Instead, they get your agreement to lower X to $0 on that day. Neither you nor they make any money on "sales" that day. But you both get publicity.
At no point were they dishonest about how the free app day works. No rational person should expect Amazon to be giving away tens of millions of dollars a year. The devs knew full well what they were getting into. They were looking for an excuse to bash Amazon.
No no no. Amazon were being dishonest right from the word go, because the developers' agreement states that if you are selected for Free App of the Day, you get that 0.2X. This is the only publicised figure for FAD. Well it would appear that this is a bait-and-switch, because they "renegotiate" it down to zero at the drop of a hat. As this is designed to draw developers into the market place, it sounds like grounds for a multi-million dollar class action lawsuit. (Of course, only people who refused the deal would be allowed to sue, as people who accepted have agreed to a revised contract.) Amazon would then be forced to disclose how often they honoured their agreement.
Note that TFA also says that a lot of Android users claim to use the free-app-of-the-day offer on the grounds that they believe they're helping out the developers. that's tantamount to false advertising.
Remember, they only need to search a point cloud once for each pixel on the screen. The volume of points in the cloud has a much lesser effect on their performance than the number of pixels on the screen.
There's still an awful lot of antialiasing to be done, though, or you're going to end up with a lot of artifacts. Look at the quality of some early digital transfers -- eg in the remastered Star Wars trilogy, where stars would appear, disappear, get bigger and get smaller when the camera panned through space. Supersampling a point cloud could get very messy, particularly if you're populating the world with thin objects (eg vines).
If there's no FOSS version of a business critical software function, stick it on a server and stream it to a Linux desktop. License compliance is dead easy in a virtualised environment because it's all done in the virtualisation layer. Using thin clients or Linux+terminal software makes it nigh-on impossible for an employee to install unlicensed Windows software without your knowledge.
Look again at the snopes article, and you'll see that it doesn't only refer to one particular hoax. The authors point out that baby-eating is historically one of the most common cultural smears. It is one of the best ways to demonise "the other". Given your French username and your command of English, I'm guessing you're not Chinese. So I'm guessing you're being racist.
I would also point out that the conservative white press love stories like this -- I remember the fuss made by certain papers when it was claimed that immigrants were killing swans for food -- so if there was any truth in the rumours, the Daily Mail would run a story on it. But they haven't, so I seriously doubt it's anything more than bigoted hearsay.
As evidence that the uncanny valley is learnt behaviour (not innate), just look at this baby's reaction to an everyday occurrence. Other mums report similar reactions to coughs, sneezes, beards, clowns, etc...
Video conferencing doesn't use much data to begin with. Talking head model conferencing uses 16kbps, and full video uses 128-384kbps. Most home and business lines can easily manage that up and down.
I've been doing a distance degree with the Open University, and most of our tutorials are on-line, and it's voice-and-slides -- we get no video. "much data" is relative, and most commercial e-classroom environments don't support video conferencing past 3 or 4 participants.
The course I'm taking is French, and believe me, a voice-only conference call is a horrendous environment for trying to learn a language. I took part in a few experimental sessions on Second Life, and the experience was a whole lot better, although a lot of time was wasted while the other students tried to get to grips with the interface.
Personally, I think tech like this has the potential to alleviate many of the problems I've encountered during my degree.
....So, correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to support the notion that we could rid ourselves of the uncanny valley if we only budgeted more for, and employed better and more sophisticated motion capture software in our 3d animations?
That's looking at it the wrong way round. The real consequence is that we should simply revert to more "cartoony" characters in our animations. We run mocap at its limits, and at the moment the level of life-like detail on our models is too high relative to motion.
Have you ever played Façade? The 3D models were pretty simplistic, but the simple combination of eye, eyebrow and mouth movements was more expressive than modern texture-mapped, million-photo mocap faces.
My solution is dyeing my hair bright turquoise. I'm also in the Aspie-and-good-actor category, and especially when I'm in full social mode I can pass for neurotypical even to psychologists, but I've found that maintaining an appearance that's unconventional without being unattractive goes a long way. I come off as incredibly charming for someone who looks so eccentric, instead of as a little odd for someone who looks so normal.
