a large part of their target market is the working poor.
A lot of the working poor can't afford new game discs anyway, so they're not in the part of the market that the major video game publishers are targeting. Publishers would probably be content to "let them eat cake", figuring that $2.99 touch screen games on Google Play ought to be enough for them.
I think they underestimate how big that market segment is, something like a dozen of the people I've raided end-game WoW content with are living paycheck to paycheck. I have no personal knowledge of similar behavior in the console market but I've certainly seen comments in gaming forums to the same effect.
Exactly this. This whole approach is aimed at the elite (like me) who have an excellent connection and little concern about bandwidth usage. What the gaming industry is failing to take into account is that a large part of their target market is the working poor.
I'm assuming that they've amassed some good intelligence in the past decade or so of Xbox Live regarding their target audiences... it's entirely possible the elite are the ones who will benefit from it or more specifically the games that the elite play, and that those who don't fit in that category wouldn't be affected in anyway in that the games they would play, wouldn't require the extra horsepower in the first place.
Always on. And what happens when you have a shit internet connection?
I guess if you have a shit internet connection you shouldn't buy and play online games?
The problem is that "online" and "connection" mean different things to different people. Apparently my relatively crappy 10Mbps connection is significantly better than most of the gaming community.
(I always have a little giggle that I get better ping times from Eastern Canada to a server in California then the average Texan.)
Always on. And what happens when you have a shit internet connection?
Exactly this. This whole approach is aimed at the elite (like me) who have an excellent connection and little concern about bandwidth usage. What the gaming industry is failing to take into account is that a large part of their target market is the working poor.
Someone else in this item brought up World of Warcraft and SimCity as examples of client-server games (Diablo III is another example of a single user game that should never have had a server). We all know how well the Diablo launch and SimCity launches went. Even WoW fails in certain circumstances. (I can't tell you how many times I've had WoW raids fail because the redneck tanking in Texas drops carrier. I don't know who the ISPs are in San Antonio, but it seems that even the mildest thunderstorm takes them out.)
Leaving games unplayable because of poor infrastructure or outages is not going to make people happy, we have tons of examples in the past. Why Microsoft thinks they're going to have a different experience with this is beyond me.
I think that eventually this kind of architecture will have enormous potential, but I don't see that we have the market penetration of sufficient high-quality, high-bandwidth networking.
Nonsense, the Americans would not get involved in Argentina, the NATO operation in Libya was commanded by a Canadian and even with half the world begging them they're not touching Syria with a barge pole.
That's why you need a transition plan. Officially Canada went metric over 30 years ago, but you can still buy tools with Imperial measures and almost all our materials are sold in feet and inches because we share the worlds longest unprotected border with the Neathertals to the south who refuse to evolve.
I lived in Canada before, during and after the transition.
Over 30 years later we're all wondering why you're all still whining like little bitches. We'd tell you but you might decide to invade our socialist paradise.
I've really only got two complaints with Python3: 1) It's too slow. 2) It's too hard to write fixed length blocks of data to disk.
Both of these could be addressed with optional typing, but I don't expect that to ever happen, because the trend is in the opposite direction. OTOH, any year now I expect Vala to become usable.
Slow compared to what? Other scripting languages? Native binaries? Or jits like Java, C# ?
Same here, except that it annoys me to the point where I don't use it. Too bad Python doesn't have a CLI switch to turn on braces instead of spaces.
I am reminded of a university professor who was supposed to be teaching C/C++ to first year Comp. Sci. and spent most of one of the first lectures demonstrating that you could basically write Pascal instead and leverage the pre-processor to generate C at compile time.
Yeah, exactly. What the writeup calls "appeasing a ceremonial type checker" is more properly called "debugging".
Don't get me wrong, I like the thrill of the chase, the satisfaction of tracking down a really hard bug, as much as anyone. But I like programming even more. Using a well-designed type checker, I can find bugs in my program and convince myself that I'm programming rather than debugging.
