Graphics are sold by screenshots and by box shots. YouTube and so on might make a difference, but ultimately you'll get more players to swoon with half the framerate and twice the geometry, than vice versa.
Time Splitters was the first game I played which was locked at 60fps: it was quite a remarkable transition, even from games which were locked at 30fps, never mind games that fluctuated (I'll take 30fps and locked over 30-60fps any day). Gran Turismo had a "Hi-Spec" mode which doubled the resolution and framerate too, albeit at an obvious graphical cost, and it looked like The Future.
On the subject of movie theatres, 24fps was chosen because it's pretty much as low as you can go before people notice problems. Roger Ebert and various others have been arguing for a doubling of movie framerates for years to no avail. Studios don't want to pay the film and (these days) CGI cost of double the frames (which is why they went with the lowest possible framerate to begin with).
He's not endorsing it, he's discussing it, in the specific context of how it changes the phone's security. Given the remit of the article, were you expecting him to go off on an eight-page screed against software signing at that stage, or something? The application sandboxing is going to seriously affect the way you interact with the phone as a programmer, should he have included something about sandboxing and its serious drawbacks for software authors too? Shit, VPN, there's another thing, I'm absolutely horrified that he didn't bring up the sociological impact of working from fucking home in his article about how god-damn secure the device is.
Precisely! From our outside ethical perspective, is the net total of the benefit to Apple's shareholders plus the penalty to media integrity greater than zero? Apple's stock price went up three cents around the leak, is that the price of journalistic integrity?
Actually, the Space.com story does mention the correct mechanism ("It also creates pressure that helps some stellar winds avoid the black hole's gravitational grasp altogether."), but also a second one ("The conduction causes some of the heat in the gas to travel outwards, reducing the strength of the radiation that results from the black hole's consumption.") that sounds a bit odd. Physorg doesn't credit a reporter because they're printing a CfA-authored story (as evidenced by the "Provided by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics").
For any publicly-trade company, acting to benefit the company is actually one of the fundimental ethical principles. If you act in a way that drops the company's stock price you're essentially shredding other people's money. Sneaky but harmless media-baiting to improve a product's chance of success is the right ethical choice in that framework. It's not ethical from the journalistic perspective, of course.
For those who don't feel like actually reading the article, here're the specific reasons given for the tablet leaks:
* to light a fire under a recalcitrant partner * to float the idea of the US$1,000 price point and gauge reaction * to panic/confuse a potential competitor about whom Apple had some knowledge * to whet analyst and observer expectations to make sure the right kind and number of people show up at the (presumed) January 26 event. Apple hates empty seats and demands SRO at these events.
I'm especially curious about the first and the third. Who is the competitor? The Google/Alex Reader partnership? The rumoured Chrome OS tablet? And who is the partner, a content provider or an OEM? Were they concerned that there wasn't enough interest in the device to guarantee volume, or was it something else?
Metro, that shitty Newscorp rag that's given away on UK public transport, does a daily feature called "NO S**T SHERLOCK" on scientific discoveries where they list an obvious quote from a bit of scientific research as though positing the idea - never mind proving it, or quantifying it - was the entire purpose of the study.
Indeed, if web 2.0 leads to content being scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers then we're way ahead of the curve. Go Slashdot!
I do wonder how many of his concerns are actually unique to web 2.0, and not common to the social use of the web in general. Maybe I should read it.
Amazon sells on the order of 100M books per year, and has on the order of 100M unique customers. That means the average book sales rate is just one book per customer per year. So Kindle owners are only buying three books per year? That's not something to shout about!
Not all two-digit computer systems "break" because of that limitation, mind you. It only becomes an issue for systems which do comparisons between dates on different sides of the discontinuity. Admittedly that's most of the computing tasks that use dates, but it's not universal. And "break" has many different senses: the media often portrayed it as everything Y2K noncompliant keeling over and dying or entering some worst-case-scenario failure mode, when in many cases the errors were benign. That's what was being oversold, really: the danger.
You're going to be paying for a service plan on the unsubsidised handset, though. You'll make a saving depending on how much you actually need, but the total cost of ownership of the unsubsidised handset over the same two year period is probably closer to $1500.
The contract handset won't last any longer than the no-obligation one, and might work out cheaper. I dunno about the US, but if I go to a UK phone company and don't ask for a handset I save a third on the monthly rate and leave at a month's notice, putting the equivalent of about $400 in my pocket.
It's probably to restrict a limited initial stock of the device to the customers who will give the greatest return. Who ever thought that a ubiquitous item, and one that performs communications at that, might have a social aspect though, eh?
The US already introduced an equal law - the DMCA. It places similar obligations on ISPs which US residents have been happily footing the bill for in increased internet costs for about a decade.
Labels are not getting any of the money. The money is the cost, to ISPs, of mandatory anti-piracy measures, which it is expected will be passed on to the consumer. The US consumer probably paid a similar amount to their ISP cover the cost of DMCA legal actions in the past decade. It's forcing the shepherd to police the duck pond, which is an entirely different problem that this summary wonderfully distracts you from.
It can be taken further. Hideo Kojima started dropping ideas about a "raw game" to journos about a year later. His idea was that the game would self-destruct when your character died, simulating the fact that you don't get a second attempt if you die in real life. Steel Battalion implimented a similar concept - if your character is killed because you failed to eject from a wankered mech, then it deletes your save games.
What specific objections do you have? You've rambled on but it strikes me that most of the content you object to comes from the CfA's own press release.
Slashdot Mirror
Dick wasn't even using it as a trademark, to boot - it wasn't the title of a novel.
Graphics are sold by screenshots and by box shots. YouTube and so on might make a difference, but ultimately you'll get more players to swoon with half the framerate and twice the geometry, than vice versa.