Hacking the Uncanny Valley effect for Fun and Profit!
The simple animalistic explanation for me fails to address all the times we have no issue whatsoever with things that are slightly off. After all, every time a woman puts on make-up should upset us, wears a bra (oh okay, that does upset me). All that causes "wrongness" in the picture but we don't care.
That would only be true if you'd never seen a woman wearing a bra and make-up before. As we've all grown up with that, we consider it normal. By contrast, as a kid I found Japanese geishas on TV very creepy. They didn't walk right and their faces were painted and held rigid in a way that made it look like a mask
No. We hypothesized this already. We still don't know it, but we now have better reason for believing it than "it sounds right". Silly scientists are more interested in truth than truthiness.
True. However TFA was atrocious. Uncanny Valley theory has long suggested that the problem is the mismatch between static appearance and ways of moving. What the article said was that the research "discovered" this, rather than "confirmed", which is what the research really did.
Most of the world runs cables alongside their railways, and have done since the early days of telegraphy. Even in westerns and civil war movies, you'd have a railway stationing "wiring" the next station to alert them to the outlaw or confederate spy on the train.
Much of the UK's current internet backhaul runs in ducting a couple of feet from the rails.
A very old and boring story. City dwellers have been subsidizing rural folk since the start of the county.
And country folk have been feeding city dwellers since before the days of the Roman Empire.
There was a time when food accounted for the majority of the household budget, because of the sheer cost of production -- early farming didn't generate much in surplus to the farmers' families' needs. A modern farmer with a combine harvester can feed hundreds single-handedly, which has meant food is now cheaper than it has ever been, giving us disposable income to fritter away on non-essentials like games consoles, overseas trips etc. But the consequence has been that rural areas have been depopulated, shifting the balance of consumer power -- there's a critical mass in cities, but not in rural areas.
If city dwellers stopped "subsidising" rural folk, what would happen? Prices would go up for everything because production and transport costs would increase. Quality would decrease, because infrastructure would be allowed to degrade and your strawberries would get damaged on potholed roads.
The very word "infrastructure" implies something fixed and fundamental. Like it or not, our modern infrastructure consists of roads, electricity lines, gas pipes, telephone lines, and (yes) the internet. These are all things that are necessary for the basic operation of society, and they really should be publically-operated.
I'm sure that's true, but there are also Brits who detest the quality of the NHS. My in-laws have good friends who live just outside London, and they voluntarily pay for their own health care, eschewing the NHS. They're not rich, they just feel the quality of the care is subpar, and they've said they hope America doesn't make the same mistake.
To make a profit for a paying service when there's a free alternative available, you have to be better than the free alternative. BUPA hospitals and clinics are a lot more pleasant than NHS hospitals and clinics and their waiting lists are a lot shorter. I personally felt that this was reason enough to spend about 600-800 quid on consultants' fees, x-rays and nerve conduction tests when I was suffering an RSI and the NHS couldn't offer me an orthopaedics appointment in under 6 months. I was in pain, and with a professional IT job I could afford it, so I paid.
But... I had the alternative, I had the choice. The UK two-tier system barely works, and it works for this reason only: the quality of care has to be better than the free option or no-one will take it, and the higher they price their care the more business they lose to the NHS.
Under the UK system, people like myself won't take out insurance, but pay directly for acute conditions. Insurance policies routinely have annual excesses and limits, and the annual limit usually specifies that all ongoing treatment for a specific condition is calculated against the allowance for the year treatment commenced. This means that many chronic treatments will default back to the NHS. Private Accident and Emergency wards (en-US: ER) are practically unheard of (2 in the whole UK, I think). The private market basically cherry-picks the good stuff, and the really expensive stuff is out of their hands, keeping costs down.
Really though, I don't think the real problem for US health care insurance is how it's paid for (private or gov't) it's simply that's its too damn expensive. There's no such thing as "free" health care, it's paid for somehow or other. There's far too much bloat and graft in the system, and having the US government -so well known for it's fiscal efficiency(sarc)- pay for it isn't likely to fix that, if anything, it'll exacerbate it.