Agreed. The languages I've used the most would be Smalltalk, C++, Javascript and Java (in rough chronological order, some overlaps), two are weak typed two are strong typed.
After a day grinding out hundreds of lines of productive Java trying to do anything in javascript just makes me want to drown kittens... well perhaps kittens named Brandon Eich. (Sorry Brandon... I've just seen too many sins committed with your language.)
Those people always bitch about and those no one uses.
Since I have yet to hear any complaints about Dart, I can only assume it's in the latter category and no one cares.
We need these languages, not necessarily for working with them, but to inspire others. The experimental languages of the 60's and 70's begat Smalltalk, which influenced C++ and Objective C, they all lead nicely to Java and C#.
All of these influence the current batch of experimental languages.
What I want is the beauty of Smalltalk, the rapid development of Python, the library depth of Java, the speed of C++ and the pervasive platform of javascript.
If I could do web-client side scripting in a language like that I'd be happier than a pig in shit.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
Once the idea is tested and youâ(TM)re comfortable with the design, you can add type annotations.
I've been doing this with comments since 1999 and it works great! Of course I still haven't gotten around to that final step of going back and adding all those comments but I love the flexibility!
Unless you like bugs, type-checking is a good thing. Lack of type enforcement encourages what -- lack of forethought?
Exactly, this is one of the things that crippled large smalltalk projects back in the day; it was almost impossible to figure out how to call someone elses code without invoking the wrath of doesNotUnderstand.
So if this were both widely deployed and effective it would just force these hypothetical dirty bomb enthusiasts to line the bomb container with lead. Lead which would become toxic shrapnel on detonation. The potential for many false positives has already been mentioned, but this system could be easily defeated by a thin lead lining. Lead lining has the further benefit of shielding a non-suicidal bomber from his own radiation.
That's easy, we just ban well shielded dirty bombs. *rimshot*
we do understand atmosphere, and yes that does make sense becasue it's trapping the heatr. OCntrary to what the media, tlaking heads, and ignorant politician tell you its a fact.
You don't have to understand every single fact of something for it to be true. That would be akin to saying gravity isn't real.
We know, for a fact, we are increasing CO2. we know, for a fact, that CO2 traps heat. We know, for a fact, the heating is occurring in the lower parts of the atmosphere We know, for a fact, that there is a trend happening on top of normal historic cycles.
Exactly. The point was, even if we didn't know all that, altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere is a mindbogglingly stupid thing to do.
It does feel good to have it stated though... a nice warm fuzzy feeling...
Regardless, we should focus on cutting pollution even if global warming is not man-made.
I wish this was more obvious to more people.
If there is no relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperatures then that means we have absolutely no idea how planetary ecosystems work at all.
If we don't understand our atmosphere does it make any sense to be modifying as a side effect of industrialization?
My only hope is we actually figure out how all this works and become environmentally neutral before it's too late.
Re:multiple social providers on the desktop
on
Firefox 21 Arrives
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Firefox just comes with the Social API, as with addon APIs, you have to install something, otherwise it's just potential.
There you go again, bringing logic and reason to an emotional argument. Won't somebody think of the delusional paranoids!
Consuming one alcoholic beverage does not make a person an unsafe driver, therefore making the limit so low that consuming one beverage is illegal is wrong.
I disagree.
I think we have proven that there is a point at which all people are "too drunk to drive", the only question is what is that limit.
I think that's it's high time we considers zero tolerance.
Slashdot Mirror
a large part of their target market is the working poor.
A lot of the working poor can't afford new game discs anyway, so they're not in the part of the market that the major video game publishers are targeting. Publishers would probably be content to "let them eat cake", figuring that $2.99 touch screen games on Google Play ought to be enough for them.
I think they underestimate how big that market segment is, something like a dozen of the people I've raided end-game WoW content with are living paycheck to paycheck. I have no personal knowledge of similar behavior in the console market but I've certainly seen comments in gaming forums to the same effect.
