While it may not be feasible to do any sort of heavy viewing on the actual device screen, I can foresee a device in the near future that solves this issue through one of the three following methods (or some combination thereof):
1. Roll-out flexible OLED displays. They already have them, just not in mainstream consumer items yet. This makes it possible to store the screen in a compact space and enlarge it when necessary.
2. Micro-projectors. They have them for cellphones already and they are pretty decent and getting even smaller. Who cares how big your device screen is when you can project a 50" display with great clarity/color/contrast?
3. Wearable monitors. This is ultimately where we are going. We have bluetooth earphones for phones, and now that texting is on the rise I'm sure we'll have the visual counterpart any year now that actually gains market traction. The problems with devices currently on the market are that they are too damned expensive, ugly as sin (sorry, "futuristic"), and don't have a portable/lightweight enough form factor to justify carrying around like a bluetooth earpiece.
Or you can just wait until some website located somewhere where they don't give a damn about US copyright gets access through a flesh and blood proxy and posts everything for free, and grabs all the juicy ad revenue that comes with it.
It only takes one leak to completely circumvent a paywall.
I'd be curious of what your model was in terms of whether you offered a free/lite version. I know *cough*people*cough* who swear by pirated apps because there is just so much godawful junk on the app store and Apple does a shitty job of filtering it so they use it to trial whether they like a game or not and get a TRUE demo of it. You can try trial/lite versions but they often don't paint a true picture of what the real game is like and its hard enough to find them thanks to the 50 million *****Wars clones flooding the store.
For any who are new to this approach to cooking, it is called molecular gastronomy. See here for a good primer.
This stuff is seriously cool and eating at a restaurant specializing in this style, while expensive, is definitely an experience worth having.
I live in Chicago and we are proud to have several famous chefs from this school of cooking with great restaurants including Alinea, Graham Elliot and Moto (along with its sister restaurant Otom). I only wish some of the ingredients and techniques were less expensive and more accessible although you can buy some of the things online easily enough.
They'd be more clever than that...it wouldn't just be a phishing attempt, they'd also dynamically insert affiliate links whenever you went to a shopping site like eBay or Amazon. Hmmm...that gives me an idea....
Is this similar to that ultra-hd I had heard about on/. years back? I seem to recall them setting up a test monitor in Japan somewhere and playing a video of the ocean and supposedly it looked so realistic people thought water was going to splash on them.
I remember being not just impressed with the specs but also the producer of the video...to make something with camera angles, lighting, sound, etc. that fit that well into the location must have been tricky and likely had more of an impact than the resolution.
"new headline: Hulu may begin loosing viewers next year."
Subhead: "General public learns how to use bittorrent--traffic to EZTV.it and Mininova surge!"
I am a heavy bittorrent user. I honestly tried to like Hulu when it came out, but the ads were just too long for me. So now I just "timeshift" my shows via bittorrent exclusively. HD rips + no commercials + no buffering + ability to easily archive + hookup to my flatscreen TV = not touching anything else with a 10ft pole.
Realistically, they'd have a good shot at overturning this new law if a big enough public stink was made about MPs and Ministers blatantly disobeying this. I think someone needs to make a very public database of all the offenders. And hey, if you happen to be a hacker and can anonymously publicize some evidence of their violating this well, that's public info now and should be displayed everywhere.
Is that a state by state thing? This issue has me seriously scared. The revenue (not much, a couple hundred a month) from one of my sites goes into a business checking account that is basically setup as a sole proprietorship (in IL). If I've been collecting unemployment because I don't have an actual job, while earning revenue from that site, am I fucked? What is my best course of action if that is the case? I don't even know what sort of lawyer would deal with this kind of law.
Personally I try to avoid companies that care that much about what I do in MY time in general. If I'm not on the clock, its none of your fucking business. If I decide to learn a new language on my own, it is irrelevant until I start using it at work, in which case I expect my going above and beyond to be noticed. If it is required that I learn something new for work, I sure as hell had better be paid by the company for it one way or another (even if it just means doing the learning during company time).
