A student discount would be cool, but probably hard to enforce. On the other hand, there are cheaper games available. Not Witcher 2, obviously. The publisher has a monopoly on the distribution of Witcher 2, but not a monopoly on games in general. There's plenty of competition out there, and you can always give your limited money to those competitors. And the cheaper games are often from indie developers, so you're really helping someone there.
I'd say it's fair. They release it without DRM, so presumably legitimate customers won't have to download any cracks in order to get it working on their system.
I'll probably reward this by buying it, although I still haven't finished the original Witcher yet. But by pure coincidence yesterday I decided to continue playing it again.
It was only a few months before iPhone 4 that Android phones were even catching up with the 3GS.
The iPhone 3GS was released in June 2009, the Motorola Droid/Milestone was released in November 2009. That's less than half a year before Android overtook the iPhone, and after the Droid/Milestone, so many other Android devices followed, that suddenly the iPhone was lagging behind for half a year.
It's been almost half a year, and there still aren't any truly competitive Android handsets in terms of overall hardware.
True, but the iPhone also lagged behind for half a year. Give it time. And the iPhone 4 was a pretty big jump. Much bigger than from 3G to 3GS. Android goes in much smaller increments.
The real big issue here is screen resolution, of course. All iPhones had the same resolution, and in order to prevent fragmentation and compatibility problems, Apple didn't want to increase the resolution until they could increase it by 4. Android supports more resolutions and had less problems growing. Only those all had different heights but, if I'm not mistaken, all the same width. So the big question is whether Android already supports bigger widths, or still needs some work. But I'm sure Google is working on that.
Google gets a one-time $15 developer registration fee, plus the usage data of who's downloading what. Roughly, 30% of the app's cost goes to the CELL COMPANY that the app was purchased from. 70% goes to the app developer.
You're thinking of a different, more locked down company that keeps 30% for itself.
You're a bit mixed up here. Google does share revenue with cell companies, but not with all, and how much they share depends on the deal they have with them. They do get money from sales in the Android Market.
Not really. There are more Android phone models per year than iOS phone models per year, but in terms of rate of technological progress, iPhone tends to outpace the industry. Comparing top iPhones one year apart and top Android phones one year apart, the iPhone makes more progress.
You don't have anywhere near enough data points to make such a bold claim. And half the data points contradict it.
Take the first Android phone ever: the G1. Nowhere near the same league as the iPhone 3G that was availlable at the time. A year later, there's the Motorola Milestone, which is already superior to the iPhone 3GS availlable at that time. Yes, the iPhone 4 puts the iPhone at the head of the game again, and it really needed to, because it was seriously falling behind. I don't think it'll be long before there are Android phones that can do all of that and more.
How is a decimeter any less practical or less intuitive than a centimeter?
I don't know, but clearly the decimeter just hasn't caught on in the way the centimeter and the meter have. You make good arguments for why it should have, and the fact that the liter is based on it suggests that people have tried, but clearly it just didn't work out like that.
My argument isn't based on what should or shouldn't work, it's about what actually happened. History. Apparently people just don't need it that much.
The Colour of Magic is kinda the odd one out here. It's more parody, less polished and grew more organically than the others. (Rumour has it it's based on an RPG campaign Pterry wrote for his neighbour.) A lot of people think it's not as good as later books, but others (including me) like it a lot. It's still one of my favourites.
If by "next iterations of the same theme" you mean The Light Fantastic and Sourcery, I'm inclined to agree. The series started by milking Rincewind, but there's a lot of other themes and deeper, more well-rounded main characters. The City Watch sub-series (Guards! Guards!, Men At Arms, Feet Of Clay, Night Watch, and I'm sure a lot of others) is very popular, and well worth a try. There's the Witches: Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies, and more (not my favourite); there's Death, although he appears in every book, he also has a few books that revolve mostly around him and his adopted family: Mort, Reaper Man, Soul Music; but there's also a lot of stand-alone books that don't revolve around recurring characters (although Death always makes an appearance at the very least): Small Gods is a big favourite with many people; Pyramids is old but good; The Truth, Thief of Time, both brilliant books that stand well on their own; and Going Postal is really great (it does have a sequel in Making Money, but that one doesn't work as well for me).
In any case, you don't need to start at the beginning. Starting at the middle or end might work better for you. Not liking Sourcery and TLF doesn't mean you won't like any of the later books.