Exactly this. This whole approach is aimed at the elite (like me) who have an excellent connection and little concern about bandwidth usage. What the gaming industry is failing to take into account is that a large part of their target market is the working poor.
I'm assuming that they've amassed some good intelligence in the past decade or so of Xbox Live regarding their target audiences... it's entirely possible the elite are the ones who will benefit from it or more specifically the games that the elite play, and that those who don't fit in that category wouldn't be affected in anyway in that the games they would play, wouldn't require the extra horsepower in the first place.
DLC, good point.
Agreed. But that's not what they said, they said they're throwing a huge server infrastructure at this.
Given how vocal, and how well informed, the elite gamers are they have to be out of their freaking trees saying bullshit like this in public.
Always on. And what happens when you have a shit internet connection?
I guess if you have a shit internet connection you shouldn't buy and play online games?
The problem is that "online" and "connection" mean different things to different people. Apparently my relatively crappy 10Mbps connection is significantly better than most of the gaming community.
(I always have a little giggle that I get better ping times from Eastern Canada to a server in California then the average Texan.)
Always on. And what happens when you have a shit internet connection?
Exactly this. This whole approach is aimed at the elite (like me) who have an excellent connection and little concern about bandwidth usage. What the gaming industry is failing to take into account is that a large part of their target market is the working poor.
Someone else in this item brought up World of Warcraft and SimCity as examples of client-server games (Diablo III is another example of a single user game that should never have had a server). We all know how well the Diablo launch and SimCity launches went. Even WoW fails in certain circumstances. (I can't tell you how many times I've had WoW raids fail because the redneck tanking in Texas drops carrier. I don't know who the ISPs are in San Antonio, but it seems that even the mildest thunderstorm takes them out.)
Leaving games unplayable because of poor infrastructure or outages is not going to make people happy, we have tons of examples in the past. Why Microsoft thinks they're going to have a different experience with this is beyond me.
I think that eventually this kind of architecture will have enormous potential, but I don't see that we have the market penetration of sufficient high-quality, high-bandwidth networking.
World of Warcraft likely does server side processing.
Now there's an understatement. :)
Nonsense, the Americans would not get involved in Argentina, the NATO operation in Libya was commanded by a Canadian and even with half the world begging them they're not touching Syria with a barge pole.
distract british people with another Falklands/Malvinas war...
I do hope you're not suggesting that Argentina did NOT invade the Falklands in the 1980s.
Ah Canada, that wonderfully large 51-57th state.
You realize that if you take that point of view you have to accept Justin Beiber and Celine Dion as Americans?
That's why you need a transition plan. Officially Canada went metric over 30 years ago, but you can still buy tools with Imperial measures and almost all our materials are sold in feet and inches because we share the worlds longest unprotected border with the Neathertals to the south who refuse to evolve.
I lived in Canada before, during and after the transition.
Over 30 years later we're all wondering why you're all still whining like little bitches. We'd tell you but you might decide to invade our socialist paradise.
having a hard time with your units, how many piss pots per parsec is that?
Good question, but the only pisspot I know within a parsec is the one that's still using Imperial.
Well there's the last two years of my life in a nutshell... but throw Dojo into the mix.
Fuckwads indeed.
I've really only got two complaints with Python3:
1) It's too slow.
2) It's too hard to write fixed length blocks of data to disk.
Both of these could be addressed with optional typing, but I don't expect that to ever happen, because the trend is in the opposite direction. OTOH, any year now I expect Vala to become usable.
Slow compared to what? Other scripting languages? Native binaries? Or jits like Java, C# ?
Same here, except that it annoys me to the point where I don't use it. Too bad Python doesn't have a CLI switch to turn on braces instead of spaces.
I am reminded of a university professor who was supposed to be teaching C/C++ to first year Comp. Sci. and spent most of one of the first lectures demonstrating that you could basically write Pascal instead and leverage the pre-processor to generate C at compile time.
Yeah, exactly. What the writeup calls "appeasing a ceremonial type checker" is more properly called "debugging".