Not a troll, I swear. Just someone interested in the works of Steven Levitt...
I've read many racially slanted comments elsewhere that seem to indicate a general opinion that the majority of Sidekick users are african american or hispanic. Someone responded at one point that there would be a huge drop in the number of drug deals that occur because everybody will lose their dealers number.
Now, the nerd in me started wondering...what if there actually was a connection!? Or not even something drug-related...could there be other connections that occur as a result of this data failure? Just food for thought...
Will this catch fried graphics cards? I have a Dell (yeah, I know) m1730 xps with dual nvidia 8800m gtx cards thatg no longer seem to work and show exclamation marks in the device manager and windows is using it's backup drivers.
I played around with different driver versions and other fixes but Dell still feels it is a software issue despite there being many forum threads from people with the same setup experiencing the same symptoms and it seems to be caused by the cards overheating due to poor engineering on nvidias part and an issue with the Dell bios that doesn't turn the gpu fans on until it's already way too hot.
Trying to find some way to confirm and isolate the hardware issue to prove the situation to Dell.
Of course they don't care. While consumers give the obvious answer that they don't like things more targeted, the unfortunate truth is that these ads are more effective. Just ask anybody who runs contextual ads. If it performs better than people will continue to use it, period.
The problem is that they do this in such small increments and in very sneaky ways that the frog (consumers) doesn't know it's being boiled alive.
Remember, they would not be moving to this model if it made us give them LESS of our money. Bottom line is everybody wants to suck on the residual/subscription revenue tit now that they've seen how much it's made for blizzard and gamers will ultimately suffer as the average cost for a game continues to go through the roof. Frankly I miss the days where you'd pay 50 bucks for the game, get some free updates, and then pay 50 bucks more for the sequel since the original was so good and the company had good support.
I didn't say anywhere in my post that lite apps are useless. Just that they are misleading with their current categorization as "Free." Agreed that there needs to be a demo section or a "requires microtransactions to do anything worthwhile" section.
So what rights will parents have to prevent their children from being taught these falsehoods? I can imagine quite a can of worms if schools don't want to let parents remove their children from instances where this is being taught.
Better yet, can parents sit in on these teachings to make sure their kids aren't being blatantly lied to?
What I think is a greater crime are all the "lite" apps or "some other stupid clone of Wars game w/ microtransactions" that clutter the Top 25 free lists. Seriously if I'm looking for free games I want an actual fully functional free game, not a cocktease that requires me to pay you in some way for the full experience.
On that note, if anybody knows of any good up to date iPhone game directories that are 100% no strings attached free to play please for the love of god post a link!
As much as I'd like to mod you down I'd rather respond.
Why do you feel you are entitled to have more fun in the game than someone who pays the same amount as you every month?
It now requires uber gear to do ANYTHING fun in the game and if blizzard prevents casual players from accessing half the game because they don't treat it like a second job they will lose a ton of subscribers. If you really need to wave your epeen around you have achievements. Hate to break it to you but who do you think blizzard cares more about, one person who is upset he can no longer solo 5 people in pvp and wants to quit or the 5 people who are getting soloed and want to quit? Guess which group makes them more money.
Reminds me of an interview I recently went to (well, I was going to pitch my freelance services, but they wanted an "interview" so whatever). Turns out it was just a standard sales call center and they basically said "We have our process for how you handle your calls and you follow it or you're out. Base pay is $33k and most people make $50-$55k after commission their first year (which is based on sales volume, not the size of the actual deal, what a fucking ripoff, not to mention I made over $50 base at my previous job before commission) and the hours are 7-5 and you come in a half-day Saturday if you don't make quota during the week."
I basically stayed and listened because I was fascinated in part by who the hell would take such a job but yeah, what a joke. The funny part though was when they were trying to woo me with the fact that some of their reps made over $100k after a couple years and I'm thinking "holy shit...if they make that much off of commissions that are based on volume, they must be the stupidest sales people in the world to still be working here since they're not getting a cut based on the size of the actual deal."