Time Splitters was the first game I played which was locked at 60fps: it was quite a remarkable transition, even from games which were locked at 30fps, never mind games that fluctuated (I'll take 30fps and locked over 30-60fps any day). Gran Turismo had a "Hi-Spec" mode which doubled the resolution and framerate too, albeit at an obvious graphical cost, and it looked like The Future.
On the subject of movie theatres, 24fps was chosen because it's pretty much as low as you can go before people notice problems. Roger Ebert and various others have been arguing for a doubling of movie framerates for years to no avail. Studios don't want to pay the film and (these days) CGI cost of double the frames (which is why they went with the lowest possible framerate to begin with).
He's not endorsing it, he's discussing it, in the specific context of how it changes the phone's security. Given the remit of the article, were you expecting him to go off on an eight-page screed against software signing at that stage, or something? The application sandboxing is going to seriously affect the way you interact with the phone as a programmer, should he have included something about sandboxing and its serious drawbacks for software authors too? Shit, VPN, there's another thing, I'm absolutely horrified that he didn't bring up the sociological impact of working from fucking home in his article about how god-damn secure the device is.
JESUS.
Important caveat, yes. I misread that part.
Precisely! From our outside ethical perspective, is the net total of the benefit to Apple's shareholders plus the penalty to media integrity greater than zero? Apple's stock price went up three cents around the leak, is that the price of journalistic integrity?
Actually, the Space.com story does mention the correct mechanism ("It also creates pressure that helps some stellar winds avoid the black hole's gravitational grasp altogether."), but also a second one ("The conduction causes some of the heat in the gas to travel outwards, reducing the strength of the radiation that results from the black hole's consumption.") that sounds a bit odd. Physorg doesn't credit a reporter because they're printing a CfA-authored story (as evidenced by the "Provided by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics").
For any publicly-trade company, acting to benefit the company is actually one of the fundimental ethical principles. If you act in a way that drops the company's stock price you're essentially shredding other people's money. Sneaky but harmless media-baiting to improve a product's chance of success is the right ethical choice in that framework. It's not ethical from the journalistic perspective, of course.
For those who don't feel like actually reading the article, here're the specific reasons given for the tablet leaks:
* to light a fire under a recalcitrant partner
* to float the idea of the US$1,000 price point and gauge reaction
* to panic/confuse a potential competitor about whom Apple had some knowledge
* to whet analyst and observer expectations to make sure the right kind and number of people show up at the (presumed) January 26 event. Apple hates empty seats and demands SRO at these events.
I'm especially curious about the first and the third. Who is the competitor? The Google/Alex Reader partnership? The rumoured Chrome OS tablet? And who is the partner, a content provider or an OEM? Were they concerned that there wasn't enough interest in the device to guarantee volume, or was it something else?
Begging your pardon, but a blog reporting consumers' problems is necessarily going to be heavily biased towards complaints.
Metro, that shitty Newscorp rag that's given away on UK public transport, does a daily feature called "NO S**T SHERLOCK" on scientific discoveries where they list an obvious quote from a bit of scientific research as though positing the idea - never mind proving it, or quantifying it - was the entire purpose of the study.
Indeed, if web 2.0 leads to content being scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers then we're way ahead of the curve. Go Slashdot!
I do wonder how many of his concerns are actually unique to web 2.0, and not common to the social use of the web in general. Maybe I should read it.
Amazon sells on the order of 100M books per year, and has on the order of 100M unique customers. That means the average book sales rate is just one book per customer per year. So Kindle owners are only buying three books per year? That's not something to shout about!
How about the one in which modern human beings have existed?
Not all two-digit computer systems "break" because of that limitation, mind you. It only becomes an issue for systems which do comparisons between dates on different sides of the discontinuity. Admittedly that's most of the computing tasks that use dates, but it's not universal. And "break" has many different senses: the media often portrayed it as everything Y2K noncompliant keeling over and dying or entering some worst-case-scenario failure mode, when in many cases the errors were benign. That's what was being oversold, really: the danger.
No reason why it shouldn't work on pre-pay. A SIM is a SIM is a SIM as far as the handset's concerned.
You're going to be paying for a service plan on the unsubsidised handset, though. You'll make a saving depending on how much you actually need, but the total cost of ownership of the unsubsidised handset over the same two year period is probably closer to $1500.
The contract handset won't last any longer than the no-obligation one, and might work out cheaper. I dunno about the US, but if I go to a UK phone company and don't ask for a handset I save a third on the monthly rate and leave at a month's notice, putting the equivalent of about $400 in my pocket.
It's probably to restrict a limited initial stock of the device to the customers who will give the greatest return. Who ever thought that a ubiquitous item, and one that performs communications at that, might have a social aspect though, eh?
The US already introduced an equal law - the DMCA. It places similar obligations on ISPs which US residents have been happily footing the bill for in increased internet costs for about a decade.
Labels are not getting any of the money. The money is the cost, to ISPs, of mandatory anti-piracy measures, which it is expected will be passed on to the consumer. The US consumer probably paid a similar amount to their ISP cover the cost of DMCA legal actions in the past decade. It's forcing the shepherd to police the duck pond, which is an entirely different problem that this summary wonderfully distracts you from.
Zero, this is how much mandatory anti-piracy measures will cost the UK internet industry, not some tax fund being paid to labels.
It can be taken further. Hideo Kojima started dropping ideas about a "raw game" to journos about a year later. His idea was that the game would self-destruct when your character died, simulating the fact that you don't get a second attempt if you die in real life. Steel Battalion implimented a similar concept - if your character is killed because you failed to eject from a wankered mech, then it deletes your save games.
I thought complete ignorance of their own actions was a mandatory part of the MP specification anyway.
What specific objections do you have? You've rambled on but it strikes me that most of the content you object to comes from the CfA's own press release.