In early 2012, there were over 1.1 million apps available on the iPhone, and in May 2011 (when they approved their 500,000th app), 37% of the apps on the store were free, and the average price of all apps was $3.64.
In my experience (2008-2010, on an iPod Touch), you could do a fair amount for free, but most (not all) free apps were feature-cut demo versions. On Android, free apps often have all their features, but are ad-supported.
I can see someone being disappointed by the difference, but I agree that the post you replied to sounds like an exaggeration.
I'm a little later than some of the other posters. We've had a computer at home for most of my life, starting with an IBM PCJr. I grew up playing games on that or Apple II's at school. When I was about 8 or 9, we had a 486-based machine that dad put together. My interest started with wanting to learn the command line to launch my games. It continued when I started to wonder how programs got onto the floppy disks we bought, in the first place. I asked around, and someone had an old book of BASIC programs. It was just full of program listings, and not terribly useful for learning the language from scratch (especially without outside guidance). I figured out enough to do some basic math, to use goto and print, but not much else. I forgot about programming for years (but I knew more about how the computer worked than my father by the time I was about 11).
Fast forward to 10th grade. I had the option for QBasic and Visual Basic programming, followed by C++ in the second semester. I took it. Getting back into programming (Okay, really, getting into it for the first time), felt *right*. Those classes kind of sucked; not much structure, and they treated C++ like "C with iostream", but it was enough to get me looking on my own and teaching myself more.
It seems like the comparison includes the limitation of "without substantial engineering expertise". That situation doesn't apply with Wozniak (assuming you're talking about the Apple I, not the Macintosh, which wasn't made in a garage or back yard). i kan read also hedged their claim by saying "The vast majority of people lack the expertise to build or program computers[...]".
Of course, ikr could've phrased their comments better to eliminate the confusion.
Reading Rainbow was a children's show hosted by LeVar Burton, starting in 1983 and running for 23 years. Each episode was themed (e.g. "construction"), and different segments that fit that theme would be included. That might be something like LeVar going to a construction site and talking to the foreman about how he helps build a building. There was usually a section where a minor celebrity would read a children's book aloud, and the show ends with shots of children, one at a time, doing a couple-line review of a book that they liked.
A couple of years ago, Burton's company produced a Reading Rainbow app with free books and some of his "field trip" segments (apparently. I haven't used it.)
Wooo! LaserDisc! It bugs me that the streaming copy of a movie that some of them provide is marketed as the "Digital Copy" of the movie, when the movie itself is on DVD and Blu-Ray anyhow.
"The Cloud" is more of a marketing term than a technical description of a specific hosting set up, and different people will use different definitions. You can let them continue the guessing game of which meaning you're using and keep calling them idiots, or you can define the term that you're using.
So, get rid of the label so that some bigot doesn't look at my paperwork and decide "oops, wrong race!"
Wonderful, until you've got something (like medical diagnosis) where it could be useful to know something about the patient's ancestry (and help more people than it hurts, social construct, or not).
Look, you've got two versions of racial identification
Condescension. Wonderful. That'll certainly be conducive to creating an interesting discussion.
Pretending that somehow we'll stop bigotry by labeling, categorizing, and dividing people into imaginary, socially constructed, arbitrary, contradictory and malleable buckets is silly.
I'm pretending precisely jack shit. In fact, I said that "bucketing" people provides opportunities for discrimination.
Genes get passed down, of course, and that propogates traits that are associated with the social construct of race (skin/eye/hair color, hair texture, etc). I'm not debating that organisms pass traits to their offspring; I'm saying that someone's racial identification doesn't necessarily have a firm basis in their genetic heritage.
Race is primarily a social construct, rather than a genetic one. Your race is still a label that bigots use as a basis for discrimination, "imaginary" or not.
Descent 1+2 should work fine in Dosbox (and I think that's how GOG distributes those two, anyhow). Descent 2's Windows 95 version seems to work in Wine (according to the AppDB), and so does Descent 3 (especially the GOG version).
I guess the question is this: Is it worth whatever extra configuration time it would take to get the joystick working under Linux via the adapter, recognized by Wine, buttons mapped correctly in-game, etc? I'm not going to guess that it'd be easy to use that controller on newer games (in Windows), but for the original Descent games, I'm guessing "where there's a will, there's a way" would be the appropriate expression.