Anyway, my point, and I do have one, is that you should read claims about high wages with a grain of salt...sure there are SOME people that work there, but they are the best at what they do and in a commissioned job, that most certainly is not everybody.
Hang about. Have you looked at the firehose? The amount of crap that gets submitted to the editors is just amazing. Roland seems to be good at writing just the right amount to make a good story, and so gets accepted frequently.
You do realize that the question of Roland's accepted/rejected ratio and his apparent Slashdot spam has been a hot topic here LOOOONG before the firehose was created right? It isn't just "good writing" that gets him posted.
Maybe for tasks that don't require any precision. There are quite a few of those -- but that's not all of them.
Agreed. From a gaming perspective, I'm sure there are many casual games out there that could benefit from this, but I find most serious games need precision control. I imagine playing a FPS with a touch-screen to be about as accurate as playing a FPS with the wii-mote. Sure you might get in the general vicinity, but unless you have something that lets you make pixel-perfect selections, forget sniping.
I could however see RTS's benefit from this in some ways if it COMBINED mouse control. Imagine being able to control five groups of units individually with each finger on your hand. Might get a little awkward, but would still be cool. Even controlling two selections of units at once. Can you say pincer movement?
These companies have no right to waste my time dealing with them. I do not and will not support any company which sells ad space on paid products.
Here's where I disagree though...if you purchase a game, knowing full well that it contains ads, well...that would be kind of your fault for deciding to purchase it. It is their game, and if they want to sell it with ads that is fine, but we have the right to vote with our dollars.
Now what I find unacceptable is when a company pulls bullshit like EA did with bf2142 and start placing in-game ads AFTER the game has already been released and people have purchased it. Talk about a fucking bait-and-switch. "Here's your wonderful game, and PS, after we have your money we'll start milking you for more by ruining the game experience with ads!"
What I'd really like to see if CLEAR and HIGHLY VISIBLE labeling on the front of boxes noting that they contain advertising and clarifying how the ads are incorporated and how many you can expect to see. If it is an advergame, dammit, I want to know before I waste my money on it and I shouldn't need to hunt down online reviews to know that.
Slashdot Mirror
While it may not be feasible to do any sort of heavy viewing on the actual device screen, I can foresee a device in the near future that solves this issue through one of the three following methods (or some combination thereof): 1. Roll-out flexible OLED displays. They already have them, just not in mainstream consumer items yet. This makes it possible to store the screen in a compact space and enlarge it when necessary. 2. Micro-projectors. They have them for cellphones already and they are pretty decent and getting even smaller. Who cares how big your device screen is when you can project a 50" display with great clarity/color/contrast? 3. Wearable monitors. This is ultimately where we are going. We have bluetooth earphones for phones, and now that texting is on the rise I'm sure we'll have the visual counterpart any year now that actually gains market traction. The problems with devices currently on the market are that they are too damned expensive, ugly as sin (sorry, "futuristic"), and don't have a portable/lightweight enough form factor to justify carrying around like a bluetooth earpiece.
Or you can just wait until some website located somewhere where they don't give a damn about US copyright gets access through a flesh and blood proxy and posts everything for free, and grabs all the juicy ad revenue that comes with it. It only takes one leak to completely circumvent a paywall.
I'd be curious of what your model was in terms of whether you offered a free/lite version. I know *cough*people*cough* who swear by pirated apps because there is just so much godawful junk on the app store and Apple does a shitty job of filtering it so they use it to trial whether they like a game or not and get a TRUE demo of it. You can try trial/lite versions but they often don't paint a true picture of what the real game is like and its hard enough to find them thanks to the 50 million *****Wars clones flooding the store.
This stuff is seriously cool and eating at a restaurant specializing in this style, while expensive, is definitely an experience worth having.