One of the problems with the US system is the lack of direct payment. Insurance companies have certain obligations to their insurees, and once they're obliged, they've basically written a blank cheque. Any commercial healthcare supplier has a duty to its shareholders to maximise profits -- so they are effectively obliged to write the biggest number possible on that blank cheque. This means that insurance premiums rise, and that insurance companies (under the same duty to create profits for their shareholders) are pressurised to refuse as many claims as they can. So they created the infamous American insurance forms to try to catch people out. These forms are so time consuming for healthcare professionals that they have to employ extra administrative help, so their prices go up, and the vicious spiral continues.
So while the healthcare providers and the insurers are involved in this spiralling arms race, what happens to the guy with a tumour and reasonable life savings? He's nothing to do with this bureaucratic nightmare, so it should be pretty cheap, right? Wrong. Insurance companies never want to pay full whack -- they want a discount for being such good customers. So he has to pay more than them. But let's get this straight: this is not a discount. If the majority of your work is for insurance companies, the price they pay is your normal fee. The poor sod who goes in self-funding is getting an artificial mark-up on his price, so he's basically getting shafted just to keep the insurance company happy.
Regardless of the efficiency of central government in other factors, and regardless of any US-specific problems, the fundamental problem in private healthcare is the existence of shareholders. The main natural stakeholder in healthcare is the patient, but market regulations end up making the shareholder the prime concern instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead, they get your agreement to lower X to $0 on that day. Neither you nor they make any money on "sales" that day. But you both get publicity.
At no point were they dishonest about how the free app day works. No rational person should expect Amazon to be giving away tens of millions of dollars a year. The devs knew full well what they were getting into. They were looking for an excuse to bash Amazon.
No no no. Amazon were being dishonest right from the word go, because the developers' agreement states that if you are selected for Free App of the Day, you get that 0.2X. This is the only publicised figure for FAD. Well it would appear that this is a bait-and-switch, because they "renegotiate" it down to zero at the drop of a hat. As this is designed to draw developers into the market place, it sounds like grounds for a multi-million dollar class action lawsuit. (Of course, only people who refused the deal would be allowed to sue, as people who accepted have agreed to a revised contract.) Amazon would then be forced to disclose how often they honoured their agreement.
Note that TFA also says that a lot of Android users claim to use the free-app-of-the-day offer on the grounds that they believe they're helping out the developers. that's tantamount to false advertising.
HAL.
Remember, they only need to search a point cloud once for each pixel on the screen. The volume of points in the cloud has a much lesser effect on their performance than the number of pixels on the screen.
There's still an awful lot of antialiasing to be done, though, or you're going to end up with a lot of artifacts. Look at the quality of some early digital transfers -- eg in the remastered Star Wars trilogy, where stars would appear, disappear, get bigger and get smaller when the camera panned through space. Supersampling a point cloud could get very messy, particularly if you're populating the world with thin objects (eg vines).
If there's no FOSS version of a business critical software function, stick it on a server and stream it to a Linux desktop. License compliance is dead easy in a virtualised environment because it's all done in the virtualisation layer. Using thin clients or Linux+terminal software makes it nigh-on impossible for an employee to install unlicensed Windows software without your knowledge.
He said he blanked out the license numbers.
Well, if they don't like "Dice Age", they should just propose a rebrand as 21st Century Dice....
Look again at the snopes article, and you'll see that it doesn't only refer to one particular hoax. The authors point out that baby-eating is historically one of the most common cultural smears. It is one of the best ways to demonise "the other". Given your French username and your command of English, I'm guessing you're not Chinese. So I'm guessing you're being racist.
I would also point out that the conservative white press love stories like this -- I remember the fuss made by certain papers when it was claimed that immigrants were killing swans for food -- so if there was any truth in the rumours, the Daily Mail would run a story on it. But they haven't, so I seriously doubt it's anything more than bigoted hearsay.
HAL.