As an asterisk on those numbers: The SNES count doesn't include any of the Japanese releases, while the PS1, PS2, and N64 counts do. The Super Famicom has 1,442 titles, and 231 were released on Satellaview. Eliminate the titles that were common between the NA/PAL list and the Japanese lists, and the count still comes below the PS1 game count (so your point still stands). I just wanted to compare apples to apples.
That's a silly claim. Replace "possible" with "profitable", and you've got a better argument (but still one that I'd disagree with). DRM will keep an honest person honest, but they're not the ones an IP holder has to worry about anyhow. Someone dishonest will still find a way around the DRM (with the aid of the tiny, clever percentage of the population that can invent ways to circumvent it).
Oops, should've worded that differently. I was thinking of the G5 (or the 970 series, if you want to stick with the IBM names). I was just looking for a well-known 64-bit IBM-produced chip from before 64-bit x86.
IBM introduced the 64-bit version of the PowerPC architecture in 2002, and I think that some of their mainframe processors were 64-bit about 2 years before that.
It doesn't; the comparatively-cheap 2nd array of 6TB drives (or equivalent storage method), providing off-site backups does. Having the serial numbers makes it easier to replace the drives themselves.
There is a number of requests that they could have to process that would make continued business in Europe unprofitable. If the costs of business go above the income generated by the business, they'll pull out (or significantly change operations to make it profitable to stay in that market, again). Will Google/other search engines receive that number of requests? That remains to be seen.
I assume that there'd be some kind of location-specific display of information. When accessed from a U.S.-based IP, Google would display the unfiltered results. From a European IP, Google would remove "forgotten" results. I guess that the issue with that would be the edge cases, where the origination point of a request can't be determined accurately.
Exactly. A search engine should display what's available and where, without regard to the content. Fred and Sandra are misdirecting their attacks, if they're going after the search engine. They ought to go after you and your website (since you are, after all, the one posting the information that they don't like).
It sounds like an implementation of a multiple-protocol IM client, but without a heartbeat ping between client and server for either of the supported protocols (and also with user identifiers that don't distinguish between which protocol the user wants to send the message on).
On an Android phone, using Hangouts, when I choose a contact that has a gchat name and a mobile phone number attached, I can switch between "SMS" and "Hangouts". Everyone with iMessage will have an Apple ID anyhow, right? Apple could use that for an iMessage username, or have a little combo-box to the side of the message being sent to choose the protocol to use. In addition, if someone unregisters a phone number from their Apple ID (which I'd imagine could be done online?), it would make sense if the system would fall back to standard SMS (or send via SMS to the phone and simultaneously to whichever devices are currently logged into iMessage).
Better than what I've got. 25 down, 5 up, $62 per month (with 100 down, 20 up available for $100/month from the same ISP). Other parts of my area have DSL at up to 6 down 1 up for about $35/month, but I'm not in range for that. Mobile has tiny bandwidth limits (and the unlimited ones can't match even the DSL connection's speed). Satellite has about the same drawbacks as mobile, except that it also costs more. Even what I have has a 250GB soft-cap (they'll send you letters when you go over, but I haven't heard of anyone actually being cut off).
Internet in the US is a terrible mess, but it seems like you've got it better than most.
DRM doesn't "allow" anything; it restricts what a user can do with the protected media by its nature. It's IP-holder-friendly, but user-hostile. I'd call some DRM implementations "unobtrusive" or "better than not having the product at all", but not "friendly", and certainly not friendlier than DRM-free media.
In general, I agree with your viewpoint, just not your terminology.
That's a contradiction in terms, right there. DRM is friendly if it does something *for* me. I'll agree that there's more and less cumbersome DRM implementations, but the argument that less-cumbersome DRM is in *any* way friendlier than no DRM at all obviously falls flat on its face.
I've also never met anyone that would admit to paying for in-game purchases. Everyone I know either plays the free stuff without paying, or buys *real* games that don't fall into the gameplay rut favored by igp. Whales are the only customers that developers of igp-containing games pay about, and I'd wager that by raw population count, those people are even smaller than the group that follows my behavior.
Wire the game up to a online service and make the player pay as they go along (a.k.a. f2p).
As you say, "So fucking wrong." That's the quickest way to get an app deleted from my device. I've got a few f2p/IAP games, but they're blocked by the firewall. If they aren't playable (and enjoyable) in that state, they get tossed. I've got more games that I've legitimately paid for than f2p games (and their devs have seen more money from me than f2p devs ever will).
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In early 2012, there were over 1.1 million apps available on the iPhone, and in May 2011 (when they approved their 500,000th app), 37% of the apps on the store were free, and the average price of all apps was $3.64.