I live in Chicago and we are proud to have several famous chefs from this school of cooking with great restaurants including Alinea, Graham Elliot and Moto (along with its sister restaurant Otom). I only wish some of the ingredients and techniques were less expensive and more accessible although you can buy some of the things online easily enough.
They'd be more clever than that...it wouldn't just be a phishing attempt, they'd also dynamically insert affiliate links whenever you went to a shopping site like eBay or Amazon. Hmmm...that gives me an idea....
I remember being not just impressed with the specs but also the producer of the video...to make something with camera angles, lighting, sound, etc. that fit that well into the location must have been tricky and likely had more of an impact than the resolution.
Subhead: "General public learns how to use bittorrent--traffic to EZTV.it and Mininova surge!"
I am a heavy bittorrent user. I honestly tried to like Hulu when it came out, but the ads were just too long for me. So now I just "timeshift" my shows via bittorrent exclusively. HD rips + no commercials + no buffering + ability to easily archive + hookup to my flatscreen TV = not touching anything else with a 10ft pole.
Realistically, they'd have a good shot at overturning this new law if a big enough public stink was made about MPs and Ministers blatantly disobeying this. I think someone needs to make a very public database of all the offenders. And hey, if you happen to be a hacker and can anonymously publicize some evidence of their violating this well, that's public info now and should be displayed everywhere.
Bingo. That was just an extremely long-winded and spun version of saying "Now with more grind!"
On the flip side, isn't buying "gold" from China what got our country into the debt fiasco we're in now with them? Fucking gold farmers.
Is that a state by state thing? This issue has me seriously scared. The revenue (not much, a couple hundred a month) from one of my sites goes into a business checking account that is basically setup as a sole proprietorship (in IL). If I've been collecting unemployment because I don't have an actual job, while earning revenue from that site, am I fucked? What is my best course of action if that is the case? I don't even know what sort of lawyer would deal with this kind of law.
Personally I try to avoid companies that care that much about what I do in MY time in general. If I'm not on the clock, its none of your fucking business. If I decide to learn a new language on my own, it is irrelevant until I start using it at work, in which case I expect my going above and beyond to be noticed. If it is required that I learn something new for work, I sure as hell had better be paid by the company for it one way or another (even if it just means doing the learning during company time).
Not a troll, I swear. Just someone interested in the works of Steven Levitt...
I've read many racially slanted comments elsewhere that seem to indicate a general opinion that the majority of Sidekick users are african american or hispanic. Someone responded at one point that there would be a huge drop in the number of drug deals that occur because everybody will lose their dealers number.
Now, the nerd in me started wondering...what if there actually was a connection!? Or not even something drug-related...could there be other connections that occur as a result of this data failure? Just food for thought...
Will this catch fried graphics cards? I have a Dell (yeah, I know) m1730 xps with dual nvidia 8800m gtx cards thatg no longer seem to work and show exclamation marks in the device manager and windows is using it's backup drivers.
I played around with different driver versions and other fixes but Dell still feels it is a software issue despite there being many forum threads from people with the same setup experiencing the same symptoms and it seems to be caused by the cards overheating due to poor engineering on nvidias part and an issue with the Dell bios that doesn't turn the gpu fans on until it's already way too hot.
Trying to find some way to confirm and isolate the hardware issue to prove the situation to Dell.
Of course they don't care. While consumers give the obvious answer that they don't like things more targeted, the unfortunate truth is that these ads are more effective. Just ask anybody who runs contextual ads. If it performs better than people will continue to use it, period.
The problem is that they do this in such small increments and in very sneaky ways that the frog (consumers) doesn't know it's being boiled alive.
Remember, they would not be moving to this model if it made us give them LESS of our money. Bottom line is everybody wants to suck on the residual/subscription revenue tit now that they've seen how much it's made for blizzard and gamers will ultimately suffer as the average cost for a game continues to go through the roof. Frankly I miss the days where you'd pay 50 bucks for the game, get some free updates, and then pay 50 bucks more for the sequel since the original was so good and the company had good support.
