Standards for defining "evil" have slipped in the past few years, I see.
If they're "going open" then I'd say that it's a good start on an open "shortened URL" standard that could, some day, solve those issues while providing a similar function. I can see the use for such a system, if only to provide a way to share links away from a computer, and I'll take short URLs over 2D codes any day.
The CPU's pretty nippy, still, but RAM is comparatively limited and the graphics card's showing its age. It's just the tradeoff you get for the benefits of a fixed platform.
Actually these days middleware and the use of thirdparty engines is becoming hugely important. Thus the software part isn't an afterthought so much as outsourced to someone more competent. The biggest problem in porting tends to be when someone tries to bring a game developed for consoles to the PC, or vice versa. Essentially the console is dramatically underpowered versus contemporary PCs. So console games are developed "close to the metal" to gain as much power as possible from coding tricks, and therefore don't code well. PC games find themselves on a platform without the horsepower to run properly with a serious rewrite to add those sorts of tricks. Again, middleware can eliminate this sort of issue by dealing with the resource-squeezing in advance.
The system discovers the categories. The analysis finds groupings of players who behave in similar ways through the game, and the researchers named those after-the-fact. There's no a priori reason why the players should group at all, though - the study could've equally found that only a small percentage of players clustered and the majority were radically different from each other.
It seems to me that the main functions of magazines pre-internet - regurgitating news releases and screenshots so that obsessives know what's going on - can be very easily and cheaply accomplished by any hack on the web. Given that, any magazine which sells itself on the back of raw news is utterly screwed. However what kept me reading games magazines as an adult was the editorial and other novel content. Lengthy discussions of game design tropes, how games are written, game history and so on, are mentally stimulating and lead to some fun conversations. To be honest, that kind of material is inevitable and essential if there are to be adult videogame players. It's those sorts of magazines that will survive, I think. Edge seems to have the right idea - its news coverage is increasingly focussed on discussing the news with games industry figures rather than simply reporting it, as though aware that it's been thoroughly scooped by the time it goes to press. Its reviews are increasingly starkly editorialised now that people can bypass nominally objective reviews in mags for mechanistically objective review aggregations.
It is not geared for appliances. Its platform is explicitly the netbook, be it x86 or ARM. Now, there's no doubt that it's going to streamline the experience in the same way that Chrome OS did, but that doesn't preclude "a rich API" for software design, or "multimedia capabilities". Look at the iPhone - it's a far cry indeed from the "general-purpose computer" but people are happy to use it to accomplish umpteen tasks because there's plenty of software support, which comes out of a developer-friendly API.
But not everyone shared in the celebration. On 7th April, 2009, five months after its release, Papazian received an email from Apple. It stated: "We have received notice from Edge Games, Inc. ('Edge') that Edge believes your application named Edge infringes Edge's rights. Accordingly, please take steps to review your application to ensure that it does not violate the rights of another party."
He is perfectly entitled to call himself "doctor", but honestly it just reeks of puffing oneself up when it's used to sign off on his legal and business documents and omitted elsewhere. In retrospect ["Dr. Langdell"] would've been better than ["Dr." Langdell].
Edge Games has been claiming to develop games for a long time, though, without producing anything. In fact almost all of Langdell's trademark registrations are officially dead, and indeed he only renewed his current UK trademarks when a database purge removed the already-dead marks from their website. And Edge has never sold products in many of the fields it has a trademark registration - they've never published a comic book or a magazine, for example.
I should point out that my original title for this article did not refer to him as a trademark troll. I think the term is overused and honestly should only apply to people like Leo Stoller who have no business registering a trademark in the first place, not folk like Langdell who (IMO) take a perfectly valid trademark registration and behave like total assholes in their exploitation of it.
You could've just said "niche blogs". What makes them "branded" verticals, anyway? It's not like "Autoblog" is one of the news industry's most sought-after trademark endorsements.
This idea assumes that ad-funded online media is the biggest threat to the mainstream media, and furthermore that by cutting off the revenue source, people will stop doing it.