In my experience (2008-2010, on an iPod Touch), you could do a fair amount for free, but most (not all) free apps were feature-cut demo versions. On Android, free apps often have all their features, but are ad-supported.
I can see someone being disappointed by the difference, but I agree that the post you replied to sounds like an exaggeration.
I'm a little later than some of the other posters. We've had a computer at home for most of my life, starting with an IBM PCJr. I grew up playing games on that or Apple II's at school. When I was about 8 or 9, we had a 486-based machine that dad put together. My interest started with wanting to learn the command line to launch my games. It continued when I started to wonder how programs got onto the floppy disks we bought, in the first place. I asked around, and someone had an old book of BASIC programs. It was just full of program listings, and not terribly useful for learning the language from scratch (especially without outside guidance). I figured out enough to do some basic math, to use goto and print, but not much else. I forgot about programming for years (but I knew more about how the computer worked than my father by the time I was about 11).
Fast forward to 10th grade. I had the option for QBasic and Visual Basic programming, followed by C++ in the second semester. I took it. Getting back into programming (Okay, really, getting into it for the first time), felt *right*. Those classes kind of sucked; not much structure, and they treated C++ like "C with iostream", but it was enough to get me looking on my own and teaching myself more.
It seems like the comparison includes the limitation of "without substantial engineering expertise". That situation doesn't apply with Wozniak (assuming you're talking about the Apple I, not the Macintosh, which wasn't made in a garage or back yard). i kan read also hedged their claim by saying "The vast majority of people lack the expertise to build or program computers[...]".
Of course, ikr could've phrased their comments better to eliminate the confusion.
Reading Rainbow was a children's show hosted by LeVar Burton, starting in 1983 and running for 23 years. Each episode was themed (e.g. "construction"), and different segments that fit that theme would be included. That might be something like LeVar going to a construction site and talking to the foreman about how he helps build a building. There was usually a section where a minor celebrity would read a children's book aloud, and the show ends with shots of children, one at a time, doing a couple-line review of a book that they liked.
A couple of years ago, Burton's company produced a Reading Rainbow app with free books and some of his "field trip" segments (apparently. I haven't used it.)
Once again, analog beats digital.
Wooo! LaserDisc! It bugs me that the streaming copy of a movie that some of them provide is marketed as the "Digital Copy" of the movie, when the movie itself is on DVD and Blu-Ray anyhow.
"The Cloud" is more of a marketing term than a technical description of a specific hosting set up, and different people will use different definitions. You can let them continue the guessing game of which meaning you're using and keep calling them idiots, or you can define the term that you're using.
So, get rid of the label so that some bigot doesn't look at my paperwork and decide "oops, wrong race!"
Wonderful, until you've got something (like medical diagnosis) where it could be useful to know something about the patient's ancestry (and help more people than it hurts, social construct, or not).
Look, you've got two versions of racial identification
Condescension. Wonderful. That'll certainly be conducive to creating an interesting discussion.
Pretending that somehow we'll stop bigotry by labeling, categorizing, and dividing people into imaginary, socially constructed, arbitrary, contradictory and malleable buckets is silly.
I'm pretending precisely jack shit. In fact, I said that "bucketing" people provides opportunities for discrimination.
Genes get passed down, of course, and that propogates traits that are associated with the social construct of race (skin/eye/hair color, hair texture, etc). I'm not debating that organisms pass traits to their offspring; I'm saying that someone's racial identification doesn't necessarily have a firm basis in their genetic heritage.
Race is primarily a social construct, rather than a genetic one. Your race is still a label that bigots use as a basis for discrimination, "imaginary" or not.
Descent 1+2 should work fine in Dosbox (and I think that's how GOG distributes those two, anyhow). Descent 2's Windows 95 version seems to work in Wine (according to the AppDB), and so does Descent 3 (especially the GOG version).
I guess the question is this: Is it worth whatever extra configuration time it would take to get the joystick working under Linux via the adapter, recognized by Wine, buttons mapped correctly in-game, etc? I'm not going to guess that it'd be easy to use that controller on newer games (in Windows), but for the original Descent games, I'm guessing "where there's a will, there's a way" would be the appropriate expression.
As an asterisk on those numbers: The SNES count doesn't include any of the Japanese releases, while the PS1, PS2, and N64 counts do. The Super Famicom has 1,442 titles, and 231 were released on Satellaview. Eliminate the titles that were common between the NA/PAL list and the Japanese lists, and the count still comes below the PS1 game count (so your point still stands). I just wanted to compare apples to apples.