I didn't say anywhere in my post that lite apps are useless. Just that they are misleading with their current categorization as "Free." Agreed that there needs to be a demo section or a "requires microtransactions to do anything worthwhile" section.
Better yet, can parents sit in on these teachings to make sure their kids aren't being blatantly lied to?
What I think is a greater crime are all the "lite" apps or "some other stupid clone of Wars game w/ microtransactions" that clutter the Top 25 free lists. Seriously if I'm looking for free games I want an actual fully functional free game, not a cocktease that requires me to pay you in some way for the full experience.
On that note, if anybody knows of any good up to date iPhone game directories that are 100% no strings attached free to play please for the love of god post a link!
As much as I'd like to mod you down I'd rather respond.
Why do you feel you are entitled to have more fun in the game than someone who pays the same amount as you every month?
It now requires uber gear to do ANYTHING fun in the game and if blizzard prevents casual players from accessing half the game because they don't treat it like a second job they will lose a ton of subscribers.
If you really need to wave your epeen around you have achievements. Hate to break it to you but who do you think blizzard cares more about, one person who is upset he can no longer solo 5 people in pvp and wants to quit or the 5 people who are getting soloed and want to quit? Guess which group makes them more money.
Reminds me of an interview I recently went to (well, I was going to pitch my freelance services, but they wanted an "interview" so whatever). Turns out it was just a standard sales call center and they basically said "We have our process for how you handle your calls and you follow it or you're out. Base pay is $33k and most people make $50-$55k after commission their first year (which is based on sales volume, not the size of the actual deal, what a fucking ripoff, not to mention I made over $50 base at my previous job before commission) and the hours are 7-5 and you come in a half-day Saturday if you don't make quota during the week."
I basically stayed and listened because I was fascinated in part by who the hell would take such a job but yeah, what a joke. The funny part though was when they were trying to woo me with the fact that some of their reps made over $100k after a couple years and I'm thinking "holy shit...if they make that much off of commissions that are based on volume, they must be the stupidest sales people in the world to still be working here since they're not getting a cut based on the size of the actual deal."
Anyway, my point, and I do have one, is that you should read claims about high wages with a grain of salt...sure there are SOME people that work there, but they are the best at what they do and in a commissioned job, that most certainly is not everybody.
You do realize that the question of Roland's accepted/rejected ratio and his apparent Slashdot spam has been a hot topic here LOOOONG before the firehose was created right? It isn't just "good writing" that gets him posted.
Awesome description...reminds me of the essay on how Everquest (and really all MMOs) are nothing but giant virtual Skinner Boxes. A great read--enjoy.
Agreed. From a gaming perspective, I'm sure there are many casual games out there that could benefit from this, but I find most serious games need precision control. I imagine playing a FPS with a touch-screen to be about as accurate as playing a FPS with the wii-mote. Sure you might get in the general vicinity, but unless you have something that lets you make pixel-perfect selections, forget sniping.
I could however see RTS's benefit from this in some ways if it COMBINED mouse control. Imagine being able to control five groups of units individually with each finger on your hand. Might get a little awkward, but would still be cool. Even controlling two selections of units at once. Can you say pincer movement?
Here's where I disagree though...if you purchase a game, knowing full well that it contains ads, well...that would be kind of your fault for deciding to purchase it. It is their game, and if they want to sell it with ads that is fine, but we have the right to vote with our dollars.
Now what I find unacceptable is when a company pulls bullshit like EA did with bf2142 and start placing in-game ads AFTER the game has already been released and people have purchased it. Talk about a fucking bait-and-switch. "Here's your wonderful game, and PS, after we have your money we'll start milking you for more by ruining the game experience with ads!"
What I'd really like to see if CLEAR and HIGHLY VISIBLE labeling on the front of boxes noting that they contain advertising and clarifying how the ads are incorporated and how many you can expect to see. If it is an advergame, dammit, I want to know before I waste my money on it and I shouldn't need to hunt down online reviews to know that.