I know I'm in the minority here but I could not stand any of Pratchett's books.
You mean you tried them all, despite your dislike? That kind of persistence is really admirable. But if you've tried only a few, it could be worth trying a completely different book of his. Even just within the Discworld series, there's a huge difference in styles between various books and sub-series.
Don't forget legos as well! Don't just buy the theme sets, buy the sets with tons of blocks and random pieces so they can get creative. I probably spent more time with my legos than anything else.
I agree completely. I think the theme sets are what's killing Lego. I've seen lots of kids put them together, then put them on a shelf and never take them out again. From now on, any kid that isn't clearly already inventing his own stuff with Lego will only get boxes of bricks. The small boxes with mostly bricks, a single minifig and several vague suggestions of what you can build with them (but no instructions!) are brilliant, in my opinion.
Once they're comfortable inventing their own stuff, you can start giving them theme sets. I had the big Crusader Castle from the '80s. After I got it, I immediately started designing better castles (where "better" means harder to conquer, of course!).
Lego is absolutely awesome, and I have fond memories of it. Can't wait until my son is big enough (he's playing with Duplo for now).
Because it's not as practical or intuitive as meters and centimeters. If decimeters had been a more practical quantity, they'd be used a lot more. Turns out most people don't have any trouble dealing with "30 cm" rather than "3 dm". And when you get to more than that, it's basically half a meter.
Not merely communism. It features pretty big in many post-enlightenment ideologies. Classic liberals (includes economic right-wingers, in many countries now merged with non-religious conservatives) are also pretty big on egalitarianism between men and women.
If we are slow at math because everything has to go through a single point, then idiots savant who are impossibly fast at really complex math probably don't have such a single bottleneck. Instead of a single dedicated math processor in their brain, half their brain is a massive parallel grid of math processors, or something like that.
This sounds a bit odd to me. Should the game be about the game, or is the game merely a way to deliver content?
If it's about content, that means games should be easy and linear, so you get to experience all the content you paid for. Personally I think that's boring and meaningless, and would prefer a complex, branching, unique and challenging experience over merely seeing all the pretty stuff they built.
Of course if the game developers have focused more on building pretty stuff than on providing a good game, I guess it really is more about the content.
My first thought was: why does national security even rely on private networks? But if there's one thing that the mortgage crisis taught us, it's that quite a lot of our economy can be easily messed up by a handful of irresponsible banks. Of course the same is true for telecommunication companies and our communication infrastructure.
I'm a bit skeptical too. It orbits around an extragalactic that shouldn't be able to form planets, and it's now part of our galaxy because its original galaxy collided with ours. What I'd like to know is: why are they so certain the planet can't have been captured by this extragalactic star during that collision? I mean, wouldn't that be the most obvious conclusion here?
its pointless. just acquiring a title does nothing, if it has no value in the game. ie, if it doesnt open new doors, or do new things, its just a text label that appears in a variable.
It depends. Yeah, the title itself doesn't do anything. It's playing the game that should be fun, and Elite definitely fit the bill for a long time. In the end, though, getting more kills to get a higher rating just turned out to be a grind, rather than about skill.
Playing and replaying games like nethack and adom to get further in the game was definitely about skill, though. And luck of course, but still. While the game itself may have appeared grindy, it had enormous replay value.
Also playing Civilization until I scored 265% at Emperor level was more challenge than grind.
Maybe there's just too much choice. Who here hasn't invested hundreds, if not thousands of hours in games like Elite, just to achieve Dangerous or Deadly status? I can't imagine myself, or anyone, for that matter, investing that amount of time in a single game nowadays. Well, WoW and EVE seem to be capturing people's attention for a really long time, but single player games? If it gets even the tiniest bit boring or grinding, just drop it and play something else. But back in the '80s, there just wasn't all that much choice if you wanted a big game.
Could be. I just don't have as much time anymore. Also, a lot of games seem to be just a bit too tedious to finish. Finishing Civilization could get somewhat tedious too, but nothing like Medieval Total War 2, for example. I can't even finish the short version of that.