And renting wouldn't be possible without DRM.
That's a silly claim. Replace "possible" with "profitable", and you've got a better argument (but still one that I'd disagree with). DRM will keep an honest person honest, but they're not the ones an IP holder has to worry about anyhow. Someone dishonest will still find a way around the DRM (with the aid of the tiny, clever percentage of the population that can invent ways to circumvent it).
Oops, should've worded that differently. I was thinking of the G5 (or the 970 series, if you want to stick with the IBM names). I was just looking for a well-known 64-bit IBM-produced chip from before 64-bit x86.
If you want to be picky, it *is* supported by Windows 8.1, but only if you use the 32-bit version of the OS.
IBM introduced the 64-bit version of the PowerPC architecture in 2002, and I think that some of their mainframe processors were 64-bit about 2 years before that.
It doesn't; the comparatively-cheap 2nd array of 6TB drives (or equivalent storage method), providing off-site backups does. Having the serial numbers makes it easier to replace the drives themselves.
There is a number of requests that they could have to process that would make continued business in Europe unprofitable. If the costs of business go above the income generated by the business, they'll pull out (or significantly change operations to make it profitable to stay in that market, again). Will Google/other search engines receive that number of requests? That remains to be seen.
I assume that there'd be some kind of location-specific display of information. When accessed from a U.S.-based IP, Google would display the unfiltered results. From a European IP, Google would remove "forgotten" results. I guess that the issue with that would be the edge cases, where the origination point of a request can't be determined accurately.
Exactly. A search engine should display what's available and where, without regard to the content. Fred and Sandra are misdirecting their attacks, if they're going after the search engine. They ought to go after you and your website (since you are, after all, the one posting the information that they don't like).
It sounds like an implementation of a multiple-protocol IM client, but without a heartbeat ping between client and server for either of the supported protocols (and also with user identifiers that don't distinguish between which protocol the user wants to send the message on).
On an Android phone, using Hangouts, when I choose a contact that has a gchat name and a mobile phone number attached, I can switch between "SMS" and "Hangouts". Everyone with iMessage will have an Apple ID anyhow, right? Apple could use that for an iMessage username, or have a little combo-box to the side of the message being sent to choose the protocol to use. In addition, if someone unregisters a phone number from their Apple ID (which I'd imagine could be done online?), it would make sense if the system would fall back to standard SMS (or send via SMS to the phone and simultaneously to whichever devices are currently logged into iMessage).
Better than what I've got. 25 down, 5 up, $62 per month (with 100 down, 20 up available for $100/month from the same ISP). Other parts of my area have DSL at up to 6 down 1 up for about $35/month, but I'm not in range for that. Mobile has tiny bandwidth limits (and the unlimited ones can't match even the DSL connection's speed). Satellite has about the same drawbacks as mobile, except that it also costs more. Even what I have has a 250GB soft-cap (they'll send you letters when you go over, but I haven't heard of anyone actually being cut off).
Internet in the US is a terrible mess, but it seems like you've got it better than most.
DRM doesn't "allow" anything; it restricts what a user can do with the protected media by its nature. It's IP-holder-friendly, but user-hostile. I'd call some DRM implementations "unobtrusive" or "better than not having the product at all", but not "friendly", and certainly not friendlier than DRM-free media.
In general, I agree with your viewpoint, just not your terminology.
user friendly DRM
That's a contradiction in terms, right there. DRM is friendly if it does something *for* me. I'll agree that there's more and less cumbersome DRM implementations, but the argument that less-cumbersome DRM is in *any* way friendlier than no DRM at all obviously falls flat on its face.
I've also never met anyone that would admit to paying for in-game purchases. Everyone I know either plays the free stuff without paying, or buys *real* games that don't fall into the gameplay rut favored by igp. Whales are the only customers that developers of igp-containing games pay about, and I'd wager that by raw population count, those people are even smaller than the group that follows my behavior.
Wire the game up to a online service and make the player pay as they go along (a.k.a. f2p).
As you say, "So fucking wrong." That's the quickest way to get an app deleted from my device. I've got a few f2p/IAP games, but they're blocked by the firewall. If they aren't playable (and enjoyable) in that state, they get tossed. I've got more games that I've legitimately paid for than f2p games (and their devs have seen more money from me than f2p devs ever will).