However most of the media content I get online is posted by interested amateurs who, at worst, use a few static banners and Google ads to cover their hosting costs. I generally get my editorial from blogs, and local and national news pops up on Twitter or Livejournal communities in no time at all. None of these people are using enough banners to motivate me to block them, and I imagine they'd continue to create for the sake of creating even if they didn't make a single penny.
The biggest stupidity is that the people seeking to monetise online media, the people with the biggest, most obnoxious video-saturated banners, the people who absolutely have to get a return on investment from the effort, and therefore the people who would be most hurt by this plan, would be the MSM themselves. The only exception I can think of is the BBC, whose site is ad-free.
Macbooks are essentially the same hardware as Windows machines, down to battery capacity. It is unlikely that a "bloated codebase" would chew through the battery like nobody's business on one x86 machine and suddenly become perfectly benign on a practically identical x86 machine. Bloat doesn't magically appear when you put an Apple logo on something.
TV's a medium where ads are the norm already. If you get a version of something that normally comes without ads, and it has ads plastered over it, it usually means it's something that's being given away. That's my experience, anyway. I may be a complete outlier.
You don't have to have 50.1% of the outstanding shares to make significant decisions regarding the company's future. That just gives you the potential to act unilaterally, which no sane individual is going to do anyway.
Your second remark is exactly my point. When you have hungry stakeholders looking for a good ROI there's no concept of turning down a lucrative offer to keep your business identity, or to ensure your tightly-knit board calls the shots, or to preserve Casual Thursdays, or because the offer mandates replacing 90% of your staff with cheap overseas labour. You've got to go where the money is.
Slashdot Mirror
Standards for defining "evil" have slipped in the past few years, I see.
If they're "going open" then I'd say that it's a good start on an open "shortened URL" standard that could, some day, solve those issues while providing a similar function. I can see the use for such a system, if only to provide a way to share links away from a computer, and I'll take short URLs over 2D codes any day.
The CPU's pretty nippy, still, but RAM is comparatively limited and the graphics card's showing its age. It's just the tradeoff you get for the benefits of a fixed platform.
Actually these days middleware and the use of thirdparty engines is becoming hugely important. Thus the software part isn't an afterthought so much as outsourced to someone more competent. The biggest problem in porting tends to be when someone tries to bring a game developed for consoles to the PC, or vice versa. Essentially the console is dramatically underpowered versus contemporary PCs. So console games are developed "close to the metal" to gain as much power as possible from coding tricks, and therefore don't code well. PC games find themselves on a platform without the horsepower to run properly with a serious rewrite to add those sorts of tricks. Again, middleware can eliminate this sort of issue by dealing with the resource-squeezing in advance.
You mean like the plot of MGS? Or the Resident Evil series? Or Manhunt? Nintendo's not the same company it was in the SNES days.
The system discovers the categories. The analysis finds groupings of players who behave in similar ways through the game, and the researchers named those after-the-fact. There's no a priori reason why the players should group at all, though - the study could've equally found that only a small percentage of players clustered and the majority were radically different from each other.
Microsoft's many things, but they're never a patent troll, so I'm not sure what you mean there beyond simple schadenfreude.
It seems to me that the main functions of magazines pre-internet - regurgitating news releases and screenshots so that obsessives know what's going on - can be very easily and cheaply accomplished by any hack on the web. Given that, any magazine which sells itself on the back of raw news is utterly screwed. However what kept me reading games magazines as an adult was the editorial and other novel content. Lengthy discussions of game design tropes, how games are written, game history and so on, are mentally stimulating and lead to some fun conversations. To be honest, that kind of material is inevitable and essential if there are to be adult videogame players. It's those sorts of magazines that will survive, I think. Edge seems to have the right idea - its news coverage is increasingly focussed on discussing the news with games industry figures rather than simply reporting it, as though aware that it's been thoroughly scooped by the time it goes to press. Its reviews are increasingly starkly editorialised now that people can bypass nominally objective reviews in mags for mechanistically objective review aggregations.
I don't think Star Wars Galaxies is a console. The subscription may cost as much as one, mind you.