To get started, an enterprisey gig might not be all bad. My first job was pretty lame too: a system for life insurance quotes in C++ and a crappy homebrew framework. But I learned some valuable lessons there. My next job was pretty cool: an open source company that gave an enterprise CMS (in Java) away for free. Had to learn XSL, Cocoon, CSS and Javascript on the job. After that: Ruby at the startup (now bankrupt due to lack of a business model, but we did some cool stuff there with JQuery). And now Groovy and Grails and a lot more JQuery.
I admit, 3 web development jobs in a row, and Groovy is not really all that new after Java and Ruby. But I'm growing in other ways here. I could have been doing Scala if I wanted. I've seen several opportunities for that already, so it's clearly an up-and-coming language. (Haven't seen anything for Clojure yet. One job for Erlang.)
Learning Dutch is tough. If you speak it badly, everybody around you will immediately switch to English, rather than help you improve your Dutch. It takes serious commitment.
What I want to know is: if RuneScape only has an office in the UK, why was this lawsuit handled under the US legal system? Shouldn't the lawsuit have been taking place in the UK in the first place?
You still haven't answered the question - why would you consider someone who knows another seemingly random language to be more interested in new technologies? Why should the fact that I like to continue to program in my daytime language in the evenings and weekends have any negative bearing on whether I like new technologies or not?
I have answered that question. Having those new technologies actually listed on your CV shows a lot better that you like learning new technologies, than listing only the same technologies that everybody else has, does.
Of course it is great to keep your.Net knowledge up to date with the latest version. But simply listing ".Net" on your CV doesn't distinguish you in any way from someone who relies on 5 year old.Net experience. If ASP.Net MVC is any different from old fashioned ASP.Net, then you should definitely list that. But an employer who's less familiar with it might not recognise it as being something new.
And even then, it wouldn't hurt any programmer to look outside his favourite environment every once in a while. Some companies care about that, others don't.
When you're blind, you're easy to push around. Which I suspect is what's happening here.
Not that I'm saying that Assange isn't an egotistical narcissist, just that he also happens to have pissed off some powerful people, that I fully expect to be willing to push justice around like that, just to get even with him.
Slashdot Mirror
A student discount would be cool, but probably hard to enforce. On the other hand, there are cheaper games available. Not Witcher 2, obviously. The publisher has a monopoly on the distribution of Witcher 2, but not a monopoly on games in general. There's plenty of competition out there, and you can always give your limited money to those competitors. And the cheaper games are often from indie developers, so you're really helping someone there.
I'd say it's fair. They release it without DRM, so presumably legitimate customers won't have to download any cracks in order to get it working on their system.
I'll probably reward this by buying it, although I still haven't finished the original Witcher yet. But by pure coincidence yesterday I decided to continue playing it again.
It was only a few months before iPhone 4 that Android phones were even catching up with the 3GS.
The iPhone 3GS was released in June 2009, the Motorola Droid/Milestone was released in November 2009. That's less than half a year before Android overtook the iPhone, and after the Droid/Milestone, so many other Android devices followed, that suddenly the iPhone was lagging behind for half a year.
It's been almost half a year, and there still aren't any truly competitive Android handsets in terms of overall hardware.
True, but the iPhone also lagged behind for half a year. Give it time. And the iPhone 4 was a pretty big jump. Much bigger than from 3G to 3GS. Android goes in much smaller increments.
The real big issue here is screen resolution, of course. All iPhones had the same resolution, and in order to prevent fragmentation and compatibility problems, Apple didn't want to increase the resolution until they could increase it by 4. Android supports more resolutions and had less problems growing. Only those all had different heights but, if I'm not mistaken, all the same width. So the big question is whether Android already supports bigger widths, or still needs some work. But I'm sure Google is working on that.
Why is this modded insightful? It's incorrect.
Google gets a one-time $15 developer registration fee, plus the usage data of who's downloading what. Roughly, 30% of the app's cost goes to the CELL COMPANY that the app was purchased from. 70% goes to the app developer.
You're thinking of a different, more locked down company that keeps 30% for itself.
You're a bit mixed up here. Google does share revenue with cell companies, but not with all, and how much they share depends on the deal they have with them. They do get money from sales in the Android Market.
Not really. There are more Android phone models per year than iOS phone models per year, but in terms of rate of technological progress, iPhone tends to outpace the industry. Comparing top iPhones one year apart and top Android phones one year apart, the iPhone makes more progress.
You don't have anywhere near enough data points to make such a bold claim. And half the data points contradict it.