As evidence that the uncanny valley is learnt behaviour (not innate), just look at this baby's reaction to an everyday occurrence. Other mums report similar reactions to coughs, sneezes, beards, clowns, etc...
Cite a credible source then.
It's always a good idea to check Snopes.com before making any potentially racist statements, pal...
Video conferencing doesn't use much data to begin with. Talking head model conferencing uses 16kbps, and full video uses 128-384kbps. Most home and business lines can easily manage that up and down.
I've been doing a distance degree with the Open University, and most of our tutorials are on-line, and it's voice-and-slides -- we get no video. "much data" is relative, and most commercial e-classroom environments don't support video conferencing past 3 or 4 participants.
The course I'm taking is French, and believe me, a voice-only conference call is a horrendous environment for trying to learn a language. I took part in a few experimental sessions on Second Life, and the experience was a whole lot better, although a lot of time was wasted while the other students tried to get to grips with the interface.
Personally, I think tech like this has the potential to alleviate many of the problems I've encountered during my degree.
HAL.
....So, correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to support the notion that we could rid ourselves of the uncanny valley if we only budgeted more for, and employed better and more sophisticated motion capture software in our 3d animations?
That's looking at it the wrong way round. The real consequence is that we should simply revert to more "cartoony" characters in our animations. We run mocap at its limits, and at the moment the level of life-like detail on our models is too high relative to motion.
Have you ever played Façade? The 3D models were pretty simplistic, but the simple combination of eye, eyebrow and mouth movements was more expressive than modern texture-mapped, million-photo mocap faces.
HAL.
My solution is dyeing my hair bright turquoise. I'm also in the Aspie-and-good-actor category, and especially when I'm in full social mode I can pass for neurotypical even to psychologists, but I've found that maintaining an appearance that's unconventional without being unattractive goes a long way. I come off as incredibly charming for someone who looks so eccentric, instead of as a little odd for someone who looks so normal.
Hacking the Uncanny Valley effect for Fun and Profit!
The simple animalistic explanation for me fails to address all the times we have no issue whatsoever with things that are slightly off. After all, every time a woman puts on make-up should upset us, wears a bra (oh okay, that does upset me). All that causes "wrongness" in the picture but we don't care.
That would only be true if you'd never seen a woman wearing a bra and make-up before. As we've all grown up with that, we consider it normal. By contrast, as a kid I found Japanese geishas on TV very creepy. They didn't walk right and their faces were painted and held rigid in a way that made it look like a mask
We knew this already.
No. We hypothesized this already. We still don't know it, but we now have better reason for believing it than "it sounds right". Silly scientists are more interested in truth than truthiness.
True. However TFA was atrocious. Uncanny Valley theory has long suggested that the problem is the mismatch between static appearance and ways of moving. What the article said was that the research "discovered" this, rather than "confirmed", which is what the research really did.
Here's an idea: free to you should be free to everybody, or the crowd's share of the rights should be ascribed to charity.
"Your friend has just transcribed x squared + y squared = z squared. Can you do better?"
I was wondering what came after dearly beloved in Horus....
Sadly true. I had a look and couldn't really tell an alpha from a delta....
ET...has men in containment suits.
But no guns, never any guns, no no no!
It's also mentioned... in TFA!!!!!
Most of the world runs cables alongside their railways, and have done since the early days of telegraphy. Even in westerns and civil war movies, you'd have a railway stationing "wiring" the next station to alert them to the outlaw or confederate spy on the train.
Much of the UK's current internet backhaul runs in ducting a couple of feet from the rails.
HAL.
A very old and boring story. City dwellers have been subsidizing rural folk since the start of the county.
And country folk have been feeding city dwellers since before the days of the Roman Empire.
There was a time when food accounted for the majority of the household budget, because of the sheer cost of production -- early farming didn't generate much in surplus to the farmers' families' needs. A modern farmer with a combine harvester can feed hundreds single-handedly, which has meant food is now cheaper than it has ever been, giving us disposable income to fritter away on non-essentials like games consoles, overseas trips etc. But the consequence has been that rural areas have been depopulated, shifting the balance of consumer power -- there's a critical mass in cities, but not in rural areas.
