirens in the neighborhood go off. That 3 - 5 minutes can mean the difference between getting to the basement and living, being horribly injured as friends of mine in Joplin were, or being dead. I'll leave the feature on.
Or rent via iTunes or Google play or XBox.
Honestly at this point between iTunes, Netflix, and the XBox Marketplace chances are I can stream the movie I want to see whether it is a new release or older film. And of the older films, chances are I already own it on DVD or Blu-Ray.
iTunes is how I watch Game of Thrones.