Take the first Android phone ever: the G1. Nowhere near the same league as the iPhone 3G that was availlable at the time. A year later, there's the Motorola Milestone, which is already superior to the iPhone 3GS availlable at that time. Yes, the iPhone 4 puts the iPhone at the head of the game again, and it really needed to, because it was seriously falling behind. I don't think it'll be long before there are Android phones that can do all of that and more.
How is a decimeter any less practical or less intuitive than a centimeter?
I don't know, but clearly the decimeter just hasn't caught on in the way the centimeter and the meter have. You make good arguments for why it should have, and the fact that the liter is based on it suggests that people have tried, but clearly it just didn't work out like that.
My argument isn't based on what should or shouldn't work, it's about what actually happened. History. Apparently people just don't need it that much.
The Colour of Magic is kinda the odd one out here. It's more parody, less polished and grew more organically than the others. (Rumour has it it's based on an RPG campaign Pterry wrote for his neighbour.) A lot of people think it's not as good as later books, but others (including me) like it a lot. It's still one of my favourites.
If by "next iterations of the same theme" you mean The Light Fantastic and Sourcery, I'm inclined to agree. The series started by milking Rincewind, but there's a lot of other themes and deeper, more well-rounded main characters. The City Watch sub-series (Guards! Guards!, Men At Arms, Feet Of Clay, Night Watch, and I'm sure a lot of others) is very popular, and well worth a try. There's the Witches: Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies, and more (not my favourite); there's Death, although he appears in every book, he also has a few books that revolve mostly around him and his adopted family: Mort, Reaper Man, Soul Music; but there's also a lot of stand-alone books that don't revolve around recurring characters (although Death always makes an appearance at the very least): Small Gods is a big favourite with many people; Pyramids is old but good; The Truth, Thief of Time, both brilliant books that stand well on their own; and Going Postal is really great (it does have a sequel in Making Money, but that one doesn't work as well for me).
In any case, you don't need to start at the beginning. Starting at the middle or end might work better for you. Not liking Sourcery and TLF doesn't mean you won't like any of the later books.
I know I'm in the minority here but I could not stand any of Pratchett's books.
You mean you tried them all, despite your dislike? That kind of persistence is really admirable. But if you've tried only a few, it could be worth trying a completely different book of his. Even just within the Discworld series, there's a huge difference in styles between various books and sub-series.
Don't forget legos as well! Don't just buy the theme sets, buy the sets with tons of blocks and random pieces so they can get creative. I probably spent more time with my legos than anything else.
I agree completely. I think the theme sets are what's killing Lego. I've seen lots of kids put them together, then put them on a shelf and never take them out again. From now on, any kid that isn't clearly already inventing his own stuff with Lego will only get boxes of bricks. The small boxes with mostly bricks, a single minifig and several vague suggestions of what you can build with them (but no instructions!) are brilliant, in my opinion.
Once they're comfortable inventing their own stuff, you can start giving them theme sets. I had the big Crusader Castle from the '80s. After I got it, I immediately started designing better castles (where "better" means harder to conquer, of course!).
Lego is absolutely awesome, and I have fond memories of it. Can't wait until my son is big enough (he's playing with Duplo for now).
Because it's not as practical or intuitive as meters and centimeters. If decimeters had been a more practical quantity, they'd be used a lot more. Turns out most people don't have any trouble dealing with "30 cm" rather than "3 dm". And when you get to more than that, it's basically half a meter.
Not merely communism. It features pretty big in many post-enlightenment ideologies. Classic liberals (includes economic right-wingers, in many countries now merged with non-religious conservatives) are also pretty big on egalitarianism between men and women.
If we are slow at math because everything has to go through a single point, then idiots savant who are impossibly fast at really complex math probably don't have such a single bottleneck. Instead of a single dedicated math processor in their brain, half their brain is a massive parallel grid of math processors, or something like that.
This sounds a bit odd to me. Should the game be about the game, or is the game merely a way to deliver content?
If it's about content, that means games should be easy and linear, so you get to experience all the content you paid for. Personally I think that's boring and meaningless, and would prefer a complex, branching, unique and challenging experience over merely seeing all the pretty stuff they built.
Of course if the game developers have focused more on building pretty stuff than on providing a good game, I guess it really is more about the content.