If city dwellers stopped "subsidising" rural folk, what would happen? Prices would go up for everything because production and transport costs would increase. Quality would decrease, because infrastructure would be allowed to degrade and your strawberries would get damaged on potholed roads.
The very word "infrastructure" implies something fixed and fundamental. Like it or not, our modern infrastructure consists of roads, electricity lines, gas pipes, telephone lines, and (yes) the internet. These are all things that are necessary for the basic operation of society, and they really should be publically-operated.
HAL.
Goddammit! I wondered who was to blame for the gold bubble!!!!
With craps you choose whether or not to play, with health, you're playing, like it or not. It's not the same thing.
But if you're going to compare healthcare to gaming, a better example would be Russian Roulette. I think my reasons are obvious....
HAL
I'm sure that's true, but there are also Brits who detest the quality of the NHS. My in-laws have good friends who live just outside London, and they voluntarily pay for their own health care, eschewing the NHS. They're not rich, they just feel the quality of the care is subpar, and they've said they hope America doesn't make the same mistake.
To make a profit for a paying service when there's a free alternative available, you have to be better than the free alternative. BUPA hospitals and clinics are a lot more pleasant than NHS hospitals and clinics and their waiting lists are a lot shorter. I personally felt that this was reason enough to spend about 600-800 quid on consultants' fees, x-rays and nerve conduction tests when I was suffering an RSI and the NHS couldn't offer me an orthopaedics appointment in under 6 months. I was in pain, and with a professional IT job I could afford it, so I paid.
But... I had the alternative, I had the choice. The UK two-tier system barely works, and it works for this reason only: the quality of care has to be better than the free option or no-one will take it, and the higher they price their care the more business they lose to the NHS.
Under the UK system, people like myself won't take out insurance, but pay directly for acute conditions. Insurance policies routinely have annual excesses and limits, and the annual limit usually specifies that all ongoing treatment for a specific condition is calculated against the allowance for the year treatment commenced. This means that many chronic treatments will default back to the NHS. Private Accident and Emergency wards (en-US: ER) are practically unheard of (2 in the whole UK, I think). The private market basically cherry-picks the good stuff, and the really expensive stuff is out of their hands, keeping costs down.
Really though, I don't think the real problem for US health care insurance is how it's paid for (private or gov't) it's simply that's its too damn expensive. There's no such thing as "free" health care, it's paid for somehow or other. There's far too much bloat and graft in the system, and having the US government -so well known for it's fiscal efficiency(sarc)- pay for it isn't likely to fix that, if anything, it'll exacerbate it.
One of the problems with the US system is the lack of direct payment. Insurance companies have certain obligations to their insurees, and once they're obliged, they've basically written a blank cheque. Any commercial healthcare supplier has a duty to its shareholders to maximise profits -- so they are effectively obliged to write the biggest number possible on that blank cheque. This means that insurance premiums rise, and that insurance companies (under the same duty to create profits for their shareholders) are pressurised to refuse as many claims as they can. So they created the infamous American insurance forms to try to catch people out. These forms are so time consuming for healthcare professionals that they have to employ extra administrative help, so their prices go up, and the vicious spiral continues.
So while the healthcare providers and the insurers are involved in this spiralling arms race, what happens to the guy with a tumour and reasonable life savings? He's nothing to do with this bureaucratic nightmare, so it should be pretty cheap, right? Wrong. Insurance companies never want to pay full whack -- they want a discount for being such good customers. So he has to pay more than them. But let's get this straight: this is not a discount. If the majority of your work is for insurance companies, the price they pay is your normal fee. The poor sod who goes in self-funding is getting an artificial mark-up on his price, so he's basically getting shafted just to keep the insurance company happy.
Regardless of the efficiency of central government in other factors, and regardless of any US-specific problems, the fundamental problem in private healthcare is the existence of shareholders. The main natural stakeholder in healthcare is the patient, but market regulations end up making the shareholder the prime concern instead.
HAL.