Their proposition to cellular companies will be seductive too.
Google: Buy our OS, it'll run on any computer and you can sell the HSDPA they need.
It is not geared for appliances. Its platform is explicitly the netbook, be it x86 or ARM. Now, there's no doubt that it's going to streamline the experience in the same way that Chrome OS did, but that doesn't preclude "a rich API" for software design, or "multimedia capabilities". Look at the iPhone - it's a far cry indeed from the "general-purpose computer" but people are happy to use it to accomplish umpteen tasks because there's plenty of software support, which comes out of a developer-friendly API.
Where do you think you are, exactly?
You're right, I misunderstood this paragraph:
But not everyone shared in the celebration. On 7th April, 2009, five months after its release, Papazian received an email from Apple. It stated: "We have received notice from Edge Games, Inc. ('Edge') that Edge believes your application named Edge infringes Edge's rights. Accordingly, please take steps to review your application to ensure that it does not violate the rights of another party."
He is perfectly entitled to call himself "doctor", but honestly it just reeks of puffing oneself up when it's used to sign off on his legal and business documents and omitted elsewhere. In retrospect ["Dr. Langdell"] would've been better than ["Dr." Langdell].
See the "related stories" Firehose link. The original, unedited slashdot submissions get posted there.
He's got a doctorate in experimental child psychology - his thesis was on autism. It's just that he refers to himself as Dr. Langdell all the time.
Edge Games has been claiming to develop games for a long time, though, without producing anything. In fact almost all of Langdell's trademark registrations are officially dead, and indeed he only renewed his current UK trademarks when a database purge removed the already-dead marks from their website. And Edge has never sold products in many of the fields it has a trademark registration - they've never published a comic book or a magazine, for example.
I should point out that my original title for this article did not refer to him as a trademark troll. I think the term is overused and honestly should only apply to people like Leo Stoller who have no business registering a trademark in the first place, not folk like Langdell who (IMO) take a perfectly valid trademark registration and behave like total assholes in their exploitation of it.
You could've just said "niche blogs". What makes them "branded" verticals, anyway? It's not like "Autoblog" is one of the news industry's most sought-after trademark endorsements.
This idea assumes that ad-funded online media is the biggest threat to the mainstream media, and furthermore that by cutting off the revenue source, people will stop doing it.
However most of the media content I get online is posted by interested amateurs who, at worst, use a few static banners and Google ads to cover their hosting costs. I generally get my editorial from blogs, and local and national news pops up on Twitter or Livejournal communities in no time at all. None of these people are using enough banners to motivate me to block them, and I imagine they'd continue to create for the sake of creating even if they didn't make a single penny.
The biggest stupidity is that the people seeking to monetise online media, the people with the biggest, most obnoxious video-saturated banners, the people who absolutely have to get a return on investment from the effort, and therefore the people who would be most hurt by this plan, would be the MSM themselves. The only exception I can think of is the BBC, whose site is ad-free.
We have an explaination!
Or more likely, there just isn't a Windows driver for the keyboard light. It's a pretty exotic feature.
I've no doubt at all that it's a driver issue.
Macbooks are essentially the same hardware as Windows machines, down to battery capacity. It is unlikely that a "bloated codebase" would chew through the battery like nobody's business on one x86 machine and suddenly become perfectly benign on a practically identical x86 machine. Bloat doesn't magically appear when you put an Apple logo on something.
TV's a medium where ads are the norm already. If you get a version of something that normally comes without ads, and it has ads plastered over it, it usually means it's something that's being given away. That's my experience, anyway. I may be a complete outlier.
You don't have to have 50.1% of the outstanding shares to make significant decisions regarding the company's future. That just gives you the potential to act unilaterally, which no sane individual is going to do anyway.
Your second remark is exactly my point. When you have hungry stakeholders looking for a good ROI there's no concept of turning down a lucrative offer to keep your business identity, or to ensure your tightly-knit board calls the shots, or to preserve Casual Thursdays, or because the offer mandates replacing 90% of your staff with cheap overseas labour. You've got to go where the money is.