My first thought was: why does national security even rely on private networks? But if there's one thing that the mortgage crisis taught us, it's that quite a lot of our economy can be easily messed up by a handful of irresponsible banks. Of course the same is true for telecommunication companies and our communication infrastructure.
I'm a bit skeptical too. It orbits around an extragalactic that shouldn't be able to form planets, and it's now part of our galaxy because its original galaxy collided with ours. What I'd like to know is: why are they so certain the planet can't have been captured by this extragalactic star during that collision? I mean, wouldn't that be the most obvious conclusion here?
its pointless. just acquiring a title does nothing, if it has no value in the game. ie, if it doesnt open new doors, or do new things, its just a text label that appears in a variable.
It depends. Yeah, the title itself doesn't do anything. It's playing the game that should be fun, and Elite definitely fit the bill for a long time. In the end, though, getting more kills to get a higher rating just turned out to be a grind, rather than about skill.
Playing and replaying games like nethack and adom to get further in the game was definitely about skill, though. And luck of course, but still. While the game itself may have appeared grindy, it had enormous replay value.
Also playing Civilization until I scored 265% at Emperor level was more challenge than grind.
Maybe there's just too much choice. Who here hasn't invested hundreds, if not thousands of hours in games like Elite, just to achieve Dangerous or Deadly status? I can't imagine myself, or anyone, for that matter, investing that amount of time in a single game nowadays. Well, WoW and EVE seem to be capturing people's attention for a really long time, but single player games? If it gets even the tiniest bit boring or grinding, just drop it and play something else. But back in the '80s, there just wasn't all that much choice if you wanted a big game.
because we're not 15 years old anymore?
Could be. I just don't have as much time anymore. Also, a lot of games seem to be just a bit too tedious to finish. Finishing Civilization could get somewhat tedious too, but nothing like Medieval Total War 2, for example. I can't even finish the short version of that.
To get started, an enterprisey gig might not be all bad. My first job was pretty lame too: a system for life insurance quotes in C++ and a crappy homebrew framework. But I learned some valuable lessons there. My next job was pretty cool: an open source company that gave an enterprise CMS (in Java) away for free. Had to learn XSL, Cocoon, CSS and Javascript on the job. After that: Ruby at the startup (now bankrupt due to lack of a business model, but we did some cool stuff there with JQuery). And now Groovy and Grails and a lot more JQuery.
I admit, 3 web development jobs in a row, and Groovy is not really all that new after Java and Ruby. But I'm growing in other ways here. I could have been doing Scala if I wanted. I've seen several opportunities for that already, so it's clearly an up-and-coming language. (Haven't seen anything for Clojure yet. One job for Erlang.)
Learning Dutch is tough. If you speak it badly, everybody around you will immediately switch to English, rather than help you improve your Dutch. It takes serious commitment.
I don't think a short-range cell tower needs to cost that much. Hackers had a private one operating during HAR 2009.
What I want to know is: if RuneScape only has an office in the UK, why was this lawsuit handled under the US legal system? Shouldn't the lawsuit have been taking place in the UK in the first place?
I actually do want RFID capability in my phone. But only if that means I can have a built-in RFID Guardian.
But giving retailers access to all my contacts? Why the hell would I want to do that?
You still haven't answered the question - why would you consider someone who knows another seemingly random language to be more interested in new technologies? Why should the fact that I like to continue to program in my daytime language in the evenings and weekends have any negative bearing on whether I like new technologies or not?
I have answered that question. Having those new technologies actually listed on your CV shows a lot better that you like learning new technologies, than listing only the same technologies that everybody else has, does.
Of course it is great to keep your .Net knowledge up to date with the latest version. But simply listing ".Net" on your CV doesn't distinguish you in any way from someone who relies on 5 year old .Net experience. If ASP.Net MVC is any different from old fashioned ASP.Net, then you should definitely list that. But an employer who's less familiar with it might not recognise it as being something new.
And even then, it wouldn't hurt any programmer to look outside his favourite environment every once in a while. Some companies care about that, others don't.
When you're blind, you're easy to push around. Which I suspect is what's happening here.
Not that I'm saying that Assange isn't an egotistical narcissist, just that he also happens to have pissed off some powerful people, that I fully expect to be willing to push justice around like that, just to get even with him.
You mean the only way the government can get it right, is when they intend to fuck things up?