Don't get me wrong, I like the thrill of the chase, the satisfaction of tracking down a really hard bug, as much as anyone. But I like programming even more. Using a well-designed type checker, I can find bugs in my program and convince myself that I'm programming rather than debugging.
Agreed. The languages I've used the most would be Smalltalk, C++, Javascript and Java (in rough chronological order, some overlaps), two are weak typed two are strong typed.
After a day grinding out hundreds of lines of productive Java trying to do anything in javascript just makes me want to drown kittens... well perhaps kittens named Brandon Eich. (Sorry Brandon... I've just seen too many sins committed with your language.)
And then there's Python.
people bitch about python. at least I do.
whitespace has effect. who has time for that..
Same, but it's almost my only complaint. Other than that it's an elegant language, my favorite for scripting.
Those people always bitch about and those no one uses.
Since I have yet to hear any complaints about Dart, I can only assume it's in the latter category and no one cares.
We need these languages, not necessarily for working with them, but to inspire others. The experimental languages of the 60's and 70's begat Smalltalk, which influenced C++ and Objective C, they all lead nicely to Java and C#.
All of these influence the current batch of experimental languages.
What I want is the beauty of Smalltalk, the rapid development of Python, the library depth of Java, the speed of C++ and the pervasive platform of javascript.
If I could do web-client side scripting in a language like that I'd be happier than a pig in shit.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
I've been doing this with comments since 1999 and it works great! Of course I still haven't gotten around to that final step of going back and adding all those comments but I love the flexibility!
Unless you like bugs, type-checking is a good thing. Lack of type enforcement encourages what -- lack of forethought?
Exactly, this is one of the things that crippled large smalltalk projects back in the day; it was almost impossible to figure out how to call someone elses code without invoking the wrath of doesNotUnderstand.
It ain't done till Lotus won't run.
I guess it's done.
Interestingly, I think you're right, Windows is done.
ohnotheskyisfalling
People said the same thing after Vista, though as far as I can see, Windows 8 is far worse for end users than Vista.
So if this were both widely deployed and effective it would just force these hypothetical dirty bomb enthusiasts to line the bomb container with lead. Lead which would become toxic shrapnel on detonation. The potential for many false positives has already been mentioned, but this system could be easily defeated by a thin lead lining. Lead lining has the further benefit of shielding a non-suicidal bomber from his own radiation.
That's easy, we just ban well shielded dirty bombs. *rimshot*
we do understand atmosphere, and yes that does make sense becasue it's trapping the heatr. OCntrary to what the media, tlaking heads, and ignorant politician tell you its a fact.
You don't have to understand every single fact of something for it to be true.
That would be akin to saying gravity isn't real.
We know, for a fact, we are increasing CO2.
we know, for a fact, that CO2 traps heat.
We know, for a fact, the heating is occurring in the lower parts of the atmosphere
We know, for a fact, that there is a trend happening on top of normal historic cycles.
Exactly. The point was, even if we didn't know all that, altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere is a mindbogglingly stupid thing to do.
It does feel good to have it stated though... a nice warm fuzzy feeling...
Regardless, we should focus on cutting pollution even if global warming is not man-made.
I wish this was more obvious to more people.
If there is no relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperatures then that means we have absolutely no idea how planetary ecosystems work at all.
If we don't understand our atmosphere does it make any sense to be modifying as a side effect of industrialization?
My only hope is we actually figure out how all this works and become environmentally neutral before it's too late.
Firefox just comes with the Social API, as with addon APIs, you have to install something, otherwise it's just potential.
There you go again, bringing logic and reason to an emotional argument. Won't somebody think of the delusional paranoids!
Consuming one alcoholic beverage does not make a person an unsafe driver, therefore making the limit so low that consuming one beverage is illegal is wrong.
I disagree.
I think we have proven that there is a point at which all people are "too drunk to drive", the only question is what is that limit.
I think that's it's high time we considers zero tolerance.